Dukish started to say something, but Tunnel moved on him as if he would hit him if he spoke. Other Anets shouldered closer. They jostled Dukish and in the confusion he almost lost his footing.
Dariel continued. “Think, Dukish, about the things you confessed to me.” He looked the Anet leader in the eyes. He really did not want to say what he was about to. It was cruel. It would hurt. It did not seem fair to break the man’s confidence so publicly.
He could say that Dukish’s master had raped him since his earliest days in Avina. He used him on a balcony overlooking the skyline of Avina. He set his head and shoulders out over the railing, and took pleasure in Dukish’s fear that he might thrust him over the edge to his death at any moment. He could say just what Dukish had—that it was there, looking out over the city as his master used him that he learned fear and hate and that he first dreamed of the things he would do to others if only he had the power. He was not born an evil man, Dariel could say. He was born weak, petty, scared. That is why he’s done the things he has here. Not because he is strong, but because he is weak. I’m sorry, Dukish, to say that about you. I take no joy in it.
He could say all those things and everyone would know that they were true. But he could not be that cruel. Instead, he said, “Admit to me that you know I hold your truth within me. Just do that and I will say no more about it, now or ever.”
“You can say whatever you want,” Dukish said. He pushed closer to Dariel. He stood just before him now. “Nobody will remember. I’ll make sure of it.”
His hand suddenly clenched a knife. He was so close and people packed so tightly around them that Dukish had only to thrust the knife forward. It sank into Dariel’s gut before he could say or do anything. He could only manage a gasp, so overwhelming was the pain. Dukish held him on his knife blade, his face a rictus of hatred that Dariel stared into for a moment. Then the world turned black.
This time, Dariel barely dropped out of life before he was thrust back up into it. When he could see again, he saw a chamber in chaos. Hands held him up, dragging him back from the center of the confusion. The pain at his center was incredible. The knife was still inside him. The hilt of it jutted out, the point jolting him with continued shocks of misery. He wanted nothing more than to curl over it, to wrap himself around it completely, and ignore everything else. Instead he looked up at what was happening. No … Dariel thought. No.
Dukish and his Anets fought like mad with Tunnel and Mór and many others. They pounded one another with fists and elbows, punching and clawing. Tunnel bashed his way toward the Anet leader, using his forehead to smash the faces of any who opposed him. Dukish fought like a trapped animal, his face crazed, shouting something again and again. The Lvin converged on them. Than raked an Anet’s eyes with the claws at his fingertips. Mór managed to sink hers into Dukish’s cheek before getting pushed back on a surge. She seemed as desperate to tear him apart as he was to survive.
With all his strength, Dariel threw both his arms up. It hurt so much his vision blurred and rippled. He held his arms high, stiff and trembling, palms flat for all to see. “Don’t!”
It was not a loud scream, but some heard it. First just those holding him. Anira’s face came into view beside his. And then those around him turned to look, and then others as word began to pass. More and more faces turned toward him. The knot of fighting went on a little longer, but even Dukish sensed the growing hush. He froze, his arm cocked back to punch Tunnel, who had finally reached him. He followed the others’ gazes and found Dariel. He stared openmouthed.
All of them did. All of them watched as Dariel shook off the hands holding him and stood on his own. I’m all right, he thought. He was not really. Part of him had just died. Part of his and Nâ Gâmen’s soul was oozing out of him even as he stood there. He reached down and took the hilt of the knife with both hands. He held for a few breaths, and then pulled on it. It felt like he was ripping out a link in his spine, like it was part of him and would not come. And then it did. He screamed it out of him with a surge of blood. The knife clattered to the floor. He let his hands drop and stood there, swaying on his feet, trembling.
I’m all right, he thought. Then he remembered he needed to say it out loud.
“I’m all right.”
To prove it, he stripped off his blood-soaked shirt. He wadded it and wiped at his torso, turning as he did so. He did not get all the blood off, but it was clear that the gash that should have killed him was already just a welt of inflamed skin.
