by Dora Machado
These were the pages that had built her practice and healed her customers with outstanding frequency and results. This was a lifetime of knowledge condensed to seed the fields of many other lifetimes. This was the work that powered her effectiveness, the reason why she had always believed that her mother—and later, she—had become so good at what they did. She had known nothing of the Strength back then, yet perhaps she had not needed to know.
She reviewed the pages again now, skimming those familiar paragraphs, looking for veiled meanings and key words. Nowhere in the book was there a stealth paragraph sharing or even hinting at her mother’s secrets. Nowhere did Lusielle find a mention of the malady that plagued Bren. And no matter how much she looked, nowhere did she find her mother’s story, a kind word or a helpful instruction crafted to alleviate the burdens of an overwhelmed daughter.
Silly Lusielle. Her mother couldn’t have written any of that. She lived under an oppressive rule, under Teos’s proscription and the threat of Riva’s murderous persecutions. Her book could have easily been used as proof against her. She had passed on her knowledge of one of her crafts to her daughter, but she had omitted any mention of the rest to protect her family.
Lusielle wished she had a way to learn more about the Odd God, the Strength and especially about the gifts, reason, knowledge and awareness. She had spoken to Elfu at length and he had answered her questions as best he could. But he was a guardian, not a practitioner of the odd arts. He knew only what he had been taught in order to perform his duties. Lusielle was having difficulty differentiating between her remedy-mixing craft and her inheritance. How did the odd arts change the way she practiced her craft?
Lusielle pondered the process she used to mix her remedies. First there was the person. Then there was the condition, a set of questions. That’s where the process began, with reason, with the application of knowledge and experience, which led to the selection of her best ingredients, which in turn had to be mixed in the right sequence and amounts for the remedy to work.
This was the moment of creation, where her physical and mental energy acted as a catalyst to single out the necessary qualities in each ingredient, to transform the many into the one, coalescing into a new, powerful substance.
Fusion, the god’s mystery, might have been a difficult notion to understand for someone who didn’t mix remedies. But to Lusielle, it was a given. Until this moment, she had never been able to put a name to it, and yet she had always known when it was happening.
Without fusion, without the blend that resulted from it, a mix was no different than a mess and a remedy was no more curative than a drink. The transformative interaction between properties and energies resulted in something concrete and consequential.
But how did it actually happen?
She spent the rest of the night poring over her annotations, dissecting step by step everything she did when she mixed, trying to figure out which of her steps might be different or unique.
By the end of the night, her list had narrowed to two very specific differences, an object and a step that pertained uniquely to her practice.
Could they account for the difference?
Dawn found Lusielle rummaging through her remedy case, reorganizing her ingredients, taking stock of her little sacks and jars, checking on the flask containing the maceration that was about to become more of Bren’s strengthening tonic.
She opened the case’s secret compartment and removed the little roll she had deliberately pocketed as she scrambled through the spilled contents of Konia’s box during her scuffle with Khalia.
In truth I dabble,
In songs I trade,
In fear supreme I reign.
In dread I deal, with black I kill,
Shiver when you hear my steps.
She had known the moment that she saw the strip in Khalia’s hands that the verse had been like the ones she had seen among Hato’s wares. The parchment looked very similar if not the same. The lines belonged to the same hand.
But there was also something familiar about the verse. The first line. Where had she heard it before? No, it wasn’t a sound she was remembering. She had seen that line before. Where?
When the memory first struck her, she rejected it as unrelated, irrelevant and implausible. Then she thought better of it, of everything she had learned in the last few weeks, of all that she still didn’t know.
She had understood all along that the strip was vital for Bren’s search and that she had to get it to him with the utmost speed. But by the time Elfu knocked on her door with a breakfast tray piled with buttered buns and hot tea, Lusielle knew three other things for sure.
First, she had to speak to Hato with all urgency. Second, she had to find out what had happened to Edmund. And third, her sleepless night had borne new and defining knowledge.
