“When you please,” I said. “In your own time. Now it’s my time to go and kick Shadry and roar at Marinesha. An innkeeper’s work is never done.” He just blinked—he never knows when I’m joking, never has known. I turned and started away.
He stopped me at the stable door with a single word. “Karsh?” The shock of it was completely physical—not a sound at all, but a touch on your shoulder when you thought no one was there. I cannot remember when he last called me by my name. He said, “There was a song. Someone used to sing me a song. It was about going to Byrnarik Bay, going to play all day on Byrnarik Bay. That’s all I remember of it. I was wondering, do you think—do you think they used to sing that song, my parents?”
There’s a good reason I’m the size I am. Fat softens and soaks up other things besides blows. “Only parents would sing a song like that,” I said. “Must have been them,” and I got myself out of there and went on up the hill to the courtyard. He’ll sing “Byrnarik Bay” to his own brats, soon enough, and always grow damp around the eyes and soft around the chin when he does, and welcome to it. The song’s as idiotic as any of that sort, but it’s the only one I know. I sang it to him all the way through that bandit country where I found him, over and over, all the way home to my country, to The Gaff and Slasher.
LAL
I said, “What? Excuse me? You are going to do what?”
“I have to go back,” Soukyan repeated. “There really is no other choice.”
We were alone in the travelers’ shrine. Soukyan wanted to make a departure prayer, since we would be leaving tomorrow. Until now he had not spoken of his plans, and I had assumed that we might journey pleasantly together as far as Arakli, where many roads meet. Now, carefully fitting the greenish lumps of incense into the two tin burners, he said, “I am tired of running, Lal. I am also getting a bit old for it. If I am not to spend the last years of a short life trying to deal with new teams of assassins as they keep coming after me, then I must return to the place they all come from. The place I come from.”
I said, “That is completely insane. You told me yourself—they don’t forgive, and they won’t rest until you’re dead. You might as well commit suicide right here, where you’re guaranteed a decent burial, and spare yourself the ride.”
Soukyan shook his head slowly. “I don’t want them to forgive me. I want them to stop following me.” He made a quick gesture of blessing over the burners and lit the incense. “I want it done with, that’s all, one way or the other.”
“Oh, it will be done with,” I said. “That it will. I fought one of those people, remember.” Soukyan had his back to me, murmuring inaudibly into the thin fumes that smelled faintly like marsh water. I was furious. I said, “So you’ll fight them all at once and get it done with indeed. A hero’s death, no doubt of it. I would have let you drown if I’d known.”
Soukyan laughed then. His laugh is a private laugh, even when shared: there is always something kept aside. “Did I say I was going to fight them all? Did I? I thought you knew me better than that, Lal.” He turned to face me. “I have a plan. I even have an ally or two back there, and some old sleights and confidences to bargain with. Believe me, I will be as safe as I was with you on the river.” He put his hands on my shoulders, adding quietly, “Though not as happy. Likely, never again.”
“Stupidity,” I said. “I cannot abide stupidity.” I sounded like Karsh. I had never been so angry with him, not even when I discovered his deception, and I was angrier because I had no possible right to be angry. I said, “What plan? Let me hear this wonderful plan.”
He shook his head again. “Later, maybe. It’s far too long a story.”
“Everything is a long story,” I said. I felt very tired, suddenly not the slightest bit ready for any new adventures, any voyages anywhere. I put his hands away and moved restlessly around the little windowless room. It was designed and appointed more or less like any travelers’ shrine in this half of the world: always white, always freshly painted (there is a law, and even Karsh apparently heeds it), always provided with the ritual cloths and candles and statues of a dozen major religions. They vary somewhat, depending on the region, but the one in which I was raised is never among them. Mostly I find that just as well, but not then.
Behind me Soukyan said, “Lal, it has nothing to do with you. This is my life, my past, my own small destiny. I am finished with waiting for it to bring me to bay one more time. I will go and meet it, for a change—and not in a bathhouse or on a river shore, but on a field of my choosing. There’s really no more to be said.”
Nor was there, for some while. He commenced a cumbersome process of passing his bow, sword, and dagger back and forth through the two tiny threads of incense, muttering to himself as he did so. I went outside and sat in the dry grass, chewing weeds viciously and watching a flock of tourik birds mob a snow-hawk that had ventured too close to their nests. Then I came back into the shrine, though you’re not supposed to reenter after leaving a ceremony. Soukyan was kneeling, head bowed, weapons arranged just so before him. I said, “You can’t cross the Barrens in winter.”
