by Megan Bannen
“The stone from my mother’s library is in there.”
“I know.” I pause, drawing as much strength as I can from my own store of energy to say what must be said. “We can’t stay. I don’t know how much time we have. I’m sorry.”
He grimaces the way he always does when he knows I’m right but he badly wants me to be wrong. Then he looks at my face, and whatever he wanted for himself evaporates. “Oh, death, what did you do?”
“Long story,” I mumble, still drooping from his hands.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes,” I answer, but then I have to reconsider that answer. “Maybe.”
He pulls my arm over his shoulder and half carries me into the shadows on the stable’s north side. Blood continues to seep from my nose. He looks anywhere but at my face as he hoists me onto one of the waiting horses. I grip the pommel of the saddle, trying not to fall off as he climbs on behind me with his usual grace. I guess we’re only taking one horse rather than two since I can’t be trusted to stay upright. It’s a relief to have his arm around my waist, partly because I really might fall off otherwise, and partly because it’s a reminder that he’s real and solid and alive.
“Where are DeRopa’s men, DeTana and DeLuthina?” I ask.
“Dead.” In that single syllable, I hear the weight in his soul, the burden of killing his own countrymen. But neither one of us has the luxury of wallowing in all that has happened in the past day, so I say, “One thing at a time. We’re heading north.”
“Okay. Why?” He’s already got our horse moving off the road and into the rolling hills northward.
My body is so wrung out that I feel like I have no bones left, and my head falls back against his shoulder. “Because I have the Sword, and I know where the Mother’s body is.”
IV.
The Forest
Thirty-Eight
We opt for speed rather than distance, but after ten miles, the stallion is too tired to go on, so we abandon the horse and trek north on foot. Tavik slogs ahead of me in the pelting sleet, holding my hand to drag me up a hill. And I do mean drag. I don’t regret using the Mother’s power at the monastery, but my body is paying for it after the fact.
“What if this tree you remember isn’t the Mother’s body?” Tavik asks, helping me over a puddle. “What if it’s just a tree?”
“It is the Mother’s body. It’s why the Goodson went to Hedenskia all those years ago. He guessed they were protecting something up there, and he was right. The only difference is that the Goodson went there to destroy Her. But you and I can put Elath back together again.”
“I thought you didn’t want to put the Mother back together.”
“Maybe what I want has changed.” How bizarre that we’ve reversed positions. His devotion to freeing the Mother has lessened, while I’m more committed than ever to getting Her out of my body.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” He lets go of my hand, leaving me to stagger behind him on my own. “If the Hedenski catch us on their soil, they’ll kill us. I can fight a lot of men at once, but not an entire country.”
“But I’m Hedenski.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Why are you fighting this?” I pant at him, struggling to keep up.
“You know why,” he fires back at me over his shoulder as the unsaid word drifts through the stormy air between us: telleg.
“Would you stop for a minute?”
“We don’t have time to stop!” He ironically stops to shout at me. He’s been angry with me before, but there’s a different flavor to his venom now. Up until a few hours ago, he was very sure of the world and his place in it. Losing DeRopa must be like losing a piece of his soul, and now I’m the one bearing the brunt of all the hurt welling up inside him. He’s not the only one feeling the sting of betrayal, but he is right on one point: we don’t have time. So I close the gap between us, reaching out to take his hand again in my own meager grasp.
“If we’re not going to Hedenskia, it doesn’t matter whether we stop or keep going.”
We stand on the side of a gently sloping hill, me teetering on my feet and both of us breathing heavily from the effort of hiking and arguing. Tavik shoves a stray curl out of his face but says nothing. In this moment, it’s so easy to see past the near invincibility of his exterior, right to the delicate fragility of his heart. Staring into his vulnerability makes my own chest ache.
“‘Only the Vessel and the Sword may set Her free,’ and we have both. I don’t want to go to the Dead Forest or Hedenskia, and I can’t tell you how much I don’t want to put you in harm’s way, but we have no choice. Now that the Goodson has lost the Vessel—and the Sword for that matter—he has to destroy the body. The only way to end this is to get there first.”
