“And this list,” he said. “Do you know any of these ingredients?”
Hawes whispered in warning, “What kind of ... man ... carries works of healing, only to stack them with something of deadly harm?”
Malice flickered so openly across her stern features that Chane tensed.
“It is a poison, as a whole?” he asked. “Or is only one component so?”
He already knew some ingredients for Welstiel’s violet concoction were benign. Others baffled him, particularly the flower he knew as Dyvjàka Svonchek—“boar’s bell” in Belaskian. Hawes might be as puzzled as she was suspicious.
“Do you know the flower?” he urged. “Perhaps by a name other than those I translated?”
In one quick step, Hawes closed on him.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “And make no mistake: I have no fear of you!”
Her claim was obvious, though Chane could only guess how skilled she might be beyond what he had seen. After their encounter at the council chamber, it made him wonder again why she had assisted him at all.
“You do not agree with the way the guild has treated Wynn,” he said, hoping to throw her off balance.
“Agreement is irrelevant,” she returned instantly. “The guild’s purpose comes first. Answer my question.”
To Chane, there were few who mattered among the common herds of human cattle. Fewer still who would be a loss at their death. Wynn was foremost among these.
Hawes was obviously well beyond the unworthy masses, and beyond many here within the guild’s walls. Had he stumbled upon a hidden, if adversarial, ally that Wynn had not recognized?
“I am the one who keeps Wynn safe,” he answered.
Hawes lifted only her eyes, not her head, glaring up at him, as if his superior height were nothing but an annoyance.
“It has been called Léchelâppa,” she said.
Chane frowned. It sounded Numanese, but he could not translate it in his head.
“Corpse-Skirt,” she added in different terms. “It was used by some in the past as a common way to draw out and kill vermin ... foolishly, considering livestock were attracted to it. I know of no one who carries it or sells it ... or would be allowed to do so.”
So it was known in this part of the world.
Chane was grateful for the information, but one thing disturbed him. Hawes openly discussed an illegal substance, but she never asked what this second deadly concoction was for. This left him wary.
He slowly reached out and took the list of components from The Seven Leaves of Life out of her hand. Clutching the book and his note sheets, he held up the glasses, peering once through their clear lenses.
“My thanks,” he said. “I am late in meeting Wynn.”
If his sudden desire to leave startled the premin, she did not show it. She cocked her head to the side, still eyeing him, and simply nodded.
Without another word, Chane strode out and down the passage. Late as he was, his own quarters were close, so he took both flights of stairs two at a time. Fumbling briefly with the key to unlock his guest quarters, he went directly to the desk, hiding the glasses and his other burdens in a lower drawer. As Chane turned to leave, his gaze fell upon Wynn’s stacked journals, and he winced.
The mere sight of them hurt for what he had found—or rather not found—in their pages.
At first, he had allowed Wynn to work with him, helping him interpret so many symbols he could not follow. The further he traveled within her stories of the Farlands, the more he wanted to study and absorb her writings by himself. He later took to struggling alone in his own room with copious notes made in her company.
Doing so without her assistance was daunting, but he began to grasp the syllabary’s premise of compressing and simplifying multiple letters into symbols of fewer and fewer continuous strokes. These were combined with special marks to account for pronunciations and special sounds in any language. It was all elegant, concise, adaptable, and so much could be condensed within a single page.
Fascinated as he was by each of the experiences he wrested from the symbols, something odd began to trouble him. Soon he stopped paying attention to actual events, paged backward, and focused on her accounts of the Noble Dead, most specifically the vampires.
She wrote of Toret—Chane’s own maker—once called Rat-Boy, and of Sapphire, Toret’s doxy. There were many passages concerning Welstiel Massing, Magiere’s half-brother, and Li’kän, that ancient undead now trapped beneath the castle in the Pock Peaks’ frozen heights. Wynn wrote of the feral monks Welstiel had created to fight his battles as they had raced for that castle. She even recounted meeting a vampire boy named Tomas in a decaying fortress outside of Apudâlsat in Magiere’s homeland.
Chane paged faster, but some of Wynn’s encounters with the undead that he knew of were missing.
At times, he had been an intricate part of her life—of her stories. But she had omitted how he had protected her from an undead sorcerer named Vordana, simply noting that Vordana escaped to be later destroyed by Leesil. She omitted how he had saved her from two mindless undead sailors in those same swamps and marshes. The account of Magiere severing his head was missing entirely.
As for the orb’s discovery, guarded by the deceptively frail Li’kän, Chane found only a mention of “another undead” in Welstiel’s company. And, that in the end, one of Welstiel’s “servants” had betrayed him. That one was never described, let alone named.
It had been Chane himself. There were so many holes in the tales, and he felt as if he were falling through all of them at once into nothing.
Chane Andraso was not mentioned once in the journals of Wynn Hygeorht.
Standing in the guest quarters’ silence, he could not bear to pick them up again. As if touching them would make the truth all the more real. Wynn had written these journals as if he never existed. All record of him had been blotted away from later becoming a reminder to anyone, especially to her. Chane did not need to ask why.
He was a thing not suitable for her world.
That realization—that intentional omission of him—cut him worse than Magiere’s falchion severing his head. Yet he could not leave Wynn.
His place was at her side for as long as she would allow him. He swallowed the pain and locked it away, but he still could not touch those journals again.
Chane left the guest quarters, heading out across the courtyard to the old barracks that served as a dormitory, trying not to let himself think. As he reached the dormitory’s second floor and Wynn’s door, a part of him did not want to see her. But he always went to her just past dusk. He stood there for a while before he could finally knock.
“I am here,” he rasped.
Chane heard Wynn’s quick footsteps within the room trotting closer to let him in.
Chapter 3
The following afternoon, Wynn sat in a deep alcove of the archives with Shade on the floor beside her. She was searching for anything to help locate Bäalâle Seatt, but her efforts gained her little.
She’d found an older map of the western Numan lands, all the way to the Rädärsherând, the “Sky-Cutter” mountain range blocking the southern desert and Suman Empire beyond. Paging through a sheaf of obscure dwarven ballads, she found one that mentioned something called the gí’uyllœ. It didn’t pertain to what she was after, but stuck in her head just the same.
The dialect was so old that the meaning was only a guess—something like “all-eater(s)” or “all-consumer(s).” At first, it seemed some ancient reference to goblins, but the verse hinted at massive size.