by Dawn Cook
“Then what is it?” she pleaded, just wanting to understand.
Useless took a slow breath before coming to sit across from her. His head drooped, and he stared at the black evenness of the tabletop. A hand ran over his white, short-cropped hair.
“I swore I wouldn’t chase after Keribdis this time, and I won’t.” He looked up, his few wrinkles looking stark. “Not this time. She went too far, and I won’t go after her. Not again. Not ever.”
Alissa blinked. Pride? she wondered. Useless was too proud to go after them? After all this time?
Lodesh entered the room, soft and subdued. He wedged a tin into his pack and gave Strell a quick, sideways jerk of his head. Strell stared blankly, his spoon halfway to his mouth. Lodesh grimaced in meaning, and, grunting, Strell unfolded his long legs and ambled after him with his plate of unfinished stew. Connen-Neute looked at her in pity, then bolted out after them.
Alissa swallowed hard. Alone with Useless, she waited until even the faintest sound of footsteps vanished. “Your pride?” she asked carefully. She hadn’t known him long enough to cast judgment, but someone had to pull Useless’s head out of the rabbit hole, and she was the only one who might get away with it. “Your pride is going to keep the Hold split?”
“You’ve been alive for twenty years,” he said, his eyes on his mended bowl. “Berate me about pride when you have eight hundred behind you.”
“Since when does age have anything to do with foolishness?” she said, knowing she was stepping over the line. But he was hiding something from her—or she was too dense to see it.
“Keribdis is . . .” he started, his golden eyes tired. “Even before we wed, Keribdis was the accepted matriarch of the Hold,” he said softly. “Better liked than I, which means more than it should.” He hesitated, his long fingers running over the repaired crack in his bowl. “She has an uncanny ability to persuade. I’m the only one who ever stood up to her, telling her when her plans were immoral and not allowing her to break our laws with impunity. If I seek her out, I will be saying her ideas to continue manipulating the plains and foothills are just. She won’t listen to even me anymore.” He frowned. “And she needs to understand her desires are wrong before she commits any more atrocities.”
“Does it matter?” Alissa exclaimed. “Is it worth all this?”
He grimaced, his white eyebrows bunching. “Perhaps it would be best to show you,” he said, and her stomach tensed. Useless had never shared any of his memories with her. Ever.
His golden eyes were sad as he read her surprise. “I’m sorry, Alissa,” he said as her tracings began to resonate in response to him setting up a ward to trip the lines and relive a memory. “This is a wisdom I had hoped you would never need to learn. It might have been easier had the rest of the Masters stayed lost for a few hundred years more.”
“Wisdom isn’t bad,” Alissa said, worried at what he might show her. “Only the way you use it.”
He smiled faintly, settling himself with his hands laced across his front. “Perhaps.”
Useless waited until she had her tracings alight with the proper pattern and nodded her readiness. With a surprising ease, she slipped into Useless’s memory.
Talo-Toecan stood three steps above everyone upon the stairway in the great hall. As they argued in useless debate, he slammed his hand upon the banister in frustration. It was an unusual display of temper. Only Keribdis noticed, pursing her lips in a derisive admonishment. The tumult of sixty-plus strongly opinionated Masters trying to outdo each other in voicing their opinions continued. “Qui-i-i-i-iet!” he bellowed, his voice resonating from the ceiling of the great hall. It was four stories up, and there still wasn’t enough room for all the egos.
Keribdis’s look was ripe with a patronizing disgust, but slowly it grew still. The whoosh of the pendulum overhead, marking time and the spinning of the earth, cut through the tense air. “Yes,” Keribdis said into the last murmurs. “Let him dig his own grave without interference.”
Talo-Toecan refused to frown. “The only grave is continuing to ignore that scores of recessive alleles have escaped unnoticed and unrecorded,” he said with a practiced restraint.
“Yes!” came an impatient shout. “We all agree on that.”
