“Show blood.”
Tobin pulled down the neck of his tunic to show her the seeping patch on his chest. “You say I’m not sick, but look! What else would do this?”
Lhel touched the damp flesh and sighed. “We asked much of the Mother. Too much, I think.”
“My mother?”
“Her, yes, but Goddess mother is the one I speak. You have pains there?”
“Some, but mostly in my belly.”
Lhel nodded. “Blood other place?”
Embarrassed, Tobin pulled up his jerkin and showed her where the first stain had soaked through his trousers.
Lhel placed her hands on his head and spoke softly in words he didn’t understand.
“Ah, too soon, keesa. Too soon,” she said, sounding sad. “Perhaps I did wrong, making Brother’s hekkamari keeping you so close. I must bring Arkoniel. You eat while I go.”
“Can’t I go with you? I want to see Nari!” Tobin begged. “Later, keesa.”
She brought him warm porridge, berries, and bread, then strode away through the trees.
Tobin huddled deeper into the robe and took a bite of the bread. Stolen from Cook’s kitchen, no doubt. The taste of it made him even more homesick. He longed to run after Lhel and sit by the kitchen fire with Cook and Nari. Being so close, dressed in his old clothes, it was easy to pretend that he’d never left home at all.
Except that Ki wasn’t here. Tobin ran his fingers along the edge of the catamount skin, wondering what he was going to say to him when he went back. What must Ki and Tharin and the others be thinking by now?
He pushed that worry away for later and touched the blood on his chest again. He wasn’t a plague carrier after all, but something was wrong. Maybe something even worse.
It was almost daylight when Ki reached the turning of the road for Alestun, but he missed it all the same, only having been this way once before. He was clear past it when Brother suddenly appeared in the road in front of him, startling his horse.
“So there you are!” Ki muttered, snubbing the reins to calm Dragon as he shied.
The ghost pointed back the way he’d come. Ki turned and saw the marker he’d missed at the crossroads behind him. “Many thanks, Brother.”
He was almost used to the ghost by now. Or maybe he was just too tired and hungry and worried about what he was going to find at the end of this night’s long ride to have any fear to spare. Whatever the case, he was glad enough when Brother stayed with him and led the way to Alestun.
It was a warm morning for mid-Erasin. A mist rose off the dripping trees, ghostly in the thin light of the false dawn.
“Is Tobin well?” he asked, assuming Brother would know something of his twin’s condition. But Brother neither turned nor spoke, just moved on ahead of him in that odd, not-walking way of his. Watching him for a while, Ki began to think he’d been more comfortable alone after all.
Arkoniel looked up from his washbasin to find Lhel’s face floating before him.
“You come now,” she said, and there was no mistaking the urgency in her voice. “Tobin is with me. Magic has broken.”
Arkoniel hastily dried his face and ran out to the stable. He didn’t bother with a saddle, just grasped the bridle and clung on to his gelding’s back as he rode up the mountain road to meet the witch.
She was waiting for him at the forest’s edge, as always. He left the horse and followed her on foot through the trees by what felt like a shorter route than usual. For over two years he’d been her pupil, her lover, yet she had still not entrusted him with the way to her home.
At the clearing he found Tobin sitting by the fire wrapped in a catamount skin. The child’s face was drawn and sallow, and there were dark circles under his eyes. He’d been dozing, but looked up sharply at their approach.
“Tobin, how are you feeling?” Arkoniel asked, kneeling in front of him. Was it his imagination, or had the familiar planes of that face shifted already, ever so slightly?
“A little better,” Tobin replied, looking scared. “Lhel says I don’t have plague.”
“No, of course you don’t!”
“But tell me what is happening to me!” Tobin showed him a bloody smear on his flat, smooth chest. “It just keeps leaking out and it’s starting to hurt again. It must be the Red and Black Death. What else would do this?”
“Magic,” said Arkoniel. “A magic worked on you long ago that’s coming undone before its time. I’m so sorry. You were never meant to find out this way.”
As he’d feared, Tobin only looked more frightened at this. “Magic? On me?”
