Revelation (2 page)

In the autumn of the year of my freedom and homecoming, we had moved back to the remote, southern land Aleksander had returned to us and resumed the vigil that few people beyond our borders even suspected. I had once again become a Warden of Ezzaria, who walked into tormented souls on the paths of enchantment woven by my partner Aife, there to face the demon beings who drove human victims to madness or grew strong by feeding upon their wickedness. And so at thirty-five I had taken up my life again where it had ended when I was eighteen.

As I expected, some among my people were not reconciled to my reinstatement and swore I would bring disaster upon Ezzaria. But I never imagined their voices would be so strong that they could set a watcher to follow me every moment of every day, examining my works, judging my words, waiting for me to slip, to err, to demonstrate subtle signs of demon infestation. In the year just past, I had fought over two hundred demon combats. There were days when I stepped through the Aife’s portal still bleeding from the last encounter, days like the past three, when I snatched sleep rolled in my cloak on the temple floor, because word had come that another combat was set, another soul in torment who needed our help. How long would it take to prove that I was only what I claimed—a man no better, no worse, than any other, trying to make sense out of the strangest life anyone could live? Until then, there was Fiona.

As if I had conjured my nemesis from the stuff of night, determined footsteps intruded on the quiet, and a glaring yellow light flickered through the trees, disrupting the soft darkness. The footsteps stopped just at the base of my hill, though she could not possibly see me from the path. “The rites are complete, Master Seyonne. I’ll be at the bridge at first light.”

Of course she would. I needed no reminders. After a moment’s silence, the footsteps resumed their cadence and quickly faded into the night. I sighed and hunched my cloak about my shoulders against the rain.

The intense young Aife had been appointed by the Mentors Council to be my shadow. Bad enough to have her watching and listening as I taught our student Wardens, to see her diligently taking notes when I skipped rituals I found hollow or spoke of how my beliefs had changed in my years of bondage, though my commitment had grown deeper and my faith stronger as a result. I could not hide how I had come to see that matters of good and evil, purity and corruption were far more complex than the precise definitions of Ezzarian tradition. But there had come a day when my wife could no longer be my partner, the peerless day when I learned we were to have a child. A woman carrying a child could not risk demon infestation—the child had no defenses—and so the partnership that had begun when we were fifteen would have to end until the birth. But that day so ripe with promise had soured quickly when I was told I could not choose Ysanne’s replacement.

A Warden’s life depended entirely on his partner Aife—on her skill at weaving the enchantment that created physical reality from the substance of a human soul, on her understanding of what techniques worked best for him, on her endurance at holding the portal until he could withdraw victorious or escape defeat. And not only had the Council forbidden me the power to choose, but they had paired me with Fiona. I was beside myself with fury. Yet I could not refuse to fight without proving the very ill that was said of me.

“Fiona is the most skilled of Aifes,” Ysanne said to me every time the call came, and I had to leave her for the temple and Fiona. “I would have no one else weave for you. Only a little while longer.”

And, of course, as I looked down on the lights winking at me from the quiet forest midnight, that consideration banished everything but joy. Some night soon, when I walked down this hill into the vale where our house stood safely nestled in the trees, I would find the proof that I had indeed been graced with every gift a man could hope for. Our child would be born in Ezzaria. There was no room for anger when I thought of that.

I jumped up from my rocky perch and started down the hill. Halfway down I stopped to reposition Fiona’s wadded cloth against the gash in my shoulder. The wound had started bleeding again, and I could feel the trickling warmth soaking my shirt. No need to worry Ysanne over nothing.

During this pause I heard a faint cry in the distance, scarcely audible against the rain that was drumming harder on the path, cascading from the thick leaves overhead, splashing and pooling in the hollows. I passed the back of my hand across my eyes, shifting into my more acute senses, tuned to see and hear at great distances and beyond barriers and enchantments. But all I heard was a horse galloping away far beyond our house.

Uneasy, I picked up the pace. Abandoning the muddy track that wound gracefully around the vale, I headed straight down the steep hillside through the thick, wet leaves. The nervous pricking between my shoulder blades grew insistent. The winking lamplight taunted me as I dodged trees and my boots slid in the mud. Bypassing the longer route across a wooden bridge, I leaped the stream at the bottom of the gully, whispered open the barriers of enchantment, and ran up a flight of wooden steps. Breathlessly I burst through the door into the large comfortable room that was our private part of the rambling Queen’s Residence. No one was there.

