A Haven in Ash

by Robert J. Crane

  Alixa dawdled at the path. She’d not ventured but one step farther, and instantly retracted her foot upon doing so, as if the overgrown grasses might part and pull her under.

  Jasen turned back to her now. “Come over here, Alixa.”

  She refused with a single shake of the head.

  “Shilara will think it rude if you don’t.”

  She opened her mouth to retort—but stuck between two improprieties, she found herself stuck. After a moment’s hesitation, she moaned and shuffled to Jasen’s back.

  “Why does she not have any flagstones?” she muttered.

  Jasen didn’t respond, for at that moment the door opened.

  Shilara frowned at them from the entryway. Lit from behind by the firelight leaking around the corner, she was, for just a moment, reminiscent of the scourge bearing down on them all over again.

  The spike of fear was gone as fast as it had come.

  “Jasen,” she said. “Visiting twice in one day? To what do I owe this?”

  Jasen could feel Alixa’s glare on his back—or the glare she wished to give. In sight of Shilara, she’d be careful to adhere to the rules of polite society.

  “We need to speak to you,” Jasen said quickly, then, remembering his manners, added, “Please.”

  His tone must have convinced her of the seriousness of the matter, because Shilara nodded and said, “All right. In, the both of you.” She stepped aside, waving Jasen and Alixa through the door and toward the sitting room with a fist. No flask in it, but she did hold the tip of a spear between her thumb and forefinger, and an onyx stone for sharpening it between the next two.

  Jasen glanced at Alixa. Her face was expressionless, or as expressionless as could be expected after their encounter with the scourge. Yet Jasen felt the ire behind it, at him for having come here, herself for coming along, and for Shilara, for … just being herself, he supposed.

  There was also a modicum of pain—for she was being invited into this outcast’s presence. Alixa would be tarred by association.

  He flashed eyes at her—Please!—and then went inside. No need to check she would follow; the tenets of politeness said that she absolutely would, and oh how she would despise him for it the moment they were free from Shilara’s presence.

  The house was about what Jasen expected: pokey, cluttered, untidy. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Shilara never cleaned, but to claim she cleaned with any kind of regularity would be untrue. A faint coating of dust had affixed to most of the surfaces, and the smell of it was noticeable in the air. It wasn’t enough to make him cough, but a few hours in this place and he was sure a tickle would settle in the back of his throat.

  The small entryway gave over to a sitting room on the left. A fire burned in the hearth, stacked high, as though Shilara expected to be up much of the night and wished for its light to last her close to dawn. The mantel was cluttered with trinkets, and though Jasen did not do more than casually rake his gaze across them, he saw they were souvenirs of war: a set of daggers, four chipped arrowheads leaning against the wall, a sword’s brass pommel, end shattered where once it had connected to the rest of the weapon.

  She had one painting: a boat on water. The colors were murky, as if a thick blanket of fog had descended upon the scene.

  Jasen hesitated, gaze lingering.

  “I had to take up a hobby eventually,” Shilara said, pointing at it. “Can’t drink and practice strikes all day. Sit, boy, sit.”

  He obliged, dropping onto the wooden foot stool he’d sat upon earlier. An uncomfortable twinge took immediate root around his backside again; Remember me?

  Alixa had stepped in the room, but no farther. Jasen glanced at her ruefully; she’d crossed the boundary with less reservation. Here she just looked as though she were about to pass her very bones from beneath her skin.

  “Go on,” Shilara told her, indicating a second armchair. It was ratty-looking, stained by dark liquid on the arms, where the threadbare fabric was close to splitting.

  “Yes, well, thank you,” Alixa mumbled. She planted herself primly upon it, right at its edge.

  Her eyes dropped to the floor. A rug filled the space between seats. On it were two mugs and a plate covered in something blue gone dry; paint, possibly, or just the juice of some long-since eaten berries. The rug had once been an animal of some kind, its coat thick and grey. Its head remained, looking into the fire with empty sockets for eyes. At the sight of it, Alixa’s lips gave a very faint downward tug.

