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

by Terry McGarry

  He concluded that his symbology would not fully develop in time to halt the droughts and floods and afflictions besetting Eiden Myr. It would require many more fine minds, working for many more years, to even begin to do whatever it was he envisioned. His seekers concocted many fascinating theories about the land’s troubles. But they made less headway toward a solution than her menders had, working along similar lines and with the same tools—reason and the instruments of scribing.

  “In the end,” he said, “the shine of heartlight was required to ease the ills of Eiden’s flesh, as it will continue to be required in the years to come. The lightless power of mind I sought cannot be developed in a moon, or a year, or six years, or a dozen, as I had dreamed. In a nonned, perhaps. Or nine nonned. Or twice that. And it is your menders who will do it, Dabrena.”

  “But there was a light,” Louarn said, to bring the tale to its point. “Wasn’t there.”

  Jhoss nodded, and waited.

  Louarn made a sound that might have been a growl. Jhoss was forcing him to tell it. “And there is a light,” he said, coming around at last to the chair at the end of the table, standing behind it. “A blue light, silver-blue, like the golden yellow of magelight and the coppery red of heartlight. Right, Adaon? Right, Pelkin, Karanthe? Any seeker will tell you that the most powerful things come in threes. Any illuminator will tell you that there are three primary colors. We have seen two of them. Of course there is a third. There had to be.”

  “Add red pigment in equal portion to yellow and blue,” Pelkin said quietly, “and you get black.”

  “Add red light to yellow and blue,” Louarn said with a strange smile, “and you get white. I know. I’ve seen it.”

  “You are it,” Jhoss said.

  There was a long pause.

  “I have a power of dreaming,” Louarn said. Acquiescing, again. Telling the tale because Jhoss forced him to, in order to have done with it. “Jhoss remembers. Torrin told him. Before she was his, Torrin’s illuminator befriended a boy whose dreams were powerful enough to kill.” He closed his eyes briefly. “I had a dream, a very terrible frightening dream, that Galandra’s warding had been breached [488] and the light was being seared from every mage in Eiden Myr. No, I didn’t break the warding, Karanthe, don’t look at me like that. Your martyr is safe. But I escaped the searing.”

  Jhoss said, “Louarn is the only adult in Eiden Myr who retains a magelight.”

  On a spike of envy, Dabrena said, “How?”

  “I dreamed myself free. To do so, my dreaming must have been fueled by other powers as well. My magelight was under attack. I felt the coring, as though I were being disemboweled. I fled into another realm, and saved my light. Through a dream. A thing of the mind. Through what I conceived of as a passageway made of brilliant white light.”

  “You glow,” Jhoss said.

  “And so do you,” Louarn said. “Silver blue. The light of mind.” He looked at Adaon. “Can you see it? It’s strong in you. Can you see Jhoss’s? Or mine?”

  Slowly, blinking, Adaon nodded. “Somewhat,” he said.

  “It will get stronger as you learn to look for it, just as the copper shine becomes more visible to those who learn from those girls down on Hunger Long.”

  “Wonderful,” Dabrena said across the table to Karanthe and Pelkin. “Everyone gets to glow but us. Thank your Lightbreaker for me, if you ever run across his haunt, will you?”

  “One light goes dim, perhaps another has the chance to shine,” Louarn said to her gently. “In each person, as in the world we know. Magelight was quenched, after we had relied on it for twice nine nonned years. And in an eyeblink, relative to those aeons, up springs heartlight. The strongest copper shine in Eiden Myr is a child of the vanished magelight—a child conceived of the failed freedoms, a child whose birth was her mother’s death in the absence of magecraft to smooth the way.”

  Dabrena noticed that he did not mention Lornhollow’s role in the flaring of that light. None of them who knew had said much about the bonefolk. And they would not, without their permission. They had only just learned of their realms, their language, their ways. Much was required before they could share that with—

  Abruptly Dabrena remembered something Pelufer had told her. Everyone had some shine ... but her shine, dull though it was, and Kara’s, which had started to dim as she left early childhood, had brightened after their passage through the bonefolk’s realm. If that passage somehow excited the shine within them ... if a heartlight could be liberated, or increased, by such a passage ...

