Grudgebearer

by J. F. Lewis

  “Oh.” Rae’en carried the baby over to where his mother lay on the ground. Kholster had dragged the woman away from the burning farmhouse, then left her in the dirt. “Why didn’t you kill her? For the baby?”

  “She’s a slave.” Kholster knelt down and pried open the woman’s mouth. Her lower molars were cracked and broken. Her uppers looked bad. Reaching into one of his oversized belt pouches, Kholster pulled out a small metal box and opened it. Inside, an array of bone-steel implements shone brightly in the sunlight. Constant teething meant many Aern carried the right tools to assist in extracting a stubborn tooth. “To the crystals and also, I suspect, to a person named Hap.”

  You’d better use the laughing salve you packed for Rae’en, Vander thought at him, if you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do, though you might want to save a little for yourself . . .

  Her teeth look about the right size, don’t you think?

  Are you just doing the molars?

  Why would I do more than that? I’m not in love with the woman!

  I thought your loins burned for her.

  She burned my face, not my pants, Vander.

  Yes, Kholster. Kholster waited for the rest of it. He knew Vander could not resist at least one more jibe. Still, are you sure you don’t want me to send ahead to the Guild Cities to have the ossuary get a selection of incisors ready? Draekar’s might be about right.

  “Pulling her teeth?” Rae’en asked, peering down. She took a sharp intake of breath when she saw the damage. “That’s going to hurt like Kilke’s stump.”

  “I have laughing salve.” Kholster pulled the small brass jar out of a pouch and held it up for his daughter to inspect.

  “That might take the edge off, but—”

  “She’ll feel better once she has the new ones. Laughing salve has a stronger effect on humans than it does on us.”

  “Huh?” Rae’en stared at him, not comprehending.

  “Why did Uled say Aern were created with constant tooth replacement?” Kholster eyed his daughter. She’d shared the memories which included that knowledge, just as had all other Aern, but a true kholster could recall that sort of detailed information more quickly than even an Overwatch.

  “‘Who wants an eternal army of toothless warriors?’” Rae’en parroted Uled’s words back to him.

  “And why did he actually do it?”

  “Uled had bad teeth and he—Wait. You’re giving her—”

  “Someone already pulled her wisdom teeth, so there should be room for eight of my molars. If we do it right. It’s been few hundred years, but I think I remember how to do it.”

  Kholster found the pliers for which he’d been looking. He set a well-worn living wood bite block, which he’d had since the days when Uled still walked Barrone, out on a black cloth Glinfolgo had given him to “repel the little beasts.”

  “But won’t she just keep crunching crystal?”

  “If she does,” Kholster straddled Cadence’s prone form, with one knee pinning each shoulder, “I’ll have Caz take them back.”

  Cadence only woke up once during the procedure, just as Kholster was trying to make sure her bite lined up properly and had to shift one of his own molars which had already taken root. Kholster, unlike Uled, hated to hear women scream. He promptly gave the woman more laughing salve.

  When it was finished, they set off at once, Rae’en toting the infant and Kholster carrying the Long Arm over his shoulder.

  “We could wait for her to wake up,” Rae’en offered.

  “You have an appointment to keep at Oot.” The Vael representative is probably already heading for Port Ammond, he thought at Vander.

  Porthost at the very least, Vander agreed. Kari sent you her name?

  Yavi, Kholster thought back, but it hardly matters. This time the Vael representative’s errand is doomed before it starts.

  CHAPTER 22

  YAVI’S ROAD

  Yavi woke well after dawn, the dregs of a dream still clinging to her mind, casting an unwanted haze over her thoughts. She rolled off of the goose-down mattress blinking at the cozy room in the inn and the stone room full of glass displays from the dream that still painted itself over her surroundings.

  A few blinks, and the display cases faded, leaving her gaze filled only with the here and now . . .

  I really need to visit that museum, just to see if any of what I’ve been dreaming all these years is true. What if it’s not? Then, she guessed, she’d really feel stupid.

  Yavi pulled her long head petals back and tied them at the nape of her neck. Thicker than a human’s hair with a texture like rose petals, Yavi’s head petals were the vibrant yellow of sunflowers. Though she might have wished she’d been an evergreen whose hair was present the whole year round, rather than drying out and falling off in late autumn, it certainly was pretty in the spring and summer.

