Mother’s song tore into a shriek.
He ran through the doorway and skidded to a stop just inside the common room.
Ellerin’s body spasmed backward as if something had hit him.
Father doubled over himself, his head turned enough to the side that Flin could see the flesh of his face. It was blackening and ... twisting, like a lemon peel tossed on the fire.
Ellerin’s eyes, rolling wildly, caught sight of the boy, and he flung an arm out to push him into his bedchamber, but missed. He fell over sideways, screaming, clutching his arms to himself and kicking his legs out like he was fighting something off.
Mother no longer looked like Mother. She looked like a shadow of Mother in a bowl of dark water. Blackening, melting, all her skin shriveling, starting to peel.
He was still sleeping. He had to wake up. He yelled, “Wake up!” It came out a squeak.
He ran to his mother. He touched her. It was horrible. He touched her harder, trying to make her be her.
Baby, her mouth said, but no sound came out. My baby boy.
Father could still talk.
“Run,” he said.
[103] Flin gripped his mother’s arm. He could not let go. His hands were burning. He screamed.
Father’s blow took him in the shoulder and sent him sprawling.
“Do as I tell you!” rasped the thing that wasn’t Father anymore. “Go, son. Run!”
Flin fumbled at the forbidden door with his burned hands. Father had told him to run. Father was out there, somewhere, with Mother and Ellerin. He looked back into the chamber. They weren’t there. They ran from the thing that made everyone black. Flin had to run or it would get him too. They were out here somewhere, at the end of this corridor, or the next one.
He ran down the corridor. He ran through an opening in the wall. There was no floor beyond it, only little black stone not-floors, one after another, down and down until there was a wall. He fetched up hard against the wall and cried for Mama. He raised his arms to be carried. The thing that made everyone black was inside him now. It was behind his eyes. He couldn’t see. “Mama,” he said, reaching for her, but where she should have been was only empty air, and he reached too far.
The blackthing tumbled and battered him for a long time before it took him.
The Head
It was always night in the holding, and there was no sleeping sound there. The air, no longer circulated by magecraft, was thick with haunts, with the dry revenants of agony. No one pinched out their candles, and oil had long since run short; where the corridor lamps were unlit, where there was no pitch for torches, few cared to walk. Folk gravitated to the common areas, crammed into the old vocates’ beds so as not to be alone, pooled their wax and oil so as not to have to sleep in darkness. In darkness, despair coated the walls, sliding down the droplets of condensation that could no longer be warded away. In darkness, some said, you could still hear the screams deep in the stone.
Rubbish, Dabrena thought, rising from her pallet and stepping carefully around her daughter, who moved listless and frowning through troubled dreams. We are haunted only by our failures.
Yet how long since she had slept sound?
Seven years. Coming with child had been the end of her own childhood; what should have brought joy had brought only betrayal. The Ennead had surreptitiously removed the freedom when they cast her warder. They had wanted more mageborn children. Dabrena had celebrated her silver ring with the prettiest boy she knew, an oblivious coupling in the glow of magestone. Now the Ennead was dead. Their Holding glowed no longer. And for Dabrena, pretty boys held no more allure.
[105] She would have preferred to bed down in the sleephall. It was what she’d been accustomed to, and the warmth and sound and smells of sleeping bodies had always comforted her. But her folk would not hear of it. “You must have your own chamber,” they’d said. Not one with windows, of course—daylight was rationed to scribes—but a private chamber with its own bathing alcove. She didn’t like it. Haunted or not, it felt both too cramped and too lonely. But she’d learned to acquiesce on small matters.
She moved from flickering candleshadow through the deeper shadow of the alcove’s hangings, and into the blackness within, feeling her way to the washstand.
