But he was far too impatient and far too loving a father to do that. As soon as she stepped into the room, she was caught up in a hug; her father picked her right up off the ground and swung her around in a circle before putting her down again and stepping a pace back. She broke out into a rare grin of delight, then sobered.
“I see you lived,” he deadpanned.
“You don’t get rid of me that easily, father,” she said just as dryly. “Would you like my report?”
“We eat first. You won’t have had anything other than meat biscuits and water. I don’t want to miss any details because your stomach is growling too loudly for me to hear them,” he replied with a lifted eyebrow.
He waved at the entrance to the living quarters, and they passed through the cloth door.
The rooms on the other side were very much like the Banner Hall behind them; most of the furniture had been cut out of the stone when the rooms were chiseled out. Every home on the Mountain was like this; wood was saved for important things. Fires were fed with carefully dried dung made into charcoal. Even the beds were niches cut into the stone, with featherbeds to soften them. Feathers there were here in abundance; most households had pigeons and chickens, there were plenty of edible birds in these mountains, and the Nation wasted nothing. The notion of wasting as much as a single feather on a bird meant to be eaten by singeing it off rather than taking care to pluck it would have invoked strong disapproval. Every bed niche had a featherbed and a feather comforter or two for winter, and winter clothing was stuffed with feathers for warmth. Metal, bones, and horns were used in place of wood for most small things, and many large, so Sira hung her laminated sinew-and-horn bow on a bone bow rack, and slung her blanket roll and some of the belts and pouches beside it, once she was on the other side of the hemp door curtain.
Each room commonly used by the family had a door and large windows facing the terrace. The windows were open now; in winter they would be covered inside and out with two panes of laminated horn and copper, and the copper door would be closed where it now stood open. The first room was a small one, to entertain guests. The second, which lay beyond that, was the room in which nearly everything else was done—cooking, eating, socializing, studying. There was a room beyond that one where Hakal, her Healer brother, and Jeshan, her brother who specialized in poisons and antidotes, worked with their herbs, minerals, and other things, making both potions that cured and potions that killed. Hakal and Jeshan were responsible for the toxin on her darts, derived from a species of toad. Hakal also made the antidote, though to her knowledge, no Sleepgiver had ever troubled to use it.
The entire family aside from her father was waiting for her around the stone table; the food was in its metal and ceramic pots on the table, ceramic plates awaited the meal, but nothing had been served. Even Nalad, her younger sister, who was in training, was there, along with Rayakh, who trained tracking and attack dogs. As she and Bey entered, she was met with broad smiles from dark faces that looked very like her own. There was a strong resemblance to their father in all of Bey’s children.
“I see you survived,” said Anhita, her mother.
“And yet, I am perishing before you,” she replied. “My stomach is much too closely acquainted with my spine.”
“Did you lose my dart?” demanded Jeshan.
“Not even the point, dear brother,” she said in mock indignation.
“Then you may eat,” he told her graciously.
She took her usual place at the table, between her eldest brother Teychik, the Heir to the Banner, and Hakal; her father sat at the foot. Her mother was already in her place at the head, and she began to send the pots around.
There was pepper-lentil stew tonight, with cleaned and chopped chicken-innards in it. Flatbread, of course, as there was with every meal. Curds of goat-cheese mixed with honey and herbs, boiled barley with lamb and herbs, stewed nettle and stewed fireweed with herbs, a dish of goat butter, and, in honor of her return, roast chicken. A lammergeyer landed on the wall of the terrace with a great thunder of wings, then hopped to the windowsill, waiting with infinite patience for his plate of bones. Sira would have known without the red and black band on his right leg that this was Windhover, the special pet of the family, older than she was, and probably as dear. Since it was dinner time, the lammergeyers of the aerie and from nests around the Mountain were circling down to land on the terraces all over the Mountain in anticipation of their evening meal. If the owner of the terrace a bird landed on didn’t happen to be serving meat tonight, he would send the bird off by showing him an empty plate, and the lammergeyer would simply flap off to another terrace for a helping of fresh bones full of nutritious marrow.
