Chapter Forty-Nine: Apprentice

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Paralatai wed at the first of summer, Erman told me. When the lambs and calves and foals are in the fields. When the trees are in bloom. Until then, I would wait. Besides, I needed time to heal, and my father could not make the long three-hundred-mile journey while snowstorms threatened.  

I’d hoped to become useful to Erman by now and help with chores, but my injuries slowed me more than I expected. The wound in my hip had become inflamed and painful. It was difficult to stand, and I needed a staff to walk. He and I now clunked around the floorboards of the wagon as a pair. 

Another anarei came when Erman’s actual duties kept him away. A young, wide-eyed, electrum-haired apprentice named Aldis. Reserved and shy, he reminded me of my young self. The kind of boy who feeds orphaned chicks until they’re fledged. Who can lose himself in a field of flowers or the way the light plays on the seed heads of ripened grain. Who gets chewed up and swallowed by the world. I wondered how he would ever survive in such a place as this. I once imagined Erman was like that boy, but now beside him, Erman appeared downright rugged. Where Erman had chosen the anarei mantle, the anarei mantle had chosen Aldis. I worried for him. He’d need the thick skin Erman had earned if he was going to survive as a soothsayer. But I came to adore him, and in his innocence, he revealed that, though many of the older anarei wouldn’t be willing to help me, he was proud to because we all served the Mistress.

In their company, I became accustomed to anarei rites. Daily shaving. Ritual washing. Chanting of prayers. Meditations standing on one foot, with one arm raised and one eye closed. There was a beautiful rhythm to their order’s life and a quiet humor and camaraderie among them.

As my wounds finally healed, I began to share in their chores—fetching water, washing clothes, drying herbs, beating carpets, collecting fuel, preparing food, and always keeping the fire. The anarei ate no flesh, so we milked our stock and cooked from the stores of cheese, grain, and honey. In the evening, there were lessons for Aldis. I shrank into the shadows at the back of the wagon and sat in silence, listening raptly as Erman taught verses, wisdom, law, divination, and music to his young protege. The scent of incense and a musty carpet laden with ash filled the room. The Skythai were mostly unlettered and didn’t expound their philosophies to outsiders. Their sacred wisdom and verses were forbidden to be recorded, deemed far too precious for uninitiated ears. Pride swelled in me to take part, to be granted the privilege of hearing and bearing witness to their arcane rites.

During the day, Erman taught me to spin thread and to weave upon his loom so I would have something to keep my idle hands occupied as I convalesced. It was sedentary work, but I enjoyed having something productive to do with my long hours confined indoors.

In the night, when the work was done, and I closed my eyes, I struggled to calm my thoughts and quiet the restless voice inside my head. Sleep was an unbroken horse, skittish and unwilling to let me climb aboard without patient coaxing. From there, the journey was always unpleasant, unrestful, and short.

I awoke gasping in panic, unable to breathe. A hand was clasped over my mouth, and it was too dark to see. My fingers pried at the hand as I struggled to rise against it. I swung my fist in the dark and met something spongy.

“Shhhh! You were talking in your sleep,” a nasal, stuffy voice whispered in the dark. 

“Erman?” I mumbled into the smothering palm. I ceased fighting as understanding replaced my panic.

“You bloodied my nose.” 

“You surprised me,” I whispered. “What were you thinking?”

“You were calling to him.” The hand fell away. Blinking away the sleep, my eyes cleared and adjusted to the faint light of the hearth, and I sat up to face Erman, cupping a hand over his battered face.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said sheepishly. 

“You must be quiet now. Careful.” He stood and went to the table adjacent to the altar, his back to me.

In the days that followed the battle, Aric had become a ghost. Slipping through the camp, ducking into a door. Straying into my line of sight, passing out of the ring of firelight. We’d catch one another’s gaze, then he’d vanish like a dream upon waking. Real, but not really there. I could see but not touch him. Hear but not speak with him. I longed to call his name, but to what end? He would go, and I must stay, banished to our separate realms. Like all ghosts, memories would become our meat.  

Early on, I’d waited for him, hoping for one last chance to meet. To explain. But a wish was only salt for a wound, and I’d given up that hope as the ceremony approached. By now, the Warband would have moved to a new buna, and Aric would have found the empty vial in the stash beneath my pallet. 

“I don’t mean to disturb you.” 

“You don’t,” Erman grinned as he hobbled back over to me, a cloth to his nose and a cup in his hand, and knelt at my side. “Drink this,” he offered me a bowl of kumis with a greenish powder mixed into it. He daubed at the trickle of blood from his nose. 