There she leaned over the basin and cried, as long and as hard as she could. Her hands gripped the splintered edges of the washstand, her body curled over, her belly convulsed. Tears ran down to drench her chin like drool. They wet the basin in smeared droplets. Such a little liquid, for such a hard, hot flow of tears. She purged herself of tears as she would purge bad ale or a stew that had gone off. A cloth soaked in soiled water, she wrung herself hard. When she was through, she poured fresh water into her hand and bathed her face, cool liquid on swollen skin, waiting for her flesh to resume its pale semblance of calm.
That’s done then.
Once a night was usually sufficient. Once a night, for six years. Tears enough to fill the parched riverbeds of the Heartlands. But she was warder no longer, and had no power to divert a single tear or raindrop to where it could do some good.
She returned to the outer chamber and sat cross-legged beside her daughter, whose first whimpers, when they came, would signal the first blush of dawn against the mountain’s skin.
Seven years since she had arched in naive, victorious ecstasy under her closest friend. Six years since she’d betrayed him to the Ennead, to save the child they’d made.
“Do you dream of him?” Dabrena whispered, not quite touching the smooth head, reluctant to wake the child. “Do you remember your father, Kara?”
The inadequate light of their struggling candle darkened Kara’s cap of honey hair to the color of her father’s. When she woke—in tears, as she always did just before morning bells—the brown eyes she turned to Dabrena would be his eyes.
It was a sick and dirty thing for a child to cry each day before waking. Kara would never say why—whether it was bad dreams, or a bellyache, or missing the father she’d known a scant three moons. [106] Whatever the cause, it could be healed only if acknowledged, and that was the last thing Kara would do.
What have you done to our baby, Dabrena?
Mind wandering and ears alert for whimpers that never came, Dabrena realised that the child had awakened only when she sat up wide-eyed, pointed, and said, “He’s here,”
Dabrena’s heart clutched in her chest. She had the child behind her and a wall at their backs before she knew she’d moved. All she could feel was her heartbeat squeezed to a rapid, painful thread, all she could see was the muted sparkle of mica around her, the twin oval stains of their sleeping pallets at her feet, the black of the bathing alcove.
The strangled throbbing in her chest opened into a pounding rush of anger.
This child. This child and her fantasies.
“There’s no one there, Kara.” She just barely maintained control of her voice.
“Well, no, not now,” Kara said. She elbowed out from behind Dabrena and rubbed her eyes, her tone and stance peevish. “You moved too fast. You scared him.”
As quickly as that, Dabrena’s rage melted into sadness. Her own fault. An overreaction—the terror of her year under the Ennead had never quite left her. Her own fault. She knew perfectly well that Kara had concocted an imaginary friend. Her own fault, for raising a child so lonely she had need of one.
“Does he frighten very easily?” she asked. She tilted her head down at her daughter but was unable to stop her eyes scanning the shadows, which jumped wildly now as the candle guttered and created the suggestion of form where there was nothing.
Kara made a face. “You mean me. You think when I talk about him I’m talking about me. You think he’s really just me. He’s not. He’s him. I don’t frighten easy. I don’t know about him. How would I know? But you frighten all the time.”
These insights were so many, and so biting, that it took Dabrena a breath to catch up to them.
She said, “You know I always believe
you, Kara—” But that was a lie. She had not believed. She had interpreted. “I thought it was a game we both knew we—” But she could not articulate something as fine as the shared comprehension of what was pretend and what was not. “I’m not always frightened!”
Justifying herself to a child. Justifying protective instincts she should be praised for! I’m not a good mother, I’m a terrible mother, we all know I was never cut out for this, but above all else I have protected you! [107] But that excused nothing. She’d thought herself a snarling mountain cat defending her young. Her daughter thought her a coward, an anxious woman who spooked at shadows.
“If you had seen what I ...” But she could not put such horrors on her child. The girl was only six and a third years old, a magical age, an age of intelligence still shielded by the vestiges of babyhood.
Are you planning on finishing one of these sentences, Dabrena?
