Windowmirror Chapter 6 ~ Soul Eater's Mark

Incorodric Lyirion had been born to middle class parents in the city of Kel-Kannath, in Elsariat, but had quickly been orphaned by disease.  Before he had age enough for memory, he found himself in the orphanage.  No one knew quite how he had ended up there, why no aunt or uncle or grandparent or even a caring friend or neighbor had taken him in.  Most orphans from good families escaped the institution one way or the other, but not Inco.

He spent only seven years in Kel-Kannath before escaping the orphanage, and eventually, Elsariat altogether.  There was something wild and untamable about him; no disciplinary action the sour tempered nurses could come up with would cow him, and no fences or locked doors could keep him cooped up in the orphanage for long.  The vast city of Kel-Kannath, which was in fact two cities grown together over time, was no place for a seven-year-old alone, and most would have either died or fallen in with whichever group of the impoverished and criminal would take them in.

Inco wasn’t most children, though, and he survived life on the streets of Kel-Kannath to travel beyond it into the countryside and eventually up into Galshan and Felnor.  He traveled around aimlessly, working odd jobs or begging provisions along the way, and it was in Felnor that he met Delfano Ezmoro.  Delfano was twenty at the time and Inco only twelve, but they were drawn together like brothers.  Both were parentless, wanderers, and unlike anyone else either had ever known.

After that, they continued to travel aimlessly, but together.  They worked, and begged, and stole their way through all of Galshan, Crythander, Felnor, and Elsariat.  But they never went to Celiadon, where Delfano had been born and spent the first eighteen years of his life.  Inco didn’t ask why, they were brothers only to a point, after that point Delfano was a man apart.  Apart from everyone.

They talked about getting a boat and sailing away to the north, or the south, or the east, to see what lands were there.  But to sail west they’d have to first travel through Celiadon, so they never spoke of doing that.

They came to Elsariat in the spring of the fourth year of their travels together, and there they found a boat.  It was a small gilded boat clearly for the pastime use of some wealthy Elsarian family.  The boat was floating down the Amadahy toward Celiadon, but had not got that far; the river cut through a meadow by the edge of a forest in rural Kel, and that was where Delfano and Inco were camped.

It was common for rich Elsarians to have grand country estates in the southwest, where the weather was pleasant most times of the year, and this boat could have come from any number of them.  Inco bounded down to the river and splashed in, calling back toward a bemused Delfano that finally here was the boat that would take them to northern lands beyond the sea.  The river became deeper and Inco had to swim out to the little boat and seize onto its side to steady himself.

He looked in and saw that the boat was not empty, as previously thought.  There was a girl in the bottom, curled up in a blanket and asleep, her hair long and loose on the planks.  The boat must have a small leak somewhere, for the girl slept in a pool of water, her face as pale and deathly as someone to whom water was no obstacle for exhaustion.

“Del!  Del!” was all Inco could manage to yell, even when Delfano yelled back, “What is it?”

The girl opened her eyes but did not sit up, or even seem all that startled to see Inco looming above her, dripping over the edge of the boat.  “Are you alright?” he finally asked, reclaiming a portion of his senses.

She sat up, slowly, a trail of water falling from her long black hair.  “I’m so cold,” she said in a small, trembling voice, “so cold.”

“Well no wonder, your boat’s leaking and you’ve been sleeping in a puddle of cold water,” Inco told her, and she looked down at herself as if realizing her state for the first time.  “What’s your name?  Are you lost?” Inco asked, still hanging off the boat, now oblivious to whatever Delfano was doing on shore.  The girl must, he figured, have fallen asleep in her boat while sailing around her family’s private pond, and drifted out to the river.  It was common enough for the rich to dig a little stream leading from the river to fill a space of dug out earth, creating pleasure ponds exactly as they pleased.

“I’m so cold,” she repeated, ignoring his questions, and wrapped her arms around herself with a violent shiver.

“Incorodric!”

Inco glanced over his shoulder, remembering Delfano at last.  He was stomping after them on the riverbank as they drifted downstream.  “Leave her be, Inco,” he said in his sternest voice, that made him sound more like a pretend father than older brother and comrade.  Delfano had a deep mistrust of the rich and generally had nothing more to do with them than he possibly could.

“Where do you live?” Inco asked the girl, turning his back on Delfano.  “Is it far?”

She simply shivered and turned a pair of large dark eyes on him, with an expression so lost, and small, and afraid, that it was like looking straight into the heart of a drowned kitten.  “Come on,” he said, leaving off any expectation of a reply, “you need to get to shore and dry off.  I’ll bet you’re hungry too.  But first things first, before you die of cold, eh?”

“Inco,” Delfano growled when he saw Inco take hold of the rope dangling from the bow and begin to drag it toward the shore.

