“I am here,” she said softly, “to bespeak the earth once you have made your decision.”
“You can speak to the earth.”
She nodded. “It will not readily do what I ask, if I do not ask in a fashion acceptable to it, but it hears my voice when I choose to bespeak it. I am not Jewel, to make an offhand command it both feels as imperative and obeys—she is not what I am, nor am I what she is.
“But here, in this place, it will hear me.” Evayne waited.
Carver looked away from her, to Stacy.
Clutching Anakton, he knelt, to bring his eyes closer to the level of hers. “Go and save your mother,” he told her. He rose. To the old man, he said, “Take care of her.”
The old man nodded. “For as long as I can.”
He then turned to Ellerson. He could feel the earth tremble beneath his feet, the rhythm of the beat shifting, less a rumble, more a tremor. “Here,” he said, and detached Anakton from the front of his shirt.
“The earth will not release him,” Evayne said softly.
Anakton was crying, but softly now; he was a wet, furry bundle.
“Yes,” Carver said quietly. “With your help, he will.”
Ellerson helped Carver detach Anakton; he did not set him down, and Anakton’s almost instinctive grip became snarled in the domicis’ clothing, not Carver’s. “Master Carver.”
Carver shook his head.
“I am domicis here, and far older than you; I have more experience, and what I might offer the earth—”
Carver shook his head again. “You’re domicis. I’ve never completely understood what that means—but I understand one thing. Your duty is to help me carry out my decisions; to support me, in both the making and the execution. This is my decision, not yours. It isn’t yours to make.”
Ellerson said nothing.
“Even if it were, they need you.”
“They need you, Master Carver. Jewel needs you.”
He shook his head, hair briefly flying in both of his eyes, not the usual one. “She doesn’t. She’s already said her good-byes. Whatever’s coming to Averalaan doesn’t require me to stop it. But it does require you.”
Ellerson shook his head.
Carver said, “I went into the closet after you. Jay’s a seer. She could have stopped me.”
“It has long been a source of pain to The Terafin that her vision, when it came, was not reliable for any save herself.” It was a counter.
Carver nodded, but said, “I came after you. I think we needed to be in the same place.” He glanced at Evayne; she did not speak.
“Only one of us can leave. Stacy, you have to let go of my hand.”
Ellerson said nothing, but bowed his head briefly, an acknowledgment of all that Carver had said—and much that he hadn’t.
“I don’t want to.”
“I know. But you have to because Ellerson is going to take you home. You’ve been sleeping too long, and you’ll wake if you’re home.”
“But I don’t want to leave you here!”
“Stacy,” the old man said, and this was a sergeant’s bark of sound. Stacy let go reflexively; Carver retrieved his hand before she could grab it again. He then slid his hand into his shirt and withdrew the leaf.
Where the leaf cut the fall of light, light broke, but not into simple shadow; as he glanced at the floor just below his outstretched arm, he saw both himself, made short and squat and almost unrecognizable by the light’s angle, and what he had called leaf.
He froze.
The leaf’s shadow was not small, and it wasn’t singular; if it resembled the leaves of the Ellariannatte in shape and size while it rested by its stem between his fingers, its shadow told a different story. His shadow was squat, short, and human. But the shadows cast by the leaf—the multiple shadows—were not. As if even the light here were strange, as if it fell from all angles, and the shadows themselves could choose which angle they bisected, he saw people, or the outlines of people, against the cold stone.
Some were taller than he, some wider, some more bent; some, quivering as if standing still took effort and concentration, were children.
He could not count them all. He didn’t try. He could still see Stacy clearly, and she was enough. No, that wasn’t true. He could see Ellerson. Ellerson’s hands remained by his sides. Carver still carried the leaf.
With one hand, Carver began to sign.
Finch. Teller. Arann. Jester. Adam. Jay.
Jay.
And then, because he might never sign these names again where others would read the gestures and understand their meaning, he added, Lefty. Lander. Fisher. Duster.
Ellerson.
