Last week I shared the first of my deleted scenes, which rejoined Malian and Raven in Stoneford, directly after the culmination of events in The Gathering Of The Lost.

As noted then, in the end I decided the story didn’t need to immediately follow on from The Gathering Of The Lost events, and that the overall story worked better picking up the Malian and Raven thread “post Aralorn” — hence this material all becoming a “deleted Act.”

You may recognise parts of the scene that got recycled elsewhere (as much as I can remember them!) but that’s all part of the fun. 😉

Last week’s warning also applies: “All deleted scenes are at “first draft” level only—so very much raw material. Consider yourself duly warned.”

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Deleted Scene 2 — Malian & Raven Depart Aralorn

“…

His gaze, across the pan of frying eggs, was measuring. “Are you recovered enough to attempt it? Opening a gate for both of us, plus three horses, will take considerable strength. From what I understand, distance will affect it as well.” He flipped the eggs onto their plates, breaking off a piece of bread for each of them.

She regarded him curiously. “I thought you would know.”

His eyes held Raven’s familiar sardonic glint. “The ability was always less common than you might think from the stories told, among either the Sworn or the Derai. We tended to have squadrons dedicated to the task and recruits with any ability didn’t get a choice about where they served. But those who could open a gate by themselves, let alone carry others through it with them—they are rare.”

Malian  concentrated on eating the eggs while they were hot. “Well, I can do it,” she said finally. “And I know where I’m going this time, since I can use the shrines I visited on my way south as destination points.” She did not add that she had hoped not to be in a position to use them, because if the Derai Lost had accompanied her she could not have opened a gate that would accommodate their numbers. “The surrounding groves mean they’re always secluded and there are enough of them that I can shorten or lengthen my distance at need.” She shrugged, eating the last of the egg with regret. “I think it’s worth the risk, because I assume it will take you time to muster the Patrol.”

“Yes.” He sounded reserved, and she glanced up from her plate, realizing she might have missed a potential problem.

“I hadn’t thought— How does your immunity work with gates? Can you still use them?”

“Gates are more like the runes, a tool, and those who are called immune can use tools, even those constructed from magic.” He still sounded as though his mind was on something else. “Perhaps, until you’re sure of your strength, it might be best to attempt shorter distances. I recall our gate squadrons were always concerned with that and distances between points were carefully calculated.”

Malian frowned, thoughtful rather than disagreeing. “It’s more intuitive for me. In some ways the distance doesn’t matter, because opening the gate is like bringing the two disparate places, the entry and exit points, together as one—but the further they are apart physically, the harder it is to do.”

“Short distances then,” Raven said, and she nodded, repressing a shiver at some of the stories of what happened to those who made mistakes with gates.

He finished eating first and went to clean the cooking equipment and packed it away again with the rest of his gear. Malian ate the last of her own food more slowly and when she stood up again and went to clean her own utensils, she noted that Raven had been busy over the past few days, which she had largely spent sleeping. The charcoal bin had been refilled and the worn leather tie on the door latch had been replaced. She could see the pile of debris where the shrine gutters, overflowing in the storm that followed her arrival, had been cleared out as well, and her gray cob—picketed amongst the olive trees with Raven’s Aralorn hill horses—had been groomed.

They were the same horses he had been riding when they first met in the Long Pass of Emer, and just as much part of his guise as the shabby hedge knight, she realized now, as the fetishes of bone and feather tied into his helmet. Just as she had abandoned the persona of Carick, the youthful scholar, Raven must have left the knight of Normarch and Caer Argent behind when he followed her south. She could see why: the hedge knight and his hill horses would draw far less attention in Aralorn—but she still felt a pang of regret for that first meeting, when Raven had rescued Carick from the outlaws known as the wolfpack and everything had been a great deal simpler between them.

“You ride Maya,” Raven said, emerging from the shrine with his saddle over one shoulder and his travel roll over the other, and nodding to the second of his hill horses. “She’s more what an archer would ride and the cob will serve as our packhorse.” He carried his bridle in his right hand, but held up another fetish string of bone and small birds’ feathers, with two, longer crow’s feathers at one end. “If you bind these into your cap, we’ll look like we’re part of the same mercenary band. It’s a Lathayran custom,” he added, when she hesitated, and Malian nodded, knowing that Lathayra was where mercenary companies found most of their work these days.

