Truly evidence of the importance of free trade. Taric gets something more valuable to him, and the trader gets something that he values more. A true win win scenario, just how Taric/Tanya likes things to go.
Threefold (Youjo Senki/Saga of Tanya the Evil x the Wheel of Time)
- Thread starter Readhead
- Start date
- Crossover
Truly evidence of the importance of free trade. Taric gets something more valuable to him, and the trader gets something that he values more. A true win win scenario, just how Taric/Tanya likes things to go.
Chapter 7: Gifts, Secret and Shared
- Location
- The Lower 48
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
(Thank you to Sunny, MetalDragon, and Teebs for editing and beta-reading this chapter.)
18 Amadine, 997 NE
Cold Rocks Hold, Taardad Aiel, Aiel Waste
The smithy was steady, firm, stolid. Reliable.
Safe.
…I certainly was not hiding within its four walls from the rest of Cold Rocks Hold.
In retrospect, I had acted foolishly. Carried away by the moment, I had thought only of a private fear shared, a dream confided, and of an opportunity to avenge a slight against another.
When I had made my rash offer, I had not stopped to consider the ramifications of my trade with Admira Mulares.
My shortsightedness had become apparent almost immediately, when a flood of Maidens issued forth from the crevice corridor into the Hold and descended upon the wagons like a swarm of wasps, transforming the Tairen couple's joy into terror in an instant.
When I had dispatched the Maiden to fetch Lea and some additional arms, I had expected to see five or six Maidens trotting back, ready to help. Instead, it had seemed that my messenger had run straight to her Society's Roof in Cold Rocks Hold and called every spear-sister therein to come help.
And help they had, pouring over the wagons in search of all books, any books, that could be secreted within the cargo boxes or even the sturdy frames themselves. Each bound volume had been eagerly carried away by a laughing Maiden, who had been immediately replaced in the search by an equally joyous spear-sister.
They had even tried to take the peddler's register. Recognizing the merchant's distress, I had stepped in at that point. The Maiden who had retrieved it from the Mulares's strongbox pointed out, a tad bit sullenly, that it was a book and had been on a wagon, and thus it was part of the bounty I had purchased. Opening it up, I had pointed out that it contained only numbers, useless for information about the Wetlands, and further contextualized it as a vital tool of the merchant's trade, akin to my hammer or her spear. That had been enough to prompt the accounting book's return to the Tairan peddler's grateful hands.
While the over-enthusiastic response from the Maidens had been my first sign that I had miscalculated the attention my intended gift would receive. The second had been the arrival of Lea, a bobbing head of bright hair amid a sea of shoufa-clad Maidens.
Carefully slipping through the dense ring of Maidens crowding the open space amid the wagons, at least a hundred of whom had one or more freshly acquired volume pressed to their chests, Lea had strode up to me. We had stood in the center of the crowd then, alone in the eye save for a gray-faced Admira Mulares, his wife having retreated with their teamsters.
"I see you, Taric of the Chareen Aiel," Lea had greeted, halting two armlengths away to address me. Her voice had been as guardedly cool as it always was, when we spoke in public, outside the privacy of my forge or the solitude of a far corner of the mesa's table. "You have called me, and I have come."
I had not glanced to the left or to the right, knowing that I would see nothing but eagerly grinning Maidens, staring at us with rapt attention and undisguised amusement.
I am sorry, I had tried to apologize to Lea with only my eyes. I had not meant to make this a spectacle.
"I see you, Lea of the Taardad Aiel," I had replied, and, taking a deep breath, had rolled my shoulders back. Just as if I was limbering up for a project at my forge. "Lea, while all smiths are bound as brothers, and while Neiralla offered me the shade of her roof and the refreshment of her water, it was you who made me certain that I had found a home among the Taardad, far from the roof of my mother and the hold of my father.
"For such a gift, no repayment is possible."
"You give me great ji," Lea had breathed, there between the wagons, amid a Roof's-worth of Far Dareis Mai, her dancing eyes wide, the nest of crinkled furrows atop her nose softening with glad astonishment. "It was no great obligation I discharged, Taric, or at least no greater of an obligation than what any host owes to any guest."
I had not disagreed with her then, for she was entirely correct, though her statement was not without flaw. Only Lea could truly judge her own honor, but I had known full well where the boundaries of simple hospitality were, and just how far they extended.
What we have shared goes far, far beyond that.
"For such a gift," I had repeated, "no repayment is possible."
For a beat, I had held the pause, savoring the mounting anticipation of the moment. Of the hundreds of Maidens present, none had stirred to break the silence. Nor had Lea.
"However," I had continued, allowing a smile containing a piece of my enjoyment of the moment to slip free, "I aim to attempt that impossibility."
Spears had clattered against bucklers like winter's hail as Maidens half-mockingly applauded my understated boast. The applause had been only half-mocking because I had, by purchasing an entire library's worth of books in a single exchange, arguably already fulfilled my brave statement. Many Aiel would consider a trove of books all their own to be more than a sufficient gift to buy any favor.
The opinions of any Aiel do not matter to me in this moment, for Lea has already proven herself willing to stand against our society, should her honor demand it.
For the first time that day, my palms had prickled with nervous sweat.
"The moment you truly made Cold Rocks Hold a home for me was the moment you shared yourself with me," I had stated, speaking louder now to cut over the clamor of the Maidens, although I had noted in the press of the moment several of the oldest spear-sisters flashing discrete handsigns, presumably ordering their juniors to hold themselves in check. Lea's eyes had widened so much that I could see white all around them. "In that moment, you spoke of a path forwards; not the path of a shuttle across a loom nor the path of a seep towards the dip of the land, but a path like a bird on the wing, soaring free but returning always to the nest.
"I cannot give you wings, but I can give you information. All of this," I had beckoned at the inner ring of Maidens and the numerous volumes they bore, "is yours. Rope and chalk to blaze a path you would walk, guided by your own honor and the spear you carry not in your hand, but in your head."
And now the crux, I had thought, and pushed the urge to gulp away.
"Please accept my gift."
Silence had hung in the air, and this time, it was free of the grinning and carefree amusement of the audience. Not a single exhalation had disturbed the air, save the mournful breeze flowing over the red-rock walls. Even Admira Mulares had remained silent, his fidgeting brought to an end at last.
My eyes had been fixed on Lea only when she said, "I cannot accept your gift."
No!
"Not," she had continued, raising a hand that was quelling, halting, and drawing all in one, "because I reject your gift, or because I reject you, Taric.
"Quite the opposite."
Beckoning wide, just as I had, Lea had swept her arm out in a broad arc encompassing the book-ladden dancers and, to my distant discomfort, the ransacked wagons.
"Earlier, I said that you give me too much ji. I shall say it again, Taric of Smoke-Caught Steel: you give me too much honor." Suddenly, Lea had glared up at me, eyes fierce through budding tears. "Honor demands honor, Taric, and what could I possibly offer you to balance out the honor you have offered me? I have no great skill to deliver such windfalls as you have brought us, and I spoke true when I said that I acted first out of obligation, though I will not say that I have remained solely within the obligations of a host.
"Would you have me be always beholden to you, oh great smith of words and spears?"
"No." The word had torn its anguishing way out of me to emerge hoarse and guttural. I had felt raw and bloodied by its passage and horrified by the misstep I had so nearly taken, corrected only at the last moment by Lea's own keen eyes. "No, I would have you stand beside me and speak to me without deference, acting as you choose for the honor your own choices bring you, an honor that is yours only, just as your choices should stem only from yourself. I ask nothing of you, save the continued shade of your presence.
"I would never forge a chain of ji to bind you by your honor."
Please, believe me.
"I know," Lea had replied, and the simplicity of her words had been rich with reassurance.
My heart had slowed in its frantic tempo.
"You said once that, in your eyes, I carried the honor of my sept on my neck," Lea had said, almost murmured, her voice thoughtful and musing. "Do you recall that, Taric?"
"I do," I had acknowledged, remembering how she had been so confused in that moment about whether to be insulted or pleased. "And that a certain chief's daughter holds ji in the eyes of all whose tongues carry her name."
"Then let that be our way forward."
I had blinked, and then, confused, had tilted my head to the side.
Lea's lips had quirked upwards for a moment, before smoothing back out.
"You have offered a gift to me that I cannot accept, but I cannot deny my… appreciation, for the thought that gift conveyed," Lea had explained, thankfully taking mercy upon me. "Very well then. What if the gift is offered, save for a few selections, to the daughter of the Chief of the Nine Valleys Sept and to the daughter of the Chief of the Taardad Aiel… But the thoughts will remain solely with Lea, daughter of Rhuarc and Amys the Wise One?
"Would that satisfy you, Taric, son of Leiran and Ayesha?"
It had taken me a moment to understand Lea's sly threading of the needle, disoriented by the emotional whiplash of her seeming rejection followed by an immediate qualified recanting, but when realization dawned on me, it had been all I could do to maintain my composure.
How clever! I had marveled then and marveled still, breath taken away by the sudden realization of what Lea had in mind. There has likely never been a single Aiel with personal ownership over an entire trove of books, and who knows what sort of disorder such a development could inspire? Aiel of course enjoy personal property, but hoarding an excess is dishonorable, especially when the knowledge contained in those books could benefit the whole clan. Likely, Lea would have been pressured into sharing the books eventually, but preempting that pressure and turning the gift into one for the entire sept…
It is a gesture that will inevitably bring us both much ji.
"It would," I had said, and it took all of my power to hold myself together as I had returned to the shelter of my forge, the day's work more than done in my eyes. Only after I closed the curtain door to the smithy, guaranteeing privacy in all but the most dire of circumstances, had I allowed myself to slump against the wall and laugh, delighted by the cunning Lea had displayed.
Aiel lived and died not alone, but as members of a complex weave of kinship ties, bound by blood, by Society, by clan, and by solemnly sworn choice. The honor gained by one was honor shared by all who called that one their kin. In gaining ji, all were honored, including the entirety of the sept. None were excluded. Such was the communal way of the Aiel, but in this case the path to that soothing shade had only been found by Lea.
"How can you separate a person from who they are?" She had asked me that question once, when I had asked who she was besides her parents' daughter.
Consider that question answered, Lea. Consider that question answered.
All of that had come and gone three tendays ago; three long and unexpectedly troublesome tendays ago.
And now, I was certainly not hiding from an unasked-for popularity among my unattached peers of both genders. No, I was only retreating to the demands of duty, placing the requirements of my role as smith paramount over the distractions of gossip and requests, discreet or otherwise, for advice or consideration.
…The request for privacy implicit in the curtain door had warded away most of the former, thankfully. Lea, meanwhile, had seen to the latter.
I will have to find some way to thank her for her efforts, I thought absently as I returned a half-shaped spearhead to the coals. Whatever she said to them certainly cut down on the number of frivolous work requests submitted during my Hold-dedicated hours.
I very carefully did not think about how much like both Lian and Amys Lea had looked as she verbally scourged a half dozen young women, including a shame-faced Maiden, for wasting my time and cluttering up my smithy with their presence. That last of whom I had spotted a day later, nearly collapsing as she completed her three-hundredth lap around the Hold's perimeter.
Apparently, a senior Maiden had been very displeased by her conduct and had seen fit to assign her additional endurance training to rectify the amount of time she had on her hands.
Good.
Unfortunately, not even Lea's approbation could keep my forge clear of Maidens for long, it seemed.
"I see you, Taric of the Chareen Aiel," the Maiden standing on my threshold announced, restless blue-green eyes sweeping the smithy's corners before locking on mine. "I am Aviendha of the Taardad Aiel; I ask permission to come below the roof of your workshop."
"I see you, Maiden of the Taardad," I replied to the stranger, Aviendha, identifying her as a native of Cold Rocks Hold by the patterns of her cadin'sor.
She must have been out on patrol, I thought, or perhaps out on a raid. Surely I would have seen her before now, if she had been living under the Maidens' Roof here.
"By the honor of your society and your sept," I continued, finishing the ritual greeting appropriate for our circumstance, "I welcome you under my roof. What service can I offer you today?"
"I have newly returned from running with my spear-sisters," Aviendha explained as she stepped into my smithy, confirming my guess, "and soon I shall be leaving once more. I wanted my spears, my buckler, and my knives seen to before I left."
"And Garlvan is still quite busy," I concluded as I accepted each of Aviendha's weapons in turn, laying each out atop a cloth-covered workbench as I tried to remember where I had heard the Maiden's name before.
Somehow, although Aviendha's face was unknown to me, her name rang with vague familiarity.
"He is," Aviendha agreed as she parted with her belt-knife, apparently the last piece of metalwork about her person, "but I also desired to meet you, particularly after my sisters and my sister-mother praised the quality of your work, as well as," she added with a smirk, "your gifts."
Of course, I sighed internally at the mischievous glint in the dancer's eyes. Of course she knows! Her sisters probably couldn't wait to tell her just as soon as she set foot back under the Cold Rocks Roof.
And her aunt too, eh? I considered that for a moment. I wonder if her aunt was the Maiden who took it upon herself to turn a simple gift into a spectacle? Her cheekbones look a bit familiar, now that I think about it…
"I am pleased to hear that Far Dareis Mai continues to hold me in such high regard," I blithely replied as I began my inspection of Aviendha's spears, carefully checking the joining pins for any signs of loosening or wear. "I am sure that, no matter what you have heard, the truth was less impressive."
"Stories often grow in the telling," Aviendha agreed as she leaned back, arms folded and a smugly feline smile on her face, against the brick wall of the smithy. "But, Taric of Shende Hold, in my experience my sister-mother rarely embroiders her recollections. Besides," and the amused grin expanded by a small but dangerous degree, "only rarely is Lian so impressed by any man as she seems by you."
"Ah," I replied, suddenly cogent of where I had heard Aviendha's name before. Pulling myself away from the inspection of an already immaculately-maintained spearhead, her story about wanting her weapons inspected was clearly just a justification for this meeting, I straightened my back and met the Maiden's gaze directly.
There was amusement there, bit below that thin veneer lurked cool assessment.
So, that's how it is.
I had indeed heard Aviendha's name before; it had come up in a conversation with Lea about her family. As Lian was sister-wife to Amys, Lea's mother, and thus effectively her sister in all but blood according to the complex web of Aiel kinship ties, that meant that Aviendha was second-sister to Lea, the daughter of her mother's sister. Or, in this case, the daughter of her mother's sister's sister. Something like a cousin-in-law in terms of placement on a family tree, but with far more significance and closeness implied.
She had, I recalled, always dreamed of taking up the spear and did so at her first opportunity, joining Lea's older sisters, Aviellin and Garna, in their warrior society. Something Lea had always envied, not because she wanted to become a Maiden but because of how effortless the decision had been for her kin, and because of how clearly they relished their role.
"As you have apparently heard tell of me, I have heard tell of you, Aviendha." I matched her evaluating gaze with one of my own, searching for any hint of a threat. I found nothing but a closely guarded resolve, a match for Lea's own watchfulness. "Your second-sister has given your name to me in the company of Aviellin and Garna. Have they returned to the Hold as well?"
Should I be expecting visits from them next?
"They have not," was the terse answer, the previous dry humor ebbing away. "Perhaps they will come, though, when they hear the same story I heard, and learn that Lea has at last acquired a suitor that she was incapable of escaping from or driving off immediately."
So, perhaps more concerned relatives will be dropping by, I noted, trying not to scowl at the interference. Fantastic. And all of them are convinced that I am attempting to court Lea, and no doubt saying as much to her.
That was the true source of my concern. I still wasn't certain of precisely where Lea and I stood with each other, but I knew exactly how she would respond if she thought I was trying to execute my ancestor's order to court her.
"I heard about your courting gift," Aviendha went on, some of her previous humor slipping back into her voice and into her sly smile, although her eyes remained keen. "I am impressed, Taric son of Leiran. It was a very thoughtful gesture. If you continue to treat my second-sister with such attentiveness and respect, it will be an honor to call you my second-brother."
An unspoken "or else" loomed in the subsequent silence.
This is a reasonable course of action for Aviendha to take, based on her understanding of the situation, I told myself, smoothing the wrinkles from my brow and the irritation from my heart. She cares for her relative and is trying to protect her, as a Maiden should protect the people of her roof's hold. She has done me no dishonor.
Moreover, there is no reason to treat her as a threat: Aviendha would no more raise a hand against me than she would a Wise One. It is unfair of me to look at her and see a threat, and I dishonor her by doing so.
I have toh.
And yet, I still needed to find a way to disarm this threat to my friendship with Lea.
"I merely paid honor for honor," I told Aviendha, disregarding her last sentence, "and returned a favor for a favor. The only thing I gave Lea was a grindstone to hone herself with; the decision to offer that grindstone to the rest of the Nine Valleys Sept in truth belongs to her alone."
"My second-sister gained great ji that day," Aviendha agreed, "but you gained a reputation for prowess beyond the anvil, Taric.
"After all," and now the smirking humor was back in full measure, the suspicious light vanished and replaced with a happiness that seemed shockingly genuine on Aviendha's face, "what better gift could a man offer the woman he pursues, than a weapon with which she could confront all the world? You respect her strength and her desire to grow strong in her own way: that much is clear to all with eyes. Honor for honor indeed, Taric, Leiran's son."
"Only a true daughter of Far Dareis Mai could gaze upon a pile of books and see a spear," I said with a rueful shake of my head, accepting the olive branch of Aviendha's light and complimentary teasing and extending my own in recognition.
"Here," I said, speaking over her delighted laugh and thrusting the hafts of her spears back towards her, "take back your equipment. You have seen to it well and it shall doubtless return the favor, wherever next you go to dance."
"I reckon the Shaido won't miss a few goats, or even a few hundred," Aviendha replied, grinning fiercely as she answered the unspoken question. "On the other hand, I suspect even that unlicked clan will notice the absence of the Algai'd'siswai I mean to bring back in white."
Goats and Gai'shain, eh? A warrior's boast indeed.
"May your feet be swift in your dance," I said, wishing her success in her raid. "Try not to trip over your spears."
"May your hands prove deft in your own 'dance,'" Aviendha retorted, smiling as she borrowed her second-sister's sharp tongue. "But not too deft, though, or too quick," she added a moment later. "After all, I wish to be present when my second-sister weaves her bridal wreath, so I might advise her on her arrangement."
Refusing to rise to the bait, I bid Aviendha farewell and returned to my ever-present backlog of outstanding tasks, grateful for solitude's return.
When the sun at last began to dip low in the sky, I returned to Neiralla's roof for supper, another day of gratifying productive work under my belt. Unlike most days, Neiralla and I wouldn't be eating alone.
