Minu, page 36
“To reclaim what is mine.”
Maqlu sees the unholy spirits lurking in the forest. His face goes whiter than the skulls they wear.
“Have you never seen the Grey Lady’s shahavaz before?” you ask. “Did you never wonder why deer skulls are placed at her shrines?”
“I thought it a superstition,” he says.
“She isn’t what you think. Or deserving of worship.”
“You proved to be something other than what I thought as well.”
“Tell me, young one, what gave you the courage to return to me? Has your sheep’s frightened bleating driven you from hiding?”
You touch your fingers to his cheek. He stands firm, but you feel his fear; his racing blood, pounding heart, feather-light breath. You feel a familiarity on him as well. Taniel’s life is twined into his. The pity you felt for your wayward apprentice sours to displeasure. Maqlu has been tampering with what is yours.
“You should have told me Taniel came to you,” you say.
“He’s done nothing to deserve that punishment.”
You don’t rise to his baiting. You knew the moment he fled your guidance he lacked the imagination to understand your vision. “Where is he?”
He nods to the trees where Asherah’s shahavaz watch. “He’s in her realm now. Beyond your reach.”
Maqlu betraying Taniel to your sister is a cold disappointment, but unsurprising. Mortal men are so eager to be led astray.
“That is to be seen.” You brush your thumb over his eyes, soft and swift. “But not by you.”
He hid your son from you, now you hide the world from him.
His dark eyes go grey then milky white. He cries out in the language you taught him, summoning a shield of bronze sorcery. His power is too little, the defense too late. A wave of your hand banishes his protective spell. He presses his palms to his eyes, groaning desperate enchantments to restore his sight to no avail. Foolish as your errant apprentice is, he still has value. The bonds you hold with Kharinah and Taniel are severed by the Grey Forest; but while Asherah hides them from you, Maqlu’s tampering presents an opportunity. His sorcery’s lingering influence on Taniel is a thread for you to reclaim your son.
You rest your hand on Maqlu’s shoulder. “Be still.”
You catch him as he goes limp. Small gasps escape his numbed throat as he struggles to break free of your hold.
You place a finger to his lips. “And be silent.”
His protesting moans cease. You hold his hands in yours, tracing Taniel through your apprentice’s meddling. A bronze thread, faint yet steady, weaves through the silver mist. Asherah’s shahavaz hiss their agitation, powerless to prevent you from using Maqlu as the key to invade their mistress’s realm.
Closing your eyes, you follow that thin bronze thread unspooling into the cursed trees.
27
The Grey Lady
Nesrin sat at the entrance to their small tent pitched in the center of the God’s Mark, carefully repacking the balms Taniel applied in the morning to ease his pain. Birds sang with easy cheer, shafts of sunlight upon the mist alchemized the silver to golden hues, and the thrum of ancient power rooted in the trees felt more like a gentle hush than the foreboding threat of the previous day.
“It peaceful,” she said, unsure of what to make of the forest’s serenity.
“The Grey Forest’s monsters must be late risers,” Taniel said. He walked the inner perimeter of the God’s Mark, warming the stiffness from his muscles.
He moved far better than he had yesterday, or any day since they’d reunited in Antarr, and his skin had not split during the night. Nesrin had expected fresh wounds opening on her husband to be the least of their nightly concerns. She’d steeled herself for the dark hours to be fraught with the ghosts of the skeletons they’d found, haunted by the eerie voices that whispered through the leaves, or for the spirit of the pale grove that only Taniel could see to return in want to claim him. She had been prepared to keep a wary vigil through the night like she had when the karakin hunted her. Instead, she’d slept soundly, waking only once to see her husband sleeping as easily as she. She woke again a few hours later to hints of dawn filtering through the tent’s pale fabric and Taniel gently stroking her arm from wrist to shoulder. Seeing her awake he’d kissed her, brushing a loose curl from her cheek.
