Wildmane

by Todd Fahnestock

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “You’re alive. That’s what matters.”

  “You pulled from yourself to make me well,” he said. Bands had once told him that healing oneself was relatively easy for a threadweaver. Healing someone else was unbelievably difficult. You couldn’t just pull GodSpill from the threads around you, the stones and the walls. You had to pull it from yourself. It took a horrible toll. He’d seen another threadweaver do this before, trying to save her child. She’d pulled all of the life from herself, and the child had died anyway. So did the mother. “You can’t do that, Mirolah. It will kill—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He sighed, closed his eyes. He’d only said a handful of words, and yet it felt like he’d run around the Inland Ocean itself. “How long has it been?” he asked. “Since the glade by the Fountain.”

  “One day. One night. Half of another day,” she said.

  A day and a half. That was beyond dangerous. The fact that Zilok Morth hadn’t found them was a miracle.

  “We can’t stay here,” he said. He clenched his teeth, tried to sit up again, but he couldn’t raise himself. The rag toppled from his forehead, and he slumped back. “Gods... This is insufferable.”

  Her hand clenched his.

  “Have you seen anything unusual, Mirolah?” he asked. “Any birds watching us? Any ravens sitting on the sill, more curious than a raven ought be? Especially any animal with blue eyes. He does that sometimes, spies through the eyes of animals.”

  “Who?”

  “Zilok Morth.”

  She watched him, and a little smile cracked the side of her mouth. “Your nemesis?” she asked. “From the Age of Awakening?”

  “What’s funny?”

  “You’ve been talking to him in your sleep. The past day and a half has been one long fever dream. You talked to him. To Bands. To your mother. To Oedandus. To everyone except me, actually.”

  “Listen to me. We have wasted precious time here. You should leave me. Today. Now. Go south to Denema’s Valley and try to work the portal. If you can, escape to Calsinac and destroy the portal behind you. If Zilok follows you, he can use the portal also. He knows how to work them. If the portal will not work, then disappear. Go somewhere and don’t threadweave. Don’t use it for at least a year. Otherwise, he’ll find you.”

  “What portal?”

  “The one I showed you. The one in Denema’s Valley.”

  “The carved arch in the rock?”

  “Except with the GodSpill back in the land, it will be working. I hope. Go there. Now. Don’t wait.”

  “And I’m to leave you here?”

  “He’ll seek me first. It will give you time.”

  “And when he finds you, what then?”

  He furrowed his brow. “No. See, you can’t worry about me. Zilok is coming. All he wants is me. If he sees you as a threat—if he even sees you as an annoyance—he’ll go through you to get to me. And you can’t stop him. So you have to go.”

  “And he’ll kill you.”

  “It doesn’t matter what happens—”

  “It matters to me!” She stood up. Her stool tipped and clattered onto the floor.

  He swallowed, calmed his voice. “Mirolah, this fight between Zilok and me goes back, all the way to the beginning. It’s not your fight.”

  “I defeated the Red Weaver,” she said.

  “She didn’t know what you could do. None of us did. But Zilok won’t underestimate you. You think he doesn’t know you, but he does. He’ll have studied you, and when he attacks, he will gut you before you know he’s there. You won’t see him coming, so you have to leave.”

  “No.”

  “Mirolah,” he said, trying to hide his frustration. “He’ll kill you—”

  “And so I will die,” she said. “What does it matter? If you can throw your life away, why not me, too? I don’t even know who I am anymore. You say I should flee. Where? Home? I don’t have a home anymore. My foster family wouldn’t even recognize me.”

  “Of course they would—”

  “I don’t even recognize me! You don’t know what happened me. I...I think I became one with the Fountain. I melted into it, and somehow, I came back to my body again. But I’m not me. My soul is still connected to the GodSpill, and the GodSpill is now spread throughout the lands. I hear things, I see things that I never did before. This town, these people, I look at them and they are transparent. Every emotion they have is written in their threads, and I’m a part of those threads now. The GodSpill is in them, just a little bit, in all of them. And so am I. If I’m not careful, and I suggest something, they do it, even when I sense they don’t want to. I don’t dare look them in the eye, because then that control becomes stronger, and they want to follow me, want to do what I ask them to do. And it isn’t just people. The trees whisper to me in some foreign tongue I feel I should know. Birds and squirrels, deer and foxes, they follow me. It all seems like a dream, like I’m doing all of this somehow... The only thing that seems real is you. I know you were with me before all this happened, and you’re the only link to who I once was. You’re all I have left. If you think I’m walking away from the one man who might help me understand what’s happening to me, then you’re stupid.”

  “I can’t stop him,” Medophae said.

  “Shut up.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I know you’ve lost him. Oedandus. I know you’re mortal now. I can see into you, the threads of you. But damn you, you are not going to give up on me and lie here waiting to die! You’re going to get up...” she choked on the words, “...you’re going to get up out of that bed, and you’re going to stand with me because I need you.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  She knelt beside his bed. “I will protect you,” she murmured.

