Life Giver

by Lisa Lowell

  18

  Sworn

  Early the next morning, they called Honiea to implement their plan to resurrect Norton. No one actually talked with the Queen of Healing about their other plans, and she had the grace to not ask about it either. Their reddened eyes and grim faces spoke enough, and Honiea knew they would not be happy with either decision.

  “We need to bring the lecher back,” Yeolani said without preamble. They hadn’t bothered moving the body, but they finally had put a blanket over him the night before, if only to ease their consciences.

  “Do you have the Life Giver?” Honiea asked, and when he held up the little furry creature, she nodded. “You’ll have to remove the arrow first, and hopefully, we can fix the damage. I’ve never done this before.”

  Wordlessly, Yeolani flipped back the cover, and then, with little ceremony, he put his boot on Norton’s shoulder to provide leverage and unceremoniously jerked the arrow out from under the arm. With a flash of magic, Yeolani made the offending shaft disappear; and then, as an afterthought, he made the pool of dried blood fade as well. No need to have a newly revived Norton wondering why he was lying on the floor in his own gore. He then magically lifted the huge man to one of the beds as the women followed.

  “Now you must give the Life Giver to the corpse. It can only be a Seeking King. I can’t do this,” Honiea advised as she knelt at Norton’s side, hands hovering over the man’s chest, waiting for the promised soul to return.

  Yeolani nodded, caressed the excitable little furball one more time, and then placed it right over the corpse’s heart. They waited for some reaction with tense anticipation. What would they do if this didn’t work? Probably bury the corpse in the forest, and Rashel could claim she’d seen him walk in but never saw him after that. She could lie convincingly, and she stood ready to lie about everything, to back up the story they had concocted to explain Norton’s absence and why he was in her house.

  Honiea sensed a thump from Norton’s savaged heart and began weaving the sundered muscles, knitting them back together. One of the major arteries to the heart had been pierced, and she mended it with a thought. Norton had lost a lot of blood, but it had filled his chest cavity rather than spilling out of his wound. Honiea directed the blood back into the veins before she sealed them off, liquefied it again, and pushed down on the repaired heart in order to ignite the pumping motion. With her first push, a gasp of air tore down Norton’s throat and he coughed. Norton’s eyes flashed open in alarm. They’d grown milky during his time dead, and before he could try to focus, he collapsed in exhaustion and pain.

  “Norton,” Rashel began explaining to him through his groans. “Relax, you’ve been hurt. It’s your heart. We’ve got a healer here. You’ll be fine in a while.”

  Yeolani looked over at her and whispered, “You realize you didn’t lie. Every word you said was true. That was amazing.”

  Norton spent the better part of an hour delirious and in pain while Honiea worked on repairing the damage of the arrow as well as the rotting process that had set in. Yeolani used that pain to link it magically with the thought of raping or even touching another woman, tying the thought to the agony he was experiencing. If Norton made it out of this alive and sane, he surely would never want to think of a woman again. It seemed to fit the crime, and with no overt magic to enforce the process, the man could live the rest of his life in peace and never know anything had changed.

  While he was in Norton’s mind, Yeolani wiped away the memory of what had happened on the day he tried to rape Rashel. Instead, he placed a vivid recollection of felling trees and having one fall on him, thus explaining the injuries and the need of the healer. It even worked as an explanation as to why he was in Rashel’s house. Hers was the last one on the road to the forest, and anyone who brought him back in from the forest to town reasonably could expect to stop here to get help. While they worked, Rashel ran to Norton’s house and told his children the lie they’d prepared and brought his oldest son back. Meanwhile, Honiea had covered the man with bandages, and he would have impressive scars to go with the perceived injuries.

  The Life Giver had worked perfectly. The little fuzzy creature had moved on, now a dust bunny under Rashel’s bed, lifeless and probably testing out wings once again somewhere else. By noon, Yeolani and Norton’s eldest son had made a gurney to lug the man to his home to continue his recovery, leaving Rashel and Honiea alone in the cabin.

