When next she looked at the book, its plain cover had been branded with the same rune. Beneath the rune, in Keeper Ishkar’s handwriting, the cover had been embossed with one thing more. A name. Her name.
Dnara Ankari.
A last name. Her heartbeat pounded. She had a last name. With a shaking hand, she took the book from its resting place and turned to the first page to find what other answers may await her.
‘My dearest child,’ it began in Keeper Ishkar’s handwriting. She stopped reading, tempted to shut the cover and toss the book across the room. Dearest child? Keeper Ishkar’s dearest child? In what convoluted reality could that be true?
‘I am certain you have many questions, least of which being how I dare to call you my dearest child after all I have put you through,’ the writing continued, stopping Dnara as she began closing the cover. ‘I hope you will one day understand how never being able to utter those words to you in person has become my greatest regret in life, second only to my failure of protecting my brother, your father, from a fate worse than death.’
Dnara looked up from the page at the stone wall and struggled to accept the sentence she’d just read. ‘...my brother, your father...’ Keeper Ishkar is- was her uncle? A giant knot formed in her throat as a sting came to her eyes. She blinked away tears and sucked back a hard sniffle, unable to control nor fathom the emotions which fought their way to the surface, asking to be felt. The tears were bitter, the knot in her throat painful, and her heart ached in a sorrow she could not name. Through the growing despair came one question above all others.
“Why?” she asked, though there was no one there to answer her.
Why had her uncle become her keeper? Why had he treated her as a slave instead of as kin? Why had she known an existence of hardship and isolation instead of one of love and family?
And Ishkar’s regret? Why regret what could have been changed?!
A flash of anger fueled her tears, her fingers clutching the book and nearly tearing the page from its binding. Her fisted hand held the lantern, its metalwork biting into her palm. The pain offered a small ounce of grounding stability in a world that had once again been turned sideways.
The wind blew against each cheek, trying to dry her tears with a cool caress, but too many fell to be counted, dripping from her chin and onto the page open before her. Gaining no response, the wind began fluttering the next page as if begging her to keep reading. She stood there, shaking with anger, content to let Keeper Ishkar’s last words linger in silence for a while longer. After all she had endured, he deserved to have this book cast back into the alcove and left to rot like the tower above.
‘Read,’ whispered the wind. ‘Please.’
A calmness washed over her anger as the wind spoke, not with a single voice but a hushed multitude, rising and ebbing like waves upon the shore. Though clear enough words to understand were few and far between, she had come to find great comfort in those voices and had not yet been led astray by following their requests. She had also come such a long way seeking answers, and ignoring the reality presented by her keeper’s hand would be a step in the wrong direction.
‘I promise to explain everything,’ Ishkar’s writing continued. ‘But first, you must bear one final burden or all may be lost forever. I am sorry for these continued hardships, my dearest child, and I curse Demroth every day for having been made their bestower.’
Dnara read the rest of that page and then the next. It spoke of things, things Ishkar knew but shouldn’t, things she had barely begun to understand for herself, and things that had not yet come to pass. His steady hand spoke of these things as absolutes, as if he had witnessed them with his own eyes. Then, once he had displaced any remaining doubt within her heart, he ask a single question, and she answered it without hesitation.
Shutting the book, she headed for the door and rushed up the stairs to find Athan drugged into a fitful sleep by the medicinal herbs. Taking the scarf from her neck, she dabbed it across his brow. His lips formed unspoken words but his eyes did not open. She pressed a gentle kiss onto his brow and whispered a quiet, sorrowful goodbye. Wrapping her scarf around Ishkar’s book, her book, she tucked it within the saddlebag. After looping the saddlebag’s strap around Athan’s arm to insure it wasn’t left behind, she stood up and followed the path set by the wind through the trees to meet the men approaching on horseback from the south.
31
Dnara peered through a winterbare thorny thicket of blackberries alongside the southern path that traders once took to the tower. That the path appeared still worn down enough to have been used recently despite the destination lying in ruins centuries old was a bit of magic Dnara hadn’t quite figured out. It didn’t make logical sense, but neither did Keeper Ishkar being her uncle, nor his knowledge of things he couldn’t have possibly witnessed himself. All would be explained, he’d promised, in the book, but she couldn’t read the book until this last ‘burden’ had been seen to its end.
How simple it would be to take the book and run, but Ishkar had ended his request with a question she couldn’t run from so easily. ‘Damn him,’ she
