by Carol Berg
“I’m not at all good at spellcasting,” I said. “Obscuré spells are unreliable at best, and I’ve never made one work. I cannot just sit here.”
“Be patient. They’ll soon tire of useless searching in the dark. And the moment they decide to wait for dawn, you’re free of them.”
Gildas’s eyes flashed in his pale face, blotched and swollen from encountering my fist. Though breathless from his hurried journey, his voice was tight with excitement. I had been on the run too often for excitement, and I was much too close to the abbey to feel free.
“I’m sorry I had to come here with so little. But I didn’t want you to wait any longer without word. I hadn’t counted on you putting me in the infirmary!”
“Yet you’ve brought me Iero’s own gift.” Upon his arrival, my wet, battered, and bedraggled friend had shoved a fat wineskin into my hands. “And I do thank you for it and for this chance, but I daren’t wait longer.”
“You need your secular clothes; they’ll be watching for the cowl. And if you’re going to avoid towns until you’re well away, you need food. Give me another hour.”
I turned his head so I could see his swollen jaw. “Holy Mother, I am sorry for this. You oughtn’t be trotting around with a bruised head. You’ll get dizzy and fall in the river. And you must not be caught helping me. Do you even understand what they’ll do to you?” He’d be god-blessed to see daylight ever again.
His teeth flashed in the rainy darkness. “Your sister’s purebloods questioned me before Compline and now think I’m asleep. I can get into the dorter and the kitchen without anyone the wiser. But they’ll certainly be back to question me, so I’ll send one of the boys with your things. The abbey will be in such an uproar, they’ll be able to slip in and out easier than any of us. And they admire you so.”
“No!” I said, sharper than I intended. “Not the boys. Of course they’d do anything you ask them. But no, please. I’d rather do without.”
I had no reason to believe Jullian or Gerard would still “admire” me in any way, assuming they ever had. Even so, I refused to put them in jeopardy. At least Gildas was a man and had some idea of the world and its horrors, but those boys…they would die in prison.
“They’re very careful and I’m sure they’d not betray you, but if you prefer, I’ll come myself during Matins. Promise you’ll not leave before that. I’m quite recovered.” His hands squeezed my shoulders, solid and reassuring. “You saved me from Sila Diaglou’s whip, Valen. Did you think I’d forget?”
I wrestled with fear and need and the desire to be gone. I could likely survive the next few days with no money, no food, no secular clothes. But of course I had a far more urgent lack. Four days gone since my incomplete doulon. Saints and angels, how I hated this. “Brother, if you can…I’ve left a packet hidden in the garden all these months, a few things I’d not like to abandon. A knife. Some extra medicine for my leg.”
One look inside the bundle and he would know. By sight or scent, nivat was unmistakable. If Gildas had risked so much to get me this far, then perhaps he could even forgive a bit of perversion.
“I’ll bring whatever you like.” After I described how to find my bundle, he gripped my shoulders. “An hour. You are in the god’s hand, Valen.”
“And you, good friend,” I said, as he sped through the stubbled field, vanishing almost before I could blink. “Be very careful.”
You’re a fool to wait, Valen. Better to be caught running than squatting like a toad. It was the same argument I’d had with myself all evening. But for twelve years, doing the unexpected had kept me free. Gildas would do as I asked. A fascination had captured him since the moment he’d learned I was pureblood, driving him to help beyond reasoned friendship. If we were successful, perhaps he’d have a chance to tell me why.
Pulling up my hood, I settled back against the cold stone and took a long pull at the wineskin. Though I expected ale, the essence of grape and oak warmed my gullet. Oh, friend Gildas, blessed be your name. And mighty Erdru, holy lord of grape and harvest, how could you have so cruelly abandoned your worshipers? I took a second drink, feeling the wine scald the hollows in my belly. With every swallow, I named Gildas holy.
