“You think he will come?” Feykaald asked.
“He will entertain the notion.”
“As you command, O Light of the World,” Feykaald said.
Raj Ahten wheeled the stallion, raced for Kartish.
9
Wizardborn
I don’t have a father. Like all Earth Wardens, I was born of the Earth.
As the slow light descended from heaven, spreading across the blasted fields thirty miles north of Carris, Myrrima asked Averan, “So, you know nothing more?”
“I’ve told you everything,” Averan said. She had told how she’d first met Roland Borenson, Myrrima’s father-in-law, on the way to Carris, along with Baron Poll and the green woman. Averan had taken Myrrima up through the time that she’d left Roland and Baron Poll, only to be rescued by Myrrima’s husband in company with Saffira. She told Myrrima how she’d helped Sir Borenson enter Carris to hunt for his father.
Averan could tell that her story hurt Myrrima.
In the back of the wagon, Sir Borenson slept deeply. A burning fever seemed ready to consume him. Myrrima had done all that she could for him last night. She’d applied balms from the healers, had poured libations of wine over him and whispered incantations to Water. They’d had to stay at Carris at night, for fear that they’d meet a reaver in the dark. But Myrrima had fled that foul place with her husband at the first crack of dawn, hoping that the king’s wizard in Balington might heal him.
A force horse pulled the wagon, and the wheels nearly sang as they spun down the road through the deadlands.
Averan had secured a ride with Myrrima by claiming that she had an “urgent message” for the king. But Averan had left out a few details in her story.
The sun had begun to rise far beyond the oak-covered hills, like a cold red eye. Averan squinted at it, then pulled her hooded robe over her face.
She didn’t like the burning sensation that the sun caused. Her skin tingled at its touch. Her hands were itching, as if she’d handled poison ivy.
But she was glad that she wasn’t Borenson. Myrrima had pulled up his tunic, looked beneath his armor, and Averan had glimpsed how he’d been wounded.
The wound would have been ghastly under any circumstances, even if it hadn’t gotten infected. Averan had had no idea that people could do that to one another.
“Myrrima,” Averan asked, “when you take the walnuts off a bull, he’s called a ‘steer.’ And when you take them off a stallion, he’s a gelding. What do you call it when they take them off a man?”
“A eunuch,” Myrrima said. “Raj Ahten made a eunuch out of my husband.”
“Oh,” Averan said. “That means he can’t have babies, right?”
Myrrima’s dark eyes filled with water, and she bit at her lip. After a moment she said, “That’s right. We can’t have babies.”
Averan didn’t dare ask another question. It was too painful for Myrrima.
“I saw how you cried over Roland,” Myrrima said.
“He’s dead,” Averan said. “Everyone I know is dead: Roland and Brand and my mother.”
“I was at Longmont when the wight of Erden Geboren came,” Myrrima said. “He blew his warhorn, and men who had died that day rose up and joined him on the hunt. They were happy, Averan. Death isn’t an ending. It’s a new beginning. I’m sure that Roland is happy, wherever he is.”
Averan said nothing. She couldn’t be sure what the dead felt.
“You didn’t know him long,” Myrrima said, as if she should feel better because of it.
Averan shook her head. “He said—” She sniffled. “He said he was going to petition the duke, so that he could become my father. I’ve never had a father.”
Myrrima reached out and took Averan’s hand. She looked in Averan’s eyes and said, “If the duke had granted that petition, then I would have been your sister in-law.” Myrrima squeezed her hand. “I could still use another sister.”
Averan clenched her jaw, and tried to put on a bold face.
She trembled. Her guts were still cramped and twisted in terror. She’d fed on reaver brains last night, but she didn’t dare tell Myrrima what she’d done. She didn’t dare tell a stranger how the reaver’s memories now haunted her.
Averan crawled off the buckboard, in to the wagon, and curled up in the hay. The new hay smelled of sweet clover, fescue, and oat straw. She buried her face in it, but it could not keep out the memories.
In her mind’s eye, Averan beheld an enormous reaver mage, stalking uphill through a windy cave. The image and smells came preternaturally clear, like a waking dream, or as if the memory were more real than the life that she lived.
Averan did not see the scene as a person would. Reavers have no eyes; instead, their philia sense life in ways she couldn’t understand. To a reaver, living animals glowed in the darkness the way that lightning glows.
Now, Averan recalled the reaver mage glowing, speaking to her in scents. “Follow my trail.”
In memory, Averan had no choice but to follow. Yet she felt terrified, and knew that she was marching to a place where she didn’t want to go. She detected scents in the air, the cries of reavers in supreme torment.
The philia near the One True Master’s anus began excreting words, and Averan scuttled forward to taste them.
“Do not fear,” the One True Master said. “You smell pain, but you shall not be subjected to it. The Blood of the Faithful will be sweet to you.”
The image faded. Averan realized that she’d blacked out.
She must have slept for a few minutes, because her eyes felt more rested. But her stomach still hurt from eating so much. She clutched it.
Averan fought a dull sense of panic. She remembered snatches of what had happened next. She recalled forcibles and an incantation.
The One True Master had given her servant an endowment. But Averan couldn’t figure out exactly which. Averan hadn’t been able to eat much of the monster’s brains—not even a tenth of them. She didn’t know all that the mage had known, couldn’t make much sense of most of the reaver’s thoughts and memories.
And it was the things that she didn’t know that scared Averan most.
She tried not to fret, held an image of the reaver in her mind, wondered why the reavers saw living creatures as if they glowed like lightning. Averan supposed that it was because there is lightning inside of people. On warm summer nights when clouds used to roll low over the graak’s aerie at Keep Haberd, she’d pull off her wool blanket and see small flashes of light against her skin. Beastmaster Brand had said that it was because there was lightning inside her.
Averan lay down next to Sir Borenson and rested her head on her hand. She noticed some pale green things—roots—woven into her robe.
She pulled a couple off, threw them into the hay. It had been raining all night, so her robe had been wet and then gotten covered in seeds.
Now the seeds were sprouting. They were everywhere in her robe, like little green worms. She decided to pick them out later.
The wagon passed under a tree, and Averan saw the shadows of leaves. She took a deep breath, inhaled the scent of fields and hills.
She sat up excitedly. They’d left the deadlands! Her head still ached. She squinted in the sunlight, pulled her robe close.
After a night of storm, the sun had surged into the sky, hurling splintered shafts of silver through broken clouds to dash against the emerald hillsides. The roosters at a nearby cottage celebrated by crowing as if it were the first sunrise in a month, and the whole land was filled with the cries of larks and the peeping of sparrows from under every bush.
To her left the round hills seemed to bow to the mountains. The night’s rain had soaked into summer-dried grass and left the land smelling drenched and new. The leaves of maples and alders turning on the lower slopes made them shimmer in shades of scarlet, russet, and gold.