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

by Terry McGarry

  She had trusted Reiligh—

  “Loris.” The word came out a moan. “It was Loris.” Then, suddenly crouching, reaching for the girl’s hands past Adaon, she said, “Is Reiligh all right?”

  Beadrin nodded. “He broke Loris’s jaw. He said that was stupid, because then he couldn’t talk, but that he still had a perfectly good scribing hand. He locked him up. I don’t know if he told anyone. I don’t know if Loris explained himself. I don’t know anything. Reiligh sent me to you. He said to tell no one, that no one but him knows where you are. So I came.”

  “How long?” she asked. Her voice sounded very far away.

  “A nineday. I did it in a nineday. I slept in the saddle. I took horses from runners. I told lies.”

  “You’re a good girl, Beadrin. None of those lies will come back on you, I’ll see to it.” She tried to sit back on her haunches and found herself sitting on the floor. Adaon lifted her into a chair and called something to the innkeeper.

  “I have to go back,” she said to Adaon. It came out so strangely, as though she were begging him for something.

  “She’s not there,” he said. “They’ll be searching. If I’m wrong, they’ll find her with or without your help.”

  “The betrayer was Loris. I have to go put things right.”

  “I don’t see how. But you know best. Or you will. Here, drink this.”

  She shook her head, then snatched the tin jigger from him and dashed its contents at the back of her throat. “She’s dead,” she choked, tears springing out of her eyes, from the liquor’s burn or something else.

  “We don’t know that.”

  [274] “The bonefolk take the dead! They take everything, flesh, bones, the lot! How could you not be dead after that?”

  “She was alive,” Beadrin said. She was crying now, too. She hunkered down beside Dabrena’s chair. “She was kicking and biting Loris when the boneman scooped her up. Reiligh said. She gave a good fight. She wasn’t dead.” This was clearly not sufficient consolation for the girl. Dabrena pulled her close and let her cry.

  “What should I do? Where can I even start?”

  Her words hung in the air. The only answers were silence, the girl’s exhausted sobs, the muted hubbub from the street, and the thin razored silver keening threading deep through her mind.

  Gir Nuorin

  You ate the last of the jellied balsam.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too!”

  “Did not!”

  “Stop that, both of you.”

  “But Ris—”

  “Caille ate it. Look, it’s smeared all over her. And you stop grinning, you greedy imp.”

  “You’ll turn into a lardball if you keep that up. A bulge in the Bulge!”

  “She eats everything, Eiden’s whole body won’t be big enough for her to live on.”

  “You’ll have to have your own limb, Caille! Then Eiden will have three legs, he’ll walk like people in a sack race.”

  Pelufer inflated her cheeks and crossed her eyes to demonstrate Caille’s fate. Risalyn and Yuralon laughed aloud, Caille and Elora giggled; even Louarn had to smile, though he hid it behind his mug of unsweetened roseroot tea.

  They sat at breakfast in the Ruffed Grouse’s greatroom. It was a large meal, befitting the third day of Longlight celebrations. The two-story stone inn was at the upland end of Gir Nuorin’s Bulge, the curve in the Knee Road where it bent around Lough Nur in the middle of a picturesque plateau in the Elfelirs—the Sudden Mountains. On [276] the mountain side of the Bulge were the inn, the ironsmith’s and farrier’s, the saddler’s and cartwright’s, a tavern and a public house, and behind them an array of paddocks backed by peaks; on the lough side were shops and crafteries, and around the other side of the lough and along the mountain river that fed into it were crofts and stone cottages. Out past those, where the mountainside rose in a forested incline from the plateau, was Gir Nuorin’s spirit wood. At the down-land end of the lough were its public dock and market grounds; past that were a few fields and an old quarry, after which the road descended steeply into forest.

