Northlight

by Wheeler, Deborah

  What was the old dragon thinking now, sitting there not even breathing? The boy watched her, too, and in his face I glimpsed something dark and nameless. Reckless, unformed. But hard, hard like steel.

  “Aviyya left my house to make her own life,” Esmelda said. Her words were slow and final as the Laurean river bells, tolling through the night-long fogs. The bells that Avi always said sounded like the souls of drowning men.

  Cold trickled through me. I had no answers for her, no pleas, no honey-tongued persuasion. For a moment I cursed myself for not having the right words, as if there were some magic in them to unlock her heart. But it was impossible. Even if he were still alive, not even Pateros could have moved her.

  “I know you and Avi didn’t...agree,” I stumbled on, cursing myself doubly for my weakness. “But she’s your own, your child — that’s got to count for something!”

  Avi told me again and again that her mother’s heart was harder than any stone, but in the end there must have been a link between them. I remembered my stepfather singing to me and my brothers through the howling, sand-swept nights. I remembered how he defied the Tribal ban and taught me knife-forms, saying I was his daughter as much as if he’d truly fathered me and he meant to give me the means to protect myself. I remembered the first time I held my son in my arms and such a feeling came on me, the tie between us that neither water-plague nor raiders could ever break. Surely Esmelda must remember something of that.

  She shook her head. “Give it up, Ranger.”

  “At least tell me why!”

  “I can take no action. None.”

  “What if it were me, lost out there?” the boy asked in a low, tight voice. “What then?”

  “My answer must be the same.” She turned to face him, a feral movement quick as a striking snake. There was something in the way she held herself, some hidden passion. “There are some things that go beyond personal loyalties, beyond even love.”

  “What things?”

  A tightening of her lips as she weighed what she should say, what she could say. Ay Mother, so much going on here I could only guess!

  “What things?” he repeated, his voice breaking. “More of your damned secrets, like the ring? Are you saying the fate of all Harth is balanced against my sister’s life?”

  Quick, he was. From her expression, he’d hit too close to something he shouldn’t know. She placed one hand on his and for the first time I noticed the ring she wore, heavy gold, the deeply incised design of two concentric circles around a single point. Nothing of the desperate tension in the boy’s body lessened.

  “Avi made her choice,” Esmelda said. “She knew the risks. She didn’t want my help.”

  He leapt to his feet, her hand thrust aside as if it might bite him. Me, I wondered just what sort of viper’s nest I’d stumbled into.

  To hell with them and their secrets!

  Waiting wouldn’t get me any help for Avi, only deeper into this quick-mire. I turned and headed for the door. Behind me I heard the boy’s voice, muted. There would be no screaming fights like Avi told me about, not for him. I didn’t think Esmelda would tell him why, either, only to keep his mouth shut and his nose where it belonged. Hell, Avi was his sister, what else should he do? But he’d lived his whole life in the shadow of the dragon; he was probably halfway to being just like her.

  Outside the door, the mouse-woman waited, her little hands knotted into fists. She shot me a look of pure hate.

  “I didn’t lay a finger on your precious magistra.” I pushed past her, through the still-darkened entryway. She slipped around me and had the front door open before I could reach it.

  The night swallowed me up.

  o0o

  I cut across the streets through the stench of crushed flowers, my running feet as sure as if they had eyes of their own. The night surrounded me, filling me with a broken darkness, a madness almost. It would pass, I knew, this dawn or the next. Or the next. Until then, I would do whatever I had to do to survive, just as I always had.

  The next moment, it seemed, I was standing in the plaza in front of a newly planted tree. The place was not yet deserted, even at this hour, with late mourners still drifting by. Before my eyes, the Starhall blazed as if on fire. Everything looked pale and sickish in its light, like things grown too long underground.

  It came to me that whatever was broken inside me happened not this night, nor even this week, but a long time ago. On a night lit with torches instead of candle-lanterns or those Mother-damned solar lights. The wind blew in fitful gusts up on the funeral mount. I still heard it in my dreams.

