The question startled him. “Nothing but my own heart, Holy One.”
“Why come to us? There seems little we can do that we have not already done: raise an army to safeguard ourselves, send out scouts, build up stocks of oil of naya, expand the safe zone so folk may plant crops when the rains come. You can be sure we do not wish to fall under the northern army’s brutal yoke. You need only look at me, Guardian, to know I speak the truth. So what else can we possibly do?”
For once he stumbled, at a loss for words. He could not force words past a leaden tongue.
Kirit rode forward. “In my tribe,” she said in her hoarse outlander’s voice, “every person works. All work together, each at her own tasks. So must we work together, to bring peace.” She frowned at Jothinin, as if scolding him.
The Hieros and the Qin solder waited as the lamps hissed and the river flowed.
The night wind’s weary sigh spurred Jothinin on, despite his misgivings. “We come to offer you a weapon. I will tell you how to kill a Guardian and release its cloak to a new awakening.”
27
ALTHOUGH IT WASN’T quite dark, a fire burned at Candle Rock as Marit approached from the north. The hells! She had expected the rock to be deserted, and yet hadn’t she also prepared the way by shifting the message stones? It was two days off the full moon. She might have known some reeve would be waiting, as reeves did, loyal comrades who would risk their lives to aid one of their own. Her eyes watered, maybe only because of the stinging wind.
She’d left Badinen and his eagle riding a high current while she dropped down to scout out a safe landing place; they’d been traveling for many, many days, and every evening she and Warning landed first as a precaution. They pulled up sharply as the man sitting beside the fire leaped to his feet.
“Marit!”
Why did it have to be him?
Careful not to meet his astonished gaze, she dismounted and slapped Warning on the flank to send her off to the altar at Ammadit’s Tit for sustenance.
“Are you a ghost or a lilu?” he demanded.
“I’m a Guardian, Joss.”
He sat down hard on the ring of stones as if all the breath had been slugged out of him. “You can’t be Marit. Not truly.”
“Truly I am,” she snapped.
“Marit died!” His head rose, and for a horrible moment she looked into him, all his shame and fury and reckless rule-breaking to make the gods say they were sorry, only of course he had caused her death by violating the altar on Ammadit’s Tit just because he was too young and stupid to think something so awful could come of breaking the boundaries. And all the drinking and sex in all the twenty-one years after her death had not made his shame and fury go away; only the years themselves had muted his grief and anger, as years will do. By then, of course, he’d gotten into the habit of drinking and devouring—
She looked away before he did. “It wasn’t your gods-rotted fault! You’re being cursed absorbed in yourself to think it was!”
“Ouch.” He chuckled weakly. “I suppose I deserved that.”
She strode over to the ring of stones and sat down opposite, the fire between them. “You really don’t believe I’m Marit, do you?”
“You look cursed like her and sound cursed like,” he replied, careful not to look directly at her. “The way the message rocks were left reminded me of you. Maybe that’s why I’ve come out here for the last three Lamp Moons, because I kept thinking of you and—Eihi!—”
Impossible not to think of the last time they had met on Candle Rock. He was startlingly older, but the cut of his shoulders and the curve of his neck hadn’t changed. He still had a good smell, clean sweat washed with the bracing perfume of the juniper soap he must still receive from kinfolk at his home village.
“It’s difficult for me to imagine how you could be her,” he went on in a lower voice. “Maybe you’re a Guardian. Maybe you’re a gods-cursed ghost who stole a Guardian’s cloak, like those ones who lead that cursed army. Some even call them demons. But I think it’s most likely you’re a lilu sent to tempt me.”
The comment sucked the breath right out of her. “Do I tempt you still?”
He laughed harshly as he turned his head to look into the night. The hells! He was a cursed good-looking man with a strong profile, a lean, fit body, his arms bare in a sleeveless leather vest. The angular tattoos marking him as a child of the Fire mother hadn’t changed, covering his right arm and ringing both wrists. His hair was no longer cropped quite so close against his skull; if it was going to silver, she saw no trace of fine pale lines in the changing light.
