The Weaver's Lament

by Elizabeth Haydon

World of star become world of bone

  Grief and pain and loss I know

  My heart is sore, my blood-tears flow

  To end my sorrow I must roam

  My terrors old, they lead me home.

  In his imagination, he could see her stir as she had in the hospice bed the first time he had sung to her, eyes still closed. Her small, soft fingers, callused from years of playing stringed instruments, had brushed his hand, and he heard her inhale slowly, painfully, as if undertaking something very difficult.

  Achmed?

  Yes?

  Will you keep singing until I’m better?

  Yes.

  Achmed?

  What?

  I’m better.

  The gentle insult had made him smile in relief.

  Obviously you’re not much better if that’s the best you can do. But you’re still the same ungrateful brat you always were. That’s nice thanks for someone who just gave you back the will to live.

  You’re right, you did, she had said slowly, with great effort. Now that you—have given me—a taste of—what the Underworld—is like—

  Her words from the night before echoed louder in his mind and through his heart, making it bleed.

  Do you feel better?

  No. I’m not going to feel better.

  He brought his lips to the baby’s head and kissed him, then looked into the bier again.

  Her skin and hair were aflame, gleaming with gold light. The sword of elemental fire was roaring with power, the blade alive as he had ever seen it.

  Achmed stood, his lips still brushing the baby’s golden hair that looked so much like his mother’s, as the fire took her into its maw, screaming in the ecstasy of claiming one of its own, crackling with life and glee and welcome.

  He turned away, unable to watch anymore.

  “Goodbye, Rhapsody,” he said quietly. “I hope the wind sings to you now.”

  He turned and took the baby away from that wind, deeper into the tunnel, and sat down, his back against the wall, as the smoke from the funeral pyre billowed out of the opening, over the canyon, and into the air of the mountains, rising into the pink and gold sunrise that was cresting the peaks of the Teeth.

  He caressed their son as silent tears rolled down his cheeks.

  I knew I would really only have you to myself in death.

  29

  At sunset that day, Meridion appeared at the opening of the long hallway leading to the overlook of the interior chasm in Ylorc.

  Sitting beneath the overhang of the opening was the Bolg king, staring at the simmering ashes of a pyre, the elemental sword of fire glowing dully at its center, a birthing cloth in his hands swaddled around a sleeping infant. The baby’s head, the only part of it visible, seemed to glow ethereally.

  The battered scabbard of Daystar Clarion lay on the rocky ground beside him.

  The smoke from the pyre lingered in the air above the ledge, a single curl rising above it and wafting over the wind across the vast gulf to the Blasted Heath beyond.

  “Uncle?” he whispered.

  Achmed did not respond, but continued watching the curl of smoke make its way east to where the sun would, with any luck, appear in the morning.

  Meridion waited in silence. He tilted back his head and let the wind wash over his face, clean and cold, with the heavy scent of woodsmoke born of brambles and hastily gathered random kindling, and a lighter one, almost imperceptible, but familiar, the trace of vanilla and earthy spice, a hint of flowers and soap.

  He choked back the tears that rose in memory.

  Finally the Bolg king spoke woodenly.

  “This is your mother’s last child,” he said. “She is dead. I burned her body.” He glanced at Meridion, whose face was white but expressionless. “The pyre was lighted with her sword.” He lifted the infant to his chest as it sighed aloud. “I tried to follow the appropriate death rituals that I have seen her perform endlessly over Time.” He leaned back against the cliff wall with the baby up against his shoulder. “Of course, that means they were Bolg rites; I didn’t pay attention to any Lirin dirges she ever sang.”

  “Thank you for tending to her. You have my gratitude.”

  “Spare me from it. I want nonesuch—I didn’t do it for you.”

  Meridion nodded silently. He inclined his ear to the east. “His name is Graal.”

  Achmed’s gaze sharpened, but he did not turn in Meridion’s direction. “You know this how?”