Ruen-Tag pushed to the front, his golden eyes bright with agitation. “We must regain control of all three populations, slowing down the occurrence of Keepers,” he said, and Talo-Toecan nodded for him to continue. “I like them and all, but I have five students already. One came from a line it shouldn’t. It made chaos of my records. I had to go back three generations to find where her family line picked up a recessive coastal allele, of all things. All my charts had to be modified, years of work. I don’t have the time—”
“Yes, yes,” Talo-Toecan soothed, his hands upraised. “We’re all running into the same problem. It only strengthens my position that we need to loosen control further, remove all the barriers, both physical and psychological, and let them mix as they will.”
The hall roared into controversy. Talo-Toecan let them rage, turning to the thin, tall windows and the sky beyond. It was a perfect morning for flight: the updrafts steady and strong, the clouds thin and high. What he would give to leave the touchy sensitivities and stubborn tempers and soar away.
But rakus loved to debate. They could be decades deciding what to do, and their callous disregard for their weaker kin disgusted him. They hid in their mountains, the people they surreptitiously manipulated duped into believing rakus were only winged beasts. Ashes, even their Keepers held the secret, bribed into silence with the promise of “magic.”
He turned from the sky when a strong voice cut through the subsiding turmoil. “Letting them mix will make things worse,” the voice accused. “You admit it yourself, Talo-Toecan.”
“For only a short time,” he agreed, but they weren’t listening. “Two centuries, perhaps.”
There was a tug on his sleeve, and he looked down at Wyden. She was flushed for having interrupted him, and his anger softened. “It’s impossible to keep track of the pertinent alleles in a homogenous population,” she protested gently. “That’s why our ancestors divided them in the first place.”
“We’d be overrun with Keepers in fifty years,” another stated.
“Septhamas and shadufs would be popping up like mushrooms in a foothills dungheap,” came a voice from the back, and there was a chorus of agreement mixed with nervous laughter.
“We could have a transeunt, and not even know it,” Keribdis said.
Talo-Toecan settled his gaze upon her, thinking she looked splendid in her proud, impassioned defiance. She stood on the floor, her low position in relation to his stance only adding to her inner strength. The babble went still, and Talo-Toecan’s brow furrowed. Keribdis had an uncanny, irritating talent of finding the slightest drawback to his ideas and twisting the knife. It wasn’t the assemblage he had to convince, it was his wife. The rest would follow her. They always did.
“Yes, Talo-Toecan,” someone accused. “What if we had a transeunt and didn’t know it? Do you really want one showing up at the Hold thinking they were a Keeper? Who knows what we would get?”
He said nothing. Were they all blind?
Ruen-Tag, forever Keribdis’s bootlicker, tugged his yellow sash straight as he turned to the assemblage. “We must regain control, if only for that reason,” he said, glancing at Keribdis for approval and flushing when she smiled at him. “A transeunt must be nurtured with discretion and prudent wisdom,” he all but oozed, “or they’ll have no reason to follow our direction upon reaching their Master potential. They must be painstakingly created, a careful blending of chosen family lines watched through the generations, so we get what we want. You can’t allow them to come into existence like a squash from last year’s refuse pile.”
“Coward,” Talo-Toecan muttered. His roving gaze landed on Redal-Stan leaning against the far wall. The old Master had a hand over his eyes as Talo-Toecan ruined what was left of his repu
tation. By voicing his radical beliefs so stridently, Talo-Toecan had just destroyed what little chance he had left to be allowed to teach a student Master. It didn’t matter, he thought dryly. There hadn’t been any raku children to teach for almost three hundred years.
“The next transeunt isn’t planned for centuries,” someone broke in. “We’re wasting time. The question is how to regain control of the three alleles necessary to create a transeunt, and the easiest way to do that is purging the plains of the recessive coastal allele.”
“No,” came a hot protest. “The contamination is minimal in the plains. It’s the foothills. They’re beginning to breed outside their population again. It doesn’t matter if recessive coastal alleles have infiltrated into the plains or foothills if we can just keep them from interbreeding.”
