by Jane Kindred
Merit wrote emphatically, underlining it: Ra.
“I’m afraid so. I convinced the Meerhunter to let him go.” Ume didn’t add that she’d done so by giving up Ra’s whereabouts. “But before we could bring him home, he was injured, and—” She hadn’t thought about how this was going to sound. “The Hidden Folk took custody of him. It’s a term the falenders use, folklore, or so we thought, until the Hidden Folk brought us to the realm they call ‘under the hill’. They claim to be related to the Meer in some way, and they’re unable to dwell in our realm.”
A sudden recognition seemed to spark behind Merit’s eyes. The Permanence, he wrote. They shall not have him.
By the time Ra became cognizant of the room around her, Shiva had lit a fire in the great obsidian fireplace of her chambers and altered both their garments to simple black woolen pants and dark, high-necked sweaters. The ruby-haired Meer padded barefoot across the red-rock tile of Zelfaal’s quarries and the thick fleece of mountain qirhu, dyed in pigment the color of black wine.
Ra sat up in the multitude of ruby-colored pillows.
Shiva bent to kiss her. “You continue to surprise me. I bind your power, and yet you work magic.”
“I didn’t mean to disobey you.”
Shiva laughed. “You could hardly disobey me. My word is your law.” She held out the cleaned dagger in its sheath. “You were resourceful. This is a Meer-hewn knife.”
Ra took it and fastened it to her belt. “Meer hewn? I wonder how Merit came by it?”
Shiva shrugged. “Walking boots for each of us.” She handed Ra the pair of glossy black leather boots that coalesced into her hands as she spoke, while another rose up over her own legs.
Ra drew the boots onto her stockinged feet. “Where are we walking?”
“You have words to finish with Jak na Fyn. Coat,” she added in a Meeric aside, drawing the heavy wool garment about her and beginning to fasten it before it had fully formed. “Would you not agree?”
Ra sighed. “Yes, MeerShiva. If Jak will listen.”
“Whether Jak will listen is not your concern.” Shiva pulled a scarf and gloves from her pockets. Even her conjuring had hidden layers, taking into account her every intention, regardless of what she revealed to those around her. “That is for Jak to decide.”
Ra still didn’t know why Shiva had come to Soth AhlZel or what had happened to her. “Your hand,” she began, but Shiva held the gloved hand up to silence her.
“Also not your concern.” She smiled at Ra’s crestfallen look and caressed Ra’s cheek. “You did well, and I’m touched that you came to me. I would have healed eventually, but you’ve saved me a great deal of misery in the process. I’m not sure anyone has ever done that for me. As for my reasons, all in good time.”
Twenty: Convolution
Climbing down through the glens of Zelfaal, Shiva’s image cut a brutal line through the snow, a solid stroke of black against the twilit eternity of white. Only her hair relieved the dark severity, a branch of mahogany wound and disciplined in silver wire with nearly sadistic care. She moved, silent, over the landscape: a cold slough of dark water beneath an iced-over stream.
Ra walked behind her with downcast eyes, pulled forward as inevitably as if she were a prisoner with both hands bound before her, held captive by a lead strung between Meer and Meer. Anxiety had produced dark circles beneath her eyes, just as if she were an ordinary woman who hadn’t slept from worry.
They came to the relatively flat land of the moor as the winter light disappeared behind the mountain at their backs.
Ra paused to pull her cloak tight as the temperature dropped precipitously. “Haethfalt.”
They’d arrived, as night had, at the rolling hills of mound country. Beneath them, life waited for thaw. To their right was the last mound to which Ra had belonged, the small dome that had housed her for a brief moment in time with one she loved. Ahr had lived there also, before. Ra knew now that she’d been desperately wrong to leave Jak when the madness came. If she’d heeded Jak, there might have been abatement; there might have been respite. None of the rest would have happened, and she would have Jak, would have them both. Meerrá, she was selfish.
Jak waited until evening to tell the moundhold they were going. Mound Ahr had escaped the flooding, and it would need little to be put in order. It would be better for Ahr and Jak to set themselves apart. Jak deliberately refused to think of the last tenant who’d shared that mound.
