by Jane Yolen
Scillia stared moodily into the fire a moment before answering. “Because I did not know the way, obviously.”
“If your way is to M’dorah, then you should be going north. We will be many days getting there.”
“We?” Scillia’s voice held the same forced casual tone.
“You will not find it on your own.”
“And you would go with me?”
“I am your mother. And a goodly part of your mother road. Moder rood ist lang.”
“What if I do not want you along?” Scillia asked quietly.
Jenna was silent for a minute before answering. “Then I shall make you a map and send you on your way.”
“Without trailing after me? You swear it?” Scillia looked straight on her.
“I swear it,” Jenna said, putting out her hand to seal the oath. It was not an easy thing to swear, and her jaw ached saying the words.
Scillia did not take the offered hand. “Company …” she said slowly, “would be nice. If you will be dark sister to my light, and not my mother. After all, I killed the man at your back. You owe me.”
“I owe you,” Jenna said. “And I will try.”
Scillia grasped her hand then, though she did not add: I shall try, too. But the phrase hung there, unspoken, between them like an apple ripe for the plucking.
What does it mean to be dark sister to her light? Jenna asked herself as they rode along. My dark sister speaks hard, uncomfartable truths to me and holds my back against the foe. For all that Scillia had just killed an enemy at her back, Jenna did not know if her daughter wanted that kind of relationship. Any truth told her would still be coming from her mother’s mouth. Thirteen is not a year for listening.
So Jenna said nothing, and the day stretched like a border between two countries, she on the one side and Scillia on the other, aware of possible incursions while crying all the while “Peace! Peace!” It was as if they were hostages to one another’s good intentions.
Hostages! She thought at once of the two boys, her own Jem and young Gadwess, alone in foreign lands and at the will of masters who would try to mold them. She and Scillia were never such.
And thinking this, Jenna turned in her saddle to speak to her daughter, now for the sake of a quiet journey her sister. “Can you let an old woman rest?” she asked. “My leg is hurting.”
It was a lie when she spoke it, and a truth when they dismounted. She walked out the pain, and then walked longer than she intended because she saw in her daughter’s face relief, anger, and love mixed in equal measure. They shared a bit of cold journeycake and water.
When they remounted, they rode on until evening and the road declared a real peace between them.
A wide turning brought an inn to view, and Scillia said: “I need a bath and something sweet to wash out the taste of blood.”
Skada would have spit back, “That is a taste that no amount of washing takes away.” But Jenna did not have the heart to tell Scillia such dark truths so early on her life’s journey; she herself had had many a nightmare about the first man she’d ever slain, a man who would have murdered Carum, then taken his rough pleasure with Jenna and Pynt. She had regrets about killing, but none about killing him. Instead, she said, “I could use a bath, too. Do we give them money here or work off our stay? It is not so rich a place as to refuse even small coin.”
“I have money,” Scillia said. “For this time.” She did not thank her mother for letting her make the decision alone. And as Jenna knew Scillia would have an easier time complaining than offering up thanks, she let it be.
The inn was not only rundown, it was all but empty except for the keeper, his wife, and a daughter who looked quite simple and appeared to do all the hard work. Still, Jenna counted that to the good. She knew the roughness of the place meant she and Scillia would not have to explain the state of their clothes or their relationship to nosy travelers at dinner.
“A room, a bath, a meal, in that order,” Scillia said, with such authority, it sounded as though she had a long acquaintance with such inns.
The innkeeper was a sallow-faced man with lips that seemed permanently puckered, as if he had been raised on lemons or had a sour disposition. Or both. If he guessed who they were, he did not say. His wife and daughter were too obviously cowed by him to bother them with questions.
The room they were shown was none too clean, but the bath water in the tin tub was kept hot by frequent infusions of heated rain water. The simple daughter was the one to do the carrying. She was more like a domesticated animal than a human, and Jenna felt sorry for her, and grateful, too.
Scillia took the first bath, a long soaking, and Jenna helped soap her hair, afterward pouring fresh water over her to rinse it out. She did not ask Scillia’s permission, though it was clearly a mothering sort of thing to do. But Scillia did not complain of it.
In turn, Scillia did the same for her, clucking over the long, reddened leg wound.
“Does it hurt?”
“It stings.”
“Can you ride on?”
“If you wish it.”
Their conversations, Jenna thought, were more like Garunian fight songs: short, pithy, and full of unspoken antagonisms. But at least they were speaking.
Scillia refused the beef pie at dinner, asking instead for a bowl of steamed vegetables which the innkeeper served grudgingly. Jenna did not show, even by so much as a conspiratorial shrug to the man, that she was aware it was an odd request. She ate her own hearty meal without comment, surprised at how good it was. If Scillia wished to give up meat because of killing a villain with a sword, then her hunger would be her own. Jenna knew there would be days on end when they would have no meat on their long riding. Or even any food at all. The rind end of winter could be a hard time to travel in the forest. But she did not say a word about it.
I am trying, she thought. I will try.
