Chapter 10
Elantriana—the proclivity for Sestans to have absurdly long names astonished me—ensured all was right with her patient, cleaning up rags and packing up her things, before leading Eden and me to her squat home down the street.
It was a two-room affair, even smaller than my home in Fount, with only a half wall separating her sleeping quarters from everything else.
For her prickly nature, Elantriana was kind.
She saw us fed and washed, and lent me a dress to change into.
It should have been tight on me, or so I thought when I measured it with my eyes.
But I’d lost so much weight on our journey it fit almost perfectly.
Elantriana’s generosity was not free; she put Eden and me to work.
I washed the bloodied rags from the birth while Eden struggled to peel potatoes over a basin, a task she’d never done before.
When she finished, she swept the rooms and watered the midwife’s many plants.
Though I wanted to stay indoors to hide my face, when Elantriana bid me to fetch water from the well, I did so without complaint.
I would earn her trust, earn my dinner, and earn my place here, until it grew too dangerous to stay.
I wasn’t sure how I’d know. Perhaps Horgansten would remain under its king’s notice, and I’d stay here indefinitely, until the war ended and someone came to retrieve me.
I wondered, briefly, if it might be my brother Brien, but such fantasies proved too painful to bear.
Our host showed me everything I would need to know while she was gone.
Which stray cats were hers and which I was allowed to feed, when to harvest and hang to dry the herbs in the little garden to the side of her home, how much food she expected to still be in her stores.
She told me what to charge the sick and ensured they would come to me, and if anyone asked, I was her granddaughter, and I ought to mask that Canseren tongue of mine.
Eden and I slept on a pallet by the hearth that night, a luxury compared to the cold ground, and before dawn Elantriana roused us, instructing us how to pack her little wagon and feed her mule, which would be pulling it.
She made Eden put on a dress far too short for her, so she had to keep her slacks on.
“If you pretend you’re a man,” she insisted, “the patrol will know something is rotten.”
She gave me a red sash to wear around my upper arm to mark me as her replacement.
They set off south before the sun had fully risen. I stood in the middle of the road, watching them fade into the softening blue, until gooseflesh dotted my skin.
Alone. Well and truly. No Elantriana, no Eden, Ursa.
I clutched my dress over my heart. The road seemed to stretch on forever. Widen under my feet. The shadows of predawn yawned like the onslaught of death in a lumis. The first birds had stirred in their nests, yet the world had grown too quiet.
Please wake up, Renn, I prayed, shivering, though I wasn’t cold. Please wake up.
Alone. Alone. Alone.
Shutting my eyes, I drew in a deep breath. Let it out and drew in another, trying to feel the ground beneath my feet. I clutched at my bodice until my knuckles ached. Please wake up.
I couldn’t stand here forever.
I’d only just returned to the house when, thankfully, my first client came knocking on my door, begging for help with his brother’s broken leg.
I was eager to fill Elantriana’s shoes—an eagerness that warred with my instinct to hide. But I needed the work. I needed the people, the voices, the company. Still, I went about my role with care, not completely healing anyone in Horgansten. I could not let on that I used the craft.
I bound wounds and splinted breaks, made harmless teas from the herbs I could identify, used poultices Elantriana had already prepared. I listened when people talked, gleaned little tidbits of information.
“I heard they have no ships,” an adolescent boy commented, referring to Cansere.
“Why wouldn’t they have ships?” his friend retorted. “They’re surrounded by ocean, just like us.”
Another time, a woman complained to me, “I haven’t had that tea in months! No one can stock it. I don’t know why; all the fighting’s in the east.”
Only to have her sister snap, “Watch your tongue. What if a soldier passes by a window and overhears? He’ll cut it out for you, most like.”
Or an elderly man whispering, “I’d like to see it. An angel in the sky. See it before I’m gone.”
Only to have his son, much like the man I’d passed on the road, insist, “It’s propaganda, Pa.”
I gave instructions for the medicine and mended lumie just to the point of being whole, then allowed the body to do the rest. Broken bones, rashes, sore throats, a pregnancy check-in.
All the while I slept in Elantriana’s bed, collected her coin, and ate her food, regaining my strength.
Each night, alone in her house, I chafed against the silence around me.
