“John was a wonderful man, Wes,” she said softly. “And…” she hesitated. “I don’t want you to suffer the same fate. I’m afraid you will, if you get too close to me.”
“Understood,” I replied calmly, giving her no agreement. “But does this mean I don’t get dinner after all?” I grinned shamelessly.
“Oh my Icons,” Stell said, practically leaping from the chair. “I’m letting you starve right before my eyes! Don’t worry, Wes. Magic can fix problems like this. Dwarven pizza sound okay?”
I didn’t even know dwarves made pizza, I realized, as Stell ran out of the room without waiting for a response. I tried not to stare too hard at the wonderful woman as she left. I failed.
Also, I promised myself that I would find a way to take care of her like she was taking care of me.
Chapter 9: Parting Glass
“Do ye have to go?” Merada asked softly as we sat together on a log.
“I wish I didn’t,” I replied truthfully. I reached over and touched her arm, running a finger over the words tattooed onto it. “But if you really need me to stay longer, I’ll find a way to make it work.”
She smiled at that.
“Ye know I don’t. I be perfectly capable of runnin’ things here. Especially now that ye’ve made it so easy for me.” She put her own hand over mine, moving it to the jeweled armband on her arm. “Ye be me first Challenger, and ye’ve left me in a better position than any of the others left their own Satellite.”
“Well, I’m not just a Challenger anymore, and you’re not just a Starsown Satellite,” I answered her. “I’m the Planetary Lord of Avalon and its sister worlds. You’re my regent, and my equal, for the Woadlands, and now you’re working for me as much as I’m working for you,” I told her with a grin. But the sentence had sounded better in my head, and maybe it wasn’t quite the compliment I meant it to be.
“As long as I get to work over ye one day,” Merada answered with a shrug and a straight face. “Think I’d prefer to be on top for the first time.”
“Wha—oh,” I said, catching her double meaning a little late. “Right. That.”
“Aye, that,” she replied with a smile.
“Understand, I’m not complaining at all,” I began, “but are the rest of Stell’s Satellites as forward as you? What expectations should I have going forward here?”
“Expect most of them to be a bit more prudish. Especially Minerv,” she said as she made a face. “She be as bad as me main body in some ways. But I doubt Stell be sending ye to the Lightborn Lands any time soon. That world be up to its chin in mighty heroes. But Via and Jarta be the closest to bein’ like me, in terms of havin’ fun.” She looked around for a bit before leaning closer. “Via be a bit of what ye Earthborn call a ‘nerd,’ though. She gets embarrassed about it.”
“Really?” I asked, torn over her telling me. “And, uh, should you have told me that?”
“She be another part of me,” Merada shrugged. “I figure it be countin’ as a private confession. Besides, others’ll be tellin’ ye as well. She be terrible at hidin’ it. And terrible about people findin’ out.”
“Why would she care about being a nerd?” I asked. “Being a nerd’s awesome.”
“Because Stell be carin’ about being a nerd,” Merada shrugged again. “And Via comes from the part of Stell that be nervous about what she wants.”
As she finished, the Woad-marked woman reached over and squeezed my hand.
“You’re the part of Stell that’s wild and free, aren’t you?” I asked as I watched her.
“Aye,” she admitted, biting her lip. “And I be hopin’ ye want the rest of me, and a little scared ye might decide I be too complicated, after all.”
“I’m still trying to figure out how to have a relationship with a multi-bodied woman,” I admitted, before squeezing her own hand. “But if you can handle me not knowing what the heck I’m doing half the time, I can handle pursuing the real you. Whatever that looks like, and wherever I might find it.”
She smiled back at me.
“I look forward to ye findin’ all of me. It’s part of what helps me send ye on yer way. Good luck.” She leaned over and kissed me. “Goodbye, Malcolm. Next time, I’ll be greetin’ ye with a difference face. And a different mouth.”
