Still asleep, the boy winced as high wind slammed the thick oaken door. She was always doing things like that - leaving a door unlatched in the wind, he half-consciously thought, eyes still closed. Irritated, he meandered between sleep and wakefulness. Always forgetting about shutting things tight. Bracing things against the mountain’s autumnal winds. He resisted the desire to get up and shut out the cold, burrowing further into the pile of woolens and furs that kept him warm against the frozen air of the high meadow.
She was always forgetting the cold and wind. Forgetting him under his pile of rags and scraps and blankets. Forgetting that this place was not a place for people - beautiful maybe, but strange, and inhospitable. No one but her seemed to think it really habitable, whereas she seemed totally at home in the wind and cloud and swirling darkness; the golden light on the meadows and the too-close Sun. Unaware of the harshness of the wind and cold and light above treeline. Still the boy remained fascinated by her.
Wind shook their small hut.
He shifted again, facing away from the door, and the swirl of air. The smell of wet snow on the air. One morning he had followed the two of them, husband and wife - and like most everything on the shoulders of the mountain it had been harsh, strange, and beautiful. Like her. Tewlder often walked up to a crag if the morning was likely to be clear to see the Sun rise over the ocean six days walk to the south east. Sometimes she woke, and followed him, lightly bounding over the stoney path with her skirts held up to reach the pinnacle with her husband. He could make sense of Tewlder - a good man to be apprenticed to. But she? The fascination remained. He rolled over, not knowing whether he was awake or asleep. Rolling the covers around his face to create a pocket of warm breathe, keeping his heat to himself. Something intruded on his consciousness. A rumbling. It was not the wind.
At first he didn’t know what had awakened him, what had made him sit so swiftly upright, jarring him out of sleep, but slowly as his eyes came into focus he felt the whole mountainside shaking. He watched as the sparse collection of earthenware objects on the hut’s shelves jumped and danced. For a moment he stayed still, not knowing what to do, or how to move. He looked around in half panic, half wonder, then he leapt from his shelf, swung a cloak about his shoulders, and rushed out into the wind.
He was immediately knocked over. What he had taken to be another gusty morning on the high meadow was instead a torrent of wind and sleet. His bare feet slid in the slush over the rocks, and he fell hard to the stoney ground. One side of his body was immediately soaked and stung by the flying water and biting bits of ice. Shoving himself back to his feet, by shielding his eyes he made out Chapter House through the fleeing clouds and precipitation, the largest building of the cluster of huts and outbuildings that made up the Monastery of Tawesek, high on the shoulders of the mountain. He ran for it, slipping here and there on the lichen covered rocks protruding through the layer of slush and wet snow. Though the stones had been laid somewhat flat to form a path, they still resembled the jumble of sharp green and grey shapes that covered the mountain’s shoulder that the monastery perched on, interspersed with tufts of tawny sedge that allowed them to refer to the area as a protected meadow.
He stumbled inside Chapter House, and immediately saw Bryok, The Abbot, sitting calmly on a small rug amidst the noise and wind and tumult. There was a small raised dais where the Abbot often sat and thought, sometimes for hours at a time.
“What’s happening?” the boy asked.
“The Earth is shaking,” the old man replied. “Come, sit beside me, Arthyen”, the man patted the flat paving stones next to him. The mountain continued to shake.
“The Earth does this sometimes,” the Abbot said, raising his eyes toward the roof as the huge red oak timbers of the structure shook and twisted at their mortise-and-tenoned joints. Though the ceiling was fairly low - the boy often caught himself about to jump and touch the lower cross-beams - the bulk of the oaken structure made it feel spacious and grand. Without a solid wall surrounding it - just wooden and cloth partitions and woven hangings - wind blew through the structure bringing wisps of fast-moving cloud and causing the brass oil lanterns to sway.
The boy sat down.
The floor continued to shake.
“The ground shrugs in its sleep, though this seems profound,” the Abbot continued. “The shaking has gone on for many breaths. I wonder what below the earth has awakened?”
“Is that why the storm has come?”
Arthyen’s mind raced between thoughts, only starting to form an idea before leaping off in another direction. The Abbot often talked strangely about the Earth as a living thing; the shaking continued, and frightened him, would the mountain fall? The storm howled, and seemed to intensify.
“The storm seems to me to be hiding something,” the old man said.
Then the boy realized what had been caught in the back of his mind.
