Crowchanger (Changers of Chandris)

by A. C. Smyth

  “Want me to come?” Jesely had set Casian to help and protect Sylas, after all. He could hardly object if Casian did just that.

  Sylas stooped to kiss Casian’s cheek. “Master Jesely disapproves of our friendship even inside the Aerie. I’ll be better off alone. Sleep. You look exhausted.” And he left.

  Casian lay back once more. He had gone to his mother in part to ensure Sylas had somewhere to go if the council threw him out. Casian had heard Sylas’s stories about his father, and being destined for the linandra pits. Better Lady Boreana recruited a new Chesammos servant than Sylas be sent to mine linandra. And if that servant attended on Casian whenever he visited, so much the better. Casian might be inclined to visit his mother often, if that happened. Very, very often.

  Chapter 2

  Jesely recognised the submissive look of a creature that knows it is prey from his flights in hawk form: the shoulders-hunched, head-drawn-in posture of a creature resigned to its fate. Coneys and desert dhevas and sand squirrels—they all looked that way, caught in the open beneath the hawk’s shadow.

  Sylas sat across the table with that same look. The lad’s eyes spoke of resentment, wariness: a youngster accustomed to taking a beating and getting back on his feet before the next blow landed. Jesely wished he would not look like that with him. The Lady knew, he had the boy’s best interests at heart.

  The trouble was, no master would take Sylas on until he showed signs of achieving control of his changing, yet Jesely had a nagging feeling that being accepted as apprentice would be just the boost the Chesammos boy needed. And he was a boy yet, though he would soon wear the linandra bead on a twisted wire through his ear. He would hardly have time to draw breath, Jesely thought, before the lad’s father had him married and producing children. For all Jesely was Chesammos himself, he didn’t hold with this practice of marrying youngsters off before they were grown, however much their race had declined. Sylas needed his mother more than a wife and family.

  “You want to talk about something?” Jesely had come to his room to find Sylas waiting on the bench outside. At Jesely’s invitation, the boy had followed him into his study and taken a seat. Jesely had made his study into a cosy retreat, and the chair into which Sylas settled was well-worn leather, scuffed and marked but comfortable. The tapestries behind him, at which so many young changers had stared over the years hoping to find the answer to a particularly tricky question, conveyed scenes of Chesammos myth and legend. A framed charcoal portrait of a young Chesammos girl took pride of place on his desk.

  The lad shuffled his feet and Jesely repressed an impatient sigh. Jesely, as an empath, often mentored students; yet these days he struggled to read Sylas. He kept up his guard, rarely if ever letting his defences drop enough for Jesely to get even an inkling of what he was feeling. When others complained of him, Jesely maintained that all youngsters of Sylas’s age were much the same—defensive and truculent—but it did little good. Some of the masters had written Sylas off, and that made Jesely all the more determined to help.

  “You go home soon.” Jesely had approved Sylas’s visit home for his manhood ceremony and his sister’s wedding. Combining events had become more usual in Chesammos villages, now that times were hard. The lavish feasts of Jesely’s parents’ and grandparents’ days were now a memory, yet weddings and piercings were still reasons to celebrate.

  “Two days, Master.” That at least brought a flicker of pleasure to Sylas’s face. “Later than many boys, but at least it will be done.”

  Jesely’s hand drifted to the linandra bead at his own left ear. His had been pierced later still. Aerie-born and raised, his parents had left the decision to him whether to wear the traditional Chesammos coming-of-age symbol. It had taken the death of his mother’s father, when Jesely was twenty-one, to show how much his heritage meant to him. His grandfather had told the young Jesely many of the traditional stories. The earring was in his memory.

  “Will you be allowed zacorro at your ceremony? At mine I poured myself a full wine goblet—drank it all, too. I think I begged my mother to kill me for three days after. I had been warned, of course, but I thought I knew better.”

  Sylas laughed. Zacorro was a Chesammos spirit so potent only those with the strongest heads and stomachs drank more than a thimbleful.

  “I will bear that in mind, Master. If my father does not provide it, someone will. It is not often the village sees a piercing and a wedding on the same day.”

  He fell silent. When he forgot himself, Sylas could be a charming young man, intelligent and well-spoken. Jesely wondered what had changed. Was it mixing with Casian that had the lad so withdrawn? Or that he knew Jesely did not approve of the direction their relationship had taken?

  Two men together did not bother the master changer. Far from it. In an environment where changers left their bird state naked, and often chose to enter it that way too, a relaxed attitude to sexual attractions was almost inevitable. Relationships were fluid, although many married, and liaisons between members of the same sex rarely caused so much as a raised eyebrow. So if, in Chesammos terms, Sylas wore his krastos blade sheathed to the back, it was none of Jesely’s business. But Casian, now, he was Jesely’s business, and for more reason than the young lord being Jesely’s journeyman. The Irenthi was devious and manipulative, and Jesely had yet to establish what exactly he hoped to gain from a relationship with the Chesammos.

  “So will we lose you to a wife soon?”

  Jesely took care to keep his tone light. He didn’t want the boy to think he was trying to send him away. The Lady knew the lad was touchy enough about his changing problems without suggesting he would be dismissed from the Aerie as a result. Even so, Sylas’s face clouded.

