by H. M. Long
“A God of the New World who refused to ally with Eang after her rise to power, so she slew and bound him.” I gestured at the stone beneath us. “This was his land and he’s… they say he’s buried under the Hall of Vision, down there, in Iskir.”
The priest of Lathian cast his gaze back in the direction of the town. “Ah. Yes, that makes sense.”
“What do you think he tied his life to? To make this… Vestige?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it was, it’s been used up and Lathian rebound Ried. Properly. Even if he has more, Lathian will keep him subdued. He is our highest god for a reason, Hessa, and even if Eang is dead he can protect your people. I can help you, if you will let me.”
“Trust me, priest,” I returned, “Eang is not dead.”
My voice was steady. Despite my recent doubts, in the face of a foreign priest my faith was instinctual, if dispassionate. If Eang was dead her sister Frir, the Goddess of Death, would know, and thus Ogam would know. She was simply weakened.
The priest levelled his chin. Whether or not he believed me was unclear. “If your people worship Lathian, he will protect them. That is the way of conquest and the pattern of the world.”
“The Eangen will never worship an Arpa god.” Drained and injured as I was, I stood and glared down at him, my dispassion hardening into something tired and sore. “And I will tell you nothing.”
“Very well, then.” Quentis stood and looked to the right. I realized Polinus stood there, watching our conversation with Castor and half a dozen others. The priest transitioned into Arpa and spoke to the commander, delivering a short discourse in a rational tone. He finished it with a question.
Polinus appeared to consider. The two of them fell into conversation, at the end of which they all advanced.
I retreated a step, realizing too late that I was without weapons. My eyes flicked between the commander and the priest. Their expressions – Quentis’s satisfied, Polinus’s grim and guarded – made my blood run cold.
I bolted, but my exhausted limbs didn’t get far. Castor caught my arm. I threw what little Fire I had left into his face and followed it with a fist, but the blow missed and the Fire only staggered him. His expression faltered into shock and a spark of fear, then a mask of anger. He redoubled his attack, grabbing for my hair and my tunic at the same time and spinning me around.
Quentis stood before me. Before I could burn, before I could draw another breath down my bruised throat to speak, the priest put a hand on my chest.
Cold. Cold seeped down through my bones and my legs crumpled. I sagged into Castor and he lowered me to the ground.
Arpa voices merged over me as Quentis leant in. Someone handed him his bowl. I squirmed, horrified and indignant, as he dipped one finger and began to draw symbols across my skin.
One, at the base of my throat – the Fire died completely. Two, over my lips – my tongue became lead. Three and four, on my cheeks – my vision blackened, and my senses closed in.
I tasted something acrid on my tongue. Henbane. Mandrake. Something else, something worse: widow’s soap. Then, oblivion.
* * *
I squinted down the raised path, dirty fingers hanging down over my temple. The setting sun washed the fields to either side of me in golden light, igniting the wings of insects like sparks as they hummed through the vegetation. There were two-pace strips of beans, knee-high corn, a flush of young barley, cabbage, turnip and so on in repeating rows, all the way to a farmhouse on the western edge of the forest.
Quentis stood in the field, watching me between waving stalks of corn. I noted him but had no real understanding of his presence. This was my memory, after all. He was not really here.
Omaskat walked beside me, slowing his long strides to match mine. His hound Ayo sniffed at the skirts of my daily working dress and apron, rounding us twice before she deviated off the road and nosed through a patch of young cabbage leaves.
“From where have you come?” My own voice came from a great distance. I held my apron high, packed with the herbs I had spent an afternoon gathering in the forest.
He smiled. “You’d do better to ask where I’ve not.”
I grinned back. It was a typical traveler’s response. “Well, we have a bed and a meal for you in the Hall, if you’ll take it.”
This was the way things went. Offers of hospitality were usually given before names were exchanged – that way, both sides were bound to Hearth Law before most lies had a chance to be told. If someone tried to circumvent this process, it was both suspicious and rude.
“I’ll gladly take it. My name is Omaskat.”
“Hessa.”
