We must go. It is getting near afternoon again. It is the second day in Rhodopalais here without you, without knowing where your body lies, without being able to stop this cut-glass feeling in my core.
Goodbye Vanita. I love you.
Lorin.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Power in your veins
Wood was constant, wood was cruel. How much could one door be knocked before it fell apart or fell silent?
But still the door thudded time after time, although Ash never opened. Just like it was doing now. First it had been Derrick, when word had got out through the palace about Vanita. Then it had been Rize. He was worse - at first there had been knocking, then terrifying crashes as what sounded like chairs were thrown against the door, then a disquieting silent scratch, made by a fingernail, for hours. Still she did not open. Then they had come and gone and gone and come back, and every time they only faced a closed door. But every time they still returned, and the hateful door still boomed as their fists hit it.
“Ash! Ash come on, open up, please!”
Derrick this time. She gathered the blankets tighter around her and stared at the door. It thudded a few more times, but eventually he was gone. Gone like Vanita. Gone like everyone else. Her nerve had left her when she’d come to Castle Blindé again, gone in under its looming battlements again after so long. She had gone straight to her room like a child, and there she’d stayed.
Ash crept further back into bed and lay down. She was just falling asleep when a knock came again, and this one was different, so she sat up.
Slowly, the door unlocked itself and opened. And standing in the doorway was someone Ash never thought she’d see again.
“You… What are you doing here?”
“Hello Ashlynne,” said her aunt.
***
At another time, Ash would get out of bed immediately, wipe her face, and try to limit the state of weakness this woman saw her in. But that time was past, Vanita and Rize and Derrick were all gone, so she just sat and stared.
“I thought you said I would never see you again,” she said at last.
The older woman inclined her head, auburn hair falling into her face and obscuring her features from view.
“I did. And that was true at the time. But the Path has changed now. And in any case, I was summoned to the castle by the Head Pathfinder, who was getting her affairs in order and naming succession.” Her face hardened. “You have been cooped up in here for several days, so you’ll not have heard. My Head Pathfinder she – she was found hanging from the rafters of a curious dungeon-like room below the castle this morning. We in the walk of the Path knew she was going to do it, and why, but we could not dissuade her. Her treason has come to the attention of the king and all Pathfinders are to be questioned.”
Ash blinked and swallowed hard, dizzied a little by the information. Dead. That woman that she had seen nearly every day for a month, gone just like that. And not just gone but… had hung herself. Because of Ash.
She had thought there would be consequences to her altercation with the Head Pathfinder, of course she had, but never this… Someone dead, alone and swinging in the dark, after Ash had made it her personal vendetta to unmask her. Rize had lost a lifelong teacher. And now her aunt was to be “questioned’, too. She’d honestly never thought it would affect her own blood. The truth had come out, yes, but at what cost? She opened her mouth to apologise, but the weight overwhelmed her, and a small whimper came out instead.
“I wish I’d never gone looking for who started the Expansion Project,” she said at last.
“Yes. So do I. But perhaps, as Sapphira said, it was meant to be. According to her last words, it all took placed right after you were dancing at a ball with the prince, so it may have been the Path’s direction all along. And actually, the truth has not come out – oh yes, I can hear you – because she has now covered for your precious prince out of sheer love for the boy by taking her own life. Do you not find it curious, the room she chose to do it in? A swinging body will draw attention away from any other number of things, while showing us the room where sensitive information still lurks so we can whisk it away. Certainly, Rizend wasn’t going to. You should see the prince, he is quite inconsolable.”
Ash did not like this conversation, being made to feel guilty. Yes, she’d done wrong, but… but… she couldn’t think about that now. “If you had been here when I arrived at this bloody castle, none of this would’ve happened,” she said with more conviction than she felt.
“Wouldn’t it? It occurred to me today that no one knows we’re related within these walls except your stable boy. And now with the talk of succession among the Pathfinders… How clever the Path is.” Her aunt shook her head, smiling, and laid a long-fingered hand on the table, splaying it wide. The gesture caught in Ash’s throat. The last time they had met, she had not really seen, perhaps not wanted to see, just how much like her mother this woman was. It was making it difficult to keep the two separate in her mind, and not put on one the other’s crimes.
Ash looked at her, this aunt, this only relative that she had left. And even though it was not the right time, was absurd in the context, she found she had to ask the question she hadn’t known that she’d been harbouring for weeks.
“Why did you leave me?”
“Because that was what the Path said would be.”
“Then why did you come back?”
“Because, Ashlynne, you were right. The Path is the way, yet on that path there are different ways to travel. In its mercy it allows small pieces of each of our puzzles to be within our control, for our walking out. And I looked within myself and found that I could not leave you in pain, feeling alone in the world. I was wrong. And I had to come back to the castle anyway, and besides this I needed to tell you something. Something about your sister.”
“My… what?”
“Vanita. Your sister is a special girl, it turns out. And I have questions about her death. She has been blessed with sight of the Path, a special gift not just for any Pathfinder.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I went to go and see her, at Rhodopalais.”
“You lie!”
