Avelune, page 25
Heat touched his cheeks. He stood, brushing dirt from his hands. “I suppose so.”
Her nod suggested she had expected nothing else, but he thought he caught a flash of regret as well. They stared at one another in awkward silence. She looked away first.
“If you’re hungry, I’ve food laid out,” she murmured. “You needn’t fear. I won’t press you.”
He ducked his head. “I . . . thank you. You never have.”
He meant it well. She had always carefully respected the matters about which he could not speak, but this time he was certain he saw frustration in her gaze before she turned her back and started toward the house. He followed with a sigh.
The table was laid with the last of the yams from the night before, sliced and drizzled with honey, a wedge of crumbly cheese, and morsels of smoked fish. Maya moved from the hearth to the table without speaking, setting down plates and pouring tea as Jhared watched. Even early in their travels, they had worked together in a compatible rhythm. Sometimes Jhared would have said he knew her reactions as his own. It wasn’t a wholly unfamiliar feeling for a scout. Tracking was an intimate business. Studying another’s movements taught him the things his target feared and loved; whether he was a sound or restless sleeper; how he reacted when tired, injured, or angered. Eventually, such observations allowed Jhared to predict another’s actions. With Maya, he had shared that link almost as soon as their Paths had crossed. Now he longed for its return. He sat self-consciously, feeling disconnected and lonely.
Maya folded herself into a chair and speared a slice of yam onto her plate.
“You seem to live well here,” Jhared said, searching for a way to ease the silence. “The Sonans accept you?”
“Mm. That’s somewhat complicated. Do you truly want to know or are you just trying to avoid the awkward quiet?”
He didn’t look at her. “Please tell me.”
She set down her fork and licked a drop of honey from her finger. “The village on the other side of the lake is named Vris. They tolerate me there for my mother’s sake. Many among them remember how generous she was with her skills as a healer. Even if she was from Avelos.”
“And beyond the village?”
One ombré wing lifted. “You must understand that this close to the border, they’ve heard the stories of Avelune betrayals. Tolerance such as Vris allows is the exception. Most stay well clear of me. Open hostility is rare.”
Jhared frowned. “But it happens?”
“There are reasons I do not call this place home.”
She spoke matter-of-factly, but Jhared felt a surge of protective anger. Maya deserved a place that was safe and hospitable. He wished he knew of such a place for her. “Will you stay here through the winter?”
“I don’t know.” She peered around the comfortable room. “Zin has given me an excuse to travel. Maybe I’ll go to Sahiste to seek the Wanderers.”
“Or to southern Sona to find the archive?”
“Perhaps.”
“Your Sahisten fears you going south,” Jhared said. “Do they hate you there as well?”
“Ah, no. No, the southerners don’t hate me.” She chuckled, a small strained sound. “Zin exaggerates the danger.”
“But you wish to go whatever the danger.”
“What would you risk if you might find a way to reach the skies, Jhared?”
He faced her without flinching. “Everything.”
She smiled, not her wry smile or the warm, welcoming one, but a hard thing, jagged with determination. “Just so.”
He had no reply to that. No way would ever exist for him to reach the skies.
Silence fell once more. Jhared sipped the strong, smoky tea.
“What happened after you left me at Parnas Pass?” Maya asked eventually. “Did you reach your people in time? I hoped for you.”
He looked up. It seemed so long ago since two Shorn soldiers had dragged him away from Maya and into the high chieftain’s camp. “I reached them in time.”
He didn’t say that his message didn’t matter, that the council had discovered his crimes and decided not to believe what he told them, that Leita had been maimed and most of his comrades slain. Those words refused to come forward.
Maya bit the edge of her lip. “The winds struck the pass again after you left. Was that you?”
“Yes.” His fist dropped onto the table, more heavily than he meant it. Maya jumped.
