The Sixth Strand
Page 31
Loukas’s gaze grew soft and almost sad. “Am I right in thinking that your binding with Alyneri is like a marriage vow?”
“A mutual binding between Adepts—or whatever you’d call me,” he added with a lopsided smile, “yes, it is much the same, and yet much more. There’s an intimacy I can’t even begin to explain.”
Loukas turned a brooding stare back to the valley. “Customs are very different in my homeland,” he whispered. “An Avataren would never think of...I mean, Adepts aren’t regarded with the same...” he pressed his lips together tightly.
Trell knew of the customs Loukas was referencing. The Fire Princess Ysolde, his mother’s Companion, had exhaustively educated him on Avataren culture. Adepts were viewed as the property of their lord or sovereign—expensive and highly coveted property, perhaps, but property, nonetheless. They didn’t even have as many rights as the serfs who worked the lands.
“When I view our customs now through the filter of the West...” Loukas shook his head and exhaled a slow breath. “I feel shamed by them, Trell.”
Trell considered his words as much as the odd undertone of regret lacing them. He wondered what history Loukas was recalling, and if Tannour was somehow involved. All of the regrets Loukas had inadvertently revealed to him over the years seemed somehow related to Tannour. For about the thousandth time, he wished he knew what fissure existed between them, that he might do more to help bridge it, but Loukas simply wouldn’t speak of it.
Trell slowly maneuvered onto his back and gazed up at the bramble hovering barely a foot above his nose. “I’m not sure it’s fair to view the customs of your homeland and mine through the same lens, Loukas. Adepts trained in the West are not like Adepts trained in Avatar or Vest—at least, so it appears from my own experience; likewise from talking to Tannour. Whatever customs your kingdom adopted surrounding its Adepts may have come as a result of a different set of conditions than what we dealt with in the Middle Kingdoms and in the West.”
Loukas gave an unconvinced grunt.
Trell turned his head to look at him. “I’m not unaware of the customs of Avatar, Loukas.” His tone summoned his friend’s gaze to meet his own. “At one time, I could flawlessly execute eighteen of the High Court Orations.”
Loukas hissed a muted oath.
Trell watched his astonished expression with amusement. “How many do you know?”
The engineer looked taken aback. “What makes you think I know any?”
Trell returned his gaze to the bramble, smiling. “Yes, Loukas, what was I thinking? Every peasant in Avatar learns nine languages and advanced mathematics.”
“The son of an engineer—”
“Would have no reason to be taught the cortata, or the High Court signs of Obeisance, Deference and Submission.”
Loukas stared wordlessly at him.
“I know you don’t want to discuss your past. My point is only to say that my earlier comment was an informed one.”
Loukas’s frown deepened to the verge of despair. He dropped his gaze to his hands. “The truth is worse than you could possibly imagine.”
Trell looked soberly back to him. “I’ve known a man so bound beneath dark patterns that not only did he not know his own name, but he couldn’t even recognize his own brother. He fought constantly against another man’s overriding will, yet for all the strength of his determination—and trust me, it was considerable—still it wasn’t sufficient to overcome the twisted things this wielder had done to him. He lived in constant torment, knowing he’d lost the most essential part of himself and with no hope of ever reclaiming it.”
Loukas regarded him gravely. “Fethe, who was he?”
Trell puffed a grim exhale. “My brother Sebastian.”
“Fiera’s ashes, Trell!”
“His ordeal is over now. My brother Ean unworked the patterns binding Sebastian to another man’s will. But undoing the damage of those years...” Trell shook his head, “only Sebastian can speak to that.”
In the stunned silence that followed, Loukas returned his gaze to the glow spreading along the horizon. “I’ve known you for so long,” he admitted softly after a time, “yet I’m realizing there’s still so much I don’t know about you.”
Trell started chuckling.
“Why are you laughing?” Loukas sounded slightly injured.
Trell arrowed a grin at him. “Loukas, the fact that you even know my family name is already a hundred percent more than I know about you.”
