by Rachel Dunne
Scal pulled his eyes up from the mug, from her hand over his. Made himself look at her. Beneath all the scarring, he saw that she was young still. She could not be much older than himself. “Scal,” he said, deeply unsettled.
She grinned wider, even the stiff side of her mouth pulling up a very little bit. Her eyes lit with joy. “Fire!” she said, and she laughed. It was a sweet sound, a sound that did not belong with the ruin of her face.
Scal was learning that he did not know himself so well as he had thought.
Slipping his hand from beneath hers, he pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. Nearly he knocked the chair over in his haste. He looked down at the woman, looked at her shoulder so he would not see her face. “Forgive me,” he said again. Choked on any other words he had been meaning to say. Fled.
Hevnje was waiting outside, eyeing the horse she was tied next to. She had spirit, this new horse. He had paid too much for her, near all of his wages from Attemo, but she was, so far, money spent well. She spun eagerly as he mounted, and ran into the wind.
He had been hoping to find new work in Bastreri. No caravans would be traveling, for the snows would come before they could find a bigger town. There should have been others, though—merchants traveling alone, musicians, families, all hoping to beat the winter on its way south. But Bastreri was close to the deep snows of the North. In Bastreri, they did not trust yellow hair. Two days he had spent, searching for work. Time enough wasted. Sivistri, some days to the south, he thought would provide better luck. And less staring women.
He was no more than an hour from Bastreri when she caught him up.
“You owe me five guilders,” she said cheerfully as she appeared at his right. Hevnje snapped at her horse’s shoulder, and the old nag nearly threw her as it twisted away. Despite himself, Scal leaned out to grab her reins, to still the horse. “Thank you,” she said.
“The horse is not worth five gids,” he told her. “It is not even worth five rames.”
Pushing her hair back from her face, she smiled. The hair did not stay behind the twist of her one ear, but she seemed not to mind that. “That’s what I told the farmer, but you didn’t exactly leave me much time for haggling, did you?”
Scal shook his head at her. “I did not ask you to follow me.”
“Men so rarely ask to be followed by priestesses. They teach us stubbornness, at the convents. I learned very well.”
“I am not the man you are searching for.”
“You certainly look like him.”
Never argue with a priest, Parro Kerrus had told him. Though Scal had long suspected that particular aphorism to be more a tool to gain obedience than holy writ. He shook his head again, and tapped his heels against Hevnje’s sides. Still the woman followed him. Her horse kept a careful distance from Scal’s. Refusing to look at her, to acknowledge her presence, Scal kept his eyes fixed on the space of road between Hevnje’s ears. Looked at nothing, said nothing. The silence was a space between them. Wide as her horse’s fear of Hevnje. Thick as the lump in Scal’s throat and heavy as the one in his stomach.
She was the one to break it. Softly, but in the silence it was not hard to hear her voice. “You and I, we’re just different kinds of monsters.” His hands were hard on the reins, and Hevnje rocked to a halt, tossing her head. Scal looked over sharply at the woman. She stared unflinchingly back. “Your horrors are easier to hide. That’s all.”
Never, Kerrus had told him, when he had been too young to understand, let a woman know you too well.
“Who is it that you think I am?” He spoke softly, too, though there was no reason for it. The road was empty. They were alone. Yet her eyes on him felt like a thousand eyes. He could not hold her gaze for long.
She shrugged easily. “You’re the one I was sent to find.”
“You do not know me.”
“You’re Scal. The Parents showed you to me in the flames. That’s all I need to know.”
“Why?” The word burst from him before he could bite it back.
Her smile now was soft, gentle as her voice. Barely a smile at all. “That,” she said, “is what I’m here to find out.”
There’s no arguing with a woman who’s made up her mind, Parro Kerrus had told him, and, Sometimes a man’s wisest course of action is to bite his tongue and bide his time. These he took to heart as he put his heels to Hevnje once more. The woman, of course, followed.
