“I saw what you saw, when you were in my mind. Did you learn anything that will help us find what we’re looking for?”
I grimaced, eyes on the floor.
“I understand their world better. But I think the visions must hold more answers, if I can find a way to remember them more clearly.”
“So we’re hunting for ghosts now, too.”
There was a touch of amusement in his voice. I stumbled with surprise and he steadied me with his hand, a slight pressure that he immediately released as though the touch had burned him. When I opened my mouth to thank him, the start of a story came out instead.
“I feel like blind Cassia, lost in the dark,” I said, nerves live as quivering strings in my voice. Gannet didn’t look at me, but his posture softened.
Who?
I realized he wanted me to tell a story, that as much as I needed to hear myself in this place to ground myself again, he had missed hearing my stories as much as he had once pretended to dismiss them.
“Cassia was the daughter of two famous court musicians. They made music so fine common folk were not permitted to hear it, only those lords and ladies with wealth and influence enough to win a seat at one of their performances. The king and queen kept them as permanent retainers at court, and so Cassia, too, was raised in the palace.
“But Cassia had no talent for music. No matter the instrument they put in her hands, no matter what song they bid her sing, she was far more likely to leave an audience weeping for wanting her to stop than she was to move them to any sincere feeling. Though her mother and father bemoaned her lack of skill, and the king and queen, too, no one felt the disappointment more keenly than Cassia herself.”
Gannet’s mind touched lightly against mine, sharing a hazy picture of the girl taking up one instrument and then another and the next and the next, the lines of sorrow in her face drawn as tightly as strings. As it had been in Jhosch, sequestered with the icons, I considered how full and wondrous something like telling a story could be when in the company of those who had the capacity to contribute to the telling without speaking.
“Cassia determined that the only way she could develop an ear for music would be to deaden one of her other senses. Maddened by her need to prove herself, she heated a dagger in the fire and plunged it into one of her eyes, and then quickly into the other before fear and pain overcame her.
“It was her dearest friend and lover, Denia, who found Cassia in a wounded stupor in her bedchamber, all but bled to death. Denia cleaned the blood from Cassia’s face, her own tears softening the medicinal waters she used to sterilize the wounds. She tucked her into the bed they had secretly shared and begged another servant to bring a healer, and Cassia’s mother and father.
“It was four days before Cassia woke, and though she could no longer see her, the contours of Denia’s face were fine and familiar when she reached out to touch the girl.
“‘You idiot,’ Denia scolded, weeping-wet kisses pressed to Cassia’s wan face. ‘What were you thinking?’
“But Cassia would not explain, only begged for a harp, for double-reeded pipes, for a drum. Denia was reluctant to comply, sure that she was only putting disappointment into the hands of her dearest friend, but she did as she was asked. The pipes were lifted to Cassia’s lips, and as the young woman took a breath and hesitantly blew, dulcet-sweet tones issued forth, circling the pair like a cooling breeze. Next came the drum and the harp, finger cymbals, the long-necked lute. Every instrument that had refused to yield to Cassia’s clumsy handling despite hours and years of practice, she picked up again and was its master. Her smile cracked so wide the sockets where her eyes had been crinkled and began to bleed anew, and she seemed to weep red tears.
“When Cassia’s mother and father came at the glorious sounds teased out by their daughter, they banished Denia from the room. Their daughter would play as they did, only ever for the noblest of ears, and never for Denia again.”
I wondered then, and Gannet, too, at the unnecessary order of our lives, why things must be so, and not so. In a story it was easier to see how such things were foolish, but we had as many boundaries to our own behavior as folk in tales; we only lived them and did not think them as strange.
The tunnel widened further, but I saw no intentional breaks in the stone, no sign of doors or what this way might once have been used for. We walked on.
“Cassia would play for the king and queen in a week’s time and was kept busy performing with her parents and suffering fittings of headdresses that would disguise her disfigurement. She could only see Denia at night, and secretly, and was now so protective of her new gifts that she brought no instruments to their meetings. She feared, and perhaps rightfully so, that the gods would take away what they had given, no matter the price she had already paid. But Denia was sorry for it—she had loved the way that Cassia’s face lit up when she played, how her whole body seemed to bend into the music, even when others could not appreciate her playing. She had often told Cassia as much, but just as Denia’s heart was stubbornly set on the happiness of her lover, Cassia’s was blinded by a lifetime of disappointment.
“So desperate was Denia to hear Cassia play again that she snuck into the performance, covering her face with a rich silk she’d taken from Cassia’s own stores so that she would not be recognized. She swayed rapturously as Cassia’s hands danced across a lap harp, folded herself against the wall in a swoon when Cassia beat her heart’s rhythm into the pliant skin of a drum, felt herself lifted to the rafters on the wind of Cassia’s breath blown through a set of pure silver pipes.