By custom and common consent, no business was spoken of over a meal, whether or not there was a Sleepgiver at the table.
That had been true even when the Sleepgivers had renounced and lived apart from their families, in the time when they all wore Talismans that dulled their own personalities and left only room for their skills and their duties. Now, though, at Bey’s order, Sleepgivers could go back to their families—or start families of their own—once training was complete. Still, for now, most of them chose life apart, with their brothers and sisters in death. For most families, while there was great pride that one of them had passed the trials of strength and cleverness, and passed the training, there was a certain . . . well, it was not unease, precisely, but perhaps uncertainty was a better word. People who do not practice the trade of death generally found it difficult to converse normally with those who did.
As she ate, Sira felt herself relaxing. There were six Sleepgivers in the family, though only three of them were active at it. Her father and mother—Anhita had been legendary, even before she had set her eyes on Bey and decided that he needed her as a wife—and Teychik, Siratai, Nalad, and Ahkhan. As good as Sira was, her mother was better, and she had handled most of Sira’s training herself—instructing Sira as she demonstrated moves with Teychik, serenely coping with the demands of young Ahkhan and baby Hakal at the same time.
Teychik looked very distracted tonight, and Sira had a good guess why. There was an orphaned girl named Lalanash, a rescued slave brought into the Nation as a foundling, who was just finishing her own Sleepgiver training. He had been giving frequent lessons to her—lessons that Sira suspected were, more often than not, things that had nothing whatsoever to do with his own specialty of sniping from cover, single-shot kills.
That suspicion was exploded into full-blown certainty by Anhita’s not-at-all subtle question as the raisins were passed around to finish the dinner. “Tey, when are you finally going to take that girl to wife and move out? I’d like your bed niche. It’s not too late for me to have another baby.”
Tey spluttered. Bey roared with laughter. Sira nearly choked. “That’s my ’Hita,” Bey said. “She misses the challenge of practicing knife strikes with a baby on one hip.”
Anhita looked both sly and demure, and she tucked one long strand of her black hair behind her ear. “I do. It’s good for balance.”
“You could borrow a baby,” Ahkhan suggested helpfully. “Or use a bag of barley.”
“No one will let me borrow a baby, and a bag of grain is not the same,” her mother mock-pouted.
It was very true that Anhita was one of those women who very much enjoyed every aspect of raising and training children with the same relish she had given to her Sleepgiver duties, and Sira’s father always claimed the only reason she’d stopped having babies was that their home had run out of bed niches. That was probably not true. It wouldn’t have taken much effort or time to bring in stonecutters to lengthen the bed corridor and add another niche to the end. But it was clear that Anhita had made up her mind that her eldest was being too slow about choosing a mate and settling down as the full Heir, and had decided this was as good a stick as any to prod him into moving faster and getting on with the job.
Poor Tey! Sira almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
With their mother and father’s obvious approval and participation, that gave everyone a ripe topic of teasing and ribaldry while they finished the meal. As the rest cleared the dishes to the dry sink to be scoured with sand, Sira took Windhover his plate of bones from the kitchen. Her mother had, of course, stripped all but the tiniest scraps of meat from every bone before she cooked it. Lammergeyers ate bone, but it had to be raw.
Windhover gazed with approval at the plate heaped with lamb- and chicken-bones, and his red eyes pinned with anticipation and pleasure. Sira hand fed him the smallest ones, the little wing and rib bones that looked like tiny splinters in his huge beak. After that, all she needed to do was hold the plate; he was surprisingly dainty as he picked out the bones one by one. He swallowed the next-smallest ones quickly, a whole chicken leg bone going down like a few raisins for a human, then took his time swallowing the fist-sized chunks of lamb bones that had been prepared for him. In the wild, lammergeyers lifted entire pelvic bones as big as they were high into the air and dropped them on the rocks below, to shatter into pieces of a size they could eat. It took young lammergeyers as long as seven years to master the trick, and that was where the Nation assured the survival of a healthy population around the Mountain. Young or old, the lammergeyers here could supplement their scavenging, and a day when no carcass could be found, or a day in which a youngster simply could not hit the rocks, no longer meant a day that ended with an empty belly for them.
