by S E Wendel
The young page shot him a look of mild curiosity as he grabbed Oren’s reins and mounted, digging his heels into the horse. The camp passed by in a blur until it was only the rolling Gray Hills in his vision, only a vast landscape separating him from home.
What funeral rites did these Highlanders have? He knew Highlanders buried their dead to send them back to Mithria rather than burning them on a pyre and spreading the ashes into fields with sown seeds like the Midlanders and Lowlanders did. But what was said over their bodies as dark earth was piled over them?
Funeral rites hadn’t been observed in sennights; there were too many dead. What could he say to them, lying with vacant eyes and skin still sticky with sweat, as he stood over their mass graves? What could he say to them as they were loaded in catapults to break upon Dannawey’s wall and rooves, used past their very lives as weapons?
As his eyes wandered the southern horizon, something like a strong hand pulled at his heart, making it ache. The desire to kick Oren’s flanks again and send them home was overwhelming. It would be so easy; no one was paying them any mind. He could outrun pursuers, run all the way to the Lowlands, all the way home to her. He could leave this behind, this war, this hellhole. Could leave Larn and Dannawey and being a warlord. And his men.
His head sagged, his chin almost coming to rest on his chest. Yes, his men. It didn’t sit well with Manek, conquering a city. Not Highcrest, not Dannawey. But every day he failed to take this city, he failed his men. He made them suffer another day, prolonged their anguish and heartache. He forced them to see things no man should ever see. He made them bury friends, sons, fathers, without giving them a road home. What could he do?
With shoulders that slumped and a weary soul that cried to lie down and never rise, Manek finally turned Oren back towards camp.
By the time he reached the Lowlander camp, most of the healthy men were standing, gathered in small groups. Their eyes followed him as he rode up, the words dying in their mouths. Taryn pushed his way forward, as did Waurin.
Manek dismounted and gave Oren’s neck a pat. He avoided looking at his friends, though he knew Waurin was trying to catch his eye.
“I’ll not have it,” Taryn spat when no one said anything.
“What’s done is done,” Manek said.
Taryn wasn’t the only man to step forward then, but they let him speak for them when he said, “We may fight his damn wars, but he’s not our lord. He can’t replace you whenever he feels like it.” His fierce eyes turned on Waurin. “I’ll not have it.”
“He didn’t win our trials,” Waurin said, clapping a heavy hand on Manek’s shoulder. “We didn’t make him our leader.”
“No. That would be my father,” Manek said, still not meeting Waurin’s eyes. He didn’t want his men’s proclamations of loyalty, didn’t want to let them shore up his breaking pride. The weight of Waurin’s hand on his shoulder was a firm reminder of what had been stripped from him that morning, and Manek wasn’t sure he wanted it back. He’d only to look at his men to see that behind the pride and loyalty and anger lurked a desolation so deep and painful, Manek didn’t know if even the sight of home could ever quite heal them. How could they want him still, when he only failed them?
Waurin filled his fist with the wool of Manek’s cloak and gave him a small shake. “Your father won the honor for himself and his son. And his son after that. You’re our leader, Manek, not Larn. I don’t march behind him. I wouldn’t take a blade for his sorry hide.”
“He’d flay your sorry hide, if he heard you now,” he said.
“Let him try.”
Manek shook his head. “Listen, you damn idiot, I won’t have you put to death because of me. There’s plague and Highlanders enough to kill us.”
“Damn it all, I’ll fight you for it if you like,” Waurin said, taking a step back with his shoulders squared. “Win it back from me.”
“Larn can’t take that honor away in the first place,” insisted Taryn. Men shouted their agreement.
Even though he heard Taryn’s words, watching Waurin stand there with his head bent to the side cockily, Manek suddenly had the overwhelming need to knock that big fool to the ground and beat sense into him.
He knew his friend saw the spark in his eyes. To stoke the little flame, Waurin crossed his arms over his bearish chest and raised his brows.
Fine then. Unfastening his cloak, he tossed it over Oren’s back and lunged for Waurin.
