The Pillars of Creation Read online

  Jennsen pressed her hand against Sebastian’s forehead. It confirmed her fears. “You’re burning with fever.”

  “We’re done, now. I can rest more easily, not having to worry that soldiers will be rousting me out of my bedroll to ask me questions at the point of a sword.”

  She wondered where he was going to sleep. The drizzle was thickening. She expected it would soon be raining. Given the persistence of the darkening clouds, once it started it would likely rain the whole night. Cold rain soaking him to the skin would only further inflame his fever. Such a winter rain could easily kill someone who lacked proper shelter.

  She watched as Sebastian strapped the weapons belt around his waist. He didn’t place the axe at the small of his back the way the soldier had worn it, but rather positioned it at his right hip. After testing its edge and finding it satisfactory, he fastened the short sword to the left side of the belt. Both weapons were placed so as to come readily to hand.

  When he’d finished he flipped his heavy green cloak closed over it all. He seemed again a simple traveler. She suspected he was more. He had his secrets. He wore them casually, almost in the open. She wore hers uneasily, and held close.

  He handled the sword with the kind of smooth ease that came only with long acquaintance. She knew because she handled a knife with effortless grace, and such proficiency had come only with experience and continual practice. Some mothers taught their daughters to sew and cook. Jennsen’s mother didn’t think sewing would save her daughter. Not that a knife would, either, but it was better protection than needle and thread.

  Sebastian lifted the dead man’s pack and threw back the flap. “We’ll divide the supplies. Do you want the pack?”

  “You should keep the supplies and the pack,” Jennsen said as she retrieved her stringer of fish.

  He agreed with a nod. He appraised the sky as he cinched the pack closed. “I’d best be on my way, then.”

  “Where?”

  His weary eyelids blinked at the question. “No place special. Traveling. I guess I’ll walk for a while and then I suppose I’d better try to find some shelter.”

  “Rain is coming,” she said. “It doesn’t take a prophet to tell that.”

  He smiled. “Guess not.” His eyes bore the prospect of what lay ahead with resigned acceptance. He swiped his hand back over his wet spikes of white hair, then pulled up his hood. “Well, take care of yourself, Jennsen Daggett. Give my best to your mother. She raised a lovely daughter.”

  Jennsen smiled and acknowledged his words with a single nod. She stood facing the damp wind as she watched him turn and start off across the flat expanse of gravel. Craggy rock walls rose up all around, their snow-crusted shoulders disappearing into the low gray overcast that concealed the bulk of the mountains and the nearly endless range of high peaks.

  It seemed so funny, so freakish, so futile that in all this vast country their paths should cross so briefly, at that instant in time, for such a tragic moment as one life ended, and then that they would both go off again into that infinite oblivion of life.

  Jennsen’s heart pounded in her ears as she listened to his footsteps crunching across the jagged gravel, watched his long strides carrying him away. With a sense of urgency, she debated what she should do. Was she always to turn away from people? To hide?

  Was she always to forfeit even small snatches of what it was to live life because of a crime she did not commit? Dare she risk this?

  She knew what her mother would say. But her mother loved her dearly, and so would not say it out of cruelty.

  “Sebastian?” He looked back over his shoulder, waiting for her to speak. “If you don’t have shelter, you may not live to see tomorrow. I wouldn’t like it if I knew you were out here with a fever getting soaked to the skin.”

  He stood watching her, the drizzle drifting between them.

  “I wouldn’t like that, either. I’ll mind your words and do my best to find some shelter.”

  Before he could turn away again, she lifted her hand, gesturing off in the other direction. She saw that her fingers were trembling. “You could come home with me.”

  “Would your mother mind?”

  Her mother would be in a panic. Her mother would never allow a stranger, despite what help he had been, to sleep in the house. Her mother wouldn’t sleep a wink all night with a stranger anywhere near. But if Sebastian stayed out with a fever he could die. Jennsen’s mother would not wish that on this man. Her mother had a kind heart. That loving concern, not malice, was the reason she was so protective of Jennsen.

