“Yes, he did.” Dualayn shook his head, the tail of his graying hair brushing the collar of his dark jacket. “A senseless waste.”
“I’m good at wasting lives,” Ōbhin muttered.
“Indeed,” Avena said, her look sharper than any knife.
“I was lost,” Ōbhin’s words from earlier echoed through his mind. “They gave me a path.”
“Not a great one,” Avena had answered.
“I will escort you to your home,” Ōbhin said as he felt two paths before him. What would the Brotherhood ask of him next?
“Good, good,” Dualayn said. “I’ve been there, you know. That hopelessness. You just have to remember that no matter how deep the dark is, the light always rises.”
Chapter Seven
Twenty-Second Day of Compassion, 755 EU
Two days later, and Avena still marveled at the change in Carstin. The man’s infection no longer ran up his leg, and he no longer needed the tube in his chest to breathe. Despite that, he remained unconscious. When she touched his flesh, she felt almost a harmonic resonance rippling through him. She did not understand what the White Lady, as Ōbhin called her, had done to her patient.
Was it magic?
The woman had bought Carstin time for them to return to Kash, Lothon’s capital, and Dualayn’s home on the southern shore of Lake Ophavin. His lab would possess healing jewelchines and his surgical tools. They could do more for Carstin there.
They were now north of Upfing Forest. They’d left the woods around noon and as night approached, neared the first village. Dualayn, who seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of farming villages dotting the road, declared it to be Branglin. As the wagon trundled to it, she thought it looked no more remarkable than Upper Kash, the place she’d been born and had dwelled in for the first six years of her life. The houses were old and worn, roofs covered in drying thatch. Wood beams framed whitewashed walls of wattle and daub. They passed fields sprouting with what was perhaps buckwheat. The farmers had already retired for the day.
Ōbhin drove, back straight. He didn’t wear his chainmail, it rattled in the back amid their supplies, but had his sword resting on the wagon bench beside him, ready to be drawn in moments. Not that they were in any danger. We left the bandits behind.
She still found it troubling that Dualayn had hired Ōbhin, and that she was already accepting it. She should feel more for the remote bloodfire. Ni’mod had served Dualayn for years, but he always faded into the background like furniture. She felt terrible for thinking so little of a man who had died, and yet he’d merely existed, like all his passions fed the fires inside of him, leaving his outside a burned-out husk.
In some ways, Ōbhin was the same. A brooding shadow, but one that parted to allow glimpses of light. He didn’t fit with Ust and his men. An aberration. He had the spirit of a good man, but one who had been so covered in black mud that he could blend in with such despicable people.
Like most villages, the public house of Branglin dominated the town’s market square. Though the village’s church lay across from it, the lessons of sobriety were often relaxed after a long day spent walking up and down rows of sprouting crops, waging the never-ending war against pests, weeds, and blight. The public house had two more stories piled above the tavern floor, rooms for travelers, merchants, and teamsters to utilize. A sleepy boy stumbled out of the stables to help Ōbhin with the horses and wagons before assisting in carrying Carstin up to a room. Dualayn slipped the small book that his agreement with the Brotherhood had provided. Her lips still tightened with disapproval when he used the primer to decipher the Recorder’s writing.
She understood Dualayn’s drive. He’d spent a lifetime researching how to heal his wife from her somnambulant stupor. Not even Chames could remember a time when his mother was vital and vibrant. Every time Avena had witnessed Dualayn stare at the wizened form of Bravine, Avena found a new passion to assist him.
Would I have loved Chames as fiercely? she wondered, the emptiness swelling in her. She hadn’t thought of him in some time, his face grown hazy over the years. Would he have loved me?
“I’ll attend to the rooms, Father,” she said.
“Good, good, child,” Dualayn said as he covered the Recorder in the thick, woolen blanket to protect the artifact. For the hundredth time, awe struck her.
How did the ancients grow two crystals together, let alone one?
So much was lost when the Black shattered Elohm’s perfect people.
Avena shook off her amazement at the artifact as she swept to the front of the public house. It had no name, only a battered sign formed of three splintered planks bound together with fraying ropes. On it was scrawled a picture of a foaming mug. The smell of sour beer and dirt wafted from it. She opened the door to find a common room crowded with men, beards thick, clothing worn and dirty from a day’s labor. They fixed her with a studious gaze as they set down clay tankards. Many wore bands of green cloth tied about arms or as scarfs about necks. The three barmaids, plump girls in flowing skirts and pale blue or yellow blouses threaded through the throng, hair wrapped with green ribbons.
“Well, a traveler,” an old woman said. Wrinkled lips parted to reveal her front two teeth missing, gums puckered at the empty sockets. “Welcome, welcome. You be stayin’ the night, lass?”
Avena nodded. “My companions are stabling our wagon. We need a quiet room for a wounded friend. Clean and dry.”
“All ol’ Hajitha’s rooms be clean and fresh, don’t you fret your pretty head. Why, you remind me of my daughter. Up ‘n before she married that
