by Carol Berg
“But then humans could never go to Sanctuary!” Surely this was nonsense. Living bodies could not dissolve into ponds or groves. And I bore full witness that Danae bodies were just as solid as my own. Unless . . . was the Gouvron Estuary Morgan’s sianou? Was that why I could find her with a touch of the water, and why she’d told me we could never be together?
“That was our dilemma when planning our deliverance,” said Signé. “One of the long-lived can take a single human into his own sianou. It requires one of the long-lived with immense power and great patience . . .”
A tremor in her voice drew my fascination from the pool. But she held her emotion private and continued her story, steady and precise.
“. . . but we numbered more than twenty thousand. And the long-lived of our lands—our friends since my ancestors first settled there—numbered scarce fifty. So with their help, we had to make our own sanctuary, a place where the Registry could not find us, where we could live as we wished until it was safe to rejoin the greater world. But we all miscalculated the cost.”
“Twenty thousand.” But of course, Xancheira had been a prosperous city on par with Palinur and, to them, only twenty-eight years had gone. “And you’ve all survived . . .”
I’d never considered so many. Even if I could set them free, where in the Goddess’s mercy could I take them? Not to Evanide.
“Survival is a different matter altogether.”
Another horn blast . . . closer.
Signé hissed and touched my wet sleeve. “Come, we mustn’t be found here. A newcomer, especially.”
“These hunters . . . who are they?”
“The long-lived. Our friends, our saviors. They helped us sever our home from the greater world, so we could all live safe until times were better there. But times never got better, it seems. And through the turning seasons, we realized the Severing had broken our friends as well as the land. Sadly, we cannot repair what we did, and they have no intention of allowing us to leave.”
CHAPTER 25
Signé ran like a fox—fast, low, and silent, devouring distance with every bound, leaping obstacles without breaking stride. Before my longer legs could match her sure and steady rhythm on the downhill track, we’d cleared a grove of wind-stunted pines and come to paved streets. Once-paved streets, rather. Vines and thorny shrubs had bullied their way through cracked cobbles and left the place more wilderness than city lanes.
The crescent moon, risen huge and bright from behind the mount, revealed elegant houses with wide porticos . . . some intact, some half charred or collapsed . . . all dark and deserted. Courtyards, gardens, and orchards were overgrown, tangled and wild.
Down and down, alongside dry channels where the Marshal’s window scene had shown flowing streams, arched bridges, and flowered lattices. The lower city was wild now, too, a woodland of great oaks and spruces, beeches, chestnuts, lime trees . . . many that startled me as they were out of place for the north of Navronne. It might have been purposefully planted with specimens from the farthest reaches of the kingdom, save these grew out from the broken cobbles of the boulevard, or straight through the ruin of homely houses that overlooked the market. As far as I could see down the hill and across the countryside, dark trees soared skyward.
“Why do the Danae hunt you?” I called softly to Signé’s back, as another trumpet blast—closer—spurred our steps. “Surely not— Where is everyone?” All the way down, I’d seen not a movement save the wind in leaves and branches. No light but stars and moon.
“They don’t eat us,” she said with only a trace of scorn. “They hunt game for our sustenance.”
“Then why are we running?”
She dodged a thicket of briars and sped through a colonnade where a third of the pillars had been toppled by a sturdy chestnut. “If they find humans out of the citadel at night, especially near the Sanctuary pool, they think we’re plotting to leave—or that we’ve learned how to open the trees. If they find an outsider, we’re all done for.”
“Open—?”
“Hush.” She paused at the end of another weed-choked lane. A bronze gate taller than I blocked our way.
Signé lifted the latch and drew the gate open without a sound. With a muffled curse, she reached back and pointed a finger at me. A flash from her silver bracelet and I fell back as if Dunlin’s big fist had slammed me in the gut. She stepped out and let the gate swing free behind her. Sufficiently warned, I didn’t follow, but flattened myself to the ground and crept forward, determined to see what had caused such an unmistakable deterrent.
