When she bolted, it was too fast for him to stop her, though he’d sensed it coming. None of the bonefolk moved to retrieve her. She fled out into the limitless coal plain and disappeared from view, perhaps wishing herself away with her dead father, or some dead ancestor even farther off. If he could puzzle out who she would flee to, he could be there in three steps. But he didn’t know if he wanted to bother.
“How far can she run?” he asked Caille.
“Forever,” she said. “It goes on forever.”
“Can they fetch her and send her back to Khine?”
“If they decide they want to,” Caille said. “I don’t know if they will.”
Louarn didn’t think he wanted them to. She’d be better off spending eternity here, where she could do no harm. But as long as she was alive she would contrive to do harm, no matter where she went. [404] This temporary vanquishment would not be sufficient.
He would not try to persuade the bonefolk to return her to the mortal world in such a way that he could kill her. He would not become their manipulator, as she had been his, and theirs.
“You can tell them I don’t believe she meant to make good on her promise to them,” he said.
“I already told them that,” said Kara. Dabrena’s daughter, all of six years old, no bigger than Caille although she had over a year on her, with her mother’s dark honey hair but brown eyes that must have come from her father. “She lied a lot.” The sight of her mother had deflated her, and though she’d embraced her with relief, it was also with a discomfort that bespoke more than the embarrassment of greeting a parent in front of one’s peers. She seemed eager to boast of her achievements, to tell her mother all about her escape, her raids, her adventure—and yet she ducked her head as if in expectation of a blow, as if her mother might blame her for her own abduction.
“Not everything she said was a lie,” Louarn told them. This was between Lerissa and the folk she had tried to swindle, now, and they had the right to know everything he could tell them. “And if she’d decided to keep her bargain, she might even have found a way, with enough mages.”
He glanced at Caille before he could stop himself, and he saw her understand that he was wondering what magecraft combined with her own power might be capable of, though he said nothing.
“I told Kara about me,” Caille said. “She’s my friend.”
“She’ll have to show me, back home,” Kara said. “I don’t know if I believe her, either, but she’s my friend too and it’s all right if she fibbed about that. She said she could talk to the bonefolk and tell me what they were saying back, and that was true.”
That was how these youngest girls had convinced the bonefolk that what they were doing was wrong. They had already known it was wrong. They had already been unhappy about it. They had already been aiding Kara’s rebellion where they could. But when Caille came and opened communication in both directions, they could no longer see the children as objects, or as livestock to herd as the sheepherd bid them. The children became real to them, as the bonefolk were becoming real now to Louarn and Dabrena and the older girls. That reality was stronger for them than Lerissa’s suspect promises, no matter how badly they longed for those promises to be the truth.
They had sent the stolen children home. Lerissa had two human henchmen; they’d sent them back where they came from, but Louarn could not extract an adequate description of where that was. Caille and Kara had stayed, Caille determined to rescue Louarn. The only [405] remaining task, it seemed to him, was for the bonefolk to send these humans back to Eiden’s realm. He could return through his dreams, and he must do so as soon as possible. Worilke was there, somewhere. Ordering the death of mages from some insane, deluded, flawed assumption about the light’s return. This sojourn had delayed him. He must finish what had begun when he left Croy Brickman’s house in Dindry Leng.
But the bonefolk still surrounded them. They stood unmoving, as though waiting, or’as though great thoughts were passing through them or among them, invisible to human view. For a moment Louarn wondered whether it had something to do with him. He had passed through this place before. Did they remember him? Did they remember his pleas for love, his pleas to stay?
But it had nothing to do with him at all. Part of him, the practical man, was relieved. Another part of him, the lost boy who was no longer Mellas but had not yet crafted himself into Louarn, felt a rush of loneliness and hurt, as though they’d turned him away all over again.
Pelufer tugged on the tatters that clothed the boneman next to her, and inclined her head toward the others. He shuddered up and down the length of his long body, and then he took a step forward, flanked by the other two who had stood with Pelufer and Elora.
