I was sitting, thinking. Brooding, frankly. Perhaps not happily alone, but contented with the solitude.
Then I realized I wasn’t alone. Damnit, I thought.
“What, aren’t you happy to see me?”
We were sitting on a large oak root. For a moment I wondered if I was dreaming of the Halls, but I lifted my chin to look around. The oak we sat beneath shot up from the center a humble little hill, making it the tallest of the scattered oak and beech trees around. The undergrowth was thin. A packed dirt road could be seen through a few layers of branches and trunks, winding its way below a ridge and above a little pond.
Lady Iltara sat beside me, her hip and shoulder against mine, her head at rest on my right shoulder. Her eyes, I could feel, traced the road. The road south to Ilianath.
“Why bring me here?” I asked.
“I asked my question first.”
I conceded and considered. “Honestly? No, I dread it a little.”
She made a hurt little whimper, gently saccharine with irony. “I have treated you with the utmost respect. I have been forthcoming and honest!”
“No you haven’t.”
“Did I not speak the truth last we met?”
“You did, but… that’s not the point. You ask a lot of me, to stumble and make decisions in the dark. Enter your service? How am I to…”
“Horwendell.” she said. She swung her hips over mine, kneeling astraddle me, her breasts at my eye level.
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“Shhh.” She leaned back a bit to make better eye contact. The view was even more alluring with her smoky eyes at the focus. “Listen. This is your problem, my dear friend. You stumble and make decisions in the dark every day of your life. You feel as though you make no decisions, but what have you done? You have followed the good sir knight on his quest. You endorse his misguided crusade. You assent to his training, his order. You are a fine sword hand, for a novice, I’ll admit. But think. You could have been pursuing your dreams with that time. But you decided not to.”
“If you mean to turn me against…”
“Oh, no, Howe. He is a fine man and I must admit some jealousy to the Lightbringer in whose service he labors. What I ask is: if I had asked you, a week ago, if you would prefer to train with a Yaria cavalry saber or drink deeply of the mysteries of the world, what would you have done?”
I said nothing.
“Especially given your current condition?” She drew two fingertips across my thigh. Remembered pain coursed through it, and I flinched under her hips.
We were getting off-track, I realized. “My question first. Why’d you bring me here?”
She smiled. “You’re the dreamer. Why’d you bring us here?”
“You have nothing to do with this?”
“Not at all.”
The road home. In a few days the band would be passing through the upper reaches of the kingdom of Orland. Ilianath would only be a short way south, along safe (if rough) roads.
Was she lying, or was I really thinking about home? I supposed both could be true. And, certainly, with my leg the way it was…
I regarded the road somberly, unwilling to admit to Lady Iltara the predicament. I didn’t have to, anyway.
“Horwendell of Ilianath,” she said. “I know where we are. I know what has transpired. You’re a good man with bright, bright promise. But your broken shell betrays you. You couldn’t help them when they went to fight, could you?”
“No,” I admitted. “Shame,” I added, trying to dispel the gloom. “Would’ve liked to see the beasts.”
“You worry. They deserve help like they got from the band’s own wise man. Help you could give… were you not a hobbled novice.”
“I get it; I get it,” I grumbled. She was right and it was making me crabby. But then I realized why: I was crabby because I felt as though I should be doing better. Because Gena had been asking me to do better. Because Gena knew I could do better. If I asked her what to do, I thought, what would she say?
Well, probably to quit moping, for one.
“Make a choice, for once, Howe,” Lady Iltara was saying, leaning in close. “Seize your dreams.”
“No,” I said, realizing what I wanted to talk about.
“… Oh?” She drew back, regarding me. Was that genuine surprise? A crack in her armor?
“Dreams… yes, all well and good. But I decline to enter your service.”
“It’s a long and lonely road home.”
“Sure,” I said, my mind somewhere else.
She watched me, looking me directly in the eyes, her eyebrows quirked. When I declined to elaborate, they peaked in a sort of facial shrug and she gave a sigh. “I think I have merely yet to convince you of the merit of life as a dreamer. Please. Think on it more.”