  “My father wants that.”

  “And you?”

  Sylas shifted uneasily in his seat, and Jesely regretted putting him on the spot. He remembered the discussion with Craie when he first brought Sylas to the Aerie. Jesely mentioned to the ash brick maker that his son could remain at the Aerie, if he felt suited to that life.

  “He will be a linandra digger,” Craie had said. “He has been tested and he has the sensitivity. He will go in the dig team, drawn in the ballot or not.”

  The ability to sense the linandra stones deep under the ground was both a gift and a curse. A gift because the villagers received food and clothing, and cut stones to raise their children to adulthood in return for the linandra. A curse because the diggers rarely lived long, their health destroyed by the ash they inhaled and the fumes that rotted their lungs.

  When Jesely asked what say Sylas had in his future, Craie had snorted.

  “He is Chesammos. He does what he must. You have never lived among us, changer. You do not know what it is like.”

  That was the crux of it. Jesely was Chesammos by birth, with all the stigmas and prejudices that entailed, but had been raised in the Aerie among shape changers. He had never lived among the Chesammos and that, to them, made him an outsider. He understood well enough the need for the villages to hold onto their young people. But Sylas was valuable to the Aerie. Changers were not so plentiful that Jesely would relish seeing this one lost to the linandra pits.

  “Master Jesely, has Master Olendis spoken to you today?”

  “Master Olendis? No. Why?”

  Sylas’s fingers twined, and he picked uneasily at his thumbnail. He swallowed hard, then glanced up at Jesely from under generous eyebrows. “I made him mad with me today. The way you were talking—well, it made me wonder if he had complained to you. If he doesn’t come to you, I think he will go to Master Donmar.”

  For Olendis to go directly to Master Donmar, head of the changer council, Sylas must indeed have upset him. Jesely leaned on his desk and waited for Sylas to explain. The lad dropped his gaze back to his lap, resuming his fidgeting.

  “I want to stay, Master Jesely. My fa
ther wants me home, I know, and the masters… Well, maybe I’m not as quick to pick things up as they might like.” He paused, and Jesely knew exactly which masters’ faces were in the boy’s mind. “But I am trying hard, Master. I want to be a changer more than anything.”

  The quaver in his voice told Jesely he spoke the brutal truth. If Sylas returned to his village he had little future: a forced marriage; digging the uncut linandra gems out of the pits with krastos knife and fingernails; and an early death, his lungs dissolved from the inside by poisonous fumes from the volcanic vents.

  “I know, lad. I see how hard you try.”

  All the reports from Sylas’s tutors—with two notable exceptions—said the same thing. He studied hard, applying himself diligently, yet what came naturally to other boys his age seemed beyond him.

  Sylas met his gaze, and a flash of hope lit his eyes. “Maybe if you were to speak with Master Olendis? With my father? They might listen to you.”

  “I spoke with your father when you first came here. He was determined that you should not stay with us. The longer you take to control your changing, the more impatient he will become, I fear. As it is, he sees his son apparently learning nothing from us when he could be more useful at home.”

  Sylas gave a long sigh and his shoulders fell once more. “Then it is decided.”

  Damn it. Jesely would not lose a young changer without a fight. He tapped the flat of his hand on the table to get Sylas’s attention. “Maybe not. The changing, now. Tell me what you feel when you try to change.”

  “I relax, send my mind floating as if I were going to sleep. I can do that. I can feel the aiea here.”

  Sylas laid a hand across his ribs. Many felt the energies there. Jesely himself felt it higher, up across his chest. A few experienced it as a weight across their backs. It made no difference. The aiea took no form and added no weight to the body. It took up no space. What was important was that the changer could sense it, could feel his reserves of it, and could draw upon it when needed. At least the boy could get that far.

  A changer had to cast his mind out as if stretching to the farthest reaches of the island, then let it go farther, into the lands beyond. There the kye—the bird spirits with whom the changers had a partnership of sorts—waited to link with the changer and help him take on his bird form. Then came the part that was impossible to explain to one who had not experienced it: the pulling, the twisting, when the bird form and the human form exchanged places. Then the person’s consciousness entered the bird form and flew, fully aware of what he or she did, and changed back to human form at the end of the journey.

  “And then?”

  Sylas frowned. “This is what annoyed Master Olendis. Then I hear voices in my head. They scold me and beg me and chatter at me until I…” This time he did hold his hands to his ears.

  Jesely knew that covering his ears would not shut them out. Jesely could hear three voices. The first was the kye for his lower bird form, the one he had learned when he was a novice like Sylas. The second was his higher form, a hawk in Jesely’s case, learned shortly before he achieved mastery. The bird forms all used the lower energy—the aiea-bar—and most, but not all, changers could take a higher form with a little effort. The last was his talent kye. Sometimes manifesting before the lower bird form, this kye gave its partner an ability of some sort. This kye used the aiea-dera, which only about a third of changers could access.

  Sylas had no talent, and he fell far short of being a master. At this stage he should only be aware of one voice: that of his lower kye. That kye should be helping him to change into his bird form. But according to Sylas, he could not hear his own kye for chatter from others he should not be hearing.

