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

by Terry McGarry

  Again she felt that strange discontented yearning, and now it was herself she was wondering about, why she couldn’t just be happy about happy endings, and that was a lot more complicated than wondering about Caille.

  [411] “Lornhollow feels that it is too dangerous to send the girls home,” Louarn said. “He loved their mother and feels protective toward them, perhaps to a fault, given the powers he bequeathed them. Elora had ... the ways, they call it ... the means to passage herself home, but only in the woodfolk’s realm. Here she requires the bonefolk. Thorngrief and Bindlegore stand by whatever decision Lorn-hollow makes. These three stonefolk, whose names are ...” He struggled. He didn’t have the words to translate their finger names into word names. Lornhollow had to supply them. “Irongrim and Slatespike and Writhenrue are willing to send Dabrena and Kara back to their home in the Head holding, but they will not defy Lornhollow’s wishes this soon after the beginnings of a renewed relationship between their folk.” He smiled. “None of them have promised never to defy each other’s wishes or oppose each other’s goals, a straightforwardness I admit I find appealing.”

  “Louarn!” Pelufer cried. “We have to go home! Nolfi’s back there, and Risalyn and Yuralon and Jiondor and Beronwy and—”

  He held up a hand. “You need not list them all. I know what is at stake. Dabrena has folk back there too, and even if we knew no one in all of Eiden Myr, their lives would be just as important. Hear me out. The Head holding may be the only safe haven in Eiden’s realm right now. Lornhollow will not oppose the stonefolk sending you and your sisters there. But—I said hear me out, Pelufer—he and I are both aware that you will reject that option out of hand, and so this is why you must be quiet and listen while I tell you: The people you care for may already be dead. There may be nothing any of us can do, not even Caille, and—not even me. If we go back there, we may all die, and die in vain. In fact, it seems rather likely from what the bonefolk have told me that dying is exactly what we’ll do. Wouldn’t you rather live, and wait out the cataclysm, and go back whole and able to heal the damage?”

  Pelufer stared at Elora for a long time, and Elora stared back.

  Dabrena said, “Send my daughter to the holding.”

  Kara said, “No! I’m staying with you!”

  Dabrena looked as though she wanted to cry.

  Lornhollow said, “Your mother gave you her ways that you might live strong in a hard world.”

  Thorngrief said, “Let what must be, pass through. Or we will return you only to follow and fetch your bodies.”

  Pelufer looked at Caille. Caille’s head came up, defiant. If they tried to send her to the safe mountain, nobody would be able to hear for a nineday. Pelufer knelt down so that she was eye-to-eye with [412] Caille, and said, “But wouldn’t it be better to be sure you’d be alive to fix it?”

  “I can fix it,” Caille said, and folded her arms over her chest, and would say no more.

  Elora said to Louarn, “They will send us back, won’t they. If that’s what we decide.”

  “Yes,” Louarn said. “They feel they’ve meddled too much in the affairs of the living, and not enough. Your lives are your own, to do with as you choose. You belong where you choose to be. They will do whatever you ask of them.”

  “Where is it worst?” Dabrena said, as if she already knew. Pelufer already knew—it was worst in the Strong Leg, where the battle was. Caille was right. Eiden hadn’t liked that battle. He’d already been sick, and angry, and he hadn’t liked that battle at all.

  “Where we came from,” Louarn said. “All of us but Kara.”

  “I think we stay together now,” Dabrena said. She meant all of them, and everyone knew that, and no one said otherwise.

  Pelufer nodded at Elora, and Elora said, “Then we go back.”

  They were going home.

  Gir Doegre

  The wind smashed them flat. Rain came down like rocks pouring from an upended bucket. The roar was deafening.

  Pelufer’s face ground against roots and rocks. A stick gouged a furrow from the corner of her eye back to her ear. An instant reminder that this was the real world. Wounds did not heal here as they were made. She went to push herself up against the deluge, and pain shot up her arm. She’d put a hand out at the last moment to break her fall, and probably sprained the wrist.

  If the wind was this bad here, in the shelter of the spirit wood, what was it like down the hill? Or outside of Gir Doegre, where there wasn’t any shelter of hills?

