4. Sleep, Interrupted
Astra gets woken up by a surprise visitor...
Escape from Ice Mountain marks the start of an epic tale, one where a middle-aged fish-out-of-water librarian (and necromancer!) navigates love, betrayal, and the complexities of power as she struggles to embrace her destiny and uncover the mysteries of her own origins. Yes, there are dragons too! And also magical dogs. It’s gonna be awesome!
It was, as she knew it would be, a short, chilly night and she was not at all ready to wake up when someone opened her door.
“M'sleeping,” she mumbled as she sat up. It was not proper for someone to sneak into another nun's cell, and those who did usually ended up on a punishment detail at some point, but it was something that happened occasionally from too-tired nuns stumbling into the wrong cell, or very young novitiates desperate for comfort.
“I know. It's only just past second bell,” a male voice said, coming into her cell and closing the door behind him.
“Sibling nun, if this is a joke, I will call on Bu to curse you.” She looked up and stopped. He held a night lantern, just enough oil in it to put his face into high relief against the darkness. “Trazkhor?”
“Hello, Ashtrakur. Miss me?” He smirked at her.
She stared at him in shock for a long moment before she grabbed the small wooden statue of Bu by her bedside and threw it at his head.
“Hey!” He barked out, catching it. “Don’t go throwing the goddess around! Where are your manners?”
Astra hauled herself out of bed and grabbed him by his arms, trying to shake him, although he stood strong as a rock, unmoved.
“Where have you been? Where have you been?” She felt her eyes prick with tears. “We thought you were dead.”
His smile turned soft as he gazed down at her. He was still as tall as she remembered, but the young lanky boy she had known had become a broad, muscular man. She stopped trying to shake him and simply looked at him for a moment. He wore heavy, dark travel clothes, breeches and a tunic with furred boots. His hair was still mostly dark brown, shot through with a few strands of gray, and tied up in a topknot like a Kundish trader. His light brown skin was mostly unmarred by wrinkles aside from slight crow’s feet around his eyes and what was obviously a very old scar running from the inner edge of his right eye down to the bottom of his ear. Astra stared at it in horror, realizing how terrible a wound it must have been.
“I’m not dead,” he said, taking her hands off his shoulders and holding them in his own warm, broad hands.
“Twenty-five years, Traz. Twenty-five years.” She took a deep breath to steady herself, putting one hand on his chest just to feel it rising and falling as he breathed.
He nodded, his regret clear on his face. “I know. Would it make you feel better to know that I never intended to be gone so long?”
“No!” She took a deep breath, but it did not calm her at all. “No word of you! No letter! No mmph!” The last was said against his hand, laying over her mouth.
“Could we not wake up the whole ward? Please?”
Astra slapped his hand away and stepped back. “It would serve you right to get caught by a Ranger after sneaking in here!”
“Like it's hard?” He held out his hands, mischievous grin in place. “It's not as if there is an unsurmountable wall around the monastery. This is one of the most poorly protected places in the whole of the Balashilar Mountains!” He snorted in derision.
“Do not change the subject,” Astra hissed back at him. Her skin was still hot with her anger, tinged with the years of grief she had held in her heart. “Nothing! I have heard nothing from you!” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “You were just gone, Traz!”
He reached out, pulling her into a hug. “I know. I'm sorry, Astra.”
“Why?” She nearly snarled the question she had longed to ask him for so many years.
“I was never meant to live here, to live as a nun. You know that.”
“No, I don't!” She protested against his chest, which was a new sensation as he had been nowhere near that solidly built when he left. He felt heavier, stronger.
He held her away from him and sighed. “Yes, you do.”
She looked up at him. The passing of time had also broadened his face and squared his jaw. “You grew up.”
Then he smirked at her again. “I know.”
Astra shook her head and smacked his chest to push him further away. “Where have you been? Why didn't you write?” She sat down on her bed, finally able to lower her voice as her shock ran out. They both knew she was really asking, ‘why did you leave me?’
Traz sat down and slung a long arm over her shoulders, holding her close to his side for a long, quiet moment as she took a few deep breaths to finish calming herself down. He gave her a squeeze before letting go and placing his hands on his knees.
“I always meant to come back sooner, but… going north, alone and penniless, got me into a few unexpected adventures, and then… well.” He sighed, staring at the wall in front of them. “I never settled down anywhere for long, but it seemed like every time I turned south, I got waylaid.”
“Until now?” She glanced over at him. For a moment his face was overlaid with the fresh-faced boy she had known, but then he smiled with a weight that hinted at a long, hard life. She had seen similar smiles on old traders who came to pray to Bu.