“Yes. Lhel’s magic.”
Tobin cast a betrayed look at the witch. “But why? When did you do it? When you put my blood on the doll?”
“No, keesa. Much older time ago. When you is born. Iya and Arkoniel came to me, ask for it. Say your moon god want it. Your father want it. Part of your warrior path. Come, it’s better to show than to tell you.”
Ki had planned to go straight to the keep and fetch Arkoniel, but Brother would have none of it.
Follow, the spirit demanded in his hoarse whispery voice. Ki didn’t dare disobey.
Brother guided him to a game track that skirted the meadow and crossed the river at a ford further upstream.
Ki peeked into the bag at the worn old doll as he rode, wondering how such a thing could matter to a ghost. But clearly it did, for Brother was suddenly at his stirrup and Ki felt cold all over.
Not for you! hissed Brother, gripping his leg with icy fingers.
“I don’t want it!” Ki snugged the bag shut and stuffed it between his leg and the saddle.
The way quickly became steep on the other side of the ford and began to look familiar. Ki recognized a large stone that they’d used for a table one summer day, picnicking with Arkoniel and Lhel. It couldn’t be much farther now.
Tired as he was, and uneasy with Brother, Ki couldn’t help smiling as he thought how surprised everyone would be to see him.
Tobin shivered as he bent over the spring’s smooth surface. Lhel had made him take off his tunic and shirt. Looking down, he could see his face and the red smear on his chest. He wondered if he should wash it away, but didn’t dare. Lhel and Arkoniel were still looking at him so strangely.
“Watch the pool,” Lhel told him again, rustling around with something behind him. “Arkoniel, you tell.”
The wizard knelt beside him. “It should have been your father who told you this, or Iya. And you should be older and ready to take your place. But it seems the gods have other plans.
“You’ve heard people say that your dead twin was a girl. Well, that’s true, in a way.”
Tobin looked up at him and saw a deep sadness in the wizard’s face.
“Your mother bore two children that night: a boy and a girl. One died, as you know. But you see, the child who lived was a girl. You, Tobin. Lhel used a special kind of magic—”
“Skin binding,” said Lhel.
“Skin binding, to make you appear to be a boy, and the dead boy—Brother—appear to be a girl.”
For a moment Tobin thought he’d lost his voice again, as he had when his mother died. But he managed a rasping, “No!”
“It’s true, Tobin. You are a girl in boy’s form. And there will come a time when you must put aside that false form and take your place in the world as a woman.”
Tobin was shivering now, and not because of the cold. “But—But why?”
“To protect you until you can be queen.”
“Protect me? From who?”
“From your uncle and his Harriers. They’d kill you if they knew. The king would have killed you the night you were born if we hadn’t done as we did. He’d killed others already, many others, whom he feared would challenge his right, and Korin’s.”
“Niryn said—But he talked of traitors!”
“No, they were innocents. And they had far less claim than you, his own sister’s child. You know the Prophecy of Afra. You’re a true daughter of
Thelátimos, the last of the pure line. This skin binding—it was the only way we could think of to protect you. And until now it worked.”
Tobin stared down at the face in the water—his eyes, his hair, the scar on his pointed chin. “No! You’re lying! I want to be who I am! I’m a warrior!”
“You’ve never been anything else,” Arkoniel told him. “But you’re destined by Illior to be something more. Illior showed this to Iya while you were still in your mother’s womb. Countless wizards and priests have dreamed of you. You’ll be a great warrior and a great queen, like Ghërilain herself.”
Tobin pressed his hands to his ears and shook his head in fury. “No! Women aren’t warriors! I’m a warrior! I’m Tobin. I know who I am!”
The scent of musk and green herbs enveloped him as Lhel knelt on his other side and wrapped strong arms around him. “You are who you are. Let me show.”
She covered the bloody place on his chest with her hand and the pain came back for a moment on crawling centipede feet. When she took her hand away, he saw a vertical line of stitching on his chest identical to the one that Brother had once shown him, tiny and fine as spider silk. But his wound had healed and the scar had faded pale. Only the lower end of it was bloody, like Brother’s wound.
