by Resa Nelson
She saved me once, Gershon thought, staring at Norah, who now approached another figure made of ice. If I travel with them, she’ll protect me. She’ll keep me safe from ghosts.
“Mistress,” Gershon called out weakly. “I’d be honored to stay by your side.”
Norah spun to face him, her face flushed with anger. “Go!” she hissed.
Astonished, Gershon stood his ground, not knowing what else to do. She was his savior. How could she speak to him like that?
Norah bared her teeth, hissing again before turning her back on Gershon.
He stood for several more seconds before he realized that if he didn’t wipe the tears welling in his eyes, they might turn to ice before he could rejoin the men running away from this ghastly place.
CHAPTER 43
At the same time Astrid, Vinchi, and Margreet made their preparations to heal Limru, Wendill gazed with a twinge of regret at Gershon, whose shoulders slumped in defeat and anguish.
The mortal walked away from the edge of the forest with the few men he’d brought with him.
Oddly, Gershon had been good for Norah. Since the day Wendill met her, Norah lived inside herself, withdrawn and sullen. But when she’d touched her tongue to Gershon’s face and unintentionally brought him out of a deep sleep from which no one expected him to awake, Wendill quietly watched her change.
Although Gershon mistook her to be an agent of the new god Krystr—a god unknown to Wendill, which baffled him—Gershon had been quite accurate in his inclination to worship Norah.
Gradually, she accepted Gershon’s fawning. Timid at first, having a strong man like Gershon make himself meek in Norah’s presence had worked wonders. She’d become more comfortable among strangers.
Wendill became strangely fond of the man and would miss his presence. But he couldn’t help smiling every time he imagined how Gershon’s face would look if he learned Norah’s true identity.
At the sound of cracking ice, Wendill turned back to Norah, who tapped the nail of her forefinger against the eyeball of the iceman who seemed to lead the other frozen figures guarding the entrance to the forest. She punctured the icy shell. Norah covered her mouth with both hands in delight, mesmerized by a white wisp of fog streaming through the tiny portal she’d created. The ribbon of fog twisted and turned, and Norah said, “Pretty!”
But the fog shifted into the shape of a man, making Norah recoil. Edging her way to stand behind Wendill, she hissed, “Dragonslayer!”
“No need to worry,” Wendill said in the most soothing voice he could muster.
Wendill didn’t recognize the face formed by the fog, but he believed Norah. Wendill always recognized a dragonslayer even though he could never describe how. He often sensed something in the dragonslayer’s expression that gave him away. How wonderful that Norah had already developed this skill. It would serve her well.
“You’re safe. Dragonslayers are friends. They’re our allies.”
Wendill sensed her step away at his words.
Norah stared wide-eyed at the spirit of the dragonslayer that still floated above the icy shell he’d allowed the hail to form around him, willing to be entrapped inside the ice until it melted—or in this case, until Norah unintentionally released him.
The dragonslayer’s spirit smiled briefly at them before whisking into the forest. Perhaps he had important tasks to attend.
Norah sank to her knees, reaching for the ground to steady herself.
Wendill knelt beside her. “The dragonslayer girl—the one we follow—you are bound to her just as I was bound to the dragonslayer father of her father.”
“No,” Norah whispered. Tears spilled down her cheeks.
Wendill hesitated. Perhaps he had said too much too soon. These things required delicate handling. He noticed a small stone on the ground near Norah. He picked it up and handed it to her. Nodding toward the ice people, he said, “They’re trapped, too, like the dragonslayer before you set him free. They’re trapped like I was inside Dragon’s Head Point. Like you were on Tower Island.”
He watched Norah study the stone after letting him place it in the palm of her hand. She shivered hard and wiped the tears from her face. Still studying the stone, she rose to her feet.
Suddenly, she threw it, smashing open the ice figure next to the one that had held the dragonslayer.
A wisp of fog emerged from the broken ice figure, but it took no form. Instead, it merely drifted into the forest.
Methodically, Norah picked up stone after stone, hurling each one harder than the last, until all the ice figures lay in shards at the edge of the Forest of Aguille.
