by Micah Yongo
“What do you mean? What war?”
But the woman said nothing.
“You’re a seer, aren’t you? Like in the stories my uncle would tell me.”
She smiled. “A seer? I did not know they told such stories in the Sovereignty. I’d thought them all locked away in Dumea’s library, along with everything else… Tell me, Neythan. Do you know the tale of Dumea’s last king?”
Neythan nodded. All the disciples had been taught the story, along with many other histories of the Five Lands and First Laws. How King Nalaam had ceded the kingship of Dumea to Sharíf Helgon nearly twenty years ago, paying double fealty to the throne and impoverishing his city. The agreement turned the city’s ruler to no more than a steward, all to preserve the Dumean laws and the famous library those laws had allowed Dumea to build and curate.
“Some say it was foolish for Nalaam to sell his throne for the sake of books,” Filani said. “They do not see that he sold a coin to keep a treasure. And that even now it remains the only place beyond Súnam where your dead priesthoods’ writings can be found… Perhaps it was there your uncle learned his stories. Perhaps that is the place you should be going in search of your answers.”
“And what answers am I searching for?”
The woman leaned forward slightly in her saddle, then paused, her eyes shifting, looking past him. Neythan turned to follow her gaze. There was a tree stump in the patch of grass on the other side. A pair of crows perched on top of it.
“There is something there,” Filani said.
Neythan frowned at her, and then stopped the horses and climbed down from his saddle.
“What’s going on?” Caleb asked, jolting awake. “Why have we stopped?”
Neythan drew his sword. “Wait here.” He stepped into the little field, stalking through the skinny reeds of wildgrass.
It was only as he neared the stump that the smell hit him. He coughed violently, pulled a rag from his sleeve and held it to his mouth. It was as he heard the greedy buzzing hum of the flies that Neythan began to widen his approach, stepping around the thick, pale stump and leaning his head to see around it.
He saw the hand first, cadaverously grey, an open pallid palm with dirty fingers resting in a relaxed claw, as if beckoning him near. Neythan obliged and stepped closer. Then he saw the stained cowl, the torn flesh, turgid skin, gashed skull, dry teeth, the single up-staring eye, the empty socket beside it where the crows had already been.
“He is Shedaím.”
Neythan glanced aside to find Caleb at his shoulder, peering down on the body.
“There,” Caleb said, pointing. “His palm. You can see the trace of the scar from his bloodseed, and from when he took the covenant.”
Neythan coughed and spat to the side. By the look of him he’d been dead no more than a week, which was concerning enough, but it was the killing wound that bothered Neythan more. A wide and neat gash arced across the throat from right to left where the man had been seized and slashed from behind. The work of a left-hander, identical to the wound that had killed Yannick.
He glanced back to the road to where the old woman waited on her mule. Nothing but plains and scrubland in either direction for miles. This was the only highway south. If Arianna was truly in Hanesda it was likely she had come by this very road to get there. He turned back to the body, eyeing the wound, rehearsing the events of the past month – Arianna missing. Now two Brothers dead. Both killed the same way, the inconvenient truths twining together in his mind like cords of rope, along with the growing sick feeling there may be more on the way. Caleb’s words in the cave came back to him. Sometimes you can think you know something, or even someone, and be deceived.
Neythan stared down at the corpse.
But would you do this, Ari? Can you truly be doing this?
Only the crows answered, cawing lazily as they scratched at the bright timber of the tree stump.
“Come, Neythan,” Caleb said. “We’re not far from the next town. There’s nothing to come from tarrying among the dead.”
Sixteen
B U T T E R F L Y
“Tell me something, Neythan.”
