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

by Terry McGarry

  I need them, for what I must do, Louarn thought, and then wondered what he meant.

  “They’re good folk and they’ll do what’s needed,” Jiondor said, and Yuralon replied, “You may be asking too much. The Khinish are waking. The land is distressed. These folk will have troubles enough, without you putting this on them.”

  Louarn saw Pelufer’s fingers move against her leg, as if she were fidgeting. Just a quick flutter, but he blinked as meaning came to him through it. She wanted to go with them, she said. He could read it the way scribes could read glyphs, with the unthinking ease of understanding vocalised words. She said she wanted to find those killers.

  Under the continuing spoken conversation, Elora replied with slower, wearier fingers that Pelufer just wanted to be a fighter like that bladed man. But he wouldn’t teach her. He was a healer now. He repented the terrible things he did.

  Pelufer signed back that he still carried a longblade, that they both did.

  Elora told her she wasn’t going to touch it, and what about Caille? Pelufer might want to have an adventure, but Caille wanted to stay here.

  Caille nodded vigorously, her mouth full of food, her hands passing treats to the dog. She had been watching the silent exchange and understanding it. Five years old. The age Flin was, when he lost himself and became Mellas. The age Flin was when he saw his parents die. What happened to these girls’ parents? Where had they learned to speak in this silent, flap-fingered way? And how did he understand it?

  Pelufer jerked her head toward Louarn without looking at him. She signed that Elora only wanted to go with him. She told Elora that the way she mooned over him made her want to throw up.

  “Ew,” said Caille, and the Girdlers and Jiondor glanced over, their own conversation faltering.

  With a leer, Pelufer told Elora she was smitten. Elora signed that she was not. Pelufer signed that she was, her fingers pressing into Elora’s leg, a physical gibe.

  “What is that you’re doing?” Risalyn said.

  “It’s a private conversation,” Louarn said, hiding a smile, and [226] added “apparently” too late to avoid the sharp glance of the middle girl. Not unlike the glance she’d given him when he mentioned seeing a glow in the woods.

  Well, there had been enough secrets. His fingers found the movements almost naturally, using the edge of the table for ... what? He didn’t know. He didn’t know what he was doing, yet he knew how to do it. Which one of him knew this thing?

  Yet that was not the most important question.

  Do I shine at all, myself? With angled combinations of one, two, and three fingers to each side of the table’s edge, he asked them.

  The two older girls’ jaws dropped. It was left to the smallest one to answer. “A little,” she said aloud, unperturbed. “But you could do something. It’s more when you do things.”

  “What is that?” Risalyn said. “Some kind of signaling, I see that much, but ...”

  “I don’t know,” Louarn said. The signing interested him less than did the shine. “Where did you learn it?”

  “Our mother,” Elora said. Pelufer started to sign something hard against her sister’s leg, then looked up at Louarn and froze. But Elora had taken the point. “She made it up, I suppose.”

  That was doubtful, but it could wait. He regarded the three powerful children with an intensity that kept the other adults quiet, waiting. “You thought you were the only ones,” he said at last. “Perhaps you’re not.”

  Looking uncertain, with Pelufer frozen beside her, Elora signed to him that they were the only strong ones. Children shined when they were small, but not enough to see in each other, and they lost it by Caille’s age. Sometimes grownups shined, but only for a moment here and there. Grafters and farmers shined longer, but mostly when they were working, and they couldn’t see her shine or her sisters’. He might be strong, too, if he could see it, she signed.

  Everyone had it. Everyone had it to some degree. But he could see it.

  He told her with his crafter’s hands that he was a crafter but he couldn’t do the things they did. After a hesitation, she signed back that maybe he could learn.

  “If someone doesn’t start saying things I understand, out loud,” Risalyn said, “I am going to do something very nasty.”

  “Don’t shut us out of this, Louarn,” said Jiondor. “We have serious decisions to make in this room, and we’ll make the wrong ones if we keep things from each other now.”

  “You don’t talk like Girdlers,” Elora said promptly to Risalyn and Yuralon. “You come from the Head.”

