Perhaps we could have a few years.…
It was an irresponsible thought—the Far still needed her to produce an heir—and it faded as she recalled Far after Far after Far, each playing the part of her mother until the time came for their own final earth. The blessing of shortened lives …
As if waking from a dream, Mira realized she’d stopped digging. Slick with sweat, she turned to look at Elan. He stood waist-deep in the barrow he dug, staring back. Her king.
“You look like her.” Fondness and sorrow vied in his face. “Same skin, like snow. Same eyes, clouds after a storm. Hair like tilled earth … I miss her.”
Lyra. Mira’s older sister and Elan’s wife, gone to her earth not two cycles ago.
She nodded. “You should rest.”
“There’s much to be done.” He gestured to the grave she dug. “For someone you know?”
She shook her head, and worked in silence for a time. Exhausted, she finally had to stop. Her king kept at the hard soil.
“I want you to stay,” he said, glancing her way between shovelfuls of earth. “I know the importance of what the Sheason asks, but you’re needed here. Another Far can accompany Tahn and Sutter. It’s the guardianship that’s important, not the guard.”
Mira leaned back against the lip of the grave. “I can’t stay, Elan, and neither can you.”
He gave her a reserved expression. “You mean Convocation.”
“You have to go. I promised to claim that seat myself if you would not.”
“The Far have never attended Convocation,” he said.
“The regent needs your support this time. Without it, I don’t think we’ll push the Quiet back again.” She surveyed the plain of Far dead.
Elan followed her gaze, and let out a long sigh.
The Veil that held the Quiet inside the Bourne was weakening. This field of dead was proof of that. And if the Veil fell, the tide of Quiet that would flood the Eastlands would be immense. The regent of Recityv had called a Convocation of Seats—all the kings and rulers of the east—to form an alliance to meet that tide.
“Our people need an heir, Mira. We’re the end of the bloodlines, you and I.”
“Does that matter anymore?” She stared into the shadows of the grave around her. “I saw the book burned to ashes.”
When she looked up again, surprise and disappointment hung in her king’s eyes.
“The responsibility to lead is still ours,” he said with firmness. “The lives of these people…” He looked around at those burying the dead. “… they still matter. It will be hard to rebuild. Harder still to give them purpose. But that begins with me, and you, and the child we must give them.”
Elan’s young face showed a different kind of concern. There had been many Far kings; their names graced the walls of the Forum, forever etched upon the dark stone. Like them, Elan was a great warlord. But he was unique. He’d also found a way to make their lives feel individual, significant beyond the commission of guarding the Language.
“And there is still hope,” he added, a light in his eyes. “The scholars are scouring the histories now. Some suggest that a child born to us could have the Aloin gift, could be a native speaker of the Covenant. That’s the gift that lives in your blood. The gift that only you can give a child.” Elan paused. Around them echoed the sound of graves being dug.
“We’ve never seen this, Elan—”
“Because we’ve never needed to. We’ve only taught our daily speech, routine words, the training figures. Perhaps if we—”
“Elan, I can’t bear you a child … because I’ve broken my oath.”
His brow tightened.
She told him of the battle in the Saeculorum, of Tahn’s shot to save her instead of the boy, Penit. She explained that she’d taken on herself the cost of that selfish choice, to help Tahn succeed at Tillinghast.
“Oathbreaker,” Elan whispered, his gaze distant.
She hadn’t heard the word since Tillinghast. Hearing it now, spoken by her king, struck her more painfully than she would have thought.
She’d known him a long time. They’d been friends who could share secrets, so she knew the expressions of his heart. What she saw now chilled her, if for no other reason than she’d never seen it in his eyes. Uncertainty. It touched his face briefly, replaced by the grit of a king who’d faced annihilation before.
“There may be a way for you.” He let a couple of Far move past them before continuing. “West across the Soliel there’s a people with a gift of their own. The Laeodalin. You probably know them as the handsingers. They’re reclusive, but they’re old cousins of the Far. If you can find them, their handsong may be able to help you. Help us.”
Fresh hope flared inside her. She remembered the stories of the handsingers. They possessed a song known as the Soriah, said to be the gentlest song that ever changed a heart. They wove their music with movement and touched the quietest part of those who heard it. Elan was right. The Laeodalin handsong might be able to remove the stain. She could be whole again. She could bear her people an heir. And the Far might even reclaim the Language they’d lost.
But there was a private, more selfish hope to go with the rest. If she were whole again, she’d reclaim her inheritance … and meet her mother in the next life. Mira would get to hold the woman who’d cradled her in those first few years before dying at her own Change.
“Go to Recityv,” Mira said. “Answer the call of the regent. Help the Sheason convince the others to pledge their support to Convocation. I’ll find the Laeodalin, and hope that they can heal me.” She paused. “Thank you, Elan.”
He nodded, still waiting on her answer.
“And as soon as I can, I’ll return to bear you an heir.”
Elan didn’t seem relieved. “Such journeys have a way of taking more time than we believe they will.”
