by Jen Williams
‘Tor!’ It was Kirune, his bulky silhouette blocking out the dim light from the end of the tunnel.
‘What is it?’
‘The other two. They are not here.’
Tor and Noon emerged into the cool night air. The big cat looked agitated, prowling back and forth in front of the entrance.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They are not in their house. Vostok called for them, nothing. They are not in the clearing.’ Kirune shook out his fur. ‘They are gone, and you hide from us. Keep knowledge from us. Eborans are . . . disappointing.’
Tor sighed extravagantly. ‘Come on, let’s find Vostok, and I will explain it all to both of you, but I don’t expect you will enjoy it.’
And they didn’t. Noon sat on the porch of their dwelling, watching as Tor outlined the truth of Ebora to the war-beasts. She felt Vostok’s growing anger and dismay as a tightening in her chest, and even thought she could sense Kirune’s disappointment and confusion. When he was done, he spoke to them about the human village, about making their way there in the morning should Micanal and Arnia not show up, but they drifted away without agreeing to anything – Noon doubted they even heard him. Vostok and Kirune walked away under the trees together, and when Noon reached for the dragon – to give her sympathy, or comfort – she sensed that Vostok did not want to speak to anyone at that moment. Tor joined her on the porch, looking downcast.
‘I fear we have only made our situation worse,’ he said quietly. ‘We came here to find something that would bind us all together, but instead . . .’ He nodded to the patch of trees where the war-beasts had vanished. ‘We are not just divided, but dispirited.’
‘Are you glad that you know the truth, though?’ Noon was thinking of the hole in her memories, the place where her mother and everyone she had known had died; she could approach the edge of the memory, but whenever she got close, a terrible sense of danger would push her back. ‘It’s weird, and disappointing, but it is the truth of who you are. Does that mean something?’
He looked at her, half smiling. His long black hair was loose, framing his face like a curtain. She realised that the scars across his eye and his cheek had become as much a part of him as anything else, and she knew only that she was glad to see his face, and to be sitting with him on this quiet night.
‘I expect Vintage would have some fine words about the value of truth,’ he said. ‘But at the moment it simply feels like everything I knew about my people was a lie. We are not god-touched, and indeed Ygseril is no god. He is the spawn of some other race, an experiment.’
‘He loved you, though,’ she replied, smoothing out her trousers with her hands. Her fingers were red and rough from days of searching through the river. ‘You told me that – that you felt his regard for you, when he returned.’
‘Hmm. We were just like you once, you know. Humans who happened to wander across a certain tree. It doesn’t sound like the beginning of much, to me.’
‘Doesn’t it make us closer, though?’
He looked at her then, and said, ‘Do you want to go inside?’
It was slower than before, and they laughed more. The lamps were burning low, but still Noon felt vaguely self-conscious as she lost each item of clothing. Tor pulled off his shirt and threw it so extravagantly that he knocked a vase over that promptly shattered, and for a long moment they just held each other as they giggled helplessly. Then, though, he kissed her, kissed her throat and her neck, and she slid her hands down the smooth skin of his belly, grinning secretly into his shoulder at what she found there. Vostok had been present the first time, in a strange way, but now she was far away, and this was very much her own experience.
Eventually, Tor scooped her up and carried her to one of the beds – it was his, she realised belatedly, as it was untidy and strewn with clothes – and there he spoke softly of the rules of his House of the Long Night. This time, Noon had the patience to listen, although not for long, and eventually she pulled him to her with a hunger that seemed bigger than herself. He burned in her, a delicious brand, and as she tangled her fingers in his hair she murmured ‘fire and blood, fire and blood’, over and over.
Afterwards, they lay together in a tangle of limbs and sheets. Noon found herself staring at the window. It didn’t seem possible, but the small patch of night she could see looked brighter than it had.
‘I prefer this to the cave floor,’ she said.