  The smell of royal hedge roses filled the room as she lifted her arms.

  At least we smell nice when we sweat.

  Shoving open the wooden shutters of the second-story window, Yavi leaned out, marking the sun’s position in the sky, her large black eyes taking it all in. Later than I thought. No time for a bath or a change of clothes. With a forlorn grunt, Yavi grabbed her heartbow and her travel pack from the wardrobe before leaping out the window. She landed lightly on the packed dirt of Silver Leaf City’s merchant path, judiciously startling two chickadees exploring the street for human leavings.

  “Go hunt something, Lazyfeathers.”

  “Are you sure you won’t stay for breakfast?” Jorum called out a first-floor window. The innkeeper, a round-bellied human with kind eyes and only one leg, hobbled out the kitchen door in a practiced lope, leaning on his crutch. Yavi had asked him how he lost the leg, but he wouldn’t tell her. Maybe on the way home she could convince him.

  “I sent Sebastian out hunting this morning. It’s not much, but it’s all fairly sought and properly hunted. Nothing domesticated. All pleasing to Xalistan.” Jorum’s voice rose hopefully on the last word, but he was already headed inside.

  “Can I take it with me?”

  His laugh made Yavi’s ears flick up straight. Reaching up to cover them, she cursed whatever it was that gave her such expressive ears.

  “Already packed. Thought you might want it as travel food when you didn’t get up on time.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?” Yavi jerked her hands away from her ears.

  “Me?” Jorum said in mock horror as he snagged a cloth-wrapped package from the bar. “Deprive a Vael princess of her beauty sleep? Not I!” He tossed the package and Yavi caught it. The smell of roasted venison curled in her nostrils.

  Yavi’s hand went to her pouch for money, her pale skin, tinted with the lightest hint of green, standing out in contrast to the black pouch, but Jorum waved her off. “You just promise to stay here again on your way safely home and don’t let the,” he spat out the word, “Eldrennai honor you to death.”

  Yavi blinked at him. The name “Eldrennai” always gave her pause. The Aern insisted the Eldrennai be referred to as Oathbreakers and nothing else. Yavi’s people also called them Oathbreakers, but the humans, who worked day in and day out with the Oathbreakers . . . she understood why they didn’t use the name. It would be like a Vael trading on good faith with someone who insisted on referring to her people as Weeds (or the less insulting, but equally dismissive, Flower Girls), but it still felt strange to hear.

  “Thank you!”

  Humans moved everywhere in the border town. Most of them worked for the Oathbreakers, carrying goods back and forth in a complicated arrangement made to appease the Aern, who would tolerate no Oathbreaker on Vael land. As a result, Silver Leaf City now had a human population much larger than its nonhuman one.

  Yavi liked humans. They weren’t all as nice as Jorum, but they waved and smiled for the most part. The humans in Silver Leaf knew how to interact with a Vael . . . no attempts to grab or constrain, even in greeting . . . and she ha
d no need to wear a samir to veil her dental ridge or to keep the humans from getting too frisky with her. In many ways, they seemed like shorter-lived versions of her people, and she loved them for it. Yavi headed out, eagerly unwrapping the cooling venison, giving thanks to Xalistan, god of the hunter and hunted, as she ate.

  At the edge of town, the hard-packed dirt road through Silver Leaf met the smoothness of the White Road. A sign molded of the same white stone as the road stood at the edge of path. West to South Watch, Yavi thought. She looked west, picturing Porthost, Kevari Pass, and even the ruins of Fort Sunder on the Shattered Plains. East to Port Ammond . . . and the Oathbreakers.

  “I’d rather go west,” Yavi grumbled with her mouth full, but she walked east all the same. The dream came back to her as she walked. Each clean white stone of the road called to mind the halls of the museum she had visited in her dream. Remembering brought a shiver across her bark, stirring her sap. Crystal cases. Aernese warsuits. A small silver plaque with the inscription “The Armor of General Bloodmane—Hero and Traitor.”

