Because Astresse is dead and it’s not the same. There, a new brick to add to the tower of recrimination. Astresse Regent, who was fierce and bold and beautiful, who took a brief month of my life and lit it up, is dead, long dead, died while I slept, and then her descendants died, too, and then theirs grew old. And intellectually I know that I was still dealing with these problems when I was with her, but in the treacherous light of hindsight she was glorious like the sun, but a sun whom my memory honours only by noting how bloody dark it’s got now she’s gone.
And yes, all the minor chorus starts up, about how Astresse was also the source of my worst unprofessionalism, and how I’d be hauled up for it should anyone come back and check up on me, and how nobody’s coming back to check up on me, and how . . . but it’s not even these humdrum woes that grip me the worst. It’s that she’s dead, and I will never have those days back, when I did stupid, stupid things, unbecoming of a serious academic, and rode to war at the side of a warrior queen whom, despite absurd differences in age and culture and genetic makeup, I loved.
That breaks me, or perhaps it breaks my depression, or both of us. Abruptly the sobs are coming, and then I’m just lying there in a forest clearing in a world where they’ve forgotten everything they ever knew about space travel, bawling my eyes out like a child because of a woman I knew for a fragment of time so brief, in relation to all the life I’ve lived, that she may as well never have existed.
It is cathartic; it is exhausting. And I sleep at last, my demons run as ragged as their prey.
In the morning there is a blanket over me. I could probably find a positive interpretation of this, if I could fight my way clear of the clouds, but instead I know it just means that Lyn and Esha were watching. Probably they had blades in hand because they thought there was a real beast they could fight off. Instead of a fight, they got to see their vaunted wizard weeping and trembling like a child, and that is just one more thing to feel physically sick about.
I lie there for a long time in the wan sunlight, on the wet ground, fighting over whether to engage the DCS. To make that decision is to get over a hill that seems insurmountable. Easier by far to let the negative feelings have the run of the place, to stay huddled in the last latched cupboard of my mind.
But at last, somehow, I give the command, which was designed to be as easy as possible for just this reason. And, yes, ready to meet the day now, thank you. Get up, feel my clothes already drying themselves out. We are to go to another community now, and this time as formal demon-hunters to meet with the local government. And I shall stay at the back and make notes and everything can go into the reports. Good. Yes.
My readouts suggest that last night’s excesses didn’t make much of a dent in my emotional balance, which is always the problem with such things. It’s not as though the whole business of depression is a zero-sum game, after all. But for now I can function again, and bleed-over should be minimal. I will just keep myself calm and avoid unnecessary provocation.
I return to Lyn and Esha at their camp. They are looking at me, and I scan their faces for things like pity or disgust, just to get that out of the way. Instead, they seem oddly impressed, and I realise that I’ve found another hole in my understanding. Theirs is not an overtly emotional culture. There are strict rules about intimacy and formality. What does it mean, for a grown person to have a full-on emotional meltdown? What does it mean when that adult is of a peculiar status such as mine? I have absolutely no idea, but apparently it is . . . creditable, in some way. Perhaps it is a luxury accorded only to certain social roles, either the powerful or extreme outsiders. Perhaps I have some secondary function as a lightning rod for tantrums, so that other people can maintain face.
*
Watacha has wooden walls, and was probably built to house perhaps a thousand people, up on a hill long cleared of trees and with the best view possible of the surrounding land, given that everything is cloaked in trees. The various little forest feudalities have small populations and no field agriculture at all, instead cultivating the forest itself so that hard lines between nature and the work of human hands are often hard to discern. The hill is thronging with tents and makeshift shelters, evidence of some serious population displacement, demonic or otherwise. I do still wonder if they might be giving personhood to some natural force, a pestilence or crop disease, or even a political schism. The way their languages work, with their multitude of qualifiers, means that I have difficulty telling metaphors from literal reports. Nothing is ever simply itself, in their speech.
Lyn’s rank signifiers get us admitted. Inside the walls, the city is crowded and the armed women who met us at the gate have to shove and elbow their way through the streets. I have to mute my olfactory senses after a while, because the stench of too many people and not enough water becomes intolerable. This place will be rife with disease soon, if it isn’t already.
We are met not by Elhevesse Regent but by a woman of close to Lyn’s age, sitting on a carved wooden throne too large for her. She is Jerevesse Third Daughter. The language she speaks is related to Lyn’s, strangely accented and peppered with loan words from several other language groups, so that I have to work hard to translate what she says. My internal lexicons do their best to fill in gaps, but the dialect is unfamiliar, and so I am always an exchange behind as the women address each other.
I am watching Lyn, and she takes being met by this Third Daughter hard. At first I think we all thought that Elhevesse just doesn’t take any of us seriously, but no. Elhevesse took a number of soldiers west into the forest five days ago, to confront the demon. Since then, no word has come from them.
Lyn just stands there, digesting the news. She stands very straight and her face is very calm, and Jerevesse sits regally enough, and her face, too, is very calm, and Esha stands somewhat back and looks down so that her face, calm or not, is in shadow. And I suddenly see, as though a book had opened, all the little tells that show just how emotional they are being. The child-queen Third Daughter’s steepled fingers are white with the pressure they exert on one another. Lyn’s fists are clenched into knotted balls with a tension entirely absent from her face. We are just a few days too late and everything has been lost. This, then, was the plan, but nobody consulted the queen of Watacha about it, and now there is no army, just a great number of hungry, sick, frightened people.
“Who have you brought, though?” Jerevesse says. “Who stands like a shadow at your back?”
I think she means Esha at first, but of course she means me.
Lyn rallies at this. She has no army, but she has a magician. She names me for the Third Daughter, and I am somewhat alarmed at the weight our host gives to this pronouncement.
“He can defeat the demon?”