And then they moved on, all quietlike, and reached a clearing with at least ten tracks heading in different directions, and Froi remembered looking up from the back of Perri’s horse to see the sign. He knew this was the crossroads, and Finnikin explained that the border of Lumatere was one day’s ride from here. There were so many arrows on that one signpost and so many words and Sir Topher read them out because they were written in Belegonian: east to Charyn/Osterian border; south to Belegonia; west to Sendecane; north to Lumatere, except someone had scratched out Lumatere as if it didn’t exist, but Finnikin took the stick out of his pack and wrote the word again. The captain picked one of the arrows to follow that didn’t have any words near it and Froi couldn’t understand why he would pick an arrow to follow that hardly had a track, but nobody ever questioned the captain.
They traveled for what seemed hours and Froi truly thought it was night because it was so thick with trees and no light crept in. But then he saw the shine in the distance and the forest turned into a meadow, that was the word Sir Topher used, and the meadow had the tallest grass with so many yellow flowers that it hurt Froi’s eyes to look at. But he didn’t look away because it was a different kind of hurt, one he hadn’t felt before and he found himself walking through the long grass and yellow flowers just to see what they felt like against his skin. Behind the meadow, there was a barn with shutters hanging, deadlike, from its room in the roof. Inside it smelled of every animal that had ever been there and it was where they put the priest-king, in the barn, and then the captain spoke, deciding that this was a safe place for them, that nobody would find them here. And that Froi and Evanjalin would stay behind with the priest-king while the others traveled to where Ced was at an inn waiting for them on the western road to Sendecane where there was the grave that belonged to Moss or Mass. And everyone pretended everything was all right.
They did a lot of pretending, these people.
So when Evanjalin didn’t complain about being left behind, Froi watched Finnikin pretend that he wasn’t going to be bothered by the fact that Evanjalin looked tired and pale, and Froi got irritated and wished that someone would tell him to make himself useful so he didn’t have to stand around through the good-byes.
Finnikin kept on saying that all they needed was a bit of rest, pretending there was nothing wrong with the priest-king, and Froi tried to tell them that it looked like fever and he had seen enough fever to know, but then Perri told him to make himself useful and fetch water from the stream, so Froi got his wish and was almost saved from watching Finnikin pretend he was leaning in to tell Evanjalin something important and then forgot what it was he had to say. Which meant that they both stood close to each other, their heads almost touching for a long long while.
And then the others were gone and things got worse.
On the first night they lay in the barn listening to the priest-king talk about Lumatere as if he wanted them to remember everything because he knew he was going to die soon. The priest-king told him about the Song of Lumatere and how he would sing it at the Harvest Moon Festival when everyone in Lumatere would sleep out in the open and they’d dance and sing and laugh and how it was bad luck to sing it outside the kingdom. Froi didn’t see anything wrong with the priest-king singing it now because it wasn’t as if they weren’t used to bad luck. And during the night Froi stayed awake and tried to hold the priest-king down in that barn because his body was shuddering and jumping and Froi was scared he’d crack one of the priest-king’s ribs because the priest-king was skinnier than him. And Evanjalin sat and watched with her arms around her body to keep it warm and he knew by her shivers that she would be next. And when she looked at Froi’s face she didn’t pretend. She just bit her fist to keep herself from crying and then the priest-king stopped breathing for a moment and something inside Froi hurt in a way he couldn’t explain.
“I fink you should use magic.”
Evanjalin’s lips were dry and flaking and her skin looked a funny gray color and there was sweat all over her forehead that made it shiny. She looked almost dead, but she could still send him a look so evil that it made him flinch.
“I’ve told you before, Froi. I don’t have magic!”
She coughed and it sounded like there was all this vomit in her throat and it made him sick to listen to it and more scared than he had ever been in his life.
“You’re cursed,” he said. “Him too. Survives the camps for years and years and survive everyfink else between. But it’s fever you die from. Two days’ ride from homeland.”
And she cried. He had seen her shout with rage and had seen tears in her eyes over and over again, but he had never seen her cry properly and it made her look pathetic and helpless as she bent and put her head in her hands, all the while coughing stuff out of her mouth.
“In Lumatere, the novices of Sagrami would mix herbs found in the Forest and bring people back from near death with the fever,” she told him.
“Then do somefink.”
“I don’t know how,” she cried. And he didn’t know what to say to make her feel right so he walked to the other part of the barn.
And began to pretend.
Later, they both sat by the priest-king who grabbed Froi’s hand in his, all oldlike, with its veins and scratchy skin.
“I dreamed last night, Froi,” he whispered through dried-up lips, “that you were holding the future of Lumatere in your hands.”
“Only saying that ‘cause you dying.” Froi scowled.
Evanjalin elbowed him to be silent. Then the priest-king closed his eyes, and she dragged Froi away to the corner of the barn where he could smell horse shit and he knew that if the captain or Finnikin or Perri were around they’d tell him to make himself useful and clean it up.
“When people are dying, you don’t tell them,” she hissed angrily.
“What about the truf Finnikin always goes on about?”