The moment was broken as Badinen and Sisit thumped down in the open space away from the fire, a graceful pair despite their lack of training. She jumped up as Joss rose, a hand on his baton as he gestured a “well-come-in-peace.”
To Marit’s surprise, the lad answered the gesture with the formal reply. He unhooked from the harness and, as Sisit looked around the outcrop, ventured forward.
“Ye Guardian sath she will dun brang meh teh ye Clan Hall. Ya one reeve?”
Joss blinked, then glanced toward Marit and wiggled his left hand, and she realized he was having trouble understanding the youth’s thick dialect.
“I found this young man in the north, on the Eagle’s Claws,” she said. “I’m bringing him to Clan Hall for training. There’s no soft way to say this, so I’ll say it hard: Horn Hall has been slaughtered.”
He didn’t react, as if her own speech had become impenetrable. “Horn Hall has been missing for the last year. The hall abandoned, every reeve and eagle gone.”
“For whatever the hells reason, they fled to the Eagle’s Claws and set up outposts there. Someone poisoned the eagles and thereby the reeves and killed everyone else. It’s one rocky Sorrowing Tower, bones strewn everywhere. It happened a year ago, maybe.”
He reeled, swaying on his feet. “Give me a moment. Here, lad—” He spoke each word deliberately, shock scraping through his tone. “What is your name? I am called Joss.”
“Badinen. An thas ya, I call ya Sisit.”
“Slow down. She will need to be jessed and set for the night. My eagle Scar bides here also. Two eagles who are strangers may fight over territory. Do you understand?”
It was clear the lad understood Joss far better than Joss understood him, no doubt from his year serving the Horn Hall reeves. Marit felt Joss’s relief as he took Badinen off to show him to the hollow where Candle Rock dipped into a natural bowl. Sometimes you could only absorb the worst news or endure pain and apprehension by engaging in the most ordinary of daily tasks.
Marit sat by the fire, watching the flames twist and dance. Now and again she fed a log to the fire. After it grew dark, Joss still did not return, but she heard as on the wind the genial crawl of a long conversation between him and the lad. She could not quite hear the words and did not want particularly to listen, but the tenor of their speech surprised her. The youth had never grown easy with her, despite their many days journey across the north together, but Joss was a kind of person he was familiar with and accustomed to obeying; anyway, the gods knew that Joss was an easy man to like when he set himself to be charming.
Aui!
The full moon crept up the span of the heavens. She could make out individual trees on the slopes of nearby hills. Atop Ammadit’s Tit a glimmer winked, dazzled, and faded. Warning was up there, drinking from the altar’s pool. She licked her lips, remembering its taste, and sighed.
Joss came walking up the path alone and halted a short distance away. She pretended he was not there. It was too difficult to know that he walked the earth and she could never touch him. Let him go.
“Is it part of the sorcery of the Guardians that causes you to appear to us as one we love, the one we yearn for and know is lost?” He spoke quietly, as if to the wind and the night. “For years I looked for you. Well, not for you but for your remains, so I could rest you properly on a Sorrowing Tower and say the prayers and make the offerings. It was like half of my
own spirit had gone away with you, and I was caught as an angry ghost unable to leave or stay. We found Flirt so mutilated I couldn’t imagine how anyone could hate the eagles so much. I knew you were dead, therefore. But we never found your body. For years it was like a talon digging into my belly, that maybe they’d buried you, the worst thing they could think of doing. I broke the boundaries time and again trying to find some gods-rotted answer but in the end there wasn’t an answer.”
He tipped his head, listening to a faint melody. Down in the hollow, Badinen was singing a song about the big fish that got away. From the rhythmic scratch accompanying his singing, he was raking the dirt, a task that would take him a good long time.
