by Megan Bannen
For a heartbeat, I’m stupid enough to feel relief, but then reality drops on me like a ton of bricks.
I carry Elath the Great Demon within me, and I just married a Kantari Two-Swords named Tavik DeSemla.
Fourteen
For the next half hour, I sit at the banquet table with my face buried in my hands, a feeble attempt at avoiding reality as the remaining wedding guests tiptoe around me. Eventually, Tavik chucks a plate heaped with food onto the table, plops into the chair next to me, and combs his cropped curls out of his eyes with both hands, undoing what little order the Dyers managed to impose upon them. “This mess is going to be in my face and driving me bonkers for the next half year at least.”
What am I supposed to say? Even that ridiculous mop is gloriously beautiful? Instead, I frown at his mini feast on the table. “You ate five courses at the banquet. Was that not enough for you?”
“Most Kantari don’t get that much food in a week. I’ve had more than enough, but you haven’t.”
For a moment, I’m touched, but then I remember it’s not really me he’s worried about. I push the plate away. “I’m not hungry.”
“In the eighteen hours since we met, I’ve seen you barf, but I haven’t seen you eat. And nice job on that contraction, by the way. Keep it up.”
“What does ‘barf’ mean?”
Tavik makes dramatic vomiting noises.
“I’m sorry I asked,” I mutter in Rosvanian, but I drag the plate toward me. I do feel better after I force down a bit of ham and mustard greens, but I’m not inclined to admit it.
I still have a quarter of my meal left when Dyer sets down two swords in their scabbards in front of Tavik and announces, “Time to go.” He shrugs out of two knapsacks and drops them on the table, making my fork rattle against my plate. “You’ll head directly west until you reach the Sargo River. That’s two miles out in the open, so move quickly. Once you’re at the river, keep to the trees for cover, because there’s a good chance the Order of Saint Ovin will have boats out on the water looking for you. Follow the Sargo north until you—”
“North?” Tavik cuts in, not needing a translation, although he’s speaking in Kantari. “No. We need to head south-southwest, toward Tovnia, toward my captain. Tell him, Gelya.”
“He said the Order will expect that,” I translate. “That’s why they’re sending us north instead. But, Tavik, I cannot believe the Goodson would send a manhunt after me.” If he’s still in charge of the Order, I add in my mind.
“Well, he’d sure as hell send one after me.”
Dyer clears his throat, impatient. “You’ll follow the Sargo north to the point where it makes a hard bend west, fifteen miles or so, then head directly east from there. Dalment is about a five-mile walk from that point, again on open road, so be careful. I suggest you move at night if possible. We’ve sent a messenger to our contact there, the apothecary on Saint Polova Street. His name is Ambrus.”
Tavik perks up. “Can you ask him if there are any more messengers?”
I pass along his request, then translate the answer back to him. “They sent the only messenger they had to Dalment, which is where we’re going. Who are these messengers?”
“What, not who. And, ugh, I’d give anything to send a message right now.”
He straps the swords to his back, and Dyer helps him shrug the larger of the two sacks over his scabbards. He holds out the other pack to me and says, “Come along, my beloved wife.”
I glare at him and hoist the second pack onto my shoulders, surreptitiously slipping my hand into my pocket to make sure Zofia’s folded parchment is there. The sooner we get to this safe house on the Milk Road—whatever that means—the sooner I can look at it, and the sooner I can look at it, the sooner I might have some answers about what happened last night and why. Dear Father, let there be something in Zofia’s notes that will help me figure out what to do about the demon within me.
If it even is a demon.
Simply questioning the nature of Elath is a heresy of which I never dreamed myself capable. I can’t believe the extent to which my belief has shrunk and my doubt has ballooned. But I remember the light when Tavik drove his blade into the Grace Tree. And it doesn’t feel evil, this life I hold within me. So may the Father have mercy on me for entertaining doubt. I would not be doubtful if He were not silent.
Tavik looks to me and jerks his head west, toward the Sargo River. “Let’s go, dearest.”
