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

by Terry McGarry

  “Stop,” Pelufer croaked, finding her throat again, her lungs. “Caille, stop.” It was not a plea. It was an order. Caille did what she was told when it was important. Pelufer found her legs and her arms and her eyes and turned them to Caille, to gather her up, embrace her in the sunshine that was streaming down between fluffy white clouds in a blue sky, hold her close and tell her she was a good girl, the best girl in the world, Mamma’s girl, Mamma’s best, tell her how much they loved her and how proud they were and how they’d never let it come to this again, they’d never let this happen again, she never ever had to use her powers again if she didn’t want to, she could just be an ordinary happy baby girl and they would grow up together like a proper family and swim in the maur and pet dogs and donkeys and eat berry bread until they couldn’t move—

  Caille came into her arms limp and lifeless. Her little pudgy face was slack, pale as a corpse. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. Her tongue hung out. Her head lolled.

  Her shine was gone.

  “No,” Pelufer said. She heard Elora’s outcry as across a vast distance. She felt one of the grownups trying to pry Caille from her arms. She wouldn’t let go. “No, Caille,” she said, kissing the little face, kissing it all over the way she did when Caille was toddling because it always made her squirm and giggle. “I promised Mamma. Mamma will kill me. Don’t die, Caille. Don’t be dead! I promised Mamma! I love you! Don’t go!”

  Deep in the cavern of her mind, she heard the whisper of Caille’s name.

  Gir Doegre

  Dabrena wrenched the grieving child off her sister. The bonefolk took hold of her. She was maddened, raving, uncontrollable.

  In the way.

  The older sister tried to block Dabrena. Dabrena caught her wrists in a vise grip and gave her one sharp jerk—snapping her neck straight, snapping her to attention. “I am a mender,” she said, staring the girl down hard. “Move away.”

  The girl obeyed, lurching off on her knees, in shock.

  Dabrena was in shock, too. What this little child had done, what she had sensed this little child do, was staggering.

  She was a mender. She would not stagger.

  Let her go, some part of her mind said as she cleared the child’s throat, pressed her tongue back into place, positioned her head. That was the triumph of a lifetime. She gave her all. Let her go.

  She drew in the breath she would have used to say no, and bent to pass it through the child’s lips into her lungs.

  Do not treat her body so. Her spirit fled. Let it go peacefully. Its job is done.

  “No,” she said, and worked the still heart, and passed breath again into the lungs. She would breathe for her, until she remembered breath. She would work her chest until her heart remembered to beat. This was menders’ work. No light, no shining. A practical remedy.

  [421] The child remained still. No breath, no pulse. Pale as death. Kara watched frozen from the back of the tree hollow, amazement draining into despair. She was giving up.

  Dabrena would not give up.

  “Wake up, Caille,” she said, with the flat, no-nonsense insistence of a parent’s demand. She slapped one cheek, then the other. “Caille, wake up!”

  “She’s not going to wake up,” Kara said. The way you said a thing you feared, not a thing you were certain of. “Neither of them is going to wake up.”

  Louarn lay slumped beside Kara at the back of the hollow. His chest rose and fell. He was alive.

  Dabrena passed breath to the child, then worked the chest and said, “She will wake up. She must. There was too much life in her.”

  “She gave it all away.” Tears spilled over onto Kara’s cheeks.

  Dabrena passed breath, worked the chest, and said, “She didn’t. She couldn’t. It’s like love. You can never give it all away.” She passed breath, and said, “Wake him up, if you like. He can help me.”

  “No!” Elora cried. Lornhollow caught her in his arms to stop her interfering, but he said, “Do not wake him. He is helping you now.”

  Dabrena shook her head. She had no idea what that meant. She passed breath to the child. She worked the chest. Life would come. Life would return. Life had not gone. The body had only been shocked quiet, breath and heartbeat suspended. “Wake up, Caille,” she said, in the tone of the last warning. “Wake up!”

  Caille and Louarn woke gasping, flailing out with their arms, as though they had been falling, as though they had been in the same precarious place and were dropped abruptly back here, or back into their bodies, and still felt the fall, still felt they had to grab themselves back from the abyss.

