The Dark Ferryman (17 page)

Straightplow cocked his head slightly, looking up at him. Thoughts rumbled through his eyes as loud as wagon wheels but he did not express them out loud. Finally, he said, grudgingly, “I was always told you were a good man, for a Vaelinar. We’ll be gone in the five days, if not sooner. We’ll take your deeds, Lord Vantane.” He paused. “We may be short-lived, but we will remember these lands and what happens to them.”

The corner of Bistel’s mouth crooked slightly. “Then I pray you shall not be able to remember when black thread ran rampant here, and took the lands, and corrupted them beyond redemption.”

Verdayne got to his feet, a little unsteadily, and Straightplow looked long and hard into his face. The Dweller said quietly, “Give my regards to Master Magdan.”

“The good Magdan passed from us several days ago.”

The farmer’s attention snapped back to Bistel. “My sorrow to you, then. Would he have sent us away?”

“He would have done,” Bistel answered evenly, “what I told him to have done. But, he might have advised me to take a milder course. When there are families such as yours, Pepper Straightplow, I prefer to be safe rather than sorry.”

“T-there are aryns,” Verdayne stammered, “and in the spring, I’ll bring more saplings and . . . and seed.”

“Then you will know where t’ find us, young gardener,” Straightplow said quietly. He folded the papers up and tucked them inside his vest. He took their hands in his and shook them.

Bistel and Verdayne left the farmer’s great house. They rode out without a look back, knowing that the family gathered on the porch to stare after them. He could give them words and papers, but not an explanation. He could not explain that for which they had no understanding.

The aryn trees which had stood as long as he had planted them, a barrier and border against the Mageborn chaos to the south and east, had begun to wither and die. A black fungus had begun to splotch their brilliant leaves and crack open their greening branches, rendering them vulnerable to more disease and devouring insects. Magdan had left him a legacy of notes and samples, and his moonlit night to harvest saplings had been to replace the stricken trees that he could. But the old gardener had not understood that this was not a battle he could win. Perhaps it was a mercy he’d died without realizing that. The chaos would not be held back much longer. What would happen to these lands, so close on that border, he could not predict but he’d seen the chaos move before and it was not pretty. No, not pretty at all, even to Vaelinar eyes which could see the threads of all the elements in the world as they were born and twisted and woven into life, broken into death, and reborn again. He rode into the grove, pointing out the destruction to Verdayne. The trees murmured to him and from the look in Verdayne’s eyes, he could see that his son was enough like him that he could hear them as well. Both of them wept quietly as they destroyed the trees of their Vaelinar legacy with fire and salt, both the affected and the clean, until smoke and ashes swirled into the sky as if night had fallen.

"DWELLERS ARE A BLOODY FORCE of nature,” Jeredon muttered. He managed the ramp and got to the door before Sevryn and Grace, waving to get it opened for them. Nutmeg had flown past all of them to get dinner ordered and Rivergrace’s room freshened up. Sevryn chucked Jeredon on the shoulder as they went past him.

“And aren’t you happy she is? She means to get you on your feet.”

“I can get on my feet. It’s staying there I can’t manage, but the healers say it’ll happen in time. She makes too much of me. She should be where she’s happiest.”

Rivergrace paused by Jeredon, her hand brushing the back of his quickly. “She is where she’s happiest.”

He ducked his chin. “You need to explain it to her. She can’t be looking at me with those eyes of hers.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Grace, I cannot look back.”

She hesitated in confusion a moment, and Sevryn took up her arm. “I’ll explain it to both of them,” he told Jeredon, before sweeping her inside with him.

“Good.” The door shut, leaving Jeredon outside as he’d intended.

Rivergrace waited until they were on the stairs and past the bustling staff which manned the heart of Larandaril for Lara and Jeredon. “Whatever was that about?”

“Stay with me tonight.”

“You’re changing the subject, and I can’t.” But she leaned into the warmth and strength of his arm. “What is it Jeredon was trying to tell me?”