“Where are they? The two of them. They weren’t in the hut. I thought they went out to that outcrop to watch the sunrise - they go, sometimes, in the morning.”
At this the Abbot looked sharply at Arthyen, breaking, if only for a moment, his calm exterior. Recovering himself he said “They’re gone?” He stood up slowly, though Arthyen thought it concealed real concern. “Then we shall have to find them.” And the Abbot strode out into the wind as though the morning was as calm and blue skied as a summer’s day, leaving Arythen alone in Chapter House as the ground continued to shake.
It began to thunder.
~
The girl stood resolutely behind the stone as the wind and sleet whipped about her. It must be Musk’s fault. He was always meddling with things that he didn’t understand. She stopped herself; she knew she didn’t understand them either, but she knew, she knew!, that those caves were important. That was where this shaking was coming from. The caves loomed large in her thoughts. Even as she tended Tawesek’s terraced gardens, concentrating under the gaze of her mistress, her mind wandered to those caves. Wondering about what a space beneath the earth would be like. How far it could stretch. Somewhere down to the roots of the mountains and beyond. She could feel their pull. Why did Bryok allow Musk to explore something so sacred and mysterious?
She would swear she had seen shadows moving through the storm coming up the path from the caves. At first she hadn’t been entirely sure, but she time had convinced her, she knew that there had been something there. She had wrapped herself in the boiled wool cloak, kept to stave off the worst of the weather. Draped in it - the color of the undyed dark mountain sheep it was made from - she slipped out after the shadows. Foolish? Probably. But if her mistress could abide the wind and weather - and she always did - then she could go and see what just walked out of the storm.
Beryan leaned against the trembling boulder, sheltering from the wind. It was always amazing to her how the stone could shelter you from the elements up here. A few feet in any direction, and she could see the wind, the sleet whipping by, but here was a space of total calm. And she was safe within it. She edged to the stone’s sharp corner, and peered around it. The shadows had vanished over the rise, perhaps forty feet away. She slipped out into the wind, and moved slowly and carefully over the rocks toward the point where the mountain’s stone disappeared into the grey storm. This was where she felt at her most calm. No matter that the mountain moved below her feet and hands - no one could move amongst these rocks, or on this mountain side the way that she could. She felt as one with these stones, moving slowly and silently. Intently. If her mistress could act as though the wind and storm were nothing, then she could follow these shadows wherever they went.
She made her way to the edge of the next terrace, and peered into the wind. Suddenly the whole mountain side flashed in intense brightness.
~
The boy stood silently where the Abbot had been, fighting urges to begin running in several different directions. The ground shook less as the storm intensified. Shapes formed in the clouds and sleet. Lightening cast shadows and the space darkened. The oil lamps hanging from the oaken beams swung. Arthyen stared out into the great gulf that stood in front of Chapter House where the mountain suddenly fell away.
She must have gone out, following Tewlder as he got up early, slipping out in the clear morning. Today was their child’s naming day, and he would want to watch the sunrise and think. She’d follow, and watch the last stars fade. They’d stand together. See the Sun coming up over the ocean. Tewlder had worked on a boat before coming to the Mountain to scratch out patterns in wood, rather than ivory and tusk. But how had they been caught out in the storm?
The mountain thrust its ancient head high into the sky. Sometimes storms gathered in the valleys, while the peak remained clear. The weather could turn with ferocious speed if those valley clouds began to rise with the morning, and push over the shoulders of the mountains - shoulders like the one on which Tawesek precariously sat. If Tewlder had left early and headed for the peak and had she followed the whole storm could have swept in beneath them. Arthyen decided. At the back of Chapter House there was a store of ceremonial uniforms that the artisans sometimes wore in some formal setting in which they showed themselves to be anything but soldiers. The weather was guard enough for whatever of value was kept at Tawesek. Still, the uniforms were thicker and warmer than anything he had back at the hut - even if they might be a little big - and he didn’t relish the idea of running back through the sleet to get whatever foul weather gear he had.
He slid into the tasseled boots, lined with fur, pulled on one of red embroidered tunics, and began forging a path into the storm.
The wind hurled sleet and slush and stinging rain against his face. Bryok was no where to be seen. Probably, he had gone off to search Tewlder’s workshop, or where the baby slept, watched over by healers and herbalists.