  [227] Pelufer grinned at their startlement, broken free of her paralysis by briefly getting the upper hand over the grownups. “Elora has a knack with accents,” she said, and then signed to Louarn that it wasn’t one of those knacks, just a trader knack.

  Good, thought Louarn, any indication of them bonding with me bodes well—and then some deeper part of him, the runner part of him who had lived in fear of manipulation all his life, recognized that as the manipulative thought of a man who tried to craft things to his own ends. Louarn, the lad-of-all-crafts, had crafted everything around him, right down to his own appearance and comportment, and had fled every time he felt himself beginning to feel. You are a very superficial man, Louarn.

  Then a wave of nausea swept him, and he thought, Spirits, I shall go mad.

  “We were trained as fighters for the Ennead,” Risalyn said.

  Jiondor made an inarticulate noise that Louarn recognized as a swallowed “I knew it!”

  “Born of High Girdle stock into a steward family in the Holding,” Risalyn went on. “They bladed us in secret, some as guards, some as assassins. Ours was one of three reserve groups, about to be sent in to put down the stewards’ uprising. Then some comrades of ours came across a gaggle of ... wounded mages. The Ennead had ... used them ill. Terribly. It showed us the truth of the Nine. Some of us turned on them. Belatedly, I’m afraid. And we tried to help those mages. But some were beyond help.”

  Pelufer repeated several unfamiliar names. “Yuralon killed them. Those ones beyond help. They asked him to.”

  “That was the beginning, yes.” Risalyn answered; Yuralon seemed unable to speak of it.

  Given the expression Pelufer tried to hide from her sisters, she knew how those mages had been used. Louarn gripped the sides of his chair. One of him knew, too. Spirits help the child if she had been inside the minds of those folk.

  Elora was frowning. “The Nine weren’t bad. That’s a lie spread by the Lightbreaker’s folk.”

  Risalyn and Yuralon could find no way between them to answer.

  “That’s what they’ve taught you to believe, here in the Strong Leg,” Louarn said. The nausea had grown much worse. He pressed a cloth to his mouth, and then managed, “Mellas saw it for himself. Flin’s parents were killed by the Nine. Believe me, Elora. Those were not lies.”

  Jiondor said, “I’d like you to tell my Beronwy that, sometime. She fought in the horde that stormed the Holding. She thought she [228] was doing right. She’s near convinced she had a hand in breaking the light herself, now.”

  “A lot of people from the Strong Leg joined Verlein’s horde,” Risalyn said. “But when the light went, people were angry. They had to blame someone.” She paused. “I fought beside that horde, in the end. I may know this Beronwy of yours.”

  He wanted to tell them. He so badly wanted to tell them that it was he who led those mages up out of the depths of the mountain. But it hadn’t been he. It had been some boy hiding inside him. A shy boy in the shadows of his mind. He remembered doing it. But it had not been he.

  And still he found himself wondering which of them had asked Yuralon’s mercy. The acerbic wordsmith? The wry illuminator? He. hadn’t learned their names. Perhaps it didn’t matter, and was best not known. Their courage had moved Mellas deeply. He would grieve to know that any of them had been lost.

  He blinked at a dislocating spasm. The stablemaster, the baker, the other foste
rlings—what had become of them? Did they still live? Who could tell him?

  Menders. Menders had taken over the Holding. Some of them must have been stewards or warders. Some of them must know. Could he bring himself to go back there, to find out?

  “At any rate, we have a job to do,” Risalyn was saying. “We must determine which of us is in, and which of us is out.”

  “The girls stay here,” Jiondor said. “Nolfi’s road is down to him. I’m going back to Gir Doegre, to my pledge and my trade. I kept your secret, Pel. I’ll keep Elora’s and Caille’s as well.”

  “I know,” Pelufer said.

  “Thank you for coming after us,” Elora said, with a tired but still cutting glance at Pelufer to remind her of her manners. “Thank you for sending us here. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”

  “You’re good girls,” Jiondor said, gruff, embarrassed.

