by Brandon Barr
Monaiella walked out onto the road and stopped beside him.
The older man jumped from his cart then knelt. “Monaiella, it is an honor.”
Rathan looked at the young man and woman, the girl’s mouth hung open. The young man stood suddenly, a knife in his hand. He drew it back to throw but the young woman’s fist was faster, and the blow to his face sent him sideways off the cart.
“Don’t you dare!” the girl shouted.
Rathan closed in on the young man who looked about seventeen. He stood shakily, then held the knife out at Rathan, blood dripping from his nose. His eye on Rathan, he reached into the cart and retrieved a sword.
“Careful! He’s a soldier,” shouted the girl.
Rathan paused at this news, only weeks before, he might have fought beside this man. “What’s your name soldier?”
“Wyell, and I command you, traitor, drop your sword.”
Rathan smiled, and spun his sword in his hand, then seized the grip and slashed the air twice. “I am the Luminess’s Life Protector; I will not back away from a fight.”
A dark, puzzled look seeped into the young man’s eyes. Clearly, he knew nothing of the title of which Rathan spoke.
“She’s no longer Luminess,” snapped the youth. “Your duty is over. Brantieth holds the throne.”
“I’ve bound myself to her. That is, I’ll die for her whether she holds the throne or not.”
Wyell glanced toward the old man. “Help me kill this rebel. It is Brantieth’s order.”
“I carry supplies not weapons,” said the old merchant. “You want me to take his sword with my bare hands?”
“As a soldier of the realm, I order you to help me.” The youth glanced at the girl he’d sat beside on the wagon. His eyes widened and he drew back his knife and flung it. The girl teetered for a moment, a small crate raised over her head poised to throw, then she fell back into the cart, the knife buried in her chest.
“Cilla!” cried the old merchant as Rathan charged the youth. Wyell deflected the first blow, but the second shaved off his left ear and a chunk of his long brown hair. The third split him open from sternum to thigh and he collapsed dead onto the road, mouth wide with a stolen scream.
Rathan turned his eye quickly on the old merchant, but the man was no threat. Tears fell down his face as he rushed to the young woman. Monaiella was already at the girl’s side, squatting beside her in the cart. She cast a grim look at Rathan that told him everything.
The old man held the young woman, wailing, for what seemed to Rathan a long while. He kept his eyes on the road. By the man’s distressed whispers, it became clear that the woman was his daughter. Monaiella’s eyes were red as she knelt beside him, her hand on his back.
Rathan was unsettled by the fearsome look burning in Monaiella’s eyes. She stared up at the jagged mountains to the west of the road, her lips tight below her soft cheekbones.
“My son will heal her,” she declared. “We must preserve your daughter and pack her in ice.”
The merchant stared at her, astonished at her words, and Rathan could only marvel at Monaiella’s boldness and bite back his anger at the swiftness with which she was abandoning a return to the throne.
The merchant’s eyes widened. “You have a son who is a Healer? How can it be? You were Luminess only two days ago.”
“If I live to complete a task given me by the Makers, I have been promised a god-touched child—a Healer. I feel a burning in my gut for your daughter’s life.”
The merchant looked down at his daughter, his brows heavy over his swollen eyes. “If this is so, I beg you, complete your task.”
“What is your name?” she asked.
He closed his eyes, fighting back his tears. “Barytine,” he said.
“Will you help me, Barytine? I can make no promises, for my future and my child depend on my safely delivering something into the hands of a man in Tilmar. A man called Quanthum.”
Barytine opened his eyes. “Quanthum? The hermit?” He shook his head. “I have little faith in the gods, but if they have given you a task and a promise…what else have I to hope in?” His fingers stroked the dead girl’s hands. “Are you presently with child?”
“No, but soon,” she said, and looked at Rathan. Her cold blue eyes shone bright and fierce, and her disturbing intent was written as calm and clear as a sea of glass.
Rathan shook his head. “No, My Lady!”
“I claim my right of privilege, Rathan. As my Life Protector, I am entitled to wed you.”
