by Kate Elliott
“You are a captain,” said Pil.
“Eiya! Through my mother’s Green Sun connections, if you want to know the truth. I was so cursed proud of myself, wasn’t I? Riding my gelding through the streets, strutting about with my fire hook.” He glanced at Peddo, then away. “My kinfolk sent me up here three days ago to square the accounts on the various hall storehouses. This much water in the cisterns. That much oil. So many tey of rice. I tell you, I think they knew. I fear they sent me up here to keep me out of harm’s way, curse them!” He began sobbing. “Gods-rotted traitors!”
They stepped away from him, and he looked over indignantly.
“I wasn’t in on it! As soon as the trouble erupted, I secured the storehouses and cisterns with what firefighters remain up here, in case any of this crowd decides to grab what they can.”
“Why come over here to the stairs, then?” asked Peddo. “Since it’s the only way up or down from this rock besides flying, or the baskets?”
The young man gestured helplessly, a sweep of his arm that took in the city. Overhead, stars glittered in silence; below, Toskala roared as its thousands ran or fought or hid, or simply wailed and grieved. The wind blustered, but like them it could do nothing but witness.
“What’s the point of staying?” asked Kesta. “We’ve lost.”
“What’s ever the point of staying?” said Nallo, thinking of the day she had walked into a strange village to marry a man she’d never met, to fulfill a contract other hands had sealed in her name. “To say you can. To show you will.”
“And what the hells does it matter, Nallo, when those demons can fly? The steps are blocked, but the demons can come back any time they want.”
“Maybe so, but if they’d wanted to kill us all, then why didn’t they?”
“The winged ones carried no weapons,” added Pil, “but the ones who died, died in blood. So then who stabbed them? Not the demons.”
“A good point,” said Peddo, smiling wanly at Pil, who blushed and looked away.
“Traitors stabbed them!” said the fire captain hoarsely. “Any of us might be a traitor!”
“The hells you say!” snapped Nallo. “I’m no gods-rotted traitor. And I’m not cursed ready to give up, either.”
“We need a captain,” said Pil. “If we mean to resist. This rock is a good fort. If we can protect ourselves against demons, and ration water and food.”
“And throw the cursed traitors to their death!” screamed the fire captain with a howl of outraged grief.
Distant voices on Justice Square echoed his cries, and the guards at the stairs stirred restlessly, looking scared.
Nallo slapped the fire captain right across the face. That shut him up. Probably with his soft skin and well-kept hands he’d never done a day’s worth of real work in his silk-wearing, pampered life.
“Do you think you’re the only cursed person who’s suffered? We either give up now, or we take stock of our situation and then we cursed well decide what we mean to do! I don’t want to give up!”
The image of her husband lying dead in the road with the flies buzzing in and out of his gaping mouth sprang so vividly into her mind that she began to cry. He had stayed behind with the other men to hold off the army while the women and children ran into the forest to hide. Dazed from a day of hiding in the brush, Jerad and little Zi had not truly understood what had happened to their father. Avisha had trembled so close to hysterics that Nallo recognized only now how much strength it had taken the girl to suck it up and keep going for the sake of the little ones. And they’d done it. They’d walked away from the ruins of a life they could never have back, and by sheer stubbornness they had found other shelter. Not a safe place, for maybe there weren’t any safe places left. But a decent place, a good place. A place they could find pride in.
“I didn’t give up before, and the gods know I’m cursed well not going to give up now. What if we can hold this rock? Won’t that give hope to others?”
“Who will be captain?” repeated Pil.
“That’s right,” she said fiercely, looking at each in turn: the fire captain still stricken and likely to break out in a whine; Peddo exhausted but thoughtful; Kesta twisted between despair and hope. Pil as always so calm that you didn’t know whether to love him or shake him to see if he would ever yelp. “We need a commander, someone who knows Toskala and the other halls. Someone who has allies. Someone who might actually know what he’s doing, even if he is a vain-hearted and insufferably smug horse’s ass. I say, we send word to Argent Hall. To Marshal Joss.”