  Jesely believed him. Even without using his empath talent, the master detected no hint of falsehood in Sylas’s voice and posture. Yet only one changer in Jesely’s experience had ever heard more than three kye: Shamella, the girl in the portrait.

  “Can you help me, Master? I know I need to hear one voice, but I do not know which one I need to hear out of so many, and I don’t think I could shut the others out if I did know.”

  Jesely sighed. “I’m sorry, Sylas, I can’t. But now that I understand the problem I can investigate. I know of one other changer who heard more kye than normal. I shall see what I can discover.”

  Sylas perked up. “What happened to him?”

  “Leave me to investigate. It was a long time ago and I don’t remember it clearly.” The bell struck three times, and Jesely rose to go.

  “I have a class now. Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

  “Yes, Master. I have a lesson with Master Gwysias.”

  “Very well. I doubt I shall have any news for you before you leave for home, but maybe when you return I shall have an idea how to proceed, if the Lady wills it.”

  “Maisaiea-yelai,” Sylas echoed him in the Chesammos tongue, pressing his thumbs and fingertips together in the Lady’s sign. As he made the gesture, Jesely caught sight of the boy’s palms and drew a breath in through his teeth. Few of the masters took a switch to their pupils, much less on their hands, but Gwysias the master of the scriptorium did, from time to time. Gwysias was convinced that Sylas’s failure was due to laziness or downright stupidity.

  Jesely did not walk as briskly as usual on his way to his class, but turned what Sylas had said over and over in his mind. The lad was a puzzle, that was certain. In all his years dealing with failing novices—the slow learners and the dull-witted—he had never encountered one like Sylas. The boy was bright enough. His mother had, against his father’s wishes, taught him the rudiments of reading and writing. But kye voices calling in his head? Was the bird kye refusing to make itself known to the boy? Or were so many kye trying to claim him that he was becoming confused, unable to hear the one to which he should be bound?

  The council and Sylas’s father alike were demanding results, if for different reasons, and if he was to help Sylas, Jesely was going to have to dig into old history. He would have to turn up parts of the past that he would rather leave forgotten. For he had loved Shamella, and she had died when she was scarcely older than Sylas was now. If the kye had killed her, he owed it to Sylas to save him, if he could.

  Sylas sat hunched over a long wooden table in the library, flanked by bookcases holding tomes bound in leather or linen. The smell of parchment and dust and old ink hung in the air, and settled on his skin. The room whispered of generations of changers before him who had studied here, but none, he would wager, had ruined more work or spilt more ink on their fingers. He was so absorbed that he did not notice Casian until he spoke.

  “Very nice. I like the way you have drawn the veins on the leaves. What is it?”

  “Medelerinn. That’s what we call it, anyway. It grows in the cracks in the rocks near our village. Not much grows there—the rain kills most plants before they can even take root—but medelerinn can grow pretty much anywhere. My mother steeps the leaves into a tea that cures headaches. I saw some outside this morning and it made me think of home.”

  He turned in his seat to look up at the silver-blond Irenthi man. Casian, freshly washed and dressed in clothes befitting a lord’s heir, looked fully recovered from his flight. Sylas’s mouth dried at the sight of him, as it always did, his breath taken away by Casian’s pale skin and high cheekbones. The haughty air of one who has grown up in wealth and status and come to expect it as his right only added to his glamour, in Sylas’s opinion.

  “And this one?” Casian pointed to the sketch below.

  “Esteia. Another desert plant. That flower forms seed pods about so big.” He showed Casian the length of the first joint of his index finger. “The seeds look like nuts—tempting if you’re out in the desert and short of food—but they’re deadly poison. Eat one of them, or just lick your fingers after picking one, and at first it looks like
you’ve got a fever. Then you get bruises all over your skin. Eight or nine hours later, you’re dead. It dissolves important parts of you from the inside.”

  “Nasty. Any antidote for it?”

  “Yes. There’s another plant often grows nearby. Boil the leaves up and use it as a tisane. Works, if you catch it in time.”

  “You lived in the desert where next to nothing grows. So how come you know so much about plants all of a sudden?”

  Sylas chuckled. “I’d only seen five or six types of plant before I came here, so I found out more about them. And see what section of the library Master Gwysias always seats me in?”

  Casian turned to check. Sure enough, they were in the section with all the botanicals and herbals—row upon row of leather-bound books about plants and their uses. Realisation crossed Casian’s face, followed by accusation. “You’re meant to be working.”

  “I was. But look at my writing. Everyone else seems to use their right hand, and I don’t. When I learn to make the letter shapes with charcoal, he gives me this stupid thing,” Sylas glared at the brush in his hand as if it offended him. “Why do changers write with brushes? Just because quills are made of bird feathers doesn’t make them wrong, ashini?”

  “I love it when you do that.” Casian grinned at him.

  “Do what?” Sylas didn’t know whether to grin back or be affronted that Casian wasn’t more sympathetic. Easy for him. From the time he could hold a stick, he’d been tutored to make shapes in a sand tray.