Shorelines and Secrets
The day moved quickly.
Luncheon with Maridale was pleasant although strangely dull.
In many ways she seemed more timid than I had remembered her to be.
I wanted to speak to Dali, to ask her what had happened between her and Teorin last night that made him feel comfortable enough to get pleasured at the breakfast table in front of me, but I did not know how to ask Maridale to leave and I did not feel like discussing the strange breakfast with anyone.
The cook came out and handed me the provisions for Eravic which I took myself, and then evening came quickly.
He was already at the shoreline when I arrived.
He looked at the provisions in my hands and said nothing, only nodded, and we walked in the comfortable silence that somehow felt natural between us.
The dark water moved somewhere beneath its own surface and the air here was colder than the rest of Morrath, salt without sea, the kind of cold that made you aware of your own breathing.
He held something out to me. A small cloth pouch, worn at the edges.
"What are these for?" I said.
"I have heard Morrath is not much for gambling."
I laughed before I could stop myself. Then I remembered my unfortunate gambling experience involving dice and human fingers and poisonous blood.
“I would rather play with you,” I said. “But we have nowhere to play."
"We do." He nodded toward a small hut set back from the shoreline. "That is where I stay when the trade routes take too long and the sea legs get the best of me."
"Is there a table for gambling?"
He smiled. "Aye."
I remembered then that I had planned to go wait for Colsar. I started to say it. "Next time, perh—"
He caught my arm. "We need to go there anyway. I brought your treatment. Not what I gave you last time, but something else our healer made for you.” He paused. “And also, there is something we must discuss."
“Fine.”
The hut was small and smelled of sea and cedar. A table. Two chairs. A lamp already lit as though he had been there before arriving at the shoreline. I sat across from him and he set a small vial on the table between us.
"This is not quite the antidote," he said. "But the healers in the West claim it is the closest thing we will find." He shrugged. "I do not know. I have more people looking. But we will try it."
I nodded. “Does it taste like what you gave me last time?” I wrinkled my nose.
He shook his head. “Far nastier, because it is stronger and more effective, according to the healer.”
"After you take it you may feel woozy. That is why it is best done here." He looked at me directly. "I will not do anything inap—"
"I trust you completely," I said without thinking.
The words surprised me as much as they surprised him. But they were true and I did not take them back.
He remained quiet. He was not the silent type, and neither was I. But somehow these small silences we shared were comfortable ones.
He uncorked the vial and passed it across the table.
It tasted like rust and something green. I swallowed it in one go and
set the vial down harder than I meant to, my hand not quite steady.
"That is vile." I do not tell him about the cough earlier that morning, or the color of what came up with it.
It had happened again before I left the Darkway tonight. This time black with red threaded through it.
In truth, I likely needed whatever this stronger treatment was. Even if it tasted foul.
His eyes stayed on my hand a second too long. He did not say anything either.
“I am sure you have been told that the West is not known for its cooking."
“You never told me that,” I said.
I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms. “I am beginning to question this whole Vaelors cannot lie thing, Lord Eravic.”
“I never mentioned that I said it myself, only that I was certain that others have.”
I tilted my head. Indeed, that tracked. There had been multiple times in my life when people had mentioned that the West had terrible food.
“Fine, I’ll give you that one,” I grumbled.
He chuckled.
We sat in silence a while longer, as though we knew there were things to talk about and gambling to be done but we simply wanted to savor the strange peacefulness of the moment.
The lamp softened at the edges. Not much. Enough that I noticed the grain of the table under my fingers and found it interesting.
He watched me carefully.
"I know you miss them," he said.
I did not answer right away.
"I do."
"There is a way."
I lifted my head.
He turned his cup slowly on the wood. "What was lost when you were born can be given back. It has a name. The Arrolyn." He said it plainly. "Placed properly, you would be able to cross. Not far. But you would be able to cross."
"Cross?”
"The threshold." He looked at me. "You would be able to go to him."
I did not trust my face to hold, so I looked at the lamp instead.
"Would it give me enough strength to kill him?"
I knew he knew who I was referencing without my saying it.
King Orsin. My mother's butcher.
"That is a different matter."
"Why?"
"Because placing it and waking it are not the same thing." He set his cup down. "Placing it makes you whole. Waking it makes you something else. One is medicine. The other is a decision."
"And you are not going to explain the difference."
"I will. Not tonight." He said it without apology. "Tonight you are foggy on a Western tonic and you would agree to anything."