  He laughed darkly. “You can’t. And even if you could, have you stopped to think that maybe I deserve it? That maybe Zilok coming for me is my just punishment for being a fool? All this time, I could have been preparing for his return. Or for Ethiel’s. If I’d thought it through, I would have known.”

  “How? How could you possibly have known?”

  “Somehow.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re so caught up with who you should have been and what you should have done that you won’t even look at what’s happening to you right now.”

  “I was half a man before, broken and ailing. Now I’m even less.”

  “You’re not. You’re whole. For the first time in a millennium.”

  “What? Mirolah—”

  “How many chances have you had to live, Medophae?” she interrupted him. “How many chances have you had to stop hating yourself since you lost Bands and take a look at what your life is right now? One for every minute of an hour? Does that sound about right? Sixty chances in an hour.”

  “Don’t talk about her. I’m saying that without Oedandus—”

  “How many hours in a day?” she interrupted again. “How many days in the hundreds of years since you lost her? How many chances to live in this moment, in this minute, have you let slide past you? Millions, I think. And you’ve let them slide away because you’re berating yourself for mistakes you made hundreds of years ago. You’d think that being immortal would have given you hope. Enough time to see what you’re doing to yourself. Enough time to set it right, to begin again. Endless time. So much power... But you didn’t. And with every chance you passed up to live a real life, you sank deeper into your self-loathing, because you knew it was wrong. Life is a gift, and you shunned that gift, clinging to memories instead. You kept trying to shove that map of your past over the ever-moving opportunities of the future. But no one can do that, not even the gods. You loathed yourself until you wanted to die, but Oedandus kept you alive. Only now you’re mortal. Now you can die. After passing a million chances to really live your life, you’re down to your very last one, and the only thing you can think of to do with it is stay here and wait for death. You thi
nk that’s all that you’re worth. Well, it’s not. We need you. I need you. This isn’t your first opportunity to die. It’s your last chance to live.”

  Her words were agony, but she didn’t know. “I don’t have a place here...” he said raggedly. “My life was hundreds of years ago. When she died, I died.”

  “What did you want to be?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “When you were my age. I mean, really my age, what did you want to be?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “Let’s say it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Zilok Morth’s going to kill us anyway. So nothing matters, really. So what did you want to be?”

  “When I first came to Amarion?”

  “Sure.” Then she shook her head, reconsidering. “No. Before you met Oedandus. The last time you were mortal. What did you want to be?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “Yes you do.”

  He thought about his childhood, so long ago, so far away from here on a small island his people called Dandere. He remembered running by the surf, his feet splashing in the water that rolled in and pulled out. He liked running. As a young man, he ran around the entire island in two days without sleep, a feat only the greatest of the king’s warriors had accomplished. He sweated and pushed himself faster than anyone had gone before. He had never heard of the continent of Amarion until his mother, Jarissa, told him stories about her homeland. She had described its vast forests and mountains, stretching farther than a person could run in two days, in twenty days, in a year. She had told him she’d come across the ocean on the back of a green dragon.

  He remembered the Ceremony of the Black Flower, once a year when his people mourned their missing god, Oedandus, who had been lost to them for decades. Everyone he knew cried on that yearly celebration, letting their sorrow show, and not one of them thought to go find Oedandus. They all considered it impossible. How did one find a god? They couldn’t fathom where to start, but Medophae itched to try. He couldn’t stand the idea that something couldn’t be done. He remembered making the decision to travel to Amarion, that mythical place his mother spoke of, to look everywhere to find his people’s lost god, and that’s when Bands appeared to him. She was a shapeshifter, and she’d been watching him for years in different forms: as the man who was always buying bread at the bakery when Medophae walked by, as the woman who played the harp on the corner for coins. She had even played with him when he was little; she’d become his friend Airric, a friend who no one else could see.

  And when Medophae had gone searching for Oedandus, Bands had revealed her true form, and took him across the Great Ocean to Amarion. And rather than finding his god, Oedandus found him.

  “See,” Mirolah said, breaking his reverie. She was watching his eyes. “I told you that you knew.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “What did you want to be?” she asked again.

  “An adventurer,” he said. “Like my mother. I wanted to do what others thought was impossible. I wanted to help them reach beyond their limits by showing them how. Before I was born, Oedandus used to visit us once a year. But he suddenly stopped coming. My people mourned, but not one of them went looking for him. They thought that finding a god was impossible. So I did it, and as soon as I set foot on the ground in Amarion, he found me.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I became what I am. I wanted to use the power rightly. I wanted to be a good man. But I didn’t have any idea how to do that. No matter how I tried, I kept making mistakes, and because of the power, my mistakes were huge. I was a child stomping around in the boots of a god. I was a fool.”

  “Is that what they said when you told them you were going to try to kill Dervon? Did they laugh at you? Call you a fool?”

  “Afterward they called me a hero, a—”

  “Not afterward. Before. What did they say before?”

  Only a handful had known what he was going to attempt. “There were some. Zilok’s parents. They cursed me. And there were others who laughed. It was ridiculous. Yes, many called me a fool.”

  “And they were wrong,” she said.