When he didn’t answer, she tried again. “How far north did you go?”
“Past Parthikapum.”
She blinked in disbelief. The distant port city was known for its excesses — of money, of sex, of corruption. It was wealthy beyond all measure, and also unfathomably distant from the monastery. She shoved at his shoulder.
He sat back from her and settled on the bed to face her, leaning in as if sharing a secret, widening his eyes dramatically. “I saw the Witch of Parthikapum!”
“No, you didn’t!”
“I did!”
She glared at him.
“Admittedly, from a great distance.”
“Hmph.” She crossed her arms and turned her head away.
She saw him smile at her again out of the corner of her eyes.
“Still my fussy girl.”
“Not a girl, if you please. Senior Nun.” She squared her shoulders, sitting up straight as one of her stature was supposed to do. He shook his head, smiling as if she had told him temple dogs could fly.
She shifted to face him directly again. “Stop deflecting. You didn’t have to come back, now or ever. We thought you were dead and mourned you as such.” She clasped her hands together tightly to hold back from shaking him again. Few had missed Traz, but she and Zochur had both cried on the one-year anniversary of his departure, assuming the worst.
They had marked it as his death day ever since.
“I’m… I’m sorry.” He folded his hands in his lap, looking down at them, to all appearances genuinely remorseful.
“That does not make up for the heartache you caused.” She let out a deep breath.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“You could have stayed dead, and no one would ever question it,” she said, more harshly than she intended if his flinch was any indication. She refused to feel bad about it, at least for the moment. “Why come back at all?”
“Perhaps I just missed this dank and freezing monastery.” He spoke breezily, but would not look her in the eye.
She raised an eyebrow to express her disbelief.
“Yes, yes, you’re right, I did not miss this place. Much.” He sighed. “I am actually on a mission of some importance. Ah, that makes it sound official… I’m not bound to a lord or anything. It’s more like a personal quest.”
“Here?” She pointed at the floor, a wave of concern washing through her.
“No.” He smiled at her again, soft and fond. “No, nothing to do with Qordashi. But I had to come south and so I thought it was time to make amends with you.” He scooted close again, so they were sitting as they had so many times during the hours and hours of prayer they had suffered as children.
“You could have written.” She frowned and looked away, her emotions continuing to roil deep in her heart. For such an old pain, the scar of it still ached, and the shock of his reappearance was not a healing balm. “At any point in the past twenty-five years, you could have written.”
“I am a terrible person who does not deserve your forgiveness,” he said with a grim smile and puppy-dog eyes.
She huffed and looked away again, gnawing on her bottom lip.
“Astra, for the longest time I wanted to write to you. At first I didn’t because…because I thought it would be cruel, to write to you about my freedom and adventures. It was hard not to send a letter. Then, after a while, I assumed it would be easier for everyone to just forget about me.”
“Easier of us or for you?”
He exhaled heavily.
They sat in silence for a few moments as Astra’s brain tripped over the phrase “Traz is home!” repeatedly, her emotions to confused to parse. Was she happy? Angry? Annoyed?
Probably.
“Oh,” Traz said with an air of distraction. She looked and saw him pick up her mother’s bracelet. “You still have it.” He turned it over in his hands.
“Don’t report me for it,” she said blandly, and he chuckled.
“I would never!” He held it up so the meager light from the night lamp glittered off the amber. “It was your mother’s, right?”
She nodded as he picked up her wrist and draped the bracelet around it, fiddling with the weird clasp until it snapped closed.
Looking down at it, she felt her eyes watering and willed the tears away. “Were you ever coming back?”
He shook his head slowly, staring at her wrist.
The admission pierced her heart and she pulled her hand back, the bracelet jangling lightly in the cold, quiet air. Traz did not move.
“Why are you here, then?”
“I have something to give you.” He sighed and looked up again, but only to stare at the wall.
She thought about it for a moment, but it made no sense. “You could not bring yourself to write me a letter but you travel all this way just to give me something?”
He rolled his eyes and finally looked at her. “You always make me sound like an idiot.”
She rolled her eyes back at him. “Because you are. Haven’t you ever heard of the transcontinental postal service? It runs all the way from the cliffs of Firestate to Bitter Pass!” She poked him in his (now) very muscular chest. “Not even a letter, Traz!”
“I get it! I screwed up!”
“Twenty-five years!”
“I heard you the first time!” He hissed.
There was thump from the hallway, distant and muffled, but it made both of them snap their mouths shut and look at the door. Both of them were expecting Zochur to storm through it to yell at them for being awake, Astra thought with chagrin.