The bonefolk began to fingerspeak to each other.
“Do you understand them?” Dabrena asked Louarn. The way he watched them suggested that he did, though their signing went too fast for even the girls to follow, and they were all signing at once, as if they could all read the gestures of every one of them concurrently, with a field awareness no human would have had.
Louarn nodded. “More or less. They are trying to ... make peace? Mend a rift? I cannot define it. The ones nearest us do not belong here. Their arrival was ... a great shock. They’re trying to sort out the ramifications.”
Dabrena nodded. “That sounds about right.” She told him the names of the forest bonefolk, and what she’d gathered of their history with the girls, and as they spoke they moved half-consciously away from the children and the bonefolk, to keep their conversation off to the side of the momentous event unfolding. “Do you realise that what they are signing with their fingers are the runes of Stonetree?”
“Stonetree?” Louarn said.
Dabrena smiled, bemused to realise that for all his apparent talents and his Holding history, he did not know scribing. How in the world [406] were they ever going to get people to learn to scribe, or even to read? Was she mistaken to assume that they needed to? “The runes the Ennead used as their own, though they learned them from a codex. The runes they carved along their casting tables, though in upright rows, which was not their intended rendering. The runes carved along the edges of the Memory Stones in the Heel. We know that they were designed to be carved in stone or wood, we know that each rune represents both a tree and the first sound of that tree’s name in an ancient tongue, we know what those names were in that tongue ... but we never knew whose tongue it was.”
“Perhaps it was the bonefolk’s, once.”
“Yes. That is what I was wondering. And if that is the case, it gives an interesting interpretation to a seekers’ conjecture that Stonetree was the scribing system of the indigenous race of Eiden Myr, predating the mages’ exile. It was not a system the mages brought with them from the outer realms. It was translated by someone long ago into scribing we understand, glyph for glyph, but without explanation, probably as a learning tool.”
“Then someone made contact with the bonefolk in some prior age,” Louarn said, “perhaps the way the girls’ mother did. And perhaps the bonefolk are that indigenous race.”
He said it as though he already knew that they were.
“I would like to speak more of this with you, in more relaxed circumstances,” she said. “And introduce you to ... my intended pledge, who would find this more than interesting.” She paused, and then said, “Do you remember me?”
“You were a warder,” he said. “I remember. I heard you calling, through the tunnels. But they branched. Your cousin wanted to go back for you, but the other mages knew they must forge onward.”
She nodded. She had thought as much. His tunnels had led her back into the Holding. Back to her infant daughter, though she could not thank him for that, for they had also led to her betrayal of Tolivar. If she had not gone back, those children would have been rescued anyway, her daughter would have come back to her anyway, but the other infant—the one she believed was her friend Dontra’s baby, fostered out—would have lived.
“
You’re remembering,” he said. His voice was gentle, and filled with an unspeakable sadness. “I’m sorry. I know what that is like.”
She wanted to laugh at the same time her heart was breaking. He was charming and breathlessly handsome, this young man, the kind of pretty boy she’d once have gleefully bedded and then thought no more of, the kind of pretty boy who’d think he was wrapping her around his little finger and never know that she was only permitting [407] herself to be charmed. The boy she remembered from the Holding had been nine-and-six, still struggling toward manhood, a haunted child who could barely speak. The difference between that boy and this young man made the gulf of years real to her as it had not been before. Before today, the past had been frozen in her memory, the way the bodies of the dead were frozen here—perfect, unchanging, unchangeable. She had relived those first steps to follow that haunted boy again and again, her journey through the labyrinth his mind had dreamed, her desperate journey to retrieve her infant daughter and its disastrous completion. Each time, she had returned to that same haunted boy, that same labyrinth of magestone tunnels, and started the journey again, and they never changed. But here he stood, six years older, changed past all imagining.
