Like it wasn’t permanent at all.
And because it had never seemed to do anything like this before, he discovered that he didn’t really know how he felt about it. Except he was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad thing.
That was as much as he could manage while the moon gleamed in her eyes. Maybe he’d figure it out later. When he wasn’t looking at her.
“So, okay, uh …” He coughed. “Uh, hi.”
“Hi.”
“Nice to see you.”
“Thanks. I’d say something nice, but I’m still mad at you.”
“Okay. Uh, listen—if you weren’t mad at me, y’know … Uh, do you think maybe you might tell me what the nice something would have been? Y’know. If you weren’t mad.”
“I’d say that since we met, every day without you is a thousand years, and every night without you is forever.”
He gaped until he decided to close his mouth before he started to drool. “Uh. Mm. Well.”
She shrugged. “If you don’t want to know—”
“Yeah, yeah, right. I should probably write that down.”
“Don’t be frightened. Beginnings are difficult.”
“You seem to manage.”
“This isn’t my beginning. And it’s not our beginning. Only yours.”
“I, uh … I, uh …”
“Sh.” She touched his lips with her forefinger. “Talk later. Work now.”
“Work? Horse-witching, or whateverthefuck?”
She touched her face with two fingers, pointing at her eyes, and he understood what she meant.
Forgiveness. Permission.
“I still don’t get it.”
She had a waterskin slung over her shoulder, which she now passed to him. “Wine,” she said. “Rinse your mouth.”
He barely quelled an instant, astonishing impulse to tell her that he loved her, because he wasn’t sure it wasn’t true. “Um, when you’re not mad anymore—”
She walked past him without another glance. “I’ll let you know.”
He worked loose the stopper and squirted wine into his mouth. It was sharp and resinous, and it awakened an astonishing array of cuts and tears inside his mouth by stinging them savagely, and it was fucking magnificent. He spat and rinsed and spat again, and after that, he kept rinsing, but without spitting, because he hadn’t had a drink in almost a tenday and he’d earned this one.
She reached inside her tunic and brought out about half a handful of wilted, soggy-looking leaves. Her other hand filled itself with a small pouch of some kind of powder. She shook a judicious amount of it into the leaves, then returned the pouch to whatever nonpocket she’d taken it from—probably next to the one where she kept those knives—then rolled the powdered leaves between her palms until it all turned into a darkly gooey ball. When the ball began emitting a nasty-smelling smoke, she slapped it onto the face of the stone fold as high as she could reach. “Don’t look straight at it.”
He shaded his eyes with his good hand as the goo crackled and spat magnesium-white fire. Even shaded, the glare hurt his eyes. When he could see again, what he saw was the horse-witch looking at Tanner, and at him, at the ruin of their clothing and at the crossbow and all the blood they two had spilled.
She said, “Now do you believe what I said?”
“About what?”
“That it’s less trouble to let them kill me.”
Over the course of the month since he’d last seen her, Jonathan Fist had repeatedly promised himself that if he ever found her again, he would stop and think for a second or two every time he was about to open his stupid goddamn mouth.
“I believe that you think so,” he said slowly, “and I believe I understand why. But I disagree. Strongly. I probably always will.”
“I know,” she said gravely. “I feel the same about you. That’s why I was mad at you.”
“Was? Is this you letting me know you’re not mad anymore?”
“No, I am. But for a different reason now.” She squatted beside him, inspecting his wounds. “I want you to take better care of yourself.”
“I’ll try,” he said. “I will.”
“I believe you.” She palpated a rip over his eyes that he’d gotten from the butt of the crossbow, frowned, and nodded to herself. “You’ve changed the way you speak.”
“Blame it on a woman I met.”
Her fingers dug into the swelling of his broken wrist hard enough to prickle beads of sweat across his face. “We need to set the bone. It’ll hurt.”
“Okay.”
“I can give you something for the pain. It’ll still hurt, but you won’t mind.”
“Will it make me sleepy?”
“Usually.”
“Then not now.”
“Uh,” Tanner said, coughing like a heavy smoker awakening from sleep. “Would it be rude to point out that he’s not actually dying? And that I am?”
“Not at all,” she said without the slightest flicker of a glance in his direction. “Did you think I didn’t know? I can see how you might make that mistake. You assume that I don’t know and do care. The truth is the other way around.”
“Always the charmer.”
“I don’t have to be polite to people who murder me.”
“Well, when you put it that way …” He sighed, and coughed some more. “Guess I’ll go back to sleep. Wake me or bury me. You pick.”
She stayed in front of Jonathan Fist, gazing steadily into his eyes with her head cocked just a bit, to hold him in her eye of grey-blue ice. He said, “What?”
“Will he live?”
Fist shrugged. “You tell me.”
“No,” she said. “Decide.”
He got it. “Yeah. Sorry. This has been kind of a tough night.”
“I know. You still have to decide.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay, in a minute.” He closed his eyes. “He wants to know what you are. The people he works for want to know.”