  “So, what have you decided?” Honiea asked as she held Nevai and entertained the baby while Rashel grimly prepared a lunch for her guests.

  “He will be a magician and move on. I’ll keep Nevai and my memories. Hopefully, we will both find someone else to love in the future,” Rashel answered in a flat voice.

  Unexpectedly Honiea didn’t comment but stood up, bringing Nevai with her, and gave Rashel a heartfelt hug and handed the baby to his mother. “You are an amazing woman, my dear. Please, keep the candle nearby, and I will come if you need me.”

  With that Honiea left in her customary shimmer of light.

  Soon after Yeolani returned from delivering Norton to his house. “He’s settled and will make a complete recovery, unfortunately,” Yeolani commented in much the same flat tone Rashel had used earlier. “Shall we go to town and transfer the farm? After lunch, I suppose, if I can eat anything.”

  “It’s not a death sentence, Yeolani,” Rashel reminded him frankly. “This is the best for us both. You’re going Seeking again and will have many grand adventures. Do you know where you’re going to go first?”

  Yeolani hadn’t thought about it. Indeed, he hadn’t considered where he would Seek at all. Now, he needed some goal if only to avoid looking in on Elin. Without thinking about it, he fished the Talisman compass out of his pocket where he had carried it ever since the incident with the Siren. He had not even shown it to Rashel or Honiea. Now he wondered if he trusted the magic it held. The compass had led him to the Siren, a trap, and yet had also kept him alive. He sat at the table and opened it, briefly trying to explain it to Rashel.

  “I found this when I had amnesia. It is a Talisman, a magical guide that I found, but I don’t know if I should trust it.” The one arm still faithfully pointed north but the second arm wavered and wobbled as if it couldn’t make up its mind. It swung in a quarter arch and back again with no explanation.

  “Why wouldn’t you trust such magic?” Rashel asked as she placed sliced cheese, meats, and bread on the table and then turned to get a pitcher of her ever-present milk.

  “Because the silly thing is following you,” Yeolani muttered. He watched the magic arm swing back to the south as Rashel brought the pitcher from the sideboard.

  She put down the milk and, while keeping an eye on the face of the dial, edged around the table. The compass moved unerringly wherever she shifted. “Maybe it doesn’t follow what you should Seek but where your duty lies,” she suggested.

  “I didn’t need to do some duty for the Siren, and it led me to her,” Yeolani pointed out. “The deceitful thing led me into her snare.”

  “Not the compass. It kept you safe,” objected Rashel. “The Siren’s magic lured you in, and the compass expected you to confront her as part of your duty to use magic. It’s still a guide. It guides you to what you should do, not necessarily what you should Seek. You have a duty to finish here with me, and then it will guide you somewhere else. Trust that.”

  Yeolani acquiesced to Rachel’s logic, and they ate lunch without speculating more over the compass’s use. Rashel cleaned up the dishes while Yeolani did some final preparations to leave her. He conjured a simple wooden box to sit on Rashel’s mantle. Then he explained what he had created.

  “It has no lock, but it will not open unless you and you alone are holding it.” Yeolani demonstrated his own efforts to pry the lid open with his fingernails. Then he handed it to her, and she easily lifted it open. Inside sat a single gold coin. “This box will fill with however much you need to pay for whatever service you need. Hire some
one to plow your fields or mend a fence. You can buy a cart to carry cheese to town or new clothes. You will never need as long as you have this box.”

  Rashel nodded and took the simple wooden chest, put it beside Honiea’s candle, and there she saw the crystal he’d given her as a means of calling him. Her fingers brushed it, sending shivers down Yeolani’s back as she picked it up. She brought it down, now numb with sadness. “I shouldn’t have this then,” she murmured. “I’d be too tempted…at least for a while.”

  With a sorrowful heart, Yeolani accepted back the crystal and made it disappear back into the earth from which he had conjured it. He then packed up his things and shouldered the pack made for Nevai so they could walk to town. Outside, the spring had settled into glorious bright warmth. They walked close enough to hold hands but didn’t dare. It would seem wrong somehow now. The birds chattering and the light smell of plum blossoms mocked their solemn footsteps.

