Vault Of Heaven 01 - The Unremembered (48 page)

Jastail had led them off the road to avoid contact with travelers, though Wendra was sure he knew she had no intention of seeking escape.
An odd man,
she thought,
but one who makes every decision with careful deliberation
. He warmed his hands at the fire, the mellow glow softening the angular shape of his face, which might never have spent a night’s sleep beneath a roof.

Despite the clear sky, the air did not grow overly cold, and slowly the chill ebbed from her body. Jastail warmed some dried meat and bread on a rock beside the fire, giving half to Wendra and settling back against a low boulder to eat his supper in silence. The highwayman stared into the flames, his eyes distant and flickering with the light of the fire.

As night closed in, prairie wolves howled and small birds chittered, reminding Wendra of the quiet peace of the Hollows. She and Tahn had spent many nights like this, stirring coals and reminiscing about their father. She remembered how she had loved to visit the Fieldstone, sip honey wine aged in a cold earth cellar, and listen to travelers’ tales rendered in florid speech. Balatin had often accompanied her there. Together they would walk home beneath the lesser light and her father would explain to her which parts of the tellers’ tales were truth and which parts exaggeration for the sake of his audience. In time it became a game, and soon she could discern the truth behind the lie nearly as well as her father. She did not remember Tahn always accompanying them, but when he did, he seemed less interested in the tale and more interested in why the teller told it. On those walks home, he’d stroll quietly and occasionally interject something about loneliness, which Wendra never understood, instead always recalling the merriment that surrounded Hambley’s guests.

Looking across the fire at Jastail, she considered that the lines of laughter in his face were the work of sarcasm, mockery, and deceit. His handsome features used a smile or laugh less because of amusement and more to paint the picture he wanted another to see. The sallow, tired mask he wore at the close of such a rough day was as close to anything Wendra might consider natural. In her mind she heard the words of the old man on the riverboat:
Too far
. And yet when Jastail laughed, it looked and felt genuine. The thought caused Wendra to shiver even as she basked in the heat of the fire. That Jastail may find delight in the labors she’d witnessed him undertaking chilled her as the river never could.

“Are we close to the boy?” Wendra asked, hoping to end the bleak thoughts carrying her away.

“Indeed we are,” Jastail replied. “Tomorrow we will come to the place where I believe he may still be.” He tossed a dry piece of cedar on the fire. “I cannot guarantee it, but the odds are likely that he is there. And I will have kept my part of our bargain by helping you find him.”

Wendra eyed him suspiciously. “And what is your price?”

The same wry smile creased his face. “Isn’t it possible that I have done this for charity’s sake?”

At that, Wendra lips curled into a grin. “Honestly,” she said, “I would bet against it.”

“That’s not a wager worth taking,” Jastail answered. “We will come into Galadell midday. You should sleep.”

“I thought we were going to Pelan?”

“That is only what I wanted the deckhands to believe,” Jastail said, smiling.

The name of the town—Galadell—was unfamiliar to her, but it was Jastail’s unwillingness to say what he stood to gain that unsettled her. She had not expected him to reveal it to her, but she’d hoped to encourage him to lie, and have the chance to look behind it for some indication of the truth. Part of her knew the truth, though. Jastail had not asked for money in exchange for information about the whereabouts of the boy, and he had not sought intimate pleasures from her. His desires must be more fundamental, or more extravagant. The riddle of it only led her back to the certainty that there existed no bargain between them. His promises were possibly lies, but he’d not made a habit of lying to her, either. What was she not seeing?

Jastail covered himself in his blanket and closed his eyes. The last rays of light escaped the sky and gave birth to a thousand stars. Wendra persisted in trying to discover Jastail’s intentions. Then suddenly, something came to her.

“What were the tokens?” she said, her voice tremulous but louder than she’d intended.

Jastail opened his eyes and looked up into the night. “You should sleep,” he repeated. But he did not close his eyes again.

“You made me a final trump in a game of chance,” she said, emotion tightening her throat, the sound of the words somehow more painful than the thought itself. “I don’t know the game, but I saw their eyes when you drew me to the table. By Will and Sky, I want to know what you made of me!” Something stirred in Wendra’s chest. In an instant, the peaceful dell and fire and sky twisted in her vision and no longer reminded her of the Hollows, but of the fragmented skies and dry, charcoal stretches said to exist within the Bourne.

Jastail peered upward, ignoring her indignation, as though threats held no barbs for him, loud language and the wail of the innocent as meaningless as wind in dry grass to his weathered ears. “You do not want to know, lady; on this you should trust the liar.”

“Liar?” Wendra asked, confused. “What game is this? Stop your tricks! I’ve no sympathy for you. I have been brought low, and I scarcely care for my own safety anymore. Tell me the truth!” Her voice rose in querulous pitch, falling in strident rhythms and beginning to rasp in her throat. At her words the campfire pitched like a dervish stirred by the wind. The change was slight, but she could not be sure Jastail did not see it. She noted it distantly, burying the observation beneath her ire as soon as it was made, and accepting it as wind upon the plain.

Still Jastail remained unmoved. As he continued his gaze upon the firmament, his face remained slack and still, like the stuffed grain sacks she and Tahn used in the summer to erect scarecrows to frighten foragers from their gardens.

“Then I will tell you,” Jastail said. “But mind you this, the land east of the mountains of Lesule Valley belong to an unrestrained few. Alliances are all that matter, and I am known at Galadell. Without me, tomorrow will become the worst Sky you ever see.”

The gambler did not know Wendra’s recent skies, but she said nothing.

