Who You Are,
Not Who You Were
As the appointed time of the duel drew near, Allystaire found himself looking for Idgen Marte. He tried her tent, the Inn, and finally it came to him: The Temple.
He found her kneeling before the Shadow’s Pillar, wearing the midnight blue leathers that she’d appeared in the night Cerisia had arrived, her scabbarded sword resting on the ground beside her, hanging from the belt she wore across one shoulder.
Allystaire waited a respectful distance away, though he was certain that she knew he was present. He could hear no words coming from her, though her lips occasionally moved, but he could feel the faintest hum of the Mother’s song.
Idgen Marte straightened, hopped lightly to her feet, adjusted the hang of her sword, and took a deep breath.
“Asking for Her favor?”
“Not favor. Permission,” Idgen Marte replied, “and perhaps a bit of knowing.”
“Knowing what?”
She frowned faintly, the corner of her mouth tugging at the scars that ran down her neck. “I…your Gifts from Her, they come and go as you need them, aye? Mine, my speed, the shadows? They are always with me. I no longer know how to move anything less than that fast when it matters.”
“Am I hearing you say you want to win this fight fairly?”
Idgen Marte scowled at him and fiddled with the hilt of her sword. “I want to meet him skill to skill. I’ve fought my share of duels. I know the speed of my wrists is his match, and more. I don’t need the speed of my Gifts.”
“You are not Idgen Marte the duelist, sword-at-hire, the adventurer any longer,” Allystaire replied quietly. “You are the Shadow of the Mother. You have responsibilities to live past this day, however you must.”
“Would you take that advice?”
“If the Mother’s Gift of strength came to my arm, I would not ignore it. I would end the fight as quickly as I could.”
“Allystaire, for the last half score of years, all I had, all that I was, I earned with this,” Idgen Marte wrapped her hand around the hilt of the long, curved sword she always wore. “I don’t mean to stand here and tell you my story, but when I left my home, I did it with nothing but this sword, a decent pair of boots, and some stolen clothes. The boots and clothes are long since gone. I’ve earned a fortune, drunk it away, earned it back, and lost it again more times than I care to count. I’ve lived and fought and collected stories in the Concordat, Keersvast, and Goddess help me, this frigid northern waste. Because of this, and what I could do with it,” she said, lifting the scabbarded blade off the frog on her belt. “Because my wrists and my feet were faster than anyone else’s. The sword-at-hire, the warband life, it’s hard on a man, you know that. The weak die quick, the cowards never last, and most of ‘em who do live have seen so much they’ve given in and become right bastards. Now just imagine it for me.”
Idgen Marte paused for a deep breath, looked down at her sword, wrapped her hand around the hilt again. “I’m not asking for pity. I could’ve chosen another life, after the one I wanted was barred to me,” she rasped. “I chose it. It meant something to me, something about myself that I can’t put into words. You probably felt the same about your knighthood, about teaching, about leading men at war. Well, the Goddess may have made us something better, something more noble or pure, than a knight or a hired blade. Somethin’ closer to a story. Yet there’s a part of me that wants to know, am I still the woman who made her own way? Am I still my own master? Can you understand that?”
Allystaire thought a moment, taking the time to let “after the one I wanted was barred to me” sink into his thoughts and lay there till he knew he’d remember to ask about it another time. “I do, Idgen Marte. I do. I felt that way when we came upon that press gang back in the summer, and that Delondeur knight with the blue cockerel lowered his lance. For a moment, I was doing what I was bred to do, spurring Ardent into the charge and couching my lance and trying to find the spot where his shield would not be. For a moment I was my old self again, Lord Coldbourne, Castellan of Wind’s Jaw, Marshal of Oyrwyn, almost always a winner in the lists. And then I remembered whose knight I was now, and Her strength filled my arm. Who we were only matters as it prepared us to be what we are now. Please do not forget that.”
“As if I could. And yet if I lunge and run him through faster than anyone can follow, am I helping our cause, or hurting it?”
“Maybe just slow down enough for everyone to see it.”