The chair cushions of russet and dark green, the woven rug, the loaf-shaped mourning stone, the simple furnishings of oak and pine, the weavings on the walls that told the stories of Ezzaria, the precious books of history and lore that had been carried into exile and back again—all were as they had been three days before when I had last seen them. The lamp of rose-colored glass beside the window was lit as it always was when I was away. Nothing was wrong. Ysanne would be in bed. She tired easily in these last weeks, and she knew I would not stay away longer than necessity bade me.

Yet my uneasiness did not vanish. The house was not asleep. Sparks popped quietly in the hearth from coals that pulsed glowing orange. Someone had been there not an hour since. A walking stick of ash stood beside the front door. The scent of unfamiliar bodies lingered. And other smells—the pungent tang of juniper berries and the dark earth smell of black snakeroot, used for healing.
Ysanne
. . .

I blew out the lamp and tiptoed into our bedchamber. It was dark, the windows open to the soft sound of the rain. Ysanne lay on her side, and I exhaled when I laid my hand on her cheek and felt it warm and soft. But she was not asleep. Her breathing was shallow, tight. I knelt on the floor by her side, brushed the dark hair from her face, and kissed her. “Is all well with you, beloved?” She made no answer, and when I stroked her arm and kissed the palm of her hand, I felt a tight quivering just beneath her skin. “Let me get out of these wet things and get you warm,” I said. She still said nothing. I left my soggy clothes in a heap, and made a halfhearted effort at wiping off mud spatters and tying a clean strip of linen about my wounded shoulder. Then I climbed in beside my wife and wrapped my arms around her . . . and discovered that she no longer carried a child. “Sweet Verdonne!”

Believing I understood everything, and preparing myself for tears and grief and the slow journeying from pain to acceptance, I whispered a word of enchantment and cast a soft silver light. Ysanne blinked her violet eyes at me as if she had been sleeping, then brushed her hand on my cheek and smiled. “You’re home at last! I’ve missed you so. When Garen told me they’d set a third battle and you’d not have time to come home, I almost bundled our blankets and pillows and brought them to the temple so we could at least sleep together in between.”

“Ysanne—”

“What’s this?” She sat up and pulled away my hasty bandage. “You didn’t let Fiona work on this. You should, you know. Not for any fear of demon poison, but to set it healing quicker . . . and here it’s raining and you’re so cold.”

“Ysanne, tell me what happened. Someone should have come for me. How could they have left you alone?”

She jumped out of the bed, lit the lamp, and brought the box where she kept her medicines. I tried to stop her, to make her talk to me, but she insisted on dressing the wound, reciting every word of the invocations and cleansing prayers. When she was done, she started to get up again to clean up the mess, but I took her bloody hands and held her there. “Tell me what happened to our child, Ysanne. Born . . . dead? You must tell me.”

But she widened her violet eyes and stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Was your head injured, too, my love? What child?”

 

“She won’t speak of it, Catrin. She pushed me away, telling me I was so tired I was dreaming, that I was thinking of Garen and Gwen and their new little one. Then she refused to discuss it anymore. I’m afraid for her reason.” I shoved aside the cup of wine that sat untasted on the table in front of me. “Tell me what to do. This is beyond anything I know.”

The dark-haired young woman in a white nightdress tapped her fingers on her mouth. “Have you spoken to anyone else about it?”

“I tried Nevya. She claimed that she had delivered no child these three days. Aleksander once told me that I was the world’s worst liar, that I turned yellow and my eyelids twitched. But these women are far worse. Daavi said she wasn’t permitted to speak of the Queen’s health to anyone. Anyone? Catrin, I’m her husband. Why won’t they tell me? They act as if she never conceived.” I rubbed my head viciously, trying desperately to cut through a suffocating fog of uncertainty.

Catrin stood up, folded her arms in front of her, and stared out of her window at the watery gray of dawn. “So what do you think is the truth?”

