Weight of Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  He turned away then, not willing to speak to them any longer while his sister’s memory was fresh in his mind.

  Her voice had directed him to these three; they were part of his plan. And yet, by agreeing to their direction, giving up his original goal, he felt as though he was abandoning his own quest for answers. Not for the first time he felt keenly his lack of years and experience.

  “Thaïs, I miss you,” he said into the faint breeze, hoping that the words would be carried to her, wherever she waited. “Tell me what to do.”

  He waited for a response, alone on the foredeck, but no whisper came out of the breeze.

  Whatever advice she had to give, she had given. The Wise Lady was gone, and by the time the three travelers had reemerged, he had composed himself, able to face the result of their wardrobe raiding with a calm and serene manner.

  As he had expected, the Vineart’s build and coloring were suited by his own clothing, a pair of loose white trousers and a dark blue linen shirt with white embroidery picked out along the laces making him look older, more dignified. He had added a pair of low leather boots, and wrapped a narrow length of leather twice around his hips as a makeshift belt, a small unsheathed knife hanging from the side. The only thing lacking was the silver tasting spoon most Vinearts carried; Kaïnam suspected he had lost it when they went overboard. No matter—he led this expedition, not the Vineart. There was no need to advertise his presence, unless it was required.

  The trader, Ao, had found a dark green sleeveless tunic that fit—barely—across his broader shoulders and fell to midleg. He wore his own trou underneath, and a pair of low boots that had seen better days. The trader clearly understood the nature of these sun-heavy lands, as he had taken a wrap of cloth and tied it around his neck, knotted in the front in the fashion of Kaïnam’s own people, to use as protection against the sun and to stop sweat from running down under his shirt.

  Overall the look was rough but quality, as though he were a younger son gone adventuring. It would do.

  Mahault was standing in the doorway of the cabin, not uncertain but waiting for a moment to announce her presence. Bracing himself, Kaïnam looked directly at her.

  He needn’t have worried. Mahault’s stern good looks were different enough from Thaïs’s beauty that the softly draping blue robe did not look at all as he remembered it. Mahault stepped forward, her hands holding the sleeves properly, the golden belt at her hips making a delicate chiming noise, exactly as it was supposed to. Cloth sandals peeped out from under the hem as she walked, and the draped neckline showed off the proud carriage of her shoulders and chin.

  “A goddess come back to human form,” Ao said in admiration, and the moment was broken when she tilted her head, a long curl of blond hair falling from her topknot and sliding over her shoulder, and she made a face at the trader, scrunching her eyes and wrinkling her straight, slender nose. The trader tilted his head right back and made an even less attractive face back at her in response, and Jerzy clouted them both, gently, on the back of the head as he walked by.

  The pain Kaïnam felt in his chest watching them startled him, and it took a second breath to understand the cause.

  They were playing with each other, similar to the way he and Thaïs had once played. The way he would never again tease and be teased by his sister.

  He turned away from the memory, and the stranger in his sister’s clothing, looking instead at the Vineart. Jerzy’s dark eyes were focused on the port—no, on the flit ship that was being rowed alongside the Green Wave. Excellent. Exactly who they needed.

  “Travel to port side? Coin for all of you, one single kehma!” the rower called up, his Ettonian fluted with the native accent.

  “Half a kehma,” Kaïnam responded before the trader could respond, and the rower screwed up his face and spat into the water in dismissal of the counteroffer.

  “One kehma, and not a hem of the lady’s gown will be wetted.”

  “If so much as a drop touches her, half a kehma.”

  “Done!”

  THE PORT’S WATERS were as noisy and crowded as Jerzy had imagined. He sat, carefully, in the rowboat as their guide took them in through the dozens of other boats, avoiding the small naked children swimming and diving in the clear blue waters around them. It smelled strongly of fish and salt and flowers, and new wood and the pungent stink of something being charred off in the distance.