As if lost in thought, Signé strolled across a courtyard centered by a single giant oak. Behind the tree, a narrow causeway snaked steeply upward to the luminescent citadel. The citadel’s remaining tower was topped with a cupola sheathed in gold that glinted in the moonlight.
Signé didn’t head for the causeway, but for the tree. She pressed her palms and forehead to the oak’s great bole, and to my astonishment, began to sing.
The teeth of spring bite sea and stone.
Storm and mist shadow vale and cove.
Where is the fire? Where is the heart? Where is the gladness of the season?
All the sadness and anger I’d felt from this place were given voice in her singing, low and rich, like a posset flavored with mead and bitter plums. It put me in mind of the weeping goddess depicted in the Marshal’s window.
Danger lurks mid trees yet barren.
And in the sea yet cold and dark.
Dance, my brother . . .
“Dost thou imagine singing will draw him, Tenielle-daughter?”
The man’s question took advantage of her pause for breath. He was somewhere on her left; the gate blocked my view.
“Or dost thou imagine he can hear thee, as long as the song is a canticle of the long-lived? Lovely as is thy rendering, I regret that is not so.”
His words were kindness itself. His regret sincere.
Though she no longer sang, Signé did not turn to the tall Dané who halted a few steps away. His body spoke power, bare flesh scribed in silver brilliance that dulled the scraps of moonlight, arms and thighs hugely muscled, as if he wrestled mountains. Over back and shoulders broader than Morgan’s friend Naari’s, he had slung a bow and quiver. One of the hunters, then.
He held back from Signé, respectfully it seemed, until she turned away from the tree and inclined her head. “Envisia seru, Kyr Archon.”
Archon. Like Morgan’s sire, he spoke for the Danae—the silver Danae.
“Singing brings my heart to life,” said Signé, “and if anything can penetrate Benedik’s prison, it will be a sister’s song. Does that not seem reasonable, even to his gaoler?”
So Signé ruled the Xancheirans because her brother was in prison? A Danae prison. Morgan said Danae did not build, whether houses or prisons. But then . . .
The hairs on my neck rose. Tuari Archon had threatened to imprison his daughter in beast form. And Signé had said the long-lived feared the humans would learn how to open the trees. Goddess Mother, were these oversized trees prisons? Twenty thousand Xancheirans and I’d seen only four people and fewer lights.
“We saw fire upon the mount and felt a stirring of the pool,” said the Dané. “We have asked thee to remain in thy fastness and leave the night for mysteries not meant for human trespass. Thou canst wander freely in the day. Is our agreement grown so burdensome?”
“We have spoken of this so often, Kyr. We will not leave without our friends and families. My spirit grieves tonight with Siever so close to death. So I walk under the stars and offer prayers on the mount and come down to sing to my brother.”
“It is a grief to all that good Siever remains stubborn.”
“He says he would rather be ash spread on our own small garden, than oak in—”
“—in ours. How sorely has our friendship lapsed since the Accord
. Just now, a touch of human magic trembled the air. How shall we ever wake this land with human enchantment still disrupting it?”
“Clumsiness,” she said dismissively. “I tripped. This bracelet yet retains traces of my brother’s spellwork. I wear it that I might feel closer to him, just as you perform your rites, though they bear so little fruit.”
Baiting him seemed foolish.
The Dané reached for the woman, sending my hand to my dagger and my body into a knot of readiness. But before I could launch an unrequested rescue, his hand stroked her short hair in unmistakable intimacy.
“What of thee, brave Signé? Tell me thou dost not share Siever’s barren wish. I would spare thee his pain and all grief. I can show thee wonders, even in this broken land.”
The night bloomed with his desire. Even from a distance, it bore the immensity of night and the insistence of the tidal onrush at Evanide.