  “I’m a Namer. I can hear my mother’s voice on the wind, pronouncing it. I can also smell the magic of his entry; he must have been summoned very near this place, too.”

  Achmed lapsed into silence. He took the quieted baby from his shoulder and cradled him in the crook of his arm again.

  Meridion reached into the inner pocket of his cloak and pulled out the small box of Black Ivory which he had taken from the display in the Repository of Lore from under the eye of the Lirin guards who had been standing there, caught in between moments of Time.

  “Uncle,” he said again quietly.

  “Begone.” Achmed’s voice was brittle and dry.

  Meridion stood in silence for a moment, then exhaled and came closer until he could see the face of the baby in the Bolg king’s arms.

  “I have a story for you. Its ending isn’t written yet.” He swallowed; the words were the same as the ones the Bolg king had once uttered to his mother in the depths of the world, while they were traveling along the Root. It was a tale of great secrecy, of utter silence, and he knew that the Bolg king would remember them.

  Achmed did not favor him with a glance. “Unless it is instructive of how to tend to this child, I am not interested in hearing it.”

  “It may be exactly that,” Meridion said.

  For a long moment there was no other sound. Then, at last, the Bolg king looked over his shoulder.

  “What do you want?”

  “I have just come from saying goodbye to my mother. I met her on the doorstep of the Gate of Life, beyond the Veil of Hoen. Now that she has left this life, she is the only other person who knows this tale. We can leave it that way if you wish. Or I can tell it to you. It is your choice.”

  He was met with nothing but silence, broken intermittently by the soft whistling of the sleeping baby, glowing within his woolen blanket in Achmed’s arms.

  Meridion sat down beside the Bolg king, at an angle, avoiding making eye contact with him, and began his tale.

  “My parents met in the old world.”

  “So I have recently heard. Just when I thought there might be a limit to your father’s ever-present, out-of-place imposition into every part of your mother’s life, it turns out that he outdid himself, again.”

  “Whatever else you can justifiably hold against my father, that was not his fault, nor was it his doing.”

  Achmed looked out into the indigo dusk that hung heavy over the canyon to the night-stayed soldiers pacing slowly back and forth on the heath beyond it. “A thousand years ago, after your mother had killed Anwyn, she told me that before the Seer of the Past died, she told Rhapsody that Time had been altered for her, in a way that had made her existence better than it would have been on the first ‘strand of Time,’” the Bolg king said at last. “But that was all she knew.”

  “Anwyn was referring to the meeting of my parents, in their youth, in the old world. That meeting led to my mother leaving her village of Merryfield in the middle of the Wide Meadows, looking for him, bringing her to the city of Easton, where you and Grunthor eventually came across her.”

  “I am aware.”

  Meridion’s gaze also looked east across the canyon.

  “My mother always believed that if she had not followed the boy who came to her, uncertain of how or why Time had been altered to bring him to Serendair, she would have been married off to a farmer she didn’t love in her village’s marriage lottery, lived and died long before the Seren War—that it was this meeting which brought her to this side of Time. But wha
t she believed was not true.”

  Achmed glanced at him, but said nothing.

  “I have seen the Weaver’s tapestry beyond the Veil of Hoen,” Meridion said, his voice dull with exhaustion and the effort to remain stoic. “I have seen both the first strand of Time, which was burned when Time was altered, and the second one in which it was remade. She has seen them as well. Since you are part of the story, I believe you should hear how Time was altered for her. And my father.” He exhaled. “And you.”

  Achmed looked down at the infant and adjusted his blanket.

  “My mother’s father, moved by her misery at that prospect, made inquiries of a passing Lirin troubadour who came through Merryfield just days before the marriage lottery,” Meridion continued. “The man heard her singing in the barn, and made arrangements for her to study at Quieth Keep. So her desire to learn, something she communicated to the young boy on the second strand, saved her from the lottery.”

  Achmed’s eyes narrowed.