“Jhared, what’s wrong? Have you forgotten how to trust me?”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, feeling the burden of too many nights of little sleep and too many days of running: from the council, the unbound, the tangle. No time to think, only to act. Keeping secrets had become reflexive. Yet reflexes played a role in a man’s survival.
Are you not delving for information from Avelos for the benefit of your people?
How much do you care if we are?
“The Sahisten makes things different,” he replied.
Maya winced, as though she had known that answer was coming. “He’s not here now.”
“But our people are a heartbeat away from war. And you . . .” You hold him dear.
“He’s not one of those who stir conflict, Jhared. He does not seek to spill Avelonian blood.” She lifted her eyes. “Will you trust me in that, at least?”
Her gaze shone a silver green, like the Parnas foothills after the first thaw or the sage growing in the rocky canyons of Sahiste. He felt the faintest tug in his chest as his spirit trembled toward hers. He sensed a thread of hope, his own and not his own. The slender connection between them twisted like spider silk. He let out a careful breath, afraid to tear it.
“Very well,” he answered. “I will. Just let me have one day of nothing more than weeding gardens and tending animals. Let me have some time to consider things without needing to watch the trail behind me.”
“Of course. Of course you shall have it.” She smiled, softly this time, an expression he had missed.
“You did promise not to press me,” he said.
“I meant it. I did!” She made a helpless gesture. “I just don’t like the silence. Too much exists between us for that.”
The spider-silk connection faded as she rose from the table and began to clear the plates.
Jhared could not remember a day when he had owned the freedom to do whatever he pleased, and he reveled now in choosing the most mundane of domestic chores. When he asked Mayavana what he might do to help her prepare for the winter, she had looked at him at first with bemusement, and then with the kind of artless pleasure he had only ever seen in Branlen. Throughout the morning he worked in the garden, first weeding and plucking snails off the greens, then digging up the last of the yams and the onions. After brushing the dirt from the tubers and bulbs, he filled bucket after bucket and carried them to the house, where a rope and pulley had long ago been arranged to draw bulky loads up to the door. He made trips back and forth, filling the bucket and transferring the food into barrels for winter storage.
While he worked at that task, Maya carried a basket of soiled laundry down to the shore. It was on his last trip from the garden that he heard her singing. He recognized the melody: a Sonan lullaby she had once sung for him. He halted, his chest suddenly too constricted to draw an easy breath. She was kneeling at the water. Her body rocked slightly as she scrubbed the clothing against a stone. One of the first times he had crossed her Path, she had been at the same task. It had been colder then; she had been wearing her cloak and he hadn’t yet known what she was. It had been one of the most peaceful moments he had ever experienced.
She stopped. Her head came up and her gaze went directly to where he stood. Abashed to be caught staring, he waved and strode toward her, as though it were what he intended all along.
Maya slapped a shirt once more against the stone and tossed it into the basket with the other wet things. “Still a scout spying out others, Jhared Denaban?”
“Not others,” he said quietly. “Not any longer. Only you.”
Her lip quirked into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Oh? And what have you learned from such observation?”
He hesitated. He hadn’t truly meant to say something so revealing, and now he’d made them both vulnerable. With a fabricated grin, he picked up the basket and started for the house. “A great deal about how to scrub stains from a shirt.”
To his relief, she laughed and jogged to catch up with him. Her black hair rippled past her shoulders and across the curve of her wings. It had grown since he’d seen her last. “I had no notion a soldier could make himself so useful,” she said. “If you’ve finished in the garden, how are you at working with goats?”
His turn to laugh. “I couldn’t say. As it happens, soldiers aren’t that useful.”
“Well, you handle that silver queen of yours without a problem. This should be easier.” She gestured to the basket in his hands. “Hang these over the line beneath the house while I grab my tools.”
She returned with a small knife and a rasp and led him into the paddock. Immediately, several of the goats came crowding over, nuzzling and nibbling at Jhared’s hands. A red and white nanny bleated expectantly until Maya pulled an onion from her pocket and fed it to them all in pieces. Just a few feet away, Seravina huffed and snorted and looked askance at the Avelun.
