Skies (16 page)

Brisson pushed his chair back and got to his feet, walking over to one of the maps on the wall. Gavin let the silence stretch between them, collecting his own thoughts. Brisson clearly had more work than he could accomplish on his own. The task of maintaining the thousands of people who lived in this valley left Gavin feeling weary just to think about, let alone actually doing it. For a moment, he almost felt bad about how he’d treated the man. Almost.

“I don’t trust you,” Brisson said, his voice faint, but firm. “I don’t know anything about you or your people outside of what legends dictate, and that is rarely the real truth.” Brisson turned and, though his expression was hard, Gavin could see the haggard look of a tired man standing there before him. “But I am also not a simpleton. What you say is true, my people are not warriors. We’ve had centuries as slaves beat the resistance and will to fight out of us. If I do not keep the people busy, they flounder, not knowing what to do.”

Brisson’s mouth formed a thin line for a moment and one of the man’s hands came up to massage a shoulder absently before continuing.

“You have the aevians and your mystics, which will serve the patrols well, but still, I do not trust you. You may have your patrols, but I will still want my own people to be a part of them. Tadeo, the man who found your man – Darryn, is his name, right – will be in charge of a third patrol that will answer to me. You will work together and coordinate your routes.”

Gavin nodded. “That works for me.”

“In exchange,” Brisson continued, “you will have some of your people assist with the other tasks of maintaining the community. We need assistance in the smithy and with the herds.”

“That can be arranged, but I have a few conditions as well.”

Brisson folded his arms and nodded to indicate he was listening.

“First,” Gavin said, “we are our own peoples, with our own leadership structures. None of your people will attempt to stop or give orders to my people and we will do the same in return.”

Brisson nodded.

“Second, I will order my people to follow all of your laws unless specifically instructed to do otherwise. With that, I will need to know what the laws are. I will send someone so we can all know what they are. You will have someone available to discuss that with whoever I send.”

Again, Brisson nodded.

“Third, I will require access to the supplies in order to provision the patrols and my people as a whole.”

“I will have Shaw draft up a document giving you that authority. In exchange, however, I will require full updates from you on all your activities. You will keep me informed on a regular basis. If we cannot meet in person, you will send a runner. The boy Benji seems to enjoy your company. He will be assigned as your messenger.”

Gavin nodded and got to his feet. The arrangement was simple, at best, but Gavin hoped it was a starting point, at the very least. He stuck out his hand. Brisson regarded it for a long moment before walking forward to grasp it in a hard, calloused grip.

“On your honor, then,” Brisson said.

“And on yours.”

Brisson released Gavin’s hand and Gavin turned to leave. Just before he reached the door though, Gavin turned back to Brisson.

“Just a piece of advice, Brisson,” Gavin said, noting that Brisson was already back in the chair and leafing through the stacks of paper on his desk. “No one man can do all this.” Gavin gestured about the room. “Not and keep his sanity. Perhaps you should look at getting some help other than just Shaw.”

Brisson grunted but didn’t look up. Gavin shook his head, wondering what sort of a man Brisson would be if not weighted down with the stress of leading his people. Maybe Brisson wondered the same thing about him.

Gavin gave a small shrug after a moment and left. It was time to lead his people.

“Strength and Power are often thought to be the same. They are not. Consider a tree blown about by the wind. Power is the wind. Strength is the tree. Power has the capacity to move. Strength is the ability to resist.”

—From the Discourses on Knowledge, Volume 17, Year 1171

The darkness rocked and Lhaurel started awake. She opened her eyes, feeling gritty and slow. Light filtered in from the small porthole behind her, refracting off the glass and sending tiny shards of sunlight darting into the darkness. Talha must have slipped out some time during the night, but . . .

Porthole?

Where had that word come from? Lhaurel didn’t recognize it, but she knew with utter surety that the small, round window in the side of a ship was called exactly that. Licking her lips, she looked down at the meditation candle. All that remained was a small nub set in a shapeless mass of re-hardened wax flecked with lavender puddled on the wooden floor.

Meditation candle?

Lhaurel sifted through her memories of the previous night. Though they were particularly hazy, she couldn’t recall any part of Talha’s instructions hinting at the candle’s name.

Lhaurel rocked back on her heels, stiff muscles protesting. One hand clutched at her skirt, tugging on the cloth. A bead of sweat formed and slipped down into the creases of her wrinkled brow.
What is going on?

Lhaurel rushed to the door and wrenched it open. One of Lhaurel’s priestesses waited just outside. The young woman started at Lhaurel’s sudden appearance.

“Fetch Talha at once,” Lhaurel ordered.

The priestess gave a hasty bow and scampered a few feet further down the dimly lit hall where another priestess—one of Talha’s—waited in front of Talha’s rooms. Lhaurel spun back into her room, striding over to her bed, making a point to avoid the candle mess on the floor.

