by Martha Wells
The strange man’s eyes went to Ilias and moved dismissively away. Then he saw Giliead still sitting on the couch. He smiled, an oddly sweet expression, and said, “There you are, boy. I’ve been looking for you.”
Wizard, Ilias thought. It was a poet’s story come terribly alive. He opened his mouth to yell for help and it was suddenly as if there wasn’t a breath of air in the room; his voice came out as a near-silent croak.
Still crouched on the cushions, Giliead watched him evenly. He didn’t look like a boy confronting a monster. His expression was mildly curious, as if he had idly wondered what this moment would be like. He said, “I was always here.”
The wizard took a step forward, still smiling but eyeing Giliead narrowly. Tumbled between the couch and the wall, Irissa struggled weakly to get up. Ilias saw a cup had fallen beside the table leg and started to edge toward it. He felt as if he was trapped in one of Castor’s horror stories of curselings and wizard-slaves. The wizard ignored both him and Irissa, still watching Giliead. He said, “Menander was a fool to think he could protect you.”
He wants to make Giliead afraid, Ilias thought, knowing it by instinct. Ilias stretched and reached the cup, lifting it uncertainly, meaning to throw it. Giliead flicked a look at him and Ilias thought the other boy didn’t want him to interfere, at least not yet. He kept hold of the cup and didn’t move, trying to breathe as quietly as possible.
Giliead told the wizard, “The god protects me.”
From the couch Irissa managed to speak, her voice a strained croak. “Menander’s here, he’ll kill you!”
Ignoring her, the wizard took two long steps suddenly, reaching down toward Ilias. Before he could scramble back the man grabbed his hair, yanking him half off the floor. Still watching Giliead, he said, “Silly little boy. Gods don’t protect Chosen Vessels.”
Ilias clawed at the painful grip, still unable to cry out, but the man had jerked him up so his toes barely touched the ground. His eyes blurry from pain tears, he saw Giliead show emotion for the first time. His eyes narrowed, the other boy looked angry. Giliead said, “You let him go.”
A door banged somewhere and a woman burst into the dining room. Ilias recognized her from the market, but her hair was tied back now and she wore a red-brown dress, and her face was strained and angry in the lamplight. She carried a weapon Ilias had only seen a few times before, a long-handled knife with a hook on the end, that he knew was for fighting on war galleys. She saw the wizard and froze for a heartbeat, her eyes widening in shock as she looked from the wizard to Giliead, then to Irissa still trying desperately to push herself up off the couch.
The wizard said with an easy smile, “Come and join us, Karima, the more the better.”
“How did you--” she started to ask, then must have decided it didn’t matter. Her face hardened and she lifted the knife, starting forward.
Giliead said sharply, “Mother, don’t. You need to get out of the doorway.”
Karima stopped, throwing him a startled look. She won’t do it, Ilias thought, despairing though he didn’t know why it was important. Mothers didn’t listen to their children at the best of times, let alone a moment like this. Emotions flicked across Karima’s face, uncertainty, fear, resolve. Then she stepped sideways, out of the doorway.
The wizard started toward Giliead, dragging a struggling Ilias with him. “Don’t try to trick me, boy, there’s no one to help you. Menander is searching for me in the woods again, and the others follow him.”
Giliead just cocked his head thoughtfully. “You shouldn’t have used curses. You were real quiet up to then, and it couldn’t hear you.”
The man stopped. Ilias couldn’t see his face but he heard him breathing hard, and he felt something change in the room, as if the air smelled different, or pressed harder on his skin.
“There’s a thing you don’t know,” Giliead continued, still calmly, “The god doesn’t protect the grown Chosen Vessels. But it’s different when we’re children.”
Try as Ilias might later, he couldn’t remember what the god looked like, though Gil always claimed it had come down the chimney and passed within a pace of him.
Ilias saw the puff of ash from the hearth, and heard the wizard yell in alarm, loud and shrill. He let go of Ilias’ hair and Ilias fell, scrabbling rapidly away. He looked back in time to see the wizard fly through the doorway as if he had been shot out of a bow. He struck the low dining table with a crash and the wood shattered beneath him, leaving the wizard sprawled on the tile floor, unmoving.
