The Shattered Vine

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Detta pretended not to notice as she sent Kaïnam and Ao up the stairs to what had been Jerzy’s room, and arranged for Mahault to settle in with Lil.

  “If I do not intrude . . .” Mahl said, clearly torn between being separated from the others and the pleasing thought of not having to share sleeping quarters with them any longer.

  “You do not intrude,” Lil assured her, tucking her arm into Mahl’s and leading her away to the side stair without a second thought.

  “Do you need help with the stairs?” Kaïnam asked Ao, who shot him a glare, and stomped off, awkwardly, on his crutches, only to stop at the foot of the staircase and give a heavy sigh. “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to need help.”

  “I will have Per construct a railing,” Detta said into Jerzy’s ear, watching the two take the stairs carefully, Ao’s upper body bearing his weight against the wall while Kaïnam carried the crutches. “And a pulley, perhaps: to slide the crutches alongside, so that he need not ask anyone to carry them?”

  “You’re wiser than everyone in the House thrown together.”

  “I’m older than everyone else in this House thrown together,” she said, with a return of her customary tartness. “And you, go. It will take some settling in, don’t think I don’t know that, but soonest started, soonest done, and soonest ready for all that’s to come.”

  Detta didn’t know even part of what was to come, but it was good advice. Readying himself, Jerzy turned right where the others had gone left, and walked through the doorway and into his new quarters.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Jerzy woke before dawn. The bed was too large, the ceiling unfamiliar, and for all that the room was more comfortably appointed, he missed the hard cot and the window with the view of the vineyards.

  You don’t need to see them. The Guardian, as puzzled as the creature had ever sounded.

  “It’s not need,” Jerzy said. “Want.”

  The Guardian could not understand. It wanted for nothing, in that sense. It had never been taken away from what it was tied to and forced to rely on memory and hope.

  The Guardian did not feel impatience any more than it felt any emotion, but it managed to convey a sense of exasperation, nonetheless.

  Go.

  Like the command of a decantation, the word drove Jerzy out of the bed, into his clothing, and through the house on bare feet. The grass outside was covered with dew and tickled his toes, while the cobblestones cut at his skin as it never had when he was a slave. But he did not go into the yard, although they whispered to him; it was enough to stand there for a long moment, watching the mist rise at shoulder level, hearing the stirring of the nightwatch slaves as they came in and those in the sleep house rising to greet the day, while behind him the House started to wake. All was, for the moment, well here.

  There was something he needed to do, first.

  THE KITCHEN LOOKED the same as it had on Jerzy’s first day in the House: large and warm, and filled with the smell of smoke and meats and the ever-present simmering kettle of tai. A small child was curled by the fire, making sure the tai did not boil nor the fire go out, while another servant was busily kneading dough in the far corner, where the air was cooler. Neither of them blinked at his appearance: the master had the right to be anywhere he wished. Jerzy placed his burden on a cleared portion of the long worktable, selected a knife, and set to work.

  He had gotten halfway through when he heard a familiar voice ask, “What are you doing?” In my kitchen went unsaid, but Jerzy could hear it in Lil’s voice, and almost smiled. He should have done this somewhere else, out of sight. Master Malech would have insisted on it.

  But the knives were here, and the worktable was exactly the right height, and nobody would notice one more splatter on the floor, if it became messy—as it had.

  He wiped his forehead with his forearm, sensing Lil pause by the fire, building the flames up and speaking softly to the child on watch before coming up alongside him, heaving an exasperated sigh as she used her own kerchief to clear his face. “If you wanted a roast hen for eve-meal,” she started to say, then actually looked at what was on the table in front of him.

  “Silent gods. Jerzy, what is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The wings of the creature had shredded during their journey back, the feathers molting all at once, the meat sliding off the bone as though it had been boiled to softness. Remembering the way those wings had beat down at his face, and carried the weight of the birds as they swooped, Jerzy doubted they had been that soft to begin with. Like the sea serpents, these beasts were meant to dissolve once killed so that none could find evidence, after. They had not needed to bury the others, at all; only the lingering effects of the basic healspell that created it had preserved this one, even this long.