Arthyen walked crouched over, with one hand held out as protection attempting to block the frozen attack. Slowly, he picked his way up, over the stones on the path that led up to the higher terrace, and from there wandered up the final cone of the mountain to the summit. Lightening flashed, lighting up the mountainside as the cloud all around him suddenly glowed with fierce light. Ahead, he saw a dark shape on the ground, darker than the wet stone, and standing out against the grey of the accumulating sleet, even as a thin layer formed over it.
Moving closer, he crouched next to Beryan.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “You’ll be frozen to the rocks.”
She glared at him. He was always interrupting important things. She’d be just settling into a conversation about something she’d thought of, some garden task with her mistress when he’d show up and interrupt with that look of awe in his eyes whenever he came near the tall, dark haired woman. She looked back into the white and grey of the storm where the shadows had disappeared.
“I’m following something,” she said. “You’re the one who’ll freeze out here.” She looked back at him and the guards’ tunic and boots. “Why are you wearing that?”
“I didn’t want to go back to the hut, and this is warmer anyway. I have to go up to the peak. Tewlder and your mistress must have left to see the sunrise early this morning before the storm came. What are you following?” he called over the rushing wind and the clatter of the sleet and ice.
“She’s out here? This is stupid! The baby was born seven days ago!” Again, Beryan sat with the uncomfortable mixture of frustration and awe of her mistress, a woman whose deep, quiet strength she longed for, and yet she marveled at the woman’s simple, careless choices. Turning things over in her head, she looked at Arthyen, in his too-big clothes, trying forever to seem older than he was. She let out a sigh that - while he saw the movement in her shoulders - was lost in the wind. “Come on, then,” she said. “We had better go after them.”
They clambered over stone, two figures lost in swirling mist on the vastness of the mountain, one in brown and red furs and leathers, the other hidden beneath a dark cloak melting into the stone and shadow. Buffeted by the wind as they climbed onto the terrace, they traced the path of set stones - indistinguishable from the tumble of sea and tides of stones to anyone not accustomed to move across the strange landscape - to the protected path that picked its slightly sheltered course between ledge and boulder up the broad cone of the peak of Men Myghtern, who thrust his gnarled and ancient and hoary head a thousand feet above his neighbors, splitting clouds, and looking out to the green and blue sea.
They moved from looming boulder to looming boulder. It seemed to take hours in the bitter wind, but eventually the path became less steep. As the terrain eased over toward the rounded top, the clouds began to tear. The wind did not grow less, but the sleet slackened, and instead they found themselves with frost on their clothes and hair and eyelashes; the cloud instantly freezing into frost. The ragged clouds let fast moving light through to the stoney ground, the tawny sedge - pools of sunlight rushing by, coming from nowhere, and disappearing swiftly to some mysterious elsewhere. They continued the climb, and as the sky grew brighter, they eased up out of the swirling mass of cloud onto the broad peak in blinding sunlight.
“They aren’t here.”
“Clearly.”
“Where else could they be?”
She stopped and thought for a moment, scanning the view in all directions. Elsewhere morning touched range on range of mountains. To the east and south she saw it glinting off something far out at the horizon - the sea. But beneath them, swirling around the peak - though not over it - the dense cloud eddied with a fierce wind coming out of the west. She narrowed her eyes against the wind, the bright light, and considered.
“There’s a place to shelter down a little ways” she said, after a pause.
“Where? What is it?”
She looked at him, again weighing whether or not to tell him. “There’s a small shelter hidden in the rocks. It’s half way down. If I were caught out here, and couldn’t get back, that’s where I’d go.” Again she scanned the horizon. A sharp intake of breath. “Over there”, she pointed to the southwest, “what’s that?”
“What’s what?” he asked. “Mountains.” He shrugged his shoulders. He squinted too, eyes still adjusting the brightness of the morning light.
“That looks different” she said, pointing again. “It doesn’t look right.”
“Dunno,” he said. “It looks the same to me. Beautiful though. It always surprises me somehow. I always think, ‘I wouldn’t want to get caught out there in that endless forest,’ but then, somehow, I want to.”
Her brow furrowed as she stared at a far valley that shouldn’t have been there. It seemed to her that a mountain had sprouted another arm that she didn’t recognize.
“Come on,” he said, breaking her concentration. “We need to find them.”