Everyone stared at him. The silence hummed and vibrated in the air for a long time, until Tunnel called out his name. Not Dariel Akaran, though. His new name. The one only they could truly bestow on him. Tunnel’s voice said it and then another repeated it. And then many more took it up.
Dariel stood, shirtless and bloody at the center of the chamber filled with the freed slaves of Ushen Brae, as they named him the Rhuin Fá.
CHAPTER
FORTY-NINE
One day, after Aliver told his sister about what Sire Dagon had written, they both agreed that they would permit themselves one day. For Corinn the news of what she had done with the vintage had a breadth of atrocity that she could fathom no more than learning of her own pending death, or Aliver’s. It was all too huge. She wanted to collapse beneath the weight of it in utter misery. She wanted to take up that knife again and end herself.
It was only at Aliver’s urging and Hanish’s quiet whisper that she agreed to put the enormity of the world aside for just one day, the last they would spend with the ones they loved. From the middle hours of one morning, through an afternoon and evening, still further through the dark hours of the night and into the next sunrise. That was the span of time that Corinn and Aliver let the world wait for them. They spent it together with their children. For Corinn, it was a lifetime.
In the short span of time she had left to live, Corinn would cherish many moments from that single day. When she lowered the cowl from her chin was one such moment. She hated doing so and acquiesced only after Aaden had asked her to quite firmly. She searched his face for any sign of disgust. There was a tenseness in his jaw and a quiver on his left cheek and a sudden moistness that brimmed his eyes. But there was no disgust. He said, “Mother, look at that. Now why did they do that?” He sounded like an old woman, full of empathy. His fingers extended toward her, asking permission. She gave it with a nod and he touched her damaged face. To her surprise, she felt the warmth of the life within him, his skin soft, gentle. For a few seconds, she almost thought his touch had healed her. Then she raised the cowl into place.
A few days ago she would not have been content to sit with Benabe across the table from her. She would not have been able to look at Shen and acknowledge the loveliness of her round, brown face without fearing that it threatened her son’s legacy. She would not even have allowed her brother to be fully himself. As she sat with them, listening to the tale they had to tell, the things that had once seemed logical reactions to a predatory world now seemed like rules composed in a foreign language. She did not understand herself anymore. The woman she had been stood unmasked. She felt that she, in her own way, had been a puppet to base parts of her nature that should never have been allowed to rule her.
“Leave that for now,” Hanish said. She tried to.
They climbed up to the Terrace of First Light later in the morning. Elya’s children were there, almost too large now to all crowd into the space. They seemed to sense that something was wrong from the moment Corinn entered. They greeted her half-covered face with suspicion, sniffing her and scenting the air with their slim tongues. Corinn calmed them by sending soothing, yet somber thoughts to them.
“I don’t like them as much as Elya,” Aaden said. He turned apologetically to her. “I’m sorry to say that. They are incredible, Mother, but Elya is special. I don’t think that any of these would have saved me the same way she did. Do you?”
Corinn ran her palm over his head, all the answer she wished to give.
Still, when Aliver and Shen shot up into the air on Kohl’s back, Aaden clawed at her, begging to follow. Po, competitive as always, was eager to oblige. The four of them swept down from the palace, over the terraced layers of the city. They swept over the lower town and then beat their way higher. Corinn thought of the day when all four Akaran children had ridden horseback with their father. They had galloped out from the town and along the winding road over the island’s hills, down to that beach, the one she saw hundreds of feet below her now. That had been a memorable day. Perhaps, for these children, this was another such day. She hoped so.