Ellerson, Anakton in one arm, crossed the distance that separated him and took the leaf.
Stacy disappeared, as Carver had known she would; she was, for the moment, Ellerson’s burden to bear. She would return to Jay; he was certain of that. Only when Ellerson tucked the leaf inside his shirt, did Carver wonder why he had not thought to give the leaf to Evayne.
But no. Even thinking it, his eyes were caught by Ellerson’s hands, Ellerson’s gestures: Carver.
• • •
Carver.
Ellerson could not see Stacy. Nor did he feel the weight of the blue leaf as Carver had felt it; he was burdened now only by the duties he had willingly accepted.
He glanced at Evayne; her lips were trembling, but he heard no words. Thrice, her eyes widened, twice they narrowed. The third time they closed. She raised hands; the folds of midnight fabric fell back from her arms exposing them; they were pale, the color of the Winter people.
Carver nodded, as if she had spoken. He signed, go, and then turned toward the tunnel they had followed to arrive in this place. Ellerson followed.
The moment he crossed the threshold between tunnel and what was, for all intents and purposes, a crypt, no matter how brilliantly lit, how carefully detailed, he could once again hear the demon. Pain, however, had given way to rage, and rage to threats that he could understand. The ground beneath his boots shook with them, as did the walls of this tunnel.
“You do not have much time,” Evayne said, following in their wake.
Ellerson did not look back in the direction of her voice.
Anakton was now cradled in both arms; he had, thankfully, ceased to weep, although his sniffling suggested that laundering would be necessary in the near future. It was a future that did not include Carver.
“You’re not afraid,” Anakton observed. “But you are older than he is. Not wiser, then?”
“Wisdom is accrued by experience.” Ellerson exhaled. The only thing he feared when he had first arrived in this strange, Winter world would come to pass. He could not prevent it, nor would he try. Carver had decided.
And he would stand by Carver to witness the outcome of that decision. He did not tell Anakton that his lack of fear—for himself—was entirely intellectual. He carried the leaf. Evayne was present. It was not for Carver’s sake, nor Ellerson’s; the scope of her goals was broader by far, and it did not stop long to rest upon the shoulders of a single individual.
She meant for that leaf to return to Jewel, and there was now only one way it would: through Ellerson. Until he carried the leaf to its maker, he would be safe. It was not his safety that had been his chief concern.
He understood that the den had lost kin in their earlier years. He recognized the names of the lost, although they were seldom spoken. Only in the teaching of the names were they added; Adam knew them.
This would be the first of the den to be lost during Ellerson’s tenure. Carver’s name would be added, by slow degree and the passage of time, to the rolls of the dead. His hands full of Anakton, he could not make the gesture—but he would have, otherwise. He had come to understand the comfort of a language that was, at its heart, the tongue of orphaned children.
“He will not die,” Anakton said quietly. “Dead, he is of no use to the earth; the earth cannot bind without consent or the aid of the god
s. I am sorry. I did not mean to injure you. Either of you.”
Ellerson said, “No.” It was why, in the end, he had taken Anakton from Carver, and why he would carry him until he could be safely set down.
They walked the tunnel in silence, Carver in the lead, Evayne at the rear. In the lesser light of the tunnel, it was dark; shadows were thicker than light as they lay across floor and curved wall.
The demon’s voice could be heard; it was louder, a rumble of thunder; it felt like a natural disaster in the making. The earth shook, continued to shake, as they walked, but the dislodged dirt did not land on the tunnel’s occupants. The tunnel held.
Carver walked to the altar that had been at the height of the dais, and there he stopped, lifting his head as if he could see the demon kept at bay by the earth itself. The altar was far deeper beneath that earth than a grave would have been.
Hands shaking, Carver removed the cloak that had protected him from the cold. He removed, as well, the boots that had allowed them to pass above the crust of ice that had settled, over the years, across snow. Both of these, he set into the almost weightless pack across his shoulders.
“Take these as well,” he told Ellerson, holding the pack.
Anakton allowed himself to be shuffled, like dead weight, to the crook of one arm.
