Return of the Guardian-King

by Karen Hancock

  Despite Tapheina’s prediction to the contrary, Abramm had for days clung to the hope this was only an early winter flurry and that the mild weather would soon return. Yesterday was the first time he’d seriously considered the possibility he might actually have to spend the winter here. Today, possibility had become certainty, the contemplation of which produced a twisting pain in his chest so sharp he could hardly breathe.

  His hope of reuniting with his wife and sons within the month was dead, and Tapheina’s parting words haunted him: “It’s already been six months. How long do you think she can wait for you?”

  Bitter frustration tightened his throat. To have come all this way only to have their reunion ripped away from him? How could Eidon do this to him?

  It made no sense. With Chesedhan shores under attack by an evil horde bent on eradicating all traces of Eidon’s Light and those who worshipped him, Abramm should be down there, helping with the defense. Not up here in the middle of nowhere shoring up beams, shoveling snow, and hauling wood and water. Where even his skills of leadership and decision making were rejected—seen as threatening, in fact—by the people he now lived with. People who disliked him enough as Alaric but would loathe him if they knew who he really was.

  Beyond his door the distant clang of the breakfast bell echoed through the monastery: two strikes, a pause, then two more. It was the second bell of the morning, the final call to breakfast. He’d wait a little longer before going down, to give the others time to clear out of the dining hall. He’d listened to quite enough of their insults and, in his present mood, had no desire for more. It would be bad enough working with them in the barn.

  He rolled onto his back and stared at the rafters. Had he not suffered enough already? How much more did Eidon intend for him to take? He had given up everything for him, and this was his repayment? Better he should have burned on that stake they’d planned for him in Kiriath. Better maybe he should have just let them cover his stupid mark and renounce his identity as a Terstan.

  He wished he had now. If he’d known how things would turn out, he would have.

  Moroq’s thinking . . .

  Suddenly as irritated with himself as he was with everything else, he sat up, gasping at the shock of the cold air on his back, even though he’d slept fully clothed. Shivering violently, his breath pluming about him, he slipped a woolen sweater over his tunic and undershirt, then jammed his feet into his frozen boots. Snatching up the cloak of long-haired fleece he’d used as a supplemental blanket, he stepped from his room into a crooked hall lined with doors and started down the narrow stairway that led to the ground floor.

  Like the dormitory, the dining hall had been built to accommodate a crowd. Three long tables ran the chamber’s length, a handful of people gathered in small clusters at their far ends near the fire crackling in the great stone hearth. Children raced around playing tag, while a few chickens and dogs foraged for scraps under the tables. As Abramm approached, Rolland’s oldest boy, Rollie Jr, came running. The blond-headed lad had taken an inexplicable liking to him over the course of their journey, one that had intensified since they’d arrived in Caerna’tha. “Master Alaric! Good morning, sir. I found some slingstones. D’ye think these would be any good?”

  He pulled several rounded oblong stones from the small pouch he’d tied about his waist and held them out for Abramm’s inspection. Lacking the heart to put the lad off, Abramm took up the stones, looked them over, then handed them back with a nod. “I think these will do for a start.”

  “So can we start, then?”

  “When the storm’s over, Rollie.”

  The boy’s face fell. “That’ll take ferever, sir.”

  Abramm tousled the lad’s hair and walked on.

  “Ye’re late again, Alaric,” old Totten Ashvelt commented as Abramm passed him. “The others’ve already gone down t’ the barn.”

  Clamping down on his irritation, Abramm gave the man a wave and descended the narrow stair into the kitchen, veiled in back-blown smoke. At the room’s far end two women stood near the cooking hearth, where the ash and embers of the breakfast blaze had been banked up to one side, and a man was standing in the fireplace. His upper body swallowed by the chimney, he moved the damper inside the flue, the metal squealing as he did. Meanwhile other women worked cleaning up, kneading bread, and preparing a side of mutton for roasting.