  “Pelufer wants to go,” Louarn said, to force the issue. “The others seem not to.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Elora put in quickly, and then blanched as she remembered that he’d understood Pelufer’s teasing about her being smitten. He caught himself midway between giving her a smile and giving her a look of gentle reassurance. Neither would have been genuine. He dropped his gaze.

  What am I? What am I if I am not the man I have crafted myself to be?

  Jiondor said, “I’d rather hear it from them, if it’s all the same to you.”

  [229] “We’ll go,” Elora said. “We’ll go find these killers. It’s something we can help with. Something we can do.” She glanced at Nolfiander, and then said, “We could have done a lot of things, and we never did, because we had to keep the secret. I think maybe it’s time to start doing things that need doing.”

  “That’s not fair!” Pelufer said. “What you said wasn’t fair, Nolfi. You don’t know everything.”

  Nolfiander had been completely quiet, soaking and wrapping his ankle, then sitting staring into the cookfire’s embers. “You could tell me,” he suggested, in a low voice, without looking up.

  “She couldn’t save Father. He poisoned himself. He left us, he ran away, he ran away by dying. He wouldn’t let her fix him. He couldn’t stand that Mamma was gone, and he went to be with her.”

  To Louarn, perhaps to Risalyn and Yuralon, Elora said, “Our mother died in an accident when Caille was a baby. Our father died of drink and a broken heart two years ago.” She spoke dully—reciting a tale.

  “She could have saved Sel,” Nolfiander said.

  Again Elora translated, as if making words out of the past could neutralise it: “Seliander was his brother. He died two years ago, too. That was the rasping cough.”

  And again Pelufer protested. “She was only three years old! Saving Sel could have killed her!”

  “No,” Caille said calmly, one cheek stuffed with grapes. She proceeded to stuff the other cheek and then sat poking them to see what would happen.

  “It could have,” Pelufer insisted. “She’d have to kill a sickness like that. She wouldn’t kill the mites and borers that ate our shed. She might kill sickness, but it would ... what did you say? It was something a trader would say.”

  “Cost her,” Louarn supplied.

  “And then she’d have had to do everyone else! That would have killed her!”

  “He was my brother,” Nolfiander said.

  Elora was sliding down in her seat. She had borne the responsibility for them too long at too young an age, Louarn thought. Thieving, irrepressible Pelufer had tried to style herself a provider for the family, but Elora felt the burden to the spirit far more keenly. The secrets, the choices had weighed on her. And if she was smitten with him, it was a brief flare, a young girl’s reaction to a pretty face in the midst of much fear and excitement, in the euphoria of the greenwood that fed her soul. Anyone could see that the barrow boy was the one [230] she cared for. But she kept herself apart from him. She had let his brother die.

  “She would have had to tell you,” Jiondor said. “It was a hard choice, Nolfi. Don’t you be hard on her for it.”

  “She never had to tell me a thing,” the boy replied, still staring into the glowing coals. “I’ve told them that a dozen times. I always knew there was something. Have to be stupid not to know.”

  “Perhaps the girls didn’t know what she was capable of, at three years of age,” Louarn offered.

  “We knew,” Elora said. “She could do it when she was a baby. Padda cut himself once. He was minding her. He picked her up to bring her with him to where he could tend the cut. She touched it and it went away. Then he knew.”

  “She couldn’t save your mother?” Risalyn asked, getting the whole question out though Jiondor hissed the moment he knew what she would say.

  “No,” Pelufer said, flat and hard. “It was too late. Mother was already gone.”

  Louarn understood. They could count the story on their fingers. Caille was five years old. The light was six years gone. She was conceived of the dying light, as the freedoms failed and women who thought they were warded came unexpectedly with child. She was an orphan of the vanished light: with no magecraft to ease her way, their mother had died in the birthing of her.

  A sad tale, that. But one repeated in every village in every region. And yet it niggled at his puzzler’s mind. A piece that did not fit. If she healed with a touch, would not her passage into the world leave her mother whole and healthy in its wake? Had they not laid the infant on her breast?

