The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination')

by Terry McGarry

  “We must talk, Dabrena,” Selen said.

  “Whatever it is, we’ll sort it out later. The runners and Khinish and shieldmaster will be waiting—”

  “Let them wait. There will never be a later. Later is always later. Now is now.”

  Selen gently disengaged Dabrena from her daughter. Reiligh took Kara’s hand. Kara looked to Dabrena for permission. Dabrena said, “No,” and reached for her. Selen took Dabrena’s arm and said, “Yes, [111] Bre. This once, let’s try it. She’ll be right there at the other end of the hall. She’ll never be out of your sight.”

  Dabrena, flummoxed, let herself be herded toward the far end of the hall. Midway there she said “No” and turned for Kara, now seated and babbling nonstop to Reiligh as if her tantrum had never happened, her mouth full of gooey breadroot. Don’t let her do that, she’s overexcited, she’ll choke on her food—but Selen and Corle had a firm grip on her, and before she knew it she was seated at the other table, and Corle was behind her, pressing down on her shoulders with his chubby hands, not letting her rise.

  “Dabrena,” Selen said in a low voice, sitting beside her, leaning in close. “You can see her. She’s with Reiligh. She adores him. He’d die for her. She’s right there.”

  “You’ve done all you could to see that I spend time with her, and now—”

  “Yes, all we could. And we’ve just seen what’s come of it. We’ve seen it every morning for three moons now.”

  Dontra barred the door, to keep the conversation private; both door and bar were new since the uprisings. Then she sat down with Dabrena, Selen, Ronim, Narilyn, Loris, and Corle. Except for Jerize, Eltarion, and Cinn, who were in the field, these were all who remained of their vocate sleephall. Tolivar was dead; Terrell and Garran were assumed dead; Jonnula had died in the Fist; and Karanthe, Herne, and Annina, like so many reckoners, had become runners. There had been nine-and-eight of them when they were called. Seven of them left alive here, six in the field. Four dead or missing. Their losses had been minor compared with other halls’.

  Well, they were all one hall now. But these were her closest advisors, her head folk. Only Reiligh had penetrated the inner circle Dabrena had formed with those who’d earned the ring with her, who’d stood by her in the last days, and the first.

  “What is this?” Dabrena said warily.

  Corle glanced at Selen, as though it should fall to her, but when she hesitated he said, “You’ve got to let Kara go.”

  “The child is a misery,” Ronim said.

  “The child is miserable,” Selen snapped. “There’s a difference.”

  “I’m not having this discussion again. Not today of all days.” Dabrena tried to rise. Narilyn, beside her, pressed her down by the forearm. She shook the grip off, but could not shake off their combined gazes. It was hard to read them and watch Kara at the same time. Was that the strategy?

  “You must, Dabrena. We can no longer endure this.” Again Corle [112] looked at Selen, a bulge-eyed goading to speak up, and Selen said, “To your family, that would be best, I think.”

  “I’ve already told you no.”

  “She’s a hindrance,” said Ronim.

  “She’s my daughter!”

  “She’s a possession you guard with a ferocity bordering on obsession,” said Corle, head bowed. “And you are killing her.”

  “Not to mention the rest of us.”

  “Shut up, Ronim.”

  “I’m not unsympathetic—”

  “Yes you are. And it’s irrelevant.”

  “We shouldn’t gang up on her,” Dontra said.

  “This has to be done,” Selen replied.

  “To send her away would be the worst kind of betrayal.” Dabrena looked from one of them to another, then across at Kara, then to the next. “Think what it would do to her!”

  “That’s not what you’re thinking, Dabrena. You’re thinking what it will do to you.”

  Dabrena opened her mouth to object, and tasted lies, and swallowed hard. “You don’t know,” she said.

  “I think we do, a little,” Dontra said. She spoke softly. Dabrena’s heart flew into her throat. If Dontra guessed—

  “We know it was bad, whatever it was. It had to be. Everything then was bad. The Ennead did terrible things. That’s all we need to know. What else could have made you the way you are?”