I talked to myself constantly to keep it at bay, and when my voice tired, I drowned in answering silence.
I’d never realized how quiet the world could become, how silent the fall of night. I was too used to her being there.
When I slept, I dreamed of Adoel Nicosia.
I fought against the binding to the tree, bark digging into my back, as I approached, floating as though a ghost. I screamed, and Nicosia shoved a hand down my throat, reaching deep into me.
Ursa screamed.
I’d wake up shrieking, my body doused in sweat, my half-heart galloping and flickering painfully.
The next morning, throat dry, I rasped, “Ursa?”
But she did not respond, and my heart broke for it.
I dowsed and fueled my heart. Checked the locks on the doors.
Peered out the windows into the dark town.
Then I sobbed into the midwife’s pillow, promising myself this would be the last time I cried on Sestan soil, for I was so tired of this place taking things from me.
In Cansere, I had been strong. Here, I was weak, fragile, and so desperately alone.
Were it not for the slivers of Renn that came through our shared heart, I might have finally broken. But I held on to him and, in my mind’s eye, imagined he held on to me, too.
After that, I spent my nights bolstering my magic-laced puzzle pieces, something I would do for the rest of my life, whether I died tomorrow or in seventy years.
Then I would kneel by my golden-threaded merlon and talk to Renn, for I’d grown so used to having someone to talk to, I could not break the habit, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.
Each night I felt for signs of him, the shift of feeling through our heart-bond, or an occasional stubbed toe or smacked elbow.
I talked and listened until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and slept an hour or two before Rodsfell haunted my nightmares, and I’d wake in bleary panic, or sometimes sleep until dawn, only to wake to my eyelashes heavy with half-dried tears.
My seventh day in Horgansten, after tending a dislocated knee, I felt a jubilation so strong it knocked me off-kilter.
I nearly fell into a horse trough. My limbs filled with glee and relief.
Renewed, I ran back to Elantriana’s home and knelt just inside her door, praying to the gods that it was what I hoped, that Eden had made it across the strait and reunited with Renn.
That she was the cause of such happiness in him.
I wanted it to be true—I needed it to be true—for if Eden had fallen into enemy hands or perished on this journey, I would suffocate beneath the guilt of it all my life.
I needed her to be safe. I needed it all to be worth it.
I stayed in Horgansten for eight days. Eight days, until two horsemen wearing black and blue came into town. Scouts, perhaps, or messengers seeking to secure housing for oncoming soldiers. I didn’t know.
I’d already packed one of Elantriana’s bags, so I was ready to flee the moment I saw them.
I did not take the main road but ventured farther west into a forest of white and red spruce.
I mourned the loss of the midwife’s lodge and the safety it provided, and I let myself mourn it, dry-eyed, hugging myself as I trekked farther south, using the sun and stars to guide me, rationing the food I’d taken from Elantriana’s cupboards, foraging as I went.
If I’d thought the town quiet, the forest was mute.
There were birds and insects during the day, but at night the wind lulled life into deep slumber.
My every breath echoed in my ears. I slept in thickets or against dense brush, my knees pulled tightly to my chest, and pressed my fingers to my beating heart, imagining every other thump was Renn’s.
I wondered how much he could sense my solitude, my loneliness, my aching for my sister, for each night, almost as soon as the sun had set, I felt warmth through our connection, like it was not my hand pressed between my breasts but his.
I dreamed of the distant music of a string quartet, of Renn’s hand on my waist in his salon, asking me to dance with him.
Of his lips in my hair whispering, I love you.
Four and a half months had passed since I’d last seen him.
More than a season. Did he still love me as he’d thrice claimed, or was this warmth I felt his adoration for another, someone who’d come to his side after I’d left it, who helped him with the war while I rotted away in Nicosia’s conservatory?
The theory sparked new fears in me. I pushed it away, but time and time again, in the long stretches of loneliness, it reemerged, taunting me.
In truth, Renn did not need me anymore. Despite the occasional aches and chills I felt through our bond, his lumis would hold.
I knew it held. Knew I’d done it right. The Canseren king had no need for a shadow any longer.
I’d told him, once, that he loved the magic, not me.
I prayed I’d been wrong.