by T. A. Miles
The bee was one of many bondmates for a mage of a singular talent, settled uniquely along the spectrum at brown and red. Eisleth continued through the wild yet orderly labyrinth of the blood lilies, to an ornate pair of doors nestled within an outer wall. It was part of a structure that stood alone at the edge of the garden, though its connection to the garden and to the rest of the Seminary was integral and paramount. The walls were constructed in slats, the spaces between shelves occupied by waxy layers in complexly arranged geometrical patterns. Even at night, beneath sparse lantern light, those layers held a coat of blushed golden shine; the honey produced by the many familiars of a mage who maintained privacy as diligently as the bees did their work. She was their queen, her magic maintaining and inspiring a hive.
Eisleth pulled open one side of the double doors, letting himself into the gold-cast room. A solitary high-backed chair, fancifully carved and upholstered in brocade occupied the center of the space, but for the moment was unoccupied. The mage who typically sat upon it when in this protected place was instead standing before one of the walls, which was alive with the movement of her bondmates. Her thin form was draped in a layered gown of deep brown and vibrant red. Her eyes and her rolling curls were of a richly dark brown as well, her skin a shade of porcelain.
“Laeria,” Eisleth said to her in announcing his presence.
She looked in his direction, then walked toward him to be greeted as she often was, with arms around her delicate form and his lips upon hers. Her scent was constantly of blossoms and honey. It instilled sensations of warmth and comfort that he carried with him in secret. Acknowledgment of it was always reserved for time spent in her presence.
Knowing that, Laeria always granted him a lengthy moment of reunion and he would not allow himself to feel bereft in their periods of separation. He held her face gently and kissed her forehead before she slipped away from him.
“There was a Council meeting,” Eisleth informed her, allowing her to take his hand and guide him toward her previous space along the wall.
“About what?” Laeria asked. She was not in the habit of presuming.
“The war,” he answered, keeping her hand as long as she permitted it, then tucking both his own into the sleeves of his robes when her work required separation.
“Has it gotten worse or better?” she asked him.
“It is far worse,” he said. Even without Korsten’s report, they had known about the near breach of the western line for some time.
Laeria looked at him, her expression offering sympathy for his stress and curiosity for the subject.
Eisleth watched her raise a pale hand, tipped with red-lacquered nails, to the wall of workers, several of which shifted to cover her fingers. He said, “A prominent city in the east is now under siege. South Meadows hovers on the brink of falling.”
Laeria listened. And then she said, “That isn’t what’s bothering you, is it?”
He anticipated her detection and shook his head. “No. My trouble remains one of my students, whose injury has brought my brother and me to a threshold we had long been avoiding. Of course, Ashwin is more prepared to cross it than am I. He intends to cross it with Ceth’s help. Ceth, the master locksmith will now undo past efforts and reestablish our entrance into a place that might do better to remain sealed.”
“You’re speaking of Merran,” Laeria said, transferring a small population of her bees to another space on the wall. Again, she had detected correctly.
“I am.”
“As I understand it, what Ceth placed with him originally was not a lock, my love, but a key.”
“Whether key or lock, it is ultimately the unlocking which disturbs me.”
“Is this something that Ceth can do alone?”
“It would require my assistance.”
“What disturbs you about it?”
“I often wonder whether or not our initial actions were out of turn. It was an instance of Foresight from Jeselle that provided us with a possible future. We were equipped to act upon that potential, and we did, but at times I believe it might have been wiser to leave it to fate.”
“Isn’t it partly owed to fate that Jeselle’s Foresight is even possible?” Laeria posed, and it was reasonable.
Eisleth agreed with a nod. “Part of fate’s assignment is to test.”
“What if you failed such a test? Is that what you’re wondering, Eisleth?”
Again, a nod.
Laeria deposited the last of her bondmates, then turned to look at him fully. “I’m glad that you’ve never considered yourself above testing by other powers, whether they may be of lesser or greater importance in the hierarchy of this world. But I believe that you test yourself more than anything else would care to. You’ve been so long upon this world that you’re as concerned with it taking over you as you are of taking over it. I believe that some of that concern is on your brother’s behalf.”
“He is immune to any sentiment related to an advance fear of consequence,” Eisleth said.
Laeria smiled. “You love him very much. Are you more afraid of what this pending unlocking might do in regards to the world, or to Ashwin?”
Eisleth opted not to answer that in words, which was all the answer that his perceptive lover required.
The smile faded from her lips, but it remained somewhat in her dark eyes. “Eisleth … you must allow Ashwin to fulfill his duties in this world as he sees them. If you attempt to make decisions for him, then you are making yourself fate.”
Which was not the role he wanted. He had no desire to control the lives of any of the souls in their world. Guidance had been his only ambition and it was more agreement than ambition—an agreement to his brother, to whom guidance was an irrepressible passion.
“You’re right, Laeria,” Eisleth eventually said. He would take the perspective she offered into consideration. Lifting a hand to her face, he traced the gently rounded shape of her chin. With that small gesture, he was requesting more of her presence, that she would share her presence with him outside of the space she very nearly inhabited in the garden.
