by Carol Berg
“I always thought you meant I’d be free of Patronn, free of this house. But you didn’t, did you?” I eased my hands from his grip. He clenched his gnarled fingers to his breast and I enfolded them in my palms. “You meant something else altogether.”
“Free of them. Free of their Law, free of their dread summoning. Thou shalt be the greatest of the Cartamandua line. Our family will be powerful beyond dreaming. Thou shalt map the whirlpools of time, the vales of memory, perhaps even the very bounds of heaven and hell. But I cannot tell thee. Forbidden. Punished. Mad…” His eyes flared hot and wild in the dim light.
“It’s all right, Capatronn. I’m here and safe.” I changed course again to soothe his rising agitation, tacking toward answers like a sailing ship against the wind.
I turned a few pages of the book. “Let’s look at the maps—tell me again how their magic works so I can use them after I turn eight-and-twenty.” Time was running, and I had to calm my own frenzy. “Anyone else must read the spell in the cartouche or the border, but I—You knew I could not read words and might never learn. So how could I ever use the maps?”
“Foolish boy. I taught thee.” He shuffled through the pages to the first map and tapped his finger on a tiny mark at one corner. “I opened this book to thee, who art without words, yet complete. For thee only, every map has one. Feed it magic…trace thy path and feed it, too…and the land will open its arms to thy skills. Not yet though…not yet.”
I nudged his dirty finger aside and uncovered a grinning aingerou. He had put one on every page. “So I touch the aingerou and release magic into the page. Then I trace the route, feed it magic as well, and I can find my way without reading. Is that right?”
He clapped his hands and chuckled. “Clever, is it not? And thine own power will take thee farther yet, for thou art of my blood, thy bent incomparably strong.”
It was all I could do to hold back my finger from the page, but I dared not work spells here.
“Earth and air and sky are one whole,” he said. “At the boundaries of thy knowledge—the boundaries of the world’s map—walk and listen and feel the joining of earth, air, and sky, seeking thy desire. Take up thy pen. Thy blood—Cartamandua blood—bears the magic; thy fingers will funnel it through pen to page and the way will be clear. Travel the way thou hast scribed, and begin again.”
“But I don’t use—” No. No need to confuse him. I had never needed pen or ink to envision a route. When he had enjoined me to “feel the earth” back when I was a child, I hadn’t understood that he meant some abstract “sensing” of the universe that would only take shape when marked on paper. I had believed he meant for me to lay hands on the dirt as we did when tracking footsteps.
“Claudio never could do it. He draws only what he sees, for his mind is clay. Thou, lad…thou art quicksilver.” His trembling fingers turned the leaves, one by one, touching, but not quite touching, the inked features, the bright drawings on the grousherres, the elaborate designs of frames and cartouches. “Thou shalt find the places even I could not.”
But unless I could get free of Osriel, I would have no opportunity. Someone other than me would have to lead the cabal into Aeginea. “Tell me, must others use the aingerou as well—before they can use the written spells?”
“No. The book is thine alone—not for Claudio, not for Josefina, not Max or the rest. With the gryphon charm canst thou permit others to use it as it was made. Thy choice.”
The gryphon charm…great gods…no wonder he’d had me recite that bit of doggerel until my head split. “So I touch the gryphon—this one”—I pointed to the gilded beast on the front cover—“work the charm with a person’s name, and that person can use the book. My choice.”
He bobbed his head happily. “Thy choice. Thine own book forever.”
“Tell me, Capatronn, do any of these maps show a way into Aeginea?”
His fingers paused in their explorations, and he raised his face, stricken. “Go not to this place where I am, Valen…to this dark place…this mad place.”
“No, no. I just want to see the map you used to find Eodward. It must be very fine. Beautiful. Showing the power of your blood, of your art and magic. Then I’ll know which map not to follow until I’m eight-and-twenty.”
He leafed through more pages until he reached the very heart of the book. The open page displayed a wholly unremarkable fiché, little more than a line drawing without colors or gold leaf or any other elaboration. Very little lettering. One might have thought it a preliminary sketch bound into the book by mistake. The landform outlined so vaguely was certainly Navronne.
