The woman rolled her eyes and tried to get up, but failed, still disoriented.
“A magecrafted blade,” Dabrena said. “I saw its like, once. It was only a dagger, but the metal swirled in that same hypnotic way. Verlein n’Tekla bore it.”
The woman spat off to the side. “I’ll have that back from her someday.”
“You were her blademaster,” Dabrena said, remembering Verlein’s claims in the holding on Spindle Day.
“I tried to be. We both failed.”
“A blademaster,” Pelufer breathed. She moved closer to the woman. The woman watched her with a frown, but did not move away.
Abruptly she offered the longblade hilt-first to Pelufer. “Here,” she said. “Have it.”
Pelufer’s arms floated up as she took the grip in both hands, expecting weight. “It’s like a feather!”
“Since the battle. Yes. But it cleaves stone. Bloody irritating thing. It’s indestructible.” She looked at Caille. “Is that your sister?”
Pelufer nodded, turning the blade from side to side, enraptured by the creamy metallic currents.
“The blade’s yours,” the woman said. “I have no other payment to tender for my life.”
The words were grudging. She had not wanted her life. A shattered jug lay not two threfts away, unremarked upon. The woman had drunk herself into a rage in the storm and run herself through. At least she had the grace to recognize what had been done for her, asked or unasked.
“Really?” Pelufer said. “Mine? I can keep it?”
“If it lets you.” The woman managed to get to her feet.
Elora started to protest, but Louarn quieted her.
Pelufer held the blade for a long time. At last she rose, and said, “It won’t,” and offered it back.
The woman gave a harsh laugh. “Of course.”
Pelufer said, in a vague, puzzled way, as though the words were not her own, “It isn’t time yet.”
The laugh died on the woman’s lips. She gave Pelufer a good hard look, squinting, head cocked. Pelufer obviously longed for that blade. [428] The woman had obviously dealt with many folk who longed for that blade. But something about Pelufer gave her pause.
It gave Dabrena pause, too. Why would a child who could hear the dead covet a weapon of death? Or was that no stranger than healers who wore blades?
The woman shrugged. “Please yourself,” she said, and sheathed the blade. But the evaluating look never quite left her.
“We must return,” Louarn said to the bonefolk.
“As must we,” Lornhollow replied.
The blond woman rubbed her eyes, questioning her sobriety in the face of talking bonefolk. Dabrena smiled and would have patted her on the shoulder, offered a joke to ease the moment, but the woman stepped back from her, wary as a wild dog, unwilling to be touched. All right, Dabrena thought. But I’ll know more of that bladebreaking power of yours before this day is out.
“If there is blessing or farewell among your folk, I never learned it, but I give it to you now,” Louarn said.
Lornhollow signed Pass through, and he and his fellows merged backward into the trees. Back to their own realm, or on to some other hauntwood. There would be many, many bodies to be passaged.
“They didn’t say goodbye,” Elora said.
“I suppose they don’t,” Louarn replied. “Or that was it. Pass through. Perhaps it’s a wish, and a bidding. Perhaps next time we meet, we can ask them.”
Elora gave Louarn a shy smile.
“This way,” Dabrena said, striking off toward the logging road she remembered from her sojourn here with Adaon. He’d be pleased to know that the world had been saved right here, where they’d had their joining. She was desperate to see him, thrilled and a little nervous. She wanted to tell Kara about him and she wanted it to be a surprise. She’d left him in Gir Mened, several leagues Bootward of here, by the battlefield; she hoped she wasn’t delayed long in Gir Doegre, and that Kara’s parting from Caille wouldn’t be too hard. They would see each other again, and often, as she and Adaon dug in Gir Doegre for his Triennead holding. She would not separate her daughter from this friend her own age, this remarkable friend with whom she’d rescued the stolen children and saved the world. Theirs might be the bonding of a lifetime.
“Hold it!” she barked, flinging her arms to the sides, pressing Kara back on one side, Elora on the other. Behind them, Louarn with Caille in his arms just managed not to bump her, and Pelufer and the fighter stopped before they ran into Kara or Elora.
