by Megan Bannen
“What’s wrong?” Tavik asks me. “What’s he saying?”
I take my hand from Sevlos’s and touch Tavik’s arm before telling my uncle, “We have come to wake Her. That is why he’s with me. He’s not one of Ovin’s men. He’s one of us.”
Sevlos narrows his eyes at Tavik, studying him in this new light.
“Gelya?” Tavik asks uncertainly.
“It’s all right.”
If Sevlos finds Tavik wanting, he doesn’t say so. He nods and pats my hand. “Would you like to see your mother’s tree first?”
“The goddess, you mean?”
“No, your mother, Lanya.”
I turn to Tavik, confused.
“Don’t look at me. You stopped translating five minutes ago. I’m completely lost.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell Sevlos.
He shakes his head again and clicks his tongue. “Those men stole so much from you. When a Hedenski dies, she or he is buried in the Great Goddess’s forest. From each human heart grows a new tree. Would you like to see Lanya’s tree?”
“My mother’s name was Lanya?”
Sevlos nods. A single giggle bubbles up my throat, and my eyes fill with tears. I turn back to Tavik and tell him, in Kantari, “My mother’s name was Lanya.”
Nobody but Sevlos offers to accompany us on the half-hour trek west to the village where I spent the first years of my life. When we arrive, I understand why he’s the only one willing to come. It feels like we’ve entered a graveyard, one in which the dead are listening and waiting. Few houses remain here, and a new forest has overtaken the ones that do. Saplings and vines have infiltrated the cottages, and the walls left standing are singed at the edges.
“Mother and Father,” Tavik utters, keeping his distance. I don’t blame him. It must remind him of his own lost family, his own obliterated home.
We can’t see the ocean from here, yet it fills every inch of this town, from the salty scent of the air to the sound of the waves crashing against the cliffs, a familiar presence I took for granted as a child and cherish now that I’ve been separated from it for over half my life.
I walk ahead, past the crumbled remnants of the well and the burned-out husk of a longhouse, my destination inevitable, as if the tide were carrying me there.
You must remember where you came from.
Zofia’s voice skates past my ears, so near I’d swear she was standing beside me. I wish she was, the woman who willingly became my mother when I lost mine. And I never even thanked her for it.
Home, I tell her in my mind. I’ve come home.
The door is gone, as is most of the roof. Inside, ten years of rain and snow have rotted the table, the chairs, and the child’s bed by the blackened hearthstones. I walk over to the bed’s frame, where the straw of the tick has given way to nests of mice. It seems impossible that I could ever have fit on it.
The more I stand here, the more I remember my home, the life that came before: sitting by the hearth, the flames of a newly lit fire licking the peat; holding a rag doll in my arms; the sound of my mother singing, so visceral I could pluck the melody out of the air.
Tavik follows me inside and puts a hand on my shoulder. I turn in to him, clinging to his solidity in a house full of death and loss. He holds me and waits, which is exactly what I need from him. When I finally let go, he asks, “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Are you?”
“I think being not all right is our baseline normal at this point.”
I put my hands on his chest to feel his life beating inside him, careful to keep my touch away from the handprint seared into his flesh. “Remind me: How do you think this is going to work? When we get to the tree, do you think the Mother will just . . .” I make a vague exiting gesture with my hand.
Tavik laughs softly, mimicking the gesture and repeating my own words from ages ago. “What does this mean?”
“Do you think She’ll just leave my body and enter Her own?”
“I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I know that’s what’s going to happen.”
“Kristorna?” Sevlos’s voice calls from outside, cutting off our conversation. Reluctant to leave, I poke my head through the doorless doorway. He stands several feet from the house. I suppose he has more reason than Tavik or I to feel sad here. He nods his head to his right and says, “This way.”
We follow him in silence, the three of us making a somber trio as he takes us into the trees and stops at last at a pale, slender birch. Sevlos places his hand on the bark for a moment, then steps away. Tavik also stays back, both men giving me space to be here.
