Mercy of the Road by Ally Bodnaruk - Volume 2

A woman travels to Keystone hoping to finality pay off her debt to the nightmarish Mercy of the Road. All she longs for is freedom, but will she find it?

Mercy of the Road

By Ally Bodnaruk

CW: addiction, abuse triggers, mild gore 

From Volume 2 of Tales From Netherün. Visit www.quillandread.com to learn more or subscribe (It's FREE)

She came with the night upon a swift horse; Mercy of the Road.

Asphodel awoke at the sound of muffled hoof beats. Her heart leapt in her chest. Harvest’s wind drew cool fingers down her spine and she shivered as she wriggled out from under her blanket. She knew who was waiting now beyond the wagon and in her knowing her stomach twisted. She stumbled upright and out of the wagon, leaving the driver and other passengers to their gentle dreams. She wrapped her shawl tight around her thin shoulders and pushed her hair �" thin and brown like dried grass stems �" behind her ears. She looked older than her meager years, haggard in the way only open sun and blighted elements could bring. Her body quavered, wracked with the desire to return to sleep and escape the nightmare before her.

The sky was clear and the moon was full, so the ink-black horse that stomped and whinnied in the middle of the road was easily seen. It’s rider was not.

Mercy of the Road was a shroud; ashe-like; insubstantial. Mercy was a gloom-filled monster, who lurked along the way preying on the downtrodden, the lost and looking, the wanderers who had a want in their heart. Mercy would make promises, and you believed them, if you didn’t know better.

Asphodel knew better. Her brother hadn’t.

‘Why do you call on me?’ She clutched her shawl, hoping her fingers didn’t visibly shake.

‘Why do I ever call on you, Flower of Mourning?’ Mercy rasped. ‘There is a debt. It must be paid.’

The horse moved closer and the figure’s cowl fell away. A viscous, black substance leaked from empty eye sockets and dripped down Mercy’s face towards her cruelly-curled mouth where it stuck to her needle-thin teeth. Out of the robes sleeves crept snow-white hands, more bone than flesh, tipped in talons. It took every measure of Asphodel’s resolve not to shrink like a frightened child, yet still she felt Mercy’s amusement at her terror.

Mercy held out a glass ampoule to Asphodel. The vial was closed at both ends with a thin neck two-thirds of the way down, where it would have been broken to release the tincture inside if it were not empty.

Asphodel had first seen such vials in her apprenticeship �" before her brother’s debt; before his death. Her mentor at the Gardens had used them for concoctions that were too precious to leave unsealed. A tool for wealthy herbalists, not for a road-wearied root-cutter. But Mercy didn’t care what Asphodel was. All Mercy of the Road cared for was the debt.

Mercy’s ampoule was a store �" Mercy had hundreds of them. They were a way of transporting nether beyond the influence of a wellspring �" the only way as far as Asphodel could glean.

‘It must be refilled at the Keystone wellspring.’ Mercy loomed through the ominous pause. ‘And then the debt will be done.’

Asphodel drew in a quick breath. An end to her servitude. Her heart trembled. Freedom; too late for her brother but soon enough for her. Nether-work was wily as a fox, but during her time paying her brother’s debt to Mercy, Asphodel had learnt to be wilier.

Unbidden, the atonal tune Mercy had taught her to summon nether flitted through her mind, and she hummed it without thinking.

Carry black tidings, over the heath.

But be careful to shroud your load.

Carry black tidings and brew them beneath,

If you look for the wraith of the road.

Mercy’s laugh, when it came, was caustic and cruel. With a flick of talons Mercy held the ampoule out to Asphodel again and shook it slightly.

‘Flower of Mourning. Deliver me this, refilled, and never again will you have to see me.’

Asphodel’s fingers twitched as she took the ampoule. It was cold, no lingering sense of what it had once contained, no matter how Asphodel stretched her senses. Any hint of the nether stayed coyly out of her reach, as always. She nodded and Mercy smiled; the corners of Mercy’s mouth turned upwards at an unnatural angle and displayed her teeth �" predator’s teeth �" threaded with gristle and black blood. Asphodel swallowed down bile.

