Hearts in Zenith (Four Husbands and a Lover)

31. A Stranger Looked

Ondrey's blood burned out in the Ashanti lantern. Violet mist clouded the edges of my vision, fingering toward the middle. I exhaled in relief when the vision stopped. Mythra's talons, I'd see it in my nightmares for years to come!

Ondrey, he lived with this memory longer. Not for the full ten years, though, since the accusation of desertion was levied against him. Still, even one minute was a long time to live with this.

I mourned for Ondrey, but just before the tent came back into focus completely and Ashanti-induced reality extinguished itself, something else happened.

A stranger faced me. She—or maybe it was he—saw me. Theirs wasn't a face from Ondrey's past. The crowd around Princess Granda appeared to me the way Ondrey had perceived them on the day. They were shadow figures, who barely had discernible features except for Yadwiga, Snehora and his murdered wife. The rest was purple, faceless, ghostly clots of Ashanti mist.

My onlooker had a fresher face, a face that belonged in the present time.

No smudges obscured it from me, so I saw sallow skin; wide-set eyes of a muddy yellow-gray; eyebrows plucked in an unnatural line, next to no eyelashes. The person's hair was darkish, smothered back into a limp braid—I could not see it, but imagination supplied a rat's tail at the nape of the neck. Their bloodless lips were nothing like Ondrey's bow-shaped ones or Parneres' passionate swell or even Miccola's mocking canyon. Just slightly darker flesh edging the black slit of their mouth.

Not even a shade of beard touched the stranger's hollow cheeks, and a throat was wrapped in a gray scarf, so it was difficult to tell if they were a man or a woman.

I scanned their face again, to make sure, and nothing jumped at me. I had hard time to guess at their age too. That simply was the most impersonal person I'd ever seen, but they were important.

They didn't look into Ashanti fumes to observe Ondrey's martyrdom. They observed me peeking into his past. Whoever they were, they didn't wish me well.

The squinting must have given me away, because they jerked out of view, disappeared. As if someone jumped back from a mirror... Or, in this case, an Ashanti lantern. But not before I had noticed a chipped tooth between their parting lips.

Was it a smile? A scowl? A gasp? Did they want to show themselves to me? Warn me of something?

I didn't know, and it unsettled me even more.

The Ashanti visions dissolved into nothingness, both the murder and the mysterious stranger. The past, the stranger—they both could wait until I had time to sort through it, while Ondrey couldn't.

Red stains spread on the icepard's skin where he lay. Blue shadowed his lips. Perspiration dotted his tall forehead. Sandy hair spilled when he slumped from sitting to the floor.

The tent was now filled with my allies--Phedoxia didn't dare to disobey me and called them in.

Miccola paced, head bent so she wouldn't hit the canvas or the poles. The scowling Haida elder stood in one corner watching her progress.

Phedoxia sat next to me.

I clutched my temples, trying to stave off the intensifying beat of blood in the veins. "Close his wound."

She jumped up to her feet and raced to the tent's exit—raced being a comparative term here. But I was supposed to see her eagerness.

"Immediately, Your Grandissima! I'm on my way!" she shouted as she went. "Forgive the old age's scatterbrain.. .I was so in a rush to find Miccola and others, it slipped my mind to fetch the medicine—"