  Dabrena sat hard on her rear, stunned.

  “Mama?” Kara said, moving into her arms as Caille’s sisters ran to her, as Caille’s face flooded red and she let out a piercing wail—as the bonefolk, who had steeled themselves to passage her body, sagged with the release of tension.

  Dabrena held her daughter and said, “Yes, sweet?”

  “If I’m ever hanging by my fingernails from a very high place, it’s you I’d like to rescue me.”

  Dabrena let out a bark of laughter as tears sprang from her own eyes. “Well, I left you, and I lost you. It was my worst nightmare. But we do seem to have lived through it, don’t we?”

  Pelufer suddenly stumbled off three paces, went to her knees, and retched.

  [422] Motioning for Elora to stay by Caille, Louarn went to steady her, and wiped her mouth when she was through. “You had a scare,” he said. “But she’s all right, Pelufer.”

  “It’s not that,” Pelufer rasped. “Not just that. It’s ... I can’t ...” She closed her eyes, swallowed, and took a deep breath. “It’s the haunts. So many haunts. They’re all different. Some are new and some are old. They’re not ... just names, anymore.” She winced, and pressed the heels of her hands against her temples. “I was so worried about Caille I guess I ignored them. That’s good, right?” She appealed to Louarn as to a master who had helped her learn to control a talent she didn’t understand. “That means that I’ll be able to ignore them on purpose.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You learned to make the cavern in your mind to put the names in. We’ll find a way for you to learn to live with this.”

  He seemed to be holding himself back—from voicing curiosity about this newly blossoming, or newly expanded, talent? Dabrena was certainly keen to know more. But it was Elora who said, “What is it?”

  Pelufer swallowed again, and blinked several times, hard. “They’re talking to me. They’re speaking, Elora. I can hear them.”

  “Can you talk back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Louarn helped her sit back, off her knees. “Don’t try right now. We’ll work on this later. Are they very loud?”

  “No. Just whispers.”

  “Then tell them you can’t talk right now, and keep thinking your own thoughts, very hard, to keep them at bay. All right? Now, can everyone get up, so that we can get Pelufer out of this haunted place?”

  Kara bounced to her feet. But it was not at Louarn’s urging. She went straight, as though every hair on her body had stood on end, and said, “He’s here.”

  Dabrena went cold inside.

  “He’s here, Mama,” Kara said, turning to her. Eager to share it. Desperate for Dabrena to believe.

  Louarn was staring hard at them. He looked at Pelufer, who had put her head between her knees and crossed her arms over it, then back at Kara, then at Dabrena, quirking a brow at her. She gestured helplessly: I don’t know. Could her daughter hear haunts, like the older girl? Was it just her father she heard? Or was it no more than a powerful imagination, excited by what she’d seen the older girl go through?

  “Mama,” Kara said. Begging her. To do what! To call out to [423] Tolivar, to run across the clearing and embrace his chill shade, what?

  She wanted to ask if Pelufer could hear him. But Pelufer was overwhelmed by nonneds upon nonneds of voices. She’d never isolate the thread of one, not a man she hadn’t known in life.


  Dabrena had opened her mouth to say something terse, something curt, to stop this nonsense now, when Pelufer raised her head and said, “He’s very loud. He’s what all the clamoring was about. He’s Kara’s father.”

  “No,” Dabrena said before she could stop herself. Kara’s face fell. That was too bad. She wanted her parents to be together. She couldn’t have that. You couldn’t have everything you wanted in this world. She might as well learn that.

  “Can’t you hear him?” Pelufer said, her eyes not quite focused, her brown face gone pale. “It’s only the one.”

  “We said goodbye to him in the bonefolk’s realm,” Dabrena said, to put an end on this.

  In a small voice, Kara said, “He wasn’t in the bonefolk’s realm. He’s here.”

  “I can’t see him,” Dabrena ground out. “I can’t hear him!”

  “There’s nothing to forgive you for,” Pelufer said.

  Dabrena went very still.

