Paden nodded with a contemplative sigh. “I knew a bard, once, with the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. He composed entire ballads and epics on the spot, if you requested it. They were intricate and clever, more moving than half the highest-praised masterpieces of the last few centuries.” The man smiled and took a deep breath. “He was brilliant and could have been a master in his own right. But beyond his music, when he wasn’t performing, the man was useless. He stuttered painfully, even on his own name. Couldn’t cook his own meals. Couldn’t lace his own breeches. Couldn’t count the coin he earned for his gift. He got paid a lot less than he should have once people caught on. But when he sang...” The healer shook his head. “Not a dry eye in the room.”
For a moment, Kherron let himself imagine such a man—what it must have been to excel so tremendously at one perfect task and lack so garishly in everything else. “I’d like to think my shortcomings aren’t quite so obvious.” He was entirely sincere, but he found himself smirking all the same, just to combat the despair of such a tragic concept.
Dipping his head, the healer replied, “At the very least, you’ve succeeded in masking them.” When he looked up, he caught Kherron’s gaze for only a moment before glancing away and pulling at his chin.
Kherron was glad for the encouragement, though such sentiments carried far more weight than they should have coming from a man he barely knew. He couldn’t help but wonder what parts of his own self had drawn the healer to him like this. It was nothing like Siobhas’ unyielding jests and attempts to play the trustworthy guide, even as the cat-man had led him toward Hephorai and Zerod, fully aware of the deceitful part he’d played in Kherron’s journey. Nor did Paden harbor the same desperate, fierce longing Kherron had found in Uishen, who’d spurned him and made every step of their business arrangement unnecessarily difficult until they’d set out on their passage across the Sylthurst; while he mourned the ferryman’s pointless death and knew he’d never forget the sailor turned eccentric pioneer, their friendship had originated from isolation and necessity. This was something else entirely—something more like a respect he’d never known—and he could not be certain whether Paden’s interest in him was authentic or stemmed from entirely different, hidden motives.
When he returned his attention to their newly arranged pile of heavy, damp firewood, he found himself wanting very much to be of use—to prove to himself at the very least that he was here for a reason. He’d gone from toiling his life away beneath a hammer to caring for Dehlyn to frantically searching for her like a child in the dark. He’d obeyed the wardens, then Torrahs, then Siobhas and Zerod, in their own way. Now that he’d separated himself from Dehlyn, emerged from the violet realm not unscathed but shorn from his burden, he no longer wished to listen to anyone else. Everyone had led him astray, one way or the other, but through all of it, the one constant he’d never doubted was that he could do things others simply could not. And that, he decided, would be his driving force.
He softened his gaze at the pile of wood, slipping into that space between seeing a thing and hearing it clear as day, and asked again for fire. Both the wood and the heat succumbed to his request, bending beneath his consideration like grass beneath a gentle step. The wet pile burst into a healthy flame, as if it had been burning already for some time and had finally all caught.
Paden startled only slightly, blinking against the sudden glare of flame before he chuckled. “Just as unsettling the second time.” The man rubbed his arms in the briskness, as if the fire’s warmth had reminded him just how cold he really was.
Kherron couldn’t help his own secret smile. He was well aware of the fact that, among all the other things he had done with his abilities, summoning fire might have been the simplest. But doing that, at least, kept getting easier.
They were silent again in the hollow, each man content with himself to stare into the flames. Kherron sat back and rested his head against the stone wall, his gaze drifting to finally explore the place to which Aelis had brought them. The growing daylight spilled through the open entrance, lending far more clarity and detail than could ever have been managed by flame alone, even summoned as it was. The bed of lichen growing where Aelis had slept and moving up the walls was a deep, lush green—greener than he would have imagined in such a cold, half-frozen climate—interspersed with lighter, brighter versions of itself closer to yellow. The growth stopped just above Paden’s head, revealing a shimmer of mineral sparkle where the light hit it. And above that, Kherron’s eyes were drawn to a shape—a whorl of copper amidst the silver and grey—before he realized it was itself not part of the stone. Someone had drawn it there.
He couldn’t make out all the intended shapes he soon found lining the wall above the lichen growth, but he did make out the swirling, round curve of what signified wind, different from the closed circles of rippling water and the points of chopping waves. And those were distinguished still from the sharp, pointed burst of what could only have been drawings of fire. Among these were crude depictions of trees and flowers, of winged creatures and four-legged beasts and odd combinations of them all. There were plenty of forms he didn’t think he’d recognize even if he studied them upside-down, but now that he’d noticed the copper-colored images spreading down the wall into the darkness farther into the cavern, he couldn’t un-see them. It amazed him how he had not spotted any of it until now.
“What do you think that is?” he asked Paden, nodding at the wall behind the healer. Beyond giving them another conversation piece, if they wanted it—he couldn’t fathom how long Aelis would be in returning—he wanted to be sure he hadn’t imagined the drawings. They felt secret, somehow, sacred in an old, nearly obsolete way, but it would be nice to know if seeing hidden visions projected on stone walls was another ability to add to his list.