We sat in the Hall, now. The sun had set, and the majority of the Hall’s inhabitants had already headed down to the river to bathe. So I sat alone with Omaskat and the dog, listening to the crackle of the fire and the chirr of crickets outside the Hall’s great open doors.
I fetched us bread and cold meat and handed him a plate. As twilight faded, we heard laughter out in the village. People began to return, flowing around us, asking who the stranger was, rubbing their hair dry and scratching the dog’s ears. They picked up their food and sat down around us, talking amongst themselves and prodding Omaskat to tell them stories.
“Who’s this?” Eidr asked, dropping down beside me. He rocked on his seat, jostling me good-naturedly. His clothes still smelled of the fields, earthy and green and rich, though his dark red hair was wet from the river.
“Omaskat,” the traveler said.
“Eidr,” my husband replied. “Omaskat. That’s an old name.”
“As old as the boats,” Omaskat said. His eyes crinkled and he glanced between the two of us knowingly. The way we sat and the ease with which Eidr had inserted himself into the conversation both indicated our claim on one another.
Eidr sat forward. “Would you tell us your story, then, Omaskat?”
Omaskat lifted his plate out of the reach of the dog as she nuzzled up, lips already pulled back for a delicate try at his meal. “Gladly. But if you give me leave, I’ll eat and bathe and regale you all with my travels once I no longer stink.”
Eidr nodded, and Omaskat turned to his food.
I gave Eidr a reproachful look that failed to be remotely reproachful. “Leave the man be. He’s my guest,” I hissed.
He leant forward to whisper in my ear, “And you’re my woman.”
I tsked my tongue, but before I could properly reply he ground his wet beard into my cheek. He fled my swatting hands and retreated, making conciliatory gestures, until he walked right into Yske’s slap across the back of the head.
Omaskat looked up and grinned, looking grandfatherly despite the fact that he was only ten years older than I. It was that expression, that simple smile on a warm, early summer’s night, which made me like him so much.
He turned that smile upon Sixnit as my friend, full with child, sat down nearby and accepted a bowl of food from her husband. Sixnit smiled back, a sheepish, weary smile, and patted her belly.
“You’re a few days early, traveler,” she quipped, “otherwise you could have met my little one.”
“Indeed I am.” Omaskat gave a second, more wry smile and raised his cup. “My mistake.”
Two more Eangi appeared and stoked the fire, temporarily blocking my view of Omaskat’s face, but I saw his eyes linger on Sixnit’s swollen belly. Then, as the firelight swelled up into the rafters, I saw the color of those eyes: one gold, one blue.
I stared. In the dream, in the memory, I recalled the way my heart had threatened to jerk from my chest, the way I’d felt absent from my own body. How had I not seen his eyes on the road? Had they changed, just now as he looked at Sixnit?
If Omaskat sensed a change in me, he did not mention it. He finished his plate and stood with the hound at his heel. I scrambled to my feet too, facing him across the flames. My heart contorted – this was Svala’s vision, the one she’d given to me that night when I was fifteen. After three long years of knowin
g, of waiting, this was the day.
But how could that be? It was so common, so full of sunshine and normality. I’d always imagined we would meet on a battlefield or on a stormy, legendary night, perhaps at a moment when all hope was lost, and his death would turn the tide. And this man – he was too kind, smiling and relaxed and gracious. I’d assumed the man I was to kill would be threatening, a shield-biting berserker or a murderer of children.
But today? Him? It made no sense. Why would Eang want him dead?
“The river is west of the village?” Omaskat asked.
I nodded dumbly. “North-west. By the lake.”
The vision shifted. I lay in my bed and stared at Omaskat’s sleeping form beside the low-burning coals. The early summer night was cool, and wind whisked through the open door of the Hall, drawing the scent of smoke and a hundred sleeping bodies up through the narrow window slits below the roofline.
Could it truly be him? He was so… amiable. He had spent an hour telling us about his travels, of meeting a beautiful wavewoman on the coast, talking his way out of a confrontation with the Arpa and a night spent in a glade so thick with flowers that the scent made him drunk.