“I think the child was born dead, of course . . . or born alive and died. I don’t know. What am I supposed to think?”

“Perhaps that’s the question you need to answer first.”

My head was a muddle. I had not slept at all, but given it up and come to Catrin when Ysanne fell asleep an hour before dawn without answering even one of my questions. And now Catrin, whom I’d counted on for straight answers, was dancing around the subject, too.

“Come, my old friend, stretch out by the hearth and sleep for a while. You’re going to collapse in a puddle if you don’t get some rest. The answers will come if you stop trying to create them on your own.”

“Catrin, was my wife with child or not? Answer me.”

Her dark eyes were clear, though filled with sympathy. “I cannot answer that, Seyonne. But I will tell you this. She is not mad. Now sleep for a while, then go home and tell her how dearly you love her.” She laid a hand on my forehead, and a wave of exhaustion sapped the last strength from my limbs.

And of course Catrin was right, as she so often was. As soon as I let go of my fear and my grief enough to sleep, I knew what had happened. The infant was dead whether or not it yet breathed. Our child had been born a demon.

 

 

 

We Ezzarians knew very little of our origins. Oddly enough, for a people so steeped in arcane lore and practices, we had almost no tradition of our beginnings, only the myth of our gods and two scrolls written a mere thousand years in the past at the inception of the demon war. Somehow in the lost years before the time of those writings, we had found our way to Ezzaria, a warm, green land of deep forests and open hillsides that seemed to nurture the extraordinary power we called melydda. And somehow in those years we had discovered the way to free a human soul from the ravages of demon possession.

The Scroll of the Rai-kirah taught us of demons—soulless, bodiless creatures, not evil in themselves, but who satisfied their hunger with human terror and madness and unholy death. The writing said that demons lived in the frozen northlands and would return there to regenerate when we cast them out of their human hosts. If they refused to go, we killed them—reluctantly, because we felt the world diminished, thrown out of balance, by the explosive power of their dying.

The Scroll of Prophecy warned us of corruption and the need for vigilance lest the rai-kirah follow the path of our weaknesses to infest our own souls. In this scroll a Seer named Eddaus had written of the war to end the world, and the battle where the Warrior of Two Souls would face the Lord of Demons. Eddaus never mentioned that the Warrior of Two Souls was really two men, a Derzhi prince and a sorcerer slave—Aleksander and myself. Together we had fought the battle and won it. After foretelling this combat, the prophecy ended. Abruptly. Whatever further seeing had been granted to our ancestors had been lost or destroyed with their other writings.

Other than the scrolls only two artifacts remained from that ancient time: the originals of the silver knives that could be transformed into any kind of weapon when carried beyond the portal, and the Luthen mirrors, the oval glasses that could paralyze a demon by showing the creature its own reflection. Everything else we knew had been learned from hard experience. Though we could explain so little of our history, the evidence of our eyes taught us why we had to do it—the terrible consequences of demon possession left unopposed. Only a few other people in the world had power for true sorcery, and none of them seemed to know anything of rai-kirah. We buried our questions because we saw no alternatives.

No scroll or writing or experience explained this dreadful thing that happened to our children—the one in every few hundred births that was born possessed. An infant had no barriers to the demon within it, and so the child and the demon were inseparable. And even if we had known how to untangle the child’s being from the demon, it was impossible to create a stable portal into an infant’s soul—so small, so inexperienced, so chaotic. Yet we dared not have a demon living in our midst, and thus our law required us to be rid of them. I had never given the dilemma much thought. Not until it was my own.

 

“She killed our child.” I sat on Catrin’s hearth rug, the afternoon sun pouring in through the open front door. I had slept for a few hours before waking with the understanding I would have fought fifty demons at once to avoid. My body was numb. My soul was desolation. A sword could have sliced off my arm, and I would not have felt it. Catrin pressed a cup into my hand and forced me to drink from it, but I could not have said whether the drink was hot or cold, bitter or sweet. I was as lost and adrift as the dust motes floating in the angled sunbeams. “She left him naked on a rock for the wolves to find, and now everyone pretends he never existed. They shun even the memory of him because they don’t know what else to do. How could she do it? We say self-murder is abhorrent to the gods. What of infant murder? A child can do no evil.”