Beneath Ceaseless Skies #179

by Therese Arkenberg

  “That story starts with what happened to all of us here.”

  She told him of the curse that swept through the city, bringing ages of ruin and rot in an instant. He had gone on a quest to save them. Here details became scarcer. He had given everything. He had succeeded.

  “The wizards returned from their exile, and everyone else awakened from the sleep we’d fallen into.”

  “You have no circle,” he said. “So you’re a scholar of magic, not a wizard.”

  She laughed. “Exactly.”

  “I’m sorry, should I not have said that?”

  “You wouldn’t have, before.” She sniffed. “Then again, Aniver, as you were before, you probably wouldn’t have noticed.”

  Aniver. The name didn’t sound bad. “I do feel... observant.” Not by any choice. He couldn’t help noticing things, the new facts and ideas that came with each moment.

  All new—as if he had never felt or thought their like before.

  “And you’re not at all self-absorbed.” Partway through the sentence, Lisandra’s laughter broke. By the end, it turned to tears.

  “Then you’re mourning for him.” He voiced another observation. “The person I used to be.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re mourning... me. Mourning my loss, even though I don’t feel it myself?”

  Lisandra sniffed harder, then laughed at the sharp sound. He smiled, too.

  Another woman came in, touched Lisandra’s shoulder with easy intimacy, and offered her a handkerchief. Lisandra thanked her and accepted her kiss on the forehead.

  Elona. It came into Aniver’s head unbidden—as if his own name had unlocked others. Elona was Lisandra’s friend, lover, partner, companion. He had known that once, along with many other things. He had cared about it, perhaps not deeply; he found no memory of being someone who cared deeply about his own relationships or others’. But he’d been vaguely happy to see his teacher glad. Now he saw two people being happy, two people he had given much to make that way. He felt nothing, not even regret.

  “Soon,” Lisandra murmured to Elona, who nodded and left them alone.

  She dabbed her eyes. “You know, at the time you mourned for me, I was sleeping—not aware of it either.”

  He could not say for certain. If the memory of that mourning remained in him, it was too vague and unimportant to grasp. Like remembering the shape of one particular leaf on a tree he’d walked past years ago. Or a tree someone else had walked past.

  “So this is what it feels like to lose one’s soul,” he said. Observing again.

  Lisandra reached for his hand, and he let her take it. “You washed away the stain from the River of Unmaking—waters from the Kingdom of the Dead itself. It’s a grace that any of you is left at all.”

  “A Grace.”

  Her hand clutched his tighter. “She told us what happened.”

  Of course, that’s how Lisandra knew despite sleeping through everything. But... “She?”

  He remembered the name even as she said it: “Semira.”

  * * *

  He asked them not to let her visit anymore. She had come when he was sleeping, they told him; watched over him a while and then left, not revealing any worry, only perhaps some impatience. He felt glad—as much as he felt anything—that Lisandra, and not Semira, had seen him wake.

  He wanted to meet Semira as much under his own power as possible. He felt it was important that he be the one to come to her.

  Lisandra had given him her description: a woman a little younger than he, brown-skinned with long, deep brown hair. Brown eyes, often rather bright, in face a little long, made more so by strain. But she smiled and laughed easily. She stood moderately tall yet seemed taller.

  “She looks as you’d expect a heroine too,” Elona had added.

  Easy to find.

  She sat on the steps above the Thurian docks, watching the crew of a pleasure barge preparing to embark. She wore a Nurathaipolean gown, silver with a long pleated skirt and a yoke collar that left her shoulders bare. A necklace dangled nearly to her waist, an hourglass hanging at the end of the long golden chain. It was empty, he saw as he came closer.

  “At a guess—” Aniver had picked up the habit of thinking aloud with Lisandra; it helped bring up wells of information—”the spell inside that pendent was devoured. Sucked up into some greater magic.”

  “No points for guessing which it was,” Semira said. She turned to him and made as if to stand—yet in the end she seemed unable to. She only looked at him.

