Dark Traveler
For once he woke long after dawn. The air was filled with breakfast smells and distant chatter and late morning light. Faint smoke and dust itched his nose. Soren felt a cool, unfamiliar emptiness at his back; he reached behind for Ike's sleeping body, and caught the air instead.
"Hey, you're up."
He sat up to find Ike sitting at the foot of the pallet, dressed for the day and holding the scroll—Soren's scroll—in his lap.
"You seemed pretty out of it, so I figured I'd let you sleep in. I hope you're alright with that."
In response, Soren shrugged and dipped back into the covers. His head pulsed against the pillow, so hard that he could hear his own muffled heartbeat through his ear. He felt fingers curl around his bare ankle.
"How's your hand," he mumbled into the fabric.
"Uh, you don't remember?" The hand idly slid to his calf, the palm freshly smooth against his skin. "Completely healed. You'd think I'm Rhys with the way you've been fussing over it."
The hairs on his leg prickled under the touch—and from the chills that traveled down his body. It was not an illusion.
"Hey, do you miss Titania?"
That was sudden. Soren turned his face towards the wall opposite from Ike, closing his eyes.
"I trust she's doing well for herself," he said.
"Well, that wasn't my question. I'm not worried about her well-being. I'm just saying, since you two…"
Soren pulled himself upright to face Ike once more.
"You know. You practically ran the company together."
His smile was faint, and vaguely rueful, if Soren didn't know any better. Familiar. He had seen it often during the wars.
"It's what you would expect," Soren said. "After working alongside anyone for a fair amount of years, you grow accustomed to their presence."
The smile gave way to a restrained, but genuine grin.
"I think that's a 'yes' in Soren-speak."
Soren did not return the grin—he pretended to busy himself with the robe on the floor beside him.
"It's a 'yes' in Soren-speak," he said.
"I bet she misses you too."
Before Soren could steer the subject away, Ike cut him off.
"Oh yeah, I've been meaning to ask you something." He held up the scroll, and it unfurled onto his knees.
"About that?"
"Yeah! It must be saying something pretty interesting, right?"
Soren considered him a moment, then crawled over to retrieve the scroll.
"'Interesting' is subjective, Ike."
"I understand that. Just, how about you show me how boring this is?"
"Is that supposed to be a proposition?"
"Uh, I guess so? I'm genuinely curious."
"Still?"
"Wait…oh."
Ike's grin came too late, and Soren ignored him to trace a finger along a tight coil of script.
"This word… carries many meanings, the further back you go. I've understood it, in its broadest usage, to signify some sort of receptacle—a vessel, if you will. Be it a sponge or a stomach…it holds a general 'something'."
Pressed snug against his stomach, warm with that glowing residue—
"This one's even worse in its vagueness. Entity. Soul. Man. Animal. A 'something', highly sensitive to context, that may or may not have once been alive in one sense. It could just as easily refer to a dragon as it could a flayed fish."
Stiff-limbed and long-furred, cold to the touch, but the essence had still been there—
He felt Ike nod beside him.
"This word? Draw? Drain? Store? Transplant? Soak? Drink? It's the act of manipulating some unspecified substance—conducting, rather—from one place to another."
It had left the body at his nervous calls with such resistance, seeking instead the soft glow of the stone—
"And this… good health. Vitality. High spirits. Longevity."
And from there, had sunken so easily into the wound.
He held his breath as Ike leaned in closer to examine the word.
"With this in mind," Soren said, "surely you can infer the nature of this document's intended purpose."
"Uh, not really."
The breath locked in his chest escaped him all at once, as though carefully deflating. He felt like collapsing back into the pallet.
"It sounds like either your scary 'this is how we store magic' lecture or instructions for a broth."
"I'm leaning more towards the latter. Hypothetically, if this were magic, the principle would be the same, but…"
He stilled at the sound of footsteps passing before the door. Someone may have been eavesdropping, if they could call it such.
"These discoveries can sometimes leave one feeling… underwhelmed. No matter how grandiose the writing, recipes were surely preserved, and people certainly fell ill. In the most mundane sense."
