Ruby Ruins

by J M D Reid

  “Not yellow ones?”

  She glanced down at her robe. “I wear enough of that sunny hue, thank you very much. Red would look brilliant on me.”

  “Still, I’m not quite following you. A rosebush?”

  “That’s what relationships are like. Various plants. They come in different sorts. Some relationships are foul and rotten, like those nasty corpse flowers they cultivate in Relasi. Sticky things that smell of death, or so I’ve read in books. Others are like nettles. Brush them, and you come away in pain. Or a rash from poison ivy. Others are bright. Daffodils that shine happy, or like those fine rhododendron bushes. Full of broad leaves and beautiful flowers.”

  “So I’m the thorns protecting Avena’s beauty?” Ōbhin asked, thinking he understood her metaphor.

  “Oh, no, she’s the thorny one.” Deffona giggled. “Too fierce and protective for her own good. You’re the flowers.”

  “Me?”

  Deffona glanced at him and smiled. “Oh, definitely. You don’t know how handsome you are. The dusky and dashing easterner. Why do you think she’s always around you?”

  “Because we’re trying to protect Dualayn and figure out what the Brotherhood is up to,” Ōbhin said.

  “That’s just the excuse. Neither of you see it.” Deffona shook her head. “From the minute she mentioned your name, I could tell. Miguil’s a nice man, but they were the most dreary plant. Grass. So common. Serviceable. Dependable, maybe, but booooooring. She would have been miserable with him.”

  “They both would,” Ōbhin said, his brow furrowing. He remembered that near kiss with Avena when they were drunk in that village not long after their meeting. He had kept his distance after that, and then other things seemed more important. Figuring out about Dje’awsa, keeping Dualayn safe, concealing the truth about Smiles.

  Her presence always brightened him.

  She wouldn’t betray me like Foonauri, he thought.

  You never imagined Foonauri could betray you, a dark voice said. His eyes drifted to his black gloves.

  “She can do better than me,” Ōbhin said finally.

  “Does she want to do better? Think about it. I would love to see your roses blossom. They would be beautiful.”

  “And if the soil they grow in isn’t fertile? If it’s black and rocky?”

  “Then it will be all the more beautiful for succeeding in such adverse conditions.” Deffona studied the lake. Scarlet dragonflies hovered for moments before darting right or left over the reeds. “It’s peaceful here.”

  “Yeah,” he said, memories of Avena rippling through his mind. The way she smiled. Laughed. How she’d throw herself into a fight. How she’d convulsed in his arms. He’d gotten her hurt trying to figure out answers to questions that didn’t matter.

  Carstin was dead. His soul passed on. Did it matter what Dje’awsa did to his body? Was it worth getting Avena killed?

  “Don’t let your darkness keep you from finding something beautiful,” Deffona said. She turned to him, her face round and bright. “No soul is too tarnished that it can’t be polished bright.”

  “Avena likes to say that.”

  “Because it’s true. That’s Elohm’s promise to us. That we can always be a better person than we think we can. But only if we try.”

  He gave an absent nod.

  “Now, I am disappointed you haven’t asked me what sort of plant Avena and I are.” Deffona shook her head, her veil rustling about her shoulders. “A lack of curiosity is a terrible trait in a man.”

  “What type of plant are you?”

  “Why, a blackberry bush, of course!”

  “Avena’s the thorns protecting your blossoms.”

  “Plus I’m sweet like their fruit.”

  Laughter bubbled out of Ōbhin’s throat. He felt mirth for the first time since Avena’s injury. The dark weight on his soul relaxed during that moment of shared joy with Deffona. A heron let out an angry caw and winged to the air away from the two chortling humans.

  When they returned to the house, Charlis looked pleased. The tray of food was gone and the refractor was ready to leave. Deffona demanded promises from Ōbhin to be alerted as soon as Avena was out of danger.

  Ōbhin agreed to deliver them.

  He decided against searching for Creg after that. The man was either alive or dead, but he wasn’t important. Ōbhin sank down into the chair outside the lab and realized what he’d been doing. Running away. A coward scared of facing more pain.

