Flesh and Spirit tld-1

by Carol Berg

  “I’ve sensed that,” I said, relishing my view of Elene’s delicious body as she went about her work. “And the squire demonstrates as virulent opinions as the lord. At our first meeting, after that unfortunate encounter with a grain sack, I made the mistake of asking Corin about Prince Osriel.”

  “Indeed?” We plodded uphill again. “And you lived to tell about it? The house of Erasku has no use for the Bastard.”

  “Corin’s vehemence was reassuring. When Prince Osriel attacked the Moriangi at Gillarine—” Of a sudden, the memory laid a blight on my fey mood. “I just wanted to make certain your little test was not enlisting me in the Bastard’s legion.”

  “Ah. I’ve heard fearful stories of that raid—apparitions, a cloud of midnight, the mutilation of the dead. You do well to keep cautious of the Bastard’s poisonous madness. Thane Stearc walks a difficult path, unable to side with any of the three. We had a narrow escape from the abbey that night.”

  “So who does he favor for the throne? Who do you favor, for that matter?”

  Gram shook his head in the same hopelessness I felt. “Both Perryn and Bayard have young children. If the brothers maintain a stalemate, Lord Stearc believes we may be forced into some sort of cousinly union and a regency. Not a happy prospect when spring brings Hansker raids.”

  We had reached a level with Stearc’s camp. The secretary rested his back against the scarp, expelling a relieved sigh. He cocked his head. “Tell me, Brother Valen, if we fail tonight—and I am no more sanguine than my master—and we arrive at some new insight that invites your participation, may we call upon you again? I do value your aid…and your advice.”

  “I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. This is all a great mystery, and I’m thinking my head will burst soon with wondering.” Indeed my mind was hopelessly jumbled as I tried to link the Danae to the lighthouse and the end times. What interest had Danae in books or looms?

  Gram’s wry, twisting smile granted a moment’s grace to his stark face. “Your abbot must enlighten you further, Brother. Tell him what you’ve learned this day, and he will likely supply the rest…in far more civil terms than Lord Stearc would do. We need men and women of courage, goodwill, and varied gifts. Clearly you have a gift where this strange book is concerned.”

  “Well, we’ll discover the truth of that at sunset, I suppose.” I returned his smile, regretting the need to deceive the mournful fellow.

  Indeed, I felt privileged to be allowed such glimpses of Gram’s private self. Servants of volatile lords had to control themselves quite strictly. The secretary had been forthcoming to a degree others had not, and I held no prejudice against madmen. The armies, the alleys, and the finest pureblood houses of Navronne were filled with them.

  I offered him my hand. “For now, farewell, sir. I must hike up this monstrous hill before I am soaked through. You’ll convey my respects to the thane and his man?”

  He nodded graciously and took my hand, showing no surprise at the unclerical gesture. The fingers that circled my wrist were firm, but cold, and his own wrist hammered with a blood pulse that spoke of more excitement than his quiet manner displayed. Or perhaps it was merely the racing heart of an unwell man who had pushed too hard to climb a hill.

  I did not take to the fortress road, but hiked only as far as the next scarp that banded the hillside. Though Stearc’s party lay hidden behind their own step of rock just below me, the dark ribbon of the cart track was clearly visible down the hill from them. The darker smudge and scattered rocks marked the fine stump where my year’s salvation lay waiting. I huddled against the short wall of rock, sinking into its shadow, drawing my cowl and hood close to shield me from the rain. Anyone coming down from the fortress to fetch me would see no one on the road or in the fields. Come dusk, I would put the last step of my plan into action.

