“I’m not sure—we left after we found you. There was a lot of fire when I first saw it from a distance. I wondered how, in the desert. . . . And after I caught sight of you I heard a voice—and there were noises, terrible, unnatural ones, and blood oozing everywhere, and I almost turned back. It seemed as if the ones with swords were fleeing—but there was such chaos that it was hard to tell. And I was looking at you.” He glanced at her and smiled, very slightly.
“The voice—did you see whose it was? Did you see what happened to him?”
His hands slipped away from hers. She was vaguely surprised at how warm they had been. “No. He was . . . important to you?”
Jaele turned her face to the wall. Cracks in the red stone, spreading like web or net. “And where have you been all this time?” she said, when she knew her voice would not shake.
He was silent. “Everywhere,” he said at last. “And nowhere. As usual. I came here quite a while ago, in a storm. Keeper found me and brought me in.”
She felt his fingers looping a strand of hair behind her ear. “Are you hungry?” She did not reply. “Rest again, Jaele. You are still not well.”
She closed her eyes. Would have laughed (bitterly, salt like blood) if she had not been so dizzy, so wrenched by pain and memory.
Dorin hummed softly and she slid quickly, thankfully away.
The sand sloped smooth before the Palace of Yagol. Jaele wrapped her hand around the latch that held the fortress’s stone gates shut.
She had woken alone, minutes or hours ago. Had risen from her bed, clutching the edge of the mattress. The blood had howled in her ears, and the chamber had faded for a moment to grey, dappled with white and black spots. She had breathed deeply and waited. After a time colour and sound had returned, and she had taken a short step, then two longer ones, and reached the door. She had bent there—slowly, each movement a breath held—and lifted her pouch and bundle. She saw, as she stooped, that there was a waterskin by the door as well, and a purple kerchief. She put the waterskin—full, gurgling—in her bundle and tied the kerchief just below her wound. Keeper must have left these things, she thought. He knew, somehow, that I would need to go into the desert. She had left the chamber and walked into the corridor, into the many corridors of the palace, despite weakness and fear and the blood that still seeped around knotted thread and skin. She had walked along twisting garden paths, following the towers she could see above the red walls.
Now she leaned against the doors, listening to birdsong and insect drone as her own breath rasped. Her pouch on her belt; her bundle tied, hanging heavy against her thigh. She gazed through the small barred window at the empty land and sky. The doors were massive but opened easily; she thought of Keeper oiling the hinges, dusting off the stone. She pulled the doors closed behind her, turned, walked slowly out into the desert.
She stumbled as she descended the gentle slope. She watched her feet, knowing she would fall if she did not. When the ground was level, she looked up. The fortress was already difficult to see: red against red, only the towers showing, with the lighter sky behind. The sand in front of her was rock-scattered and silent. The sun hummed around her.
The towers had vanished the next time she looked back. She stopped walking. A moment later she sat down. No, she thought. Dizzy again, her head and neck throbbing. I cannot. A helplessness too great even for grief held her still.
Dorin had said there were bodies. Charred, blistered? A hut woman man boy, burned beyond seeing. Birds gouging, insects burrowing, bloodied cloth lifting in wind. Sand soaked black beneath webbed feet. Hoofprints and spent torches. Long sliding marks of boats like sea creatures. Wagon tracks weaving among and then away. Alone, running through jungle—alone. She drew a breath that was wrenched like a sob. I cannot. Cannot look, or find. I do not even know where. . . .
She was lying on her side. Staring at her fingers, which were smeared with blood. “Dorin,” she murmured, and curled around longing old and new.
He bent over her, as he had before. “Jaele—oh, Jaele, you did not know where to look—why did you not ask me?”
“I thought,” she said, words slurred and strange, “that I might remember, maybe” and then she closed her eyes.
A fall of black hair, grandmother Alna weeping. Snow spinning, and sand, and bodies lit by sparks. Aldreth, Alnon, Nossi, their daggers and their blood. A scar, white and puckered and soft. A chamber rippling blue. An army broken, scattered. Riders who would never stream down to the sea—not without Nossi to hold them, to bind them with her fierce smile. Her laugh quick beneath painted flame and ivy.
