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

by Terry McGarry

The woman turned, putting the tree behind her, and Pelufer was taken aback by the hard authority in that harmless-looking body. She had a desperate shape to her, hands clawed, neck and jaw bunched with tense muscles, squared shoulders. But she checked whatever impulse ran through her. “I’m Dabrena n’Arilda,” she said. “I’m a mender. I’m looking for my daughter.”

  Elora said, “She’s from the Hand, but she’s spent a long time in the Head.”

  “Good with accents, are you?” the woman said.

  “You’re alive,” said Pelufer. Did the bone folk ever make mistakes? Take the living by accident?

  The woman patted herself down. “Apparently so, to my own surprise. And so are you. What’s your name?”

  “Pelufer. This is Elora. How did you get here?”

  “I jumped into a pile of dead bodies while the bonefolk were feeding.”

  “They weren’t feeding. They were sending them here.”

  “Then why aren’t they here?” She looked around, still having trouble reconciling wherever she’d been with where she was now. It took grownups longer to adapt. “There were nonneds of them. ...”

  “They go where they belong. With their families, mostly. You can find the ones you know, if you want to.” She was thinking of the woman’s daughter. She might have been stolen, but she might have been dead, too. Sometimes grieving people did try to fling themselves on the bonefolk.

  The woman blinked. “Can I, now. That’s very interesting. Did the bonefolk bring you here?”

  “Yes. But they don’t bring. They send, and then they come after.”

  [388] The woman sagged with relief. “Then my daughter’s alive.”

  Stolen, then. “Probably. But she’s not here. These are woodfolk. They aren’t the ones stealing children.”

  The woman rubbed both hands over her face and let out a bitter laugh. “After all that, I jumped into the wrong circle of bonefolk?”

  “I guess you did. But we’re going to try to go there. The other ones took our sister, too.”

  The woman stood up straight. Ready to take charge. “How do we do that?”

  Pelufer sighed. “I don’t know yet.”

  She thought the woman would get upset. She was tight as a wire. She must have wanted her daughter back awfully badly, to jump into a pile of the dead while the bonefolk were working. That would have been a scary thing to do. But Pelufer would have done it to rescue Caille, if she’d thought of it. It was a clever idea. She wished she had thought of it.

  The woman just said, “Ah,” and went back to examining the forest. Back where she started.

  Pelufer opened her mouth to tell her about Lornhollow, then shut it. She turned to Elora, raising her hands to finger some questions at her. They had to decide what to do now, and what to do with this woman, and how much more to tell her.

  The bonefolk surrounded them before she could form the first question with her fingers.

  They were just there, like another grove appearing inside the grove of trees. Pelufer was lifted off the ground before she could blink, and Elora was lifted away from her. The bonefolk crowded in around the woman, Dabrena n’Arilda, trapping her. She didn’t try to run. She stood there as if she could stare them down. She was tiny among them, they were so tall, but she was fearless and determined and Pelufer could see that she was thinking hard.

  “They’re going to send us back, they don’t like us being here, we’re not supposed to be here,” Pelufer told her.

  Elora’s hands fluttered at the bonefolk—she and Pelufer weren’t harming anyone, let them go—but the bonefolk didn’t respond.

  “Can they understand me if I talk to them?” Dabrena frowned at Elora’s fingers, now pressing into the arm of the boneman who held her—a firmer way of speaking, so he couldn’t ignore her.

  “I don’t think so,” Pelufer said. “Not these ones.”

  “Let them send us then,” Dabrena said. “We’re in the wrong place anyway, from what you say.”

  “She might be right,” Elora said, giving up on the fingerspeech. [389] “It might be better if we went back and tried to find some stonefolk—”

  Lornhollow pushed his way through the circle, flanked by two other bonefolk. The circle loosened a little, opened up. They were trying not to let Lornhollow come too close to them, and Lornhollow was trying not to go too close to Dabrena. His fingers were working, and the surrounding bonefolk became a semicircle so that they could all see what he was saying. One of them took Dabrena in hand at the same time that they let Elora and Pelufer down to stand in the grass, but they didn’t let any of them go.

