The Bitter Twins

by Jen Williams

  31

  ‘I have eaten so much I might actually die.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Noon threw a piece of fruit at Tor, which bounced off his shoulder. Arnia had been as good as her word, and had thrown them a feast that rivalled even the food at the Sea-Heart Inn. They had eaten it all on a long table outside the house with the ship for a roof, and now they sat and watched as Micanal walked with Vostok between the trees. Arnia herself had not eaten much of her food, and disappeared soon after dinner, murmuring something about some tasks she could not leave undone. It was difficult, Noon reflected, not to feel a sense of peace here, as the sun set through the leaves, and the warmth of good food spread through their bellies. All of which just put her more on edge.

  ‘I am serious,’ said Tor. ‘It won’t be the crimson flux that carries me off, or extremely advanced old age. It will be that pie. I don’t even know what that fruit was, but I wish to eat it every day forever.’

  ‘Where do they get all this stuff?’ said Noon, looking at the remains of the spread, which had included meats and cheeses and even a sort of sour wine. ‘And where is everyone else? Are you telling me that Arnia makes all this cheese herself?’

  ‘Please do not ruin a perfectly good cheese by worrying about where it came from.’

  Noon snorted at him, and looked back at Vostok. The dragon was talking quietly with the old man, even lowering her head in a deferential way, which only made Noon feel more ill at ease. Kirune was asleep in front of the fire; at least the big cat did not change his ways so easily.

  ‘Arnia and Micanal didn’t come here alone. What happened to the people in those graves we saw? And wine – I’m sure Vintage would be able to tell us how much effort goes into making a bottle of wine, but even I know you don’t just milk it from a wine-cow. Are you even listening to me?’ She smacked Tor on the knee, and he jerked back into an upright position. He had been on the verge of falling asleep.

  ‘Look, it’s been a long bloody journey, Noon. There will be answers, I’m sure of it. I have questions myself. Why does the lovely Arnia look as fresh as a newly ripe fruit, for example, but Micanal is so frail? Why did they come here? And why did they stay?’

  ‘And what’s with the weird bloody field of lights around the island?’

  ‘That as well. I hope they have more of this wine, because I sense we will get through a lot of it.’

  ‘If she comes to you in your sleep again, tell me.’

  Tor raised an eyebrow. ‘My dreams are private, thank you very much.’

  ‘When it suits you, perhaps.’ Noon turned to him, trying to make him meet her eye. ‘Something weird is going on here, and I don’t think it’s entirely safe. Micanal looked less than pleased to be found in that underground cavern, and Arnia’s face when she realised Ygseril is alive . . . We’ve only got tiny pieces of the story here. Vintage would tell us to be careful.’

  Tor sighed heavily. The scarring on the right side of his face had faded a little, she realised, and his hair had almost entirely grown back. Her blood had helped, perhaps, or it could even be Kirune’s influence; they understood so little about the link between war-beasts and their companions. Thinking of this, she reached out towards Vostok with her mind; the dragon was calm, if intensely curious. As though she had somehow summoned them, the old Eboran and the dragon turned and headed back towards the house. Micanal looked very grave, and a shade paler than he had during dinner.

  ‘The lady Vostok has explained some of what has brought you here, and my heart is both joyful and wounded. To know that war-beasts live once more in the world, and that they suffer so . . . More and more I feel that the long lives of Eborans are a curse, that we should live long enough to see this.’ Noon frowned slightly. Vostok had told him everything already, which was unusually trusting for the dragon. ‘She also told me that you came here in the hope of being able to see my great final project – the history of the war-beasts, which I was preserving within the amber tablets. Well –’ He stopped, and pressed his lips together as though he didn’t trust himself to speak further. ‘You are right; I did bring them with me when we left Ebora all those years ago. I thought that this sacred place would lend a kind of magnificence to the project, and that whatever answers we might find here about Ygseril would help to complete it.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘What a fool I was. Come, please, the two of you, walk with me. I know it grows late, but now the idea is in my head I know I will not sleep until I have shown this to you, and when you get to my age you need your sleep quite desperately.’