She snorted. “Why’s he doing this, anyway? He knows the rest of his men are walking away.”
“He is afraid of what he faces if he returns to his church in disgrace. And I think he is a little ashamed of how the acolyte duped him.”
“As if he were the first man led astray by the promise of parted legs?”
“I do not think Joscelyn’s were the legs he had in mind, and I believe that weighs on him as well.”
“Well, he’s a fool. A little ashamed is better than dead.”
“Mayhap. Could be that a clean death here is what he is really after. Under the sun, with a sword in his hand, rather than knives in the dark, or a quick fall off a ship.”
“You think Fortune’s temple would murder him?”
“I do not doubt that Braech’s priests would. And do you think most of Fortune’s clergy are more like Cerisia or more like Joscelyn?”
“Not sure what the difference is.”
“Joscelyn was willing to do murder to advance herself. Cerisia came here hopeful of avoiding bloodshed.”
Idgen Marte stopped near the door, her silhouette outlined by the thin band of bright daylight it let in. “Are you so sure of that? Not at all distracted?”
Allystaire frowned thinly, choosing his words carefully. “I may have been, at points,” he admitted. “Mildly. Yet not when I compelled the truth of her. She is genuine on this point, if not others.”
“Let me hazard a guess. You valiantly resisted her advances in the name of chastity and piety.”
Allystaire laughed, though faintly, as the memory of Cerisia’s fingers, her lips, her scent drifted across his sense. “I would not say chastity and piety so much as politics.”
Idgen Marte sighed, shaking her head in mock sadness. “You probably made the smart choice. After a fashion. Still—when it comes to Fortune’s clerics, I never saw one didn’t have gold sticking to their fingers. And she’s no different.”
“Enough gossip. You have a duel to fight.”
Allystaire led Idgen Marte out of the Temple, acting as her second. On the long walk to the roped-off field at the other side of town, a crowd tried to follow without pressing too close upon them. When they reached the Temple field, Ivar and her Ravens had joined with Renard and his villagers to keep the crowd back, and the disarmed prisoners cowed. Cerisia paced nervously, wearing her white silks and her mask, while Joscelyn and Gerther, hands bound, hunched miserably nearby in dirtied rags.
Iolantes wore his mail and helm and a longsword and a heavy dirk on his belt, though he’d dispensed with Fortune’s surcoat. His guards stayed a pace behind him as he approached Cerisia and knelt.
Fortune’s Archioness, unreadable behind her mask, seemed to pay little attention to whatever Iolantes had to say. The man knelt before her, speaking quietly, no words carrying across the stillness to Allystaire’s ears. He made no grand gestures, did not raise his eyes to her mask, simply staring at the ground as he spoke. Finally, after several moments of this, Cerisia raised her hand to his head and bent over him, speaking, Allystaire assumed, some kind of blessing.
After a few quick words, she turned away from the kneeling guard. There was a kind of finality in the gesture. He called softly after her, then stood, his back as straight as the blade on his hip, and awaited his opponent.
The day was cool and cloudless beneath a bright sun. Allystaire led Idgen Marte to the edge of the flat space that was serving as their field.
Cerisia had circled around and met them, as well as Iolantes and the guard serving as his second, in the middle of the field. Mol did the same, gliding from one side where she had stood with Torvul.
“Is your servant bound to this foolishness?” The young priestess addressed her older counterpart directly, with that curiously adult, unmistakably educated voice Mol had grown into.
“He is no longer my servant.” Cerisia’s voice was flat and muffled by her mask, but colder than Allystaire remembered. “His life is his own to throw away as he wills it, foolish or not. Do not look to me to dissuade him.”
“Enough of this,” Iolantes snapped. His skin was tight across his jaw, but otherwise he was the picture of professional, soldierly calm. Even his voice softened when he spoke again. “Let us set the terms.”
“The terms are that you die when I kill you,” Idgen Marte said, “and that afterwards your men go free, with what food and stores they can carry. Their weapons, armor, valuables, and mounts are forfeit.”