“What?”  Inco spat out water as he swam nearer.  “You want to leave her to drown in a leaky boat just because it’s a fancy leaky boat?”  He dragged himself out of the water and with a grunt pulled the boat up against the earth.  “Besides,” he added, panting and dripping, “her family will be extremely happy, and likely more than generous, when we return their lost daughter safe and dry.”

Delfano took a look at the bedraggled figure in the wet bottom of the boat, and grunted, then turned and walked away.

“Don’t mind him,” Inco assured the girl, “he’s grumpy on the outside, soft as fresh manure on the inside.  If you’ll pardon the expression . . . .”

All he got in return was a long stare and a blink.

“Ehm . . . alright then.”  He held out one hand, still holding tight to the rope with the other.  She looked up at his hand, then to him, but made no move to get out.  He wasn’t sure if she clutched her arms around her simply from cold or for fear of him, and he didn’t know what he should do to reassure her.  He was beginning to realize that there was something more going on than a simple case of a girl falling asleep on a quiet pond and drifting away.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, smiling as harmlessly as he could manage.  She looked to be about his age, perhaps a little younger — her thin wet dress left little to the imagination as far as her maturity was concerned.  But she acted so much like a frightened fawn that she appeared, to him, very much like a child.

“If she doesn’t want helping,” said Delfano abruptly, returning with a swoop down like a bird of prey, “maybe you should let her drift on.”

“Take the rope,” Inco replied shortly, irritation setting in.  Delfano took it wordlessly, proving his arguments to be as half-hearted as Inco already knew them.

“Look,” Inco said, slipping down the grass a little closer to the girl and her boat, “I don’t blame you for being scared of strangers, I know there’s plenty of bad men in the world who’d be only too glad to abuse a girl like you.  But you’ve been lucky enough to be found by a couple of the more upstanding and gentlemanly vagabonds you’re likely to ever meet.  So you can either get out and let us help you, or you can float on downstream till you drown, or die of cold, or meet the very kind of rogues you fear us to be.  So?”

He took a breath and waited for a response.

She gave him a wordless, wide-eyed look of such distress that he wondered if she could even understand Elsarian.  But then, that’s what she’d spoken herself when she complained of cold.  “Fine,” he said, making a swift decision, and stepped into the boat.  Delfano made a sigh of aggravation, but held tighter to the rope nonetheless.

The girl didn’t shrink away, struggle, or scream as Inco put one arm around her back and another under her legs, hefting her up from the water.  She seemed as incapable of reacting to him at all, though something about the situation certainly scared her enough to knock her still and dumb.

He carried her back to their camp while Delfano tended to the boat.  “You should probably get out of those wet clothes,” he said.  “We don’t have any spare clothes, I’m afraid, but you can wrap up in this blanket.  Don’t worry, I’ll turn my back as you change.  In fact I think I’ll go get some wood and start a fire . . . unless you don’t want to be left alone, then I’ll just turn my back . . . .”

He drifted off, disconcerted, when she began to cry.  She did not take the blanket offered her and seemed to not hear a word he said.

“Look, I know you can speak Elsarian, and if you can speak you can understand what I’m saying, and even if you couldn’t, it’s pretty plain that I want you to take this blanket and if you can feel cold like you said, you ought to understand what the blanket is for!”  Inco gave up trying to keep the frustration from his voice and manner, shaking the blanket a little as he ranted.  “Now obviously you’ve been through an ordeal of some sort but for God’s sake, girl, you can’t just sit there like a lump shivering and doing nothing to accept help.  If you don’t want to talk to me that’s fine but take the damn blanket before I toss you back into the river!”

She did nothing but cry harder, clutching her soaked dress, once white and now a dirty gray.  She bowed her head a little and her damply clumping hair fell forward to shield her face.  Inco could not follow through on his threat to return her forcibly to the river, however, and simply threw the blanket down with a muttered curse and went off to fetch wood.

He took a good long while at it, and when he came back the girl was asleep, curled on the ground with the blanket spread over her.  Delfano crouched by the ring of stones for their fire, building it up with little twigs and flint.

“Did you put the blanket over her?” Inco asked.

Delfano nodded.  “She was lying there whimpering a bit . . . didn’t seem to notice when I threw it on her.  If you ask me there’s something wrong with her.  In the head.”

“I wonder what happened to her,” Inco said, setting down the wood and seating himself next to the sleeping girl.  “A shock of some sort.”

“Dropped on her head as a baby, likely,” answered Delfano.  “You should get her out of those wet clothes.”

“Me?” Inco turned red.  “But I . . . .”

“Never seen a naked woman?” Delfano looked at him in surprise.  “And you’re what, sixteen now?  I should have thought to take you to a whorehouse for an education, I’ve been remiss.”

“I just don’t think she’d like that.”

“You’re right, she’d prefer to drown, but you’re the one who insisted on dragging her out of the river.”