  The hours passed slowly. Sleep crept over me like the clouds and fog drifting across the gray-green landscape. Yet whenever I started, from grazing my cheek on the rock as I slumped or from the cold drizzle on my hairless patch of scalp when a gust of wind lifted my hood, the light seemed unchanged from my last waking. I was only wetter and colder. I settled deeper against the rock wall. Pretend you’re warm; you’ve done that often enough. Just stay awake…

  Yawning, I played out the plan over and over again. As soon as the light fades enough to leave shapes and landscape indistinct, slip down toward the stump. Pray the rain continues. They’ll never see you. Empower the illusion. Replace the bag of seeds with the empty provision bag that will now appear exactly the same. To empty the nivat into the provision bag and leave the empty one behind would take too much time. One last touch of magic…a flash of blue light as the night closes in…easy, as you creep away unseen. Then the long trudge up the hill to the fortress. I’ll think of a story for Brother Adolfus…for the edane whose mule driver won’t have found me…Sympathize with Gram and Elene that their Dané eluded them…sympathize tenderly with Elene…

  My eyelids weighed like lead…and still the game played out…over and over…

  Trigger the spell…creep silently…careful…timing…all was timing…switch the bags…slog upward…a story…one more lie…a flash of spiraling sapphire in the night…

  I sat bolt upright. Deunor’s fire, it was almost dark. The wind had died. The rain had stopped. Banners of fog lay in every hollow and niche, the world now colored with charcoal and ash. I shook off the dregs of sleep, cursing my everlasting carelessness. How long would Stearc wait to scoop up his bag of nivat and yell at Gram to devise him another plan? Impossible…unbearable…that my scheme or my magic should go to waste. Scooping up a fistful of earth, I recklessly poured magic into seeking a route through the twilight.

  Once sure I would not tumble over the scarp into Stearc’s lap, I sped downhill. But I had not traveled half the distance when I glimpsed lights of deep and varied blue moving through the fog. A few steps closer, until the scene halted my feet and left me gaping. Exactly as I’d seen in the fog of my dreaming, the light was drawn into long coils and spirals…into delicate vines and leaves that hung in the thick air…living artworks as bright and rich-hued as the windows of Gillarine Abbey church. They drifted in sinuous unison away from the demolished cairn. Away from the tree—an oak of such a girth its bole could house a family and of such expansive foliage it could shelter a village beneath its limbs.

  “Wait!” Gram’s cry bounced off the rocks and fell dead in the thick air. “Please! Hear our message…for any who dance in Aeginea. We need your help. Envisia seru, Dané.”

  The blue lights paused and shifted, turning…the movement revealing the canvas for the artist’s magical pen…long bare limbs entwined by sapphire snakes, and flat breasts traced with azure moth wings, half hidden by a cascade of curling red hair…a pale cold face upon which a glowing lizard coiled its tail about a fathomless eye, while the reptile’s scaled body drawn in the color of lapis stretched across an alabaster cheek. So beautiful…so marvelous.

  “Human voices are thorns in our ears.” The voice of the wind could be no more soulless. She was already moving away.

  “Our estrangement shadows our hearts.” The speaker’s dark shape—Gram’s shape—moved between me and the apparition. “Meanwhile, the world suffers, and we seek to understand it. Can we bargain? Will you convey our request to Stian Archon or Kol Stian-son?”

  I wanted to scream at Gram to move out of the way so I could see more, yet I could not accomplish even that. My limbs were frozen in place, stricken powerless with wonder. But I smelled her…woodrush and willow and the rich mold of old leaves and shaded gullies…she came from the fen country.

  Everything of my own life—past, present, thought, sense—paled and thinned, having no more substance than smoke alongside the substance of her. I felt starved, fading.

  Standing beneath the spreading branches, the Dané paused and cocked her head to one side, raising her brow so that the lizard’s tail twitched. “Bargain…and forget betrayal? Forget
violation and poison? Forget thievery?” She breathed deep of the night air. Her nostrils flared. Her lip curled. “Thou canst not claim ignorance, human, for thy very blood bears the taint of betrayal and thy flesh stinks of thievery. The long-lived do not forget. Offer recompense for betrayal; uncorrupt that which thy poison has corrupted; return what was stolen, and we might consider a hearing.”

  “Theft? Poison? I know naught of—”

  No need for Gram to finish his claims of ignorance. She had vanished in a rush of air, as if she had wings to bear her back to heaven. And no spreading oak stood at the cairn. Only my ugly stump.

  Sodden, chilled to the marrow, I sank to my knees and tasted all that remained of the night—charcoal and ash, empty of magic. I pressed my forehead to the cold earth and wept.

  Chapter 18

  “Brother Valen! Are you injured? We heard a cry.”

