by Holly Lisle
“His sister died when he reached her to rescue her,” Tuua said, his voice low … but not quite low enough. “The woman he loves is dying.”
Makkor’s exuberance fell away. “I offer my condolences,” he said. “That does not seem the way things should work.” He sighed. “I’ll not keep you, then—I’d hoped for a dance and a banquet when you reached the bay, and to fete my bride-to-be at the same time. But you’ll not be wanting such festivities. You found a girl for me?”
Aaran started to say no. He was going to just give up and admit to failure. He didn’t care. He would never go to sea again; he had nothing to go back for. He could give the old man back his ship, work passage to Hyre, and find a place there where he could be alone with his grief.
But then he thought of the old man, who wanted a companion. Who was lonely. Who had given Aaran the ship he sailed on a handshake, for the promise that Aaran would look for a wife for Makkor, or pay for the ship if he couldn’t find one.
It had been an offering of faith and goodwill, and it had reaped massive rewards for Tonk everywhere.
“I have a great many women on the ship,” he said slowly. “None who would agree to marry a man sight unseen. But I’ll ask them to come on deck to meet with you, and you can talk with them.”
Makkor nodded. “That will suit me.”
He didn’t ask if Aaran had the money to pay him if none of the women wanted an old man for a husband. Aaran appreciated that bit of forbearance on Makkor’s part.
He went halfway down the passenger companionway, and found the Ossalenes in the passenger common sitting in utter silence. His gut knotted.
“Has something happened to her?” he asked. No one needed to ask what he meant.
Redbird, huddled disconsolate in front of Hawkspar’s door, said, “There is no change. There is only the continuation of the sameness. But we near land, and the sera must know the orders of their Oracle. They only wait until a moment when she is calm to ask her what they are to do.”
His life was not the only one in disarray. He said, “I have a man above who seeks a wife. He hopes for an islander, he says. He is the man who gave me this ship to come to your rescue when no one else would deal with me, and he did that in exchange for the hope that I might bring back for him a companion for these lonely late years in his life. I would ask of those of you who might care to have a rich husband that, as a favor to me, you go talk to him. You don’t owe me, any of you. But … he’s a good man. And he did a service to all of us.”
A few of the women stood. One said, “None here dares say we owe you nothing. But we owe this man, too, for without him, you might not have found the means to reach us.”
Another said, “If she says anything, call us back.”
Five went. Three Obsidians, one Rosestone, and one Amber.
Aaran gave a final glance to Hawkspar’s door. He could hear her inside, sobbing and screaming. He knotted his fists and followed the Ossalenes up the companionway.
Makkor studied the five of them, clearly taken aback by their appearances. They were all young and graceful, all strong and healthy. But they all bore the Eyes of the Ossalene Order.
He studied them. And then he said, slowly, “Kurga gal glaksa yadnega gnee, rega ksoggingor hkgack pongi?”
One—only one—of the women burst out laughing. She was one of the Ambers; Aaran had talked to her a few times. Her name was Gnadable. She spewed out a string of syllables that sounded like a cat trying to cough up a hairball in a hurry.
Makkor responded in kind, a big grin on his face.
And the girl answered him, smiling, too.
Hope. Aaran dared not breathe; he feared if he did, the same fate that crushed him at every turn would see what was happening and destroy it.
But that didn’t happen. The Amber turned to the other Ossalenes and said, “I’m going to sail with him to Port Midrid. We’ll meet you when you arrive, and I’ll receive word of the oracle then.”
Makkor came over to Aaran’s side and said, “Consider your debt to me paid, whether she’ll marry me or not. I like the look of her, but even if she decides she won’t have me, I owe you as much debt as any free man today. Releasing you from your debt for the Taag av Sookyn will be my small repayment.”
Aaran managed a smile, though from where they both stood, they could hear the screams below. “My heartfelt thanks,” he said.
Makkor said, “You have enough to occupy your mind, it seems. I’ll not add to it.”
Makkor returned to his own ship, accompanied by Gnadable.
And Aaran exhaled. At least his men would get paid.
He handed off the ship to his kor daan as they neared Port Midrid’s harbor. He could see the ribbons festooning every stationary object in the port, the bright streamers, the docks crowded with people waiting to see the Taag av Sookyn—the only ship in the Grand Pack to go there direct from the fight—so that they could cheer the warriors who had won them their freedom.
Aaran wanted no part of celebration. Ermyk av Beyrkyn could handle the crowds. He’d enjoy the adulation, no doubt find himself an armload of nubile young women who would treat him to a hero’s welcome.
He went down the passenger companionway, and found the Ossalenes hugging Redbird, or each other, and weeping.
He could not hear a sound from Hawkspar’s quarters.
One by one, the Ossalenes picked up their packs and filed silently past him, up the companionway.
“She’s dead?” he asked Redbird when the last of them was past him.
“No. She is, for the moment, herself. She cut them from the Order and sent them away. Me, too, but I won’t leave her.” Redbird, pale and gaunt, with her black stone eyes red-rimmed from weeping and lack of sleep, said, “She asked to speak with you. She might still be herself when you go in.”