‘Mmm.’ Tor was twirling a section of her hair around his fingers. ‘I think you are my favourite witch, witch.’
‘I have a bad feeling about this place, Tor. Why did that . . . Aboran person react to me that way? He couldn’t possibly have known me, but he seemed . . . I don’t know. Horrified. Scared.’
‘Well you are pretty scary.’
‘Tor.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Noon. To be honest, I think so long alone has turned them strange. And they’re not even really there, not physically.’ She felt him shift in the bed, and knew that his mouth would be pressed thin with annoyance. ‘Thousands of years stuck there, stranded, slowly dying, and then channelling what was left of them into mirrors, becoming reflections of themselves. It’s not healthy, to be alone for so long.’
‘Like Micanal and Arnia, you mean. I don’t think they are as happy or as normal as you would like to believe.’
He shifted again, and she sensed him reluctantly agreeing with her.
‘We’ll find them, and get some answers. Soon.’
Hestillion waited.
There was little else she could do. She could feel Celaphon at the edges of her perception, a strange mixture of angry and cowed – he had not enjoyed her commanding him as she had, and he was outraged by the loss of his siblings, but had chosen to keep his distance from her for the time being. Her chamber was dark and still, the landscape beyond the translucent panel speeding away from them under grey skies. On the floor some distance from her scuffed boots, the Tarla card Aldasair had once given her lay crumpled and discarded. She stood looking out of the makeshift window, and did not turn when she heard the wall open behind her. Distantly, she was glad she was wearing what she now thought of as her battle clothes – a fur vest, leather leggings, her hair pulled back into a tight braid. This was more comfortable than her silk robes.
The queen’s movements were almost silent, yet Hestillion felt no surprise at all when her long tapered fingers closed around her neck. Her touch was warm and papery.
‘Hestillion Eskt, born in the year of the green bird, child of Ebora.’ The queen tightened her grip, just slightly. ‘You have disappointed us.’
‘I did what I felt was necessary.’
‘Our prisoners were interesting to us. We have developed an appreciation for . . . experimenting. We were anxious to see what would happen to these new shapes, how we could change them, and you have taken that away.’ She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was much closer than it had been. Hestillion imagined the queen bending her strangely flexible neck, bringing her teeth closer to her throat. ‘I could tear your head off. That would also be an interesting change.’
‘Why don’t you?’
Instead of answering, the translucent window grew cloudy and the lights grew dim. Hestillion felt a moment’s sorrow at that; she didn’t want to die in the dark.
‘Yet you did not leave with them,’ said the queen. ‘It would have been easier, safer, to go. You could even have taken your war-beast – we think you know he would have followed you. Why?’
Hestillion closed her eyes, hoping she had judged this correctly. ‘Why do you ask, when you can easily know the truth of me?’
Abruptly the grip on her neck vanished, and the queen moved to stand in front of her. She looked curiously diminished. For the time being, she was not much taller than Hestillion, and her mask-like face was grey and solemn. Her eyes moved wetly as she peered closely at Hestillion. ‘Know the truth of you. To learn what holds you together. Yes.’
She touched the crystal
at Hestillion’s heart, and Hestillion felt all her hiding places, all her shields and barriers stripped away pitilessly in one heart-stopping moment. She was alone and exposed within the heart of the Jure’lia, cradled within its sprawling, busy intelligence, and there was only the truth. She felt the queen looking her over like the skittering touch of thousands of spiders, and then just as swiftly it was done. The queen stepped back, becoming taller and more impressive again. A slick sheen moved across her mask-face.
‘So. You have turned away from them. You have . . . “cut ties”.’ Her head tipped to one side. ‘It is interesting to us that you could not bear to be joined so with your blood-cousin, with the war-beasts you prize so highly.’
‘But you see that it’s true,’ snapped Hestillion. ‘I have made my choice. There is no returning to Ebora – I will become something else instead, something new. There is no walking away from this path.’
