Ashwalk Pilgrim (22 page)

His gaze drifted to his feet as his hands went to his shrunken chest. His fingers fiddled with one another as he pressed his foot hard against the stone patio. “I didn’t know then what I know now. I was hungry, Mara. In the streets, you take what you can get because you never know how long it will be before you eat again. And then you wonder, will I really ever eat again?” He looked into her eyes. “Will they catch me next time? Will I lose another finger?”

All the hardness in her heart melted. She kneeled and smiled. “Tag, I forgive you. I have lived on my madame’s barge all my life and never went without a meal. I could not even know the dark things you faced in your short years.”

“I was afraid,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“I hated myself for leaving you in the alley, Mara. I cried when I left. I cried and cried and knew my momma saw everything I did from the heavens and turned her head in shame. I wish I’d been stronger. I wish I would’ve taken you to the steps.”

“I know.”

“You can’t give yourself up. You’ve got to know your life’s beyond whatever happens in front of this house.”

Mara hesitated. Her gaze drifted to the ground, searching for an answer. “I still don’t understand what this is all about. I still don’t know why they want my child so badly. I’m afraid. I’m afraid because I don’t know what this is or why I have a part in it.”

“Things will become clear before long. You’re nearly to the Mother’s temple. Make it to the steps. Don’t give up. If you care about me and all others from Hightable to the Floatwaif and all the many kingdoms of Urum, you just can’t give up no matter what happens.”

“Will you take me to the temple this time?”

Tag grinned, his pink wedge of a tongue sticking through his broken tooth. “You’ll find your way. I would lead you if I could, but I can’t. I’m not leaving you, though. I promise I’ll never do that again. I’ll always be here with you even if you can’t see me.”

She blinked, shaking her head. “What? Are you a priestly magician now?”

The boy bowed. He backed into the shadows, his body melting into the darkness of the arch. “Stay strong, Mara. You’re nearly there.”

His voice tumbled into a whisper, and he vanished. Mara leaned forward. She reached into the darkness. Her hand found the wall and searched its face for any nook or hiding spot the boy might have slipped within.
 

She found no hiding spots, and neither did she find the beggar boy who lacked a finger. Mara whipped around. She knelt by the arch and peered into the courtyard. The noblewoman Nialle still crouched before Sister Ialane as if the world had held its breath while Tag spoke with Mara.

The creeping crawl of time resumed, and Nialle fell before the priestess. “Please, mercy, Sister Ialane. My husband and I are good people.”

The soldiers lorded over the woman like hungry vultures. Ialane Donra ripped Nialle’s necklace off and threw it into the yard. “Then do you pledge fealty to the Serpent Sun? Will you cast off all faith to the Six and let the Serpent Sun rise?”

The woman peered into the sister’s mask. Her own eyes fought with the bargain. Olessa once told Mara faith was a soul’s most precious currency, and one did not tithe it to a different god lightly. Seeing Nialle struggle, Mara finally understood the words.

Nialle’s husband still lay unconscious on the ground. The soldiers focused fully on his wife, and she focused fully on Ialane.
 

“Now,” Tag’s scratchy voice whispered in her ear. “Go now!”

Mara bounded from the arch. She moved swift as the wind whistling from the open sea and soft as a lover’s kiss upon the neck. If she could just reach the plaza, she could find her way to the Mother’s temple. The temples were close, so very, painfully close.

Her toe struck an upturned rock. A fiery, blistering pain shot through her foot and raced up her leg. Her knee twisted, and she fell onto the grass. She caught herself with her free hand, her son held in a death grip with the other.
 

She sucked in the tears threatening to spill from her eyes. She glanced behind her. Nialle’s bleary gaze caught hers. Ialane began turning toward the sound.

The noblewoman swallowed, her throat glistening with sweat. The dark curls of her locks clung like polished hooks to her pale cheeks.
 

I have doomed us both
, Mara thought.

Nialle’s wet eyes hardened, her jaw flexing with a snarl. She grabbed a soldier’s sword and pointed it at his throat.

“There is no place for a serpent among the Six,” Nialle cried, the blade tearing in a silvery arc toward the startled man.
 