  She saw Adaon recognize that she was holding in some important [489] thought. She shook her head. There would be time for this. She would not interject her new seekerlike theory into whatever Jhoss and Louarn were having out.

  “With magelight to rely upon,” Jhoss said, we neglected many powers of invention and intellect that we otherwise might have fostered. Twice nine nonned years of progress were lost. For lack of necessity. As the instruments of ink and sedgeweave were restricted to magecraft’s use. I grieve those years ... yet there is relief, as well. Of a burden. I made a great effort toward that vision of invention. Time thwarted me. But perhaps ... that other path ...” He faltered.

  “That other path might have led to powers that would have harmed more than helped us,” Louarn said. “But we’ll be here all day with visitors gawping at us if we don’t get on with this, Jhoss. The answer is no. Ask your question.”

  They must be glowing bright blue, Dabrena thought. Working their mindlights like mad, weaving rings around things they haven’t even said aloud yet. I’ll take that red shine, if I get a choice.

  Karanthe, perhaps thinking along the same lines, or just responding to the sour expression on her face, stuck out her tongue. Dabrena grinned, and felt seven years younger.

  Jhoss stared at Louarn with no expression. At last he said, “There is a mindlight. Seekers have it. Others have it. Some very bright. As bright, perhaps, as the brightest magelights were described to me. Those folk have powers. Not powers of symbology and invention, as I had hoped; those went to the menders, and they must pursue them. Not powers of dreaming, like Louarn’s. But powers to reckon with. I have found only a handful. I continue to seek.”

  “What kind of powers?” Dabrena said, no longer amused.

  Jhoss turned his corpse-pale face to her, with its strange pink eyes filled with incomprehensible visions, and said, “Powers to fear.”

  “Ah,” Pelkin said. “Yes. I see.” He rubbed his chin and jaw and let out a rough sigh. “Three discrete, fearsome powers. Three lights, growing day by day. Within a dozen years we will run the risk of great conflicts among them.”

  “Three primary pigments combine to black,” Karanthe repeated softly.

  “Three primary lights combine to white,” Adaon insisted in return.

  “Those will be our choices,” Pelkin said. “To combine and complement, becoming something more brilliant in whole than in part. Or to go dark.”

  “A leader is required,” said Jhoss. “A leader with all three powers .”

  [490] “Louarn the White,” Louarn said, in soft mockery of an old tale told by tellers at hearthside. “Or Louarn the Black. You put much trust in me, Jhoss, to assume I would be the former and not the latter.”

  “You spent most of your life in shadow,” Jhoss said. “I need not hear your long tale in the tavern to know it. You have been Louarn the Black. If he were here, we would know him.”

  Pelkin plucked ruefully at his ordinary tunic. “Black is really a very rich color,” he said. “I’m rather fond of it, myself.” In response to Jhoss’s hard stare, he said, “Yes, Jhoss, I apprehend the metaphor. But it seems Louarn is not interested in being this leader of yours.”

  “You always wanted a leader,” Karanthe said suddenly, as another gaggle of visitors came through, rushed along by Kara, who was well aware that important things were being discussed in that particular common room. “Torrin made you want it, simply by being who he was. W
hen you lost him, you went looking for someone else, and everyone you asked said no. Torrin would have said no, too, and somewhere inside you know that. Not even he was the leader you longed for him to be. You tried to become it yourself. And now you’ve grappled on to Louarn.”

  “Who has said no, twice,” Louarn said, while Dabrena was smiling at the sailor terminology Karanthe had picked up from Tolivar. He did haunt them, in so many ways. “And now that the proposal is in the open, I say it for the third, most powerful time. I am a journeyer, no more than that. A lad-of-all-crafts.”

  “A lad-of-all-lights.”

  “Perhaps. But my search for their meaning and their powers is a personal one, and any good I may do with them will be as an ordinary man. My childhood was a living nightmare because of a corrupt Ennead that sought control. Our mages were seared of their light by that Ennead battling one of its sons for control. The Menalad Plain was drenched in blood by folk battling for control. Lerissa sought control by hoarding light. Worilke sought control by exterminating it. You seek control, Jhoss, and like everyone else you will come to know that you cannot have it, acquire it in proxy, or bestow it. Not in this land.” He paused, as though he would go on and was grabbing hold of himself.

