Song of Leira

by Gillian Bronte Adams

  Yet even now the words rang with a discordant note.

  It was echoed in Quillan’s gentle rebuke. “The Song is meant for just such as him.”

  Birdie looked up into his earnest face and felt the notes of his song ringing with sorrow and hope and compassion for the dying Shantren.

  And yet she could muster no feeling at all, save grief.

  “Gundhrold is dead.”

  She did not realize that she had spoken the words out loud until Quillan’s face softened. His hand rested on her shoulder, just rested there, but that simple touch was almost enough to undo her. A sob built up in her throat, but she shoved it back down. Then Quillan broke away and ducked beneath the left-hand hanging, and Birdie didn’t know whether to follow him or ignore him or turn and walk out, so she waited. A moment later, he emerged with a large knapsack slung over one shoulder and a walking stick in hand.

  “Walk with me, Songkeeper.”

  •••

  Out beyond the hollow they walked, out onto sage-clad hills beneath a colorless sky. Quillan set a fast pace at first, his walking stick stabbing the ground to propel him forward beneath the bulk of the large knapsack. Birdie was glad for their speed, because the frenzied movement steadied her thoughts. A little of her anger bled out with each pounding step, and it made her feel as if she was accomplishing something each time her feet hit the ground.

  Even if it was just outmarching the old Songling.

  At last Quillan seemed to flag a bit, winded. His pace eased, and then he halted. They stood in the midst of a mountain meadow dotted with clusters of yellow flowers that were so bright they made the sun look pale. Without a word he sat cross legged in the grass and slid the knapsack onto his knees. Untying a few knots allowed the knapsack to fall open, revealing a lyre. He ran his wizened fingers across the gleaming frame and then settled it against his shoulder and began to play. The furrowed lines on his brow melted away. Eyes closed, face tilted somewhere between the lyre and the sky. Light and fleet as Frey’s hooves, his fingers ran across the strings, releasing a song that was woven with echoes of both his melody and the master melody.

  It rang with hope and sorrow, a glorious mingling of the two.

  At first Birdie remained standing, not ready to sit beside the Songling who had befriended Khelari and Shantren alike. But by the time Quillan laid aside his lyre, she had fallen to her knees in the grass and wept into the damp spring earth until her tears were spent. Slowly she sat back on her heels, listening to the whisper of the wind through the flowers. For a time they sat in silence. She was grateful that he did not press her for details on Gundhrold’s death. And though she had been so eager to confront him about the Shantren before his song, she could not summon the anger now. It had been quenched by the walk and the melody and the beauty of this place.

  “Sixteen . . .”

  Birdie cast a curious glance at the old Songling. He had returned his lyre to his knapsack, laced it in again, and pulled something else out. Something small that he turned over in his hands, a thoughtful look wrinkling his brow. “Sixteen?” she prompted.

  He started, as if surprised to discover that he had spoken aloud, and then nodded ruefully. “I thought myself a man. Old enough to discern for myself. Old enough to choose my path. Old enough to take the talav.” His fingers opened, and the broken end of a chain dangled from his hand. A shard of clear crystal danced at the end.

  Birdie blinked at him. “That is . . . was . . . yours?”

  “Shocking, isn’t it?” Quillan stretched his long legs before him. “Raised a Songling by a Songling father, trained to use my gifts, encouraged in the way of the Master Singer . . . and yet I threw it all away. Rejected my heritage and chose the Shantren instead.”

  “But . . . why?”

  “Does it matter?” His eyebrows rose. “I was rebellious. I sought to make my own way. I believed the Takhran’s lies. Honestly, the true answer eludes me now, but believe me when I say that the Takhran can be most persuasive. Power, belonging, freedom from fear—a thousand different promises draw them in like flies to the bait, but in the end they are all ensnared. Ten years I spent a slave to this thing.” He flicked a finger at the crystal. “Until a Songkeeper befriended me and set me free.”

