by Carol Berg
Once I joined him, Kol whipped out the length of braided thong that tied up his hair and bound one of my wrists to the narrow column. “Hold up,” I said. “What are you—?”
“The binding is to keep thee safe, rejongai, lest thou shouldst move untimely and fall. Stian insists we work thy remasti here, and not solely that the exposure might discomfort thee. This rock is called Stathero and plunges deep into the heart of this mountain, which is his sianou. Stathero hath a mighty presence, and wind is necessary for this passage as water was needed for the first. But thou needst not worry. I made my own remasti here and emerged unbroken.”
Stian’s sianou. I was not soothed. Stian valued Kol.
My uncle motioned me to stand straighter. “We must imagine that the rain hath sufficed to cleanse thee. I understand this passage comes hard upon thy first. Thy separation gards have not yet settled into their pattern, and thou hast much to learn as a wanderkin. Yet thou art full grown already and resilient, I believe, thus new changes should not daunt thee. Art thou willing to continue?”
I nodded, but kept my mouth closed lest my stuttering resolve declare this lunacy gone far enough.
He inhaled deeply and bowed. I returned the formality as best I could, tethered like a wayward goat. But then a blast of wind staggered me. My fingers closed around the black spire, and my free hand as well, and I wished heartily for a thicker leash.
Kol briefly touched his hands to my shoulders. Then, impossibly, he began to dance. His unbound hair billowing wildly in the wind, he spun on his toes about the perimeter of the rock. One misstep, one miscalculation, and he must crash to earth. No winged angel, he had leaped from the high branches of the ash tree, not flown, and Stathero reached more than three times the ash tree’s height. In fascinated horror I watched the stars grow hazy and the moonlight dim, and I heard no music but the howl of the wind. “Kol, do have a care.”
By the time a breathless Do not be afraid appeared in my head, I could not heed it. The bluster atop Stathero had grown to a shrieking gale, tearing at my hair and rippling my skin, lashing me with particles of ice and whips of cloud. Had I the benefit of clothes, they would have been torn away. My own gards pulsed a dull gray-blue, yet all perception fled as if the south wind blew straight through my head to empty it of thought, of prayer, of memory, of identity, and the north wind reached deep to snatch the very breath from my lungs. The world shrank to a roaring knot of black and gray, threaded with the blue lightning that was Kol. And then the lightning struck and set my back afire.
Somewhere Kol’s voice called to me, but I could not heed it for the burning. The wind tore my free hand from the column and raised me in its giant’s grip. Bound only by Kol’s tether, I fought the wind, drew in my limbs, and crouched lower to find purchase on the rock. I touched my hand to the cold surface and released magic, but I could summon no thoughts save Let me be somewhere else than this and Please don’t let it blow me off the edge and some fool’s apology for causing such chaos atop the broken rock. Roaring, devouring, the lightning reached over my shoulder to fire my breast, and I closed my eyes and screamed…
“It is done, rejongai. Thou art—” The hands that had untied my wrist and now rested so gently on my scorched shoulders withdrew abruptly. “Stian! Sagai! Come up, quickly.”
I was far too weary to heed unexplained urgency. My head rested on my arms. When had I last slept? The bitterly cold world whispered hints of rosecolored light around my eyelids. The wind had settled to a modest bluster, but something blocked it, so that it touched my face only now and then. My legs felt odd. Kneeling. Cold. Heavy. I didn’t bother to look. Moving, thinking, choosing what to do next…those tasks waited far beyond me. I craved sleep.
Approaching voices. “…never seen such…not precisely a hole, but a niche…to fit…”
“…some error in thy kiran…”
“My kiran intruded not upon this rock, sagai.” Kol stood over me as he pronounced this chilly conclusion.
I wished they would take their bickering elsewhere. A sunbeam touched my cheek, a lancet that pricked my veins, infusing warmth and light, as if I had drained the Bucket Knot’s prize butt of mead. The fond memory of my favorite sop-house roused such a prodigious thirst as no man had ever suffered. The wind and lightning had surely burned out every dram of moisture in my body, and I would lick old Stian’s toes did I imagine he had brought a wineskin with his grim company. As I had no wish to be subject to further insults, I kept my heavy head where it was.
