“Enlao, enlaio, enlien, enlindi, enlindial, how many tenses does Old Elvish have?” Euris frustratedly slammed the primer down. She’d found it on Gath’s nightstand, and had taken it back to her room to read, thinking in the back of her mind that if he would never complete the translation, the least she could do would be to pick up where he left off. Since Gath’s small and simple burial, she had mostly stayed in her room, either reading the primer or pretending to read it while her mind raced with other thoughts. She wasn’t sleeping well, and often watched the winking but unmoving stars at night.

The little primer was a worn leather book, which was unguessably old, but which was a strong and welcome reminder of Gath. She did not think she could have chosen a more appropriate memento from his life, even though the choice had not been a conscious one. She often picked it up, and felt its smooth cover, thinking about him sitting in the Gray Tower, reading from it. But when she studied the book, the waves of frustration returned. Old Aeral had finished translating several leaves of the book before she could conjugate a regular verb. She was even more frustrated because she remembered the long afternoons imprisoned in the Sea Tower as a young girl, learning the Boccha dialect of the sea traders under Wasaris the Sea Master’s close watch. The effort to learn Old Elvish was going nowhere, and she knew it, but did not want to abandon such a close link to Gath.

Nothing had seemed right to her since Gath died. She didn’t know exactly why. She had already felt a disturbance in her life simply by graduating. She had been disappointed to not be named Protector to the Sea Tower’s apprentice, but after the journey with Gath she had longed to come back to the Gray Tower and resume her life in the College. But Gath died, and she still had not figured out what was next. Maybe nothing was right all along, and this was the first chance she had been afforded to think about it. The most unwelcome new feeling haunting her life was frustration. She felt like her brother was standing over her, as he did when she practiced fencing or archery or swimming or anything as a young girl, pushing her; as if he was saying the answer to all her questions would be plain if she tried a little harder and made a better effort to figure things out. She felt frustrated, and the pain in her head reminded her of missing a square hit on the jousting target and having it swing around to whack her in the back of her helmet. She missed Euralin greatly, and wished she could talk to him. Who else did she have? Laria was long gone, as were most of her friends.

Maybe South Port was the answer. At least for a while, if not forever. Thoughts of home had become more appealing to her. Somewhere familiar where she belonged, and could get back on her feet and decide what was next in her life. To smell the air, eat fresh saltwater taffy (not the stale taffy her brother brought up to her), and sleep in her own bed once more sounded good.

She started out of her thoughts when a knock came at the door, and wondered what time it was. The sunlight in her room still pointed to mid-afternoon. She got up slowly, placing the primer she had been holding onto reverently on her desk.

Old Aeral was there at her door. “Do you mind an old man coming by for a visit?” She did not, and welcomed him into her small room. “I haven’t seen you for a while. You’ve seemed to stop coming by the Tower.”

Euris said, “I guess I’ve been busy.” Even to her it sounded incredibly lame. What else could she say? She avoided the old man because he reminded her too much of what had happened, and she was happier in self-imposed denial?

Aeral seemed to understand, because he did not press the point. “Ah, well, so you know, the translation is coming well along. Won’t be much longer before I have it whipped into shape, although I don’t think it will fall to me to write the commentary. But that’s not why I’m here. I wanted to give you something, but I put off going though Gath’s things, and then you never came back to the Tower once I found it. So here it is! I think Gath would want you to have this.” He pulled a small pendant out of his pocket and held it up. The gold circle held a crystal representation of the Star of Sorcery.

Euris gasped. “But this is his Journeyman pendant! Surely it’s not meant for me?”

“Who else? If nothing else, you have earned it, discharging your duty as a Protector. But you don’t get to be my age without understanding a few things, and I know between you and Gath there was more than duty. You’ve had such a loss. I knew Gath’s days were dwindling when I let him go, but it still has been hard on me. And you hardly knew him. Keep it, and wear it in his memory. Whatever befalls you, you will have those memories for the rest of your life. And that reminds me: What will you be doing now?”

Although she had made no decision at all about her future, she told him with a certainty that surprised herself, “I’ve decided to go home, that is, back to South Port.”

