Sword and Sorceress XXVII (13 page)

“Change the straw back,” she said, in
the tone she usually reserved for impertinent ambassadors.

“Come with me.” He held out a hand; it
was overlarge, and gnarled, and his fingernails curved like claws. “Your mother
misses you. She will teach you our ways, and in a few days, you will be able to
transform the straw yourself. If you still care to.”

Alina swallowed hard. This, she told
herself, was where she could do the most good. Unless she plunged into the life
of the fae, into love and passion and madness, and no longer cared about doing
the most good.

The thought terrified her, and at the
same time it pulled at her. The pull seemed stronger than the fear.

That was what the goblin was counting
on.
If you still care to.
He’d said it as if it was a taunt.

Her real father grinned at her, a grin
wild with pure delight.

She crossed the marble floor, step by
steady step, and did not flinch as she took his hand. It felt cold and scaly
and very strong. She half-turned, not meaning to, and looked at the king.

Who was standing. Who was being
restrained by one of the sorcerers.

“Why?” he demanded. Speaking to the
goblin. “Why do you want her?”

“Which
her
?” the goblin said, and
laughed. “Because I loved your queen, as you did not. And this one is my
daughter. I love her too.”

It was true, of course; the fae couldn’t
lie. And she could hear the sheer intensity in his voice when he spoke of her
mother, the fierceness of his passion. If the duke of Darmil had spoken to her
like that, would she have considered his offer after all?

Yet the goblin’s love had not kept him
from leaving her mother in a marriage with a man she didn’t want, from
bargaining with her for the fate of her child. The love of a fae would be
possessive and selfish.

Perhaps that was what her mother had
liked about it. Her mother, who had never known love. Alina wondered what it
would be like to be loved that fiercely, wanted that openly.

The king shook off the high sorcerer’s
grip. “Alina,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t. The gold is not important.”

He knew that wasn’t true.

“I’ll still care to,” she assured him,
calmly and surely. She smiled.

Then she turned and took the goblin’s
other hand.

#

Three days after Princess Alina was
kidnapped by the goblin in a spurt of smoke, all the straw in the castle
storage rooms turned back to gold.

Three weeks later, when the king was in
his study examining a map—the map of the border between Ciern and Aimar—the
door opened and the princess walked in, still wearing her heavy violet
betrothal dress.

The king looked up at the first creak
and went very still. He looked older than he had three weeks ago, the wrinkles
around his eyes deeper, his jaw sagging lower. He was silent for a space longer
than he would once have been, before he said, “They let you leave?”

“They couldn’t stop me,” Alina said, “once
I knew their ways.”

A longer silence. Then the king said, in
a voice that sounded even more unsteady by contrast with hers, “And why—why did
you come back? Your mother didn’t want to, once she knew their ways.”

The silence was momentary but vast.
Alina looked at her father, and knew she would never tell him of the time she
had spent in the courts of the fae. Of the overwhelming force of their loves
and passions, so wild and all-consuming that the tales of humans dying for
faerie love made sense to her now. Of the warmth of her mother’s arms,
satisfying a lack she hadn’t known she had.

She would never tell him how close she
had come to staying, once she knew their ways. Until she had come across her
mother’s letter, and opened it, and read it again.

You were nothing.
Not
when her mother had chosen to love one of the fae, or to lie with him, or to
bear his child. Her mother had not loved her then, could not have loved her,
because she didn’t yet exist.

Which was why love, for all its power,
had failed her. It had come too late to make a difference. But
responsibility... responsibility was something you could feel for an unborn child.
For a child not yet conceived. For the possibility of a child.

Or for thousands of people she didn’t
know.

It is always that simple, to choose
love.

But it was the king who had chosen love.
Her mother had simply been swept away by it.

“Their ways are wild and fierce and
free,” Alina said at last, knowing her father wouldn’t understand. “But our
ways are real.”

The king looked at her, his expression
grave. She wondered, suddenly, if he did understand. If he had always known, as
she now knew, what she was giving up and what she was choosing.

“Besides,” Alina said after a moment, “I
wanted to talk to you about Aimar. We will have to find another solution, now
that I won’t be marrying their prince.”

