Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  Once I would have marked this unsentimental declaration as the wisdom of ever-sensible Gram, and reveled at the new knowledge he’d let slip. Now I worried at his purpose, sure his every utterance hid meanings within meanings. And, too, a knife of guilt twisted in my heart at the reminder of my forgetfulness.

  “Brother Victor…how fares he?” I’d heard a sick man struggling to breathe and wondered if it was the little monk. “I’d like to visit him. And Jullian…have we word of his fate? Plans for his rescue?”

  His expression grave, Osriel clasped his hands behind his back. “We’ve had no further word of Jullian, and no word on the negotiations between my brother and Sila Diaglou. Be assured I remain committed to getting the boy back safely. As for Brother Victor…he improves daily, but his injuries were dreadful. Saverian has kept him asleep as she works to repair them. We hope he’ll wake again when they’ve healed enough to cause him less pain. Best leave him in peace for now.”

  I was hardly surprised at his putting off my visit to the chancellor. “Later, then. As soon as he’s able. I would never have guessed Victor pureblood.”

  “A humble man is a rarity among purebloods.”

  “True,” I said, glancing at the magnificence above us. “For certain, I am no judge of men.”

  I longed to pour out my myriad questions to my friend Gram, but I dared not expose my ignorance to Osriel. Which was a wholly foolish sentiment. After weeks of raving mania, what part of me could be left private?

  We ambled down one of the paved walkways that interlaced the garden, pausing when we came upon a fountain tucked into a grove of elders. Water bubbled from the feet of a statue depicting a tall, nude woman with an eagle taking flight from her upraised hand. Beside her, a sculpted man bent one knee and stretched the other leg behind him in a straight line with his muscled back. His fingers touched the center of his forehead in a gesture of respect, as his stony eyes gazed on a small tree bursting from the earth just beyond his bent knee. My skin slithered over my bones when I noted the fine whorls and images carved into the figures’ marble flesh.

  The prince stood at my shoulder. “My obstinate physician declines to reveal what the two of you discussed this morning. So I must ask if you remember our last conversation?”

  I stared at the statues and forced my voice steady, as if on every day I spoke the unthinkable. “Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria sired me. The Dané named Clyste was my mother.”

  “It explains a great deal, don’t you think?” he said. “So you believe it’s true?”

  “Yes.” Though questions piled upon questions, like a flock of sheep at a narrow gate, each pushing to get through. “I wonder…did they lock her away in the earth for lying with a human or for allowing a human to steal me away?”

  I stole a treasure they did not value, but could not forgive the loss of, so Janus had said. I could not yet think of the old man as my father.

  “Almost certainly the latter,” said the prince. “My father and the monk Picus left Aeginea well before you were born. But I have Picus’s journals, where he recorded all he learned of the Danae. He wrote that once past the third change—the passage of regeneration—a Dané is capable of mating and can choose his or her partners at will. As long as a joining is consensual, none may gainsay it. Certainly for Clyste to conceive a child could have been no accident. Danae females are fertile on the four days of season’s change and no other. No matter that her family, the archon, and every other Dané would disapprove her choice, we must assume she chose Janus, and she chose to make a child with him.”

  They’ll never have thee. I saw to it. The mad old man’s words hung in my memory like stars in the firmament, sharpening the familiar aching void in my chest. Of a sudden, no caution could restrain my questions. Half my life had been denied me, the other half twisted out of all recognition, and this prince held some answers at least. “Then why would she let him take me? Everything he said leads me to believe she consented.”

  “Danae dislike halfbreeds”—he squatted beside the fountain and ran his fingers over the marble branches of the new-birthed tree—“but they believe no one else has any business raising one of their blood. Unlike Aurellian purebloods.” He flashed a grin up at me. “Once our blood is proved tainted, the Registry cares naught what becomes of us. Perhaps you’d like to send the Registry a notice of your changed status?”

  I had already considered that. “They’d only believe it another of my lies.”

  “Mmm…likely so.” He removed a stone cup from a niche beside the fountain, scooped water from the font, and drank it down. I declined his offer of the cup, and he replaced it in its niche.

