The Warden, page 34
As she investigated the drink, Tun took a crock from a shelf that looked absurdly small in his hands and set it down. He opened it, took up a small wooden stick to stir the honey within. He worked a generous measure of it into his own mug and offered it to Aelis, who waved it off with a hand.
“Not much for sweet,” she said, then sipped.
She was shocked at the strength of the flavor. “Gods, Tun. I think this is better than tea.”
“That,” he said, taking a sip of his own, the mug lost in his hand, “only proves that your opinion may be safely ignored. Now, the maps?”
Aelis scooted the sheets of parchment over to him. Immediately, Tun began rearranging them with a finger that moved far more delicately than it had any right to.
“These,” he said, “are pieces of the kind of maps carried by Ystain officers in the war. They show forts, supply dumps, that kind of thing.”
“Makes sense. I need to orient them in relation to Lone Pine and figure a navigable path to them.”
“Must be a half dozen locations noted here. The notations are recent. Not from the war. But they match up to lines of march.” Tun raised an eye toward her. “Looking for something?”
Aelis shrugged. “How do you know so much about lines of march for Ystain soldiery?”
Tun shrugged in turn, sipped his not-quite-tea. Aelis did the same.
“Tun,” she said at last, in a rush, “I don’t like keeping secrets from you. I wouldn’t if I wasn’t forced to it.”
“I understand, Aelis. I do. I hope I can at least persuade you that trying to do this with winter coming on is tantamount to suicide.”
“It could be worse if I wait till spring.”
“That seems unlikely.”
The animated dead do not feel cold. They do not know hunger, or suffer from poor morale, or worry about the boys and girls they left behind. If they’re out there, they are a disaster waiting to happen. If any malevolent spirits are trapped with them, or bound to them, or commanding them, it could be so, so much worse.
Aelis wanted to say all these things, but held her tongue. “Trust me. It could be.”
If they’re holdovers from the war, they’ve waited at least eight years. They can wait a few months. Aelis dismissed the whiny, self-serving voice that said those things. They were unworthy of a Warden.
“I trust you. But I do not think you know the weather. These will take you beyond the Durndill Pass, farther north and farther west than we went after Elmo. By some distance. You could be caught and buried in snow. The wind could toss you off a high trail. A storm might turn you around, get you so lost that you never find your way back. You cannot do this on your own. You ought not to do it at all.”
Aelis had to admit that Tun had a compelling argument. “That sounds … pretty convincing. I’ll tell you what. Just help me find out how to get to the nearest location. Just the one. That may help clarify how many of these I have to visit, and how soon.”
Tun frowned around his tusks, drained off the rest of his mug in one careful sip. “I will do as you ask because you are my friend. But, also because you are my friend, I am going to ask you again not to do even that. Not on your own.”
“It’s my job, Tun. I signed up. I sought it out, spent years working for it. It’s not meant to be easy.”
“There’s difficult, and there’s impossible. People who speak of doing the latter have rarely attempted the former. But,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall her, “I said I would draw you your directions. And I will. It will take some time, and I will need ink, pen, parchment…”
“I have all of those with me,” Aelis said, digging into her bag and pulling free a leather writing case, dyed Abjurer’s College blue; a graduation gift from Miralla. From it, she drew out paper, pens, and ink, setting them all carefully on the table.
“I’m not going to get out of this, am I?” Tun grinned as he carefully rearranged the map fragments and shifted in his chair.
With surprising delicacy, Tun dipped a pen in ink and poised it over the paper. He set it down and ink began to soak into the fibers from the nib, forming a dark blotch. Then he stopped and looked up at Aelis.
“This is foolish. This is suicide. Some of these markings are well beyond where we ventured last time, Aelis. I cannot help you do this in good conscience.”
Aelis sighed. “I lack the time to keep arguing over this. I have a duty and I will see it done. I must report faithfully that I tried.”
