Jonas walked a lap of the barracks before heading for Llew’s room. Problem was, he was no closer to knowing what to do.

Braph was right, he did need his brother. Maybe not Braph. But he needed someone.

And maybe he still had Hisham, but it took too much effort to look past the year of lying. Hisham would have to earn his way back in.

“You trust him?”

Funny thing, really, that Llew’s first response was to ask him his thoughts after everything Braph had done.

“Not a whole lot, no.”

Her whole bearing relaxed, but she still looked haunted.

He scratched an itch on his hairline, shifted his seat on the chair by her bed. She was still mostly bed-bound, and he was getting sick of the sight of the hospital room, but the barracks didn’t have anything better to offer. Besides, she was still delicate. Could be for months.

At least she was sitting, if hunched against the wall since Jonas had broached the subject of Braph, her knees to her chin, arms around her shins. She’d need help extending out again, but she was up.

“I don’t need to trust him,” he elaborated. “He needs somethin’ from me.”

“What?”

Jonas shrugged. “I don’t know. But he ain’t safe in a Quaven gaol.”

Llew sat with that statement of fact briefly. “And what if just getting you into Turhmos is what he wants?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Half-brother. Who killed your wife … and you!”

Jonas sat back, looking at his knees.

“He’s my brother.” Jonas hated himself for pulling out such a weak argument, but Braph had little else going for him. “He’s my blood. I’m not like you, Llew.” He leaned forward again, real close. “I think you’re amazin’, the way you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get on bein’ your own foundation, your own home, but I ain’t you. I need people. The people in my life: my folks, my wife … Hisham and Aris; they’re either gone, or my faith in ’em is. I know in my head what Braph did, to me, my wife… to you should be unforgivable. It is. But he’s my brother, and he’s come to me in his time of need. I can’t turn him away.” Truth was, Jonas was scared. He needed Braph.

Llew swallowed, but she didn’t seem to have anything to say. Jonas suspected she knew his truth.

“He’s got ideas. More’n I could ever come up with.” Jonas sat back a bit. “He’s got a way to slow Aris down when the time comes. He knows about Turhmos. He’s got smarts. He’d be invaluable to have along.”

“Don’t do this to me.” Llew glared at him, but her words lacked conviction.

“Llew …”

“You know what he did.”

“Yes.” He bit off his own words. It seemed easy to follow Braph’s hint. You can’t rape an Aenuk. It was such a widely accepted, often repeated anecdote. But the way she’d reacted to Jonas and his similarities to Braph since she’d returned, the haunted look in her eyes … “He won’t touch you again.”

“That’s not the point. Just the thought of him makes my skin crawl.”

His jaw clenched tight. Thinking about it made him rage. He took a deep breath and blew it out. “I’m sorry. I can’t take back what happened. I wish I could. Look, I’d leave him behind in a heartbeat if I thought we could.”

“We can.”

“I’ve got people expectin’ me to fight Aris, Llew. Not the old man we knew, but someone as fast as me, probably as strong, who heals like you. And it looks like he’s got Karlani to back him. How do I fight that?”

Llew opened her mouth, but she didn’t have an answer. “Do you have to face him alone?”

Jonas pressed his lips together. “How many lives should we put on the line?”

“Yours is worth so little?”

“No. It ain’t that.” He shook his head. “You know I’m the only one with any chance.”

Llew sighed. “And still too little.”

“We could go in with numbers, but only so many are gonna get near him at any time. He’d knock ’em down one-by-one, maybe in twos, but they’d fall.”

Llew sighed again. Fidgeted. “And what can Braph do?”

“Well, we haven’t made a plan. There’s a lot we don’t know for sure about Aris. We thought …” He shifted in his seat. “I figure there’s time to work things out on the journey.”

They fell silent, eyes locked in a relaxed kind of staring contest, each too deep in their own thoughts to try to project anything at the other.

Llew was right to be worried about Braph. He was a bad man who’d done bad things, but Jonas struggled to hold a grudge. If he held grudges against everyone he battled, he’d be weighed down in ill thoughts. Sure, few of his opponents were still breathing at the end of a confrontation, and only Braph had killed him. And yet, there was something about still being alive that made it possible to let that go. Braph had wanted a fight. They had fought. Done. And done.

“Would you have killed him?” Llew asked.

“When?”

“‘When?’” Llew shook her head in derision. “If his magic hadn’t been enough. If he hadn’t had his back-up ridiculously loud devices. If he didn’t win. Would you have killed him?”

Jonas had to think about that. Braph had done a lot of hurt and wrong in his life. He couldn’t deny that. Plenty of it had fallen in his own lap. And yet, the thought of killing Braph with his own hand hit an impenetrable wall each time it did the rounds in his head.

