by JANRAE FRANK
"There may not be time for that," Aejys said slowly. "But I'll have Tag ask around. There's probably a guildhall hidden in Vorgensburg. But you know, all of you, once challenge is issued I cannot refuse it."
"Who will save Laeoli when you are dead?"
"Josh and Tag will. Don't underestimate them. If I can't take Farendarc down, I can take him with me. That will no doubt buy time." Aejys rose. "Now you must be tired and I need to get down to the south docks. They are refitting some ships for me. I'll have Becca show you to rooms. Brendorn, will you share mine?"
"Always."
* * * *
Josh the Sot sat at a small beer stained table in the far back corner of the taproom, hidden in the shadow of the stairs. He had seen their shadows through the door – Aejys' visitors – known who they would be before Becca even spoke their names. Josh had known for weeks that they had been coming. He had seen them in his dreams when he got drunk enough. He had also seen the black and crimson shadows trailing them, the dangers to Aejys, but he had not spoken of them. It terrified him to speak of the magic. It made him shake and sent him running for the bottle. But the bottle only made it worse. Why, god? Why, when he had finally made peace with the magic's loss, give it back to him – twisted into a thing of horror? It would be so much easier to be dead. To stop feeling. He had tried wading out into waters toward the undertow, but could never quite find the nerve to see it through. And then there was that name that would echo through his drunken mind in the wee hours, "Abelard." A name he had never heard spoken aloud in this life.
His rough, weather-beaten hands framed a whiskey double without quite touching the glass. A bottle with just one drink taken out waited just a few inches north of his fingers. All his muscles seemed to twitch invisibly beneath his skin, every fiber of his body ached. Each morning he started out feeling clear and centered, hopeful and certain that this day he would feel good just being alive; but then he would encounter another person and another, with each meeting his muscles would begin to crawl beneath his skin as he interacted with them, even when it was a very small exchange, nothing more than a brief acknowledgement in passing. It would build like a physical manifestation of some weird psychic hysteria, the burning would start in his nerve endings, in the seared and blackened connections of his withered mage-net. By then Josh wanted to weep with fear and pain, gripped hard in the inescapable, inexorable gauntlet of sheer panic. Relief lay in that tiny glass and no one cared if he drank it. His throat and mouth longed for the smoky taste. The Sot longed for the sudden heat that raced through his veins and nerves when he drank it. Yet he hesitated.
In his youth he had gotten past this deep baffling physical and mental distress by sheer will power. He never asked himself why or where it came from, just knew a grinding need to repress it, shove it far down inside himself where it would never surface again. But it always came back. As he got older he turned more and more to the bottle as his strength of will slid down into a quagmire of terror, nightmares, and flashbacks, especially of the day six years ago that the archenwyrm had sunk his father's ship just off the blowholes. Josh saw it eat his father and brother before he washed up on shore, the only survivor. Since then he had lost his war with the bottle completely: for the last six years he had rarely been sober.
Two years ago Josh showed Aejys Rowan and Tagalong where to find the cave of the giant archenwyrm that had sunk his ship thereby starting his four-year binge. When things went awry, Josh, in an act of booze-born bravery beyond the ken of the sane and sober, finished off the beast. As an accessory, not a partner, he had no part in the treasure, but Aejys Rowan had vowed to provide for him for the rest of his days without judgments or recriminations in whatever way he chose to live those days. If he wished to live out his life in the grip of the bottle she would not refuse him: it was not her life to live, it was his. Aejys Rowan never went back on her word.
Aejys provided him with all that he wanted to drink as well as everything else he needed including two servants to pick him up when he passed out, clean him up, tuck him into bed and care for his hangovers.
Josh's problem began when Aejys dosed him with a sylvan medicinal, holadil, to both get him over his hangover and keep him tractable enough to guide them to the wyrm. In fact, she had dosed him twice since then for particularly bad hangovers. A very few humans were rumored to experience strange side effects and once the holadil got into their system it tended to stay there. For Josh the side effects only showed up when he drank, coming in an unconsciously accessed gallimaufry mess, random and unpredictable, of psychic phenomena and the twisted magic that haunted him. Needless to say, Josh seriously considered giving up drink. But there was always a good reason, he told himself, for snagging that next bottle.
