Elora went stiff and but did not sit up.
“It’s a threat,” he said. “They’ll never be safe, ever. Sel died. I don’t know if I can forgive that. But maybe it would have hurt Caille to save him. She was so little. I don’t know. I can’t ever know, and anyway he’s gone, there’s never been any changing that and there never will.” He swallowed, and went on, “She was so little, and she’s still so little—”
“Ei!”
“It’s true, that’s why you’re cuter and more special than anyone else, because you’re the littlest. But they’re all little. Now look, they’re all angry at me. I’m a boy, Elora. I work a barrow because I have no one, because I have to do it to stay alive, to keep on in my parents’ trade, and that’s if I still have a place when I go back after all this is finished. But I’m a boy, I’m only nine-and-six, and I have two years on you and four on Pel. This isn’t supposed to be happening to any of us. They’re going to want you to save the world. They are. You know it. That’s why you were crying. Everyone knows it. And they’re going to be mad that you didn’t save it already. Just like me.”
“We can’t save the world,” Elora said. “I couldn’t even save the forest. I did one tree, and I couldn’t get up for days. That was all [233] right, I told myself, if Pelufer would mind the pitch for once, just for a few days here and there, I could do all the trees, even if it took years. But it only got poisoned again. It still drank the water. It was so hard to make it better, and then it died anyway. I couldn’t save it.”
“What if someone could clean the water?”
“Maybe. If there was someone who could do that.”
“Could Caille do that?”
“Maybe. I think she can do almost anything. But even if she could. Even if she were a grownup and big and strong. Even then, there’s only one of her. She can’t clean all the rivers and heal all the people and all the animals and ... it’s too much! Nolfi’s right. We’re just little girls. When we grow up, we’ll be only three, and that’s years away.”
“I won’t let you make them do it,” Pelufer said. “People should look after themselves. They shouldn’t be looking to other people to do it for them.”
“It’s important to help people, Pel,” Jiondor said.
“Not if they’ll take your life away because of it. Not if they’ll make you do more than you can do.”
“Your father frightened you very much, didn’t he,” said Risalyn.
“Their father loved them very much,” said Jiondor.
Louarn turned to Elora. “You thought it might be taught,” he said.
She pursed her lips. “I don’t know why I said that. I never thought about it before. I’ve never seen anyone like you before.” She blushed, but went on, “We could try.”
“Good girl,” he said, softly, though in truth he was reluctant to say anything to her for fear of trying reflexively to charm her.
Jiondor said, “If such skills as these could be taught ...”
“... we could heal the world,” Yuralon finished for him, with Risalyn adding, “And no need to realise their father’s fear, for if all shared in this there would be no using them—or abusing.”
“There’s something else, though,” Nolfiander put in. His brown eyes were sad but steady under his forelock of sandy hair as he came around the table to face the girls. “It has to be asked, Elora. Caille can kill sickness. Can she kill people?”
“No kill,” Caille said.
She remained absorbed in a precarious structure of bread crusts she had been assembling on her plate, and Louarn could read no expression from her. An adorable child, but inscrutable. Had she been taught those words? They were the words of a baby, and they issued from her instantly. Had her father felt compelled to put that stricture on her? If so, there were profound dangers here.
[234] Elora answered then. “She never has, so I guess we don’t know. But I don’t think so. I think ... I think that if you killed someone, it would kill you.”
“But she could do harm?” Louarn cast it as a question, not a statement. “She could inflict such damage as she healed?”
“No!” Caille cried, and this time it was clear: not a parent’s injunction, but an appalled denial. Such a thing would be anathema to her.
But it could be done.
“It would hurt her,” Pelufer said.
“Do you know that for a fact?” Risalyn asked.
Pelufer started to answer, then stopped, looking sullen.
Nolfiander said, “It made Elora tired to make the tree bloom. It made her tired to weaken the planks to get out of the tavern. That’s how you did it, isn’t it?”