“I’m the horse-witch.”
“I think,” he said slowly, “the real question is why there would be a horse-witch. At all.”
“There isn’t. We’re all just pretending there is.”
“Okay.”
“You get confused by names,” she said. “Most people do.”
“Um …”
“People call me the horse-witch,” she said patiently, “because they find me strange. Witchy. And because they find me among horses. But I’m found among horses because I like horses, and horses like me. We understand each other. We share power with each other. Most horses deserve me. Most people don’t.”
“I guess the forgiveness-and-permission-witch doesn’t really scan.”
“Some things are difficult to explain because they’re complicated. Other things are even more difficult to explain because they’re simple. Forgiveness and permission are words, and abstract. What I do is concrete and specific.”
“Yeah, and maybe you can explain it to me. Small words, huh?”
“I can use words, if I have to. You seem to need them.”
Her ice-eye opened like a flower before him, and in its depth he saw horror he could barely imagine. “Everything that lives understands punishment: the pain of having done wrong. We’re born knowing it. It’s what pain is for. A smack on the wrist for stealing sugar. A burn from touching hot iron. A slap for approaching a woman the wrong way, or a beating for approaching the wrong woman. But deep inside, in the places we can’t look, punishment is the source of every pain. All pain. So when we are enslaved, when we are whipped, when we are raped, when we are maimed and tortured and slain—in that dark place inside us, we know we deserve it. Because if we weren’t bad, bad things wouldn’t happen to us.”
“But that’s not—I mean, y’know, you grow up and you find out that’s just not—”
“But you never believe it.”
“Well, I guess … I mean, sure, some people can’t seem to let go of—”
“You’re not listening.” Her face had gone dark and
savage, and behind her eyes smoldered a fury that threatened to burn him down and maybe the mountain too. “I said, you never believe it.”
He went still.
For a long, long moment, he could only blink.
Slowly.
She said, “Was it concrete you don’t understand? Or was it specific?”
“No,” he said, blank. Numb. “No, I get it. But—I just … the kind of shit I’ve done—”
“Has nothing to do with me,” she said. “You might face justice someday, if there is such a thing, and if it’s unlucky enough to find you. Absolution is between you and your god.”
“Then you—” He shook his head, still blank. “I guess I don’t get it after all.”
“Listen to me now,” she said intently. “I know you call yourself a bad man. I know you have harmed people who were no threat to you. I know you have left a trail of horrors that scar the face of this world. I know all these things, and many more, and I don’t care. They have nothing to do with me. They’re not what I do.”
“Maybe if you started with what your work is, instead of what it’s not.”
“My work is your father’s madness,” she said gravely. “My work is your mother’s murder. My work is pain, and fear, and having to be a parent to your parent while still you are a child.”
“How do you … how can you possibly know …”
She laid a hand on his arm. Her touch was warm and cool together, and it unspooled eternity inside his head. “What you call yourself, what others call you, what you have done—these mean nothing to me. I know you. You met me a month ago. I have known you since the world was born. Everything you are is what you should be. Everything you should be is what you are. I know all of you, and there is nothing in you I do not love.”
The abyssal depths of forever were too dark for him to gaze into; he flinched back as if she’d burned him. “Don’t—don’t do that …” but she held on to him and drew him close until she was everything he could see, everything he could hear or smell or taste or touch and she didn’t say it, she didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to.
child
you are forgiven
It was too much. It would always be too much. “You can’t do that—I don’t deserve—”
“What you deserve has nothing to do with me.”
“Lucky for me, I guess.” He pulled back his arm, and grunted at the sudden pain. He’d forgotten that his wrist was broken. With his other hand he scrubbed at his eyes. “You know, I’m …” He had to cough his voice clear. “I’m way too old to fall for touchy-feely hearts-and-flowers shit.”
“Do we need another talk about age?”
“No,” he said. “Really. I remember.”
“What I say to you is what I said to Orbek. What I will say to this dying killer. What I say to every damaged horse who struggles into the witch-herd.” She leaned in and whispered, her lips brushing his ear. “Be not afraid, child. Be what you are.”
He looked over at Tanner, who lay silently, eyes closed, breathing ragged and shallow.
Except you’re one of them, he’d said.
The horse-witch smiled. “It’s all right, you know.”
“What?”
“The world does not require that we kill our friends.”
“Friend, my ass.” He glared at her. “And I had a pal named Stalton who’d tell you different.”
She only shrugged.
He looked at Tanner, and couldn’t tell if the assassin was alive, let alone conscious. “Fuck the world. I don’t need an excuse to kill him. I don’t need an excuse to let him live.”
“That’s what I’m trying to help you understand.”
He turned to her, frowning. “Permission …”
“Is a word,” she said.
He blinked. Then he blinked again, and when his eyes opened he saw exactly what she meant. “Tanner,” he said slowly. “Tell your Abbot—no, tell Damon. Personally, if you can. Tell him I have the horse-witch.”
