White sand, still hot from the Ashes, fell from Farisa’s clothes as they walked through Switch Cave, still hot but already two flags cooler than where they’d been. Over the sound of her footsteps, she could hear Talyn and Kanos. She was glad they were leaving the group; it would be good never to see them again.
“Here it is,” Runar said.
Farisa stopped. “The kasa?”
“It’s something.” He pointed.
She closed her eyes. In the blue, she could see as well that space’s texture was here abnormal. The distortion had been here for so long, the stones of the cave walls had fused together despite miles of original distance between the two places, but there was a shimmering here suggestive of some once-conscious and fully unnatural concentration of energy. Such work could usually be undone; indeed, even entropy and time favored it.
“Do you think you can break it?”
“Maybe.” Farisa waved her arm. “Everyone go a hundred yards beyond me.”
“In case it doesn’t work?” asked Claes.
“In case it does work.”
She sat cross-legged on the hard cave floor, using its slant to elevate her tailbone, minimizing her discomfort by pressing her hands into her knees.
“This is going to take some time, so I’ll need you all to be as quiet as you can. Make it dark, too.”
Their lamps went out. Water dripped in the distance over the sound of the others breathing. A husker’s tail swung about, and bats were flying somewhere. Otherwise, all was still. She focused on her breath. Sitting on bare granite was starting to hurt, but she had endured thirty-mile walks, twenty-mile rides on an unta’s saddle, eleven-flag heat, and danger’s vicious shocks—the crash of the heart against itself every time her eye caught motion she had not expected—and so she decided this would not harm her. Minutes passed; she had started out counting breaths, but lost track of the number.
No one had voiced anxiety, but she was starting to perceive it in the sounds and rates of others’ breathing. Kanos and Talyn could still be heard. The skin on her arms prickled; the ground’s dull pressure on her tailbone became a blinding soreness.
This hurts more than I expected. I should have rolled up my jacket as a cushion, but it’s too late. No, I can handle it. I can handle it. But... what if the pain pulls me out? What if I lose my tether, mid-casting? What if Kanos, the betrayer, comes back? What if this spell fails and we die here? What if it throws us into some other place entirely? What if we die here because I actually can’t break this thing, since I don’t understand the spell that I am supposed to be working against... ouch, ouch! So much of me hurts. So much of me hurts. Of all things, Farisa. Of all things...
No, Farisa, don’t fight it. The pain is no threat to this meditation, but the fighting it is. Give it focus. Concentrate on it. Ask it to double. Let it hurt, let it hurt more. Your skin is hot with sunburn and your spine aches, but you can focus, you can get this right...
The twinge in her lower back increased its pain, but lost specificity. A bodiless cloud of mere discomfort, though severely unpleasant, required no response; she could float on it until it became a hazy red heat, and what did heat do but dissipate... dissipate... spread to nowhere... until gone, just gone... gone into space so the world can face the sun at equilibrium rather than grow hotter and hotter... gone. She could see the kasa in full detail, though her breath seemed to move it, so she would have to slow that too to get the best sense of its geometry. The blue and she clung to each other with icy precision. I have done rishona before; I can do it again. The curving knots of her own mind swept overhead, pulling her into herself; she had no choice but to spiral in.
In a warm, black space she felt a feminine presence. Her eyes opened and she was sitting bare-legged on the bed of her Cait Forest cabin. The windows were shut, so it had to be winter. Odors of her own novice cooking collected—she had been making someone dinner, but only one person had ever been invited to her cabin... Erysi.
In fact, the blonde girl had been here for half an hour. Their lips had just met, and the back of Farisa’s head tingled...
She pulled back. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Shouldn’t we?” Erysi pressed lightly on Farisa’s shoulders. Farisa let herself fall back, pillow under her neck. Another kiss. Farisa’s fingernails dug lightly into Erysi’s upper arms. Calves and shins and arches of feet entangled. Thighs tingled, breath mixed, hair was pulled. Erysi lightly sucked Farisa’s lip.