They flew out to Haven’s Rock, where they stood in the wind and listened to Aliver eulogize his former tutor, Jason, and Leeka Alain of the Northern Guard, the first to slay a Numrek and the only one to ever run down fleeing sorcerers. He thanked the tutor for being the first to draw the map of the world in Aliver’s mind, for being such a lover of knowledge and a keeper of history. “It was he who first challenged my princely arrogance. I should have thanked him more for that before this.” About Leeka, he said, “And here, after years of service, his last deed. He returned to us and said the words that saved us for the now.” Looking at Corinn, he added, “In the end, he did what mattered. For that, he will not be forgotten.”
After that, they returned to joy. They dove down from heights like seabirds. They skimmed out over the water, the waves growing more and more pronounced as the sea grew deeper. Aaden shouted above the rushing air, “It’s wonderful, Mother. Let’s go faster. This is like Mena said!” Corinn did not know quite what he meant and she could not ask. She could go faster, though. She urged Po to do so.
And then all too quickly it was night. How tired they all were, or should be but were not really. The notion of sleeping hours away seemed so wasteful. When Aaden proposed that they stay together throughout the entire night, Corinn was amazed at how easily that problem was solved. Of course. Why sleep? There were not enough hours left to sleep! Listening to the two children’s cheers, Corinn could not help but think of that day long ago when her father promised them a late-night snowball fight. That night never came to be. This one would.
They had the servants stoke the fire in the center of a small amphitheater on Aliver’s terrace. Night sky clear and chilly above them, they curled up among the blankets and cushions and furs. So many things to remember: the shape of Shen’s teeth when her head was thrown back in laughter. The way Benabe could make any sentence into a song just by putting music in her voice. The stories Barad told, the tree trunk of a man, stone eyed, holding the children rapt with his deep voice.
Corinn would always remember the comfort she took when she slipped Aaden’s head from her lap, thinking he was asleep. She tried to move away, but he said, “Mother, it’s not over, is it?” She could not speak and his eyes were closed, but he did not need to hear or see her answer. “You’ll fix it. I know you will.”
A little later, after sleep finally overpowered both children beside the fire pit, the two monarchs sat beside each other on the stone bench that looked out over the harbor. They had both read yet another message, this one from Mena, describing what she intended to do. Corinn tried to reach out to her across the distance. She was tired enough that it almost worked. She did shoot up out of her body and above the palace. She flew, wingless, toward the north. But as with that time she had searched in vain for Dariel, she eventually came to a halt, hanging in the air, no feeling for where to go or how to reach her.
“Mena is a warrior. If anyone can hold back the Auldek, she can,” Aliver said. Then he asked her more about dream travel, about what it felt like to separate a soul from a body, and about what she knew of how the Auldek could hold spare life forces inside themselves. She had Rhrenna bring her documents the league had provided, and together the siblings talked through the fantastical horror of it. “What greater form of slavery could there be?” Aliver asked. “Enslaving not bodies but souls.”
Corinn did not answer, for she could think of none.
As Corinn had wanted to speak with her brother without other men’s voices, she had asked Barad and Hanish to stay among the others. Instead, she spoke with a quill and parchment. It made her choose her words carefully. She wrote, I know. I just wish I could have seen her again, and Dariel. I sent them both so far away. Now I can’t understand why I didn’t want them near me and Aaden. Don’t make Mena wait long. Go as fast as you can. Reach her. Fight beside her. If I could, I would go with you.
“I’ll get to her. I’ll do everything I can to end this before I end myself.”
I’ll do the same.
Aliver slid a hand over hers, held it there a moment. She did not like the quiet hopelessness of the gesture. She pulled her hand away, wrote, and turned the page so he could see.
I know what to do. I have the book.
It took a moment for this to fully sink in. When it did, his eyes came back to hers, not so hopeless anymore. “You have it?”
Corinn nodded, and then playfully nudged him on the shoulder.
He understood. “Of course, you have it,” he said. “You didn’t send the Santoth to it. You sent them away from it. My clever sister.”
The way lines formed at the edge of her eyes was the only way she could indicate that she was smiling. She saw that Aliver saw it, and was glad.
