Stonewiser

by Dora Machado

  She took stock of the shelter while she ate. Kael must have arranged to have provisions retrieved from Ars before he came to the executioners' camp. She was glad to see some of her things as well, the few garments she owned, her pack, her stones, her leather-bound engrossments and annotations, her scribing floor desk and her tool baskets. The man was a stubborn ox, but she had to admit that when it came to planning, he was brilliant.

  With a lick of her fingers, she finished her meal. She washed her wounds, and in doing so, discovered the grime of the last two days. She scrubbed herself mercilessly. She may be a rogue stonewiser, but she had always abided by the Guild's cleanliness rules. Besides, she liked to smell fresh.

  Clean and fed, she clad herself with a fresh shift from her pack and sat down on the pallet to examine the banishment bracelet. It was an object that defied reason. Its mysterious power evoked the stones, yet it was obviously a thing of the Domain. A number of Domainer coppers could be seen engraved in Generosity's link, a Domainer buckler was emblazoned on Pride's link, and two Domainer half-moon swords were crossed on Courage's link. She found no trace of the hinges and clasps that had been there before. She tried to pull the thing over her knuckles, but it wouldn't fit. On the contrary, it seemed to tighten in proportion to her efforts. Strange. Was her imagination playing tricks on her? Nay. When she fiddled with the bracelet, it stuck to her arm with the grit of a thousand suckers.

  Nine links. Nine months. That's all the time she had to find the tale that the executioners' required. At the breaking of the wall, Mistress Grimly, the Guild's Prime Hand, had appropriated the seven twin stones that contained the tale of the Blood's split. By now those stones were buried or worse, destroyed. But what Sariah needed now was different. She needed a tale that would help unify the divided Blood, heal the wounds of a broken world, and build consensus among the fiercest of foes. By Meliahs, she needed a miracle, a stone tale capable of fostering peace on a warring world.

  She didn't have much in terms of promising leads, only the work she had done this last year and the fragmented information she had wised from other stones. She also had Zemi's words, the final ranting of the intrusion created by Zeminaya, the most powerful stonewiser of her time. The justice of the execration ends with me, the intrusion had said. The Shield dies with me. The Blood we split and the proof is with the bane of the pure. The rot we made ourselves, because we created simmering fire and flesh, we broke Meliahs’ pact, we forsook labor and sweat.

  She remembered the shock of realizing the truth, the desperation of knowing what neither one of the Bloods was likely to accept—that they were both part of the same blood. Old Blood wisers had created the New Blood to labor in its stead. But as the rot destroyed the Old World, the oppressed New Blood had turned on their creators, expelled the Old Blood from the Goodlands, and condemned them to die in the Rotten Domain under the false belief they were the New Blood.

  She had known then that the revelation would be hard to accept for both Bloods. What she hadn't known was that both Bloods would find her discoveries beyond disagreeable, untenable. Far from crumbling, the powers that had ruthlessly ruled the world survived to terrorize it. Her formidable foes had doubled and multiplied. The Guild. The Shield. Mistress Grimly. Master Arron. In the throes of a changing world, her enemies, and yes, even some of her friends, favored her death for different if valid reasons. The executioners' bid for her life was just one example of the dangers that stalked her. Kael, the inveterate cynic, had seen it for what it was. Sariah had to be careful. She didn't have Kael's battle-honed instincts.

  Was there a lost tale out there, a forgotten stone capable of bringing unity to a divided world? And if there was, would she be able to find it before it was too late? She had one sentence from the intrusion to guide her. The Blood we split and the proof is with the bane of the pure. Who were the pure? What and where was their bane? How could it lead her to find the tale she sought?

  Unable to find a way to undo the bracelet, Sariah fetched a needle chisel from her tool basket and began to probe the clasp for a weak point.

  “Ouch!” She dropped the chisel. Had the bracelet just stung her? With the pain fresh in her mind, she couldn't blame her imagination, but she grabbed the chisel and tried to force open the silvery lid again. The pain returned, like a wasp sting, only worse.

