Revelation (4 page)

 

“Do you know what you’ve done?” Fiona’s harsh accusation was the first thing to penetrate the momentary confusion of my return to the real world. The Aife could not see into the landscape she created, only sense the shape of it and the outcome of the battle as it progressed. But she would not mistake the death of the victim.

“I struck too hard,” I said—in explanation, not justification. A Warden did not have to justify the outcome of a battle save to another Warden. No one but another Warden understood how difficult demon combat could be. “He did not deserve to live.” I believed that. I had walked his soul and I knew. But I had never intended to kill him.

I got slowly to my feet, taking stock of limbs and senses, of bruises and aches, making sure that the blood that soaked my clothing and covered my hands was not my own. A red clay jar and mug sat on the stone platform, and I filled the cup over and over until the cool, clean water was gone. I felt as if I’d been trampled by a herd of maddened chastou. Every bone ached. My skin felt stretched tight and was raw from venom and scraping claws.

“What happened? Explain it.”

“I don’t have to explain it.” Every breath grated like skin on ground glass.

I cleaned and put away my weapons, washed my hands and face, and retrieved my cloak from the preparation room.

“You’re not leaving? We’ve not sung the chants or wiped the floor or—”

“Do them if you wish. I need to sleep.”

“This is a violation. The law says—”

“Gods of night, Fiona. I’ve just fought a monster for half the night. I can scarcely stand. The demon is dead. The victim is dead. Wiping the floor and singing will change nothing.”

I did not look back as I strode into the forest. The raging in my blood masked the too long hours of combat and the too short hours of sleep. I didn’t know when I would ever be able to sleep again. How could I have done it? I was not fool enough to believe I could fight as I did and never make mistakes. We had to take the risk, and my old mentor Galadon had made sure I understood that I would have to live with failure. Sometimes the victims died. Sometimes they went mad. Sometimes we lost and had to leave them to their fate. I had done my best, and I could not fault the outcome.

Yet the event was immensely troubling. I had lost control. Because I was tired. Because I was angry. Because the victim had raped and enslaved children. And most worrisome of all was that the demon knew to use those things against me.
Damned, cursed fool. What’s wrong with you?
The Council had the bow strung and ready, and I had given them the arrow.

I paused at the top of the hill, faced with yet another dilemma—where to go for the rest of the night. Catrin would have me back, but as I began to cool off, I heard the favor she had asked of me while Fiona was listening. Only a few months until she would complete the training of two new Wardens. Until they were ready, she needed to be my mentor, not my friend, lest she be tainted with whatever suspicions attached to me. And so she had asked me to hold back. To be careful. Too late for that, but I could at least leave her unburdened with my presence. I could not embroil her in my trouble until she had ensured our future.

I had other friends . . . friends who would know by now of Ysanne and the child. Some would agree with me that shunning a dead infant was useless, that slaughtering a demon-possessed child was murder, and that murder was no solution for ignorance. Others would pretend there had been no child. All of them would be sorry for Ysanne and me. None of them could do anything. I could stomach neither pity nor hypocrisy, so the only place to go was home—what was left of it.

The lamp was in the window when I arrived. I stepped back out the door and threw it into the stream that danced under the wooden bridge in the moonlight. When the glass shattered against rock, the oil flared up, then went out. I pulled off my bloody, stinking clothes, found a blanket in the chest, and curled up in a chair by the cold hearth.

 

 

 

For one year of my time in bondage I had been owned by a vile Suzaini ivory merchant named Fouret. An innately cruel man, Fouret had always taken pleasure in the pain of others: luring innocent lovers into the depths of depravity and driving his business rivals into such financial ruin that they took their own lives. He would sell his rivals’ children into slavery and bed their wives before destroying them, and before casting off a young mistress for some new innocent, he would reveal to her family and friends the degradations he had required of her. To his slaves, whom he valued far less than his women or his rivals, he was worse.

