by Sandra Waugh
“Evie, you are not yourself.”
“You do not know me!”
Laurent hesitated. I saw his hand twitch to reach for me then drop, my heart dropping with it. “This is how the Breeders toy with us,” he said abruptly, and turned to the woods to listen. He walked a little ways. “By all accounts they should have found us.”
“And neither are Breeders the excuse.” My tone was changed again—another emotion to cloud it, the sharp bitterness of rejection. “You once said I hold something so tight. But so do you. It makes you push me away.”
There was a terrible pause. I stared at his hard back, watched a tremor flick across his shoulders and his hands clench. “Rider—”
“You were over his body,” he gritted, head bowed.
It took a moment—Laurent was staring at his fist, and then I realized he was not speaking of his horse but a far different memory.
Raif.
“You were undone,” he whispered. “I killed the Troth, rode past—I saw you.”
“I know.”
“No,” he hissed, eyes fixed on his fist. “You do not understand. I saw you.” Head up, he took a harsh breath. “You burned straight into my soul.”
He would not turn. But his words hit, drop by drop: “You…do…not…know.”
I stared at him. You do not know. Like raindrops fizzing on parched earth, those words, exploding life—it sprang into my head then the picture of what I’d so badly wanted to erase: that horrible day, that moment of death, of running for Raif…and Laurent’s eyes on mine. ’Twas only a catch of stares, only the briefest of moments. And yet—
“You mourn your Raif,” he was saying. “I would neither taint nor damage that memory.”
And yet. Laurent’s eyes—that look as he galloped past in the smoke and grit. I remembered it there in the dark, dry night as vividly as if it were yesterday: something that was never acknowledged yet never forgotten, something the old seer had warned of and the Insight spell exposed. It was Laurent I’d seen. Eye to eye, soul to soul. The image burst from memory as if it had to be exposed. And now here we stood, spinning in reverse—I uncovering feelings and Laurent burying them deep.
“Taint?” I whispered. “How can you taint when you fill me with this?” My hand was already pressing against my heart. “I love you. I have loved you since that moment, even if I did not claim it then.”
We stood apart, silent. Then hoarsely Laurent said, “You have his ring.”
I started, and then laughed at the simplicity of misunderstanding. “ ’Tis Raif’s ring, but not as you think!” I reached into my satchel, pulled the ring from it, held out my hand. “Look at it, Rider: Raif’s grandfather’s ring. I choose to keep it for them both, as memory, as honor. ’Tis a symbol of love, yes, but ’twas never betrothal.”
Laurent’s shoulders heaved once, hard. “You say you knew in a moment. I know what comes from moments.” He was warning me, himself, us. “But it has to be real. I could not bear this as regret.”
Regret? I rolled the ring between my fingers, then slipped it on my thumb. I didn’t need to hide the ring away; it didn’t hurt the way it once did. “Rider, I am glad for you,” I said, eyes on him, my hand back at my heart clutching a discovery no Healer stoicism could have suppressed: “I am glad.”
Laurent let out a breath like a shudder, a release. A hope. I said louder: “Know it, Rider: what I feel is more real than any token of memory. Can you not tell?” Louder even: “Shall I own it here and now?”
He still had not turned. I stepped back from him, brimming with light, determined. Grandmama had said loving freely would not weaken my gifts. She was right. Love empowered. Here in this dark night, in the midst of drought and death, I felt so incredibly alive—things fervent, and rich, and bubbling up from inside all making me grin madly. “Rider Laurent!” I called out. “Rider Laurent, I love thee!”
There—he was turning to warn me back to the canopy. But I stepped away from the bare trees, flung my arms wide open and shouted up, waking the universe: “All you stars, hear my claim: I love the Rider Laurent. I love him!” And I was laughing, spinning in a circle, yelling to the night sky, “I love him! I love him!” Let the grackles spy, let the Breeders hear, terrors could not hurt us.
