Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  “You cannot help me. You must not.” Saints and angels, make him believe it, for you’ll never be able to repeat these words. My darkest core prayed he would not listen.

  “Look at me, Valen.” His icy fingers shook my chin. “Open your eyes. I am your lord and your bound master. I command you tell me what’s wrong.”

  Best let him see the raging hunger. Best see his reaction in turn, to crush hope and understand my fate. I allowed his clear gray gaze to capture mine, then spoke so that only he could hear. “The doulon.”

  “Ah.”

  He dropped his hand but not his eyes, his expression such a strange compounding of comprehension, curiosity, and calculation, I could not read it. But at least I saw no judgment. Perhaps a man who enslaved souls saw no perversion in teaching the body to crave pain in order to release one moment’s ecstasy and gain a few weeks’ comfort.

  “You are full of surprises, friend Valen.” His voice was soft. Puzzled. Kind. Almost as if he were Gram alone and not the other. “But this one—”

  He turned away abruptly, leaving me slumped against the window, where I tried to inhale enough cold air I would not erupt in flames. I was relieved to hear him dispatching the others about their duties, telling them he would set out after Gildas as planned. Good. Maudlin sympathy was no better an asset for a worthy king than self-righteous judgment. Somehow it made my shame easier to bear that he was proceeding with the kingdom’s business.

  Eyes closed again, stomach heaving, I slid slowly down the wall, trying to decide what to do with myself once these four were dispersed on their missions. I could not remain in the guesthouse. Stearc would not be so matter-of-fact about this betrayal as his prince was. Horrid to think of the thane filling my last hours of reason with bullheaded insults. But I also hated the thought of burdening the brothers…

  “Come, come, you’re not going to get off so easy.” A firm hand caught me under the arm and halted my downward slide. “Stand up, Valen. Gather what’s left of your wits and come with me. We must find our young friend and your book and this villain who thinks to use them.”

  “Your Grace, if I could—please believe me—I would. Do you have any idea—?” I lowered my voice so the others would not hear. “Doulon hunger destroys mind and body. I’ll be of no use to you.”

  “I have a very good idea. I was born with saccheria.”

  Saccheria! No wonder reports named him a cripple. Joint fever, a rare and brutal rogue of a disease, could crack a man’s limbs or bend them into knots. Even if the first bone-twisting onslaught of fever didn’t kill you, you were never free of it. It would attack again and again, vanishing abruptly for weeks or months at a time before the next assault, manifesting itself in a hundred cruel variants—one time as grotesque skin lesions, the next as mind-destroying fever, a lung-stripping cough, or a palsy that transformed a robust warrior into a bed-ridden infant who fouled his sheets. Always lurking…always unexpected…always, always painful.

  He released me as soon as I was standing again. “One cannot live as I have without learning every remedy the world provides for pain. And the first and most difficult thing you learn is that there exists no remedy without cost. I was fortunate that my father forbade me try nivat or poppy until I was old enough to understand their price. I won’t give you either one.” His calm assurance eased even so blunt a condemnation. “Unfortunately for you, I also know you’re not going to die in the next few days.”

  “I’ll want to,” I said. And even if I shed the doulon hunger, I would have to face the disease itself.

  He pulled my cloak around my shoulders and tugged it straight. “So you will. But I won’t allow it, and perhaps you will have accomplished something useful before you expire.”

  Chapter 7

  “I can’t eat this,” I yelled, knocking away the spoon, spilling hot soup over my clothes, my blanket, and my unfortunate companion. “Tastes like drunkard’s piss.” I rolled to one side and drew my knees to my chest, the sound of my own croaking voice threatening to burst my eyeballs. I was shivering so violently I could not catch hold of the blanket to draw it over me, and so lay exposed to the frigid evening.

  One of my tormentors threw the blanket over me—over my head, so that every breath was tainted with the stench of horse, smoke, vomit, and my unclean body. Moaning, I clawed at the damp wool to get it off my face before I could not breathe at all.

  “Just stick a knife in me,” I said between gulps of the frosty air that froze the slime leaking from my nose. “It’s quicker than poisoning or suffocation.” Quicker than devouring oneself from the inside out.

