Zachary Jernigan - No Return

“We can’t expect to travel as fast at night...

“I can’t imagine what Abse would say to me if he knew...”

They had been over it all before, on many occasions. He had kept the debate going long after deferring to her better judgment.

Shut your mouth , he told himself—and finally, he did.

The millstone around his neck was no lighter. In the silence that followed, he considered what might be done to negate the words he had just spoken, and arrived at no solution.

Berun grunted. “I’ve heard these things before.”

Churls sighed, obviously displeased to have her good mood sullied. “I thought we were through with this argument, too, but I guess you need one more go-round. We’re making the best time we can, Vedas. We’ll deal with Lake Ten when Lake Ten is in front of us. As for the Apusht, you’re right. It’s home to some of the most dangerous men in Stol. But it’s a short walk compared to what we’ve traveled so far. We’ll move at night. The border guard are warriors, not mages. While it won’t be a stroll to the butcher’s, at least we know what to expect.”

Vedas closed his eyes, shamed by her self-control. She had not lashed out, as was her right. Rather, she had explained matters to him as if to a child.

She would not have to do it again, he vowed. Experience had confirmed the soundness of her judgment, had it not? She had proved herself more knowledgeable than Vedas and Berun combined. If she believed they would make it through unscathed, they would.

Reason failed to alleviate the weight pressing down upon Vedas’s shoulders. He massaged the tight muscles over his ribs, trying to ease the tension constricting each breath. Filled with the awareness that he had not spoken his true concern—that he could not in fact identify the source of his disquiet—he stared beyond the fire, unable to shake the conviction that something had followed him down from the highest Step.

‡

Long after Churls had fallen asleep, he lay awake, exhausted yet unable to still his thoughts. A familiar condition. As he had done every night since the cat attacked Churls, he replayed the event in his mind, imagining all the ways it could have ended badly.

All the ways he could have failed.

When sleep finally came, it offered no release. Churls perished again and again, her throat in the cat’s teeth or her chest opened by its claws. Held back by invisible hands, he could do nothing to help. He watched her fall beneath the beast’s weight and tumble over the edge of the world, only to rise again and succumb to another violent death.

He jolted out of the nightmare every time she turned in her slumber. Stilling his galloping heart, he listened for a sound, anything out of the ordinary.

This is pointless , he thought. She doesn’t need me worrying over her .

Knowing this to be true—indeed, that she would consider his concern an insult—for two weeks he had hidden the signs of his distress. He remained still throughout the night so as not to alert Berun, and pushed beyond his fatigue from sunrise to sunset. He never mentioned the pain that lingered in his jaw where the cat had struck him. The joint clicked softly when he chewed his food, ached like a rotten tooth before every rain, and throbbed when he worried.

He wondered if the beast had been born of magic, if it had cursed him for taking its life.

Of course, he reminded himself, he had not been the one to deliver the killing wound. Churls’s strike had been a thing of beauty, an act of stunning strength and precision.

In retrospect, he should not have expected anything less from the woman, who routinely got the best of him during their nightly Dull Sword sessions. Though unable to match his suit-assisted strength, she made up for her relative weakness with speed that outstripped his own. More than once, she disarmed him before he registered her movement—a first for an unsuited opponent, in his experience.

Unlike most combatants, she possessed only two giveaways: She pursed her lips before pressing forward, and her right shoulder twitched prior to switching her weapon to the left hand. At times she did neither, causing him to wonder if she were trying to keep him off-balance.

Their bouts were silent, humorless affairs. She breathed evenly through her nose and never showed her teeth. Afterward, she smiled tightly, as though disappointed with the outcome. He concentrated on stilling his shaking limbs.

Now and then, he caught her staring at him, as if she did not recognize his face.

Could she see through his pretense? He doubted the simple fact of his exhaustion would arouse her sympathy. But for a few brief moments of communion, following their course change he had given his resentment free reign. The gap between them continued to grow with each passing day, and he did nothing to bridge it. They could not be called friends, not by a stone’s throw.

By the end of their journey they would be strangers once more.

This outcome had not always seemed inevitable. He remembered the way she had looked at him when they set out from Nbena. After two decades of celibacy, the recognition of a woman’s attraction—and his own desire in response—had shocked him. For a brief while he had actually fantasized about a sexual encounter.

Now, when he caught himself staring at the curve of her clavicle, the inside of her thigh, he recoiled from his arousal.

Abse, Vedas reflected, would be proud. Though the abbey master did not stop brothers and sisters from forming physical bonds, he had made his own position clear on many occasions: Lust clouds judgment. Remember, Vedas, we exist for one purpose above all else—to achieve victory over the enemies of man. Others have heard this calling, and felt it their duty to raise children who believe as they do, but this strikes us as too delicate a solution. Ours is the direct path. Any act that does not further us along that path is suspect.

Vedas recognized the truth in these words, and vowed to achieve an alignment of heart and mind. Accomplishing this, reason dictated, would allow him to see his path clearly again.

And yet... Again? The word rang false.

Had his heart and mind been in complete agreement when Sara and Zeb Jol were slaughtered before him, or when the hellhound took Julit Umeda’s life? They had certainly seemed to be, but now he found room for doubt. It seemed unreasonable that a man, knowing his cause to be just, having acted in accordance with his principles—bending his every thought toward one unselfish goal—should bear the weight of so much guilt.

Vedas considered the possibility that his heart and mind had never been in accord.

‡

Another restless night and fourteen hours of stiff-legged walking brought two facts into focus: He could not continue on his path without confronting his doubts, and one more day of traveling in strained silence would drive him mad.

The solution to both was simple, if not easy: he would have to seek counsel with Churls and Berun. The sooner he reestablished a sense of fellowship with them, no matter how fragile or slight, the better able he would be to name the problem that had so far eluded his waking mind.

Nonetheless, their arrival at the edge of the tenth Step came too soon. He prepared dinner slowly, trying to order his thoughts into a coherent pattern. An apology, a justification, or simply an explanation for himself. He suspected neither Churls nor Berun would accept an apology or fail to see through his justification.

An explanation, then. If he could make them understand the nature of his order, the specific reasons for his joining, they might help reorient him to his original purpose.

He had no intention of broaching the issue of intimacy with Churls—the thought of doing so horrified him—but he wondered if they might be able to reset their relationship, return it to its beginning. Dreaming of a physical encounter, ludicrous though the idea was, had distracted him from the memory of Julit Umeda.