Loukas frowned. “The percentage is closer to eighty-five, actually,” he muttered, looking back to the valley, “but I take your point.”
The engineer shifted as if to quell a sudden consuming agitation, then sank into an even deeper stillness in contrast, such that Trell imagined he could hear even the pace of Loukas’s heart beginning to ebb.
The stars were vanishing from the heavens when the engineer confessed in a whisper thick with frustration and thin of hope, “Tannour spoke to me of bindings. Our concept in Avatar is very different. I never imagined...and he would never elaborate, so I couldn’t...” He clenched his jaw and retreated into silence, emanating a brooding disquiet.
Trell perceived his friend’s sadness as much as a lingering confusion, which clearly had something to do with Tannour’s failure to elaborate. “There’s such a thing as a truthbinding, Loukas,” he offered, thinking on an earlier conversation he’d had with Tannour. “Have you heard of them?”
Loukas shook his head.
“Such bindings use elae’s fourth strand to contain a man’s thoughts so that he cannot speak them. The workings can be very...forceful. Even under interrogation, someone truthbound by a skilled truthreader or wielder would be unable to speak of the information he’d been bound to keep, even so far as to be unable to say that he’d been truthbound about it. If pushed too far, such a man could become intensely ill, or even lose his memory of the related events entirely.”
There must’ve been something more in his tone than he’d intended, for Loukas’s eyes widened. “Trell, is that—”
“How I lost my memory?” He gave a resigned exhale. “Doubtless a large part of it, yes.”
After a moment’s startled pause, Loukas asked, “Are you still bound to those secrets?”
“By Epiphany’s grace, no.” Or perhaps I should say by the Mage’s grace...
By that time, dawn had claimed enough of the sky that they could see the road leading up to the fortress as well as the barricade blocking it. Trell stretched out on his belly again, and, fully concealed by the gorse, took up his spyglass and studied the barrier.
Formed by a conglomeration of wagons, barrels, and deadly wooden spikes, the barricade sat at the exact point in the road where the incline began to level off. Anyone rushing the barricade would still be warring against gravity, not to mention maneuvering at a steep angle.
Trell handed the spyglass to Loukas, who put it to his eye. He sighed. “That is going to be a problem.”
The blockade was positioned in such a way that Trell could throw men upon it by the battalion and achieve little in return for their efforts. The fortress itself stood too high above the valley for trebuchets to be of much value in the assault. The only way to attack the walls would be to roll their catapults to the top of the road, where the incline leveled off, but the barricade made that option impossible.
“Seems pretty clear they mean to force a siege,” Loukas noted.
“That seems clear, does it?” Trell started backing out of the gorse on his elbows.
***
Loukas turned a look after Trell, well knowing that tone he’d used. “Doesn’t it?”
He quickly disassembled the spyglass and followed Trell out of the thicket, both of them backing away on their bellies, being careful not to disturb the gorse concealing them, even though it was unlikely that they’d run into any of the warlord’s patrols, not when a man would’ve had to be mad to attempt to climb the rock face they’d ascended last night in the dark.
But the A’dal must’ve already had a plan of how to take down the warlord, even before leaving the ruined city they’d navigated for hours the day before, long before they’d ascended the cliff in the dark—fethe, the A’dal had probably taken one look at the fortress from five miles distant and known exactly how to get inside it.
Fiera’s breath, but Trell was always leaving him in the dust. How could he speak nine languages and work advanced equations in his head and still not see what Trell saw in a barricade of wagons and barrels?
‘You’ve got to stop comparing yourself to them!’
Tannour’s words flashed to mind, and Loukas suppressed a flinch. He remembered too nearly the moment of their speaking, a memory that rapidly tumbled back, like it always did, to the beginning, which was somehow a far more comfortable memory to recall...
%
The arrow had thrummed solidly into the earth a good three inches from Loukas’s foot. The ash wood shaft reached nearly to his knee, even with the arrowhead well embedded in the dirt. Bright crimson feathers fletched the tail, each with a peculiar tuft at the end.
