by Tia Reed
“I am devastated you do not consider me worthy, divine Highness.” Naldo turned to Matisse. “Our queen values her chastity more than the porrin. Give the extra back.”
“We did promise. And it is for the good of your adopted realm,” Matisse said to her. When she hesitated, he added, “Surely, it is the custom even in Terlaan.”
She could not deny that it was, but these two men turned a gesture of respect into a dangerous play of seduction.
“For your service to the Crown,” she conceded, allowing Naldo to kiss her hand. His lingering liberty was disconcerting, turning the swell of her chaste heartbeat into a wild gallop, but she could not say the attention was unpleasant.
“Our next port of call awaits,” Matisse said, presenting his arm. He took her free hand in his, easing her close to his side, keeping her there as they walked past the lilies clogging the garden canal while Naldo trailed, reciting poetic lines of love. Vae’oenka knew she did not encourage this shamelessness, that she tried to edge away. But he was strong, and insistent, and held her fate in his hands; and his thumb was rubbing the back of her hand, and he was smiling at her with those teasing eyes even as the groomsman brought their horses and Naldo offered one final bow.
Her eyes betrayed her, to keep glancing at him as they rode to the gate. He knew, he must have, though he looked ahead the whole way. It was her doing he reached over and halted her horse as a guard ordered the gate open. Reached over and stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. “You must learn to have a little fun, Kordahla. A woman as gorgeous as you has the power to steal the hearts of men.” Then he leaned over and kissed her on the lips. She closed her eyes and revelled in his lingering touch, in the heat tingling through her whole body. If this bliss was the sin of a disgraced woman, Vae’oenka could condemn her all she liked.
* * *
Daesoa had been showing her the way. The yellow moonbeams glided over the knoll on which the terrible city stood, across the sunburned meadow, to the edge of the fretting trees. Through a daze filled with the rustle of leaves and a cold prickling on her warm skin, Sian heard the soldier’s distant call. Faradil Forest lured her on. The air grew heavy; the shadows fell thick. Boughs bent towards her; litter swirled at her feet. An ancient presence whispered through the foliage, welcoming, warning. This was not a place where mortals could hope to tread and return untouched. That scared her, but pretty Daesoa led her on, the dense canopy no barrier to the moon’s bright beam. It swept across the moist floor, and came to rest in the middle of a babbling brook, where crystal water tumbled over mossy stones. Sian knelt and gave thanks to the water spirits before scooping a handful of the icy liquid into her dry mouth.
“You are welcome,” a girl’s voice tinkled.
Sian jumped up. A blue spirit was sitting on a boulder in the middle of the brook, pretty patterns of clear ice interlocking to form her body, white water cascading off her head. As she stood, she melted into the stream, her filmy shift of droplets disintegrating into a spray which sprinkled into Sian’s hair. Sian stared at the boulder, at Daesoa’s beam sliding over it and plunging to the shallow bed. Stared because it was safer to do that than face the life of the forest. Stared because a bone lay at its heart, glistening, smooth, and unfamiliar. Taking a deep breath, she set a wobbly foot into the brook and waded to the light. She dipped her hand into the water to pick up the bone, thanking the spirits for the offering as Ishoa had taught her.
“You were brought here for that.” On the far bank, a girl with a bundle of moss for hair leaned against the trunk of a white poplar. Her fingers and toes were seeds, her ears wingnuts, her eyes the knots of an aged trunk. In her hand sat a creature that looked like a stick with huge eyes. As solemn as the other was gay, the forest-spirit girl picked a dried leaf, crumbled it and blew the fragments into Sian’s face. Sian coughed. When she opened them again, the girl was melding with the tree, her leaf-brown tunic crumbling to mulch.
A wind stirred. Leaves rustled. Sian went cold with a sudden gnawing prickle something was watching. She ran. Back home she could judge the mood of the trees and the humour of the hilltops, but this wood was as foreign in its whims as the city.
“Never to you,” a voice said. “You are home.”
She ran harder.