The horse stamped once, twice, then spun with a whiny, disappearing back into the shadows.

It didn’t matter where Asphodel went, Mercy of the Road would follow. Asphodel had tried every road and hidden grove, and every time, Mercy would come once more to demand payment. This was her chance to break that cycle and take back the freedom her brother’s foolishness had stolen from her.

***

Asphodel had heard plenty about Keystone. More than enough to convince her not to visit. She’d heard that it was busy and bustling �" full of young lovers and scampering children. On the surface, Keystone had sounded like it was alight with the glory of the world.

But Asphodel had seen the hollow eyes of people who had fled to the roads in search of something better. She had heard the shadows in the tales told round roadside gatherings. Something dark had a hold in Keystone and Asphodel hadn’t wanted to find out more than that.

It was like her mentor at the Gardens, Fen, had always said: if you used a wellspring even once it could find its way to using you.

So walking into Keystone, Asphodel was surprised. In the clean-lit harvest sun it was a city of glittering temptations, food carts on street corners selling sticky-sweet candied berries and mulled wines, decadent architecture of wrought iron, and gull-cries signaling the nearby presence of water. The heady scent of anise wound its way around her and made her mouth water. A treat, she thought, as she parted with a handful of shucks in exchange for the spiced honey coated strawberries. They made her teeth ache and her fingers tremble from the sugar and Asphodel grinned as she wandered down the street.

The bridges were completely unlike what she’d imagined, so wide that she could barely see one side of the bridge from the other. Houses, alleyways, scraps of parks and shops crowded in against one another, nosing up into each other's business.

Asphodel marveled at it all. She was, at her heart, a wanderer and new places made her soul soar. The space and possibility of the road spoke to Asphodel. It was a language of muddy boots and wind-chilled fingers, scavenged hedgerow lunches and sun-worn eyes.

Keystone whispered of iron and mines and smithy heat. And water, Asphodel acknowledged, as she walked past a fish monger and wrinkled her nose against the smell �" ripe and salted.

She followed the road towards the bridges’ central point �" the crossroads that loomed over the wellspring �" and the temple that sat in the middle of it all. She’d heard the locals call it the Wellmind, which made her wary. Did it have a mind? She knew wellsprings could be strangely lifelike, but sentience? In the Garden, Fen had always taught caution when it came to nether and wellsprings, even for those sympaths who studied the herbal arts. Once, and only once, Asphodel had complained about her inability to sense the nether. Fen had snapped a switch of ash across Asphodel’s knuckles.

‘Never wish for a curse, Asphodel,’ Fen had growled. ‘Or it will surely find you.’

On the road, Asphodel had seen artificers do extraordinary things. Miracles in the form of worldly delights. But as surely as Fen had predicted, the curse had found her. Or rather, it had found her brother and slunk it’s way into her life after he’d died.

All she’d wanted was to work herbs and make people’s lives better. Fen and the Gardens had taught her much, but she’d been forced to leave too early to call herself a herbalist. Root-cutter it was; she provided ingredients to herbalists and artificers in between Mercy’s visits. She didn’t mind it, even enjoyed hunting and foraging. But when Mercy called, she worked nether, skill be damned.

Sometimes she thought she could feel its curse working deep inside her bones. But perhaps it was only paranoia and all the nether really left behind was guilt.

But this would be the last time.

***

The temple was grandeur incarnate. It rose from the bridge’s flagstones �" a titan breaking free of its restraints. Spires rose from each of the temple’s corners and the walls were covered in façades depicting the discovery of the wellspring and the building of Keystone. Keys and locks were central throughout the façades, the edging gilt depicting delicate silver ferns. The ferns looked to be moonwort, the herb of thieves and lock-pickers, which Asphodel thought was clever. The building spanned almost the width of the whole bridge and the steps, wide and deep, were surrounded by bustling markets.

Asphodel could smell food and incense; she could hear the tolling cry of gulls and the rhythmic shouts of the street hawkers. This place was ablaze. It was hard to remember caution when Asphodel could see a hawker selling roast vegetable hand pies with thick, flaking pastry that made her stomach rumble.