Iolantes spat. “That is no fair bargain.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting,” Idgen Marte said cooly. “Take it and die clean. Refuse it and you’re the first of many to hang today.”
“Fine. And if I win?”
“Hadn’t given it thought,” the swordswoman answered.
“If I win, my men go free with all their gear and goods. All my men, any that were witched into staying must be set free.”
“Believe what you like and make peace with this world. May the Mother grant you mercy in the next.” Idgen Marte turned sharply away and barked, “Clear the field.”
Allystaire tried to catch her eye as he, Mol, Cerisia, and the other guardsman all hurried away, but Idgen Marte’s eyes locked on Iolantes as she turned to face him. The bright, deceptively gentle curve of her sword gleamed as it cleared her sheath with hardly a whisper. With her left hand, she lifted the scabbard free of the frog it rested upon on her belt and gave it a good toss, clearing it away from her legs.
Iolantes drew more slowly, his heavier blade coming free with a loud and angry skirl. He lifted his shield and, mail rattling, trotted straight towards her, picking up speed as he moved. Shield lifted in front of him, he raised his sword for a brute-force overhand swing straight down at her.
Rather than even attempt to parry, Idgen Marte stood still, so still that even as his blade reached the top of its arc and began to descend, she seemed not to move. Allystaire’s breath caught in his throat.
The heavy longsword swung through empty air. With an economical grace, Idgen Marte had sidestepped, planting her left foot wide to one side and pivoting on it. Her right foot only whisked against the ground. As Iolantes’s sword over-swung, she lifted hers and lashed a sharply snapped kick at his hand. His arm shook and his hand loosened around the hilt, but he wasn’t that easily disarmed.
Iolantes swung his shield in an arc in front of him, but Idgen Marte was already rolling away. She popped back to her feet several paces in front of him. Resettling his grip on his sword, he danced forward again, more warily this time, shield advancing, sword probing.
She declined to meet any of his attacks with her own blade. Tentative as they were, she simply skittered to either side of them. Finally, some frustration beginning to wear on him, he tried a vicious, wide swipe at navel height. She brought the edge of her sword down along his flat and knocked his sword harmlessly away. Holding his weapon pinned with one hand on her sword, her left hand darted inside his shield.
Whatever soft spot or gap in his chainmail she found, or technique with her hand Idgen Marte performed, was hidden from their view, but the effect was immediate. Iolantes’s left arm dropped nervelessly to his side, shield starting to slip from his grasp.
She didn’t wait to press him, but stepped forward even closer, and snapped her elbow straight into his face.
His helmet’s noseguard smashed into the soft bone and cartilage it was meant to protect with a loud thud. His nose wasn’t broken, but he was stunned in surprise, and she used the moment to dance around behind him, unpinning his sword.
He spun around to meet her, shield trailing on the ground and slowing him down, forced to advance with his right hand, his sword hand, forward.
“Don’t worry,” she taunted, “your arm will come back in a few moments. Provided you’re still alive.”
“Witch!” Iolantes shouted through gritted teeth. With a hard shake of his torso, he swung his dead arm loose of the straps and let his shield fall to the ground with a clank.
Idgen Marte smiled, but otherwise stood pat, her posture relaxed, sword at her side.
She is taunting him, Allystaire thought. Then, trying to direct the thought at Idgen Marte, hoping she would hear him: Stop this! Be what you are, not what you were.
She was distracted, for a moment, by Allystaire’s thought, her eyes flitting towards him from yards away. Iolantes saw her brief distraction and lunged forward, leading with his right shoulder and swinging his sword in an upwards arc, its tip starting near the tops of his boots.
Idgen Marte stepped backwards to avoid it, casually, as before, barely shifting her grip on her own blade.
And then she tripped.
She recovered quickly, flinging herself backwards and rolling back to her feet in little more than a blink. But the effect was chilling, her easy confidence replaced, if only briefly, with uncertainty, and her sword flickering as she brought it up into a more secure guard position, both hands on the hilt, fingers moving uncertainly.
