Loss
“N ot a Green Rider?” Stevic said. “What are you saying?”
“Come in and close the door,” Laren said.
He did as she asked, and sat on the trunk that held her possessions.
She paced in a tight circle before sitting on the edge of her bunk.
The captain’s cabin was spacious, but as spartan as a military vessel ought to be.
Grand windows looked out sternside to an expanse of sky and sea, and the cabin was furnished with a desk and chair, cabinets and shelves.
It was stately if not luxurious, and in a way, Stevic thought it suited Laren perfectly.
“I don’t know how much Melry told you about my capture,” she said finally.
“She told me what she remembered,” he replied, “though it was difficult for her to relive. And for me to hear. And, of course, she told me how she slipped away and hid from the Darrow Raiders.”
Laren smiled, and there was fierce pride in it.
“Yes, hiding in a beaver lodge. That took some quick thinking. At the time, however, I only knew that the Raiders were going to take my daughter to their camp and abuse and kill her. It was far worse torture for me than anything else they could have inflicted on me, which Torq well knew.” She turned away from him and released a deep, shuddering breath.
When she returned her gaze to him, her expression was determined.
“When we get back, I will hunt down Torq and kill him with my bare hands for what he put us through.”
“I will aid in that endeavor however I may. The king sent me to retrieve you, but I would have come on my own, anyway. I felt as if my heart had been ripped out when I heard of your abduction.”
Her expression softened, and she looked down at her hands. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, and the two fell silent for some time. The restraint between them was painful, but he would not push her. She had to come around in her own time. And if she never did? He would face that possibility when it came to pass. In the meantime, he refused to entertain it.
“Among the things Melry told you about,” she said, “did she mention the centipede?”
“Yes,” he replied. “She told me how it was placed in your ear, and that it was sensitive to the use of your ability.”
“Yes. If I detected a lie in someone but claimed they were telling the truth, the centipede would react and cause me a good deal of pain, more excruciating than this disk.” She tapped the bronze brand on her neck.
“I believe my hearing has been diminished in my right ear because of it, but it could have been worse. There were those enslaved at the palace I heard about who died of infections from the centipede’s bites, and still others in which the centipedes burrowed into the brains of their hosts. ”
“Can you still feel it in there?” he asked. The very thought of a centipede crawling in his head was repugnant.
“No, not at all,” she replied, “which is a good thing. Otherwise, I would not have been able to manipulate King Farrad Vir so easily, but I’m getting ahead of the story.”
“It’s a good thing if you don’t feel it, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And no.”
“I don’t understand.”
“After I was first captured,” she said, “a day or two into it, while I was still in Sacoridia—I am unsure of the timing because I had been beaten by Torq, and the additional abuses by Tol Asmerand made much of that time foggy—the centipede crawled out of my ear. An ekedian centipede, I was told, cannot be removed without killing the host, and one leaving on its own is almost unheard of. You can believe I killed it right away. Fortunately, no one was present at that moment to witness the event, or surely they would have found another one to place in my ear, and upon doing so, discovered that their truth-teller was, in fact, a fraud, because it would have crawled out just like the first.”
Ah, he thought. So that was how she was able to lie to King Farrad Vir.
“But surely it is a good thing it crawled out. Is it not?”
“What it means...” and here Laren took a deep breath, “is that my brooch abandoned me even as I sat in the carriage of the Varosians. At that moment, I realized I could no longer see my brooch or feel the presence of my ability. Nor could I access it. It was simply gone. The emptiness of it...” She shook her head, pain etched into her features.
“The centipede crawled out because my magic was gone, and without my brooch, I am no longer a Green Rider.”
The cabin fell to silence but for the constant ambient roar of the ocean and the creak of the ship as the wind propelled it forward.
They dipped and rose with the motion of the waves, the view out the stern windows filling with churning, frothy ocean one moment, and replaced by the azure of the cloudless sky the next.
Some time ago, Laren had told Stevic about the golden winged horse brooches the Green Riders wore.
Magically concealed, non-Riders could not see them, or sometimes they appeared as decorative pins, or medals.
She had explained that they augmented the natural ability of a given Rider, that the ability was otherwise so weak as to be nonexistent.
“For reasons we don’t understand,” she continued at last, “a brooch abandons its Rider without warning, and when that happens, it is considered the end of that individual’s time with the messenger service.
Without that brooch, an individual can no longer call on his or her ability in service to the realm.
It used to be that brooches normally abandoned their Riders in about five or so years, but of late, the trend has been to hold on to our current generation longer. ”
For a moment, Stevic’s hope kindled that it meant Karigan’s brooch would soon be ready to leave her.
Hadn’t she been with the messenger service more than five years?
But from Laren’s words, it did not sound as if it was to be the case.
He was relieved, however, that Laren’s had left her, though he tried not to show it.
It meant she would no longer face the dangers she had known in service to the king.
“Even so,” she continued, “I am an outlier. I’ve been—was—a Rider for almost twenty-five years.
It’s unheard of, though it may have happened in the past. There is just too little in the historical records about Riders to say for sure.
Zachary and I have speculated that perhaps the brooches are able to sense periods of strife, which requires experienced Riders, but we just don’t know. ” She shrugged.
“So, after all these years,” Stevic said, “your brooch left you, which means you are retired. Why, if it is as you say, that brooches retain Riders during times of strife, has yours left you now when our country is at war?”
“Yes, it is the tradition that Riders retire when their brooches abandon them. The why or how of the abandonment is unknown, though there are some patterns—for instance, Riders who become injured and are too impaired to carry on their duties. But there is another theory I have, that during times of relative peace, a brooch will abandon its Rider when the Rider hears another call, maybe to settle down and start a family, or to follow a trade, or simply because they have served their time.” She shrugged.
“As for me, I suspect the brooch recognized I was being torn from duty and it would not permit my ability to be used in service to a king that was not of Sacoridia. It’s only a guess.
Or, it could be that it was just time, and interesting timing, to say the least.”
He rubbed the scruff on his chin with his forefinger. “You speak as if the brooches have intelligence.”
“In a sense, they seem to often have a mind of their own. Perhaps it has to do with something cast into the magic during their making. The same has been said of other arcane objects, as well.”
This all tread uncomfortable ground. Stevic had never been fond of magic.
Most Sacoridians carried a latent, deep-seated fear of it, believing it led only to malignant threats like those posed by Mornhavon the Black so long ago.
However, he had been learning through Laren and Karigan that not all magic was bad, though it still appeared to have a penchant for causing trouble.
“What it comes down to,” she said, “is that my brooch has abandoned me, and I can’t access my ability in service to the realm. Therefore, I am no longer a Green Rider, and yet...”
“Yes?”
“And yet, either I developed such a talent for assessing honesty in people over the years by sheer repetition, picking up cues of the expressions, ticks, and body language of liars, that I came to naturally recognize the signs even without the aid of my ability, or, perhaps, some latent power lingers because I wore the brooch for so long.”
“If you have retained a latent power, as you describe it, would the centipede have left you?”
“I just don’t know, Stevic, I don’t know. I can certainly feel the absence of my ability. It’s like losing one of your senses, maybe your sight or hearing. And yet, I felt confident as ever when it came to determining the honesty of those who stood before King Farrad Vir.”
“Then why can’t you continue as a Green Rider? I mean, if you can still do the job as before?”
She absently fingered the end of her braid.
It was as precisely plaited as he had ever seen.
“Well, there is tradition, and there are questions. Is it actually a skill I developed over the years beyond the use of my ability, or is it indeed an after effect of wearing the brooch for so long, and if so, how long will it last? Neither strike me as reliable, which does not support being able to serve the realm as I did before.”