Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  Bowing to the inevitable, I rapped on Conall’s boat and gave it a shove. The loaded skiff melted into the fog.

  “What do we do?” said Bek, looking about as if a doorway would appear out of nothing.

  “First we’ve got to get the two of you to the crypt unnoticed. . . .”

  I drew the water door shut and pointed to the slopping wavelets. “Jump in. Tonight you are going to be two sorry novice warriors.”

  They goggled for a moment, then did as I said. Fortunately there were plenty of bags around the boathouse that I could use to cover their heads—as was often done for tyros fool enough to lose their masks in a dunking. Juli already wore men’s clothing, but I found a rag of canvas in one of the boats to wrap around her. We were entering a fortress that had seen no women for near two hundred years. Even the stones might notice.

  Soggy and bedraggled, they trudged through the fog-shrouded halls, my hands on their shoulders to guide their steps. We encountered only a few people along the way; none who were interested. To my sorrow, an alert sentry was posted at my cell door in the barracks passage. I’d had dreams of snatching the remainder of my leek pie. Though likely congealed by now, it could have soothed the worrisome gnawing in my belly. I had to settle for two water flasks from the boathouse filled at the barracks laver.

  When we arrived at the crypt, I gave Juli and Bek a drink and time to breathe without wet bags over their heads. Bek examined the dry bones, mumbling regrets that we had no recent corpses. It set Juli laughing, which bothered me. A surgeon’s studies might be useful, but Bek was a man who sought pleasure in his own pain. Did he enjoy thinking of the pain of those he studied?

  Juli started up with questions about the fortress and how I’d come to be here and what had caused me to lose my memory. When I said it wasn’t the time, she offered to tell me of our hours together before I sent her with the Cicerons. I stopped her.

  “Once we’re back here we’ll talk,” I said. “I need to know everything you can tell me of that time. But to make the crossing, I need a clear head. Thinking about missing memories is like bashing my skull with a hammer.”

  “So do we dance our galliard as before?” said Bek. “I’ll save my fascinating history for when we get back as well.” I could see why Bastien valued him.

  “Just as before.”

  After draining what was left of each water flask, I heaved a breath, then nodded to Juli. Her arms went around my waist.

  Hands on handle and hinge. Thread a lifeline through my two companions. I drew up images of the ruined citadel and our purpose, of the bronze door in the bowels of the citadel and the symbol of healing. But when I focused on Signé’s scarred face, instead I felt her capable hand stretched toward me . . . cold, not warm, and when she spoke the name that had once been mine, it was not appreciation, but urgency that flowed into my bones. Lucian de Remeni . . . hurry . . .

  I poured magic into the door, pushed it open, and the three of us fell.

  • • •

  Abasket of stunted parsnips and withered greens was the only casualty of our arrival in the citadel atrium. Evidently landing on one’s feet was a matter of concentration as well as luck, and Juli stumbled after me. Bek had made some effort not to step on Juli and tumbled into the basket. Once the thumps of bouncing parsnips ended, no sound broke the damp and earthy silence but the trickle of water in the troughs above our heads. A lamp hung from a hook over the sorting tables.

  Where was everyone? I’d thought they’d be waiting.

  The urgency I’d felt at the portal hadn’t left me. Without the press of people to intrude, simmering bitterness and an outsized rage too familiar of late seeped like autumn smoke through the citadel’s every crack and crevice. Its source was outside the great entry doors . . . farther . . . perhaps beyond the outer wall.

  “Bek, check downstairs and see if anyone’s at the portal. Juli, how do I get outside the walls without stepping through those doors?” We dared not be seen.

  “Out the Bronze Tower guardroom and through the herb garden,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  “I’ll follow when I’ve seen what’s what,” said Bek, darting for the cellar door.

  Juli led me past garden beds and storage casks to a doorway punched through the rubble of the collapsed Bronze Tower. A passage had been rebuilt from the crumbled bits. Restraining her for a moment, I peered through. My senses reported no one ahead of us.

