by Holly Lisle
Medwind’s stomach twisted. “Then why do you say his condition is worse than Roba’s?”
“Because magic seems to be the cause of his injuries.” The hill-girl stared down at the old man and slowly shook her head. “None of his worst symptoms were caused by the baofar. The problem is, I think, that he is so old. There are spells on top of spells to keep him from aging—all of them buried very deep. You knew of this?”
Medwind was startled. “No,” she said. “He did a lot of his work alone at night. So did I. There were things both of us did that we simply didn’t talk about. We gave each other that privacy.”
She thought of her vha’attaye, with their skulls still stored in the back of the airbox. All Nokar knew of the vha’attaye were those things non-Hoos could rightfully know. And he knew nothing of the rituals to Etyt and Thiena. It unnerved her to realize she didn’t know all of his secrets, either.
So Nokar was older than he looked. That was hard to imagine.
Faia said, “From the spell-shards and echoes, I would guess he had an entire set of spells set one inside another to ward off aging. They seem to have invoked each other to respond to changing situations.”
Medwind frowned and stared at the old man. “Those are called nested subroutines—they’re very elegant when done well, but they’re hruning complicated to set up, and they eat enormous amounts of power.” She glanced down at the old man, surprised. “He might have earned the Eye of the Infinite with real magic after all.”
Faia reached out and touched Nokar’s unmoving hand. Medwind saw tenderness and worry in the girl’s gesture.
The hill-girl said, “When we went into the magicless areas, his spells collapsed in on each other. He got much older, very fast. Without any magic, he would have caught up to his real age and died in just a day or two. I think the baofar actually saved his life—at least for a while.”
“But not for very long.”
“Not now. Nothing can reverse his age—”
Medwind cut Faia off. “The Time River—”
Faia shook her head. “You barely survived that, from what you told me, even though you were young and strong. You went back, what—four hundred years? But you only seem to have gotten fifteen or twenty years younger in the process. I do not think fifteen or twenty years would do anything for him—even if he could survive the Time River.”
Medwind stared down at her hands, turning them over and over. Finally she clasped them together and looked back up at the hill-girl. “How much time do you think he would need?”
“I can’t tell. Not at all.”
Nokar turned his head and opened his eyes. “I’d need at least a—hundred years, Med,” he croaked. “I’m well past—two hundred by this time.”
Medwind’s shoulders sagged. “There’s no way, then.”
“No.” Nokar stared into her eyes. “I’m going to die. But if you can—buy me some time—I want to see the—City of the First Folk. I can die happy then.”
Medwind looked at Faia. “Is there anything you can do?”
“I do not think so. His are not injuries sheer magical strength can repair. His spells within spells need to be reformed—and I do not have the art for that.” The girl’s voice cracked.
Medwind saw the brightness of unshed tears in Faia’s eyes. Her own throat was tight. “Kyadda, Faia. You take care of Roba. I’ll do what I can for Nokar.”
The girl nodded and got up and walked away, head down and shoulders slumped.
As soon as Faia was out of earshot, Medwind turned her attention back to Nokar. “I can give you almost forever, old man,” she whispered.
He smiled weakly. “Dear love of mine.” He reached out with difficulty and patted her hand. “I wish that were true.”
She leaned closer and stared earnestly into his eyes. “It is true, Nokar. The vha’attaye don’t die.”
“They don’t live, either. If I were vha’attaye, I couldn’t smell—the sweet smell of your hair—or taste your salty kisses—or roll over in the bed at night and—squeeze your very fine breasts.” He gave her another gentle smile. “I’ve lived long, Medwind. Those are—my principle pleasures now.”
“But I don’t want to lose you.”
“Life is like that, Medwind. Eventually, we lose—everything we love. What you must do is—love many things—so the process takes longer.” The old man attempted a wheezy chuckle that became an ugly cough.
