by Carol Berg
He relinquished my burning toes. “Stand now, Valen, that we may end this passage properly. Thou art free to wander Aeginea, and none may hold or hinder thee without our argai’s consent.”
Entirely wrung out, I moved slowly to all fours. Every quat of my length felt something different from every other. Frozen or scorched or nothing. Worst…I could not feel my hands at all. “What’s wrong with me?” I croaked.
He offered me his hand, but I was loath to touch him again. I stumbled to my feet and stared at my skin. My chest and abdomen and groin remained as they ever had been, cold pale flesh and dark hair caked with sand, but the now-hairless skin of fore and upper arms, of hands and fingers, of thigh and leg and foot, appeared an ugly mottled gray. Dead. No pattern was discernible, and certainly no beauty or power. And as the fire of Kol’s touch died, every particle of that flesh lost all sensation. I shook my lumpish hands, kneaded them, slapped my arms and dying legs with no effect. “By Kemen Sky Lord, Dané, what have you done to me? I can’t feel anything!”
Knitting his brow, he reached out to take my arm. I jerked away and stepped back, wincing from the fire in one foot, stumbling over the deadness in the other. “Stay back.”
“Does not the world speak to thee?” he said, puzzled. “Thy gards will clear as thy senses waken, and take on their design as you walk the days. Touch the wind, rejongai.”
“I can’t feel the wind, not with dead limbs! Is this your clever vengeance? What of Danae justice that punishes only the guilty?” I could not strangle his long straight neck, for my blighted arms could be used as naught but bludgeons.
“No, no. All was done as prescribed. Thou shouldst discern more than before. More intently. More delicately.”
His conviction did naught but unravel me the more. My chest and stomach seemed stuffed with sodden wool that thickened and compacted with every breath. I dropped to my unfeeling knees and plowed my hands into the sand that might have been silken pillows or hot coals for all I could tell. Wrenching my focus tight, I sought magic, but no warmth flowed through my dead fingers. I sat back on my heels and roared in rage and frustration. “You’ve killed me, you cursed gatzé.”
Kol crouched beside me, for once unwrit with scorn or anger. “This is not of my doing, rejongai. Why would I pledge thee care and teaching, and then set out to make my own words false? The remasti is a work of reverence for the vayar, a work that becomes a part of his kirani—the patterns he dances—as much as any jeque or eppire. No joy or use can be derived from such betrayal. It is why the long-lived fail in understanding of human ways.”
“Then what’s wrong?” I gasped, my chest laboring, my throat swelling shut as if a door had closed behind my words. I was suffocating.
He reached out again, and this time I had no strength to resist. I watched his fingers touch my arm and trace my sinews, but I could feel naught of it. “I experienced resistance as I released thy change,” he said, puzzled, “but I assumed it to be thy years of restraint and thy intractable nature. It felt as if some other skin sheathed thee.”
His surmise stung me as a slap on my cheek. “Get the woman,” I whispered. “Hurry. Please.”
The daylight blurred and wavered. I did not see Kol move, for I curled into a knot on the sand and concentrated all my strength on drawing air into my lungs.
“All right, all right, you can let go of me. Am I to be punished for watching?” Her dry voice rattled like a stick in a pail fifty quellae distant. “Egad, Magnus, you look even worse close by. Is this part—? Gracious Mother, what’s happening to you?”
“Undo your spell,” I croaked. “It’s stopping the change. Can’t breathe.”
Praise be to all gods, she did not hesitate. She ripped the delicate chain from her leather pocket and pressed the gold medallion to my forehead. The maggots crept outward, only this time they left life, not deadness, in their wake.
