by sun sword
"Then what?"
"Yollana," Valla replied, lowering her voice, "is moon-touched. She goes where she goes. You know that. I've even heard that the Tor—"
"Enough," Ashaf said, raising a hand and touching the moving lips of a careless young woman. The gesture brought the silence that she hoped for—and demanded. Whether it was true or no, it was never safe to speculate, beneath the day's open sky, about the habits and the secrets of powerful men. The wind carried careless words farther than arrows and spears.
Yes, she knew Yollana well. What girl, with a heart full of foolish dreams in these, the richest lands of Annagar, did not? What girl, with such a heart, could resist the trek over fields and hill, before night had fully set, to offer the mysterious Voyani woman what little food or item she could find in order to procure both a blessing and a hint of the future?
She had already faced Yollana once, in the year before her first marriage to the man of her desire. She could remember, clearly, the icy night of Yollana's face, the darkness of unblinking eyes, as Yollana had promised her that she would have her heart's desire. The first intimation that her heart was a thing to be feared. She would have others, but like so many things, the first was a scar that time did not diminish.
That year, she had discovered that nightmare and dream come from the same place. And it was nightmare that returned her to it, time and again, stripping her of the strength of wisdom and experience, paring her down to a girl's fear and helplessness.
Her arms ached, and her back, as the minutes dwindled into a stream of time; hours passing.
Things happened, when they happened, in threes. Three visitors: Isladar of no clan, Evayne of Nolan, and now Yollana of the Havalla Voyani.
I am too old, she thought. I haven't the strength. But she wiped her dirt-crusted hands on the thick cotton drape of her long skirts and shielded her eyes against the sun's fall. She could see the Voyani wagons at the crest of the gently sloped hill beyond which her house lay. She knew that she would go around them.
And that it would make no difference.
Dusk was the time of shadows.
Night, and the Lady's moon was brilliant against the speckled backdrop of cool, dark blue. Day, and the Lord's face turned a merciless, necessary heat upon the greens and the golds, the reds and the browns, the earth's colors.
But at dusk, with neither Lord nor Lady in ascendance, the light and the darkness intertwined and every possible path was a step into the unknown.
She could not sleep.
And sleepless, she left the sanctity of her single-room dwelling to stand a moment in the wash of a sky that was caught, in crimson, between two shades of blue. Beneath that sky, crossing the footpaths that had been worn by time and the steady movement of sturdy heels, was a lone figure, illuminated from behind by the lamp that hung across her left shoulder by the shaft of a long pole. The figure's face was in shadow, but she did not need to see it to feel the apprehension of recognition.
Fate.
Ashaf waited numbly as the figure came closer.
Yollana, the wisewoman of the Havalla Voyani.
But here, she felt a strange thing: not fear, as she had expected, and not even resignation, although its touch was heavy upon her unbent shoulders. No, she felt kinship; the kinship of those weary with the burdens of the responsibilities they have chosen—and wearier still with the loss of them.
The Yollana of her youth was gone in that instant; her perfect midnight hair bleached everywhere by the touch of harsh sun and time. Her pale skin was lined now, although not furrowed; it was no longer translucence defined. But if she did not have the slenderness of youth, she had the muscled, sturdy appearance of one who has been tried and tested without breaking.
As if she had expected no less, Yollana looked up from the ground's even slope as she at last approached the house, nodding at the younger woman who waited. Her eyes were the eyes that Ashaf remembered.
"Well met," the Voyani wisewoman said, bowing low enough that the folds of her voluminous shirt obscured the wide, red sash across her midriff.
"And you," Ashaf said softly. She waited a long moment, and then looked away. "I have no water to offer."
"I do," Yollana replied, and she lifted the skin from the folds of her wide skirts. Those skirts could hide many a thing: water, gold. A dagger. "Will you drink with me?"
It was formal; an offer of sorts. But of what, and for what, Ashaf could not guess. She nodded quietly. "Night is coming," she said. "I should sleep soon." But she turned quietly and opened the door to her home, inviting by gesture this third visitor for whom she felt such ambivalence.