I murmured their names, over and over. I wept, and tore at my stitches. Dorin and Keeper held my arms and I screamed at them, into the emptiness where my hope and joy had been. I screamed and bled and burned with fever. Perhaps you have done the same, in this darkness so far beneath? So far from your own joy.
Darkness and light shifted against the cracked walls and the plants of the garden. Dorin sang and laid cold wet cloths against Jaele’s face and cheeks. She dreamed and woke, sweat-soaked, whirling with faces and her own arms reaching into void. The room lifted and tipped and she retched into a bowl that was tiny in Keeper’s fingers. “Sleep, my dear, rest, my dear, sleep and cool and rest are near,” Dorin sang, and she clutched his hands as she had in Luhr.
One day she heard rain and opened her eyes. The room was still and solid. She blinked and rolled her head carefully on the pillow. No Dorin, no Keeper—but she saw a woman standing by the open window across from the bed. The curtains were lashing blue, and the woman’s dress, and rain was blowing like silver against her skin and the flagstones. Jaele made a sound and the woman turned, and Jaele saw that her skin was the colour of Keeper’s neckring and that her eyes were blazing.
“I must wait!” she cried, holding her hands out to Jaele. She was shining with rain. “They do not return, and the town falls to ruin. But I must wait. How long? Can you tell me how long I have been waiting?”
Jaele tried to raise herself on an elbow but could not. “I’m sorry,” she said in a rough voice, “I don’t know. . . .” but the woman was gone somehow, between blinks. The curtains billowed with wind and rain against the red stone. Jaele slept again, restlessly, muttering names and sometimes laughing.
The next time she woke, her head felt like clear water, and she was alone. The rain had slackened and was sliding in noiseless, golden-clear trails along the glass. She was gapingly hungry. She lifted herself slowly out of the pillows and was not dizzy. She slid off the bed and stood. The stone was warm against the soles of her feet. She noticed that someone had dressed her in a blue tunic which hung in long folds. She remembered the woman and wondered if Dorin had slipped the tunic onto her as she slept or tossed in fever. Before she opened the door, she put a hand hesitantly to the back of her head. She felt the wound-ridge there, rising from one ear almost to the other, knobbly with dried thread. No, she thought as the emptiness of loss began again to bloom. Do not remember—not now.
She went out into the corridor that stretched away in arched doorways on one side and sunlit windows on the other. These windows looked onto a different garden—lusher, greener, more tangled, bright with wings and eyes that blinked and disappeared among the vines. Jaele walked slowly, half in sunlight. When she tired, she leaned against one of the doors, and with a rush of air it opened.
She heard the crying first: a thin infant wail, choked breath and rage. The room was huge, thick with tapestries and golden vases that caught candlelight, and sculptures whorled in black stone that shone only dully. She could not immediately find the source of the crying. As she stepped onto the carpet (soft as fur, covering her bare toes), she saw that the candles were burning against darkness: it was night beyond the windows. She hesitated for a moment, her head and blood throbbing with confusion. Then she stepped forward again.
There were two babies. They were lying together in a high bed bounded on all sides by wr
ithing wooden carving. They lay with their dimpled arms around each other, straining their heads upward as they wailed. They were dark-skinned, shiny with saliva but not tears. Jaele bent to touch a cheek, a black curl—but before she could, there was a splintering crash and a hissing of blown-out candles. The crying stopped. She could not see or feel the bed, could not see anything at all. My iben-sight? she thought as she groped her way through the darkness. Her hands met stone. She fell gasping into the sunlit corridor, where Keeper was waiting, towering against the garden.
Jaele cleared her throat, but when she spoke, her voice still shook. “Those babies—who were they? Why was it night, in that room? Please tell me what’s happening.”
“Keeper serves,” he said, and again her heart beat strangely at the sound of his voice. “He serves,” he repeated, pointing at the door, “when time flows backward and around.”
“So,” Jaele said slowly, “I am seeing other time? And you do not want me to? Should I not go into these rooms? Might I cause some harm, or be hurt myself?” When he did not answer, she went on, “Was it you who made the woman disappear, so I wouldn’t keep talking to her?”Keeper bowed his head. “Keeper serves,” he said, and moved off down the hallway.