She bought two. A week or two in Keystone wouldn’t be so bad. Surely there were herbalists here that could make use of her skills, or at the very least, be willing to pay for something from her wares.

Asphodel’s steps were jaunty as she walked through the markets towards the temple’s steps. At their base, market-goers sprawled in rest while scruffy children ran about between them, hands outstretched for either begging or thievery; they seemed to have no preference. Herb of thieves, indeed, Asphodel thought. Higher up, towards the temple doors, petitioners crowded in a half-formed line, their gazes desperately fixed towards the temple’s interior.

Asphodel climbed the stairs and hovered at the back of the crowd.

‘A blessing for my Thomas,’ a man called. ‘Please, sir.’

‘My Alia’s still missing, with no sign for a week yet,’ a woman keened. ‘Can you do nothing?’

Collectively, the crowd seemed to be addressing a young man standing in front of the doors. His pale blue robes hung loose about him and had the worn-thread look of hand-me-downs. Asphodel recognised the hounded look in his eyes �" the same look on her brother’s face the last time she saw him.

‘Ah, you see,’ the man began, ‘the Wellmind is entirely too busy to, uh, hear every case. You all know the new rules.’

The crowd howled and shuffled forward as one, a cacophony of pleases and entreaties. Asphodel cursed. How was she to fill Mercy’s ampoule if the Temple was closed? She needed access to the temple and the wellspring to fill the ampoule with nether.

‘You know we haven’t the coin,’ a woman growled.

Coin? Asphodel hadn’t heard that Keystone was such a mercantile city that it charged for its wellspring. She appraised the woman who had spoken; gritty blonde hair in a long braid that was tattered at the end; her clothes tidy, but patched, the seams beginning to give way around her shoulders.

‘My sister needs healing. You artificers are supposed to help people. Help the city.’ The same woman pushed forward until she was right up in the young man’s face. ‘You’re a disgrace.’

The artificer looked at the woman as if she were a stain, his lips pulled down and his nose wrinkled.

‘You know the rules.’ Shoulders back, chest puffed out, he looked like a self-important turkey. ‘I’ll call the Temple guard if you don’t start behaving.’

The woman sneered and spat on the ground at the artificer’s feet then turned and pushed her way back through the crowd and down the temple steps. The crowd thinned as she left, the threat of guards changing their priorities.

All of this was another thing Asphodel didn’t like about the nether. Wellsprings like this, that were managed and barricaded, had been turned into a resource for the few, rather than something which was the domain of the many. She did not want to give this place her patronage. But Mercy and her debt didn’t give her the option.

With reluctance, Asphodel stepped forward and caught the artificer’s eye.

He squinted at her. ‘No entry.’

Asphodel pressed her tongue behind her teeth as she searched for the answer that would best get her what she needed.

‘My name is Asphodel,’ she said, deciding mostly on the truth. ‘Root-cutter. I need to fill an order.’

‘At the temple?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘We’ve no roots for you to cut here.’

‘Yours is not the only way to work the nether,’ Asphodel reminded him sharply. ‘My employer needs their store refilled with nether.’

He looked her up and down, gaze lingering on the root-cutters badge she’d been given when leaving the Gardens. ‘Come on, then.’

He led her through the temple doors to jeers from the crowd. Asphodel hunched her shoulders. When she was free she could use what she knew for good. Help people like the ones clamouring on the temple steps, rather than turn a blind eye to their plight. She could be a force for good. Not just a game piece, to be moved where Mercy of the Road saw fit.

The doors closed with a thud behind her.

***

A fountain grasped towards the Wellmind’s ceiling, depicting a man with a severe brow and a sharp grin holding aloft a key. Water thundered out of iron spokes that rose up around him, like a half-finished cage. A swirl of empty chairs filled the rest of the space and were framed by walls of iron; artfully curled and woven as if it were rope. Asphodel may not have had any smithing knowledge, but she recognised the skill it took to make one thing look like another. The walls were lit by oil lamps, hanging from ornate iron hooks; the centre was aglow from a sky light, built high in the ceiling that directed a beam of light down to alight upon the fountain. It was majestic and ornate and so fiercely over the top that Asphodel suppressed a wince.

