by Jen Williams
The old man appeared out of the trees, a heavy-looking sack in his arms. Noon stepped back from where she was tightening the belts around Vostok and freed up her arms, half expecting a fight, but Tor waved her back.
‘I thought you should have these,’ said Micanal, passing the sack to Tor. ‘It’s why you came here, and perhaps some good should come of your disastrous visit.’ He glanced uneasily at Vostok, who was watching him closely. ‘If they help to bring your war-beasts some sort of connection, or peace, perhaps I will have achieved something after all.’
Tor pulled a long, golden object from the bag and held it up to the sunlight, where it glittered and glowed with an inner fire.
‘The amber tablets. You had them all along?’
‘No.’ Micanal’s lips twitched into a smile that lasted only an instant. ‘I really did throw them in the river. I was in quite a melodramatic mood that day. I suspected that Arnia found them, and had hidden them away for her own purposes.’ He sighed. ‘Sometimes I fear that I did not understand my sister at all.’
‘I know that feeling,’ said Tor.
‘But she only ever had a few hiding places, and I knew them all, so I went and had a look. I hope my last great work is useful to you, Tormalin the Oathless.’
Noon felt Vostok stir behind her, and she waited for the dragon to speak, but in the end she turned her head away. Micanal left, and she did not see him again.
There were some final visitors before they left. Vostok and Kirune had gone to fly one last circuit around the island, when Highsun and Fallow emerged from the trees, shading their eyes against the sun. To Tor, both of them looked gaunter than when they had last seen them, and the woman looked almost frail, as though something vital had been stripped from her in the last few days. Noon offered them some of the sour wine they had gathered, and Tor did not miss the sardonic look Fallow gave the bottle: his people had made it, after all.
‘The dreams have stopped,’ said Highsun, once they had all shared a glass. ‘I don’t know, really, how to explain what that’s like to you. A presence, a reassuring voice that has been with us forever, is now gone.’
‘Arnia is dead,’ said Noon. ‘She was the one who was manipulating you.’
Highsun nodded, gazing into the bottom of her glass. ‘I assumed so. Did you kill her?’
There was a note of accusation there, but when Noon shook her head, Highsun seemed willing to let the matter go.
‘And Lord Micanal?’
‘He is still around,’ said Tor. ‘But I doubt he will be bothering you much from now on.’
‘It is a hard time for the Poisonless,’ said Fallow. ‘For us, I mean. With the dreams gone, we’ve lost the backbone of what we were. Worse than that, is realising what lies we have eaten.’
‘Lies that you never believed,’ said Highsun sharply. ‘And we exiled you for it, fools that we are.’
Fallow touched her arm. ‘That doesn’t matter anymore. We have spent centuries toiling in this place, working from sunrise to sundown to feed and clothe our gods. To know the truth of that is painful. But we will survive it. Now everything we make will be for us alone, and we will have good, rich lives, I think.’
‘What will you do?’ asked Noon. She had finished her glass of wine already, and had poured herself another. Tor wanted to joke with her, to tell her that if she had too much she would fall off her dragon, but there had been an icy wall between them since the confrontation with Arnia: as thin as paper, but cold nonetheless. ‘You can leave this place now, you know.’
Highsun and Fallow exchanged a look. ‘There is more to tell you,’ said Highsun, and here her voice became thick, and she looked at the ground when she spoke. ‘Without the dreams, we can see clearly what we have done to ourselves. To our children.’
‘As I said, it’s been a hard time.’ Fallow put his hand on Highsun’s arm again, and this time he left it there.
‘Whatever it was that kept them silent, it is gone,’ said Highsun. ‘Those who have been given to the roots began to speak to us – those who could, anyway. Mostly they had difficulty forming words. Because they’ve all been there since they were babies, you see, and . . .’
For a time, Highsun could only stand, swallowing hard as she struggled to get her sobs under control. Noon’s face was a mask.