I continued to stare, suppressing a deep tremor. I could not kill this man with laughter in his eyes. There were so few like him in this world.
Maybe I was wrong. If Svala were here she could have affirmed his identity, but she was gone to Urgi. What if I killed the wrong man, under Hearth Law? Who knew what Fate would do to me?
Just then, I saw someone silhouetted in the doorway of the Hall of Smoke. I stared, unable to decide who it was, until a distant part of my mind understood it was Quentis.
Quentis? The Hall blurred and the priest stepped forward, as if to stop the scene from changing.
The dream shifted again, but I was too aware of it now. Images fled as soon as they took form, no matter how Quentis grabbed at them. I saw Eidr’s body. Sixnit, wracked with grief. I stood in the line of slaves before Omaskat. I stabbed the hairpin at his neck. He snapped my wrist. I cradled Vistic in the destroyed Hall. I floated in the arms of a riverman.
Somehow, somewhere in the chaos of the memories, I found an anchor. The anchor was Svala’s face on the afternoon the blacksmith cut off my collar with two laborious clips.
“You were given a charge directly from the goddess,” her voice was like the crack of ice underfoot. “And you chose to disobey, Hessa. She gave you a task. Until you fulfill that task or make atonement, you are no longer welcome in this Hall, or the one to come.”
I held the vision there, at that moment. I saw Quentis over Svala’s shoulder, bowl in hand, bloody fingers weaving something in the air.
Svala’s hand shot towards my wrist. I stifled a gasp and recoiled.
This was not part of my memories.
“Run, Hessa,” she hissed, low so that Quentis could not hear. The Fire in her eyes burned into my skull. “Run as soon as you can. Run into the mountains. You will find Omaskat where the waters run white and the sky bleeds into the mountain.”
I clutched at her. She felt so real, sounded so real. “Where are you?” I rasped.
The vision closed like a clap of thunder. I lashed out, still in the throes of the drug. I was bound, bound to a tree – I felt rough bark and sticky sap – and men fought nearby. The tension in the air made me struggle all the harder. I heard bones pop and felt my muscles stretch beyond bearing, but there was no pain.
“He’s killing her!” Nisien’s voice raged. “Look at her – gods above, she’s going to kill herself – what did you give her? Quentis! Quentis! You bastard, I swear if you don’t—”
Quentis touched my eyelids and all went dark.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Castor held Melid’s reins as my mare plodded along behind his. I hunched forward in my saddle, eyes slit against the sun and battling the worst headache of my life.
The headache never eased. Quentis’s witchcraft ensured that. Sometimes I was permitted to walk; other times I was so stupefied by drug and pain that I had to be tied to the saddle. I lolled and I wilted, snatching at fragments of thought but unable to pin anything down.
At some point, I registered that the mountains were close. I saw the line of them soar above the tops of the trees, snow-crusted crags sweeping into the clouds. The sight consoled me before I slumped forward over Melid’s neck and vomited.
Melid, to her credit, reacted well. She danced left but didn’t bolt or dislodge me.
Moaning, I buried the side of my face in her neck. “Take me away,” I whispered to her in the oldest Eangen. “Run, Melid.”
That night I found myself tied to a tree again, hopelessly disoriented. I dreamt of Svala, charging me to flee again and again. I dreamt of Eidr and the warmth of our bed on a winter night. I dreamt of Yske and I as girls, braiding flowers into one another’s hair beside the river after a day under the Eangi war chief Ardam’s brutal instruction.
The next morning as we rode, I heard Ogam’s voice on the wind. But I was so addled that I couldn’t make sense of it.
“I can’t hear you.” I stared upwards, watching a pair of sparrows flutter by. “You sound too much like your father.”
Castor smirked at me, catching my languid gaze. I lacked the will to scowl back.
That night, Nisien, with Estavius at his side, convinced Polinus not to tie me to a tree. I was allowed to lie in my bedroll close to my friend, under sight of the watch and near to Quentis, who stalked me ceaselessly.
I rested my bound hands on my stomach and tried to pick out constellations among the tattered clouds.