  He could fight a mob of angry rioters, stand against a horde of shambling dead, and face against a magic-created monster like Ust, but what really mattered terrified him. Avena dying. What he felt for her. It was easier not to face it. To throw himself into something else.

  He stared down at his black gloves and thought long and hard about what he felt. Avena didn’t spark that instant blaze of heat that Foonauri had. He was a decade older now, twenty-two instead of a boy of ten. He’d loved and lost and suffered. His soul was streaked in grime and guarded against loss. The possibility of another woman betraying him terrified him.

  Could Avena even do that? Could a woman that stubborn, that loving, that fierce, and that open be as duplicitous as Foonauri?

  Was he worthy of finding out? What would happen to Avena the next time he took her into danger?

  After that, when he wasn’t training guards or doing his share of duty at the gate, he sat before Dualayn’s lab and waited to find out her fate. He didn’t know what would happen when those doors opened and she emerged—if she emerged—but he wouldn’t run from his feelings. He would confront them.

  Ōbhin vowed to stop being a coward.

  Chapter Seven

  Fiftieth Day of Forgiveness, 755 EU

  She felt remote. Separated. A fleshless existence forced into a body. The weight of it surrounded her awareness. The sense of limbs. Of breathing. She experienced warmth. A weight on her eyelids. She struggled to open them. To move.

  Fingers twitched. Toes curled.

  The body felt more and more real. Less distant. She sank into it, merging with it. A heart beat. Blood pumped through veins. She smelled something familiar; the antiseptic sting of wood alcohol.

  Her eyes opened as the alien sensation vanished. She wasn’t separated from her body. She was awake, staring up at a stone ceiling. She caught a glimpse of locked cabinets. The creak of a heavy metal door opening and closing.

  Dualayn stepped out of his jewelchine vault and into her sight. She shuddered, wanting to sit up, but her body felt so weak. Drained. She blinked. She felt no injuries. No throb of a bruise on her head.

  “Father?” she croaked. “What . . . happened?”

  “Avena,” he said in relief as he hurried over to her and leaned over to study her. She realized she lay on the hard surface of his exam table. “Elohm’s Colours, I think it worked. It is you.”

  “Who else would it be?” she asked. A fuzziness rolled across her body, prickling her senses. Her fingers spasmed. “What happened? I feel so weak.”

  “You’ve been unconscious, child. Poor Ōbhin has worn through the soles of his boots in worry. The whole household has.”

  “Ōbhin . . . We were . . . looking for someone.” Memories rushed back into Avena. Those felt sharper than her body. “For Creg, that sniveling runt who worked for Ust. We found him in a house and . . . and . . .” She struggled to remember what happened after they entered the house. She caught flashes. Boys with green faces. Bursts of purple energy. Ōbhin’s booted foot crashing through the ceiling. “I think there was a fight.”

  “What month is it?” asked Dualayn.

  “Forgiveness,” she answered. “The Forty-Third Day of Forgiveness, right?”

  “It’s the Fiftieth. You’re off by a week, but that’s not surprising since you’ve been unconscious the entire time.”

  “I took a blow to my head?” she asked. “Is that why I can’t remember the fight?”

  “You had this buried in your head,” Dualayn said. He
marched to his jewelchine bench. She managed to sit up.

  The effort left her dizzy.

  When her vision cleared, he held up the severed end of a blade. He put his finger near the middle. “It had lodged that deep into the left lobe of your brain. Can you move your right hand?”

  She raised it while processing what he said. It made no sense. She stared at the length of deadly metal, trying to fathom that burying into her brain and her still surviving.

  “Good, good, and the palsy is gone from the right half of your face,” he noted.

  “That was in my head?” Avena croaked. “I should be dead.”

  “But you’re not!” Dualayn had this look of giddy joy. “I regenerated your damaged brain, child. Using resonating topazes placed directly on it.”

  Avena’s hands swept across her head. She prodded at her temple before her fingers slid into the fine silk of her brown hair. She stroked across her skull, feeling for any imperfections, finding no scar. Her hair felt different. Less weight.