  “The house is small, but there’s room in the cave where we keep the animals. If you wouldn’t mind, you could sleep there. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ve slept there myself, on occasion, when the house felt too confining. I’d make you a fire near the entrance. You’d be warm and could get the rest you need.”

  He looked reluctant. Jennsen held up her stringer of fish.

  “We could feed you,” she said, sweetening the offer. “You would at least have a good meal along with a warm rest. I think you need both. You helped me. Let me help you?”

  His smile, one of gratitude, returned. “You’re a kind woman, Jennsen. If your mother will allow it, I will accept your offer.”

  She lifted her cloak open, displaying the fine knife in its sheath, which she had tucked behind her belt. “We’ll offer her the knife. She will value it.”

  His smile, warm and suddenly lighthearted with amusement, was as pleasant a smile as Jennsen had ever seen.

  “I don’t think two knife-wielding women need lose any sleep over a stranger with a fever.”

  That was Jennsen’s thought, but she didn’t admit it. She hoped her mother would see it that way, too.

  “It’s settled then. Come along before the rain catches us out.”

  Sebastian trotted to catch up with her as she started out. She lifted the pack from his hand and shouldered it. With his own pack, and his new weapons, he had enough to carry in his weakened condition.

  Chapter 4

  “Wait here,” Jennsen said in a low voice. “I’ll go tell her that we have a guest.”

  Sebastian dropped heavily onto a low projection of rock that made a convenient seat. “You just tell her what I said, that I’ll understand if she doesn’t want a stranger spending the night at your place. I know it wouldn’t be an unreasonable fear.”

  Jennsen considered him with a calm and somber demeanor.

  “My mother and I have reason not to fear a visitor.”

  She was not alluding to common weapons, and by her tone he knew it. For the first time since she had met him, she saw a spark of uncertainty in Sebastian’s steady blue eyes—a shadow of uneasiness not elicited by her expertise with a knife.

  A hint of a smile came in turn to Jennsen’s lips as she watched him considering what manner of dark danger she might represent. “Don’t worry. Only those bringing trouble would have cause to fear being here.”

  He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Then I’m as safe as a babe in his mother’s arms.”

  Jennsen left Sebastian to wait on the rock while she made her way up the winding path, through sheltering spruce, using twisted roots as steps up, toward her house set back in a clutch of oak on a small shelf in the side of a mountain. The flat patch of grassy ground was, on a better day, a sunny open spot among the towering old trees. There was room enough to yard their goat along with some ducks and chickens. Steep rock to the back prevented any visitors happening upon them from that direction. Only the path up the front provided an approach.

  Should they be threatened, Jennsen and her mother had constructed a well-hidden set of footholds up the back, to a narrow ledge, and out a twisting side way via deer paths that would take them through a ravine and away. The escape route was nearly inaccessible as a way in unless you knew the precise course through the maze of rock walls, fissures, and narrow ledges, and even then they had made certain that key passages were well hidden by strategi
cally placing deadwood and brush they’d planted.

  Ever since Jennsen was young they had moved often, never staying in one place too long. Here, though, where they felt safe, they had stayed for over two years. Travelers had never discovered their mountain hideaway, as sometimes had happened in other places they had stayed, and the people in Briarton, the nearest town, never ventured this far into such a dark and forbidding wood.

  The seldom-used trail around the lake, from where the soldier had fallen, was as close as any trail came to them. Jennsen and her mother had gone into Briarton only once. It was unlikely that anyone even knew they were living out in the vast trackless mountains far from any farmland or city. Except for the chance encounter with Sebastian down closer to the lake, they’d never seen anyone near their place. This was the most secure spot she and her mother had ever had, and so Jennsen had dared to begin to think of it as home.

