Saro raised his bow. When his father had thrust a bow in his hands with an order to patrol the streets for the “dirty half- animal” and the “filthy demon,” he had not known what he felt about it. It was the second of these beast people that had caused a full alert in Dyna today, but he had never seen the last one. He did not expect to see this one, but there she was, crouched in the alley in front of him, clearly trying to lay low.
He had known it was a woman, but after all the stories he heard through his childhood, he had expected… just something more. At first, he just thought she was an old woman, but the way she crouched, the lack of lines in her face, he realized she was not that much older than he was. She looked distressed. Those awful yellow eyes were wide as she stared at the ground. She had not noticed him. She was listening for the whistles and shouting among the guards that were looking for her.
They really are like animals, he told himself, looking at the way she crouched, the way her eyes gleamed in the gloom. The stories were that demons like her could control you with just a touch, so his heart began to pound as he reached behind him and slowly, quietly drew an arrow from the quiver. He muffled the sound of it knocking with his thumb, and then silently raised his bow and drew it back.
The creaking of the wood made her look at him. She slowly stood up, facing him, looking at him. His hands began to shake.
“That is not going to work,” she said, holding up both her hands in front of her, like she wanted to calm him.
Saroe's hands shook. She sounded just like a human, and she had a beautiful voice. Yet all of his life he had been told that people like her were bloodthirsty, ruthless animals. That they killed and ate not only each other, but also other humans, that they could bewitch a man and take control of his mind. Yet, unlike the monsters he had learned of, she just stood there, making no move against him or even to protect herself. “Why don't you do something?” he asked harshly.
“I do not want to hurt you. I do not want to hurt any of you. I just wanted to pray at a temple and look for answers.” Her hands were shaking a little, there was a nervous pressure coming from her also.
He lowered the bow, “You aren't like the stories.”
She was shaking, “I think most people like me are not.” She swallowed and kept her hands up. “But our stories say the same of you, and many of you fit the description.” Her expression had changed from one being hunted, it was now that of someone who was watching a pit viper. He raised the bow again. She tensed, but made no move against him. Her gaze grew more intense, but somehow she was on top of the situation. Bruises were purpling on her jaw and cheekbone.
I cannot do it. He lowered the bow again, and this time he put the arrow back in his quiver. “You really just wanted to pray?”
“I am seeking an answer from the Gods, but now I would be happy to just leave without harm.”
He hesitated. “My uncle is a priest. I think I could smuggle you in?”
She started to slowly approach him. He was never a strong mage, but he could read the winds and had practiced a lot to be able to see the magic of others that were near him. As she got closer, he could feel the magical pressure of her magic, and when he focused, she was searingly bright to him, enough that he immediately looked away. She could melt half the city, he thought with a cold feeling. “Why did you just stand there? There was no way for me to touch you, with all that magic!”
She said nothing and only smiled at him.
He shook his head. “I might never understand girls. This way.”
***
Well, I had been a little worried he was just luring me where there might be more people, but that reaction tells me that he had no idea he needed to lure me anywhere special. He was not a bad looking boy, tall, fair like most Myraduilians, with long brown hair.
He led her through some alleyways, around the chaos. At one point, he ran into guards, at least, she guessed so by their uniformly brown cloaks with bright yellow insignia on the back. “I haven’t seen anyone,” he confirmed as Rosalea crouched down behind a trash barrel.
Then, he led her around the chaos to a small shrine on the south east side of town. It was poorer looking here in every way, which did not surprise her. She had read that in Myraduilian cities the wealth tended to concentrate in the hands of the nobility who lived in their own quarter of the city. “Uncle?” the boy called.
A man in his mid-forties answered, “Saro! It has been awhile! Please come in!”
“Uncle, I have brought a guest. Uh, please do not panic, she’s a lot nicer than she looks. She just wanted to pray.”
Rosalea tentatively followed Saro, as he was apparently named, into the temple. She openly met the uncle’s eyes, and his lips drew into a flat line. “You’re a beast woman.” His nose began to wrinkle.
Rosalea breathed out and did not try to fix the derogatory term. “Will you stop me from praying then?” she asked, her tone taking on a noble lilt and bite. She closed her mouth and regretted that a little.
