Bone, Fog, Ash & Star

by Catherine Egan

  “My Lady.”

  Tariro did not turn around. It was the other Faery who had spoken, her faithful spy, Miyam.

  “Tell me,” said Tariro.

  “He left the Realm of the Faeries and flew to the lake of the Crossing. There he met a Mancer and three young humans. Two of the humans he brought back here. The other human and the Mancer immediately returned to Di Shang.”

  “The two humans he brought back. Can you describe them?”

  “Male and female. Young. Perhaps in the teen years. The boy is dark-haired, the girl has lighter hair. They are of a complexion neither light nor dark, but somewhere in between.”

  Tariro made a little gesture of impatience. “The girl. Light brown hair, violet eyes and very beautiful?”

  “Yes,” said Miyam.

  Tariro simmered with rage. Cadeyrn was malleable; he had followed her advice and made a good match with Alvar’s daughter. As a result, he had been promoted. But Jalo, her brilliant Jalo, was still carrying a torch for the human girl! He would sabotage any chance of a fine career in the Faery Guard or a beneficial marriage if she allowed the affair to persist.

  “Where are they staying?” she asked.

  “With his friend Emin.”

  “Emin!” scoffed Tariro. “The one with the apricots, who married a servant girl?”

  “The very one.”

  She seethed. Why he should have such useless friends and pine for a human girl she could not understand. And he was deceitful, above all else, seeking to hide it from her. But he did not know his mother well enough.

  “I want the girl dead. The boy too, why not?”

  “By what means?”

  Tariro was so irritated that she very nearly turned around. But she did not want to take her eyes away from the pool of water. She was granted only one look at a time and she meant it to last. As soon as she turned around the pool would be empty.

  “Any means!” she snapped. “All you have to do is run a human through with a sword or drop them from a great height to kill them. It won’t take much. But do it soon.”

  “It is done.”

  Miyam bowed but Tariro wasn’t looking. She watched her sons carefully in the pool. I am saving you, Jalo, she thought. I am saving you from your own folly. May you one day be grateful to me for it.

  Chapter

  ~9~

  “Argh! Can’t you hurry up?” Malferio wailed, thrashing on the divan. “It hurts!”

  Kyreth sat on a rough bench before a stone desk that emerged from the wall.

  “I imagine it does,” he replied.

  Malferio leaped off the divan and crashed to the floor. “Argh! She Cursed you too; why is my Curse so much worse?”

  Kyreth was shaving a twisted root into powder over a flame and did not look up. He said, “Perhaps I simply bear it better. And I have friends. There is that. You, on the other hand, are quite friendless.”

  “Blast you!” sobbed Malferio. “Blast you and Blast the Ancients too. Why are you going so slowly? You just enjoy watching me suffer, don’t you?”

  “There are few things more tedious than watching you suffer, Malferio,” said Kyreth dryly. He spoke a few words in the Language of First Days, then took a dropper from the desk before him and added three drops of clear liquid to the powdered root. The powder smoked and hissed and absorbed the liquid. Kyreth deposited the mixture into a long pipe, and this he passed to Malferio.

  “Flame!” rasped Malferio, grasping the pipe in shaking hands. Kyreth struck a match and held it over the pipe. Malferio put it to his lips, sucking eagerly.

  He breathed out a plume of bluish smoke and relaxed.

  “Powerful stuff,” he murmured. “Ah. The room goes dark. You look like a goblin, you know, with this spell. All is shadow, and you are a great shadowy goblin with eyes of fire.” He giggled and sucked on the pipe again.

  Kyreth watched him with vague distaste. Malferio saw the expression and giggled again. “Horrible fire-eyed goblin. You’re going to miss me, you know. I’m not friendless at all. You’re my friend.”

  “I am not your friend,” Kyreth said. “Nor will I miss you in the slightest. You depress me.”

  Malferio waggled the pipe at him playfully. “Nonsense! Well, and how is the Magic?”

  “Ready,” said Kyreth.

