As soon as the words were said, she cursed silently. Aldreth looked away from her, the tendons in his neck standing out suddenly as if in pain. But he spoke, staring at the thin dark lines of smoke rising from the fires that lay behind them.
“The battle happened when Nossi and I were children; she was six and I was eight.” His voice had deepened and hardened into edges. “The Perona are cold and heartless wanderers of the eastern deserts. They ride horses as we do, but cruelly, with metal and whips. The beasts bleed and foam, and their eyes roll back in terror. I remember this. I hid beneath our parents’ wagon with Nossi and watched the horses come together. The Alilan fought with daggers, and the Perona with their three-pointed short swords. Swords like stars, I remember,” he said, and Jaele closed her eyes.
“The battle was short and terrible, but we triumphed. So I am told. There were many dead on both sides, of course, and one of them was my father. He was laid beside our wagon, and Nossi screamed. He was covered in dirt and blood, and she did not recognize him. The blood was from his chest, torn by the three tips of a Perona sword. Our mother knelt by him with her hands in his hair, and cried while Nossi screamed. I will never forget her face—my mother’s face.”
There is a fire—huge, roaring, filled with dissolving shadows. The desert air is cool: the flames climb into a stream-clear sky. The drumming is slow, and feet shuffle as people circle the smaller watch fires. The bodies of the dead blacken and tremble among Alnila’s tears. Suddenly there is a scream, torn high and breaking. A woman runs from a watch fire, away from a boy and girl who stand and do not move. Dark hair flying around her, mouth gaping wide, she runs into the heart of the fire. There are cries—some almost silent—and the wide liquid eyes of the children. No one follows her. After a moment the shuffling grief dance begins again, quiet and slow. The fires burn.
Jaele blinked and shook her head to clear it of the sounds of flames and grief. Aldreth was still staring back at the smoke. He was rubbing at the scar over his left eye, gently but steadily.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her words thick and blurred.
He looked back at her. “No. I’m sorry it all came out like that. I forget, sometimes. Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She could not speak of the sickness that had risen into her throat. Flames, flesh blackened, curling. “I feel,” she went on, “as if I’ve been sleeping—confused, I don’t remember what you said.”
“No,” he said, “you wouldn’t remember exactly. You probably saw images, heard sounds, maybe even felt heat or cold?” He moved so that he was turned toward her. She watched his eyes and thought they were sad, but not like Dorin’s. “I have an ancient Alilan . . . gift. In our caravan only Grandmother Alna and I have it. We Tell and our words become real for a moment, sometimes longer, depending on the story and our skill.”
“Does it hurt?” Jaele asked. The sickness was subsiding now, as she breathed and looked at him.He smiled, very faintly. “Yes, but in a way that is almost impossible to describe. It is pain of distance and vanished things. It is as if I exist among layers—I could call up any one of them, but I feel lost doing it. I belong nowhere when I Tell.”
“Does Nossi have a bit of this gift as well?” Jaele asked after a time. “Because when she was explaining the Alilan to me, and then again when she was speaking about my journey, I thought I felt something—just a bit, like a shadow of colour. Heat, also.”
Aldreth nodded. “Yes, she has a hint of it. Our mother had it, too—I remember her images so clearly. She used to fill the air with stories at night: sometimes I fell asleep still caught in a Telling.”
“Yes,” Jaele said, and closed her eyes briefly on candlelight and baby’s warmth and imagined footsteps on the sand.
“Jaele,” Aldreth said, his face very close to hers, “sharing your journey will be so important to me. Revenge is something I understand even more keenly than most Alilan: my Tellings are sometimes so vivid that I emerge blind with rage and blood-need.” He touched his scar again, lightly.
“It will be important to me, as well,” Jaele said, and added quickly, “I also will fight these Perona, if we encounter them.” He smiled at her and she flushed and turned her face away. “This Telling—can you use it in battle? To confuse your enemies, or to frighten them? To hurt them?” Beginning to hope—until Aldreth shook his head.