So he sat, his hands hovering around the whiskey and not quite daring to touch it.
"You okay, Josh?" Tagalong Smith settled into a chair across the table from him and drew her legs up so that her knees rested against the table edge. The handle of her hammer thunked the chair seat.
Josh yelped, snatched up the whiskey, glass, and bottle, and fled through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Tagalong stared dumfounded at his retreating back.
* * * *
In a big box stall in the northeast corner of the stable Gwyndar shook his big black-maned head impatiently watching the sot rush towards him. His forelock settled askew and a twisted horn just two handspans long glinted in the torchlight. At eighteen hands the wynderjyn, get of a unicorn stallion and a mare, towered over all but two of the other animals in the building: the wynderjyn of Cassana and Tamlestari. Josh paused at the stall gate, swallowed the little bit in the glass that remained unspilled by his mad dash, then darted in and burrowed under the straw.
Gwyndar nuzzled him questioningly.
"Something bad's going on. I know it!" Josh rasped, then uncorked the bottle, took a big swig, and burrowed deeper. The more drunk he became the more strongly he could feel the distant swirling of dark energies. He only felt safe from them hiding down in the straw beside Gwyndar as if the big animal could somehow protect him. Yet Josh knew it should be the other way around. The power was his, if he could find the strength to reach for it, but it terrified him. And that name whispered like a memory through his thoughts: Abelard. In his mind's eye he saw a darkened chamber and a woman with a wealth of dark hair who looked much like Aejys, only softer. She turned her neck to a man who twined about her in the throes of passion. His eyes were amaranthine, without whites, iris or pupils. Sa'necari. His lips parted and his fangs descended as the living necromancer with all the powers and appetites of the undead sank them into his lover's neck. Josh screamed into the straw, rejecting the vision, and passed out.
The big animal settled down around him to keep him warm as he always did.
* * * *
In the servants' quarters of the Cock and Boar, Tamlestari sat in a rough chair at the bedside of a coughing woman beneath a worn, patched and re-patched blanket. She threw some leaves into a pot of boiling water. Astringent steam rose, making Becca's nose wrinkle as she supported the woman, easing her up to inhale the vapors. The servant's face cleared and a little color returned.
A young girl stood in the doorway watching. Tamlestari nodded at her. The girl joined her. Tamlestari pulled several vials of powder and bottles of liquids of various colors from a large satchel leaning against her knee. She measured and mixed them into an empty bottle, stirring with a glass rod. "Give your ma'aram two spoons at dawn, noon and nightfall until its gone. When it's gone she can go back to work," Tamlestari added, meeting Becca's eyes. "I know you're short handed, but you can hold out until then, right?"
Becca nodded. She left the rooms beside the Sharani youth. "I didn't like you at all this morning," she said. "But I'm starting to now."
Tamlestari's lips twisted into an impish grin. "Same here. But don't expect much. Sometimes I just can't help myself."
"I'll remember. Josh is having some odd problems, now that I think on it."
"Li
ke what?" Tamlestari stopped, turning to Becca with an interested expression, but Becca only shook her head.
"You can check for mage gift?"
"A bit. I'm not really skilled at it. Most Readers can't, but I can."
"Then Josh won't let you within reach of him.
"Why?"
"No one knows. Unless it's Clemmerick. They're best friends. Or the Kwaklahmyn shaman, Branch. Branch has protected Josh since the mon was a child. Branch knows everything that goes on along the Northwest Coast, the dark and the light."
* * * *
Narrow two and three story houses set wall against wall like huddled orphans, made bright with a patchwork of hanging plants lined the first street. At the street's end the docks and wharves opened up. Stevedores bustled about the ships, many of them stripped to the waist in the unseasonable heat, loading and unloading. A carpenter's mate went past with his stained leather apron and belt of tools. Along the curving shoreline a distance from the wharves, fishing nets dried in the sun beside the boats drawn up on the shore in a pattern of weathered gray and brown against the golden sands. Fishermyn moved among them patching and tending, removing bits of debris that might later cause problems. Beyond the shore the sea stretched out like a liquid infinity, going on forever.
