Reckoning Possibility

Sure, I love the starry nights, the evenings when the moon is bright and the sky unmarred by a single cloud; but even better are the darkest of dark hours, when even with eyes straining I cannot see my hand outstretched. A kind of soft blackness covers me like a cloak; I am hidden.

I think I like it because out there I could be anyone at all. A thousand possibilities seem to be open to me, in the same way they had been when I was a child. The strange thing is that out of all the lives I had hoped for, the one I live is something even I could not have imagined.

Or maybe I like it so much because it was always forbidden me. At nights, in the village, no one strayed away from the light of the torches. It was dangerous out there, there were things that dwelt in the darkness that no one ever saw in the light. It never frightened me, though; instead, it set me to wondering. I found out what everyone feared that first evening the warlord came to Amphipolis.

And it was only later that I became one of those that the simple village people feared; someone who dwelt in darkness.

Later on I had to ask myself why I didn’t know.

Well – I never did have to ask myself, because Gabrielle asked it about a thousand times a day until I silenced her with a look.

“How could you not know? How was it possible that you just didn’t know?”

I shrugged an answer; but that wasn’t right, of course. If I thought hard, I knew why. I knew why I didn’t realise it was Ares setting me up, even when I fought against him.

It wasn’t his dark cloak, though some have said it contained godly powers, to confuse mortals. Perhaps it does; but I’d seen that cloak before.

It wasn’t his change of form, or his invisibility, because however he appeared I had always known him.

No, it had nothing to do with him at all; it was I.

Gabrielle and I had had our usual laughing start to the day. I’d learned how to tease her, and she’d learned how to enjoy being teased, too. Sometimes I felt that every day I spent with her I grew younger, or some kind of burden slipped from my shoulders. She drove the past far from me, and nothing and no one before had been able to do such a thing. Perhaps it’s because she lives so clearly in the present, and enjoys each moment so completely.

We’d spent only weeks together, but in that time I’d been offered possibilities that before meeting Gabrielle I had never even considered. A man – an ordinary village man, who nevertheless knew my past – saw me as part of his family, as a beautiful young woman, a wife and a mother. Such a thing seemed astonishing to me . . . let alone being offered the hand of friendship from kings and princesses. More astonishing than being offered friendship by an innocent girl? I don’t know.

Those possibilities made me unwary, I see that now. So that when I heard the clash of swords and came riding up to see a cloaked man murdering the innocent, I did not recall my own past and think immediately of who it would be – who it could only be. I hadn’t woken up and thought that by evening the blood of men dead because of me would be staining my hands. But as it had been, so it was. I found myself that evening with my arms trussed and with dark red stains of blood still on my fingers.

I should have known. There was every excuse for Gabrielle’s incredulous question. I should have known, because I had been there before.

I’d made it alone many times before. Firstly when I was cast out of my own hometown after defending it from the warlords. Well, I hadn’t been alone for long; many of those who had fought with me stayed loyal, and joined me as I drew more and more villages into my circle of defence, and when I finally turned to the sea to keep the raiders far from me.

When they were destroyed by Caesar, and I gave my life to death and destruction, I had no one at all. But it was not long before men as vicious and bitter as I joined me, and before I found those wild enough to be part of my plans; when I found Borias.

Even when I left Borias after he betrayed me in Chin, and I went north, I spent little of that time truly alone; I met Odin soon afterwards, and became a Valkyrie before that life almost entirely destroyed me, and I ended up returning to our army, to Borias’ arms.

But it was only complete the night I saw Borias die in the mud, because of me – the night I gave up my child and left my entire army.

I had no thoughts of army, then, no thoughts of anything much except getting far away from Corinth and all the memories it held. Apparently its army wiped out what was left of our scattered force; the centaurs if anything grew stronger by the circumstances of that night. While I rode and rode, shuddering with physical pain and the horror of the things that I had done, having nowhere to go.

I could not try my childhood village; I had already been there once, and had used their trust in order to gain more men for my army. They would kill me if I went back.

Instead I ended up in some unnamed town, begging for shelter at the local tavern, and being offered a place by the fire by a suspicious publican. I was cloaked, and shaking with cold and grief, barely able to spoon up the soup I’d ordered, the bowl trembling in my hands.

They thought it was fear, but it wasn’t fear. When they looked closely they knew who I was, and instead of spending the night in the Inn I ended up being chained in the dungeon. I thought I would die that night, and I didn’t care. I was utterly broken.

I didn’t die, though.

I wasn’t cold, and I wasn’t shaking, either with fear or sadness, when I was trussed up the second time for crimes that – for once – I had not committed.

I stood patiently while Gabrielle explained her strategies and marvelled at a girl who would think of ten ways to free a woman such as myself while so many more were thinking of ways to hurt me.

And when she left I waited a little longer, knowing with a certainty what would happen next.

“I used to wonder what you looked like,” I said carefully when he appeared to me. I needed him to know that I understood why he’d done this. He was bringing me back to the beginning. This was how we’d first met – in a dungeon, where I was on trial for the lives I’d taken from that village many months before.

“That is the problem – you used to wonder –“ Ares replied, moving around me, his dark cloak flapping a little. I had to grin at that; he was always awkward when he attempted any style outside his basic leathers. I had to smile, because he was completely and utterly correct. I hadn’t thought of him in a very long time, mostly because I was afraid to think of him. I’d hoped he’d given up on me after I’d changed allegiance, joining the very man Ares had sent me to kill. But of course he hadn’t given up. And so he took me back to the beginning, an idle finger brushing over my bonds and freeing me from them, showing me how easily he had done so once, and how easily he could do so again.

I had been empty and purposeless when he had found me before. Oh, he knew the potential – had watched me take on Corinth, had seen the city fall out of my grasp. But he’d waited for the right moment, and it happened to be a freezing cold cell in a tiny village. With the right weapon I was able to pay back those villagers with all the bitterness inside me. Later Ares had taught me to hone my focus, channel my anger into pure war. As for that evening, however; all I’d needed was rage.

He didn’t bother with that the second time we met. He didn’t woo me with thoughts of revenge, nor did he remind me of past bitterness. As always, he saw me as I was. I was cold and hungry and he offered me warmth, softness, food and drink. He slid an arm about me and lifted my chin up to look directly at him. I shuddered, remembering what it had been like when I had been cloaked by darkness.

It worked. The rage came back, and I beat my oppressors. The bitterness grew in me and the longing to be free meant that I struck out again and again. He reduced me once more to a wild colt, in need of training. I hit Gabrielle and remembered I was a woman.

All his temptations meant nothing in the face of her forgiveness.

That was how it ended, for me.

The first time I saw nothing outside the potential he saw in me – a warlord, stronger than all the others, able to channel my anger for his purpose.

The second time I saw the hope in her eyes, and I knew to her my life held possibilities I had yet to meet or imagine.

But somehow, at the end, it all changed.

He held my hand, kissed it, and looked at me as though for once he saw something he really hadn’t expected. As though he saw in me what she did; the possibilities for something different. For a moment he looked afraid, I thought, but then he smiled, and nodded, as though it had been all a game.

“Well played, my dear,” he told me, “until next time . . .”

Next time could mean a thousand different things, just as I could lead a thousand different lives. And maybe there was even promise in him. After all, Gabrielle had seen it in me, in the darkest of hours.

I knew one thing; he was uncomfortable in that cloak he’d donned, and I doubted if I’d see it again.

...h.o.m.e...
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