‘Yes, we see that it is true, Hestillion Eskt, the green bird of the corpse moon. But there must be a penance, we think, for such disobedience.’ All her early gravity had vanished, and instead she sounded amused. ‘You will find them and kill them, the prisoners. You will kill them for me, my little war-queen.’
50
They left as soon as the dawn light turned the trees a silvery, delicate grey. Vostok and Kirune stayed behind, in case the two Eborans should return. Both war-beasts were uncharacteristically quiet, keeping their heads low and together. Vostok in particular seemed almost mournful, and although Tor could not sense her feelings like Noon could, he watched the young witch’s face and saw a line of worry growing between her brows.
‘There’s nothing to say they will be at this village you found.’
‘No, but there will be answers there, I’m sure of it.’ The crevasse was a dark slit in the ground ahead, and when Noon led them beyond a heavy thicket of trees Tor found himself willing the bridge not to be there. Perhaps if it was not there, he could go back to believing that the siblings were simply eccentric recluses. But it hung across the gap, oddly gossamer in the strengthening light, and it was solid enough as they crossed it; the bridge was old, but it was well cared for.
‘Are you sure you know the way?’
Noon stopped, seeming to consider the question.
‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure.’ They started walking again. ‘When I was a child on the plains, we were taught very early on to remember where you were at all times. To be able to find your way back from places. Kids who wandered off from the tribe and couldn’t find their way back would usually die.’
‘Killed by animals? Wild-touched things?’
‘Sometimes. But mostly just being out under the sky too long. There are lots of places on the plains that are far away from any drinkable water, and it can get very cold at night. We would find their bones sometimes, when we came back that way, and we would take one bone, as evidence of what we had given to the land, and bury the rest.’
‘It sounds like a hard place.’ He glanced sideways at her. In the growing light, her face and the column of her neck looked luminous, and he felt an odd tightening in his chest. ‘You don’t talk about it very often.’
‘A hard place. I suppose it was, but maybe no harder than being poor in Mushenska, and certainly better than being a prisoner at the Winnowry. It feels like it was another life – a dream I had, or someone else’s life.’
‘Memory is strange like that.’
They walked on until the sun was a hot presence overhead and the air was alive with the sound of birds and insects waking up for the day. Eventually, Noon laid a hand on his arm, and just visible through the trees ahead was a sprawling settlement, surrounded by wooden walls and a palisade. He could smell wood smoke, and meat cooking, and there was a murmur too – the sound of a reasonable number of people living their lives. After days at sea and in the relative seclusion of the twins’ houses, it was a strange, almost alarming sound.
‘What do we do? Just walk up to the gate and ask if Micanal and Arnia can come out to play?’
Noon grinned at him wickedly, and for a moment he considered suggesting that they find a secluded patch of grass instead. When had he started to need her so badly?
‘Why not? Let’s see what these people know of the great artist and his sister.’
They ghosted towards the main gate, but before they reached it Tor spotted something moving furtively in the shrubs to the far side of the settlement. He touched Noon’s shoulder and they both stopped. It was a man, short and stocky, in his middle years for a human, and he had a thick black beard and skin that had likely once been tan like Noon’s, but years of the island’s hot sun had turned it as deep a brown as polished wood. He wore an outfit constructed from various small patches of fur and leather, and around his neck there was a necklace strung with a motley collection of coloured stones – red, brown, black and grey, and one bright piece of what looked like sea-glass, as green as Noon’s fire. Although his appearance was somewhat odd, it was his behaviour that struck Tor – the man was moving slowing through the bushes, his posture that of an animal ready to flee at any moment, and all the time he kept his eyes rigidly on the settlement. His right hand compulsively reached for the stones at his neck, over and over, each time brushing the smooth surface of the sea-glass.
‘Him,’ Tor said, pitching his voice low. ‘We’ll circle around and grab him, and ask him some questions. It makes more sense than storming the place.’