“No map can show the way,” he said. “Aeginea is everywhere. Nowhere. But this”—his tremulous finger drifted across the page from small notations of a tree and an arch to five rosettes scattered here and there in no particular pattern—“depicts its heart and its mystery.”
His chewed and broken nail touched a rosette, causing another symbol to appear beside it like a shadow, only to fade as he moved on to the next. I glimpsed the symbol for a mountain and another for the sea. A third, located beside the rosette at the top of the map, I didn’t know, but the fourth showed the same waterfall symbol he had used for Clyste’s Well. If that one did indeed depict the Well, then the tree and the arch must certainly be Caedmon’s Bridge and the Sentinel Oak.
“This is the Center,” he said, reverently, as he touched the fifth rosette, which was nowhere near to being the accurate center of the other symbols or the page itself. If the arch was Caedmon’s Bridge, then it lay well south in Evanore. Its shadow symbol was a bolt of lightning, a notation I had never learned. “Here is where the Chosen dances to bring all life to joining.”
His grizzled mouth and chin worked in tight spasms, as he gently smoothed the worn edges of the page. His eyes filled with tears.
“Saved only this one map of them all. Promised Clyste to destroy them, so no human could travel there. The long-lived had grown to despise and fear us. Clyste said I could keep my promises without the maps. But this is my life’s greatest work. Our family’s glory.”
Thus we reached the heart of the matter. “Why, Capatronn? Why do the Danae despise us so?”
He shuddered and jerked, and I was afraid he would retreat again. But he took a quivering breath and gathered his spasming limbs. Summoning control, I thought. Every emotion, every physical expression required constant mastery to prevent it running wild. His head jerked and his eyes squinted and blinked as if someone was striking him.
“We lie,” he said at last. “We betray. They cannot grasp our nature and dance it into their patterns. Sometimes our needs make demands of us they cannot understand.”
“As with Eodward who did not return to the Danae, though he had promised he would.”
My grandfather bobbed his head. “That was but one of so many. They did not blame me for that one. Nor for the Scourge.”
“The Scourge?”
“Some humans want to drive them away. They foul groves and springs, trees and fields. Sometimes”—he leaned close and dropped his voice—“they damage the Canon itself. The long-lived never speak of it lest we learn the power we have over them. It is their direst secret: that they cannot cross the barriers of tormented spirits. If the guardian is not joined with the tainted sianou when it is poisoned, she cannot return to it. The Canon is corrupted, and the guardian wastes with grieving. If joined, the guardian is trapped—ah, holy ones—trapped inside the sianou. Chained as if with myrtle and hyssop, but chained with poison, and so he does not fade, but dies there. Both land and guardian lost forever. Forgotten. And so is the Canon broken.”
“Tormented spirits?” I said, wrestling with the ideas of dancing that could be broken and Danae who could be murdered while outside their bodies.
“Violent death. Corrupt blood.” My grandfather’s face crumpled. “They did not blame me for those crimes—nor any human save madmen. They could not believe that any reasoning creature would purposely break the Canon. And they k
new I loved the dance. Ah”—he clutched his heart—“to see the dancing in Aeginea again. But never will I. Never. I am lost until the last ages of the world. They do not forgive.”
As fog lifts from the mountains, revealing snow-draped crags and sunlit pinnacles, so understanding grew in me. Not only about the world and coming chaos, not only about the savage rituals of Harrowers and royal bastards, but about what I saw in front of me. I took his chin and drew his face around so I could look on his pain-racked visage. Every word of sense, every moment of stillness, cost him dear.
“Capatronn, what did you do that the Danae have punished you so terribly? That they have broken their last ties with humans? You must tell me, Grandfather.”
“I”—his brow creased; his lips twisted and fought to shape the words—“stole from them. A treasure they did not value. I had the right, but they could not forgive the loss of it. And then I failed her. Ahh…” He gasped and gripped his head in his hands, drew up his knees, and curled into a knot. The book slipped off his lap.
