Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  “Deunor’s fire! Have you thought of—?”

  But he waved me off as he hacked into his sleeve. And I had no time to press him.

  “I’ve likely not reached the age of wisdom, but I do try,” I said. “I’ll have great care with what I say tonight.”

  “Work a bargain with your Danae lady,” he croaked, with astonishing ferocity. “Agree to nothing, speak nothing, without her sworn word and, unlike thy first so-foolish oath, let the terms of that bargain be as strong and seamless as Syan silk. Friendship, honor, love, faith . . . the long-lived can express them all in such beauty the heart cannot hold it. But these are human qualities, not those of star or rock or grass. It is no simple madness that drives Kyr and his kin to do as they’ve done. Nor is it evil. ’Tis what they are, driven by nature to do as they do.”

  “She has defied her archon, her own father,” I said, willing him to understand. “She’s mortgaged her future to help me.”

  “Listen to her words. Not what they say, but what they mean. The long-lived do not lie, but the source of their truth is not the same as ours. Discover what she wants and what she needs. Trust her no further than that.”

  Throttling another spasm, he rolled over on the cot and shooed me away.

  Of course he would mistrust. In Osriel’s cave my bent had revealed love and reverence between Xancheirans and the Danae. Even the Danae themselves had not foreseen the outcome of such a unique and drastic solution to Xancheira’s danger. Who could lay blame?

  Yet as I guided old Dorye across the bay on the last of the onrushing tide, I could not shake Siever’s warning—especially the eerie echo of Morgan’s own. ’Tis not magic, but what we are. Though we share the same form, gentle Lucian, I am not human.

  CHAPTER 29

  Moments after dragging my hand in the water of the Gouvron Estuary, threads of sapphire and indigo glimmered beyond the marsh. The memory of those threads entwining my flesh in exquisite heat obliterated every plan save one.

  Leaning over old Dorye’s gunwale, I dunked my head in the cold slosh of brine and muck. Only when my teeth ached from the cold and the rest of me declared the impossibility of such delights did I pull it out. And then I could see her entire and the sturdy man who hurried across the matted marshland alongside her. I kept my eyes on him and decided he was not entirely unlike an otter.

  “Well met, sweet Lucian!” Morgan called cheerily. “Here’s thy friend, an amiable traveling companion and most fascinating gentleman of the law. His questioning would have led our tutors in Montesard to speechless confusion.”

  I splashed through the mud, dragging the squinch farther into the marsh before tying it low on a well-rooted clump of reeds.

  “Sorry it’s taken me a few days to get here,” I said, eyeing the dwindling crescent in the sky. Incredibly small it seemed, compared to the sliver that had lit Xancheira only two nights previous. “And I can’t stay long. Are you well, Coroner Bastien?”

  In fact he appeared quite well. The paleness of his teeth signaled a grin behind the snarls of his beard. “This is just the damnedest. Erdru’s horns, I’d wholly forgot what it was like to have an adventure, and what man ever dreamed of such a one as this?”

  The jerk of his head Morgan’s way was unmistakable. She noted it as well and her own pleasure put the scrawny moon to shame.

  “For certain the lady marches one hard,” I said, “but then covers the ground at a rate that’s kind to the feet, yes? I’d be ever grateful could she do the same for a boat!”

  “However wouldst thou hone thy well-made shoulders in such a case?” Morgan’s voice stroked my skin like silken ribbons. An hour’s frigid dunking of my entire self might be needed to keep me thinking straight.

  “So she explained why I was afraid for you to stay in Palinur?”

  Bastien grew full sober. “I thank you for the warning, and your kind friend here for delivering it. I sent our few who were left—Constance and two diggers—off someplace safer. I’m no slouch to defend myself against the scum of Palinur, nor even against a prince’s soldiers, but magic that makes you fearful enough to warn me . . .”

  “I can’t leave here just now . . . to protect you or your friends.”

  He examined me as he might one of his witnesses. “She says you’re soldiering now; never thought I’d see that. No lack of courage—not in the least—but you were brought up soft. More drawing than wrestling or running. More books than weapons.”