It would have bumped them over a cliff.
[429] Where the logging road should have let out onto the thoroughfare from the Knee to Maur Lengra, passing downland into Gir Doegre, it simply stopped.
The Knee Road was gone.
The storm had ripped off the entire side of their hill.
Below were rocks and trees lying skewed and tumbled on a shelf, and beyond that was a slide of earth and rubble.
Where the roads from Knee and Boot crossed and became Tin Long and Copper Long, forming the angled corner of Gir Doegre’s wedge, was only a wasteland of wreckage. Small figures moved around the rubble; some were bent over shovels, digging, and others were crouched, digging with their hands. Dogs’ barking carried up on the clear air. They were looking for buried survivors.
“Grieving spirits,” she said.
It was too late to keep the girls from looking.
“That’s our home,” Elora said.
“I’m sorry,” Dabrena said. “I didn’t know.”
“The town looks all right,” Pelufer said. “But that whole corner is jaxed. And the road. And it took some of the Kneeside.”
“A shantytown,” Louarn explained.
“Nobody would have stayed there in the storm,” Pelufer said. “Nobody. They’d have been smarter than that. The inns and taverns would have taken them, and the waysiders and the folk from the ground pitches.”
She said it the way you said a thing that you prayed for, not a thing you were certain of.
“How far is this town from Gir Mened?” the blademaster asked, and when they told her, she said, “How in the bloody blazes did I manage that?”
No one replied. Then Pelufer said, “Look! That’s Risalyn! There’s Yuralon!”
She shouldered past them, intending to wave, and when Elora snatched her back from the brink she turned and ran toward the clearing. “There’s another way! Come on, I’ll show you!”
Dabrena turned with Kara, eager to put the precipice behind them, and just caught the strange look in Louarn’s eyes as Pelufer’s words drifted out among the trees. It was very like what he had called, as he led the mages into the tunnels he had crafted. Dabrena gave him a reassuring smile, and together they followed the girl, with the grumbling bladebreaker in tow. Elora ran on ahead so that they wouldn’t lose track of Pelufer.
It was a long way down and around. If there had been paths, they were washed out. Fallen stonewood trees blocked them, and the [430] bladebreaker cut their way through when there was no choice among storm-delved gullies, piles of downed trees, and some impenetrable thicket. Dabrena had never been good at forests—crofts and fields had been her bailiwick at home, and for six years she had known only the inside of a mountain—and she was relieved when they came out onto the Boot Road and had only its mud to contend with. Logging crews were already clearing trees that had fallen across the road. Louarn asked one of them what day it was, and received an array of queer looks and the answer “Longlight,” which any sane man would have known. But their faces softened when they looked at the children. They assumed they had been rescued by the three sodden adults. They could hardly know that it was the other way round.
They had been in the bonefolk’s unchanging realm only one night. It was midmorning of the day after the battle. Longlight. The summer solstice. The longest day of the year.
The day of light.
They came at last to where the rescue crews were digging for survivors. They had found a few, a
nd ministering to them Dabrena saw the two bladed Girdlers who’d acted as healers on the battlefield.
The Girdlers were more surprised to see Dabrena than she was to see them. But they greeted Louarn and the girls like family.
Elora introduced them, and the Girdlers gave Dabrena the fighters’ feral grin.
“Mender,” said the woman, whose name was Risalyn, as she hefted Caille for a sleepy hug. “I have never in my life seen anyone do a thing as daft as that.”
“It worked out all right,” Dabrena said. “Did my pledge get to see Verlein?”
The man, Yuralon, nodded. “And talked her out of storming your holding, from what we heard,” he said. “But—”
“Your holding?” said Pelufer, staring at Dabrena.
“Dabrena n’Arilda is the head of the menders, from the Head holding,” Louarn said. “That sounds funny, doesn’t it? She was a warder in the old times. She’s a very important person.”
“You didn’t tell us that!” Pelufer said.
“No,” said the blond bladebreaker, stepping away. “You didn’t.”
