The Warden, page 22
Aelis dropped the ward. The stone thunked into her chest, driving the breath from her lungs. The world went dark, energy tingled against her skin, and the last thing she felt was the pain of hitting the ground.
17
THE AFTERMATH
Aelis’s eyes snapped open on flickering flames. Immediately, she sat up.
And just as suddenly she fell back over. She was one mass of pain, beginning in the soles of her feet and spreading across every inch of her skin to her scalp in slow, exquisite waves. It made sure to linger in her joints, behind her eyes, and to make itself felt in any part of herself she tried to move.
A huge presence loomed on the other side of the fire. She decided it was probably Tun.
“Am I dead, Tun? Is this what death feels like?”
“Death feels like nothing, I expect,” the huge shape answered, in Tun’s voice. “Life, on the other hand, is quite painful.”
“Oh good,” Aelis said, slowly. Speaking hurt her jaw. Gently, she inspected her teeth with her tongue, expecting them to hurt and feeling mild surprise when they didn’t. “Do come over here and kill me then, hmm?”
“That is the last thing I would consider doing, Warden,” Tun said.
“That’s not very charitable of you.”
“What you feel is not permanent,” Tun ventured after a moment’s pause.
“I should fucking hope not.”
“It should not even last very much longer. You will shake off this effect. And you’ll do it sooner if you stand and move.”
“That is quite impossible at the moment.”
“Warden.” She heard the movement as Tun unfolded his bulk and felt as much as heard him coming closer. Then he was leaning over her, looking somewhat ragged in the dimness as twilight fell, half of an eyebrow singed away, some of the fringe of his coat blackened. “You dismantled a Demon Tree in a way that should have killed you. You still clutch the runestone that drove it in your hand. I should say that we are beyond the impossible now.”
He extended his hand and Aelis—who suddenly realized that her left hand was curled so tightly around something that her nails were digging into the heel of her hand—reached painfully up to take it with her right.
She’d have liked to say that Tun helped her to her feet, but in truth, she’d never have stood if he hadn’t simply lifted her. It was agony. Seconds stretched to hours.
Once she was upright, though wobbling, he pried open her left hand and touched the fingers of his own hand to what lay within.
The pain vanished. She could practically feel it being sucked into the half-orc standing before her, who grunted, stood rather more stiffly, but didn’t collapse like she might have expected.
Aelis looked down at what lay in her palm. A stone, and not a large one. Runes covered its surface, running into one another in characters she could not read.
She peered more closely and saw that each rune was filled with traces of amber, like honey poured into the crevices of a piece of toasted bread.
There was a hole drilled through the top of the stone; through it was threaded a lock of hair so fine it felt like silk. The lock appeared unbroken, somehow secured in place.
She looked back up at Tun, who plucked the stone from her hand. He wrapped his own fist around it and took a step back from her.
“Anaerion’s balls, I’d hope it would at least tingle when you touched it.”
“Do not,” Tun said, with suddenly more expression in his voice than she’d heard before, “feel as though this means you are weak, Warden Aelis. Do not. I am made to hold such things as this. Those of purely human blood cannot.”
“I think we should revise that to ‘should not.’”
“Are you quite sure you’ve no orc in your history?”
Aelis’s first instinct was to suppress the laughter that rose up, fearing for her ribs. Only then did she remember that the pain was truly gone, and she allowed herself a chuckle.
“If my father heard you ask that, Tun, he’d demand satisfaction. Or die of a choking fit in his anger—and he is not an angry man, or without a sense of humor.”
“The point remains that orc magic needs orc blood, so far as I know.”
“Well,” Aelis said, “what matters is that the Demon Tree is dead.”
“How? What did you do?”
“I merely used wards. Well, a ward. Nieran’s Sheath. It covers one’s entire body, cutting off all things. Blades, magic—but also air. It is not a long-term defense.”
“And yet in order to grasp the stone, you must have let it go.”
“I did.”
“That instant must’ve come very near to annihilating you,” Tun said.
“And yet,” Aelis said dryly, “here I am. I am not among the most powerful Abjurers, but … that was the most powerful ward I have managed to sustain. It is no parlor trick.”
“Regardless,” Tun said. “I am now in your debt.”
“How? We agreed to fight the thing. Together. We did.”
“It was mine to kill.”
“Don’t be childish, Tun.”
“I am being the farthest thing from that. It was not mine in the sense of a trophy, but rather as an obligation.”
“How can you have obligations to people you do not live among?”
“It is a fact of my existence, of my very being. You do not truly live among the people of Lone Pine, but are you not bound to them?”
“That’s mutual,” Aelis pointed out. “They are obligated to provide food, maintain my residence, and assist me. And being a Warden is something I chose.”
“If I chose to live with an orc band, it is possible that honors and riches would be mine. I do not. But that does not absolve me of the obligation to destroy a rogue Demon Tree if I come across it. I hold very little sacred, but that…” Here, Tun shrugged. “That is something that comes as near the word as I am willing.”
Questions rose in Aelis’s mind but something about Tun’s tone suggested she shouldn’t ask them. Instead, she pointed to the fetish he’d taken from her. “Can I study that?”