  Louarn, aged two nines and three—far younger than he’d thought he was, or felt—surveyed his tablemates with what he feared might be a grandparent’s fondness. Were they becoming a family? The thought came unbidden and disturbing. The girls had torn through a spread of food that the six of them together couldn’t have afforded a moon ago, Longlight or no. Cloudberry compote, honeyed fir, frost-grape jam, and three different breads to smear them on in addition to hands and faces; cherry-plum sauce over stewed apples rolled in parchment-thin wheat-flour pancakes; mashed turnips, soft-fried velvet mushrooms, and white-cheese spinach layered inside a butterflake crust and flavored with red pepper and dill. The advantage of unseasonable heat was early ripening, and drought did not trouble the spring-fed Knee. Risalyn and Yuralon discussed downleg illnesses that as yet had not affected Gir Nuorin, debating compresses and decoctions that out of context sounded almost appealing. If there had been sunlight through the gauzy curtains, if the slightest breeze had stirred them, if there were not a pressing weight of overheated air, this would be an idyllic end-of-sowmid morning, and he might be some affluent uncle enjoying the company of relatives before an ordinary workday.

  The girls were often taken for Risalyn’s get, no doubt owing to the hair, sometimes folk took the adults for a pledged threesome, a common arrangement in the Heartlands, or assumed that Risalyn and Louarn were the mother and father, since she and Yuralon were so obviously related by blood. But they slept by gender; though all three adults traded watches, they’d let two rooms for the moon they’d been here, one for Risalyn and the girls, one for himself and Yuralon.

  It had seemed a foolish extravagance at first, though the Girdlers turned out to have no trouble paying their way with herblore. But at this point they might have made an offer on the whole inn. There were no peacekeepers in this town, no alderfolk, and superstition was far less virulent than in Gir Doegre, though Elora traded her workings on a shadow market of her own creation, most townsfolk knew and made no protest. How could anyone object to such beauty? She [277] rendered faces with uncanny expressiveness, capturing the essence of personality in living wood. In rounded burls, right on the tree, she worked tiny replicas of trees detailed down to the last leaf; her birds seemed on the verge of flight, and Pelufer had broken one posed with outspread wings, trying to sail it through the air across their room. Elora had mended it with a touch—the wood flowed back into itself just the way it had been worked, the way it wanted to be. The mending had taken no toll on her.

  Louarn had built them a stall and workbench on the market grounds. Elora did the haggling; he fronted as the craftsman. He loved woodcraft, close detailed work most of all, and his birdhouses and toys and puzzle boxes, made on the spot and to order if requested, moved as quickly as the more practical wares traded by those around them. They had made a good life for themselves here, strange as it was to think so, strange as the circumstances were, and brief the time that had passed, briefer still the time that might remain.

  Contentment was a danger. Elora flirted nearest to it. She was a keen trader and an inspired crafter, and she ran their business with pleasure and a sure hand. But she was a child—and he sensed that she was, now, only waiting to grow up, only waiting to become old enough for him. He regretted the barrow boy’s absence. A deep-seated awareness of their own transience had kept them from opening a shop and taking up residence above it. Elora urged that next step with increasing frequency and enthusiasm—and the only argument Louarn could raise, against expansion and entrenchment that made all the sense in the world, was that their success as crafter-traders was an ancillary benefit, unintentional ... irrelevant.

  They were stationed at the forefront of a busy market in a well-traveled town, on the one road from the mid-Leg through the mountains of the Knee. The Knee had been drenched in magelight. But in all this time their trap had not been sprung. Pelufer worked the stall day af
ter day, hating it, desperate to be out boating the lough or hiking the wooded river or—her heart’s desire, as yet unmet—drilling in bladecraft. She contrived to touch everyone who passed them in the market. She took the tallies and the trades, she handed across the goods; she hawked their wares, skipping out to pull the reticent playfully toward the stall. She was good at it—she was a traders’ daughter—but bored and restless. And not one of the hands she touched had been a cold killer’s.

  He’d feared she might turn up ill-doers who had no connection to the magekillings. But the worst she’d come across had been a couple of former bindsmen, and farmers who’d put ailing, agonized livestock out of their misery. Now that she had control of her power, she could feel [278] the deaths of calves and kids and lambs, cattle and geese, sheep and goats, as well as those of human animals. The stray shielders who passed through, bladed and trained to kill, had been mercifully unblooded.

