Either she had laid down for a nap—in which case he would have to have a most unpleasant lecture with her later over the virtues of announcing one’s departure—or was taking in the sheets from outside. Whatever the reason, it guaranteed more work for him. Not exactly the ideal course, but at least the customers had waited until after he finished with the bread.
Blowing out the fire in the oven, he lightly doused the logs and knocked some of the loose bits of dough from the racks. He called out to the customer, assuring whoever it was that he would be out in but a moment, to which he received no reply. Sighing through the indifference, he padded a bit of the flour from his hands, shoved the last loaf in with the rest, and headed for the door. A final glance back assured him the fire was out. One always had to be sure. The details, his father told him. It was always about the details.
Putting on as apologetic a smile as his weariness might allow, he stepped out saying, “Sorry about that.” Already he was racing ahead of himself, to the next day and the next, to the loaves that would need to be made, the cakes that certain families would be wanting. What flavors might he produce, in the time granted? There was always a danger in experimentation, but he often found it worthwhile. Life was a learning experience, and if he failed, it was not as though the punishment were some unknown terror. His mother would hit him, or scream at him. She always did.
Expecting an angry rancher, he was pleasantly surprised when the garish figure turned and greeted him with a familiar grin. “Messar Rowan,” he cried, extending his hand as he rushed forward to meet him.
“A pleasure, Messar Voren. Hope you don’t mind…?”
“Of course not. Please. I was just finishing up, actually.”
The swordsman’s smile tightened pleasantly as his hand fell away. All thoughts of annoyance in his mother’s abrupt departure were hastily expelled. If she had been there, she would have harped Rowan right out of the store as soon as she realized he was not a customer. The only thing she hated worse than errors was having her time wasted. If they were not there for bread, and they were not there to gossip with her, then by definition they could have no purpose.
Assal above knows they could not be here for me. Sometimes, though, the Holy Father moved in strange ways. Sometimes, the Holy Father actually indulged him.
“So this is the bakery,” Rowan remarked, moving slowly around the room. “Smells divine,” he added, making a show with his deep, satisfied breaths.
“Certainly. One of the perks.” Anxiously, he could not help but quirk an eye to the door. “Are you alone or…?”
“Essa’s not with me today. Off sitting children, as it were.” With a wink, Rowan added, “I’m the only free one for the day.”
At an offer of bread, Rowan declined, insisting he was merely passing through. He had no intention of being a long-standing bother. Mostly, it seemed, he came with questions of the town, the people, the motions of its being. Voren leapt at the opportunity to be useful, and indulged him, much as he might. Yet he did not mention his mother, or her other hens. He did not mention how little that gossip came to him. He did not mention his isolation.
In gradual lines, their conversation shifted back to the kitchen, where Voren could continue working as they spoke. The cleaning nagged at him—all that flour and dough, out of place, out of order, unseemly nonentities—and the sooner done, the less anxious he was certain he would feel. He felt a pang of longing for Essa’s company, but he did his best to ignore it. Duties called. Such was the nature of the world.
“…and I swear, that woman had no sense about her. Five children. Five! How on earth does she hope to manage five little devils all at once? Nonsense, I say, and madness…”
The stories Rowan came with were entertaining enough, but they dragged on as he indulged with his own editorial commentary. Words scrambled in Voren’s brain as put himself to his work. His focus shifted, however, when he heard the muffled “mmm” that interrupted his guest’s latest speech. The man’s eyes squinted with delight, poised beneath the shadows of his long, feathered cap, mouth twitched in pleasure, but his finger…his finger…
It slid down, struck up a stray bit of powder on the counter. Then it slid back into his mouth with the barest pop, and his pink, unclean tongue flicked out to wipe it from existence.
On the counter, the trail where his saliva had passed. Voren felt the bugs crawl up his skin—the familiar tensing in his fingers. His lips parted to say something, but found no sound.
“Delicious,” was all Rowan said.
Mop in hand, Voren took a hesitant step toward him. “Could you…”
“So do you like it here?”