When no more noises were forthcoming from the hallway, Traz turned back to face her.
“Sometimes the winds take people in different directions, Astra. I knew you would never come with me, if I asked.”
She would not have. Her gift…it was far too dangerous to allow outside of the monastery. She had dreamed of running down to the **** river to sail away with Traz, when they were both naïve children. The gods had shifted the winds instead to carry them apart.
She nodded slowly. “I know.” She pulled her robe more tightly around her. “But why did they send you back?”
“They didn’t.” He huffed in annoyance, throwing a look toward the window that overlooked the statue of Bu. “I’ve walking into the head wind every step of the way.”
She frowned at him, but he waved a hand at her before she could ask.
“I… I found something.”
“You found something?” Astra glared at him. “The thing you want to give to me?”
He nodded, then looked around as if a ranger was hiding under the bed, ready to grab him.
“Your fire horn,” he finally said, barely above a whisper.
“What?” She stared at him, trying to process what he had said.
“Your fire horn. The one that came with you? Along with the bracelet.” He motion at her hand.
“My fire horn? But… No. Remember? It went north years ago, when we were kids, to that prince—”
“I know who Dzrezor gave it to,” Traz snapped.
“So you stole it? Traz! He’s a patron of Dzrezor!”
“Why is your first thought that I stole it?” He asked, looking wounded. She smacked his (very solid) shoulder.
“Traz!”
“No, I did not steal it. He traded it… or sold it. I’m not entirely sure.”
“You’re not sure?” Astra did not believe what he said for a second, because for all that he had gone from boy to man over the past twenty-five years, he turned out that he still could not lie to her.
“I found it lying around. I swear I don’t know how it ended up where it did! But I have it now. I found it, took it, and came here.”
“You mean you stole it and came here!”
“I mean, I found it and came here to return it to you!” He huffed and crossed his arms. “It’s yours, and you should have it!”
“And do what with it? If I hang it on the wall, it will be exactly one bell before Dzrezor finds out and comes to confiscate it! Again!”
He rolled his eyes. “You can hide up in one of your caves.”
What he was not saying was loud and clear: the caves, where the bones and shells of long-dead things lived in the rock, and would protect anything that Astra gave them.
She glared at him. He raised an eyebrow in return, and they sat there, staring at each other in a silent show down. Astra finally broke eye contact to really look him over with a critical eye, then at the night lantern sitting on the small table. Traz was wearing dark clothing, too. Like a thief, she thought uncharitably, and added to that the way he sneaked in instead of coming up the main road to the monastery. She narrowed her eyes as she faced him directly once more.
“Where is it?”
He smirked at her. “It's outside of the monastery.”
Astra put a hand over her face, unable to stop herself, because of course he did not come all this way just to hand over what belonged to her to begin with. She wondered how she could have forgotten his love of games, especially the ones where they had to run around the mountain like spooked goats. Some things, it seemed, had not changed at all. She took a deep breath and let it out.
“You know I cannot leave the grounds without special permission.”
He blinked at her innocently. “Just this once?”
“No. You have shown up twenty-five years after you ran away, having never sent word to me that you were even alive, and now you want me to go scampering off somewhere outside of Qordashi? For no reason?”
He shook his head for a moment, then reached out and took her hands in his again, giving them a gentle squeeze. She looked down at their joined hands, taking in the differences. His were still broad and strong, but deeply tanned and showing the passage of time, his skin thick and worn like aged leather. A working man’s hands, not those of a young nun used to scholarly pursuits.
“For one thing, trying to sneak that big damn horn in would have gotten me collared by every ranger in sight of the bells. And secondly…Astra. Ahhh.” He tipped his head up and she saw tears glittering in his eyes. She tightened her own grip on his hands, and he gave her a wane smile in return. “I won’t be coming back this way again. Once we leave, I know for certain it will be our last goodbye.”
She wondered who he meant by “we,” but let it go. “We never got a first goodbye.”
He nodded slowly. “And I have regretted that ever since.” He took a deep breath, steading himself and plastering on a smile. “If this is the last time we see each other in this life, then give me a chance to say and I’m sorry, and to say goodbye properly. The way I should have done before, instead of stealing out in the night like a coward. I want to live the rest of my life knowing that you don’t hate me.” He looked at her, and she could see the regret in his eyes.
“I don’t hate you,” she said gently, shuffling closer to him.
His smile turned softer and more genuine. He picked up her hand and tenderly kissed the back of it. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”
She nodded.
Oooh. (Also, he “found” it, right?)