A Telling of Stars

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

“Jaele,” Nossi said urgently, one hand on the door. As Jaele moved forward and tried once more to speak, Nossi quivered like water and was gone.

  “No!” Jaele cried, and her body snapped as if waking, and she blinked at her own hands on the wood. “Nossi,” she whispered, and because she had begun to tremble again, she pushed at the door and looked into the chamber.

  The wind was roaring, battering at the coloured dome which now only dribbled thin red-blue. Fire crackled: the wood in the brazier before the thrones was burning. Scented smoke rose in violet clouds and wreathed the Two Princes who stood above. They seemed very tall, and Jaele squinted against the blaze of colour that was their jewels and bronze. Between them was the One Wife, was tiny before the clawing black thrones. Her head was raised, but her eyes were wide with fear, and Jaele looked to the front of the dais and knew with a sudden savage joy what she would see.

  Maruuc was there, kneeling with his hands chained behind him. Blood beaded his wrists and fingers, and his naked back was patterned dark and glistening. Jaele could not see his face, which was turned up. She supposed he was looking at the One Wife, steadily and maybe smiling.

  “Maruuc,” one of the Princes cried, his voice wavering above the wind, “it is only because we”

  “have need of you,” the other continued, “that we will not kill you. You are”

  “mighty in battle, and possess knowledge of rain and growing that is necessary to”

  “our survival. But bear in mind that if we could, we would”

  “crush you and throw your bones to the sand lizards. Therefore we have ordered your Binding with this collar of your own fashioning.”

  The Two Princes turned to the woman and waited. Slowly, still gazing at Maruuc, she lifted the black ring in both hands until it shone empty in the air between them.

  “You will be Bound. You will hold one end of the ring, and the”

  “One Wife will hold the other, and when it is done, she will be sent into the desert at noon in”

  “garments of black, and she will wander and be picked clean by wind and sand and”

  “teeth. But you will serve us and our sons and our long line until it is no more, and even then you will live and serve”

  “any man or woman who enters this place, and you will live for all passings in your gardens and your empty rooms.”

  They were smiling. Jaele saw their teeth through the smoke and thought of the tower room and the yellow bone. Together the men grasped the One Wife’s arms and lowered her to the floor beside Maruuc. Together they said “Rise,” and he did, laboriously, so that the writings on his back twisted open like mouths. “The chains,” they said, and she drew a key from her dress and fitted it, shaking, to his wrist chains, which fell to the floor in thunder above the wind.

  “Do not try”

  “to run, man of no name, or we will kill her now, before your eyes”—and the lovers stood together, very still, each holding one end of the neckring.

  “You have forged well, at our command, and the metal is still living. It will”

  “squirm like a snake when it is placed around your neck, and you will both pull it until the Binding is complete. You, beast-woman, will place it there now.” And, when she did not move, “Now.”

  It was like a fever, Jaele thought later: Nossi and the smoke and wind, the chamber that tipped in the heat, this scene for which she had longed. She raised a hand, infinitely slowly, and looked at it, watched its fingers bending back and forth at some command in her head that she could not remember giving. She looked again at the people who seemed too far away: Maruuc and the One Wife in front of the thrones, Nossi and Aldreth on their horses, her parents and brother on the sand. Keeper would serve, he would cut them down at her word—and the One Wife was drawing the ring around his bent head while the Two Princes laughed and cried “Now!” and Jaele screamed “No, Maruuc, Maruuc!” and ran toward them all.

  She saw the woman’s eyelashes clumped dark and wet, and the raw edges of Maruuc’s wounds. They were looking at her, and for a moment everyone was motionless. In that moment her own fingers strained for the writhing band and fastened on it. There was a sound, above the wind—a jagged crash, a first splintering—but she knew only that the hot metal was scalding her skin and that she must hold on.

  “No,” she whimpered, and pulled the ring away from the One Wife. With her other hand she clawed at Maruuc’s neck, where the collar had already sunk into his flesh. He cried out once, and then Keeper was there beside them, reaching for them and bellowing until Jaele could hear nothing else and see nothing except the cavern of his throat.