They picked their way down through the rocks, and back into the storm. It seemed to hang, swirling around the lower reaches of the summit cone. As they descended, the sun grew dim, then disappeared altogether. The flying cloud bit at their faces, slowly turning from frozen mist into sleet and stinging rain. The stones of the path collected a clear coating of ice in places, and they had to go gingerly to keep from being blown onto the jagged points below the path. Twice the mountain shook again - moments when they froze, and steadied themselves against heaving boulders until the tremors passed. They seemed lost to the world outside, or else held tightly in their small space of swirling grey and stinging air. They could see twenty feet, perhaps, in any direction, and it seemed entirely possible that the path could have led them somewhere else entirely.
Beryan led the way, nimbly placing her feet on whatever she could find to provide safe purchase, until they came at last to a piece of quartz as large as a ram’s head placed atop a boulder to their left. It had stayed precisely where she had put it in spite of the shaking. Beryan paused. The only person to whom she had spoken of this place was her mistress, and it was deeply personal. Her own small space. But somehow she felt like this was the place her mistress would go. She turned to Arthyen.
“This place is a secret. It’s my place.” She eyed him amidst the wind and sleet and rushing cloud, trying to impress upon him with her stare the seriousness with which she took the decision to let him see it. “Don’t make fun of it.”
He stood a moment seeing the look in her eyes, and nodded. Tawesek was a tiny place amidst the vastness of the mountain, and yet they all lived - especially these two parentless children - one on top of the other, huddled for warmth and protection. He had often sought out hiding places in odd corners of the buildings - huts, workshops, eating spaces, a few storage sheds, and of course Chapter House - to be alone. And then been shooed out of all of them. He nodded.
She passed behind the boulder on which the quartz rested, and walked the small path that she had tended between the stones. She had moved and rebalanced rock and stone, filling in spaces, uncovering small patches of soil from which sedge and bunched alpine flowers sprouted. As he moved, Arthyen was taken by how obvious the path was as he followed her, and also how natural and like all their surroundings it looked. They had hardly traveled fifty feet from the path, and yet he knew he would never have found this place had he not been shown the way. Around another corner, and then between two large boulders they went, and then he saw the orange light of a candle.
They saw Tewlder bent beside his wife, sheltered in a small cave formed by a fall of large boulders. Only six or eight feet deep, the space was protected from the weather, and had numerous rags of blankets and furs, which covered the form of the tall woman, a great red gash across her brow below her raven black hair. Tewlder had lit one of the candle stubs Beryan had collected and hidden away in a crack at the back of the space.
“What happened?” the girl exclaimed, rushing into the space she had done so much to shape.
Tewlder, tall, strong-limbed, dressed in dark leather, with worry in his eyes turned sharply to look at them as the girl climbed along the far side of the still woman. “How did you find us?” he said. “I only knew the space because after falling she said ‘turn at the frozen light, the path from the star’, before she lost consciousness I would never had known this was here, and I can’t carry her down in this by myself.”
“This is my place,” Beryan said. “Go find Bryok. Bring others. You two. I know what to do,” and she turned to the still woman lying amidst the blankets, and furs.
Tewlder hesitated. He did not want to leave this child alone with his beloved, but his wife was always saying things about trusting a serious child to see things that others could not. He looked out at the boy who stood at the entrance to the space, back in the wind and sleet, while facing this calm inner space. There was nothing that he could do now, except get help, and the girl worked with his wife in the gardens, and as a healer. In truth, she was more help here than he was. But the boy he could do something for in those ill-fitting men’s clothes.
“Come with me,” he said rising, “let’s find help”.
~
When they had gone, Beryan busied herself, finding calm in movement and purpose. Along with the stubs of candles, she had a small copper kettle, some scraps of wood, and a store of herbs from the garden which she had dried, and hung from some twine. She pressed dried moss gathered around a nearby seep into the wound to staunch the bleeding with one hand, while gathering a pile of kindling onto the flat space now vacated by Tewlder. These collected objects had always been play things. Now she used them in earnest, hoping they were real enough now. Ripping one of the rags, she bound the moss in place, and then started separating strips of birch bark. She took the small kettle, and went to the long spout - made of small balsam trunk the thickness of her wrist - which she had pounded into the rocks to catch the trickle from another seep just outside her hiding place. She had wedged an iron hooked into a crack in the rock to hang the kettle from, and she now lit the small pile of kindling, and began to warm the collected water. She searched amongst the dried herbs hanging above - the collected scraps discarded from the crop destined to fill the stores of Tawesek’s healers - for bearberry willow and creeping snowberry and crawling azelea.
