He stirred. “No,” he whispered, and the word was hot against her shoulder. “I won’t touch you again, if you wish, but please don’t go.”
She lay quiet. After a moment he pulled a blanket over them both. She was quickly warmed; it had to be his warmth spreading over her, although she could not feel his skin. She followed the flame through the leaves until her stinging eyes closed.
His arm was curled over her when she woke. It was heavy and almost familiar, but she remembered immediately that there would be a dark sourfruit grove. She eased herself onto her back. Serdic sat up beside her and gazed at the still-burning lantern. She knew that he had been lying awake, his arm draped carefully still.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“It’s morning. You won’t be able to feel it, but I can.”
She wanted to lay her fingers against his cheek, or the slender clenched hand by her head; as she had wanted to touch a scar once, in a forest of winter, not red.
“You’ll leave now,” he said, so bleakly that she flinched.
“Yes,” she replied. She did not move, yet, to put on her clothes.
“And I won’t see you again.”
“No more questions that aren’t!” she laughed, almost. “Of course we’ll see each other again. If you want. As long as you don’t. . . .” There was silence, until she went on, “But that’s unfair, of course.” Curse you, Dorin, she thought, as Serdic turned his face away.
She drew on her leggings and tunic and laced her hide boots. While her back was still to him, he said, “It’s not unfair, really. I would much rather see you without touching you, if that’s what’s needed, than not at all. You have been here with me, and now. . . .” He paused. “And now I like you very much.”
She slipped off the pallet and sank into the spongy earth. He reached for his own clothes. When he was ready, they walked back through the trees. They talked: he was probably late; Tylla would be furious; Annial would be unaware that Jaele had been gone; the day was doubtless grey, as usual, maybe snowing. . . .
At the door, the river was very loud. “Stormy,” he cried, and reached for the ring.
She touched his fingers. “I will see you. I promise.” She was not sure if the water had taken her voice, but he nodded before he pushed the door open.
Jaele flung her arms over her eyes. River and sky were searingly white. Serdic held her waist as she reeled. When she finally opened her eyes, she saw snow gusting in a fierce wind, water lashing against the stone. She clung to the wall. He shouted, “I will help!” and they began to creep along the ledge.
“It was the strangest feeling,” she said later to Annial as the old woman hurried about the kitchen, preparing broth. Jaele was wrapped in several blankets, shivering in one of the wall niches. “It was like a storm I was in once in the hills—but this was different. I knew there was a wall, I could feel it and his arm around me; but I couldn’t see anything except the water and the snow. He led me up the stairs after what seemed like forever, and I screamed at him to go back. It’s such a terrible day—no one should be out in it.”
Annial pointed a spoon at her. “And he agreed? My estimation of young Serdic has decreased. He should have escorted you home—particularly because the night which preceded this storm was surely so tender. Yes?”
Jaele shrank into her blankets. “Well. . . .” she said, but Annial was no longer listening. She put a steaming bowl in Jaele’s hands.
“I had only one night with my Queensfighter. The next day he set sail for the Raiders’ Land with several others—young men and women, all. None returned. I sat every day and gazed at the sea, but never was it anything but water and cloud. Hania urged me to seek out another love, but I could not. I have tended you children ever since. Generations of you. And it has pleased me, in its way.”
The storm went on for days, and Jaele watched it—livid, churning waves glimpsed through rents in the snow. On the evening before the clearing, she and Ilario again found each other in the kitchen. “Lucky wench,” he commented, with one eyebrow arched high. “Winter has truly arrived. Now I will be sure not to cast you out upon the cruel, cold streets of Fane.” He coughed, bending his chin into his chest.
“I thank you for your generosity,” she retorted, and he bowed his way from the room with exaggerated flourishes and a grimace of a smile.
Sunshine woke her the next morning. She squinted as she padded to the window, and it was a few moments before she could see. The water was golden, and the sky a brilliant sweep of blue. The boats in the harbour were still and quiet. She thought she saw—far, far out—a plume of spray. Such clarity—and yet there were edges, already, muddy cloud seeping toward the sun.