Neythan suspected that’s where it began. But then he couldn’t be sure. Funny thing memory, will of its own. Even now he wasn’t exactly sure what Arianna had meant to speak of that night. Looking back, the sense of something ulterior, beneath the surface, beneath the words, had always lingered. They’d sat with their feet dangling on the lip of the Great Dry Lake that Master Johann had shown them as children when they first came to Ilysia. They’d stayed there for a long time, chatting, staring into the jagged shadow the crater spread beneath them. A warm starless night, benign sky above, still forest behind. How different Arianna had seemed; strangely coy, nervous even, almost a different person. Tell me something, she’d said; her voice soft, insistent, opening to some foreign part of her Neythan had never seen before, his admittance a privilege. Tell me something you have never told anyone before. And that thought, that sense of privilege, of a secret between them, tugged at him, made him want to prolong the spell, play along, and so he answered.
“I dream sometimes.”
Arianna had regarded him suspiciously, waiting for the joke to spill. “Dream?” Her nose wrinkled like a rabbit’s. “Everybody dreams.”
“The same dream,” Neythan clarified.
“Hm. And what is it you dream of?”
“Of night,” Neythan said slowly. “Of flames… of blood. And someone there in the dark, dying. Someone I don’t want to die.”
Arianna had studied him, fiddling her tongue at the back of her front teeth in that considered way of hers, emerald eyes atwinkle, fronds of dark hair askew. “And you’ve told no one?”
Neythan shook his head.
“Why not?”
Neythan shrugged with another shake of the head.
A corner of Arianna’s mouth twitched to a half-smile.
“What?” Neythan said.
“I’m trying to imagine what Master Johann would say.”
“About my not telling?”
“About your dream.”
Neythan shrugged again, a thought he’d already considered. “He’d say it’s my sha.”
Arianna nodded. “He’d say it’s trying to teach you.”
“Teach me… Teach me what?”
“Helplessness.” The answer was quick and, though she said it quietly, emphatic, like something she’d known a long time, like wisdom. “That there are things you cannot do. Things you cannot stop, or control.”
“You almost sound like him.”
Arianna shrugged and glanced up at the night. “And he’d be right too, Neythan,” she continued, speaking to the sky. “There are things we cannot control, can’t wield, even of our own selves, no matter how many disciplines we are taught.”
“What things?”
“Things like the mind… What is in it. What it chooses to want. Even when you don’t want it to want what it does…” She continued to stare into the muted constellations above where puffs of cloud were now gathering to block out the moon. “Do you ever wonder, Neythan?” She turned to look at him now, eyes narrowed, accusing, pleading, it was difficult to tell which. “Do you ever wonder what it would be to simply go where you please, do what you want?”
Neythan hesitated. The words seemed prickly, hot to the touch. “Go where?” he said, holding the question at arm’s length. “Do what?”
“Anything,” she said. “Anywhere.”
“But the teachings…”
“Never mind the teachings.”
Neythan balked but tried not to let it show, tried not to disturb the spell, this quickened nameless something, fickle as a perched butterfly, lingering in the space between them. “The teachings,” he repeated quietly. “The creed… it is what guides us… what makes us. It is who we are.”
“What do you know of who we are? You do not know who you are. Or who I am. And neither do I. They – the tutors – they make us fearfu
l of knowing. But why ought we be frightened, Neythan?” Her voice lowered. She moved closer, whispering, as if the woods might hear. “Why ought we fear the things we want?”
He’d hesitated then, a growing habit of the exchange, the two of them treading carefully into where these flighty words of theirs had ushered them. He gazed at her face, the large jade eyes almost luminous, their whites curious and glowing. The dainty nose and small expressive mouth and her dark hair, usually tied into a single braid, now loose and unfettered and falling messily. And she seemed so timid, so unlike herself; innocent, fragile. And so, after a long pause, almost experimentally, just to see if the words could be said, he answered. “Perhaps you’re right.” And it was these words Neythan had come to both regret and cherish the most.