  “Ready?” Malferio’s eyes widened. “It is a potent mix you make me, I must say. No fear of death. But look, you promised me that I could see her…that she would know. There’s no fun in dying without getting to see the look on her face, knowing she’s done for too.”

  “We shall see how it plays out,” said Kyreth.

  The embers were dying from the pipe. Malferio sucked up the last puffs of smoke desperately, then crawled back to the divan and lay down, shooting Kyreth a lopsided grin.

  “The difficulty is that I cannot kill you,” Kyreth went on. “Not I, nor any other Mancer, according to the Oath of the Ancients struck with Nia.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be hard to find someone who’ll do it,” said Malferio carelessly. “Say, have you found your little Sorceress yet?”

  “Not yet,” said Kyreth. “The Mancers are working to repair the Vindensphere. The Emmisariae will go out again with first light.”

  “You don’t sleep, do you? I’d always heard Mancers were such big sleepers,” said Malferio, his eyes half-closing.

  “No, I do not sleep,” said Kyreth in a low voice. He looked thoughtful. “Foss will be weakening,” he added to himself. “He has been stripped of his Emmisarius status and he is outside the Citadel walls. He will not last long.”

  “Ridiculous system,” scoffed Malferio.

  Kyreth looked up. “The sun is rising. I will see to my wife.”

  Malferio gave him a greedy look. “Oh yes. You’re going to kill her, then? Doing away with your own wife, by the Ancients! I suppose we’ve a lot in common. Poor taste in women, for starters.”

  Kyreth gave him a look of disgust. The stones in the floor made way, opening into the spiraling staircase of the tower.

  “You’re coming back soon, aren’t you?” asked Malferio, sitting up, his eyes wide and panicky. “This stuff doesn’t last so awfully long, you know!”

  “I will be rather busy today,” said Kyreth, sweeping down the stairs.

  “You’ve got to come back soon!” Malferio screamed after him as the stones closed and sealed him alone in the room.

  Kyreth made his way with swift strides to the south wing, to Eliza’s room, as the sun inched up above the horizon and the Mancers began to wake and enter their trances.

  “I apologize to have kept you waiting,” he said to Selva, drawing a long knife out of his robe. “There was much to do.”

  “Oh Kyreth,” she said, releasing her breath in a long, unhappy sigh. She stood still within the shining barrier, apparently unweary though she had been standing there a day and a night. “I pity you. Truly I do.” She cocked her head on one side. “But you will not kill me.”

  “I do not wish to,” he said. “But you have shown yourself too dangerous, my dear. What can I do?”

  “No matter, love. Little choice is left to you. They have come for me and you will have to let me go.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “They have come for me,” she repeated. “How strange that it should happen this way. Such a mixed life I have had. And now this next chapter. But what else am I to do, with this Curse, with this Gift?”

  Kyreth looked at the knife in his hand, hesitating.

  “Your Eminence.”

  He turned slowly. There was a Mancer in the doorway, a manipulator of water.

  “There is…” the Mancer began. Her eyes took in the knife in Kyreth’s hand and she faltered, then started again: “The Faithful are here, your Eminence. A delegation. They are at the shore of the Crossing and they demand that you hand over to them the new Oracle of the Ancients.”

  Kyreth looked back at Selva. She smiled at him and shrugged slightly. “Strange i
ndeed,” he conceded. The barrier around Selva disappeared at a flick of his finger. If the Ancients had claimed her, there was nothing to be done. She stepped close to him, brushing against the blade he still held in his hand.

