A creak made her turn. Berun slowly made his way down the stairs leading into the kitchen. For a moment, she fought the urge to offer him assistance, and then gave up. She stood and went to him, wrapping her good arm around his massive right one. His craggy, outsized features drew into a smile as he looked down at her.
“Berun,” Vedas said. “Vedas,” the constructed man returned. The words were spoken with little obvious feeling, but Churls recognized their hard-won affection.
“Welcome again, Berun,” the Tamer said. “You need no food I can provide, clearly, but if there’s something else I can do, please ask.”
Berun stared at their host in silence, and then rumbled, “I’ve been left alone to recover for one day and an evening, and now part of the next morning. My ears have been open the entire time. You could have visited with me and explained yourself. Vedas woke from his rest briefly to lay upon the roof with me. He said that we’re being encouraged by your men on the lower floor to stay here, to continue resting, that all will be explained. And so …” He made fists and rested them upon the table. Not quite, but almost, a threat. “I need nothing but for you to explain yourself.”
The Tamer’s smiled disappeared. He nodded, stood, and took their plates.
When he turned around, a fractured expression had altered his features markedly. A new man stood before them, one who appeared neither friendly nor particularly sane. His left eye rolled up into his head, and the other twitched madly as it settled briefly on each of them.
Churls fought the nearly overwhelming urge to send her chair skittering across the floor behind her, to place distance between herself and him. Vedas slowly lifted his hands to the table’s edge, likely to prepare himself for upending it. Berun’s eyes flared briefly, two magnesium-blue flares.
The Tamer made a series of gutteral utterances while his lips moved, neither sound nor movement appearing in concert. Slowly, however, his throat managed to catch up with his mouth, and an alien vocabulary emerged, veering between utterly indecipherable and disturbingly familiar, putting Churls in mind of every time she had heard spats through thin tenement walls or from across a collection of tents. The odd word caught and guessed at.
She spared a glance at Vedas. His brow furrowed as he sought to comprehend something that clearly continued to slip away.
‡
Finally, the Tamer’s alien words ground to a halt. His left eye rolled back into place and his features evened out, solidifying into a glare he shared with each of them in turn.
“Shavrim Coranid.” he said in a strained whisper.
Churls raised her eyebrows.
“Shavrim Coranid,” the Tamer repeated. He repeated them a second time, and slapped the table. Color bloomed in his cheeks. He closed his eyes and bowed his head, breathing audibly through his nose, struggling, obviously, to contain his anger. When he spoke again, it was with a voice shaking in rage, struggling to not become a shout.
“I am Shavrim Coranid.” He looked from Churls to Vedas, brows raised. “Shavrim Coranid. Shavrim. Coranid. This … This name means … This name means nothing to you?”
His gaze settled fixedly upon Vedas. Churls looked from the Tamer to her lover—the former, shaking from head to toe, and the latter, unnaturally still—and imagined that if she passed a hand between them it would encounter resistance. She opened her mouth to speak, and found, quizzically, that any question would be unnecessary.
She anticipated Vedas’s nod a heartbeat before it came. When it did, she shadowed it. Berun stood immobile, a question creasing his features.
Vedas nodded. Churls nodded.
And then they both, at the same moment, said yes. Yes, the name meant something to them.
‡
“A name, once heard, cannot be forgotten,” she had once overheard a Bashest priestess tell a practitioner. The words possessed a ring of truth to them, though Churls’s mind had never been particularly suited to remembering. Faces, names, dates, she could not recall them beyond their moments of relevance, yet she knew with a peculiar certainty that she had never forgotten a single thing. Once acquainted with a place or person, even the most dim memories could be summoned again to help navigate oddly familiar streets, to understand a near-stranger.
As a small child she had taken ill with bone featherings, forcing her mother to visit a sawmage: not even someone who worked on livestock, no, but a local man who healed pit-dogs and other fighting animals. (They could not have afforded someone who worked on livestock.) When her mother mentioned his name a decade later, Churls did not associate it with the event she remembered only fuzzily.
She did, however, experience a surge of discomfort upon hearing it. The sawmage’s name, which, of course, she could not now recall, was ugly, even offensive. It seemed wrong that it had come from her mother’s mouth.
Had hearing it actually caused her to rub the long, jagged scar the man had left upon her right thigh? She recalled doing so, but it hardly mattered. The rush of emotion that had accompanied two small words—a name, surely, she had only heard a smattering of times as a sick-unto-delirious child—had not been an imagined thing. She had not created it out of nothing. It existed, a permanent connection to a place and time.
Likewise, she could not dismiss her reaction upon hearing the Tamer’s true name. It had not been immediate, no: it had built slowly within her, an increasingly undeniable pressure between her ears each time the man spoke.
Shavrim Coranid, SHAVrim Coranid, SHAVrim CORanid.
When it finally registered, when she could not discount her reaction as an ordinary response to the man’s anger, it was as though it had always been a part of her, this name, and attendant to this name a weight, a collection of impressions beyond the scope of recollection, pressing upon her without discomfort, welcomed without conscious volition—as if a door had been opened into a previously undiscovered room, admitting a stream of vaguely familiar people who spoke in nearly-recognizable languages, who told tales of places she could almost picture.
