by Carol Berg
“Can’t,” I yelled over my shoulder, for of a sudden I was running. Kol had risen, glanced at the barren rock, and was walking away.
“Kol, wait! I want…” Breathless, I came to the rocks and called after him, heedless of duty, fear, or pride. As if a sword had opened my breast to expose a wildcat in place of my heart, a lifetime’s worth of dissatisfaction, of restless searching and unfocused longing made some kind of sense. I had never imagined such possibility as my uncle had just revealed. If I wanted to help my friends, I had to live. If I wanted to live, I had to take this chance. I could not let fear and caution make me run away—not this time. “Please. Teach me.”
Chapter 13
“Season upon season does it require to learn the dance. The fullness of a gyre at the least to grasp the very beginning positions.” Kol’s hands flew up in empty offering, demonstrating the futility of what I begged. His every word and gesture spoke the extent of his scorn. “For a body half human, unpracticed, grown fixed in its working, for a mind distracted by human concerns and unprepared even by the remasti, the breadth and extent of the Everlasting would not be sufficient.”
Not even such denial could discourage me. Could I but find the proper words to describe this revelation…this certainty that lived in my very breath and bone…I could convince him.
“I am not wholly unpracticed,” I said, following as he strode along the shore, incoming wavelets lapping at his feet. His gards shimmered palest silver in the cold sunlight. “I’ve run since I could walk, danced since I first heard a flute in the marketplace. And I’ve vigor and endurance beyond other humans—I see that now.” My pleas sounded weak and pitiful beside a hunger that left the doulon but a passing whimsy. All my life’s desires and longings had come together in those moments of Kol’s dancing. Could I but grasp this purpose, surely all other matters—duties and vows and promises—would fall into a pattern I could comprehend. I was meant for this.
“To master the correct line of a jeque—the simplest leap—and how to balance, how to approach, how to land, how to shift weight and control the strength required while bringing grace and smoothness, takes practice—every day, every night, season upon season, constant work to develop the flexibility of the hip and the power of the leg and the understanding of how these work together. A sequence of three eppires—spins on one foot—happens not in all the seasons before a wanderkin becomes a stripling. And these are only the movements. The wanderkin and stripling study the land and seasons, the growing things, the beasts. Even more difficult…the maturing student must learn to work with the music of the Everlasting, so he may devise sequences of steps to conjoin all these elements, else the dance is but exercise with no effect. And once these are mastered, even yet must one learn the lore of the Canon and how to work a sianou. Thou art far beyond teaching, even were I willing to take on such a task.” He had drawn his brow so tight his dragon’s upper wing curled into a knot.
“A lifetime of practice…yes, I can see that. Like a swordsman’s training. I could not do what you do in any matter of months or years. Even the moves that appear simple are built on layers of strength and precision. But the other learning…Music lives in me; I hear it everywhere…even across the years, when I use my bent. And I’ve not spent my life without eyes or ears. Likely I picked up much of the worldly lore in all these years. It’s just the movements…” My limbs and spine longed to stretch and spin and soar. My heart and lungs ached to fuel such power as I had seen.
We rounded the curving end of the shallow cove and came to a point where sand yielded to a cobbled shore, carved with tide pools. White-winged gulls flapped and rode the wind, while bearded ducks and thin-necked grebes pecked at sea wrack abandoned by the tides.
Kol took out across the cobble, and I followed, abruptly aware of my bare feet on the cold hard knobs. The Dané halted and pointed at a crescent-shaped pool near the water’s edge. One could not mistake the challenge. “Share your knowledge, halfbreed. Tell me what lives here.”
Having worked for a time in the ports of Morian, I knew something of shore birds and fish and shelled creatures. But to recite them as for a schoolmaster…Kol’s expression echoed my every childhood tutor’s disbelief. Ignorant plebeiu. Stubborn, ill-mannered whelp who refuses even to try. Have you some disease, Magnus, that you cannot pick out one simple word from a page, or is this but the incurable hardness of your spirit?
I forced past failures aside. This was the dance, life that linked sunlight and sea and earth. Even the Cartamandua bent could never again bring me to this crossroads of possibility.
