The Hidden Stars

by Madeline Howard

  “Eiarann is dead. But perhaps you knew?”

  Sindérian glanced up briefly, nodded, and went back to work, murmuring a shibéath to dull the pain, beginning to ease the arrow out of the bone.

  “I did—I did feel a wizard die last night.” Her voice shook, but she kept her hands steady. “I thought it must be someone at Cuirarthéros, or Dunnardeth, it seemed so remote. How did it happen?”

  “He rode out with some of the men just after nightfall, and they met an enemy party much larger than theirs was. He kept so busy helping his companions, he left his own healing too late and bled to death.”

  She caught her breath, and for a moment she forgot what she was doing. Healers were sometimes killed in the war—in a rain of arrows, or a fall of stones when the enemy brought in a siege engine, and they all knew the danger. But for anyone to strike deliberately at an unarmed man in healer’s grey—“The moon was full last night; it was almost as bright as day. Are our enemies barbarians?”

  “He wore a dark cloak,” replied Duillig. “And in all fairness to the men of Phaôrax and Rhuaddlyn, Eiarann had no right to a healer’s protection. He went out with a scouting party, and he was helping them.”

  Sindérian felt a jolt of outrage at such unmitigated folly. “He had no right to endanger himself that way! There are scouts enough, but we’ve a shortage of healers.” Still, she was hardly surprised. Desperation grew, day by day, and reckless acts by the fighting men, the wizards, even the civilians, were all too common.

  “I understood he was supposed to go with the wagons today, to escort the women and children to Thäerie.” She braced herself, tightened her grip on the shaft of the arrow, and gave it another pull. The point came grating out of the bone, slid through muscle and skin, past broken metal links, and a moment later she had it in her hand.

  “Yes,” said Duillig. “He meant to go with the refugees. That is why I’ve come to you.”

  Sindérian scarcely heard him. She sat staring down at the broken shaft lying across her palm, at the cruel bodkin point, glistening with blood. It might have been cast right there at Gilaefri. Both sides gleaned arrows after a battle, for reuse later. In the forge at that very moment the smiths were making more heads, exactly like it.

  A slight restless movement by Duillig reminded her of his presence. She dropped the arrow into the mud, gathered up the heavy folds of her skirt, and rose to her feet. “You can’t mean that I should go in Eiarann’s place. I am needed here.”

  “As you say,” Duillig admitted, with a sigh. “But the refugees need you, too. Many of the women are ill, many of the children, also. Without a healer, few can expect to survive the journey.”

  “They will still have Bainné, or has that plan changed?” Without waiting for his answer, Sindérian walked across the yard, knelt by a redheaded boy who sat, or had been propped up, with his back against a rough stone wall.

  An ugly bruise covered the entire left side of his face. His auburn hair was clotted with blood, and his wide blue eyes stared vacant, unseeing. The moment she touched him, she could sense internal bleeding: in his brain, in his chest, in his belly. Her stomach clenched, and her heart gave a painful thud as she realized the truth. The boy was past saving. All she could grant him was sleep, sleep and sweet dreams till the end, which could hardly be long in coming.

  She wove the charm—by now it was second nature—then made the sign of the Fates and whispered a prayer to the Light. Her own faith was in crisis, but the boy and his family might still be devout. The brother or friend who had carried him home—still daring to hope, though his wounds were so grievous—might care for such things. For their sake, she recited the eirias and tried to mean it.

  Meanwhile, Duillig came limping up to join her. A wound too long untended, half a year ago, had left him unable to sit a horse, forced him to use a stick when he walked. On Leal, there might be someone with the time and the ability to make him whole again; but here, in his own country, he was doomed to remain a cripple.

  “Bainné is only an apprentice. And the journey could be a dangerous one. It may take someone with Foresight to guide them safely.” He ran a hand through his greying hair. “That was why we chose Eiarann to go.”

  “It would seem that Eiarann’s Foresight failed him.”

  A troop of horsemen came clattering through the gate, forcing Duillig to raise his voice in order to be heard. “Perhaps it did fail him. Perhaps not.”