53
Joss paced to the edge of darkness beyond which Scar drowsed on a rocky perch, but he heard and sensed nothing out of the ordinary. Yet he could not shake off a tingle along his skin, like ants crawling up and down his neck. He returned to the fire. Water boiled in a pot set on a tripod over the flames. He placed a bowl on a rock and poured water over leaves, then covered it to steep. Darkness had trapped them in the steep-sided, hidden valley, and he was himself confined to the circle of firelight with a blanket on the ground, if he even dared attempt sleep. Hearing the scuff of footsteps, he rose.
Miyara set down their lamp beside the bowl. She wiped sweat from her forehead with a cloth and sank into a crouch, rubbing her neck.
“How are things?” he asked, not sure how much he was permitted to know but desperate for any scrap.
“I’ll take the tea. Thanks for brewing it. Priya and I could use a sharp pinch to keep alert.”
“How are you managing without the lamp, if you don’t mind my asking? Or did you find another in the shelter?”
“I did not.” She grinned. “Us reeves taking a break from training at Naya Hall to spend a night in the cave aren’t doing so because we need light, eh?” She laughed.
Joss ran a hand over his head. “What do you mean?”
“Surely you of all people would—” Then she laughed again. “As nervous as you are, Marshal, you’d think you were the father, eh?”
“Or responsible for Captain Anji’s wife. This is scarcely the time for jokes.”
“Aui! No more jokes, then!” Miyara shook her head, lifted up the bowl’s cover, and inhaled. “Eihi! That’s ready, eh? It’s out of your hands, Marshal. The gods will favor her, or curse her, but if you ask me, she’s a tough one. Never a word of complaint. She’s managing as well as any can who must suffer through her first birth. Here, now, let’s take this back. I’ve something I’d like you to see.”
“Is that allowed—? I wouldn’t want to—”
“Not all the way into the cave. If you will, Marshal, come and see. It’s a puzzle. I thought you might have an answer.”
She carried the lamp and he the bowl, warm against his hands. The path led through a tangle of growth unexpected after the dry tableland of the Barrens: candle-flowers, plum, falls of sweet-scented heaven-kiss, moist ripe sunfruit, lush stands of uncultivated jabi. This burgeoning orchard of wild fruit was tended solely by the gods’ blessing. He bumped his head on a ripe sunfruit dangling over the path.
Miyara balanced the lamp in one hand and plucked it with the other. “This way.”
No insects chattered, nor did night-waking animals rustle within the growth. The lack of animal noises was unnerving, but at least a stream babbled in the distance and wind caught among the surrounding crags. They reached the pool, deep and round, rimmed by the remains of an ancient building. A waterfall thundered into the pool from the height. They walked alongside walls no more than knee height, worn down by time and wind and rain. Who had built here? Lived here in such isolation? How had they found their way in, when truly it must be impossible to reach the valley by climbing?
Halfway around, as they neared the curtain of water, Miyara halted. The pool rippled with a constant churning. The waterfall glinted with filaments of light, and at first he thought the lamplight was reflecting within the falls and then he realized she had snuffed the wick. A glow emanated from tendrils of writhing light spilling out of the falling wa
ter and drifting, as if pushed by the action of wind and water, into a cave carved out of the rock that extended behind the falls.
In that protected cave, the reeves from Naya Hall had kitted out a shelter with a chest, flown in, in which they stored a lamp, oil, bedding, bowls and utensils, and a pot for cooking.
In that cave, Mai labored, and he was cursed sure that if anything bad happened to her, he’d be called—quite rightly—to account for their coming here instead of crossing the Olo’o Sea to deposit her into the capable hands of the Ri Amarah women.
“Were those—things—there before?” he asked nervously, as the glittering strands swirled in an eddy of wind and mist.
“I’m not sure. They’d be easy to miss in daylight. They’re like finest quality silk thread, neh?”
“Miya! Are you there?” Priya called from behind the curtain of water, and because of the noise he could not tell if she was frantic or just searching with her voice.