The artificer turned to her with a sweeping gesture. ‘Welcome to Keystone’s crowning jewel.’

Asphodel widened her eyes and tried to look appropriately awed. He smirked, clearly thinking her a country bumpkin, some foolish, uncultured layabout who scraped and snivelled their way through the world.

‘Where is everyone?’ she asked, genuinely confused.

In a space designed for hundreds, she could only see fifteen, maybe twenty, people huddled in different corners of the hall.

‘We don’t allow any old riff-raff to set foot in this sacred place.’

Asphodel heard the implication that she was only the merest smear of ink above said riff-raff. But she was also beginning to see the whole painting, where before the details had been obscured. A changed city, a closed-off wellspring, twitchy artificers. This was a wellspring that was beginning to, or already had, turned. No wonder Mercy had sent her here, she thought bitterly. She nodded and reached into her satchel to produce the ampoule. She held it up, but it only glowed in dull tones in the oil-light.

‘The store. I can fill it myself.’

He frowned. ‘The fee is the same, whether you do it yourself or not.’

Asphodel shrugged, though she was disappointed. ‘The fee?’

‘Ten talents.’

Asphodel hissed. That was more than she had expected. It was more than she had. Curse her brother and his debt.

‘Is that too much?’ the artificer sneered and Asphodel bristled.

‘How about I pay you five talents,’ all she had ‘and a flask of fire tonic, brewed in the Gardens themselves. Easily worth all ten talents on it’s own.’

He raised his eyebrows and Asphodel prayed that while he seemed to have heard of the Garden, he wouldn’t know how to tell if the tonic had truly been brewed there. Because it hadn’t. She’d brewed it at a gathering by the side of the road out of ingredients scavenged from the other wanderers she had been camped with at the time. It was a good batch, one of her best, but it was a far cry from what Fen could’ve produced.

She pulled out the flask with a flourish, glad that she’d used the one Fen had given her, the one with the Garden of Coprianthus’ seal still visible on the outer.

He glanced around, nodded, then took the flask and hid it within his robes. More than the tonic, Asphodel mourned the loss of the flask. But that was how it was with Mercy. Each payment took more and paid back less than the last. It wore away at her �" had worn, perhaps. She was nearly done. It was worth the sacrifice of her flask if it meant her freedom.

She dropped the talents into the artificer’s hand, and his fingers greedily closed around them.

‘Go,’ he gestured to the fountain, then added as an afterthought. ‘And be at peace.’

There was only one way Asphodel knew to fill a source. Mercy had taught it to her the first time she’d come to collect on her brother’s debt. Or, well, taught was a strong word. Mercy had told her to do it this way. Had told her it would work.

So Asphodel gently submerged the ampoule in the bubbling water of the fountain, and hummed gently under her breath.

The words danced through her thoughts as she hummed. Spiralling and spinning, like dandelion seeds in a gusting wind. She could feel neither the nether nor the wellspring; but she could see the faint tremble in the water as the current responded and became a little whirlpool with the ampoule at its centre. The song was a siren’s call to the nether and the water responded with ease.

She settled herself in, carefully watching the inside of the ampoule for the first signs of water.

***

Asphodel left the temple with the ampoule refilled with a trickle of water. She tucked it safely away in her satchel and looked around. The night air menaced in a way that reminded her of Mercy. For a moment, she wondered if this was it. Had Mercy done the unthinkable and left the road? Had Mercy followed Asphodel to the city steps to collect her final payment? But she could not hear hooves. This was not the road.

‘Careful,’ she murmured to her fluttering heartbeat.

But there was something in this city that felt emergent under cover of night. The moon’s tremulous glow casting monstrous shadows across the streets. The market had packed up and the square below the temple seemed empty at first. But at the edges of the square shadowed figures stood beneath eaves and within the mouths of alleys. They weren’t doing anything other than congregating, but it made Asphodel clutch the ampoule tighter just the same.

Two worlds, one lurking within the other’s shadow.

Here was the second world of Keystone, revealed by cover of night. A drunken shout from further down the street set Asphodel’s heart leaping. She stepped sideways, feet hesitant, and clung to the shadows as she made her way down the temple steps.