‘Some of them spoke, and some of them cried. A few screamed. They all said the same thing, in truth. That they lived in terrible pain, had always lived in pain – a cage of it that existed inside and outside their bodies. They all wanted it to end.’
Tor took a slow breath and looked away into the trees. It was such a beautiful place. But it was like a beautiful veneer over something rotten and dark. When he looked back he saw the horror on Noon’s face, stark and unavoidable.
‘And you . . .?’
‘It was swift,’ said Fallow, and he sounded on the verge of tears himself. ‘But it’s an act that will have changed all of us who witnessed it. And we will bear those marks into the grave, every one of us.’
‘They are not in pain anymore,’ said Highsun, firmly, as though to convince herself of the fact. ‘But I do not know that we can stay here. It is blood and lies, this island.’
‘We have no ships of our own,’ said Fallow, in a more businesslike tone. ‘The dreams always told us that we could never leave, so why would we? We can build our own, perhaps.’
‘But it would be helpful to have outside help?’ Tor smiled faintly. ‘I think, Fallow, with everything my people have done to yours, we can probably find some way to help.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But it will take time, I have to warn you of that. Micanal and Arnia didn’t lie about Ebora so much as embellish the truth. We aren’t dead, but we’re not exactly thriving either, and we’ll probably need to have ships built.’ He thought then of Bern, and the Finneral people with their coastal territories. ‘Or it’s possible we have friends who might help. The Barren Sea isn’t kind to ships, but that’s not to say we will abandon you out here.’
Fallow nodded. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Noon suddenly. ‘I’m sorry for everything that was done to your people.’
Highsun pressed her hands to her cheeks, swiping away the tears that still ran there. ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Don’t you be sorry. If you hadn’t come, we would never have known, and our children would have lived in torture for decades more. So please, do not say you are sorry.’
When they had packed everything, and the amber tablets were safely stored in a pack tied across Kirune’s shoulders, the four of them left without speaking. To Tor it seemed that they flew under a new weight, as though tendrils of despair were pulling them back, but as they rose up and above the island, some of that lifted. He pressed his hands into the dense grey fur on Kirune’s shoulder and felt a mixture of emotions from the big cat; sorrow, yes, but satisfaction too. They had got what they came for, after all.
As they flew out over the white strip of beach he caught sight of a tall figure on the shore, his brown skin striking against the sand. The man was looking out to sea, and if he saw them as they flew over, he did not raise his hand to them.
52
Jessen hit the ground too hard and half fell, half skidded into a heap. Aldasair loosened the straps on the harness and jumped down, before stumbling forward to press his forehead to the great wolf’s neck.
‘I’m sorry, my friend. You’ve done well, we’re home now.’
Jessen was panting steadily, too exhausted to speak. Some ten feet away, Sharrik landed with a crash. They had been flying almost constantly, racing ahead of the corpse moon, through days that passed like eye blinks and nights that seemed a lifetime long, stopping only to drink from streams and grab the briefest of naps. They would lose sight of the Behemoth sometimes as weather moved in or they swooped low over valleys, but even then the Jure’lia queen would send out battalions of strange-winged men, who could not keep up but did keep them moving. Finally, they had sighted the familiar sweep of Ebora with her dark
forests and dusty city, and at its heart, the silvery branches of Ygseril.
‘I just hope we’ve made the right decision.’ Bern climbed down from Sharrik, holding his injured hand out awkwardly as he did so. The big griffin was holding his head down, and there were white foamy gobs of sweat on his furry hide. ‘We’re bringing them right to where we don’t want them.’
‘Where else could we go?’ It was a discussion they had had many times in the last few days, shouted between their war-beasts and wheezed over handfuls of water. ‘We can’t hold the corpse moon off by ourselves, and Ebora is the only place we might find help.’
Looking around the palace gardens, he stopped in his tracks. The northern forest was gone, and in its place was a blackened and ash-covered nightmare.
‘What has happened?’