  “Unlike you to visit twice in a day,” Shilara repeated. She lowered herself into her seat, watching Jasen intently. “Let alone at this time of night.”

  “Sorry.”

  Shilara waved him off. “Why’ve you come?”

  “I went out again,” Jasen said. “Past the boundary.”

  Shilara’s frown deepened. “Why?”

  “I … lost something out there earlier today. I needed to find it.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes.” He’d stowed the pendant around his neck on the hurried walk back to Terreas. From now on, he planned on taking stock of the thing more. A lot more.

  “Well, I’m pleased to hear that.” Shilara’s hands began to move again. Not particularly paying attention to what she was doing, she began to run the sharpening stone across the edge of the spear’s tip.

  Alixa’s mouth gave another downward quirk. Her hands were clasped between her knees; now she gripped them just a fraction tighter, turning the knuckles yellow.

  “We ran into scourge out there,” Jasen said.

  “‘We’?” Shilara’s penetrating gaze shifted to Alixa. “You ventured out too?”

  Alixa’s lips pursed. “I crossed,” she said, the words low and scraping, as though they were being used to grind the moss off her favorite stone.

  If Shilara was bothered by Alixa’s curtness, she did not show it. Instead, she immediately demanded, “Why?”

  Alixa sniffed. “My cousin was in danger.”

  “And you believed you could help him?”

  Alixa puffed up. “There were no scourge when I crossed over. My cousin—”

  “His name is Jasen, child; use it.”

  “—was struggling to stand. I believed I could help him.”

  Shilara nodded at that. “I’m not scorning you. But you should know, both of you, that a man or woman cannot stand between the scourge and another human. They will be torn apart. It’s folly to even try.”

  “I didn’t,” Alixa replied snippily. “I stood next to him.”

  Jasen glanced between them nervously. Shilara was one for saying what she thought, which was surely almost as offensive to Alixa as any of the woman’s other faults. He trusted Alixa to continue her bare minimum of courtesy, right to the end of this visit. What he wasn’t sure about, however, was how much of a hole she’d burn in him after it was done.

  Trying not to imagine her recriminations already, he said to Shilara, “Three scourge set upon me out there.”

  “Jasen.” She pressed her lips into a flat line. “I warned you of them just this afternoon.”

  “I know,” he said hastily.

  “You shouldn’t venture out. The scourge are dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  “You might have outrun them twice now, but—”

  “Shilara, I didn’t outrun them,” Jasen said over the top of her.

  She stopped.

  “I fell,” Jasen continued. “Out by the boundary. And three of them came up to me, out of the rye. They pressed their noses to me and scented me. But—it wasn’t like you said earlier. Remember? You said that if they scent a man, they won’t stop until he’s dead. But these three, they scented me, and then they just … they just … they turned around,” he said desperately. “All three. They backed away, and returned to the rye.”

  “Hogwash,” Shilara said.

  “It’s true,” said Jasen. “It happened. Didn’t it?”

  Alixa’s face was flat. Yet she did confirm the
story with a single incline of the head, and a short, “Yes.”

  “You saw this?” Shilara asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly as he tells it?”

  Now it was Alixa’s turn to thin her lips into a perilous line. “Yes.” Her knuckles were close to white now.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Shilara.

  “It happened,” said Jasen.

  “I’m not disputing you, lad,” she said, waving his words away. “Not with her confirmation.”

  “She has a name,” Alixa said, both muted and saccharine all at once.

  “Alixa Weltan. I know who you are.”

  “Well, perhaps you might use my name when speaking of me.”

  Please, don’t fight, Jasen willed. Before the sparks could turn to full fires, he cut in again. “There’s more, Shilara.”

  Her penetrating stare bored deeper. “Go on.”

  “After Alixa climbed over the wall to help, two of the scourge came for us again. We couldn’t get away in time—but then a third came.”

  Jasen took a deep breath. This was going to be the hardest part of all to say, the part that he didn’t think Shilara would believe in a thousand centuries.