“But Denia, in her rapture, tripped and fell, dragging the scarf away from her face, revealing plain, unpainted features and the stark, unadorned collar of a servant. She was seized immediately and dragged before the court. Though Cassia could not see her, she recognized her cries and rose to her defense. But she could not stop the punishment that befell anyone who dared listen where they were not welcome: boiling oil was poured into Denia’s ears, deafening her. She was imprisoned, and Cassia vowed never to play again until she was released. But the judgment came from Adah himself and would not be reversed. Cassia begged to be chained up, too, and it was perhaps his perverse version of mercy that he allowed it. They shared a cell, chained to opposite sides of the wall so that they could not touch, one calling out in a voice the other could not hear, one pair of eyes searching and seeing nothing. They could take no comfort in each other, and lost their youth in darkness and silence.”
My breath was shallow and sorry, and I could almost feel the dragging weight of manacles on my wrist, the raw sadness of jailed isolation. I wondered now, with what little sense I had been able to make of the visions with Gannet’s help, if there wasn’t more to this story. Maybe Cassia had been one of the First People, and Denia had not. Maybe the cruelty of that world had been driven by a god’s hand, and not a mortal one.
But weren’t we just as cruel, or worse, if we acted on their behalf?
“I’ve fought Adah’s judgments in the past,” Gannet said, and there was something in his tone that made me think it wasn’t just his own punishment, the burden of the mask, that he spoke of. “Being an icon has many privileges.”
“I know that,” I replied, thinking of our earliest conversations, when he had urged me to accept who I was.
“Including using the power and influence of our station to change things,” he insisted, slowing as the terrain grew rocky, more naturally subterranean than shaped by tools. It was cool here but dry, and my steps grew more halting at the smooth, uneven stone beneath my feet.
“Is this your way of telling me to be optimistic about our chances with the Ambarians?” I asked, incredulous. Always Gannet had seemed resigned to his fate, urging me to accept the same for myself, but something within him had been woken. Had it been when he struck out to find me after the fire in Jhosch? At the opera? Or sooner, even? Had the conversation I had witnessed in his mind with Morainn been the start of something neither of us coul
d have anticipated?
Gannet strode forward with none of my hesitation, pausing to inch his way down a deep depression in the stone where the shadows in my dark sight parted to reveal at least a dozen stout, squat casks, each as large as a seated man.
“That depends,” he answered, examining the seal on the nearest cask, “on whether this is wine or fire oil.”
I crossed to him, holding out a hand toward one of the casks, closing my eyes as I felt for the spark within, not wanting to feed it, not yet. I just needed to know if it was there. I immediately sensed but did not stoke the embryonic fire within the cask, the hungry flame in my heart that recognized fuel.
I opened my eyes.
“We won’t be drinking tonight to celebrate your change of heart.”
Chapter Fifteen
Though we considered for a moment going back the way we had come in the hopes that the battle was over, a thorough survey of the cavern revealed four more caches of fire oil and a rotted platform and pulley system that had been used to lower the casks here, many generations ago. There were handholds carved into the rock, leading straight up to the open air. It had grown dark, and I quelled the panic at having lost a full day with the knowledge that we had, at least, secured one small advantage for my family’s forces. I didn’t immediately recognize the surrounding ruins, but I could see the palace in the near distance, and we moved quickly and quietly in that direction, noting the turns that we took and any features that would help us find our way back to the cache of fire oil. How we retrieved it I would leave to my parents and my siblings. Gannet and I still had work of our own to do.
There were no specters in the streets, no sense that the past would overtake me, though I could see it as before, out of the corners of my eyes. I needed more of Ji’s story, needed to know what she knew, and I was as ready to open my mind again to her world as I might open a book and page quickly through it to the conclusion. But no one and nothing appeared, and when we drew close enough to the palace to encounter a patrol, Gannet and I both threw our hands up in the air, baring our faces in the cleansing moonlight. When they escorted us within, only my father was awake, poring over documents in the room where Esbat had shown us the map. He looked up, and Gannet explained quickly what we had found.
“Are you sure the Ambarians didn’t know it was there? That wasn’t why they were attacking in that quarter?” My father’s face was lined with worry, exhaustion, having aged years, it seemed, in the months I’d been away.
Gannet shook his head.
“If they’d known, they would’ve used stealth. Disrupting a cache that size with missiles would’ve resulted in that whole section of the city being sunk in fire, and all the oil with it.”
“Then we’re lucky they didn’t.” My father laid a hand upon my shoulder, pulling me into a sudden embrace. I was dead on my feet, but I didn’t sink into his arms as I might have before, and I couldn’t place my hesitation until he spoke. “You kept her safe. Thank you.”
I bristled. Gannet’s look was guarded, his words careful.
“Han’dra Eiren doesn’t need safekeeping.”
My father’s gaze narrowed, and when he smiled, the expression didn’t reach his eyes.
“So I am beginning to understand,” he responded, releasing me. I felt his discomfort and had the sense that it had more to do with thinking of me as a woman grown than the icon of a goddess possessed with terrible strength and fury. I didn’t like to be so close to his thoughts and took a step back, toward Gannet.
But I knew that hurt him, too.
“We should sleep. It will be another early morning for us,” I offered, my tone apologetic. My father nodded rather more enthusiastically than was necessary.
“Of course, of course. I should do the same.”
