Later that day she came to a jumble of massive boulders, with the shadow of a hole beneath them. She did not hesitate.
You know that darkness is slow and weak, for us. Our prison. Their voices seem clogged with earth.
Wait—it is not what you think. Listen.
Her iben-sight showed her a broad sloping path free of stones. The walls were high; the roof far above was veined with silver. Ten people could have walked beside her. She knew that if she spoke, her words would leap and return and leap and return.
The path curved down and around so gently that she was surprised when she looked back and found the entrance gone. She touched the walls, almost expecting them to be damp, but they were coarse and crumbling; her fingers smelled of ash. The air was strangely grey, not completely dark, as she had anticipated. Down and around, her footsteps muffled, her ribs echoing heart.
After a time she came to a sharper bend, and saw the reflected shimmer of light beyond it. She stopped and stared. There was no sound—but her feet stuck. Such fear, humming in the silence.
She closed her eyes and stepped around the corner. Halted immediately as light bathed her eyelids and iben-sight receded. Then she looked, moved forward, saw.
It was a river-chiselled cavern, streaming with water and sunlight. Rain on the river, gold on the river, dazzled, dappled motion like music which washed her eyes with tears. But no. No, no—and she dropped to her knees, looking down at the dry bed and up at the rock roof etched with holes. Long slender holes like ripples; tiny clustered holes like rain; large round holes like suns, moons. Others—small, scattered, perhaps random, perhaps constellations.
They have laboured, they have made this place so beautiful it is real, it is sacred.
She covered her eyes and wept. Cracks, ribbon-thin at the stone garden, lanced wide. I am sorry—so sorry—I have failed you all, I did not run at their backs so that they faltered, I did not run after him, not fast enough—and now I cry in this place that is theirs.
When she opened her eyes, she was lying on her back. Light and rain eddied over her skin. Sun edged to silver and stars spun; she was tossed among them like driftwood. She knew these stars—or maybe time was folding. She heard the river, and dreamed.
It is deep green. Somehow everything is green, soft, laden with water. Vines and blossoms brush the river, which foams and sings and whittles at the rock. Whittles and surges, rises from the earth in spray and flows down to pools, down to jugs, down to mouths, down to the sea. Children with the hands and feet of seabirds follow the river, singing and breathing and stretching older, liquid green. They walk as well, and speak with sounds like ground pebbles, and they gather and cut wood into boats for carrying food, fresh water, strange, unimaginable things borne back from beyond the pools and flowers. The ocean is wider than the river; the ocean is forever. Their voices clamour, more and more above, and only the children follow the river. They sink to the silence of their blood, lie still among thick creepers and coiled trunks until night darkens the water. They lie still because this will be memory later, in a desert. Memory that will keen in the webbed hands that carve or kill. But now the green—deeply green
She was awake and running, her cries wrapped around her in wind. Something following her—pebble voices, the shadow of a boy—as she fled over broken earth, over sand, over sodden jungle leaves. Stars burned through the dust as she ran, and the Raiders’ Land lay gilded and stark, though she did not see it. She saw nothing—not even the webbed footprints, not the stone that caught her foot and sent her sprawling. Her eyes closed again, though not in green-drenched sleep.
Silence woke her. Wind and distant water were still, and she sat up, frowning and uncertain. A moment later she remembered: fossils, a frozen garden, a lake and a light-filled riverbed. She rose and saw the garden far behind her, and the black-toothed hills behind it.
She walked toward the vines and blossoms and the almost-finished lake. The silence all around her; she heard only her own breath and the thud of her feet, and they were someone else’s. She was beyond empty, beyond the numbness of her arrival: she was apart, away, nowhere. Absent in a wide and barren place.
As she drew nearer to the carvings, she finally saw the footprints. For a few paces she watched her own feet scuffing them, scattering them back to formless dust. Then she stopped and knelt, her fingers reaching out to follow the lines of webs and flesh and bone. She lifted her eyes and traced the steps until she could not see them. Then she looked at the garden and saw him sitting against the stone.