She leaned over and kissed him firmly on the lips. Her tears mingled with her kisses. “Get some sleep, old man,” she said. “I don’t want to find someone else to love today.”
* * *
Choufa curled with her back against the airbox wall, and stared over the lumped forms of sleeping sharsha. The look-holes framed a lonely, star-filled sky. Her burns ached, but the tall, red-haired peknu woman had smeared a sweet-smelling mash of plant-leaves on them. That took the worst of the pain away.
It was not pain that kept her awake. It was fear.
She wriggled upright, and crawled cautiously over the oblivious sleepers. She peered out the opening.
The air was bitterly cold, and thin. Gusts eddied around the airbox and blew through her coarse, tattered robe, raising bumps on her skin and causing her nose to run. Her teeth chattered. She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed them against each other. For the chance to view the weird landscape in front of her, she had suffered far more than cold.
To one side of her, huge black walls of stone, bigger than the biggest Keyu, crawled up to the sky. They were so tall and mighty, even trees were afraid to climb to their peaks. She could make out, in the darkness, the silhouette of the line beyond which the trees would not go. That was the place Choufa thought she would like to reach.
How wonderful it would be to live in a world without trees. Without trees, nothing would scare me.
In front of her, dark lumps clustered close to the airbox. The peknu had such ugly little cloth houses; but Choufa recalled the beautiful silk hangings that had always surrounded her before and decided there was much to be said for some kinds of ugliness.
Beside the folds of one of those little houses, a tiny fire glowed. The peknu woman she’d saved sat by it, awake as Choufa, staring back the way they had come. The fire cast the sharp planes of her face in ruddy hues and gave some color to her star-white hair. The woman looked worried and sad. Suddenly she appeared to realize someone was watching her. She looked over at the airbox. Her pale eyes gleamed in the firelight. She smiled and said, in soft, oddly accented Folk-Speech, “If you already awake, you can come and company me.”
Choufa climbed out of the airbox and walked over.
The woman handed her a heavy blanket. “Here. Take. Is Keyu-ugly cold this night. Sit by the fire. You can tell me your name and tell a story.”
Keyu-ugly cold. Funny words, but Choufa liked them. “Keyu-ugly cold,” she agreed, and took the blanket, and took a seat near the woman, out of the wind. “My name is Choufa. What story do you want?” she asked.
“Hai, Choufa. I called Medwind Song. Sometimes just Medwind. You save me, save all of us.” The woman grinned at her. “Tell me why you need us save you.”
Choufa laughed bitterly. “Not a big story there. I’m sharsha.”
Medwind Song wrinkled her forehead, and shrugged. “Sharsha. You say that before. What that mean?”
“We are the people the keyunu kept to feed the Keyu. The Silk People kept us until we had babies—to make new sharsha—and then they fed us to the Godtrees.” Choufa looked out into the darkness, into the place that was so far from her destroyed home, and pulled the blanket tighter around herself. “If we did not come with you, where would we go? After the Keyu were dead, the Silk People would have killed all of us, I think. They hated us.”
“Sometimes, people fear what they not understand. They hate what they fear. That the way of some people.”
“It’s a bad way.”
Medwind Song nodded. “Yes. You right.” She placed a few more twigs and
broken branches on her fire and sighed. “You out of that place, safe from those people. Now what you want to do?”
That was the source of Choufa’s new fear. She had no idea what would happen next. She and her fellow sharsha were away from the hated Keyunu—but they had no place to run. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Where are you going? Can we go there?”
“We hunt lost City of First Folk. Tagnu lead us there.”
Choufa made a face. The other woman noticed and cocked her head to one side.
“You and tagnu, you no like each-each?”
Choufa shook her head slowly. “The tagnu are bad.”
Medwind wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her chin on her forearms. She fixed Choufa with an intense stare. “You think so? Why?”
Choufa squirmed. “They—they had to leave the village.”
“Yes. Why they had to leave? You know?”