“There’s no need for you to leave,” Rem protested when Jak made the announcement after dinner. They’d gathered for a ket’ of wine after Jak and Ahr—absent from both lunch and dinner—had emerged.
“There is, Oldman. I’ve never really belonged here, as evidenced by my choices in companions.”
Geffn snorted, seated on the floor before the fire with Sevine curled in his lap. “Thank you very much.”
“My point exactly. It was only my poor choices with you that made me an agreeable member of the mound. I’m not really family, and I’m making Sevine uncomfortable.”
Sevine looked up, her cheeks reddening. “No,” she began, but Keiren interrupted.
“Jak, you’re being asinine.” He set down his ket’ beside the overstuffed chair. “Family is what you make. Mell and I are nobody’s blood relatives, but the four of you opened your home to us when Mell’s father disowned her. It’s what mound living is all about. The redefining of family.”
Jak sighed. “I have these notions, these attachments”—Jak took Ahr’s hand to illustrate—“that make everyone so uncomfortable.”
“For the love of truth, Jak.” This time it was Peta whom Jak had driven to exasperation. “She’s different from the other one. Just give us time. Perhaps once she’s learned Mole again and we get reacquainted, we’ll forget the peculiarity of her origins. It’s not as if she’s one of them.”
Jak’s mouth opened to tell them Ahr had recovered her understanding of Mole, but Rem cut in before Jak could.
“The other was trouble from the start.” He spoke around his pipe as he lit it. “We all pretended not to notice her peculiarities, yourself included. No one blames you for that. You fell in love. She was enchanting. That’s how they are.”
Peta nodded. “And that’s all that bothers us about your friend. It’s uncanny how she looks like her. She has the charm. And her ‘renaissance’ can be nothing but unnatural. But we know Ahr was no Meer. He was a bit stand-offish, but a decent man.”
“A weird man,” said Geffn under his breath with a nudge to Sevine.
“We’re only worried about your well-being.” Rem puffed on his pipe. “He belonged to that extremist group, didn’t he? Those Expurgists? Geffn, didn’t you say he was one of the very men who brought down the Meer?”
“Expurgaht?” At the quiet word from Ahr, the moundmates went silent, realizing they should have been careful with Deltan.
Jak had been unable to get in a word to stop them, to tell them they weren’t speaking of someone who was effectively absent from the room. “Listen,” Jak insisted, anxious to stop the conversation before it got any worse.
“No, it’s your turn to listen.” Rem pointed emphatically with his pipe. “You’re not going to debate your way out of this. We want you to stay. It might be best if she moves to her own mound for the time being, but only until we determine her mental stability. Right now, things are apt to be a bit crowded and complicated. Geffn’s asked Sevine to join the moundhold.”
Jak’s mouth opened, and nothing came out. Sevine looked mortified. Ahr stole her hand away from Jak’s and sat in the chair at the edge of the gathering. Even Jak, for the moment, was distracted from her.
Geffn’s face was red with anger. “Dammit, Oldman. I was going to tell Jak myself.”
Sevine’s blushing cheeks had bloomed into a more delicate pink. “We meant to ask for your blessing, Jak. It’s important t
o both of us.”
“What…?” Jak faltered. “I don’t—how long have you two been seeing each other?”
“Since spring,” said Sevine.
“Spring.” Jak cast a significant look at Geffn.
Geffn seemed fascinated by the bottom of his wine ket’. “We didn’t want a fuss about it at first. You and I were still technically bound, though you were with Ra. Vee and I had only been seeing one another casually until the storms, when her mound took shelter with us.”
Vee. Jak wanted to vomit.
Sevine smiled at her intended, the pink in her cheeks undeniably charming. “We spent a lot of time together of necessity. That’s when we knew.”
“During the storms.” Jak managed to meet Geffn’s eyes, though he swiftly looked back down at his drink. Everyone in the moundhold had heard Jak’s brief reunion with Geffn on the morning of the floods. Obviously, nobody intended to tell Sevine this. “And you just decided then and there. Awfully precipitous.”
“Rubbish,” said Ahr. “I was only a few hours old, and I knew I wanted you.”