“Evie—”
Gasping, exultant, I looked back. Laurent had started forward, half ready, I think, to drag me back under cover. But I shook my head, laughing, emotions no longer to be contained or kept secret. “There can be no danger here,” I cried, running to him. “For this is too good. Too powerful. Too pure!” I grabbed his hands and pulled him out under the sky. “This is love.”
He stared for a long moment into my eyes, reading everything that I laid bare in a gaze—a luxury of time we’d not had our first meeting. Every sense was burning, every detail unfolding a thousand more. I felt his hands slowly pull out from mine. My breath hitched, but he was only moving to cover my hands with his.
“Then I would like to know this love,” the Rider said. And he pulled me into his arms, and took me down with a kiss.
—
We lay on my cloak under the canopy of boughs. I fit into Laurent’s chest, my head resting just under his jaw. Arro’s even breaths soothed the quiet. There was no other sound. We were drunk with discovery, brimful and sated. It should have been, then, that we slept, but this peace was too precious and fleeting to let go of. And yet trying to keep hold of it left us restless and a little sad, our thoughts trailing to dark things.
“Evie.”
“Mm?”
“Why did you speak of blame?” Laurent shifted his head so his lips were against my temple. “Spirits—those who’ve not fully passed through. ’Tis your power as Guardian to bring them forth. What blame is there?”
My power. He said it so simply, as if it were a simple thing that I could call back those whose lives had ended cruelly, that I could beg favors in exchange for passage.
“What blame, Evie?” Laurent repeated.
I whispered, “Because if they had no blood on their hands before, they do now. So I wonder that it was right. That I asked them to kill in my stead.”
“They made a choice,” Laurent answered. “You did not tell them what to do.”
“Didn’t I?”
“The dead are your allies, Guardian, not your slaves. They killed what killed them.”
“At my beckon.”
“It seems a fair trade. They aided you in your need. How they did so was their own making.” Laurent shifted, thoughtful. “It is your Guardian right to be able to summon spirits.”
“A right?”
“A strength, then—yours to call. Death helps its amulet’s Guardian.”
“I wish I didn’t need to ask for help. I wish there was nothing to beg help for….”
He raised a brow, “Or…?”
“Or I should learn to do my own killing.”
I heard him grin. “You cannot, Evie. It is not your nature.”
“I could make it mine.”
“Nay.” Laurent turned. “You and Lark are the part of Balance that is not aggressive by nature. You cannot force it.”
I don’t know if that soothed, but it answered for my struggle at least. It also opened more questions: If the forces of Life and Death existed as calm equilibrium, then Dark and Light would have to be the balancing spears of vibrant energy. I thought of the missing two Guardians, tried to picture them. Did they sense a change inside themselves, or were they still naïve to what was coming? How would they fight?
Laurent said, “You ask no questions.” He chuckled. “For once.”
I grinned. And then I couldn’t help but ask one: “Is it better to be a warrior or not?”
“We need both.” He drew his arm away to sit up. Alert, listening, as if I’d prompted him. He turned to give me a brief grin. “Arro’s breathing is steady.”
“Yes, but that’s not what you attend,” I said. “You listen to the night. You still expect the Breeders to find us.”
>
Laurent was quiet for a moment. “Do you not wonder that the amulet was so easy to retrieve?”
“Why do you hold on to that suspicion? I could not have left Hooded Falls without your sacrifice—you nearly died! There was nothing easy.”
“Nay, Evie, trust me. It was a suspiciously easy find.”
“Reaping hounds, swifts, Troths, soldiers, wisps, incinerators…” I laughed a little; the list was longer but we were still whole. “What more could they do?”
Laurent seemed not to hear. His strong profile was etched against a starry sky—both hushed and still. But then came an unpleasant answer: “You ask what more? Any depravity of Earth and creature—beast or human. Whatever is spawned from the Waste.”
“Tell me about it.” I sat up to be closer. “Tell me about this Waste.” I’d refused to ask of the Waste before. How different that all was now.
There was a longer pause. I wondered if he was choosing words carefully, if he thought he should spare me more horror. “The Waste is the realm of the Breeders. They hold Chaos there the way the Keepers hold Balance here.”