With her.
I don’t know what to do or say, so I follow Sevlos’s example and place my hand on the tree. I feel a pulling at my stomach, a tugging ache in my heart. I remember the weight and softness of the doll in my arms before I dropped her in the mud the night the men came. I remember screaming for my mother, the Hedenski word lingering on my lips: Ati! Ati!
For the first time, I feel the full force of my loss. Grief racks my body. I grasp the slender trunk, and I sob my pain into the tree.
“Ati,” I call to her.
I close my eyes so I can see her—my mother—the face I couldn’t remember until now. Her eyes are dark like mine, her skin freckled, her hair red. And she sees me, too.
She sees me.
I reach for her, and she stretches her hand out to me, even as she says, I can’t come to you, my soul, not where you are.
But I don’t accept that. I’ve come all this way. How can I let her go now? I touch my fingertips to hers and feel the warmth of her. My mouth opens in a song I pull from the depths of my being, a song to bring her back to me. Elath’s power pours out of me, pulsing with the beating of my heart as She takes and takes and takes what little of my own life remains.
Tavik wraps his strong arms around my body and pulls, but my soul clings to my mother’s spirit. “Gelya!” he shouts, pulling so hard on my body I feel I might break in two.
My mother’s eyes soften, searing my heart, but she lets go of my hand. My soul crashes back into my earthly body, to the place beside my mother’s tree where Tavik holds tight to me and calls my name again and again.
Then there is darkness.
I drop like a stone.
Less than a stone.
A pebble.
A nothing.
Are you any more precious than the rest? Is your life worth more than anyone else’s?
“Gelya.” Tavik’s voice is very faint.
“Kristorna,” Sevlos calls to me.
My soul.
I open my eyes and feel my blood seeping from my nose, my ears, my eyes, my mouth, even rimming my fingernails. Tavik looks on me in grief, as if I were already dead. His breath stutters as he holds my wasted body in his arms. It breaks my heart to see him hurt, but I can’t speak or give him comfort. Even drawing breath requires staggering effort.
“Which way?” he begs my uncle in Kantari, but Sevlos is staring at me, wide-eyed and terrified. “The tree!” Tavik bellows. “The path! Where is it?”
There is a language that goes beyond words, because Sevlos, who does not speak a single word of Kantari, shows Tavik the way to the path’s beginning. And all I can do is sway in his arms like a baby.
Forty-Nine
I long to sing life back into the dead branches of winter and wake the seeds nestled and waiting in the earth. Or is that what She wants? Does it matter? Do I matter?
I don’t know where She ends and I begin.
“Tavik.” I say his name, my anchor, the hand in the darkness.
He shushes me. “Save your strength.” As if anything in this world could be wasted on Tavik.
I am a little girl, dancing along the forest path to the rhythm of drums, spinning until my hair comes loose of its plaits and tickles my cheek, leading a line of all the Gelyas who came after: the one who told stories to a new rag doll in her hiding places, the one who tried to
erase all that came before, the one who learned everyone else’s words and everyone else’s truth, the one who quailed before a captured soldier and thought, He is every bit the dangerous Kantari heathen I always imagined.
“Look,” Tavik tells me as he approaches the enormous tree at the center of a wide clearing, its roots sprawling across a spring that gives life to a brook, a stream that becomes a river running all the way to the Fev.
The tree.
The body.
Her.
For weeks, the idea that we would reach this place felt as unlikely as the sun rising in the west, but now that we’ve arrived, our presence before the tree brims with finality, like the period at the end of a sentence. I feel the tremor that runs through Tavik’s body, a certainty, a knowing. The Mother’s spirit has walked beside him all this time, and here is Her physical self, alive and waiting.
“I told you,” he speaks into the top of my head with raw emotion. “I promised you I would get you here.”
“You did,” I breathe, giving him a weak smile he can’t see.