CHAPTER 44
Gershon walked in stunned silence, following his men without paying attention to where they led. First, his wife—his greatest possession—had been stolen from him by a fellow merchant, one he’d trusted for years. After being poisoned by a dragon conjured out of nowhere by the boy, Gershon fell into a deep sleep only to be awakened by Norah, a glorious agent of Krystr.
And now even she betrayed him.
Had the entire world turned against him?
“We’re here,” one of his men said.
Gershon snapped out of his misery long enough to notice they’d arrived at a small village. Harvested farmland surrounded a few dozen wattle-and-daub houses. Cattle grazed on the last pale blades of grass before they dried up for winter. He followed his men down the village’s dirt road and into the largest house. Gershon paused at the threshold, his vision fading as he stepped out of the light of day into the dimness of the house. He reached out for the doorjamb and held onto it to steady himself. His men greeted the homeowner and spoke quietly.
“And who do we have here?” a friendly voice bellowed.
“Gershon. Who are you?”
The friendly voice laughed in response. Gershon’s eyes adjusted to see a short man with bushy brown hair standing before him. “Clerk Thomas. Welcome to my home.” The man’s blue eyes seemed to twinkle. Gershon took in his odd dress of a white smock covered by a belted brown robe.
His garb made sense, because all clerks wore such clothing. The man claimed to be a clerk, a man who spread the word of the new god.
Gershon’s men made themselves at home around the hearth in the center of Clerk Thomas’s home. Two young women wearing simple blue smocks and white cloth bound around their heads to hide their hair tended the fire and steaming broth and potatoes cooking in iron pots. When one of Gershon’s men slapped the bottom on one of the women, she cried out.
Glancing over his shoulder, Clerk Thomas said to the woman, “No need to make a fuss, Cyntha. These men are my friends, and I expect you to make them at home while I walk with my new friend.” He turned back and smiled at Gershon. “My new friend Gershon.”
Gershon watched his men squeeze Cyntha’s bottom hard enough to make the girl wince. Gershon had gone for days without having his wife at hand for his convenience. Without the release she provided, he felt taut and brittle. Damn the woman! For the first time, Gershon wondered why she hadn’t fought back against Vinchi and the boy at the time they stole her. Margreet was a spry little thing. Many times she’d wriggled out of Gershon’s grasp, which had excited him and made her ultimate surrender even that much sweeter.
Gershon stood twice the size of Vinchi, so Margreet should have been able to free herself from that wretched merchant with little effort!
But you’ve seen the way he looks at her, a tiny voice in the back of Gershon’s mind said. What if she finally looked back?
“Follow me,” Clerk Thomas said, breezing past Gershon and out into the sunlit village.
Gershon staggered to keep up, the world now going white as a result of stepping from the dim house into the light.
“I understand you believe you encountered an agent of Krystr.”
Gershon nodded. “She saved my life.”
“I would beg to differ.”
Gershon stumbled and bumped into Clerk Thomas, who seized Gershon’s arm and kept him
from falling flat on his face. The clerk seemed surprisingly strong for a man of small stature.
Regaining his balance, Gershon stood up straight and tall. “I knocked on the very door of Death itself. I was attacked by a monster, a dragon, and slept for days. No one expected me to live, and yet she sucked the poison out of my skin and gave me new life. How could she not be an agent of Krystr?”
Clerk Thomas knelt by a patch of dried plants outside his home. “In the spring, the most beautiful flowers grow here. Lovely things. Lovely colors of purple and pink and red. They grow bountifully, and when they’re ripe for the taking, I pluck them.” He stood and motioned for Gershon to keep following him while he strolled through the village. “Has it never occurred to you that the one you claim as your savior is a woman?”
The clerk’s question stunned Gershon into silence. In truth, Gershon had failed to consider this fact.
“Women are here to serve men,” Clerk Thomas said. “And the world was a perfect place when only men lived here. The Krystr tells us that when men grew arrogant and needed to be reminded of their own weakness, a woman was sent to show that weakness to them. If we had been able to curb our arrogance and simply rejoice in the world, no woman would ever have been sent to ruin it.”
