by Erin Hoffman
When he came back to himself, Orchid was doing something rather remarkable involving her thumbs and the balls of his feet-it sent little prickles of sensation jolting up his spine. Despite the sleepy haze he'd drifted into earlier, he suddenly felt quite awake and energized.
Orchid seemed to sense his return to full consciousness. Her quiet voice was pitched for his ears only, a tone that said she was describing plant leaves, or linseed oil. “You must be careful with priestesses,” she pressed deeply just above his heel with her thumbs. Vidarian's heart picked up speed, and not from the pressure. “They are rarely what they claim, and even more rarely what they seem to be. You know this, I am sure, good sir, but you have been with Lady Ariadel long, and your air together is one of shared pain that binds. Take care it does not bind you too closely.”
Vidarian would have spoken at that, for an objection rolled up like a blue squall in his chest, but Orchid twisted his foot in a way that sent thin lances of white energy up his calf-hardly unpleasant, but utterly disabling. Lights flashed across his eyes, and Orchid was still speaking as she moved to his other foot, with a smile as though she were commenting on his reaction. “Lady Ariadel is long a friend of this inn, we have known her family for generations. But there are secrets that the priestesshood keeps from her. Never confuse her for them.”
Quelled, he said, finally, pitching his voice to wonder, as though he were asking about her technique: “How do you know so much of the priestesshood?”
“They do not have a monopoly on secret knowledge,” she said, a careless murmur that said she was discussing the weather, a cloth shipment. “You have energy of a kind I have never seen, sir Vidarian. Your task will be as great, of this I have no doubt. Look to yourself for answers, and trust not what you hear.” She raised her voice. “Prepare a robe, please.”
Orchid's assistant padded lightly across the room and was promptly at his shoulder, ready to help him to his feet and into a plush cotton robe.
Orchid appeared in front of him just as he settled the robe across his shoulders. Something glistened on each of her index fingers, and she reached up to massage his temples with them. The sharp, clean scent of lavender filled his nostrils, and he took a deeper breath almost without meaning to. “Remember always,” she said, rhythmically as if in harmless ritual benediction, “the gifts you carry will bring many to desire your friendship. But that friendship is your own gift, to be delivered to those most deserving. And the world is wide and full of secrets.” As if to complete her anointing, Orchid brushed one thumb across his forehead, and smiled, the intentness of her eyes sealing the words they had exchanged into silence. She and the assistant stepped back and bowed gracefully, still smiling, palms flat on their thighs. Vidarian fought the impulse to return the bow as they smoothly straightened. Orchid gestured, and her assistant nodded, then turned to lead him down another hallway.
In his haze of physical relaxation and mental brooding it was difficult to recall what directions they'd taken before, but if his suspicion was correct, the inn was huge-Orchid's young assistant, still unnamed, led him further in toward its center through another series of wood-paneled hallways, one of which opened up suddenly into a misty atrium.
Ariadel awaited them there, stretched like an indolent goddess across a satin-upholstered lounging chair. Her eyes roved up and down Vidarian's body as he approached. The assistant did not quite bow quickly enough to mask her smile.
When the young masseuse had taken her leave, and Vidarian had settled gingerly into another lounging chair next to Ariadel's, the fire priestess spoke. “You had Orchid? Oo.” Catlike envy twinkled briefly in her lazy gaze, and her voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. “She's my favorite.”
Vidarian searched her eyes for any hint of hidden intent, but found none, and grabbed at random for something to say. “I didn't catch her assistant's name.…” He craned his neck to look back up the wood-paneled passageway.
“She probably didn't have one.”
“What?”
“I mean, she has a name, of course, but she probably doesn't have a flower-name yet. They only get those after they've completed training. The assistants are all trainees.”
“I see.” He consciously smoothed his furrowed brow. “Do you come here often?” As he spoke, Vidarian took in his new surroundings, eyes roaming to absorb the tall, waxy-leafed trees, spreading ferns, twittering little birds, and strange hanging decanters that issued forth steady streams of white mist.