  “You protected the baby,” Pelufer said. “Now you have to let go.”

  “What does that mean?” Dabrena said, searching the clearing and the air and Kara’s face for some sign of him, finding none.

  Pelufer turned toward her, unseeing. “You’re hurting him. Stop doing that. It hurts him and it keeps him from moving. He wants to fly before the wind.”

  “What hurts him?” Dabrena whispered.

  “The way you hang on. To things. Guilt. What happened. Let go. Let him go.” Pelufer groaned, and her eyes focused. “I don’t know! You’re the one, you have to figure it out.”

  As long as she denied forgiveness to herself, she remained in control. As long as betraying him remained an unforgivable act of weakness, it was her own. If his death was on the Ennead’s hands, then he’d died for nothing. Nothing. Not even because she had betrayed him. And Dontra’s child had died for nothing. Not because she’d held out too long, not because she hadn’t been quick or canny or strong or brave enough to beat the Ennead, but simply on a whim of the cruel, the careless, the vicious.

  Dying had not destroyed his spirit.

  She was the one doing that.

  “I understand,” Dabrena said. Talking to the air, she couldn’t [424] believe she was talking to the air, but she said, “I understand, Tolivar. I’ll try. I can only try.”

  There’s a girl, said the old, familiar voice in her mind.

  “There’s a girl,” said Pelufer, and shook herself all over, like a dog shaking off water, and got to her feet as though nothing had happened. “Can we go now?” she said to Louarn. “It’s gone all quiet.”

  With a cautious glance at Dabrena and Kara, he said, “Yes. Let’s go while it’s quiet.”

  Dabrena forced herself standing. Kara patted her on the arm and gave her a smile. Perhaps, for once, she had managed to say the right thing. Perhaps she ought to be silent for a while rather than ruin it.

  Pelufer helped Caille and Elora up, and said to Caille, “I felt your haunt. I felt your spirit knocked loose.”

  Caille gave a wary shrug, wiping her nose on her sleeve before Elora could catch her arm and press a cloth into her hand.

  Pelufer was grinning. “You took my jacks! That lost set I blamed Elora for all that time! It was you, you little sprite!”

  Caille put on a perfectly innocent face, and said, “I’m hungry.”

  Pelufer snorted. “Trust her to think about food when the whole world almost came to an end. And her with it. But I’m hungry too.”

  “She’s hungry because the world almost ended,” Louarn said. He’d moved toward the bonefolk, to say his farewells, but now he cocked his head at Caille. “She should weigh nine stone, the way she eats. But she doesn’t. It goes to fuel her powers. You’re hungry because you just used yours. You girls never get sick, do you? She’s using her powers all the time. She just doesn’t tell you.”

  “Well, she won’t be using them for a good long while now,” Elora said. “We’re going home, to see how everyone fared, and we’re snugging you into a bed for a nice sleep.”

  “Food first,” Caille said, at the same time that Thorngrief gestured at something on the ground, half sucked into the mud, covered in bark and leaf mold and twigs, and said, “One more use for her powers, perhaps. I cannot send this one through the ways.”

  Dabrena, curious even though she wished to be away from this hauntwood, took Kara to see what it was. Louarn and Pelufer followed. Caille did not seem interested, and tucked herself against Elora, her thumb on her cheek and her fist against her mouth. Elora sat, to make a lap for her.

  It was a body, not yet dead. Sunken like a drowned rat into the ground. Dabrena and Louarn hefted it out and turned it, laying it on the longblade harnessed to its back. Though steeped in mud and tannins, the hair, once white-blond, was recognizable, as was the face.

  [425] This was the towheaded woman who had melted all the blades to end the battle.

  They checked her carefully. She was breathing, but unconscious, not sleeping. Mucus slimed her mouth and eyes. Dabrena leaned down for a sniff, and came up quick. “Don’t light any fires around this one.”

  “She needs care,” Louarn said. “We must warm her, dry her. We must get her into the nearest town.”

  Dabrena would “have said don’t bother. But she had seen what this woman had done in the battle, however belatedly. They shouldn’t leave a power like that to die on a hilltop. “The nearest town is Gir Doegre,” she said, “and she’s not going to make it.”

