An Elegy of Heroes

by K. S. Villoso

  “She’s not Sagar. You know that, right?”

  Kefier’s heart sank. “What?”

  “Apparently, Sagar is her son. Her name is Narani.”

  He tried to wrap his head around that. “Why does it matter? She’s a healer too, isn’t she?”

  “Sagar specialized in agan-wrought ailments, which she thinks this is. She doesn’t know much about these things herself. We’re in Jin-Sayeng, after all.”

  Kefier dumped the firewood under the stove and sighed. “Where’s her son?”

  “Shirrokaru. She tells me she hasn’t seen him in years. Doesn’t mean he’s dead, so maybe we can find someone who knows where he is. Or perhaps we can travel elsewhere, find a healer who can do something.”

  He held his hands out. “I don’t know how far Shirrokaru is.”

  “It’s another five or six days from here.”

  “Elsewhere is even further. The closest you can find anyone working with the agan is the Kag, perhaps. Across the sea to Xiaro? Or we’d have to go all the way to Dageis.” He snorted at the thought.

  “I don’t care. For Dai’s sake…”

  “If your Ylir hadn’t destroyed the mages in Enji, maybe we’d have a shot.” It was an unfair slight, but he couldn’t help it. “If he was more careful, you’d be in better condition to travel wherever it is you wanted.”

  “Are you actually blaming him for all of this?”

  “Do you want me to blame you?”

  “I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  Kefier turned away. They’ve had this argument before, and he was too cold and too hungry to bite back.

  Of course, there should have been no argument that Enosh—the man she loved and knew by his merchant name, Ylir, and Kefier’s own brother—was an idiot. The man was single-handedly responsible for this upheaval in their lives, and for what? Some selfish reason, no doubt, which would only benefit him. Kefier noted that Sume was glaring at him, bit his lip, and sat down. “All right,” he said.

  “All right what?”

  “Don’t get yourself all worked up. The baby might pop out of you.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” she snapped.

  “Not if it’s not time yet! I don’t know!” If there wasn’t a storm outside, he would’ve walked out by now. Ab in heaven, were all women so temperamental when pregnant? Jang was looking more and more like the better company.

  It took all of Kefier’s strength not to start hitting the wall in frustration. Sume hated it when he lost patience, and they weren’t going to get anywhere if they continued arguing, which seemed to become easier the more familiar they became with each other. “Please,” he found himself murmuring. “Sang Narani told me you need to be more careful.” He gave a thin smile and tried to lower his voice. “You can’t die and leave me alone with Dai. That wouldn’t be fair.”

  Sume took a deep breath, as if she herself had just refrained from saying something hurtful. “All right,” she murmured. “I’m sorry. We need to work together to save him. And for what it’s worth, you’ve already done more than enough for us. More than I expected.”

  The sudden softness of her voice was enough to soothe his temper. He suddenly regretted being so hard on her. Being saddled with a child after getting abandoned by the man who planted it in her couldn’t be easy, and he knew—had seen—the burden she’d had to bear the last few months. “It’s not enough,” he replied. “I can’t bring your brother back.”

  “That life would have killed him, sooner or later.” She turned away and placed her hand on her belly. “We have to live with the consequences of the decisions we make.” She left him alone, then, in silence and in the dark.

  Sang Narani returned not long after with a bag of rice and a pork hock wrapped in paper. “You didn’t butcher that flower, did you?” she asked, casting one eye on him. “Well, at least you started the fire. I see you’re not entirely hopeless.”

  She dropped the hock into a pot of water before gesturing at the bundle of herbs on the table. “Lucky for you, my friend had exactly what your wife needs.”

  “Will it be enough?” He glanced through the doorway at Sume’s sleeping form.

  She snorted. “Of course not, unless she births tonight. Have you thought about what you will do?”

  “No,” Kefier admitted. “She has. She wants to go to Shirrokaru and find your son.”

  Narani laughed. “My son! That wayward boy? Two decades without a word to his poor, ailing mother, and you think you can find him?”