“You think you make nice to me in morning mean I let you stay in bed and be lazy all day?” She’d shifted to rest her head on his chest. “No, I still mad at you. You need get me flowers and bring breakfast in bed for weeks before I let you have lazy day.”
His smile had been the first of the day’s hopeful signs that whatever healing power the Grey Forest held had taken favor upon Taniel. Nesrin wanted to ask if he noticed the change as well, but was superstitiously afraid that bringing attention to the observed improvements risked revealing them to be wishful thinking. So she offered silent thanks to the gods, and prayed they continue to work through the forest’s strange power to bless her husband.
Taniel sat beside her at the tent’s entrance. His movements were guarded but he did not wince as he usually did. “I can carry the pack today.”
“Maybe we rest here for day,” she said. There was no knowing what had granted the small return in his health. It might be his experience with that spirit in the grove, the ancient sorcery of the forest coupling with Maqlu’s medicines, or his sheltering in the boundaries of the God’s Mark. Nesrin believed the last was the most likely cause, and was reluctant to leave the stone circle. “Or you rest here, I look around. See if there more places like this nearby.”
“I don’t want you going off alone.”
“I go alone for miles to find you. I be fine.”
“Tired of my company already?” he teased.
“Oh no, I not let you from my sight ever again. And when I do, I tie you down to be sure you no wander off no more.”
His laughter confirmed it was not simply her wishful thinking. He was feeling better.
“I told you, I wanted to spare you—” A violent shudder toppled him to his side. He convulsed as red steamed from his skin.
“Taniel! What wrong?”
Dark spittle hissed through his gritted teeth. “It’s her. She’s coming.”
Nesrin looked wildly about for the demon she imagined Minu to be—a waxen fiend leering to show sharp teeth framed by blood-red lips. Sorcery pulsed hot to her left and a fiery wind spun into a portal, the interior too clouded to clearly see the other side. Silver mist besieged the burning door like crows swarming a hawk. The red wind snapped and crackled, struggling to maintain its shape under the mist’s assault.
Taniel screamed. Unseen claws tore into him. His flesh strained as though hooks sunk into him were pulled taut. Blood spurted from the gashes when the magic tugged him sharply toward the portal.
“No!” Nesrin grabbed his arm. Her added weight did little to hinder the force reeling them toward the faltering portal, and Taniel fighting the magic only deepened the wounds it sank into him. She heard his bones creak then snap in punishment for his resistance. His shriek was a blade through her heart.
The sorcery yanked him from her hands. He clawed at the ground, slowing himself just enough to grab hold of a stone pillar.
“Don’t come through,” he begged. His claws left thin scratches in the stone as inch by inch the witch pulled him closer to the portal. “Don’t follow.”
A terrible intuition warned Nesrin that once Taniel was taken from the God’s Mark, he lost his greatest defense against the dark witch’s magic. The silver mist assaulting the portal wouldn’t destroy it before Minu stole him through. Nesrin rushed to the tent. Throwing the bedroll and pack to the side, she grabbed the pistol and aimed it at the portal. Through the warring chaos of silver mist and blood-red magic she saw a woman’s figure shimmering like a distorted reflection on agitated water.
Nesrin fired three desperate shots. The woman’s shape staggered, mist swallowed the portal, and the fiery sorcery collapsed in a thunderous boom that threw Nesrin off her feet. Taniel slumped to the ground, sides heaving, clothes drenched in ink-black blood.
“Oh gods, no. Please, no.” Nesrin crawled to his side. Ripping open his shirt revealed lesions cutting to the bone. She pressed the ruined cloth over the deepest. “Don’t take him, please don’t take him.”
“Pack,” he said through bloodied lips. “The pack.”
She tripped in her haste to grab their travel bag, hurriedly spreading the contents before him. He reached for the jar containing the salve Maqlu provided to heal the splits in his skin. Nesrin uncapped it and set to work liberally applying the ointment over the worst of his injuries.
“Will that be enough?” she asked. She already knew the answer. Torn tissue knitted together but the wounds remained open.
“No.” He tried to sit up.
