Aisling Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 5 of 10

Melora woke by noon, just as Granny promised. Within a week she was scolding Aisling for weeding the garden wrong. But one morning she found Aisling stalling by the woodpile, splitting logs she didn't need. Melora leaned on her cane and watched. "You gave that fox-eared god your word," she said. "Three weeks now, and you haven't climbed his stairs once." Aisling set down the axe. She had no answer. The deity's patience had a bottom, and she knew it. "Go," Melora said. "Before he comes looking. I'm strong enough to weed my own garden." She pressed a bundle of dried thyme into Aisling's hands. Then she pushed her toward the mountain path with surprising strength for such a small woman. Aisling climbed the long stone stairs at dawn. They wound up through green trees toward the shrine crowning the summit. Her legs ached by the time she reached the red doors. She half expected cold anger. Instead Zamir stood waiting on the top step, his black tail still, his violet eyes fixed on her. "You made me wait," he said. His voice was soft, but his fox ears lay flat. "Others waited hundreds of years for me. I did not think I would wait three weeks for you." "My mentor was cursed," Aisling said. "I healed her myself. No spells. No gods." She lifted her chin. "I came to learn, not to grovel. I serve my people first. You agreed to that." Something shifted in his face. The flat ears rose. "You healed a curse alone," he said slowly. "With no borrowed power." He studied her the way a person studies a door they thought was a wall. "Then perhaps I have less to teach you than I believed. Come inside." He taught her that day. Not compulsion, not commands. He showed her how to listen for the dead who lingered in the trees, how to feel the border where the living world thinned. Aisling was good at it. She asked questions that made him pause. He answered longer than a teacher needed to. By dusk they sat on the top step together, watching the light fall over the forest below. Aisling realized she had stopped being afraid of him. She looked at his profile against the fading sky and felt her chest tighten. Not fear. Something warmer, and more dangerous. "Come back tomorrow," Zamir said. It was not a command. It sounded almost like a hope. "I will," she answered. And she meant it. She descended the stairs in the dark. The obstacle was gone. She had returned, kept her word, and begun her training on her own terms. But a new weight rode down the mountain with her. She was falling for a deity who carried a fragment of her own soul and had never told her. Every lesson would pull her closer. She did not yet know what loving him would cost.