Joss sighed. “But there is an answer, the one that’s been staring at me all along. It all started here, in the Liya Pass, twenty-one years ago. That time when we stumbled across the beginnings of this Star of Life army. Only I mistook them for common bandits. They’re the ones who killed you. Worse, they got away with it and maybe that’s what made them so bold, seeing we were unable to stop them. Village by village we retreated over the years. We didn’t fight because we thought the people did not want us in Herelia and then later in Iliyat and then later in other valleys and villages. When they refused to have us reeves stand at their assizes, we thought it was because they distrusted us or had come to hate us, maybe because of the actions of a few useless strutting reeves who abused their authority. But it’s so obvious now. Of course there were some among the villagers who hated the reeves. There always have been, but that’s not why things changed. Of course there were some who liked the new order, if it meant they could have what they wanted for the taking, because some folk are that way. But what if the rest were simply being coerced? Eiya! Not that such a thing didn’t occur to some among us at the time, but it came on so cursed slow, a rot eating into the beams and posts while all the time you think the house remains sound and then it collapses around you and buries you. Eiya! Marit, you have no idea how badly I have missed you all these years.”
Even Guardians can weep. They can grieve for what is lost.
“Marit—” Gaze averted, he walked toward her with a hand extended.
“Don’t touch me, Joss.”
He jerked to a halt as if slapped.
“Neh, you don’t understand. I’m still the Marit who loves you, but I’m something else now, too. What folk are, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling—it’s all laid open to me now, like flayed skin.”
He let his hand drop to his side.
She pushed on recklessly. “The Guardians are not pure gods-touched vessels given the form of humans. They’re just people, like you and me, given a second life. Those who die seeking justice for others may be awakened by a cloak to become Guardians. The other cloaks aren’t lilu or gods-cursed demons, they’re just people who have succumbed to the worst in themselves, and who have twisted the power the gods granted them to serve their own corrupt ends.”
“Why would the gods give cloaks to humankind if they could be so easily corrupted and used in the service of such monstrous goals?”
“Surely the question isn’t whether it was wrong to begin with, but what is to be done about it now.”
He shifted impatiently, his gaze still averted. “But it has to matter! We have to figure out why this gift from the gods was corrupted, and stop it from happening again. What has happened in the land to poison it? Maybe these troubles are only a reflection of our own selves. The marshal of Bronze Hall says we’ve betrayed the gods by forgetting the old ways, the traditional forms.”
She considered the assizes she had so recently presided over, and a hollow weariness sank into her heart. “Maybe. But we can’t cling to the old ways just because they’re the old ways. Maybe that’s the puzzle we’re meant to solve, the mystery whose heart we must seek. Maybe this is a challenge, to discover how to walk forward from where we are now. Joss!” Yet she looked away, because it hurt to look at what she had lost. “You know as well as I do that if we don’t stop this army, they’ll infest the entire land and we’ll all pass under the Shadow Gate.”
“I know.” He stared fixedly at the ground.
“Take Badinen to Clan Hall so he can tell his story, and get training. Then before you return to your duties in Argent Hall, you’ve got to convince the commander at Clan Hall that the reeves must unite in finding new ways to fight.”
The smile that pulled at his mouth was wry and mocking in a way the young Joss she’d loved had never been, because he had always been straightforward and passionate and outward-moving. That had been a great part of his charm.
“That’s easily done,” he said as he looked up.
His eyes caught her: the reckless, bold, and sometimes furiously brooding young man had been tempered, beaten, burned, and yet emerged with the deepest part of him intact. The part she had fallen into love with, even if she had called it only desire. The part that was willing to rebel in the face of injustice even if meant standing alone. The part that was bold and crazy enough to try anything, however unexpected or difficult.
“You are Commander of Clan Hall!” she cried, gaping at him.
He closed the gap between them and grasped her wrist. Gods help her, she fell into him in the remembered way that had once come so easily, the way her arms embraced his torso and her hands crept up his muscular back; the way he held her close with one arm just below her shoulders and the other bracing her hips against his. His kiss was the same, at first tender and tentative and then abruptly passionate and searching.
