Death After Death-Chapter 356 - A Peaceful Interlude

For the next few days, everyone was on edge. Simon’s maid especially feared that they’d be caught and punished. She argued several nights running, “We could turn ourselves in! If we come clean, I’m sure those witch hunters will go easy on us.”

Only repeatedly reminding her that they’d burn Aranna at the stake, and even then, only after torturing her, kept Bessa calm. Still, after a week, even she started to calm down. Leo, to his credit, never flinched; Simon was pretty sure the boy would jump off the cliff and into the Sea if Simon told him it was the right thing to do.

Even after the immediate danger passed, though, Aranna didn’t leave his room for weeks. The only change in their circumstances was that after a week, he stopped sleeping on the floor at her insistence and moved to the bed with Aranna.

“It will be getting cold, soon, and you can’t sleep on the floor all winter,” she explained, eventually making him relent. Bessa and Leon already thought they were sleeping together despite Simon’s insistence to the contrary, so it didn’t really change anything.

Even after that change, though, things didn’t lead to sex, which was strange. He wasn’t so old in this body. He wasn’t even forty yet, and his barmaid was more than attractive, but her own dark history had obviously killed whatever sex drive she might have once had, and the only time the two of them so much as flirted was when drinking was involved.

Still, if he forced the issue, she’d made it clear that she wouldn’t resist him. “I owe you my life,” she said on more than one occasion. “If there’s any way I can repay you… Anything you want, it’s yours for the taking.”

Just hearing those words made Simon feel dirty, but it was also striking that he didn’t act on them. He was no saint. At least, once upon a time, he wasn’t. He’d become attracted to Freya at first almost solely because of their forced closeness; that such a physical relationship had eventually evolved into love was relevant.

Simon considered the fact that he wasn’t falling into the same pattern here, with a woman that might have been even more beautiful and interesting, and he often lay awake, listening to the sound of his breathing as he thought about it.

Is this clarity, or maturity, he wondered. It was his most common thought besides the fact that a lot of guys trapped in the Pit probably just had sex with whoever they could, as often as they could. He’d certainly been that guy on some level at the start of this, but when had he changed exactly?

It was hard to say, but if he had to put a specific moment on it, it would have probably been his most recent tryst with Elthena. Previous relationships or not, I shouldn’t have done that, he chastised himself every time it came to mind.

Still, eventually lying in bed every night with a beautiful woman became normal, and in the spring, when they returned to their own rooms, it felt strange to sleep alone. By then, they’d decided that they’d been more than careful enough, and after a month without her pendant, Aranna returned to work.

However, she did so with a new look. Before she returned to the world of the living, they decided it was best to disguise her, just in case. It would have taken only a word to do so, but Simon resisted the urge. Instead, they cut her hair shorter, and used wood ash lye and tallow to bleach it, and wrapped her breasts to appear slightly less feminine.

By the time they were done, she was a new woman, and Leon barely recognized her.

Their patrons didn’t seem as taken with Pelona as they had been with Aranna, which was the pseudonym she chose to go by, but Simon promised that she could become the woman she’d been before and show the full flower of her beauty again in a year or two when they were in the clear.

“I don’t know,” she said with a smile. “Aranna had a hard life; perhaps Pelona will be happier.”

In the year that followed, the Unspoken returned only once, and even then, they were only passing through and didn’t so much as give their surprised barmaid a second glance. They didn’t say what they were in such a hurry for, and when they were well and drunk, they only hinted that their message was an urgent one.

Secret messages piqued Simon’s curiosity, but aside from alcohol and amiable conversation, he made no attempt to pry the information free from the white cloak. He had other things to do this life.

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It wasn’t until that summer, when he almost got heat stroke loading beer barrels into a wagon on one blazing summer's day, that he had his first brush with his visions again. There, under the midday sun, he looked at the small brewery and saw not just the white glow of the brewer and his sons helping him, but the darker glow at the edge of the building.

Complaining of weakness, he took a break and got some water, and on the way back from the well, he took note of the small family graveyard back there, as well as the two unmarked graves lying next to the gray glowing markers.