She followed him. He did not look back at her. She trotted along, four of her footsteps to one of his, glancing only briefly at the doors and windows they were passing. She was still dizzy, feeling in the centre of a circle turning into a spiral, folding in on itself. She kept her eyes on Keeper’s back, which hardly moved with his strides.
They came to stairs, so huge that Jaele had to slide from one to the next. As the stairs wound down like the inside of an empty shell, the sunlight faded and was replaced by darkness that smelled of forest floor. Keeper still did not turn. Torches flickered from brackets in the wall; she did not, could not, look at them. A wind, very deep and far away, touched the flames and her face, damp and old, old.
The stairs ended in another vaulted corridor, but this time the rooms off it were not hidden by doors. Some rooms were torchlit. In one, Jaele saw stacks of metal cages, blacksmith’s tools, anvils; in another, heaps of tapestries, jumbles of bowls, vases, many-necked jugs. Other rooms were dark, and she saw only brief glints off polished surfaces, or mounds black against blacker walls (too quick for iben-sight). The passage snaked and Keeper disappeared around corners. She stopped glancing into the rooms and stumbled after him.
The chamber into which he finally led her was so vast that she could see no ceiling, no walls—only twists of ivy blowing thick and red-green, and wings disappearing into hazy distance. Jaele stood very still and turned her head slowly. Scattered in front of her were brick ovens and chimneys rising like stalagmites; squat iron cauldrons; giant slabs of tables littered with bottles and plants and furred or feathered animals; bushes or small trees; glass cases filled with emerald water and huge, distended, glittering fish. There were shadows as well, smoky at the outside of her vision, but when she turned her head the air was clear. She sat down heavily on a massive log, and Dorin appeared beside her.
“Jaele, you shouldn’t have left your room.”
She smiled shakily and put up a hand to stop him from speaking again. “I wouldn’t have, except that I was ravenous.” And alone.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly, “I knew you would be. I’ve been trying to make you something delicious, something I learned far away.” The eagerness in his voice almost made her smile.
He led her among the bushes and chimneys to a thick wooden table that curved at both ends like a boat. On it were red earthen platters, silver drinking cups and tiny bronze food spears. There was thick, steaming soup, dark green leaves wrapped in pastry and petals, fish in deep purple sauce, and globes of bread.
“How did you do this?” Jaele asked, and Dorin grinned.
“A secret,” he said, gesturing to a massive chair. “Now sit, and enjoy.”
After they had eaten, Jaele swung her legs back and forth and cupped her chin in her palms. She felt too slow and warm for speech or thoughts. She watched the winged creatures fluttering into darkness, the fish as they circled and breathed bubbles of reflected candles and leaves and iron heat. She watched Keeper moving silently around the room, stirring and feeding and bending low to touch with his large cold hands.
“I saw a woman,” Jaele said at last. “In my room. And babies in another room. I don’t think they were real.”
Dorin turned to her with raised brows. “Ah, you saw. . . . I am not surprised. You and Keeper and I are alone here—but as I told you, there is a strangeness about this place. I’ve heard people walking, once even talking. I’ve never seen them: you’re lucky. What was the woman like?”
“Desperate, lovely. Said she was waiting for someone, even though the town was falling apart. Then she asked me how long she’d been waiting and I started talking and she disappeared.”
Dorin rolled a speckled sourfruit over in his hands. “The One Wife, perhaps. Waiting for the Two Princes to come home from a battle where they died long ago. Or so I assume. There’s no evidence at all of a town, or people. Living ones, anyway.”
“And Keeper?” she asked in a low voice, looking into the kitchen. She could not see Keeper now. “He said he looks after the Princes and the One Wife. How could he if. . . .?”
“If they’ve been dead for too long to remember? I’m not sure.”
