A memory of war and sola.., p.2
A Memory of War and Solace, page 2
But their eyes were the same. Lively and sharp, with a tension that spoke of a deep hidden well of emotion held in reserve, never to be shared.
That I was now taller than them was disorienting. They were like a visitation from a past life. A ghost of my childhood. Haunted woods indeed.
“You didn’t come on me by chance,” I prompted.
When they spoke, their voice had the same reedy timbre I remembered. Almost fragile. “I nearly didn’t come here at all. Your Warding of this place is impressive. I think I tasted the style of Old Jae, no?”
I sighed. “Yes, I stumbled upon Jae, and they taught me their way of Warding. Will you tell me why?”
“No one ‘stumbles upon’ Jae Anten,” Sem said, their face blank. They didn’t pursue the issue yet, predictably opening a different front. “When I was scouting your boundary I watched a trio of rough-looking men walk a wide circle—I don’t doubt they went dozens of miles out of their way to avoid that little collection of huts and barns on the hill up north. Despite the swords on their hips and their fingers itching to use them, they didn’t even seem to realize what they were doing. Do they know what you do for them, this village?”
“They don’t have any need to know.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because I can. Because they deserve whatever peace they can have. Their children deserve to grow up without fear of brigands and highwaymen.”
“And because it gives you a place into which you can disappear?”
I turned away from them. “I suppose it will be dark before you answer my question. I’m afraid you’ll have to accept a meager dinner. I was not planning on guests.”
Dinner was a cold mash I had left soaking before my Warding walk, flavored with some chopped bits of wrinkled apple, the last of a rind of hard yellow cheese made from sheep milk, and a heel of bread. Split two ways, it was enough, but only just.
The complication was that I only had bowl and mug for one. Sem pulled their travel bowl and a tin cup from their pack. We ate in silence for a long time, washing the meal down with cold water dipped from a stone cistern fed from a nearby spring.
Years of solitude makes one comfortable with silence, even in company. I had asked my question, and I could wait as long as necessary for the answer. Sem had never been talkative, but I had confidence that I could outlast them.
“Why did you leave Reft?” they asked, finally breaking the silence.
I closed my eyes, feeling the pain of loss roiling in my heart anew. There was an easy answer that I knew would not satisfy them. There was a more difficult answer that I knew I couldn’t articulate. There was no answer at all, and no language existed to even frame the thoughts.
“You know what I did,” I said quietly.
Sem grunted. “You think you’re the first to lash out in rage and violence at someone who caused such pain? You don’t think those in Reft would have forgiven you?”
I shook my head. How could I explain? That I feared that response in myself. That I had within me the same violent and selfish potential that Eelie had.
“Everyone who knew Eelie saw in them the rot that chewed away at their being. The void that swirled where their moral center should be. Those same people were ready to forgive me.” I shook my head. “Is it up to me to take a life? To kill in retribution for violence I suffered? I knew it was wrong, knew it was hate and malice and rage, and I did it anyway. If I let them forgive me, if I allowed them to let me back into their society carrying that within me… Then I become the rot eating away at the center of Reft.”
Sem sighed. “So, what then? You disappear into the wilds? Take everything good that you learned, every good thing that you’ve become and… take it out of the world? How does that serve anyone?”
I shrugged. “I serve Evans Hill well enough. The families go unmolested by robbers. Babes are born hale and with little pain. Sickness rarely troubles them. When the seasonal peddlers come they forget their plans to cheat the poor farmers.”
“You sit here like a spider in your web, playing games with your little pets.”
I flinched back as if slapped.
“What do you think will happen to your precious village in fifty years or so when you begin to be too old to walk your perimeter; when you begin to wither and death stalks you? Or when your isolation drives you as mad as Old Honfry and your mind turns childlike and mercurial?”
I turned away, but they continued, pressing their point. “Do you think they’ll thank you on that day when sickness returns and they have forgotten their own herbalism? When brigands discover that a town exists where they never thought to look, and the villagers have forgotten how to protect themselves?”
“What would you have me do?” I whispered.
“Rejoin the world. Go back to Reft. Or if that’s too much civilization and luxury—if you need hardship, doubtful comforts, and miserable weather to help you flog your guilty conscience, you can come with me. There are people—children—out there who really do need your help.” Their gaze went absent for a moment, and their voice vague. “There’s something brewing out in the world, and I don’t like the stench of it.”
I stood from the table and moved to take the satchel and my cloak from the peg and stick from the corner, pulling the door open. I stepped out into the darkening forest. The last light of the evening filtered through the dense canopy, making a mosaic of greens, browns, and yellows on the littered ground.
The smell of the forest was rich and evocative. Loam and leaf mold and green life. Some small animal scratched through the brush somewhere in the distance and birds called to each other from the branches above. I held my breath for a few moments and could just hear the gurgle of the spring.
I moved to the crumbling stone outcrop beside the door and sat. Sem came out beside me, taking in the shadows and scents of the living forest. For a time we simply breathed it in.