He picks his way closer to the body’s great girth until he finds a spot where the roots make a cradle. He hugs me very gently against him before he sets me in this hollow, carefully sliding me out of his arms. He kneels in awe and reverence and waits for the Mother to receive Her soul. His eyes are lit up like a beacon.
I work up the strength to ask him with the remaining shreds of my voice, “What will you do once the Mother is free?”
He takes my hand in his and plays with my fingers. “I’ve always wanted to see the ocean.”
“We were so close in my village. You should have told me.”
“Seemed like bad timing. I mean, there you were, facing the ghosts of your past. I’m not going to say, ‘Hey, can we take a quick detour to the ocean?’ I do want to see it, though, once we’re finally finished with all this. It’s hard to imagine so much water in one place.”
“Then I will take you to the sea,” I tell him softly.
A smile tugs up on one corner of his mouth. I’ve kissed those lips. “And we’ll sail to the Empire of Yil and drink the tea of Ulu Province until our bladders are nearly bursting,” he tells me.
We. I like the idea of we.
“Will you take me to Kantar?” I ask.
“Of course. That goes without saying. We’ll dance in the Prima’s palace in Nogarra.”
“Yes. And I want to see where Zofia came from in Auria.” My voice thins as I sink between dream and reality.
“Then I will take you to Auria, beloved wife.”
“Dearest husband,” I murmur, my eyes drifting shut.
“Do you want to hear something funny?”
I try to nod, but my head and neck won’t cooperate. “Yes,” I whisper instead.
“You accidentally married me.”
“Hmm?” I ask him, opening my eyes to slits.
The smile tugs up on both corners of his mouth, but he manages to look sadder rather than happier. He runs his fingertips along the slender bones of my hand as he speaks. “In Kantar, when people want to get married, they pray each other’s prayer. And you prayed mine.” He looks at me shyly from under his thick lashes. “But it’s not like you knew what you were doing. I promise you’re not stuck with me.”
“Unless I want to be?”
He nods, and I feel like I’m standing before the statue of the nameless saint. Here is Tavik, holding out his own heart and wondering what I’m going to do with it. He lets go of my hand and musses up my hair, far more lightly this time than on previous occasions, but I moan my annoyance anyway.
“You know you love me,” he says, his grin going lopsided.
“It’s true. I do,” I tell him, because there’s no reason not to.
My words erase the grin from his face, but I don’t regret saying them. I may not get another chance. Tavik releases a shaking breath, then scoots a couple of feet away on his knees.
“You stop me if this isn’t what you want, all right?” he says.
I wish I could ask him what he’s doing and what I’m supposed to stop, but I’m not sure I have enough strength left to string together that many words. I simply say, “All right.”
He presses his forehead to the frosty earth, the position I used to assume when I still prayed to the One True God. Tavik speaks in Kantari, but I recognize it as “The Vessel’s Prayer” from The Song of Saint Lanya, the words as he understood them whenever I sang my song.
Father, most high and most exalted,
I am your humble Vessel.
You have made my mouth clean to sing Your praise.
His voice is dampened by leaves and snow, and yet I can hear the notes of longing threaded through it, the same music I put into my own prayer on my hands and knees in Ambrus’s attic. The execution isn’t perfect, but the sanctity of it is.
You have made my tongue straight to spread Your word.
You have made my body pure to receive Your spirit.
He pauses. I think he’s waiting for me to stop him.
I don’t.
You have given me life to reflect the light of Heaven for all to see.
You have given me death that I may live eternally In the light of the Father.
He sits back on his heels and gazes at me with beatific reverence. He switches to Rosvanian to speak the words I thought he barely understood when he repeated them so long ago on our fake wedding day. “My body shall be your body, and my soul shall be your soul.”
He doesn’t say your body shall be mine or your soul shall be mine. He’s not telling me that I belong to him. He’s telling me that he belongs to me. My throat swells with an emotion so enormous, I feel like I might burst. I don’t know how to respond. What could anyone say at this moment that would be anything other than inadequate?