A clamor of shouts and running footsteps came from the front of the house. Karima stepped toward the wizard’s prone body, lifting the boat knife cautiously, but the man just lay there, one last breath sighing out of his limp body. If she hadn’t moved out of the way, Karima would be smashed under him now.
Irissa managed to sit up, clutching her head with a groan. “It took the god long enough. I thought he was going to kill all of us,” she muttered. Cylides and Macritus both began to stir back to consciousness.
Ilias shoved himself upright and limped over to Giliead. The younger boy slipped off the couch, standing barefoot in an oversized blue shirt. An ordinary boy again, he chewed self-consciously on his thumbnail. “Is he dead?” Ilias asked him quietly. The wizard looked dead but he wanted to be certain.
Giliead nodded solemnly. “Yes.”
“Good.” Ilias took his hand and limped into the dining room with him.
The room and the atrium beyond seemed full of people suddenly, calling out in alarm, talking, anxiously leaning over the two half-conscious guards, helping Irissa stand. Someone scooped Giliead up and when Ilias stumbled and nearly fell, someone grabbed him too.
They ended up in the kitchen, with herbs bundled up to dry hanging from the rafters and big storage amphorae stacked against the walls. It was still pleasantly warm from the banked fire in the big cooking hearth. There were a lot of people in there too, most of them armed, talking urgently. In all the confusion, Ilias got handed over to a young woman called Sabiras, who was probably Niale’s age, but her olive skin had darkened from the sun and her hands were calloused and hard from work. She wore loose pants and a shirt with the sleeves tied back, and her jewelry was all shells, with polished cowries on her armbands. She set him down beside the hearth and made concerned noises over his feet. She got some warm water from the pot sitting in the coals and cleaned the cuts, which hurt but he managed to bite his lip and not cry. If his behavior was going to be reported to his mother, he wanted to be sure he didn’t make any mistakes. And after what had just happened with the wizard, it seemed a small thing to cry over.
Irissa sat next to him, holding a cup of warm wine someone had given her. “Mother, I think the wizard did something to Treian,” she said. Her hands were shaking a little, making the liquid tremble inside the red-glazed cup, but her voice was firm. “We called but he didn’t come.”
Karima bit her lip, her expression still tense. She kept absently squeezing Giliead’s shoulders, as if making sure he was still there. “They’re searching the house now. If he’s hurt, they’ll find him.”
“He’s dead,” Giliead told her, still calmly. “The god’s showing me. I think he’s out in the woods. Treian, I mean. It thinks the wizard killed him when he got separated from the others after dusk, and the wizard made a curse on himself so they thought he was Treian.” Giliead frowned in concentration, his eyes distant. “It wasn’t a good curse. Not good, I mean it didn’t work well. He had to stay in the dark, or people would have seen he wasn’t Treian. The god says he must have known Menander would see through it, and so he had to act when he realized Menander and Ranior were returning.” He blinked. “Can I go to bed now? I’m sleepy.”
Ilias stared, then looked at Karima and Irissa, both listening in growing consternation. Appalled, Karima said under her breath, “He was here in the house all that time. And the motherless bastard killed Treian.” She pushed to her feet, shaking her head.
Ilias took
a sharp breath. “He waved his hand and we couldn’t--”
Sabiras put a hand over his mouth. Ilias looked up in surprise. “You were too startled to call out, it happened too fast. That’s what happened, isn’t it?” She looked at Irissa pointedly. “Irissa?”
Irissa looked blank for a moment, then nodded in startled comprehension. Ilias realized others in the room were listening and that Karima was staring at him with concentrated intensity, as if willing him to make the right answer. He didn’t understand but he nodded emphatically. Sabiras removed her hand, saying, “Good.”
* * *
Ranior and Menander returned, but Ilias didn’t see them, only heard them talking out in the atrium. He got a quick bath in warm water, and a clean shirt to put on that was far too big for him. Irissa told Sabiras that Ilias hadn’t eaten all day, and Sabiras brought him a bowl with lentils and bread soaked in mutton broth, and the fact that these people still had bread this late in the day just confirmed Ilias’ opinion of Niale’s bad management of their house.