“No.” He had to be honest. Maybe if he’d known everything Braph had done to Llew at the time, things might have been different in the heat of the moment. Maybe. But one fact would never change: Braph was Jonas’s brother.

They held each other’s gaze for a long few moments again.

“Fine. Alright!” Llew burst out. “I hate him.”

“I know. And I understand, I do. If I could see another way …”

Llew’s shoulders slumped. “I get it.”

Jonas nodded. He had nothing else to add.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Don’t let him make himself more powerful than you.”

“I won’t. He’s there to help me. That’s all.”

----------------------------------------

The following day, Jonas and Llew left the barracks again. And again, under the cover of a carriage.

They waited in the carriage while the guards emptied the garden of visitors.

“It’s clear.” A guard poked his head in and held the carriage door open for them.

Jonas stepped out first and helped Llew down the steps. As always, these days, his hands were enshrouded in leather. She accepted his offered guidance with some reluctance. She couldn’t refuse the leather fingers, or she would still be stuck in her bed, but it rubbed her the wrong way to be so close to human touch, and yet so far. It barely mattered whose anymore. Llew was well aware of the distance between herself and the rest of the world. She was as cut off as she ever had been.

They walked into the garden with a more relaxed air than the first time. In fact, Jonas almost seemed happy to be there. He smiled at her once or twice.

His old home, once left as a mangled monument to the horrific events that had occurred there, was now a place of beauty to be shared by all. And in the center, an Ajnai tree. There was no placard, nothing to identify it, just their own knowledge and a round-the-clock guard to prevent defacement, or worse.

Two days after its transplantation, the tree was up to Llew’s chest, though the trunk was still only a couple of inches thick, and she already knew it wasn’t ready to help her.

Oddly, the tree seemed to pulsate with a pale glow, more pronounced than the shimmer she remembered from the Turhmos tree. She blinked, and blinked again, sure her eyes were playing tricks on her. She peered around the garden, seeking a pool of water or some other explanation. There was a small trickling pond, but it was off to one side, in a corner and nowhere near the tree. The trunk shimmered under the shifting light filtering into the garden, but there was something else going on.

Jonas must have seen it, too. His eyes were narrowed.

Llew stepped forward and kneeled before the tree. She opened her mind to the tree’s babble, its song oscillating as the light did over its bark. As with the tree in Turhmos, she found its chatter uplifting, filling her heart with love and hope. And there was something more from this tree, another layer to its talk, like a second voice, and the pair of them were tripping over each other to talk to her.

“Shh. You’re talking too fast,” she said, very much aware that she was talking to a tree again. And this time Jonas was there to see and hear her. “I can’t make out what you’re trying to say.” She looked up at Jonas. “It’s speaking gibberish. I can’t … I can’t make out what it’s saying.”

He looked down at her with tolerance, maybe even full acceptance, but she still felt silly. Nothing in his expression suggested he could hear anything unusual.

After a few minutes, the sapling seemed to calm, though the other voice kept crying out, cooing, and generally trying to be the center of attention. Llew found herself smiling, and with a strange desire to cradle the tree in her arms. She shifted her focus entirely to that voice, and suddenly it was the sapling’s turn to sulk. Tears sprang to her eyes as she felt a sense of a tiny, perfect person snuggle into her heart, pulling it tight about itself like an eiderdown. She knew, she just knew, that her child, the one Aris hadn’t put the knife through, somehow still lived. In essence, at least.

The chatter died down. That second voice, the one of her child, now silent, content to snuggle. While still holding a grudge, the tree’s own presence acknowledged Llew’s need to connect with her child with a reluctant calm. Then, with a hint of sorrow, it flickered an image of the Turhmos Ajnai, its own parent, in her mind. It followed up with a flickering glimpse of itself, blackened and shriveled, silenced, and her child silenced, too. A warning of what would happen if she attempted to heal from it while it was still young. It needed a chance to grow first.

Llew rocked back on her haunches, extending the distance between herself and the tree, alleviating its fears.

She looked up at Jonas, deaf and blind to her conversation. “We have to go to Turhmos.”

Any confusion he felt passed quickly and he helped her to her feet. “You alright?”

Her throat hurt from the pressure of the lump forming there, so she nodded. How could she explain to him that his child lived on, in a way, but that he would never see it, touch it, or sense it?

They left the garden and returned to the barracks for Llew to rest up and preparations to be made for their journey.

----------------------------------------

Llew held Amico’s rope, fighting the urge to pat his head, as Jonas finished checking the fit of the tack on the cart horses. She’d tried to help but found there was little she could do as far as lifting tack and pulling straps tight that didn’t send nasty aches through her belly. She was getting sick and tired of being in pain. How did normal people ever get through life? And of course, Llew had the very unwelcome added risk of injuring any animal she assisted with.