I have never, Allystaire thought, a slight shiver moving down his neck, seen her put a wrong foot. Even in her cups.
Iolantes took another wild swipe, and instead of tumbling away, Idgen Marte lifted her sword and turned the swing away with her flat.
Finally, Idgen Marte lashed out with her own attacks, darting her sword in three short, swift swings to his left, then right, then left again, clearly trying to exploit his weakened, shieldless arm.
Iolantes parried the first and second, swinging his sword almost blindly. The clash of steel on steel was made louder by the silence surrounding the combatants. The third swing, faster than the first two—but not with the unnatural speed Idgen Marte had since her Ordination—he danced away from, backpedaling with deft, if not graceful, feet.
Allystaire spared a moment to look at Iolantes’s dangling left hand, saw the fingers flex, curl into a fist.
Idgen Marte saw it too. She stamped forward and launched a low, sweeping swing at his left side. His blade met hers, guided as much by instinct, by luck, as intent. Again the clash of steel, again her attack knocked harmlessly aside.
Iolantes, gritting his teeth with the effort, brought his left hand up and wrapped it around the bottom of his swordhilt. Smiling then, he lifted his arms, bringing his hands up to his right shoulder as if preparing for a swing.
She went on the offensive again, a cut starting low near his left knee that sliced towards his right shoulder. Trying to draw him one way and go the other, Allystaire recognized, even as she made her cut.
Iolantes knew it, too, and he swung his blade down faster and harder than his bad arm should’ve allowed, trapping her sword against the ground for a moment. In that moment, he lifted his boot, stomped down on the tang, and snapped Idgen Marte’s sword off less than a span above the hilt, the bulk of the curved blade falling to the dying grass in a brief, mirror bright shower of steel.
Iolantes let out a loud but inarticulate cry of triumph, and while shock widened Idgen Marte’s eyes, she wasted no time. She flung the broken end of her sword at Iolantes with her right hand, while seizing the dirk on his belt with her left. He deflected the improvised missile by batting it away, but as he swung, she sprang backwards and away from him. Luck may have been with him in the fight, but speed was hers.
Staggering backwards a few steps, she shifted the dirk into her right hand and crouched, making a smaller target of herself, and holding the dagger in a forward guard.
Allystaire realized he was holding his breath, and felt a kind of curious, anxious buzzing creep up the base of his spine. His hand fell to his hammer, contemplating the distance, weighing consequences.
The buzzing grew louder. Idgen Marte backpedaled, catching and turning away a few probing strikes from Iolantes’s sword. Blood trickled down around his mouth where her kick to his noseguard had opened his skin, turning his smile into a bloody rictus.
Suddenly a voice rang out over the crowd, and the combatants froze. The faces of the crowd snapped towards the source of the noise.
Gideon stood an arm’s length away from Joscelyn, who still knelt, hands bound behind her back. One of his hands was upraised, and Allystaire could feel some power flowing between the boy and the acolyte.
“Break it! Break it!” the boy was shouting. “Break it or I swear I will draw so much of your Goddess’s power through you that none will ever feel her benison again!”
Iolantes looked over Idgen Marte’s shoulder, distracted by the sudden interruption, though she kept her eyes locked upon him. Take him now, Allystaire thought, at her. He is distracted!
She gave no indication that she heard. Her mouth moved, forming words he could neither hear not make out.
“It might kill me,” Gideon suddenly hissed through gritted teeth, “but it will kill you. And it could kill your Goddess. The world will not miss you. Will it miss Her?” He raised his other hand. It began to glow, then his flesh seemed to disappear behind the dazzling concentration of light at the end of his arm. Joscelyn’s eyes rolled back in her head, her mouth clenched, and she collapsed.
Gideon’s hand clenched into a fist, and then he released the coruscating ball of energy that he’d gathered. Tongues of heatless flame had begun to lick around his hand.
A cloud passed across the sun as the ball dissipated.
The tableau was broken. Iolantes charged, sword raised in both hands for a killing blow.
