Louarn struggled not to react visibly. If this was so, then he [365] himself was magestone, the vessel for the memories of the long-lost boys who dwelled inside him. He knew how powerful those echoes were. He leaped ahead to her point, and only came upon more questions, and swallowed them, waiting, letting her tell it.
“One night I sat alone by a dying refugee child on Khine; I had eased her pain with my herbals, and I had meant to comfort her, but I failed to pay attention, and she died without my realizing. I had rather a lot on my mind, and there was nothing I could have done.” And you were concerned only with the appearance of ministering to her, Louarn thought. “The bonefolk came before I could absent myself, and they felt the presence of the stone, and reacted to it, and then I knew.”
The bonefolk were the race long lost.
“They crafted the Holding from the black stone of the Aralinns. They crafted our impossible mountains, our unnatural terrain. They made the stone forest in the Belt and the Memory Stones in the Heel. They crafted the Eiden Myr landmass in their own image.” She paused for effect. “And then they fell. And now they are what they are. I can make them what they were. But I will need magelight to do it. And so they bring me children.”
“How will you redeem them?”
She glanced over her shoulder and held a finger to her lips, eyes dancing.
A pretense, that she would not tell him because the bonefolk might hear—clearly they understood the spoken tongue, they had ears though they did not speak, they responded to her spoken bidding—and effect their redemption themselves. A pretense, that she would not tell him because he might depose her and fulfill the bargain in her stead. He gave her a conspiratorial smirk, with just a hint of hesitation, to say that he understood, that he must defer to her but now dared to hope they would share a special understanding.
It was quite clear that she had no means whatever of redeeming these sad, fallen folk.
“Now wouldn’t you like to meet your father?” she said.
A calculated jab, and it worked all too well. He wanted nothing more, and feared nothing more. He let bored diffidence blank his face, then brought his eyes back to the ring, as though he coveted it and could not resist another look. “The bonefolk leave all metal and stone. How could that ring have gotten here?”
“Clever lad,” she said. Mocking. Then she shrugged. “Magestone isn’t stone, apparently. It came with me in its drawbag. And the setting isn’t silver from our world. It was crafted here, for me, by the bonefolk, from one of their silver trees. It blackened when it went [366] around my finger. A change in its own essence when it touched living flesh, or some subtle gibe of its crafters at me, there’s no telling. It serves its purpose.”
“To test the children.”
“Yes.” She made him wait; made him ask.
He acquiesced. “How did you know the light was returning in the children? Did the stone glow for one of your refugees?”
“The first children of the broken wardings turned five this past winter—conceived on Ve Galandra six years ago. They will just be showing their lights now.”
“You may miss some who haven’t begun to show.”
“We shall repeat the sweeps periodically, as anxious parents forget their terror and relax their guard. It’s not that I must have them all immediately. It’s that I must have them before they see the lights in each other.”
“And alert their parents that the light is in fact returning.”
“That the light is reborn. It will never return to those of us who lost it. We are permanently cored. Seared. But it will shine twice as bright in the next generation. Particularly to children of those who were mages. What cannot bloom in the parent will bloom in the child. Pruned back, the magelight will flower all the more profusely. That verse came to me in a codex retrieved from an errant scholar over the winter. The exiled mages lost their light when Galandra cast the shield, too, you see. But only those who were alive when the casting was done. In the next generation it came back stronger. ‘Cut back hard, light’s vine blooms thrice as lush: The children shine. The children shine. The children shine.’ Well, it was quite moving in the original, but that’s not a language you would understand.”
For spirits’ sake, then, why was she killing these mage parents?
“You keep the children here?”
“It’s a lovely place, don’t you think? A peaceful, pretty landscape from some tellers’ tale. They need not eat, they need not drink. I don’t yet know whether they will grow, but they never sicken, and cannot die. They run and play, within boundaries I have set—this place appears to be infinite, we wouldn’t want to lose any—and once they turn six I will set about teaching them their craft.”