But the Pathfinder didn’t answer her, or even look her way. “They say the first Pathfinder ever born was blessed by an angel,” she said softly, looking down at her own hand. “That there was a man and his wife who were so beautiful, pious and pure that an angel came down on the birth of their first child to grant any power to the infant as long as it lived. “That she should never lie,” answered the couple, and it was done. But as the child grew, all the world soon learned what a power it is to always speak truth. As a bouncing tot the girl would laughingly proclaim the sky green or all men tall as trees and it would change to make her words the truth, until her parents begged her to speak it back to normalcy. And on and on…”
The woman turned to face Ash. “You do not know what it is to be born with a power in your veins, a power which like any weapon must be wielded with wisdom and humility. I discovered a long time ago that with this destiny on my path, if I told half-truths or worse I was lost. And so, the truth: the women in our line are powerful Pathfinders. There had not been a single girl in a hundred years that had no traces of the magick until you.”
“But that’s not possible. What about my mother? She -”
“… She was a perfectly adequate Pathfinder until she married and later turned her faith to the Christian God.”
Ash had been thinking of her mother’s face, and at these outlandish words, relief pulsed through her, warming where she’d gone cold at the mention of Vanita. This woman was crazy, that was all there was to it. She could not be angry at a lunatic and tried for a weak smile.
But her aunt did not smile back. “It was tradition once that a woman have a path forecast over her at birth, with a phrase just for her that her sisters of the faith heard from the Path itself. But over time it became unofficially believed that a woman
truly became a Pathfinder only when she had given birth to a girl child. And then her sisters would prophesy over both the babe and mother together, what their collective path would be. I was there the day your mother received hers, with you so pink and little and swaddled up in her arms. The words were: “from ashes to beauty’. Even your name comes from those words.”
From ashes to beauty. The words stitched into gowns, into the inside of the shoes that she’d danced in at the palace and later lost. There was no way this woman could have known that. No way except that it was true.
But the Pathfinder was not done speaking. “You must understand that we were not always in the prominent position we are now. Instead we positioned ourselves within each noble house of influence, and advised on the Path from there in secret, guiding the country on its way. After it was determined that you had no power, and with your mother fading, a new one of the Path was chosen to be the Pathfinder stationed at Rhodopalais. She had a daughter of no outward signs of power herself, but before Jadene could carry out her directive of having a child with your father, he himself died.
“Your entire family is of the Path, Ash. Your mother, stepmother, sister. Everyone.”
The words hung there, still and perfect and terrible in the air. The ring of truth was undeniable, and unbearable. Neither woman said anything for quite some time.
“What does it matter now, that they’re both dead?”
Her aunt cocked her auburn head to the side, a faraway look in her eyes. “You wouldn’t know this from experience, but Pathfinders” gifts differ from woman to woman. I can hear, rather than see, something which is heightened relating to other Pathfinders or people of my own bloodline. That’s how I could hear your thoughts just now. If you had been born with abilities, you would doubtless have your own unique ones.”
All at once, Ash remembered in crystal detail the look on the Head Pathfinder’s face when Ash had pushed that ball of her awareness at her. She remembered the ease with which she’d made the carriage take them to Rhodopalais. And she remembered Lorin’s advice about court, all those weeks ago, and said nothing.
The Pathfinder before her was still speaking, Ash letting the words flow over her without listening. That changed the instant she heard her sister’s name:
“… And so, when I heard Vanita shouting for her mother to get up just a few days after I left Rhodopalais, I listened with baited breath. And the last thing I heard her say was “it’s fine.” I’ve heard nothing since then.”
“Wait, what?”
“Vanita said the words “it’s fine” right before what I assume was her death.”
The words sent Ash’s heart crashing into her ribs. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Perhaps she was specifically talking to me, to get a message to you. Perhaps she was trying to communicate that she was not going to suffer, nor your Stepmother. She was a brave girl, your sister… Or perhaps she was trying to ensure that you wouldn’t lose your own life by going after the mob to avenge her death.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Path powers
In the ruins of the morning, somewhere, a house that was once called Rhodopalais was lying. A couple of rooms may have been spared, but if you had been a mob or a monster going past, you would know: there is nothing to see here. Not in this place. Its heart is broken.
So many people dead, so many things and times lost. And now this.
The house itself. Rhodopalais. Gone.
“I supposed it was my home after all,” said Mother in a hushed voice, taut with emotion. They stared as much as their necks could turn, straining backwards, as they were led in chains into the morning sun.
The stabbing had not come immediately, but it was still there. Vanita could see it, a wispy smoke image overlaid on the real world. It had obviously been earlier than she’d thought, for by the time the woman had pragmatically bound them, the sky was greying into dawn overhead. She had whistled, even, while he chained them, and that more than the cold iron had made Vanita’s skin crawl. And she had gone inside the remains of the house to sack it, still whistling, leaving Vanita next to her sobbing mother in the dark.
Then the woman had come out with a bulging cart covered with a dirty cloth and they had started walking. They’d walked hours, without pause, the woman with the length of chain in one hand and her cart pulling another, not even looking at them, pulling them along like dogs. The morning air as cold and sharp in Vanita’s lungs, fear making her chest almost too tight to breathe. But when Mother stumbled and almost fell, the chains cutting into her bony wrists, Vanita at last found her voice.