When Windhover was done, he bent his handsome head down for Sira to scratch, closing crimson eyes in bliss. Unlike vultures, to which they were related, lammergeyers had fully feathered necks and heads, and Sira thought they were every bit as beautiful as falcons. As she scratched him, she watched her family continue to tease Tey, who by this point was bright red under his deeply tanned skin. She wondered if she ought to rescue him and decided against it. This was, after all, one more thing he needed to learn to be able to deal with and not betray a hint of how he felt. One day he would be the Bearer, not merely the Heir to the Banner. He would need to know how to accept flattery, insult, and innuendo without turning a hair. The Nation might be united and one great family—but even in families, there were those who caused trouble.
Hakal left the others and came out to the terrace to join her. “Is the dart case in your blanket roll?” he asked, reaching a hand under Windhover’s chin to scratch him. The bird nearly melted with pleasure. “I need to clean the toxin off the darts and get them ready for the next time you need them.” Hakal might only be thirteen, but he was as poised and focused as a Healer twice his age.
“No, here it is. And I only needed one dart. These idiot priests of the Karsites are almost too easy to kill.” She frowned. “I wonder if they are sending us the ones that are stupid, unreliable, or troublemakers for us to weed them out for them.”
“It’s a theory,” Hakal agreed, then changed the subject. “The Mages have been asking when we expected you back. It seems they found some really old Talismans that aren’t like the others.” He waited for her to respond. She didn’t, so he prompted, “What do they mean, not like the others?”
This . . . was a potential mire. For years the family had tried not to talk about the Talismans around Hakal, but they had all known he was going to start asking about them eventually. It appeared that now was that “eventually.”
“Did you ask the Mages?” she asked, finally.
“They said to ask you,” Hakal persisted. “Or father, but he’s busy, and you’re not. You can all stop dancing around the subject now. I want to hear about them. I got the feeling this was going to be a long explanation.”
Windhover finally had his fill of scratches, lifted his head away from their hands, and then lifted his wings. Since that was the signal to get out of his way, they both backed up. His wings were huge, powerful, and getting hit with one would certainly end in a bruise and possibly a broken bone. When they were far enough away to avoid injury, the lammergeyer pushed off from the battlement and half fell, half flew off to the side. He dropped out of view for a moment, then rose back into sight, laboring up to the aerie (and possibly a second meal) with the assistance of updrafts.
“You’ve never liked the old Talismans,” she temporized.
“I hate the old Talismans,” he corrected, flushing. “And I don’t know why. They felt wrong. I don’t want them near me.”
“Well, if the Mages said you were to ask me about them, I guess they feel you’re ready to hear about them without throwing a fit,” she said. “Again.”
They were both quiet for a moment as they recalled the very memorable scene when Hakal was being tested for training and had been too young to know better than to make a scene over something he didn’t care for in public. Everything had been fine until he had encountered one of the last of the Sleepgivers still wearing the old-style Talismans. No one then had known he was a Healer. All they had known was that the moment the Sleepgiver got within touching distance of the boy, Hakal had turned into a screaming, biting, fighting whirlwind, insisting that the man not come near him. And since that made it obvious he was never going to be a Sleepgiver, no matter what else he would grow into, and most of the Talismans had already been replaced with the “new” versions, it had been decided that the situation was moot.
And then, of course, his Healing powers manifested, and it didn’t matter anymore. And no one talked about the Talismans at all around him or showed theirs to him.
