The brazen gambit

chapter Ten

A summons slid into Akashia’s dream some twenty nights after her return from Urik: a twinge of pain in a deep muscle, the unfocused scent of anxiety, the wind-borne words Laq, templar, and Pavek—all woven through a mind-sent image. Striding out of her solitary hut before she was completely awake and without the night-cloak folded beside the door, she was shivering by the time she reached the doorway of Telhami’s hut.
A fist-sized oil lamp hanging from a crossbeam cast shadowy light through the single room. Telhami sat on a wicker bench, her eyes closed. She’d slumped, precariously pressed against the bark-covered center pole. Her head had fallen forward at an odd angle. For one horrifying moment, Akashia thought her friend and mentor had died.
“Grandmother?” Akashia couldn’t make herself cross the threshold. “Grandmother…”
Telhami awakened with a shudder. Her eyes opened, and she stared at the doorway.
“Kashi? Kashi, what are you doing here in the middle of the night? Is something wrong?”
“You summoned me,” Akashia whispered. “You were dreaming, Grandmother. You summoned me from your own dreams.” Her voice grew louder, steadier as the situation became clearer.
Telhami shook her head, but her face grew thoughtful.
Akashia became convinced she saw things correctly: “You’re worried about Pavek and Laq, aren’t you, Grandmother? Confide in me, Grandmother. Tell me what troubles you. I brought him and his problems to Quraite. Let me help you deal with them.”
“No.” Telhami continued to shake her head. “It’s nothing that serious, Kashi. Certainly nothing for you to worry about. Pavek strives hard, but learns slowly. It’s frustrating for both of us, no worse than that. And Laq is a problem that will solve itself.”
“How?”
“I don’t know—yet.”
Bracing herself against the bench and the center pole, Telhami pushed herself upright. She took an unsteady step, releasing the bench but keeping her other hand’s fingertips curled firmly on the rough bark for balance.
“But I will, Kashi. I will. It’s a matter of time and memory. A little more of each, and I’ll have the answer.”
“Not if you wear yourself out first.” She accepted the fundamental truth of Telhami’s assertion. Where Quraite’s guardian and Quraite’s history were concerned, she hadn’t learned much—she wasn’t ready to learn. But Pavek was another matter. “If the templar has told the truth about Laq, then Laq is the more serious problem. The templar himself is insignificant Surely he didn’t learn anything in the Don’s archive that is more important than what the Lion’s minions are doing with our zarneeka. Let me teach Pavek in my grove for a few days, at least until you’ve found what you’re searching for. I’ve led the children through their catechism. I enjoy it, and you’d be free to do what only you can do.”
Telhami removed her hand from the pole. She stood straighter, and her eyes, when she turned around, were clear and bright. “Pavek is not a child, Kashi. Pavek is a man, a young man with a mind and strong thoughts of his own.”
“Grandmother, I’m not blind. I know exactly what Pavek is. I kenned him when he first told us his tale. His thoughts were strong, but there weren’t very many of them. His spirit isn’t dark, it’s empty. Scarred and empty. I could almost pity him, Grandmother, but no more than that.”
“Almost?”
She lowered her eyes. In Urik, she’d barely pierced the surface of Pavek’s mind when she kenned him for his basic character. Still, what she had encountered had both surprised and saddened her.
“You taught me that children are all innocent and full of potential, and that men and women are uniquely good or evil according to the sum of their deeds. But Pavek’s not like that. He’s not anything. His memory is filled with terrible images, Grandmother. Evil images. But he’s empty. He risked his life to tell us about Laq; he risked it again to save Ruari’s. And yet he’s empty. It’s as if Pavek has the shape of a man, but the spirit of—of something broken. Something that never grew. The spirit of I don’t know what.”
“Of a templar,” Telhami said gently.
Images of habit and prejudice swarmed her mind. Templars were brutal and malicious predators, savoring the agony they brought to less fortunate, less privileged folk. Ruari’s father had been a templar—a rapist and murderer whose victims, Ghazala and Ruari, had survived. When she’d kenned Pavek, she’d seen a man who was more preyed upon than predator, more numb than brutal, and scarcely more fortunate or privileged than a beast of burden. “Not a templar.”
