Broken Blade (30 page)

Read Broken Blade Online

Authors: Kelly McCullough

“All right, I think that answers the ‘what happened’ part of my question, but I’d still like to know where we are.”
Maylien smiled, her teeth shining bright in the firelight. “We’re a bit less than a half day’s slow ride south and west of Tien by the shortest road. We took a much longer and more roundabout way, so it took us from dawn to dusk to get here.”
“And
here
is?”
“Nowhere really, a little dell on crown lands about a quarter mile back from the smuggler’s track we took to get here. Between the trees and the hills, the campsite’s invisible to anyone not right on top of it. It’s frequented mostly by poachers. They’re going to be a little bit grumpy about my using up a bunch of their woodpile without replacing it, but I’ll square it with them later.”
“You sound like you know the area well, and the poachers.”
“Well enough,” said Maylien. “I’ve spent a good part of the past four years traveling in this part of the country. The smuggler’s way”—she gestured off behind her—“is one of the three best routes from the Barony of Marchon to Tien proper if you don’t want to meet up with either the Crown or Baronial Guards. The Rovers taught me how to survive in the wilderness while the crown and my dear sister taught me to avoid the various guards.”
Maylien leaned back against a log and stretched her feet toward the fire. “As for the poachers, and the smugglers, too. Well . . .” She shrugged. “We all get along well enough. We live much the same lifestyle, and the same people would see us all hanged if they could.”
“But you were raised by the Rovers.” I nodded at Bontrang. “Don’t they frown on your shadowside acquaintances? They hunt bandits and other wilderness criminals as a part of their holy mission, don’t they?”
Maylien laughed. “Bandits, yes. Bandits prey on travelers and pilgrims, and the Rovers kill them wherever they find them. But as long as the poachers and smugglers leave the people on the roads alone, the Rovers leave them alone. The order was established to protect travelers, they don’t give a damn about protecting taxes and tariffs.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“They don’t advertise the fact. Otherwise, people like the various Barons of Marchon might decide that they didn’t want to dedicate house lands to Rover chapter houses.”
Something struck me then. “You talk about the Rovers like you’re not really one of them, but the nature of your familiar says otherwise. I know that you and your sister spent six years off the edge of the map of official history, but I don’t know what happened beyond that or how you came to join the Rovers’ order.”
“I didn’t. Not really, though I desperately wanted to once upon a time. My mother gave Sumey and me to the Rovers at the Marchon chapter house when we were thirteen and fourteen to protect us from our father. They handed us over to one of their traveling bands, which happened to be spending a few weeks at the chapter house, and the band whisked us right out of the kingdom.
“Between fourteen and twenty I spent more nights under the stars than under a roof. I’ve walked or ridden over most of the kingdoms of the east, from the northern marches of the Sylvani Empire in the south to Kadesh in the north and from the eastern ocean to the western mage wastes. I think those were the happiest years of my life . . . and the worst of Sumey’s.”
“How so?”
“Sumey hated every minute of the road. She complained constantly. After a couple of months of that, the Rovers parked her in a chapter house in Aven. But I’d fallen in love with the road, so I stayed with my traveling band. I learned to hunt and ride and fight as well as any Zhani warrior-noble. I even fell in love with a Rover, Serak, and I took Bontrang as my familiar when it turned out I had both gifts. I even went so far as to ask to take the Rover’s oath.”
“And then what happened?” I asked.
“What makes you think something happened?”
“The fact that you’re here with me and fighting for a baronial seat instead of off on the road with the Rovers maybe?”
Maylien looked into the fire. “We were in the Kvanas. A lesser khan took a fancy to me, knocked me on the head, and carried me off. It was a really stupid move on his part. I’m a decent mage and a better swordswoman. When I woke up, I killed him and slipped away, but not before the other Rovers of our band came after me. There was a big fight, and Serak was killed along with about half our band.”
She got up and walked away from the fire, turning her back to me. “We went to the High Khan for redress, but the khan I’d killed was a nephew of his. He threatened to sell the lot of us into slavery in the Sylvani Empire if we didn’t get the hell out of his lands. So we went. We didn’t have any choice. I had been supposed to take my Rover’s oath a few weeks after that, but I was devastated and angry and terribly bitter. The senior members of our band told me that I needed to wait, that vows should never be said in anger.
“While I was waiting, I got to thinking about what makes a good ruler and what makes a bad one, and the fact that I had fallen heir to Marchon when my uncle died without issue. I hadn’t been back to the barony proper in years, but the chapter house there made sure that the news made it to me. And then I started thinking about how I would feel if someone else took the seat when my mother died and did something horrible like what had happened to me and Serak. It would be my responsibility, you see. So I left the Rovers, and collected my sister, and we came back to Tien so that I could take up my seat . . .”
“And then it all went to hell,” I said. Having read some of it, I could make guesses as to how, but I wanted to hear it from Maylien.
Maylien nodded. “And then it all went to hell. Thauvik advanced my sister’s claim over mine. Which was all right. It meant that I could go back to the Rovers once things settled down. Except they didn’t settle down. My mother died within a few months, almost certainly by poison. At first I believed Sumey when she said that Mother had committed suicide. But then, bit by bit, I came to believe that she’d been murdered and that it had to be my sister who’d done it. I’d already started to hate Sumey more than a little by then.”
