I must find them. Aldreth may be alive. There may still be enough of them to help me. But I am so weak—and I have been here so long that the wagons will be far ahead of me. And so many died.
“This journey may be yours to make alone,” Bienta had said to her by the river. Jaele had told him that she would travel slowly if he and Serani came with her. She had told Nossi that she would wait with the Alilan until the desert. Now she would also wait, here in a palace, her rage and blood-need shrunk beneath fear.
I am here now, with Dorin. He will come east with me. We will go together. When I am stronger.
“I want to do some exploring. Alone.”
Dorin stared at her. Then he smiled, a twisted thing she had never seen before. “Of course,” he said, and pulled a pink petal from a flower that was hanging by his head. “My company has begun to bore you.”
“No—listen,” Jaele said. “I just want to be quiet for a while—to concentrate on the people Keeper shows me. The visions. You know I can only seem to see them when I’m by myself—I’ve told you this.” She looked past him at the sun-streaked leaves, the branches that bent and swayed with blossoms.
“Indeed,” he said. He strode back to the fortress. She called after him once, as he disappeared head-bent into darkness, but he did not turn around.
She drew a deep breath and walked slowly along the red snake path. She did want the visions. Needed them, to layer hues and sounds over her many wounds; needed them because even Dorin was too close sometimes, too warm with breath and sunlight. But after she had walked alone, she always hastened, almost ran, to find him. We will leave together. We will go east together, soon.
Soon trees and ivy surrounded her, and she followed a burbling of water to a fountain. She sat there for a time as the water bloomed from the stone mouth of a fish. Real fish drifted beneath the surface and she trailed her hands above their gold and blue. It was like her beach—the human silence, the colours, the water. These images endurable, now, because they were an older pain? She did not try to think. She was empty of thought and feeling and night terror.
She walked on, past benches and smaller fountains and birds with huge sweeping tails. As she came to yet another turn in the path, she heard voices. She peered around a low spreading tree.
Ahead of her was a flower-ringed clearing. In it were two young boys and a woman, all three holding double-headed axes. The woman kept hers steady, while the boys’ weapons dipped and listed. Her laughter lit her face, but the boys were frowning, their tongues stuck firmly between teeth. “Slowly, now,” she said; “feel your arms as tree trunks and your hands as fish with jaws of metal. Grip, my sons! Swing the way the wind slices the leaves in its path. It is a kind of music.”
“But,” panted one boy, “there”
“will be blood,” continued the other, and their mother lowered her axe smoothly to the ground.
“That is true,” she replied quietly. “But that is for your fathers to teach you. It is for me to give you balance and form—and music,” she went on as she watched them struggling, “even though you will someday forget it.” She looked sad, although the boys continued to heave and swing.
Jaele was gazing at her as she stepped out from behind the tree. The One Wife saw her immediately. “Who?” she asked, hands tightening around the axe haft, and then they were gone.
Jaele knelt where they had been: no footprints, no blade-shaped furrow. “Keeper!” she called. “Keeper, where are you?” But there was only distant birdsong, insect hum, water falling nearby.
She walked again, her fingers trailing across hot stone and cooler green. When the arched windows of the fortress were again visible, she stepped from path to blossom-strewn grass. Insect drone, water song, the scent of flowers were almost—almost—solace.
When she rounded the bole of another tree and saw another figure before her, she thought, Vision? Dorin? But then she halted and looked and knew him. He was perhaps ten paces in front of her, hunched over a crimson fruit and a knife. His hands stained with juice; mouth stained as well, as it tore and sucked. She saw immediately that he was thinner: cheeks hollow, collarbone rising from drum-stretched skin. His hair was longer, tangled, and a beard smudged his chin. There was no streak of blood across his forehead. Of course not, it has been so long, and he can wash and swim, even if he cannot drink. . . . Her heart roared in her ears like sea, like screaming (a tumble of rocks in water; this knife; her mother’s throat blooming dark and wet).