  Sindérian sat back on her heels, suddenly feeling drained. Almost too tired to think, certainly too tired to argue. She knew what he meant, and what he meant was undeniable.

  All the healers wrestled with despair from time to time, especially those who had served long on the battlefield, as Eiarann had, as she had. The empathy required of a healer, these oceans of human blood, this vast tide of suffering: it could be a lethal combination. She wondered, suddenly, if she had been chosen to replace Eiarann because somebody thought she needed to go home, because someone imagined she was on the verge of doing herself an injury.

  But she quickly dismissed the idea. The lives of many were at stake here, and it did not make sense that Duillig would put the safety of his women and children in the hands of a suicidal seer.

  “I will make you a bargain,” she said. “I will go with the refugees…if you go with me to the Scholia on Leal for healing.”

  Glancing up, Sindérian saw the sudden flare of hope in his eyes, as he considered what he would do if whole and strong again. But then it died, and his eyes went dull, his expression hopeless again. “No, I can still be of some use here. I may not be able to ride into battle, but if these walls are breached, I can still swing a sword. It would be wrong for me to go.”

  “And yet you suggest that I go.”

  “That is entirely different,” he insisted. “You may save lives by going, I by staying.”

  Unspoken between them was the fact that she had a home to return to, while Duillig had only this, this time, this place, this losing battle. “Very well,” she said with a sigh. “When do I leave?”

  “You leave at midday. That should give you just enough time to gather your things—and say your good-byes.”

  She could not find Cailltin until the very end. He and some of his captains appeared by the stables just as the women and children came out of the keep and headed toward the wagons. When Sindérian ran to meet him, he caught her up in a hard embrace. “They told me you were going.”

  He had cleaned up after the battle, but he still smelled of blood and sweat. As his arms encircled her, a cold edge of metal from one of his vambraces cut into her back. Sindérian hardly noticed. She leaned into the embrace and buried her face against his neck. “I didn’t want—”

  “No. But you couldn’t refuse to go where you are needed.”

  She drew away, a new suspicion forming in her mind. She felt her throat close, so that it was difficult to force out the words. “Cailltin. Was this your idea? You were not the one who suggested that I—”

  “How can you think it?” He took her hand and raised it to his lips. “We vowed to face all chances and mischances together—as duty and honor allowed. Now it seems that your duty calls you elsewhere.”

  Sindérian studied his face. He had changed since first she met him—why had she never before noticed, until now, how great the change? Though she was two or three years older than he, time had already touched him as it would not touch her for another century. There were silver threads in his fair hair and fine lines around the eyes.

  But those who live their entire lives in the shadow of war lose their youth early, she thought.

  “I will come back,” she said, “as soon as ever I can. On the very first ship.”

  Cailltin did not answer, in words, but in his silence, in the sudden droop of his shoulders, she read all his meaning. “You think it will all be over by the time I can return!”

  He made a faint helpless gesture. “We have been losing this war for the last nine years; they now lay claim to mo
re of this kingdom than we do. The end is very near, Sindérian. Oh, not for you and your people, or for our allies to the north, but certainly for my people, here. And most of all for me and those like me: the fighting men of Rheithûn.”

  “For all that, I am coming back,” she insisted. “I swear a most solemn oath—” Her voice faltered, then failed.

  He put up a hand to cover her mouth. “Don’t make a vow that you may not be able to keep.” His fingers moved lightly over her lips, trailed around to the back of her neck, under the heavy fall of dark hair. “And don’t poison the memory of our time together with regret for an oath, which, in the end, you might find you should never have sworn.”

  “I don’t understand you,” she said. The color had drained out of his face, the light of youth and hope had gone from his eyes; he looked suddenly old, and haggard, and ill. Yet still Sindérian struggled against despair with all her remaining strength. “How could any memories of our loving be poisoned?”

  He pulled her closer, so that their foreheads touched. She heard the sudden intake and release of his breath before he spoke. “If the Fates are kind, you never will understand,” he answered softly.