"That is probably true,” I said without apology.
He stared just briefly, then burst into laughter. A low, rumbling laugh that made something in me go warm.
"So wait, you have it here, in Morrath?" I said.
"Aye."
"How?"
"I spent the past year making sure I had it."
He said it so casually that I knew that obtaining it was likely not a casual feat at all.
I sat with that. "How did you know I would need it?"
"I did not." He shrugged. "I knew only that your mother believed it would one day save your life, and that we owed her that. That was enough."
I studied him. "Simple as that?"
"Simple as that."
I pushed myself upright against the back of the chair. The room came with me and I immediately sank back down.
“It can make you foggy the first few treatments, apparently, but at this dose it shouldn’t last more than an hour or so, the healer told me,” Eravic said.
At this dose. That meant there were higher doses of this foul-tasting medicine. The thought made me shudder.
"Do you have any ale?"
He laughed again, this time loud enough that it filled the small space. "On the ship. I can bring you some next time."
"There will be a next time?"
"Yes. The more treatments, the better, is what I have been told.”
“And…the Arrolyn, once placed, will let me cross the wards?”
“Yes. But likely not far.” He leaned back. "Even with it, you are not strong enough to go all the way home. If you tried to walk out of Morrath tonight I would put money on ten paces."
I frowned. "Ten?"
"Twelve if you were angry."
"Why?"
"Because you are still poisoned. You have had one day of a treatment that is not an antidote, given to you by a man who told you so before he gave it."
I looked down at my hands. “The Arrolyn. What if you awaken it?”
He was quiet at first.
“That is different.”
“Different how?”
“Placing the Arrolyn restores what was missing. It allows you to cross thresholds. It returns something that was taken from you. And if you were not poisoned, it would be more than sufficient for you to go home and live your life and return to your family.”
He paused. “But waking the Arrolyn, that is something else entirely.”
“Meaning?”
He looked at me carefully. “Meaning it does not simply return what was lost. It awakens what was made with it.”
“And that is dangerous?”
“Power always is.” His expression tightened slightly. “Especially power created with Sarenal magic. The Arrolyn was not made lightly, princess. There are reasons things like that are not used casually.”
“But you can awaken it, even though you were not sure where to place it?” My voice was skeptical.
“Yes. Because the ancestors do the work. There is an incantation for it I was taught during childhood for this.” He laughed. “Magic isn’t complicated. People are.”
“You are being so vague and mysterious, Eravic. Perhaps I want to be upgraded to the awakened version of this thing you put inside me?”
A faint, humorless smile crossed his face. “Then it is a discussion for a different day. Today has been enough.” He paused. “Not just for you, but for me too.”
I opened my mouth. Then I thought about what that could mean.
He raised an eyebrow.
I closed it again.
I frowned. “Then where is the antidote?"
"I have men looking. Axar is looking. Colsar has men looking too. Between us we will find it." He said it evenly. "Until then we have something that might work and might not, and it has to be nightly."
"Must I come here for it?"
"Yes."
The thought did not bother me, but I asked anyway. “Why?"
"Because the people that carry it will only bring it to Vaelor ships. Then it must be prepared, and my healer is one of the best in these matters and can prepare the treatments well.”
He clearly is not the best with taste, I wanted to say, though I knew it would sound ungrateful if said aloud.
And because we have just discussed what it does to you." He paused. "It will be worse now. And once the Arrolyn is placed, worse still."
"Why?"
"The energy it costs you to move through a day as something more than human is more than it was before." He looked at me steadily. "You will feel like yourself at night, but you will pay for it in the morning."
I turned the empty vial on the table.
"It really is disgusting."
"So you have said."
"Twice."
"Three times. At least.”
“Another Vaelor lie.” I stuck out my tongue at him and he barked a laugh.
I found the pouch he had given me and shook it. Coins moved inside.
"Well," I said. "This means I can beat you at gambling."
"I doubt that. You certainly didn't before."
"You have not seen me play lately. Perhaps I have improved."
"I have seen you lie. It is the same skill." He collected the cards from the shelf behind him and set them down between us. Then he stopped. "Although I suspect we will need to wager something other than kisses this time. Your husband would not be very happy."
Heat climbed my throat before I could do anything about it as I remembered the night we first met.
I did not want it there. It arrived anyway.
He did not look away and neither did I, and the lamp went on burning, and neither of us said anything at all.
Then he picked up the cards and began to shuffle.
"Coins," he said. "Since you insist on winning."