As the shadow from the moving cloud fell over her, Idgen Marte blurred from view. Iolantes stopped in his tracks, then suddenly stiffened as his own dirk was plunged into the back of his skull, slid just beneath his helmet. Behind him, Idgen Marte had reappeared, though instead of the tall, dusky-skinned warrior Allystaire had met, she was the Shadow of the Mother, a twisting, barely visible figure of light and dark blended into a shape of terrible reckoning.
The blade was placed with the precision of a dwarfish chirurgeon. Iolantes fell straight to the ground, bone and muscle gone slack.
Idgen Marte stepped back, leaving Iolantes’s dagger buried in the back of his own limp head. As the cloud passed away from the sun, she was herself once more.
Allystaire started to her side, but then veered towards Joscelyn and Gideon. I wanted you to stay out of sight.
“I couldn’t any longer,” Gideon answered aloud. He knelt beside the prone but steadily breathing form of Cerisia’s acolyte, put a hand to her neck, and then her head. “I felt her calling upon her Goddess, drawing power. She was modifying the probabilities of the fight. It is what they do.”
“In words I can understand, Gideon,” Allystaire said.
“She was lending unnatural luck to Iolantes,” the boy said. “Did you not think his blind parries meeting Idgen Marte’s strikes was unusual?”
“It is one of the ways we can direct the power of our Goddess.” Cerisia spoke, having glided carefully and quietly across the field to them. “I should have felt it. That I did not speaks ill of me as Fortune’s servant. I am sorry for allowing her to endanger your comrade.”
I think she endangered herself, Allystaire thought. “It is what you did to this idiot’s crossbow just two nights past, aye?”
“It was,” Cerisia admitted, her voice not only muffled by the mask, but subdued on its own. Her unreadable, jewel-eyed gaze moved from Gideon, to Allystaire, and back. “Who are you and what did you do to her?”
The boy didn’t answer immediately. He looked at Allystaire. “I began drawing the power she asked for through her, more than her mind or her will could sustain…”
“Not Joscelyn,” Cerisia snapped. “Her. Fortune. My Goddess. What did you do to Her?”
Gideon shrugged. “Nothing of any consequence. She is far too vast for me to do Her any permanent hurt unless I took great risk…”
She lunged towards Gideon, a wordless cry rising in her throat, hands clenching, only to be barred by Allystaire’s outthrust arm. “Take another step towards the boy, Cerisia, with your body or your mind or your Goddess’s power, and I will treat it as the beginning of a war. There is still a chance to avoid any further bloodshed. Leave before the road is darkened and I will give you Joscelyn’s life.”
“It is not yours to give!”
“She forfeit it when she interfered in this Trial. I am trying to show mercy, though I am sure I will come to regret it.” His eyes flicked sidelong to Gideon, who was not, as he’d expected, watching the two of them. Instead, the boy’s head was lowered, his eyes closed, face tightened in an expression of deep concentration.
“You wouldn’t—”
“Stop trying to imagine what I would not do and focus on the things I can do. I can take her head, and those of all your men. Begone from this place before dark.”
“You will want to leave,” Gideon said, “if you want to speak with your Goddess again. I have been,” he waved a hand vaguely, fingers spread, “checking. She is gone from this place, from Thornhurst and its environs. Not forever, by any means. But for a while.” The boy thought a moment, eyes turning skywards before settling back on the priestess.
Cerisia brought her hands together and muttered something Allystaire couldn’t hear, but the words trailed off into a muffled shriek. Quickly, though, she composed herself, her back stiff, and took a deep breath.
“What are you?”
Gideon stared at her, unblinking, then turned to Allystaire, who shrugged.
“He is the Will of the Goddess. The Fifth Pillar.” Allystaire let out a faint, resigned sigh. “Now begone, Cerisia. At sundown, our doors are closed to you and yours, unless you wish to stay and earn your bread.” He nodded at Gideon, and the boy followed him as he left Cerisia silent in his wake and crossed to Idgen Marte, who knelt on the field, having gathered the broken pieces of her sword.