The reeve set down the lamp and took the bowl of tea out of Joss’s hands. “Keep the water hot.”
“There’s nothing else I can do?”
She shrugged. “This isn’t men’s business, eh?”
Walking on a narrow rim that hugged the rock wall, she vanished behind the spray.
A splash disturbed the pool. A dark shape shouldered out of the roil and so quickly slipped beneath that it might have been only a trick of the light, or a reminder from the gods that he was intruding. He started back around the pool, but before he reached the path he heard his name called and turned back.
Miyara waved wildly at him, both hands aloft.
He ran back. Wisps slithered in the air around him, and when one brushed his cheek he got such a jolt, like a stinging burn, that he yelped.
She called, “Marshal, we don’t know what to do. You have to come.”
He followed her along the narrow path, steadying himself with a hand along the rock wall on his right while water poured past to his left. The mist pelted him, an oddly iron taste on his tongue. They passed out of the spray and into the cave. She halted. A step behind, he stared into the cave, which extended deep into the rock, a haven lit so brightly that he blinked before he saw Mai.
“What do we do?” cried Miyara.
With a plank wedged across and between rocks, they had set up a birthing stool halfway back in the cave, over a hollow smoothed into the cave’s dirt floor. Mai leaned into a cushion made by her folded clothing, but she was herself limned by filaments clustering around and over her as if to smother her. And yet she breathed; she grunted, and Priya said,
“Hold your breath as I say the prayer of opening. Now.” She spoke words in a steady voice, while Mai gripped the edge of the plank and strained.
Priya was her own self, unencumbered, but the filaments traced Mai’s form as if a translucent second skin wrapped her, so that she blazed.
“Here it comes, plum blossom. Look down. Do you see it? This is the head of your child.”
Panting, seemingly oblivious of the threads of light, Mai bent her head to stare down between her legs. Her sweaty face changed expression. “I can’t look!” she cried. And then, “I have to push again!”
“Take in a breath. Hold it.” Priya spilled words Joss did not understand, as Mai pressed her mouth shut and bore down.
Miyara grabbed his elbow. “Quickly! We must weave a blessing. She has no clan to surround her. The child will be cursed if no blessing greets it!”
The hells!
She stamped to begin, and though he had no particular skill, he was like anyone who had heard the chants and songs all his life. He could stumble along in her company.
May the Earth Mother greet you, little flower.
May the Air Mother greet you, little breeze.
May the Fire Mother greet you, little flame.
May the Water Mother greet you, little wave.
From this angle, he could not see beyond Mai’s gleaming body, but as Priya extended her hands to catch the baby as it was born, the threads poured off Mai to fill the hollow until it seemed to burn, drowning the newborn child.
Mai sagged back, reclining against the cloth-draped rock with a gasped sigh.
“Marshal!” cried Priya. “What are these things? Are they living creatures? Or something else? What do we do?”
The baby wailed, and the tendrils spun as though on the strength of that tiny voice and whirled into the air and blinked out. The child ceased crying.
Miyara faltered, voice breaking, but within the darkness she stamped and kept singing.
Be woven into the land with this song.
Be strong. We cherish you.
Joss stumbled out along the path and groped along the ruined wall until he found the lamp. It took him three tries to light the wick with his flint, and by the time he got back into the cave the infant had been placed on Mai’s chest, still attached by a cord pulsing with faint flashes of blue as though the last tendrils had actually slipped into its umbilical. Above, a weave of light bridged the cave’s high ceiling, glimmering faintly.
“One more!” exclaimed Mai, and she sucked in a breath and pushed again.
Priya caught a red mass in a bowl.
Miyara hurried forward to offer tea to the new mother. “You have to name the child before you cut the cord,” she said to Mai.
Mai’s eyes were closed, and at length she opened them to stare at the baby, who opened its tiny eyes as if in answer. “The father names a child,” she said, in a remarkably ordinary voice. “I must wait for Anji.”
Miyara glanced at Joss as if for support. “That’s not our way,” she said. “It’s—”
“Never mind it,” said Joss hastily. “She’ll name the child, or he will, as they please.”