Elora nodded. “It’s wrong to do unnatural things. Wood is still alive even after you make houses and tables and tools out of it. Metal is alive after you mine it. Stone is alive. Everything’s alive. There are right ways for it to go, and wrong ways. When you push in a way things aren’t meant to go, it’s no good for you. If I hurt a tree, I don’t think I’d just be tired. I’d be hurt too.”
“Is that why crafters shine?” Louarn felt iron shaping under his hand, wool spinning into yarn, beeswax layering into candles, brick sliding into place in a broken hearth.
“When they’re doing it right,” Elora said. “Yes. I think so.”
And when they’re doing it wrong, it tires them, and frustrates them, and drains them, Louarn thought. He’d seen it many times.
Risalyn said, “I can give a man my hand, or kill him with it. Every power comes with ill uses as well as good. We lost all the protections of magelight because the Lightbreaker decided it was the only way to stop the Ennead doing harm. This is a safer power, I think. The harm you do comes back on you. I can’t say the same for magecraft. Or blades. Or hands.”
“The harm we do does come back on us,” Yuralon said quietly.
Her mouth twisted in sad, knowing agreement. “Yes. But not so persuasively, perhaps. Not for everyone.”
Jiondor cleared his throat. “I was going to say that if such skills could be taught, they might be honed, too, like any other skills, and maybe Pel could learn not to say the names aloud, so that she wouldn’t betray herself to killers who might hurt her.”
He’s coming around to it, Louarn thought. He’s almost willing to let them go.
Pelufer seized on the prospect of control. “How would I learn a [235] thing like that?” she asked. “How long would it take?”
For some reason, everyone in the room looked at Louarn.
How would I know? I’m a journeyman crafter, and a haunted man with dreams you know naught of who may soon prove quite insane. Do not look to me. Yet it was an interesting question. A puzzle, a challenge. “A few days of practice, I’d say. Somewhere quiet but haunt-ridden. A spirit wood, to start. Then the streets of an unfamiliar town. With us to protect you, perhaps drown out any slips, you might master it, assuming it can be done.” While he still had their attention, he brought the matter back to the larger question. “As I was going to say many breaths ago: I would like to learn more about this shining craft, but there is a task at hand, as Risalyn long ago gave up reminding us, and we must choose our paths before the farmholders return. If Pelufer is willing, I might devise a plan. We have Risalyn and Yuralon to shield and heal us. Caille and Elora need not show their powers. My only fear is for Caille’s comfort and safety in the traveling, but perhaps there would not be much. It was the Knee where I was bound. We’re in the Knee now. We have only to position ourselves in a more populous place.” A place where there were former mages. A lot of them. Gir Nuorin might do. “But we must move quickly.”
“This is the reckoning, then,” Risalyn said, and took a survey of the group. The two older girls were determined to go, for their respective reasons. Louarn couldn’t quell the satisfaction that gave him; though he’d taken as little hand in it as he could, still he had crafted this, if only by his presence. They would not have gone with the Girdlers alone. He was getting what he wanted. The youngest girl made no objectio
n, though she bade a sad farewell to the dog, which might have been an oblique indication of reluctance. Jiondor was returning to Gir Doegre, as he’d stated. Louarn’s path, and Risalyn and Yuralon’s, was clear.
That left only Nolfiander, the barrow boy, undecided.
“I should go back,” he said. “My barrow’s untended. I was going to try to protect Elora’s pitch, too. But ... well, I’m in it now, aren’t I? I guess I’d rather come along.”
Louarn wasn’t sure whether the oldest girl would object to him putting himself in danger, object to his presence on some pretext to cover conflicted yearnings, or embrace his company as loyal friend. When she went once again to dig a hand down into her blanket carry sack, and drew forth a third working to hand to the boy, it was the last thing he would have expected.
“Sel,” the boy breathed, uncovering the young man’s face shaped in living wood.
“Bring him home,” Elora said. “Bring him home safe, and watch [236] our pitch, and mind your family’s trade—and keep that dog while you’re at it, too, if it’s all right with Risalyn, she traded for him fair and square and his master couldn’t have been fond of him if he gave him up. Go home, Nolfi. We’ll come back to you. Gir Doegre’s where we belong.”