Inside the palace, they found Vintage and Eri. The older woman looked harassed, her tightly curled black hair escaping from its ties in little blossoms of chaos, but when she saw them both some of the tension dropped from her face.
‘By Sarn’s crooked bones, you gave me a bloody fright! Where have you been?’ Without pausing for an answer, she grabbed hold of Aldasair and hugged him fiercely, nearly lifting him off the ground despite his height and her injured ankle. ‘How are Sharrik and Jessen? Both fine?’ She transferred her attentions to Bern, patting his face fondly. ‘You both look bloody awful, if you don’t mind me saying so. What’s happened? Look, we’ve had something of a situation here, perhaps you should come and sit down.’
It took some time to sort through it all, with each party convinced that their story was the more urgent, but when Bern managed to explain how the corpse moon had been actively pursuing them, and was likely to appear any day over the Tarah-hut Mountains, Vintage grew very grave, and listened to the rest of their account in silence.
‘You’ve been through a lot, all of you.’ She sighed and touched a hand to her eye, although Aldasair could not tell if she was crying. ‘Bern, I . . . May I see your hand?’
Bern held it out to her, the blue crystal appearing dark and dead in the dim light of Vintage’s study. She took his large hand in both of hers, and carefully turned it back and forth. Very lightly, she brushed her fingers over the place where skin met crystal, and then, curiously, fingered the bones in his wrist.
‘This is very deeply embedded. And you say this is how the Jure’lia queen is following you?’
‘I’m sure of it,’ said Bern. ‘There were times when we lost them, and the connection grew very quiet, and there we gained some time. I can feel them now, very far away, but getting closer. It’s like someone is singing a song, and I can just hear it.’ He raised his hand and looked at it, turning the palm back and forth so that the crystal glittered in the lamplight. ‘I can’t make out the words, and they are so strange, it makes me sick. Although it hardly takes their poison in my blood to tell them we would come back to Ebora.’
‘We had to, Bern.’ Aldasair turned to him, feeling a flush of an emotion he was unfamiliar with. ‘Where else could we go for help?’
Bern the Younger shook his head slightly. ‘As I said on the way back, more than once, I could have led them away. This connection is dangerous, Aldasair. We all know it.’
‘My dears, what’s done is done. We have to prepare as well as we can, with what we have to hand.’ Vintage reached up and tugged distractedly at her hair, trying to push it back under one of the ties. ‘I had thought our news was dire enough, but we do still have the war-beast armour Tyranny brought with her. Perhaps our run-in with the Winnowry won’t have been a complete disaster.’
‘But where is Tormalin? And Noon? Haven’t they returned?’
‘We’re waiting for them,’ piped up Eri, who had been mostly silent during the discussion, save for describing Helcate’s new acid-spitting ability. ‘We’ve had no word but Helcate can feel Vostok and Kirune, and they . . . well, they’re still alive.’
‘There is a chance they will return before the Jure’lia arrive,’ said Vintage, although she didn’t sound convinced, and when Bern took a breath to argue, she spoke over him. ‘Think about it. We estimated it would only take a few days of flying to find this secret island of Micanal’s. They have been gone much longer than that, yet Helcate reports that they are alive. We can conclude from that, that they have found something out there, and are investigating it. They could be on their way back right now.’
‘Lady Vintage,’ said Bern, ‘I enjoy your optimism, I really do, but I think we are all avoiding the obvious problem. If the Jure’lia come here, and we are not able to defend Ygseril, then all the war-beasts could die. The only sensible thing to do is for me to leave. Sharrik can take me some distance and then return to help you. He won’t like it, but I can talk him into it.’
‘No.’ Aldasair saw the flash of anger in Bern’s eyes, and ignored it. ‘That is out of the question. And as the only Eboran here, the only adult Eboran bonded to a war-beast here currently, I forbid it.’
Bern and Vintage exchanged a look.
‘I agree,’ said Vintage quickly. ‘And we don’t have time to argue about it. Go and get some rest, the two of you, and Eri and I will see what armour will be suitable for Jessen and Sharrik. Go on, go.’