Chapter Seventy-one
BREN EMERGED FROM THE AGUE’S SMOTHERING darkness slowly, painfully, like a battered soul. At least he was able to tolerate the sounds. He opened one eye cautiously. The cabin’s darkness was a welcome relief. Hato had blocked the light coming through the porthole with a blanket. In the low light, he made out the stool, the door, his mantle hanging on the peg. None of those objects ignited with the excruciating brilliance that had pierced his brain earlier, leaving him blind and smarting, trying to claw his treacherous eyes out of their sockets.
No wonder Harald and his brothers had gone mad.
It was only after he stumbled out of the berth that he noticed his hands had been tied behind his back. The little mirror Lusielle had hung on the wall revealed the reason for Hato’s precaution, as angry scratches scarred his face around his eyes and ears.
Dear gods. He was losing it all too soon.
He now understood his brothers’ predicament better than before. He wasn’t going to reach Teos in time. He wasn’t going to see Lusielle again.
“Open up!” he shouted, banging on the door with his foot. “Open the door, I say!”
After a small delay, the sounds of a bar being lifted from the outside echoed in the little cabin. How bad had he gotten if they’d had to lock him inside?
Hato’s somber face breached the threshold. Shadows of fear and caution clouded his stare.
“I’m good,” Bren said. “I’m fine now. Unknot these ropes, will you?”
The ropes were removed quickly. Clio brought in a tray with food and drink. Bren wasn’t hungry, but he understood that his lack of appetite was also one of the ague’s vile tricks and that the ague would kill him faster if he didn’t eat.
The wine reeked with sourness and the gritty food tasted like ashes, but he gulped down the drink and crammed one spoonful after another into his mouth, forcing his throat to swallow until he judged he had put enough sustenance into his body. Only then did he set down the spoon. “How long was I out?”
“A day and a night,” Hato said.
Longer than Bren had hoped, but shorter than he had expected considering that the ague episode had felt as if it had lasted for years. “How far along have we come?”
“We’ve made excellent time, my lord,” Hato said. “We’ve come farther and faster than any other barge on the Nerpes has ever done before. So says the pilot, a speed fanatic who’s kept track of the fastest speeds on the river. Your rigging worked miracles.”
Who would have thought that the dreams of his younger self would somehow fuel his current need – otherwise known as a dying man’s last wishes?
Bren had to laugh—at himself, at good old Harald, and at the crazy absurdity of his curse. His laughter sounded off-kilter, more like a madman’s outburst than anything else. It scared him a bit.
By the alarm on Hato’s face, it scared him as well.
“I’m fine,” Bren said again. “Where are we now?”
Hato gestured towards the door. “Would my lord like to take a look?”
Scratching the stubble on his face, Bren stepped out into the cloudless day. A multitude of vivid colors assailed his eyes. He had
to blink several times before he recognized the sights before him, as a day and a night had brought the barge much further than he had anticipated. Even in his wildest calculations, he had not been able to predict this kind of success.
The rigging he had improvised—not to mention the plan Hato and his men had been able to execute to perfection—had not just doubled the barge’s speed as he had hoped. It had quadrupled its efficiency as evidenced by their timely arrival to the sacred island of Teos.
Teos was already abuzz with mid-morning traffic. The island stood in the middle of the Nerpes, on the busy confluence of two main tributaries, the Little Nerpes and the Black River. It rose on a rocky promontory, supporting an intricate configuration of masterfully crafted buildings aligned at either side of an ascending spiraling lane and crowned by the resplendent White Temple.
The barge was moored in Teos’s crowded harbor. The island’s gilded ferries were at work, transporting luxuriously dressed passengers and their retinues from both banks of the river. A curious group stood on the dock, gawking at the strange contraption powering the barge. Not only had Bren managed to get to Teos within the three-day grace period. He had arrived punctually and without cause for penalties on the offering’s official day.