The lamp was bright enough to illuminate the four walls of her life; to cast a shadow around the sagging cotton mats upon which she lay night by night; to show the marks and stains and scratches in the wood of the small table before which she knelt to eat. To pray.
She crossed the room and knelt there now, taking from a small shelf beside the table the delicate clay bowls that had been a gift from her husband and placing them upon the worn wooden surface. After a moment, Yollana joined her, unhooking the lamp and placing it on the floor by her bent knees. They stared at each other a moment in uneasy silence; it was the Voyani woman who spoke first.
Yollana's smile was crooked. "You've aged," she said. She took the skin from her belt, uncapped it, and poured. She was skilled, and it was clear from the way that she watched each drop that she had traveled in the Lord's heartlands.
"And you," Ashaf replied. "But more gracefully."
"Voyani blood." Carefully lifting a bowl, she offered the sweet water to Ashaf.
Ashaf took it and lifted it to her lips, accepting the visitor's gift as if there was nothing unusual about such a visit. "All blood is red," she said softly. Then she stopped; the water that touched her tongue was sweet and cool—it was almost as if she drank water's ideal, and not the water itself.
At that, Yollana smiled broadly. "All blood, yes. I give you my word under the Lady's moon that I will spill none of yours this eve."
Ashaf laughed bitterly. "And that is meant to comfort? Oh, no, Yollana. I know the Havalla Voyani well. You are subtle when you exact your price."
History stood between them; history and the piercing clarity of the memory of a young girl long gone.
"We have all met our heart's desire," Yollana replied at last, speaking to a past that had never, and would never, fully die. "And most of us have survived it. If I had warned you then, what would you have done, you a seraf of the clan Valente?" She lifted a hand. "Don't answer. We both know that you would not have chosen to believe me. You were sixteen, Ashaf kep'Valente." Her smile was oddly crooked. "I was sixteen once. I know the age."
The younger woman's face twisted a moment, and then relaxed. "I survived," she said softly. "And for a time, I flourished. It is gone now."
"Yes. You have lost two lives."
She started, as if in pain, and then said, "I have lost more than that."
"You have mourned and buried more," Yollana replied, as cool this night as she had been almost thirty years past. "But the two that I speak of are yours." Yollana's words were carried by a cold, sharp wind; they pierced the skin and more.
I have lost two lives, Ashaf thought, feeling the strange truth of the words as they echoed, unspoken, between them.
Things were done in three. She exhaled slowly, feeling the dread of the moment give way to weariness.
"Why have you come, Yollana? It is not the way of the Voyani to seek out the serafs—or the clansmen, for that matter. You hide in your tents and your wagons, in your stalls and beneath the masks you wear upon your stages. If you want gold, I have none to give you. If you want food, there are richer women than I.
"And if you wish to tell a fortune, you must find someone who is fool enough to ask you. I have already been bled. I will not hold my hand beneath your dagger again."
"This night I cannot see the answer to the question of your future written so clearly across yo
ur face. You were beautiful in your youth, Ashaf; you were known for it two villages in any direction. It did not take the mystical skills of the Voyani ancestors to know what that beauty presaged."
"I will not speak about my past," Ashaf said. "And I have not asked you about my future." She spoke calmly now, and clearly, meeting eyes that had once been dark and icy and yes, mysterious.
She was surprised when Yollana turned aside, her eyes flickering with some emotion that made her seem human. Made her seem, for a moment, as much a seraf as Ashaf, and not a woman of Voyani freedoms. "No. But I have come in search of your future, whether you ask it of me or no."
"What?"
"I have crossed the plains, Ashaf kep'Valente." She looked down at the still surface of the almost untouched water in her bowl. "I have stood beside the waters of the Tor Leonne, and I have gathered them."
Ashaf grew still; her bowl was half empty.
"You have lost two lives, and you stand upon the threshold of a third. I cannot influence your choice, and I would not; I could not bear your burden; not then, and not now.