Telhami’s eyebrow arched. “Exactly a templar. Did you think they were all like Ruari’s father?” She made a fire in a tiny hearth and filled a small pot with water.
“Yes. Yes, I suppose I did. I suppose I still do. Pavek was different, even that first time, when he wore a yellow robe. Did I tell you he fought with another templar over a human infant’s life? I keep thinking he should be a good man, but he’s not. He’s just plain broken.”
“I suspect all templars are broken. One way or another. They couldn’t survive if they weren’t. Some survive better than others, of course. I doubt Ruari’s father was the worst to wear the yellow. But broken is as true a description as any. The pieces grind together when he invokes the guardian. Are you sure you want to take a broken man to your grove?”
“He can’t harm me,” she said, with less confidence than she’d intended. “If he forgets or tries, he’ll be very sorry.”
“And what about you? How sorry will you be, Kashi? How disappointed or betrayed?”
“Betrayed? Betrayed by what? I said I know he’s not a good man. He’s not even an attractive man. I know I brought him here, Grandmother, but I don’t particularly like him, and I certainly haven’t lost my head or my heart to him.”
“You’re certain?”
“Of course I’m certain. Wind and fire, Grandmother, you’re as bad as Ruari. Do you think I’d be blinded by the first stray man that stumbled across my path—and a templar at that?”

* * *

Telhami threw tea into the pot. “No,” she conceded, swirling the leaves, studying their patterns on the water.
Akashia hadn’t been blinded by Pavek, but she was blind to her own beauty and to beauty’s effect on the men around her. Not that Pavek seemed to be affected by beauty… or anything else. Beyond his determination to master spellcraft, Pavek seemed to have no other interests. His very doggedness blocked his progress; Quraite’s guardian responded to livelier spirits’. Perhaps Akashia’s notion was not so bad, after all. Kashi was good with beginners…
Then the image of a copper-haired youth stormed through her mind, all flashing eyes and scowls.
“There’d be trouble with Ruari,” she admitted aloud.
“If there was going to be trouble with Ruari, it would have happened by now. He hasn’t said anything since Pavek invoked the guardian. We all felt it. Ru wasn’t happy, but he couldn’t very well argue after that.”
Fragrant steam rose from the pot, restoring her more thoroughly, more gently than her contact with the living pole of her hut. She was tired. Pavek’s determination combined with his lack of progress made him an exhausting pupil. Moreover, Pavek slept soundly each night while she pondered the problems he’d brought out of Urik. Ruari might not argue with Quraite’s guardian, but she did, every night.
The guardian didn’t care about Urik or the aches and pains of common folk. When the guardian caught the drift of Laq, it was ready to destroy all the zarneeka bushes in Quraite, and with them the sole source of Ral’s Breath. Telhami believed there had to be a solution that did not punish the commoners. But she’d need the guardian’s help to find it, and thus far that help had not been forthcoming.
She looked up from her tea and studied Akashia as she stood beside the center pole, apprehension and eagerness written on her face… and anger. Kashi said she’d been summoned; Telhami had no reason to doubt and—as the tea warmed her from the inside out—every reason to believe that her own deeper wisdom, working through her own dreams, had done the summoning.
“Take Pavek to your grove, Kashi. If that fails, put him to work in the fields.”

* * *

A third of the night remained before the sun’s red glow colored the eastern horizon and Pavek began his daily trek to Telhami’s grove. Akashia had ample time to fetch her cloak from her hut, and with it secured around her shoulders, she settled on a hard bench in easy sight of the bachelor’s hut.
By dawn, when the woven-reed door opened and Pavek stretched himself into the open air, she was chilled to the bone, despite her cloak, and consumed by doubts. Her voice failed when she first called his name, and it quavered the second time, too. He stopped short at the corner of the hut and stayed where he was, waiting for her rather than coming over.
“Telhami’s resting today. I’m taking you to my grove instead.”
All her doubts and shivers hadn’t prepared her for the slack-jawed frown that hung, suddenly from Pavek’s face.
