2
Sharina led the last of the four coach horses back from the stream where she'd watered them. Meder sat looking at the campfire; Asera was arranging a blanket into a bed for herself under the coach. Privations hadn't changed the procurator, but she bent with the wind when she had to.
"Where's Nonnus?" Sharina asked. They'd come about five miles south of Gonalia. The road was good by any standards a girl from Barca's Hamlet could apply—a firm bed and no ruts deeper than the axles of the coach—but there was no reason to risk driving in darkness once they'd gotten beyond the immediate vicinity of the castle.
Meder turned and looked at her. The fire behind him hid his features; he didn't speak.
"He went into the woods," Asera said. She pointed in a general direction across the road from where the coach stood. "Not long ago. Not too long."
Sharina set the hobbles on the horse. It and its fellows whickered to one another. They were used to stalls at coaching stations. They spent most of their lives either enclosed or harnessed, and they weren't sure they liked this new practice.
The recent rain had brought out the frogs and toads. They weren't the species Sharina knew from Haft. Their cries, particularly the tuneless scream of one of the toads, wore on her temper. She walked into the woods with the coachwhip, using its long butt as a feeler in the dark.
Sharina didn't have a right to be angry at Asera and Meder for being what they were. She was frightened and far from home, but they were as much out of their depth as she was.
She eased her way past a thicket of cedar saplings too dense to push through. Charity doesn't come easily when you're alone in the dark.
"This way, child," Nonnus said from nearby. He stood at the base of a conifer at least ten feet in diameter.
"I just wanted to see..." Sharina said. "I wanted to see that you're all right."
He laughed. "Oh, yes," he said. "I was praying."
Another giant tree had fallen within the past year, smashing a two-hundred-foot hole through the forest. The saplings springing up to fill the gap hadn't yet closed the sky overhead. Starlight showed the hermit's face and the features of the clearing.
Nonnus had shaped the bark at the conifer's base into an image of the Lady. He'd used no more than six quick strokes, but even a stranger would have identified the figure at once. He was an artist with the blade.
His belt and Pewle knife hung from the branch of a larch ten feet back from where he'd been kneeling before the image. The javelin leaned against the same sapling, its fluted blade gleaming in the starlight.
"I had to get away from them," Sharina admitted in a low voice. "I wanted to..."
Her features hardened as she allowed them to show what she really felt. "Nonnus," she said, "he shouldn't be alive. His blood magic makes me sick. I'd rather die than be touched by it! You didn't see what happened to Callin and the guards."
The hermit smiled faintly. "No," he said, "I didn't see that."
He looked at her. His face had its usual wooden calm. The only times Sharina had seen any other expression there was when Nonnus held the knife and there was blood on its blade.
"Dead is dead, child," Nonnus said softly. "How one man killed another doesn't matter to the dead man and it doesn't matter to the Lady. I'm not the one to object to the way another fellow does his work."
"Nonnus, he's not human anymore!" she said. She wanted to cry. "I'm not sure he ever was."
"Don't say that!" the hermit ordered. More gently he went on, "Child, don't ever let yourself think that somebody isn't human because you don't like what he does or what he wears or how he prays. Don't ever do that, because if you do you'll find yourself doing things that you'll never be able to forgive. Or forget."
Sharina knelt because her knees were wobbling. She laid her head in her hands and began to cry. Nonnus squatted beside her and put the tips of two fingers on her shoulder.
"Why somebody died and you lived isn't a question for you, child," he said. "It's in the Lady's hands. We have to believe that."
"I hate what he did," Sharina said. Her sobs faded to gulping; she got her voice under control again. "Nonnus, he says he did it for me and I believe him!"
"Yes, I believe him too," Nonnus said. He put his fingers under her chin with a gentle pressure so that she met his eyes.
"I killed the men upstairs," he said. "I didn't take any chances: they had to be dead for you to be safe, so I killed them."
Sharina looked into the hermit's face, wondering what he saw when he looked at her. "If you killed them for me," she said, "then their blood isn't on your hands."
Nonnus said nothing.
Sharina drew the dagger from beneath her sash and walked to the trunk of the fallen tree. She stabbed the point deep enough in the thick bark to hold; she didn't have a belt and sheath to hang the weapon by, out of the way.
She turned, knelt before the image of the Lady, and began to pray for the souls of the enemies who had died that she might live. After a moment, Nonnus knelt beside her.