“The magic grow thin, the binding not hold. Must be new magic made,” Lhel said. “It’s not your time to show the true face, keesa.”
Tobin pressed against her gratefully. He didn’t want to change.
“But how—” Arkoniel began.
Lhel forestalled him with one upraised finger. “For later. Tobin, you should know your true face.”
“I don’t want to!”
“Yes. Is good to know. Come, keesa, look.”
Lhel pressed a finger to the stitching on his chest and when she spoke again, he heard her voice inside his head; for the first time her words were clear and unbroken. “Goddess Mother, I loosen these stitches made in your name, sewn on the night of your waxing harvest moon, that they may be made sound again in this moon to protect this child with the binding of one form to another. Let this daughter called Tobin see her true face in your mirror. Ease, red moon woven strand, here.” Saying this, she passed her hand across Tobin’s eyes and guided him to lean over the pool’s glassy surface again.
Fearfully, unwillingly, he looked down to see what stranger would peer up at him.
She was not so different.
It was a girl—there was no mistaking that—but she had his dark blue eyes, his straight nose and pointed chin, even the same scar. He’d feared to see someone soft and silly, like the girls at court, but this one had nothing soft about her. Her cheekbones might be a little higher set than his own, the lips a hint fuller, but she met his gaze with the same wariness he’d so often seen in his mirror at home—and the same determination.
“Not ‘she,’ Tobin,” Arkoniel whispered. “You. You are she. You’ve been looking at Brother in your mirror all these years. But not all of him. Your eyes are your own.”
“No binding change that. And this.” Tobin felt Lhel touch the wisdom mark and heard the witch’s voice inside his head again. “That did not change from your birth. That has always been a part of you. And this—” She touched the scar. “This was given to you, and this you keep. All your life you have thought to follow Sakor, but Illior marked you from birth. So it is with your memories, your training, your art, your soul. All the things that you are you keep. But you shall be more than that.”
Tobin shivered, remembering the ghostly queen who’d offered him the sword. Had she known, and given it as a blessing?
“You can see me, Arkoniel?”
“Yes. Oh, yes!” The wizard’s voice was thick with joy. “I’m so glad to see you at last, after all these years, my lady!”
My lady.
Tobin covered her ears against the word but could not take her gaze from the reflection.
“I know what you fear, Tobin,” Arkoniel told her, speaking gently. “But you know the histories. Before your uncle’s time, the queens of Skala were the greatest warriors of all, and there were women generals, women captains and squires and arms masters.”
“Like Ki’s sister.”
“Yes, like Ki’s sister. And Cook, too, in her day. They’re still out there in the armies, as she is. You can bring them back to court, back to honor. But only if you stay safe and hidden until the time is right. To do that, you must go back to Ero and remain Tobin to the world. Nari and Iya are the only others who know the truth, besides we two. No one else can know. Not even Ki or Tharin.”
“But why?” Tobin demanded. She’d had enough of secrets already. How was she to bear this one alone?
“I gave my word to your father and to Iya that no one would learn of your true identity until the sign is given.”
“What sign?”
“I don’t know that yet. Illior will reveal it. For now, we must be patient.”
The incident with the doll had ended any chance of Ki being at ease with the spirit or demon or whatever the hell Brother was.
Even so, he wasn’t prepared when it suddenly flew at him as they climbed a steep, crumbling bank. It didn’t touch him, but spooked Dragon, who reared and threw him. He went tumbling ass over tippet down the bank. Luckily the ground was soft with moss and ferns, but he still found a few rocks and logs before he fetched up against a tree halfway back down the slope.
“Damnation, what did you do that for?” he gasped, trying to get his wind back. He could see Brother at the top of the hill. The ghost had the flour sack now, and he was smiling that unsettling smile of his as he looked back at Ki. The horse was long gone.
“What do you want?” Ki shouted at him.
Brother said nothing.
