Sebastian Page 33

  So why was she worried about horse-shaped demons being fodder for death rollers and bonelovers and whatever else the Eater was bringing back into the world? She could alter the landscape. She had the power to rip this chunk of the world away, to take it out of the world so completely it would be lost forever. It wouldn’t move, not physically, but the eye wouldn’t see it, the mind wouldn’t recognize it, and the heart wouldn’t acknowledge it. No access. No bridge to cross over. And if a heart did acknowledge that dark place…No way out once the person stumbled into that landscape.

  Are you going to give up another piece, Glorianna? Are you going to become like the other Landscapers who thought demons didn’t matter, didn’t deserve a place of their own in the world, didn’t need that breathless moment when something beautiful catches the eye and dazzles the heart? Are you going to give them up because they aren’t human? Neither are you. Not completely. You don’t have that comforting lie anymore. Whatever you came from might have bred with humans so that, all these generations later, you live in a human body, but your power isn’t human. Was never human. Landscapers focus on humans because the human heart can create so much—and destroy so much.

  But other beings shouldn’t be forgotten. You knew that when you were a student, felt that need from those no one else wanted to think about. Even demons need a home. Even a dark landscape should feel the warmth of the Light. Why have you forgotten that?

  Glorianna stopped. Turned around. Night had fallen, and she had no sense of how far she’d walked or in what direction. Her emotions were so churned up, she had no idea where the pond was in relation to where she stood.

  “Insidious bastard,” she whispered. “I don’t know how you gave me that gut-jab of fear, but I won’t forget you can use my own heart as a weapon against me. I won’t give up the landscapes in my care. Not even this one. And I won’t let you have any of them. I’ll find a way to defeat you. I’ll find a way to do alone what it took hundreds like me to do the last time. And by the time I’m finished, I will lock you in a landscape even you will find unbearable.”

  She closed her eyes and began to breathe slowly, evenly, until she could feel the resonance in the land. Until she could feel the dissonance once more.

  And something else, drawn to the strength of her feelings.

  Ephemera. Ready to manifest her feelings and make them real.

  Wait, she told it, sending gentle restraint as she walked back to the pond. Wait.

  When she smelled the blood and vomit, she stopped. In her mind, she pictured lines of power—red with anger, black with despair—running from where she stood straight into the heart of the pond. Then she let her feelings flood through her and become a channel for the world.

  “Despair makes a desert,” she whispered, watching grass and rich earth turn to sand, sensing the water in the pond changing to sand. “And anger…makes…stone.”

  Boulders pushed up from the earth, forming a cage around what had been the pond. Smaller stones edged the sand, separating it from the grass. As the last stone formed beneath her feet, Glorianna stepped back.

  Altered landscapes. A piece of desert in a place that knew nothing of deserts. A one-way border…but not a boundary. This place would be visible to the eye and could be avoided. Anyone who crossed the border of stones would find sand and heat and little else. And no way back to the waterhorses’ landscape.

  The death rollers would die there.

  But there was still an anchor—or a bridge—somewhere in this landscape that had allowed the Eater of the World to return.

  Enough, she thought. Lee can locate a bridge a mile away from where he’s standing, but you can’t. That’s not your gift. It’s time to go home.

  She walked for a little while, not caring about the direction, just wanting to feel the land. It was a dark landscape, but it was good land. Rich land. Oh, human fears had seeped into it, but also relief and joy.

  She smiled. The waterhorses were changing, weren’t thinking of all humans as prey or the enemy anymore. They were beginning to realize it was as much fun to scare a drunken fool by giving him a fast ride and a cold dunk as it was to kill a man. And the man, given that moment to see that his life could end and have that life given back, was also given a chance to change. Opportunities and choices. For some it would change nothing. For others it would take them on a different path, lead them to another landscape, bring a little more Light into the world.

  Calm again, she focused on her heart and will, took the step between here and there, and stepped into her garden a moment later.

  It wasn’t until she’d gone back to her house to wait for Lee to return that she thought about the horse’s head again—and wondered what had happened to the traveler.

  Sitting alone on a bench in her personal garden, Nadia watched Lee stop and study the plants that had turned brown overnight.

  “Frost?” Lee asked as he walked to the bench. “At this time of year?”

  “Frost,” Nadia agreed sadly. She tapped her chest. “That came from here.”

  Lee sat down beside her. Looked at her.

  He had his father’s eyes, that green that could be soft and dreamy at times or darken toward stormy gray with a mood—or, like now, be clear and penetrating.

  Her boy. But he wasn’t really hers. Not for a lot of years now.

  “What’s troubling you, Mother?” Lee asked gently.

  No, not her boy. As much as he loved her—and she knew he did—he wasn’t hers. “Did Glorianna send you?”

  “She knows something is wrong. Something strong enough to resonate through your landscapes.”

  “She’s right.” After all, the heart held no secrets from Glorianna Belladonna. “When I went to a town in one of my landscapes, something touched me, contaminated me.”

  Lee stiffened. “A Dark Guide? You think one of them is in your landscapes?”