A few more words, and I grudgingly acknowledged that it would have to do for a parting. I left behind the first person who had risked loving me so openly, and walked back into the primitive castle I had summoned into this world.
It was time to send it, and myself, back to Avalon.
The same function that allowed me to summon the Shelter to endangered people on other worlds allowed me to return it directly to its proper place on Avalon. According to Avalon’s recovered knowledge, that had been its primary purpose: to arrive on other worlds, serve as an emergency refuge for the local endangered peoples, and either overcome the current crisis or evacuate all survivors back to Avalon. I had wound up having to do both, because there were some people—like the new mother of twins I had saved the other night—that had no more family.
Or rather, they decided to claim me as their family now, the chief who had bothered to save them.
According to Merada, choosing to shelter the tribeless survivors had given them a special place of honor. No Challenger before me had ever adopted anyone after a Tumult. The fact that I was now a Planetary Lord made an even bigger deal of the whole thing, meaning that they now belonged to the tribe of the mightiest chief of the Woadlands.
So I concluded the Tumult by saving the day and coming back home with a couple hundred more people. I didn’t worry about it, because Avalon still had plenty of room and plenty of resources. In fact, I suspected that the one time Guineve made nothing but soup was probably just a ploy to get Stell to help cook for me.
Stell had apparently come back because she was finished making supply runs to the other worlds and wanted to exchange information with me. She had meant to have a conversation with me earlier, but I had been unconscious again, and then she sort of freaked out after talking to Breena and Merada. Finally, we found a moment of time to talk, when I was about to leave for Avalon.
“So, I guess you have to go now, too, huh?” I asked the Starsown as we walked into my manor. She nodded reluctantly.
“Yeah. Forgetting the whole issue of Cavus,” she said forcefully, indicating that the subject was not up for discussion right now, “all of the other worlds are either starting or experiencing their next Trial or Tumult. The locals, and the other parts of me, need all the help they can get. Since I’m the only one that can risk portal magic right now, I need to make full use of it. I need to be making as many supply runs as possible, and do what I can to increase the personal power of my other Satellites.” She gave me a weird look that I couldn’t read. “If I can get more time, I need to figure out how the Satellites that have encountered you are becoming so much stronger.”
“Really?” I asked, “Guineve, too?”
“No, I do not mean Guineve too,” Stell half-snapped at me. “Guineve is already my strongest Satellite and does not count. If she got any stronger, the Icons on all my worlds would get even more nervous and—” she interrupted herself with a sigh and a groan, placing a hand on her forehead. “And now I just gave you another dangerous idea that you’re going to think about later, and probably figure out how to do it when I least expect it, and I can’t prepare for it. Blast it, Wes.”
“Stell,” I asked carefully, “are we still talking about the same Icons that didn’t show up when you asked them for aid?”
“That was complicated,” she hedged. “But yes. Thank you for reminding me. And thank you for everything you’ve done here,” she said, softening. “I mean everything. Overcoming the Tumult and Trial so quickly. Sticking up for Merada when the Icons weren’t giving her the proper respect. Doing the same for me, though you really didn’t have to,” she added quickly. “I was fine. But it meant a lot to me that you bothered. The other Challengers never
had to get so involved in the politics behind it all. I wish you didn’t need to either, but I want you to know that I appreciate how much you’ve taken my side in all this, when a lot of other people probably think I’ve screwed everything up.”
“I wouldn’t know if you did,” I admitted, “because you’re the biggest expert on stopping apocalypses that I have ever met. You were self-taught, beginning when you were just a little girl, and you have had to fight and claw for each scrap of support and trust ever since. I figure it’s my job to help you do the unpaid work that no one else volunteered for, instead of being a lazy, critical jerk that wasn’t even around for the whole thing.”
Stell sighed again.
“No wonder Merada and Breena keep—nevermind. The point is, I appreciate it. Now, moving on. I haven’t been giving a lot of concrete info, because I think it’s best for you to worry about one world at a time.”