Caught off guard by the question’s suddenness, Voren stumbled for a reply. “I…yes. I think. I mean, Verdan is—”
Rowan nodded, disregarding his comment and interrupting him with his own. “Quaint, though, no? Oh don’t mind it. I don’t mean anything by it just—mundane. It’s got that homey sort of feel to it. The bakery, too. It’s not a bad thing, but it was never my thing. Same with Roellich. If that’s your thing, that’s the peak, but it’s not enough. It’s a life, but living—aye, that’s another. I could have had a good, simple life back home. Everything would be laid out, you know.
“Mother was a seamstress. Father was a huntsman—just like Pescha.” Rowan paused, gathered himself with a laugh. “Well, not just like Pescha. You met him right? Part of the reason I couldn’t stay. All this…sameness, it just…breeds people like him, you know? Or at least, it holds them in. That man did the worst and the best things ever for us.”
The worst, so far as Voren saw it. The worst and nothing but. Yet he stood, frozen, as the swordsman pressed on, ranting. Mundaneness, he called it. Quaint. Voren might have reeled from that, if his mind did not keep racing back to the finger, and the powder, and the counter, now wet. Was his life so quaint, so horridly vapid, that even such a slight change as this might rile the reflux within him? He smiled, faintly, trying to focus.
Quaint, he called it. Dull, he meant.
Voren liked to think of himself as content in this life. It was repetitive, to be sure, but he could make something of himself in it. At least, so far as the nobles allowed. He had constraints, but he could find his coin. So long as no one else came to do the same. So long as he never sought to move beyond baking. That was his role, and thus, his identity. Even his family’s name was a derivative of it.
To be so defined—a maddening discourse.
“Have you ever felt that uncertainty?” Rowan asked. Voren shook his head, assured him there was contentment in the day to day. The certainty. Rowan smiled back—condescendingly. The day to day was the death of identity, far as Rowan was concerned, and Voren knew it. The day to day was another way of saying nothing. Nothing ever changed, nothing was ever anything but certain. No reward, but no punishment either. Simplicity.
Look at Pescha. Rowan vaunted him as his example of what the mundane did to a person. But it was not so. It was the change. When he reached beyond, when he found that aswari woman—that was what did him. Pescha tried to reconcile the ordinary and the extraordinary, and it tore him to pieces for the effort.
But the risk, even then, did herald something greater. Pescha was a monster because he could not see that. He could not look beyond himself. Did anyone? Pescha had Essa. Yet he shunned her, struck her, cast her off. The fact that he was not with her now was only further evidence to his imbecility. Life is more than yourself, though you are the only one you can depend on in it. A curious conundrum, Voren thought, in the very core of existence. They were a paradox. Thus: suffering.
“Without Essa, though, I never would have had the courage to be off,” Rowan pleasantly sighed. He sank down, into a chair by the door.
“Essa?”
“Oh certainly. The most restless of all. Pescha to thank for that one. And Rurik—well, that helps.”
Rurik. The exile. He kept his contempt under lock and key, merely cocking his head with a ponderous twinge.
“Whatever do you mean?”
He remembered the day Rurik was forced from home, like it was happening still. It was all for the best. The man was the least among them, made all the worse by his station as a lord’s son. He was supposed to be better. All he was, however, was a spoiled, self-serving rapist. The day the count palatine’s train of carriages left the town was perhaps the darkest day in all of Verdan. Few people wept for Rurik, but they did weep for the count and his daughter. Less for them, than what it meant. They had thought for certain he would have them all by the throats for that.
No one ever shed a tear for Rurik Matair. Not in Voren’s presence, anyway, and he certainly was not about to. Not after the way Rurik had treated him. That one was a valuable lesson in mortal flesh—trust not, want not. As soon as his own desire had gone, Rurik was as cold to him as anyone else. So it was.