“I told Caille,” Kara said, and Caille nodded her head against Risalyn’s shoulder.
“Verlein looked in no shape to be storming anyone’s holding,” the bladebreaker said, frowning.
“And who are you?” asked Risalyn, handing Caille off to Yuralon. To free her hands—there was a new blade in the scabbard on her back.
[431] Bloody fighters. Like cats, they were.
“No one,” the woman said, as she had before. “I’m no one at all. But I knew Verlein once. I saw her ... yesterday.”
“She’s the bladebreaker,” said Dabrena, with a strange satisfaction. “She’s the one who stopped the battle by disarming all you folk.”
“She melted the blades?” said Risalyn.
“And not before time,” said Yuralon, his face darkening. “We lost comrades in that battle.”
“As did we all,” the bladebreaker growled. Stock words, from a fighter. She did not explain herself.
Pelufer was standing with her mouth agape and some new understanding struggling to life in her eyes. Whatever it was, she couldn’t voice it. Dabrena caught her eye and cocked a brow, inviting her to speak, but she stood as stubbornly mute as the bladebreaker did. They looked like two of a kind. Dabrena wondered if that was what the child was realizing.
Then Yuralon dismissed the bladebreaker with his gaze and turned it back on Dabrena. “Mender,” he said. “Verlein is here, in Gir Doegre. Her folk brought her here last night, before the worst of the storm hit, but I could not determine why. Your pledge sent a runner girl off somewhere and then followed Verlein, and we came with him. He explained everything to us. He spoke with Verlein. He persuaded her to call off her siege, as you bade him. Her shielders were glad of it. But this morning we heard a rumor that she had changed her mind. We were unable to find her. All the public houses were crowded with folk sheltering from the storm.”
“All right,” Dabrena said. “I’m grateful for your report, and for your befriending Adaon. Those public houses will be emptying out. I’ll find Verlein and speak with her myself. Where is Adaon?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you.” Yuralon glanced at Risalyn. “He was a busy lad last night. He feared for you, I think, and could not sit still after he’d done what you’d asked. He found the head alderfolk of this town and asked them for permission to dig. They were distracted, what with the storm, and he pestered them until they said yes just to be rid of him.”
“That sounds like Adaon,” Dabrena said. “He knows how to pick his moments.” Her smile died when Yuralon did not return it. “No,” she said. “There was a storm. There was a storm to end all storms. He wouldn’t have ...”
Her eyes were drawn up the rubbled slope to the shelf on which trees and rocks lay piled.
“Eiden’s eyes,” she said. “That’s the holding.”
[432] “The holding?” Louarn asked.
“The Strong Leg’s Triennead holding,” Risalyn said, echoing what Adaon had explained to her. “The seekers believed there had to have been three enneads and three holdings once. Adaon—her pledge—he thought one would be here, and one in the Haunch. He’d seen a map, he said.”
“My map,” said Kara. “I showed him my map. Where Father said the treasure was.” Her small hand slipped into Dabrena’s, and she pressed close. She knew. She understood what the adults around her were saying. She’d put it together. She knew.
“Where is Adaon?” Dabrena said again.
A wince shadowing her eyes, Risalyn pointed at the destruction of the hill. “He got his permission and he left us. As daft as you hurling yourself on the bonefolk.”
Yuralon said, “He thought you were dead, mender.”
Risalyn said, “The storm was very bad. The quakes. The wind. We thought we were going to die. We all braced for death, in our own ways.”
The first cart piled with bodies was struggling off up the Boot Road. How they thought they were going to get those bodies through the forest to the bonefolk’s wood, there was no telling. “Is he in that cart?” Dabrena said. “Tell me. Let me say my farewells.”
“No,” Yuralon said. “We’ve watched. They haven’t pulled him out.”
Yet, he did not say, but it was in his voice.
“Louarn, take Kara, please,” Dabrena said. “Kara, please stay with Louarn for a little.” Kara protested. Louarn spoke quiet warning. She barely heard it. She couldn’t, she couldn’t—this was between her and her loss, between her and Adaon, she couldn’t consider the rest of them right now.