Tun grumbled and rearranged the scraps of map and then began drawing on the fresh sheet Aelis had given him.
She found herself captivated by the quick and careful way he drew the ink across the paper. The pen was a twig in his thick, gray-green fingers, but it danced lightly. She stepped closer to the table he hunched over; not so close as to interfere with him.
His hands were bigger than the paper he worked with, but under them Aelis could recognize the features that quickly took shape, if she assumed that the first small X he made was Lone Pine. From there he filled in the path they had taken in the summer, up to the edge of the Durndill Pass and the frontier at the edge of what had once been the Earldom of Mahlgren.
“This is an old supporting fortress of Mahlhewn Keep,” Tun said, quickly sketching a tower that seemed to be just north of the place he’d marked with a tiny drawing of a cave, and another close by of standing stones, further landmarks from their journey. “It is not, perhaps, the closest as the crow flies. But it is the only one with clear trails to it and back and, likely enough, the only one with any walls still standing.”
“Will there be orc bands between here and there?”
“Almost certainly,” Tun said. “And so long as you carry the walking stick I have made for you, you need not fear them. They will read my signature upon it.”
Aelis looked at the map he’d sketched and sighed. She could just imagine the cold, the twice-a-day meals of hard bread, and sticks of dried fruit, fat, and venison, the endless walking. But she was a Warden, and that duty superseded all else.
“Thank you, Tun. Once again, I owe you the ability to carry out my duties.”
“And I owe you the ability to reconcile both halves of myself,” Tun said. “It is hardly a small thing.”
“Then I’ll see you when I return. Thank you for your help. And the tea … and this work of art,” she added. She stood and took up the walking stick she’d leaned against the table.
She headed for the door, stopped, turned back to face Tun. “I do consider you a friend, Tunbridge. I want to be sure you know that. I have a tendency to live in my own head, to get caught up in whatever task I have in front of me. I should be a better friend. I should have come to see you. You know you are welcome at my tower anytime.”
“I do not require a great deal of company,” Tun said slowly. “But it would be good to occasionally share a meal and conversation with someone who is not afraid of me.”
“I have books, in the tower. Not too many, a couple dozen. You’re welcome to come and read them if you like.”
Tun’s face brightened. “That, I would enjoy very much. It has been some time since I was able to read a book.”
“It’s not thrilling stuff. Magical theory, histories, lives of wardens.”
“It is more thrilling than talking to the pine trees, I’m sure. Now I know you have business. We have rekindled our friendship, we both understand that. There are no hard feelings. Go. Don’t make me come looking for you in winter; I will be very grumpy if I have to.”
30
THE VISITOR
Aelis set off for her tower. She thought wistfully of the warm interior of the inn, of hot wine and fresh bread and especially of Maurenia, but she headed straight for her tower.
The village was bustling. A few people were driving flocks to pasture—harder and harder to find as autumn really took hold—and each farm she passed was swarming with people trying to do all the work before it got too cold to do any of it.
Aelis tried rehearsing what she might say to Maurenia before she left and rejected everything she had come up with. Thank Onoma I didn’t try writing any of this down, she thought, or I’d have wasted half my stock of paper and ink. She found herself thinking about her attachments at the Lyceum, her dalliances with Miralla and Humphrey, and occasionally the three of them companionably together. Those were good, enjoyable days.
Something about her time with Maurenia felt different, though the demands of their respective callings made it dangerous to even think of the possibilities. A recollection of what Bardun Jacques had to say about romantic attachments flitted through her mind.
“Have all the sex you want,” he’d barked when one of his rambling lectures had alighted on the subject, “so long as you take the right steps. But don’t make attachments. And by Stregon’s Mighty Sack, don’t fall in love. You let that kind of thinking into your mind, you or people who depend on you end up dead.”
Aelis shook the memory from her head and walked on, hastening her stride, swinging her new walking stick ahead of her like she meant to make for the wilderness immediately.