The weapon scraped against his breastplate. Its sharpened tip found the soft flesh beneath his jaw. Crimson coated silver as the man’s blood snaked down the blade. Sister Ialane hissed as the other soldiers threw their torches aside and swung their weapons.

Nialle glanced at Mara one last time. She smiled and closed her eyes like a priest was about to bestow a blessing. “Praise the Six, for they will endure all suns!”

Mara turned and sprinted onto the plaza. Behind her, steel tore flesh and silenced the noblewoman.

After the longest, darkest night of her life on the most blessed day of the year, Mara had finally reached her destination. At the base of the hill in the heart of Hightable stood the mighty houses of Six, the heart of the faith that spread throughout all Urum.
 

No monument in the city was as grand as the temples. Not even the mighty titan standing guard in the shallows could ever hold a candle to the majesty of the temples of the Six.

Braziers shaped like men and women held brass bowls flickering mighty flames. Firelight washed against the tall temple walls. Ivory pillars crowned by sculptures of blooming orchids, roses, and trails of ivy supported their roofs. Murals lining the temple walls told the story of the god within them.

At that moment, she faced the temple of the Silent Father. Two braziers of brass silent sons illuminated the towering doors at the top of the marble steps leading to its interior.
 

Mara did not know much of the Six, but she knew the Mother and Father were opposite pillars supporting the same arch. The Mother’s temple would be placed on the other side of the palace hill.

She closed her eyes and whispered a fleeting prayer of thanks to the Silent Father for all his sons had done for her that night. Keeping to the perimeter of the vast, circular plaza where the shadows were longest and both highborn and soldier were few and far between, Mara made her way around the hill.

Wailing nobles dragged from their homes punctuated a dying night of soldier’s boots stomping on smoothed stones and gruff shouts from steel hoods. Mara kept to the long shadows and graceful arches bordering the plaza, her feet moving along the gentle curve of the grand courtyard as quickly as her heartbeat.

A bead of sweat rolled down her back in a frigid line. She shuddered, blowing a lock of dark hair from her vision as the temples slowly scrolled by.
 

As she bounded like a lioness toward her goal, she noticed the crowds filtering into the plaza from various lanes. They swarmed like a plague of locusts into the courtyard, gathering around the tall lampposts illuminating the open and staring at the king’s legions standing between the world and the temples.

There were so many people. So many whispering lips. So many shouting soldiers. So many poisonous eyes fixed upon the gods’ temples. Yet none of them saw her. All looked for her, but none of them saw.

She smiled. The Six saved her. The Six cloaked her in shadow. They would deliver her to the Mother, and all would be made right. A moon maiden, a whore, a mother with a cursed womb would evade the full might of the king and save her son’s soul. The thought swelled a heart used to timid beats with the rocking thrum of pride.

The plaza encasing the temples rounded with the hill. A roof appeared. Mara’s heart skipped a beat. Her smile spread into a toothy crescent.

Although she had never seen the Mother’s temple, she knew she had arrived at it. Her hands tightened on her son’s body as tears brimmed her weary eyes. “We’ve done it. We’ve done it, my son!”

Crowds gathered in ever-growing throngs within the plaza. So thick they became that Mara struggled to keep hidden, even on the edge.
 

Eventually, she came face to face with the temple. She lingered on the far side of the cobbled stretch and stared at the building where she’d buried all her hopes.

Two giant maidens held burning braziers toward the brightening sky. They surrounded a massive door closed tight, its iron bound planks belying it would not give up its treasures easily.

If only she could reach the building. The highborn swarming the temple clumped like fungus in its shadow, and the soldiers stood in strong and steady lines as a barrier to any who might dare approach the steps. The people spouted obscenities, curses, and longwinded soliloquies at the Mother. Among the shouts, praises of Good King Sol coated the hate like honey dripping from a poisoned peach.

Mara took a deep breath. She sank into a mass of tall marble pots overflowing with silky vermillion daffodils and smooth, spongy tongues of aloe. Alone in the shadows, she waited until something of a gap grew in the crowd.
 

She looked at her son, and his features twisted her heart into a thousand knots. The last of his hale skin had faded into ash-tinged blues, and his lips took on a sickly grey.
 

