Thalen spoke again, his voice sad and wistful. “I just want to go back to my fields. Morning dew on the crops and soil. Tilled earth. Long harvest fields. That’s my court … I’m no king.”
The words stole some of Sutter’s anger. He could see the things Thalen described. He could see his father and mother ankle-deep in turned soil. He could see himself and Tahn hiding in the deep autumn wheat, having smaller adventures.
He shook his head in frustration. He hoped Tahn was all right—Recityv guards had separated them after they’d been captured—but damned hells, had Tahn gotten them into a mess. All because of a feeling.
* * *
Two days without food or water. Tahn sat still, aching from beatings. The dank smell of sweating stone lay just under the stench of waste and filth and stale straw. A clink of chains jounced around the room as his cellmate squatted over a waste hole in the corner. A shaft of torchlight fell slantwise from a barred window in the door, growing weaker as it met the floor down a set of stone stairs.
In the night the man in the corner moaned in his sleep. Whatever dreams Tahn’s unseen companion had, they caused him to thrash about, scraping his chains across the stony floor.
The manacles around Tahn’s wrists and ankles had rubbed the skin raw. The iron stung. His ribs were bruised. His lips cut. And his cheeks throbbed with the beating of his heart. A gash in the back of his head made lying down intolerable. He slept sitting against the wall, his chin on his chest. His left eye had swollen nearly shut. And though he didn’t remember it, he thought someone had stomped on his fingers, leaving the joints too bruised to flex.
No outer window freshened the stale air. When he or his cellmate shifted or sighed, the sound of each movement reverberated loudly off the high ceiling.
They’d stripped him of his bow and belt, ripped his cloak from his shoulders. He wished they’d left him that, at least. The cold stone chilled his flesh through his clothes. They had taken Sutter somewhere. Just now he could use some of Sutter’s wit.
He pressed the back of his left hand to his one good cheek and felt the familiar shape across his skin. The scar comforted him, if only because it was still his.
In another time, Wendra would have sung to him, the soft sound of her voice easing his mind. But he’d failed her.…
“Two days and not a word. Where are your manners, son?” The voice broke the silence. Tahn didn’t flinch, paying it no more attention than any other dream that fevered his mind.
“There’s just the two of us here,” the other said.
Tahn raised his head in the direction of the voice. It came calmly, with patience and clarity.
“You’ve not spoken to me, either,” Tahn said. He tried to peer beyond the shaft of light with his one good eye.
“That’s a matter of caution,” the other replied. “The League has sent informants pretending to be prisoners.”
“Then why speak now?” Tahn still couldn’t see the man.
“Because no free man has ever suffered two straight days of beating.” The man softly chuckled, and his chains rattled in the shadows.
“So you’ve decided to trust me because I’ve been beaten?” Tahn was too weak to lend his incredulity any bite.
“I didn’t say I trusted you.” The man’s voice changed to become flat and precise. “I’m interested.”
“In my beatings?” Tahn said.
“Well, yes. What makes the League lay into you with such enthusiasm. I don’t think they beat me with such zeal.” Tahn again heard chains rattle, and imagined the man tapping his chest.
Tahn considered. If he told the man what he’d done, the fellow might want to know why, and what would Tahn say?
“Still cautious,” the man said with appreciation. “Then consider this, my young friend. I’ll have no reprieve. No second stand before the Court of Judicature. When my turn is done here—a long turn to be sure—I’ll stand to face my death and wonder if my final earth could be any colder than this damned stone.”
“At the gallows?” Tahn asked.
“Whatever they deem appropriate,” the man said. “So you see, your story, whatever it is, will never reach another soul. But down here it may offer us each some entertainment for a few moments.”
There was an earnest undertone, a need, in the man’s voice. A need to hear a story, something to carry him beyond the walls of this cell.
Still, Tahn asked simply, “Why?”
