by Janny Wurts
‘That fellow is not crazy!’ Blushed under her censure, Tarens amended in heart-felt conviction. ‘No, I don’t know everything. The Light’s policies confuse me. But if Efflin dies, our family holding is lost to us anyhow. Should we act on our unseen fears before the virtue of human kindness? Who’s given us more, the Light’s faith or that stranger? And if you choose to reject generosity, then what standing do we have left in this world, or in the hereafter, for that matter?’
Kerelie turned her back. Palms pressed to her face, her hunched shoulders quivering, she lashed out and kicked the tin tray. The spoon flashed air-borne and tumbled into the garden, while the napkin, wind-chased, fluttered across the sere ground and caught like a forlorn flag of truce in the rose trellis. A moment, she stood, her vulnerable fragility fit to shatter at the next breath. Until the surfeit of grief overset her distress, and she broke into snuffles of laughter.
‘Well,’ she gasped presently. ‘I never did want to marry. Or bear the brood it would take to upkeep this sprawling place properly. If you think that scruffy creature might help, go ahead and try to find him.’
Late night made the vigil the hardest to bear, when the candle carved harsh shadows that rendered Efflin’s wasted face cadaverous. He had not touched the stew brought for his supper. The sorry, cold mass congealed in the bowl, that hard straits and poverty saved to reheat for Tarens upon his return. Since the plan to seek help must wait for the vagabond to emerge from his hidden cover, the lonely watch extended far into the night.
Kerelie fetched a rushlight for thrift, and her osier work-basket. She stretched new linen onto her embroidery hoop, then snatched for the illusion of solace by plying her needle. Against the laboured breaths of a brother’s decline, she sewed life: small birds, brilliant butterflies, and entwined summer flowers. The simple beauty that nurtured her delight bloomed under her hands in lovingly set, intricate stitches. Frantically as she sought to escape from her grief, the pervasive astringency of cailcallow tea and the bitter aroma of willow bark made the sick-room oppressive.
Religion had never founded her peace, but nothing else fed her stark absence of hope. She lacked the wisdom to tell if the vagabond was in fact a rogue sorcerer. Her prayer to the Light appealed for clear guidance, or lacking that, the gift of clemency. Should the human heart be asked to choose between a blind adherence to faith, or succour for a dying brother? Hours passed to the whine of the wind through the eaves and the bang of a loosened shutter. The northerly cold that brought in early blizzards seeped through the casement and flared the coals as the kitchen fire subsided to ash. Kerelie arose and piled on fresh logs. Almost, she wished Tarens would be unsuccessful, that the gall of her doubts might stay the brute course on known ground, without liability. Perhaps the refuge of belief was best kept unchallenged by troublesome questions that bordered on heresy.
The latch clicked in that moment of harrowed uncertainty. Kerelie met Tarens as he stepped in, bone chilled but triumphant. The disreputable vagabond dogged his heels, slight and graceful in step as a ghost.
Kerelie’s start of jangled trepidation met green eyes, oddly sparked by ironic hilarity. Then the wafted stink brought indoors with him assaulted her nostrils. Her mouth, just opened to scold, snapped shut against sudden nausea. Hurled beyond dignity, Kerelie back-stepped, hands clutched to her middle.
For of course, denied any civilized shelter, the vagabond had been forced to survive on snared game. Necessity made him fashion his jerkin and jacket from green hides, skinned off the animals he trapped for sustenance.
Kerelie whirled, forearms braced on the window-sill until her shocked spasms subsided. ‘Light’s grace attend us!’ she gasped. ‘Your sorry friend will breed rampant pestilence, reeking of rot as he does!’
Before Tarens managed a heated response, she collapsed on the bench, flushed bright pink. She drew several taxed breaths, then abandoned propriety and curled up, not sick, but helplessly laughing.
‘My fault, I admit, for pinch-fisted thriftiness since I refused to spare any other warm clothing for someone so desperately needy.’ Her contrite change of heart came on as the spring storm, without apology and brisk enough to level pride and presumption. ‘Tarens! Fetch in the wash-tub and draw water for bathing. Then ask that poor creature to strip to the skin! Burn his unholy mess of raw fur out of doors and throw the ashes onto the midden. I’ll fetch the good soap and scrounge proper dress from Uncle’s left things in the cedar trunk. Be sure of this! I won’t let that appalling charnel stench anywhere near Efflin’s sick-bed.’
