Song of the Shiver Barrens

by Glenda Larke

  He didn’t see her again until the next day, when she took her position in the continuous line of healers who came throughout the day. He had complained to Temellin, saying he really wasn’t ill enough to warrant such attention, but Temellin’s reply was stern: ‘These healers are the reason you feel as well as you do, and don’t you forget it.’ Chastened, he submitted with as much good grace as he could muster to the entry of yet another taciturn Illuser who took his hand and concentrated over his work.

  He brightened, though, when it was Samia’s turn. The moment she came into the room, he felt happier without any good reason that he could see. She was bossy, she scolded, she talked far too much, she treated him as if he was her younger brother—yet he cheered up the moment she was around.

  ‘I’ve had a trim idea, if you’ll listen,’ she announced. ‘I think it’s trim anyway.’

  ‘Not something that’s going to make me feel an awful fool because I didn’t think of it first, I hope.’

  ‘Oh, most boys your age are awful fools,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure why. Look at Perradin and Bevran and—’ He glared at her and she subsided. ‘Anyway, here’s my idea. When a cabochon is shattered, or when we use up all our power, the gem goes almost clear. I checked with the healer who saw you first: he said when he first saw yours, it was colourless, like clear quartz. Then, as you recovered, it recovered some of its colour, just as anyone’s does as they build up power again.’

  He looked down at his hand and snorted. ‘This is just a pale reflection of what it should be. Back in Tyrans, I had a nurse, a Theura once. Hers was shattered by legionnaires. It was pale green; a pretty shade, but never that lovely deep emerald colour it should have been. She had no power. None. Ever.’

  ‘No, and I don’t suppose you will either. The cut is there, and nothing will change that—but you were born with power, and every time a Magor uses up that power, it’s renewed. Remember, the gem just magnifies what the individual Magor feeds it. In other words, you are still producing power. I think a cut cabochon would probably still work—but it can’t, because the power leaks out.’

  He stared back at his hand. ‘You’re saying I still have power?’ He regarded his palm in revulsion. It was obvious when he thought about it. Gods in Elysium, what did he have to do to get rid of something he didn’t want? Aloud he said, and his voice held a note of desperation, ‘No amount of potential is going to amount to much now, is it? So what’s your bright idea?’

  ‘I can build a ward around your hand tonight. I’ll stretch it tight over your cabochon and attach it to your bed, with your hand trapped that way. I know wards are hardly my strongest skill, but if it’s just a tiny one, I think I can make it tough enough to stop your power leaking out temporarily.’

  ‘But why would you want to do that?’ He stared at her in genuine puzzlement.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Preserve me from the stupidity of sprouts! To give you enough power to call Tarran and talk to him, of course. After all, don’t you think it’s possible Tarran might be just as worried about you as you are about him?’

  ‘Oh. Oh!’ He thought about that. It might just work. For a while.

  But what if he lost control again? He didn’t know why his magic had flown away from him in all directions out there on the practice ground. What if it happened again, here, in the confines of the bedroom? Of course it wouldn’t be much, but it might be enough to hurt Samia. Or Tarran yet again…

  ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘No. I have no idea if I can control any power at all. I will not put myself in a position where it can happen again. Never. Understand?’

  She pulled a face. ‘Oh, all right. And it was such a good idea, too.’

  After she had gone, he tried once more to speak to Tarran, but the inside of his mind was his alone.

  And that was the true horror of the breaking of his cabochon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Just a few more days and she’d be in Madrinya. She’d hold Temellin in her arms once more. She’d see Arrant. How much he must have grown in two—no, almost three—years. A youth on the edge of manhood. Indeed, his next anniversary day was the age of manhood in most of the known world.

  If he was alive. She had left Tyr before receiving any message, and she still didn’t know what had happened. That ghastly feeling of knowing someone she loved had been somehow torn, but not knowing exactly how—or even being positive who: it haunted her dreams as well as every waking moment.