“I know,” she said. “But a child born now won’t have much of a future if this Convocation fails. You saw what happened today.” She nodded out at the plain, where thousands of Quiet lay on the shale. “If we can’t push the Quiet back, any heir I give the Far will meet the same fate as human children will. Your presence at the regent’s table will convince the doubtful. And your army alongside theirs will make a difference.” She crawled out of the grave she’d been digging and went to take his hand; not in affection, but in reassurance. “I’ll hurry.”
Elan finally nodded. He reached to the side of the grave he was digging and picked up a long bundle wrapped in heavy, dark leather. He regarded it a moment, then handed it up to her.
“What’s this?” She began to untie it.
He said nothing, only watched, as she unbundled a new set of swords. Or rather, an old set … her father’s. “It isn’t allowed,” she said first. Then she looked up. “You knew.”
“I’m glad you told me yourself, but yes, I knew. We’ve been friends too long for me not to notice. But oath or not, you need a matched set. And your father would have wanted you to have them. The quality is splendid.”
She then noticed a smaller rolled piece of leather beneath the handles. She unrolled it, and held it up to the moonlight.
“A map,” he explained. “It’ll help you find the Laeodalin. If there’s danger or threat of losing that,” he pointed to the map, “destroy it. They guard their privacy, and so should we.”
Her esteem for him grew double in those moments. But he waited for no gratitude. Taking up his pick, he started again to dig at the hard soil.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lamentations: The Future
Let us not forget that beside absolute sound is related sound. The very real power of the latter belongs to anyone willing to offer song as a comfort.
—First tenet in the instruction of absolute sound, taught to Lyren and Souden alike in the cathedral of Descant
A sound of great languor woke her. Wendra sat up, chill and fever still rippling across her skin. Her bedchamber lay in darkness, a lighter charcoal color where her window stood. I
t was music she heard. A hymn sung in a tongue she didn’t know. The language didn’t matter, though. She knew this hymn rang out for the dead.
It was beautiful. The song didn’t rush, didn’t swell. The wailing so often associated with songs for the fallen wasn’t present in this lament. It wafted with a steady, unending expression of loss. It had been composed with what her father had called “the sad notes.” Belamae called them halftones, notes between notes often used to compose dirges.
She stared out through her window at the Far king’s garden, and lost herself in the sweet anguish of the song itself, which—to her ear—bore an undertone of hope.
“Tell me about the song,” she said to Sendera, who occupied her shadow in the corner.
“A great many fell today,” Sendera answered.
“I want to go,” Wendra said. “Can you take me?”
“You’re not welcome there.” Sendera spoke without any particular prejudice.
Wendra turned to her. “I should go. Please. Many of those they sing for … I’m to blame.”
“That’s why you cannot.”
If not for the guilt running through her over the deaths of the Far, she’d have marveled more at this ability awakened in her. As she sat, thinking back, she could remember only one time she’d invoked its power to do anything other than tear down. The first time. She’d sung her song box tune, and healed the fever that had gotten inside her after being wounded by a Bar’dyn.
“I’d like to mourn with them. I owe them that.”
Sendera kept a long, taut silence, before saying simply, “No.”
“Then take me closer? I’d like to hear the music better.”
The Far hesitated a moment, then stood. Wendra dressed quickly, and together they passed into the Naltus streets, following the sound of the lament through the city of black shale. The streets were empty, windows mostly dark. Everything smelled of dusty stone and timber thirsting for rain.
After a time, they came to a great building raised in shale, like the rest of the city, but whose exterior had been scored in tight script—names. Rendered small, the names began at the doors and ran in columns to the roof some thirty strides high. And on each side of the hall, long lines of Far waited patiently, silently, to file through side doors.
Sendera pulled Wendra’s cowl up and forward, obscuring her face. “Leave this on.”
They stood across a wide street from the great house of song, listening. For most of an hour neither of them moved. It helped to be closer, but Wendra wanted to join them. Knowing that she couldn’t, she soon found the song too painful to listen to.
She turned to Sendera. “I need to walk.”
The Far woman started away. When Wendra didn’t follow, Sendera looked back.
“Alone,” Wendra said.
The Far woman wasn’t her jailor. Her duty was only to watch while she slept. “Keep the hood up,” she advised, and returned in the direction of Elan’s manor.
As Wendra walked the cool evening streets of Naltus, heading as far away from the funeral hymn as she could, she thought about how easily she’d lost control that day. How the song seemed to take over. But mostly she thought about the Far who slept alone tonight, and the beds left empty. Many of those emptinesses were because of her.
She hadn’t meant to do it, of course. She’d wanted only to sing an end to the Quiet. For all the damage they were doing to the lives of so many, she’d sung to end them.
Sometime later, she realized the streets were silent. No funeral dirge. She kept walking, and soon heard another lament. Not a chorus of voices. A single voice. And not a song. A fragile sound. A quiet sobbing. Wendra followed it, and found herself outside the window of a Far home. She peered through a small opening between the curtains to see a child curled on his bed. He might have been five.
She heard it in his voice—he’d lost loved ones in the day’s battle. And when a child wept so, it meant a parent. Maybe both parents.
Wendra leaned against the wall of the house to brace herself. Is this my fault?