Scoured clean by his own hand, also shaved and refreshed by the scent of lavender soap, the vagabond soon passed the sister’s critical muster to be admitted to her brother’s bedside. Kerelie ensconced herself in Aunt Saffie’s rocker, once used to settle her infant sons after nursing in the late hours. Now, the worn cushion held a bristle of jabbed pins to take in Uncle Fiath’s good winter jacket. Tarens tucked cross-legged on the window-seat, reluctant to rest and abandon the beggarman to his sister’s prickly temperament.
Efflin alone showed no apprehension. Bone-pale, he lay lifelessly still, the smoothed quilts on his chest scarcely stirred by his shallow breaths. His cheeks were sunken into his skull, with his half-opened, flint eyes glinting empty and listless. He seemed to have drifted past Fate’s Wheel already, with naught but a shell left behind as his sturdy frame wasted.
The vagabond absorbed the cadaverous flesh at one glance. Restless or driven, he retreated into the kitchen and slipped back out into the night. A taut interval passed. Before Kerelie loosened her guard in relief, and while Tarens wrestled impatience, the fellow returned with an armload of logs from the wood-pile. His hand-picked cache contained only birch. The sweet fragrance lightened the air as he built up the kitchen fire.
Once the crackling flames caught from the embers, the ruffian stood up and quartered the croft cottage, length and breadth. His industrious survey peered into crannies and touched random objects with an interest that ran beyond curiosity. His rapt manner frayed Kerelie’s already rattled state of anxiety. She dropped the distracted pursuit of her needlework, stalked into the kitchen, and hovered over his shoulder, though Tarens chastised her rudeness.
‘Let him be, Kerie! He isn’t a thief.’
‘What’s he doing, then?’ Trailed after the man’s furtive step up the stair, she bridled as his brazen exploration turned down the second-floor hallway. Before he presumed the unthinkable and breached the shut door to the boys’ empty bedroom, she called downstairs, benighted, ‘Shouldn’t somebody check to be sure he’s not up to mischief?’
Which comment froze the snooping stranger at the forbidden threshold. His head turned. Kerelie caught the brunt of his razor-keen stare, charged by a contempt that prickled her hackles. Then, undeterred, he spun on his heel and invaded the family’s most sacrosanct shrine. The room was pitch-dark. He carried no light. Since Kerelie could not bear the desecration, she refused the loan of a candle. Instead, she fled headlong downstairs and collided with Tarens, who captured her into his steadfast embrace.
‘You know where he’s poking his inquisitive nose,’ she objected, muffled by her brother’s warm shirt.
‘Let him do as he must,’ Tarens urged, also shaken, but unready to surrender his last glimmer of hope to the stifling shadow of grief. ‘Everything that man’s done has held purpose! I’d place my trust in the same goodwill that spared you from Grismard’s clutches.’
Kerelie sniffed. She conceded the point, enough to suppress her outraged nerves until the intrusive, quick footstep re-emerged and descended the stair. Her stare still shot daggers for flagrant presumption. Worse yet, the glow from the kitchen fire brushed the tell-tale gleam of polished wood in the pilferer’s hand.
Rankled, Kerelie shouted, ‘He’s got Paolin’s flute! Efflin’s going to be furious!’
Tarens clamped her arm, curbed his own blast of temper, and whispered a plea for restraint. ‘Efflin’s riled nerves might be for the best. Force him t
o take a stand and maybe he’ll rejoin the living.’
If the vagabond noticed their umbrage, nothing deflected his course as he poked through the cottage kitchen. No pot and no spoon on the rack went unfingered. He laid his ear to the trestle, eyes shut, as if the scarred planks spoke like a book’s riffled pages, scribed with the past layers of ingrained conversations.
While Kerelie glowered with prim disapproval, he moved on and ran a near-reverent hand over the contents of Aunt Saffie’s dish cupboard. As if the tactile slide of bare fingers garnered the nuance of buried impressions, he lingered, drew in a satisfied breath, and savoured a pause before he pressed onwards. Glimpsed by the frangible gleam of the fire, his eyes appeared softened from focus. Bemused as a dreamer’s, the slight tilt of his head suggested he listened to strains far beyond natural hearing.