They shared a bed, of course. They had not the money to waste on two rooms, and besides the warmth was welcome. But Scillia had never been a quiet sleeper, always claiming more than her half of any pallet. Even as a small child, she would travel about the mattress, forcing Jenna or Carum to get up and seek a bed elsewhere. In those early days there had been no nursemaids, no tutors, no one else to take charge of a child at night but the parents.
Lying by Scillia’s unquiet body, Jenna remembered those times with an uncommon longing. How easy it had been to be a mother to a child who adored her unconditionally. And—she thought almost bitterly—queen to a kingdom full of people who felt the same.
Enough! she told herself fiercely, grabbing back part of the coverlet from Scillia who had somehow managed to twist the entire thing around herself without ever waking. Stretch your feet according to your blanket. Jenna snorted at the thought; it so particularly suited the situation.
She did not have an easy night, all things considered, with dark dreams, old feet, aching leg, and a daughter who did not lie easy. On waking, Jenna was as tired as if she had not slept at all.
They took the long way around, through small villages, skirting the edge of the deep and unmapped western woods. They could have ridden the great King’s Road that ran north and south, but Jenna knew instinctively that would not have suited Scillia’s need for a hard and long search. So she told Scillia nothing about the route, talking instead of woodcraft each time they slowed or stopped.
She showed Scillia the kinds of wintered-over plants that could still be used for food, like wake robin which, boiled down till the acrid taste was gone, served a nutritious if bland turnip meal. Like the hard fruit of trees—butternut and chestnut, “That is,” she cautioned, “if the squirrels have spared any.”
And she showed Scillia how to read the tracks that crisscrossed the path: the difference between wood rat and squirrel, the long lope of wolf, the longer of hunting cat, the deep scratches on trees that bespoke bear.
Scillia listened like a child with a beloved tutor, storing away information for hours on end. Occasionally sh
e asked Jenna to repeat something just explained, or pointed with pride to tracks or fruit or roots she could now name. She seemed to forget nothing.
She proved an apt pupil in the Eye-Mind game as well, remembering much of what she had seen hours later. Long lists of things she recalled with ease. Jenna knew that kind of recall was now beyond her own reckoning.
Only once did Scillia complain, and it was to say baldly, “I should have been taught this before.”
“I had hoped,” Jenna answered simply, “that you would never need it.”
“You hoped, rather, to keep your time in the woods for yourself,” Scillia answered.
Jenna had no response. Indeed, she greatly feared that Scillia might be right.
They stopped at another inn, this one filled with a wedding party and many cheerily drunk soldiers. The captain of the men recognized Jenna at once. He made her a deep bow and she shook her head at him, a warning that she wished to remain unremarked. But once Scillia was abed, all the covers twisted around her, Jenna went downstairs and called the captain to her with a quiet nod.
When he came over, she said quietly, “I have a message for the king.”
“I will take it myself, Anna,” he said.
“There is nothing written. I give this to you mouth to ear, and so it must be delivered. Tell him that Jenna and Sil are well and on the mother road together. He will pay you handsomely for that one sentence.”
“My queen, I do it for the honor alone.” He bowed his head. “Do you need a guard?”
“Have I ever?”
“You look …” he hesitated,” … well-traveled.”
She laughed. “Like the scruff of a mongrel, you mean?”
“Never that, Anna,” he said, but joined in her laughter, adding, “I have seen you worse.”
“And that was …?”
“At Bear’s Run,” he said, naming the great battle at which so many of Jenna’s troops had fallen, yet was a victory nonetheless. “You know, of course, it is but an hour’s ride from here.”
So close, Jenna thought. “You must have been a mere boy there,” she said.
“And you a mere girl,” he added graciously.
“War is a great ager,” Jenna said. “And kingship worse yet. Good night, good captain.” She started to leave, then turned back. “There is one other thing you can do for me.”
“Name it, my queen.”
“A man lies on the road by a great line of elder pine in the southern woods, two days ride from here. He will be by an ash that has been struck down across the road. The tree may have been pushed off by now, to let carts go by; the man has a deep sword slash in his right leg and will not have moved on his own. He may even be dead of blood loss. Bury him if he is there, else bring him to the king. He laid hands on the king’s daughter and would have done worse than that.”
The captain nodded, his face dark and disturbed. “Were there others?”
“There are always others,” Jenna said. “Two of them. They are dead. If he has not put them in the ground, take a moment to do so.”
“My lady, I ask again: Do you need a guard?”
“Did I at the ash tree?”
“You walk with a slight limp.”
“But I walk. You cannot say the same for the men I left there. My daughter and I would ride alone.”
“I will go at once, Anna.”
“The dead have a long patience,” she answered him. “Go in the morning.” She turned and went up the unlit stairs, not looking back. She was glad she was far enough from firelight and candlelight that Skada had not appeared. At the moment, her dark sister’s wit would have been too much to bear.
The door to her room creaked when she opened it, but Scillia lay too deep in sleep to waken. Jenna lay down on the bit of bed left her and, even without a blanket for warmth, she was almost instantly asleep.