  “It wasn’t so bad when she was little. She could stay by you night and day, amuse herself alone in the midst of adults hard at work. Her mother’s presence was enough for her then. Now she needs company. She needs children. She needs freedom.”

  “She’s not interested in children’s games.”

  “You’ve taught her not to be.”

  “It comes down to this, Dabrena. Send her home to your village in the Fingers, or we will all go permanently into the field.”

  This was madness. “You’d leave the holding? With so much half done? You’d leave your work, your friends?”

  “I’m afraid we would.”

  “Then I’ll go into the field, I’ll take her with me and—”

  “You’d keep her on as tight a rein outside as you do here. Tighter! If you won’t let her run the corridors of the holding, how will you treat her when there’s a whole world to get lost in? You’ll tighten your stranglehold on that child until she gags. She doesn’t want to go adventuring. She wants a home, a real home in the sunlight, where she can run free in blithe safety.”

  [113] “She’d only love my village because it would be a holiday, full of gifts and treats. When the holiday wore off ...”

  “Why would it? They’d cherish her. They’d adore her.”

  “I cherish her. I adore her.”

  “Do you? Do you really? Dabrena, do you even love that child at all?”

  Dabrena was too appalled to answer.

  Loris said, “She’s a precious stone, Dabrena, a beautiful glowing stone you were handed out of nowhere and never wanted but protected with your life because you knew she was precious, even though you couldn’t see it yourself, even though the stone was never something you wanted and all it ever did was weigh you down.”

  Dabrena stared at the barred door.

  “You can let her go, Bre,” said Selen. “It’s all right. She’ll still love you. She does love you, though you cripple her. Her love for you will only grow stronger for her learning to love the world, too. Let her go. Let her go to a place where she’ll be happy.”

  After Karanthe had left, Selen had been closest to her. She relied heavily on Selen’s judgment, her equanimity. “They wouldn’t look after her properly, they’d—”

  “Oh, spirits, Dabrena, of course they would!” said Dontra.

  “Children are dying out there. Fevers, injuries—”

  “At least they lived a little!” Ronim cried. “That child is dying here, can’t you see it? As surely as if you’d let her take a fever or fall off a cliff. Living in the dark, among people too driven, too busy to be with her, living among haunts in the shadows, denied the company of other children, pets ... You will kill her if you keep her with you, no matter where you go.”

  “And we need you here,” said Narilyn.

  “You must think I’m a very bad mother,” Dabrena said softly.

  “You were a good mother,” Selen said. “You were, Dabrena. The way you made her laugh, the patient way you taught her, the way you touch her when you aren’t thinking about it, which is when she feels it because that burning intensity of your focus is diverted from her for long enough to let her feel. But she doesn’t laugh anymore. She’s secretive. She throws tantrums. When is she happy? When she’s away from you. Look at her there with Reiligh, look how animated she is. You are smothering that child. She is a flame that has no air to breathe that she might burn bright. Let her go, for this little while. Just a few moons. If your village is ailing, send her to Glydh. She’s a piece of Tolivar, still living in the world. Entrust her to his family. Let them touch her. Let them love her. Let them see him living on in her.
”

  [114] After a long silence, Dabrena said, “There’s so much I should have done, Selen.” Gone to Glydh, to see Tolivar’s folk. But I’d have had to tell them what became of him. I could not tell them how he died. When he went for a proxy, they knew they might never see him again. Better to leave it at that. Better to wonder, than to know what I would tell them. Let the child run free and happy through the passageways. But she might have fallen, gotten lost somewhere I couldn’t reach her. Brought her home. But there’s fever in the Hand, symptoms we’ve never heard of, an illness we might not be able to outsmart ...

  Saved that infant from the Ennead.

  But I couldn’t.

  Saved Tolivar.

  “I’ll let her have minders,” she said abruptly. Negotiating, like a petitioner. It had come to this. “Reiligh can look after her in the mornings and Belwyn can have her with the other children in the afternoons.”