“Cast off. Unwanted. An exile in his own dear home. Sound familiar? They’re kindred spirits, at that. And she’s got the wanderlust. And he’s always got to wander. Adventure and intrigue follows, no?” Rowan rolled his eyes, settling back into his uncomfortable chair. “It’d be a fine love story, if there weren’t all the stabbing and the misfitted blaggarts looking to pimp us out for coin. I tell you, mercenarying…sellswording, what have you…it’s got its allure. But the people in it, dear me, that’s what’ll get you down.”
“Kindred? That is to say…”
“Bloodthirsty gits, the lot. Oh but once, I’d say to you, give me the honest knight, the shield that glitters bright…but the invisible must stay ever invisible I suppose. Enigma, there. Can you see that boy as invisible?” Rowan let that hang for a moment before he seemed to realize a question had been asked of him. “Oh. Quite. It’s good for them, really. The both of them. You need something to love, I think, or you’d lose yourself. The blood—I don’t see how anyone like them could deal with the blood, without it. Me, well—so it goes.”
“Are you to say…Essa’s killed?”
For some reason, he could not reconcile his vision of the bouncing, cheerful girl of yesteryear, and yesterday, to those invoked at the mention of sellswords. That such a smile might shine yet so pure after driving an arrow into someone’s heart was inconceivable. She had killed animals, but man was a different animal entirely. When a hunter killed, it was for food. When one killed a man…he tried to picture her willfully putting herself to murder. Worse: murder for coin. He could not do it. Rurik, however…
“Oh, friend,” Rowan said sadly, “we’ve all killed. The difference is, some of us cannot stand to do it.” The swordsman tipped himself back, stretching out as he looked to the ceiling. He must have seen something there, because his eyes seemed to focus intently on a spot, and Voren followed his gaze thinking, perhaps, mold but—the man’s eyes fell heavy, and his head shook from side to side. “It’s the empathy what makes us human.”
How strange, the paths life can take. Did killing make someone any less a person? Empathy, Rowan said—that was what kept them human. As Voren began to stir the mop again, the dirt and the mud swirling through the sopping pail, he imagined Essa smiling as she neared. Hair down, wild as ever. A blade in either hand, she kissed him on the cheek, even whispering sweet nothings as she drew the steel across his throat. Blood rained down, and it all fell away—and Essa, giggling, skipped away, hand-in-hand, with his corpse on one arm and Rurik on the other. The stain spread. The water darkened.
Because one regretted what one did could not make the blood any less real. There was a stain, no matter how much one washed, and the very real void that would have once been filled with a body, a life, a song. Mere sorrow could not fill that void. Dead was dead. Murder was irreconcilable, irretrievable. It was a stain, forever blighting the world. The question, then, was if the human could survive that stain. If death pushed one into some bizarre and horrid sort of freedom, beyond the bounds that locked the rest of society into their cycles.
Mundane, Rowan had called it. Normal, Voren would have preferred.
Essa could not have done this on her own. When she left Verdan, Voren had seen a child being pulled away by circumstance, but a child still. The innocent. She could not have killed a man. Verily, the source of this blight—this newfound woman—must surely have come from without.
Rurik had the tendencies. He had none of that grace. His words were his weapon as a child, and when he grew, the vices seized on that. Even as a youth, Voren could see the darkness growing in him that others could not. That path they bred into nobility. Morals—he had none of them. He was a seducer and a rapist. If Rowan’s words were true, he was a murderer as well. It made sense. One course led to the next. Even as a boy, he was an influence in Essa’s life—perhaps the greatest. She trusted him beyond all reason.
The exile, then, was the corrupting force. Voren felt the wind waver in his lungs. Years removed and years gone by, and still, that creature managed to find and corrupt the one truly good thing that either of them had ever known. For Voren, she had ever been the image of what was supposed to be. Now, even that was called into question.
If empathy held the man, rather than made the man, then there was still hope. The human and the the beast—if one surrendered to it they would surely be lost. Empathy, then, was the guard against the indiscretion of that animal desire, for death was one of the most basic and evil of lusts.
“But come, let us talk of more pleasant things.”
All too eagerly, he acquiesced, but though Voren obliged the swordsman in all he asked, Voren’s mind did not turn away. It remained locked upon a notion, a symbol of a man. It was the corruption and the fall; and the empathy reached for Essa, and longed to set her free—free from duty, free from fear, free from he who wrought them all and bound them to the cycle of their own dissolution.