“She’s frightened of me,” Maya said, glancing at the mare.
“No, that’s not it at all.” Jhared watched, amused and surprised, as Seravina scuffed the dirt and put on airs. “She thinks you’re a threat to her status.”
“Ah. I see. Even your mare counts me as more beast than woman.”
From her acerbic tone, Jhared recognized the scar of an old wound. It startled him. He had never considered she could believe such a thing of herself. “Maya, Seravina’s grandsire was Chosen. It’s Riana who’s acknowledging you.”
The Avelun made a skeptical face before turning toward one of the wandering goats. “I only need you to hold them and keep them from bolting.”
She gestured to a grizzled black billy near the fence. Together, they separated him from the herd, then Jhared took firm hold of the animal’s ridged horns and wrapped one arm over its flank.
“Good,” Maya said, bending over her work. She lifted a cloven hoof and set to it with her knife.
The goat bleated in complaint and tried once to buck out of Jhared’s grip, but Jhared murmured reassurances and gradually it quieted. When Maya finished trimming all four hooves, Jhared released his hold, sending the billy scrambling back among its kin. Maya pointed to a grey nanny next.
By the time they had finished with the entire herd, the sun had sailed past midday. Jhared was dusty and smelled vaguely of goat. Across the enclosure, Sera still eyed Maya dubiously, prancing and fretting her sentiments.
“A queen indeed,” Maya muttered.
“She needs a stretch,” Jhared replied. “I’m going to take her out.”
Maya’s hand stilled where she’d been scratching the poll of a grey kid. “Now?”
Jhared waded through the goats to Seravina, who seemed pleased to claim his attention. He ran a hand down her injured foreleg: no heat or swelling. In the last few days, she had moved out soundly. He patted her shoulder and vaulted onto her back, not bothering with tack. She danced an eager circle.
“Is there a reason we should not?” he asked.
For a moment, he thought Maya meant to tell him no and send him out—he anticipated Seravina’s speed with a grin—but instead she took a tense step toward him. “It’s the villagers. A foreign soldier is a threat. Someone might follow you back to see where you’ve come from and then . . .”
His grin faded. “Then I will be a danger to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, Maya. It’s for me to be sorry. For what I’ve brought to you.” He swung down from Seravina and turned her loose.
“Come inside?” Maya suggested.
Jhared gazed over the landscape, the garden, the lake, and the wilderness beyond, not certain what he was looking for. “I think I’ll swim for a while. I smell of goat.”
She nodded, looking unexpectedly shy. “Later then.”
He swam for several hours, enjoying the effort of crossing the lake, and the strange landscape along the shore. Stunted trees with glossy leaves twisted up from between large rocks. Brightly colored lizards hung from the tree branches and sprawled on the stone. The beasts were an impressive size, thicker than a man’s forearm and as long as the distance from Jhared’s wrist to his shoulder. As he swam past them, the lizards merely blinked impassively and flicked their tapered tails.
Only when a storm blew in, bringing pelting rain and wild spears of lightning, did Jhared retreat to the cottage. By then, afternoon had melted into evening, and dusk had stolen the color from the Sonan wilds. As he climbed the ladder, he heard the sound of the bar being lifted from its cradle. Maya smiled to see him, even when he came in dripping wet. She threw him his cloak from where it had been hanging on a peg. “Dry off. Then sit. You’re famished.”
It was an absurd thing to feel pleased simply because she could understand the scale of his appetite, because she experienced the same thing herself, but there it was nonetheless. He rubbed the cold droplets from his skin, then hung his cloak and dropped into a chair, pleasantly weary. Maya laid out for each of them a half-shell of a large squash mounded with a golden, crispy filling. When he spooned a bite of the mixture into his mouth, it melted with a tender, creamy warmth that offered both sweetness and spice. She had mashed the flesh with onions, cheese, and some type of sausage before baking the whole, tremendous concoction. He ate slowly, savoring every bite and promising himself he would hunt tomorrow to contribute to her larder.