By daylight, Asphodel had been eager to stay. Now, she couldn’t fathom a desire to linger. Had she been swayed by some mysterious power? The wellspring trying to make her want to stay here? Or had it simply been the collective desire of the people of the daylight to ignore what their city became at night that had tricked her?

All she had to do was leave. One step after the other, down to the square, then beyond that: the streets. Once she was clear of the city she could find a copse of trees, or a hedgerow, to shelter in until dawn or Mercy came. Whichever was first. And then she would be done.

Her stomach twisted and Asphodel pushed away her hope. Don’t get ahead of the present. But, she couldn’t quite extinguish the flame.

Sleek, silent movement was something Asphodel had practice at. But with each step she took she was reminded that her feet were more familiar with the tread of forests and dirt roads; she was used to the swaying shadows of trees and the mottled tones of leaves. Keystone was all cobblestone and sharp angles. There was no movement in the shadows to disguise her own. She felt observed as she slowly made her way across the square, avoiding the groups she could see, as if every part of the city was studying her for weakness.

The main street stretched before her and Asphodel’s shoulders relaxed. There was less open space. The buildings reached up and over the street while the threads of alleys wove between them. Easier for Asphodel to hide as she snuck her way out of Keystone. Easier for someone to sneak up on her, perhaps, but she would have to hope she didn’t look rich or interesting enough.

Asphodel brushed the thought away. She would be fine. She would be alert. Carefully, her ears straining for every noise, she crept and slunk her way through Keystone.

She had not gone far when a commotion sounded ahead of her.

At first, the way the bellows and smacks echoed off the buildings made it seem as though the noise came from all around. Asphodel froze, half-crouched against the window of a bakery, and peered through the gloom. There was a group of people, men mostly, in the street before her, desperately brawling. Their grunts and snarls sounded to Asphodel’s ears like wild boars tussling after sows in the month of Oxneap.

She was no quivering child to be scared of even a slightly scuffed crowd. But there was something in the people’s faces �" something wild and cruel �" that made Asphodel grit her teeth and shrink back against the wall.

Once she was certain that they were too preoccupied to notice her, she carefully continued moving. Step after step, she sped forward, fuelled by a sharp want to be gone from this city and its second world before it noticed her.

But as she slipped from one shadow to the next a thunderous toll shook Keystone. It rolled through the street like an unhurried storm and Asphodel shrieked, for the briefest second she thought the bridge was collapsing beneath her.

The sound faded and in its absence came the realisation that she was across the street from a bell tower, sounding out the hour. She opened her mouth to laugh at herself�""

But a cry sounded from the group in front of her. They had noticed her, and with raucous shouts, they were coming towards her, their thoughts turning to what they could buy with the coin she might have. Asphodel glanced back the way she’d come, but there was movement from the square in front of the temple. Cornered, her breathing was shallow.

There, across the street, she could see the entrance to an alleyway. She took off, shirking her previous attempts at sneakery. Now it was time for speed, not subtlety.

She reached the alleyway with the men close behind her. Their voices still slurring, but with enough bite that they sounded like braying hounds caught on a fresh trail. The alley was darker than the main street, and Asphodel would have seen little enough going at a sedate pace. At full tilt, she was banging into barrels and shrubbery as her feet slammed to the ground.

She hoped she could gain enough ground that they would lose interest. Or lose her entirely. But despite their inebriation, they knew the streets better than she and it was a tight race. Her trouble, she realised �" as she spun around a corner and found a dead end �" was that she didn’t know the streets at all.

Molten panic welled in her throat as the shouts grew closer.

‘Quick, you fool,’ a voice scraped out through the quiet and a hand snatched her wrist.

Little choice, Asphodel let the hand pull her through a doorway. She helped slip the door closed just as the first of her pursuers came round the corner. Outside, the men brayed. Inside �" Asphodel met the wavering gaze and pursed lips of a woman, not much older than herself. Strangely, the woman �" long, blonde braid tucked under a bonnet that had seen better days �" looked familiar.

‘You were at the Wellmind, earlier today,’ the woman hissed, her gaze dipping to Asphodel’s root-cutter’s badge. ‘What are you doing out on the streets so late? Did your fellow artificers not give you shelter?’

