Fire & Water
Ashe: Book Two
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TBCChapter Fourteen
That night they made camp miles and miles from the temple. Neither spoke as they decided - in unison - that they had travelled far enough for one day. The air felt warm to Ashe, who’d become accustomed to the permanent cold of the snow and the mountains. While she lit the fire, Alexis went in search of supper. Even those processes didn’t bring about the slightest conversation and when by the time the two of them stretched out in preparation for sleep, the silence had never been broken.
Ashe shut her eyes tight against the sky above her. There was an ache in her heart that was beginning to hurt her and a dryness behind her eyes and in her throat that she identified but defied. It was a very long time since Ashe had last cried, and it wasn’t the right time to bring about a change. But her limbs ached and would not ease: no amount of stretching or forced relaxation would bring about the slightest degree of comfort. She wasn’t going to be capable of sleep and the sooner she accepted that fact, the better. Ashe gritted her teeth.
It was so stupid. It was almost absurd. Gowdie and Alexis? Who the fuck thought that one up? But then, Ashe hadn’t seen the two of them together in Gowdie’s cage, when there was no-one else Gowdie could manage to be with. Ashe had missed Rhea’s arrival, and Betany’s fairness, and Gowdie’s pain. And she’d been called a servant girl, nothing more. Ashe’s hand went out to her sword. The metal felt very cold against her skin. But what did she intend to do with the sword? Attack Alexis? Dig the fucking thing into the dirt and throw herself upon the blade? A little shocked at the thought, Ashe sat up.
A half-hour later she was still sitting up, her back against the rough support of an immature oak. That seemed only fitting… Ashe listened to her heart pound with a beat so profound she thought it would wake up Alexis. The fury growing inside of her was born of the horrors of the Temple, to which she knew she would have to return, sooner or later. The images she’d seen there had been burned into her skull: she could not let the horror of the beast diminish, try as she might. Then she dismissed the beast: there were worse things at hand.
Betany was pregnant. A wave of regret so powerful it nearly sickened her washed over Ashe. Betany was pregnant and Ashe was miles and miles away, learning the news after everyone else had feasted on it. Once before, when they’d been trapped in the inn, Ashe had felt this same despair, a mix of loss and sadness mixed with simple fatigue, but a recognition of the feeling failed to make it easier to accept.
She was back on her own again. Perhaps she always would be. While Betany had found out that she was pregnant, Alexis was getting it on - or thinking about getting it on - with Gowdie, and where was Ashe herself but off in the mountains and the snow, finding Red Temples, cutting off hands and fighting monsters. She could have stayed with Betany. She could have stayed at home and lived a different life. Now she knew the beast, and possibly it knew her, too, and sooner or later they would have to meet again: she couldn’t leave something that monstrous in the world. She had been incapable of staying where she was wanted and look what happened. Talk about bad decisions…
If there was ever a time when Ashe needed a friend, that was it. Sitting in the dark, hearing Alexis’s breathing on the other side of the fire, Ashe felt like the last inhabitant of the planet. Cairo, who’d been Ashe’s best friend and companion throughout her time in Lammor, was gone. She’d died fighting in Ashe’s defence and while her death had been acknowledged and her life and service applauded, she had left behind her a fucking great hole in Ashe’s life. Cairo, who’d been loyal and steady and utterly reliable, wouldn’t be coming back.
The past, clear and bright and unavoidable, ran through Ashe’s tired head. She thought back to the day that Rhea told her that she’d been supplanted in Laure’s affection. Long-since supplanted, to be entirely honest, and firmly betrayed, if betrayal was the right word to use. The identity she’d possessed then was no longer a part of her. The girl she had been really had died - she hadn’t lied to Alexis about that - while the woman who sat uncomfortably propped against the tree was someone else altogether. And beyond the fire Alexis slept; Alexis her former enemy, Alexis who had known before Ashe that Betany was pregnant. Gods, how that hurt.
