“Why are you here?” I said, sitting down in front of him. “What are you?”
The bearded man, who was not a man, smiled in delight. “Much better. Those you send back are always so dull. Gastai brutes. Never quite get over it. Not that they don’t deserve whatever you deal them. They’re useful, but I truly don’t want to be like that. But, of course, it’s better than having you poke that nasty slicer into me. And I have no desire to chop off any of your parts or have you screaming at me for mercy or any of that sort of thing. I just want to learn of you and see a bit more of this world. My own is a bit frosty, though it improves.”
“Just want to see . . . ?” My head was swimming with his prattling. What was a Gastai?
“Gracious, you are hard to convince. Yes, I came hunting just like a regular Gastai, and I found this fellow who was so crunched up . . . squeezed, as to say, with his woman partner and all these screaming little creatures around him, and all he wants to do is slather colored messes on papers . . . canvas, he calls it. So I came along and gave him the wherewithal . . . the ‘manhood,’ he says . . . to do it. I’m only here for the fun, and I’m not going to have him do terrible things, as you seem to believe. He does indeed have a good eye for interesting sights. We’ve had a fine romp, and I’m not quite ready to end it, but someone—one of your cohorts, not mine—came poking around. My friend here, my host, my vessel, is mightily afraid you’re going to get rid of me, because then he won’t have the manhood anymore. I don’t quite understand it, because I never learned that a human could change from manhood to womanhood or anything else, and I don’t quite see that it has anything to do with this splattering on canvas business, anyway, but whatever . . . I don’t want to leave quite yet, and I certainly don’t want to leave with my own head ruined, if you know what I mean.”
I had no words. Rather, to my uttermost astonishment, I found myself laughing. If this was madness, then it was not half so fearsome as I had always believed. And if it was not . . . stars of night, what had I come upon?
He shifted the scene in his unsettling way, so that we were outdoors again. Outdoors in some poor man’s soul. An artist’s soul. We walked side by side through the flowered fields, the blooming and dying profusion of color and life. Sunlight warmed my cold hands. My weapons were sheathed and I felt no danger. How was it possible?
“This is extraordinary,” I said. “I have faced hundreds . . . hundreds of your kind, and never . . .”
“You must not judge all of us for some unpleasantness. You’ve not looked, you know. Do you judge the forest by the unhealthy, wind-stripped trees at its edge? Do you judge the pulp of the fruit by the bitter skin? And, truly, when you go hunting with such things as those”—he jerked his head at the knife sheath and mirror pouch at my belt—“what do you expect to find? The nervous birds are not likely to flock around when you cast out those particular seeds.”
“So there are others like you?”
He took a deep breath and sighed ponderously. “Well, I won’t go that far. My Gastai cousins are fairly brutish, most of them. But there are many Rudai worth knowing, and a few of the rest of us that are quite sensible and would very much like to get to know you. You need to look. To learn. We can show you a great deal.”
“If you think to turn me, to have me do your bidding—”
“Like the other Warden who played a game far above his head? No, not at all.” He pulled a handful of flowers and held them to his nose, inhaling deeply and sighing in pleasure. “My friends and I had no dealings with the Naghidda, and rejoiced when you . . . I do believe it was you . . . took the villain down. No, this is . . . Blast and all, what’s that?”
The sky turned purple and bulged out toward us like a swelling bruise, and the dirt path beneath us cracked and slithered. Fiona . . . the portal. In the name of the gods, where was the portal? And the demon was still standing. Still in possession of the victim.
“I’ve got to go.” My hand was on my knife. I had sworn an oath that was the cornerstone of my life. What was I thinking?
The demon grinned at me. “So what is it to be? I suppose I could fight you, but I’d rather not. I won’t leave. Can we pretend that you couldn’t find me?”
The ground where we were standing slumped down into a hole. I grabbed the wind with my wings and soared upward, looking down on him. His fair hair was whipping about his face as the flowers continued to bloom and fade, more rapidly than ever. I could take him. He was fast and cocky, but I had watched him, and he thought too much.