Her dagger slid smoothly out. She held it before her as she rose and walked on, her feet in the marks of his. Closer, as the wind began to blow; closer, as he sat and did not move. At first she thought his stillness must be sleep, and her steps quickened. Closer—she saw ragged cloth, paleness of legs and arms; she saw blood on his face and she saw his eyes, open and raised to hers.
She stood above him. Blood on his hollow cheeks, on his arms, his hands. His skin oozing, cracked, the webs between his fingers hanging jagged and torn. His lips drawn blistered over blackened teeth. There was a smell—rotten leaves, wet before crumbling. His chest heaved with shallow, moist, grating breaths. His eyes were wide and unblinking and golden brown.
She stood above him with her father’s dagger in her hand and her mother’s brooch at her throat. His eyes moved to the brooch and back to her face. She remembered him on her beach, in Keeper’s palace, across the shonyn river. Remembered him ahead of her, behind her, shaping and wounding. And now here. She gazed down on him and saw his helplessness and knew that the dagger would not be enough.
She sat, watching his eyes. When she untied the neck of the fishfolk bag, she saw him flinch (widening cracks, new blood) and blink once, slowly. Water flowed from the bag into her mouth, down her face, along her arms; it beaded on her skin and hissed away to nothing on the ground. She drank, and still she watched him. His eyes, which burned as she had known they would; his lips drawn up in a silent snarl.
After she had drunk, she sat with her dagger balanced atop her crossed legs. Light faded, and they were both sunk in the garden’s shadow—but she could see the white glint of his eyes, the black weeping of his skin. She held herself very straight and did not sleep. When the darkness began to thin, she lifted the dagger from her lap and rose.
He watched her stand. Then he moved: his right hand and arm groped along the earth behind him. She clenched her muscles, bunched them ready and aching. He dragged his hand back again and she saw a knife. His knife, longer than hers, blade curved and notched. He held his knife up to her, hilt first, trembling.
Her mother’s throat as it gaped; her mother’s eyes. Blood like rivers snaking to the sea. This blade. She watched her own white fingers reaching, taking it in her hand so that she was holding two daggers. He gazed at her and did not blink.
She took a stumbling step back, then another. For a moment she could not see him: saw instead her father’s hands, upturned, outstretched, empty. A throat splintering beneath her own dagger as horses reared against desert sky and torchfire, as her eyes and flesh blazed red. The earth was hard with stones; she did not remember sitting. One dagger lay on either side of her. Her hands were wet and she looked down. Sweat, not blood. A breath came swift with relief. Not blood.
She looked at him and he at her, across a space of shifting dust. The sky darkened until he was a featureless shape against the vines. Her breathing was as loud as his, as loud as Ilario’s. Blood and bones, plucking at skin. Ilario sitting against the wall beneath her window, snow so thick behind him that she could not see the sky.
Voices muttered and she almost recognized them. I like those stories . . . I ran, I hid . . . Maybe you discover, maybe not . . . But there weren’t many of them . . . Comforted? Do you think it will be that easy, Jaele? . . . They began to sicken, for the water they had brought with them was gone . . . In her heart was desert and blood . . . Perhaps it is only a story. . . .
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nbsp; When she woke at sallow dawn, he was slumped to one side with his head resting on a rounded stone fruit. His eyes were closed. She leaned forward and heard his breathing, quieter now, and saw that his chest barely lifted. Fresh blood seeped from the cracks in his flesh and wound slowly down, into the dust.
He did not move when she rose. She stood for a moment; then she left her bundle, the fishfolk bag, the daggers, and walked. She walked to the foot of the hill and drank black water from a puddle, and she was surprised that it did not dissolve in her mouth like jungle fungus, yellow with its own dust. She bent her head and drank from the pool without reflection or ripple. The water was thick and salty, and she retched before she drank again.
