“My questions for now,” she said softly, looking at him with a sort of kind sadness. “Yours for another time. All right?”
Raz didn’t reply, struggling with himself as he took her in once again, witnessing her wasted, bruised body, thinking of everything that he knew and wondered had been done to her.
Then he nodded.
“All right.”
After that they spoke for what could only have been hours, no matter who was keeping track of the time. Raz told Syrah his story, initially starting upon reaching the North but going back to working with the Mahsadën and its šef at her insistence, then further back again at her continued urging. Eventually, Raz found himself at the very beginning, spending a great deal of time telling her of the Arros and the life he had lived as a child of the trading caravans. He spoke of how he had come to be among them, then of how he had come to be accepted. He spoke of his mother and father, of his sister Ahna and his uncle Jarden. He’d laughed, remembering the antics of he and his cousin, Mychal, telling her of how he had once rebroken his wing when the boy had convinced him to jump off his parents’ wagon in an attempt to fly.
Before long, Raz realized he was speaking more of his family than he had ever done since that frightful night, nearly eight years ago…
Eventually, though, his tale grew dark. Syrah sat, quiet and attentive as he told her of the day they’d first met, when he’d saved her from the slavers. He tried to get around the truth, get around why his family had been torn apart and butchered, but there was no doing so. He felt Syrah’s hand begin to shake as he described the events of that night, telling her of the fire and the bodies, and of how he had pulled Mychal, Prida, and the Grandmother from the flames.
When he spoke of how he had ruthlessly butchered the unfortunate slaver who’d been attempting to crawl away, then hunted down every one of the group who’d borne down on the Arros, she stopped shaking.
After that, Raz tried to tell his story faster. He spoke of Mychal’s betrayal, of the Mahsadën’s attempts to use him, and of the half-madness in the weeks that followed as he pushed himself to new limits in an attempt to eradicate them from Miropa, the Gem of the South. He told Syrah of his murder of the šef, then of his flight to the North. For the first time since starting he found himself having trouble continuing as he spoke of meeting Lueski Koyt in the woodlands around the Northern city of Azbar, and of how he had saved her and her brother, Arrun, from the bounty hunters who had been set upon them.
It was only her hands around his, tightening lightly in a reassuring sort of way, that kept him going. Even then, after he’d described his meeting Talo and Carro and their eventual departure from Azbar, he couldn’t bring himself to speak of how Lueski and Arrun had died.
“They’re… gone,” he said simply, almost choking on the words. “They’re just… gone.”
Then, though, he’d taken great pleasure in describing for Syrah how he’d dealt with the man responsible for the children’s passings.
It was at this point that the woman began to involve herself in the story. She started asking questions, occasionally pressing him for more details, especially when Talo and Carro were involved. She didn’t interrupt often, and when she did Raz found himself wishing she would do so more frequently, if only to hear her voice. He guessed, by what she said and asked, that someone—likely Jofrey, whom Raz suspected by the lingering scent of the man had kept him company as he slumbered by Syrah’s bedside—had given her their understanding of the story as best they could, and Raz found great relief in this, because he was rapidly coming upon the part of the retelling he was most greatly dreading.
He knew he had been right when he got to the night, not that many days ago, when the ursalus had set upon them in the Woods. He felt Syrah’s fingers tense in his, and he got the distinct impression that she was steeling herself for what was to come. He had hoped to slip by this portion of the story as quickly as possible, sparing her what pain he could, but it was at this very part of the tale that Syrah began to demand more and more of him, practically begging him to tell her all he could remember.
Eventually he obliged, forgoing only the grisliest particulars.
She was dry-eyed as he told her of how Talo had died bravely striving to fend off the most terrifying creature Raz had ever—and hoped would ever—laid eyes on. As he recounted the battle, Raz felt himself slip back to that night, and once again it became difficult to speak. Together he and Syrah sat there, holding each other’s hands in the flickering light of the room, she listening and he speaking with slow, deliberate detail. When he came to his slaying of the beast he felt her hands tighten abruptly, and her eyes glinted with what looked to be righteous fire.
