Virien’s face changed. “And what if it would not? Isn’t that what love is for? Oh, no, don’t answer, I don’t want to hear it. Shora, you’re so anxious to be a martyr, and all the while you loathe me like the rest of them.”
“I share no hate with you. No one does—”
“Yes, you do! And pity, too, which is ten times worse!” She lunged, but Merwen was prepared for it and fought back the hands that closed around her neck. For an endless minute Merwen strained, her lungs ready to burst, until Virien fell away and vanished between two silk panels. Gasping and shaking, Merwen wiped the sweat from her forehead. Then Virien came back—this time with a length of shockwraith arm. And if Yinevra had not been waiting unasked, outside…
That was all past, except for the scar. Today, Merwen faced a planet full of Viriens. Though it contained Spinels, too, and even starstones, she remembered. The aged male with the starstone had called upon a Spirit of…something, a Life-spirit at least. There was hope in that.
But there could be no hope for this Malachite the Dead.
Time was running out; Merwen had to face forward again. As she turned away from her past, the tunnel ahead was not fixed as was the one behind. It pulsed and writhed in all directions, like the churning gut of a starworm. It could pinch shut at any moment, if she willed that.
But in the world of this moment, of the living, she had left some unfinished sharing behind.
Her mind came rushing back to her, and she blinked. Outside, the sun was descending, and sisters were scurrying about the solar cookers. Merwen rose and stretched, snapping her toes until the webs hummed.
Nisi came quickly, and Usha too, with a disapproving furrow in her brow. Usha’s arm came around Merwen, who rested her head gratefully on Usha’s breast. “Too much mourning,” Usha grumbled.
“How long does one mourn a soul that never lived?”
Nisi caught her breath, but words choked away. Her glance appealed to Usha, but Usha only listened for Merwen.
“Why, Nisi?” Merwen insisted quietly. “Why have you brought us dead ghosts from the shore?”
Nisi closed her eyes and swallowed. “Some sisters have a different concept of…of ‘humanness.’ Surely you understand that by now?”
“And who are you? What is your humanness? When will you learn whitetrance?”
“I—I can’t, Merwen.” Tears swelled Nisi’s eyes. “I just can’t…hang my life by a thread.” She clung to Merwen and sobbed desperately. “Don’t close me out now. I’ve shared too far for that.”
Pity arose in her, but she fought it back. She pressed Nisi’s hand, brushing against the odd little shells at Nisi’s fingertips. “Yes, Nisi, you try your best. But you see, I have to know now. I have to know whether you are like Malachite or only, perhaps, like Virien.”
Nisi drew herself up very straight and rubbed at her scalp with a nervous gesture. “You have no right, Merwen.” Her voice had lowered, and thickened. “That I could be so great as the one or so low as the other—how could you conceive of such a thing? Do you completely fail to appreciate what I’ve done for you on Valedon? Well, I’ve had enough; I’ll go home, until you see. You’ve shared false judgment this time.” With that, Nisi turned her back on Merwen, and perhaps on Shora as well.
For three days, Spinel could not get through to Lystra. No matter what he did or said, pleaded or threatened, he might as well address a slab of granite. Time crawled by in misery, and at dinner he was too depressed to eat.
Flossa pertly advised him, in between chewing on crab legs. “Ignore her right back. She’s bound to come around, sometime.”
Lystra was sitting right there, deaf to any remark addressed to him.
“But that’s idiotic. Just plain id-i-otic.” He drew out the word, pouring all his frustration into it.
“Oh, Lystra, dear,” came Wellen’s mocking voice. “Tell us, why won’t you share speech with Spinel the malefreak, hm?”
“Who is that?” said Lystra.
Wellen convulsed in laughter, squealing and rolling back to kick her heels in the air. Spinel glared at her malevolently, and his fists tensed. Wellen did not notice, but Flossa did, and wrinkled her nose in obvious disgust at his reaction.
Spinel rose to his feet. “I’ve had it. I’m going home.”
At the announcement, Usha looked up, her eyes owlish, but Lystra did not make a move.
“I’m going home where I belong. Where sisters love me for what I am, not despite it.”
