Chapter Thirty-Eight

 

 

Av ignored the woman and sniffed the air. Everything was suddenly so clear, so crisp. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. Everything smelled of blood, but underneath it all he felt the magic tugging at him.

He remembered the dream from so long ago. Aren screaming, her voice coming from the ground. He followed the thought, looking over the village. There was only one place where a set of steps might come up, he decided, and walked towards it.

Sure enough, there were steps there. He followed them down into the darkness and stepped into a chamber as something lunged at him. Av snarled and batted it away. He was here for Aren, not anything else.

Sniffing the air again, he turned this way and that. The only one in the room was the crumpled form, struggling to get to its feet. Up it came and he looked it over. Little more than a stick, dirty and grimy, touched by the place in nasty ways.

There was no hiding those brown eyes, though. When they locked onto Av, his knees went out from under him. Aren might have been filthy as could be, but she still had the same temper. The queen seemed to float towards him and set a hand on his neck.

For a moment Av was certain he was going to die, certain that he felt the cold of sharp steel against his throat, and then the moment was gone and there was a furious woman glaring down at him. Aren was upset, because he had taken too long. No, because she was dirty, or because she was hungry. Maybe she was angry because he had batted her away, but he hadn’t known it was her, he had to defend himself.

“Where is Danya?” Aren commanded.

Av shuddered at the strength in her voice. She sounded different—why did she sound different?

“Who?” he asked. “The woman?” The name could only belong to a woman, it was a woman’s name and there had only ever been two people in the village. The man and the woman, obviously.

“What did you do to her?” Aren demanded.

“Nothing, why would I attack a woman?” Av asked. “She was defenceless.”

“Then who are you wearing?” Aren asked, pulling her hand away from Av’s neck. She motioned up and down his form, causing Av to look down at himself. The queen plucked something off Av's shoulder between two fingers and dropped it to the side with a disgusted look.

He was covered in blood. “Well, that would explain why she started screaming the way she did.”

“What did you do?” Aren asked.

“I don’t know,” Av said. “The man lunged at me, then the woman started screaming. I smelled blood suddenly, but I also figured out where you were, so I came to you. Why aren’t you happy to see me?”

“I have other concerns,” Aren said sternly. “Like how long I can keep this up.”

“Keep what up?” Av asked as Aren moved to the steps and disappeared up them.

The cavern was dim, the stairs dark. Av followed Aren up the steps, slipping several times when he misjudged the distance. At the top of the steps the sun seemed far too bright. Aren stood shading her eyes and blinking. On her wrist was a black bracelet. It looked as if it had been created with old magic, the type of magic one might find from the enlightened time.

No wonder she had been contained for so long.

“You broke the chain?” Av asked, frowning when he didn’t see where the chain had attached.

“Something like that,” Aren said. “It’s not the first time something like that’s been created, you see. So you just have to mash it in with the others and keep it there until it’s all one lump.”

“That makes no sense,” Av said.

“It makes little sense to me, which I think is why it actually works.”

She marched off suddenly, leaving Av sputtering behind. He had arrived, he had come to save her, but she didn't thank him. She rushed off.

“Hero always gets a kiss,” Av growled at his feet, scuffing at the dirt.

Taking a breath, Av looked up and walked back to the village proper. Aren stood by a porch, her back to the common area. He approached her, realizing that there was someone else with her, a woman by the sound of the quiet sobs. The woman sounded frightened, causing Av to look around for a threat.

All he saw were the bloody remains scattered across the common area. A finger here, a foot over there. Intestines everywhere, as if they had been ripped from a body and tossed about, far flung from the centre of the destruction. There was a centre of destruction, bits all over the place, spreading out from the middle. The only identifiable piece was a head, sitting in the middle of it all.

Av looked down at his hands. A dreaded understanding throbbed through him.

The woman was crying because she had watched Av kill a man. Aren was standing to place herself between the destruction and the woman, as yet unaware of what he had done.

‘Kill’ may have been putting it lightly.

He had heard of warriors tipping off the edge into a momentary madness. His father called it blooding, said that those of rank tended to slip into the madness during their first kill. Not just warriors, but all ranks. It only took once and someone stumbling onto the body, or one witness, and a rank never had to lift a finger to follow through on a threat again.

Yet Av was terrified at what he had done. He was supposed to protect people, not rend them into tiny bits.

If his father were there, he would tell Av that a warrior's place wasn't to flinch away from violence. His duty was to face what was done and remain calm while the women wept and the men shit themselves from fear. Even though he wanted to hide from his own violence, Av forced himself into a calm.

He walked to the porch, looked over Aren, then over the woman.

She couldn't have been much older than Aren, and she was far too thin, and yet there was still beauty in those features. A rank—Av felt it, and then the rank was gone. Blue eyes stared up at Av, so different than the greys and browns he was used to seeing. The only other person he knew of who had blue eyes was Telm.

And the man Av had killed.

He shut down the shuddering revulsion that attempted to roil through him, refusing to allow his face to show the emotion. Suddenly, he recalled the man lunging at him, remembered that he had grabbed the man and flicked the axe away.

Scared the horse off.

Av frowned and looked to the common area. His pack was still there, but the horse was gone.

