“Here,” said a voice, “quickly.” The invitation came muffled by the beating of hail upon the earth.
Braethen peered around him, shielding his eyes as he searched for the owner of the voice. He could see nothing, and the hail bit at the flesh of his hand.
“Quickly,” the voice repeated, “to your right.”
Braethen still could see no one, but he hastily followed the directions, finding himself in front of a dwelling a short distance away. Drifts of hail already collected against the outer walls, and rolled from the thatched roof in thick clumps. The shutters had been latched tightly against the storm. A rug similar to Ne’Pheola’s, serving as a door, hung from the lintel of this even smaller hovel. A hand drew back the rug, offering entrance into a darkened room. Braethen hesitated. In the darkness he could not see a face. Hail continued to pelt down in painful waves, covering the ground in a blanket of white. Unable to stand the thrashing, Braethen dashed inside, away from the onslaught.
Without even the neutral light that had seeped through the glass windows at Ne’Pheola’s, the room was utterly dark. The sound of feet was the only evidence of the presence of Braethen’s rescuer. Slowly, his eyes adjusted; dark shapes showed themselves against the lighter shadows. Behind a table stood a figure wearing a coarse wrap much like the one Ne’Pheola wore. She stood patiently looking at him through the darkness.
“Thank you,” Braethen said. “I’d nowhere else to go.” He wiped his face with his cloak and looked around. A small bed, cupboard, and desk furnished the modest home. In one corner stood a trunk half covered with a piece of some delicate fabric. Atop it a slender vase held a number of green stems. It appeared to be an attempt to brighten the spartan room, but the stems, bearing no flowers or buds, seemed more dismal for their thinness.
“How often I’ve said the same thing,” the voice came again. This time Braethen heard the soft inflection of a young woman, different from the even tones of Ne’Pheola. He guessed this voice had not been in Widows Village as long, her remark almost witty, satiric, but bleakly underscored by the sizzle of hail upon the roof and streets outside.
“Do you have a candle?” Braethen asked, growing tired of the dark.
“Yes,” she answered, “but the dark might be preferable to you.”
“The dark has never been preferable to me,” Braethen said. “Would you light it?”
The woman went to the hearth behind her and struck flint to a bed of straw. When it flared alight, she added several small sticks before taking one lighted piece of straw and touching it to a candle wick. The room brightened, but seemed emptier in the light.
“That is better,” Braethen said, and looked back toward the woman. Terrible burn scars had ruined one side of her face, the disfigurement running from her forehead across one eye to her cheek. Scar tissue had grown completely over her left eye; she refused to look at him with the other.
She could not have been much older than Wendra. She wore a shapeless grey dress. Her hair and skin were as drab as her clothing. Over her ear she had tucked a green stem like the one in the vase. It was all the color she bore, apart from the blue of her one good eye. Around her delicate shoulders, she had wrapped a shawl. Her hands trembled, as if unfamiliar with visitors, which Braethen imagined were few here.
“You may leave if you wish,” she said, still not looking at him.
“But I may stay, too?”
Her gaze finally found him. “Yes.” Braethen thought he saw a thin smile touch her lips.
“Well then, I am Braethen. What may I call you?”
“Names have no—”
“But I am not from here,” he said. “And where I come from, our custom is to know a person’s name.”
The woman’s gaze grew distant. “I was once called Ja’Nene.”
“Then I shall use that name,” Braethen said cheerfully. “And it suits you well. You should make a habit of using it.”
“You do not understand,” Ja’Nene said.
Braethen looked about and lowered his hood. He spoke loudly, hoping to fill the room with sound, and paced as he spoke, hoping to fill it with movement. Ja’Nene stood still and did not speak. “I’ve not seen such a storm in ten years,” Braethen said. “In the Hollows, we wait for the hail to stop, then rush into the streets to gather it into balls and throw at one another. Usually only the young ones play the game. But can there be anything funnier than someone getting hit in the ass with a hail-ball?” Braethen chuckled.
Ja’Nene may have smiled weakly, or it may have been a trick of the light.
He went on. “Wait, there is something funnier. We have a grand inn at home, and the roof is not quite even on one side. In the winter, melting snow falls at the foot of the kitchen door. When the skies clear or the night comes, the water there freezes. Our good man, Hambley, can never seem to remember this, and I’ve waited in the morning cold for him to arise early and come out his kitchen door to fetch eggs from his coop. The funniest sound is a man slipping on the ice and falling on his ass.”
Braethen laughed more genuinely, seeing Hambley in his mind’s eye pinwheeling to stay on his feet before landing hard on the seat of his trousers. This time, Ja’Nene clearly smiled, the smile turning to laughter, and the look and sound of it stole his breath. It was beautiful and weary and sad, like the first touch of yellow in the leaves at the arrival of autumn.
Their laughter faded to smiles.
“It has been a long time since I laughed. It feels strange now.” She motioned to her scarred face.
“What happened?” Braethen asked.