"Well, that's a relief. The way you were studying it, it seemed like…well…"
"Like it prophesized the signs of an impending cataclysm?" suggested Soren.
"Yeah! Something like that."
"No. We're through with those."
Ike laughed and placed a hand on his head as he stood.
"Probably more fun than just loafing around here all day, anyway."
"That is the idea," Soren said.
"It just seemed like you were getting restless, you know?"
"Funny. I'd gotten a similar impression from you."
When Ike failed to respond with the faintest of affirmation—or protests of chuckles or anything—Soren began to worry again.
"I'm going to dress," he said, furling up the scroll and setting it to the other side of the pallet. "Save me a plate."
"They're always going to have a plate for you, Soren."
"Of course. You know what I mean."
Ike still did not leave.
"I'll catch up," he added with a quick glance over his shoulder. He felt Ike's stare on his back, heard a small grunt of assent. Footsteps. The door scraping shut behind him.
Soren doubled over, limp against the hard mattress, and muffled his heave with a pillow.
"Devomos prodeme," the woman croaked from the base of the front deck, a wooden box tucked beneath her arm.
Shall we go, she asked. Soren nodded.
A slow dip of the head towards the side of the schoolhouse—around the back, towards the garden, their usual locus—a heavy sigh that whistled through her nostrils, and Soren understood. They needed no words.
She turned to shuffle away, muddied green cloak cinched tight over her shoulders. Soren followed.
Where the others chirped and trilled in their songful tongue, she groused—weakly, as though every breath spent would be her last. Soren was not expected to answer. Loose folds of skin sagged over her eyes. Soren was not expected to meet them.
These quiet sessions presented the rare opportunity to occupy his thoughts with something engaging and suitably strategic. Something distanced from his newfound bundle of doubts and anxiety.
There was always the occasional reminder—the stone pressing against his stomach when he sat, echoes of Ike's concern, of children sniffling into Lugh's cloak. Nothing that couldn't be drowned out by his inward seethes of disgrace and frustration.
The game was more complicated than he had surmised at first glance. He had only learned the rules through observation and the woman's short, quiet corrections in a language he understood on the most elementary level. Then he had begun to pick out patterns; like games of Tellius, there seemed to be a common counter-strategy for everything, as well as common counter-counter-strategies and counter-counter-counter-strategies and the veritable knots of predictions and guesswork coiled up within each other until Soren's final move; he had trapped her main piece from close to every end. No egress.
Captured her commander, he liked to think.
He didn't like to think about the number of matches it had taken him to do it.
"A mulo ani," the woman rasped, quietly surveying his formation.
He'd heard the phrase before. A form of congratulations. He nodded and began returning his pieces to their starting positions.
"You are very clever."
His fingers stilled on the tip of the commander figure and his breath caught in his throat. If that had been the Lycian—the Elibean language—then he had finally gone mad.
He slowly brought his eyes level to the maid's; her dried, flaking lips were cracked into a smile at one corner, and her hands were folded on the table. There was an awareness in her eyes that Soren had never noticed from any of their games before—a knowing glint.
"Unless I am mistaken, or senile. Perhaps you are as stupid as that boy would have us all think."
He saw her lips and jaw move this time, and he knew he was being spoken to in Common. Or perhaps dreaming it.
"Will you play me again? Or will you continue to savor that rare victory?"
"You're from Tellius." Soren had gone too numb inside for his pride to sting.
She exhaled a sharp, dry bark of a laugh, nearly a scoff.
"No. Not as you are. If there is one particularity we share, it may be wanderlust."
Her accent carried the same lilt, the same trills on the r's, the same sing-song pattern of emphasis as the Lycian's language. Soren accepted the possibility for now.
"…Your Common is remarkably clear, then."
Another laugh.
"I lived there for quite some time. Longer, in fact, than I have been on Elibe since my return. But for all this land knows of yours…my residence had amounted to little more than an unusually scopious delusion. And perhaps you and your friend are remnants of that—specters. May I touch you to be sure?"
Soren's hands withdrew into his lap, and she sniggered—softly, entirely through her nostrils.
