Bransen turned his head to eye her hard.
“I understand,” she whispered to him, “and I know your reasoning. I wouldn’t dare pretend that I have the right to disagree. But I beg of you to measure your pace, my love. You are tormenting your body more than it can take. You’ll need more than the soul stone if you break your knee, and where will that leave me and my ma?”
“My patience is long gone with this creature known as the Stork,” said Bransen.
“But mine is not.”
Still holding the gemstone tight against his forehead, Bransen leaped up to his feet, catching himself surely and with incredible agility. He was the Highwayman now, the rogue who could scale a castle wall of tightly fit weatherworn stones. He was the Highwayman, who could challenge a laird’s champion in battle and win.
Bransen pulled the gemstone away. Immediately, he swayed. He caught himself, though, and kept Cadayle at bay with an upraised hand. Then he stubbornly put his gemstone back in his pouch and let it go.
He took a step, awkward and unsteady. He nearly fell over, but he did not, and he even managed to glance back at Cadayle to see her and her concerned mother exchanging frowns.
Hand shaking, arm flailing, Bransen managed to get his fingers back around the precious gemstone. He brought it forth and collected, too, the black silk bandanna he used to secure it to his forehead.
“I did not wish to end with a stumble,” he explained, securing it in place. He managed a strained smile, one that undeniably showed Cadayle and Callen that he was surrendering for the day for their benefit and not his own.
“I will be as patient as I can,” he promised his wife. Despite his frustration his words were sincere.
“I love you,” Cadayle said.
“With or without the gemstone,” Callen added.
Bransen licked a bit of blood from his lip.
How could he be so fortunate and miserable all at the same time?
And how, he wondered as he brought his hand up to check on the security of the gemstone, could he both appreciate and resent its healing magic? The soul stone freed him from his infirmities, made him whole-heroic, even. And yet at the same time it trapped him and held him dependent to its powers.
He wanted to be free of it, but he could not tolerate the reality of that freedom.
“You are better than you were before you found the soul stone,” Cadayle said. She waved her hand at the rough and root-strewn trail. “This ground trips you up, perhaps, but in your youth the flat grass of the monastery courtyard often left you on your face.”
“Ki-chi-kree,” Bransen said.
“The promise of the Jhesta Tu,” Cadayle agreed. “You will overcome this infirmity.
“You already have,” she added. Bransen eyed her curiously. “You defeated it with your spirit long before you found any real control of your limbs. To others you were the Stork, some in jest and some in earnest sympathy. But you have always been Bransen. And you will always be Bransen, with or without the soul stone, whether or not you need the soul stone to walk a broken trail.”
Bransen Garibond closed his eyes and took a deep breath, blowing out all of his frustration in one great exhale. “I never knew my real father,” he said, and Cadayle and Callen nodded, for they knew well the tale. “He studied the Jhesta Tu. He has been to the Walk of Clouds. He copied their book-the same book that Garibond taught to me when I was young. He will have answers.”
“Or he will show you where to look for them.”
Bransen nodded, his smile genuine, and genuinely hopeful. “Garibond told me that he went to Chapel Abelle in the North. If I can find him…”
“Bran Dynard was a good man,” Callen said, stepping up beside her daughter. “I owe him my life as surely as I owe it to Sen Wi. He knew why I was put out on the road to die, and why I carried the bites of the serpent. He knew that his superiors in his Church had witnessed my execution and had, with their silence, condoned it. And still he fought for me against the vicious powries, and he hid me away at great personal peril. You are much like him, Bransen. You carry his integrity and his sense of justice. Physical strength is nothing when weighed against that.”
“I will find my physical strength,” Bransen replied. “It is there-the soul stone shows it to me. I will overcome this infirmity.”
Callen nodded. “I would never doubt you, and double blessed am I to have been saved by your father and again by you, the Highwayman.”
Cadayle walked over and took Bransen’s arm. “Five miles?” she asked.
“That would make seven for the day,” said Bransen. “And we will do seven tomorrow.”
Cadayle tilted her head back to get a better look into her stubborn husband’s eyes.
“Two without the gemstone?” she asked.
“Two and a half,” he replied flatly.
Callen’s laugh turned them both to regard her, standing with Doully’s reins in hand. “And they say that my walking companion brings a reputation for stubbornness,” Callen remarked, shaking the donkey’s lead.
All three were laughing, then, and even old Doully gave a snort and a whinny.
FIVE
Foul Chaps We’d Be
It called to him from the far corner of the darkness, a continual growl, a rolling “r.” Finally it broke and rewound in its timbre like a wave flowing over itself just offshore.
It grew again in resonance and filled Cormack with its mournful vibration, beckoned him forward in the darkness. He followed, a purely instinctive and unthinking move. He knew not if the sound would take him from the abyss, nor, locked as he was in a state of near emptiness, if he even wanted to come forth from the darkness.
At that moment Cormack didn’t want anything. He just was. A moment of pure existence or of nothingness, he couldn’t tell. But the rolling “r” pulled him forward as if walking him to the edge of a cliff. He stepped off and fell through the blackness. His eye cracked open, and crystalline brilliance stung him. Sensations returned, and with them consciousness.
The light was the sun, sparkling off the water. The taste in his mouth was sand, for he was facedown on the beach. The sound was a song, a powrie chant.
With great effort Cormack rolled his head to the side.The bloody-capped dwarves were huddled in a circle, their arms locked over the shoulders of the next dwarf in the ring. They turned their living wheel in perfect cadence, a few steps left, a few back to the right, all the while singing:
Put me deep in the groun’so cold I’ll be dead, ’fore I e’er get old Done me fights and shined me cap Now’s me time for th’endless nap Spill no tear and put me deep Dun want no noise for me endless sleep Done me part and stood me groun’ But th’other one won and knocked me down
Put me deep in the groun’so cold I’ll be dead ’fore I e’er get old Spill no tear and put me deep Dun want no noise for me endless sleep
Cormack tried to lift his head to get a better perspective, and only then did the monk realize that he had been tightly bound, his hands painfully drawn up against his back, the rough weeds tight into his wrists. More than those shackles, though, loomed the noose of pain shooting through his head. As soon as Cormack got his chin off the sand, he dropped it back, grimacing all the way, as hot fires erupted in the back of his skull.
He closed his eyes tight and tasted the sand and tried hard to growl through the burning agony. He wanted to reach up and grab at the spot, but he couldn’t wriggle free his hands.
Gradually it passed, and the powrie song continued, and their huddle circled left and right, just off the beach. This time Cormack slowly rolled his entire body instead of trying to lift his head alone, and he managed to gain a better perspective on the powrie dance. He realized only then that the dwarves were circling a particular spot, a particular thing. As he considered the words of their ditty he solved the riddle.