  What kind of power did the bracelet conceal? And where was the power hidden? It had to be in the stones. Anticipating a trap, or at the very least, a snaring trance, Sariah braced for a bruising contact. Cautiously, she tapped on one of the red stones. Nothing. Perhaps it needed a firmer contact. She tapped harder. Nothing again. She rubbed the stone against her palm, first lightly, then more firmly. Complete and utter blankness. Odd. Maybe the wising was concealed in one of the other stones?

  Surely the stones had to be the key. She tried all the tricks she knew. She queried all the stones individually and then together. She did it gingerly at first, then more forcefully. Nothing. The nine stones on the bracelet were cold and silent like the dead. The eye on the clasp remained stubbornly closed.

  She wasn't going to give up so easily. If stonewising didn't give her any answers, she would try something else. She grit her teeth and applied her chisel to the links’ junctions. There should have been hinges there, but there weren't any. Instead, the bracelet flowed seamlessly and her chisel found no place for purchase. She even tried to pry out the red crystals. Her pain was for nothing. There was no weakness or leverage to be found on the bracelet. All nine crystals appeared to be one with the cuff.

  She tried to saw it off, first with her knife, then with one of Kael's spare rotfish fangs. The bracelet's gold finish didn't yield, not even a tiny chip or a slight dent. Her wrist was a different story. It was bruised and chafed, and it hurt as if she was sawing off her hand. Was she going crazy or was she suffering the bracelet's vengeance on her own flesh?

  “Enough of this.” She picked up one of Kael's axes, braced her wrist over her writing desk, and landed a well-aimed blow. The pain that exploded in her skull blinded her and left her seeing in shades of black and red.

  “What by the rot are you doing?”

  Sariah jerked to her feet. She had been so involved in trying to rid herself of the accursed bracelet that she hadn't realized that the deck had stopped moving and that Kael, with his pulling harness still on, had entered the shelter.

  “I was trying to get this off.” Wasn't it obvious? She was still reeling from the pain.

  Kael snatched the ax from her hands. “You're going to kill yourself. You can't get that thing off. Nobody but the chief executioner can. Think, Sariah—what good would it be to them if you, or anybody else for that matter, could take off the bracelet?”

  “You mean to tell me that there isn't a way?”

  “Not one that involves you surviving the attempt.”

  “Lovely then. And to think I despise gaudy jewelry.”

  “Don't make light of this.”

  Time to face him squarely. “You shouldn't have come.”

  The intensity of his black and green stare locked on her. The harmonious flow of his straight nose, the defined lines of his tightly pressed lips and the sleek construction of his jaw would have made for a beautiful face. But the scarred eyebrow and the discordant black eye broke all sense of facial harmony and added a perpetually fierce expression to his features.

  The broken brow lifted on his forehead. “Do you want me to go then?”

  “Aye. You should go.” And then, “Maybe.”

  She was all too aware of his nearness, of the irrepressible sense of wholeness that enveloped her when he embraced her, of the inevitable course of his mouth toward hers. Her senses were lost to his intensity. She breathed him, the heated air he exhaled, the distant hint of laurel clinging to his hair, the salty scent of days of travel, toil and sweat, mixed with the smell of the Barren Flats’ acid emissions. She could feel the hunger in him, in his shoulders’ tension, in his hands’ clutch around her waist. Her own
hunger was no less rebellious, wanting to burst from where she kept it contained. It was always like this between them, a struggle of wills, a battle with restraint.

  “We have very little time.” In a swift motion, he pulled the shift over her head, pushed her back on the blankets, and parted her legs with his knee. All the while, his lips were intent on hers, drinking her breath and filling her mouth with the taste of him, as if he knew she needed the strokes of his tongue to survive.

  She slid her hands under his shirt and ran them over the contours of his familiar body. He was tall and powerful, but not bulky with the pretentious extravagance of muscle built for show. Instead, his neck, back and arms were strong from pulling his deck through the Barren Flats. His legs were lithe from jumping and running in the dead water. Her fingers tripped over the scars on his chest. No one knew those scars as well as she did, because some of those were her fault too, and always a stark reminder she had almost lost him once.