“Here and there—’tis another balance.”
He smiled. “It has always been as such. The Myr Mountains divide the two: Breeders to the north, Keepers to the south. So yes, a natural scale.”
“I’ve heard the Myr Mountains are an impassable boundary. How is it then that Breeders spread on this side?”
“Near impassable,” Laurent corrected. “Besides, the Breeders can manipulate through thought, reach through flame, keep watch by spy….What mountain can stop that?”
I had no answer, so Laurent nudged my shoulder, saying, “ ’Tis not so grim. Pockets of opposing forces are known on both sides. They might have collaborators in Tyre, but we have the white oak inside the Seth—the desert that surrounds their throne.”
“That is a single tree,” I said with a sigh. “They build an army.”
The Rider’s retort was surprisingly sharp: “You, Healer, know that a plant can best a man. And sanctuary is never gratuitous.” He caught himself, calmed. “But if you wish: there is Heran as well, a Keeper outpost at a northernmost tip of the mountains. They keep watch.” Laurent was quiet again for a moment, navigating violent descriptions. “Heran is as close to that realm as anyone can safely survive. The Waste is a savage wilderness. Things warp; become distorted beyond understanding. If you were to spend any length of time there you could not help but change.”
“Why does that not work the same for the Breeders here? Why can those in Tyre be warped as they are—maraud, reap, kill—why wouldn’t being on this side turn them nice?”
He laughed. “Do not look at this as good and evil, love, even if it seems such. By virtue of its stability Balance seems morally righteous, but it’s not. It is simply Balance—both good and bad exist within it. And neither is Chaos inherently evil. It is just desire unbound.”
“Regardless,” I whispered, “Balance is the source of life. It must be saved.”
“Yes.” There was a moment so long that I thought the Rider let the subject go. But then he lay back on the cloak, saying softly, “Desire is a devious and powerful intoxicant.” And the barest murmur: “They cannot help themselves.”
His voice made me shiver. “You forgive it,” I whispered. “People close to you—what happened?”
“What more to tell?”
“No.” I leaned over him, hands propped on either side, and insisted, “Do not spare me anymore, Rider. This is your story, what formed you. I want to know.”
He looked up at me, blue eyes dark in the dead of night, hair smudged black against my turquoise cloak. But his face—so fair, so strong-shaped—was neither dark nor black, just faintly shadowed by sorrow from the past.
Perhaps Laurent had a similar thought. He smiled and touched a gentle finger to my brow. “I would not mar this beauty with sad stories.”
“I am not easily marred. Tell me.”
He would have refused again, but I leaned down and kissed him hard, and so he sighed. “Your choice. Close your eyes, then, Evie Carew.”
I did, nestling once more in the curve of his arm. And Laurent wove his tale, murmuring against my ear as if it were meant to be a bedtime story. And I pictured his rich details as if I were there myself—so very rich, but none sweet.
—
The spires of Tyre once glistened with the bounty of its mines: rubies, emeralds, opals, garnets, sapphires, silver, copper, and gold….A city of astonishing beauty, renowned and celebrated for its artists and their creations. Craftsmanship was the source of pleasure, not the material, and those who came to admire the buildings studied the skill of design rather than its worth. Tyre soared up from the Dun Plains like a beacon, an invitation to all travelers who wished to trade knowledge and goods. And so the city was filled with diverse traditions and people. Keepers lived there as openly as anyone.
Centuries of beauty, of scholarship. But in this last generation came a subtle infiltration, a whispered thought—Breeders were working their own sort of skill, putting a value on materials that ultimately dwarfed inspiration. And what was once something mined for art became a source of greed, power, and the jealousies and vengeance that follow. Gems were hoarded, killed for, or sold, the bounty of which empowered a select few who titled themselves Genarchs. Beauty was forgotten in the frenzy to claim more wealth. Mines riddled the earth, the city decayed around its inhabitants. Gems and metals were ripped from every building, every furnishing; spires turned black with ash from innumerable smelters. Tyranny succeeded the communal governance—arbitrary rules were levied by whichever Genarch had wrested power from the last. Keepers were executed; any of their allies not killed either escaped or were forced into the mines. Families were torn apart by gluttony….
