by Victor Poole
"Well, how do they grow things?" Ajalia called.
"There are springs at the edge of the forest," Delmar told her. Ajalia could see the edge of his face; the light in the trees made a sharp plane against his cheek. She could not understand why she liked Delmar; she had to admit to herself that she did like him. The curious, itching impulse to gather him up in her arms, to kiss him thoroughly, was biding its time quietly in her heart. She tried to cover this impulse up, to turn it into something else. She told herself, as she picked her way down a gentle rise in the forest floor, that she was cultivating Delmar's acquaintance as a strategy, but in her heart she knew she was wrong. She liked him, and she was ashamed to admit it, even to herself.
Delmar stopped, and waited for her to catch up. He put out a hand towards her; she flinched.
"I won't hurt you," he said with a grin. She smiled, but her smile was a grimace. Delmar took her hand. She winced; the cuts on her arms still ached. "Are you all right?" Delmar asked her. Ajalia looked at him, and she thought that she had never really looked at him before. His face was drawn and harsh, older in the late morning light.
"What do you think of me?" Ajalia asked him.
"The cave's down here," Delmar said. He still had a satisfied grin pasted over his face; Ajalia resented his good cheer. She followed him down a steep, narrow gap that vanished down between two thick trees. He held her hand, and kept his face upturned, his free hand ready to catch her if she fell. Ajalia wanted to snap at him; she wanted to tell him to stop watching her so solicitously. She wanted to hurt him, because he made her feel exposed somehow. She slid down the last length of dirt; her annoyance made her stronger, gave her an edge against the queasy turbulence inside of her.
She reached the bottom of the dirt slope, and sat down on the ground. Delmar let go of her hand; she pulled her arm in close against her side. A lumpy shape pressed against her ribs; she moved the fingers of her right hand around the shape. It was the book, the slim leather book about magic. She sighed; for a moment, she thought about throwing it away into the trees.
"Let me see," Delmar said. He sat next to her, and lifted her left arm into his lap.
"Don't hurt me," Ajalia said. He smiled at her. And stop smiling at me, she said to him in her mind.
Delmar snapped the stitching at the end of the bandage with his teeth, and unwound the strips of fabric. Ajalia watched his face as he bent over the cloth. He pulled the last strip of cloth away from Ajalia's arm; she looked down at the raw place.
"It looks better," he said, turning the shining red skin in his hands. His fingers were warm and dry against her arm.
"It looks awful," Ajalia said.
"But better," he said with a grin. Ajalia was itching to ask him why he was so cheerful; she felt as though some change had occurred between the time she had killed Lim, and the time she had woken up, and she knew it had to do with something within Delmar, but she couldn't figure out what had changed in him. He was too happy, somehow, too jovial. She wanted to interrogate him, but she feared his smile.
"Delmar," she said, as he replaced the bindings.
"I'll change them when we get back," he said.
"Shouldn't have taken them off here," she muttered.
"You're grumpy," he said lightly.
"Let's get the horse," she said. She chewed on her lower lip, and watched him work. "You're different," she said. She sounded petty, even to herself. "Why are you different?" she asked.
"I'm the same," Delmar said. He tied off the end of the fabric.
"You're efficient," Ajalia said suddenly. "Why are you like this?" Delmar shrugged.
"I'm always like this," he said.
"No," she replied. "You're usually vague, and you look lost, and you used to follow me around like a sad dog."
Delmar met her eyes. She blushed.
"Well, you did," she said. He inched closer to her. "Stop!" she said.
"No," he murmured, and kissed her. She meant to stop him, but his lips were warm, and his cheeks were soft, and he smelled like Delmar.
"Del," she said, when he had pulled away, and pushed his face into her neck.
"What?" he asked. She looked down at him. He had closed his eyes; she could feel his breath on her collarbone.
She wanted to ask him why he liked her, but instead she wrapped her fingers around his neck. Her bound wrist throbbed against his hair.
"I love you," Ajalia said. She sounded unhappy. "Why do I love you?"
