Ilek’Inari spared him a pained look. Part of him wanted him to focus on Corenna; part wanted to strike Ilek’Inari for his failure.
“The spirits of things-to-come cannot see all things,” Ilek’Inari said. “Especially so where men are concerned. And I was only ever an apprentice.”
Quiet hung between them. Ilek’Inari had turned Corenna’s head to the side, looking away from them, but he heard her cough blood, spattering the leaves and brush. As strong as she was, she looked frail, like a fallen child crying from a bruise.
In the back of his mind, his apprentice’s words played again. The fair-skins’ barrier, gone. The promised safety for his people, gone, though it should have run a length greater than the boundary of all land claimed by the Sinari, Ranasi, Ganherat, Vhurasi, and Olessi together.
It should have mattered, but it didn’t. He stared, sure of nothing, only that Corenna couldn’t die, that she would heal, that she wouldn’t leave him alone.
17
SARINE
Wilderness
Near Lavendon Abbey
Oaks and elms twisted away from the space where the barrier had been. A natural growth over hundreds of years; touching the barrier meant a violent shock, same as coming into contact with any Shelter binding. The wilds had responded by making a wall of wood and brush, while most of the land to the south had been cleared for farming. No one had ever seen the gap between them, the space between worlds, save in controlled areas where the barrier was opened for trade. She’d seen illustrations of those, if never attended such a meeting in person. And now she was among the first to see the wild—the true wild—since the first colonists had drawn the lines in collaboration with the native tribes and engineers from Thellan and Gand.
Though she supposed that wasn’t strictly true. The native tribes lived in the wild. It wasn’t fair to say she was among the first to see a place thousands of people called home. And of course, the traders caught their glimpses, and the priests. But thought came slow in the wake of what she’d seen. Axerian had torn it down, using Black, and the wardings. He’d brought down the Great Barrier, and every league of the colonies was now exposed.
“How?” Acherre said. One word, enough to capture the horror and wonder of what they’d witnessed.
“Black,” she said. “It’s like Death, but it only comes from killing. He used Black, and the wardings—the blue sparks. That’s where he must’ve been, since the battle. Traveling the length of the barrier, setting wardings, preparing to do this.”
Acherre paced toward the tree line, her hand on the hilt of her saber as though she might draw and charge the open sky. “He,” Acherre said. “You mean Axerian? The assassin?”
“Yes. It has to be.”
Quiet fell between them, and numbness. She wanted to act, to do something, to find him, force him to undo what he had done. Zi’s weight rested on her shoulder, whereas before he had never been even the slightest of burdens. She could feel him now, sick and pale, flickering yellow in the midday sun. Once she might have thought his coloring a reflection of the light; now she knew better. Yellow meant emotions—strong emotions, and negative ones. Shame, guilt, and fear. She felt them all. This was her fault. She should never have trusted Axerian, should have listened to Zi’s promptings and warnings against helping him. And he was still her best hope of finding a cure for whatever was afflicting Zi. The thought of using Axerian for anything was like oily filth coating her skin, but she hadn’t lacked for reasons to search for him before. Now she added a new one: justice for what he’d done. For the thousands that would die to the beasts of the wild before a new barrier could be put in place.
“Gods damn it,” Acherre said. “I need High Commander d’Arrent to make a connection. She has to see this. Is there any chance it’s a localized thing? If the barrier went down here alone, it could mean an attack coming, but I’d as soon chance that over … the alternative.”
“I … I don’t think so.” She’d felt the blue sparks in the moment before Axerian had triggered Black through them. A network of wardings as far south as the barrier ran, from New Sarresant to the swamps and marshlands of the Thellan colonies, with the southern plains of the Gandsmen in between. “I think he took it all. I think—”
Acherre snapped her fist into the air. A sign for quiet.
A moment passed, with no more than birds chirping in the trees.
“What is it?” Sarine asked.
“Movement.” Acherre hissed it, just above a whisper, though they were standing in a cleared field, with nothing to use for cover short of the twisted trees neither had been eager to approach. “Tether Life to be sure.” She pointed. “There, and there.”