  “Be sure that every weakness of my upbringing was made clear in my first days here,” I said. “It was hard learning. . . .”

  “No hiding that,” he mumbled, “mask or no.”

  Such a reference to the past when I wasn’t prepared set off the familiar throb inside my skull. I’d mostly avoided the headaches of memory probing of late. Even when meeting my sister, I’d been thinking more of present circumstance than our shared past. That frightened me in a way. I wasn’t ready to relinquish what remained of my true self.

  “So it’s your commanders who want your friends dead? Or someone’s paying them for it?”

  “No. The Order is not a mercenary troop for hire. Our missions are not chosen for coin, but for merit, for right, for worthy needs that none else are prepared to meet. . . .”

  Though chosen by a man compromised. Even now, I could not truly accept that the Marshal I believed in might harm a man whose only crime was to know me. Which showed how little of a military man I was. Sentimental, Inek had called me.

  Knights gave up their personal memory of a completed mission, but they did not give up conscience or intelligence or judgment beforehand. Always we were taught to observe and ensure that our orders made sense. But how would that work if we were ordered to war?

  “Damon has convinced some of our commanders that there is larger, more important work to be done with the kingdom in such chaos,” I said. “He has plans to remake the Registry—clean out the corruption and put his own people at the head of it. I’m afraid he thinks to use our Order to enforce his will. And for some unknown reason he’s fixed on me to play a part in this remaking since long before I worked for you.”

  “Since your grandsire brought this back from the north country?” Bastien pulled a small object from his belt pouch—a pale cylinder no thicker than my thumb with a dark knob protruding from each end.

  “The Xancheiran spindle!” I’d almost forgotten.

  I sank to a damp tussock, the canvas-wrapped wood in my hand. It was bound in enchantments that I’d once have imagined complex. One of them seared my hand with fire that left no mark.

  Bastien crouched beside me to watch.

  Morgan remained standing. “Hast thou more to tell before I go, Lucian? I’ve duties will not wait. The good Bastien knows the way to his cave.”

  Though her generous presence blunted Siever’s warnings, I couldn’t wholly ignore them. Neither could I get the Cicerons away without her help. I had to craft a story. . . .

  “I found a portal in the crypt at the sea fortress,” I said. “It was framed in bronze just like the one in the hirudo. The frame held neither a vision of light nor an abyss nor a blockage of stone, but a true door. My magic opened it. Beyond its threshold, I found the Palinur Cicerons.”

  Bastien goggled. “Shite!”

  Morgan pressed her palms together and held them to her mouth. Slowly, she sank to her haunches, her whole body listening.

  “The place was not Sanctuary,” I said, “nor was it the five-fingered land. And the sentinel wasn’t there. The land is wild, thick with vines and great trees, though surely a part of the true lands, for the Cicerons believed they had only been there a few months, not the years since I sent them. They’d brought their own provision and kept hidden, waiting for me to come for them. Cicerons don’t work the land, Morgan, so they—”

  Her quick hand pressed my lips. “Say no more, friend Lucian. I wouldst not hav
e thee lie to me. What wouldst thou have me do?”

  The flesh beneath my mask burned. “They’ll starve if they stay there,” I said. “And my sister’s with them . . . my only family. So, I plan to return tomorrow night and fetch them. I’ve a scheme to get them across the bay, but two hundred men, women, and children can’t stay here in the marshes. I need you and Bastien to take them to whatever place in Navronne they specify”—Siever’s warnings dogged me—“by the shortest and safest route possible, leave them in peace to make their new home as they will, and bring the coroner back here if he chooses. Will you do those things for me?”

  “I shall await thy coming on the morrow’s eve and take thy friends where they will—exactly as you say. All shall be well.” Morgan rose, brushed her glowing fingers across my masked cheek, and riffled my hair. “And when that work is done, we shall have time for other matters—some serious, some very much not. Bastien may have to dwell in his sea cave unsuccored as I have my way with thee.”