A boy swooped out of the canopy and around a flowering myrtle. His body was a cloud as translucent as the air, his eyes small suns too bright to meet. “Bring them back to us,” he said, floating before her in a swarm of tiny creatures with buzzing iridescent wings. A cry of fear caught in her throat as he faded, his rippling robe sparking into a rainbow.
Sian turned about. She was lost. Worse, she was an intruder in a sacred place, too frightened to steady her rapid breath. She closed her eyes, praying to the Spirits of the Forest to open her path, the Spirits of the Earth to guide her step, the Spirits of the Air to light her way. The silent forest woke into whirrs and chirps, and she with it. Damp earth soaked her feet, and a breeze played through her hair. They woke her to memories too brutal to bear, an agony so intense she fell, and cried out, and tore at her hair. Her tears flowed until her head was spinning, and the world was shrinking, and she was clawing and fighting her way out of the consuming darkness.
“Don’t fight it,” said the dark-skinned girl.
“Give in to the dream,” the boy said.
“Let us help you,” the others added.
“Surrender to the forest.”
It was oblivion, at least for a time. A refuge from a past she didn’t have the courage to face. She dove into the dark maw of her fit so that she might be spared. Spared the future, too.
It was different this time. They were with her, no longer children but beings of pure light. Their voices soared and echoed, singing of mysteries lost, and forgotten ways. They bore her through Faradil, to the dewdrops on the mossy rocks, the bugs under the rotten logs, the veins of the budding leaves, and the hairs on the knobbly root. The forest twined around her soul, its vines winding through her until they were one. It embraced her pain, drawing it into the essence of the ancient place. The streams wept for her. The sturdy trunks groaned. The boughs soughed, and the earth shook for her ordeal. And when they did, she knew the Forest was damaged too. She bled for it, for the trees that had been ravaged, the animals slain, the waters polluted.
And when she woke, she understood. She was not lying down but upon her knees. The strange bone was in her hand. Like a four-pointed star, it glowed from within.
“Sian.”
This voice was adult, human. She glanced up and saw a tall man, a dark moustache over his lip.
“You should not have come here,” she said, returning to her contemplation of the gift. It was a mystery deserving of Ishoa.
The man went down on a knee. The crickets quietened, disturbed. “Your friends are worried.”
“They don’t need to be.” She kept her head low, so her straight hair draped across her face. Washed and combed, it was the colour of Daesoa’s light.
“You are a very brave young lady.”
The ironwoods around them rattled their leaves. The man was straining in his effort not to stare. He didn’t understand the Forest. He didn’t understand her. She shook her head, refusing to look at him, a stranger, a man. The forest bore the worst of her pain, but the memory of those others burned raw. “You need to go.”
“Some bad men did some very bad things to you,” this man went on.
She could see the concern on his face in green Dindarin’s light. The moon had sent a thousand of His beams through the gaps in the leaves. She wished He hadn’t. If the canopy had twined tight, if the moon had left her in darkness, she might have blotted out the man’s words. She kept looking at the bone. It was safest to do that.
“Look at me when I speak to you. Look at me, Sian.”
His insistence wore through the mist surrounding her. Her eyes slid sideways onto his. Finding nothing of evil there, she eased her head around until her eyes were once again centred, on him.
>
“I think you are the bravest person I know.”
The owl hooted as it flew over her head. A mouse darted into a burrow between the roots of an oak. She wanted to do that: run, cower, hide.
“I’m not brave at all. I’m scared of everything.”
He said, “But still you go on. That is courage of the best kind.”
“Why did you come?” Men feared this place for good reason. Faradil had succoured her and she understood.
“They say you can see the djinn. Is this true?”
The forest had fallen serene in its stirrings, the flitter of a leaf beneath the flutter of a moth, the whir of a wing in the sigh of the breeze. It did not mind this man. That was reason enough to trust him.
“Two of them. There’s only ever two.”
“Are they here now?”
“No.”
“But you see them as plain as you see me.”
She nodded.
“You are going to make a formidable soothsayer, Sian.”