  “It's been too long,” he mumbled apologetically while he fumbled with his breeches’ ties. “A fortnight. Wicked goddess, I thought I was ailing.”

  She knew the thirst and suffered it willingly because the emptiness of their separation, terrible as it was, was better than giving him up. Theirs was an unusual bond, tried and tested, as demanding as a twin stone trance and as fundamental to her existence as breathing air. She didn't try to understand it, not anymore. Her wiser's mind was at a loss to comprehend her heart's mysteries. The lust she couldn't explain either, so she acknowledged it in the only way she could, granting him berth.

  He didn't bother with the rest of his clothes. He came into her firmly, claiming occupancy of every space he bore in her body's depths. But his hands were tender when they traced the bruise on her forehead, when they spanned her waist and cupped her breasts with a connoisseur's delicacy. The black and green eyes beheld her as if she was a hard-earned prize. She should have been afraid, knowing full well from her years at the Guild that done roughly the sport could cause her injury, but she was not scared.

  Her body was the gift she gave him freely. Raised to serve without a mind for the self, it was no small privilege to her. In the ways of the Guild, she hadn't known parents or kin. She had only known the obligations of her leases, the services required by her masters and mistresses, and the use of her body for others’ pleasure, a bothersome, most often harmless chore which was a part of her duties. Then she had met Kael and everything changed. She thought she knew why.

  “May I?” she whispered in his ear.

  “Aye, Sariah. Always when we're together like this.”

  She pressed her hands against his back. His emotions burned through her palms, reaching out to stroke her mind like the clearest of stone tales. Need. Lust. Affection. It had been the flood of his affection that had percolated through the drought of duty and allowed her scorched soul to discover her own reservoir. It was that affection that touched her now, transforming something common and lurid into a gratifying sharing for the generous purpose of each others’ free and willful pleasure.

  The clips on his pulling harness jiggled at his pace. His weave chafed against her skin. She could feel the struggle in him, the lust advancing on the affection, not suppressing it, not exactly, but teaming up with his need to burst his restraint.

  “When I saw you there—” He couldn't finish.

  “I'm here now.” She smiled at her own uncharitable wickedness, relishing the power that a thrust and a twist granted her body over his, appreciating her own boldness, the shivers that shot through him, the pleasures she unleashed.

  His eyes narrowed to slits. The furious grin turned up at the corners of his mouth. He pinned her wrists in his hand, cutting her connection to his emotions. It prevented her from outright witnessing the barbaric surge of the beast she cherished. The inevitable collision loomed in his eyes’ luminous horizon. And to think that until she met him, she hadn't known such bliss existed.

  She gave herself to the moment, because the moment was all she had. But she knew better. Danger, fear and despair watched undeterred from the dark gallery of her impending fate.

  Five

  WHEN HER MIND next reclaimed her senses, they were both breathless and tangled in each other's arms, still joined, satisfied and yet starting again, lips engaged with kisses and tongues.

  “We have to stop,” Kael murmured.

  She was lost when their mouths parted as a result of his will power, not hers. Curse Meliahs, claiming her service thrice, to the stones, to the legacy, to the only man she had ever wanted to serve of her own accord. The attachment was as grave as a deadly ailment and as debilitating as the stone madness, and yet she, a wiser trained to care only for the stones, relished him like the rarest stone. It was an unthinkable bias for a stonewiser, but at least it was one she had chosen for herself.

  He leaned his forehead against hers and exhaled slowly, reclaiming his discipline and hopefully hers. She sensed him escaping her body's clutch. Then he was gone from her arms and she mourned the loss of his touch.

  He inspected the eel bite on her leg. “You skipped the salve.”

  “Don't fret. It's just a nick. I had a stone, you know. I dropped it like a witless ninny.”

  “Witless? Nay.” He rummaged through his sack. “Witless was to dismiss the runners. Witless was to tell Torana not to fetch me. Witless was to leave Ars before I returned.”