Then, though, he was at the moment of Talo’s death.
“He asked me for mercy,” Raz said, feeling almost ashamed, averting his eyes from hers. “He was in pain. He was broken, and he asked me for mercy. So… I gave it to him.”
For the first time since he’d started the story, a stillness seemed to fall over the room. As though some of the warmth had been sucked out of the air, Raz felt a sudden chill, and he looked around. Syrah was staring at him, wide-eyed and mouth agape. She seemed paralyzed, almost horrified, and for a moment Raz was terrified that, in admitting this fact to her, he had doomed whatever closeness they might have had. He felt his heart sink as she began to pull away.
But only one of her hands left his, to come up and clench at the clothes over her heart. The other stayed within his grasp, and he understood then that whatever emotion it was that he had drawn from her, whatever anger or fear or sadness he had elicited, none was truly directed at him.
“Talo… Talo died by your sword?” Syrah asked him slowly. “And Carro was there?”
Raz suddenly understood why she appeared so surprised. By the way she asked, it seemed that this was not what she’d expected to hear following the story as had been told to her by Jofrey. He suffered several seconds of confusion, then remembered another similar instant he had been taken by surprise, regarding the exact same events.
That time Carro had been retelling of Talo’s death to the High Priest and his council, and had made it sound as though Talo Brahnt had died of his injuries, rather than after asking for Raz’s sword.
I’ve said too much, Raz thought, still watching Syrah as the woman continued to gape at him. I’ve let something slip.
“Raz!” Syrah hissed in a hushed tone, demanding an answer.
Raz hesitated, thinking fast.
Seeing no way out of it, though, he nodded.
In response, Syrah groaned, and seemed to collapse in on herself. Her thin form slumped forward, like a tree bending under the weight of snow.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, starting forward as he made to catch her. “Syrah! What happened? What did I do?”
“Not you,” Syrah moaned, her face hidden from him for a moment, bent down towards the blankets. “Not you, Raz! Carro! Carro’s broken the law of our faith! He allowed you to take a life!”
All at once, the understanding came to Raz in full, rushing over him in a terrible wave.
“That’s why he refused the High Priest’s mantle,” he said aloud, though he was speaking to himself as he gazed emptily into the silky folds of her hair. “That’s why he let me out of the cell…”
“Cell?” Syrah asked him, looking up from the bed, her left eye red and wide with worry and confusion. “What cell?”
Raz turned all the information he had over in his head, struggling to make sense of it. When he thought he had everything in place, he looked back at Syrah.
“Syrah… I think Carro broke your law more than once.”
XLIV
“There is an abundance of evidence, throughout all the great realms of the world, of the existence of the religions that influenced our own modern concepts of gods and deities. The Southern tradition of worshiping the Sun and Moon have their base in a belief system in which the desert itself was considered a god, and of which carvin
gs and depictions have been found scrawled across sand-smoothed stones among the dunes, or in caves within the crags. In the North, it can be assumed that the Stone Gods of the wild men of the mountains derive from the elements themselves, drawn from simpler minds put in awe by the sheer power and terror of the winter storms. Laor, too, has his roots in bygone beliefs, as echoes of him can be found in the old tales passed from a time in which the earth and woods and sky were prayed to for rain and game and health. Religion, though, is a living thing in many ways. And—as many of these antiquated faiths seem to have gone—like a living organism, it can either adapt… or die.”
—FROM THE LIBRARIES OF CYURGI’ DI, CONCERNING ARCHAIC RELIGIONS
“YOU AREN’T going to let me see her, are you?”
The man’s question almost broke Jofrey’s heart. The Priest sat, stripped of his robes and his broken arm still slung across his chest, on the stone bed at the back of the very cell he freed Raz i’Syul Arro from not twelve hours prior. He looked somewhat diminished out of the familiar clothes and colors of the faith. The old cotton shirt he wore was loose over his bulk, and the worn cloth of his wool pants seemed almost dirty in the dim light of the room. His beaded and braided hair, usually so iconic of him, looked tangled and wild over his thick blond beard. His feet were bare, resting on the floor before him, now cleared of the mess Arro had left the room in.
