A Home in the Hills

by Robert J. Crane

  Alixa bit her lip. There was something on her mind, something she wished to ask, Jasen thought. He waited for it, but it didn’t come. He could not read it from her expression, only that she was troubled.

  She breathed.

  “What is it?” Jasen asked.

  Alixa shook her head, lips clamped tight. She rested her forehead upon her knees again.

  And then she laughed.

  “What?”

  When she looked up, tears sparkled in her eyes. But she was smiling. “Do you remember when Hanrey found out Josef had been picking the strawberries from his hanging baskets?”

  Jasen frowned, half because the sudden shift in conversation had caught him off guard and half because though he racked his brains, he could not recall it. “No?”

  “You must,” said Alixa. “You were there.”

  “When?”

  “It was three or four years ago, now,” said Alixa. “You must remember. I do, because it was one of the funniest things to have happened that whole summer. We were sitting together, all three of us, near the assembly hall, you, me, Pityr. They were just finishing a meeting, I think, because the door opened and out came Hanrey and Euonice, arguing like always. She must have been particularly irritating that day, because he stomped off before she could follow—it was after she twisted her ankle, remember? She hadn’t been back on her feet very long, and she wasn’t managing very well.”

  The barest skeleton of memory came back to Jasen.

  Eyebrows drawn, he forced all of himself into picturing it. “I think so,” he said.

  “Pityr kept saying it was like she forgot to use the cane while she was resting up, you remember? He used to do that stupid impression of it—waggling an invisible stick around, wobbling on it like he was infirm. You remember that, surely?”

  Jasen did—it brought a wide smile to his lips.

  Alixa grinned back. “You do remember.”

  At first it was just a brief thing, Pityr pretending to stumble about, his whole body shaking, his back bowed low like the invisible cane was the only thing keeping it up. When he saw just how it made Jasen and Alixa laugh, though, it had grown into a routine. He’d stagger about for longer. He’d pull the stupidest faces. He’d put on a gravelly sort of high-pitched voice, nothing at all like Euonice’s, which made it even funnier, and berate Terreas: “Why’s everything shaking all the bloody time? Can’t you keep still?” Up pretend steps he’d climb, huffing and puffing, accusing Hanrey of putting an extra inch onto them while she was off her feet. Then it became two inches, three … Eventually it was a full six inches. By that time Euonice was long healed, and the routine mostly retired in favor of other things … but it never failed to make Jasen laugh. Alixa too, though she kept back her snickers as best she could—properness and all that.

  Actually, come to think of it, that had probably been a factor in the death of the routine. Aunt Sidyera caught her laughing out of place somewhere around then, and from that moment on Alixa had allowed the joke to amuse her for all of a few seconds. Then it was, “Oh, stop that, Pityr. She’s all well again now. It’s not funny to laugh at an old woman.” He’d obliged, though not without a wink at Jasen when Alixa’s back was turned and one last pull of that ridiculous face he put on.

  “I remember the impression,” said Jasen. “I still don’t think I remember Josef though.”

  “Right, so Hanrey left Euonice behind. He was really fuming—he was so red-faced—and he marched past us muttering, and then who should come round the corner but Josef. He had a handful of strawberries, big fat red ones, and one in his mouth, and Hanrey saw him and just—that’s it, you remember, don’t you?” she asked as a slow dawning washed over Jasen’s face. “He exploded. Shouting down the street, so everyone in the entire world could hear it. ‘So it’s you who’s been stealing my strawberries!’” She did her best imitation of the gruff old councilman. “‘Every ruddy day I come back to see someone’s been off with the things! Do you know how long those damned seeds took to take?’”

  Jasen could see it now. Josef was a couple of years younger than he and Pityr, so at the time he must have been nine, maybe ten. He was a skinny little boy, quite runty actually, but he had, for want of a better description, a damned big pair of balls on him. Authority meant very little to Josef. Jasen saw him around Terreas here and there, often getting into trouble, but no matter how many tellings-off he got, he never changed, never stopped causing trouble, never ceased his back-talking. He was a law unto himself. And on that day that Hanrey confronted him, he reacted in a way that only Josef could: instead of denying the charge—because Hanrey couldn’t know, really, that it had been Josef who did it (though he almost certainly did)—he grinned right back at him, with a mouthful of half-chewed strawberry.

