“The deranged idiot’s soul-bound her,” Kanmi said, opening his eyes, proving that he hadn’t been sleeping, or at least, hadn’t been for a while. “That’s dangerous, Trennus. Human souls are the coin that malefic spirits traffic in. She’s not a lost puppy.” Kanmi looked at Lassair, his eyelids heavy. “No offense.”
None taken, Emberstone. I have not tried puppy-form yet. Do you think it would suit me? Lassair’s tone was unruffled.
Adam’s head had snapped up. “Ah . . . soul-bound?” he asked, apprehensively.
Trennus was giving Kanmi a very dark look. “She’s not malefic. She was damaged when I found her. She was down to a tiny spark. I didn’t have enough personal power, didn’t know the Names of any spirits that might help. All I had to give her was me. So I did.” He gave Adam and Kanmi a defiant look. “Lady Lelayn bargained for a year of her life. Soul, life-energy, whatever. I gave Lassair here part of my life. My soul. Whatever you want to call it. It binds her to me, and me to her. Kill me, you kill her. Kill her, you kill me. Fortunately, she’s . . . pretty difficult to kill, unless you’re another spirit.”
Adam’s mouth had dropped open. This sounded like a deal with a demon out of folklore. He sat silently, absorbing that for almost a full minute. “And what do you get out of this?” he finally asked. “Eternal life?”
Trennus winced. “No. Gods, no. Her last summoner had ahold of her Name and was forcing every last bit of energy out of her to prolong his own life. He’d been doing that for . . . seventy-five, eighty years. He’d done it to other spirits before her. Along with other things.” His face had turned to granite, and Lassair had tucked her head into his hair, mantling her wings as well.
“So what the fuck did you bargain for?” Kanmi rasped.
“Nothing.” Trennus cleared his throat. “I didn’t ask for anything in return.”
Kanmi dropped his head back to his pillow with a look of stunned disbelief. “You are the most complete idiot I’ve ever met,” he told Trennus. “Case studies will be written about you for summoning courses. Each one will be entitled, ‘How not to do it.’ You handed over part of your soul and didn’t limit the bargain in any way?”
He said I could stay with him, and when I had healed enough, I could help him in his work. And when I had recovered completely, I could leave, without any further entanglements. That is how I came to learn of giving freely, and without expectation of return. In doing so . . . it seems that you often do receive more, in the end, than you gave. It is an interesting system.
Kanmi sighed, and pulled his pillow up and across his face. “Ben Maor? Shoot me. Shoot me now,” he said, in a muffled tone from behind it. “I’ll make it easy. The pillow will muffle the sound.”
Adam half-snorted, and stood back up, still eying Lassair and Trennus cautiously. “Since we all owe Lassair our lives . . . and quite a few people in the convention center do as well . . . it seems like a bargain that’s working out pretty well,” he said, slowly. “I’d have preferred to have known about it before now. But I guess you’d tell me it wasn’t my business.”
Trennus flushed. Kanmi pulled the pillow away and said, changing the subject completely, “So, that Chaldean magus? Having heard what she did to Abgar . . . and if she weren’t, you know, nobility . . .” Kanmi’s tone was mocking, “I think I’d throw over Bastet and ask her to marry me. My age, my type, and all that magical power.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Eh. Best I can do is ask if she’d let me study her tomes.”
Adam left the room to the sound of Trennus and Kanmi laughing, though Kanmi’s laughter had a rusty, pained sound to it, which would surely persist until his lungs had recovered completely.
___________________
It was late, and Sigrun wasn’t out of surgery yet. Adam headed back to the governor’s mansion, checked in with Livorus, and raided Sigrun’s room, grabbing her suitcase for her—which held all the books she’d purchased to kill time with here in Judea—as well as a clean change of his own clothing. Then, for lack of anything better to do, he went back to the hospital. By the time he got there, it was nearly dawn on Maius eighth, and Sigrun had finally been moved to a room. Adam was allowed to sit there in a folding chair, much in the way Trennus was sitting with Kanmi, and he stared down at her pale face and the fall of loose hair over the white pillowcase, his hands clenching and unclenching. She was breathing on her own, at least. No intubation.