Three days ago, the dyer's daughter Neisha had returned with the rest of her band of newly inducted Maidens, who had all been set to the necessary but unglamorous task of guarding the flocks of the Nine Valleys Sept as they grazed. Fortunately, by the time I returned from my forge, Neisha had already been briefed by her mother about my circumstances, so most of the excitement had already worked its way out of her system.
After her weariness dissipated after a night of restful sleep back under her mother's roof, I found myself retroactively thankful for the relatively low-key meeting.
It had been the most quiet Neisha had been since her return. As it turned out, the young Maiden was abundantly energetic and remarkably chatty, seeming to never sit still or stop talking for more than a pair of breaths at a time.
Even by her usual standards, Neisha was quite noisy tonight.
She had, after all, secured the permission of her Society's Roofmistress to accompany the band of Maidens preparing to raid the Shaido pastures.
"We will each return with ten goats," the youthful Maiden, just a few months older than me and about Aviendha's age, predicted confidently, barely a whisker away from bragging. "No, fifty! And a Gai'shain apiece to help tend to them all!"
Neiralla smiled at her daughter's enthusiasm, but in the low, dancing light cast by the central cooking fire, her face looked lined and creased with strain, her lips pursed with worry.
It could all just be projection, I knew. It would be far more in keeping with Aiel cultural norms for Neiralla to be proud of her daughter and her eagerness to dance the spears. If Neisha somehow managed to return with white-clad Shaido in tow along with freshly captured livestock, she and her spear-sisters would earn much ji.
And yet, I thought, holding my tongue as I methodically ate a dinner I could barely taste, from oosquai-fueled conversations in the darkness of night, I know that Neiralla still grieves for her twins, both of her sons who woke from the Dream even before their father slipped awake.
What ji did their deaths earn? How were the interests of sept or clan advanced by the two empty spaces by this fire?
"Thank you for dinner," I said when Neisha was forced into silence for a moment by the need to chew. Placing my bowl down, I rose from my position on the floor of Neiralla's house near the fire. "It was as delicious as your food always is, Neiralla."
"And you are kind as always to say as much," Neiralla replied with a smile, speaking just as Neisha opened her mouth to interject. "Will you be visiting Lian's roof again tonight?"
"I will be going for a walk," I said, ignoring how Neisha's eyes first widened in shock, and then narrowed mischievously. "I will return shortly."
"Are you going to go visit Lea, Amys's daughter?" Neisha burst in, her curiosity barely veiled by a pretense of knowing amusement. "This is what, the second night in a row? Do you require a chaperone, hmm?"
"No," I declined, eying the impertinent child. No, not a child: She was wedded to the spear, and thus an adult. And thus could be held to adult standards, including that of Ji'e'toh. "You dishonor Lea with your implication."
Neisha flushed at that, her florid cheeks and ears jarring with her lighter-hued hair.
Her ears, glowing with heat, were particularly noticeable, standing out from the short-cropped hair at the sides of her head. Like her close-cut bangs, the nearly shaved sides were the traditional style worn by virtually all of the Maidens and Spears. Speaking frankly, I had never much liked the rat-tailed appearance of the traditional haircut, but I could understand its use: no need to give an enemy easy handholds, and nobody liked blood matting their hair.
"I have toh." To her credit, Neisha was quick to take responsibility, jerking her head forward to stare down at the rug below her, clearly signaling remorse in her body language. "I spoke too rashly, Taric."
An adult, yes… But not that far from childhood.
"Lift your head," I sighed, allowing my shoulders to ease forwards, tension released, "but guard your tongue more closely, Neisha, Jhoran's daughter. You are a Maiden now, wedded to the spear. You no longer carry dolls."
She nodded, still not looking up. Somehow, her ears looked even redder than they had a moment longer.
And to think that she'll be leaving for her first raid…
Abruptly dispirited, I nodded farewell to Neiralla and left the shade of her roof to venture out into the evening, leaving the quiet dwelling and the three ghosts who should have been lying by the fire next to mother and daughter behind.
Lea was sitting on her haunches outside of her family's dwelling, up near the western rim of the bowl-shaped depression within the mesa that contained the heart of Cold Rocks Hold, when I found her.
Lian's roof was, in my judgment, a very pleasant structure, surprisingly capacious behind its facade of adobe bricks that never failed to remind me of the bones of Shende Hold, buried under coat upon coat of stucco. Gardens grew on the roof and out in the gap between the wall and the path leading past the house, and according to Lea, provided all of the herbs and vegetables used by Lian for cooking and Amys for Wise One's purposes.
Lea had also told me how tending to that garden had been an activity she had shared with her sisters when they were young, all laboring under her mother's watchful gaze.
I hadn't needed to voice my suspicions that Amys had likely used that family chore as an evaluation of her descendents, scanning for any trace of proficiency with herbs that could indicate an interest in the medical arts practiced by the Wise Ones. Judging by Lea's expression when she told that story, the thought had already occurred to her as well.
Lea had also laughed when I had noted how humble the structure seemed, considering that a man who led thousands of dancers from both the Nine Valleys Sept and from the broader Taardad Aiel lived within.
"You only say that because you haven't seen the inside," she'd smirked, eyes dancing with glee. "I cannot wait, Taric, to ask you just how humble my sister-mother's roof is once she grants you permission to set foot within, and to ask you which of my father's tapestries is your favorite!"
As I approached the dwelling and the small figure squatting outside its door, I strained to read the title of the book in her hands. The light was waning as the sun dipped low over the distant Dragonwall and the printed letters were almost indistinct at this distance, but I thought I could make out most of it.
"Men of Fire and Women of Air," I said aloud as I approached Lea. "Already, your careful instruction has borne fruit. Lea, I see you."
"I see you as well, Taric," my friend said, briefly looking up from the book as I squatted down next to her to favor me with a quick flash of a smile. "I also see that even the most iron-headed of students can learn, given proper instruction."
"Truly," I agreed, "an expert teacher can accomplish the impossible."
Her snort of disdain was disrespectful and childish, but the way Lea wrinkled her nose when she glared up at me made it difficult for me to begrudge her.
"What is your book about?" I asked, craning to look over her shoulder. "Is that one of the volumes you selected for your own, or will I have a chance to find it in circulation elsewhere among the sept?"
"Ah." My heart sank as Lea's face fell. "Taric… Shall we go for a walk? I would like to watch the sunset, and if you have nothing better to do than disturb my reading…"
"Certainly," I agreed, rising back to my feet as Lea tucked the book under her arm. "We will have to be quick, though; the dragon has almost devoured it whole."
The conversation meandered between Lea and I as we strolled up the steep path leading from the uppermost terrace of the hold to the flat expanse atop the mesa's wall, deserted at this late hour save for us. We exchanged trivialities and small jokes as we walked side by side. Every few steps, her arm would brush against my own, and with it, the corner of the book tucked safely away, bringing the mysterious volume back to the center of my mind's eye again and again.
Lea's caginess about the thing was unusual; she was usually more than willing to share whatever was on her mind.
Still, I trusted that she would not keep me waiting for long.
As we stared out to the west, the Threefold Land below us washed in shades of darkening ochre and spreading patches of shadow, I began to feel a chill between us that had nothing to do with the wind.
"I met Aviendha today," I halfway blurted, immediately vomiting the first topic that came to mind out into the inches-wide void between us. Fortunately, I was able to bite down on the second topic that came to mind, specifically the humorous misunderstanding that had in part brought Aviendha to my shop.
Lea did not seem in the mood for such jokes.
"Did you?" Lea asked, her tongue lemon-tart with acid under sweetness. "And what does the Smith of Smoke-Caught Steel have to say about my second-sister, known to all as the pride of the Nine Valleys Sept?"
"That she is a Maiden to the soles of her feet and the crown of her skull," I replied, taking care to speak as plainly as I could without stepping on the jealousy I knew Lea harbored for her cousin. "She is married as firmly to her spears as your mother is to Rhuarc of the Taardad Aiel.
"Also, she clearly holds you in high esteem. When she spoke about you, she was happy." I waited a moment, then added, "She hopes to assist you when it comes time for you to weave a wreath."
For a moment, Lea remained stiff, arms stick-straight at her sides.
Then, like a deflating bladder, she slumped where she stood, her shoulders and head falling.
"I owe her toh," Lea sighed, and leaned gratefully into the hand I rested on her shoulder. "I should not resent her so. She has done nothing to earn it."
"She has an arrow-straight path before her, one that clearly brings her joy," I mildly observed, returning Lea's words on her second-sister back to her. "It is frustrating to see someone so close to you in age and circumstances so certain and happy."
"What a wise man you are, to see so keenly!" Lea remarked with feigned astonishment, a bit of her teasing fire returning. "I'm surprised you can see so keenly, considering how many hours you spend every day staring into flames."
I hummed, and, after quickly glancing around the mesa-top and seeing nobody else in evidence, slipped an arm across Lea's shoulder and pulled her into my side. Small displays of affection in public were grudgingly tolerated between spouses but were heavily frowned upon between those unbound by kinship or by marriage.
But as we are alone, I reasoned, we are no longer in public, and thus I commit no dishonor. Besides, Lea needs this.
"She has earned her honor," Lea mumbled, and if her voice sounded just a bit wet, I chose not to notice it. "That is without question. I do not begrudge her accomplishments or her victories. It is just so… frustrating how nobody ever questioned her decisions, her choice of path. Nobody ever pushed Aviendha towards any path she detested and bludgeoned her with duty when she balked."
Everything that Lea wants, given to her second-sister. Her envy is fully understandable, but that is still not a good reason to begrudge another's satisfaction.
"She does her duty as she understands it and consequently earns much ji," I said aloud, tightening my arm around Lea. "But, I do not believe that your second-sister has reflected on her duty to any significant depth. Tomorrow, she will leave again, or so I am told, at the head of a party of Maidens blooded and otherwise, bound for the lands of the Shaido."
"Raiding other clans is an honorable tradition," Lea said, the flatness of her voice speaking volumes. "Especially," and now a trace of sincerity emerged, "the thieves and wastrels to the north."
The antipathy between the Shaido and virtually everybody else was virulent and deeply held. The specific incitements that had given rise to the network of grudges and feuds between the Shaido and every other clan were lost to time, but their flagrant disregard for ji'e'toh endeared them to nobody else, and nor did their habit of giving shade and water to criminals outcast or fleeing from other clans.
Worst of all, as one of the northernmost clans, any Shadowspawn intent on raiding down into the lands of the Taardad, Shaarad, or Miagoma had to first pass through the land controlled by the Shaido. Each raid was only possible due to laziness or laxity on the part of Shaido spears.
"I shed no tears for the Shaido," I replied shortly. "Raiding them will indeed bring the Maidens soon to venture out at Aviendha's back their eagerly awaited ji. But… Ji does not solely stem from the commission of action, but from the consideration. The mind, not only the hand, that wields the spear. Risking the clan's strength in exchange for a few goats, a handful of gai'shain… Is that a worthy gamble?"
"Perhaps it is," Lea mused. "We are sworn to clan, to sept, and to one another, but our lives are ultimately our own. If Maidens or spears care to dance, and perhaps even dance with Sightblinder, in the pursuit of ji, is that not their decision?"
"It is," I sighed, running my free hand through my hair. It was really getting cold, with only the last lingering tails of sunlight remaining in the sky. "Yet, if lives must be risked, why for such petty stakes? Why not for a more worthy target, something that would truly bring honor to the warrior while advancing the clan's interests?"
"We aren't feuding with anybody," Lea reminded me, "so what would you have in mind, Taric? Would you have the Taardad embark upon a new feud to sharpen our skills and expand our territory?"
Her sly tone made it clear that this was not a serious proposition, thankfully.
Then, she asked, "Taric… you cannot take up a spear. You will not venture forth with Aviendha's Maidens. You… You are of course of Nine Valleys Sept now, and of Cold Rocks Hold, but you were not so just a year ago. Why do you care so much for the honor of these Maidens?"
How firmly she says that I am of her people now! I smiled at the incredible hospitality and welcome Lea had given me. Cold Rocks Hold felt more like home every day.
But thinking of a home here within the mesa's sheltering walls took the smile from my face.
"My forge-brother's wife, Neiralla, whose roof I dwell below, once had three children," I said, staring out at the place where the sun had been. "Now, she has one, named Neisha… A Maiden of the Spear, newly initiated to Far Dareis Mai and eager to embark upon her first raid. She is… so young, Lea, and so determined to prove herself, to prove herself worthy to herself and to her spear and to her spear-sisters. When she leaves tomorrow, she will leave Neiralla sitting alone by her cook-fire with only a half-replacement for her husband to keep her company.
"I worry what will happen to Neiralla, should the last of her children wake from the Dream."
"Your concern speaks volumes about you, Taric," Lea said, voice soft, the acid gone from her citrusy voice and only sweetness left behind. "But that is the way of things, is it not? We all wake from the Dream eventually, with only the memories we left in the minds of others and the stories we left on their lips to note our passing. What better way to wake, than in the Dance? Certainly better than the way Neisha's father found his own awakening."
"Aye," I conceded, "Though there are many things I would risk my life for."
Indeed, I had risked my life for many things before, most prominently the Empire, the comrades who had fought beside me, and my own advancement.
"But…" I struggled for a moment, groping for the words, "Is there honor in risking one's life for a few stolen goats? We are not starving; rustling goats is not our thin shield against starvation. We have plenty of hands to tend to the gardens, herds, and mines; we are not short of labor. I know that the raids serve a purpose, Lea – your mother and my ancestor speak often enough about the necessity of whetting ourselves against the Last Day – but surely fighting for a few herds will not aid anybody against Leafblighter! Not unless he fields an army of Aiel all his own for us to fight as we always have, spear to spear!
"If skills must be sharpened against the day when the Shadow threatens to swallow all else, why bother starting a war when there is a struggle that never ends just to the north of us? Moreover," and now I was smiling, an idea rising within me even as I drew it with words for Lea's ears, "what truly brings ji to a Maiden of the Spear or a Spear Dancer? Killing a foe… or saving a friend?"
"Saving a friend," Lea promptly replied, absolute certainty ringing in her voice, an Aiel to the bone no matter her struggles with her duty and her track. "Above even taking an enemy gai'shain, there is no higher honor than to defend others and guarantee their peace in the shade of your shadow."
"Absolutely," I nodded fervently, "and what is the greatest crime of the Shaido?"
"Their inability or refusal to put an end to Trolloc raiding parties, jeopardizing their honor as they jeopardize any unfortunate enough to dance alone and by surprise against a warband."
"Then," I asked, "what greater honor could the Taardad find, and what greater slap could we inflict upon the Shaido, than for our dancers to venture into their lands and put the Shaido to shame? And, how better to prepare a war against the Shadow than to face the beasts of the Shadow in the flesh and to dance the spears with them?
"After all, shouldn't you train for the war you intend to fight? Should we not fight, above all else, to save the light in the eyes of our kin and our clan, rather than to fight simply for the sake of fighting?"
"I… never thought about it quite like that," Lea breathed, pushing herself off me just enough to look up, eyes glittering with stars. "Yes, I… I see your point. But, what of Neisha? You worry for her, but are you not arguing that she should be sent into greater danger?"
"If she is to fight a war, and if she chooses to fight a war, so be it," I said firmly, my own turmoil firming into certainty. "As you say, that is her decision. But, the target of that war is her leader's decision. A leader who chooses a war with its roots in the preservation of our people will surely find greater ji than a leader who fights in the name of the Fifth."
The Fifth being the booty seized from a captured hold. Under ji'e'toh, no more than a fifth of the movable wealth could be pillaged by an attacking clan.
"You speak wisely, Taric," Lea said, frowning, "but you are not the leader of a warrior society or a Wise One. Who will listen, should you speak?"
That was a good question, and one I could not answer. As I tried to find an answer, Lea continued speaking aloud to herself.
"But, the message is important, not the messenger. So… We need a spear who is respected, and who would be amiable to hear what you have said…"
The frown eroded into an expression of stone hard determination. Moving with deliberate actions, Lea stepped away from me, breaking contact.
"Taric of the Chareen Aiel, I have heard you speak. I shall carry your words with me."
And with that, she was gone in a swirl of skirts, leaving me to pick my way back down the mesa trail in the dark, on my lonesome.
It was only when I passed by Lian's roof that I realized that Lea had never answered my questions about her book.
Early the next morning, Aviendha left Cold Rocks Hold at the head of a trotting band of thirty of her spear-sisters, Neisha among them. Word rippled through the social networks of the Hold and by mid-afternoon, arrived at my forge.
Aviendha would lead her band north, but no longer against the Shaido. Before the Roof of the Maidens, I was told, she had sworn not to set foot in Cold Rocks Hold again until a Shadowspawn scalp dangled from the belt of every Maiden in her raiding party. She had sworn to return only with a set of Trolloc horns in her sack, to be mounted on the wall of her mother's roof as testament to her daughter's dance with the Shadow.
21 Amadine, 997 NE
It was supposed to be a spearhead like any other. A straightforward if lengthy task that I understood completely, thanks to Salin's instruction and my own mounting experience.
"Met my lass from Cold Rocks Hold," I sang out as I tempered the steel, smiling as I sang out the lyrics of the ever so slightly modified song Salin had taught me as a mechanism for keeping time while forging a spear.
An unorthodox version, true, I thought, but the meter remains the same, and that's the important part. So…
"Eyes she had, all green and light," I sang, abandoning the rhyming scheme without second thought as I plunged the spearhead back into the forge, "But all I want is water!"
"…iiisssss waterrrr….."
I froze in an instant, hands still on my tongs.
I had never noticed an echo in my inherited smithy before. There shouldn't be any echo here, not from the bricks or from the carved stone of the hillside – the surfaces had been roughened deliberately to prevent sounds like hammers slamming onto anvils from reaching deafening levels.
So, no echoes. Supposedly.
Did I only imagine that? I wondered, but turned on my heel to see if a visitor had somehow slipped into my forge without me noticing, but there was nobody behind me.
I stood alone in my forge, and suddenly felt very alone in what had hitherto been a very intimate setting, hemmed in by racks of tools and materials all arranged to my specification.
In this place, more than any other, I was in control. This was my place.
"…iiisssss waterrrr….."
Slowly, I turned on my heel to stare into the smoldering coals. That could not have been some unlikely echo, nor had I only imagined that hissing voice between my ears.
After all of these years… Somehow, my thoughts sounded hushed in the privacy of my own mind, tentative and hesitant. Even considering the possibility… Is it you, Being X? Come back again to spew your madness once more?