Brendorn drew a sharp awed breath, and then lifted his eyes to the tall masted sailing ships. "Like castles on the water!"
Aejys smiled, took out her pipe, and filled it. "You think that one's big?" She gestured with the pipe, "You should see mine."
"Can we go on it?" Brendorn asked eagerly.
"That's what we're down here for. They have finished the main cabins. The furniture is in. Architect wanted my approval."
The people they passed stopped in their work and greeted Aejys as she went by. Brendorn stayed close, looking a bit uncertain under all the attention so different from the polite deferment the Sharani showed their upper classes.
"Why do they all speak?"
"For the same reason they want me for mayor. I guess. Just after the spring thaw, Vorgensburg got raided by pirates out of Brunstrat. They blocked the port. Came in in longboats. By the time the guard got organized my household and I were already turning them. The raiders definitely did not expect anything like Clemmerick."
"Clemmerick?"
"The ogre who takes care of my stables. He's not full blood or full size, his father's human, but he makes a good substitute catapult in a pinch," Aejys paused to re light her pipe. "As well as wielding a mean pike."
"You are collecting misfits again," Brendorn said softly, with approval in his tone. He slipped his arm around her waist and pressed against her.
"I don't know about that." She smiled back and kissed the tip of his nose, stroked the points of his ears. "To my mind, Brendorn, there is no such thing as a misfit, just people who have not found their place in the world."
"Like a half-breed gardener?"
"I thought you had found your place..."
"Only when I am with you."
Aejys shook herself loose, starting on again. "You still taking care of Kaethreyn's gardens?"
Brendorn shook his head. "No. She has given me my own gardens, private ones. I think she meant to comfort me when you left..."
Aejys nodded thoughtfully, "Ma'aram would do that. Treat you like I made a grass-widow of you when I ran off."
"It did comfort me. And Ladonys and Laeoli also. You should see them and our gardens."
"I intend to. Do you have a bench in your garden?"
Brendorn nodded. "And a table."
"We will try to get there before winter sets in. I want to sit there with you and smell the flowers you have nurtured." Impulsively, Aejys reached around him to draw the sword he carried at his side. Brendorn lifted his arms to let her take it. She felt the weight and balance. It was a good blade. "You ever learn to use this?"
"A little. Ladonys finally gave up on me. She says I'm hopeless. I'm a gardener, Aejys, never going to be anything else."
* * * *
"There she is." Aejys stopped and pointed. "The Seafox. It's based on a triton design. The amphibians know more about sailing than land people. Or so Josh tells me. He also says the tritons don't use oars, but the shipwright wasn't happy without them."
Brendorn looked up, he had been so lost in thought and conversation that he had not even realized they were approaching a ship. "She is beautiful, Aejys. Very beautiful."
The Seafox was three masted, double-ended with a double row of oars. She carried a crew of 35, four officers and had room for just over a dozen passengers or soldiers. A gangplank extended to the quay and a stout man stood at the foot of it with a roll of parchments under his arm. They toured the ship, coming at last to Aejys' cabin. There she dismissed the architect.
The cabin was wide. Carpets covered the floor. A broad double bed lay to the right of the door covered by a thick gold velvet bedspread and piled with pillows of all descriptions. A well-stocked desk stood to the left. Aejys drew Brendorn to the huge bed, unbuckling his belt while she pushed him down onto the thick satin bedspread. "My love, I have an itch that has not been scratched in years."
* * * *
They walked home in the dark, arm in arm. Lights winked out in the shops and homes as they passed, the streets going still and sleepy. The night watch stopped them, recognized Aejys immediately and offered to see them safely home. Aejys declined and they went on. A light still shone in some of the Cock and Boar's upper story and the kitchen, but the common room was dark. At the northeast corner of the compound the stable was brightly lit.
