by Kate Elliott
“They’re not patrolling out of Gold Hall? Clan Hall hasn’t the resources. I suppose Argent Hall or Horn Hall might fly these parts. Don’t they oversee your assizes?”
He looked at the ground, dense with the green growing breath of plants feeding on the early rains and the promise of a fresh year. It almost seemed that he darkened in aspect, pulled shadows over himself as he changed his mind about trusting her. He was hiding from her, flashes that pricked at her vision
what if she knows?
a snake winds through underbrush, tongue flicking
keep a vessel as of clay about your thoughts, it is the only protection against the third eye
She blinked back tears and realized he was not speaking.
Fear makes you cold. Shivering, she clambered to her feet. Nip barked as the other dogs circled in. There were five dogs that she could now see, but three wagged their tails tentatively. None threatened her; they simply remained vigilant.
“You’re one of them, seeing into me,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You’re death. Have you come to kill me?”
The speed of his transformation from pleasant companion to frightened lad shocked her. She took a step away from the ugly emotion she had roused in him. “What do you mean?”
He scrambled to his feet and backed away, holding the lute as if it might shield him from attack. “She hides us, it’s all she can do against the others, for they have all become corrupt and soon their shadow will darken every heart. It’s just that the dogs didn’t bark at you. Why is that? What power do you have that can charm the dogs? Is it all for nothing, all that she has done for us to spare us?” Tears ran down his cheeks. He wept for what his folk had lost. And he continued backing away, angling so she had to turn to keep facing him.
Desperately, she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m seeking answers. I’m lost.”
“That’s what they all say. That’s what she warns us they will say, trying to get inside us, to get past the defenses she taught us to build. Nothing is safe. Nothing.”
For so many years the protection had held. Now, in an instant, all had fallen, fallen. The shadow will grow, and in the end it will consume even those trying to hide from it.
Marit swayed, struck by the hammer blow of his fear and grief. The sun cleared a cloud; its light forced her to raise a hand to spare her eyes. He had turned her, so the sun’s glamour blinded her.
He whistled. The dogs bolted into action, rounding up the bleating sheep. He grabbed a pack that had lain concealed in the grass. Silver ribbons to mark the new year fluttered from the buckle of the pack where he had tied them. The Year of the Silver Deer followed the Year of the Black Eagle, only in that case why weren’t there only two ribbons tied to his pack, appropriate to the Deer? Why were there eight ribbons, the number of the Fox? He loped away from her with his lute in one hand and the pack bumping up and down on his back.
The Year of the Silver Fox would fall nineteen years after the Year of the Black Eagle. So why was he celebrating it now?
She didn’t call after him. She recognized futility when she saw it. Anyway, she was still trembling with a fear that penetrated her entire body. She hadn’t “seen” into him. It was a trick, him speaking and her too tired or anxious to notice, or maybe a kind of magic she’d never heard of except in the tales: the magic of misdirection common to clever thieves and cunning jaryas. But he had recognized the change. He’d known she was doing it. That’s when he had run.
The lad and his dogs drove the sheep out of the meadow while she watched. The dogs yipped excitedly, eager to be on the move. Behind her, a creature stamped through the grass on her trail. She spun, grabbing at her knife. The mare trotted up beside her, wings furled.
“You warned me,” she said. “I just didn’t know what you meant.”
The horse nosed in the grass. A surface glinted, and she crouched to investigate as the mare chopped at the earth. An ornament had fallen among the grass, frayed strands of silver ribbon caught in a tiny leather loop that had once fastened the ornament to another object. It was a cheap replica of a fox, no longer than her thumb and rendered out of tin: a poor man’s year medallion, the kind of thing, like the eight ribbons, given out by the temples at the feasts dedicated to the year’s beginning. The Year of the Silver Fox.
Maybe she was still dreaming.
The mare lifted her head, left ear flicking back. Her stance changed. She stared toward the tree line off to the north in the opposite direction to which the youth had fled. Clutching the fox medallion, Marit rose.
A spit of movement made the mare shy, and Marit jumped sideways. An arrow quivered in the earth.
“The hells!”
A punch jabbed her body. Gasping, she looked down to find an arrow protruding from her belly, low by her right hip. The mare spread her wings. Gagging at the sheer utter knife of red-hot pain, Marit snapped off the haft and tossed the fletched end aside. With a shout, to pour out a breath’s worth of pain, she hauled herself into the saddle. The mare sprang into the air. Marit gripped the saddle horn, sweat breaking over her as she resisted screaming, as the point jabbed and ground inside her gut. Armed men ran into the meadow, bows raised and arrows rising in high arcs after her. These were the same sullen bandits who had first chased her, their ruthless captain identifiable by the lime-whitened horsetail ornaments dangling from his shoulders.
Then they were clear. Her vision blurred. Hills rose and fell on every side like an ocean spilling and sighing beneath her: highlands pine, vistas of grass and heath and bitter-thorn and later moss and lichen with no sign of the youth and his dogs and sheep. She concentrated on clinging to the saddle. Hold on. Hold on. Let the horse take its head and run the straightest course away from danger.
They will never stop hunting me.