  “I give you no leave to die. You vowed without reservation that you would not run away from me. Remember?”

  My chief tormentor was no more than a shadowed outline between me and the fire. I closed my eyes and clung to his voice. Calm. Cruel. Kind. The fragile thread of reason that held my body and mind together. Days…blessed angels, how many days since I could think, since I could move without screaming, since I could sleep? And now it was almost night again, and we lay on a bleak hillside in a forest of charred trunks, all that remained of a spruce and aspen forest. I had tracked Gildas and Jullian into this desolation somewhere west of Gillarine, but I could not have said where.

  “Tell me, Valen, what is it you do when you put your hands on the earth? Do you work a spell to find the way? Or do you ask…someone…something…to show you…as with a prayer? Or is it something else altogether?” Gram…Osriel. Of course I knew the one who held me on his leash. It was just difficult to remember the two were the same man. “Answer me, Valen.”

  “Don’t know. I feel. I see. It hurts.” I swiped at my face with my trembling hand, only to sneeze again—a great wet gobbet of a sneeze. Samele’s tits, I was disgusting. I hunched tighter as the sneezing set off another barrage of cramps. Chokesnakes writhed in my belly, clamping their wirelike bodies about my stomach, liver, and gut. The two swallows of piss soup I’d got down came ravaging back up my gullet, as did everything my companions tried to shove down me.

  When I was done with the latest bout of retching, a warm wet rag wiped my face. “I’ve seen that the seeking pains you, as does everything just now. But Voushanti says it didn’t seem to distress you in Palinur or Mellune Forest. So perhaps when you are yourself again, it will be painless again.”

  The prince’s patient baritone never changed. If I could find a blade, I might slip it between his ribs just to see if the next time he said, “Tell me, Valen,” it might sound something different. But my eyes watered so profusely, the world and its contents were never in the places I expected them, and my two companions hid their weapons from me.

  “Please let me sleep,” I whispered, rolling tighter, clutching my blanket to my chest, trying to hold still so the cramps would ease. “Have mercy.”

  “I’ll not give you what you want. I told you that. Sleep will come when it will. Perhaps later tonight. Now it’s time to search for Jullian again. You told us this afternoon that we were close. You made me promise to force you to this again when we reached higher ground.”

  No…no…no! Impossible when rats fed on my brain, when my parched soul shriveled, when marvelous, glorious life had shrunk to this frozen, wretched, burning hell.

  “Come, Valen, will you try?” Ever and always patient.

  “Aye, lord. Just help me move.”

  The two of them unfolded me, supported me as I knelt beside a patch of cleared earth, and then gently unclenched my fists and laid my shaking palms on the cold ground.

  “Find the boy, Valen. You are gifted beyond any man I know. You’ve kept us close these four days, though we’ve traveled in entirely unlikely directions. This child, your young brother, stolen by a traitor who would use him to destroy you…”

  Somewhere in the ragged, hollow shell of my being, where the shreds of reason, talent, and sense had collapsed like the walls of Gillarine, anger smoldered. When my tormentor’s voice touched that ember, I could grasp my anger, use it t
o steady my shattered nerves, which in turn gave life to my magic.

  Where are you, Archangel? I promised to protect you. Where?

  My will drew my mind into the earth, and I sought through soil and roots, frozen now, the cold penetrating deeper than these lands had known since before men walked the earth. The roots tore at my mind’s fingers like metal thorns, the dirt and rocks scraped like ground glass, leaving my soul raw and my gut bleeding. But anger held me together, and I swept my inner vision across and through the landscape, seeking the footsteps of the traitor and the boy…and discovered they had diverged. Where are you, boy? Saints and angels, if I but had a drop of his blood to link a path…

  I poured my soul into the seeking, existed as worm, as beetle, as root, listening and smelling and feeling the cold grit as I groped for some hint of human footsteps. Gildas had led us on a lunatic’s path. This high, rocky wasteland had welcomed few humans, but hosted every kind of wild goat, squirrel, and rock pig for generation upon generation. Most of them dead now. A sickness festered in this desolation.