“I guess we’re uncle and aunt now,” said Miyara. Then, as an afterthought, she added, “That’s how we do things here, Mai.”
Mai smiled wearily, too exhausted to move as Priya washed her and bound a pad of linen torn from Miyara’s shirt to absorb her bleeding. “And I am glad of it, for I thank you, both of you. What is it, Priya? A girl, or a boy?”
“A boy, mistress.”
“Just as Grandmother said. Aiyi! I thought it would never come out!” Her skin gleamed from sweat, and all at once Joss saw how naked she was.
“Marshal,” said Priya, “please fetch water so I can wash child and mother. It must be cooled enough so as not to burn, but still generously warm.”
He flinched as though he had been slapped, although she had spoken in an entirely pleasant tone. He hurried out, carrying the lamp. Thunder rumbled among the crags, and the air felt charged, ready to snap and spark. High in the air, almost out of range of his vision, a fireling winked into existence and vanished, and then a second, and ten more, and after that more than he could count, like kinfolk come to weave a new child into the heart of their clan, chanting the greeting.
He stopped to stare, but they were already gone.
Eiya! Never for him a child called from beyond the Spirit Gate to join father and mother; he must be content as an uncle, and unaccountably he wept as he trudged the long dirt path to the fire pit, where flames blazed and the wind caught sparks and sent them tumbling. Away up in the mountains, lightning flared, and thunder boomed, and as he hooked the pot off the tripod, rain washed over the valley, cleansing everything in its path.
“WHY DO YOU follow me?” asked Kirit.
“I’m the hells unlikely to follow them.” Downstream along the bank of the River Istri, Marit indicated distant lights sweeping northward through the sky out of the Toskala.
“They are looking for us,” said Kirit. “It is safer if we do not travel together.”
“You don’t trust me.”
The girl shrugged.
“I thank you anyway,” continued Marit, “for not joining them. I’m not your enemy, Kirit. But I have a cursed good idea that they’re headed back to their camp, to see if Hari has woken. To give him his staff. Then they’ll be after both of us.”
>
“He will betray us?”
“I like him. But that doesn’t mean we can trust him.”
“Or that I can trust you,” said the girl. “Do not follow me. Maybe you are their spy.”
“I’m not,” said Marit more with weariness than heat. “But I’m not going to debate that now. At the turn of the next month—when Lion falls into Ibex—I will walk the shore of the Salt Sea where the spine of the Earth Mother cradles the birthing waters.” The girl stared at her, devoid of emotion. “If you don’t know of it, you being an outlander, the Salt Sea lies northwest beyond Heaven’s Ridge, where the gods cleft the Hundred from the lands beyond. When a new reeve finishes her first year of training, her circuit of the land, that’s the last place she visits: to lay an offering of flowers at the Earth Mother’s womb. You’ll know the place when you see it.”
“You go back to them, now?”
“I am not one of them, Kirit. Surely you saw they meant to destroy me. If you won’t trust me enough to ally with me, then what if they find you in the end? Five, to judge one. They’re after you now, just like they’re after me. And most likely they’re after the envoy, wherever he’s hiding. As for me, I’m going to find my staff.”
REEVES PATROLLING OVER the Liya Pass had once commonly met at Candle Rock to exchange news and to replenish wood for the signal fire kept ready in case of emergency. But the fire-pits were half filled with dust and debris, the white stones that had once ringed the hollows tumbled out of line. Under the craggy overhang, spiders and rock mice had made comfortable homes in the depleted woodpile.
What a bright day that had been, Joss waiting for her, him so young and her so eager. Where had that young woman gone? What we have lost we can never get back again.
Marit stood where she and Joss had so long ago shared the embrace of the Devourer. With the setting sun behind her, she looked east toward the ridge of hill held by the hierarchs to be sacred to the Lady of Beasts, to whom she had served her year’s apprenticeship as a girl of fifteen. Ammadit’s Tit could be mistaken for no other landmark.