All activity in the room dropped into a stunned, frozen silence.
Ahr observed the rest with a characteristic look that revealed nothing, the calculated thoughtfulness that had often been mistaken in the old Ahr for aloofness.
Jak glanced away from her to the rest of the moundhold. “I was trying to tell you.”
“Trying to tell them what?” Ahr wasn’t going to make this easy. “That I know what I want, or that I was listening? Or was it my mental stability you were thinking of discussing?”
Rem took his pipe from his mouth and cleared his throat. “No one’s impugning your mental stability.”
Ahr stood her ground. “Forgive me, sir, but you were. You’d like me to clear out to Mound Ahr for a while, but you want Jak to stay here and…what? Be punished for the choices Jak’s made by watching Sevine and Geffn in the blush of love?” The two in question gave an admirable demonstration of this as she spoke, their faces red with embarrassment. “Jak has found love also, and I want Jak with me. If that means we reopen my mound, then so be it. I’d prefer it. But Jak is not staying here without me.” Ahr looked at Jak. “Have I got that right, Jak, or have I completely screwed up my charming parroting of Mole?”
“She’s just like her,” exclaimed Peta under her breath, but Ahr heard.
“Am I?” Ahr frowned. “The mysterious ‘other’ I can’t remember.” She paused and closed her fist over her heart. “Except here.”
Geffn snorted. “She’s not like her at all. She’s like him. Equally insufferable. You needn’t worry Jak, she’s lost nothing in the translation.”
Ahr raised an amused eyebrow at Geffn. “I don’t remember fighting with you. But I’d like to.” She looked back at Jak, seated on the arm of her chair. “We need to discuss this ‘other’. Let them talk about me while we do.” Ahr stood and gave a nod to the rest as she turned toward the private quarters. “Come give us a knock when you’ve decided what to do with me.”
Jak threw an apologetic look at the group and followed.
In the bedroom, Ahr turned around the straight-backed chair when Jak closed the door, and sat with the high, carved wood beneath her folded arms. It was unnervingly like Ra.
“Are we really so similar?” The question unsettled Jak. “Is that why you’ve made love to me?”
“Sooth, no.” Jak shuddered. “I want nothing to do with her.”
“But you were lovers.” Ahr nodded when Jak said nothing. “And she was, what? A necromancer? Meer. What is that?”
Jak leaned back against the door, afraid to come close to her. This wasn’t a conversation Jak wanted to have. Absurdly, Jak had hoped the past would be forever banished by Ahr’s declaration: “Nai Ra.”
“You don’t remember the Meer.”
The warm olive hue of Ahr’s skin rippled white with goose bumps. “It gives me a terrible feeling, that word. It seems intensely important. I was Expurgahtahn? A killer of these Meer?”
“That’s not for me to say. You knew him long before I met you. He was killed. They all were.”
“He.”
“Before she returned.” Jak was unwilling to say the name.
Ahr’s voice said she was on the verge of tears. “Where is she now?”
Jak tried to take a deep breath, chest tightening painfully. “You said ‘no Ra’.”
“You didn’t tell me that you loved her!” Ahr began to weep, and Jak’s stomach sank with the weight of a stone.
Tears were falling onto the floor before the chair—in tiny bursts of red.
Twenty-one: Fulmination
“No.” Jak’s gaze was fixed on the red-blemished floor. These couldn’t be Ahr’s tears. Ahr was ordinary—blessedly, comfortingly, adoredly ordinary. “Oh no.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you loved her?” Ahr continued unrepentantly coloring Jak’s newly mended world with red, unaware she was shattering it. “How can I lie beside you in the place her body occupied and not think of it?”
Jak was hearing nothing she said, had forgotten the conversation that had been so urgent a moment before. Somehow, Jak had been deceived, this demon placed here in Ahr’s stead to drag Jak down once more into perdition. It was just as Geffn had said: Jak was a Meer magnet.
