by Monte Cook
She touches a button along the top. It opens flat, still resting on nothing. On its surface is a map of the Stere, self-lit inside the stronglass panes, drawn by two different hands. Her mother’s, the artist, with her fine lettering and her exact landmarks and locations. And Aviend’s, whose work is more scattershot and uncertain. Sizes and distances are all approximate. But she thinks it’s a good approximation.
Beside her, Quenn gasps softly.
“I’ve never seen the whole woods like this before,” he says. “It’s so big.”
How to tell him the size of the world? She can’t. She doesn’t even know it all herself. She puts her hand along the western edge, traces it out, off the map, for as long as her arm will reach. She knows that’s still not far enough, not even near, but the comparison is good enough for the moment. “I went here once. Beyond here, to a place called Lhauric. A single city greater than all of the Stere combined.”
She doesn’t remember much of it. Only glimpses. She was a child, holding the hand of her mother, an Aeon Priest, a clave leader. In a place where none of that mattered. Lhauric was full of great beasts and blood sacrifice. Red and black, metal and synth. Gods that forced their believers to kill and maim and die.
She doesn’t say any of this. What good would it do? Quenn knows already the desire of Rillent’s power. Knows already how he aims to be a god.
“I worry that whatever Rillent is planning, it’s going to stretch to there and beyond,” she says.
“What is he planning?” Quenn asks.
“We don’t know,” she says. “I wish we did.”
Aviend gives Quenn a few minutes to look at the map in silence. Then she says, “Where is your home? On the map. Approximately?”
He gets a nervous look in his eye. Protective. Even after all they’ve talked of.
“No,” she says. “Not like that. We just want to know how far Rillent’s reach extends. Where is safe still.”
After a breath, his finger lands on the far northwestern side of the map, nearly to the forest’s edge. It’s not all that far from here, but it’s a long way from the kubric. Damn. She’d been afraid of that. All the way, then.
“Destriatch?” she asks.
“When I’d left? Yes. Now? I don’t know. He seems to be pulling them back to the kubrics.”
She touches the bit of her scorched hair. “I noticed that,” she says.
The question is why? She doesn’t know. Something they’re still missing, even after all this time and planning. Why would he pull them back? Leave an opening? He must have found something else, something stronger, that would give him protection or power. Or both.
“But that might have changed by now,” Quenn adds, almost as if he’s afraid that saying it might make it true.
“It might have,” she agrees. Letting him go. Back to his home. His family.
His fingers running over the pendant whir, almost like the map before them. As quick as he’d moved before, he moves again. This time the star is off his neck and falling onto her palm before she can think to close it. Heavy. Both smooth and sharp.
“You need to have this,” he says. “For saving me.”
“I can’t,” she says. She means it.
“Is it easier if I say it doesn’t mean anything to me anymore?” His voice is tender as a torn petal underfoot. And she realizes this isn’t about her. It can’t be. He needs to go, to leave the yesteryears behind, with their ghostfalls and dead gods and mortar dust. Move forward.
“Yes,” she lies.
“Then it doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.” He lies too.
She turns the pendant over and over in her hands. Thinks about the way someone enters your life and changes it. So quickly. As fast as falling. Before you can blink. Or breathe. Or say thank you.
Begin and the stars shall find you.
By the time she slips the pendant over her head, Quenn is already walking out the door.
“Coruscates beside you,” Aviend says to the empty room. He’s not dead, yet he is. A part of him, at least. A part of them all dies, she thinks, after Rillent touches them.
Kyre finds her, still sitting there in the morning. She thinks she’s slept, but she can’t remember. Her back is cracked with bad angles, and her ass is all bone and ache.
“Vi,” he says. The nickname catches her attention. He only calls her Vi when he’s very, very serious. She has a vague recollection of him calling her that while she was in the treehouse. Or it might have been a dream.