“What if she wakes up and claws my eyes out?”

“Then I will be very entertained.”

Inco shot him a dirty look, but reluctantly pulled back the blanket and gingerly began to peel off her wet dress.  It was, he realized with surprise, actually a nightgown.  And there was something more — he tried not to ogle the girl’s body, it seemed a perverted thing when she seemed so young and wrong in the head — but he couldn’t help but notice a mark stamped on the skin of her chest, over her heart.

“Del,” he said, quietly, “what is this?”

Delfano looked extremely amused, as if he were about to impart an especially insulting joke, but came up short when he saw what Inco was looking at.  “Cover it up,” he snapped, turning away.

“But—”

“Cover it.”

Inco did as ordered, shaken a little by Delfano’s serious reaction.  Delfano knew more than your average person about signs and symbols from all over Eora, the world they knew surrounded by the vast and mysterious oceans.  The tattoo over the girl’s heart was fresh like a brand seared into the flesh, red and irritated.  Inco recognized it vaguely as something Celian, which crossed over the line into the thing he and Delfano never discussed.

“Tell me what it means, Del,” he insisted, fearing Delfano’s anger but fearing ignorance more.

Delfano was quiet for several minutes.  “It’s the soul eater’s mark,” he answered finally.  “Daothez, an old goddess worshiped by my people thousands of years ago.  Some people still do worship her, but . . . it’s more a cult now than an official religion.  The priests and priestesses don’t recognize her anymore, though some may in secret.  I don’t know.  She belongs to a more primitive time, you see.”

Inco let a moment pass before saying, “You reacted pretty strongly for an old superstition.”

“Who said anything about superstition?” Delfano looked at him strangely.  “Daothez is as real as anything you can see or touch.  Goddess or monster, I don’t know which, but I’ve seen things that tell me she is real.”

“Del, I don’t understand,” Inco watched his friend closely through the flickering of the building flames.  “We’re in Elsariat.  How would this girl get a mark from . . . that?”

“I don’t know, but I know the mark.  The girl should be dead, Inco, dead or worse.”  He gazed at her with a new kind of mistrust, deeper than anything he held for the simple rich.  “Daothez touches you and you die.  I’ve seen it, Inco, I won’t say anymore but that I have seen it with my bare eyes, not in visions or paintings.  I think we should put that girl back in her boat and wish her a happy drowning.”

“No,” Inco said firmly, without a second thought.  He moved closer to the girl.  “She’s a bit shocked but alive and I’m not going to leave her.  I mean . . . not after I went to this much trouble.”

“Inco,” Delfano’s voice was low, as if fearful that Daothez might overhear, “you have a softness for wounded animals and orphaned children, I think it’s a noble attitude of yours, but you don’t want to get involved in anything like this.  We Celians don’t give up our gods very easily, it takes a true devil to be fought away and pushed into hiding, as legend tells Daothez was.  We say that she was sundered and thrown to the four winds, and since a goddess cannot actually die, that she took refuge in the deadly winds from the cold north.  She was so terrible that my people rebelled against a fundamental belief that the gods and goddesses are sacred and deserving of respect and care.  Perhaps not being born a Celian you cannot understand the gravity of that, but trust me, it’s a thing you don’t want to meet in your lifetime.”

Inco listened to all this patiently, but his mind was more set against the idea of abandonment than ever.  The fear and the stillness and the tears all made so much more sense now, even if Delfano was withholding as to the nature of what a meeting with Daothez did to a person.  “You say the girl ought to be dead,” he reasoned.  “Well she’s not.  If your old monster is as bad as you say and this poor little girl managed to live through . . . whatever it is that was supposed to kill her . . . well I’m not going to be the one that drowns her in the river.”

“In—”

“And that’s final!” Inco turned his back on Delfano, placing himself firmly between his friend and the girl.

Delfano sighed.  Here he was faced with the stubborn spirit that survived the streets of Kel-Kannath from the age of seven, that would not be turned bitter or sour by an unlucky childhood and a dangerous life.  To argue against Inco once he’d set his mind on something was to butt up against a brick wall.

He went to sleep by the fire, deciding that whatever they did they would not keep the girl with them long, but that Inco would have to come to that realization by himself.  In his dreams he walked the streets of Azla in Celiadon, saw the hovel where he’d grown from boy to man, and from the long ago time when he was only ten he saw again the mark of the soul eater flower like a black cancer over his father’s heart.

Inco watched the girl sleep for a long time before he lay down himself.  Her face was still and her breathing deep, there was not even the flutter of her eyelids to show that she dreamed.  She could be dead inside, he thought, mulling over the name; Soul Eater.  And yet there had been so much frightened soul behind those eyes, that this could not be the case.  “I’m so cold,” she’d said to him, from the depths of a soul that could not be eaten; “so very cold.”