He swore loudly and turned back to the women, who were suddenly staring at him with wide eyes. The woman looked as if she were about to start crying at any moment. Aren was attempting to convey something to Av with her eyes alone, but he wasn't understanding the emotion.

“I lost the horse,” he said to Aren. “You'll have to walk to the next village. Which is a day's ride, so that makes it over a day of walking and you're a stick and she's a… Well, what is she?”

“Manners, Aren, remember?” the woman said faintly.

“Oh, yes, Av, this is my Danya,” Aren said, setting a hand on the woman's shoulder. “She's a healer. She's lived here her entire life and is… How old, Danya?”

“I don't know for certain… Over thirty,” Danya said. “And a rank is only supposed to call someone theirs when they're sexually interested in them.”

For a startling moment Av thought of the three of them sharing a bed. When the woman on the porch grinned at him despite the tears still dancing in her eyes, he knew she had done it on purpose. She knew how to speak to warriors and how to lead them to the conclusion she wanted them to move to.

“Why does he look like that?” Aren asked Danya. “I thought only Mar could make him look like that.”

“I'm breaking the awkward mood,” Danya said to Aren in a tone. “He just killed Rewel. I don't see anyone else, either. I don't know where they went.”

“Rewel,” Av said. The name seemed to stick to his tongue. He wondered if he would ever be able to forget the name. “We really shouldn't stay around here. There could be bandits.”

“There are no bandits,” Danya said quietly. “And I'm not certain I can leave.”

“Of course you can,” Aren said.

She said it sternly enough that Av was certain Aren was trying to give Danya a command. There was also a desperate edge to the words. Whatever Aren's thoughts throughout her time in the village, she had never stopped to consider the fact that Danya might be stuck there.

“This is simple,” Av said. “Where's the old warrior?”

“What warrior?” Danya asked.

“Warrior—you're a rank and know more than Aren, so—someone who felt like me, was old enough to be my father, though he might look younger considering everything.”

“Why are you looking for this warrior?” Aren asked.

“Long story short,” Av said while he stepped back from Aren, “a warrior drew a pregnant queen out here to link her to the same thing you were linked to and when that failed because the link won't work if you're pregnant, he cut the babe from her belly. She cursed him, trying to save herself and the babe. We thought the village was cursed, but it's actually him. He dies, the curse ends, Danya's free to go.”

“Why do you believe him to be here?” Danya asked.

“Because landscape magic is the only thing that remains in one place,” Av said expertly. He didn't know much about magic, but that much he knew. “If you curse an object and the object moves, the curse moves. If you curse a person and the person moves, the curse moves.”

Although it had taken him most of the winter to figure out that the man had to still be in the village.

“Rewel was the only man left alive in the village,” Danya said. “There were others—they were all men—but they took their own lives over the years.”

“Did any of them feel different?” Av asked. “One of them must have felt like me.”

“No,” Danya said. “You feel like a commoner.”

“That's impossible. I'm not a commoner,” Av said to Danya.

“Oh,” said Aren.

“I'm sorry, I've never met a warrior before. I can only tell you that you feel like everyone else I've ever met. Besides the Others, but they were villagers that were killed in the initial attack. Because of the magic, they were unable to pass to where spirits go. They just sort of haunt us, I guess. The longer a queen was attached, the more solid they became, making Rewel think that he just needed a stronger queen to rid us of the magic.

“The strongest amongst them could move things but only objects new to the village, and it drained them. They could speak, but they couldn't really answer your questions. My mother visited for years. She'd tell me all kinds of stories and taught me a great deal about history. All she knew, really. But I could never get her to elaborate on anything. For whatever reason, the healer kept appearing to me, talking a great deal. I learned everything he knew as well.

“Then my mother vanished, then the healer did, right about when I turned eighteen. Since then until this morning, I saw neither of them, and then the healer came to me. I never knew his name, but he always seemed kind.”

“Did he have something to say?” Av asked.

“’Lavender and mint can make a queen sleep,’” Danya said. “I knew that, of course. Then he said a little holly berry juice can make her go with the spirits.”

Knowing what that meant, Av was furious that the healer would tell Danya how to drug a queen.

“And I had the strangest reaction to my food this morning,” Aren said.

“Rewel tried to slip you something,” Danya said. “And the healer warned me.”

“Maybe one of the Others is him, just caught in between? Can you summon them?” Av asked.

“No, no,” Aren said. “She doesn't know what a warrior feels like because they were all warriors. I can't tell the difference, right? Did you stop to see if he was a rank?”

Av twitched when Aren motioned behind her, to the common area.

“But the Others—” Danya started.

“Pissed off, dying queen reaches out to destroy the one who did her harm. She's confused. The commoners are wiped out because a queen doesn't hurt commoners on purpose. The ranks are left alive. Yourself, just a toddler, and a bunch of warriors.”

“Link like that?” Av managed to get out even though his throat constricted at the thought of it. “One warrior didn't do that by himself. Rewel might not have been the original one, but he sided with the warrior. Trust a queen's instinct.”

“Then how do we know if the magic is gone?” Aren asked.

An idea occurred to Av. He looked at Aren, then turned to Danya.

“Got anything to drink?”