  “It’s too late!” she screamed as he towered. “I’ve touched it, I’ve stopped it, and you let me do it!” Maruuc was weeping and looking beyond her at the One Wife. “You let me do it, Maruuc—you are Unbound.” And then he had her. He raised her lashing and she looked into his face, and he cried “Never!” and the word was hot wind against her cheeks. The sound of crumbling grew louder and she was liquid with fear, but just before he let her fall and the world broke apart, he tipped his face and she saw his eyes.

  When she raised her head from the floor, they were all gone. As she lay still, the dome above her shattered and the wind caught red and blue glass and spun it like snow. Crimson stone began to fall, ripping in boulder pieces from the walls, and she rose and ran as they crumpled the ground and the thrones and the wood, which was grey. She ran, and the gardens and rooms bled together. She ran through a rain of blossoms that turned to ash before they settled on the earth; through an underground hallway, past rooms stacked with tipping jugs and crashing metal; through leaves shrivelling and dust. She ran along a darkening garden path, past birds swallowed by crumbling fountains, water spilled and drying to sand. She ran by her own room, where glass vials sang and flagstones gaped. Through a vast chamber: ivy stripped away and glass broken, fish drowning in air. People—thousands of them, on every path and in every hallway—cried out and fell suddenly, finally silent. She too cried out as she saw their colours die against the stone. At the last, before she ran out the double doors into the desert, she saw Keeper in the library, hacking into the stone by the door an image of a girl and an unbound man and the end of all things.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Run!” cried Dorin. He was beside her, bending low to the ground and shielding his face with his arms; she saw him briefly before red dust howled into her eyes and mouth. He pulled her to her feet and they stumbled into the wind while the earth around them buckled and the palace spat rock at the black-red sky. There was a wailing—not wind, not Jaele—and she looked back as they slithered away.

  “Dorin!” she cried, and lunged for him. He turned and they stood for a moment, trembling against one another, watching the storm advance.

  An undulating column of darkness stretched from earth to sky. It moved in devouring circles toward the palace, which already lay like broken bones on the sand. The wailing grew so high that the inside of Jaele’s head flamed deaf-white and her own voice burned her throat but was lost. Sand rose in sheets above their heads and the shadow fell over them until the light was underwater-ghostly. Dorin grasped her wrists and mouthed “Down,” and they plunged to their stomachs.

  There was grit in her mouth, on her lips, rough between lashes and lids. She felt Dorin’s arm across her back and was safe—enough air beneath the living sand, numb darkness, and this weight of him. They lay together in the shrieking, lashing wind until the column spun its way around them and faded.

  Jaele did not remember falling asleep, but when she lifted her head and rubbed her clogged eyes open, it was day. She sat up and squinted into the sunlight. After a moment she saw Dorin standing atop the dune hill. She rose and went toward him, her feet slipping along the sand as they had when she was a child. He did not turn, though he must have heard her. He was smiling slightly.

  “I assume you have accomplished this, somehow,” he said, and swe
pt his arm before him. “There’s nothing left, Jaele, not even a rock. Just look.”

  The sand was smooth, rolling softly in places, unbroken by stones. It stretched out before them like an empty sea: no gates, no gardens, no Maruuc striding across the sand to her. Jaele felt her throat close and open over tears—old tears of bitterness, sorrow, anger. She remembered the earth silga and thought, I freed Keeper, yet he is not with me. He will not serve. Unbound and gone; another who will not be beside me to the ocean. My dagger gone as well, and my father’s cloak, my seagreen bag—and new tears rose and trembled in her eyes.

  She shifted slightly and felt something against her skin, metal snagged on the underside of her tunic. “Dorin,” she said, “wait—look,” and she drew the twisted black of Keeper’s neckring from where it had caught in the cloth he had stitched for her. Dorin did not touch it when she held it out to him. She looked at her hand—at the place where the metal had burned—but it, like the sand, was unmarked. Then she remembered Keeper’s plants and red stone, and his birds and fish; she saw these images vividly, clearly, without the thread of her own pains beneath. She looked at the smooth, quiet sand and almost smiled over the regret that remained, like a song of insects or water.

