“I want you in my city,” Keifon blurted. He saw Agna stand as he hunched over, resting his head in his hands. The dam-burst of relief dizzied him. “I want you to be your best, I want you to get all the good things you deserve, but – if I could see you, I’d be so happy.”
Her hand lighted on his shoulder, and he felt her body settle next to him. “You’re sure.”
He straightened. “Yes! Of course.”
Agna sighed. “Following a boy again,” she muttered, but Keifon heard the irony in her voice.
“You should – you should go back for yourself, though. For your career.”
“This is for my career. I’d rather do something new than follow my father. That’s what I’ve come to realize, I think.”
“Don’t jeopardize your future just to spite him.”
“I’m not doing it to spite him,” she retorted. “He doesn’t know yet, and he’s going to be angry, but I don’t care. It’ll expand our name in the end. Let Marco take over Murio. I’d just end up competing with him anyway.”
Keifon was left breathless by her cavalier rootlessness and her obliviousness to tradition and propriety. It wasn’t right. Yet he also pictured her throwing open the doors of a museum she’d founded, and pride swelled in his chest. She would be magnificent wherever she went.
He found a path through his worry. “I know you know what’s best for your career. I just – you know how I was raised. It’s hard for me to accept breaking with the establishment.”
“Yeah.” She rubbed his shoulder, smiling. “I won’t take it personally. And I’m not breaking with the establishment; I’m just taking it in a different direction.”
He had to trust her appraisal of the situation. It wasn’t his decision to make. He could only watch her fly, and worry for her, and be there if the wind picked up.
“I’m proud of you,” he said at last. That was the truest part. “You’re so brave, and I know you’ll do what you set out to do.”
Agna snuggled in against his side. Her arm around him was all the reply he needed.
“And I think it’s all right,” Keifon went on, not sure where his voice would lead. “To want to go where you know someone. You can make new friends, but… it helps. I know I’m…” He took a breath, trying to sort through his thoughts. “I’m so happy you’ll be there.” He already saw a timbered house on the edge of Wildern. Part of him wanted her there with him, just like this; he wanted to come home and make dinner with her and read by the fire. Part of him shied away, not wanting to hope for too much, not ready to consider where that might lead. Instead he imagined Agna coming to visit him, opening the front gate to be tackled by his adoring children, her own bursting out from behind her to run and play. She laughed, and his children called her Aunt Agna. He wiped his sleeve over his eyes. Agna would stay in his life. That would always be enough.
Agna ruffled her fingers through his hair, which only weakened his resolve. “You can cry if you need to,” she murmured. “It’s from happiness, though, right?”
“Yeah.” He sniffled, but her voice had broken the spell. “I’m just thinking about the future. How it could be.”
Agna’s shoulders hitched in a near-silent laugh. “You – you, Reji Keifon the Medic – thought about the future, and it made you so happy you almost cried.” Her voice cracked, and she let go of him to wipe her eyes. They laughed unsteadily together. Agna leaned back as her giggling subsided. “Did Nelle feed us something hallucinogenic out there?”
“If she did, we need to get more of it.” Keifon gave her a hug, getting used to being unafraid. If he got attached – if he admitted that he was already attached – it was all right now. She wasn’t leaving. Someday he would have to be less afraid of having his heart broken. But for now, she would stay, and that was all that mattered.
When they were ready, they drew apart. Keifon reflected, now that he felt calmer, that in his beautifully outlandish daydream, he’d given her a couple of children that she’d never said she wanted. That was presumptuous of him. Besides, they had been pale-skinned and dark-eyed like her. If she did ever get married and have children, they would probably be half-Kaveran. As, Keifon reminded himself, his own would probably be. It was strange to think about, though not at all unpleasant.
“So,” he said, distracting himself, “what do you call your aunts in Nessinian? I can’t remember the family terms right now.”
“What?”
Keifon realized that his question had no context. “Um. I, uh – it was part of my thoughts about the future. My – well, my future kids called you Bita Agna. – Outside aunt,” he translated.
“Outside?”
