Deep magic second coll.., p.51
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 51
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
“... we wish the wind to hear our prayer ...”
Those faithful to the wind people didn’t have churches anymore. The buildings were all gone, torn down or boarded shut. Sometimes when Neladi sat at her altar, she tried to picture its ancestors. She’d last seen one of the great church altars when she was a child. It had been the day the soldiers came to extinguish its flames, and the people had gathered one last time to pray.
“Why are they taking away our flames?” she’d asked her father, as the smoke trailed past them out the door.
“The king needs them somewhere else, Neladi.”
She still remembered the pain on his face, and the way he had limped out into the street, as if to try to disguise the wound as something else.
Three decades later, Neladi shredded leaves and flowers in her hands. She’d ripped them from the plant out back that morning, sliding her fingers between thorns to get at them. The tree’s branches, even darker than her skin, hadn’t tried to stop her. They’d just watched, as they did every season, as Neladi stole their growth away. Perhaps they’d consider the fruit more precious were they harder to come by.
She cupped the garden’s sacrifice to her mouth and inhaled. Moist earth, spice, the sweet blood of flowers. The scent felt alive, even if the leaves were wrinkled with thirst. Neladi threw them to the flame.
Instead of snuffing out, the candlelight bulged, swelled against the shadows of the room. A plume of green smoke rose up, circled to the roof. It vanished the moment it hit the ceiling. Neladi frowned and swept the perfumed cloud out of her face.
“Night of the High Winds must be a time away yet,” she said, rising.
As if to challenge her, another gale blasted the house. The candle flame, bouncing on its wick, trembled. Neladi lowered the cloth hood back into place, watched the little orange teardrop start to shiver. She ignored its plight, crossed the dining room, and forced the backdoor open. Scarf wrapped across her mouth, she stepped into the yard.
Neladi kicked through the dust towards the desert. It was midnight—the time when the world dared go no darker. The time when the thing people feared most was to be brave.
When she reached the gate, Neladi pushed hard against it, guiding it through the wind until it clattered shut. The damn knocking sound ended abruptly, and there was peace. But rather than turn for the house, she leaned against the timber, stared out onto the plains.
Vast, barren, featureless. At the Frontier, the desert still cast the longest shadow.
“Frontier,” she said, tasting the word as though it were new.
That was what they’d decided to call it—the five or six no-name towns that made up the empire’s edge. Some scholar who sat behind a desk every day a hundred miles away probably thought it was clever. He might have imagined the place was just one great adventure, where the fighting was easy and the women easier still.
But it wasn’t.
At the Frontier, if the tools weren’t too blunt, the rain was too scarce, or the earth lay too shallow. The people planted without fail each spring, but not even the wind held its breath come harvest. Nobody blamed it either. After all, most things eventually withered.
On either end of the fence, Neladi had erected torches. Her father had first put them there decades before, as if to rob back the fire the king had taken from him. A few years later, the empire responded with a wall, a great ring of stone that circled the town. Their home, pinched on both sides, became an honorary tower in the defences. She still wondered why the king hadn’t built around it. Her father said nothing, though, while her mother only joked that one half of the house had gone to the desert. The rest was still stuck at the Frontier.
That same winter, Neladi’s father died, so the torches and responsibility passed to her. He’d never asked her to keep them burning, but the act had almost become ritual. She’d kept the tradition ever since. Even on the night her mother faded from the world, Neladi found a moment to go there—to the border beyond the border—to light the two ever-candles against the darkness. In the king’s religion, they would have called that a vigil. In Neladi’s home, they called it work to be done. Her mother had found the strength to say thanks before she went to sleep.
Now the flames struggled in the storm, flickering as though they were coughing, or choking. Their light was a soft glow, an empty threat to the desert’s shifting shadows. Still, it was another pair of eyes at the Frontier. Another set of watchfires that illuminated nothing.
Neladi waited for the thunder of hooves, for the cry of a guard somewhere on the wall overhead. But as usual, nothing stirred. The whole scene remained frozen in time.