  “I didn’t say it was a good idea,” he mumbled.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “What do I think?”

  She waved the wet ladle at him. “Don’t answer a question with a question, boy. Her mind is muddled. I can see it: she’ll jump off a bridge for her nephew if she’s convinced it would save him. You need to decide here.”

  Kefier glanced through the window for a moment, staring at the grey, pouring rain. “There will be healers in Shirrokaru, in any case. It is a very big city.”

  Narani cocked an eyebrow. “You’re afraid of her.”

  “Of course not! I...”

  “Do you honestly think I’ll let you both walk out of here while she’s in that condition?” She got up and stirred the pot. “You will stay here until she has the child, and then you may leave. The herbs alone may not save her, but being here is better than if she begins to birth out there, with only you by her side.”

  “If there’s nothing you can do for Dai, she won’t want to stay. I tried. The boat was her idea. If I hadn’t gone with her, she would have gone on without me. Besides...” He clasped his hands behind his neck. “I am responsible for the boy, too. You did say. They’re my family, now.”

  She looked amused by his declaration. “You needed to say that?”

  A sudden thought occurred to him. “What if you went with us?”

  She threatened him with the ladle. “Now you truly are daft! Why in all the spirits of this kingdom would I want to go with you? In this weather? With my back giving out more and more often these days?”

  “Maybe if you didn’t insist on carrying the boy…”

  “Gods be damned, children walking in here and spouting nonsense like it’s everybody’s business…” She pulled out an onion and began to chop it up.

  “Don’t you want to know what happened to your son?”

  “No. Don’t bring it up again. And get out of my kitchen—your prattling is ringing inside my head like a cat in heat. Out!” She lifted the knife. He dashed out before she could think of pointing it at him, and returned to the horse in the rain.

  Chapter Three

  Sapphire’s face was hidden behind a book when Enosh walked into her room. He pulled a chair close to her and sat in it backwards, his arms folded over the rail. “May I have a cup of coffee?” he asked in the sweetest voice he could muster.

  The look she gave him from the rim of her book made him regret his words, and for a moment, his entire existence as it was.

  “I didn’t make enough for two,” she said, in a tone you normally gave to people if you had a knife at their throat.

  He touched his chest, feigning heartache. “You needn’t be so harsh, you know.”

  She placed her book face-down on the table. “What are you doing here? Had enough of your whores?”

  “As a matter of fact, they’ve had enough of me, so I came up here to see if maybe you were up for it.” He smiled and waggled his eyebrows.

  She glared.

  “On second thought, you’d probably castrate me with a spoon. Look, I have quite the conundrum here. How can you not have any idea where your old master had gotten off to?”

  “Because I’m neither his confidante nor a mind-reader.”

  He laughed. “I told Yn Garr the exact same words. He ahhh—doesn’t believe you.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “Ah, but dear Sapphire, it is. You see, my master tends to have a m
ore drastic approach when it comes to these things. Have I told you the story of Hamis Begram? It’s a delightful tale of a world-famous builder turned alleyway beggar. You’d laugh.”

  She pretended to, for a moment, before returning to her book.

  “You fail to see how big of a predicament this brings you,” he said.

  “No, I see it. Your master wants me tortured in the slim hope that I might be able to reveal Bannal’s location to you.” She calmly turned a page. “And you, on the other hand, are going to do everything in your power to keep me safe and secure, because you don’t want him to find out that you need my help more than you let on.”

  Enosh coughed. “You do have a way with words.”

  “Do I? Perhaps I can pen him the letter myself, tell him that your pet has sorely outgrown your skills—”

  “Now, leave Giggles out of this…”

  “—and that perhaps his time is better spent with apprentices that are actually trained in the art of manipulating agan.”

  “Come now, Sapphire. You know that Yn Garr can’t find a replacement that easily. Maybe you’re a better mage, but you won’t even approach that thing, let alone do half of what I can do. My blood…”

  “You don’t have to explain it to me. I know how it works.” She narrowed her eyes. “Do you really think you’re the only descendant from that motley of mages who once defeated your pet?”

