Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  I nodded, a chill more bitter than Navronne’s foul winter shadowing my spirit. Of course, I remembered. This recital was for Voushanti’s benefit. Only the previous night had I shared with the prior my new-formed belief that Brother Gildas, scholar and traitor, had not only stolen young Jullian away, but murdered his friend Gerard.

  Nemesio straightened his back and spoke boldly. “We of Saint Ophir’s brotherhood are Gerard’s family. If he lives, then we must locate him and ensure his safety. If he is dead, he must be returned here where we can afford him proper rites. We understand that Brother Valen’s pureblood bent involves tracking and route finding, thus request his aid in our search for the boy.”

  Fool of a monk! I wanted to strangle Nemesio. Gerard’s body must be retrieved, and I was more than willing to lend my paltry skills to the task, but Voushanti was Prince Osriel’s man and could not be permitted to know of the place I believed the boy lay—or its significance. The Well was secret. Holy. And Voushanti and our master were not. “Father Prior, I couldn’t possibly—”

  “Cartamandua is not brought here to serve you, monk,” Voushanti snapped. “Prince Osriel has chosen this monkhouse as a neutral meeting ground suitable for his royal business. The pureblood is required to attend his master. Nothing else.”

  Nemesio’s hairless skull and wide neck glowed crimson. “Well, then. It was but a thought. We would never wish to distract a man from his duty. Here, I’ve brought refreshment for you all.” He filled the five plain vessels from his pitcher, handing them around first to Voushanti and the two warriors, then to me. “In all the excitement of your arrival yestereve…the various comings and goings of so many…we lapsed in our sacred rituals of hospitality.”

  Nemesio raised his cup to each of us. His hands were shaking. “May the waters of Saint Gillare’s holy font bring good health and serenity to our guests.”

  Voushanti shrugged at Philo and Melkire and the three of them raised their cups and drank. I raised my cup in my two hands, but only touched my lips to its rim. Since the day I turned seven, the day my mother the diviner first pronounced that I would meet my doom in water, blood, and ice, only desperation could drive me to water drinking. And were I naught but a withered husk, I could not have touched this water. The holy spring that fed the abbey font had its source in the hills east of Gillarine—in the very pool where I believed Gerard’s body lay.

  A glance across my cup revealed Nemesio glaring at me as if I were defiling a virgin. I had no idea what I’d done, but his shoulders sagged a bit as I lowered my cup. He snatched away the vessel and gathered the emptied cups from the others.

  “I’d best leave you gentlemen to your preparations,” he said. “The guesthouse is yours for as long as you need, of course. Though we can provide but meager fare since the Harrower burning, we shall send what refreshment we can for His Grace when he arrives. Our coal garth is intact…” Nemesio’s nervous babbling slowed as Melkire sagged against the doorframe, rubbing his eyes.

  I glanced from the prior to the soldiers. Something untoward was going on.

  “Mardane Voushant…s’wrong…” Philo’s voice slurred as he dropped to his knees and slumped to the floor. Melkire tumbled on top of him with a soft thud.

  “Gracious Iero!” said the prior softly. But he made no move to succor the men.

  “What treachery is this?” Voushanti’s hand flew to his sword hilt, and the core of his eyes gleamed scarlet. But before he could draw, he blinked, sat heavily on the low bed, and toppled backward.

  “Father Prior, what have you done?” I said, my stomach lodged so far in my throat, my voice croaked as if I were a boy of twelve.

  Nemesio dropped his vessels on the table. “They’ll sleep for a few hours and wake confused, so Brother Anselm told me. We’d best go right away.”

  I could almost not speak my astonishment. “Nemesio, are you absolutely mad? These men serve Osriel the Bastard, the same prince who conjured horses and warriors the size of your church from a cloud of midnight, the same who, not two months ago, cut out the eyes of a hundred dead soldiers who lay in your fields. We know neither his capabilities nor his intentions in this war. Great Iero’s heart, for all we know he may have dispatched the Harrowers to burn you out!”

  “I’m well aware. If the Bastard Prince wishes our destruction, then he’ll do it. I cannot control that. But you have made a grievous charge against Brother Gildas—the lighthouse Scholar—and we cannot know how to proceed until you prove it. As we’ve only these few hours until Prince Osriel takes you away, and as only you can find this place in the hills, I see no alternative.”