  “My understanding is that she was happy at the university, pursuing the science of healing through music. For the first time in her young life, she was not one of the only Lirin in her community. In addition to humans, among the faculty and the student body there were many other Lirin, as well as Ancient Seren, Nain, Gwenen—and even a half-Dhracian, half-Bolg man called the Brother, who also was studying healing, through a different method.”

  Achmed snorted. “You consider assassination a different method of healing?” he asked sourly.

  Meridion shrugged. “I imagine it can be. But according to the tapestry, he wasn’t studying assassination—just actual healing, as his mentor, a monk named Father Halphasion, had begun to show him.”

  “I think I’ve heard enough.”

  “If you say so. I think you believe otherwise, however. Or you should.”

  Achmed finally turned and stared at him with his mismatched eyes. Meridion waited, still keeping his own eyes fixed at an angle away from his gaze, but the Bolg king said nothing, so he continued his tale.

  “At first, what you had in common with my mother, who was known to you initially as Emily, her family nickname, then later, when you became closer, by her given name, Amelia, besides the study of healing, was a young human woman by the name of Werinatha.” Out of the corner of his eye, Meridion saw the Bolg king inhale, but maintained his gaze away. “My mother and she shared quarters in the university, and were dear friends—the closest thing to a sister my mother had ever known. The tapestry of history shows that Werinatha and the Brother shared something more—a fondness that was mutual, and growing.”

  “Stop,” Achmed ordered. The very air in the tunnel grew drier. “This is not history you wish to examine.”

  “I do not wish to examine that history. I am telling you the story of my mother. As a Lirin student of Singing, she was given a two-year pilgrimage, a Blossoming Year, just like her own mother, and sent after her first year of classroom study to the forest Yliessan, the Enchanted Wood where Sagia, the Great Tree, stood, to learn its song, and that of the Pool of the Heart’s Desire, and Widershin’s Stream, and all the other historic places housed within that enchanted wood.

  “After the second year, her Year of Bloom, she returned to Quieth Keep, only to find it in ruins, destroyed by the accidental mismanagement of a magical undertaking that sought to cool the Sleeping Child, the star that had fallen ages before into the sea nearby, and threatened to rise, which eventually would result in the destruction of the Island of Serendair. On either strand, that cataclysm came to pass, as you well know.

  “Also back from a scholarly pilgrimage was the Brother, who had arrived moments before her. Together the two of them stared in horror at the destruction of the university, seeing that only a very few had survived the disaster. Werinatha was not one of them. Jal’asee, however, was—which is why you hate him so, even now, three or more millennia later. Jal’asee had been one of the professors responsible for the undertaking that had ended in disaster, something else you do not forgive him for. That was true on both strands of Time as well.”

  Achmed turned away again.

  “Your devastation broke my mother’s heart. She knew the story of your youth, of your torture at the hands of the Bolg, of your mother’s rape and death in childbirth. Your rage at what had happened to Werinatha was growing into something even more potentially destructive. And, just as you did after Grunthor’s death, you and she turned to each other for comfort. Her love spared you, and the Island, from your wrath. Perhaps the greatest healing in her time as a Namer was that of you.”

  The Bolg king had fallen silent, staring down at the child in his hands.

  “Graal—Graal was my mother’s first child, not her last, born of blood and love—he was not conjured when the thread of Time was originally passed through the tapestry. He was conceived, as any real child is conceived, given to her by you, carried within her, and delivered from her body into your hands. The history says you loved them both, though your love was odd and fragmentary. So you did not follow the path of the second strand of Time—you did not become the primal assassin that you did when Time was remade.”

  Achmed was staring across the canyon again, silent.

  “Do you understand, Uncle? On the first strand of Time, you were a healer—you did not have the skills that came when Time changed, because those skills were formed later in hatred, not love. You never met Grunthor, never learned to be the greatest of assassins—you never found yourself in the demon Tsoltan’s employ, never had the key of bone that allowed the Three to leave Serendair in the second iteration of Time. You never came to the new world.” He inhaled the dry, stinging air, then spoke as softly as he could.

  “You died in the Seren War, Achmed.”