Sarine followed the instruction, finding the green pods of Life on a nearby leyline. A tether between them made the spring breeze cooler on her skin, light enough to feel every current of it, and sharpened the tones of the birdsong sounding nearby. She looked where Acherre had pointed and saw nothing, only copses of thick foliage. Not even a rustle from a beaver or a deer.
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“Shake me if there’s danger,” Acherre said. “I’ll use Mind.”
Sarine nodded, but Acherre’s eyes had already gone blank, a fogged gray covering pupil and iris together. Strange. Was that what she looked like when she used Mind? A power with two uses—like Life, which could heal wounds or sharpen senses, depending on how it was tethered. Mind would split Acherre into a set of perfect copies if she bound it into herself, but bound into the distant foliage it would shift her senses forward, to see and hear as if she were there in person.
As suddenly as Acherre’s eyes had fogged, she returned. “They’re there. Tribesmen. Three at least, by my count, and likely more.”
The wind seemed to bite colder than it had. The last time she’d seen tribesmen, they’d attacked the city, spurred by Reyne d’Agarre’s madness.
By the time she’d processed the warning, Acherre was already walking back to their mounts, retrieving the reins they’d dropped to let the animals graze in the field behind the site of the barrier.
“What are you doing?” Sarine asked.
“You’re heading back to the city. Full gallop for a league and a half, then you dismount and walk half a league before you gallop again. Can you measure distance by the movement of the sun? Never mind if you can’t.”
“Kiss the Nameless if I’m riding back to the city.”
Acherre halted mid-stride, holding the reins to both mounts. Evidently direct refusal of an order wasn’t a thing commonly experienced in the cavalry.
“One of us has to carry word of this to high command,” Acherre said, still keeping her voice low. “And you’re not suited to scouting whatever these tribesfolk are doing.”
“Axerian could be out there. He has to be close, if he’s the one the spirits said opened the barrier for anahret and valak’ar. And with Zi’s help I can speak the tribesfolk’s tongue. Can you say the same?”
Acherre frowned, showing signs of piecing together an argument before she spoke. But there wasn’t time. They had to reach Axerian before Zi got any worse. He was already coiled around her shoulder, clutching her and trembling. His scales were pale white, almost pink.
“You there,” she shouted, gesturing toward the twisted growth of forest, trusting to Zi to translate her words to the tribesmen’s tongue. “I need your help. Show yourselves.”
“What in the betrayer’s damnation do you think you’re doing?” Acherre strode forward to grab her by the upper arm.
She felt Zi pulse Red, strong enough to rebuff Acherre’s grip and keep her footing. “I’m known to your guardian,” she shouted. “A man called Arak’Jur. Show yourselves and help me!”
Acherre let her grip loose in disgust. “Fool! Those could be advance scouts, or did you forget what happened last time the barrier was breached?”
“Anch’a bi ulav. Arak’Jur orai dhakai dan Sinari. Q’ana il cha’be?”
Zi translated the w
ords in her mind: You are a fair-skin. Arak’Jur is the Sinari guardian. How can you know him?
She grinned, forgetting for a moment that Acherre wasn’t likely to know one word in three, if she knew any at all. Still, vindication was vindication.
“I brokered a peace with him, when you last came into our city. Is he with you?”
“No,” the tribesman called back in their tongue. “But he is close. If you speak for your people, I can lead you to him.”
“Let’s go,” Sarine said to Acherre, offering a hand to take her horse’s reins, though the thick foliage wouldn’t allow for easy riding. “They say their leader is nearby. If anyone has seen Axerian, the guardian will know.”
“You’re bloody mad. I’m not—”
“Either you’re coming, or you’re not.”
She tugged the horse’s reins, the animal’s reticence somewhat spoiling the gesture of her striding away toward the wood. But she was pleased to see Acherre and her mount following behind a few paces later, enough to outweigh the tingling fear of passing through where the barrier had been, hours before. She raised a hand to signal to the tribesmen. For Zi’s sake she could brave the wild, and worse. For him, she would face the Nameless himself, and whatever chaos he’d sown in his wake.