  She saw simultaneously a suit of plate with an irkanth’s head and an actual four-legged beast of metal, a roaring lion with pearlescent skin, amber eyes, and a mane wet with blood. One and the same. Alive, with a voice like a gentle mountain, the irkanth had always spoken in her dreams. “Here where you are safest,” the irkanth told her. “To Oot. Send. He is injured. Zaur in the forest. Kholster Rae’en. Please?”

  Words, a mad sample of time-tossed moments, returning always to the same phrase, a refrain of reassurance. “Here where you are safest.”

  Whether it was the spirit within Kholster’s armor trying to communicate, or whether the warsuit itself could and would talk to her, Yavi could not discern. She had the oddest feeling that the armor was alive, that it was watching, barely restrained by the case in which it was displayed and that when she saw it, the case would shatter, and she would scream. Why would she fear a being so beautiful with a spirit that, despite its raw power and primal nature, felt like an abiding calm? She shivered again at the memory of its voice.

  Even wide awake, Yavi believed in the voice of the irkanth. She was driven to see Bloodmane, perhaps even . . . touch it. But she didn’t want to ponder her conflicting emotions about the boy-type person who’d forged it. Rubbing her arms to get the sap flowing, she stomped her feet to clear her thoughts. Okay, Yavi, where are we now?

  After a few more candlemarks of walking, the forest that had remained on both sides of the road fell away to reveal a vast level plain. The sun hung close to its apex as Yavi broke the tree line and stared wide-eyed at the grass-covered Eldren Plains the Oathbreakers called home. The ten-mile mark, she thought to herself. Do I need to measure land in jun instead of miles now that I near the Aern?

  Would they care? She’d heard they could be very touchy about language. How had she never thought of that before now? Jun, then. Just in case.

  The smooth white road before Yavi was a good example of differences in nomenclature. It ran across the multi-hued plains toward Port Ammond to her northeast, and beyond her to the southwest past Silver Leaf to South Watch under a cloudless sky. Her people called it the Big Road, its lazy oval encompassing most of the Eldren Plains and connecting all the Oathbreaker watch cities.

  The humans called it White Road because of its color, but Yavi felt certain the Oathbreakers (and probably the Aern) had another name for it. For the Oathbreakers, it was likely along the path of “The Magnificent Avenue” or “The White Progression of the Infinite Thought.” Oathbreakers always assigned pompous names to things, even to Yavi’s own people, calling them the Vaelsilyn despite the fact that they had begun calling themselves Vael over four hundred years ago. She guessed Vael was too small of a word to roll off Oathbreaker tongues correctly.

  But the Aern . . . they liked simplicity and descriptives . . . probably the White Road, for them, too.

  “The White Road,” she said aloud, starting toward Port Ammond. “Jun. Oathbreakers. Okay.”

  To her surprise, a strange and tingling feeling drew her back a few steps along the road, a sense of disaster, not in South Watch but beyond it, far along the road, something she needed to see. She weighed the two feelings, the desire to see Bloodmane and beyond that to fulfill her royal duty at the Conjunction against this strange new feeling. If she were truly destiny-pulled, her mother would understand and send another in her place, or go herself to the Conjunction. There was still time.

  “What do I do, Yhask?” she asked the god of the winds aloud.

  Even from where she stood, miles (jun!) away, Yavi fancied she could smell the smoke and clutter of the Oathbreaker city, imagined that she could hear the noise of people shouting at each other at the docks or crowded around market stalls haggling over the price of silk from Barrony or fine Khalvadian wines. An irkanth roared in the distance, bringing a smile to Yavi’s lips as its call brought to mind an image of the crimson-furred leonine beast with curling black horns. In her mind’s ear it had massive regal horns and a mane the color of rich red wine.

  Yavi stood quietly for a few more minutes, just staring at the road, reluctant to leave the last vestige of her forest home, waiting for some sort of answer from Yhask. She rubbed at her arms again. She hoped her head petals would stay presentable long enough for Kholster to see them, then flushed at the thought. She shook her petals out of their confining band, tempting Yhask to answer her, to blow through her floral crown.