The words came out like a hard hot flow of tears into a dark basin. “Tolivar and I came down to the Ennead’s torture chambers to aid the illuminator who came to rescue you, who’d been a vocate with us. We did so at the request of your master, Bron, the stableman, because she’d told him we were two warders who could be trusted. We left our baby daughter with his fosterlings in some stewards’ care. But in our absence the Ennead captured those fosterlings, and our baby with them. Unknowing, I went back to retrieve her, while Tolivar stayed with the illuminator and Bron to fight. We agreed upon a meeting place. I found the fosterlings, all right, and I found Kara. And the Ennead had me. They wanted the illuminator. I would not tell them where to find her. So they took Kara from me, and held a blade to her. Still I would not tell them. I didn’t believe that even they would kill a child. So they took an infant of the same age from among the fosterlings, and ...” She could not say it.
“And they killed her,” Louarn supplied. “Her body is here. I have seen her. She was a sweet-tempered child. I was fond of her. It grieved me deeply when I learned her fate.”
“And they killed her,” Dabrena said, because it was not enough for him to say it. “They killed her in order to get the information they wanted from me. I should have just given it to them. I was a warder, I was an Ennead proxy, it was my job. Tolivar could fend for himself. Tolivar was a grown man, responsible for himself. That infant was at their mercy ... but I could have saved her ... I betrayed him anyway. ...”
His hands on her upper arms were a shock. He had not seemed the kind of man who would touch you, grasp you tight that way and say to you, “The Ennead killed that child, Dabrena.”
“I could have stopped them. I could have given them what they wanted before they killed her.”
[408] “It happened too quickly. I knew them, Dabrena, I knew their methods, I was one of their victims too. They had killed that child before you could blink, to shock you into submission. You could not have saved her from them. There were nonneds we could not save from them, none of us. They were a great evil, and great evil does harm, and we cannot blame ourselves for the harm it does.”
Her eyes were locked with his, and she saw him blink, saw him listen to his own words, and knew that he blamed himself for as much as she blamed herself for—perhaps more. But it was not enough. His sins were not her sins. His sins could be reconciled, whatever they were. Hers could not. She would not permit it. They were too grave.
She shook free and finished her tale, spitting the words out now: “I told them where the illuminator would be. Tolivar was with her. They captured them, and tortured them, and Tolivar died, horribly, in the depths of a rock he came to seeking light and love and power. He was a sailor, and he drowned in stone. And not two days later came a rescue party, to liberate those fosterlings, and Kara, and me. If I had not gone there, they would all have been saved.”
“If the rescuers had come sooner, they would all have been saved, and you as well, and your friends,” Louarn said. “If you had not entrusted your child to stewards in order to save a friend, she would never have been there at all, and your friend would have died—and myself as well, as it happens, and possibly everyone in the outer realms. If you had not heeded the vocate call and gone to the Holding, your Tolivar might have lived. If I had not distracted my parents before a critical casting, they might have lived. If Lerissa had not given me up, if Bron had not fostered me to them, they might have lived. I was a child, it was not my choice to make, yet I will never forgive myself their deaths, even though it was the Ennead that killed them. If I had run away, just ridden away into the Heartlands and prenticed myself to some kindly farmer when I was Pelufer’s age, I would not have delivered countless vocates into the Ennead’s hands. Still they would have heard the call, and heeded it, and gone. Yet I will never forgive my own complicity in delivering them, even though it was the Ennead that killed them. You be stronger than that, mender. You go find your Tolivar, and kneel by him and praise his sacrifice and accept his forgiveness. You do that for your daughter’s sake.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, an old habit—what felt, now, like the oldest habit of all.
“Ah,” he said softly. “But I do. If you’ve listened, you know I do.”
[409] “Mother!” The sweetest sound in the world, the sound of that voice, calling her, wanting her.
