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

by Terry McGarry

  He grieved. There were so many crafts still to learn. There was love—he had never felt love, he had wondered when it would come, why it hadn’t, and now he’d never know. There was so much of the [218] world still to travel. There was so much he wanted to know.

  “No dying,” said a child’s voice.

  New hands touched him.

  His muscles unclenched their shattering hold on his bones, released his airway, eased his nails from his palms, uncramped his toes and groin and gut.

  Hands touched him, touched his seized heart, returned its rhythm.

  Hands touched him, knitted his long bones, reseated the displaced sockets of his spine.

  Hands touched him, sealed burst vessels and cleared his eyes, smoothed away the bloody gouges in his palms.

  Hands touched him, a child’s hands, and his body was whole.

  He sat up through a rusty mist, trembling. The pain lingered like an echo, then faded. After long breaths, blessed breaths, he leaned forward to cup the healer’s face in his hands. “Spirits, child, what did that cost you?”

  Her grin plumped pudgy cheeks into his palms. Her merry eyes, an unearthly shine of emerald and flame, eased back to ordinary hazel as he blinked. Her only answer was a giggle.

  “Nothing,” said the oldest girl. She was behind her sister and to the side, sitting on the ground, rocking with her arms clasped around her knees, tears on her face. “It costs nothing when it’s the way the body wanted to be, when there’s no death.”

  He didn’t understand.

  “Diseases are alive,” she said, bitterly, spitting her explanation as though it was the only way to wipe the stupid awe off his face. “When you heal a sickness, you kill them, so it costs you. She doesn’t like killing, as you may have noticed.”

  Standing tense beside her, the middle girl said, “This is what you wanted. Let Caille fix people. Tell people. Give it all away so nobody would die. You wanted this, Elora.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did.”

  “Shut up!” Elora covered her ears, elbows tight against her knees, folded in on herself. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  Louarn sat back gracelessly, stunned. His gaze rose to the naked blade the little girl did not see over her shoulder. The Girdlewoman must have drawn it when he leaned forward to touch the child. Ready to run him through if he looked to harm her. But the Girdlewoman hadn’t known. None of them had known—not the Girdlers, not Jiondor, not the barrow boy Nolfiander. Their shock mirrored his own.

  Not even mages had been capable of this. Not with a touch.

  “I don’t suppose she could do my head,” the other Girdler said [219] wryly. Yuralon. The woman had called him Yuralon.

  The child looked at her sisters for permission. She must have healed me of her own stubborn choice. They tried to stop her, to keep us from knowing. Elora, the oldest girl, shrugged miserably. “Padda would kill us,” she murmured, rocking. “But it’s done now. Go ahead.”

  “Are you really all right?” the barrow boy asked, though he was moving to Elora, to stay helplessly by her as she cried.

  Louarn nodded. The movement left him feeling he had three heads, as though two of them flew nearly free and then snapped back into place, elastic. “My body is, at any rate.”

  They watched with no less awe as the littlest girl pulled the tall Girdler down to her level and laid hands on his bloody head like a benison. He had spoken to ease the tension, not expecting her to do it, and now looked dazed. She glowed like an iron heated red in a forge’s flame, and drew her tiny hands from a mended head.

  Yuralon probed his skull. “Thank you, child,” he whispered.

  She shrugged, and sat by her sisters, pulling the cowdog into the circle of one arm. The other thumb crept toward her mouth; the middle sister, barely looking at her, batted it absently away.

  “And you?” Louarn said, to the grieving eldest. “Now that we’ve seen all this, will you show us what you can do?”

  “She can’t do anything,” Pelufer said, quick and harsh. She pulled herself tall, freeing her hands, prepared to defend her sisters however she must. “She was a love child, we had different fathers. She showed a light but now it’s gone. She didn’t even live with us until—”

  The eldest rose slowly, cutting off the escalation of lies. She walked to a sack of blankets, lying half tumbled open a few threfts away, and withdrew two wrapped objects, which she put in Jiondor’s hands. Then she stood by an old upright damson tree, one of a scattering beyond which mostly young ash was visible, suggesting some orchard or hedge demarcation overtaken by forest.