He said, “Well. Then.” Redbird opened the door, and he passed by her, and went in.
“You’ve come,” Hawkspar said.
“I’ve been here all along.”
“Yes. Part of me knows that. We’re nearly come to land. This voyage will be over, and whatever waits for you in the future will be out there. Not in here.”
“I love you,” he said. “I don’t care about the future. I only care about you.”
In the darkened quarters, he could see only the faintest curve of her lips. “What little of me remains loves you, too. But I’m done, Aaran. I can’t hold on any longer. It hurts to try. So I want you to … leave me. I don’t want you to watch me die.”
“I don’t want you to die alone.”
“I would give anything to die alone. It’s dying in the midst of this chaos that weighs on me.”
“I won’t leave you.”
She was silent for a long time. “Do you remember,” she said at last, “the day we danced?”
“On the deck? Of course I remember.”
“I won the bet,” she said. “And I told you then I would ask nothing of you harder or greater than having a dinner together. I intend to collect my winnings now.”
“No,” he whispered.
“I ask that you leave me. That you not watch me die. That you not see what the madness does to me when it takes me completely. It is not such a hard thing, turning and walking away. When my body is done with this life, you may come back. Burn it, and when I am ashes, scatter them in a garden, where the sun is warm and the flowers are beautiful. And find some way to smash the Hawkspar Eyes into powder, or if you cannot, take them and toss them into the deepest heart of the sea. These things I ask of you as the man I love. But the leaving? That I claim as the winnings of our bet. If you are a man of honor—and I know you are—you will honor that.”
She was gaunt. Skeletal. Starved, bruised, dying. He could look at her and see how near death she was, and still, in that moment when she knew him and herself, he could not believe that she could not—somehow—be saved.
“I love you,” he said, and his voice broke. He could not think of her dead and still upon a pyre. H
e could not think of her lost and torn in her mind. And he could do nothing—nothing—to help her.
“Be well,” she said. “Find happiness. In the future, you will find someone to love. I have already seen you with her, and in most of your futures you grow old together and are happy. You will not mourn me for long.”
She lay back down, turned her back to him, and pulled her knees to her chest.
“I’ll never love anyone but you,” he whispered.
“It’s such a funny thing,” Hawkspar told him. “I have never been able to see your face in the rivers of time. Never the face of anyone else, either. But I can see her. She has blue eyes.”
He would not believe it. He started to argue with her, but she said, “Go. Please. The river swells, and soon it will take me again. Have mercy on me, and do not see me as I am about to become. I cannot bear thinking that you might.”
He would not leave her. He would join Redbird outside the door if he had to, and spend every last moment of her life as close to her as he could get. But he would give her a little peace of mind. He would leave the room as she asked him to.
As he closed the door behind him, he heard her say, “I’ll never love anyone but you.”
52
Hawkspar
I lay there listening to the voices in time washing over me, feeling the current pulling under, deeper and deeper into cool darkness. The ship had come to land, and the Ossalenes were leaving. Aaran and Redbird both sat on the other side of my door, though, and I knew neither of them would release me and live their lives again until I was dead.
I would never be better than I was at that moment; I would only get worse. The kindest thing I could do for both of them, then, was to die quickly.
I had knives, swords, the skill to kill myself. But I did not, and I could not be sure if it was because I didn’t want to take that final step, or if the Eyes refused to let me. I had a way to end the misery quickly, though, and at last I took it.
I embraced the madness of the Eyes. I did not want to fight any longer. I was lost, I would die, and everything I loved would vanish for me as if it had never been. The inevitable came, and at last I opened the door.
My mentor had warned be about pursuing my own past; that if I went back to a place where I was happy, I would never find my way out again.
It was the choice I could not unmake.
It was the choice I made.
I pushed my way back into my own past.
I found the places where I was with Aaran, where we held each other, touched each other, and those moments were so sweet they broke my heart. I wanted to stay in them—but the still-living Aaran sat on the deck outside my door, and his presence stirred the tides that flowed through me. If I could find my way out to him, he would hold me again, and there would be more wondrous moments. He was too real, too living, for me to be satisfied with memory.
I pushed deeper into the current. And Redbird was with me, as we struggled through fight training, language training, as we learned the rudiments of the Ossalene rites, as we scrubbed floors and ran errands, as we lay side-by-side in the dark, stinking hold of the slave ship keeping each other going. Those were strong memories, but not happy ones.
I dove deeper yet.
Past my parents’ deaths and my capture.
Back. To them alive.
They held me once again. They embraced me, and I was small and safe in a world that no one would ever touch. Ever. I could stay with them forever in the bright shadda, with the horses outside, with my sisters and brothers all around me. The smells of my mother’s cooking filled the air, the sound of her singing, and my father singing with her, or laughing. The feel of horseback as he taught me to ride, my small hands on the loom as I sat in my mother’s lap and she started teaching me to weave.
“Yeri,” my mother called me.
And I remembered my name. Not just Yeri, but all of it. I had a name, a home, safety, people who loved me enough to die for me, but this time they would never die. I would never have to make my way alone again. This time my mother would still be holding me when I died.