She was the woman with the sickly sister, Asphodel realised, who the artificer had threatened with guards.

‘I’m no artificer,’ Asphodel said, though perhaps that was a lie now, after Mercy.

‘That doesn’t answer the rest of my questions.’

‘I wanted to be clear of Keystone.’

The woman’s gaze turned sympathetic. ‘Aye, that’s a sound idea.’

‘Perhaps sounder would have been by river, not the streets,’ Asphodel said with a glance to the door. ‘My name’s Asphodel.’

She held out her hand and the woman squinted at her, looked her up and down. Whatever she was, or wasn’t, looking for, she seemed satisfied. She nodded and pressed her palm to Asphodel’s and briskly shook her hand.

‘Tarielyn. I think you’d best be staying here. At least until they get bored.’

***

Tarielyn’s home was cramped and sparse, empty spaces along the mantle and shelves ringed with dust. Asphodel was led through the kitchen to the small sitting room, which held a simply-carved bench with pillows and two smaller arm chairs. Although Asphodel had presumed Tarielyn to be poor, this home held the echoes of money. Not wealth, as such, but more coin than Asphodel’s family had managed.

‘Thank you.’ Asphodel sat on the bench and folded her hands in her lap. ‘I’ll be gone as soon as I can.’

Tarielyn nodded and sat in a high-backed chair opposite Asphodel, her eyes watchful. Asphodel was used to strangers. As a child, their home had been filled with a rotating array of her mother’s old friends from the road. Trust well and judge quick, that was the wanderer way. She had cleaved to that teaching after Mercy had brought her brother’s debt to her doorstep, and tore her clean away from everything else in her life.

‘Tarrie?’ Another voice called out from deeper in the home. ‘Who was it?’

Asphodel froze.

A harsh cough followed the words and Tarielyn’s eyes widened as she hurried towards a closed door. The door opened to reveal a young woman, sallow-cheeked and sunken-eyed, who trembled in the door frame.

‘Careful, Bette,’ Tarielyn steadied her. ‘Slow breaths, gentle. That’s it.’

Asphodel watched, fingers twitching for her satchel and her herbs �" mallow and hawthorn berries �" as Tarielyn led her sister to a chair and settled her into it. She caught Asphodel’s focused gaze and glared at her.

‘It’s not contagious.’

Bette gave Asphodel a weak smile and spoke slowly with thin breaths every couple of words. ‘Oh, don’t mind Tarrie. She’s protective as anything; it’s only that my heart is failing. Along with the rest of me. Now that I see my insistence that my sister go and investigate the commotion was warranted, the more interesting question is: who are you?’

‘Asphodel. Root-cutter from the south.’

‘A pretty name.’

Asphodel shrugged, she’d never thought so. The flowers of her namesake were said to grow best on graves where the deceased’s spirit had lingered as an ashe. What her mother had been thinking, she would never know.

‘You sister gave me shelter. I was, uh, being chased.’

‘The fool was running around outside.’ Tarielyn turned and bustled to the kitchen, returning swiftly with a glass of water, which she pressed into her sister’s hands. ‘Here, drink a little.’

‘Have you tried mallow?’ Asphodel blurted out.

The two women looked at her with identical frowns.

‘For the congestion.’ Asphodel touched a hand to her breast bone.

Bette smiled sadly and Tarielyn rolled her eyes.

‘We’ve tried everything there is,’ Tarielyn said in a low voice.

‘Besides, I’m so sick of eating things that taste foul.’ As Bette spoke, coughs wracked her thin body.

Tarielyn reached for Bette, one arm wrapped around her back in support. When the coughs finished Bette collapsed against her sister, clearly exhausted. The gentle manner with which the two interacted made Asphodel long for her brother.

The days spent in rollicking fields. The night’s spent sneaking about as they looked for fox holes. They had been made to pull the other into mischief, their mother always said. She’d been correct to the end.

‘You should be back in bed,’ Tarielyn chided her sister. ‘It’s too late in harvest for you to be up late.’