  The news she’d heard at the wayhouses on the paveway from Ordensa was unsettling rather than tragic. Unfortunately, it had also been garbled, with every traveller having a different tale. Arrant was ill. No, he wasn’t, but he was no longer Mirager-heir, Korden was. No, that wasn’t true. The Mirager-heir’s cabochon had burst and killed people. No, that was shleth tripe. He’d been tried by Council for killing Korden with his sword.

  Knowing she wouldn’t have the real story until she reached Madrinya, she tried to relax.

  When she rode into one of the wayhouses north of Asufa, after asking in vain for some accurate news, she used the baths and went to her room, intending to sleep early as she wanted to ride a double journey the next day; two days’ ride in one…She had to know, blast it.

  She dozed, only to be woken not much later by agitated voices. Trouble. She knew the sound of it, the feel of it. Emotions seeped through the wall. The wayhouse was awash with alarm and grief and shock. Vortexdamn. She listened, then rose and dressed, and by the time the knock came at her door, she was ready for it.

  ‘Magoria?’

  The wayhousekeeper. He didn’t know who she was, and she hadn’t given her name, but the fact that she was a Magoria was enough. This kind of trouble was Magor business. ‘What is it?’ she asked, although she had already heard the gist. A strange wind. A dust-storm. People slaughtered in a vale like chickens for a feast. And no one to blame for it. Magic, someone said. A Magor murderer, another postulated. No, numina, it had to be numina, those strange spirits that no one ever saw, but that everyone thought existed nonetheless.

  One part of her didn’t want to deal with this, not now, but this was Magor business, and she was Magoroth. She sat in the wayhouse refectory and listened to the stories, and promised to tell the Mirager of all the tellers had seen. Not numina, but beasts leaving the Mirage on the wind. She recognised the descriptions. The Ravage was on the move.

  He was on the road, waiting for her. He’d felt her coming and had ridden out, alone, to meet her. In the distance Madrinya huddled, glowing in the soft light of sunset, but he was a mile or two outside the last of the houses. The feeling of him gleamed as steady as a lamp in a still room. The essence of him hadn’t changed. He was Temellin, Mirager of Kardiastan, who loved her. She’d seen him last when Arrant was five, and he’d been standing on the shore in Ordensa, watching the Platterfish sail out of the harbour. Ten years ago, ten years of separation, yet now even a few more moments seemed too long to wait. She urged the shleth into a last burst of speed.

  And at last she was tumbling off her mount and into his embrace. She didn’t need to ask if her son was alive, she felt that much in him. But the rest? She felt that too: his pain, his grief, his anxiety. His reluctance to tell her what it was that had torn her soul in two.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ she said, her first words, ‘we will survive it, and go on. Tell me.’

  Arrant woke, knowing that she was there in his room. And feeling for too brief a moment that he was a child again, and the arms that reached out to him would make everything all right, the way they had when he was very young. She held and rocked him and brushed the hair away from his forehead before he managed to sit up straight and give the appearance of being someone on the threshold of adulthood.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said.

  ‘I am so, so sorry,’ she said. ‘You didn’t deserve this.’

  ‘Has Father told you everything?’

  ‘Yes. Everything. Including everything about your brother, and your power. I
should have believed you concerning Tarran. I—I can’t apologise for doing that to him, though. It was the only way I had to save him.’

  ‘He knows. He has the Mirage Makers’ memories of everything—of who his mother was and what she did, and what happened the day she died. He grew up knowing. It bothered me more than him. He is proud to be a Mirage Maker. I might have blamed you, but he never did.’

  She took his hand and looked at the cut along his cabochon. ‘I can understand why you allowed this. Better, I think, than your father does. We both know there is a world beyond being Magor, don’t we? You must go and find it, Arrant. Find a way to be happy. To be the best you can be. You have so much to give.’

  ‘I thought of going back to Tyr, to learn how to build aqueducts for Kardiastan. It’s absurd to be so limited by water resources when there is all that snowmelt from the Alps going to waste.’

  She laughed. ‘That is a very Tyranian answer.’