  The body, interestingly, remained intact longer; Jerzy suspected that the wings had taken the brunt of effort and so had used more of the magic—and therefore broken down faster. But it was only a thought; he had no proof, either way.

  Using one of Lil’s larger knives, he had cut open into the bird’s flesh, laying it apart in sections.

  The sea serpent had been solid flesh, no blood or veins, no bones to speak of. Master Malech had tested it and found nothing to indicate life at all, as though it had been pressed together the way a potter might press clay. This bird had bones—hollow bones, strong but light—and blood of a sort, although the way Lil was staring at it in horror added to Jerzy’s feeling that it looked like no innards of any natural fowl.

  “Don’t touch it,” he said sharply, when she would have poked at one dismembered bit, and her arm jerked back as though he had threatened her with one of her own knives.

  “That . . . that’s blood?” Lil, rather than being disgusted, was fascinated. She leaned forward over his arm, almost pushing him out of the way, although she was careful to keep clear of the sticky mess. “Ugh. It looks like night-meat.”

  Jerzy stared at the carcass, then turned his head to look at Lil. “What?”

  “The goo. It looks like when I’m making night-meat, before it all congeals and cools. The blood and vina and the ground meal and the meat, all look like that.”

  Night-meat, so called because it was prepared the evening before, mixed and set in skins and left to cook overnight, to serve with breakfast in colder weather. Master Malech had liked it, although Jerzy never developed the taste.

  “Blood and vina.” Roots and vines, connected. His earlier thoughts suddenly collided in a new tangle. Nothing made sense, and yet there was a pattern. There had to be. Mil’ar Cai had said there was a pattern to everything; that was how you won a fight, by finding the pattern and controlling it.

  “Jerzy?” She took another look at his face, and stepped away carefully, giving him space to think.

  The pattern of attacks. From bloodless, compacted flesh, roaming at will . . . the cat’s-paw of magic that had attacked him on the road months before, powerful and directed, but without physical form . . . and now this: flesh and form, directed to a single purpose. Puppets, played by a single, malicious will. Again, the question of how.

  He remembered the sense of roots. Roots. Patterns. Methods. Think like a Vineart, Jerzy told himself. Think like a soldier. Think like a man of power. . . . If he had no Command to hedge him, what might he do?

  “Not vina,” he said finally. “Spellwine. Spellwine, and blood.” Vineart Giordan had taught him that weathervines, only lightly blooded, required their Vineart’s blood to bind them to an incantation; without that connection, they would fight him. Sin Washer’s blood had been powerful enough to break the First Vine, shattering the power into lesser legacies, protecting the world from human folly and greed.

  One god’s blood, to shatter a world. Only a few drops, to incant an entire cask. How much would a skin of blood do? How much could a single Vineart give? How much, to create a spell that could twist and control so many beasts. . . .

  Lil had been raised in the House of M
alech, and she was no fool. “That . . . that thing is a construct of magic. Like the monsters that attacked the villages, last spring?”

  Master Malech would not have ventured a theory, not without testing it with Magewine, to try and identify the traces. But Jerzy had seen more than his master ever had, felt the malign press of the taint often enough to recognize it, no matter how it was masked.

  “Yes.” He pushed the tip of his knife into the flesh, watching it part under the pressure, raw and soft. Spellwine . . . and blood.

  How much blood, Jerzy wondered uneasily. And . . . whose?

  KAïNAM HAD ALSO woken well before dawn, feeling restless and too-aware. Rather than lay there, he had gotten up, leaving Ao still snoring in his bunk. Like Jerzy, he had been drawn to the outside, standing on the grassy verge just beyond the archway, but his attention looked not over the fields but back down the road, the way they had come the day before.

  The weight of someone crossing the grass coming down from the house alerted him, but he did not move.