  “Do you remember it?” she asked.

  “No. Do you?”

  She laughed. He wondered why he’d made so many people laugh recently. He suspected he hadn’t, before. “Nobody’s thought to ask me that.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember us standing in the Kingdom of the Dead. Before the Queen—Kahzakutri. I’m not afraid of Her name anymore. We unleashed a whirlwind then.”

  “A Grace, they tell me.”

  “It was beautiful.” Semira smiled at some memory. “Such wings—and the face was strangely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.”

  Aniver sat down beside her.

  “I remember all of that,” she said. “I remember the adventure. Being a hero. It’s all I remember clearly.”

  “You don’t remember anything before that?”

  “Oh, I suppose I do—facts of it. I miss my family, a little, and I expect I’ll go back to them in Timru. In time.” She frowned. “But it all feels washed-out, compared to these last few months. I... I think I’ve been made so conscious of being a hero that I’ve lost the sense of what it’s like to be a real person anymore.”

  “Not lost,” Aniver said, so quickly Semira startled. “Sorry,” he said then—which seemed to startle her even more. “These memories and feelings—they’re not forever lost, or it’s not helpful to think of them that way, Lisandra says.” Semira nodded; she must remember meeting Lisandra at his bedside. “They’re more... misplaced. Although we feel empty right now, or washed-out, it will come back. Not quite as it was, of course. But something will replace everything lost... or so they tell me. The most important things, those will come back, or something new will come in their place, in time.”

  Semira nodded. And now it was his turn to sit looking at her.

  She was—there were no words. She was Semira. He not only knew her, he felt her. Felt something to be near her.

  Just a glimmer. But it was something.

  “You were very important to me,” he said.

  Her cheeks took on a glow, a brightness suffusing her skin and eyes. And Aniver felt the same—as if he were much younger, a child even. A child’s excitement, and pride at finding something he did not need to be told. He hadn’t even needed to share his discovery aloud. But he had, so she would hear. Because she must have thoughts to untangle, too.

  “It’s not so hard to figure out, though,” she said, her blush fading. “I obviously wouldn’t have left Timru for nothing.”

  “That only proves that I was important to you— Oh. Sorry.”

  That brought another laugh, and she looked down as she had when she blushed. “So keep going,” she said. “No apologies necessary. Why can you tell I’m important?”

  Slowly, one hand went to the pendant. Had he given her that? Did she think he remembered?

  And in an instant, he did.

  “There’s no reason why,” Aniver said. “I just can. It’s... a grace.”

  A small miracle, with little more meaning than the fall of a blue feather. Yet it was.

  “A Grace,” she breathed. “Like the one we made, between the two of us.”

  “I know.”

  “Even if you don’t remember.”

  “Even if I don’t remember, I know. It’s... like a story. A story that no one told me—Lisandra didn’t have all of it to tell... Maybe if I heard it, really heard it, that would help bring it back.”

  “I’ve told the
story to a lot of people,” Semira said. “But maybe, with the right audience, I might finally make sense of it. As if I wasn’t the hero.”

  “But perhaps you are,” he said.

  “I’m more than that. Or at least I’d like to be.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, and for a moment there was silence. Companionable. But he didn’t feel bad breaking it, asking, “Where does it begin?”

  “Your part?”

  “Our part.”

  Semira closed her eyes. “In the east, there’s a stretch of water they call the Glass-Clear Sea. It’s haunted by the ghosts of an old city, Damartis, that lies beneath it. After the Polean Cities fell, an oracle told you to seek answers from the dead—”

  “But that was the wrong place to go.”

  She shrugged, smiling. “Not entirely. Because that’s how we met, you and I, in a boat sailing east from Timru harbor...”

  The pleasure barge had cast off, and another was sailing by, continuing downriver, perhaps all the way to Merenthaipolis. It was a beautiful day for long travel. Pennants fluttered in a crisp breeze, and Aniver almost recognized the standard embroidered on them. Might have recognized, too, the figures aboard, a raven-haired lady and a harpist whose hand went still on the strings as he looked up at them.