Aaran
“She set you free with all the rest. Why didn’t you leave?”
Redbird turned to Aaran and frowned. “I’m not with her because I’m bound to her. I’m with her because I love her. She saved my life—I owe her every breath I take.” Redbird hung her head. “If I could, I’d die in her place.”
Aaran leaned his back against the wall next to the door. Hawkspar was quiet for the moment. He could hope that she was sleeping, regaining her strength. He could tell himself, when she wasn’t screaming, that she could yet get better. She wouldn’t, and in his heart he knew she wouldn’t, but for the moment he could still tell himself fairly convincing lies.
“Tell me,” he said. “About how she saved your life.”
Redbird sat on the opposite side of the door, her knees pulled close, her arms propped out straight atop them. She sighed. “She chose you, but we both lose her the same, don’t we? I suppose I can tell you.” And she shrugged.
“I was captured before her, along with a brother a little older than me. He died quickly, trying to fight his way to me. I lay in the dark for a long time. I was already weak when the slavers chained her next to me. By then, I didn’t want to live anymore. There was no light in the hold, and I’d never been in such darkness, in such a stink. The slavers did not wash us. We lay in our own filth. They didn’t care if we lived or died, and eventually neither did we. At least not most of us.”
A tiny smile crossed her face. “But she cared. From the first day, when they tossed the food at us, she grabbed enough for herself, plus for the girl on the other side of her, and for me as well. If we wouldn’t eat, she fed us. She talked to us—told us stories of sunlight and horses and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. She made up ways in which we could get out of our chains and run away. She was very young, but life was so strong in her that she passed some of it on to me. The girl on the other side of her died, but I didn’t … because Mouse wouldn’t let me. She kept talking about the day when good people would come and take us out of the darkness, and we would run in fields again, and ride horses, and find our parents.”
He saw a tear run down Redbird’s cheek.
“It was all she ever wanted. To find her way back to her own people, to have a family again. She gave me my name—I don’t suppose you knew that. I’ve long since forgotten my real one, but it never mattered to me, because I had the one she gave me.” Pursed lips, another shrug. “She was all I ever wanted.”
Aaran could understand that. “You ever tell her?”
“No. I’m Ossalene. I was brought up from a very early age to understand that self-denial was a virtue, and that punishment came swiftly to those who failed to deny themselves. I was forbidden to own anything of my own, forbidden to claim a friendship, forbidden to hope for love. I understood from the beginning that I might love her, but it would never lead to anything.”
Aaran thought about that for a while. In a way, it was not so different a story from his own.
Above, he could hear sailors singing, and people shouting and cheering. He heard Tonk pipes blowing, wild and discordant and passionate. His people loved and fought and touched and held on to what they cared about with everything in them—but to do that, sometimes they practiced self-denial, too. He had. He’d never thought he would love, and in the end, the love he’d dared lay dying.
“She’s quiet,” Aaran said. “I hope she’s sleeping. I hope she isn’t hurting.”
Redbird turned her face to him, and he felt himself under cold scrutiny. “I hope she finds the sunlight and horses and family she yearned for. She won me my freedom at last, though I don’t think I want it. She got me out of the Citadel. No one ever got away from the Citadel before, and she didn’t go alone. She saved me, and a lot of others. So I hope the stories she told me come true for her, wherever she is. I hope she finds joy.”
Aaran heard the clatter of
boot heels on the companionway, and rose to his feet. “No one down here,” he said.
A tall, lean woman with gray-streaked brown hair pulled back in Ethebet’s braid leaned down to look at him. “My name is Talyn,” she said. “Talyn Wyran av Tiirsha dryn Straad. A dream brought me here. The woman in white sent me.”
Aaran’s mouth went dry. Both Hawkspar and Talyn had talked of the woman in white who appeared to them in dreams.
“She … sent you?”
“I have little time to talk. Where is she?”
A chill ran down Aaran’s spine. “What are you going to do?”
“The woman in white told me,” Talyn said, “that I must greet the ship. That another was bound in the twists of magic spun too deeply, as I had once been bound. That another faced the hell of darkness caught between life and death. I’ve come to save her. If I can. If it isn’t too late.”
Hawkspar
My mother and father talked, and I sat on the rug-covered floor of our shadda, playing with a wooden horse an older brother had carved for me. I was warm. I was happy. Nothing changed, but then, it didn’t need to change. I needed nothing but what I had.
And then a woman pushed her way into the picture—bent my world around me and said, “No. You will not die this way.”
I could not ignore her, though I tried. I tried to hang on to the safe places, the comfort, my family, but the woman surrounded me with brilliant light in gold and red and blue, and the power and the brilliance of it dragged me back into time. Into cold, screaming currents that carried me, fighting, back to places of pain and fear and madness.
I fought, but the woman held me down, and shielded both of us—I could feel her magic, and I could see the Hagedwar she held around us both. It was different than Aaran’s—the points of both tetrahedrons pushed all the way through the surface of the ruby cube and into the brilliant sapphire of the sphere. Because of the difference in its shape, it had a different feel, as well. It felt dangerous. Powerful and wild.