Loukas lifted twelve-year-old eyes to the far side of the sparkling River Ver, whose waters were nearly too bright to look across. A boy was standing on the Vestian side, holding a longbow nearly as tall as he was while the wind tossed his shoulder-length black hair into his eyes. He wore neither cloak nor noble headwrap, only a white tunic belted over chestnut leather britches, with an arm guard for archery strapped to his arm. He appeared to be barefoot.
Loukas looked hard back to the arrow at his feet.
In that wind...had the boy been trying to miss or trying to hit him?
He yanked the shaft free of the soft earth and shoved it into the air, shouting in High Avataren, “What in Fiera’s name were you thinking?”
The boy replied with a grin and a very rude gesture.
“You might’ve hit me, peasant!”
“If I’d been trying to hit you, peasant, I would have!” the grinning boy shouted back. His High Avataren was only slightly accented with the vowels of Vest, which told Loukas that he wasn’t a peasant, no matter how simply he was dressed.
Loukas held out the arrow between himself and the boy, solemnly, as his father would extend the evidence of some misdoing. “Firing an arrow at an Avataren Furie on Avataren soil constitutes an act of war, you Vestian prick!”
The boy drew another arrow from a quiver at his belt. “What are you going to do about it, peacock prince?” He nocked arrow to bow, took aim and let loose.
Loukas watched the arrow fly across the river and—
He dodged to his left with a sharp intake of breath.
The arrow thunked into the impression his footprints had left in the grass.
Loukas arrowed a glare back at the Vestian. “Are you out of your fethen mind?”
The boy grinned again. “You should mount those!” He motioned with his longbow to the arrows he’d shot. “Commemorate the day a prince of Vest spared your ridiculous peacock life!”
Loukas made fists at his sides. “High talk when a river runs between us!”
The boy gave Loukas the Avataren sign of Obeisance, bowed mockingly and sauntered off.
As it happened, what Loukas did about it was redouble his efforts on the archery field. His lord father thought it a curious use of his free time, considering Loukas’s future lay far from any field of battle, but since free time was by definition his to do with as he pleased, his father allowed it.
Of course, the Lord n’Abraxis might not have been so amenable if he’d known why Loukas was suddenly so determined to hone his aim.
The animosity between Avatar and Vest traced back seventy generations. That Loukas had even spoken to a Vestian was cause for caning, even for a Furie’s son. In his father’s estimation, the only acceptable form of communication with a Vestian—be he peasant or prince—was an arrow through the eye.
A fortnight and several new calluses later, Loukas found himself again on the banks of the Ver, this time with a recurve bow and a quiver stocked with black-fletched arrows. But the boy didn’t come.
Loukas practiced shooting across the water anyway and soon realized it was a lot harder than he’d given the Vestian credit for. He went back to the archery yard, switched to a longbow, and spent another two weeks honing his humility.
The next time he went to the river, he didn’t find the boy, but he did find a crimson-fletched arrow lodged in the earth near the still-present footprints of his own recent practice. Loukas pulled it free.
As he straightened, he noticed a tiny flash of crimson on the embankment a hundred paces away. When he reached it, he found a second arrow lodged in the earth. A glance downriver revealed yet a third crimson flutter, even farther away this time. The Vestian boy was leaving him breadcrumbs.
Loukas followed from arrow to arrow, twelve in all—exactly the same number that Loukas had shot across the river two weeks before—and more than an hour distant. Finally, he reached a place where the river became shallow and wide, just before it tumbled into the perilous Devil’s Horn Falls, the latter named for the towering scythe of rock jutting out over the abyss, which forced the river to either side of it.
The Vestian boy was sitting atop this twenty-foot spire, his raven hair and white shirt billowing in the backwind of the waterfall, with a quiver full of fluttering crimson arrows strapped to his back, eating an apple.
Summers in southern Avatar were long and the rains infrequent. The river was running low, but the Devil’s Horn was still a decidedly dangerous place to take an excursion and the last locale Loukas would’ve chosen for a picnic.