He was lying twisted on his back when she returned to the garden. His eyes were still closed. She went to the far end of the carving and drew her fingers along the edges of vine and blossom, along the foaming crests of waves on the stone lake beside. This beauty that is theirs, she thought—and then, like breath after deep water, she did see. The Raiders in their ragged animal skins: tattered, frightened men and women who had thrown their own leader’s body into the fire. The fear in the eyes of the one who had held her mother—the man who had not wanted to kill her mother. The man who had run into forest, into red stone corridors and ivy; the man who had swum rather than use his dagger again.
A shocking new pain held her still. Faces, motions, were changed. Memory was changed. She closed her eyes, wrapped herself in breath and the winding, shifting colours of before and now. Willingly, as the pain spread like flame or ivy beneath her skin.
When she opened her eyes, she saw stars. She walked to the black pool to drink again, then returned for the last time to the garden. She sat beside him through a night that seemed to deepen and deepen. She spun in darkness, holding to the thread of his breathing. An ocean of darkness, endless and cold. The black salt water rose again in her throat. Then light seeped, sluggish as his blood, and smoothed at the stars until they vanished into ash.
When she touched the jutting bone of his shoulder, his eyes fluttered open. Golden brown, burning with thirst and death. She raised the fishfolk bag so that he could see it; she watched his eyes focus and widen. She took a long swallow of water and closed her own eyes against tears. Then she held the bag out to him.
Dust eddied in the scalding wind. His lank hair stirred against the ground, leaving lines as delicate as the imprints of fins in rock. She still watched his eyes, his face; she knew what he had decided before she saw his nod.
Although she only touched him gently, behind his head, his skin chipped like bark beneath her fingers. She felt a rush of hot blood, and the fishfolk bag shook in her hand. She cupped his head and angled the mouth of the bag toward his.
Water fell, clear and light. His blistered lips glistened. He swallowed, swallowed again, and raised his eyes to the sky. His chest lifted in one deep clean breath. For a moment she thought that the fishfolk water might be different, that there would be another breath, and another. But there was one, only. His head eased back into her hand and she laid it carefully down against the earth.
Later, as the sky began once more to darken, she straightened his limbs and pressed his eyelids closed. She walked to the lake and shivered into sleep beside the frozen waves. She woke in daylight and looked down at him. His body was already crumbling, it edges sifting away over the dry, bloodied ground.
She knelt beside her bundle and laid its contents out before her, as she had done on the dock, the night Annial’s hairpins had fallen shining to the carpet. Jaele looked at the stones, the map, the broken neckring. She had seen the faces of the Sea Raiders and found them changed; now she saw other faces. Murtha’s.
Murtha, who did not want revenge. Not against the tree silga, not against the Sea Raiders, of whom he probably knew nothing. Bienta—he gave me an ancient map and I looked only at my own path. You—you sang to me and I felt only bitterness, even when you gave me your gift of light in dark places. And Keeper. Keeper Told me his life, and I saw only his towering servitude—except for that moment when he showed me his eyes and I knew my own smallness. And then, briefly, when I looked at the sand where the palace had been. But only briefly, and soon forgotten. So much forgotten. And so much running. Flying through these lives, when perhaps it was they who lit, so fleetingly, in mine?
Aldreth and Nossi, skinny Alin and grandmother Alna. Serani and Bienta. Saalless and Lallan. Ilario and Annial, Serdic and Tylla. The Perona woman. And him, his people—people of blood and ragged skins, vanished green and water. I remembered all of them then. Remembered them as I could not, before this place, and wept.
When I had no more tears, I looked inland. I saw nothing, of course. No distant huts, no webbed prints in the dust, no raging red behind my eyes. I could have walked on, past the place where he lay. I had come so far to seek among these stones.
“There is choice for you, child.” Grandmother Alna’s words, and tears in the creases of her face—and I had kissed her, grasped my dagger, leapt down the wagon steps. My choice to kill a Perona woman? To look for a desert battlefield and then turn back? To run through a jungle? My choice—now, only now. A knot unbound, and a tender aching place beneath.