“No,” Farisa said. “Stop. It’s wrong. I’m your teacher.”
“You were my teacher.” She lightly kicked Farisa’s ankle. “Months ago. Now I have something to teach you.”
“It isn’t the best idea.”
“It’s the only idea.”
Erysi put her hands around Farisa’s head, straddling her, and gave her a deep, disorienting kiss. Bare arms and legs came together to ward off winter's chill. Farisa tongued Erysi’s neck, earlobe to collarbone, jabbing with stiffened tongue. Squeezes and licks and tickles followed. Blouses came off. Erysi’s pink nipples, then Farisa’s brown ones, hardened. Heat and light spread through hips, bellies, breasts.... The girls clung together as if nothing else existed in the world.
Farisa wasn’t ready to say what she really felt, so what came out was:
“Never hurt me, Erysi.”
As Farisa said the words, a wall of rumbling sound crashed into her chest.
The chairs in her cabin were in different positions—days had passed. The light of a cloudy dusk came through the window.
“The stove should be putting out more heat,” Farisa said.
“I don’t mind,” Erysi said from Farisa’s reading chair.
“I’ve been cold all day.” Farisa put her hand to the wall. “There’s a draft coming in, and I cannot find the source.”
“Maybe there isn’t—You tend to be...”
“I tend to be what?”
“Nothing.” Erysi turned the yellowed page of the magazine she had brought. “It's nothing.”
Farisa adjusted her sweater. Cait Forest was never supposed to get this cold, not even in winter, let alone mid-March. She had doubled up her cotton socks, because the floor of her cabin was frigid. She looked at Erysi and felt, in truth, mixed emotion. She would see, for just a moment, a flash of something on the young woman’s face that, if she didn’t know better, she would have mistaken for dour contempt—something visible only in peripheral vision, like the Marquessa’s milky image, because it clearly wasn’t real, but was haunting nevertheless. Worse, there had been a tendency over the past hour for her to ask Erysi a question and receive not the young woman’s typically enthusiastic response, but a one- or two-word answer.
“Something is upsetting you,” Farisa said.
“No. I’m fine.”
Farisa rubbed the center of her forehead. She remembered all the Encyclopedia Veridica’s warnings, all the mages who had used their abilities to create lovers and broken their own minds in the process. Magic was a weapon at worst and a medical implement at best; Erysi was someone she was starting to love.
Still, my intentions are good. If she’s somehow broken—today, she feels broken—and I can fix her, it would be wrong not to try.
Farisa let her mind wander into the blue, and she entered Erysi.
“I don’t know why I keep going up there.” Erysi’s voice sounded different coming through her own face. “I feel sorry for her. She doesn’t have any other friends. Don’t worry. I won’t be long.”
A garbled response followed.
“I wouldn’t say it like that. I do like her. She’s isn’t a bad person, but she just doesn’t have...”
The inaudible voice responded.
“That’s it. Force is the word.”
The whole world swirled; Erysi’s mind shifted to a different memory.
The bed stunk of beer. The thing had happened. It had been no worse than a transaction, certainly not a crime, because Easthorn girls did not get themselves assaulted and Easthorn boys, as the future’s law, could not be criminals. She would have to get used to this.
She had, in any case, trained herself to enjoy—if not the speed of it, for she would have preferred that it happen five minutes or at least a full breath later—what she had already known, in some sense, could be the only outcome of arriving here. On his back and satisfied, Bufton wore the stupid smile of a feeble boy; but a minute ago, his face had been twisted up into that irresistible grimace of a man at war—a man set to do as he wanted, who could not be stopped, who would burn his way on the fastest path to whatever he desired. This had caused an abeyance of anxiety because, if the decision was not Erysi’s to make, she could not be held at fault. War face, that beautiful war face, would stand for no opposition. War face was power and force and, because it could not be resisted, there was little use for the will to do so.