He took one bite, another, and she whimpered. She raised her hand and bit her knuckles to keep herself from crying out, but he lifted his head and saw her. Juice dripped steadily from his chin to the ground. His eyes widened and his lips drew back and she knew that he remembered a beach and a girl and a burned-out fire. He rose slowly; the fruit fell with a soft sound to the grass. She held her hands out, trembling, waiting for him to vanish. He took a step back. Then he turned and stumbled through the trees and flowers toward the fortress.
The fruit still lay on the ground. She stared at it. It oozed juice and seeds—real, solid, present. Present. Jaele cried out and ran after him, knowing that she was too late again, too slow, dazed with shock and folding time. She fell into the shadow of a corridor. She turned, turned, and saw nothing but window-light on red stone, closed doors curving away and into silence. She ran on—along hallways she had never seen before, up stairs, into chambers that were empty or jumbled with cushions, axes, vases full of freshly cut flowers. There was no echo of him, beneath the noise of her heart and her sobbing; no trail of blood and webbed footprints in ash-blown sand.
At last she stopped running. She was in a star-shaped room and her feet were soaked to the ankles in water. She had slid down tiled stairs into a wide, shallow pool. Her breathing rang from the walls and water.
“Keeper!” She waded out of the pool, calling his name with every step, until she was in the corridor. “Keeper!”
He was behind her. She felt him there, though she had not heard him come. She turned and looked up into his sun-latticed face. “There is a man here,” she said carefully as her limbs began to shake. “Not Dorin. A different man.”
Keeper angled his head. The light on his face shifted, but she still could not see his eyes. “Keeper serves all, here,” he said. “Dorin. Queensgirl Jaele. The other man from beyond a sea.”
She shook her head back and forth. “How do you . . . what do you know of us? Tell me.”
“Keeper serves and tends.”
She lifted her hands to her cheeks. Felt warmth of skin as if it were not hers. “Keeper,” she said slowly, “you must take me to this man. If you truly wish to serve me, you will do this.”
There was a long silence. She almost did not breathe. “It is Keeper who must tend,” he said at last. “Not Jaele.”
She bit her lip so savagely that tears rose and Keeper quivered in her eyes. “You do not know enough,” she said, her words quivering as he did. “You do not understand. This man is evil—he has killed. . . .”
“He is here. Keeper serves him as he serves Dorin and Jaele. Keeper tends them as he tends his gardens.”
She was dizzy. “Then I will find him on my own,” she said, and turned away.
She walked through the strange hallways until the sunlight dimmed and dusk birds began to call from the gardens. Her iben-sight led her back somehow, to the kitchen and then to the library.
Torchlight touched her own face in stone, and Dorin’s beside hers. She looked from their images to one before theirs: a man, lying crumpled before the fortress’ gates.
“Who is he?”
Jaele started. Dorin said, “I didn’t mean to surprise you—and if you’d still like to be alone, I’ll go.”
“The Sea Raider,” she said. “I have seen him. I thought at first that he was another one of Keeper’s visions, but it was him—he is real. He is here, though I do not know where. He ran from me. Again.”
&nbs
p; “How is this possible?” Dorin asked quietly. “How is it that he was ahead of you in Luhr, and now here?”
She gazed again at the image of the Raider. “He is following an ancient path east. This is what the fishperson in Luhr told me he would do. He is tracing the steps of those other murderous Sea Raiders, as I am tracing those of Galha and her Queensfighters.” She lifted a hand but did not touch the stone. “Perhaps if I looked at all these pictures, I would find that their armies stopped here before they reached the river. I do not know. But he is here. I may not have to go to the sea now.” She felt a rush of relief, and then regret; she remembered Nossi’s words, and the map Bienta had given her. “Keeper will not take me to him,” she said after a moment, “even though I tried to tell him why I had to find him.”