The twin weights of leaving Betany behind and having been rescued by Alexis, simply fell upon Ashe. So what if they’d agreed to a potential duel later on: Ashe was stumbling, Ashe was faltering, Ashe was going under for the third time. Even killing Alexis wouldn’t fix this particular hurt. She felt the anger of the beast as it twisted and turned and snarled beneath the grass, brick and stone that held it in, and it seemed to her that the beast’s expression was not so very different from her own. She remembered the bite that Gowdie had given her and wondered if she’d rather had lost her throat. Tears spilled down her face and fell silently onto her shirt. Ashe felt the momentary warmth turn to chill as the night air cooled all about her. She set her teeth against the desire to howl. And the horrors rose up all around Ashe, so solid they were almost corporeal. She accepted, suddenly and fiercely and on the instant, that sooner or later she must return to face the beast. Then sleep knocked her out. Ashe dropped into unconsciousness.
Alexis opened her eyes and sat up. For some time she’d been awake but was unwilling to let Ashe know; she’d heard her companion shift and sigh and then finally - finally - give in to sleep. She got to her feet and walked over to where Ashe dreamed. Alexis had lost all her old powers - she knew there was no hope of a resurrection there - but it didn’t take a mind-reader or a wise woman to see that something was very badly wrong with Ashe. It had been hard for her to hear - no doubt - that her partner was pregnant, when she was so far away from said partner. Well, no-one had ordered Ashe out of Caer Arianrhod, had they? But even while she decided that Ashe was responsible for all her current failings, it was hard not to feel a touch of compassion when looking at that set, strained face... The moon rose higher and higher above them and it seemed to Alexis that the lines on Ashe’s face now illuminated were brand new. Alexis had lost her powers, but it seemed as if she could see the inside of Ashe’s dreams, and those dreams were horrible.
Alexis stared on. The life that Ashe had sworn had been already used up brought vivid memories to mind. She remembered seeing Ashe in the dungeons, and wasn’t that at least a dozen lifetimes before? Maybe it wasn’t just Ashe who regretted her decisions: Alexis remembered clearly how she had felt that day, knowing that Calypso was on her way into not just a ceremonial binding, but to a whole life with the princess, and feeling that knowledge bite at her, pull her down.
Surely Ashe hadn’t looked that tired, that wasted, when they’d met in the temple? Alexis watched the irregular beat of the pulse at Ashe’s throat and wondered if the Guardians truly were immortal. Hard to believe, hard to accept, even for a moment, that Ashe was anything other than wholly human, despite all that she’d been told. Alexis had heard about the Guardians but had never - obviously, emphatically - expected to meet one of that breed. She looked at Ashe’s shabby clothes and worn boots.
While Ashe spent her time in dreams the like of which she wouldn’t have wished upon anyone, ever, Alexis stayed vigilant. The night sky didn’t seem to be quite as nature intended, with the light of the moon forcing the shadows out and across the valley. Alexis watched the moon, now almost overhead, and saw how it lit up the floor of the valley. Once it would have been glacial country, she noted, the channel forged by time allowing a softer shape to the path cut. The river that did now run through the valley was an easy distance from where they’d made camp, and Alexis could hear the sounds it made, but even that lulling noise could not tempt her back into sleep.
She turned her gaze upon Ashe again, and it seemed to her that she saw not simply the flesh and bones figure, but something deeper and almost… she frowned after the word, harder. Less human, even. She looked at the sharp shadows thrown across the sleeping face and the frown lines that did not ease or fade, even in sleep. She cast her mind back to the first time she and Ashe had met, in Lammor’s almost-forgotten dungeons. She’d been bright with anger, that day, watching Calypso’s rather lustful smile on beholding Laure again and knowing that she had no choice but to accept it. Perhaps she had freed Ashe for no other reason than that of desired revenge upon a lover who, although they would soon come back to her, could make her feel like hell in the meantime. But as soon as she, Alexis, had been hurt, there had been no doubt over where the centre of her emotions lay.
What if she had killed Ashe that day? It would have been easy enough: no-one would ever have known. A few slabs in the dungeons floors pulled up, the earth dug up and forced to receive nothing but unfeeling flesh and bone, and there was an end to it.