All of this, at once. In a flash of awareness, her skull had become pregnant with associations she could not yet contextualize. She admitted the possibility of it being the product of enchantment, but it hardly mattered. If Shavrim Coranid were powerful enough to place such a complex sense of recognition within her mind, then all things in his presence were suspect.
‡
He collapsed after hearing their affirmations. Berun lifted him easily and took him upstairs. In Shavrim’s room, the three of them stood silently around his bed for several minutes, staring at his motionless body as though it were a fascinating vista, a landscape they had seen a lifetime ago, perhaps, or had heard described by a relative. Churls spared a look at her companions, just in time to see them doing the same. They avoided meeting each other’s eyes.
Without a word, Berun turned and ascended to the rooftop.
Similarly content not to speak, Churls and Vedas returned to their room, where, after a long period of examining the floor between them (she, feeling not the slightest trace of awkwardness, but instead a mounting sense of purpose, of waiting for the exact moment to move), they embraced. Slowly, they undressed one another—she completely, he as far as he would allow her to peel back his suit. She pressed her fingernails into the elder-cloth and carefully expanded holes that he allowed to form in the material, slowly revealing his chest, belly, upper and lower back, and buttocks.
She stopped before going lower, her hands playing over his rawboned torso. Inexplicably, sadness no longer gnawed at her to see how wasted he had become. For a fleeting moment, his frailty seemed appropriate, even beautiful. Its impermanence appealed to her, as did his atypically casual reaction to it. He had always been so worried over his body, touching it as though he thought it would suddenly fail him. As if, having lost something, it could never be regained.
It was a preoccupation born of privilege. He had always had enough to eat, enough spare time to train. A man like him had no reason to worry, and so he did
.
“You just needed to lack for something,” she whispered to herself, slipping her hands around his ribs and squeezing him to her, possessively, protectively. His fingertips ran lightly up her back. Gripping her head in his hands, he kissed her, tongue flicking over her teeth. When he pulled away, his arms fell around her shoulders and he buried his face in her neck. She shuddered at the scrape of his beard. Gooseflesh rose, covering her from head to toe.
They pulled each other onto the bed.
Immediately, she knew it would not be as it had been before. Unclothed, Vedas had always possessed a hint of nervousness about him, a feature now entirely absent. He moved as he had always done in his element: she thought of the sparring they had done, the times she had seen him confront an opponent, reacting fluidly, refusing to be rushed yet without an ounce of hesitation. At times, he became animated in a manner she had not yet seen, eyes wide or eyes shut, grimacing and smiling, abandoning himself to his sensations. He did not hide himself from her, or worse, try to impress her by taking control, but instead responded to her naturally, like it had always been a familiar thing between them.
“You’re here,” she breathed when they surfaced for air.
“I am,” he said, and surprised her by returning a knowing smile.
She buried her fingertips in the thick nap of his hair and pushed him downward.
Afterward, they lay together, spent, touching only at the hands and crossed ankles, comfortable on a level she had rarely felt in the previous year of traveling and fighting and worrying. Of course, now that she acknowledged it, it began to fade. She fought to keep it from going away, and failed.
She frowned, her suspicions finally demanding full attention.
Somehow, he precipitated her words. She felt it in the air a moment before he let go of her hand.
“Vedas,” she said. “We need to question this. All of it. Even if we don’t want to.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him turn away from her. “I know,” he said.
“It feels this good to you, too, doesn’t it, what we just did, how we are now? It feels right, but you and I aren’t … I mean, we haven’t …”
“I know.”
She squeezed his hand, grateful he had filled in the blanks. “It’s not just that. There’s also this feeling of … knowing? Shavrim, that name, it …” Again, she searched for words.” It means something to us. I could feel the moment when we realized it, together—both of us. Just like here, now, it feels real, full, like something obvious I’d forgotten.”
“Like a dream,” he said, “one you only recall later, because of a smell or a series of words. It didn’t exist, and then—” he snapped his fingers “—it does.”
She nodded. “Yes. Exactly. But we don’t wake up from life, Vedas. We’re not dreaming.”
“You know there’s more to the world than we see,” he said. “I may be opposed to Adrash, Churls, but I’m not blind to the way forces other than he have bent creation. Miracles occur, beyond our reckoning. I’m not saying I’m convinced, but who’s to say Shavrim Coranid isn’t revealing something to us that we should know, something greater than ourselves?”
“Something greater, Vedas? No. The world has been shaped by many hands, but what of it? The events that appear as miracles, then and now, are exercises in power vastly greater than we can summon. They’re impressive, no doubt, but they’re also normal, completely of this world. Inexplicable things don’t happen.” She closed her eyes. “Nothing I’ve experienced would lead me to believe there’s anything more than this, right here, this moment with you—”
Her last word ended in a croak.
The quality of the air had changed. Concentrating against the hammering of her heart, she realized that Vedas’s breathing was no longer audible. His thumb, which had been rubbing at the back of her hand, had stilled.
She had been about to lie. Not to keep silent about Fyra, but to actively mislead.