“Why?” If I was going to put Maylien in her sister’s place—and my debts bound me to do just that—I wanted to know as much as I could about both of them.
“As soon as Sumey took the seat, she started to do . . . things to our people, treat them like animals and worse than animals. I don’t know if she was always that way, and I’d just never seen it before, or if something happened to her during her years in Aven, and that changed her, or what. Whatever the reason, my nightmares about someone else doing horrible things from the baronial seat that I ought to have inherited started to come true. And it was made a thousand times worse by the fact that the person doing horrible things was my sister. How could someone so close to me turn into something so awful?”
I looked away from Maylien, into the fire. I didn’t have an answer for her question. If I had, Devin’s betrayals of the goddess and her ideals might have hurt less. Or then again, they might not. It would all depend on the nature of that answer.
If Devin and Sumey were simply bad people waiting for the right moment to go rotten, then we could bask in the armor of righteousness. But if they were just people like Maylien and I were just people, and the only reason that it was the two of us here and the two of them there was a matter of circumstance . . .
One of the things I’d learned over the years since the temple fell was that nothing was ever simple. Maylien hadn’t moved since she stopped talking. She just kept staring out into the darkness. I was still pretty weak, so I rolled onto my hands and knees before I tried to get up.
When that didn’t kill me, I slowly and carefully pushed myself to my feet. It wouldn’t do to fall into the fire and make her rescue me again. I walked over to stand behind Maylien, making plenty of noise so she’d know I was there. She didn’t turn around, so I put a hand on her shoulder. I could feel her crying, though the tears made no sound.
“Maylien, what your sister has done belongs on her conscience, not yours.”
She shrugged my hand off. “I
am
Marchon, or should be. Sumey has tortured and murdered people . . . my people, and done it under the banner of the Marchon. What Marchon does is my responsibility. Those deaths are on my head.”
“Did you make your sister Baroness Marchon?”
“No, of course not! That was Thauvik’s doing. And my sister’s . . . when she murdered my mother to take the seat.”
“And you’ve been trying to fix it ever since?”
“Yes, but that’s not enough.” Maylien turned to face me. “Don’t you see? It can never be enough. My sister is a monster. She’s already done things at least as bad as what happened to me and Serak. I should have seen it coming, done something about it earlier, prevented it somehow.”
“You want to make it never have happened, right?” I asked, and my voice sounded to me like it was bubbling up through bitter waters—an aftereffect of my nima loss, maybe.
“Yes!”
I shook my head. “That’s not how it works. You can’t change the past . . . No matter how much you might want to, no matter how awful it was. Not even gods can change the past. You can’t let the weight of might-have-been fall on your shoulders, or it will crush you.”
“You’re not just talking about me and Sumey anymore, are you?”
I looked through Maylien, into the past, and saw deep water with the sun shining dimly down from above. Beneath me a broken stone goddess lay sprawled on the floor of the lake, weeds starting to grow in her hair. Though my lungs burned already, I swam deeper so that I could place my swords in one cracked stone hand.
“No,” I said, “I’m not. But that doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true for you and Sumey. When the temple fell, I took the weight of a dead goddess onto my shoulders, and the guilt destroyed me.”
“I don’t understand.” Maylien canted her head to the side. “You’re here now, talking to me. How can you say the guilt destroyed you?”
“Because I’m not the man I was then, not the man you were looking for to help you with your sister, really. Aral Kingslayer, the Blade of Namara, didn’t get the opportunity to die in defense of his goddess, and the guilt of that drove him so deep into the bottle that he never came back out again. I might wear the same face, and I might have shared the same bottle, but I’m not really him.”
I laughed, and it sounded harsh in my ears but also strangely hopeful. “Maybe that’s why I’ve actually managed to poke my head out into the light again, because I’m finally beginning to understand that.”
Maylien stepped in close and kissed me gently on the lips.
“What was that for?” I asked after a long moment.
“For understanding.”
She kissed me again, longer this time.
“And that?”
“For caring.” She smiled then, in the dark. “And this next is simply because I want to.”
I kissed her back this time and didn’t have to bend down to do it. For a little while we simply held each other there in the night. It was the first time in more than five years that I’d held a woman like that, and it felt good. Maylien felt good. She was strong and athletic, like Jax or Siri or one of the other female Blades I’d shared a bed with, but softer somehow. She smelled of the road and hard riding, but also of woman, and she brought back memories long lost. Of camaraderie and shared purpose and nights spent together out of simple companionship. I found that I wanted her badly.
But it had been a very long day on top of a very long night, and I soon felt the world slowly tilting to my left. When I lurched rightward to compensate, Maylien slipped from my arms and half dragged–half led me back to my bed of ferns.
“Finish your drink,” she said, handing me the cup, and I did.
Then she pushed me gently back into the ferns and tucked a rough blanket over me. “Now get some sleep.”
I reached up and ran a hand along her side from ribs to hip. “And in the morning . . .”
“We’ll see.” She smiled at me, then got up to deal with the fire.

 

17
I
jarred awake once in the night when I sensed someone leaning over me. Reflexes put a dagger in my left hand with a flick of the wrist, but vaulting to my feet proved beyond me. I was far too weak and dazed to do much more than sit up.

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