He set it down on the grass beside her with an inclination of his head and no words before making his easy steps back into the house. Jalcina looked at the bowl set before her. The cup of foaming oil sat beside it as if in offering to get her to try it.
She discarded that thought immediately. Jalcina did not intend to starve, but she certainly did not intend to try anything so obviously strange either. Someone would have to come and force it down her throat. Remembering the powers of the Queen and how she had once frozen Lecern with a thought, Jalcina did not doubt such a thing possible. The bowl contained fish stew Jalcina had become somewhat accustomed to on the trip, though the fish wasn't as salty. She found herself missing the crunch of it. Realizing half-way through the bowl she was no longer alone, Jalcina looked up to see Mekan standing in the garden doorway holding the reed curtain to one side and frozen in place as if he waited for permission to enter. Meeting her eyes, he brought his foot down and stepped out.
"How are you?" His voice had no edge to it, as if he intended to get along. Good. That might make this pleasant enough.
Jalcina rearranged her legs and waited for him to say his piece.
"I had business I needed to attend to. I see you are fine." He stood over her in the grass and she measured his shadow out of habit. Long days seemed to inhabit this part of the world. Sartol the day had always seemed far too short even in summer. Here it was always summer and the days stretched forever.
"Your business, what was it?"
"It has to do with the powers around us," he said hunkering down to her level. "You are not who they think, but you are something more than any have anticipated. Something older and perhaps even stronger."
Prophecies again. To say she tired of them would be too much.
Vad'Alvarn dragged her away from her life for carrying a soul he desired. For that she spent three hundred years resting without a care. Now she returned to a world where everyone seemed to desire her but only for something she had nothing to do with. It was hardly fair, but she didn't care about fair. She wanted her own life and she would have it.
"Who is Wrepta?"
He did not start at the name, but appraised her with an uneasy eye as if he feared to say too much.
"I am already your prisoner in a world where I understand one word in three shouted at me from a distance," Jalcina said. "You can at least tell me what it is you have brought me here for."
"What do you truly know of the world you live in?"
His question brought her to a stop. She knew plenty of the world, but it was a candle against a bonfire compared to what she could know if she had been given the chance to learn further. Her old tutors told her as much as they could, but even they had only known so much.
"How do you mean?"
"What do you know of magic?"
"Tell me what I need to know." Jalcina reached out to him as if in need of solace. Mekan took her hand and rubbed his fingers along her knuckles.
"Wrepta is ancient magic. Magic from perhaps even the foundation of the world some say. I do not know if that is true. I do know once Wrepta protected all of Xernia and its people from invaders. That was before the Black King."
Before Vad'Alvarn whom Jalcina remembered as a man driven by demons to conquer all he surveyed. A tortured soul he was not, he enjoyed his conquests, but he could no more have stopped himself from acquiring more than he could have reached up and stopped the course of the sun with his bare hands. If Wrepta was even older than him and she had not met the Black King until he was well into his four hundredth year and she herself stood over three hundred years old, it was old indeed. Old enough that perhaps the foundation of the world story was true. If it was, she didn't try to puzzle it out. Age certainly could matter no more to magic than it did to anything else.
"Wrepta fell into the sea ages ago, leaving behind only a sign of her passing, the Crystal Spire which juts out of haunted waters south of here. I would take you there. The Kemalan says to. I sought once to get Leviana to come, but she refused. I could not force her."
"What does her, or even me, coming here have to do with Wrepta?"
He fell silent, his demeanor shifting. Jalcina snatched her hand back.
"Tell me the truth."
"I don't know what will happen. I only know there is a connection."
If she doubted he had harmful plans for her before, those doubts disappeared. She had to escape him before he could do whatever it was he intended to do.
"Go away," she said turning her face from him. Mekan stroked her exposed cheek in a familiar gesture before rising to leave. He did not return. The man in the white robe did. He picked up the tray and put a gentle hand on Jalcina's arm to wake her from drowsing in the shade.
"Come inside. Things will bite if you stay out much longer."
The long day drew toward a slow close.
Inside the house had become cool as the sun descended and the woman now lounged on a mat with her back to one of the pigmented walls. Jalcina stopped before her and knelt down.
"Kemalan?"
The woman opened her eyes like expressive marbles and gazed at the younger.
"What am I to Wrepta?"
"Hope."
With that she shut her eyes and made an impatient shooing gesture. Jalcina did not press the conversation but followed the quiet man further into the house that seemed too small to be so large. The pallets in a back room were made of woven grass and covered in light sheets she wondered at when she slid them over her fingers. Memories of nights huddled under a dozen blankets with her youngers nestled for warmth came back to her and she found herself wishing to know what happened to them.
The history of her Father was not truly known. Only a suggestion of his death when Sartol fell as he would have loved his people any less. Mordaen loved his people. He would never let them suffer a yoke while he lived. Jalcina knew that in the depths of her bones. Of course, facing a relentless opponent such as Navar would have brought him nothing but joy as well.
She laid down on the pallet and covered her body with the sheet. She could sleep alone; it would not harm her.