—
“Mine was one,” Laurent added softly, jerking me from the reverie. “I lost my brother to the Breeders, who in turn condemned my parents to the axe. Dragged from our home, executed in Tor Tower while the bells…” He trailed off, and then, like it was some curiously horrible discovery, said, “My brother forced me to watch their heads come off.”
There was a moment of nothing. I swallowed thickly. “But he didn’t kill you.”
“For no sentimental reason. My brother is ten years my senior; his interests were long separate from mine.” There was a dark humor in his tone: “I was eight, a ripe age for the mines. ’Twould have been a waste to kill me.”
I sat up abruptly. “You were in the mines? You were a slave?”
“Six years.”
“But…” Six years in captivity! He’d acknowledged it so calmly. “How—how are you here? I thought no one could escape the mines!”
“True. But that does not stop some from trying. And if…” Laurent’s voice faded for a moment, weighted with some memory. “Miners are sometimes transferred to the Waste. If a Genarch believes more can be squeezed from slaves who cause trouble in the mines, they are carted to the Waste as offerings. For entertainment. For food.” He paused, the faint smirk returning. He tugged a strand of my hair. “They waste no muscle.”
A crude jest. I ignored it, exclaiming, “You—you were one of those transferred to the Breeders’ dominion. That’s why…” Why he scolded me for doubting the necessity of the white oak. “How did you survive? You are not changed from being there.”
“I was not there long enough.” A hesitation—his fingers threaded through the ends of my hair. He was not telling me all. Perhaps the journey had changed him. But then he murmured, “You ask what is the Waste? It is nothing of life. I remember the ash of a charred landscape, the tar of the barren Seth and the green-gray of choke weed. I remember open pits of flame, the stink of sulfur. I remember death—”
I waited, breath held. But Laurent ended abruptly with: “Some tales are not worth remembering. I escaped the transport. I made it back over the mountains; some of those from Heran’s watch helped me through the worst of the Goram Pass and pointed me south to the hills
. ’Twas Arro who found me there, bore me to Castle Tarnec.” He paused. “When I healed, I joined the Riders. I was fifteen.”
We both listened to Arro’s soft whickering for a moment. Laurent grinned, then brushed back my hair, dismissing the dark. “Lucky for me that this horse took a liking or I’d have been slain as a trespasser in Tarnec after all that struggle.”
“That is a terrible ending, Rider.”
“But an end nonetheless,” he said, pulling me back down. “Come, Evie, this is hardly the way to share a pillow. We are safe and Arro is still with us.”
“Safe! So now you no longer listen for a Breeder attack?” I teased.
I felt him smile against my hair, though I could not tell if it was a happy smile. “A respite, then,” he said. “And I hardly use it to purpose. I should woo you, my lady, with raptures of your beauty—your silver hair and smooth brow and the deep blue of your eyes.”
It made me laugh. “And your eyes, Rider Laurent, they are as deeply blue.”
“Then you may woo me,” he said.
I rolled over to face him. I could hardly see him in the dark, but it did not matter. “You, Rider, have eyes the depth of the sea—”
“Have you ever seen the sea, Guardian?”
I grinned. “No, but it must be so.”
“Good, then continue.”
“Continue to woo?”
“Aye.”
“Hmm.” He was drawing me from my dark thoughts; I knew it. Our precious peace. “Shall I speak of your hair, Rider?” I reached to brush it back from his temple. “How it falls shiny black like a crow’s wing—”
“Crow?” He snorted. “What sort of wooing involves a crow?”
“Blackbird, then? Raven?”
“Raven I accept.”
“And this jaw.” I touched the edge of his jaw. “Square and grim-set, but you are now excused for that. Besides, your smile softens everything.”
“And my mouth?”
I pressed a finger against his lips. “Your mouth is a yearning,” I murmured.
“And if I kiss you, is the yearning sated?”