  At the city hall, they found the gentleman who had officiated at the auction. Clerk, mayor, and magistrate all in one, Yeolani thought but greeted the man with a friendly handshake. “I’d like to take a look at the records of Rashel’s farm. I want to make sure it is hers, no matter what happens to me,” he declared.

  “Of course,” the mayor replied, but his suspicion evidenced itself with a sideways look. “You aren’t planning on dying, are you, Master Yeolani.” Or leaving, his thoughts continued loud enough for Yeolani to hear.

  “You never know,” redirected Yeolani, “so I want her to be taken care of.”

  “I would have thought you would come in soon to marry her instead,” the silly man commented as he pulled up the carefully written deed and put it out on the counter. “Can you read then, sir?”

  Yeolani assured the mayor that he could and made a show of reading the official document while Rashel looked on. “Will putting it in her name ensure that she can remain on the farm if anything happens to me? No more auctions or some such nonsense,” Yeolani wanted the man’s promise. “I’ll marry her when it’s right,” he added to reassure him.

  The mayor didn’t make the promise but instead brought out a pen. “I’ll write her in as your heir and that should do the job. Now, Rashel, do you know how to spell your given name?”

  “It’s Elin, E-L-I-N Hokansdotter…” but she paused when she realized that the clerk had frozen with the pen hovering over the paper. She looked over at Yeolani who stood there with his mouth agape as well, but at least he was blinking. “What?” she protested. “Rashel’s a nickname, and this document has to be official.”

  “How on God’s green earth did you get Rashel from Elin?” he asked in near shock. Yeolani’s mind wouldn’t settle until he heard this amazing tale.

  “My mother called me Rashel first. I was always climbing trees too high, falling in the well, riding the cows and bulls for fun, and otherwise putting myself in danger. She believed the fairies followed me to keep me from breaking my neck. She kept saying I was ‘far too rash, Elin.’ It became something of a reminder; “Rash El” every time I did something dangerous. It quickly got shortened to Rashel until no one knew me by my real name. Is that a problem?”

  “No,” Yeolani sighed, looking over at the clerk who remained in that frozen state like on the first day they had met the winter before. Then Yeolani shifted back at Rashel’s intense eyes set in a perfectly sweet face. “It’s just that when the fairies told me the name of my lady I had only two things to guide me: her name and the knowledge that I would love her immediately. It would be a compulsion. The lady I was to Seek was to be named Elin.”

  Now, it was Rashel’s turn to have her mouth pop open in wonder. “You didn’t know my name after all the mind reading you did? You mean…” and she reached out her hand and touched his chest where he’d hidden the Heart Stone meant for that lady he would leave her to Seek.

  “It would mean you would become a magician, and there are a whole host of limits and strange things you’ll find happening to you. You won’t be able to lie anymore, and you’ll find you have to...”

  Rashel interrupted by reaching up and kissing him, making speaking impossible. That first kiss, gentle and amazingly light, as if spring finally had thawed him out after the terrible winter, made it all worthwhile. The torn priorities mended instantly. When she pulled away, Rashel’s smile made him weak in the knees and he couldn’t breathe.

  “Ask me again,” she ordered.

  Yeolani put his hand against her cheek, twining his long fingers in her rich mahogany hair, hoping the spell on the mayor lasted a bit longer. “Elin, will you marry me?”

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “Even if it means leaving your farm and raising Nevai on the plains and fighting evil and living in that cave I found and…” She kissed him again to stop the litany of indignities he could foresee.

  “Even if it means all of that. All I need is for you to be whom you were meant to be, King of the Plains. If it will not hold you back, then I will go with you anywhere in the Land.”

  The smile on her face was infectious, and he grinned back with a twinkle in his eye. “Then shall we?” He caught her nod of readiness, and he broke the freezing spell on the mayor. She took up where she’d left off.