  “You cut my hair?” she asked.

  “My apologies. You did have a lovely braid. Long hair is a woman’s glory, so I do feel a tad bad for having to sever yours. But it was in the way.”

  “No, no. I’d rather be bald than dead.” She smiled. “You truly removed the top of my skull to heal me? That theory on using topazes and a tuning fork?”

  “The topazes’ default mode is to spread healing energy,” said Dualayn. “They repaired the swelling in your brain. So far, I can find no deficiencies in your memory or your abilities, but I must perform an exam.”

  She nodded. Despite the hollow pit in her stomach, a gnawing need for food, she was eager to learn more. The Recorder had revealed so much knowledge. What he’d uncovered alone was worth keeping protecting him. She had to recover to do that. To study with him and fight at Ōbhin’s side.

  He carried me all the way from the Greenlet. He’d crossed the breadth of the city. Not its longest measurement, for it stretchered wider west and east along the Ustern than it did north and south, but a feat that sent a giddiness through her. That must have polished more of the murk off his soul.

  A yearning to see him almost overwhelmed her need to be examined for any problems.

  Dualayn returned with a small diamond jewelchine housed in a tube of polished steel. It was another of Dualayn’s inventions, though it hadn’t caught. Diamond torches were just more expensive than a candle or an oil lantern. The rich might use diamonds to light their houses, and many cities were lighting their streets with them, but the commonfolk didn’t have the extra coin on portable light, so had to go with cheaper alternatives.

  “Okay, let’s check your pupil dilation,” Dualayn said.

  She sat there as he shone the light in her eye, had her follow his finger, tickled her sides to get her to giggle, poked and prodded half her body to check her senses, and used a leather-wrapped hammer to tap her knees in the right spot to get them to spasm.

  “What is the multiplication of twenty-eight and four?” he asked as he worked, the first of many questions.

  She did the sum in her head. “One hundred and twelve.”

  “In what year did the Tri-Color War occur?”

  “It started in 645, when King Kashen Briflon died, and ended in 652 when the last surviving brother, Gerey Briflon, perished killing his nephew Vash Briflon in the Battle of the Mud. They were the last two survivors of the Briflon dynasty.”

  “What is the property of heliodor?”

  “It represents Elohm’s Patience,” she said. “His bright Yellow. It is the color that is associated with air and wind, with alarms and warnings. A heliodor can be left to be triggered, waiting for the right conditions before activating it.”

  “Good, good,” he said as he went about his exam. “And who is the Archon-Supreme of the devas?”

  “Reylis,” she said, and thoughts stirred. The White Lady claimed not to be a deva, but she never denied being Reylis. “You once said that many of the pagan gods in the eastern lands have the same name.”

  “Similar names, even amid languages that have no familiar connection. Demochian, Qothian, and Tethyrian can all trace their origins back to a distant proto-language, but Ki’manese, Relasese, and the tongue of the Shattered Islanders is a separate family of tongues. Our Lothonian, Roidanese, Onderian, and those who live on the distant island of Busil are a third such family. Yet the names of gods, tones, spirits, and other such entities connected to the gems all are similar. The Tone of Fire is Otsar while the Passion of Fire is O’csari.”

  “Passions are what the Ki’manese people worship?”

  Dualayn cocked his head as he prodded her armor. “Revere, perhaps. But you see the similarity.”

  “Raleth is the Tone of White and Reylis is the Archon-Supreme.” A nervous writhe twisted through her. “Those seem . . . similar.”

  “There are names of other devas if you read older texts, but the church long thought revering them was too close to paganism centuries ago. Different villages might still remember them in their prayers, but only Reylis survived with official sanction. There is a Deva of Vengeance, I believe, named Oysar, and the Broken Mirror heretics in Ondere are said to worship them as the shattered pieces of Elohm. One god split into seven or eight parts or some nonsense like that.”

  Is the White Lady a deva? It sounded foolish. She couldn’t be a divine being, and yet speaking with her a month ago had left Avena shaken. The woman spoke Honesty in everything save when she gave her name as Raya. Her nickname, she’d said, used by those she called friends. Not her true name, but a diminutive that could be drawn from Reylis.