Kneeling on the hard cobbles, I peered into the clear water, the sunlight dazzling my eyes. I saw little but rocks and a few sea plants with long stalks and filmy red leaves. One tiny fish darted into the rocky shadows. The carnage the hunting birds had scattered on the cobble told me more. “There’ll be crabs and mussels here,” I said. “Those bunched green fronds are a snake plant stuck to the rock, I think. When the tide goes out, it withers.”
“But does it live or die? Guesses and simplicities hardly suffice.” Kol stood straight as a post. What did he want? Such creatures as lived in pools hid among the rocks and weeds. Who could know them all?
Irked by his contempt, I plunged my hands into the pool. Perhaps my bent might reveal what passed here in the same way it allowed me to distinguish footsteps. Elbow deep, the cold water wet my sleeves and crept upward toward my shoulders as I loosed magic to flow through my fingertips. I listened, smelled, tasted, stretched my mind into the crevices and crannies. Slowly, I began to comprehend what my senses uncovered: threads of color, of stillness and movement, of life and death.
“Fish live here,” I said. “Shannies and bearded rocklings—and tiny shrimp, almost transparent, and the warty yellow lump that is a slug, not a pebble. And this”—I touched a dark, twisted knot of a shell—“is a dog whelk that Hansker milk for purple dye. The strawberry growing on that bulging rock is no plant, but a tentacled beast that stings its prey—the smaller creatures who hide in these forests of leaves, like the glass shrimp brought in by the tide and the mitelings of the dog whelk…”
I told him of death and birth, of how the whelk’s tongue scoops the flesh of the mussel between its closed shells, and how an entirely new creature can grow from the broken arm of the scarlet sea star that hid beneath a wave-smoothed rock. The pool was a world to itself, fed and ravaged by the god of the tide, as Navronne was fed and ravaged by our fickle gods.
When my hands grew numb from the cold, I had to stop. Bundling my fingers beneath my arms, I sat up, shivering and blinking in the watery light.
Kol sat on his haunches beside me, staring into the water. “As I have watched thee walk the land and sound the streams of the earth in company with humans, I assumed thy works a preening deception—the arrogance of the Cartamandua passed on in his seed. Again, I have erred.” He shifted his gaze to my face as if he looked on me for the first time. “For a gyre—a full turn of the seasons—I studied this very pool, and only then did I understand so much. Thou hast a grace for seeing, rejongai. Did the gyres wheel backward, I would press thy sire earlier…convince him to bring thee to me for teaching, not wait, as I did, for him to fail.”
He rose to his full height. “But no wishing can recapture lost chance. Clyste was wrong. Were all accomplished as she hoped, even then thou couldst not dance the Canon. Human blood flows in thy veins, and the archon forbids tainted blood nigh the dancing ground. Naught can change the lessons of the past. We will speak no more of the Canon. I can gift thee the gards of separation and exploration and the teaching of their use, as I said, and that only.”
But the vehemence of his denial was no longer directed at me, but at himself. Pride had caused him to fail Clyste, a sister whom he loved. For the first time since I had seen him greet the morning, a spark of hope burned inside me. I would not push too hard. He would bend. Whatever the “lessons of the past,” I believed as I believed naught else in this world that my mother ha
d meant for me to dance.
“What must I do?” I shoved up my sleeves and stretched out my arms as if they were sword blanks to be heated, hammered, and shaped.
He motioned me to follow him back around the headland to the sandier shore. “As I said, each change lies buried within thy flesh already—the three suppressed and the great one yet to come.”
“Then why didn’t I change when the time was right? I suppose it’s more difficult for ones like me. Halfbreeds. Which means this will likely be uncomfortable—” Memories of battle wounds came to mind, and those horrid birthdays when I’d gone half mad with pain and lashed out at anyone within reach, driven by an agonized restlessness that naught but violence or spelled perversion could still.
No matter my desires, dread shivered my marrow.
