by Rachel Dunne
Another set of red eyes stayed on Keiro’s face—Straz, first of his kind, the giant white mravigi that lay at the Twins’ feet. There was ancient, unreadable knowledge in those eyes, a creature nearly as old as the gods he guarded. Keiro was shaking again, as he turned to follow his Starborn guide, and Straz’s eyes never left his back.
He knew the journey back to the surface was a long one, through twisting tunnels barely big enough to fit his body, but his thoughts were swirling so that he hardly noticed the time pass. The first breath of open, clean air nearly knocked him back into the tunnel. For a long while, he simply sat on the side of the hill with his arms wrapped around his knees, and stared up into the stars. The Starborn sat with him, silent, its own stars gleaming softly.
“I don’t know,” Keiro finally said aloud, to the stars and the Starborn, “if I ever truly believed. It was always the message that mattered, and the old stories spread the message. But old stories aren’t often true.” He looked down to the Starborn gazing at him curiously. “I wanted to believe they were real. That there was justice to fight for, lives to redeem. I wanted to believe. But I don’t know now if I ever really did.”
“You would not be here,” the mravigi said in its breathy voice, “if you were not a true believer. Often, the heart knows more than the mind.”
Keiro looked back up at the stars, so many thoughts and words jumbled in his mind that he couldn’t pull any of them out and put them to use. All of his life, Keiro had walked, and he had seen more things than any other man, seen beauty and horror and death and life and more than he could give name to, but it all paled next to this night. He had met his gods, spoken to them, proved them real. He had found the mravigi, a race lovingly shaped by Fratarro’s hands and almost as old as mankind. He had found, finally, his redemption.
A brief, sharp pain traveled up Keiro’s shin, and he cried out in surprise more than anything. A creature with dull gray scales, no bigger than his hand and almost as thin as two fingers, pulled itself onto Keiro’s knee. It gazed at him with small red eyes, and it seemed to purr.
“Cazi,” the Starborn at Keiro’s side admonished. The smaller mravigi was unperturbed, leaning down to snuffle at the hair along Keiro’s arm. His time in the cavern below the hill felt like a blur, but Keiro recognized the little beast’s name. Cazi had greeted him with no fear, amid Keiro’s shock at meeting the Twins. “The young are too curious,” the Starborn said by way of apology. “And he is especially bold.”
Carefully, Keiro lifted a hand toward Cazi. The mravigi didn’t so much as flinch as Keiro gently stroked the ridge of its back with a fingertip. “He has wings,” Keiro said wonderingly. They were small, flimsy things, thinner than paper, but they were wings. The old stories said Fratarro had shaped the mravigi for flying, that they had soared above paradise and their wings had brushed against the stars. But Keiro’s guide, and all the other Starborn he had seen beneath the ground, were wingless.
“Yes,” the Starborn said, though the word was so soft Keiro almost missed it. “He has wings.”
They sat in silence for a time beneath the stars, as Cazi ventured up and down Keiro’s arms, nuzzling into his hair, sniffing at the scarred socket where Keiro’s right eye had been. The moon crept down, and behind it the sky began to lighten, the start of a new day like any other, though so much had changed in the night. The Starborn’s white scales began to dim, until they were as dull and lightless as Cazi’s scales, and finally the beast rose with a stretch.
“We must go. The sunlight is no longer ours to share.” She—for Keiro had come to think of the Starborn as female, though he had no way of truly knowing—fixed her red eyes on him. “We will come for you when we are bid. If you have need, come to this place and call my name. I will hear. I am Tseris.”
“Well met, Tseris,” Keiro said formally, ashamed that he hadn’t thought to ask her name sooner. “It has been an honor to meet you, truly. I . . . I hope we might speak again. I have so many questions.” None of which, of course, he’d thought to ask the whole night she’d sat silent beside him. The creeping sun was kicking the cobwebs from his brain, and he was beginning to curse himself for ten kinds of a fool. “Would you—ow!” Keiro instinctively shook his hand, and Cazi tumbled onto the grass, his teeth tearing free from the tender webbing of Keiro’s thumb. The little Starborn scrambled to his feet and disappeared into the hill, and Tseris sat watching Keiro with a tilted head as he sucked at his bleeding flesh. It was just a small wound, a half circle of tiny punctures, but it was a sharp pain still.