Bren scoured the harbor. “Is Khalia’s galley here?”
Hato pointed. “Docked along with Teos’s fleet.”
“We have to—”
“I’ve already sent messengers to Khalia, my lord; to inquire about the woman.”
“Good man, Hato.”
Lusielle had to be close by. She would be returning to him very soon. Thinking about her set his mind awhirl. He had to take control of his emotions. Teos was not a place to falter. Neither Teos’s residents nor its visitors tolerated weaknesses or mistakes. If you came to Teos, you had to be ready. You couldn’t be mourning fantasies or craving the impossible.
“Have you unloaded the cargo?” Bren asked.
“Yes, my lord,” Hato said. “The bulk of the cargo is already at the treasury. The last of it is being unloaded as we speak.”
“Well, then, we better get this done.”
“We better.” Hato’s stark mood matched Bren’s wariness.
Bren returned to the cabin to don his boots, put on his mantle and collect his sword. As he was getting ready to leave, he took a last look at the small room. The crammed shelves, the unmade berth, the entire tidy space reminded him of the time he had spent in the little cabin with Lusielle.
His time on the barge seemed somehow formative, as if his dreams and aspirations had been reborn here, and what little remained of his life had been reshaped. He didn’t think he would ever travel back to Laonia by barge or by any other means. He turned his back on the memories and closed the door.
* * *
The sacred island of Teos never ceased to amaze Bren. Resplendent was the word that came to mind as he advanced through the alabaster steps spiraling amidst the distinctive halls flanking the ascending road. Every temple in the land was fashioned after the island and yet the shrines here were by far wealthier and more elaborate than anywhere else. The halls were akin to palaces. It was discouraging to think that half of the original twenty-eight halls rising upon the steep hill were now under Riva’s control.
Up ahead, Bren spotted Laonia’s hall. It was a larger version of the one at the Temple of the Lesser Gods, five stories of striking Laonian slate filled with the finest furnishings dating back to Laonia’s wealthier times.
The gaunt steward of Laonia’s hall was waiting at the doors. “It’s good to see you, my lord.”
“And you, Pharseus.”
“There were rumors, my lord, that you were gone, that you were ill.”
“Rumors are never true by definition.”
“The offering, my lord. It’s more than we expected. Good enough to pay the tribute and turn a profit.”
“Excellent, Pharseus. Please deliver a cask of Laonian wine and a gold coin to each of the men who sailed with me on the barge. And might you pamper the lord Hato while I dress?”
“Of course, my lord.”
Bren climbed the steps to the lord’s sumptuous quarters. The thick carpets, the ornately carved bed, the lavish tapestries, they were a shock to his senses. He could hardly remember the time when such luxuries had been common in his life. Oddly, he didn’t miss them anymore.
On the other hand, he was grateful for the toiletries carefully arranged around the basin, because the man in the mirror looked more like a drifter than a highborn.
Bren had never taken to the highborn fashion, but Laonia deserved better.
He washed himself, soaped his scruffy cheeks and put the razor to work. Considering the scratches on his face, the purple wells ringing his deep-set eyes, and his hair—which had grown longer and refused to cower to the brush—he wasn’t going to be at his highborn best. Instead, he aimed for clean and presentable.
His ceremonial clothes were laid out on the bed. He changed into a pair of freshly pressed trousers and donned the starched white blouse that was the staple of formal highborn fashion. The high collar was always a challenge to button. The silly lace at the throat and cuffs itched like prickly gorse. He belted the gold-trimmed blue robe around the waist. Made to his measurements, the polished knee-high boots slipped easily around his calves.
A distant screech strummed his eardrum, the damn ague, trying to ambush him again. His knees buckled. An eerie shriek prevailed among all the discordant sounds torturing his ears. It was coming for him.
Not now.
Bren clenched his jaw and fisted his hands, pushing back with his mind. He was going to deliver Laonia’s offering and nothing, not even the ague, was going to stop him.