“What will you do with the book? Can you destroy it?”
She shook her head and wrote, It’s not mine to destroy.
Aliver thought about that for a time. “All right, it’s not yours to destroy. It was here before us and it might be wrong to take it from the world completely. That could be another mistake. I understand that. What, then?”
Return it.
“Return it to whom?”
To the worm.
“I don’t understand.”
Corinn looked at him, and then at where Barad slept. She seemed to consider waking him, but then shook the thought away. Pulling the tablet onto her lap, she leaned to write her response. With her posture, she told Aliver not to begin reading until she was done. She wrote for a long time, and then slid the tablet back into his hands. She moved away to the railing as he bent to read.
She had written: From the day I began to study The Song, I felt a living force protest. In my mind it was a great worm. I sometimes imagined it rising from the floor of the sea, its jaws so large they could close around all of the isle of Acacia. I knew it to be angry with me, and I thought it a foulthing.
I know now that’s not right. That creature was always telling me to return the book to it. That creature is its protector. It was of the world before Elenet. Edifus called on it to devour the book, to eat it and hold it inside its body. That’s what it did. Tinhadin should have left it there.
“How do you know all this?”
She pressed her fingers to her chest, indicating that she felt it in her heart. I know it, she wrote.
“How do you take the book to this worm?”
I find it. I don’t think it will be hard. It is somewhere beneath the Gray Slopes. Po will fly me there.
The two siblings sat in stillness for a while. She thought of Leeka Alain in the moment just before his death. What do you think Leeka was trying to tell us?
Aliver shook his head. That was all the answer he had. Eventually, Corinn asked the question Aaden would have wanted her to. She wrote, Might it be untrue?
Aliver did not have to ask what she was referring to. “I know I should wonder that myself, but I don’t. I feel the truth of it. I feel nearer to returning to where I should be. I feel no fear of it. Sadness, yes, but … I don’t doubt that Dagon wrote the truth.”
She wrote, Nor do I. I wish the first time he was truthful wasn’t this. So much conspiring. He and I—we’ve conspired our lives away. That’s the only part of this that feels right. I couldn’t live with this guilt. The Santoth. The vintage. Jason and Kelis and Barad. The things I did to everyone. I couldn’t live with it, but knowing of my approaching death helps. We h
ave little time and much to do.
Seek Paddel, the vintner on Prios. Make him tell you everything about the vintage. It’s mist by another name, Aliver, another of my crimes. Make him tell you.
Aliver nodded. “I will. What of Elya’s children? They’re monsters, Corinn. I know you didn’t intend that, but—”
She stopped him by beginning to write. I did intend it. They are monsters, but they are our monsters. Use them. As long as I live they will be true to us. I sang that into them before they were even born.
“After that?”
I cannot say. After I die it will be different, but trust them until that. She paused a moment, and then wrote, I don’t deserve this day. The fullness of it. The time to talk with you, even like this. I don’t deserve it
“Of course you do.”
Corinn exhaled through her nose. I’ve planted nothing but evil seeds. Now they have sprung to life, none of them as I imagined.
Aliver’s hand stopped hers. He had been reading as she wrote. “Don’t. That’s the past. I look at you and I see so much to admire. It means a great deal to me that you treat my daughter with love, and that you are kind to Benabe. I barely knew her, yet … still, it matters. And I know that the sister I had but a few days ago would have seen only challenge in them. Only foes and dangers to be clipped and controlled. You don’t have to explain that to me. That’s what it means to be siblings. I do know the worst of you, whether you like it or not.” He smiled. “But I also know that you would not be here as you are today, with them sleeping over there after such a wonderful day, if the love that you are showing wasn’t in you always. That’s why I cannot be angry with you. Anger would be a waste of the moments we have, and it would make us weak in the face of the things we have yet to do.”
It sounded so good when he said it. She sat with that a while, hoping it was true.
The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy Page 48