A Telling of Stars

by A Telling of Stars (v5. 0) (epub)

  “No, no,” he giggled, squirming.

  She sat up, declared, “I have won!” and raised the dagger again into the sun.

  “Give it to me.”

  The dagger fell, though Jaele did not feel her fingers loosening. Reddac’s shadow slid over them as he picked it up. Then he stood, very tall; the light was behind him, and they could not see his face.

  “Jaele. Elic.” A new voice—not for singing or laughing or even for telling stories in darkness. They did not look at each other, did not look at him. “Never again. Do you understand? Never again.”

  He turned and strode away from them, following the damp, curving wave-line until he was small, on the bank across the bay. They saw him stop, saw him turn his head toward the open sea. They watched him, and he did not move—not even as the sun tugged shadows long across the sand.

  Jaele and Elic stayed on the shore in front of their hut. Elic hollowed out holes with his bare heels; Jaele wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees and tried not to shake. When their mother’s boat appeared at the mouth of the bay, they glanced at each other but still said nothing. Lyalla’s boat stroked toward the beach and Reddac began to walk back. Elic and Jaele rose and waited for them both.

  “What. . . .?” Lyalla asked after she had waded out of the water, her fishing traps and nets heavy behind her. She looked at Reddac, only paces away. At him and at the dagger in his hand. “Reddac,” she said quietly, “what has happened?”

  “Let us all go inside,” he replied

  Jaele thought he sounded very tired, but not angry. Because he did not seem angry, she ran back to the rocks, picked up the empty box and returned to where they were waiting. She held it up to her father, who took it and smiled at her—tired, sad, his face veined with sun-dried salt.

  “Tell your mother what you did,” he said when they were in the hut. He and Lyalla sat on the loom bench; Jaele and Elic on the ground.

  “We. . . .” Jaele began, staring at the carpet beneath her. “Elic said we should take it—”

  “Because you’re always the ruler!” She heard his tears before she turned and saw them. “It was part of our game,” he went on, struggling, clenching his hands against the tears. “To see who was brave enough to rule. So I . . . got the box, and Jaele opened it. I never touched the knife.”

  She leapt to her feet. “But it was your idea!” she cried. “I didn’t want to do it.” Her own eyes filled, stung, as if the wind had blown sand against her face. “I said I was sorry.”

  Elic yelled “You never did! You never said anything until right now!”

  She was silent for a moment. “No,” she admitted at last, and looked at her parents. “I meant to, though. I did.” She paused, then continued in a rush, “But in stories there are Queensfighters and battles, and we were only playing. . . .”

  Lyalla shook her head slowly. “Stories, yes. But you two are not Queen or Queensfighter—”

  “Yet,” interrupted Reddac with a small smile. Jaele felt weak, dizzy with relief.

  “Yet,” agreed their mother. “For now, you are children who imagine only. You do not need a real knife for that.”

  “Why do we have it, then?” Jaele demanded, and Reddac turned the dagger over in his palm once, gently.

  “Because it belonged to my parents, and it is beautiful. . . . And it would serve to gut a fish, if all of your mother’s knives were somehow lost at sea.”

  Elic giggled and sniffed. Lyalla turned to Reddac with raised brows. He raised his in return, and grinned—an exchange so familiar that Jaele felt her own smile aching on her lips.

  He was not smiling when he said, “Both of you promised, before, that you would not open this box. Must I lock it, now? Or will you promise again, and truly?”

  “We promise,” Elic and Jaele said together. Elic added, “Truly,” and sniffed again.

  “Very well,” Lyalla said briskly. She took the dagger from Reddac’s hand and placed it back in its box of wood and gold.

  Later, Reddac sat between his children’s pallets and spoke into the darkness. He did not tell of the Warrior Queen but of the girl Galha. She had lain in her bed, ill and afraid, and listened to the song of an iben seer—a song of gentleness and light and comfort, words of future lulling until she slept. When the story was done, Reddac kissed Jaele and Elic on cheeks and foreheads, and Lyalla came in from the doorway and bent to smooth their hair.