He still smelled of orc’s blood—not the cheap garbage made of tomato juice and rat urine, but the real stuff, the kind you were from an important family if you could get. The odor wasn’t pleasant but, like war face, it kicked hard.
Erysi’s mind shifted back to Farisa, here in this small cabin. Farisa had no war face. She was harmless fun. She lacked the strength and will to take what was not given to her. If a rule had been quoted to her, she would consider following it; she might break it, but she would not break it solely because the setting of a rule indicated a violative opportunity—in that way, she was unlike Bufton and his war face. Farisa was soft, like a stuffed bear. She was candy. War face was steak. Farisa’s sweetness made Erysi want to cuddle. War face made Erysi yearn for total bodily destruction.
I’ve been coming all this time out of pity, Erysi realized.
Farisa was this odd, enigmatic combination. She was a prude, a twenty-year-old virgin who never left her cabin barefoot. Yet she was also a pervert. It was nothing wrong that Easthorn girls dallied with other girls, and Erysi was sure boys did the same, but one was supposed to outgrow this stuff—merely rehearsal of skills one would use to keep men happy so their money and seed remained in one house—by a certain age, and Farisa was past that. What she did with other women—what she had done with Erysi—she had actually meant.
Although intelligent and even beautiful, in her own dark-skinned way, Farisa was a warning to other women. She would never marry or have children. She would spend the rest of her life teaching dead languages to the sons and daughters of better families, but never form one of her own. A woman who could not develop a taste for powerful men—a taste for war face—could expect no more.
Erysi looked over. Farisa, who had closed her eyes, was beginning to open them.
The blue's pressure increased; it squeezed Farisa out.
Farisa ran outside her cabin. The dry winter grass and cold ground pressed against her palms and knees as she vomited. The fact slowly returned to her that she had not nodded off into a strange nightmare but ventured into Erysi’s mind, and everything she had learned was true.
She wanted to scream, but she would not let the blonde woman still in her cabin know she had been hurt. She shut her eyes in agony. She puked again; she puked beyond the point of having nothing to give; she nearly puked herself inside out. The cold winter air invaded her lungs and she shivered.
I’m sorry, Erysi. I should not have entered you. It was a violation of your privacy. I know things you never would have told me. Farisa stood up, arms out for balance, and walked back to the door of her cabin. She felt the experience as a transaction; to me, it was an assault—but I am the one who entered, so it’s my fault.
Erysi said, “Should I get the doctor?”
“No.” Farisa held the door in her hand before stepping inside. “This whole thing, between us, should end. It has been a mistake.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Erysi looked down and twirled a lock of hair. “A mistake?” Her face stiffened. “I suppose you have a point. We are a bit too, uh, it has been fun, but... yeah.”
“That’s the problem. To you, that’s all it is. Fun.”
“That’s not true. You have no idea who I am.”
Farisa raised her eyebrows.
“You entered me?”
Farisa walked to her bed and sat down, facing the wall. She didn't want to look at anyone; she didn’t want to be seen. “I’m not mad at you.”
Erysi closed the door. “I'm not leaving. I don't deserve this.”
“Go.”
“Farisa.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
Erysi crossed her arms and leaned back. “Do you think you're better than me?”
“Of course you would make it about that. No, I have no issue with you. This is about where you’re from.”
“I don’t even know what I’ve done wrong.”
Farisa turned around and looked at Erysi. “Do I really have to spell this out?”
“I’m not leaving you until you do.”
“You want something I can’t give you.” She stopped short of saying “war face,” because those were Erysi’s words, not hers. “Something I’ll never be able to give you.”
“I see.” Erysi looked up at the ceiling. “I’m a spoiled, rich cunt and I’ll never change. I guess I should go off and die.”
Farisa, fighting vertigo, leaned back on her bed. “Don’t fucking say that.”