“Agreed,” I answered as we walked. “I’m learning a hundred different things at once. Anything more is going to make it hard for me to concentrate. Just give me the general info on a world until I can deal with it directly.”
Stell sighed a third time. I realized it was a nervous habit for her.
“Glad you agree. The good news is that most of the worlds are still okay at present—if you can count things like global war as okay. They’re fighting furiously, but none of them have succumbed to either their Tumults or the invaders from your planet yet... except for the Sun-Jeweled Seas,” she finished bitterly. “The dark Earthborn hit that world harder than all but two of the others. Probably because it has Pathways to nearly every other world that are large enough to fit ships through, so they can move even more resources than I can with my portals. At any rate, most of the population centers have been devastated. I don’t think you’ll be able whip an army together and help you fight for this world, much less a navy. We need to decide if we can save it, or if we should just spend our time rescuing another one instead.”
She had been dreading this conversation, I realized. Her entire body trembled, even more than it had when talking about Cavus. The lives she had been taking care of, for probably hundreds of generations, were weighing heavily on her.
She was at least a few thousands of years old, but for her race, that was a woman barely out of puberty, and no one had helped her grow into the role she was now fighting so hard to keep. The fact that she had been holding both these worlds and herself together for so long was a truth that no one appreciated enough.
Including me.
Shit, Teeth said guiltily. We’ve been screwing up.
Let’s do better, then, I told him, and looked down at Stell.
“If I can help you save it, I will,” I told her gently, “but let me go ahead and hear your thoughts, since you’ve had to deal with this choice longer.”
She shook her head.
“I’ve had to deal with it longer, but Wes, I don’t have any real answers. I’ve spent centuries trying to study how your people fight, but I’ve never seen them fight with magic until they invaded. And even if I did, I’d never be able to train enough people on any one world to repel them. Combined with the facts that they could just come back when they died, and Descended so quickly.. and then they appropriated my portal network when I had to leave Avalon…” she breathed out through her nose. “All that would have been bad. But they also worked alongside every Tumult., Instead of my worlds having one Challenger to help avert a single impending doom, they were betrayed by dozens, if not hundreds, of false Challengers who sabotaged their efforts to save themselves. The Sun-Jeweled Seas had three Tumults, Wes. That’s unheard of, to begin with. It took everything I had, everything Via had, just to get everyone to last this long, but we still failed. The Sun-Jeweled Seas succumbed to its first Tumult before you reconquered Avalon. A supernatural storm wiped out most of their fleet, and then the Subjugation Tumult was reinforced by the Horde, who somehow cross-bred with the invading race of monsters. I did everything I could to keep people from being killed off en masse, but most of the population has been enslaved. And now that the final Tumult is under way, they’ve just started disappearing. I don’t even know where they are going, because from what I can tell, they’re not traveling through the Pathways. Even the monster race is disappearing. Which doesn’t make sense, because the next Tumult was supposed to be a Behemoth-type Tumult. That’s when a colossal monster shows up and starts wrecking enough of the environment to threaten a planet’s stability. They usually eat people, too. But they don’t make people disappear into thin air. And it’s happening to the Horde and other monsters in the area as well. They just vanish. Or they’re found dead, appearing to have asphyxiated, even though they should be able to breathe in almost any environment. Which is a bad sign for the people who have disappeared. It’s the same with everything else that was alive in those areas—crops, livestock, all of it. Either they disappear, roots and all, or they just lie there, lifeless and withered. So, Wes, by the time you even find a way to get there, there may not be anyone left to save. There may not be more than a handful of people on maybe a dozen islands.
‘On the other hand,” she said, taking a breath. “Maybe they still can be saved. There are no bodies, so I can’t confirm that the people are really dead. They could all be somewhere, suffering, like the victims of a Horde Pit, who I also used to think were beyond saving, until you came along, Wes. Which brings me back to having to decide if the best course is to be ruthlessly practical, and give up on an entire world where I’ve invested all but the earliest stage of my life. I have to figure out whether to just write it off as doomed, like the Lost Deeps, and move on to people we can actually save, or hope that you can do yet another miracle somehow. That you can possibly save anywhere from dozens to hundreds of thousands of people and recover an entire world for me. Sorry,” she said, looking away. “I meant for that to sound objective, not snarky.”