Vedas released her hand and sat up. His suit slowly began to mend, circles closing to cover the areas of his back and upper buttocks he had allowed her to unveil. She pinched the bridge of her nose, grimacing, then swung her legs over the side of the bed and quickly pulled her clothes on. She allowed one glance to confirm that his nakedness had been covered completely.
“Fyra,” she said. “Fyra, it’s time.”
‡
They stared at one another. The girl defiantly, chin up. The man expressionlessly.
“Fyra,” Vedas said, voice flat. “You’re the daughter.”
The girl looked to Churls, who shrugged.
Fyra nodded. “Yes.”
Vedas gestured for more. When neither mother nor daughter spoke, he sighed. He met Churls’s gaze levelly, eyebrows raised.
“Nothing you’ve experienced would lead you to think there’s anything more than this, here?” He pointed at Fyra, a clear indictment. He smiled, utterly humorless. “A bit of an untruth, isn’t it, Churls?” The smile vanished, replaced again with a blank expression. He turned back to Fyra. “Please. Explain to me what your mother couldn’t, or wouldn’t.”
Fyra surprised Churls by sneering at him. “Don’t act like that,” the girl said. “Mama made some mistakes. I wanted her to tell you, and that made me angry. But you …” She pointed at him, returning his earlier gesture. “You could have asked her after Tan-Ten. You didn’t, so don’t blame her for just now getting around to it.”
After a brief pause, Vedas dipped his head in acknowledgement of her point.
They waited, Churls resolved not to speak. Finally, the girl caved.
“Ten years,” she said. “I’ve been dead for ten years. Almost eleven. I wasn’t always around. For a while, I don’t think I thought anything at all. I was sleeping, I guess.”
Vedas appeared to accept this without difficulty. “And now you’re present—all the time? Hiding? Watching?”
The girl blushed a warm pink. Churls had never seen it happen before, not in life and certainly not after death. She had thought the girl’s ethereal form incapable of generating color other than the blue of her eyes. Seeing it affected Churls in a way she could not have imagined.
It hurt, seeing it. Color in her daughter’s cheeks.
She turned toward the window to hide the expression on her face.
“No,” Fyra said. “Not always. I can’t be here all the time. Even when I really want to be, it can be hard. The dead call me back. Not everyone wants me here.”
Vedas shifted on the bed. Churls sensed his eyes on her, but did not turn back. She had invited Fyra into the room: the two of them could do the rest. She would not influence what information they did or did not share with each other.
“Why?” he eventually asked.
“I saved you and Mama on Tan-Ten, and then I fixed her shoulder after you hurt it. Don’t say it. I know you didn’t mean to, but you did. There are ways for the dead to be part of the world, to help the living, but most of them are afraid of doing it. They don’t want to attract anyone’s attention, especially Adrash’s. That, or they’re not good at crossing over.”
“But you are?”
“Yes. Yes, I am. Better than anybody, ever.”
Churls heard the smile in her daughter’s voice, and grinned in response.
The expression fled upon hearing what Vedas said next.
“And Berun—does he know about you?”
The question hung in the air. Churls fidgeted with her belt buckle, and made herself stop. Now that the issue had been broached, it seemed pure, embarrassing foolishness that she had avoided it. And yet, so much had been successfully avoided for so long, what did one more avoidance matter?
Just after rescuing Churls and Vedas in the shallows of Tan-Ten, Fyra had indeed appeared to Berun, leading him to shore, saving him from a slow death of light-suffocation under Lake Ten. Days after Vedas’s speech, she had almost certainly helped Berun find Churls in Danoor, though neither the constructed man nor Fyra admitted to it. What Churls h
ad never ascertained was whether or not Fyra had revealed her identity to Berun.
“I think so. I helped him,” the girl said. She glanced at Churls. “Twice. But I can’t be sure if he knows exactly who I am.”
“Well, then,” Vedas said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. “There’s an easy way to be sure.”
He opened the door and left without a glance back.
“That went well,” Fyra said.
Churls sighed. “You have an interesting definition of well, daughter.” She gestured Fyra toward the door.
“Not yet,” the girl said. “They can wait. Give me your hand. There’s no reason not to fix it now, right, Mama?”
Churls thought of arguing, but saw little point. Berun was patient, and Vedas could stand to pace through a minor delay.
As radiance flooded her body, touching every nerve and rendering it liquid, Churls reflected not on the violence or the tension of the last several days, but on all the talk. There had been too much. She could not fight the sinking feeling that like Vedas she had given too much away, that she had been careless in her words and revealed something she would regret. Of course, filled with Fyra’s soft healing fire, she could not put her finger on just what she had lost—or if, indeed, anything had been lost. Perhaps it was mere paranoia, the result of having talked herself into a corner. She had never liked ceding control.
“Fyra,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell him? About … about …”
The girl smiled. “Yes, mama? Tell him about what?”
Churls’s head swam. Her tongue was thick, heavy in her mouth, and then it seemed as if it had fled her body entirely. She blew air out between her lips, causing them to flap. She laughed, though she saw no humor in the situation.
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