And at that thought, she puffed out a frustrated sigh, turned to sift through her things and pulled on her gloves. Feeling defeated, she reached for Amico’s head again, this time with a protective barrier between them. He stretched his head forward, joying in her scratches. She hated it, though. Just another thing between her and the rest of the world. Sure, Jonas had taken to wearing gloves any time he was with her, but he could take them off, he could touch Chino or … or anyone else with his bare hands. Anyone, but not Llew.

The sooner she got to the Ajnai tree the better.

Llew wore a brushed-leather jacket provided by one of the Quaven soldiers. It was better than any jacket Llew had ever owned.

The night air was settling in to be freezing by the time the sun rose again. The stars twinkled about as clear as Llew had ever seen them. Thinking on it, this was the first night sky she’d seen in Taither, and it was her last. They were riding out at night to avoid a scene in the streets. She’d heard Jonas could attract quite the crowd. She was a little saddened not to see it herself. She could do with a laugh. Except that laughing hurt.

Her legs were still cold. She couldn’t stand to wear trousers over her damaged belly, and so she was in a wool dress. It was surprisingly non-scratchy – wool from some special breed of sheep, apparently. Still, a dress left her legs exposed to the cold. She could have worn leggings, but they were no better than trousers as far as her belly was concerned. She had a clean shirt and trousers packed, anyway. She could wear them once they’d stopped by the Ajnai tree.

“I wish I could ride there,” she said, idly rubbing Amico’s fluffy head. It didn’t feel right, through the leather, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“I know.” Jonas paused in his work to share his sympathy. “Ridin’ away’ll have to be enough.”

“I hope I’m not riding with her.”

Llew froze at the horribly familiar voice. Hisham and a Quaven soldier stood either side of Braph, his one hand cuffed to the guard and Hisham clasping the bicep of the shortened limb. Jonas straightened from his work.

“Who knows what she’ll do to me, given half a chance,” said Braph, perhaps only half-jokingly.

Jonas feinted a lunge and Braph tried to pull back, fear scrawled across his face, but his escort held him firm.

Jonas smiled. “Hisham will ride with Llew,” he said, straight-faced. “You’ll ride where I can keep an eye on you.” He took Amico’s rope from Llew and led the horse to the rear of the cart. Llew’s saddle was already secured on the back of the cart, along with tack for Hisham’s horse and supplies to feed both the horses and the people in the group for a fortnight. Llew didn’t relish living off travel rations, but their goal was to get to the tree as quickly as possible. There would be little time to stop to catch fish or hunt game and stopping amongst civilization was almost certainly out of the question.

“The thought of touching you sends shivers down my spine.” Llew surprised herself, calmly holding Braph’s gaze as she pulled her hands free of her gloves. “But seeing the life drained from you … That would be worth it.” She kept her expression flat and lay the gloves on the cart, letting her bare hands speak all the words she wished she were brave enough to say. But this was Braph.

He didn’t smile. Perhaps he couldn’t tell whether she was joking, which was exactly the effect she was after. Jonas turned from them both. Llew caught the flash of moonlight on his teeth. Seemed he didn’t think she needed his help in this. While she trembled and squirmed on the inside, her bravado must have been succeeding.

Anya was due to leave for Rakun in the morning, and yet she still hadn’t been satisfied with simply saying goodnight and goodbye and getting a good night’s sleep. She couldn’t resist giving Llew a farewell embrace, even if it hurt when they came cheek-to-cheek. The contact was brief enough she didn’t suffer lasting damage, and she brushed it off like it was nothing.

Jonas lifted Llew into her seat at the front of the cart and Hisham settled beside her. Then Jonas and Braph struck out and Hisham snapped the carthorse into life behind them with a half-dozen soldiers trailing behind as an escort to the border.

Jonas had successfully negotiated to take leadership of the expedition, and to keep the group small. His argument was that the fewer Quavens that crossed the border, the fewer bodies there were likely to be. A small group would be more likely to go undetected, and they weren’t going there to raise tensions between nations. Kane and his superiors had been more than pleased to find a way to sweep their little misunderstanding under the rug. Putting as few obstructions in Jonas’s way as possible suited them, so long as his focus was anywhere other than revenging his and Llew’s incarceration.

Of course, he hadn’t forgotten, but he wasn’t immune to taking advantage of opportunities, either, and doing things their way without interference was a big one.

As the gate closed on the barracks, Llew felt they were leaving a door open, not so much to welcome them back, but because there was so much they were leaving behind; their children and a certain kind of innocence, both for Llew and Jonas, who’d had complete faith in Aris until the attack on Llew. His world, everything he had believed and held dear had come crashing down around him.