Risalyn made a gesture of offering to Louarn. “There’s your reckoning,” she said. “Do we leave at morning light?”
Do not look to me, he thought again, more harshly. But he nodded, already devising strategies, calculating travel time, the needs of young children, what stories they would give to explain themselves. “If these good landholders will put up with us on their common-room floor for the night.”
The sunset angled smoky red through louvered shutters in the Bootward wall, as if the embers in the hearth had flared to light the room. The farmers would return any moment. Jiondor told Pelufer to fetch water for the kettle and went to build the fire back up to cooking heat.
“May the spirits speed you down your road,” he said, shaking his head. “And may you all come safe home, wherever home may be.”
II
The Belt ◊ The Girdle ◊ The Druilor Piedmont
Kazhe’s boots sank into the muddy shore of Lough Elm, leaving prints that sagged and smoothed almost as soon as her soles f came free. Where reeds had choked the water’s edge, the going was less sticky. The lough looked solid, congealing with red algae that mages had once kept in check, collecting windblown plant matter and soil that, left untended, would form a sucking bog. Far out in the middle, draggers poled their way on flat boats, fighting the encroachment as they could, working to keep channels clear.
“At least we can eat the stuff,” said her companion, a tall redhead dressed in black. “But it tastes like snot.”
“I’ve had worse,” Kazhe said, watching a heron wing its slow way across the surface. Not much room left for birds, here. But the draggers aided the waterfowl as much as they aided Elingar’s trade with its neighbors around the lough.
“You said you needed help,” the woman said, crossing in one long stride a sinkhole it took Kazhe a tussock-hop to clear.
“Quiet help,” Kazhe replied. “I might be mistaken to look to a runner. But your master wasn’t available. It cost me enough to find that out. You folk aren’t cheap.”
“He’s not my master, and he’s on Khine.”
“Ah.” If the runner knew why, it would make this easier. But of course she did. She was a runner. “I need to know how your pigeons work.”
[240] The woman laughed aloud. “I would tell you they eat, they flutter their wings, they take to the air, it just happens—but you’d knife me for being flippant. They’re not looms, Kazhe. They’re not even pigeons, most of them.”
“How they find their way,” Kazhe growled.
“That’s a trade secret.” Laughter danced in the runner’s blue eyes. She said, “You might not have the knack for imprinting a bird, and it takes time. They don’t find their way home, as they used to. They find the people they love. If you need to fly messages, you’ll need birdfolk to do it for you.”
“Only one message,” Kazhe said. “And given what you say, it would mean sending one runner to the Boot and giving one to me.”
“Logistics are my job, not yours. But you’re going to have to tell me what you need to know.”
“And where I plan to go.”
“I don’t have to know that, though I’d very much like to.”
“You’ll find out anyway. If you sent someone with me, they’d get word to you.”
“Most likely. But only to me, as their sender. We’re not leaky sieves. I’d say you’ll have to risk trusting three of us.”
“Not four? You wouldn’t tell the man who isn’t your master?”
“I might.” The woman stepped up onto a grassy sward, stopped, and regarded Kazhe with folded arms. Waiting.
“I’ll need to know when the Khinish march. I’ll need to know fast. And I don’t know where I’ll be.”
The woman nodded, looking out over the lough and back toward Elingar. The incessant rain had abated, leaving the summer air close and sticky, but storm clouds still roiled across the sky, black and gray as rock doves’ wings. “Perhaps they won’t march,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll sail, or not come at all.”
“Trying to talk them out of it, is he?” Kazhe suppressed a sneer. Pelkin was wise, but no match for the Khinish.
“He’ll fail,” the woman replied. “So will anyone who tries to stop them. Still, I’ll go with you. We’d be safest sending two to the Boot, each with a couple of my birds. The weather’s bad, and getting worse. One bird can’t be assured of getting through.”
“You’re one of these birdfolk?”
“I am. I love the birds. They do what I can’t do. They fly.”
“You would ally yourself with me, one woman alone, though you say no one can stop the Khinish?”
