A Haven in Ash Read online

  Out of the assembly hall, Jasen squinted slightly. The sky was still overcast, but even so the mid-afternoon light was almost blinding after the dark hall. The air was fresh again, although the scent of perfumed candles seemed to have caught somewhere deep in Jasen’s chest, and a whiff of it lingered. He coughed, trying to loose it.

  Alixa harrumphed. “Cover your mouth, you animal.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Typical.” She rolled her eyes, much like Eounice had, an exaggerated motion that seemed to fill her whole being. “You don’t do anything properly, do you?” It was an insult rather than a question; she turned her nose up accusingly.

  “Not covering my mouth when I cough …?”

  “Crossing the boundary!” Alixa exploded.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s just like Mr. Smithson said. We’ve been told since we could walk—since we were born—not to cross over. And you did it anyway!”

  “Tery was out there!” Jasen said, voice growing louder.

  But Alixa went on as if she didn’t hear him. “I knew I shouldn’t have gone out with you today. You’ve been trying to trample that tradition for as long as we’ve been friends—longer, even, because I remember you talking about it before Pityr went.”

  “I was joking!”

  “Were you?” She rounded on him, and Jasen stopped dead in his tracks to meet the fire in her eyes head on. “It seems you’ve been looking for excuses to go out of Terreas, as if you forget there are scourge out there.”

  “I don’t forget about them,” Jasen bit back. “Ever. That’s exactly why I jumped over the wall this morning. Tery was out there—did the smell of that bloody place addle your brains, or did you forget the scourge that chased after us when I got him? That wrinkly grey thing with the black eyes—remember? The beast that would have eaten Tery if I hadn’t gone out there to save him?”

  They were drawing a fresh round of stares now. They’d stopped just shy of the shoe-mender’s, where fragile Mr. Timmons was working outside, sitting on the stoop. The shoe he’d been working was forgotten in his hands, and he stared open-mouthed at the two arguing teenagers. Two doors down, the baker, Mr. Hughes, had stuck his head out to see what the commotion was all about.

  Alixa seethed. “It’s not safe out there.”

  “No, it’s not,” Jasen said, and he worked to keep his voice low again, to encourage this slice of Terreas to just stop watching. “That’s why I went.” And he set off at a march again, not much caring whether Alixa followed or not.

  She did come, hurrying her legs to fall into step at his side.

  “That was horrible,” she started.

  Jasen gritted his teeth. Here she went again. “And there I was thinking you’d enjoy a run-in with the Matron of the Assembly.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Alixa said. “Although it was horrible, thank you very much. I mean breaking the tradition.”

  “What’s the problem? It’s not like you did it. Everyone in there heard that.”

  “It’s still not right, Jasen,” she snapped. “My mother was disappointed. I could see it in her eyes.” She shook her head, idly fingering her hair. “You know what that feels like?”

  “My father was disappointed too.” Or just angry. Although, with parents, wasn’t that more or less the same thing?

  “It felt like a hot poker to my very soul,” Alixa finished dramatically.

  Jasen pursed his lips. Not that he didn’t understand the feeling, but the description was much too poetic for Alixa. For all her complaints about Sidyera, Alixa had begun to mimic some of the crone’s flamboyant turns of phrase just lately. Jasen said nothing, but filed away the growing resemblance should he need to break it out sometime Alixa’s castigation got out of hand.

  “We oughtn’t to have gone,” Alixa said. And then: “I oughtn’t to have agreed.”

  “We went. And in doing so, we were able to save Tery’s life.”

  Alixa made a noise of discontent.

  “Don’t act like that. Come on.” It was Jasen’s turn to round on her, and now he found he suddenly didn’t care about the passers-by whose eyes would inevitably turn to them. “You’re so full of disapproval and dead set on propriety. What’s your alternative? Should I have left Tery out there to die?”

  “No,” Alixa answered, sounding put out.