  “You cheeky little—!” Hanrey had roared. “I’ll have words with your mother! Now give me those strawberries, you thieving little—”

  And he snatched out with a liverspotted old hand for them.

  Two things happened at that moment.

  The first was that Josef pulled backward, so instead of grabbing the strawberries out of his hand, Hanrey slapped them from it instead.

  The second was that Euonice rounded the corner too.

  “What in the blazes are you doing to that boy?” she cried, and she hurried up with a burst of speed she hadn’t shown since probably three decades prior.

  “He’s a thieving little blighter!” Hanrey responded. “He’s been stealing my strawberries!” And he whipped his hand out again, presumably to grab Josef by the wrist so that he could march him all the way back home and have words with his parents.

  Euonice was there first. She whipped out her cane in a streak that would make Huanatha proud, and rapped Hanrey hard across the knuckles. “Don’t you dare lay a finger on him!” Euonice brandished her cane, which was apparently utterly unneeded at this point.

  “THAT BOY HAS BEEN STEALING MY STRAWBERRIES!”

  “Leave the boy alone,” she said, “you crotchety old fart.”

  Hanrey’s lips pursed. He glared, from Euonice, to Josef, and back again. Then, without another word, off he stalked, back toward the assembly hall, disappearing with a bang! as the door slammed closed behind him.

  Yes, Jasen remembered it very well. It came to him vividly, the image of all their faces: Josef, grinning madly; Hanrey, eyes bulging, steam practically pouring from his ears; and Euonice, who let none of her joy show upon her face, though Jasen knew she was almost as happy in that moment as Josef. They were all so clear to him that he might still be there, in Terreas three or four years ago or however long it was.

  “Hang on,” he said. “One of the funniest things to happen that summer? As I recall it, you were mortified.”

  “I was. Josef had been stealing—and I was friends with him! I thought Hanrey would come over and lay into me next.”

  Jasen shook his head. “Typical Alixa. So concerned with what is proper that you were guilty by proxy.” But he smiled too. “And look at you now.”

  “Covered in blood and mud and ash. At least these are your bedcovers I’m dirtying.”

  He laughed—and oh, how good this felt. It felt as though he hadn’t laughed in years. Perhaps he hadn’t. He’d not laughed properly since Pityr was taken anyway, not like this. And if it hadn’t been for Pityr, he might not have laughed with such mirth since the day his mother died. It had been Pityr who had been able to cut through that grief, giving Jasen the semblance of a boyhood he would never have had otherwise …

  Jasen wished he could thank him for that.

  You can. Soon.

  He ran his middle finger along the back of his pendant, feeling the polished stone upon his fingertip.

  “I miss home,” he said softly.

  Alixa nodded, somber once more. “I do too.”

  He thought of it, his mind pulling away from that scene outside the assembly hall, like a bird aloft on the wind. He saw the village itself, nestled in the shadow of the mountain
s, below the cratered, smoking peak that would one day be its destruction. He saw the fields, the farms, where crops grew and sustained lives that refused to yield, to the scourge that had destroyed everything beyond this enclave. He saw the great stretches of grass, where no crops grew yet, but one day might, when the village grew large enough. He saw them, rolling down gently to the wall that kept the villagers in and the scourge out. He saw the grasses grow high, as spring gave way to summer, and dandelions and daisies and wildflowers grew amongst their green blades, and the rye fields beyond the wall grew taller than they had any right to be. Then he saw them cut back for straw, bundled into bales tied with twine. He saw the grass rise again, but then autumn came, slowing its heavenward reach, and finally a frost gripped it, turning the village into a beautiful, blue-white idyll, almost the same color as the snow at the tops of the mountains.

  He loved the summer, but winter was better, in a way. Perhaps that was because of his childhood memories—he and his mother and father, clustered together at home in front of a warm fire, listening to the crackling of the wood, its occasional pops … drinking hot soup, warm and spiced … long evenings, the sun low, the village lit by lamps, the glow from windows, behind curtains, and, on clear nights, a sky full of stars.

