“I see it!” Arlow pointed through the swirling mist at an indistinct shape in the distance.
Yarrow licked the sea salt from his lips and peered into the billowing haze before him. Yes, there was definitely something out there. The deck of the ship rocked below his feet, but he had long since developed the equilibrium required to remain firmly upright.
Footsteps behind them announced Ko-Jin, who settled against the railing beside Yarrow, leaning his face into the sea spray.
“Almost home,” he said, smiling.
Yarrow didn’t feel he was going home. He was voyaging to a foreign nation, far from Glans Heath, far even from the Chisanta Temple, which had come to be a home of kinds. To a place where he did not speak the language, where the customs were strange and confusing.
“I can hardly wait to get my feet on land again—and away from these stinking deckhands,” Arlow said.
Yarrow and Ko-Jin exchanged exasperated expressions.
“Shall we have another Chaskuan lesson before we arrive?” Ko-Jin asked, turning away from the sea.
Yarrow bobbed his head. He’d been trying to learn as much as he could before arriving, but it was a complicated language, with many levels of formality. So far he’d only managed to remember ‘hello,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘yes,’ and ‘no’— and these he said with such an atrocious accent that Ko-Jin warned he might not be understood by a native.
“No. I’ll never wrap my head around that chicken scratch,” Arlow said.
“And how will you communicate?” Ko-Jin challenged.
Arlow shrugged and flashed a wicked smile. “I’ll manage.”
“Have you gotten some sort of mental communication gift, then?” Yarrow asked.
Arlow grinned still wider. “Don’t you worry about my gift, Yarrow. All in good time.”
Yarrow rolled his eyes and he and Ko-Jin departed, heading towards their cabin.
“I bet he’s gotten some terribly dull gift and is just trying to hide it,” Ko-Jin said
“He just likes keeping us in suspense. We should really stop asking him about it.”
Ko-Jin bumped headlong into Rinny as she exited her own small room, shared with several of the other girls.
“Alright, give it back,” Ko-Jin said, holding out his hand.
Rinny smiled innocently. “Give what back, mate?”
“My watch.”
Rinny laughed and handed it over. “Just keeping you on your toes.”
She began to walk away and Ko-Jin called out to her, “Hey, Rinny.”
He flourished an object Yarrow didn’t recognize and lobbed it to her. She caught it and laughed.
“Out-thieving the thief! You rascal, Sung Ko-Jin.”
Yarrow shook his head in bemusement. Ko-Jin beamed and led the way into their bunk, where they drilled the pronunciation of Chaskuan vowels until they heard the boat dock.
“Ready?” Ko-Jin asked.
Yarrow took a fortifying gulp of air and mounted the stair, off to see the country that would now be his home.
“I’m leaving come morning, Bray,” Peer said.
“We are leaving come morning,” Bray corrected.
He quirked his eyebrow skeptically—an expression she was growing used to.
The cicadas droned soporifically in the moonlit gardens. Somewhere, an owl hooted.
Bray clenched her fists. “I’ve nearly gotten it, I swear.”
“I’m knowing you have, but it’s three in the morning.” He rubbed a bleary eye. “The next ship’ll be leaving in a few weeks.”
“I am not staying in this place for weeks, alone, Peer. Go to sleep if you want. I’ll continue on alone.”
Peer rolled his shoulders. “It’s not that—I’m not even tired. I’ll stay with you till it’s boarding time. Just don’t want you being hard on yourself.”
Bray set her jaw and crossed her arms.
“Alright, let’s go again. Close your eyes.”
Bray shut her eyes and pictured the mirror version of herself, her Mearra. It came to life with alacrity. This, Bray had mastered days ago.
“Now, reach on out and—”
Bray reached, endeavoring confidence. This was her stumbling block—upon physical touch, her Mearra would usually poof into nothingness. Even though her phantom was not truly there, Bray needed to feel her. You cannot fight a thing you cannot touch.
Bray’s fingers extended and grazed her Mearra’s shoulder, felt the smooth glossy leather.
“Got her?” Peer asked.
“Yes,” Bray said, her eyes still closed.