Ahr met Jak’s eyes, the damasked face cunningly innocent. The tears were the hidden smile of the devil revealed from within the appropriated body of a virginal temptress. But the comparison was unfair. This was Ahr, the same person Jak had loved an instant before. She’d done nothing to deceive Jak. It was impossible. Just as it had been with Ra, the renaissanced Ahr didn’t know what she was.
“You have nothing to say to me?” Ahr wiped at her cheeks, the sudden flood of emotion and disaster already waning.
“Look at your hands.”
Ahr paused, obviously nettled by the change of subject. “What about them? Aren’t you listening to me?”
Ahr had glanced at her palm as she brought it away from her face, smeared red but not alarming her in the least. Jak couldn’t do this again. Ra had been allowed to go on believing in her own innocence, and what had come of that? Ahr had to be told.
Jak tried to speak calmly. “Ordinary people don’t weep blood.” Jak’s words gave Ahr a moment’s hesitation, holding her finger before her with a single violent tear poised on the tip. “Do you remember ever doing so before?”
“I…” Ahr raised her sullied eyes to Jak, puzzled. “Is it odd? Why are you looking at me like that? You’re scaring me. Am I ill?”
Jak produced a handkerchief from a pocket and began to dry Ahr’s face, rubbing harshly at the streaks. Ahr protested against this odd attack, her fingers pressed to her smarting cheeks as Jak crouched before the chair and cleaned all evidence of her tears from the floor. “Don’t do that again.” Jak stuffed the stained cloth deep into the pocket once more without rising. “Keep your tears to yourself.”
“Jak!” Ahr pulled away from the back of the chair with a look of alarm. “You’re being cruel. What’s the matter with you?”
“Those are—” Jak paused over the unintended insult of the idiom. “They’re not normal, Ahr. They’re Meer’s tears.”
Ahr rubbed her cheek as though Jak had struck her. “But I’m not. I’m not one of them—am I?” She shook her head. “No, I’m sure I have never been. I’m not.” When Jak said nothing, Ahr drew back. “You don’t want me anymore. You want me to go.”
Still kneeling, Jak leaned forward against the chair back, forehead pressed to it, gripping the wooden slats. Ahr’s resurrection had been an indescribable gift. How could Jak possibly relinquish it? A scream of nearly Meeric madness was building up inside. Ra had done this. Somehow, she’d tainted Ahr. Jak wanted to kill Ra.
Ahr stood and stepped to the side of the chair so that it no longer protected Jak from
her. “All right then, Jak. In an instant, you’ve begun to hate me. I’ll go.”
Clutched tightly around the wood, Jak’s knuckles went white with strain. “Truth help me. I can’t do it. I can’t.” Jak looked up at her, perfect flesh and blood. “Truth help me, but I love you, Ahr.” Jak was suddenly conscious of kneeling at her feet. The image of Ahr similarly poised before Ra at AhlZel sprang to mind unbidden. The dark, unrecognizable voice echoed in Jak’s head. “Impregnate her. You will receive him.”
Ahr’s face twisted with emotion, her hand to her mouth, as though she’d heard the words aloud. “Oh, Jak.”
“Don’t.” Jak rose, seized with an irrational desire to do anything she asked. It was the eyes, ink blue swimming with violent red. Ahr had bewitched Jak more surely than Ra had ever done. “I’m sorry.” Jak reached for her. “You’re right. I was cruel.”
Ahr backed away, hand still over her mouth, and tripped against the bed, falling back onto it. “I refused.”
The fact that Ahr was Meer, with all its attendant abilities, sank in fully. Jak’s thoughts had been too loud.
“She wanted me to hurt you, but I refused. Didn’t I, Jak?” Ahr’s face was flushed, her eyes once more brimming red. “I will not!” she cried, and gripped her stomach, doubling over. “Ai,” she gasped. “Meerrá.” Blood was seeping from Jak’s borrowed shirt and through Ahr’s fingers, darkening in an expanding pool of red.
“Ahr!” Jak sprang forward in alarm and caught her shoulders.
“She put her hand right through me.” Ahr held her hand out as though offering the blood.
Jak tore open the buttons on the shirt, uncovering her to find the source of the bleeding, but there was none. It was the fluid of stigmata.
“She put her hand right through me. She didn’t love me at all.”