“There are different types of truth, Froi. Let the priest-king tell you whatever he wants. So when he says you’ll hold the future of Lumatere in your hands, nod. Agree.”
“We all be dead soon.”
She looked at him long and hard. Sometimes he thought he hated her the most because it was as if she could read inside his head. The others pretended that deep down he wasn’t bad. That he didn’t come from evil. But she knew. She saw the badness. She saw it now and she shivered. He didn’t know whether it was because of the fever or because she knew what he would do, but there was an understanding in her look.
“Go,” she said tiredly. “Save yourself. It’s what you want to do. And if you have any heart, find Finnikin and Captain Trevanion and Sir Topher. Walk to the crossroads and wait for someone to come riding by to take you west to the inn on the main road to Sendecane. There’s not much else out there, so you will find them. Tell them we have the fever.” She reached into her pocket and held out the ring. “To save you the trouble of stealing it from me.”
He hated her for knowing he would.
“I have a plan. But if I fail, the priest-king and I will be dead by the time you return. Make sure we are buried. By Finnikin. At an altar made to the goddess complete. With his blood sprinkled on the rocks, which will guard me in death. Do you hear me, Froi? It’s all I ask of you.”
She stumbled back to the priest-king and put her hand on his forehead. “Hold him up,” she ordered as he moved behind the priest-king’s head.
“A joy,” the old man murmured. “To die in the arms of the future of Lumatere.”
Froi nodded. “I agree.” He looked at Evanjalin to see if he had said it right, but she just whispered to the priest-king that she had a plan and the priest-king would need to stay alive.
Later, he watched from the window as she stumbled into the woods with a dagger in her hand and then he looked back at the priest-king as he slept, the death rattling his breath.
“Fink I would have liked to hear you sing that song,” he said, leaning over the old man.
Then he walked away. And
as he went through that meadow where the grass grew to his armpits, he felt a strange feeling inside of him that he had never felt before. Like someone had punched him in the stomach and he was all mashed up in there.
He didn’t believe in fate and destiny and gods and guides. He didn’t believe in people or goodness or love or what was right. But he understood survival, and at the crossroads, where he thought he saw the sign to Belegonia he knew he could return to the towns they had passed, full of rich people careless with their coin purses and their goods. His life would go back to the way it was before he saw Evanjalin in that alley in Sarnak what seemed like a lifetime ago. But no one had ever taught Froi the difference between left and right and south and west, and later when he rode with the toothless man in his two-horse cart and realized he had taken the wrong turn, he tried to convince himself that maybe he would have made that decision to find the others along the western road. And when fate had the toothless man stopping at the inn where the captain and Finnikin and Sir Topher and Moss and Perri and three others sat, staring at one another as if they had seen things that made them dead inside, he blurted out the words. “She ask me to come fetch you. To bury them.”
Perri stared at him as if he knew the badness that lurked in Froi because Perri was dark himself. But it was Finnikin he tried not to look at, except he heard something come from him that sounded like some wild animal and then Finnikin said her name and as long as Froi was alive he had never heard a word said with such pain and he knew he never would again. The captain told Moss and Sir Topher and the two other guards that they would meet in the valley where their people waited, while Perri and Finnikin and Froi traveled with him to bury the priest-king and Evanjalin. Froi liked the way the captain included him, so he did more pretending. Evanjalin said there were different types of truth, so he showed them the truth of what he could have been rather than what he was. He climbed onto Finnikin’s horse and he clung on to him and sometimes he thought Finnikin would tumble off dead because it was as if he had stopped breathing for all that time. He heard Finnikin pray to the goddess that if she spared Evanjalin’s life, he would always ask her for guidance. Never doubt her again. Lead Lumatere wherever she believed it had to be led. Finnikin’s head was bent low over the horse and he kicked its flanks hard and Froi had never clutched the body of one who felt so much but it reminded him of the time when he had tried to take Evanjalin in the barn. Both times the touch of their bodies had burned him, but this time something entered his bloodstream.
Planted a seed.
And this is the way Froi of the Exiles remembered that moment they entered the golden meadow that hurt his eyes but made him dream of all things good. On one side of the path was a stone fence half-covered with overgrown weeds. On the other, olive groves with pomegranate and apple trees mixed. And there in the middle stood the priest-king like one of those ghosts who appear in dreams and Froi saw Evanjalin in the high grass, her face pale but not with death or fever. She wore flowers in her hair and Froi liked the way their stems fit into the bunch of hair beginning to stick out of her head. And when Finnikin grabbed her to him and buried his face in her neck and then bent down and placed his mouth on hers, the others pretended that there was something very interesting happening in the meadow. The priest-king even pointed at the nothing they were pretending to see. But Froi didn’t. He just watched the way Finnikin’s hands rested on Evanjalin’s neck and he rubbed his thumb along her jaw and the way his tongue seemed to disappear inside her mouth as if he needed a part of her to breathe himself. And Froi wondered what Evanjalin was saying against Finnikin’s lips when they stopped because whatever the words were it made them start all over again and this time their hunger for each other was so frightening to watch that it made Froi look away.