“Didst thou sense a breach, Stian? What does it mean that he could do this?”
“No. And I cannot—” The elder Dané bit off his words. Did I not think it ludicrous, I would have called him frighted. “Get him beyond my boundaries, Kol. But let him not stray from thy sight until I come to thee.”
The knots in my burning back did not relax as Stian’s angry presence receded and vanished.
“Come, get up, Valen,” said Kol, tugging on my arm. “Thou’lt have to extricate thyself.”
I lifted my boulder of a head, stared at the Dané’s toes, and realized my eyes were below the level of his feet. So the rest of me…I blinked, squinted, and peered downward.
I sat in a hole—actually more like a small, dark cave hollowed from the surface of the rock. My legs were tucked around a small protrusion, preventing Kol from pulling me straight out.
I looked up at my uncle, whose face was shadowed against a brightening sky. “This isn’t usual, is it?”
“No. This is not usual,” he said, dry as sunburned leaves. “Somehow your remasti has caused an unnatural change in Stian’s sianou, one of the most stable locales in all the Canon.”
“The wind,” I said. “Never felt such a wind. And lightning.”
He gave me his hand, and I untangled myself from the rock that appeared to have melted and hardened again in just such a tidy nest as to hold me. “The wind did not do this, rejongai. Thou hast done it—and if by accident rather than intent, that is perhaps worse. Assuredly were this known among the long-lived, knee breaking would be the kindliest remedy proffered thee.”
I did not want to imagine consequences worse than crippling. Nor did I want to remember my prayers for shelter or think of what power might shape rock. Such wonders could have naught to do with Valen the Incompetent. I stepped out of the little bowl. Movement and the resulting sting front and back reminded me of the occasion for my presence atop this hellacious boulder. Apprehensively I glanced down. Gods among us…
A tangle of fading sapphire traces marked my breast and belly. Kol stepped back and cocked his head to one side, then walked around behind me.
“Stathero hath taken no offense at thy intrusion. Its likeness forms the gard on thy back, and here”—his finger traced an outline on my breast—“I have a thought we may find a sea star, a dog whelk, perhaps other beings from my own sianou.” He sighed, and rueful resignation scribed his face as clearly as his dragon. “To carry so clearly the markings of the places thou hast touched…and so early…those things, too, are not usual.”
Twisting my head in an attempt to see my back near broke my neck. That the marks faded into silver as the sun rose higher did not help. I closed my eyes and pretended I did not feel like some marketplace oddity come from savage lands to swallow fire and juggle hoops.
“Come, Valen. Thy tasks and lessons have scarce begun. And we must leave my sire’s sianou that he may examine this night’s work in peace. Thou’lt come to envision thine own gards, as their use becomes a part of thy nature. If thou art fortunate, their line and color will please thee.”
We began the long climb down Stathero’s jagged south face, a matter that consumed all my attention. Down, even in daylight, was at least as terrifying as up in the dark. Yet from the number of questions that tumbled out of me when my feet at last touched the ground, at least a bit of my mind had been working.
As we hiked down the mountain, away from Stathero and Stian, Kol responded to my barrage of queries with studied pati
ence.
“The gards fade naturally in sunlight, save when we dance or otherwise focus our needs upon them. Once fixed in design, they do not change. Some believe they express a truth about the spirit who wears them…
“Wearing coverings, such as human garb, that hide the gards inhibits our use of them and the power they carry. Excessive covering and lack of use will weaken them. To travel the paths of linked remembrances requires full use of the gards…
“Males with maturing bodies oft bind their loins for dance training to ease soreness, but they cannot persist in it too long else they’ll not progress as they should…
“Yes, we sleep and eat and drink, though not so frequently as humans. Of course we enjoy it. We do not understand why Picus’s ‘one god’ prizes dirt and hunger. The sea doth not starve itself of rain to satisfy the requirements of the Everlasting…
“We do not understand human gods at all, though every human tries vigorously to explain them. The long-lived, as all things—sea and sky, humans and beasts—are both subject to the Everlasting and a part of it. The Law of the Everlasting has charged our kind to tend the land and sea. Thus in our work we seek beauty, balance, vigor and harmony to match that we see in the Everlasting. But even among the long-lived lie disagreements as to the exact nature of the perfection toward which we strive…
“No! As vayar I pledged to answer thy questions as far as I am able. But I cannot and will not discuss the Canon with a halfbreed stripling, though you were to stand twice my size or manifest talents to make your present ones seem small. Thy tasks are other and will never be concerned with the dance.”