  Among them were Kitrenna Trinley and dark-haired Marta Brackleford, the latter already approaching him with a covered bowl of the morning’s porridge. “Good morning!” she greeted him cheerfully. “I saved this out for you, but I’m afraid it’s gotten really thick. . . . I could put some milk in it if you’d like.”

  He shook his head as he took it. “This is fine. Thanks.” He knew he sounded gruff, but her attentiveness grated at him. She reminded him too much of Maddie and, for some inexplicable reason, brought to mind his appalling attraction to the tanniym Tapheina.

  He’d learned from Caerna’tha’s community of permanent residents that the shapeshifters’ breath carried spore that paralyzed the will and dazzled the mind. If they had taken refuge under the bridge as Kitrenna Trinley had wanted, all of them would have died. No one but Rolland knew that Abramm had actually fallen victim to it, and not even Rolland knew to what degree. Abramm understood only that Tapheina had been deliberately seducing him and that, to his shame, part of him had responded.

  But he couldn’t blame Marta for that—nor for the fact that her presence and solicitous nature reminded him of the wife he’d not be able to see for another six months.

  “Are you sure you don’t want some milk?” she pressed. “I could water it down. And there’s honey, as well.”

  “I’m fine,” Abramm told her more sharply.

  His brusqueness only intensified her efforts to please. “An apple might help. How about I chop you an apple to put in it?”

  “How about you don’t?” he said, shoveling the porridge in as fast as he could.

  He saw the hurt flash across her face, but before she could respond, the old man working with the damper gave a shout, fell to his knees, then came scrambling out of the hearth as a dark heronlike bird dropped out of the flue after him. Feyna.

  One of the women shrieked and swung a soot-blackened broom at it, but the rhu’ema spawn darted between them, flapping up to the bread table, then the counter, provoking shrieks and ineffectual swats as it did. It bounced off the hearth and soared toward Abramm standing at the far side of the room. He watched it stupidly and, when it was nearly upon him, could only think to throw his mostly empty bowl at it.

  The vessel sent it tumbling and flapping across the bread table again, where Marta calmly struck it with a burst of Light from her slender fingertips. It stiffened, jittered briefly, and collapsed on the flour-dusted table in a puff of white.

  She picked up the carcass by one of its feet and handed it off to the old man as Abramm realized he had himself just thrown a bowl of porridge at the thing. Embarrassment squirmed in his middle.

  “I can’t believe there’s another of them,” the old man said as he headed for the dining room. “There must be a nest or somethin’ up there.”

  Marta grabbed a rag from the dish tub she’d apparently been stationed at before Abramm had entered, and cleaned up the spilled porridge. Then she gathered the spoon and now-emptied bowl and returned to the washtub without comment.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” he said, following her. “You didn’t deserve that.”

  “No.” She concentrated on washing the bowl. “But since you have been doling out foulness to everyone in equal measure these days, I don’t feel especially offended.”

  Doling out foulness to everyone? He’d hardly spoken to a soul since he entered the room. And what did she mean by “these days”?

  “Speaking of foulness,” she added, dropping the bowl into a tub of rinse water, “as soon as you have a chance, you should make use of the hot springs up the hill. A bath would do you wonders.”


  “A bath?”

  “You’ve been wearing the same clothes for at least seven weeks, Alaric.”

  “I don’t have any other clothes.”

  “A fact of which we’re all very well aware.” She reached for the stack of bowls on the board beside her tub, then hesitated, glancing up at him. “Do you mind?”

  He stepped back to give her room, and she transferred the bowls to her tub of soapy water.

  “Ye know,” Kitrenna Trinley remarked from where she worked at the counter behind them, “the others went down t’ the barn some time ago. I’m sure they’d welcome those strong shoulders o’ yers, Alaric.” She didn’t look up from the side of mutton she was seasoning.

  “Without a bath?” he asked.

  “Ye can bathe once the roof is fixed.” Kitrenna tightened her lips as she rubbed salted herbs into the meat. “ ’Tis a dangerous job. You should be down there helpin’ ’fore someone gets hurt.”

