“Let it!”
“But if you do,” she cried, “if you lose your ability to control your desires, then how can you control an army? You must find a way.”
“Or what?”
“Or I will abandon you,” she said quietly. “And so will every other god. We chose a divine ruler, not a mortal one. Cease this constant pursuit of the carnal – or else!”
He glared at her, but he had not yet lost all use of his reason, and he knew he needed help to accomplish his goal. “I will find a way to be both mortal and divine. I have not given up on that,” he warned, shaking from the effort to speak with calm, “but I will find a way to control it. If even a demi-god,” and he pointed back toward Garrity, “can control his urges, then what is to stop me? I will indulge and I will control and I will not have to choose one or the other.”
“Very well,” she said coldly. “Now tell me why you have let fear dominate you with this demi-god.”
Stifling his ire, he explained it to her. “Don’t you see? Mercy told me the ending I feared – my failure before the coming of the Golden King, where I will have everything I built torn from my hands. How could I accept that degrading, horrid, eternal…I worked for this! I ruled, I built, I designed this earth, and who does He think He is to rip it away from me? I HATE Him!”
“Justice!” she commanded.
“Ah, sweet Justice,” he roared. “What did she show me?”
“She showed you what you wanted to see. You’re hope!”
“Mercy said only One can stop me. Only One. Trinian – the king of Drian – he marks my doom. But what if he has sent this demi-god to kill me? He must! Why else would he send him to the Yellow Mountains? Nothing lies beyond them! Justice showed me,” his eyes glowed, “she showed me a reign.” His eyes burned with fiery greed. “A beautiful reign where all I see, all I built, is mine to command. Not just this scrappy, tiny hole!” He kicked the flat muddy ground, and then extended his arms toward the east. “I would rule forever, and no one, not even the Golden King, would stand in my way.
“However!” he turned back toward her. “There’s a however, and it haunts me, stalking my every waking hour like an inexorable predator. Only One. I assume it’s the mortal king – who else could it be? It’s he she warned me of, after all. But will he strike the blow himself? How can he, the petty, weak thing?” He leaned toward her, his eyes practically crackling in hounded madness. “He has sent this god-man to do it for him.”
His chest heaved so hard the mountains in the distance rumbled, and the memory of hearing about his failure was so humiliating it choked him.
Passion grew bored watching him struggle, and said bluntly, “She told you of your own death.” He whirled on her with wild eyes. “It was a warning,” she emphasized. “That’s all. You are the god of Power, of might, of glory! You, not some mortal, deserve to rule. By what right has he earned it? You have a plan, you will conquer the world, and do you really believe, for one moment, that a mortal, even a half-mortal, can stand in your way?”
His facial muscles contorted between rage and resolution. “I am a god!” he muttered aloud. “He is insignificant. He’s another piece of the puzzle that I didn’t account for, but he can be solved. We’ll be careful about it.” He looked toward the group, and saw them stumbling toward a desert oasis behind the figure of an old man, and he had forgotten all about Lavendier. “They’ve found a resting place, and will be there for many days. I will muster Kellan and his beasts, and we will call Terror and Destruction to our aid. We will lead my warriors across the waste and capture this puny demi-god.” He grinned with a sudden new thought. “Perhaps, I may even learn from him how to control my passions.”
77
A Thousand Years a Healer
Lavendier awakened on a soft surface and as she lifted her lids, feeling fresh and warm and cozy, she saw Garrity’s dark brown hair splayed out on the edge of her bed. He had been sitting on the ground beside her, and had fallen asleep.
She slipped quietly out of the covers, careful not to wake him, and looked around. The room was bright and fresh and smelled like lavender, and there was a little antechamber where, behind a door, stood a large tub. On the tub were handles, and when she turned them, hot and cold water came out. Delighted, she filled the tub to the brim, slipped in, and let the sand, grime, and grease of weeks of travel melt away.
When she got out, she found a new gown hanging on the back of a chair. She put it on, relishing the crease and rustle of fresh-pressed clothes, and realizing just how much she had missed it. Lastly, she refilled the tub and returned to the bedroom.
She shook Garrity awake.
“Wake, my dear friend. I do not know where we are, but it is paradise and everything is right and good. There is a hot bath for you in that little room there.”
Opening his weary eyes to see her standing before him, clean and well-dressed and healthy and alive, he thought it was a dream. She smiled at his woozy gaze, stroked his bearded cheek, and then went out the door to let him find that he was wrong.
They all awoke in beds (how many beds did a man in the middle of the desert need?) rehydrated, with fresh clothes laid out and fresh baths waiting. The place was a circle, with bedrooms and stalls along the perimeter, surrounding a courtyard of soft green grass and poppies. In the center of the courtyard, on a raised stone dais, was a fire pit and wooden chairs. Cila, Viol, and Jacian sat in the chairs, and when they saw Lavendier approaching, her sisters leapt up and exclaimed for joy.
Viol ran down and wrapped her arms fiercely around Lavendier, holding tight to her waist.
“He said you were alright, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.”
