“Caille?” Pelufer asked—relieved, but not relieved enough.
Elora said, “Lornhollow thinks he knows who took her and where, but he can’t send us there.”
“That’s Lornhollow?” Pelufer said, pointing at the boneman.
The boneman said, “I am Lornhollow, in your naming.”
So she had heard him speak. She didn’t know bonefolk could speak. She thought she might have imagined it before. He wasn’t very good at it—his mouth was a queer shape, too round, and it didn’t have lips—but he managed it somehow.
“If you can’t send us to our sister, send us back,” Pelufer said. “We’ll find our own way.”
“You cannot,” the boneman said. “You do not have the way of stone.”
“Then you do it!”
“We are woodfolk. Those are stonefolk. They are different.”
Pelufer swore, slamming her arms against her sides, and whirled around looking for something to throw or break, but there was nothing. She was so sick of being looked after when she didn’t expect it and didn’t know and hadn’t asked for it! She didn’t ask the boneman to rescue her and Elora. She might have figured out what the reaching-out feeling was, she might have stopped the battle if he’d given her a chance, but no, he had to just send her here, and wherever it was and however safe it was, it wasn’t where the other one sent Caille. It wasn’t good enough. No matter how good anyone’s intentions, they never saved her all the way. They never rescued her enough. Like every other time, she’d have to do it herself.
“Is it a safe place, where they took her?” Elora asked, moving away to touch a tree. “Like here?”
“No place is safe,” Lornhollow said. His slurred speech sounded as sad as his big dark teary eyes looked.
Elora was still moving, going between trees now. She was in one of her trances. Woods made her drunker than Father after a jug, and these groves were golden, enchanted, perfumed. It would only be worse here. “Don’t, Elora, don’t get lost in this,” she said, trotting after her to stop her. Movement was strange here. Elora might walk off into some other grove and Pelufer might not be able to find her. But she was right there, right in front, so close that Pelufer blundered into her. She was staring down at their father.
“Where’s Mamma?” Elora said.
“I couldn’t find her.” Saying it made it hurt. It hadn’t hurt before; [381] finding Mamma was just a thing she needed to do, and it wasn’t as important as finding Caille and so she didn’t let it touch her when she failed. Now it did.
Lornhollow came up beside them, moving in a slow, intentional way, rustling the grass with his long bare feet, so that they would sense him. He could have moved like the others, in a shifting silence. He was trying to be human for them, a little bit. As much as he could.
She didn’t care. She didn’t care. He could be as nice as he wanted and try as hard as he wanted. If he couldn’t take them to Caille he was no use and they had to go.
“Prendra’s flesh is not here,” he said, in his dry, slurred, mournful voice.
Pelufer’s heart took a turn. “They took her to the spirit wood. We were there. We saw it.”
Lornhollow looked down on them from his height of more than seven feet. Tall as a tree, pale as mist. Luminous, as if there was something inside him that made him shine the way they shined when they did workings. “Prendra is here,” he said.
“How do you know her name?” Elora asked, still vague, still entranced.
“I knew her,” Lornhollow replied.
“Is that why you rescued us?” Pelufer said. “You were watching us, because we’re her daughters?”
“I watch,” Lornhollow said.
There was no telling what he meant. The way he spoke wasn’t the way they spoke. The sounds came out in the shape of their words, but they didn’t fit exactly. They were like someone giving you a plate because it was the closest thing he had to the kind of bowl you were used to, and you wouldn’t recognize the kind of bowls he used. But it didn’t hold what he needed it to. It was just a platter to present something on. It wasn’t the right thing.
Pelufer stepped away, and looked up at him, and in the secret silent language their mother had taught them she asked him why.
With his long, facile fingers, Lornhollow told them.
“Watch” would not have described the way he’d been connected to them. “Children” meant so much more than new people their mother’s body had made. “Because” would not have conveyed the obligation or the longing or the affection. “Love” would not have been enough if he’d said it, not for joy and pain that went as deep as roots. “Her” meant their mother, but so much more. His fingers were fluid and eloquent, and the shapes they made said things he never could have said with his mouth.