‘Grab him? You can’t just wander around beating up whoever you like.’
‘I’m not talking about a beating, Noon. Think about it – remember the people on Firstlight, how frightened they were to see me? How do you think this man will feel about new strangers on his island, and does he look like someone we can explain all this to quickly?’
The man was now tugging violently on his beard and glaring at the settlement with an expression of anguish. He stopped, then pressed his hands to the side of his head, looking at the ground.
‘Fine,’ said Noon, although she sounded unhappy about it. ‘Quickly. I can stun him, just a touch.’
Moving quickly and quietly, they doubled back on themselves and took some effort to approach the man from the thickest part of the bush, but ultimately Tor sensed it was a wasted effort – the bearded man remained utterly oblivious right up until the moment Noon slipped a hand around his wrist and he sunk into a faint. Tor grabbed him under the armpits and hauled him out of sight of the village – he was remarkably light for a stocky man – and propped him up against a tree. Already, his eyes were rolling in their sockets as he fought to regain consciousness.
‘You’re getting pretty good at that,’ Tor said to Noon. She raised her eyebrows at him.
‘Are you saying I wasn’t before?’
‘The first time you did it to me I thought I’d been lightly tapped with a sledgehammer. You’re using it with precision now . . . look, he’s awake.’
The man was staring at them both with apparent horror, his mouth hanging open.
‘Hello,’ said Noon. ‘What’s your name?’
The man swallowed hard. ‘Am I awake?’ He spoke a version of plains speak that was very close to Noon’s, just as the people on the other island had.
‘You are, friend.’
His eyes skittered to Tor, and he blinked several times. ‘Are you sure?’ Then, ‘I have seen you before, both of you.’
Noon glanced at Tor. ‘You were the figure I saw on the other side of the crevasse that day, watching us. Why?’
When the man didn’t reply, Tor took a hold of his shoulders. ‘My name is Tormalin the Oathless. We’re looking for a couple of Eborans – people like me. Have you seen them? Micanal and Arnia. They are brother and sister.’
The man’s eyebrows had shot up to be hidden under the scruffy flap of black hair that hung over his forehead.
‘Oh, I know them. We all know them, they—’ He stopped, appearing to struggle with something. To Tor’s alarm, he saw the man’s eyes grow bright with tear
s. ‘They are constant, they are gods, but I can’t see it. Why can’t I see it? My name is Fallow.’ He took a deep breath and tugged viciously on his beard. ‘I am an outcast, but I keep coming back here to look. To see my people, living on without me.’
Tor opened his mouth to ask if he’d seen Micanal or Arnia recently, but Noon spoke over him. ‘Why have you been cast out, Fallow?’
‘I dream differently,’ he said, and each word was so coated in misery it made Tor’s skin grow cold. ‘In their dreams, they all sing together, but I am the lost note.’
‘You mean the other people here all have the same dreams?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Fallow looked up at them as though they were mad, and his fingers closed around the piece of sea-glass again. ‘Every night they sing and walk as one. I don’t. My dreams are chaos, darkness.’
Tor glanced at Noon, but whether or not she had caught the significance of what the man had said he couldn’t tell. If the villagers on this island were all dreaming the same thing every night, it was very likely that Micanal or Arnia were interfering with their dreams, crafting them all to be the same. Something about that caused the worm of worry in his gut to grow.
‘How long have you been here, Fallow?’ asked Noon.
‘Here? Cast out, you mean?’
‘No, on this island. When did you come to this place?’
‘I was born here. My mother and father were born here, their mother and father . . . we were all born here.’ He screwed his eyes up tight, trembling, then popped them open again. ‘There were ships, hundreds of years ago, and we came here with our gods. But people – they forget there was ever another place, that there was a time when we didn’t believe in these gods. Years ago there were others, people who couldn’t dream the poisoned dream either, but they left. Made a secret boat and left, my grandmother said.’