Beneath Ceaseless Skies #60

by Brennan, Marie

  A chill enters my bones despite the warmth of the fire, the tightness of the cottage against the sea-driven wind. She slides the earthenware cup—empty but for the clustered remnants of my tea—between my hands. I look down.

  “Remember when you were very small.” The cadence of her voice is even, soothing. “Remember when you’d come to my house. Your guards waited in the boat. We’d drink tea, and I’d lull you with my words, ease the pain in your legs, your ankles, your back. Remember.”

  Staring into my cup, I feel something loosening inside myself, a knot I hadn’t known resided in my chest—a distant, elusive feeling, yet familiar. I nod as though drowsing, despite feeling in some ways strangely alert, aware of minute details: the snap and hiss of the driftwood fire; the whuffle and scuff of gull feet scrabbling on the windowsill; the heavy presence of Katte’s broken body. Almost, I think I can hear the knitting of my friend’s fractured skull, the remaking of her rent skin where her injuries run deepest.

  In a sleepy voice I murmur, “I do. I remember drinking tea together. You always saved my cup, and peered into the leaves....”

  She nods. My head dips in echo of her motion. Languor builds in my bones as the fire’s heat suffuses my limbs, soothing away aches from rowing, from carrying Katte, from descending the sheer cliff to the fisherman’s boat. Everything dissolves as I slip away from myself and into the world of the tea leaves.

  The ebb and flow of waves wash across my drifting consciousness. The tea dregs swirl, though my hand hasn’t moved. The leaves shift to show a chamber draped in Mekklan gold, the unmoving lump of a dead woman on a massive curtained bed. A young boy, hands held out stiff like clubs wrapped in white linen as though badly burnt, cradles a silent newborn infant. Boy and baby study one another with eyes equally wide, while a hunched form I recognize as the witch by her gullfeather cloak moves to obscure them from my view.

  A sucking with the force of tidal pools drags me from the scene. It spirals downward as if through a waterspout. Off go spinning the bandaged boy and his bundle, the healer witch and the dead woman.

  I hand the teacup back with a shudder. “You were there, in Mekk,” I say. “The little boy...the warlord’s son? And the woman, his wife?”

  “His wife, yes,” she says. “Poor little thing. Dead these eighteen years.”

  Eighteen. My age, just like Katte’s.

  “Mekk, the warlord’s wife, his son...so the baby was Katte,” I say, but the witch isn’t listening. Her eyes glaze over as she stares into my cup. Gulls flap and rustle against the glass, and the howling wind beyond the cottage grows suddenly louder.

  Her eyes snap into focus. “He’s coming,” she says, “as promised by fate.”

  “Who’s coming?” I ask.

  Her eyes are crystal sharp, her voice still distant. “The warlord’s son,” she says. “Coming to reclaim his sister.”

  * * *

  I sit in helpless silence while the witch moves about her cottage. She stirs the ever-bubbling iron pot of aromatic tisane at the hearth, crooning to it. She raps her knuckles on the windowpane, much as she rapped on my hooved foot, and hisses when the gulls flap black wings for her attention. She shuffles several times to Katte and presses her wrist or the beating pulse at the base of her throat. Once, she sticks out her bent tongue and licks the damp skin at Katte’s temple. She frowns, as though my friend’s flavor displeases her, and goes about her puttering and muttering once more. Not safe yet, I hear in her mumbling. Not quite certain to live, though I drew as much life as I dared without killing the other one.

  I grab her wrist as she passes. “Help her,” I say, looking into her eyes, small and beady like those of her island’s soot-colored gulls. “Don’t give her to the brother she barely knows. He’s a murderer. He killed his own father, and my uncle, and all their advisors and personal guards; he would’ve killed his sister already but for chance.”

  “No such thing as chance,” says the witch. “Everything is fated, including the end of a war without end: Mekk and Toth, Toth and Mekk.”

  I grasp at her hand. It lies in mine, curled like a bird’s foot at rest. “You wield magicks,” I say, sliding from my seat to the floor. On my knees I’m nearly level with her eyes. “Call on the waves! Make the ocean’s power crush the warlord’s ship against the serpent tooth rocks until nothing’s left but splintered wood.”