With a great whoop, I inhaled half the sky, clearing throat and lungs and head. When she took the disk away, I stretched out on my back and flung my limbs wide, reveling in the delights of properly working heart and lungs. “Mother tend you in your need, good physician…”
No more had I begun to speak than the wind caressed my arms and legs. Of a sudden I drowned in sensation: the overwhelming scents of the salt and sea wrack, and the lingering aroma of our cook fire, last night’s fish, and the morning’s ill-favored eggs. I smelled a distant winter—rank furs and damp wool, the smokes of burning coal and pine logs, the damp earth and scat and piss of animal dens, the dust of empty grain barrels, the ripe sweat of lust beneath old blankets. And from other senses…Not only did I hear the crash of waves and the gurgle of the slops between the rocks, but I perceived the rustling of the red-leaved sea forest in the tide pools and the rippleless darting of the shannies. Not only did I feel the salt in the wind, but I knew that in its wanderings the air had once kissed a church, drawing away the scent of beeswax and marble dust, the sweet smokes of incense and oil of ephrain, the pungent perfume of ysomar, used to anoint the sick and dying…And still there was more.
“Holy Mother,” I whispered, wrapping my arms about my head to prevent its bursting, “how can I ever sort it all out?”
“Are you well, Valen?” said Saverian, sitting on her heels at my side, the gold disk clutched in her hand. “What’s happening to you? I can moderate the spell if need be and reimpose it.”
Unlike the experiences I had named a disease, this barrage of scents and sounds neither seared my nostrils nor made my ears bleed. Nor did my eyes revolt at the daylight’s complex textures of gray, blue, and silver or the impossible shapes of distant rocks that would have been a blur an hour before. I could make no sense of much that I perceived, but none of it drove me mad.
“For now, yes, I’m all right. Thank you. I think—” I swallowed hard, took a shaking breath, and stretched my arms skyward so I could see them. The gray mottling had brightened to the same pale silver as Kol’s gards, though that could be but a trick of the shifting light. I could yet discern no pattern to the marks. My stomach hitched, and I folded my arms across it and stopped staring at myself. “There’s just so much.”
“So your disease is indeed of your own nature,” said Saverian, kneeling in the sand, as matter-of-fact as if on every day she witnessed madmen transformed into Danae children. “As I predicted.”
“Thy perception is quite limited as yet,” said Kol, looking down at me. His handsome face expressed naught but tolerance—no more of concern or bewilderment. “’Tis the task of wanderkins to learn the source and nature of what they perceive and to extend the boundaries of their skills. As they learn to walk in quiet, layers unexpected reveal themselves. Having lived in the world so long, thou shouldst have an easier task than most.”
“You mean, there could be more?” How ever could a child manage all this?
“Always more. Subtleties. Grand things that might once have seemed whole display their sundry parts. The reach of thy experiencing shall widen from this small shore to distances and deeps. Wert thou a true wanderkin, destined to dance and live as one of us, such discrimination would be necessary to thy duties.”
“And I’ll perceive whatever exists in the human realm as well as Aeginea,” I said, sitting up. Indeed, I was already experiencing many things far beyond this shore. No ale-sodden hunter lay snoring beneath fouled blankets anywhere near here, I’d guess. No wheezing practor in a freezing church anointed a woman dead in childbirth, unless…Perhaps those places existed as did Fortress Groult or the Sentinel Oak—visible in only one plane, though I could touch their very rooting place in the other.
His nostrils flared in distaste. “No. To experience the sensations of human works we must depart from the true lands and immerse ourselves entirely in the human world.”
I glanced up sharply. “But I—” His certainty made me doubt. Perhaps my long-distorted senses were but remembering things I already knew. My finger crept up my ugly arms. The lack of hair was disconcerting, but I could n
ot feel the marks themselves. I brushed at my skin, half expecting the pale mottling to fall away like dry flakes from a charred branch. Perhaps nothing at all had happened to me, save a blessed remission in my disease.
“A true wanderkin’s primary tasks are exploration and the perfection of sensory knowledge.” Kol took on his schoolmaster’s aspect, as if I were indeed a new-changed Danae child. “I can teach thee closure…to silence one sense or the other…to quiet levels thou dost not wish to perceive. Control and discipline will ease thy confusion.”
“Yes, I’d like that very much…”
Learning to manage this oversensitivity that had plagued me my whole life would be a grace indeed. But more awaited me. I was sure of it. My mother had believed that Kol could protect me from the Danae’s crippling blows and instill in me what I needed to make sense of the world. If she knew Janus de Cartamandua at all, then she knew how unreliable his character. She would never have based her whole plan for me on his promises. I inhaled deeply, buried apprehension, and averted my eyes from my body.