“Don’t move. Tell me what need doing.”
“Go to the stream. Get as much of the water as you can.”
“What for?”
His breaths were wet and weak. “To cleanse her taint. Otherwise the wounds will keep reopening.”
Nesrin bit her lip. Taniel needed more than running water and a mage’s medicine. “I don’t want to leave you,” she said.
“It’s not far. I’ll be here. I promise.”
She hesitated at the circle’s edge, terrified of leaving only to return and find him dead.
“Nesrin …” His mismatched eyes found hers, dulling to a distance there was no return from. “This was always the most likely way it would end.”
Anger burned through the cold dread holding her in place. A hate she’d never known surged within her, turning her blood to fire, her bones to steel. The witch had stolen her husband, held him from her for over a year, and now she dared to try and steal him again.
“Stay here,” she said. She refused to lose Taniel to that witch. “I be back.”
You turn the bullet between your fingers, admiring the craftsmanship of the Purger sigil delicately inscribed into the metal. Sorcery sparks around the wound healing below your eye. Bone, muscle, and skin reform. Suffering the pains of flesh is a price you’re willing to pay to more closely mirror the mortal form. You spent centuries learning how to shape yourself into a true likeness, not the shadow of flesh and blood your sisters elect. The miseries of the body are small inconveniences compared to its pleasures—and you will know great pleasure when you find the wretch who stopped you from reclaiming your son. Asherah veiled the woman in mist to hide her from you, but you’re confident you’ll know her when she is found.
Maqlu lies at your feet. The binding you threaded through his veins holds him a quiet captive.
You kneel beside him, running your thumb over his forehead to smear away the penitential ash. “Do you know what Asherah’s shahavaz are? They’re the souls of the dead who trespassed into her trees. She harvests them. Turns them into abominations.”
He cannot see you wave your hand at the silver creatures damned to their frail, insubstantial slavery.
“How many have you sent to her?” you ask. “What lies did you speak to guide Sariel’s son into her hands?”
He turns his face from you, ever refusing your teachings.
You leave him lying at the forest’s edge. Your binding on him will fade in time. Until then, you’ll let the forest decide his fate. The shahavaz watch him. Light glows from the skulls’ hollowed eyes. They pace the forest’s edge, whispering in voices that are remnants of who they were, starving for the life stolen from them.
There’s no visible mark where Kharinah tore into the forest. The trees are healed and unbent, their bark smoothed, their roots unburnt. But you feel traces of her lingering like a scar, and the destructive chaos she leaves in her wake is your means to reopen that into a wound.
You plunge your right hand into the earth. It yields as easily as dry sand to your touch. You’ll not abandon your children to Asherah. They’ll not be made into pitiful shadows of what they should be.
Your sorcery unfurls westward, singing a summons to the graveyard that was Sevget, and the dead you buried stir. You’d prefer to let them rest longer before waking. They are incomplete in their reshaping, alternating between crawling on four legs and loping on two. Unsure, unsteady creations.
Asherah’s shahavaz hiss when you sink your left hand into the earth. This time you do not summon. You release. All the injury and suffering Asherah has forced you to bear, all the hate she bred for you to endure rushes forth. The ground puckers and shrivels like diseased flesh, outlining the buried roots. You bleed your hate into the ground, suffocating those roots until the poison Asherah planted in you is all there is for her forest to absorb. A small, red-black thread snakes up the nearest tree, following the hidden scars left by your daughter’s breach, to find the lowest leaf. It shrivels, falls, and is dust before it touches ground.
You smile. You feel the shambling step of Sevget’s reborn marching east, sense the fissures you’ve created in Asherah’s defenses widen, and you will know pleasure, great pleasure, in reducing her kingdom to dust.
Taniel pulled himself up to lean against the pillar. The stone cooled his burning skin and the upright position allowed him to draw easier breaths. Stirring the cold embers of his dying faith, he used the blood dripping from his fingers to scrawl a summoning symbol on the stone—the one he’d seen on temple walls, in prayer books, and most recently in the forest ruins. His shaking hand drew an unrecognizable smear of dripping lines. Intent would have to suffice.