  She turned on her side and groped for Elora through the dark. The hill underneath her hip and shoulder trembled as Elora’s hands fumbled to grasp hers. She was shouting something. Pelufer couldn’t make it out. Pelufer held her palm up flat and pressed Elora’s fingers against it. Elora signed that they had to keep the others from hurting themselves when they passed through.

  Pelufer didn’t see how, but then Louarn was there, stumbling and going to his knees on her other side, and Caille, who had tucked up into a ball, was between her and Elora. They put their arms around Caille and dragged her through the pointy, muddy bracken, out of the way of where Dabrena and Kara would fall. Pelufer was starting [414] to be able to see a little. She made out the blur of Louarn crawling on all fours the other way, to try to catch them.

  He caught Kara, but Dabrena fell hard. Pelufer thought she heard a cry of pain, but it could have been the wind. It was a horrible wind, shrieking, keening, a moan of anguish and loss and rage. It was Eiden, wailing his agonies. It was Sylfonwy, singing his death, and Morlyrien crying it.

  Lornhollow had gone first. Why hadn’t he reached for them when they fell? She twisted around, raised her injured arm to shield her eyes from the blinding downpour. Lornhollow was there—easing to the ground a brittle bonewood tree that had ripped free at the roots and would have crushed them where they’d fallen. Elora poked her, and she saw the pale runny blurs of Thorngrief and Bindlegore emerging from yew and bonewood. They were so tall, so spindly-thin, the wind should have lifted them and flung them away, but it seemed to pass over them as over a blade, or their bodies were shaped in a way that cut through it, or they just weren’t entirely here—enough of them was always in their own realm to keep this one from harming them.

  Inside the pounding rain and the thunder and the rumbling in the earth, Pelufer felt the brush of names. She’d already said them all once, they shouldn’t have come again, but they did, breaking like soft bubbles in the safe cavern of her mind. It hadn’t been like that before. She could tell differences in them now—some fresh and strong and redolent, some older and burnished with a patina of age, and many more, so many more of them, ancient and fragile, like flaked gilt, as whispery as dry leaves.

  That wasn’t the only difference, in these first gasping breaths of their return from the bonefolk’s realm.

  Dabrena and Kara were shining.

  It was only a little bit, just the dimmest shine, like sunset reflected in dull tin, but it was there. Brighter in Kara, because it was always bright in children, although she was just getting to the age where it would start to disappear. It must have always been there. Everyone had some shine. But either it got stronger because of the bonefolk, or Pelufer was stronger and so she could see it now.

  She thought no more about it, just accepted the gift. In the dark of storm, she’d be able to see their shine even if she couldn’t make out their forms.

  Lornhollow and Bindlegore helped them move back toward the relative shelter of the trees. Thorngrief stumbled over something, went to lift it, then changed his mind and left it where it was. The bonefolk weren’t luminous here the way they were in their own realm, but their pale flesh was visible in the sheeting dark. Their tatters hung [415] down, soaking wet. The rain did touch them. They were much stronger than their bony frames looked.

  Three bonefolk, and the six of them.

  But only one Caille. She had said she could fix this. But she had not known how bad it was. She had said Pelufer could fix the battle, too, but she
couldn’t, not before she would have been killed. Caille was only five years old. She was only a little girl.

  They should go home. They should go down the hill before all these trees fell on their heads, and get to Nolfi, and Jiondor, and make sure they were all right.

  Lornhollow crouched down in front of them like a wading bird in a watery world. He signed that this was a place of power. He signed that this was where they got the ways.

  What was she supposed to do with that?

  The ground shook again, harder, trying to buck them off. They clung together, and Louarn’s hands moved over them, making sure each of them was linked to the others. They heard a tree go down back in the plain woods, a long tearing wet crash through sodden dying leaves and branches. It sounded like a tall tree, one of the stonewoods probably, they were shallow-rooted, and it took some smaller ones with it.

  Again Lornhollow pressed them back, and back, and Pelufer felt wood enclose her. There was shelter from the rain, here inside a hollowed trunk. It was one of the massive, ancient yews. She hadn’t noticed that any of them were hollow. She should have looked for hiding places like this. The tree must be twice nine threfts around, and all its heart wood gone, leaving a gnarled cavern where six could just huddle if they jammed close. She felt Elora relax, drugged and slowed by the surrounding wood. To find out if she could be heard, to wake her sister up, she said, “How old is this tree, Elora?,” and her words echoed dully back, audible within the storm.