“Aimar,” the king said, after a long
moment, “will be a problem.”

“Perhaps,” Alina said. “I think I know
how we might deal with them.”

The king nodded and moved over. Alina
lifted her hem, stepped over the bench, and sat beside him. She pulled the map
closer.

“I believe,” she said, “that if we build
a bridge over the river here....”

They bent their heads together to take a
closer look, and remained that way for many hours, talking in low tones as the
sky outside the window dimmed into dusk and then deepened into night.

Mahrut’s Road

by
Nathan Crowder

I love to read
stories from non-European traditions. It’s always interesting to view the world
from a different viewpoint, and to see gods created for other ways of life.
Mahrut may be a difficult god to belong to, but life in his service is never
dull.

Currently
living with his cat Shiva in the Bohemian wilds of Seattle’s Greenwood
neighborhood, Nathan Crowder works to create the stories that he would like to
see in the world. Not content in a single genre, his published works span
horror, science fiction, superheroes, clown noir, zombie westerns, urban
sci-fi, and of course fantasy. “Mahrut’s Road” stemmed from his belief that the
landscape of heroic fantasy needed more women heroes and less Euro-centric
world-building. His fondness for curry might have played a pivotal role in this
decision. He has staked out a corner of the internet at www.nathancrowder.com
where he rambles about writing, social justice, pop culture, and fringe candy.
He is also fond of Twitter where he appears as NateCrowder at a 140 characters a
shot.

****

As a child Siri Viraj wanted nothing
more than to welcome the monsoon season with dance, to twirl in the temple
courtyard with flowers in her hair. She would have been a dancer if not for the
will of Mahrut, the Inside-Out God. A fever in her tenth year left the small
but strong girl clinging to life and sent her on a silent journey on the Shadow
Road. Siri finally awoke when the fever passed days later, reborn anew to
unexplained visions and sudden fits of anger. The village elder knew the signs
well. Mahrut, he of the red rage and madness, had staked his claim. Siri had
been marked as one of his chosen.

As soon as she could walk again, the
young girl was sent from her parent’s home to the temple of the Inside-Out God.
She took her oath to Mahrut and trained for years as a priest before being
released into the world for a life of service to the community.

In keeping with the tradition of the
priesthood, Siri traveled Mahrut’s road without clear direction. Less than a
year of service took her far from home. She traveled by foot where possible, by
river when necessary. For the past several months, a dugout canoe had been her
chief means of travel, her twinned maces her only constant companions.

Siri stuck close to the bank whenever
possible, where the currents were less chaotic. Heavy, sweet–smelling blossoms
on laden goma tree boughs brushed her cheek like a baby’s fist as she paddled
down the slow-moving river. Siri lost herself in the sensation. Half-remembered
dreams of dancing possessed her mind until the boat’s wooden hull thudded
against a sunken log.

The unexpected impact jostled the canoe,
but months of practice navigating the swollen river kept her upright and dry.
She shook a finger at the distracting blossoms. “You thought you had me there,
Mahrut. I did not see through your disguise, but Siri Viraj is nimble like a
dancer!”

There was a sudden explosion of movement
from the bushes along the bank, and Siri reached reflexively for the twin maces
at her belt, almost losing the paddle to the river in the process. A child, no
more than five years old, burst from behind the verdant depths of the
undergrowth, and ran downstream. Her small voice shouted, “Hurry! Hurry! A
priest arrives!” Shortly, Siri heard the cries of the child echoed by other,
adult voices.

Once around the river bend, she saw a
small clutch of white, mud-walled huts and a humble, open-walled shrine without
visible adornment. A crowd had gathered to see her approach. Siri watched as
hope faded to grim acceptance once they recognized her colors and spotted the
copper emblem of Mahrut around her neck. A community this size was too small to
accommodate a priest of its own. They had to make do with whatever religious
authority wandered through. Most of the twelve gods had traveling priests of
some kind. With the exception of the temple masters in the City of Stone Faces,
all of Mahrut’s priests were wanderers. The children of the Inside-Out God were
tolerated, revered, held as blessed, but no one wanted them in their towns for
long.