They entered unnoticed through the postern door. Targets had been mounted on bales of hay set up at the far end, away from the animals. Becca slid a stone into a sling, whirled it thrice, and let fly. She continued until she emptied her pouch, never missing.
Clemmerick, sitting amid the hay bales with his back to the wall, applauded her, roaring approval.
"Where did you learn that?" Aejys asked.
Becca gave her a cocky smile. "Father was a farmer. We learned young to shy a stone at the birds that got into the crops. Got so the birds didn't come around much once I killed a couple each season."
The tavern master began retrieving her stones. Aejys walked to the targets and picked one up. The stone was a smooth deep red with blue and green veins. "Where do you find these?"
"Not around here. Those are my lucky stones. I found them in the river beds around Cherdon'datar."
"Your father is a centaur?"
Becca frowned, swallowed an irritated non sequitur, "No. There are humans in Cherdon'datar as well as centaurs. My family farms at the Three Points where the rivers meet."
"You are a long way from home, Becca."
Becca gave her a wry look. "Aren't we all?"
"Becca, before I forget, is that serving woman doing any better?"
"Not really. Her daughter tells me she's coughing so bad at night she can hardly sleep."
Aejys nodded thoughtfully. "Have a healer look in on her at my expense. Take care of our people, Becca."
"I have," she replied. "Tamlestari treated a few hours ago. She'll be better soon."
"Tamlestari?"
"She's very good," Becca replied.
Brendorn nodded agreement. "She's a chirurgeon as well as ha'taren."
Aejys considered that a moment, remarking, "A rare combination."
* * * *
"Margren was the reason you left, wasn't she?" Brendorn said as Aejys rolled off him and they lay together in the warm afterglow of love.
"Part. Yes." Aejys turned away, pulling the sheets around her heavily scarred body. "I'd rather not talk about it."
"I know." Brendorn moved closer, his hand gently closing on her right shoulder, which bore a criss-cross pattern of scars. "But there is a time and a season to all things. Ladonys, Laeoli, and I ... we felt hurt when you left. We tried hard to understand. You were so badly wounded from... from..." Brendorn realized he couldn't say it any more than Aejys could.
"What happened taking Bucharsa Temple."
"I'm sorry," Aejys rolled back to face him. "I'm truly sorry. I thought you would be safer in Rowan Castle. I didn't know where I was going or what I was doing. I just had to get out of there."
"We weren't safe." The calm patience in his voice made her wince.
"I meant to send for you as soon as I got settled in Vorgensburg. As soon as I had a place to bring you." She knew that sounded lame the moment she said it for she had had a place for nearly two years. A drawer filled to overflowing with unsent letters to him bore mute testimony to her intentions but she could not bring herself to mention them.
"What did Margren do?" Brendorn went straight for the point.
Aejys sat up, reaching for her pipe on the nightstand. The sheets settled down around her waist and lap. She filled the pipe, tamped it down, and lit it. She sat sucking on it for several moments. The candlelight, wavering in a breeze that slid in around the open window shutters, cast strange patterns of light and shadow across her scar-mottled body.
"Just before the invasion of Waejontor. When the levies were gathering at Rowan Castle. Ma'aram begged me to promise I would never harm Margren in any way. I made that vow. 'My life be forfeit to God if I break it'," Aejys quoted the final words of the most solemn promise a ha'taren could make. "After Bucharsa, Margren came to me privately. When she finished I knew I couldn't keep that vow."
Brendorn's expression turned bleak. "I should not have come."
"You had no more choice than I did – do." Aejys' mouth pulled into a thin line. She re-filled her pipe and drew on it contemplatively for several moments before realizing she hadn't lit it. "It was an impossible situation. If I break that vow, not only am I dishonored, but also I break Kaethreyn's heart. I love my ma'aram."
"I know," Brendorn acknowledged. "But she isn't always easy to live with."
Aejys gave him a long sad look. "And if I keep it... There's no doubt in my mind... Margren will kill me." Anger flared white hot and she cursed, "If I could have defended myself I would have stayed and fought. But my hands were tied. I wasn't going to stay there like some bloody lamb waiting to be butchered."