Kerelie’s impetuous tongue blurted outright what Tarens was thinking: ‘Either your creature’s as daft as the moon, or we’re watching a sorcerer work.’
‘I fear the temple’s meddling examiners far more,’ Tarens snapped. ‘If harm comes to us by this man’s hand, I’ll shoulder the blame. But without a shred of contrary evidence, my mind is going to stay open.’ Deaf to debate, he positioned himself to shield against his sister’s untoward interference. When at last the vagabond made his way back into Efflin’s chamber, the shortened candles cast fluttering haloes over coverlet and furnishings, and pooled yellow light on the braided-rag carpet. Kerelie beat a nettled retreat to her chair and retrieved her dropped mending like armour. Tarens stationed himself by the door, despite his stout claim of unshaken faith, poised to move fast if need warranted.
The vagabond drifted onwards to the bed and extended the hand-made flute, balanced across his open palms. There, he waited until his planted stance forced Efflin’s blank stare to a flicker of confrontation. The moment faded. Indifference resurged, then subsided to flat rejection. The inflamed rims of the sunken lids lowered, sight shuttered behind adamant, closed eyes.
The vagabond bowed his head, not resigned. He laid the flute across Efflin’s stilled knees. Left it there, gleaming atop the plain coverlet as he leaned forward and ran his expressive fingers over the bedstead: the same that Aunt Saffie and Uncle Fiath had shared through their eighteen years joined in marriage. He stroked the carved wood, engrossed: as if his engaged survey of another’s belongings scrutinized intimacies that even kinsfolk had no right to rifle.
‘Feels like an invasion of somebody’s privacy,’ Kerelie grumbled with self-righteous heat.
Her intrusive comment offended at last. The vagabond’s chin snapped up from absorbed contemplation. His disturbed regard raked her soul-deep with reproach. The effect all but flayed skin, as he left Efflin’s bedside and advanced on her chair, his stalker’s step primed for a challenge.
Her fierce courage met him straight on. The fears that edged Kerelie’s outbursts never had stemmed from concern for herself. Aware she would stand her adamant ground, Tarens looked on with choked breath as the vagabond squared off against a loyal sister’s disapproval. The hands he raised could have belonged to an artist, but for his broken nails and chapped knuckles. Firmly, he tugged the bastion of fine needlework out of her defensive fingers. Then he gathered up her emptied palm, and cupped her own flesh against the old scar that disfigured her cheek.
His clasp guided, only. She easily could have yanked free. Yet as though anaesthetized, she did not jerk away, but looked upwards into his angular features. His green eyes captured hers, deep beyond measure, impenetrably calm and unthreatening.
And something inside of her burst the rigid dam that constrained a violent torrent of feeling . . .
She was three on the day the neighbour’s cranky mule lunged with flattened ears and nipped at her arm. Open-hearted and innocent, she had leaned over the fence-rail to plant a kiss on its whiskered muzzle, eager to grant any creature who wronged her that earnest gesture of forgiveness.
Such a simple mistake to have scarred her for life. The pain as the mule’s blunt teeth crushed her cheek had been brief, and the pinprick trauma of stitches, a pittance. The damage that crippled struck later, inflicted by endless humiliation.
Hurtful memories rushed through in a cruel cascade: of her mother’s exasperated anger and resigned pity; then the remorseless jeers of the other children who poked fun at her welted face. She shrank into self-consciousness, then scourging embarrassment, as puberty delivered the blow that her blemish made her undesired by the young men. She endured the torment of her uncle’s strained silences, then the helpless resignation that drove him from the room each time her aunt broached her dim prospects for a good marriage. The westlands tradition of chaperoned courtship made her teen years a punishment as she sat through the dances, or waited forlorn at an empty table. Shunned, she had watched the lit candles burn above the baked sweets that hopeful youth had laid out for young suitors who failed to appear. Or worse, she had struggled to make conversation, when callers were sent by their insistent mothers as a hollow gesture of conciliation.