  The sweetsmonger unwrapped two heads. Though each was only the size of paired fists, it took Louarn a moment to realise that they were made of wood, so lifelike were they. The planes of the features, the hairs on the heads, looked as though the wood had simply, impossibly, just grown that way.

  “Nimorin,” Jiondor said. “Prendra. These are their parents.”

  “Our mother made those!” Pelufer cried, squirming and jiggling. “She gave them to us before she died! Elora, tell them!”

  Elora said, “It’s done, Pel. They know. They might as well know it all. It’s already over.”

  [220] “Your alderfolk burned carvings like that,” Louarn said, remembering what the spiteful girl Mireille had told him.

  “They were afraid,” Jiondor said. He looked sad, beaten. “They were afraid that work like this would keep the light from coming back. I’m glad you saved these, Elora. I’ve never seen such carving in all my life as a trader.”

  “It’s not a carving,” Elora said. “It’s a working.” She laid her hand on the damson trunk beside her. Her muted copper shine became a ruddy glow, like the light of a blood moon low in the sky, or the rich heartwood of the fruit tree she touched. Slowly, magnificently, the tree came into profuse bloom, clouds of white emerging on its branches.

  Elora sank down gently as a fallen leaf and slumped against the trunk. White blossoms drifted around her.

  Pelufer swore a streak and went to sit her up. She was pale and vague, half in a faint. “I can’t believe you did that! That was so stupid!”

  “That cost her,” Louarn said.

  Pelufer rounded on him. “It was the wrong time, that tree was done flowering a moon ago, she had to push it. She’ll be tired for a day now. Just to answer your stupid poxy question! And after everything we did. I was sorry for you!” She was fierce and red-faced, her eyes wild. “A plague on you! A stinking rotting plague on you all! We kept those secrets all our lives! And now you’ll try to use us, now everyone will want to use us, Padda told us, he told us, Elora, why didn’t we listen? Never get beholden and never let anyone know what you can do, because your lives won’t be your own anymore. He told us!”

  “Padda’s dead,” Elora said, almost too low to hear.

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “That’s enough.” Jiondor pressed the wood work into Nolfiander’s hands and got to his feet. “This is madness. We’re going back to the house. We’ll sort this out. There’ll be no running and there’ll be no blades. You two—give them over.”

  Louarn watched in amazement as the Girdlers handed their sheathed weapons to the sweetsmonger. One of the girls must have explained them to Jiondor when he and the boy arrived. Louarn didn’t remember their arrival. They had come while he was swamped in the past. The people standing in this wood were connected now, bound together by extraordinary circumstance. But they were nothing to each other beyond the revelations they had shared.

  “Will you let me carry her?” Yuralon asked Pelufer, gesturing to Elora.

  [221] “If she will,” Pelufer grudged, still ready to fight or bolt.

  “I’ll take Caille,” Nolfiander said.

  Caille. The littlest girl was Caille.

  “You can’t,” Pelufer told him. “Your ankle.”

  Caille looked up, sleepy but expectant, perhaps wondering if she might heal the sprain.

  “N
o,” the boy said. “I don’t want it. It’s too late.”

  “What are you talking about?” Elora murmured, raising her arms for Yuralon to lift her. The gesture sent a queer twinge through Louarn.

  “Not now,” Jiondor said, when we’re settled,” but Nolfiander stood staunchly and replied, “She could have saved Sel. She could have saved everyone. She could have saved your father.”

  “I know,” Elora said.

  They walked in laden silence through woods and fields streaked with morning light. Yuralon bore Elora, whose shine was very dim now. Pelufer bore Caille, who walked the last bit when her sister could no longer manage, the cowdog trotting at their heels. Jiondor bore the girls’ carrysack and the longblades, Risalyn her pack and Yuralon’s. Louarn supported the limping barrow boy. The boy was nine-and-six years old; though he was brown-eyed and sandy-haired and a Souther, with the turned-up nose and impish look of the mid-Leg, still, Louarn thought, this was how it would feel to walk with Mellas beside him. Caille’s five-year-old face plumping into a grin against his hands was how Flin’s face might have felt. Pelufer had woken them. It had nearly killed him. Caille had saved his life.