I was fortunate to leave Fouret’s service with all of my limbs. One could say I made my own luck, of course, for there came a day when I loosened the railing on the balcony where he stood to watch his slaves being whipped to death, and I made sure that he drank enough marazile in his breakfast tea that he would be groggy for the entire day and need to lean heavily on the rail. As it was my own flogging that was interrupted by his plunge to his death upon a spiked fence, I thought I managed things very well. I was not proud of killing him, but neither did I feel guilty. It was the same now. I did not feel guilty for killing the demon-possessed slave merchant.

I thought of Fouret for another reason on the morning I woke cramped and stiff from sleeping in a chair. I had once seen the mad Suzaini open the chest of a living man and lift the heart from his body. And I had seen the victim’s face in the instant before he drowned in his own blood. I feared my face would look the same when I had to confront my wife and name her a murderer. How could a man live without his heart?

So I didn’t face her. The morning was warm—no need for a fire in the hearth. We had a quiet young man named Pym who took care of our house and cooked for us, but there was no evidence of him that morning, save a neatly folded stack of clean clothes—shirt, breeches, leggings, boots—and a plate of bread, cold chicken, and sugared cherries left on a nearby table beside a blue teapot. I was hungry—absurd, but I had lived long enough to expect it—yet I could not eat until I had talked with Ysanne. I donned the clothes and stayed where I was, in my chair with my back to the room, and when she came at last, I did not turn around.

The breath of morning air from the opening door behind me gave her away. I could not mistake the sweet smell of her skin or the rain-washed fragrance of her hair. She had damp earth on her shoes. I heard the soft shuffling on the rug as she took them off and walked three steps toward me. Not even halfway across the room.

“Trust me, Seyonne.”

Absurd was too generous a word for what she asked of me. “As you trusted me?” I sat staring into the cold ashes of the brick hearth. “Did you arrange for the third battle so I wouldn’t be here before you finished cleaning up?”

“I warned you two years ago that you were marrying the Queen of Ezzaria, and not just a woman who loved you beyond reason. I told you there might come a time when I had to choose.”

“And so you have done.” I closed my eyes and ignored the emptiness in my chest where my heart had once lived. “If it were only about me, I could not fault you. But you murdered our son and gave me no chance to save him, and I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to forgive you.”

She stood there without speaking for a very long time. Only a sorcerer could have detected her stony presence. Only a lover could have felt the doors closing on the passionate heart that so few had ever been privileged to know. Then the oaken floorboards creaked, and she was gone.

I started eating then, commanding my stomach not to revolt. I could not afford weakness. At the rate the Searchers were unearthing demons, I could be fighting again before nightfall. I ate until I could not look at another tasteless bite, then I got up and left the house. Fiona was waiting on the wooden bridge. I walked past her as if she didn’t exist.

 

It was almost midday. On most mornings, I would work at the kyanar for an hour, go running for another hour, and then go to Catrin’s practice arena to help in training her student Wardens and hone my own still returning skills. Catrin was a tremendously talented mentor, having grown up watching her grandfather and possessing the sorcerous ability and strength of mind to make use of what she had learned from him. Though it was unusual for a woman to mentor Wardens, who were all men, she was already held in such high esteem that she sat on the Mentor’s Council, the five men and women who oversaw the training, pairings, and assignments of those who fought the demon war.

Ezzarian society was very different from that of the other lands of the Empire. Among ourselves we did not trade or compete, but settled into our assigned roles to support our single purpose. Nor was there any rank or nobility among us, save what fell out from our natural gifts. All children were tested at age five. Those found to have the strongest melydda—true power for sorcery—were designated from their earliest days to assume a role in the demon war according to their particular talents. They were freed from all other responsibilities to devote their lives to training mind and body until they passed rigorous testing and took up their assignment. Honor and renown often accompanied such a life, as did danger and death and frequent nightmares. We called them valyddar—power-born. One of the valyddar—always a woman of immensely powerful gifts—served as our Queen. As she grew into middle age, she would, with the aid of her closest advisers, select her kafydda—a young woman to be trained to succeed her.

