~35~
Ten days before the destruction of Emeth'il
Tsu'min found it hard to breathe. White trees spread with blue and turquoise leaves sang around him in the breeze. To the north, the low, bright dwellings of the city of Emeth'il clustered peacefully along the green waters of the I'o'ai Nar'olua. He listened to gulls cry and stood behind a prickly bush full of small red berries.
In front of him was a short Sh'ma with turquoise eyes and long hair of navy blue.
She bent and inspected a patch of red-and-yellow flowers on the side of the hill. He had felt her coming, seen the flowers, put the two together. Young Sh'ma were often given gardens to tend in the forest. It was a part of their lessons that introduced them to both the practicalities of growing plants and the idea that the world around them was bursting with life and that they had a responsibility to maintain it.
Tsu'min's heart filled with a thick, sickening mixture of joy and fear.
Mi'ame.
She lowered her head, sighed, lifted it again, and placed her hands on her hips. Her eyes shot defiantly to the bush.
"I feel you, stranger, whoever you are," she said in Sh'ma.
Stranger. He'd expected the word, but it hurt nonetheless.
Tsu'min fingered the jade bead that hung from his wrist. He hadn't been so afraid in centuries.
He stepped around the bush.
Mi'ame took a small step back. Tsu'min could see her more clearly without the bush between them. She had short legs, a long torso, wide ears, a small nose with one piercing. Her eyes stretched.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
Tsu'min's heart pounded.
It was her.
The flesh had changed, become younger and shorter, broader in the shoulders, softer in the face. But it was so like her to see a half-breed—ostracized and shunned—step from the trees and wonder not why he was there but who he was. So like her to see everyone she met as a person.
His throat closed up and his face flushed.
He had expected this. He had rehearsed a dozen answers.
But still—hearing those words felt like having the rivets he'd so carefully driven his heart together with ripped out one by one.
"I have had many names," he said. Eraic was long dead to him. Tsu'min he couldn't bear to hear her say. "It would honor me if you gave me a new one."
She paused. A flicker of mischief crossed her face.
"Then I will call you Oura," she said. Her hands went back to her hips, which she thrust to one side. The trees rustled. The gulls jeered.
She was young. Very young. Below her bravado, her breath was as rapid as his.
"Oura," he said. Strange one. It was as good a name as any. "Guash'ta'tya." The sea whispered below the hill. A nearby spring trickled over rocks and stones and moss. "And what shall I call you?"
She straightened. She was skinny, he noticed. Like a child who hadn't yet fully grown into her frame. She couldn't have been more than forty.
So young, he thought again. Why have you come back now?
"Tyash," she replied.
Tsu'min's heart leaped.
Tyash. Worthy. A nonsense name that no Sh'ma would give another, but a name that Mi'ame had used long ago. The name she'd given to the part of herself she felt was least worthy.
Tyash, where are you going? she would ask when she got them hopelessly lost. Tyash, you're a terrible cook, when she let a pot boil over or a loaf of bread burn. Tyash, you're too slow. Tyash, you talk too much. Tyash, Tyash, Tyash.
She was still there.
"Tyash," he said. He sat on the leaves, leaving the bed of flowers she'd been tending between them. "Will you tell me your story?"
The girl who was his beloved reborn took a moment to think. She brushed her hair behind her ears. She looked at the garden she had come to tend, then down at the city.
The sunlight felt warm on Tsu'min's neck. The breeze playing with Tyash's hair smelled of salt and the freedom of the ocean. I shouldn't be here, he thought. I should be helping the others save the world. He swallowed. I promised her.
But neither of them had known this was possible when that promise was made.
Tyash sat carefully on the other side of the garden. She drew her knees to her chin and wiggled her toes. The afternoon light dappled spots of brilliance and blue shadow over her face.
The birds quieted. She began to speak.
And Tsu'min stopped caring about the world and had ears only for her.
#
An hour later Tsu'min sat contentedly on the moss and watched the sun slip toward the horizon. Tyash had returned to Emeth'il, to what he was sure was a dormitory she shared with the kinship group she would live with for her first hundred years. If she was forty, her parents would be dead already, victims of the 'thmesh'sh'nar. The love-death. The wasting sickness that gripped all Sh'ma after the birth of full-blood children.
But not me, he thought. Never me.
He'd seen the death many times. The skin grew sallow and rubbery. The eyes bleared. The bones became more and more pronounced, until one day a Sh'ma simply did not wake up.
It didn't seem painful. Those in the grip of the love-death had a halo of joy around them. Like there was a happiness and a completeness to their lives that he would never know.
The nar'oth alone could not procreate. The nar'oth alone could survive forever.
Tsu'min got up and walked deeper into the forest, toward the camp he and Maegan Heramsun had set up in the trees. Tyash would return to the garden the next day.
She was still her and yet not her. His veins coursed with the curious, potent brew of first love. He was getting to meet her all over again. Getting to know her for the first time, see her follies and curiosities and fall in love with a new person who was still, somehow, someone he had known for centuries, thousands of years ago.
And he had rarely felt so blessed.
#
He seems like a different person.
Maegan Heramsun's pen scratched across the parchment in her lap. Tsu'min was seated on a hill overlooking the bay below, staring at the waves. He still hadn't allowed her to see Mi'ame, but Maegan had managed to overhear their conversations several times, hiding behind a hummock just above the spring.
She hadn't understood the words, but there had been other things more meaningful.
Like laughter.
He laughs now. Often when he is with her, and even sometimes when he is not. It feels like watching the cone of a pine, cauterized by flame and ground underfoot, sprout after lying dormant for years. I understand the stories so much more clearly now. The way his eyes light up when he speaks of her—the way they seem like old friends, though they have just met in this incarnation. It is a remarkable thing to watch.