"It was Crimea where I found myself," she continued. "In the care of a noble house, just west of the capital. The count had a flair for dramatics, but it is to him that I owe my acclimation… and my sympathy, concerning your situations. I hear you are reluctant to talk about yourself, but humor me, perhaps. The count took in frequent visitors from other countries—he familiarized my ear to many voices. But this is too familiar. You speak with a Crimean's accent."
His mouth felt dry and tasted bitter; he nodded dumbly, then swallowed down the thick knot that threatened to choke his words.
"We lived in West Crimea," he said evenly.
"I am very good, see?" She flashed a yellowed smile. "I think it is beautiful; such a beautiful accent and language, for such a beautiful land. I knew you were Crimean as well, because you are sensible. They are such a sensible people. Diplomats. And for once, a king with his wits about him! Creatures of myth, here."
Soren bit back the palpable truth on his tongue: much has transpired since you left.
"You were no common soldier, were you?" she said.
"I was a mercenary."
He immediately regretted the choice of tense.
"And your friend?"
"He's a mercenary as well."
"He is, or he was?"
Soren changed the subject.
"Why did you choose to speak to me now, and not before?"
She sank her back against the chair, hands folding in her lap.
"What good would that have done me? So you could best my shriveled old wits even quicker?"
"In other words, you were wasting my time."
The woman made a clicking noise with her tongue. Soren had come to understand it as an expression of impatience from these people.
"Let me try again. What good would that have done you? You are a… unusually quick study. Who am I to interfere?"
"I don't know," he said snidely. "Who?"
"Bored, tired, and getting along in her years. Life's been little more than a cycle of tedium since I returned to Elibe. Until I found a new opponent, that is."
Soren ignored the gloating edge to her words.
"Then why are you here?"
Her smile faded.
"Homesickness. Family obligations. Shouldn't I be asking the same of you?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"Oh, spare me the runaround, child. We have words for that sort of behavior. Enscela—cheeky and evasive!"
He cringed inwardly. Child.
"We have words for you too," he said. "'Disingenuous', for one."
"Ha, I like that. No, but I understand. Your reasons are your own. A word of friendly advice, however. When you are so obviously reluctant to volunteer such information, people tend to assume the worst of you. Sometimes rightfully so."
"That's their prerogative. Why should this matter to me?"
"Why should it matter?"
Her next laugh was incredulous, and loud; Soren nearly flinched.
"Perhaps you have not realized yet. Allow me to expound the virtues of travel—those that you may see as difficulties, at least! Whoever you once were before—whoever you were, be it a Crimean peasant or a Goldoan noble…"
She paused.
"Do Goldoans have nobility? I would ask my ward time after time about the dragons and their culture, but he was pointedly tight-lipped. Anyway."
Soren held back the next palpable truth on his tongue: an emphatic yes.
"However you passed the time on Crimea means as much as dirt here. Slaughtered a small village? Deny it all you please! Wanted to get familiar with your cohort?"
"What?"
"Proceed along to Etruria!" she snickered. "But I jest. Lord Roy is said to be one of the gentlest, most evenhanded men of his rank. The guests of Pherae are treated like kings—I would have endured their company, myself. Perhaps because I am bored and tired. I would gladly trade dignity for comfort."
She slowly scratched her head from beneath her hood.
"But not everyone will treat you like royalty. Even if you had once been royalty, which is what some have come to believe. I can understand them. In a way, your carriage is quite dignified! Yours and Ike both. In the very least, I do not believe that you two were common mercenaries."
"We are not—"
He stilled at the sound of a soft rustle behind him; Soren checked over his shoulder for an eavesdropper, and saw a bird of some sort take off from below a shrub.
"Don't worry," she assured him. "The others are occupied. You see, that is why I chose to speak with you now. Had I been afforded such an opportunity during my stay in Tellius, my head would positively burst with questions! There can be no room for distractions."
"Occupied with what?" Soren demanded.
"Oh! You do not know, then. Ike and the others went to town."
His chest tightened and his chair nearly toppled backwards as he shot to his feet.
"According to Igor, at least," the woman sighed.
"They what? Why?"
"They did not tell us. But Soren." She idly picked up a game piece and set it in her box. "I do have a hunch. Since I see that you would rather not sour today's victory with a fresh loss."