  “Those who know you least fear you least,” she whispered in his ear. “It is them you have to fear.”

  ~~~

  Eliza woke to a terrible thirst, her head pounding and her tongue dry as paper. The sliver of sky showing between the edges of the cliffs on either side of them was a pale blue.

  “I need water,” she told Foss, her voice a croak.

  He was sitting on the stony ground with the Gehemmis in his hands, examining it curiously, but he looked up when she spoke. She thought his eyes seemed dimmer than usual, his face a little drawn.

  “Of course,” he said. “Another day walking north should bring us to the Noxoni.”

  The Noxoni was the river that marked the southern edge of the Interior Provinces, joined in recent years by a huge canal to the Arnox, the northern trade route on whose banks Kalla had been built.

  “I cannay go another day without water,” said Eliza. It was shady and cool in the deep canyon and a part of her wanted to just lie still, let her weariness have its way for once. “There must be streams nearby, or a spring, lah.”

  “Divining,” said Foss. “I have never learned it. We need some wood, I believe.”

  “You’re a manipulator of water. Cannay you…make some? Or find it?”

  “I do not manipulate actual water so much as the natural powers inherent in water, which I am able to transform into Magic,” explained Foss drearily. Eliza stopped listening halfway through the sentence. She closed her eyes and black ravens bloomed behind her eyelids. She saw the terrain from above, this barren rocky land at the edge of the desert. Somewhere a trickling sound, like music.

  “How is your foot today?” Foss’s concerned voice interrupted her view. She hushed him with a flap of the hand, squeezed her eyes shut again, swooped over the bare hills riddled with gorges. No sign of Mancers, though no doubt they would be sent out again soon. There, that sound again, water running over stone. She swooped downwards and circled until she found it, a spring in the rock, a pool that turned into a damp trickle running down a hill stubbled with short green shrubs, hardy little plants to survive out here.

  She opened her eyes.

  “I know where to go.” She got to her feet and winced. Her ankle was still very sore.

  “Let me see it,” said Foss. She sat down again and he held her foot in his large gold hands, twisting it gently this way and that.

  “Ouch,” she muttered.

  “A sprain,” he said. “You should not walk on it, Eliza. Come, I will carry you.”

  A raven was perched a little way down the path watching them. As soon as Eliza climbed onto Foss’s back it flew ahead a bit further, then stopped in the path to wait again.

  “Your Guide will guide us!” said Foss cheerfully. “How convenient.”

  “I cannay begin to tell you,” Eliza heartily agreed.

  It was a long hour to the little pool. Once there she climbed off Foss’s back and fell on her knees to drink her fill. Nothing had ever tasted as good as this fresh, cold water. She felt instantly revived. Foss stood over her, looking up at the sky.

  “The Mancers know about Mt. Harata and some other crossings, but not your volcano,” said Foss. “We will go there and seek the assistance of your friends in Tian Xia. I assume we can find a train or a boat going east once we reach the interior provinces.”

  “I wish I had made more of the potion,” said Eliza. “I feel very exposed, aye. It willnay be hard for the Mancers to find us out here.”

  “Keep your ravens in the sky,” said Foss. “The Emmisariae on golden dragons in the sky will be easier to spot than us down below. As long as the dragons do not give us away, we can take cover before the Mancers are able to see us.”

  Weak with hunger, Eliza half-dreamed as Foss carried her through the heat of the day. Once, she thought she saw Nia out of the corner of her eye, hair piled on her head in an elaborate upsweep, holding the bone Gehemmis and looking triumphant. She startled and woke. There was nothing, nobody.

  The low hills were mostly bare but for clumps of determined grass and deep-rooted shrubs. They kept going north until they found themselves, as the sun went down, facing the floodplains of the Noxoni. The hills dropped off dramatically into the broad, flat, fertile plains, a strip of trees running between the hills and the fields. The river was a brown snaking mass with rich green farmland on either side of it. Dilapidated farmhouses dotted the plains, a few muddy roads meandering between them.

  “Thank the Ancients,” breathed Foss. “We can find food for you here.”