  Befriending a Shantren? Everything within Birdie recoiled at the notion—until she recalled Inali. She had unwittingly befriended the desert warrior, and he had almost lost his arm saving her. It had all been for his own twisted purposes in the end, but even he had admitted to being deceived by the Takhran. In a way, she supposed, she could pity him for that.

  And what if there were others like him?

  Quillan went on. “He was kind, Artair was.” The name pricked Birdie’s attention—Amos’s friend Artair, whose sword she had lost in the Pit? “Told me to seek him out if I ever wished to be free of the talav. Oh, I laughed at him then, but eventually I came to see my folly and begged him to release me.” He tipped his head toward her. “That is why I, for one, do not view them as monsters, Songkeeper. For I was one of them. They are people, just like us, created by the Master Singer with melodies of their own, and they are more enslaved than they know.”

  It was an impassioned plea, and it tugged at her heart, but it wasn’t wholly truthful. Not all of the Shantren had melodies of their own. Inali, Zahar, and the one in Quillan’s healing room were prime examples. She narrowed her gaze at the Songling. “What of the silent ones?”

  “Ah.” He broke eye contact. “The Songless.” A long silence stretched between them before he spoke again, and when he did, the words came quickly. “Not all Shantren are so. Most retain their melodies even after assuming the talav, though their melodies are distorted. But any who were Songlings or Songkeepers lose their melodies when they take the talav. The two are diametrically opposed. They cannot coexist.”

  He spoke with such a level of detachment that it took Birdie a moment to realize this subject had struck close to the mark. “So you were . . . Songless?”

  “Until Artair freed me, yes. Then my song returned to me, and the beauty of it . . .” Quillan’s voice trailed off. He weighed the broken talav in his hand and then placed it inside his knapsack and laced it shut. “I shall live all my life reveling in it.”

  He fell into a contemplative silence, and Birdie seized the moment, summoning her courage to speak before it was gone. “I need your help, Quillan. You understand all of this—the melodies, the Shantren, what the Takhran is planning. You know what it is to be a Songling, a Songkeeper.” She threaded her fingers together in her lap. It was so difficult to get the words out. “Will you come with me?”

  There. She had said it.

  But Quillan was already shaking his head. “I fight this battle through healing and good food and pleasant company beside a warm hearth, in the hopes that some may come to seek the freedom that I have found. Peace is my calling, little one. Not war.”

  But war was hers.

  Birdie pushed up to her feet, unable to sit inactive any longer, and paced a ragged path through the meadow. “The others are waiting for me. The Song beckons me to help them, and I promised Ky that I would find them somewhere safe . . . But I can’t face all of this alone.”

  Pity tinged Quillan’s gaze. “Why are you here, Songkeeper?”

  His tone demanded honesty. “I told you. I am alone. I don’t even know what to do.”

  “You are not alone, Songkeeper.”

  “Do you mean Ky?” She swallowed the twinge of anger that rose in her throat. “This mess was his fault. He led us on a mission to free the slaves from the army and then abandoned us halfway through it. He risked all our lives, all to find his friend, and now Gundhrold is dead. And the others—they are sheep. Lost. Despairing. What help can they give to me?”

  “Better yet, think what help you can give them. But I did not mean your traveling companions. I meant that the Song is with you.” Mild mannered as ever, Quillan did not react to her frustration. He rose and slung the knapsack over his shoulder.
“You have heard the voice of the Master Singer. You of all people should not think yourself alone.”

  And yet she did.

  His words stuck in her mind all the way back to the hollow. When they reached Mogrinvale, she slipped away from Quillan’s side into the narrow room that housed the captured Shantren. He did not rouse when she knelt by his side, just lay there with his chest rising ever slower and shallower. Still the Song did not stir her to heal him, and even after her talk with Quillan, she could not help feeling relieved. At last he slipped away, and she sang him to sleep.

  20

  “This is it.” Breathless with anticipation, Birdie slid from Frey’s back and stood beside his head, surveying the place where the Song had led them. A warm breeze rustled the bald-tipped trees circling the flat-topped hill. Beyond the ring of trees, the skeleton of an old stone wall and hewn-log huts had been blackened by fire and overgrown with moss and dragon’s tongue vines. With each step that she took the Song strengthened, until it felt less like Birdie was being led and more like she was being pulled.

