No,said Gerant slowly.Unless my memory or my logic has gone very badly wrong, it’s Klaishil, but I never visited.As he spoke, Darya felt his attention turning to the roses, as he looked not quite with her eyes and not quite with his own.I know the spell that grew those, though. It was one of mine.
* * *
The real distress in Gerant’s “voice” silenced all the smart replies that rose to Darya’s lips, from comments about his taste to asking whether he’d also made ornamental mazes.
“I’ve never seen one like it before. Didn’t let this one get around?”
I’d only just worked it out when the storms broke. And I had the help of Sitha’s High Priestess, who died in those storms. Nobody since has been able to bear so much of the Golden Lady’s power, and the spell wouldn’t work without it.
The rubble was higher than Darya’s head, but the rose stems would work for handholds: she’d had worse pain than a couple of thorn scratches, and she’d yet to find the poison that could cause her more than a moment of discomfort. As she reached for the first, she saw that it was bent already, and by someone with at least as much strength as she had.
She froze and listened. The hall remained silent, even to her enhanced hearing. Whoever had come that way was likely long gone.
“You want to tell me about it?” Darya asked, when she felt safe speaking again. “If you don’t, I won’t ask about anything that won’t kill me.”
It’s an enchantment of stasis, Gerant said. He didn’t hesitate—Gerant would never be hesitant, talking about magic—but he spoke slowly, as though he stripped all feeling from each word before he let it leave his mind.Beyond this, likely not far beyond, time has stopped. Those there when the spell was cast can’t be hurt, and they don’t age, but they…Sleepis the best word for it.
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
I came up with it during the war. I was needed elsewhere, but I discovered how to put the spell on a physical object. A rose. I thought it made a poetic symbol. I was young. I gave it to my lover.
“General Amris var Faina?”
The very same. I thought he’d died before he could use it, when Thyran was destroyed.
They’d talked about Amris a very little during their years together. Gerant had broached the subject rarely. Darya hadn’t pushed. She’d lost comrades and friends, but grief like Gerant’s was foreign to her, as it was to most of the Order, and she’d always known herself out of her depth in those conversations. She felt the same way now. “Should I—”
All we can do is go and see.
She climbed quickly until she could just see over the top of the rubble, then paused.
Beyond, a man stood with a red rose in one outstretched hand. He was tall, lean, but muscled like a warrior, and both the sword in his other hand and the plate mail he wore bore out that impression. An ornately old-fashioned helm, rich with gold and set with sapphires, hid his face, but Gerant didn’t need to see it.
Amris, he said, and his voice held more love and anguish than Darya had ever heard before.
Chapter 3
“What can I do?” The question felt foolish, and Darya didn’t know why. The spell was Gerant’s, so of course he’d know how to break it.
Indeed, his answer was quick and sure.You have to be unarmed. Then you must approach him, very closely, and speak his whole and true name.Gerant hesitated, though not from any mistrust of her, Darya knew.Amris ap Brannon var Faina.
It was only a description of the man’s lineage, but Gerant said it slowly, bringing it out from where he’d kept it close down all the years and putting it in front of her, who’d barely known him for ten—which usually seemed a long stretch.
She went over the wall and down the other side, feeling helpless in a new, foreign way. There was no monster whose death would stop Gerant’s pain, or avenge it. She might be able to bring Amris back, but the years that had passed wouldn’t come with him. And she couldn’t simply wish Gerant the best, take her payment, and ride off.
There was nothing for it but to fix what she could. Darya unbuckled her sword belt and laid it carefully on the floor. On top of it, she put the knives from each of her boots, the smaller venom-coated ones from each of her wrist sheaths, her short bow and her quiver.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t kill me before I can explain myself,” she said, but didn’t get an answer. It was harder to talk to Gerant when she didn’t have the sword on. “Or that something else doesn’t before I can get armed again.”
Glancing over her shoulder with every other step, she approached Amris. The burn marks grew fiercer in a circle around him: the wall behind was scorched black, and three broken arrows lay at his feet.
Up close, closer than Darya generally got to anyone she wasn’t trying to swive or kill, she started to notice details: the dents in Amris’s breastplate and gauntlet, for instance, accompanied by smears of blood from a battle four generations past, and the copper-colored leather wrapping the hilt of his sword. His face, under the helm, was strong, with dark bronze skin, a sharp, square jawline and chin, thin lips, and a nose like a hawk’s beak; his eyes were the dark, misty gray-green of pine and spruce, with surprisingly long dark lashes. They were narrow, made more so by the fact that he was glaring—had been glaring for a hundred years.
Darya inhaled, sounded out the words in her mind to make sure she had the name right, and then slowly spoke it: “Amris ap Brannon var Faina.”
* * *
The world was silent, and that itself told Amris the spell had worked—not that he’d ever doubted Gerant’s skill, whether at magic or anything else. It was a different matter, though, to be transported, in the space of two breaths and two words, from the screams and crashes of a pitched battle to utter quiet, save for a single voice.