“It is a place of the dead. That is no place to raise children.”
“I’m not raising children. I’m training mages. And the dead don’t bother them.” She drew back with his hand in both of hers, bending prettily when he did not move, her arms extended, a display of lithe flirtation—girlish, breathless. “Come. Come and see.”
He could no longer resist. He let her pull him through the silver trees, to the top of a soft-coal slope, and he looked out.
[367] Rank upon rank of the dead, for as far as the eye could see, and farther. Flesh and clothing of every color, bodies of every size, laid out as if sleeping. Healed, and perfect. Like pebbles on an infinite shore, soft human stars on an inverted fabric of sky. This hill they stood on was some construct of the bonefolk’s, a gold-and-silver forest rising above the endless plain of the dead. Similar hills shouldered up to either side.
This was where the bonefolk sent the bodies they consumed.
“To what purpose?” he murmured.
She heard him, in the unmoving air. “I have no idea. A memorial? A collection? Fuel for some future use? Their spirits were passaged to bet-jahr, or haunt the mortal realm.”
Magecraft had passaged spirits ... what else might it do, what more might it be capable of in its new blossoming? If a power arose that could unite haunts with their restored flesh ...
Lerissa should know. She did not. She could bid the bonefolk, but she could not understand them, or they would not tell her everything. There was a breach here. He could exploit it. He had understood them, somehow, when he was here before, when he was Mellas ... but he could not remember ...
Somehow, he could exploit it, when his mind caught up with him, and he could take everything Lerissa had, everything she had constructed, and craft it to his own use.
“Do you know how limestone forms?” she asked, taking a step nearer to him. “Shells collect at the seabottom. The waves grind stone to sand. Time and pressures and shifting earth compact those particles into mountains. That’s what these bonefolk did, in their glory. They crafted mountains. They are stoneweavers, these folk. They hear the thoughts of stone, they enter it bodily, they plumb its essence.”
He’d seen them move through stone. There was stone under all the ground in the mortal world. They could go anywhere. Yet there was no sign of their passage through turf, no divots, no tearing. Bonefolk were known for lurking in forests. And he had not seen enough bonefolk here to collect all the corpses in his ailing world. All these dead, and they might be only the ones who died near stone, or enclosed in it. If there was more than one kind ... if there were forest bonefolk, and water bonefolk ... if she had subverted only this one group ...”
Another breach to exploit, more potential to leverage one thing against another, but he must have a few breaths to think, and the sight of the dead legions had nearly blanked his mind.
“It will be the third age,” Lerissa said, moving close upon his right, pressing in so that he felt her soft breast against his upper arm. [368] “All those lives, all those shells, like grains of sand, the dead of twice nine nonned years. The next nine nonned have just begun. Imagine what lofty peaks we might craft of them, you and I.”
He breathed deep, and what came to him was the shock of her scent.
It
was his mother’s scent. It touched the oldest, deepest part of him—the part that Pelufer had been unable to name because it had no name. The newborn infant he had been, just come into the world of sight and smell, laid on his mother’s breast to breathe her scent and look into her face for one instant before Evonder took him off to Bron to be fostered, as Rigael had ordered. His body knew her. His body yearned for her embrace.
She is not my mother.
Moving around behind him, she smoothed a hand over his hair, down his neck, along his shoulder and arm. She was beautiful, and deliciously cold, and under the frisson her touch evoked his flesh burned for hers, and yearned for hers, all at cross-purposes.
She is not my mother. My mother’s name was Pirra. My mother loved me. This woman is not my mother. I can bed her, if it will get me what I want. Evonder did; why shouldn’t I? I could turn this seduction back on her in ways she’s never dreamed, disarm her with passion when she thinks to cloud my mind with it. She does not know how I have gotten what I wanted all these years.
Or he might join her, make that only the first, symbolic joining in a partnership that could craft all the world to their own ends.