  It drew her unto itself.

  “Come on.” She pressed on toward the ruins, knowing that the others would follow. After several days of travel, they were all of them exhausted and eager to reach the promised rest. The Song had led them on a circuitous route through the mountains, though whether that had been to avoid Khelari patrols or throw hounds off their scent or for the sake of the journey itself, she did not know. It was enough that, at long last, they had arrived.

  “Are you sure about this place?” Ky cast a wary glance around, sling dangling at the ready between his fingers, as if he awaited only the slightest provocation to loose a sling-bullet at the nearest threat. Over the past few days, he had pushed himself relentlessly—constantly on the lookout, doubling back to cover their trail, volunteering for multiple watches every night. From the size of the dark circles under his eyes, Birdie doubted that he had slept at all.

  And in all that time he had said scarce ten words to her.

  She nodded. “I am sure.”

  “I just . . .” He rubbed a grimy hand across the back of his neck. “Don’t know. Feels off.”

  “Songkeeper.” The edge of fear in Frey’s voice recalled her. He had not moved from where she left him, standing stock still as if his body had been cast in iron, muscles taut beneath his downy coat. Primed to flee. “The boy is right. This is an evil place.” His muzzle twitched, whiskers snuffling the air, and then he blew out a sudden snort that made Birdie jump. She had never seen him so skittish. “Something terrible has happened here. Are you certain this is where the Song leads?”

  “Why do you say it’s an evil place?”

  “I do not know. The air—it tastes wrong.”

  Birdie could not taste the air, but she could hearken to the broken melodies calling out from the rock of the hill and the trees and the blackened stones. And though the notes were sad—heartbreakingly so—they did not strike her as evil. Again she felt the tug of the Song in her chest, beckoning her forward. “This is it, Frey. This is where the Song leads.”

  She turned and walked forward through the ring of trees.

  Skittering hooves told her that Frey accompanied her, and the steady crunch of footsteps meant that Ky led the others forward as well. Beyond the whispering trees, dragon’s tongue vines partially obscured a gap in the broken wall. She pushed her way through, slapping aside the sticky leaves, and emerged into a lifeless quiet.

  The wilderness had overtaken this place. Vines grew over the twisted remains of the log huts—and there were a good number of them, spread out across the hillside with sage and sapling trees filling the spaces in between where once there must have been paths. A mountain village of some sort? She halted and turned in a slow circle to survey her surroundings. The others spread out and explored the ruins.

  Gull marched past her, arrow to the string of his bow, eyes narrowed in imitation of Ky’s alertness. Something brittle crunched under his foot, and he parted the grass with the tip of his bow. “Ugh,” he groaned. “Bones.”

  “More over here!”

  “And here.”

  Birdie knelt to inspect the ground. Half-buried bones littered the soil. Here and there, the tip of a rusted weapon protruded from the earth like some strange sort of plant grasping for sunlight. A little farther in, vines grew along the curve of a breastplate visible through the tall grass, and beside it a battered helmet yawned empty.

  A battle had been fought here, long ago.

  “It’s not evil,” Ky muttered. He had come up behind her and stood, scanning the ruins as if he expected enemies lurking behind every tree. “It’s just . . . dead.”

  And she couldn’t deny his words. Though the bald-tipped trees that ringed the hills still rustled in a steady breeze, no wind made its way past their branches to touch the hilltop. A heaviness hung over the ruins, as if it had been carved out of the normal flow of life and time and left to rot on its own, until the wild claimed it.

  “Still . . .” Ky shrugged, ran a hand through his hair. “It’d be easy to build shelters here. Gathering food won’t be a problem, and if we could find a spring or some source of water nearby, it could make a good hideout.” He seemed to remember then who he was talking to and scuffed a foot on the ground, opened his mouth, and then wheeled abruptly away.