And yet, despite all this, Carro al’Dor seemed more himself now than he had at any point since his return to Cyurgi’ Di. His blue eyes were bright and clear, his back erect as he sat, straight and proud, to face Jofrey and the council, who had come to inform him of the atherian’s success.
And to demand, one last time, that he explain what foolishness might possibly have possessed him to so callously transgress the laws of his faith.
“No, Carro,” Jofrey said with a shake of his head, looking down on the Priest as he answered the man’s question. “I’m not going to let you see her. Not yet. You stand accused of breaking the cardinal law of Laor, and know damn well you’ll be found guilty of it unless you can provide this council with information that would incline us otherwise. You won’t be allowed more than food and water until then.”
“Murderer,” Valaria Petrük muttered under her breath from Jofrey’s left, though she kept her tongue after he gave her a sharp look.
Carro, though, heard the accusation clearly.
“Murderer?” he almost chuckled, looking at the woman without so much as a hint of regret or even anger. “Aye, maybe. Maybe in your eyes, and maybe in mine. And for longer than you know.”
“You admit it, then?” Behn Argo demanded, taking half a step forward from behind Petrük. “You admit to your crime?”
Jofrey was about to snap at him, to tell him to mind his tongue, when Carro’s reply stopped him.
“If I do, will you let me see her?”
There was a shocked pause, and fortunately it was Jofrey who recovered first.
“Carro, your admission is only half of what that will cost you,” he said slowly. “We know you let Arro free. Even the atherian didn’t deny it when pressed for his side of the story.” He gave his friend a long, hard look. “What we want to know… is why?”
In response, Carro met his eyes coolly. “Do you know how Talo died, Jofrey? Do you know how the man whose mantle you now wear was killed?”
There was a collective murmur from the others as Talo’s name was spoken, but Jofrey ignored them.
“A bear,” he replied steadily. “You told us you were ambushed by an ursalus, and that the animal—”
“Talo died on the end of Raz’s sword.”
In an instant, the council erupted.
“WHAT?” Behn Argo could be heard yelling.
“The beast?” Elber howled, looking suddenly livid.
“Laor’s mercy…” Benala Forn whispered from the back of the group.
Jofrey actually had to put a restraining hand on Cullen Brern, who looked as though he had just been stabbed in the back.
“I’m assuming,” he said loudly, his voice carrying over the confused shouts of anger and horror, “that as Carro didn’t tell us this before, he has good reason to do so now.”
The words had the desired effect. Over several seconds the council settled, though none looked too pleased to do so, and all eyes found Carro again.
“I was never one for the world,” Carro began slowly, for once not looking up at them but rather down at the ground, between his bare feet. “Ever since my mother gave me to the faith, I rarely left the Citadel. Talo asked me to, often enough. When he went on missions to the South, or to the western valley towns. He always asked me, even though he knew I would almost never go. The long trips up and down the mountains stairs during the foraging season were enough for me, and I thought I needed little else but Laor and my friends and the walls of my home.”
He paused, searching for the words before continuing. “I wish I had gone, now. Maybe if I had, I would have had a better understanding of the world…”
He looked up, meeting Jofrey’s eyes once more. “When Talo told me he had asked Raz i’Syul Arro to join us, I was appalled. Raz was a beast to me, a killer I’d heard the commoners of Azbar cheer as ‘the Monster.’ I was furious with him, and it was a sensation that lingered for a long time. I couldn’t understand what would possess him, the High Priest of Cyurgi’ Di, the greatest of Laor’s temples, to wish to bring such a brute under his wing. I couldn’t fathom what had come over him, and pushed it all aside merely as the musings of an old man that saw a reflection of his former life in a creature living the same violence he once had.”