  “Did you send my message to Stearc and Gram?” Thane Stearc was likely the leader of the cabal now that Abbot Luviar lay dead and Brother Victor lay comatose somewhere in Prince Osriel’s captivity. Stearc despised me and would no more believe my charges than Nemesio did, but Gram—Stearc’s quiet, pragmatic secretary—was a man of reason. He’d see that a search was mounted for Jullian and Brother Traitor.

  “Indeed I sent news of your safe return. I also informed them of your foul accusation and my determination to seek the truth. You claim that you are one of us—sworn to Abbot Luviar’s memory to aid us in our mission—and this is the service we require of you.” Without waiting for my hundred arguments against this lackwit plan, he stepped over the two warriors and vanished down the stair.

  Gods preserve me from holy men. It was Abbot Luviar’s persuasive passion that had got me caught up in his mad scheme to preserve the entirety of human knowledge in his magical library. Now his splayed and gutted corpse hung from a gallows back in Palinur. Crossing Prince Osriel…laying out his men with potions…the prior would have us end up the same or worse.

  Yet as I pulled on a heavy cloak, I could not deny the virtue of retrieving poor Gerard. Unlike Jullian, a wily, experienced conspirator at age twelve, simple, good-hearted Gerard had been but an unlucky bystander. He should not lie forgotten.

  For the fiftieth time since we’d left the abbey, I glanced over my shoulder and saw no one. A frost wind gusted off the mountains to the south, whipping the snow into coils and broomtails that merged with the gray-white clouds, hiding Gillarine’s broken towers. Ahead of me the prior, his black cowl billowing, strode eastward across the wind-scoured fields toward the valley’s bounding ridge, leading Dob, the abbey’s donkey.

  Though the calendar marked the season scarce a month past Reaper’s Moon, the once-fertile valley of the Kay lay blanketed in snow. The Karish said Navronne’s past ten years of increasingly cold summers and bitter winters were caused by the One God Iero’s wrath at mankind’s sinfulness. The Sinduri Council claimed the elder gods’ bickering among themselves had shifted the bowl of the sky. Those of the lighthouse cabal feared the cause lay with the earth’s guardians—the mysterious, elusive Danae, who had withdrawn from all contact with humankind. Though I had no sensible arguments to make, my instincts told me that matters were worse than they imagined. Whatever the cause, famine and pestilence had taken on bony reality and crawled into our beds with us.

  “We should be hunting the living, not the dead,” I said, puffing out great gouts of steam in the cold air. “Don’t you understand, Nemesio? Not only does Gildas have Jullian, he has my grandfather’s book of maps. And the god’s own fool that I am, I unlocked the book to him. Given rumor of a Danae holy place…given even a guess as to where one might lie…he can follow the maps and take the Harrowers there to destroy it. Once Prince Osriel takes me away from here, I’ll not be able to help you anymore. And without me or the book, you’ve no hope to find the Danae and ask for help.”

  “Brother Gildas has been a member of Saint Ophir’s order for nine years.” Nemesio’s voice quivered with suppressed fury. “With unmatched scholarship, holiness, and devotion, he has devoted himself to work and study that he may carry the world’s hope into the future. You, sir, are a liar, a charlatan who has mocked our faith and suborned the weak-minded with your unending prattle, a hedonist and libert
ine, an illiterate wastrel who has spurned Iero’s greatest gift—the magic in your blood—and accomplished nothing of value in your life. Why would anyone accept your word as truth?”

  Knowing that his every charge had merit did nothing for my bitter temper. “Have you no fear of walking out alone with such a rogue?”

  “Two of our brothers hold missives to be forwarded to Thane Stearc should I fail to return.”

  “Spirits of night…”

  Nemesio halted where the land kicked up sharply into the ridge, motioning for me to take the lead. “Abbot Luviar, the most admirable and perceptive of men, insisted that you were more than we could see. Yet he also named Brother Gildas as the Scholar. In which man was he deceived?”

  And so was I silenced. I could not argue Gildas’s guilt without confessing my own—that my slug-witted reaction to an excess of nivat seeds had prevented me rescuing Luviar from his hideous death. The fact that Gildas himself had abetted my perverse craving could never exonerate me.