Erysi paced around Farisa’s cabin in widening circles, then sat down on the bed beside her and stretched out her legs. “I think I know where you ‘were’. It happened before we met.”
“I know it did.”
“I... regret it.”
“You regret it now, but at the time...”
“I have—I had—to make myself enjoy it. I made myself want it.”
“You had an orgasm, Erysi. That’s the part I can’t—it doesn’t matter.”
“Are you going to hurt him?”
“Just stop fucking talking and go.”
#
The Present.
Mazie asked, “Is she...?”
Claes whispered, “Quiet.”
“It looks like she’s in a lot of pain.”
“I imagine she is.”
Farisa had a passing awareness of a low-pitched moan coming from her throat. With the slight sway of a metronome, her spine moved. Frigid sadness welled up. She had so much work to do here; she didn’t know where to begin. A world had been broken here; it had been twisted—the impulse to fix, to repair what was not hers, had led Farisa astray before, but she could see no other option but to follow through, wherever the glassy currents of the blue took her, no matter how bleak the task became.
#
March 19, ’94.
Two days had passed since their argument. The sun had come out; it was warm enough to leave the cabin door ajar.
Erysi arrived. “Can I...?”
Farisa said, “You may.”
They sat together on Farisa’s unmade bed.
“I forgive you,” Farisa said.
“Right,” Erysi said. “And I suppose I...”
“I don’t need your forgiveness. For anything.” Farisa paused. “What was his name?”
“It wasn’t...” Erysi looked down. “It wasn’t that sort of thing.”
“You did that and didn’t even know his—?”
“Bufton. That was what they all called him. Whether it was his first or last name, I’m not sure.”
Farisa looked at her heating stove, which she had turned off now that spring weather had returned. “It doesn’t matter. Let me ask you this. Why was he on your mind when you were up here?”
“Cait Forest is a small place. I still see him all the time. He’s in one of my classes.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter?”
Farisa used her thumb to work out a cramp in the ball of her foot. “It does.”
“Ettasi history.”
“Which professor? Which section?”
“Why do you care?”
“He’s going to be changing his schedule very soon. This is about your safety, Erysi.”
“My safety?”
Farisa crossed her bare legs and scratched the inside of her ankle. “What he did to you was wrong. You were a child.”
“I was—I’m eighteen.”
“It was disgusting, what he did to you, and I don’t think we can spend time together unless I... you know what, never mind. Just go. I’ve meddled more than I should.”
“Farisa!”
Farisa looked up at her cabin’s sloped ceiling. She remembered Erysi’s fingertips on Bufton’s ugly shoulders and his artlessly hard body; she remembered the ogreish scent of orc’s blood on his breath. She had never felt such hatred as now, toward this boy she had only met through the blue, but she wanted to destroy him so much that, if Erysi was not going to let Farisa evict her from her own life, she would have to solve the problem in some other way.
“I can fix you. I can clean you. I can remove the parts of you that were attracted to him in the first place—but if I did that, and nothing else, then you would remember the encounter as—and in my mind it was—a rape.”
Erysi shook her head.
“So, that’s no option. I have to burn the whole memory out of you. The problem there is that it wouldn’t be fair—wouldn’t be safe—to leave you in the same world as him, one where he knew things about you that you do not. I have to protect you from him. I have to leave something in you—a sense of disgust, of horror—at his face, just enough that you don’t—”
“Do it,” Erysi said.
“Are you sure? It is your choice.”
“If I say no, you’ll never want to see me again.”
“That is correct.”
Erysi looked about to cry. “I’m a bad person.”
“You were a bad person. You are a good person.”
“Take my memories, reshape me, whatever you have to do.”
“Are you sure?”
Erysi nodded.
“Very well.” Farisa walked to the cabin door and closed the latch. “Put your jacket and shoes over there and get comfortable in my bed. I’ll put a blanket over you so you don’t get cold.”
“Is this risky?”
“Always, but I’ll put as much of the risk as I can on me, not you.”