  “We’ll carry her.”

  “That’s not what I mean. She’s dangerously cold, and her blood is poisoned. And there’s this.” She widened a tear in the woman’s shirt to reveal a blade wound, newly bleeding. “The mud and the cold must have sealed it, but she’ll bleed out now. It’s a marvel she’s alive.”

  As she reached to rip cloth from the woman’s clothes to improvise a binding, Caille struggled off Elora’s lap and came up wearily beside her. “I can fix this,” she said, though with no enthusiasm.

  Dabrena believed her. She had felt her heal all the body of Eiden. And even if that had been a dream, some spectacular shared hallucination, her own broken rib had not. She’d fallen on that stone, right there, when she passed through from the bonefolk’s realm, and felt the rib crack. It was not cracked now. Jammed into the hollow yew, she’d had one leg stretched out between Caille and Pelufer, and she’d felt the healing flow into her. So like and yet so unlike the healings mages cast. This was power of a completely different kind—a different taste, a different texture. The difference between fire and earth.

  But this power drained its wielder as magecraft had not. Mages wearied in an ordinary way, their eyes and hands tiring from the physical practice of their craft, and sometimes their creative powers ebbed. But this power drew directly on the force of its wielder’s life. Caille had nearly died. Caille had been dead for many breaths. And she was hungry. She had not restored her depleted strength.

  “That wound was self-inflicted,” Dabrena said to Caille, and gave the hilt of the longblade a shake to illustrate. “This woman wanted to die.”

  “No she didn’t,” Caille said. “Or she’d be dead.”

  Dabrena couldn’t argue with that. But Caille’s sisters never missed an opportunity to argue. Elora declared that Caille was not healing any drunken suicidal woman, and Pelufer said it wouldn’t [426] cost Caille to do it, she’d only be putting the body back the way it was meant to be and the woman was passed out so there wouldn’t be any pain to feel, and Elora said she’d only put Eiden back the way he was meant to be and look what that cost her, and Pelufer said that that was different, Eiden was upset and hurt in ways they couldn’t understand, and Elora said so was that woman if she tried to kill herself, and Pelufer said that that didn’t count, she was unconscious, all Caille had to do was purge the drink from her and seal the wound, and it was up to her anyway, they had to stop making decisions for her all the time.

  While they were arguing, Caille laid her small hands on the
woman’s body.

  Dabrena had seen wounds healed before. Dabrena had healed wounds herself, and done far more, as mage, as warder. With eight other warders, she had diverted a Great Storm that was the equal of what had just swept across Eiden Myr—and part of her wondered if the storm just past was some echo of the Storm she had denied. Diverting or beating back a great force, as she had done with that Storm, as Verlein had tried to do with the Khinish, was not enough. It had to be disarmed, as this woman had done, as Caille had done.

  Watching Caille work, she felt a profound respect for powers she had never known existed, and was humbled. She had thought that magecraft was the only power in the world worth having—the only glory to be attained—and that in its absence they would be forever diminished.

  She had been wrong.

  The woman opened startling ice-blue eyes, took in the two adults and four children clustered round her and the three bonefolk beyond, and scuttled backward, spiderlike, on palms and heels. Then she reached behind her and drew the longblade from its sheath. Blinking, trembling with cold, holding the blade in one hand as though it weighed nothing, she groped her midriff with the other hand.

  “No, you didn’t dream it,” Dabrena said.

  The woman turned the gleaming blade in her hand, looking for blood on the tip. There was none.

  “It went into the metal,” Caille said, then laid her head against Elora and went promptly to sleep where she sat.

  “That child healed me. How do I know that?” the woman demanded.

  Dabrena said, “I have no idea. I hope you’ll thank her sometime.”

  The woman scowled.

  “Who are you?” Pelufer asked. Her eyes followed the blade, entranced. Elora regarded her warily.

  [427] The woman let the blade sag. “No one,” she said. “I’m no one at all.”

  “You are,” Pelufer said. “You’re someone. What kind of blade is that?”