It took time. The small fire needed constant feeding, and the flames licked the blackened bottom of the kettle. She looked at her mistress’ face. It was pale, and her breathing was ragged. Peeling back the moss, she saw that the gash was deep. She saw broken bone. She replaced the bandage. A few deep breaths restored her equilibrium. The water came to a boil, and she began to strip leaves from the sprigs she had laid out, and the small space began to fill with the familiar smell of the mountain herbs.
~
Tewlder and Arthyen picked their way down the treacherous path. The slush and sleet and ice soaked through the leather of their boots, and slowly their feet went from wet, to painful, to numb. As they reached the high terrace just above Tawesek, they began to see fire light through the mass of cloud, and stumbled down the last jumble of rock steps into Chapter House. Stripping boots, they padded across the stone flags, and saw Bryok turn to them, while a small group of fellow folk of Tawesek stood arrayed in front of him.
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you. We checked here, and formed a party. We were waiting for you, and are ready for you to take us to her.” He said all this with a maddening calm. “We’ve new boots for you, as well, there.” He gestured to two pairs of the uniform boots Arthyen had worn, sitting primly on the floor beside him. “You must be soaked through.”
Tewlder who stood for a moment in shocked silence now began to speak quickly. “I had gone up this morning as soon as the sky began to lighten. I couldn’t sleep. And she followed me, but when the storm came in…”
Bryok cut him short with a raised hand. “Tell me on the way, my friend. Let us begin. We will have the time we need.” The folk in front of him - men and women, artisans, tradesfolk, gardeners, and healers - began moving out the back of Chapter House, Gwiader the weaver carried woven blankets in a well shaped pack, while Gwelivedhes the midwife with her grey braided hair and crimson skirts bundled rain-proof skins. Gov who wrought such beauty in metals and her apprentice Ferror, with his arms like the limbs of strong trees, shouldered the litter. Each was clothed in layers, and oil skins. Each bent to the wind and walked in silence against the buffeting storm. Last walked the Abbot, gesturing for Tewlder to walk with him. He bent to Arthyen who stood silently watching, and said “Go along with them. Show them the way.” He nodded to the bundled figures ahead, seemingly oblivious to the sleet.
As Arthyen scrambled over rocks to make it to the head of the party, Bryok took a walking stick in hand, and made his way after them, listening intently to Tewlder, in spite of sound of the wind. He listened as Tewlder explained how he had watched the sunrise with his wife, taken in by the beauty of the dawn that would see them choose a name for their daughter. Tewlder never lost his love and awe of beauty - even in times like these. They had watched the eastern sky lighten without noticing the roiling clouds sweeping up the sheer ravines to the west of the range, until the ragged strips of clouds had begun flying madly across the rock strewn meadows that separated the stoney peaks. The clouds had enveloped Tawesek below, and as they picked their way down the path, the storm had risen to meet them. And then the earth had begun to quake. A rock lodged above them - frozen to the mountain side - had been dislodged, and had struck her over the right eye with great force. She had told him about the frozen star at the side of the path.
“Yes,” Bryok said, “a frozen star. She would be drawn by that, I think.”
~
Arthyen led the men and women to the stone shelter where Beryan was bathing the woman’s brow with a strip of cloth soaked in the tincture, while holding her pale hand.
“Her breathing is shallow,” she said, with a strange sense of calm. “She’s weak.” Beryan tilted her head to one side, taking in the beauty of her mistress’ face. Even with the bandage above her eye, the face, framed by flowing dark hair, was striking. Her skin had lost the color of days spent in the open, but somehow, rather than looking sickly or palid, it seemed to take on the purity and white of snow.
As the folk of Tawesek gathered around the final stretch of path, they arrayed themselves about the small opening with silence and stillness. The Abbot Bryok had brought a thoughtful silence to all those who spent time with him; a calm silence that always marked wherever they went. They folded their hands, looking on until Bryok came up, and then they parted and he walked up to the opening, looking at the two candle-lit figures in the small space. He nodded to Beryan, a small bow of thanks, and then turned to the figures gathered around him. “Come,” he said, “let us put her on the litter, and carry her down. Please listen to Beryan, and allow her to walk beside. She has shown herself to be a healer, and I place my daughter in her charge.” The surrounding adults nodded acknowledgement, moved forward, and carefully lifted the figure onto the red embroidered cloth of the litter, strung between two dark red oaken poles.
