by Carol Berg
I laughed at his question. Only to be expected that Aleksander would hit upon the single puzzle Ezzarians themselves would like explained. “Actually, we aren’t sure. We’ve lost a great deal of information from the past. But we have the power, the melydda, to do it, and we’ve developed the skills over the years, and if we didn’t ...” I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t really possible to explain the devastation of the world that would occur if we failed in our task. The cruelty, the violence, the horror ... there was so much of it already that sometimes it was hard to feel that we made a difference. You had to view each victory in itself: the wife no longer beaten to the point of death, the child no longer starved, the slave left unmutilated, the man no longer weeping with the horror that his hands created, the woman no longer clawing her eyes to rid herself of unceasing visions. “... there is no one else. There are horrors worse than those we live every day.”
“And women are in charge of it. That seems a demon-wrought thing itself.”
“All have their role,” I said. “Equally important. Women have certain talents—sorcery you would call them—that enable them to do certain things. Other tasks require physical skills and sorcerous ones that women are less likely—”
“Fighting. You actually fight them, don’t you?”
“It’s how we get them out—not battling the possessed person, but the demon itself.” In a landscape woven of sorcery and the human soul. There was no simple explanation for the Aife’s magic—the portal and the land beyond it. “If the ones who did those things also carried the tasks of governing or examining, it would bind up too much knowledge in the person most at risk.”
“Like sending your master strategist into the vanguard?”
I wished he would stop his questions. I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to think of it. “Exactly that.”
“Warriors. Warriors who battle demons. And you were one of them, weren’t you? Before. What I saw was no dream.”
“Please, my lord ...”
He was quiet for a moment, though I could feel him looking at me.
“... tell me ...” Did I want to know or not? “Please, my lord, tell me of the Queen.”
“Exceptionally lovely.” He rolled over on the bed and kicked off his boots. “Cold as a stone goddess, but fire in her eye—and in her soul, too. When I got there she was playing some kind of lap harp. Thought my boots might start to smoke. Do they ever marry anyone but Ezzarians?”
“Never. Put it out of your mind.” I wished I could put her out of mine. It had been a mistake to ask. Music. That wasn’t right. She had never played. If it wasn’t her ... Darkness crept into my being. Dread.
Aleksander was still babbling. “It could be a good thing for Ezzarians to have me in the family, you know. Her consort has eyes like a frog. ...” He caught my attention again. “Not a bad-looking fellow, but his eyes don’t sit nicely down in a hollow, more flat on his face. Built like a Manganar, though. If he can fight, he’d be a day’s work to get rid of.”
“Oh, he can fight all right.” He could twist two Thrid into a knot and still crush a Derzhi neck with the other hand.
“You know him, then?”
“And the Queen, she’s tall, lighter-haired than most Ezzarians ...” Streaks of red-gold sunlight in her dark chestnut curls—so different from the straight black hair the rest of us had. “... with a cleft in her chin?”
“I could spend a day exploring that cleft. And another exploring under her skirt, and another—”
“That’s enough!” I jumped up from the floor. “Gods, will you leave it?”
Of course, Ysanne was queen. Why had I doubted it for a moment? She had been groomed for it from childhood. Her power, her perception, her skills honed every day. Fate, even in the form of a Derzhi conquest, could not have prevented her.
Aleksander came to me and pulled down my hood, cocking his head to one side. “She’s not just an acquaintance, is she? Not just your sovereign? A kinswoman, perhaps? I was told you were a royal bastard. Couldn’t be your mother unless Ezzarian magic is more powerful than I can imagine. Or was she your lover? That would be a tale worth hearing. How—”
“She was my wife.”
“Athos’ balls.” Odd how heartfelt sympathy could be expressed so crudely.