In those first moments, her eyes squeezed shut, it was merely a glorious kiss. Aui! How she had missed this!
Then it hit.
The contact so intimate, so intense, released on her a flood. She was devoured again and again in the guise of different women—so cursed many!—and one young woman so blazingly and immediately vivid that his desire for Zubaidit was a knife in Marit’s own longing heart; all his grief and anger poured over her, stupid petty disputes like stings, raging arguments, devouring thirst that no amount of rice wine could slave; yet also she was slaked by the calming friendships he treasured among the other reeves whose affection for him was balm, and yet this comradely affection more than anything made her ache for what she could never again share—
She broke away, blindly groping for a path out of her gods-rotted loneliness. “Don’t touch me!” Grief felled her; she sank to her knees.
He knelt beside her but did not touch. “Ah the hells, Marit. I wasn’t sure—Aui!—but now—No one else can kiss like that.”
Laughter choked her sobs, or maybe laughter and tears were the same thing. “You sure as hells tried enough women to find out.”
“Marit—”
“Neh, you have nothing to apologize for. Sheh! You thought I was dead. And even if I weren’t, I hope I would never be the kind of person who was jealous of the Merciless One. Let it go, Joss.”
After all these years, he could not. “Do you still love me, Marit?”
She wiped her face. “I love the memory of the love we shared then. How can I know if I love you now? I’m not so naive, nor should you be. I’m a Guardian. I have my duty, and you have yours. Please tell me you understand.” She did not look at him. She did not want to know if he was lying or telling the truth.
He rose and paced away, his back to the fire. “What must I do?”
She rested on her hands until she was no longer shaking. Then she rose and wiped her face a final time, organized her thoughts as she would when, as a reeve, she was reporting to her marshal. “This is what I have seen. First, Herelia is poisoned. That is where they’ve built their stronghold. Wedrewe is a stranglehold gripping the throats of every person who lives within the cloak of their power. Wherever they extend their control, they choke until those they rule are grateful merely to be living. Second, I have come to see that in the days long ago the reeves were organized differently than they are now. They ranged more widely, and spread their perches into more outposts
. They weren’t all gathered into a few halls.”
“Then why do the tales speak of six reeve halls?”
“The tales speak of ‘the fifteen towns’ of the Hundred, but that does not mean there are only fifteen towns today. A reeve hall might have meant something different in the tales. We say it is an actual place, but maybe it used to mean—oh—an allegiance, or a breeding line of eagles.”
“Family groupings,” he said, musing. “It’s true, I’m trying to implement new patrol protocols, even methods of fighting in concert with our allies. But not all the reeve halls will join me. I’ve got to be cautious in how I approach them.”
“Don’t wait too long to act. A newly trained cohort has already marched from Herelia to join the main army. Another will march within the month, and a third in three months. Fifteen cohorts they have in number.”
“Fifteen?”
“They will train more, whether with willing recruits or unwilling ones. These are the people who hang prisoners from poles. Surely you’ve seen—”
“I know what we face! We have Olo’osson’s support. There’s an outlander captain named Anji who is training an army, and he’s very good. But how can we defeat an army that boasts fifteen cohorts of fighting men and is commanded by Guardians, none of whom we can stand against?”
“What if I told you there was a way to separate a Guardian from the cloak, to release that cloak to find a new vessel? Maybe a cleaner spirit, one who has not crossed the Shadow Gate.”
He became still, as if holding his breath; it seemed the wind itself ceased. “Are you saying I could kill you?”
“Yes. If you could take me by surprise, render me senseless so you could separate the cloak from my body. Or if I let you because I was desperate enough to welcome oblivion.”
“Are you that desperate, Marit?”
She could hear how badly he wanted her to answer no. He wanted her to be alive for his own sake as much as for hers. Yet she must consider dispassionately. She must delve into her own heart, her own spirit. Aui! How strongly that heart beat; how powerfully that spirit flamed!