Elora and Caille looked up. “That’s it?” Elora asked.
“Yes. Just fair warning.”
Or his way of saying goodbye. That wasn’t good enough. Regarding him warily, Pelufer said, “Will you come back?”
Louarn smiled. “Yes. I can’t promise it will be to stay. I’ll go out again. Perhaps quite often. Perhaps for long periods. But yes, I will always come back here.”
Pelufer danced.
Khine
Evrael paced Streln’s cool, uncarpeted bedchamber. Streln’s house was constructed from the marbled blue stone of Khine. Perhaps that was one reason Evrael had always loved it here. It had the cool, clean chill of a stone holding, the temperature almost constant across the seasons within the thick stone walls, an environment that reminded him enough of home to replace it; but the stone was blue, not black, and it had always been warmed by the fires of Streln’s presence.
It was cold now. The light in the chamber was aquatic, oblique; on the other side of the house, the sun biased in a clear blue harvestmid sky. The day itself was sultry. Khine didn’t feel the crisp bluster of harvestmid until winter had come to the Northlands. He’d never entirely accustomed himself to the offset seasons. On Khine, Longlight was midsummer; in all but the mainland’s most southerly precincts, summer began with Longlight. The battle in the Strong Leg was known here as Midsummer’s Folly. On the mainland, it was merely the battle of the Menalad Plain, and they didn’t make much of the fact that it occurred during their Longlight festival. It was an event so contrary to reason that it had no place in the context of ordinary lives, and certainly not in the context of a celebration of life and light. Now, on Khine, it was harvestmid, which had started on Moonfire, what they called Sheaf Day in the Head. Ve Eiden, the equinox, harvestmid’s peak, was a nineday away, and then harvestmid would [473] be only beginning on the mainland. He felt unmoored from time, adrift. Position was relative, and he no longer had a lodestar to navigate by.
He walked to the window. The buffed bluestone floor was smooth and chill against the soles of his feet.’ A good place for sailors, Khine, where the stone was the color of sea and sky, where the custom was to go barefooted unless footgear was needed. He wore the loose nine-pleated pants of a ship’s master, and nothing else but a ceremonial blade on a strap around his left shoulder—grief’s knife, the blade Streln had worn to mourn his father. He’d let his hair grow out, according to the custom. On Ve Eiden, three moons after Streln’s death, he would cut it, and go back to sea.
He had left the grounds of this estate only twice since his return. Once for the headman’s memorial, and once more nine days later, to attend the hall that chose his successor. The new head woman would render fine service. She came from an impeccable family and had many good works to her name. A woman of strength, compassion, and reason. There could have been no better choice.
He had denied the factions who would put him forward. He wished to return to sea as soon as propriety allowed. He planned to stay there.
At one end of the world, the mountain holding that had given him birth. At the other, this stone house, this cool blue bedchamber, where he had spent the brightest of his days and the most heated of his nights. He was weary of stone. Stone became permeated with the scents and tastes of ecstasy and pain, and exuded them thereafter. The sea washed all hurts away on the oblivion of tides. At sea, there was always a fresh wind, a new course.
Beyond the window, figs and olives hung ripe on their trees, grapes on their vines. The green terraces were acrawl with laborers—Streln’s family, pitching in to maintain his land. He had bequeathed it to Evrael, according to his eldest brother, who mentioned some passing madness about the woman Lerissa, the details of which he seemed to have forgotten. It was moot anyhow; Lerissa had not returned from her last philanthropic journey, and was here to inherit nothing. Evrael had arranged for Streln’s estate to pass to his youngest nephew, and for his own estate to pass to Streln’s youngest niece simultaneously. Streln’s family was large, and those youngest would otherwise get short shrift. Evrael had leased his land season by season when he was away at sea and could not tend it; the shipyard he had built was worked and owned by those in residence. He had held land only to assure his own standing in this community of landholders. But his ship was his own, and that was enough. If he lost his fleet [474] command for lack of holdings, it was of no matter, so long as he was master of his vessel. He’d prefer a younger commander to run the fleet in any event, and would be looking for one suitable to put forward.