Many girls don’t get a say on their wedding day. I’m glad I had a choice to make after all.
He comes back to me and takes my freezing hands in his deliciously warm grasp. “I love you, Brother Elgar, Kicker of Ass.”
We burst out laughing—or Tavik does at least. The best I can do is smile feebly. At least I can feel the joy of it, of loving and being loved. Happiness tethers me to the earth at the point where our hands meet, a firm knot that keeps me from floating away like the tufts that burst from the seedpod of the Grace Tree when it opened in my hand.
Tavik’s laughter peters out, and we fall into silence. After a few moments of waiting for the Mother to take Her soul into Her body, Tavik speaks again with an ominous doubt creeping into the low notes of his voice.
“I was chosen to free the Mother. It was supposed to be my life’s purpose. But I’ve got to tell you, I don’t care about that anymore. I just want you to be all right. I want you to get your life back. That’s the only thing I want now.”
He wears his burden. My life weighs as heavily on him as his life tugs on me. I watch his face as despair seeps into the taut lines of him with each passing second. He didn’t mean to make me the Vessel of the Mother. He didn’t mean to love me. And now he watches and waits, powerless, as my body cracks and breaks while nothing—nothing—is happening.
Time stretches on. A minute. Five minutes. Ten. My shallow breath grows slower and slower, but the tree is only a tree, and Elath’s life still thrums inside me.
The Mother is also waiting, but for what?
There was another girl hundreds of years ago who was the first Vessel, the prison and the prisoner. And there was another boy, a Two-Swords, who was both the breaker and the broken.
Some vessels are made to be shattered.
The Mother is waiting for Tavik to destroy me. She’s waiting for me to break apart and free Her.
I look into Tavik’s tortured eyes, feeling as though my heart beats in his chest rather than my own. I don’t want to leave him. I don’t want to leave me. I don’t want to leave the world I’ve barely come to know. But I use my expiring strength to whisper the truth anyway. “She’s waiting for me.”
<
br /> He presses my palm to his cheek. “But you’re already here. I brought you here in time. We made it.”
My skin to his skin. Tense muscle. Hard bone. Ticklish beard. I can finally understand why he didn’t tell me what he knew all along. It’s a hard thing to face.
“No,” I tell him gently. I have no choice but to be gentle. My body won’t let me be anything else now. “She’s waiting for me to die.”
He freezes beneath my hand, an unmoving statue, turned to stone by an unwavering denial.
I draw on the strength I have left to speak again. “You opened Her first prison, and now you must open Her last.”
“No,” he breathes.
Somewhere along the way, that lid I kept so tightly over the life inside me slid off. I’ve lost track of it and see no point in searching for it now. The Mother fills every part of my body, taking hold of my voice to sing to him, to help him understand.
Call down the Mother’s voice, the song of the soulswift, to sing the tale of Tavik, Breaker and Broken.
“No!” His pain is a blade that stabs me where it hurts most. He releases me and climbs over the roots of the Mother’s body, right to the great trunk of Her tree. He pulls the Sword of Wrath free of its scabbard and slams the blade against Elath’s body with both hands on the hilt as if he could open the tree and let the Mother’s soul slip inside.
Nothing.
“Tavik,” I call to him, but he hacks at the tree, over and over, dulling the blade, crying out with each impact.
Nothing.
“Stop.”
He throws the damaged sword away, and his hands tear at the bark until his fingers bleed, and when that doesn’t work, he pounds the trunk with his fists.
“Please,” I beg him, but he refuses to stop.
“I brought her to You!” he shouts, slamming his open palms against the rough bark. “We came all this way! And I promised her! I promised!”
Nothing.
“Tavik.” I’m crying when I thought I had no tears left.
“You chose us!” He grips the tree with both hands like a child clutching his mother’s hem.