“I’m not a soothsayer.” The words were out as quick as Dindarin flared. Her breath was fast, nervous for him. The forest might punish him for such presumption.
“And that?” he asked, indicating the bone in her hand.
“The Forest wanted me to have this.” Ishoa might even love her for its beauty.
“It is extraordinary. Do you know what it is?”
She traced its outline, and shook her head. It was like no bone she had ever seen. “Ishoa will know, when I give it to her.”
“I do not think she will take what is intended for you.”
“Spirit bones are for soothsayers.”
“And how is it you understand me?”
She looked up sharply. Her straight hair swung back, exposing her face, exposing her. “You are speaking Akerin.”
“I am speaking Laanan, the tongue of the Three Realms.”
Again she shook her head, this time to dispel her doubt. She was despised among her people. Even the outcast addicts would laugh to think the afflicted girl, the girl with half a brain, could command the spirits. Soothsayers were revered. Soothsayers were feared.
The stranger leaned forward, one arm across his knee. “Did your soothsayer not give you her lore?”
Sian turned her face away. The teaching, the tasks, the bone casting – they were favours the soothsayer had bestowed on a friendless outcast. They were that, if she did not delve deeper into her trembling. This was not a truth she could reveal in the wake of her suffering, and so she reverted to the other truth, the protective one. “You should not have come. Faradil is angry.”
“I came for you. And you, I think, Faradil wants to protect. For that reason alone, it will do me no harm.”
She sensed the truth of his words. This man commanded power, though his force paled in comparison to the ancient mysteries in the heart of the trees. If ever there was one to confide in, it was him. The forest had admitted him, leading him to her when it could so easily have lured him to madness or death. Around her, leaves rustled along the ground. Tiny pairs of bark-skinned hands lifted the decaying foliage so strange round eyes could peek out.
“A new mystery approaches,” she said. “A presence as ancient as Faradil.”
“Something that threatens the forest?”
“Something that threatens us all.”
“And the forest seeks our help?”
“No. But you may need the help of the Forest.”
An apricot ball of light flitted between them. The nearby trees cried out in indignation. The stick creatures shrieked with cracking-twig voices, and hid beneath the leaves. The light was wrong and wrongness. She frowned.
The man stood up. “Do we follow the light?” he asked, as it flitted up and over their heads.
“It is not part of the forest,” she answered twisting her neck to follow its zigzagging path. The trees around them sighed their relief as it left. Its presence remained an ache at the back of her mind, but the larger threat bore back down. Her deep breath caused the man to look at her once more.
She was human. The forest could not change that. “Faradil has not chosen her side.”
“Will it come to that?” he asked, deep worry in his eyes.
She gave him a single nod.
“Can you tell me more?”
She shook her head.
“I understand,” he said, gentle still.
Biting her lip, she studied his grave face. Perhaps he did understand. She was too tired to help it, now. Her pain was too deep. Tears trickled down her face.
“Sian, are you all right?”
She was an abandoned child in a strange land. “I want to go home.”
He held out his hand. “I think that can be arranged.”
She placed her small hand in his. “I’m scared of that too.”
“I know.” He stood. As she rose, he plucked a dirty leaf from her hair. “Just promise me this. When the time comes to face who you are, do not run.”
He was a stranger. He seemed to know her better than anyone except Ishoa. She knew she ought to make the promise; Faradil desired it. She opened her mouth but the words would not come. That was fine. Daesoa was telling her so by sending a yellow moonbeam to caress her face. It swept across root and frond, asking her to follow, leading them past ironwood, oak, and beech, out of the ancient heart of the land, onto the withered plain. Under the stars, she searched the sky. Dindarin showed but half his face. The small moon was gone. She faltered.
The mage had a gentle query on his face.
“Where is Daesoa?” she asked. She needed to thank the moon.
He shook his head. “She is new this night.”
* * *
Levi’s increasing groans and bent stance as they wound along the steep mountain paths worried Vinsant until his stomach hurt. He bit his lip while staring at the floating Majoria and waited until Levi was finally asleep.