“All questions are answered in time, son of gods. You will find your answers, whether you seek them or not.” She left him then, disappearing down the same hidden hole Cazi had gone, and left Keiro alone with the rising sun.
The sun showed half its face before Keiro finally rose to his feet. His thoughts were no clearer, questions still swirling, but sitting here would do him no good. He prayed briefly, with his back to the sun, his eye on the ground between his feet—a simple prayer, asking the Twins to keep watch over him. A simple prayer, yet heartfelt.
Yaket was waiting for him. There was an unusual seriousness to the half-blind elder’s wrinkled face when he found her between the hills and the tribehome.
She held up her hand, stopping him nearly two lengths from her. “I will not ask where you have been this night,” she said. “The answer isn’t for me to know, or for anyone else. What has passed is for your knowing alone.”
Disappointment swelled in Keiro, for he’d been dearly hoping to ask Yaket the questions he’d been too foolish to ask Tseris. There was no compromise in her face.
“There are things not meant to be spoken,” she said, “lest the words taint them. Secrets too precious to share.” She turned from him and walked with her slow, rolling gait back toward the tribehome.
Keiro’s feet itched. The craving nearly swallowed him unbidden, the need for a road beneath his feet, a path spiraling out unending and all the world before him. He had been made for journeying, his feet and heart singing the same song, and he had been too long in this place. The tall grasses were not his home; the plainswalkers were not his people. He did not belong here.
Yet he thought of his gods, buried and bound for centuries, finally found, finally known. There was no turning from them. Keiro had walked into the trap unknowingly, and it had closed about his ankles.
He paced slowly to the tribehome, remaining well behind Yaket. The children greeted him as eagerly as they always did, for he was still a novelty here. Poret, who was sweet and who adored him, brought him half a cooked groundbird and berries on a mat of woven grass. Yaket sat across the carefully contained fire, and though her face still held its secrets, there was a smile in her eye, and a knowing.
Of all the ways to be trapped, Keiro could be glad enough it was this trap that had caught him.
The men of the tribe returned from their hunt as the sun slipped once more from the sky. They spitted birds and hares over fires, set hard nuts to cook at the edges of the coals, passed around handfuls of berries and chewy roots and skins filled with water.
With the sky darkening above them, Keiro picked the last pieces of meat from a thin bone and set his scraps aside. All eyes turned to him, glowing at the unspoken signal.
They no longer asked for specific stories; by this point, he had already told most of their favorites, the same stories Yaket had been telling all their lives. Lately they had been asking for new stories, stories of the world beyond their waving grass, stories of the world that had gone by while they stayed still. Keiro had often wondered why they’d never left the Plains, why these people—so curious about the wide world, so hungry for adventure—had never gone to make their own stories. He thought, now, that he was beginning to understand why they had stayed.
The forced secrets burned inside Keiro, so fierce that it was a challenge not to shout at them: “My gods are real. I have seen them, and I have wept with them, and I know the truths of the world.” But Yaket was th
ere across the fire, her face smiling but her stern, milky eye shining with admonishment.
Keiro looked up at the stars, and the imperfect circle of the glowing moon, and when his gaze returned to the earth he lowered his ratty old eyecloth to block out the world and he began his tale.
“You know the Eremori Desert,” he said, and softly the plainswalkers murmured in fear and fury. The Eremori was a short journey south through the Plains, and its hot winds and blowing sands could reach this far during the worst desert storms. “With heat as great as the sun’s, the sands burn with the remembered wrath of the Parents. But it was not always so. Long ago, Eremori was a place of beauty, a land that knew love and the joy of Fratarro’s shaping. Trees grew taller than twenty men, and flowers fell from their branches like curtains. Rivers sang in delight, and threw their song far over the land.