He looks serious now, standing in front of her. Not catching her eye, like she’s a millibird he is afraid to startle. He has sleep hair and sleep eyes, and when he fists one hand and wipes it across his sleepy lips, she thinks she might just melt right where she’s sitting. “We need to talk about what happened,” he said.
Rillent. He means Rillent. Who’s still alive. Still enslaving people. Still working toward his horrible end. Whatever that is. She wishes she knew. The fact that she can’t figure out his goal, his desire, his very purpose, lends to her feeling of not being smart enough to figure this out. To fix it.
“Or are you planning to keep hibernating in here in the dark like a ravage bear?” he asks.
It’s an innocent, teasing question. And yet it’s not. He’s asking her if she’s ready to talk. He knows her well enough. It’s not that she’s afraid, exactly. Or maybe it is fear, but not fear of death or the destriatch or even Rillent. But fear that she will once again believe she is prepared, planned, perfected, only to discover at the wrong moment that she is none of those things. No, it’s not a fear of death, but a fear that she isn’t as smart as she tells herself she is. That she will fail not just herself, but Kyre. Delgha. Thorme. Quenn. Her mother. The whole of the Stere.
They don’t need to talk about it, she thinks. They were both there. They made a choice. Right or wrong, it’s done. Now they need to look forward. Move forward.
No. She knows that he’s right. She’s avoiding things. It’s not like her. That in itself makes her anxious. She can tell herself that she’s protecting the base by not thinking about things, by keeping her thoughts secret from Rillent and his probing gaze.
But she can’t keep him out forever. He’s going to find them. When that happens, they need to have a plan. Not just a plan, but something that’s already in motion.
There’s something Kyre wants to say too. His face tells her. But she can’t find the space inside herself to make room for it. Not yet.
“No,” she says. It’s the best she can do to answer all of the questions that she can feel him pouring into her. It’s her most honest self, and she gives it all to him. “But I’m not ready yet. I need to… I don’t know what I need.”
“I’m here,” he says. “When you figure it out. Or when you don’t.”
She stands, sleep-ached and muscle-torn, and goes to him, and inside all of the darkness and cold, he is heat and warmth and light.
A few days after Quenn left, Kyre woke to find himself alone again. Which meant Aviend had dreamed of Rillent. Or perhaps, not a dream at all. He hoped it was only that, and not reality. If that were true, then Rillent was moving faster and more aggressively than they were ready for.
He reached an arm out, found the bed chilled. She’d been awake for a while, then.
In the past, he’d have gotten up, gone to find her. But he understood her better now, her need to move after she woke, the footfalls to wipe away Rillent’s hold. Rillent had never come for him that way. He hadn’t needed to. Kyre had gone to him, eager to help him build a better town, a better world.
He’d tried to imagine what that might feel like, to have someone else in his head, commanding. He couldn’t. Aviend saw into his head, to be sure, but that was a welcome thing, a fair connection. Not a takeover.
With Quenn here and then gone, Kyre felt the absence of the other clave members more acutely than he had in a long while. No one talked about how their group had narrowed in, gnawed itself down to the bone. It was as if
they couldn’t bear it, couldn’t admit how skeleton they’d become.
Once, the Night Clave had been closer to a dozen. Mostly members of the original Ovinale clave who’d followed Aviend here after her mother’s death. Others had come after Rillent destroyed their towns. Still others – himself included – had only made it out from under Rillent’s boot after too long beneath it.
Only two of their members had died. Others had left, had enough, changed their mind. They went elsewhere in the world, looking for a place where they could just live out their lives without the touch of men like Rillent, wherever that might be. Some went back to their families in the Stere, wanting to believe that Rillent wouldn’t touch them there. That they’d be safe if they didn’t make waves. He thought Quenn might be hoping for that, a little.
He understood, all too well, the pull of that. It was heavy on the best of days, and exhausting down to his marrow on others. Always fighting and failing. Always waiting to see what new thing Rillent would do, how he would stretch the sphere of normal into something misshapen and gruesome. And then convince everyone that this was better, normal, exactly what they’d agreed to, what they’d fought for.
