by Gregory Ashe
Chapter Twenty-seven
“For the last time,” Irwa said. “Let it go, Kjell. I am not going to change my faith.”
Kjell’s handsome face fell slightly, but his pale blue eyes remained locked with hers. “I’m not committed to changing your religion,” the man said. “Just to awakening your faith.”
The people of the small village moved around them, not stopping to listen or gawk at the small, dark-haired woman who had suddenly become part of their lives. A few of the children still tagged along wherever Irwa went, but they no longer stared; they simply followed her from place to place around the village, as if determined to keep their oddity in sight. Right now they played on the village green, dodging a lone sheep as one of the huge blond men of the village known as Statnbyrg left the town. Another shepherd would undoubtedly take his place; the green was never unoccupied for long as shepherds came and went from the mountain village.
“My faith is fine,” Irwa said. “No matter what you expect to have happened to me, whatever you think the proper reaction is to my experience, my faith is fine.”
Frustration marred Kjell’s fine features. He tugged absently at one of his thick braids. “You make it sound like I want you to be unhappy, that I’d prefer you to lose your faith. That’s not the case. I see you pray, every morning, every night. I hear you say the words. Sometimes I believe that you truly mean what you pray for. But there is something in the way you carry yourself, in your posture when you pray. Even more so, there’s a darkness in your eyes.”
“Darkness in my eyes?” Irwa laughed. “In case you hadn’t noticed, my eyes are much darker than anyone’s here. I think your list of symptoms may be a bit skewed.”
“See, even now you seek to turn away my words,” Kjell said, his face coloring. “I’ve seen this look before, though, Irwa. I’ve seen it in—” He stopped himself, then, his cheeks turning an impossibly bright shade of red. Irwa wondered, curiously, what he had been about to say. For a moment, she imagined it had been Hynnar’s name. “I’ve seen it in the men of this village, and the men around here, first when Jaegal conquered us, and then when Lord Brech began consolidating everything in the cities. It’s the look of someone who has given up.”
His words hit closer than Irwa would have liked. For whatever professions of faith she made, even in spite of her own continued, sincere belief in Ishahb, in his power to save—as he had that night in the cart, when she had dreamed of the terrible fire—in spite of all of that, Irwa felt like a piece of her was missing, broken away during her time in Meik’s camp and never restored. The worst part was that she did not know what it was.
Her only words were, “I’m fine, Kjell. And I appreciate your attempts to help me by . . . explaining the tenets of Skallid. Isn’t that more Eyo’s job? She’s the priestess for your village, isn’t she?”
“The erldur,” Kjell said. His whole face lit up at the mention of Eyo’s name. “It’s her job to perform the ceremonies, yes, but the faith of Skallid is something we all share. You should know better than anyone that faith is not limited to the priesthood.”
Irwa nodded, unsure of how to respond. Kjell and Eyo found it immensely amusing, ridiculous even, that her profession was the priesthood. Eyo was erldur, and Kjell was something of an elder or a scribe or something within the village, but both of them worked every day at their small store of dry goods, and twice since Irwa’s arrival at the village Kjell had traveled to Fakholme to bring back more supplies. Kjell seemed to sense her confusion and laughed.
“If nothing else,” Kjell said, “your time here seems to have done you well physically. How is your arm?”
She glanced down at the limb in question, now neatly dressed and wrapped in a sturdy cast. It barely pained her at all now. Her other wounds—scrapes and bruises—were almost all healed, and few visible marks remained of her time with Meik’s men. Her mind and spirit, however, continued to suffer. She still woke every night, most times screaming, in the small bedroom that she shared with Eyo and Kjell. Neither one had said anything to her; in the day, they acted as though nothing happened.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine. I need to leave soon, to travel to Fakholme. My friend may have made it there; she might be waiting for me.”
“When you’re ready, you can go,” Kjell said firmly. “There’s no point in leaving now if you’re going to have a relapse of fever halfway there.”
“I don’t want to go,” Irwa said. “I . . . like this place. But I have to leave before the first snows.” Maribah had seemed hurried during their time together, as though racing to meet a deadline, but she had never shared that information with Irwa. Now, in the peaceful village, Irwa felt little need to continue her mission—although now, her delay came from her selfish enjoyment of Kjell’s and Eyo’s company. Her previous objections, to both her magic and taking life, were ashes, burned away by Ishahb’s purifying fire. “If I do not find my friend in Fakholme, I want to be able to leave Greve Sindal before spring.”
Kjell smiled and said, “A perfectly understandable request. Now, if I’m not mistaken, these children are waiting for you to do something utterly fabulous and outlandish, and my presence is inhibiting you.”
Irwa laughed when she saw the wide-eyed children, now bored with the empty green, staring at her again. “More likely they want to hear me try to speak with them,” she said. “It’s embarrassing when a child of two can put together these words more easily than I can.”
Kjell laughed. “It’ll come; just imagine how Hynnar sounded when he first tried to speak Jaecan.”
“That bad?” Irwa asked.
“He once told our tutor that his dinner was rude instead of raw,” Kjell said. “And his pronunciation . . . well, I won’t even start.”
Irwa laughed again; it surprised her how easily she laughed now, how quickly everyday life had become, well, normal. “I’ll have to ask him about that,” she said, testing Kjell. “Next time I see him.”
