“As you’ve all, no doubt, already heard,” Foy said in a powerful voice, “our king was lost to us two days ago. Killed by Quade Asher while meeting with the Bellra ruler.”
There came a collective moaning; not one of surprise, but a guttural expression of grief that echoed in the large vacant space. Foy paused, allowing the people to express their feeling. He, himself, swallowed hard and wiped at an eye.
“We’re here to discuss what’s to be done next,” he resumed at length. “Where do we go from here?”
The fire cracked and sparked at this, causing several people to jump. Arlow walked from the back of the crowd around to the side, but kept his distance. He wanted to be able to meet Mae’s gaze, while still not presuming too much.
“What’s to be done?” an angry voice called out from the far right of the gathering. “It’s clear, ain’t it? Justice. This Quade, he’ll have to answer.”
“Aye,” several called out.
“Kill him!” shouted Cline, his ugly face twisted with bewildered rage.
Mae’s complexion was uncommonly pale, her eyes hollow and weary. Though she hadn’t yet spoken, more of the Pauper’s Men were looking to her than to Foy. Arlow wondered, for the first time, who would step up and fill the vacancy of leadership.
“Justice?” Foy asked, in a deep and resounding tone. “Death, you mean?” He did not sound as if he disagreed, but merely desired clarity.
“Aye,” said the same ruffian—a short, bearded man with watery blue eyes, whose coat was little more than rags. “Cut him down. Our king might’ve had a no-kill policy, but there comes a time, don’t there?”
“Aye,” came the booming reply, universal. Arlow agreed, but kept his opinion to himself.
The old woman in the plaid shawl took a step into the empty space. “Mae?” she asked.
Mae’s eyes moved up from the bare floor to the people, as if surprised to find them there. She bobbed her head in agreement.
The crowd waited, listening to the snapping of the fire and the howl of the wind through broken windowpanes. They were waiting for her to speak. Arlow could see the hunger on all of their faces plainly enough. These people needed a leader, and they wanted her.
Mae licked her lips, looking around with the appearance of increasing lucidity. “Linton,” she began, in a voice that was small yet carrying, “was the finest brother any girl could have. He was…” She looked up, to keep tears from falling. “I don’t have to tell you what he was. You know—you saw him, you ate with him—ate because of him. Quade—” She paused once more, but this time to suppress the naked hate that looked, to Arlow, wholly wrong upon her affable features. “He put out a light, and now this world is blacker for it, hungrier. Heroless.”
“Not heroless,” Foy interjected, still with those blighted lover’s eyes. “When a king without progeny falls, a queen takes his place.” Foy went down to one knee, head to fist, paying obeisance to Mae. She looked across the room, to Arlow, in shock. He smiled slightly, not surprised.
It took only a moment for others to follow Rodgeman’s lead. They descended to the factory floor in an erratic wave, until Arlow and Mae were the only two people standing.
Arlow, still holding Mae’s eye, went down to one knee. And it was not for show. She had earned the love and loyalty of all these people, himself included. He felt the hard coldness of the floor, and it sent a chill straight up his body.
Mae appeared to grow in that moment; she stood tall, chin held high. She had a self-possession that, despite all her roughness, seemed fitting for a ruler.
“Pauper’s Queen,” Foy said.
“Pauper’s Queen,” the assembly echoed.
Mae lifted a hand to quiet them. That hand turned to a fist. “We’re many, and he’s only one. For Linton, for all of us, we’ll get him.” Her hand drifted down to her abdomen in a brief, unconscious motion. “For our children, for the future. We’ll get him.”
Arlow’s mouth thinned. She was right—he did not want any child of his sharing space in a world with the likes of Quade Asher. He had never experienced such a keen rush of protectiveness before that moment. It was primal, wordless, and fundamentally unselfish, and it left him feeling off-kilter—yet hopeful.
Perhaps he might make a tolerable husband and father after all.