They didn’t ask him any questions, until Sabiras carried him to a bedroom on the opposite side of the portico. It was nearly as big as the room Ilias’ sisters and cousins slept in, but there were sheepskin rugs, and only one bed and a couple of clothes and blanket chests. It wasn’t as warm as the kitchen, though the winter shutters in the outside window were tightly closed.
Giliead was already in bed, his face buried in the pillow, with Karima seated on a stool nearby. As Sabiras put him down on the bed, Karima asked him, “Ilias, how did you get lost today?”
When she smiled, she was pretty, nearly as pretty as his mother. “On the way to town.”
“You walked from Cineth?” Sabiras asked, brows lifted.
“No, we didn’t go all the way there. I got lost on the way.” He rubbed his eyes, just wanting them to stop. He was more glad than ever that he had lied. He was being treated like a lost child; he wasn’t sure what would have been different if they knew he had been...left, but he wasn’t willing to take the chance. “I’m sleepy.”
Karima and Sabiras exchanged a look he couldn’t read, but they didn’t ask him any more questions. Sabiras tucked him under the blankets and they both left the room.
Giliead rolled over and cuddled up next to his side, and Ilias put an arm around him. Ilias hesitated, then asked, “Why wouldn’t Sabiras let me tell them why I didn’t call for help?”
Giliead blinked. “Because it was a curse on you and Irissa. It’s gone now, and it didn’t do anything to you. But people might hear about it, and say you should have a curse mark, like Cylides.”
Ilias knew what a curse mark was. People who had been under a wizard’s curse had to have a silver half-moon branded into their cheek. He had never seen one before because those people weren’t supposed to be around normal people. He wanted to ask a question, but he couldn’t put it into words.
Giliead seemed to know what he wanted to ask. “Cylides needs a place to live, so he lives in Andrien village, down on the beach. Ranior says having a curse mark doesn’t mean he’s done anything wrong. It means a wizard did something wrong to him.”
Ilias asked, “So why does he have to have it? It isn’t fair.”
Giliead shrugged, nestling into the pillow. “Because people are so afraid of curses. Anything that has to do with them.” He eyed Ilias thoughtfully. “Ranior says people are afraid of Chosen Vessels, too.”
“I’m not,” Ilias said automatically, before realizing it was true. He had seen a wizard now, he knew what there was to fear, and it wasn’t Giliead or Menander. He could hear voices, through the shutters and from the doorway, and knew there were people on guard. But there had been people on guard when the first wizard got in. “What if another one comes?” he said aloud.
Giliead shook his head, barely awake. “The god’s under the bed.”
Ilias bit his lip. He didn’t think Giliead was lying, and he didn’t want to look. But he was too exhausted not to drift off, and he slept soundly.
* * *
The next day was mostly spent sleeping. Ilias finally woke buried in the blankets, feeling hot and a little sick, with Giliead using his back as waves to sail a toy boat on.
The shutters were open, revealing warm afternoon sun and the branches of an olive tree moving gently in the breeze. Blearily, he crawled out of bed onto the sheepskin rug in front of the banked hearthfire. Giliead had been up for some time, judging by the scatter of wooden toys. Remembering last night, Ilias leaned down to cast a suspicious look under the bed, but there was nothing there but a little dust.
Ilias examined his feet with a grimace. The left one felt fine, if tender. The right was swollen, the skin stretched tight, and the cuts on the heel and just below his toes were red and ugly. He didn’t think he could walk on it, at least not today.
He picked up a toy galley, trying to think what to do. The boat was scarcely bigger than his cupped hands, but precisely carved, the eye for the ship’s soul carefully picked out over the bow. It was old, with traces of the paint that handling had worn off.
“Ranior made that for my sister,” Giliead told him, settling next to him. His fine hair had completely come out of his braids and he was still wearing the same shirt he had slept in. “She gave it to me. She’s going to be a captain and sail to the Chaeans.”
“Is she your only sister?” Ilias asked absently, turning the boat over. He had a wooden horse, not carved as well as this, and battered from years of play. It had come from Timeron and Castor hadn’t wanted it anymore, so it had been Ilias’ to play with. “If she’s the only girl, then she can’t go to sea. She has to stay here and take care of your family’s land, so the people who live here don’t starve.”