  Had there been one of them in the marketplace? “Maybe. Or maybe it was the pleasure coming from some of the people because of other people’s misfortunes. A Dark Guide nurtures feelings that are already inside a person. It can’t create doubt if the seed of doubt doesn’t exist.”

  “I see.” Lee pulled on his lower lip. “So you’re the one Landscaper out of all them for all the generations who doesn’t have the full range of emotions.”

  “What?”

  “You never get angry or sad or grouchy or wonder if you made a good decision or just feel pissed off because it’s been that kind of day. No, you’re nothing but happy, kind, generous, sweet, loyal, loving. Yep. You’re just a puddle of goodness.”

  Deeply insulted, Nadia sprang to her feet, sure she’d burst if she didn’t move. “I can’t decide if I should whack you upside the head or wash your mouth out with soap.”

  “Before you try doing either, remember what you taught us,” Lee said quietly. “The human heart is capable of every feeling imaginable—good and bad—and it’s part of our journey through life to decide, day after day, which of those feelings we will nurture so they grow stronger within us and which feelings we’ll turn from because we don’t want them to dominate our lives. But those feelings still exist inside us. The shadows in the garden. Isn’t that what the Landscapers call them?”

  She felt as if he’d thrown cold water in her face, waking her out of some foggy dream. She sat down on the bench. “Shadows in the garden,” she said softly, the echo of the feeling she’d had as a student when that phrase began to have meaning welling up inside her. “Yes, that’s what we call them.”

  “And now, when things are turning bad and the whole world depends on the choices she makes, you’re wondering what’s inside Glorianna that makes her Belladonna.”

  Shame stained Nadia’s cheeks. “Yes.”

  Lee shifted on the bench to get more comfortable. “Do you know where the koffea beans come from?”

  Nadia frowned at him, puzzled by the change in subject. “They come from a land far south of here. A—”

  “Demon landscape.”<
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  She stared at him—and wondered why his smile was a blend of amusement and sadness.

  “Not all of them,” Lee said. “The ships that come in to trading ports from those southern lands carry koffea beans grown on farms—no, that’s not the word for them, but that doesn’t matter. Those other places are human. But the koffea beans that find their way to some of your landscapes as well as Glorianna’s come from the piece of that land inhabited by a race of demons.”

  “You never told me.”

  “You love her and you’d fight to your last breath to protect her from the wizards, but you’ve never been comfortable with the fact that Glorianna resonates with the dark landscapes inhabited by demons. So I’d like to tell you about this one.”

  She looked into his eyes and knew that if she refused to listen, couldn’t find it in herself to try to understand, she would lose her children. Both of them.

  Her throat felt so tight she couldn’t speak, so she just nodded.

  “I was with Glorianna the day that demon landscape resonated so strongly she had to answer. She’d been working in her garden, turning the soil in one of her ‘waiting’ spaces, and I was there to keep her company and rest, since I’d done a lot of traveling over the previous few weeks. I saw her pale, saw the shock in her eyes as her hands pressed flat against that newly turned earth. She had to go, right then, with dirt on her hands and wearing the old clothes she keeps for the times when she’s going to be grubbing around in the garden. I held on to her, and we took that step between here and there.

  “I’m not sure who was more shocked when we appeared in that landscape—Glorianna and me…or the spirit men from the various clans who had gathered to ask the Sacred Mother for help. They were asking for protection against their enemies, and two of the enemy suddenly appeared inside their circle of power.

  “But they recognized what she was. They had old stories, passed down through the spirit men, of women like her. Heart-walkers, they called them.” Lee paused for a moment. “Do you know what they wanted, Mother? Peace. There are veins of gold and silver in parts of their land. And there’s the land itself. The humans, who already control all the land around them, wanted to drive them out. But that place is all they have in the world. It’s their roots, their life. They just want to live there and tend the land. They’ve had enough contact with humans to know there are ‘pretties’ they’d like to have and are willing to trade for. But the human traders who had found a way into their land weren’t honest and brought in other men who were willing to burn out villages and kill everyone they could before they, in turn, were killed.”

  “She took them out of the world,” Nadia said softly.

  “Yes. She altered the landscape so that its boundaries no longer touched the human land in that part of Ephemera.”

  “But…you said the koffea beans come from there.”

  Lee nodded. “For a few months, the only access to that landscape was through Glorianna’s garden, and she was the only one who could reach that place. Then, one day, she came with me when I went to check on the bridges in one of her landscapes, and she headed off down this road that led to a little village. When we got there, we ended up in a merchant store. The two brothers who ran the store were grumbling about a promised shipment that had been sold to someone else in another town who could pay a thieves’ ransom for a bag of koffea beans. They had a grinder and two perk-pots and had dreams of adding a room to their store, making it into the village koffee shop, but the traders who brought bags of koffee inland from the seaports and had to cross over bridges to reach various landscapes tended to sell what they had to whoever would pay the price. Less time traveling meant more profit—and less chance of crossing a bridge and ending up somewhere the trader didn’t want to be.”

  Guessing where the story was going, Nadia smiled, even though tears welled in her eyes.