We’d not yet been formally wed, but the distinction was too subtle for a Derzhi. Ysanne and I had been paired when we were fifteen and had fought our first battle together at seventeen after I passed my testing and became a Warden. We were the youngest pairing ever to dispossess a demon. We had come to think as one, to mesh our talents so that I could move with ease through her portals from the world where we existed into the reality, the battleground, she created for me. There I would seek out the demon to banish or destroy it. Ysanne had been able to sense my doubts and fears before I knew them myself, and send me her strength and power and care to vanquish them. There had never been a Warden and an Aife so attuned to each other as we had been. We were destined for each other, we said, pledged through a hundred battles and three years of such intimacy as husbands and wives never know. I had known she would marry if she lived. I was dead. She was to be queen.
“And the fish-eyed consort?”
That was the true surprise. “A friend.” My dearest friend from the day we could walk. “On the day of Ezzaria’s fall ... when things got desperate, I sent him for reinforcements, spellmakers who could cause a distraction, allow us to regroup, anything to get five minutes to think, to get people out. He said that the only way he would fail was if he was dead. He never came, so I assumed ... all these years, I thought he was dead.”
“And instead he was running off with your wife. Sounds like a Derzhi!”
His words at last prodded me out of my confused musings. “Of course not. Something happened. He couldn’t get back. And she was free to marry from the moment I was captured. I’m just surprised they’re together, that’s all. They argued ... irritated each other, so I could never be with both of them at once. I wouldn’t have thought they’d suit.”
Aleksander returned to the bed, his large stockinged feet hanging off the end of it. “Clearly you didn’t look. You’re naive, Seyonne. I’d guess you were the only one not to see it.”
I tried to rid myself of my disturbance. I should be rejoicing that two I had loved so dearly lived and had found love with each other. Enough to draw music from one who never believed she could create beauty, but only lunatic landscapes. Of course I rejoiced. Ezzarians were not Derzhi. Ysanne needed a partner to make use of her skill, and a lover to embrace her fire. Rhys was a good and honorable man. There was no betrayal. Aleksander knew nothing about Ezzarians. Nothing.
Chapter 22
I sat in the cottage doorway all afternoon, leaning against the doorpost, listening to Aleksander groan and mumble in his sleep, and watching the quiet activity of the Ezzarian settlement, quite successful at forcing aside all thoughts of Ysanne and Rhys. As surely as the sun moved along its path toward the western peaks, the man with the now empty barrow trudged out of the forest, past the cottage, only to disappear beyond the next rise in the road. An old woman drove a small flock of sheep across a nearby field with the help of a dancing pup. The only excitement was when two youths careened down the road on horseback and reined in hard in the center of the road, laughing excitedly and splattering sun-melted slush. A woman stepped out of the Records House and scolded them, and they began walking the horses back toward the forest. I smiled when, at the very moment she reentered the building, they whooped and shot off again. Some things never changed.
After an hour of quiet, the children—fifteen or twenty of them—burst from the schoolhouse door and ran in every direction, some toward the river, some toward the forest. Two girls went straight to the Weaver’s cottage. Perhaps one of them would be the next Weaver, she who was the heart of an Ezzarian community. My mother had been the Weaver for our settlement before she died of fever when I was twelve. Two more girls and a boy, older children,
sat on the rocks outside the school talking earnestly, drawing in the air with their hands, leaving traces of silver glinting in the sunlight. Musings on the universe, I guessed, remembering a hundred such conversations. Trying to understand why, among all the peoples in the world, Ezzarians were charged with keeping demons from ravaging human souls. Believing that someday they would take on their responsibilities and that those thousands of strangers who lived out in the world, never knowing or understanding what had been done for them, would become worthy of its beauties. I longed for a moment’s sharing in their innocence and ignorance.
The woman came just after sunset as she had promised. The road was deserted by that time, and so she was halfway to our cottage before I picked out her green cloak against the background of the darkening trees. It was odd for her to invite us to her home. Outsiders. Supplicants. My people were sincere in their welcome to anyone in need of help, and generous beyond the world’s understanding in the sacrifices they made to hold the power of demons at bay. But their homes were their private refuges—warm, comfortable havens for those who lived close with horror and madness. A cynical voice in the back of my mind said that the investigator was but another young woman captivated by Aleksander’s overabundant virility and breathtaking station in life. But I dismissed the thought quickly and told myself it was more likely exactly what she had said. A kindness. And perhaps a desire to converse with someone new.
