Opal, who had calmed herself a little, started wailing again.
“Of course… of course I will see that your mother and father are… are well taken care of ...” Briony began.
“No,” Flint said firmly. “It does not take the god in me to know that you will be busy in the days ahead. Too busy to be a proper parent to a growing child. Do you want your father’s youngest son, who might become either your own heir or your greatest enemy someday, to be raised by servants you scarcely know?”
“But… how… why… ?” Briony held out her hands; Vansen marveled to see the young woman who would in a matter of a tennight or two become queen of all the March Kingdoms rendered helpless by the arguments of a tow-headed child.
“To give things shape,” Flint told her. “That is one thing the gods do. They give shape to the stories of men.” He rose. “Now I must go, if you will let me. Papa Chert? You once made me promise not to leave until five years had passed. I cannot wait that long.”
Chert spread his hands helplessly. “I could not hold you to a promise I forced on you when I did not understand everything. Of course—you are released. ...”
“No! Don’t go! It will be dark soon!” Opal cried.
“Mama Opal, do you really think I am afraid of the dark?” The boy looked at her sternly. “Even if I was only as old as I look, I would still have at least ten summers!” He went to her then and embraced her, holding on for a long time. Chert joined them and as Vansen watched, the three whispered to each other, heads close together; Chert and his wife both had tears in their eyes.
“Your other guests have arrived, Briony Eddon,” little Flint said at last, pulling away. “I hear them now.”
Vansen had only a moment to reflect that he himself had heard nothing, but then one of his guards called for him. He leaned out.
“A large force coming this way up the road,” the soldier told him. “I think it’s them Qar.”
“It is,” said Flint. “I will leave you to meet them. Farewell!”
The sun had dropped behind the hills, but although the fire built outside her tent was bright, and was undoubtedly cheering the hearts of Ferras Vansen and the guards waiting for her there, the Qar themselves had built no fires and raised no tents. They waited beside the road in their silent hundreds while their leader spoke with the mistress of the mortal castle they had so nearly overthrown.
The mistress of the castle was also their leader’s sister, a fact that Barrick Eddon seemed to remember now for the first time in a very long while.
“I’m sorry,” he told her as they made their way slowly along the road, their backs to their obligations. His crippled hand, which had seemed quite cured the last time she saw him, was all white knuckled and cramping fingers, and he carried it like it had begun to hurt him again. “I see now that, in a way, I was blinded by all that has happened. I was wrong, Briony, very wrong—there is much for us to talk about, but we have no time for it now.”
“What do you mean? We have all the time in the world. The war is over, Barrick. There is nothing to do now but rebuild, and trust me, there is enough of that to go around. Stay and help us. Do you mean to make me beg?”
He looked at her for a moment, then slowly shook his head.
“Curse you, Barrick!” she said angrily. “Can you never unbend enough to let someone reach out to you?”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “We don’t have enough time because we don’t speak the same tongue anymore, Briony. I have found some of what I lost—some of what I loved about this place and you—but for us to speak with true understanding, I would have to teach you all that happened to me in the time we were apart, and you would have to do the same so that I could understand everything you think and say. We have become… different.” He lowered his chin toward his chest as though it were cold, although the early evening was warm and she doubted Barrick even felt cold much anymore. “And I do have to go, Briony. If I stay here, Qinnitan will surely die.” He led his sister from the road and through the fringes of the waiting Qar, who watched her pass with the suspicious eyes of animals. “At Qul-na-Qar I might be able to save her, or at least learn how to keep her close enough that one day I can cure her.”
“Qinnitan.” Briony tried to swallow her unhappiness. How could so much be changing at the same time, and seemingly forever? “So that’s it. Because of this girl you scarcely know, you will go away and I will never see you again? The only real family I have left?”
He stopped. She thought she had angered him and braced herself for his furious words, but when he spoke, it was something quite different.
“I had not thought of that,” he said. “I… there is a part of me now, a large part, that does not easily remember those things—it has too many memories of its own to protect. My apologies.”
She gasped a little at that, frightened. “Merciful Zoria, you sound just like that Flint. He told us he has a piece of a god inside him.”
“He does.” Her brother reached out and took her hand; both the unexpected gesture and the coldness of his skin startled her. “With me, it is something only a little less unusual. I am not the same, Briony… but a little of what I was has begun to come back, too.” He held up his knotted hand; the knuckles were white from being so tightly clenched. After a moment, and with only a small grimace, he managed to uncurl his fingers almost all the way. He showed his hand to her, smiling through his pain, and although she did not quite understand, she knew he was showing her something important. Tears came to her eyes. “Perhaps someday there will be so much of the old Barrick that I will come riding up to the gate, shouting for you to let me back in!” He laughed at the notion. “Maybe I will even bring a wife and children.”
“This will always be your home.” She didn’t want it to be a jest. She could barely keep the tears from overwhelming her. “Always. And I will always, always miss you.”
They began walking again. For a while neither spoke.
“It is the place, not you,” he said at last.
“What?”
“That which makes it hard for me to stay here, even if I did not need to take Qinnitan to the House of the People. This place, its… history. The Qar hate it here. They won no victory. In fact, this may still be the site of their final destruction. And it has not been good to me, either. But I can change things, I think, both for the survivors and myself.”
“You are wrong about some things,” she said.
He looked at her with a little surprise. “Tell me.”
“The last time I saw him, Father told me a story about Kellick and Sanasu. He loved her, did you know?”
“What?”
“He loved her. Father said that in Kellick’s own words, he meant only to find out what the Qar did beneath our castle, and so he took men to question them. But the first time he saw Sanasu of the Qar, his heart filled with love for her so completely that he could not imagine going home without her again. In the middle of dispute, anger, and suspicion, he told her brother, not understanding that Janniya was not just her brother but also her betrothed. Enraged by this terrible insult, as he saw it, Janniya struck out at Kellick and in the fighting that followed, Janniya was killed and the few Qar who survived fled. Kellick took Sanasu and before too much longer they were wed. Whether she was unwilling, Father told me, no one can say, but they lived together in what seemed like harmony until Kellick died.”
“So the crime was no crime because it happened for love?”
“No.” Briony reached out and took his cold hand again. “But even you must admit the crime is different than the stories have made it. Love and a foolish, deadly accident is a far cry from murder and rape.”