One (The Godslayer Cycle Book 1) (17 page)

Duncan visibly struggled with how to answer.  But he never got the chance to settle his internal debate.

“
Yes, Nathan,” came a whispered voice from behind him.  Nate turned to see Mari standing in the doorway to their room, her arms wrapped tightly about herself.  “Yes, my father and I were...  there.  We were part of... 
it
.”  Tears welled up in her eyes.  “I'm sorry.  I never told you.  I...  I just couldn't...”

Nathaniel could only stare.  The pit dropped out of his stomach. 
It's true,
was all he could think. 
It's all true...

Mari lowered her eyes, staring at her own bare feet.  “I don't know how you found out, or who told you.  I thought after all this time, people wouldn't talk about it anymore.  I thought...”  Mari looked up and took a half step toward her husband.  “I thought if I left it alone, it would go away...”  Her eyes were sadder than Nathaniel had ever seen them, a sadness that he now realized had been there all along beneath the surface.  And that sadness took on an edge of pain, as well.  “I guess I know why you were acting so strange though...  I couldn't think of what I had done wrong...  I guess I just didn't think back far enough...”

Nathaniel could stand still no longer.  He moved quickly across the room, past Mari, who cowered fearfully at his approach.  But he only pushed past her with the barest contact he needed to enter their room.  He took up his boots there and turned again.  Mari had backed out of the doorway this time, so Nathaniel's route to the front door was unobstructed.  In quick order, he had brushed past Duncan and Brea and out of the house.  Without a word, he stalked off around the side of the house barefooted and headed into the woods at the side of the cabin.

Mari fell back against the door jam, sobbing.  Great heaves wracked her body as her legs gave way and she found herself sitting unceremoniously upon the floor.  “H-he's g-g... gone!” she cried piteously.  “He just left me and he's gone!”  Anything further she might have said were barred by the huge, wracking sobs she could no longer control.  Like a man seized in fits, she fell to her side and began convulsing in her misery.

Duncan was torn momentarily, looking first after his friend's son and then to Mari.  It took him only a breath to decide though and he crossed the room to kneel next to the distraught young woman.  “There, there.  He'll be back,” the man soothed, leaning down and lending what strength he could through placing a firm hand upon her back.  “He's in shock, he is, and a might bit scared, too, I 'magine.  But he'd not leave without another word.  His ma raised him better'n that...”  

“
N-no he won't!” Mari wailed.  “I killed her and the only thing that's kept him here at all is he didn't know!”  Her voice was quickly approaching that of a screech, which Duncan supposed was the only way she could talk at all at that moment in time; her lungs were compressing in with the force of her convulsions so that only a scream had a chance of escaping her lungs, at all.

Duncan was struck by the confession.  Of course, he had known she had been there that day, even that she had participated.  His father had bragged afterward over his cups on her aim.  As morbid as that thought was, she had only been a little girl, egged into an evil act by her own father. 
What a terrible bit of knowledge to grow up with,
Duncan thought. 
To know you helped kill a woman...

“
Hush now.  It'll be alright,” he said aloud.  “Nate loves you, lass.  He'd not take leave of you without talkin' this through.  He's a rational boy, that one.  He would want answers, not more questions.  And you'll be who he comes to for them...”

Mari turned her head and looked up at the older man.  “I didn't know, Duncan,” she cried.  “I swear, I didn't know what we were doing!  P-papa p-put the rock in my hand and he showed me how to throw one himself.  I- I didn't know what it would do!”

Duncan did not know what else to say.  He worried for her, more than he did for Nate.  What this must have been doing to her all these years...  the guilt must have been unbearable.  When he had heard that Aliban's daughter would marry Nate, he had thought the young man had known and had forgiven her past.  Love conquered all, they said after all.  That she would have kept this from him had been unthinkable.  But obviously she still blamed herself and had feared the possibility of losing Nate if he ever learned the truth more than she had trusted in his good nature to forgive her.

Pleadingly, he looked up to the priestess for guidance, but the Lady Brea had vanished from the entryway. 
Likely gone to comfort Nate,
he mused. 
I don't imagine she'll be all that welcome, but I guess it's part of her creed to help people in need.

With that thought, he put the priestess of Imery from his mind to focus his attentions upon the woman curled up on the floor in front of him.

* * *

Nathaniel stalked into the trees with no direction nor destination in mind.  He did not know why he had left.  All he could think of was to get away.  He had gone after his boots only, but he had not even tried to put them on.  Even now he could feel the rocks and sticks gouge the bottom of his feet.  But he just did not care.  He never thought about actually stopping to put on his boots anymore than he thought of just casting them aside.  So he still carried them at his side as he made his way through an area of pathless forest.

They had been right.  Or, at least, Karmel had been, he amended.  His
wife
had been using him.  She had not loved him.  She had prostituted herself out of some misguided whim of the New Order, for no other purpose than to control his offspring, to make certain that whatever remnants of faith in the Old Gods his mother may have passed on died with his son.  And worse still, she had helped in taking his mother away from him!  The woman who would marry him had aided in his mother's
murder!
  How could he have been so blind to never see?

Before he realized it, Nathaniel had slipped in muddy soil and slid bodily down a short slope into the stream that ran roughly half a mile from his cabin.  There was a trail he and his wife maintained a little further downstream, but Nathaniel had come across the stream by a less traversed way.  The water fed from somewhere to the north, and it was cold – even though the frost had not yet set in the hills, this water felt like fresh snowmelt to Nathaniel's reawakened senses.  Likely it fed from some deep underground spring, cooled in the deep rock, but Nathaniel had never bothered to follow the creek to find out.  He had imagined doing so as a child, but as with so many childhood dreams, it had vanished by the time he was grown enough to actually pursue it.