  “That’s Lornhollow, our mother’s friend,” Elora said.

  “Our friend,” said Pelufer. “But I don’t know those other two.”

  One of the bonefolk who flanked Lornhollow said, “I am Thorngrief, in your naming, and that is Bindlegore. We stay by Lornhollow and learn your noisy speech, to speak and to hear.”

  “Can the others understand us?” asked Elora.

  “Not to speak or hear. But they will understand your hands if you use them.”

  “I did, they didn’t listen,” Elora said.

  Lornhollow’s gestures had continued, and some of the others were gesturing back to him. They looked very animated, for bonefolk.

  “What are they saying?” Dabrena asked. “I feel I could almost make it out, but ...”

  “It’s too fast, I can’t follow it,” Pelufer said. “Can you, Elora?”

  Elora shook her head, but said, “They’re arguing.”

  “Yes, I gathered that,” Dabrena said. Then suddenly she stiffened, and the boneman behind her tightened his grip so much that she swore at him. “I know those signs,” she said. “Sweet spirits. Those are Stonetree runes. They’re forming Stonetree runes with their hands.”

  “This isn’t good,” Elora said. She was starting to get the gist of what they were debating. “They want to send us back where we came from, but Lornhollow’s upset. He says things are very bad there. He says we’ll die if they send us back there.”

  “There was a battle,” Dabrena said. “It was very bad. But it’s over now.”

  “Not a battle. Something else ...” Elora swore, and Pelufer’s eyes flew wide. She’d never heard that word from her sister. “I can’t make it out. A kind of tearing thing, or a breaking thing.”

  No, that didn’t sound good at all. And the argument wasn’t going Lornhollow’s way. He was jittering and distressed. The other bonefolk were moving farther away from him, closer to each other, all except for Thorngrief and Bindlegore, who stood by him. Thorngrief had a longer face, and Bindlegore wasn’t quite as tall or thin. Given [390] time, she’d learn to tell them apart. But there wasn’t going to be time. The boneman lifted her again, cradling her, until she tried to fight free, then holding her hard by the middle. She knew she couldn’t hurt him. She’d tried that before, with Caille. She couldn’t fight something that didn’t feel pain, that couldn’t be wounded. Why shouldn’t they go home? Why would it be so bad if they went home?

  Lornhollow let out a sound, and the other bonefolk recoiled.

  The one beside Pelufer started to lift Elora.

  Elora didn’t fight him. She got a look on her face as if she was staring into another world, the look she got when she did a working, and she walked right through his arms.

  A shudder went through all the bonefolk, even Thorngrief and Bindlegore, and then they all went very still.

  Elora stood in the middle of the semicircle of bonefolk and said to Lornhollow, “They want us gone. Tell them to send us to the stonefolk’s place. Then they’ll be shut of us.”

  “That is not done.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is not done.”

  Pelufer called, “He didn’t say it can’t, Elora, he—”

  “I know what he said,” Elora snapped over her shoulder. “Shut up, Pelufer. This is what I do. Let me do it.”

  “She’s a trader,” Pelufer told Dabrena, to get some of he
r dignity back. “She’s a good bargainer. You can’t outplay Elora on an even board.”

  “She’s nine-and-five,” Dabrena said, unconvinced.

  “Nine-and-four,” Pelufer said, with a grin despite herself.

  “It is not done to move the living through the ways,” Elora said to Lornhollow. He was jittering again, not a human movement, more like something a cricket would do. At the same time, he was fingering Wait, wait to the other bonefolk. “But you moved Pelufer. It is not done to move the living through the ways. But you would have moved Prendra if she’d been in danger. It is not done to love the living. But you loved our mother. Send us to the stonefolk, Lornhollow. Your folk don’t have to know. Tell them you’ll get rid of us, but it has to be you, you won’t let them touch us, you don’t trust them. Obviously they don’t trust you, so that shouldn’t surprise them too much. You’ll be giving them what they want. They want us gone from here. You’ll be getting what you want—keeping us safe from whatever’s going on at home. Do what is not done. You’ve done it before. It’s the right thing. It’s the only thing you can do.”