“You’re death,” the lad had said.
Blood leaked down her belly and spilled over her thighs onto the mare’s gray flanks, to drip-drop into the air like rain. Her hands went numb as feeling left them. The cloak wrapped her so tightly she could not even see the landscape passing beyond, shrouding her in the same way the white shroud of death drapes the dead. But she was still breathing, each breath like flame sucked into her body. The pain of burning kept her alive for a thousand years with each lift and fall of wings, and she hung on forever wishing that oblivion would claim her, but it never did.
With a jolt that made Marit cry out, the mare clattered to earth. She spread her wings, and Marit tumbled out of the saddle and fell hard on her back. Pain blinded her, or she was already blind with night suffocating her. She choked on air. Better dead than this. Desperate, wild, she fixed hands around the broken shaft and yanked.
A stink of blood and effluvia gushed free, warming her hands. The gods heard her pleas. A roaring like a storm wind battered through her. Rising out of that gale, the white cloak of death smothered her in its wings.
3
After a certain point death is a peaceful condition, but a bit uncomfortable if your one leg is twisted beneath you, and if your shoulder, pressed into rock, is beginning to feel the pinch, and if your hip aches. She shifted, because it irritated her that minor twinges must plague her when she had earned the right to rest. Once shifted, she realized she was awake and her mind was full with questions.
Why were those men hunting her? Why did Lord Radas want her? Was it not enough to murder Flirt? Must he torture and abuse her as well, as he had that poor Devouring girl? Yet he had not questioned her when she had claimed her name as Ramit. Did he seek Marit, the reeve, or Ramit, the unknown woman walking an altar? What had the shepherd boy meant when he had called her “one of them”?
So many questions, and not a single answer in sight.
She groaned and rose to her knees. A sticky dry substance flaked from her hands as she pushed up to stand. Blood stained her tunic and leggings; her hands were grimy with dried blood and slime, but the smell had faded. She raised her hands to rub her eyes, then recalled how disgusting her ha
nds were, and looked around bleary-eyed as her skin went clammy with fear.
The mare had brought her back to a Guardian altar.
The cursed horse sucked noisily from a pool, tail swishing. The stupid beast paused to snap at a fly.
The hells!
Marit tugged at the stolen tunic, but the worn linen weave ripped right away. Below, her dark belly rounded in a curve dimpled by the Mother’s Scar, her navel. A paler line, smooth along the skin but ragged in its journey, marked a scar just below and to the right of her navel. Had she earned that scar in her days as a reeve? Had she only dreamed the arrow that had punctured her abdomen? She probed along the scar, but felt no tenderness and no pain.
“What am I?” she said in the direction of the mare, who lifted her head at the sound of Marit’s voice. “What has happened to me?”
The cursed animal gazed at her. What did she know about horses, really? Stubborn, unpredictable, skittish, narrow-minded, fixated on the familiar because the unfamiliar is a threat to them, they were prey, born to run from that which pursued them.
As she was running. She was no longer a reeve, bound to her eagle, free to hunt. She was the hunted. Like the deer, she fled the arrow meant to kill her, and when the next flight struck, she probably would not even have seen it coming.
“You’ll give me warning, won’t you?” she called to the mare.
The cursed beast flicked its ears.
“I’ll call you ‘Warning,’ just to call you something. I’ll hope you grow into your name.” She dusted flecks of grime from her ragged clothing. “Why in the hells do you keep bringing me to Guardian altars?”
The wind hummed across the pinnacle of rock on which they stood. She was panting with anger, furious and scared together, but even so the rose-purple light of a setting sun caught her attention. She spun slowly all the way around, because when beauty awes you, you must halt and try to catch your breath and your staggered heart.
The wind was light this evening, a constant blowing presence but easy enough to stand upright in despite that she stood on the very top of a vast pillar of rock. Broken contours suggested that a low wall had once rimmed the edge. No craggy peak loomed above. No overhang offered shelter within. She stood a few steps from a sheer drop-off; she might easily stumble over tumbled stones and fall to her death because the ground was a long, long way down. There was no way down except to fly.
To the west, a range of hills was painted by the colors of the falling sun. Below the pillar, a ridgeline snaked out from the hills. The ridgeline terminated in a bulge where a ruined beacon tower stood, a complex of abandoned buildings arranged at the base of the spire on which she and the horse perched. To the east, the ground dropped away so precipitously that even a reeve with her experience of heights felt her breath taken away by the grandeur of the scene: A wide basin of land darkened as the eastern sky faded into purpling twilight. Clouds drifted like high islands above the land. Out there beneath the sea of night, a few lights glimmered, village watch fires lit against the gloom.
As twilight overtook them and the light changed, the twisting coil of the labyrinth came to life, marking the path to the center where the mare waited beside the pool. Water burbled up from the rock beneath. Marit licked her lips, smelling the moisture and craving its coolness.
She did not want to be caught out at the edge of the pillar once night fell, for fear of falling over the edge. That cursed mare had a knack for dumping her at the entrance to the labyrinth. She set a foot on the glittering path, then the other. Nothing happened.
