Her parents exchanged a long, silent glance before Gheza motioned to her to stand. “We’ll see. Go to bed, and we’ll discuss it in the morning.”
Just before Disaris closed the door to the bedroom she shared with Luda, she overheard her mother ask her father what he thought. His answer was brief. “I’ll take care of it.”
Whatever “it” was, Reylan never mentioned it to Disaris. She noted how in the days following their confrontation, the schoolmaster avoided her and especially her father any time he saw them on the streets of Panrin, sometimes darting into a shop or crossing the street so as not to pass them on the walkway.
Disaris was never invited back to the schoolroom, but the gossip among the villagers was that while jin Morevan still snapped at recalcitrant students and instituted punishments, he no longer touched any of them, and no longer carried one of those dreaded canes.
Even though Reyland and Gheza hadn’t forced her to return to the school or apologize to the schoolmaster, she didn’t escape punishment for her actions altogether. Gheza thought Hazarin’s idea of volunteering Bron at the tannery was a wonderful idea and did the same with Disaris. Reylan agreed, and the master tanner was delighted to have more free labor at his shop.
Disaris didn’t dare protest, feeling she’d been granted a reprieve of sorts. After her first day at the tannery, she considered begging her parents for a kiss of the strap instead.
It was hard, filthy work, fleshing hides and mopping up the mess around the fleshing beam. By the time she walked home after a day’s work, she was covered in bloody smears of scraped flesh, and stank bad enough to kill a person at thirty paces just from the smell. Like Bron before her, she happily submitted to scalding hot baths and soap harsh enough to peel the skin off one’s bones. She was sure her hair, even tightly bound and covered by a cap, would never feel clean again.
At the end of her second to last day at the tannery, she trudged home, cold, smelly, and tempted to lay down in the road and take a nap. She might have celebrated the end of hermandatory employment except that a full month had passed since the Festival of Spirius and Bron still hadn’t made an appearance in Panrin despite Ceybold’s smirking assurances that he would.
“So much for your empty promises, you lying sack of horse shit,” she declared to the wintry gray sky. If she weren’t so tired, she’d march straight to Ceybold’s fancy house, knock on his fancy door, strike down the servants with her reek and drag their master outside where she’d beat him to a pulp with her lunch pail. As it was, she’d have to settle for missing Bron and imagining how she might turn Ceybold into fish pie with the nearest kitchen knife.
As if her sinister thoughts had somehow conjured up her greatest desire, a voice called from a cluster of trees far off the worn path.
“My gods, I can smell you from three fields over! Have you been rolling in the tannery’s muck pit?”
Disaris peered into the trees’ shadows, hardly daring to believe what she just heard. When Bron stepped out of concealment and onto the road, she couldn’t contain her excitement. “Bron!” she shrieked, sprinting towards him. She skidded to a stop when he held up both hands to ward her off, pale blue eyes wide with horror. She broke into laughter and stuck her tongue out at him. “I’m not that bad, you delicate petal!”
He grinned before his expression turned solemn, and he sighed. “Besides beating up schoolmasters and kissing Ceybold of all people, what have you been doing since I last saw you, Disa?”
Missing you, she thought.Wishing you were here. You are, and the world is right once more.
Chapter Six
Bron lay across Disaris, certain his heart was about to burst from sheer terror. Fear combined with fury, and he struggled with the conflicting needs to crush her to him and shake her until her teeth rattled. “Answer me, Disa!”
She lay still beneath him, then suddenly surged upward with such speed and power, she managed to throw him off her as if he weighed no more than a pillow. “No, no, no!” she cried, gaze fixed on the thinning pillar of violet light coiling up from the pavestone as she crawled toward it. Runes carved into the stone pulsed with the same light, their glow brightening and fading until finally going dark.
Disaris kicked at Bron when he grabbed her leg, screaming her frustration. Afraid she’d slip out of his grip and throw herself into what remained of the luminescent column, he stood and scooped her into his arms, carrying her, squirming and twisting, a safer distance away from a portal that was now a death trap.
“Stop it, Disa! He snapped, grabbing her wrists with one hand to keep her from clawing his eyes out. The woman he held was not the one he’d known most of his life. This was a panicked animal caught in the throes of madness. It was a battle to holdher, and he imagined this might be what it was like to wrestle one of the legendary great serpents that hunted the jungles of far-away Izindas.
She refused to quiet, reduced to feral grunts as she thrashed in his grip. The soldiers who’d accompanied them to the temple raced toward them, weapons drawn as they prepared to fight off whatever men or monsters were attacking their leader.
“Stand down!” Bron’s command boomed throughout the nave. His men lurched to a stop, their faces masks of confusion when they saw no enemy, only their commander and the wild-eyed itzuli he held in his arms.
“Commander,” one of the men said. “Who’s attacking?”
“No one,” he said, thrusting his chin toward the thin streamer of light that was all that remained of the awakened gate. “She somehow activated a lim gate and almost fell through. I caught her in time, but she’s frightened.” A lie, but they didn’t need to know any more than what they’d just seen with their own eyes. “Go back to your posts and your duties,” he said. “I’ll take care of things here.” They leapt at his “Now!” and disappeared the way they’d come.
Bron was not yet through shouting at people. He returned his attention to his captive and employed a tactic he’d once seen used on her to great effect by a woman who could have been a general instead of a farmer’s wife.
“DISARIS JIN GHEZA, MIND YOUR GALL!”
Disaris froze, wide-eyed and gaping at Bron as a semblance of sanity slowly crept back into her eyes. She went lax in his arms. Bron slowly let go of her hands, mostly assured she’d no longer blind him.
She stared at him, lower lip quivering. “Why do you sound like my amman?” she asked in a shaking voice, then covered her face with her hands and began to cry. Between the muffled sobs,he thought he heard her say her sister’s name. A frisson of alarm snaked down his spine. Why was she crying for Luda?
When the sobbing dwindled to sniffles, he eased her out of his embrace to help her stand, but kept a hand on her arm, wary of what she might do next. She leaned to one side to see around him, her face splotchy with tears and the tip of her nose red. All the crazed violence that had turned her into something rabid had disappeared, and she stared at where the column of light had once been.
Despair drooped her shoulders and the corners of her mouth. “It’s gone.” The way she acknowledged the gate’s closing sounded like the grief of someone attending the burial of a loved one.
Bron took a small step back, lowering his hand from her arm. “If I turn away, will you run?”