The sound of the man standing came out of the dark, and Tahn saw a shadow rise near the shaft of light that slanted in from the window up the stairs. “Because the League doesn’t brutalize simple lawbreakers.” The man let that hang a moment. “A young man who smells of the road, whose face is new to a razor, but who excites such passion from his captors … you’ve angered the League, son. That’s a story to melt the walls of this place. And I’d like to hear it.”
Tahn swallowed against the thickness in his mouth, and suddenly felt the pains of thirst and hunger. “My mouth’s dry.”
“You’ll be fed your fourth day. Moldy bread. And it’ll run through you like rain down a spout.” Tahn thought he heard a smile. “Still, it tastes good. Careful though. The rush of it into an empty stomach will give you pain.”
Tahn groaned and drew himself up against the wall at his back.
“I’ll split my ration with you,” the man said, still angling to hear Tahn’s story. “To keep your strength up.”
Tahn meant still to refuse him, when an arm stole into the light, pushing a metal plate with a slice of bread and cheese toward him. A moment later came a cracked decanter. The face and shoulders of the man remained in the shadows.
Tahn ate in silence.
Never had stale warm water tasted so good. He hardly noticed the sting of his shackles over his raw wrists. When he was done, he simply started talking. He spoke just above a whisper. His voice reverberated against indifferent stone.
It felt like confession.
He held back only two things: the sticks entrusted to him by the scrivener, and drawing an empty bow at Sevilla.
He finished by recounting his arrival at Recityv and discovering another public punishment about to be carried out. He described the division in the crowd that watched the hanging, and his feeling that one of the men shouldn’t be put to death.
“And here I am,” Tahn said, ending his story.
His mouth and throat were again dry.
The cell was silent until his cellmate exclaimed in quiet amazement. “Dear dead gods, son, who are you?”
Tahn’s chains clattered on the stone paving, but he couldn’t stop his arms from shaking.
The man didn’t seem to notice. “And now for my story,” the man said in a slightly more genial tone. “I’m Rolen. And I am Sheason.”
Tahn’s head snapped in Rolen’s direction. “Sheason,” Tahn echoed. “But then you could free yourself. Why do you—”
“Easy, son. Patience.”
Tahn sat up, wanting to know how a renderer could be held against his will. A guard came to the door. The man looked in, letting out an oath before passing by, satisfied that they were sufficiently miserable.
Rolen stood and began to pace slowly. The lengths of chain swayed almost musically in time with his steps.
“The food I shared with you,” Rolen began, “always comes in small portions. My rations keep me weak. And what energy I have, they make me render to heal leagueman and the like.” Rolen paused, and stared at Tahn. “But this isn’t why I stay.”
Rolen panted with the exertion of relating his story. The rasp in his lungs reminded Tahn of winter pox. Rolen coughed with a wet tearing sound that made Tahn wince. The man spat something thick onto the floor.
When Rolen’s breathing had calmed, he chuckled again, inviting a few more stifled coughs.
Tahn shook his head at a troubling thought. “You choose to stay, don’t you?”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Maesteri
To sing Suffering is to feel suffering. You liv
e it all. What most forget is the last movement: Reclamation.
—Admonition offered by Maesteri Kyle in his aria on “incomplete understanding”
Wendra looked up when she heard Penit gasp. The boy’s eyes were impossibly wide, staring into the distance before them. Turning, she saw what no reader’s description could ever do justice to: a wall more than a thousand strides across, rising from the plain as high, it seemed, as the cliffs of Sedagin. The encampments along the road and at the base of the wall would fill the Hollows a hundred times and more.
“There she is,” Seanbea announced. “Recityv. The jewel of Vohnce. House of song and floor of debate.” A wide grin split Seanbea’s face—the grin of a man returning home.
“How big is it?” Penit asked with evident awe.
“Why, how big does she look, lad?” Seanbea spoke through his smile. “Mountains have fallen to quarry her stone. And forests have been harvested and replanted more times than a man can count to fuel the forges that built her.” The Ta’Opin swept his gaze from far left to right. “She’s a jewel,” he repeated.
Seanbea drove them through the thronged highway to the expansive gate. Soldiers there questioned him, and eventually waved him through.