Dorin said, “You cannot expect Keeper to understand—”
“It is because he is Bound,” she said, interrupting Dorin. “He has no choice: he must serve everyone who comes here. If he could choose, he might do otherwise.” She smiled at Dorin, though she did not really see him. “I will look for him now. And if I do not find him, I will wait for him—by the fortress gates and in the kitchen and the gardens. He will need to eat.”
“And so must you,” Dorin said, and he took her hand and led her away from the rivers of stone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jaele did not see the Sea Raider again in the days that followed. She walked through the gardens, through all the hallways she knew and many she did not. Often she nearly ran, slowing only to open doors and rip curtains away from windows and peer down shadowed stairways. Sometimes Dorin accompanied her; mostly she was alone.
“You believe me this time,” she said once, looking over her shoulder at him. “You didn’t in Luhr, but you do now. Don’t you? You don’t think I’m mad?”
He shook his head. “Of course not.”
Every night and every morning she went to the library to look at the stone by the door. There were no fresh images cut there as the days passed. “He is still here,” she said to Dorin. “I am sure of it. Keeper would carve his leaving.”
When she did not find him in the palace’s corridors and rooms, she waited for him. She sat in the shadows of the bushes in the kitchen; she stood in the courtyard, watching the double doors that would open into emptiness. She was so still sometimes that her blood became his footsteps, and she ran again, straining toward the sounds that she only later realized had been her own.
She saw Keeper, twice, three times, though always from a distance. She followed him every time, and every time she lost him in the turnings of the corridors or in the mazes of the rooms. She walked and waited and slept too lightly for dreams.
One day, in yet another strange corridor, she thought she heard footsteps on the floor above her. The hallway ended in a door, which she pulled open. She saw a stone staircase winding upward and began to climb, her feet slipping into cavernous indentations. After a few moments she no longer heard the footsteps, but she kept climbing. I have not been here; I should see. . . . The rounded walls were broken by slits of windows, and when she rested, she gazed down at the gardens. She did not look out the windows on the other side; she knew that she would see red sand rolling away unbroken into a haze of sun. When she reached the top of the tower, the sound of her breath echoed around her, and she leaned her head against the cool metal of a massive door.
It opened silently onto a windowless chamber. The only light was from a circular brazier set in the floor; flames streamed along walls and ceiling. She closed her eyes and thought, It is just fire—not torches, not swords. . . . She opened her eyes and stepped hesitantly into the room, and as the fire dazzle left her sight, she went cold. Stone pillars stood in a ring in front of her, and set in each one were bones: skulls and bulging ribs and downturned feet with long wrinkled toes. She looked from one pillar to the next to the next. She shrank beneath the hollow darkness of eye sockets. They were behind her as well, fused into the walls, and she tried to back away from their crooked fingers. Jewels flashed and she saw rings hanging, necklets sagging against spine-circles. She edged around a pillar and found skeletons on the other side too: the Two Princes, polished and grinning.
The sounds were very faint at first. Jaele turned her head and stood frozen. She heard a low pounding, a murmur of footsteps or voices. Too many to be him, she thought as her eyes darted to the rows of slightly parted teeth. The pounding came closer—a stamping up the stairs—and she looked desperately around the chamber before slipping behind the column farthest from the open door.
The feet stopped just outside the entrance to the room. “Open?” asked a low voice, and Jaele pressed her fingertips against her forehead. Bone gleamed beside her. There was silence, then the footsteps drew nearer and halted. They echoed for a moment, endless disappearings into stone darkness. Slowly, barely breathing, Jaele eased her head away from the pillar until she could see.
The One Wife appeared first. Jaele had not seen this one before, but she was similar to the others, tall and dark and seeping sadness. There were men behind her, their eyes lowered, bearing torches. The One Wife’s head was turned to something beside her; Jaele angled her eyes and found Keeper. Cradled against his chest—small and curled as children against its hugeness—were the Two Princes. Jaele drew in her breath with a hiss and Keeper looked up.