  “So Elohm’s religion still survives in some forms in the pagan lands?” she asked. “And they have mistakenly worshiped His devas as gods?”

  “That’s one interpretation,” said Dualayn. “You remember the name I told you about. The individual from Koilon.”

  Koilon had been a myth, one of the Anteshattering cities, until ruins were found in the Upfing Forest. Dualayn was certain they’d found the remains of it along with the Recorder. They had lucked out to dig into the library and found the Recorder immediately. Just as they’d started studying the relic, Ust and his bandits had “invited” them to meet with Grey Koilon, leader of the Brotherhood.

  “It was a name similar to Otsar,” she said, recalling the specific conversation Dualayn brought up.

  “Ozsor,” Dualayn supplied.

  “Are you saying that these gods and tones were real people?”

  “Mythology comes from somewhere.”

  “The Archon-Supreme is not a myth!” It was tantamount to calling Elohm a myth. She knew in her heart that a loving God had created the world. Her. Ōbhin. Everyone.

  Dualayn smiled. “There’s that fire. I think you are recovered.”

  She blushed. She didn’t like what he was implying at all. She shifted. The White Lady couldn’t have been one of these individuals from the distant past who inspired the name of all these pagan gods. The Shattering happened three thousand years ago. It was lost to recorded memory, only maintained in legends.

  Mankind had fallen after it happened. Every history book Avena had perused at Dualayn’s suggestion had given different dates. They couldn’t even agree when Lothil Boat-Breaker led Avena's ancestors across the sea to settle the Arngelsh Islands, nor when Lothil’s grandson, Boan Sword-Arm, had led the fight against the darklings infesting the forests and mountains before sealing them behind the Warding.

  “Your recovery is remarkable,” Dualayn said, drawing her out of her thoughts. He stared at her with a look of awe. “I think this is it, Avena. I’ll soon be ready to heal her.”

  “You’ll succeed,” she said, hoping Dualayn could restore his wife’s damaged mind.

  Her own throbbed from weighty thoughts. Dizziness washed over her. Her mind felt remote, almost outside of her. She ran a hand over her forehead and it passed.

  He helped her slip off the table. Her legs felt weak, a tremble racing
through her muscles. She stared at her body. Her cheeks looked shrunken, cheekbones more pronounced. She ran a hand through the linen shift she wore and felt her ribs. She’d lost weight, but not enough that a few days of extra meals wouldn’t recover, or so she hoped.

  She had to resume her work with Ōbhin.

  Did he get the information from Creg? Excitement galvanized her at that thought. She took the housecoat proffered by Dualayn and wrapped the light-blue wool around her body. She cinched it up tight before taking his arm for support.

  “I am sure Ōbhin is eager to see you,” Dualayn said. “He has taken to sitting outside my lab. Gave me a fright two days ago when I went to fetch my dinner. I didn’t notice him until he let out a snore so loud I thought the house would shake.”

  She giggled as he opened the door to the entry hall.

  Her eyes fell on Ōbhin. The scar on the handsome easterner’s right cheek enhanced the deadly swordsman grace he never lost no matter what he did. He always moved with deliberation, even now as he stood to greet her. His dusky-brown face lit up at the sight of her. Life stirred in his dark eyes. Shining hope.

  Awe.

  She blushed beneath his intense scrutiny. He stared at her like she was impossible. A dream come to life. The beat of her heart quickened. A smile spread on her lips as, so it seemed to her, she witnessed him for the first time.

  Joy burst inside of her.

  *

  Awe filled Ōbhin as he stared at Avena.

  She looked frailer than he’d ever seen her. Her brown hair fell loose and short about her face, framing her round, pale features in a new way. A smile crossed her lips while her emotions blushed her exposed cheeks.

  She stepped away from Dualayn. Her liquid eyes shone with her excitement. Ōbhin’s heart felt light. It almost lifted him from the ground. Deffona’s words whispered in his mind. Seeing Avena confirmed what the daughter had suggested.

  For a moment, he thought she would fall. His hands reached for her and—