Wendra thrilled at the size of the buildings, her own surprise as vocal as Penit’s. Seanbea pointed out certain inns, shops, merchant exchange houses, sometimes adding a bit of history in the telling. Wendra sat in the bed of the wagon, clinging to the side and gathering in one sight after another as they rolled onward.
They pressed through a throng of people that parted like waters around an island.
Then gradually, the elegance of the buildings diminished. Stonework seemed older, more often in disrepair and stained from seasons of rain and sun. The buildings themselves weren’t as tall, their mortar crumbling and leaving gaps in their facing, like missing teeth. Awnings tilted over entries to various establishments. Many windows looked like sharp-toothed maws where shards of glass rimmed an opening.
Even the livestock here seemed old and broken—horses with deep-swayed backs and ungroomed manes and tails, dogs coated with burrs and muddied bellies. People went about with heads bowed. Coats and breeches were puckered from poorly mended tears. Boot creases showed too many strides to remain comfortable. The streets themselves were unpaved here. Muddy pools stood in potholes. And shallow ditches stood at the edges of buildings where rain fell from rooftops and beat their own stale troughs. Slop was thrown from windows—the smell of human filth rose in waves.
Between buildings, pigs had been penned in narrow alleys waiting to be butchered. Flies buzzed in clouds. Her delight and Penit’s fell to disappointed silence.
They turned down a cross street, and like a bit of magic, at the end of the avenue rose a grand building in the midst of the squalor. Four times higher than the closest building, the majestic cathedral ascended in a series of spires and pitched gables that left Wendra with the impression of a castle. The roof and cupolas shone green in the afternoon light, resplendent and luminous.
“Wow!” Penit remarked.
“Descant Cathedral. I told you,” Seanbea said.
High in its darkened stone, colored glass caught the sun and glinted violet, crimson, gold, lapis, and emerald. Nearer still, the green cupolas disappeared from view. The spires seemed to angle toward the sky like spears thrown at heaven.
The wagon creaked to a stop, and brought Wendra’s gaze earthward. At eye level, the windows showed none of the magnificence of those higher up. Slats of wood boarded them over, either protecting the creation of the colorful mosaics, or filling gaps left behind by a vandal’s work.
But despite the unbeautiful windows and the aged stone covered in patches by lichen and withered vines, the cathedral made Wendra forget its surroundings. Descant pressed up and out like a monument of strength and nobility.
A large set of double doors swept inward and two men bustled out and down the stone steps toward them. Each wore loose breeches tied with a wide crimson sash knotted on the left hip, and a simple coat with a pocket over each breast.
“We’ll bring you in,” one said cheerfully, ignoring Penit and Wendra as he pulled off the tarpaulin and hefted some of Seanbea’s load.
The second man paused on the bottom step, taking note of the extra human cargo. “What’s this, Seanbea? I hope you don’t expect additional pay for these.” He pointed fingers toward Wendra and Penit, and smiled.
“And hello to you, Henny, Ilio.” Seanbea jumped to the ground. “These are friends of mine. I intend to introduce them to Maesteri Belamae.” He leaned against the side of his wagon and smiled as though holding a secret from the two men.
“That’s nice,” Henny said, and bowed awkwardly before turning to pack his armload of instruments into the cathedral. Despite his rush, he handled them with great care. “Come on, Ilio, we’ve work to do.”
Ilio didn’t take his eyes off Wendra as he lifted two small boxes from the wagon. “Is she spoken for?” he asked, inclining his head toward the Ta’Opin, his stare still locked on Wendra.
“I don’t think she heard you,” Seanbea mocked. “Speak up and perhaps she’ll answer you herself.” He bent over to hide his laughter.
Ilio gave Wendra an embarrassed smile. His face flushed. Holding the boxes against his chest, he rocked side to side, seeming not to know what else to do. “If there’s anything I can do to help…” Ilio said, leaning out over his boxes. “Rooms, rations, clothing … manners.” The man scurried up the stairs after Henny.