“You don’t need to look so happy.”
“Is this your choice? If Telhami’s tired—”
She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I’ve held the door for other beginners; I can hold it for you.”
They left the village together, Akashia’s progress through Quraite’s mysteries didn’t yet permit her to ride the guardian’s power from one part of the oasis to another, as Telhami did. Curiosity overcame her reservations—she’d had few opportunities to talk with someone who lived inside the massive yellow walls of Urik, and none at all with anyone who’d lived a templar’s life. She peppered him with questions that he answered with grunts and shrugs. In equal parts frustration and compassion, she let the one-sided conversation die. Pavek, who could have easily kept pace with her, fell a good fifteen steps behind and remained there until the rippling green meadow of her grove spread before them.
Watching from the corner of her eye, she waited for his reaction. Quraite’s children most often bounded into the air, squealing with delight, or plunged face-first into the sweet-smelling wildflowers she nurtured. Pavek got a few paces into the waist-high grass and stopped cold.
“Where’s the path? I don’t know where I’m walking. I can’t see my feet. I might step in the wrong place.”
Not a child, Akashia thought ruefully, and not a man, either, but broken. “There is no wrong place, Pavek,” she called, then added with a mischievous laugh: “Unless you make it wrong.”
He chewed uncomfortably on that, and she came close to shame for teasing him. But this was her grove—her special place in all Athas—and being here filled her with a joy that banished everything else.
“Stop worrying! Open your eyes, your heart, and relax… Start moving!”
Pavek stayed where he was.
“Race me to the center!”
“Is that a command?” he demanded, fists resting on his hips. “A part of today’s lesson?”
Broken. Just-Plain Pavek was definitely broken. The essence of druidry was wild and reckless, on the verge of danger, like the land itself. He’d never master it if he thought in terms of commands and obedience.
“Yes! The only lesson, if you can’t catch me.”
She was light-footed and began with a ten-pace lead, but she could hear the grass parting and snapping beneath his sandals as she entered the stand of trees she’d inherited from the grove’s earlier druids. Elves were one thing; she knew she couldn’t outrun an elf, or Ruari, for that matter. But a heavy-footed human male? It was embarrassing, and she leaned into the longest stride she could manage until she was a step short of her grove’s bottomless pool. Then, taking a deep breath, she dived into the water, a mere—but significant-half-step ahead of him.
“You lose! No lessons today…!”
She expected Pavek to be in the water behind her, but he was bent over at the edge of the water, pale and panting.
“Water’s deep. Can’t swim.”
Akashia pulled herself out of the pool. She sat on a rock, wringing water from her hair, berating herself for taunting Pavek. It was discourteous, and dangerous—even when she could call upon the guardian’s power. And it would have been avoidable, if he’d been willing to answer any of her questions about life in Urik.
“No lesson?” he asked.
She began a damp braid before giving Pavek a narrow-eyed look. Sweat flowed down the ugly scar on his cheek, and his ribs still heaved. He hadn’t even slaked his thirst. For all of her unfairness, there wasn’t a trace of anger or outrage in his expression, only a hint of disappointment in the slope of his shoulders.
“Should I leave? I can find my way back to the village.”
“Pavek! Don’t leave. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” His head tilted toward a rising shoulder. “Why be sorry? You made the game. You made the rules. You won. Druid lore is safe for another day. Don’t worry—I’ll be careful; I’ll stay out of sight. Telhami won’t know, unless you tell her.” He started away from the pool.
The half-finished braid slipped through her fingers as she stood. She caught up with him under the trees.
“First lesson: There are no rules in druidry. It’s nature—all flow and change. Don’t be afraid to let go. And don’t leave; I am sorry.” She wanted to pat his arm. Quraiters touched each other when they were happy, sad, or anxious. But she hesitated before touching a templar.
Pavek shied away. “I don’t understand.” He sidestepped toward the village. “Magic is magic. I’ve read the scrolls; the spells are the same. There must be rules.”
“Come to the pool, I’ll show you.”
This time she didn’t hesitate. She wrapped her hands firmly around his wrist and dragged him to the pool like a stupid—stubborn erdlu.