"I don't know," Delmar said. He stood up, and pulled her to her feet. She wanted to ask him what he had done to her, what the magic was that he had pushed into her side, the magic that he said had made the dark hollows beneath his eyes and his cheeks.
"Why did you put the book into my clothes?" she asked. He led her through a narrow ravine that cut for several feet beneath the surface of the forest floor. After a short distance, the ravine opened into a wider mouth that vanished down into a black hole.
"Wait here," Delmar said. He passed into the darkness. In a moment, Ajalia heard the jingle of harness, and Delmar appeared, leading the scruffy black horse. The horse had been cleaned up a little; his mane had been trimmed, and the long hair that tangled over his hooves had been cut away. The horse was wearing a plain bridle from the East, and Ajalia's black goatskin saddle was cinched around his girth.
"That was thoughtful," Ajalia said. She reached out and stroked the leather of her saddle. "Philas brought me my saddle," she said. She felt as though she were about to cry. She put her face into the shoulder of the horse, and wrapped her arms around his furry neck.
"Come on," Delmar said. He put his hands about her waist, and lifted her into the saddle. Ajalia's heart gave a lurch. The curious floating sensation threatened to return; she wound her fingers into the black horse's mane. Delmar led the horse through the narrow ravine. When he came to the steep slope that curved up to the level of the forest, Delmar scrambled to the top and gave the horse the whole length of the reins. The horse snorted, and heaved himself rapidly up the sharp rise, his haunches digging deeply beneath him. Ajalia leaned forward. She admired the powerful action of the horse's legs; he was scruffy, and his legs were not particularly shapely, but he moved well, and his joints were clean. She watched the horse's shoulders ripple with movement. Delmar took the reins up; he led the horse through the forest.
A line of oxen was flowing over the road like massive white boulders; Ajalia could see them through the gaps of the trees. Delmar held the horse in the shadows of the forest until the oxen had passed. He waited for the boys who drove the beasts to pass on down the road, and then he brought Ajalia and the horse into the white road. Ajalia let herself be led like a child; she could not remember a time when she had submitted so wholly to another person, as she seemed to do by default now with Delmar. She did not understand herself. She had made a life out of being strangers with the whole world; her identity as a slave was bound up in being a sort of emotionless deliverer of her master's desires. Delmar inspired in her a kind of mute obsequiousness; he did things to her, or around her, and she did not realize until minutes later that she normally would have protested. Had anyone but Delmar attempted to lift her onto a horse, and to lead her about the forest around Slavithe, she thought that she would have ripped that person's throat to shreds with her teeth. She did not think the reason could be Delmar's appearance; the first time she had seen him, he had seemed like an overgrown child, a boy who had lost himself in the woods. Even now, he walked through the trees with a kind of trusting love; his heart seemed to be open to the whole world. If Ajalia had believed in magic, she would have ascribed his power over her to it, but she thought that Delmar's strange ability with golden light, and with the white light he had drawn from the earth, was due to some other cause. She could find no explanation for his power, but she was determined never to believe in magic. Perhaps, she reflected, scraping against the limits of her own reason, she had imagined the lights she had seen. She knew this was not true, but she could bring herse
lf no closer to a belief in magic than to presume a fault in her own perception.
Delmar took a different way, a longer way, towards the hidden hollow.
THE BONES OF THE POISON TREE
Ajalia felt as though time was slipping around her in slopping streams; she could not fasten her mind on what needed to happen next. She told herself that she needed to get angry, that she needed to focus on the servants. She had been planning for her new household; she had been ready to take a house, a larger house, in a better part of town. She had been ready to go and meet the owner of the property, to work out a trade with them, or a sale of one of her properties, to buy the house she had in mind. She had been planning trips to the market, to buy clothes for her own servants, to clean them up, and discipline them until they were sharp, clean, and presentable. She had been planning the furniture of the new house; she had been thinking of what she would do with Delmar, and with Chad.
