“Now you sound like one of us.”
“They’re dying. Even the trees renewed by harvesting for wood and lumber. They shouldn’t be.”
“Their rivers poison them here. They carry minerals from the Druilors that magecraft doesn’t clear anymore.”
“These aren’t river trees. No river runs under this hill. They drink rainwater.”
“The clouds and fog are deceptive. They’re in the middle of a drought here. It hasn’t rained in ...” She was embarrassed to find her hand twitching to reach for a codex she didn’t have, to find a fact she didn’t carry in her head. “... a long time.”
“Ah. Thank you, mender. That explains some of it.”
“Perhaps I could be of help in other ways. If you would tell me what you seek.”
He came over to crouch by where she sat in leaf litter, her hands pressed to the sides of her head. “You’re in pain?” he said.
“My head’s pounding. I think I’m hung over. I’d like to know what that fog was spiked with.”
“The truth, from the sound of it.”
“For me, but not for you.”
“I don’t need drunken mist. I’m a seeker, I always speak truth.”
She laughed, then winced at the pain. “You do not.”
“Yes, I do.” Smiling, he added, “Not that a great deal can’t be twisted by the inflection.” He sat beside her, heavily, as though the weight of the heat and this ancient place was affecting him, too. “I’m looking for the Triennead holdings, Dabrena.”
She stared at him, her mind wiped blank.
“You must have thought of it,” he said, seeker hubris surfacing briefly. “One could not have been enough. There had to have been three. Three holdings would have balanced each other, checked each other’s excesses, resisted the formation of one misguided hidebound hierarchy vulnerable to corruption. All the most powerful things come in threes. The first mages would have established three holdings. Seekers have argued this theory for years. Of course no one listened to them. Graefel was ready to banish me for pressing the issue.”
“The Ennead’s Holding defended Eiden Myr against the Sea of Storms,” she said, trying to grasp it. “One holding, at the Head. That’s all there ever was. That’s all we needed.”
“Three holdings, evenly spaced throughout Eiden’s body. Centers [267] for healing, learning. Accessible places where folk could seek knowledge, and share it.” He looked sidelong at her.
She swallowed. It had become very hard to breathe. “Wishful thinking,” she said. She stared at the ground as if she might sink in, trapped, drowning in earth.
Adaon blocked her view, rolling up onto his knees before her, leaning forward, his hands pressed tight between his thighs. His pale eyes burned. “There’s something here, Dabrena.” His voice was hoarse, breathless, h’is speech rushed and intense. “In that town and under these hills. Refugees flock here and stay for no good reason. Gir Doegre draws people. The Haunch draws people, reckoners in particular. It drew them even when there was light. Sauglin was a meeting ground for journeymages, a place the untnaded went in desperation, craving power, craving light. They sensed it there, under the ground. They sense it still. And it’s here. Can’t you feel it?”
She had felt inebriated, then drained. Now her heart raced, her blood pulsed. There has to be something you want. ...
“I was sent here to find treasure,” she breathed.
She’d thought the treasure might be people. Someone who had miraculously retained a light, perhaps. But if it was the contents of a second holding, buried under the aeons and the earth ...
A trove of stored codices. Codices no one living had ever seen. Codices that would fill in everything they had been missing because the only texts they’d had to go by predated the mages’ exile from the outer realms.
“History is treasure,” Adaon said.
For him. He was a scholar after all, delving the past. For her it was practical knowledge they could use to mend and cure. Her folk pored over ancient herbals, but the plants matched few that grew on Eiden’s body—they were mostly herbs and roots and flowers of the outer realms, rendering the text useful only as paradigm, not practical guide. They pored over descriptions of ancient crafts, but many of the woods and stones were unknown to them here. It was only partly the fault of uncertain translation. The words weren’t wrong. There was simply nothing in their world that corresponded to them. Reiligh had worked wonders with grafts and crossbreeding, but his success owed more to his own natural talents than to anything they’d learned from the ancient world. What Adaon’s theory and Tolivar’s treasure and Kara’s map combined to offer was the missing link in a referential chain: codices that had been kept during the reclamation of Eiden Myr from wasteland.