When the tower came into view, though, something immediately struck her as wrong. She stopped, dropped a hand to the hilt of her sword, and focused.
She hadn’t been in it since the day before, but smoke was drifting out of the chimney at the very top. I did not leave a fire that would generate that kind of smoke, she thought. The structure itself was in no danger.
But someone was inside it.
Immediately, Aelis’s mind flashed to Dalius’s attack. To the way he’d casually smacked her sword away, the equipment that had been smashed, the shard of glass that he’d driven straight into her stomach. The scar flared cold and hard, and she drew her sword.
Won’t find me unprepared this time, you fucking wraith, she thought, ignoring her pedantic self that said that “wraith” was entirely the wrong term to apply to whatever Dalius had become. Sword in her right hand, stick looped against her wrist and held under her left arm, she walked boldly up to the tower. The door was unlatched, so she carefully reached out and pushed it open with the metal-shod end of her staff.
She waited, listened, took one cautious step forward, straining her senses. A ward was half summoned into the pommel of her sword. She tested the weight of her staff with her left wrist, and found it unbalanced as Tun had warned her, but probably worth the swing, given the reach it offered.
The Abjurer’s litany ran across the very surface of her mind. Fear is a response to danger. The Abjurer does not know danger. The properly prepared and ever-vigilant Abjurer is the antithesis of danger. Thus, she cannot fear.
Expecting a horrid and twisted Dalius-like specter, she took two more slow steps down the entry hall and burst into the central round.
Only to find Maurenia sitting in one of her reading chairs, a book on her lap, a wineglass in her hand.
“You’re not going to stab me with that, are you?” Maurenia turned a page without looking up from the book.
Sighing, Aelis placed the tip of her sword against the stone beneath her feet and released the power she’d been gathering. She sheathed her weapon, then sagged against her staff.
“How did you get in?” She spoke over her clasped hands on the staff, trying to dispel the surging of her blood.
“Your physical security is … not very good.”
“Meaning?”
“The lock is a useless lump of iron. If I showed it to Timmuk, he might cry.” At last, Maurenia looked up. Aelis set her stick against the wall and took a few steps into the interior.
“I didn’t take you for the sneak-out-in-the-morning kind,” Maurenia said, but the warmth in her voice softened the criticism.
“I’m not. But I had business.”
“What kind?”
“Warden business. What other kind could I have?”
Maurenia carefully closed the book. Lives of the Wardens, Aelis noted, and was glad to see the care with which Maurenia treated it.
“You’re thinking something else that you don’t want to say. Out with it.”
Aelis took a deep breath. “I’m about to leave.”
“On Warden business, no doubt. Where to?”
“Into the wilderness. Again.”
“Where in the wilderness?”
“I’m not entirely sure, and even if I did know, I really can’t say.”
“This is something to do with that letter I brought you, isn’t it? The one with the death’s head on it.”
Aelis thought that silence was probably as good as a direct answer in the moment, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do or say. In order to avoid responding, she peeled off her gloves, scarf, and cloak and tossed them onto the nearest flat surface in a heap.
Maurenia swept to her feet and immediately picked up Aelis’s discarded garments. Cloak in hand, she brushed past Aelis, folded the scarf neatly, lined the gloves up, and set them down flush with the edge of the table. The cloak she hung on one peg of a board that someone had hung up by the entryway when the tower was renovated.
“Tidy sort, eh?”
“For the last thirty years I’ve lived out of a backpack or a trunk. Stop trying to change the subject. I knew that death’s head was bad news.”
“It’s just an old symbol for one of the Colleges. An obsolete symbol. But someone of rank insists on using it and no one has the authority to make him cease.” Aelis found her legs unexpectedly weak, so she sank into the nearest hard wooden chair in front of the worktable.
“Is it going to be dangerous?”
“Wouldn’t be Warden work if it wasn’t.”