“Reinstate the animosity between their cultures,” came a strong voice. “It’s easy, fast, and maybe we can remove some of those coastal alleles in the process. A famine? Diverting the main snowmelt for three years ought to be enough.”
Talo-Toecan closed his eyes to gather his strength. Purging alleles? Reinstating their animosity? What they meant was killing half the world’s human population.
“No,” Keribdis said, and his eyes flew open. She had put herself into a beam of morning sun, knowing it would glow through her hair like glory itself, knowing exactly what it would do to him. “We should reduce all three populations to a manageable level. When the dust clears, we can pick up the remaining family lines, make minor cullings where needed, and move forward from there. Everyone will get a needed break. My sabbatical is up in eight years, and I’m not looking forward to having the overabundance of students everyone else has.”
Talo-Toecan divorced himself of the thoughts Keribdis had stirred. “You don’t understand,” he whispered as he tugged the black sash around his waist straight. “Limiting the populations isn’t a viable option anymore,” he said loudly. “It’s too late. The recessive alleles have escaped. The populations are mixing. There are too many people to instigate a continent-wide plague or war again. It would be inhuman.”
“Inhuman,” Keribdis said, tossing her head. “Listen to yourself. They don’t live very long—and they breed fast enough. In a few centuries we will have Keepers again. And at a manageable level.”
Talo-Toecan’s breath came fast in anger. “I’m not concernedwith the temporary lack of Keepers!” he exclaimed. “Keepers, commoners, you forget they are of us. To treat them as we have in the past is wrong! Killing half the human population to regain control is not management. It’s murder!” He was shouting now, trying to finish, but his voice was drowned out in the uproar his claim of equality provoked.
“Your personal views on the matter,” Keribdis said, her mocking words cutting through the noise, “don’t amount for a fledgling’s chance in a windstorm.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said bitterly. “You never cared enough to give me a child.”
The hall went silent. Keribdis drew herself up, glaring magnificently at him. Feet scuffed, and gazes dropped as the rest of the assembly cringed, embarrassed to be witnessing one of their frequent arguments so openly.
Talo-Toecan’s hands clenched at his sides. “Killing half the human population to free your morning from work is unacceptable, Keribdis. We should encourage their genetic histories to mix. Masters have been manipulating the human population for the last five thousand years, and what happened? Our numbers have dropped to sixty-four. Sixty-four!” he accused, spinning about. “Only one raku child has survived to maturity in the last three hundred years, and even he went feral! Doesn’t that tell you anything?”
He gestured over the assembled Masters in frustration. “They are us! Look at yourselves. It isn’t coincidence theirs is the only form we can shift into and return back from. Why do they frighten you?” He pursed his lips, frowning. He had said more than he should.
Keribdis gave him a withering look. Turning, she sedately walked out the front door and into the sun, lightly warding it open as she went so he would be forced to see her shift into her raku form and leap golden and shimmering into the light, a vision of grace untamed. Someone coughed, and Talo-Toecan looked back.
“Meeting adjourned?” Ruen-Tag stammered.
Without a word, Talo-Toecan spun on the stairs to rise to their empty room. He would give her a generous head start, he seethed. Already he could feel the tension building, an undeniable desire for flight, for chase. Nothing else mattered. For all her well-thought-out protests, Keribdis didn’t care about this morning’s meeting. But she knew he did. All her spiteful words had been to goad him into chasing her.
And chase her he would, as he always had, thrilling in the hunt as much as she, even as he despised himself for succumbing to her wiles. Despite his years of gently refusing the quiet offers of companionship extended by his female associates, he clung to the hope that Keribdis would someday find within herself the same feelings he held for her.
But he knew he waited in vain. She was too much a beast and too little a Master.
5
Alissa sat cross-legged at the western opening to the holden, brooding in the warmth of the setting sun. The Hold’s tremendous cavern of a cellar was hard to get to unless one had wings. The only other way besides flying was a long, cramped tunnel that started in one of the Hold’s closets. The capstone was currently warded shut. She knew; she had checked.
