CHAPTER 61

Saying goodbye to Beckra is a sadder affair than I thought it would be – but I’m also not myself. A few mugs of ale have made that abundantly clear. There’s a pleasant feeling in my head, a swimming comfort that makes me giddy and sometimes sad, and sometimes worried, but always I go back to feeling happy and carefree and to finding the world very funny. Until we say goodbye to Beckra.

She hugs Ged and tips her hat at me, and all is fine, completely fine. Then she mounts her horse and trots down the road. Ged shouts some joke after her, she flips him off, and then – I can’t tell if it’s the sight of her riding away, if it’s the stress and the nightmares, the plots of the last few days, if goodbyes just make me sad now – but I feel a tightness in my throat and turn away so Gedden doesn’t see me blinking furiously.

“Well, there she goes.”

Thankfully, he never picked Observant.

“Ready to walk back?”

I mutter in the affirmative, not trusting my voice at the moment, and make sure to walk ahead of him up the road and to the forest. Roark the stablemaster bids us pay his compliments to the lord, by which he means Lysander. This starts a whole new chain of thoughts.

Lord of what? By whose authority? All the kings are dead or deposed, and Valkas isn’t anything but guildmaster.

“What was that?”

Oops.

“Uh, nothing. Just wondering why some people call Lysander lord and you just call him ‘Lys’. Is it because you’re Godtouched?”

“God, no. Lys has no patience for that sort of discrimination. He just lets you call him whatever you damn please.”

“So Amelia calls him lord because she wants to?”

“Basically. I think she started doing it ironically and then it just stuck.”

Ironically. Nothing to do with how the elf styles himself, living in his damn big house, making his damn big plans.

I realize with some surprise that I’m angry. Boiling. I’m watching my rage from outside, slightly amused at the shaking of my body, the turmoil in my mind.

“What do you know of his plans, anyway?” I ask.

Ged gives me a meaningful sidelook. I spoke too loudly.

“Maybe we should have stopped you after the third mug.”

“I’m fine. What isn’t fine is that I don’t know what the elf’s plans are, and that’s—”

“’The elf’?”

“That’s what Mossgreen calls him.”

“Mind if I start calling you little fly from now on?”

I bite my tongue and breathe in deep. Can’t get distracted.

“Do you know what Lysander’s plans are?”

We’ve walked long enough and deep enough that the somber trees are beginning to cluster together and blocking the sun above, making it hard to see in any direction but front and back.

“Let’s say I agree with his goals,” Gedden says slowly. “And so far I’m all right with his means. He’s secretive, as you must have realized by now, but, ultimately, it’s up to you if you want to follow him or not. It’s always up to you, with Lys.”

We walk in silence. I feel a slight throb in my head and the beginnings of nausea in the back of my throat.

“Why did you decide to follow him?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Ged furrows his brow as he wobbles around a stone in the path. “I did: I don’t want to live like this. Tame. Trapped. More power means more possibilities, and I’m ready to risk my life for that chance.” Gedden shrugs. “Lysander is the only guy trying to give me that chance. And now I have it. As soon as we’re ready, The Princess will take us to the only Dungeon we know of that hasn’t been dismantled. All we gotta do first is get you sorted.”

“And Delos? Amelia?”

“He’s in love and she owes him.”

“Owes him what?”

“No idea. Something in their past, before my time.”

Might as well turn this conversation into a full-on interrogation.

“Do you know what his plans for me are? Why he’s bothering to go to all this trouble when he could just sail away?”

Gedden looks at me, unsure.

“I really don’t, Malco. Sorry. But why don’t you ask him?”

“Because he’s secretive.”

“Aye – sorry, Becks does this to me – yes, but it wouldn’t hurt. Ask away. If he tells you he tells you, if not, he doesn’t. Personally, I think you deserve to know.”

I look at Gedden and his skin dappled with sunlight and darkness, his eyes swimming in and out of focus.

“Ged…”

“Yes?”

“I’m gonna be sick,” I manage before a whole-body jerk has me running for the bushes.

“There, there.”

I manage to turn the eruption into a bit of dry heaving and spit while Gedden pats my back. The forest waves around us though no wind is present, each tree a dancer moving to a sound only it can hear. If Mossgreen is threatening me or being sympathetic, it’s beyond my power to say.

“Maybe in a few more years we can try this again, yeah?”

“I never want to try this again.”

“Oh, you say that now,” he says philosophically. “It beats moping while sober.”

We walk for what feels like ages, and no time at all. Sometimes we’re silent, sometimes we speak of inconsequential things. Every conversation, sooner or later, seems to get turned around in Gedden’s mouth and come out being about Beckra. Idly, I compare his willingness to speak about her with my refusal to even mention Katha unless talking about her can bring us closer. I decide it makes sense: Ged is voluntarily apart from Beckra, while Katha was taken from me.

Taken from me. I hadn’t thought about her in these terms since the beginning. Things have become so muddled. Arbiter and Lysander and Kord and Valkas. All I wanted was to get her back.

For some reason, Beckra floats into my mind, her golden teeth shining in the sun-beaten road to Olvion.