“The bear’s chasing the hart,” I commented absently, “but the hart is too fast… and the hind is too fast for the hart… But the bear is here now, did I tell you that? The great bear is in Eangen. I saw him, twice.”
Nisien, cleaning his armor, glared between me and Quentis. “You’re going to ruin her mind,” he snarled at the priest. “She can’t take much more of this.”
“She can,” Quentis stated. “I’m close.”
It didn’t occur to me to wonder what he was close to.
“It’s all right.” I rolled over to face Nisien. “I’ll get away.”
Nisien rubbed the back of one hand across his brow. If I’d had my wits about me, I would have seen how burdened he looked, how worn and divided. But just then, all I noticed was that he had three days of beard on his chin and the hair on his head was growing longer. It made me smile.
I waited until Quentis left before I reached out and tugged at one of Nisien’s trouser legs. I hissed, “I mean it. I’ll escape. You can come with me.”
He lifted his eyes but kept working. “You should try to sleep.”
“We can escape together.”
“It’s not so simple. They don’t trust me enough.”
“Nisien—”
Quentis returned. “Sit her up.”
I saw Nisien lace with tension as another legionary crouched and hauled me into a sitting position. This happened every evening and morning now, so I was used to the routine, and fighting it only used up what little strength I’d managed to gather.
Still, I couldn’t help a small, petty spark of rebellion. I focused on keeping my eyes level with Quentis’s. “I won’t drink it.”
He held his bowl in hand, undeterred. “Hessa, please. Listen to me. I’ve seen enough now to know whatever you’re hiding is vital, and I will do anything to honor my god and protect my people. By tomorrow, perhaps the day after that, I’ll have learned how to kill that fragment of Eang inside of you. Then you will tell me anything I want to know – so why not spare yourself the trouble? Talk to me. Now, freely.”
The relevance of this fought its way into my befuddled mind. Kill my Fire? That was impossible, wasn’t it? But I supposed that made little difference. The core remained; he was going to drug and poison me until I posed no threat to anyone.
Quentis grabbed my chin and lifted the bowl. “Drink.”
I turned my head away,
fear cracking through my numb façade. I squirmed to the side and toppled over Nisien’s pack, forcing my captors to haul me back into place.
Quentis grabbed me by the hair and upended the bowl into my mouth. I blocked it with my tongue until the priest clapped one hand over my lips and pinched my nose, forcing me to choke and swallow all at once.
I toppled into blackness.
* * *
I lay among poppies, in the shadow of a shrine, and watched the wind tug at a shroud of mist. I could see nothing beyond it; it smothered the sky and coiled through the tree line to every side, condensing on the fine needles of conifers and drooping deciduous leaves.
Yet, somehow, I did not feel stifled by it, nor could I sense Quentis nearby. Sunlight still filtered through, warm and full of promise, and the moisture that swept into my lungs was sweet and heady.
The shrine here, in my dream-skewed memory, differed from true life; it was less weathered, and untouched by the rigors of the real world. Moisture darkened its beams, fresh-hewn and smelling of cedar, and turned the rattle of its bones and carvings and feathers into a muted tinkle.
If I didn’t think too hard, if I didn’t reflect on recent events or the goddess the shrine represented, I remained content. So I lay there, impassive to the hum of a few brave bees, and watching the poppies dip under their weight of dew.
But the longer the dream went on, emotions began to crop up. There were no thoughts attached to them, only feelings: anger, fear, urgency, and, beneath them all, confusion.
“Svala,” I asked the sky, “are you here?”
“Hessa.”
Ogam dropped into a crouch before me. His snowy skin nearly merged with the fog, and his hair was in mild disarray. Irritated, he swatted at the mist and leant down to get a better look at my face.
“Hessa, what is wrong with you? Why are you here?”
I stared up at him, still lying on my back. I laced my fingers over my stomach. “The priest of Lathian drugged me. Am I imagining you?”
“No, I’m here. What did he drug you with?”
“Widow’s soap. Henbane.” I pronounced the words thoughtfully. “Mandrake… It tastes like yifr might but… not. How do I know you’re actually here if this is a dream?”