by JANRAE FRANK
"There's trouble, Becca. I don't know what it is, but I'm about to find out," Tagalong told her grimly.
"For Aejys?" The light of suspicion grew in the tavern master's eyes while the rest of her face lost expression.
"Yah. I'm beginnin' ta think this wasn't no social call." Shoulda known that when I saw'em.
"What can I do?"
"Keep yer eyes open."
"I'll keep my eyes open, Tag, but understand I'm short handed right now."
"Speak of a demon," Tagalong muttered, seeing Brendorn start down the stairs. She sprang from her chair, charging up to him. Her open palm met the half-breed's midsection firmly but not aggressively. Her expression turned savage as she waved the letter in his face. "Ya've got some serious explainin', Brendorn Amaranth of Vallimrah!" Her accent thickened with anger as she pointedly used his Valdren name to imply she felt his connection with Aejys was broken. "Serious explainin'!"
Brendorn, who had lingered late into the morning just to touch everything in the room to savor the places her hands had been and the smell of her in the sheets, caught the letter as it brushed his nose. For just an instant both of them held the folded square, then Tagalong Smith released it. He read quickly. "I don't know what you are upset about. She has just gone to a shrine," he said, a look of relief in his eyes.
"She hasn't been in a shrine or temple in seven years," Tagalong punctuated each word by tapping him in the mid-section. By the time she started the second sentence Brendorn had begun to wince and by the third to almost flinch. "Not since before Bucharsa. What's got'er roiled enough ta go ta one now? Unless it's something ya said. Ya put a tack in her chair and yer gonna tell me what it was. Ya understand me, Breed!" Tagalong snarled and bits of spittle flew from her mouth, some of it striking the sylvan's face.
Brendorn recoiled, his expression pained. He had never seen her so enraged before, especially at him. Her anger frightened him for he was, after all, just a simple gardener. Tagalong had, by choice, spent most of her childhood wandering the Sharani ghettoes, tagging along after anyone or anything that interested her or aroused her curiosity, which had gained her her name, and she had fought her way through the worse war in five hundred years at Aejys' side. All the sylvan quickness in the world would not stop her from giving him a severe pounding if that was what she intended. But even more, Brendorn had always experienced difficulty dealing with the anger of those he loved when it was directed at him. He started to flee, but Tagalong caught him by the tunic.
"Just becuz ya don't like the talk don't mean ya can rabbit on me."
Brendorn froze, closing his eyes, an unspoken prayer on his lips that she would release him, but Tagalong hung onto him until he opened them again. He looked down at the stout dwarf, who though shorter than he, outweighed him a good fifty pounds. Distress filled his face. "Tag, please, this isn't your business. It's her place to tell you, if she wants to. Not mine."
"Aejys has been my business since before ya ever laid eyes on her," Tagalong pointed out stubbornly, her mouth tight and eyes narrowing. She twisted his shirt into a knot and lifted him off his toes. "Paladins make screwy decisions, even lapsed ones, and don't always call fer backup when they need it... I gotta a gut feeling ya've just put Aejys' life on the line again and I wanta know fer what."
Brendorn drew a deep breath and surrendered. "So be it, show me your rooms and we will talk there in private. It isn't my story to tell you, but I will. I am certain Aejys will understand."
"Yah, I'm sure she will."
* * * *
Tagalong's antechamber looked much like the front room of a Kwaklahmyn lodge. They sat on brightly patterned floor pillows around a stout, legless hardwood table which she had purchased from the Kwaklahmyn when she and Aejys had gone up to attend a potlatch given by Thomas Cedarbird's paternal kin. Tagalong was totally impressed with their arts and crafts. Cedar blankets hung as decorations on her walls alongside a pair of crossed harpoons with whalebone tips. A four character totem pole which the local shaman, Broken Branch, designed for Tagalong dominated the northwest corner; earth dragon, cave bear, raven, manticore.
When Tagalong had heard his story, she slapped the table, "Answer's easy. The best thing would be to just go in, grab her daughter and leave, side-stepping all the bullshit."