  “So why are you so down in the mouth?” Why was everyone, himself included? “Why can’t you accept this for the good thing it is, instead of chastising me at every turn? Don’t you think I got enough of it back there from Smithson?”

  Alixa groped for a response. Finally, she burst out, “It’s just wrong, okay? I’m glad Tery is all right, but—but it doesn’t mean I feel it’s okay to scorn our traditions like that! Both of you made a mistake today in crossing that wall—”

  “It was a mistake to go out and save him?”

  “It’s—yes,” she said. “It’s not wrong to have saved him. But it’s … you shouldn’t have … the tradition … it’s not right to just—”

  “Fine,” Jasen said, holding up a hand. “Done with it.” And once again he stalked away, a little self-conscious after all under the gaze of a middle-aged woman who peered at him as he passed.

  He’d hoped Alixa would take that as her cue to go … but very soon her hurried footsteps followed, and she was once again at his elbow, marching to keep up.

  “It’s difficult,” she ceded.

  “Sounds like you find admitting that painful.”

  “I do,” she said. “I struggle with it. It’s not just black and white now.”

  “What a shame.”

  “I like black and white, Jasen.”

  They lapsed into silence for some time.

  Only when the outskirts of Terreas approached, where the Weltan home was positioned, Jasen’s another half-mile north, did Alixa break their quiet.

  “Baraghosa is coming.”

  Her words were low.

  Jasen suppressed another shiver.

  After a moment … “Maybe Pityr will be back with him?” Alixa said hopefully.

  Pityr—boyish-faced, dark-haired, tall and slightly doughy round the middle in spite of the ceaseless energy pouring from him. Jasen had been friends with him since he was barely old enough to walk. Alixa had been his friend too, and it was really through Pityr that the cousins had come to be as close as they were.

  He’d be sixteen now.

  Jasen missed him.

  Alixa’s question hung in the air, hopeful: Maybe Pityr will be back with him?

  Jasen shook his head. “He won’t be.”

  And again they fell into quiet.

  The Weltan house came into view, set back from the path, a small walkway of cobblestones set into the earth winding to the door. Margaut had turned the front garden into a miniature spot of farmland. Summer squashes lined one plot, then sprouting heads that might belong to carrots, and finally a row of runner beans. The opposite plot, on the other side of the path, was bushy and low: fruit, just now budding. Those flowers would turn into fat little strawberries, and take much too long in doing so.

  “I’ve weaving lessons with Aunt Sidyera,” Alixa said. “See you.” And she ran off, leaving Jasen dawdling by the path.

  After she’d gone in, he huffed and kicked a stone. “What am I going to do then?” he muttered to himself.

  Maybe home was best. His father would be done with assembly meetings before long. He’d probably hope to catch Jasen and deliver this latest in a long line of reprimands. And much as Jasen longed to avoid it, it was like removing a thorn or a sliver of wood from the sensitive home it had made in skin: the quicker it was done, the better. So he ambled home, hands in pockets, kicking a clod of earth until it disintegrated.

  Jasen’s home, in comparison to Alixa’s, was smaller. It had once held three, now just two, and neither of its occupants seemed to make great effort to fill it. Outwardly much like any of the other homes in Terreas—wood and stone and thatched roof—the warmth i
n it seemed to have evaporated. Same with the light. No matter how wide the shutters were thrown, or how far the curtains were pulled back, no matter if every lamp was turned on in the place, and the fire roaring in the hearth—it never seemed bright. Just dark and dingy and sad.

  Jasen stopped by the path to scrutinize it.

  Home.

  Didn’t feel like much of one. And today less than ever.

  He breathed a sigh, kicked loose a new clod of dirt and sent it careening away with the side of his foot—anything to avoid going inside, and waiting—and meandered to the door.

  As he was about to push it open, his father called, “Jasen!”

  He looked back.

  His father came up the way. Still looking hard, as he had done since … well, for a long time. But there was less rage in his face now.

  “Father,” Jasen greeted.

  “Is Alixa at home?”