“I’m sure you impressed her,” Seanbea called after Ilio. He turned his smile on Wendra. “Pardon me, Anais, but I simply can’t resist the opportunity to see Ilio’s face turn that color. If I could duplicate it, I’d make a fortune in textiles.”
Wendra and Penit climbed down from the wagon, just as Henny scurried back out.
“Will you see to the wagon and team?” Seanbea asked the man.
“Surely,” Henny replied.
Seanbea patted the man’s bald head, and led Wendra and Penit up the steps.
“It’s a special place,” Seanbea said, speaking as much to himself as anyone else.
At the top of the steps, the doors seemed much larger. The hard ironwood bore engravings Wendra couldn’t read, and more than a few dents and scars. As they passed through them, cool air caressed her skin with the scent of cedar incense and oak and mild fruit rinds.
And underneath it all came the faraway echo of song. It seemed to emanate from the walls themselves.
“What is that?” Wendra asked, putting her hand to a pillar and looking up at the ceiling of the vestibule in which they stood.
“That,” Seanbea said, “is the Song of Suffering.” His voice carried a deep reverence. He moved further into the cathedral without any further explanation.
Wendra’s heart began to race. Suffering? My last god, Suffering.
Penit trotted past her to follow Seanbea. Wendra lingered a moment, feeling the hum through the marble pillar. Under her fingers, the beautiful stone felt vibrant, imbued with life by the uttering of words and music deep within it. Pulling away proved difficult. But she sensed that the song touching her fingers came from voices somewhere deeper within the cathedral. She wanted to hear it. Every word. Every note.
Beyond the vestibule, three hallways sprouted, each passing beneath great stone vaults and housing a few cherrywood tables bearing silver urns. Intricate scrollwork had been carved directly into the stone walls. The doors were heavy and paneled. Candles and lamps burned in long glass hurricane tubes, lending the halls intimacy. Brass handles and fittings had grown dark with time. And footsteps echoed flatly down the clean marble floors.
Wendra caught up to Seanbea and Penit, who’d angled left. Down the hall they passed a series of oil paintings of men and women, all wearing long robes. A few held instruments in their laps, and a few sat reposed holding a kind of baton.
As they proceeded down the hall, Wendra thought the music grew louder. Each step excit
ed her. Something in this melody felt familiar, though she was sure she’d never heard it before.
As she tried to remember, three women turned into the hall ahead. The one in the middle wore a thick white cloak, the hood up, her arms wrapped about herself as though she fought the shivers. On each side, the others supported her as if afraid she might fall.
“Sariah?”
The woman in the middle looked up. “Seanbea?” Her voice sounded weak and tired, but pleased.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. “You’ve just finished a turn at the Song, though. Our reunion can wait until you have rested.”
Sariah hugged Seanbea anyway, allowing his strong arms to hold her for several moments. Wendra watched the young woman’s face laid against the Ta’Opin’s broad chest, and saw a kind of concern and frightful wisdom that didn’t belong in the face of one so young—she was maybe twenty.
Then finally she drew back. “Therin sings now. He’ll want to see you, too, before you go. Can you stay a while?”
“Of course,” Seanbea said. “Now get some rest.”
The young woman smiled and the two girls beside her helped Sariah continue on. Seanbea continued as well, and a few moments later they came to the last painting at this end of the hall.
Wendra gasped, and covered her mouth.
She knew this face: the paternal smile, the patient eyes.
It was the face of the man who had appeared to her in her fever visions near Sedagin. Seeing him in this portrait gave the memory a frightening reality.
Her song was more than mere melody. And the burden of it burned in her. Singing had forever been an escape and source of comfort. After everything that had happened, this one private pleasure and reminder had become something … more. She looked away from the painting.
Seanbea softly rapped at a nearby door. As she turned, she saw the door open, revealing the face of the man in the painting, the man from the cave. He looked out and past Seanbea, directly at her.
“You’ve found your way,” he said, beaming.
She stared back, not sure what to say.
“Well, Seanbea,” the man said, shifting his attention to the Ta’Opin. “Always good to see you. Am I to thank you for shepherding this young woman to us?”
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