Before building a fire for their supper, they rolled the wagon up along one side of the church, offering a bit of shelter if it stormed. From here he could stare at the curving ridgeline or out over a stony beach onto the sound. The water was so still that it seemed like solid ground, where a man might walk for leagues and leagues on its surface out into the wild lands beyond the guardian islands. Out there, strange creatures traveled and wept, or so he remembered. There were fish with the faces of men and men with claws in their hands who raced across the sea on ships as sleek and effortless as dragons.
Memory came in flashes as sharp and as brief as lightning.
That window, half obscured by a rosebush run wild, opened into the scriptorium. The monastery boasted a precious Book of Unities bound between covers plated with gold and encrusted with jewels.
“I know this place,” he whispered. He saw in his mind’s eye an old man leaning on a stick, dressed in monk’s robes. But he was dead, wasn’t he? Hadn’t they all died? The storm had come in off the sea and slaughtered them all and burned and destroyed their home as it would sweep in again.
“Shut him up, will you?” demanded Heric. “All that babbling about dead dead dead makes me want to hit him across the face, and I will!”
“Poor mad soul,” muttered Ulf, but the carter brought him a crust of bread to gnaw on and, quite unexpectedly, a skin of ale so rich that he had to sip at it and not gulp it down lest he spew it all back up. At first it unsettled his stomach, but then it warmed him enough that he could curl onto the hard bed of the wagon amidst the remains of dirty straw, shut his eyes, and doze as the guardsmen gossiped by their fire in the shelter of the deserted tower.
He heard their voices.
“Don’t like the look of the sky.”
“What, them clouds? Not enough wind to blow them over us.”
“Nay, look at the color of that sky. It’s not natural. There’s some terrible nasty storm coming, mark my word.”
“What bitch’s tits did you suckle from? You’ve been harkening to the madman’s voice.”
“Oh, shut up, Heric. What have you got against him anyway?”
“He stole my girl!”
“A filthy beast like that? Not likely.”
“He was all cleaned up in a lord’s tunic and bright jewels. Of course he stole her! Thief and cheat—”
Thief and cheat, he slipped into darkness and he dreamed.
A noble youth sleeps in the midst of a heap of gold and gems with six companions surrounding him, but out of the shadows creep gnarled figures whose skin gleams like pewter, whispering and tapping, seeking.
Seeking, rivers of fire forge new paths deep within the Earth, and the world trembles.
The storm is upon them.
The Holy One bends her gray head as she watches the sun set. From her vantage point beside the stone crown, the farthest east of its kind, she watches the weaving plotted and planned in ancient days come to life once more in the hands of those who are now her enemies, not her allies.
She is so weary. A part of her hopes this night will be her last, that she is too old to endure the force of the storm. She does not weep, because she has lived too Long and made too many difficult choices to weep any longer along the trail of years, a path down which she can never return or retrace her steps.
But there was one whom she loved unforeseeably, inexplicably. Sorcery exacts a cost, although humankind in their immense arrogance have not always understood this principle, and each gesture, each choice, will be counterbalanced by a consequence of equal weight. Yet affection drowns reason. Although she knew it for a foolish act, she reached onto the paths of the dead and expended more power than she ought because she wanted to make happy the one she loved like a daughter. Adica. She had no daughter of her own among the Horse people; that was forbidden. She loved too well where she should not have loved at all, and that act of love rebounded on her in a way she never anticipated or desired. By meddling in the paths of the dead she dislodged the stream of her own soul.
For so long death has been denied her. She witnessed the unfolding effects of her great undertaking, and all did not transpire as she hoped it would. She lived while her people slowly died off and diminished, as humankind migrated into their ancient homeland, stole or gelded their puras, and hunted down their daughters one by one. She wants to sleep, but she must stay wakeful in order to save her people, whom she doomed although she never meant to. She will stay awake one more night and then she will lie down and die and let others carry the burden she has carried for so long.
Be careful what you wish for