“It is neither fault in thee nor a factor of thy mixed birth that thou art unchanged. A remasti is impossible to accomplish alone. The vayar must guide the immature body to express its power, and the gards are the visible signs of its accomplishment. Other halfbreeds have taken the remasti without difficulty.”
Kol motioned me to stand before him at the edge of the water, but I held my ground in the dry dunes. My nerves would not permit my mouth to be still. “What will I feel? What will change besides the…marks?”
As if even that alteration was a small thing! How would I walk the streets of Palinur again, with blue light glowing on my skin? “Surely it will be different for one who is part human.”
“Certainly the result will differ.” He visibly forced himself patient, closing his eyes, whose color had shifted from a deep sea green to aspen gold. “What hand or eye is entirely the same as any other? What walking step or standing posture is the same? The long-lived tread the path of perfection, but we each find our resting posture somewhere along the way, our own talents and our bodies’ limits determining our place. Even tainted blood does not preclude one attempting the path. Now we must begin or even the slow days of Evaldamon will carry us to the Everlasting with thou yet unprotected.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. Answers would come. With no more hesitation, I moved to the edge of the water. “Tell me what to do.”
“We will begin by acknowledging our bond as vayar and tendé. Then, when I give thee a sign, thou must wash. Especially thy arms and legs. Sand is an excellent aid.”
“Wash…here? In the sea?” Water and cold, my two least favorite aspects of nature, and not entirely because a diviner had once named them my doom.
“Yes.”
The wind had risen, frosting the waves with foam. A haze paled the sky and sunlight, and a layer of deep gray banded the horizon. No chance Kol intended for me to stay clothed. Gods, I was damp to the skin, and now he wanted that skin bare. However Danae managed to stay warm as they ran about naked in winter weather, I had not inherited that gift. I glanced along the shore and over my shoulder. A trail of smoke rose from our fire, but I could not see where Saverian had got off to. “All right, then.”
Kol bowed with all the formality of a pureblood head of family, then clasped his hands behind his back. He dipped his head in approval when I returned the bow without prompting. “The season has long passed for thee to leave thy parents’ side, nes—”
His dragon gard drew up as he cut off this pronouncement. “What name dost thou prefer? Thou art very big for such address as nestling or wanderkin.”
This slight break in his formality nudged me toward an unlikely grin. Indeed, though he could likely break me over his knee, we were quite evenly matched in size. “I answer most to Valen. Is there some proper title I should use for you? I’ve no wish to be rude.”
“Name me relagai—mother’s brother—or vayar. To address an elder by name requires a harmony we shall never share.”
I ignored his coldness and bowed to acknowledge his point. “Relagai.”
He took up where he’d left off. How much “elder” was he? Likely centuries. Gods…“Freed from thy parents’ side, Valen, thou shalt have license to wander the world and learn of its wonders and its evils, to learn the names and natures of all its parts. I have accepted the duties of vayar given me by she who gave thee first breath and who nurtured thee for the long seasons of thy borning. I pledge with all honor and intent to provide thee truth and healthy guidance and to protect thee from harm to the limits of my being and the Law of the Everlasting. Come to me with thy questioning, with thy fears and troubles, with thy joys and discoveries, and I will hear thee…without judgment…and answer thee as far as I am able. Thy own part of this joining is but thy pledge to explore and learn and come to me if thou art troubled. If thou wilt accept my teaching, Valen, give me thy hands.” He extended his own hands, palms upward.
I had not expected so solemn a swearing. The cost to his pride could not be small.
“Thy pledge honors me, relagai,” I said, inclining my back in deference. “All the more for our disharmony.”
At least my own part seemed uncomplicated—unlike the other oaths that bound me. I laid my palms over his, and the world—sunlight, colors, shapes, and outlines—dimmed and faded, as if reshaping themselves. Moments later, when he released my hands, the cast of the world returned to its normal state, as if I had but waked. He gestured toward the foaming sea. Time to wash.
I hesitated. It was not that I was shamed. Nakedness in the proper time and place was comfort and pleasure, not wicked. But somehow, when I glanced at Kol, I imagined myself as one of the transparent shrimp standing beside the scarlet sea star. And somewhere Saverian would be watching…ready, no doubt, to catalog my lacks.