  My sister’s hand firmly in mine, we sped through the low arches to a dusty chamber lined with brackets and hooks—the Tower guardroom or what was left of it. Cloaks and canvas bags adorned the hooks. Wooden spears stood in the brackets. The residue of old spellwork lay everywhere.

  A doorway had been cut through the original curved wall to the outside. A thick new door stood slightly open, its wooden barricades standing against the wall. Juli motioned me through.

  Caution bade me leave my sister here while I found out what was so wrong. But even had I known the way, no force of will or reason would allow me to be separated from her. She already held her own dagger, as did I. We squeezed through the narrow opening into the night.

  Surprising to find it night. I had assumed only a short time would have passed here in the hour or two we’d been away.

  Morgan had told me that crossing the boundary from the human world into the true lands would always match in season and time of day, but that the slow meandering of life in the true lands caused the days to spend so differently and humans to age at a much slower rate than they expected. I wasn’t sure I would ever understand that.

  The citadel’s eerie luminescence had faded, leaving the darkness of its precincts as profound as the wildlands bordering the Gouvron Estuary. Starlight revealed a great lump of stone had crushed half of the Bronze Tower portico—recognizable only from pale columns yet standing.

  Anger and bitterness dripped from voices in the distance, like acid piercing holes in my gut.

  Juli drew me faultlessly through a labyrinth of fallen cornices and vine-choked gardens. She hesitated for a moment at a wall’s dark face, then crept rightward, halting at a simple garden gate, twisted at its hinges and smelling of rust.

  The voices came clearer.

  “. . . ’tis a cruelty unworthy of thee, Kyr.” Signé’s desperate fury split the night. “What you felt is but a dying pulse of the old magic. We’ve no power like that anymore.”

  “Lies do not become thee, Signé. I am no senseless worm to judge every step and whisper as earthquake. Petra, choose the next, a male this time.” Kyr Archon’s rage could have crumbled Evanide itself.

  “Mistress! Please! Don’t let them . . .” The man’s horror would have slashed the night even had he remained silent. But the darkness writhed as his pleading became panicked grunts . . . became moans . . . became a rising agony of screams.

  I pressed Juli to the wall, willing her to wait. She acquiesced, and I slipped through the gate and alongside a fallen column until I could get a view.

  Ten Danae, their flesh marked in fiery silver, stood in an arc between the top of the causeway and the citadel’s gates. Twenty or thirty Xancheirans knelt on the paved terrace before the gates, Signé standing at the center front. At eight-and-twenty she was their eldest. Five slender trees, barren of leaves and lit eerily by the bright light of Danae gards, stood between Danae and humans. No tree had stood there on my first visit.

  At first I thought yet another Dané stood in the very center of the saplings like a column of silver light, but he twisted around, the source of the dreadful cries. A young man I’d seen manning the gates on my first visit was being consumed by the argent fire. Feet and legs had vanished. Knees and thighs shattered like an exploding star. And as the light flared around groin and belly and chest, the lower part of the column turned dark and slender like scorched bone, transformed to wood and bark, rooted in the broken paving.

  T
he Xancheirans did not wail or cover their ears, but clenched their fists and fixed their eyes on their friend as if to imprint his pain on their own souls. Nor did I betray the youth’s agony by covering my own ears. This was retribution—not for the workings of old magic, but for mine.

  A last cry, then chest and lungs were gone. Only his rictus of horror remained—and his spread arms, raised to keep them from the blazing light. When the light died, a sixth sapling stood with the others. Mother’s mercy . . .

  “Now again, Signé. Which one of thy people hast done this magic? And where is Siever?”

  “You can feel my truth, Kyr. None of my people have done magic this day. And Lord Siever’s long dying is ended.”

  The archon waved at one of his kinsmen. “Prepare another rooting, Petra. This time a female.”

  “Kyr, please no!” Signé cried.

  Schemes to interrupt the dreadful standoff bloomed in me like deadly nightshade. A frontal attack? Or I could lure the Danae on a chase to the Sanctuary pool. More than breathing, I needed to feel Kyr Archon’s heart stop beating.