“There are good ways and bad ways,” she explained, once she had him moving on his own. “Ways that usually work, and ways that usually don’t. You practice what’s reliable, but when push comes to shove, you do what you have to do.”
He stopped short, and they nearly collided. “Druidry’s like fighting?”
She frowned. “I hope not.” The thought that combat might be as free and formless as druidry was truly frightening. Before they started taking zarneeka to Urik, Yohan had taught her a few tricks of open hand fighting—in case they ran into trouble. She’d practiced the moves exactly the way Yohan taught them and had been confident that she was fully prepared for the unexpected. It hadn’t occurred to her, until now, that a true opponent might be unpredictable.
But what unnerved her proved helpful for Pavek who, as the warm Athasian morning became the longer, hotter Athasian afternoon, had some small success with the simple mnemonics and invocations she suggested to him. He was not a difficult student—not argumentative, like Ruari, who wanted to try his own ways before he mastered the tried and true methods, or uncertain, like most other youngsters. Just-Plain Pavek was just plain exhausting.
Failure didn’t daunt him. Even when he failed ten or twenty times in succession, he’d simply shake his head to clear it, close his eyes, raise his hands, and be ready for another attempt.
Sweat-stained and trembling, she called a halt while the sun was still well above the treetops. Pavek was disappointed, saying his lessons in Telhami’s grove lasted until the sky was as red as the sun. But Grandmother insisted that her pupils do everything for themselves, while she subscribed to gentler theories of education, pressing her hands against his each time he attempted an invocation, rough-shaping the guardian’s primal energies before they reached him.
Today Pavek had summoned spheres of water and fire and called a timid songbird down from the trees. Today he wanted to practice until the moons rose.
She threw up her hands. “Enough! Let’s save something for tomorrow.”
He grinned, the first she’d seen. He’d never be handsome—he looked better with a beard but he preferred to go clean-shaven—but a smile took the menace out of his face and balanced it nicely. It vanished the moment she invited him into the pool. Wild water, no matter how sweet or cold, apparently didn’t tempt the city dweller, especially when he couldn’t see the bottom of it.
He sat in the grass with his back to the water until she was thoroughly refreshed, then they headed back to the village, walking side-by-side. This time he answered her questions about Urik and asked a few of his own, mostly about druidry. They saw smoke rising from cookfires while they were still in the scrubland between the grove and the village. Succulent and spicy aromas met them on the footpaths through the garden fields. Recognizing them all, she stopped talking and began to run. Pavek kept pace, and she stole a sidelong glance to see if he looked as hungry as she felt. He didn’t; that vaguely sullen, menacing mask of disinterest he wore most of the time had clamped down over his face again. , The first person she saw in the village was Ruari, crouched on the porch of a pantry hut, frantically scouring a wooden bowl. She assumed he’d taken extra food to his grove and was now destroying the evidence. The druids, who did not work in the gardens, weren’t supposed to take more than their fair share from the pantries, but Ru was always finding orphaned kivit kittens and sheltering them in his grove until they could fend for themselves. It was one of his better habits, and all the mote endearing because he tried so hard to conceal it, lest anyone think he was tender-hearted or soft-headed, or a half-elf.
His mix of human and elven inheritance gave him a special rapport with animals, as if Athas itself understood that lonely, misunderstood half-elves would need the friendship only a loyal animal companion could provide. Ru loved animals, and they, by in large, loved him. But he kept his friends hidden in his grove where visitors were never welcome.
Since Pavek’s arrival, very little food had vanished from the pantries. She knew she wouldn’t be the only one who was glad to see Ruari pilfering again. After telling Pavek to go ahead, she called her friend’s name and left the path.
Ruari’s head came up—slack jawed and white eyed, caught squarely in an act of compassion. She smiled to reassure him and got a glower of purest malice as a reply. Then, with the bowl in one hand and a clump of scrubbing thorns in the other, he darted out of sight behind another hut.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she protested, but he remained in hiding and, after another futile effort, she went on her own way to supper.
