[Valen 02] - Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  “Ronila?” said Saverian. “The woman you lay with…who must have been a student, if you betrayed a teacher’s trust. But I thought your only student was Eodward himself.”

  I glanced up from my knees where I had focused my eyes to get control of my stomach. The dim smoky room swirled unpleasantly. “You mentioned Ronila in your journal—a disaffected halfbreed girl who left Aeginea after making her third change.”

  Picus wagged his head. “We witnessed her knee-breaking, my prince and I. A golden child of an age ye would judge fourteen summers. ’Tis after the child passes the second remasti they do it. She screamed and begged us to save her from crippling, but we could not. My prince was naught but a tender seven-year-old, and I God-sworn to protect him above all things, which meant honoring Danae customs. So much pain…After, I thought to give her something back to redeem her suffering, something the others would not have and could never take from her. The long-lived claim to bear no grudge against a broken halfbreed, but of course they do. They seek perfection in their arts—which are firstly their bodies and their use of them—and thus treated her with cruel disdain. She was clever at numbers and had such a vivid imagining that she devoured all I could teach her of Navronne, of natural philosophy, of human history and warfare, of moral philosophy and the teachings of Karus. Every afternoon when she had completed her tasks of the day—making baskets or weaving spidersilk or gathering apples or mushrooms—she would hobble to my canopy for teaching…Ah, I babble on too long. I sinned. I renounced that sin. But I will pay the price of it until my bones are dust.”

  He tightened his mouth and would not speak more for a while. He broke pinches of herbs from his dangling bundles and threw them in his pot, each breaking an explosion of fragrance. The scent of dried mushrooms, damp earth, and moldering leaves left the memory of nivat on my tongue. Sweat dribbled down my sides. My left thigh muscle cramped, and an ember burned in my gut…

  No! Nivat no longer had power over me. I forced my thoughts away from my body. So the celibate monk, exiled far from home and holy brotherhood, had seduced a half-Danae girl. Or had she, a lonely outcast, enamored of a kind, virile young man, used her Danae wiles to tempt him? Yet more troubled me than such common failings as lust and seduction. Something in the telling of his story…something in the words…had touched off a bone-deep revulsion, but I could not capture it. Wit seemed to have drained out of me, along with the myriad telltales of my senses that had been with me since the remasti. This windowless room. So small. So close.

  “Here, give me thy cup, good Valen, and we’ll see thy belly filled.”

  I looked up and Picus’s grimed face leered huge and grotesque in the garish firelight. The encircling walls of his hut bulged inward, threatening to squeeze the breath out of me. Heat seared and scoured my limbs. Of a sudden I was back in my bedchamber in Palinur, my skin on fire from my father’s leather strap, panicked, cursing, screaming, beating on the door barricaded with sorcery as the walls closed in. The firelight wavered…darkened.

  “Excuse…must go.” Gasping for air, I scrambled to my feet, knocking my forehead on the roof beams, and escaped into the night.

  Saverian burst through the door flaps while my hands were yet propped on the outer wall of a lean-to filled with wood, and I was gulping great lungfuls of cold air. “Do you need the medallion, Valen?”

  “Just air. So hot.” I fumbled at the laces on the scratchy shirt and ripped it over my head, allowing the cold rain to hammer and scour and revive every part of my skin. My senses quickly regained some balance.

  “Sorry. Rude of me.”

  From her shelter in the hut’s doorway, she held out her cupped hand, overflowing with tangled gold chain. “Perhaps you should wear this.”

  Shaking my head, fighting to shed the oppression of panic and suffocation, I turned around and leaned my back against the woodshed. The sodden shirt wadded in my hands preserved a bit of propriety.

  “I’ll be all right. You may write this in your notes: Danae halfbreeds sicken within walls.”

  Kol had known what would happen. The Dané no longer sat in the tree, but music had joined the clamor in my head, and I glimpsed blue flashes among the trees. “It must be time for my lessons. You’d best stay here, unless…”

  I beckoned Saverian urgently. Without hesitation, she darted across a muddy strip and sheltered under the lip of the shed.

  My finger on her lips silenced her question, and I dropped my own voice to a whisper. “…Unless you’re afraid of the monk.”