Kara, running over to tell her about the amazing reconciliation between the woodfolk and the stonefolk. Dabrena listened, awash in amazement—amazement that her daughter would return to her, safe and whole and eager to share what she had experienced while they were apart. She had only to let go. All the harm she had ever done was in trying to hold this astonishing, brave child still.
Then Kara grew hesitant. “Father’s here,” she said.
“Yes,” Dabrena said, and smiled at her.
Heartened, as she always was when her mother didn’t burst a seam, Kara said, “I look like him!”
Dabrena’s smile grew wider despite herself. It might take some time for Kara to unlearn that expectation of burst seams, but there was hope. “I know,” she said.
“Do you want to see him?”
“I already did. But we can go together, if you like. To see him one more time before we decide about leaving here.”
Kara nodded, and led her off by the hand. She did not look back at Louarn. She would make no promises.
“But you have to!” Pelufer cried, and looked to Louarn for help. Lorn-hollow was being impossible.
All but three of the stonefolk had gone. There were dead waiting in what they called Eiden’s realm, there was a job to do, and it was frightening that so many left to do it, because that meant there were a lot of dead, and she wished she knew how they knew, and she wished she knew exactly what was going on at home, but whatever it was, it wasn’t fair to keep them here because of it. Louarn would be able to convince him. Louarn could talk with his hands. Lornhollow would have to respect that, if nothing else.
Lornhollow was fingering that he didn’t have to do anything, and that he had promised their mother to watch over them.
“You can’t keep us here against our will,” Elora said. “That’s the same as what the stonefolk did, and they just agreed how wrong that was.”
Pelufer nodded vigorously. Trust Elora to solder a seamless argument. But Lornhollow said it was not the same thing at all, that protecting them was quite different from holding them for use by another, and that everything in Eiden’s realm had changed, and they must wait to see what happened before they could go safely back.
Louarn caught the last bit of it as he came near, and he fingered [410] something to Lornhollow, and Lornhollow fingered back in surprise, and then the stonefolk and the woodfolk and Louarn were all fingering too fast for her to follow, and
she was ready to scream.
“Be quiet and let them talk,” Elora said.
“Let the grownups make all the decisions,” Pelufer said. “That’s always what you want to do.”
“Not always. But sometimes. And this is too big for us.”
“It is not!”
“It is too and you know it.”
The fingers stopped, and Louarn turned to them, but then he said, “Hold a moment,” and they had to wait for Dabrena and Kara to come back from whoever’s body they went to visit. Caille said Kara had grown up in a stone place and had never been anywhere but there and here. Pelufer had trouble imagining that, even though, until they went to Gir Nuorin and then down to the battlefield, she had only been outside of Gir Doegre a few times in summer to go swim in the maur, and that was when they had Padda and Mamma, so it was a long time ago. Until they went to Gir Nuorin, Caille had never left Gir Doegre, so Kara’s story sounded reasonable, even though Gir Doegre was a town and Kara’s home was inside a mountain. They had become good friends, much better friends than Caille and Lusonel the innkeepers’ daughter. Pelufer wondered if that was because Lusonel wasn’t as smart as Caille, and Kara was, or if it was because Caille had to be careful to keep their secret from Lusonel, and with Kara she could just be herself. It was complicated, having to wonder things about Caille. It used to be that all she wondered about was whether she was warm enough and had enough to eat and didn’t have too many holes in her clothes.
Dabrena and Kara joined them, and Dabrena and Louarn shared some kind of a look, and Pelufer thought that if Risalyn and Yuralon were here, or maybe if they were all back in Gir Doegre with Nolfi and Jiondor’s family, this would be like a happy ending in a teller’s tale. The light would come back, and their shining would be safe, and they could all just go back to being traders and crafters and healers, and as long as there was an honest day’s work to be done, it might almost be a little bit like how things were before, when you could go to the maur and play in the sand and the surf and there’d be someone there, someone you knew and trusted, someone besides just yourselves.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 51