Tarin patted Voran on the head as though Voran were a sick dog. His expression was the kind reserved for children who insist to their parents that their imaginary unicorn friend is real.

The next day after that—the fourth day after their arrival—Tarin didn’t bother Voran at all. That worried Voran more than any of the other nonsense. He approached Tarin’s hut, fearing that he had forgotten something, and that he would be punished with another round of tiring absurdity. Falling on his knees before the door, he spoke through cracked lips, “My lord. I, who am wretched, beg leave to enter.”

“You may enter.” Tarin’s face showed only composed calm. “Raven Son, did I not make myself clear to you? Why did you put all the stones in a heap? What a waste of time. Did you not understand that you had to plant them all and water them?”

That’s it. The old goat’s gone crazy.

“Raven Son,” said Tarin with a face that suggested that the half-wit he was speaking to may have dangerous tendencies. “Do I have to use a stick on you, or will you do as you are told?”

Voran went. Though he was starved and every muscle in his body shuddered with overwork, he did as he was told. The sun rose, bathing even the lifeless tract around him with unexpected colors—hazy purples, dark reds, and oranges in the field, blue tones in the bark of the trees.

Voran had been wrong about this place. It was beautiful here.

As he worked, a compulsion to sing tickled at him. Soon he could hold it back no longer. He bellowed all the old sowing songs that his third-reacher education had given him. As he did, he understood them perhaps for the first time in his life. How he wished, at that moment, that he had become friends with Siloán the potter earlier. His first-reacher sowing songs must be even better.

The earth itself seemed to respond to his song, seeming more willing to accept even such lifeless seeds as he was offering it. He began to notice birdsong, tentative at first, then stronger as he worked. Somewhere very far away, he heard the music of wind whistling through reeds. Lyna was close, though still she could not approach him, it seemed.

As Voran worked, a calm seemed to rise up from the earth and hug him. He laughed.

He thought he finally understood what Tarin was doing. It was probably a trial that every young Warrior of the Word had to undergo at the early stages of training. A kind of breaking down of the self, so that the master could rebuild the student in his own image. A true warrior. Voran realized, with something like surprise, that he actually wanted Tarin to continue the nonsense. He’d never felt more free, more truly himself, in his life.

“Lyna, wait for me,” Voran said to himself. “Sabíana, don’t forget me. I will come back, and whatever the cost, I will bring back Living Water.”

Eventually, Voran planted all the stones at equal intervals and watered them from a moldy bucket that threatened to fall apart at any moment.

After he finished, Voran walked on stiff legs toward the staff in the middle of their small court of huts. No longer thinking lightly of the absurd task, he diligently watered the “tree,” leaving no spot of earth dry. So intent was he on his work, that he didn’t notice Tarin standing behind him until he spoke.

“Voran, you may rest now.” Tarin’s eyes, full of tears, glimmered in the morning sun.

“Thank you, my lord, for a most interesting few days,” whispered Voran, hardly able to keep his eyes open as he half-walked, half-dragged himself to his dirty straw pallet, which for one night at least was the most luxurious bed of his life.

Do you never wonder about the power of the earth? Earthquakes, avalanches, lightning strikes, deluges…It is great indeed, is it not? But do not think it is accidental. There is a race of beings that manipulates the power of the earth. And they want to be worshiped.

From “The Wisdom of Lassar the Blessed”

(The Sayings: Book I, 7:4-6)

Chapter 26

Contagion

Even in winter, life on Ghavan was loud. For Mirnían, it began with the morning bell, whose tongue he could feel beating the inside of his right temple. Lebía never heard it, but in her condition, it was entirely natural—or so he was told—to sleep through anything until ungodly hours of late morning. Then the storm-shutters slapped open, one after the other, as goodwives and their daughters and daughters-in-law traded the latest gossip from house to house. How they could have gathered so much information in the dead of night, Mirnían had no idea. Nor did he particularly wish to find out. Then the call to prayer, nearly as insistent as the morning bell. Then the endless chatter of men and women at work around the village, which was too small to provide any modicum of peace or privacy.