The men and women preparing the evening meal hailed her at once, asking her if she’d brought anything special for the pots from her grove. She hadn’t. She’d forgotten completely—Pavek’s lessons had driven everything else from her mind. So she offered to stir one of the pots instead. But Telhami, standing straighter and stronger after a day of rest, called her over.
They were still discussing Pavek’s progress, or the lack of it, on the porch of Telhami’s hut when the supper-horn sounded.
Day and night, Quraiters went about their own business. They came together as a community only for the evening meal. The hard-packed dirt around the cookfires echoed laughter and gossip as neighbors shared the events of their day with each other. Akashia and Telhami shared in the daily greetings, but ate apart from the rest, continuing their conversation.
From the corner of her eye, Akashia caught Ruari emerging from his hiding place. He took his place with a handful of age-mates—the same youths she herself had played and worked with until Telhami singled her out for special instruction. Ruari ate with them, but he didn’t look at or talk to anyone.
Pavek was the last to enter the commons, the last to pick up a bowl. The servers had gone to eat their own meals, abandoning their ladles on the pot rims. The templar served himself, his custom and his choice, made at his first Quraite supper and continued without exception since that night. He ate quickly, standing up and completely by himself. As soon as the last drop of stew had been sopped up with the last morsel of bread, he cleaned his bowl and returned it to a large basket by the well.
He left the commons, headed for the fallow fields, where, according to Yohan who kept an eye on him when he was in the village and made regular reports to Telhami, he would sit by himself, recreating his memorized spellcraft in the dust with a piece of straw.
“What will become of him, Grandmother?” she asked, though she knew there were only two alternatives: he would master their spellcraft and become a druid, or he would become a farmer, as all other Quraiters were farmers. She refused to consider the third alternative: that he would wind up in the roots of Telhami’s grove.
“Too soon to say.”
While other Quraiters relaxed into a twilight of song and storytelling around a crackling fire, Akashia remained on the porch. The greatest of Quraite’s mysteries did not reside in any ancient grove or in the guardian’s mystic presence; they resided in Telhami’s keen understanding of the forces that shaped the Tablelands. And so Akashia sat, listened, and learned another lesson about the movements of the moons and the winds, of seeds, oil, metal, and salt, and every other thing upon which their lives depended.
Pale Ral, the smaller moon, rose above the trees to begin its journey through the stars. Ral was solitary this evening, Guthay was resting with the sun. The heat of day gave way to the chill of evening and the fireside gathering dispersed, singly and in pairs and families. She would have gone with them if she could. Her day had begun earlier than usual, and she hadn’t had Grandmother’s advantage of an afternoon nap, but Telhami was talking about salt and gave no sign of tiring. So she waved to friends who walked past, and tried to stay awake.
Her eyes were still open but her thoughts had wandered into dreams when someone shouted their names. A moment passed while she collected her wits. By then Telhami had vanished, using the guardian’s energy to travel instantaneously to the problem. She had to wait until a boy skidded to a stop in front of her.
“It’s the templar,” the child said breathlessly. “He’s dying. Grandmother says, bring her herbs, and hurry.”
Surprisingly and inexplicably numb from heart to fingertips, she collected a handful of thong-wrapped pouches. The boy led her beyond the trees where Pavek’s moans were a better guide than the boy.
“What’s happened?” she asked, although Pavek’s pain-contorted body told an eloquent tale.
“Poisoned himself,” Telhami muttered, taking two of the pouches from her hand.
“Poisoned himself?”
She would have sworn to anyone, including the guardian of Quraite, that Pavek had been in the best of spirits when they returned from her grove. He’d shaped the elements with only a little help from her; his belief that he would master druidry had been restored. He’d smiled, and even laughed—as if he were made of the same emotional stuff as other men. “He had no cause to poison himself,” she concluded, trying to assure herself as much as Telhami and the other shadows beneath the trees.
“Poison,” Telhami repeated, and this time, as a black froth bubbled through Pavek’s lips, there could be no further doubt.
She cradled his head in her lap and forced his mouth open enough for Telhami to dust his tongue with herbs. His eyes rolled white, his back cracked like a whip, and he writhed loose. A moan erupted deep in his gut, and he began to retch up a foul-smelling, viscous fluid that shimmered briefly before turning dark and dead.