“Go on,” she murmured, as he approached. “Tell me you were right about all of it.”
“I was merely going to suggest that you might want to look over the gear we are confiscating from Fortune’s guards, see about a suitable replacement.”
“There won’t be one,” Idgen Marte said, looking at the smooth-worn hilt she held delicately in her hands.
“A sword is just a sword,” Allystaire replied. “I have lost count of the weapons I have carried, broken, or lost. My hammer fits my hand well, but I could replace it if need drove.”
“Their swords are northern garbage. Islandmen blade? Might as well try to cut a man with a rock. A dull, heavy rock,” she spat. “Keersvast work would be mildly better. But this,” she said, holding the remnant to her eyes, “this was Concordat work. Light, flexible, strong—”
“And you were a Concordat sword-at-hire. Now you are the Shadow of the Mother. Gather up the pieces and take them to Torvul if you must, but we have work to do.”
She nodded. “Aye. Let me find a rag to gather them in,” she said as she stood and walked off, the hilt with its half-span of broken steel curving from it still dangling from her hand.
* * *
“You can have a pair of bows, and such arrows as my men consent to give you,” Allystaire said, addressing Fortune’s gathered servants as he, Ivar, Renard, Torvul, and Idgen Marte inspected the gear they’d confiscated. “As well as any knife with less than half a span of blade. Everything else stays.”
Idgen Marte diffidently picked among a pile of swords, shifting them about with a studied frown and one extended hand. She quickly stood and walked off in evident disgust.
The gathered mercenaries, minus the two that Mol had granted leave to stay, milled around uncertainly. Cerisia sat upon her palfrey as though it were a throne, wearing her furs and silks, but without her mask. Neither the Banner nor the Wheel were in evidence, both broken down and tucked away.
Joscelyn was slumped over the pommel of a saddle, tied into it. In the turns that had passed, her senses had not returned to her. As she’d been secured into the saddle, Allystaire had used the Goddess’s Gift of healing upon her, but had found nothing to heal. Gerther, his hands bound, was secured to the same pommel Joscelyn slumped over by a long lead.
“M’lord,” one of the guardsman—the one Allystaire had hit with his own helmet, judging by his swollen, mottled-purple nose—spoke up. “What of Iolantes’s arms?”
“What of them?”
“Ought to go to his kin.”
Allystaire made a show of thinking this over, with pursed lips and a finger tapping heavily against his chin. “Tell them to petition Fortune’s clergy if they are in want of money—he was a loyal temple servant, aye?”
“What d’ya think they’ll do for ‘em?”
“Nothing,” Allystaire replied, dropping his hands to his belt. “And when they get that nothing and learn they cannot eat Fortune’s lying promise, nor live in it, nor sleep warm beneath it, tell them to come to Thornhurst and petition the Mother, and they will have what we can spare.”
He spared a glance then for Cerisia, who refused to acknowledge him or meet his eyes, though on her pale cheeks he thought he spotted a shamed blush.
“Begone, then. And know that you have seen the Mother’s mercy. Return here with weapons to hand, or plots and deceptions brewing as before, and none of you will leave here alive.”
Allystaire watched as Cerisia kicked her mount rather too sharply into a trot, leaving the rest of the party hurrying to catch up. Ivar and Renard stood with him till Fortune’s delegation was nothing but a dust cloud.
“Well,” Allystaire said, “this does a good deal of solving the problem of arming the village, eh?”
Ivar spat at the ground and said, “Doesn’t do anythin’ for Evert.”
Allystaire shook his head slightly, and spoke in as kindly a voice he could manage. “Nor would it have done anything if I had killed each and every one of them, Ivar. Evert was my brother of battle, too, and I will mourn his loss, but they paid for it, one man for one man.”
“And when they come back—and they will—with more men?”
“Then we will kill them—in defense of our lives, our home. Not for cold vengeance. Surely we can all see the difference.”
Ivar looked at the ground, spat again. “Lord Coldbourne I served woulda seen ‘em all dead rather ‘an wait only t’fight ‘em again. Woulda called that nonsense.”