‘Rest shall not lengthen my months. Let me speak to our new friend,’ Bette waved her hand is dismissal of her sister’s concern. ‘Tell me, Asphodel, where do you hail from? Why did you come to Keystone?’

‘Bette…’ Tarielyn sighed, but Asphodel waved her aside.

This was what she was used to, swapping stories at the end of the day. It helped calm the rapid beat of her heart.

‘My mother was a wanderer, but we grew up in a small village to the west, far inland, and a little south. I’m a root-cutter, trained with some of the best herbalists in the land. I wander the roads now, and the one I was on brought me to Keystone.’

‘Few roads lead to Keystone these days,’ Bette said with a frown, ‘and none of that explains what you were doing skulking about town in the night hours, coated in nether.’

Asphodel narrowed her eyes. A sympath, but surely not an artificer, if Tarielyn was being turned away at the temple doors. And one so bold, as well, to reveal her skill in front of a stranger. The sisters seemed peaceable and kind enough to have helped a stranger, but Asphodel had learnt that some stories were better kept out of the firelight.

‘I have always had an ear for a story,’ Bette added. ‘I can tell that yours is one that will be better for the telling.’

Sifting through the moments of her life that lead her to Keystone, Asphodel realised Bette was right. She wanted to have someone listen and nod and acknowledge what she had gone through. But as she opened her mouth to speak Bette was taken by another coughing fit, harsh hacking noises that made her whole body shake. What had Asphodel gone through that could compare to staring down an early death?

Bette laughed, when she had regained her breath. ‘It feels some days as though my entire body is slowly betraying me. If I may give you some advice, Asphodel, it is to never take your health for granted.’

Asphodel tried to hide both her wince and her curiosity. She bit her tongue against the desire to list herbs and ask what they had tried.

‘We’d not be so bad off,’ Bette continued, ‘but after mother died, father grew careless. Died at work, or so we were told.’

‘Bette,’ Tarielyn scolded. ‘Leave it be.’

Bette brushed her sister away. ‘Mr Locke is hardly going to care what I say in the privacy of our own home.’

Turning to Asphodel, Tarielyn leant back in her chair. ‘Our father worked at Locke & Key; the key factory.’

‘Is making keys a particularly dangerous job?’ Asphodel asked hesitantly.

‘It is when they’re made with nether,’ Tarielyn replied sharply.

‘Oh, hush, Tarrie. So, Asphodel, indulge me, tell me your story.’

Gently, Asphodel reached into her satchel and pulled out the ampoule. The candle light fractured against the glass and made the water inside glisten. Bette gasped.

‘I was visiting the Temple. It’s for… a job. You know how it is, a root-cutter provides the ingredients, an artificer works the herbs.’

‘In Keystone, the nether is only worked with iron and forges.’ Tarielyn’s expression grew wary.

‘Nether and herbalism.’ Bette shook her head. ‘Does it work?’

There was something in her expression, some longing, that made Asphodel’s heart ache. Because it did. The right hands could bind the nether to the herbs and use them to cure almost any illness. The right hands and the right money. Fen treated any who turned up at the Garden’s gate, but most who were sick could hardly make the journey.

Asphodel could see Bette’s outline refracted in the ampoule. Hers could be the right hands, she had studied under Fen for just as long as most others. It had only been her brother’s death and his debt that had called her away. The debt that was now her own debt. This ampoule was her freedom.

She wrapped it in her fist, hiding it from view.

‘It can,’ she said. ‘With the right herbs, the right artificer.’

Bette nodded and Asphodel waited for her to ask, to beg for the kind of healing the ampoule could bring about, but she just smiled again. 

‘There is so much to wonder at in the world. How much of it have you seen, Asphodel the Wanderer?’

Asphodel was silent for a moment, surprised that they seemed so un-inclined to take advantage. She berated herself for thinking the worst of people who had shown her only genuineness. She settled back on the bench and reached for the tone that she felt sounded most like a storyteller.

‘Some, but not as much as I would like. I studied for a time at the Gardens of Coprianthus, far to the south. But wound my way back north to Thastor by the sea roads after I left. I passed the Serani Needles and witnessed the Ocean’s Bellow at Karantaur. The roads have taken me inland as well, through the Wolden Forests’ and beneath the arches at Mossildrury, and I spent a winter in the foothills of the Arkoss Peaks after I misjudged endur’s arrival.’