  “Okay, then, I’m going to the Conjunction,” she said, hoping Yhask would disagree. “I’m going.” She took a step forward. “I’m going . . . now.” No answer. She took another step, a step that brought her farther away from the forest than she had ever gone.

  “So . . . I guess that means I’m supposed to go, then.”

  Yavi set out down the White Road with a purpose.

  A late summer breeze picked up, blowing Yavi’s mop of yellow petals madly. She gathered her petals in her hands, tying them back loosely to keep them out of her field of vision. She could braid her petals later, but while there was wind, she intended to use it. Yavi made certain her travel pack and bow were secure. “I guess I have Yhask’s answer after all,” she whispered.

  The wild untamed magic of nature welled within her and she leapt into the air, letting the wind carry her like a floret toward her destination, legs dangling like a seed head beneath her. Spreading her arms wide, Yavi gained altitude in a sudden burst. Under the influence of the spell, she could easily see the wind spirit who was guiding her. The handsome wind spirit’s semitransparent lips curled upward into a smile. “Somebody enjoys blowing through my petals.”

  Humoring him, she reached out and pretended to take his insubstantial hand in hers. The wind spirit guided her higher and higher into the air. Spirits were everywhere, some helpful, others harmful. Yavi had always thought the Vael’s ties to the spirits of nature were why her people tended to respond more to the Deep Elementals, the gods of nature, than to the dual-natured deities the humans tended to worship.

  Yhask, Queelay, Nomi, Gromma, and Xalistan. Air, Sea, Fire, Land, and the Hunt. Of course, Xalistan was, Yavi admitted, technically dual-natured, but ruling both sides of the hunt . . . the hunter and the hunted . . . made perfect sense to her. Of course he had to rule both sides. How else could he keep things fair and balanced?

  As whitewashed stones of the road flashed by beneath Yavi and the air spirit, Yavi spotted a human riding in a wagon. He waved at her casually and looked back at the road.

  Tran, Yavi’s brother, when he had first Taken Root and could still talk, had once told her that the Vael had more in common with humans than with their Oathbreaker creators, but both races still puzzled her. How did either race live without being able to touch or see the spirits? The humans, she knew, had never been able to do it, but had the Oathbreakers long ago forgotten what it meant to have a dialogue with the world, or did they simply no longer care what the world had to say?

  Even more tragic were the Ae
rn. They had never known the spirits, as far as Yavi knew. A frown tugged at the corners of her lips, and the wind spirit sagged in response, dropping her unceremoniously in the dirt alongside the road with the dying breeze.

  Dusting herself off, she eyed the spirit angrily but couldn’t stay mad. The wind spirit shrugged at her as it danced away, blowing higher and higher up into the sky. “Don’t worry about it,” she called after him. “My heart was too heavy. It wasn’t your fault!”

  It had been her fault. Thinking about the Aern while working spirit magic had been a bad idea. It made her sad to think of them, exiled, living in caves somewhere, all because the Oathbreakers couldn’t get along with their own creations. Sadness attracted the wrong sort of spirits for overt magic; flashy spirits preferred emotions that stirred the sap, happiness or anger.

  Yavi brushed the dirt off of her doeskin leathers, popped a handful of the mineral-rich earth into her mouth as an afterthought, and started walking alongside the road.

  A better idea struck the young Vael, and she plopped down to remove her boots. She only wore them in summer and spring when her bark was softer and smoother anyway. Stowing the boots in her pack, she wriggled her toes in the dirt and grass before stepping barefoot onto the stone and feeling for the spirit of the road. It was there but stretched so thin as to be nearly invisible to Yavi’s eyes. Over time the poor thing had been so squashed down by the horse carts and people who traveled the road day and night without so much as a thank you that Yavi could not tell what kind of spirit it had once been.

  “Well, I appreciate you,” she told the spirit. “This is the way to Port Ammond, isn’t it?” She pointed in the direction she was traveling, and the reedy spirit of the road looked at her blankly. “Are you shy?” she asked when it didn’t answer. “You don’t have to be. My name is Yavi. I have to spend a month in Port Ammond and then it’s on to Oot for The Grand Conjunction.” She emphasized the last three words in mock arrogance as if she were an Eldrennai and winked at the spirit when it hazarded a smile.