“I try to stop in every time I come up this route. They're very kind, and adjust their schedules to accommodate me when they can.” Ariadel was picking delicately at a silver platter of strange pink-orange fruit. After a moment she selected a thin slice and began to nibble at one end, away from the slim green rind. Between bites (which by her ecstatic eye-closing she thoroughly enjoyed), she said, “It makes the rest of the journey quite a bit more tolerable.”
Vidarian lifted his eyes from the fruit platter, one hand hovering over it. “Rest of the journey?”
Ariadel wrinkled her nose. “It's by verali. Smelly creatures. I never liked them.”
Priestesses had a fondness for heights that continually baffled Vidarian. The climb to Sher'azar was steep, blasted by wind and sun alike, and treacherous. Thalnarra had parted with them at the mountain's base, and as they watched her climb into the sky, wings angled and embracing the wind, Vidarian got a glimmering suspicion as to why all of the great temples perched like rock gulls on barely accessible mountaintops. If what Thalnarra had said about the origins of magic was right…he wondered if the priestesses that inhabited the temples now knew they had been meant for gryphon perches and not human habitation.
This trip up a treacherous mountain, at least, bore stark and comforting contrast to Vidarian's lone trek up the unforgiving crags of Sher'azar. Though the wind bit, the warmth of their verali mounts and the soft shrouds of black wool given to them at the mountain's base kept them both warm and protected from the howl of Sher'azar's persistent winter.
The verali themselves seemed agreeable enough: lanky creatures with exceptionally long necks and legs. Their curled wool-black for Vidarian's, a kind of mottled rust-and-ochre for Ariadel's-had a strong smell to it, not entirely unpleasant, but carried by oil from their skin, and as such it clung to any who handled them for days after. It was the smell of them that Ariadel claimed drove her mad. Between being saddled with a verali and having to leave her kitten at the Gatehouse (Endera, it seemed, was allergic to cats and would not permit them on temple grounds), Ariadel had worked up a fine head of ire, and Vidarian kept as clear a berth as he could without drawing attention to his distance. Irrational Ariadel had been about that kitten from the very beginning, but Vidarian had to admit that leaving it behind hadn't been easy-the thing had made such a terrible fuss, seeming to know even before Ariadel did that it would not be coming with them.
When they stopped to make camp halfway up the peak, with the wind intensifying and threatening ice, the sun had already sunk low beyond the foothills, leaving only a smudge of ruddy light to carry its eulogy. When Vidarian slung himself down from the saddle, jolts of forgotten feeling speared his legs, and he reached for his mount to steady himself.
Something, he was never quite sure what, guided his hand to one side, away from the hold he normally took on the pack's open flap. Startled anew by his sudden lack of control over his hands, he was about to stretch out his legs to make sure no other muscles were failing when he caught the glint of something small and metallic out of the corner of his eye.
There, tucked into a fold of the pack, rested a tiny glinting spider, gold of body, its ten legs balancing it cozily on a network of gossamer stretched across the parted leather. Vidarian's sharp breath of surprise brought Ariadel to his shoulder, and when she saw what the pack contained, she let out a little cry of astonishment.
“These spiders were prized by the priestesshood decades ago,” she said, a flush high on her cheeks, all thought of verali or abandon
ed kittens forgotten. “We haven't seen one in all that time, and they were rare long before my mother was born. Endera will be ecstatic.”
“What do you want to do with it?” Vidarian eyed the spider, unsettled by its returning ten-eyed unblinking gaze.
Ariadel's forehead wrinkled as she considered the creature. “We can't leave it in there. One jolt and it'd be done for.” With a little turn that scraped gravel under her feet, she turned to her verali and dug into its packs. After a moment of rummaging she came up with a sheet of the thick, fragrant parchment the priestesses used as a kind of quick-flaming incense; when burned, it would go up in a rush of bright flame all at once, leaving behind only a column of richly scented smoke.