She clung to the pillar, thrust her body against the stone despite the arm bone that lay against her own like an oar, she thought desperately—like a bleached yellow piece of wood. She closed her eyes and waited, but no footsteps approached, and the scene did not shift again into emptiness. After a time there was a rushing sound and a high, terrible screaming, and she whimpered because she knew it would not be heard. When there was silence once more, she peered around the column.
A new pillar stood by the door. Jaele’s eyes widened as they met the stare of a Prince set in the stone but still clothed in jewels and tunic and flesh. Firelight seemed to lick his teeth and hair. As she watched, Keeper reached his hands around the column; the One Wife raised her arms, and the red cloth of her dress rippled away from her skin. A sickening flash of light—too bright, dead sand and air at desert noon—and flesh seared in fat sizzling, and now Jaele screamed, layers torn away to the fire, the stench, the sound of Nossi dying.
When the light and her own cries had faded, Jaele looked again at the place where they had stood. They were all gone; only bones and threads and the flashing breath of rings remained. She swallowed and pushed the sweat-curled hair away from her mouth, and before she could think more, remember more, she ran out among the columns and past the still-glowing pillar by the door. The smell clung to her skin. She cried out and flung herself down the dark stairs.
The red corridor was empty. Jaele leaned against a window frame and breathed until she could smell only Keeper’s garden. “Please,” she whimpered, “please—no more fire. No fire. . . .” She watched petals falling, gentle as rain, catching on leaves and grass.
Jaele was screaming. She could see nothing through the blood in her eyes; she was struggling, choking for breath between dream and waking.
Nossi had swum with her beneath the boat. She was laughing, trailing a wide swath of red. Jaele’s father had ripped a piece of cloth from her hand, crying “Never” while her brother clawed at her neck. She had spun into the open wound of the Perona woman. It was purple and wet and lined with teeth that chattered as they tore her flesh. Nossi laughed.
Dorin was shaking her. She saw his eyes in the darkness, and a shape looming behind him, and she put her hands in front of her face. She was sobbing now. He lowered himself down beside her and held her. Her cheek slid damp against his neck, tiny circles as she breathed. When he lifted his hand to wind it in her hair, she made a sound and he lowered it again, pulling her in, in, until she was wrapped against the hard, warm length of him. She heard and felt him humming a gentle song with no words. Her eyes were heavy and sore, but there was nothing behind
them—only black laced lighter as her eyelids fluttered. She fell asleep.
She woke to sun lying across the stone and the edge of her bed. She was quiet and still and, for a time, without memory. When she did remember, it was slowly, in incoherent snatches of water, blood, screaming. She remembered Dorin and turned her head. There was no one, of course, and she thought briefly that she had been wrong. But then she noticed rumpled cloth beside her: his blue tunic, which she had held so firmly that he had slipped out of it rather than pry her fingers open.
“Jaele.” She sat up slowly, despite the sudden surging of her blood. Keeper was standing in the doorway, stooping so that he could see her. “Jaele,” he said again. “Come.”
She stared up at him. “Where?” she asked, her voice small and dry.
“Come,” he said.
She knelt and drew her father’s dagger out of her pack. For a moment she thought that there would be blood—horse, woman, the red of sun and rage—but the blade was clean. Keeper looked at her, at it, and said nothing.
He led her through halls she knew, down stairs she knew. Torchlight and ancient wind and then a space of wings and glass-bound fish. She pulled herself up to stand on the huge table. I will see him from here when he comes. I will be ready. Keeper began to walk away. She cried, “Wait!” but he did not look back at her.
Animals stirred the ivy. She spun round, her hand clenched sweat-slick around the dagger’s hilt. Spun and spun—and then glanced down and saw the Sea Raider leaning against a chimney, gazing up at her.
There was a moment of stillness again, as on her beach, and in the garden. She had expected him this time—but she could not move. She watched him wet his lips with his tongue, watched him swallow and blink. She saw the glint of his eyes—narrowed, hooded—and shivered.
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