The procession moved with painful slowness down the mountainside. Maintaining balance amongst the rocks - covered as they were with ice, and sleet and snow - was extremely difficult, even for these folk, accustomed as they were to the harsh environment. As they moved along the path the storm ebbed. At first the sleet slackened, and the blowing mist bit their faces less and less. In time blue sky showed through tears in the tattered clouds. The wind blew, but slowly the clouds raised, and soon they could see, now and then, the roofs of the buildings, and down into the ravine below the paved stone porch of Chapter House.
They brought her to the small raised dias where Bryok often sat in the midst of Chapter House. The litter was placed on small wooden supports set on the carefully patterned rug, wool dyed in golds and deep reds and crimsons - the colors everywhere at Tawesek - that lent the Monastery a warmth amidst the cold blue of sky and rock amongst which it nestled.
~
No one knew the full story of Tawesek, unless it was Bryok, and he stayed silent on this, as he did about many things. Most people lived clustered along the coastline off to the south and east. The people of Mons had come across the sea generations ago, but the world had gotten colder, and the passage to ancestral homes that lay across the sea had filled with grinding ice, and no one had been able to return for many long years. Still, enough had made the journey into the west where long ago Mons had sailed, and the land had been fertile enough in its own way, that they had made a home for themselves between the sea, and the mountains.
They sailed their ships up and down the coast, or out to the islands with their black sand and sheer mountains rising out of the sea, and fished and farmed and traded.
But someone had ventured to this peak of Men Myghtern - visible from for the three hills of Monsoth - the largest city along the coast sitting upon its peninsular in a wide and sheltered bay into which the Great River flowed. They had found high on this shoulder, amidst the unearthly rock and wind and light, a place to sit and watch the world.
Tawesek sat at the edge of civilization, it’s back to the wilderness, looking eastward to the sea. Bryok had continued the building. He had gathered to him artists and artisans, gardeners and farmers, healers and builders. From the valley they cut oak and maple and cedar to make fields to grow food, and to raise the hardy sheep, and goats and cattle that sustained them. The wood they had cut and shaped and carried up the mountain to build their small homes and humble workshops. They had shaped the mountain’s stones into floors and terraces. They had built up beds out of the sandy soil, mixed with the scraps from their kitchens, and the animal’s byres for gardens to partner with the strange plants that grew amongst the heights.
They lived in a world apart. Though the trackway that led to Monsoth was well laid, it was seldom travelled, except when a cart load of what the folk of Tawesek made on the mountain was sent to the market at Monsoth, returning with what they could not gather in their sheltered valley. Tawesek acquired a reputation amongst the people of the coast as an almost mythical place. Six days travel into the mountains was too far for most of the people on the coast, busy with their lives. The goods that came from this mysterious place - intricately woven blankets, carefully fired pottery, lamps and blown glass, beautiful books of old stories bound in calfskin - were sought after, and those that brought them to market always left with their carts full of raw iron from Hornbreow, or bronze from the Orm and with news of the wider world. The few that made the journey from the coast - many went in search of cures to ailments that the leeches along with coast had no power over - told strange tales of people with strange beliefs and customs.
~
More hot water was brought, as well as the herbs that Beryan requested. One of the old healers, Sawya, watched with Beryan. “He’s given you a great compliment, my love”, she said to the girl. But she wondered, too. Bryok made few mistakes, but even this woman was unlikely to survive such a wound. ‘By Sea, Storm, and Stone,’ she thought, ‘if the old fox has a plan - and I’ll always believe that he does - let it be. We have enough to be thankful for.’
Beryan again cocked her head to one side. “Do you think she’ll live? She’s turning as white as snow. And yet I somehow feel that she’s getting stronger even as she seems to slip further away.”
Sawya watched the young girl, standing at the edge of the harsh transition to womanhood. “She was always strong - much like others I might name,” though Beryan missed the meaningful look. “A creature of the stone, and wind. The small plants that cling to the mountainside for life and shelter in a harsh world.” Sawya reached out to touch the girls’ hair, running a lock of it between her fingers. “You have a hardness within you, and a warmth, too. I see on you both shadow, and kindled flame. I think that if she is to recover, it will come by your hands, and if not, then she will be satisfied that we live on in this way that she so loved.”
Without taking her eyes of her mistress, Beryan nodded, though whether she heard the words or simply understood their sense was unclear.
Slowly the clouds lifted, and eventually vanished into the sky’s blue. The day brightened across Tawasek, and the wind calmed. The folk of the monastery went about their spaces, and found what had been broken by the shaking earth. They set to rights that which had fallen. They began their day.