Though it was just one room, the floor of Shelini’s packed-earth home was too dense with hand-woven rugs, walls too bright with paintings, scraps of tapestry, charms and children’s scrawlings on bark pieces; the small, dwarf-built hearth too cozy to call the structure a ‘hut’ with conviction.

“You are not sufficiently surprised to learn of Gregory’s passing,” Ionia accused even as she sank into an enormous, wool-stuffed crocheted pouf.

“Well, I was! We all were!” Shelini replied, pouring tea into an earthenware mug and pushing it toward Ionia.

“Really. You felt a word of power, a word of power of this realm, at a distance. You broke your own staff, Shelini, and I’m to believe you can sense changes in this realm’s magic so acutely?”

“Tch. I never broke my staff. I cultivated him. He’s actually the one who told me of just…all of it,” Shelini gesticulated. “The word of power, Gregory, the kids, this Amaranthine person. The whole great mess.”

“A tree told you all of that?”

“Sure!” Shelini pointed through the window to a strange, silver tree, sprawling with twisting branches dotted with blue leaves. “Remember? He was still greenwood when I left. Cut a staff at a node, pop it into a bit of sphagnum moss, poof! You have a staff-tree. Trevor. Your tree-nephew, I suppose,” she nodded at Ionia’s staff, cut from the same ironwood as Shelini’s over a century before.

“Trevor?”

"He chose 'Trevor'. Who am I to judge?"

"You are a sorceress!"

"Hmm-mm," Shelini wibble-wobbled her head. " I was once, but even then, judgements made me uneasy.”

“Utter madness. How do you control the magic it channels?”

“I don’t,” Shelini answered. “He’s quite intelligent on his own.”

“Just like you. You’ve no idea what such a thing may do to the order of things you’re always on about.”

“O-ho,” Shelini laughed, spreading her hands to wiggle her fingers. “Great Lady words of power is concerned with the order of things?”

“Things are meant to be what they are,” Ionia insisted. “Staffs becoming trees, I ask you!”

“Staffs began as trees. Supposedly deathless mages did not, but here we are, anyway.”

Ionia laughed, downing her tea in a single gulp.

“You’ve not changed a bit. I mean that as praise. As unaccustomed as I am to offering compliments, I now realize it might sound a bit sharp.”

“Oh-ho, of course. In that way, you have not changed, either.” Shelini sat cross-legged on a rug, a low table between herself and Ionia.

Shelini’s eyes were different, Ionia thought. Always as bright, dark and sharp as obsidian, Shelini’s eyes shone with her years, with hidden knowledge.

Ionia wondered how much Shelini knew of her guilt, of her hand in the horrors of the past thirty years.

“‘In that way’?” Ionia asked. “You speak as if I’ve changed a great deal since we last met.”

“But you know you have, or you would not sit here.”

“I sit here because I was summoned by a tacky piece of magic--even tackier than the Fetch you attempted to place on me.”

“Oh, that was never a Fetch,” Shelini said, waving a dismissive hand. “Just a coin on a string. You’ve always been one for pageantry. You’d not have bothered with reading the Wayfinder spell if there’d been no implied threat.”

Ionia cackled.

“Why not just send me a proper letter?”

“You wouldn’t have come,” Shelini insisted. “And if Trevor can be trusted--and he can--I very much needed you to. What’s more, you needed to.”

“For Xagar? You can't have known he would accompany us."

"We-ell," Shelini hedged, "Trevor knew two non humans, aside from whoever is walking about because of your word of power, were bound to you. Aga I knew about--she’s in more Lady Ionia songs than not.”

Ionia grimaced.

“Oh! As if you didn’t know songs came with the job. Xinx Stonesthrow does quite a lovely arrangement of the one where you and Aga tricked all those vampires.”

“Sweet basil,” Ionia groused. “And better sanitation. The utter idiots had hookworm. Vampires! Honestly.”

“I had assumed as much,” Shelini agreed. “It’s still a rather good tune. I’d like to see Aga with a blade. She’s such a tiny thing!”

“Spade,” Ionia corrected. “The child dug privies for weeks.”