There was little enough, between Bastreri and Sivistri. Some farms, some small collections of huts that could be called villages. No places that would smile at a Northman. Places, perhaps, that would welcome a merra, but she did not suggest any stopping. She did not speak at all, which Scal found a good thing. The sun began to lower, and there was a stand of trees that would shield them from wind, and perhaps from sight. It was a strange thing he had learned, in his years on the road—a man alone had little to fear from bandits. Often they would wait, for fatter prey than a single man. Two, even, was a safe number. Likely little enough between two travelers worth stealing. As Scal set up camp, he tried to make himself believe that the woman was merely setting up her own camp that happened to be near his. He could not deny, though, that she was competent. By the time he had finished brushing Hevnje, the woman had gathered a respectable pile of kindling and sticks. She had left her horse, though. The poor old beast still saddled. It looked as though she had no intention of tending to him. That made Scal angry, but not angry enough that he would let the poor horse suffer to prove a point. So he removed her saddle, and cared for her horse as he had done his own. When he had finished, the woman had a pot of roadstew bubbling over a fresh-kindled fire.
Scal stood by the horses, staring. Disgruntled. He did not like to share the road, to share a camp. Even when a job demanded it, he would build his own fire, his own bed, a distance away from any others. A long habit. He most especially did not want to share his camp with this woman who was following him. And yet the camp, as it stood, was more hers than his.
He did not know he made the sound, but a deep, unhappy growl rumbled up from his chest.
Resolute, he went to gather his own wood for a fire.
He set his first armful near the horses. When he returned with the second, the first pile was gone. The woman’s pile of sticks was noticeably grown. He set his down again, and went for more. It happened the same.
There was a knot in his stomach. One he knew well. Twisting and grumbling. A boiling fury.
He stomped, though he knew it was the act of a child. He gathered half of her pile of kindling in his arms. A stick poked him in the eye, and he left a trail of sticks behind him that he could not keep hold of. Hunkering down, he began to build his own fire. He kept his back to her.
When the fire was burning well, he looked up to see that she had snuck up on him once more. It was a dangerous thing, that. She planted her cooking tripod over his fire, hung her pot of stew, and crouched down across from him. Staring again, over the flames.
“You,” she said, “might as well get used to me now.”
“I travel alone.”
“You used to.”
The knot twisted, fire bubbling up his throat. “I do not want you here.”
“And I don’t particularly want to be here,” she said easily. “But I do as the Parents command me. That fire over your heart says you should be doing the same.”
Instinctively he reached up to grab at his chest. Two pendants, strung on the same circle of leather. The painted flamedisk, to mark him as a different man than he had been. The other was a reminder from his last life. That he was, always, who he was. Usually he kept them tucked inside his tunic. Hidden.
“They have not demanded anything of me,” he told her.
“Then you’re not listening well enough.”
He did not wish to speak with her anymore. The stew was boiling, and he was hungry. If she was going to force herself into his camp, he was not going to feel any remorse at eating her food. Retrieving his well-used wooden bowl
from his pack, he dunked it into the pot. It burned the tips of his fingers some, where he was careless, but that he hardly noticed.
“My name is Vatri.”
The stew was not bad. She had used dried meat, torn into pieces, and it was fresh enough that the taste was good. There were some berries he recognized, and leek and onion mixed in.
“We should know each other, if we’re going to be traveling together.”
The broth was thin, though. He could have made it better. Still, it worked well enough to soften the hardbread he pulled from his pack.
“You’re going to talk to me eventually.”
Scal licked his bowl clean and stowed it away. He pulled his snowbear cloak around himself. Lay down with his pack for a pillow. The fire would spend itself. It was warm enough outside that a fire was not needed for sleep.
The words were quiet, so that he almost thought he dreamed them among the night sounds. Cracking one eye open, he saw her staring into the fire, her eyes not on Scal as her words drifted into the dark night. He stared up into the sky, at the stars. She had a nice voice. Nicer when it was not matched with her face.