The tribesmen stood from where they’d hidden in the brush, and she waved again. Tall men, bronze-skinned, dressed in a mix of sewn coats and fur-lined breeches of the sort the trappers favored in the south. The men returned her greeting with cautious eyes, directing her to follow as one went ahead, and two more flanked them on either side. One stole a glance at her, then looked again, pivoting his gaze to Zi, resting on her shoulder.
“Gan’cha il’si Llanara! Ana kar’ka, dommat—”
He shouted it, too fast for Zi’s translation to register in her mind. But Green flared, and the man went docile at once, all sign of his alarm quelled as they returned to quiet among the trees.
Sarine froze, waiting for more, a lashing out that never came.
“What was that?” Acherre said from behind.
They mistook me for another of my kind, Zi thought back, and somehow she knew he’d made himself heard in her thoughts as well as Acherre’s. Follow, and I will be sure none are troubled by the sight of me.
His words sent a pang of sympathy through her. He would have vanished, as he always did, if he could. Instead she fished for a saddlecloth in her horse’s bag, withdrawing it to wrap around him as she cradled him to coil around her forearm. They had to be close now. Axerian would know what to do. The tribesmen would know where to find Axerian. It would work out, and Zi would be fine. But no matter how she wished the tribesmen would rush as she followed them through the trees, they kept a steady pace, and she led her horse close behind.
The forest broke in small clearings, and it was clear at once this was no hunting party. This was a people on the move.
She’d seen wagon trains of refugees, villagers displaced and relocated to the city by the ravages of war. The ragged hunger, and the shame of being uprooted and made reliant on others’ charity. This was different. Tribesfolk watched her pass with pride burning in their eyes, though from the presence of children and wrinkled elders this was no army on the march. Something had driven these people to move toward the barrier, and for the first time she began to wonder what else had been done, alongside Axerian’s taking down the Shelter ringing the colonies.
Their guides stopped twice to converse as they passed through the trees, quick directions given to where the guardian had last been seen, and questions for her sake, and Acherre’s. She tried to look as docile as she could, unthreatening and calm, though Acherre wore full military dress and couldn’t help but look a soldier. It seemed to serve, and soon they broached a clearing following an elder’s sure direction that he had seen the guardian and his woman walking the outer edge of their company, to the north.
The guardian, Arak’Jur, sat on the far side of the clearing, resting on his heels but leaning forward, watching another man perform some work as they kneeled over the grass. No mistaking him, though—he was the same bull of a man she’d seen in the city, when he’d brokered a peace between the tribes, Lord Voren, and Erris d’Arrent. He was bare-chested, as he had been in the city, and still muscled like an ox, with russet skin decorated by scars. A dangerous man, but one who spoke of peace and reserve and caring for his people. He would listen, when she asked for help.
“Honored guardian,” their escort said in the tribes’ tongue. “There is a fair-skin here who claims—”
At mention of her skin, Arak’Jur snapped a look of fury in her direction, though he hadn’t deigned to notice their approach. It gave their escort a start, just as it revealed the subject of the guardian’s attentions, and the man’s at his side: a woman’s body, blood-smeared and lying flat in the grass.
Sarine dropped her horse’s reins, rushing forward without thought.
Arak’Jur sprang to his feet, surrounded by a shimmering image of a birdlike creature, all leathery skin and feathers and claws.
“It’s all right,” she said, stuttering to a halt and feeling half a fool for her hasty approach. “I can help, if you’ll let me.”
Arak’Jur weighed her a moment before recognition dawned in his face. “Sarine,” he said. “The girl. Yes. Yes!” He gestured to the woman’s body. “We were attacked by a fair-skin. Corenna took a wound to her chest.”