Choufa licked her lips. Her mouth felt suddenly very dry. “Um—the Keyu made them leave.”
The pale-eyed woman nodded, and an expression of satisfaction crossed her face. “Same Keyu who say you bad and had to be sharsha. You really bad? You should be tree-food?” she asked.
“No!” Choufa snapped.
“Right. They not really bad either.” The pale-eyed woman stared out into the darkness. “I think Keyu picked tagnu because they had no magic, and you sharsha because you had lot-lot magic.”
“Magic?” Choufa stumbled a bit over the foreign word.
“Power.” Medwind frowned slightly. “How you made the airbox fly today. Tagnu not know that word in your tongue, so I not know it.”
“No word for it,” Choufa told her. She thought about the magic for a moment “It is what the Godtrees do—and no one could talk about that. We prayed to them and asked them for things, but no one who wasn’t Keyunu could say their name. And I don’t think even the Keyunu dared to talk about them.”
“Feed the hruning trees little children. I bet they not want talk about that.” Medwind spat into the fire, and it hissed.
“Hruning trees?” Choufa asked.
The woman winced. “That a bad word. Forget it, you understand?”
Choufa grinned at her and said nothing. Hruning, she thought. Hruning… hruning… hruning. “Magic” is a good word, but I bet “hruning” is better. She decided under no circumstances would she forget that word.
They sat together without speaking for a long time, listening to the croaking and buzzing and grumbling of the night things, and the whispers of wind through the grass. Finally, though, Choufa asked, “Medwind Song, can we go with you to this city? We could help you.”
Medwind gave her a sad little smile. “You can come. But—we not know what we find there. First Folk city maybe very dangerous. Maybe you not want come.”
Choufa studied the complex patterns of green and tan that curled up both her arms; heyudakkau, symbols of everything she hated in the Silk People—and she wanted to laugh. Any situation that contained even a chance of survival at the end of it didn’t seem dangerous to her. She didn’t doubt for an instant the other sharsha would feel the same way. “We’ll come,” she said.
* * *
Roba remembered fire—red-on-black-on-red, hellish trees, smoke and pain and more pain; drums and chants. She remembered being sure she was going to die. She even thought she remembered dying, but that memory, at least, appeared to be false.
The morning air was cold on her cheeks. Every breath was a new and separate agony, and every word burned in her ruined throat. She could see Kirgen’s hand curled around hers—but she couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel anything below her neck. Her body seemed to belong to someone else—someone who had gone away and wasn’t intending to come back. The really disturbing thing was, she still felt she had a body—the only problem was that it wasn’t the one she could see. Her invisible but tangible body was bathed in amorphous pain. She kept trying to move her hand, to rub away the pain, and although her mind told her the hand had moved, she could see damned well it hadn’t.
“I will send my spiritself into the whitecord,” Faia said. She sat cross-legged on the floor of the tent on the other side of Roba.
Roba looked at the hill-girl—lean, graceful, young, and very, very beautiful—and she hated her. She hated the girl, and the girl’s lithe movements. She hated the compassionate healer smile Faia gave her—and she hated just as much the nervous, uncertain glance the girl threw in Kirgen’s direction.
Faia said softly, “I cannot promise this will work right. I cannot promise it will work at all. I do promise I will do everything I can.”
Kirgen gave the hill-girl a grateful smile, and for an instant Roba hated him too.
“This thing you must know,” the hill-girl said, speaking only to Kirgen. “Once we start, you must not violate the shield or touch either one of us, no matter what you see, or what we say. You understand?”
“No. Can’t I even hold her hand?”
“No.” Faia looked at him. “You cannot. Not one touch.”
Kirgen started to argue, but Faia was already taking a long, slow breath and closing her eyes. She traced an arc around her from the ground to the point over her head. The air inside the sphere she drew began to glow blue.
“Amazing,” Kirgen whispered.
Roba found herself impressed even through her haze of pain.