Possessing tremendously high ceilings and pillars decorated with the Masters’ script, the holden was both a ceremonial chamber and a prison. Masters went feral while learning to shift to a new form, and the holden had been used to confine them until sentience was returned or deemed lost forever. Bailic had perverted its use, cleverly trapping Useless within it for sixteen years while the cowardly man searched for a safe way to put the plains and foothills at war. It had been Strell who had freed him. Alissa came down here when she wanted to avoid Useless, knowing the large cavern made the usually unflappable Master uneasy, even though he had torn the enormous western gate from its hinges shortly after regaining his freedom.
Shadowed and still, the only sound besides the wind was the measured drips of water falling into the cistern behind her. Alissa had once spent an afternoon trapped here herself, scratching her pet name for Useless upon the cistern’s wall next to his real name, Talo-Toecan. Afterward, she had fallen in to nearly drown herself. Alissa flushed at the memory. Lodesh had fished her out. But that had been before she had really known him.
She had come down here to sulk, as only Useless and Connen-Neute could reach her. “And you, Talon,” she said, soothing the small bird as Talon worried Alissa’s fingers with a gentle beak. Sighing, she looked out over the tremendous drop-off and to the unseen sea. Sunset had turned the clouds pink, and they stood out sharp against the deep blue of the evening sky. The sun had beat upon the flat rock face all afternoon until even her human eyes could see the updraft as a shimmering waver.
She was packed, Alissa thought glumly. Connen-Neute was packed. Strell was packed. Even Lodesh had managed to whittle his pile down to something he could carry. But Useless wasn’t budging, having cloistered himself in his room the last two days to avoid everyone.
The kestrel chittered a welcome as the shadow of wings covered the shattered remains of the western gate. It was Useless, and Alissa listlessly scooted sideways to make room for him to land. Her hair flew wildly as he back-winged before her, expertly clearing the low opening and finding the floor. There was a tug on her thoughts as he shifted from a raku to his human form.
Alissa ignored him. Knees pulled to her chin, she clasped her arms around herself. She had nothing to say he hadn’t already heard.
Useless tugged his black sash around his waist straight until the tips of it brushed the floor. Saying nothing, he sat cross-legged beside her and watched the sun set. Slowly the sound of the dripping water became obvious again. Alissa squinted at him from the edge of her sight, then looked away. “Let me go find them, Useless,�
� she said. “I’m the only one who can.”
“I know,” he said shortly.
“I’m the only one who can hear Silla this far away,” she asserted.
“I won’t argue that with you,” he agreed, not giving way at all.
“I’d be very careful. I’d follow your rules,” she pleaded. “I wouldn’t complain.”
“That,” he said dryly as he turned to her, “would be a miracle in itself.”
Frustrated, Alissa exclaimed, “I am not Keribdis! I’m not running away from you!”
His eyes closed against the sun, and he took a slow breath. “I know.”
A miserable puff of sound escaped her as she slumped. “Then why are you here?”
Useless opened his eyes. For a long time, he was silent. “You know you are the only Master I’ve taught?” he finally said, and Alissa nodded. “Over eight hundred years old—five hundred years of teaching experience—and never granted the opportunity to take a raku child for a student, only Keepers. At first, they said it was because I was too busy or held too many responsibilities. Later, there were no children to teach. But I always knew it was because they were afraid I would pass on my strong beliefs, shifting the balance of power in the Hold.”
The grievous hurt in his eyes froze her words of sympathy.
“The only thing I was ever allowed to teach a raku child was how to fly,” he whispered.
Alissa said nothing, almost frightened at what he might say next.
“I would like to teach Silla how to fly,” he said softly, and she felt a stirring of hope.
He was silent for the span of three heartbeats. “Go,” he said.
Astonished, she took a breath and held it. Shoes scraping on the floor, she turned to face him, reading the worry behind his decision. “Go,” he repeated, his jaw muscles clenching. “All of you. Bring them back to me.”
Her heart leapt. “We can go?”
A faint smile broke over him, somehow making him look old as his white hair and few wrinkles did not. “Did you ever doubt it? Lodesh didn’t.”