Shadows of Aggar (Amazons of Aggar)

by Chris Anne Wolfe

  “You are up and about early,” the Mistress observed when Elana appeared at her door. “Would you join me for a cup of mulled wine? You must be fairly chilled.”

  That brought a smile and Elana nodded. In the past she and the Mistress had often begun the day quietly in the elder’s room, sharing something hot.

  The Old Mistress moved to the hearth, leaving Elana to shut the door. After so much time with Di’nay, she found the overheated room almost pleasant.

  “I have tea also,” the elder said, half-turning back. “Would you prefer that?”

  “Yes, I would,” Elana admitted, unclasping her cloak. She slipped off her ankle shoes, and then with a sigh she sank down onto a backless couch and tucked her feet up under her. “Is there any honey?” The Mistress gave her an odd glance. “Certainly.”

  The mug was warm between her icy fingers, and contentedly, Elana settled down to let the brew cool. It was a good morning.

  With a drink in hand the old woman stiffly seated herself across from Elana. In a habitual gesture she tasted her spiced wine, already knowing it was too hot, but it seemed there were some things one never learned. It was a long time before her gray eyes turned to Elana. “You were rarely given to sweets. Has your Amazon been teaching you new tastes? Or perhaps the bondstone wearies you?”

  “The stone, I think. Honey — sweets — seem to help some.” Candor had always been part of their relationship; she saw no reason to hide from that sharp gaze now.

  “It has been known to help for a time,” the Mistress said, nodding.

  “It is the oddest feeling,” Elana continued reflectively. “I am alert. I can still do almost anything, and yet there is this — weight. When I ignore it and insist, my body responds well. It seems that I run as fast and tumble as well as I ever have…?”

  “You do,” the elder confirmed.

  “Yet beneath it, Mistress, I am exhausted. It is as if I could sleep for a ten-day.”

  “And then you find, you can barely sleep at all.”

  Elana said with a touch of a smile, “I had expected that, but for other reasons.”

  “You have grown to love this Amazon.”

  Elana had almost forgotten how good it was to talk with this woman — she had seen so little of the Mistress since her return four days ago. The Seers and scribes had been monopolizing her, although she had still supervised the trainees in their exercises each morning. But there had been no opportunity for the two simply to sit and talk. A sigh escaped her. She wished Di’nay could have grown to know this old friend. Elana felt her heart tug. “Her promise is to return within the ten-day.”

  “Will that be soon enough for you?”

  “It is not a problem,” Elana returned calmly.

  The Mistress nodded slowly, seeing the quiet strength in the younger woman. It would not be a problem, not for this Shadow. “The scribes could not tell me if she is to leave you again or not?”

  “I don’t know. It is enough for me to know we will be able to say good-bye.”

  “You haven’t told her then?”

  “No, and I don’t want it otherwise.”

  Silently the Mistress absorbed that. Then she asked, “Has your Amazon never spoken of staying? Or of you accompanying her offworld?”

  “Once. We did not choose to face tomorrow until our task was done. There is the added difficulty involved, if we were to plan for my traveling off-world.”

  “Ah yes, this Charlie IV ruling.” The elder frowned. “It’s alarming to realize how careless we’ve grown in our off-worlder dealings.”

  “It was not the Council’s doing then? The initial stipulations?”

  “No, no.” The Mistress shook her head. “The original decrees were the Empire’s policies. It has always been assumed that none of us would have need — or desire to leave Aggar. The original Council agreed with the policies so the information was filed in the vaults as our decision.”

  “The Terrans have been here for nearly two hundred tenmoons, Mistress. That’s a very long time to accumulate a great number of scattered details. It’s inevitable that some of what we know is set aside.”

  The elder scoffed. “It does not excuse the risks imposed upon you.”

  “Nothing was imposed,” Elana reminded her quietly, “except by the Mother’s Hand. I could have chosen not to be the one to go.”

  “Truth. It is also truth that regulations often have little to do what can be done. If there is the desire, Elana, a way can always be found.”