  “Someone is out there,” the House-keeper said.

  “Yes.”

  Detta worried. Not obviously, and not without cause, but a House-keeper worried so that others could go about their responsibilities without having to do so. There had been no House-keeper in his father’s House, as such, but Kaïnam understood the role; it must be even more complex in a Vineart’s House, where the books measured not merely kitchen rations or purchased bales of cloth or servants’ payments, but the purchasing and keeping of slaves. And how much did she handle the flow of casks and wagons to a dozen or more different ends?

  And then, to carry on with the Keeping, in the absence of the House’s master, never knowing if they might come under attack, or from where—or by whom? She had kept things working in Jerzy’s absence, and had accepted his return with a smooth grace that most regents would not be able to manage, in Kaïnam’s world, and so he did not snap at her or dismiss her fears when she stood next to him and told him things that he already knew.

  “We had company on our way home. A Washer.”

  The older woman did not look surprised, but merely nodded her head, her gray curls bobbing slightly. She was rounded but not soft, this woman. “And they will not come to our door, because of . . . what happened here? To the other Washers?”

  The day Malech died, struck down by a then-invisible foe, the Washers who had come to take Jerzy into custody had either been killed by that same hand, or disappeared.

  Jerzy was master here, but Kaïnam knew more of strategy. “I believe he was set to observe, only,” he said. “A few days wait, and then Mahault and I will ride out to confront him. For now . . .” He shook his head. “Let him watch. Where is Jerzy?”

  “He went out just at sunrise,” the House-keeper said. “Wanted to walk the yards, I suspect, although he did not say. It is what Master Malech did, whenever he was more than a day or three away.”

  Jerzy had been away considerably longer than that.

  Kaïnam nodded. “I want to get Ao out and moving, before he forgets that he can. Is there a place where we might practice, away from the House itself?”

  “Behind the icehouse,” Detta said, without hesitation. “Jerzy took his lessons back there, when armsmaster Cai was still here. You can’t do much damage, and nobody will see you without you seeing them first.”

  Kaïnam nodded, pleased. “Excellent. Please let Mahl know that is where we will be.”

  LIL FINALLY LEFT Jerzy be, with strict instructions to get rid of every bit of the creature from her kitchen or she’d not cook in there again. When he’d decided that there was no more to be learned, Jerzy scraped up the decomposing remains of the beast, and set it to burning in a pit behind the House, where they disposed of the kitchen scraps. Even the thick, smudgy smoke that rose from the debris made him feel ill.

  He cleaned his hands in the washroom, scrubbing at his face to make sure any splatters were removed, and then walked out of the house, the fresh air against his skin a welcome relief. His feet took him, almost without thought, across the paving-stone road and down into the yard proper, looking for calm among the winter-quieted vines. The re-tinged leaves whispered against his hand, their sounds barely a low murmur of recognition, and Jerzy felt as though they were asking the same of him that he had thought to receive. Like him, the taint disturbed them, the uncertainty uprooted them. Vines, like Vinearts, were creatures of deep-rooted tradition, and unquiet did not bode well for the next year’s Harvest.

  Guilt pressed against him from within, guilt and regret. He was Vineart. The well-being of the vines was his responsibility. And he had been too long away. So he walked from one end of the yard to another, passing occasional slaves who ducked their faces and curved around his path as they went, until his feet were sore and the whisper of the vines had become a more contented, sleepy drone.

  The vines were appeased. Jerzy was not. His soft-soled shoes in one hand, fine-grained dirt between his toes, and a sense of being unsettled in his own skin, he turned away from the sloping yard, meaning to return to the study and the work awaiting him. Instead, caught by unusual sounds, he turned away from the House proper and walked up to the grassy area behind the stone icehouse and the stable.

  The last time he had been here, the Washers had erected their tents, and he had been questioned by Vineart Neth as to his actions in Aleppan. Now, the space was empty save for a peg-and-rope circle tied about an arm span off the ground, marking off a practice area and the two combatants within.