  I still felt the blood streaming down my back to lure the bloodbats down to me.

  Mother, why must I still remember? I’ve run, I’ve killed, I’ve frozen in that damned Kratera mud. And still it comes back to me, that night!

  There was no answer. There never was. Or maybe the demon god of chance knew and kept it to throw in my face as I died.

  Now I knelt on the smooth Laurean stone, jamming my knuckles into my eyes as if to gouge out the visions there. For the first time, I noticed the smell of the new-turned earth. The slender trunk, the leaves glimmering in the unsteady light of the candle-lanterns set about the shrine.

  One by one I opened my fingers, each joint a slower heartbeat, a steadier breath. I held my hands out in front of me and they did not tremble.

  I was not alone. I froze, searching for the shadow behind me. A man, I thought, from the feel of him. I slid a knife-hilt into my palm, body-warmed and solid. I could spin around, be on my feet and the blade halfway through his guts before he knew I’d even moved. Blood smelled better than flowers or grave-dirt.

  I wouldn’t do it. This was Laureal City, after all, not the Ridge. Not the steppe. Pateros promised me it would be different here.

  Is it? Is it ever different anywhere?

  Slowly I rose, slowly turned. The boy’s face shimmered in front of me like a polished skull. No more rainwater eyes but pits of darkness.

  Movement at the edge of the plaza. More mourners, still too far to hear more than their murmured voices. The skull-faced boy followed me into the night.

  “Look,” he said when I paused. For an instant I heard steel in his voice and then it was gone. “You need — Avi needs help.” One shoulder jerked back toward the big, empty house. “I don’t know what the hell is going on or why — but I’ll find a way to get it for you.”

  “Wishcrap.” Even the mouse-woman would be more use than this pale, city-soft boy.

  “I’m her brother, damn it!” His body tensed as if he’d like to grab me and shake me. He didn’t — the first sign of sense he’d shown yet. “There’s got to be — I’ll find something. I swear I will!”

  “Forget it, cub. I’m leaving at dawn.”

  But his curses, shouted into the night, brought me a strange and unexpected comfort.

  Chapter 13: Terricel of Laureal City

  A solar lantern brightened the usually dim entryway. The rest of Esmelda’s huge house lay dark and silent, except for the faint, almost secretive creaking as it surrendered its warmth to the night. Just inside the door, beside the table piled with notebooks and correspondence, a travel pack sat on the floor. It was made of soft, oiled leather, with buckled outer pockets and felt-padded shoulder straps. Alongside lay a woolen cloak, neatly folded, and Terricel’s best pair of boots.

  Leaving the front door to swing closed behind him, Terricel knelt in amazement beside the pack and clothing. When he’d stormed out of the house, he had no idea he’d have any need for travel gear. But someone else had known: Lys, who’d tried in her own way to be the mother Esmelda never was.

  o0o

  At first he couldn’t believe that Esmelda refused to take action, even for her own daughter. He’d pleaded with her, “How could you turn the Ranger away? Couldn’t you at least say you’d think about it?”

  “Why give her false hope?”

  “It’s because of Montborne, isn’t it?” he cried with a
strange, savage desperation. “You’re afraid that whatever you do, he’ll find out.”

  Age lines deepened in Esmelda’s face, foreshadowing her death mask. “I can’t afford to give him a single...” She paused, as if searching for the right word. “...a single weapon to use against me.”

  “I don’t understand. Montborne’s ambitious, certainly, but there’s no question about his loyalty to Laurea. You could do worse than to bargain with him.”

  “I have no choice in the matter. As long as Pateros was alive, he kept Montborne in check, but now...Montborne may be a Laurean patriot, but I have to think on a larger scale. He could well be a destabilizing force for all of Harth.” She lifted one hand, a fluttery gesture so unlike her that it startled Terricel into silence.