  “That’s H-O-K-A-N-S dotter.”

  The official took down her name as Yeolani’s heir and then had Yeolani sign his name to agree to this change. If they seemed a bit impatient, or if Yeolani’s hand shook slightly as he signed his name, the mayor didn’t note it.

  When the officer began blowing on the deed to dry the ink, Yeolani added, “Now that I’ve made that step, it’s time. I think I will marry her, right here and now.

  The mayor manfully covered up his surprise and gladly drafted out a marriage certificate for them. He called a passerby to come inside the office to witness for them, and they were married before the city official without much ceremony. This time they walked back to the farm hand in hand, traveling a great deal faster than they had come.

  19

  Looking Down

  Yeolani made a tremendously stupid decision on the walk back toward the cabin. He felt so giddy with the wonder of having this woman actually agree to marry him that he needed to give her a gift to show his love. He stopped in the middle of the morning traffic in the busiest part of the path through town and gave Rashel a long, lusty kiss to prepare her.

  “I want to give you the Heart Stone,” he whispered.

  “Here? Now?” Her eyes grew huge. “Won’t it…”

  Yeolani knew what she was asking and stopped her. “Nothing is going to happen. No one will notice. At least it didn’t with me. It doesn’t change you. It’s a key to a door, and you have to walk inside.”

  “Very well,” but the trepidation in her eyes spoke of her doubt. Loud in her thoughts rang dread of the villagers knowing she was a Wise One and throwing her out of her home again.

  Yeolani did not share her doubts and brought the Heart Stone from its hiding place beneath his ribs. The fluttering of its light witnessed to the near panic pace of Rashel’s pulse. Yeolani cast a blur of invisibility around them the same way Honiea had back at the inn at Simten. No one would notice them standing like idiots in the middle of the road, but he could not wait to see what Rashel would do with her magic. She reached out her hand to touch the globe between them.

  Nothing happened, at first.

  “Nothing,” she whispered in relief, looking down at the orb in her hand and then back up at her new husband. “I feel nothing.”

  “That’s right,” he explained. “It does nothing until you learn how to do magic.”

  “What do I do with it?” asked Rashel.

  Yeolani grinned boyishly as he replied. “You could club me over the head with it, or just put it in your pocket. Do you see the fairies are brighter now?”

  Rashel looked up, and her face lit with the brilliance of the spring sun and the glow of fairy light that added to it. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered.

  “I
couldn’t agree more,” Yeolani replied, but he had eyes only for his new bride.

  Just then Nevai began to whine uncomfortably, and the spell was broken. The newlyweds began walking hurriedly on through town, wanting to get home. However, something strange began happening as they rejoined the flow of foot traffic.

  “Look,” Rashel muttered as quietly as she could, turning back up the road to show Yeolani what had caught her eye.

  To their utter surprise, a trail of crocus flowers, bright purple and white, followed them up the well-pressed cobbles of the main street, squeezing through the cracks, and in some cases, sprouting right up out of the stones. Each upwelling of flowers was shaped perfectly like a footprint.

  “Make them go away,” she gasped, as people walking by them began to look at the phenomena with curiosity and traced them to Rashel who stood frozen in the middle of the track. She even lifted her foot to look, in alarm, at the sole of her boot.

  “I can’t,” Yeolani chuckled, far less worried about this than his bride. “This is your magic. I remember now; the fairies said you would be the Green Lady, Queen of Growing Things. I’m just amazed that it showed up so quickly.”

  “Everyone is looking at us,” Rashel hissed under her breath. “How do I make them go away?”

  Yeolani grew serious and turned her to look her in the eyes. “First, tune out everything: the baby, the villagers, the traffic. Now, just wish the flowers to go away. They’ll obey you.”

  Rashel followed his directions, closing her eyes in concentration. The crocus flowers faded like the spring sun scorched them and disappeared. She sighed in relief, but Yeolani could feel the tense set of her shoulders. “Now how do I walk home without that happening again. I wasn’t thinking about flowers….it just happened.”