  “My magicks don’t find power in hate! I couldn’t do as you ask. Wouldn’t. Besides, no Toth and no Mekk?” She shakes her head. “A void begs to be filled. Without protection, without leadership, the people of both isles would be at the mercy of the next outland invader from beyond the water. Or the next. Or the next.”

  She gently slides her hand from mine. “No, girl. The warlord’s son is coming for his sister. I doubt a healer witch of modest abilities could stop him. Not even if she wished to; not even if she could somehow harness the powerful magicks of the sea.”

  I swallow the hundred pleas and threats and desperate bargaining promises rising in my throat, and try to damp the pain of fear smoldering deep beneath my ribs.

  * * *

  Morning spills golden and beautiful over the rim of the ocean, marred only by the square wool sails and serpentine silhouette of a Mekklan warship moored at the rocks. A black column of smoke still billows from the distant cliffs of Toth to one side of the rising sun; the humpbacked isle of Mekk hulks to the other. And between where I stand with the witch and the line where sea meets shore, the warlord’s son and his twelve armed men wait on the sand, black gulls perched among pebbles on the ground like watching, feathered stones.

  We near them. Up close, the warlord’s son is everything I expected: dark and handsome and cruel. “Witch,” he says, his voice grinding like pestle against mortar, “I’ve come for my baby sister.”

  The witch cocks her head sideways, bird-fashion. “She’s no baby now,” she says. “You gave her to me for safekeeping eighteen years ago. And if she’s had a recent brush with death, it’s more your fault than mine.”

  I step forward. “Katte doesn’t want to go with you,” I say. “She’s never been happy in Mekk: imprisoned in her own home, ignored by you, treated cruelly by your father. She told me everything in what letters she could bribe servants to send.”

  My voice quivers, but the tremor is slight. Perhaps he’ll not notice. I bury my fists in the folds of my skirt and command my knees to cease their unwelcome shaking. “When she’s healed,” I tell him, “we’ll leave the narrow sea. We’ll leave and never come back.”

  His attention shifts to me, burns into me like his alchemists’ fire burning into the cliffs of Toth. “The war is done. I want my sister.” His expression is fierce when he turns it back on the witch. “I’ve come as promised, the day after my father’s death. You said it was fate; you said my sister would go home with me.”

  “I foretold she’d be here,” says the witch, “and she is. I also said she’d go home. But I didn’t say it would be with you.”

  Behind the warlord’s son, the faces of his twelve men are grim and watchful. Unlike my uncle’s guards, these Mekklan warriors keep beards, some forked or braided with small bells and trinkets which glitter in the rising sun. The sea for now is smooth as glass. Shading my eyes, I peer out at the column of alchemical smoke rising where the Fortress of Toth stood a thousand years.

  The silent Mekklans shuffle, grip the pommels of their thick swords as the witch moves to take their leader’s hand. But she ignores them. She turns his hand in her little birdclaw fingers. “Miraculous,” she murmurs, bringing his palm close against her face. “Utterly astounding, for them to be so changed, and for you to live after such power has surged through you. The pain of hate-driven magicks must be indescribable.”

  He tugs from her grasp. “I told you I’d find a way to make my hands right,” he says. “At my father’s order I endured endless experiments, concoctions, magick treatments carried out while he went off warring. Eighteen years, witch!”

  “Poor, p
oor little thing,” croons the witch, her voice gentle. “Poor little boy, without anyone to love but a newborn baby facing a misery he well understood.” She reaches to stroke his cheek. He flinches.

  The witch shrugs and lets her hand drop. “It would take more hate than the girl has in her bones to survive the magicks you endured, so I’m afraid she’ll remain as she is, and for the better.”

  “But I told you I’d come for her.” His voice rises, grinding against its own pain.

  The witch nods. “Yes, you said you’d come. Any child who’d scheme with a witch at his dead mother’s birthing bed to pass his sister off as his enemy’s heir, to switch her with the perfect baby his father would accept when he returned from warring...a boy of seven capable of that would surely grow to be a man capable of anything.”

  I stand stunned, mute, trying to make sense of their words clamoring in my skull: ...newborn baby who shared his affliction...pass his sister off as his enemy’s heir...I told you I’d come for her.