  Elora leaned her temple against the twisting wood, and said, “As old as this hill. I don’t know how old that is. Ages.”

  Lightning flashed, illuminating the bonefolk outside in glaring white, their eyes black hollows like the inside of this tree. She could feel everyone jump as a tree exploded, cracking, shrieking as its blasted trunk split and the parts of it tore away from each other. That had been close. Had it been a tree like this? The stonewoods and ironwoods were taller, they’d draw the lightning, wouldn’t they? And the bonewoods in among the old yews and the hazel understory?

  The ground wrenched again, and they felt the deep complaint of the yew’s roots. The wind gusted so severely that Lornhollow and Bindlegore swayed. Another glaring flicker of lightning was [416] accompanied by a crack of thunder so loud it seemed the sky must have shattered, and the ground rumbled reply, and the rain whipped across the bonefolk with renewed fury, sheeting sidewise along the gusts, spitting hailstones.

  It was getting worse.

  “We didn’t come here to hide,” Louarn said: “We had a place to hide.”

  “Can you fix this?” Pelufer asked Caille. Though Pelufer and Elora were pressed close against her, she was shaking with cold, soaked to the skin. Pelufer felt Kara’s arms go around Caille from behind. Dabrena and Louarn were in back of her and to either side, jammed in at an angle. Pelufer felt Dabrena’s hand on her shoulder, squeezing tight, and in the next blaze of lightning she saw Louarn’s hand on Elora’s neck. They were all connected now, to each other, to the tree, to the earth. They all had a shine, bright or dim. The bonefolk were arraying themselves around the tree, laying hands on it, maybe even merging with it. Whatever they were going to do, they had to do it now.

  “Eiden hurts,” Caille said, doubtful and plaintive. She had been so determined before. But they’d never let her use her powers before, not really, not to their utmost. And they had forgotten that Caille felt pain through touch. They had all completely forgotten that Caille felt pain as if it was her own.

  Pelufer turned her head toward the ruddy woody shine that was Elora. “Maybe we should just try to go home,” she said.

  “No!” Caille cried. Kara said something encouraging to her, right in her ear, that Pelufer couldn’t hear, and Pelufer felt the queerest rush of jealousy, that someone else could talk to Caille the way they did, and exclude them. Caille nodded. “It hurts,” she said. “Eiden hurts. I want to fix him. But I’m scared.”

  “We’ll help you,” said Louarn. “We’re here. Draw on us, if you can.”

  Caille nodded. Pelufer couldn’t tell if she was responding to the rich assurance in Louarn’s voice, or if she really could draw on their shining somehow if her own wasn’t enough.

  Whatever she’d heard in what Kara and Louarn said to her, Caille’s shine began to swell.

  First Pelufer felt a healing go through them. The cut by her eye sealed up and the throbbing in her wrist eased. She was going to tell Caille to stop, not to waste herself on that, but Dabrena had been in a lot of pain, and Caille wouldn’t be able to work through pain like that. Dabrena gasped as her bones knit back as they were meant to be—she hadn’t really known what Caille could do, but now she did.

  [417] Caille’s shine got brighter. A shine didn’t really cast light, their hollow was just as dark, but the shine expanded until it was as if all six of them were shining bright, all blended, like the rivulets of heat in a banked hearth, or the glowing tip of an iron bar drawn from the forge fire and laid on an anvil—like a mist of molten copper, like the color of a burning heart.