“Seraph …” He coughed, then amended the prayer. “Asherah, guide her through life’s journeys. Lead her … lead …” His blood-filled lungs drowned his final plea that Nesrin find her way from the forest and not suffer for his failures.
Silver shone through the world’s darkening. A humming soothed the arrhythmic gasp of his erratic breath and weakening heart. The spirit of the pale grove circled above the stone ring, its abyssal pits for eyes fixed on Taniel. He understood with the preternatural clarity of a dying man that the creature bore no malevolence. He’d been mistaken in thinking the grove’s graveyard was the spirit’s hunting grounds and that it intended harm. Yesterday, the lament it sung had been a senseless hum. Now, Taniel was close enough to death to comprehend its meaning; it sang a promise to see lost spirits find rest.
The trees faded to blurs. The taint running from his nose and mouth no longer felt warm. He hardly felt anything at all. A feminine shape flickered in the silver drifting like misting rain from the spirit.
“Nesrin …” He lost sight of the forest, a woman spoke his name, and then the pale light went out.
Nesrin’s trousers were filthy and her sleeves were soaked from her careless haste while filling the water skins in the stream. Her feet flung mud up her back as she raced to the God’s Mark. Furious terror pounded in her chest. She wasn’t going to lose him. Not to that dark witch, nor to death.
A shimmering radiance slipped through the trees, stretching their shadows long and soft. The light strengthened as she crested the stream’s embankment, growing from an eerie brightness to a hum she felt in her teeth. Coming to the top of the rise, she clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle her cry. A monstrous shape hovered above the God’s Mark; its body made of luminous mist, its face shaped from death.
She ducked into the trees, one hand clutching the talisman around her neck, the other pressed to her mouth.
“Taniel.” She whispered his name through her trembling fingers; a frail prayer that the God’s Mark possessed the power to protect him from that creature.
Finding her courage, she peered through the ferns. The spirit descending upon her husband was gone. A woman emerged from mist and shadow to cross into the God’s Mark. She moved as silent as night’s coming, her steps unhindered by the age lining her features. Years creased the corners of her mouth and framed her eyes, yet no grey flecked her black hair descending in a long braid from a headscarf decorated by green and white beads. Her dress was simple, the blue-grey of a winter’s sky, and she looked like any peasant woman to be found in the eastern villages.
Nesrin was unfooled. The woman was only one in appearance, not in nature.
The woman knelt beside Taniel. She felt for his pulse before moving her hands to his arms and chest, exploring the twistings of his bone and flesh. She ran a hand through his hair, sweeping the bloody, sweat-damp locks off his brow. The words she whispered were too quiet for Nesrin to hear. Taniel gave no response. His head was tilted at a limp angle, his eyes half-closed.
Nesrin dug her fingers into the mossy earth, torn between the want to rush to Taniel and fend off this strange woman, the fear that if she so much as moved the woman would disappear along with the last hope of her husband being saved, and the desperation urging her to throw herself at the woman’s feet, offering her everything she had to give so long as Taniel lived.
The old woman scooped him into her arms as if he weighed no more than a newborn, cradling him with the tenderness of a mother holding her sleeping son. She leaned her ear to Taniel’s lips, then looked to where Nesrin hid.
“Nesrin, there’s no cause for fear. And Taniel has no wish to leave until he knows you are with him.” She spoke in Nesrin’s native tongue. Her voice was the deep groan of ancient trees weathering a storm. “Come.”
The command frightened as much as compelled Nesrin to take a timid step forward, but she hesitated to follow as the woman carried Taniel from the God’s Mark. She felt like a child—small, vulnerable, and incapable of understanding the events transpiring around her. Taniel reached for her, and that was a calling stronger than her greatest fear. She hurried to take his hand.
“Don’t leave.” His breath rasped weak from congested lungs. His eyes were clouded. “Please.”
