“How much time will that cost us?” Hafgrim asked.
Elias shook his head. “Very little. Once we’re on the coast, the ocean winds will be against us. We’d do about as well to ride the distance, at least where time alone is concerned. As far as safety...”
“You don’t trust the benevolence of Kelmantium?” Adria smiled wryly.
He shrugged. “Absolutely, just as I’m assuming that your entire Sisterhood embassy tripped and fell down the stairs.”
Criseda, Tiffan, and Osenne, shadowed by Emoni, came above deck in the wake of the battle, and now proved of some worth tending to the wounded with reasonable skill.
Adria was able to use her own skills as well. She found one of the young Knights sitting alone and out of the way, his back against a barrel, seemingly relaxing except for the arrow protruding awkwardly from his hip right where his leather hauberk ended. Adria rushed to kneel beside him when she saw this, and he blinked and smiled awkwardly at her.
“Good... morning, Ma’am,” he said, as if drunkenly passing a stranger on the street.
“...good morning, soldier,” Adria said, reflexively unsheathing her skinning knife. “Can you tell me where you are from?”
“I am... I am from Heiland, Ma’am...”
“And what is your name, if I may ask?”
He nodded, slowly, then seemed to remember the question after a moment. “It is Edward, Ma’am... if it pleases you.”
Already confused...
As she cut the linen of his breeches, Adria was relieved to find only a long cut along the side of his thigh. Not even going to need a suture...
“You’ve served well today, Edward...”
“Thank you... Ma’am.”
As Adria reached into her pack for clean cloth and the Aesidhe ointment for burns and wounds, she noticed that Emoni had wandered over to watch.
“You’ve learned from the Wilding,” Emoni said without inflection, as Adria cleaned the excess blood and carefully spread the salve upon the wound.
“The Mechushegiya of the Aesidhe have much to teach,” Adria responded.
Emoni nodded very slowly, her eyes now unfocused, turned to look upon the sea or beyond. “The voice of many in one...” she whispered, and Adria nearly stopped in her ministrations. Emoni sighed, and smiled slightly, then looked over Adria’s work, the Knight, and turned half away.
“A pity this one will die anyway,” she sighed, distractedly.
The young Knight tensed, though he otherwise kept his composure, and Adria raised her voice, only slightly. “Walk away, child.”
Emoni curtsied, without turning back. “As you say, Your Highness,” she breathed, and wandered off to other curiosities. “Once more for the crows…”
She saw moments of light, then faces she tried to name. They sang for her, and called her names, and then she awoke upright into darkness, covered in the water of her own sweat.
“You were lost for some time, Mélitali,” Shísha said as Adria came to awareness. “Scattered to the winds. It was not easy to pull back all the strands. They tangled. They stuck to places and things I could not see, and even after much effort, I thought that we would unravel the last of you, and you would join your ancestors. But then, you were at last led home.”
Adria nodded, dazed. “Yes... I was led, Imatéli. Did you see her?”
Shísha nodded and smiled. “I did see, Pukshonisla, and I was not the only one. You have been well named.”
Adria shook her head, confused, even as her own memory faded from the waking and the dreaming. And then she remembered something of what had happened. Arrows, fire, a bridge over water, and her uncle’s hand.
“Atuteko...?” she asked then, as the Holy Woman helped her to sit up, and then held a heady broth to her lips.
“Ch,” Shísha said, an odd Aesidhe expression, somewhere between shush and oh which one only used with close friends or family. “Your Chosen Father is making wrong things right, as best he can.”
Adria nodded, unsure of her meaning but not her tone. “I don’t remember everything that happened. I remember nothing after the fire... after the bridge.”
“Drink, silly girl,” Shísha chided in Aeman. “What is passed can wait. It is not a simple task to come back from such a death.”
Adria did as asked, and in the coming days her strength and pieces of the rest of her story came in fragments. The first and easiest came with some humor. As she recovered, others joked that she had stood alone against an army of Aesidhe Hunters and won.
Out of respect, her uncle’s part was not directly mentioned — they knew, as Adria did, that his reconciliation would have to wait — his reconciliation with her, with the Runners… with the People.
Maybe this time, time will heal his wounds, Adria hoped.
Imani was somewhat more revelatory, though the details and scope of the events were a bit beyond her knowledge or understanding. “You nearly drowned, they say... if Watelomoksho had not been there to save you from the river, you would not be here now. Still, you took fever, and they carried you back on a litter, all the way from the Others’ lands. They had you in the lodge for almost two days…. It took Shísha and all our Mechushegiya to bring you back, and more. You should have heard how Náme and I prayed for your safe return, how all the women wept and the men made offerings to All Our Ancestors.”