Chapter Twelve
“Three—”
Bray closed her eyes against the imminent fall and stepped forward, Yarrow’s gloved hand clasped in her own. But no plunge followed. Her eyelids flew open, and reality rippled.
The blazing Adourran desert disappeared. Her outstretched boot landed in grass—in a circle of grass, surrounded by sheer stony steps. A different sun shone down upon them from high within a cloudless blue sky.
“Spirits,” Yarrow murmured.
Bray was glad of Yarrow’s support, or she might have fallen over in shock. However, she was surprised to find him there beside her. She had never before had company in this place; the solitude of the Aeght a Seve was one of its unquestionable constants. She pinched his fingers to test their solidity.
The single tree at the center of the Place of Five stood where it always had, but it was not the same. This tree had been burnt; its trunk was now blackened, its branches leafless and grasping. Looking at it, Bray experienced an inexplicable surge of guilt.
“We’re here,” Yarrow said, looking around. “Really here, in body.”
“This is…” Bray had meant to say ‘unbelievable,’ but then jerked towards Yarrow in sudden realization. “What you were hiding from Quade. This. You gave up your memories—”
“For this,” he finished, nodding. He gazed about him with a look of dark satisfaction.
Bray was so stunned that she laughed. She had never dreamed that this trip might actually yield answers. In the future, she thought, she ought to give more credence to Yarrow’s hunches.
He released her hand and pulled off his glove, then he knelt and touched the grass with his bare fingers. She stared down at the top of his head, a look of amused confusion on her face. “What are you doing?”
He smiled up at her. “I’ve never felt grass before. Is it always so very green?”
“Depends on where you are. But what do you mean you’ve never felt grass?”
He was already pulling his glove back on. “It’s been winter in Daland for all of my memory, and there’s not much of it here in Adourra. Not like this.”
“Yes, but you’ve come to the Aeght a Seve before. I saw you on the ship.”
“When I come here I always appear up there,” he said, pointing far up the stony ledge. Bray followed his gaze, shielding her eyes from the sun and craning her neck. For the first time, she wondered just how Yarrow had managed to climb up and make his sacrifices. It seemed an impossible height.
“Let’s have a look at the tree. It isn’t burnt when you come here in your mind, is it?”
“No,” she said, equally curious. “It’s not.”
They walked together towards this one anomaly in a familiar place. As she drew nearer, she saw that the tree was not dead—not entirely. From within the charred husk of the trunk, a new sapling bloomed with perfect green leaves.
“Not gone after all,” she whispered, though the words seemed not to be hers. She thought she heard Yarrow say the same beside her, and a shiver raced across her skin. The closer they drew, the more her anticipation mounted.
Bray blinked, thinking her eyes were playing tricks on her. There was motion near the tree. The shadow of a man came round from the other side. For a moment Bray wondered how Yarrow had passed her unseen, until she looked properly and realized that the man before her was not Yarrow. He was familiar, and the sight of him filled her with love, but he was most certainly not Yarrow.
Her heart gave a great, painful throb. “Da?”
“Hey there, monkey,” he said, in an accent even thicker than she recalled.
She ran forward to embrace him, seeming to become the twelve-year-old girl she’d been when
last she saw him. But he wasn’t truly there, not in body. It was like trying to touch the wind.
“Da,” she repeated. Tears dripped from her chin.
He smiled at her, his eyes crinkling in just the right pattern. His dark hair lay heavily atop his flat head, and he had the same strong, blunt-fingered hands she remembered.
Bray knew that she had transitioned from composed to puddle-of-tears in record time. Her chest heaved, and she sniffed against a running nose.
“Spirits, Da, I’ve missed you so much,” she croaked. All of the wounds that life had dealt her had come after his death, or because of it. In her memory, only when she had been with him had she been whole.
“Me too, monkey-girl.” The smile left his eyes. “And I’m—I’m so sorry, about…” The torment on his face was too sharp. She had to look away.
“It’s not your fault,” she whispered.