  Since she was six, Jennsen had been hunted. As careful as her mother always was, several times they had come frighteningly close to being snared. He was no ordinary man, the one who hunted her; he was not bound by ordinary means of searching. For all Jennsen knew, the owl watching her from a high limb as she made her way up the rocky path could be his eyes watching her.

  Just as Jennsen reached the house, she met her mother, throwing her cloak around her shoulders as she came out the door. She was the same height as Jennsen, with the same thick hair to just past her shoulders but more auburn than red. She was not yet thirty-five, and the prettiest woman Jennsen had ever seen, with a figure the Creator Himself would marvel at. In different circumstances, her mother’s life would have been one of countless suitors, some, no doubt, willing to offer a king’s ransom for her hand. Her mother’s heart, though, was as loving and beautiful as her face, and she had given up everything to protect her daughter.

  When Jennsen sometimes felt sorry for herself, for the normal things in life that she couldn’t have, she would then think of her mother, who had willingly given up all those same things and more for the sake of her daughter. Her mother was as close as it came to a guardian spirit in the flesh.

  “Jennsen!” Her mother rushed to her and seized her shoulders. “Oh, Jenn, I was starting to worry so. Where have you been? I was just coming to look for you. I thought you must have had some trouble and I was—”

  “I did, Mother,” Jennsen confided.

  Her mother paused only momentarily; then, without further question, she embraced Jennsen in protective arms. After such a frightening day, Jennsen openly welcomed the balm of her mother’s hug. Finally, with a comforting arm encircling Jennsen’s shoulders, her mother urged her toward the door.

  “Come inside and get yourself dry. I see you have quite the catch. We’ll have a good dinner and you can tell me…”

  Jennsen was dragging her feet. “Mother, I have someone with me.”

  Her mother halted, suddenly searching her daughter’s face for any outward sign of the nature and depth of the trouble. “What do you mean? Who would you have with you?”

  Jennsen flicked a hand back toward the path. “He’s waiting down there. I told him to wait. I told him I’d ask you if he could sleep in the cave with the animals—”

  “What? Stay here? Jenn, what were you thinking? We can’t—”

  “Mother, please;, listen to me. Something terrible happened today. Sebastian—”

  “Sebastian?”

  Jennsen nodded. “The man I brought with me. Sebastian helped me. I came across a soldier who fell from the path—the high trail around the lake.”

  Her mother’s face went ashen. She said nothing.

  Jennsen took a calming breath and started again. “I found a D’Haran soldier dead in the gorge below the high trail. There were no other tracks—I looked. He was an extraordinarily big soldier, and he was heavily armed. Battle-axe, sword at his hip, sword strapped over his shoulder.”

  Her mother canted her head with an admonishing expression. “What aren’t you telling me, Jenn?”

  Jennsen wanted to hold it back until she explained Sebastian, first, but her mother could read it in her eyes, hear it in her voice. The terrible threat of that piece of paper with the two words on it seemed almost to be screaming its presence from her pocket.

  “Mother, please, let me tell it my way?”

  Her mother cupped a hand to the side of Jennsen’s face. “Tell me, then. Your way, if you must.”

  “I was searching the soldier, looking for anything important. And I found something. But then, this man, a traveler, came upon me. I’m sorry, Mother, I was frightened by the soldier being there and by what I found and I wasn’t paying attention as I should have. I know I behaved foolishly.”

  Her mother smiled. “No, baby, we all have lapses. None of us can be perfect. We all sometimes make mistakes. That doesn’t make you foolish. Don’t say that about yourself.”

  “Well I felt foolish when he said something and I turned around and there he was. I had my knife out, though.” Her mother was nodding with a smile of approval. “He saw then that the man had fallen to his death. He—Sebastian, that’s his name—he said that if we just left him there, then, more likely than not, other soldiers would find him and start questioning us all and maybe blame us for their fellow soldier being dead.”

  “This man, Sebastian, sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.”