So why rescue Ashe now? It might have been Alexis’s own idea but all she was really doing was putting her life on the line in order to make things easier for the leader of Caer Arianrhod. Betany wanted to maintain the impression of a strong leader, but strong leaders don’t send assassins (how she’d hated Ashe’s use of that word) to bring back errant lovers. Strong leaders don’t have errant lovers in the first… She looked at Ashe and then she looked at her own sword and wondered if even the likes of Ashe would recover from being stabbed through and then taken limb from limb.
Alexis stood up. The voice that had suggested Betany’s weaknesses was now advocating Ashe’s immediate death. Alexis knew herself well enough to recognise that said voice was no part of her.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are.” She whispered the words, and at first nothing responded. She was on the point of speaking again when one of the long shadows lifted itself up from the ground and slipped across the valley floor from the darkness of the trees, coming to rest only feet from Alexis. Calypso’s former captain looked up in the shrouded face and the long dark robes that stretched to the ground, gathering dust as they went. “Whoever you are… ” she said again, and the creature put back its hood.
Alexis didn’t know the sharp, almost feral face that glimmered in the moonlight, its surfaces whiter than snow, brighter than bone, but Ashe would have done. Said sleeper twisted and turned in her sleep but failed to draw Alexis’s attention from their night visitor.
“How happy you could make the shade of your former lover if you took away Ashe’s life here and now. Just think how easy it would be to kill her now. Kill her, bury her and go on your way. No-one would ever know, no-one would ever grieve over her loss. Go back if you must and tell her lover that you could not find Ashe, that she had been absorbed by the powers of the Red Temple. You could tell her almost anything and she would believe you.”
Alexis listened to the smiling voice and said, “Who are you?” She gazed over the creature’s face and cloak and down to the long sleeves, the cuffs of which were dusted with chalk or clay. The hood had been cast back easily enough, but the creature held itself lopsidedly, as if its form was not symmetrical. Alexis saw that one of the creature’s arms ended in a stump, not a hand, while the other was thin enough, long enough, and sufficiently taloned to make up the difference. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
“Only her life.” The creature came closer still and Alexis looked into cold eyes and reached to lay her own right hand on the hilt of her sword. She sensed that physical force against such a beast would be useless, but the sensation of cool metal beneath the calloused palm of her hand was comforting.
“Her life? Do you even know who she is?”
The creature laughed. “Her name is Ashe. She did this…” she gestured toward the stained, wrapped stump of her hand. “She took my hand and then she took my life.”
Alexis waited a moment before saying, “If you want her dead, why not kill her yourself? Or are you too newly a phantom, not yet strong enough to do your own dirty work?”
The creature narrowed its eyes until the pupils, so deep a red as to be approaching black, were hardly visible. It seemed to be appraising Alexis for its next remark was appropriate to the question. “I see that you once had magic. I can feel the space where it used to be, but you must possess some to know me even that well. I can feel the ghost of your magic.” Then it grinned with delight. “Ashe took it from you! And she hurt you badly, didn’t she, and as good as destroyed your lover? You owe Ashe nothing; she owes you all.”
That was hardly fair and Alexis nearly said so. She admitted - strictly to herself - that on one level she wouldn’t mind seeing Ashe suffer a little, but she didn’t much care to be inducted into the creature’s employ by simply agreeing. She added, “The magic I lost…” she smiled faintly, “I lost through my own actions, not Ashe’s.” An image of Rhea came to her mind and she raised an ironic eyebrow. “I can screw up quite respectably all by myself. I didn’t need her help for that.”
“Help me now,” said the creature, “and I will give you back that magic. I could give you better powers, stronger powers. I could give you the force to hold off legions.” Alexis said nothing, but her desire was weakening: she missed her magic every day. Having that power back would be the next best thing to having Calypso with her again, well and whole. But if Calypso was well then Calypso was with the princess, now Lammor’s puppet queen, and she could not bear that.