I ought to sleep. The coming days would be long and difficult, and sleeping bodies were harder to locate with magic. But the events of the past weeks roiled in my head like cream in a churn, and strangeness hung about me like a fever. Through the hours of waiting, I had imagined I was hearing things through the drumming rain…sounds like sighs and breathing, like worms gnawing their way through dead flesh, like heartbeats and green shoots struggling to break through the mud and rock. I kept my hands clasped tightly in my lap, remembering the earth breathing under my hand as I searched out the route to Elanus. If I laid my palms down tonight, I felt the eerie certainty that I’d detect a heartbeat.
Holy ground. Of course, the world was infused with divine mystery. Everyone felt such things on occasion—saw faces in the clouds, experienced a day in the midst of winter when it felt as if spring had leaked through the boundaries of seasons, felt prickles when walking through a darkening wood. But I had never thought myself closer to such mystery than the next man. Signs and portents had never shaken me, never driven me to any action beyond kissing the nearest aingerou or pouring a libation for the appropriate deity. But here in this valley…in the cloisters, on the road, in the hills. What was happening to me?
Likely what I felt tonight was nothing save these ancient rocks. Simple and stark, dolmens were scattered in the open country throughout Ardra. No one knew what purposes they had served—burials, ceremonies, boundaries, markers. Yet anyone with even a touch of magical sensibility would recognize the power that lingered about them.
And I had seen a Dané. Only now as the rain spattered on the stone and showered softly on the barley could I recapture the wonder of it. They lived…beings that could dissolve into earth or water or tree. Beings that could hear the music of the stars and weave life into the fields with their dancing. Knowing the legends were true…the world could never look the same to me.
A breath of wind swirled the mist, bearing the powerful sweet scent of rotting grain. I pulled my hood lower, huddled the wineskin closer, and drank again, closing my eyes. I didn’t want to see what beings might live in a place so ancient. I didn’t want to hear the creaking as the stones shifted with the breathing of the earth. I shuddered. What had Gildas said? If the cities die, if learning dies, we are sent back to the land, to nights in the wild forest with spirits we can no longer tame with words, to awe of these Gehoum…
“Brother Valen?”
The soft voice sent me to my feet with my stomach in my throat. Giddy with the wine and foolish musings, I imagined all sorts of things before I associated the voice with the human shape standing near a mound of musty grain stalks ten paces away. “Mistress Elene?”
“Yes.”
I pressed my back to the stone, peering into the darkness, trying to glimpse other movement. “Have they sent you to drag me back? I warn you I won’t go other than feet before, and I don’t think you’re capable of overpowering me on your own. Or perhaps you’ve brought comrades?”
“I’m quite alone.” She stepped under the lintel rock, water cascading from her cloak. Her wet hair curled about her face. “I spied on you and Brother Gildas in the maze and followed you out here, determined to bring you back. When you stopped so close, I believed you were having second thoughts. So, like a moonstruck chit, I’ve hidden behind that pile of sour barley all this time debating whether to speak with you or just to pray you would go back on your own.”
I did not mistake her reference to “moonstruck chit” for any more than description. Nor did I tease her about it. Her face, so pale in the night, was tied into much too sober a knot.
I sank to the ground again, leaning against one upright stone. My feet and my back reminded me of two exhausting days, a sleepless night, and a butchered pig. “I’m always glad for company, mistress. But I ca
n’t believe your father would approve.” Certainly not after Thalassa’s jibes.
“He won’t.” She matched my position against the other upright. “My father would prefer having a son and flies into a rage when I show any independence of mind. Even when he can’t find reason to refuse a request, he seeks a way to make his acquiescence unpleasant. If I’m to be chastised anyway, I might as well do as I please now and then.”
“Thus your cheerful life as Corin the Squire.”
“He calls me Corin even when we’re alone.”
This confession was couched in such rueful exasperation that I laughed in sympathy and tossed her the wineskin. “So we have both cursed our families with unfulfilled expectations. At least you bear no fault for your father’s disappointment, as I’m sure a scholarly man such as Stearc will recognize eventually. My family has no such consolation. I was a dreadful, obstreperous child, who set out from the crèche to turn their well-ordered household bottom side up and who maliciously tormented every unfortunate who stepped within my view. My sister’s reports of that are perfectly true.”