He couldn’t blame Rillent for everything, especially not his own position there. Not entirely. He’d joined him willingly at first. Believed in Rillent’s vision of the Stere growing powerful, of their families being protected. Even after everyone he knew was dead or dying, Kyre had still believed. Not even when Kyre’s father died beside him in the trenches, gave out under the weight of the work and the press of Rillent’s impossible timeline, not even then had Kyre pulled away.
“There’s no shame in wanting what Rillent was offering,” Aviend said quietly, as she entered the room. She joined him in the bed, shifting to press her body to him. “He’s a liar and a killer, but he’s smart. He spins a world and makes you believe. He made us all believe.”
“Not you,” Kyre said.
“I did,” she said. “You know I did.”
He did know. She’d told him the story long ago. She was the first that Rillent had come to. She said that was why she’d been the first to step away from him. He wasn’t sure he believed her, but he thought she believed herself.
“Thorme put together some pilgrim packs, if you want,” she said. “I think she thought we could use a task.”
Thorme was right. Today, of all days, Kyre was happy to step into the pennon and see the pilgrim packs stuffed full with foods and seeds, probably medicine, cyphers, whatever other supplies Thorme had been able to scrounge up and trade for. It felt good to be hiking through the woods with a heavy pack on his back, Aviend beside him, breath and footsteps. And it felt especially good to enter the clearing and see familiar faces, faces they’d helped rescue from Rillent’s hold.
They arrived at the clearing with no trouble. None of the defenses had been triggered. They’d seen or heard neither ghosts nor people. At least until that very moment.
“Aviend! Kyre!”
The man coming toward them was tall and lean. Topped by a flowering of bright white hair, limbs bending at unusual angles, he looked less like a man and more like a plant blowing in the wind. If Kyre had a favorite plant, it would be Toev Riack.
True also of Aviend, he guessed, by the way she said his name. Such rare delight on her tongue. “Toev,” she said, and touched both palms to the man’s cheeks by way of greeting.
“It’s been too long,” Toev said. He gestured toward the makeshift buildings behind him, the common area where people were cooking and working on building… something. A shed, perhaps. In the small garden nearby, a little boy hacked at the dirt with a shovel, a woman laughing beside him. There were few men. It was harder to pull men from Rillent. “Come and sit. We’re making a meal. You can share it before you head back.”
Kyre caught Aviend’s glance, the smallest shake of her head.
“This isn’t a comfort visit, I’m afraid,” Kyre said. “We need to be quick. And share news.”
“Ah.” Toev took a moment to glance at their faces. Kyre wondered how much of the truth he saw there. Whatever it was, it was enough that he said, “Well, come and sit briefly anyway. But here, away from the others.”
He guided them to a small table near the garden’s fence. There wasn’t much growing in the soft sod, but still an improvement. Just last year there had only been a mound of debris and stone where a small town had once stood. Now half a dozen rows of something green and blossoming were fighting for space with weeds, and a couple of umlan goats were bleating their despair at having eaten all of the shrubs within their reach.
“The garden’s looking good,” Kyre said. He unloaded the pack from his back and set it beside Toev, who rested his hand on the top with all the protectiveness of a parent. Toev didn’t say thank you. He didn’t have to; they were together in caring for these people, helping them get back on their feet. Everyone did what they could. Thanks were unnecessary in times like these.
Aviend followed suit with her pack, saying, “I believe Thorme even said something about there being a few treats in there for the young ones.”
“Thorme’s heart is bigger than most people’s whole bodies,” Toev said. Then a moment later, grinning, “As is her displeasure, should you be dumb enough to find it.” His laugh was as scattered and angled as his body.
It felt good to sit in the sun and laugh about the kindnesses of the people who mattered in his life. Kyre wished, just for a moment, that they didn’t have to talk about dangerous things. He would have liked to sit here longer, in this small vision of a possible future built despite Rillent, with the warmth of the sun on his face, and not feel fear for their very lives. But the shadow of Rillent’s knowledge felt like a great blackness slipping across the landscape. He kept feeling like if they didn’t hurry, that blackness would catch them when they weren’t looking and they would drown in it. All of them.