Self-consciously, Siri touched the
medallion against her breast, a head splitting open as a smaller face appeared
within the skull. The people had gathered quickly at the sign of her approach.
Their need for a priest was apparent on dozens of disappointed faces. She
paddled the canoe to shore, and two young men stepped from the crowd to help
drag it onto the pebbled bank.

She pitched her voice to be heard above
the murmur of the few dozen villagers. “Mahrut has guided me here.” It was the
standard greeting of the priesthood. And it was as true a statement as she
could make. No schedule, no conscious plan dictated the route Mahrut’s children
took as they wandered the land. They let madness and rage guide their steps,
trusting their patron to take them where they were needed. “Do you have need of
a priest in this village? I would exchange sacred rites for a few days of food,
and can sleep upon the floor of your shrine, if you permit me.”

Siri tracked the gaze of several
villagers to a tall, balding man with a hawkish nose. As village leaders went,
he was younger than Siri was used to seeing. Few wrinkles and no gray in his
thinning hair marked him as experienced. It made her wonder what hardship might
have befallen the small community to trust their leadership to one so young.
The leader motioned her towards the shrine with a resigned nod. The crowd
parted to let her through.

The life of a traveling priest was not
an easy one. Mahrut rarely led his children to prosperous communities with
their own priesthoods. Siri was accustomed to sparse accommodations, and most
villages she visited maintained little more than a small shrine, open on three
sides to the elements with a central fire pit to keep her warm in the frost
season. This village was no different. She shrugged off her feathered cloak and
left it on the worn stone to serve as her bed for later.

She offered up a quick prayer to the
Inside-Out God, the mantras tumbling off her lips as rote sounds that held more
ritual than meaning. She did not need to raise her voice to be heard. Mahrut
rode within her, nestled in the red-hot rage and madness at her core. She let
the bows and supplications stretch out the sore muscles in her arms and back,
wincing at the tightness. The village leader stayed outside, stoic in the shade
of the shrine’s peaked roof, until Siri was done with her devotions. Once her
final bow was completed, Siri turned and waited with a calm smile.

“A demon has come to our village,” the
elder said. This was not typically a claim one made without evidence. His voice
did not shake with doubt.

“A demon?” Siri reached into a pouch at
her waist and pulled out a handful of spiced seeds. She pondered the
declaration while feeding the seeds onto her mouth one at a time. “Has anyone
seen this demon?”

He shuffled his feet but lost none of
his sincerity. “No. But every night since the new moon, he has entered our
village and stolen a child in their sleep.”

Siri nodded confidently. Her confidence
was not echoed in the village elder. It might be a demon. It could be a man in
the guise of a demon. It could be many things. But in Siri’s eyes, one thing
was certain—this village had convinced itself that it was incapable of solving
the problem on their own. No Justicars traveled this far afield from the City
of Bright Birds, and they had no local clerics. This village would have to make
do with what help they could get. Even if that help came in the form of a
compact, and self-described “delicate little flower” such as herself. Like it
or not, they were stuck with Siri Viraj.

“Have food brought to me just before
sunset,” she decided. “I will slay my hunger, and when this demon of yours
comes, I will slay him as well. Until then, this priest has traveled far today,
and she needs her sleep.”

Without waiting for acknowledgement from
the elder, Siri removed her burnished copper helm, quickly ruffled the sweat
from her short, dark hair. She made a bed for herself on her feathered cloak.
The smooth, twined light maces lay next to her hand, her shoulder crooked to
provide a crude pillow for her head. The village elder crept out of the shrine
as quietly as his sandals would permit, but he needn’t have bothered. The
strange priest had slept in more chaotic places than the center of a small
village. The madness helped. Chaos tended to reign behind her eyes, no matter
what was happening around her. And her body knew it would need sleep for the
task to which she had set herself.

The smell of a simple but spicy curry
coaxed Siri from sleep’s embrace. A young girl, reed thin and no more than eight
summers old, was kneeling at the entrance to the shrine with a bowl of food.
Siri rolled to a sitting position and held out her hand for the steaming bowl.
The crude, clay dish contained a bed of rice covered with a pungent, yellow
curry of bright vegetables and what she assumed to be bits of fish. The bowl
was not much, but this was a poor village. She took what was offered and gave
thanks in return.