He frowned at her. “What would a changer like you want to pray for?”
“Ieshans have a prophecy, and I have… revelation… that I need to act on it.”
The old man passed a hand over his balding head and sighed. “Well, the Gods work in mysterious ways after all.” He made a motion to “stay” with his hands and moved away. Rosalea lingered uncertainly with Saro near the doorway.
There were a lot of sounds of rifling around, and then the man came back, holding in his hand a new scroll, the ink smell was still on it. “The first priest who lived here had a forest god as his companion. They are big animals that speak like a man and use magic from deep within Dyran. The forest god told him stories, and he wrote some of them down. One of them was about an Ieshan prophecy. I’ve copied the basics of it for you.”
Rosalea breathed out slowly. This was the best thing she had turned up so far. She put her hand against her skirt, hiding it so they could not see her do magic to withdraw her coin from the earth. She held it out to him, an entire gold piece, probably a hundred times more than he got as an average offering.
His eyes bugged out a little. “You are too generous. Did you steal it?”
Rosalea raised a brow, “No, but it is on my soul if I did, do you not think so?”
He grumbled but he accepted it, though he held his hand out for her to drop it into his palm - he did not want to touch her. Well, he should not let Ieshans touch him, she accepted.
“Thank you. I will leave you now.”
Saro nodded, “I will help you get to the outskirts of town.”
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Rosalea bowed to him. She could see a little bit of a hopeful gleam in his eyes after he had seen the gold piece, and she decided not to let it go unrewarded.
He took her without a lot of questions back through alleys and to the farmland that sprawled just outside of town from the temple. Rosalea gave him a gold coin and began to run, wanting to get as far away from this place as she possibly could.
As soon as she passed into wheat grass, she dropped out of sight and shape-shifted into a wolf. As always, her clothes and belongings disappeared into the “earth” storage that she had gotten very good at using even outside of transforming, and she ran toward the trees.
Being far away from Fen never felt comfortable, and her heart knew where Fen was, even though they had not picked a meeting point. She ran until she found her liana, and then they ran together and did not stop until they were several miles from the town.
They came to a small pond, Rosalea let go of shape and flopped onto the grassy bank. “Well, I never got the chance to go to the library,” she finally said.
“Yes, but you are not disappointed, so you must have found something else,” Fen asked with a cocked ear. “I heard a lot of noise. I was worried.”
“I got hit on by a drunk man and then my veil came off, and everyone panicked. I feel like there might be some sort of changers nearby, they were ready for me.” Rosalea reached out her hand and summoned the scroll. “A man decided not to shoot me after all, and when I said I just wanted to pray, he took me to see his uncle, the priest. I got this.”
Fen did not seem as excited as Rosalea thought she would be. “Have you read it?”
Rosalea shook her head, but she unrolled it now. The priest’s hand writing was quick and messy; it was a little hard to read. The chosen one of Iesha and Urye is to journey to the home of the Gods, called Fincyra.
Rosalea stared. That was it? She growled, “We cannot keep going directionless like this. It is a waste of time! I could be home with Lio and Rhainnon and everyone else!” She broke off, turning on her side irritably.
“Did the priest say anything else?”
“Just that it was told to the first priest of the temple by a forest god, some sort of creature from Dyran!”
Fen sat down and looked thoughtful.
Rosalea sighed. She wondered what Lio was doing. She had sat with Fen and Lio in the grass by the duck pond so many times. Her heart ached. She lost herself in thoughts about how Yelena and Briar’s wedding had gone, and she wondered about Rhainnon. Then, as she thought about Lio, she began to remember something.
“Mother,” Lio demanded.
“Yes, dear?”
“Where did Fen come from?”
Rosalea smiled, continuing to sweep. “Why don’t you ask her? She is supposed to be all- knowing right?”
Fen huffed, then stretched, as if it didn’t really mean all that much. “I am liana,” she replied airily at last. Rosalea chuckled.
“Where do you come from?” Lio inquired.
“East,” Fen replied evasively. Rosalea caught on that they weren't really supposed to know. So she added in on Fen’s behalf.