  Noon glanced at Tor, who looked about as nonplussed as she felt, and together they followed the old man back towards the trees. When Vostok made to follow, Micanal turned to her apologetically.

  ‘My lady, I am afraid that the trees will grow very dense here, and it will not be a comfortable journey for you. I am sure that your companions will explain everything to you when they return.’

  The shadows within the trees were thick, and, all around, the birds were singing the sun down. Noon felt as though they walked through the body of a great living thing, something made of lots of separate parts, each with its own inner life. The last time she had felt like this had been when they had walked through the belly of the Behemoth on Esiah Godwort’s land, but there she had felt threatened, too. This island seemed to offer the opposite of that. She didn’t trust it.

  ‘Where are we going, Micanal?’

  The old man looked at her. In the growing dark, she couldn’t see his eyes.

  ‘There is a place I must show you, and there I will explain what I can.’

  ‘Well, as long as we don’t need to be able to actually see the place.’ Tor squinted up at the canopy, where the patches of sky were turning violet. The day took a long time to die here, but Noon suspected the nights would be very dark indeed. ‘We’ll be stumbling around in the pitch-black soon enough.’

  ‘Perhaps, then, your good friend could light the way?’

  When Noon turned to the old Eboran in surprise, he touched her arm lightly, just once. ‘We had fell-witches in Sarn during my time in Ebora. Little about their ways have changed, it seems.’ He tapped his forehead.

  ‘Oh.’ Noon reached up and attempted to pull her fringe over the tattoo, knowing what a pointless gesture that was. ‘Fine. What were the Winnowry like in your day, Micanal?’

  Micanal looked down at his feet as they trudged through the undergrowth. ‘They were powerful. Unbending. We did not see them often in Ebora. As I’m sure you know, the gift of the winnowfire is one that Eborans do not possess. But I travelled widely in my youth and would see them. I even heard about their actions during the Sixth Rain, when, briefly, they fought alongside us against the Jure’lia, and I can tell you that they were not thought kindly of by our people.’

  Noon pressed her hand to a tree trunk as they passed and siphoned off a little of its green life. It tickled against her palms.

  ‘I don’t think they’re thought kindly of by anyone,’ she said. ‘Least of all by the women they imprison.’

  Micanal nodded, but did not venture a further opinion. For a time they walked in silence, and when it became impossible to see where they were putting their feet, Noon summoned a small ball of winnowfire to dance just above her fingertips. The forest was revealed to them anew, in shades of emerald.

  ‘The light!’ said Micanal. ‘It is so beautiful, in its way. I have known these trees for centuries, yet they look quite different. I should like to paint it so.’

  ‘Micanal,’ Tor cleared his throat, ‘when I read about the Golden Fox expedition, it always said that you took a good number of our people with you. I don’t mean to be rude, but where is everyone? Did . . . did the disease take them all in the end?’ Then he spoke quickly, as though to cover up any pain his words might have caused. Noon noticed he did not mention that they had found the gravesite. ‘The palace was decimated, with no more than one or two from each family surviving, and sometimes not even that.’

  The old Eboran bowed his he
ad, as though dealing with some physical hurt, and for a long time he didn’t say anything.

  ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘They all died of the flux. We were very unlucky.’

  In the greenish gloom, Noon tried to catch Tor’s eye. The old man was lying. Why would he lie about that?

  ‘Their bodies,’ she said quickly, ‘did you bury them?’ Micanal looked startled, so she continued. ‘It’s such a tragedy. We might like to pay our respects.’

  ‘I . . . This is very difficult for me to talk about. Perhaps we could continue this discussion another time. Please, walking this far is not so easy for me these days. Forgive me if I must walk in silence.’

  It was another hour before Micanal spoke again. The night fell thick and suffocating, and Noon found herself looking up at the night sky, seeking out the stars as some sort of comfort. The air around them seemed to be alive with insects – their trilling calls, the buzzing brush of their bodies against bare skin – and her back itched and tingled to be within four walls again. You were stuck in a cell for ten years, she reminded herself. Don’t let a few bugs put you off your freedom.

