Tad Williams - Shadowheart

The mistress of the castle was also their leader’s sister, a fact that Barrick Eddon seemed to remember now for the first time in a very long while.

“I’m sorry,” he told her as they made their way slowly along the road, their backs to their obligations. His crippled hand, which had seemed quite cured the last time she saw him, was all white knuckled and cramping fingers, and he carried it like it had begun to hurt him again. “I see now that, in a way, I was blinded by all that has happened. I was wrong, Briony, very wrong—there is much for us to talk about, but we have no time for it now.”

“What do you mean? We have all the time in the world. The war is over, Barrick. There is nothing to do now but rebuild, and trust me, there is enough of that to go around. Stay and help us. Do you mean to make me beg?”

He looked at her for a moment, then slowly shook his head.

“Curse you, Barrick!” she said angrily. “Can you never unbend enough to let someone reach out to you?”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “We don’t have enough time because we don’t speak the same tongue anymore, Briony. I have found some of what I lost—some of what I loved about this place and you—but for us to speak with true understanding, I would have to teach you all that happened to me in the time we were apart, and you would have to do the same so that I could understand everything you think and say. We have become… different.” He lowered his chin toward his chest as though it were cold, although the early evening was warm and she doubted Barrick even felt cold much anymore. “And I do have to go, Briony. If I stay here, Qinnitan will surely die.” He led his sister from the road and through the fringes of the waiting Qar, who watched her pass with the suspicious eyes of animals. “At Qul-na-Qar I might be able to save her, or at least learn how to keep her close enough that one day I can cure her.”

“Qinnitan.” Briony tried to swallow her unhappiness. How could so much be changing at the same time, and seemingly forever? “So that’s it. Because of this girl you scarcely know, you will go away and I will never see you again? The only real family I have left?”

He stopped. She thought she had angered him and braced herself for his furious words, but when he spoke, it was something quite different.

“I had not thought of that,” he said. “I… there is a part of me now, a large part, that does not easily remember those things—it has too many memories of its own to protect. My apologies.”

She gasped a little at that, frightened. “Merciful Zoria, you sound just like that Flint. He told us he has a piece of a god inside him.”

“He does.” Her brother reached out and took her hand; both the unexpected gesture and the coldness of his skin startled her. “With me, it is something only a little less unusual. I am not the same, Briony… but a little of what I was has begun to come back, too.” He held up his knotted hand; the knuckles were white from being so tightly clenched. After a moment, and with only a small grimace, he managed to uncurl his fingers almost all the way. He showed his hand to her, smiling through his pain, and although she did not quite understand, she knew he was showing her something important. Tears came to her eyes. “Perhaps someday there will be so much of the old Barrick that I will come riding up to the gate, shouting for you to let me back in!” He laughed at the notion. “Maybe I will even bring a wife and children.”

“This will always be your home.” She didn’t want it to be a jest. She could barely keep the tears from overwhelming her. “Always. And I will always, always miss you.”

They began walking again. For a while neither spoke.

“It is the place, not you,” he said at last.

“What?”

“That which makes it hard for me to stay here, even if I did not need to take Qinnitan to the House of the People. This place, its… history. The Qar hate it here. They won no victory. In fact, this may still be the site of their final destruction. And it has not been good to me, either. But I can change things, I think, both for the survivors and myself.”

“You are wrong about some things,” she said.

He looked at her with a little surprise. “Tell me.”

“The last time I saw him, Father told me a story about Kellick and Sanasu. He loved her, did you know?”

“What?”

“He loved her. Father said that in Kellick’s own words, he meant only to find out what the Qar did beneath our castle, and so he took men to question them. But the first time he saw Sanasu of the Qar, his heart filled with love for her so completely that he could not imagine going home without her again. In the middle of dispute, anger, and suspicion, he told her brother, not understanding that Janniya was not just her brother but also her betrothed. Enraged by this terrible insult, as he saw it, Janniya struck out at Kellick and in the fighting that followed, Janniya was killed and the few Qar who survived fled. Kellick took Sanasu and before too much longer they were wed. Whether she was unwilling, Father told me, no one can say, but they lived together in what seemed like harmony until Kellick died.”

“So the crime was no crime because it happened for love?”

“No.” Briony reached out and took his cold hand again. “But even you must admit the crime is different than the stories have made it. Love and a foolish, deadly accident is a far cry from murder and rape.”

He thought for long moments. “There’s something in that,” he said. “I’ll think about it. And I will tell the Qar about it, too. It may change nothing.” In the dying light of evening Briony could see little of him except the hard angles of his face, and although it was her twin’s voice that spoke, she could hear that it was different, too: Barrick was no longer the beloved, infuriating, pitiable companion of her childhood, but something altogether stranger and stronger.

“And now that you’re going away, that’s the Barrick I won’t get to know,” she said, airing her thoughts aloud.

He shrugged. “The old Barrick would never have survived without you. Besides, we shared blood in the pantry, remember? Even the new Barrick can’t forget that.”

She looked up in surprise. “I had never thought to hear that again.”

“It could be that we’ll also find ways to share our thoughts that you don’t anticipate,” he said with a serious face. “We will be two monarchs. Brother and sister rulers should stay in touch.” He tapped his head. “I will give that some consideration, too.”

Tears threatened again. “Still, it’ll be years at best before we see each other again! The one thought that got me through all of this was that at the end, if we survived, we would be a family again.”

“We are family, Briony. The more I change, the more I see that which will never change in me. I was an Eddon before I was anything else.” He bent and kissed her forehead, then pulled her close. Surprised, she resisted for a moment, then wrapped her arms around him and clung. For long moments they just stood that way, two people on a green hill at the side of the Coast Road as the moon rose.

“Oh, Redling, I will miss you so!”

“I know, Briony.” A smile crept onto his face. “I mean, ‘I know, Strawhead…’ and I’ll miss you. But that means we will never be completely apart.”

Vansen found it hard to think clearly on the ride back. Just helping the Funderling Chert to get his grieving wife back into the carriage felt like helping to betray someone.

“But how can he go off on his own?” Opal kept asking. “Our boy—what will he do? Who will feed him?”

“He will manage,” Chert told her over and over, but the little man looked quite stunned himself. Vansen felt for him. He knew what it was like not to be able to mourn because others needed you. “Flint has always managed, long before we heard of any so-called god.”