Tag fondled her hammer idly as she spoke, adding more to herself than Brendorn, "Very best would be to lock her in the cellar, throw away the key and leave without her. But she'd be hotter than hell when she got out an' be my ass she'd be after." Tagalong lapsed silent for a minute, then picked up her initial trail of thought again. "Try'n ignore Margren and when pressed arrange ta never let her be alone with her sister. Never leave Aejys alone, period. Just never give Margren an opportunity ta put her in an inescapable position. And then get out as quickly as we can. Kaethreyn just wants a chance to try'n talk Aejys into staying home. Look, Brendorn, I got family in Iradrim, I got family in a dozen places we could get to easy. Places we could winter where Margren couldn't reach. So stop worrying. Leave it all to me and nothin' will happen to Aejys. Okay?"
Brendorn nodded, forcing a smile. "You always find a way, don't you, Tag?"
"Yeah, I do. So we let Aejys think she's in charge, but we both know it's me."
* * * *
Spruce and fir stretched their sovereign green through the rainshadow east of Vorgensburg, then gave way to the dominance of white fir and willow as the land rolled down into the deeply recessed water hollows stretching like dark fingers toward the south. Aejys dismounted in a willow thicket by a tiny sheltered stream. She could hear the waterfall crashing into the stream beyond the willows. Gwyndar followed. Aejys pushed through the willows, careful to do no harm to them, as they were sacred to Aroana.
Strange foreign pantheons of Gods of Light were awakened and drawn to the world of Daverana by the call of the last surviving god of the previous pantheon of light as a holocaust destroyed it. When they began to cleanse and rebuild it, they each brought gifts from other worlds. Aroana brought the willow tree, the tree that wept, as a symbol of her grief at the destruction and loss of life among the elder races of that world. The willows growing around a shrine were considered doubly holy because the priests consecrated them to the God. The doorframe and edges of the roof were thickly adorned with seasonally discarded deer horns. The wild deer came and left them there each year in remembrance of the early days of the New Creation when gigantic stags defended Aroana's shrines, her children, and the helpless that came to her for succor.
Aejys hesitated at the door, intense feelings of shame and guilt filled her for turning her back on the vows, which had framed her sense of honor and fairness since her earliest days, forming the foundation of her life from as far back as she could remember. All the determination she had started out with faded. Her aching need to make peace with her god remained, but fear of what her unknown sin had been, knowing to what degree she had not lived the life since Bucharsa, filled her with trepidation. She felt as though she had come clothed in mud instead of cloth.
Once the tenants of Aroana had filled every crook and cranny of her life, shaped every turn and corner. She had always felt that no matter how bad things got she could always pray and Aroana would listen. In Aroana's name Aejys had experienced miracles that marked her as one of the god's chosen. Then her faith died at Bucharsa when she cried out in her pain and distress and no answer came from her god. Since god had turned her back on Aejys, Aejys turned her back on god. And yet, in the dusty corners of her heart and soul, she still longed to be wrong, to find that Aroana still wanted her. That now, in her time of need, she could be forgiven for seven god-forsaking years.
The door opened and the slender figure of the priest stood forth. She was a small dark woman with a face too narrow and long for her otherwise modest nose. Her large black eyes, warm and compassionate, seemed almost too large for her face. She extended her long-fingered hands and clasped Aejys' arm.
"I have been expecting you since yesterday, Aejyst
rys Rowan. I am Suthana Willowheart, priest to this shrine."
Aejys sighed heavily, struggling to release all her troubled feelings and doubt. "Ma'aram Suthana, I have come..."
"Peace," she said, touching Aejys' mouth lightly. "I know why you have come. You need not speak if it pains you. Like many warriors, you did not know you were wounded here," she patted Aejys' chest with the tips of her fingers, "until long years after the battle was fought. You must learn to lean into the sharp points if you would have those wounds heal."
"You're an oracle?"
Suthana smiled gently. "The priest of this shrine is always an oracle. Do you know not which shrine this is?"
Aejys glanced around, trying to remember her lore and failing. She shook her head. "No."
"This is the Willow Horn."