“I should have brought my sword,” she said, reminding herself of its place in the house. “I could have cut the silence open myself.”
The blade had been a gift from her brother. He’d given it to her the day he rode off for the desert. She’d fawned over it as he swung into the saddle.
“And it’s really for me?” she said, watching the light dance along the steel.
“I tried to find one as sharp as you,” her brother said. “But even metal has its limits.” He grinned. “I’ll teach you how to use it when I come home.”
But you never did. Not really.
Now Neladi found herself at the same fence, wearing away the coarse wood beneath her fingers. Her eyes scanned the horizon. She waited. Thirty nights later, she would tell herself why.
The man who did teach me how to wield a sword is still out there. Her husband. Emmi’s father.
“Baylian,” she whispered, loud enough for the desert to hear. She wondered if Emmi was still awake in the house.
Neladi couldn’t blame her daughter for hoping every second sound was Baylian’s return—not when she hoped the same even in silence. At least, in the silence found at the Frontier. Tonight there was such a quiet, because while the storm raged hard, not a single soul would hear their heart beating. They’d hear only the yawning of the wind.
Neladi saw the guard approach from the wall. She decided not to linger.
“He’ll be home soon,” she said, as she wandered back to the house. “He’ll tell me he killed a dozen saptors.” She smiled. “Maybe this time I’ll be kind enough to believe him.”
It took twice as long to open the door. The lock argued with her wrist, but Neladi had been raised better than to negotiate. She jerked the handle with intent, and the house allowed her inside. Were she not so tired, she’d have forced surrender.
But Neladi needed her rest. So, too, did Emmi, and the three ghosts, and the candle still burning downstairs. They all needed to be ready.
Because tomorrow they would come.
* * *
Neladi watched the horsemen approach from the upstairs window. There were five of them in all, and this time they were armed. The steel was white-hot beneath the red Varen sun. One of their bright banners cracked in the wind.
“Never send a pawn to do a knight’s job,” she said, and sighed.
At the front of the column, as expected, came Sir Kelvin. The dust in the street blurred his face, but she knew it was him all right. Nobody else would dare come to her door with an army like that.
“Mama, someone’s coming.”
The voice sounded from the room below, creaking like the old floorboard that needed fixing. Neladi rushed down the stairs to answer it.
“Emmi, you come away from that door,” she said, as her daughter stretched up to reach the handle. The girl’s small hand darted back to her side, as if the door itself had burned her. Neladi sank to her knees.
“You go upstairs now,” she said, fixing the little girl’s dress. “Go upstairs and sweep the landing.”
Emmi stared into nothing, gave a weak nod.
“Can I bring Bunchy?” she asked, and for a moment there was something of the old Emmi in her words, a thrill of excitement that didn’t know what to do with itself.
Neladi glanced down at the doll dangling from her daughter’s fingers. The toy knight’s helmet was hanging to one side, and his face was starting to fade underneath. Another thing she meant to fix.
“Of course you can. You’re gonna need him; dust is feeling a little braver than usual.”
Emmi grinned, but Neladi only half noticed. She had already turned to the door.
“Who’s out there, Mama?”
Neladi thought it best not to give her daughter an answer. But Emmi waited, her face scrunched up mean, as though Neladi’s next words better be to her liking. It was an act, of course, but she damned her husband for ever teaching Emmi that look all the same. That man had given them both too many things to remember him by.
“Wolves, Emmi. There are wolves outside.”
The bravery fled from her daughter’s face. “Are they hungry?” she whispered.
Neladi shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Didn’t I ever tell you not to feed those wild dogs?”
She hadn’t. Her husband had, and his daughter realised it too. They both smiled, and then Emmi skipped her way up the stairs.
Neladi hesitated, took a shaky breath in the shadows, then tugged the door open fast. A cloud of sand and light swept past her. Some of the dust caught in her throat, and she nearly coughed. But she didn’t. This wasn’t a day for clearing throats. This was a day for the stubborn.