Well, so did I. I circled and called down to him. “Do you have a name?”
He laughed and used his hand to cup his words so they could be heard over the rising gale. “You could not pronounce it. And it may be different the next time you meet me. But I’ll remember you, Warden. We could see a bit of the world together, I think, you and I. Have some adventures. Find some common ground. There may come a time when it serves your purposes.”
As the sky fell in and the fields of flowers began to disintegrate, I streaked for the portal. I glanced back once and I still saw him, standing in the black void where flowers had once bloomed. He waved and disappeared into darkness. I passed through the portal and landed feet first upon the temple floor.
By the time my head was unfogged from my return, Fiona was nowhere to be seen. She had abandoned the rites: the cleaning, the duties, the prayers and chanting that were of such importance to her. For a brief moment, as I wiped the unused knife and mirror and laid them in their wooden case, I wondered if she were ill. But as I went about the rituals and considered the unbelievable encounter, I began to feel queasy. I came to the verse in the closing chant where you changed the words depending on the outcome of the battle. One phrase if you had emerged victorious. One phrase if you had suffered defeat. One phrase if the Warden had died. One phrase if he had been abandoned, alive in the abyss. For me on that night, there were no words. What had I done?
Fiona would know that I had not killed the demon. The Aife could feel it in her weaving, just as she could sense when the demon left the victim . . . or did not. My guess was Fiona had gone to report the outcome of the encounter to the Mentors Council. To think that she was speaking my name in the same breath with the word treason was unnerving.
Yet, as I stowed the weapon case in the preparation room, drew water from the well near the temple, and washed myself, my moment’s panic was submerged in my wonder at the day’s meeting. How I wished that I could talk to Ysanne about it, or that she could have been the one to experience it with me. Her senses were so keen. A demon who was not drawn to pain and horror, but to art, color, learning, and adventure. A rai-kirah with a sense of humor. I had looked into its depths with my Warden’s sight, and I could not be mistaken. Incomparably strange. I needed to follow Fiona, to tell my mentor and the rest of them, not of treason, but of something extraordinary. Something we had never imagined.
I had violated my oath, yet I could not feel guilty. It would have been wrong to kill him. Wrong to banish him. We had learned that forcing a demon from a human soul damaged the creature, at least for a time. Ezzarian mentors taught that hunger for evil was the nature of all demons, but if the hunger was not there, then how could I justify harming him? Of course it was possible, likely even, that this demon was only an aberration. But whatever he was, we needed to learn more.
And, of course, as the afternoon waned and I pondered these things, yearning for Ysanne, my mind returned to the matter of our dead child. My heart twisted in my breast, and I wanted to push my fist through the stone columns of the temple. But instead I slumped against a fluted pillar, pressed my hands to my aching head, and cried out in an agony of grief that would no longer be denied. What if his demon had been one like this? In a thousand years we had never even considered such possibilities.
CHAPTER 5
Each of the five well-respected men and women on the Council represented one of the special talents used in fighting demons. Catrin represented those who trained Wardens, and at thirty, was by far the youngest. Maire represented the Weavers, those who held the safety of Ezzarian settlements in their care. Talar represented those who trained Aifes, Caddoc the Searchers, and Kenehyr the Comforters.
Seventy-year-old Maire was a wise, sharp-eyed Weaver who had been my mother’s dearest friend. She had known me since I was born and had administered the testing that named me among the valyddar—the power-born. Though she would never do anything to compromise her integrity, she would not doubt me without incontrovertible proof. I trusted Maire’s judgment of me beyond my own.
Kenehyr was a round, cheerful man who had once been a Comforter. His melydda was so strong that he could fell trees with a glance . . . but only if no one distracted him. He had always needed a Searcher partner who was a powerful fighter to keep him safe, for he could never do more than one thing at a time and was so gentle a spirit that he could not see danger were it sitting on his toes. Kenehyr had also known me for most of my life in Ezzaria. As much as Ysanne or Catrin, he had convinced my people that my life was a fulfillment of prophecy and thus no corruption, allowing me to come home. He was also the most liberal-minded of all Ezzarians, and would likely not doubt my word even if he saw demon fire in my eyes.