  Irked anew, he gave her a nod. “By all means, then, I shall hurry down to help.” But irony rang sharply in his voice, for they both knew her husband would receive his assistance grudgingly at best.

  On his way out the door, he helped himself to an apple from the basket on the sideboard, then stepped out onto a porch completely enclosed by walls of snow. A short, narrow passage had been shoveled through it to the first of the wood-covered walkways leading down to the hay barn.

  Things did not improve as the day wore on. In the hay barn, Trinley castigated him for his lateness, for his snobbishness in going off to a private cell rather than sleeping with everyone else in the Great Room, for being obstinate, disrespectful, and foul tempered. Abramm bore it all with increasing frustration until a minor accident sent Trinley ripping into him for his carelessness, and suddenly he found himself facing the man with fists clenched, ready to grab him by the throat and throw him across the room.

  Trinley mocked his aggressive stance with an invitation to fight before Rolland stepped between them. “No one’s fightin’ anyone. Now, both of ye just calm yerselves down. . . .”

  “I have no need o’ calmin’,” Trinley said. “It’s him who’s got the fire under him.”

  Abramm glared at him, the crazy, blind rage slowly subsiding, leaving him trembling in its wake.

  Rolland’s big hand tightened about Abramm’s upper arm as he said, “We’re just about done here, Alaric. Great Room woodbox probably needs fillin’, though.”

  A moment more Abramm stood there, wrestling with the wild temper. Then he drew a deep breath and pulled himself out of Rolland’s grip, nodding and turning away.

  “Well,” he heard Cedric say as he stepped out the door, “that was right scary.”

  Trinley growled a disdainful reply about brigands and brawlers.

  Abramm stalked back up the hill to the woodyard, where he spent an hour chopping wood, then brought a load up to the Great Room, the monastery’s all-purpose gathering place and communal sleeping chamber for most of the newcomers. Walled in rough-hewn stone with a high ceiling of stripped log beams, it boasted a huge multipaned window at its far end. A red-andgray wool rug covered the stone floor beneath an array of wooden chairs and worn couches, while overhead a rough-hewn wheel hung on a long cable stretched from the rafters, kelistars burning brightly in the glass-shaded pans dangling around its circumference. A misshapen stuffed elk’s head looked down from above the massive fireplace.

  Abramm stacked the wood in the hearth box, then went to stand before the great window, beyond which the shifting curtains of snow came down harder than ever. His anger bubbled unevenly, like a cauldron of heated mud. Trinley was insufferable. Arrogant, ignorant, stubborn, and small minded. It was unfair that Abramm should be stuck here the whole winter with him!

  Why have you done this to me, my Lord? It makes no sense.

  He drew a deep breath and let it out, fogging the windowpane before him.

  “I thought you were helping out in the hay barn, Alaric.”

  Abramm turned to find Arvil Laud standing in the Great Room doorway, regarding him with surprise. Thick, chin-length gray hair framed a narrow, weathered face with a short goatee and an ever-present pipe between his teeth. Once a university professor in Springerlan, Laud had been captured by Gadrielites over seven years ago and beaten for writing heretical tracts and articles, his right hand chopped off to ensure he never did it again. Now he served as leader and acting kohal to the community of permanent residents at Caerna’tha.

  Abramm shrugged. “They were about finished, so I came up to fill the woodboxes.”

  The kohal arched a gray brow. “Ah.”

  Abramm turned back to the window, hoping the man would go away. Instead Laud joined him, the sweet aroma of his pipe tobacco overlaying the smoke of the hearth fire.

  Together they stared at the storm, the older man puffing silently. “I’ve only been here six years,” he said presently, “but old Wolmer says it’s been decades since we’ve had a storm this heavy so early in the season.”

  Abramm watched the curtains of snow shift and undulate outside the window and said nothing.

  “Did you know,” Laud said presently, “that the number of your company is exactly the same as the number of those taken from us in the raid last week?”