“Well, now, that is probably best,” the old man said, weighing his words as he spoke them. “You need to regroup. We all do. But you know, of course, you always have a place in the Gray Tower, if you want to come back. I will always welcome you. Not just in memory of Gath, but you would have been a wonderful addition to my dingy old Tower.”

“Thank you.” Impulsively, she hugged the old man briefly, startling him some at first. He smiled, and disappeared out of her door, leaving her alone once more.

She found an old chain someone had once given her, and slipped the pendant onto it. Funny how she had once worn jewelry, but since coming to the College had never put any on. Other than, of course, her House’s signet ring which she wore even under her heavy leather practicing gloves. The slender gold chain went around her neck, and she tucked the pendant under her shirt. It felt comforting against her skin.

Deciding on the spur of the moment to go home, and actually going home, were two different things. She slowly began to pack, and everything she put in her traveling kit reminded her somehow of Gath, even though most of the stuff she carried came from a time long before she had ever met him, as gifts from her father and brother from when they had brought her up to the College of Swords.

The next day, she guessed she was as packed as she would ever be, and meandered down to the stable, not taking any direct route but savoring the quiet grounds of the College as much as possible. She slowly saddled her horse, and embarked upon an indirect route out of the city. No one to meet, no one to tell where she was going. Quite an odd feeling, and as she left the town she felt like she had forgotten something. She still had not fully decided if she were going home or just for an early morning ride, until she was out of the capital and on the road south.

Many days passed, with Euris savoring being alone with her thoughts in a way she was not even in her own room. One day when she set out in the morning from her camp, she was thinking about nothing in particular, trying to remember an old song the bards sang on the wharfs of South Port which eluded her memory, when up ahead on the road walked a man. Not having had any company in many days, she responded to his friendly wave and smile, and dismounted her horse to walk alongside him so she could stretch her legs.

The man was of average height, and had brown hair and brown eyes, and seemed unremarkable and plain. He had on a simple but sturdy robe, suitable for travel. She did not know why, but she felt drawn to him. They talked about the weather, the condition of the roads, and the lands thereabout for some time, until Euris noticed he was drawing her out more and more. Realizing this, she opened up to him like she’d never opened up to anyone before. Something about him inspired her full trust and confidence, but she didn’t know what. Maybe it was just the fact that he was a stranger, someone she’d never see again in her life, and she wanted to unload.

Euris talked about her College days and graduation, and Gath, and their trip. She omitted most of the bad parts, the wight and the Book, and concentrated on the little things. She finally ended up, in the late afternoon, mentioning she was going home.

“So what fascination does home have for you?” he asked her.

She frowned, pausing, having never adequately answered that question for herself. “I don’t know. I want to be somewhere safe, where I know that I belong. I have felt so empty lately. It’s like the world I lived in slipped away, and I am drifting, waiting for something I can’t even name.”

The man nodded, as if she had explained herself perfectly to him, when she wasn’t even sure she could put her feelings into words. “You are trying to find a new world, a new place you belong. You are trying to fit yourself into a permanent place.”

Euris smiled, since he had found the words she lacked. “Exactly. Somewhere I can live the rest of my life, where nothing ever changes.”

The man nodded briskly, as if they had finally gotten to the point of the conversation. “You want a stable, permanent home which you have only imagined. Every time you find it, it slips from your grasp. And you can’t enjoy what you find, because even as you experience it, it seems to be slipping from you. Like the hours of your life were the grains of sand in an hourglass.” Euris fell silent, thinking about these words. The man let her have her space.

They walked along in silence for a good while, and the road they followed flowed into a little town. Afternoon was at its very end, and Euris decided to stop at the inn and sleep in a bed for a change after many nights of camping. And eat some hot food. The man agreed that staying at the inn was a good idea. Euris realized the inn was one she had visited once when she was much younger and just a skinny girl. Naturally, no one recognized the powerful woman she had become, and she and the man had a bite to eat in anonymity in the deserted common room.

As they were finishing their meal, the man looked up from his food as if to say something, but they were interrupted by an older woman who hurried up to stand before their table.  “Good sir,” she said to him with an expectant voice. She was missing several teeth, and had her steel-gray hair pulled back into a bun. She wrung her hands on her apron with suppressed nervousness.

“How do you know I am good?” the man asked, with a smile and a twinkle in his eye.