Kjell’s laughter died, and his face turned dark. “I think he’d like that,” was all he said, and then, “I need to get back to the store; Eyo has things to attend to this afternoon.” He bid her farewell and left her there, with the children watching her as they began a new game of tag.
What is the mystery of Hynnar? Irwa wondered. Every time she mentioned him, to Kjell or Eyo, she got the same reaction—either feigned ignorance, or outright refusal to respond. The look of anger, though, that Kjell frequently showed, or Eyo’s sighs and quick changes of conversation, made Irwa think that, whatever prompted Hynnar’s behavior, it pained his brother and sister-in-law. And that, in turn, only made her more curious.
The children ended their game of tag with fighting that turned into more playful wrestling among the boys. The girls watched, giggling, and darted glances at Irwa. In spite of the blank looks that the rest of the villagers offered her, their children seemed more than happy to have Irwa among them. As she watched, though, one woman, her face lined with care, her hair thinning, came over to collect two of the girls, and she fixed Irwa with an angry frown before marching the children into one of the thatched-roof homes.
Irwa stood up from the low stone wall that encircled the green, and the children scattered like startled birds, each taking up a different position to watch her walk down the only street in the village. Kjell’s store, which served as his home also, stood at the edge of the village, where walls of the surrounding mountains almost closed, leaving only a narrow trail between the grassy valley and the rest of the world.
Irwa ducked into the building, hearing the children burst into conversation as the door shut behind her. Eyo glanced up from a bolt of cloth, but when she saw it was Irwa, she turned her attention back to her wares. “Hello, Irwa,” she said, one finger tracing something in the cloth. “How has the day been?”
“Fine,” Irwa said. She did not stop to talk, but headed toward the back door. “I’m trying to lose the children for a little bit; I need some time to think,” she said over her shoulder.
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br /> “Don’t leave the valley,” Eyo called after her. Irwa was already at the door. She raised her hand and formed a cheiron, focusing her will on the arcane movement. The gateway came much easier than it had when she had first begun practicing on her first day in the village. The cheira and hepisteis, once intentionally forgotten, had come back to her. She did not trust herself yet to try to prepare the parakeis; too much could go wrong if she made a mistake.
The spell worked though; Irwa felt the air shimmer around her. It wasn’t much of a spell, really—all it did was distract people, so that as long as she kept moving, she would have a much better chance of slipping past the children. And anyone else who might be watching for me, like Kjell. After their earlier conversation, she needed a break from the man’s overwhelming desire to fix her.
She headed back the way she had come, passing the green—already occupied by another shepherd’s flock—and the rows of rough, stone houses. The village was built at the edge of valley, where several different mountain streams came together to form a small river, which ran all the way to the far side of the valley to form a shallow lake. The valley itself, though, was wide and deep, with plenty of rocky folds breaking up the long swaths of green. Closed off from the world, except for the shepherds, the valley seemed impossibly safe to Irwa. Children and adults alike ignored her passing, whether out of distaste or enchantment, she did not know.
When she had passed beyond the last of the ancient stone walls surrounding the village, Irwa let her enchantment slip away and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Every use of magic was an imposition of form on chaos. Irwa had gone so long without practice, though, that even simple hepisteis fatigued her.
Her time in Meik’s camp, though, had broken down the last barriers that she had raised so long ago between herself and the magic. Forgotten were her long arguments about the use of power, absent her own sense of shame at what such power had done to her. Now all that remained for Irwa was the law of strength and the grim determination never to let herself be weak again.
When she had walked for about an hour, Irwa finally made her way to one of the strands of white pines that clustered on the edges of the valley. She took one final look, to make sure that no one was watching. For all of Kjell’s and Eyo’s hospitality, she doubted very much that they would be able to keep the villagers from stoning her if they became frightened. There was no one around, though, and so Irwa began to practice.
Hepisteis and cheira tumbled from her in fits as she struggled to open half-remembered gateways. A great dragon swelled within the glade, smoke and fire leaking from his closed jaws, and then collapsed into whirling clouds of cinders that swept through the trees, blackening bark and igniting the dry needles that covered the floor. Flushing with exertion, Irwa reached out, suffocating flames. The gateways were simple—she did not open anything higher than jal—but they left her panting. Even as she worked, she remembered with envy Maribah’s masterful control, the ease with which she had killed that man in Jan-as-Subh.
When she finished, Irwa’s too-long dress, borrowed from Eyo, was drenched with sweat. Irwa left the glade and stretched out on the grass, cropped short by grazing sheep, near the river. Dusk had fallen, and although the last light of day still showed from behind the mountains, much of the sky overhead had already fallen into darkness, and the first stars stared down at her, incredibly close and bright.
She lay there for a long time, the cool breeze from the mountains making her shiver in the growing darkness. Irwa could feel the part of her that was missing, the part that Kjell had pointed out, but she could not identify it. Her faith was whole; she had felt Ishahb’s touch, she had been rescued by his power from that camp. The pain that still came over her, the screams in the night, well, they were to be expected; it would take time to heal spiritually as well as physically from that ordeal.
Even as Irwa thought about what Kjell had said, though, her thoughts went back, again and again, to Hynnar, and to the nervous smile he had given her when he left. She pushed the thought away more than once, but it returned, interrupting when she least expected. Who is he? What is he doing with Meik and his men? Something unexpectedly light fluttered around inside her.