Elene took a single swallow of wine and slowly replaced the plug. Earning my eternal gratitude, she tossed it back to me. “I think your sister does not know you as you are now.”
I took a very long swallow. Perhaps the wine would blunt the whispering seduction of the night. The mist curled around my cheeks and tickled my ears like a woman’s tongue. The earth pulsed beneath my legs and backside. The richness of Elene’s voice drew soft fingers up my thighs. To keep talking was an effort.
“Nor do you know me, good Corin. If you’re feeling guilty for leading me into that little mess this afternoon, don’t. I am quite good at embroiling myself in messes on my own.” I shifted position, moving close enough to offer the wineskin again.
She shook her head and leaned forward, her knees drawn up, her hands clasped firmly in front of her legs. I could feel her breath on my face. I could smell the barley on her. The layers of damp leather. The woman underneath. Foolish to allow such distraction…
“If I’m to feel guilty, then I’d rather more fault than an accidental meeting to justify it.” Her voice played like music in the night. “I came here to ask you—No, to plead with you. The cabal needs you, Brother Valen. I’m surprised at Brother Gildas helping you escape. I never judged him a man to care about anyone’s personal safety. He is quite single-minded. But he is a fool if he thinks the lighthouse cabal can succeed without your assistance. Your sister has tried everything to glean the information we need from your grandfather with no result. And since the day the gods brought you to Gillarine, each of us has tried to unravel the book of maps and got no farther than a bare cliff and a crossroads cairn.”
“And how do you propose I assist you? Do you understand the somewhat limited prospects for a recaptured recondeur? Until the day I die I’ll not be allowed to piss without three guards watching me. You’re all mad anyway.” Her choice of conversational topic cooled my rising fever.
“The life of a pureblood…I’d always thought it holy. Your people live hidden, so honored, valued, protected, elevated beyond all of us who must struggle with everyday life, as if you spend half your days in heaven, returning only long enough to produce wonders. I thought a recondeur must be soul-dead to leave such a noble gift as sorcery behind. Yet I cannot believe that of you.”
How could I explain that the favor of kings and a life of luxury, ever shielded from want and war, was not worth the price? What ordinary would ever believe it? Few purebloods besides my own mad self had ever believed it. Everyone who’d ever known me swore that I spoke such heresy to excuse poor skills and willful ignorance, or to service childish whim made stubborn by “unfortunate conflict” with my father. All agreed my nature insupportably perverse. Yet my belief was rooted as deep as any knowledge or understanding I possessed.
The night hid her expression, leaving us a certain intimacy, like comfortable bed partners after the frenzy is past. “Mistress, when your men threw that grain sack over my head, I was convinced I would die from it. No matter that the bag was loosely woven. No matter that your intent to let me live was soon clear, and that the restriction of my sight was part of a well-considered plan. Had the sack been woven of spider’s silk wound with gossamer, the cord about my neck softer than angel’s wings, and your bodyguards’ hands as gentle as your own, it would have made no difference to my horror and dread. I could not breathe. Pureblood life was very like that for me. Now it will be worse.”
“Surely, whatever your problems in the past, your family will see you’ve changed.” She was truly naive.
“Ah, lady, you don’t know my family.” I touched her face, so pale in the fog, cool and damp. And my hand slid around the back of her neck, pulling her gently toward me while stroking the downy hair and soft skin, feeling the strength and pride of her. So alive…
Her breath caught, but she yielded, warmth flooding her skin under my fingers. Imminent danger…escape…caution…vows…all slipped away, the pulse of the night driving me where I’d no intent to go. It had been so long. The ache within me grew, trapping breath in my lungs, obliterating thought as my lips touched hers…
Torches flared from the direction of the abbey. Shouts accompanied them and were answered from the mist on our flanks. Blessed saints and angels, how stupid, how inexcusably weak, lust-blinded, and incautious, could a man get? She wanted me taken.