“When you Reshaped your body,” they asked, “why didn’t you remove the scar?”
Leave it to Sem to ask an intrusive question, apropos of nothing.
“Why have you never done a Reshaping for yourself?” I asked. How to explain that the scar on my face was part of me in a way that mere breasts had never been? I’d lived with it so long that I would hardly know the feel of my own face without it—the slight tension on my cheek when I smiled; the rippled texture I felt against my teeth when I moved my jaw. It was a constant physical reminder that I was myself.
Sem looked deeply into the distant labyrinth of trees for several moments, silent.
“There is a well of pain I have never felt the need to tap,” they said finally. “It is a… comfort… to know it’s there.”
My eyes widened. I was not expecting an answer. The Sem I had known years ago would not have answered such an intimate question so bluntly put. It seemed we had both changed in the time since last we traveled together.
As if they could read my thoughts, they pressed. “Whatever you were when I found you in that brothel, you became something more in Reft. Not something else; something more. Deny it all you like. Hide it in the ends of the earth or bury it in this grave in the middle of your haunted forest. The seeds of that violence you survived as a child are in you and always will be. In Reft, you learned to tend those seeds and grow something nourishing from them.”
They turned to look to the north. “Now you’ve come here and taken your skills and power—power that could change the world—and you’ve used it to make… an ornamental garden. Some pretty little stand of flowers for the birds to play in. It’s lovely. Never mind that outside the boundaries of your little paradise the ground is littered with corpses you might have fed.”
They shook their head. “I expected more from you, Arin.”
I was shocked and hurt at the anger in their voice. I stood up. “Who are you to come here and tell me that I’m running away from who I am; that I owe anyone anything? Why are you not still training the Watch? Why are you not still living in Reft? Maybe if you had been there—if you had stayed with me instead of handing me off like a sack of beans—” I turned away from them, unwilling to finish the thought aloud. “Stay the night, if you like. You can take the bed—I don’t sleep much these days.” I settled the cloak over my shoulders, and strode out into the forest twilight.
Between my bare feet and the soft, damp leaf litter soil of the forest, I was silent as a ghost as I walked through the descending darkness. Cicadas and crickets began their evening music. The frenzied buzzing and cheerful chirps filled the night air. Before long I reached a wide glade where the canopy opened out into an irregular perimeter revealing the darkening sky.
Near the edge, a pair of mules were grazing, leather hobbles preventing them from wandering far. I smiled at seeing the sorrel and clucked twice, the signal she had been trained to. Beatrice lifted her head and shuffled closer. I pulled the apples from my satchel and held one out to her. She took it from my hand with a dextrous curl of lip. I rubbed her forehead and scratched her cheek.
“Hey there old friend,” I said softly.
Not to be left out, the gray mulled over and nudged my shoulder. Sem had never named the animal that I knew. The other apple disappeared just as readily from my hand. After a few moments of hopeful prodding, they both dismissed me and began their grazing again.
I stroked both mules’ flanks and murmured nonsense to them as I scanned the sky. Darkness was settling heavy over the forest and the stars were coming out in the clear night. I let myself go still for a long while, letting the sounds and smells of the wood wash over and through me.
Sem’s words churned in my gut. Of course, I could not deny the truth of them. I had run away from the world, and we both knew it. I was hiding—hiding myself; hiding from myself.
But… a spider in a web? Was what I had done so despicable? I had spoken the truth: My Wardings kept the village and local families safe. On my occasional trips into town for supplies I listened for news of illnesses and upcoming births and saw to both where I could to ensure good health throughout Evans Hill. My monthly walks on the Warding line meant that some of its power clung to me—I was rarely remembered within its circle, even by those who spoke to me.
I moved through the wood like a shade, still lost in my thoughts. I paused here and there to examine a troop of mushrooms or a sprig of herbs. Some of these went into my satchel, others I left to mature longer before picking.
A glistening silvery trail of slime caught my eye, sparkling in the dappled moonlight that filtered through the trees. I stopped to watch a snail skate its way slowly across a flat stone as large as my leg.
The problem—the deep flaw in what I was doing here that Sem had seen immediately—was clear and simple now that they had spoken it. I had taken on the lives of Evans Hill, taken responsibility for them, and I had done it without their consent. I had diminished the choices of an entire village without consulting them, taking their very ability to choose out of their hands. And they didn’t even know it.
I sighed to myself, continuing on my evening ramble. A vixen cried somewhere to the south. Its howls were eerily human, sounding like a woman screaming for her life.
Of course, had they known—had I offered, certainly they would have refused. Refused and likely chased me out with violence despite the cost to themselves. It was not only in Meers that the name “witch” was an epithet.
My wanderings led me down a hill into a crowded dell, where the trees were thinner, but the forest floor more varied. The soil here was rockier and the leaves lay sparsely on the ground. A low fog clung to the earth and swallowed the sounds of the wood. Shadows lurked around me as I moved through it, resolving into low stone plinths that marked ancient barrows.