“I…” But her voice died away. She looked down upon Ashe as if from a great height, seeing Ashe as little more than an ant she might simply grind beneath her boot before moving on. Look at her, for the sake of the goddess, weak and worn and bloody and really not that necessary to anyone’s happiness. The clothes were worn and shabby, the face was not remarkable, not really, and the heart that beat beneath those undoubtedly chipped ribs was far less than Betany deserved, far less than Betany needed, for crying out loud. What was Ashe but a darkening shadow against the trees? If Alexis half-closed her eyes to do it she could avoid any last exclamations, or pleas. A single stroke to the heart then the sword twisted and jerked upwards: loss of blood would take Ashe out in a matter of minutes, and the pain, though it would be awful, would be over very quickly. Nothing to do but take that one simple stride forward, her sword coming down at an angle, the hands jointly holding that hilt and the full force of her body weight behind the swing. Ashe would never know what had hit her.
The creature sensed that it was winning, for its voice became sweeter and more flattering and uxorious than before. “The leader of Caer Arianrhod will forget her, soon enough; Ashe has neither family nor army to seek after her. Kill her now and roll her body down to the water and let it carry her away from here. You will simply go on your own way with the blood washed clear of your hands and your powers returned ten-fold. She is nothing to you and it will take very little to finish her.”
It was all true. Betany would grieve, of course, but she had the child to complete her life; she could get by very easily without Ashe. With her own powers returned, who knew? she might even be capable of saving Gowdie from her fate. And Rhea would be impressed, would appear timorous and slight before the kind of power that Alexis would be demonstrating. Alexis felt herself grow a little taller with each contemplation; well-being ran through her veins and caressed her. She felt her heart beating, felt her pulse quickening as it did when she was really, really aroused. With the warmth of the creature’s approval on her like sunlight, Alexis drew her sword and held it up high, high enough to catch the moonlight. The creature’s voice was soothing and arousing at the same time, and Ashe’s figure seemed less vivid, less human and less real with each breath Alexis took. She felt the sweat break out on her forehead and remembered for an instant exactly how it had felt to fuck Calypso, and have Calypso fuck her. She could remember how Calypso tasted. A wash of dizziness enveloped her; she was aware of a sensation of heady delight and a denial of every thing good in the whole wide world.
Alexis raised her sword.
*******
It is pleasant enough to visit Laure in the form of the little apprentice, but it is not enough. It is not satisfying, and satisfaction seems to be ruling my head more and more. I can feel what Ardan would feel, but being in possession is like touching the flesh through a thick wool blanket. It is the same with taste: a grape to Ardan may be a little bit of sunlight with a few pips thrown in, but to me a grape is like eating pigeon with the feathers intact. It is a less than desirable experience and it seems entirely ridiculous that after all I have learned and all that I could be, I am virtually… Oh, hell, out with it: I’m a virgin. I’ve never been with anyone! Hell, I could probably bring down a city through simple force of mind, and I’ve never had anyone in my life.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. And even while I cry out that I want to taste and want to feel, a part of me does nothing but mock the intention. There are times when if I could tear clean out of myself the vulnerable, hungry, unhappy part, I would do so and then dance on the fucking thing, even while I still bled.
*******
The words were spinning around inside Ashe’s head but they weren’t making sense. She could hear voices and on some level she probably recognised them, but what they said wasn’t making sense. The clearest voice she didn’t know, oddly enough, but was sure she ought to. In the dream that the voices centred around she was on the edge of a cliff. The cliff looked oddly familiar and in due course she’d know it as the one she’d dropped off, when falling however many hundred feet to the base of the cliff was preferable to the idea of being beaten and then eaten. The assonance might have pleased her had she been a little less bemused.
The voices were ringing out loud and clear and she understood that she was in danger but had no idea where said danger originated. Whatever it was she had to fear, she was just too fucking tired to be able to care enough. Wherever she was, she’d crawled to the edge of the cliff. If she fell off now, would it really matter?
*******
Betany sat bolt upright in bed. Rhea, who had dozed off in a chair by the fireside at the conclusion of their conversation, woke up too, but in her case it was care of the queen that broke her dreams. “What is it, my dear?” Rhea saw that Betany’s face was washed of all colour. Rhea put up a hand to Betany’s forehead and felt it damp.
She said, “Ashe,” and then slipped back into a sleep so deep Rhea couldn’t at first wake her. Rhea made sure that Betany was warm and snug before going to the chamber door and making her way to Gowdie’s cell. The karg greeted her, fur uneven and still damp from the morning’s wash. Rhea wondered if she was wasting her time in even trying to reach Gowdie, and the karg regarded her with light, bright eyes.