“But for all its beauty, there were no feet to walk it, no hands to mold it, no voices to join the rivers, no eyes to see the wonder that Fratarro had made. And so Fratarro, in his might and his love, shaped feet and hands and mouths and eyes, and his greatest creation rose into the sky.
“Straz, first of the mravigi, spread his great wings and flew, and he was like a piece of the black night sky spread against the daylight—for the world was young then, and the night sky was only an endless black, as dark as the mravigi’s scales. Straz soared, and Fratarro’s heart soared with him. The mravigi touched the tops of the mighty trees, and he sang his joy with the rivers, and he loved all that Fratarro had shaped.
“Yet Straz was lonely. Fratarro grew tired from his efforts, and he did not have the strength to make a companion for Straz. He could only place a bright-stone collar around Straz’s neck, the stone white and warm, and it held all of Fratarro’s love. Sororra, who watched over her tired brother while he slept, did not have her brother’s skill for shaping something from nothing.
“And so Straz left.” Keiro dropped his voice, and he felt the plainswalkers lean in, rapt. “The bright-stone collar hung heavy around his neck, reminding him always who had given him life and love—but still he left to search for a companion.
“He flew across the land the Parents had shaped, but he found only men, and beasts that were nothing like him. The beasts fled from Straz, and the men threw pointed sticks at him, and so he left the Parents’ lands behind.
“He flew higher than he had ever flown before, flying toward the sun, which glowed as warmly as his bright-stone collar. Yet the sun fled from him, drawing a dark curtain behind itself so that Straz was lost amid the deep night. He could not find his way.
“Alone, and cold without the sun’s warmth, Straz curled upon himself into a tight ball, and he cradled the bright-stone at his center to hold the only warmth he had, and he wept for the love he had left behind.
“Shaped by Fratarro’s own hands, Straz bore more of his creator than any had thought. Straz could shape—not mountains or men or worlds, but he had a very small piece of Fratarro’s power. Just enough to pull at the edges of the bright-stone, to turn it like a glassblower and make it bigger, bigger, bigger . . . until it was big enough to hold a single, lonely mravigi.
“He sealed himself within the bright-stone, for he knew he could not withstand the sun’s cruelty alone. With the bright-stone as his shield, bathing him in Fratarro’s love, he could withstand.
“Straz slept.”
It was silent, not even a breath to stir the air, and Keiro turned his face once more up to the moon. He couldn’t see it behind the black eyecloth, but he knew where it hung. “The heartless sun,” he went on, “drove Straz-in-stone through the sky, forcing the sleeping mravigi ahead of itself. The sun whipped Straz with chains of burning light, and drowned him in dark, but could not cast him down. He was held safe by the bright-stone. The sun tried, for thirty days and thirty nights, until a spear of light finally cracked open the bright-stone egg, and Straz woke with a mighty roar.
“As Straz spread his wings, they were changed: he was changed. All of his night-black scales had been turned white, bleached by the sun’s merciless onslaught. Straz glowed white, as bright as the sun, as bright as Fratarro’s love that shone within the broken pieces of the bright-stone egg. In the light that now filled the sky, Straz could see through the night once more, and far below he saw the land he had left behind. Joy shimmered through Straz, but there was one last thing he would do: he took the shattered pieces of the bright-stone and he flung them into the sky, spread them so that never again would there be a place in the night that was not touched by some piece of Fratarro’s love.
“Only one piece of the bright-stone he did not scatter. This last piece he held: the brightest piece, the piece that had lived at its very center. Straz used his small shaping powers once more, turning this last bright-stone piece until it was as big and as glowing as the egg that had sheltered him so long from the sun. He left this piece hanging in the night sky, so that the sun would always remember.
“Finally Straz could return home. He fell through the light-spotted sky back to Fratarro’s side.
“Together, Fratarro and Sororra and Straz gazed up into the night at the shining moon and the flickering pieces of bright-stone scattered across the sky, and it was as beautiful as anything Fratarro had shaped on his own.”