Jaele put the stones and map back in her pouch. The twisted neckring she left on the ground beside him. Then she picked up the two daggers and walked. Away from the stone garden and past the fossils, up and over the hill with its thick black water. Through blowing ash to the shale at the edge of the ocean.
Fog rose from the water into the dun sky, into her face as she stood on a tumble of boulders. Waves soaked her and sucked at her feet, but she stood firmly, even when she drew back her arms. She threw her father’s dagger and the Sea Raider’s and they flew. Her vision bloomed briefly outward like blood in the tide, staining, spreading again to clear. After a moment she dove out beyond the rocks. She swam in long, steady strokes, westward and away.
RETURN
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
My companion sea snake was waiting for me, circling in the dead water, twining among the bones of the ships. It carried me again, and there were stars everywhere, in the sky and in the water. We did not dive. I thought: I understand—it is a different journey now.
There was a storm, after the first calm, conscious night. Jaele clung to the sea snake’s familiar ridges, numb with cold and weariness. Waves pitched, rose black against the sky, screamed down upon them with such force that her nerves died. Lightning split, horizontal and red.
Ah—remember when you came to us, time ago. There was skylight above, and Llana fled and found you among the stones. You were small and crumpled.
She was withered, empty, battered by water and noise; she clung to the scales with hands she could not feel. Only when the clouds parted on blue did she lift her head.
The sea snake was not moving—only drifting, carried by the swells. Birds perched atop the water—up up, gently down. Birds. Shreds of seagreen and moss, torn by the storm. Fish spinning, glancing beaded light. Sudden returning life. Jaele craned forward.
Land rose from the rolling ocean. At first she thought it was her land, that she had slept so long—but she knew in a breath that it was not. The sea snake began to swim again, and details sharpened: trees spread thick and dark; a sweeping violet beach; massive wooden rafts lashed to what seemed to be tree trunks, growing bald from the water. She bent her head, queasy, and concentrated on scales.
The violet sand hissed as the sea snake’s belly touched it. She gazed at this sand, which was fine, with scatterings that looked like gems. Unclenching her hands, she slid off the creature’s back. She slept immediately, curled in the serpent’s shadow as the sun climbed and sank.
She woke blazing with thirst. Sat up and waited until the dizziness had faded, then rose, leaning on the sea snake’s flank. She did not drink from the fishfolk bag. “Still here, friend?” she asked, and her words rasped. It angled an eye at her and blinked, and she tried to smi
le.
The trees began about thirty paces from the shoreline. They soared into the light, sheathed in huge four-pointed leaves and clusters of berries or larger fruit. She reached up and grasped a silver-white bunch. Round, three in her palm, crimson within, soft golden seeds so sweet her teeth ached. She moaned as she ate, as the juice coursed and dried and stained her fingers, deeper than blood. (Had he moaned, eating Murtha’s berries, Keeper’s fruit, Serdic’s?) She walked on, eating until her arms were numb from stretching. She found a pool, clean and still, dark with tree shapes. She bent and sipped. It was fresh water—fresher, even, than that in the fishfolk bag lying on the shore.
When her mouth and stomach rang—enough—she sat with her back against one of the great trunks. The sea snake’s gold shone against the sand; the ocean lay seamless and clear. No wind, no waves. The rafts shifted soft as whisper.
She slept again, after the sun had fallen away in scarlet. Almost dreamed, but wrested herself away, further into darkness. Voices woke her.
They were loud, laughing, singing; there was a clacking as well, and knew what it was. She remembered Dorin leading her among the wonders of Luhr, remembered the fishfolk and their mats, and the half-giants’ clacking songs. Eels’ scales, she thought as the half-giants came clamouring onto the beach.
She crouched beneath her tree, hidden by its shadow. They were to her right, many paces away, but she saw them clearly. There were three women and three men, all at least twice her height, perhaps more. Fishing nets swung from their shoulders and jogged against their hide-wrapped legs; three also carried wooden poles. A few half-giant steps back from the water, the poles were dug into the sand: Jaele saw that they were connected with rope, which stood taut when the poles had been secured.
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