"I come to perform no act of magic, no act of mysticism. I have left my tents and my wagons and my family behind. Tonight, we are two women beneath the Lady's Moon." She raised her head and the lamp's glow caught and whitened her chin, making of her face a stark relief.
Ashaf looked out and saw that at least some of her words were true; dusk had passed, and the secrecy of darkness held them. She looked down at her half empty bowl, as if deciding, as if afraid to decide.
The water was sweet as she lifted the delicate clay to her lips. From the Tor Leonne, she thought. For me. So did the Serras drink in all their finery, surrounded by serafs and cerdan.
But she knew, from her time in the harem, that the Serras were only a little more free, and only a little more honored, than the serafs themselves. The will of the Lord whose waters were so sweet.
"Why?"
"Because you have haunted my dreams for three nights. Three nights beneath the Lady's Moon, I have dreamed of the death of the Havalla Voyani—and more, the death of the Dominion." She drew breath; her lips thinned as if she were attempting to hold the words back. No Voyani woman spoke her mind so freely to strangers—not for free. And among the Voyani, Yollana was more mysterious than any.
"Did you have these dreams," Ashaf asked, as if the revelation were as natural as the turn of seasons in the valley that had been home for the only parts of her life that she cared to remember, "before you journeyed to the Tor Leonne? I have not heard that the Tyr'agar freely grants the Voyani permission to take what the lake holds."
"Yes," Yollana said starkly. "Three nights." She moved then, unbending at the knee and rising as if freedom of action could soothe her.
"You saw me."
"I saw you."
"Where?"
Yollana averted her gaze and did not speak.
"Yollana."
"I will not lie to you this eve. I will never lie to you again." She fell silent, and it was a moment before Ashaf realized that Yollana did not intend to answer. It seemed to her, as she watched the Voyani woman, that Yollana's actions were a mixture of nervousness and, oddly, pity. She should have felt fear, but she felt almost nothing. Almost.
"Why have you come?" she said, asking for the third time, realizing as the words left her lips that the third time was the significant one.
"To bring you this water," Yollana replied, quietly placing the skin upon Ashaf's humble table. "The Havalla Voyani will be in no one's debt."
The answer made no sense, but the set of Yollana's lips, the shadowed lines across her brow, made it clear that she would answer no questions about such a debt. They stood a moment in silence, and then Yollana shook her head, sending graying curls across the curves of her face, her shoulders. "You will forgive me," she said, almost wry in tone. "But I am not a gentle woman. Not a sympathetic one. I am not good at these offers, these gestures. I raised Voyani; I define what the Havalla are." She reached into the folds of her shirt and pulled something from between her breasts. As she lifted it, it caught the light and sent it out in a fan of intense color.
"Take this," Yollana said, and if there was a request in the two words, she hid it well. "Take this, and wear it. Travel this village, these lands. Speak to the people who make this your home. Visit your graves, your fields, your hills; find the shade in your forest, the cooling waters in your brook and small river." She let it fall; Ashaf gasped until she saw the glittering chain that stopped it from reaching ground. A necklace or a pendant of some sort.
She reached out an open palm, and Yollana carefully dropped the stone—for it was a stone, a clear one, like a diamond that would beggar even a Tyr—into her hand. At once, it flared with a deep, blue light; the light ran the length of her arm, shrouding it.
Magic.
"What—what does it do?" Her voice was, momentarily, a girl's voice—the girl that she had thought long gone. Dreamer. Seeker of wonder.
"It is the Lady's magic," Yollana replied, "not the Lord's. It will not protect you; it will not defend you. Where a blade is raised or spell is thrown, you will find no solace in it."
Ashaf smiled wryly. "I did not ask you what it wasn't. I asked you what it is."
"It is a keeper," Yollana said. "Of memory. Of affection. Of place. Wear it, as I have told you to wear it, and it will take some of what you feel and hold it within depths that you cannot even imagine. Wear it, and you will feel exactly the peace or the joy or the quiet—yes, or the sorrow—that you felt when you first donned it."
"Why?"
"It is a piece of home," Yollana replied gravely. "Many of the Voyani women wear them, because the heart—our hearts—so seldom find a home, and when they do, we cannot remain there."