“I hate the dark,” she murmured. “I learned how to make a fire almost before I learned to walk. My papa taught me. I was marked.” Her hand lifted, touched the side of her neck where the skin was rough and ridged. “It’s gone, now, but I was godmarked. That’s why I was sent to the convent. The day I arrived was the first time Metherra spoke to me. That’s not a common thing, you know. Priests say all the time that they hear the gods, but most of them are lying. She spoke to me, though, she really did. Welcomed me home. It was years before I heard her again. I couldn’t sleep, went to tend the everflame. I built it too big, but I heard her again. Nothing clear, nothing I can remember, but it was her voice.”
The merra stopped, but she did not need to go on. Scal could see how the story would go. Building a fire, big enough to bring the voice of a goddess. Staring into the flames, hearing a whisper. Shock, perhaps, or rapture. Leaning too close, too eager. The voice drawing her in. The flames swallowing. Skin boiling and melting. Screams, dancing with the flames. He could see the memory in her eyes, alongside the reflected flames.
Her voice was small, scared, hardly even spoken. “I can never sleep at night.”
Long ago, in a life he had long left behind, Scal had been a boy who could not sleep. There had been a priest, who softly sang his prayers in a voice not meant for singing. In another life there had been a woman, holding her swollen belly and singing her own songs before a night-fire, calling to the boy who crouched on the landing above and stroking his hair as she sang. It was those songs that came to his mind, as they did most nights. Softly, in a voice as ill-fitted for singing as the priest’s, he began to sing the old songs of the North. Of cooking, and cleaning, and building. Of children, and children growing into men. Of quiet nights spent waiting for the men to return. He did not know when Vatri finally slept. It was before he drifted into his own sleep, leaving the stars to their silence.
CHAPTER 19
The wide world hadn’t much changed in the thirteen years since Joros had last gone wandering. The roads were still packed dirt, winding in strange patterns, never taking a straight route if they could detour by a pond or an unusually large rock. The villages were still ramshackle collections of huts, hardly deserving of whatever name the villagers had branded the place with. The people, overwhelmingly, were still stupid.
It was much how he imagined things would be if he returned to his family’s home. Disgust and disappointment from both sides, and an excess of sullen glares. At least in the villages, Joros wasn’t causing his sisters to cry.
They’d run into a traveling merchant a few days ago, a merchant who’d looked so much like Joros’s puffed-up, pompous father that his hand had gone instinctively to the sword at his belt. Wise men were better than their emotions, though, and Joros had made his fingers loosen. Instead, he’d had Anddyr weave a distraction while Joros had robbed the merchant blind, horse and all. It hadn’t improved their traveling speed, with Anddyr still trudging along, but it had spared Joros’s feet and given him clothing that drew less attention than his preacher’s robe. His brothers would have laughed at the irony of Joros finally wearing merchant’s garb.
He’d hesitated before giving Anddyr one of his black robes; the mage wasn’t deserving of the black, but the days were growing colder, and he was starting to shiver in his simple tunic and breeches. Joros couldn’t have his mage dying of the cold, but it stirred a small anger in him each time he looked back to see Anddyr plodding in a preacher’s robe. Still, the mage would fare better than Joros if any of the villages should turn sour quickly at the sight of a black robe. Anddyr usually had enough presence of mind to hide himself before entering a village, a simple spell that directed eyesight away, but his stores of magic weren’t endless.
Joros had considered having the mage attune more seekstones, but it could take just as long as the first set—years of Anddyr’s searching to even find the proper locations, and years more for the mage to devise a way to twist the seekstones’ magic to affix a location. They’d be a waste of time, in the end, so long as Anddyr didn’t get himself killed. The man was like a walking seekstone. He would cast his searching every few hours to see if they needed to turn from their winding road onto one that went winding off equally foolishly.
