Uzmina shook her head. “No. This is something else. This is sorrow made red with anger, confusion. It isn’t the death of a person but the death of the heart.”
He’d surged out of her bed then, dressed, and fled. Two days later a note arrived from the Nesting Grounds for him.
I offer solace, not judgment. Should you return, you will always be welcomed here.
Uz.
He didn’t return, but he did have a servant deliver a pomegranate bush to her.
She pointed to it now, growing lush and green amidst her small garden. “Beautiful, isn’t it? I’ll have fruit from it by the time we move to the next camp.” Her eyes were as green as the plants she tended and saw far below the surface mien. “You’re not here for company or to forget, are you?”
Bron patted his gelding’s neck. “I’ve come for help.”
It was a risk asking Uzmina for aid, but his instincts had always been true regarding most people—except for Ceybold,and even for him, Bron laid the blame on his own willful denial. He prayed he wasn’t wrong about the bed maiden.
She eyed him with her long, searching gaze, then held out her hand. “Come inside, friend,” she said in a louder voice. “I’ve as many hours free as you’re willing to pay for.”
Once inside her abode, she asked only one question. “What do you need from me?”
He kept his explanation short. “Two hours of your company in here, then an exit out the back. Allow my horse to stay hobbled outside for another hour after that. I’ll return for him.” He took her hand and plopped a small bag heavy with coins into her palm. “And a blind eye to anything I do. This is payment for your help, your discretion, and any flowers my horse might eat.”
She tilted her head, studying him. “I think you still mourn, Moon Raven, but you’re no longer asleep.”
She was right. What he was about to embark upon guaranteed a life on the run if he managed to survive, yet he embraced it, driven by an eagerness he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Uzmina gestured to her neatly made bed. “You have my company for two hours. What do you want to do?”
Had Disaris not reappeared in his life, he might have accepted her offer to bed him. Instead, he asked her, “I don’t suppose you have a map?”
To his delight, she did – a large one. They unrolled it until it lay flat across her bed. A merchant’s map instead of a military one, it detailed roads and waypoints that were best suited, not for troop movements, but for travelers and cargo journeying to trading hubs. Other points on the map marked where safer, better inns stood, where certain drover roads were plagued by bandits, and pathways that snaked through forests and were friendlier to the wheels of wagons hauling heavy cargo.
Bron ran a finger down one particular route leading to a pair of villages situated on either side of a river. He searched for oneparticular item and found it neighboring the village on the river’s western border. He tapped the spot on the map. “Have you seen this in person?”
Uzmina bent for a closer look at what he indicated. “The Hayman lim-stone.” She nodded. “I’ve passed by it once or twice in my travels.” Unease flickered across her features. “It’s considered cursed. Some who got too close to it disappeared and were never seen again. Many people believe the carvings on its face warn people away, but since no one can read it, it’s hard to say what’s truth and what’s fancy.”
Bron had heard stories of the Hayman lim-stone as well. Based on the map, it was four days hard ride north. Unlike the pavestone at Slaekum’s temple, it hadn’t been tampered with and was much larger, a true menhir that drew people to it with offerings despite its notorious reputation. If he could bring Disaris to it, she might be able to translate the carvings. If it too was a gate to another waystation, it might bring them closer to Luda. If not, then they had at least a fortnight of riding before they reached Kefian territory, and the hard task of finding Luda before Ceybold did became colossally more challenging. That was without factoring in the probability that Daesin bounty hunters, sent by Golius, didn’t catch them first. A gamble of high risks and dire consequences if they lost, but if they wanted any chance at saving Disaris’s sister, they had no choice.
Uzmina rolled up the map and stowed it away. She took a sandglass from its place on a nearby chest and turned it over so the flow of sand began to cascade from the upper glass bulb to the lower one. “When the top empties, the wagons will be here with supplies.” She chortled at his surprise. “I make it my business to know the comings and goings of the Nesting Grounds. Your request for specific time with me wasn’t a random choice, nor a coincidence.” She gestured for him to joinher at a nearby low table crowded with cosmetics, brushes, and a hand mirror.
He protested when she pulled his arm to make him sit on the stool in front of the table. “What are you doing?”
Her fingers twitched back his hood to expose his hair and face. “That hood only goes so far in hiding your identity, Moon Raven. Your features are memorable. The scar makes them even more so. We need to make you less noticeable.”
He’d asked for her aid, and she offered more than he’d expected. If she had advice for how to better sneak through the Nesting Grounds to reach Disaris, he’d be a fool not to take it. He sat still while she opened tiny pots containing mysterious contents that smelled of a mixture of roses and lilac, frankincense and the sharp, acrid odor of charcoal.
“Be still,” she ordered as she applied a black to his eyebrows with the tiniest comb he’d ever seen. It took three tries before he stopped blinking and tearing up for her to darken his eyelashes. “Don’t touch your eyes,” she warned. “Or you’ll smear the eye paint and ruin all my efforts.”
She then set to smoothing another kind of paint on his left cheek, over the scar carved there. Bron tried not to flinch as splinters of sensation shot across his cheekbone, forehead, and up through one side of his nose.
“Sorry,” Uzmina said. “I’ll be gentler.”
Just when he thought she’d finished, she took the same pot of black eye paint and applied some to his hair line from the top of his head to his temples. She rubbed more of it onto the tiny braids that framed his face. “All of this will wash away with your next bath,” she assured him. “But for now, you look like a man of the deer herder clans in the west.” She gave a dismayed cluck. “There isn’t anything I can do about your eye color. You’ll just have to keep your head down and avoid meeting anyone’s gaze.” Finished with his transformation, she set aside her cosmeticsaside and raised her hand mirror in front of him. “What do you think?”
Bron stared back at the stranger in the mirror’s reflective surface and recoiled. It was his face looking back at him but changed in ways he hadn’t imagined.
He’d always looked strange to others with his lack of color and eyes that shifted from light blue to reddish-pink and even violet if the light around was a certain way. Some people conjectured his absent father might have been one of the lim folk, and he’d been involved in more than one tussle when he was younger with bullies who tried to pull on his ears and see if they were pointed. They’d have been disappointed if they had seen his father before he died: a stolid man with brown hair, hazel eyes, and skin that turned brown instead of fiery red after time in the sun.
The person who stared back at him from the mirror looked far more lim in his opinion. The kohl-darkened hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes made him even paler if that was possible, and his eyes burned the blue of the fool’s flames that were known to lead the unwary to their deaths in the marshes and swamps. His scar was no longer as red but still visible, a deep groove that started near the corner of his eye and chiseled a diagonal path to his jaw. He might not look like the battle mage known as the Moon Raven, but he didn’t think he’d go unnoticed in a crowd.