  She yanked my hand away and took on such a look of scorn as would chill a salamander. “Afraid of the chance to converse with a man two hundred years old? I’d barter my maidenhead for the chance, and here it is laid in my—” Of a sudden the fireglow of her damp cheeks outshone the white light from the twiggy lantern. “What are you smirking at? That I happen to find many amusements more enticing than rutting like an overheated dog? Study the human body and its lamentable urges, and you’ll see it is an altogether ridiculous object.”

  “Bless me, gods, that I remain an unstudious man!” Not even her sour expression could restrain my laughter.

  But now that the rain had reawakened the chaotic information of my senses, I could give thought to the serious matters that had gathered with the deepening night. So I stifled amusement and quieted my voice. Despite her peculiarities, Saverian was a woman of sense and intelligence. I could not stay here to learn what I needed, but perhaps she could.

  “Saverian, if you would, I beg you discover what you can of this Llio’s curse—this Danae fear of halfbreeds. My mother conceived a halfbreed apurpose, knowing what her people would do to me if I was caught. Why would she do that? Kol says that she believed I belonged in the Canon, which makes no sense at all. The mere consideration appalls and disgusts him, and I’ve no faith that I can budge him to tell me more. And there’s something else…something in the monk’s story…that sets off warning trumps in my head. Truly I’m half knob-swattled with this day and cannot capture it, yet every bone in my body screams that all this is connected: Eodward’s history, Danae intransigence, my birth, the wretched weather, and the sickness of the world, the Harrowers and their poisoning of the Danae.”

  A thought darted past like a firefly, before being swallowed in an assault of scents reminiscent of a town marketplace: baking pies, roasting meat, leather goods and perfumes, herbs, vegetables, and scented oils, horse manure, pigs. I prayed that Kol could teach me what to do with all of it.

  “Even if you care naught for Navronne, you’re Osriel’s friend and servant,” I said. “What we learn here could be the keys to his future.”

  “Osriel betrayed you. Why would you care about his future?”

  “You’ve witnessed the havoc the Harrowers wreak in Navronne. And I promise the damage is much deeper than that you saw. Surely you saw, too, the hope he brought them, almost without trying. People wiser than me have entrusted Navronne’s salvation to Prince Osriel’s hand—but I fear that trust has been misplaced unless we can find out the truth of all this before he takes a path of desperation. This thing you will not speak of. This thing he hopes to fuel with Danae magic. I have this notion I can help him, but only if I learn enough.”

  What wastrel fool had ever made so pompous a statement? But I did feel it, however foolish. If I could only see the way.

  Saverian nodded slowly, her clear eyes as lustrous as jade in the white light. I had never noticed their color. “I’ll learn what I can.” Then she lowered her lids halfway and snatched the wadded shirt from my hand. “Meanwhile, I’ll dry this out. I doubt you’ll need it for a while.”

  I grinned as she threw it over her shoulder and ducked into Picus’s hut. Then I set off into the trees to find Kol. Amid the cascading telltales of hunting foxes, nervous deer, and mice and moles that burrowed through leaves and earth, I heard Picus greet Saverian with concerned questioning. She reassured him as to my health. “Ah, for certain,” he said. “I’d forgot how the walls torment
the odd creatures…”

  Creatures…beings that had no souls. My smile faded.

  Chapter 15

  Kol crouched impossibly high in the limbs of a leaf-bare ash that bordered a swath of open meadow. The wind rustled knee-high grass and faded leaves, and the rain outlined odd dark shapes, barriers of timber and tied brush set at angles across the meadow. I blinked, astonished that I could see so much as that on a starless, moonless night. The air smelled of must and soured grain, of soggy earth and the small stream that bisected the gentle slope, and of a thousand other scents that had naught to do with this meadow. A wolf’s howl sent chilly fingers up my bare spine, hinting that even the magics of Aeginea could not hold back this foul winter. Naked in the night wood…I’d never felt such an idiot.

