Solace Arisen (2 page)

“No. I still see life in you, but some of your spirit is drifting away.”

Drifting away? A knot of dread tightened in Arvana’s stomach. When she died, her sins would pull her deeper into Hell, away from even this small connection to Nan. She wouldn’t deserve that mercy. “I only—”

Lina held a hushing finger to her lips. “Someone is coming. Look.”

A small blue light, the size of crown coin, shone above them. From it, a rush of life threads twisted and spun into the life-size form of a gaunt-cheeked old woman with sunken but bright eyes. The superior! She didn’t wear her veil and the blue light emanated from her hand. It was the relic. For a moment, the superior was awestruck by Assaea’s light, saying, “How amazing.” But when she looked to Arvana, the lines about her mouth grew as grim and aged as a weathered fence post. With a kindly smile, she tried to cloak her initial expression.

“It’s too late, isn’t it?” Arvana asked.

“You’ve been here a long time.”

“Cover it,” Arvana said of the relic. She wanted to confess. Perhaps it would spare her from falling away from Nan completely.

Madra Cassandra nodded and shut the locket lid almost closed so The Scyon would not see them.

Arvana would’ve kissed the ground long and hard if she could. “I have failed in so many ways. I chose Prince Lerouge to take the Blue Eye, and now he’s dead. And I broke my promise of constancy of heart. Take my ring. I don’t want to die false to my vows.”

“False?”

“I loved him. I put him before the Maker in my heart.”

“And you do not repent this?”

“My repentance is never enough.”

Arvana watched, but felt nothing, as the superior removed the ring from her finger. It was as if she was watching it happen to someone else.

The superior closed the ring in her hand. “What use is the Maker’s forgiveness if you won’t accept it?”

“Madra?”

“When your brother brought you here, he told me how your father died and how he blamed you. In his heart, he had to know he was wrong, but he was weak, couldn’t bear to blame himself. It was easier to blame you, who would bear anything. And you, you look upon what you endured as a punishment, as if you deserved it. You won’t accept mercy. Not for that. Not for forsaking your vows.”

Though Arvana’s living body seemed so distant, the past was as close as ever.

She was driving the sleigh. In the back sat her brother Allasan, his fiancé, Payter and Elizabetta. They were in the open country. The road ran in a long, straight stretch. With a flick of the reins, she urged the horses to go faster. She didn’t know why she wanted to fly over the snow. It just was necessary to feel something, anything other than Payter’s betrayal. How could he love Elizabetta? She cracked the reins. Snow stung her face and the wind whistled.

“What are you doing?” her brother shouted. “You’ll put us in the ditch.”

What
was
she doing? They could go in the ditch. With a tug on the reins, she slowed the horses to a trot. She’d never forgive herself if she hurt the horses...or anyone else. Even Payter or Elizabetta.

Their lane was ahead. She would go home and let Allasan drive. As she made the turn, something by the stable bounded from behind a snowdrift. She couldn’t see it clearly through the snow. A dog? She halted the horses. They stamped and snorted restlessly. The animal loped into the lane. No, it wasn’t a dog; it was a coyote. Why was it out in the middle of the day and why didn’t it shy away as they always did?

It burst into a run toward them.

“Allasan,” she screamed, but he was already beside her, grabbing the ax from under the front seat. He jumped from the sleigh. The spooked horses threw their heads up and began to retreat. The sleigh slid backward. They were angling toward the ditch. She sawed the reins, trying to steady them.

The coyote launched at Allasan.

One of the horses jerked in the harness. The rims of his eyes were white with terror. His front legs left the ground and circled in the air. The sleigh heaved to the side. They were going to overturn into the ditch.

She dropped the reins and leaped into the snow. She ran to the front of the team and grabbed their headstalls in either hand to hold them. “Easy, boys, easy.” But the panicked horse threw his head back and his teeth flashed. He was going to rear. Her right arm snapped straight and her feet left the ground. The other horse’s headstall ripped from her grip. She was dangling in air. Not weightless. All the weight in the world was pulling on her arm. She couldn’t let go, couldn’t fall beneath those frantic hooves, couldn’t let the sleigh overturn.

“Whoa!”

Her feet sank back into the snow and she pulled the horse’s head down by the headstall. “Good boy. That’s my boy.”

Allasan’s hand joined hers on the wild horse’s headstall. Steaming breath huffed from her brother’s mouth. He gave a reassuring nod to his fiancée, then whispered, “That coyote was mad. I’m sure. Its eyes...its mouth...Ari...it had the mad disease.”

“Allasan?”

“No, it didn’t bite me. Now, let’s get them away from
this
.”

And then she saw it.
This
was bright red snow.
This
was the coyote, dead of a shattered skull. Her brother had been brave, then.

As they guided the skittish horses up the lane, she looked to the sleigh. Payter’s cold-rosy cheeks had gone pale. Though the grain merchant’s daughter was sobbing, he hadn’t put his arm around her, wasn’t holding her hand. He was a coward.

“Ari. Look.” There was something brittle in Allasan’s voice. It cracked as thin ice over a stream did underfoot.

Blotches of blood stained the trampled snow between the stable and the house. Blood streaked her father’s guide rope. The coyote had been here first.

“Dear Maker, no,” she said.

Allasan started running toward the house.

Then, everything disappeared into a blur of snow.

“If I had stayed home and done my chores, I would have seen the coyote,” Arvana said to the superior.