As in a trance, she walked toward the rubble and up the slope, picking her way over rocks, through the skewed piles of tree trunks. She’d walked in such a trance through the crowded streets of Gir Doegre the day they’d arrived, she and Adaon. Awed by the myriad of goods, by the surfeit of wares in a town weakened by disease, a world bowed under misfortune. Awed by the bursting color and texture of life and trade, despite all the troubles that had befallen them. And Adaon had said, “There must be something you want. ...” And there had been. In the end, she had wanted him.
She slipped on the slick surface, earth drying in the late-morning sun over an underlayer still soggy. In her mind, she was lying in bed with him, the night before the battle, the night before the last time she would ever look on his living face.
[433] “Who was Tolivar?” he asked. He’d heard her say the name, in her mist-drunken babbling, to the keepers who had rousted them from the spirit wood. Is this your Tolivar? they had asked, and she had said, No. That’s Adaon. He’s alive.
“My best friend. And occasional bedmate. Kara’s father.”
“You grieve him like a lost pledge. Or you try to.”
“He was my bindsman. We were triaded warders. With Selen n’Minn, you met her briefly in the holding.”
“Plump, motherly woman.”
“Motherly. Yes.” She blinked. “I try to?”
“He wasn’t your lifemate. You weren’t pledged.”
“I thought we would be. Someday. When I was older. When I was ready. I was two nines and one. 1 was a child. Promiscuous and thoughtless.”
He laughed. “And you’re an old woman now.”
“I am,” she said. “A widow woman with a child and a holding depending on me. I should not have left it.”
“You should have left it long ago.”
“You’re a journeyer, Adaon. You don’t understand about roots.”
“I understand about chains. And you’re a journeyer too.”
“That was a long time ago. Another youthful dream. You’re a seeker. You keep your dreams forever. You’re still young. You always will be.”
“I have four years on you at least.”
“I’m older than I look.”
“You’re two nines and six if you’re a day.”
“Two nines and seven,” she said. It sounded like nothing. But it was the difference of a world between who she had been and
who she was now. “I’m two nines and seven.”
He made a face. “I stand corrected,” he said, with absurd formality. “But I do have four years on you. I’m three nines and three. Where I come from, that makes me a grownup.” Then, more gently, “Dabrena. A harvest-master at nine-and-eight, a vocate at two nines, a mother and head warder at two nines and one. You did a lot of living for a child. But if you believe you’re an old widow woman, burdened with a child, battered by a hard world, oppressed by a weight of black stone, then that is what you’ll be. Go ahead and believe it, if you like. I can’t stop you. It’s not my place, even as your sworn irritant. But for what it’s worth, that is not how I see you.”
“It was once.”
“Never. I swear it.” He grinned. “The woman who made love to me in a sacred glade was neither promiscuous child nor old used-up woman.” The grin widened. “Neither was the one I had just now.”
“But when you were first galling me ... you didn’t want me then. I would have sensed it.”
“When I met you, I thought you were a tight-strung snob with delusions [434] of authority. It was my responsibility to tease you. You needed loosening up. Then I began to feel for you.”
“Desire?”
“Pity.”
“Oh.”
“And respect. You’d done yourself more harm than any nine enneads could have done, I thought. But there was more inside you than that. I hoped you’d let me see it. I hoped you’d open to me, in the odd moments, if I kept you off balance. It was somewhere in there that I realized my own mocking advances had backfired. I wanted nothing more than to ... well, let’s say crack the tight nut of you, which is both too blunt and not blunt enough. But I knew you’d have nothing to do with me. I dismissed the notion, stopped considering it. It was interfering with my teasing. And I was nothing to you. It would never happen.”
“You saw me softening. You must have.”
“I saw you beginning to realize that there might still be pleasure in the world. I told myself that if you found it against a wall behind a tavern with some pretty local, I’d be glad for you. I like to think I would have been.”
It had all been to distract her from the loss of her daughter, and from what they both knew she planned to do, the daft attempt to follow her. But it had been no less true for that.
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