With a wild grin, Waurin struck Manek right across his face as the men shouted to each other if they should pull them apart.
Manek felt his nose break, blood rushing out. “Don’t you get it?” he shouted at Waurin, wincing at the pain in his face. “Larn doesn’t care about our ways. We’re just fodder to him.”
“Well, if it’s all the same to you, this fodder would damn well like to follow the fodder he chose to be lord of the fodder.”
Manek howled and tackled Waurin again, sending them both to the ground, limbs flying. He landed a hit on Waurin’s face, sick satisfaction rolling over him as he felt it break against his knuckles.
For long minutes, they scuffled, each unseating the other the instant one of them gained the upper hand. Waurin put up a struggle when Manek managed to shove him off. Using his size against him, Manek pin his arm back and leverage a knee into his back.
Waurin grunted when Manek pulled the arm far enough to hurt.
“Idiot,” Manek muttered, breathless.
“There now,” Taryn said, clapping him on the back and pulling him up. “Won it for yourself. No arguing with that.”
Manek reached down. Waurin took his hand, letting Manek pull him up. They held their respective broken noses, blood dribbling down their chins and staining the collars of their already dirty tunics.
“You happy now?” Waurin asked.
“Of course not,” Manek said, though he almost grinned despite himself. “It doesn’t change anything.”
“The hell it doesn’t.”
“Larn doesn’t care which of us has more blood running out their nose, idiot.”
“But I do, you bastard.”
“Do I need to hit you again?”
Waurin laughed. “I’ll still be prettier than you, regardless.”
“Larn may not recognize you,” Taryn said, eyes going back and forth between Manek and Waurin warily, as if he really did think they’d start another brawl. “But by Mithria’s green earth, we do.”
Waurin nodded. “I can humor Larn. But you’ll be told everything, and I’ll tell him as you’ve told me.”
Manek looked at the men gathered there and thought of Ennis, of what she’d said to him the day the summons came. You wanted to lead them, he could almost hear her say, so do it. Gods, she made him brave, even now. With a resigned nod, he decided that if he couldn’t save his men from the horrors to come, he could at least not dishonor them now.
“Fine. But I should warn you, it isn’t easy being Larn’s dog.”
Thirty-Seven
Though fleet-footed Tamea was at ease in her forests and wilderness, discontent settled within her breast. She went to her mother, Mithria, with her troubles. “What is this sickness, Mother?” she asked. “With the trees I was content, among the animals I was happy. But no longer.” “Your Father has given you your realm, but I have given you your tender heart. The pain in your heart is for the human soul, for while their bodies wither away, the soul does not. And once the body is gone, the soul has no home.” “Then let my Father given them a realm,” said Tamea. “He cannot,” said Mithria, “for he has gifted all the realms to you, His Host. I will take the mortals’ souls, for I am the only realm left. When they lay down their bodies, you, my daughter, shall bring the souls to me.” “I will be your harbinger of death?” “You, Tamea, shall be my harbinger of peace, for I shall show them only love and rest. Their toil shall be over, and they will greet you like friend.”
—Tamea and the Last Mystery
The Lowland summer was brutal on
a Highland constitution. As the summer rains gave way to long, hot, sticky days, sometimes Lora fantasized about plunging into the well outside the Haven and staying there until autumn came.
Despite the heat, there was a sort of excitement about the townspeople, something the Sisters admitted was unusual. By this time in years previous, Rising had endured at least one Oltaraani attack, the crops raided, animals stolen, and women carried off in the night. Not so that year. The people of Rising looked upon their wall with understandable pride, and there was loud talk that the very sight of the wall had deterred the Oltaraani.
But when the summer stretched into its hottest days, they discovered the real reason they’d been spared—plague.
At first the only fever was one of fear as news travelled upriver to them, that whole Oltaraani villages had succumbed. People were dying faster than they could be put to sea, as was the southerly custom. And so the people of Rising began looking to their wall for defense, to keep the invader away.
When the first children with fever began trickling into the Haven, Lora knew the wall could do nothing more.