Lavendier kissed the top of her sister’s brown head. Jacian was staring at her as if he were afraid, and Cila was crying quiet tears. Lavendier hesitated, unsure how to speak to them or comfort them. For her who had experienced the agony, it already seemed like a bad dream, but to them who had watched her, it was still very real. Gently, she touched Cila’s shoulder.
“I’m alright now,” she whispered.
Cila nodded. “I know.” She tried to smile, but it was a grimace. “I am glad.” She was hugging her arms, as if trying to recede into herself, to block out the world, and abruptly, she whirled and walked away.
Jacian tugged on Lavendier’s sleeve and drew her attention to him. “Are you a ghost?” he asked.
She leaned down. “Feel my face. Do I feel like a ghost?” He ran his little fingers all over her mouth, nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and even stuck them in her ears until she was laughing; he shook his head. “Then I’m not.” Then, with a pleased grin, he put his arms around her neck and insisted on sitting on her lap while she ate breakfast.
“Viol, where are we?” she asked. The food was hot oatmeal and cold milk, and it was heavenly. “Did we get over the mountains? Everything is a haze, and I remember nothing.”
“No, the mountains are still ahead, see? You can see the white peaks over the courtyard wall, over there. We are with a Healer, Laven, and if we were not, you would not still be alive.”
The man was a hermit, she explained, living far out in the middle of nowhere on this oasis, and his name was Habas.
“Good morning,” came his old, creaky voice, full of life. Habas, an old, bent man with a long gray beard and lively gray eyes, was ascending the dais, with Adlena behind him. His beard reached regally to his knees, and his long, tan robe quietly brushed the ground as he walked.
“Good morning,” returned Lavendier.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Better than I have in months, sir, thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
Adlena wordlessly came up to her, laid her cool hands on her forehead, and kissed her hair.
“So,” he said to them, “your queen was telling me that Gladier is the last of the Healers. Good for him, the old fool.” He chuckled kindly. “I’m sure I don’t know what crime he committed to deserve such a long life sentence, though.”
“What horrors?” asked the prince.
Habas handed him a bar of dried almonds and figs. “The unspeakable kind,” he answered gravely. “But, fortunately, I did not get away with it. Fate appeared to me, took me up, and carried me here to this oasis, where this house already stood. He told me that I would wait here, in seclusion, and see no one for hundreds of years. This suffering was to be my punishment.
“And I have suffered. My redemption, he said, would come when once again I saw mankind, and if I showed the kindness and love I should have showed all the rest of my life, then I would die a forgiven man.”
“How can any crime be so great that it deserves such a punishment?” asked Adlena.
He smiled his ancient smile, and shook his wise old head. “We are not as you are, my dear. We are privy to knowledge that goes beyond the realm of man. It is a gift beyond great, but an enormous responsibility. I knew the nature of my offense, and yet I presumed to think myself a god. My suffering has been no more than I deserved.”
Garrity joined them now, looking as fresh as the rest. He too had a new shirt and pants of light cotton that fluttered in the breeze. He had shaved, and his face was smooth and dark, and his eyes shone as blue as the sky. He came up to them and bowed deeply, but his eyes never left Lavendier, as if he could drink her up by looking at her.
“You are really alright?” he asked her warmly. “How do you feel?”
She blushed and looked at the ground. “I feel fine. Better than I have felt since we left Drian.” She looked around at everyone. “Really, I feel fine.”
“What about those attacks?” Viol asked shakily, and Jacian looked at Lavendier fearfully, as if he expected her to have one right then. His eyes grew big and he began panting for breath, as he had seen her do at the time.
Lavendier grabbed his face and looked him in the eyes. “Jacquee, stop. I’m fine – you see? I’m fine. Nothing is wrong.”
“Are you going to die again?”
Lavendier, and everyone else, looked to Habas.
“What happened to me? Will it happen again?”
He sighed, shaking his head. “I never saw anything like it before,” he said at last. “These gorgan creatures that the queen tells me of are new to me. They were not in Minecerva when I walked among men. When I healed you, there was a poison in your veins. Heat and ice, comingled…I know not – I know not what it was. But it is dormant now. It will not freeze you or burn you again.”
They all exhaled, as if a pent-up storm were unleashed to wash the world new again. Jacian buried himself in Lavendier’s breast, and after a moment, his head popped up, rosy and bright, and he proclaimed, “I’m glad!” and everyone laughed, the tension at last released.
Habas told them, as Garrity ate, that they were a day’s march from the edge of the desert toward the Yellow Mountains, and when they all recovered, with plenty of rest and nourishing food, he would send them on their way, with ample provisions and good directions. “But,” he said at the end, “you do not have to leave. You are welcome to make this the end of your journey.”
78
Of the Wood and Humanity
The hollows in Jacian’s cheeks, the dark, deep circles beneath Adlena’s eyes, and the bones that poked out under Garrity’s shirt all vanished with the ample, healthy diet that the Healer urged upon them. Viol was at last clean and comfortable, and a little color returned to Cila’s peaked and yellow face. The air was still and comforting, and they rested in the knowledge that no danger could find them, so that, for the first time since departing Drian, they did not jump at shadows.