Her eyes were closed and lips were nearly at mine, and I hadn’t yet really figured out what I wanted to say. Or, rather, how I might best put it. So I just blurted it out: “you are an ekhlehk?”
She drew back, eyes flaring open then narrowing. “That is exceedingly rude. I will forgive you a second time. Do not ask me to forgive you a third time.”
“Oh! I’m sorry. My Yaria is terrible. What does it mean?” Then, rather than give her any room to deflect, I stuck my hand in the fire: “you rebel against your king?”
Her mouth twisted in distaste. “It means upstart. The wise man of the band has been speaking ill of me, I see.”
“Well, no, he merely says…”
“Do not heed the ramblings of an ignorant outlander,” she snapped. She was still close, but it was a decidedly different tension between us now. It had become less of an embrace and more of a grip.
“My master always taught me to see things for myself, and see them for as they are,” I said. “So…”
“I am a lady who serves my people, and he…”
“… you have declared yourself and your domain against the king…”
“… indulges in this jealous heckling…”
“… and you mean to seize his throne with the stolen power of the storms. To fell a god?”
Her eyes began to burn. And her hands, so firmly on my robes, began to burn. We began to burn. “You think I cannot?”
My instincts were screaming at me. The heat of her hands was stinging at my shoulders and chest. And the sting would soon become a sear, and then a scorch. I was already trying to worm free. “I’m just trying to see the truth of it,” I stammered through my animal fear.
“I have given you the truth and offered so much more,” she snarled. I toppled backward, and she atop me. Her eyes were bright like stars, and dreadful wings of flame spread behind her. I was still trying to wriggle away, but I found no purchase on whatever surface we had fallen back onto. My leg seized with pain. “But when so generously I bade you decide, you decided to reject the truth. Perhaps I must show you.”
I couldn’t get away. I was going to be consumed by fear and the flames, all at once. My skin would crack and bleed, then cauterize, my lungs would be quashed with smoke and airless heat, and I would reduce to ash and bones while the sorceress held me to the flames.
She said nothing now, only willing my anguish with her shining eyes.
My training. It was a dream. Through the fear and the pain, I wrested control of my fear-flailing arms and mind, and I cast the spell for seeing.
As the spell culminated in its final signs of meaning in the forefront of my mind, I awoke in the tent.
Gena stared eastward, deep in thought.
The camp was abuzz with the news of Eidahn’s recovery, and the tent fairly thronged with visitors that morning. Hester had been near when I had awoken making embarrassing, rapid, groaning exhalations of fear, and he had been kind enough to help me outside, to the edge of the camp, when I became coherent enough to ask for it, and then he had gone to fetch Gena. I had recounted the tale of my night and then sat, hoping the cool breeze might soothe my imagined burns.
“She more or less confirmed your hypothesis,” Gena said, finally. “Well done.”
I just kept drinking in the fresh air.
“She means to usurp the throne of the Old Kingdom,” she continued.
“The House of Os-Kedis, formally,” added Hester. “That’s how the king signs his letters.”
“She’ll fail,” Gena said, her brow tightening. “One spellbook and a mighty hubris? If that’s all it took…”
“Gods have been felled before,” Hester said.
“By peer forces. Other gods. The Lords of Hell. It took the Lord of Agony and his entire army to kill Tormus-Iliath, and at the end of it they were all destroyed themselves. This is one woman. Formidable sorceress she might be; potential access to formidable wizardry she might have, but… Howe, do you have a read on her? Do you think she’s unstable? Howe?”
Gena turned to look at me. I was only just catching up to her line of thinking. Mostly, I was hugging my good knee and feeling the cool air in my lungs and on my bare back.
“Gods, I’m sorry Howe.”
“No, no, I’ll be fine,” I said, at the sort of low volume that might’ve made her wonder if I would be fine. “I just…”
I trailed off, and we were silent for a time.
“Howe?”
“Yeah?”
“I need to ask a favor. A big one.”
“What is it?”
“I have a hunch, and we have an opportunity. Am I close? Can I be ready to talk to her tonight?”