  He could hear the soft exhalation of the Bolg king’s breath.

  “My mother, however, survived. She fought in the war, though in the role of healer mostly, largely protected by Oelendra, her mentor on this Time-strand, who was younger than she on the first one.” He shook his head. “Strange to contemplate; in this history, Oelendra was like her second mother. But the first time, she was like a daughter to her.

  “Eventually the war ended, and Time went on. Gwylliam was born, and grew to be king of Serendair, was given his vision of the Cataclysm, and built his flotilla, led his exodus ‘from the grip of death to life in this fair land.’ My mother sailed with Oelendra, with the First Fleet, while Graal, a man by then, went with the Second—just as on the second strand, he was the one to provide the prophecy to Gwylliam of the Cataclysm. When that fleet was sundered at the Prime Meridian, MacQuieth offered the surviving members of it two options—to remain on the Island of Gaematria, which was within sight, or to sail back to Manosse. Graal chose Gaematria, and became the most visionary of the Sea Mages.” Meridion looked down as his conjured half-brother. “My mother never saw him again.”

  In the depths of his blanket, the baby whimpered.

  Achmed’s sensitive hands stroked his cheek.

  “She was greatly aged when she landed with the First Fleet in Elynsynos’s lands. Like the other First Generation Cymrians, she did not grow older from that point on, and she continued to teach the science of Singing, and employ her talents as a healer. Then the Cymrian War came in response to the first Grievous Blow, and she served, again in her capacity as a healer and a woman of wisdom, on the Lirin council that repudiated both Anwyn and Gwylliam. The whole mess came to the same pathetic end it did on the second strand, with the continent divided against itself.

  “But because the Three never came, because you and Grunthor were not there to kill the F’dor with her, the demons were ultimately victorious. Anwyn had shattered the Purity Diamond, which was the only real weapon against them, and soon the world was on fire, drifting through space, alight with smoke, dying. The Wyrm within its bowels was awakening.”

  Achmed removed his hand from the baby’s face as he settled back into slumber. His own sallow face, etched with sorrow and exposed
veins, grew even more somber.

  “The remnants of the council took shelter in the mountains of the Deep Kingdom with the surviving leadership, particularly Faedryth, who had built his own Lightforge and had seen the end coming. Manwyn, also sheltered in the mountains of the Deep Kingdom, had uttered a prophecy about the unnatural child born of an unnatural act, saying it was the only hope of undoing the inevitable destruction of the Earth. Only after she had made that pronouncement did she warn Rhapsody about childbirth, that the mother would die, but the child would live.”

  Meridion’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper.

  “So she knew, Achmed. On the first strand of Time, my mother knew the cost, and understood what the consequences would be, both of taking the action, and of not doing so.” He choked. “Even though she did not on the second strand.”

  For the first time since he had begun his tale, Achmed nodded.

  “Go on,” he said as if the words pained him.

  Meridion felt tears stinging the corners of his eyes.

  “Among the others taking shelter in the Deep Kingdom was Llauron, who had brought along his wounded son, Gwydion. Gwydion was almost a vegetable, a profoundly broken man who had undertaken the same brave deed he had on this Time-strand—he gone to the House of Remembrance alone, expecting to meet Oelendra there, and was torn apart by the F’dor on midsummer’s night. As on the second strand, his friend Stephen Navarne found him, dying, Oelendra took him to the Veil of Hoen, and the Lord and Lady Rowan patched him back together as well as they could. But, because he had never met my mother in the old world, nor had he been healed with the Ring of Wisdom she gave to him on the second strand of Time, he had sunken into madness, drowning in unrelenting pain, his arms restrained, a gag in his teeth most of the time.

  “Being a Namer of the highest order, my mother knew the lore of conjuring. The Council agreed, including Llauron, that Gwydion would be the one to be asked to provide the second piece of soul to bring this unnatural child into existence, this child that was to be ‘born free of the bonds of Time.’ Just as my mother asked you to do with Graal in this Time.