  He welcomed the dearth of killers. He welcomed the dearth of bad tidings; they had heard of no further magekillings. But he was deeply frustrated. It seemed all was for naught. He was plagued with memories he might have preferred to leave buried, given a choice; tendrils had grown between him and the children as tendrils had grown from the soles of his feet, seeking to root. For as long as he had been solely Louarn, he had avoided entanglement. He had denied fondness. Knowing why, knowing what he had lost, in the past, that had made him so wary, was no consolation whatsoever.

  Still he surveyed them with fondness—unwelcome, uncomfortable, unavoidable affection. Their young faces glowed with a health all too rare in these hard times, their fawn skin scrubbed clean of street dirt in clean mountain water; their good clothes were tidy and fresh. Elora, successful and shining and almost content, with her long streaked silken hair and sweet fey looks, would grow out of her puppy love and bloom into an extraordinary woman, a precious gift for Nolfiander or whoever she gave her heart to when the time came. Pelufer, brimful of energy, sleek and wild as a young horse, seemed unharmed by her dark shining talent, which she had mastered with admirable dedication; she would succeed at whatever she applied herself to. Caille was still too young to assess, but if she could channel her tremendous power in safety, she might do anything. Assuming, he thought as he watched her gnaw cloverbread, she didn’t gain a nonned pounds before she turned six.

  Caille returned his gaze calmly. “You’re shining,” she said.

  They all looked at him.

  “Spirits, you are,” said Elora, and “You’re nearly as bright as when you work!” said Pelufer.

  Was that what it was, then, that shining ruddy light they shared? Was it affection, compassion ... love? He could certainly identify this additional new feeling: embarrassment. They had determined that his shine was brightest when he was crafting—wood, metal, it made no difference—and had increased now that he was aware of it. He’d thought it was love of crafting that caused it, some sweet mix of ability and pleasure. He knew it went somewhat beyond that; he shone when he befriended animals, too, something Caille had been quick to point out. “Made friends with old Skulk there, did you?” the farmer had said, the one who’d given him the name he bore now. “He never minded me so well when I sent him to his bed.” But there was more to it. There was the melting love-at-first-sight when he’d met the foal Purslane, [279] the overwhelming sense, when pressing his face into that brown velvet coat, that he had come home.

  And there was the unendurable pain of the horse Purslane dying, broken in a mudslide in the Black Mountains.

  That was why love was not permissible. That was why the distant chimes sounded. These children and Girdlers were cursed with siblings to love, no choice in it, an accident of birth. He was different. Fortunate. He could choose to walk away.

  He need not pursue the shining, or court the pain it promised.

  “Now he’s remembering,” Pelufer said, in a bored drone. “He’s always like that—happy and then sad.”

  “And the shine winked out,” Elora said, puzzled. She had taken the firmest hand as tutor, with Louarn her prize pupil and the two Girdlers her challenge. She claimed that Risalyn and Yuralon were beginning to shine when they worked their herbcraft, though Louarn had not seen even the dimmest glow in them. Perhaps their bladedness interfered. Or perhaps the girls had keener eyes.

  “I was thinking about a new thing I might try making today,” he said. “Something to ease the aching back of a poor sleeper. A set of wooden balls on dowels ...”

  “You were not,” said Pelufer.

  “I was too,” he lied, falling into their patter—the crafted man, the man who could blend himself into any situation, become unnoticeable. But they knew him too well. They knew he didn’t talk that way. They laughed.

  “Breakfast is over,” he said, and rose from his seat. He was transparent to them, his insides becoming more visible by the day. He despised the development. If that made him seem testy, so be it. They had work to do, the blasted make-work that had succeeded beyond all expectation. He would do his work, and find his killers, and move on.

  While Yuralon took the girls to wash up and collect their gear, Risalyn waylaid Louarn. “Speaking of poor sleepers,” she said, “how long has it been since you had a good night’s sleep?”

  “I’ve been short-tempered,” he said, attempting to relax a tensed jaw. It only set a tic going in his cheek. “I apologize.”

  “I don’t mean just now. Yuralon says you’re always up when he wakes up, even when you’re not on watch. You doze fitfully for a few breaths and then jolt yourself awake.”