  ‘Here, it is just here.’

  Noon jumped slightly at the sound of the old man’s voice. ‘Please, be careful. It could be easy to miss in the dark, and that would be unfortunate.’

  Lifting the winnowfire to light the way ahead, Noon saw that the ground fell away just in front of them, and they stood on the edge of a great crevasse. The island continued some fifty feet away; she could just make out the far side, with its sheer cliff facing them. There was the sound of running water coming from below. Abruptly, she felt it was very important not to be within arm’s reach of Micanal. She took a few soft steps back.

  Tor, however, had gone right up to the edge of the cliff and was peering over into the black.

  ‘Unfortunate is right. This is an impressive drop.’

  The old man nodded. He seemed to be finding it difficult to talk again. As casually as possible, Noon leaned against a nearby tree and siphoned off some of its life energy, while keeping her eyes on Micanal. If he made any sudden moves, she could simply blast him off the cliff. Somewhere, distantly, she felt Vostok responding to the tension thrumming through her, but she pushed the dragon away.

  ‘Micanal, what does this place have to do with your project?’

  He looked up at her as though he’d forgotten she was there, and she felt a pang of shame. He was ancient, and clearly struggling with something, and she was planning to set him on fire. I guess that’s my answer to everything. The old man turned back to the cliff face, and sighed.

  ‘This is where it is. Down there. I threw it down there, oh, years ago. If the river hasn’t carried it out to sea, that’s where it still is.’

  Tor stood up straight, clearly startled. In the light from the winnowfire he looked both impossibly handsome and utterly indignant.

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Forgive me, I must sit for a while. My knees are staging a rebellion these days.’ Micanal, with some awkwardness, seated himself on the dirt floor. His knees popped like knots in the fire. When he was settled, he waved at them both with a touch of impatience. ‘Are you two just going to loom over me like that?’ With a smile in his voice he added, ‘Have some respect for your elders.’

  Reluctantly, Noon sat, although she still made sure that she was out of the old man’s reach. Tor sat next to her, leaning on her shoulder briefly to lower himself to the ground. Much to her own annoyance, she felt a burst of warmth at this unexpected touch.

  ‘I could not finish the project,’ said Micanal. ‘It was as simple as that. Young woman, you cannot guess at the despair we felt as we left Ebora, sure we were leaving it to its ruin, but there was hope, too. We – I – was sure this place would be the rebirth of our people, a place to find a new start. I wanted to take our past with us into that new start, and the most important part of that was the war-beasts. They had been our companions for as long as we could remember, a living, breathing part of Ygseril, and century after century they had fought with us and died for us. They are honour in its purest form, a weapon and a shield.’ He paused to cough into his hand. ‘Ygseril and the war-beasts are so closely bound. With the tree-father dead, I knew that if we found a new tree-god here, on Origin, the war-beasts born from them would likely not know their own histories, so I saw it as my duty to give them that record. To paint the lost war-beasts, in dreams, for all the Eborans that were to come.’

  ‘That is exactly what we need,’ said Tor, leaning forward. ‘Our war-beasts don’t remember their past lives. With this history of yours, they could learn it.’

  ‘What did you find here?’ asked Noon. ‘Because I’m guessing it wasn’t another tree-father.’

  ‘If we had known that Ygseril was shamming death, well . . .’ He seemed to lose the sense of what he was saying, then, but Noon noticed he had not answered her question, or even acknowledged that she had spoken. ‘It was to be my greatest work, and indeed I completed a great deal of it on the journey here, locking myself away in a cabin. Sea voyages are so dreary.’

  ‘I have never been in a boat, so I wouldn’t know,’ said Noon. ‘What did you find on this island, Micanal?’

  The old man sighed. ‘We did not find another tree-father. That is not what we found. The hope that we could start anew died with our friends as the flux came for them, and eventually working on the war-beast record became tortuous for me. To look at their glorious forms, and to know that they were lost forever to history, was too much. One day, I came here to this crevasse, and I threw all the amber tablets down here. Even if I regretted it, I would not be able to fetch them back. By that time, old age had its painful fingers in my joints and I was no longer capable of even attempting to climb down such a cliff.’