Icy rain falls on Tavik’s shoulders as surely as the truth, but he’s going to need something greater than truth to cross through the Dead Forest. I put my hands palms up in front of me and tell him, “Hold out your hands like this.”
He frowns but mirrors the gesture. I pull the blade from my scabbard and place it across his palms. Then I put my hands under each of his so that we’re holding the weight of the weapon together.
“This is the Hand of the Father, Ludo’s sword, given to him by his Mother. This is the sword Goodson Anskar carried through the Dead Forest ten years ago, the sword that slew every telleg in our path. You promised to protect the Vessel, Tavik DeSemla, and you never break your promises.”
He blows out a shuddering breath as he takes the full weight of the sword into his own hands.
“We’re in this together,” I tell him. “You and me.”
Church bells ring to the south, rousing the local patrols from their dinner tables and pub stools. Our time is running out. Tavik gives me the saddest excuse for a smile I’ve ever seen. “To the bitter end,” he agrees. It’s been a while since he’s made me blush, but he holds my gaze long enough to make my ears turn pink.
“I’m a Two-Swords, not a Three-Swords. You’d better take one of these,” he jokes weakly, turning his back to me so I can free up space for his new weapon. As I pull one of the swords from its scabbard, I spot a bird over Tavik’s shoulder, flying past us in a blur of blue feathers.
“Do you see that?” I whisper when it stops to perch on a cypress branch.
He nods and takes several tentative steps toward the soulswift.
“Does it have a message?” I ask him.
“I don’t see a canister.”
The bird studies Tavik with one eye, turns her head to blink at me with the other, then darts off, flying to a shrub ten feet away. Tavik and I glance at each other in unspoken agreement before we follow her. When we get close, she flits away again, this time landing on a signpost pointing the way back toward Saint Helios.
“Why are we doing this?” Tavik pants as we follow her from the sign to a copse of pines at the bottom of the hill, where she disappears into the thick branches. I’m too out of breath to answer. All I know is that my instincts are screaming at me to follow the soulswift.
When we burst into the trees, we barely stop in time before crashing into a couple of rough-looking men and three barrels we did not expect to find in the clearing. The astringent scent of alcohol cutting through the air alerts me to the fact that we’ve barged in on a pair of bootleggers and their illegal distillery. The men gape at us, both of them wiry and a little dirty.
“Saints and sinners, it’s them,” cries the leaner of the two.
Tavik’s swords are out a second later, the Hand of the Father bright and dangerous in his left hand.
“Whoa!” both men shout repeatedly. One of them rolls up a pant leg while the other pulls down on the neck of his shirt. For one alarming moment, I think they’re disrobing, but then I realize that each of them is showing us his tattoos. Trees, just like the one on Tavik’s wrist.
“Blessed be the Mother!” the sturdier man says, his eyes wide as he stares at Tavik’s swords. “Every Elathian between here
and Juprachen’s on the lookout for you.”
“I missed that last part?” Tavik says in Kantari without taking his eyes off the scraggly men.
“I think we’re getting back on the Milk Road,” I tell him as I grapple with the fact that a soulswift seems to have led us here deliberately.
Tavik puts his blades back into their scabbards and shakes his head. “Holy Mother, divine intervention is kind of terrifying.”
The people hiding us from the Order are a family of smugglers named Bennik, which makes Tavik and me smuggled goods. We sit beneath a storeroom’s hatch, Tavik huddled on a sack of grain with the Hand of the Father in his white-knuckled grip, and me sitting slightly higher on a barrel of whiskey. We’re surrounded by enough black-market wool to clothe every Daughter in the Convent of Saint Vinnica, but we can’t see any of it at the moment, because we’re hiding with all these illicit goods in a cramped space beneath our rescuers’ house, and we don’t have a lamp. I only know these things are present because I caught a glimpse of them when we were shooed down the ladder.