“The Lord Coldbourne you served is dead, Ivar,” Allystaire said. “There is only Allystaire, the Arm of the Mother. Get some rest while you think on it,” he added, and though quiet, there was still a tiny snap of command in the voice.
Ivar only just avoided clicking her bootheels. “I’ll get the men over t’take charge o’ this lot, get it cleaned up and inspected.” She walked off, boots thudding rather more heavily into the ground than they needed to, raising clouds of dust as she went.
Allystaire sighed, and wandered off towards his tent, though he looked sidelong at Idgen Marte and Torvul, who knelt upon the ground, the dwarf examining the broken pieces of her sword, humming quietly to himself.
Leaving them to it, he walked alone, burdened only by his thoughts and no need to converse, give orders, make demands, or interrogate. My thoughts are plenty burden enough, he told himself. The Longest Night. Two months away, at best. Then he snickered at himself and said aloud, “You are no horologist, old man.” Got to speak to Torvul about the armor. Mol and Gideon about the rain. And the refugees from Bend—ought they to be here by now?
These thoughts knotted up his shoulders and the muscles of his neck by the time he arrived at his tent and slipped inside.
A curious scent lingered in the air inside: strong, floral, strange, not at all unpleasant.
“Cerisia,” he said quietly, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light and searching the space.
On his writing table he saw a folded sheet of parchment with his name written in a looping and graceful hand.
He lifted it with two fingers, or started to, but something held it down. As it pulled free of the desk, two objects of like size and weight slid free and gleamed against the wooden slats of the table.
The topaz eyes from Cerisia’s mask. He scooped them into his hand, felt them cool and smooth and heavy against the calloused skin of his palm, and held the letter up—closer to his eyes than he would’ve liked—to read.
Allystaire,
I did mean to avoid bloodshed, and it pains me to know that not only did I fail, but that the deaths are my own fault. Had I watched my own acolytes more closely, or kept a better eye on Iolantes, some kind of accord could have been struck between us. I know you would not accept my Temple’s proposal, but surely any arrangement, any acknowledgment, would be better than what you will now face.
I still find you an exhilarating man, an enticing man. Yet you are also a frightening man, at turns as warm as the noonday sun, as protective and sheltering as a castle wall, as chilling as the north wind at the turn of the year.
The certainty I leave here with is that you will always do precisely what you say you will, and that makes you as terrifying as anyone now living.
I will tell my Church what I have seen, and what I believe, from the above: that you are what the stories say you are, what you claim to be—a Paladin.
I leave you these gems as a way of chastening myself, and a sign that I am not, I hope, as awful as you may think. I am Fortune’s Priestess, and that is not a life I would willingly set aside for anything. Yet even I can be sympathetic to the life of the folk of Thornhurst, and those like them all over your baronies. Do as you think best with them.
I leave you also with a word of warning. Whatever it is you plan, whatever change it is you think you can effect in this world, I do not doubt your ability to bring it about. I question your ability to control those who will follow in your wake. Think on this.
Cerisia
Allystaire set the letter down and picked up the gemstones. They were cleverly faceted, cut so that one surface was wider than the other, and had been carefully removed from the settings. “Nowhere to spend them now,” he murmured, and went rummaging among his baggage till he found the small, soft sack he was looking for. He took a few moments to work open the knot its strings were tied into, and carefully slid the pair of topazes inside, drawing it tight. Some impulse made him open it back up, however, and pull from it a single piece: the portrait of a woman worked in carnelian. The features were soft and indistinct, as they must be, but the profile was as familiar to Allystaire as his own.
“When you sent me the Ravens, Audreyn, did you know what you were sending them to? Will I have to ask them to fight a war, alone, against Braech and Fortune and Delondeur, all together?” He sighed, held the gem up to the light, then slid it back into the bag and tucked it away among his things. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and opened the flap of his tent to the afternoon light. “Refugees. Weather. Armor. Palisade,” he murmured, as he stepped out.