With deft fingers Ariadel began folding the parchment into a small but secure little box. “The acolytes used to practice at making paper figures,” she explained. “This won't be paradise, but it'll do.” She'd left one side of the box open and held it widely ajar as she returned to Vidarian's side.
The spider lifted its two front legs as her shadow crossed its vision, but otherwise did not move, not even when Ariadel, exquisitely careful, brought the box around behind it and scooped it, plus a good portion of web, gently into the paper box. She shut the lid by tucking its flap into one of the intricate folds, then cupped the box between her hands as though it were the warm egg of some precious bird.
But another occupant of the pack had been disturbed by the tearing of the gossamer web. It skittered across the back of the pack, tiny clawed feet clinging delicately to the leather. Vidarian took an involuntary step back as its motion caught his eye. “I think you're going to need another of those boxes.”
Ariadel rushed back to the pack, still cradling the paper box with fingertips touching it as little as possible. “Another one?” Her voice was dry with incredulity.
The second spider, as far as Vidarian could tell, was identical to the first, glittering gold body and tiny black eyes. “Looks like it. Is that lucky?”
Ariadel cast him a look that made him feel quite the cabin boy, but superstitions had never been his forte. “Not particularly.” She frowned. “Just very strange.” But she made another box, and it went next to the first, tucked with a cushioning nest of underclothing into the emptied case for their firebox. By the faraway look in her eyes Vidarian knew she was still contemplating the spiders as they set about making camp-Ariadel with the fire and cooking, Vidarian seeing to the verali.
It was the first night that they had spent together, truly alone, since the farmhouse and the storm. That quiet realization set in with the fading of the sky and the appearance of the first bright stars. Three moons brightened the sky, enough to show them both to each other clearly even without the golden light of the fire.
“Did you always want to be a ship captain?” Her soft voice barely rose above the crackling of the fire as it consumed the dark, pitchy wood that was all that was available on the mountain.
Vidarian stared into its quiet light a long moment before he answered. “I wasn't supposed to be,” he admitted finally. “The Quest was my father's ship, my grandfathers'…. They won her from the first Emperor.” He thought again of his ship, his crew, and here his feet further from the sea than they'd been in years. “I was born on her. But Relarion, my brother, was supposed to be her captain. He died when I was young.”
Concern wrinkled her forehead, and something more-a fear and a hesitancy. But she said only, “I'm sorry.”
He lifted his hands to the fire's warmth, shaking his head. “You never let go of a pain like that, but it's an old one. I became the captain I thought my father wanted from Rel.”
Ariadel smiled, a soft smile of quiet wonder and unfamiliarity. “We never had a ship, but…my family always thought that I was special,” her head tilted with shyness, “destined for something.”
His hand moved of its own and brushed her arm with the back of his fingers. “You are.”
Her eyebrows lifted a heartbeat before her laugh, high and sudden, but then her fingertips, cool with the night, were on the back of his neck, pulling. Vidarian moved to her with a quiet rush, filled his hands with her hair, drawing their faces closer, and when they met it was with electricity, searing memory and completion that shot straight down to his bones. His hands traversed the slender column of her neck, rested on her shoulders, thumbs tracing slim collarbones, before he opened his eyes again.
“This was where we left off,” Ariadel breathed, and her heart was a wild rhythm beneath his hands.
“Then it's a good place to pick up,” he said, and her arms tightened at his back, drawing them closer again, sliding to guide him to parts of her that were soft as summer waters, firm and smooth beneath his weathered hands. As their faces met again something dropped inside him, and every sensation doubled. When his hand slid down her arm the sweet rush of warmth was in his mind as in hers, felt as she felt, and when she drew quick breath, the same headiness quickened his pulse. That's very interesting, she breathed, in his thoughts. And pick up they did.
Vidarian woke, gasping.
