Sheria

Five months earlier

A frigid blast of wind tears through her clothing, and snow scrapes at her face like sandpaper. Her fur cloak and padded leather clothes do little to cut its force. But Sheria endures the early-January snowstorm patiently; her body has its own priorities and, anyway, her mind is only partly here.

She gazes at the single, snow-choked street of a tiny roadside village. A few lonely homes with steep roofs make shallow lumps under the snow, and a shabby inn rises just over their shoulders. There is a warm, welcoming light at its door. But Sheria sees more than the snow and the light. Two years ago, there might have been a fire in the house next to the inn; she sees that it is both here and gone, and its dimness suggests that there is a substantial probability the fire was real. An old woman sweeping the snow off her step across the street might have slipped on ice last month and broken her hip; she appears hazy and indistinct to Sheria’s black eyes. In many close branches she is not there, and the house is dark and cold. She might be real. A thousand other likely variations of what might be in the perceived reality around her register in her mind. To the humans who live here, such vision would quickly bring on madness. But the black eyes of the feyess absorb a broader spectrum of energy, and her brain knows how to interpret it.

The visions of what might be do not distract Sheria. She is looking for something very specific; something singular. Many paths are real, but only one is correct.

She sees it there, in the snowy street and the inn. It winds through the endless branching pathways of reality like a shining, golden thread. She has followed it here, followed it for all the long years of her life. It appears differently to every fey, but it is the same thread. It led her to Jonathan Miller and Merrily Hunter and Cyrus Stoat. It led her to Michael Rider, and a love she never imagined. And now it leads her here, to a snow-swept village along the human way that runs between their ugly, crowded, unhappy cities in the north and the south.

Sheria enters the inn and removes her snow-crusted cloak. She shakes the water and ice off her tall, lithe frame and hangs the garment by the door. The handful of humans in the inn’s small common room look up at her, surprised and wary. Some are hazy, possibly elsewhere or dead. She sees the many minute variations in their possible reactions. But in all the close branches, Sheria is an outsider to be feared and avoided. It does not trouble her.

She gives a man one of the odd bits of metal to which they attach such value, and he probably gives her a bowl of soup and a hunk of bread. This is their way. She does not dispute it with them. She sits down in one corner and sips at the probably-soup. Fey must eat and drink, just as humans, and her last meal was a possum who likely chose his last place of hibernation unwisely. She had no time to cook his body, once the mind departed.

The time of her waiting is not long when the man arrives, his body tall and lanky even under heavy outer clothing. A gust of wind and snow from the door announces his presence. He is unusually definite; there are few variations in which he is not here. His solidity heralds the coming of a singularity in the branches. It happens, sometimes, when one is close to the Bright Path.

She allows him to hang his cloak. He carries with him a satchel of oiled leather, keeping it close and protecting it as though it were fragile and precious. The satchel has a postman’s brass sigil showing a man on a galloping horse, carrying an identical satchel. The tiny brass rider’s satchel has its own tiny plaque; she checked once when its owner was sleeping. She is fond of the little brass man and his horse and his infinite variants.

The man does not see her at first. She smiles slightly. He is human, so his vision is severely flawed. She waits until he sits down at a table with his own bowl of soup, and then approaches him. He looks up at her in surprise as she sits down.

“Sheria!” he exclaims. A smile brightens his face instantly, and he stands. He takes her hands. “What are you doing here?”

Something catches in her throat. His smile is familiar and warm and very welcome. It is a smile she longs to see in all the broad spaces when they are apart. The definiteness of his presence, and of what is to come, tears at her heart.

“Eat your soup, Michael Rider,” she commands with a mischievous grin. “You will need your strength. Then give the man some metal bits so we may not be disturbed in one of the rooms.” They sit, and she watches him eat. She does not need to fill up the space with words, and he knows better than to try. She watches, recording the hard, un-varied reality of him in her mind. She loves him.

It happens tomorrow, she knows. Tonight, Sheria loves Michael Rider. Tomorrow, she kills what she loves.

Another Jonathan

Two Years Ago

The hold of the slave ship was dark and hot. It smelled of tar and wood and ocean and sweat. But it was clean; men came down with water every day to scrub it, and the slaves were made to bathe. There were several tubs for them to evacuate their bladders and bowels, changed regularly. They were given bread and salted meat and water twice a day.