  Spirits help him if he shows a little uncontrolled emotion, Dabrena thought. Then, with some sadness, And now he’ll go off, and break those three girls’ hearts again.

  And then her eyes went wide as she saw it.

  He had a magelight.

  He was a binder.

  She’d watched him, in the rebuilding of Gir Doegre. Watched [491] him work tin, stone, wood—watched him turn his hand to anything, with skills acquired in six years of prenticing to smith after wright, bricklayer after carpenter, chandler after weaver after cobbler. He’d told her of his wanderings, his insatiable hunger for new crafts. But in all his crafts, he’d never learned the binder’s. He’d circled round it, never landing—never knowing, in a lightless world, that there was anywhere to land. His hands worked looms when they should have been laying sedgeweave, cut dowels when they should have been trimming quills. He was lad of all crafts but the one he was meant for. None of his prenticeships had been the one he truly craved.

  He was a bindsman, in every sense. The preparation of materials would come easily to him, and solving the puzzle of each casting—which inks, which pigments, which implements to provide his wordsmith and illuminator to make their work effective. A binder bound his triad the way Louarn had bound those children, the Girdlers, the bonefolk, the way he bound everyone in this chamber. The way he bound, within himself, the three lights.

  He might not have the voice for it. Binders sang, to complete magecastings. She didn’t know if he could give himself into song the way that binding required. It was an opening of the soul. A revealing. He was as yet too closed a man for that.

  But he could learn. He had a dozen years to learn, with the children of the reborn light.

  You’re a binder, Louarn. The words pressed against her wordsmith’s lips, straining to come forth. I don’t need a light to tell me that. I loved a binder once. I know one when I see one. Take up the craft you were born to. You will never cease your wanderings until you do.

  She could not say it. The words would be no better than Jhoss’s—an attempt to shape him into what she thought he should become. Louarn would have to find his own path to the manhood he was destined for.

  “The answer is no,” he said at last. To Jhoss, though Dabrena knew he would have said the same to her. “The rest is words. I leave it to you.” With a perfectly executed Holding bow to Pelkin and Karanthe, he sought the doorway he had courted and made use of it. No glance toward Dabrena or Adaon, no reassuring wink. That boded ill for the girls’ hearts. But every journey began with a departure.

  One visitor had lingered in the shadows just beyond the doorway. Dabrena’s eye caught on the movement as Louarn left. Had Kara lost track of one? She was so organized for her age, and quite bossy on what she felt to be her own territory. ...

  She heard the visitor’s voice, and understood.

  [492] “The true king crowned is king no more,” Kazhe said, and stepped into the room. “Hello, Jhoss.”

  Kazhe n’Zhevra and Jhoss n’Kall, in the same room for probably the first time since the day the Lightbreaker died. She and he had been with him from the earliest days, and had stayed by him, his strange pale shadows, when everyone else was off pursuing their own concerns. Jhoss’s and Kazhe’s concerns had been wholly Torrin. Jhoss desperately wished to see Torrin’s ideas come to fruition, Torrin’s goals met. Kazhe desperately wished to keep Torrin alive against impossible odds. They were the kind of people often overlooked by history, and the kind of people most deeply wounded by it. Leaders lost their lives, and left folk like Jhoss and Kazhe to live on and bear the heartbreak.

  “That was part of the elegy,” Jhoss said. “That you said for your father.”

  “Old verses of my folk. The kenaila—the blademasters—or whoever it was who settled the plains Girdle. Or both. Maybe it was a song, once. Songs are odd things, make me feel I’ve gone queer—they do to your gut what dinging your elbow does to your arm. We forgot the tune, if it ever had one. I had most of the words, but we’d lost the end. Torrin gave it back to me, once he figured out that what I was saying was the same thing he had read in some old volume. Funny. It turned out to be about me.”

  “Songs have a tendency to do that,” said Adaon.

  “Yes. Even the ones you like because you think they’re not about you at all.”

  “We’re just swimming in old verses today, aren’t we?” said Dabrena.’

  Pelkin replied, “There was a reason the wordsmith’s craft carried so much power. And the binder’s song.”