“Sweetlet,” Annial called as Jaele stepped into the kitchen, “see the miraculous clear! A perfect day for you to go up to the market for some speckled sourfruit. We’ve had none for days, and Ilario is so testy without it.”
“Well,” Jaele began as Annial thrust a basket into her hands, “—well, no. I can’t. I’ll do all the cooking, if you want—and it’s a lovely day for you to go walking. . . .”
The old woman regarded her without blinking. “I see. You are afraid of poor Serdic, who is as generous and kind as any you will meet. Poor Serdic, who is my friend. You are afraid—”
“No!” Jaele cried. “Please stop. I know that he is kind and generous, and I know that he wants to see me, but I can’t—not yet. I can’t explain.” A lie, since it would be so easy to explain revulsion, pity, shame.
“And if he asks after you?” Annial said as she stood by the back door with the basket over her arm. The snow outside was sparkling.
“He won’t,” Jaele said, and Annial pulled the door shut behind her.
“I smell a love story gone awry!” boomed Ilario as he gusted into the kitchen. Jaele winced and sat down. “Tell all,” he continued as he tore off a piece of soft, steaming bread. “Leave nothing out. This is by way of thanking me—woefully late—for my house and victuals.”
Jaele groaned and rubbed her eyes. “I can’t. It’s too base. Although I’m sure you’d appreciate that.”
He chuckled. “Ah, my girl, it’s all so easy to see. I shall humour you, though, by posing questions. You are pining for someone?” She nodded. “And you have recently allowed yourself to be blinded by passion with another?”
She glared at him. “You’ve been listening to Annial and me; I am not impressed.”
He held up an imperious hand. “To continue. This other is simply an inadequate distraction—you now feel remorseful and revolted?” He sat down at the table opposite her. “You need not answer. After all, I speak from long and tawdry experience.”
Jaele laughed ruefully. “A flawless analysis, whether or not you listened at the door. Annial thinks I’m cruel.”
“Mmm,” Ilario responded. “And so you may be. But remember that, to her, the love of one good man is sacred. She who spent her young life and old pining for a fisherman who perished on high seas.”
There was a moment of silence, which Ilario broke. His voice was now quite soft. “You, of course, think that she loved a Queensfighter who died on an ill-fated expedition to the Raiders’ Land. A gentlemanly, handsome fellow on a horse who no doubt recited poetry. And perhaps Ellrac the fisher was these things.”
“So,” Jaele said, after a time, “there was no expedition to the Raiders’ Land?”
“Oh yes—there was one, during Annial’s girlhood. The Raiders had been driving at the coast, sometimes killing, mostly stealing livestock. A band of Queensfighters set off in pursuit and never returned. Strangely, though, the Raiders did not return either.”
“Yes,” Jaele said quickly, “they did.”
She felt Ilario looking at her. He said, “Perhaps—but never here.” He stood then, and stretched his long arms above his head. “It is now time for my daily skulk. I am disappointed that I seem to have done more storytelling than y
ou have, but one can always hope.”
“Ilario,” Jaele said, and he lingered in the doorway. “There’s nothing wrong with fishermen.”
“My girl, my girl,” he replied, rolling his eyes, “I never suggested there was. You must not be so tender. As I’ve always said, the tender parts are inevitably eaten.”
Jaele went out as well. She walked through Fane, over ice and snow that crackled loudly enough to fill her ears. When she returned to the house, the kitchen was warm with firelight and Annial was preparing dinner.
Jaele sat in one of the wall nooks and watched her. The old woman was silent, her back rigidly turned. A pile of speckled sourfruit gleamed in the basket by the door.
