He leaped to his feet and removed his shirt.
“The thing is,” Arjuro said, rubbing the ointment on Froi’s bruised body later that night in the cooper’s cottage the five of them shared. “I probably would have stayed down the tenth time the human bear had your head between his thighs.”
“Did you not hear me call out to stay down that last time?” Lirah said.
“He’s never been one to listen,” Gargarin muttered, sitting opposite Lirah at the table, scribbling in his journal. “Deserves all the pain.”
Froi closed his eyes, wincing. “I would so appreciate it if every one refrained from expressing an opinion.”
When he opened his eyes again, he felt the force of Quintana’s stare.
“There’s no shame in losing against the Turlans,” she said.
“I didn’t lose,” he said just as Arjuro finished. Froi got to his feet, really wanting desperately to stay calm. “And you would have known that if you had watched instead of playing with those yappy dogs at the exact moment I snatched victory!”
Quintana’s stare continued, but she refrained from speaking.
“And I’ll have you know that not once have I lost a fight this year against anyone from the Lumateran Queen’s Guard!” he added, sitting next to Lirah, who was trying to remove blood from the trousers he had worn in the wrestle.
“You said they were forty years in age, Froi,” Quintana said, irritated. “Can you honestly compare the Turlan lads to the old?”
Arjuro made a rude sound. Even Gargarin looked up from his writing, slightly wounded by her words.
“The younger men would like us both to join them for tale-telling time,” she said.
“Wonderful idea,” Arjuro said. “Perhaps you can join them, and they can pierce both your bodies with blunt instruments and leave us old and decrepit alone to get some rest.”
Quintana turned her stare to Arjuro. After a moment, she smiled. “You’re very funny, Priestling. The funniest man we know.”
Arjuro was wary of her mood. “What?” he asked. “Funnier than Bestiano? Because I hear he is hilarious.”
This time she laughed and then Lirah joined in, and Froi couldn’t help laughing himself, although it caused him pain. He caught Gargarin’s stare.
Quintana reached out and touched Lirah’s mouth and then Froi’s.
“When you laugh, you look like your boy, Lirah.”
Princess Indignant was back the next morning as they prepared to leave. She spent her time skipping after the hound pups, looking up at Gargarin longingly.
“Are they not the most beautiful pups you’ve ever seen, Gargarin? It’s as if the gods are begging us to take —”
“No,” Gargarin said firmly.
Ariston joined them on horseback, and Froi had a feeling it was more about keeping an eye on them than the need to help.
“We missed your women last night, Ariston,” Gargarin said smoothly. “Is the goddess of winter keeping them from you?”
“The cleansing takes time,” Ariston replied.
Gargarin and Ariston spoke among themselves most of the way up the mountain. From what Froi could hear, it was mostly about produce and irrigation, and it wasn’t hard to see that both men were impressed with each other, despite their lack of trust and the very little they had in common.
Froi and the others were quiet for the rest of the way, and he could see that Arjuro was curious about this strange visit to the dying man. No matter how much Arjuro had tried for the last two nights, he had not uncovered the reason for Ariston’s warning against the godshouse priests. Froi wondered what had taken place forty-five years ago on an isolated mountain peak to warrant such an accusation.
As Ariston had promised, it was half a day’s ride, and Quintana slept against Froi’s back most of the way.
“Why is she always tired?” he asked Lirah.
“Because she’s making a baby,” Lirah said quietly to prevent Ariston from hearing. “In the first few months, when I was carrying mine, I was weary to the bone.”
Froi noticed that she said “carrying mine,” not “carrying you.” Lirah and Gargarin still had not acknowledged him as theirs, and he realized that he wanted more from them than they were willing to give. But they seemed broken people who were not good with words, so he kept his silence.