  Memories softened her expression and Elana felt a faint smile upon her lips. “You forget you have made me into a Shadow, Mistress. I must always believe in finding the way where none is said to be.”

  The Old Mistress sighed and turned to other matters. “Would you like to know of this Seer and the Council’s plans for the Maltar?”

  “Yes, please.” Elana looked up eagerly. “And Di’nay? I have not been able to fathom why Maltar’s Seer did not know of her existence.”

  “Because he never saw her clearly. Your meeting with her in the gardens — yes, the scribes told me of that as well. Your meeting was surely guided by the Mother’s Hand. You spoke some of the Sight and of the Seers. Your Amazon is of quick wit. She refused to deal with our own Seer later that day because of your words. Her amarin were clouded with an intensity that our best Seer could not decipher without meeting her eyes…”

  Oh yes, Elana knew of that intensity, didn’t she?

  “…she patently refused all attempts to face him, and, in the end, the Council Master abandoned that effort. We agreed we would content ourselves in following you. Which the Seers did, as you expected.”

  “So they never connected directly with Di’nay.” Elana understood. “Maltar’s Seer saw me since he followed the edges of the Council’s vision of me. Also he could not so easily find Di’nay because she is not Blue Sighted.”

  “Exactly.” The Mistress nodded in satisfaction at her student’s astuteness. “Whenever this Seer glimpsed your Amazon, he undoubtedly reported her as a green cloaked figure. Without direct information, he would never have discriminated between the two of you.”

  “And the Maltar was not adept enough to decipher the confused images.” For a brief moment Elana remembered why she had fought so hard to avoid the Seer’s fate — that inability to think — to interpret images — what terrible madness.

  “For any Blue Sight it would have been difficult unraveling anything through your perceptions. You have always known Di’nay to be a woman, and so the brief glimpses this Seer had following you would be of a woman clad in green. Yet to any bystander your Amazon is a Southern Trader and a swordsman. I do not think it would have been possible for the Maltar to unravel such details unless he knew of the off-worlders and Amazons beforehand — a Blue Sight and an Amazon. No one else could have succeeded.”

  Elana nodded. She had thought much the same herself.

  “Without your Sight you would not have threatened the Maltar and deceived this Seer — nor safely journeyed. You certainly would not have been able to guide your Amazon through the Priory’s dungeons or into the Wayward Path.”

  “And if the off-worlders had not become involved,” Elana added, “there would have been no quest that could have indicated this Seer existed. We literally needed the crisis to fall from the sky.”

  “Truth. Everything was so clouded beyond Maltar’s borders that we would not have deciphered the imbalances until his scheming was well hatched into war. The necessity of an Amazon over other Terrans was plain from the beginning: the ethics of her Sisterhood hold the secrets of Aggar as sacred as her own. The Empire will not fear our inadvertent abuse of their antiquated machinery, nor will they learn of the ways of our Seers. Yes, you and your shadowmate have played your parts well, my child. I could not have imagined a game so intricately woven a tenmoon ago and yet there are none I would rather have sent to challenge the Fates.”

  “I am honored,” Elana murmured, shy of such praise from her mentor.
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  “As well you should be… although,” a wicked gleam touched her old eyes, “I am sure the Maltar would not offer you any laurels.” Elana smiled grimly.

  “The Council is aware that this madman’s family has held power undisputed for an inordinate amount of time.”

  “They took their throne a generation or two before the Imperial Invasion?”

  The Mistress nodded. “It may be appropriate to see this changed.”

  “Is there a challenger already?” Elana asked. It shouldn’t have surprised her, but knowing that the Seer was there, she had assumed that any threatening noble would be long dead by now.

  “Two in particular. Fourth cousins to the Maltar and quietly secluded in the northern ice ranges. The younger is unerringly bright and the elder worships the ground the child walks upon — they are more like father and child than brothers — with ambitions well cloaked by patience and more honorable than many. It is time for that region to begin developing a conscience. An invitation for the Spring’s Turning is being sent to them end of the monarc. If they accept, we will search amongst our trainees again.”