  He looked sheepish. ‘It is, isn’t it? But then part of me is still Tyranian, I swear. Tell me everything. How is Gev? And Narjemah? What did you do about Devros?’

  They talked till dawn, catching up on the missing years, with an easy camaraderie he could not remember ever having in the past. ‘I am older,’ he thought. ‘And we have much in common—we are both haunted by our different guilt.’ And haunted by the same tragedy too: Brand’s death.

  ‘Will you come back to Tyr with me?’ he asked, as the sun came up on a new day.

  She shook her head. ‘No. As of this moment, the last Exaltarch is no more than someone for historians to argue about. Now Temellin needs me. And I need him. I’m sorry, Arrant, I am abandoning you yet again, aren’t I?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. The other way around this time. It’s me who’s leaving.’

  ‘Well, I am stealing a position that’s rightfully yours.’

  ‘Watch your back,’ he warned, and he wasn’t joking. ‘Firgan wants to be the next Mirager a lot more than either you or I do, and he has no scruples about how he gets there.’

  ‘Oh, I’m pretty experienced with devious schemers. Rathrox Ligatan was a good example and I was a willing pupil.’ She stood up and yawned. ‘I must go; I have kept you up all night. Don’t worry about us, Arrant. You go and build your aqueducts. Pick up the threads of a new life.’

  He nodded and smiled. New threads for the weaving of a future of his own patterning: he liked the idea of that. He would be the architect of a new Kardiastan, a land where everyone had water piped to their house. Nothing romantic in that, perhaps, but a worthy ambition nonetheless.

  It was odd, but the two people who made the most fuss about his decision to leave Kardiastan were Serenelle and Samia. When he was up and about again, Samia cornered him in a quiet corner of the garden, and enumerated a whole list of things he ought to be doing instead, which included finding a way to mend his cabochon, discovering why it didn’t work in the first place, investigating if Firgan really had engineered Lesgath’s death somehow, and working out a way to banish the whole Korden family to the islands off the west coast of Inge or somewhere equally remote. He didn’t know whether to be amused or exasperated.

  Serenelle was even more blunt when she found him packing up some of his belongings left in the Academy classroom just prior to his departure. ‘You’re running away,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘No point in staying. I don’t belong here any more.’

  ‘You let him win.’

  He didn’t have to ask whom she meant. ‘He didn’t win.’

  ‘You know he did. And worse is coming, you’ll see. He’ll be the next Mirager, and your parents will be dead before their time.’

  ‘My parents can look after themselves. They’re good at that.’

  ‘I hope they are better than you are.’

  ‘Why does it worry you, Serenelle?’ He was genuinely curious. ‘I would have thought you’d be glad if Firgan became Mirager. He’s your brother.’

  ‘And what do you think it’s like having a brother like him, you fool?’ She stamped her foot at him in frustration. ‘Mirage preserve me from shleth-brained sprouts!’

  ‘If Firgan bothers you, go to your father.’

  This time she rolled her eyes. ‘No father wants to acknowledge that his heir is a murderer. Least of all mine. Do you think he’d ever credit the idea that his precious firstborn is guilty of fratricide?’

  He was shocked that she spoke so casually of Firgan having a deliberate role in Lesgath’s death, astonished that she had even considered the possibility of it. While he was still trying to think of something to say, she took a step closer and reached out to take hold of both sides of his bolero. Then, even as he wondered what she was up to, she had pulled him close and kissed him full on the lips. He was so unprepared, he went cross-eyed trying to look her in the eye.

  Then other parts of his body reacted to her curves pressed against him and he found himself kissing her back with an ardour that came from nowhere he recognised. Just when he’d decided that the sensations he was feeling were very pleasant indeed, she stepped away from him.

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘was just to show you what you could have had, if you’d kept your wits about you. I don’t know exactly what Firgan did, but I do know that he made a fool of you, Arrant Temellin. And I know that you wrecked my life as well as your own when you allowed your cabochon to be destroyed by my idiot of a father.’

  With that, she turned on her heel and left him.