I don’t bother to ask Tavik if he’s all right. I know how much he hates dark, tight spaces. There’s a part of him that will always be a frightened child stuck in a well. I reach for his hand, petting my way down his arm until I’m able to twine my fingers with his. His uneven breathing is the only sound in the room except for the occasional footsteps and voices from above.
Tavik makes a startled sound and jerks away, scaring me out of my skin.
“What is it?” I whisper.
“I think a rat just crawled over my foot.”
He is definitely not all right. I reach for his hand again, and he grips mine painfully. Time stretches on. And on. Tavik’s breath stretches and thins with it, moist with unspoken panic.
At last, the moment we’ve been dreading arrives, the cacophony of footsteps, sharp voices, and furniture groaning across the floorboards.
Someone has come looking for us.
My breath grows as thin as Tavik’s, and my hand, clutched tightly in his, goes numb.
I sense him moving beside me, silent as a cat. He touches his way up my arm and shoulder, all the way to my face, cupping my cheek in the palm of his hand. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispers. “They won’t find us here, and if they do, they’ll have to get through me. I won’t let them hurt you. I won’t let them touch you. I won’t let them take you away.”
It feels like a prayer, the way he says it, comforting himself as much as me. He wraps his arm around my shoulders and pulls me in close. I breathe in his scent, which has gone a bit ripe, and even that is a comfort. I curl into him, my head tucked into the crook of his neck, my face pressed against his chest.
“You’re safe,” he whispers as we cling to each other in the darkness, each of us counteracting the other’s fear like weights on a scale. I listen to the furious beating of his heart and feel his lungs expand and contract through the storm of men above us and through the ominous silence that follows.
At last, the hatch opens, sending a square of light into the darkness.
“All clear,” a woman calls down to us. “Damn telleg lickers made a mess, but they didn’t have a clue how to find you, them being men.”
“Mom,” one of the bootleggers complains behind her, but she only cackles in response, the sort of sound I imagined old crones making in the stories Zofia used to tell me.
I pull myself free of Tavik’s arm and get a good look at him. Sweat shines on his skin, and his waxy complexion makes his bruised eye lividly purple.
“Get. Me. Out of here,” he says in a thick, harsh rumble.
The house is a large, one-room block that contains the entire Bennik family—a widow, her two grown sons, their wives, six children, five sheep, and a cow—but compared to the cramped darkness underneath our feet, it feels like a castle. Technically, property is supposed to pass from father to son in Rosvania, but it quickly becomes clear that Widow Bennik rules the roost here.
Tavik and I sit with the adults at a large, rough-hewn table while the children run riot around us. The elegant tea service on the table’s rustic surface contrasts mightily with the rest of our surroundings.
“Is this Yilish tea?” Tavik asks in Rosvanian after a decadent sip.
“From Ulu Province,” the widow answers with a semitoothless grin. “We serve only the best at Bennik Palace.”
Tavik takes an indelicate slurp and rolls his one good eye in ecstasy. “Tell her I might actually kiss her,” he says to me in Kantari. When I refuse, he rolls his good eye again and raises his teacup to the old woman. “Blessed be the Mother.”
She snorts. “Honey, I don’t believe in gods. I believe in people. So be someone I want to believe in, and maybe I’ll help you.”
“If you’re not an Elathian, why are you a part of the Milk Road?” I ask her.
“Well, my boys got religion from their old man, and for my part, I make good money smuggling for the Elathians, mostly wool and grain, but I do smuggle people on occasion, helping them get somewhere safe.” She leans back in her chair, pulls a pipe from her pocket, and starts puffing away. I had no idea women like this existed in the world. “The Prima of Kantar pays particularly well,” she adds, “which is why I agreed to smuggle the two of you out of Rosvania.”
“What? Where?” I exclaim.
“What’d she say?” Tavik asks, picking up on my alarm, but Widow Bennik keeps talking.
“We’re going to transport you in a shipment of wool to Portham in Auria, where you’ll board a packet sailing to Yil. My Yilish connections will then smuggle you into Kantar through the usual black-market channels.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” I tell her, while Tavik nudges my elbow, struggling to follow the widow’s twang.
