Solace

by Meredith Anne DeVoe

  Solace

  By Meredith Anne DeVoe

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 2015 Meredith Anne DeVoe

  All rights reserved.

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  Solace is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any events or characters, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Solace

  It was solace and a clear head I sought as I climbed the ridge, toward midnight; the wind growing blustery as I reached the top. Still, the sentinel pine there had withstood much greater troubles, so I climbed the spoke-like branches and sat near the top, watching the stars and idly trying to wipe the sap off of my fingers onto the bark of the trunk.

  So it was complete chance that a dark shape interrupted the stars long enough to catch my attention, and I saw within it a pair of eyes. In surprise, I reached my sticky hand up and it was grabbed by a grey-wrapped claw of a hand, while grey eyes clawed for a hold in my own.

  A face formed around the desperate eyes while we stared. My arm had snaked around the trunk while the wind buffeted the rest of the body of the figure about, but there was no weight or pull beyond the pressure of the hand that warmed in my own.

  “That harshbag, Eradis!! He turned me around so I’ve been anchorless and lost to the world for, how long? Seven winters or seventy. Please, your other hand. Please,” she begged as I hesitated, then released my arm and held it up. Another arm formed from the shadows and a cold, grey hand took it.

  Then she was swinging down to sit on a nearby branch, gasping. Further shadows formed in the night but I couldn’t tell where she ended and the tossing pine boughs began.

  I could sense she was very, very tired and the fever-bright eyes closed slowly. She leaned slowly toward the trunk and rested her head. “How is it you saw me?”

  “I was a follower of Eradis. I am a follower of Eradis,” I corrected myself, but the eyes had opened and fixed on mine again, wild.

  “Was, you said. Was? What happened? You said ‘was’. I think you meant it.” She looked me up and down, and then sat up. There was curiosity in her eyes, which I realized were blue, not grey. Color was returning to her lips, as well. “You no longer trust him, do you.”

  I hoped my voice was indifferent as I said, “What’s between me and Eradis is none of yours. What about you, why did he send you spinning?”

  I realized, though, that she was no wraith, but a girl; not much younger than myself. And she was shivering. If she didn’t get out of the tree soon, she would fall out. Eradis might not like me pulling her out of the sky like that, but it was already done and I may as well find out what I could from her before sending her back. If that’s what I was going to do.

  By the time we reached the bottom branches I had to carry her pig-a-back, but she was thin as a twig on a dead sapling. I kept her aback as we descended the ridge as it was easier than trying to climb down holding her up. The fire was embers in my hut and getting out of the wind, it seemed almost cloying. But the grey girl huddled up to the hearthstone and shivered there a long time. I lit a lamp and put one of my two stoneware cups, full of lukewarm tea, beside her. I drank cold water because the trip down had warmed me. Also, I didn’t trust her and I was on high alert. I had no idea what she would do, but if Eradis had warranted her offenses great enough to toss her over the side of the world, I had best be on the watch.

  I went to the rill and filled the small, black cookpot with sweet water. Inside, I added knots of wood to the embers and placed the pot on the three stones. I had washed barley and set it to soak earlier, so I added this to the pot with a knuckle of a wild boar and a good pinch of salt. It was simmering before the girl decided to speak. Now that she was almost warm, she smelled of icicles and smoke and summer storms and lilac and falling leaves and cold death, all at once. Her skin and hair remained grey, and I noticed that her lips had faded again to the color of old bone. I was surprised to see them color as she spoke in cold anger.

  “It was in the year that the old king died, that Eradis discarded me. Of course, kings had little to do with us. But that was the news, and the people in town were celebrating the new king’s reign. Or that was the excuse to have a party, anyway. I was surprised when Eradis insisted we go down and enjoy the music and the cider, maybe dance or play a game. He warned us to take care, but it seemed like he himself didn’t have a care in the world.” Her voice rasped and she picked up the cup and drank deeply.