  “So Clyste’s child vanished,” he continued. “The Danae believed the child belonged with them and punished her. But as to Clyste’s purpose…A Danae mother is responsible for her child’s education, including preparation for the remasti. She selects the child’s vayar—the dance master. This preparation is the most serious and sacred duty among the long-lived. Perhaps she meant for Janus to bring you back at some time.”

  I hadn’t even known the right questions to ask that night in Palinur, and my grandfather’s ragged mind had skipped from one thing to another. But there had been something…“He said she bade him destroy his maps to keep other humans away from the Danae lands, because he could ‘keep his promises’ without them. And he said he’d failed her. But that could mean a thousand things.” It was all very well to explore past intents, but the future concerned me more. “Why did he say I would be free when I turned eight-and-twenty? What happens then?”

  “Four times in their lives—at the ages we would name seven, fourteen, one-and-twenty, eight-and-twenty—Danae undergo these bodily changes they call remasti or holy passages. We know little about the passages, save that each results in new gards—their skin markings. They consider the whole thing very private. Most of what Picus learned of them came from the confidences of one disaffected Dané female—a halfbreed girl named Ronila who left Aeginea before making her fourth change. He knew only the results of the fourth: The newly matured Danae are bound to a sianou and allowed to dance in the Canon itself for the first time, and from that day they are free to walk the world as they choose, subject to no person, law, or duty save the Law of the Everlasting as interpreted by their archon.”

  “But Janus had no intention of me living as a Dané. He wanted me to stay clear of them until I passed my birthday.” ’Tis no life for thee, he had told me. “Perhaps that was it. He had promised Clyste that he would send me back and then changed his mind.”

  Osriel nodded as he picked dead blooms from the violets massed about the fountain. “Therein, too, lies freedom of a sort. Picus wrote that those Danae who choose not to undergo the fourth remasti, or are forbidden to do so, or are incapable of it, lose the power to become one with a sianou. They revert to an ordinary life span—longer than humans live, but far short of the centuries a mature Dané would expect. It sounds as if you will become wholly human on your birthday. That must be what Janus wished.”

  “There must be something more,” I said. “He told me I would be the greatest of the Cartamandua line. He said our family would be powerful beyond dreaming.” Dawning understanding knotted my hands and heated my cheeks. For a lifetime I had hated Janus de Cartamandua with every scrap of my strength. But he had given up his mind to the Danae, and in the throes of despair and weak-minded sentiment, I had come to believe he’d done it to protect me from harm. But now matters became clear. It was never for me—child or man. All was for the Cartamandua bloodline. “He must have thought staying free would strengthen my bent or change it in some way. He thought I would make our family ‘magnificent.’”

  “Would that we could question Picus. But not long after he and my father returned to Navronne, the monk vanished without a word to anyone. Come along.” The prince motioned for me to walk with him. “What happens or does not happen on your birthday is not the only mystery to unravel. Would you like to hear what I know of yo
ur mother?”

  “Very much.” I needed to move, to walk if I could not run.

  “Clyste was my father’s foster sister, making you and me cousins of a sort. I hope that does not disturb you too awfully.” We walked out of the garden, through the airy passages, and into a series of shuttered rooms. “She was daughter of the Danae archon Stian and beloved of every Danae for her joyful spirit and for the skill and glory of her dancing. When Clyste came into her season for her fourth change, the powerful Dané who had guarded the Well for time unremembered announced that he was tired and ready to yield his sianou to a younger guardian. All believed that the Well, a place revered among the Danae, had chosen Clyste. Kol told Picus that she brought an intelligence and a perfection to the Canon that the long-lived had rarely seen.”

  “Until Janus corrupted her,” I said, near spitting gall. Anger burrowed under my skin and throbbed like a septic wound, poisoning the hard peace I had made with the old man on that last night in Palinur.

  Osriel shrugged and strolled through a chamber littered with old paint splashes and stacks of canvas into a room hung with every size and shape of willow bird cages—all of them vacant. Someone of wide-ranging interests had lived in this house. But no longer.