Morning dawned as a blaze and the room felt oppressive even though it had hardly begun when Jalcina opened her eyes. She was no longer alone in the room. The white robe man laid a few feet away softly snoring with his mouth open. Mekan had a corner close enough to hear him breathe as well, but Jalcina let her eyes drift across him looking for evidence of the Kemalan. She was not with them. Perhaps she didn't sleep in this room.
Jalcina rose and without putting on her sandals moved through the house on soft feet.
Those who marked her passage made no indication.
The Kemalan sat where Jalcina first met her facing the door with the red bar.
"What do the symbols mean?" Jalcina asked as she settled beside her. The ancient one offered her the cup of foaming oil without comment. Jalcina shook her head against it.
The shifting eyes of the Kemalan offered nothing when the woman looked at her, but Jalcina knew she was being weighed. It was in the contemplative set of the woman's mouth.
"They mean warning where I come from. They keep the evil inside its bounds."
The Kemalan shook her head and said something in Xernian. The only word Jalcina caught was ignorant and only that one as the men on the ship had said "Ignorant fish thief" to each other often.
"Ignorant of what?"
"Ignorant take things they do not understand and use wrong." The Kemalan went to the door and put her hand on the bar before rising it. The shuffle of her feet was at odds with the sudden sound of the world outside as if the bar had also raised another barrier. "Power can be invited and it can be turned away." The woman returned to her space facing the door and sank back down to her rest. "Your people used it to keep evil away because they did not know it could also be used to offer a place for power to reside. Thus they make the evil inside stronger by keeping it there."
Jalcina thought back. The wards had always been a warning.
They kept the monster under the trees and away from everyone else, but if it was true, did that mean they also made it worse?
"Can power be made to leave? Be banished."
"Power never disappears, only moves. Gathers, collects, showers, but never goes truly away. Change comes and goes. Power with it."
Jalcina put her hands out in front of her.
"I have power."
"You do."
"What can I do with it?"
"You are old spirit, a one who has come again."
With a shake of her head, Jalcina tried to make sense of that. Her hair, tangled at the base of her skull, refused to move and she tried to rake her hands through it.
"Come." The Kemalan took her into the room near the garden door and took out a thick comb. "You are dirty. When Hok awakes, I will have him take you to bathe. First, hair."
The sensation of the comb pulling snarls from her hair brought back a memory so old at first Jalcina thought she imagined it. Yet she knew she had a mother. The woman existed. Her presence had been felt throughout Jalcina's childhood by her very absence as she grew older.
Mordaen loved his wife who gave him a daughter and a son, but he rarely spoke of her after she stepped into a winter night and disappeared. Whatever he felt beyond that, he said little.
Hanks of Jalcina's black hair landed on the floor and she tried not to focus on the bright stars of pain thrown up in her vision. They warred with her heart's hurt at the memories.
"You are one who has come again and you will return again as you have before if the wheel continues to turn."
"What does that mean?"
"I cannot say what it means, only what is known."
Her enigmatic response did not set Jalcina at ease.
Hok got up a few minutes later, his characteristic white robe held by its bright red ribbon. He came upon them sitting in silence and waited patiently at the door to be acknowledged.
What the Kemalan said to him in Xernian included something about water, but it meant little. Water was such a common word in their tongue she couldn't be certain what water they meant. He nodded his head and went out of the room returned with a band for his head with a coin set against his forehead.
"What's that?"
"Mark of station. You are guest, you will not need one."
Jalcina marveled at the intricate coin and refused the urge to touch it. So close to his skin, it might well have been a part of him. Hok showed her out of the house and as they stepped off the house shifted under their weight. He led the way through the boarded up streets with efficiency of one used to his path. Whenever she slowed to marvel at something, he waited with studied impatience. The sun grew higher and brought with it the heat Jalcina had come to despise.
Cross sprawled in a dozen directions made as it was of islands and bridges, but they reached a place that seemed secluded even for all the bustle. It went through a part of swinging trees and into a small building that steamed even so early in the day.
Hok opened the door for her and stepped inside behind her. A few feet inside, a woman hunched with a scroll held in her hands. The script stood out in bright red against the brown-white. From further in came puffs of scented smoke. He said something to the woman who nodded and went to gather a few things from a pile near the back door.
Jalcina followed the woman when she beckoned.
"Scent water," the hostess said offering her brightly colored cloths to dry with. Jalcina had seen something like this before in Kerlan. Then it had been set in a floor below ground, man-made to fulfill its function. Here, the ground swelled with water smelling of salts and flowers and Jalcina let them comfort her at least some. Hok did not follow from inside the little house and the woman appeared to be waiting for Jalcina to do something. After several long moments, the woman came over and started helping her out of her clothes.
With a flush, Jalcina started.
"Wait."
"You cannot go in dressed. You ruin your skirt." Apparently she was not the only overly cautious person to come to this place. The young woman seemed utterly unbothered by the idea of stripping someone down to their skin. Though she couldn't bring herself to look, Jalcina allowed the indignity. Down to her skin, the woman placed the heel of her hand against Jalcina's shoulder and pushed her toward the water.