As she spoke, Asphodel watched as Bette and Tarielyn followed her words through the pictures she was creating. They smiled and hummed and nodded, Bette in particular seemingly taking great joy in her tales. She avoided Mercy, avoided her brother, but she spoke of her mother’s ease with the herbs and father’s skill in the garden.

‘He could always tell what the plants needed,’ she said.

Bette nodded, but there was something in her eyes that told Asphodel that Bette had noticed the holes in her stories �"  that she could see the shape of the spaces Asphodel had left blank. Let my ghosts haunt only myself, Asphodel silently prayed, these people had no need of them.

Bette yawned so wide that her jaw cracked as Asphodel was telling them about the fields of lavender beyond Crossing-by-Way.

‘That’s enough,’ Tarielyn said, voice now firm. ‘Bed for you, Bette, and I’m sure our guest has need of sleep as well.’

This time, Bette acquiesced, and Asphodel was left by herself in their sparse living room with a thin blanket and her heart keening for the road and the ampoule burning a hole in her pocket.

When she fell asleep, curled up in the armchair, she dreamt of horses hooves and shadowed riders, and of always being watched.

***

She awoke to a roasted and bitter scent. It smelt warm and inviting and her mouth watered as she sat up. She could see through to the kitchen, where Tarielyn was stirring something on the stove. No sign of Bette.

Carefully, Asphodel made noise as she clambered to her feet, smiling as Tarielyn half-turned in greeting.

‘Chicory?’ Asphodel asked as she hobbled on sleep-stiff knees to the kitchen.

‘Cinnamon, too.’ She must have seen something in Asphodel’s dubious expression. ‘I save it for special occasions, like when we have guests. We weren’t always as poor as we seem. Father was paid well for his work before he passed.’

As Tarielyn poured the mixture out into three cups, Asphodel’s heart rose in her chest, moved by the small kindness of a teaspoon of cinnamon. What were we, if we did not share what good fortune we had left?

Her hand slipped into her pocket where she toyed with the ampoule, freshly filled with water from the wellspring. It was her freedom and she had earned it. Slogging through forests and traveling in cramped carts as she bounced from wellspring to wellspring �" merely a piece in whatever game Mercy was playing.

She had earned it. She wanted to keep it.

‘I have some bread and a couple eggs from the neighbours' chooks. Are you hungry?’ Tarielyn asked.

Asphodel hesitated. Wanderers did not turn down food, nor did they hoard their resources. They shared generously and openly. These people weren’t wanderers, but here they were upholding those same values. What good was Asphodel, freedom or not, if she didn’t embrace them all the same.

‘I’m fine,’ Asphodel muttered, then frowned and looked away towards the room where she was sure Bette still slept soundly. ‘I think I hear Bette coughing?’

With predictable worry, Tarielyn turned and hustled towards her sister’s room. She wouldn’t be gone for long.

With trembling fingers Asphodel plucked the ampoule from her pocket and held it over one of the mugs. How to do this?

‘Break it? Sing to it?’ She asked the empty room. But singing was Mercy’s way, and Asphodel wanted as little of Mercy’s taint as possible. Besides, destroying the store would surely produce more power. She could hear Tarielyn returning.

Chicory, cinnamon, nether, good will. Would it even be enough?

‘May you be hearty and hale,’ Asphodel whispered and snapped the ampoule in half.

The water slid into the mug. There was no discernible change, she would just need to hope. She picked up a different mug and took a sip. Hope she could manage. Hope for herself, hope for kind Bette, hope for the souls who had shown her acres of generosity on the road. Asphodel would not falter when those of her acquaintance needed help. She swore it, no matter what consequences rode her way.

‘She’s still sleeping.’

Tarielyn slipped back into the kitchen and Asphodel held out a mug to her, so only the nethered mug remained on the bench, waiting for Bette to awake. How much further away was her freedom now?

In a distant echo, Asphodel heard the clatter of horses hooves and a sharp jangle of a laugh.