  “I thought so, too. I had intended to cover the dead soldier, to try to hide him, but he was big—I could never have dragged him over to a cranny by myself. Sebastian offered to help me bury the body. Together we were able to drag him over and roll him into a deep split in the rock. We covered him over good. Sebastian put some heavy rocks atop the gravel I scooped in. No one will find him.”

  Her mother looked more relieved. “That was wise.”

  “Before we buried him, Sebastian thought we should take anything valuable, rather than let it go to waste in the ground.”

  One eyebrow arched. “Did he, now?”

  Jennsen nodded. She pulled the money from her pocket, the pocket that didn’t have the piece of paper in it. She dumped all the money in her mother’s hand.

  “Sebastian insisted that I take it all. There’s gold marks there. He didn’t want any for himself.”

  Her mother took in the fortune in her hand, then glanced briefly to the trail where Sebastian waited. She leaned closer.

  “Jenn, if he came with you, then perhaps he thinks he can have the money back at any time of his choosing. That would give him the opportunity to look generous and win your trust—and still be near enough to end up with the money when he chooses.”

  “I considered that, too.”

  Her mother’s tone softened sympathetically. “Jenn, it’s not your fault—I’ve kept you so sheltered—but you just don’t know how men can be.”

  Jennsen let her gaze drop from her mother’s knowing eyes. “I suppose it could be true, but I don’t think so.”

  “And why not?”

  Jennsen looked back up, more intently, this time. “He has a fever, Mother. He’s not well. He was leaving, without asking to come with me at all. He bid me a good-bye. As tired and feverish as he is, I feared he’d die out in the rain tonight. I stopped him, told him that if it was all right with you he could sleep in the cave with the animals where he could at least be dry and warm.”

  After a moment of silence, Jennsen added, “He said that if you don’t want a stranger near, he will understand and be on his way.”

  “Did he? Well, Jenn, this man is either very honest, or very clever.” She fixed Jennsen with an intent look. “Which do you think it is, hmm?”

  Jennsen twined her fingers together. “I don’t know, Mother. I honestly don’t. I wondered the same things as you—I really did.”

  She remembered, then. “He said that he wanted you to have this, so you wouldn’t have to fear a stranger sleeping nearby.”

  Jennsen drew the knife in its sheath from behind her belt and held it out to her mother. The silver h
andle gleamed in the dim yellow light coming from the small window behind her mother.

  Staring in astonishment, her mother slowly lifted the weapon in both hands as she whispered, “Dear spirits…”

  “I know,” Jennsen said. “I nearly yelped in fright when I saw it. Sebastian said that this was a fine weapon, too fine to bury, and he wanted me to keep it. He kept the soldier’s short sword and axe for himself. I told him I would give this to you. He said that he hoped it would help you feel safe.”

  Her mother slowly shook her head. “This does not make me feel safe at all—knowing that a man carrying this was near us. Jenn, I don’t like that one bit. Not one bit.”

  Her mother’s eyes showed that she was on to worries bigger than the man Jennsen had brought home with her.

  “Mother, Sebastian is sick. Can he stay in the cave? I led him to believe that he has more to fear from us than we from him.”

  Her mother glanced up with a sly smile. “Good girl.” They both knew that in order to survive they had to work as a team, with well-practiced roles they fell into without the need for formal discussion.

  She let out a sigh, then, as if with the burden of knowing all the things her daughter was missing in life. She ran a hand tenderly down Jennsen’s hair, letting it come to rest on her shoulder.

  “All right, baby,” she said at last, “we’ll let him stay the night.”

  “And feed him. I told him he would have a hot meal for helping me.”

  Her mother’s warm smile widened. “And a meal, then.”

  She drew the blade from its sheath, finally. She gave it a critical appraisal, turning it this way and that, inspecting its design. She tested the edge, and then the weight. She spun it between her slender fingers to get the feel of it, the balance.