  Bobbing lantern light announced Elene well before she knelt beside me and brought her face down near my own. Even without sight I would have known her. She smelled of fennel soap and horse, damp leather and wet pine smoke, of a warm human woman, not the woodrush scent of the cold Dané.

  “My lord, over here!” she yelled. And then quieter, “Brother?”

  “I sprained…fell…I was on the way…the fortress…” My lies limped into nothingness. I inhaled and began again. “I stayed back to watch. Waited up the hill. Saw her.”

  That was all I could muster. I could no more explain the fullness of grief that had overwhelmed me than I could explain my pain in the cloister garth, my dread at the pool in the hills, or why in the name of heaven a Dané had come to a tree stump conjured from a weed. I knew only that when the blue sigils vanished, I felt as if some great door had opened in the world and all joy had rushed out. Were the king’s own minstrels surrounding me, I could not have sung with them or danced to their music.

  “So it was not just the three of us who saw and heard. Lord Stearc and I each thought we were dreaming. Gram even spoke to the creature! But you look dreadful, Brother. Are you sure you’re not hurt?” Elene laid a hand on my shoulder, and the sheer kindness of it came near setting me weeping again.

  “I’ve not been myself of late,” I mumbled. “Ill. No sleep. So much praying. A different life.” I tried to sort myself out, dragging a sleeve across my face as I sat up. How long had I knelt here weeping like a babe bereft of its mother’s tit? My reaction made no sense at all. I hated feeling so helpless, so at the mercy of emotions without cause. “It’s nothing.”

  I’d wasted the day. Wasted my bent. Of course, the Dané had taken the nivat. She would not have come at all if not for the seeds. So beautiful…so strange and majestic and proud…such magic…

  Ah, stars of night, that was what hurt so dreadfully. To look upon such power that dwelt so near us, in tree or pond or meadow, and yet so vastly distant. Never had dirt and ignorance and uselessness weighed on me so. The damp, heavy wool of my drab monk’s garb itched and choked me. Stories said the Danae danced to the music of the stars. Easy to see how people might mistake such a being for a messenger of heaven.

  “Brother Valen! What are you doing here?” Stearc’s sudden presence assaulted my spirit like a cadre of Moriangi foot soldiers.

  I shook my head. I was doing well to sit up, trying not to feel anything, terrified that my next move would ignite the fire in my belly. My waste of magic likely meant that the next doulon would be no more successful than the last. And then my nivat supply would be gone. Ass! Ignorant, blind, rock-headed ass! I wanted to slam my head on the rocky ground. All the images I kept at bay descended on me at once: the pain-frenzied youth in the Palinur alley, thrashing in his own filth and vomit, the whore in Avenus whose eyes screamed when you touched her hot, rigid limbs, paralyzed with cramps and seizures. Better to slice my own throat than end like that.

  “He stayed to watch, sire. He says he’s not injured. We should tell him—” After a sharp gesture from her father, Elene bit off whatever else she wanted to say.

  “I’ll vow I believed you a charlatan, monk,” said the thane. “That a nobody, a cowardly hireling bowman with no family of consequence and an arrow wound in his back, could interpret the book when better men could not seemed unrighteous and impossible. But it seems I erred.”

  I did not even bristle.

  The thane crouched beside me, his oiled leather jaque gleaming in the lantern light, his hawkish bearded face flushed with zeal and thirsty with curiosity. “Sword of the archangel, I cannot comprehend what we just saw. I’ve never believed any of these legends. How did you do it? What key have we missed in this confounded book?”

  “I don’t know.” Luck? Fate? How could anyone believe that I—a man of so little skill that I never had and never would accomplish a single thing of worth in my life, so blindly thick skulled that I could not untangle the meanings of the simplest markings on a page, and so weak of will that I had enslaved myself to the doulon—had done anything to summon such a being? “I did only what I’ve done before.” Exactly nothing. I could not explain it.

  Gram arrived shortly after the thane, moving slowly. The secretary was stretched tight. His black cloak and the sharp light on his deep-etched features made him look like death itself.

  “We should get back to our blankets,” said the thane when he spied Gram. “Foolish to stand here in the cold. Come on.”