“It is forbidden by the goddesses, who spoke to the first Alilan Teller. To use words as violence is a terrible crime. It did happen once, long ago, but that Teller’s deeds and name cannot be known. And that,” he went on in a lighter voice, flexing a muscular arm, “is why we are so handsome and strong!”
They rode more slowly this time, returning to the camp. She was aware of his stomach, flat beneath her hands, and of the feel and smell of his rough tunic as it brushed her cheek. She hardly looked at him when they dismounted, and she walked away before he could speak.
“Nossi,” she said when she found her friend at their cook fire.
Nossi glanced up at her. “Well!” she said. “Look at you. Been riding, have you?”
Jaele groaned. “What can I do about him?” she asked. She felt herself smile, felt the heat in her cheeks, and wanted to groan again, because it could not be so simple. “Please tell me.”
“Oh,” Nossi said with laughing blue eyes, “do whatever you want! But,” she added, wagging a finger at her, “I warn you: do not break his heart.”
Jaele did nothing, for a time. They travelled through the frost until there were trees again, tall and bone-thin against the sky. She stayed away from Aldreth. She remembered his tunic beneath her cheek, his stomach beneath her hands; she remembered Dorin’s arms around her atop a mountain tree. Both memories stung her with need and confusion. After a few awkward attempts to sit with her, Aldreth no longer came to their fire at night. She watched him, though—watched as he rode with his body straining forward above his horse’s head, as he leaned over his dagger, polishing it, as he danced tall and graceful in the darkness, against the bodies of other girls. Soon he did not look at her at all.
“Alnila’s Night is coming.”
Jaele turned to Nossi, who was leaning over a soup pot, stirring and tasting and sprinkling herbs from a small clay jar. “Oh?” Jaele said. “And what is that?”
“A celebration of flame’s victory over winter, Alneth’s sleeping time,” Nossi replied. She set the spoon carefully across the pot’s rim and looked at Jaele with narrowed eyes. “You may enjoy yourself. This celebration involves even more drinking, dancing, and passion than usual. Or,” she went on, shrugging, “you may just want to sit and tap your feet with grandmother Alna.”
“Nossi,” Jaele said slowly, “I am sorry—I wish I could explain myself to you, or to Aldreth, but it’s so confusing. I’m so confused. . . .”
“Shush,” Nossi said, picking up her spoon again. “I know I should not tease you—but he is my brother. Try some of this. Too spicy? Too rich?”
The day of the festivities dawned bitterly cold. Shivering in her layers of cloaks, Jaele watched men and women tending huge cauldrons and gathering wood for the evening’s fires. Children ran shrieking and laughing. There had been numerous fights already about who would dance with whom. The older youths wheeled their horses among the trees, calling to each other. Jaele could not see Aldreth.
With dusk came a silence. Families gathered around their wagons. Without words the eldest of the groups lit the fires, one by one. “Ah,” Nossi breathed beside Jaele. Perhaps the flames were the same as always; perhaps the cold was no more biting than usual. But the fires bloomed like winter flowers in silence, and the air was white.
Jaele drank a good deal, very quickly. She ate, but not much. She did not speak; no one did. At last grandmother Alna stood, gripping her staff and drum. Aldreth rose beside her. He bent over her briefly, then straightened and laid a hand on her rounded shoulder.
It was Alna who began. I will never forget the
first touch of her Telling voice: a great wave, all the water and thunder of the world as it had been once, before words. It was like your singing—but different, as well. I wish that my words could make you hear it.
There was a scalding, roaring wind, and fire, and slowly, slowly, green and breath and footsteps in the rich dark earth. Jaele closed her eyes against the cooling wind and heard a thread like river water, another, gentler voice calling the first Alilan to their wandering. And so she listened to Alna’s ancient Telling and Aldreth’s young one, and something within her began like a tide to recede.
The twin Telling ended in winter cold, an image of flames rising huge and blistering over snow. Jaele’s cloak slipped to the ground. She spread her arms wide and saw herself and all the Alilan whirling in the fire as they themselves were Told.
There was a long silence afterward. Jaele was sitting by the small fire, breathless and burning-cheeked as the images bled to stillness. She looked up at Alna, who stood with her eyes tightly closed; then at Aldreth, who gazed back at her from wild faraway eyes, and smiled.