Náme embraced Adria almost shyly, as she always did, seemingly oblivious to matters of life and death, regardless of her own experience. Still, just this once, she did not seem to be expecting a present.
Mateko arrived with the first of the Runners, fresh with stores from distant caches, readying the tribes for winter. When they met, each of them seemed a little wary of the other.
“You saved the camp?” she said, after they had exchanged a smile and a nod.
“We did, only barely so.”
They were silent for a moment, as Adria and others helped him unload the pallet he dragged behind him. Finally, she asked, hesitantly, “Did you lead them along the foothills?”
He looked up at her and smiled again. “Did you lead your uncle’s army to the fort?”
She shook her head. Of course, he knows what happened.
He shrugged and nodded. “It was a good thing you disobeyed, for so did we.”
They smiled at each other again and finished their task. They would say nothing more, for they both knew that what had to be said had to be said by Preinon.
Finally, several moons after she had awoken, even as the first snows fell, Adria learned that her uncle had returned to camp, alone, and Mateko brought her the news.
“He did a wise thing,” Mateko said. “He said he wanted a judgment, a punishment, but that we have no such thing. And so he returned all of his Hunters to the tribes they had come from, and he told them the story of what had happened, and humbled himself before their elders in shame, and prayed to their Ancestors for forgiveness. By now, every tribe must know the story of the Hunters of Men, and the one who turned them away from tragedy.”
Adria only nodded sullenly.
He smiled and punched her in the arm. “Aren’t you happy, Lilene? You are a hero now.”
She smiled gamely, but he knew something of how she felt. He might have embraced her for comfort, but hesitated, and she rose instead, with a heavy heart, to find her uncle.
As she walked, barely disturbing the surface of the first winter snow, she absently touched the wound upon her breast, and the cheek where the pain from her uncle’s hand had long faded from flesh, but not from memory.
Despite the need to make port, Captain Falburn ordered for the ship to be scandalized for an hour, as soon as the worst of the wounds were cared for. The sailors half-dismantled the rigging, leaving the sails and lines useless against the masts. The dead were buried at sea, to a mournful shanty led not by Josson but by the captain.
“Too many,” Adria said, as they saluted the last of the sailors, who slipped into his deep blue grave, the very image of the sky above it.
Elias answered, “There’s little better we might have fared, Highness.”
Adria nodded as she looked out over those gathered to mourn, nodding with some satisfaction and even pride. Not, perhaps, without a greater cost.
“It’s over now,” Hafgrim agreed. “Perhaps we were given this challenge to strengthen us.”
Adria thought of a dozen Aesidhe sayings as response. Some agreeable, some contrary. In the end, she merely smiled a little and nodded, letting Hafgrim have the final word.
When Adria went below, she found Starbrow and the other horses safe within their slings, though of obvious distemper after The Echo’s battle maneuvers. The deck was still awash beneath them, and this and the slant made footing difficult for Adria.
“Ch, strong one,” she urged the steed in Aesidhe. “Everything will be better now, for awhile...”
In the corner of her eye, she saw a bit of what seemed like sunlight upon the water, and when she turned her head, she saw that an apple had floated into the cabin.
“Look, Starbrow, a present...” she laughed, and when she reached to pluck it from the wash, she saw more of the golden fruit at the edges of her vision, trailing off across the deck to where their barrel had toppled. There, Emoni stood, considering the same scene across the distance, her skirts soaked a darker green up to her knees.
They watched the apples, half floating and half tumbling down and across the planking, and they watched each other, without a word.
And in another moment, Adria turned to feed her apple to the impatient steed beside her, while Emoni drew up her outer skirt a little in the front, and leaned down, and began to gather up the apples again, with the grace and beauty of a ghost or a dancer.
Adria found Preinon in the meadow where he had first trained the Hunters of Men. It was covered in early snow now, but in the spring it would be full of tall grasses, foxes, and butterflies. He had set up camp here, at its center, and as she arrived he was making himself a simple dinner over his small fire.
“I have enough to share,” he offered as she approached.
She nodded, sitting on her haunches beside him, warming her hands. They had grown callused in her time among the Aesidhe, unseemly for an Aeman princess, but she had long since ceased to worry for such affectations in the face of utility. She had lifted so much wood and carried so many packs, had fired too many arrows. Her knife, her sword. A golden coin, the rope of a wooden bridge. Bruises that never fade.
I am only sixteen, but I have killed too many already, and... even nearly died.