  A touch on my back fired my reflexes. No time could have elapsed before I pinned the scrawny sneaker to the ground, knees on his arms and dagger at his throat.

  “It’s Bek,” he croaked in a harsh whisper. “Bastien’s friend.”

  His name alone would not have saved him, not in the dark where I couldn’t see him, at a time when rage threatened reason. As it was, I jerked my hands away and shifted back so he could scramble away from me.

  “They’re waiting at the portal,” he whispered.

  The Cicerons. In the cellars, not the rooted ground beneath the paving. But how could I leave? A woman’s shrill cries carved terror into my bones.

  “Why do they allow this?” I spat.

  “Those prisoned in the trees live,” said Bek softly. “If they kill Kyr and his kin, who will keep them living? Who else will set them free?”

  “Every one of my city’s children kneels before thee, Kyr.” Signé’s words were built of the crumbled stone and ruined gardens, of strength and caring, of endurance and despair. “You can take us all, but it will not soothe thee. It is thine own broken power torments thee, not ours. When all of us have been devoured by this mockery of life and still the land does not yield to thee, how will you explain it? Let us work together to find an answer. . . .”

  As if she knew I lurked close by, Signé had given me her answer. If all free Xancheirans were kneeling in the courtyard, my magic might prove they were not the sinners.

  Bek and I slunk backward through the gate. I hated it. Sobs racked Juli, entirely silent. Gathering her close, I whispered in her ear, “We go. Now.”

  As a boy’s yelling scoured the night, defiance dissolving into torment, Bek, Juli, and I pelted through ruined gardens.

  The Bronze Tower stood against the brittle stars like a broken tooth. I held out a hand to slow my companions as we neared it. At the moment the tower doorway took shape from the night, a flare of silver blocked the way.

  I shoved Juli and Bek behind me and readied a blast of fire from my bracelet.

  “Hold, Remeni-son!” The quiet urgency stayed my hand, defining a dark shape behind the silver light. An eagle of wrought silver surrounded an eye colored deep as a spruce forest. Safia.

  “Savages!” I snarled, low. “I should kill you all.”

  “No kind greeting for the one who guided you here,” she said.

  “With lies and childish mystery. You toyed with me when you could have told me the way. You could have told me about their desperate straits . . . and yours. You never mentioned this barbaric practice. Twenty thousand souls, and now these children . . .”

  “Thou wert weak and unskilled,” she said fiercely. “Through the passing season, I’ve felt the changes in thy power, though even yet thy human blundering leads Kyr to wreak his despair upon us all. Kill us and the prisoners die. Instead, use thy power to set them free!”

  “Tell me how.”

  “Did I not say thy magic dissolves the boundaries? Must I etch the meaning on thy flesh?” Her green glare seared me.

  “My power . . . you mean my magic can undo the Severing? But I’ve neither the knowledge nor the means.” I’d only guessed about my grandsire’s chest—and it lay in Palinur.

  “No! To repair the Dark Divide is too much a risk.” She ripped up a length of bloated, rotting vine and held it out to me. “Rejoin the lands while my kind yet walk this land and our blight will infest the true lands. The greater world will die as this one has. Take the prisoners from the trees, Remeni-son. Transport them across the Dark Divide, seal the crossings, and never look back.”

  “But how—? You’re saying magic alone will release the Xancheirans from the trees.”

  “What is the shell of trees but another boundary? Lay thy magic upon each one and it shall release its prisoner, the most of them healthier than when we took them.”

  “But how in the shades of Idrium can I touch twenty thousand trees without one of you planting an arrow in my back or slaughtering any Xancheiran who yet lives?” Each of twenty thousand would take days.

  “Thou’rt the sorcerer. Learn what’s needed. But quickly.” Her hand was an iron manacle on mine. “Give me thy promise, Lucian. Free Benedik first. Get him to safety before all others, and when the time comes, I’ll keep my kin away.”

  More soul-searing cries dimmed the stars.

  I wrenched my hand from her grip and locked hers in my own. “Stop Kyr from this horror or I’ll stick a knife in him in the hour the Xancheirans walk free.”