He strode down to the water’s edge to sit on a branch and eat his heart out for the home he loved. Somewhere up there, his folks were struggling to make ends meet, or worse; what had become of them? A shroud of fog hid even moons tonight.
“Spinel,” came a voice, “I love you for what you are.” It was Merwen who reached out to him, just as the last time, six months before, when Lystra had left him here, hurt, by the water.
“Lystra doesn’t,” Spinel said. “She’s always hated what I really am.”
“She only fears you, as a mirror to herself. Try this. Say to her, ‘Speak to me, lest I go Unspoken.’”
“And what then, if nothing happens?”
“Then you must go out alone, Unspoken. Think, will she let you do that?”
“She let Rilwen do it.”
Merwen looked down. “That was different.”
“I could never go. I can’t bear even the thought of being…all alone.” Fanwings screeching overhead, the sea pounding and nothing else: it was enough to drive one insane, if one were not insane to begin with.
“If it happens, Spinel, I’ll go with you.”
He was amazed. “You would? You mean the two of us would go off alone just because Lystra—” He shook his head. “You’re weird. How can you call Valans ‘sick’ when you do such crazy things?”
“I never called you sick.”
Spinel sighed and rubbed his aching temples. “I have to go back. I’ve got to find out if my folks are alive or dead.”
“Oh, that’s another matter, troublesharer. You’ll go, then. And when you return to us, you will share a selfname.”
Spinel sucked his breath in, then very slowly let it out again. “How do you know I’ll return?”
“Because there is no other hope for us.”
Merwen had sought him out, perhaps even from the day that their eyes first met in the market square. Spinel was just beginning to grasp the scope of what she expected of him, from scraps of words dropped by Lystra and Lady Nisi. The more he saw, the greater a burden it seemed. And yet it is a precious gift in any universe to be needed for something.
Part IV
STAR
OF STONE
1
HALF A YEAR had passed since Berenice and her Sharer companions had limped out to the Ocean Moon on Dak’s rickety moonferry. Today Berenice was headed back to Valedon, and this time she had booked passage for herself and Spinel on the sleek Hyalite liner Cristobel, named after her mother.
At the water’s edge she waited for a shuttle boat to the traders’ raft. Her gray travel suit blew about her in the wind, which tugged also at the brush of hair that started from her scalp, and self-consciously she reached for the opal pinned to her collar. Beside her stood Spinel, obviously luxuriating in the silken white tunic she had ordered up from Iridis for him, with its border of nested squares in gold thread that sparkled in the sun. She had chosen the outfit deliberately to pique Merwen and to set off Spinel’s striking figure, now coal black but for violet palms and lips.
Spinel stretched his limbs through the gorgeous cloth, which was actually seasilk, bleached and machine-finished. “Mm, this stuff slides like—like water.”
Berenice pursed her lips. “Well, don’t get carried away.” Inwardly she was gleeful to see his delight in the richness she bestowed. He was not immune to the high life that Berenice craved and fought with every breath.
The sky darkened as stormclouds crossed the sun. When would that shuttle boat arrive as ordered? Berenice tap
ped her heels and clucked to a passing clickfly before she recalled that she had a watch to check, after all.
Then through the clouds broke a great shaft of light, sprinkling the waves, as if the Patriarch Himself had parted the troubled skies to extend His benediction. Berenice smiled with great contentment. This had always been her vision of the Patriarch of Torr: a hand of calm light, reaching down out of darkness. Talion feared His wrath, and even Merwen feared His Envoy. But Berenice knew that once the All-wise had spoken, the just had nothing to fear.
Recalling Talion’s last interview, she pitied the High Protector now. How ashamed he must have been to see his will for Shora so overridden by the Envoy. Now he would need Berenice all the more, to keep the peace with Sharers. He had not called her of late, but, to set Merwen at ease, she would call on him at the Palace. She would see to it that events flowed smoothly in their new path, in the wake of the Patriarch’s hand.