  A girl who communed with haunts. A girl who shaped living wood. A girl who could heal injury and illness. Two fighters become mercy killers and healers, yet still bladed, chasing magekillers. Two Gir Doegre traders who only wanted to help and protect.

  And me. Whoever, whatever, I am.

  A wood. An eerie, wondrous wood, where no winds disturbed the sweet air, where no leaves fell. The sky was lavender, the ground was black, the leaves were gold, the trunks were silver. The smell was chill, metallic, rich. They said he had dreamed himself here, but that was a lie, or a different side of the truth. They had brought him here. They were the only ones who could have found him. And they were making him go. The trail had forked twice, and split again here.

  [222] This is it. You don’t get in from the back. There is no back. You get in from the top. Or the sides.

  He stood on a platform of shadow within a vast, roaring space, stillness within rushing void. This was the birthplace of shadows. Existence was a roaring void where shadows dwelled.

  Half-formed links weakened and broke as the next loop in the chain failed to fit. He looked for repetition in the curds of cloud crossing the moon, in the shadowed valleys of the moon’s silver disk. He wove puzzles, braiding twig and stem and vine into intricate workings to trick the eye and capture the mind. He whiled away the slow breaths till noon weaving box puzzles for the children, twistleaf puzzles

  He was himself the puzzle he had been braiding all these years.

  Had he pursued killers because he was haunted himself? Or because he had killed the parts of himself he could not bear?

  Hang on, but don’t look back. Looking back was like looking down. He could not keep his balance if he looked back.

  “Tell us what brought you to the Knee, then.” Risalyn’s words returned him to the farmhouse common room, the table set with simple, hearty food, the whiff of the cookfire left to burn down.

  He must stop lapsing into reverie. He feared it would take as long to sort through his memories as it had taken to make them. How many times would he have to relive it all before it became part of him? Would his memory ever be seamless, scenes recollected at need rather than intruding themselves as alien visions? Would he be forever torn in three?

  He could not remember what memory had felt like before.

  “By hit or miss, I followed the killings as far as Dindry Leng,” he said. His voice seemed distant; his memories, Louarn’s memories of what had happened most recently to him, were dimmed now in comparison with the intensity of Flin’s life and Mellas’s. His existence seemed a dry, two-dimensional thing, gray and flat. A half-life. A third-life. “When I realised that all the victims were mages, I headed for the place where the magelight had always been strongest. It seemed to me that there would be the most former mages there—the most folk in jeopardy, the most likelihood of flushing the killers. Gir Doegre was on my way. I had heard of two folk asking similar questions to my own in Dindry Leng. In Gir Doegre, I heard of those folk again, and concluded that they were the killers I sought. Those folk were you and your brother. I followed the girls because you would be following them, to retrieve what I believed were trophies—triskeles and a proxy’s ring taken from the victims.”

  “They came from the spirit wood,” the middle girl said. Pelufer n’Prendra, nine-and-two years old, wiry and thorn-sharp, with canny [223] hazel eyes, fawn skin, blond-streaked chestnut bangs. And that shine to her. All three girls had it even at rest. No one else had mentioned it; he might be the only one who could see it. Not magelight ... one of him remembered magelight ... it was golden. ...

  He shook himself and moved closer to the dying fire. He could not seem to get warm. “You never told your alderfolk that. They deduced it—incorrectly, I believed. Risalyn collected what you had dropped. I believed she was retrieving her trophies, and her claim that she would return them to the wood was a lie.”

  “I did return them, on my way upland,” Risalyn said.

  “And I returned the rest of it,” Jiondor added, raising a warning brow at Pelufer’s annoyed wriggle. “She meant to trade it.”

  “They don’t miss those things, you know,” Pelufer said. “The dead don’t care.”

  How much did she know about the dead? How much could she tell him? He saw now why Risalyn and Yuralon had been following her. She would be of inestimable value in the search for killers. But they must know more about her powers.