Cila spent the days in memories. Every moment of her life with Asbult rose up before her inner eye, and she dwelt on each as a separate sweetness. He had always been with her, since her earliest memories, and she knew he would never leave her. He played with her in childhood, courted her in maidenhood, and together they had crossed into the realm of maturity as a married couple.
From before she could remember, she had loved his adventurous, playful nature. Every happy memory of her youth had him as a part of it: his laughing blue eyes, his loud voice, and his fiery hair askew. She had asked him once why he loved her, she who was so calm and quiet, and he said it was because she was his other half. It was in her presence that he always found a center of peace; it was in her spirit that his could rest.
Now he was laid forever to rest, and she was in turmoil. Her nature could not find calm, it could not rest. She was adrift in a sea of pain, and her anchor, her laughter, gone. How she needed him to get over him! Everything noble, good, terrible, jealous, rational, and emotional about her was tied to him, and now, she was incomplete, and no one could reach her.
Viol spent her time wandering through the hermitage, traveling outside the sandstone building to the vast desert, where she gazed over the dunes, far, far away toward the west – toward her home. She relinquished herself to the clean desert air, to the wind, and she felt as if cool breezes blew over her soul and aired it out after a long, hard winter. There were dusty, dirty corners from her hardships, but nothing a little spring cleaning did not quickly whirl away. She was innocent, beautiful, and full of hope.
Lavendier, when she was not running around with Jacian, threw her newfound energy into household chores. Not because Habas needed help, but because she was fairly bursting with excitement, and wanted to take care of everyone. She baked and cooked, swept, scrubbed, and even painted a badly drawn archway of leaves around one of the entrances. She did everything badly, but she did it with gusto. She had learned that if she tried something for long enough, she could master it, and she wanted to make up for lost time.
After the first day, Garrity disappeared. Habas told them not to worry about him; that he was worrying enough about himself. “He must just be left alone,” he said. “And he will come back to you soon.”
“But where is he?” they asked. “Where has he gone?”
“Not far. There are many places to find solitude here.”
Lavendier demanded if he was getting food, and Habas promised to take it to him every day, so she let him be.
Adlena, attempting to enjoy the peace but lost in thoughts of her husband and home, stood gazing, on the third day, toward the mass of mountains that loomed welcomingly before her. The base was of yellow stone, with veils of red and blue that streaked the rock as it ascended. Ever before, the mass had seemed black and forbidding and dangerous. But now, somehow, it had transformed into white and yellow, soft and welcoming.
“What do you see?” Habas joined her.
“I see yellow and white, and above it, a dry, empty sky.”
“But my dear, that is only with your eyes.”
She looked at him quickly, then glanced away again, her body suddenly rigid and tight.
“You are a gazer,” he observed.
“I am a Queen,” she said.
He smiled, and a thousand more wrinkles creased across his ancient face.“I am old,” he said, “and I know truth. You are a queen, and my old heart leaps to hear it. You are a gazer, and my old eyes drink it in. I am foolish, stupid, after my many years of exile, but I have always known that one day I would meet the prophetess, for it was foretold that this would happen before my death. Tell me about the other sight,” he prodded her gently. “You are afraid of it, I think?”
“No, not afraid,” she said too quickly. “Why would I be?”
He nodded. “Why would you be?”
She was defensive. “I do not have to use it – it has served its purpose. Why are you asking me?”
“Why are you afraid?”
“Stop ask
ing me!” she said and whirled away, her new velvet cloak trailing behind her and putting a barrier between them. Habas sat down on the desert sand and waited patiently for her to return.
After a while, humble and contrite, she did. There was a large stone beside the old man that he had long ago chiseled into an ornate chair, and the pregnant mother lowered herself into it. “How do you know about my second sight?”
“Because,” he said, “I share it, and I recognize the signs in you. As I am sure Gladier did when he first met you.”
“Yes, he said he knew the moment he saw me,” she hesitated. “He taught me to use it, and what had been only dreams before…I knew them with certainty – I could see deep into the nature of things.”
“Such as?”
“I knew Gladier was a wizard and a healer: I could see the mark on his soul. I knew I was a human and a Dryad – I could see the mark on my soul. And, when I saw my husband, I knew he was the rightful king.”
He nodded, thinking. “Yes …. And me? Can you not see who I am?”
She stared at the sand and shook her head. “No. I see nothing anymore.”
“But why stop? Why not continue to use your gift?”
She sat dejected and disappointed in herself, shaking her head. Then she looked up in indignation. “Is it a gift? I have only ever seen five people clearly, and the fifth was so black it terrified me. In my dreams, I am haunted by the images of evil men and women. What if I saw that clearly? What if I saw the nature of the gorgans, or the evil god himself. It is enough horror to see it with only my waking eyes.”
He nodded compassionately. “Yes, I see. I understand. Evil is a terrible, frightful thing. But if you let it control you – then that is the real danger.”
“I do not want to see it,” she said firmly. “And I fail to see why I should. All the prophecies have been fulfilled.”
“So you live your life according to prophecies. Again, very dangerous.”
“What would you have me do?” she cried out.
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