  “That last scourge … it saved us, Shilara. It leapt ahead of the other two, and fought them off. It—it even killed one of them, right there in front of us.”

  “You’re lying,” Shilara said flatly.

  “I’m not,” said Jasen—and something in his tone must have given her pause, because her eyebrows twitched in strange comprehension. The frown she wore became a desolate look of confusion. And the blade and stone she ran together in her hands ceased, the grating noises giving way to pure silence.

  “This one scourge fought two others off,” Jasen said. “And when we were safe, it looked at us, turned around, and retreated too.”

  “Jasen isn’t lying,” Alixa confirmed.

  Shilara peered from cousin to cousin, eyebrows drawn low. “It can’t be,” she muttered. “There’s no such thing as a good scourge.”

  “This one was.”

  “You must be mistaken,” said Shilara, and Jasen felt his stomach drop.

  “We’re not mistaken!” Alixa cried. “I saw it, just as Jasen did!”

  “There is no such thing as a good scourge,” Shilara repeated. “As close as they get is when they’re dead—and even then they’re no good. They stink to high heaven.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to say,” Jasen said lamely. “This one protected us. Even when it slunk off, it kept watch, like a sentry.”

  Shilara shook her head. The pad of fat around her neck quivered. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Well, you ought to,” said Alixa stiffly. “See the welt on Jasen’s head? He received it when he fell in the chase.” She said nothing of the hole torn in her dress, but then Jasen didn’t expect her to. Holes were terribly improper—although given the way she’d considered the chair before sitting upon it, Alixa knew full well that Shilara was perfectly familiar with them.

  Shilara rose, setting her spearhead and stone aside. She crossed to Jasen in two short steps—the room was barely more than four or five across, furniture removed—and clutched his chin. Her fingers were hot, and strong. She tilted his head toward the fire, letting the light from it properly illuminate the growing red lump across his forehead.

  “The scourge didn’t do this,” she said. “They’d have split your skull in two.”

  “I never said they did,” Alixa snapped.

  “I fell over and banged my head on the boundary,” Jasen said. “And I think I bruised my arm too.”

  “Hmm.” Shilara let go. She took a step back and then looked Jasen up and down, assessing. “Hmm.” She turned to Alixa—

  Alixa’s stranglehold around her own knuckles grew tighter still. In a moment her fingers would snap off entirely, Jasen was sure.

  “You’ve dirt on you,” Shilara observed.

  Alixa spluttered, casting panicked eyes over herself. Sure enough, she found a smear of it upon her knees, and she reached out to brush it off, then ceased with hands three inches shy, for brushing it off meant dirtying Shilara’s floor. Agitated, she finally settled for gripping the dirty spot in a tight fist and wrapping her other hand around the first to fully hide it.

  Shilara lowered into her seat once more. This time, she did not reclaim her spear tip.

  “You’re certain this happened? Both of you?”

  “Yes,” Jasen said.

  A beady eye turned to Alixa. “And you?”

  “Certain,” she said, sounding somewhat strangled and tightening her hold on her clothes.

  “You’ve not been drinking? Eating peculiar fruit? Smoking odd leaves?”

  Each of these earned an indignant splutter from Alixa. “No!”

  “None of that,” said Jasen.

  Shilara mulled this over … then leaned back in her chair, befuddlement apparent once more.

  “How can this be?” she wondered aloud. “I’ve seen them, up close, and never once have they—”

  “Up close?” Jasen said, leaning forward, eyes lit with more than a reflection of the dancing flames in the hearth. “You mean when you fought them in the war?”

  “More recently than that,” she said distractedly, waving a dismissive hand. “I’ve run up against scourge many times, even this year, and never have I seen—”

  “This year?”

  Shilara stopped dead. She came back to the room as if from a far-away place.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” she began.

  Jasen was practically at the edge of his seat, a half-inch from falling off. He leaned as far as he could go—as far as the bruises covering his body would allow. “When did you fight them this year? Was there an attack on Terreas? Did they try to cross the boundary?”