  All of his conscious memories were of The Berengia: the mild winters and breeze-filled summers, the sky overhead a gentle canopy, not this hard, overbright glare. His birthright was the Seven Unions, according to Mil’ar Cai’s assessment of his looks and his faint memory of that language, but he had been a child when taken up by the slavers; he knew nothing save random memories of being carried on the back of a racing horse, the hard wind in his face and the smell of snow in his nostrils. Even his trip to Corguruth had been within a familiar enough landscape, although the language and customs were different. This, the exotic smells and sounds, and the heat making his armpits sweat as though he had been working all morning rather than merely sitting in a boat while another man rowed? It was all new, and not a little overwhelming. He wanted both to soak it all in, the way he would a new spellwine, and to hide somewhere dark and cool until he could better understand it all.

  But there was no respite; their little rowboat slipped into a spare slot among the boats heading for shore, and their guide leaped out with surprising agility, knee deep in the water, reaching back to tow them onto the creamy golden sands. Once the hull of the rowboat scraped dry ground, they scrambled out, Mahault lifting the hems of her skirt over the wooden edge. As the rower had promised, not a drop had fallen on her.

  Kaïnam paid him his coin with good grace, and Jerzy saw him slip another, much smaller, duller coin into the man’s hand as well.

  Jerzy had never seen such glittering golden soil—the shoreline of The Berengia was hard rock and scrub vegetation for the most part—and he bent down to touch it, wondering if it felt as soft as it looked. No sooner had his bare skin touched the tiny granules, though, than a sudden, tingling shock ran through him, making him forget everything else.

  “Jer?”

  Ao was there, immediately, helping him stand up when his body seemed to refuse orders. “Jer, are you all right? Are you seasick again? Is the sun too much for you? Here, Kaïnam, get him some water!”

  Jerzy missed the princeling’s reaction to being ordered about like that, still caught up in the sensations coursing through his body. It was totally unfamiliar, the shivering sensation, and yet he knew, immediately, what it was.

  Master?

  No, not quite right.

  Guardian?

  His thoughts went from chaotic, disordered, to a sharp-edged clarity. No matter what he had told himself about the reach of magic, and the diluting effects of the expansive sea, Jerzy had never quite believed that there was anything Master Malech could not do. All the days at sea, the nights he had spent staring up at the stars, the fear had come that, perhaps, Master Malech and the Guardian were not searching for him, had—he could acknowledge the fear now—abandoned him for his failure. Not so. It had merely taken his touching land again—land where the roots of the vine still grew—for the connection to be regrown.

  MALECH.

  It was rare the Guardian used his name, rare enough that Malech paused midpour and looked up at the stone dragon perched in its usual place over the doorway, its long gray tail curling just over the frame.

  Jerzy would reach up and touch the pointed tip of its tail when he came in, like a good-luck charm. The Guardian allowed the liberty, which always amused Malech. He would never have thought to do that, never had the thought to treat the dragon as some sort of pet. Jerzy … the boy and the Guardian worked differently together, and Malech was not certain yet what, if anything, that might mean.

  It had been nearly a month since Jerzy had disappeared from Aleppan. None of Malech’s contacts had seen or heard of him, no dose of the pow
erful, expensive Magewine had found trace of him, no messages had come from him. And the Washers who were still camped in the field behind his House had not heard anything of his missing student, either—at least, not that they were sharing with him.

  A vague and cautious truce had been issued between them in recent days; the Washers had pulled back their demand for Jerzy to be handed over to them, under Malech’s assurances that the boy would come home without struggle, thereby proving his innocence. The fact that Malech did not know where the boy was, or how he fared, was the only rot in that crop. That, and he was not sure he could trust the Washers to keep their word to leave the boy alone … but what choice did he have?

  Malech.

  “What is it?”

  The boy.

  The Vineart placed the flask of vina magica he had been testing down on the desk, almost knocking an expensive glass goblet off the surface in the process.