There were nineteen of them, counting Jonathan and Boris, chained to the walls with heavy iron manacles. The slaves were mostly Carolese. He gathered, from a few whispered conversations, that they had been taken in the same manner as he and Boris. Conversation was discouraged, though, and anyone found talking by the crew was thumped with a club. One man or another always remained on watch in the hold.

Boris, his strange traveling companion, was chained to the wall on the opposite side of the ship. There was no chance to speak to him. If he was bothered by their predicament, he did not show it. Rather, his pallid face had a strange serenity. When light was brought into the hole, he looked at Jonathan with his pale red eyes, and his expression, if it said anything, said: This is not wrong. Simply accept, and wait.

The slaves around Boris edged as far away as they could.

Jonathan did not take this unspoken advice. He lived those long days, chained in the dark hold of the cog, in a state of confused disbelief. This can’t be real, he said to himself over and over. I’m dreaming. Or I’ve eaten something nasty, and I’m hallucinating. A few good heaves and it will all go away. This can’t be real. How could I have gone, in one night, from being a free man, setting out to see the world, to being chained in a slave ship? There had been some mistake.

But the pain and fear of his captivity dulled next to another pain. He could see it and hear it in his memory: the exact moment when everything around him had shifted into a reality that was all wrong.

I can’t, Jonny. I love you. I do. But... I can’t love you the way you want me to.

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Imprisonment and slavery had little more to add, in the end.

✽✽✽

He counted eight days—marked by slightly less darkness in the hold. He was troubled by terrible headaches, of the sort that had afflicted him ever since he struck his head badly in the Green Wood south of Hog Hurst. The only relief he could ever find was to think for a few minutes in the convoluted, oddly indeterminate language of the fey he had known in his childhood. “I am [highly probable] within a ship, or perhaps I am also [distant-concurrent] a silver-fish in the sea-chaos below,” he might think, for instance. And he would see wavering, confusing variations of the people and objects around him for a moment. But then the headache would abate for a time.

On the eighth day the cry of seagulls and the shouts of the crew above heralded land. Then he and his fellow captives were led out of the hold and onto a stone quay, where they were chained together in a long line. The buildings around him were made of brown mud bricks, sheathed in clay and painted white, like shabby imitations of the more elegant buildings he had seen in southern Carelon. The sun beat down on their heads and bodies mercilessly. Those people he saw around him, who were not slaves, were dressed in loose, flowing robes of white linen, and many carried parasols. Nearby stood several other lines of chained slaves, waiting quietly. The air smelled of hot dust and clay and human misery.

“Help!” he shouted to several smartly-dressed Carolese soldiers standing guard near the docks. “I’ve been kidnapped!” The soldiers ignored him, but one of the crew came and lashed him with a whip. Jonathan did not try again.

“Don’t make trouble for us, Uellishman,” muttered the man chained behind him, speaking in Carolese. Jonathan had picked up enough of it on the long journey from Uelland to understand. “Wait until we’re sold off,” the man continued, “and then you can get yourself whipped all you want.”

Jonathan began to be truly frightened. In the ship’s hold, the absence of sights and sounds, and the unending struggle against his headaches, had robbed his predicament of concrete reality. But now it became inescapably clear: he was a captive, helpless, and far from anyone who could or would care. He tried to contemplate what a life of slavery would be like.

He was frightened, but fear did not rule him. Instead, his heart drifted back to the bank of the Green River in Uelland, just a few months ago, and to the moment he’d got it all wrong.

✽✽✽

At the slave auction in the town, waiting in the crowded pens, he finally had a chance to speak with Boris again.

“Are you alright?” he inquired.

Boris nodded. But he looked unusually pale, and he swayed slightly.

“Do you know where we are?”

“Fraçon, on the southern shore of the Gulf,” answered Boris softly. “In the Carolese colonies. I overheard one of the traders mention it.”

“What’s going to happen to us?” he asked nervously. “Can we get help?”

Boris shook his head gravely. “No one will help us here, Jonathan. We will be sold into slavery, worked as our masters see fit, sold again perhaps, and then one day, maybe soon or maybe in many years, we will die as slaves.”

Jonathan felt sick. For just a moment, he managed to forget his own heartbreak.

“There’s no hope?” he asked.

“There is always hope, Jonathan Miller,” said Boris. His eyes flared red, and the shadow that invariably lurked over his presence grew darker. His pale face had grown even whiter, and there was sweat on his brow and cheeks. “Now, we will soon be parted, and our eyes will never see each other again. So, you must listen carefully. I will set before you a path to follow all the days of your life, until one day you will bend the path of all the world to follow you.”