"But this is—this is—" Ashaf fell silent, realizing two things. For the first, she bowed low. "You have honored me," she said softly.
Yollana's face was in shadow as she bent to retrieve the lamp. Ashaf slid the chain over her head with shaking hands, letting the stone fall to rest against her skin. What should have been cold was warm; what should have been hard was smooth and almost soft.
Honored? Yes. But she knew, as the Voyani woman attached the lamp to the pole she carried, that Yollana did not expect to see her again. Did not expect that anyone would. The Voyani did not surrender the secrets of their hearts to anyone.
What had Evayne of Nolan said?
Your story ends here, in this village; there will be no
one to tell it, to carry it on, to bring it to light.
* * *
The next day, at dawn, Ashaf kep'Valente rose and walked to the graves in which lay the remnants of the second life that Yollana of the Havalla Voyani had spoken of. She knew now when it ended—had almost known it then, so bleak was the day, and the year, and the year that followed. The last of her children. Her son.
You were to find your joys, she thought, as her hand smoothed out drying strands of once green grass. But her joy, such as it was, was here, if she could let go of the memory that ended it.
And sometimes she could; sometimes she could see his youth—all of their youths—and his innocence, although she expected that the latter was the kindness of aged memory.
As if this were her last day here, she knelt before the grave, these graves—but she could not sit for long; the tears came, and it was not tears that she wished to capture.
Valla kep'Valente was waiting for her this second morning. Valla, with her delicate chin, her raven's hair, her intemperate words. She was like a child, and unlike; she spoke her mind as it pleased her, and often with great surprise at the results.
The pinks were fading from the sky, and the men had been fed; it was time to tend the fruit of the fields. They walked together, and to Ashaf it seemed that everything— the colors of the valley fields, the smell of the cut stalks and turned earth, the movement of birds and men, the sound of the river—was heightened. Almost new. She looked from side to side, as if a won
der long dead had found new life.
"Ashaf? Ashaf, have you heard a thing I've said?"
"It's—it's a lovely day," Ashaf said, blushing.
"Which means no." Valla's face was caught a moment between a smile and a frown; the smile won. "It is a beautiful day."
"Is that Riva?"
"Yes. And that monstrous son of hers."
"He's not monstrous," Ashaf said softly. "Or he will not always be. He is reckless. When your own are that age, you will understand it better."
"My own," Valla said, with the arrogance of loving ignorance, "will not survive if they choose to become like Eric. It's Riva's own fault." She shrugged. "Give the child no child's name, and what happens? He knows no mother's calm."
It was common wisdom. "Na'Eri," she said quietly, turning the words around in her mouth. "Be kind."
Valla's brow lifted a moment. "You weren't so forgiving when he broke your door."
"True enough," the older woman said. "But the door was fixed."
"I worry about you, Ashaf. You've been sleeping well?"
"No," Ashaf replied cheerfully. "Very poorly. Come; the shadows are lengthening and the overseer will take our names."
He didn't, of course; and she knew he wouldn't. Although he was a clansman in theory, he had spent his life here, in this village, among the serafs. He had played with them, bullied them, and been bullied by them; he had lain with them, and broken their hearts, and had his heart broken. He had wed here, under the Lady's Moon, with the permission of the Tor'agar—the same man who had given Ashaf a husband and her freedom.
The freedom of a seraf.
He was also a good ten years younger than she, and twice, when his daughters were ill, had come over the hillocks, his lamp and his fear burning high. And she had followed him to the biggest house in the village, to tend to his children in the silence of sickness, of terror. How could she do less, when she understood that particular helplessness so well?
"Ashaf. Valla. You're late again."
"Daro," Valla said, kneeling meekly.
"Daro," Ashaf said. "At my age—"
"At your age you set about Michale with a broom and reddened both his ears." But his good-natured smile was broad enough; it had been a good year, and the harvest would please the Tor who ruled them all, whether his serafs were late or no. "We'll fall behind without you, Ashaf. You set the good example."