  Birdie did not try to stop him. Days of travel had not eased the tension between them. She rose and walked farther into the ruins, tiptoeing lest she disturb the quiet of the place, with the Song whispering in her ear. Somewhere within, a hollow voice moaned a mournful note from the depths of the earth. She followed it, ear cocked forward. And then a new strand of melody snagged her ear, and the breath fled her lungs, the strength drained from her limbs, and the warmth leeched from her veins.

  She began to tremble.

  “Songkeeper?” Coming up behind her, Frey nuzzled her shoulder, concern alight in his eyes. “What is wrong?”

  She broke into a run, dashing heedlessly through the jungle of tangleroot, sage, and weeping thrassle, leaping over scattered bones and fallen weapons, darting around ruined huts. Ky shouted for her to wait. Frey trailed close at her heels.

  In the center of the ruin, she saw him. A broad-shouldered figure, stooped beneath a long overcoat, head bowed, standing alone with his back toward her. The sight dashed over her like a wave of cold water, halting her midstep. Frey skittered to a stop and lowered his antlered head in defense, muscles quivering. As if from a distance, she heard Ky issuing commands and caught glimpses of the runners stalking to surround the stranger.

  Still she could not move.

  The voice was clearer now, unmistakable, but she could not bring herself to hope. Because hope, as the mahtems had insisted in the Matlal’s war council so many months ago, was the most dangerous of all. It bit deepest. It left the cruelest scars. It gouged the worst wounds.

  The stranger turned around.

  Her heart seized. She caught barely a glimpse of his weather-worn face half concealed behind wild strands of fiery red hair, fierce green eyes gleaming beneath, before her feet carried her onward at a run. “Amos!”

  “No!”

  His anguished cry slammed into her. She lurched to a halt, limbs tingling with a sudden chill. Amos’s face had gone whiter than Frey’s coat. He staggered away from her, hands gripping his head, and dropped to his knees. “No, no, enough. Enough!” His words were garbled. She could scarce make sense of them.

  “Amos?”

  His head jerked up, eyes pale-lit within the haunted caverns of his face. “Just let me die.” Shoulders shuddering, he collapsed face forward onto the ground.

  •••

  Fires blazed amidst the ruins, and the runners and freed slaves huddled around them in clumps of five and six. The crackle of burning wood and the sizzle of roasting food lessened the pervasive quiet. Gradually, tongues loosened beneath the balm of warmth and peace and rest. Here and there laughter broke out, and the sound was so unexpecte
d and so good that it eased the ache in Birdie’s heart.

  She hastened back to the smaller fire that Ky had built off to the side for her and Amos, her arms laden with purloined supplies—a cloak, a water-filled kettle, a bag of tea leaves. When she had bid Quillan farewell, he had sent her and Frey on their way with several sacks filled to bursting with cooking gear, medicinal herbs and bandages, and all sorts of basic foodstuffs—so many of the simple necessities that would aid in carving new lives for the freed slaves. The tea was a welcome touch. Strengthened with a measure of mead, she hoped it would steady Amos and revive him from his daze.

  After his collapse earlier, she had leapt to his side. But there were no raw gaping wounds that she could bandage, no blood to staunch, no broken bones to mend. Countless scars marked his dirt-crusted skin. He was frail—emaciated even—swallowed beneath the ragged folds of his overcoat. But he was alive.

  She clung to that. Wasn’t that all that mattered?

  “Songkeeper, wait.” Frey materialized before her, emerging from beneath the quavering branches of a weeping thrassle. His eyes glistened in the firelight. “Please be wary. I am concerned for you. Your friend—he was taken by the Takhran?”

  She nodded.

  “How is it possible that he is free?”

  “It doesn’t matter how, Frey. I am just glad that he is alive.” She brushed past him, but the saif would not be avoided so easily. He darted out in front of her again, lowered antlers blocking her path.

  “Does he bear the talav?” When she hesitated, his stare hardened. “Think, Songkeeper. You must make certain that he does not. Be cautious, little one. Greater men than he have fallen to the Takhran’s snares.” With a final searching look, he spun on his hindquarters and darted away, passing like a wind beneath the low-hanging branches of the trees.