by Anna Steffl
She held the cup to him again. “Heran, it’s not come to the Passage Prayer,” but she looked to Degarius with a question—had it come to that? Was Kieran going to die?
Degarius wanted to shake his head no, but he’d seen these cases before. The man was certainly delirious, calling Miss Nazar hera. And his sense of doom, the surety of death, was a bad sign. Even if they could find a doctor, nothing could be done.
Miss Nazar sat the cup aside, closed her eyes, and began a prayer. Her lips moved, formed every word, but she only gave the slightest, reluctant, breath to them, as if they were a penance to say.
Kieran grew still, so Degarius paced to the far side of the clearing. He’d rather have his knuckles busted than listen to Solacian chanting, even a chant done halfheartedly. Had she ever done it with the whole? But he turned to practical matters. How he was going to bury the man if he died before they reached Ferne Clyffe. They didn’t carry a shovel.
“Heran!” Miss Nazar cried.
Degarius spun around. Kieran was on one elbow. His eyes darted wildly. “Where is he? I failed. I killed men for nothing. He left. He took it. I was supposed to make sure he kept his word.”
“Kieran, you didn’t fail.” Miss Nazar grasped the monk’s shoulders and pressed him to lie back down. “Lord Degarius is here. He won’t take it.”
Damn. Why did she have to say those last words with such certainty? Degarius returned to them.
Kieran half-closed his eyes and his head drifted to the side. The birch tea must have started to work. “After I killed the men, I prayed every waking moment, hoping the Maker would forgive me. I prayed for a sign. I thought the deer was my sign. When I was fourteen, when I was good, I touched a doe. I followed her for hours, moved so slowly, cautiously. The surprise in her eyes when she felt my hand...that was the happiest I’ve ever been. I always thought being with the Maker would be like that happiness.”
Degarius ran his fingers through his beard and wished he’d never felt contempt for Kieran. There was something fine about him, about his realizing the worth in an act like touching the doe. It wasn’t for glory or gain, but to connect with something beyond self. Degarius wondered what his happiest moment was. Killing the draeden was tainted by the deaths of Nat and Micah and the damage the water had done to his feet.
No, there was nothing happy about that moment.
Winning his first tournament and earning Assaea from his grandmother? That was happy. Reading the letter granting him the generalship made him happy, though he’d always expected to be happier. Those were bright spots. But beneath the memories he wanted to think his happiest, was the truth. Not a bright, shiny truth. Sometimes the truth, and happiness, was as deep and black as the moment of forsaking oneself before sleep. Kissing her had been that kind of oblivion.
What had been her happiest moment? She seldom spoke of her life before Solace, but he gathered from what the superior said that it was a hardship. She blamed herself for her father’s death. He looked back on their acquaintance. The happiest he saw her was when she woke in his arms after she’d fainted before the fire. It was a moment of pure joy. A moment, as Kieran said, uncensored by thought or word, that showed one’s true nature.
Kieran, speaking again, drew Degarius from reflection. “I thought the Maker had answered my prayers by sending the doe. If I could touch her, it would be a sign that I was clean again. But instead, this happened.” His fingers plucked at the spiritbane he wore around his neck. “It doesn’t keep them away. The dead soldiers still follow me. I can hear their horses, always hear them.”
Kieran turned his face to the sky. His eyes glazed and his whiskers stood out like black barbs from his sickly white skin.
As Degarius swallowed an unexpected surge of pity and repulsion, Kieran reached out, pointed to the overcast sky, whispered, “The doe...there...she’s coming,” and then collapsed, senseless and limp except for the corners of his mouth that still clung to a smile.
Degarius peered at the sky. It was nothing but a gray sheet. He glanced to Miss Nazar. She hadn’t bothered to look. “Your prayer helped him,” he said.
She shook her head. “He’s going to die.”
The dull thud of an arrow piercing a tree punctuated the word die.
Degarius drew his sword.
Laughter came from all sides, then one Cumberlandian after another appeared from behind the surrounding trees. There were six in all, with drawn arrows.
Thieves.