  “My father’s failure to return to the Danae caused much anger and grief, and as years passed, visits with Clyste and Kol and my father’s other friends among the Danae grew rare. But on one night not long after I was born, Kol barged into my father’s bedchamber. Bitter and furious, Kol told him that Clyste had been bound to her sianou with myrtle and hyssop, forbidden to take bodily form again. He left with no further explanation, and my father neither saw nor spoke to another Dané before he died.”

  I held back a curtain, and we passed into what must once have been a gracious library, its dusty shelves now holding only a few scattered volumes. I guessed that the rest now sat in the magical lighthouse.

  “Clearly there is even more to the story than we know,” the prince continued, “for one must ask: If the Danae knew Janus de Cartamandua had stolen you and punished him for it, why did they never claim you? It would have been no great leap of intelligence to see that the infant who appeared in the Cartamandua house at the very time of the theft must be the half-Danae child.”

  I caught his meaning. “Yet if they had known I was half Danae, they would never have tried to drown me in the bog along with everyone else.”

  “Exactly so. I believe that, of all the Danae, only Kol knows who and what you are. Clyste never told them that Janus had fathered her child.”

  Which meant that Kol alone had driven my grandfather mad and that it was unlikely that Kol had launched the owl to drown us in the bog. If he had wanted me dead, he’d already had ample opportunities.

  “Had I known all this before Mellune Forest, I might have run into the wild and begged the Danae to make me one of them,” I said, “assuming such a thing is even possible. But whatever their reasons might have been, to trick fifty people into drowning—without judgment, without mercy, guilty and innocent alike—is as despicable as the Harrowers clogging wells with tar in Palinur. To protect my friends, I had to become complicit in their evil. I won’t do that again.”

  Perhaps it was my imagination that Osriel’s complexion darkened. A perceptive man as he was would surely understand it was not only of Danae evils that I spoke.

  I moved swiftly to make my intent clear. “I will uphold my oath of submission to you, lord—I’ll not run—but I intend to stay out of their way until my birthday.” I had no desire to live as a stone or a tree.

  Our meandering path had led us back to the passage of shields and curtained doors. “Your position makes sense,” he said as we neared its end. “But you have also sworn to serve the lighthouse cabal. As there seems to be no immediate danger to you from Kol, I must call upon your oath and bid you guide me to a place where I can try once more to speak to him. We must discover if the Danae know the cause of the world’s sickness, and we must warn them of Sila Diaglou.”

  Bonds of oath and obligation, now made all the more repugnant by this deeper loathing, settled about my limbs. “But, my lord—”

  “You’ll not have to face him yourself. In the hour I stand in Danae lands—beside the Sentinel Oak at Caedmon’s Bridge—I shall deem your present obligation to me and to the cabal complete, and you may choose your own course to face your past and future. Saverian will maintain her remedy for your sickness as long as you require it. You will be welcome to reside here or come and go as your health allows.” His face—Gram’s face—expressed his particular earnest sincerity that could persuade a hen to lay its neck beneath the ax blade. “After the solstice, the world and our place in it will be changed for good or ill. At that time we will renegotiate the terms of your service. So, are you willing?”

  Free to choose my own course…how sweet those words, offering the one thing I’d ever begged of the gods. He was right. If Kol meant to hand me over to the Danae or drive me mad, he could have taken me at Clyste’s Well or fifty different times back in Palinur. And the deed should be possible; I had seen the great oak where only a crude illusion should have existed, where nothing grew in the human plane. I could take Osriel there, then be on my way…search for Jullian. Once the boy walked free and Gildas had paid a price for Gerard’s murder, all my oaths would be fulfilled. Free to choose…“My lord, yes. Of course I’ll take you.”

  “Good. I’ll have done with my thirsty warlords tonight. If you feel in anywise fit enough, we’ll leave for Aeginea tomorrow. Time presses us sorely.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  I pulled aside the blue and yellow curtain and waited for the prince to enter my bedchamber, but he motioned me to go ahead alone, bidding me to rest well.