Sir Kelvin was already on the doorstep, his hand raised as if to knock. He lowered the mailed fist back to his side at nobody’s speed. His grin told her it was a threat.
“Good morning, Neladi,” he said, six paces too friendly.
Neladi glanced at the soldiers behind. All four of them had dismounted, but now they just stood in the wind-run street, watching the exchange with heavy eyes. One of the older ones was glaring, but even through the cloud of dust, she swore his gaze fell on Sir Kelvin.
“It’s a no-good morning to me,” she said.
Sir Kelvin’s good hand—his better hand—tapped the pommel of his sword. Neladi ignored it, focusing on the desert behind. The winds were up again, stripping the red soils away, revealing the bones of the earth buried beneath them. The sun was still climbing the white sky, but already there was heat. Heat so close it could make a man sweat. Heat so sharp it made even her dark skin hunger for shade.
“Not a morning you’d give your daughter away on, granted, but a good morning for business. Which is why I’m here.”
He flexed his fingers on the sword. It might have given Neladi a fright if she believed he could use it. Instead, it was his expression that made her heart quiver. Sir Kelvin was handsome, in all the storybook ways that didn’t matter. Waves of fair hair, bright eyes, and a face as clean as a free breeze at sea—every girl in the empire longed for a man like him.
Every girl except Neladi.
She didn’t know why, but she guessed he was ugly. Deep down, beneath the armour and the mask he wore, Sir Kelvin was a villain—of that much Neladi was sure.
“When the world knocks for the fourth time,” she said, singing each word. “It will be the last.”
Neladi rapped her knuckles against the frame of the door. It must have been hollow, because her fingers made a lifeless sound, a sound so wooden it didn’t even think to echo. Her words were a passage from the Aelia scriptures. When the priests from Kraken came converting all those years before, those were some of the first words they’d spoken. The red-robed men spoke them still, repeating the promise of that fourth knock as if it were something to look forward to. Sir Kelvin, no doubt a devout man, didn’t seem impressed.
“That is to say, you decided to come yourself,” she added.
Like a chastised dog, the man in front of her didn’t try to hide his embarrassment. “Some of us keep very busy,” he said.
Neladi arched an eyebrow. Busy indeed.
First, Sir Kelvin had sent Old Tom, the dandy town sheriff. Neladi had given him a stiff drink and talked about old times. He’d left an hour later.
Then Captain Roy came. A young man, not a day more than thirty. She reminded him about the time he broke the water wagon, cut him a slice of pie, and sent him home with another piece for his mother. A good boy, Roy Edden; she hoped no harm ever came to him.
Last, Sir Kelvin sent Commander Furst, perhaps his best choice. Furst was a military man, but he’d only blown in from the Mistlands two months before. Long enough to know the ground he fought on, not so long to know her husband.
He brought the storm with him that night, and in the meagre warmth of the evening fire, he and Neladi went to war while thunder raged outside. Furst’s voice rose so loud the timber shook, the fire shrank, and the good glass chimed in its cabinet. Even the damn step creaked. But only because in that moment, Emmi appeared from upstairs, her tiny face painted with fright.
“Have a daughter myself,” Furst had said, before vanishing into the black street.
Now Neladi gave Sir Kelvin a withering stare, a look so dark even Emmi refused to practice it. “Well, you’re here now. So say your piece and get on with it.”
Sir Kelvin stood tall, took a deep breath, and measured her with what she assumed were his I’m-very-sorry eyes. “Neladi, I’m truly sorry—”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh winds, give me strength; my husband is alive, sir. If that’s all you have to say, get gone.”
Sir Kelvin bowed his head. “It’s been weeks and weeks. Nobody has ever survived beyond the Frontier that long.”
Neladi folded her arms, as if to argue that her husband wasn’t counted nobody. But she knew it had been some time. More time than even Sir Kelvin implied. It had been over a month since Baylian had held her.