Olvion. The word resounds in my head with the clarity of a bell. So close on the map.

“Listen,” says Ged as Hollow House appears in the distance, framed by the final stretch of trees. “You won’t tell Lys I got you drunk, will you?”

I look up at him with a lopsided smile. Ged is frowning and scratching his neck, his face spelling worry.

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“Of course – of course not. You didn’t get me drunk, I got me drunk.”

“You’re right,” he nods, making sure I understand I’m not right at all. “Maybe you should go lie down a bit, yeah?”

I open my mouth to give him some glib answer that floats into my mind, but in the end I just nod.

“Sounds great. Sounds like a great idea.”

Looking relieved, Gedden escorts me to the house’s vetibule and leaves me to it, making his way to his own room with a nod reminiscent of Beckra’s hat-tip. I stand there in the sun, brain fizzling, discordant notes bringing my normal thought process towards new and interesting directions. The door to the basement is open a smidge, which means Amelia has popped down there for some mysterious errand, likely in the room’s she’s forbidden me.

Moving of their own volition, my feet walk over to the kitchen, into the pantry, and, without waiting for my agreement, take a wine bottle from among the ones ready to serve. Carrying it with me, I come outside again and make for the stables.

Everything happens as if I’m observing myself from a distance. Like earlier, when I looked inwards and found roiling, shifting, building anger, now I follow my movements with curiosity, as if I’m just watching a stranger from afar. The stranger, a skinny kid with overlong black hair and a pointed chin, moving erratically, clearly drunk, wanders into the stables, finding them empty and clean, and peruses the assembled horses. They watch him in turn with mean, plotting eyes.

The stranger spares a mental nod for the days right before leaving Reach, which he spent watching stable workers tending to horses while he carted their shit around – the horses’, not the workers’. He picks a mount, a tall grey mare, reins, and a saddle. He’s forced to admit he’s far from knowing what he’s doing, but is pleased to find that’s no problem at all; the mare does know how things are supposed to go and seems willing to help. Her mean eyes have shifted to curious malice – the day has just taken a new and interesting turn.

A little drunker than he went in, the stranger emerges from the stables with a miraculously saddled beast and an open wine bottle under his arm. Mounting a horse one-handed is a challenge, but he overcomes it with no grace spared. With a final look towards the house, the windows, the tree, the stranger eggs the horse on – kicking, shifting in the saddle, giving it a limp smack with the reins – until the beast moves away, mostly of its own volition. The stranger aims it towards the opening in the forest and takes a swig of wine. As he does, the final gears turning in the mare’s head click into place and she realizes her newfound freedom under an ineffective rider. Her walk turns to a trot that makes the rider shake in the saddle.

Watching, as I am, from a distance, I’m very surprised and alarmed when, immediately after the horse and its rider disappear in the bend in the road, I discover that the stranger the mare has kidnapped is me. The trot turns into a gallop and I hold on for dear life. The mare neighs, a runaway with a hostage in tow.

Trees zip past followed by a murmur of foliage that sounds distinctly like Mossgreen’s laughter. My mount has gone insane, entranced by the open road into thinking it has regained control of its destiny. ‘No gods!’ it seems to neigh. ‘No riders!’. She flies down the road, the clop of her feet drowning my pleas for mercy.

We leave the forest faster than we entered it and gallop down the road into Hollor’s Fall My scream could conceivably be mistaken by a an invading barbarian’s warcry. Roark’s stables. The man himself watches us blaze by with an impressed salute.

“You can still catch her, young master!” he yells after me.

I beg him, unintelligibly, to make it all stop. His arm waves vigorously in the air in a heartfelt goodbye.

The crazed hellmare dashes through the quiet village like salvation waits on the horizon. The good people of Hollor’s Fall are dragged out of their peaceful afternoon by a mix of my screams and the beast’s war neigh. We nearly run over a farmer returning home after a long day of work. His curses follow us out of the village and into the grassy hills beyond.

As we put distance between ourselves and civilization, the mare’s pace becomes smoother, less frantic. The danger of falling and breaking my neck is reduced from a certainty to a mere possibility. I dare to stand a little straighter and she looks back at me with a big, round, dark and admonishing eye.

Get yourself sorted, it seems to say. I’m doing all the work here.

I do my best. Apart from businessmen like Mago and enthusiasts like Rev, riding has never been a favorite pastime for Reachers. The treacherous roads are best walked on foot, and pack mules preferred to creatures such as this one. I could hold my own on top of a walking horse. A trotting one would have tested my skills on the best of days.

But then again, my frazzled brain supplies, you weren’t an Inquisitor way back then.

Gritting my teeth, I do my best to apply the principles I was taught. Control over the reins, not too heavy, not too lax. Back straight, position shifted forward. Move with the horse; do not stay in its way.

It’s a pleasant surprise to find I can do all of this without further endangering myself. I relax the pressure in my legs and the mare neighs approvingly. Her gallop shifts into an easy canter that seems to float over the landscape and in the midst of it something finally clicks. My weight shifts along with hers. I close my eyes, feel the wind in my face, clearing the drunkenness and the fear, dragging a smile from me.