“Magrog have you, woman!”
Elene shot up from the ground in the same moment I did. “Brother Valen, wait! I didn’t—”
I didn’t dally to hear her excuses, but sped southward into the fog, stumbling blindly until I stopped cursing perfidious women and threw every sense I possessed into the race. Feel the thicker mist hanging over the river on your left…smell the wrack and weed…hear the whisper of water in its deep channel. Feel the road on the right…the tread of feet…of wheels…of hooves and paws for a thousand years…the restless horses patrolling there…waiting for you to stumble. And the earth underfoot…
I stopped and tore at the laces of my sandals. Throwing them off, I ran barefoot, feeling the prickling stubble of the barley field and the cold, sodden earth. Instinct warned me of holes, channels, and rocks and guided me southward, upward, away from the abbey.
The fog swallowed the torchlight and voices, and my bare feet were light, little more than a mouse’s tread through the fields. I slowed a bit and controlled my breathing so as not to give away by gasps and gulps what I gained by speed.
A pale line emerged from the fog—a rampart of stone—the abbey boundary, a waist-high rubble wall out here in the fields, not the smooth-dressed ashlar of the abbey’s public face. I slapped my hands on the top and leaped over the wall, trying to remember the terrain to the south, the route Brother Adolfus and I had traveled toward Caedmon’s Bridge. Broad meadows between the road and the river, broken by swaths of trees, and then the short steep climb toward the higher meadows, the giant’s steps toward the mountains.
Chest heaving, I knelt and pressed hands and forehead to the earth. Stretched my mind forward. Swept it across the landscape. Safety…haven…guide me… The night shifted a little. Left. A path limned with moonlight. I popped up and ran.
The breeze swelled, swirling the fog, thinning it here and there. Patches of stars appeared and were as quickly obscured. Angle right and around to avoid a spring and a thicket. Foolish as it was to hope, I began to think I had eluded them. My destination—the refuge—felt near.
Hoofbeats to my right. On the road, much too close. Torches again. Damnable beasts to bring pursuit so fast.
I burst through the edge of the fog. The night was clear; the stars gleamed above a lush meadow, broken only by a ring of trees with smooth white trunks and bright gold leaves. I’d thought these aspens were already bare…
“Ho there! Get him!” The hoofbeats dulled when they left the road for the grass of the meadow. Or perhaps my heart thudded so ferociously that it drowned out the sounds o
f pursuit.
A searing finger touched the back of my neck. Of a sudden my feet felt shod in iron. Stumbling, I dragged them onward, unwilling to concede the race. Another bolt touched my back—no mundane weapon, but sorcery, a brutal binding of limbs and will.
I was so close to the ring of aspens. What safety might lie there when I had already been spotted, I could not imagine. Yet I believed that to reach it must yield victory. Only a little farther…a few steps…
A third bolt took my knees, and I crumpled a mere ten paces from the rustling trees. The stink of horses and diseased leaves gagged me as I fell.
Until the end of days I would swear that a naked man, a dragon traced in blue fire upon his face and limbs, reached out to me from the grove. But it was too far, and the fourth bolt of fire made the night go black.
They rolled me onto a palliasse thinner than the one in the monks’ dorter, and with only hard floor, no sling of ropes underneath it.
“Can he breathe properly? Swallow?”
No, I wanted to say. He cannot breathe, not if you’ve put him in a cell. The place smelled of rusted iron and musty stone, fresh straw and old piss. Prisons were prisons, even in an abbey.
“Indeed, sir abbot, all those things. We are not permitted to injure him.” The perfumed man who had hauled me up from the ground and thrown me over his saddle sounded as if he’d a broom up his backside. His scent was cheap; his contract with Thalassa must not pay well. “The spell merely prevents voluntary movement. He is probably awake even now.”
Fingers shoved my eyelids open and I stared directly into the yellow glare of a lamp. My eyes blinked and watered. From behind the glare two shadowy faces looked down at me.