Gershon frowned. He’d heard part of this story told in various ways before, but some of the details were new to him. “The world was once perfect?”
Clerk Thomas nodded. “We would be living in the most wonderful world imaginable had not a vixen succeeded in tempting men and causing us to fall in disgrace for our weakness in succumbing to something beneath us.”
“Something beneath us,” Gershon said. “You mean a woman.”
Clerk Thomas nodded. “A woman.” He glanced up at the sky as if speaking in front of a divine audience. “So how could an evil creature be an agent of Krystr?”
Gershon’s heart sank. How could he have been duped so easily? How could he have let himself be humiliated by a woman? “It’s impossible,” he said, his voice cracking with shame. “Krystr’s agents are good, not evil.”
“And all women are evil.”
“Yes,” Gershon whispered. “I know.”
“It has come to my attention that some of the best clerks are men who have experienced the torment of women. They speak courageously from personal experience. There is no one better to warn others of the importance of minding their women with even more care than they mind their cattle or pigs or sheep.”
Gershon shook his head. “I trap animals—I don’t keep them. I have no interest in giving up my trade.” Even now, possibly the lowest moment of his existence, Gershon knew the one thing he could trust was his work. It felt good to trap animals and kill them and skin them. No woman could take that away from him.
“There is no need to give up anything.” Clerk Thomas smiled. “I’m a farmer and yet I’m also a clerk. And as I reap the benefits of my farmland, I also reap the benefits of my workers and followers.”
“Benefits?”
“Here, for example.” Clerk Thomas stopped in front of a modest wattle-and-daub house. “One of my farmhands and his new bride.” Without another word, Thomas entered the small house.
Not knowing what else to do, Gershon followed.
This time, his eyes adjusted more quickly to the dim light inside. A pretty girl in a green smock sat by the hearth and cut vegetables. A man, presumably her husband, sat in a corner fiddling with an ax.
“Is she serviceable?” Thomas called out.
The man rose to his feet quickly, followed by his wife who bowed meekly. “The blade needs sharpening,” the man said. “But the handle is loose. It could use replacing.”
“And it’s a fine day to look for good wood to replace that handle,” Clerk Thomas said cheerfully.
Worry creased the husband’s brow, and he stepped closer to his wife, whose face looked flushed from sitting so close to the fire. “I had planned to spend the day with my bride. I was too tired to see much of her during harvest.”
“You’ve the entire winter approaching. You’ll have so much time to spend with her that you’ll be sick of her company by spring.”
The man reached for his wife’s hand, and she clung to it gratefully. “With all respect, clerk—”
Thomas maintained his cheerfulness. “Respect comes from actions, not words. I suggest you spend the next hour finding the best piece of wood possible to replace your handle.”
Still, neither the man nor his wife moved.
“My dear,” Clerk Thomas said to the girl. “Tell your husband to go on his way.”
“It’s fine,” she said with too much brightness in her voice as she kept clinging to her husband’s hand. “Everything will be fine.”
Gershon fidgeted when the husband stared at him.
Clerk Thomas laid a strong hand on the man’s shoulder, pushing him out the door. “We need to ask your wife her opinion of clerks.” After the husband stumbled onto the road, slouched in defeat, Clerk Thomas slammed the door shut. Facing the girl, he said, “Tell my friend Gershon what women think of clerks.”
Her eyes glazed and she stared into empty space. Gershon recognized the expression. He’d seen it on Margreet’s face whenever he struggled with her to convince her of the time for his release.
“Clerks are the most trustworthy men,” she said. “They are the best men. The most handsome.”
Clerk Thomas spoke softly. “My friend Gershon may decide to study with me. Can you show him what a clerk can expect from his patrons?”
She moved stiffly, as if not thinking, and raised her smock up to her waist, revealing her nakedness underneath.
Gershon watched in stunned silence. Each man owned his wife as personal property. No woman ever showed her body to anyone other than her husband or, if unmarried, her lover.