  The witch continues: “What surprises me is that the boy who held his newborn sister like a fragile and precious thing, who bargained for her safekeeping and her very life, would become the man who arranged her father’s death on the eve of peace.”

  “Father,” says the warlord’s son in a strangled voice. “If you’d known him, you’d know he intended no peace. A month, a year, a week perhaps before he’d lead his warships back over the narrow sea. Do you know the experiments, the tortures he ordered his alchemists and surgeons and magickers to perform during his absences to rid me of my deformity? And on my mother, in hopes her second child would be born perfect? It killed her!”

  The healer witch nods. “I was there,” she says.

  I recall my vision in the tea leaves: sometimes the future, sometimes the past....

  My voice is mine again, words dredged from deep in my throat. “You were midwife at Katte’s birth.”

  It’s not a question; I saw it in the leaves. It’s simply a thread of the tapestry shifting into place, the entire picture beginning to form at last.

  She nods, her back to me, her gullfeather hood bobbing. “And at yours of course,” she says. “You were born just days apart.”

  I know this, have always known. Everyone in both our kingdoms knows of Katte and myself: two girlchildren birthed in warring royal houses, one on each side of the narrow sea.

  The healer witch turns. I’m startled to see tears streaking her creased cheeks. “One girlchild born to the house of Toth, perfect in feature and limb and every aspect,” she says. “So unlike the other born days before, with still-soft, crooked little hooves and a dark glower to her open eyes. That one never cried, though the misshape of her feet pained her terribly. She didn’t cry even when I lifted her from the ruined body of her dead mother and placed her in the arms of her brother, a boy of seven who cradled her between his own misshapen hands.”

  Astounded, disbelieving, I glance at the warlord’s son. He wears no glove or gauntlet. His hands curl to fists. His perfect, pink-skinned hands.

  “Then Katte....” I trail off, comprehension still ebbing and flowing in unpredictable waves, pieces of a broken mirror not quite reflecting the image of the whole.

  “Katte is the heir of Toth,” says the healer witch, raising her voice for all the Mekklans to hear. “Switched at birth with the youngest child of Mekk because an old woman who’d sworn never to take sides in a foolish, overlong war couldn’t deny a headstrong boy’s tearful plea to save his newborn sister from the same tortures he’d endured.”

  Her gaze hones to me alone, piercing me to my core. I grow still and wait for the witch to utter aloud the truth already slicing through my heart.

  “You, Sigra of Toth, are second in line to the house of Mekk.”

  * * *

  The world spins and my knees buckle as I bite back choking, bitter laughter. Fighting to keep upright, I turn and stagger once more up the rocky path to the witch’s cottage. This time the weight across my shoulders is even heavier than the last—heavy enough to crush me into the salted earth, to grind me into dust.

  Gulls caw and flap their inky wings as I fling open the cottage door. Inside, I drop into the chair by Katte’s cot and rest my head beside hers on the pillow. One thought clashing against another inside my skull, it’s some moments before I notice the absolute quality of my friend’s stillness. No pulse beats at the base of her throat. Her chest doesn’t rise or fall. When I reach for her hand, her skin is damp, and cold as sea-drenched sand.

  “Katte!” I cry, leaping to my feet. I chafe her hands between mine, bend to listen for her heart, hear nothing.

  I rush to the door, tug it wide. Black gulls shriek and flutter upward like puffs of noisy smoke. The witch and the warlord’s son come running at my call, clouds of flapping birds parting to let them to pass.

  The witch mutters over Katte’s body. I see now the faintest movement of her chest, the slight jump at the base of her throat. “She’s not dead,” I say, wanting the words to make it true.

  The witch’s crooked mouth is taut. “Not yet, but soon.”

  An unfamiliar wetness stings my eyes. Tears at last, after all these years of none.

  All else forgotten, I drop to my knees. That’s twice I’ve knelt at the healer witch’s feet, and both times for Katte’s sake. “Save her,” I beg. “Please. She’s the only friend I’ve ever known.”

  “I can’t, girl,” she says in her odd speech. “Serious healing magicks suck the life energies from one to transfer to another. Very dangerous to borrow so much health from a living being.”