  “He looked at me,” she said softly, “at the end—he lifted me. He is Unbound, as he wanted to be.” She swallowed and said, “I know it was right. I know.” The neckring lay open, broken, in her palm.

  Dorin said, “I don’t see your Raider—he must not have escaped in time. A neat finish: revenge and Unbinding at once.”

  She shook her head. “No. The Raider did escape—he left the night before . . . this. I saw the new image in the library. I tried to find you, afterward. He has gone on. East.” And so must we, she thought but did not say.

  Dorin gazed at her so long and steadily that she turned away. When he walked back down the slope, she stood for a moment, blinking and biting her lip. Then she tucked the neckring into her pouch and followed him to where the shapes of their bodies had already trickled away. He was standing above a large bundle. Before she had decided to speak, he said, “Provisions. Water and food. Should be enough for both of us.”

  “Water and food?” She cleared her throat. “How did you get this? Or were you intending to leave alone last night? To leave alone.” She heard her laugh and its sharpness. He stared at a point above her head.

  After a time he slung the pack over his back and began to walk away from the place where the Palace of the Two had been. East, she noticed, and wondered at this. Then she looked at the sand and the red rocks and the pulsing sun, and she cried, “Dorin—wait. We will not see that . . . other place?” The place she had not allowed herself to think about since her dizzy, fevered walk away from the palace.

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. “The battlefield?” he asked, though it was not truly a question. “No. The storm may have cleaned it all away, in any case—though if you want to. . . .”

  There would not be wagon tracks or hoofprints; even the bones might be stripped bare and scattered. Rocks and dunes, shaped, reshaped, burying a palace and a place where blood, words, loves had fallen. “No,” she said. She walked over to him and they continued on together. She did not turn back to see the melting footprints they had made beneath the cloudless space of sky.

  That night the stars were white and blue, and the moon was so large that Jaele could see its lines, dark jagged threads weaving across the light. Dorin drew wood and flint from his pack and she snorted. “You had everything planned, didn’t you? A perfect escape.” He rose and reached again into the pack. He threw something and she caught it before she realized her hands had moved.

  She knew the material as soon as her fingers closed around it: seagreen bag, folds of cloth within. Colours she could see in the night air, and a smell—almost a taste—of home. Iben slate and earth as well; Alilan fires and horses. She fumbled with her father’s cloth and there was a brief glint and the dull sound of a shape hitting sand. The jewels of her dagger shone, and the blade curved gently silver.

  She sat down heavily and stared at Dorin’s fire-rippled face. “You weren’t going to leave alone,” she said at last into the silence. “You were going to ask me to come with you. You wanted us to leave together.”

  “And that’s what we are,” he said, snapping a twig in his fingers and tossing it into the flames. “Together. Though I was not intending for us to leave with such drama. You’re just lucky that the wood I took didn’t disappear like the rest of it.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were—”

  “You know nothing,” he interrupted, and he raised his eyes to hers across the firelight. “Nothing.” The silence returned, thick beneath the crackling wood.

  She woke in pink light to his hand on her shoulder. She was briefly confused and thought, We mustn’t wake Serani. Then she shook her head and her eyes opened, and she took the hand he was holding out to her. “Come,” he said, and smiled a shadow of his smile, “let’s run now, when it’s not too hot.”

  He leapt away before she did, but soon she was past him, feeling her body draw up and harden into strength she had forgotten. They ran beneath the ghost lines of the moon, and as they did, the sun appeared, a scarlet band above the flat. When they reached the top of a dune, he caught at her ankle and she fell with a shriek. They tumbled, twined together now, and when sky and earth had tilted into place again, she looked down at him. His face was pressed against her, just below her breasts, and she could not see it—only his hair and the brown of his neck. His arms were around her hips, locked behind her thighs. She lifted a hand and touched his hair so that the sand fell out of it like rain. She felt some of this sand beneath her fingernails and closed her eyes.