  He could not ask that here. It didn’t matter, perhaps; power was power, and that the girls were not its only possessors was the more staggering revelation. Elora had said that he might learn. But there had been no one to teach these girls. If something had happened after their mother’s death, or during it, to increase their inherent abilities, to make them shine so bright ...

  “I would like to learn more about this shine of yours,” he said. “And—”

  “Shine?” said Yuralon.

  Louarn found himself looking at Pelufer. She thought for a long time. Then she shrugged.

  “They have a shine,” he said. “A ruddy shine, like the golden shine that magelight had.”

  “Eiden’s eyes,” said Jiondor, amazed. “I don’t see it.”

  [231] “Nor do I,” “Nor I,” said the Girdlers.

  Softly, Nolfi said, “I do. A little.”

  Elora’s head whipped around. But he would not raise his eyes to her. She slumped back into her chair, her own eyes fixing on the table. Louarn felt a pang, and then something like a distant, pealing bell. It was time to go.

  When he began to feel for them, it was time to go.

  “It’s the light, come back into the world,” Jiondor breathed. “Just like they said it would.”

  “It’s not magelight,” said Risalyn. “I lived my life in the Ennead’s back pocket. Trust me on this.”

  “What we’ve seen wasn’t magecraft,” Yuralon agreed, “nor anything like it. And the magelight was yellow. Louarn said this was red.”

  “It’s a shine, not a light,” said Louarn. Tell them, he thought. Tell them who you were. Tell them who you are! But he couldn’t. It was too new. It was not him.

  Pelufer said, “Mellas showed a light.”

  I didn’t, there was no light in me, magestone glowed for mages but not for me, the illuminator thought there was a light but she was wrong, my life wasn’t so hard that it would seal off my own—

  Mellas hadn’t remembered Flin.

  When he was six, he would show a light. The moment he turned six, there it would be. He’d look down at his hand and see it glowing. He’d look up and see his mother glowing, and his fathers ...

  Magecraft had seared the skin from Flin’s parents before his eyes. It was that as much as the fall that knocked his mind into darkness. He’d been almost six. The light had most often shown in one’s sixth or seventh year. Some had believed it was there before that, but not strong enough to be visible. His mother had been sure he’d show a light. His father had pr
ayed he wouldn’t—the Ennead would have no interest in him if he didn’t show a light. Lightless keeps you safe. He’d turned that; he’d turned it to mean that shadow kept him safe, and darkness. But Father had meant his own light, the light inside him. He could never show a light if he was to remain safe.

  That didn’t work out very well, now, did it, Louarn thought.

  “That boy Mellas ... the last thing before he went dark ... the thing that burned in, the thing I feel when I touch you ... I think it might have been the light dying. I think that might have been what hurt him so much.”

  “He was lost,” Louarn said. “He was deep in a cave, no food or water.”

  [232] “That didn’t kill him, or you wouldn’t be sitting here,” Risalyn said.

  Perhaps it was true. Perhaps there had been a light in him. Perhaps Flin had understood his father’s warning perfectly well, deep inside, and hid his own light to keep himself safe. Mellas remembered ... he remembered the shifting plane of lights, a realm of lights burning calm and true across the plane of the world ...

  “They were yellow,” Pelufer said. “Or maybe gold. I’m not good at colors. They were like a candle flame. We’re not like that.”

  “No,” Mellas agreed softly, and Louarn let him.

  “What, then?” Jiondor said. “What is it? What are they?”

  “You make us sound like dogs! Like we’re cowdogs or sheepdogs or—”

  Jiondor was laughing. Despite all the heartbreak and tribulation here, he was laughing, and of course that was the right thing to do, the real thing to do—what else could you do when you had discovered a power that might replace the only power that had kept the world safe and well?

  “Dogs are good,” Caille said. “I’ll be a cowdog. Like this one.” She slipped another cheese wedge under the table.

  “I’m sorry, Pel,” Jiondor said. “I don’t mean it like that. But it’s wonderful, whatever it is! Merciful spirits, it’s a miracle!”

  “It’s not,” said Nolfi, and at last he turned.