Rhea looked at the karg and the karg snuffled a little and commenced a thorough cleaning of its claws. Periodically there came the snicking noise of claws being extended and washed and then allowed to slip back beneath the covering of flesh and fur. The karg paused to drink water from a bowl on the floor and growled a little as Rhea came closer to the cell. For a moment they regarded one another, the beast and the wise woman, and a brief and solemn moment passed. Rhea knew that Gowdie had gone. Her powers had failed and Gowdie was simply… no longer there. The karg had its own awareness of itself and of the world, and to it Rhea was nothing more than a shadow flung across its area of confinement. Rhea put up her hands to the ceiling to test it for strength: yet again the world seemed to be crumbling, and she wanted to see if the roof was about to fall in.
The roof held. No stones came crashing down to bury wise woman and beast in a cloud of dust and rubble. Rhea wasn’t sure if she was relieved or not, but she paused only long enough for one more look at the karg. She said, “Gowdie, I know you have to fight to come back out but I need you here now. Something is happening, something is changing the world and I don’t think it’s in any way good. I need you here as Betany’s sister, and co-ruler of Caer Arianrhod. I need you to shrug off the manner of the beast and come back.”
The karg regarded her again and then bent to clean another set of claws. That same ripping noise as the tongue brushed around the hardened skin. Rhea didn’t bother asking a second time, but turned away and headed back toward Betany’s room.
This was all wrong. What in the name of the gods could have happened? Only the night before she and Betany had been visited by the ghost of Murah, but even that event, shocking as it might be, went nowhere near explaining the sudden chill that had crossed the land. Summer had dimmed into autumn overnight, and even the sun-warmed stones of the palace did nothing to alleviate the new coldness of the air. It looked as if everything was going to hell in a handcart, again, and this time Rhea lacked the same kindly forces that had flocked to Ashe’s side when Calypso had thrown caution to the winds and decided to become a despot. Betany was pregnant, but she was still the ruler of Caer Arianrhod, even if she was currently unconscious. Gowdie had transformed back into the karg, possibly forever, and Ashe was out somewhere in the wide unknown with Alexis, Alexis of all people, sent to bring her back.
Gowdie, Alexis, Ashe. Rhea muttered the names under her breath. The karg, the foreigner, and the Guardian. Oh, and Murah. Well, Ashe must have had a good reason for fighting and then killing someone from the higher echelons of the Red Temple; Ashe wasn’t the kind of person who’d go out of their way to hurt anybody. Rhea felt happy enough about Ashe. But she was worried about Betany and as to Gowdie… Well, as far as that school of thought went, it was no longer Gowdie that Rhea had to worry about. Now it was simply the karg.
Rhea found herself thinking about Calliope. She’d heard enough from Betany to know that the three of them - Calliope, Betany and Ashe - had had a very happy relationship for the very short time that fate had allowed it to continue. She understood that Calliope - and Sam, of course - had had no choice but to return to the water. And in any case, Calliope had been injured; there had been no way that she could possibly have remained on land. And hadn’t it been Alexis who was mostly responsible for that turn of events? Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone around to ask; whatever was going wrong was going wrong too quickly. Rhea was concerned about Betany and the baby; she was worried about the karg, who looked likely to remain wild forever, but most of all, she was anxious about Ashe.
Rhea wished she’d been around long enough to counsel Ashe before she and Gowdie had set off into the great unknown. She’d heard from Betany that Ashe had had a bad attack of wanderlust, and perhaps Caer Arianrhod’s leader had been best advised to let Ashe go without hesitation, without even an attempt at persuasion, wanting to maintain Ashe’s freedom to the last. Rhea would not have been bowled over by a wish to keep Ashe happy: she would have tried more than a little persuasion, hang that: she would have gone straight for the throat. After all, she wasn’t the one in Ashe’s bed. Rhea grinned broadly, her nice strong teeth showing: sometimes there were advantages to living a celibate life.
You never had to make anyone breakfast, for one thing.
