“Dreams of War, Dreams of Peace” – an excerpt from River Dragon
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This is an excerpt from River Dragon, Book 5 in the Ari Ara Series.
You can get River Dragon through our Community Publishing Campaign.
Since the official trial would not start until the next morning, the Twins of the Sisterlands and the Abbess led Ari Ara on a tour of the Gateway Abbey’s workshops and libraries, sleeping quarters and offices. Ari Ara asked many questions – or as many as she dared. A potential queen was not nosy, after all. She watched the twelve-year-old girls learning soap making, sewing, candle dipping, and thought how fortunate she had been that Shulen took her under his wing and trained her in the Way Between.
All through the city streets, up the steep staircases, over the jumble of walkways and through the verdant rooftop gardens, Ari Ara could sense the hard glare of the Warrior Sister drilling into the spot between her shoulders where the Mark of Peace was inked, indelibly, onto her skin. The Mother Sister offered a friendly counterpoint, falling into step beside her, showing her interesting statues or sharing tidbits of the city’s history. Ari Ara never forgot that this could be a test. She held the door into the workshops, gesturing for the Twins to precede her. She marveled appreciatively at the book-lined walls of the study halls. She spoke kindly to the young orphans in the sleeping halls, asking where they had been born.
A queen cares for her people.
A queen takes interest in the workings of her nation.
A queen listens attentively.
She spoke with girls her own age who were nearing the completion of their apprenticeships. Shyly or boldly, they shared their dreams for their futures, responding to her interest in what they wanted to do when they got a little older.
“I’m going to marry a warrior,” said one with a small giggle as she batted her black lashes flirtatiously at Emir Miresh, ignoring the reproving cough of the Abbess. Roka Maro, the Warrior Sister, nodded approvingly.
“Those who marry warriors end up widows,” Ari Ara muttered under her breath, quoting from Alaren’s book of stories on waging peace.
The Great Lady Brinelle coughed and elbowed her. Then she distracted the group by asking the next girl about her future plans.
“I’m going to be a battlefield healer,” the youth answered with a determined set of her chin. “I’ll save and heal our nation’s greatest defenders.”
Ari Ara almost made a face, but didn’t. There were plenty of people to heal without a war. She held her tongue, though, and simply replied with a careful compliment on her dedication to the healer’s profession. She admired the vibrancy of the herbal salves the girl was making and told her she’d make a welcome addition to any healer’s hall.
“I am training in records so I can serve our army,” said a third girl when they visited the abbey’s thousand-year-old records hall. “I will make sure the warriors receive their pay, food, equipment, and so forth. You can depend on me to keep your army functioning!”
Ari Ara didn’t quite know what to say to that, so she said nothing, swallowing her unease. Every aspect of life at the Gateway Abbey seemed to circle – subtly or obviously – around war and warriors. The girls weren’t fighting the enemy with swords, but they were part of the vast machinery of industry that kept the warriors fighting. From the workshops to the kitchens, Ari Ara heard the same things: the girls’ dreams revolved around war, battle, and warriors.
Lifting a wriggling orphaned boy onto her hip, a girl scarcely older than Ari Ara cooed to the toddler that he’d grow up to be a great warrior. Ari Ara held the child for a moment and silently prayed that he’d grow up to be whatever he wanted – a dancer, a scholar, a follower of the Way Between, a farmer – in a time of peace. In the smithy, the muscular, red-faced girls at the forge brought out their knives, swords, and helmets for the Lost Heir to admire. Ari Ara asked if they’d made any farm implements or jewelry and they started blankly at her, wondering why they’d waste time and steel on such things. They crafted weapons, not rakes or plows.
“What if we have peace?” Ari Ara finally asked the girls. “What will you make then?”
“Peace is but an eye in the storm of war,” recited one. “It is a lull in which to prepare for the next battle.”
The Warrior Sister nodded approvingly at that response.
“My mother maintained peace for a decade,” Ari Ara pointed out.
“And look what happened to her – ” the girl blurted out thoughtlessly.
“Mind your tongue!” the Mother Sister scolded.
The girl blushed and stammered out an apology. The Twins hustled Ari Ara onward, leading her through the Shrine of Fallen Warriors, the Armory of Unusual Weapons, and a healer’s research hall – the pride of the Gateway Abbey, funded by the nobles of the Westlands whose son had died of an untreatable wound during the War of Retribution.
Ari Ara was dismayed by how much of the abbey’s focus was oriented toward war. She’d expected it at Monk’s Hand Monastery – they were famous for training warriors – but she’d assumed the Sisterlands would be different. Of course, the Warrior Sister ran the training grounds at the Citadel, but Ari Ara thought the Mother Sister’s work with the orphans would stand in sharp contrast with her twin’s.
Instead, the pair worked in tandem, two sides of the same bloody coin.