Without looking up, he answered, “I know that. I will make for the coast and turn south at Leishai. A longer road, but a safer one, for some way at least.” When the last of the incense had smoldered away, he rose stiffly to his feet, making a final obeisance to nothing. He said, “And you?”
I shrugged. “Arakli, I suppose. I have wintered there before.” The marshy incense-smell still lingered in my nostrils, irritatingly heavy with memories that were not even mine. Soukyan said, “And after Arakli?” I did not answer him. He said, “Come, I’ve told you my destination. It would comfort me much to know where you are.”
“I am Lal,” I said. “That is where I am.” Soukyan looked at me for a moment longer, then nodded and strode to the shrine door. When he opened it, we both heard Lukassa laughing nearby, a sound neither of us had ever imagined hearing: it went by us like a breeze in the grass. Soukyan held the door, but I said, “I will stay here for a little,” and turned back toward the white chests full of other peoples’ gods.
ROSSETH
I rode with them as far as the turning where I had first seen them, by Marinesha’s bee tree. Not clinging behind Lal this time, but on Karsh’s old white Tunzi, who clearly felt very important to be part of such a procession. The wizard led the way, mounted on a tall sorrel stallion that had simply appeared in the stables the night before, calmly munching oats and barley with the guests’ beasts as though it had every right to be there. Tikat and Lukassa rode beside him on the two little goat-eyed Mildasi horses, and I rode in the rear between Lal and Soukyan. I must always remember it just as it was, because I never saw any of them again.
It was a cool, windy dawn, and leaves dead too soon were rattling across the path, hundreds at a gust. With the end of the terrible summer of the magicians, autumn seemed to be rushing in too fast, reaping the dry sticks in the fields, stripping the trees of the scabby brown lumps that the birds wouldn’t eat. It saddened me to see it then, because I felt that my life was being stripped of companionship and excitement and dreams in the same way. Soukyan read it in my face, surely, for he leaned from his saddle to put his hand on my neck, as he had before. Once we had passed out of sight of the inn, he had let his woman’s guise rise from him like mist, dissolving in the morning sun. His gray-brown hair was growing out, the harsh convent cut fading as well, but the twilight eyes and the reluctantly gentle mouth were still Nyateneri’s.
“Nature always likes to clear away and start over,” he said. “Mark me, next spring will be richer than anyone has seen for years. You’ll never be able to tell that a couple of wizards fought a war here.”
“No, I won’t,” I answered, “because I won’t be here next spring.” Lal put her arm around me, and I breathed in her smell of great distances and strange, warm stars. She said, “So many lovely things burned without having a chance to ripen. Be sure that this does not happen to you.” Her hand brushed Soukyan’s hand then, and she pulled it away sharply, covering the movement by ruffling my hair. She began to sing softly in that half-talking, rise-and-roll-and-fall way of hers. I inhaled that, too, as I did Soukyan’s exasperated sigh and Tikat’s quiet, almost invisible attentiveness to both the old man and Lukassa. I wanted to move up beside him and say a proper farewell, because we had been friends, but he was already gone from my world, as surely and finally as the wizard Arshadin was gone.
Oh, it was never so short a ride to the tree and the spring and the bend in the road as it was that day. Nothing I could do or say or think about could make it last any longer. All that was left was to concentrate on remembering everything: the blowing leaves, a scuttling shukri that hunched and spat at us by the roadside, the sudden cross-currents of cold air down from the mountains, the colors of the six ribbons in the old wizard’s beard. Lal’s song, the flickering loose end of Lukassa’s white headscarf, Tunzi’s constant farting which embarrassed me so. And I did remember it all, and I fall asleep to it still.
You can’t see it until you round the turn, but just beyond the path divides, one fork skirting the mountains toward Arakli, the other slanting eastward to meet the main road that runs to Derridow, Leishai, and the sea. The wizard drew rein at the bee tree and wheeled his horse to face the rest of us. Fragile even now, to my view—I know Soukyan thought he would never be truly strong again—nevertheless he held himself as straight in the saddle as Tikat, and the green eyes were as eager as though everything, everything, good and bad, were waiting to happen for the first time. People of my age are supposed to feel like that, but I certainly didn’t, not that morning. I felt as if everything were over.
“We part here,” he announced. “We shall not meet again.” Somehow he made it sound joyous—hopeful, even—but I could never explain it now. He said, “Tikat and Lukassa and I will travel west together. It seems to me that I have a house somewhere near Fors na’Shachim, or perhaps I mean Karakosk. Wizards’ houses tend to move around as much as wizards, but I am sure we shall encounter it sooner or later, and it will know me if I have forgotten.” He turned to Lal and Soukyan. “And you two, who have all the gratitude of a foolish, vain old man whom you have long outgrown? Where shall I think of you after today?”