  And then Pelufer wasn’t looking out at the drenched, pummeled, lightning-slashed spirit wood anymore. She was beyond it, and above it, and inside it flowing outward. Into the world. She knew it, every tortured fingerspan of it. The entirety of Eiden Myr. The sea crashing at its edges, the tides sucking out, the massive waves forming offshore, rearing up to swoop in and smash down on the coasts. Gales tearing up trees, tearing up houses, whirlwinds spinning wagons and sheds, flinging cattle and people to their deaths. Fissures opening in the earth, swallowing cottages. Earthquakes everywhere, Eiden’s limbs writhing in agony, thrashing in rage. Like ripples through his muscles. As if he was trying to tear himself right up out of the sea. This was like the way Louarn was when she gave Flin and Mellas back to him, when his body tried to rip itself apart. Seizures and paroxysms. Swollen rivers flooding their banks, sweeping everything away. Sheeting, slicing, stinging rain. Hailstones bigger than fists. Blizzards in the summer Highlands, two threfts of water in the Girdle. All the Belt flooded, all the loughs trying to connect up into one river from the Highlands to the Dreaming Sea. Gold and iron boiling in the veins of the Blooded Mountains. Magestone sloshing like silver freezing slush in the veins of the Black Mountains. Great pieces of the chalk Oriels crumbling into avalanches on the towns below, bowling down those fleeing up the mountainsides from the river bursting its banks. Ships stove to flinders on rocky coasts, coracles sucked out to sea like leaves. The swamps burning with Galandra’s fire, burning themselves up, exploding. Furnaces bursting in the Weak Leg. The Fingers cramping, the Head throbbing, the Shoulders hunching, the Fist clenching, the Neck spasming, the Heartlands seizing, the Legs shaking, and the worst of it here, because of all that bladed death.

  And in the Fist. Why in the Fist? It was terrible there, trees and fences toppled, chasms splitting the gentle downs, houses collapsed in on themselves, livestock drowned or crushed or tangled in a terror in thorny brush or broken fencing, and all the wildlife scattering, birds grounded by the winds, moles and rabbits drowned in their holes, hives smashed, rats swimming for their lives ... The Fist was where it twisted, the Fist was where the land and sea and air had been twisted, and then the twisting was broken, and it untwisted like a taut string snapping back, and everything was wrong after that, [418] unbalanced, with no one to right it, and the flexion kept twisting and twisting until it came to this.

  From Fist to Head and Highlands and Lowlands and Legs, Eiden’s body was racked with agony. Air and water raked across it in swirls and whirlwinds and blizzards; snowstorms and rainstorms and windstorms, and those bashed against each other, towering battles in the sky, while the sea reared up around the whole twisted shape of Eiden, poised to strike it.

  Caille’s tiny body had gone taut as that string before it snapped. Stop! Pelufer tried to cry. Oh, stop, stop, it will break you! But she could not control her own body. She was more than her own body. She was part of all the flesh around her, and the wood, and the ground
beneath them, and the air around them, all the elements linked, all the elements combined.

  And then she felt what her sister could do.

  It was only a blink since she’d healed them. Pelufer, and then Dabrena, and any cuts and bruises and welts on the rest, any broken bones or skin. That blink had encompassed all of Eiden Myr. Now it was the next blink, and in that blink Caille’s power was unleashed.

  It flowed out the way Pelufer’s senses had flowed out, and took her with it.

  The pain was eased. The deep structures of stone were realigned and set right, the quakes smoothed quiet, the fissures sealed. Eiden’s muscles unclenched, his limbs relaxed, his head sank [back]. As the agony subsided, the winds lost their breath and their power and died away. The air settled, warmth flowing where it was supposed to, cold flowing where it was supposed to, breezes and currents carrying heat and chill where they were meant to go. The sea’s great waves collapsed in on themselves in the absence of the fury that had fueled them; the sea rocked, lapping over the shores in long tongues, then found its level again, caught the rhythm of its ordinary waves, its ordinary tide. The earth set about absorbing and distributing the water that had drenched it; the rivers carried their swift swollen burdens to the sea, and emptied them there, and eased back in their courses.

  Eiden sighed, and settled into his ocean cradle, calm.

  Wreckage was everywhere. Devastation was everywhere. Drowned and broken animals and people. Shattered structures, flooded fields and pastures, tumbled stones, swaths of felled splintered trees. But the injuries began to mend. Where there was life, healing followed. Fractures knitted. Punctures and gashes closed. Contusions, abrasions, lacerations ...

  It was too much. The mortal wounds were healed, but the smaller ones, the strains and wrenches, the bumps and bruises, those would [419] heal themselves, she had to stop now, it was enough, it was too much, next she’d be healing the illnesses they already had, the fevers, the disease, it was too much, it would hurt her—