She needed to make it right. But it was a foolish thought. There was no answer for the loss the little boy was feeling. But she could do something.
With a softness such that one hearing it might think it a dream, she began to hum. Not a bold sound. Not a song to cheer. She hummed a lullaby. One she would have sung for her own child, had he lived.
She gave it all the empathy she knew how to sing. She wove it beyond what she had originally written, making it new, making it for this boy. It carried apology in it. It held tones of reminder for memories he could cling to. Mostly, it soothed. It said to know that he would be all right. That his parents loved him. And to know that the feeling of their love never needed to go away.
She didn’t lend it the influence of her Leiholan gift. She was afraid what might happen. This time, she simply sang with what tenderness she could. There was a common place she shared with the boy, a place of loss. She sang the sound of that, and shared the sense of healing she’d hoped for after her own losses. After losing her own parents. She could still see the fresh earth being shoveled over their bodies laid down in the ground. She could still feel the sense of permanent separation that followed each shovelful of dirt. No more songs together. Not even a chance to say good-bye. Her song grew thick in her throat with emotion.
She continued to sing long after the boy had ceased to weep and fallen asleep. She sang for herself. And the pull toward Descant was stronger than before, to learn more about her song. How to control it. Strengthen it. For the next time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
An Overdue Conversation
A good astronomer—hell, any good scientist—finds little value in the notion of destiny. That’s an entirely different matter from predictive ends that follow from close observation.
—From On the Reconciliation of Poetry and Science, an examination of providence, astronomy annals, Aubade Grove
Most doors in Naltus, including those in Elan’s manor, didn’t lock. Such would violate Far hospitality. And locks were largely unnecessary, anyway—the Far didn’t bother with valuable personal items, and were well-mannered besides. So, Tahn quietly pushed the door open. He wouldn’t wait another hour to have this conversation.
He stepped inside the bedchamber and gently nudged the door shut. Then he turned, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dark. In the opposite corner, a bed squatted in the shadows, where he could hear the long pull of a sleeper’s breath.
He was nearly ready to wake Vendanj, when the Sheason asked, “Things to discuss in private?”
“Why did you take me away from the Grove?” Tahn took one step into the room.
Vendanj rolled over to face him. “More memories?”
Tahn pressed. “You must have known I was happy there.”
“Why do you ask questions you know the answers to?” Vendanj made no effort to get up. He squeezed the bridge of his nose, as one with a lingering headache. His movements, even his words, were slow.
“To protect me. Protect the Grove.” Tahn took another step into the room.
Vendanj spoke with a slow sigh. “You were fond of the Grove. More than fond. And of the many reasons to veil your past, one was to keep you from leaving the Hollows—where you were safe—and returning there.” Vendanj motioned to a chair near his bed. “Please, sit down.”
In the man’s words Tahn heard an invitation to learn more about his own past. He quickly sat.
Vendanj leveled a thoughtful look at him and pointed at his bow. “You have certain aptitudes, Tahn. Certain abilities. Everyone does. Things that set them apart. And because of it, there’s a role for everyone to play in what we’re doing.”
“You mean Braethen and Wendra.”
“I mean everyone,” he replied without any pointed correction. “Most of this help will never be seen or heard. Small sacrifices. Endings without clamor…” Those last words sounded like Vendanj was quoting a favorite line of poetry, and his voice trailed off for a mome
nt. “For you there was Tillinghast because of the way you draw your bow.”
How I used to draw my bow.
“We haven’t had time to talk about the children.” A look of understanding touched his face. “I’m sorry. It was a difficult thing you did. But it was the right thing. For us, but also for the small ones. Don’t let it unsettle you for too long.”
Vendanj then told Tahn about his own child. An unborn child. A child that perished when his wife died under the poor physic ministrations of the League. A small smile touched the Sheason’s lips as he spoke of the future his child might have had. It was as fanciful as Tahn had ever seen or heard Vendanj.
“She would have been ten come spring.” Vendanj made a circular motion with his hand, as though rolling time forward. “I like to think of her making me drawings. We would have wrestled together, and she would have laughed when I let her pin me down. And in the early morning we would have walked the markets looking for the perfect apple. Except she would have made us buy one badly bruised, because she would have hated to think that no one else would buy the poor thing.”
He went on like that for a while. Sometime later, and without pause, he transitioned to imagining the futures of the children Tahn had mercifully killed that day. He gave them life, conceiving specific moments that felt as though they’d actually been lived, and lived fully. Vendanj never rushed, never sounded as though there was anything more important to be saying.
And when he did pause, he invited Tahn to imagine with him.
So Tahn began, fighting through regret that burned in his eyes. “The first boy … I think he was a prankster. He liked to sneak up on his friends and shriek like a demon and watch them jump.”
Vendanj laughed, his eyes looking like a man who saw it clearly. “He’ll grow to be another Sutter.”
Tahn laughed, too. “But he was also the first one to step into a fight to defend a friend,” Tahn added. “And at night, when the other children started to weep with fear because another day had passed without their parents coming to save them … he sat by them with an arm around their shoulders and explained how it took a long time to climb the Pall, and that their parents were coming. Telling them to be patient.”
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