Tharadis straightened. “Rocks can’t speak. And if they could, we would have to consider whether or not they were capable of thought.”
Alyssa shook her head. “That’s still all conjecture.”
“True. But there are some things we can be certain about.”
Alyssa’s face brightened. “Such as?”
“This ‘one’ mentioned in the prophecy has at least one true choice open to him.”
Alyssa thought over the words again carefully, she but couldn’t see a choice in them at all.
Tharadis smiled. “‘The unyielding shatters.’”
“That’s not referring to the ‘one,’ but to ‘Blue.’ Whatever that is.”
Tharadis reached for the hilt of his sword. Instantly, Alyssa scooted her chair back in a panic, glancing towards the door. Why in the Abyss had she sent the guards away?
But then he drew it and placed it on the table.
She had expected a steel blade. She had not expected a blade that looked like it was made of a sliver of the sky itself.
Blue.
Entranced, she reached out and touched the blade. It wasn’t slick, like metal. It almost felt like fired clay, but even that wasn’t quite right. She had seen ceramic knives, and they were rare and incredible things. But nothing at all like this.
She ran her finger inside the fuller and frowned as she felt the tiniest tug on her skin. She pulled her finger back and squinted.
Inside the fuller was the tiniest of cracks.
The unyielding shatters.
“And blades do not yield,” Tharadis said, as if reading her thoughts. “Only those who wield them.”
Alyssa’s mind reeled. She looked up. She wanted to believe that this man was a charlatan, trying to trick or deceive her.
But she knew Patterns swirled around this man like a maelstrom. It didn’t take a trained Patterner to see them; they were obvious even to her. From the book he brought, to how he found the prophecy archives, to all the connections he made without—she begrudgingly admitted—much help from Alyssa at all. The man was a whirlwind of destiny. It would have been strange if the World Pattern hadn’t tried to speak to him.
Still, the words troubled her immensely. If they were true, and if Alyssa understood them, then it could only spell their doom. And there was no escaping it.
“This, this is big.” She stood up so fast that she knocked her chair over. “I have to tell someone. The Headmaster. I can’t deal with this.”
“Alyssa.”
She froze.
“Who is this prophecy for? The Headmaster? Or me?”
As she mulled over the words, the beating of her heart slowed. “Okay.” She righted the chair and sat back down. “It’s strange, but I feel better knowing that you’re going to take care of it. And stranger still that I’m willing to admit it to you.”
“Thank you.” Tharadis sat back down. “Now, I need your help with the beginning.”
“Right.” She took a deep, quavering breath. “‘To the land of the dead, one must go.’ It seems to me that the one would have to die. Which makes sense, given that the prophecy explicitly states that later on.”
Tharadis frowned. “But why say it twice? Especially when it’s so explicit the second time.” He shook his head. “No, I think we’re missing something. I think that passage is ambiguous.”
“Hmm. Yes.” They sat in silence.
It hit Alyssa like a blow. She leaned in. “‘Land of the dead.’ That’s it. That’s what’s different. It has to be the important part.”
Tharadis stood and raked his fingers through his hair again. “Shores take me,” he whispered. Then he laughed, though there was nothing joyful in that laugh.
“Tharadis,” Alyssa said softly, “you have to go to where all dead souls go. You have to find Farshores.”
Chapter 35: The Second Line
You know,” Tharadis said, grinning with his hands on his hips, “there’s something funny about that.”
Alyssa couldn’t imagine anything funny about a prophecy telling someone they had to find Farshores. She merely blinked at him wordlessly.
His smile widened. “I don’t even believe in Farshores. I don’t think it really exists.”
“I don’t think that’s funny. I think it’s …”
Sad.
Alyssa’s mind went to the next line in the prophecy.
To find what was lost.
She studied his face. His smile wasn’t genuine at all, she realized. It was a mask.
A mask hiding pain.
To find what was lost.
“Tharadis,” she asked hesitantly, “what about the next line?”
She saw tiny cracks form in his composure.
Tiny cracks, like the one running up the fuller of his sword.
Alyssa pressed on. “What was lost?”
Slowly, Tharadis pivoted on his heel, turning his face away from her. His answer came low, hoarse, so quiet it was almost inaudible. “Everything.”
His sadness was so tangible, so absolute, that Alyssa wasn’t surprised to find tears filling her own eyes at his answer.
Tharadis raised one hand to his face, head bowed, as he raised the other to ward Alyssa off as she rose from her chair. “Thank you for all you have done for me today,” he said. “I’d like to call on you for help again sometime, if I may.”
With her sleeves, Alyssa dabbed at her face. “Of course.”
With his face still turned away, he grabbed his sword from the table, slid it into the scabbard at his hip, and walked out without another word.
After a few moments, Alyssa began the mundane task of cleaning up the scrolls. She managed to stack three in her arms before casting them aside, throwing herself on the table, and weeping as she’d never wept before.
* * *
Night had fallen, yet traces of twilight still clung to the horizon. Tharadis walked down the steps of the library, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. He focused on the simple act of walking. Focusing on that was all that kept him going.