After a month of married life, Mirnían had found that there was really only one place where he could be comfortably alone. This morning, as Lebía lay next to him, one hand instinctively protecting her belly, the other thrown across her eyes in a position Mirnían found uncomfortable even to look at, he felt an especial need of that place.

It was the work of a few minutes to dress and be out of doors. Luckily, not many of the villagers were up yet this morning, so the going was quiet. He gritted his teeth as he passed the house of the baker and his wife—she was always very solicitous about Lebía’s health, and the word-for-word repetition of their daily conversation grated beyond endurance—but they were either busy or sleeping in. As soon as he passed, he rushed along an uphill path, then down an incline to the rocky beach. Every step on the old snow crunched. He was sure that someone would accost him with yet another pointless conversation. But no. Before he knew it, he was in the thickest part of a pine grove.

The pines leaned down a little over his head, as if bowing in greeting. He didn’t mind the noise they made—as opposed to the women in the village—though here the trees were a little too quiet. Most of all he preferred the noise of the sea, its gentle and constant complaint about something so old it had long forgotten what it was.

Finally, the deaf stillness of the forest gave way to the suggestion, then the echo, then the sea itself—slate-grey near the beach, then deepening to black farther out. He had never imagined water could look so black. There was a mystery and a beauty to it, one he never thought he would appreciate in a color always associated with the darkness in stories. He sat on his knees on the last stone before the water. The water tried to reach him, but lazily, as if it never got enough sleep, despite the endless nights of winter. He agreed with the water, once again wondering how it was possible to constantly want more sleep in a season when ten hours a night was not considered over-much.

Such trifling half-thoughts took up all his time at the sea, doing what they were supposed to. Everything would fade into the soft complaints of the sea and his mind—the disaster of Vasyllia, the unhappiness of Sabíana, the death of Dar Antomír, the fear that gnawed at him as Lebía’s paleness daily tried to match the new-fallen snow for whiteness. She was transformed by what she carried within her. The mystery was too deep for him to fathom, and more often than not he felt isolated from that almost sacred reality of the child inside her.

There goes the bell again, he mused as the sound reached him like the sun through a heavy fog. He continued to stare over the water, hoping to glimpse a rare otter, or even a pair of them entwined by their paws, as they did for hours, even as they slept. The ringing continued, still a haze in his mind, until he snapped to attention, like falling out of a dream. That was not merely a bell. Its insistence, it regularity, its color—that was an alarm.

Lebía lay on the floor of the bakery, covered with blankets up to her chin, though her right hand lay atop the covers. It was so pale, it was nearly blue. Her lips were blue, and the skin around her eyes was splotchy, though that could have been the light of the fire in the oven. But it was not all this that poured terror like ice water down Mirnían’s throat, but the complete lack of expression on her face. She looked dead.

“…knew something like this would happen, I did.” The baker’s wife had been chattering on for minutes now, but he heard little until that moment. “Weak blood. Nothing to worry yourself about too much, my dear boy. Now, mind you, I don’t think we have enough stores of game to toughen her blood back up.”

“What? What are you saying?” Mirnían croaked, his throat dry and gummy.

The baker’s wife was a round woman just the far side of middle-aged, though her skin was smooth and her quick smile showed the lasting vestiges of a former beauty, of a sort. Bits of grey-flecked hair kept getting entangled in her temple rings. She seemed ashamed of it, and would retie the scarf every few minutes, no matter what the conversation.

“And you, a future Dar? Silly. It’s normal when a woman expects a baby. The baby takes all of mother’s best blood. Lebía should be all right, my boy. If we can find enough meat, that is.”

Mirnían was confused by the constant talk of meat and blood. He was sure that Lebía was in the first stages of leprosy, but he didn’t dare speak it aloud.