Jaele shook her head. “Perhaps they’re not really dead to him. Perhaps he tends their ghosts and they seem alive. I’m sure he showed me those visions. He showed me, then took them away. Or . . . I don’t know. I don’t understand.” She put a hand to her forehead; her palm felt cool. Dorin was gazing at the plants and fish. She looked at him and noticed that his hair was longer and lighter than it had been on the silga mountain, and his skin was lined with tiny seams and cracks from the sun.
“Let me distract you,” he said, turning back to her. “I’ll take you to the most interesting place in the fortress.” His arms guided her to the floor.
She was not certain how he found the edge of the cavern; the ivy and the bubbling, twittering space looked the same to her as they walked. But after a time they came to an arched doorway and passed through it into a narrow, glistening passage. Torches guttered and sighed around them; Jaele saw shadows fluttering between Dorin’s shoulder blades and across his hair. They did not walk for long: within moments a stone door rose before them. Dorin leaned against it and strained until the cords in his neck leapt and stiffened like bones. It opened slowly. Jaele felt a thread of cool air against her skin, remembered a deep dark place beneath the sand, then shook the memory away.
It was a huge round room, seemingly empty except for torches and a large glittering platform on wheels. Jaele took a few steps forward, gaping as the sandstone walls spun into vivid colours around her. There were rows upon rows of figures and scenes—rivers of cut stone and paint that stretched up to the domed ceiling.
“Come over here first,” Dorin said, standing to the left of the door. “This is where it starts.”
“Where what starts?” she said, staring at the images, but before he could answer, she pointed and said, “Oh—there’s Keeper! Without his neckring. And two men with axes. . . .” Her voice trailed off as she moved closer.
“It’s the history of the palace,” Dorin said. “This could be considered the library. You have to climb up onto the platform to see it all. It’s such a long history that I’ve only really looked at the beginning and end. Here,” he went on, and she followed him to a place across from the door.
It was Keeper, again without his neckring, standing with a richly gowned woman; he was touching her cheek, and her hand was on his. In the next image he was kneeling before the Two Princes; both men were pointing at him, eyes wide and raging beneath circlets of bronze. In the next, Keeper was at an anvil, his arm raised high; then kneeling once more, while he and the woman fastened the black ring he himself had made around
his thick tree neck.
“Ah,” Jaele said, “it was a punishment—he loved the One Wife.” The images enfolding, strange, warm.
“Is she the one you saw?” Dorin asked, and she shook her head.
“No. Maybe I could find her if I had time.” She traced her finger along the lines of Keeper’s bent head. “Poor man. They Bound him and he served them—all of them—for so long.”
“And served them well,” Dorin said, moving a bit to the right. “See? Keeper in battle with the same Two. He’s so powerful that the bodies of those he’s killed lie waist deep, and the rest are fleeing. But look at this: here he is with a cauldron. He’s pulling out what looks like a tree, and there are birds flying up out of it. Here he’s standing in a garden with a lizard in his hand.”
Jaele glanced up at the colours that blurred above them. She felt very still. “He killed for them, and created life for them, and he probably carved all this, too, because he is still Bound, even though all of the Two Princes are long dead. Will it end?” She felt hope stirring, in a place beyond memory, and thought, He is so strong—and there is no one else for me now. She dragged a trembling hand across her eyes.
She went with Dorin to a curve in the wall near the door. The lines here were brighter and more delicately incised. Beside the door the stone was smooth and red and empty. She crouched to look at the last images and drew back with a start. “Yes,” he said, “uncanny, isn’t it? The likenesses are perfect.” Dorin’s face looking away, a strand of hair curling into the wind. Jaele’s body crumpled over Keeper’s shoulder as he carried her and Dorin toward the palace. Jaele asleep with her head turned into the pillow, short hair and knobbly stitches along her neck.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, and there was an aching dryness in her throat. The edges bled away and she almost saw them—the wagons, the horses. Nossi blazing; Alnon slumping forward into his own blood; Aldreth weeping as he opened his mouth to Tell. Sickness rose in Jaele’s throat and she fell to her knees on the stone floor. Dorin put an arm around her and steadied her as she shook. He did not speak, not even when she stood and staggered out the door. She did not remember, later, how she returned to her room. Shadows and a high screaming in her ears, a feeling of falling and then darkness.
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