“Actually, Warden, this is where the favor I mean to ask comes in,” he said, making the stone disappear into one of the pockets of his long coat. “But we can discuss that later.” He turned to a pile of loose dirt that had resulted from digging the small firepit with his massive hand and began scooping the dirt onto the fire, smothering it. “It is time we get back on the trail. Dark is falling and we have distance to make up.”
Aelis had used the night vision that Onoma’s moon granted her for so much of her life that she hadn’t even noticed that she could see clearly once again. The silent moon was closer to fullness than it had been when they’d set out. She’d slept a day at least. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she felt energized, more capable of keeping up than before. There was a dull buzz in her muscles that was in no way painful or debilitating. She almost felt like running.
That’d be a first, she thought. She’d done as much running as she’d ever wanted to, and more, during her training. Bardun Jacques, being pulled alongside the students in a light carriage, shouting discouragement, obscenities, and occasionally zapping the legs of those who lagged with a bolt of light that arced from the crystal embedded in the top of his staff, had forever inured her to any enjoyment to be derived from it.
“Is it too convenient that they found you?” she wondered aloud.
“They were looking for me. They’d come some distance to do it, and tracked us fairly easily.”
“So there are orc bands that … know you? Or of you?”
“More or less. It is not as though I have lived outside Lone Pine all my life.”
“Oh,” Aelis said, somewhat taken aback. “I suppose I assumed, with the frontier close by, and so much contact in this region…”
“I was born near here, it’s true. But I have traveled more widely than you expect, and seen many of the great cities you long for.”
“What do you mean, long for?”
Tun stopped in his tracks and turned to face her. “Warden. I like to think a certain trust, even camaraderie, might flourish between us based on our experience of fighting the Demon Tree, to say nothing of spending days in each other’s company with nothing but the sky and the country and the hardship to share. Do not endanger that by lying. To me, or to yourself.”
Tun’s words stung but Aelis was never one to shy away from the bare truth, once she’d confirmed it was the truth, and it was no labor to know that he had sussed her out easily.
“I don’t mean to lie, Tun. I just … supposed I wasn’t that transparent.”
Her guide shrugged and turned back to whatever invisible trail he followed in the darkness. “I have a sense for these things.”
“Apparently,” she said, springing lightly after him. “I don’t like thinking I come off as if I hate this place. I’m going to do my best here, but I don’t know how.”
“Warden, I can see the issue, but do not look to me to fix it.”
“Have you any advice, at least?”
“Think of a beast. A wolf or a sheep or a goat or a fox. Whatever suits. It does not want to be standing out in the rain, but it never occurs to it to imagine that it has a right not to be wet.”
Aelis sighed and let her questions subside for the time being. Above them, clouds parted and clusters of stars appeared. She spared a glance for them and supposed that if any revelation was going to come to her it would be now, beneath the awful majesty of the night sky above the foothills and the mountains looming in the near distance.
If there were any justice, she thought, I’d have a great epiphany about nature and the struggle on the frontier and the stark beauty of it all. I’d lose my heart to this place and learn to love sheep. I’d even make peace with that goat that keeps breaking into my tower.
Instead, all she could think was that when she was back, she’d have to take advantage of the clear nights to make sure she had her orrery correctly engaged, and that perhaps she could curry favor back at the Lyceum by making some notes on the positions of the stars and the moons from elevation.
If I had the lenses and the notation books and cared enough to do the math, she thought.
“The beasts must just be smarter than me, Tun,” she murmured. “I would trade every star in the sky for the lights of Antraval, and the great crush of people, the throbbing life within its walls, the music in the taverns, the talk in the coffee shops, the calls of merchants, the quiet blue evenings in the garden mazes…” She trailed off.
Tun said nothing, and Aelis kept following.
18
THE CAMP
They walked on until near to dawn, and Aelis remained shocked at how much energy she still had. Deep down she suspected that she’d pay for it later, that the strength in her limbs was somehow a remnant of her sojourn inside the Demon Tree’s body. She had some dim memories of it that fled from her mind like a dream every time she tried to focus on them. But, like the memories of a dream, they crept up into the corners of her thoughts, teased her, tantalized her, darted into her vision and then away again as soon as she looked.
She was determined not to let it distract her, and Tun did his part by flinging out his hand and stopping her, planting his stick in the turf at their feet. They’d climbed steadily for most of the night. She had the presence of mind to note that breath was becoming a bit harder to find and was too grateful for the momentary pause to question whatever Tun was doing.
“This is unexpected,” he muttered. “I think your man has fallen in with someone.”
“With someone? Not any of the same desperate men you mentioned before?”
“That is impossible to say. There are folk out here, of course. The kind of folk uncomfortable with anywhere as populated as Lone Pine.”
“You mean the kind who want to be beyond the reach of the Estates House, the law, the Wardens, and the Crowns.”
“Not everyone finds the reach of the law a comforting embrace, or the growth of stone walls a warm mantle against the winter.”
“Anarchists and bandits and so-called pioneers who don’t want to respect the terms of the treaties signed.”