Lal did not answer. Soukyan said, “I have a journey south to make. It will be hard, and I shall need your thoughts. As much as ever, I shall need them.”
“Nonsense,” the wizard said, but he looked pleased all the same. “Very well. But it will be more practical for you to mind your manners, stay off the Queen’s Road after Bitava, and give up any notion of the secret stair. It is guarded since your time—they will not make that mistake again.” Soukyan nodded. The wizard made a small gesture that might have been a blessing, or not. He said to Lal, “And you, chamata?”
When she spoke it was not to him but to Soukyan, low enough that she might have been talking to herself. She said, “If you are going by way of Leishai, I might ride that far with you. I have been too long away from ships— no wonder I cannot think clearly. I need to be on a ship.”
Soukyan put his hand over hers. He said, “I will see you aboard.” He had drawn breath to say something more, when the fox followed its black nose and glowing eyes out of his saddlebag, as it had done on that afternoon in early spring. Soukyan spoke to it, saying, “Ah, so you have chosen Lukassa. I thought you might.” To Lukassa he said, “He is not mine to keep or to give you—he goes where he will, always.” He stroked the fox’s neck once, briefly, and said into a pointed ear, “Go, then, companion.”
But Lukassa laughed and shook her head, riding close to look into the fox’s eyes. “Come with me and the wizard as well? Not likely, is it? Not you.” She took the sharp muzzle between her hands, bending down to whisper something I could not hear. Then she kissed it quickly, just below the mask, and the fox yelped indignantly and ducked down out of sight. Lukassa said quietly, “He only wanted to say goodbye.”
And after that it is all goodbyes, happening all around me, happening too fast. Tikat shakes my hand, suddenly shy, mumbling something about the little brother he lost to the plague-wind. Lukassa kisses me as she did the fox, with a sweet clumsiness, and what she remembers or does not remember I will never know. Lal kisses me differently, saying, “Wherever you are, whatever happens to you, somebody loves you.” Soukyan takes a silver medallion from his neck—this one, see—and puts it around mine. “It is worth very little and has absolutely no magical powers, but it will at least buy you a meal somewhere—or make you a friend, if someone should recognize it.” The medallion has an eight-angled figure on one side, and raised lettering that I cannot read on the other.
When I protest, “But I have nothing to give you,” Soukyan smiles and fetches something out of a pouch at his belt. It takes me a moment to understand—then I recognize the shabby cloth spattered with rust-brown stains. Soukyan says gently, “Do you think that many people have shed their blood in my defense? I treasure this as much as anything I own.” And he kissed me, too, so there were my three.
As for the wizard, he said, almost absently, “Tell Marinesha that her kindness is not forgotten. Farewell, farewell.” He was plainly anxious to be off, and had already turned his horse again when Lukassa remembered to give her emerald ring back to Lal. Lal hesitated, looking at the ring with some longing, and then handed it over to the wizard. He shoved it unceremoniously into a pocket and touched his heels to his horse’s sides. The stallion leaped away immediately, and Tikat and Lukassa followed without a backward glance. But as they rounded the bend, the old man turned in his saddle and called loudly to me, “Your name is Vand! Remember us, Vand!”
So then there were only Lal and Soukyan and me, and my true name. Soukyan said, “A good thing he thought of it in time. His memory for such things is completely gone.”
But Lal answered, “No, that’s always been his way. Pure strolling player, to the last.” And after that there was nothing left to say, and they bade me a last goodbye and trotted away, already arguing. Both of them looked back before they passed out of sight, but it was hard to see them clearly.
Tunzi did not at all want to return to the inn. He whinnied and surged under me trying to follow the others; when I tugged on the reins to bring his head around, he danced lumbering caracoles on the path, even rearing once, which was exhausting for both of us. He turned reluctantly, just the same, and slouched along home at a disgraceful pace—I could have done as well walking and leading him. But I was crying then, and it took longer than I had thought it would, so that was as well, I suppose.
Karsh met me at the crossroad, which was nearly as astonishing as Tunzi’s insurrection. He was walking slowly when I saw him, but his voice sounded as though he had been running not long before. “I thought you might have gone with them, after all. Last-minute sort of thing.”
“I will tell you when I go,” I said. Karsh nodded and took hold of Tunzi’s bridle, but the horse snorted and pulled away, still trying to turn back. I said, “But he would have gone, and gladly too. I’ve never seen him like this in my life.”