The gate to the pens opened, and the slave next to them was roughly pulled out. Jonathan could see a low podium in the open, dusty space beyond the gate, and raked rows of benches.

He turned back to Boris. Boris leaned his pale face and bald head close to Jonathan. His eyes had an unhealthy brightness to them, and his lips twitched.

“Do you remember the story I told you about the boy and the spirit of the water?” he asked intently.

Jonathan nodded. “Yes. The boy kept trying to go back in time to save his village, and every time he made it worse. Are you alright, Boris?”

Boris ignored the question. “Ah, but in the end the boy did as the spirit asked, and was rewarded with exactly what he wanted. And do you remember the story of the Great Places of Change?”

Jonathan nodded slowly, his head suddenly throbbing. “You said you heard a story from a man who had fled the Holy Empire, about machines that they built in the Empire of the Dawn to change the world to be as they wished.” He thought for a moment. “Funny. I remember Cyrus once talking about the Empire of the Dawn. He said it was some historical linguist’s idea of a joke. Merrily told me later that she thought he meant a linguistic historian rather than a historical linguist. She said they’re different things.” His heart stopped for a moment at the thought of her.

Another nearby slave was plucked away to stand on the podium and be auctioned.

“The way back, Jonathan. You asked me once if there was a way back. The answer is yes.”

Jonathan stared at him. “I asked the question in the fey-tongue,” he hissed in reply, “and you said you didn’t understand that language.”

“But I know what you asked,” replied Boris, smiling madly. “And the answer is yes.”

“Is there a way to go back?” asked Jonathan, switching to the fey-tongue. The vision of Boris before him wavered, and he suddenly saw two copies of the man. His headache vanished.

“You will find the way back through both history and language, Jonathan Miller,” said the two men, speaking with one voice. The eyes of one Boris blazed red, and the shadow of terrible wings lurked over his shoulders. There was a gaping hole in him. The eyes of the second Boris were cool and gray and peaceful, and he was complete. “You will find the way to the Great Place of Change in the whispered tales and the hidden talismans of the Holy Empire, and buried in texts that have been plastered over with the scriptures of the Ecclesia. You will find the Dark Path, and it will lead you into the wasteland. You will follow and you will search all the days of your life, until one day, Jonathan, you will stand in the Great Place of Change and enter the loophole. And there you will find the way back, if you care to pay the price.”

The voice of the two copies of Boris grew raspy, and both swayed toward each other. Jonathan could feel the faint edges of some terrible violence inside both of them, and in the air between them.

“What’s happening to you?” he asked in growing alarm. “Who are you? What are you? How do you know these things?” But as he switched back to the familiar Uellish tongue, the dualistic vision collapsed, and there was just Boris, looking deathly pale and tired beyond all enduring.

“Follow the Dark Path, Jonathan Miller,” said Boris in a final whisper. And then he fell forward, face down.

When next the slavers came into the pen, they found the body and took it away with expressions of mild disappointment. Slaves died all the time, after all; spoilage was just a cost of doing business.

And this was the last Jonathan ever saw of that Boris.

✽✽✽

Jonathan was sold to a Carolese vintner and taken to work on his sprawling vineyard in the hills above the Gulf. The land was dry, the overseer was cruel, and the other slaves were unfriendly. He was afraid, and his heart ached inside him even as he worked long days in the hot fields. It was not for his captivity that he sorrowed.

And then Jonathan Miller discovered something. It was something that happened when he spoke the fey-tongue to relieve his headaches. He found that he could do more than simply witness incoherent and confusing copies of the world around him; he could see a line through them. Some were more real than others, but he could move himself gently, delicately, into the different possibilities.

One day he saved the overseer from a poisonous snake by knowing when it would strike. In gratitude, the overseer moved him from the fields to the house.

When the vintner’s young daughter fell from a rooftop where she was playing, Jonathan was standing underneath to catch her. He was made her tutor.

When money was disappearing from the household’s vault, Jonathan led his master to the steward of the house, who was caught in the act. The man was hauled away to be executed, and Jonathan was made the new steward of the house—though still a slave.

He moved carefully, precisely, making one tiny choice after another. The path he followed was lit by a thin, delicate strand of utter blackness that marked itself out ahead of him and showed him what to do. He whispered to himself in the fey-tongue, watching the possible outcomes and slowly growing to see farther into the branching pathways.

And in this way Jonathan set off to follow the path that led back.