Her voice, and the words they carried out into the open air took his breath away. As hard as he tried, he could not chase away the deep honor he felt by her request. That she would invoke this right over him, and that he would become her husband. And yet he still had his hope to see the wrongs done to her made right.
“My Lady, you are the true Luminess,” he said with all the passion he could muster. “I cannot allow you to forfeit your chance to regain the throne!”
“Enough, Rathan. I am only Ella, now. You’ve bound yourself to me, and I can choose what I will. A return to the throne is not in my heart, nor in the Maker’s promise. I will bear a son, and you will be the father.”
CHAPTER 6
MONAIELLA
By the time the carts were safely hidden off the road, she was fully perturbed at Rathan. He had fervently sought to place her back in power, and the finality of her demand to make him her husband had dashed his heroic vision.
She had accepted her fate, he had not.
He wore a scowl as they carried the lifeless girl wrapped in linens to the leeward side of a sheer cliff, where a glacial pile of snow lay, and warmer weather would not touch until mid or late summer.
The snow was hard, and Rathan used his sword to break the ice. Ella invoked a prayer of future healing over the girl, as Barytine and Rathan piled snow and ice over her and set stones to mark her temporary grave.
“This delay was a great risk,” said Rathan in a harsh whisper as the two made their way back toward the carts. “And this promise you made, it is beyond a Healer’s ability. Your son would need to be a Restorer, and that gift hasn’t been given in eight hundred years. Not since the crab trappers, Crivenleer and Rohannah.”
She looked back at the old merchant. He had lingered at the grave, and now trailed behind them, out of earshot.
“I know the histories and how the gifts work. The Makers will resurrect the girl, I know it. I feel it—a power stirring in my empty womb.”
Rathan did not respond and walked quietly beside her for a time. The annoyance she had felt earlier ebbed. She knew he was doing his duty, keeping watch over her life. Why should she expect anything less? His desire to fight for her and win back a throne that was wrongfully stolen only proved that he was honorable and selfless.
“I’m sorry, Ella,” said Rathan. “It’s not you I’m fighting against, it is the Makers’ prophecy over you. Why they’ve promised you an ordinary life after you’ve proven yourself a faithful and pure Luminess, devoted to their teaching, sacrificial in war, sparing so many lives…I cannot understand it.”
Ella felt the bite of all that Rathan said. If the long history of Hearth said anything in harmony, it was the indictment that the gods never did enough to overcome the injustices perpetrated in their world. Yet they moved prophets to speak, and from all that was recorded in the sacred writings, the Makers gave men and women all they needed to battle the scourge of cruelty.
She slowed her pace as they neared the merchant’s horses tied to the trees.
“I’m not so sure the Makers see power the same as we do,” she said. “Whether I am Luminess or a peasant, I can shape history. You know the names of Crivenleer and Rohannah, but can you tell me who was Luminary of the Hold during the life of the two Restorers?”
Rathan stopped and turned to her, his green eyes solemn in silent acknowledgment of her point. For a moment, he looked years older than he was.
She came up to him and kissed him on
the cheek. “Find your heart, Rathan. Fight to fulfill this promise set before me. I do not fear death, but I do not want to die. Look into my eyes, Rathan. Remove from your thoughts the visions you hold of me as Luminess and replace them with what must now be. I am a woman, young and perhaps beautiful. I want to have a son by you. What better gift could the Makers give us?”
She saw surrender behind his eyes, and acceptance. The dark green color of Rathan’s eyes absorbed her as his hand came gently to her face. He dipped his head down and she felt his lips come softly against hers.
The raw prickling that ran down her back at the sensation of her first kiss drew out a warmth from the core of her body. A floodgate was opened inside her, the power of something soul-deep awakened, and she marveled at the searing touch of Rathan’s fingers upon the side of her face.
There came the light crunch of the merchant’s feet plowing through the snow behind her.
Ella drew back, giving Rathan a long look, which he held until she turned to Barytine.
