Time's Children

by D. B. Jackson

  The demon faltered mid-step, her body solidifying once more. She was already halfway across the courtyard. She faced Mara again, blurred back closer, and waited.

  “I’m sorry for accusing you,” Mara said. “I shouldn’t have done that.” She brushed a lock of damp hair from her brow. “I don’t know what you want from me. I’m trying to understand, but you have to tell me more.”

  “There is no more,” the demon said, her tone still cold. “Tobias is gone, the world is changed, and this future is wrong. The rest…” Her shrug conveyed indifference.

  “Why come to me?”

  “I’ve told you: your time sense–”

  “I’m not a Walker. You said so yourself. So what did you think to gain by speaking to me about all of this?”

  Droë dropped her gaze, appearing more vulnerable and childlike in that moment than she had at any other point in their encounter. “You were the only one I could think of. You love him, and I think he loves you, too. If anyone would care – if I could make anyone remember him – it would be you.”

  “Is that possible?” Mara asked, exhaling the words. I think he loves you, too. She had never loved Delvin, and she knew he didn’t love her. That very morning, she had sensed that maybe she was supposed to be with someone else. And, she had to admit, the idea of being loved by anyone, even this stranger from a different time, filled her with longing. Was she mad, pining for someone she had never met? “Can you make me remember him?”

  “I don’t know. I can show him to you, show you the two of you together. That could be enough.”

  “How?”

  The demon beckoned her closer. “Come here.”

  Mara hesitated, drawing a frown from the Tirribin.

  “I told you before: if I intended to take your years, I would have done so already, and you wouldn’t have been able to stop me.”

  Mara suppressed another shudder. “Why are you doing this?” She was stalling, trying to decide how much she could trust the demon. “Why would your kind care so much about us, and about this one person in particular?”

  Droë looked away again. “He’s my friend. And the feeling you have of things being other than what they should be – that is compounded a thousand times in Tirribin.” She made that same world-encompassing gesture. “This is wrong, and that wrongness touches everything. I can’t escape it.”

  Her words spoke intimately to what Mara had been experiencing this entire day.

  Mara took a long, steadying breath, making her decision. “All right.”

  Before she could say more, or approach the Tirribin, Droë’s gaze shifted and she shrank back. “Novitiates,” she said.

  Looking in that direction, Mara glimpsed several pairs of trainees entering the middle courtyard from the upper. Chances were, Delvin and Hilta were with them.

  “They’ll go to the keeps,” Mara said, turning back. “They won’t bother…”

  The Tirribin had vanished.

  “Droë?” She turned a full circle, but saw no sign of the demon.

  Mara clutched her robe more tightly, unnerved. But she lingered in the middle courtyard, hoping the Tirribin would return. When she didn’t, Mara headed toward the Windward Keep. She avoided the others and took special care to steer clear of Hilta once she was in the dormitory. After shedding her robe and drying her soaked hair, she pulled on a sleepshirt and retired to her bed. She opened the shutters of the nearest window to listen to the rain, and bundled herself in blankets. Settling back against her pillow, she closed her eyes. Try as she might to rest, however, she was too agitated. She might as well have been out on the training grounds with Saffern.

  Long after the rest of the female trainees had drifted off to sleep, she remained awake, her heart thudding in her chest, her thoughts riled and scattered. Two passing female soldiers laughed quietly in the corridor outside the chamber.

  They don’t belong here.

  Already she questioned her memory of her exchange with the demon. Could she have imagined it? Or had her fellow trainees been having some fun at her expense? Perhaps the episode was real, but the girl merely pretended to be a time demon. Mara had mentioned to Delvin that she’d been feeling odd; he could have found someone to impersonate a Tirribin.

  Someone who could blur into motion before my very eyes? Someone who could vanish without a trace at the first sign that others were coming?

  Why had Droë called them “novitiates?” For as long as Mara could remember, the masters had called them trainees. Or was that an Oaqamaran term, imposed on them by the chancellor? Either way, she had never heard them called “novitiates.”

