by Sonia Lyris
Of course he would.
“Did he pay you a lot, to find me? Does he still?”
At this, Maris’s expression went oddly flat. Despite the warm breezes, Amarta felt a chill.
For a time there was silence between them. Amarta felt herself flush, regretted her words. What was she thinking, to risk angering the one person they knew here, who had thus far treated them so well? And a mage, whatever ill-fortune that might also bring.
“When we disembark,” Maris said at last, as if Amarta’s questions had not been asked, “what will you do?”
“We’ll find something.”
Perhaps when she was far enough away from Maris’s magic, vision would return more fully to guide them.
“He will send people here to search for you. The deeper into Perripur you go, the more you’ll stand out. My countrymen are no fools; they’ll know you’re on the run. Some of them will gladly turn you in for the money he’ll be offering.”
Or already had.
“What do you suggest, then?”
“My house in the Shentarat Mountains is remote. It should be as safe as anywhere, even when I’m not there.”
Dirina and Pas had just joined them.
“We go to the mountains with Maris!” Pas said happily.
Amarta turned her back on the town, fully facing the mage. “Why?”
“Why?” Maris laughed a little, expression turning sober. “You’ve no money, you speak no Perripin, and the most powerful man in Arun is after you.”
“That’s why for us. Why for you? You are strangely generous for someone so recently employed to hunt me down.”
“Amarta,” Dirina said with shocked reproach.
“And you’re awfully suspicious for someone who can supposedly see into the future. Why don’t you tell me what I’m going to do?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” Not exactly, anyway. People changed their minds, and the future altered.
But she had looked, and vision would not name Maris as a threat. Or could not. A way around your magic.
“I see,” Maris said with an odd tone. “Perhaps I want help cleaning a house I haven’t seen in years. Perhaps . . .” Her gaze went to Pas, hung there a moment. “Perhaps it seems to me that Innel has too many advantages in this, and I want the contest closer to fair.”
“Fair is what you take,” Amarta said sharply.
At this Maris’s eyebrows raised. “Then take my strangely generous offer, Amarta.”
Could it be that Maris was offering only what she seemed to be offering? If so, it was even more important that they refuse.
“No.”
“No?” Maris’s laugh seemed more astonished than amused.
“Ama,” Dirina said. “Do you see something?”
So many had paid dearly to take them in. If Maris only meant them well, then—
They were the last ones on the boat now, a few of the crew remaining to coil ropes and take down sails. One Perripin sailor approached, looking as if he were about to speak, perhaps to shoo them off the boat. Maris held up a hand and he nodded, backing away.
“Those who help me come to harm. Or worse,” Amarta said softly.
“You are concerned for my welfare?”
Amarta nodded.
Maris looked at her a moment. “That’s quite . . .” She seemed to search for the right word. “Unnecessary. I don’t need your protection.”
“Everyone tells me that. Everyone. And then they—”
“You know little of mages and the work we do, do you?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m a little harder to hurt than those who’ve helped you before. I will take my own risks. Come with me.”
Amarta looked at Dirina and Pas, and nodded. “We will come.”
“We will help you clean,” Dirina said.
“Me, too,” Pas said, nodding enthusiastically.
“It will be good, to have help,” Maris said, smiling down at him.
“Maris,” Amarta said, again regretting her hard words earlier, “you’ve been so kind and generous and I—”
“No.” Maris said, cutting her off curtly. “Don’t say that.”
They walked through the town of Dasae, a small city of wide houses with low roofs—some, Amarta noticed, with only roofs, no walls at all. Here they attracted long stares and even lengthy whispered discussions. Maris was right; there would have been no hiding here.
They walked the road out of town, through farms of thick green bushes, orchards of bright fruit, pastures of goat and spindly creatures who made trilling sounds as they passed.
If all this walking were indeed a ruse to convince them they were safe, only to turn them over to someone who would take them back to Arunkel, well, it seemed too elaborate. Maybe vision showed her no threat from the mage because there truly was none.
As the mountains grew closer, they passed tall fields of canes. They walked over rises of thickly tangled trees. When the land went flat again, they began to approach what distantly seemed an enormous dark gray seashore.
At the edge of the gray-green flat that might have been a frozen sea, they stopped, the three of them staring in silence.
Maris took out a water bag, shared it around.
“What is that?” asked Pas at last.
“A monument to the ruin that my kind brings to the world.”
“The Glass Plains,” Dirina breathed.
“How was it made?” Pas asked, eyes wide.
“Some mages got into an argument,” Maris answered. “When it was over, the cities of Shentarat, Mundara, and Tutura had been flattened into molten earth. Tens of thousands dead. Farms, towns—every tree and rock flattened. This is what remains.” She gestured.
“Was it very exciting?” Pas asked.
“I was not yet born, little one.”
“The mages, did they die, too?” Amarta asked.
Maris laughed, bitterly, shook her head. “I am told they reconciled. Not much comfort to the dead, that.”
Along the edge where the glass ended and earth began, grasses and small shrubs grew. Amarta knelt to examine the surface. Like dirty, frozen water, but solid and hot to the touch. Up close it was riddled with sand-filled cracks and bits of hard shards.
