Anne Bishop - Sebastian

Lee stiffened. “A Dark Guide? You think one of them is in your landscapes?”

Had there been one of them in the marketplace? “Maybe. Or maybe it was the pleasure coming from some of the people because of other people’s misfortunes. A Dark Guide nurtures feelings that are already inside a person. It can’t create doubt if the seed of doubt doesn’t exist.”

“I see.” Lee pulled on his lower lip. “So you’re the one Landscaper out of all them for all the generations who doesn’t have the full range of emotions.”

“What?”

“You never get angry or sad or grouchy or wonder if you made a good decision or just feel pissed off because it’s been that kind of day. No, you’re nothing but happy, kind, generous, sweet, loyal, loving. Yep. You’re just a puddle of goodness.”

Deeply insulted, Nadia sprang to her feet, sure she’d burst if she didn’t move. “I can’t decide if I should whack you upside the head or wash your mouth out with soap.”

“Before you try doing either, remember what you taught us,” Lee said quietly. “The human heart is capable of every feeling imaginable—good and bad—and it’s part of our journey through life to decide, day after day, which of those feelings we will nurture so they grow stronger within us and which feelings we’ll turn from because we don’t want them to dominate our lives. But those feelings still exist inside us. The shadows in the garden. Isn’t that what the Landscapers call them?”

She felt as if he’d thrown cold water in her face, waking her out of some foggy dream. She sat down on the bench. “Shadows in the garden,” she said softly, the echo of the feeling she’d had as a student when that phrase began to have meaning welling up inside her. “Yes, that’s what we call them.”

“And now, when things are turning bad and the whole world depends on the choices she makes, you’re wondering what’s inside Glorianna that makes her Belladonna.”

Shame stained Nadia’s cheeks. “Yes.”

Lee shifted on the bench to get more comfortable. “Do you know where the koffea beans come from?”

Nadia frowned at him, puzzled by the change in subject. “They come from a land far south of here. A—”

“Demon landscape.”

She stared at him—and wondered why his smile was a blend of amusement and sadness.

“Not all of them,” Lee said. “The ships that come in to trading ports from those southern lands carry koffea beans grown on farms—no, that’s not the word for them, but that doesn’t matter. Those other places are human. But the koffea beans that find their way to some of your landscapes as well as Glorianna’s come from the piece of that land inhabited by a race of demons.”

“You never told me.”

“You love her and you’d fight to your last breath to protect her from the wizards, but you’ve never been comfortable with the fact that Glorianna resonates with the dark landscapes inhabited by demons. So I’d like to tell you about this one.”

She looked into his eyes and knew that if she refused to listen, couldn’t find it in herself to try to understand, she would lose her children. Both of them.

Her throat felt so tight she couldn’t speak, so she just nodded.

“I was with Glorianna the day that demon landscape resonated so strongly she had to answer. She’d been working in her garden, turning the soil in one of her ‘waiting’ spaces, and I was there to keep her company and rest, since I’d done a lot of traveling over the previous few weeks. I saw her pale, saw the shock in her eyes as her hands pressed flat against that newly turned earth. She had to go, right then, with dirt on her hands and wearing the old clothes she keeps for the times when she’s going to be grubbing around in the garden. I held on to her, and we took that step between here and there.

“I’m not sure who was more shocked when we appeared in that landscape—Glorianna and me…or the spirit men from the various clans who had gathered to ask the Sacred Mother for help. They were asking for protection against their enemies, and two of the enemy suddenly appeared inside their circle of power.

“But they recognized what she was. They had old stories, passed down through the spirit men, of women like her. Heart-walkers, they called them.” Lee paused for a moment. “Do you know what they wanted, Mother? Peace. There are veins of gold and silver in parts of their land. And there’s the land itself. The humans, who already control all the land around them, wanted to drive them out. But that place is all they have in the world. It’s their roots, their life. They just want to live there and tend the land. They’ve had enough contact with humans to know there are ‘pretties’ they’d like to have and are willing to trade for. But the human traders who had found a way into their land weren’t honest and brought in other men who were willing to burn out villages and kill everyone they could before they, in turn, were killed.”

“She took them out of the world,” Nadia said softly.

“Yes. She altered the landscape so that its boundaries no longer touched the human land in that part of Ephemera.”

“But…you said the koffea beans come from there.”

Lee nodded. “For a few months, the only access to that landscape was through Glorianna’s garden, and she was the only one who could reach that place. Then, one day, she came with me when I went to check on the bridges in one of her landscapes, and she headed off down this road that led to a little village. When we got there, we ended up in a merchant store. The two brothers who ran the store were grumbling about a promised shipment that had been sold to someone else in another town who could pay a thieves’ ransom for a bag of koffea beans. They had a grinder and two perk-pots and had dreams of adding a room to their store, making it into the village koffee shop, but the traders who brought bags of koffee inland from the seaports and had to cross over bridges to reach various landscapes tended to sell what they had to whoever would pay the price. Less time traveling meant more profit—and less chance of crossing a bridge and ending up somewhere the trader didn’t want to be.”

Guessing where the story was going, Nadia smiled, even though tears welled in her eyes.

“Well, the sum of it is, Glorianna said this was a place for opportunities and choices, so I made a bridge between those two landscapes. Now the merchants, who were willing to trade with demons in order to have a steady supply of koffea beans, have their koffee shop and have expanded their store as well, since they can sell bags of koffea beans to merchants in the bigger towns near them. More trade means providing the people in their village with more variety of goods—as well as establishing sources for the goods the demons want in exchange for the koffea beans. And there’s a man, a teacher by training and an adventurer at heart, who now lives in the demon landscape, teaching the demons human language and acting as a translator when they cross over the bridge to barter with the merchant brothers.”

Lee paused. Nadia watched his throat working, as if he needed to swallow some strong emotion.

“Do you know what those demons say when someone asks them where they come from? ‘I come from a piece of Belladonna’s heart.’ So tell me, Mother. How do we judge a dark landscape? Is it dark because the ones who already live there won’t let humans have their piece of the world? Do we judge who is good and who is bad by the color and shape of their skin—or by what resonates in their hearts?”

The tears fell, washing away the stain on her heart. I should have asked about those landscapes a long time ago.

She wiped the tears from her face. “I went to see the Den the other day.”