“Is there any way you could smuggle us into Tilmar?” she asked. “I see you have a few large crates we might fit inside.”
“I can get you to Tilmar,” said Barytine. “But not in those crates. They’ve checked them twice already. The second time they forced us to take on the soldier—gods curse his soul.” For a moment, the merchant lost his composure all over again and began to weep, but the pain passed like a flash flood across his face, then his jaw tightened resiliently. “Don’t worry, I have a secret compartment you can hide in, as well as a believable story as to why I would return to Tilmar without delivering my goods to the Hold.”
“What should we do with Wyell’s body?” asked Rathan.
Barytine looked in his cart where they’d laid the young soldier. “Leave him. He’s part of my story.”
“You’re going to claim we attacked you?” she asked him.
Barytine gave a slight bow. “They may check the food crates just to be sure I’m not selling them a lie. But they won’t check my bench.” He climbed the cart and sat on the bench, then reached under the lip of the seat. A wood panel sprang open at the back.
“So you’re a smuggler?” said Ella.
“Never!” he said, as if offended. “I don’t smuggle. I’m a merchant who occasionally exports items some deem illegal.”
As Luminess, she would have confiscated such a cart and sent the owner to prison. But having become an outlaw herself, she could only smile and thank the gods for their good providence.
“It may be a little tight,” Barytine added, “but you both should fit.”
Rathan helped her slip inside. The smuggler’s compartment beneath the bench dropped low, down to the bottom of the cart. The interior was more spacious than she’d imagined until Rathan had to twist sideways to squeeze his large frame through the open panel, and once inside, the space became exceedingly crowded. Still, she and Rathan could move a little where they lay.
Barytine looked in through the panel, his eyes still brimming with grief, yet he smiled at them, despite it. “I know Quanthum, the man you’re looking for. Reclusive as he is, the man is a trapper and peddles as a calligrapher. Often he disappears into the forest for weeks, but I saw him in town three days ago. With a little luck we’ll find him at his home in the woods. Keep quiet, and I’ll see you safely there.”
The merchant closed the panel, and it clicked shut, locked in place by some tinkerer’s mechanism.
The cart swayed and jolted roughly on the uneven terrain of the forest floor, smoothing out only once the wheels met the snow-covered road. It was not completely dark within the enclosure, lines of light cut through the thin cracks in the wood.
“Last night—the strange man and the lightning—I cannot stop thinking of it,” said Rathan.
Ella could not help but shiver at her own recollection. “It has been on my mind as well.”
“I understand now why the portal has been guarded so closely for thousands of years,” said Rathan. “If weapons like what we saw last night were brought into our world, there’s no telling what might be done if they were to fall into corrupt hands.”
A slat above Rathan’s head poured light upon the side of his face. She pinched her lips together, remembering the man’s crazed laughter and the horrific death he’d dealt to the men searching for them.
Ella shook her head, “If we survive to deliver the memory leaf, our next mission will be to go to the Verdlands. The king must be convinced not to use the portal. And if he’ll listen to anyone, it is me. His responses to my letters seemed genuine, and if they were, then he is a decent man, despite our longstanding feud.”
“Good day!” came the muffled sound of the merchant’s voice from above. The clomp of passing horse hooves sounded on the road, then faded away, leaving only the constant creak of Barytine’s cart.
Her thoughts returned to Rathan’s kiss. He had accepted the new path her life must take. But the new path was his as well, and she was thankful he had embraced it. The passion she had found in his kiss had eased her concern that he might not enjoy the more intimate responsibilities of his new role.
Lightly, she placed her hand upon his arm.
“Rathan,” she whispered, “It’s time. I am ready to wed.”
In the dim light filtering through the slats, she noticed his face become solemn, as if she were asking a sacred duty of him.
“I will make arrangements,” he said, his tone serious. “When you’ve safely reached the Verdlands, I will search out a suitable room.”
She shook her head slightly. “You don’t understand.”
