The Wanderer's Mark: Book Three of Imirillia (The Books of Imirillia 3)

by Beth Brower

  Spring fled into the heat of summer. And, though there was much work, there was little peace found by Eleanor at Ainsley Rise. Edythe suggested they visit the old fortress of Anoir by the eastern sea. Eleanor asked to be excused from the journey. Edythe did not go.

  “Do you wish you had never chosen to fight?” Edythe challenged, after a string of days where Eleanor had been particularly silent.

  “Excuse me.” Eleanor looked up from her work. “What did you say?”

  Edythe lifted her eyebrows in frustration. Her hair was bound back in a mature twist, paired with a gown of deep purple and when she spoke, her tone reflected the adult manner of her bearing.

  “I understand this fog that’s about you Eleanor, you know I do. But Aedon and I feel—we wonder whether you could reconcile the decision to fight, if you were willing to accept the reality of it, and move past what has happened. Bury the dense clouds that surround you. You can’t keep second-guessing a decision made over a year ago. Could you even say you would have done differently now, knowing the outcome? Would you rather have us carrying the weight of the Imirillian taxes, unable able to feed our children, starving our bodies of food and our souls of identity and independence? Would you trade our freedom now for the lives that were lost?”

  “I can’t say what I would do!” Eleanor rested her elbows before her, pressing her face into her hands. “Some days, I feel with such surety that I did right, that my duty was to see Aemogen preserved. Other days, I think, ‘What is a land worth preserving for if so many lives are lost for it?’ I’m happy that Shaamil is dead, that the Continent is rid of him. I am glad we have come off victorious. Yet I can’t look at the people of each fen, but see the fatherless, and all the fields lying fallow. Is that really a victory?”

  “Eleanor,” Edythe said firmly. “You chose to fight. The people of Aemogen chose to fight. Shaamil could have died years ago. Shaamil could have died as a boy. All of these things would have altered what happened, but we can change none of them. Now, it is up to you to stop pretending you could still alter that decision if you paid enough personal penance.”

  “I’m not trying to feel sorry for myself,” Eleanor answered.

  “No, you’re not. You’re trying to carry all the sorrow in Aemogen on your own shoulders,” Edythe said, “thinking that, somehow, it will diminish the pain of those around you. But you can’t, and it won’t.”

  Eleanor lifted her head and stared at Edythe.

  “Grieve with us, Eleanor, not for us.”

  ***

  “And what of joy?” Seraagh asked the Illuminating God.

  “Joy is to be found in the fulfillment of all promises; it comes of purity and understanding.”

  “Is it not to be in this life?” Seraagh asked.

  “Joy will come, and so, be joyous. Peace will come, and so, live in peace. Eternity will come, and therein is joy everlasting.”

  —The Fifth Scroll

  ***

  Thayne came. He arrived on a cool morning of mid-summer, just as the flowers born of the seeds Basaal had given Eleanor were bursting into full bloom. The red flowers, bearing the wanderer’s mark, now filled her garden. Eleanor embraced Thayne eagerly, relieved not only by his company but also for the reminder that life still existed beyond Ainsley Rise.

  “May first marked one year since the battle,” Thayne said as they walked near the river a few days after his arrival. His statement came with the force of having thought it for days.

  “Yes,” Eleanor said.

  “Edythe says she believes you are doing better,” Thayne hedged.

  “She’s made me step outside of myself,” Eleanor replied. “It has helped.”

  “No news of whether he will yet come?”

  Eleanor looked down at the vermillion bloom of the wanderer’s mark between her fingers.

  “No,” she answered. “I’ve heard nothing, and neither has Ammar. I am almost glad of it. I—” she paused and grimaced. “You can understand, can’t you, Thayne? I wish for him to come, I have dreams that he comes, or attempts it…never quite arriving. But I could not have survived this year had I not buried him with all the rest. So, I’ve left him for dead. Basaal is a casualty. And that is how I must reconcile it.”

  “Do you define your marriage as a casualty of war, then?” Thayne asked, turning towards the blue river, his arms crossed over his chest, the silver of his bound hair glinting in the summer sun.

  “Was it ever anything else?”

  Eleanor tossed the red flower into the river’s steady current, watching it catch in the swirl of an eddy before it dipped and disappeared.