That wasn't it. The thing that claimed omnipotence and dealt in lies had never been anything less than blatant in announcing its presence.
So, if not Being X… What then?
Focusing back on the waking world, I realized I had been staring at the spearhead in progress, where it sat among the coals. It was exactly where I had left it to soften in the heat, innocuous atop the cheerful orange incandescence of the coals. Except… it was wrong. Wrong somehow in a way I couldn't immediately pin down.
"Met my lassss from Cold Rocksss Hold…"
I had been wrong to call it a voice; it was not a voice, no more than the rattle of a beetle's wings was a voice, but yet the sing-song words were as clear and distinct as if they had come from my own mouth, if with a bit more sibilance than was strictly necessary. But those were words, and that lilt in their enunciation was an obvious if indecipherable mockery of my time-keeping song.
"What is this?" I murmured, my wondering thoughts escaping my lips as I stared at the spearhead, entranced. What was wrong with it? The answer seemed to hover just past the point of recognition, almost within reach…
"All I want… iiisssss waterrrr….."
Staggering suddenly, fever-heat licked my skull as I realized just what I was seeing, what I had been staring at blankly perhaps for minutes but refusing to process: The spearhead, like every spearhead I forged, was an amalgamation of two types of steel, with soft carbon-rich steel concentrated towards the interior, ideal for absorbing the shock of the blade entering flesh and hammering bone, and a rigidly hard steel towards the exterior, perfect for holding a killing edge. Where the two met and mingled, the smokey patterns that had given rise to my forge name swirled.
Not the full long-soaked crucible treatment that I had used to prepare the ingots for my hammer and my first spear, but the second best option, and one much less lengthy in duration.
I had forged many spearheads by now, taking steel and wood and giving form to spears, and always as the spearheads had heated in the blaze, their thinner exteriors would glow first, before the heat seeped into the steel's heart and turned the entire ingot into solidified fire.
This spearhead glowed from within. The steels I had mixed, high carbon and low, had darkened to a black nearly that of pig iron, dimmed in contrast to the sullen orange pinprick that seared out from the heart of the half-finished piece, glowing like an old and decaying star from the shadowy clouds of the inexplicably dark iron.
"Ssssing… Don't you know your kind ssssang onccceee…? There isss power in the sssong…"
Below sweat-slicked skin, something within me twitched, jerked, and then violently spasmed under that implacable and heavy-lidded gaze from that impossible, disdainful eye.
Bile flooded my mouth as my stomach heaved, nausea overtaking me. Below, the forge's floor bent crazily away from me as I heaved forwards, bending at the waist as every muscle in my belly clenched under an unseen impact. Something was bludgeoning me, smashing into me like the bludgeoning head of an enraged ram.
Filth, scum of the purest kind, iridescent like chemical rainbows over puddles black with engine oil and ash, spread over me, spread within me. Filling my pores, filling my mouth, filling the private place behind my eyes that was me, I screamed at the violation, but my mouth was so full of filth and wet-clenched teeth that I couldn't hear myself over the SINGING!
Gasping for breath, I staggered out of the smithy, cadin'sor sooty and soaked with a sweat that was halfway mucus, jelly-thick and opalescent as it slowly ran down my forearms. Behind me, the curtain door fluttered and twitched, half-torn from its hooks. I couldn't even remember touching it, much less almost ripping it off the smithy wall, such had been my rapidly receding panic.
And… and it was all rapidly receding, the entirety of the experience flying away from the present in the comparatively cool relief of the Threefold Land at the height of the day. Already I was feeling… well, not better, per say, but perhaps more controlled. More myself.
For, as the filth receded, a force as familiar as breathing and as impossible to imagine in this third world as a clockwork masterpiece set around a cut jewel flowed into me and over me, pounding down upon my head like a waterfall.
Without question, without doubt… For the first time in almost exactly seventeen years, I was holding magic in my cupped, filthy hands.
And oh, what magic it was!
The mana that had come from within my second body had been nebulous as gas, free-floating on gossamer strands that required precise channeling through the marvelous cores of the computation orbs to compress into spells. Only on a handful of occasions had I felt the need to cast unassisted spells, and these were always crude things, simple and only made functional by dint of great effort and focus.
By contrast, this new power that engulfed me was almost like the Type-95 in its sheer presence and magnitude, but without any of the disassociation the cursed orb had carried in its tainted gears. To the contrary, I had rarely felt more aware of my every movement, how every hair on every inch of my body brushed against my clothes, my boots, the morning breeze thrilling me with chills, a welcome relief as Sunday, midsummer, approached.
Utterly uninhibited, I could do nothing but throw my head back and laugh. Magic! This was magic! Frothing, curling, boiling magic battered at me, but it was nothing, nothing at all, to pull tight its leash.
Magic! After years without even the slightest drop of mana, I had forgotten the sensation completely, and like a dehydrated castaway offered water at last, I drank greedily from the sudden flow. Distantly, I could perceive something far away, something like a membrane, or perhaps the curve of some vast muscular wall, and I knew that it was my maximum capacity.
Or at least, it was my maximum capacity for now. Any muscle could be worked and developed and stretched. Why not my magical bladder?
Chortling at that image, I stepped back into the forge. Now, now that I knew what I was looking for, now that the first inexplicable smear of pollutants had ceased to be an issue, I could see clearly when I gazed down at the half-finished spearhead in the coals.
Not only coals surrounded the spearhead; a bundle of strands glowing like heated wires dove in and out of the surface of the steel like dolphins and wrapped tightly around the weapon in progress like a coiled spring, and somehow I knew these to be Earth and Fire respectively. My experience with experimental magic and basic spell design came in handy for the first time in a decade and a half, as I could tell it was an incomplete spell; there were holes in it at regular intervals, and those holes spoke of Air.
The ancients all thought smiths were magical, and that they hid their magic within their songs and their steel.
So thinking, I opened my mouth and sang an experimental bar. "But all I want is water!"
Nothing.
Of course not, you fool, I scolded myself, pushing past the elation that I could do magic again to turn a critical eye on the project. How can you shape a spell without holding mana?
That wasn't quite the right way to put it. I'd been holding mana, or whatever this other thing was that fueled my magic, but in the way a miser holds a coin. Tightly, to be precise.
I needed to push what I had taken in back out into the world.
As the thought crossed my mind, the magic turned in my hand and tried to bite me, to crush me, to pull me under the thundering tide and drown me.
Almost carelessly, I gave the magic the equivalent of a light slap. A warning, that I was the one in control here, and not it. Here in this forge, I was the master.
This was my place.
"Rum is not my only choice," and when I sang, my words came out in ribbons of ice and light and in a wind that was every breeze that had ever blown, "Lea is my finest vice, yet still I must have water!"
The spearhead warped, the spearhead screamed, and the spearhead became itself as the hammer raced the ribbons to the anvil, slamming into steel as the ribbons found their home in the divots between Fire and Earth.
And then, in a welter of activity and sweat and song, it was done. Black as coal and sharp as treachery, it sat upon my anvil, an offering to my own prideful skill. And yet, it was truly steel, no anthracite this! At the bladed edges and the beveled peak, wherever hard planes met one another and sloped together, skeins of smokey gray billowed, the last kiss of Air entombed in the bones of Earth and fused by the passion of Fire and the embrace of cooling Water.
And yet, I thought dizzily, Spirit runs through all things.
Focus ebbed away from my finished project and something that had been prodding at the back of my mind finally elbowed its way to the forefront of my attention.
There are no men who can channel among our people, for they are dead men walking. Any man who can channel is dead to the world and to the Aiel and is sent into the Blight to dance with Sightblinder.
I had learned as much years ago while sitting at Sorilea's feet, carding cotton with the other children of Shende Hold.
My laughter died. The elation, like a fever, broke.
I had magic. I positively sloshed with magic.
I was a dead man walking.
The spearhead, so smug upon its iron bed, gazed up at me and laughed.
18 Amadine, 997 NE
Cold Rocks Hold, Taardad Aiel, Aiel Waste
The smithy was steady, firm, stolid. Reliable.
Safe.
…I certainly was not hiding within its four walls from the rest of Cold Rocks Hold.
In retrospect, I had acted foolishly. Carried away by the moment, I had thought only of a private fear shared, a dream confided, and of an opportunity to avenge a slight against another.
When I had made my rash offer, I had not stopped to consider the ramifications of my trade with Admira Mulares.
My shortsightedness had become apparent almost immediately, when a flood of Maidens issued forth from the crevice corridor into the Hold and descended upon the wagons like a swarm of wasps, transforming the Tairen couple's joy into terror in an instant.
When I had dispatched the Maiden to fetch Lea and some additional arms, I had expected to see five or six Maidens trotting back, ready to help. Instead, it had seemed that my messenger had run straight to her Society's Roof in Cold Rocks Hold and called every spear-sister therein to come help.
And help they had, pouring over the wagons in search of all books, any books, that could be secreted within the cargo boxes or even the sturdy frames themselves. Each bound volume had been eagerly carried away by a laughing Maiden, who had been immediately replaced in the search by an equally joyous spear-sister.
They had even tried to take the peddler's register. Recognizing the merchant's distress, I had stepped in at that point. The Maiden who had retrieved it from the Mulares's strongbox pointed out, a tad bit sullenly, that it was a book and had been on a wagon, and thus it was part of the bounty I had purchased. Opening it up, I had pointed out that it contained only numbers, useless for information about the Wetlands, and further contextualized it as a vital tool of the merchant's trade, akin to my hammer or her spear. That had been enough to prompt the accounting book's return to the Tairan peddler's grateful hands.
While the over-enthusiastic response from the Maidens had been my first sign that I had miscalculated the attention my intended gift would receive. The second had been the arrival of Lea, a bobbing head of bright hair amid a sea of shoufa-clad Maidens.
Carefully slipping through the dense ring of Maidens crowding the open space amid the wagons, at least a hundred of whom had one or more freshly acquired volume pressed to their chests, Lea had strode up to me. We had stood in the center of the crowd then, alone in the eye save for a gray-faced Admira Mulares, his wife having retreated with their teamsters.
"I see you, Taric of the Chareen Aiel," Lea had greeted, halting two armlengths away to address me. Her voice had been as guardedly cool as it always was, when we spoke in public, outside the privacy of my forge or the solitude of a far corner of the mesa's table. "You have called me, and I have come."
I had not glanced to the left or to the right, knowing that I would see nothing but eagerly grinning Maidens, staring at us with rapt attention and undisguised amusement.
I am sorry, I had tried to apologize to Lea with only my eyes. I had not meant to make this a spectacle.
"I see you, Lea of the Taardad Aiel," I had replied, and, taking a deep breath, had rolled my shoulders back. Just as if I was limbering up for a project at my forge. "Lea, while all smiths are bound as brothers, and while Neiralla offered me the shade of her roof and the refreshment of her water, it was you who made me certain that I had found a home among the Taardad, far from the roof of my mother and the hold of my father.
"For such a gift, no repayment is possible."
"You give me great ji," Lea had breathed, there between the wagons, amid a Roof's-worth of Far Dareis Mai, her dancing eyes wide, the nest of crinkled furrows atop her nose softening with glad astonishment. "It was no great obligation I discharged, Taric, or at least no greater of an obligation than what any host owes to any guest."
I had not disagreed with her then, for she was entirely correct, though her statement was not without flaw. Only Lea could truly judge her own honor, but I had known full well where the boundaries of simple hospitality were, and just how far they extended.
What we have shared goes far, far beyond that.
"For such a gift," I had repeated, "no repayment is possible."
For a beat, I had held the pause, savoring the mounting anticipation of the moment. Of the hundreds of Maidens present, none had stirred to break the silence. Nor had Lea.
"However," I had continued, allowing a smile containing a piece of my enjoyment of the moment to slip free, "I aim to attempt that impossibility."
Spears had clattered against bucklers like winter's hail as Maidens half-mockingly applauded my understated boast. The applause had been only half-mocking because I had, by purchasing an entire library's worth of books in a single exchange, arguably already fulfilled my brave statement. Many Aiel would consider a trove of books all their own to be more than a sufficient gift to buy any favor.
The opinions of any Aiel do not matter to me in this moment, for Lea has already proven herself willing to stand against our society, should her honor demand it.
For the first time that day, my palms had prickled with nervous sweat.
"The moment you truly made Cold Rocks Hold a home for me was the moment you shared yourself with me," I had stated, speaking louder now to cut over the clamor of the Maidens, although I had noted in the press of the moment several of the oldest spear-sisters flashing discrete handsigns, presumably ordering their juniors to hold themselves in check. Lea's eyes had widened so much that I could see white all around them. "In that moment, you spoke of a path forwards; not the path of a shuttle across a loom nor the path of a seep towards the dip of the land, but a path like a bird on the wing, soaring free but returning always to the nest.
"I cannot give you wings, but I can give you information. All of this," I had beckoned at the inner ring of Maidens and the numerous volumes they bore, "is yours. Rope and chalk to blaze a path you would walk, guided by your own honor and the spear you carry not in your hand, but in your head."
And now the crux, I had thought, and pushed the urge to gulp away.
"Please accept my gift."
Silence had hung in the air, and this time, it was free of the grinning and carefree amusement of the audience. Not a single exhalation had disturbed the air, save the mournful breeze flowing over the red-rock walls. Even Admira Mulares had remained silent, his fidgeting brought to an end at last.
My eyes had been fixed on Lea only when she said, "I cannot accept your gift."
No!
"Not," she had continued, raising a hand that was quelling, halting, and drawing all in one, "because I reject your gift, or because I reject you, Taric.
"Quite the opposite."
Beckoning wide, just as I had, Lea had swept her arm out in a broad arc encompassing the book-ladden dancers and, to my distant discomfort, the ransacked wagons.
"Earlier, I said that you give me too much ji. I shall say it again, Taric of Smoke-Caught Steel: you give me too much honor." Suddenly, Lea had glared up at me, eyes fierce through budding tears. "Honor demands honor, Taric, and what could I possibly offer you to balance out the honor you have offered me? I have no great skill to deliver such windfalls as you have brought us, and I spoke true when I said that I acted first out of obligation, though I will not say that I have remained solely within the obligations of a host.
"Would you have me be always beholden to you, oh great smith of words and spears?"
"No." The word had torn its anguishing way out of me to emerge hoarse and guttural. I had felt raw and bloodied by its passage and horrified by the misstep I had so nearly taken, corrected only at the last moment by Lea's own keen eyes. "No, I would have you stand beside me and speak to me without deference, acting as you choose for the honor your own choices bring you, an honor that is yours only, just as your choices should stem only from yourself. I ask nothing of you, save the continued shade of your presence.
"I would never forge a chain of ji to bind you by your honor."
Please, believe me.
"I know," Lea had replied, and the simplicity of her words had been rich with reassurance.
My heart had slowed in its frantic tempo.
"You said once that, in your eyes, I carried the honor of my sept on my neck," Lea had said, almost murmured, her voice thoughtful and musing. "Do you recall that, Taric?"
"I do," I had acknowledged, remembering how she had been so confused in that moment about whether to be insulted or pleased. "And that a certain chief's daughter holds ji in the eyes of all whose tongues carry her name."
"Then let that be our way forward."
I had blinked, and then, confused, had tilted my head to the side.
Lea's lips had quirked upwards for a moment, before smoothing back out.
"You have offered a gift to me that I cannot accept, but I cannot deny my… appreciation, for the thought that gift conveyed," Lea had explained, thankfully taking mercy upon me. "Very well then. What if the gift is offered, save for a few selections, to the daughter of the Chief of the Nine Valleys Sept and to the daughter of the Chief of the Taardad Aiel… But the thoughts will remain solely with Lea, daughter of Rhuarc and Amys the Wise One?
"Would that satisfy you, Taric, son of Leiran and Ayesha?"
It had taken me a moment to understand Lea's sly threading of the needle, disoriented by the emotional whiplash of her seeming rejection followed by an immediate qualified recanting, but when realization dawned on me, it had been all I could do to maintain my composure.
How clever! I had marveled then and marveled still, breath taken away by the sudden realization of what Lea had in mind. There has likely never been a single Aiel with personal ownership over an entire trove of books, and who knows what sort of disorder such a development could inspire? Aiel of course enjoy personal property, but hoarding an excess is dishonorable, especially when the knowledge contained in those books could benefit the whole clan. Likely, Lea would have been pressured into sharing the books eventually, but preempting that pressure and turning the gift into one for the entire sept…
It is a gesture that will inevitably bring us both much ji.
"It would," I had said, and it took all of my power to hold myself together as I had returned to the shelter of my forge, the day's work more than done in my eyes. Only after I closed the curtain door to the smithy, guaranteeing privacy in all but the most dire of circumstances, had I allowed myself to slump against the wall and laugh, delighted by the cunning Lea had displayed.
Aiel lived and died not alone, but as members of a complex weave of kinship ties, bound by blood, by Society, by clan, and by solemnly sworn choice. The honor gained by one was honor shared by all who called that one their kin. In gaining ji, all were honored, including the entirety of the sept. None were excluded. Such was the communal way of the Aiel, but in this case the path to that soothing shade had only been found by Lea.
"How can you separate a person from who they are?" She had asked me that question once, when I had asked who she was besides her parents' daughter.
Consider that question answered, Lea. Consider that question answered.
All of that had come and gone three tendays ago; three long and unexpectedly troublesome tendays ago.
And now, I was certainly not hiding from an unasked-for popularity among my unattached peers of both genders. No, I was only retreating to the demands of duty, placing the requirements of my role as smith paramount over the distractions of gossip and requests, discreet or otherwise, for advice or consideration.
…The request for privacy implicit in the curtain door had warded away most of the former, thankfully. Lea, meanwhile, had seen to the latter.
I will have to find some way to thank her for her efforts, I thought absently as I returned a half-shaped spearhead to the coals. Whatever she said to them certainly cut down on the number of frivolous work requests submitted during my Hold-dedicated hours.
I very carefully did not think about how much like both Lian and Amys Lea had looked as she verbally scourged a half dozen young women, including a shame-faced Maiden, for wasting my time and cluttering up my smithy with their presence. That last of whom I had spotted a day later, nearly collapsing as she completed her three-hundredth lap around the Hold's perimeter.
Apparently, a senior Maiden had been very displeased by her conduct and had seen fit to assign her additional endurance training to rectify the amount of time she had on her hands.
Good.
Unfortunately, not even Lea's approbation could keep my forge clear of Maidens for long, it seemed.