  “But what of the Maltar’s Seer? Won’t he learn of such an expedition?”

  The lined face grew solemn, and the woman looked as old as her seasons. “He is dying, my child. The veil of blackness with which he once clouded Maltars’ realms, the Seers of this Council have now folded back against him. He is nearly as isolated as if he were in a Tomb. He will not see the single moon rise again.”

  With pity… with revulsion, Elana shuddered. His death would release him to feel the Mother’s winds as he could not while in the Maltar’s chains, but the dying would be lonely. Though no lonelier than existing with the Maltar’s insanity. Her breath steadied, and she looked back to the Mistress. “Who was he? He came from this Keep sometime in the past, did he not?”

  The elder nodded. “All Blue Sights pass through these grounds. He was a senior apprentice when he left here. It was to be his last journey beyond these walls… he would have been fifteen in the monarc of his return.”

  “So old?” Elana breathed. Senior apprentices were seldom ten or twelve before their Sight’s melding with Aggar’s forces seduced them to the Seer’s path.

  “Occasionally,” the Mistress reminded her, “there are apprentices that choose even as trainees to turn from the way of Shadows. As you chose not to become a Seer — they choose a more delicate balance.

  Ror’tay was such a man.”

  “It must have been a very difficult choice,” Elana whispered. She knew the lure of that rushing flow of life… to be trained to catch such a temptress and then to deny the culmination? Surely that was to dance with fire and turn away?

  “He found it less difficult than many — as your mother found her turning away.”

  Elana finally grasped the treasured amarin in the words. Astonishment echoed in her whisper, “Your husband!… the one you thought murdered by the Maltar.”

  “As he was in the end,” she pointed out wearily.

  “What happened?”

  The Mistress sighed. “He was sent to fetch a youth from Maltar’s reign — a lost historian’s apprentice — a typical journey for a Seer’s apprentice. One of my best trainees went with him as guide. They were ambushed shortly after finding the boy, and word was sent that they had died… or rather, been executed for crimes against the realm. The Council’s Seers could find nothing of them — absolutely nothing. Now we know that the depths of the Tomb prevented our Seers from finding him… just as it prevented you from reaching Aggar’s life cycles.

  “After a few days, they abandoned the search, and my daughter and I were left to mourn. We assumed that the three had been murdered within some windowless stone chamber — somewhere generally inaccessible to Seers. We never suspected how completely inaccessible.”

  A daughter? Since she had been a youngster, Elana had known the Mistress had unaccountably lost her husband to a whimsy of the Fates. It had never been openly discussed by any at the Keep, and she — who knew so much of respecting another’s privacy — had not asked. But never had she suspected there’d been a child.

  “Yet we were not so far deceived,” the Mistress pointed out. “The younger two did die, and the man I had loved was gone. A Seer’s Tomb rapes the soul from the body. He truly died that season. The battered husk that has cloaked the Maltar’s realm all these seasons since has been a mindless reflection of that tyrant’s plots. It is time for that aged shell to join his spirit. I do not mourn his passing now. Both my child and I eased our sorrow many, many seasons past.

  “But,” the Mistress drew a slow, deep breath before admitting, “the bitterness will be assuaged. The Maltar will never sit easily again. Even if this challenger we sponsor fails, courage will reach throughout the lands, and another will rise. That — and the Maltar’s great plans will not come to be. He will not mold the Sight to his meddling ways. He will no longer swallow innocent people whole. No, my Ror’tay was not the seed for our destruction but rather the beginning of Maltar’s downfall. There is irony in that handling.” Her gaze drifted into a far place; there was peace in her eyes. “Yes, to the chagrin of the Fates, a balance grew from this situation.”

  As she spoke Elana felt the release of the other woman’s weary, silent despair, and saw more clearly than ever before how the events of her life were interwoven with this woman’s. Now that the Mistress’ thoughts were of family — Elana grasped the familiar amarin they shared. Since her childhood she had seen these, but for the first time she recognized the pattern beneath the emotions and was stunned.