  A wolf of hammered gold adorned the wall above the archway. Its garnet eyes gleamed fierce in the lamplight. Kindness, understanding, generosity…how easily Osriel induced me to forget my doubts. No matter my chosen course, this time I must not avert my eyes.

  I took a knee and touched my forehead in proper obeisance, and rose at his nod. “Tell me, my lord,” I said, as he turned to go, “if Brother Victor dies, will you take his eyes?”

  The gaze he cast over his shoulder could have frosted a volcano’s heart. “Yes.”

  I wanted Osriel to be worthy of his inheritance and worthy of my trust, but as the Duc of Evanore vanished down the passage, it felt as if he dragged my entrails with him. I needed to learn what Elene would tell me.

  Chapter 10

  Restlessness drew me out of my bedchamber before Osriel’s footsteps had faded, and I paced the sprawling house as if paid to measure its myriad dimensions. In hopes of finding Brother Victor, I bypassed the domed garden, the painter’s room, the scavenged library, and the other places I’d walked with the prince. Wisdom advised me to seek a confidant who did not transform my loins to fire and my mind to jam as Elene did. Loyalty bade me warn the monk of his peril. I could not believe he knew of Osriel’s unsavory practices. I was already chastising myself for agreeing to my master’s plan. Why did I trust him? He didn’t even bother to mask his infamy.

  Though dusty and deserted, the house was finely proportioned and lavishly ornamented with windows and murals, painted ceilings and rich hangings. Yet the farther I walked, the worse the stench: latrines, rotting meat, male sweat, candles, incense, and wood ash, mouse piss, boiling herbs. I’d always thought Moriangi houses the nastiest in the kingdom.

  By the time I rounded a new corner only to find a corridor I had traversed three times already, I suspected some magical boundary kept me separate from the ailing monk. I touched the smooth tiles of the passage floor, seeking some trace of him, but as before my bent failed to answer my summons. Confessing defeat, I chose to retreat.

  I could not find my bedchamber. My footsteps thudded on the tiles. The mice scuttling in the walls were surely the size of houses. Anxiety grew like dark mold in my lungs and heart.

  Increasingly confused, I burst through
a door I’d not yet broached. Tables jammed with neglected plants crowded the long room, and the glare of the westering sun through its three walls and roof of glass near blinded me. Eyes blurred, nauseated by the stink, I stumbled sideways.

  An explosion of pain in my skull sent me crashing to the floor. I crawled into a corner and huddled quivering, arms wrapped about my head.

  Running footsteps hammered the passage floor like the thousand drums of Iero’s Judgment Night. With a hiss of disapproval, the newcomer wrenched my arms aside, pried my chin upward, and slapped something cold and round onto the center of my forehead. As worms burrowing into my flesh, magic flowed outward from the disk, gnawing skin, muscle, and bone, quieting whatever it touched before squiggling onward…deeper…farther…

  When the disgusting sensation faded, the world felt dull and distant, as if my entire body had been sheathed in silken hand bindings. “Could you not make this enchantment feel more like your fingers and less like maggots?” I said.

  “My apologies, O Magical Being!” Saverian grabbed my hands and hauled me to a sitting position. The world spun only slightly. “What a fool I was to design this spell for your relief and not your pleasure.”

  “Mistress, I didn’t mean—”

  “Of course, had you remained where you were told, I could have renewed your shield at the proper time, and you would not have experienced the spell’s less pleasant aspects so acutely. But then, the parts between your legs do resemble those of mortal males, so I shouldn’t expect too much in the way of common wisdom.” Her complaints were issued with the same ironical humor she had used to address the uncooperative logs in my bedchamber hearth. “And I dislike being labeled as anyone’s mistress. My name is Saverian.”

  I rubbed at the crusted mess on my eyelids, hoping to regain my faculties now she had withdrawn her hand. Water sloshed and dribbled. She whispered, “Igneo,” and not long afterward, a hot damp cloth scalded my eyelids.