“Hmm,” Shelini considered. “I see why the bards changed that bit. Though digging good privies is quite a lot more useful than skill with a blade, and saved more lives, too, I would wager.”

“You wager well,” Ionia agreed. “Which is why I simply cannot stomach the songs. Certainly, Xagar hasn’t made an appearance in one, though?”

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Not any of yours,” Shelini frowned. “And really, what’s repeated about him has more in common with counter-curses. I’m quite glad the mysterious non-human was good Xagar. Of all the Sapients I can imagine, he is perhaps the second-most in need of reconciliation.”

Ionia glared.

"Which, you've been clear, is not the same as redemption."

"Quite right. But there is no redemption without reconciliation.”

Shelini laid her smooth, dark hand over Ionia’s, pale and mottled with age. A few months shy of her one hundred and fiftieth birthday, Ionia wore the extra years steeping in magic granted her with less grace than most magic handlers--Queen Marilee, Ionia’s mistress in her youth, had the appearance of a robust fifty when she passed at four hundred.

“It’s nonsense,” Ionia seethed through gritted teeth, biting the inside of her mouth. “Utter nonsense. My whole life, Shelini, since a scant decade after we parted, I have served, and this--” she indicated the bulges of her knuckles rising above her many rings, the loose skin of her hands, her swollen wrist. “Is all I have to show for it. There are debts that cannot be paid. Wrongs cannot be reconciled. Ceremonies do not change the past.”

“The past cannot be changed. It informs us, but what use is bludgeoning ourselves with it? The ceremony is an oath. The beginning of change.” Shelini cooed.

Ionia held her head in her hands.

“Come now, stay with me tonight,” Shelini patted Ionia’s arm. “It’ll be fun! Like the old dormitories.”

Shelini rose to unfold a hammock, hooking one end to a tall post to one side of the room. She handed Ionia the other end. Her fingers numb against the soft, knotted hemp net, Ionia stretched to latch the hammock’s loop into a hook nailed into a matching post.

Shelini weighed the hammock down with blankets and pillows before sitting, waving for Ionia to join her.

“Come, come. It sleeps three to five, depending on your species.”

Too downtrodden to argue, Ionia sat next to the elf, letting her balance the swinging net before she lay down.

Unaccustomed to sleeping in company, Ionia was surprised to find she did not mind the hang of the hammock rolling her to the center, close to her friend.

“You intend to accompany us, don’t you?” Ionia said.

“I do. Before you argue, I’m acquainted with horses who would not be put out by a

journey.”

“I cannot ask you…it’s my mistake. It’s mine to right.”

“How lucky that I’ve insisted, and you’ve not asked, hmm?” Shelini trilled.

Shelini had always been brilliant, especially in botanical magicks. If Ionia’s magical

signature could be seen, Shelini had read it. And yet.

Ionia leaned against Shelini’s shoulder.

“Why?”

“I know you, Ionia, and I love you. Whatever else you might believe, know this to be absolute truth.” Shelini said, turning to rest her forehead against Ionia’s.

Looking into Shelini’s dark, shining eyes, Ionia suspected her old friend may be the only

being in any realm who did know her.

“I know. Mothers help me, I don’t deserve you. Nor Aga and Xagar, if I’m to speak truth.”

“Probably not,” Shelini agreed. “But you have the lot of us, and our little clan travels. So,

Great Lady, what will you do with our confidence?”

While comfortably outfitted with springy moss, warm, hand-knit blankets and crocks of dried fruit, water and jerky, Pravama’s mud and thatch guest quarter could be called a hut with absolute conviction.

Aga lay awake, wrapped in a lopsided mitered square blanket, listening for Xagar outside.

“Xagar,” she called. “S’bigger than it looks in here. You’ll catch a chill.”

“My thanks for the concern,” Xagar answered. “But my ogrish body prefers chillier temperatures.”

Aga stepped outside to find Xagar sitting upright, his back against the hut.

“You sleep sittin’ up?” she asked.

“Often.”

Aga fidgeted with a ragged nail.