“If I saw what you saw, I still wouldn’t frighten easy,” Kara said. Responding to the words Dabrena had swallowed—bloody irritating child! But now Dabrena drew her gaze from the mocked shadows and said, quietly, brows raised, “You wouldn’t?” And more frightening than any spectre in the shadows was to see smug pride flicker across the little face, see the girl puff up, about to assert, “No, I wouldn’t!”—only to falter under the dark implication of her mother’s tone.
“Easily,” Dabrena corrected, gentling her voice, and knelt down to pull the child into her arms.
Now the tears came.
The little-girl body was so tiny in her embrace. Her father had been a wiry man, not tall, and Dabrena had been taunted for her size all her life—called doll, toy, trinket, for her small stature and honey hair and long-lashed hazel eyes. Now she was the big girl. She tried to soak up the racking sobs, take them into her, another thing to be purged after the long day ahead. If I could spare you this, she thought. If I could have spared you this ...
This what? This life? Was that it, in the end? That she had never meant to have this child, and now was saddled with her, failing and failing to make her world a happy place?
What have you done to our baby, Dabrena?
She set Kara away from her and combed the damp bangs with her fingers. Kara’s eyes slid closed under the caress, then opened with a kind of yearning. For what? What was it she cried for? Dabrena tried to lighten the mood. She tapped the button nose, three times for luck, then said, “You’re a very brave girl.”
“Why do you spoil things?” Kara cried, the morning bells ringing in her voice, and whirled away to dress herself in a wild flurry of silks and woolens.
Dabrena just knelt there, helpless. Get me away from this child, she thought. Shielders and Khinish cannot be worse than this!
“You say things to make them be true.” On went a sock. “I am brave! But you don’t know that. You think I’m a baby.” On went a pair of breeches, with much hopping and stamping. Dabrena winced as she heard a seam tear. “You tell me and tell me how grownup I [108] am because you want to make it be true—because you think it isn’t!”
“I—I’m a wordsmith,” she said, on reflex, forgetting that it was no longer true in the sense she meant. “That’s ... what I do ...”
Kara glared as if to say, That’s what you do. Make words. As if they could change things. And they never do.
It was too much. She was reading insight into the tantrum of a six-year-old. “Put your shoes on, then clean your face and teeth. We’ll be late.”
“I can’t find them!”
“Your face and teeth?”
“My shoes!”
“How can you lose a pair of shoes in a chamber this size?”
“You moved them!”
“I haven’t touched them.”
“Then maybe he took them.”
Your make-believe friend did not take your shoes. No, that would not help. Kara meant to rile her. They searched the room in silence, finding the shoes under a sack of unused outerwear moved last evening when Dabrena tidied. Her fault, again. Vindication only entrenched Kara’s sulk. In silence they walked the long lamplit corridors to the cookroom, in silence they ladled out porridge and prepared a dull salad of crumbled cheese on mushroom heather, and in silence they ate. No one ever disturbed Dabrena with news or business until she and her daughter had broken their fast, just as no one would disturb her once they had retired to their chamber for the night. She wished someone would interrupt—save her from these blighted silences, hand her a task, give her something possible to do.
But they would not. The moment she dropped spoon into empty bowl, Selen or Corle would appear as if out of the stone of the walls with a nonned critical items requiring her attention. Let her call for one of them during the meal, to discuss some plan for the day, and they would be nowhere about. Let her try to bed the child down on a cot in a maphall so she could work into the night, and Ronim or Narilyn would hound her until she took Kara off to her own bed.
A bitter laugh came out of her: My own folk, forcing me to spend time with my child. As if I didn’t keep her by me every breath.
“It’s not funny,” Kara mumbled through porridge.
“I wasn’t laughing at you, sweet.”
“Nothing’s funny! I’m angry at you!”
“You’re too young to be angry at me. You’re not supposed to be angry at me for another six years, till you discover something called ‘boys,’ which spirits help me I’m going to have to—”
Kara flung her breakfast bowl to the floor. It hit with a dull, [109] unsatisfying clatter. She stared at it for a moment, like a baby vaguely aware that her rattle was no longer in her hand. Then, with a despairing snarl, she scrambled down and began bashing it against the black stone. Dabrena was on her knees next to her just as the wood cracked jaggedly apart, gripping her hard by the wrists before she could cut herself, snatching the pieces from her hands. “Kara, Kara, Kara, what in all the world—”
“Get away!”