  Alixa’s voice came high now, a squeak. “An attack?”

  “No,” Shilara said—and then bit her lip. A slightly mad look had come across her, eyes a mite wider than usual.

  Jasen’s excitement flared. So that meant—

  “You’ve crossed the boundary,” he breathed.

  “Ohh,” Alixa moaned faintly.

  “I …” Shilara began, and stopped. “The boundary …” she said, trying again, but that sentence also died an early death.

  “You have,” Jasen said—and for all the fear at his two crossings, for all the terror that those terrible beasts had struck into his heart as they stared him down, his excitement overflowed with renewed vigor. This woman had crossed. She’d been beyond—and she could tell him—

  But before any of the thousands of questions being to formulate could take shape, a ruckus went up outside, creeping through a crack in the window where a pane must have shifted.

  Alixa twisted upon the edge of her chair to peer through the gap between the curtains. “What’s—?”

  Shilara had risen, was leading the way to the front door already. Jasen followed, and he grabbed Alixa by the hand as he passed, tugging her onto her feet.

  The front door was thrown open, and they spilled out to louder cries—

  And Jasen realized with sudden dread exactly what was happening in Terreas.

  Baraghosa was here.

  8

  Though he came only once a year, Baraghosa’s visits were the same each time—and they always were seared in Jasen’s mind … last year’s most of all.

  So when he, Alixa, and Shilara left her house, he knew exactly where the villagers would congregate to herald his arrival. And after bidding Gressom a brief farewell—she would not venture into the throng, of course—Jasen found his feet carrying him inexorably to a destination he very much did not wish to visit.

  Baraghosa always went to the assembly hall first. And thus so did Terreas’s villagers crowd around it, drawn out by shouts, some meant to rouse the village, others to intimidate the strange merchant. So by the time the man reached Terreas’s heart, a vast group of people had collected.

  Ja
sen and Alixa arrived in the packed street. Torches were lit in the assembly hall still, and the chimney coughed out a frail plume of smoke, no doubt tainted with the odor of the unpleasantly scented candles. It was not typical for the assembly to work this late into the night; only pressing matters kept them past nightfall.

  Baraghosa, of course, was a very pressing matter.

  Still more people were arriving even as Jasen and Alixa added their bodies to the throng. A young-ish couple, maybe thirty, stopped by Alixa. The woman, a matronly sort whose hair she smoothed back into place, said, “Has he arrived yet?”

  “Not yet,” Alixa answered.

  The woman nodded. “You both ought to get nearer the front.”

  Neither Jasen nor Alixa replied.

  He felt sick. So, so sick.

  An image of Pityr flashed through his mind, boyish face laughing happily.

  Chatter filled the night, the cacophony rising to the skies, now almost entirely devoid of cloud. Stars twinkled. Jasen envied them, for not one knew what was about to unfold—and if they did, they were so many eons away that not a single spark among them would surely care.

  Jasen waited.

  Alixa gripped his wrist. He reached up as far as he could with his fingers, to touch one to her knuckle.

  And then the chatter grew more violent. Louder cries filled the air, a cacophony, and there were curses among them, coming from mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. They began near the front, but the back of the crowd reacted in an instant, joining their voices as one against Baraghosa.

  Or not as one. For this had gone on for many years, and the village was not united in their derision. The broken families wept—but the untouched among them, those Jasen could not help but view as callous, cruel, and detached—these people railed against the shouts of the others. The woman to Alixa’s right was among them, folding her arms and yelling, “He’s doing us a service!” The sidelong glance she fired the teenagers served as extra punctuation.

  And as the nauseating dread reached its crescendo in Jasen’s midsection, he saw Baraghosa come.

  The man was preceded by lights. Like two great fireflies against the sky, white orbs heralded him, dancing above the rooftops. Not much brighter than the moon when it was full, they might be pretty if one did not know who or what they presaged. Knowing the truth, Jasen only felt nauseated at the sight of his strange magic.