“I left you to the mercy of that—that—”
“You didn’t leave,” she said, strength returning to her voice. “You died. It wasn’t a choice.” Still, something within her eased as she said this aloud. An inner knot loosened. She could not recall ever blaming her father for abandoning her, but perhaps some small silent piece of her had. He had sacrificed his safety every time he went down into that mine, and in the end he had paid the ultimate price. The choice had been all his. But she had paid, too, and never had a say. That is the way of self-sacrifice—the people left behind bleed too.
“But I am so proud of the woman you’ve become.”
Her smile was watery and tremulous. “Thank you.”
Bray remembered Yarrow suddenly, but when she turned to make an introduction, she found him in deep conversation with empty air.
“He can’t see me. I’m here for you alone. Edged out a young man who very much wanted to speak with you, I’m afraid, but that’s a father’s privilege.”
“What is this?” Bray asked. She wiped her face, but as the tears had not yet slowed, it was a futile effort. “How is it possible that you’re here?”
“This,” he said, gesturing to the broken tree. “The Confluence. It is the bridge between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.”
“Truly?” she reached out to touch the sapling. There was something peculiarly alluring about that bit of greenery, that new-life which had sprouted from within death itself.
“Wait—”
But she had already brushed finger to the velvety leaf, and immediately she felt herself lurch forward, falling.
“Da?” Bray called out into the blackness.
A scene materialized around her slowly, only coming into focus and color in increments. “Da?”
But he was not here. She was not either. Soon she forgot there was a person called Bray Marron. There was only Charlem Bowtar.
Charlem raised himself from his chair with an effort. All his joints creaked and groaned in protest.
“Sir?” a young voice asked. “Brother?”
He shuffled to the window of his Temple office. He gazed out at a Dalish sea, though the cataract in his left eye had made him half-blind. He could remember the full sight of it, though—the sea. He could recall the first time he had set eyes on all that wet. As a young man raised in a desert city, how formidable it had seemed then, how awesome.
You were there too, weren’t you, Jae-In?
It was one of the odd truths of age—he could precisely recall a day forty years gone. He could remember the sound of his son’s laugh and Jae-In’s silky straight hair twirling in the wind. He could remember running through the streets of Nerra as a boy, long before Nerra had been abandoned.
All of it—his youth, his training, his wife—he held in his mind like a scene preserved with oil paint on canvas. But what he had eaten for breakfast, the name of the young man yammering at him at that moment—about things such as these, he had not the faintest inkling.
“What’s to be done, brother?”
“Hm?” Charlem asked. He realized that the young man was in a panic. These youths were always in a flap about one thing or another.
“Chevrre,” the lad cried out, wild-eyed. “He’s gone completely mad. He’s going to burn it all down!”
“Very well, young man,” Charlem said in a croaky voice. “Calm down. Let’s go have a see.”
Charlem took up his cane and they began their slow trek out of the office, down the stair, and across the grounds. The young man leading him was plainly in a hurry, and thoroughly annoyed at Charlem’s plodding pace.
“Peace, young man,” Charlem said. “When you’re as old as I am, you won’t be moving so sprightly.” He gave a barking laugh. “Pray you’re never as old as I am, lad.”
Ain’t that the truth of it, wife.
“Yes, sir,” the kid said. “Excuse me, sir. It’s only that this situation is dire.” Though to look at him, perhaps he was in his thirties. Not such a lad in his own estimation, most like.
But to Charlem they were all children. He was a relic from a previous time—the last of the old Chi’santae. And, by the Spirits, after nearly fifty years of finding marked kids and training them up in the old ways, he had earned the right to a slow walk.
The smell of the smoke arrested his step. In an instant, he was in another place, another time. The Confluence was alight with embers, and the smoke of it was thick in his nostrils. And his Jae-In, his perfect Jae-In, lay so still, with white ash dusting her black hair like snow.
No, my love. Not again.