To Angel, he said.
Ellerson nodded.
Carver glanced at the ring on his hand, and up again. But the ring, he kept. “The earth likes it. He likes the sound of it.”
Evayne said nothing. Ellerson moved to stand beside Carver; beside and behind. Evayne remained where she stood—facing him, the surface of the altar between them. Carver took the dagger he carried; it was a small, clean knife. He grimaced as he drew it across his left palm. Blood welled slowly; it had been a shaky, shallow cut.
“I won’t die,” he told Ellerson, his gaze flicking briefly to Anakton. “The earth says I won’t die.”
“What does the blood signify?”
“It’s living blood,” Anakton said, as if this explained everything. Or anything.
“Blood of my blood,” Carver said, his words following Anakton’s. “I . . . don’t understand it. But blood offered to the earth on death isn’t the same as the blood of the living. In the South, in the Dominion—I think—there’s power, some obligation of earth to the people who can’t hear it or speak to it.” He blinked. “I think—I think it wants you to know that.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll go to a place where the earth isn’t awake.”
“The earth,” Evayne said quietly, “does not wake often, even in the wilderness. Were it not for the leaf, it would not be awake now—but the Sleeper’s dreams are light and fractured, this close to his waking. They are one.”
“The earth doesn’t wake when she carries the leaf.”
Evayne’s frown was a network of etched lines around the corners of her lips, her eyes. “No. I do not entirely understand the why.”
But Ellerson said, “Perhaps it was Shadow.”
She turned her gaze to Ellerson then, her eyes narrowing. “Shadow? The gray cat?”
“He was here,” Carver said. “Not for long, but he was here.”
“When this is over,” the seer replied, “I will singe the fur off those cats. It should not have been possible for him to be here at all.”
It was Anakton who said, “No one tells the eldest where they can—or cannot—go. But he did not expect to be here, and he was not pleased. He could not stay.”
She looked at them all, exhaling slowly. As if counting. “What is done is done. And perhaps the oldest understand what we cannot immediately understand. There would be no way out of these lands—for you, for what you carry—if the earth could not be roused.”
“And there is now?” Carver asked.
“For your companions—yes, even Anakton—if you desire it.” She looked up again. “But this space will not hold for long, and you will not survive if you do not do what you intend.”
Carver nodded, then. He placed the palm he had cut upon the altar.
• • •
At once, the earth stilled. The roars of the demon quieted, although they did not—as they had done in the room which housed the sleeper—vanish utterly.
Carver lifted a hand—the uncut hand—and signed, although he did not turn to Ellerson. He was watching Evayne. She was watching him. When he finished, he lowered his hand. And when his hands stilled, she raised hers. She signed—it seemed to Ellerson that she signed—a word he did not recognize. Carver did.
He closed his eyes.
“Yes,” she said, abandoning den-sign. “You will buy their freedom with yours. It is why I am here.” She then placed her bloodless hand upon the altar, across from Carver’s; she lifted her head, closing her eyes. She began to sing.
Her voice was not practiced, not strong—and yet it carried. Ellerson did not move; the earth did. The room, if it could be called a room, around the altar began to shift, to change; dirt became stone as stone emerged from its deep, deep brown; roots seemed to withdraw, to give stone the burden that they had undertaken.
The altar began to glow. Carver winced, shutting his own eyes, the fall of his lashes a fan of color that the light appeared to leech from everything else. He levered himself up, onto the altar’s flat surface; he then lay across it, although the cut hand remained palm down on the surface of stone.
“Living blood,” Anakton said. “It is a promise and a binding. Blood of my blood. Flesh of my flesh.”
Carver’s skin became the color of stone, as if color were blood, and he grievously wounded. His clothing likewise changed color, but instead of gray, it was brown—brown, green, gold. His hair remained a shade of brown that was almost black; Ellerson could not see the color of his eyes beneath his lids.
Evayne continued her rough song, and her robes swirled around her, as if they sought to accompany that song in a writhing, sinuous dance of their own. He could hear their movement.