But when we moved to depart the smoky chamber, the braziers burning low, my father didn’t follow. I felt the light touch of Gannet’s mind against mine, gentle as a nurse’s hand might be tending to a wound. It was dark in the corridor outside my small chamber, the lone torch burning several paces away, failing to banish the shadows from Gannet’s face.
“You haven’t called me Han’dra Eiren in some time. I always wondered why you addressed me so formally, and after our fashion, not Ambar’s,” I said on an impulse, unable to keep my hands from settling against his chest, smoothing the rumpled collar of his shirt. I felt the warmth of his skin beneath, tantalizingly close, but I didn’t allow my fingers to stray.
Gannet studied me, head cocked at a slight, quizzical angle.
“I wanted you to know from the first that I respected you and where you came from. I knew you felt conquered and lost, at the mercy of strangers. I assumed it would be a comfort to you.”
And now my hands did stray, framing the bones of his jaw.
“You were a comfort to me,” I whispered, feeling the jump of his pulse beneath my fingers. “You are.”
I leaned forward then against his chest, not wanting a kiss and the inevitable breaking of it. He held me only a moment and I was keenly aware of the huff of his breath in my hair, as though he were gathering my scent. When he stepped away and retreated down the corridor, he was silhouetted a moment in the torchlight, his shadow thinning impossibly long behind him until it was folded into the darkness where the wall met the floor. Gone. He would go to his bed, and I would go to mine.
“What were you doing?”
I jumped, bracing myself against the stone wall behind me. Esbat had emerged from the chamber opposite, twitching the cloth closed behind her. How long had she been there?
“Gannet and I found a cache of fire oil beneath Dsimah’s temple.” My words came out in a guilty rush, sure that I owed my sister more but strangely resistant to share my feelings with her. “We’ve told father, and Jurnus will be able to muster a force to recover it tomorrow.”
Esbat hugged the shadows, and I couldn’t see her whole face. Her mind was quiet, but I sensed her trying to make sense of my actions all the same. So, she had seen something of what had passed between us.
“Gannet is a friend to me,” I continued, determined to curb her suspicions. It was bad enough that I had to share him with Theba; I didn’t want my sisters passing judgment, too.
Despite the dark, I could see Esbat’s eyes widen.
“He took you from us. From your home. You were their prisoner, Eiren.”
“Yes, but—”
“They’ve slaughtered our people,” she continued heatedly, her reason sharpened like a blade against a stone. “You left and it didn’t stop, and it was worse because we didn’t know what was happening to you. And then you return here with him and claim he is a friend? How could someone like that ever be a friend to one of us?”
Unless you aren’t one of us anymore. She didn’t say it but I suspected she knew that I could hear it, and that hurt more. Before I could argue or temper the rage that twisted in my gut, she waved a hand, dismissing her thoughts, or mine.
“Lucky you stumbled on such a find. I found a record detailing how to craft a slow-burning fuse for use with fire oil—I’ll be sure to share it with Jurnus in the morning.”
And she swept back behind the little curtain, leaving me alone in the corridor. It might have been made of stone for the distance it put between us.
I wasn’t sure what I had expected, returning to my family, but the distraction of the war made it easier to ignore the obvious unease between us. We didn’t have to reach an understanding, not really, not yet. It wasn’t only the Dread Goddess that had awakened within me. I didn’t always like who I was becoming, and I was beginning to think they didn’t, either.
I didn’t sleep in my room, not at first. Someone had left tough bread and bitter wine at my bedside, and I ate every crumb while drinking more than a reasonable share of the bottle. My head was spinning by the time I laid it on the thin pillow, and my body, too, seemed to turn in the sheets, twisting like a corpse in a funeral shroud. There were no windows in my chamber, but the light that touche
d my eyes come morning was warm as day. I opened my eyes, expecting a torch or a lamp, but it was the sun, breaking through a clever skylight above where I slept. Beneath me I felt the touch of silk, and the air was heavy with fragrant flowers.
I sat up, wondering what dream I had wandered into, or if this were a vision, pressed upon me while I slept. It felt most like the brief encounter at the fountain with the fish, when Jurnus had first brought us into the city. I was still Eiren, still aware that what was happening was not quite real.
But if I was in Re’Kether as it had been, as myself, I should learn what I could, shouldn’t I?
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, feeling the thick pile of a rug beneath my bare feet, unable to resist curling my toes into the luxurious weave. There was a fine sturdy door of pale wood where the curtain had hung, and when I tested it, it opened easily.
The corridor was equally bright and happily empty. I sped down the hall, not sure where I was going, only looking out for inhabitants or perhaps a library. Esbat must have gotten her scrolls from somewhere, and what I couldn’t learn from Gannet I could maybe learn here.
But several turns brought me outside, and I found I couldn’t move for wonder. I was in a lavish garden, leaves as broad as my body and as brightly green as pigment arching overhead, providing ample shade. Vivid pink, yellow, and orange flowers were bedded at the bases of the trees and they stirred in a delicate wind, spilling their heady scent. This place was empty, too, but I felt surely this was somewhere the wealthy would gather to admire and envy each other. And I did hear them, muffled laughter and the splash of water. I followed the sound, moving off the stone path onto tufted, springy grass. The slick blades beneath my feet felt so real it tickled.
The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two Page 15