"I see you, Taric of the Chareen Aiel," the Maiden standing on my threshold announced, restless blue-green eyes sweeping the smithy's corners before locking on mine. "I am Aviendha of the Taardad Aiel; I ask permission to come below the roof of your workshop."
"I see you, Maiden of the Taardad," I replied to the stranger, Aviendha, identifying her as a native of Cold Rocks Hold by the patterns of her cadin'sor.
She must have been out on patrol, I thought, or perhaps out on a raid. Surely I would have seen her before now, if she had been living under the Maidens' Roof here.
"By the honor of your society and your sept," I continued, finishing the ritual greeting appropriate for our circumstance, "I welcome you under my roof. What service can I offer you today?"
"I have newly returned from running with my spear-sisters," Aviendha explained as she stepped into my smithy, confirming my guess, "and soon I shall be leaving once more. I wanted my spears, my buckler, and my knives seen to before I left."
"And Garlvan is still quite busy," I concluded as I accepted each of Aviendha's weapons in turn, laying each out atop a cloth-covered workbench as I tried to remember where I had heard the Maiden's name before.
Somehow, although Aviendha's face was unknown to me, her name rang with vague familiarity.
"He is," Aviendha agreed as she parted with her belt-knife, apparently the last piece of metalwork about her person, "but I also desired to meet you, particularly after my sisters and my sister-mother praised the quality of your work, as well as," she added with a smirk, "your gifts."
Of course, I sighed internally at the mischievous glint in the dancer's eyes. Of course she knows! Her sisters probably couldn't wait to tell her just as soon as she set foot back under the Cold Rocks Roof.
And her aunt too, eh? I considered that for a moment. I wonder if her aunt was the Maiden who took it upon herself to turn a simple gift into a spectacle? Her cheekbones look a bit familiar, now that I think about it…
"I am pleased to hear that Far Dareis Mai continues to hold me in such high regard," I blithely replied as I began my inspection of Aviendha's spears, carefully checking the joining pins for any signs of loosening or wear. "I am sure that, no matter what you have heard, the truth was less impressive."
"Stories often grow in the telling," Aviendha agreed as she leaned back, arms folded and a smugly feline smile on her face, against the brick wall of the smithy. "But, Taric of Shende Hold, in my experience my sister-mother rarely embroiders her recollections. Besides," and the amused grin expanded by a small but dangerous degree, "only rarely is Lian so impressed by any man as she seems by you."
"Ah," I replied, suddenly cogent of where I had heard Aviendha's name before. Pulling myself away from the inspection of an already immaculately-maintained spearhead, her story about wanting her weapons inspected was clearly just a justification for this meeting, I straightened my back and met the Maiden's gaze directly.
There was amusement there, bit below that thin veneer lurked cool assessment.
So, that's how it is.
I had indeed heard Aviendha's name before; it had come up in a conversation with Lea about her family. As Lian was sister-wife to Amys, Lea's mother, and thus effectively her sister in all but blood according to the complex web of Aiel kinship ties, that meant that Aviendha was second-sister to Lea, the daughter of her mother's sister. Or, in this case, the daughter of her mother's sister's sister. Something like a cousin-in-law in terms of placement on a family tree, but with far more significance and closeness implied.
She had, I recalled, always dreamed of taking up the spear and did so at her first opportunity, joining Lea's older sisters, Aviellin and Garna, in their warrior society. Something Lea had always envied, not because she wanted to become a Maiden but because of how effortless the decision had been for her kin, and because of how clearly they relished their role.
"As you have apparently heard tell of me, I have heard tell of you, Aviendha." I matched her evaluating gaze with one of my own, searching for any hint of a threat. I found nothing but a closely guarded resolve, a match for Lea's own watchfulness. "Your second-sister has given your name to me in the company of Aviellin and Garna. Have they returned to the Hold as well?"
Should I be expecting visits from them next?
"They have not," was the terse answer, the previous dry humor ebbing away. "Perhaps they will come, though, when they hear the same story I heard, and learn that Lea has at last acquired a suitor that she was incapable of escaping from or driving off immediately."
So, perhaps more concerned relatives will be dropping by, I noted, trying not to scowl at the interference. Fantastic. And all of them are convinced that I am attempting to court Lea, and no doubt saying as much to her.
That was the true source of my concern. I still wasn't certain of precisely where Lea and I stood with each other, but I knew exactly how she would respond if she thought I was trying to execute my ancestor's order to court her.
"I heard about your courting gift," Aviendha went on, some of her previous humor slipping back into her voice and into her sly smile, although her eyes remained keen. "I am impressed, Taric son of Leiran. It was a very thoughtful gesture. If you continue to treat my second-sister with such attentiveness and respect, it will be an honor to call you my second-brother."
An unspoken "or else" loomed in the subsequent silence.
This is a reasonable course of action for Aviendha to take, based on her understanding of the situation, I told myself, smoothing the wrinkles from my brow and the irritation from my heart. She cares for her relative and is trying to protect her, as a Maiden should protect the people of her roof's hold. She has done me no dishonor.
Moreover, there is no reason to treat her as a threat: Aviendha would no more raise a hand against me than she would a Wise One. It is unfair of me to look at her and see a threat, and I dishonor her by doing so.
I have toh.
And yet, I still needed to find a way to disarm this threat to my friendship with Lea.
"I merely paid honor for honor," I told Aviendha, disregarding her last sentence, "and returned a favor for a favor. The only thing I gave Lea was a grindstone to hone herself with; the decision to offer that grindstone to the rest of the Nine Valleys Sept in truth belongs to her alone."
"My second-sister gained great ji that day," Aviendha agreed, "but you gained a reputation for prowess beyond the anvil, Taric.
"After all," and now the smirking humor was back in full measure, the suspicious light vanished and replaced with a happiness that seemed shockingly genuine on Aviendha's face, "what better gift could a man offer the woman he pursues, than a weapon with which she could confront all the world? You respect her strength and her desire to grow strong in her own way: that much is clear to all with eyes. Honor for honor indeed, Taric, Leiran's son."
"Only a true daughter of Far Dareis Mai could gaze upon a pile of books and see a spear," I said with a rueful shake of my head, accepting the olive branch of Aviendha's light and complimentary teasing and extending my own in recognition.
"Here," I said, speaking over her delighted laugh and thrusting the hafts of her spears back towards her, "take back your equipment. You have seen to it well and it shall doubtless return the favor, wherever next you go to dance."
"I reckon the Shaido won't miss a few goats, or even a few hundred," Aviendha replied, grinning fiercely as she answered the unspoken question. "On the other hand, I suspect even that unlicked clan will notice the absence of the Algai'd'siswai I mean to bring back in white."
Goats and Gai'shain, eh? A warrior's boast indeed.
"May your feet be swift in your dance," I said, wishing her success in her raid. "Try not to trip over your spears."
"May your hands prove deft in your own 'dance,'" Aviendha retorted, smiling as she borrowed her second-sister's sharp tongue. "But not too deft, though, or too quick," she added a moment later. "After all, I wish to be present when my second-sister weaves her bridal wreath, so I might advise her on her arrangement."
Refusing to rise to the bait, I bid Aviendha farewell and returned to my ever-present backlog of outstanding tasks, grateful for solitude's return.
When the sun at last began to dip low in the sky, I returned to Neiralla's roof for supper, another day of gratifying productive work under my belt. Unlike most days, Neiralla and I wouldn't be eating alone.
Three days ago, the dyer's daughter Neisha had returned with the rest of her band of newly inducted Maidens, who had all been set to the necessary but unglamorous task of guarding the flocks of the Nine Valleys Sept as they grazed. Fortunately, by the time I returned from my forge, Neisha had already been briefed by her mother about my circumstances, so most of the excitement had already worked its way out of her system.
After her weariness dissipated after a night of restful sleep back under her mother's roof, I found myself retroactively thankful for the relatively low-key meeting.
It had been the most quiet Neisha had been since her return. As it turned out, the young Maiden was abundantly energetic and remarkably chatty, seeming to never sit still or stop talking for more than a pair of breaths at a time.
Even by her usual standards, Neisha was quite noisy tonight.
She had, after all, secured the permission of her Society's Roofmistress to accompany the band of Maidens preparing to raid the Shaido pastures.
"We will each return with ten goats," the youthful Maiden, just a few months older than me and about Aviendha's age, predicted confidently, barely a whisker away from bragging. "No, fifty! And a Gai'shain apiece to help tend to them all!"
Neiralla smiled at her daughter's enthusiasm, but in the low, dancing light cast by the central cooking fire, her face looked lined and creased with strain, her lips pursed with worry.
It could all just be projection, I knew. It would be far more in keeping with Aiel cultural norms for Neiralla to be proud of her daughter and her eagerness to dance the spears. If Neisha somehow managed to return with white-clad Shaido in tow along with freshly captured livestock, she and her spear-sisters would earn much ji.
And yet, I thought, holding my tongue as I methodically ate a dinner I could barely taste, from oosquai-fueled conversations in the darkness of night, I know that Neiralla still grieves for her twins, both of her sons who woke from the Dream even before their father slipped awake.
What ji did their deaths earn? How were the interests of sept or clan advanced by the two empty spaces by this fire?
"Thank you for dinner," I said when Neisha was forced into silence for a moment by the need to chew. Placing my bowl down, I rose from my position on the floor of Neiralla's house near the fire. "It was as delicious as your food always is, Neiralla."
"And you are kind as always to say as much," Neiralla replied with a smile, speaking just as Neisha opened her mouth to interject. "Will you be visiting Lian's roof again tonight?"
"I will be going for a walk," I said, ignoring how Neisha's eyes first widened in shock, and then narrowed mischievously. "I will return shortly."
"Are you going to go visit Lea, Amys's daughter?" Neisha burst in, her curiosity barely veiled by a pretense of knowing amusement. "This is what, the second night in a row? Do you require a chaperone, hmm?"
"No," I declined, eying the impertinent child. No, not a child: She was wedded to the spear, and thus an adult. And thus could be held to adult standards, including that of Ji'e'toh. "You dishonor Lea with your implication."
Neisha flushed at that, her florid cheeks and ears jarring with her lighter-hued hair.
Her ears, glowing with heat, were particularly noticeable, standing out from the short-cropped hair at the sides of her head. Like her close-cut bangs, the nearly shaved sides were the traditional style worn by virtually all of the Maidens and Spears. Speaking frankly, I had never much liked the rat-tailed appearance of the traditional haircut, but I could understand its use: no need to give an enemy easy handholds, and nobody liked blood matting their hair.
"I have toh." To her credit, Neisha was quick to take responsibility, jerking her head forward to stare down at the rug below her, clearly signaling remorse in her body language. "I spoke too rashly, Taric."
An adult, yes… But not that far from childhood.
"Lift your head," I sighed, allowing my shoulders to ease forwards, tension released, "but guard your tongue more closely, Neisha, Jhoran's daughter. You are a Maiden now, wedded to the spear. You no longer carry dolls."
She nodded, still not looking up. Somehow, her ears looked even redder than they had a moment longer.
And to think that she'll be leaving for her first raid…
Abruptly dispirited, I nodded farewell to Neiralla and left the shade of her roof to venture out into the evening, leaving the quiet dwelling and the three ghosts who should have been lying by the fire next to mother and daughter behind.
Lea was sitting on her haunches outside of her family's dwelling, up near the western rim of the bowl-shaped depression within the mesa that contained the heart of Cold Rocks Hold, when I found her.
Lian's roof was, in my judgment, a very pleasant structure, surprisingly capacious behind its facade of adobe bricks that never failed to remind me of the bones of Shende Hold, buried under coat upon coat of stucco. Gardens grew on the roof and out in the gap between the wall and the path leading past the house, and according to Lea, provided all of the herbs and vegetables used by Lian for cooking and Amys for Wise One's purposes.
Lea had also told me how tending to that garden had been an activity she had shared with her sisters when they were young, all laboring under her mother's watchful gaze.
I hadn't needed to voice my suspicions that Amys had likely used that family chore as an evaluation of her descendents, scanning for any trace of proficiency with herbs that could indicate an interest in the medical arts practiced by the Wise Ones. Judging by Lea's expression when she told that story, the thought had already occurred to her as well.
Lea had also laughed when I had noted how humble the structure seemed, considering that a man who led thousands of dancers from both the Nine Valleys Sept and from the broader Taardad Aiel lived within.
"You only say that because you haven't seen the inside," she'd smirked, eyes dancing with glee. "I cannot wait, Taric, to ask you just how humble my sister-mother's roof is once she grants you permission to set foot within, and to ask you which of my father's tapestries is your favorite!"
As I approached the dwelling and the small figure squatting outside its door, I strained to read the title of the book in her hands. The light was waning as the sun dipped low over the distant Dragonwall and the printed letters were almost indistinct at this distance, but I thought I could make out most of it.
"Men of Fire and Women of Air," I said aloud as I approached Lea. "Already, your careful instruction has borne fruit. Lea, I see you."
"I see you as well, Taric," my friend said, briefly looking up from the book as I squatted down next to her to favor me with a quick flash of a smile. "I also see that even the most iron-headed of students can learn, given proper instruction."
"Truly," I agreed, "an expert teacher can accomplish the impossible."
Her snort of disdain was disrespectful and childish, but the way Lea wrinkled her nose when she glared up at me made it difficult for me to begrudge her.
"What is your book about?" I asked, craning to look over her shoulder. "Is that one of the volumes you selected for your own, or will I have a chance to find it in circulation elsewhere among the sept?"
"Ah." My heart sank as Lea's face fell. "Taric… Shall we go for a walk? I would like to watch the sunset, and if you have nothing better to do than disturb my reading…"
"Certainly," I agreed, rising back to my feet as Lea tucked the book under her arm. "We will have to be quick, though; the dragon has almost devoured it whole."
The conversation meandered between Lea and I as we strolled up the steep path leading from the uppermost terrace of the hold to the flat expanse atop the mesa's wall, deserted at this late hour save for us. We exchanged trivialities and small jokes as we walked side by side. Every few steps, her arm would brush against my own, and with it, the corner of the book tucked safely away, bringing the mysterious volume back to the center of my mind's eye again and again.
Lea's caginess about the thing was unusual; she was usually more than willing to share whatever was on her mind.
Still, I trusted that she would not keep me waiting for long.
As we stared out to the west, the Threefold Land below us washed in shades of darkening ochre and spreading patches of shadow, I began to feel a chill between us that had nothing to do with the wind.
"I met Aviendha today," I halfway blurted, immediately vomiting the first topic that came to mind out into the inches-wide void between us. Fortunately, I was able to bite down on the second topic that came to mind, specifically the humorous misunderstanding that had in part brought Aviendha to my shop.
Lea did not seem in the mood for such jokes.
"Did you?" Lea asked, her tongue lemon-tart with acid under sweetness. "And what does the Smith of Smoke-Caught Steel have to say about my second-sister, known to all as the pride of the Nine Valleys Sept?"
"That she is a Maiden to the soles of her feet and the crown of her skull," I replied, taking care to speak as plainly as I could without stepping on the jealousy I knew Lea harbored for her cousin. "She is married as firmly to her spears as your mother is to Rhuarc of the Taardad Aiel.
"Also, she clearly holds you in high esteem. When she spoke about you, she was happy." I waited a moment, then added, "She hopes to assist you when it comes time for you to weave a wreath."
For a moment, Lea remained stiff, arms stick-straight at her sides.
Then, like a deflating bladder, she slumped where she stood, her shoulders and head falling.
"I owe her toh," Lea sighed, and leaned gratefully into the hand I rested on her shoulder. "I should not resent her so. She has done nothing to earn it."
"She has an arrow-straight path before her, one that clearly brings her joy," I mildly observed, returning Lea's words on her second-sister back to her. "It is frustrating to see someone so close to you in age and circumstances so certain and happy."
"What a wise man you are, to see so keenly!" Lea remarked with feigned astonishment, a bit of her teasing fire returning. "I'm surprised you can see so keenly, considering how many hours you spend every day staring into flames."
I hummed, and, after quickly glancing around the mesa-top and seeing nobody else in evidence, slipped an arm across Lea's shoulder and pulled her into my side. Small displays of affection in public were grudgingly tolerated between spouses but were heavily frowned upon between those unbound by kinship or by marriage.
But as we are alone, I reasoned, we are no longer in public, and thus I commit no dishonor. Besides, Lea needs this.
"She has earned her honor," Lea mumbled, and if her voice sounded just a bit wet, I chose not to notice it. "That is without question. I do not begrudge her accomplishments or her victories. It is just so… frustrating how nobody ever questioned her decisions, her choice of path. Nobody ever pushed Aviendha towards any path she detested and bludgeoned her with duty when she balked."
Everything that Lea wants, given to her second-sister. Her envy is fully understandable, but that is still not a good reason to begrudge another's satisfaction.
"She does her duty as she understands it and consequently earns much ji," I said aloud, tightening my arm around Lea. "But, I do not believe that your second-sister has reflected on her duty to any significant depth. Tomorrow, she will leave again, or so I am told, at the head of a party of Maidens blooded and otherwise, bound for the lands of the Shaido."
"Raiding other clans is an honorable tradition," Lea said, the flatness of her voice speaking volumes. "Especially," and now a trace of sincerity emerged, "the thieves and wastrels to the north."
The antipathy between the Shaido and virtually everybody else was virulent and deeply held. The specific incitements that had given rise to the network of grudges and feuds between the Shaido and every other clan were lost to time, but their flagrant disregard for ji'e'toh endeared them to nobody else, and nor did their habit of giving shade and water to criminals outcast or fleeing from other clans.
Worst of all, as one of the northernmost clans, any Shadowspawn intent on raiding down into the lands of the Taardad, Shaarad, or Miagoma had to first pass through the land controlled by the Shaido. Each raid was only possible due to laziness or laxity on the part of Shaido spears.
"I shed no tears for the Shaido," I replied shortly. "Raiding them will indeed bring the Maidens soon to venture out at Aviendha's back their eagerly awaited ji. But… Ji does not solely stem from the commission of action, but from the consideration. The mind, not only the hand, that wields the spear. Risking the clan's strength in exchange for a few goats, a handful of gai'shain… Is that a worthy gamble?"
"Perhaps it is," Lea mused. "We are sworn to clan, to sept, and to one another, but our lives are ultimately our own. If Maidens or spears care to dance, and perhaps even dance with Sightblinder, in the pursuit of ji, is that not their decision?"