“We’d have to dig,” she said, getting her knees under her, sinking her fingers into the mulch.
[268] “Not by hand,” Adaon said. His thighs pressed tightly against his fists. “And not here. This is a sacred place now.”
“From the side, then.”
“Perhaps. But only with the alderfolk’s permission. It will not be given easily. And there are eight hills.”
“You’ll argue them into it. You’ll charm them.”
“Perhaps.”
“But ... Adaon, they can’t know. They can’t, you mustn’t tell them—they’ll destroy anything that’s left. There won’t be anything left, what am I saying ... nonneds of years under the ground, any wardings on them broken with the light ...”
“There will be something. But it may be too great an assumption to believe they kept records at all.”
“They did. They had to. The prohibitions on permanent scribing must have come later. They never made any sense. All that time, through all those golden years of magecraft, there were codices in the Head. The last Ennead kept records for years, made copies, and it never harmed the craft. Superstition, like keepers keeping people from wearing dyes. The first mages must have known better. Superstition came later, from ignorance, from forgetting. ...”
“You want those codices. Spirits, look at you—
“You want them too. You must. You’re a scholar ...”
“I gave up my grays for one tail-eye glimpse of a pretty girl in silks. I want to know why, Dabrena. What happened, why the Triennead fell, who lived and who died in the dim mists of the past. I want to restore a lost age into our keeping. We do not know what we are unless we know what we were, why we were, why we changed. It’s the knowing, Dabrena, don’t you see? What I want is to know. ...”
They were kneeling face-to-face, hot and soaked, breath coming hard, Adaon’s hands clenched to keep from touching her, Dabrena’s clawing into the earth.
He managed a wan grin. “And you thought vegetables excited me.”
She swayed toward him.
He swayed back, blinking.
“Adaon ...”
He murmured, “I only meant ...”
She pressed her mouth against his, pressed him back into the yielding ground cover. His heart pounded wildly under her breasts. She smoothed one hand over the sweet curve of his head, explored the tense ridges and furrows of muscled neck and chest and arm with the other. She slid her leg across his thighs, levered her hips over [269] with the other knee, sank down. Under his body she felt Eiden’s body swell to welcome them.
Adaon took her by the shoulders and moved her off him, rolling them onto their sides, gasping as her lips came away. “No,” he said. “You will not have me in order to make a point.”
“There’s no point but that I want you.”
He caught her wandering hand. “This is use. Don’t use me this way. Please.”
“You, Adaon. Not some pretty keeper to prove I can still take risks.”
He searched her eyes. Evaluating, not pleading. “I want more than this from you,” he said. “More than I can have.”
“Don’t be so sure of that.” She kissed the jumping pulse in his throat, digging one hand under his hip and curving the o
ther around his rear to keep him still as she fitted herself to him, ground gently against his hard length. She nearly lost herself to waves of sweetness.
“Don’t,” he begged, gripping her hipbones, forcing her back. When she growled, he gave a ragged laugh. “I won’t last that way, love. It’s been a long time.”
She had been close. She couldn’t wait anymore. She fumbled his tunic up to get at his waistband, undo the string; an impatient thrust of her hips in his hands urged him to do the same. He complied, but more slowly, distracted by her caress as she freed him from the impediment of fabric or unwilling to let her rush. He kissed her, deeply and thoroughly, with a kind of amazement—as if this was one moment of bliss the spirits had for some unknowable reason blessed him with, and he was prolonging it, because it would end, because it would never come again.
She smiled against his mouth, an irresistible, joyful smile, and extricated her tongue, and took his hands from where they belayed her, and said, “The sooner we do this, the sooner we can do it again.”