He took a swig from the tonic flask, but only a sip, because the bottle was light in his hand and the liquid in it had dwindled to almost nothing. He straightened his back and grabbed for his scabbard, working through each movement with deliberate care. He focused on the simple tasks, placing the belt around his hips, stabbing the leather through the frame, pulling on one end, until the prong caught the eyelet.
At last, the house of Uras’s sword was fastened to his side. The sight of the brutal steel that had protected Laonia for generations finished quieting the ague.
Silence.
Somehow, he had managed to will off the ague’s raid. Somehow, he had managed to keep hold of his wits.
He faced the man in the mirror. So this is what a Laonian lord should look like. Someone else would be wearing these clothes next year. He found himself wondering what Lusielle would say if she saw him dressed as he was. She would probably laugh at him. The man in the mirror grinned. Bren realized he almost always smiled when he thought of her.
Time for business. Laonia needed a sharp lord today, not a smitten fool. He took a last look at the place. The chamber had sheltered every Lord of Laonia who had come to pay tribute at Teos. He had been coming to this place in one capacity or another for ten years. Would this be the last time that a free Laonia came to pay tribute?
Grim thoughts from a cursed man. He steeled his resolve and went to serve Laonia. It was what he had been birthed and bred to do. And he would do it.
Chapter Seventy-two
ANY NEWS FROM KHALIA?” BREN SAID, as he came down the stairs.
Dressed in formal regalia, his lord looked like a different man. He reminded Hato of the old days, of the young, handsome, fashionable men Hato and Edmund had been when Laonia had been at the height of its power and the world had been right.
“No news from Khalia yet,” Hato said, straightening the slim flask in Bren’s belt. “The messenger reports she’s engaged at the offerings and unable to receive him.”
“Then we’ll go see her directly.” Bren marched to the gates.
“What about Tolone, my lord?” Hato asked. “You’ve always presented together, on account of your betrothal and all that.”
“Is Eleanor ready?”
“We must have passed her barge on the way
downriver. Word is that it has been sighted. She’ll be docking soon.”
“I’m short on time this year,” Bren said, pulling on his ear like a toddler with an earache. “I can’t afford to wait.”
The familiar gesture chilled Hato’s body down to his toes. Bren’s brothers had developed the same habit within hours of their deaths.
Hato followed his lord up the thousand steps, inhaling great gulps of Teos’s perfumed air as he went up. The climb was designed for younger men than he, but Hato was not about to leave his lord alone in this. He puffed up the accursed stairs without any assurances from his stuttering heart. He swore that the original Chosen had those steps carved high and narrow on purpose.
Perhaps they had wanted to exorcise all traces of fury, malcontent and roguish pride that often plagued the highborn. Perhaps they had wanted to exhaust the hardy race before they reached the temple. Mayhap, the thousand steps were an endurance test of sorts, a way to assess the fitness of the lands’ prime rulers.
If the latter was the case, his lord was at a disadvantage. The hardships of the last few years, combined with the recent wound and the ague, had taken a toll on Bren. But a quick glance revealed that he wasn’t going to admit to any disadvantages, physical or otherwise. Despite the dark circles ringing his eyes, his back was straight. His steps were sure. His head was held high and his hand rested secure on his sword’s hilt.
At last, the tall steps finished at the gates of the White Temple. Hato had to heave discreetly between his lips to ease the pain in his breast. He adjusted his garments, including the sumptuous overcoat that Pharseus had provided for him. Hato too had changed for the occasion. Laonia and his lord deserved worthy representatives.
The White Temple was a perfect replica of the similar buildings that crowded the lesser temples throughout the land, displaying the same alabaster floors and walls that made Hato feel as if he strolled within Suriek’s sparkling womb, only bigger, higher, and more massive. The exaggerated architectural perspective was likely designed to elicit awe and humility from the mighty, a useless attempt, considering the colossal pride of his fellow highborns.