  He felt a fool. He’d kissed Serenelle and enjoyed it, but he was far from sure he liked her, and damned sure he didn’t trust her.

  PART THREE

  FRIENDS, FOES AND LOVERS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In the valley of the River Arteus, which flowed from the Alps to join the River Tyr near Getria, a man hauled himself up the flimsy scaffolding ladders to the highest point on the stone arch of a half-built bridge. His movements were as deft as a spider on its web, and on arriving at the top, he strolled casually over the freshly laid stonework to within a finger’s breadth of the edge. He was now further above the ground than the roof of the tallest building in Tyr. Until the keystone was slipped into place, the only thing that held up the arch—and him—was a makeshift wooden mould, yet the height worried him not at all.

  The bridge workmen called him Araneolus, ‘little spider’. He wasn’t that little, being rangy rather than short, and muscular with it, too—a man couldn’t spend much of his days on the network of scaffolding without building muscle—but they thought the name suited his fearlessness and agility. Besides, they found the similarity between Araneolus and his real name, Arrant, amusing.

  Once he had been an Exaltarch’s son, but the workmen didn’t consider that of any importance. There was no Exaltarch now; the last one—a woman, would you believe?—had vanished one day after addressing the Senate and telling them they didn’t need an emperor any more. What was important to those who built the aqueduct was that they now had a bridge builder who knew what he was doing, who worked alongside them, who wasn’t too uppity to haul on a rope or pass a pail, who cared if one of the labourers was hurt, and who saw to it that they were paid on time. They mocked him to his face, and he would grin amiably at their rough wit, but in the company of others they referred to him as Architectus, buildermaster, and they didn’t give that title lightly.

  A stonemason, awaiting the arrival of a carved block of stone from below, greeted him with a grin. ‘Right on schedule, Master Araneolus. The last keystone.’

  ‘Looks as if you’ll get your bonus, Licinius! Start the winch and let’s get that thing up here.’

  The stonemason bellowed, the workers started to turn the winch, the rope squeaked across the pulleys of the wooden crane. Arrant felt a deep satisfaction. Maybe he couldn’t help out with Magor power, but he could build a fine bridge spanning a river valley. They’d be laying the channel for the aqueduct across it soon, and water would flow from the mountains down to Getria.

  ‘
The most beautiful bridge in Tyrans,’ he told himself. ‘And when it is finished…’ He looked over at the mountains, where the aqueduct would collect pure spring water. The Alps, barrier between him and Kardiastan, between him and what was left of the Mirage, between him and his brother. So near—and so impossibly far. Perhaps one day, it would be time to go home. But not yet.

  When he had left Kardiastan, he’d just turned sixteen. Now he was twenty. Four years, studying and working and building. And living without the people who loved him best.

  At least he knew Tarran had survived. Before he’d left Kardiastan, a young Magoroth sent into the Shiver Barrens had brought back a message from the Mirage Makers: He lives, but cannot find you. He was hurt, but has recovered. The terror dammed up inside of him melted away with the news. Tarran lived! And doubtless it was the lack of colour in Arrant’s cabochon that prevented contact.

  He should have been happy.

  If anyone had asked him, he would in fact have said he was happy. He was doing something he had often dreamed about, yet never thought would be within his reach. He had the joy of seeing the simple elegance of one of his bridge designs become reality. He was young, yet had the respect of his teachers and his artisans and his workmen in ways that had nothing to do with being the son of the last Exaltarch or the son of the present Mirager.

  The truth was, though, that he could not remember the last time he had been completely happy, untrammelled by the burdens of the past trailing after him like a clogged plough dragging behind an ox and unworried by his fears that the Ravage would win.

  Worse, his brother’s absence from his life was a constant ache. And it wasn’t just Tarran who was absent. He missed his friends: Perry with his sturdy, unquestioning support; Bevran with his funny face; Vevi with her bossy ways; Samia, pertly irritating and always so annoyingly right. There were even times when he would have given anything to see Serenelle, whom he didn’t understand at all.