Another smile had shivered on Arianna’s lips then, like a skittish bird – disbelieving, grateful – and Neythan saw that his agreement had freed her somehow, had affirmed what she had not allowed herself to believe before. A secret, some private madness he, by agreeing, had saved her from. She leant forward. The space between his face and hers – precarious and bewitching and agitated, like the air before a storm – closed. She neared, eyes flitting nervously – to his nose, his ear, his cheek, his eye, his forehead, his lips… A twig snapped behind them. Neythan turned around. Nothing. No one. Too dark to see. He turned back but it was too late, the spell broken, the butterfly unnerved. Arianna was running away to the safety of the thickets, away into the milky blue night.
“If you’re not careful you’ll turn to salt, you know,” Caleb said.
Neythan glanced up from the deep, shadowed tunnel of the well he’d been staring into. Nearly four years had passed since that night he’d sat with Arianna at the crater, feeling known by her in a way he’d not been known before or since, like there was some fleshless umbilical thing between them, pulling from inside, a secret bond. More than Brotherhood. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before…
“What were you thinking of just then?” Caleb said. “It was like you were a world away.”
Neythan blinked, smiled thinly, then tossed the rope-tethered pot down the pit again to draw more water for the animals. “Did Filani say how long she would be?” he said. “Or who these friends of hers are?”
“Cousins, I think she said. Or a cousin.”
“A cousin…” Neythan tugged on the rope, pulling it taut against the mooring post by the well to check its bind. They’d been here for close to an hour now, waiting at the edge of the township for Filani to return. “… in a Sumerian town? I thought Súnamites did not like to settle away from their homelands.”
Caleb scoffed. “Sayings and proverbs. Rarely trust them, especially that one. When we reach Hanesda you’ll find plenty of Súnamites. There, you find many of any and everything that can be found.”
“You don’t speak fondly of the place.”
“Should I?”
Neythan shrugged. “You’re a merchant. They call it the merchant’s home.”
“Like I said, not all that is said can be counted true.”
“No,” Neythan said. “I suppose not.”
Caleb watched as Neythan’s gaze grew still again.
“Who is she?”
Neythan started, looked at him. “What? Who?”
“This girl you hunt… She is your decree?”
Neythan tugged at the rope, bobbing the vessel beneath to tip and collect its water.
“Come now, Neythan. I have told you the story of my cause.”
“Little of it.”
“I’ve told more of it than you have of your own.”
“Only whilst you were in your cups, aided by the sourwine.”
“Even so. I have told.”
Neythan pulled on the cord and began to yank the vessel from the water. He grunted. “There is nothing to tell.”
Caleb laughed. “Well of course there isn’t. We journey halfway across the Sovereignty in pursuit of her for mere sport. Half-starve ourselves on the way for the same reason… I may no longer be of the Brotherhood, Neythan, but we are still covenanted you and I, in words as binding as blood. You know what binds me in my part, I ought to know what binds you in yours.”
Neythan, straining, pulled the vessel to the lip of the well. He looked at Caleb and nodded at it.
“Ah, sorry.” Caleb came and reached across to hold the pot’s handle as Neythan let go of the rope to grip the pot’s other side. They heaved it over the well’s ledge together, then set it down against the nearby trough, allowing the water to pour in as the mules and horse drank.
“So,” Caleb resumed. “Is she your decree?”
Neythan let out a long slow breath. “She is a rogue,” he said. “A betrayer.”
Caleb’s eyebrows hopped up on his long forehead. “She is Shedaím?”
Neythan didn’t answer.
“Strange of them to have sent you, one so young, after a heretic. And alone.”
“I was not sent,” Neythan said, already regretting the conversation.
Caleb frowned, then gestured for further explanation.
Neythan sighed heavily. “We were sent out… a decree to fulfil… She turned on us.”
“Us? How many of you were there?”
“We were three.”
“Three? All Brothers? For a single decree?”
Neythan started lowering the pot once more into the well.
“Where is the third?”
“Dead. She slew him.”
That stopped Caleb. He shifted. Paused. Then spoke again. “Why?”