  Abramm snorted. “How could I not? Your people have been crowing about that from the moment we arrived.” Two days before Abramm and his companions reached Caerna’tha, men from the village at the valley’s mouth had launched a late-season raid and taken all their able-bodied men, women—even the children—for the slave trade. It had been a bitter blow to those left behind, who, being old and weak, would have been unable to shovel snow off roofs and fix all that would need fixing during the winter. Upon first hearing of it, Abramm had suggested they launch a rescue and was told it was too late. The villagers had already left for the lowlands where they’d sell their captives and spend the winter.

  “It puzzles me you cannot find it in yourself to share our joy,” Laud said. “Your presence will save our lives this winter season.”

  “Yours are not the only lives needing to be saved.”

  The other man puffed on his pipe for a time, a cloud of fragrant smoke rising around him. Then, “You speak of the war to the south.”

  Abramm turned to him sharply. “A war for the very survival of the Terstan faith! I should be down there helping to win it.”

  “But instead you are here.” Laud shook his head, still staring at the storm. “Eidon simply must not understand how desperately he needs you to defend and protect him.”

  Abramm frowned, smitten by his mocking words.

  “From what your companions have told me of your actions the night of your arrival,” Laud went on, “I’d guess you’re well skilled in the Light. Rolland says you saw right through the trap that was set for you all in the way station. We at Caerna’tha saw for ourselves how you drew off the tanniym to give your companions time to enter our gates. Your courage is commendable, your strength and skill in the Light impressive.” He paused, drawing a puff from his pipe. “But her breath was in your face, Alaric. You must know her spore is in you now.”

  “I’ve already purged it.”

  “Not all of it. And even a little is enough to make you vulnerable. Especially when the Shadow has you.”

  Abramm stared sulkily at the storm, resenting the man’s criticism.

  The professor went on. “Do you know how the raiders got in last week?” When Abramm maintained silence, Laud answered for him. “One of our own opened the gate for them. A man who was approached by your tanniym friend on a wood-cutting expedition last fall. And inhaled the spore in her breath.”

  “I won’t be opening the gates for her,” Abramm said stiffly. “You have no worry of that.”

  “You think you’re strong enough to resist her?” Laud shook his head, gray hair rasping against his collar. “Your Light skills will be useless if you’re living in the Shadow. As you have been for days now, I’d guess. Normally I would not i
ntrude upon a man’s privacy this way, but you endanger us all with this ongoing . . . tantrum of yours.”

  Abramm ground his teeth and glared at the window, feeling the blood rush to his face. “You have no idea what I’ve lost, professor. What I’ve been through.”

  Laud snorted softly. “Perhaps not.” He sighed. “I do know that I once felt as you do now: bitter, frustrated, angry. As if all my purpose had been stripped away. I had been surfeited with my suffering, and railed at Eidon for what I saw as excess.”

  Abramm shifted away from the man, discomfited by how close Laud’s description was to his own reality.

  The professor lifted the leather-bound stump at the end of his right arm. “They took my hand, Alaric. Do you know what it is like to go through life without your strong hand? The loss is impossible to forget—everything you try to do brings it back to mind.

  “Bad enough that, I thought, but then I had to leave my books behind in the pass when the wagon broke—all I had left of my old life. We, too, came late to the monastery and were trapped for the winter. Suffering upon suffering, I thought. And none of it deserved. He was stripping everything away from me. My worldly possessions, my hand, my writing, my reputation, my job . . .”

  Abramm turned to look at him, unnerved by his words. The older man smiled, his eyes blank with remembrance. “Oh yes, I was bitter and angry and wretched. And Eidon let me stay that way for a time. But finally I came to my senses and confessed to him my failings. And when I returned to the place of embracing his will over my own, that’s when I recalled that if one wants to know Eidon, one must come to know Tersius. And his sufferings. All of which were undeserved, yet borne without complaint.”

  He fell silent. Outside the wind whistled, and the snowflakes ticked against the glass. From somewhere outside the Great Room, children’s voices echoed in laughter as overhead the roof creaked with its accumulating weight of snow.