So he sat there, listening to the heart monitors, and, with a look over his shoulder at the door, muttered a few, quiet prayers to his own god, for her health. With the blank realization that he valued her. Valued her company. Wanted to talk with her more. Wanted to make her laugh. Finally, he simply couldn’t hold off sleep any longer. He faded out.
The sound of the door opening snapped his eyes open, and Adam found he was reflexively, reaching for a gun. His subconscious was still in combat mode, expecting a threat from any direction, and he’d half-risen from his chair before he was fully conscious . . . and then blinked as he met his sister Rivkah’s eyes. “What are you doing here?” Adam asked, surprised.
“I work here. You’d know that if you kept up with family news at all.” Rivkah stuck her tongue out at him, saucily. Adam relaxed, giving her a quick hug, before sitting back down, as his brain finally started to function again. That’s right. Nursing degree. Following in Imah’s footsteps.
“You’re not actually a full nurse yet, though, right?” Adam asked, trying to fill the silence as Rivkah carefully took notes down on the levels in the saline IV and the numbers on the monitors.
“No. Just a nursing assistant. Till I finish school.” Rivkah shrugged. “It’s a job. It’s good experience.”
“Imah found the position for you, didn’t she?”
A dour glance. “I am capable of making decisions on my own, brother.” A faint flicker of guilt crossed her face, however, and then she added, scrupulously, “Although, yes, she did mention that there was a job opening. She wants to keep track of me, I think.” She filled a paper cup with water from a pitcher, and set it on the stand beside Sigrun’s unresponsive form. “You have the oddest coworkers, Adam.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You and Chani seemed rather interested in Trennus.”
Rivkah flushed. “He’s very different from what I thought a summoner would be like. And he’s much different from all the . . . very nice young men . . . that the matchmaker Imah hired has dutifully brought to the house for me to meet.”
“Oh, lord. So I’m not the only one.”
“Oh, no. Doesn’t help that Chani’s been sneaking out at night covered in Hellene paint. Makes it so Imah and Aba don’t feel like they can trust her, but I think all she’s doing is sitting around in a café with friends.” Rivkah shrugged again. “Imah is on a grand quest to see us all settled and happy. Aba is . . . Aba.” Their father had been a distant figure for them, growing up. That had apparently not changed since Adam had left the house. Rivkah looked down at Sigrun, and pointed at the stack of books Adam had placed on the nightstand, for when the valkyrie awoke. “You know, I wouldn’t have thought she even knew how to read.”
Adam’s head snapped up, and he fought down a hot flare of temper. “I don’t see why you’d think that,” he told his sister. “Half our time on the job is spent reading case files written in Latin.”
Rivkah waved her hands quickly. “Calm down, Adam. You have to admit, it’s an odd picture. She carries a spear, and the first time I saw her, she was wearing a leather bodice and a cloak made of feathers. How much more primitive can you get?” His sister made a face, and Adam grimaced. Sigrun had asked him about the modesty issues here in Judea, but she was, when all was said and done, a lictor in the employ of the Praetorian Guard. She had as much right to wear her deerskin bodices as Trennus had to wear his kilt, or Adam had, for that matter, to wear his skullcap. Or not. “The next thing we all know, all four of you are outside fighting that . . . creature . . . and then you all came back inside, covered in blood, half the nei
ghborhood wrecked, and she sat down and read a book.” She paused. “Once the bleeding stopped, anyway.”
“You know, if you talked to her, you’d realize how educated she is.”
“There hasn’t really been a chance.”
“You found enough opportunities to pester Matrugena.”
Rivkah flushed and sat down next to him. Adam gave her a patient stare. “People have enough stupid ideas about Judeans,” he told her, bluntly. “The last thing we need to do is have stupid ideas about other people. I know for a fact that she speaks and reads three or four dialects of Gothic. She speaks Gallic well enough that she and Matrugena chat together. She speaks and reads Latin. What were your marks in Latin again, Rivkah?”
“Oh, I speak it well enough. I just didn’t like reading all those boring old plays and poems.” Rivkah’s tone was airy.
Adam picked up the first book in the stack and handed it to Rivkah. It proved to be the art history book on the tomb of Isis that he remembered Sigrun purchasing before they left Rome. This was written in Latin. The second book was the collected plays of Sophocles—in the original Attic Hellene, with footnotes in modern Hellene.