“Good. Now, push on into the mind of your Mearra and look at yourself.”
This, Bray had only managed for an instant on one occasion. She must be able to think for both halves of herself, which meant she needed to be in both heads. This was no easy feat.
Bray focused so intently she suspected she’d give herself a nosebleed. A bird twittered in the tree above her. When she opened her eyes, she could see that bird, perched on a branch above her own, original head. She was actually looking at herself—her real self—through the eyes of her own projection. It was such a strange experience that she nearly lost it, but she grabbed hold and did not let go. Through her own real eyes, she could still see her Mearra, could see Peer sitting on the ground looking at her encouragingly. It was exactly like being in two places at once.
“Now, attack,” Peer said.
Bray—the original Bray—swung. But her Mearra saw this coming and dodged easily. Bray made her Mearra take advantage of her own lack of balance and struck out with a kick. Her original body, only just in time, rolled onto the ground, out of danger. She got up onto her feet and parried two more blows. Her Mearra left a gap in her defenses, and Bray struck out and delivered a sharp blow to the stomach.
Bray felt the pulse in her neck quicken, her mind sharp and vigorous, honed to slice. She sensed a kind of parting in reality, like a crack in the world. Mentally, she thrust herself into the opening.
Abruptly, Bray no longer fought in that dark garden. She was in an entirely different place, bright and dry. She stood at the center of a round clearing, natural rock rising all around her, forming many monstrous steps. The circle of grass was interrupted only by a single, familiar-looking tree.
Bray laughed—she had done it! She was in the Aeght a Seve and yet she was still completely aware, not only of her own body back in reality, but the body of her Mearra as well, still fighting fiercely.
Bray tilted her face up toward the sun, its warmth kissing her cheeks. That heat ran straight through her, from the tip of her head down to her toes. And she knew, knew without any real evidence, that she had been gifted. Gifted with the thing that she had always desired. Exploring the Aeght a Seve would have to wait—she was too desperate to show Peer her gift.
Bray focused on the part of her mind that still fought, and slowly the warmth receded and she found herself back in the darkness of the garden. She allowed her Mearra to pop into nonexistence and turned to Peer, beaming.
“You’ve done it?” Peer asked, rising to his feet.
“I have,” Bray said, smiling so wide her cheeks ached.
“Bray!” Peer exclaimed and came to embrace her. She patted his broad back, grinning into the leather of his jerkin.
“Well?” he asked, as she pulled away. “What did you get?”
She smiled mischievously. “I’ll show you. Hit me.”
Peer looked nonplussed. “What?”
“Hit me.” She readied her stance and pointed at her chin. “Right here.”
“Come on Bray, I’m not going to hit you. Just tell me what it is.”
She shoved him in the chest. “Hit me!”
“Bray…”
“Peer, for the love of Benteen, you won’t do any damage. Just take a swing.”
Peer sighed, defeated, and punched at Bray’s face with an obvious lack of force. Only his fist did not make contact with her cheek. Rather, it floated straight through her.
&nb
sp; His sandy eyebrows contracted. “You’re a ghost?”
Bray snorted. “Don’t be daft. Ghosts are dead. I’m just…untouchable.”
Peer frowned and crossed his arms. “And all I got was some lousy literacy.”
“Don’t worry, friend. I’ll share.”
She took Peer’s hand and phased them both into nothingness. Her flesh thrummed and rippled, the sensation strange but not unpleasant. Peer’s hand clamped harder onto her own. Bray pulled him along, towards the wall to the Chiona meeting hall. She charged at it, and Peer matched her stride. He flinched slightly—she did as well—as the stony surface should have struck them. But it did not. They passed through the wall unscathed and appeared on the other side.
Peer released her hand. “That…” he said, running fingers along the solidness of the stones, “was the strangest thing I’ve ever felt.”
Bray yawned dramatically. “Well—it looks like you won’t be leaving without me after all. Want to get some sleep?”
“Nah,” Peer said. “Not much point. We can sleep on the boat.”
“So, what do you want to—”
“We can pass through walls.” Peer beamed down at her. “I’m thinking we can find some mischief.”