They had made camp in the lee of a rocky prominence, a pocket in the stone sheltered from the wind. Here it seemed full night, but a red glow that just touched the stony path outside whispered of the oncoming dawn. Vidarian's eyes sought it out of reflex, reaching for light as he drew in a deep breath to still his pounding heart.
There, resolving with the slowly grown morning, was the curve of a slender foot disappearing beneath folds of velvet.
The red-haired priestess he had met on his first journey up the mountain stared coldly down at him for a long moment, then turned and left the niche opening. Her footsteps made no sound.
The command in her stare had been unmistakable, and Vidarian swallowed a groan as he levered himself up from the blankets. He moved carefully and watched Ariadel as he did so, but she did not stir.
The priestess stood facing the dawn, pupils reduced to pinpricks and rendering her golden eyes all the more unworldly. There was no sign of the splendor of images that had surrounded the goddess at their first meeting; only, for several long moments, her stony silence.
“I miscalculated,” she said at last, and Vidarian tried to wrap his mind around that thought. The perpetual winds of Kara'zul seemed to rise at the sound of her voice. “We have all miscalculated. And now the hour is late.” Her eyes remained fixed on the rising sun, a steady gaze that would have burned the eyes of a human in moments. “You should die for what you bring into this world. I should have killed you, last you came here. I only want you to know that.”
No protocol that Vidarian had ever learned dealt with apologizing to an angry goddess. “If I have angered you, my-”
“Leave my mountain quickly,” she said. “You cannot anger me. But you are mine no more.”
In the morning Ariadel was as subdued as Vidarian felt, and he resolved then to mention the appearance of the fire goddess to no one. There had been no symbols for Endera to mine, and indeed no message for any but himself. As they packed in wordless cooperation, he wondered if somehow Ariadel suspected that the goddess had visited, and spent the remainder of the morning puzzling over how she could know, or, if she did, why she remained silent.
But Ariadel's mood seemed to lift as they closed in on the temple by midday, and Vidarian listened with genuine interest as she described the history of the various parts of the architecture and the paved road that led to it. It was a much finer way of approaching the temple, he decided, than being carried in unconscious.
Their welcome, too, differed night and day from his first visit. Acolytes stood waiting for them at the temple doors, panels of carved red ironwood that stood three times a man's height. One of them took the verali, leading them off to an outbuilding as soon as Ariadel had taken the paper spider boxes from the packs. She carried them gingerly and led the way through the temple doors.
“I'll need to see Endera right away.” She turned apologetically to Vidarian. “But they'll have prepared quarters
for us both.”
“We have,” the remaining acolyte said, and her eyes were round and blue and large as she addressed Vidarian. “Lady Endera has prepared a private banquet in honor of your arrival, my lord-”
“It's Captain.”
“-my lord Captain,” the acolyte corrected with a deep bow of apology, and Vidarian swallowed a sigh. “If you'll be so kind as to follow me, I can escort you to our bathing house, and your quarters.”
Vidarian lowered beseeching eyebrows at Ariadel, but she only lifted the spider boxes gently in encouragement. “Some hot water would do us both good,” she said. “I'll see you at dinner, Captain.”
“All right.” He surrendered with lifted hands. “Lead the way.”
By the time he was seated at the alabaster banquet table, Vidarian was glad indeed of the temple's opulent bathhouse, though he could swear he still detected a hint of verali musk on his skin. Perhaps Ariadel was right about the smelly creatures. He found himself smiling as he thought of her reclining at the Lustrous Pearl, and mastered his features with conscious effort.
Endera joined them some time after Ariadel arrived, accompanied, rather to Vidarian's surprise, by Thalnarra. Despite the presence of the huge gryphoness, the four of them were dwarfed by the high-ceilinged banquet hall and vast alabaster dining table, and their voices echoed. The two golden spiders had been invited as well, it seemed-each occupied a mesh terrarium filled with thick green-leafed branches.
