He slid an arm around her shoulder, dropped beside her on the bed, curving his knees beneath his free arm to lessen his height, to make his size as insignificant as he could. She stiffened but didn’t push him away. Had she, he would have released her, moved back, and waited. It was always easier with small children; they were still young enough to seek comfort, to accept it.
As they grew, what brought them comfort changed, and sometimes there was no comfort that could be offered or, rather, none that could be taken. He accepted that, too. Trying was necessary; accepting rejection was simply a part of that. He had learned, with time, to understand the instant rejection that was part of a child’s rage—that they might push him away and then scream when he actually attempted to leave.
But he understood, as well, when walls had been erected that could not be climbed or breeched. She did not speak, but she did not push him away. She was lonely; pain had dulled the edge of suspicion—or overwhelmed it.
He did not speak. He did not ask questions. He did not offer her platitudes or promises that things would be all right. How could he? His mother could have. Adam, however, was neither a good liar nor an authority. What comfort could she take from his words? And he knew that there was no safety for Evayne. And no home. The Voyanne at least allowed families to be together. The road she walked did not.
He sat with her for an hour, perhaps longer, before she stopped shaking. She had fallen asleep.
• • •
When Adam disentangled himself—taking care not to wake her—he carefully folded the robes she was to wear. He would have cleaned the room, but there were no brooms, no cloths, no odd Western dusters. Night did not return. The door did not open into the same crude tunnel that had led to it; it opened into sunlight and greenery. The room, which had not seemed dark in comparison to the tunnel from which he’d first emerged, was no match for the light that now streamed in through the open door. The light cast shadows, and his shadow fell upon the bed and the girl who lay in it.
As if that shadow had substance, she stirred, turning away from the light—and then, in turn, toward it. Her eyes opened to Adam framed by the door and what might appear like escape. She shed blankets and sheets and swung her legs toward the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said in quiet Weston. “This is not escape or freedom.”
“There is no freedom,” was her equally quiet reply. “But—there’s been so little light. So little air.” She reached up to her neck with both hands, her eyes widening in alarm.
“No,” Adam said quickly. “It is on the small table.”
She all but leaped toward that table, her arms shaking and outstretched. Her hands closed instantly around the only item of value she seemed to carry: a metallic lily, a flower in worked silver, caught and held by a slender, silver chain. She put it on—or tried; her hands were shaking, and the clasp was undone. Adam left the doorway to come to her aid.
She lifted her chin as he held both ends of the chain and lowered it again as he worked the odd clasp. “It’s my birthday present,” she told him, although he had not asked. “My sixteenth birthday present. It’s the only one I could carry—it’s the only one I had in my hands when—” She stiffened. Adam continued to ask no questions.
After a pause, he said, “It is lovely. The craftsman who made it was skilled.”
“He is!” She turned then, the lily on the outside of her clothing, her hair a sleepy mess. “He doesn’t make much like this—there’s so little call for it in the village. Mostly, he works with my father. The blacksmith. But he made this for me. I don’t know when he did the work—he—” The smile fled instantly. “He’ll never see me wear it.”
“Are you so certain?” Adam was not. Of a sudden, he thought the opposite.
“He won’t survive.” Her hands became fists, but she did not remove the lily. Would never, he thought, remove it.
“He lived when you last saw him?”
“He was trying to fight,” she said. “He’d gone back for his sword.”
“Against demons?”
“Against demons. Because he used to be a soldier before he lost part of his leg. He has a leg—my father helped to craft it—so he can walk.” But not well enough to fight, in her opinion. Adam slid an arm around her shoulder, holding her up, bracing some part of her weight against his chest. She wasn’t a child, but the pain and the fear were familiar to him. Had he not felt it himself?
When she fell silent, he began to speak. It was harder to converse in Weston than Torra, but this young woman spoke the Weston of the Free Towns. He told her of the Arkosan Voyani. Of their Matriarch, his mother; of her death. Of their Matriarch, his sister. He spoke of the Serra Diora, her beauty a story, a legend in and of itself; he spoke of her isolation and her bitter loss; he spoke of the lute he had borrowed from one of the bards who now traveled with the caravan.
The rains had carried it away.
He had promised to return it—and he understood that he must keep that promise; the lute itself was special to the bard in a way other instruments were not.
And then he spoke of drowning, of dying.
She was silent, now, caught in his voice and his story—because Adam could tell stories. It was one of the ways in which he entertained the young. He did not have a bard’s voice; he understood that. But in Weston it was harder, and the words were simpler because they had to be.
“I did not die,” he added, smiling. “As you can see. I am here.” The smile dimmed. “I would have died. All help—and there was help—was too late. But I am healer-born. It was on that day that my powers woke. I . . . came back. I was not conscious when I did. I was not breathing, and then I was.” He looked at his free hand. Lifted it. It was a normal hand in all ways.