With measured steps, she warily paced out the path. A pulse hummed up through her feet as the magic of the labyrinth came to life around her: a flat ocean pricked by the emerging milky-bright light of stars; a fallen stone tower rising above rocks barely visible above surging waves; the last rumbling footsteps of a thunderstorm over a tangled oak forest keeping time with flashes of blue light high in the sky; the sun drawing a golden road across a calm sea of water; mist shrouding a high peak; in a homely village of six cottages, farmers laughing together as they trundled their carts home.
For an instant she saw onto the place she actually stood: the pinnacle of rock beneath her feet, the vast bowl of land to the east, and the rose-painted hills to the west. She took another step and saw a dusty hilltop rimmed by boulders, the setting sun visible as a red smear. She faltered, chest tight as she sucked in air for courage.
When she had looked onto this place before, Lord Radas had spoken to her. Hastily, she moved on. She smelled the rotting damp of marshland but could see only the suggestion of a flat landscape against the swallowing night. As she moved through the path, she must smell and hear what lay beyond each turn because the sun had set and she was walking in layers of night, some too dark to penetrate and others still limned with the last measure of day as though she were leaping from east to west, north to south, and back again, randomly.
Not randomly. The pattern repeated. And if it repeated, she could learn it.
She took another step. Air iced her lungs. Her face and hands smarted in a bone-freezing chill. A tincture of juniper touched her nostrils. She halted, startled by the brush of that perfume, remembering Joss and how he had washed with cakes of juniper-scented soap sent twice yearly by his mother. Joss, her lover. The man she loved, even if she had never quite told him so.
Twilight is a bridge between day and night. On its span, the wind blows both into the whispering past and the silent future, and you partake of them both because you are in transition from one state to the next, a condition that recurs with every passage between night and day and night. Indeed, this condition occurs many times in the entirety of a life, which is lived out as a series of such transitions, bridges between what has gone before and what will come next.
Twilight is a presence, hard to know in its impermanence.
Twilight speaks to her in a soft foreign lisp, with a good-natured voice half amused and half cynical.
“Hu! There you are. They’ve been looking for you for a good long while now, since long before I came to them. They’re getting irritated. If I were you, I would submit now. That’s better than what will happen if you can’t keep hiding from them. On the other hand, I don’t mind seeing them wring their hands and stamp their feet a bit longer.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a ghost.”
“A ghost! You don’t sound like a ghost.”
“What do ghosts sound like?”
“Aui! I suppose they sound like we do, I mean, that they talk no differently as ghosts than they do when living.”
“So are you saying I can’t be a ghost? Or I can be a ghost?”
“You’re a flirt,” she said with a laugh, because she liked his lazy, good-natured, and sexy baritone even if she could not trust him.
“It’s been said of me before.” Like twilight, he seemed not to partake completely of any one thing: he might be a good man coarsened by a bad situation, or a bad man mellowed by a good situation, or just someone caught in the middle with no way out but through.
“Don’t trust me,” he added, his voice darkening. “I’d give you over in an instant if I thought it would get me what I want. Who are you?”
“I’m not telling. What do you want?”
The lazy tone worked up to an edge. “Escape from this hell of endless suffering.”
“Why are you trapped?”
His laugh scraped. “We’re all trapped. Don’t you know that yet? Wait where you are and submit when they reach you, or keep running and hiding.”
The bitterly cold air hoarsened her voice. “Those can’t be the only choices.”
“How have you evaded them for so long? Neh, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. But they’re long in looking for you. They don’t like that. They hauled me free at once. They made me what I am now.”
“What are you now, besides a ghost, if you are a ghost?”
“A coward who fears oblivion and yearns for it. I have more power than I could
ever have dreamed of. I wish I could die. I want to go home, but I never will leave this land.”
“Who are you?”
For a long time he remained silent. Her fingers grew taut with cold until it hurt to bend them. Her ears were burning, and her eyes had begun to sting as though blistering from the cold.
He spoke in a whisper. “How I fear them, for they are sweet with the corruption that comes of believing they must do what is wrong in order to make things right. I was called Hari once, Harishil, the name my father gave me. Will you tell me your name?”
Marit had served as a reeve for over ten years. She’d learned to trust her instincts, and she knew in her gut that even if she might want to trust him, she must not. Anyway, what kind of person got a name from his father, not his mother? “I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”
Had she been able to see him, she would have guessed he smiled. “You need not apologize for what is true. I’ll have to tell them I saw you, but I’ll say I didn’t know where you were. There’s one thing you need to know. We can see into people’s hearts with our third eye and our second heart, but we are blind to each other. Remember that. It’s your only weapon against them.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“Nine Guardians the gods created, according to the tale you tell in this land. I think at one time they walked in accord, but now they are at war. Two rule, and three of us submit; five are enough to hunt and destroy the four who have not yet submitted to the rule of night and sun. They will find you in the end, and if you will not submit, they will destroy you and pass your cloak to another, one more easily subdued.”
“The Guardians are dead. They’ve vanished from the Hundred. Everyone knows that.”
“Guardians can’t die. Surely you know that, now you are one. Hsst! That cursed worm Yordenas is walking. Go quickly if you don’t want your whereabouts known to him! Go now!”