  Cold…frigid, searing, mind-numbing cold…a thread of ice…suffocating…drowning…

  I snatched my hands from the ground and clamped them under my arms, rocking my body to soothe the urge to vomit. “Water!” I gasped. “Gildas has left him in the water. A spring or a seep. Holy gods, in this cold. Hurry…hurry…no time.” I flapped and floundered, struggling to rise. What if Gildas had left him bleeding as he had the hapless Brother Horach, as he had poor Gerard, attempting to poison another Danae guardian? Jullian’s brilliant mind and noble heart, his determined courage that had stood up to mad sorcerers and powerful priestesses, laid waste by knives and despair…the imagining drove me wild.

  “Wait!” Osriel crouched in front of me and clamped his hands on the sides of my head, demanding I look him in the eye. His features swam in the light of the crescent moon that shone bright and heavy in the west. “Be clear, Valen. Jullian is abandoned? Where is Gildas himself?”

  I blinked and squinted in the moonlight, trying to connect the wavering landscape with the images in my head. We crouched just below the summit of a rocky bluff, a vantage where the prince and Voushanti could survey the steep-sided, narrow gorge.

  “Northwest,” I mumbled, shaking my head to clear it. “Over that ridge at the end of the gorge and into the earth. Moving fast as if he knows this country.”

  “That makes no kind of sense,” said Voushanti from behind me. “This is bandit country, riddled with hiding places, true enough, but what purpose for a scholarly monk? Into the earth…a cave, then? Does he think to be a hermit like the wild holies in Estigure?”

  The two of them had speculated endlessly on why Gildas traveled so far from the impoverished Moriangi villages and failing Ardran freeholds where Sila Diaglou enlisted most of her support, and so far from the estates of Grav Hurd and Edane Falderrene, the two nobles who trained her legions.

  The prince’s attention did not waver though he had to squeeze his questions between bouts of coughing. His saccheria had flared up a day out of Gillarine. “How far, Valen? Can we reach Gildas before you lose your sense of him?”

  “If we stay high…traverse the ridge. But Jullian is down. Straight west and down. This side of the ridge.” To get down these icy slopes to fetch Jullian and then back up again and over the ridge to catch Gildas would be impossible. And I would lose the monk’s track long before we could travel the long way around out of the gorge and up the easier slopes to the ridge. Tears and mucus ran down my face unchecked. “The boy will die down there in the water. Die alone. We can’t leave him…not fair…not right…an innocent…”

  “We should go after the book,” said Voushanti. “The monk believes us weak. He’s planned to make us choose. The boy is likely dead already.”

  “Not yet,” I said, holding tight to my anger so I could think. “I’d know.”

  “I’ll not build our future on one more dead child,” said the prince hoarsely. The saccheria had left thorns in his breathing. He moved carefully, as if his joints grated upon one another. “If we cannot protect our own, then how can we protect the rest of the kingdom? Valen and I will fetch the boy. You can go after—”

  “No,” said Voushanti flatly. “I am here to protect you and your pureblood. You have bound me with that duty, and no whim—even yours, lord—will sway me from it.”

  “You—are—my—servant.” A flash of red lanced from the prince’s fist to the bottomless black of Voushanti’s eyes…and held.

  Muffling a groan, the mardane dropped to his knees. Even in his submission, he struggled and writhed, his body seeming to bulge and swell until he twisted his thick neck sharply, wrenching his eyes from Osriel’s lock. In that same moment the red lance broke and vanished. The mardane yanked his sword from its scabbard, laid it crosswise on his upturned palms, and thrust it at our master. “Do with this as you choose, lord, as is your right and privilege,” he said, curling his half-ruined mouth into a demonic leer, “but I will not leave you.”

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and confirmed that the sword’s crimson glow was not some artifact of blurred vision.

  “By the mighty Everlasting!” Osriel’s upraised fists shook and spat white sparks that showered down on Voushanti’s dreadful face.

  Surely Magrog’s own presence would not taint the night with such a stench—death and brimstone and scarcely bridled violence. The earth shivered at Osriel’s wrath, or so it seemed to me, who would gladly have exchanged my body for that of one of the cold worms I had touched. I laid my head on the ground and shrank as small as I could manage.