Another thing that foreigners apparently didn’t do. Keifon repressed the urge to pace. “From the side of the family that has a different name than you.”
“Yanwei is too complicated.” She ruffled a hand through her hair. “Aunts and uncles on both sides are Ceisi. Kei-ceisi,” she added, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Not that I’ll…well, you get the idea.”
He squeezed her hand. “Agna-ceisi?”
It made her smile, as he hoped it would. “Yep.”
It was the most important word he learned that day.
Agna: Homecoming
Agna dropped off her letter with the master of records. Mail runners were thick on the ground this close to the major cities. She trusted the letter to get to Prisa before the caravan arrived.
She and Keifon took a seat near the front of the passenger wagon. Agna propped her stationery box on her lap, opened her sketchbook to a fresh page, and nestled her tin of pastel crayons on the seat between herself and her companion.
“I know what somebody’s getting for her birthday.” Keifon let go of his backpack strap and steadied the tin against the wagon’s vibration.
Agna selected a warm brown, underlaid with orange. It was one of the longest remaining pastels in her collection; over half of it remained. Most of the greens were worn down to nubs.
“If they last that long. I think I’ll look for more greens in Prisa.” She drew the lightest lines she could finesse in such a bold medium. The paper’s tooth grabbed and released the pigment, bringing texture to the lines.
“Then somebody’s getting an easel, or paper, or whatever it is you can use when you are an artist who lives in a house.”
“Beds, I hear. Bathroom facilities. Houseplants.”
“For making art,” Keifon elaborated, stomping resolutely off the nervous sidetrack she’d attempted. “Because somebody always looks relaxed when she draws.”
Agna suggested some details on her sketch with twining shadows. “Paint,” she said, and kept her voice steady. “In a house you can paint.”
She swapped out the first pastel for a cool yellow-brown. Keifon watched her lines form a boxy, familiar shape.
“Are you scared?”
“Of painting? My mother is Alfia Despana; I’d say I’m intimidated.”
“Of Wildern. Of… changing.”
Pastels did not allow many mistakes. She could not rub them out with a chunk of rubber, as she could do with graphite. She could only incorporate the mistake into the drawing and keep going, or start over. That was always possible, too.
“Yes. And no. Yes and no.”
Keifon squeezed the arm that supported her makeshift desk. “Me, too.”
She chose a darker brown, like freshly turned earth. “Worth it. Is the thing.”
“…yeah.”
The wagon’s wheels turned on the stone road that connected Wildern to Prisa, that wound into the forest, that linked town and homestead and city like the delicate map of arteries in the human body. Only a few stops remained. Fort Unity was where she had fought with a partner she’d barely known, and where she had played darts with a dear and patient friend. Vertal was where the Benevolent Union waited for her reports, and where the ships back to Nessiny would depart without her.
The next stop was Prisa, just over the horizon. It was where her people had made
a foothold and built lives and homes and places of worship far from the rolling hills and olive groves. It was where one old friend from Nessiny had forgiven her for all she had said and not said. She would incorporate her sins and keep going.
Agna replaced the last pastel into its slot and closed the tin. Keifon leaned in to see the sketch, so she slid the book toward him.
Nelle’s wagon, wreathed with painted leaves.
The camping tent, with the suggestion of a lighted lamp inside.
Keifon’s lute, leaning on a bonfire log bench.
“It’s beautiful,” Keifon said.
“…Yeah. It was.”
***
Marco’s most recent letter, filed in her backpack, said Good luck. Write me when you get to Wildern. Violetta had drawn a flower under his signature in purple ink. Lina’s most recent letter said Send me your new address! I’m so happy for you. She had enclosed a sprig of sweetmint, its scent lost to the paper and the weeks of travel.
Agna carried Rone’s most recent letter in her pocket. It said I miss you, and I’m sorry I hid things from you. She did not have a copy of her most recent letter to him. It said much the same.