  Signé had spoken of a bond between her and Kyr, because of the intimacy they’d shared. I believed it. Morgan could tell when I was withholding truth. Likewise for me. Even as her desire infused and entangled me and became my own, so did a deep and mortal sadness.

  I caught her hand and pulled her back down. “What do you need of me, sweet Morgan? What might I offer in return for your generosity? Always you give, but you never ask anything for yourself.”

  Her smile seemed to make her sapphire gards grow brighter. “What could I want that I do not have, save more days and nights with thee, my gentle warrior? Perhaps, someday, a new portrait to show us what beauty will come of our deeds.”

  Which was, of course, no answer at all.

  My gaze lingered on the moonlit marshland long after all trace of sapphire and indigo had vanished. Beauty had gone with her, leaving frog croaks and bird calls, the slurp of backwaters and the stink of mold.

  “Where will your sister go?” said Bastien, half startling me. “She can’t stay with you, I’d guess.”

  “I’m hoping she’ll have an idea. Or you might, since you’ve had more dealings with her than I can remember.”

  “I’ll give it thought.” The coroner eyed the darkness where Morgan had vanished. “Summat’s changed with the lady Dané. From the moment you spoke of that door.”

  My fingers picked at the spindle, welcoming the stabbing fire of its binding magic. “Let’s look at this. I’ve two mysteries on my hands, and my skull’s going to cave if I don’t get answers to one or the other.”

  “Curator Damon’s plot and the Danae mystery. Same as two years ago. You’re further along the path but still without a map to either one. Don’t envy you.” The coroner mimed a shudder. “So tell me, were you going to lie to her?”

  “My commanders consider omission to be a lie,” I said, fixing my gaze to the roll of canvas and wood. “If you see it that way, then yes, I was lying.”

  “So what else is beyond the door? The part you didn’t tell her.”

  Bastien was easy to trust. He felt solid, not tenuous, not wavering. A man who was either on your side or not. As if his purposes sprang not from higher duty or demanding conspiracy, but entirely from who he was.

  “Xancheira itself. Seven-and-thirty living survivors of the massacre. And some twenty thousand more of them who’ve been imprisoned in trees while yet alive by Danae whose gards shine silver. Morgan told me that silver gards imply madness. The survivors confirm it, though they say Safia, the one I spoke to, is the most benevolent of her kind. All of them—humans and Danae—will starve or die if I don’t bring them back.”

  “Shite!”

  “I’m afraid of what would happen—” I left off, drawing my cloak around me against the rising wind. Bastien didn’t need me to explain my fears. He’d recognized the dangerous state between the blue Danae and the silver. A Danae war? A slaughter? Such a conflict was far beyond our understanding, but Morgan’s father would surely summon overwhelming numbers to deal with mad ones of his kind, and if so, then what would be the fate of the Xancheirans? Siever had forced me to see the truth.

  Morgan had spoken frankly of humans bringing danger, disorder, and violence wherever we traveled. She’d told me my magic was risky, because it thinned the boundaries that kept us out of the true lands, and that their Law of the Everlasting required them to eliminate such a threat as I was. The long-lived did not lie. Morgan was willing to help me when it did not conflict with her nature. If her people considered humans to be such a blight on the world, they wouldn’t care what happened to twenty thousand Xancheirans as they dealt with a few of their own gone mad.

  “I’ve got to learn how to release those prisoned in the trees and how we might rejoin the city and its surroundings to the world without Morgan’s help. The abyss she saw in the hirudo portal does indeed lie between here and there. But if I keep the oath I swore her father and take him across it, I’m afraid the Xancheirans—prisoned or free—won’t survive. I can’t let that happen.”

  “And if you don’t keep your oath, the lady will be a beast until the end of her days.”

  “If you can get me out of this one, Coroner Bastien, I’ll conjure you a gift of your choosing from whatever’s in my power to give.”

  “Seems to me a drawing or a bit of history delving might give answer.”

  “A drawing . . .” My bents could take me straight to Safia. “Gods, Bastien. I told you I wasn’t thinking straight. She’s there. The sentinel. I just didn’t see her. Surely she can tell me how to get them out. Maybe even help.”