As he crouched to pluck the twelfth arrow from the earth, his eyes traveled across the swiftly moving waters and up to where the boy was now getting to his feet.
Loukas straightened to look up at him.
“Afraid to get your boots wet, peacock prince?” the boy teased. He had a very bright smile around straight, white teeth. His complexion was a shade more caramel than Loukas’s, testimony to his Vestian heritage.
Loukas really wanted to smash his fist into that face just then. He was summoning a scathing retort to put the uppity Vestian in his place, when he happened to look down at himself and realized why the boy kept calling him a peacock.
His brilliant blue silk pants and golden shirt, bound at his hips by a silver-tooled belt that matched his calf-skin boots, were perfectly acceptable garments for a high lord’s son, but they posed a stark and colorful contrast to the Vestian’s muslin shirt and fine suede britches. Loukas admitted that if their situations had been reversed, he might’ve called the boy the same.
Looking again to the rushing water, his eyes sought the line of crossing least likely to douse him or drag him over the falls, while his mind computed probabilities. The best outcome he reached rounded up to fifty-three-point-nine percent likely to get dragged over the falls.
Yet the Vestian boy had made it to the Horn—admittedly from the river’s opposite bank, though the laws of probability said both routes posed similar dangers. The other boy was also barefoot.
So Loukas sat down and took off his boots while the Vestian teased and smirked at him. He left them on the riverbank and started out into the river.
The current was moving fast, but the water only reached up to his knees at its deepest point. He took care with his footing, for the rocks were uneven and slick, and it was a bare ten feet between himself and the edge of the falls. Two minutes and one pounding heart later, he’d reached the Horn.
Walking over slippery rocks was one thing. Climbing them was another. Loukas stared at the smooth horn of stone with a little frustration and a lot of foreboding.
“You have to find your line, that’s all.”
Loukas sq
uinted up to see the boy squatting on a ledge that would’ve felt precarious to a squirrel. His features were slightly sharper than Loukas’s, and his eyes were striking—pale blue irises bound by darker rims. He had dark lashes that Loukas’s sister would’ve drooled over. The Vestian’s brows were straight, giving his countenance a thoughtful, serious cast.
He jumped from on high into a mighty splash and straightened to stand half a head taller than Loukas. Otherwise they appeared to be close in age. Loukas regarded him warily.
The boy beckoned him around the stone. “Well, come on then, Furie.” He flashed another smile. “The Ghost Kings know you’re committed now. No point in backing out.”
“I wasn’t backing out,” Loukas protested, though he’d seriously been considering hightailing it back to his side of the Ver.
On the Vest-facing side of the towering rock, the boy pointed to a fissure that cracked the stone from base to...well, higher than Loukas could see. “See there? That’s where you climb. Here, I’ll show you.” He shoved damp hair back from his eyes, placed his hands and feet into the crevice just so, and started monkeying up.
Clearly the boy had lots of experience climbing rocks. Loukas had little, but he couldn’t just stand there looking the fool. Like the boy had said, there was nothing to be done for it except to follow. The Ghost Kings were watching, apparently.
Somehow Loukas made it to the top. He didn’t really like recalling the experience. Ever.
But afterwards, they’d stood on the lip of the Horn, with the mist blowing their hair back and the sun in their eyes, and shot arrows off into the thunderous froth at the waterfall’s base...
That experience, Loukas thought upon often...how they’d become such fast, if unlikely, friends.
As the summer lengthened, the boy taught Loukas all of the best Vestian swear words, the ones his tutors would never have dared speak aloud, and Loukas taught the boy the cortata as he was learning it from his father’s baddha talavāra.
Months had passed in this fashion.
Loukas never knew how the boy came and went, or where he went when he went away. He’d be gone for a fortnight, or sometimes a moon. Loukas spent countless hours prowling the riverbanks beneath all kinds of different skies on the lookout for a crimson arrow.