Holy hell, she’s under a lot of stress, Teeth whispered. You need to fix it for her. Tell her you’ll fix it!
I almost did exactly that. I wanted to act on my instincts, to assure her that I’d win the day for her, and that it would be no problem at all. But something made me hesitate.
Then I tried to speculate how that would sound to me if I was in charge, and I had to make a hundred different life-or-death situations every day.
Crown her, the familiar voice interrupted, and write love on her arms.
She wasn’t asking me for promises I couldn’t substantiate. She wasn’t asking me to take responsibility and authority from her.
She was honoring me by sharing her authority for just a moment, provided I could help while still acknowledging her role and responsibilities.
Why haven’t you told her yet? Teeth tugged on my mind, not understanding my rationale. Let her know you’ll fix it!
Crown her, the voice demanded. And write honoring love on her arms.
“The Behemoth Tumult you’re talking about,” I began. “If it runs its course, can it travel to other worlds, like the Chaos Wound could have?”
“Maybe,” Stell said with a nod. “If I knew more, I’d be able to tell you for certain. But any Tumult can spread on some level, if it overcomes a world. So yes, that’s a possibility, too.”
“Okay,” I told her. “Here’s the thing. Time has slowed down a lot on Avalon. A day there can be weeks, or more, for any other world. So, assuming I can gain access to a new world’s Pathways at all, it shouldn’t take that long to visit the world. I could pop over to the Seas, spend a week taking a look around, and try to figure out what’s going on. If the world is doomed, I can help by grabbing Via for you, along with anyone she’s managed to rescue. I can also attempt to sabotage the remaining Pathways with Avalon’s magic, and then come right back. That way, we’ve saved at least some of the people, and done what we could to keep the danger from spreading. The risk for me to do all that shouldn’t be any greater than visiting another world and just looking around. If I can do more,” I leaned for
ward. “Then I will. I’ll check to see what new powers I have gained from unlocking more of Avalon’s secrets. And maybe, since I don’t have to move between worlds as often as you do, I’ll be able to learn more about what’s going on. Besides, if we take the world back, we’ll be denying the Malus Order an entire route to ship resources through. That’s even more important, now that their own portal network is down. So let’s at least agree to have me take a look there. There’s no reason for me not to do that.”
“Yes,” Stell said in relief. “That sounds perfect. I should have thought of exactly that.”
“If you had made me handle more than one world at a time, I probably would have been too stressed to think of it either,” I offered, and meant it.
“You’re right, Wes. Icons,” she said, covering her face. “It’s so much better to have someone I can talk to about things like this, that isn’t already a part of me, or a ruler that wants to lobby me for something. Thank you, Wes. Thank you. I needed this, and I didn’t even know how much.”
I shrugged.
“That’s how I feel about you,” I said, and she suddenly tensed. “More specifically, the dwarven pizza you made yesterday. I have so many questions…”
Her tenseness evaporated, and she let out a giggle.
“You goof,” she chuckled. “You know what? Hit me with your questions. We can spare a minute...”
She took a little bit of time to explain how dwarves had invented their own version of meaty, cheesy, deep dish pizza. I realized that Guineve actually got most of her cooking knowledge directly from Stell herself, and Teeth unhelpfully insisted that we find a way to marry her immediately. He couldn’t understand that she wasn’t ready to go for that.
“I have to go,” she finally said. “But you take care of yourself, okay, Wes?”
She hesitated, then she reached out and touched my cheek. “I mean it,” she added.
“I have too many good reasons to come back alive,” I replied, still smiling at her. “And so do you. So I insist that you do the same.”
Lighting Distant Shores (Challenger's Call Book 4) Page 14