“All will be well soon,” she said. “Your soul will be free, and you will be nestled in the Burning Mother’s arms. I will find a way through the king’s soldiers, my love.”

“I’m sure you will,” a rough voice said.

Mara jumped, twisting to the sound. She backed into an urn and barely grasped its marble lip before it crashed to the ground. A man as foreign to Hightable as a moon maiden sat against the wall behind the vases.
 

His milky eyes betrayed their uselessness. His sunken skin sagged over once proud cheeks. His teeth might have been mistaken for an old hound’s fangs, so bent and broken they appeared. Filthy rags clad his thin arms. His long, bony finger toyed with the rusted tin cup set beside him.

“Galladus?” Mara asked.
 

The beggar she had met in Lower Sollan grinned. One of his broken teeth caught his lip and warped his smile. “You remember my name, little moon maiden? I haven’t felt so blessed in quite a while.”

“You’re in Hightable!” For the moment, Mara forgot her mission and fell to her knees beside her friend. She clasped his hand, feeling its rough callouses weighing the thin, liver-spotted skin, and the subtle shake he couldn’t control.
 

“I suppose you could say as much.” His teeth slid behind his lips. He squeezed her hand and looked over her shoulder at the crowd gathering before the Mother’s temple.

“But how did you get up here? I have seen so many things tonight that I am…” Mara looked to her knees and frowned. “What was in Olessa’s glimmer? Has it addled my brain? Am I seeing ghosts like they say happens to glimmer addicts, or…”

She stumbled back. “Are you an alp? Are you a vision of the demons of the Second Sun? They are said to swarm around the ashwalk pilgrim and her child’s unsaved soul. Olessa said as much and Gia warned it true. Have you come to keep me from saving him?”

“
Shh
, child.” Galladus gently clapped her hand. “I am no demon alp returned, and you can be assured I have not come to keep you from saving the boy.”

Mara instinctively tightened her grip on her son. She glanced over her shoulder. The gap she would have taken had closed, and now the crowd was a wall that might as well have been three times as tall as the one she scaled to Hightable.
 

“Yet you stalled me! You kept me from the temple. I was so close, Galladus! Why?”

“Not all paths are as clear as they appear to be. A canny hunter will lay a trap no lioness could ever hope to see. The Six threw shadows to keep you hidden, but not even they can turn a serpent’s eye when blood is in the air.”

“I don’t know what to do. I am here. I am
here
! Where am I to go but through the highborn and the soldiers to the Mother’s steps? I have no wings. I have no silent sons to make holes in walls and shadows.”

Galladus puckered his lips. His dull eyes slipped toward his tin cup. He angled the broken mug’s mouth and stared sadly into its empty belly. “It was the busiest night of the year. Still, none gave their coin. The city has soured. As hearts turned from the Six, they fled like barbarians beneath the blades of Eloia’s armies. I knew soon after you left, I would not eat tonight.”
 

“So you braved the way to Hightable despite your lame leg and bad vision? I would have brought you with me if you wanted. We could have walked this together.”

A clunking cackle tumbled from his lips. He slapped his knee and looked to the side, his smile quickly fading. “No, my braving days were over when I grew too weak to wield a sword.”

His deep breath swelled his chest, and his clouded eyes locked on hers. “Tell me, Mara, what is your value?”

The beggar’s question utterly disarmed her. She slumped, grabbing the rough edge of her cloak. “I don’t understand.”

“It is not a riddle, little moon maiden. Tell me your value.”

She bit her lip and stared dully at her son. All her life, Olessa had dictated her worth. Olessa set the price Mara’s patrons paid, and even then she hardly ever knew the count of coins.

“Three, maybe four silver? Perhaps a gold on a busy night? We were not allowed to know the count. Olessa said we profited through a comfortable life.”

“Dear, I wish to know your value, not your worth. I need to know if the price I paid was worth it.”

“The price…” Mara’s brows knitted together. “You died. They killed you, didn’t they?”

Galladus had no answer for her, but his eyes said all she needed. Mara was not sure if the beggar before him was a specter or some glimmer-born ghost, but her heart ached for the poor man nonetheless.