  “Rai!”

  The Old Mistress started, pulling herself abruptly back to the present. With a snort she stood and went to pour herself more hot wine.

  But Elana was not daunted, and more loudly she repeated, “Rai?”

  “What of her?” she snapped, and the clay jar smacked as it hit the hearthstones.

  “My mother — ”

  “I know she’s your mother. What do you think me, child? A fool?”

  No, but she herself had been one. Elana had known someone in her family must have been gifted with the Sight, but she’d never given it much thought. Her parents had been trainees, their families left behind in unknown records. It was the way of the Keep.

  “We both have work to do,” the old woman rasped irritably. “Unless you choose not to lead the trainees through their paces this morning?”

  “What? No, certainly I will.” Elana rose hastily, slipping back into her shoes. There was really nothing else to be said, was there?

  At the door, though, she paused to find her oldest friend still standing before the hearth. Elana was not concerned that the Mistress was ignoring her. As sometimes irascible as the seasons had been, they had spent them together. There would never be a charge of favoritism simply for the sake of blood in this Keep; she knew that… so did the Mistress and every Council member. Her respect for her young Ona had come from Elana’s own character and from skill, but the Mistress’ pride and her concern had been heightened in knowing that after so many generations, one of her family had finally become Shadow.

  The Mistress half-turned, scowling at Elana’s unmoving figure. Elana’s pride deepened; it meant something to know she had earned this woman’s respect. It also meant a great deal to know she had such a woman as a grandmother. “Thank you, Mistress — for everything.”

  The old lines softened, and for a moment, the Mistress was unguarded. Then with a crooked smile, she waved toward the door. “They will be waiting.”

  † † †

  Restlessly Elana pushed back the thick quilt. Sleep came so seldom now that she wondered why she even tried. Reluctantly she climbed from bed to dress. Warm tea and a little honey would be much more satisfying than this chilly chamber.

  She grinned ruefully at herself as she reached for a fleece-lined jerkin. She was growing more and more like Di’nay each day in her need for hotter temperatures. The fire was stoked high and still sh
e shivered. It was a small room, the one she and Di’nay had shared that first night. It should have felt sweltering hot by now.

  Should it really? She chided herself. It was not her Amazon’s influence; the lifestone was drawing heavily upon her body’s reserves. Usually it was nurtured by the mingling energies of Di’nay and herself. Their proximity… their interactions fed its powers and linked it, as well as themselves, to the flowing circles of life around them. But that primary link was stretched too thin — too taut — by the distance. To maintain their bond the stone drew upon the most available life force now… Elana.

  The grand hall was not quite empty at this moons-lit hour. Alone, a robed figure sat before the fire in an ornate, high-backed chair. A distant stare watched the leaping flames as his lax hands held a forgotten cup of mead.

  She hesitated, yet Elana welcomed company. With a soft tread she descended. “You sit up late, Master,” she murmured as she neared.

  The Master shifted, pulling his gaze from the fire long enough to recognize her. With a grunt, he waved at the warming jar of sweet mead and the nearby footstool. “Come. Join me if you will.”

  The drink was hot and the cup chased the chill from her fingers. With a nearly contented sigh, she drew the stool towards the hearth and settled quietly.

  His gaze turned, studying the bruised shadows beneath her sapphire eyes and the faint caramel tinge of her skin. He might have been amazed if any other had come to sit so calmly at his side after six days of emptiness, but Elana had never been like the others. He was proud of her decision to fight this waiting. Regardless of her Amazon’s choices, if she was abandoned now there was hope that her body would be strong enough to manage the withdrawal. And if the Amazon did return — well, then that was reward enough.

  But he had had a hand in raising Elana… and compassion stirred as he spoke. “You’re finding it hard to sleep?”

  “I manage a little. It is odd to be restless and yet weary.”