  “It’s disrespect nonetheless,” Jiondor was saying, “and it’s mended now, and that’s an end on it.”

  You’ll be Louarn, and that’s an end on it.

  “What brought you to Gir Doegre?” he asked Risalyn, to drown out the voices of the past.

  “The same as you,” Risalyn replied, “though we started at home, and our trail has muddied. The killings are legwide, now, and into the Heartlands. It’s not one killer, or even one pair of killers, though perhaps they work in pairs or threes.”

  “Then the runners know,” Louarn said, and Risalyn nodded. “They are better equipped for this hunt than any of us.”

  “Not anymore,” said Yuralon. “We have Pelufer now.” Risalyn’s brother, a few years younger than her four nineyears. They were of a height, with tawny hair worn long and loose when possible, banded back tight when necessary. Their long heads swept forward into prominent sharp noses, the hatchet features typical of the Highlands Girdle. Both had eyes of dark quartz, though where Risalyn’s were watchful, experienced, Yuralon’s were smoked with old griefs. They spoke in a way that Mellas remembered—in the refined cadences of the Holding. Louarn was afraid to find out more, and longed to. Mellas’s path might well have crossed theirs.

  His path.

  “You don’t have Pelufer,” Elora said. “You don’t have any of us for anything.” Already a slim beauty at nine-and-four, she shared her sisters’ coloring but was more fey, more fine-boned. She’d be ripping [224] hearts out of boys’ chests in a couple of years—and that was the least remarkable thing about her.

  Jiondor said, “You will not take that child into the kind of horrors I’ve heard described. I wouldn’t let Risalyn take her when I thought she was a fighter. I wouldn’t have let you have her if I’d believed you were a healer.”

  “Fighters,” he said to Louarn in the tinker’s wagon heading Kneeward. He spat the word. He’d held it in since their confrontation behind the tavern. “I didn’t say so to the girls, but I thought they had been fighters in the magewar, gone off to join the shield, to keep the art of death alive in the name of protecting us against some imaginary threat from the lands-beyond. They’re good girls. I would have fostered them. Always looked out for them, as I could. A lot of us did. My first pledge died. Beronwy, the woman I’m with now, she was a fighter in the horde. The magewar ended. The horde went off to form the shield. She came home. This is a place of peace. W
e don’t hold with death arts here, though we tolerate bladecraft some, keepers are bladed, but it’s mainly for show. I thought that woman would have forged those girls into weapons. That’s not a thing to do to children. Said she was a healer, but I could see it in the way she held herself—just like Beronwy. Then it turned out the middle girl would have to leave town, she finally stole something so serious ...”

  “Triskeles. A proxy’s ring.”

  “Yes. They wouldn’t let her stay, after that. It only made them more determined to prentice her to that blade. I sent her off to some relatives, to keep her out of harm’s way till I could make things right with the alderfolk. I thought the woman would give up, and that man with her. I know she saw something in Pel, there’s a fire in that child and she’d trade her soul for a blade. All the more reason to keep her away from people like that.”

  There was more, and Louarn knew it. Something more about the girls than the man was willing to say. ...

  Now memories as recent as last night felt as alien to him, as vivid and yet distanced, as those of the boys he had been. Would it become impossible to tell which were theirs and which were his? Louarn, I’m Louarn, I’m Louarn ...

  “She can’t go home,” Risalyn said. “She committed a crime.”

  Jiondor replied, “I’m sure I can concoct a story close enough to what Louarn believed to convince my alderfolk. And if they can’t go home they’ll stay here, as planned.”

  “Will your relatives still abide that?” Yuralon said. “They were none too happy about this morning’s events, and I fear that no matter how these children hide themselves, trouble will find them.”

  Jiondor’s cousin and her pledge and her sons had left them to sort themselves out, having a farm to look after. These little girls would [225] be more of a blessing than the farmers could know, if they earned their trust and the aid of their powers, but they could be a curse as well. Fate was no longer content to let them hide. It was a marvel that they’d concealed themselves as long as they had, in their crowded town. How many years of safety could they eke out on this peaceful farmstead? Enough to grow up?