In Defense of She, Who Stands Forsaken

Silvio flickered in the doorway, fixed like a shadow, as if cast into being by the golden fire at work within the simple hearth. From his vantage the small study revealed itself in full, and the window at its edge, whereupon he watched with pursed lips the falling snow. Winter had been at play in Rullenroot for several ellipses now, and though his cycles of service in the Order had indoctrinated him to all manner of climes, his southern blood would forever balk at such miserable fare. Old wounds twanged. He resisted touching his face, where the strings plucked loudest.

A clattering at his back interrupted the looming misery of his eventual exit. He stepped aside to make room as his host whisked by with a tray and tea set. He caught a whiff of her, like honeyed spirits and dusty books. A memory spurred; he smiled at the familiarity.

Zhara Kilami stooped to place the tray on a low wooden table, bookended by two high-backed armchairs darkly wooded and upholstered in faded azure. A faint trembling stole her hands, a whorl of white about the knuckles. Dusty bands of silver threaded hair the color of ripe hagnuts, like star-bands in a velvet sky. Age etched itself into the corners of eyes and mouth, burnished the once-golden hue of her skin. Time, amassing itself upon her.

It brought to him a measure of sorrow, and a flicker of the old anger. There was no natural force more dangerous, he thought, No sword more double-sided.

A soft murmur and she seated herself; a gesture of a willowy hand bade him do the same.

Silvio hesitated, encircled by his considerations. She followed his gaze to the window.

“You look aggrieved, Inquisitor,” she noted, and the sound of her voice reminded him of the woman in his memory: stern and cultured and bristling with a quiet vitality. His worries eased, albeit slightly, enough to uproot him. He took the opposite chair.

“The weather,” he offered, a half-truth. “Not much of snow in Lucina, nor the capital. I prefer it that way. How do you tolerate it?”

“Being Koroni, you mean?”

Silvio cleared his throat. “No. Of course not. I’m just—”

“Making small talk. I know.” She smiled over her teacup. Took a sip. “You weren’t particularly good at it in the Academy. Time changes so much. Makes the familiar, strange.” She sighed. “It’s refreshing to see something, at least, has held steadfast.”

He allowed himself a smile. “I could say the same of you, Judicator Kilami.”

Zhara chuckled. “If you want to flatter me, Inquisitor, drink the tea.”

He eyed the steaming cup of dark liquid. “I want to talk about Ahmelia Valunkroft.” The heat from the fireplace bathed the unsullied half of his face as he leaned forward.

Zhara arched a viper-thin eyebrow. Omar had gotten to her first, of that he had no doubt. It hardly mattered, he knew, but it did little to unseat the nagging suspicion that had plagued him since his Master had seen himself to the prosecutor’s seat.

A sigh. “And here I thought an old student was simply stopping by to say hello. A colleague of yours was here a few days ago,” she confirmed. “Don’t you Inquisitors talk?”

Silvio weathered the bite in her question. He held his silence, and his stare. Zhara shrugged. It made him want to smile again.

“You know, I could have you turned away,” she said. “Questions, unanswered.”

“It’s not recommendable.”

“Going to haul me off if I don’t cooperate?” She fixed him with a knowing stare. “My husband’s father was an inquisitor. Mean old bastard. Liked to throw his weight around. I’m aware of the parlance.”

Silvio picked up his tea. Took a measured sip. Bitterness scalded his tongue. “I wouldn’t. But it could be perceived as interfering with an investigation by my office. I don’t control what they do. Besides,” he sipped again, “you already spoke to my colleague. Why not me?”

“Perhaps I don’t like repeating myself.”

“You were a teacher.”

“Maybe I wasn’t a very good one.” Her stare matched his own.

Silvio shrugged. “Some would argue otherwise.”

“Yes, well, some people did love to argue,” she retorted.

“Time changes some things. Will you answer my question?”

Zhara sat unreadable in the silence. It felt like being in school again, standing at her desk waiting to receive a grading, or a punishment. Fearful to speak out lest he earn an admonishment.