The Sargo River unspools south as Tavik and I make our way north toward Dalment. A mosquito keeps wheezing in my ear no matter how many times I bat it away, and my feet feel like lead weights attached to the ends of my legs. I would give anything for an hour’s rest, but since that won’t be happening any time soon, and since it doesn’t appear as if we’re in imminent danger at the moment, I decide the time has come for Tavik to start answering my questions.
“Tavik?” I ask his back since he’s walking in front of me.
“Yes, my beloved?”
The way he’s treating this nightmare like a joke makes me want to kick in those perfect teeth of his. “You do understand that you married me today, correct?”
“Uh, no, I didn’t.”
“You spoke the sacred wedding vows and swore an oath to the Father. And we . . . we—”
“Which is so weird,” he interrupts, saving me from having to say the word kissed. “Doesn’t the bride get a say in the matter?”
“That is not the point!”
“It kind of is, though.” He slows down so that I can catch up to him and walk by his side. “Let me ask you something. Do you want to be married to me?”
“No!”
“Do you think I want to be married to you?”
“I highly doubt it.”
“You would be correct. I don’t. Where I come from, you’re not married unless you want to be. So there. We’re not married. Problem solved. Do you think you could pick up the pace a bit?”
“Holy Father, this is my life now,” I mutter in Rosvanian.
He must catch my drift, because he nods in agreement. “No kidding. You’re an Ovinist Vessel, and the Mother is literally living inside you, but here I am, talking to you like it’s totally normal.”
“Like I am a human being?” I ask him, resenting his reminder of Elath’s presence within me, not that I could ever, for a moment, forget it.
He studies me before facing forward again. “I know you’re a human being, Gelya.”
I don’t know why, but Tavik’s words make my eyes water and my throat swell. My humanity should be obvious. I have arms and legs and a torso and a head just like anyone else. And yet almost no one has ever treated me like a person, except for Zofia and the Goodson. The entire Ovinist faith thinks of me as a Vessel of the Father’s Word, and the only other thing most people see in me beyond that is that I’m Hedenski, something that hardly borders on human in the eyes of many. So Tavik’s simple recognition that I’m human touches a sore spot I didn’t know I had until now.
This weepiness has the added side effect of making the foreign presence inside me pulse more vibrantly, which makes me want to cry all the more, so I deflect my emotions by asking another question. “What is the Milk Road?”
Tavik glances sideways again. “The Milk Road. Right. Elathians who live in the eight countries of the Ovinist Church have to hide their faith from the Order of Saint Ovin, so there’s a communication network in place, a way for us to stay connected and help each other. That’s the Milk Road.”
“And Kantar is part of the Milk Road?”
“Kantar is where the road begins and ends. Elathians the world over feed us and supply us, and we do the best we can to free the Mother and keep the faith alive.”
“The Dyers recognized you by the mark on your wrist. What is it?”
Tavik stops, rolls back his sleeve, and holds up the image on his wrist. “It’s a tattoo, the Grace Tree of Kantar, the symbol of Elath the Mother and Her gift of life.”
“We
call it Elath’s Tree,” I inform him.
“Yes, I know,” he answers drily and begins walking again, his eyes scanning our surroundings in search of possible threats.
“Why do you call it the Milk Road? It is such an odd name.”
“It’s a metaphor. Where does milk come from? Think about it.”
I think about it. And then I get it.
“Cows,” I reply, humiliated. “Obviously.”
Tavik bursts out laughing. “May the Mother and Her Sacred Milk bless you.”
“What do you think will happen if Elath is not set free?” I ask, eager to change the subject away from the demon’s breasts.
“You really are the Prima of Questions,” he tells me with a comical contortion of his eyebrows. “We’ve been living in the Mother’s Last Breath since Ovin took the Mother from us. What little life remains on earth comes from that. There used to be forests and farmland and pastures in Kantar. Now it’s mostly desert and mountains, stretching into all the countries of the south. It’s only a matter of time before death comes for the north, too. When the Mother’s breath runs out at last, there will be only the Father’s half of the world left: night and rock and desert and death. No new souls will be made, and all the souls of the dead will remain in the underworld for eternity, never to be reborn again.”