Merwen and Usha came out to see them off. Weia followed, although a glance at their trappings sent her scooting to hide behind her mother. Lystra was absent, of course. Merwen was still Unspeaking, but she would come round eventually, once she saw how things turned out. She needed Berenice’s help as much as Talion did. Berenice went to Usha and hugged her without speaking. A sadness hit her; it did hurt, after all, this break with Merwen. Would the Impatient One really let her go without a word?
“Share warm currents,” Merwen told Spinel. She added something else, but a hornblast covered her words, a ship’s horn, from just beyond the channels. The shuttle boat had arrived.
Spinel’s excitement at this new adventure largely overtook his immediate regrets at leaving Merwen and Raia-el raft. And Lystra—but why think of that, now?
Before him reared the Cristobel, a mountain of spotless “coldstone.” Even the moving steps that lifted him up into it were a heady thrill. Once inside, Lady Nisi—Berenice, he reminded himself—led him to a lounge built of monstrous cushions from floor to ceiling. He wondered how he was supposed to seat himself.
Berenice simply lay back and sank in. “Two moon’s-breath tonics,” she ordered.
A long white snake twisted from the ceiling, with drinks in a hand at the end. Startled, Spinel tripped and sank knee-deep into yellow velvet.
“Do relax.” Berenice laughed delicately.
Once he had achieved some sort of balance in his cushion, Spinel accepted his drink and sipped at it. The sweet warmth in his throat was heavenly. “This is the life, all right. Why’d we ever bother with Dak’s old junkheap?”
“Sharers are not allowed. Were not, that is.”
“But we’re Sharers.” He scratched his head; the hair just growing back prickled.
“We are when we choose to be. Here: you’ll want some Apurpure.” At the word, another arm shot down, proffering a bottle of white pills. Puzzled, he stared. Then his nightmare ordeal flooded back. His drink slipped; a white hand snatched it up with barely a splash.
“Oh, how could I—” Berenice slapped at the pill bottle and the arm retreated. She bounced forward in her cushion and sat up, contrite. “I’d forgotten, I’m so sorry. I always take them so I’ll look ‘normal,’ in Iridis.”
“Never mind.” The first servo arm was hovering solicitously with his drink. Spinel’s eyebrows knitted pensively. “This all must cost a troll’s hoard.”
Her fingers waved it off. “You’re family, now. Better than my own, in fact.”
The remark shocked Spinel. What a thing to say of your own folks. They were all you ever had, in the end. Yet what had Berenice said of her mother; tried to kidnap her; was it? What an odd lot were Iridians. Ahn and Melas would laugh and say, We told you so.
Out in space, he remembered just in time to go out to the observation bay for a last look at Shora before it shrank to a moon. The mottled blue gem looked even closer than the last time, a starstone that he could cup in the palm of his hand.
“You are still a Sharer,” Merwen had told him, just when the boat had come to fetch him. “Remember that, even as a shaper of stone.” The words had settled about him, almost a lullaby. Perhaps he could yet be a Sharer and himself, too. If only Lystra would understand—but that was altogether too painful to think of.
When the moving stairs set them down in Iridis, Spinel sighed; the fun was over. “How do I get to the coast steamer?” He had traded some amber weed for cash, enough for the steamer to Chrysoport that his father often used.
Berenice looked doubtful. “The steamer? That’s rather slow, is it not?”
“Well, how else? Time to ‘share parting.’”
“Share this, first.” She held out to him an engraved ring. “A line of credit, up to two thousand a month.”
His mind leaped. Cyan could retire on that, twice over. Yet something rebelled inside. “Uh, I don’t know.”
“It’s all right, really.”
How could he explain the distaste he felt? “Look, it’s like this: Thanks, ‘sister,’ but when do I earn a beggar’s stonesign?” He winced, knowing as usual it had not come out right.
Her face turned to crystal again, the glacial Lady of Hyalite whom he had first met on the landing of Dak’s moonferry. “You’re worse than Merwen.” With that cruel compliment she left him, stepping briskly into the heart of the Valan capital.
Once Spinel went aboard the steamer, every familiar landmark on the coast made his heart beat faster. Trollbone Point with its jagged cliffs thrilled him so much that he could barely contain himself. At Chrysoport, he bounded down the plank so fast that a seam snapped in his tunic.