  ***

  “None are lost from before Him. He reaches after all who are scattered.”

  —The Sixth Scroll

  ***

  “It is incorrect,” Ammar insisted to Eleanor and Aedon who had joined him in the records hall. Edythe worked quietly nearby. “I’ve been studying the ancient documents of Aemogen, and the grammatical structure of your language clearly delineates the differences between the uses of such an article. Thus, the opening phrase of your oldest historical document is an absolute atrocity.”

  Eleanor began to laugh and was joined by Aedon, who had just returned that morning from a late-summer tour of the fens. Even Edythe looked up from her work, enjoying the debate.

  “You’re insufferable, even in exile, Ammar,” Eleanor said once she’d stopped laughing. Brushing the back of her hand against her wet cheek, wiping away the eager tears. Everyone was smiling, and even Ammar stooped so low as to look pleasantly amused.

  “Your lawless language,” he said as he shook his head in disapproval, “will cause me endless pain.”

  Eleanor’s cheeks hurt from smiling, and she was glad of it, for Eleanor could not remember the last time she had laughed. Aedon was watching her, pleased, and when she stood to leave the records hall, so did he.

  “I would like to meet this afternoon to discuss your tour.”

  “Yes,” Aedon replied.

  “And the people?” she asked as they turned north, walking along the east side of Ainsley Castle towards the northern gardens. The scar that crossed Aedon’s face gave him the appearance of additional sobriety, if that were possible. And he frowned just long enough for Eleanor to look away, worried.

  “They go forward, as do we,” Aedon finally said. “They send their love for you. All the fens send their love.”

  Swallowing hard, Eleanor said, “I don’t know if it’s their love that I need.”

  Aedon waited a moment before pressing his question. “What then do you need?”

  “Their forgiveness,” Eleanor replied.

  “All of Aemogen has been asking forgiveness of someone, be they dead or living.”

  “Is obtaining it worth holding a hope for?” Eleanor asked, for herself, and she also asked for Basaal, whose existence was so silent, so separate from her own. He was still isolated from everyone he had ever known, No word had been heard from him in Zarbadast. Sometimes, Eleanor envied his self-imposed oblivion. Mostly she worried he would never be able to find his way out of it again.

  Settling his weight on one leg, Aedon stood with his hands behind his back, answering her question as he looked out across the late summer gardens. “Have you seen a winter that was not followed by spring?”

  “No.”

  “I trust myself to that,” he said.

  “Has trusting eased the pain?”

  Aedon studied Eleanor’s face for a long moment before answering. “I believe it undergirds the process.”

  ***

  When the last trumpets declare the work of the Illuminating God, the wanderer

  will be brought home; Peace shall be his inheritance, and love shall be his joy.

  —The Final Mark of the Seventh Scroll

  Basaal looked up. His desk sat before the open window, which framed the endless maze of peaks and valleys below. He read the final line again before binding up the scroll, and setting it beside the othe
rs. Pushing his nondescript gray sleeve away from his forearm, Basaal moved his palm along his empty skin, remembering. He looked again towards the open window.

  ***

  The ground sounded thin and tired in the late fall. It had spent what it had. And, as Eleanor worked in the soil, dividing plants and loosening stones, she could not help but feel that she was as tired and fatigued as the earth from the work of harvest. This had been the most taxing autumn of her reign, but Aemogen had managed, and the food stores were secured. Now, Eleanor longed for the quiet of winter despite knowing the loneliness it would bring.

  Sitting back, Eleanor lifted her eyes to the gray sky; it was heavy, the air warmer than it should have been.

  “Snow,” she said aloud as if the clouds were prophets and she could hear their whisperings. Another long winter at Ainsley, everything swathed in white for months and Eleanor continuing with the precarious work of healing oneself. She pressed her bare fingers against the cold ground, staring at nothing as the first light hint of white fell around her.

  Snow was falling.

  A sound—neither loud nor unusual—brought Eleanor’s thoughts back to the garden. She stood, brushing the dirt from her skirts, and turned to look towards the western gate.

  There was a figure, seeming blurred through the falling white, standing, watching her; his face thin, gaunt, pale. Eleanor opened her mouth then closed it again.

  It was Basaal.

  He lifted his hand, hesitant now that she had seen him, running his fingers through his hair in that familiar nervous habit, while his face battled with uncertainty. There was a mark, a wanderer’s mark on the top of his hand. One on the top of each hand.