  “Listen to yourself. Every one of those words was a tooth being pulled. You can barely stand to sit across from her in the same hall.”

  You weren’t there you don’t know ...

  “Something terrible happened.”

  “We know that.”

  “But it happened six years ago.”

  “It’s a new world now.”

  Like proxies, all speaking with one voice, as they had been trained to do. She would not sway them with words. She would have to prove it to them.

  “I cannot delay the meeting any longer.” She rose. She called across the room: “Reiligh, could you look after Kara until sunset bells?” She heard Kara’s gasp of hope. She saw Reiligh’s surprised, pleased nod. “Would you like that, Kara? Just until suppertime?”

  Kara clapped her hands in delight, a gesture Dabrena had never seen her make. Her beaming smile cut deep.

  But she had done it. “You see?” she said, turning.

  “Yes,” Selen said quietly. “Do you?”

  Head high, Dabrena fetched the tray she had prepared, then set it on a table by the door. She unbarred the door, opened it. The corridor beyond stretched long. She stepped out.

  It was like ripping off a limb. All she could feel was that soft weight pulled from her arms, over and over again. Held before her, that tiny precious life in the balance. The echo of the strangled cry, the infant who was not her own, but could have been. All she could think was I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t.

  [115] The child was part of her. The child belonged to her. They could not be separated. Not even for Kara’s sake. She fetched her daughter.

  When Verlein n’Tekla l’Sayal had left this holding, at the end of the mage war, it had been a chaos of fleeing stewards, a slaughterground of mages. Its warders, newly deprived of their magelight, had been exhausted and demoralised. By rights the place should have been abandoned. It should stand now a deserted memorial to the failure of magecraft, its only denizens some refugees weathering the gales that battered its coastal village, perhaps some former mages and stewards clinging at peril of starvation to the only home they’d ever known.

  It should not, by any means, be a thriving community. It should not have its own sources of food or suppliers of materials; it should have nothing to trade or barter.

  She had assessed this holding as a casualty of the magewar. She should have known better. Never count the dead till you see the bodies. There had been life in it still. Not much, but a flicker. Enough. And Dabrena n’Arilda l’Desarde, against all odds, had fanned that ember, and made this mountain holding a force to be reckoned with once again.

  Oh, they were struggling. You could see it through the cracks in the rotting wood of the privies, smell it in the cheap candle drippings. They were living on fungus and goat cheese, wearing castoffs, shivering in their stone chambers—but they were fed, they were clothed, and they were sheltered, which was more than many could claim. They went bladeless not because forged iron was beyond their means but because danger, here, was beyond their ken. Above all, they had purpose. They moved through their smoky passageways with vigor. They discussed their work over meals, at chance meetings, in their sleephalls, with laughter and eagerness.

  This had been a terminus of torment and death. A petite cottar from the Fingers had made it a nexus of healing and life.

  How the woman had done it was not entirely clear. She’d built somehow on the structure of proxies. Verlein had paid little attention to the ins and outs of magecraft. She had never fully understood its hierarchies. Why understand what you were set to behead? She had dedicated herself wholly to the Ennead’s downfall. She had mustered an armed force to effect it. An “army,” she thought wryly. Thanks to little squiggles on parchment leaves I could tear with my fingers, we have a word for it. They were my fighters. The Ennead called them rebels—a horde of rebels. And now we know: They were an “army.”

  [116] It was a word from an ancient world, speaking like a haunt through the medium of ink and leaf. There was more power in those squiggles than she’d allowed for; they were a window on a warring world she would never have heard of without them, and folk who could read them. There were volumes of such leaves, bound into codices. She’d found them cached here when she took the place.

  Burn them—her lips had formed the words, but her throat had given them no voice. She’d taken a torch from the wall and prepared to cast it into the chamber piled high with codices. You burned off the leaves of autumn, the detritus of the dying year. Those codices represented an order that had taken her folk and returned nothing, ignored her and then killed those she loved. Every particle of her being had wanted to see them burn.