  “They couldn’t possibly know the power I had been given—”

  “They were wrong,” she reiterated. “Back then you were a fool. You didn’t know what you couldn’t do. And you succeeded.”

  “But now I don’t have Oedandus to—”

  “Shhh.” She put her finger on his lips to silence him. “Stop there. Right there. That’s where we will live.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s be fools like that. Fools who don’t know what they can’t do.”

  He let out a little sigh. “That’s pretty talk, but Zilok Morth is coming. I’m not talking about some poetic story villain, pulled from a minstrel’s tale, but a killer, a calculating malevolent spirit who has no humanity.”

  “Like Dervon.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes. Let’s be fools who don’t know what we can’t do.”

  He felt a flicker of hope, soft and surprising, like a seed sprouting in his heart. Whatever she had undergone in the Fountain had changed her. She was certain, confident. And she was right about one thing: she had defeated Ethiel, something that Medophae himself had failed to do in hundreds of years. That was no mean feat. Was it possible she could do the same to Zilok?

  Maybe they could do it.

  Then, as he realized that he was agreeing with exactly what she wanted, his flicker of hope shriveled. That was exactly how his glamour had worked on others, when Oedandus burned through him. He would talk, and whomever he talked with would soon begin nodding his head.

  “Did you threadweave? Right now? With me?” he demanded. She had just talked about the villagers here, how they were swayed by her needs and requests.

  She hesitated, but she didn’t look ashamed. Instead, she shrugged. “A little.”

  “You changed me,” he accused.

  She raised her chin, suddenly realizing what he was getting at. “Changed you?” she said. “You mean, did I threadweave to force you to agree with me?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  Her eyes flashed. “I didn’t change you,” she said with a biting edge. “If I was going to change you, I’d stop you from being such an idiot!”

  He blinked at her.

  “I looked at your threads,” she continued. “I felt your emotions. I saw the emotional darklings that cling to your back. But I also saw that you are a good man, that you want to help others, that your concern for me is genuine, that you would save me from suffering. I saw what everyone in the history of Amarion already sees in you, but that you can’t see because you’re so busy beating on yourself! Did I change you? No, you bull-headed man, I pointed you at a mirror.”

  He was stunned.

  “You...” She stood up, and her anger seemed to drain away. “Are an idiot. And you’re unbelievably horrible to yourself.” She put her hands on his temples, leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “You’re going to stop doing that. Even if I have to keep reminding you every ten seconds.”

  “I...” He felt like he should apologize, but he couldn’t find the words. “Where are you going?”

  “To get you some soup.”

  Medophae slept that night, and when he awoke, he felt confused, perhaps more than he ever had in his long life. But Mirolah’s biting words had gotten to him, and her sprout of hope had grown larger. Was he defeating himself first? He’d seen it happen in many soldiers he’d trained, that they couldn’t get past their own nay-saying, couldn’t get out of their own way.

  He began to notice things he hadn’t noticed in a long time, like the smell of the cool air from the open window, like the angles of the roof, like the feel of the floorboards on his feet. It all seemed new to him, as if he hadn’t given himself the opportunity to appreciate these small things in years. He was like a child discovering how to walk all over again. He hadn’t felt this way since he was a
young man. He couldn’t tell if it was because he’d been a sick man who was now recovering and appreciating health. Or if it was because he was newly mortal again, and appreciating the danger and beauty of things he might never see again. Or if it was because Mirolah had opened his eyes to the fact that he wasn’t looking at his present, only at his past.

  The despair that had surrounded him was like a fog that had begun to dissipate. This morning, he wasn’t certain Zilok would destroy them. They were still alive, so there were opportunities they could look in to. In fact, he was beginning to feel a small thrill at the idea of trying, the kind of thrill he hadn’t felt since the early days.

  He glanced at Mirolah, curled on her side on a pallet of boards and straw with a blanket below her and a blanket over her. She had constructed the makeshift bed near the door during his days of sickness.

  He moved his legs to the edge of the bed and set his feet on the floor. He was a little shaky, but the burning under his skin was gone. His throat no longer hurt. The ache in his muscles had all but vanished. He went to the window, moving as quietly as he could.

  Yellow, orange, and lavender light spread across the sky, igniting the clouds. He smiled. To his right was a little table, and there was a pile of coins: copper, some silver, a lot of gold.

  “Good morning,” Mirolah murmured. He turned as she sat up, blinked and stretched. She wore a long, dun-colored nightshirt.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, nodding at the table.

  “I made them.”

  “You made them?”

  “You were sleeping. I was bored.”

  “How did you make them?”

  “I traded a gold nugget for thirty copper and two silver pieces. Then I turned most of the copper pieces into gold. It’s actually pretty easy.”

  “These are Teni’sian coins.”

  “That’s what the innkeeper gave me.”

  “How did you get the nugget?”

  “I had to borrow a gold piece from a wealthy merchant so that I could see how the threads of gold looked. Then I made a rock into gold.”

  That was transmutation. He knew about it, but there hadn’t been many threadweavers who could do it, even during the Age of Ascendance. “And you gave the coin back?”