  Jasen nodded. “Probably weaving with Sidyera, being bored to death.”

  A curt nod was all his father gave.

  At the stoop too now, he stopped and looked Jasen over—properly, as if seeing him for the first time.

  Jasen wondered what he saw. An echo of himself? Not quite; Jasen’s father was taller, though Jasen was promised he’d grow to the same stature. Adem Rabinn had muscle too, though, and Jasen didn’t have a lot of that. Nor did he have the same dark hair, unruly and awkward to tame. He’d inherited his mother’s copper curls, and softer features to match. None of that hardness lived in Jasen. In Adem it had taken root, sending those tendrils deep, like a tree’s, too deep to be chopped out.

  Was he disappointed in him?

  If he was, Jasen couldn’t read it. Couldn’t read anything from his father. He was closed, shut tight.

  “In you go,” his father said at last.

  Jasen obeyed, in dread already.

  Inside, the house was plain. Except for aging furniture, a battered table, and a row of wooden trinkets on the mantel, the main room was mostly bare, same as the rest of the house. The only real feature it had, that made it theirs, was a musty scent that they’d never been able to rid it of.

  His mother’s things had been squirreled away, and even those had been reduced to a handful of keepsakes.

  “Sit,” his father said, and took up his usual armchair.

  Jasen lowered into his seat. It was hard, difficult to sit on for long without a cramp driving down his leg from his backside.

  And he waited.

  Adem crossed one leg over the other. He laid a hand upon it, just staring at his knuckles for a long time.

  At last, he breathed a sigh, and met his son’s look.

  “Being a councilman is … difficult,” he started.

  Jasen carried on waiting. He’d not interrupt his father—not now, not ever, if he could help it.

  “We have to make tough decisions,” Adem went on, slow, a trifle stilted. “That is our job. It’s not an easy one, and some people don’t see us as being very fair. But we try our best to be balanced, and make the choices we do as decently as possible, using all the information—objectively, and properly.”

  Jasen didn’t say anything.

  Adem ran his thumb and fingers across opposite cheeks, downward from under his eyes, meeting together just below his bottom lip, which he gently pinched. It was his thinking face, one of the few parts of his father that Jasen could read.

  “Take Baraghosa, for example,” Adem said. “I am in favor of our dealings with him. But many others are not. And can you blame them? It is a devil’s bargain … yet necessary to keep our village safe.”

  His eyebrows wrinkled at that, and he appeared to think to himself for a few moments.

  “Anyway. In spite of what I’d like, we have to take account of the world as it is, not how we’d like to see it. If we set foot beyond Terreas, the scourge will descend upon us. So,” he sighed, “it is better to make our trade with Baraghosa; let him bring the seed, and make the exchange we have made for so long.”

  There were so many questions that Jasen wanted to ask. The most pressing burned the back of his throat, threatening at the end of his tongue:

  But what of the price?

  He kept his mouth shut, and so for another day those questions would go unanswered; for Adem certainly had none, and this story, in this musty little room that was almost as dull as the assembly hall, had nothing to do with any of those things, Jasen sensed.

  “The point I’m making,” Adem said, “is that we have to look at the world as it really is. Not as we’d like to see it. Like you.” He leaned forward. “You wish for adventure. I know you do, Jasen,” he said, as though Jasen had been about to speak, though he had not been. “I hear word around the village. You’ve long had a wish to leave this place and rove beyond. Today, you clutched at that. Just the barest sliver of it, but you did.

  “You cannot clutch at it again. For your sake, and for the sake of all of us. You did a good thing by saving the Malori boy, whatever Smithson says. But do not chance beyond the boundary again. You might think there is a life of adventure out there, a world to uncover—but there is not one. Only danger. The scourge infest these lands, and if one should gets it teeth around you … that’s the end of your tapestry, Jasen—out there, alone, knowing in your last moments that you were wrong.

  “Rules exist for a good reason, son. I’d like for you to continue following them.”