“She says she comes from the far, far East,” Rosalea added. “So far east that the women all wear giant pantaloons and the men wear skirts.”
“Really?” Lio asked, her eyes wide.
“Would your mother lie to you?” Rosalea asked.
“Wow! Wait’ll Rhainnon hears!”
“Fen!” Rosalea cried sitting up.
“What?” Fen made a startled motion and then grumbled, sometimes Rosalea was entirely too excitable for her own good.
Rosalea grinned, “Did the all-knowing wise one fall asleep?”
She scooped Fen, who had been laying next to her as close as she could get to her body and wrapped her arms tightly around the much bigger than average wolf, burying her face in the thick ruff.
“Yes,” Fen replied, not at all ruffled by Rosalea's sarcasm and pleased to be cuddled. “You remembered something?”
“A while ago, you told Lio and I that you were from the East. Are… you a forest god? Or were you?”
“Well, humans have called us that. We call ourselves mystics, but yes. All liana start as mystics, and I did come from east of here.”
Rosalea breathed out slowly, “So, if a mystic told the priest’s forefather the story, then maybe a mystic would know the rest of it.”
Fen sighed, “Well, there are many mystics much older than me, so it is possible. I am… traditionally forbidden from bringing you home. I am supposed to assimilate with your clan… but, I think, we find ourselves in an exceptional situation with this quest we have been set on.”
Rosalea pressed herself to Fen and closed her eyes. “Thank you.” For a moment, she was afraid and excited. She was excited to have a lead, however tenuous it might have been. She was also afraid that if the path was correct, she might find herself down a road that there was no returning from. Lio.
She laid against Fen, soaking up the affection of the wolf and calming herself down. It is too bad I did not get to see more of the capital. Despite all of the people, it would have been nice to have warm food someone else made me.
She was hungry. She got up and started making a small fire. She rinsed her hands off in the pond and caught a reflection of herself. The bruises showed darkly. “Fen, do you feel my pain exactly as I feel it? Or is it the same as I feel when you hurt, just the shadow of it?”
“I feel only a part of your pain as you only feel a part of mine. Though I would be willing to bet those badges hurt quite a bit.”
Rosalea brushed one with her finger and winced. “Badges?” she asked wryly.
Fen ignored that, and Rosalea finished up washing herself. She moved to her hot embers and set a pot on them. It was from last night’s stew, and still had last night’s stew in it. Enough to last her four nights more maybe. The beauty of earth storage was that things came out the exact way they went in.
While the stew got a bit warmer on her fire, she moved to the pond, and look at her own reflection. Where the man had struck her face, there was quite a large bruise coming in. Too bad I cannot heal myself, she thought with a huff. She reached into the pond and drew up some water, chilling it with her imber magic and then pressing the ice to her bruise.
The back of her head also ached, but not as bad as her face. He must not have slammed her back quite as hard as he had hit her. Stupid brute probably had no idea of his strength as drunk as he was.
She spent a moment devising terrible fates for him until the pain dulled a little. She dropped the ice back in the pond and returned to her stew. She stirred it, it was steaming, so she felt she could already take it off of the heat, and this time, put it away sooner so it did not chill at all.
As she summoned her bowl from earth storage, her magic told her a horse was entering her range of influence. It’s desperation and misery was strong, and she was unfamiliar with it. They cannot have tracked me this far, she thought of the Dyna city guards.
The horse was coming right toward her. She stood, and prepared herself to have to fight back, feeling something about the situation was really off. If it was a guard, then where were all his reinforcements? Her mind made up a scenario where Saro or his uncle were in trouble for helping her…
The horse and its rider came into view around the side of the hill. The horse was bony, a chestnut of some sort, but its mane was raggedy, and she looked exhausted. The rider had darker skin and black hair, and he was completely slouched over, veering back and forth in an awkward way, before Rosalea realized that he had ropes running form his hands to the saddle, and the same with his waist and feet. He might have come off if not for them.
The man raised his his head, and she recognized him immediately. Her heart began to pound, and her whole body went tense. Her emotions made a tight knot in her center, and she felt a little sick as she clenched her fists. “Ulric,” she hissed.