  “I’ve already said more than is safe for either of us,” she said, twisting the ring with the dotted circle on her finger. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  o0o

  Terricel had roamed the streets for what seemed like hours, too flaming angry to think what else to do. He thought of seeking out Etch at The Elk Pass, as he had a number of times since that first night, but he wanted something more than a few hours of drunken oblivion and another fight with Esmelda the next morning.

  By some miracle, he’d found the woman Ranger, Kardith, on her knees in front of Pateros’s grave like some kind of pilgrim. She’d turned her back on him, all but laughed at his offer of help. After all, why should she believe him? Why should she have anything to do with him?

  He’d stood there in the plaza after Kardith left. Above him a formless darkness hovered, and at his feet lay pale smooth pavement. An ice-edged wind lashed across the open space, turning his skin as chill and lifeless if he had turned into the marble figure of Gaylinn’s painting.

  Gaylinn... Terricel’s throat ached until it turned numb. The wind howled her name as it scoured away flesh and bones, leaving nothing of him but words. His University masters’ words, Montborne’s words, Esmelda’s words — all patched together to make something that walked and talked and looked like a man. The years of working and waiting and secret imagining — nothing but words.

  Now other words unexpectedly boiled out of him, words he’d never even whispered aloud before, words that made all common obscenities pale and safe. No one knew what they meant anymore, except maybe the most highly placed gaea-priests.

  Finally he paused for breath, his throat half-frozen, and noticed the people gathered around Pateros’s tree. No one said anything to him. Their expressions were unreadable in the eerie Starhall light — disapproving perhaps, sympathetic, maybe even grateful he was doing their cursing for them.

  As he wandered from the plaza, a feeling began in him, condensing with the sharp-edged clearness of an ice crystal, a feeling that out of all the horrors of the past week — the assassination, the funeral, the planning and scheming, the riot, the blood — there was only one thing that touched him or moved him beyond his old life.

  Everything else was to be endured and survived, like the thing beneath the Starhall. He could feel it even now, as if it had become a permanent part of him, and suddenly the taint of it became more than he could bear.

  Aviyya needed help. Terricel clung to the thought as the single reality in his life. He couldn’t do a damned thing for Pateros. Or for Gaylinn, either. His academic career was a bad joke. As for being Esmelda’s heir, he was nothing more than a convenient secretary. If only there were some place he could go where no one had ever heard of Esmelda of Laurea or the Inner Council or even the University.

  No wonder Aviyya had run as fast and as far as she could.

  “Half of what’s wrong with you,” Gaylinn once said, “is that you’ve grown up with just Esmelda and her off most of the time saving the world. The other half is that you’ve never done anything to change it.”

  “There was Lys,” he’d said.

  And Avi... Part sister, part mother, who was she now?

  Suddenly the darkened city streets faded before his eyes. He saw Aviyya, her face pale under streaks of blood, her black hair tangled with mud and leaves. She was struggling up a mist-cloaked embankment. She paused, breathing hard, her breath coming in puffs of vapor. Then her gray eyes went cloudy, as if she somehow sensed his presence. Abruptly, the image vanished.

  The Ranger woman, Kardith, she’d been out there on Kratera Ridge with Aviyya. Avi was important to her, too, in some desperate way he could only guess. What lay between them, bound them together, went beyond simple comradeship. It had taken the threat of mutilation to bring Kardith to Esmelda, and she wasn’t the kind who found begging easy.

  She had no reason to help him, and he would have to find some way to convince her. He needed directions, maps, woodscraft. There was nothing he could do that she couldn’t do a hundred times better. But he had one overwhelming advantage, if he could find the courage to use it — he didn’t take orders from Montborne.

  o0o

  Back in the entryway to Esmelda’s house, Terricel sat down, pulled on the boots, and inspected the contents of the traveling pack. The pockets were filled with packages of concentrated food bars, a generously stocked money belt and a selection of his own clothes, the most warm and durable he owned.

  A shadow caught his eye — Annelys, clutching her robe around her thin shoulders. She stood, bleached and squinting, in the lantern’s glare.

  “Did my mother put these here?” Terricel indicated the pack.

  The old steward shook her head.