  That was that; Adem’s tone said as much. So Jasen nodded solemnly, pulling his lips up in a brief ghost of a smile.

  Adem rose. “I’ve got to go back to the assembly hall. You be good today and stick to the village, you hear?”

  Another nod.

  Adem granted Jasen a pat on the shoulder. Then through the door he went, and was gone.

  For a long time, Jasen sat, and pondered the future.

  No adventure out there. Not for him. Not for anyone, with the land so filled with scourge.

  So what lay in store for him? What future did he have? He had no skill; unlike most of the children in the village, he had no apprenticeship. The Rabinns had no land to farm. There was no store for him to mind. His father was an assemblyman, a position he would inhabit for a long, long time, one that Jasen might inherit only when he was old himself.

  What did Jasen have to point toward? To look forward to?

  Most pertinent of all, and the one question for which Jasen could not find an answer, had never been able to, no matter how his mind went around and around—

  Where in this world did he belong?

  4

  Moping could only last a person so long before they tired of it, and today Jasen tired of it much sooner than usual. Still, midday was long past by the time he left the house again, and the afternoon hours were piling up like logs beside a chopping block.

  The first breath outside was still tainted with a stale tang. Mustiness clung to him. It always did, in Terreas. The freshest air he had ever breathed was beside the boundary wall … at least until the sickening rot of scourge came to linger in the air.

  He could return to Alixa’s, busying himself in the herb garden, or perhaps the vineyard. Those pungent smells would mask the scent on him easily enough. But Alixa was still weaving, and should he show up and Sidyera catch a glimpse of him loitering through the window, he had no doubt that she would try to ensnare him too. Once in a thousand times, when he felt particularly bored and listless, he would allow her to do so. Today, having been lectured more than enough for the year, he decided the Weltan place was not where he wanted to be.

  He idly tracked up the path. Toward Terreas’s outskirts, his house was perched toward the edge of the gentle slope that angled down and away from the clustered village buildings. Other houses and pathways were laid out beyond, but the descending earth gave him a long view out to the mountains and the wide stretch of land that stretched to the boundary.

  Another time, he might have wandered down by himself, spending the afternoon stalking back and forth beside the perimeter.
But this afternoon he couldn’t even stand to look out there, to search for scourge around the base of the mountains now the sun had turned the mist to only a faint wisp. Nor did he want to fall back the way he always did, whiling the day away by constructing stories about the adventures that lay beyond. Why bother? It was just childish hope anyway. Nothing but scourge out there by the thousands, roaming this defiled land.

  Folly. All that filled his head was folly.

  He thought, You’ll be lucky if you don’t get shunned.

  He pursed his lips at that … and then a thought struck him, and he turned on his heel and headed in the other direction.

  Terreas faded, houses quickly becoming fewer. The ones out on the edges were like Jasen’s: small and pokey. But they had a wide swath of land around them—would do, of course, until eventually new ones were erected—and Jasen thought they were probably fine enough places to eke out a life. Perhaps a mite lonely; these paths were rarely trodden. The village children didn’t come out here very much … As the house Jasen headed toward came into view from behind a straggly-looking tree, he thought he knew why this part of Terreas was ignored.

  Shilara Gressom. Her house was little more than a box, and a rundown one at that. The wood was going rotten, great chunks of it missing in places. The thatch roof was tatty, looking like Jasen’s hair did when he woke up after a particularly poor night’s sleep. If she had ever cleaned the windows it had been well before Jasen was born, because they were all misted with dirt, and alive with cobwebs. Jasen had never seen inside, but he had no reason to think it was in any way different from the exterior.

  There was no properly demarcated yard, because why bother when the next buildings were some two hundred feet to east and west? Gressom’s plot was clear enough though, because littered amongst the unruly grass were relics of war: shields, spears, a log on its side with a row of daggers embedded along its length.

  To Terreas’s teenaged boys, these objects should be fascinating. Yet no one came to see—for these were Shilara Gressom’s things, and few were those who wished to fraternize with the village outcast.