“Well?” he pressed, banishing boyhood fears behind his years and the mantle of his station.

“I’m thinking.”

“About?”

She smiled. “Whether we’re arguing.”

“I’d rather we not.”

The Judicator crossed her trousered legs. Settled against her chair with fingers steepled below her narrow nose. The dancing flames sent shadows skittering across her face, muddying her expression save for the glint of her golden eyes behind a pair of wire-thin spectacles. Silvio relaxed his own posture, aware of the balance playing out between them.

“You don’t have children. Do you, Inquisitor?”

The question surprised him. “No.”

Zhara nodded. “I have four. They taught me many things as a young mother and even now, but what they enlightened me most on was recognizing the responsibility you have as a parent toward their security. Their story. And what it feels like to betray it. These things I have carried with me outside of my personal life and into my professional, as a teacher, soldier, and commander.

“When your colleague came to me, I answered him willingly, yes. But now, as we sit here, I admit I am left withered by the feeling that I made a terrible mistake in doing so. And I am not so certain I wish to make it again.

“So,” and now she leaned forward, hands dropping to reveal the stern cast of her expression, “I would ask you, Inquisitor Xel Kora: To what end do you come here? Who is Ahmelia to you? And why should I betray her twice?”

Silvio frowned. He had not expected this. “I come as a defender of Ms. Valunkroft. And I am not asking you to betray her—I am asking you to help me understand her, to assist me in facilitating true justice in this matter.”

“Why? There’s already talk of excommunication, possibly worse. The Moonswaths are certainly in favor of it. They’ve even been pushing for my resignation, citing ‘willful negligence’,” she added bitterly. “The case against Ahmelia seems fairly ironclad and decided, wouldn’t you say? ”

“You wouldn’t,” he pointed out.

“No,” she admitted.

Silvio watched the confrontation bleed from her face, slowly, pooling around a virulent frustration. She took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, eyes shut. She sat that way for a time, the only sound between them the crackle of the flames.

“Why?” he asked.

She scoffed, but it sounded tired.

“Judicator,” he said, “I know you have no reason to trust me. The Inquisition hardly lends itself to such proclivities. I don’t sit here as a friend, or a comrade-in-arms to the accused. And I can’t tell you I believe she’s innocent—”

“Then perhaps you should leave,” Zhara said, uncoiling from her silence with all the natural sophistication of a snake.

“—but you think she is,” Silvio pushed through, “and I want to know why. The evidence says Ahmelia Valunkroft murdered Vekka Moonswath, her own Oathsister, in cold blood. Her prints were on the dagger. All I have are transcripts, dossiers, files, histories… cold data that gives me nothing to push back with. In order for her to have a chance, I need you to talk to me.”

The Judicator took to her tea. The cup trembled.

“Zhara, please. She’s all alone right now,” he said, pushing for sympathy. He detested the manipulations, especially on such an exemplary judicator as Zhara, but necessity dictated his hand.

Instinct said his Master possessed some ulterior motive for his zealous prosecution of the Valunkroft girl, and Silvio had long learned to trust that instinct. Legality prevented an open dialogue between them, especially now that Silvio had entrenched himself in the proceedings. Whatever Omar’s reasonings, he would bring them to light in due time… and, if Arkaenus willed it, acquit the accused in the process. Until then, the Inquisition’s internal dramas needn’t be the stage play of the common Arkaenite.

“What is it you wish to know?” Zhara offered the question with an inescapable wariness.

“Everything I don’t already,” replied Silvio.

“And what do you know?”

“Like I said, cold data: Born in Belgraud; father was Howard, a rising merchant baron; mother, Elizabeth, was a shop-hand. Elizabeth murdered Howard in self-defense in front of Ahmelia when she was eleven. Elizabeth suffered a breakdown and was interred in a local asylum. Ahmelia lived with an uncle briefly, then disappeared until she popped up here as a ward of the Order. Entered the klaerichood at fourteen. Placed in Binding courses after showing strong aptitude for the arkaene, but otherwise struggled at the Academy: disciplinary issues, violent altercations with classmates, low test scores, write-ups, threats of expulsion… things that don’t make for good reading in front of a court.