I knew the body’s lust, my own so recently and so kindly tended. But his was not the simple urgency to shed despair in breathless pleasure or tender intimacy. His hunger was as clear to me as if his intent were scribed upon the air. He wanted to possess her entire . . . to dissolve her human frailties and make her essence a part of himself. Could he do such a thing?
His hand, silver gards gleaming, slid down to her throat and traced its curve out to her shoulder. In the brightness of his silver was her face revealed at last, a fine-boned, pleasing oval. But an ugly, dark red blotch marred her brow and one cheek, sealing her left eye half closed.
“Ah, Kyr . . .” Her sigh wove another thread of love and sorrow into the night. It did not ring false. She laid her hand atop his, stilling its creeping movement. “Thou art all kindness, yet my duty remains to care for our people. We are so few. When the last day of Xancheiros comes and I am all that’s left, then shall I hear thy offer and choose my way.”
“So be it.” His head bowed and he withdrew his hand. But flares of anger spiked his lust—fury scarce contained within his cold beauty. “Let me escort thee to thy rest.”
“I beg thy indulgence, noble archon. I remain foolish and would companion my brother a while longer on this luminous night. The citadel is noisy and cramped, and it stinks. But an hour more and I’ll make my way straight back as we’ve agreed. Good hunting, dear friend, and may thy rites bear fruit for us all.”
With a curt dip of his head, the Dané strode out of sight. Signé rested her back on the oak’s rugged bark. Only when she beckoned did I race across the broken cobbles to join her.
“You heard?” she said. Her breath came ragged as it had not when we ran.
“Lady Signé, this Dané is very dangerous. He wants to possess—”
“I know what he wants. Come, let’s walk where we are not so exposed.”
She led me deeper into the strange woodland, sure of her path through the dark. The track wound over broken bricks and cracked flagstones, heaved up by the trees’ burgeoning roots and buried in generations of dead leaves.
“When I was a rebellious girl no older than your sister, I worshipped Kyr,” she said, her fingers brushing the trunk of each tree we passed. “I refused to believe what our elders said was happening to him and to us. Our dalliance left a bond between us that makes it difficult to keep secrets. So mostly I tell him the truth, and when I speak of his kindness and grace, I must recall the way he was and how I felt when I was innocent of horror . . . and how my people’s arrogance and failure caused this doom for all of us.”
“They’ve gone mad,” I said, half question, half declaration. Surely Morgan’s fear—her father’s fear—glared starkly. “The Danae who saved you.”
“When we cut ourselves off from the greater world, the power . . . the grace . . . the great ordering of the Everlasting . . . whatever it is that binds them to the land and to the others of their kind with whom they are conjoined in their great mysteries was broken, too. Not only could they no longer enter Sanctuary or their own sianous, they could not make new ones. They suffer terribly, and without their nurturing, the plants and beasts the land produces cannot nourish us.”
“So your people starve. . . .”
“Eventually, yes. Some sooner, some later. Yet by a terrible irony, the long-lived can transform our dying bodies into saplings, dissolving our physical form as if we were entering a sianou. Kyr and his brothers and sisters perform their mysteries in the night watches as they have always done. It gives them purpose, keeps them living. The trees thrive and grow to this monstrous size, while vines and waste plants breed uncontrolled.”
Dissolving . . . so the prisoners were not in the trees; they were the trees.
“Some, like Siever, refuse this end, because we know the prisoners do not die. They are ever aware and can feel when we are near.” She let her hand linger on a giant beech. “’Tis a terrible and lonely fate.”
Some subtle sound or movement warned us both of an oncoming rush. As one, we dived into a pit of leaves beneath a half-fallen column. None too soon, for a great dark blur—a stag, I guessed by its size and smell—leapt over our shelter. Silver streaked the air as two bodies launched themselves after it. I cringed as I awaited the impact, for the slant and thickness of the sheltering column made it impossible for human-sized legs to clear.
Only they did. The two Danae raced after their quarry into the night.