  ‘Arnia could have, though,’ said Tor.

  The old man blinked, and scowled, so briefly that Noon almost missed it. ‘Arnia has never had the slightest interest in my work, and certainly would not risk herself to retrieve something I did not want anymore.’

  Next to her, Noon could feel Tor wanting to ask another question, but something was holding him back. No new tree-father, she thought. So no sap. Then why has Arnia not aged as her twin has?

  ‘You were our greatest artist,’ said Tor softly. ‘Micanal the Clearsighted, it pains me to hear that you discarded what must be a work of supreme genius.’

  Micanal smiled slightly at that. ‘You are kind.’ He sighed, and all the wind seemed to go out of him. All at once, the old man seemed smaller, less mysterious. Just an old man at the end of his life who had seen everything he cared about destroyed or ruined. ‘It is good to see your face, you know. A young Eboran face. That, at least, is a blessing I did not expect.’

  ‘So, what we came here for, is down there?’ Noon nodded towards the crevasse. In the dark, it was little more than a yawning absence next to them, a difference in the air.

  ‘Yes. At least, I assume it is. Ygseril’s amber is quite heavy and it could well be exactly where it landed, all those years ago. Or perhaps the current has moved it, or animals might have burrowed under the pieces. I am afraid I could not tell you. Since I threw them away, I have not been back here.’

  Noon looked at Tor. ‘Then we could get them back. Easy enough to fly down there with Vostok and Kirune and have a hunt around in the mud.’

  ‘Hunting around in the mud, my favourite. It’s just like being back with Vintage.’ Tor cleared his throat. ‘Micanal, you do not object to us retrieving your work?’

  Noon sat up. She wanted to kick Tor. There was more at stake here than the ego of an old man. And if he objected, how could he stop them exactly? But Micanal shrugged.

  ‘Do not ask me to look on them again, but other than that, you can retrieve them with my blessing. I would recommend doing it in daylight, however.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Noon stood up, and picking a tree nearest the edge of the cliff, pulled life force from it until the bark under her hand grew
blackened and flaky. She repeated the process with several of its neighbours. ‘There. We should know this place when we return, so that you don’t need to come back with us.’ She walked to the edge of the cliff and released the winnowfire she had built within her chest in a big blast of flame. For a few seconds, the crevasse was lit with an eldritch daylight, and she thought that she saw movement on the far side, just for a moment. When the winnowfire had spent itself, she blinked rapidly at the after-images floating across her vision.

  ‘Did you see something, then? Moving on the far cliff?’

  Tor came up next to her, shaking his head. ‘You just blinded me, witch, so no, I did not.’

  ‘Come on,’ Micanal was abruptly on his feet and heading back into the trees. ‘Let’s start making our way back. I have no wish to be out here all night.’

  32

  ‘Bread, and ale, and somewhere to sit. These are the good things in life, lad.’

  Aldasair looked up to see Bern the Elder looming towards him, a foaming tankard in one hand and what appeared to be half a loaf in the other. It was late, and Aldasair had found a quiet spot on the porch of the hut where they were staying. The place looked over the Broken Field, and had a dusty, unused quality to it – Bern had explained that once there had been a guard that lived there, keeping an eye on the Field, but since the Jure’lia had appeared to have been defeated, that particular tradition had been gratefully abandoned. Currently, the Field was quiet, although it still glowed faintly, and Aldasair found that his eyes were drawn again and again to the exposed crystal. They had left it where it was for now, with plans to move it with special precautions later – Vintage’s suspicions were one thing, but all they truly knew was that it could be dangerous.

  ‘Of course,’ Bern the Elder settled next to Aldasair with a grunt. ‘Bread is best when it has a big chunk of something’s flesh in it. Have you eaten, lad? Of course you have. Rainya will have taken one look at you and decided you need fattening up.’