I realize I’m on the road to Olvion and no one is following me. I have a princely beast under me and a full – half-full, after the gallop – bottle of wine under my arm. I let out a cry, half-scream, half-laugh, it echoes in the hills and spurs the mare onwards.

*

The sun sets on the horizon, approaching a distant line which I’m sure must be the sea. We rode for a good while. My legs are sore, my head aches, and the mare is drowning her fatigue in a fountain. We never caught Beckra, who must ride like the wind itself is under her. The wine I finished some distance back. It only made my headache worse.

We stopped on the grassy slope to watch the sunset. I dismounted and fell on my ass, cushioned by the vegetation, and I haven’t mustered the energy to pick myself back up since. There’s no rush. The land is painted golden, too beautiful to look away, and I let my muscles relax, ignore the pain in my legs, in my head, and let the world be. The bottle languishes at my side, picking sunrays and casting them away again. An owl observes me from the bough of a tree, swirling its head one way and then the other. I hoot at it, and it hoots back.

Someone appears on the path, coming up. A small woman, covered by a cowl and carrying a stick that she flings this way and that. She looks up, her face hidden in the shadows thrown by the dying sun.

“Good evening, traveler,” she says in a husky voice. Could be young, could be old, could be anything at all.

“Good evening.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Olvion.”

“Olvion! It’s yet a day off. I hope you’re not planning on travelling through the night.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“A risky decision. But good travels if you decide to go through with it.”

“Thank you.”

She nods, politeness having been served, then turns away from me to observe the breathtaking sight, leaning on her walking stick. A busy silence descends, fanned by the blowing wind and the clomping of the mare as she bites down on a nearby bush.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” the woman asks. “And yet so terrible.”

“Why terrible?”

“In my younger days, there was a soothsayer. Every time a sky like this presented itself, he would come out, look at it, and sigh dreadfully. He called this the blood sky and said it heralded war. Back then, I thought him a dreadful curmudgeon. Now…”

She sighs herself. Silence stretches as the sun sinks another finger, touching the line of the sea. A long ribbon escapes from the woman’s shadow and flutters in the wind tethered to her head, coiling and uncoiling. I pick through her words, flying loose inside my head, and arrange them into coherence.

“And did it?” I ask.

“Hmm?”

“Did it herald war?”

“Each and every time,” she says. “Eventually. Can’t run from it. Violence is on its way to us, and all we can do is light a fire and stand our ground.”

We stay in silence for a moment, me and the woman of indeterminate age. The charade stretches.

“Thanks for this, by the way,” I say, lifting the stump.

Arbiter turns partially to face me, the red ribbon covering her eyes redder than the setting sun.

“You’ll make a fine Inquisitor someday,” she says approvingly as her blind eyes observe the point at which my arm end, the bandages covering the painful absence. “And don’t act the victim. You knew as well as I did that the hand would have to be removed. I plucked the knowledge from your very mind.”

“Maybe the Godtouched could have saved it.”

“You think they would? Such magic is rare. Well.” She bobs her head, shifting the cowl and letting loose a few hairs. “Rare for those you call the Godtouched.”

“That I call the Godtouched. What do you call them?”

She smiles.

“I call them mediocre. They wouldn’t have saved your hand.”

“And you came all this way to tell me that?” I say with more bite than I thought to give it. “How gracious.”

“Come, Malco,” says Arbiter. “I’m not really here.”

“And yet here you are. How? Why?”

“You entered my Door and took my gifts. We are connected. As for why, well… To repeat my earlier warning. To make sure you understand. War is coming. If it’s allowed to grow out of control, it will spare no one. Not Katha, not Reva. Not you.”

“What do you mean, ‘grow out of control’? What’s going to happen? Tell me!”

I stood up without meaning to, shouting my frustration to the valleys of the night. Arbiter faces me impassively. Behind her, the sun allows the earth to swallow it almost completely, a thin line remaining that paints the blood sky in deeper tints.

“Violence is coming. Follow the elf. Save them both.”

A beating of wings as the owl above flutters down from the treetops to land on the curve of Arbiter’s walking stick. It watches me with uncaring plate-round eyes.

Just then, the sun falls beyond the lip of the horizon. Something changes in the air; shimmer, a twist, and Arbiter is gone. The owl flies away with a final hoot.

I don’t sit back down. Instead, I inhale deeply, trying to cool a building pit of rage that I can no longer separate myself from. My yell covers the land, echoes in the valleys, seems to stretch all the way to Olvion.

Raw, defeated, I turn to go and find Lysander’s mare. Instead, I find someone else has stepped onto the path. He’s tall, bearded, wearing an ill-fitting leather armor. His fingers scratch his hairy chin as he watches me curiously.

“Please,” he says pleasantly. “Don’t stop on our account.”

Two more shapes step onto the path, one of them holding my mount’s reins. I can distinguish a few more, farther up the path. The mare neighs apprehensively.

When I don’t respond, the man in front takes a step forward.

“Well, then, since you’re done. It’s the usual: your purse or your life.”