The Cosanta welcoming feast had been raging for hours. Though the evening air outside was chill, the hall sweltered. There were hundreds of people, ranging in age from those of a year with Yarrow to those shriveled with age. The accents and skin tones varied as widely as the topics of conversation. The din grew steadily louder as the Cosanta worked their way through cask after cask of fine Adourran wine. Yarrow’s head pounded. He needed to escape.
He searched for his friends. He spotted Ko-Jin in conversation with a pretty Chaskuan girl in their own tongue. She laughed loudly at regular intervals and found every possible excuse to touch him—straightening his collar, patting his hand. She wasn’t the only young woman looking at Ko-Jin with desirous eyes.
Arlow, too, was deep in conversation. He spoke with a middle-aged Dalish man who had a tight, chestnut mustache and a drawling accent much like Arlow’s. They seemed to be discussing politics; something about which Yarrow knew little and cared for none.
Yarrow shouldered his way through the crowd, cursing the lack of space. When he’d entered the hall that morning he’d thought it absolutely cavernous. Arlow had assured him that it rivaled the Great Hall of the King in Accord. The detail and artwork of the room had awed him. Every single inch of wall, ceiling, and pillar space was covered in tight, colorful designs.
After many long minutes of apologizing and elbowing in equal measure, Yarrow found his way through the great doors. He meandered onto the grounds, where the air brushed deliciously cold against his flushed cheeks.
The Cosanta Temple comprised a vast collection of breathtaking buildings and gardens, all highly influenced by Chaskuan design. The corners of the roofs overhung dramatically and curved, pointing up towards the sky. The underside of each and every such structure was as intricately designed as the walls in the great hall.
Yarrow wandered between building after stunning building, puffing clouds of vapor with each exhale. He walked past a thin-branched tree still bearing several plump orange fruits—he would have to ask Ko-Jin what they were called—and up to a large open pavilion.
Within loomed five time-weathered statues. They glowered down at Yarrow.
“Not a lover of crowds?” a deep musical voice asked from the shadows.
A shape stepped forward; an old Adourran man. He had skin like the bark of a tree, dark and deeply grooved. His mustache, braided hair, and unruly eyebrows shone snow white in the limited light of dusk.
“I like them fine…for a little bit,” Yarrow said.
“A lad after my own heart, then.”
Yarrow’s gaze returned to the statues.
“Do you know the four sacrifices?” the Adourran asked. He crossed the pavilion to stand by Yarrow and laughed, a rough, pleasant barking sound. “Of course you do not—not one so young.”
“Yes I do. The four sacrifices are Propagation, Contact, Identity, and Mind,” Yarrow recited.
“Ah, lad—to name a thing isn’t to know it. If it were, we would all have gifts coming out our parennas, wouldn’t we?” The man said.
Yarrow’s eyes traced the first statue. He saw now that it depicted a mother, father, and infant, though they seemed to be heads and arms all extending from the same base; not three separate entities, but one with three faces. Yarrow walked along the hall, examining each in turn. The next, Yarrow was embarrassed to see, portrayed a man and woman kissing, holding each other tightly. The last two Yarrow didn’t understand—the third was a monstrous head of a man, but within were carved various scenes—another kissing couple, three laughing figures, a man with a sword, and several more. The fourth depicted the face of a woman split in two. One half of her mouth smiled, one eye looked directly at Yarrow with intelligence. The other half of her mouth hung slack and open, and the other eye was wide, wild, and unfocused.
“I don’t really understand them,” Yarrow said at last.
The Adourran man smiled. “Good lad. It’s always better to acknowledge incomprehension than feign expertise. What is your name?”
“Yarrow Lamhart.”
“I am Dedrre Alvez,” the man said, and the two of them clasped forearms.
“Let us start at the beginning,” he said, and they walked back to the rendering of the first sacrifice. “As you correctly asserted, the first sacrifice is propagation—the ability to have a child. Most Chisanta don’t marry and never have children, so some might think this would be an easy thing to willingly forgo, but it is not. You know what it takes to make a sacrifice?”
Yarrow thought back to Arlow’s book on the carriage ride. It had certainly said something about this.