“It’s strange not to hear you singing,” Jaele said after a time. Annial did not reply. “I love it when you sing: you have such a young—”
“You were right,” Annial interrupted. “He did not ask for you. Not in words.” She swept a pile of vegetables off the counter and into a pot. “But in his eyes, my girl, and in the lovely lines of his face, you could see yearning, plain as plain. Yearning that will become sorrow. He spoke not a word about you, but it was all I heard.”
“Annial, please,” Jaele said, and her voice trembled. “I am not as good, as true, as you are.”
“Well, I don’t understand it. You and Ilario are the last, and neither of you gives me anything but heartache. I have seen generations, and now I have only heartache.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jaele woke to an insistent knocking. “Awake, sluggard girl!” Ilario cried from behind her door. “Awake and come with me!”
She groaned and stretched until her skin ached. “When have you ever requested my presence?” she called, and heard his chuckle.
“A rare opportunity indeed! I will await you by the front door.”
By the time she had dressed and descended, he was standing outside, gazing at the harbour with his hands clasped behind his back. She stood beside him.
“Peer out toward the ocean,” he said without looking at her, “and listen. Above all, listen.”
Jaele stared past the ragged boats to the white-streaked cliffs that encircled the water. “What am I looking for?” she asked after a moment.
“Addle-head!” Ilario hissed. “Not looking. Listening.”
“But—” Jaele protested, and Ilario held up an imperious hand.
“Stop prattling. Listen.”
At first she heard only waves and wood and the distant keening of birds. Ilario was very still beside her. She was about to say that she had not imagined he could be so tranquil when she heard the sound. It was a humming; it began gently, barely touching the bottoms of her feet. Within minutes she could feel it in her teeth, on her tongue, the lids of her eyes—but still the harbour mouth lay empty. She glanced along the wharf and saw that it was thronged with people. An infant wailed. Beside Jaele, a man with burnt-leather skin smiled toothlessly and squinted at the open sea.
The next sounds were so close together that they were almost one: splintering, groaning, creaking; high, sweet notes that sang clear above the rest. As Jaele shrank from the clamour, she saw a twisted spire of ice moving slowly behind the cliff. She clenched her fists; there was something terrible about its size, its grace and crashing song. Ilario sighed.
She saw the icemount more clearly when it glided to rest at the mouth of the harbour. Under the sunless grey sky it was pale green, almost transparent, and it glittered slightly—drawing light from where?—as it turned gently around. Its sides were toothed and massive, curving and sheer; arches leapt toward the air; bubbles breathed and died within frozen cascades. The icemount roared, and waves surged against the wharf. Jaele felt the water on her feet and legs, so cold that she stood on nothing; but she did not look down.
When there was silence at last—the waves pounding, beating, lapping—she heard other icemounts. Their calls were still distant, but the humming ran like an earth tremor beneath stone and ocean. Jaele imagined fish darting in fear, seagreen fronds straining away from the rumble which would send cracks lancing along the harbour floor.
People began to move back among the tattered buildings. “But,” Jaele said, looking at Ilario, “there are more coming! Listen!”
He arched an eyebrow at her as he too turned away. “Now you urge me to listen? Yes, more will arrive soon, and over the next many days, but it is the first that draws us.” He opened the door and gestured her inside. “You also will hardly notice them.”
Days later, Jaele was still noticing them. She woke each morning to a new vista of peaks, and the sun—when it shone—glanced off ice of green, blue, lightest pink. The icemounts crowded the harbour and jutted out past the cliffs. She watched them for hours as they turned, their spires and buttresses shifting almost imperceptibly.
She also huddled in her cloak on the dock, for it was only outside that the notes and clangings could be easily heard. Sometimes there was long silence, when even the waves and timbers were still; sometimes there was crooning or sudden, deafening thunder. Jaele sat shivering and remembered that her father had said “low, sad place,” and she longed to tell him of colours and singing.
She was sitting at the round table in the front room, tracing a vine-like sweep of words, when there was a knock on the kitchen door. She continued trying to read, and the knock came again.