Aejys dropped trembling to her knees. Where Aroana emerged from the Ethereal Void and planted the first willow! Her stomach seized up painfully. She folded her arms and leaned over them, pressing them into her stomach. Holy Ground. Holy of Holies. I should never have come here. I am unclean. Unclean. A need to weep and confess every transgression of the last years warred with her need to be in control of herself.
Suthana knelt and wrapped her arms around Aejys. "Let go, Aejys Rowan. Let yourself heal."
The priest's arms felt warm. Aejys drank in their comfort like a mon dying of thirst that suddenly stumbles on an oasis. She sucked in deep breaths to still her trembling.
"You have committed no major transgressions against your liege-god and honor. Just a sea of little ones." Suthana raised her up and drew her to the altar.
Aejys shrugged her left shoulder. The saddlebag slid off and down her arm. She took the two bottles out. Suthana removed the saddlebags, setting them outside the sacred altar circle.
"She abandoned me," Aejys spoke softly with a small catch in her voice that her best efforts could not stifle. "At first I thought I must have offended Her. But I could not think how. Unless there was some evil in me that I could not see. Then I became angry and turned my back on Her. Finally I just stopped thinking about it or her at all."
"When?" Suthana prodded gently. "Lean into the sharp points and tell me when you first felt abandoned."
"She wasn't with me in Bucharsa Temple – when I needed Her." Aejys shuddered as the memory came flashing back through her with incredible intensity. "Near the War's end I got cut up bad. By rights I probably should have died. I broke into a Waejontori temple, got separated from my troops in the maze..."
Aejys hesitated.
The smell of burning flesh. The clang of weapons and cries of the wounded and dying. The silence when she realized her heedless charge had outdistanced her guard. Turning a corner. The iron grip of a stone troll seizing her from behind. The swish of sa'necari adepts' robes. She could feel the terror of what came next in her bones. Recoiling from it, a tremor shook her and the breath seemed to seize up in her lungs while rocks gathered in her stomach.
"Damn. Damn. Damn." Terror and shame roared up and suddenly she was on her feet, running for the door. She plunged from the temple, staggered six steps, and fell to her knees, clutching her stomach and vomiting into the moss at the base of the largest willow.
Suthana followed silently. The priest knelt, supporting Aejys' trembling shoulders as the former paladin retched. Finally it was over. Suthana helped her to rise and they walked only a few steps before Aejys sank again to her knees, her hands clutched tightly together. Suthana's hand covered the lapsed paladin's and her touch brought her back. Aejys drew a series of measured breaths and straightened making no move yet to rise. "I'm okay..."
"Are you certain?"
Aejys nodded. "Sa'necari and trolls captured me. Took me deep into the labyrinth. Past secret doors sealed by magic." Cold stone altar. Intense faces gathered around her. Rumble of stone trolls. Banewitch-adepts and sa'necari chanting. Cold burning blades slicing her. Unclean death. Unclean. Unclean. Aejys realized she was close to losing it again. She forced air into her lungs, mastering herself. "Do you know what a baneblade is?"
"Tell me," Suthana bade gently, although clearly she already knew the answer.
"It doesn't just cut your body. It flays your soul. You come back. Undead. Their slave. The longer it takes you to die from them the more powerful an undead you are. The more powerful a servant." Aejys paused. She had started down this path and would go all the way. So she stood up and slipped off her pants. The pattern of scars showed on her thighs as well as her calves.
Suthana winced, her breath catching in her chest in spite of herself. She sketched the Aroanan rune in the air before her.
Aejys pulled her pants up. "As ha'taren, a paladin of Aroana ... I would have made a very powerful banelich, a slave of the blade." Aejys named the thing that most terrified her: the thought of becoming – herself – one of the monsters feeding on her people; her soul trapped possibly forever because of one headlong, heedless act. "They had finished with my legs and started on my arms when Tag blew a hole in the wall and ceiling with Iradrim Fire. My soldiers poured in. Most people die of one cut from those things. Don't know why I didn't. But I was six months in bed and another six getting my strength back. I had plenty of time to think and weigh things. Aroana was not there for me."
"Was She not?" Suthana sounded surprised. "One cut of a baneblade is death and undeath. You were ritually cut dozens of times on that altar, yet you live. And I feel no taint of undeath lingering on your soul. When your time comes you will die clean, your soul will go free. Can you not see Her hand in that?"