“What’s your news?” Toev asked, as if he were sensing Kyre’s impatience.
Aviend had her chin on her hand, watching something in the direction of the garden. He wondered, briefly, what she was thinking. It was rare that he couldn’t guess, but he noticed it happened more in the moments when she was thinking of Rillent. As though she were putting up mental blocks, allowing no one through.
Since she didn’t seem likely to answer Toev, Kyre did so. “Rillent knows we’re alive. Knows Aviend’s alive. We don’t know what that means yet, but we know it means he’ll be scouting for us. For the base. Maybe even for everyone here.”
They hadn’t told Toev, or anyone else outside of the base, what their plans were before. Normally they gave him a heads up, enough so that he could protect the clearing should something go wrong. Kyre should have known, even as they chose not to tell him this last time, that it meant they weren’t doing the right thing.
Toev’s eyes were pale, a pearly blue-grey to his ivory hair. He followed Aviend’s gaze, watching the goat standing on its hindlegs, stretching to reach the bottom branches of the nearest tree.
“You’ll need to prepare everyone,” Kyre said.
“We are always preparing,” Toev said. “I’ll relay the news to everyone at dinner. Is there more?”
Grateful that Toev didn’t ask how Rillent knew, Kyre shook his head. “Not that we know yet. We’ll send runners if we know more.”
“We saved a boy, Toev,” Aviend said. “Well, not a boy so much. A Gavanite.”
“I knew a Gavanite once. It was long ago.” He cupped an elbow into his opposite palm. “Coruscates.”
“Coruscates,” Kyre echoed. It seemed he’d been saying that a lot lately. After such a long absence, the word felt like sad sustenance in his mouth.
Aviend pulled the pendant from where it had been laying hidden against her skin, letting it dangle from her fingers. In the sunlight, it sparked a new color, the golden hue of fall grasses.
“He gave you this? May I?”
She nodded, and leaned toward him, moving the pendant into easy reach
of his long fingers.
“It was a surprise to me, too,” she said. “To all of us. He seemed attached to it.”
Toev moved his fingers over it without moving the pieces of the pendant. “He must have thought you needed it,” he said.
He let the pendant fall. As it swung back, Aviend caught it and tucked it beneath the fabric.
“Maybe,” she said. “More, I think he might have just been shaken up. It’s hard to make good decisions when you’re in shock. I’m mostly just holding it safely for him until he wants it back.”
As they were talking, a woman stepped from inside one of the small buildings behind Toev, bringing water and glasses toward the table. She wore not the black of Rillent’s trenchers, but the gold of his personal wards. Her suit was gold flecked with black, the heels of her boots painted with Rillent’s love of purples. The clothing itself was worn but well tended, patched by careful hand.
Her hair was wildly cut at various depths, tight curls of ash and grey. Both of her index fingers were nubbed down to the knuckles, clean well-healed cuts so perfectly straight they could only have been purposeful. The way she held her hands, he knew that the wounds were old, delivered so long ago that muscles and bones no longer searched for their missing pieces.
He and Aviend exchanged glances. She wasn’t one of their rescues. Had another of Rillent’s wards managed to escape his grasp?
As she drew close to where they sat, Kyre saw that Rillent hadn’t just taken her fingers. He’d given her something. Her left eye was hollowed out and filled with a cylinder of green metal and black glass. Black fibers extended out from the bottom of it, and then sank beneath her skin, trailing down the side of her face. Their braided surface raised her skin in a pattern that would have been beautiful if you didn’t know any part of the story behind it.
At her chin line, the wires reappeared, slipping out of her skin. He could see they’d been pulled from her neck and snipped – the skin there was raw and open, not yet scabbed. Both ends of the wires dangled, one up, one down, frayed as if by a long, slow cut with a too-dull tool.