When they reached a small hut close to the peak of the mountain, Ariston helped Quintana dismount, and once again he grabbed her face, this time more gently, to study her. Lirah exchanged a look with Gargarin, and he shook his head to silence any question from her lips. Although it seemed unlikely that Ariston had ever traveled to the Citavita and seen Quintana before, the Turlan was strangely suspicious of her.
A woman stepped out of the cottage, having heard the horses. She was perhaps sixty in age, her face long and thin. She seemed guarded, until she saw Ariston and greeted him with a nod. But then she noticed Arjuro and her expression changed to hostility.
“Why bring a godshouse priest to my father’s house, Ariston?”
“Because I believe these people have a story to tell,” he replied.
Arjuro stared at the woman as if he were seeing an apparition.
“What is it you see in me?” she asked angrily.
Arjuro looked beyond her into the open doorway of the cottage.
“I truly feel I can vouch that they mean no harm, Hesta,” Ariston said. “I’m curious myself.”
The woman, Hesta, walked away and entered the house. Froi and the others looked at Ariston for guidance. He nodded, and they followed her inside to where a weathered man lay on a cot. Skin and bones, he seemed, with gnarled hands that Quintana reached out to trace with an inquisitive finger.
“He’s the oldest man I’ve ever seen,” she said indignantly.
The woman stared at her in amazement.
“Who are you?” Hesta of Turla asked her abruptly.
“R-Regina,” Quintana said, but she was an awful liar, because she looked at Gargarin for approval. Froi made a point of rehearsing her with a different name. Not Quintana. Not Reginita. Not anything that would have strangers connecting her to the palace.
“I’ve dreamed of the dying man of Turla,” Quintana said. “Do you call on my dreams, old man?” she asked loudly. Gargarin winced. This was certainly one of the moments where they needed the decorum of the other Quintana.
The old man stared at her through milky eyes tinged with blue. He beckoned her with one of his gnarled hands, and she leaned forward for him to speak against her ear.
“Your whiskers are tickling,” she said.
The man chuckled, and Hesta softened.
“My father has been dying for almost nineteen years, yet he refuses to be taken.”
“But he seems in so much pain,” Arjuro said, lifting the man into a sitting position so he could breathe easier.
“Why would he share his dreams with our girl?” Gargarin asked.
“You need to tell me who she is before I answer that question,” the woman said firmly, but Froi could see fierce emotion in her eyes as she stared between her father and Quintana.
“Is he gods’ touched?” Arjuro asked.
Hesta shuddered. “I’ve not heard those words for many years now. He refused to say them out loud after the godshouse priests came.”
They waited and she sighed. “Yes, he is, and I am too, but not enough to make us special.” She looked down at her father tenderly. “He was good with his herd. The perfect shepherd.”
After too long a bout of silence, Hesta shivered. “You’re frightening me.”
Gargarin bowed his apology. “My name is Gargarin, and this is my brother, Arjuro; Lirah; and … our young ones,” Gargarin said. “We have no idea why we are here except our girl has dreamed of your father all her life.”
“He wants to die,” Quintana announced. “But he’s waiting for the spirit of another. That’s what he tells me in the dream. He’s looking for his lost lamb.”
Hesta studied Quintana
warily. “Why you?” she asked.
Quintana looked at Gargarin, who sighed, not knowing how much to divulge.
“Let’s just say she isn’t who she seems.”
“Can she not speak for herself? She seems simple.”
“I’m like you and your father,” Quintana said. “A bit of a gift but not enough to make me special.”
There was silence from the others, made uncomfortable by Quintana’s frank words.
The woman noticed her father’s hand hovering above his blankets and gripped it.
“What can you tell them, Hesta, that may make sense?” Ariston asked.
She shook her head, confused. “What is there to tell?”
Froi walked away in frustration. They were talking in circles and wasting time. Hesta seemed nervous at his movement.
“You’ve come from the Citavita, haven’t you?” she asked bitterly. “What could we possibly have left for you after all these years?”
“Hesta?” Arjuro said, as though asking her permission to use her name. She nodded. “Can you tell us the story of the priests coming to take away the children?”