“That Nutmeg adores him, and he can’t return her feelings.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“That scarcely matters among the Vaelinars. There is no way for her to be happy here.”

Rivergrace frowned slightly, and he wanted to smooth away the faint line in her brow as she did. “And the two of you think she doesn’t know this?”

“I think Jeredon hasn’t the heart to send her away and hopes someone else will do it for him.”

“She’ll leave when he tells her he doesn’t need her anymore. I know my sister. She can be stubborn, but she’s never been a fool.”

“That stubborn trait must run in the Farbranch family.”

She laughed softly at him, the frown lines fading away as she did.

“Aderro.” His mouth brushed her temple. “This isn’t about Lara or dear Nutmeg; this is about the two of us. Stay with me tonight.”

She knew a little of what he could do with his Voice, although he’d never used it on her nor did he now. He could whisper to the trees and convince them to let him meld into their being. He could coax the recalcitrant into agreeability. He could calm panic, turn loyalty in its tracks, bring forgetfulness to the aware. All with a soft sentence or even just a word or two. He would not convince her to love him if she did not wish to. She curved her slender arm about his waist. A delicate heat spread from her touch. Her long hair brushed his shoulder as they walked. She said not another word, but when the time came at the top of the curving stairs for them to part, he to his apartments in the west wing and she to her rooms in the north, she matched his footsteps.

Rivergrace watched him bar the door behind them.

Someone had anticipated her visit, for in the cupola at one end of his apartment a bathtub stood, filled with water that still steamed and flower petals strewn across its surface. A drying sheet lay demurely upon a nearby footstool near a folding panel that could be drawn at the entrance to the cupola for privacy. Rivergrace let out a soft sigh of anticipation upon seeing the tub.

He took her elbow. “Hurry now, while it’s still hot.”

She chucked her clothes with all the glee of a child readying to jump into a welcome pond in midsummer’s heat and left them in a pile with no more thought than that, letting out a sigh as she sank her willowy form into the tub. He thanked the Gods that she was still without artifice, that her pleasures came honestly and sensually without calculation and that he could enjoy her in each moment as it came to her. He crossed his arms and put a shoulder to one of the great carven armoires nearby and watched her splash about, first lying at the bottom of the tub without so much as a toe or a nose showing, then surfacing with her dark auburn hair streaming about her bare shoulders and upon the fragrant water.

“This,” she said, “is glorious.”

“I agree.”

“Come join me!”

“In a while. You, my lady, are dirty with far more need of the tub than I have. I bathed at the racks this morning. Take all the water . . . and soap . . . you wish.”

She tossed a handful of water and petals at him, laughing as he tried to dodge and could not in time. “You’ve grown slow for a warrior!”

He had. The corner of his mouth quirked. “My wounds are a bit unyielding. Perhaps I could use a good soak.” He moved toward the tub, the fragrance of the herbs and flowers in the water rising toward him, along with her own aroma of innocence and sensuality with the barest hint of musk. He stripped his leathers off and kicked them to one side, then his shirt and under breeches, but she did not shrink as he leaned over. Instead, she reached out and with wiry strength pulled him into the tub with her. Water surged around them, and he coughed out a mouthful of soapy water, laughing.

Rivergrace ran her hands over his newly stitched cuts and the many dark bruises mottling his skin as he settled into the tub next to her. Her touch both soothed and aroused him, her slim fingers tracing each cut, her mouth making noises of distress. “I shall kill Daravan for this.”

“Harsh words. And he would be as hard to kill as I am.”

“There was kedant on the blades that carved you.” She gently smoothed a puckered cut, bringing fresh pain to the purple-and-pink sutured flesh, then the pain and more eased away as her touch soothed him.

“How can you tell?”

She looked up at his face. “I know you and kedant well. Once you’ve been quickened to that venom, it will always mark you more harshly than one who hasn’t been. Remember that, or it’ll be the death of you when you least expect it.”

“Daravan had a potion for it.”

“He knew they’d have poisoned blades?”

“I rather imagine he suspects the worst of any encounter.”