The man who’d been tending the woman Arak’Jur had named Corenna moved aside, making way for her. Sarine knelt, shifting her sight to the leylines as she placed both hands on the woman’s skin. Body’s red motes sprouted like weeds through the clearing: a sign of violence, and recently done. The woman’s chest corroborated it, her skin opened to the cool air around a gash still seeping blood, just shy of her heart.
“A fair-skin did this,” she said, working strands of Body through the woman’s form. A tether to strengthen her one working lung, and another for her throat to swallow the blood without choking. One more for the heart itself, to calm it and give it strength through the shock. “Dressed in black, with a hooked nose and curved swords on his belt?”
Arak’Jur nodded, a feverish agreement. “Yes.”
Her heart raced. Axerian was close, close enough for the woman not to have died yet from the blow he’d struck. She blinked again, this time finding Life, the green pods that would heal the wounds, rather than simply giving the woman the strength to handle her pain. Tethers formed as quick as she could think them into being, a strand for the skin and ribs, another for the ruptured blood vessels, another for the punctured lung. At best she could stop the damage, let the wound regenerate faster and do in a few days what might have taken weeks, but it was better than—
The woman coughed, a spat of blood sprayed over Sarine’s hands and chest, and she opened her eyes.
“Corenna!” Arak’Jur said, coming to kneel on the opposite side, clutching her hand as though he held a treasure.
“Arak’Jur,” the woman—Corenna—muttered weakly. But she seemed to grasp his hand back, more firmly than should have been possible.
“How did she recover so fast?” Sarine began, though neither the guardian nor the woman seemed to pay her any mind. Instead it was the other man, the one who had tended to the woman first, who laid a hand on her forearm with a gentle smile.
“It is part of our magic, for those touched by the spirits to recover quickly,” he said. “Whatever you did, you were aided by that gift.”
A glance at Corenna’s chest confirmed it; the blood still soaked her clothes, streaming down her sides, but the wound itself was half knit shut, with pink swelling and raw flesh of the sort she wouldn’t have expected to see for a month of healing.
“Can you examine her belly?” the man continued. “She is pregnant. If you can sustain the child …”
He left it unsaid, but she nodded, reaching again for Body and Life and laying hands on Corenna’s stomach. This time both Arak’Jur and Corenna turned to watch her in silen
ce. She tethered lines into Corenna’s belly, finding a small spark stirring within. If it had dwindled, there was no sign of it now; the child embraced the lines she tethered like a fish swimming in a stream. Warmth pulsed through her, and she fixed the bindings in place, withdrawing her hands from Corenna’s flesh.
“The child is healthy,” she said, feeling almost embarrassed at the beaming looks shared between them.
“Thank you,” Corenna said, her voice reduced to a croaking rasp.
“Thank you,” Arak’Jur repeated. “You have restored to me all that I value most, and I owe you a debt.”
Sarine reclined back on her heels, taking a moment to loosen the saddlecloth wrapped around her forearm to check on Zi. “You can repay it,” she said. “By helping me find Axerian—the man in black, the man who attacked you. My companion is sick, and I need him to lead me to a cure.”
18
ERRIS
The Grand Promenade
Covendon, Capital of the Gand Colonies
Her field-marshals flanked her atop the platform—Royens and Etaigne on the left and de Tourvalle on the right—with a dozen more generals at attention to their sides. There hadn’t been time for dress uniforms; instead they made do with field colors, disparate shades of blue and gray, with a mix of stars, epaulets, pins, and stripes for rank. Opposite her commanders, the Gandsmen were immaculate on the other end of the stage, each one in a matching red coat with white undershirt, breeches, and hose. It stung her pride to see her army so mismatched. An error in judgment, perhaps, not to insist on ceremonial dress before the signing. But if her pride was wounded, the Gand generals’ would be limping to its grave. At the center of the stage, under the open air of a park the size of more than a few trade villages, the Gand aides laid out inks and pens, half for the officers of New Sarresant, half for the politicians and generals of Gand, intended for the signing of documents offering the Gand colonies’ unconditional surrender.
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