  The road to the coast was long and cold and windswept. Sindérian went on foot between the wagons, moving from one to the next, looking in, meeting the hopeless stares of the women and children, then moving on. All of the faces had a white, pinched look; the old and the young, the sick and the well, famine and grief had marked them, everyone alike. There had been no harvest, not even a meager one, this last season. How could there be, when all of the fields were battlefields and all of the men and half-grown boys gone for soldiers? And the promised supplies of wheat, apples, beer, and cabbages from Hythe and Mere had never arrived.

  Some of the children began to whimper. Too cold to sleep, Sindérian guessed, too distracted by the bump, bump, bump of cart wheels over ruts to take any comfort from their mothers’ weary attempts to soothe them. She began to croon a lullaby:

  Shenana, beichlin,

  Shenana, beich ilthanen—

  Then she remembered the last time she had whispered those words in an infant’s ear, and the breath caught in her throat and she could not go on.

  The wind had scoured the road clear of snow, but dark clouds gathered overhead, promising a blizzard by sunset. Where in all this vacant stretch of country, she wondered, was shelter for so many to be found? Surely not in any of the burnt-out farmsteads they had already passed along the way.

  She was still trying to think of someplace where they could wait out the storm, when a current of force passed under her feet, a thrill of power that burned right through her, then was gone. She felt all of the fine, invisible hairs at the back of her neck stir; gooseflesh prickled on her back and her arms.

  Instinctively, Sindérian looked to the south. Over the town of Cuirarthéros—where Cuirarthéros ought to be—a great smoky cloud was rising. At such a distance, she could not hear the stones crack, the walls come tumbling down, but she felt it all: as though her own bones crumbled, and the world around her shattered like glass, as though her eyes and nose and throat were full of smoke and powdered stone and mortar ground to dust, as if all the deaths of men and wizards up on the walls were her own death, experienced again and again and again—

  She came back to herself, down on her hands and knees in the road, blind and sick, with the sound of Bainné’s voice in her head, repeating her name over and over. She struggled to catch her breath, but she could not get enough air, could not get enough; the world went briefly grey, then came back into focus. Sindérian sat back on her heels, panting and sweating. There was grit in the palms of her hands, which she wiped on the full skirts of her gown.

  As her mind cleared, as her awareness of her immediate surroundings grew sharper, she saw that the wagons were no longer moving; the women and children huddled together, their eyes wide with unspoken questions. Bainné knelt in the road beside her, pale but composed, yet behind that composure Sindérian could sense a confusion to match that of the refugees. What had been so intensely real and immediate for her could be nothing more than a passing shadow over the mind of the young apprentice. Bainné’s powers were as yet (and mercifully) undeveloped.

  “The Furiádhin have thrown down the walls of Cuirarthéros.” Bile burned in Sindérian’s throat, and her stomach continued to heave. “All along the eastern and western side—there is nothing left but rubble.” And dead men, and men who are still dying, she added to herself. She swallowed hard several times, but the sickness stayed with her.

  “But how—?” whispered Bainné. “Goezenou and Ganhardin have been laying siege to the town for almost a month. If they had the power to—to do that, to topple the walls, why not do it before this?”

  “There may be more of them now. Dyonas, Náoiss, they were a hundred miles to the south a month ago. Perhaps they’ve come north to lend their strength.” With an effort, she climbed back to her feet, but the world turned dark again, and she swayed where she stood as the truth shocked through her…“Gilaefri will fall next, then Dunnardeth. Everyone we know, everyone we left behind—”

  The caravan started to move again. The wagon wheels creaked. The burning taste of acid was still in Sindérian’s mouth, in her throat, as she continued, half-blind with fear and grief, down the road. It was all too familiar, this heartbreak, this frustration. She thought, They always die. I am sent away, and the people that I love are left to die.

  Somewhere along the way, she had turned her ankle. Every step she took brought a jolt of pain, but she lacked the will or the energy to do anything about it.