“It’s sharp, Amarta. Watch yourself.”
Amarta touched an edge, pressing her thumb onto it, drawing it along, feeling it cut into her skin. She pulled back, put her thumb to her mouth.
“You see? It cuts. I walked barefoot here once.”
“Why?” Amarta asked.
“To give something back to the dead. To pay on a debt my kind is rarely called to account for.” A small shake of her head. “A debt beyond measure. What we bring the world, it neither wants nor needs.”
Amarta put her foot onto the surface of the glass. Under her the plate of gray-brown gravel shifted a little. She looked out at the expanse stretching away into the distance.
“Did your blood bring back the dead?”
A snort. “Nothing can bring back the dead. Or make up for the plains. Or for Nerainne. Or the Rift . . .” Maris paused. Her voice fell to a whisper. “I would see my kind melted flat here as well, though it is no reparation to those we so casually ruin with our petty, destructive whims. All we’ve done. All we’ve failed to do.”
Amarta followed Maris’s eyes to the horizon, past the plains, where the distant mountains faded into murky, heat-warped gray.
Strange words, but they also felt right in some way she could not name. Blood to pay for blood.
Behind her eyes, vision stirred. She sat down on the warm, hard surface and pulled off a shoe so worn it was no more than a tattered leather sock.
“What do you do there?” Maris asked.
“I take off my shoes.”
“I can see that,” the mage said sharply. “Refrain.”
“I have a debt to pay, too.”
“You? With your few years? Do you mock me?”
Amarta looked up at the mage in surprise.
Maris’s expression had a furious intensity about it.
“The world would be better off without me, too,” she whispered.
“You presume. This debt has nothing to do with you. You are no mage.”
“What am I?” Amarta yanked off the other shoe.
“A woman-child who understands little of the world. Who had best do as she is told lest her actions and words lead her shortly to lament.”
“Amarta.” From Dirina a warning that she already heard clearly in Maris’s tone. Pas looked from her to Maris and back again in dismay.
She took a breath and paused, her shoes in hand, staring out across the plains, wondering what she was doing. A sort of double vision came to her: the world as it seemed, in which she was angering the only person they knew in this strange, hot land; and the dim flashes that something was giving her. Not foresight. Not quite.
“You will put your shoes back on. Now.”
It was a tone she had heard before. In the shadow man’s voice telling her to comply. From the tall stranger in Botaros years ago, demanding from her the visions that had made him powerful enough to try to kill her. Now in her body and blood she felt all the times she had done as she was told, hoping it would lead to safety, or at least out of danger. The times she had fled, wanting only to survive.
To whom did she truly owe this demanded compliance? Where was her duty?
Dirina and Pas. That was her duty. For them she saw no danger here and now and in the moments ahead. All that was at risk was herself.
She struggled to her bare feet. The sun-warmed glass was nearly too hot to stand on so she shifted between her feet, facing Maris, forcing herself to meet the growing storm in the mage’s dark eyes.
“Maris, how can you be responsible for this? You weren’t even alive then.”
“Do you intend this as challenge, child?” Maris asked with a sudden and frightening softness. “Or is it merely a foolish lapse of judgment?”
In her chest she felt the fast heartbeat of the prey. So many years of running, of being the rabbit. She wanted to be something else.
“I am not a child,” she replied, voice quavering. “And you will not hurt me today.”
At this Maris raised a hand, her fingers spreading slowly, pointing at the sky, her other hand a fist at her chest.
Not the right thing to say, Amarta realized quickly, sensing the future shift away from the one in which her last words had been true. As she watched Maris and tried to figure out what to do next, she dimly recalled having seen Maris and this moment before in vision, years ago.
No more running, she decided suddenly. The mage began to hum, very low. Vision began to warn that something was coming that might hurt.
“Maris,” she said. “My parents are dead because of me. All those who took us in came to harm or death. Dirina and Pas have nothing, no home, because of me. Let me walk the plains as I must. Help me understand. I beg you.”
At this the Perripin woman inhaled sharply, and turned away, dropping her hands.
For long moments there was no sound. Distantly, away from the plains, a hawk cried. Amarta dared not move, despite the heat of the glass under her soles.
When Maris turned back, Amarta could feel the mage’s look though she did not understand it.
“There is an old saying,” Maris said. “‘With mages, respect first, reason later.’ I wonder, should reason be mentioned at all?” A thoughtful sound. “He was so quick to anger, my teacher. I loathed him. More than you can know. And look at me, threatening you. I sound almost exactly like him.”
“Not to me,” Pas said quickly, shaking loose his mother’s grasp and going to Maris, taking her hand, looking up. “You sound like you.”
Maris seemed more shocked by this than anything that had come before. She picked Pas up in her arms and held him, burying her face in his hair and neck while he hooked his legs around her waist.
Finally she lifted her head and looked back.
“What is it you want, Amarta?”
“To walk.”
“The shoes.”
“They’re too tight. If I’m going to hurt anyway, let me choose how.”