She took a deep breath at that. “Because you have done miracles before. The elders said so. And my daughter just had my grandbaby, but he’s in an awful way with a fever. They’re saying he may not make it through the night. I know you could help him, if you’d kindly come up and have a look-see.” She glanced nervously over her shoulders at the stairs towards the back of the dining room, and then back towards the man with eager expectancy.

The man rose, and the woman led him to the steps, and Euris followed. She was curious about the miracles this man could do, since in her time at the College, she had seen enough so-called “doctors” plying their worthless medicines that purported to cure any ill under the sun, at exorbitant prices, and usually did nothing of effect. She knew this man was different, but was not entirely sure, and wanted to find out.

They entered an upstairs room where a scraggly looking young woman with limp, greasy brown hair and pockmarks on her face from some childhood disease stood beside a crib, looking down sadly and with little hope. In the rough wooded crib lay a baby, obviously weak from fever. The man came in, and put his hand gently on the baby’s head, and rested it there a moment. Before her eyes, Euris saw the fever break and the baby return to normal. Lovingly, the mother picked up the baby and held it, her face transformed by her smile.

“Thank you, sir, thank you!” The old woman cried in her relief. The baby, cradled by his mother, cried just because he was alive and able to.

The man told her, “I can do nothing, except where you believe. The child will live because of your belief.”

The next morning, after Euris had arisen and eaten a quick bite alone, she saddled up and was on her way. She did not see the man, and wondered what had became of him. In a way, she missed his company. By the time she got to the outskirts of the small town, she saw him ahead, walking along the road.

“Hello! Good morning, Euris!” the man said, waving to her. She slowed her horse, and then dismounted lead it as she walked along side him.

“You should see the look on the grandmother’s face!” Euris told him. “She was beaming and singing as she put out breakfast and tidied up.”

“I know.” He laughed. “Nothing makes me happier than to see the honest, simple folk of these villages happy. Some day, they’ll all be in a kingdom of their own.”

They walked along in silence for a few moments.

“Do you want a baby of your own, some day?” His question came suddenly and keenly, as if she had been stabbed through the stomach.

Her throat went dry, and she pushed down an image of life in the Gray Tower she had tried to erase from her mind completely. Then an image of Mattak feeding his beautiful Protector a grape came to the forefront, and she violently pushed it aside as well. “I’ve seen others,” she said for want of a direct answer, “so happy together, but I have never found anyone like that.”

If the man had been fencing with her, his stabs would have been directed at her heart. “From the way you spoke about Gath yesterday, I imagined that you had,” he said.

Euris was parrying his blows, caught off guard, and had no time to wonder why he was attacking her with these questions. She felt a heavy weight descend on her chest. “Maybe. We never had time to know.”

“You loved Gath, didn’t you?” the man asked.

Why was he pushing her to admit that? Why would she not even admit it to herself? “I don’t know; we never had time to know. It was like I belonged with him, in spite of all of our differences.” Why couldn’t he shut up, and leave her alone?

“And that was part of the permanence you wanted to build.”

“Yes,” Euris said reflectively, as if to herself, “I would have been perfectly happy if I had stayed with Gath at the Gray Tower and nothing had ever changed.” There, she had admitted it. Nothing had changed. She had been empty, and now she was empty and sad, but nothing had changed.

“And, now, you’re wandering the face of the earth, trying to find this lost place you belong.”

“No, not wandering, going home, to South Port.” She said it defiantly, as if she was drawing a line he could not cross: he could not dare to suggest she not go home.

He did not. The man looked pensively towards her a brief moment. “You are certainly free to go back there, and to try to make it a home again. But I will be honest with you, Euris: you are not likely to find what you are looking for there. The only way you will understand what I mean is to go. Sometimes you have to go back and see where you’ve been in order to make any progress at all.” The man smiled at her. “I believe I have given you enough to think about for a while, wouldn’t you agree?” Euris most certainly did. “So I need to be going. Some friends need me over in the next village. Maybe I’ll see you in South Port, though, since I should be there in a day or so.”

Euris waved goodbye to the man as he walked off down a small side trail towards a poor village to the east which she knew about, but had never visited. So he had shut up, and had left her alone, but the emptiness inside of her did not abate, even when she felt a twinge of excitement over getting closer to her home.

On to ... Chapter Eleven: South Port