  She didn’t know what stopped her. Not Evrael; though he took credit for snatching the torch from her hand, she had already let the arm fall, the command die on her lips. Certainly not a promise made to a mage who had betrayed her. He’d asked her to salvage them at all cost. She had agreed. Then he had abandoned her. The promise was forfeit. Yet she kept it.

  And here she was, in this holding again, six long years after sparing the codices, sparing the warders, six long years of vigil along Eiden Myr’s shores. The presence chamber was empty now, serene in lamplight, hung with colored tapestries that would have been a sacrilege in another time. They had only tangible wardings against cold and damp here now. The blood had been scrubbed from the stone by hand.

  She had come here to meet with the remains of the mages she had spared. She had come here to say, “Your folk are gelded. Send them home to provide for their families, or send them to us if they can learn the blade.” She had thought to make this dead mountain a fortification against attack. But she had found it thriving.

  What she had done was not so different from what Dabrena n’Arilda had done. She had encircled Eiden Myr with her fighters, so that no ninemile stretch of coast was left unguarded. When the magecrafted warding around Eiden Myr was broken, it left them vulnerable to the outer realms. On the rare clear days, they could see the strip of land on the horizon off the Fist. “That’s where we came from,” the scholars said, and tellers took up the tale, and spread it. “That’s where mages lived once, long ago, before we fled to exile here. What we thought was the world was an island. We live in an island realm. There really was a land beyond the mists.”

  Verlein had taken charge. If there were real folk in the land beyond the haze, they would have real ships and real blades, and they [117] would covet this fertile bit of country laid out on the waters. They would fear and hate its mages, whether or not they knew the light had gone.

  Where there had been a magecrafted shield she put a human shield, bristling with iron. From the Holding she had headed into the Midlands, where folk had been primed to fight her, and turned them to her cause. They were ready to fight something; a threat from the outside was more palatable than the threat from her, and at any rate she had beaten them. She was the victor. The Ennead had been corrupt and she had routed it. Chastened but still battle-ready, young Midlanders had flocked to her. Cored and directionless, mages had flocked to her too
, for the structure and stability her cadre offered. She had a clear goal and a chain of command. Lightless, useless, they welcomed the tasks she set them. They had spent their lives protecting Eiden Myr through their craft; with their craft denied them, they turned readily to her. Oh, some had gone back to the trades they were born to, becoming cobblers and weavers and sheepherds again, where their villages would have them; and some had fled to the Isle of Senana, where a pale shadow of magecraft’s routine could be found. But many had come to her. And some, it seemed, had come here.

  None of it was more important than what she was doing. If hordes of fighters, invaders, armies, came over the Forgotten Sea, or the Dreaming Sea, or the Sea of Sorrows, or slipped around and came at them from top or bottom or back, there would be no cobbling then, no scholars, no sheepherds. Eiden Myr would be conquered and enslaved. That was something else they had learned from those codices of theirs. In the outer realms, in the realms of old, that was how it was done: You invaded, you conquered, and you ruled.

  She would not have it. Her folk would fight to the death, to the last one of them, before they would let outworlders set foot on Eiden’s body.

  She ran her finger along the rounded edge of the triangular table in the center of the chamber, surprised that they used this space at all, even more surprised at how little they had altered it. Welcoming guests into a slaughter chamber ... was it to remind them what they had fought, or what they had been, or what they had lost? If there was message in this, Verlein could not translate it.

  No matter. She would evaluate whatever they offered, negotiate for what aid they could provide, and get out—back to her windy hillsides, her outcroppings, her seawalls, her guardposts, where she belonged. Scanning the hazy waters for the first prick of sail or swell of hull on the horizon. She was not healer, or seeker, or scholar, or reckoner, or whatever these Holding folk had become. This was a [118] dark, unhealthy place. She had conquered it once. She had better things to do than conquer it again.

  “Verlein.”