  Semira waved. Aniver joined her.

  “Are they friends?” he asked.

  “They could be.” She waved harder, with exuberant enthusiasm.

  He nodded. And as their greeting was returned, he smiled. After a moment, she continued speaking, telling him their story as the notes of a tune, unfamiliar yet beautiful, carried across the water.

  Copyright © 2015 Therese Arkenberg

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  Therese Arkenberg writes and runs a freelance editing business from her home in Wisconsin. Her fiction has recently appeared in Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and a forthcoming issue of Ares Magazine, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She blogs sporadically at ThereseArkenberg.com.

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  THE EXILE OF THE ELDEST SON OF THE FAMILY YSANNE

  by Kendra Leigh Speedling

  My brother seemed smaller in his cell, empty, as if the soul within him had already fled the city. He had folded himself into the corner where his bed met the wall, knees tucked up to his chest like a child.

  I slid the viewing-window shut and pushed open the door.

  “Sister,” he said, looking up as I entered. He gestured Friendly Greeting, but there was a hint of mockery in the movement. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

  “Hello, Tien,” I said, then cursed my tongue. I should not have called him by final-name; we were no longer family in the eyes of the law. Custom did not provide a way to address a relation-turned-exile—the assumption being, naturally, that such interactions would not take place at all.

  He caught it, of course; his hands shifted to Subtle Wryness. “Still claiming me?”

  “No.” I shut the door, moving to stand in front of it.

  “Then why are you here?” He unfolded his legs, straightening his posture. Imprisonment had not agreed with Tien; his clothes were rumpled and his hair was a mess, and not in his usual fashionably disheveled way. “Have the Quiet realized their mistake?”

  I fought my flash of anger. Tien always had excelled at being aggravating. This conversation was futile, and I had been a fool to hope otherwise.

  “The Quiet do not make mistakes,” I said. “I’m giving you a chance to explain.”

  “Explain?” His face showed no expression, as was proper, but his tone had fangs.

  I took a deep breath, stopping myself from gesturing Irritation. “Father trusts there may have been circumstances that were not brought to light at the trial—”

  “I didn’t kill her!” His voice cracked on the last word; he turned his face to the wall while he composed himself. His hands, which had been nearing Fury, clenched into fists instead.

  Still he insisted on this charade?

  “This is ridiculous.” I realized that my hand had strayed to my sword hilt and forced it to relax. “I won’t waste time asking how you could shame our name like this. You cannot think that anyone will believe—”

  “Do you?” He strode across the room, halting in front of me. “Do you believe I’m a murderer?”

  “Of course I do!” Unbecoming, my voice was too close to a snarl. An official of the Quiet had to remain composed at all times; how else could the City trust that laws would be enforced fairly? I let a moment pass before continuing. “I believe my eyes. I believe the mages who plucked that poor girl’s last memories from her!”

  Tien rocked back on his heels, hissing in a faint breath. For a moment, I thought he was actually going to cry, which would have been the height of humiliation for both of us. This was bad enough without an adult showing emotion on his face like a toddler.

  “I can’t explain that,” he said. “Somehow—” He broke off, glancing down at the floor. His left hand was gesturing Deep Grief. “Somehow, the memories are wrong. I didn’t kill Irune.”

  Irune? I remembered her full name; it had been read off at the trial. I’d known that she and Tien had been involved—but he was a flirt, ever since he was a teenager. He spoke of someone new every month. But if he was on seventh-name with her—

  Vexing though Tien was, I hadn’t wanted to think that he was capable of killing a lover, or anyone, for that matter. He’d been in plenty of duels, but they’d been first-blood or to-the-floor, not deadly. Tien was an indolent dandy who—infuriatingly—managed to be a good swordsman anyway, but he wasn’t a killer.