  “I’ll go alone,” said Eliza. “You’ll be too shocking, aye. People are going to be frightened of you. Wait down below, among the trees. I’ll find someone who’ll feed me and give me shelter for the night, lah, and see if I can arrange transportation east for tomorrow.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  They descended the hill and Foss tried to make himself comfortable on the marshy ground among the cypress and tupelo trees. Eliza left the backpack and the Gehemmis with him and limped along the grassy ridges marking out the rice fields, where long, bright green stalks stood tall in the water, their tips waving and rippling in the breeze. She knocked on the door of the nearest farmhouse, an unpainted wood structure with broken steps and a corrugated tin roof. The hungry-looking dog chained up outside started to bark when she approached but soon calmed down and came to lick her hand. She tried to shoo it away; its unnatural friendliness was a dead giveaway that she was Sorma, and people around here were distrustful of the Sorma’s mysterious ways. Eliza had been to this region before, when she and her father fled the bandit raids in Quan years ago, and they had not received a particularly warm welcome. But Rom Tok was a grown man and obviously Sorma, whereas Eliza’s mixed heritage was more difficult to place and she was still not much more than a child. She hoped she would receive a friendlier reception this time.

  A red-faced woman in a stained apron opened the door. Her mouth was a pursed little trap, lines shooting out from it angrily.

  “What?” she asked in a bark.

  “Pardon me,” said Eliza, putting her hands together in a gesture of supplication. “I’m dead tired and I haven’t had a bite to eat for two days. I’ve heard of the generosity of the folks living along the Noxoni and hoped you could spare me a bite to eat and a roof for the night.”

  “You heard wrong if you think we’re generous with what we don’t got,” snapped the woman. “You’re not from around here, so where are you from?”

  “Huir-Kosta, originally,” improvised Eliza. “I’ve been living in Quan with my parents, but the town got raided and I had to run.”

  “Hadn’t heard of any raids in Quan lately.”

  “It just happened.”

  “Those border towns are dangerous places. Don’t know why anybody lives out there. No way to make a living.”

  Now that she was so close to a place to rest and eat, Eliza’s stomach was cramping with hunger and her knees were ready to give way beneath her. She leaned against the doorway, not needing to feign her weakness.

  “Please,” she said. “Whatever you can spare.”

  The woman frowned at her.

  “Where your folks?”

  “We got separated,” said Eliza. Tears rose easily to her eyes. She had never lied so effectively in her life. Desperation was a powerful motivator.

  “You walked from Quan? Impossible.”

  “I had a car. I drove partway but it broke down in the hills. I’ve been walking for two days.”

  The woman appeared ready to relent.

  “Well, I suppose we might be able to do something for you.” She looked Eliza over and then her eyes froze around thigh height. Eliza felt a cold despair close around her. She let her eyes fall shut a moment.

&n
bsp; “What’s that?” The woman’s voice had gone hard as flint. Eliza didn’t have to look at her to know she had seen the end of the scabbard beneath her jacket.

  “Nothing,” she breathed.

  “Looks like some kinda weapon.” There was fear in the woman’s voice now. “Thorton!” she bleated.

  It was no good. They weren’t going to take her in having seen the dagger. Eliza turned miserably and staggered away into the dusk. The immediate neighbors would be no good either, since no doubt the woman would call them and say what she had seen. Eliza walked towards the river, the woman a silhouette behind her in the bright doorway, watching her go. Perhaps she could get somebody to take her across and she could try one of the houses on the opposite side.

  It was dark by the time she reached the only light by the river she could see. It was a little boathouse with a bar attached. Two grizzled fishermen were seated at the bar, chatting with the barkeep. In this part of the world, Eliza knew, the men fished and the women farmed, and still there was barely enough for a family to get by on. She was an odd sight here: a dark-skinned young woman on her own. Nobody came here who didn’t live here, because what was there to come for? But fishermen with a few drinks in them might be more hospitable than the woman protecting her home. She tightened the scabbard’s shoulder strap and pulled her jacket tight around her. The bar was small and shabby but the glow of light outside made it seem a friendly place.

  “What’s this?” the barkeep called out when she entered. He peered at her over the counter.

  “If you have anything you could feed me,” she said, cursing the sob that quavered at the back of her voice, “anything at all, I’d be grateful.”

  “Got money?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Eliza.

  “We don’t feed ’em for free, you know,” said the barkeep. “This isn’t a poorhouse. It’s a pub.”