  “I’m the only one who can do this.”

  “So you tell yourself. Enosh, even you can’t be that naïve.”

  He paused. “What did you just call me?”

  “Your name. It is your name, is it not? Enosh Tar’elian.” Sapphire pressed her spectacles upward. “Before you attacked Enji, Lord Bannal drew the memories out of your brother Kefier. He knows everything. He knows that another descendant of Jaeth is alive, and within grasp. Get close to him and he may just use this against you.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Ke-if is about as useless in the agan as a little boy fighting with a stick. Why, when we were children, our father tested him. I won’t bore you with the details, but he landed head-first in the sand and was unconscious for several hours. We thought he’d died.”

  He drew back and saw that Sapphire wasn’t even listening to him. “Is that what you think, then? Bannal is going after my brother?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. He doesn’t know where he is.” Sapphire leaned back against her chair and regarded him with an expression that was almost smug. “Do you?”

  When Enosh said nothing in response, she gave a rare smile. “Then I suggest you find better ways to keep tabs on your family before they can be used against you.”

  Enosh returned to his room and found the letter Ranias had been keeping for him these past few months. For a long time, he stared at it, his fingers drumming across the yellow parchment. The sole candle on his desk flickered against the breeze from the open window.

  “Close that,” the woman in the bed said. “It’s cold.”

  “Go back to sleep,” he murmured. There was a plate of grapes beside the candle. He popped one in his mouth.

  She drew the blankets up to her chest and sat up. “What’s that you’re busy with?”

  When he didn’t answer, she giggled. “It’s a letter from your lover, isn’t it?”

  “You’re my lover.”

  “You’re such a flatterer.” Her Gasparian accent was thick on her tongue. “Aren’t you going to read it? I do so want to know what she has to say. Perhaps she wants you back in her bed. On cold nights such as this—”

  Enosh held his hand out to silence her and turned to the letter. He unwound the scroll. It was dated from several months back, sent from the port of Aret-ni. But he already knew that; he knew that Kefier and Sume had gone there when they left Enji and that they stayed for months before disappearing. Before that, eight months ago—a few hours after the attack on Enji, in fact—he had sent men to retrieve his woman from their camp and was told she was last seen on the road with his brother and a boy.

  “What boy?” he remembered fuming. The men had wilted around him, realizing the gravity of what they’d just said.

  They explained. He realized that the boy was her thieving nephew, Daj, or Drai, or something like that. He wasn’t sure how the boy had made it all the way out here. Probably did it to piss him off; it didn’t matter. The boy, he was told, was very sick—an unfortunate victim of their assault on Enji. He didn’t care. She could have left him a message, could have waited to tell him herself. Instead, she went off with that stupid boy, and with Ke-if. Kefier, his bastard brother, who seemed to have made it his life’s goal to interfere with his business and take his women at least once every decade.

  It was an old wound, one Enosh refused to pick at because he thought himself better than that. So he left things as they were, and moved on to more important things; he had to return Naijwa’s beast to the tunnels that had allowed them to transport it from the Kag to Gaspar, and his master Yn Garr didn’t need to see how much personal problems interfered with his work. But he hadn’t exactly told the men to stop searching, and a few weeks later they had returned to him with the news that Sume was staying at an inn in Aret-ni. No doubt she was waiting for a suitable ship to take them back to Jin-Sayeng. Animosity between Gaspar and Jin-Sayeng had all but closed the trade routes, but there were other ways.

  Where was he, in all of this? One’s brother, the other’s lover; they seemed to have conveniently forgotten all that they owed him. He had even saved the boy himself, once. He probably shouldn’t have. Getting involved with other people for no reason was more trouble than it was worth.

  He pressed the letter back down without reading it, and turned to hear someone knocking at the door. He got up, swearing under his breath, and opened it.