  Mara wondered what would have happened if she’d allowed the Tirribin to show her the boy, Tobias. Might she have remembered a different life, a different world? Or had the demon wished only to feed on Mara’s years, a phrase that still made her quail, even in the warmth and safety of her bed.

  She was, she decided, woefully ignorant in the ways of demons. She also knew too little about the history of Daerjen and the value placed on different sorts of Travelers before the invention of the tri-devices. Fortunately, she had at her disposal the finest library in the northern isles. It was past time she availed herself of the volumes stored there.

  Mara finally felt slumber tug at her, like a retreating tide. The sensation of not belonging remained, but now she had some idea of what she might do about it.

  She had been careless. She had allowed panic to guide her, to loosen her tongue and expose her thoughts and emotions. Worst of all, she’d done this in front of a human girl. In front of prey!

  As if she needed more proof of how scared she was.

  Of course the girl couldn’t remember. Not even a Walker could navigate the folds of time as Droë did. Tobias couldn’t have done it. She had asked too much of this other. Her mind wasn’t working as it should. She, of all Tirribin, knew the risks of venturing into the palace and interacting with novitiates. Tobias had been a friend, but he was gone. None of the rest of them could be trusted.

  She should have taken the girl’s years and left her. That’s what she would have done yesterday.

  No, she wouldn’t have. Tobias made her promise. Tobias, who was lost to her.

  Among Tirribin, she was considered young. A bit over five centuries, she thought. Between time spent and time taken from others, it wasn’t easy for her kind to reckon years. Whatever her age, in all her time she had never experienced anything like this. She couldn’t tell, though, if that was because of who Tobias was to her, or because of what he had done.

  You love him very much, she had said to the girl. Almost… She managed to stop herself in time, before she blurted, Almost as much as I do.

  Tirribin did not love humans. It wasn’t done. At best, humans were here for but a flicker of time. They thought their lives long, because they couldn’t understand what it was to bend time to their purposes. A Walker might understand – surely he would come closer than the others. But Walkers lived shortest of all. They spent their years, but couldn’t replenish them as Tirribin did.

  Yet she loved Tobias. What else explained the flutter in her breast when she saw him, the warmth in her gut when they spoke or he laughed at something she said, the cruel cold that gripped her when she thought of him kissing the girl?

  What else explained Droë’s willingness to enlist that same girl’s aid to save him? Yes, it might mean that he and the girl would be together, but at least he would be found. He would be all right, and time would flow again as it was supposed to. This wrongness, like a poison in her blood, would finally be gone. Droë couldn’t bear to contemplate the alternative.

  She had called the girl homely when speaking with Tobias. She’d scoffed at her bronze hair and deep brown skin. The truth was, the one he called Mara wasn’t ugly at all. She reminded Droë of him.

  He must have gone back far – many more years than most Walkers went. That was why she had lost track of him, why she couldn’t find him even now, as she cast her awareness back a
s far as humans might safely Travel. It didn’t help that he had sailed hundreds of leagues before Walking. Time she could cross, but distance… She was as helpless before miles as a human who couldn’t Span.

  After leaving the girl at Tirribin speed, she navigated the sloped lanes back into Windhome and wandered its streets. She should have been hunting. She felt hollow, the way she did when she hadn’t fed on years for too long. Nevertheless, she merely walked, a child in the rank streets, poorly dressed for the rain and wind, drawing stares from wharfmen returning late to their homes, and drunken sailors staggering to their ships.

  Though few of them were young, any of them would have satisfied her hunger. She ignored them, and they left her alone.

  As she neared the docks, and the cold, inky waters of Windhome Inlet, she slowed, then stopped. She hadn’t many friends. She knew of another Tirribin on Trevynisle, but she and he kept their distance from each other. There was Tobias, of course. And one other, whom she had last seen here some months before. Treszlish. Tresz, as she called him.