“Whoa, you there!” From behind, Spinel’s arm was seized and twisted. He cried out and turned his head, to find himself staring into the shaggy beard of a Dolomite guard. “Where’s your pass, boy?” A neuralprobe swung from the man’s chain belt.
“Pass? What the devil—” Pain streaked up his arm.
“You can’t get into town without a pass.”
“But—but I’m Spinel, son of Cyan the stonecutter. I live here.”
The Dolomite pinched Spinel’s lip. “You look like no Chrysolite I ever saw.”
Spinel burned all over but swallowed his hatred.
“I know the stonecutter,” said a different Dolomite, a short burly fellow who combed his beard through his fingers. “I’ll take the boy there. The fine is twenty solidi, without a pass,” he told Spinel.
“Got none left but five.” Spinel forced the words through his teeth.
His captor muttered, “Chrysolite scum,” and spat on the dock.
“Pay what you got now,” said the other one.
In a daze Spinel followed the man through the market square, its stalls full of cabbage heads and reeking of overripe fruit, and then the cobblestoned streets beyond. Little was new except for the appallingly inescapable Dolomite troops, all bearded and woolen-clad with chain belts clanging at their waists, some striding in groups, others posted at corners.
Spinel’s guard finally reached the stoneshop. It looked much smaller than Spinel remembered, and dingier. For a moment he felt an utter stranger; but the old wooden door after all had its same weathered scratches, and it creaked as badly as ever when it opened.
“Cyan?” the Dolomite called. From within came mingled smells of lime dust and earthnut stew.
Beryl came first, from the storefront. She looked tiny, and the house felt like a dollhouse. She peered at him, her eyes wary under deeply lined lids, then her face lit up. “Is that—you? Spinny!” She flung her arms around him, clinging, tears streaming. At a loss, Spinel patted her dark hair.
His father’s tread thumped up the basement stairs. “What’s this? By Torr, my son is back.” Cyan clapped his shoulder and tugged his fine tunic. “Look at you. You’ve made good, or I’m a troll’s cousin.”
Then Galena’s hoarse scream rose above everything as she waddled over, shorter and rounder than ever, and Oolite bawled just to join the commotion.
Cyan pulled some coins from his pocket and started to count
them out.
“Forget it,” muttered the Dolomite.
“He had no pass—”
“Forget it.” The man’s bark stilled the tumult. He turned sharply and left.
“That’s Sergeant Rhyol,” Cyan said. “He’s billeted with us, along with Ceric, a private.”
Galena nodded. “How would they eat, if we spent food money on fines?”
“Lodgers?” Spinel asked, “But where do you put them? And why those filthy Dolomites, of all—”
“Spinel.” His father’s sharp word caught him.
“They’re good boys,” his mother insisted. “Just remember that.” But for an instant an ugly look crossed her face.
Spinel shook himself. “Oh, all right. Say, how’s the new kid? What is it, anyhow?”
Beryl smiled just a little. “Oh, Chrysoprase; he’s sleeping in the shop. I’d better—”
“A son? Wow, Harran must be pleased to pieces. Say, where is Harran? Still up at the crack of dawn with his ropes and nets?”
Beryl’s lips worked in and out in a funny way. She burst into tears again and fled.
“Son, Harran joined the Militia.” Cyan’s voice was very tired. “They tried to throw out the occupation, a few months back but—”
“But what happened to Harran?”
“He was brave,” said Cyan. Galena wiped a tear from her cheek.
A numbness settled to his toes. Harran was dead, and Chrysoport was in chains. Spinel and his parents stared at their feet, united once more, yet each almost unbearably alone. For that, at least, Spinel glimpsed a reason. “‘Death can be hastened but never shared,’” he murmured.
His mother frowned quizzically at the sound of a foreign tongue.
2
THE DOLOMITE “LODGERS” were sharing Spinel’s old bed, so that night he slept on the couch in Galena’s study, where Merwen and Usha had sat when they came to claim him. All night he kept waking, convinced that the couch was rocking, rocking steeply enough to roll him off; but in fact the house was frozen still, and there was nothing but dry land and bedrock underneath.
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