  “Pah!” she said, wrenching her arms from my grasp with a strength entirely unlikely for her sylph-like form. “He’ll not take all of them tonight. But do not delay. And though simple knives cannot end us, thou canst be well satisfied; once the trees are gone, we shall weaken and die.”

  “You, too?”

  “Prove thy quality, Remeni-son.” She vanished in a flare of silver.

  As I started for the door, Juli stepped in front of me. “Luka, we can’t leave Signé to this. . . .”

  “We’ve no choice.”

  “But—”

  “Our responsibility waits in the cellar.”

  Of course she was angry. So was I. As the three of us raced through the citadel, the earth trembled. Stones cascaded from the rubble walls of the Bronze Tower, rattling on the guardroom floor, and the makeshift arches of the passage creaked as we sped through on our way to the cellar.

  The Cicerons were petrified by the rumbling earth. With my head full of Safia’s warnings, Signé’s desperation, human trees, and the magnitude of the tasks yet waiting, it was immensely difficult to concentrate on the crossing. Had it not been for Bek and Juli getting the people calm and in order, I could never have managed it. Even so, as I toppled into the void with Juli at my back and some hundred people strung out behind her, my binding thread slipped. Terror rippled through the darkness. Children.

  Hold, hold, hold, I cried with every particle of my senses. Pouring magic into the tether, I stretched invisible arms from Juli all the way back to the surgeon. If only I’d planted splinters of silver in each person, linked with spells to hold us together, this would work better. . . .

  CHAPTER 34

  Head and shoulder crashed into a stone wall. The blow caused my belly to erupt, and I vomited so violently, it seemed I must be turned inside out.

  The world bulged and retracted beneath me. I crawled toward a jouncing blur, grasped a gunwale, and heaved again. Always puke over the side.

  As the shivering of depletion racked my bones, I clung to an imagining that I could do what was necessary. If I could just recall what that was. Or what had brought me to this disgusting state.

  Concern was voiced in the language of squirrels. When frigid water splattered my face, the shock made me heave again. Only as stringy bile d
ribbled on my chin did I realize I was puking into a boat, not out of it. Fix would drown me. Or at least make me swab it out.

  “Will something to drink help?” The low voice came from a short distance away.

  “Yes. And he needs food.”

  I clamped my mouth shut and swallowed hard. Repeatedly.

  “Truly?” The man seemed unperturbed. “Seems unlikely he could hold on to it. Mayhap, there’s more food in the boats.”

  I squinted into a soft ivory light. Dark, lank hair framed deep-set eyes of charcoal. Haunted eyes. Bek. And with his name, the light took on its proper meaning. As did the slop of waves and muffled whimpers from the dark. The horror at Xancheira’s gates shrilled in my ears and lurked behind my eyelids.

  “How could you let them do it?” Juli stood over me, too, her fingers glowing, her small face a storm front. “What use is all this soldiering nonsense if you can’t do something about a few naked, murdering creatures?”

  “I’m just a man. D-danae are not.” Teeth clattering like hailstones on a roof, I rolled up to sitting. “It profits nothing for us to end up trees. Signé knew that. D-did everyone make it across?”

  “All safe—but scared,” said Bek. “Almost lost three wee ones.”

  “Goddess Mother.” I should have drawn on Fix’s rubies. I should have figured out a way to transfer a holding spell through the line of people. I could have used—

  “Splinters!” The solution exploded in my mind like a new sun. Not for the task just done, but for the one to come.

  “What?” Juli and Bek chorused.

  “Silver splinters! You can transfer magic through linked splinters, not just a particular spell, but raw power, too. Insert a splinter in the bark, a notch, a woodpecker hole. Anyone can do it . . . if there’s anyone left.” I scrambled, still shaking, to my feet. “Juli, I can open the trees.”

  “Woodpecker holes? Splinters? Luka, what have you done to yourself?” Juli patted my shoulder as if I were one of the children.

  “I know how to set Signé’s people free,” I said. “Just have to eat. Sleep a bit. It will take everything I have.” And everything Fix had loaned me. All temptation to draw on the rubies to cure my depletion vanished.