Leaning forward, she found his lips again. He kissed her gently in return. She knew he was familiar with the old ways, when pomp and ceremony were not in fashion, and all that mattered were the eyes of the gods.
A fire spread through her, fueled by the vision of a new vocation. She would be the mother to a god-touched child.
Slowly, she pulled away from his kiss.
“Do you understand now?” she whispered.
Something like fear washed over his face. “Now? Here?”
Yes, she thought. Here. Now.
She pressed against him, as she had two nights ago, only now she sought a different kind of warmth.
—-
“Soldiers in the road,” said Barytine, “Stay quiet, we’re nearing Tilmar.”
The cart picked up speed as Barytine drove his horses forward.
The memory of what had transpired an hour ago lay fresh upon her. No longer was she ignorant of what the other women of the Hold often gossiped about. Now she knew.
Ella locked eyes with Rathan for what seemed to her the hundredth time. As before, there was a new, raw energy behind those familiar green eyes. And yet they looked heavier, somehow.
“What is that I see spinning your thoughts?” she asked.
“Fear,” he said quietly. “You know I cherish the role of Life Protector, but now I’m scared by this new duty. To protect you as a soldier protects the realm, that was easier. Then, you were a sacred responsibility, but now, you have made yourself my wife, and beyond precious to me.”
A faint smile thinned her lips. “We must be strong now. For each other. And for the child who might now be.”
The cart rumbled as it gained an almost reckless speed.
Rathan reached out and held her.
“Help!” shouted Barytine. “I’ve been attacked!”
CHAPTER 7
RATHAN
Rathan held her form tight within the protection of his arms. He did not like being shut in a box, unable to draw his sword. He and Monaiella were fully dependent on the success of Barytine’s plan. If anything went wrong, the box they hid in could quickly become a coffin.
“Whoa!” called a distant voice. “Slow down old man!”
Rathan braced himself and Monaiella as the cart came to a lurching halt.
“A man on the road attacked us! My daughter’s been killed,” he cried out, the pain fresh in his voic
e.
Rathan looked through the wood panels and caught sight of five men’s faces peering into the back of the cart.
“Who’s this?” said one of the men.
“The solider you stationed with me,” said Barytine.
“It’s Wyell,” said one of them, and the man climbed over the side and turned the dead youth over. A silence fell over the other men as they saw the gruesome slash.
“I can hardly believe it,” said a voice that rang familiar in Rathan’s ears. The speaker’s face was obscured by a barrel. “You said your daughter was killed too?”
“Yes,” growled Barytine, nearly yelling. “He stabbed her in the heart with a knife!”
Rathan could hear the barely hidden rage in Barytine’s voice, and imagined the merchant glaring down at Wyell’s body.
“What did the attacker look like?”
“Your height, large framed, muscled, black hair. He wore a wool cloak and was deadly with the sword. You see what he did to the young soldier.”
“Brantieth was right then,” said that same voice. “Rathan has lost his mind. I only hope Monaiella is still alive. You didn’t see anyone else with him did you?”
“No, he was alone.”
There was a long silence, and then Rathan saw the man behind the barrel as he leaned forward to inspect the dead soldier. The man was Dendryn, one of the ten riders he served alongside in protection of the Luminess.
Another soldier spoke. “I suppose Rathan could have had Monaiella bound and left her in the woods.”
“We can hope,” said Dendryn,
“See anything strange in the sky, old man?” asked another soldier.
“What do you mean?” asked Barytine.
“Nevermind,” said the soldier.
Dendryn’s gaze lifted from the dead body up to where the merchant sat. “Can you show my men where you were attacked on the road?”
“Yes, of course, but what about my cart?”
“I’ll take your wagon back,” said Dendryn “You take a horse and go. There’s no time to waste.” Dendryn turned to the other soldiers hunched over the side of the cart. “The four of you go with him and be quick. If you can find Rathan’s footsteps, follow him and send the merchant back to tell me. Brantieth is eager to find Monaiella, it would be good for all of us if we had something hopeful to report.”