And this last answer drove me to distraction. “You’ve told me the world is dying,” I said, as we trotted down the mountainside, “and I believe you. I’ve seen it. My prince, Eodward’s son, a man who studies and reveres the Danae, has brought your archon news of those you call the Scourge—the Harrowers. We fear the Harrowers have some larger plan that threatens your kind. Ignorant as we are, we cannot guess what that might be or what must be done about it. That is what he hoped to learn from the archon…the reason he gave me up to them.” I told myself that knowledge was Osriel’s aim, not solely the power to aid in his unholy mystery, as Elene feared.
Kol listened carefully, gravely, his body poised in interest. But his response, when it came, remained unchanged. “Humans can do nothing. Nor can halfbreeds. I will not discuss this matter with thee.” Which declaration, along with his troubled expression, told me that all of this most certainly had to do with the Canon, and that no matter my wheedling or pleading, he would not budge. All I could do was stay close and hope to change his mind. Perhaps Saverian would have more luck with the monk.
“Attend, stripling!” As we descended into the forest that wrapped the lower slopes of Aesol Mount, Kol broke his broody silence. “If thy walking gards are to be of use, thou must learn. Unless…Perhaps thy human half flags?”
His scorn grated, especially as it reminded me how long it had been since my restless night on the sand and Saverian’s lusciously fat and gritty eggs. “I’m here to learn,” I said.
He acknowledged my declaration with a jerk of his head. “Recall the crowned fir I showed thee. Dost thou see something like here in the daylight? Yes…there. Now consider the one that stood on the ascent from the meadow—the same in its shape against the sky, in its smell and taste, in its presence in the wood, though its location differed greatly…”
As dreams of food and sleep crept into my bones with the allure of nivat, Kol forced me to dredge up every recollection of the path we had been walking when I had asked about his mode of traveling—the slope of the land to either side as well as what had lain under our feet, the configuration of the stars, which I could not remember, and the taste of the air, which, to his surprise, I could. And then he bade me close my eyes and consider the new marks I wore, explaining that it was easier to begin this teaching while I yet could feel the burning of their newness.
“I’ve no expectation that thou’lt accomplish a shift so soon. Subtle moves give always the most difficulty to a stripling. The touch needed is not a grand jequé, but only a small leap from one manner of thinking to another. Haste leads to error. Thou must remember to—”
“Just so. I understand.” Impatient with his tedious schooling, I glared at the treetop. I was accustomed to wielding magic, and the memory and instinct he described as bound into my new markings were but another form of it. My mind held to the recollections and reached into the faint blue aura that I envisioned near my heart, grasping the power I found there…
…and I was tumbling head over heels down a steep gully, snagging limbs and hair on rocks, wild raspberry thorns, and rotting timber. My sublimely graceful vayar, gards gleaming silver in the morning sunlight, stood on the path at the verge of the gully, one arm wrapped about a stately fir, laughing at me. It was worth the uncomfortable exercise to see him laugh. If his grieving made the mountains weep, Kol’s merriment made the sunlight shimmer.
“Another lesson, my cocky stripling,” he said, once on the near side of sober again. “One must remember to decide a position for one’s feet, else one may topple from a mountaintop, step into a lake or tar pit, or slide…most wretchedly…into a ravine.”
I struggled helplessly in my nest of raspberry thicket and rotted hawthorn, laughing, too, despite my humiliating display, the painful scrapes and bruises atop my already tender skin, and the long, steep climb awaiting me. Even beings of legend could not always get things right.