  “Jaele,” Elic whispered when they were alone.

  Jaele shifted and groaned. “Go to sleep.”

  “No—wait,” he hissed. “I wanted to say . . . that we’re both brave.”

  She rolled onto her side and looked at him, at his face pale against the blankets. “Yes, we are,” she said, “And,” she added after a moment, “I think you can be a Queensfighter from now on.” He did not answer, though she knew he was awake.

  Jaele heard Elic’s breathing and her own, twining, slowing to sleep. She heard the waves against the shore, and the wind against the waves. And she heard her parents’ voices, laughing and murmuring, steady as singing or the beating of her heart.

  Jaele was eighteen and alone and far, far beneath the cold slate surface of the water when her world shifted.

  Fog had gathered over the harbour at dawn that day; by afternoon the air was frigid and thick, the water invisible. Jaele and Elic were arguing and tossing bits of cooking rock at one another. The loom sounded louder in the dimness. As the wood thundered and their voices rose, Lyalla cried, “Jaele, Elic—quiet!” They turned to her. “Elic,” she said in a low, dangerous voice, “there are fish to be cleaned. Jaele, we need some seagreen. Go, both of you, and give me some peace!”

  “Excellent,” Elic muttered as they walked out onto the beach. “Now I’ll stink of fish guts and you’ll freeze to death.”

  Jaele snorted. “I will not. And you already stink.”

  They laughed and parted and did not look back.

  Jaele’s skin rose in shocked bumps after she had draped her cloak and outer tunic over a rock. When she dove, even the oily paste she had rubbed over herself did not entirely blunt the chill. She swam close to the surface for a time, circling until the water was almost warm. When she was ready, she drew in a chestful of ice-sharp air and sliced down and down, and the grey sky faded into darkness.

  She gathered seagreen strands until they billowed behind her, but she did not return immediately to shore. She cut deep, around the black rocks and into the stretch of water that lay outside her own. By now she was warm and effortless, guarding the breath in her lungs more easily. She swam and swam, unwilling to go back to the sullen sky and the noisy hut. And so she was many strokes away when the boats slid silently through the moss-thick fog and cold water of her bay.

  She gasped as she surfaced at last and her mouth opened on air. She rubbed a hand over her eyes to clear away black spots, tiny fish that trembled in and out of her vision. As her heart pounded and her muscles relaxed into aching, she looked through the darkening sky toward her home and saw torches.

  She swam with her head above the water until she reached the pile of black rocks nearest her hut. As she drew closer—silent strokes, barely a ripple in the sea—she saw the two boats, large and strange and resting on the beach like terrible creatures, water-slick and waiting. There were people—not many—some dressed in ragged skins and a few in thick leather armour. Steel glinted in the fog-blurred light. Jaele’s fingers wrapped white and sea-tender around the pitted rock when she saw the knife at her mother’s brown throat, the arm that held her brother thin and small against a stranger’s body. Her father was free: he was standing very still, facing the tallest of the men in armour.

  “Please,” she heard him say, clearly and without shaking, “do not harm us. We will give you whatever you ask. Please—let my family go.”

  The big man turned so that she saw the sharp bones of his face and the shadows of his eyes. He spoke to a wom
an next to him in a rough, halting language. The woman answered him and he looked back at Jaele’s father. Jaele watched the man’s hand clenching around a dagger handle. He spoke, and her father shook his head.

  “I’m sorry—I don’t understand you.” He held out his hands, palms up and pale. “I have no weapon. . . .”

  Jaele sobbed. As she thrust her fist into her mouth, she saw her mother’s eyes shift quickly toward the rocks. No one else had noticed. There was no way that Lyalla could see in the stone darkness, yet she looked at her daughter, eyes wide and torchlit and commanding. Don’t give yourself away, daughter. Stay. Commanding, Jaele told herself later, over and over, as she remembered how she had huddled in the tumble of rocks and done nothing.