The pot touched and bobbed against the well’s water, bouncing softly along the rope. Neythan removed one hand and looked at Caleb. “That is what I intend to ask her… Perhaps the last thing I will ask her, before I require at her hand the blood she’s taken from the Brotherhood.”
Others arrived at the well, a few shepherd boys settling a flock at the bottom of the low footworn slope beneath and walking the shallow incline to draw water, a group of young girls coming out from the town with buckets, a large company of men coming in from the country.
“What do you imagine will be the answer?”
“What?”
“Why she did it.”
“How should I know?”
“You above all others can know. You, the others of your sharím, you will have spent every day since you were children together. You will be like family.”
“Yet she saw fit to kill one of us.”
“So, there was nothing? No sign? No hint that might point to–”
“You think I haven’t thought of all this? Haven’t wondered? You think every day, every hour, all this has not come to me? She killed my friend, Caleb. Butchered him. Carved his throat like a lamb before a banquet. Listened to his gags, listened to him choking on his own blood as he died, slow, and in pain… Family?” He laughed sourly. His jaw bobbed, as if to continue, but he stopped and shook his head instead. He turned to the well, tugged the rope to dunk the pot, then yanked again, put one foot against the ledge and gripped the cord two-handed, bracing to draw it out.
Caleb watched silently, letting Neythan settle as he pulled the pot to the top of the well. He reached across and helped lift it out and over, then stepped back as Neythan put it once more to the trough for the beasts to drink.
“What kind of girl was she, this Arianna?”
Neythan glanced sidelong at Caleb, irked by his persistence, but saw no malice there. He sighed again and looked out over the empty land leading to the town gates.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She was always… different, I suppose.”
“In what way?”
Neythan shrugged. He sat down on the ledge of the well, thought about it. “I don’t know… For the rest of us, the disciplines, the training, it took all our strength to master. Eleven years… there was rarely a day we ended without sweat and exhaustion. But it never seemed like that with her. It was as if everything to her was a kind of game, to be made light of… I remember
one time, the tutors and Master Johann take us down the mount, half a day’s walk from the village. They want to teach us a new weapon. The shentak, it is called. You carry two of them, blades, like daggers sort of, but the hilt is curved, doubles from either side of the handle, around your knuckles and down your arm to the elbow…” He lifted his hand to demonstrate and looked at Caleb. The old man nodded knowingly. “Of course. You will know it… So you know then that the thing with it is the blades move, they swing, are weighted in the handle so you can sort of feel, after a while, the way they will swing. Not easy to master.
“So Hamir and Master Johann have brought us all this way so our sha will be clear and still, undistracted by the village and its people, so we can remain there for a few days or weeks to learn it. We can’t have been much older than twelve or thirteen years at the time… Well. By nightfall of the second day Arianna is wielding these things as if born to. The rest of us are still just trying to make sure we don’t chop off our own arms. Meanwhile she’s telling Master Johann, ‘let’s go back, I’m missing Yulaan’s sweetsoup.’”
He turned back to face Caleb. The little old man smiled a little, which seemed strange, until Neythan realized it was he who had been smiling, at the memory, and that Caleb was simply smiling back. Neythan shed the smirk like something dirty.
The approaching girls from the town had come near the well, giggling bashfully, glancing at Neythan. There were three of them, sisters by the look, ages close together. Neythan stepped back and handed over the rope. The eldest took it with a grateful nod and began to carefully let it down as Neythan stepped away to stand by Caleb.
“There was sometimes something else with her,” Neythan said. “A sadness… or fear.”
“What was she afraid of?”
“I don’t know… It never really made sense.”
Neither spoke for a while. Neythan glanced over to the town gate where Filani, less than an hour before, had wandered in on her mule to search for her cousin. He glanced back at the well and the girls drawing their water and the men coming in from the country. Neythan could hear the soft clink of metal on them as they moved. One or two acknowledged him with a nod as they sat tiredly down at the other side of the well. Neythan nodded back.