[382] Elora sank into the downy grass and touched Padda’s body. “You’re not ... our father, are you?”
With her head bowed, Lornhollow could not fingerspeak to her. “This is your father,” he said, curling his hands loosely in front of his chest. “You are flesh. We are woodfolk. We are different.”
“Where is our mother?” Pelufer asked—softly, in awe, as though she already knew.
Lornhollow uncurled one spindly finger, and pointed it at her.
“In me?” she whispered.
“All of you. You have the ways. She gave you the ways.”
“Everyone has the ways,” Pelufer said. “All little children have the ways. Grafters have the ways when they’re doing it right. I saw a man with no shine to him at all pick up a dog that a cartwheel rolled over, and he shined, he eased the dog’s pain and he wrapped up the shattered leg and the dog bit him in the beginning but later on it licked him and the whole time he was shining. He had the ways.”
Lornhollow lowered his head and his arms. From the shape of it she knew she was babbling and he expected better of her. “You have more,” he said, and his shape said You know that perfectly well. “She gave you more. She gave you hers. I gave you hers.”
Slowly, like a giant heron folding itself down into a nest, the boneman folded his legs under him and sat in the grass by their father’s body. Sitting, he was eye-to-eye with her.
“Look up, Elora,” Pelufer said. She sat beside her sister and turned her toward Lornhollow. “He’s going to tell us but he has to do it with his hands. You have to look at him.”
“I don’t want to know,” Elora said. “I know too much. I know enough. I don’t want any more. It’s going to hurt.”
“It won’t.”
“It will.”
“All right it will. But I want to know.”
“We have to get Caille.” A calculated plea—she hadn’t been so worried about Caille a moment ago, but she knew Pelufer was. At least the trance of the forest was wearing off.
“He’s going to tell us what Caille is.”
“I don’t care, I don’t care what we are, I just want Caille, I just want Mamma, I just want to not hurt.”
“Don’t look then,” Pelufer said, but of course Elora looked, and with his fluid hands Lornhollow gave the story to them.
When the folk dissolved the bodies of the dead, they sent them on to these waiting places, leaving the spirits to go where they would. In the age of people of light, the spirits had already been sent on, most [383] of the time, and all the bonefolk did was transport and repair the bodies. But when that light was gone, the spirits stayed behind in Eiden’s realm. The bonefolk made the bodies anew. They learned the bodies, every particle of them, and made them right, and sent them on, Pelufer could not tell the order of those things, they were all one the way Lornhollow conveyed it, and there was terrible pain involved and glorious pleasure. Even his fingers could not shape the full extent of what it was like. Pelufer understood that. She couldn’t explain her knacks to people even when she tried hard. But she understood what he said next: that there was power in those bodies. The force of life. The force of their hearts, she thought he said. And Prendra made him promise that when her spiri
t left her body, he would give that power to her girls. The world was turning dark and hard, with no mages to protect them anymore. She gave her heartforce to her children, to make them strong for what was to come.
Pelufer remembered. She remembered bundling up the new baby, sneaking out of the house with Elora in the lead, the way her foot hit that bad board even though she knew it was there and it let out a creak but Padda didn’t hear under the sound of his grief. She was five, and Elora was seven. She had to be very careful with the baby, and once they came to the woods Elora took her because she was bigger. They went to the woods because while the baby was growing inside her, Mamma made Elora promise that if anything happened to her and they took her to the spirit wood, Elora had to take Pelufer and the baby and follow. Pelufer was scared, and angry at Elora. Elora was always so good and always did what Mamma and Padda told her. But when they got into the woods, she forgot about being scared and angry. She had never seen a boneman. She stared in wonder from the place where they were hiding, at the edge. She saw the boneman pick up their mother the way their mother picked her up, the way you picked up something you loved very much. The bonefolk were nicer than people said. The boneman looked so kind. But then her mother went away, just turned into green light in the boneman’s arms and went away, and something passed through her like a wind, the sweetest strongest wind in the world, the most wonderful feeling she had ever had. But Mamma was gone. The boneman had made her go away. And Elora and the baby were glowing green now. What if the boneman took them too?