  Except he was. I could still hear her screams echoing through the courtroom as the memory was displayed. Tien hadn’t watched them; he’d buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

  “That’s not possible,” I said.

  “I know,” he snapped. “And no, before you ask, I wasn’t drinking; I don’t take anything, and I didn’t even see Irune that night. The first I heard of her death was when the Quiet hauled me in for questioning.” He glanced down at the floor, fighting to control his expression. One hand had gone to his belt where his fan would ordinarily be. “Imagine that, Aika, if you can imagine caring for anything that isn’t cold steel.”

  I had hold of his collar before I could stop myself, yanking him up so that his toes just brushed the floor. He didn’t flinch, simply sagged in my grip.

  “I care for our family,” I said. “I care for the City, and you still dare to call me by final-name?”

  He gestured Sardonicism, his gaze an empty, lifeless thing. “You did it first.”

  I dropped him.

  How could he? He could admit his fault, salvage some shred of honor, but no, he had to cling to his foolish vanity. The memory had shown his guilt; the court had decreed his guilt, and there was no use in discussing it further.

  “Are you going to come see me off?” his voice sliced through the air as I flung open the cell door.

  “Enjoy your exile,” I said, and slammed the door behind me.

  * * *

  I did see him off; Ward Chief Satia assigned me to the guard standing at the walls as they opened the gates. I could tell that she expected me to protest.

  I did not protest. An Aster-rank didn’t argue with an Azalea-rank, and I knew she was testing my loyalty. The Quiet were responsible for holding the City together when the fractious bonds of familial loyalties and obligations among the Council families threatened its stability. Any hint of weakness on my part would not have been forgiven.

  I stood on the walls as the gates swung open below. Tien looked impossibly small as he walked out of them, a bowed speck of a figure crossing the steppes. He had a bag with him—Father must have appealed to the others of the Council for that dispensation. He and Mother stood further down the wall, heads held high, my remaining siblings ranged between them. Their hands were still, betraying no emotion.

&
nbsp; The Jieha family stood on the other side of the ranks of the Quiet, bearing witness to the exile of their daughter’s killer. Her younger brother, an Iris-rank, stood with his family. He was the eldest and the heir now; he would have to leave the Quiet. Father had been furious with me when I’d joined, for the converse reason—you are the Ysanne heir, he’d said, your loyalty belongs here—but he’d accepted my decision.

  The Council Speaker, standing on the watchtower, unrolled the decree. “Sonam Juin Lajos Andreu Roel Shen Santxo Tien da Ysanne,” he intoned, the sound echoing over the walls, “has been found guilty of willful murder—”

  My mother’s hand clenched against her robes.

  “—by the courts of Our Most Serene City of Xiuvri. He is therefore cast out to the judgment of the gods. Henceforth, he shall not be as one dead, but as one never born; his names shall not be spoken within these walls.”

  Father’s hands were shaking. He’d defended Tien until he saw the memories, and even then could not quite believe it. It had fallen to Mother to convince him that it was hopeless. Our family had held a seat on the Council since my great-grandfather was a child; respect for the Ysanne name went back further still. We could not shackle ourselves to Tien’s actions.

  “May justice always have a voice within these walls,” the Speaker said.

  “Justice has a voice,” the ranks of the Quiet chorused.

  I stood straight, between two other Asters, and watched my former brother until he disappeared over the horizon.

  * * *

  I looked over the records again at my desk at headquarters that night, wondering if they might contain a hint as to why Tien had so stubbornly clung to his story. It should have made no difference—his reasons were irrelevant in the eyes of the law—but I would not be able to let it rest until I knew.

  The records contained nothing that I hadn’t seen before; the evidence spoke for itself. Tien, for all his faults, was neither heartless nor conscienceless, or so I’d believed. When we were children, he had always been the one to confess to indiscretions first, though he generally charmed his way out of consequences. I would have thought he would break when faced with her memory, at the latest.