“I don’t know that you’re trying to stop the Khinish. I don’t know what you’re trying to do. You’re probably insane. But I know that above all you have always sought to protect. The Belt was my [241] home, when I started. Perhaps I’m just feeling protective, posted here.”
“Or tethered.”
Karanthe n’Farine smiled. “That too. Come on, Kazhe. Let’s go pick some other runners you can trust. Or use. However you want to look at it. You’re not one woman alone anymore.”
The Girdle was unrecognizable.
In the lands Kazhe had known, grasses rippled under the caress of wind, the wind sighed sweet and lonely, the rivers wound slender and sinuous. Now all was muddy, trodden, tilled, battered by downpours. The rivers bulged, their curves flooded straight, bordered in mudflats marred by reeds and rot. Rice paddies terraced what had been gentle grassy rises. Horses huddled under tarps, rain-beaten and miserable; folk huddled in tents staked down tight, with so many structures built up around them that moving on would be a task too involved to consider. The many-colored grasslands had gone drab and dour. The sighing wind shrieked, and pummeled them with rain, then died to a dripping whisper only to writhe and whip and pummel them again. Her herd-band folk had become rice farmers. The plains of her home had become a swamp.
“The land defies us,” said a low voice, so achingly familiar that Kazhe froze, unable to turn. “It doesn’t want to grow what will grow in this flooded place. It wants its horses back running free, it wants its folk to roam. But it thwarts them. It no longer knows what it wants.”
“Benkana,” she said, and still could not turn.
His arm came around her from behind, embracing shoulder and chest. He laughed when Comfrey nipped him, and scratched the spot under his mane where he liked it best. It was a rich, infectious laugh, one she’d never thought to hear again. He rested his chin on the top of her head, pillowed by his beard. After a moment, she crossed her forearms over his, pale skin on dark, pressing tight.
“I knew you would come home,” he said. “So I waited. Sira’s here, she left the Jhardal band, and a few of the others as well.”
>
“This looks more like your home than mine.” He came from the Lowlands in the Weak Leg, jungle verging into swamp by the Low Sea.
“Maybe that’s why I stayed. Give you plainsfolk a hand with your new terrain.”
She spun around in his arms and kissed him with a ferocity he returned threefold. Her hands slid under his horsehair vest, her short [242] nails scraped down bare flesh. He had to bend to reach her lips. It arched his body away from hers. She slid her arms around his neck to hoist herself and mount him standing. He boosted her with locked wrists. After long breaths, she abandoned his mouth to say, “I don’t know for how long, Benkana,” and she could see in his dark green eyes, in the subtle deepening of squint lines in his brown skin, in the hardened jaw under his black beard, that he knew she meant it in more ways than she had words for.
“I take what’s offered,” he said, and kissed her again, hot and deep. She had forgotten how sweet, how hard that draught of flesh could be. Once she would have ridden him straight to their tent, or taken him right here in the rain. But she was practicing restraint now. Just for a while. Just for a short while, till the job was done. Far too soon he eased her down so he could greet the runner Karanthe, reunite Kazhe with her old friends, find out what had brought her here and what might lie in store for them.
There were eight of them now. Within days, quietly contacting relatives and old friends of her father’s, she had made them two dozen. Gritting her teeth, sheathing old hatreds, she made brief visits to other villages, to the children and siblings and pledges of the turncloaks who’d killed her father. She was gratified to find cheitla and tainla among them, many earned; but there were no kenaila. Those blades lay where the kenaila who bore them had fallen, and would not be wielded again. It was better that way, for her. When she returned with the last she could find, her cadre numbered more than three dozen.
She drilled them hard, out in soaked grazeland in pelting rain, far from scanning eyes. She did not promise to make them kenaila; a kenai trained only three, one in each blade and one of those in all three, and she had neither the weapons to bestow nor any intent to teach them cheit or tain. “But I’ll teach you the first way of the kenai,” she told them. “I’ll teach you to disarm.” She left it to them to hope for more. She drilled them in shield and spear and longstaff, the wooden weapons, knowing that they would follow her whether she bladed them or not—some because they had loved her once, and some because they believed she meant to muster a horde of kenaila. They hoped for much more than she would offer.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 30