My vayar raised his eyebrows and inclined his head toward the water. Waiting.
Reluctantly I shed my layers and tossed them onto the sand above the tide line. My bare feet had become something inured to the chilly sand, but the cold wind stung, my manhood retreated, and my first step into the water was a badger’s bite. By the time I’d submerged to the knees, my teeth clattered like hailstones on a tin roof. If I were to be done with this before my blood congealed, I’d best move faster. I lunged a few steps farther into the oncoming waves and sat.
“G-g-great Iero’s m-m-mercy!” Unfortunate if some ritual silence was required.
Once sure my heart had not stopped, I scooped sand from underneath me and hurriedly scrubbed at my flesh. The waves slammed into my back and lifted me from the sea bottom, threatening to tumble me over, but I splayed my legs and dug in my heels. For the most part I managed to stay upright and keep the salt water out of nose and mouth.
After the briefest service to every spot I could reach, I floundered and lurched toward the shore, only to discover what I should have expected. Emerging wet into the wind felt far, far colder than sitting in the water. “C-c-could we be quick about this?” I mumbled.
A scowling Kol moved to my side and cupped his hands about my right shoulder. Warmth flowed from his touch and again the world shifted. The sunlight dimmed, and the shore receded as if a great fog had settled over it. I no longer felt the buffeting wind or the gritty sand, but only Kol’s warm hands and the sea that crashed and gurgled about my ankles, tugging at me…breaking the bounds of my skin…pouring into me…filling me. Drowning me…
Do not be afraid, Valen. Kol’s sharp command interrupted my growing panic. To make this passage, we must step outside the bounds of bodily form. This sea is myself and will not drown thee.
I lost myself—limbs and torso, head and privy parts dissolved. His hands yet anchored me—one solid point of heat, a tether to the world, all that stood between me and blind terror. All else was embracing water, as if I were the immortal sea star tucked securely in the tide pool, knowing that any broken part of me would form another self, and that the tide would bring me all I needed to live. I trusted Kol, and so I drifted…tasting salt and fish and sand. I smelled green sea plants, felt the tickle of wind on the surface and the great heavy urging of the god of tides—everything a curiosity. I wondered at the endless play of daylight in the shallows
and shied from the shadows of the boundless deeps. Fish in silver armor darted past me…through me…
For a nestling, such life as this is the greater part of what he knows—the safety and comfort of a parent’s sianou, its myriad parts, its voice and texture, and the elements that make it live. Kol’s voice existed everywhere around me and inside me, though I could not say I heard him. The remasti of separation shifts a nestling from an existence sheltered and constrained by sire and dam into one shaped by his own body—a much greater change for most than for thee, one who has lived across a multitude of seasons constrained by flesh—however ill-fitting. Now, thou must choose to step beyond this place and allow thy true nature to reshape thy flesh. Let my hand guide thee.
From the anchor point, warm strong fingers began to re-create my invisible arm, moving down its length as a sculptor’s fingers might smooth his clay. Only this sculptor’s fingers left traces of fire and blade in their wake. Cutting, burning, tearing…
Pain and panic bade me fight, but I could not locate the rest of my body. Nor could I find voice in the sea to scream or beg that he should stop before what flesh I yet owned was left in tatters.
Be easy, Valen, he said, as he released the fingers of one disembodied arm and shifted his touch to the place where another ought to be. I but release what is bound in thee. It is so difficult, I believe, because thy true senses lie buried deeper than those of a nestling. Be easy and dream of the wide world. I shall not harm thee.
Both arms now pulsed with agony. While the greater part of me yet floated insubstantial in the gray-blue water, I existed amid the frothing surf and freezing wind as well. Great gray masses of cloud boiled on the horizon, reaching for the sun.
Kol’s hands left my fingers and began to sculpt a thigh. Great gods among us…
By the time his hands released my second foot, I existed wholly in the familiar world, sprawled on my face with my mouth full of sand. Though fire raged in my legs, my arms had fallen numb. I was afraid to move. I was afraid to look.