The village girl sat on her haunches and
watched Siri eat, silent until the bowl was almost empty. “Are you really a
priest of Mahrut?”

Siri gazed at her visitor of the lip of
the bowl. There was no fear in those young eyes, just a degree of skepticism
that reminded the priest of her own youth. “What is your name? You do have one,
don’t you?”

“Mara,” the girl said, furrowing her
brow. “Are you a real priest?”

“Yes.”

“Does Mahrut talk to you?”

Curious one
, Siri thought.
She wondered what age of children were being taken in the village, wondered if
Mara might be next, wondered if Mara thought the same. “Maybe he’s talking to
me now,” Siri said. She raised her eyebrow at the girl. She finished her meal
and handed the bowl back. “The other children who have been taken—were they
friends of yours?”

“The demon took away my little brother
Kempur two nights ago.”

Ah, that’s it,
Siri
thought.
It is not the madness that attracts this fledgling so much as the
rage
. She should have noticed the clenched fists sooner. The young priest
stood in one, smooth motion, a dancer’s motion. She bent at the waist to
collect her feathered cloak and fastened it around her throat. Siri looked at
the sun, low in the sky above the goma trees. Sunset would be coming soon.
Already long shadows covered much of the village. She tamped the copper helm
with the boiled leather lining down upon her head. The twinned maces were last,
their smooth, tapered heads like slumbering, bronze blossoms. “Two nights ago,
you say? Take me to where you live before the daylight is gone.”

Mara took off at an eager trot and Siri
had to break into a jog to keep up with the little legs. The girl’s family was
near the edge of the village, a few huts from the river’s bank. A wooden sash
hung broken in one window. Siri pointed towards the window with one mace. “Your
brother, Kempur, he was through there?” No sooner than she saw Mara’s nod of
confirmation, Siri was at the window, peering into the dim interior of the
home. She could tell it was a richer family who lived there despite the small
size of the home by the mud walls dividing the interior into a series of smaller
rooms. Two rolled-up sleeping mats and a rattan chest occupied the cramped
space, with a woven blanket covered the passage into what was likely the common
living area. A similar room for the parents was likely on the other side of the
house. Siri took it all in, nodded to herself, turned back to Mara.

“Did you see your brother taken?”

“No.” Mara’s face screwed up in a purple
knot of anger. “I was learning needlework by the fire.”

Siri didn’t waste time trying to comfort
the girl. There was nothing she could say that her parents hadn’t likely
already told her. Anyway, she was not that kind of priest. What could she say?
That it wasn’t her fault? She knew, or should know that already. She couldn’t
tell the child to let go of her anger over what had happened, not when rage and
anger gave Mahrut strength; not when they gave Siri strength. “Sleep soundly
tonight, little one,” she said. “Mahrut will walk the road of dreams with you.”

Night came quickly. The sweet hum of
fiddler beetles gave way to the swoop and flutter of the bats which fed on
them. The white-ruffed nightbirds cooed their mating calls in the rushes, while
a fearful village huddled within their homes. Siri shared the wide branch of a
goma tree with a family of bushy-tailed shrews, blind to their antics as she
watched the river’s edge below her. The soothing sound of the river against the
bank threatened to pull her down into slumber, and she thanked Mahrut for the
foresight of the afternoon’s nap.

It was the sudden stilling of the
nightbirds that alerted Siri. She sat up straighter in her perch, the clarity
of madness empowering her vision as she pierced the darkness along the river.
She caught motion in the rushes, not far beyond the end of the very branch she
sat upon. She stood silently, eyes riveted upon the rustling of the tall reeds
as something long moved through them. Sure hands unhooked the maces from her
belt, leather straps secure around her wrists lest they slip. Either whatever
approached the village from the water hadn’t noticed her, or it didn’t perceive
her as a threat, as it continued on its way unabated. “Mahrut, let your rage be
my rage. Let your madness guide my hand,” she whispered.