She shook her head. “Not the children. One child. A gifted child, beyond anything conceivable. If it was to rain in four days’ time, she would say the words, ‘In four days time it will rain.’ If a man she did not know in a village half a day’s ride away was to die soon, she would say it long before the man would die. People came from all over the mountain to hear their future spoken by this child.
“When she was thirteen, the godshouse priests came to see us and asked her questions all the day long, when she only wished to play with her lambs. Oh, the songs she’d sing to bring them home,” Hesta said, closing her eyes. “I can still hear them in my sleep.”
“What happened to her?” Lirah asked, shivering.
Hesta’s eyes were far away, and the dying man held one of her hands.
“They stole her. In the dead of night, the priests stole her. We never saw her again.”
Arjuro held a palm to his brow as though he could not quite believe what he was hearing.
“In years to come, they may have covered her face when she walked among the people, but I knew who she was.”
Arjuro let out a ragged breath.
“Arjuro?” Gargarin asked.
“The oracle queen was a Turlan mountain girl?” Arjuro said, looking at Hesta for confirmation. “Stolen from her people?”
There was a hushed silence among the others.
Arjuro reached out and touched the woman’s face.
“You have some of her features,” he said with a gentle smile. “I lived with her in the godshouse of the Citavita. I was a young lad, and she was a fair bit older, but we shared a … strange humor. They said I was her favorite.”
He pointed to a chair beside the dying man’s bed, and she nodded. Arjuro sat.
“I never really quite believed that the oracles were demigods who found their way to the Citavita godshouse,” Arjuro said.
“But most people do,” Gargarin said. “They need to believe it.”
“The last thing they’ll want to hear is that she came from the backwaters of Turla,” Ariston said, his face pale at what had just been revealed.
“Who were you to her?” Hesta asked Arjuro.
“A priestling. Those of us who were gods’ touched lived at the godshouse from when we were sixteen to twenty-five. After that, we could go as we please, live the way we wanted, but during those years, we lived and breathed for the godshouse. We were the voice of the oracle, really. She rarely ventured outside the godshouse walls, and when I think of it now, perhaps she was as much a prisoner to the Citavita as …”
Arjuro looked at Lirah. As much a prisoner to the gods house as Lirah was to the palace. Two young girls taken from their homes at the same age. One to be the king’s whore, the other to be oracle to a people.
“As far as we priestlings were concerned, she had always been there. We thought she was ancient, of course. The hubris of the young who think that everyone else is too old or too young.” He smiled. “Old and decrepit, and she would have been younger than my brother and I are now.”
Arjuro took the old man’s hand.
“If what you fear is that she was controlled by the priests who took her, then I will reassure you that the oracle allowed no one, man or woman, to tell her how to think or what to say. Regardless of how she was placed in the godshouse, she had power. We loved nothing more than watching the older priests travel from the provinces and get a serving from her tongue. More than anything, she could not be bought. She could not be convinced to lie. The gift of foretelling, she would say, was not meant to bring on war and nurture greed. It was meant to guide.”
Froi could see that Hesta was touched by Arjuro’s fierce respect for her sister.
“And the events in the godshouse all those years ago?” she asked. “The carnage?”
“All true, I’m afraid,” Arjuro said sadly.
“And she took her life all those months later?”
Arjuro looked at Gargarin.
“No,” Gargarin said. “I was with her at her death. She died …” he swallowed hard. “She died in childbirth.”
Hesta was shocked to hear the words.
“How can that be?” Hesta asked.
“It was … nine months after the attack on the godshouse,” Arjuro said.
Hesta wept, understanding the truth.
“By who?” she asked, her voice broken. “Was it the Serkers?”
No one spoke for a moment.
“By my father, the king,” Quintana said, her voice quiet. “When Lirah and I went searching for my mother’s spirit that one time in the lake of the half dead, it was not to be found. But there was another. A second child born dead, who had somehow become separated from our mother, the oracle, in spirit.