I laid my hand on his trembling shoulder. “What treasure? What was worth all this?”
His fingers curled and he drew his fists to his head as he began to rock. “Cannot tell. Cannot. Secret…secret…secret.” Though he was trying not to, he moaned…louder by the moment.
“Can I help you? I could stay a while.”
“Naught.” He shook his head wildly, even as he clamped his jaw over a scream, and wrenched his shoulder from my hand. “Naught can be done. Go.”
I quickly gathered up the book, stuffed it in the bag, and snuffed the lamp. As I crept through the darkness toward the door, my grandfather began retching violently. The stench of vomit and loosened bowels followed me to the door.
“Go!”
“For the book…Grandfather…thank you.” I pulled the door closed behind me. Breathing deep of the clean, wintry air, I leaned on the thick oak that muffled his rising screams and wished that most futile of all wishes: that I could begin again and weave the knowledge I had just gleaned through the days of my life.
Swallowing hard, I crept silently through the frozen courtyard. I stopped in the rose arbor, brushed the snow from the stone bench, and sat, pulling the book from its bag again. The book must go back to Luviar, and if it was ever to be of any use to the cabal, I had to open it to them. Tonight, for I might never have the chance again. I had to trust that they would use it wisely, accounting for the information I would send them. And so, accompanied by the unholy melody of my grandfather’s screams, I touched the golden gryphon and recited the bit of verse he had pounded into me years ago.
With mighty sinew, beak and claw,
Feathered wings and eagle’s eyes,
The gryphon guards its nest of gold.
Ripping, flaying sinew raw,
Crushing rib and limb and jaw
Of all who seek its agate prize,
Save for the…wily…hunter…Luviar…bold.
I fed magic into the charm, which was supposed to impart whatever virtue you named to whomever you identified as the hunter bold. As a boy I had always inserted my own name as the hunter, wishing for strength to fight off my father’s next beating or cleverness to elude recapture when I ran away. I had hoped to use the golden nest and agate eggs to pay for my own house or buy my own contract, before I knew such possibilities were as much myth as the gryphon itself. I’d not even known how to quicken a spell in those days.
The golden gryphon pulsed with warmth and light, and I considered whether to give access to anyone else. To leave it with only one seemed risky. So Gildas. He was younger, less prominent, and the Scholar, who needed to find the Danae. And one more? I considered Stearc, but settled on Gram, the secretary, instead. Clearly the conspirators relied on Gram’s intelligence. And he understood the Danae better than any of the others.
Once done, I packed the book away and peered around the edge of the arbor to watch for Jullian. When the slight figure trudged down the path from the kitchen, lugging a heavy pail, I followed and slipped through the doorway behind him into the warm and comfortable apartment. The bathing tub was filled to its brim.
The boy about jumped out of his skin when I grabbed the door from his hand and closed it softly behind us. “Did you see him? Did you learn anything about the book? Is he truly mad?”
“Yes to all three. But first, did you have any trouble? Any suspicions?”
“The pureblood—not the one in these green clothes, but the other one in black and yellow—stopped me on the last trip and asked if I liked serving you. His hand was on my head as I answered, and I felt…unclean.” The boy averted his eyes.
“That was Caphur,” I said. “An overseer from the Pureblood Registry. Very skilled at his work, and he doesn’t like me very much. I hope you told him the truth.”
He nodded. I surmised that Caphur had approved his answer. I did not press to hear it.
I sat on the chair and summoned him close, lowering my voice even more. “So tell me, how did the abbot and my sister plan for you to send them information?”
“The false priestess said I should tell the people here that she had thought-summoned me back to her temple,” he said. “Or I could ask for Silos and tell him a particular word she gave me, but to do that only if things were very bad. Elsewise, I’m to wait until she sends for me.”