“You’re going too fast. Can’t you see she’s weak?”
Faster than seemed possible, the woman whipped around. A wispy outline of her hand connected with Vanita’s face. Vanita pulled back instinctively, and the woman’s real hand sailed through empty air. She frowned. In the daylight Vanita could see her better: tanned skin, straight black hair interwoven with white ornaments that looked suspiciously like bones. She looked familiar somehow, but still… It was not an appearance that spoke of mercy.
“I am to question you both. That’s the only reason I haven’t stabbed you yet, girly, right here.”
As she shoved a finger into Vanita’s sternum, she suddenly saw it: the wispy image of a hole next to a ragged tent. That was where she’d die. “Ohh,” she said to the scene, sagging in her chains, and the woman must have taken it for submission, because she turned back around and carried on walking.
Some time later, they stopped to rest. Vanita wanted nothing more than to sink to the ground and never leave it, but she saw to her mother first, checking her temperature and breathing. In the background, to her surprise, the woman lifted the cloth on the cart and revealed, not stolen weapons or silver, but Vanita’s second dress crumpled beneath a pile of books.
“You can read?” she asked in spite of herself.
The woman whipped around to face her, glaring. “You entitled nobles think you’re the only ones who can read?” She narrowed her dark eyes. “Yes, I can read, but most of those oafs don’t. They would take these to burn for fires. I couldn’t let that happen.”
Vanita looked down at the familiar spines, so odd-looking out of context in the filthy cart. One she recognised – a sentimental romance story of a nurse falling in love during a war. It was the memories of that book that had helped her know how to bandage her eye. “I’m glad you saved them. Thank you.”
The woman grunted, looking uncomfortable, then stood. “Up! We walk again.”
“How much further? And you, assassin-person or whomever you are, why are you so rude? And why are you wearing breeches like a man?”
“Mother quiet! Please, please I’m sorry, don’t hurt her, she’s old.”
“Humph. She’s old and she forgets herself, speaking so high and mighty like a lady when I’m the one with you in chains, I’m the lady now. You privileged scum. We’ve been walking miles and have only now left what used to be your estate grounds, or your neighbour’s at a push. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to survive this with no high walls –”
But Vanita had stopped listening. The wispy outline of the future had changed, sharply and without warning. It seemed that the further in the future something was, the wispier, for she saw the rope snapping up from the ground clearly, attached to the woman’s foot, hauling her up into the air.
“Don’t move!” she yelled without thinking, lurching toward the woman. Then, when her captor only scoffed at her and took a step anyway, she had to fling herself on her on pull her by her arm, just stopping the woman short as the rope snapped up and swung, an empty noose, in front of their faces.
“Mob trap,” the lady whispered, turning to stare wide-eyed at Vanita.
Mother, meanwhile, was less impressed. “Bloody Path gifts! Why didn’t you let her walk into it Vanita, you stupid girl? Then we’d be rid of her and some other villain could carve her up.”
“Good grief, Mother, think! We would be maroon
ed out here alone waiting for the same mob without her protection.” Vanita didn’t say the other reason – ever since she’d seen those books in that cart, like it or not, the woman had become a real person to her. She couldn’t just let a person die.
In the meantime, the woman had come right close, almost pressing her dark eyes again Vanita’s own, single eye. “Look at me,” she commanded. “It is you, isn’t it? I should’ve put it together from it being the same house. You’re that one who so scared that brute, aren’t you? I thought you looked familiar. Let me hear your voice again – say “remember Gelanne.”
“You? That woman, with those men… that was you?”
“Yes, and I’m not much proud of it. But “Path gifts’, you say? Well well. Then it’s definitely time to start walking again.”
***
Before long the featureless dry veld they were walking through started changing. First there were withered stumps of leafless bushes that looked like they had been shaped topiaries once upon a time, then cracked empty fountains the colour of bone began peppering the scrub. And then an archway, in the middle of the dry ground, made entirely out of blackened dried plant stems that had been contorted into arching semicircles meeting in the middle, most likely once wisteria and ivy as had been popular before. Now, the black scraps of dead leaves looked like the entrance way to death itself, which Vanita supposed it was, and she hesitated.
The tanned woman looked hard at her, but without the malice of before. “We’re here. Come on.”
As soon as they were out the other side of the tunnel, Vanita heard her mother give a faint “hmm” of surprise. She agreed – if this was what death looked like, it wasn’t what she expected.
Right before them was the remains of a statue that looked to have been some sort of conqueror atop a rearing horse. It was difficult to tell because he was obscured by at least ten different scraps of tattered clothing, arranged across the statue’s horse legs, outstretched sword the conqueror himself to dry in the sun. Nearby was another fountain, but this one was filled with dirty water and seated around were, not marble nymphs, but equally grubby women with painfully thin arms, washing the next tattering clothing items in the brown water. They seemed to have been chatting, but when Vanita came into they fell into silence, casting suspicious, sulky glances at her and Mother as they walked past. Just visible behind their scowling faces was the broken shell of a former mansion above them.
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