“Lhaurel,” Talha said, striding into the room with a smile on her lips. She had a book in one hand and jar of ink in the other, a feather quill clutched between a few of the fingers. Despite the hour, Talha had managed to do her hair up into a tight bun, though it was tied with a strip of brown cloth rather than pinned in place with wooden rods.

“What have you done to me?” Lhaurel asked, flopping down onto the bed and dropping her head into her hands. She could feel a headache building. It buzzed at the base of her skull, like the sound of a voice muffled by a great distance, yet far more penetrating and annoying. Would those ever go away?

“Whatever do you mean?”

“With the candle, the dream. There are things in my head I shouldn’t know, but I know them all the same,” Lhaurel said. “For example, I know that the window over there is called a porthole, though just yesterday I simply called it a window. I know that,” Lhaurel said, looking up and pointing at the lump of wax on the ground, “is a meditation candle made from beeswax and lavender petals and used in any number of religious ceremonies, all of which I know by name and can tell you what happens in them though I’ve never performed any of them. What did you do to me while I dreamt?” She bit her bottom lip to keep it from trembling.

“That was not a dream,” Talha said, closing the door. “And don’t bite your lip. You really must let go of that habit.” Talha put the book down on the desk and gestured in Lhaurel’s direction with the hand that held the ink and quill. Luckily, the ink bottle was closed. “You experienced a communion of lives. You’ll have no memory of the actual event itself, but it happened nonetheless. Some things are simply too pure even for memory. They must remain a part of the Path alone, remembered only in passing as fragments of knowledge gleaned, but not recalled affirmatively. Like your mastery of the Orinai tongue.”

“What?” Lhaurel shot to her feet, realizing for the first time that she was speaking Talha’s language. She hesitated, her mouth working, and tried to focus on what she was saying. “How can I be speaking the Orinai language without even knowing it? Wait, I still am. Why isn’t it like before? I’m still speaking it, aren’t I?”

Talha smiled and took a seat at the desk, flipped open her book, and took a few notes.

“I told you your prior Incarnations could assist you, Lhaurel,” Talha said. “Did you not believe me?”

Lhaurel’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Of course she hadn’t believed her, not really. True, the evidence had suggested that something was happening, something unnatural. Lhaurel had been dreaming of Elyana since right after the Oasis and the records they’d found in the grottoes—Elyana’s grottoes—validated those dreams. And Beryl . . .

Lhaurel sank down onto her bed, all strength draining out of her. “No. I didn’t.”

Talha turned and regarded Lhaurel with cool, appraising eyes, eyes that held Lhaurel’s and seemed to look deep into her soul.

“And now?” Talha asked.

Lhaurel shuddered. “Now I believe.”

What choice did she have, faced with what had just happened to her? If she believed that, though, what did it mean for everything else she’d been told? Did that make it all true? Fear gnawed at the inside of her throat and she felt weak. Insignificant, actually. Without her powers, without claim to the one thing she could
actually
feel and fully explore, she was nothing. She needed her powers back. Needed them desperately.

Lhaurel swallowed hard.

“Come over here and sit with me,” Talha said, looking up from a note she was penning in her book. “Have one of your priestesses fetch you a chair. There is still much studying to be done before we reach land this evening.”

“Are we nearly there, then?” Lhaurel latched onto the thought like a breath of clean air in a sandstorm. It calmed her, even if the lingering terror and despair danced around the edges of mind, courting and nursing her headache to a dull ache.

“Estrelar? No, child, we have several more weeks of travel ahead of us before we reach the city. We will reach shore tonight, though, and that means entering the Northern Dominion.
Politics
enters the equation at that juncture.” Talha said the word “politics” as if it were the vilest of expletives.

Northern Dominion, the part of the Empire that was furthest north, the land of plantations and farms that supplied the rest of the nation with much needed food and staple supplies. Lhaurel tried to push down the repulsion she felt at knowing that. She felt simultaneously violated and oddly blessed to have been granted such knowledge, but the depravity of it was what stuck. She swallowed and walked over to Talha, steeling herself for a long day of study and mental exhaustion. At least it would give her something on which to focus.

A priestess opened the door bearing a chair, one of Lhaurel’s. This one was older, with grey beginning to adorn her temples and streak through her once brown hair. As the woman set the chair down near the desk, Lhaurel idly wondered what her name was. She’d never bothered to learn them. Lhaurel pursed her lips as she sat, turning her mind away from the haunting new knowledge she’d gained and onto that question.

Why hadn’t she learned their names? The priestesses had fought for her back when their caravan was attacked. They’d come to her defense, even if she’d had to goad them into it. The least kindness would have been to learn more about them, learn their names and who they were. Why hadn’t she?

The answer, Lhaurel realized, was simple. She hadn’t cared. She’d never thought of herself as one of the Sisters, or even as one of the Orinai. She wasn’t—not really, at least. Lhaurel was a member of the Rahuli people, though she was beginning to realize that perhaps a part of her, at least, was something more. She was—though it terrified her to admit it even to herself—one of the Seven Sisters. She had access to the Progressions in a way that bordered on absolute. She really was a guardian of the Path, one who led others to their ultimate destination. The least she could do to honor the ones who followed her was to learn their names.