  “Oh, but that’s good to feel going down.” She eyed the cup gratefully, then glanced at me. Her eyes again fixed on mine, and tears formed in the lower rims. “So cold, so lonely…” I squeezed her shoulder. The skin was cold in the rent at the shoulder of her ragged garment, but warmed under my touch immediately. When I pulled my hand away, the creamy color remained for a few minutes. I could even see freckles.

  She relaxed visibly and returned her gaze to the fire, her hands idly playing with the cup. “You went to the fête,” I prompted. The bitter aspect returned.

  “We danced, we drank, we ate roasted meat and pears and fried bread, and we laughed and danced some more. Then we started disappearing, one by one. I asked Eradis, ‘Where’s Paloma?’ He would,” the girl shrugged in illustration, “’Oh, she went back tired.’ From the six of us, only myself and Tury remained and it was getting dark and then he was gone and I saw him, trudging back up the path, like a ghost of himself. I started after him to ask what happened and Eradis was there, holding my arm in a grip like a bear’s jaw.”

  My mind was turning over. I had never heard of Paloma or Tury. And what old king was she referring to?

  I thought of the last harvest festival I had snuck off to. I knew Eradis looked the other way sometimes so I wasn’t worried about missing a few evening chores. The big house itself had plenty of places to hide, and he could assume I was playing in the hay with one of the girls.

  I had my fun and came back after dark, full of cider and music and the smiles of one particularly sweet and pretty girl. Suddenly, Eradis had been on the path in front of me. He grinned broadly at me and drew me to himself as I passed out… I awoke in the dawn, clothed on my bed, shivering and down in spirit as I could ever be. The cider had been sour, the music harsh, and the girl unkind in my memory, although none of that had seemed right.

  I dragged myself about my day, but Eradis was full and strong and seemed younger and more kind and happy than ever. I was grateful for his patience with me as I fumbled about my lessons and went back to my bed to sleep rather than practice.

  The girl continued her story. “I asked Eradis if Tury was all right and he started laughing. It was like he couldn’t help himself. He let go my arm as he doubled over. I ran to Tury to walk home with him, but it was like Tury couldn’t hear me or understand anything I was saying to him. He told me he felt so empty and cold. But I had seen him not a half-hour before, smiling as he taught a little girl the steps of the summer reel. I had eaten roast meat and plums with him.

  “Eradis was there again, and the same smile I had seen on Tury’s face as he encouraged the little girl was in his eyes. A lot made sense all at once. The others. The waking up cold and hungry of a summer’s morn after feasting. But his grip was on me, and this time after draining me of light and joy, he simply said, ‘Too bad. Now you know,’ and flung me into the summer wind, spinning and turning.”

  She looked down at her a
rms, and slid her hands up and down the thin biceps as if to warm them.

  “Summer wind doesn’t stay summer, does it?” I murmured. While she had been speaking, I had added wild leeks and thyme to the pot, and now I filled two gourd bowls with the steaming soup and set it on the hearth to cool. I added the pig’s knuckle to her bowl.

  She could barely wait and in a few moments had picked up her bowl and was blowing on it to cool, slurping tiny mouthfuls. My mind was a-roil and I couldn’t eat just yet.

  I had so much more to ask her—who she was, to begin with—but a warm, full belly was too much for her and she was asleep in a heap almost before setting the bowl down with the clean-gnawed bone. I covered her with my blanket and took the bowls to the rill to wash. I returned and banked the fire. I covered the stew, of which there was enough to break our fast.

  I was still very unsettled and it was already deep in the night. So I decided I would ask her dreams a few questions. I curled up behind her on the floor mat and pressed my forehead into her hair. Her body grew warm against mine and I stilled myself long enough to sleep.

  In the morning, she was sitting up, rubbing her face, before I woke. She looked askance at me, then shrugged. “I suppose I would have done the same,” was all she said as she unfolded her tiny frame and went outside. I also needed to go outside, but gave her a few moments to herself out there. I poked some life into the embers and put the stew near the fire. Suddenly I wondered if she had left and I grabbed the blanket and went outside.

  She was just standing in the first beams of the morning sun among the dead barley straw. Her hair, I noticed, was gold at the back where I had pressed my face into it; or was that the morning light? I shook out the blanket and began rolling it tightly.