"It is," I sighed, running my free hand through my hair. It was really getting cold, with only the last lingering tails of sunlight remaining in the sky. "Yet, if lives must be risked, why for such petty stakes? Why not for a more worthy target, something that would truly bring honor to the warrior while advancing the clan's interests?"
"We aren't feuding with anybody," Lea reminded me, "so what would you have in mind, Taric? Would you have the Taardad embark upon a new feud to sharpen our skills and expand our territory?"
Her sly tone made it clear that this was not a serious proposition, thankfully.
Then, she asked, "Taric… you cannot take up a spear. You will not venture forth with Aviendha's Maidens. You… You are of course of Nine Valleys Sept now, and of Cold Rocks Hold, but you were not so just a year ago. Why do you care so much for the honor of these Maidens?"
How firmly she says that I am of her people now! I smiled at the incredible hospitality and welcome Lea had given me. Cold Rocks Hold felt more like home every day.
But thinking of a home here within the mesa's sheltering walls took the smile from my face.
"My forge-brother's wife, Neiralla, whose roof I dwell below, once had three children," I said, staring out at the place where the sun had been. "Now, she has one, named Neisha… A Maiden of the Spear, newly initiated to Far Dareis Mai and eager to embark upon her first raid. She is… so young, Lea, and so determined to prove herself, to prove herself worthy to herself and to her spear and to her spear-sisters. When she leaves tomorrow, she will leave Neiralla sitting alone by her cook-fire with only a half-replacement for her husband to keep her company.
"I worry what will happen to Neiralla, should the last of her children wake from the Dream."
"Your concern speaks volumes about you, Taric," Lea said, voice soft, the acid gone from her citrusy voice and only sweetness left behind. "But that is the way of things, is it not? We all wake from the Dream eventually, with only the memories we left in the minds of others and the stories we left on their lips to note our passing. What better way to wake, than in the Dance? Certainly better than the way Neisha's father found his own awakening."
"Aye," I conceded, "Though there are many things I would risk my life for."
Indeed, I had risked my life for many things before, most prominently the Empire, the comrades who had fought beside me, and my own advancement.
"But…" I struggled for a moment, groping for the words, "Is there honor in risking one's life for a few stolen goats? We are not starving; rustling goats is not our thin shield against starvation. We have plenty of hands to tend to the gardens, herds, and mines; we are not short of labor. I know that the raids serve a purpose, Lea – your mother and my ancestor speak often enough about the necessity of whetting ourselves against the Last Day – but surely fighting for a few herds will not aid anybody against Leafblighter! Not unless he fields an army of Aiel all his own for us to fight as we always have, spear to spear!
"If skills must be sharpened against the day when the Shadow threatens to swallow all else, why bother starting a war when there is a struggle that never ends just to the north of us? Moreover," and now I was smiling, an idea rising within me even as I drew it with words for Lea's ears, "what truly brings ji to a Maiden of the Spear or a Spear Dancer? Killing a foe… or saving a friend?"
"Saving a friend," Lea promptly replied, absolute certainty ringing in her voice, an Aiel to the bone no matter her struggles with her duty and her track. "Above even taking an enemy gai'shain, there is no higher honor than to defend others and guarantee their peace in the shade of your shadow."
"Absolutely," I nodded fervently, "and what is the greatest crime of the Shaido?"
"Their inability or refusal to put an end to Trolloc raiding parties, jeopardizing their honor as they jeopardize any unfortunate enough to dance alone and by surprise against a warband."
"Then," I asked, "what greater honor could the Taardad find, and what greater slap could we inflict upon the Shaido, than for our dancers to venture into their lands and put the Shaido to shame? And, how better to prepare a war against the Shadow than to face the beasts of the Shadow in the flesh and to dance the spears with them?
"After all, shouldn't you train for the war you intend to fight? Should we not fight, above all else, to save the light in the eyes of our kin and our clan, rather than to fight simply for the sake of fighting?"
"I… never thought about it quite like that," Lea breathed, pushing herself off me just enough to look up, eyes glittering with stars. "Yes, I… I see your point. But, what of Neisha? You worry for her, but are you not arguing that she should be sent into greater danger?"
"If she is to fight a war, and if she chooses to fight a war, so be it," I said firmly, my own turmoil firming into certainty. "As you say, that is her decision. But, the target of that war is her leader's decision. A leader who chooses a war with its roots in the preservation of our people will surely find greater ji than a leader who fights in the name of the Fifth."
The Fifth being the booty seized from a captured hold. Under ji'e'toh, no more than a fifth of the movable wealth could be pillaged by an attacking clan.
"You speak wisely, Taric," Lea said, frowning, "but you are not the leader of a warrior society or a Wise One. Who will listen, should you speak?"
That was a good question, and one I could not answer. As I tried to find an answer, Lea continued speaking aloud to herself.
"But, the message is important, not the messenger. So… We need a spear who is respected, and who would be amiable to hear what you have said…"
The frown eroded into an expression of stone hard determination. Moving with deliberate actions, Lea stepped away from me, breaking contact.
"Taric of the Chareen Aiel, I have heard you speak. I shall carry your words with me."
And with that, she was gone in a swirl of skirts, leaving me to pick my way back down the mesa trail in the dark, on my lonesome.
It was only when I passed by Lian's roof that I realized that Lea had never answered my questions about her book.
Early the next morning, Aviendha left Cold Rocks Hold at the head of a trotting band of thirty of her spear-sisters, Neisha among them. Word rippled through the social networks of the Hold and by mid-afternoon, arrived at my forge.
Aviendha would lead her band north, but no longer against the Shaido. Before the Roof of the Maidens, I was told, she had sworn not to set foot in Cold Rocks Hold again until a Shadowspawn scalp dangled from the belt of every Maiden in her raiding party. She had sworn to return only with a set of Trolloc horns in her sack, to be mounted on the wall of her mother's roof as testament to her daughter's dance with the Shadow.
21 Amadine, 997 NE
It was supposed to be a spearhead like any other. A straightforward if lengthy task that I understood completely, thanks to Salin's instruction and my own mounting experience.
"Met my lass from Cold Rocks Hold," I sang out as I tempered the steel, smiling as I sang out the lyrics of the ever so slightly modified song Salin had taught me as a mechanism for keeping time while forging a spear.
An unorthodox version, true, I thought, but the meter remains the same, and that's the important part. So…
"Eyes she had, all green and light," I sang, abandoning the rhyming scheme without second thought as I plunged the spearhead back into the forge, "But all I want is water!"
"…iiisssss waterrrr….."
I froze in an instant, hands still on my tongs.
I had never noticed an echo in my inherited smithy before. There shouldn't be any echo here, not from the bricks or from the carved stone of the hillside – the surfaces had been roughened deliberately to prevent sounds like hammers slamming onto anvils from reaching deafening levels.
So, no echoes. Supposedly.
Did I only imagine that? I wondered, but turned on my heel to see if a visitor had somehow slipped into my forge without me noticing, but there was nobody behind me.
I stood alone in my forge, and suddenly felt very alone in what had hitherto been a very intimate setting, hemmed in by racks of tools and materials all arranged to my specification.
In this place, more than any other, I was in control. This was my place.
"…iiisssss waterrrr….."
Slowly, I turned on my heel to stare into the smoldering coals. That could not have been some unlikely echo, nor had I only imagined that hissing voice between my ears.
After all of these years… Somehow, my thoughts sounded hushed in the privacy of my own mind, tentative and hesitant. Even considering the possibility… Is it you, Being X? Come back again to spew your madness once more?
That wasn't it. The thing that claimed omnipotence and dealt in lies had never been anything less than blatant in announcing its presence.
So, if not Being X… What then?
Focusing back on the waking world, I realized I had been staring at the spearhead in progress, where it sat among the coals. It was exactly where I had left it to soften in the heat, innocuous atop the cheerful orange incandescence of the coals. Except… it was wrong. Wrong somehow in a way I couldn't immediately pin down.
"Met my lassss from Cold Rocksss Hold…"
I had been wrong to call it a voice; it was not a voice, no more than the rattle of a beetle's wings was a voice, but yet the sing-song words were as clear and distinct as if they had come from my own mouth, if with a bit more sibilance than was strictly necessary. But those were words, and that lilt in their enunciation was an obvious if indecipherable mockery of my time-keeping song.
"What is this?" I murmured, my wondering thoughts escaping my lips as I stared at the spearhead, entranced. What was wrong with it? The answer seemed to hover just past the point of recognition, almost within reach…
"All I want… iiisssss waterrrr….."
Staggering suddenly, fever-heat licked my skull as I realized just what I was seeing, what I had been staring at blankly perhaps for minutes but refusing to process: The spearhead, like every spearhead I forged, was an amalgamation of two types of steel, with soft carbon-rich steel concentrated towards the interior, ideal for absorbing the shock of the blade entering flesh and hammering bone, and a rigidly hard steel towards the exterior, perfect for holding a killing edge. Where the two met and mingled, the smokey patterns that had given rise to my forge name swirled.
Not the full long-soaked crucible treatment that I had used to prepare the ingots for my hammer and my first spear, but the second best option, and one much less lengthy in duration.
I had forged many spearheads by now, taking steel and wood and giving form to spears, and always as the spearheads had heated in the blaze, their thinner exteriors would glow first, before the heat seeped into the steel's heart and turned the entire ingot into solidified fire.
This spearhead glowed from within. The steels I had mixed, high carbon and low, had darkened to a black nearly that of pig iron, dimmed in contrast to the sullen orange pinprick that seared out from the heart of the half-finished piece, glowing like an old and decaying star from the shadowy clouds of the inexplicably dark iron.
"Ssssing… Don't you know your kind ssssang onccceee…? There isss power in the sssong…"
Below sweat-slicked skin, something within me twitched, jerked, and then violently spasmed under that implacable and heavy-lidded gaze from that impossible, disdainful eye.
Bile flooded my mouth as my stomach heaved, nausea overtaking me. Below, the forge's floor bent crazily away from me as I heaved forwards, bending at the waist as every muscle in my belly clenched under an unseen impact. Something was bludgeoning me, smashing into me like the bludgeoning head of an enraged ram.
Filth, scum of the purest kind, iridescent like chemical rainbows over puddles black with engine oil and ash, spread over me, spread within me. Filling my pores, filling my mouth, filling the private place behind my eyes that was me, I screamed at the violation, but my mouth was so full of filth and wet-clenched teeth that I couldn't hear myself over the SINGING!
Gasping for breath, I staggered out of the smithy, cadin'sor sooty and soaked with a sweat that was halfway mucus, jelly-thick and opalescent as it slowly ran down my forearms. Behind me, the curtain door fluttered and twitched, half-torn from its hooks. I couldn't even remember touching it, much less almost ripping it off the smithy wall, such had been my rapidly receding panic.
And… and it was all rapidly receding, the entirety of the experience flying away from the present in the comparatively cool relief of the Threefold Land at the height of the day. Already I was feeling… well, not better, per say, but perhaps more controlled. More myself.
For, as the filth receded, a force as familiar as breathing and as impossible to imagine in this third world as a clockwork masterpiece set around a cut jewel flowed into me and over me, pounding down upon my head like a waterfall.
Without question, without doubt… For the first time in almost exactly seventeen years, I was holding magic in my cupped, filthy hands.
And oh, what magic it was!
The mana that had come from within my second body had been nebulous as gas, free-floating on gossamer strands that required precise channeling through the marvelous cores of the computation orbs to compress into spells. Only on a handful of occasions had I felt the need to cast unassisted spells, and these were always crude things, simple and only made functional by dint of great effort and focus.
By contrast, this new power that engulfed me was almost like the Type-95 in its sheer presence and magnitude, but without any of the disassociation the cursed orb had carried in its tainted gears. To the contrary, I had rarely felt more aware of my every movement, how every hair on every inch of my body brushed against my clothes, my boots, the morning breeze thrilling me with chills, a welcome relief as Sunday, midsummer, approached.
Utterly uninhibited, I could do nothing but throw my head back and laugh. Magic! This was magic! Frothing, curling, boiling magic battered at me, but it was nothing, nothing at all, to pull tight its leash.
Magic! After years without even the slightest drop of mana, I had forgotten the sensation completely, and like a dehydrated castaway offered water at last, I drank greedily from the sudden flow. Distantly, I could perceive something far away, something like a membrane, or perhaps the curve of some vast muscular wall, and I knew that it was my maximum capacity.
Or at least, it was my maximum capacity for now. Any muscle could be worked and developed and stretched. Why not my magical bladder?
Chortling at that image, I stepped back into the forge. Now, now that I knew what I was looking for, now that the first inexplicable smear of pollutants had ceased to be an issue, I could see clearly when I gazed down at the half-finished spearhead in the coals.
Not only coals surrounded the spearhead; a bundle of strands glowing like heated wires dove in and out of the surface of the steel like dolphins and wrapped tightly around the weapon in progress like a coiled spring, and somehow I knew these to be Earth and Fire respectively. My experience with experimental magic and basic spell design came in handy for the first time in a decade and a half, as I could tell it was an incomplete spell; there were holes in it at regular intervals, and those holes spoke of Air.
The ancients all thought smiths were magical, and that they hid their magic within their songs and their steel.
So thinking, I opened my mouth and sang an experimental bar. "But all I want is water!"
Nothing.
Of course not, you fool, I scolded myself, pushing past the elation that I could do magic again to turn a critical eye on the project. How can you shape a spell without holding mana?
That wasn't quite the right way to put it. I'd been holding mana, or whatever this other thing was that fueled my magic, but in the way a miser holds a coin. Tightly, to be precise.
I needed to push what I had taken in back out into the world.
As the thought crossed my mind, the magic turned in my hand and tried to bite me, to crush me, to pull me under the thundering tide and drown me.
Almost carelessly, I gave the magic the equivalent of a light slap. A warning, that I was the one in control here, and not it. Here in this forge, I was the master.
This was my place.
"Rum is not my only choice," and when I sang, my words came out in ribbons of ice and light and in a wind that was every breeze that had ever blown, "Lea is my finest vice, yet still I must have water!"
The spearhead warped, the spearhead screamed, and the spearhead became itself as the hammer raced the ribbons to the anvil, slamming into steel as the ribbons found their home in the divots between Fire and Earth.
And then, in a welter of activity and sweat and song, it was done. Black as coal and sharp as treachery, it sat upon my anvil, an offering to my own prideful skill. And yet, it was truly steel, no anthracite this! At the bladed edges and the beveled peak, wherever hard planes met one another and sloped together, skeins of smokey gray billowed, the last kiss of Air entombed in the bones of Earth and fused by the passion of Fire and the embrace of cooling Water.
And yet, I thought dizzily, Spirit runs through all things.
Focus ebbed away from my finished project and something that had been prodding at the back of my mind finally elbowed its way to the forefront of my attention.
There are no men who can channel among our people, for they are dead men walking. Any man who can channel is dead to the world and to the Aiel and is sent into the Blight to dance with Sightblinder.
I had learned as much years ago while sitting at Sorilea's feet, carding cotton with the other children of Shende Hold.
My laughter died. The elation, like a fever, broke.
I had magic. I positively sloshed with magic.
I was a dead man walking.
The spearhead, so smug upon its iron bed, gazed up at me and laughed.
Tisaku
Head Chief Thinkomancer
-The more carbon, the harder and more brittle the steel, the less carbon the softer and more ductile.-
Huh. Cast iron had me thinking iron is harder and more brittle, but apparently cast iron is actually steel with *more* carbon than it's supposed to have? I hate english sometimes.
Aviendha is the same age. So, not long at all.
- Location
- The Lower 48
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
We're about a year out from canon start if I haven't botched the calendar up.
Well. That's uh, a *while* to hide having magic. At least Taric will probably be a more trustworthy magic teacher for Rand by that point than trying to use one of the forsaken? I mean, Rand lasted years using magic like crazy before he started really lising his mind. Though the black tower had some people snap in months, so it seems pretty variable hm.
Honestly, I'm rather fascinated to find out what he's going to do here. Like, I would expect someone to hide it, but he is kind of *really* into the whole honor system in this life. Tanya or the salaryman would never have done it, but this version has gone through enough character growth that I could honestly see him turning himself in potentially. I bet he'd do a lot better than the typical exiled aiel channeler with his experience in magic, too. But then he wouldn't be around to meet Rand. Unless it's early enough and he wanders far enough to get caught up in the whole eye of the world adventure? Hm.
So, glancing back at the start of the chapter and seeing this opening paired with the ending where the forge turns out to be the very opposite of safe when his magic awakens was interesting lol.
The sb thread has a bit of discussion about that debating whether men made black cuendillar and women white. I'm a bit skeptical it is, but I imagine it is *very* good steel.
Chapter 8: Man of Fire, Woman of Air
- Location
- The Lower 48
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
(Thank you to Sunny, MetalDragon, and Teebs for editing and beta-reading this chapter. Congratulations to Teebs on finishing his WOT Quest, A New Player in the Game! I recommend it highly to any fans of WOT, along with its story-version branch.)
21 Amadine, 997 NE
Cold Rocks Hold, Taardad Aiel, Aiel Waste
There was no such thing as an unsolvable problem.
I had believed as much long before I was Taric; long before I was Tanya Degurechaff, even. For as long as I had been me, under any name and in any body, I had firmly believed that every problem had a solution. It had been an article of faith to me that sufficient intelligence, savvy, and social maneuvering could engineer an outcome agreeable to all reasonable people. Failing a compromise, I had been equally sure that carefully applied force and leveraged ruthlessness could inflict a lasting resolution on the unreasonable and the unheeding.
It was difficult to believe as much now, where I stood by my forge in the shoes of a freshly sparked male channeler.
In the shoes of a man who, if conventional wisdom was to be relied upon, was already dead and yet, like a barrel of toxic waste, remained a very real threat to everybody unfortunate enough to share his proximity.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to rage. It was unfair! I had worked so hard, planned out my course years in advance… And I had won! I had achieved my peaceful life, found a role that kept me far from violence while still garnering the respect and affection of all around me! I had won!
But, that had all been a lie, one that I had accepted as my own truth.
I had grown complacent.
I looked down at my hands, so strong and still so dextrous, flexing my fingers as I held them out before me. These hands could make wonders, tools and weapons of incredible quality and art that provoked awe, at least in the eyes of the uninitiated. Studded with callouses and marred by old burn scars, with old soot and coal dust ground into the palms, I knew every mark and curve of my hands, had shaped them in my forge just as I had molded iron and hammered steel.
I had known my hands.
I had thought I had known my hands.
All this time, while I labored and schemed and learned… Magic was in my bones all along, like a land mine waiting for an unwary foot. Two Wise Ones as ancestors… How could I have ever been so foolish to not anticipate as much?