I kneaded my scalp. The plan was much too obvious. No one would believe Thalassa summoning the boy in the middle of the night so soon after getting him assigned here. Having grown up with a brother like me, she didn’t understand what trouble Jullian would have with lies. And I could not risk his safety by having him sneaking about with secret passwords.
“We’re going to do things a bit differently. In a little while, I am going to start yelling at you and throwing some things. I want you to run both to Silos, the fine-scented temple guard, and to Caphur, the one in black and yellow, and tell them that I’ve frightened you. Tell them you want to return to the temple and that, of course, the Sinduria will allow it. Only that.”
“But—”
“You can’t take the book. You might be searched. I’ll hide it here under my palliasse, and the Sinduria can retrieve it. Here’s what you need to report to her…”
They weren’t going to like what I told them—that my grandfather had stolen some treasure from the Danae but refused to name it, and that they should look to Prince Osriel, who mutilated the dead, or these Harrowers, who sacrificed violated bodies to their Gehoum, as the root of Danae hatred for humans. He had even claimed such rites broke the Canon. What did that mean? Was it possible that some ritual dance could determine the fate of the world? Now I had seen a Dané, anything seemed possible.
Perhaps the conspirators could use this new knowledge to strike some bargain with the Danae and find out. And any stolen treasure of my grandfather’s was likely to be in this house. If they could persuade the Danae to say what he’d taken, Thalassa could likely find it. Three of the cabal should be able to use the book, at least, leaving them with no need for a Cartamandua to guide them. Whether these things fulfilled their need, I couldn’t say. I had no more lei-sure to think.
“…and lastly, I need you to tell Brother Gildas…only him, please, no one else, for I am sorely shamed by it…that I desperately need to see him. Tell him that I am…beset by my old sins…and need Iero’s grace that only he can bring before I go to my new life. Can you remember all that?”
The boy rolled his eyes, a portrait of pained tolerance.
Despite my guilt at burdening a child and a holy monk with my perversions, I could not restrain a smile. “Well, of course, you can. The brightest scholar ever come to Gillarine. And the bravest. And the kindest. A light worthy of a holy lighthouse. Tell me one thing, lad; you’ve never—No one’s ever said aught to you of your real father, that he was…special…in some way?”
He shrugged. “Mam told me he was a scribe who drank so much his liver rotted. She showed me his portrait that his sister drew on a bit of ba
rk, so I could know him. But she said good riddance to him and that my new da was the better man.”
So much for legends, rumor, and Valen’s clever insights. I squeezed the boy’s thin shoulder. “Godspeed, Jullian. You make me wish to be a better man.”
This time, when I picked up the padded chair and threw it into the wall, two legs broke off. The stools, the upended table, and all the scraps from our dinner splashed into the overfull bathing tub, inundating the rugs. While making silly faces at Jullian to soothe his fear, I yelled and cursed and threw myself at the door until the hinges snapped. As soon as the door crashed into the courtyard, he ran. When Caphur and Silos found me, I was ripping up my fine clothes and dropping the silks, brocades, and fur-lined cloak into the greasy water. A knot burned in my gut.
Thoughts and plans roiled in my head all through that long night as I lay tied to my bed, feeling my disease and my craving devour me and praying for Gildas to come. My grandfather had been trying to protect me, not from my family, but from the Danae. He had violated their trust…a man who had traveled their lands for years…who had guided a high priest and a hierarch to Eodward and brought them safely back to Navronne. Janus de Cartamandua had turned thief, and in retribution for his crime, the Danae had severed their last ties with untrustworthy humans and threatened the grandson whom, for whatever inexplicable reason, he favored. To shield me from their vengeance he had let them take away his control of his mind and body. Great gods, what had I ever done to deserve such a sacrifice? What secret bargain had he made with this Clyste? And why would one more birthday set me free of the threat?
The Dané at Caedmon’s Bridge had confirmed his story, speaking of thievery and treachery, of poison and bargains broken, and she’d said that we must return what was stolen before they would deal with us. What treasure had he stolen that could exact such a dreadful price? A “treasure they did not value,” but were determined to have back. Something he believed he had a right to.