“…and then I’d like—How soon can we move on to the second remasti?”
“When we move on.” Kol strolled away toward the water.
Saverian rolled her eyes as if I were a lunatic. The burgeoning clouds released their burden, binding sea and sky into a gray eternity of rain.
Chapter 14
Saverian pressed herself to the cliff to shelter from the rising storm. I grabbed my clothing from the sand and joined her. But the rain drove straight in from the sea, a cold sheeting deluge that soaked us to the skin—not all that far in my case—chilled us to the bone, and made it impossible to think too much about what I had just done. Certainly the ugly change to my arms and legs did naught to keep me warm or dry. Naught that I could see along the strand promised better cover, and a fire was out of the question. We could not stay here.
“We need shelter,” I shouted at Kol over the hammering rain, the continuous rumble of thunder and surf, and the maelstrom of sounds and smells that filled my head with more images than I could possibly sort out. “Humans die of cold and wet.”
I saw no benefit in pressing the point. The Dané would choose to help or not. I believed he would. He had squatted ankle deep in the surf and spread his fingers in the incoming wavelets, as if ensuring that their texture met his expectations. Rain sheened his long back like a cloak of transparent silk.
“Thou shouldst not have brought the woman,” he called back without looking up. “I could have taken thee into the sea again.”
“Did he do that?” I asked Saverian as we waited and shivered. “Take me under water? I mean, I experienced something. Naught I’d want to do again.” My antipathy for water was too deep-rooted. The gray waves churned and frothed in nauseating rhythm. “I felt as if I were dreaming of the sea…of drowning…of his voice. I didn’t think it was real.”
“Nor did I. When you came out from your w-washing, he grabbed your shoulder and led you right back into the water.” The shivering physician grimaced and wiped water from her eyes. “The waves boiled bright b-blue around you. You both vanished. I’ve seen nothing like it…nothing ever. How did you b-breathe, Valen? It was hours before he led you out again. Why aren’t you d-dead?”
“Hours? That’s not possible.”
“I’m a good judge of time. I was beginning to think I would need to find m-my own way home.”
I jabbed my fingers into my ribs. It hurt. “Well, I’m not dead. But I’m not going to try diving in on my own.”
A reluctant smile teased at her mouth. “I’d planned to examine your new skin to see if you had scales or gills. But I’ve no paper or pens to record my findings. A poor practitioner to get caught without.”
I could not but return her smile, grateful for her astringent practicality. Had she screamed or shrunk from me in disgust, the anxious knot lodged in my own breast might have unraveled into panicked frenzy.
Kol unfolded his limbs and struck out northward along the shore. His hand twitched in a gesture I interpreted as an invitation to follow. Saverian must have gotten the same notion. She sped after him like a constable after a thief. The physician might miss her bed or her books, but I couldn’t imagine she would regret the absence of any person.
I used the moment’s privacy to relieve myself and wrestle my ugly arms into my soaked wool shirt, hoping it might cut the wind and soften the impact of the driving rain. Then I set out after the others.
Saverian’s time estimates could not be accurate. I could feel the sun hiding behind the storm. I could almost see it, in the way you see the rider in an approaching cloud of dust or envision a Syran woman’s body within her cloud of drifting veils. And it had scarce moved from the cliff top since Kol’s dance of greeting. As I marveled at this certainty, all out of nothing, a moment’s flush left me warm and cold together. I tried to hold on to the sensation, but sounds and scents and images piled one up on the other like unruly children demanding my attention, and soon I was naught but cold and wet again. Strange.
Kol moved swiftly. Just past the slumped cliff where we’d found fresh water, the shoreline curved and took the two of them out of sight. I trotted a little faster and caught up with them just as the Dané started up a steep bank scored with rivulets of mud. The footing was tricky, and I was just as happy to be bootless, able to feel where rocks and rooted shrubs gave surer purchase.