Before me, Sorilea's face swam into focus above the coals. Leather and sinew, mummified by the unrelenting sun and wind, and eyes as hard as the bones of the Threefold Land. Eyes that had seen generations from cradle to grave. Eyes that had always seemed fixed upon me, even from my earliest days sitting at her feet and listening to the stories of our people.
I wondered how many sons and great-sons my Honored Ancestor had seen wake from the Dream while still drawing breath, how many she had sent to dance with Sightblinder. I wondered if she had always known what I had just discovered.
No, I realized, that couldn't be the case. If she had indeed known what lay ahead of me, Sorilea of the Chareen Aiel would never have sent me out of her sight. She would never have placed me as a burden upon the back of another.
But I could do nothing but wonder if, even now, back in Shende Hold, her eyes were fixed on Gharadin, still weighing and assessing and searching for whatever tells her old memories might reveal.
I can do nothing for him now, I acknowledged, striving to push the thought of my younger brother from my mind. Not for the moment, at least.
I can hardly do anything for myself, now.
A shiver passed through me. The stories Sorilea and the others had told of men who burnt with power had been vague on the details. Consequently, they were far more frightening and worrisome than any superbly illustrated tale could be. Still, a few particulars had slipped out from under the cloak of ambiguity.
"They rotted while they yet lived, and all in their path festered at their passage…"
I shuddered again. What was I supposed to do?
Ji'e'toh.
When I had first been reborn among the Aiel, born to Ayesha and Leiran as Taric of Shende Hold, I had latched onto Ji'e'toh as an easily understandable guide to the Aiel, a method to quantify correct behavior and make amends for failures.
But, after years living as Taric, after growing up boy and man in my family's room within the adobe and stone walls of Shende Hold and the open-walled smithy of Salin the smith, I had… I had embraced the Aiel. Embraced being Aiel, with all that entailed. Had embraced Ji'e'toh without ever deciding as much. There had been no need to decide; to live by what I knew to be correct and by what I knew to be my obligation had been as natural as breathing.
After all, what adult required anybody else to tell them their duty? To be an adult was to know one's duty, to understand honor and to accept obligation. It had all been so beautifully simple at its root, though the application of that simple principle to daily life was an endless and complex dance.
But now… That natural understanding was upended, the dance disrupted. There was not only obligation now, but obligations in plural, and standing in the forge still dripping with thick sweat, still staring down at the black spearhead my hands and my song had forged, I could not find my sense of honor.
Think. Deep breaths, in and out, like the bellows. Stoke the coals of your mind. Think.
I had toh. Not because I had done anything dishonorable, but simply as a factor of who I was, and what I had been born with. I had been born with magic, that much was clear, but I had also been born with the perspective of two previous lives' worth of experience. That knowledge had given me advantages, but in the same way that a strong man had a duty to work harder and be more productive than a weak man, that perspective had also thrust a greater obligation upon me.
The Aiel culture was, as I had known for years, a death cult. No Aiel feared death, because the Aiel were primed from the cradle to embrace their own extinguishment. They toiled for a master that they did not know to avenge sins so ancient that all memory of the particulars had slipped far away, with the ultimate goal being the forging of an entire civilization into a weapon meant to be used up and discarded in a great final battle.
My people deserved better than that. I knew as much, just as I knew that I had a duty to save them from themselves. I was a smith, and I knew the hardest blades were also the most brittle.
Toh.
Now, I was a threat to everybody around me, through no desire of my own. My own inherited gift, my blood and my bone, betrayed me and betrayed everybody around me. This was profoundly wrong, not just on the level that any unwarranted threat against others was unacceptable, but because of my calling as a smith. A smith held weapons against none save for Shadowspawn; that was my role. For a smith to present a threat to others, to sept and to clan and to family…
Toh.
Slowly, my breathing slowed, my panic calmed. It was easier now, to think about all of this, once it was all reduced down to matters of honor and obligation and duty.
There was no such thing as a problem without a solution.
I did not want to wake from the Dream. I had so much left to live for, to learn, to enjoy.
I would not succumb. I would not bow. I would not be ground below the turning of the Wheel.
Fate was not immutable.
Fists clenched, then released.
I had toh to meet, and I would not discharge it if I remained here.
My Tinker-made traveling pack weighed heavy on my shoulders as I slipped below Neiralla's roof, muttering an apology as I stepped over the threshold uninvited and unwelcomed.
It was a minor violation, all other things considered, but honor was honor and duty was duty.
I had toh.
Soon, my scarce personal effects were stowed away in the pack, between the forge-tools that were my livelihood and my badge as a smith. The small bundle of clothes and the few precious papers covered with Lea's writing, practice material for her efforts to teach me how to read, were almost lost among whetstones, tongs and tinsnips, each carefully wrapped and strapped into its proper place within my pack.
Were that I also so neatly arrayed in my own proper place, I thought, glancing around the cool interior of Neiralla's house.
It had not been home, but it had been a roof over my head and a comforting conversation around the night's waning fire.
From that central firepit, I retrieved a smudgy lump. Flaking ash fell away from unconsumed anthracite. Neiralla had no paper below her roof, nor any ink.
I needed neither to put Lea's gift to good use.
Coal would suffice, to say goodbye.
Mistress of the roof above my head and widow of my forge-brother Jhoran, I greet you.
I have toh. Indeed, I leave your roof encumbered with many obligations left unfulfilled, both to the Aiel and to you. I shame myself with this act, but act I must. I am breaking my oath to you. Greater toh takes precedence over the lesser, and to remain would incur still greater shame.
If it is ever within my power, I will discharge my toh to you.
Taric, son of Leiran and Ayesha, of no sept and of no clan.
Pack upon my shoulders and soot upon my hands, I left my letters behind me, scrawled across the smoothly planed stone of Neiralla's floor. When she returned from the dyepots this evening to stoke the fire anew and set to work preparing the evening meal, my words would greet her.
I would already be long gone.
Wire-Armed Garlvan was breathing as deeply and as steadily as his pumping bellows above his anvil, hammer rising and falling with almost mechanical precision.
He was, I noted, churning out masonry nails, ideal for reinforcing the construction of the freestanding buildings outside of the sheltering bowl containing Cold Rocks Hold.
Livestock had to shelter somewhere, after all, once the biting winter winds came.
"I see you, Garlvan!" I called out over the ringing hammer. "Let your hammer rest; I must speak with you!"
"But you are speaking already," Garlvan pointed out, an easy smile already twitching at the corners of his broad, mobile mouth.
Regardless, he set the hammer aside and strode out of the forge towards me, long limbs bare under the sun as he had surrendered his shirt in the forge's heat.
The smile faded as Garlvan neared and found no reciprocation, eyes roving over my blank face and down the straps of my pack.
"I see you, Taric," he said at last, stopping before me. His voice was neutral, with only the slightest brush of curiosity for inflection. "I see you as you were when you came before me, freshly arrived at Cold Rocks Hold."
"In appearance," I conceded, nodding. "Were that it so otherwise."
Garlvan said nothing. His dark eyes, blue like the oceans my own eyes had never seen, met my own, patient and waiting.
"I have toh."
The words hung in the air between us, strikingly mundane as all the most important words always seem to be.
How many times a day are those words uttered between Aiel? I wondered, imagining exchanges all across the length and breadth of the Threefold Land. A simple phrase, worn almost smooth by the passage of many fingers, but the bedrock of our shared cultural code. A simple admittance of obligation, be it ever so great or ever so trifling. However many times they slip our tongues each day, the import never diminishes.
"You have toh," Garlvan acknowledged, a long breath's hold in the time between us. "What now, Taric, Leiran's son?"
"I go to meet my toh," I replied. "In leaving, I am placing a burden upon your shoulders."
"You are," Garlvan agreed. "You are a good worker, Taric, and a good smith. When Jhoran awoke at last from the Dream, it was difficult to carry even a portion of his responsibilities as well as my own. With your absence, I will do my utmost to reshoulder that burden."
"And in doing so, you will see less of your daughter's smile, nor be at your wife's side to support her," I concluded, nodding my understanding. "To you as well, Garlvan, I have toh."
"You have toh," Garlvan agreed again, "in so far as you feel obligated."
"That is the root of toh."
Garlvan did not disagree.
…This should have been Gharadin, I thought, meeting Garlvan's implacable eyes. I should be saying this farewell to my brother, not just my forge-brother.
But Gharadin was not here, and the farewell I wished to exchange was sticking behind my teeth. Everything felt awkward, uncomfortable. Nothing had changed, except for me.
I was out of place.
"Farewell, Garlvan," I said, taking a step back. Whatever I had come here for, I was not finding it. "I leave now, brother. May your hands never weaken or your eyes dim."
"...May the fires of the forge burn bright and steady for you, brother," Garlvan solemnly replied, hands folding before him into a mute expression of distress. "And… When you have met your toh and know yourself again… I will be waiting."
I found Lea out under the sun, on the threshold of a house of pain.
There were no screams; we were trained from an early age not to scream with pain, but rather to remain silent for as long as we could. When pain could not be denied and silence broke, we were to laugh and to joke, and to give voice to our pain in mockery against our enemy.
All an outgrowth of the ideal that Aiel should go to dance with Sightblinder with laughter in our voice and defiance in our hearts.
When I was a child, young enough that I had only just begun to learn the ways of my people, I had witnessed an execution at Shende Hold. By and large, the Aiel were an orderly people, lawful without any need for a formal code of laws. Still, though, the Aiel were ultimately people. Human as they were, the occasional crime was still committed, though nobody referred to it as such, and so due correction was administered.
In this case, the patient had been a murderer, a Dancer whose thirst for oosquai had proven too deep one night. While deep in his cups with his friends, harsh words had been exchanged and the man, a member of Sovin Nai, the Knife Hands, had put his society's art of unarmed combat to use and crushed an erstwhile friend's windpipe.
The next morning, in the presence of all who dwelt under Shende Hold's roof, the man's society brothers in the small chapter of Sovin Nai present at Shende Hold had avenged his dishonor over the course of five hours.
The murderer had played his part well. Arriving to the appointed place on the stony flat outside of the Hold's roof under his own power, arms unbound and head held high, the murderer had stripped himself and handed his cadin'sor to the wife of the man he had killed before laying himself flat upon the stone.
He had jerked when the heated coals first touched his skin, but the murderer had quickly amended his performance by making jokes at his own expense, and at the expense of his tormentors, his society brothers and the brother of the slain man. They had laughed with him and had smiled at his words, exchanging banter for banter as they commended his spirit.
They were still laughing when they drew their knives.
The murderer had laughed too, as words fell away, falling into himself as he laughed and laughed. Each cheery gale had seemed higher pitched, shriller, almost but not quite verging into screams.
When at last the condemned man fell silent, those in attendance agreed that he had earned much ji. The wife of the murdered man stood to accept that the guilt of the act was paid, and accepted as collateral for her dead husband's absence eight sheep from Sovin Nai's flock.
The ritual of retribution had been observed; the social wound healed.
Yet, as I had stood watching all of this, I had noted most closely the actions of Parrag, Sept Chief of the Jarra, and Sorilea. While all of the audience had stood watchful and silent through the proceedings, Parrag and Sorilea had never once smiled nor softened their iron-hard expressions. Sorilea had pronounced the man's guilt the night before and Parrag had stood beside the chapter leader of the Sovin Nai when the man declared the punishment his society would inflict upon its wayward brother, but neither had spoken apart from that.
Ultimately, Sorilea had broken her silence regarding the murderer to say the same words over his grave as she had said over the grave of his victim.
Neither she nor Parrag had attended the wakes of either dead man.
Now, gusts of hearty laughter, barely forced, echoed from the open door of the house Lea squatted before. Hunkering down, I joined her in the dust.
"I see you, Lea," I greeted, dropping down onto my haunches next to her. "What are you doing out here?"
"I see you, Taric," she replied shortly, her face locked up in a grimace. "I am avoiding the smell. Malan was bitten by a lizard two days ago, while out with the flocks. By the time he arrived at the Hold this morning, the wound had already gone sour."
Another bout of almost uncontrolled laughing punctuated her words, and I winced with sympathetic pain. If the wound had gone sour to the extent that Lea had to get some fresh air, it was almost certainly necrotic.
I could not imagine what debridement must feel like when done with a heated knife and with only a few mouthfuls of oosquai to numb the pain.
"Would you walk with me?" I asked, jerking my head towards the rim of the mesa. "The air will certainly be fresher up there."
Lea did not require a second invitation, almost bouncing to her feet in her eagerness to be away from the house. "I am already doing very little to assist my mother in this matter," she said, scooting out past the domestic garden and into the terrace path. "I doubt that I shall be greatly missed. Let us go quickly, so that I will be back before my presence is required."
A frown began to crease my brow; for all that Lea was not a Wise One, helping the sick and the wounded was the duty of all members of the sept and all residents of the hold. For her to forsake her place of duty to enjoy the day…
The invitation was mine, I reminded myself, and were today like any other day, I would still be at my forge at this very moment, instead of sneaking about like a fugitive. I have no grounds to criticize Lea.
Besides, knowledge of Ji'e'toh can only come from within. Her toh is not mine to set, though I may owe her toh before today is done…
"By the way, Taric," Lea said, turning in a swirl of skirts and hair as red as the surrounding stone of the mesa, "why are you wearing your pack? And why do you clink with every move?"
Vainly, I had hoped that she would not notice that I was prepared to leave, at least not until we were atop the mesa. It had been a stupid, silly hope, not something I had wished for consciously, but…
"I shall tell you when we reach the mesa-top," I half-sighed, meeting Lea's suddenly worried eyes with a tight-lipped smile. "I would prefer to speak to you alone about this."
Something set behind her brow.
"As you say, Taric," Lea agreed, head bobbing. "It would be best to discuss such matters in private."
Her tone was interested, engaged, but… firm. Firm in a manner that was distinctly Lea, but also a sure sign that she had decided upon her course in some decision.
It did not fit an invitation to a simple, quiet chat.
But perhaps it suits a woman who already knows that she is bidding farewell to a guest, and thus is nearly free from the burden of hospitality.
Thoughts swirling, I followed a pace behind Lea as we made our way up to the lip of the mesa, past row upon terraced row of dwellings and patchwork gardens, green against gray and red. I could not help but wonder, now that my time here at Cold Rocks Hold was coming to a close, how much of the relationships I had felt slowly coalesce around me had solely been the product of that hospitality, or perhaps of the social bonds connecting a craftsman and his community.
All of that was moot now, of course. All of the goodwill I had built up, the skills I had cultivated, were meaningless now.
Lea's hair, as red as the walls of the mesa protecting her native hold, caught in the dancing breeze and flapped out behind her like a flag, smacking me in the face with its soft weight and sneaking a few strands between my parted lips. Immediately, the urge to spit the strands out dragged me away from my thoughts, though I pushed off the urge without issue.
Wasting water was appalling, particularly over such a small matter.
Wiping my hand over my mouth, I lengthened my stride so I could walk side by side with Lea. She glanced over at me, eyes still hooded with concern and distracted, perhaps still back in the house with the injured man, but still with enough interest and connection to smile at me. A small thing, but enough to convey a greeting, and reassurance.
That reassurance lasted until we reached the brim of the mesa, sunbaked and, even with the wind, almost unbearably hot. In the searing light of day, the windworn rock made familiar by so many evening walks was strange and unwelcoming.
As if the stone itself is rejecting me. As if the land and the Hold both reject the poison in my bones.
"Great holds of the people they burnt and thousands they slew, but the greatest wounds were inflicted upon the land itself…"
"So, Taric," Lea spoke, turning on me with a Dancer's grace, "will you tell me now why you carry your tools upon your back? Will you," she reached out, and a hand, callused with work but slender and quick, brushed my chest, "tell me why every part of you save your tongue has already told me farewell?"
"I…"
The words were caught behind my teeth again, like loose cotton fibers wet and sticking and glued against the roof of my mouth. What could I say? How could I possibly admit to what I had discovered, that I was damned to blight everybody around me so long as I lived and that I didn't want to die?
I looked into those pale jade eyes and found the cool distance I had dreaded, that I had fully expected. I also found… understanding. Something that left me feeling naked in a way that the steam tents never could.
There were no words to admit the greater shame, that I refused to die for honor, that I refused to throw myself into a hopeless battle again, even though I had apparently been fighting an equally hopeless battle ever since I had been pushed off that long-ago station platform, if not even longer than that.
Like a coward, I confessed my lesser shame to those piercing eyes.
"I can channel," I said, simply and to the point. Blunt, as Aiel were. Blunt, as I so often was not. "I have toh."
Revulsion. Disgust. Horror. Most of all, pity.
All of these and more were in Lea's face.
She did not step away though, nor did her hand move from my chest.
Suicidally brave. An Aiel to the core.
And yet, I do not want to die. Does that make me not an Aiel? Is Taric truly so shallow? Was I ever sincere when I called the Aiel my people?
If magic was within my bones, the poisoned gift of Being X outliving Tanya Degurechaff… What else could be down in my subconscious, waiting to wake up? Was I ever who I thought I was?
I saw in Lea's face nothing of the Aiel stoicism, only a spasm of emotions, raw in their intensity and nude in their honesty.
I saw no hatred, though. I had expected none; it would be like hating a rabid dog. Pointless.
Like a lizard skittering away under stone, the welter of emotions vanished almost before I could parse it, perhaps before I could fully mark it for all of its character and nuance. Instead, I saw a face I recognized, though it was not Lea's.
It was not the face of the girl who I had exchanged barbs with in a forge I had called my own, almost meaning it. Not the girl who I had clumsily gifted a library to, and who had refined my hammer-handed gesture into deft maneuver. Not the girl who had patiently taught me how to read again, and who had unlocked the gates of literacy for me once more.
I saw Amys. I saw Lian. More than anything else, I saw my great-greatmother, my Honored Ancestor.
Sorilea.
The face of a Wise One, jade-eyed and freckled, confronted me, Lea's necklace of Treekiller gold glittering at her throat and her band of turquoise and amber crowning her brow like a diadem.
"Very well," stated Lea, no hint of doubt entering her voice. Perhaps because there could be no doubt in the face of such claims. "When this became known to you, did you harm anybody or cause harm to befall anybody?"
"No," I replied, and barely swallowed the appellation "Wise One" that sprang automatically to my tongue. "It was… Not more than two hours ago, when I was at my forge, something… Something touched me."