The healer gave him a questioning glance, then turned on the ground to look up. He scanned the wall, craning his neck up toward the cavern’s ceiling. “What?”
“The copper... patterns,” Kherron slowly replied. “They’re nearly the same color as the wall, just slightly different.” That was a complete lie; they shone out to him now beneath the rising sunlight nearly as much as if they’d been depicted there in fresh blood. While that thought was a little startling, he pushed it aside, not wanting to make either of them feel foolish if Paden could not, in fact, see what Kherron saw.
The healer peered closer at the wall, squinting, his gaze brushing the worn surface with more intentional focus. “Oh... look at that.” He raised a tentative hand, and while Kherron believed the man saw something, he didn’t think they looked at it in the same way. Or perhaps it was the figures themselves showing each man something different. “Is that a wolf?” Paden asked, pointing to a shape closest to him above the line of lichen. He turned to look at Kherron with a smirk of amusement.
“I think so,” Kherron replied. It was, in fact, very obviously a wolf’s head captured on the wall, telling him both that the healer wasn’t lying and that he had assumed correctly; Paden seemed only to notice very little of what was actually there.
“That’s incredible,” the man said, turning back to study the stone. “These must be incredibly old. They’re nearly impossible to make out.” He huffed out a surprised laugh. “How did you manage to see this in the first place?”
Kherron ran a hand through his hair, smiling at the man’s astonishment. “I’d been staring at it long enough.” The healer snorted but didn’t seem to recognize Kherron’s omission. He raised his hand again and drew it across the shimmering surface of the wall, as if he would feel the symbols beneath his fingers. The sight of it stirred something protective and not altogether accepting in Kherron, as if the man had helped himself to Kherron’s things without invitation. It seemed completely absurd, but he couldn’t shake the feeling. “Hand me the waterskin?” he asked, needing something to distract him and to pull the healer’s hands away from the copper designs.
It worked; Paden turned with a nod and grabbed the
waterskin from beside him. He shook it briefly and frowned. “It’s empty.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a river conveniently nearby...” Kherron said, partially joking. He knew now he could find water if he really needed it, but that wasn’t his purpose.
“I have no idea,” the healer replied. “But snowmelt works just as well.”
Kherron nodded and reached around the fire. “I’ll do it.” Paden handed him the waterskin, and Kherron rose from the floor to head out into the brisk morning. He didn’t particularly want to leave the hollow; he’d felt safe, comforted there since Aelis had brought them, as if the place had been waiting to welcome his arrival. But he did not want to give the healer any indication that in some inexplicable way, Paden’s presence there felt like some type of trespassing. The man had been intrigued and amused in a detached way by the symbols’ discovery, and Kherron didn’t quite feel like watching Paden play out the rest of his superficial inspection before he lost interest.
Stepping out into the cold, bright morning, Kherron found himself awed again by the cold-weather birdsong and the glimmering facets of sun on snow and ice. It differed so much from what he himself had always known, yet the peace it offered him—the memory and expectation of potential just around the corner—was powerful. He felt he could do anything here, be anyone, stripped clean and fresh in whatever way he wanted by the briskness and the cold and the frozen beauty. The sensation was a little unnerving, but he decided to embrace it.
There was no shortage of snow to choose from, though most of what remained in the snowbanks had been there a few days. He found what looked like a clean bank to draw from and took to filling the waterskin. The snow was closer to ice than anything else, and in minutes, his hands were red, raw, and achingly cold with the work.
He’d gotten the waterskin mostly full before he heard something approach through the woods. At first, it was just a natural sound, mixing with the rustle of birds and smaller, scurrying creatures along the frozen ground and in the pine branches. But then a larger branch cracked, echoing through the trees, its volume matching the width of a very thick branch splitting beneath the weight of a very heavy foot.
Kherron straightened, wiped the slush of half-frozen snow from his reddened hand, and scanned the forest. He didn’t feel threatened or in danger. By this point, he would have expected some kind of warning from the forest itself, as he’d received countless times before he’d learned what they meant. The forest, insofar as the whispering requests and the tickle of caution on his shoulders were concerned, remained silent to him. Not closed off, not vanished, but contentedly silent. Even still, Kherron waited and did not move. It wasn’t impossible to think Paden’s army could find them in this place, and while those men had seemed strangely intent upon retrieving their abducted healer, Kherron acknowledged fully how many other forces worked in silence against him and those around him, even all the way in this new place, wherever he was. He did not wish to let himself be caught unawares again if he could help it.
Then he saw movement through the trees, which he’d nearly missed due to how close in color the thing resembled the pine trunks and damp, half-frozen earth. It moved slowly, with purpose, ambling between the trees until it emerged into full view yards away.
Unable to fathom the massive brown bear shuffling through the forest toward him, Kherron froze. He thought briefly of the Sky Metal dagger at his belt before immediately dismissing the idea. His skills with a blade did not extend anywhere near successfully engaging in single combat with such a creature, and the thing seemed particularly uninterested in him—save for the fact it headed directly his way. Something in the back of his mind suppressed any real notion of trying to stave off the beast, and he had a particularly strong hunch that no part of his abilities would aid him in attacking a creature who did not seem to mean him harm. And he did not wish to give the thing reason to change its mind.