  Our path twisted upward through gullies and rockfalls, every crevice and shadowed nook treacherous with ice and crusted snow.

  “Not far now,” I said, as I led Nemesio and the flagging donkey up the last steep climb and onto a shelf of rock that abutted a shallow cliff.

  Shivering, uneasy, I gazed back out over the valley of the Kay and the slopes we had traversed, shrouded in snow fog that teased the eye. Drifting clouds mantled the cliff tops above us. I could not shake the certainty that we were being watched. How could I have been so stupid as to come here? Only one day ago I had narrowly escaped a trap set by the trickster Danae down in the bogs of the River Kay. And now we were to intrude on their holy place, an unassuming little hollow that touched on the most profound mysteries of the world.

  Chapter 2

  Sila Diaglou, priestess of the ragtag Harrowers, wished to send Navronne back to the days before cities and roads and tilled soil, to a time when women hid in caves and men cowered in terror of night and storm. She named all gods false: Iero, the benevolent deity of the Karish, as well as Mother Samele and Kemen Sky Lord and the rest of the elder gods, worshiped in Navronne since time remembered. Harrowers ridiculed belief in Iero’s angels, called the impish aingerou naught but fools’ wishing dreams, and denied the existence of the Danae, whose dancing defined the Canon—the pattern of the world.

  I could not name which gods were real and which but story. Nor could I argue the truth of angels or aingerou, though I spat on my finger and patted the naked rumps of those cherubic messengers carved into drainpipes and archways in hopes my prayers might be carried on to greater deities. But Danae…As boy and man I had scoffed at my grandfather’s claims to have traveled their realms. But Danae existed. Since I’d come to Gillarine, I had glimpsed at least two of them for myself.

  The prior and I trod slowly along the snowy shelf path. Repeated melting and freezing had left small glaciers along the way.

  “Are you having second thoughts, pureblood?” asked Nemesio, blowing on his rag-wrapped fingers to warm them. “Why would Brother Gildas choose this particular spot to hide a body when any of these gullies would do? Perhaps you’ll tell me this is the wrong location after all.”

  There was no mistake. “He chose this place because killing Gerard was not his object. He wanted to kill the Danae guardian.”

  Despite their claims, at least some of the Harrowers believed in the Danae. It could be no accident that their savage rites murdered Danae guardians one by one.

  Legend said Danae lived both on the earth and in it. Everywhere and nowhere, my mad grandfather said. Most times they took human form to walk their lands—our lands, for the human and Danae realms were both the same and not the same. But for one season of every year a Dané became one with a sianou—the grove, lake, stream, or meadow he or she had chosen to guard. The protection of a Dané infused the sianou and the surrounding land with life and health.

  Our destination was such a sianou, a pool I had located at the bidding of Abbot Luviar, before I even understood what kind of place it was. I had brought my friend Brother Gildas there, and in the weeks since that night, Gerard had gone missing, blight had infected Gillarine’s orchards and fields, and disease had come to its sheepfolds. When I touched my hands to the earth in the abbey’s cloisters, I could no longer feel its living pulse. Harrower raiders had left the abbey buildings in ruins, but I believed the cause of its underlying sickness lay here and that Gildas was responsible.

  Snow and ice packed a jutting slab beneath its slight overhang. Dob balked and brayed in protest at the tight corner. As the prior slapped the donkey’s rump and hauled on the lead, a horse whinnied anxiously just ahead of us.

  Startled, beset with imaginings of lurking Harrowers, I hissed at Nemesio to keep silent.

  Footsteps and jostling spoke of one man and one beast. “Easy, girl, it’s friendly company on the way. We’ll be about our business and be off again to hay and blanket.”

  The quietly persuasive voice brought a smile to my lips. Gram could convince a cat to play in the ocean.