He told her of the healer-born, although she knew the stories. He told her of Levec, both grimacing and smiling as he did. He told her of the terror of being alone—made harder by far by the absence of every adult and child he had ever known. He had not understood, waking alone, a grim terror of a giant at his bedside, that had he remained, he might have destroyed both himself and those who loved him because his power was wild and uncontrolled and his desperate need to destroy the isolation itself was far too strong to be denied.
“I might have died anyway,” he continued. “But I was saved. And my kin. And I learned about the powers I have. I learned how to heal, and when to heal, and . . . when not to heal.”
“How did you reach the Houses of Healing?”
She was shorter than he was; he realized this as he tucked the top of her head under his chin. His Onas would be so surprised when he finally made his way back home: he would be taller than them.
“A woman,” he said quietly. “A stranger. Not kin, not family.”
“Who?”
“Her name was Evayne.”
• • •
She was silent for long enough, Adam was afraid that he had offended her. But she did not draw back or pull away, not immediately. Breeze ruffled her hair—and his—and he said, “Let’s go outside. There’s sun. It’s warm.”
She did not answer, but did not resist as he drew her gently outside. The skies above were an azure broken by tufts of clouds too slight to block sun for long. There were trees, however; branches cast shadows to lessen the heat of the sun. There were no insects, no birds; the sound of moving water implied that there was a stream, a brook, nearby.
The door of Evayne’s room, however, did not appear to be attached to something as mundane, as ordinary, as a wall. He could see the open door, and he could see the room they had exited, but the door was not attached to a frame. If he closed it, he wondered if it would vanish into the scenery.
He almost wanted to close it.
Jewel was here because she had been determined to take the Oracle’s test. She had felt it necessary, and Adam understood why. But Jewel was a woman, full-grown; she was a power. She had the full might of a clan, or its equivalent in the Northern Empire, at her disposal. She wanted for no
thing; not food, not money, not companions. She had fought her way through demons, had survived assassins, had trod ancient and abandoned halls; her allies were ancient, immortal, and wild.
Evayne had none of those things. She was older than Adam, but felt, in this moment, much younger.
• • •
He found a large, mossy rock, near the brook that passed through these lands, and there, he and Evayne stopped. They were silent as they sat, adjusting their positions, lost in their own thoughts. This time, it was Evayne who broke the silence.
“My parents live in Callenton. It’s one of the Free Towns.”
Adam knew very little of Imperial geography, but it was irrelevant. He nodded.
“My father was the blacksmith. I—” She hesitated, as if searching for words and abandoning them unsaid. “I wasn’t their natural child.”
Adam said nothing, but he did not look away. He slid an arm loosely around Evayne’s shoulder, prepared to remove it instantly if she tensed or in any way rejected the comfort he might have offered a young child.
She did not. She didn’t react at all. Her focus, her intent, was on the story she was, even now, attempting to convey.
“I was left on the doorstep of the Mother’s church. In swaddling cloth that the mother-born found strange. The priests there didn’t believe I was a child abandoned by one of the villagers. It’s not like the city you live in; there aren’t as many people, and everyone knows everyone else. It would be hard—not impossible, but very difficult—to hide a pregnancy and a childbirth.
“At the time, one of the Mother’s Daughters was passing through. It happens often, in the Free Towns. She saw the child—saw me—and saw the swaddling cloth, and she decided to bespeak the Mother personally.
“The Mother understood why, I think. My own mother told me this today.” She tensed. “Today,” she repeated, her voice softer. “This morning. My sixteenth birthday,” she added, a tinge of bitterness in the depths of the words. “I was the unwanted orphan, given to the blacksmith and his wife, who had no children of their own to raise. Everyone knew it. Every child in the village. Every child who attended the Mother’s service.”
Adam could not conceive of an abandoned child among his own kin. Even the children who were the product of violence were taken in by their mother, by the tribe. But the Voyani were not so numerous as the citizens of Averalaan, and perhaps the rules of the Northern Houses were different. They did not appear to value blood-kin, blood ties—and they were proud of that.
But absent blood ties, they still built families; he thought of the den. They did not share parents, but that didn’t seem to matter. They were kin, and bound by ties of kinship, in the way the Voyani were bound by ties of blood.
Evayne shook herself. “My parents loved me,” she continued. “And I loved them. Neither my mother nor my father acknowledged the truth that the rest of the village knew: I wasn’t theirs. My mother didn’t birth me. My father was strict, and often silent, but . . . there was a warmth to his silence, and sometimes, when he worked, a kind of excitement. I wanted to be a blacksmith,” she added.
“My mother was chattier—but that wasn’t hard. She was the smith’s wife, and she was held in some regard. But she tried to be friendly and helpful when help was needed, and she was of the village. She was still treated as the blacksmith’s wife after my father’s death.”
“You were of the village, as well.”
“No, not really. I was a child from nowhere. I had no history in the village.”
“You had your entire life!”
“It doesn’t count. I was a stranger.”
Adam’s arm tightened; he forced it to relax.
“When my mother got quiet, it was bad. And she got a lot quieter in the past year. She’d look at me as if—” Evayne didn’t finish the sentence.
Adam didn’t require it, though. Her mother must have been told something by the Mother’s Daughter at the time she had been found.