My Ezzaria had been isolated from the world. It was necessary. We dared not reveal our purposes to anyone, lest the demons be drawn to us, or the rest of humanity interfere with our work. But there had been a great deal of travel between our own settlements in those days, and we’d had a hundred or more Searcher teams out in the world, constantly coming and going with news and information and books. With so few Ezzarians left, and all of them in hiding, there could be only a few teams out and only the most necessary contact with outsiders.
I stood up when she came, bowed, and held open the door.
“Good evening,” she said, lowering the hood of her cloak, but very pointedly keeping her eyes averted from me.
“Good evening, madam,” I said, biting off the apology that came to my tongue. I could afford neither her interest nor her friendship. I needed to stay apart so she would at least acknowledge me as a living being, however boorish.
Aleksander was sitting at the table, his head bent over a cup of steaming nazrheel. When I’d waked him at sunset, he’d almost broken my arm before shaking off his restless dreams. He complained that he’d slept only an hour, and indeed dark smudges circled his eyes, and the skin of his face was stretched tight. But he recovered his spirits quickly when the woman came. He snatched his cloak from the hook on the wall, swirling it about himself dramatically as he fastened it about his shoulders.
“At last! I’ve begun to despair of Ezzarian hospitality. Lead me away, gracious lady. Anywhere.”
The lady’s amusement gleamed softly beneath layers of dignity, serious purpose, and gracious formality—a burden of roles for a quiet, graceful young woman. “We must seem a dreadfully dull village to one from so different a life,” she said. “I can offer only a pleasant, though chilly, walk through the woods, a simple meal, and perhaps a little conversation. Not exactly an evening in the courts of Zhagad.”
“Madam, it is the company makes the evening.” Aleksander offered his arm, and the woman nodded and took it. As they walked out of the door, the Prince looked over his shoulder and grinned fiendishly, calling out, “Come along ... Pytor. You don’t wish me to have all the fun.”
I trailed along behind, cursing Derzhi princes and the paths of fortune, as had become my unseemly habit of late.
To Aleksander’s astonishment our guide made a light with her hand, silvery beams that mimicked moonlight and showed us the way along the path. Every few steps a smaller path would break away, wandering off into the forest darkness, where you could see homely lantern beams winking through the movement of the trees.
My corruption had weighed heavily on me from the first moment we’d entered the Ezzarian settlement, and as we passed under the eaves of the forest, beyond the barriers of enchantment woven by the woman with fleeces hanging in her window, the burden of my unclean soul became almost unbearable. When I inhaled the pure air, every violation of my body and mind came back to haunt me: every unseemly touch, every night of forced intimacy with women or men I did not know, every drop of impure water, the food that was never clean, but half rotten or taken from unclean beasts or dung-fed fields, my blood exposed to outsiders’ touch, my hands immersed in their filth, my body, once dedicated to the service of honor and truth, scarred and maimed and forced to grovel before those who considered themselves gods. I knew none of it was my fault. I had done nothing to deserve what had happened to me, despite what many of my people would assume. Yet reason—all the arguments and philosophizing I had used with Llyr—had no effect on my feeling. As I walked behind Aleksander and the Ezzarian woman, I wished only that I could run from that place and never stop.
“Here,” said the woman, leading us to the left along one of the narrow tracks and across a wooden footbridge that spanned a gurgling brook. Cheerful yellow candlelight shone from the windows of a good-sized cottage, speaking of comfort and companionship and familiarity. To be a Warden, one had to be able to separate oneself from others, to rely on no one save your partner who held the portal. One had to embrace solitude and self-sufficiency. These were skills and habits that had preserved my life and my sanity in my years of bondage, but they were not without cost. Never in all my life had I felt so alone.