Those children found to have modest amounts of melydda—the eiliddar or skill-born—grew up to serve in other ways: warding our borders; building homes and temples; keeping our water clean, our fields protected from blights, and our homes clear of vermin; even teaching our children and doing craft work such as pottery or metalsmithing. To shape anything of permanence, whether a pot or a buckle or a child’s mind could not be left to those without melydda, lest their lack of power might leave their shaping flawed and thus a danger to us all.

The tenyddar or service-born—those who had no power for sorcery—did whatever tasks they were assigned: hunting, farming, animal husbandry. We had a duty to guard an unknowing world from the horrors of demons. Even those who shoveled manure in the fields knew that their work was valued and necessary.

This is not to say there were not jealousies and rivalries. The results of a child’s testing—the sole determinant of his or her future—were a matter of grave import in many families and had caused not a few disputes. Many tenyddar like my father had talents or loves for some occupation but, because they had no melydda, were assigned menial tasks instead. Some had not his grace to find the beauty and satisfaction in the life he was given—working in the fields. He had wished to be a teacher, and I had always grieved for the students who never knew his wisdom or his gentle hand. Only since my return had the consideration of that made me angry. Fiona had faithfully recorded my opinions on the matter.

Catrin was an excellent teacher, and she could have taken her charges ahead well enough without my help, but there could never be too much preparation for what they would find when they stepped through a real portal. To have an experienced opponent to practice with was a helpful addition to the very real visions Catrin conjured for them.

I was not as proficient at training students in ritual. In my years with the Derzhi, I had longed for the order and beauty and purpose of Ezzarian life. But once I was immersed in it again, it was very easy to see the flaws, the places where ritual had replaced purpose, and tradition was valued for its own sake. I had dared suggest that it might serve us better to take our young students into the world to broaden their perspectives. But I had been roundly chastised for that idea, as if I had suggested that they could learn to bathe by rolling in the mud. Though we spent our lives working to protect them, Ezzarians had little use for the people who lived outside our forest boundaries. Outsiders brought corruption.

“Seyonne!” Catrin seemed surprised to see me walk into the long whitewashed building. “What are you doing here?” Sun poured steeply through the tall open windows, drenching a narrow strip of the dirt floor where nine youths, ranging in age from eight to twenty, were engaged in various activities from sword practice to acrobatics to sitting absolutely motionless with legs crossed and eyes closed in the image of sleep. They were all so very young.

“This is what I do, I believe,” I said. “What else should I be about?”

“I just thought . . .”

“No call has come this morning, and Fiona has informed me that using enchantments to repair the rotten crossmember of the bridge beside our house is an unconscionable waste of a Warden’s melydda. So rather than teetering on the verge of such corruption, I am at your service. A nice eight-hour practice session . . . maybe Ezzaria’s ten best students at once might be a pleasant diversion.” I offered her a smile, but neither of us believed it.

“We need to talk, my friend,” she said, “after we’ve done with these boys.” She nodded curtly to Fiona, who had followed me into the practice arena and settled herself on the floor to watch and listen.

Two sturdily built young men were moving strangely in one corner of the room surrounded by a silvery curtain of light. Contained in a space twenty paces square, they passed within a hair’s breadth of each other in violent activity, yet apparently unaware of each other’s existence. Tegyr and Drych, Catrin’s two most advanced students, were buried deep in her illusions. They believed they were fighting demons, taunting predators who disappeared and reappeared in landscapes of madness. They had likely been fighting for several hours. The morning was heavy and damp, and their skin was dripping with sweat, though in their minds they were probably bleeding and slimed with nastiness spewed from their opponents. As we watched, the shorter one, Drych, dropped his sword and held his stomach, letting out a groan of agony as he sank to his knees.