Keiro paused as the silence spun out, his heart aching. Like many of the old stories, this one ended with a reminder of what had been taken: Patharro had burned the mravigi, killed them for the simple crime of existing, and he’d robbed the world of their beauty. But it wasn’t true . . . Somehow the mravigi still lived, and Keiro could not end this story with a lie, not now that he knew the truth. He paused, and the tension grew, and softly, one of the youngest children began to fuss.
He spoke again, voice low, words picking carefully through the darkness. He was a storyteller, not a story-maker, and so the words came clumsily . . . but they rang through him with truth, with the brightness of starfire. “Straz hadn’t been afraid of the sun, no matter how cruel it was . . . no matter that it was Metherra’s most powerful creation. He wasn’t afraid, for he knew Fratarro’s love would protect him. Mighty Straz, who touched the sky and who made the moon and the stars . . . he knew that the sun was not as powerful as everyone thought. Straz had hidden within the bright-stone, sleeping, and so the sun had thought him weak—but that wasn’t true, was it? Mighty Straz, who outmatched the sun . . . he knew that hiding is only waiting, that sleeping is only gathering strength. Straz knew that, with patience and with time, even the sun could be outwitted.”
There was murmuring at that, confusion at the new ending, speculation already rippling through them. Keiro grinned, pleased with himself, pleased he had found a way to give them the smallest of clues to their purpose here amid the grass sea. He thought it was a thing they deserved to know, even if Yaket didn’t seem to agree. When he lifted his eyecloth and looked down from the sky, across the fire Yaket’s face was hard. Her blind eye, white as the moon, held no gentleness, or light.
CHAPTER THREE
It was the snows again. Swirling, biting. A dream, he knew, but the knowing did not stop the dream. The knowing only settled the fear deeper. A live thing gnawing in his guts. He did not remember anything of his first life, but he remembered well what had come after, the snows and the wandering and the fear. It was a hard thing, his first memory. A thing he did not like to remember. The dream made him live it again.
In the dream he was a child again, but he was still made for the cold. Skin hard and thick as leather. Blood flowing hot through his veins. This was a different cold, though, a deeper cold. Killing cold, they called it. The snow that grabbed at his legs when he tried to lift them. Grabbed and pulled, and the fear swelled, and then the howling swelled.
The wolves were not so far away, now. Closer, hot breath splitting the air, sharp-nailed feet flying smooth over the snow. Smelling his fear. Smelling his blood. Sleek bodies weaving through the trees behind him, thin with hunger, swift in their perfect savagery. Closer, and the
tears were frozen on his cheeks. This life, so short, would end soon. Hardly a life at all. He would die, knowing nothing but the snows, biting and heartless and fierce.
The snow rose up, and drowned everything but the fear. Flakes falling all around, pieces of the world, gathered higher than his waist. He was kneeling now, too cold to cry anymore. Waiting for the wolves, waiting for the end.
“Northman!”
Somehow, he knew the word—a word that meant “fear” in any language, a word that meant “death.” Louder than the heavy-falling snow. Not so loud as the fear roaring through him, but he heard it. He knew. And the men came for him, quicker than the wolves, with spears and blades sharper than teeth. With fingers faster than sharp-clawed feet, hands that grabbed and pulled. With hate swelling in their eyes.
They took him. Robbed him from the killing-cold snows, chased away the burning cold with burning fire. Stole his life, brief and bleak.
Gave him a new one. A life of warm fires and a red-robed priest whose gruff smiles felt like home.
The everflame was the first thing Scal saw when he woke. It was not what he expected. The priests said that souls of the dead were drawn to a part of the godworld that Metherra had made for the faithful. A place to peacefully spend one’s death. To see again others from life, the ones who had passed before. It had always sounded a nice thing.
In the North, they did not have such beliefs. Death was death. Nothing after, save the flames to keep animals from the body.
This did not seem to be either. There was the everflame, and a roof above. Dimly, he heard praying. It hurt, tucking his elbows to push his body up. There was not supposed to be pain, after death. And then he saw the merra, her face folded and crinkled and ruined by fire. Staring into the everflame, searching for a message from the gods. A sight he had seen times beyond counting.