“Come inside and get warm.” She pushed open the door and stepped inside. Aleksander followed her. I went as far as the doorway and stood stupidly gazing upon the past.
The room was quite large, the wooden floor covered with woven rugs of russet and forest green, the chairs and table of smooth dark pine, laid with sewn cushions and cloths of autumn colors. It was pleasantly jumbled with books, papers, and baskets of needlework and pinecones and nuts. One end of the long table was laid for three. On the other end lay a mortar and pestle and a stack of small, sewn bags. It looked as if she had been packaging herbs dried from the previous season, for bundles of herbs hung from the rafters above the table, and a few more lay beside the implements. The room smelled of thyme, and rosemary, and roasting meat from a spit over the hearth fire. The walls were hung with weavings, lovely, rich-hued, some in simple patterns, some with detailed depictions of Ezzarian life.
The lady removed her cloak and hung it on a wooden peg inside the door. “Do come in,” she said. “Spring comes late here, and the nights are always cold.”
“I cannot,” I stammered stupidly. “I’ll wait outside ... or go back. I don’t belong here ... eating ... with the Prince.” Nonsense poured from my lips because I could not bear leaving, yet I could not accept the consequences of stepping inside. How could I keep wearing my cloak and my hood in that room?
“Come inside,” said Aleksander gently. “My servant is quite affected by the cold,” he said to the woman. “Would it violate your customs if he left his cloak on for a while ... until he’s comfortable?”
“He may do as he wishes,” said the woman. “Come to the fire and get warm,” she said to me. “It took me three winters here to get accustomed to the cold. Are you from southern climes?”
“Yes,” I said numbly, and stepped inside.
She closed the door and took Aleksander’s cloak, then excused herself and disappeared through a doorway on the left.
“You have to do it sometime,” chided Aleksander quietly. “She is not someone you know, so it might be easier with her. Perhaps they’ve changed their ways.”
“Perhaps the Derzhi have become peacemakers.”
“You are a man. Tell them they’re wrong about you. You’ve convinced me of a number of things I had no wish to believe.”
“You said it yourself, my lord. I am a slave, not a man. They’ll not hear me when I speak.”
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He didn’t answer. The lady returned and began setting food on the table. She put out hot bread, potatoes roasted in the coals of the fire, a bowl of dried fruit, and a plate of meat, sliced thin from the piece on her spit. As she poured three glasses of wine, she invited us to make ready.
Aleksander started for the table, but I caught his arm and nodded to the painted pottery bowl and pitcher sitting on a small table next to the hearth. He was puzzled, but I pulled him with me and showed him how to clean his own hands with the water and the small linen towel laid out beside. The lady was pleased.
“No business while we eat,” she said, offering the plate of meat to Aleksander, who shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He was accustomed to reclining at table, and he didn’t know what to do with the offered plate.
“May I serve you, my lord?” I said softly, taking the plate from the woman and picking up the fork that lay on it.
“Whatever is done,” he said.
I filled his plate and my own. The woman seemed not to notice. That is, she was very skilled at ignoring awkward behavior.
“So tell me, sir,” she said to Aleksander after everything was served and we’d begun eating. “What is it you enjoy most about your life?”
It was a simple question, seriously asked. Not frivolous. She truly wanted to know and to weigh it along with everything else she had learned. Aleksander understood the same, and he gave it serious consideration, rather than blurting out something foolish as he might have done in Capharna.
“The horses,” he said at last, then laughed heartily at himself. “Amazing, isn’t it? I’d never considered it quite so plainly. I have been given everything in life a man could want, but the thing I prize most is that I can ride the finest horses in the world.”
“Horses are indeed beautiful creatures,” she said, her dark eyes fixed on him in such serious attention as a man might bleed for.
“Intelligent. That’s what I like about them. Strong-willed. You can’t tame them, not without making them less than they are. To get their best, you must convince them of your worthiness to be their rider.”