After Erysi got in Farisa’s bed, the mage sat beside her. There was no resistance this time, as Erysi knew she would be entered and had in some sense requested it, so Farisa swam easily through Erysi’s knotted pathways of thought. She replaced that interval of disgusting pleasure with a vague sense of nausea, one that would repel the conscious mind and block the memory’s retrieval.
Erysi, she learned, had not been fully forthright—the young woman’s own disgust at the encounter seemed to have come after Farisa’s reaction to it, as there had been other, later fantasies in which the atrocity had been relived as desirable. The mage, now furious that this attraction had been real and persistent, made sure to obliterate everything.
“You’re clean,” Farisa said as she left the blue.
Erysi’s eyes opened. “Clean?”
“I was muttering.” Farisa picked up a plate she’d left on the floor. “It’s clean, it doesn’t need to be washed. How do you feel?”
“I feel empty.”
“Good or bad empty?”
Erysi sat up. “Neither. Lighter.”
“Physically?”
“No. In mind.”
Farisa smiled. “Your mind is the place you make it.”
Erysi chuckled. “Rhazyladne.”
Rhazyladne had ceased to be a mere teller of stories; she had rewritten one.
“Then it worked,” Farisa said. “You’ll never have one of those headaches again.”
Erysi had never, in her life, had a migraine, though she would remember such a problem as her pretense for coming up here and being entered by the mage.
“I have never felt better,” Erysi said. “I feel so young.”
#
The Present.
Runar heard commotion in the distance. Echoes garbled the noise, so Talyn’s scream sounded like a deep rumbling of rock. “They’ve gotten into something,” he said.
“Perhaps they have,” Claes whispered back.
“Should we go and help them?”
“It’s too late. They split from us. They have a road, and we have a road.”
#
March 23, ’94.
The storms of Farisa’s anger had eyes sometimes—those central sunny spells in which she woke up with a pressure behind her face and the feeling that she could run a hundred miles without tiring. Updraft, she called it. If she were ever asked, in the life between lives, to ask for what she was about to do, she would refer to it as thus. The Marquessa’s subjects were all prone to such episodes.
She was not angry about Erysi and Bufton; she was not angry about anything. Cait Forest shimmered with promise; the sense of vulnerability and exclusion so often native to her life here was gone, as far away as someone else’s memories, and it was clear in this strange shimmering moment that she belonged. She had proven her value through the great work—the relevant work—of removing from Erysi’s mind some vicious poison, of sickening herself to restore another’s innocence.
I am a fucking hero for sucking that venom out of her. No one will ever know what accolades I deserve.
Get yourself together, Farisa. There’ll be time for self-congratulation tomorrow. You know what you have to do today.
Erysi’s foul memory was one half of the horrid thing the mage had found the need to destroy—to leave the other half alive would be unfair, asymmetric, and unsafe.
(“I still see him all the time. He’s in one of my classes.” “Which one?” “Ettasi history.”)
She waited outside Bufton’s four o’clock lecture and followed him to his vartero house, a gaudy domicile dressed in a smattering of different styles, overlooking Plumm’s Lake. She deduced that there would be a party tonight, because people were already moving furniture outdoors to make space for it.
Around one in the morning, she went uninvited—by that hour, no one was paying attention to who came and went—and pretended to drink, pretended to get drunk, pretended to pass out on a beer-soaked sofa, her face buried in a pillow, and waited while the vart boys’ joked about what they would do to the “dead” woman on the couch, but none had the gall to try. She was glad for that; she had not come here to kill anyone.
By four o’clock, the party noise had died down to stray conversations; by six, the house was fast asleep. She crept to the landing beside Bufton’s bedroom and entered the blue. She had intended to take surgical care, as she had with Erysi’s memories, to erase only specific ones—but seeing Erysi’s desire, through his eyes, a look she had never seen through her own, roused such rage she burned everything she could. One unsightly tree had damned the whole forest.