  “And will again,” Karanthe said.

  “So what shall we do with these three powers of ours? The gold, the copper, and the silver?” Pelkin asked. “This is a metals town. Surely even leaderless we can think of something.”

  “Let them shine,” Dabrena said. “Buff them as we can, give aid and counsel where we’re asked, and let them shape themselves.”

  “There are risks,” Jhoss said darkly. “Risks none of us can see.”

  “Tightening your fist on Eiden Myr won’t reduce your risks,” Kazhe said to him, and ghosts of old debates filled the air around them. The past clung to them all, like a haunt. Like a caul. “And there will be no rulers in Eiden Myr. Not so long as I live.”

  “Our folk have always done best when left to sort themselves [493] out,” Dabrena said. Deciding to apply her own advice to Jhoss and Kazhe, she rose. Adaon rose with her.

  “Let them shine,” Pelkin said, testing the words in his mouth as he stood up. Dabrena watched how Karanthe stood beside him, but still could not discern the nature of the bond. That was all right. She’d have it from her later, no matter how many jugs of wine it took. “Those may be the wisest words I’ve heard in a long time.”

  They slipped between groups of visitors and made their way down the stairs and out through the excavation scaffolds and back into the clear open sunshine of noon in Gir Doegre. The balance of the balance day of Ve Eiden, the harvestmid equinox. To Dabrena, for at least this one moment, all things felt in balance indeed.

  “Let them shine,” Pelkin said, and smiled.

  Verlein slipped the band from her hair and let the wind comb it loose. It felt good to be free of restraints. It felt good to be free of Worilke n’Karad, and the Ennead’s clinging webs, and the rigors of command. Her shield would not rally to her in battle again. She had let too many of them die, and stood by helpless while they were gelded, and rumors of her secret association with the Nine were now too rampant. She wondered if this was how Torrin Wordsmith might have felt, standing on this spot, or near enough, if he had lived to feel anything.

  She let go of her regrets and her rages, let the wind take them. She was still first shield, though only in name. It was just another word, another squiggle on a piece of parchmen
t. The seconds were the shield’s leaders now, and she did not aspire to so much as command of a guardpost. She wanted only to stand here, in the Fist, and watch the seam between sea and sky for any ravel in its stitching. And feel the wind sweep her clean.

  Beside her was a young shielder, just shy of a year past two nineyears of age, just shy of a year in service to the shield. A chunky, freckle-faced girl with long red hair, she was lighter on her feet than you’d expect, and had trained well with the blade. She was still smarting from not being called down to the battle in the Strong Leg, though Verlein had pulled only her own seconds from Fist postings; it had been far too great a distance, and the coastal watch could not be weakened in this of all places. Now the only battle this girl would see was one that sprang upon them from without—and like as not Kazhe would come and knock it down to a battle of fists.

  Well, she’d do all right there, this youngster. Verlein had never seen anyone so handy in a brawl. And more than blades and battles, the girl had joined the shield, the moment she came of age, because [494] she was keen to watch. There was no more farsighted or patient observer. She volunteered for double duty at any opportunity, and al’ ways worked the holidays. She was content, if that was the word for someone with eyes as restless as those, only when she was keeping watch.

  Quiet and dedicated, she was Verlein’s favored partner, and Verlein could not even remember her name.

  The smell of the sea came up sharp in a gust of spray. Long mare’s tails swirled the sky. Murres squabbled and purred in their rocky perches; gulls and terns wheeled and croaked. The sea rose and fell in easy swells. As the slow, steady breaths went by, the sun moved directly overhead, and their shadows were sucked into their feet. Noon of the harvestmid equinox. The balance of the balance day. The moment when time and light poised motionless, suspended ... and then tipped over into the headlong fall toward Longdark. They were too far from the nearest village to hear the Ve Eiden chanting, and no one had come to hold vigil here beside them by the sea; this was Eiden’s day, the celebration of earth and flesh, and they stood on Galandra’s ground. Where Galandra’s triad had cast the warding, and Torrin’s had broken it. On Galandra’s day, then they would come, to look out over the Forgotten Sea at the dark strip of the old world along the horizon. On Galandra’s day, the celebration of spirit, then they would come.