Elora couldn’t hold her back because she had the baby in her arms, and Pelufer scrambled into the clearing to get her mother back, to stop whatever the boneman was doing to Elora and the baby, to punch him and bite him—only midway there she started spewing names, and the boneman must have gotten frightened and left, but she [384] didn’t see what happened because she was choking on the names, and Elora had to come and get her out of the wood and get them home. It was hard to carry the baby and get Pelufer out of the wood too. Elora told her that later. She told her that Pelufer could never ever go back to that wood. She was angry and scared about it. But she was proud of herself. She was proud that she did what Mamma wanted.
She was already starting to try to be Mamma.
Pelufer saw all that, remembered all that, through the shapes described by Lornhollow’s hands. That night was when they changed, when they got their knacks. Caille got the most because she was the smallest and newest. That night had changed their lives forever.
He’d met their mother in that wood. He’d come for the dead, when she was a young girl, and had not sensed her creep up on him. It was—embarrassing, humiliating, to be seen in the act of working the dead. Like people shifting each other. You weren’t supposed to watch when people did that. Mamma and Padda always kept their door closed. The bonefolk wouldn’t come if someone might watch. It was their great pleasure and their great pain. Some were more shy than others. Lornhollow had been very shy. The girl had startled him badly. But something made him stay. She was so young and so shining, and she wasn’t afraid of him. Time passed. He met her again, and again. His folk disapproved. They did not linger by the living. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t done. But Lornhollow did it. Her folk would not approve either. They had to be secretive and careful. But one of them saw. Another girl. Prendra tried to show the other girl that Lornhollow was good, tried to teach her the language of fingers she had learned from Lornhollow. Lornhollow tried to talk to her in the language of sound he had learned from Prendra. But the girl ran away. She threatened Prendra. Lornhollow was afraid of what would happen, what would befall Prendra. He lingered closer. He would send her away if she came into danger. But Prendra told him she had seen to it. She did not tell him how. Only that he was safe, as if his safety and not hers had been the worry, and that the other girl would not trouble them again.
“Mireille’s mother,” Elora murmured. That was the old grievance between them. Jenaille had been a stickler for convention. Every little rule, every little proper thing. She guarded decorum like personal property. Prendra consorting with bonefolk ... she’d have gone spare.
“I’d like to know what Mother said to her to make her keep her mouth shut,” Pelufer said with a grin.
Sadly, Elora said, “No wonder Mireille’s the way she is.”
Typical Elora, to pity that spiteful girl. It was Lornhollow Pelufer [385] pitied now. “You gave her up for us,” she said. “You didn’t send her here.”
He did not reply. Maybe he couldn’t.
“Did Padda mind?” Elora asked.
She meant was Padda jealous. Pelufer wouldn’t have thought of that.
Lornhollow told them again that bonefolk and humans were different. Bonefolk could not mate with humans. Bonefolk did not mate. That was a thing of life, a creation of life, a pleasure of flesh that was alien to them. What he and Prendra shared was not like that. But Nimorin knew of them. He was pained by them. He tried to love Lornhollow too, and could not. He feared that Prendra loved Lornhollow more than she did him, as if she didn’t have enough love in her for the both of them and the girls too. She gave all her love to all of them. Her love was limitless, like this place. She was love. That was her shining.
“But the bodies ...” Elora said. “You send them here to wait. To wait for what? To get their spirits back someday? To put the haunts back in them?”
If that was why, then Padda could live again, and Mamma could not, and Mamma had given up everything to make them strong.