The herbs confirmed the diagnosis, nothing more. Telhami turned toward the shadows—
“Yohan?”
“Nothing, Grandmother,” he said wearily. “Whatever he ate, he ate it to the last crumb and drop, or he didn’t eat it here in the village.”
“He ate supper with the rest of us,” another shadow interjected, going soft and slow at the end. “We all ate what he ate.”
No one said anything for a moment, while Pavek, no longer vomiting, pressed his fists into his gut and curled around them. He was conscious, after a fashion, muttering names between his moans: Dovanne, Rokka, Escrissar. But he was unaware of his immediate surroundings. Of Telhami or Yohan… of her as she once again tried to shield his head.
“That won’t help,” Telhami chided. “Give me your hands.”
Obediently, because Telhami was right, she raised her hands, palms-out, above Pavek’s chest. As Ruari had channeled the lifeforce of Athas for her when she wrought healer’s spellcraft on the injured kank, she took the second’s role for Telhami. Here in Quraite, where the guardian’s presence was concentrated, she surrendered herself completely to its power.
Other druids worked their magic in different ways. Other clerics certainly did. But in Quraite where Telhami had learned druidry and where her way was now the only way, one druid channeled the lifeforce and a second invoked the spell whenever it was possible. She heard the first droning syllable of the invocation; her flesh grew warm. She heard the second; her hands burned as if her fingers had become flames. Then nothing, heard or felt, as Telhami took what she offered and fought for Pavek’s life.
Time passed without measure or mark. The healing fire was quenched. She yawned and stretched, no worse for her experience, and looked down on Pavek, stretched out between her knees and Telhami’s. His limbs were relaxed, but not limp. His chest rose in a deep, regular rhythm and, in the hollow of his throat, four dark beads the size of a jozhal’s eye glistened in the moonlight.
Cautiously Telhami touched one bead with a moistened finger, then pressed the tip against her tongue.
“Kivit.”
Kivits excreted an effective poison through musk glands beneath their cheeks. They spread the ooze across their fur as they groomed themselves. The defensive coating made the little creatures an unappetizing mouthful to any but the most desperate predator. Quraite’s farmers smeared kivit musk around the trunks of their trees while the fruits budded and ripened. It killed any field vermin that ventured across it, but a man was in no danger, unless he gorged himself on kivit, fur and all—at best an unlikely possibility—or he mistook a sun-dried clot of concentrated musk for a date or raisin—a mistake he should have corrected the moment his mouth puckered.
Her thoughts raced toward a dreaded conclusion: Ruari collected kivits in his grove. Ruari collected and dried kivit musk for the farmers. Ruari had run away when she’d caught him scrubbing a bowl.
Not cleaning it. Not so innocent, but lining the bowl with poison.
It could be done. Pavek had made himself predictable, vulnerable. He came late, took the last bowl, and served himself. He’d never complain if the stew tasted strange, never suspect that his was different. And he’d use a sponge-like chunk of bread to mop up every last morsel and drop from the bowl’s sides. Every last morsel and drop of poison, too.
“Kashi?”
Telhami interrupted her down-spiraling thoughts. She met the sharp, ancient eyes with a shiver. It didn’t matter what Pavek was, who he’d been, or what he might become. What Ruari had done would be Ruari’s death once Grandmother knew about it.
“Kashi?”
“It’s nothing,” she lied and, knowing that lie would not be sufficient, added: “I’m a fine one to chide you about wearing yourself out with Pavek. One day guiding him through his lessons, and I’m so exhausted I can’t see straight.”
Lying was frowned upon in Quraite, but it was not a capital offense, and she congratulated herself that she’d been able to come up with a good lie so easily. With a heartbeat’s effort, she could even convince herself that the guardian understood and approved.
“You young folk need more sleep than I,” Telhami agreed. “Danger’s passed here. Go on, take yourself to bed. Pavek will tell us what happened when he wakes up tomorrow morning—”
That had the ring of certainty to it—and all the more reason for her to find Ruari first. She rose unsteadily. No lying there: her muscles were cramped from kneeling on the chilled ground. The healing had lasted longer than she’d imagined.