Ki started to scramble up after him. When he looked up again, Brother was gone.
He climbed to the top of the rise and found Brother watching him from the mouth of a game track a few yards away. Ki took a step in his direction and Brother faded back, leading him.
Not knowing what else to do, Ki set after him, letting the ghost lead him as it would. After all, it had the doll now.
Lhel had taken Arkoniel back behind the oak some time ago, leaving Tobin alone at the spring. She knelt where they’d left her, staring down at the face in the pool and feeling the world turning upside down around her.
My face, she told herself.
Girl. Lady. Princess.
The world spun again.
Queen.
Me.
She touched her cheek to discover if it felt as different as it looked in the water. Before she could decide, the image burst in a splash that wet her from face to knees.
A cloth sack floated in the spring in front of her.
A flour sack.
“The doll!” she cried, pulling it out before it could sink. She’d forgotten it in Ero. Brother crouched on the far side of the pool, staring at her with his head cocked to one side, almost as if he were surprised to see her like this.
“Look Lhel,” she called. “Brother brought it all the way from the city.”
Lhel and Arkoniel ran to her and pulled her from the spring. The witch wrapped the catamount robe around her like a cloak, pulling it forward over her face.
“No, Brother couldn’t have done that. Not by himself,” said Arkoniel, scanning the edge of the clearing with frightened eyes.
“Then Brother must have brought Ki,” said Tobin, trying to pull away. “I was so scared when I saw the blood that I just ran away and forgot the doll. Brother must have shown it to Ki and told him to bring it.”
“Yes, the spirit knows his way,” Lhel said, but she was looking at Arkoniel, not at the ghost. “And Ki knew the way to the keep—”
The wizard had disappeared into the trees before she could finish. She sent her voice after him, finding his mind with ease.
“No, you must not harm him.”
“You know what I have sworn, Lhel.”
Lhel almost followed, but knew she couldn�
��t leave Tobin alone like this.
“What’s wrong?” Tobin asked, gripping her arm.
“Nothing, keesa. Arkoniel gone to find your friend. We start the healing while he go.”
“No, I want to wait for Ki.”
Lhel smiled and placed her hand on Tobin’s head, then spoke the spell she’d shaped in her mind. Tobin fell limp in her arms.
Lhel caught her and held her close as she stared into the trees. “Mother, protect him.”
Brother kept just ahead of Ki all the way to Lhel’s clearing, never close enough to question but never quite out of sight. Then he disappeared, and where he’d stood Ki could see what looked like Tobin through a break in the trees.
He opened his mouth to hail him when Arkoniel suddenly stepped in front of him. Sunlight flashed on something in the wizard’s hand and everything went black.
Tobin woke on a pallet inside the oak. It was hot and his bare skin streamed with sweat. His head felt like it was filled with warm mud, too heavy to lift.
Lhel sat cross-legged beside him, holding the rag doll on her lap.
“You ’wake, keesa?”
A twinge of pain brought Tobin fully awake and he sat up with a cry of dismay. “Ki? Where’s Ki?”
There was something wrong with his voice. It was too high. It sounded like—
“No!”
“Yes, daughter.”
“Where’s Ki?” Tobin asked again.
“He be outside. It’s time for the teaching I tell you of all that time ago, when you bring me this hekkamari.” She held up the doll. “The Skala moon god got path set for you. You a girl, but you got to be a boy looking for a time again. We do another binding now.”
Tobin looked down and saw that her naked body was still a boy’s—lean and angular with a little penis nestled like a mouse between her thighs. But there were a few smears of fresh blood there, too.
“Why am I bleeding there?”
“Binding got weak when your moon time come on you. Fight with the magic.”
“Moon time?” Tobin realized uncomfortably that Lhel must mean the monthly female bleeding Ki had told her about.
“Woman got a tide in her womb like the sea, called by the moon,” Lhel told her. “Give you blood and pain. Give you magic to grow baby in your belly. Some get other magic from it too, like me. And you, too. It give you dreams, sometimes, and the eye. Strong magic. Break some of my stitching.”
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