Sitting now in the shallow, flowing water, Nathaniel wondered how different his life could have been if he had followed that sense of wanderlust instead of staying, wooing the local beauty and settling down to raise a family.  He could have escaped from all of this and he would not now be sitting half-soaked in the frigid running water, aching so deep that even the numbness of his limbs could not take away the pain.

No, he could not have escaped all of it.  There would not have been anywhere he could have gone to escape the attention of the Gods!  How far exactly would he have needed to travel, he wondered, before another of the potentials would have become the next closest target for their games?

Nathaniel slammed his fist into the water and screamed.  He could not take this, any of it!  It was too much for any mortal to bear!  The trees themselves seemed to sway away from the force of his voice as he howled his voice raw.

“
Do you plan to sit in the water all morning yelling like that, or will there be a point you become a man again long enough to pull yourself out and dry off before you catch your death of cold?”

Nathaniel turned from his watery misery to see the so-called Lady Brea standing at the treeline. 
Perfect,
he thought. 
Abject humiliation on top of it all!

Nathaniel picked himself up, balancing on the slick rocks of the streambed.  “Why don't you go bother some other heretic?  This one's already suffering well enough without you, thank you very kindly.”

Brea cocked her head.  “I truly do not understand you.  I cannot begin to imagine the kind of power you must have, yet you sulk around like an infant, throwing a tantrum in the middle of the wilderness!”

Nathaniel's head snapped up.  Had she said “power”?  She knew.  Somehow, she knew about the Avatar power given to him by the Old Gods and she had come after him.  The Gods had warned him that sooner or later someone else would learn of his empowerment and seek him out for their own ends.  And here was the first – a priestess of one of the New Order, scolding him about wasted “power”.  She had come, just as they had warned him she would!  But how could the New Order have found out about him so soon if the Old Gods' schemes were truly hidden from them all this time?

“I...  don't know what you're talking about,” Nathaniel fumbled.  He tried to put force behind the words, but he felt more like a child caught in a lie even before he uttered the words.

“
Oh, please,” Brea purred.  “I don't need the ability to truth read to know that was a lie.”

Nathaniel slowly sloshed to the edge of the stream.  By fortune, he had lost his grip on his boots before falling into the river, which he could see now lying upon the bank.  Unfortunately, only one remained completely dry; the other boot's calf had been half-submerged in the water.  He ambled onto the bank where they lay, trying to let himself drip some of the water from himself before trying to get the leather garments wetter than the one already was.

“Your feet are bleeding,” Brea commented casually.

Nathaniel looked down, lifting the sole of one of his feet.  Sure enough, several lacerations bled freely, as likely from the trek through the woods as his walk in the stream, it seemed.  Cursing, he sat down to take a better look at his other foot.

“You certainly do make a show of being helpless, don't you?”

Nathaniel glared at her.  “Why don't you just come out and say whatever it is you're after so you can leave me to bleed in peace?”

“I'm not the one playing at games,
Nate
.”  There was that stress upon his name again.  “You're the master of that,
Nate
.  You could give me lessons on how to hide your true nature, couldn't you,
Nate
?  You could help me be the best priestess ever to wear the mantle if I could learn at your knee how such deception is accomplished!  Wouldn't that be something,
Nate?
”

“
Why do you keep saying my name like that?”

“
Why, isn't that what you want to be called?  Or would you rather I call you
Nathaniel?
  Or maybe
Nathan?
 
Goodsmith
, perhaps? Is there one I am missing?” Brea grimaced.  “Oh, would you stop bleeding all over yourself already?”

“
What would you have me do?  Slice a vein to bleed out faster?  And what have you got against my name?”

“
I have nothing against your name, not your
real
name.  I am Imery's vassal in this world, and I have dedicated my life to exposing the truth.  So why don't you share some truth and stop all this pretense?  I know who you are.  I know what you are.  The only thing I do not know is
which
you are.”

Now even Nathaniel was lost.  He had been told by both Airek and Karmel that he was the only Avatar, that none of the other potentials would have awakened because he was the closest to wherever it was this sword was now.  Were there more, after all?  Were the Gods misleading him about his importance in their scheme?  Or did Brea refer to the ones who had also held the potential to become the Avatar besides him?  And somewhere, if the Gods' timeline could be believed, somewhere there was a nine year old boy or girl who would have taken his place in six years or so, so who knew how many other nine year old potentials were out there?  If he had the Avatar power now, exactly how helpless were those others?

Or perhaps Brea meant whether he was the actual Avatar or one of the potentials in the first place.  Were the other potentials in the world being subjected to a similar test by other priests, to test whether one of them had inherited the actual power?  Perhaps the Old Gods were far less powerful than they even believed and the New Order had known all along about the swords, and only lay in wait, watching their potentials to see which one became the actual Avatar?

For all the good it did to have that so-called power.  So far, all it had been good for was to fill his head with meaningless pictures and draw out fossilized relics that still believed they were Gods!

“Spell it out,” Nathaniel growled, his mind still racing through the possibilities, or what he could do if she intended him harm.  Even without his feet ribboned as they were, priests were reputed to have control over
real
magic.  How could he hope to stand against something like that?  “What is it you want from me?”

“
Your name would suffice for a beginning.”

“
You know my name.”