“Until morning,” she whispered, careful to retreat toward her own hut, and getting well beyond the torchlight around Pavek before beginning her search.
Ruari might have retreated to his grove. He might have left Quraite entirely—which was what she was going to tell him to do in no uncertain terms. But Ruari hadn’t inherited a grove. His tiny plot of nurtured ground was as far from the center of Quraite as it could be while remaining under the guardian’s purview. She’d search there last, just before she’d decide that he’d left Quraite forever. First there was the bachelor hut, where he usually slept and where a finger hooked through the reed walls revealed Ruari’s undisturbed blankets folded along the wall among a half-dozen snoring men.
Next the pantry hut where the bowl-filled basket was in its usual place and filled with its usual jumble—impossible to discern if one half-elf had removed one telltale bowl. Then, to the porch of the hut where she’d seen him scrubbing the bowl before supper, but which was deserted now. And, finally, to the place where he’d hidden himself earlier.
He sat there, cross-legged in the shadows, waiting to be caught with the incriminating bowl squarely in his lap.
“Why, Ru? Why?”
He hadn’t heard her coming, hadn’t expected her at all. The bowl bounced in the dusty dirt as he scrambled to his feet, looking right and left—as if he might run—before standing still, looking at his feet.
“Someone had to. He didn’t belong here. Never could, never would. I kept waiting. Every day I waited for Grandmother to say he wouldn’t be coming back, that the guardian and her grove had taken him—”
“So you decided you’d be the guardian instead?”
He didn’t answers, only twisted the hem of his tunic around his forefinger until the entire garment was tight across his chest and he looked a larger version of the boy Ghazala had abandoned years ago. But this time there could be no taking him in her arms or drying his tears.
“No one has the guardian’s rights. It’s murder, Ru. Pure, simple, and planned. Murder, not justice—”
“He was the real poison!” Ruari sputtered, barely in control of his rage and fear. “It was bad enough when Grandmother took him to her grove, every day. I thought… I thought maybe, maybe she was peeling his mind back, extracting his templar secrets before she put him in the ground. But today… Kashi, you took him to your grove. All day. Wind and fire, Kashi—a templar! I asked myself: what were you thinking—and I knew the answer: He’d poisoned Grandmother’s mind and yours. He was making you do foolish things—”
“You’re the fool, Ru.”
“Pyreen protect us if I’m the fool, Kashi.” Ruari’s voice was low and even. Rage had gotten the upper hand in his emotions, and despite herself, she took a step backward. “I saw you coming back today: all talking, all smiles, your hair all damp, your dress. I saw it, Kashi. The only thing I regret is that I waited a day too long to kill him!”
It came to her then, with the suddenness of lightning, that Ruari was jealous. He cared for her, not as she cared for him—a tag-along orphan, a temperamental younger brother who needed an older sister’s unquestioning affection until he learned the manners to return it—but in the way Telhami had feared she’d cared for Pavek.
If the air hadn’t been so charged with betrayal, she would have laughed. Even so, she couldn’t keep a smile from ghosting across her face as she reached for his arm. “Pavek hasn’t poisoned my mind, Ru. And there’s nothing—nothing at all—between us. He’s afraid of the water, afraid of the grass, can hardly smile or laugh. He’s just a man completely out of his element. Just—” She caught herself before she completed her thought, completed the comparison her mind had accidentally made between a hapless, sullen Pavek standing at the edge of her pool and Ruari himself not many years ago.
“Just what?” he demanded, an ugly sneer curling his lips. “Just another raping, murdering, yellow-robe templar! I’m glad he’s dead, hear me. I’ll swear an oath in Grandmother’s grove. I’m not afraid: I killed him and I’m glad. I’ll show the guardian what’s in my mind: the way he looks at me—’cause I’m wise to his templar games, the way he looked at you when we were in Urik, the way he looked at you today—”
“The way—” Akashia began to say The way he saved your life in the storm, but that would only feeding a futile argument. “Pavek’s not dead,” she said instead. “We saved him, Grandmother and I—”
Ruari lashed out with his fist, freeing himself from her hand and striking her across the chin in the same movement. She’d never been hit before, never in anger. The pain lasted an instant; the shock echoed in the depths of her being. Her hands flew to her face—all Yohan’s self-defense instructions forgotten.