She stood before a modest storefront. Garlands of New Year’s paper flowers looped behind the glass, over a series of signs lettered in Kaveran in a hand she didn’t recognize. Rone Sidduji. Nessinian Combat Arts. Classes Daily. She recognized the writing on a larger sign: Closed on New Year’s / Spring Festival. Beyond the glass she caught glimpses of movement. Laughter and battle cries and the dull crack of wooden swords mixed with the street noise behind her.
Agna knocked on the door and waited.
It opened on the full clamor of a practice room full of swordmastery students, framing the body of her old friend. Agna dropped a little formal bow to hide the molten flush rising up her neck. “Swordmaster Sidduji,” she said, her treacherous voice wavering.
“Agna,” Rone said quietly, chiding, affectionate, made real after too many years. He bent to throw his arms around her, and Agna gritted her teeth against the urge to cry. Not out of disappointment, not out of grief, not even out of rage. Nothing so simple or so sad. Love, she supposed. The lifeblood of all creation. Nothing more or less than that. It was not the same as with Laris, or Esirel, or Keifon. Each was its own particular, beautiful, heartbreaking thing.
“I missed you,” he said.
She nodded against his chest. “I missed you, too.”
He stepped back after a little while, and she saw him swallow hard. “Please come in. The students can practice without me.”
She thanked her old friend and followed him inside.
Afterword
Wildern’s cultural offerings are due for an expansion, Agna’s parents aren’t going to wait forever to settle the question of inheritance, and a certain aspiring revolutionary isn’t done with his life’s work. Agna and Keifon’s journey continues in The Healers’ Home, available now.
If you enjoyed The Healers’ Road, or if you did not enjoy it and still got this far (I’ve been there!), please help out your fellow readers by leaving a review. Reviews help readers to find books that fit them.
Visit www.serobertsonfiction.com for new book announcements, progress reports, extras like playlists and character art, and lots of chatter about other people’s books.
Acknowledgements
This process took longer than it should have, though it was always a joy. The completion of this book owes so much to:
My husband, Jay, who admitted that he doesn’t generally read fantasy or mushy-emotional books, but who gamely read multiple drafts and always believed in me.
The readers of the first draft: Jay, as noted; Dan, who pointed out the preponderance of tea and bathing; and Scintilla, my internet neighbor of umpteen years.
The readers of the second draft: Jay, who said I should put the beginning back in; Dan, who said that some of the “boring” stuff was fine after all; Stacie, who took the time to read despite being in the throes of grad school; and Martha, whom I’ve never met, but who sent me notes that kept me up till 2 a.m.
And thank you for sharing this story.
About the Author
S.E. Robertson lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their cat. When she is not writing, holding down a day job, reading other books, or watching nerdy TV shows, she crafts, gardens, and learns how to do things.
Visit www.serobertsonfiction.com for updates and extras.
Table of Contents
Part 1
Agna: Arrival
Keifon: Exile
Agna: The Golden Caravan
Keifon: Traveler
Agna: Advice
Keifon: Open for Business
Agna: Loss
Keifon: The Long Night
Agna: The Patient
Agna: Interview
Keifon: Safety
Agna: Dispatch
Agna: Nelle
Keifon: The Game
Edann: Weakness
Agna: Nemesis
Agna: The Feast of Darano
Laris: Agna
Agna: Laris
Keifon: Perspective
Agna: Lakeside
Part 2
Agna: The Medics
Keifon: Gifts
Agna: Connections
Keifon: House Calls
Agna: Caretaker
Keifon: Teamwork
Agna: Strategy
Keifon: The Tourist
Agna: Celebration
Agna: Balance
Agna: Postwar
Keifon: Counterpoint
Agna: Vigil
Keifon: Favor
Keifon: The Feast of Darano
Laris: Confessions
Part 3
Keifon: The Long Season
Agna: Aspirations
Keifon: Waiting
Agna: Love and Money
Keifon: Freedom
Agna: Second Chances
Keifon: Forethought
Agna: Conspiracy
Agna: The Home Front
Keifon: Past and Future
Agna: Return
Keifon: Fairy Tales
Agna: Homecoming
Afterword / Acknowledgements
About the Author
The Healers' Road Page 38