I’ve done it, he thought. Everything I touch gets infected and dies.

“There isn’t enough meat for her in the village,” said the baker, who was a passable leech as well, though where a Vasylli first-reacher would learn such things, Mirnían couldn’t imagine. They were still talking about meat, to Mirnían’s annoyance, but the repetition of the theme began to suggest to his limping mind that perhaps it was important.

“Is that all it is?” he asked, incredulous. “She needs more meat?”

“I see no other reason for concern,” said the baker’s wife. “She has been overworking herself, yes, but now it seems the baby and her body will force her to rest and sleep. It is well that she lives here, not in some mountain city where no one cares for anyone else.” She harrumphed. “The entire village will take care of our swanling.”

He had no doubt they would, and it relieved him. But something else—a thought, or the beginnings of a thought—added excitement to the relief, something that he almost felt guilty about.

“Matron,” he said to the baker’s wife, “will you be kind enough to take charge of Lebía’s care for a day or two? I have determined to go hunting.”

“But there is no meat to be had on the island. Not after all that feasting,” protested the baker.

“I know,” he said, hoping the excitement now flaring inside him like the fire-light over the mountains would not show in his face. “I intend to try the mainland.”

Mirnían had come so close with a few of the arrows, but the deer escaped him. One of the arrows even had the slightest dab of red gore, tipped with a fluff of downy fur. Always at the last possible moment, it ran, as though it were prescient. A few times Mirnían nearly screamed in frustration, but he must not. No need to scare anything that might not have caught scent of him yet. Though he had been hunting for three days, enough of his original excitement remained to keep him going forward at full-tilt.

It was not merely deer he was after. Seeing Lebía in that state, pale as death, finally suggested to him a horrible truth—if he was still marked by leprosy, however latent, he was a threat to her and to their child. He needed to find healing. He needed to finish the quest for the Living Water, and quickly. How, he had no idea. But a strange kind of sureness was on him; a buzzing excitement that suggested the possibility of merely crossing the next ridge and finding another waystone, this one with a much more helpful direction. In the meantime, he hunted in vain.

He didn’t know the part of the world where he hunted. The trees were mossier, somehow more sinister and older than at home or on the island. Even the sounds were foreign. The trees creaked in the wrong tune, the needles of the conifers were the wrong length and far too sharp, the smells were old and dank, as though the trees didn’t breathe in this part of the world. Then a creeping certainty—he was being watched—tickled at the back of his neck and needled at the pit of his stomach. Shadows became hidden beasts waiting for the pounce.

Something immensely bright flew over his head and landed in the forest ahead. It was round and burning, like a sun fallen from the sky. He couldn’t hear the force of impact, but then he noticed that sound itself seemed to cease. He drew his sword and crouched forward, half-crawling, using his other hand to find the quietest path. Smoke filtered through the trees, but it did not burn his eyes. It was pungent, like the scented resin burned in the Temple, and it seemed to contain flashes of light, like small bolts of lightning, within it.

Mirnían saw that an entire section of forest had been annihilated, though there was no fire except for a few smoldering logs at the edge of the cleared circle. In the middle stood a monolith of stone, or at least so it seemed at first. Then the smoke cleared enough for a full moon to shine milky-blue, illuminating not a stone, but a giant warrior.

He was the height of a tree, the width of a house. His mail was golden-red, reaching down to his knees. His helmet was peaked and open-faced; its horsehair flowed down to mingle with his own hair like molten gold. The ear-covers were gilt serpents of iron that seemed ready to burst out of the iron and bite the giant’s neck. His eyes glowed, and his features were smooth like marble and beautiful like an iceberg. He held a tear-drop shield bearing the same twisting serpent as on his helmet, and the sword in his right hand was taller than a full-grown man. Flames of dark red played around his body, and Mirnían was reminded of the circle of fire around the darkened sun he had seen in Vasyllia, what seemed so many years ago.