“She reads this, too?” Rivkah sounded startled. Hellene and Hebrew were the twin languages of science and philosophy, after all. Most truly educated people in the Empire spoke Hellene. It was a sign of being cultured.
“Her sister’s a Pythia at Delphi.” Adam hadn’t really looked at the books as he’d dragged them out of the suitcase. The last one in the stack had Hellene lettering on the cover, but the title wasn’t what he’d expected. The Pentateuch. The Hellene name for the Torah. Inside, the pages had columns of Hebrew facing columns of Hellene translations.
Just then, Sigrun awakened. “Sig. About time you woke up.” Relief surged through him as she looked around, her gray eyes clearly dazed. “How do you feel?”
“. . . like a gutted fish.”
Sigrun closed her eyes again, and Adam leaned forward, catching her hand in his. Come on. Stay awake. Be the pain in everyone’s ass that you know so well how to be. “Close enough,” he told her, squeezing her fingers. “That was your own bright idea, I might add.”
The eyes opened again. “. . . whatever doesn’t kill you . . . .” Barely audible.
“Makes you stronger. I really don’t want to hear that one again. For someone who hates hospitals, you certainly spend a lot of time in them.” Adam realized he was gripping her fingers too tightly, speaking too sharply. Rivkah, at his side, was already stirring in protest, and put one hand lightly, on his left forearm to stop him. “God damn it, Sig, what were you thinking? I didn’t ask you to take the wounds for me.” He didn’t care if his sister heard the words.
The steel-sheen eyes widened. Palest gray at the center, dark rings around the outside of the iris. Oddly dark lashes, considering how light her hair was, brushing against her cheeks for a moment as she closed her eyes, and then managed to open them again. Sigrun licked her lips, and told him, “. . . better me . . . than you. My job. To decide.”
“To decide who lives and who dies?”
“. . . yes. Valkyrie.” She swallowed, and Rivkah hastily stood and offered her a tiny sip of water with which to wet her mouth, with a caution not to swallow any of it. “We . . . always know. When people will die.”
Adam seethed. They’d covered this before. “So what?”
“So . . . we know . . . when we can do . . . something. Can make a choice. My mother, when I was three?” Sigrun paused, her eyes sliding shut again. “I knew then. Knew it was mortal. Cancer. Eating her away from the inside. Couldn’t help her.” Sigrun swallowed, hard. “Could help you. Battle-wound.” She opened her eyes again.
Adam leaned forward, and so she couldn’t look away from him, his face within a few inches of hers. “Those wounds were mortal, Sig. I don’t want you taking a mortal wound for me again. You hear me? I want your word on that.”
“. . . mortal . . . for you.” She closed her eyes. “Not for me.”
“God damn it, Sigrun. You listen to me. You could have died. You nearly did die. Do you have a death-wish or something?”
“. . . highest honor . . . is to die in battle.” Her eyes opened, met his. “Don’t wish to die. But my life is . . . service. Tool in the hands of the gods. A weapon.” She closed her eyes again, but she didn’t stop speaking. “A god-born . . . can never be more than what we are. What we’re born to be. Humans can. Can be more than what they are. Reach for the stars. And you burn the brightest of all, Adam. Couldn’t let that spark go out. If I died . . . acceptable price.” Sigrun turned her head away and clearly suppressed a cough, with an agonized expression slipping over her face.
“No, it’s not.” Adam wanted to shake her for making it sound rational. Reasonable. “It’s not acceptable, Sig, because I’ll never accept it. You don’t die for me. You understand that? Not for me.” His fingers were clenched on her hand, and it took Rivkah putting a hand on his shoulder for him to realize his sister was even still in the room.
“Adam? She only just woke up.” Rivkah’s eyes were wide. “She’s already talked more than I thought someone could after . . . .” A helpless gesture at Sigrun’s body, shrouded by the sheets.
Adam loosened his fingers. There was plenty of time to talk to Sigrun about all of this, now that he was . . . ninety-nine percent sure she was going to live. “You’re right,” he told his sister, and then looked back at Sigrun. He shifted to grip her hand with his left, while he raised his right to trace a strand of hair back from her face, with a gentle fingertip. “Sorry, Sig.”