  More strangers emerged from the hut, carrying sacks, a pile of Reddac’s weaving, cook pots, sleeping mats. They shouted to the leader as they threw their armloads into the boats. Others began to walk toward them, putting daggers back in belts. The tall man smiled and stepped forward. His arm moved, so quickly that metal and armour blurred. Reddac’s eyes widened as his throat opened dark beneath the dagger. Lyalla screamed and writhed. The leader called out, and the man holding her stared at him in fear or disgust. After a moment he drew his own dagger across her neck and let her slip to the ground.

  Jaele was watching the sand darken in rivulets beneath her parents when Elic moved. Perhaps his captor’s grip had loosened; perhaps he, like the other man, had thought to defy his leader; perhaps he had merely underestimated the thin boy in his grasp. Elic twisted free in one fluid motion and lunged silently, reaching for the man who was twice his height and blood-eyed. Jaele saw a flash of blue and red; some breathing part of her remembered an unlocked box and a promise. But Elic gripped the dagger now, and he thrust it under the leader’s armour, hard and sure below his heart. The man cried out, and his own dagger shone up and into the boy’s chest, and both fell limb-twisted to the sand.

  Later, Jaele remembered sounds: the yells of the attackers, the pounding of feet and the heavy pull of bodies, and afterward her own screams, ringing white against her skull. She did not remember watching her parents and brother being thrown into the hut; she did not see how the leader was also tossed inside, except for an arm which sprawled out the door. She did not see the man who had cut her mother’s throat standing still, shaking his head as the others milled around him and shouted. She did not see him fall, struck hard by a club; did not see his body lying crumpled where waves met shore. What she did see, at last, was torchfire in the thatch, red-gold streaking along the walls and up against the sky; the Raiders leaping into their boats, faces wrenched and hands scrabbling; the boats smaller, smaller and shivering below the first stars. And the torches, graceful wingfishes, falling slowly into the sea.

  LUHR

  CHAPTER TWO

  The leader’s hand was webbed. Jaele stared. Fingers joined by tiny fans, flesh like a seabird’s.

  She was very cold. The fire was gone, burned down to black rubble and stench. She had looked for them while the flames still roared; she had looked and cried out their names until her voice had bruised to silence. They were not on the beach or in the shallow water—and she remembered, as she cried, that she had heard the dragging of bodies on sand. She gazed up at the hut and the fire, saw the long smooth tracks that led to the place where the door had been. They were there, within. Coursing, dissolving, curling away to bone. They were there in the heart of the fire, far beyond her sight and her hands and her voiceless keening.

  Then she had seen the outflung arm. Had found that she was on her knees in water, and that her father’s dagger was beside her, almost buried in tide-wet sand. She had wrenched it free and turned again to the arm. The leader’s—she knew this from the armour. She did not notice the other body by the shore: the fire was too bright; she was nearly mad; she saw only that one arm and moved toward it. She had hacked at the arm while the heat battered her, hacked until the hand twisted off in her own. She held its fingers, wiped it clean of blood. She retched, suddenly, water and bile—then shuddered until her bones and teeth had ground into sand and she lay with her face turned up to the dawn-white sky.

  It was blinding noon when she woke. There was terrible pain, a blade drawn along her muscles and skin and behind her eyes. She sat up carefully. Carefully she folded a cloak that had been dropped by one of the Raiders—her father’s cloth bright and soft—and put it in the sack she had almost emptied of seagreen. She removed the swimming paste from her pouch and attached the empty pouch to her belt. She did not look at the hut; though she could smell it behind her, acrid and blackened. She brushed fire ash from her face and saw more blowing out over the water. She turned her father’s dagger over in her hands, slowly, seeing it without colour or edges. Blood still smudged her skin wet; she washed blade and flesh in the shallows and watched the blood dark coiling as smoke between her fingers. She dried the dagger on her tunic, then wrapped it in the folds of the cloak in her sack. The wind was thrusting the smell toward her. She picked up the Sea Raider’s hand and held it, stared at its webs and its short, ragged nails. Then she threw it arcing into the sea. Birds descended instantly and she looked away—away, and into the face of the man who had killed her mother.