Hesta stared at her, stunned. “Your mother?”
A look passed between the two of them, and Hesta shivered.
“She was just the oracle queen to us,” Arjuro said. “Blessed, we would call her. At their deaths, Gargarin gave the babe a name. Perhaps it was for that reason Regina of Turla made it to the lake of the half dead to wait for her mother’s spirit. But her mother’s name was never known, and so the oracle has been lost, except in the dreams of her father and her daughter.”
Hesta’s eyes were still fixed on Quintana.
“Solange,” she said. “My sister’s name was Solange.”
Quintana looked down at the old man. “He cannot bear the idea of being separated from his daughter in both life and death. He needs to take the spirit of Solange with him, and somehow she sent me to him because he wants to die.”
She turned to Arjuro. “Can you do that for him, Arjuro? Now that you know her name. Can you call her spirit home after all these years?”
Arjuro nodded solemnly.
“Leave us,” Quintana said to Froi and the others. “I need to speak to my Turlan kin.”
Outside, Ariston took a ragged breath.
“Our women are hidden,” he said after a while. “Ever since the talk of calamity in the Citavita, we’ve kept them protected. We long suspected that the oracle came from Turla. If the priests found an oracle among us long ago, then the palace will find a girl to produce the first now. The last thing we wanted were madmen riding into our villages and taking our last borns.”
“Do you know what the lettering means, Ariston?” Gargarin asked.
The Turlan shook his head. “We’ve always believed the mark of the lastborn to be a message from the gods.”
“It’s not godspeak,” Arjuro said. “But it is certainly a message of some sort.”
Ariston looked back into the cottage.
“I thought it strange that the girl had some of the features of our Turlan women,” he said. “But the despised king’s daughter? We are lowly enough in this kingdom without Charynites claiming that the curse maker belongs to us.”
“You’re never to spea
k of it,” Gargarin said sharply. “Do you hear me? The mystique of the oracle stays as it is. As far as this kingdom is concerned, the oracle was not from Turla and she did not birth the king’s child. If a king is born to us in years to come, ignorant men could use that against him.”
Ariston nodded, looking back at the old man’s cottage.
“Will you come down from this mountain, Ariston?” Gargarin asked. “To fight for Charyn when the time comes?”
Ariston shook his head. “We’re Turlans, not Charynites. We fight for no one, only to protect ourselves.”
“How can you say that?” Froi shouted angrily. “You practice all day long to be the best, but you can’t fight for your people. In Lumatere, no one is prouder of being a Lumateran than a Mont. Why can’t you be both?”
“You’re a Lumateran?” Ariston asked, surprised.
“Does it matter?” Froi asked.
“Do you know what we say to each other every day, Luma teran?” Ariston asked. “ ‘Remember Serker.’ Annihilated by Charynites. They had no one on their side but each other. Mark my words: you will find no province who will fight for Charyn. You don’t have to be a mountain goat to know that.”
“Would you fight for a king, Ariston?” Gargarin persisted. “For the curse breaker? Would you fight so that your last-born girls need not fear the mark on the back of their necks?”
“I would fight to the death to protect my people on this mountain,” Ariston said, glancing at Froi. “You know, they say that the Lumaterans will strike when we least expect it, out of revenge for Charyn’s part in their cursed ten years.”
Froi shook his head. “They would never attack the innocent.”
“Where do you hail from in Lumatere?” he asked suspiciously.
“I was found in exile,” Froi said, having no reason to lie to Ariston. “I belong to all of them.”
Ariston glanced at the others, as though not knowing what to believe.
“I mean no offense, Gargarin of Abroi, but the sooner you and your companions get off my mountain, the safer I’ll feel for my people.”
They camped that night under a full moon and a sky crowded with stars that made Froi forget that there was an old man waiting to die and remember that there was a kingdom dying to live.