He couldn’t think about anything else. Not yet, not until he was alone in his room.
He passed inns along the way. Light leaked out from beneath doors and through shutter slats. So did sound. From nearly every inn he passed, Tharadis could hear laughter, singing, talking, and in some, guitars and flutes.
When he had first come to Garoshmir, he had reserved a room in a local inn rather than taking up the offer given to him by the Council of the Wall, to stay in one of the apartments in the Dome and Spire set aside for visiting dignitaries. He knew that such apartments came with lavish furnishings, food, and servants, all of which would be paid for by the citizens of the Accord. He knew he had no right to their money, so he had brought his own to spend on lodging. Yet as he passed inn after rowdy inn, he knew that he couldn’t stay in the room he had originally planned to.
Mere solitude wouldn’t be enough. He needed isolation.
He headed for the Dome and Spire.
When he arrived, Tharadis showed the guards there his summons. Moments later, a clerk came trotting toward him, smiling and bowing his head. With a sweep of his arm, the clerk showed Tharadis the way to his apartments, and then proceeded to lead him there, chattering all the while. Tharadis grunted at the man occasionally, which seemed to placate the clerk’s need for a response to his endless stream of words. Tharadis paid little attention to anything the man said. He was still too focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Only when the man mentioned something about servants did Tharadis utter a word: “No.”
When they finally reached the room, Tharadis shut the door on the clerk’s face. A few moments later, Tharadis heard the clerk’s footsteps fading as the man walked away. Tharadis let out a quavering sigh.
Finally, he was alone.
The room was dark and silent, save for the sound of Tharadis’s own breathing. Moonlight filtered through gauzy curtains that reached the floor, presumably leading to a veranda. It gave enough light for T
haradis to make his way to the massive four-poster bed pushed up against the far wall without cracking his knees on any of the small tables and sofas scattered about the room.
He lay down on the soft bed. He didn’t get under the covers, cold as the Garoshmiri night was; he had never felt comfortable covered in blankets. The bed was massive, much too big for a single man. He stretched his arm across the covers. He felt their coldness sink into his hand.
A cold bed. Cold as death.
Like a dam breaking, the feelings Tharadis had fought to control roared through him, drowning him, obliterating all thought of the present and dragging him back to the past.
Back before the Rift was bridged.
Back before he was made Warden.
Back before he had lost it all.
Chapter 36: Hearthsflame
It was a simple enough design. A few sweeping curves flowed out from a single point, swirling and branching, layered upon themselves, all of which was encapsulated in a perfect oval. Tharadis was proud of that; he had worked on sketching ovals for a very long time.
The design was his obsession. It reminded him of a flower that grew only in the driest, most shadowy places of the Face. The flower was called hearthsflame for the soft red color of its petals. It had no uses that anyone had discovered—no medicinal properties, and while it wasn’t dangerous, it was bitter and left one feeling like he had been punched in the gut for a day if eaten. Although no one paid much attention to this seemingly useless flower, Tharadis found himself drawn to it. Some days, he would hike down some of the hidden game paths on the Face just to see it. Seeing such a beautiful flower persevering in such harsh conditions had always made him feel emotions he couldn’t put names to. The mere contemplation of such a flower had sometimes even brought tears to his eyes.
Ever since he had first seen hearthsflame, Tharadis had been compelled to draw it, to capture and retain and immortalize some fragment of its essence, as if failing to do so were some great injustice to the world. So he had always drawn his design, ever since he was a boy, to remind himself of the flower, even if no one could see or really understand what it was he drew. All they saw were the lines.
Hunched down near the footpath that led down to his brother’s house with a stick in his hand, Tharadis etched the final line in the flat patch of dirt. Sometimes other young men his age would scoff at him for playing in the dirt like a child, but what Tharadis did was more important than listening to them. He still worked as hard as any of them, sometimes harder, but he still made time for this. It was profoundly important to him that every once in a while, he was reminded of this flower.
There was a rhythm and an order to its design. He had to lay the foundation, which was a strong heavy line curving across the center. From there, each subsequent line had to be placed at the right time, as if ridges of one needed to overlay those of an earlier line. Such details mattered to him, though he supposed it was his own peculiar need than any inherent importance in the design. Still, that was the way he always did it.
Occasionally, he even made improvements to the design. It always seemed perfect every time he saw it, as if it captured the spirit of hearthsflame exactly, but sometimes he would look at it from a different angle and could see something to make it even better. He didn’t know how he judged such an abstract design to be better, and again marked it up to being an affectation of his.
This was one of those times. The line representing the third stamen could be turned the other way, providing a counterpoint to the direction of the first two. Once he had finished it, he rocked back on his heels to study it and was pleased by the change.
“It’s beautiful,” he heard from behind him.
Startled, he jumped to his feet and spun. “Oh, Serena. Shores, you scared me.” He chuckled softly. “Thank you, by the way.” He cocked an eyebrow. “What are you doing out of the house?”