  “How in great Iero’s mercy do you happen to be here?” I said, abandoning the prior to the donkey while I hurried around the rock and along the shelf toward the slender, dark-haired man stroking a gray mare. “Did you get Nemesio’s message about Jullian and Gildas? Well, of course, you must have done. That’s why you’ve come. Gram, you must believe me. Gildas has taken Jullian and the book. He’s murdered Gerard…”

  I wanted to pass on everything I knew: what I had sensed in the abbey’s cloisters, the truth about my damnable perversion and how Gildas had thought to use it to bend me to his will. My determination to rescue Jullian—perhaps the only true innocent left in this blasted world—had become a fever in me. Ever-sensible Gram would understand the importance of prompt action. The man spent his days as the calm center of the lighthouse cabal, juggling his testy employer, Thane Stearc, and Stearc’s ebullient daughter, Elene. But I’d scarcely begun my tale when Gram raised his gloved hand.

  “Hold, friend Valen,” he said. “We are already moving. Thane Stearc and his men have spent the night scouring the countryside between here and Elanus for the two of them. Mistress Elene leads another search party between here and Fortress Groult. We told Thanea Zurina that a wayward monk had kidnapped a young friend of yours and asked her to keep an eye out along the roads west as she makes her way home.”

  The flushed Nemesio joined us, hauling Dob behind him. “What are you doing here, Gram?”

  Gram bowed politely. “Good Father Prior, your god’s grace be with you this morning. As I was just telling Valen, Thane Stearc has dispatched several parties to search for Jullian and Brother Gildas. As he wished to move swiftly, my lord left me behind at Fortress Groult. So I rode up here, hoping to make myself useful.”

  The secretary’s pale skin took on a hint of scarlet. Though no older than I, Gram was sorely afflicted with ill health.

  Prior Nemesio shook his head. “Brother Valen’s story is nonsensical. How could a scholarly man such as Gildas give hearing to Harrowers? Even if he be apostate to divine Karus and the One God, which I cannot credit, who but mindless lunatics could imagine that a world without tools or books is what any god intends?”

  Sila Diaglou claimed her dark age would be a time of appeasement, a time of cleansing, required because we had forgotten our proper fear of the Gehoum, the elemental Powers who controlled the land and seasons. The bitter wind whined through the crags, as if to answer my skepticism with a reminder of our wildly skewed seasons, and the disease and starvation that howled at Navronne’s door like starved wolves.

  Gram stroked the mare’s neck and fondled her ears. “Men are driven in such varied ways, Father Prior. Brother Gildas relished his task as Last Scholar, destined to be the holder of humankind’s accumulated wisdom. Perhaps—and who can say what is in a man’s heart?—he does not relish the task of First Teacher.”

  Nemesio tightened his full lips. “We have only Brother Vale
n’s surmise. I’ll not believe ill of Brother Gildas without some proof. So where is this pool, Brother? We must get you back before the demon prince’s heathenish servants awaken.”

  I’d been to the Well only once, in conditions of light and weather so different I didn’t trust my memory to recognize the cleft in the wall. So I crouched down, recalled the passage, the grotto, and the pool, and allowed magic to flow through my fingers into the stone beneath my feet. Cold, harsh, its cracks filled with frost crystals, the stone gave up its secrets far more reluctantly than earth. But I stretched my mind forward, swept the path and the cliff, and after a moment, a guiding thread claimed my senses—a surety something like that birds must feel when the days grow short and they streak southward beyond the mountains toward warmer climes. Such was the gift of the Cartamandua bent, the legacy of my father and grandfather’s bloodline—a gift I had spurned because of its cost to my freedom. “This way,” I said, moving northward along the shelf path.

  “You said Prince Osriel himself comes to Gillarine tonight?” said Gram to the prior, as they trudged behind me, leading the beasts and sharing a flask Gram had brought.

  “Aye,” said the prior. “’Twas only out of respect for good King Eodward’s memory that I could stomach hosting such a visitation. How could a noble king breed such a son?”

  Gram downed a long pull from his flask. “Abbot Luviar himself could not explain the ways of the gods sufficient to that question.”

  Dikes of dense black stone seamed the pale layers of the limestone cliff with vertical bands. Some twenty paces along the cliff, a wide crack split one of these dark bands. “Here,” I said. “We’ll find him here.”

  The gray morning dimmed to twilight in the narrow passage. We stepped carefully. A dark glaze of ice sheathed the straight walls and slicked the stone beneath our feet. Ahead of us, beyond a rectangle of gray light, lay the little corrie, centered by a pool worn into the stone.