“Priestess, hold a moment,” Lhaurel said, looking up. The older priestess stopped at the door, one hand outstretched toward the handle. She let her hand fall to her side as she turned and bowed low, eyes downcast.

“Yes, Honored Sister?”

“What is your name?”

The priestess clasped her hands together in front of her, one wrinkled finger making a pattern on the back of her other hand.

“My name?”

“Yes,” Lhaurel prompted.

She ignored the pointed sound Talha made by clearing her throat.

“What is your name? I’d like something to call you other than ‘priestess.’”

“Priestess will do fine, Honored Sister.”

Lhaurel felt something foreign well up in her: annoyance. Not the ordinary annoyance of being pestered by someone tedious or frustrating, but the annoyance of being disobeyed. Lhaurel pushed it down before answering, struggling not to let the emotion show in her expression.

“Your name, if you will.”

“Meibas.”

“Thank you,” Lhaurel said with a small nod and a smile, though Meibas’s eyes were still fixed on the wooden floor. “You are dismissed, Meibas. Thank you for the chair.”

“As you will, Honored Sister,” Meibas said and scurried out the door. It may have been Lhaurel’s imagination, but it appeared as if the priestess almost broke into a run at the end.

“Well,” Talha said as soon as the door was shut. “That was interesting. The other priestesses will hear about that before the outside of a minute has passed.” She frowned, then shrugged and turned back to her notes. “I guess it’s of little import now. You are a strange one, Lhaurel, I will grant you that, but it may simply be a part of your Path. The Progression of Honor has always been something I have not quite understood. Perhaps that’s why I’m so fascinated with it.”

“Honor?” Lhaurel’s lips formed the word, tasting a familiarity with it that was not her own.

“Indeed, child. As I have explained before, you are the Sister who guards and leads others down Honor’s Progression. We will discuss this today as we study. Are you ready then?”

Lhaurel nodded, though she felt as if she were anything but prepared. Still, deciding to do something of her own accord, learning Meibas’s name, had lightened her mood and driven away some of the vestigial terror. It gave her a direction and an anchor on which to hold. It didn’t even bother her that she knew what an anchor was.

***

Several hours later, Talha snapped her book closed and tossed her quill onto the tabletop in obvious frustration. The pen struck and bounced, splattering small drops of ink onto some scattered papers and books there. Talha cursed and—for perhaps the hundredth time since she’d awoke that morning—Lhaurel felt surprised that she both recognized and understood it. That surprise was starting to fade though, giving way to acceptance born on the back of resignation.

“I don’t know why I bother trying to teach you when you already know it all,” Talha said, picking up her pen and looking around, presumably for something to blot up the spilled ink.

“I—you—I don’t know what I’ve learned. I can’t remember anything until it just comes up in conversation. It’s like living inside a dream while I’m awake,” Lhaurel protested. “I’m as clueless about what I know as you are.”

“An adequate description, actually,” Talha said, tapping one finger against her lips with one hand, her irritation giving way to curiosity in the space of a single breath. “But the timing is off. When I finally came into my powers, it took several long weeks of meditation before I was as immersed in my prior Incarnations as you have reached in a single night. That shouldn’t be possible.”

Lhaurel waited for the odd recognition to hit her, a memory or knowledge that wasn’t really her own, but nothing came.

She shrugged. “I don’t understand it either.”

Talha frowned and, as she seemed to be perpetually doing, opened her book, inked a new quill, and started jotting down notes.

“Clearly. I, on the other hand, have studied this at length over the years. I am one of the older Sisters, well into my third century, and have seen four of our Sisters come into their powers and memories of their former lives. It always takes more time than this . . . hmmm.”

Lhaurel could tell Talha wasn’t going to let this go any time soon. Though she hadn’t known the woman long, her personality—at least in regard to the pursuit of answers when questions were at hand—was pretty easy to follow. Then something Talha had said registered in Lhaurel’s mind.

“Third
century
?” Lhaurel asked. Her mind had skipped over the information at first, a part of her simply accepting the fact and moving on. It had taken a moment for Lhaurel to realize it should have bothered her, just as learning Beryl’s age had.

“Hmmm? What was that?” Talha looked up. “Oh yes. That’s right.”

“You’re three hundred years old?”

“Three hundred and forty-six, to be precise,” Talha said, turning back to her notes.

Lhaurel struggled to wrap her mind around that number. In the Sharani Desert, forty was considered old. Fifty was ancient. Older than that was either a cruel twist of fate or a miracle.
Three hundred forty-six
. The number was staggering. Beryl had, supposedly, been older, but he’d actually
looked
old. Talha barely looked middle aged. Her skin was still smooth and without wrinkle or blemish, despite its paleness. With her blood red hair and nails and painted teeth, she was – in a word – exotic, but also stunningly beautiful.