“Living my life,” she said, leaning on the crutch she sometimes used. Her straight black hair hung around her face, the tips touching her belt. As always, her deep brown eyes seemed to swallow him whole. Once his eyes met hers, it was hard to look away. He felt a bit guilty for staring so intently at his brother’s wife, and quickly glanced somewhere else. His gaze joined hers in regard of his design, and for some reason, sharing that with her felt just as private. His guilt grew and he chose some sage brush to focus his attention on.
“It’s … a flower, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Hearthsflame.” He had never told anyone else what it was.
She nodded as if it was what she had expected. “I’ve always seen you drawing it, but I never thought to actually take a look at it.” She turned and smiled at him. “I’m glad I finally did.”
He didn’t know what to say.
She turned began walking back to the house she shared with Owan. The crutch tucked under her left arm took as much of her weight as either of her legs. Still, she didn’t complain. “My husband send you to tend to me?”
Tharadis picked up his woven sack and slung it over his shoulder. “Duty calls,” he said. “But no, not exactly. He said you never needed tending, but that the house, the laundry, and the kitchen might while he was gone.” Tharadis hung back a few moments while she made her way back toward the house. He didn’t want to walk at her side. It didn’t seem right for him to, so he followed her a few steps behind.
Her answering laugh, low and throaty, was one Tharadis could never tire of. “Well,” she said, “I guess he respects me somewhat, if that’s what he said.”
If she had been there, she wouldn’t have believed that. Tharadis’s brother had said the words with contempt well-masked, but not well enough for Tharadis to understand how his brother truly felt about his wife. She had taken ill two years back, shortly after their marriage. Tharadis hadn’t been told the specific details—he could guess, but always regretted it when he did—but Serena had gotten hurt by something that shouldn’t have hurt her at all. No one had thought anything of it at the time, with some of the men in town blaming “women’s moods,” but it happened again later. And again.
And it only got worse as time went on. It wasn’t long before people began to recognize that Serena wasn’t merely a fickle and snivelly young woman, but that there was something genuinely wrong with the way her body experienced pleasure. Owan couldn’t even massage her feet without causing her to cry out in pain. The best healers in Naruvieth had examined her but could find no way to cure her condition.
Her life became a test of endurance. She didn’t want to be touched, not even by her own husband. Simple pleasures that other people took for granted, such as scratching an itch or combing her hair, were exercises in agony. Of course, she felt any normal hurts no less keenly than anyone else.
But as her condition worsened, Serena only seemed to get stronger. With each new challenge, her resolve to overcome it hardened.
Tharadis wondered just how hard she could get before becoming too brittle to sustain any more. Was there a limit to how much she could take? Would she decide she had had enough one day? What would happen then?
What would she do?
It was on days when he wondered this that his drawing of the hearthsflame consumed him the most.
The setting sun was an orange egg settling into the nest of drytrees that towered behind Owan and Serena’s house. A thin curl of gray smoke rose from the brick oven out behind the house. She had built the fire on her own, then, despite the healer’s orders to go easy on herself. She probably had chopped the wood herself, too. Tharadis swore to give her a scolding about that but smiled when he realized just how useless it would be. He might as well scold the hearthsflame about growing where it did. It would have the same effect.
And why should he scold her for doing something that made him feel happy? No, he wouldn’t scold her. But he would make sure to chop enough wood for her before he went back home.
Owan had built his house outside town, on a small ledge on the side of the plateau upon which Naruvieth was
built. The path leading down was steeper than the switchbacks on the Face, and so Serena didn’t have many opportunities to go into town. Ever since Owan had been made Warden of Naruvieth three years ago, he would often be gone for long stretches of time. Tharadis often took it upon himself to bring down a few days’ supplies for her. She wouldn’t hear of it when he said he would pay for them with his own money. She didn’t want charity, or even gifts, so he let her pay him back for everything he brought, though sometimes he snuck in a few extra trinkets, jade hair clips and opal-headed pins he was sure wouldn’t hurt her to wear, frivolous things, without telling her. She never complained about those.
He could have sworn something green like jade pinned her hair behind her ear. Seeing her wear it made him happier than he could account for. He tried to shake himself of the feeling, failed, and focused on following her into the house.
It was a cozy place, its single large room given the appearance of three rooms by sheets of canvas that stretched up to the conical ceiling. Tharadis had read in one of the old books his father had given him that it was a holdover from when the remnants of mankind were on the run from the sheggam, never settling down and living in tents. Times had changed, and more buildings, particularly those of a more official function, had actual walls separating the rooms within, but people had grown used to seeing canvas dividers in their homes. Owan and Serena’s house was big enough for them, and a baby, should one ever make its way into their lives, but with only her in the house, it seemed an empty, lonely place. Maybe that had more to do with the expression on her face, one which she only ever seemed to show Tharadis, one that she was too proud to show in front of anyone else. He wasn’t even sure if she knew just how alone she looked when it was only him around.
He wondered how she looked when she was truly alone. He wondered if she cried.
With her crutch under one arm and a broom in the other, she swept up the remains of a clay cup she had apparently dropped. Her left hand trembled, from what Tharadis didn’t know, but her face betrayed nothing.
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