Ennis pressed the back of her hand to her mouth as the girl twitched, her skin running with sweat that pooled on her upper lip and hairline. Lora sponged the girl’s face.
“You’re sure?” Ennis asked.
Lora nodded, pointing at the bulbous lumps on the girl’s neck and beneath her left arm. She knew them well; they had grown on her before, when she was fourteen. The plague took her mother and two older brothers. And now it was poised to take Rising.
“The fever must be allowed to take its course,” Lora said, drawing raised eyebrows from Renata, who stood just outside the room.
“The fever could kill her,” she said.
“The plague definitely will. It must be burned out of her.”
That was how she’d survived—her mother and brothers had contracted the plague first. She’d tended them, had watched as it slowly consumed them, made them hot corpses with sunken eyes and twisted mouths. She and her father packed them with ice to keep them cool, but the plague took them anyways. By the time Lora succumbed, there was no ice to be had in Highcrest, all of it, even snow from the nearby mountain peaks, used throughout the city to stave off the fever. For perhaps more feared than the plague was the fever it brought. Violent shakes, grasping at ghosts, seeing illusions. It was rightfully called Dea’s curse. But the fever had burned the plague from her body, and where her family had perished, Lora woke from the delirium.
“Where’s her mother?” Lora asked.
The sobbing woman was called into the room. A wail escaped her at the sight of her daughter, naked, sickly.
Lora asked, “Where has she been?”
“Nowhere, Sister! She hasn’t seen a southerly since the raid this winter.”
“She hasn’t been outside the wall?”
“Sh-she went with a few others to hunt. Brought back a few rabbits, that’s all.”
Lora chewed her bottom lip.
“Plague can’t just come from nowhere,” Ennis insisted. Lora could see her friend trying to work through the logic, avoiding looking at the girl. While there was some logic in the plague, how it could almost be seen slithering from house to house, it still killed without reason.
“We’ll need to see everyone who might have touched those rabbits,” said Lora.
“Plague from rabbits?” Renata said dubiously. “I don’t think Dea needs to work through such insignificant creatures.”
“I’d rather not argue about theology, Sister,” Lora said. “All we know is that the girl went outside the wall and caught rabbits.”
“And plague,” Renata said with hollow eyes.
Lora knew that look. It was something only a witness, a survivor could wear.
When they discovered the other two girls of the hunting party were also sick, a sort of quiet horror settled over the Sisters.
“Have they been around anyone else?” Lora asked the sobbing mothers.
“They’re children. They play.”
Lora’s eyes fixed on Ennis’s.
“The gate must be closed,” Ennis said. “Nothing gets in.”
And then she was gone, rushing from the room, from the Haven, into Rising. Lora hadn’t the heart to tell her it might already be too late.
The gate was closed all the same, and Kierum ordered all outside animals burned. The doors of the afflicted houses were marked with broad strokes of paint. When the paint ran out, they used animal blood. Before long, there was no point in marking the doors; no house was left untouched.
The gates opened again when there was no longer anything to keep out, and pits, long, shallow, ugly cuts in the earth, were dug. The first was filled almost entirely with girls, none older than seventeen.
“They took my son up north to die,” a woman muttered as Lora ran a cool cloth over her forehead. “My daughter stayed here to do it.”
“Shh. Rest now. You’ve two daughters yet, and they need their mother.”
But even as the mother, herself riddled with fever, put her hot hand on her youngest daughter’s shoulder, her eyes were dark. No light reflected in them, and it was like looking down into an abyss, never-ending. Lora imagined it was what Dea’s eyes looked like.
Lora spent those first days in the Haven, hurrying between rooms. She sponged, washed, fed where she could. She tread up and down the lower hallway so often she wondered how it didn’t bear shallow grooves up and down, up and down.
“Aren’t you afraid?” a girl whispered to her as she handed out meager broth.
“I’ve had it before.”
“It didn’t kill you?”
“It certainly tried.”
The girl looked down at her sister. “Could she live too?”