“I’m sorry?”
So he was awake. And listening. Go figure. “Tell him I have her. Tell him I’ll report what I learn. And tell him I don’t need any fucking help.”
“Um …”
“Tell the Council of Brothers we can have peace, if they leave the horse-witch alone. If they don’t, we’ll have something else.”
“I get it,” Tanner said. “Everybody knows your something else.”
“Tell them the horse-witch is family now. My family. They’ll understand what that means.”
“I kind of do myself.”
“I hope I’m right about you. I hope you’re too smart to mix in my business again.”
“What, no third time’s the charm?”
“Third time’s the slab, Tanner. Believe it.”
“I wouldn’t presume to doubt. Hey, if thanks from me means anything—”
“Don’t.”
“Yeah, all right.” Tanner relaxed, and let his eyes drift closed. “Family, huh? Family since when?”
He looked at her. She looked at him.
“Apparently,” he said, “mostly forever.”
“Everybody spends their whole lives pretending shit isn’t random. We trace connections between events, and we invest those connections with meaning. That’s why we all make stories out of our lives. That’s what stories are: ways of pretending things happen for a reason.”
— CAINE
Blade of Tyshalle
The entry hall of the Monastic Embassy in Thorncleft was wide and tall and comfortably warm after the spring chill outside. In accordance with Monastic custom, the embassy had been constructed with local materials; in Thorncleft, just below Khryl’s Saddle, this meant stone, mostly varieties of granite like the walls of polished porphyry that gleamed dark rose in the afternoon sun.
There was the usual complement of a dozen or so novices dusting and scrubbing and polishing pretty much anything that couldn’t get up and run away; his practiced eye tabbed four of them as covert Esoterics, and there were two more who very well could have been, which meant they were the dangerous ones. Even four covert Esoterics in the front hall would be overkill for this embassy—a small installation in the sleepy capital of a small, peaceful nation—if the Monasteries indulged in overkill, which in his experience they did not. So they were wary, watching for trouble. Likely violent trouble.
They might be expecting him. Specifically.
Several of the novices and two of the Esoterics looked up when his boot heels clacked on the marble floor. One Esoteric’s eyes widened in shock, and his mouth fell open, and when he drew breath for an exclamation, he was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a large matte black pistol whose muzzle was centered on his right eye.
“You. Shut the fuck up.”
“Your pardon, sir?”
“There’s a time to bluff, kid. This isn’t it.” He looked over the group. “Don’t talk. None of you. Not a fucking word. Now, everybody here who knows who I am, raise your hand.”
Both of the probables raised their hands, as did two of the obvious ones and three of the regular novices. Sometimes being a celebrity kind of sucked.
“All right, go over there. Stand by the Duty Master’s office and keep your mouths shut.”
They kind of looked at one another like they were trying to decide between obeying, stalling, or blitzing. “You know who I am,” he said patiently. “You know you should do as you’re told.”
They did.
He looked at the remaining novices. He pointed the pistol at the head of the last Esoteric. “This guy knows who I am, but he didn’t raise his hand. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll kill him for it. So if every other liar owns up and raises a hand … ah, fuck it anyway. All of you. Over there with the others. You, get the door. We’re going in to chat with the Duty Master.”
The office was small and plain, its only furnishings a writing table and a small wooden stool. On the writing table sat a large volume of cutgrass paper bound in what might ha
ve been dragon skin. On the stool sat a small plain man of indeterminable old age, who held a large reading glass in both hands. He lifted his head and silently regarded his visitors with a squint notable for its expressionless concentration.
He showed the pistol to the Duty Master. This elicited no reaction. “You know who I am?”
The small still man said, “Jonathan Fist.”
He blinked. “That’s … impressive.”
“Thank you.”
“How do you know that name?”
The small plain man set down the reading glass, closed the book, and stood. “All of you stay here. Keep the door closed and make no sound until I send for you.”
All twelve of them clasped their hands behind them and settled into parade rest. The small plain man tucked the book into the crook of his elbow. He nodded to Jonathan Fist. “The rest of this conversation should be private. Please follow me.”
“And they’ll just stand here?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Then we’re both fortunate you’re not on my staff. Shall we?”
“The only conversation I need is with the Reading Master.”
“I am the Reading Master.” He hefted the book. “You may be interested to learn that this is our archive’s Unbound History of Faltane County, including a fresh transcription of the Faltane County War.”
“Tanner filed already?”
“I know of no one by that name.”
“Me neither. Interesting reading?”
“Unexpectedly so.”
“And why in hell would you read it? Why would you even have one? Faltane’s weeks from here; there are two abbeys within a three-day ride. How come they’re not keeping this History down there?”
“They are,” the Reading Master assured him. “The report on the events of the recent war has rendered the History of Faltane County subject to a specific protocol, requiring that one volume of each new edition be Bound in Thorncleft’s Vault.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you’re in it.” He nodded toward the door. “Brother Jonathan? Please.”