“What happens in the underworld? What is it like?”
His eyes go distant, unfocused. “It’s dark and underground and nothing happens. Just waiting and waiting.”
I think of him as he was beneath the convent, panicked and unable to breathe. I have to believe that there is no such thing as this Elathian underworld, if only so that Tavik never has to go there.
“My turn,” he says, as eager to change the subject as I was a moment ago. “An Ovinist believes that the souls of faithful people go to heaven, right? While the souls of people like me . . . what? Disappear?”
This is one of the most basic tenets of Ovinism, but having to say it aloud to an Elathian’s face makes me squirm with my doubt of the Father’s goodness. “The souls of heathens become the telleg of the Dead Forest.”
“Seriously? You think the Dead Forest is where the mean people go when they die?”
“It is called the Dead Forest for a reason. Is that not what Elathians believe?”
“No. The telleg are just the telleg. They’re just there.” I’d swear I see him shudder before he asks, “What do you think will happen if the Mother is set free?”
There’s no criticism buried in the words. He really just wants to know what an Ovinist believes. And it would be nice if he understood what’s at stake not just if he fails, but if he’s wrong in the first place.
“Then Elath will shackle all souls to the physical world with her temptations, and the immortal life of the soul will remain on earth, sinner or not. It means there is no everlasting life beside the Father.”
“Well, your heaven is already barred to me. And frankly, I’d rather be bound to earthly pleasures anyway.”
He doesn’t understand.
“It means the whole world becomes the Dead Forest, Tavik. It means everyone becomes a telleg.”
He considers this before he says, “I think the Father is a lot nicer than Ovinists think He is. Just because death is weaker than life doesn’t make Him a jerk.”
I have no idea what the word jerk means, but I’m fairly certain that it would be nice to believe the Father isn’t one.
We don’t talk much after that, and the silence gives my brain all the space it needs to pile up even more questions. I start with Zofia. I can’t understand how or why she hid so much from me. I thought I knew her well, and now I wonder if I knew her at all. Was she an Elathian before she came to Saint Vinnica, or did she come to doubt the Father slowly, over time?
Like me?
It’s an oddly comforting thought.
As I mull this over, my mind fixates on one question in particular: Why did Brother Miklos kill her? Tavik said there was an Elathian spy at the convent, someone who figured out where Elath was truly hidden. It had to have been Zofia. Was Miklos trying to silence her before she could tell anyone else that Elath was imprisoned at the convent? Was he punishing her for betraying the Holy Ovinist Church? And what did the Goodson have to do with any of it?
It’s the Goodson’s actions that make the least sense of all. I can’t imagine a world in which I would not trust him with my life, and yet here I am, living in it. My suspicions grow like a thicket all around me, barbed and poisonous. Why did he try to stop me from going to the summit? How could he have allowed Brother Miklos to let armed men enter that room last night? Why wasn’t he there to protect us? None of it adds up, and that’s all the more reason to avoid the Order until I know more.
“You look terrible,” Tavik observes, rousing me from my thoughts.
“Oh, thank you very much.”
“Was that sarcasm? Thank the Mother. You do have a sense of humor. I was starting to worry.”
Tavik makes my head throb. I stop and put my hands over my eyes, pushing against the pain.
“Hey, sorry,” he says. “You don’t look terrible. I meant you look like you feel terrible. There’s a difference.”
“Mm-hmm,” I mumble, leaving my hands where they are.
He pulls them away gently so that I have to look at him. Every time I get an eyeful of that handsome face, I can feel my skin turn red and blotchy. How on earth do normal girls navigate a world full of boys?
“You know what?” he says. “We’ve made it a good distance, and we should probably save the remainder for the cover of night anyway. Why don’t you get some rest?”