So he stood where he was and watched the bear make its slow way toward him, massive shoulders rising and falling with each lumbering step. The thing looked up from the forest floor, stopped, and seemed to notice Kherron then. For a period of seconds that stretched the length of days, Kherron held the bear’s gaze, images flitting through his mind—razor claws raking through his flesh and agonizing teeth crushing down on his limbs, all before he had a chance to defend himself or run or even make a sound. The fact that the bear did no such thing muted his fear, which he realized now had morphed into more of a fascinated curiosity. The bear held his gaze, licked its jaws, and snuffled, bursts of steaming breath puffing from its nostrils into the cold air.
Then the bear resumed its plodding gait, slow and deliberate, though it did not change its course in Kherron’s direction. By the time it had gotten close enough for Kherron to have kicked a rock and hit the creature with relative accuracy—though he didn’t dare—the bear slowed briefly to stand on its back legs, rising nearly twice Kherron’s own height. Kherron stared up at it with wide eyes, finding it aggravatingly impossible to guess what the thing meant by such an act, and what happened next took him completely by surprise.
The bear’s dark, coarse fur twitched and rippled—as if the thing had shaken itself, though it hadn’t—and Kherron thought the creature was lowering itself back to all four paws. But that wasn’t quite it; the bear shrank and thinned, massive and imposing one instant, much smaller and just as imposing the next.
Aelis’ sharp brown eyes stared at him from where the brown bear’s beady gaze had held him, her red hair fanning out over the shoulders of her bearskin cloak in striking contrast. When she took her next slow, confident step, she was herself again completely and not a bear at all. Unless, Kherron realized with detached intrigue, herself was neither woman nor bear at all and something else completely.
As she neared him, the woman shot Kherron a glance of either amusement or reproach; he couldn’t tell the difference through his shock. “Oh, don’t look so surprised,” Aelis told him, shaking her head as if to shake off his stare. “You’ve seen this before.” She shouldered past him, heading back toward the hollow, and Kherron thought he glimpsed the fraction of a smile at the corner of her mouth before she turned her back to him completely.
A bear. That explained nearly every question he’d had about the woman and bombarded him with countless others. No wonder the soldiers he’d killed had been so intent on loosing their arrows, though Kherron wondered now whether they’d shot her as a bear or out of terror after having seen her shift into a woman. None of that excused what they’d done—nor what he’d done in turn to them—but it drew a lot more pieces of the mystery together than he’d expected.
He watched her duck into the hollow’s entrance without turning to look at him or beckon him to join her, as if she’d known from the minute he’d pulled an arrow from her back that he would always follow her, without question. If he had not so acutely felt his heart racing at the thought, he might have stopped to wonder why it didn’t terrify him.
Chapter 8
“Any luck?” Paden asked. Kherron heard the man’s voice, muffled within the hollow, just before he stepped inside to join Aelis and the healer.
“Plenty,” Aelis replied. She looked up at Kherron when he stooped through the hollow’s entrance, and he thought he saw her smile. Knowing her—as little as he did—it could just as well have been a sneer.
There wasn’t really much he could say to her now, not in front of the healer; he realized full well that all three of them had known each other for nearly the same length of time, yet he still felt as if he’d known and understood this bear-woman his entire life. And so far, Paden seemed the only one of them who, beyond his healing touch, could not do something extraordinary. So the only thing Kherron could manage was to ask, “How are you feeling?”
Aelis fixed him with a pointed gaze and raised an eyebrow. “Full.”
Kherron held back a burst of laughter. Of course she was. And he wondered with acute curiosity what enough food to fill a bear’s belly must
now feel like in this woman’s stomach, or if it even mattered. “Did you... happen to save any for the rest of us?” he asked, partially jesting and partially serious.
“No.” Her words were flat, and she flashed him an altogether different stare—something wrought of anxiety and fear and disdain. “You don’t need me for that.”
“That’s fine,” Paden said, and whether he’d spoken in earnest or in an attempt to keep from either of his strange new companions inciting animosity in each other, Kherron didn’t know. But the healer watched his recovering charge with amusement and awe, which he concealed remarkably well for the things he’d witnessed. “It’s still better for you to rest as much as you can,” he added. “We’ll manage.”
Aelis smirked and made herself a new place around Kherron’s fire, between the men, facing the hollow’s entrance with her back toward the darkness of the cavern. She squinted at the flames for a moment, glanced up again to meet Kherron’s gaze, and gave him a barely noticeable nod of approval.
Kherron’s stomach flipped at such acknowledgement, even while he realized how ridiculous it was. He didn’t need her approval, by any means—either in conjuring fire or moving the sun, or whatever other task to which he set his abilities—but he craved it. He craved it not with a desperate longing but with a deepset understanding that he would receive it, over and over, for as long as he sought it. Only when Paden interrupted the silence did Kherron realize how hot he felt beside Aelis or the fire or both.
“Have you seen these?” the healer asked, gesturing in excitement to the wall behind him and the copper designs drawn therein.
Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3) Page 8