Giliead frowned, taking the toy ship back as if Ilias had just lost the right to hold it. “She can be a captain if she wants.”
It wasn’t worth arguing about. Only women could own things like houses and land.
Sabiras came in then, looked at Ilias’ feet, and made him get back on the bed.
She cleaned Ilias’ cuts again and put on smelly ointment and bound his right foot up to keep it clean. Then she made up for it by bringing them bread, fresh and still warm, and fish with pickle sauce and lentils. Ilias ate all of his and half of Giliead’s portion, since the younger boy had been awake earlier for breakfast. Sabiras lectured him on staying in the bed, not walking around and especially not going out in the atrium or the farmyard to play in the dirt.
Ilias felt better after the food. “Are there still wizards outside?” he asked her, scraping the last of the sauce off the plate. Until the wizards were gone, he couldn’t walk home.
Sabiras hesitated, and Giliead, sprawled on the foot of the bed and pushing another wooden boat across the fold of the blankets, answered for her. “There’s no curses, so there’s no wizards.”
She glanced at Giliead a little uncomfortably, then quickly smiled at Ilias to hide it. “There you go. That’s what Menander says as well.”
Ilias got out of bed as soon as she left, but it really did hurt to walk. So he played with Giliead on the floor, naming the wooden toys after famous wizards and Chosen Vessels from the poets’ stories, and reenacting their battles. Ilias hadn’t played like this in a long time; Castor had decided he was too old for these kinds of games and was too busy trying to bully Ilias to want to do anything interesting. Giliead was still young enough to have fun.
The house was quiet except for the occasional reassuring sounds of Sabiras or someone else talking out in the passage, or the lowing of a cow out in the fields. Once Ilias heard Ranior’s voice outside, speaking to someone in a serious tone as the leaves crunched under their boots. It was odd to be in a house so quiet, to have a whole room to themselves for their play, but Irissa seemed to be Giliead’s only sibling.
He was so wrapped up in the game, he didn’t even know Karima was watching them until Giliead, laughing at Ilias’ rendition of Ifaea finding the edge of the world, rolled onto his back, smiling,
and said, “Hello, mother.”
“Hello, Gil.” She smiled at him openly, not hesitantly the way Sabiras did. “Menander needs you to talk to the god for him. Can you do that?”
“It’s in the hay barn, where it’s dark and cool. It doesn’t like bright light,” Giliead told her, rolling over to prop his chin on his hands. He explained to Ilias, “Menander could talk to the god himself, like he talks to the Uplands god, but he wants me to practice. Our god likes him, though. He sounds like pine needles in the wind.”
Ilias nodded seriously, fascinated. It was a novelty to talk to someone who told you interesting things, rather than badly made-up lies.
Karima sat on the floor, her green dress pooled around her. “Ilias, let me see your feet.” Her voice, calm and firm, was impossible to disobey and he shifted glumly to face her, stretching his legs out. She looked him in the face when she spoke to him, and he couldn’t remember when his mother had last done that.
He held his breath as she took his foot, but she handled it gently, not hurting him. “You need to listen to Sabiras and not walk on this,” she told him, adding almost absently, “What’s your family name?”
“Finan,” Ilias said, then bit his lip. She had caught him by surprise, before he could decide to lie.
She nodded, her eyes thoughtful. “You’re Timeron’s son?”
“Yes, but he died and I don’t remember him.”
“I see.” She smiled a little, and he thought she looked tired. “We’ll send a message today and see if we can’t get you home soon.”
Ilias nodded, but he knew it wouldn’t be that simple. And he didn’t want to be carted home like a stray goat. He wanted to prove himself, to show he could get home on his own. That was the point of this.
* * *
Menander didn’t come until later that day, when the sun was just beginning to set.
Irissa had come in earlier, not long after Karima, and proved that she wasn’t much like Ilias’ notion of an older sister. She played games, and then they sat on the floor and she read to them out of a poet’s story that Ilias had never heard before, a long story about a voyage down the coast, and fighting with Hisians. When she was done, Giliead said, “Read about the Chosen Vessels, ‘Rissa.”