Now everything was in shambles around her. She felt as though her whole soul had been broken into scraps and rags; she felt herself drifting aimlessly, as on a breeze, or a stiff wind. She could not have said what her next step was. A part of her was considering Delmar; he was in line to be the Thief Lord, whether or not he was willing to admit his power, and he was, she admitted to herself, a much straighter path to her desires than the path she had planned. She was still working in a nebulous way; she had a sort of direction she was feeling her way towards. She thought that Philas must think she was executing a careful series of steps. The truth was that she hardly knew what she was going to do from one day to the next; she could feel, with a sort of internal sensor, whether she was moving closer to what she wanted, and whenever she felt a dimming of that sense, she changed until it glowed bright again.
That sense of purpose now was dim, and lit only as a star is light behind clouds. She felt miserably alone, and muffled. She wanted to tell Delmar everything, about why she had come, and what she wanted of him, but she thought he would never cooperate with her if he knew the full purpose of her master's convoy. She did not want to share her secrets. As the horse picked carefully behind Delmar through the trees, Ajalia began to think there was no other option than to talk things through with him. She could not keep her mind focused on any one thing; she was vague in her mind, and lost. She felt like a child. She could not bring herself to care the way she had always cared before.
She could not think of a time when she had not cared deeply about things; her passion had made her sharp, and efficient, careful, and sure. Now her surety had dissipated, and she felt alone and lonely.
She opened her mouth to speak to Delmar, and closed her mouth again. She wished, for the fourth time, that she had never set eyes on him. The idea of Lim gradually grew in her mind; she pictured the slave's shorn head, and his pasty thick body. She could take care of the body, she told herself firmly. If she disposed of the body the way she had meant to in the first place, perhaps she would be able to jolt herself into knowing again what to do.
"What did you say about yourself?" Ajalia asked suddenly. "That you put yourself in me? What did you mean?" She watched Delmar's shoulders as he led the horse. They were curving through the trees; she thought that he was taking her around the back of the hollow; she tried to glimpse it through the trees. "Delmar?" she asked.
"What?" he said. He turned and smiled at her. Her heart hardened.
"You're pretending not to hear me," she accused. His smile faltered.
"No," he said.
"What did you do to me?" Ajalia demanded. A tide of crimson rage began to build gradually up in her abdomen. "Tell me," she commanded.
Delmar turned into the forest, and led the horse through the trees. The harness jangled softly, and the hum of insects made a strong noise in the air.
"What did you do?" Ajalia demanded. She wanted to slide off the horse, but she didn't think her knees were going to bear her weight. She could feel the trembling weakness; it was back in her knees, and in the base of her spine. Ajalia growled in anger; she could not believe this was happening to her. She wanted to get her life back. She wanted to be in control of herself again. She wanted to go about her business without this irritating tingling rushing through all her joints and limbs. She wanted her arms to be healed. She wanted her scars back.
Ajalia ripped at the place where Delmar had tied the bandage back around her arm. Her fingers scrabbled at the cloth; her fingers were weak. Ajalia put the knot into her mouth, and tore at it. Her jaw ached. Tears of hot rage tumbled down her cheeks; she was glad that Delmar's back was turned. She was sure he would make fun of her, if he saw. She remembered her knife, but when she reached for it, her hand hovered limply in the air. The connection between her head and her body seemed to have broken; the command to lift her knife, to cut away the cloth, to free her arms to the air, got lost somewhere in her neck, or her shoulder. She stared down at her hand. She could not remember why she had lifted her hand in the first place.
"Delmar," she said, and her mind was blank.
"Yes?" he said evenly.
"What was I asking you? What did I say just now?" She could almost remember, and she could still feel the anger, but she could not recall the words she had said; they had vanished behind a kind of opaque screen. "What did I say?" she asked again, struggling to keep the panic out of her voice. What is happening to me, she asked herself, and had no answer.
Delmar brought the horse to the edge of the hollow made of twisting tree roots, and looped the reins around a branch.