“Do you know the day I was born?” she said, her tone soft, only mildly curious.
Preinon split between them a carrot he had roasted. It was still too hot, even despite her calluses, so she tossed it between her hands a moment. He sighed. “No. I was not there for your birth. I did not know you until months afterward.”
Adria nodded, trying a bite of the carrot and eying the quail he had hung over the fire to cook. “A person should know the day of her birth.”
“Perhaps so.”
She flipped her carrot around and tried the opposite side. She liked the parts which were well-roasted the best. Most usually, such things were eaten raw in the wild.
“Still,” she considered. “The Aesidhe have no calendar. They don’t seem to care so much.”
“They have the day they are named. That is better than a birthday. There are even presents.”
“Yes, I have some myself,” Adria smiled after a moment and whispered. “Shísha even crowned me Princess of Heiland.”
There was a pause before he answered, “I did not know that.” He peeled off a strip of the bird for her to taste, and she glanced at him and smiled gratefully.
“Here we are,” she said quietly. “Aeman Princes, still lost in the wilderness.”
He smiled a little at this, nodding.
She added, then, “But... still lost with a purpose. I think.”
The silences between them, somehow, had not changed. They were as comfortable now as they had ever been, despite the paths they had traveled. They shared a meager meal without complaint, regret, or guilt.
“You know,” Adria smiled after some time. “I once tried to insult Taber, by pointing out that all her Sisters took foreign names. Of course, you can guess what she said to me in return.”
“Aye.” Preinon chuckled mildly, for neither of their names were Aeman.
“It shook my pride... to think that I wasn’t Aeman enough somehow, like my father, like Hafgrim. I felt wrong, somehow, and suddenly had a name to blame it on. It seems silly, now, of course.”
“You’ve earned three others.”
“Three birthdays, three names, none of them given at birth,” she nodded. “They all mean something, to the People and to me.”
“They tell a story,” he smiled. “Golden hair paling in the sun, walking the webs of two people, and following the White Wolf into the Wild.”
“...the once and future princess, who may yet leave the People, but keep the hope of saving them... of...” and she shook her head. “...of seeing them saved... in some way, somehow.”
She closed her eyes, blinking tears, savoring the quail and the wild carrots a moment, before speaking again. “We are led, Atuteko. I know this now. By all who came before us, to some far ocean only they now know.”
For the first time in awhile, Adria was not worried by the mystery. She had asked enough questions — of those around her, of herself, and of the world. But as she watched the fire and cherished the last few morsels of meat, she thought of the Aeman boy who might have survived Palmill.
She thought of the coin, of more value than any in his village had likely ever known, which might have bought him a place in any town, or might just as easily have brought him only trouble.
An offering… Adria sighed. In payment of my guilt.
She imagined the survivors of the village, and wondered if they had returned to the ruins. She imagined their wrath for the Aesidhe, for Preinon, for her. She imagined they wailed in anger, and looked forward to their own day of vengeance against the savages of the forest.
Perhaps unborn children would be named after dead fathers, and young boys would grow into Knights, with the righteousness of The One and a rage for their fallen fathers.
How many of us are named in love, Adria wondered. And how many in anger?
“The Ghosts of Heiland far outnumber the living,” Adria whispered. “They live on in our names, if not our memories.”
Preinon swallowed, nodding slowly. “You were... named after your mother.”
Adria saw tears in his eyes, and they mirrored her own. Without looking away from the fire, Preinon reached to take her hand in his.
“Why did you never tell me?” Adria whispered after a long, long moment. “Why such a secret? Because the question makes me stronger than the answer?”
He nodded slowly, still watching the fire. “Because it keeps you safe. Because… it gives you a choice.” He turned, still nodding, and Adria could see.
He might have conquered the world for me.
Preinon Idonea took a long breath, smiled as much as he might, and squeezed her hand in his. “Because such a secret can make you queen.”
Epilogue
The Same Dream
It’s the same dream as always.
But…
There is something missing.
I’m flying, carried by a raven’s wings.
I’m clutching something precious. Something secret.
But I cannot see what I hold.
O
nly the sun, the sky, and the sea, far below.
A ship floats upon the water. Men shouting, loosing arrows, and...
Whatever I held so precious falls.
And I fall after... Into water, into nothing,
Into light.
There is something... missing.
A memory. A name.
A purpose. A place.
I don’t know who I am.
I don’t know why I’m here.
I am staring at the sun, and it doesn’t blind my eyes.
There is something missing.
Me.
The Story of the Heirs Continues...
Heir of Scars I: Parts 1-8 Page 61