Alna finally moved. She brought her gnarled hand down on her drum, again, then again, as the other elders joined in with their own drums and feet. People began to rise and dance, still slowly. Jaele saw Nossi lifted up by Alnon, saw her twine her arms and legs around him and open her mouth to his, saw his hands drawing her hair down around them both. Alin touched Jaele’s hand and she rose to him.
The dance grew faster. Cloaks flew off, and overskirts, and shirts. Jaele saw old Alna spinning, white hair unbound. Alin’s hands held her; she felt them run along her arms. And then, suddenly, Aldreth was there.
He lifted her, held her face so that she was looking into his eyes. “Yes,” she heard herself say, and she put her hands in his hair and kissed him wet and drink and fire.
They were on his horse; they were riding, threading their way among the trees. For a time there were others around them, but soon they were alone. She was lying on the ground with her head turned toward him; he was making a fire with swift fingers. She was sitting facing him. She touched her clothes and they fell away; she watched the skin puckering in bumps along her breasts and arms, but did not feel cold. He kissed the curve of her collarbone; she bit his shoulder and knotted her legs behind his back and there was dagger pain and then a rush of crackling joy as he strained and strained and stilled in the weaving of her body. Then the tears—her tears—hot sparks searing her cheeks black, and a terrible wound ripped from its hiding, her voice calling blood on the sand and Aldreth’s voice matching hers, Telling of a forest of light and peace where he would hold her wrap around her until she fell asleep by his heart.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jaele woke to pale grey light and the smell of burned-out fire. Aldreth’s head was on her left breast, and her arm was around him. She could feel his breath, steady and warm on her skin. Snow had begun to fall; she watched it melt in his hair. She was so cold that she could not move her fingers. Her eyes felt like sand.
After a time he stirred, lifting his head and shifting onto his elbow. His face was smudged with sleep; he smiled like a boy when he saw her. He bent and kissed her, smoothing his fingers across her cheeks. She almost reached up to touch the corners of his eyes and the scar that she knew would be soft. But she did not; and when he tried to draw her against him, she said only, “No.” His face changed; he sat up and drew on his clothes.
“Nossi told me about Dorin,” he said as he laced his boots, his back turned to her. “Is that it?”
She touched her shell. She felt the knot within her again, and forgot that it had ever dissolved into forest and tears. “Yes,” she answered, amazed at the strength of her voice. “I’m sorry.” Not enough, she knew.
They stood at last, facing each other. She tried to speak and could not. He smiled crookedly at her. When he put his arms around her, she pressed her cheek to his chest and heard the pulsing of his blood. “You know my heart,” he said roughly, into her hair, and she nodded.
They rode back through the thin, pale trees and falling snow. She wound her arms around his waist and closed her eyes against his gently moving back.
The camp was very quiet that day. Children lay curled up around fires as their parents and siblings stumbled back from the woods to sleep inside the wagons. A line of girls and women gathered around the healer’s wagon to drink a sour concoction of roots and berries; they would bleed and cramp for a bit, the woman told them, but there would be no babies. Jaele found Nossi there. The two smiled wearily.
“I see you enjoyed yourself after all,” said Nossi with a half-hearted arching of her brows. Jaele shook her head and looked away. Nossi said at last, “We’ll soon be in the lake country. It’s beautiful, even in winter. Maybe things will be easier there.”
Jaele could not say, No, I don’t think so, there’s so much unfinished in me. She said, “Maybe.”
The lake country was beautiful. The Alilan entered the hills when the snow was thick and soft; their wagons left deep furrows, and the horses sank up to their knees. The lakes among these hills were not entirely frozen: black water lapped around tooth-shaped blocks of ice.
“Cold,” Jaele mumbled, shivering.
Nossi chuckled. “Just wait until we get to the desert. We’ll be going from well to well, parched and blistered. Remember this place then.”
They stood in the doorway of their wagon and gazed at the lake below. Their breath smoked and thinned. “I’ve heard that there are fishfolk here,” Nossi said, and Jaele turned to her.