Maris was silent a moment.
“So be it.”
“Amarta,” said Dirina softly as she walked behind with Pas, Maris leading, “this is foolishness. If you cut your feet, how will you walk the rest of the way? What if your cuts go bad?”
“They will not go bad,” Maris said.
Amarta’s focus was on the dark glass underfoot, soaking up the blazing sun, returning the heat to her with each step. Some spots were smooth, others rough and sharp. Maris was right: in places it was edged like a sharpened blade. In some places tiny plants grew in crevasses, small and prickly, tenaciously grabbing what life they could from the sand and dirt that had collected there.
She would not slow for the ground. Not for thorns, not for heat, not for cuts. Nor would she let vision guide her. She would follow where Maris led.
Her debt could never be paid back. Her parents—she could tell herself that she had been too young to understand and thus save them, even though the vision had been clear. But Enana and her family? She had known danger followed them to that house.
And then there was Nidem.
A friend. Perhaps the only one she’d ever had. Someone who had laughed with her, hugged her, and whom she had killed as surely as if she had herself sent the arrow into her heart.
To save Kusan, a small voice seemed to cry inside her.
No. She could have tried harder. Used her foresight more deftly. If she and Dirina and Pas had never gone to Kusan in the first place, Nidem would still be alive.
A cut to her right foot, deep and sudden. She bit back a cry of pain.
Because of her, Nidem was gone from the world. Because of her, their parents were dead. Enana and her sons, urged to let a deadly hunter in their door who might have done them grievous harm. How many more would die because of her?
She let herself cry, very softly, for all who had suffered for her coming into their lives, and for those she had put on the road to the Beyond.
Now she was leaving blood on the glass underfoot with each step. It did not absolve her of Nidem’s death. Nor her parents’. Not even a little. Not a hair’s weight on a merchant’s scale. Nothing could make right what she had done.
Yet it seemed right and necessary, each pained step a kind of balm to her spirit. They walked in silence for a while.
“Enough,” Maris said at last. She had Amarta sit, and examined her feet, dabbing at them with a cloth. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she told Dirina. “She’ll heal fast.” Then, to Amarta: “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Some measure of it, perhaps.”
“At times that is all that is possible.” Maris touched her face a moment, looking into her eyes, and Amarta felt some long-held pain seep out of her. For a time she trembled with sobs, then brushed the wet from her face and stood, ready to continue.
“Amarta,” Maris asked, “do you truly see the future?”
“I—” She looked at the woman curiously. “It seems so, yes.”
“Then tell me something: these plains—a hundred years hence—what do they look like?”
There were some things in the world that, as they changed across many years, left little room for deviation. The land before her was like that, and when she looked, all the futures seemed to lead to similar places, making them easier to see. Like the ocean at a distance.
“Small trees,” she said. “Over there, a large town. That way, farms. Green, everywhere, breaking through the glass. Taking back the land.”
Maris exhaled a long sigh and handed her back her shoes. She could barely pull them on now with her skin raw and cut as it was, but she did anyway. As the land rose into hills and they hiked, climbing away from the plains, the pain seemed to fade, turning to itch, and then to calm.
“Thank you,” she said to Maris, who nodded.
As they hiked
into the mountains, she thought of the unforgivable things she had done, the unpayable debts, and realized Maris was right: it was necessary to pay against the debts anyway.
* * *
They hiked the next day and another after that, passing infrequent houses, an occasional fox, and some oddly shaped four-legged animals with long snouts who bobbed their heads as they went by. At last they came to Maris’s high mountain desert cabin.
The house was made of orange brick and a flat roof surrounded by a long-overgrown garden. Once inside, they put down their packs on a floor covered with a thick layer of dust. One wall was entirely covered with shelves of dust-gray books. Pas struggled in Dirina’s grip, wanting to explore. Dirina held his hand tightly, keeping him close.
“It is a shambles, but the well works. With a little effort, the garden will return full force.”
“Even this late in the year?” Amarta asked.
Maris smiled. “You are in Perripur, where everything grows with great passion. I will go to the nearest town for supplies tomorrow. The two rooms in the back are yours.”
Amarta turned a startled look on Dirina. Sleep without Dirina and Pas by her side?
“Or take the same room,” Maris said. “This is your home, as long as you wish.”
“Let go, let go,” Pas complained up at his mother. Once released he took Maris’s hand, staring up at her with what Amarta had come to think of as his charm-spell. Maris petted his head with her other hand and trailed the small boy while together they made an inspection of the house, opening doors and cabinets.
Amarta’s suspicion had faded, and she felt instead something like gratitude, almost relief. Here in Maris’s remote mountain home, Dirina and Pas might truly be safe. And that meant Amarta might be able to—what?
Be something besides afraid for them.
“Home,” Dirina said softly, walking around the room, looking wonderingly at Amarta, giving her a tentative smile.
She looked around. Furniture. Food. A fortune in books. A warm, dusty smell.
Home. She mouthed the word to herself to see how it sounded. Could this really be home?
Snow crunched underfoot. A winter sun shone weakly through tall fir and pine.