“Lockanlo,” Miss Nazar cried. She had her hand on the relic, but instead repeated, “Lockanlo.”
One the thieves motioned for the rest to stay their arrows. “Don’t move. You’ve trespassed our hant,” he said in Anglish. “You owe us spirit money.”
Kieran awakened and wildly darted his glazed eyes. “Hant?”
The man who spoke approached. By kicking the grass, he cleared a spot and then pointed to a gray slab of granite. Dirt filled the carved lettering. “These are the graves of our ancestors.”
“The spirits will follow us,” Kieran cried.
“They are already following you.” The Cumberlandian laughed again.
Degarius glanced to the thieves. Why hadn’t they killed them? Why in all hell didn’t she use the relic? They weren’t going to chat all day. He looked to her and grimaced at her chest, but she did nothing. Damn it, if there was any time to use the Blue Eye, it was now.
The Cumberlandian gave an order and two men lowered their bows and went to the horse rigged with the travois. They rummaged through the packs. One found the bag of hant markers and gave it to the headman who spoke Anglish. He then went to untie the travois. They led the horse, with its packs, down the path to the main road.
Were they really going to leave with just one horse?
The Cumberlandian headman took one of the hant markers from the bag, knelt beside Kieran, and put the blue glass eye on the brother’s chest. “The spirit money must be paid.”
The hant marker rose and fell on Kieran’s heaving chest.
“Lockanlo,” the Cumberlandian said to Miss Nazar, who was on the other side of Kieran. He then drew a knife and plunged it into the soft spot in Kieran’s neck. “May the thirst of the dead be satisfied with this blood.”
Now, Nazar, now.
Still, she sat on her heels next to Kieran’s bloody body and across from the Cumberlandian as he pulled out the knife. He could stab her in an instant.
Now.
The Cumberlandian leaned forward, but instead of aiming the knife at her, he simply rose. The bloody knife dangling in his hand, he headed down the path with the rest of his party.
Miss Nazar reached into the apothecary’s box. The thieves had left it behind. She wadded a bandage and pressed it to Kieran’s neck.
“Don’t bother.”
“I have to. It’s making a noise. His breath is coming through the wound.”
“What in all hell is lockanlo?”
“The thieves’ code to tell friend from foe. The woman told it to me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She made me promise to share it with no one. Anglish aren’t supposed to know it.”
So that was what the woman had whispered to Miss Nazar after receiving the blue nightgown.
Miss Nazar took her hand from the bandage. “He’s dead. We should bury him.”
“We should leave.”
“There’s no reason to fear the hant. The dead are everywhere.”
“You should fear the living. And, we don’t a shovel.”
She looked to her hands, as if considering using them to dig. For all love, why would she contemplate such a folly? As much as he hated leaving behind his dead, sometimes it was necessary. “It won’t work,” he said. “The ground here is too hard, full of stone.”
“I know.”
TALISMAN
Field Marshall Fassal’s house, Sarapost-Gheria battlefront
Fassal had dismissed the last of his advisors when Caspar went to the window and began
to howl. Then came cheering. It could only be for one thing. His wife had arrived in the border hamlet now serving as the command for the troops. Though her presence must draw him away from duties, he now considered Jesquin, as the cheering suggested, might be a talisman. She’d spark enthusiasm, for who wouldn’t love her?
He made a last moment’s appraisal of the co-opted house. The parlor was so small the dog could hardly turn about in it without unsetting the small tables. The windows were drafty and the walls shabby despite having been patched and painted. New linens, gold-rimmed plates, and two cartloads of furniture only served as foils to highlight the place’s rusticity. Still, the house was the best the hamlet had to offer Sarapost’s field marshal and his wife. As a consolation, Fassal thought that though the house might be rustic and uncomfortable, the bed upstairs wasn’t. Not that he thought about their sleeping in it.