  “You will pay for this, Voushanti. When your day of trial comes next, you will pay.”

  The dispute was quenched as quickly as it had flared. The night became only night once more, rather than the vestibule of hell. Before I could sort reality from nivat-starved illusion, the two of them had tied me to the back of a horse and we were descending the slope into the darkening gorge. I could not fathom why Voushanti yet lived. In what kind of bondage did he serve?

  The nervous animal’s hooves slipped more than once. Voushanti cajoled the beast to stay afoot and me to balance my weight back to help keep it so. But every jogging movement set off my cramps, and before we’d descended halfway to the bottom of the vale, I had stopped worrying about Osriel’s scarce-contained furies and was begging Voushanti to throw me from a cliff.

  “Tell me which way to the boy, Valen,” said the prince, laying his hand on my knee as he walked beside me. Fifty times he had said it, between his hacking coughs. Even through my layered chausses I felt the heat of his fever.

  “Water,” I said, my chin bouncing on my chest, lips numb, drool freezing to my chin. “Find the water. Down.”

  The beast beneath me jolted forward. I muzzled my screams in the crook of my arm. Gildas must not hear us.

  The night’s black seemed washed with silver. Details of the land crept out of the dark—scrubby trees, snow, crooked slabs of ice-slicked rock. Could it be morning already? Please, holy Iero, no. After a night in freezing water, the boy would be dead.

  No, this light was something else. Not moon. Moon and stars were lost in cloud. Yet I could see…there, the guide thread itself laid out on the landscape, a gray pattern that sparked and shimmered of its own light, scribed atop the landscape, like the sigils of the Danae that shone from within and yet apart from their bare flesh. I dared not ask if my companions could see it, too.

  “Bear left,” I croaked. Red sand hardened into stone and twisted by wind and water had formed a narrow rift. Thistles and scrub sprouted between its thin layers. “It’s narrow. Choked with boulders.” Beyond the boulder field a wall rose like the facade of a temple, an oddly flat face in this rugged wilderness.

  We halted, and before I comprehended he had gone, Voushanti returned from a scout. “It’s as he says, my lord. Great slabs fallen everywhere. Dead trees. No sign of anyone, boy or man. But the place has an odd feel. We’d best le
ave the horses and the pureblood out here. Neither will manage the boulders.”

  They untied my hands and feet and helped me to the ground. Propped my back against a rock. Bundled blankets around me and gave me a sip of ale.

  “Are we in Evanore, lord?” I mumbled, my speech vibrating through my skull.

  “No, Valen. Why would you think that?” Gram’s endless patience at my shoulder. Profound weariness. Perhaps the netherworld I had witnessed in his eyes had been but my own madness.

  “Brains boiling.”

  Soft laughter fell about my head and shoulders like autumn leaves. “Should we ever travel to my wondrous land, I’ll shield your poor brains, Valen. Now tell me: Is the boy close? We can’t take the horses any farther.”

  I clutched my belly and rolled to the side, onto my knees, pressing forehead and hands to the churned snow and dirt. All I could sense was the blistering heat of my skin. “I can’t feel, lord.”

  “Do we need to warm your hands? We daren’t make a fire.”

  “Can’t raise my magic.” I could not even remember why I searched.

  “Heed me, pureblood.” The presence swelled and darkened just behind me, close to my ear, sending thrills of terror up my spine. “Your father and grandfather used you to fuel their war with each other. Do you think I do not understand why a child’s pain touches your soul so deeply? Stop playing at this and find the boy, or I will break you.”

  The boy… The ember yet burned. I grasped it and dived into earth. And from the deep crevices between the rocks came the faint trickle of water and a rhythmic tapping.

  “Holy Mother, he’s trapped in the boulders,” I mumbled, hands clawed into the frozen mud, pebbles digging into my forehead. “In the crevices between. Look down. Seek the water.”

  “Hold on just a little longer, Valen. Not a sound as we fetch him.”

  “Careful on the ice.” Voushanti’s parting whisper carried through the night air as clearly as Gillarine’s bell.