  He frowned. It was an effort to remember, and he was tired of remembering, battered by memory, sick of it. Not letting himself sleep deeply had been second nature for so long that he’d forgotten why he did it, just as he’d forgotten why he blended speech patterns and gestures and styles of dress. “Six years, I suppose.”

  [280] She blinked. “Years?”

  He found it hard to produce his wry, self-effacing smile for her. He found it ever harder to craft himself for any of them. “The side effect of a troubled childhood.”

  She pulled a face. “I don’t care what happened to you, and I know a good bit of it now. Everyone has to sleep.” She. paused, thinking it through. “Everyone has to dream, Louarn.”

  Yes. That was it, of course. The dreams. The shadows. He’d told the Girdlers, at last, about leading the mutilated mages out of the Ennead’s casting chambers through tunnels he had dreamed into existence. He’d told the story as though it happened to someone else. They weren’t as surprised as he’d expected. Yuralon had tended those mages—put some of them out of their pain—and they had mentioned the boy they’d followed. A sad, haunted boy, they’d said, yet brave; a sound lad who rose to a challenge. He’d regretted divulging the secret then, not least because they in turn had filled in what he’d missed while wandering the labyrinth—the revitalized stewards’ revolt, the arrival of the rebel horde, the Khinish taking Lerissa Illuminator into custody. He had burned to know what became of those he’d known. Now he knew that the gentle stablemaster Bron and the kindly baker Drinda had died on Ennead blades. Now he knew that one of the Nine who had terrorized him still lived. He was heartened that all but one of Bron’s other fosterlings had survived, though held briefly hostage by the Ennead, then doubly pained that the one who’d died had been an infant. He’d grown up in a dark, diseased rock steeped in cruelty and secrets. Now that he knew who had lived and who had died, he wished he didn’t. Louarn alone had not been a happy man, but he’d been content in his craft-hungry, puzzle-hungry wanderings. So much better to be that ignorant, empty man than whatever trebly-haunted creature he was now.

  “I have bad dreams,” he said at last.

  Risalyn snorted. “Don’t we all. Dream them, Louarn. Face them. Dreams are offal, they excrete the things our minds can’t bear.” “My dreams come true.”

  “So you said. But you’re not the boy you were. It might be time to try again.”

  With that she le
ft him, and he moved, sluggish, through the unendurable air to fetch his tools.

  Pelufer, already bored, set the last crate of their wares on the market ground.

  “He’s shining more,” Elora said, unfolding the clever hinged [281] worktable that clever Louarn had built onto its clever hinged legs so they could open out the stall’s clever side baffles and get the clever awning up. “He’s learning.”

  Pelufer groaned. “Louarn Louarn Louarn! Go puke your lovesickness on someone else.”

  Smitten with that haunted man, when he was just itching to be away from them, when loyal Nolfi waited at home. Pelufer liked Louarn too much, too. She liked Yuralon too much. She liked Risalyn too much. But they were still on their own. Still orphans. Caille and Elora were forgetting that. She wouldn’t forget. She would get everything she could from them, learn everything they’d teach, and she’d pay every bit of it back by finding the people they were after, and then they’d be square. Then, when Risalyn and Yuralon went back to being journey healers, when Louarn took up his wandering lad-of-all-crafts life again, it wouldn’t matter.

  Pelufer stooped to pull some puzzle boxes out of the crate and handed one to Caille, for something to do besides watch ants in the grass. Yuralon, helping unpack their gear, was asking Elora about the language of their hands now. Elora was turning the questions as only a trader could. But in truth they didn’t know where the secret fingerspeech came from. Mother had made a game of it, when they were little. It was their baby talk, she thought. But then Louarn had understood it. Louarn had been able to answer. And his fingers had an accent that his voice didn’t. It was a shape accent, not a sound accent. He had a perfect, accentless voice, Elora said. You couldn’t pin down where he came from, not from the way he spoke. But it was too perfect, as if he’d had to learn to talk from scratch when he woke up that last time with no memory. Where had he gone, in between? Somewhere that other people used the secret fingerspeech. But with an accent.