“I had friends,” she said softly, after another long pause. “Not many. But—friends. Most of the villagers didn’t care for me. They tolerated me for the sake of my parents, and after my father died, my mother. I tried so hard to be a good daughter. To be what the village wanted. But I couldn’t be. I was a foreigner, an outsider.”
Adam did not understand the village.
“Wylen was a year younger than me. He was also the child of people who had come to settle in the village. We started spending time together because we had that in common—but Wylen at least knew who his parents were. And Darguar. He did some of the smithing work my father had once done—but he was an outsider as well. He was respected because he could do some of the necessary work.
“He was missing a foot. He’d fought in the wars in the South—I don’t know which ones. He wouldn’t say. He told us that he’d been a soldier, that he’d lost a foot—but we stopped asking questions because he’d stop, sometimes, and just stare off into the distance, as if—as if he couldn’t see us anymore.
“He’d come to the village. I think he wanted to farm.” She shook her head. “He wasn’t raised to a farm, and he didn’t know what he was doing. But he knew how to work in a forge. He wasn’t as good as my father, but his early training was in silver and gold—very different things. He was a big bear of a man, and when he was angry, he was terrifying. He never hit us,” she added quickly. She had loved this man, whoever he was. “But you just—you wanted to stay away until it passed.
“He was an outsider, too, but he was more accepted because of what he did.” She glanced up at Adam, her smile wan. “We were all outsiders, and we made our own inside.”
She fell silent again. Adam thought she might stop and accepted that; his curiosity was not her problem. Or it shouldn’t be; he was no longer four years old, asking questions in an innocence that would never be accepted from adults.
She had not finished.
“Last night—late last night—I had a visitor.” Her hands became fists. She drew her knees tightly into her chest, dropping her chin; hair obscured her face. “It was my sixteenth birthday.” She buried her face briefly. “Three visitors,” she added. “For my birthday.”
“The first was a man I had never seen before. Never seen but knew. He told me—he told me he was grateful to see that I had survived to be sixteen. He said he was my father. My real father.
“But my real father was the man who found me and raised me. My real father was the man who loved me. Who died. I didn’t want to listen to him—I was angry. I—it was late, I’d been sleeping.”
There was no need to make excuses now, no need to explain—but she did. To Adam, her words made sense, but the Voyani were never completely safe on the open road. One didn’t always know, in times of violence, who one’s father was. One knew one’s mother. And one’s tribe.
“He asked me to go with him. He seemed to expect that I would; that he’d tell me he was my real father and I’d follow him, deserting my mother. I said . . . no. I said . . . a lot more, but it all meant no. He just bowed and told me he would come again.”
“I thought—” She shook her head. “I woke. I was awake. I’ve always had trouble with sleep. It’s the dreams,” she added quietly. “Or nightmares. I went to check on my mother, who’s never had trouble with sleep. She was there. She was sleeping. But she stirred because I’d checked, and she woke. And I don’t know what she knew—but she knew something was wrong. Even in the lamplight, she was so pale.
“She was afraid. She was afraid I would leave her.” Silence, the sound of swallowing, of unsaid words. “I asked her what was happening.
“She asked me why I was awake. I answered—but . . . she knew something. It was something she’d never told me.” She swallowed again. “I—” she fell silent, curling further in on herself.
Adam understood. “We say things,” Adam said softly, “in anger. But anger is not our only truth. She is your mother. She understands.”
“She knew,” Evayne said, to he
r knees. “She knew that someone would come for me on my sixteenth birthday.” Evayne exhaled. “She wouldn’t have taken me. Wouldn’t have raised me. He—he wanted to come back when I was twelve, and my mother said—my mother said that twelve was too young. If he meant to take me back at twelve, he could find some other woman to parent. She said my dad never intended to give me up at all.
“But—sixteen seemed old enough to my mother, when I was a babe in arms. Until I turned fifteen. And then it seemed too young. She wanted a child. They both did. And he told her—”
“He?”
“The man who claimed to be my real father. He told her that I was—” She laughed, bitterly, derisively, “the hope of the world. The hope upon which all others depended. My mother asked him why someone so important was to be left to a blacksmith and his wife in the Free Towns. She didn’t believe him.
“But if she’d told me, I wouldn’t have believed him, either.”
“He answered,” Adam said, certain, although it was a guess.
Evayne was crying now; the sound was in all the syllables, changing their weight and breaking them in different places. “He said—” She stopped, started again. “She said he said it was because they would love me. What I needed—” But the words were lost again. When they resumed, they were low. “He’d been told that they would love me and protect me better than anyone else, anywhere. All he needed for me was that.
“And he told them that the choice—to stay or to leave—would be mine, in the end. That he would come to me at the start of my sixteenth year.”
“I think my parents believed that if it was my choice, I would never leave them.” And then, she wept anew.
• • •
“Your second visitor was the Oracle?” He asked the question only when she had stilled and her tears had stopped. He had no doubt they would start again. They would love you, he thought. That was what her parent had desired. And they had. Love begets love.
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