Seared to her core, Kerelie ached for the flaw that could not, in this life, ever leave her. Her spoiled features could not be restored. She lived, day on day, as separate as though sealed behind a pane of marred glass. Except for her brothers, no one she met ever saw her: until a wild vagabond, chance-met on the road, had bridged the gap of her isolation. No person, ever, had soothed her raw nerves with the tonic of clear understanding.
The first sob tore from Kerelie’s chest with a sound like rent cloth, coarse and alarmingly primal. Tears followed, a wracking catharsis of shame that alarmed Tarens to witness. The spate passed without incident. Limp, drained to emptiness in release, Kerelie made no effort to disentangle herself. Bent forward, leaned into the vagabond’s support, she allowed him, that gently, to ease her soaked fingers back into her lap.
Now, his weathered touch cradled her scarred cheek directly. The drawn flesh with its whitened, hard knot of tissue did not repulse him. His contact stayed steady, an unpretentious acceptance beyond any banal word of comfort.
Unthreatening, tender, he lifted her chin. He brushed the brine from her lashes, and gazed into her eyes until the flood brimmed again, spilled, and emptied. Something uncanny quickened the connection: a bloom of spring warmth, or a balm on the spirit. The spark ignited change that rippled beyond mere sensation, too ineffable to be captured by language. As though she received the live pulse of his thought, Kerelie experienced a view of herself that transcended flesh and shattered the framework of outward appearance.
She experienced a redefinition of value, as if a veil lifted, or the dross had been razed at a stroke from an unfinished sculpture. Where strangers complained of her carping tongue, this touch spoke of a vulnerable heart, defensively guarding a family. She saw, in the stitches of her busy needle, a glow that whispered of happiness so delicate, she had never risked its fragility to outside expression. The caring she could not expect, from a man, was twined into her embroidered flowers and birds, and the ebullient scrolls of spring vines. These quiet gifts were bestowed on close kin, and more shyly, to the rare few who showed her a constant friendship.
No one before ever spoke of her grace as she moved. None mentioned her staunch strength, or complimented the confidence she brought to the mindful tasks of plain living.
Through the stranger’s eyes, which mirrored her self, she saw her steel core and encountered the person she was: a being devoted to kindness, who would not forsake the living trust of another. The monstrous shadow thrown by her scar no longer eclipsed the inherent treasures of the virtues she brought to the world.
The bubble of startled laughter began in her chest and burst from her throat. Remade inside, she gave rein to the joy unleashed from the locked prison within her. Hurled into a freedom too large to cram back into her former shell, she revelled in the vibrancy of her wholeness. The mask people viewed was not who she was. Her inner light shone with a rarefied brilliance beyond any flaw to extinguish.
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sp; The vagabond quietly withdrew his hands. Deferent, he smiled and ducked his head to forestall her effusive thanks. He bowed instead to show honour to Kerelie, which restraint let the unfolded changes within her smooth into resettled alignment.
When Tarens’s anxious query broke in, puzzled and sharply insistent, Kerelie answered, astonished to wonderment. ‘Be still! All is well. I’m quite fine. More than that.’ She paused, drew a breath, and tingled from head to foot with exhilaration. ‘Now I know how your beggarman healed the old hen.’ Hesitant, she touched her ridged cheek. The ugly scar remained as prominent as ever, but its blight on her spirit had lifted. The entrenched belief she was hideous no longer smothered her under the patent falsehood of unworthiness. The blemish on her self-image, which had strangled the fearless intimacy of her innate joy, was cleansed.
She pronounced at due length, ‘If this man’s talent is considered black sorcery, then the temple and the Light’s priesthood are wrong to forbid us the benefits of such practice.’
‘He might heal Efflin’s ailment the same way, you think,’ Tarens ventured, afraid to hope.
As fresh tears brimmed her luminous eyes, Kerelie nodded with encouragement. ‘Let him try. I can assure the attempt is unlikely to cause any harm.’
The vagabond accepted her tone as consent and resumed his disputed place at the invalid’s bedside. Efflin’s eyes remained stubbornly shut. Inert to the life in his presence, he languished amid the unwrinkled sheets, motionless but for his slowed breaths. He seemed a being sucked empty: except that the dark-haired healer surveyed his slack frame with undaunted focus. As though attentive to registers too refined to be heard, he studied Efflin’s unresponsive condition.