He was in the prime of his life, at six nines and two. He felt inordinately old.
With a sigh, he moved at last to the locked trunk he had found in the well under the stone platform of the bed. A trunk that had borne Lerissa’s scent. A good blow from a ship’s axe had opened it for him. Inside he had found an unusual codex, and inside that he had found the motivation for Lerissa’s scheme.
It was wrapped now, and ready for a runner to deliver to Pelkin n’Rolf before it was sent back to the Isle of Senana, or wherever they were keeping the Head codices now. He had delayed long enough setting eyes again on a black-clad proxy. He called the waiting runner in.
The instructions he gave for the package’s care and delivery were not complex, but the runner insisted on scribing them, and Evrael’s brief message, on a sedgeweave scroll, so that he would get it right. In my day, Evrael thought, our runners kept even the longest messages in their heads, and went where they were told without scribing the destination.
The world had changed. He sent the boy off, and was again alone in the chamber where he and Streln had slept, the chamber Lerissa had appropriated. Streln’s younger brother had her things removed before Evrael’s return, though he had not known the trunk was hers. Evrael was grateful for that. But it made no difference. Streln was no longer here to fight for.
I should have fought for you, he thought. I should have called her to an honor wedge and made her lift a blade in defense of her claim on you. I should have dishonored myself to save you.
It was too late. It was far too late. Jealousy was ashes, and regrets were for the weak. He could not undo the past. A courageous man, a strong man, a Khinish man, went on, unbowed. With honor.
When he lifted his head, unaware that he had let it fall, Lerissa n’Rigael was standing before him.
He thought he was mad. Had she lurked here all this time? Were there hidden passageways unknown to him in this house of stone, as there had been in the Holding? Had she come back from some land-beyond? Or was she a phantom of his tight-held grief and rage, a manifestation of his unhealthy, cloistered mourning?
She stumbled slightly, like a sailor coming onto solid ground from a heaving ship’s deck, and her hair and clothes were disarrayed, as though in a struggle. That was unlike her.
[475] Why would he hallucinate a daughter of the Ennead in that disheveled state?
He wouldn’t. He would not hallucinate at all.
“Evrael,” she said, with some surprise, striving for composure. Then she seemed to realize where she was, and laughed. “So again it seems I come into your capable hands.”
“So it seems,” Evrael said, and stepped between her and the door.
“Will you deliver me again into your headman’s care?”
“You seem to have returned yourself to his bedchamber with no aid required from me.”
“I must have been gone some time, for you to make your way back into that bed.”
“There was an absence in it.”
“It’s a large bed. There will be room for three.”
He moved in close to her without touching, forcing her back with his height and breadth until her calves were pressed against the cold stone platform of that bed. “There are only two of us,” he said. His breath lifted a strand of her hair.
Slowly, she raised her sapphire eyes, searching his face for signs of what he wanted—what would move him.
“Have you no crystal stone to capture my thoughts?” he said.
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Her lashes fluttered—surprise that he knew how she had controlled Streln—and then she drew her lips back in a smile and her hand down his bare chest. It wasted no time seeking lower, more intimately. “You don’t strike me as the sort of man who needs a crystal stone,” she said.
“I have had quite enough of stone,” he agreed.
Probing for response, she faltered when she could elicit none.
“And alas,” he said, “I have never been aroused by women.”
Her eyes flew wide as he took her by the neck and wrested her over his leg and to the floor. He wedged one hand under her chin, and whatever reply or protest she made came out a gurgle as he stroked the ceremonial Khinish blade across her throat.
“This was Streln’s blade,” he said quietly to her, as her lifeblood soaked the stone foundation of the estate she had usurped. “I consign to his spirit the blood it draws, and he is avenged.”
He left her for the bonefolk.
He would grieve Streln his life long, but his days of mourning were at an end.