  He eased himself up along the edges of her body, which trembled, a bit. She could feel his breath, and hear it, but she kept her eyes shut. Only when his lips brushed hers did she open them. He was so close that he seemed blurred, skin and eyes and mouth large as if seen through glass. She smiled and reached up, and his mouth opened under hers with a taste of warmth and strangeness. For a moment she remembered Aldreth—vivid as crimson sun or the path of a scar—but Dorin’s arms tightened and she wrapped her legs around him and forgot.

  He slid his mouth down her neck, biting and kissing and tickling until she laughed and he raised his head and laughed and they rolled each other over and over in the sand. She tugged at his tunic and he at hers, and she arched her naked skin against the warming golden sunlight and his hands. She lowered herself until he was inside her, and he dug his fingers white-nailed into her hips and lay very still. She held his face between her hands and looked, looked, even when she began to move so quickly that the lines of him dissolved. She saw his mouth go wide; she saw the muscles of his stomach and chest clench when he groaned. Then he pulled her down, and at the last she saw his smile and they both shouted and laughed and lay twisted together until the sweat dried on their bodies.

  They went back slowly, stumbling and giggling and pushing each other into the sand, clothing trailing behind them like ragged tail feathers. Jaele touched him as they walked—shoulder blades and knuckles and knobbled backbone. He stopped once and drew her to him. He curled his hand around the shell that hung against the hollow of her neck, and said, “Still.” She nodded and replied, “Of course,” and they clung to one another but did not speak of that place above the leaves. He sang and whirled her and she threw her head back and saw the sky, which was streaked spinning white. She saw the sky and Dorin and her own strong brown skin, and there was such a pain, pushing at her chest until she felt as if it should be bleeding.

  BOOK TWO

  SHONYN

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The sun was shining on the river, and on the trees that lined the opposite bank. The leaves were silver; they gleamed and flashed in the light and hung low over the water so that the tips touched their own reflections, sometimes with a ripple of wind. The trees’ bark w
as dark, almost black, and seemed unusually smooth. Amid the silver, and bending the branches, was the fruit: blue globes which, when sliced open, revealed handfuls of black seeds and thick juice that would stream over hands and down arms like veins or the tracings of a river delta.

  That was the other side of the river: silver rustling and ripeness and tall shoots of green that were very bright against the black of bark. This side of the river was different. No trees grew here—only small grain plants that had been coaxed from the damp earth beside the water. The ground was the dusty gold of desert fringe; the houses rose like rounded red hillocks of sun-baked river mud and brittle grasses. Flatboats lay pulled up onto the bank; they were dry, in the blinding daylight, but at dusk they would be poled out over the water, toward the blue fruit that hung ready each evening for cutting or bobbed, already fallen. For now the river was empty except for leaves and occasional wind-driven glimpses of cloud.

  There was a deep silence; only, once or twice, a sound like sighing from the trees on the opposite bank, and gentle water on the earth. Jaele was alone, breathing as slowly as sleep. All of the villagers were inside their clay houses; in late afternoon they would stir and stretch and emerge to greet each other. They were large, solid people, dark as wet ground but with a sheen of blue that came from ages spent harvesting and opening the fruit they named “lynanyn.” Themselves they named “shonyn,” and as Jaele began to learn their language, she discovered that this meant “fruit of moment.”

  She and Dorin had arrived at the shonyn village exhausted, without food or water; these they had finished, although they had been careful to eat and drink only as much as was necessary. They had not expected the desert to go on as it had, limitless, blazing each day under a sky that held only dry white clouds. She had looked ahead for a mound of stones that could have been a well, but there was just an empty and unchanging sweep of sand. Her map remained in her pouch. We are already lost, she thought, remembering the formless red brush strokes of desert. The Sea Raider had been a day ahead—and now? They walked east, though they did not speak of this; east, though this was not as important as it had been.