She rattled on down the corridors, her mind running off in a dozen different directions as she tried simultaneously to keep an eye on Betany; bear the baby in mind; try to come up with a new dose for the karg; figure out where Alexis was, establish where Ashe was, where Murah’s apparition might next turn up and try to understand the inner workings of the Red Temple. It was just too much… Then a thought struck Rhea and clarified the moment. “Ardan,” she told herself. “First thing this morning I will send for Ardan.”
*******
Sleep had lasted for years and years. For years the beast slept, the lake of blood in which it swam being kept deep and warm by the ministrations of generation upon generation of priestesses and the involuntary generosity of visiting students, willing and eager to learn and only too easily sacrificed. The beast knew nothing of sacrifice for its own sake, and it felt nothing of any real emotion save that of need. Hunger it had never had to experience, as those who administered the needs of the Red Temple had never let the beast go without regular and rich sustenance. It rarely woke, but deep within the recesses of its brain it was aware of something necessary to its being that could not be addressed simply by applications of warm blood. The beast had slept for years and years, and now it was beginning to wake.
For such a long time there had been no need for the beast to make itself felt, make itself known. Why should there be? The beast was complete in itself and eternal - it guessed - and without specific need to propagate or adapt, it could hang in suspended animation within that warm red sea. But lately there had been changes: a wealth of blood in which it continued to swim had tasted in part odd and distasteful, as if it had fed upon its own - seemingly impossible - offspring. No-one would venture down to the dark cave with the red lake to tell the beast that its chief priestesses had been assassinated, because no-one else living knew that the beast existed. In this manner it is possible that the beast might simply have slept on for another hundred years or more, possibly drifting into a state like that of coma when food did not come, and did not come. But the warmth of the lake had changed just enough, and this time the sleeping beast encountered something unusual: as the waters shifted and shook as the beast turned first this way and then that, some tiny… thing brushed against it. The teeth demons, who released the blood for the beast to swim in, and who returned to their own dark caves after feasting, had brought down with them an oddity; two oddities, in fact. Two bodies, one whole, though broken and defaced, and the other unfinished - one arm ending in nothing but a gaping wound, had been lowered into the water for the beast’s attention. Even if it did nothing more than breathe in the empty bodies, their end would not go unmarked.
*******
My life becomes more complicated and less clear to me. I was aware that my appetites were not being met through my involvement with the queen and the apprentice, the foremost result of which was a case of sustained and impossible desire that has left me tired and drawn as each night becomes a kind of nightmare coupling where no matter how passionately I reach out to my dream lovers, they remain always out of reach. This situation did not please me - of course - but I understood and accepted it. Now of course the game changes form afresh: Ardan is going. She did not even meet Laure to tell her that the wise woman - currently in residence at Caer Arianrhod - had demanded her presence in Betany’s court. No. Ardan simply upped stakes and left, and I could actually feel the distance between us growing as my power became first faded and then meaningless. I had pushed Ardan too hard and too far, I admit that. I responded like a child - and a rather hapless child at that - to the emotions that I felt. I was enjoying myself too much; I had stopped looking in on my situation from outside, as well as in.
Ardan has left Lammor. I should be honest with myself, though who else is there for me to lie to? I had thought my powers to be stronger than it turns out that they are. This new situation is frustrating and I am so angry with myself for having miscalculated that I want nothing more than to turn my anger out on the world beyond. After I felt Ardan go I closed my eyes and allowed myself to enter into that other world in which I saw the little apprentice for the first time, and my acquaintance of Rhea. Rhea I should like to meet - and probably will meet, in the fullness of time - but I am wary of her. Her powers - even if they did go missing for a term - are developed and deep. I think that she is currently grasping at straws, but she is one step ahead of me: at least she has straws at which to grasp. I have nothing.
If I could push myself away from my current feelings and allow myself to go numb and feelingless again, it might serve me better than this current haplessness. I am torn: on the one hand I have begun to experience the simple human pleasures that could - I see - make life either hugely better or far worse than it is at present. On the other hand I know that by cutting free of desire I will eventually strengthen myself, but what would be the final point to that? What do I must want? Success? Destruction of my enemies? Freedom? Affection…?