Abruptly Aejys drew a deep easy breath. Her whole body relaxed and Aejys felt almost dizzy as though heavy stones had been lifted from her heart and chest. She had not unknowingly offended Aroana. The God had not forsaken her. "Light of Justice, forgive me..."
She allowed Suthana to draw her back into the temple. Then she remembered her offering. She extended one bottle to Suthana as the priest's portion. Aejys knelt and began to speak, in the Sharani tongue, the words of the ritual of offering. When she faltered and struggled for the long forgotten words Suthana softly whispered them to her. As she continued more and more of the ritual prayers returned to her: Aejys grew calm and strong again. Toward the middle the words came flooding back. She felt as though the last years had not happened and her younger self knelt before the altar with truth and faith in every word. When she finished, she opened the wine and poured in out onto the earth around the statue of the God Aroana. The statue showed a tall, strong woman with battle-ax and shield ready, while a fawn and a genderless child huddled behind her for protection.
The heady scent of incense filled the chamber. She turned to face the priest who had taken the seat of oracle beside the altar, casting the Incense of Seeing into the flames of a large brazier. Aejys knelt again, facing the priest now.
Suthana's eyes were closed. Her lips parted and a voice, not Suthana's, one Aejys had not heard in many years came from Suthana's lips.
"You have been long away from me. I counted you among my favorites. I would have you back. You ride with death at your heels, before you and behind you."
Aejys wanted to return so desperately it made her sick, and yet fear swelled up into her throat, her stomach tightened. Bucharsa was burning in her mind, behind her eyes, what peace she gained in the words of ritual burned away like dew before the sun. A scream formed within her. She forced it down, forced the words out in a twisted croak, "I want to return ... I want to..."
"Then pray to me now."
"I can't! I can't!"
The God's voice turned sad. "I cannot help you until you return fully to me in faith and trust and love. But I will give you this advice: Take a party, five score, hand picked, gray mice, red ravens, and borrowed badgers – and any others who can hold their own and come of their own free will – if you would have hope of reaching your child alive. But mark this well, Aejystrys Rowan: far, far more is at stake than just Laeolytyn. The war is not ended, just moved in another direction. A very dangerou
s one for the realm and people you once swore to defend with your life and honor, spirit and soul, mind and body. One you once knew well has given herself over to the darkness and Shaurone will fall at winter's solstice. You are already caught in this darkness. The evil that reaches out to destroy you, reaches out just as surely to destroy the realm that holds it in check. When Shaurone falls, so falls the world."
Aejys raised her eyes to the god speaking through her priest, feeling stunned and shaken to the core of her being. Once she would have risen to face this darkness, to defend and fight, but her heart quelled with sick dread. "I – I can't. I just can't."
She felt bile rising in her throat again, wanting desperately to run and never stop this time. But she controlled herself with great effort.
"So be it then. But return to me, my ha'taren, in full faith and honor and at your darkest moments I will make a way where there is no way. I will open a door where there are no doors. When you lie down in the garden of death I will awaken you to life. For now, go and sit beside the waterfall until the sun rises on the morrow. Reflect on your ten years of war and your seven years just passed. Then Suthana can cleanse you, but only with High Priest Sonden at Rowan Castle can you retake your vows if by then you have recovered your nerve and faith ... and wish to return to me."
Suthana sighed and grew still. The God had left her. Aejys rose to her feet and fled staggering to the door and then out, collapsing in a sobbing heap among the mossy willows.
* * * *
Josh walked the beaches. The straw was too empty with Gwyndar gone, but he would go back there when night fell. Either there or the north cellar, if he did not want to be found. Otherwise, he had a room at the Cock and Boar, or Branch would let him stay at the village. So many places to hide.
He carried a bottle of whiskey in his pocket and he had filled his other pocket up with seashells and a bag at his shoulder with more shells along with his scrimshaw supplies. His scrimshaw was without peer, although before Aejys came along he rarely got paid what it was worth. He had a fine hand and eye when he wasn't shaking with the need for another drink.