To his own ends.
If he could control her, he could put it all to rights. Harnessing the magelight of the children she had collected, seeing to it that they were treated with compassion and trained to treat the world with it, he might heal all the world’s ills, calm the quakes, redirect the weather, conquer the blight and plague and drought and flood. One benevolent leader could change it all.
Why shouldn’t it be him? He was still half intoxicated with the pure white light. He possessed magelight, and the same earthy copper light as the Gir Doegre girls, and he had the girls, as well—the eldest enamored of him and easily charmed, the youngest and most powerful an ally by virtue of their shared light. Only the middle girl would be troublesome, and she, an orphaned child who had fended valiantly on her own, was struck with pity for the orphaned children who dwelled inside him. He could turn her however he wished. And the bluesilver light, connected somehow with the puzzles he made, with the medium of thought ... he could fan that silver flame, quicken it, find others who possessed it, delve its powers. He would be the first [369] man of a new age, an age in which all lights were kindled, all powers available. Who better to restore the world that was, than he? Who better to make it more than it had been? Who better than a crafter, to craft the third age of Eiden Myr?
If he slept, if he dreamed, he could change the world.
He was dreaming now, a waking dream of peaceful fields and pliant skies, and with one word, one turned seduction, one choice, he could make it all come true.
He swallowed his gorge, and turned to Lerissa.
From behind them, in the trees, came the phosphorescent tingle of the passaged, the ragged ends of tantrums tailing off into wonder, the sniffles of frightened children frozen in lampglare.
Lerissa dropped her shoulders in an affectation of regret. “Only a brief interruption,” she said. He felt her breath on his lips. “Then by all means we shall resume.”
A child’s voice called his name, questioning.
Caille.
Lerissa did not know his name. Lerissa did not know any of his names. Lerissa had not given him a name.
They turned as one and approached the children grouped loosely among the silver tree trunks and pendulous golden branches. As the others had, they moved closer to one another, away from the strange surroundings and the bonefolk and the unfamiliar adults.
“Louarn!” Caille called again, from the midst of them, and for a terrible moment he thought she would run to him. But she kept still, looking from him to the trees, to the bonefolk, to the other children, to Lerissa. She seemed very small and alone without her sisters, and her face was smeared and swollen from tears, but she dragged one thumb-stretched sleeve across her eyes and the other under her nose and, receiving no response from him, turned on the bonefolk with a stamp of foot. “I said to take me to the battle!”
Lerissa had turned her head three-quarters to Louarn, her lips forming a question for which words had not yet come, but the child’s behavior was so odd in comparison with that of the other children that she forgot Louarn, or glanced off the flat stone of his expression glimpsed from the corner of her eye. She began to coo to the frightened children, approaching them with tender, silken softness, no threat in her bearing. Just that hand held out, as if in expectation of a kiss. Or obeisance.
No one could tear their eyes from her. She was beautiful and terrifying. She began on the left, holding the ring before each child. The second, a boy, she drew gently out of the group and pressed into [370] the care of the bonefolk with whispered reassurances that he would see his mother soon. The third showed no light.
Louarn stepped in close behind her. He saw the ring glow for another boy. These were Knee children. The light had been strong in the Knee.
Caille was in the middle. A little girl from the back had come up to clutch her arm. The innkeepers’ child, from the Ruffed Grouse in Gir Nuorin. He could not remember her name. Caille told the girl not to be afraid, and the fierce, wary face she turned toward Lerissa looked exactly like Pelufer’s face.
If Caille showed a light, and stayed here, her powers would be revealed. There was no injury here to heal, but Louarn did not know what else she might do. Almost anything, Elora had said. And she could not be trusted not to speak of it, without her sisters keeping watch. He could feel Lerissa’s excitement build as she made her way, casually methodical, toward the center of the group. She sensed Caille. She wanted Caille.
Caille was next. She did not look at Louarn. Her eyes were fixed on Lerissa. Wary, and hardening, as her chin jutted out and her fists clenched at her sides.