The instant the word rest exits his mouth, my eyelids grow heavy and every muscle in my body goes slack. He moves behind me and coaxes me out of the knapsack.
“Here.” He holds out the blanket from my pack before shrugging out of his own knapsack. As I spread my blanket on the ground in the clearing where we’ve stopped, he takes the blanket from his supplies and holds it out to me as well. My exhausted brain can’t figure out what he’s doing, and I frown at the wool, confused.
“Take it. One to lie down on, one to go over you.”
“Don’t you need to rest, too?”
“I’ll keep watch.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“I’ll be all right. I’m used to it.” He rises and presses the blanket into my hands so that I have no choice but to take it. Gelya of Twenty-Four Hours Ago would not have dreamed of falling asleep in front of a stranger. Gelya of Right Now could not possibly care less. I curl onto my side on the soft wool, facing away from Tavik as I pull his blanket up to my shoulders. The earth beneath me is hard and lumpy, but sleep closes in anyway.
“Gelya?” he whispers.
“Hmm?” I answer sleepily.
“Can you feel Her? Does She talk to you?”
Her.
Elath.
I wish I could forget, but the knowledge that something lives inside me never fully goes away. I feel like a simmering pot on a stove, and I know without being told that I could lift the lid if I wanted to sniff what was inside.
“I sense that She’s there,” I tell him. “But no, She doesn’t speak to me.”
He nods and looks away. As I drift off to sleep, I hear him whisper, “I’m sorry, Gelya. You have no idea how sorry I am.”
The last thought that randomly pops into my mind as sleep finally catches up to me is, Tavik is right. Why don’t brides get a say in the matter?
I wish I had.
I tap lightly on the door with freckled knuckles.
“Come in.”
One of the hinges squeaks familiarly as I push open the door, and there, sitting at the old polished desk in the Sacrist’s office, sits Zofia, sifting through a stack of papers. I hover at the door, drinking her in with disbelieving eyes.
She looks up from her work. “Well, don’t just stand there.”
In a daze, I cross the small room and take a seat at the wooden
chair opposite her. “Zofia?”
“What’s wrong?” she asks, and I can see that my confusion amuses her.
“I thought you were dead.”
She plays along, holding out her arms to get a good look at herself. “Am I?”
I glance around the office. Everything is as familiar to me as my own body, even the scent of lemon oil used to polish the oak desk to a mellow sheen. “I thought so.”
Zofia rises from her seat, and suddenly, she seems much taller than I remember. She crouches down in front of me and takes me by the arms, a warm smile on her face. “Do you know what we haven’t played in a long time? Hide-and-seek. What do you say to a game? Would you like that?”
I nod.
She rises and sprints out the door, calling, “Come and find me!”
I follow her down the long convent hallway, both of us giggling like mad, but when I round the corner after her, I find myself chasing her along a forest path. The ground beneath my feet rises and falls irregularly, making it hard to navigate, and I fall farther and farther behind.
“Come on, Gelya!”
I run so fast I can hardly breathe. A lock of red hair comes loose from my braids and tickles my face as I burst into a wide clearing. An enormous tree stands in the center, its branches stretching toward heaven, grasping at the clouds in the sky. The roots reach out like the tentacles of an octopus, straddling a brook that seems to come from the tree itself.
A stag stands in the clearing, regarding me with curiosity. His antlers remind me of branches, as if he were an extension of the great tree. A woman stands beside him at the circle’s center. She is fuzzy, indistinct, faceless. She holds a dagger in her hand.
And she slits the stag’s throat with it.
The poor creature lets out a horrid, gurgling cry before he can make no more sound at all. Dark blood pours from the slash in his flesh, gushing in waves with the pumping of his dying heart.
The woman has no eyes, and yet she looks at me. And when she speaks, it’s Zofia’s voice that comes out of her mouthless face.
“Hurry.”
Fifteen
I wake to find myself sore and cramped on the hard earth as the river whispers behind me in this living world where Zofia cannot go. She was so real in my dream, and waking to the realization that she’s gone is like losing her all over again.