“It was so strange to hear those girls,” Ari Ara complained to her friends Finn and Minli later, stretching like a cat on the woven rug by the hearth in her quarters. Moonlight pressed against the windows. She should go to bed – the first test of the ordeal would start at dawn – but she was too wound up to sleep. Snippets of conversation twanged like taut bowstrings through her memory. The words of the young girls kept snapping back into her thoughts.
“It was as if they couldn’t dream beyond war,” she went on, “as if the rest of the world of possibilities didn’t exist.”
Minli nodded in agreement, rubbing his stomach and sipping mint tea after the rich and sumptuous feast held in their honor. Ari Ara had been so busy minding her manners that she hadn’t eaten more than two bites. She had been insistently warned not to spill sauce on the soft gold of her layered robes. Sitting stiff as a stone statue, she had stayed on her best behavior while the feast dragged long into the night. She’d been patient with the orphans, attentive to the Sisters, generous with her smile and careful with her words. When she finally shut the door to her sleeping quarters behind her, she flopped onto the bed with an exhausted groan. She’d endured hours of sweat-dripping drills that were easier than this!
And the official trial wouldn’t even begin until tomorrow.
She had been glad when Minli knocked on the door and let her vent her pent-up steam with a long-winded tirade. By the time Finn showed up with some bread and cheese he’d charmed out of the kitchen girls, she had changed into her favorite set of patched-up practice clothes and was in a much better mood. The three sat on the mats and cushions next to the hearth. The furnishings were finely-made, but sparse; until she passed her ordeal, she was an aspirant, not a royal leader. Minli and Finn’s room was larger than hers. Brinelle’s was an entire house. Ari Ara didn’t mind – she slept better on a simple cot in her Fanten cloak than on a springy mattress buried under featherdown.
“If we’d grown up here,” Ari Ara mused, nudging Minli, “do you think we would have wanted to serve war and warriors, too?”
“I grew up at Monk’s Hand Monastery,” Minli reminded her, “and yeah, I might not have known I could have a different future if you hadn’t come along.”
“That’s your task though, isn’t it?” Finn told Ari Ara as she munched on the bread he’d brought. “To make space for other dreams?”
“It’s our task,” Ari Ara countered, gesturing to him and Minli. “All of us who follow the Way Between.”
Since ancient times, against unspeakable odds, amidst bloodshed and terror, these dreams had refused to surrender: a time of peace, a world beyond war, a generation who could do more than survive. In Alaren’s time, a world without battles dwelled within living memory. Their parents and grandparents remembered it, clung to it, and worked with Alaren to restore it. One brutal battle after another, this hope faded from humanity’s memory. But the dream never vanished, not entirely. The longing for peace wove into the language of myth and the beauty of vision. And some people continued to work for it. Even when Alaren’s followers had been hunted down, imprisoned, and executed, the warmongers could never rid the world of those who still kindled the dreams of peace. Blood cannot wash off blood, after all.
Every person who sees the light fade in a wounded friend’s eyes will one day long for an end to violence. Every child who loses their parents will wish for a world where peace could have kept them alive. Every terror-struck youth on the eve of battle, every war-weary fighter soldiering on, every haunted veteran wracked by the past yearns for peace to come sooner, last longer, and hold faster. Under their heartache, despair, fear, and bitterness lies the hunger for what could have been: lives beyond the sharp edges of violence, loved ones growing to old age; vocations of healing, building, and creating; communities that can live and rejoice.
“Imagine,” Ari Ara murmured, her eyes distant with the stories of both ancient times and future hopes, “if our world had known peace since the beginning of time.”
Thousands of years. Millions of lives. Libraries of stories.
By the crackle of the hearth, they murmured out glimpses of how the world might have been – still could be – without the vast nightmare of war. The muscular strength of warriors poured into dance, or barn-raising, or stone carving. The steel of swords forged into crafts halls and tools. The marching armies transformed into people working for peace in every village, town, and city. Historians and storytellers spinning epics of how war was averted, how conflicts were solved, how peace was won for a little while longer.
Who might they be in a world such as this?
How many bright futures had been lost to war?
If their societies – Marianan and Harraken – stopped wasting even a single breath, droplet of sweat, or moment of time longer on preparing to kill each other . . . what sort of lives could they live?
Even a day of this possibility loomed unfathomable. It quickened Ari Ara’s pulse. It shone in Minli’s eyes. It caught Finn’s breath in his chest. And a year of such a world would change everything. A century of peace stretched beyond even a lifetime of wild imagination. A thousand years entered the star stuff of legends.
Still, they could dream. If ever the dreams of peace had a chance to take root in the fertile ground of reality . . . this was it. It started with them, with three friends committed to change. With the resurgence of the Way Between. With the Mark of Peace printed on their tunics and inked between Ari Ara’s shoulders. With the potential of the heir to two thrones, coming closer to wearing the crown.
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This is an excerpt from River Dragon, Book 5 in the Ari Ara Series.
You can get River Dragon through our Community Publishing Campaign.