  Pelufer’s jaw dropped. Elora had grown up a lot more than she’d thought, while she wasn’t looking. That was annoying.

  [391] Anybody should have caved in to what she’d said. But Lornhollow was still resisting. He was fingering things to Thorngrief, too quick for her to understand. Thorngrief had been in the real world, their world, more recently than Lornhollow. He seemed to have a better idea of what was going on.

  Thorngrief said aloud, to keep the other bonefolk from understanding, “We do not know what the others do with the small living ones. Their place may not be safe.”

  Pelufer glanced at Dabrena, expecting her to react—watching for her reaction to see whether she herself should be upset. If they hurt Caille ... if they’d done anything to her, even scared her ... But Dabrena wasn’t yelling or struggling. Her body had gone to stone. Her face had no expression, but her cheeks were bright red. Pelufer understood: Everything hinged on the decision that Lornhollow made now. They had to get to Caille. They’d thought she was as safe there as they were here, but she might not be. They couldn’t afford to go back home and fight through whatever was wrong there to find stonefolk they could trick into taking them to her. They had to go there now.

  Lornhollow had to send them.

  Thorngrief said, in his stilted, rattleseed voice, “We would have to go too. One of us ahead and one behind. To guard.”

  “Two behind,” said Bindlegore, just barely understandable.

  Agitated, like a leaf on a trembling aspen, like a mantis on a branch, Lornhollow said, “It will seem an attack if woodfolk go there. An intrusion. A terrible breach. It is not done!”

  Dabrena said to Elora, with almost as little inflection as the bonefolk’s voices had, “It appears the bonefolk split into factions at some point, They remain separate from fear of propriety, not fear of harm. Blind adherence to propriety makes rifts in our own world, too. It would not be an intrusion. It would be a courageous act of offering. He could build a bridge to his brethren. He could be the first one brave enough to reach out. Sometimes that’s all it takes, one brave soul. Tell him.”

  Softly, Elora said, “He heard.”

  Lornhollow was shy. Lornhollow was not the type to be the one brave soul. They saw the way he ran away from Dabrena at first. Like a striped squirrel, or a ground sparrow, or a dormouse.

  Lornhollow’s jitters got much, much worse—and then they ceased. He fingered rapidly to the surrounding bonefolk. With a sense of grudging irritation, the others withdrew. Pelufer and Dabrena were released to stumble over to Elora. Pelufer turned and watched the rest [392] of the bonefolk slide into the trees. The impossible sight of it made her eyes hurt. But Elora could do it, too.

  She felt she hardly knew her sister anymore, after today.

  “I will go first, to shield you,” Lornhollow said, and then fingered it, slowly so that they could understand. Thorngrief and Bindlegore would send Pelufer and Elora, then follow.

  “What about Dabrena?” Pelufer asked. “Her daughter is there.”

  “I do not know you,” Lornhollow said to the woman, and Pelufer didn’t need his fingerspeech to understand everything that “know” conveyed.

  There was a long silence. Dabrena said nothing, holding herself tight, as if aware that she could not influence this decision, that any appeal she made would only weaken her position. Pelufer would have ranted and raved. That was interesting, she thought. Sometimes ... sometimes, if you just waited for people to think it through ...

  “But you spoke wisdom,” Lornhollow said at last. “You fear for a child. I fear for a child. We are one.”

  “Send me first,” Dabrena said. “So that the girls can arrive together.”

  Lornhollow turned his hand palm-up in a gesture that Pelufer read as “All right,” and then held his arms out, and took her by the shoulders when she came to stand before him.

  It was the most unlikely possible sight, the vibrant living woman giving herself voluntarily into the hands of death. But Pelufer was beginning to think that the bonefolk had a lot more to do with life than with death. She couldn’t imagine what terrible thing they could ever, have done to deserve sadness and punishment. She’d like to help them, if she could, someday. But it might not be something she could do.

  Maybe it would be something Caille could do.

  They were going to go get Caille.