He encircled Lerissa with his arms and drew her up and back. He closed his hand on her hand, brought it to his lips. “Let me,” he said, kissing her palm, her wrist. Moving to slip the ring from her finger.
She disengaged. “Not yet, love.”
He caught her wrist, playfully. “The dawn of a new age,” he said. “Let me share it.”
She twisted her wrist, and he tightened his hold and bared his teeth, and her eyes went flat, and he endured the slap and would have stepped in to kiss her, stepping between her legs so that the knee could not come up into his crotch, but there was a patter of feet and a murmur from the children and Lerissa wrenched free of him and called out to her bonefolk, but they were only turning their long torsos from one side to the other, arms raised, as if in confusion, confounded by an invasion of mice, and there were children everywhere, running, swooping in through the trees—
Bearing the new ones off.
“Hold them!” Lerissa barked to the bonefolk who had the boys who’d shown a light, as she grabbed the nearest children by the hair. “Help me,” she growled to Louarn, and “Bofric!” she shouted.
One of the children she held was the innkeepers’ daughter. Caille tried to haul her away, but Lerissa would not release her grip on the girl’s hair. The girl shrieked in pain, and a wink later Caille let go [371] as though she’d touched a hot iron. Then an older child with blunt-cut honey hair swept Caille away with a whoop of glee, and they were gone, vanished among the trees.
Two-thirds of the new arrivals remained.
Quickly, Lerissa tested them; she culled half their number and sent the others home. The child from the inn was among the latter. Louarn bit his tongue to restrain himself from some attempt to send a message with her.
“What was that?” he said, when she’d parceled out her charges and turned to him at last, before whatever banishment or scolding or seduction she had chosen for him in the meantime.
“A minor difficulty.” She smoothed her saffron robes. “Of no concern.”
“It’s of concern if they’re liberating your—”
“Where will they go? The ones who show a light will still be in this realm; the others are simply unnecessarily denied their passage home. She’s
doing them no favors.”
The honey-haired one. It had to be. She was older, and she swept through with the assurance of command, the others following in her wake as she’d run off. It was a familiar pattern, observed among countless children during his travels. There was always a ringleader. “Who is she?”
“A little girl who shouldn’t have come here. My man in the Head holding sent her to me in a thoughtless panic. I wanted him with me, and sent one of the bonefolk for him, but it apparently caught him at an inconvenient time. He sent the girl on, planning to follow. It was stupid of him, and he’s paid for it since. He miscalculated her age. She was already born when we were cored, there’ll never be a light in her. I would have sent her back, but she got loose, and now she harries us. She steals new children from me, ganging them together who knows where. She’s seen too much now, I can’t permit her to return, and she’s terribly quick. Even my bonefolk can’t catch her.”
It hadn’t seemed to Louarn that they’d tried very hard. If these raids happened from time to time, they should not have been taken by surprise. That surprise had been feigned to cover a failure to act. They aren’t doing everything you bid them, he thought. Perhaps they were working against her in whatever small ways they could, unhappy with what she had them do but still trying to keep her sweet in case she could actually deliver on the vague redemption she promised.
“She seems to think she’s their rescuer,” Lerissa said. “Perhaps she believes I’ll kill them. I’ve called out to her, I’ve told her that I’ll send the lightless home and take the best care of the others, but she doesn’t respond. She thinks it’s a game.”
[372] Oh, I doubt that, Louarn thought. I doubt that very much. I think she’s fighting for her life, and fighting for the lives of all these children. Brave girl. Good on her.
And then, in a flash of connection so quick that it took him a moment afterward to isolate the disparate pieces, he realised: She will be able to converse with them now. Now she has Caille.
He had understood the bonefolk in this place when he had passed through from being Mellas to being Louarn. He had understood the fingerspeech with which the Gir Doegre girls spoke to each other in secret.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 46