  As I opened my mouth to call him, the Dané rose from his crouch and brushed bits of bark and leaf from his skin. Angling his feet, as if for proper balance on the branch, he stretched his arms skyward. His gards brightened to the cold blue of a mountain winter sky. Somewhere—in my head, in my heart, in my imagining?—music swelled. The sweet clarity of a rebec’s bowed strings twined my overcrowded thoughts in a single long note that stretched my nerves taut…and then Kol launched himself from the top of the ash.

  My heart near stopped until his feet touched solidly to the grass, and he began to whirl and spin and leap through the meadow, a glory of power and strength, raising one and then another thread of melody to join in a driving gigue. Danae danced to the land’s music—or made it.

  Determined to understand what he did, I pushed aside the wet leaves and pine needles at the edge of the wood, pressed my fingers into the mud, and released magic. As if lightning illuminated the symbols on a fiché, I glimpsed rowed turnips, carrots, and onions slimed and rotting underground, a plot of stunted wheat across the stream, and hungry moles panting as they excavated tunnels underneath it all, their fur patched with disease. My spirit choked at the suffocating sickness. Kol’s exuberant feet scribed silvered traces across the unhealthy landscape, his every bend, dip, and spin bringing new complexity to his insistent melodies.

  I could have watched him dance until the end of days. Every note perfect…every step exquisite…

  exhilarating. Even when I knelt up, allowing the rain to rinse the mud from my hands, the magic he raised in Picus’s garden meadow enfolded me in such beauty as would draw a stone’s tears.

  The music reached its whirling climax, and Kol stretched legs and arms to leap in one great arc across the stream, streaks of blue trailing behind him as if his gards were threads of silk, whipped to frenzy by the wind of his passing. Above and below and around me an explosion of color washed the landscape like watered ink. The healthier humors of a nearby forest glade flooded the diseased plots. Owl and hawk rose up from the wood, dark shapes diving and soaring to purge the pests, while other creeping creatures deep buried in the soil, too tiny for a human eye to see, woke to cleanse and nourish roots and stems. The waterlogged soil released its burden, riddling the undersoil with new channels to the stream. When the spinning Dané took a knee, aligning his back and outstretched leg in the position I’d come to know as completion, it seemed as if the earth gave a great sigh of contentment, while I was left roused and aching with unspent desire.

  Kol held his position for a long while, and when at last he stood, his posture bespoke a man completely drained. His head came up, expression vague and lost, his sculpted features sharpening only slowly when he caught sight of me. He heaved a sigh, kneaded his neck, and started up the gentle slope, following the path of the stream. A slight sweep of his right hand commanded me to follow.

  I joined him, padding through wet grass while he strode on a game trail that bordered the stream.

  “How do you do it?” I said, when it became clear he had no plan to initiate conversation. “Draw the music from plants and beasts and dirt clods? Use your body…your movements…to join all the parts together? Is the Canon something like this?”

  “I am not here to teach thee of the dance. I’ll not speak of the Canon. Nor will I guide thee through the remasti of regeneration. No use in developing skills…and hungers…thou canst neither use nor satisfy.”

  He swept his dripping hair back from his face, squeezed water from it, and tied it into a heavy knot at the back of his neck.

  “Regeneration,” I repeated. Osriel had said the third remasti was the passage of regeneration, when Danae first experienced the hungers of fleshly love…when they became both capable and desirous of mating. “That’s what you did to this field. Your dance healed its sickness as a human physician heals a body, diagnosing its ills and applying the proper remedy. You called forth creatures to cleanse and nourish it, changed its makeup in subtle ways to leave it healthier. But the way you accomplished it was more like mating than healing. The dance this morning touched my spirit, but this…I was honored…humbled…to witness it, relagai.”

  Kol cast me a sidewise glance. Suspicious. “Thy gards tell thee these things?”

  I looked down at my mottled arms and legs, so pale and ill-defined beside the brilliant clarity of his dragons, reeds, and heron. My marks no longer flashed or swirled. I doubted a human eye would even notice them were I ten paces distant. Yet though the wind had picked up, and I felt its bitter edge, the cold no longer penetrated beyond my skin.