"He’d better not ever encounter me when I’m this angry with him. He used you.”

He tried to sound stern. “Rivergrace, I am the Hand of Lariel, and it’s my service to be used.”

Her mouth curved truculently. “Not in this manner.” Her hands dropped to his skin again, finding and stroking each bruise, each wound, and as each fire of kedant burned away, an ember of desire kindled in its place. They curved so closely to each other in the overflowing tub there could be no way she didn’t know the effect she had on him. He dropped his face to nuzzle her neck.

She moved slightly in the tub, twining her legs with his, and meeting his mouth with hers, and both of them were silent for a very long moment as he tasted her, as lush and sweet as he remembered. She drew away after that kiss and put her hand on his chest as if to stop him for a moment, and he waited.

Her throat swelled a bit as if the words didn’t come easily to her before she spoke, her eyes of aquamarine and other river blues and grays watching him. “I saw you in the river.”

“And I, you.”

“No one told me this could happen.”

“It doesn’t happen.”

She toyed with the small triangle of fine, burnished gold hairs on his chest. “It’s nothing we can depend upon, then. It may never happen again.”

“There are other bonds.”

She turned her face so that she could lean against him, cheek to cheek. “I thought perhaps it was part of being Vaelinar.”

“Perhaps it is part of being us.” He slid his arms around her, drawing her close, molding her body to his. Where their skin touched, his body warmed. He kissed her again, thoroughly, until she moaned softly against his mouth. He ran his hands over her, feeling the slender strength of her body and then the fullness of her breasts, and she moved onto him, taking him into her before she was fully ready, and the tightness of her made him hiss in pleasure, but he held back. She was not ready yet, she only wanted that joining, not the joy of it, not the heat of it, not yet. He would stroke her and kiss her and bite her neck until she arched her back and pleaded with him to move. And then he would.

She braided her fingers into his hair. As she did, she murmured, “I feared I would feel it if you died.”

He had feared the same but protested against her lips as he returned that he would never, never die. She sank her teeth ungently into his lower lip to still his words. “You’ve already died for me, and I for you.”

“And was it so bad?”

“It was . . .” and her words faded away, and she touched him, and he sank into a sensation he had never known before, the water from the bath rippling about them, still hot though cooling, a brand upon his skin as he realized the chill of death, her dying.

The chill lanced through him and she gasped as she felt it also, both of them cold as ice within the embrace of each other.

Flesh to flesh, yet he moved through her and she throughout him, both of them as insubstantial as wisps of river mist, yet he could feel the swirl of fire at the center of her being, even as she touched the whirlwind that comprised his being, his Talent of Vaelinar. So began their knowing of each other from within.

The moment replayed itself in him and he shuddered from its echo. He took her wrists in his hands to brace himself and felt the weight of the blade when she took it up, the sword twisting violently in her hands in an attempt to break away from its new master.
He brought her hands to his mouth and kissed her palms, a balm against the ache of it. Her eyes widened, seeing him and not seeing him, even as he beheld her and yet found himself held blindly inside the sword. Her torment cut into him as deeply as the wound which had killed him as he held both her trembling hands to his lips.
Anguish welled up in her from Cerat’s very touch, from its vileness and the death it had wrought and the souls it held entrapped within it, and she unable to bear any of it but that she must. It was all she had left of him.
He realized then she would have put it down again, dropped it like a firebrand searing her flesh, but she could not bear to leave him behind. Sevryn released her hands to put his forehead to hers, and fresh tears on her face bathed his cheeks and tasted faintly salty on his lips.

And then it was like this,
he told her without words, in the river of thoughts that flowed between them.
A biting iron cage about his being to be endured only because it was her hands which carried it and her presence which
steadied him, that and a silvery essence which eased his own torture, a being as light in its divinity as the Souldrinker was dark in his. Sevryn rode on her shoulder when she carried Cerat high, and trailed in the dust when her will faltered and she dragged it behind her, and he knew when she raised it with the last of her strength to strike at the abomination which poisoned the sacred river Andredia, shattering both the sword and the curse.