“Is your nose all right? Let me look.”

“I’ll be fine. Drink.” He grinned inscrutably as he handed the bowl to me.

Holding the bowl in both hands, I stared into it. “What’s in it?”

“It will help you sleep.” 

I drank slowly, looking up at him with curiosity—and some apprehension. 

“Your dreams have been disturbed for some time. And you’ve been brooding about like a cow waiting to be milked. Dreams are one of the arcane languages understood by the anarei. Speak your dreams to me so that I may interpret them for you. Unburden yourself before you burst.”

“I don’t need to be unburdened,” I said guardedly. He’d been watching me, and I suddenly felt uneasy. Perhaps I’d outgrown these close quarters.

“You do not trust me?”

“I do,” I mumbled, feeling queasy. “But it’s nothing you should be troubled with.”

“That’s what friends are for,” he said softly, giving me a big, shy grin as if he was trying on a smile—or a friendship—for the first time.

“It might oblige you to act.” If he was indeed my friend, he could get hurt. And if not, he could hurt me.

“I serve the gods before serving the king.” He smiled sympathetically and placed his hand upon mine. His blue eyes nearly sparkled like sunlit water. His face was not feminine, but not quite masculine either, except for the bit of stubble that darkened it late in the day. 

“You hear all. What do people say?” I asked. 

“The things you’d expect. But that’s not what’s troubling you—what’s making you call out in your sleep.”

No, I supposed it wasn’t. I heard things too. Rumor spread around court that Ariapaithi had divested Aric as his heir, even after his successful command of the Warband and his valor in battle, risking himself to protect the king. People said it was because the king was ashamed that his son was rescued by a woman in the fighting—people who weren’t there. But I knew it was because he refused to take the Boraetai girl to wife. His flash of defiance had cost him his hard-won position and his honor. Aric deserved better. We both did.

“Have I not done my duty here?” I asked.

He cocked his head and frowned. 

“It’s like all the good I tried to do is undone. After all that has passed, I’ve earned no credit here. Instead, we are both punished for it. After the battle, when I made my tally, there was no ceremony, no recognition: no one dunked my head in the cauldron, and I never drank from the king’s damned bowl. Not even the smallest acknowledgment was made.” 

“In the chaos, the ceremony was quietly forgotten, wasn’t it?” He grinned and took the empty cup from my hands. “I wonder, would you have given them up so willingly? Let Aric break your torc and burn your girdle like the rest? Do you think he’d even dare try?

“What are you saying?” 

“He made you vazarka for life. Though none realize, you still belong to Goetosura.” 

“I’m still vazarka?” I shook my head, the thought not settling easily in my mind.  

“You’re still a karik beneath that dress if you wish it. For some, it’s not so easily undone. No more than I can be unstruck by that bolt from heaven.” 

“Why would he not tell me himself?”

“Because this place has invisible bindings everywhere.”

“Then I am a hostage.” I drew a deep, steadying breath. 

“A vazarka never plays the prey,” he said emphatically.

But what choice did I really have? My eyes drifted down to my hands, fingers nervously tracing the woven chevron pattern on my blanket. “How can I remain true to my oaths when I am forbidden to fight?”

“What makes a good warrior? Is it the weapons you wield? Your strength or skill in combat?”

 “I think Aric would say it is the will.”

“We are strange creatures, we humans. I always considered this the essential difference between the beasts and us. It’s not that we wear clothes, craft weapons, or build cities that makes us different from them. It comes down to this simple fact: beasts have instincts, and humans have choices. In time, we become our choices. The blessing—and burden—of humanity is that our lives can be about so much more than just sustenance and shelter, sex and procreation. The beasts are slaves to their drives for these things. But we, whether warrior or seer, have the power to choose other, greater things. I also know, this is not the road for all, being solitary, stony, and hard.”

“All worthy roads are.” 

“Indeed.”

I suppose it was the nature of indifferent fate that I should not come to fully grasp the life I had chanced to live until now, at the leaving of it. I didn’t appreciate men like him and those of the Warband, or what force drove them to choose the lives they did. I realized, too late, that I had not been escaping a fate in the Marches, but seeking one.

“I envy you,” I said. “I, too, wanted my life to be about more,” I whispered, oddly ashamed for failing him.

He placed his hand over mine. “Your life is not yet over.”

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Chapter Fifty: Warrior

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