  He saw her take note of them, and what he saw on her face assuaged him, for he smiled and his face shifted into a singular expression. It was not the look of a traveler returned home, neither one of duty, nor of penitence. It was something Eleanor had never seen—that of a husband coming home to his wife, having been long away.

  A few steps towards him carried her into a run. Basaal’s smile faded into an expression of unparalleled relief as he caught Eleanor in his arms, wrapping one arm around her waist as the other hand held her head gently against his shoulder. She pressed her face into his chest, a desperate, exhausted sound coming from her lungs, and Eleanor was aware that something inside her was easing, a palliative force she’d not known for years.

  Basaal’s words were soft as he dropped his head, pressing his cheek against hers, bringing her even closer to him. “When the last trumpets declare the work of the Illuminating God, the wanderer will be brought home; peace shall be his inheritance, and love shall be his joy.”

  The confident sound of his voice permeated Eleanor, and she pulled away to see his face, lifting her hands to touch him. He was thin and worn, but in his Marion blue eyes, Eleanor saw something she had never seen before: peace.

  Her hands moved down his arms towards his hands, and she paused, surprised by what her fingers could not find. Eleanor pushed his sleeves back, revealing only two Safeeraah: a golden band, marked with the symbols of the sun, on his left wrist and a matching silver band, delicately carved to carry the faces of the moon, on his right. Then Eleanor noticed that the symbol of her own house was marked in the skin of Basaal’s right forearm, opposite his own symbol on his left.

  She brought her chin up, and he nodded, sincere affirmation evident in his eyes. And Eleanor knew he was anchored to her—and anchored to Aemogen—and she could trust herself to be anchored to him. Her eyes dropped again to the beautiful bands on his wrists.

  “The gold, marked with the sun,” Basaal quietly explained, “is my new covenant with the Illuminating God. And the silver is my covenant to you.”

  Eleanor passed her fingers across the deep green mark in his skin then touched both the gold and the silver Safeeraah in reverence.

  “Are the symbols of the moon for me or for Seraagh?” Eleanor asked as she looked back up into his clear eyes.

  So quietly she could almost not hear his pleased laugh, Basaal answered Eleanor with an affectionate twist in his smile. “Yes.”

  Acknowledgements

  My detailed and heartfelt acknowledgements from Queen’s Gambit and Ruby Prince still stand, and to those words I want to add a few fresh lines to reflect my appreciation for the last several months.

  Thank you to my generous beta readers. Thank you to the friends who have gathered round me in myriad ways. Thank you to my siblings for holding me up. Thank you to my parents for the hours of seeing me through. Thank you to Kip for reading on the train.

  Thank you to my team: Phillip Jackson for inking the maps, Kevin Cantrell for my beautiful covers, Julie Ogborn for copy editing, Allysha Unguren for substantive editing, & Stephanie Winzeler for the layout. Also, Ben Unguren, for being a magician.

  Thank you to the characters of these books, who could have chosen to be less, but fought forward, determined to become more. I promise you, spring will always come.

  And, now that we’ve begun to find each other, thank you to my beloved readers. All your words of encouragement have made me smile, and grin, and want to laugh for the joy. It has been the deepest pleasure to run into you in the fens of Aemogen, or the deserts of Imirillia. I am just delighted to have found you, and I hope you’re up for many more journeys ahead. I write them, after all, for you.

  About The Author

  Like many of my siblings, I would sneak out of bed, slip into the hallway, and pull my favorite books from the book closet. I read my way through the bottom shelf, then the next shelf up, and the shelf above that, until I could climb to the very top shelf—stacked two layers deep and two layers high—and read the titles of the classics. My desire to create stories grew as I was learning to read them.

  Subsequently, I spent my time scribbling in notebooks rather than listening to math lectures at school.

  I graduated with a degree in literary studies, and have spent several years working on the novels that keep pounding on the doors of my mind, as none of my characters are very patient to wait their turn. I currently live in Orem, Utah, with my wonderful chemist husband, and books in every room of the house.

  www.bethbrower.com

  Books By Beth Brower

  The Books of Imirillia

  The Queen’s Gambit

  The Ruby Prince

  The Wanderer’s Mark

  And The Q Coming Fall 2016