  “Add your thanks to the debt you owe me already. I paid good coin for four years of your service, but reaped only forty-six days.”

  Heaven’s gates . . . assuming there was still an Order I wanted to be a part of at the end of all this, what would the Order make of an unfilled contract for my service? Did he mean it?

  My sharp glance upward set Bastien laughing. “You’re worrying about the rules, aren’t you? Sky Lord’s balls, no matter the formidable aspect, you are still Lucian de Remeni!”

  Cheeks as hot as the spindle’s magic, I laughed with him. “For now, I’m Paratus Greenshank who needs to get back to the fortress before anyone knows I’m missing. But you’ve come all this way to bring me this little mystery, and I’ll be damned if I leave without seeing what it means.”

  I ripped away the spindle’s annoying binding spell, several protective enchantments, and an outer covering of canvas, and spread a strip of fragile linen across my knees. Most of it, for it was a long piece that would be draped around someone’s neck at a Temple rite, a funeral or wedding or other solemn event. A stola.

  “Great gods of the universe . . .” A bit of Xancheiran needlework, so I’d told Bastien in that other life. Indeed it was, names and symbols formed by neat stitches—the crafted genealogy of two people on their wedding day. A simple witnessing that upended history and certainty in the single moment of comprehension, exposing the root of rivalry and slaughter, a truth that had spawned Xancheira’s horror and the Registry’s centuries of determination to bury its secrets.

  A halfblood’s children have no magic. That single incontrovertible truth was the foundation of the Registry’s strict breeding rules. A pureblood who begat children with a mate not pureblood broke his or her bloodline, squandering the divine gift, because their every descendant would possess degenerate magic at best. Except it seemed that our incontrovertible truth was a lie.

  The spindle had, indeed, changed the course of my life. The genealogy witnessed that I, or any other mature male or female of dual bent, could mate with a halfblood or even an ordinary and beget a child with pureblood talents—a feat which every pureblood believed as impossible as our backs sprouting wings. A pureblood woman could marry the man of her choice and her bent could reappear untarnished in her children or her grandchildren as long as one person in that lineage bore a matured dual ben
t. Every example was stitched onto that ancient genealogy. The magic we believed confined to descendants of the Three Hundred families—the uniqueness that had kept us wealthy and privileged, powerful and protected, and arrogant beyond telling—could be spread to any bloodline in this world. Even to ordinaries.

  The stola testified that Xancheirans had allowed dual bents for at least six generations. And their magic had thrived and flourished, grown to power that could reshape the earth itself.

  It was magic grown from dual bents that created my paintings that showed things I couldn’t know, that allowed me to open the Xancheirans’ portals and cross the crack they’d made in the world. Even Fix, with the all the power of Evanide’s Knight Defender, could not do those things.

  I, grown to maturity with dual bents, was an example of what the Registry had stolen from the world. And they could not allow anyone to know. How right Signé was that neither I nor any pureblood had been taught the truth of Xancheira’s fall. Because the Registry had chosen to settle for a weaker gift so they could keep magic all to themselves.

  “So am I destined to remain in ignorance?” said Bastien, his eagerness well cooled.

  I’d done right by Bastien to keep this from him. Had the Registry a hint that he knew, he would have died in an eyeblink. Now danger stalked him anyway, because of me. And Siever—Goddess save him—a man who could confirm this conclusion in an eyeblink, was in peril with every breath.

  Carefully I passed Bastien the stola, bathing it with magelight that he might read its tale. “On the day this secret comes to light, the world will change forever,” I said.

  He puzzled over it. Traced the marks of names and talents and lineage with a thick finger.

  My portraits had borne witness that the Registry curators had passed the secret from one to the next, and were willing to protect that secret with blood. Cicerons, who claimed a magical gift, had to die. Historians who probed Xancheiran history had to die, along with anyone they might have told. And those like Pluvius and me, born with two bents, were mutilated in the name of the lie. Only in my case, it seemed, my grandsire had waited too late to rip my second bent away.