When at last I climbed onto the path, I stretched out my blood-scoured arms. “Tell me, vayar…”
“The gards survive all but the most violent wounding,” he said, all seriousness again. “On our way, we shall practice closure. Clearly thou didst not find true closure at Stathero, if thine ears yet reported sound. Stone hath no voice.”
“Nay, vayar, I heard them, even Stathero…”
Kol refused to believe my claim to have heard the speech of stones. Evidently the exercise was supposed to result in the silence I ultimately found. He set me other problems as we walked: to describe the scent of thistledown from one particular withered plant along the path, to isolate the feel of salt spray on the wind, carried from the northern sea. Some I managed, some I did not. But I felt more in control of my senses, and came to believe I could learn to pick and choose what I saw and heard.
“Control and discrimination must become as natural as breathing,” said Kol. “With practice, it will.”
He jumped from a steep hillside, where he’d had me examining the movement of the soil sifting ever so slowly downward, and landed softly on the path far below.
I flattened myself to the scrubby ground and crept downward, my tired feet skidding—speeding the hillside’s centuries-long collapse.
When I joined my uncle on the path, pleased I had not slipped and broken my neck, he huffed scornfully. “Thou hast the capacity to jump as I do, if thou’lt but try. Drive thy spirit upward with the leap and hold it firm and soaring until thy feet touch solidly. It is will that counters the forces that draw us to earth.” Without waiting for me to so much as catch my breath, he marched down the path. “Next task: Tell me which elements key our shifts on the way down. Be attentive.”
After some half quellé of rocks and roots enough to make a goat stumble, Kol halted and asked me how many changes we had made since he had jumped from the hillside. The shifting exercise and the downward climb had sapped nearly the last of my endurance, and the wintry air had begun to penetrate the shield of warmth I had enjoyed since leaving Picus’s house. Unable to summon words enough to describe or even count what I’d seen, I sat on my haunches, cleared away the leaves and debris from a square of earth, and sketched out a map in the soft dirt.
The exercise helped refresh my mind. I pointed to an angled square that signified a rock. “You shifted here, where that squarish boulder hung out over the path. Again here…I think…where the pond was choked with dead leaves. And here”—I po
inted to a split in the path—“or just beyond…I’m not sure. Here, perhaps?”
Kol looked from my face to the sketch and back again. “Dost thou mock me?” he said stiffly. “Thinkest thou my object is to shame thee, that thou must attempt the same?”
I blinked, entirely confused. “No…I’m sorry…what is it? You asked how many shifts. My head is too tired to think. I drew the map so I could show you.”
“Thou canst untangle such markings?” he said. “Like Janus’s papers? Picus’s books?”
“Read? Not words, no. I’ve never—” As the underlying sense of his question struck me, I understood his surprise…and his offense. I was both and neither, Osriel had said. “I cannot read words…books…the writing on pages as humans can. They appear naught but blotches and a jumble. However, the lines and patterns of a map, the pictures and symbols, those make sense to me. But you…and the others of your kind…can’t sort out those, either?”
“We see what lives. What moves. We understand bulk and shape and eating and purpose. Scratchings on beast skins or wood chips or dirt have no meaning to us.”
“And yet, your eyes can interpret these.” I held out my arm where pale fronds of sea grass twined my fingers.
His eyebrows rose. “Thy gards live—a part of thee, as mine are a part of me.”
I bowed to him in sincere apology. “Forgive me, vayar. I did not understand. Another lesson learned.”
He jerked his head and walked ahead. “Attend, rejongai…”
Feeling as lively and attentive as a post, I stayed close enough to follow Kol’s shifting paths the rest of the way, but was incapable of analyzing his moves or the terrain. When the woodland and Picus’s little garden vale came into view at last, I had fallen considerably behind.
Kol halted a little upstream from the monk’s tidy plots, and by the time I joined him, he had plunged his hand into a reed-shadowed backwater and pulled out a plump silver fish. As he stilled its flopping distress with a rock, I knelt beside the pool and plunged my head into the water. Though chilled already, I hoped the icy bath might set my sluggish thoughts moving again. I had so many questions I needed to ask, so many lessons to learn. I could not allow him to think me weak or foolish.