A light, shaking sigh matched the whine of the wind, and she looked up from her contemplation. Aric had chosen to sleep near the horses, away from the adults and Vincane, who now dozed in herb-induced slumber near the fire. Rhapsody rose, feeling the cold in her bones, and went to the child, bending beside him to check his festering leg. She crooned a soft tune, aimed at easing his pain in sleep, then came back to her place near the fire beside Achmed.
He was staring into the western distance, his face shielded, his eyes clouded with thought. Rhapsody waited for him to speak. It was not until the bottom of the sun had sunk below the rim of the horizon that he did.
“We can’t make it to the carnival, or to Sorbold now before the birth of the last child.”
Rhapsody exhaled. As always, Achmed was giving practical voice to her thoughts. The oldest child of the Rakshas was a young man, a gladiator in the nation of the Sorbold, in the northwestern city-state of Jakar. Achmed had never been thrilled with the prospect of attempting a rescue of this child, but Rhapsody had been insistent, and finally he had granted the possibility as long as the timing allowed. Prior to their diversion back to Ylorc, had they followed the schedule, the gladiator, whose name was Constantin, could have been found outside Sorbold, at the winter carnival of Navarne. By the time they got there now, however, the carnival would be over and Constantin would have returned to Sorbold. It seemed the rescue of the additional slave children had been bought at the price of the gladiator’s damnation.
“The baby is due to be born in the Lirin fields to the south of Tyrian forest,” she said mildly, watching the sunset herself. “We’ll be in the area. We could go to Sorbold after Oelendra takes the baby off our hands.”
“No.” Achmed tossed some frozen grass into the fire. “It’s too much of a risk. If I’m caught while in Sorbold secretly, stealing as valuable a commodity as a gladiator, it will be an act of war. This mission, as I’ve told you from the beginning, was to gather these children for the blood we could get out of them, not to save their souls.”
“Perhaps for you.” Rhapsody’s gaze didn’t move. “How ironic,” she said, with a bitter tinge in her voice. “I suppose that means we are no better than the Rakshas, tying children up like swine and slaughtering them in the House of Remembrance. I guess blood is the means, whether you are well-intentioned or not.”
“Perspective is everything, Rhapsody.”
“I’m going after him,” she said mildly, still not moving her eyes from the vanishing sun. “I appreciate all that you have done, and will do, but I am not abandoning him. I understand your predicament, and I can’t ask you to risk your kingdom for this. But I’m going into Sorbold, even if I have to go in alone.”
Achmed exhaled. “I’d advise against it.”
“I can ask Llauron for help.”
“I’d advise against that even more.”
“You’re not leaving me many choices,” Rhapsody said, searching the sky for the earliest stars, waiting for their appearance to begin her evening devotions.
“Leave him. When this is over I will hunt him down and put him out of his misery; you know as a Dhracian I cannot abide anything tainted with F’dor blood being left alive.”
“You’ll be damning him to the Vault of the Underworld.” Her comment was rote; they had argued unproductively about this many nights before this one.
Achmed shrugged. “If you like I will sprinkle holy water on the cinders of his corpse for you.”
“Thank you, no.”
“Well, there’s always Ashe. He could round up the rest of them. You called him on the wind once, and he came.”
Rhapsody shuddered. “Yes, I did, but I was standing in the gazebo at Elysian, which is a natural amplifier. I don’t know if it would work in the open air. Besides, you know very well that I don’t want to tell Ashe about these children until I’m back from the Veil of Hoen.”
Achmed’s fists clenched more tightly, but his face did not move. “He doesn’t deserve the protection you are always wrapping around him like a child’s blanket,” he said bitterly. “Perhaps it would do him some good to fight his own battles, to be responsible for wiping his own arse once in a while. It is making me ill to watch you be his arse-rag.”
The light of the setting sun filled her eyes, making them sting with memory. “Why do you hate him?”
Achmed didn’t look at her. “Why do you love him?”
She stared silently over the endless fields to the horizon, darkening now. The rosy glow of sunset was deserting the clouds, leaving only hazy gray where a moment before there had been glory. Finally she spoke, her voice soft.
“There is no reason for love. It just is. And when it’s there, it endures, even when it shouldn’t. Even when you try to make it go away. It’s hard to make it die. I’ve learned it’s also unnecessary—and unwise. It only lessens you for it. So you accept it. You lock it away. You let it stay. You don’t deliberately kill love. You just don’t act on it.”
She glanced his way, noting his eyes fixed beyond the rim of the world, his folded hands resting on his lips, lost in thought. “But hate is different. If you’re going to hate, you should at least have a reason.”
Achmed inhaled the cold wind of the coming night, then let his breath out slowly.
“I don’t hate. I have given up hate. But I disdain Ashe’s promises, his misplaced loyalty, his weakness.”
Rhapsody ran her hand over a dry stalk of highgrass, blanched and frozen, that jutted forth from the snow.
“He’s no longer weak. I’ve seen what he’s endured, Achmed. Even in his agony, his isolation, he spent his time protecting the innocent, struggling to find the very demon that held his soul captive. He’s whole now. He’s strong.”
“You misuse the word; I thought Namers were more selective in their use of accurate language. He’s been mended. Mending him did not make a god of him. He will betray you again, fail you, lose his grasp while you hang in the balance, arrive moments too late. I have seen it before.” He glanced at her and their eyes met. “So have you.”
She pulled the stalk of grass from the frozen ground. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I believe I do.”
-
The grains of the seedpod slid between her fingers, then scattered onto the snow. “It’s easy to criticize something you think of as a weakness, something you’ve never had. But if you’ve never been in love yourself, never had to balance it against duty, never been totally lost in it, you can’t—
“Stop!” The word came forth violently enough to make Rhapsody drop the remains of the grass stalk. “How do you know what I have had? How do you know I can’t understand from personal experience how weak love can make you? How dare you presume that I would condemn anyone, even him, without having walked those paths myself?”
Achmed’s eyes finally turned on her, and they were blazing with dark light. “I know everything about the promises of youth. I know that stupid surrender, that need to save the unsavable that love makes you believe is possible. That’s what I despise most about Ashe—that he has made you expect that he can save you, or you him. That he has made you believe you need saving. That he was worth saving at the cost you paid to do it.”
He broke his gaze away and stared out into the new darkness at the horizon’s edge. Rhapsody watched him for a moment, then looked westward herself.
“Who was she?”
The Fibolg king exhaled, then lowered his gaze. “Please. This is lore that will remain lost. Consider this my own Sleeping Child, better left alone.” Rhapsody nodded. “Does Grunthor know?”