Talar and Caddoc were a different story. On the last day of Ezzarian independence, the third day of the Derzhi war of conquest, it was the Wardens and Searchers and Comforters, those of us with fighting skills or experience of the world, who led the Ezzarian resistance. We had known it was futile. Our strategy was to hold long enough that the Queen and the strongest of the valyddar could get out of Ezzaria, along with all of the precious books and manuscripts, and the weapons we used to fight the demons. Then we would try to save the rest. We succeeded in saving the Queen and the books and a few mentors, but in everything else we failed. Only a few managed to follow the Queen and rebuild their lives in the mountains north of Capharna. Some, like me, were enslaved. I saw so many dead, it was hard to imagine there was anyone left. But hundreds of Ezzarians had retreated into the forest as the ring of Derzhi occupation closed around them.
They had been left with nothing. Our centuries of secrecy and isolation meant that we had no allies to give us refuge. The Derzhi occupied the lands nearest the northern borders, and sent hunting and logging parties deep into the trees. The Ezzarians dared not be seen, so they had to live on what they could hunt or collect. They had no books, none of our magical weapons, and few mentors to train others. They lived without hope of resuming the tasks that we had believed our sacred duties, for no Wardens had survived in their midst, and they had no idea whether the Queen or anyone else had made it away safely. They began to fight among themselves and disregard our customs that seemed impossible to follow in the face of such disaster.
But Talar, an Aife of modest gifts, had taken matters in hand. She refused to allow hardship or despair as an excuse for failed discipline, railing at the others that such weakness would give the demons a foothold among them. She told the tales of Verdonne and her long struggle to protect the peoples of the earth from the jealous raging of her immortal husband, and said that if a mortal woman could hold strong against the assaults of a god, could not embattled Ezzarians do the same? Though near starvation, she refused to drink anything but rainwater or to eat any food that had not been grown, caught, or cleaned in the ways laid down by our ancestors. She led rites of purification and found a few young women with skills enough to attempt Weaver’s enchantments to protect their camps. She had the tenyddar teach everyone, even the valyddar, their business of hunting and gleaning, and chastised those who used their melydda for commonplace tasks to make life easier rather than saving their power for the demon war. Her resolve humbled others into following her lead and drew the tattered refugees together again. They came out of exile with immense pride that they had been faithful to the laws and customs they believed given us by the gods.
Those of us who survived other horrors and other kinds of exile rejoiced in their strength and admired their determination. But when Talar and her followers discovered how I had been welcomed back from certain corruption, they were infuriated. And when I said that I had come to new ways of thinking about impurity and corruption . . . that perhaps it had less to do with what water you drank than with the character of your soul . . . I did not make friends of them.
I knew I would be called before the Council to answer Fiona’s charges of treason, but with Kenehyr and Catrin solidly behind me, and Maire almost the same, I had no concerns. The Mentors Council could only assert an adverse ruling with a vote of four of the five. More than worrying about politics, I needed to talk to Catrin of what I had seen, a demon outside the boundaries of our experience.
By moonrise, I had regained my composure and made my way to my mentor’s home to tell her of my extraordinary encounter. Catrin lived in the house her grandfather had built when he was young and the most powerful Warden in Ezzaria. He had set it on the top of a hill, though still under the trees, for the Weaver laid her enchantments of protection in the trees, and no Ezzarian would think of building a house unsheltered. But from Catrin’s porch, you could look out over the rolling rooftop of the forest, glimpsing the trails of smoke from scattered settlements and lights that flickered through the leaves like luminous fish in a dark ocean.
“Is Mistress Catrin here?” I asked the drowsy-eyed young student who answered her door. A pile of books, scrolls, and blotted papers on Catrin’s worktable behind the boy gave evidence of a long evening of study.
“She’s been summoned away,” said the boy, yawning hugely. “Not sure where. Said she’d be back before too late. You’re welcome in, as always, Master.”