Northlight (45 page)

Forgiveness...

“Thank you,” he whispered to me, his voice all raspy. “Thank you for saving my mother's life.”

Stung, I lifted my eyes to his and saw them as if for the first time. Eyes the color of rain, soft as dew and strong enough to etch a mountainside. Tears shimmered there —
tears, ay Mother!

Or maybe they were in my own eyes.

I was wrong that he must inevitably become like her. His strength and vision were of a very different breed. He could no more be like her than Pateros could. I had so little faith, and now I'd never been so glad of anything in my life. I wanted to shout aloud, to jump, to laugh. I did none of these things, of course. I straightened my shoulders and marched up to Esmelda.

She touched my hand, her fingers slender and fragile, all bone. Her eyes searched mine, bits of brightness in a face like a wrinkled flower, this formidable old dragon who'd twice now saved the balance of Harth. For a fleeting moment the Mother moved through me and I understood what it had cost her to turn her back on Avi, lost on the Ridge, that night I begged her help...and to let Terris go.

Avi came up to us. “Orelia and I can handle it from here. Go home, Mother, and start organizing what comes next.”

Esmelda stiffened and drew in her breath, but then something happened as she looked at her two children — her two heirs — so different and yet so alike. Maybe she saw something in them that went beyond her scheming and her secret oaths. Maybe she saw herself in them, as she had been so many years ago, charged with hope and fire, eager to reshape the world with her dreams.

Her expression gave away nothing as she looked from Avi to Terris and back again. But I saw the way her body softened and the faint trembling in her hands as she took Terris's arm and, leaning into his strength, walked away.

The evening breeze gusts cool and wild-smelling off the Border hills and sends the gray horses running for the sheer joy of it, necks arched, tails bannered, coats like polished silk against the greeny silver grass. Only the sorrel gelding waits by the gate, hoping to be let back into the barn. Terris calls him “Lazy Bastard,” or “Fat as Butter,” dumbest-shit names I ever heard for a horse.

Me, I stand on the newly painted porch of the ranch house with the smells of roasting barnfowl and potatoes tickling the back of my senses. Etch has done a great job fixing up this place. He never said a word that he knew it was my doing. It was Esmelda's guilt-offering to me — but how could I tell what she really meant by it? I said I wouldn't touch her money even if the Mother herself came down and blessed it, but I had a horse that needed a ranch to pasture in, and I knew just the man to run it. I didn't add that Terris could use a place to go to, far from all the flowers and poisoned daggers.

Etch saunters out on the porch and stands near me. I feel the heat of his body.

“You going back tomorrow?” He means Laureal City.

I sigh, shifting my weight against the railing. The long-knife waits in the chest in my bedroom, and my thigh feels half naked without it. But to be here is an act of trust. For all three of us.

“Got to spit in the old dragon's eye one way or the other,” I say.

If it were just me, I'd as soon not go back. Avi doesn't need me, that's sure, though I think we'll always love each other. While Jakon was off getting his grandfather's consent to the new treaty and marriage contract, she was busy becoming Esmelda's public heir.

The city itself is the same as always. Esmelda gave Montborne a hero's funeral — she said Brassaford had been too great a price for him to pay, and typical Laurean wishcrap like that. Terris said it was his love for Laurea that blinded him to everything else, but I still think he was only out for his own glory. Whatever it was, Esmelda had him cremated and scattered his ashes in the Serenity River. No tree with his name grows in the plaza.

We won't stay long in the city. Terris is not the old woman, to sit like a dragon-spider in the heart of her web, barely twitching except to reel in her prey. All of Harth calls to him — to see, to taste...to change, as he has me.

“I wish you wouldn't go back,” Etch says, half-shy like a boy.

I shake my head, thinking of his gentle ways with the horses, and how my gray mare comes up and nuzzles him for a caress or a bit of apple. I think of the son he lost, the dream he hungers to make real again with me. He won't be alone for long. There are enough widows and daughters out here on the Border who want that dream just as much as he does and would love the sweet-sad mystery in him.

As for me, I am what I am. Whatever else I might have been died that night on the funeral mount.

Terris comes out on the twilit porch. Etch is clean-faced again, but Terris has kept his beard and shoulder-length hair, neatly trimmed.

Etch looks up at him. “You ever find a name for that horse of yours?”

Terris shakes his head. “It's better not to name some things.”

Etch considers this. “I expect you're right,” he says, and goes back inside the house.

At my side, Terris watches the horses settle down to graze. Their coats glimmer like bits of cloud in the growing dark. He stands very close, but he doesn't touch me. He is not Aram, and I am not the young girl that Aram loved.

He talks of the beauty of the evening, not just here but all through Harth — the wild western coastline, the tundra with its ice and wire-grass and volcanos, the rolling farmlands. The perfumed cities, the riverbank forests, the unexplored jungles beyond the Inland Sea, even the windblown steppe in a way I've never seen it before. He talks about them as if they were a single living thing, growing and changing. His words take me to all these wonders, not only places on the map but places in the soul.

Ay Mother, sweet Mother who answers my prayers, what does it matter if I no longer wear the badge and leather vest of Laurea? I serve the secret Guardian of Harth. With my sharp steel. With my heart.

I am a Ranger...

...first again and only.

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people,or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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