When Evanjalin almost fell down with weakness, Finnikin picked her up and carried her to the barn and he lay her down, all gentle-like, and then they listened to the soft tone of the priest-king’s voice, which always made Froi feel dreamy and warm, and Evanjalin slept. Froi bit into a pomegranate and felt the juice soak his chin as the priest-king told them that one day he would sing a new Song of Lumatere. Her song. Of the one named Evanjalin who walked the sleep and took the child’s hand in hers. Knowing she and the child could not hear each other speak, Evanjalin prayed that she could read as she wrote two words on the walls of the chamber they walked. Fever cure? But the child could not read and the words on the wall disappeared.
And so she used her nails to scratch the words on the arm of the child, who cried from the betrayal of the pain, and she waited one whole day to walk the sleep that night, praying for an answer. But for a moment she lost hope. There were no words alongside those on the child’s arm and Evanjalin’s heart sank because she knew it was the end. For the priest-king had already begun his walk to the land between theirs and that of the gods. But as the child turned her back, Evanjalin saw markings above the crisp nightdress and slowly she lifted it to reveal a world painted with instructions and names and drawings of plants. And one question. Three words.
Is hope coming?
And Evanjalin did a last cruel thing to the child who did not deserve so much pain. She scratched one more word on the child’s arm.
A name that would bring hope.
Sometimes Froi thought it never happened and the way he said it was all wrong and dreamlike. But Lumaterans had enough of their curse stories so he asked Finnikin of the Rock to write it down exactly the way he remembered it.
So he could one day place it in the Book of Lumatere.
Far away from the pages of the dead.
Resurdus.
Finnikin woke in the loft of the barn with the word on his lips. Beside him, Evanjalin slept quietly, her skin paler than usual but her breathing even. He would never forget Froi’s words in the inn. Never ever forget the sight of her standing in the meadow breathing life back into his dead heart.
He and Evanjalin slept away from the others, who tossed and snored, except for Perri, who lay with his eyes wide open, forever on the alert. Finnikin knew that if Sir Topher were there, he would have insisted that he not lie beside the girl, deemed it unacceptable in a way the priest-king didn’t seem to question. Finnikin cradled her, shuddering at the confused images that came into his head. Of the mass grave he had seen the night before on the border of Sendecane. Of her body among the dead. Evanjalin pulled his arm tighter around her, holding it to stop the shaking. “It’s only a nightmare,” she murmured gently.
“Do you belong to the king?” he asked, his voice husky.
She gently placed his hand against the beating pulse of her heart. Always, always it beat out of control, and he held his hand to it until he felt it perfectly match his.
“Yes, Finnikin,” she said. “I belong to the king. I will always belong to him.”
And there lay the bittersweet despair of what awaited them in the Valley.
Beloved rival. Cursed friend.
He wondered what they’d say to each other after all these years. If he would recognize him in a crowd. Balthazar looked like his father. The Flatlanders claimed the king was descended from their people. “Hair like chestnuts, eyes like the heavens,” they would say. He even heard Trevanion whisper it lovingly to Beatriss. They were the queen’s favorite words to her older daughters and son, although Balthazar would be mortified when she said it in the presence of Finnikin and Lucian. “And me?” Isaboe would ask, hating not to be the center of their world. “You’re our precious little Mont girl,” the queen would say.
He wondered if the cousins had been together all this time. A streak of envy washed through him at the thought of the prince staying with Lucian and the Monts. They had been a trio, despite the fierce competition between Lucian and Finnikin. They had fought like brothers and made pledge after pledge from the moment they could talk. He missed them both. But here in the meadow, so close to his homeland, he felt the presence of Balthazar and Lucian so strongly that he knew with certainty he would see them soon.
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The next morning, Trevanion announced they would leave by midday. Finnikin and Evanjalin stole away and lay in the meadow, forehead to forehead, musing and hypothesizing.
“Do you remember the main village in Lumatere? There was a bridge that took you to the smithy, where the Flatlands began?” Finnikin said. “My father would have his horse shod there and I’d hang over the side waiting, watching the water and following it in my mind downriver. I used to imagine going beyond the kingdom where the river would flow out to the lands beyond ours.”
“Imagine if someone was standing there right now. What would they be doing?” she wondered. “At this very moment? Do they know we’re so close?”
“Perhaps they are living in total tranquillity,” he said. “Do you think we could have had it all wrong? Do you think they’ve been happy and will not care about our return?”
She shook her head. “I know they suffer,” she said quietly.
“More than the exiles?”
“How does one measure it, Finnikin? Does a man who’s lost his family to famine suffer less than one who’s lost them to an assassin’s knife? Is it worse to die of drowning than be trampled under the feet of others? If you lose your wife in childbirth, is it better than watching her burn at the stake? Death is death and loss is loss. I have sensed as much despair in the sleep of those inside as I have seen in the exiles. When I saw the words painted on the child’s body, I sensed their urgency, their anguish. ‘Is hope coming?’”