  “What else did you expect me to do?”

  He rolled his eyes, a gesture that always heated Sariah's not-so-tepid blood. “Use your good sense?”

  “And blow up our deck and Ars? Get the children killed?”

  He pulled out a flat jar from where he scooped a good bit of yellow salve and began to spread it over the eel bite. “Do you know what scares me?”

  “Not the executioners, that I know.”

  “You believe it.”

  “What?”

  “That you can manage on your own. Always. That asking for help, or waiting for it, is somehow wrong.”

  “The executioners came before their time, that's all.”

  He worked the salve into her wound until she winced. “You can't go at this alone. You'll die if you try.”

  It was her burden, her duty. And better she than he. “It's not so good for your lungs to run the water as fast as you did. And your leg, you're still regaining your strength—”

  “My lungs and my leg are fine. I can do my duty well enough.”

  Duty. She hated the word. She had never wanted to be duty to him. Not to him.

  He finished with the salve and stuffed the jar back in his bag. “You should have sent for me right away. You should have dallied and delayed. Somebody tipped off the executioners. They knew what they were doing.”

  “Ars. That's what they want. And you gave it to them.”

  The black-eyed glower was dark like a bad omen. “Do you think so? You're alive. You're with me. We can manage the rest.”

  “The deal you made is too expensive, too risky, for you, for your kin, for Ars. We've worked hard, I give you that, but our leads have been weak.”

  Light twinkled in his eyes.

  Sariah's heart raced. “What?”

  “You shouldn't hold me in such low regard when I hedge my bets. I learned from the best. You. Remember?”

  Did he know? Sariah probed cautiously. “Have you learned something new?”

  “Me?” His chuckle was devoid of mirth. “Not me, not really. You, on the other hand…”

  Sariah's breath caught in her throat. She hadn't told anyone, especially not him. “How?”

  “You're a bad liar to start. And I live with you. Recall that? I knew you were up to something even as I left.”

  Sariah wished she could deny it, but her face was hot like a chunk of flaming coal.

  “There's the small matter of your bag.” He gestured toward the pack now stowed among her wares. “The one I found on the stonewiser's deck, packed nice and tidy with a few days’ provisions.”

  Sh
e gulped dryly.

  “Never mind that you sent away my runners. That's a small detail, really. Where were you going, Sariah?” he asked softly, a poor attempt at masking his temper.

  “I— Well—”

  “North, I think. That's why I started pulling this way.”

  How could he have known?

  “You packed your heavy mantle.”

  “Oh.” She felt like the dumbest wench in the Domain.

  “I thought Davenhorn at first, seeing you packed for about four days, but then I spoke to Mia and she said you recently visited with Torana's friend, Agatha.”

  Damn the man, there wasn't a daft bone in the whole of his body. Well, she hadn't done anything wrong. She was free to do as she wished and visiting a friend was not a gravity. Was it?

  He stared at her with a stern look of disappointment on his face. She hated that look and she loathed the thought of letting him down, but she had no illusions he would understand her reasoning. For good and for bad, he was too righteous to consider life's little nuances, too virtuous to admit to the usefulness of vice, and too pure of mind and heart to embrace something as corruptive and convenient as a touch of deception here and there.

  “Nafa, I think.” He startled her out of her thoughts. “Agatha hails from there and you would have wanted to know as much about the settlement as you could. I hope you got good directions, Sariah. The Domain is unforgiving to the unprepared and the foolish.”

  “Of course I got good directions. Do you think I'm stupid?”

  “Only occasionally.” He quieted her mounting indignation with a finger to her lips. “Why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn't lie to you.”

  “Even Mia knows better than that. Omission is no less of a lie. Neither does it count as an attempt at half-truth.”

  He was right, of course, but she wasn't ready to admit it. Besides, she was no mindless wench, no empty-headed scoundrel running scams for profit. She was a stonewiser, albeit a flawed one, but one who understood her duty and the importance of the legacy she had undertaken. She was trapped, angry and unable to do right no matter how much she tried.