The highwayman continued to stare into the heavens, half of his face lit by the fire. Cricket song whirred in the night around them, as Wendra waited.

“I care nothing for money,” he began. “Coin is the currency of the ignorant, those imprisoned in the trappings of custom and convinced that it elevates them. The earth provides food, the animals clothes, the timber and mountains wood and stone to build homes and cities. With flint we warm ourselves, and the birds teach us music. All this is given to us freely, the world is plentiful, and each age inherits something of the marvels of the age before it.” Jastail’s voice quieted. “But the deeds of men, the measure of their lives, these are things that cannot be obtained from the land.

“They cannot be bought and paid for, or if they are, they are not natural choices or honest actions.” Jastail slowly turned his head toward Wendra. “The great game is to know the offering in these deeds, these sacrifices people make; to weigh their price, and barter them; to hold them in token is a dear thing.” Wendra remembered the many items upon the gambling table, and feeling that they represented actions, choices of sacrifice.

“Dearer still,” Jastail went on, “is the one who can
direct
the choice, up the wager, hold the action suspended in one’s hand. It is no less than holding life, for what is life but choice?”

He held up the metal glove won from Ariana. “Our fair lady at the table spoke but a wish to a doting warrior, and sent him to his death, knowing it beforehand.” Jastail’s smile flared. “Do you see, his was the choice, but by her influence he chose a path of ultimate sacrifice. The glove became an emblem of his life, his will offered to another.”

Anxiously, Wendra rubbed her belly, now flatter absent her child. Only vaguely did she note Jastail’s observant eyes as she tried to soothe herself when her mind raced again to understand what else lay upon the table of the gambling boat. Her thoughts, though, went quickly past those tokens to Jastail’s final play—pulling her toward the table’s edge. And then a dark revelation came.

Will and Sky, he does know where Penit is! That was his wager. It was not simply my life. It was my choice, my chance, to find Penit!

Wendra rose from the fireside and raced into the darkness with her mouth open, gulping lungs full of crisp night air to cool the fire that burned within her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The Scar

The quiet roar filled his mind like silence, like listening while submerged beneath a swift-flowing river. Braethen’s heart raced as it had when first he’d accepted Vendanj’s sword.

For reassurance, he fingered the hilt. He needed to know he was not really in that place again, that unnatural blackness. The sensation of being both in and of the dark filled him. He fought the duality, trying desperately to see something through the thick pall of black.

The night will not lift! I am inexorably caught in it. But I am not born of this desolate place!

He took the sword in hand, weeping at the sky. But somehow the fevered action left him disconsolate. Was it the sword that defined him, led him, defeated the dark?

His skin ran hot and cold as he denied the violence inherent in the blade but reveled in the peace it seemed to offer. He felt like a child in the womb, blind and helpless and safe. In that moment he started to fall. He could not see the sky turn, or the ground rise up and roll as he slid toward nightmare. He clung to the sword, but released himself to the descent.

“Open your eyes, sodalist!” The command boomed through the obscurity.

Braethen did not understand, and relaxed further into his tumble. He would be glad of some rest in the peace of that obscurity.

A hand caught him. And a wave of disappointment began to wash over him.

“Your eyes!” the voice said again from down a long black tunnel.

But still he did not fully understand. Images cascaded through his mind, all blurring, tumbling, fading, claimed by the dark as quickly as they rose, until he could see nothing save a blade of grass.

He blinked his eyes open, and looked into the hard eyes of the Sheason awash in white light. Vendanj gave him a hard stare and heaved him from his bedroll. Mira looked on, standing still in the fall of rain and lit dimly a few paces away in the same radiant light. The realization hit him as he traced the source of the illumination back to his hand, where the sword burned brightly against the night.

Vendanj continued to stare at him, his sharp features catching the light of the blade, his brow drawn tight. Braethen thought he could feel the force of the Sheason’s thoughts spreading like the weight of a graveside requiem. The turnings of the Sheason’s mind were palpable, living things. Whatever their true message, they fell so heavily on Braethen that they threatened to overwhelm his own sense of purpose.

“Will you still take this mantle?” It was a question without an answer, because the decision had already been made. The real intent was to say that Braethen may fail.

Vendanj shared a final pained look with the sodalist, then walked away. The weight of the Sheason’s thoughts departed with him, and Braethen gasped in relief. He didn’t believe Vendanj had meant to let them get away from him; Braethen had never felt that weight before in all his moments spent near the Sheason. It felt like a yoke, harnessed tight to a beast of burden. In his mind flashed the skeleton of an ox, white bones bleached in the sun, the tatters of its yoke still fettering the skull and hitched to a wagon laden with an immense white stone sculpted at long vertical angles. The flash seared his mind like a portent of things to come. Braethen shook his head and dashed to catch the others.

“It was given too soon,” Mira said evenly.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Vendanj replied, his voice soft. “Two journeys, sodalist. May they converge for you.”

Vendanj rode ahead, leaving Braethen holding the dimming blade. As the light receded on Mira’s skeptical features, he thought he heard the words “For us all.” But the sound of them seemed carried away by the night as they again found themselves in relative darkness.

Mira strode to where the Sheason stood, and the two spoke as they looked east under a starry, cloudless sky.

Watching them, Braethen’s face flushed with anger. He was being left out while being asked to put everything at risk. He wanted to justify the Sheason’s initial confidence in him when he gave Braethen the sword, but now he felt like the boy who first sat at his father’s table and thumbed books he could neither read nor understand.

With as steady a voice as he could muster, he asked, “What is it that must remain a secret from me?”

Neither the Far nor Sheason acknowledged his question.

Again he asked.