“Oh,” she said. A single word, hardly more than a sigh; a sweep, within, of spires and marketplace, the glint of desert sun off scales, a webbed hand and a red stone.
“I nearly mentioned this to you before,” Nossi went on, “when you first told me of your journey—when you talked about Luhr, and meeting one of these fishfolk. But I was afraid that you wouldn’t be ready; that you wanted to tell then, not hear. And in any case, they have not been seen since well before my birth. They may no longer be here.”
“If your strokes lead you to us,” the fishperson had said in its voice of hiss and bubble. “I will find out—I will go to them,” Jaele said quickly. “I must. I didn’t ask the fishperson in Luhr for aid; it was too soon and I didn’t think to. I will ask now. We will have companions to the sea.”
Nossi nodded. “That would be wonderful, of course . . . but how will you find out if they are there? Surely you don’t intend to leap into one of the lakes?”
“Why not?” Jaele said, and smiled at her friend’s expression. “I have swum in cold water before, Nossi. This could not be so much colder.”
Snow had begun to fall. Jaele looked up at the heavy clouds and remembered another sky, endless above a sea of trees. Her words to Dorin: “Tell me about the silga.” Tunnels beneath the earth, lined with green stone and singing.
“Murtha did not understand revenge,” she said to Nossi. “The fishfolk will. They have hated the Sea Raiders for a long time.” She watched the black water, as if she would see the darker shadows of limbs beneath. Then she stood. “I will seek them out now.”
“Jaele,” Nossi said slowly, as if to a child, “do not be foolish. You may have swum in cold water before, but not this cold. Imagine what it would feel like.” She spoke more swiftly as Jaele moved down the steps. “Listen to me. You’ll get sick, you’ll die—oh, wait, you stubborn girl. Let me at least get some blankets—” Moments later they both walked down to the lake, through the gusting snow.
“I may not surface right away,” Jaele said as she unclasped her cloak and stepped out of her skirt. “Don’t worry. I can hold my breath for a very long time, and I’m an excellent swimmer. Do not leap in after me.” She grinned at Nossi, who was holding extra blankets and cloaks tightly against her chest.
“Very well,” Nossi snapped. “But I wish to say that I did not swear to join you on a long journey to the east only to lose you now, in a fre
ezing lake, looking for scaly people who may not even be there. Now go—and may the Twins guard you.”
The water was much, much colder than in her bay. Jaele flailed and lashed. She saw nothing but murk and could not tell, after the first thrust of her dive, which way she was facing. She waited for her iben-sight to bloom, but it did not. The only light she saw was from the fishfolk stone clutched in her hand: a thin, crimson glow, dribbling between her fingers. She spun and kicked, already numb—and then there were webbed hands on her arm, wrapped tight as oceanweed, tight as talons in another darkness.
The fishperson did not draw her up to the air and the teeth of ice; down instead, and down. At first she struggled, but the hands were strong, and she stilled the thrashing of her limbs. Farther down, and farther. Nossi was right. I will die here—I am a fool.
Suddenly, as though she had come over the rise of a hill, there was light and warmth and a vast space. Jaele watched the bubbles of her scream trailing above her. When she looked down, she saw this new place through the familiar water-weaving of her hair. She saw arches and spirals of living coral—red, pink, brilliant blue. Lakegreen rose like mountain trees; silver-flashing snakefish slipped through the fronds, leaving sinuous paths. The light, golden-green, seemed to be coming from the water itself. Jaele had swum through the sand-thick water near the shore of her bay; she had gone deeper, into water that was clear and laced with distant sun. But never had she seen water such as this. She felt its warmth against her skin, and breathed—breathed it, like air.
When she had become accustomed to the water-air, she looked for the first time at her guide. “Mmmff,” she said, in another rush of bubbles. The fishperson nodded at her, white eyes unblinking, and released her arm. Then it swam. After a moment Jaele followed it through a blue arch of coral. She felt excitement blossoming, filling her as it had when Nossi said, “First you will have your revenge.” She thought, The Alilan on their horses and the fishfolk in the river—all of us sweeping down to Fane.
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