She paused, dipped her quill in ink and held its feather to her lips, then continued.
Even now, with darkness threatening everything, love finds space to bloom.
There was a gentle snap in the forest outside the camp. A rabbit probably, or a squirrel or a bird.
Still, one of these days, he must return to the others. I have not asked him whether he means to take this new Mi'ame with him. I do not know whether he is yet certain himself.
She heard his feet move over the carpet of fallen leaves that covered the floor of Soultholenash. He was walking quickly and purposefully in the direction the snapping twig had come from.
Very carefully, Maegan blew on the ink and closed the pages of her book.
She had just poked her head out of her lean-to when his voice split the forest like an axe.
"You!" he thundered.
Maegan hurried after him. She ran down a gully, leaped across a stream—
And found him standing in front of the necromancer Soren Goldguard.
Maegan's heart chilled. The necromancer wore his patched and faded robe. He held his hands in his sleeves and his head high. Golden sunlight spilled over him like the benevolent arms of Yenor Hirself.
Somehow that felt very, very wrong.
She had learned to dislike Soren Goldguard during the weeks she'd shared cooking and cleaning duties with him on the great green mother volcano of the Sh'ma. He was a cold man, given to dark jokes and violent sarcasm. When he looked at her, she saw echoes of the darkness he had let into the world, left across the depths of his eyes like black claw marks.
"She's lovely, Tsu'min," the necromancer said.
Tsu'min took a deep breath through his nose, and Maegan slipped partway behind a tree. Tsu'min's back was to her and Soren wasn't looking at her, but they would both know she was there, she was almost certain.
She felt safer with something between her and them. They didn't like one another. And they were terribly powerful.
"What are you doing here?" Tsu'min muttered.
Soren cracked his neck and stood. The breeze shook the leaves above him and sent bits of dirt and dust and leaf skittering over his feet.
"I came to ask you the same question," he said. "What are you doing here?"
Maegan's heart hammered.
"That is not a question I must answer to you."
"Maybe not. But it still stands."
Soren crossed his arms and gestured toward Emeth'il. The city was hidden by the trees and the hills, but still close enough that when the wind was right, they could smell the smoke of its fires.
"The dragon will burn it all. Murder them all," Soren said. He pulled some kind of leaf from his pocket and began to chew it as he spoke. "You aren't warning them. You aren't helping them prepare. You're indulging yourself with a child a fraction of your age. Aren't you embarrassed? Aren't you ashaaack—"
Tsu'min closed his hand around Soren's throat and yanked the necromancer into the air.
Maegan stepped out from behind her tree then froze, unsure whether she should intervene or not.
The anger, she thought. The anger had always been there in Tsu'min, lurking under the surface—a festering growth twining forth from the things he'd forced her to see that first night on the barge; the nightmares and terror he'd brought into her life for a crime no worse than irritating him.
I thought he'd be different now, whispered a childish voice in her mind.
"You know nothing," grated Tsu'min.
Soren gasped for air. His legs kicked impotently.
"Leave!" Tsu'min barked.
He dropped him.
The necromancer didn't quite land on his feet. His knees buckled. He tumbled backward and sprawled in the dirt on his elbows. He coughed and gasped and wiped spittle from his face.
And then he chuckled.
And then he laughed, and when he looked back up, his eyes glittered dangerously.
"There it is," he hissed. Even lying at Tsu'min's feet, in the shade of the trees of Tsu'min's homeland, the necromancer looked like a viper, coiled to strike.
Once again, Maegan Heramsun shuddered. Her chest closed in on itself.
What am I doing here? she wondered suddenly. Who am I helping? She'd told herself that she wanted to shape the great events of the world, but instead she'd stood by and chronicled them. Cooking a few meals no longer felt as if it counted for much.
"There's your hypocrisy, Tsu'min Nar'oth," Soren spat, rubbing his neck. "There's the darkness that festers in your heart, where you pretend that you can't see it. There's where the dragon calls to you."
Tsu'min didn't move.
"And you dare to judge me," Soren said.
Tsu'min turned his back and began walking toward Maegan and the camp beyond.
"You can't run from Sherduan, Tsu'min Nar'oth!" shouted Soren. He pushed himself up. "You can't hide from it. It sits inside all of us. Human, Sh'ma, Aleani, Duennin, Wilderleng, Syorchuak—it's the wool the world was woven from."
Tsu'min stopped and turned around again. He was close enough that Maegan could see the tendons tensing in his neck. "Why are you here?" he asked a second time.
"Why am I here?" Soren wiped the dirt and duff from his face, his sleeves, and his tattered robe. He straightened, and his eyes took on an angry, hunted aspect. "I'm here because you came to Emeth'il instead of helping your comrades make contact with the people they need. I'm here because you broke the heart of a dreamstruck Aleani girl."
Maegan's heart stopped.
He didn't, she thought. Not me.
And deeper, more quietly:
Not yet.
"I'm here because you did all that while hating me for my sins." Soren crossed his arms over his chest. "Well, I'm here to take you back. I, Tsu'min Nar'oth, am here to make you atone for your darkness."
His eyes glimmered in the fading light. For the first time, he acknowledged Maegan's presence. He looked past Tsu'min and nodded toward her. His voice remained directed at the Sh'ma.
"I ask you again, half-blood. Why are you here?"
Tsu'min turned and looked at her. His eyes narrowed. He swept back toward their camp.
Maegan was left to stare at a very smug-looking Soren Goldguard.
You, she thought. She narrowed her eyes. That's what I'll do. I'll watch you, when Tsu'min cannot.
She was the daughter of Len Heramsun. Watching one human necromancer would not be beyond her.