Hakal looked over the edge of the parapet, staring down at the terrace below. “I promise not to pitch a fit,” he said.
“Sleepgivers all wear them. Everyone in the family does except you. Even me,” she said, and pulled hers out. “See?”
He started. “But—how can—why don’t—”
“Because these are the kind all the Sleepgivers wear now, and that all of them used to wear; but for a couple of centuries until just recently, they were wearing something else. This one is just magically stored memories, and very specific ones. Memories of how to do things. Here—put it on. I promise it’s safe. It won’t upset you at all.” She slipped the cord over her neck and handed it to him. He took it very gingerly, and spent a long time staring at it. Then he looked at her, frowning fiercely.
“You’d better not be trying anything—”
“You idiot,” she said without rancor. “Why would I do that? You’re a Healer. You’re valuable. If I spoiled you somehow, I’d be cleaning the aerie for the rest of my natural life. They’re Mother’s memories, you dolt. Put it on.”
He slipped the cord over his head. “I—don’t feel anything.” He looked at her again, expression uncertain. “So what—”
“All right. Now think very hard about how you’d get from this battlement to the aerie without using the stairs. Climbing the wall outside.”
“But I—” he protested, and then his eyes glazed over for a moment, and when he came back to himself again, he stared at her in open-mouthed shock, the updraft from below teasing bits of hair out of his braid.
She nodded. “See? Memory, but not just memory like pictures in your head. Every kind of memory. Exactly where you’d put your hands and feet and how it should feel if it’s right or wrong, down to the least little muscle movement. And now if you needed to do that, you could.”
He pulled her Talisman off and handed it to her with a shudder. “No, I couldn’t. Not in a million years. That’s crazy.”
“You could if you really had to. And that’s what most of the Sleepgiver training is—assimilating memories and then practicing them until we’re as good as the original person who imprinted those memories. I’ve got Mother’s. Tey and Ahkhan have Father’s, and Father has his father’s. But those Talismans take . . . months to imprint. The person doing the imprinting has to wear them while doing all those things. Think about all the things Mother knows how to do as a Sleepgiver! Ju
st doing them takes a lot of time, and she has to wear the new Talisman and have a Mage working with her the whole time. Sure, they work for everyone, and when Father dies, Tey will inherit his and give it to a new, young Sleepgiver he wants to honor. But there was a while when we had a lot more new Sleepgivers than we had Talismans for them, and most of the working Sleepgivers were out on missions for money to support the Nation. So that was when things changed. The Mages would imprint a lot of Talismans on a Sleepgiver when he was dying, and the way they did it was like taking a little bit of his spirit and putting it in the Talisman. So . . . ”
She stopped, because now Hakal was open-mouthed in horror. “That was what I felt!” he choked. “It was—something imprisoned, but in control of the Sleepgiver!”
“Exactly,” she said, matter-of-factly, because she figured that was the easiest way to get Hakal to calm down. “When he got back from Valdemar, Father and the Mages started going backward through the old records, and we found the place where that became the way things were done all the time, and the old kind of Talismans went into storage. And the reason the spirit-trapped Talismans became the only ones was because the Bearer at that point was a right bastard and wanted to completely control the Sleepgivers. The spirit-trap ones dull your mind and make you more obedient. So that was why he ordered the old ones put away. That way he had Sleepgivers that were just as good as the ones in the past but who would never question anything and always obey orders. He kept spies on the Mages so they’d never tell what was happening, and within a generation, it just became ‘that’s how we do things.’ And when Grandfather died, Father decided we weren’t going to do that anymore.”
“Sometimes I regret that decision,” said her father, who had left the table and was now within earshot. He grinned at Sira, who knew exactly what he meant, and at Hakal, who stared at his father as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Oh, come now, don’t act so shocked. You’ve heard some of my screaming matches in the Council Chamber. It would be a lot easier if everyone knew I was in complete command of a small army of absolutely obedient, ruthless murderers now, wouldn’t it?”
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