“Sir?” the lad insisted, shaking him. “Please keep on, sir. The damage he could cause… We need to hurry.”
“What’s that burning, hey?”
“As I said, sir, it’s Chevrre. He’s really lost it this time. I don’t know what we can do…”
“Who?”
The kid sighed. “You know Chevrre. He has the fire gift?”
“Ah,” Charlem said. There had been a few of them with fire in their blood, if he remembered correctly. These gifts the Spirits gave these young marked ones, they could be wonderful. And dreadful. When he joined the Company of Spirits, he intended to give them a real talking-to on that matter.
They at last made their way around a bend in the lane and came to the gardens. The smoke thickened, and Charlem coughed and squinted against the ash in the air. Two of the three gazebos were already up in flames. Even Charlem’s poor left eye could detect the blaze.
“Keep back,” a young Adourran man called out, his posture full of desperation. “I’ll do it, you know I’ll do it, so stay back.”
His hands were full of fire, and the flames grew in size and heat as he spoke. He stood upon a small bridge that crossed a dry riverbed. “I said stay back,” he bellowed, though no one had moved any closer. He jerked his hand and a ball of flame shot to the ground, turning a rose bush to ashes.
Charlem frowned at the young man. “Where’s his bevolder?”
“I’m his bevolder,” his young guide said, not concealing his exasperation. “I told you. But I don’t want to hurt him. It’s not his fault—you know he’s not right in the head. He sees things that aren’t there; sometimes the paranoia just takes hold.”
Charlem nodded. He had seen a lot of things in his years as the head of the Chisanta. A number of these young ones had been given the gifts they were least equipped to handle. “Then you can stop him.”
“I don’t want to hurt him,” the young man repeated. “And I’m afraid if I approach…he might not really see it’s me, you know?”
“You two are connected,” Charlem said. “All bevolders are, right down to the spirit, in life and in death.” Are we not, Jae-In? “You are the only one who can help him. You are his counterpart.”
The young man huffed, clearly annoyed that he had bothered to bring Charlem along in the first place. He sighed and inched forward, hands outstretched in a kind of peace offering.
“It’s me, Chevrre,” he called out, stepping carefully towards his bevolder. “It’s Anton. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Stay back,” Chevrre bellowed, and the flames flared.
The young man, Anton, stepped steadily onward. “No one will hurt you, Chev. Everything’s going to be alright.”
He stepped up onto the bridge, palms extended. At that proximity, he had to be feeling roasted by the fire.
“I said stay back!” Chevrre shrieked, and then fire exploded around him in a monstrous burst, like an explosion. Even at a distance, Charlem’s cheeks were scorched by the heat of it. He coughed, wiping his eyes.
“Anton,” several voices called out in anguish.
Charlem blinked in amazement. The fire appeared to be pulling back in upon itself, as if time were moving backwards and he were witnessing the explosion in reverse. When the bright flame had receded entirely, they could all see that both men were intact, and apparently unharmed. The bridge was gone.
Anton knelt in the ash, holding onto his weeping bevolder, head pressed to head. He stroked his spirit-mate’s hair and made soothing noises. “Everything will be well. Be calm, Chevrre. I’m here now.”
Charlem, leaning heavily into his cane, gaped at the two men. He had believed himself beyond surprise, but apparently even he had not yet witnessed all there was to see in this life.
“How?” someone called out.
Anton shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s as if…as if I took on his gift for a moment, and was able to shut it off. I don’t understand it myself. It felt very surreal…”
Charlem leaned onto his cane and croaked a laugh to himself. He felt tears forming at the corners of his eyes—though that may well have been a consequence of the smoke. He shook his head in amusement.
How do you like that, Jae-In? He thought, still chuckling. We were each other’s antidote all along. Suppose even I don’t know all that we are…
And then Charlem and his students, the newly constructed Temple and its gardens, began to fade from view, to disappear entirely. And Bray recalled herself.
Lamentation of the Marked (The Marked Series Book 3) Page 21