“Understanding?” Yarrow said, pulling the word from his memory without confidence.
“Very good,” Dedrre said. “To make a sacrifice you need to understand its full and complete worth. A man or woman who has never had a child is unlikely to ever truly grasp just what a child can mean—the joy, the pride, the investment. It’s nearly an impossible thing to comprehend.”
“You’ve made the first sacrifice?” Yarrow asked.
Dedrre laughed wheezily. “Certainly not.” He pulled a locket from beneath his robes and opened it to show Yarrow. “That there was my son, may the Spirits guard his soul, and that,” he pointed at a pretty, high-cheek boned girl several years older than Yarrow, “is my granddaughter—the day she was marked was the proudest of my life.”
“Is that common?” Yarrow asked. “The children of the Chisanta being marked?”
“About as common as anybody else being marked,” Dedrre said, his dark eyes flashing.
“I meant no offense,” Yarrow said hastily, raising his hands.
Dedrre smiled. “Ah, of course you didn’t. A man can be defensive about his offspring. But that’s just the point, isn’t it? I understand the worth of having children—and even if I could go back to being freshly marked like yourself, I wouldn’t make a different decision. There is no gift the Spirits could possibly give me that would have been more meaningful than my son was. You see the Po Lim-Nee quote engraved on the wall?” Dedrre pointed.
Yarrow looked up and saw the now-familiar markings of the Chaskuan language. Thanks to Ko-Jin’s lessons he could sound the words out, though he would not know their meaning.
“It says, ‘When the thing you must lose is too great to bear, when the thought of it makes you weep like a child, beat your breast like a madman, and rip your hair like a widow, only then may it be sacrificed.’”
“So in order to give it up, you need to not want to give it up?” Yarrow asked.
Dedrre nodded. “Exactly. Very good. There is only one living Chisanta with a second gift, and he is as old as I. In the past, when the three nations were at war, there were circumstances that drove us to reach for the higher gifts. But Trinitas has been at pe
ace for more than two hundred years. We already receive our first gift, as well as innate fighting abilities. Most of us lead the comfortable, well-provided lives of scholars.”
“So the other three?” Yarrow prompted.
“Ah, yes. Next comes human contact. It means that a Chisanta could never touch another person without both causing and feeling immense pain. No kiss from a loved one, no ungloved handshake from a friend. Third,” they strode to the first statue Yarrow didn’t fully understand, “is identity—or rather, memory. In the past, people who gave this up knew general knowledge still, but would not recognize their own mother. And lastly, and most greatly, is the mind. A person who makes the fourth sacrifice becomes insane.”
“What gift could possibly help a person if it cost them their mind?” Yarrow asked, staring with horror at the wild eye of the statue.
“Only three Chisanta in all of our thousands of years of written history have ever made the fourth sacrifice. In all three cases, the Fifths became empty, mindless vessels that babble truths.”
“When would that be useful?”
Dedrre stroked his mustache. “Only in times when information is desperately required.”
A gust of wind blew through the pavilion, causing Dedrre to shiver.
“Thank you for taking the time to explain this,” Yarrow said.
“Not at all, my boy. I remember well how overwhelming it was, being freshly marked.” He let out a raspy chuckle. “If you have any questions or problems here, you come to me. In fact, I’d be glad if you’d come for tea and keep an old man company.”
“I’d be honored.”
Dedrre patted him on the shoulder with a firm, gnarled hand and set off across the grounds. Yarrow watched him go. He had never seen a man of such advanced age move so well. Yarrow rather liked Dedrre Alvez, he decided, as the man’s form receded into the darkness.
Yarrow gave the alarming face of the fourth sacrifice one last look. He wondered what kind of ‘truths’ these Fifths had spoken that would make the sacrifice worthwhile. Perhaps he could find a book in the library on the topic…tomorrow. He was too exhausted to do anything other than head toward his own, yet unslept-in, bed. As he wandered through the grounds, between the magnificent buildings, passing several chatting groups of Cosanta, he thought that though it was entirely foreign, he might well feel at home here.
Division of the Marked (The Marked Series) Page 11