Lornhollow didn’t know. The bonefolk didn’t remember why they did what they did. It was their sacrifice and their reward. It was pain and pleasure. All beauty was both pain and pleasure, as was all love. They did not know what would happen. They no longer knew what they were, what they had been, why they were. They simply were. They did what they did. They’d failed in some grievous way long ago, and so they did what they did. That was all.
“It is what is,” he said aloud.
“Why are you stealing children?” Pelufer asked.
Lornhollow gestured that he stole nothing, and Pelufer sensed irritation in the shape of it—insult. He would get up in a moment, she could tell. He didn’t like this. He didn’t want to talk about it.
“The others then. You’re woodfolk. The stonefolk took Caille and Lusonel and those others. Why? Where?”
To their place, Lornhollow told them. To their waiting place. Because they were bid to. It was wrong to move the living through the ways.
“You moved us,” Pelufer said.
“Only you,” Elora said. “I came myself. I can do it, Pel. I can move through the trees like they do. It’s wonderful and frightening. I want to do it again, and I don’t. But he only brought you. He broke his own rule to save your life.”
[386] Pelufer scowled, but she couldn’t explain about the battle. She couldn’t explain the feeling she’d had there at the very end that maybe there was something she could do to stop it, maybe Caille had been right after all. Lornhollow did a kind thing, and it ... cost him.
“Thank you, Lornhollow,” she said. Elora didn’t even have to glare at her or pinch her first.
Lornhollow blinked—his eyes closed and then opened, even though they had no lids and he never blinked, not the way people blinked now and then to wet their eyes. His eyes were always wet. She wondered if that blink was a kind of smile.
She smiled back—
And then he was up, she hadn’t even seen him get up but he was up and backing away, fading between the trees, or into them, moving with the bonefolk’s swift silence.
Stricken, she said, “What did I do? I didn’t do anything, I swear, I only smiled—”
Elora was scrambling to her feet and looking back the way they had come, and then Pelufer realized that she’d heard something, too, it just took a moment to come through to her. Lornhollow hadn’t been insulted, he’d been startled, like a woodland animal, and he’d fled into invisible safety.
“We’d better go see what
it is,” Pelufer said.
“We’d better not,” Elora replied. “Stay here, Pel. We don’t know ...”
“It could be Caille!”
“He wouldn’t have run from Caille.”
They could hear someone now, moving around the emerald grove. It was both right beside them and incalculably far away. They could walk right toward it and end up in some other grove if they wanted to. In fact, if Elora did that, she probably would end up in some far grove. They were already in some far grove. You moved the way you needed to move, here, and if Elora was afraid of whoever was rustling around over there, she wouldn’t be able to go there.
“I’m going to go see.”
“No! We can’t split up.”
“We can always find each other, Elora. We can always find Padda. That’s how it works here.”
“I know. But no. I’ll go with you. You might need me, somehow. It’s a forest. It’s where I belong.”
She had a point there. But she still might not get to the emerald grove, not if she really didn’t want to go there. “All right,” Pelufer said, “just go back to Padda if things go wrong.”
“We have to find Caille,” Elora said, miserable.
[387] “I know. I’ll find a way, Elora. Maybe that’s the way, over there, whatever that is. I have to go see.”
With Elora following—watching her back, and hiding behind her at the same time—she crept back to the edge of the emerald grove.
A woman was examining the periphery. She never moved far from the center of the familiar trees. She wasn’t yet ready to strike off and go exploring. She was stunned, confused, her limbs loose and not completely obeying her. She put a hand in front of her mouth to feel her own breath, then laid the palm on the dappled tree trunk before her.
She wasn’t wearing any weapons. She was hardly taller than Elora, and nearly as slim, with honey-brown hair cut blunt at the shoulders and a hairband dangling at the bottom of it. She had a pretty face, from the side anyway. She didn’t look like any kind of a threat.
Pelufer stepped into view. “Who are you?” she said.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 48