Waiting as the mage searched, Joros would brush his fingers over all the seekstones his shadowseekers had brought him through the years. The work of a lifetime, of many lifetimes; careful discoveries, and careful markers. They were the shadowseekers’ greatest accomplishment and purpose: one seekstone matched to each set of twins they’d found hidden throughout Fiatera. The stones showed little different than they ever did, flashes of imagery and a faint tug in the direction where the matched stone sat, far away. His best prospects seemed to be in the capital, Mercetta, which was at once surprising and unsurprising: there were so many people living there that someone should have been able to recognize twins, yet so many people that it was easy enough to hide in a sea of faces. Joros only needed to find one set, and so—much as it made his skin itch—they were traveling toward the capital.
The villages became less scattered the closer they drew, but that was good for one thing, at least: inns. Warm taverns with beds that were soft, if also buggy, and enough food to make his stomach swell up. The first nights out from the mountain, they’d slept on the hard ground and eaten what they could, after they’d gone through their meager food supplies. It had been berries and roots until Joros had commanded Anddyr to kill them a deer or a bird or anything, and the mage had returned bawling with a dead rabbit cradled in his arms. The fool had burned away nearly half the rabbit with his killing blow, but the meat had been better than berries. Joros had to force Anddyr to eat his portion, and the mage had thrown it back up after two bites. That had earned him a royal thumping, but the uneaten portion had comfortably filled Joros’s belly.
How Joros had ever survived as a wandering seeker, he couldn’t remember. It had been over a decade ago, and truly he hadn’t ever wandered far unless it was to follow a promising lead. Any time he hadn’t spent inside cozy Raturo was likely spent in an inn after a day of walking, and for the times when no shelter could be found . . . he’d blocked those dark times from his mind, honestly. He’d survived them, and that was that. Joros wasn’t a man prone to failings, or to admitting them. They were past camping now, for a while at least, and that was a blessed thing. There was nothing like a real bed for a man’s health and happiness.
Anddyr, strangely, seemed to thrive in the outdoors. At the first inn they’d come to, the mage had sheepishly asked if he could be allowed to sleep behind the building. Joros had lost half a night of sleep to suspicion, but he’d kept all the skura jars in his bought room and slept holding the seekstone that was tuned to the matching one around Anddyr’s neck. In the morning he’d found the mage dew-wet and curled into a ball around that stupid stuffed
horse, sleeping as peacefully as a child who didn’t know any better. It had been much the same all the nights to follow; Joros still had a faint chariness lurking in his mind, but the mage knew better than to run, and certainly wasn’t brave enough to go anywhere without his skura.
They were perhaps four days outside of Mercetta, if Joros’s memory was any judge, and the villages were slowly becoming veritable towns. It made his fingers twitch, the places starting to look too much like the town where he’d grown up. He was happy to avoid them when he could, happier still when he could find a crossroads inn between towns, full of travelers as dispassionate about conversation as he was. It was still a few hours until the sun would flee the sky, but there might not be another inn or another town in that space, and Joros wasn’t about to chance a night in the brush when there was an inn standing right before him. He dismounted and waited for Anddyr to plod by.
The mage was so bound up in his own head that he walked past Joros without even noticing, his eyes fixed on the ground and his lips moving as they always were.
Joros cast around until he found a good-sized rock; his aim was off, hitting Anddyr on the hip, but it was enough to get his attention. The mage trudged back to take the horse’s reins and immediately began talking to it in low tones, pressing his forehead against the beast’s nose.
Frowning, Joros reminded himself to check the skura supply later. It seemed to him that his pet mage was growing slightly more unbalanced with each passing day. He might have been dipping his fingers too deeply into the skura jar of late.
“Anddyr,” he said sternly, to pull the mage from his reverie with the horse. The man liked that horse more than he should; it was the same as it had been with those blasted twins, an unhealthy relationship, but there was little Joros could do about it. “There will be a trough around the back. Care for the horse, and clean yourself up before you track any of your filth inside. I daresay the place has enough as it is.” Joros left the mage to it, and ducked into the inn.