  I realized what she was doing. Just standing still in one spot on the earth. Savoring that. I left her to it.

  Some time later she returned to the hut. She glanced at my things, which I had tidied into a bundle for traveling. There wasn’t a lot. She herself spooned out the warm stew into the bowls.

  I told her, “We can’t stay here. Eradis will come looking by tomorrow, if not today. I’ve been away for a few days. He knows about this place. It was my uncle’s. He died a few weeks ago and I told Eradis I wanted to make sure the place was in order for selling. But I really just needed to get away for a few days.”

  “I know all of that, you realize. Luken.” She looked at me significantly. My dreams had been hers as much as hers had been mine.

  “Sidoney,” I said. Saying it, I realized how much I liked the name.

  “I don’t know where you want to go, but I’m heading up the river, to Gloswin. I have a couple of relatives who might want to buy this farm from me. At least, it’s a place for me to go.” I looked up from my bowl. “What about you?”

  “If some time has passed, I think I can go back to Bend-In-the-River. He won’t come looking for me.” I must have been staring at her, because she stared questioningly back.

  “Do you mean Bend Town? You don’t want to go there. The Redhands would grab you and make you one of their thralls in a heartbeat.” She frowned, and I explained. “The whole city burned in the year the mountain smoked. That was seventy years and more ago. The land was ruined. It’s only outlaws there, and the Redhands dominate the local trade in slaves, brew, gambling, and murder.”

  Sidoney drank the last of her stew and sighed. “I have been gone a very, very long time, it seems. All my people would be long gone.” She looked at me suddenly. “How old is Eradis?”

  We both realized that Eradis was unnaturally well-preserved, and we didn’t have to guess how he accomplished his continued vigor. He sapped it from his young followers like a spider drinking the blood from its prey. Whatever misdoubts I had about Eradis became firm disillusion. And resolve.

  Sidony took my empty bowl with hers and stood to take them to the rill to wash. “Go down stream a hundred yards, and there’s a pool for bathing. Use one of the bowls. I found some clothes. You can’t show up is Gloswin in those rags.” I handed her a bundle containing a tunic and trousers, with a small pot of the rosemary-scented grease that my uncle had used oh his skin. My uncle hadn’t been a big man, and had been fastidious about his linen. I myself had changed into his old clothes just so Eradis wouldn’t spot my familiar red tunic. I had left that hanging from a peg in the hut.

  I walked backwards, saying goodbye to the farm. Even bare in the late fall, the place had charm, and I had always liked visiting when I was a child. The water was sweet and the exposure of the barley fields was favorable. The land went up to the ridge and the wild boars were plentiful on the hillside in the forest past the plum trees. My uncle had brought in his barley, dried his plums, and cut his wood; but it would go to whoever decided they wanted to live up there. It was a little far from town but a good living situation at that.

  Sidoney had come back from the stream with her hair dripping. I loaned her my comb and she worked at the tangle as we walked. Her skin looked soft from the grease, but she still appeared pale as a corpse, and as her hair dried and she plaited it down her right shoulder, it was clearly going to remain colorless as well. With the blue of her eyes, it gave her a strange beauty, like a stormy sky with a single patch of blue, a sapphire among ashes.

  Her gait seemed slightly unsteady at first and I imagined that after being tossed about the sky like a feather for however many years, she needed to get her sea-legs back. I was eager to put some miles behind us, especially if Eradis decided to come sniffing around. He would have his beautiful brown horse to ride. Only he would expect me to go downriver, to the town, not upriver. I had never mentioned any connections there. I wasn’t even sure my shirt-tail relations were still alive, or in Gloswin. But my uncle had spoken of them many times; his cousins.

  We passed numerous small farms and traded stories of Eradis and how we had come to be his followers. I told her my “gold-skill” was spinning silken thread from mermaid’s hair growing from rocks in the stream. She laughed and told me in her day all the money came from forging weaponry for the old king’s insatiable armies. She herself could make a mean spearhead from the icicles that hung from the caves on the mountainside. Too bad it wasn’t winter, I thought.