“Don’t . . . understand . . . why you’re angry . . .” Sigrun managed.
Adam swore, all too aware of his sister’s eyes on them. Sigrun was doped up on pain medication, at least as much as she could be. She was hurt, and in no shape for him to make any sort of explanation. He wasn’t even sure he could explain it, except that she’d come to matter to him. Deeply. Instead, he shifted the subject. Raised the Hellene copy of the Torah, and asked her, quietly, “You’re reading the first five books of my faith?”
Sigrun clearly tried to shrug, but it involved too many core body muscles, and instead winced in pain. “When in Rome . . . ? It seemed . . . a good idea to understand more of the people . . . who live here.”
Adam gave Rivkah a pointed look. Here’s your chance. Talk to her. Rivkah hesitated, and then said, “Translations are always uncertain. Much of the original meaning gets lost.”
Sigrun looked up and focused, uncertainly, on Rivkah’s face. “Yes. And Hellene . . . is not . . . my first language.”
“I could teach you to read it in Hebrew,” Adam said, suddenly, as inspiration went off in his mind. “You’re not going anywhere for a few days, Sigrun. Would occupy the time.” And I have got to keep you in bed. I know you. You’re going to try to stand up by tonight. Tomorrow at the latest. And that might actually tear you back apart.
Sigrun grimaced. “Hellene . . . Latin . . . Gothic. Three alphabets. Hard enough.” She looked up at the ceiling, and managed to sound cranky. “Your letters are all different. They run the wrong direction.” A pause. “It would be as painful for you as it would be for me.” She closed her eyes again. “My pedagogue despaired of me.” Another pause. “She considered me a very slow and stupid child, because I was so slow to learn Latin and Hellene.”
Adam’s head snapped up. “She called you that?” It was hard to fathom.
“Yes. Many times. When I was receiving my canings for not having known my lessons.” Sigrun opened her eyes again. “Kanmi’s children . . . their pedagogue seems a kinder sort.”
“How old were you?” Rivkah asked, her dark eyes wide. Adam could see empathy blossoming in his sister, and mild outrage. They’d been taught Latin and Hellene at home by their father, and there had been cryptographic puzzles and Torah verses to memorize, but they’d never been caned for not remembering a lesson.
“She had my care since I was four. Lessons began when I was six.”
Sigrun’s voice was distant. “She said that . . . that it might be my birthright to be a battle-maiden, but that if I couldn’t understand more than swords and spears . . . then I was a waste of her time.”
“Couldn’t you have gone to a public school?” Rivkah demanded.
“Begged to go. Couldn’t. God-born have to be . . . educated differently. So we understand our powers are . . . to serve others. Not to rule them.” Sigrun closed her eyes.
“I hope your father sent the pedagogue packing,” Rivkah said, after a moment. Adam was rubbing his thumb lightly over the back of Sigrun’s hand. He was learning more about her in a few minutes than he’d managed to uncover in the past eighteen months, and he wasn’t about to argue with the results.
“She was a Hellene slave. Before slavery was abolished in Nova Germania.” Sigrun didn’t open her eyes, and her tone was weary. “When she was done teaching me, my father freed her. And then they married. I don’t ask . . . what passed between them . . . before that.” A faint, wintery smile. “I hate that woman. But she did give me a younger sister. Sophia.”
Adam blinked in belated realization. Oh, god. So her teacher also had god-born blood, somewhere along the line. Not expressed . . . more like a recessive gene. Sophia’s god-born, too. She raised both of you. But she favored her own flesh and blood, I expect?
Rivkah finally excused herself. “I should tell the doctors she’s awake. I should have done that five minutes ago, actually.” She scuttled out, but left looking more thoughtful than she’d arrived.
Adam watched her go, then returned his attention to the book he’d perched on the edge of the bed. “The offer stands. I’ll teach you, if you’re interested.”
Sigrun actually managed a smile. “I wouldn’t . . . want to put you through the pain, Adam. I’m not a good scholar.”
“Sig, you can speak and read at least four languages in three different alphabets. I would call that exceptional by most standards.” Adam’s temper flared, and he knew that if he ever happened to meet Sigrun’s stepmother, he’d be hard-pressed to keep from throttling the woman. “You can learn whatever you want to learn.”
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 72