  Best of all, winter had been the farthest they could ever be from Baraghosa.

  Home.

  Jasen missed it so, and thinking of it, thinking of what he had lost, he felt an even greater hollow inside his chest, one that put the sadness at his looming fate to shame.

  Terreas was gone.

  Perhaps Alixa thought of this too. For a time, both of them were quiet. The only sounds were their breathing, Scourgey’s, and the boat, shifting on an ocean as they moved once more, perhaps for the last time, after Baraghosa.

  Finally, Alixa broke the quiet. “I almost don’t want to ask, but … do you have a plan to beat Baraghosa?”

  Jasen answered her honestly. “No.”

  Alixa nodded.

  There was more she wished to say. Jasen could see it. But this, he could guess at. How did he even plan to fight, exhausted as he now was? How could he, when he would grow only more and more tired as the days passed?

  He did not know the answer to that either—only that he would.

  22

  Jasen vomited.

  He hung over the edge of the deck. One hand gripped the railing, keeping him from going over. It was a limp hold, though, and if the boat happened to give a particularly powerful lurch, his fingers around the wooden post would not save him from sliding into the sea—a sea full of bright orange vomit.

  It hurt coming up, hurt dreadfully. More bile than anything else, most of its volume came from the water Medleigh had instructed he drink as much of as possible.

  It had been four days since they’d left Nonthen behind, their Prenasian captives left upon the crumbling clay shores. To say that Jasen had deteriorated was an understatement. For the past two days, he’d been unable to keep food down. Since yesterday, the water he forced into his stomach seemed to just stay there, sloshing about unpleasantly. Now it was coming up again every few hours.

  “You must keep drinking,” said Kuura. “It is important that you remain hydrated.”

  Jasen did. But it was so hard to force himself to swallow it, knowing it was only coming back out of him again before too long, and not easily. The spasms racked his body. Every shuddering heave was like a bruise that grew inside of him, always aching.

  The vomit coursed through his nose on its way out of him, burning.

  He coughed, spitting it out over the side of the ship. It streaked the side of the boat, hot and foul.

  “Jasen!” cried Alixa.

  She’d been practicing with a pair of daggers, taken from the armory below deck. Huanatha and Longwell both conducted lessons, intermingling their own practice with guided instruction to Alixa and Kuura.

  Jasen had joined them on the first day. Fatigue cut his efforts short, though.

  Energy rapidly deserting him, he hadn’t been able to do more than watch since. Just lifting the sword was too hard. He’d suggested, breath wheezing out of him, Maybe a dagger? Longwell and Huanatha exchanged a glance. She told him, with her kindest look, to just rest for now. He needed to conserve his energy for their last battle with Baraghosa.

  As the days passed, and he slipped closer to the veil, he wondered more and more often, what energy?

  Alixa dropped her daggers now with a metallic clatter and rushed to his side. Landing heavily on her knees, she grasped him by the arm.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, alarm high in her voice.

  He vomited again. Little was left to come out of him now. Just empty retches and flying spittle. That and pain—a lot of pain.

  “Is he seasick?” asked Longwell, lance placed aside.

  Lying beside Jasen, Scourgey whined. Apparently the disease had eaten enough of him that she was scared to touch him. Rather than lie with her head upon his legs, she curled up beside him, close enough that he could reach out and touch her, that she could slip under an arm and brace him as he moved around the ship, to the deck and back—but she would not place her weight upon him anymore.

  “Of course he’s not seasick,” Huanatha murmured. “He is dying.”

  “Have a little bit of tact,” Alixa hissed. “He can hear you.”

  “It’s … fine,” Jasen breathed. “I know I’m dying. It’s no secret.” He wiped his mouth and let his arm drop like a leaden weight.

  “You’re not gone yet,” said Alixa. She said it as though speaking the words would anchor him here for longer. “And we are close.”

  “How close?”

  “A day.” This was Longwell. Bowing low over Jasen, he rested a hand upon the boy’s shoulder. “We will see this through. I promise you.”