  Our shared dreams had given us a sense of intimacy we both knew was false. Neither of us knew what the other would do in the real world. I knew her name, what anxieties entangled her, and the cold tug of the wind for a hundred winters over the land until it blew her over the sentinel pine on the ridge. In her dreams she flew over and over that pine, never quite catching my uplifted hand. She also knew a little too much about my fear of drowning, and that I still missed my twin brother who died when we were five.

  We slept the first night in a woodshed, in exchange for stacking wet wood almost to the ceiling. I could see she tired quickly and told her to collect twigs instead for our bed on top of the wood. The next afternoon it began to rain and we entered a small public house. As Sidoney huddled by the fire, waiting our food, I noticed again her strange scent. It was natural and lovely and repulsive all at the same time. I wondered if she were actually human, or genuinely alive. But I had been inside her dreams and there was nothing unexpected there, in the least.

  I paid for hot baths, something I had been some days without, Sidoney for who knows how long. After a hot meal it was like taking a sleep drug. So we were both dead to the world and who could blame us if we didn’t hear hoofbeats come up the road. It was the subterranean smoothness of Eradis’s voice that pulled me suddenly from sleep. I shook Sidoney’s shoulder and we both arose. I pulled on my uncle’s shoes and Sidoney my uncle’s sandals, and were out the window in a few heartbeats.

  We were out of sight of the inn, hurrying down the wagon track in the meager light of the red moon, when a claw-like hand gripped me around the upper arm. “Harshbag!” he cursed me. “What dried-up husk have you found for me? No sweetness left in this one.” He cast Sidoney aside to the grass at the edge of the road. “But you still hav
e something of summer left in you, boy. Don’t think I don’t know how you poisoned the others against me. All my fair ones saw the look in your eyes before you flitted off, and they did the same; I find myself short of the liquor of youth. I will drain you to the last glint of your eye.”

  Eradis closed his arms around me—even starved for the nectar of youth, he was still powerful—and my consciousness began to flicker. But before it faded away I felt something else. Something pulled his head back and his grip loosed me. I staggered, shaking my head. The beams of the red moon between the trees were just enough for me to see Eradis, struggling to loose Sidoney, whose arms were wrapped around his neck from behind and her legs around his waist. She was groaning with the effort, almost croaking.

  I was still woozy and it was easy to fall into the semi-trance in which Eradis had taught us to do our various transformations. In this state I could see that the more Eradis struggled, the stronger Sidoney became. They tumbled in the wagon-tracks and into the grassy margin. Eradis grunted and choked while her death-grip only tightened. Her limbs glowed with vitality. And she laughed musically.

  By the time he fainted onto the grass, a shriveled man impossibly old, Sidoney was no grey girl anymore. When the white moon leapt suddenly over the treetops in its hurried transit, her cheeks glowed and the dead grass stood out white against the brown of her hair. Her limbs were pink. I reached out to pull a twig from her braid. I saw that she was smiling.

  But her mouth crumpled and I realized there were also tears brimming over and trailing down her fair cheeks. Without thinking I brushed one away, and Sidoney fell against me. I circled my arms around her. She was laughing and sobbing, both. We walked back to the inn some time later, and climbed back in the open window through which we had left.

  I curled myself behind her on the bed, and together we dreamed of Eradis’s ancient body crumbling in the ditch, the mead of five hundred summers drained from his bones. We dreamed of faces we had known who had mysteriously vanished from our lives, Eradis saying “When they’re ready, they leave”. We dreamed of dances and cider and roasted meat eaten on autumn afternoons, of winter fires, of spring’s multiform burgeoning. We dreamed of slow aging, and even death come welcome after a life fully lived and surrendered. We woke, and she no longer smelled of smoke or lilacs or death. Just soap and skin and a hint of rosemary. I was awkwardly aware that the grey girl was a young woman with me on the bed. I arose, and stood over her; she was blushing and pulling the blanket up to her chin. Her lips were rosy and smiling.