Fumbling into a slide down the slick rounded rocks, Jalcina found herself standing in a waist deep pool of water warm enough to make her skin flush all the harder. She expected it to be cold, no matter the steam around her because water was always cold in Sartol. Nowhere did it just come up warm like this. After adjusting, she dipped down to let the warmth run over her hair and further pull snarls out. Luxuriating, she stayed there a moment with only her eyes showing as her hair ran in long tendrils around her face.
The water in Kerlan had been cooler than this as it pulled against her ankles. She demanded to see him and the woman, his servant, brought her to what must have been taken as his private bath. Of course, she knew of no such thing. Her imperious desire pushed her to seek him out even in a vulnerable state. Somehow she ended up in the water with him, his touch leaving sparks of pleasure up her ankle.
She remembered him being commanding, strong, with a pull like the north star. Yet he was dead.
What had he left behind but a legacy of war, just as could have been predicted when he lived.
Jalcina scratched her scalp with her fingertips to dislodge the worst of the dirt. Long days and nights at sea had done her no favors. She could see how many of Xernia became the streaked and striped ones by the time they grew of age. They could become nothing else between the touch of the sun and the surf. Brown as their boats with strong skin to stand the weather. She envied that strength though she wondered how they would fare cast in the blizzard of her home. Would Mekan be so strong when he stood against the howling of the wind as it whipped frost and snow across his face like chains?
The thought brought a smile to her face even as she worked her way to the edge of the small pool to find what might have passed for soap. It seemed like it might be. It moved across her fingers when added to the water like it should.
Her contemplation broke when she noticed the woman still sitting on the edge of the pool with her legs folded under her. Did she need a chaperone to bathe?
As if the woman wanted her to remember, she waved to her patron. "Hello."
Jalcina responded with a weak smile before turning away again. Having someone watch her made her flesh crawl in spite of having spent what felt like a week on a boat surrounded by others. In those instances, she had not been asked to become completely naked and vulnerable as a babe. The woman, unoffended, stared off at the wall beyond the bathing pool made of tightly woven reeds. Not meant to stop an attack, but simply keep back prying eyes.
"Where is Hok?" Jalcina's pronunciation of his name sounded harsh to her ears, but only because after hearing the Kemalan say it, she knew it wasn't right. The woman shook her head and made a shooing gesture toward the house. He apparently had to stay inside and out of sight. Then she touched her forehead.
After a few seconds of failing to communicate what she wanted, Jalcina gave up and used the soap where she could to get rid of the worst of the smell. At least after all this she wouldn't smell as if she wore fish as a shawl.
Though there was no rush, Jalcina pulled herself from the pool a short time later and hastily wrapped her body in the offered clothes. The woman came at her with a comb and Jalcina tugged it away before trying it in her hair. Her previous treatment by the Kemalan had been enough as far as allowing someone else to comb her hair. In the little hut, Hok knelt by the door with his head down in repose.
When she reached him, Jalcina shook him lightly. He awakened as if brought to life by her touch and smiled. His teeth stood out shiny and white against his deep brown lined face. Was he like the Kemalan, someone outside of time? He pressed his hands to the sides of her face and dipped his face close enough for her to kiss his mark of station before leadi
ng the way out of the hut. Another group came in as they were leaving and bows were made. Jalcina couldn't help feeling the way their eyes traveled over her, so different from them. She allowed Hok to show her back out into the world as her hair continued to dry down her back.
"I want to go there," she said to him as they crossed a bridge leading back the way they came. He slowed down to look in the direction she indicated. It was a broad waterway with many little boats on it, some of them empty. Others carrying passengers Jalcina could only just make out.
Hok shook his head and grabbed her hand to urge her forward.
"Why not?"
He didn't respond but pulled her away from what she saw. She let her eyes fill with it as they moved away. No one moved around that strange waterway, at least not that she was. Busy Cross seemed an odd place for such silent stillness.
Returning to the house of the Kemalan, they found her sitting in the front room with a pipe in her mouth. Again Jalcina saw flashes of the Queen of Backaran in the woman's demeanor, alike but different. Where the Queen was statuesque and even grotesque in her inhumanity, the Kemalan seemed more human than human, if that were possible. As if she distilled the essence of the strength of the spirit. The intensity terrified Jalcina as she settled once more on her knees before her.
"You smell better," the Kemalan observed. "This is good. Do you feel better?"
With a quirk of her mouth, Jalcina considered the question. Did she feel better? Was there something to feel better about now since she had washed away the days before in the scented water? Not really. There were still too many things hiding at the edge of her vision for her to feel at ease.
"Tell me what you would have me know," Jalcina said. "I want to know what is going on."
"Nothing to tell. You are hope for our people. Mekan has brought you here for that. It must be enough."
None of her answers made Jalcina feel safe. The continued evasions made her feel less and less safe with every passing moment. She moved to something else.
"There was a waterway we passed and it was full of little boats. Boats too small for people. What was in them?"
Ruins of Fate (Fate Circle Saga Book 3) Page 11