Arun, Vinsant called, levitating himself into the air.
I’m here.
I need a healing spell.
Levi said you might ask.
Huh? You mean you talked to the Majoria without me?
Do you have a problem with that, apprentice?
Eh, no, Minoria. So are you going to teach me?
I believe the Majoria said your injury was result of your disobedience.
Well, not exactly. But–. Vinsant sent a mental picture of Levi’s hand. And to emphasise his own dire need, he let Arun feel his pain too.
What is this? Arun asked quickly, focusing on Levi’s burn.
The indigo djinn, Vinsant said, confused because hadn’t Arun just said he had spoken to Levi. A second later he found himself flat on his back on the damp ground.
“How dare you, apprentice,” Levi floated towards him, finger pointed at the end of an outstretched arm.
Vinsant wriggled back, not that he was going to avoid the Majoria’s blasting. Thank the Vae Levi only raised his head in the silence of thoughtspeak. Well he should be a part of that too. It was his conversation after all. He concentrated on reforging the link with Arun. It was downright unfair, unjust and unmerited he found himself excluded, and not for lack of trying.
Levi bids me tell you myself that an accident with a healing spell may leave the patient worse off, Arun’s voice intruded into his concern. The Minoria’s tone became more sympathetic. You have faced more in a month than many mahktashaan do in a lifetime. Be patient Vinsant, and trust your elders.
“What punishment do you believe your presumption deserves?” Levi asked, when Vinsant had bid Arun a good night.
Vinsant sighed. “A trek back to the shrine?”
“I think not. Come here.” Levi placed a hand on Vinsant’s forehead. Warmth spread through his body and Vinsant found his pain was gone. “You will sleep upon the ground tonight.”
“Yes, Majoria,” Vinsant said, trying to levitate just enough to assert a covert defiance. He should have known he would find himself magickless.
“And Vins
ant,” Levi said as he reclined on air. “Your concern for your leader becomes a mahktashaan.”
“All honour to you, Majoria,” Vinsant said, moving the stones that poked into his back.
Chapter Forty-five
Not ready for bed, Kordahla doused the candles and threw open the double doors to the balcony outside her room. Would that her feverish yearnings drifted as effortlessly as the scent of the frangipani on the breeze. Its caress was both soothing and welcome after the humidity of the last few days. Down in the candlelit gardens, another strolled beneath the quarter moon. The lady moved with a grace that belied her chosen role in life. She stopped beneath a blossom-covered bush to pluck a bloom, and with it, dear Vae’oenka, plucked the echo of Matisse’s words.
“You are as beautiful as this flower,” he had said, snapping the pink frangipane flower off the shrub. “But I cannot believe, delicate as you are, you bruise as easily.” He pressed the tip between thumb and forefinger. She could find no words when he showed her the petal, crushed to translucence.
She had been wandering the canal beneath the hanging gardens when Matisse had approached, Timak quiet at her side, relentless guards behind. She wrapped her pink sheer shawl tight around her, covering her bare arms, her midriff. Between the bouts of fearful shame at exposing her skin, trills ran up and down her belly. Jordayne had seen fit to ignore her requests for a modest dress. In the privacy of her room, she twirled the beaded skirt, delighting in the allure of the revealing garments, their sheer femininity. In the presence of the flirtatious heir to throne, they struck her mute. Her feeble protests when he sent the boy on a trivial errand and dismissed her escort had not swayed him.
“But we are not alone,” he had said, amusement dancing in his blue eyes and along the slight upturn of his lips. “We are together.” They had meandered to a bench beneath a shady arch draped with the canes of a clematis. He had held her hand as they talked of Terlaan. She was not so naïve she did not guess he was probing for weaknesses, or figure the warm pressure of his hand aimed to disarm. Better this than the barrage Ordosteen would beset her with if Father dragged an army to the border to reclaim his honour. She had little to offer, but it had never been her intention to betray her home. Vae, but it was difficult to look at him, that teasing smile on his face. At least he did not begrudge her uselessness.