“Why? Why, if he’s nothing to you?”
Ruari’s fist rose to shoulder level, but whether for another blow or mindlessly, as her own hands had risen, no one would ever know. A muscular shape surged between them: Yohan coming to her rescue. Yohan, who’d followed her as he followed Pavek, on Telhami’s orders. Yohan who had, undoubtedly, heard everything. He easily lifted the half-elf and hurled him against the nearest hut, where he slid to the ground and held still: eyes open, conscious, thinking, scared. The dwarf folded his massive arms over his barrel-ribbed chest, fairly daring Ruari to move.
“You’ve got to leave, now,” she pleaded. “You’ve crossed the line. Go—before it’s too late. Leave. Pavek’s alive; no one will stop you. The guardian won’t stop you. But you intended murder. You can’t stay here any longer. Renounce your grove, Ru—it’s the only way.”
“Renounce it… so a damned templar can trample through it?” Ruari challenged, defiant even in defeat.
The sound of stumbling and staggering intruded before she shaped an answer. Yohan raised a finger to his lips and dropped into a crouch. Another few heavy, flat-footed steps and a seedy-looking Pavek was among them.
“Trample through what?” he demanded, steadying himself against the wall above Ruari’s head, looking down and making it clear that only Ruari could give him a satisfactory answer.
Which Ruari would not do.
“This is no concern of yours, Pavek,” she said into the lengthening silence, trying to sound confident and in command. “Ruari’s done wrong. He—he’s the one who tried to murder you with poison. He’s got to leave Quraite. He’s got to leave now, before—”
“Before Telhami starts asking questions?” Pavek asked—seedy or not, he was the one in command of the situation. Grandmother must have suspected Ruari and shared her suspicions with her patient. Yohan, apparently, approved, because he straightened his legs and folded his arms over his chest again.
“Druids don’t murder,” she said, feeling that she was the one under attack. “Quraite doesn’t shelter murderers. The guardian won’t tolerate it.”
Pavek shrugged. “That’s for your guardian to decide, isn’t it? If there was a murder, I wouldn’t be standing here, would I? If there’d been murder done tonight…”
“He meant to murder you. It’s the same thing.”
The ex-templar smiled, a cold and frightening smile. “Not where I come from. Seems to me a druid wouldn’t make foolish mistakes measuring out his poisons. If some druid wanted me dead, some druid would have used enough poison so some other druid couldn’t haul me back from death’s door long before it swung shut. Some half-wit druid, with a grove where everyone knew he kept kivits and collected their musk, couldn’t have been so foolish. So, some half-wit druid must have known what he was doing, must have been sending me a warning. That’s what I think. That’s what I’d swear—”
“Mind your words,” Yohan interjected, deep-throated and meaningful.
“That’s what I’d swear before a Urik court. My word against his. My warning against his murder. And my word would prevail, because there’s been warning, but no murder. In Urik, by King Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy, what a man does is all that matters. What he thinks is spit in the wind—or every man, woman, and child would die each sundown for what he’d intended to do each sunrise. It’s a sorry state, I think, when the Beast of Urik has more mercy than a Quraite druid.”
Akashia laced her fingers together. She could see now, for the first time, what Ruari saw when he looked at that scarred face, and she couldn’t imagine why Grandmother had shared her suspicions with him, as she must have done.
Pavek was shaking. Vomit stained his tunic; the stench reached her nostrils five paces away. He was crude and disgusting, and he wore both traits like armor. Pavek was broken, all right. He was a templar to the very bone.
And, once again, this templar was giving Ruari’s life back to him.
“Ru—?”
The coppery face swiveled up toward Pavek, not her. “I intended murder. My only mistake was that I failed.”
“Your word against mine, scum,” Pavek replied, as cold as a human voice could be. “I heard a warning. You won’t get a second chance.”