  She wouldn’t have thought of him if not for a cloud of pale mist that hung above the gentle swells of Safsi Bay, unmoved by the wind and undiminished by the rain. It could have been him.

  “I see you in the gloaming, I beg you stop your roaming,” she sang, her voice as thin as a sandpiper’s whistle. “I’d a word if you’ll grant it, and a song to pay if you want it.”

  The cloud boiled, rose, and drifted in her direction. It appeared to move slowly, but in moments it had swept across the outer piers and settled over the cobbled lane on which she stood, enveloping her, and carrying with it the smell of mold and must.

  Droë was immune to most cold – even the winds and snows of Sipar’s Settling couldn’t touch her. This mist chilled her, though, raising bumps on her skin. She hugged herself and rubbed her arms with raw hands.

  “‘Grant it’ and ‘Want it’ isn’t a very good rhyme.” The voice was oily, thick, the words deliberate.

  “It was good enough to lure you here.”

  His silence seemed to concede the point.

  The mist around her shifted again, and she glimpsed the figure at its center. He was taller than she, human in form, hairless. His skin was slick and gray, and as he drew nearer, his features came into relief: a flat nose, thin formless lips, a gently tapered chin, and large, round eyes that glowed faintly, like stars peeking through cloud cover.

  “You say you have more song?” he asked after a time, another concession.

  “Yes. I’ll sing for you. First, though, I need your help.”

  Surprise widened his eyes, bent the broad mouth downward. “A Tirribin, asking help of a Shonla. How odd.”

  Droë lifted a shoulder, hoping the gesture would convey indifference. She wasn’t sure it worked.

  “Do you finally wish to work together? I can trap them, you can feed, I can swallow their screams. Everyone is happy.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Everyone?”

  He grinned, exposing blunt, gray teeth. “We’re happy.”

  “I feed very well, thank you. That’s not why I called to you.”

  “Then why? Quickly. Late as it is, there are ships on the bay.”

  Droë peered out over the water. Lights bobbed on its surface like fireflies. “They have lamps, torches.”

  “Most of them, yes. But not all. There’s sound and fear ripe for the taking. Now, tell me what you want.”

  She kept her eyes on the distant ships, unwilling to meet his luminous gaze. “A man – a human boy – left here some time ago. A turn maybe. He sailed south, toward Daerjen. I want to know what became of him.”

  “Do you?” the Shonla said. “What would make a time demon care so much about a human boy?”

  Droë scowled. “What would make a mist demon so crass and meddlesome?”

  He shrugged, acknowledging the riposte.

  “Will you help me?”

  “When did you say he left?”

  “A turn ago. He sailed for Daerjen aboard a merchant ship. I don’t know what it was called, but the captain was a tall, thin woman.”

  Tresz’s frown deepened as she spoke, until at last he shook his head. “I remember no such vessel, and I make it my business to know all of them.”

  “There is… a question of time in this case.”

  “You know Shonla can’t sense things as Tirribin do. If he is lost to time, he is lost to the mists as well.”

  Droë nodded, grief constricting her throat.

  The Shonla canted his head to the side. “You are most curious. I forget how young you are.”

  “I’m not so young.” She knew she sounded defensive.

  “What is your interest in this human?”

  She felt herself flush. Shonla saw well in the dark.

  “He’s a Walker, and the world has changed since his departure. I fear he created a new future, one that could bring ruin to his kind.”

  “And to him. This is about him most of all.”

  She wouldn’t bother denying it. Usually, Tirribin cared no more about humans ruining their world than did Shonla. “Yes.”

  “Their world has been in ruin a long time, at least by their reckoning.”

  She lifted her shoulders, saying nothing.

  His expression soured. “Allow me a moment.”

  Tresz closed his eyes and spread his sinuous arms wide. The mist around him thickened, or else he grew less opaque, blending with it more. He stood that way for a time. Rain continued to fall on the streets of Windhome, and small waves on the inlet slapped at the wharves.