  “But does she know? Lys, is this her idea? Because if it is — ”

  “You’ll what? Stay here just to spite her? Listen to me. I brought up her tisane and she said to me, ‘I’ve lost him. I’ve lost them both.’ You think she doesn’t know what she’s done? To Avi and now to you? She knows what she did to her daughter all right, forcing her into secrets that were none of her own choosing. And she knows what it did to you to keep those same secrets from you. That’s why she’s lying upstairs right now, waiting for you to leave.”

  Unable to reply, Terricel clambered to his feet. Annelys scooped up the pack and cloak. She shoved them into his arms.

  “Now here is something she doesn’t know. You want a life of your own, that’s your chance. You go out there and find your sister, do you hear me? But don’t you bring her back. You keep right on going! This family’s suffered enough from Esme’s secrets.”

  “Lys!” He took her in his arms. She hugged him back with unexpected ferocity, as if she never expected to see him again.

  “Enough with good-byes! I’ve served Esme for thirty years and never once have I faced her in tears!”

  There was nothing else Terricel could say to her. He backed out the door and paused for a moment on the steps, listening and knowing he would hear nothing.

  He looked out across the city that had been his world. Here the solar-stored light burned all night long and kept the shadows from growing too deep or too cold. Here the people lay safe and dreaming in their beds. What had they to fear? Montborne would keep the northers at bay, and if they no longer had Pateros to guide them, they still had Esmelda.

  o0o

  When Terricel arrived at the Blue Star Stables, he found the house dark and silent. A flickering lantern hung crookedly from the railing, but a second, stronger light streamed through the partly opened barn door. As he approached it, Terricel heard the sounds of animals chewing fodder.

  Inside the barn, the horse smell was thicker, mixed with a sweet, musty odor. Bits of straw littered the hard-packed dirt of the central aisle. A large lantern, in better shape than the one outside, swung from the rafters. A half-dozen horses, their sizes and colors shadowed, poked their heads over the stall doors, ears pricked and nostrils twitching. From the far end came a man’s voice, low and indistinct.

  “Hello?” Terricel called. “Hello, Etch?”

  In answer came a squeal and a bellowed curse. Terricel hurried to the large box stall at the opposite end of the barn and peered over the w
ooden door. Etch stood behind a speckled-white horse, his shoulder tucked under the tail at an improbable angle. The horse’s legs splayed out, its rounded sides heaving. Blood streaked its hind legs and matted the straw bedding.

  The horse squealed again and began thrashing its head, which was tied by a stout rope to a ring in the wall.

  “What the hell?” Etch shouted. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Terricel.”

  “Harth’s sweet ass, boy, don’t just stand there! Grab her head, quiet her down. The foal’s crosswise and if I can’t turn it, we’ll lose both of them.”

  Terricel dropped his pack and managed to unlatch the stall door. Circling around Etch, he got a good look at the laboring mare. He’d ridden horses a few times over the years, but he’d never needed to actually handle them. He was always surprised how big they were, how earthy and vivid. Now he saw that Etch had the better part of one arm inside of the mare’s body. Both of them were sweating hard, straining. The veins on Etch’s forehead stood out sharply.

  The mare’s bony head was as long as Terricel’s forearm. She snorted, spraying his chest with foam, and pulled her head away as he took hold of the halter. The straps were fever-hot and sodden with sweat. Blood crusted her jawbone where the buckles had torn her skin.

  Suddenly her whole body tensed. Her eyes rolled, showing crescents of white. She gave a wheezing cry and staggered, as if her feet had suddenly slipped out from under her. The leather straps jerked through Terricel’s fingers.

  “Stinking hell!” yelled Etch. “Hold her still! I’ve almost got it!”

  Terricel tightened his grip on the halter. “Hey, you!” he said to the mare. “Take it easy...” Horses, he’d been told, responded to tone of voice rather than actual words.

  “Hey,” he repeated, trying to make his voice as soothing as he could, “hey, Mama Horse, it’s going to be all right.”