  In the nearest wagon, one of the children began to cry, and others joined in. The wind caught up their shrill voices, wove them into a melody, into a dirge, and carried them away, across the barren fields of Rheithûn.

  She woke to the sound of her own name, and a light shining in the darkness. Sindérian sat up in bed, feeling the cold sweat slide over her skin under the linen nightdress. She struggled to regulate her ragged breathing, the wild pounding of her heart. She was at home surrounded on all sides by peace and safety, in her tiny whitewashed cell-like room at the Scholia on Leal, the room that had been hers on and off since childhood. What time was it? It must still be very early.

  Níone stood by the door, holding a honey-scented beeswax candle and shielding the flame with her other hand. Her lovely ageless face was serene, but her hand shook, holding the candle. “Are you ill? You cried out in your sleep; then I heard you weeping.”

  “No—no, I’m not ill.” Sindérian pushed back a damp strand of dark hair. Her voice sounded hoarse in her own ears; she wondered how she must look, how she must sound, to frighten a healer as experienced as Níone. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. It was only a dream.”

  Floorboards worn smooth after countless years creaked as Níone crossed the room. Setting her candle down on a little iron stand near the bed, she turned to face her onetime pupil. “The same dream that has tormented you every night for the last three weeks? Isn’t it enough that you had to live through these things once? Must you relive them each night in your sleep?”

  Sindérian felt the hot color flood into her face. “You think that I bring these nightmares on myself!”

  Níone sat down on the thick wool blanket and folded her hands in her lap. “This house is warded, as you know quite well. Every stone, every beam, every board, peg, and nail, woven round with spells. No dream ever comes here uninvited.”

  Sindérian was silent, biting her lip at the gentle reproof.

  “My dear child,” said her friend and teacher, “can you not forget?” Glancing around the room, Níone’s gaze came to rest briefly on a little shrine in a niche in the wall, on the earthenware oil lamp with seven wicks, which had not been lighted since Sindérian returned from Rheithûn. “Can you not permit yourself to forget?”

  “Men that I knew—friends that I loved—died.” Sindérian’s voice shook; her eyes stung with tears. “Not in battl
e, as they had long since resigned themselves to die, but executed like criminals, slaughtered like beasts—”

  Níone reached out, touched one burning cheek with her long cool fingers. “That was no fault of yours—nothing you could have prevented by remaining. And it was no fault of yours, either, that you were sent home, to live, while others died.”

  “And yet I remain at home,” said Sindérian, in a stifled voice. In all truth, sometimes the peace of the Scholia felt more like suffocation, sometimes this weight of pain around her heart threatened to crush her. “The war continues: in Gonlündor, on Erios. What use am I to anyone here?”

  The older woman drew back, her softly arched eyebrows coming together in a slight, perplexed frown. “You think that the work you do here is worthless? The training of young healers?”

  “No, no.” Sindérian’s hands closed around the heavy blanket. Like everything else in the room, it was simple, well made, practical, yet there was something of wizardry about it, too. The wool had been mixed with flax and milkweed, then woven with charms for sleep and healing, with a single red thread running through for protection. It seemed that everything at the Scholia had its place, its uses—except for her. “The work is necessary, the work is vital. If one could do it well…but I don’t! I lack the patience.” On the stand by her bed, the candle flickered and almost went out with the vehemence of her protest. Instinctively, she steadied the flame with her mind.

  “You might learn patience, if you applied yourself,” Níone suggested. “You might learn it in time.”

  “So I might. But what would my students be learning, while I am about it?”

  Níone shook her head. One eyebrow went up, one corner of her mouth twitched—perhaps in memory of a certain headstrong, homesick twelve-year-old newly arrived from Thäerie—yet she answered blandly enough: “Who can say? Duty perhaps. Or acceptance. There is always something to be learned by a willing mind.”

  Rising to her feet in one swift graceful movement, Níone picked up her light again and glided toward the door. But she paused on the threshold, turning back toward the room. “Try to rest, Sindérian. Try not to dream.” Her eyes flickered, momentarily, back to the dark, neglected shrine. “Pray, if you can. And in the meantime—”