  When he opened his eyes again, his frown had deepened. “There is awareness among Shonla of this misfuture you describe. Not all are as convinced as you that it brings ruin, and for Shonla it has been profitable. More humans at sea, more nourishment for us.”

  “Do they know when it started?”

  “Wouldn’t that be a question for Tirribin?”

  “Yes,” she said, impatience in the word. “And if I could reach them as you reach your kind, I’d ask. I have only you.”

  “They say only that it has been years, a considerable number of them by human standards.”

  “He wouldn’t have Walked so far.”

  “It is unlikely,” Tresz said, “but it’s possible, yes?”

  “Yes, it’s possible.”

  “They fight wars in the Bone Sea, the Inward Sea, the Aiyanthan and the Herjean. All of these began at similar times. Coincidence perhaps. Or perhaps your Walker is at the center of it all.”

  She wanted to tell him that Tobias wasn’t “her Walker”, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “I must go,” the Shonla said, casting an avid glance out over the water. “I’m grateful for the song, brief though it was. I will collect more another time. I… I wish you well with your search.”

  “Thank you.”

  His mists swirled, further chilling the air, surrounding him, concealing him. Moments later, the cloud moved off, leaving Droë alone on the warming street. The formless gray glided over the inlet. Before long, it had swallowed a ship.

  She continued onto the nearest dock, her steps light as she crept toward the moored ships. Ropes creaked with the shift of water and wood. The rain had eased to a drizzle, and the wind no longer keened. Droë kept to shadows, watchful.

  Reaching the first vessel, she brushed her fingers against the wood of the hull and closed her eyes, tasting the years of those who slumbered within. Many were young; she could have fed well, had that been her purpose. But she sought knowledge rather than sustenance.

  Most of those she perceived through the planks of wood had trod the same path all their lives. Whatever events had transpired to bring the world to this misfuture, whatever changes had been wrought, made little difference in their fates. They would have been sailors on this ship no matter what.

  A few, though, didn’t belong. They had been traveling a different road, only to be shunted here without warning, without their knowledge or even an i
nkling. Droë pressed her palm to the wood, delicate fingers splayed, her touch deepening. She caught the flavor of the years Tresz had mentioned. He was right. Not a lot of time, barely an instant for Tirribin. For a human, however… Ten years. More.

  This couldn’t have been Tobias. How could a Walker go so far?

  She opened her eyes, withdrew her hand, and crept to the next ship. Fingers on that hull, she tasted again and found much the same: most unaffected, a few out of place, but on a path that had carried them for more than a decade. A third ship revealed a similar pattern.

  Removing her fingers from this last vessel, she held them to her lips and licked them, lost in thought.

  What if it was Tobias? Daerjen’s sovereign sought a Walker. Most royals used Walkers for small journeys back in time, but what if the sovereign wanted Tobias for a Walk of great length, a single, desperate attempt to change as much as possible?

  She couldn’t imagine why he would do this, and that was her own fault. For too long, she had ignored the affairs of humans, content to hunt and feed. Now she longed to understand a future that was forever lost to her.

  If Tobias was responsible for this misfuture, and if he lived long enough to reach this time once more, he would be much changed, a grown man, someone she probably wouldn’t recognize until she tasted his years.

  Her skin pebbled again, and she rubbed her arms trying to keep warm. Boot heels clicked in the distance, first on cobblestone, and then wood. A sailor, hurrying back to his ship. Droë considered slipping away, but all this tasting had left her hungry after all. She licked her fingers again, smiled, and crouched in the shadows to wait for her prey.

  Chapter 20

  25th Day of Kheraya’s Ascent, Year 647

  Delvin avoided her the next day and throughout the days that followed, but Mara couldn’t bring herself to care. He and Hilta spent each evening together in the upper courtyard. Mara refused as well to let that bother her. Her thoughts cleaved to the time demon and the implications of their exchange. The sensation of being in the wrong place – the wrong time – remained with her, undiminished. But Mara understood its origins now and had resolved to find a solution; the burden of her time sense didn’t weigh on her quite so heavily.