“Or folk who remember living in this part of Old Ystain, or whose parents did, and want somewhere to feel like their own again,” Tun said. “People who worked land or practiced trades there.”
Aelis felt the furnace of her anger stoked despite Tun’s reasonable tone and mild objections. She tamped it down and said, “This debate isn’t getting us any closer to Elmo.”
“It is not,” Tun agreed. “The point is, there are the tracks of more than one figure here.”
“How many?”
Tun turned and squinted at the ground, pushing the tangle of his hair away from his face. “Half a dozen, perhaps? Hard to say. No mounts, or at least, none have come this way recently.”
“Dammit.” Aelis bounced the tip of her walking stick off the ground. “Can you learn anything more about them?”
Tun eyed her a moment, then bent down. “Well, of the six, four are human men. One perhaps a dwarf, or a fat gnome with a lame leg. They encountered our man more than twelve hours ago but not more than a day. No signs of a fight; in fact, they appear to have shared breakfast with him.” He sniffed the ground. “Eggs and old ham, I suspect.”
“You’re fucking with me.”
“I’m fucking with you,” Tun said with a nod as he stood back up. “You either haven’t known any woodsmen, Warden, or you’ve known the wrong kind. Don’t expect miracles out of any tracker, no matter what tales they’ll tell you. I have led you this far, and I will find Elmo, but I all I can say is that he met with other folk here and they departed together. I see no signs of a fight; no blood was shed here. But,” Tun added, drawing the syllable out, “if men came upon him with loaded crossbows and marched him back to a cave to dress him out and salt him for the winter, there would not be any signs of a fight.”
“Well, that’d solve one problem, anyway,” Aelis said. “But on the whole, I’d rather not have cannibals setting up shop just a few days’ walk away from Lone Pine.”
“If he has fallen in with some wild band, best we approach carefully.”
“A warden does not slink,” Aelis said, repeating something Bardun Jacques had told her many times.
“So, your plan is to walk directly toward a numerically superior force and then … do what, exactly?”
“I’ll figure that out when I get there and we have a look at them.”
“Does a warden plan?”
“The best plan never survives contact with the enemy, the suspect, or the objectives,” Aelis said. “So why bother making one?”
“So that we survive contact?”
“Thought you weren’t here to help me fight,” Aelis said.
“I agreed to help you track a possible fratricide. Combat was not on the agenda. That being said, I would rather not watch you take on a dozen men by yourself.”
“And I killed the Demon Tree for you.”
“I was giving it something to think about.”
“Oh? What to do with your body when it was done strangling you?”
“I was distracting it.”
“By getting strangled?”
Tun sniffed in a way that Aelis thought was part laughter and perhaps part genuine dudgeon. She couldn’t be sure, since his expressions were still hard to read, but she thought the corners of his mouth had curved in a smile around the protruding teeth.
They walked on in silence but, Aelis thought, in something like camaraderie.
* * *
“Can a warden skulk occasionally?” Tun’s question was whispered as they pressed themselves flat against a hillside. Stumps dotted its rise, leading to a crude timber-framed gate and flanking walls that abutted a cave face in the hillside. Whether it was natural or had been dug out or was some combination of the two, they couldn’t tell, but it could have housed a dozen or two dozen or more for all they knew, and there were armed men behind the rough fence.
“In the face of overwhelming odds, perhaps, a certain amount of skulking could be allowed. Purely in the interests of developing intelligence.”
“I don’t suppose you can make yourself invisible or blind them to your presence?”
“I could, under ideal conditions, make one or two people forget that they had seen me, but I’m afraid that isn’t what you’re looking for. I’m no Illusionist.”
“We could wait till dark,” Tun suggested.
Aelis gave her head a slight shake as she eyed the men behind the little palisade. She saw crossbows and spears and that was plenty enough to worry her. “People approaching in the dark are definitely enemies to this lot, I’d expect. That’s a fast way to get a bolt in the chest, or a spear, or both.”
“Assuming they’d see us in the dark,” Tun said. “We have an advantage there.”
“I can see, yes. But in the dark I’m limited in what I can do without giving us away. All my best tricks are rather visible in darkness.”
“Sword isn’t.”
“I’m not going in there to slit throats,” Aelis hissed.
“Your sword has a pommel. A short, ugly nap and a long headache is all I meant. We study the guard patterns and pick a time.”
“And then all it takes is one person up for a late-night piss to raise a cry and we’re up to our elbows in blood. I’d rather find out from the start if we can resolve this peacefully. You’re sure Elmo was brought here?”
“His tracks join with others and lead straight here.”
“Well,” Aelis said. “Then there’s only one thing for it.”
She rose, clearly silhouetting herself against the hillside for anyone who cared to look, and began advancing up the hill. Behind her she heard Tun mutter something, words in the same language he’d spoken to the orc hunters but considerably less cordial, as he slowly stood up to follow.
She’d made half the distance to the little compound with Tun just a few steps behind before anyone noticed them. A cry went up from one of the guards who glanced in their direction, and crossbows were leveled over the rough and uneven top of the timbers. She stopped in her tracks. At only twenty or so yards from the wall, she was within easy range of any crossbow and she well knew it.