Clerk Thomas had already unbelted his robe and shrugged out of it. Startled, he stared at Gershon. “How could I forget my manners?” Thomas said. With a fresh smile, he gestured toward the girl and asked Gershon, “Would you care to go first?”
CHAPTER 45
The night they set the spirits at Limru free, Astrid, Vinchi, and Margreet camped on the outskirts of the temple. The next morning, Astrid stood outside the stone circle, now filled with ashes. It didn’t make sense. Bones shouldn’t reduce that quickly to cinders. And the dried leaves fueling the fire had burned far longer and hotter than any leaves she’d ever known.
She hadn’t needed to ask the others if they saw the smoke spirits rise from the fire. Astrid recognized this truth from the shock and awe on Vinchi and Margreet’s faces last night in the glow of the firelight. For a moment, Vinchi looked like he tried to speak with one of the spirits until it darted toward Margreet. Then Astrid had seen the spirit’s face and noticed the resemblance between that spirit and Margreet. The spirits left soon after they took form, rising up through the enormous limbs of the sacred trees of Limru and into the darkening sky.
But the fire burned inexplicably for hours, and the embers glowed through the night, casting an eerie white glow on the stones forming the circle. Astrid had come awake in the early morning hours and knelt outside the stone circle to watch the last embers’ light wink out of existence. Only then did the eerie glow fade from the stones.
Later, Vinchi awoke and started a breakfast fire. Margreet and Astrid sat on the logs next to him. He reached into the pouch hanging from his belt, handed something to Margreet, and spoke in her language.
Margreet sat quietly for several minutes, staring at the object in her hand.
Straining to see what it was, Astrid asked, “What did you give her?”
“I found it when we gathered the bones,” Vinchi said, staring at Margreet. “It is the sign of the Keepers of Limru. An iron pin in the shape of a tree.”
Astrid glanced at the pin on Vinchi’s hat that identified him as a member of the weapons guild. “Did the Keepers wear them the way you wear yours?”
Vinchi’s voice softened. “In the old
days, yes.”
Margreet closed her fingers around the tree-shaped pin, walked toward Astrid, and sat next to her. Margreet placed the pin in Astrid’s hand and spoke foreign words.
“She wants you to have it,” Vinchi said.
“Didn’t this belong to her people? Shouldn’t she keep it for herself?”
Speaking quickly, sensing Astrid’s hesitation to accept the gift, Margreet closed Astrid’s fingers around the pin.
Vinchi rubbed his eyes. “She says it belongs to you now.”
Seeing the determined set of Margreet’s mouth, Astrid nodded her thanks and began to attach the pin to her shirt.
Margreet and Vinchi protested in unison. As Margreet pointed to the pouch on Astrid’s belt, Vinchi said, “Never wear it outside of the Northlands. It could attract the attention of the people who killed the Keepers.”
Nodding, Astrid tucked the pin inside her pouch. She then said, “Can you take me to the Dragon’s Well?”
Astrid worried that Vinchi would question her reason for wanting to see the Dragon’s Well. She couldn’t tell Vinchi or anyone else about Taddeo. What could she say? That the animals Vinchi and everyone else believed were dragons were actually lizards, overgrown as a result of being overly impressed with themselves? That true dragons were shapeshifters that often took the shape of men and women whenever they ventured outside of their caves? That Taddeo had told her she needed to drink from the Dragon’s Well in order to become whole again?
Vinchi questioned Margreet, and she answered him.
“She knows where it is. The well is inside the temple. Among the trees.”
“Will she show us?”
Again, Vinchi posed the question.
Margreet wrapped her arms around her bent legs, tucked to her chest. She considered them both carefully for a few moments, but mostly she considered Astrid. Margreet spoke, and her voice softened.
“Margreet wants to eat first. Then, she says, she’ll show us where the Dragon’s Well is located.” Vinchi fed a series of small sticks into the new fire. “I’ve heard stories that her mother was one of the Keepers of Limru. I think I saw her ghost last night and that Margreet saw her, too.”