The trip to M’dorah took longer than Jenna had anticipated, for when at the morning meal she casually mentioned that they were close to the site of the Battle of Bear’s Run, Scillia—all unaccountably—wanted to see it. Jenna had not been back to the site since the battle thirteen years earlier, and when they came to the field she was shocked to see how small a place it was.
“I had remembered a vast plain,” she said quietly. “And the bodies … and all the blood.” She shivered.
“Father often told us of the battle,” Scillia said.
Surprised, Jenna turned to look at her. “What did he say of it?”
“He said many good men and women died here.”
Jenna did not say anything more, but dismounted and walked toward a stand of trees, their branches so overhanging they brushed the withered grass. A cold wind puzzled through the clearing, delivering a sharp shock between the shoulder blades. Jenna shivered again. Suddenly she recalled Alta’s words to her in the grove so long ago: Remembering is what you must do most of all.
And she had spent the last fifteen years trying to forget.
“Forgive me, Alta,” Jenna whispered, staring into the shadows behind the trembling branches and seeing figures that were not there.
“Mother.”
She thought she heard the grunting cough of an old bear.
“Mother!”
She thought she heard the scream of a woman warrior riding into battle.
“Mother, please!”
She thought she heard the thin, mewling cry of a child.
“Mother, you are frightening me. What is it?”
Jenna shook her head and turned. Smiling ruefully, she said, “Ghosts.”
Scillia held out her hand. “There is nothing there but some trees. And an overgrown field.”
Jenna took the hand. “There are ghosts here all right. And one of them is you.”
“Now you are really frightening me. I am very much alive, mother. How can I be a ghost?”
Jenna pulled her around the trees. Behind them were two high mounds covered with coarse wintered-over grass. “Those are the common graves,” she said. “One for the men—boys, really—and women who fought with us. And the other for the Garuns and their allies who fought against us.”
“Which is which, mother?”
“I no longer know,” Jenna admitted. “Is that not a horrid epitaph? I no longer know.” She sighed. “But if you look between those two mounds, you will find something more.”
“What will I find? Scillia asked.
“Go—and then come back and tell me what is there.”
“Not ghosts, mother.”
Jenna smiled at her. “Not for you, perhaps. Now go. I cannot.”
“Cannot?”
“Cannot. Will not. It is the same.”
Scillia raised an eyebrow at that and when no more admission was forthcoming, turned and disappeared between the mounds.
Jenna looked away, staring instead at the sky where an eagle was hunting on set wings, gliding over the meadow without a sound. She was glad it was not yet winter’s end. She didn’t think she could have borne visiting the place with spring running riotously green and dozens of birds singing from the branches.
“Mother.” Scillia was standing not three feet away, a puzzled expression on her face.
“And what did you find?”
“Two graves with markers. One of them has a crown on it and Gorum’s name. That was father’s brother. Why have we never come here before?”
Jenna stared at the ground as if she might discover answers there. “Because of the ghosts. And because we wanted you to be children of the peace, not inheritors of the war. Though your father does manage to come once a year, in the fall. He is always especially solemn afterwards.”
“Who is in the other grave? The one marked with a goddess sign.”
“Iluna. This is where she fell, under this tree. I killed the man who killed her, and took you from her back.”
Scillia put her hand on Jenna’s. “So it is her ghost you cannot face.”
“And Gorum’s and all the men and women, boys and girls who died
here.”
“But you said my ghost was here, too. What did you mean?”
“Because here died your old life. I took you from dead Iluna and strapped you on my own back. I can hear you crying still.”
Scillia drew her hand away. “We have further to go. And probably more ghosts to meet. Are you willing?.” She started toward the horses.
“You will not find the woman who abandoned you.”
“I know that.” Scillia’s voice floated back to her in the cold air. “But I will sit atop M’dorah and see the world as Iluna saw it. Perhaps then I will be ready to go back home.”
Jenna sighed. She thought she’d done it quietly, but Scillia heard and turned.
“You do not have to come along.”
“I am your dark sister,” Jenna said, smiling a little. “I must go where you go.”
“Mother!”
“Besides, how can I not go when I know what you will find there?”
“And what do you think I will find?”
“Nothing. You will find nothing. It all burned down over thirteen years ago.”
It was Scillia’s turn to sigh. She brushed a stray hair from her face. “Even ash is something, mother, as you have found tracking me.”
Jenna smiled and did not point out that there would hardly be ash left after years of scouring winds and rain. “How smart you have become in one short journey.”
“It is because I finally had a teacher worthy of the lesson,” Scillia said, smiling back.
Jenna’s face flushed with embarrassment, and she opened her arms. Scillia rushed in and they embraced mother to daughter, sister to sister, almost—Jenna thought—friend to friend.
They foraged for lunch. Jenna showed Scillia an odd grey mass, like a mushroom, that grew on a dead tree. With a bit of added journeycake crumbles, it cooked up to a bland porridge. And she pointed out which green roots to boil for a gingery tea.
“Quite filling,” Jenna said when they had finished.
“Makes up in bulk what it lacks in taste,” Scillia said. But she did not say it with anger or even as a complaint. It was, Jenna thought with relief, merely an observation.