She smoothed the girl’s knotted, sticky hair. Hair that should have been the color of honeysuckle, but within the humid confines of the Haven had come to resemble rotted wheat. “There’s always a chance. Speak to her. She may speak madness back, but she hears you.”
This she told all of them, all the family members who stood by and watched death come upon their beloveds and waited for it themselves. Speak to them. So small, so simple. Their voices helped drown out the victims’ fever craze, their howling and writhing and cackling.
Her father had talked her from oblivion, had cooled her burning cheeks with his tears. “Come on back, dove,” he’d said. “Don’t go now.” And in the fever madness she heard him, had reached out for him though she clawed only at the air, had called out to him though the words became nonsense. When the fever passed, and the lumps lost their swell, she opened her eyes and saw her father’s haggard face. She opened her mouth and said what she’d been trying to say all along. “I wouldn’t leave you, Dada.”
Lora pushed the tears down and drove away the memories by walking the hallway up and down, up and down. The other Sisters began working in shifts, but not Lora. Not Lora. She worked and tended and soothed until she could no longer stand. When she fell from heat, exhaustion, or thirst, she allowed herself those few moments. But then she was up again, going up and down the hallway, for she couldn’t bear the sounds of life escaping bodies and leaving only husks. She couldn’t bear the sounds that brought her back to Highcrest, to her mother, her brothers. She couldn’t bear not hearing her father calling her back.
In the second sennight, Sister Kanna took ill. Then Sister Aelia. And Sister Jenna. When Kanna died, there was no time for grief. Lora and Sister Elarie dragged her out, nearly dropping her in her burial shroud twice. In the twilight, they placed her among the others in the third plague pit.
Elarie quickly retreated back to the Haven, but Lora couldn’t look away. Lying in a neat row was a family of five, mother, two daughters, a boy no more than five, and a babe tucked into the mother’s elbow. The baby’s eyes were open and kept Lora enthralled. Only when night had fallen and the baby melted into shadow could she look away.
Raising her face to the sky, Lora finally let out the wa
il that had been building for days. She shouted at the sky, at Dea and Themin and all the other heavenly hosts she could think of. Was this what it was to be cursed? To survive something only to watch others succumb to it, not able to do anything?
“Lora.”
She looked around, startled at the sound of her name. Ennis stood nearby, her features drawn, even in the long shadows of night. Lora had seen little of Ennis these past days, as she did what she could in the town, running back and forth between it and the Haven to help those who they didn’t have room for.
“What can we do?” Lora sobbed, gesturing at the pit.
Ennis slipped her arm around Lora’s waist. “All we can.”
“Will I be the only one left? Will I have to dig the graves myself?”
“I’ll help you.”
“I never thought I’d h-have to s-see it again,” she hiccupped.
Ennis’s arm tightened around her. She began the Highland death rites and though she had no voice left of her own, Lora mouthed the words in time to hers.
Lay down your cares, beloved, for you have no need of them.
Tamea takes you in her arms and brings you to the Life-Giver,
And at Mithria’s bosom shall you sleep, forever at rest.
May Mithria keep you, and may you lessen her load.
Peace be, beloved, and blessed journey on.
And with her head tucked against Ennis’s shoulder, Lora let herself be led back to the Haven, up the staircase, and into bed. It wasn’t until morning that Lora noticed Ennis felt too hot to the touch.
When Ennis stumbled getting dressed that morning, a line of sweat glistening on her brow, Lora cried, “Irina, leave now!”
Irina took one look at Ennis and hurried from the bedroom.
Lora reached for her friend, felt her skin burning beneath her hands. “Oh, Ennis.”
“I’m all right, Lora. I just need…to…”
“Lie down.”
The days of tending took over, and with practiced hands, Lora searched Ennis for the signs. When she found a small lump underneath both Ennis’s arms, she flew down the hall, down the stairs, to the ransacked supply cabinet. Claiming what she could, she rushed to Ennis’s side. Her steady hands amazed her, and she let the motions numb her, for she couldn’t bear to think of what was to come.