He did the obligatory hemming and hawing to his staff about preferring to stay in the tent amongst his troops. He knew Degarius, wife or no, would have been in the field sharing his men’s hardship. At the remembrance of his friend, Fassal closed his eyes and exhaled heavily. What had happened to Degarius? The redcoats reported that he took the Solacian to Solace and then disappeared. Was he still alive? He’d kill himself before anyone put hands on him to collect the bounty. Had he heard of the terrible fire at Solace? Learning of her tutor’s death on the heels of her brother’s, and then her father’s fury over her secret marriage, had nearly sunk Jesquin. But the one good thing her misery did do was convince her father to acknowledge their marriage and allow Jesquin to go to Sarapost. All seemed well until Fassal had to leave for the front. From Jesquin’s increasingly despondent letters, he knew that without him she was slipping into despair and growing homesick for Acadia. His sisters endeavored to entertain her, but they couldn’t replace a husband. There was nothing to remedy the homesickness until she proposed joining him. Then her correspondence teemed with excitement. She diverted all the latent energies left from the unrealized grand wedding into arranging a life as the field marshal’s wife. And now she was here. Fassal pushed aside the gloominess, and though he told Caspar to stay, the dog followed him outside to meet the coach.
With an escort of smartly outfitted guards and Jesquin waving her gloved hand from the coach window to the cheering soldiers, it was like a small parade. The coach was still rolling when Fassal opened the door. Batting her lashes, Jesquin snuggled into her coat’s plush fur collar and asked with tender teasing, “Have you missed me, Gregory? Aren’t you going to welcome me?”
How could she be prettier than he remembered?
The coach lurched to a stop. Fassal slipped his hand inside her coat and kissed her. She was everything warm, soft, and reassuring in this blasted camp. “I have a big bed to introduce you to, sweetheart. I’m tired of sharing it with Caspar. He snores.”
Jesquin giggled, for the dog had stuck its snorting nose in the coach. “So do you.”
LILY GIRL
Near Ferne Clyffe
“My land begins here,” Degarius had announced a full twenty minutes ago. They were still riding at a fast clip past vast tracts of wood, fallow fields, silos, and pastures dotted with sheep and black cattle. Arvana knew he wasn’t a poor man, but she’d never imagined his holdings so large. Several villages must have lived off the working of his land.
They rounded a bend in the road and Degarius slowed and halted at a drive sided by square stone pillars. Perched atop his mount, he was making a survey of the prospect—and what a prospect it was. Though he’d spoken often of his home, she had always pictured it as like one of the nicer farms in Sylvania. It wasn’t. Ferne Clyffe was finer, in a way, than the mansions of Acadia. Situated in the wide curve of a river, with gardens to one side and orchards to the other, it seemed a part of the landscape. Even in fall, surrounded by bare trees and a brown expanse of lawn, it was a handsome two-story house with a grand front door, a dozen windows across the front, six dormers in the attic, and a circle drive in front of it all. How would it be in summer, to run barefoot across the swath of green lawn to the river, to have a choice of fruit straight from the trees, to cut an apron full of flowers and still have more for the next day and the next? Far to the right, half-hidden by trees, was a magnificent barn. What her father would have given for such a barn. “It is...” She was going to say beautiful, but stopped. At one time, he said it would please her to see Ferne Clyffe. At one time, maybe for just an hour or two, perhaps he’d thought what it would be like for them to live here. Now, hers was the last opinion on earth he’d seek.
“Is that smoke?” Degarius suddenly asked.
Smoke? Draeden? How could it have found them here? Arvana clutched the Blue Eye and scanned the sky. There was no smoke except for the light gray billowing from Ferne Clyffe’s chimneys.
“The damn steward is a usurper,” Degarius snarled and took off in a gallop.
By the time Arvana understood his concern was over the occupation of his home, he was too far ahead to catch. Without waiting for her, he dismounted, drew his sword, hurtled the steps, and burst through the front door. While Arvana tied the horses, she heard him shout, “Mrs. Karlkin, why is my house open?”
Arvana tiptoed across the porch and peered around the open door. A handsome, stout woman with a halo of blond-going-gray hair was standing in the foyer. She was likely the housekeeper Degarius had been yelling at. With her arms crossed over her apron in satisfaction, she was watching a weeping Chancellor Degarius embrace his son. Through sobs, the chancellor said, “Fassal has made a public condemnation...but issued no call for your arrest...still it’s dangerous...the price on your head.”
