The TwiceBorn

Everything You Once Were

          "What if everything we have adds up to nothing?"--Indigo Girls

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Gre slouched down in his saddle and fell silent. With a sick realization, he now knew Behrin's plan had worked. Aubery had served his purpose, making her as docile as a dog on a rope, and she'd go to Behrin. Maybe not gladly, or willingly, but indifferently. All fire extinguished and the days nothing more than a succession of breath and the slow movement of the seasons as time passed on by.

Gre looked out over the fields and remembered seeing her and The Twiceborn together. A vision reared up out of the mossy fingers of his dreams on the nights the ale didn't work. The two of them by the basin, black hair intertwined with blond, skin on skin, and both laughing. And he'd tried hard to forget what he'd seen. He'd tried to drink it away, tried to think it away, even tried to engage Aubery in enough conversation to take the image down a notch from occupying such a prominent part of his thoughts and relegating it a bit lower on his ale-fogged list of priorities but nothing had worked.

And the image never faded. The clarity of it was always blade-sharp, as nightmares and the sense of being wrong usually are. And when he envisioned it, everything else faded.  He could hear the quiet chuckle of the stream they were by, and he was aware they were laying on bank-grass but all of that was hazy when compared to just the two of them. And the way they looked at each other.

Sometimes he wished it had been a flash show. For once, he wanted Aubery to be right. He wanted to be able to sneer and be honestly disgusted by it all, if not on a physical level, at least on a spiritual one.

What her and that bitch were doing was wrong. Him and Aubery...they had saved Islinn.

Hadn't they? Gre was no longer sure. The girl riding behind Aubery and staring out at the grasslands was not the same girl he'd seen on the riverbank. Nor was she the same girl he'd seen at Westerfox.

Had they done Brede's will?

It was a question that had lingered in the back of his mind ever since the Crusade and it had only become stronger since they'd taken Islinn from The Twiceborn.

Gre gathered up the reins, his carefree attitude gone, and rode quietly along, listening to the mud squelching beneath Pixie's hooves.

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Aubery didn't notice the slave fields. He rode, glancing neither left nor right, his nose wrinkled as he trotted past the tumbledown shacks of the field bosses.

Nothing but fodder. Peasants.

The songs of the field slaves rang in his ears, and he would have urged his horse faster to get away from the infernal noise but the mud was thick and people crowded the road. He forcibly willed himself to keep a tight rein on his horse.