“The Exigents came for my husband. When I tried to stop them, they threw an oil lamp at me.” She faltered, a tear escaping her good eye before she resumed. “It struck my face and shattered, spilling burning oil. I ran into the street to find a water trough to douse the flame. By then, the damage was done. And when I returned to our home, Molinu was dead. I felt it even then; I knew we would never be together again. The Undying Vow was torn asunder. And so I came here, as all of us eventually do.”
“Do none of you have families you could go to?” Braethen asked.
Another weary smile pulled at the ruined half of her mouth and cheek. “It’s hard to explain, but when that union is severed, you need the company of those who know the feeling. And yet…” She paused, her gaze distant. “With time, the sisterhood and empathy die from the burden of grief. For me”—she looked up at Braethen—“well, a woman wants to feel womanly. The night they killed Molinu, they stole that from me, too.”
Braethen got up and came around the table and took her hand in his own. “I think what a woman is has very little to do with how she looks, Ja’Nene. On this topic, I will suffer no argument.”
She looked up at him, another tear falling from her useful eye. “Would you kiss me?”
Braethen stared back at her. Ja’Nene did not look away. Deep gravity etched her gentle, ruined features, touched with a pleading hopefulness.
“Is that proper?” was all Braethen could think to say.
“Then you will not,” she said.
“Wait—”
“Questions are the last effort to avoid action or honesty. Is it because I am ugly?”
Braethen felt as though he’d been slapped. It brought him back to himself. “I have come a great distance in a very short time,” he began. “And I have seen things I had only read about in books, some things I did not believe to be more than tales created by gifted authors.” He knelt to look at her eye to eye. “And today I came into this sad and dreary place and found a village of people who have removed themselves from the company of others. People who believe their lives are over or of so little worth that they choose to live apart from those who might care for them. It isn’t proper—”
She shot him a scathing look. Braethen bit back his words, and painfully watched as her anger turned first to sadness and then quickly to apathy. He much preferred her scorn. The diffident look left upon her face served as an indictment Braethe
n could not bear. She sat at the table silently and ignored him, the shadow of her head cast large upon the table.
Braethen desperately looked around the room, searching to find something to talk about, something to say, to investigate, praise, comment upon. He lit upon the thin, green blades of tall grass, the stems sitting in the vase. They, too, cast long shadows upon the wall, like ethereal fingers trying to claim purchase upon the physical world. The image struck him.
Finally, in an emotionless monotone, Ja’Nene began to speak. “Forgive me. I forgot myself. They say I will eventually come to understand, to accept what I am now.” The haunted sound of her words was more disturbing than Ne’Pheola’s. Perhaps because of her youth.
“What you are now?”
“It was rash of me. But please understand.” She turned her one good eye on him. “I don’t ask because I am love-starved, though that is certainly true. Nor because I seek a memory to warm me on bitter nights.” A tear fell gently down her cheek from her eye. “I sense a gentleness in you. A kind of caring. I have always been fast to know such things about men. And I”—she swallowed, tears coming more freely—“I just wanted to remember … the closeness.”
Braethen looked from Ja’Nene to the long blades of grass and back again, understanding dawning in him.
“Why do you pick the grass?” he asked. And answering his own question, said, “It is because it is not so desolate. Because you hold out hope against the life left to you. Because whatever joy you knew has not been bled from you, even if it is only seen in a blade of grass.”
Something awakened in him at the revelation of what he had just said, an admiration for this woman dressed in grey and living in such a vacant, dreary place. He put his hand on her scarred cheek. She jerked away at first, but after a moment inclined her cheek toward his hand, a warm tear falling on his knuckles.
“Despair overtakes my heart now, as for all of us it eventually does. One day I will wake and will not walk to the hills to pluck a few blades of grass. I fear that day. I can feel it coming.…”
Braethen looked at her, and in that moment did not see her ruined face, but the girl she had been. And thinking of her, he leaned in and kissed her tenderly on the lips.
When he drew slowly away, he saw wonder and gratitude in her eyes. He smiled kindly and nodded to her. Then gazing around the room, Braethen memorized the look and smell of desolation. Fixing on the blade of grass, he turned back to speak directly to her. “It will not always be this way. A blade of grass might sire a forest.”
He stood and crossed to the rug-door. When he looked back, he saw Ja’Nene, sitting in the shadows of her small fire and candle, staring after him. He remembered the darkness he had felt when he took the sword, and his cry when he lifted that sword to defend the Sheason’s life. It stirred in him the one thing more he could leave her with.
“You are beautiful. And I will not forget your name … Ja’Nene.”
The sodalist stepped back into the hail and strode toward the others with more purpose in his step than he remembered ever knowing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Reputations
The sun-weathered man arrived at the small town of Solencia. Today he traveled with one of his wards for whom he had been unable to find a home. He would need help in transporting and protecting the provisions he had come for—the road back to the Scar could be treacherous. And these excursions away were good opportunities for his wards to learn more of the ways of men, and a means to test their desire and readiness to strike out on their own.
Solencia squatted against a hill, little more than a collection of merchant shops and a smithy, which did most of their trade with overland travelers. A few homes dotted the road into and out of the place, and some few tents and wagons had been set up along the highway, where travelers—who could not or would not afford a room—took a day of rest while they gathered supplies.