Laeria answered by raising her hand to his and kissing him softly.
Korsten sat upon the balcony ledge of his own room at the Seminary, robed after a bath, gazing upon the starless darkness of the hour beneath an overcast sky and thinking of the battle he’d left behind. At least, there was some comfort in knowing that efforts would be focused there. And now he found himself torn on whether or not to return to Indhovan himself. There were Vadryn present in the battle, and he could help in vanquishing them, true … but he felt a peculiar conflict in him over it. Destroying them had never been an easy task, but now it was accompanied by emotions other than lingering fear or relief. Now he had begun to feel sensations of guilt and remorse … for expunging demons.
Apart from that, he hesitated to leave the Seminary again without Merran. They worked together. Korsten worked best, he believed, with Merran. But even regardless of his partner—his friend, his lover more often than he probably should have been—Korsten had trouble veering his mind away from his experiences at Cenily. His dreams of his mother continued to distract him and now that he was away from the urgency of battle, he was again feeling compelled to follow her guidance … to go home—to where she had called home.
Zerxa had escaped a war, been member to a family overthrown in a revolution. A revolution against what? He opened his hand and looked down at his palm, at the item in it, that had belonged to his mother. He didn’t know what it was, but he could begin to imagine. He could begin to imagine, and that was the nettling part of it. His ideas were incomplete and incoherent.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep, my dear?”
Korsten looked toward Ashwin, who he hadn’t previously noticed enter his room. The only thought that came to his mind just in that moment was that his mentor was too beautiful.
An
d with that thought, Korsten closed his hand over his mother’s heirloom and slipped off the balcony railing.
“What have you there?” Ashwin asked casually, watching Korsten’s path toward the bed.
At the bed, Korsten shifted the heirloom between thumb and forefinger and displayed it momentarily to his mentor before depositing it on to the stand beside his bed. “It was a gift from my mother.”
An inquisitive look came to the elder’s face, which Korsten found dangerously endearing in that moment. Even in his tremendous amount of years, he could still seem quite young in a moment. “Have you always had it?” Ashwin asked.
“I haven’t,” Korsten replied. “I had many odd experiences in the short time I was on the eastern shore. Among them was an unexpected arrival at my childhood home in Cenily.”
“Was it really?”
“Yes, it was. I met my father, as a very old man after years painting a portrait of him as deceased. It was there where I also came upon Lerissa and Sharlotte. They’d been spending the last thirty years taking after Adrea’s search for the Ascendant.”
Ashwin’s light expression took on a bit more weight at the mentioning of that. He stepped nearer to the bed, tipping his head slightly, so that his currently loose hair draped neatly off his shoulder. “Their efforts led them to Cenily?”
Korsten nodded. “Yes. Lerissa believes that it was no coincidence … that Adrea believed that the Ascendant would be in some way connected to—perhaps by circumstance—connected to me or my family, and that was the reason why she selected me to inherit her role as a mage.”
“I see,” Ashwin replied.
Korsten might have asked to know what went through the beautiful older man’s mind at that moment, but instead he asked, “What happened to her, Ashwin? I know that it was much more recent than I had at first believed, and I’m very sorry. I know that you loved her….”
“Korsten,” Ashwin interrupted. He closed the remaining gap between himself and the bed in a few gradual steps and then seated himself. There was much consideration to the action, enough that Korsten felt he might have somehow misspoken.
His mentor reached for his hand, which was given, and guided Korsten to sit beside him, which he did.
“Korsten,” Ashwin said again. “None of us knows positively how Adrea died, only that she did. Our evidence was in the return of her soul-keeper and the subsequent departure of yours.”
Korsten accepted that, and then he rephrased his question. “What do you believe happened to her?”
The words were delivered very quietly, though there was no one else present to hear them. Somehow Korsten was beginning to feel exposed and observed, as if knowledge of the topic being discussed had manifested someone or something that could, unseen, pry away the Seminary’s Barriers and peer in at them. Such was a level of paranoia he was not accustomed to. The suddenness of its onset was unsettling.
“I believe she was murdered,” Ashwin stated, and the candidness of it pulled Korsten out of his prior state in order to look at the elder.
Korsten took several moments to consider that option, coming from Ashwin. “By whom?” he eventually asked.
“By whom … or by what,” Ashwin answered without answering at all. And then he shook his head. “This is a war, Korsten. We exist in a constant state of chaos. Any number of elements or individuals might have led to her death. We must not dwell on the details of what’s past.”
“And yet, both of us do,” Korsten said, sliding his hand over Ashwin’s arm. He gently squeezed the Superior’s wrist and leaned toward him to kiss the side of his face. He lingered there for some time. He knew it was time too long when Ashwin turned his face toward Korsten as well, touching their foreheads together. Though he adored the gesture, it always brought him to the very rim of temptation. Now was no different, and he delayed a retreat from Ashwin’s close presence.
For that delay, his mentor kissed him on the mouth.