Then the blue glow stretched out and engulfed her. Faia toppled to one side, and Kirgen instinctively moved toward her. At the same instant, Roba heard Faia’s voice inside her head.
Do not touch me! the voice demanded.
“Stop!” Roba croaked. “I can—hear her inside me. She says—don’t touch.”
“Oh. Well… Kirgen sat back and looked anxiously between Roba and Faia. He pushed his hands onto the ground in front of him and chewed on his bottom lip.
Here it is, the voice muttered. Roba felt a few errant tingles at the base of her neck and one sudden blaze of pain in her left hand that immediately vanished back into nothingness. I have found the top of the whitecord. For a little while, I will be a part of you. Both of our lives depend on how you react—I am matching your whitecord to mine, but if Kirgen or you or anything else causes me to lose my concentration, the whole spell could snap.
Roba responded directly to the hill-girl for the first time. And what a pity that would be, I’m sure. Then you will walk away, and I will die, or go on being a cripple—which will leave Kirgen free for you. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You and Kirgen and Kirtha—and me gone!
The voice in her head was mild. Not precisely, Roba. Both of us occupy your body right now. If the spell snaps, then my whitecord will configure itself to yours—and we will both end up dead or crippled.
The rush of shame that overwhelmed Roba kept her mind occupied through the arduous, painful procedure that followed.
* * *
Medwind had spent most of the night in meditation. For a while, the little sharsha kid, Choufa, gave her a diversion from her worries, but when the girl went back to the airbox to sleep, the worries returned to fill the void.
Morning came too soon and offered too few answers. She could feel the edge of Faia’s dangerous magic from Roba’s tent. She could feel Nokar, hanging on to his life by the thinnest of threads. She could feel her own weakness, and her own inadequacy for the task before her. She sat outside the tent, staring at the last stars as they faded on the western horizon and wished she could take herself and Nokar back in time to a place where they were both young and strong.
She considered what lay ahead. A spell that could give Nokar back his life would be one that required subtlety and enormous skill and incredible amounts of power. She would have to figure out how Nokar had created the spells-inside-of-spells with which he had held back the plunderings of time. She would have to discover how he made those spells call on each other, what each separate spell did, and where each had fragmented when the magic faded. She would have to bring him back to health, rejuvenate hi
s failing organs, and repair the shattered spells—and at her best, in full health, she simply wasn’t that good.
In the last hour of night, she’d thought of an alternative. It was clumsy and heavy-handed. More than that, it would cost her, and cost her in such a way that she would never know the extent of the price she paid.
She could give him part of her own life, slice the years off of her own time, and graft those years on his life. By the very nature of the gift, it was something she could give and never miss—
I’ll never know how many years I’ll have—except I’ll know some of them are gone, she thought. Even so, if I could give him a year for a year, I would not question. I would simply give.
If only it were so clear-cut.
The magic would not work that way. It would eat up part of the fabric of her life in the removal, part in the transfer, and part in the grafting on, so that a year of her life might only bring him a week, or a day, or an hour.
Or I could give him a year—or ten—and watch him die in the next instant anyway. How much would be enough to save him?
How much am I willing to give for love? she wondered. How many of my days are one of his smiles worth? How many sunrises can can I willingly forgo to gift him with a glimpse of this city of his dreams?
She clenched her fists and stared into the dying embers of the campfire. How much can I pay, knowing when the time I’ve given has gone, I’ll lose him anyway? She felt the oppressive weight of guilt. Gifts, she had always thought, would be freely given, and the price never questioned. She stared out across the lands that lay to the west and yearned for a simple answer.
There were none. But then, in a perfect world the gods would never put a price on love.
* * *
Seven-Fingered Fat Girl and Dog Nose lay in the tall meadow grass, and kissed, and fumbled, and rolled on the ground.
“This would feel better if you took off your myr,” Dog Nose whispered. “I’ll take mine off, too.” He tugged at the front flap of her loincloth.