Affection. Oh, that part of my desires has teeth all right. Yes, some tiny part of my emotional being - possibly the size of a nail paring - wants something irrational and human and utterly pointless: a relationship, a sea of relationships, possibly even a lover. I would say, friend, but I sense that friendship is of more value in the long term, and so would be so much harder to achieve. I could find someone to fuck, easily enough. Finding someone to like, finding someone who might like me… Oh, that is the hard bit.
My courtiers appear to like me. They fear me, although still on some less than conscious level, and so they are polite and diffident and abstain from arguing with me. I am their natural leader and so that does predispose them to follow me without question, without thought. But they do not love me. Why should they? They feel no affection for me, either, which is again understandable. But is it just? I rule them well, even if I do encourage them to feel rebellious toward their current “teachers”, as I name the Caer Arianrhod soldiers and small government; they have every reason to believe me a good and solid leader. After the mess that my sister made of the whole fucking charade I’m surprised they didn’t all just mutiny, but I guess that my family have ruled for so many generations that the idea simply did not occur to them.
I sifted through Ardan’s mind to find the full background to my sister’s utterly faulted ruling and her desire to go to war. I can understand the sexual desire she felt towards Laure - the one-time princess, now queen is attractive enough to blind most people towards making the right decision - although I cannot understand the arrogance she exhibited toward her captain and lover. Ardan’s opinions on the subject do of course cloud the images I perceive, but through it all I do become aware of relationships to envy, partnerships to avoid. The degree of magic inherent in almost every chapter of the war fought between Lammor and Mercia and Caer Arianrhod intrigues me.
I am amused by the other characters - all now extinct or banished in one way or another - who played important roles in the process. Ardan thinks warmly of Cairo, another of Laure’s best captains, even though Cairo disappeared from Lammor, only to turn up on the battlefield as the right-hand woman to the Caer Arianrhod champion, Ashe. Ardan thinks too of the water spirits who accompanied the little group of social oddities, neither of whom remain and neither of whom had names Ardan can recall. I do know, however, that Ardan and Ashe met, saw one another if no more. And I believe that a kind of sympathetic feeling passed between the two, as one went on to new worlds and the other remained here, with a future neatly mapped out and undemanding.
Oh, how little either of them knew about that one.
*******
Would it really be the wrong thing to do? She and Ashe had always been at odds, and the bizarre mend in the anger they felt toward one another was not of long-lasting material. After all, what chance was there of a relationship between herself and Gowdie? And Gowdie had been her only real reason for wanting the slightest good toward Caer Arianrhod. Take the woman/karg out of the equation and what was left? No good reason to do anything further to help out Betany and her people. And weren’t they the enemy, anyway? What about Calypso, who’d been cut about by Ashe and then left to live… Leaving Calypso to live out the rest of her life had been the worst and the cruellest thing Ashe could ever have done, but she went ahead and did it all the same. And what about the miseries she’d suffered, lying on a bed in that bloody hospital ward, waiting for the pain to begin again, and for the blood to start flowing.
Alexis was far gone. Murah smiled approvingly as she felt Alexis’s will begin to fold beneath the weight of her own. She watched with interest as a dozen thoughts cascaded around Alexis’s mind.
Alexis was doing fine: Murah’s support for her decision was evident. Once Ashe was gone there would be nothing standing between her and… and the world. She would be free to go in whatever direction she wished, with no sense of having to be grateful to anyone for anything. She could live out her life a constant wanderer, or find some new world in which to set up home. She would cut out of her mind and life all at Caer Arianrhod and here… A simple blow, a cut and thrust and twist and nothing more to deal with, no-one left to worry about. It wouldn’t take long to dig a grave and the valley was a lonely place: no-one would ever find Ashe out here. She was back in the dungeon again, so clearly that she could pick out the detail of the walls, the richness of the clothes that the girl before her wore. Ashe looked up at her from the shadows with an expression of appeal in her eyes. Better to let her go directly, to cut this prisoner free. The grip on the sword hilt tightened as Alexis’s certainty grew. Smiling, she brought the sword down.
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