  “Well, the sum of it is, Glorianna said this was a place for opportunities and choices, so I made a bridge between those two landscapes. Now the merchants, who were willing to trade with demons in order to have a steady supply of koffea beans, have their koffee shop and have expanded their store as well, since they can sell bags of koffea beans to merchants in the bigger towns near them. More trade means providing the people in their village with more variety of goods—as well as establishing sources for the goods the demons want in exchange for the koffea beans. And there’s a man, a teacher by training and an adventurer at heart, who now lives in the demon landscape, teaching the demons human language and acting as a translator when they cross over the bridge to barter with the merchant brothers.”

  Lee paused. Nadia watched his throat working, as if he needed to swallow some strong emotion.

  “Do you know what those demons say when someone asks them where they come from? ‘I come from a piece of Belladonna’s heart.’ So tell me, Mother. How do we judge a dark landscape? Is it dark because the ones who already live there won’t let humans have their piece of the world? Do we judge who is good and who is bad by the color and shape of their skin—or by what resonates in their hearts?”

  The tears fell, washing away the stain on her heart. I should have asked about those landscapes a long time ago.

  She wiped the tears from her face. “I went to see the Den the other day.”

  Stunned silence. Then Lee burst out laughing. “Oh, Sebastian must have sweated bricks when you showed up.”

  Annoyed humor filled her. “He took it better than that other boy, Teaser. Acting all flirty until he found out I was Sebastian’s auntie, and then—”

  Lee howled.

  Nadia gave her son a hard smack on the shoulder. “It’s not funny. For pity’s sake, Lee, he’s an incubus, and he blushed.”

  He laughed so hard he fell off the bench.

  Nadia huffed and waited for him to regain some semblance of composure. When he finally sat upright, albeit on the ground, red-faced and gasping for breath, she leaned forward and looked him in the eyes. “You shouldn’t laugh at him. You can’t say ‘mother’ and ‘sex’ in the same sentence.”

  Sputtering, he raised his hands in surrender. “No, I can’t, but we aren’t talking about me.”

  “You’re grown men. You’ve had sex. I don’t see why you get so huffy about someone else having some.”

  “Can we go back to talking about Sebastian and Teaser? Please?”

  Looking at his face, she laughed—and felt something shift inside her, felt her heart regain its balance.

  When her laughter faded, she sighed. “She really is a Guide of the Heart, isn’t she?”

  Lee sobered. “Heart-walker. Yes, she is. It’s what she’s always been.”

  “I know. I keep hoping there are others like her, somewhere in the world beyond the landscapes we know. But even if there are others, Glorianna is the one who is here—and the Eater of the World is going to do everything It can to destroy her.”

  Lee held out his hand. She took it, welcoming the warmth and connection, while she thought about the daughter who held Ephemera’s fate in her hands.

  They sat that way, silent, for a long time.

  Koltak stumbled, although there was nothing to trip his feet. Then he realized the endless grass had changed to a dirt lane. The air felt different—warmer, drier—and he could hear the sound of waves rolling in to shore.

  He hadn’t felt the resonance of a bridge, but he was so tired, he might not have sensed it. More likely he’d crossed a border between similar landscapes rather than a boundary that required a bridge. Still, a lane would have a destination, so he followed it until he came to a cottage.

  The place looked human-made. He could knock on the door and ask for food and shelter.

  Of course, just because the cottage was human-made didn’t mean the occupants were human.

  He hesitated, then continued following the lane. If there was one cottage, there would be others. Maybe even a village.

  He had no sense of how long or far he walked before he saw the colored lights
. His heart lifted. Had he finally reached the end of the journey?

  Hope battled exhaustion, winning long enough to get him to the edge of a cobblestone street he’d seen once before, years ago.

  Determined to finish the journey, Koltak walked down the main street of the Den of Iniquity.

  The Eater of the World has been sealed away and can no longer touch anything in Ephemera except the landscapes It shaped. And they, too, have been taken out of the world. But the Dark Guides, who brought the Eater into being, who rejoiced in Its destruction of the world, are still out there in the landscapes. Somewhere.

  They are clever. And they are cruel.

  They nurture the dark desires of the heart. It is said they can slip into a mind to whisper things that can turn a heart away from the Light.

  Yes, they’ll tell someone, it isn’t fair that you are poor and can’t afford that pretty trinket. You deserve to have the pretty trinket. If you take it…The merchant is wealthy. What’s the loss of a few coins?

  Yes, they’ll whisper, you’re right to be angry. She was cruel to break your heart. She deserves to feel your fist…that knife…that ax.

  They nurture the dark feelings in the heart and help them grow.

  But the worst thing they can do is use truth to destroy something good, to use truth as a lie in order to dim the Light inside someone—or even within a landscape.

  No one is immune to the Dark Guides. Not even Landscapers. So beware. If someone tries to persuade you to turn away from something you know is right in order to do a greater good…sometimes it really will be the truth and is the right thing to do.

  And sometimes it will be a lie.

  —The First Teachings

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Sebastian and Teaser stood at the edge of Philo’s courtyard, looking over the customers. Or, in Sebastian’s case, watching Lynnea take orders and clear tables.

  “Is it love,” Sebastian wondered, “when a particular woman complaining that you hog the bed makes you feel happier than a dozen other women undressing you with their eyes?”