Authenticity, she also knew, was key to any disguise—so she took the cap off and worked the fetish string into it her hair, while Raven saddled his mare, Peta, and then transferred Maya’s pack saddle onto the cob. Malian returned to the shrine and moved her own tack and travel gear out onto the porch, before emptying the brazier ashes and sweeping the space clean of any sign of their occupation. She also left a gift by the altar, as thanks for the shelter: two Emerian silver talents with the oak tree on one side and the Black Tower on the other, and a charm of Seruth she had made herself, in the style popular on the River. Even there, the charms were sought after by travelers and expensive to buy, but far more so in the south. Malian hoped the lay priest would feel it compensated for their occupation of his shrine—and she had bound in an invocation to Ornorith’s smiling face as well, an old Derai tradition in return for hospitality.

She secured the door again on leaving and saddled and bridled Maya while Raven loaded the remainder of their gear onto the cob. When they were done she led the way into the grove, where their only companion was the breeze, rustling the olive leaves and turning the edge of every leaf to silver. The shrine lay out of sight behind them and the road was just a bend of dusty ribbon, glimpsed between gnarled trunks. Raven was quiet, holding Peta and the cob’s reins.

Malian closed her eyes and opened her mind to the sun-warmed song of power that was Aralorn. She let her mind travel back along the road she had ridden to get here: the small villages, with outlying farmhouses among patchwork fields and grazing sheep; the shrine at Lowcliff that was just a cairn beside a crossroads, and the chapel in Hurdle that doubled as storage for wool bales and sacks of grain at need. Lowcliff was too near, she decided, and Crossgate with its fine mosaic of the god crossing a stream in flood—a relic from the Old Empire with its bright, unfaded colors and lifelike curl of water about the divine knees—too far for her first attempt. “Hurdle,” she said aloud—and felt Nhenir’s presence focus sharpen, and the thrum of the sword’s silent power, linked to that of the helm.

She had extended her arms once, in the Old Keep of Winds, invoking the gate while Hylcarian’s golden fire wreathed her  hands. Now she simply visualized the small chapel, with a straggle of olive trees on one side and an almond grove on the other, and brought the two places together in her mind. From there she extended her will, transmuting the mental image into reality: that placed joined to this, with the frame of her silver fire forming an opening between Hurdle’s almond grove and Stoneford’s olives.

The scent of Aralorn—warm, dry earth and sheep’s fleece, woodsmoke and olive oil—rose in her nostrils as the song of the southern earth murmured along her veins. An olive bough brushed against the silver shimmer in the air but did not burn, and although the gray cob snorted, throwing up its head, Raven spoke quietly and he steadied again. Peta pricked her ears forward, interested, but did not shy away as Raven led her into the gate.

I keep forgetting he must have done this before, Malian thought: he may even have a House of Fire gate squadron with the Patrol. She waited until the cob’s tail had swished through before following herself. Maya ambled through beside her, imperturbable as Peta, and Malian closed the gate as soon as they both stood fully on the Hurdle side. The imprint of the Stoneford olive trees lingered briefly on the bright air, and then there was just their small company, standing beside the Hurdle shrine.

“All right?” Raven asked, with knight of Normarch’s searching look.

Malian nodded, her mind already reaching ahead to Crossgate. The portal opened to a view of the stone chapel’s door of weathered oak, and Malian hesitated as she joined Raven outside it. “I should like to see the mosaic,” she said, reaching her decision as she closed the second portal. “Because I may never come this way again,” she added, partly to Nhenir, but mostly to herself. She did not need to say that might be because she would fall in some distant pass of Night’s Wall, the same way that Yorindesarinen had done, on a long-ago world.

A line of cold fire ran around the armring, echoing the dead hero’s name, its flicker bright against the chapel’s shade as she stepped inside. Raven tied the horses to the ring in the chapel wall and followed her, his boots a muted echo on the stone floor. Malian paused a few paces from the mosaic, taking in the vivid colors again and the artist’s depiction of Seruth’s face, in the Haarth god’s aspect of the traveler. The face was ageless, unlined and fair, but the eyes were older, dark and far-seeing—the eyes of the sojourner who has observed everything there is to see of the world’s condition, both the sorrow and the joy. Malian gazed back into those eyes, depicted by some long dead artists, and her seer’s vision rose and showed her—not Seruth, Imulun’s bright son on one of his many journeys, but Raven, riding the length and breadth of Haarth along both high roads and back trails, and serving as hedge knight and household warrior from Emer to Ishnapur, through the course of a thousand years.

She turned, the seer’s light still in her eyes, and studied him: not just his hard-to-make out expression, but the hedge knight’s wellworn harness, and the bone and feathers woven into his helmet crest—and had the sense of standing on the edge of a precipice, above very deep water …”

© Helen Lowe