  Dabrena n’Arilda, her jaw set, as though she wasn’t particularly happy about being dissolved into green light again, disappeared in a surge of phosphorescence so strong that Pelufer had to cover her eyes, and even then saw the veins in her own eyelids. When she peeked through her fingers, Lornhollow’s head was coming down, his eyes were opening, and if a boneman’s face could look awed, then that was how his looked.

  “I know her now,” he said.

  Then he was gone into the trees, maybe down into their roots and from there into the earth and stone. Did he really know how to get [393] to that other place? Should they have tested it first, had someone go and come back?

  Too late, too late. Pelufer and her sister walked to the two remaining bonefolk, and passed out of the forest of the dead.

  And came onto the plain of the dead, a vast black plain of coal or sand, with hills far in the distance, and so much sky that Pelufer staggered under it, and so much space that there was nothing to hang on to.

  Lornhollow wasn’t there. Thorngrief and Bindlegore didn’t come along behind. They must have come through somewhere else. They weren’t familiar with this place, the difference between sending here and coming here. Had they come through at all?

  Pelufer clutched at Elora, trying to make sense of the purple light and endlessness. It smelled different here. Like wet stone, and dry stone, and dust, and sand. Age and erosion and endurance, ancient and timewashed. The outline of trees capped the distant hills with a spiky fuzz, but it didn’t look like real tree fuzz, it looked more like some metal-worker’s suggestion of trees. But in that there was something she could hang on to. She was born of a metals town, a child of metalcrafters. Something deep inside her resonated to copper and tin, pewter and bronze, and most of all to the tempered iron of blades. Metals came from stone. Metals were a kind of stone. Her flesh and her spirit responded to this stone and metal place. She’d have her bearings in a breath or two.

  She could sense that Elora was entirely out of her element. Elora’s spirit resonated to wood. She had been all right in the forest where they’d been, even though it wasn’t like any forest in the world they [395] came from. The colors were strange and the trees were strange, but they were trees, they were something she could know if she had time to learn them. Here there was nothing familiar to her. She looked lost and scared ... and then she didn’t, then she went very straight, as if on a surge of relief, as if she’d spotted something that made sense to her and centered her in the midst of the alien infinite. Something she could hang on to.


  “Louarn!” Elora cried, and dragged Pelufer forward.

  A stream delved the matte-black ground, clear and sparkling and disappearing into nothing where it left the range of sight. Beside it sat Louarn, his knees cradled in his arms, his hands grasping for something held just out of their reach by a stranger.

  Pelufer dug her heels in.

  She had never, ever seen anyone as not-right as that stranger.

  Grunting and slipping on the unnatural ground, Elora hauled her toward them. She called Louarn’s name again. The stranger looked up. Her eyes were blue, and beautiful, and utterly malevolent.

  Louarn looked up, too. His eyes were exactly the same blue, in a face exactly the same shade of pale, under a tousled shock of exactly the same dark hair.

  There was no recognition in his eyes.

  The sweet voice had stopped murmuring to him, gentle words of kindness and encouragement, sensible words, wonderful words, describing how all his talents would at last be put to use, how she would help him weave his powers into something indomitable and grand. Don’t stop, he wanted to say. Tell me what I am. Tell me what I can be. He knew what he was. A superficial man. No more than what he had crafted of himself. Inside that he was a lonely wanderer, lost and divided. She would give him purpose. She would mold his ghosts and powers into a unified strength. He had told her everything: the shadows, the dreaming, the haunts, the shining, the crystalline passageway through realms, the three lights. She would know what to do with them. She would take the hard decisions from him. There would be no love, no pain. Love only led to pain. She would free him of all that. She would lead him through the treacherous labyrinth, back into the pure light.

  He turned his head, seeking the sound of her voice, but his eyes were filled with starbursts and he could not see. He was lost, he was lost without her, she had abandoned him like all the others, why was he never a good enough boy to keep, to stay with, what was wrong with him?

  “Mother,” he whispered, pleading. “Tell me what to do.”

  * * *

  [396] Dabrena saw the little girls. She saw the woman and the young man. She saw the girls start toward them, the older one dragging the younger one, the younger one resisting.