Peripherally aware of a concerned group gathering, Dabrena tried to enfold the tantrum in her arms. Kara resisted with the tensile strength of hysteria. Dabrena stopped pulling. Try another tack. That’s what the child’s father would have advised. “Look at me, Kara.” In her voice was all the command of the harvestmaster she had once been, before ever she was warder or mender. She could tell Kara a dozen times to do a thing and she would not, but use that tone and the child snapped to obey. A tone could have nearly the power of a binder’s song. But Kara covered her face with her porridge-smeared arms. “No,” she sobbed. “I hate you.”
Dabrena’s awareness of the crowd melted away, and there was only the child in front of her. “Why, Kara?” she whispered, letting her hands drop—then lifting them again, only to pull back when Kara batted at her. “Why do you cry? Why are you so angry? Is it your father? Do you miss him? Is it friends you miss? Other children? You have so many friends here, everyone loves you, Narilyn loves you, Selen loves you, I love you. You’re safe, Kara, I will let no harm come to you. Why are you so angry with me?”
The child, past speech, would only sob—forced, fierce sobs calculated to demand attention, to tell the world she was angry, she was hurt. But never why. Did she even know?
“Let me take her.” Reiligh, rising behind Kara like a tree. Dabrena followed the legs up the trunk to the ruddy face of the herbmaster. He was a gentle soul, a male child of Neck hill women fostered into a craftery. Unlike so many here, he had been neither mage nor seeker; just a kind man with a body too big for him, better at growing things than making things, who saw a need when the magelight failed and found his way here to fill it. “We could take a walk. Go down to the cataract. That’s her favorite place. A dip in the fizzy basin! You’d like that, Kara, wouldn’t you?”
“No,” Dabrena said—snappish, overly harsh, and it shut down the brief hope that focused Kara’s eyes. That was too bad. But this was one line they could never cross. “You know better than that.”
“Then come with us,” Reiligh persisted, calm and
inexorable.
[110] “We’ll all three of us go. Make an outing of it. How long since we’ve had an outing, eh?”
Golden Narilyn, off to the right, said, “Our visitors are gathering in the presence chamber. Dabrena must attend them.”
“But Kara doesn’t have to,” Ronim said. Like Narilyn and Selen, he’d been a vocate with her, and would speak as few others dared; the bond among those called by the Ennead was strong, and stronger for what that Ennead had done to them. Dabrena caught the tap of a foot. Ronim thought the child should be packed off to Dabrena’s family in the Fingers.
It was the same on all the faces, even Selen’s and Corle’s. Pity, embarrassment, irritation. She could not afford a display like this in front of the junior menders. So many of them had come here since the uprisings. The others hadn’t seen what she had seen. They didn’t understand what it was like, what she had done, why she must always keep the child near, keep the child safe.
Kara’s sobs died to a sniffle. Poor Kara, tiny Kara, forgotten in the midst of a crowd centered on her. “We have to go now, sweet,” Dabrena said. “This is an important day. People have come a long way to see us. We have to be strong and smart today. Tonight we can cry, all right? Tonight we can be angry. All right, Kara? All right, sweet?”
The child rose obediently, accepted the wet cloth Selen offered her to wipe her face and hands. But her shoulders were slumped. The clear angry light had gone from her eyes.
I think I’d prefer the tantrum, however inconveniently timed.
What have you done to our baby, Dabrena?
She denied the voice that haunted her, the guilt that ran like an old dark bindsong under all her thoughts. With Kara firmly in hand, she turned to fetch the food and drink she would be bringing for the holding’s guests.
Selen stopped her.
The others exchanged glances. Then everyone left the dining hall but her most senior folk.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 13