  “You have found him?”

  The Guardian was linked to every member of the Household, by some extension of the magic that animated it. The range was limited, though—the dragon had been able to reach the boy but briefly, while he was in Corguruth—and since Jerzy disappeared, there had been nothing the dragon could report.

  I have found him.

  The Guardian was incapable of sounding smug. It was purely Malech’s own imagination that put that tone of self-satisfaction into its mental voice. That made it no less annoying.

  “Where is he? No, never mind, is the connection solid? Can you reach him?”

  Barely. But I have touched him. He lives.

  Malech had not allowed himself to seriously consider the possibility that the boy had been killed, but the Guardian’s confirmation made his eyes close in an instant of relief. A Vineart did not form attachments beyond the vines … but it was good to know the boy yet lived.

  The desire to know where the boy was, what he had been up to, what he had learned, all crowded like butterflies in his mind, and he waved them away with an effort. Only one thing mattered right now.

  “Tell him to come home.”

  “GUARDIAN?”

  The others stopped what they were doing and looked at him. Jerzy knelt on the sand, not caring that his borrowed clothing might be getting wet, or that people were staring at him. The touch had been so faint, he almost thought he might have imagined it, save that it felt more real, more solid than any memory of that voice. He could not have explained it to another person, but he knew that the touch was true.

  “Vineart, is there a problem?”

  Kaïnam’s voice, officious but without the coldness he had first projected. The days at sea had shown a different side to their rescuer, and Jerzy could hear the compassion underneath—arrogant, yes, but also kind. The princeling would have been a good ruler, someday. Might still, if his quest to restore his people’s place in the world was successful.

  Jerzy knew he should respond to the question, but he could not form the words. His mouth was heavy, as though it were carved from the same stone as the Guardian’s muzzle.

  “Is he having a fit?” That was a voice Jerzy did not recognize, worried and apprehensive.

  “No.” Ao that time: familiar and confident. The trader might not have any idea what was happening, but he would take control until Jerzy could explain. That was what he had been in training to do, as part of his trade delegation: to observe, and cover, and gain—or keep—the advantage. “Give him room, step back, leave him be. He’ll come back to us when he is done.”

  The bodies shifted away from him, and Jerzy focused again on that touch of stone-cool voice. “Guardian?”

  He was flesh and wind, and yet heavy and solid as stone, wrapped in misty clouds and touched by warm sunlight. Not-he and he merged and tumbled, and he could not tell what was true, and what was magic, faint and dizzy with sensations. The connection wavered, was almost lost, and he almost cried out in pain. Then a swift dive, wings folded underneath him, breaking through the mists and into the familiar stone encasement of the Guardian’s voice.

  You are to come home.

  “But …” The longed-for instructions came, and he rebelled, his mind stuttered over all the reasons why he was where he was, what they were planning to do, the trace he was trying to follow …

  Home, the Guardian repeated. There was an odd echo to its voice, as though something else was underlying it. Jerzy sucked at his cheeks, trying to pull up enough saliva to touch the bloodstaunch, using it to force a connection with the Guardian—both spellwine and the spell animating the Guardian were Master Malech’s work, and there should be a link he could use….

  His tongue collected a small pool of spittle, and swallowed it again. The taste of the bloodstaunch was faint now, four days later, but the quiet-magic within him recognized what was being summoned, and made the leap from his tongue to his throat to the Guardian’s touch; as quickly as that he felt Master Malech’s voice, pushing through the stone conduit of the Guardian. No words, but a sense of relief, and urgency, and yet through it all the confirmation of the order, and a sense of something that Jerzy could not recognize; the feel of solid ground underfoot, of a warm bath, a comfortable bed …

  Reassurance. Security. Safety. It was safe to come home. More, it was important that he come home.

  “But we …” He tried again to explain what he had intended to do, but the stone’s voice weighed heavily on him, a command, until he gave in.

  “All right.”