I had not meant for that mewling note to enter my voice, nor the way my voice had broken at the admittance. I had tried for Aiel resolve and found only horror and an undeniable, perverse, filthy pleasure when I remembered the ecstasy of that first instant.
Just thinking about it, trying to hold the memory in my head… I feared it, for all that it meant, both that burst of inexplicable filth and the full knowledge that the fate I had outrun had found me again, but likewise I craved it. I had to have more of it.
Magic that I had said goodbye to so long ago had returned to me once more.
Perhaps I could fly again…?
It was a dirty thought, a shameful thought, and one that I was sure was stamped boldly across my face as I struggled to hold Lea's gaze.
"So," said Lea, "the only injured party here, the only wronged party here… is you, Taric. Of all the people of my Hold and of my sept… You alone have been hurt.
"Why, then, do you have toh?"
"I…" I had not expected this, had not looked for this. I could find nothing in her face as my eyes flicked from mouth to hand to eye and back to mouth, nothing to indicate what lay under that implacable facade. "I… have no sept," I denied, pushing back on her nonsensical words, heaving them away. "I have no clan. Those who have woken are beyond societies, beyond clans. Per the teachings of our people, of the Taardad and Goshien and all the Aiel, men who can channel have woken from the Dream in all ways but one, and must go north to seek that last waking."
But I do not want to wake from the Dream! I have so much left to live for, so much left to offer! What I could have accomplished! What I could have built for myself and for my family and for my people!
But I do not wish to harm them either. It would undermine all that I have done and all that I believe in. I will not be a burden nor a parasite.
But… I do not want to die.
"You have much to say," said Lea, "but I do not hear your words, Taric of Cold Rocks Hold, smith of spears and melter of coins. I hear only the words of others on your tongue. Is that all your honor is, the words of others repeated like a child? Speak for yourself, what wrong have you done?"
"I have done nothing!" Her hand was like a stone against my chest, and for all that I loomed above her, I felt like I could not have pushed it away, had I dared to raise a hand against the Wise One.
Amending my claim and lowering my tone when I realized I had all but yelled in Lea's face, I said, "I have wronged Neiralla by breaking faith with her and entering below her roof without permission, I have wronged Garlvan by placing the burden of my work upon his shoulders, and I have wronged Cold Rocks Hold by leaving that work undone, but for all of that, I have inflicted deliberate and lasting harm upon nobody and nothing."
Her cool silence and unblinking, weighing eyes pulled the words from me like new-drawn wire from a die.
"But…" I swallowed, throat thick and clotted, "I fear that if I remain, I will hurt somebody. I have been told that… That channeling brings madness, and that madness brings ruin. That once it has begun, it cannot be halted. That this is the reason that men who can channel go north, to spit into Sightblinder's eye.
"I will not do this. Will not prove a…" parasite "dishonorable guest by inflicting harm upon Cold Rocks Hold. I came under your mother's near-sister's roof as a guest. I will not stay as…"
"You will not stay," agreed Lea, and my heart sank when I heard the stoniness of her voice. Still lovely, but unspeakably solid. Whatever had briefly fluttered in my heart subsided.
"You will not say," Lea repeated, but continued, "because when you said that your affliction could harm those around you, you spoke truly. But, Taric, I ask you this: What toh does one with the fever bear? Do we shun the sick and demand they flee out into the Threefold Land, forever driven from our roof and our hold?"
"No," I answered, remembering the tale of how Jhoran had been woken, in his bed with his wife and his daughter at hand, helped in the search for an honorable way out. "There is no shame in sickness. There is only shame in the refusal to acknowledge affliction or in attempting to spread it to others."
"Finally," and Lea was there, peering out from behind the Wise One wearing her face, "proof that your wits have not fully deserted you, Taric. I am relieved."
"...I do not know what you want to hear from me," I confessed, confused at last by her strange whipsawing attitude. "I… I do not believe that I have done wrong by existing. Not truly. I… I cannot believe that. I have always labored to act in accordance with what I believe to be right. But I cannot overlook what I have learned about myself. It would not be right to do so."
"Do you remember what you told me, when I wondered if I should take up a spear and approach Far Dareis Mai?" asked Lea, and then answered for me, "You said that just by hearing me give voice to the idea, that I did not believe it to truly be my duty. I return those words to you. You know that seeking out Sightblinder to spit in his eye will not bring you ji."
She was correct, but at the same time, she was not.
I was not that honorable.
But, jerk my head as I tried, I could not just nod in mute acquiescence.
I was leaving my friend behind. I would not lie to her now.
"I do not want to die!" I burst out, and now shame washed over me, hot like the water ladled over the heated stones of the bath, wet and sticky and clinging in a manner unlike the scorching heat of the sun. Yet now that it was out, the words spilled fourth unbidden, uncontrolled, like the salt-stinking air rushing up from the fetid south in stormy whips to scourge the Threefold Land. "I am a smith! A maker and mender of things! What is the point of my sacrifice? What could I possibly do to help our people in my waking that thousands of men before me could not accomplish with theirs? I asked not for this power, only for the power of my hands and of my mind to make things that would help our people!"
Panting like a bull, I halted, caught again by pale jade.
"The truth at last, Taric." No give in her voice again, only hard duty. "No words of others, repeated without meaning. But truth at last."
"I…" have toh.
I swallowed the reflexive words, sensing how they would fall flat before her scorn.
As well they should, because… Because I had lost my honor. And without honor, how could one know what was right and what was wrong?
I have become a child again. I have lost mastery of myself.i
That was the cruelest cut, and the one that had lanced me the deepest in this whole benighted scenario. All my skills… All my honed self-control… All my carefully cultivated proficiencies, everything I had built for myself was like so much splintered kindling in the howling, hungering, insatiable flames of this new magic I found myself cursed with! Something that had been deeply buried within me had broken free, and there was nothing I could do to control it, to control myself.
I am broken.
"I… am not the man you think that I am," I said instead, as truthful as I could be, probing for what I could possibly say to mend what I had done. "I was never that man."
The return of my magic had nothing at all to do with that.
"You presume much, Taric of the Chareen Aiel," Lea hissed, angry for the first time in our conversation. "You presume to tell me of my thoughts, what I thought of you, what I saw in you?"
"I have toh," I said automatically, and found to my surprise that I meant it.
Ah, so perhaps I do still have something resembling honor after all.
"When I saw you, I never saw a Spear," said Lea, "nor did I come to your forge looking for one. Do you know what kind of man I saw in you, Taric? What your metal was, perhaps?" The way she emphasized that last sentence made it twist mockingly in my ears. Goading me.
"Yes," I shot back, angry now myself. "What did you see, Lea, daughter of Amys? Did you see a coward, perhaps? Someone unwilling to fulfill their duty?"
As unwilling to fulfill their duty as you?
"I saw someone with a passion to escape the path set before them equal to mine," answered Lea, and effortlessly killed my mounting head of desperate anger. "When I look upon you now, I see that nothing has changed."
"Then… what now?" I asked, lightheaded with emotion and heat. "Here I am, a man who can channel. What can I possibly do, Wise One's daughter, to escape my path?"
What can I do to unchain myself from this damned Wheel?
"You are sick," said Lea, "and this sickness is beyond the knowledge of the Wise Ones. If it could have been healed, it would have been long ago."
Her hand pulled away from my chest, leaving me almost dizzy in its absence, and slipped into the satchel she wore at her waist, strap looped over her opposite shoulder.
It emerged with a book, one whose title I recognized.
Men of Fire, Women of Air.
When I had seen Lea reading from it as she waited by her mother's door for me, I had asked her about its contents, and she had evaded my question.
Now, she pressed it into my chest, holding it in place until I realized what she wanted, and lifted my hands to fold over both the tome, and her hand. Holding both to my chest.
"You are sick," repeated Lea, "but you are of my people. My hold. So, it is my duty to care for you, you fool. What ails you is beyond the Wise Ones, but that does not mean you should flee to despair. It only means that we must seek out a cure from a source wiser than the Wise Ones.
"We must seek out the White Tower, and there, the Aes Sedai."
For a moment, my mind caught on that storybook name, the name of those who our ancestors had served, had supposedly failed. Had, according to the stories, failed so greatly that, even now, a hundred generations later, we atoned for their crimes in the hope that we could one day discharge the massive toh the Aiel labored under.
Then, I heard the rest of her sentence.
"We?" I almost squawked, incredulous. I met her eyes again and found nothing of the Wise One, the totem of carved jade and red sandstone like the mesa below our feet.
I found only green fire, gold-flecked and so thankfully familiar.
"We," confirmed Lea of the Nine Valleys Sept of the Taardad Aiel.
21 Amadine, 997 NE
Cold Rocks Hold, Taardad Aiel, Aiel Waste
There was no such thing as an unsolvable problem.
I had believed as much long before I was Taric; long before I was Tanya Degurechaff, even. For as long as I had been me, under any name and in any body, I had firmly believed that every problem had a solution. It had been an article of faith to me that sufficient intelligence, savvy, and social maneuvering could engineer an outcome agreeable to all reasonable people. Failing a compromise, I had been equally sure that carefully applied force and leveraged ruthlessness could inflict a lasting resolution on the unreasonable and the unheeding.
It was difficult to believe as much now, where I stood by my forge in the shoes of a freshly sparked male channeler.
In the shoes of a man who, if conventional wisdom was to be relied upon, was already dead and yet, like a barrel of toxic waste, remained a very real threat to everybody unfortunate enough to share his proximity.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to rage. It was unfair! I had worked so hard, planned out my course years in advance… And I had won! I had achieved my peaceful life, found a role that kept me far from violence while still garnering the respect and affection of all around me! I had won!
But, that had all been a lie, one that I had accepted as my own truth.
I had grown complacent.
I looked down at my hands, so strong and still so dextrous, flexing my fingers as I held them out before me. These hands could make wonders, tools and weapons of incredible quality and art that provoked awe, at least in the eyes of the uninitiated. Studded with callouses and marred by old burn scars, with old soot and coal dust ground into the palms, I knew every mark and curve of my hands, had shaped them in my forge just as I had molded iron and hammered steel.
I had known my hands.
I had thought I had known my hands.
All this time, while I labored and schemed and learned… Magic was in my bones all along, like a land mine waiting for an unwary foot. Two Wise Ones as ancestors… How could I have ever been so foolish to not anticipate as much?
Before me, Sorilea's face swam into focus above the coals. Leather and sinew, mummified by the unrelenting sun and wind, and eyes as hard as the bones of the Threefold Land. Eyes that had seen generations from cradle to grave. Eyes that had always seemed fixed upon me, even from my earliest days sitting at her feet and listening to the stories of our people.
I wondered how many sons and great-sons my Honored Ancestor had seen wake from the Dream while still drawing breath, how many she had sent to dance with Sightblinder. I wondered if she had always known what I had just discovered.
No, I realized, that couldn't be the case. If she had indeed known what lay ahead of me, Sorilea of the Chareen Aiel would never have sent me out of her sight. She would never have placed me as a burden upon the back of another.
But I could do nothing but wonder if, even now, back in Shende Hold, her eyes were fixed on Gharadin, still weighing and assessing and searching for whatever tells her old memories might reveal.
I can do nothing for him now, I acknowledged, striving to push the thought of my younger brother from my mind. Not for the moment, at least.
I can hardly do anything for myself, now.
A shiver passed through me. The stories Sorilea and the others had told of men who burnt with power had been vague on the details. Consequently, they were far more frightening and worrisome than any superbly illustrated tale could be. Still, a few particulars had slipped out from under the cloak of ambiguity.
"They rotted while they yet lived, and all in their path festered at their passage…"
I shuddered again. What was I supposed to do?
Ji'e'toh.
When I had first been reborn among the Aiel, born to Ayesha and Leiran as Taric of Shende Hold, I had latched onto Ji'e'toh as an easily understandable guide to the Aiel, a method to quantify correct behavior and make amends for failures.
But, after years living as Taric, after growing up boy and man in my family's room within the adobe and stone walls of Shende Hold and the open-walled smithy of Salin the smith, I had… I had embraced the Aiel. Embraced being Aiel, with all that entailed. Had embraced Ji'e'toh without ever deciding as much. There had been no need to decide; to live by what I knew to be correct and by what I knew to be my obligation had been as natural as breathing.
After all, what adult required anybody else to tell them their duty? To be an adult was to know one's duty, to understand honor and to accept obligation. It had all been so beautifully simple at its root, though the application of that simple principle to daily life was an endless and complex dance.
But now… That natural understanding was upended, the dance disrupted. There was not only obligation now, but obligations in plural, and standing in the forge still dripping with thick sweat, still staring down at the black spearhead my hands and my song had forged, I could not find my sense of honor.
Think. Deep breaths, in and out, like the bellows. Stoke the coals of your mind. Think.
I had toh. Not because I had done anything dishonorable, but simply as a factor of who I was, and what I had been born with. I had been born with magic, that much was clear, but I had also been born with the perspective of two previous lives' worth of experience. That knowledge had given me advantages, but in the same way that a strong man had a duty to work harder and be more productive than a weak man, that perspective had also thrust a greater obligation upon me.
The Aiel culture was, as I had known for years, a death cult. No Aiel feared death, because the Aiel were primed from the cradle to embrace their own extinguishment. They toiled for a master that they did not know to avenge sins so ancient that all memory of the particulars had slipped far away, with the ultimate goal being the forging of an entire civilization into a weapon meant to be used up and discarded in a great final battle.
My people deserved better than that. I knew as much, just as I knew that I had a duty to save them from themselves. I was a smith, and I knew the hardest blades were also the most brittle.
Toh.
Now, I was a threat to everybody around me, through no desire of my own. My own inherited gift, my blood and my bone, betrayed me and betrayed everybody around me. This was profoundly wrong, not just on the level that any unwarranted threat against others was unacceptable, but because of my calling as a smith. A smith held weapons against none save for Shadowspawn; that was my role. For a smith to present a threat to others, to sept and to clan and to family…
Toh.
Slowly, my breathing slowed, my panic calmed. It was easier now, to think about all of this, once it was all reduced down to matters of honor and obligation and duty.
There was no such thing as a problem without a solution.
I did not want to wake from the Dream. I had so much left to live for, to learn, to enjoy.
I would not succumb. I would not bow. I would not be ground below the turning of the Wheel.
Fate was not immutable.
Fists clenched, then released.
I had toh to meet, and I would not discharge it if I remained here.
My Tinker-made traveling pack weighed heavy on my shoulders as I slipped below Neiralla's roof, muttering an apology as I stepped over the threshold uninvited and unwelcomed.
It was a minor violation, all other things considered, but honor was honor and duty was duty.
I had toh.
Soon, my scarce personal effects were stowed away in the pack, between the forge-tools that were my livelihood and my badge as a smith. The small bundle of clothes and the few precious papers covered with Lea's writing, practice material for her efforts to teach me how to read, were almost lost among whetstones, tongs and tinsnips, each carefully wrapped and strapped into its proper place within my pack.
Were that I also so neatly arrayed in my own proper place, I thought, glancing around the cool interior of Neiralla's house.
It had not been home, but it had been a roof over my head and a comforting conversation around the night's waning fire.
From that central firepit, I retrieved a smudgy lump. Flaking ash fell away from unconsumed anthracite. Neiralla had no paper below her roof, nor any ink.
I needed neither to put Lea's gift to good use.
Coal would suffice, to say goodbye.
Mistress of the roof above my head and widow of my forge-brother Jhoran, I greet you.
I have toh. Indeed, I leave your roof encumbered with many obligations left unfulfilled, both to the Aiel and to you. I shame myself with this act, but act I must. I am breaking my oath to you. Greater toh takes precedence over the lesser, and to remain would incur still greater shame.
If it is ever within my power, I will discharge my toh to you.
Taric, son of Leiran and Ayesha, of no sept and of no clan.
Pack upon my shoulders and soot upon my hands, I left my letters behind me, scrawled across the smoothly planed stone of Neiralla's floor. When she returned from the dyepots this evening to stoke the fire anew and set to work preparing the evening meal, my words would greet her.
I would already be long gone.
Wire-Armed Garlvan was breathing as deeply and as steadily as his pumping bellows above his anvil, hammer rising and falling with almost mechanical precision.
He was, I noted, churning out masonry nails, ideal for reinforcing the construction of the freestanding buildings outside of the sheltering bowl containing Cold Rocks Hold.
Livestock had to shelter somewhere, after all, once the biting winter winds came.
"I see you, Garlvan!" I called out over the ringing hammer. "Let your hammer rest; I must speak with you!"
"But you are speaking already," Garlvan pointed out, an easy smile already twitching at the corners of his broad, mobile mouth.
Regardless, he set the hammer aside and strode out of the forge towards me, long limbs bare under the sun as he had surrendered his shirt in the forge's heat.
The smile faded as Garlvan neared and found no reciprocation, eyes roving over my blank face and down the straps of my pack.
"I see you, Taric," he said at last, stopping before me. His voice was neutral, with only the slightest brush of curiosity for inflection. "I see you as you were when you came before me, freshly arrived at Cold Rocks Hold."
"In appearance," I conceded, nodding. "Were that it so otherwise."
Garlvan said nothing. His dark eyes, blue like the oceans my own eyes had never seen, met my own, patient and waiting.
"I have toh."
The words hung in the air between us, strikingly mundane as all the most important words always seem to be.
How many times a day are those words uttered between Aiel? I wondered, imagining exchanges all across the length and breadth of the Threefold Land. A simple phrase, worn almost smooth by the passage of many fingers, but the bedrock of our shared cultural code. A simple admittance of obligation, be it ever so great or ever so trifling. However many times they slip our tongues each day, the import never diminishes.
"You have toh," Garlvan acknowledged, a long breath's hold in the time between us. "What now, Taric, Leiran's son?"
"I go to meet my toh," I replied. "In leaving, I am placing a burden upon your shoulders."
"You are," Garlvan agreed. "You are a good worker, Taric, and a good smith. When Jhoran awoke at last from the Dream, it was difficult to carry even a portion of his responsibilities as well as my own. With your absence, I will do my utmost to reshoulder that burden."
"And in doing so, you will see less of your daughter's smile, nor be at your wife's side to support her," I concluded, nodding my understanding. "To you as well, Garlvan, I have toh."
"You have toh," Garlvan agreed again, "in so far as you feel obligated."
"That is the root of toh."
Garlvan did not disagree.
…This should have been Gharadin, I thought, meeting Garlvan's implacable eyes. I should be saying this farewell to my brother, not just my forge-brother.
But Gharadin was not here, and the farewell I wished to exchange was sticking behind my teeth. Everything felt awkward, uncomfortable. Nothing had changed, except for me.