“Conscripted into the Belfrost Campaign at seventeen,” he resisted touching his scars, “as part of the auxiliary force in lieu of completing academic studies. Upon returning, she took up the oaths with Vekka, where they were barracked under your command. Over the next five years they get up to some good, but also some notably bad: burning down Ghol Lamen, for one—an incident that, as you noted in your report, only avoided severe punishment due to Vekka’s sterling reputation. And of course, there’s the more recent condemnation coming from the Moonswaths’ themselves, claiming that Ahmelia ‘preyed on their daughter’s soul, and turned her away from a righteous path’.”

A look of disgust darkened Zhara’s golden complexion. She swallowed it along with her tea. “Vilanic bigots,” she muttered. “Arkaenus, forgive me—if they knew Ahmelia, as I do, they would not speak with such damnation in their hearts.”

Silvio spread his hands, a gesture of what he hoped reflected openness but felt more hopeless. “Her history only adds ink to their quills: a traumatic childhood, made a klaeric under less-than-ideal circumstances—as a Binder, no less… They’ll say her mind fractured under the constant abuses of the Horizon. That she is corrupt. Dangerous.”

Zhara eyed him critically. “I thought you wanted to help.”

“I do. I’m just… laying out the facts. What I know,” said Silvio.

“Then forgive me, Inquisitor, for I mean no disrespect, but you know nothing about Ahmelia Valunkroft. Or Vekka Moonswath, for that matter.”

Silvio allowed for the barb; he knew what it was to feel anger. To feel misunderstood. He nodded.

The Judicator hunched forward, hands clasped together, features pressed in contemplation of her next words.

“For five years I watched those girls grow together. Five years, I dedicated my life to them as their commander.

“Vekka was easy to like: she was pious, well-mannered, disciplined, thoughtful, viciously effective, accountable… Everything you could want in a Vindicator. A credit to her name and the Order.

“Ahmelia, I’ll admit, tried my patience harder than even my own children at their most stubborn. She’s difficult. Mouthy. Temperamental. Headstrong. A tremendously gifted Binder, blessed with a long Sight, but cursed with a short view; she only has a mind for what she can see, and Arkaenus help anyone who tries to tell her different.”

Silvio withheld a smile, not wanting to interrupt Zhara now that she’d started talking. Her words rang true in a way memory made undeniable: Though a cycle had come and gone since, he recalled mistily an encounter with the obstinate Binder during an investigation into possible misconduct. She’d been alight with indignity and passion, often to the detriment of her Oathsister’s attempts at providing diplomacy and support. Nothing formal had come of the matter, and he’d lost sight of the occurrence until now.

Zhara continued, and he listened. “For the longest time, I could never understand why Vekka chose Ahmelia for the oaths.” She added: “And make no mistake: Vekka led that charge. Ahmelia didn’t have the clout necessary to make such a push. But she saw something in Ahmelia, beyond the scars of her past. This wasn’t about her raw talent as a Binder, either. Vekka didn’t need the prestige—she had her family name, graduated top of her class, with more commendations in her young life than most klaerics achieve in all their cycles.

“No, what called to her was Ahmelia’s heart. Her passion. Her spirit—Arkaenus be, that girl’s spirit. I tell you this, Inquisitor, it burns like an inferno. You can feel it, just standing in the room with her; a primal force. She overflows with it. That, I could see.

“Then, there was what I didn’t see. Not soon enough, anyway.” Zhara’s voice trembled. “You’d think, being a mother, I would have marked it. Four kids, two of them nearly adults… there’s no excuse.”

The sudden flux of emotion pushed Silvio forward. He thought to take her trembling hands in his own, to provide comfort to this woman who, in his younger days, had mentored him with stoic resolve. Anger shimmered off her like the heat distorting the air from the fireplace, even as sorrow weighed her shoulders down, a match for the compounding snow outside.