Sir Kelvin offered another fake smile. “He was a good man, an even better fighter, but there’s been no sign of his company since they left.” He unrolled a parchment as he spoke. “Now, all the other wives have had to come to terms with their losses. They grieved, of course, but they also accepted what was best for their families.”
Sir Kelvin offered her the letter.
Neladi took it, gave it a quick glance. She already presumed what had been written.
“A half-house at Bawden,” she announced. “And a job in the local mill.” Neladi clutched the letter to her breast. “When do we leave?”
Sir Kelvin glowered. Behind, one of the soldiers disguised his laughter as a cough.
“There’s no place at the Frontier, Neli, for those who can’t fight.”
Neli. That’s what her husband called her—what he had called her. It was the last word he’d spoken before he’d left home. Neladi straightened herself upright, squared her shoulders, and dug her jaw into the space between them. Sir Kelvin, his face still grave, wavered on her doorstep.
“My father’s father came to this sorry patch of earth when it was nothing but wind and a promise,” she said. “He built this good house—built it with his own hands. Never asked for permission, never curried favour with the high lords either.”
Sir Kelvin narrowed his eyes.
“And ever since, all we’ve been doing is fighting. We fought to make the land our friend, fought for freedom for our God, and when those serpents came out of the desert, every man in the house went off and fought them too.”
Neladi took a bold step closer. “Those were hard years, sir. Years of storms and dust, years of wind and fire. I know, because I gathered the ashes when I was a child, kept them safe so they wouldn’t scatter.”
She stomped the board at her feet. “Now I’ve carved something here, and it’s taken me too long for us to just up and leave with the next breeze. We’ve got nowhere else to go, but we don’t want nowhere else either. This is our home. The winds know we’re going to fight for it.”
She nodded to the desert. “When you see those reptiles, you tell them I said that too.”
Sir Kelvin swallowed. He opened his mouth to speak, but before a single word escaped, Neladi brought a hand across his face. The slap cracked like thunder, left a streak of red on his cheek so large it looked like he’d been clawed.
“And don’t you ever call me Neli in front of my daughter.”
Neladi swung again, but this time it was to close the door. Sir Kelvin tried to stop her, but he still had one hand on his face. When he moved, it was like he’d lost his heart. The door hurried towards him, and he must have realised the tide had turned. He managed to give her one last glare before he disappeared from view. Then the old wood heaved, the hinges moaned, and the whole door rattled shut. Neladi, too scared even to breathe, pressed her weight fast against it.
“Bloody natives,” Sir Kelvin said, hiding the curse beneath his breath.
A few seconds later, Neladi heard him step from the porch. After another minute, men shouted, horses neighed, and then the column took off down the road. Only after the memory of drumming hooves faded was Neladi certain they were gone.
* * *
“Where are we going, Mama?”
Neladi slid between members of the crowd. Behind, Emmi chased her breath, struggling to keep up. “The market, my sweet.”
Two guards watched them from a doorway as they passed. The larger one whispered something in his friend’s ear, and the pair broke out in laughter. But they were also frowning, as though whatever joke they shared was funny and sad at the same time.
Neladi swallowed. “Stay close, Emmi.”
They soon reached the end of the street, where a great arch marked the entrance to the market quarter. Hundreds of people flowed through it, and Neladi quickly felt herself and Emmi become part of the stream. As the river carried them into the main square, a world jumped out to meet them.
“Can we go see Grandma Edden?” Emmi asked, twirling on the spot.
Neladi took her by the hand. “She’s all we’re going to see, you hear me? I don’t want you talking to any of those traders.”
Emmi glanced around at the commotion and frowned.
Even at the Frontier, a branch of the empire that kings and queens often forgot to feed, the market square blossomed. It was a trap for the senses, drowned in colour and sound and smells so rich it seemed criminal not to taste them. Dozens of stalls lined the streets, despite the fighting a few miles away. When Neladi wondered why, a conversation nearby gave her the answer.