The sensation of Ashwin’s soft lips was calming, yet the contact and all the potential that accompanied it was exhilarating. Korsten had felt it once before, and at that time Ashwin had mercifully withdrawn. His lovely mentor was in no mood for mercy now.
Ashwin continued to kiss Korsten, to draw their spirits nearer to each other with each caress, and to remind Korsten of how protected and inspired his spirit felt when entwined within Ashwin’s. He thought of moments when his fingers had entangled themselves in Ashwin’s lengths of white-gold hair, of how that gentle grasp had always seemed a handhold on Heaven. All the memory of times they’d spent together, doing nothing more than lying beside one another, or holding one another’s hand burst forward and scattered across the sky of Korsten’s mind, like sunlight breaking through clouds and casting prismatic rays over endless oceans of blue. This sea had no weight, no drowning depths, only freedom away from … away from everything except for Ashwin.
My dear mentor, I still believe you’re a power above men, visiting this world.
The thought came and went, like leaves or feathers adrift on the wind, like the graceful pass of Ashwin’s hands over his shoulders, removing Korsten’s robe. Korsten let the smooth fabric slide down his arms and drew his hands out of the sleeves, placing one behind Ashwin’s head and the other at his chest. The definition felt beneath his fingertips inspired beyond emotional and the time for separation came and went in the matter of an instant too fleeting to respond to.
His mentor laid him down and Korsten left the world with him in spirit. The movement of their bodies eventually became as ocean waves rolling beneath their souls, both calming and energizing while their emotional beings drifted free. For a moment, perhaps in a dream, their spirits became as stars. Korsten let go of ever returning.
In spell-induced dream, Merran had escaped the farmhouse of his past and wandered for some time in the void again. He felt no comfort in the void itself, but he felt relief away from his memories. He would take nothing, over remembering.
The thought inspired the crone’s low cackle. It dragged across the darkness with the patience of one who had all of eternity. Of course, the crone had no time at all. She could not have survived.
“Is this fear, defiler? Fear of the truth of what you are?”
Merran determined to ignore the lingering ghost of his recent trauma.
The ghost would not be ignored, however. “Tell me what happened.”
Though he had no interest in being motivated to recount his past by this phantom, for some reason any mere mention the crone’s voice made guided him instantly back, and he found himself reliving what should have killed him.
My brothers and sister and I all shared a room. I had my own pallet while Schalek and Ervanien shared one slightly larger. Brea occupied the bed that was meant to be mine because I was the oldest. I didn’t like the idea of my sister going from her cozy cradle to a simple bedroll on the floor. I let her have the mattress and whenever she felt unhappy or afraid or just restless for some reason, I always sat with her in the dark until she fell asleep. It wasn’t so easy to get her to fall asleep, however, with Erschal outside in the chill autumn air.
“I bet he’s hungry, Merran,” Brea whispered. “And cold.”
“He’ll be all right,” I said, stroking her dark hair away from her eyes. “Dogs do well out of doors.”
“But he’s little,” Brea argued. I could see her tears glinting in the full moonlight that crept through our small bedroom window. “He hasn’t eaten since we got him, Merran. He’s going to starve.”
“No, he isn’t,” I said to her, smiling gently to calm her fears. “Do you want me to go check on him?”
And that was when I found out that my brothers hadn’t been sleeping either.
“You can’t go out, Merran,” Ervanien whispered. “You seen how mad Da is. He’s like to only get madder if you sneak away in the dark.”
I was already stand
ing, whispering back at my younger brother. “I’ll be only a moment. Da’ll never know.”
“Better make sure of that,” Schalek said. “Never seen him in such a foul temper. And he’s not been well. Don’t know what he’ll do if he catches you disobeyin’ him.”
“Aye, he’s not been well,” I replied on my way to the bedroom door. “That’s what we need to remember. Da’s not himself. He doesn’t mean the harsh things he says right now, and he’d never do anything to hurt us. I’m goin’ to see what Erschal’s been up to. Now I expect the lot of you to be asleep when I get back.”
Schalek sighed. “Right, Merran. S’pose I’m in charge while you’re away then.”
“Hurry back, Merran,” Ervanien said, his voice sounding small and unsure. “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
“G’night, Merran,” Brea said, smiling at me over the blankets she’d pulled up to her chin.
I returned the bidding and pulled the bedroom door quietly open. I could feel my siblings’ eyes on me up until the moment I pushed the door closed and crept carefully down the darkened passageway beyond. My parents’ room was at the end of that passage and I stopped at the entrance to the main room, looking down it, seeing nothing. I could hear things, though. It sounded like my mother crying out. The noises I heard my father making told me why. I knew what went on in older people’s bedrooms at night. Other boys my age enjoyed talk of such things. Some of them acted like they’d done more than talk, but not me. I didn’t even talk, but I’d listened. I knew things, helplessly, but I’d never heard my parents like this. I didn’t like it. It didn’t sound like anything pleasant was going on. In fact, it sounded brutal … animal….