She eyes the pair of us as if we had just sprouted horns. “Why not?”
Tavik nudges me again, but I swat his hand away. “We have a plan already, and we could use your help with it.”
“Oh boy, this should be good,” Widow Bennik says, releasing twin streams of smoke from her nostrils. “Let’s hear it.”
“Hello? Remember me?” Tavik growls, and I finally bring him up to speed. He glances around the room at the two men, their wives, the children, the sheep, and the cow before he turns his handsome face to Widow Bennik again and asks, “Do you have a messenger?”
Thirty-Nine
There’s nothing to do but wait until the Prima of Kantar answers Tavik’s message. How appropriate to be waiting on a soulswift, at once the harbinger of death and the symbol of eternal life. I wonder which of those things the Prima’s answer will bring us: life or death.
I sleep for nearly two days solid, but no amount of rest fully replenishes my depleted strength. Each time I dip into the Mother’s power to take one step forward, I wind up taking two steps back in the long run. The constant buzzing of Elath’s presence inside me also refuses to subside. If anything, She’s getting louder, more insistent, a brimming life I can’t ignore.
Waiting is pure torment to Tavik. He’s not good at sitting still, and having time to think rather than to act makes him broody. I’ve spent the past several weeks slowly easing my way into the annihilation of my worldview, while Tavik is having to deal with DeRopa’s betrayal in one sudden burst. He bites off my head any time I try to talk to him about it, so instead I’ve taken to reading books, of which, as it turns out, Widow Bennik has many.
Rain drenches the thatched roof overhead and funnels down into several pots on the floor, making a repetitive rhythm—drip-DRIP-pause-drip, drip-DRIP-pause-drip—as I sit at the table with a book of Ostmari poetry and read by the light of a candle. I was never allowed to read secular texts at the convent, and I feel as if my mind is devouring a decadent dessert. Each poem extolls the beauty of a different landscape—mountains, the sea, a desert—a lyrical catalog of a world I’ve hardly seen and would not have known at all if it weren’t for Tavik.
Widow Bennik sits across from me smoking thoughtfully
on her pipe. She doesn’t seem like the sort to keep works of literature on hand, but I’m coming to accept the fact that people are surprisingly unpredictable. “That one’s easy on the eyes,” she comments to me, jabbing her pipe toward Tavik, who’s trying to practice sword drills indoors without jabbing a small child with one of his blades.
“Mom!” Hroth chastises her. He’s the older of her two sons and the one more easily embarrassed by his mother’s frankness.
“What’s she saying?” Tavik asks. “Is she talking about me? She’s talking about me, isn’t she?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I’m trying to read.”
He gives up on drills and plunks the swords on the table with a dramatic sigh. One of the pommels covers a page of my book, so I also heave a sigh and scoot it out of the way.
Drip-DRIP-pause-drip, drip-DRIP-pause-drip.
I look up when another sound joins the rhythm of the rain. Tavik has taken a wooden spoon and a ladle from the daughter-in-law cooking dinner and is now on his knees, drumming the sides of one of the pots to the drip-DRIP-pause-drip rhythm, wiggling his hips back and forth in an alarmingly obscene fashion.
“Would you stop, please?” I protest. I expect the women to back me up, but they and their children are laughing at Tavik’s antics while Hroth and his brother grunt in irritation.
Tavik continues to clank the spoon and ladle against the pot as he sings in Kantari, “I’m so bored I’m going to die.”
“You are not going to die.”
“Not of boredom, but since the world is a horrible place, I’ve decided to have fun tonight.”
“I’m familiar with your idea of fun,” I mutter, turning my attention back to the poetry.
He changes up the rhythm so that it dances around the steady beat of the rain, one complementing the other—the leaks constant and predictable, his own beat syncopated and driving and persistent. I gurgle my annoyance under my breath. Tavik either doesn’t hear me or takes this as encouragement, because he begins to sing, belting out a love song in soulful Kantari. One of the sheep bleats in alarm.