“What didn’t you see?” Words seemed a better option to him.

“They loved one another,” Zhara said, a wounded laugh catching her throat. “One would never think to see it in them, they bickered and fought so much. Like children.” She wiped her eyes. “But that’s what they were. Children. I think we like to forget that sometimes; we put blades in the hands of babes, make them peer into the unknowable and task them with seeking out the nightmares so the rest of us can sleep easy. They hardly have the time to know themselves, let alone one another. It’s cruel…”

Zhara trailed off, consumed by a bout of emotion Silvio found difficult to look at. He cast his gaze along the room, bare for all its homeliness. The fire hurt his eyes. The snow hurt his mind. He settled on his hands, scarred, knotted things that they were, while his thoughts wrestled.

“Forgive me, Inquisitor,” Zhara said following a long breath. She sat, composed once more, only the edges of her visage retaining any hint of her disturbances. She made the sign of the Arkaena. “I forget myself.”

He held up a hand writ with the memories of his own struggles with the faith. “I… understand. Please, continue.”

She nodded. “Like I said. They were in love, and neither knew how to say it. I saw it in Vekka first, after Ghol Lamen. An adoration beyond simple kinship. I thought to warn her, certain that Ahmelia’s virulent spirituality had numbed her to such pursuits. That was my mistake. When you stare into a fire, it’s hard to see the details. And, like most everyone else, I let myself be blinded to the true depths of Ahmelia’s character.

“That girl was hurt in ways no dossier could hope to explain… and yes, she took that pain and acted out. She caused problems. Ruffled feathers. Burnt a city to the ground. Maybe punched out a city official or two. Did things that, to the rational amongst us, could be viewed as ‘dangerous’. But, she also took to her duty with selflessness and an uncompromising severity. The innocent were her charge, and she would do anything to protect them, no matter the cost to herself.

“So, when you ask me, Inquisitor Xel Kora, if I believe Ahmelia Valunkroft murdered her Oathsister in an act of cold blood or jealous criminality or a spurned heart, then no. I do not believe it. She loved and devoted herself to that young woman as she did all things: with her whole soul.”

He withheld his thought—that love, fettered for so long in hearts bereft of guidance, might have invited the very corruption Ahmelia stood accused of. Zhara Kilami did not need the obvious stated; she was a studious woman, possessed of ironclad faculties—and while her confessed guilt over the matter bore consideration, it hardly felt to him that it held any sway over her reasoning. Zhara believed in Ahmelia’s innocence.

He kept his expression neutral. “If you are called before the court, would you testify to all this?”

“Without question or delay,” she replied.

“Good.”

Silvio gathered himself up in preparation to depart. The snow had broken, and he wished to retreat to his lodging before it decided to resume. A handful of hours separated him from his next appointment with Ahmelia’s uncle in Belgraud, and though he knew his racing thoughts would keep him busy, the idea of catching any amount of sleep tantalized him.

Zhara saw him to the threshold of her home. A cold wind blew in from the snow-blanched woodlands, tugging at Silvio’s cloak. His scars burned.

“Thank you for your time, Judicator.” He threw up his hood and offered a slight bow. “And, the tea.”

She returned the gesture. “Safe travels, Inquisitor. And, when next you see Ahmelia, please tell her from me: ‘Don’t let your spirit go out. You’re not alone’.” Zhara held him with the no-nonsense intensity she’d made infamous as a teacher. “She needs to know that people—this very Order—are fighting for her. Now, more than ever.”

Silvio nodded. As he made his way down the snowy descent leading away from Zhara’s house and back toward the road that would take him to the Academy, he considered all he knew, and what he didn’t.

Zhara fought for Ahmelia’s innocence.

The Moonswaths fought to see justice done.

He fought for the truth, in whatever form that took.

As for Omar…

Zhara’s question came to him: “Who is Ahmelia to you?”

And why am I so terrified to find out?