When they were back in the hallway, Bern and Aldasair walked for a distance together in an uncomfortable silence. For Aldasair, it was deeply unsettling; he had no words for what he was feeling, and did not understand his own anger towards Bern. After all, what he had said was correct – it would make the most sense for Bern to lead the Jure’lia away from Ebora, and he was only right to put it forward as their only viable plan. And yet Aldasair was outraged with him for suggesting it, and he knew well from the look on the big man’s face that he was equally outraged with Aldasair for forbidding it. As they reached the door to Bern’s own quarters, the bigger man turned to him stiffly.
‘You know I’m right.’
Bern stood partially in shadow, a hulking form framed in the doorway. What light there was turned his hair the colour of beaten silver, and dusted the curve of his shoulder in moonlight. To Aldasair in that moment he looked like the statue of some forgotten hero, someone from centuries ago who had lain down his life and then been lost to the endless pages of history. It was too much to bear, somehow.
‘I will not have you die for us.’ Aldasair shrugged. ‘There is little else I can say. Ebora might fall, all of Sarn might be taken by the worm people, but I cannot—’ He stopped. Bern was a warm presence in the corridor, solid and real in a way he wasn’t sure anyone else in his life had ever been. ‘I spent so many years doing nothing, Bern. Being no one. I was empty, just a thing for gathering dust, and now I am full of something, and if that causes me to make poor decisions, then I will live with it. Or die with it. I don’t care.’
Placing his hands on either side of the doorframe, he reached up and kissed Bern firmly on the mouth. The bigger man seemed startled at first, and then responded, pulling Aldasair through into the room beyond. His beard felt scratchy against Aldasair’s chin and cheek, and something about that seemed to awaken his entire body – suddenly he could feel the weight of his own clothes, the breath in his lungs, and every inch of his own skin. He gasped, and Bern pulled away. In the dimness of the room he got the impression of almost military tidiness; Bern had made the bed before their trip to Finneral, and the surfaces were clear, uncluttered. A screen had been pushed back away from the window, allowing for the silvery moonlight to flood the room.
‘Are you all right?’
Aldasair nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak. Instead, he listened to the new voice inside him that had recently begun to talk, very urgently, about everything he wished to see and do in this room.
Aldasair tugged at Bern’s shirt, at his belt, and all sense of their earlier disagreement faded into nothing. Gradually, they lost their clothes, and Aldasair saw that a human’s body was not all that different from an Eboran’s. Bern was muscular, and he found himself particularly fascinated
by the smooth planes of his stomach, the rigid mass of his thighs, and the thick patch of hair – darker than that on his head – that swept across his chest, and existed in sparser whirls across his lower belly and legs. Almost more interesting was the feeling of their bare skin together, and for some time Aldasair found himself lost in that alone, moving and touching in ways that he would have sworn, hours before, were completely unknown to him. When he looked back on that night in years to come he would always see the room in silver and black, a place and a time unlike anything he’d ever known – yet, ultimately, deeply familiar and enormously welcome.
‘Aldasair,’ by this time Bern’s voice was low and rough, tight with need, ‘are you sure?’
‘I am, but . . . You might have to show me?’
Sex had always seemed to Aldasair to be something done by other people, probably in a place very far away – he imagined it to be something necessary, quick, simple. To his surprise, what he thought of as sex was like a shadow cast onto a wall, while he had completely missed the fire. He and Bern moved slowly at first, the bigger man taking the lead, until quite abruptly Aldasair realised that he could not wait, and they came together swiftly then, urgently – Bern’s breath on his neck as sweet as wine, and joy beyond all things. Later, sleepy and yet utterly unable to sleep, Aldasair found himself exploring the bigger man’s body again, trailing kissing across his chest and following the dark line of his hair down. When Bern pushed his hands into his hair, breathing in a way that only made his own desire sharper, Aldasair felt a shiver of power move through his body. How had he never known this? How many centuries had he wasted without it?