It was a town of little talk. Prices weren’t negotiated and passersby didn’t stop to trade greetings. Even the one tavern hunkered small and quiet at one end of the main road—a place to get a drink, nothing more. While outside, the sound of wagon wheels or horse hooves seemed the louder for the lack of human voices.
All of which suited the man and his ward, who were used to the absence of human sound.
They stopped in front of the general store and went in. The traveler handed a list of items to the shopkeep and dropped exact payment on the counter without a word. They waited patiently while the order was filled, then began to shoulder the provisions out to their small wagon for the trip back.
On their last haul, voices finally interrupted the solitude of Solencia.
“So it is our outcast come to take our food and water back to his desert home. And he brings with him one of his bastards this time.”
The man turned toward the sound. Three men stood in the road several strides away, challenge in their stances. They held weapons in their hands. The traveler took a quick survey of the scene, noting the men’s positions, full complements of weapons, the ground itself, onlookers, everything.
This was not the first time someone had called him out, hoping to make a reputation.
“Go home,” the weathered man said. “We have no quarrel with you. We will take our supplies and be gone in a moment’s time. There is no need of a contest between us.”
His challengers laughed, and the leader said, “It is not enough that you take our goods, but the word is you also take our arms. I think you have much to answer for. And we will not wait upon the councils of justice to put things right.”
The man placed his sack of oats in the wagon bed and spoke softly to his ward. “Be calm. I will talk with them. If it comes to conflict, remember your training. You are young but practiced. Have confidence.”
Despite his words, the sun-worn man did not want to see the youth—barely in his thirteenth year—tested on the road of Solencia. He approached his challengers, his weapons still sheathed.
He glared at each one, being sure they saw the look in his eye—something he knew a wise fighter could use to gauge what would follow. “You are not the first to call me out so that you might earn your reputations by putting me down. But if you persist, I promise you, you will not be the last.”
The lead man looked back evenly, deploying his men to encircle the traveler. “Your reputation is known, both for prowess and betrayal. And now for crimes against the innocent. For all these reasons we will not heed your threats.”
“Don’t be a fool,” the man replied. “We need not shed blood this night. But I will not ask again. We are packed and ready to leave.”
The traveler could see immediately that his words had fallen on deaf ears. He cursed the circumstances that made another man’s ambition of him. There were always those who sought to claim they had slain the outcast. But this many years into his isolation, it had less to do with the reasons for his isolation, and more to do with the notoriety killing him might win a man.
And down those years, the skill and refinement of his combat gifts had sent more men to their earth than he could count. Nor did he lament a single one.
“Prepare yourself,” the challenger said into the cool night air.
With that, the weathered man’s blood cooled and he set himself.
The attack came fast, but predictable. A knife shot out from the lead challenger’s left hand, meant to put the outcast off balance while his sword arm brought down a hammer stroke that could end the contest before it began.
The man dodged the knife and in a fluid motion stepped to the side, unsheathing his own sword as easily as he drew a breath. He removed the challenger’s arm in token of the offense with which they’d charged him, then put his sword through his heart. A scream shot out across Solencia.
But it did not issue from the throat of his attacker. The man pivoted around in time to see the two accomplices fall upon his ward, who blocked one stroke, but took one in the belly from the other man.
He rushed to the bo
y’s aid, howling defiance to distract them as he went. But they seemed not to hear, as they each raised their blades against his ward. The lad ducked and rolled, grimacing with the pain of his wound. The boy brought his blade up to deflect another strike and thrust, sticking one of his attackers. His sword hung in the flesh of the man, and as he fought to pull it back, the other smiled wickedly and used both hands in his final swing.
“No!” the outcast cried, now a mere stride away.
But he was too late, and the blade of the second man tore out the boy’s throat. The lad’s eyes showed awful surprise at his own death, followed fast by a look like a longing for home that the weathered man would never forget.
Then the boy fell back, his head striking the edge of the wagon bed before he landed on the hard earth.
In fury, the outcast laid into the killer. With a single raging stroke, he took the man’s head from his body. He followed the momentum of his sword, doing a complete turn, and brought it around on the other man, ripping his throat out as his cohort had the outcast’s young companion’s.
The challengers fell almost simultaneously, their heavy bodies thudding against the road and bleeding out. The man dropped to his knees. He had a few precious seconds to hold the lad and look some comfort into his eyes before the light there went out forever.
It was once again quiet, and terribly still, as he sat alone on the road of Solencia, holding a child he had been entrusted to protect. He mourned his ward, dead because prideful men had sought the outcast’s death to bolster their own esteem.
It struck him yet again, as it had so often before, that no matter where he went, he never escaped his condemnation, which would spread with the death of this lad. The poor boy, dead so young. His heart ached at the sight of him, while growing yet harder and more rancorous.
Something fundamental had to change.
The land of men could not endure with such pettiness, such selfishness as had banished him into the desert to begin with, and now threatened him and those he safeguarded … even when merely buying a bag of oats.
Vault Of Heaven 01 - The Unremembered Page 30