  “Take mine!” I say. I struggle to my feet, my hooves clattering loudly on the bare planks of the cottage floor. I glance at Katte’s pale face. The bandage across her wound seeps blackish red.

  The healer witch shakes her head. “I did take from you,” she says. “Last night. More than was safe.”

  The incredible heat, the powerful flashes of light, my loss of consciousness: my life energy, flowing into Katte, keeping her from death. “Take a little more,” I plead. “Just enough to keep her alive.”

  “No. It’s not a spigot with a tap. Once opened, the magick can release a trickle or a deluge. At its worst, you might as well try to turn off a waterfall. It’s fortunate I didn’t lose you both altogether.”

  I’d nearly forgotten the warlord’s son, but now he speaks. “My men,” he says, his voice the same gruff gravel as before. “Their loyalty is absolute; they’ll risk their lives at my sister’s behest. They’re sworn to me...to us.” His gaze shifts from the witch to me. “My sister is my only heir.”

  I don’t comprehend the sister he speaks of is me until he meets my stare. Not Katte. Me.

  The healer witch shakes her head. “Won’t do,” she says. “Duty is good and well, but it’s not the base ingredient of healing magicks, the pivotal component which gives life, which makes life flow from one being to another.”

  What, then? I want to shout. What magick power do you need to make my friend live?

  The warlord’s son echoes my thought with words. “What’s the base ingredient of healing magicks?” he asks.

  “Love,” says the witch.

  Katte’s body shudders, and I feel mine tremble in reply.

  “I’ll do it,” I say.

  The witch studies me, tilts her head and narrows her eyes. “It might work. She might live, though you might die.”

  I look at Katte on the narrow cot. Her pale cheeks glisten with a sheen of sweat, her hair swirls damply across her brow. I remember all those years of loneliness and loathing, with her smuggled letters like a rope cast to a drowning man.

  I shift my gaze to the healer witch. “For her sake, I’ll risk death.”

  The warlord’s son has never once glanced at Katte. Even now he doesn’t look at the witch, nor at his men who have begun to gather in the open doorway. His attention bores into me, past my skin, my flesh, the hollow middle of my self.

  “No,” he says. “I will. For you
rs.”

  * * *

  And so it comes to this: the murderer of my uncle, the destroyer of the land of my childhood—my brother—for my sake removes his armor and his sword and lies beside my only friend on the stone floor of the witch’s hut. To save me from my love for her.

  But no: it’s not his love for me. His powerful emotions are for some sister of his imagination; a sister not of reality but of private longings and childhood shame, and a thousand daydreams in which he was beloved in return by someone somewhere—if not by his cruel father or dead mother, then by the sister he saved as a child too small to save himself.

  I’d thought the healing magicks powerful before, but now, watching the witch’s body go rigid as the white hot energies consume her from the inside, devouring her blood and muscle so she seems to shrink, eaten by the very force which will bring Katte back.... I realize what I witnessed before, what I felt as I offered myself unknowing, was but a whisper of the healing power. Seeing my brother’s body shrivel and darken, breathing the crisp scorched smell of hair and sweat and blood as he gives his life to prevent me from spending mine, I understand that the force drained from me was to this as the air-strokes of a moth’s wings are to a raging tempest.

  It’s difficult to conceive of the warlord’s son as a man capable of love. To think he loves me, who sees him still as my people’s greatest enemy, is almost unbearable. And yet he risks sacrificing himself for the newborn sister he saved eighteen years ago; he has had no one else and so loves still that tiny baby, and with inconceivable fierceness. Me, he hardly knows any better than the true Toth heir he avoided all her life—a girl who didn’t know even the secret of his hands.

  This time I’m helpless, a mere bystander while the healer witch stands bowed with agony, making of herself a bridge between one life force and the next. The deluge open, the magicks flow; life energies spark like lightning, jumping, forking, rushing from the warlord’s son into Katte, tempered by the witch. Afraid to help, afraid to touch, afraid almost to breathe, I watch Katte’s chest rise and fall where before it had been still, her cheeks flush with color where there had been none, her eyelids flutter open as a heaving breath leaves my brother in a stuttering rush of air.