I could feel the age of this place, a weight that hung heavily on my shoulders. If there was any kernel of truth to the legends of hauntings in this wood, certainly these graves were it. I had spent days examining the markers when I first came here, trying to determine their history. They bore the remnants of engravings, but so little had survived the centuries of erosion that even the nature of those marks was lost. Were they names? Dates? Prayers? Chan might know.
I remembered my tall, willowy friend who was so enamored of language that they learned even the long-dead precursors to what we thought of today as Freelander and Somiri. Thinking of them inevitably took my thoughts to Migs, to Kari and Fanti, and all the others I had left behind in Reft without any word or gesture of goodbye.
I sat down on a broad stone beside one of the markers. More than a thousand years ago, it might have been a bench placed near a loved one’s burial mound so that family could sit as they visited their departed kin. It was half buried and spiderwebbed with cracks—now occupied by weeds and moss.
The fox cried again, and in the chill it was easy to imagine this place teeming with ghosts. Someone had built these barrows, mounding stone and earth to make monuments to the dead. Perhaps some of these graves held those very someones, their own tombs raised by yet more hands, testament to their respect and visions of some future that may or may not have ever been found.
I peered around the dell, my eyes finding dozens of markers in the mist. Each one held a life, a story. But whatever their stories, they had been lost to the inexorable tread of time. Not for the last time, I wondered what it said of me that I found immense comfort in this place. That it existed at all, that those long-ago people had found some kind of peace in an orderly interment of their dead.
I knew the motivation that had driven me to settle here, to take on the village of Evans Hill and shepherd its people in their lives. The need to feel a part of something, even if it was illusory. I could pretend I knew the people of the village and was involved in their lives, and at the same time not risk actually living in their society.
I leaned back and rested my head against the marker. In reality, this was my society. The long-dead, who could neither speak nor feel nor reject me. I closed my eyes and felt the fog close around me like an embrace.
TWO
The next morning, I returned to my home to find Sem gone, either earlier than the sun which was only just lightening the sky, or the previous night after I had walked off into the wood. The only sign they had been there was a scrap of paper on the table, weighed down by a handful of silver pennies. I moved the stack of coins and lifted the paper to read the words penned in a surprisingly elegant hand: “Walking west. Took some food.” Nothing more.
I sighed aloud and shook my head. A quick scan of my larder showed me that Sem had taken enough that I now needed a trip into Evans Hill if I was to eat tonight. I pocketed the coins and strode back into the wood, grabbing my walking stick as I passed the door. I hadn’t even shed my cloak or dropped my bag yet.
If I left now, I could reach the village by just after mid-day, walking fast. Under the arched boughs of the trees I pushed hard, moving as quickly as I could. When I broke out of the wood into the rolling hills the sun was only a hand or so above the eastern horizon, the hills taking on an orange glow over the tops of grasses waving in the morning breeze.
My route curved easterly to avoid the bulk of the Borwith farm, the southernmost of the outlying farmsteads. By now, they would be out in the fields and I had no wish to test my Warding this far from the center and off the line itself. Further into the center of the circle, the power was strong enough to shield me from close observation. Near the edge… I wasn’t so sure.
As the sun rose steadily, the day warmed and burned off the morning dew and my bare feet became caked in dust. Despite the rising heat, I kept the hood of my cloak up, shadowing my face and making me even more anonymous to any passerby.
The village of Evans Hill was spread out in a semi-circle at the base of the rolling rise that was the source of its name. The road was an unpaved dirt path, and the houses were a mixture of river stone foundations and timber, much like the buildings I remembered from my childhood. The roofs were red clay tile instead of thatch, but otherwise any house here might have been the one I grew up in.
There was no grocer or chandler in Evans Hill, and it was days yet before the harvest market—a small affair that spread out on the common green for villagers and farmers to trade their goods. But there was a public house where villagers could share pints of ale after the day’s hard work. The owner kept a room to let to traveling peddlers, and not knowing when they would come, kept a larder stocked with enough food to offer.
I walked around to the kitchen door—under a lean-to shed attached to the rear wall of the house—and knocked three times. And waited.
Some minutes passed before I heard steps and the door opened. The owner’s wife and cook for the house stood within, one hand holding a large wooden spoon, the other clutching a towel and planted firmly on hip. Pinala was short and plump, brown hair going gray at the temples and plaited in a long braid over her shoulder. She tried to see me, her face going vague and perplexed as her stare warred between the shadow under my cowl and the dusty path behind me.
This confusion was one effect of the Warding line I walked. Even those who saw me didn’t see me.
“Excuse me for interrupting. May I bother you for some onions, lentils, and grain?” I held out three of the silver pennies that Sem had left me, more than enough for what I asked.
At my voice, she seemed to startle and her eyes went to the glint of coin in my palm. There, they could focus, and she gave herself a little shake.
“Oh, aye. Come in, come in. Sun’s getting powerful hot these days, no sense you standing out in the heat, ‘specially you in that old cloak…” she seemed to hunt for a name, something familiar to hang on the idea of me in her mind that she couldn’t quite pin down.