Carro took a breath, sitting back to lean against the wall behind him, wincing as his arm shifted uncomfortably. “But Raz, it turns out, is not a creature at all. He’s not a beast, or an animal. In fact, he’s a man that has gained a better understanding of life in his twenty-something winters than I think I have in my sixty.”
There started to be another angry outburst at this, but Carro carried on through it.
“We have allowed ourselves to assume, whether by the grace or folly of our god—I’m honestly not sure which—that the world beyond these walls exists in a way that can be balanced by our beliefs. Life is precious. Death is avoidable, save for with great age. Peace over war. Kindness over cruelty. We have allowed ourselves to be ensnared in the artificial peace projected by Laor’s light, and even as we fight the dim border of the shadows that flicker at the edge of that glow, we are blind to the world beyond and the darkness that exists there, real and caustic and harsh.”
His eyes hardened, and swept over the group. “Talo’s injuries were not something out of a tale of heroism and glory. He was not dying peacefully, as knights do in the stories we tell our children in their beds. He was a broken man. His chest was crushed, caved in from the blow the bear gave him. His ribs were shattered, edges tearing out of his flesh to cut at his skin and leak his life away into the snow. Blood was in his mouth, in his throat, in his lungs. He was in torment, well beyond the help of magic. He was lingering, and among the few words he was able to say before he passed, the ones I remember most clearly are those he formed when he asked Raz to fetch his sword.”
The council was utterly still, hanging on to every word.
“Laor—or at least the Laor we claim we know so well—would have demanded I allow the man I loved to suffer and remain, to bear the agony of his broken body until his injuries saw fit to claim him. That Laor would have demanded I stay by his side for those seconds, those minutes, those hours, and fight with him using prayers and kind words and sorcery to ease what pain I could.”
Carro grimaced, and it was an ugly look. “I worship a god of light and kindness,” he snarled, “not the hateful Stone Gods of my father. I worship a god of mercy and love. So—when Arro returned with his blade—I allowed him to thrust it through Talo’s heart.”
Only Valaria Petrük hissed at that. When she realized she was the only one to make a sound, however, she sh
ut up again.
“Raz gave my love a mercy I would not have been able to, a mercy none of us would have been able to. He took Talo’s pain away in a moment, even though the act took a great toll on him. I watched a man end the life of his friend, and it was the single greatest act of kindness I have ever witnessed. I don’t think Raz could have sacrificed more than he did in that moment, to save Talo a slow, miserable death.”
Carro took a deep, shaking breath then, and was silent for some time. The council allowed him his reprieve, partially out of understanding that this story must be a hard one to tell, and mostly out of being unable to say anything themselves. When the Priest started speaking again, they listened all the more intently.
“I think the world was a new place for me, after that,” Carro said quietly. “Reality set in, and I could see the darkness again. Raz proved it for me once and for all not long after.”
“How?” an anxious voice, possibly Kallet Brern, asked helplessly from behind Jofrey.
“By showing me that choices often present themselves only in lesser variations of evil,” Carro replied, seeking whoever had asked the question with his eyes, but seeming unable to find them. “We found the Kayle’s men laying siege to the mountain pass. The only way to reach you was through the sentries they’d posted along the base of the stairs.”
“You could have turned back,” Behn Argo began angrily. “You could have returned to Ystréd and—”
“It would have taken you weeks to get back to the town,” Jofrey interrupted quietly, understanding. “The same to return once more, not counting whatever months would have passed while Ystréd sought to gather help.”
“If they sought to gather it,” Carro spat. “By which time you would all have been dead, as I don’t think the Kayle is fool enough to let time slip idly by.”
“You chose the mountain pass,” Jofrey continued, seeing the whole picture now. “You chose to make for the Citadel.”
“And to bring you what news we could,” Carro said with a nod. “And in doing so… I condoned the death of as many of a score of men Raz needed to kill in order to get us up the stairs in one piece. I traded the lives of a few for the hope of saving the lives of a thousand. Any other decision would have only been choosing my life over all of yours…”
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