  A tall man with a dark beard stood outside. “Lord Azchai calls on you, Ferral,” he said, showing stained, yellow teeth. He was wearing dusty brown leathers.

  Enosh frowned. “Good evening, Makin. At this hour?”

  “He wants you to go on an early morning ride with him.”

  “At this hour.” He crossed his arms.

  Makin grinned. “It is the correct time of the day to smell the refreshing morning breeze.”

  “Do we do that before or after we trip in the dark?” Enosh sighed. “How were you able to find me, Makin?”

  “It is an easy thing. I am told to fetch you, so I send riders to every inn, and ask for a wealthy Kag who always—always—asks for someone to warm him at night. It has not failed to show us your movements.”

  “Always? You flatter me, Makin.” He took a cloak and closed the door behind him. “Not that you can blame me if that were true. Your bloody nights are awfully cold.”

  “Then stop doing business in Gaspar! You need tough skin around here.” Makin laughed as they made their way out of the inn. Past the yard and out on the road, he caught sight of several horses. An even taller man than Makin was standing against the fence, his breath billowing like smoke. Although he was dressed in outdoor riding clothes and not the silk tunics that marked his noble status, Enosh would recognize his face anywhere. Lord Azchai leapt to his feet and gave a beaming smile as soon as he saw Enosh.

  “Hertra Ylir yn Ferral,” he said, his voice booming like a drum. He held a finger and flicked it across his nose. “You’ve eluded me too long, my friend.”

  “And here Makin was just telling me how it was such a simple thing to find me.” He held out his hand to shake Azchai’s. “I didn’t realize he was with you, now.”

  “Rajiat proved a more disagreeable employer than I figured,” Makin said with a grin. “Although, after those threatrics you engaged in just to get under his skin—a dagger in the eye, really? How did you manage to get out of that one alive, and with hardly a scratch on you? I’m hoping it’s not something we want the mandraagars to examine, do we?” He peered at Enosh’s eye with a knowing smile and a scrutiny that made Enosh uncomfortable.

  “K’an Rajiat,” Azchai snapped
. “I won’t have it said that I allow such discourtesy in my men.”

  “I apologize, K’an Azchai. Will you give me permission to withdraw and cut off my tongue with a hot blade?”

  “This man,” Azchai said, pointing. “I’m surprised Rajiat didn’t go out and cut it for you. Now, where was I?”

  “Makin was just telling me you wanted an early morning ride.”

  “Indeed.”

  Enosh frowned. “I didn’t think he was serious.”

  Azchai laughed. “Come now, Ferral. I made sure to bring you this spirited young filly. Just like you like them! Besides...” He tapped his eye. “You don’t know who could be watching. Place like this…did you know, Sir Ylir, that there are over thirty lords throughout Gaspar?”

  “Excellent. They can mingle with the Jinsein warlords and cut each others’ heads off,” Enosh murmured, climbing into the saddle. The filly danced under him. He dug his heels into the stirrup and caught Makin grinning at him. Azchai’s stallion lurched into the darkness. The filly snorted and followed him.

  A blanket of faint, greenish-blue light shimmered over the stars above them. The dazzling array was thought to be one of the few instances where agan could be seen by the naked eye. He felt the filly slow down and reached for the saddle to steady himself.

  Azchai turned to him. “I’ll cut to the chase. You’re not married, are you, Ferral?”

  The question caught him off guard and he had to stop himself from gaping. “My lord?”

  “I was told you weren’t. I wasn’t sure if you’d gone and married that Jin—Mhagaza’s concubine. What’s-her-name, daughter of that Jin hero. Not that it matters. Marry my daughter, Ferral.”

  He struggled to process that. “My lord,” he started again.

  Makin laughed. “Are you sure of this? He might give you addled grandchildren. I ah—also don’t seem to recall hearing you ask Reema for her opinion.”

  “Whatever it is, she may keep it to herself,” Azchai barked.

  “I think Reema is unlikely to do that.”