He surrendered then, and she let him cover her, let him control it, in smooth even thrusts that swept her up to the brink in moments. She drove her face into the thick flesh of his neck and let out a deep groan as ecstasy peaked and vision fractured. He followed without a sound, one great silent shudder. As he eased his weight to the side, she began, impossibly, terribly, to laugh. It jounced him out of her, and he rolled onto his back. An uncertain smile flirted with hurt.
“If I’d known my rusty technique would produce this hilarity,” he said, “I’d have saved myself a moon’s attempts at cleverness and kept my grays in the bargain.”
She kissed his ear, his pale-stubbled jaw, trailed her hand down wrinkled linen in a frustrated wish to stroke his chest, and said, still [270] laughing, “That is the only thing in your life, Adaon, that you do in complete silence.”
He let his head fall back and relaxed with a sigh. She caressed the spent softness between his legs, exploring him, toying with the notion of a second time. Then, reluctantly, she sat up and grasped the bunched tangle his hose and silks had become. He protested, but raised his hips at her insistent tug, so she could slide the hose up and snug the drawstring.
“The quake’s over,” she said, fixing her own clothes. She stood to give him a hand up, grunting. He was dense as a tree. “Despite every effort, we failed to make the earth move again. The keepers should have been back by now.”
“Good thing they weren’t sooner. Sleeping here was crime enough. I can only imagine what they’d have made of that.”
Dabrena surveyed the peaceful glade, drank in the deep, ancient quiet. “I think the dead might have been rather pleased.”
He brushed twigs and leaves from her clothes, turning her to clear the back and comb his fingers through her hair. Her eyes slid closed under the caress. His arms came around her, and his lips touched her ear. “I don’t suppose you meant what you said.”
She swiveled to face him. “I did. This doesn’t have to end, Adaon.”
He smiled, hopeful and wry and sad all at once. “It will, Dabrena. It will end. But I will love every brief precious moment while it lasts.”
She kissed his broad lips, left corner and right, top and then bottom, loath to give up the taste of him. He squeezed her tight, and she felt arousal swell against her groin. With a moan, she gave him her tongue, but he drew back after barely two breaths, placing thick fingertips on either side of her chin.
“All right,” he said. “I believe you. But alderfolk now.”
She was slow in releasing him.
“Codices, Dabrena,” he sang, gently taunting.
“Lentil,” she threw back at him, and struck off down the path to the main road.
She came into the crowded haze of midday Gir Doegre with the seeker’s arm draped over her shoulders and glints and gleams of visions sparkling across her mind’s eye: new holdings, new knowledge; exchanging their lodgings for space to spread out for a leisurely, thorough encounter; what it would feel like to hold ancient vellum no one had seen in generations, to open to the first recovered leaf; [271] striding into a place like Lowhill with lifesaving remedies, their rescuer, their savior; what Adaon’s skin would feel like bare against hers, the broad dark whole of him; history and codices unearthed and restored; coming home to Kara a better mother, a better woman, with that charming scholar at her side, to whisk her off into a wide world full of wonder and invitation. The restrained panic in the long streets, the shuttered windows and absent wares along the short, the keepers massing along the Boot Road, all jarred so badly that she simply could not comprehend them. As reaction to an earthquake half a day gone, none of this made sense. The quake had passed. Why were folk running, why the looks of fear? They didn’t have quakes in this region, but many had fled quakes elsewhere; memory and ignorance might combine to produce such anxiety. But why all the keepers? Why had the traders packed up their wares, breakable and unbreakable?
“The Khinish have woken!” a woman cried when Adaon waylaid her, as if she’d had to say it twice and he still hadn’t heard. “They’re coming. The shield is tightening to meet them. There’ll be fighting here, or near enough. Spirits, let me go!” His attempts to calm her failed, and she tore free and disappeared into the mists and milling crowds.
Dabrena’s heart went cold. “The Khinish.”
“There’ve been rumors of them waking for some time now.”
“It’s Streln, their headman, he saw things on his way Headward ... but we’ve seen nothing of the sort, it’s madness, it makes no sense. ...”