When all was quiet, Signé scrambled out of the leaves. I followed, wincing at stabbing reminders of the wound in my back, agape at impossibility.
“That was entirely too close,” she said, voice tight. “We must loop back to the citadel. I doubt you came here to end as a tree. Kyr would not wait for you to starve.”
Sick in body and spirit, I followed her lead, stretching my every sense as far as possible without magic.
“How do you know the prisoners yet live?” I whispered as we crept from tree to rubble pile.
“Your friend Safia loves my brother, as I once loved hers, and from time to time when she thinks it safe, she brings Benedik out to breathe the air of the world. Sometimes she lets me speak with him. He says the prospect of that brief respite keeps him sane, though returning to a tree of such size . . . it is an agony. If Kyr ever learns of what she does—”
“He’ll prison her in beast form.”
Signé’s head snapped around.
“I know a bit of Danae lore,” I said. There was no time to explain about Morgan. “Not nearly enough. Safia speaks in riddles. She says my magic could save you all if I followed something called the Path of the White Hand. But she didn’t say what that was.”
Signé darted from an elm as broad as a cart to a half wall, and then to a beech, pausing to listen before speaking again. “I never heard of it.”
Awash in history, I missed a step, tangling my boots. I reached for the smooth, pale trunk of a birch, but yanked my hand away before touching it.
“Do it,” said Signé. “Benedik says he experiences warmth from a human touch. It helps him think, reminds him of what he truly is. Certain, he admits the warmth might possibly be a bird.” A trace of humor gleamed from her sadness, like a single gold thread woven into a smothering blanket. “But he prefers to think it’s me, or Siever, who was his brother in all but blood, or one of the others. We spend most of our days touching the trees. There are so few of us now, I fear some of our people go days without comfort.”
“How long has your brother—?”
“Seven years. Those who came here young—he was only twelve—survived longer than the elders or those of middle years.”
So I touched the trees as I followed her, hoping my presence was not so alien as to frighten those inside. It was difficult to refrain from using my bent. Surely magic could tell me if what she said was true. It seemed impossible, as if I had truly reached the halls of Idrium and found it a weasel’s den.
“I’ll do whatever I can to make this right,” I said. “I’m jus
t not sure how.”
“Find your way back to the greater world,” she said as the pale gleam of the citadel announced the edge of the trees. “When you’ve established that it’s possible, take your sister and her friends back with you. Their provisions have run out. We’ve a good well and few gardens inside the citadel that yet thrive, ones planted and protected with the finest magics of Xancheiros to withstand siege. Mingling our grain and greens with what Kyr provides seems to help. But those gardens will soon fail as the rest of our enchantments have. The Wanderers must be out of here or they’ll begin to fail, too.”
“I’ll find a way back,” I said. “But all of you must leave with me that day. We can work together. Learn what must be done to free your brother and all these . . .” The sea of trees behind us seemed endless. Thousands. Goddess Mother.
“I was born on the day of the Severing,” said Signé, “forever marked by its fire. I have just passed my twenty-eighth year. People began dying when I was eight. Starvation is ugly and painful, and most accept Kyr’s offer, believing that in some fashion it pays our debt to those who tried to save us.”
She brushed the bole of a monstrous elm. Naught of her was visible but the paleness of her fingers and her face—and the dark, palm-sized blight that intruded on it.
“While they yet had power to try, our finest mages worked to breach the trees. But what holds our people in them is not spellwork. Like all the rites of the long-lived, it is mystery. We’ve only seven-and-thirty of us left, all but one of us born here, and we’ll not leave our family and friends, no matter if you show us a road paved with silver.”
We’d returned to the overgrown courtyard and her brother’s oak.
I understood her despair. Watching an entire people die out must smother hope and turn bone and spirit to iron. But Safia believed I could help, and my magic made the Danae of my own lands fear me, so I persisted. “What do you mean while they yet had power?”