  He was standing a few steps to her right and slightly behind her—white-faced, a smudge of blood across his forehead; swaying slightly, so that some part of her knew he had only just stood up. His eyes were narrowed and dark, and his lips were curled, snarling without sound. He looked at her, and she at him. The wind was still blowing; though she did not take her eyes from his, she could see leaves and smoke stirring behind him. The wind made no sound. She heard nothing but her own blood.

  Only when he took a step backward did she think of the dagger. Her fingers were stiff as old dry wood on the mouth of her sack. She glanced down, the blood a roaring now, as if she were diving too deep. A glance—but when she looked up again he was gone, running toward the wooded hills, leaving a trail of blood and webbed prints in the sand. She followed, her whole body wood now, unbending, splintering with every sleep-slow step. He disappeared into the trees and she whimpered—far behind, staggering, her sack dragging like stones.

  When she finally reached the forest, the path before her was empty. She stood for a moment, panting, leaning on a lightning-shorn trunk. The earth was dark and firm here, swallowing blood and footprints. No trail of his—only this trail, which wound among the close-set trees. She ran on, more quickly this time. At first her feet recognized the path: she had wandered here before, over the fallen leaves and needles. She had never wandered far: there was a heavy, closed silence about the deeper forest, and she had always turned back to the sunlight and the beach and the open sea. But now she ran on, on, following the track further into a dusk of trees. Following him. When she could no longer see the way, she sat at the base of an oak; she wrapped her arms around her knees and was very still. The hollow rasping of her breath calmed, but she did not close her eyes. A howl rose high among trunks and branches; she did not move, did not blink. She sat until a muddy grey dawn lit the path before her—then she rose and ran again, her fingers wrapped tight around her father’s dagger.

  Days and nights swam together and Jaele could not count them. She walked or ran. Occasionally she slept, curled against bark, drifts of leaves, earth damp from a river she never saw. It was a shallow sleep that did not relieve the dry burning of her eyes; shallow because she listened for him always—his steps, his breathing, his voice calling out words she would not understand. Sometimes she thought she heard him, thought she saw a shadow slipping away ahead of her. She would leap forward, scrabbling and panting, and run until long after she knew she had been wrong. She smelled her mother’s blood, and his, and ran, ran.

  She noticed rain once or twice, but the limbs above her were woven close as threads: the rain was a distant murmur, and only a few drops fell cool on her skin and hair. Sometimes she found water pooled in stumps or among roots; she drank
, head down like an animal, and tasted ancient green.

  Days and nights; latticed sun and shadow. She stumbled on, among trees that were no longer forest: the bark was raddled, and the leaves bent huge and curving to brush moss-sprung ground. She smelled earth and oozing decay that was jungle-rank—her own warm salt smell above and beneath. She ate fruit that had fallen and split, spouting seeds; she tore at fungus that bloomed like sickly yellow flowers from stumps, not thinking of poison or illness or living. Thinking only of him: blood-streaked skin, narrowed eyes, forearm corded muscle across her mother’s throat.

  She could not run here; she staggered, and now and then she crawled, when the path was slick. Shapes—always him, never him—twined around the edges of her sight. There was no night, no day. The hissing and cackling of beasts she could not see filled her ears, and she moaned in fear or relief. Suddenly she did see: there was something looming, panting, on the track ahead of her. Something too enormous, too misshapen to be him. She fell to her knees and swayed. Then it surged toward her and she slipped with a cry into darkness.

  “Close your eyes.” A whisper. Jaele feels her little brother breathing sleep against her cheek.

  “Luhr is the most beautiful city in our world. Queen Galha made it so, when peace was upon the land. She built it tall with towers and twisting spires that glittered in sunlight like pearl. The walls were stone without mortar, and they stretched smooth. After the Sea Raiders shattered Queen Galha’s peace, she built a silver portcullis where before there had been no need of a gate, and it shone and burned the eyes of those who gazed upon it.