Voren thought on this, and in it, saw hope—for there were many paths yet to freedom, and of them, he knew the darkest, and the brightest. Life, he wished to tell Rowan, could be unmade, as would his own mundane existence. But he did not, and never would.
Chapter 4
The streets of Verdan may have lacked some of the exquisites and eccentricities of proper cities, but a man that knew what he wanted and had the coin to pay its way still could find his poison, whatever it might be. Stone or wood, coin cared little. It wiggled its way behind any wall.
Overhead, the sky had grown dark, the stars hidden behind a thick canopy of clouds. Silly things, clouds. In the day, when they were white or grey, they were not so unlike the flour on the table. When he was younger, he used to dream that he might one day reach the sky and drag those puffy messes down and roll them proper. Dough needs its kneader. However, he had long ago learned the confines of station and the reach of his arm.
Peasants do not touch the sky. Peasants must keep their eyes to the ground, or lose them in the looking. There were reasons the sun burned, his father said.
These clouds allowed no hint of light. These were more like globs of tar spilt across the sky. One could stir it around, but they could not wipe it all away. Perhaps the sky itself will burn one day, he mused. And all the crows with it.
For the moment, there were no flames. There was just a man swaddled in his tattered cloak, to hide the glimmer of plate beneath. The man should have been on duty. And I should be to bed. Everyone made sacrifices. Hesslebeck for coin, and himself for love. Both were noble pursuits, in their own regards.
He handed Hesslebeck a pouch, its contents jingling as they exchanged owners. The guardsman promptly dumped them into his hand, that he might count the lot. In his haste, he dropped one and quickly stooped to swoop it up, nearly toppling himself in the process. Hesslebeck was nearly all flesh and bone, even worse than himself. The guardsman’s armor only barely fit, having been made for a larger man. Hesslebeck could have fixed it up years ago, or even procured a new suit for himself if he had so pleased, but he was as tight as his armor was not.
Grinning his wide-gapped grin, Hesslebeck returned his coin in clay and liquid.
There was one jar, stoppered and indiscriminate in appearance. He popped the stopper off it, finding it filled to the brim with what might have passed for water, if one had no eyes for it.
This was not his first time, though. He and Ginse both had tried a taste when they were younger, to see what all the fuss was about. It was a tasteless thing, in truth, but that only seemed to make it more the potent.
The thought of that night brought the hint of a smile to his face. It was the first time he had ever lain with a woman. He took that to be the night of a great many changes in his life. He could only hope the second go-round would be as sweet.
All the more to gain and ever so much to lose. He held the jar up to the clouds, as though they would help him eye the substance better. Arasyl was a deadly thing, in the wrong dose or the wrong hands. If it was watered down or mixed with something else it could…
“Pure, I tells ya,” Hesslebeck assured him. He prodded the jar to make his point. “Erry drop. Been at this since the day I donned the steel. Would’ve found me bloody raw in a ditch if’n I’s a liar bout that. Long ago, long ago.” The man cackled, as he was wont to do. Hesslebeck was many things, but no one had ever accused him of stability.
Contented, Voren set the jar on the ground and swung his satchel down after it, to slip it inside. To his annoyance, he had to shuffle a few things around to make it fit.
To his further dismay, Hesslebeck took the delay as an invitation for conversation. “So…just out of curiosity, who you buying it fer?” The man would be accustomed to evasion, though. Hesslebeck was the sole provider of this beloved bit of illegality throughout Verdan—to ask more than he needed to know was to invite a great many problems for not only himself, but a great many around him as well.
“An old friend,” was all he granted him.
Nervous laughter spilled from Hesslebeck’s wisp of a mouth. “Friend? You do know what that stuff will do to her…roit?”
He ignored the guardsman as he shoved the second jar inside. He pocketed what trinkets wouldn’t fit back in the sack and swung it over his shoulder.
The Hollow March Page 8