The ground shook beneath his feet. The ceiling shook above him.
Evayne lifted her free hand and signed. Den-sign. Go. Now. She could not speak and sing simultaneously and did not try.
Ellerson, shouldering two packs, cradling a talking beast, stepped back from the altar. But he could not leave, not yet. Anakton bit his hand. He did not draw blood, but that was a deliberate choice on his part; he did catch Ellerson’s attention.
“We must leave,” he said, a hiss of sound. “Did you not hear her?”
“I heard her.” He did not understand the words of the song.
“We must leave, or we will not leave. Come, come, we must away.”
They were underground, and there did not appear to be an exit. Ellerson considered this obvious and did not say it. “Where?” he asked, instead.
“That way, that way.” Anakton’s head swiveled in the direction of the tunnel they had taken; it still remained. “She cannot keep singing. She should not be able to sing here at all—but she does it for your sake.”
Ellerson did not argue. He glanced once at Carver, but Carver’s eyes did not open; he was becoming part of the stone upon which he had lain.
“We will not be able to leave if she does not sing. And she sings, where she should not. It is dark—can you not see it? We must be away before the darkness eclipses us.”
Ellerson nodded, a brief, curt gesture. He turned toward the tunnel.
If Evayne’s song was darkness, the tunnel’s response was light: it was as bright, now, as the great hall in which the effigy of the Sleeper lay. Ah, no. He could see, as the light expanded, that it enveloped them all—all except for Evayne. The tunnel shifted, changing as the floor and the walls of this room changed; with the expanse of walls came color, a mosaic of a pattern, and between those flashes of color, pillars. They were not the pillars that girded the Sleeper’s hall; they were not so tall, not so fine.
But they were better, in every way; they were statues, forms of people, the likene
ss perfect: the den. Carver’s den. Ellerson could see their past being built as color continued to spread. Only Evayne remained, untouched, untouchable.
“Mortals,” Anakton said, “are fast. Always fast. Everything moves so quickly. Everything changes in a rush. Perhaps that is why the earth is willing to keep him. It makes me dizzy.”
There, Finch, Teller, Jester, Arann—pillars all, but perfect in their likeness. Angel. Jewel. Ah, he thought. Merry. The cats. He was surprised to see the cats, but they weren’t pillars; they were mosaics, one on each of three walls. This was Carver’s room, Carver’s hall. This was the amalgam of the earth and the man.
The altar was not the center of this evolving, emerging hall. Perhaps, when the transformation was complete, it would be. At the moment, however, Ellerson was surprised to see a trapdoor in the center of the floor, hinged to lift, its surface a simple, plain wood.
He approached the door, lifting it one-handed with effort until it lay flat against the stone. There were stairs leading down, adding distance between them and the demon above. But distance from Carver as well. He straightened his shoulders as he rose, and then turning once for a final glimpse of Carver, began his descent.
5th day of Lattan, 428 A.A.
Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas
Jewel had, as a child, daydreamed of living in a palace. Palaces were, after all, for the rich and the powerful. They had more room than she could conceive of, and in the early years, more rooms than she could count. Wealth and power had been, to her much younger mind, guarantees of safety. Her family could live without struggle and fear—because the fear of both cold and starvation had always been a looming shadow that threatened to become a shroud.
In that distant youth, surrounded by her family, the words palace and castle had been interchangeable. They were large places in which powerful people lived.
As she stood before the closed doors of this castle, she did not feel powerful. She felt apprehensive. The castle itself had come into existence in her absence. Or perhaps it had come into existence upon her return and she had failed to notice.
Teller and Finch remained at the foot of the stairs that led to this grand door. The Chosen—Torvan and Marave—stood to either side. Torvan had attempted to open the door; he’d failed. He did not try again. The castle was new to him as well, and he understood that it was not, in any fashion anyone understood, a building that could exist within Averalaan. It was, as was the previous iteration of personal chambers, part of the wilderness. Part of Jewel.
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