  Jasen nodded and closed his eyes. The sun was bright. And the deck hurt. But he needed to stay out here, if only because, in case Huanatha was wrong, he did not wish to die alone in his cabin.

  No. She could not be wrong. He would make it through to see Baraghosa’s end.

  “Go ready yourselves,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  Alixa’s frown, though he could not see it, was clear in her voice. “Jasen, you are not—”

  “Time is short,” he said. “You need to practice.”

  He could see her, in his mind’s eye, her lips pursed together, preparing an argument.

  “He is correct,” said Huanatha.

  For a moment, Alixa did not rise. She squeezed her cousin’s arm gently, and although that small touch hurt, it brought comfort to him too. He could feel the creeping blackness now, wending farther inside, its snaking tendrils devouring the life inside of him.

  If not for Baraghosa, it would be so tempting to just give in to it … to just close his eyes and let it take him, so that he could reunite with his mother and father and his ancestors …

  But he had made a pact, to them, and to himself: he had this one last thing to do. And he would do it—somehow.

  “I’ll be right here if you need me,” said Alixa softly.

  He nodded weakly. “Thank you.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. Then she rose and was gone.

  Tomorrow. Muratam would come tomorrow. Their battle with Baraghosa would come. And he would still be alive to see it.

  He told himself this as he lay there, waiting as the blackness pushed deeper, deeper, deeper still, blotting out a little more light with every inch it grew.

  *

  He was sick again.

  “Easy.” This was Kuura. He rested a large hand on Jasen’s shoulder.

  Evening had come. The sun was moving low to the horizon. It had come down right in Jasen’s field of vision. Bloated and reddish-orange, it had been blinding, painful even through closed eyes. So he’d moved, to put it behind him—which meant he now vomited over the other side of the deck.

  He emptied his stomach. Nothing solid at all to come up—it had been how long since he last
ate?—and hardly any bile either. What did come out of him was watery, a very pale orange color. Insubstantial though it was, it still stung the back of his throat and his nose as it came up, and it did not stop him from feeling utterly exhausted.

  When he was finally empty—again—Jasen moaned. “Ohh …”

  “Drink,” said Kuura. He pressed Jasen’s flask into his hands. His fingers wrapped around it feebly—and then tried to push it away. “No, drink. You need to stay hydrated.”

  “I’ll just be sick again.”

  “You will be sick anyway,” said Kuura, and though Jasen could not see his face, there was a hint of a kindly smile in his voice. “This will help you keep the little strength you have left. Drink.”

  Reluctantly, Jasen obeyed. Swallowing hurt too: his throat was raw, and the muscles that controlled it were tired. The water should have soothed some of that ache, but his body was long past soothing now.

  He drank. It probably wasn’t much, but his stomach felt uncomfortably bloated. Then he dropped the flask. The cap was tied on with twine, but he hadn’t tightened it, so water spilled out across the deck, pooling around his chest.

  “I see that,” said Kuura, picking it up and turning the cap tight. “You c’not fool me by tipping it away. I may be getting on in my years, but I am not completely stupid.”

  “Could have fooled me,” Jasen said.

  Kuura laughed, his traditional great big belly laugh. Though Jasen had his eyes closed, and his head turned out to sea, he could picture the man very clearly, sat beside him, with his head thrown back and every single one of his teeth visible. It brought a faint smile to his lips too.

  “Your humor has taken a cruel turn in these days,” said Kuura when his laughter had ceased.

  “I just say what I think now.”

  Kuura boomed a laugh again. It felt good to hear.

  “Of course,” he said. “Why worry who you will offend when you will be rid of all of us soon?”

  Jasen smiled. “Exactly.”

  They sat in quiet. The war galley gently rose and fell upon the sea. Wind blew through, caressing Jasen’s face. He could smell the salt constantly now, subtle but tangy, just as he could also smell Scourgey. Her scent was not overpowering, as it had once been. Why he could detect both smells now, when he thought he’d grown immune to them, he did not know. He could only guess that the filtering system that had sorted sensations for him was giving up too.