  Then the connection was broken, and he was able to open his eyes to the crowd of people determinedly not looking at him.

  “I need to return to The Berengia,” he said. “Immediately.”

  Ao, in the middle of negotiating with a young boy to arrange lodging for them, threw up his hands in exaggerated dismay, while Kaïnam merely looked thoughtful. “Your master calls you?”

  Jerzy could see no way of denying it, not if he wanted to ensure Kaïnam’s assistance, and the use of his ship. Else he would have to hire passage home on another vessel, and that would cost him time and coin he did not have. “Yes.”

  “Ah.” Kaïnam did not look angry or frustrated, but merely turned to Ao, removing a small leather bag from the inside of his tunic. “If we are to set to sea again, bound for The Berengia, we will not need a larger ship, but we will need more supplies. Water, food—and clothing for all three of you to replace what was lost. If you are as good as you think you are, this should suffice.”

  Ao took the bag, weighing it with his hand, his eyes thoughtful. “It will take me several hours,” he said, speaking to all three of them directly, rather than replying only to Kaïnam, a small rebellion against the princeling’s manner. The assumption that they would all go with Jerzy passed unchallenged, as though there was no other option, and Jerzy was still too fuddled to think beyond the need to be home as quickly as possible.

  “I will go with you,” Mahault said. “Not that I do not trust you to choose clothing you think suitable …”

  Ao looked her up and down with a considering eye. “A sahee, perhaps? Or a—”

  “Off with you,” Kaïnam said, flicking his hands at them in dismissal. “Suitable clothing. No sahee. Cover her arms and her legs; The Berengia is a more sober place than this port. Be wise in your choices!”

  Once the two of them had started off up the sandy slope toward the brightly colored awnings that heralded the marketplace, Kaïnam turned to Jerzy. The Vineart had regained his feet, and his composure, and was brushing at the sand clinging to his trou’s legs.

  “It will be some time before they return, even if your trader is as good as he thinks himself. There is no point to our waiting here, in the direct sunlight, and even less to returning to the ship so quickly. A short walk from here I remember a stall where we could purchase something to eat … and perhaps visit a wine seller’s stall, to see if there is any whisper of news from that quarter.”

  Jerzy paused in his brushing and considered the suggestion. Wine sellers were merchants who bought
vin ordinaire—and the occasional spellwine—from Vinearts, and then resold them at a markup in places where no Vinearts lived, or where they could not trade directly. Jerzy had never seen one of their stalls, and wasn’t sure he enjoyed the thought of paying for his vinas, but he saw no way around it. If he was to be useful at all, he needed at least a basic winespell or three on hand, and not rely on Kaïnam’s sparse supply if he needed anything on the journey home.

  Jerzy had had enough of being useless. No more.

  So he nodded agreement, and the two of them set out, heading in the opposite direction from Ao and Mahl’s path.

  “You fought us to go to Caul, and yet now you agree without hesitation to change course again. No questions, no arguments. Why?”

  Kaïnam chuckled. “You will never be a Negotiator.”

  Jerzy waited. He might not be subtle, and Ao despaired of teaching him how to get answers without asking questions, but he had the patience of stone when it came to waiting.

  “Your master spoke to you,” Kaïnam said finally as they walked across the sand, avoiding the sailors, porters, and occasional child running messages from town to shore. “Through magic. I did not know that there was a spellwine that could do such a thing.”

  Jerzy looked sideways at Kaïnam, but the prince’s face showed only casual interest. Was this a trick question? Or merely an intelligent and educated man’s curiosity? A slave learned not to trust anyone, and recent events had made him even more cautious

  “There isn’t,” he said. “My master …” Tricky, this. He could not deny it had happened, obviously, but neither could he give away any of his master’s secrets, nor was he willing to start rumors of a spellwine that did not exist. He did not think that Kaïnam would use the information badly, but it was still not information that he should have. Bad enough that Ao and Mahault knew as much as they did …