She considered, for a moment, that Bufton’s being asleep meant there was no resistance from him at all, and that she could stop his heart if she wanted, but she decided not to do so. That would take it too far. Still, when she learned that the boy—the finest doctors would discern no cause—had forgotten three years of his life and developed seizures, she was pleased with this result.
#
The Present
The scar on Farisa’s shoulder ached. She heard a popping sound. Her sense of weight returned. No ancestral memory had come, no past life had been retrieved, and the blue had yielded no new spell. Her sins, it seemed, had been judged too grave for celestial inspiration.
She was standing but did not remember getting up.
Mazie asked, “What did you find?”
“I’m not done.” I cannot fail here. I have to find something. I have to— She waved an arm. “Get back.”
Erysi, she was never mine. I tore up the world because I couldn’t bear to see the truth of it, but she was never for me, and now, because of me, she’s—
“Kavalaiko sabira,” she heard herself say.
The first word was Myuna, the second Lyrian. The words did not belong together, being from different languages with opposing grammars; they were like water and oil, destined to mix badly and they were... knotted heart, heart-knot, heart-break, breaking knot, break the knot. Farisa’s chest tightened. My heart is breaking, all over again. These people behind me depend on me, and I’m going to let them down. Knot, knot, knot… tighter, tighter. Fuck you, Erysi. I’m almost glad you’re—but I’m not, no, I’m really—
Secrets exist inside me, burls in the veins of my mind, tied-up tangles and snarls and sins. Tied up, kavalai. No, -lai is recent past; tied up long, long ago, distant past; kavalaiko.
She remembered being a little girl, reading Tales of the Sixteen Winds on a cold autumn night. There had been a riddle in one of the stories about an intractable knot. “A rope can move freely into a tangle, but defend its own stasis therein to the death.”
Farisa did not remember the whole passage; she remembered that the knot had been undone, in a sense, but had caught fire from its own friction in the unraveling. It would have been easier to burn the rope from the beginning.
The mage stepped into an oval-shaped rupture, an egg-like pocket of place joining two patches of darkness nature had placed fifty miles apart but that had been pasted together by a process and for a purpose unknown. The notion of being in two places made her unwell. Did she have two selves, standing here? Would she split herself open if this spell worked? The enchantment she had come here to undo was thousands of years old; would it fight her? Outside was inside; Farisa found herself in a kaleidoscope of placeless discomfort that twisted itself through her; the panic hardened her neck. She could only survive if she found a pattern in the agony, and there was one, a beat… a ba-duh, ba-duh, ba-duh. She remembered Bufton, his malicious smile, his looming war face, the harm he had done to Erysi thrust after thrust, and she remembered her refusal to stop its heart concurrent with the knowledge of how exactly it might be done, and...
There is a cardiac architecture here. It is a self-recurrent wave of impulse with the precision and complexity of clockwork. It is like that ugly cloud of electric current inside Bufton, and it can be stopped. I just have to want it.
All the world is hunting us. If we falter, the Global Company wins. Hate. Ba-duh.
In my soul there are smears and streaks. The world blames me for starting the fire and, for all I know, maybe I did. Sometimes, I hope to learn it was me. Hate. Ba-duh.
I can fix a flaw in space, but not in time—sorry, Erysi. I now remember why I don’t miss you. I saw you inside him and him inside you and from those perspectives it is clear that you enjoyed that human piece of trash. I’m not glad you're dead but I’d rather you be dead than in my life. Hate. Ba-duh!
Her furious mind seemed to know ancient movements; the glyph of destruction clashed against the will of the space ahead of her, but as she found herself walking forward, almost unaware of the motion, she nearly stumbled. The cave floor dropped about four inches—a hazard that hadn’t been there before.
The kasa was broken. The real Mountain Road, unseen to the Known World for thousands of years, stretched ahead.
“It’s done,” Farisa said. “We can go on.”