  Reminded of his own time spent within a similar circle, Jerzy leaned against the low stone wall and watched.

  Kaïnam was carrying a length of wood, crudely shaped like a sword, his long black hair tied back from his eyes and his tunic off, his skin showing a definite sheen of sweat although he did not appear to be winded.

  By contrast, Ao was breathing hard, and swearing harder. He sat in a wheeled chair, a battered construction that looked like one of master Malech’s chairs from the study, affixed to three wooden wheels, two in front and one behind. There was a small shield strapped to one arm of the chair, just high enough to protect his midsection, and he held a wooden sword-stick like Kaïnam’s in one hand, moving the chair with the other.

  That must have been Master Josia’s chair, the one that Detta had mentioned.

  “Again,” Kaïnam ordered, in the same voice Mil’ar Cai had used in this same spot, teaching a younger, flailing Jerzy the basics of fight survival. Even as Kaïnam gave the order he lunged, swinging his mock sword down with the same force as he might use in a true battle. Jerzy’s muscles tensed in reaction, his first instinct to voice a protest, to warn Ao, but even as the urge rose, Ao’s arm raised his own sword and blocked the downward blow, turning the chair so that the side rammed into Kaïnam’s hip, driving him back a step.

  “Good. Again.”

  They went back and forth, trading blows, until Ao misjudged his movement, and nearly tipped the chair over. Kaïnam dropped his own blade and righted him before the trader hit dirt.

  “Rot and blast.” Ao sounded both disgusted and dispirited. “In the middle of an actual fight, that won’t do me much good, to ask my foe to stop and assist me, if he would be so kind.”

  “It was the chair, not you. It was built to move back and forth in peaceful times, not joust like a warhorse. We’ll have a better one crafted for you.”

  “Best to have Jerzy magic me up new legs,” Ao muttered, then saw the Vineart standing off to the side. “Jer, can you . . . ?”

  Ao looked so hopeful, and so exhausted, that Jerzy found words he hadn’t intended to say in his mouth. “I can’t . . . not new legs, but there may be something I can do. May.”

  Ao had lost his legs protecting him. Jerzy felt his earlier determination grind the doubt into dust. If his foe could create monsters, surely he could find a way to give Ao back mobility. The vines stirred, whispering to him of ways, stirring ideas in his mind. But it would have to wait a little while longe
r. His findings earlier weighed heavily on him, and he needed his companions’ advice before he could decide the next step.

  “We need to talk,” he said. “All of us.”

  Chapter 5

  Master Malech, when he had things to consider, had gone down into the cellars. There, in close proximity to the stored spellwines, he said he could think best. Jerzy, with three others and Ao’s chair to consider, chose instead the courtyard within the House. Open to the blue sky, the breeze tinged with the smell of rough dirt rather than the sea, the moment he ushered them all through the doorway, the rightness of his choice settled on him. He could think, here.

  The night before, they had not done more than unpack the wagon and settle in, so Kaïnam had not had a chance yet to see the courtyard in the center of the House. He looked startled, then frowned at the bare ground as though demanding that grass grow underfoot.

  “Over there,” Jerzy said, directing them to the great spread-branch tree with the stone bench underneath that dominated the center of the courtyard. The branches raised all the way up to the second floor, creating shade against summer heat. Now, with winter approaching, the branches were mostly bare, and it appeared more like a skeleton than Jerzy was comfortable looking at.

  Kaïnam sat down on the bench, still looking around curiously as though he were memorizing every detail, or checking it against something in his own memory. Mahault, who was familiar with the courtyard from her previous brief visit, pushed Ao’s chair toward the tree, then started to fuss at him, making sure that he was situated out of the direct sunlight, until he mock-growled at her. “I’m legless, not witless,” he said.

  “There are days I wonder about that,” she responded, but left him be, waiting for Jerzy to take the other edge of the bench. He waved at her distractedly, indicating that she should sit. He thought better while pacing.