"Don't do that," Ajalia croaked. Her voice had gone dry. "He'll break them," she said. "We need a rope."
"He's a good horse," Delmar told her. He came to the saddle, and reached for Ajalia. She meant to struggle, and to get down by herself, but his hands came around her middle, and grasped her above the hips, and she went limp again. She fell into the undergrowth as soon as he set her down; she felt as though she were drunk somehow. She struggled to keep her eyes open.
"Don't make fun of me," she warned, her speech slurring a little.
"I'm not making fun of you," Delmar said patiently.
"Not my fault," Ajalia mumbled.
"No," Delmar agreed. He stood next to her and waited. Ajalia worked on breathing; for some reason, breathing had become difficult. She felt her skin and her bones pushing down against her lungs, keeping her from expanding her ribs fully. Spots of darkness were gathering in her vision. She closed her eyes and dragged some air into her body. She stood up.
"I don't want to be here," she said. She pressed her palms against the strong tree roots that curled into a lip over the edge of earth that lay in the rise around the hollow. She gathered her powers together into a knot. When she was sure she could, she opened her eyes and stood upright.
"Show me Lim," she said. Her voice was calmer now; she felt in control. Delmar watched her eyes, and then nodded.
"He's over here," he said, leading her deeper into the trees. Ajalia grabbed the end of the horse's reins and brought him, too. Delmar looked back at the crushing noise the horse's hooves and body made against the foliage. He glanced at Ajalia, and didn't ask.
Well back from the hollow, buried in a copse of thick trunks and strangling saplings, Delmar gestured at a pile of logs and rocks.
"He's there," Delmar said. Ajalia looped the horse's reins over a young branch. She walked carefully forward to the pile, and sat down even more carefully. She was learning that if she moved as if through deep water, she could keep from disturbing the knot of pain that hovered behind her eyes. She was failing to notice now, when she felt badly. The unpleasant sensations were becoming boring, background noise, filler in her brain. She shut it out as much as she could. Sitting on the ground, her legs stretched to either side, she put her hands on a big rock at the bottom of Lim's grave.
"What are you doing?" Delmar asked, watching her heave aside a branch.
"Disposing of the body," she grunted.
"I already did that," Delmar said loudly.
"No," s
he said. "Not properly." Delmar watched her struggle with a shattered branch.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked. She pulled aside another rock. Talking seemed to her a waste of time. Delmar put his hand on her arm. "Why?" he demanded. She looked up at him. She saw him through a haze.
"I have to get back to work," she explained. Delmar pulled at her, drawing her away from the makeshift grave. She pulled free of his hands. "Leave me alone," she snapped.
"No!" he said.
"Let me be!" she shouted. "You don't know how to bury people." She stared at him, and there was fire and the water of tears in her eyes. He looked at her, and he saw death, and unholy things. He let go of her.
"I'll be at the hollow," Delmar said finally.
"Thank you," Ajalia said. Delmar eased away; she could hear his footsteps inching away; she knew he was trying to decide if he should carry her off. "Don't carry me off," she said.
"What are you going to do with him?" Delmar asked. His voice was cautious.
"I'm going to put him into the poison tree," Ajalia said. There was a long silence as she stood, and pulled a heavy log from the top of the pile. It rolled away, and she half-fell against a tree. Delmar leapt forward, but she put out a hand to stop him. "I'm fine," she gasped. Delmar watched her, a helpless expression in his eyes.
"I want to help," Delmar said, but he didn't touch the logs and rocks that covered the dead slave.
"When I'm finished," Ajalia breathed, "you can show me to the poison tree." She dropped a rock. The sides of the stone scraped up against her raw arms; she could feel new blood seeping out from the old scars. They oozed beneath the bindings; the skin felt as though it was rotting apart. She thought that her arms would never heal. She imagined her wrists dripping away, the bones exposed. She was glad that she would be dead soon; she was growing weary of the noise and the shuffling inside of her heart. The dark maw of insanity shifted behind her back; she ignored it.