“And perhaps died instead of your father? What would that have done to him, a man whose responsibility it is to protect his child? You dishonor him and the Maker.”

Arvana knew, had always known, what the superior said was true, but it couldn’t stop her from feeling that everything would have been different, good, if she hadn’t chased after Payter, insisted on being a part of the sleigh ride her brother didn’t want his younger sister tagging along on.

“The Maker sorrows over your father and your loss of him,” the superior said. “Let that be your comfort, just as you let the Maker prop your strength when you stayed beside your father through the mad disease.”

“Strength? I hated Allasan for leaving.” Inwardly, she admitted why she loathed herself. It was something that couldn’t be spoken: she’d wished over and over again that her father would just die when he thrashed with the mad disease, when he begged for water but couldn’t bear to drink it. She had caused him this suffering and then couldn’t even abide it. It was the worst selfishness.

“Would you have left your father if Allasan stayed?”

“It was my punishment.” And she hadn’t been able to willingly abide it. Just as she now didn’t want to abide slipping farther away from Nan.

“But you stayed. Now, try to stay with us.”

The superior went to reopen the relic when Lina flew to Arvana and said, “Promise me you’ll take the relic.” To the superior she added, “In my journals is the way to Alenius, the one with the Beckoner. I told my grandson to read them. They are in my trunk at Ferne Clyffe. What I revealed is worth more than a hundred thousand men.”

The superior’s widened eyes looked from Lina to Arvana. “You wish this task?”

“Madra, do you remember the translation of the book I sent you?”

“Of course.”

“You can see the future. Look into the threads of my life and see if it possible. Ask with your heart.”

“The glow of your life is weak, but I will try.” Madra’s brow knit while she peered into the possible paths of Arvana’s life. Finally, she shook her head. “It is impossible to tell. There are too many possibilities. It isn’t a simple yes-or-no question.”

The glow of Assaea was still near.
He
was here. Up through the sorrow of her father’s death welled a feeling of love. “I can’t leave it to him alone. He has no chance against The Scyon without the Blue Eye.”

Lina splayed her hands between them. “Take her back before it is too late. What is the sense in this?” Her ring, a cluster of sapphires and diamonds, seemed to flash with the woman’s impatience.

The superior opened the relic’s cover and curled a finger to Arvana. “Come home.”

An excruciating pain, as if her whole body was being torturously squeezed, clenched Arvana. She screamed. The startling sound of it, coming from so far within her, dulled the pain for a moment.

From a distance came the sound of a door flying open. In a panic, Hera Musette shouted, “Madra Cassandra?”

“Out,” the superior barked and snapped the locket closed.

Another wave compressed Arvana from head to foot. She scrunched her eyes shut and tensed. Waves of pain kept coming. Even Hell was better than this agony. “Stop, stop it.” Her back arched from the bed. Her arms and legs burned. Involuntarily, she screamed again and wanted to thrash her limbs from her body.

“Soldier, help me,” the superior said.

Arvana felt warmth around her shaking ankles, calming them. Gradually, the pain faded to an ache, and she relaxed into the lavender scent of the pillow. Was she home? She opened her eyes. It was dark but not gray. A slender column of light was breaking in though the gap between the drawn heavy drapes and fell across a familiar patterned stone floor. She was in her old cell. While bracing for another onslaught, she glanced to the superior, who was sitting in a chair beside the bed. She didn’t glow with life as seen from Hell; she was pale and covered with a clammy sweat. Arvana marshaled her strength to raise her head. At the foot of the bed stood Nan, bent over and still holding her feet. Half of his hair had worked loose from its binding and obscured his face. “Madra, this is General Degarius.”

As he righted, he flinched. He looked weary.

“Your shoulder,” she said.

“I don’t understand what happened,” he replied.

“General, you are owed an explanation, but I ask you to wait. Your wound should be tended sooner rather than later,” the superior said. “A monk from the other side of the valley has been summoned. He should be here now. After it is mended, you will take a room here to get rest. It would be cruel to send you to the other side of the valley now. Hera Musette,” the superior called. The door opened and Musette hesitantly peered in. “Take the general to the infirmary.”

“Nan,” Arvana said. She wanted to thank him for bringing her here, but all he could do was give her a long backward glance as Musette led him away.

Her head dropped into her pillow. With Nan gone, the reality of where she was and what had happened closed in around her like the walls of the tiny cell that had once been her room. Chane was dead. Though Nan had killed him in self-defense, it was another death on his hands. It had all gone so wrong because she hadn’t been staunchly true to her vows. “Madre, I have failed you...failed everyone. I—”

The superior raised her hand. “The world returned you to Solace wrapped in a soldier’s black cloak. You have died to this life and the Maker has had mercy and granted you a new one. How are you to make it pleasing to the Maker?” She opened her palm. On it laid Arvana’s silver novitiate ring. “From the first, I questioned your suitability to our life. Undoubtedly, you loved the Maker and wanted the Maker’s love most fiercely. But, what happened to your father... Running away from things doesn’t resolve them, but I thought I could help you, bring you peace. You were such an admirable novice that I almost forgot my reservation, even though you never confessed the things that lay heaviest on your soul.

“I meant to have a candid talk with you before awarding your veil, but then I saw you use the relic. You were the first, the only, in all my years as superior to see the blue glow when the stone was black.” She opened the hand containing the Blue Eye and the other holding Arvana’s ring. It seemed as if she were weighing the two. “I couldn’t let you go. The Maker has corrected my mistake. In this new life, you are no longer a Solacian.”