Soulwoven

Chapter Forty-One

~41~

“You love her, still. This Temple soulweaver of yours.”

It was the night of 8 Horsemonth, and Leramis Hentworth stood on mossy stone atop the roof of the Citadel and listened to Rhan the Eye speak. A warm, sea-spray breeze wisped over his cheeks. The ocean roared and murmured on sharp rocks behind him, six hundred feet down.

Leramis had just come, after more than a week of waiting, from an hour-long meeting with the Council of Taers that had felt more like a trial than a debriefing. He had been upbraided for failing to apprehend Soren Goldguard, berated for failing to report, dressed down and insulted and belittled.

And through it all, he had stood like stone with his hands at his sides and answered the questions that were put to him. For Ryse, and for himself, he had borne it.

The quiet shadows of the city of Death’s Head stretched over the skullish contours of Menatar’s tip to his south. A cornucopia of constellations graced the sky: the squat, rounded cross of the Heartwren, slipping minute by minute into the water; the long line of the Bastard’s Sword, following it into the next day; the ribbon of tiny, bright stars called the Fool’s River; the deep, starless blackness of the Abyss; and above it, the five stars in a low, squat ‘x’ called the Temple’s Gag, or Yenor’s Mark, or the Necromancer’s Bones.

The stars did not always follow each other in that order. They shifted with the seasons, with the years, even with the days. They spoke to each person in turn and offered a hint of the future, and of destiny.

Leramis sucked in the cool, clean air of the night. He would never again take the act of breathing for granted after the burns he’d suffered on the Rokwet. He rubbed his chest absent-mindedly. The skin atop his breastbone had healed into a scarred, puffy, wrinkled mass of flesh.

He wondered how long it would be before he got used to it.

You love her, still—

There was no sense in denying it. Ryse and the endless possibilities of her presence in his life filled his thoughts. Over the last ten days, as he’d waited in his cold, spare apartment for the Council’s summons, he’d had little else to think about. He had questioned many things.

He didn’t say as much to Rhan, but there was no need to. Rhan knew. Rhan saw.

So Leramis did not speak. He watched the stars in silence, and he waited.

“Have you known what it is to lose true love, Leramis?” Rhan asked.

A coldness rose in Leramis’s heart and whispered to him that he was learning.

“I have,” said Rhan. “And it is no small thing.”

Leramis rubbed the tortured skin on his chest again through the cloth of his robe. He remembered falling on the Rokwet. He remembered pain. He remembered knowing that he was going to die.

And under the shadow of that knowledge, he’d discovered something he might not have found anywhere else.

No.

He had expected to regret the things he’d left undone, like redeeming his family’s name and doing great things for the world. But as the threads of his life had slipped through his fingers, he’d mourned not the loss of those grand things, but the breaking of the simple promises he had made to a young woman whose eyes twinkled in his dreams.

Ryse had been the first person he had ever truly thought he could help. And she had been the first person who had looked through his name and believed in his strength, his will, and his destiny.