Gir Doegre ◊ The Fist
It had been night in this holding for countless nonneds of years, as it rested in its long sleep inside the hill. When they shed light on it at last, it was as on a dream. A life imagined, yet fully lived; an ancient realm of alien objects and carvings and ornamentation, yet inhabited by people as human and ordinary as the folk of the town in its afternoon shadow. Ornate platters and goblets left set out for a meal. An overturned stool of strange design. Once-vibrant tapestries grayed with time, depicting scenery resembling the landscape they knew, yet different in dozens of details—windows on the past. The familiar rendered strange at every step. The folk of this lost age had been mages, folk of their own; but they were as wondrous and arcane as any folk from the outer realms could possibly have been. They illuminated their world, and inscribed it—in the stone of their chambers, in the metal of their diningware. Sculpted scenes ran along the ceilings, around each door, faces and animals and flowers and trees. Glyphs and pattern were everywhere. This had been the pinnacle of a culture. It had been plunged into darkness. They had opened it again to air and light.
It was also the highest sacrilege, by Strong Leg standards. Yet the alderfolk who stood beside Dabrena, here on their Ve Eiden tour, were not mortified.
Jeolle n’Jedona’s face was slack with awe. Denuorin n’Amtreor beamed. Anifa n’Bendri appeared serene—satisfied in a sublime, [477] peaceful way, as though something she had always suspected had come to pass. The junior alderfolk were smiling.
They were proud. Far from demanding a bonfire to destroy this nest of sacrilege, they had embraced it. Their reverence for people of light was rooted just as deep as their prohibition against the use of their tools. It would be a long time before the white and gray and black of menders and scholars and runners were tolerated in Gir Doegre, if they ever were, and longer still before color and patterning and scribing were permitted to the lightless. They might never understand that the carvings and inscriptions in this holding were clear evidence that nontriadic patterning did not weaken the power of castings. But as far as these alderfolk were concerned, it was the work of people of light, and they would cherish it, as they would cherish every child who showed a magelight.
This holding had been a center of magecraft and a well of light. They could not have been more happy that it had existed here under their feet for all these generations. Perhaps they saw its unearthing as a reward for their staunch defense of magecraft’s instruments. As traders they had been quickly persuaded of its value as a local attraction. But their pride went deeper than self-righteousness or avarice. They were good folk, and they recognized the extraordinary when they saw it.
“It’s beautiful,” Anifa breathed, in the strangely scented air. There was as yet no cross-ventilation, but the interior would retain the odor of its long slumber even when thoroughly aired. A combination of Druilor and Elfelir stone, the peaty acidic damp that had seeped in long stains through the shuttered windows, and something else—the piquant scent of another world. The scent of time and the ages; the scent of history.
“Who’d have known people of light were capable of such work?” Jeolle said. “I thought it was all parchment and inked signs I knew nothing of.”
“They made rings and pendants,” said Denuorin, who was a pewterer. “I always admired those triskeles. I touched one once. It felt alive in a way my own metals never did.”
“You’ve done a fine job here,” Anifa said.
“Thank you for granting us access,” Dabrena replied. “And for the time to clean it up before we presented it to you.”
In truth, there hadn’t been much to clean up. Some rodent bones, some ancient droppings, the remnants of an aborted nest, worms and insects hadn’t found much to their liking in the bare stone halls. The seeping stains had been the worst of it. There was hardly any dust to speak of; dust was a byproduct of life, and no human living had been [478] done here in nonneds of years. Earth had not filled the rooms. They had been preserved just as they were, stale air and all. Her first breath of that stale air had been a marvel. A draught of the past. Adaon had been drunk on it for three moons now.
What they had wanted was time to look, and catalogue, without the disturbance and contamination of visitors. Their own intrusion was disturbance enough. While they employed waysiders to excavate the front of the structure and provide safe ingress, they assembled a small crew to help with the interior. Stairways had to be cleared, the whole structure checked for soundness, and all had to be done with painstaking care, every detail recorded.