  “No. Not the gards…” I stumbled a bit, as the truth of my change settled even deeper in my gut. “I saw, or well…rather, it’s something like seeing. When I touch the earth and use my magic…my Cartamandua bent…an image of the surrounding land forms in my mind, in my senses, so I see and hear and smell what’s there or has been there in the past—plants, beasts, humans, the paths they’ve left. And I can explore the image—look deeper, learn how it fits together, as I did with the tide pool. It’s difficult to describe.”

  “Thy senses comprehend the particular changes I brought to this land?” Surprise and skepticism boiled out of him like seepage from a wound. “Without study or examination or practice?”

  “The changes—the hunting birds you called forth, the water channels, the rest—yes. The paths of your movements that link them all together appear to me as threads of silver across the landscape. I can see the threads even as you draw them, and those of other Danae from earlier times.”

  He halted in midstep and glared at me, his aspen-gold eyes like flame in the darkness. “Thou canst see the paths of the kiran—the patterns left behind from the dance?” His tone dared me to affirm it.

  “I could walk them as you do this track under your feet.”

  He clamped his mouth shut and stomped faster up the path. When a dead limb blocked his way, likely fallen from Picus’s fence making, he snatched it up and threw it farther than even my improved eyesight could make out in the middle of the night. Had it struck a fortification, even at such a distance, I would wager on the stick to penetrate the stone, so vicious was its launch. I’d thought he would approve my increased understanding. Perhaps I had trespassed some protocol by observing Danae mysteries or speaking of them. I trailed along behind him, my bare feet tormented with sticks and rocks, narrowly avoiding wrenching my ankle in some burrower’s entry hole, and near giving up on comprehending my uncle.

  As the vale sloped upward, the land grew rockier, so my battered feet could attest. The path soon vanished, as did the stream, replaced, almost before I could imagine it, by rills and rivulets that trickled across the hillside from thick forest on either side of us. The soil beneath my feet thinned. At least the rain had slackened, holding somewhere between a drizzle and a mist. Kol’s gards flared brighter.

  Of a sudden, I realized that we had traveled farther from Picus’s meadow than our steps could justify.

  Alert now, I began to feel a shifting when Kol invoked his magic—when the path took a sudden turning or broke dramatically uphill. When the scent of pine and spruce entirely supplanted the scent of oak and ash and hawthorn in the space of twenty paces. When the air grew sharply colder a
nd very dry.

  “Your gards carry power that enables you to move from one place to another,” I said, pushing my steps to keep up with the fast-moving Dané.

  “Aye. After the second remasti, the stripling’s growing familiarity with the world becomes a part of the walking gards and can be called on as desired.” The brisk walk seemed to have restored his calm. “The particular slope of a grass-covered hillside recalls that of a mountain meadow. The sound of one stream echoes another that happens to feed a mighty river. Just here”—he pointed to a stand of evergreens—“the odd shape of that tallest tree’s crown recalls to me the outline of another tree against a different sky, thus forms a path from this place to the next. I can walk there if I will. It is all a matter of similarity and recollection, for all places are bound one to the other in ways a human—most humans—cannot perceive.”

  “Sometimes we do,” I said. “We come to a new place, yet feel as if we’ve been there before. Or we meet a stranger and feel as if we know her already.”

  “Perhaps.” A grudging admission.

  By the time I wrenched my eyes from the fork-tipped fir, disappointed it had not belched fire or displayed some other obvious magic, we walked a slightly steeper path amid widely scattered trees. My breathing labored. Around another corner and we were traversing the shoulder of a conical peak outlined against a star-filled sky. Mist floated like a gray sea below us.

  A half hour’s hard climb and we had left the last stunted trees behind. We came to a rocky prominence—a thick slab of pale stone, some twenty quercae in height, that poked up in gloomy isolation from the mountainside. Kol propped one foot on a broad flat shard, long split off from the standing rock and toppled to the grass.

  “We begin thy teaching here,” he said. “Thy gards draw in the sights and sounds, tastes and smells from forest, vale, and shore, as well as the dust of Picus’s foolish babbling and the stink of his dwelling place. No doubt rememberings of thy usual days intrude upon thy perceptions, as well. Likely it is some confusion of these impressions with the observation of my kiran that caused this seeing thou hast reported.”