“Annial?” Jaele called as she rose. There was no reply, and the old woman was not in the kitchen. Jaele pulled open the door. “Serdic.” She spoke before he could; the word sprang away from her in a tiny, disappearing breath of happiness.
He was damp with snow, and his hair clung to the slender white of his neck. In his hands was a clay bowl full of gleaming scarlet leaves. Jaele looked at this only briefly (already recoiling) and said, “Come in, please—you’re so wet—it’s snowing.”
He stood by a counter. Jaele stood by the door, her back against one of the round windows. His bowl made a gentle sound when he set it down. She stared at the rise and fall of the bump in his throat.
“I knew you wouldn’t come back.” The bump a small thing, struggling in skin. “I have been sad, which is strange, since I hardly know you. I thought that if I saw you, I could ask. . . .”
She looked away, down at a basket of dried fish. Salt lay like unmelted snow among the scales.
“You can’t even look at me.” He laughed breathlessly. “And I thought I would come here and ask you to travel with me to my home. Just for a time. To see how much more beautiful the icemounts are there, and to help you forget—at least until the spring.”
She raised her eyes and said, “I can’t, Serdic.” They looked at each other steadily. He walked around the counter toward her until her head was tilted up toward his face. No, she thought, it must be passion always, even rage.
Serdic closed the door quietly; only when she felt a cold brush of air, then returned warmth, was she sure he had gone. She went to the counter and cupped her hands around the earthen bowl. The leaves were glistening, slightly curled at the edges. She sank her fingers into them, and the wet-sweet scent that rose made her wince.
Jaele went up to her room. She lay on her stomach and followed the wind-carved ridges of desert. Felt an aching emptiness where before there had been a pulse of anger, blood smeared dark across a forehead, moving skin, seagreen hair. Breath and spires in candle glow.
The next day the leaves from the sourfruit tree lay like ashes in the bowl. They smudged her fingers with black; she wiped them clean and retreated to a corner of the kitchen.
It was very early. She had hardly slept; had watched the sky instead, as it spun stars then cloud then almost-dawn slate. Once or twice the icemounts called: a note, two, a quiet shifting creak. No thoughts, after the first grappling with memory. Only a hollowness beneath her ribs.
Her fire shivered as she stood and drew on her clothes. Iben-sight led her along the hallway. Once down the stairs, she blinked, and her
own vision took her on in grey, to the kitchen.
“So you’re awake,” Annial said later, when she entered and saw Jaele in the corner. Now the light was clearer, tinged with pink. Annial picked up Serdic’s bowl; she opened the door and tossed the ashes away.
“Does Ilario go to the same place every day?” Jaele wanted to know, wanted Annial to smile and answer and chatter about wine and Hania.
“I’ve no idea,” the old woman replied. After a moment she added, “I do not think so. His search may take him near and far. As Hania used to say, the most heartbroken searches lead you away from the hearth and back again.”
Jaele almost smiled. “Thank you, Annial,” she said.
“Mmm,” Annial muttered.
When Ilario left the house that morning, Jaele followed. She walked silently behind him, though she knew she should have called out, should have hurried to walk with him. She watched him through lightly falling snow, saw him pull his hood over his face as he strode along the wharf. At first there were a few people between them, gazing at the icemounts, but after he stepped from the wharf’s edge to the cliff path, there was no one. Jaele hesitated, then turned back to the harbour. The icemounts circled and hummed. She saw her window below the steep tiled roof of Ilario’s house.
When she looked for him again, he had disappeared around the cliff face. She ventured onto the path, which was ridged and crusted snow. Clenching her fists, she went quickly after him.
The path bent gradually up, clinging to the jagged stone. It was wide enough for two people to walk side by side, but she pressed her body against the rock and stared at her boots. She heard water and ice and sudden bird cries—and, somewhere ahead, Ilario’s feet and the cracking of his cloak in the wind. She glanced up once there was a green-white flashing of waves on rock. She huddled for a moment against the cliff.
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