I wonder what happened there? Simon asked himself as he sat under a tree. He thought about asking, but based on how nervous the man he had his dealings with got when he lingered in the area, Simon decided against it. It was obviously some skeleton in the closet of this family, but it was just as obvious that Mr. Annken, the brewer, was a good man, and Simon felt no need to pull this particular thread on the sweater of the world.

It was a fleeting thing that went away as soon as the feeling that he was about to faint did, but it was promising nonetheless. That fall, he fasted several times in an attempt to repeat the experience, but that didn’t happen until the winter.

By then, he'd finished the small outbuilding that he and Leon had been working on, on and off throughout the year. He’d originally intended to make a smokehouse so that he could improve the quality of their menu, but he’d finished it as a sort of sauna instead.

“Next year we’ll see about getting a big tub installed, and maybe even expand it, to make a proper bathhouse,” he told his employees and any guests that cared. Warm baths were hard to find, and it would be a great way for the Wayfairer to make a little money, even if some quick math said it would nearly double the amount of firewood they’d have to chop every winter.

Still, for now, he didn’t worry about that. For now, Simon focused solely on trying to make the little room so hot he could barely stand it, as he sought the same glimpse of enlightenment he’d felt only a few months before.

He spent many winter nights alternating between the thick scalding steam and the frozen embrace of a nearby snow bank that winter. Aranna or Bessa joined him rarely, but often as not, Leon accompanied him, but Simon told him they were doing it for health reasons, not anything mystical.

The closest he came to mysticism with the boy was in getting him to ponder imponderable questions so that Simon could sit there in silence and think. What song does a bird sing when no one is around to hear it? If a witch casts a spell that kills you before you are ever born, would you know? If a priest saves a murderer who goes on to kill more people, did he commit an act of good or evil?

None of the questions was particularly original. Leon didn’t know that, though. He was illiterate, and despite Simon’s efforts to get him interested in learning, he showed no real interest in the subject. He was clever enough.

He could do simple sums and figure out most tasks without help, but he saw no value in staring at pages full of symbols. So, even though Simon readily admitted to learning most of the things he knew from others, the boy would just respond and say something like, “So do I! I don’t need to learn how to read books when I can just learn everything from you instead.”

That made Simon laugh. The boy would obey him in all things, but he reserved all his curiosity for practical things. It was disappointing in some way, but then it was hardly the first time he’d had children in his life who were reluctant to learn such valuable skills.

He thought about forcing the issue on more than one occasion, but there really wasn’t a point. Besides the few books that Simon owned, the closest library was in Abresse. The trade city was overflowing with books, but he would probably never be able to afford them. Instead, Simon tried to get the boy to pick a profession so that he could find Leon an apprenticeship before he was too old for one.

Still, despite those distractions, he made progress. He could feel it, even if he couldn’t see it most nights. On rare occasions, he would see a faint glow around Leon. That was the other reason he let the boy tag along. Because he made the perfect target for observation as Simon’s senses began to sharpen.

The goodness in the lad shone like a lamp, and the shadows of his traumatic experiences weren’t even visible at first. Still, Simon eventually teased those out as well. The effect wasn’t long-lasting. Most nights, it would disappear as soon as he gave anything deep thought or stepped outside.

One night, though, when he lay down in a nearby snowbank to cool off, the world around him sharpened to a fine point, and for a moment, he saw everything. He could see the threads that connected him to his inn, and some of the people inside it, and as he looked up, he could see how those threads connected him to the stars themselves.

Fire and Ice. Maybe there was more to the Oracle’s methods than whim, he thought as he lay there in the snow gazing up at the constellations and the way they connected. In that moment, he would have sworn that the destinies of everyone in the world were inscribed in those slender glowing lines, but whatever insight he attempted to glean from the heavens faded along with the heat of his body. By the time he was shivering, it was just a beautiful night, but that wasn’t so bad either.

There were worse things than beautiful nights, and with that thought in mind, he went back into his makeshift sauna to extinguish the coals and fetch the lantern. His attempt to restore his sight was a marathon, not a sprint, and every achievement like this deserved to be celebrated with a mug or two of beer in his own common room.