“You ain’t a pet,” she said, her voice low. “We don’t know much of each other. It weren’t fair I go demandin’ confessions. I’d like knowin’ you better, though, if you’ll forgive me.”

“Thank you,” Xagar said. “I do not believe I recall receiving an apology for any reason. It’s quite an unusual sensation.”

“Xagar,” Aga said, standing in the doorway. “I don’t know what you done, but I’m glad you survived it. You’re kind an’ helpful, an’ I’m right proud to know you.”

Silence hung between them until Aga could no longer conceal her shivering in the cool night.

“Go warm yourself, my friend,” Xagar said, not unkindly.

The sun hung two small-elf fists above the horizon as Xagar sat on the ground, eyes fixed on the villagers of Pravama. Ionia and Aga sat behind him, a gesture generating deep ambivalence. He kept his back straight and his eyes dry through each tale of harm he had done: through action, through inaction, through complicity. Some faces he recognized. Most he did not.

“Do you recognize me?” the elf with the wood and metal arm asked.

“I do,” Xagar replied.

“I want to know why,” he demanded. “You killed hundreds. Why only maim me?”

Xagar bit his lip. He had not killed hundreds--dozens, perhaps, but one life taken was too much.

“Xagar?” Shelini called, “Stoicism admirable, but only in its place. Have you a truth to tell Eliad?”

“I did not wish to kill you,” Xagar said, “I did not wish to kill anyone. As has been revealed, I was a cook, charged with obtaining meat.”

Eliad went pale as Xagar recounted the tale.

“You play-acted? And you lived?”Eliad asked, rubbing his wood and metal arm.

“I was considered quite foolish outside of cookery. A bruise to the back of my head offered proof my simple ogrish brain was overcome by an outpouring of Elvish magic.”

“I watched you faint.” Eliad insisted.

“I meant to appear convincing. I hoped you would take the opportunity to flee.”

Eliad’s eyes welled.

“I don’t know about preparing,” he struggled to say the word, “meat, but I was fair sure it didn’t involve tourniquets. You tied my arm so tight I thought the knot alone would sever it.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve hated you for years,” Eliad said, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“If I may speak a deep truth, I agree. I am quite strong. Only fear stayed my hand against the Lich. For all his magic, he was just a man. A simple blow to his head would’ve cost my life, but spared the violence which plagued us all.I lived too long believing my life was valuable simply because it was mine.”

Eliad stepped forward, wide-eyed Athanka clinging to his waist.

“We have no quarrel,” he extended his Mothers-given hand to Xagar, who took it gently.

“You humble me, sir,” Xagar bowed.

“All spoken? All hearts revealed?” Shelini asked the assembled.

A course of ‘aye’s answered her.

“Spare one, perhaps?” she eyed Xagar.

“I do not deserve…”

“Oh, the bitter root is not about who deserves this and that,” she waved a dismissive hand. “We are here to heal, to grow beyond the past.”

Xagar nodded and closed his eyes.

“I wanted to live. I held hope that, should I stay alive, a change might come. This change has come to me, it sits behind me, in my lady and my friend, to whom I owe my very life. But I owe my life also to the lives I took through my actions, those lives I allowed to be taken through my inaction. This is not a debt I can pay. That I may ask forgiveness is a gift beyond my wildest imagination. I renounce my cowardice. I cannot right what I have done. I can, however, work against cruelty still abroad. With your forgiveness, I endeavor each day to make my life of value.”

Xagar opened his eyes, finding a small wooden bowl of dark liquid in front of him. Watching the villagers drink from similar bowls, he raised it to his lips. The brew tasted of poison, more vile than the harshest barracks-brewed gin, it burned down his throat, flaming into his stomach. Warmth emanated throughout Xagar’s body, relaxing tensed muscles, clearing his worried mind.

“Let our conflict end. May our bitterness pass,” the crowd recited. The villagers’ eyes reflected pity, sorrow, empathy. Despite a long, thorough search, Xagar could not detect even the ghost of hate in the crowd. Sitting straight, he opened his mouth to offer his thanks, but his voice had left him.

For the first time since childhood, Xagar Greengrass wept.