When they had finished the meal and cleaned up, Jhared sat back in his chair, listening to the whispers of the lake against the sand. Maya had pulled out a piece of mending and was making small neat stiches in the cloth. A wisp of her black hair brushed her cheek. She reached up absently and tucked it behind her ear. Her wings, furled against her back, gleamed softly in the lamplight.
It was a simple, perfect moment. He wished he could halt the anguished flow of his thoughts to enjoy it, but sitting in this strange country with the Avelun beside him seemed less real than all the blood and death he’d faced in the past weeks. Nightmare images—Rona’s body, Trevazio’s grief, Leita’s anguish, Amalia’s chains—burned in his mind, had been burning him all day, although he had done his best to extinguish them. Tired and with no distractions now, those memories threatened to ambush him.
“Mayavana, do you know that once again you have saved my life?”
“With squash?” she asked, an arch curve on her lips.
He smiled a little, then shook his head. “Allowing me sanctuary when you’ve no reason to do so.”
She snorted without looking up from her work. “Did you imagine I would send you away?”
“You could have.”
This time she looked at him, her expression perplexed. She studied him for several long moments. “No. No, I don’t think I could.”
She set aside her mending and went to the sideboard. From inside the cabinet she lifted a large, earthenware jug. It thunked heavily as she set it upon the table. She poured two cups, handed one to Jhared, then retrieved her mending and drifted toward the chairs near the hearth. Jhared sniffed the contents of his cup—it had the plum-blossom scent of slu. With more relief than he should have felt, he took a deep swallow and quickly poured again before following Maya.
They talked for a long while about very little: the care of goats, the quality of the local fishing, the length of the Sonan growing season. Maya told Jhared that the colorful lizards by the lake were called cissanu, for their bright hues. They were harmless, so long as they stayed out of the garden, she said, and palatable enough if roasted with the right spices. Jhared told Maya of Seravina’s breeding and her sensitivity to the Paths. The Avelun smiled at his description of the mare’s haughtiness.
Jhared hoped the slu would make it easier to push aside the other images hounding him, but everything he said seemed to circle back to the reason he had ended here, with three bags of sacred maps and nowhere else to go. Finally, he stood, walked to the table, and filled his cup once more.
“Maya, the story you’ve asked for is terrible, path-twisting. Before I start, consider whether you truly want to know it.”
She looked up quickly from her mending. “I do.”
“No. I said consider!” He strode back to the middle of the room and stared down at her. “You asked for my story once before, and regretted it.”
“That wasn’t regret, Jhared. I was angry and sad. I don’t regret learning about who I would have been. Who you are.” Her green gaze turned fierce. “Do not think me afraid to hear this.”
“Are you not?” he murmured. “I am afraid to speak it.”
The house grew quiet. He turned away and moved to a window, unlatching the shutters to reach the cool air. When Maya replied, the iron had melted from her voice. “The Sonans say even the strongest pillar does not support the house alone. Share your story with me. Share this much of yourself. Please.”
The rain had stopped, but no starlight graced the darkness. Still, her plea was a kind of grace. She had asked not only for the story, but for a part of him. He drew hope from that. With his back to her, he started to speak. The story came out in a spiral, as Alende might tell it. He formed the first loop from the events that seemed a lifetime ago: his patrol’s capture by Commander Ciam, his discovery of treachery at Aglar Tower, and Lieutenant Sevar’s order that he run south to warn the council. The winds that had struck the Sandien Mountains then had been of his own creation. They had pushed him into Maya’s cave. She nodded with understanding, and he knew that questions she had never asked were being answered. He spun out another loop of the spiral: the day, weeks later, when he had left Maya in Parnas Pass and was captured by the Forest Guard. He held nothing back in this telling. He told her of the northern traitors, his own crimes, Commander Ciam’s accusations, and Elder Trianor’s sorrow.