But of course it made sense. That was the point he’d been making, when he held her daughter to the blade. Not that pacifist Dabrena would gladly sanction violence if the outer realms threatened her home ... but that he, Streln, Khine, could hold all Eiden Myr to the blade.
Verlein had killed the man he ordered to do it. Verlein was moving her shield in now to stop him. A blade to pierce Khine’s throat before it could do any harm, whether it intended to or not.
“We’ve got to get out of the road,” Adaon said.
They made their way, bumped and jostled, down Bronze Long, to the inn where they’d taken a room. Dabrena needed a moment to think, to sort out motivations and intentions and plan her response. She’d need runners ... birdmasters ...
The innkeeper was brusque and acerbic; he’d let the room when they never came back, but they could have it again now, all right. “And there’s a girl been in looking for you, so.”
The holding, messaging her to tell her what she now already knew. “Where is she?”
“Running up one long and down another trying to find you, I [272] imagine. No, I take that back—she’s right behind you.”
Dabrena turned as Beadrin came up. She was a holding girl, one of the stablemaster’s fosterlings from before the magewar, stayed on to do what stewards had once done. She ran messages for them, but never this far—they’d have employed a runner for a trip like this. Dabrena frowned at her, trying to wait until she got her breath. Her eyes were shifty, as if she’d done something wrong. Or carried some news she feared, for all her desperation, to deliver.
“Tell me,” Dabrena said.
“It’s Kara,” Beadrin said. “She’s ... They’ve taken her.”
All the blood left her limbs. She remained standing only because she was already standing, because no breath of air brushed her. “The Khinish,” she said.
“No, no ...”
“Who?”
Whatever Beadrin saw in Dabrena terrified her. “R-R-Reiligh ...” she stuttered, and could get no further.
Dabrena slammed her into a chair, one fist in her collar, one hand on the chairback, tilting it but not letting it fall. She shoved her face down to the girl’s. “Not Reiligh.”
“Rei—” she choked. Her arms windmilled.
Dabrena’s fist tightened convulsively at her throat. “Reiligh didn’t hurt her. Reiligh didn’t lose her. He watched. I left him to watch. Reiligh wa
sn’t the betrayer!”
“I—don’t—what—” The girl was strangling. Her fingers clawed Dabrena’s wrist. Dabrena clenched tighter.
“Let her speak.” Adaon lifted the back of the chair with one arm, the other hand closing over her fist, pressing between thumb and foreknuckle until it opened. His elbow moved her back, and he crouched in front of the gasping girl. “Tell it,” he said, his voice low and flat.
“Reiligh left her with Loris, they were in a scriptorium and he was called out to discuss something he didn’t want her to hear, but it only took a few breaths and he went back in to fetch her, and ...”
Beadrin faltered. Dabrena twitched, and Adaon barred her from the girl. “Get your breath,” he said, “and go on.”
“Reiligh found Loris ... giving her to the bonefolk. The boneman took her ... he ...”
She couldn’t say it. It wasn’t fear of Dabrena’s rage. She hadn’t even been there to witness it, but it was so horrible that she couldn’t get it out.
“He killed her,” Adaon said.
To find out. Only to find out.
[273] The breath between that probing statement—he shouldn’t have said it words make things true words have too much power—and the girl’s answer was the longest of Dabrena’s life.
“No!” Beadrin cried. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it does to the living! No one knows! They don’t take the living! But ... oh, spirits help me ... I’m sorry, Dabrena ... Reiligh made me come. ... They took her. The boneman took her. He ... fed, or ... I don’t know! She’s gone! I’m sorry!”
Dabrena fell back a step. One part of her was shaking her head in complete disbelief at this inane tall tale. Another part of her grieved for the girl’s distress. Beadrin had been fond of Kara, kind to her at times, offering to amuse her, take her riding, but Dabrena would never allow it. She had kept so many fond people from getting close to Kara, and now none of them could get to her at all.
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