And then there were the triskeles. They had been nearly everywhere, though clustered, either because folk gathered together to die, or because the bonefolk had passaged their bodies in groups. Woodhill had been a grave mound, a cairn, a memorial to the dead. They had marked the location of every triskele on a map, then collected them all, with utmost respect, into a plain chest, now stored on the level below awaiting an appropriate place of honor. More than a nonned of them. More than a nonned mages had died here, and their triskeles were all that was left of their passing.
Now they could no longer hold off the hordes of seekers and menders and scholars who swelled Gir Doegre to the bursting point—and they would need trusted, expert help to mount an inventory of all the volumes stored here in their magecrafted, airtight vaults. The denizens and caretakers of this place had known that they might fall. They had not counted on wardings to safeguard the treasure of their lore. They had sealed their codices away from air and damp in stone chambers below ground level and in stone chests on the first and second stories. All had been carved with Stonetree glyphs to indicate their contents. She and Adaon had required the help of a stonecutter to open one, and what they had found still made her giddy. A set of herbals, three nines of them, perfectly preserved. Not in perfect condition; they had been used, in their day, marked and emended, wooden covers dented at the corners, bindings worn, leaf edges smudged with the oils of many ancient seeking fingers. In and of themselves those signs of human use took her breath away. And the contents—the renderings of familiar plants, the recipes and instructions ... It was a mender’s dream, a healer’s dream, come true. Lore from what might have been Eiden Myr’s most glorious age, restored to them.
Adaon had suggested Ve Eiden for the unveiling day. A tour for the alderfolk, by way of courtesy and thanks, in the morning when the sun shone through the maur-facing windows. The rest of the day, [479] and the next, for the curious townsfolk—and then they would unleash their stonecutters, their seekers and scholars, their menders and runners, and open the treasure trove. The holding would live again.
She lingered in a sunlit corner on the second story as Adaon escorted the alderfolk back down the closest stairs and out. She traced a finger over the animal carvings in the stone as the alderfolk’s steps receded, and smiled not to hear the thunk of Anifa’s cane. Caille could not halt natural death any more than magecraft could, but she could e
ase the pains of aging, and Anifa’s arthritic knees now moved fluidly and supported her weight. Ronim and Dontra waited below to begin showing Gir Doegrans through. This would be her last quiet moment here—perhaps ever, or at least until the novelty wore off and they could begin to work in earnest, and in peace.
From what she’d heard from the menders who’d come down to join her, and from what Adaon’s scholar friends had told him, her own holding was much changed in these three moons. If Caille had not calmed the Longlight storm when she had, the Isle of Senana would have drowned, and its store of codices with it. As it was, it nearly had drowned. Folk in gray had watched in despairing horror as a great wave loomed incomprehensibly large on the horizon, so large it would have towered over their heads and swept Senana under before it broke on the High Arm’s coast. Then the wave had melted into the sea. The residual water that slopped over them came up far enough to flood the floors of their dormitories on the hilltop. If they hadn’t raised the codices nearly to ceiling height—or covered them in waxed tarps against the roof leaks and the driven rain that ripped through two layers of storm shutters—all would have been lost. When it was over, the decision to return them to the safety of the mountain holding in the Head was perhaps the first thing that Graefel n’Traeyen and Nerenyi n’Jheel had ever agreed on. They had been removed from the Head to keep them from the ire of any backlash against the Ennead—to keep them from people like Verlein. Dabrena had acquiesced in their removal. But they belonged where they had come from, not out on some windswept island, and the Head was safe haven for them once more.
Graefel might have always had designs on that Head holding. He’d followed the codices to Senana, but he’d always grudged their being stored there, and the authority their location conferred on Nerenyi. Nerenyi was pledged to one of the island’s leaders. In concert with them, and Pelkin n’Rolf, and the Lightbreaker’s advisor Jhoss n’Kall, she had arranged for both codices and scholars to be housed on Senana. Graefel must have been gratified by the opportunity to leave Senana and return to the holding that had once been the pinnacle [480] of his ambitions. Before you know it, he’ll be running the place, Dabrena thought.
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