The housekeeper saw Arvana and gave her a head-to-toe look. Feeling like a spy, Arvana was about to retreat to the steps, when the woman motioned her inside with unexpected friendliness.
“I’m at liberty?” Degarius asked his father.
The chancellor released his son and looked at him from arm’s length. “Myronan, don’t hope for it. They’ve stripped you of your appointment. As it is, we’re lucky King Lerouge didn’t pull his troops. Plus, you have no time. The war likely starts in three days. We think the Gherians will declare at the end of their Winter Solemnity. Alenius has called a meeting of the Cabinet of Counties to mark the event—at sunset in the Fortress. The nine days of atonement began a week ago.”
“So soon,” Degarius muttered. “We’ll just make it.”
“We? Going where?” The chancellor turned around and narrowed his rheumy, astonished eyes. “Hera Solace?” He glanced to Degarius. “Myronan?”
“Miss Nazar is with me.”
His father pinched his brow and looked between them. Undoubtedly, he’d heard from Lady Martise the circumstances of his son’s disgrace. Undoubtedly, he would blame her, too. Though he’d been the kindest of men in Acadia, he was Degarius’s father. He was probably wondering why she was here when his son so obviously disdained her. Arvana steeled herself for a chilly reception.
Instead, the chancellor said matter-of-factly, “I’d heard you’d perished in Solace with the rest.”
With the rest. Why couldn’t he have just said something unwelcoming? The rest.
“Mrs. Karlkin,” Degarius said, “I need the keys to the attic and my grandfather’s chest.”
A great ring of keys came from the housekeeper’s apron pocket. She singled out two. “These would be them, Lord Degarius.”
“The attic?” his father asked. “What must you have from the attic this moment?”
“Something I should have looked for a long time ago,” Degarius mumbled as if to himself and started up the stairs. “It would have spared me a world of trouble.”
Arvana began to follow when the housekeeper curtsied to her. “Excuse me, but how should I address you? I heard hera and miss.”
“Miss, now.”
“Ah yes. For now.” The housekeeper curtsied again. “Most excellent.”
As Arvana grasped the baluster, she turned to give th
e woman the only thing she could for her kindness—a grateful look. The housekeeper accepted it with a smile so warm it consumed her genial, black, quail-like eyes. Intuitively, Arvana knew all the goodness of the world had been bound up in this woman.
At the end of the second floor hall, Degarius unlocked a door to narrow, steep attic stairs. His father led the way up to a cavernous attic flooded by channels of light coming in through the dormers. It had the fusty smell of a dead person’s house that had been kept locked and unswept for many moons. Degarius weaved through crates, past an old table with a baby cradle stacked on top of it, to a big cedar chest.
In Sylvania, her family home didn’t have an attic, or the extraneous bits and pieces leftover from life to keep in it. An attic was a strange, cold place, like Hell—full of things not good enough, not necessary, left to themselves. Except one thing here was necessary, just as one soul in Hell had been. Poor Lina. What had she done to deserve damnation? While in Hell, Arvana couldn’t ask, and Degarius never seemed surprised, or shaken, to hear of her fate. Lina had molded her grandson into a consummate martial man. Perhaps, if not bribed with Assaea, he’d have been content to manage Ferne Clyffe. Dirt, instead of blood, would have stained his hands. Was that enough to damn her?
Degarius grabbed the trunk by one handle and dragged it into the light. Kneeling before it, he inserted the key in the lock and tried to turn it. He jiggled the lock, slid the key in and out again, his face growing redder with each attempt. He hammered the chest with his fist and then turned the key with all his force. The key bent and the lock remained stalwartly closed. With a growl of irritation, he threw down the key and rose to rummage through the mounds of household goods. After considering and rejecting a table leg, he found a sooty fireplace poker. “Move back.” He brought the tool down in a perfectly aimed glancing blow against the lock. Nothing. The muscles in his neck stood out and he grimaced as he raised the iron for another strike, then another. Each blow was louder, like the thunder in an approaching storm.