Saverian climbed like a goat, but with far less grace. She was confident and fast, but grabbed on to every protruding rock and twig, and her boots slipped every other step. Her black braid had escaped its bonds and water cascaded from her straggling hair down her neck and the back of her cloak. When I came up behind her—by sheer virtue of my longer legs—she was mumbling through chattering teeth. “Wretched royal b-bastard. ‘Leave your b-books and ride out with me,’ you said. ‘I need you.’ Yes…to be trapped in a city full of torch-wielding madmen, chased by Harrowers, saddled with a d-doulon-raving lunatic, frostbit, saddle-sore, bashed in the head, d-drowned, and now abandoned in a monsoon in company with said madman and a cold-blooded dancing g-gatzé. Never again, Riel. Enough is enough.” She stomped through the mud as if it might be Osriel’s face.
I scrabbled upward, wondering if she’d find it amusing if I accused her of whining. Likely not. “You’ve not traveled with the prince all that much, then? On his visits to Gillarine? Or to…battlefields?”
Locked in her grumbling misery, she perhaps forgot what she considered my business and what not. “Stearc keeps him to his regimen when traveling. I give the thane spells and medicines enough to get Osriel home if he gets very bad. Of course, now Stearc’s commanded to stay at the abbey, it’s left to the dead man to see to Riel. The god-cursed fool oughtn’t travel at all…”
The dead man…Voushanti? An extra chill raised my neck hairs. Her commentary flowed like the mud around our feet, and I didn’t want to interrupt it, but someday I’d get her to explain.
“…and certainly not in winter. The cold torments his joints, and swells his lungs and air passages. One day he’ll fall off his horse and die, and then what of his grand plans? What of his father’s wishes? What of his warriors and his subjects and his—The rest of them? Blasted, mite-brained, cold-blooded, soul-blind idiot.”
The rest of whom, physician? Another question to save for a better time. “He told me that life is pain and only movement makes it bearable.”
“Pssh.” Saverian dispensed disdain as innkeepers dispense gossip. “His father spewed that drivel when Osriel was a boy and he was trying to coax the child out of bed on a day when every move Riel made was agony. He’d put Osriel on a horse or force him to run races with him. It wasn’t fair. The child would do anything to please his father, though it caused his saccheria to flare and he suffered for days after, and King Eodward knew it. The king called this torment love.”
“But Osriel got out of bed.”
“He did. He does it every day. Honestly, I’ve no idea how. His father’s love left his
joints like broken glass and his soul a grinding stone.” Saverian slipped again and only her grip on a pine sapling saved her from falling face down in the mud. “The Mother spare me any such love.”
I didn’t think she had to worry. Loving the physician would be as rewarding as romancing the dunes we’d just left behind.
Mud squished between my toes as I climbed. I could well imagine robust, ruddy Eodward prodding his sickly child to be strong enough to survive in a brutal world. Yet I had received a privileged glimpse of the king’s nature once when I was a young soldier under his command, and I surmised that the pain Osriel experienced on those hard days did not outstrip that his father felt at forcing him to it. Eodward had been rewarded by seeing his sickly child grow to manhood, an uncommon fate for a victim of saccheria. Saverian was right, too, though. Pain could change a man. Make him hard.
“Did you love the prince…when you were children?”
“No. We were friends. Playmates. My mother was his physician.” As if she realized, of a sudden, the personal turn the conversation had taken, Saverian tightened her jaw and hauled herself upward even more forcefully. “Where is this creature taking us?”
That, too, was a most interesting question, for a glance back over my shoulder showed naught but rain and a valley of trees. No sea, no shore. Even more unsettling…the sun, yet buried deeply in the clouds, now lay behind us, what my instincts deemed west, though our path had not turned and scarce an hour had passed from my recovery. What daylight the storm had left us was rapidly failing.
I pressed my hand to Saverian’s back, hoping to speed her steps. The Dané would likely welcome an excuse to abandon us. When we crested the steep slope, Kol’s sapphire gards were just visible through a scattering of saplings that bordered a darkening wood.
“Come on.” I took Saverian’s hand, and we pelted after him through the trees. The gloom of the deeper woodland enveloped us.