I stared at her dumbly for a second, then managed to ask her to elaborate with a twist of my head.
“Remember that she called us out here.” (“You two, maybe,” Hester mumbled.) “You declined her service. I have not.”
“You cannot,” Hester belted out.
“She’s watching, you know,” Gena said, pausing for effect. Shut up; I know, Hester was what I took that to mean, but did he get it? “She must know you’ve been teaching me the art. She’ll appear to me with an offer, won’t she?”
“Probably,” I said. But the logic seemed… abstract, insubstantial. I wasn’t so sure.
“I need to be on my best footing for a negotiation.”
“For a what?” Hester demanded.
“A negotiation. I hope that she should offer me something similar to what she has to offer Howe. Maybe she’s willing to explain why.”
Hester shook his head and stood. “This is a dangerous game you play.”
“Think of it this way,” Gena replied. “I wager she plans to appear before me, whether I like it or not. I can prepare for the audience, with Howe’s help, or I can show up impaired. Drunk, basically.”
Hester sighed miserably. “Fine. I mislike that idea even more. But I know in my heart: we must fight this sorceress, and we must be the victors. Don’t lose sight of that, will you?” He stalked off, trying to look like he wanted to take a stretch.
“Howe, we can do it, right?” Gena said, turning back to me. She paused. A brief movement of her eyes told me that she was looking inward. “Wait. Howe?”
“Hm?”
“What I’ve been meaning to say is… I’m sorry that… well, I’ve been dismissive, haven’t I? Even in this dream-communion, this is harder on you than I knew.”
“Is it that obvious? Ugh, no, I’m…”
“Howe, no. You don’t need to hide it. You’re feeling real pain. And it’s because I asked you to. I’m sorry. So help me do my part. Please.”
I nodded. I wanted to ask, you’re not going to take the offer, right? but remembered that we were being watched. But why did I want to ask that? Didn’t I know the answer?
“We’ll go over the theory and exercises again today, then,” I said. “One last thing I haven’t taught you… well, how to cast a spell. That’s normally the most reliable way to break a dream, if it is necessary. And it has been… necessary. But even with your academic background…”
“Not in one day? Are there alternatives?”
“A few months, maybe, but not one day. But instead of a spell, perhaps we can… fall back to the general principle. Anything too… heavy, too real, can be used to break a dream. But it should be something that’s reflexive. Which is why a spell is perfect for it.”
“Perhaps the Word? I can recite The Vigil of the Second by heart.”
“The…” I almost had to laugh. The Vigil of the Second is one of the most notoriously difficult passages in the Word, consisting of a series of poems with strange meter connected by prose narrative that is rich with allusion and all but impossible to truly appreciate without a deep understanding of Heroic-Era literature1. Of course Sister Gena would have it memorized. But obviously this conversation had done a lot to nourish me back to health and coherence, because I displayed the presence of mind to not laugh. Besides being difficult, The Vigil of the Second is a tale of a man outcast from his home, with no family to call his own, and who must find meaning in the world with only his memories and the Mundus Medias to guide him.
“Gena, is that…” I began, apologetically.
“It’ll do, right?”
“Yes, if you know it deeply enough that you’re making meaning, not just reciting empty words,” I said. “Gena, I don’t mean to be nosy, but… the Vigil means a lot to you?”
“Oh. No apologies necessary,” she said a bit distantly. “Yes, it’s what you might expect. I was raised by the priests at the Academy-Temple at Ilium.”
“Were they…”
“Kind? Yes.”
“You must be disappointed with academia, then,” I joked, remembering the symposium.
“No,” she said with a soft laugh. “I’m a quick study. By the time I was a teen and beginning my studies as an acolyte I had already noticed the way men and women treat each other when their pride is on the line. And when they think the children aren’t watching.”
“You knew what you were getting into.”
“I’ve told you; I was made for this life. I’d never let any of the mediocrities get in the way of the search for the truth.”
No Heroic-Era literature survives besides the Word itself. This, you see, makes it difficult to develop a deep understanding of Heroic-Era literature. ↩