I was out of place.
"Farewell, Garlvan," I said, taking a step back. Whatever I had come here for, I was not finding it. "I leave now, brother. May your hands never weaken or your eyes dim."
"...May the fires of the forge burn bright and steady for you, brother," Garlvan solemnly replied, hands folding before him into a mute expression of distress. "And… When you have met your toh and know yourself again… I will be waiting."
I found Lea out under the sun, on the threshold of a house of pain.
There were no screams; we were trained from an early age not to scream with pain, but rather to remain silent for as long as we could. When pain could not be denied and silence broke, we were to laugh and to joke, and to give voice to our pain in mockery against our enemy.
All an outgrowth of the ideal that Aiel should go to dance with Sightblinder with laughter in our voice and defiance in our hearts.
When I was a child, young enough that I had only just begun to learn the ways of my people, I had witnessed an execution at Shende Hold. By and large, the Aiel were an orderly people, lawful without any need for a formal code of laws. Still, though, the Aiel were ultimately people. Human as they were, the occasional crime was still committed, though nobody referred to it as such, and so due correction was administered.
In this case, the patient had been a murderer, a Dancer whose thirst for oosquai had proven too deep one night. While deep in his cups with his friends, harsh words had been exchanged and the man, a member of Sovin Nai, the Knife Hands, had put his society's art of unarmed combat to use and crushed an erstwhile friend's windpipe.
The next morning, in the presence of all who dwelt under Shende Hold's roof, the man's society brothers in the small chapter of Sovin Nai present at Shende Hold had avenged his dishonor over the course of five hours.
The murderer had played his part well. Arriving to the appointed place on the stony flat outside of the Hold's roof under his own power, arms unbound and head held high, the murderer had stripped himself and handed his cadin'sor to the wife of the man he had killed before laying himself flat upon the stone.
He had jerked when the heated coals first touched his skin, but the murderer had quickly amended his performance by making jokes at his own expense, and at the expense of his tormentors, his society brothers and the brother of the slain man. They had laughed with him and had smiled at his words, exchanging banter for banter as they commended his spirit.
They were still laughing when they drew their knives.
The murderer had laughed too, as words fell away, falling into himself as he laughed and laughed. Each cheery gale had seemed higher pitched, shriller, almost but not quite verging into screams.
When at last the condemned man fell silent, those in attendance agreed that he had earned much ji. The wife of the murdered man stood to accept that the guilt of the act was paid, and accepted as collateral for her dead husband's absence eight sheep from Sovin Nai's flock.
The ritual of retribution had been observed; the social wound healed.
Yet, as I had stood watching all of this, I had noted most closely the actions of Parrag, Sept Chief of the Jarra, and Sorilea. While all of the audience had stood watchful and silent through the proceedings, Parrag and Sorilea had never once smiled nor softened their iron-hard expressions. Sorilea had pronounced the man's guilt the night before and Parrag had stood beside the chapter leader of the Sovin Nai when the man declared the punishment his society would inflict upon its wayward brother, but neither had spoken apart from that.
Ultimately, Sorilea had broken her silence regarding the murderer to say the same words over his grave as she had said over the grave of his victim.
Neither she nor Parrag had attended the wakes of either dead man.
Now, gusts of hearty laughter, barely forced, echoed from the open door of the house Lea squatted before. Hunkering down, I joined her in the dust.
"I see you, Lea," I greeted, dropping down onto my haunches next to her. "What are you doing out here?"
"I see you, Taric," she replied shortly, her face locked up in a grimace. "I am avoiding the smell. Malan was bitten by a lizard two days ago, while out with the flocks. By the time he arrived at the Hold this morning, the wound had already gone sour."
Another bout of almost uncontrolled laughing punctuated her words, and I winced with sympathetic pain. If the wound had gone sour to the extent that Lea had to get some fresh air, it was almost certainly necrotic.
I could not imagine what debridement must feel like when done with a heated knife and with only a few mouthfuls of oosquai to numb the pain.
"Would you walk with me?" I asked, jerking my head towards the rim of the mesa. "The air will certainly be fresher up there."
Lea did not require a second invitation, almost bouncing to her feet in her eagerness to be away from the house. "I am already doing very little to assist my mother in this matter," she said, scooting out past the domestic garden and into the terrace path. "I doubt that I shall be greatly missed. Let us go quickly, so that I will be back before my presence is required."
A frown began to crease my brow; for all that Lea was not a Wise One, helping the sick and the wounded was the duty of all members of the sept and all residents of the hold. For her to forsake her place of duty to enjoy the day…
The invitation was mine, I reminded myself, and were today like any other day, I would still be at my forge at this very moment, instead of sneaking about like a fugitive. I have no grounds to criticize Lea.
Besides, knowledge of Ji'e'toh can only come from within. Her toh is not mine to set, though I may owe her toh before today is done…
"By the way, Taric," Lea said, turning in a swirl of skirts and hair as red as the surrounding stone of the mesa, "why are you wearing your pack? And why do you clink with every move?"
Vainly, I had hoped that she would not notice that I was prepared to leave, at least not until we were atop the mesa. It had been a stupid, silly hope, not something I had wished for consciously, but…
"I shall tell you when we reach the mesa-top," I half-sighed, meeting Lea's suddenly worried eyes with a tight-lipped smile. "I would prefer to speak to you alone about this."
Something set behind her brow.
"As you say, Taric," Lea agreed, head bobbing. "It would be best to discuss such matters in private."
Her tone was interested, engaged, but… firm. Firm in a manner that was distinctly Lea, but also a sure sign that she had decided upon her course in some decision.
It did not fit an invitation to a simple, quiet chat.
But perhaps it suits a woman who already knows that she is bidding farewell to a guest, and thus is nearly free from the burden of hospitality.
Thoughts swirling, I followed a pace behind Lea as we made our way up to the lip of the mesa, past row upon terraced row of dwellings and patchwork gardens, green against gray and red. I could not help but wonder, now that my time here at Cold Rocks Hold was coming to a close, how much of the relationships I had felt slowly coalesce around me had solely been the product of that hospitality, or perhaps of the social bonds connecting a craftsman and his community.
All of that was moot now, of course. All of the goodwill I had built up, the skills I had cultivated, were meaningless now.
Lea's hair, as red as the walls of the mesa protecting her native hold, caught in the dancing breeze and flapped out behind her like a flag, smacking me in the face with its soft weight and sneaking a few strands between my parted lips. Immediately, the urge to spit the strands out dragged me away from my thoughts, though I pushed off the urge without issue.
Wasting water was appalling, particularly over such a small matter.
Wiping my hand over my mouth, I lengthened my stride so I could walk side by side with Lea. She glanced over at me, eyes still hooded with concern and distracted, perhaps still back in the house with the injured man, but still with enough interest and connection to smile at me. A small thing, but enough to convey a greeting, and reassurance.
That reassurance lasted until we reached the brim of the mesa, sunbaked and, even with the wind, almost unbearably hot. In the searing light of day, the windworn rock made familiar by so many evening walks was strange and unwelcoming.
As if the stone itself is rejecting me. As if the land and the Hold both reject the poison in my bones.
"Great holds of the people they burnt and thousands they slew, but the greatest wounds were inflicted upon the land itself…"
"So, Taric," Lea spoke, turning on me with a Dancer's grace, "will you tell me now why you carry your tools upon your back? Will you," she reached out, and a hand, callused with work but slender and quick, brushed my chest, "tell me why every part of you save your tongue has already told me farewell?"
"I…"
The words were caught behind my teeth again, like loose cotton fibers wet and sticking and glued against the roof of my mouth. What could I say? How could I possibly admit to what I had discovered, that I was damned to blight everybody around me so long as I lived and that I didn't want to die?
I looked into those pale jade eyes and found the cool distance I had dreaded, that I had fully expected. I also found… understanding. Something that left me feeling naked in a way that the steam tents never could.
There were no words to admit the greater shame, that I refused to die for honor, that I refused to throw myself into a hopeless battle again, even though I had apparently been fighting an equally hopeless battle ever since I had been pushed off that long-ago station platform, if not even longer than that.
Like a coward, I confessed my lesser shame to those piercing eyes.
"I can channel," I said, simply and to the point. Blunt, as Aiel were. Blunt, as I so often was not. "I have toh."
Revulsion. Disgust. Horror. Most of all, pity.
All of these and more were in Lea's face.
She did not step away though, nor did her hand move from my chest.
Suicidally brave. An Aiel to the core.
And yet, I do not want to die. Does that make me not an Aiel? Is Taric truly so shallow? Was I ever sincere when I called the Aiel my people?
If magic was within my bones, the poisoned gift of Being X outliving Tanya Degurechaff… What else could be down in my subconscious, waiting to wake up? Was I ever who I thought I was?
I saw in Lea's face nothing of the Aiel stoicism, only a spasm of emotions, raw in their intensity and nude in their honesty.
I saw no hatred, though. I had expected none; it would be like hating a rabid dog. Pointless.
Like a lizard skittering away under stone, the welter of emotions vanished almost before I could parse it, perhaps before I could fully mark it for all of its character and nuance. Instead, I saw a face I recognized, though it was not Lea's.
It was not the face of the girl who I had exchanged barbs with in a forge I had called my own, almost meaning it. Not the girl who I had clumsily gifted a library to, and who had refined my hammer-handed gesture into deft maneuver. Not the girl who had patiently taught me how to read again, and who had unlocked the gates of literacy for me once more.
I saw Amys. I saw Lian. More than anything else, I saw my great-greatmother, my Honored Ancestor.
Sorilea.
The face of a Wise One, jade-eyed and freckled, confronted me, Lea's necklace of Treekiller gold glittering at her throat and her band of turquoise and amber crowning her brow like a diadem.
"Very well," stated Lea, no hint of doubt entering her voice. Perhaps because there could be no doubt in the face of such claims. "When this became known to you, did you harm anybody or cause harm to befall anybody?"
"No," I replied, and barely swallowed the appellation "Wise One" that sprang automatically to my tongue. "It was… Not more than two hours ago, when I was at my forge, something… Something touched me."
I had not meant for that mewling note to enter my voice, nor the way my voice had broken at the admittance. I had tried for Aiel resolve and found only horror and an undeniable, perverse, filthy pleasure when I remembered the ecstasy of that first instant.
Just thinking about it, trying to hold the memory in my head… I feared it, for all that it meant, both that burst of inexplicable filth and the full knowledge that the fate I had outrun had found me again, but likewise I craved it. I had to have more of it.
Magic that I had said goodbye to so long ago had returned to me once more.
Perhaps I could fly again…?
It was a dirty thought, a shameful thought, and one that I was sure was stamped boldly across my face as I struggled to hold Lea's gaze.
"So," said Lea, "the only injured party here, the only wronged party here… is you, Taric. Of all the people of my Hold and of my sept… You alone have been hurt.
"Why, then, do you have toh?"
"I…" I had not expected this, had not looked for this. I could find nothing in her face as my eyes flicked from mouth to hand to eye and back to mouth, nothing to indicate what lay under that implacable facade. "I… have no sept," I denied, pushing back on her nonsensical words, heaving them away. "I have no clan. Those who have woken are beyond societies, beyond clans. Per the teachings of our people, of the Taardad and Goshien and all the Aiel, men who can channel have woken from the Dream in all ways but one, and must go north to seek that last waking."
But I do not want to wake from the Dream! I have so much left to live for, so much left to offer! What I could have accomplished! What I could have built for myself and for my family and for my people!
But I do not wish to harm them either. It would undermine all that I have done and all that I believe in. I will not be a burden nor a parasite.
But… I do not want to die.
"You have much to say," said Lea, "but I do not hear your words, Taric of Cold Rocks Hold, smith of spears and melter of coins. I hear only the words of others on your tongue. Is that all your honor is, the words of others repeated like a child? Speak for yourself, what wrong have you done?"
"I have done nothing!" Her hand was like a stone against my chest, and for all that I loomed above her, I felt like I could not have pushed it away, had I dared to raise a hand against the Wise One.
Amending my claim and lowering my tone when I realized I had all but yelled in Lea's face, I said, "I have wronged Neiralla by breaking faith with her and entering below her roof without permission, I have wronged Garlvan by placing the burden of my work upon his shoulders, and I have wronged Cold Rocks Hold by leaving that work undone, but for all of that, I have inflicted deliberate and lasting harm upon nobody and nothing."
Her cool silence and unblinking, weighing eyes pulled the words from me like new-drawn wire from a die.
"But…" I swallowed, throat thick and clotted, "I fear that if I remain, I will hurt somebody. I have been told that… That channeling brings madness, and that madness brings ruin. That once it has begun, it cannot be halted. That this is the reason that men who can channel go north, to spit into Sightblinder's eye.
"I will not do this. Will not prove a…" parasite "dishonorable guest by inflicting harm upon Cold Rocks Hold. I came under your mother's near-sister's roof as a guest. I will not stay as…"
"You will not stay," agreed Lea, and my heart sank when I heard the stoniness of her voice. Still lovely, but unspeakably solid. Whatever had briefly fluttered in my heart subsided.
"You will not say," Lea repeated, but continued, "because when you said that your affliction could harm those around you, you spoke truly. But, Taric, I ask you this: What toh does one with the fever bear? Do we shun the sick and demand they flee out into the Threefold Land, forever driven from our roof and our hold?"
"No," I answered, remembering the tale of how Jhoran had been woken, in his bed with his wife and his daughter at hand, helped in the search for an honorable way out. "There is no shame in sickness. There is only shame in the refusal to acknowledge affliction or in attempting to spread it to others."
"Finally," and Lea was there, peering out from behind the Wise One wearing her face, "proof that your wits have not fully deserted you, Taric. I am relieved."
"...I do not know what you want to hear from me," I confessed, confused at last by her strange whipsawing attitude. "I… I do not believe that I have done wrong by existing. Not truly. I… I cannot believe that. I have always labored to act in accordance with what I believe to be right. But I cannot overlook what I have learned about myself. It would not be right to do so."
"Do you remember what you told me, when I wondered if I should take up a spear and approach Far Dareis Mai?" asked Lea, and then answered for me, "You said that just by hearing me give voice to the idea, that I did not believe it to truly be my duty. I return those words to you. You know that seeking out Sightblinder to spit in his eye will not bring you ji."
She was correct, but at the same time, she was not.
I was not that honorable.
But, jerk my head as I tried, I could not just nod in mute acquiescence.
I was leaving my friend behind. I would not lie to her now.
"I do not want to die!" I burst out, and now shame washed over me, hot like the water ladled over the heated stones of the bath, wet and sticky and clinging in a manner unlike the scorching heat of the sun. Yet now that it was out, the words spilled fourth unbidden, uncontrolled, like the salt-stinking air rushing up from the fetid south in stormy whips to scourge the Threefold Land. "I am a smith! A maker and mender of things! What is the point of my sacrifice? What could I possibly do to help our people in my waking that thousands of men before me could not accomplish with theirs? I asked not for this power, only for the power of my hands and of my mind to make things that would help our people!"
Panting like a bull, I halted, caught again by pale jade.
"The truth at last, Taric." No give in her voice again, only hard duty. "No words of others, repeated without meaning. But truth at last."
"I…" have toh.
I swallowed the reflexive words, sensing how they would fall flat before her scorn.
As well they should, because… Because I had lost my honor. And without honor, how could one know what was right and what was wrong?
I have become a child again. I have lost mastery of myself.i
That was the cruelest cut, and the one that had lanced me the deepest in this whole benighted scenario. All my skills… All my honed self-control… All my carefully cultivated proficiencies, everything I had built for myself was like so much splintered kindling in the howling, hungering, insatiable flames of this new magic I found myself cursed with! Something that had been deeply buried within me had broken free, and there was nothing I could do to control it, to control myself.
I am broken.
"I… am not the man you think that I am," I said instead, as truthful as I could be, probing for what I could possibly say to mend what I had done. "I was never that man."
The return of my magic had nothing at all to do with that.
"You presume much, Taric of the Chareen Aiel," Lea hissed, angry for the first time in our conversation. "You presume to tell me of my thoughts, what I thought of you, what I saw in you?"
"I have toh," I said automatically, and found to my surprise that I meant it.
Ah, so perhaps I do still have something resembling honor after all.
"When I saw you, I never saw a Spear," said Lea, "nor did I come to your forge looking for one. Do you know what kind of man I saw in you, Taric? What your metal was, perhaps?" The way she emphasized that last sentence made it twist mockingly in my ears. Goading me.
"Yes," I shot back, angry now myself. "What did you see, Lea, daughter of Amys? Did you see a coward, perhaps? Someone unwilling to fulfill their duty?"
As unwilling to fulfill their duty as you?
"I saw someone with a passion to escape the path set before them equal to mine," answered Lea, and effortlessly killed my mounting head of desperate anger. "When I look upon you now, I see that nothing has changed."
"Then… what now?" I asked, lightheaded with emotion and heat. "Here I am, a man who can channel. What can I possibly do, Wise One's daughter, to escape my path?"
What can I do to unchain myself from this damned Wheel?
"You are sick," said Lea, "and this sickness is beyond the knowledge of the Wise Ones. If it could have been healed, it would have been long ago."
Her hand pulled away from my chest, leaving me almost dizzy in its absence, and slipped into the satchel she wore at her waist, strap looped over her opposite shoulder.
It emerged with a book, one whose title I recognized.
Men of Fire, Women of Air.
When I had seen Lea reading from it as she waited by her mother's door for me, I had asked her about its contents, and she had evaded my question.
Now, she pressed it into my chest, holding it in place until I realized what she wanted, and lifted my hands to fold over both the tome, and her hand. Holding both to my chest.
"You are sick," repeated Lea, "but you are of my people. My hold. So, it is my duty to care for you, you fool. What ails you is beyond the Wise Ones, but that does not mean you should flee to despair. It only means that we must seek out a cure from a source wiser than the Wise Ones.
"We must seek out the White Tower, and there, the Aes Sedai."
For a moment, my mind caught on that storybook name, the name of those who our ancestors had served, had supposedly failed. Had, according to the stories, failed so greatly that, even now, a hundred generations later, we atoned for their crimes in the hope that we could one day discharge the massive toh the Aiel labored under.
Then, I heard the rest of her sentence.
"We?" I almost squawked, incredulous. I met her eyes again and found nothing of the Wise One, the totem of carved jade and red sandstone like the mesa below our feet.
I found only green fire, gold-flecked and so thankfully familiar.
"We," confirmed Lea of the Nine Valleys Sept of the Taardad Aiel.