“Last I checked, Warden work also encompassed casting wards to hold sheep in their pen, treating ankles that twisted when their owner stepped in sheep shit…”
Aelis laughed lightly. “Believe me, Maurenia, the last thing I want to do is leave while you’re here.”
“Then don’t. Give it a couple of weeks. Gather intelligence. Lines of communication are so slow that they’ll never know the difference.”
“To someone with enough rank in the Lyceum, communication can move a lot faster than you’d think. But it’s not even about that, it’s—”
“About obligation. About who you are, what you signed up for. Believe it or not, Aelis, I understand that.”
She thrilled to hear her name fall from Maurenia’s lips, in her rich, deep voice.
“That I understand it doesn’t mean I like it. Especially not at this time of year. Surely you don’t plan to go alone,” Maurenia went on.
“I think I have to.”
Maurenia walked up to the chair and laid one hand on Aelis’s shoulder. “Why is your hand trembling?”
Aelis sighed, and sagged in her chair. “Because the last time I walked in on my tower occupied by someone else, it was Dalius, and he nearly killed me.”
The scar on her stomach flared with pain, though the anatomist in her knew it had no reason to. In her mind, suddenly, Dalius loomed over her. Every breath hurt. Her hand scrambled for her orrery, found it, was sheathed in claws so black they drank the light.
Maurenia rested a hip on the chair behind her and placed both hands on Aelis’s shoulder, squeezing gently. Then she reached out to the hand Aelis had flung toward her orrery and guided it away from the heavy silver base of the machine.
“I’d prefer you didn’t brain me with that any more than you stabbed me, honestly,” she murmured.
Aelis laughed, and the sound of laughter from her own throat brought her back to the moment, to the warmth in the tidy tower she’d come to think of as home, to the woman whose hands were on her.
“I wouldn’t try to brain anything with that. Alchemically treated silver is worth too much, for one. And I can make much better use of the magic it stores.”
“It stores magic?” Maurenia leaned over the table, suddenly all questions. “How much? What can it be used for? Is that how it works?”
“A lot, anything I want, and yes. And before you start asking about gear teeth or pinions or rods or any of that, I don’t know a single thing about the internal mechanism. As long as I put magic into it regularly, it runs.”
“You mean you don’t know how it operates?”
“I don’t need to,” Aelis said. “Is asking me questions about magical equipment really why you came all the way up here in the cold?” The weakness in her legs and the trembling in her hands having subsided, she stood up and snaked an arm around Maurenia’s waist.
Maurenia looked right into her eyes and Aelis felt her knees weaken again for a moment. “I came back because I wanted you. You wanted me. More than that, probably. Eight hundred miles each way on a wagon with the Dobrusz brothers is a high price just for wanting. Let’s just not look at it too closely. Nothing will kill an affair faster than talking about it.”
“Then let’s not talk at all,” Aelis said, leaning forward and aiming her lips for Maurenia’s, only to find them stopped by the half-elf’s finger laid across them.
“You,” Maurenia said, “need to pack. I will help. Then we can not talk.”
Aelis tried not to sigh in frustration and only half succeeded. She stepped away and thought she heard Maurenia chuckle before the half-elf spoke again.
“How long are you planning to be gone? What’s the maximum length of time you think you can stay in the field alone? And what do you need to bring?”
Maurenia’s tone was suddenly businesslike, and it snapped Aelis out of her reverie. The twinge of pain in her stomach, the memory of Dalius, were gone. She had tasks. She was a Warden, and she would see them done.
* * *
With Maurenia’s expert advice, it didn’t take long till Aelis had a bag packed. Maurenia had vetoed many things Aelis had seen as essential—soap, more than one spare piece of any kind of clothing, a sewing kit—and had convinced her to dress in light layers she could discard or add to at need.
“I’ll put together a tinderbox for you,” Maurenia said, “since an alchemy lamp will do for light but not heat, not given the amount of fuel you said you’d have to carry. Dry wood ought to be plentiful enough. Too bad you’re not an Invoker.”