  Before I could resist, Stearc grabbed my elbow and hauled me up as if I were no larger than Elene. No threads of fire shot through my limbs, demanding the doulon’s solace. Thank the gods for that.

  Stearc grunted an order at Elene, and father and daughter hurried off. Gram and I trailed behind as if drawn along in their wake.

  “You removed the salt,” I said.

  Gram nodded as he muffled a bout of harsh coughing.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You were right,” he said, and absently pushed damp hair from his face. It promptly fell down again. “It wouldn’t have made any difference to bind her. She wasn’t going to do what we asked in any case.”

  We found no more to say on the short walk down the hill.

  A sullen Elene thrust a blanket into my arms when we reached their camp, and then retreated to a spot well away from us. Stearc removed his swordbelt and tossed it on the ground beside her. Her mouth tight, she rummaged in one of the saddle packs, set out stone, rag, and oil flask, and set to cleaning and polishing his long-sword. Her silence bulged and stretched near bursting.

  They had pegged a canvas awning to the stone and supported it with three hinged poles and a tangle of rope. The ground underneath was damp but not soggy. Bundled in cloaks and blankets, Gram and I squatted beside the lantern, as if the weak yellow light might warm us.

  The thane pulled out a wineskin, took a few swallows, and tossed it at Gram. “Now we know the nivat works, we should try again. Perhaps a different creature would be more accepting.”

  Gram took a long pull at the wineskin. “She is a sentinel,” he said, rubbing his forehead tiredly. “One charged to watch the boundaries between human and Danae. She would most likely respond to any advance here. Her own sianou is probably somewhere nearby. But after hearing her, I believe that other Danae would reject us as well. Her dislike was not some private matter.”

  “But it was aimed directly at you.” Elene made no attempt to mute her voice or her hostility. “Have you done something without telling the others?”

  “Hold your tongue, squire, or be sent home. I warned you.” Stearc jerked his head. “Go see that the horses have not pulled their tethers. Now.”

  Though Elene clenched her jaw in the very image of her father, she slammed the sword back into its sheath, jumped to her feet, and snatched up the lantern.

  “Hear me, Corin.” Gram rushed into the angry silence as the woman strode into the night. “The only betrayal I know of is Eodward’s failure to abide by their terms and return to them. Perhaps they’ve come to think of that as stealing what ‘belonged’ to them. Their help. Their c
are. No theft is mentioned in the journal.”

  Their family quarrel could not hold my attention this night. The mention of King Eodward’s name sparked in me like flint on steel. Eodward who was said to have lived with “angels” for a hundred and forty-seven years. Eodward who had asked a saucy-tongued pikeman to take a message—

  “Aeginea.” The word spilled from my lips.

  “What’s that, Brother?” Stearc and Gram said it together, as if they had forgotten I was there.

  “When you spoke to the Dané, you mentioned a place called Aeginea. What is it?”

  Though I addressed Gram, another bout of coughing rattled the secretary’s chest. The answer came from Stearc instead. “Aeginea is the Danae’s own name for the lands where their archon holds sway, where they celebrate the turning of the seasons and dance the pattern of the world they call the Canon. Though we don’t see the name on any of Cartamandua’s maps, we believe it exists both within and apart from our own land.”

  “It is Navronne,” said Gram, hoarse from his cough. “The Heart of the World.”

  “And King Eodward…what does he have to do with all this?” I was half afraid to ask, sensing a tether of obligation reaching out from the past to bind my choices. Somehow doubly bitter after having seen a Dané.

  “That is a very long story,” said Stearc. He stretched out on the bare ground, wadded a blanket under his head, and pulled his cloak around him. His hand moved out and touched the swordbelt, loosening his knife in its sheath. “Too long for tonight. We should sleep now.”

  I was as wakeful as if my wastrel drowsing up the hill had been a night’s unbroken sleep. Even after the thane began snoring, my thoughts would not keep still.

  Though Elene’s departure with her lantern left us in the dark, I heard Gram rustling about in the packs, unstoppering a flask, drinking something that seemed to soothe his cough better than the wine had done. He must have sensed my wakefulness, as well, for he began to speak softly, as if not to wake his master.