Flesh and Bone

by Robin Lythgoe

  “That’s what Papa always said.” Her smile was wistful.

  Sherakai started, soft and a little uncertain, reacquainting with the song he had daydreamed to so long ago. He closed his eyes and remembered the magic of his dreams. Remembered his visions of that one imaginary woman he could give his heart to. For her, he could be noble and brave, kind and true. As he gained confidence, his voice gained volume. The words and the notes plucked at his soul, and his mother wound the music of the harp around him like a fragile ribbon. He forgot—for just a moment—his terror and despair and put his entire being into the song.

  He could love like that… Wanted to love like that.

  The harp song ended before the words did, and the final, quavering note hung in an air full of hope and promise. Sherakai took in a breath, letting it out again in a lingering sigh.

  A muffled whimper broke what he realized was utter silence. Strange silence. Tears ran down Imarasu’s face. Kanya beamed as if she’d won some prize. He turned—and froze.

  Elinasha stood in the door with her fist against her mouth. Tears glittered on her cheeks as well.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  “Nothing.” Imarasu sniffed, dabbing at her tears. “You sound like your father.”

  “I do?” he asked, doubtful, apprehensive all over again.

  She licked her lips and gathered her composure. “He used to sing that song when he was courting me. It was—” She set the harp upright carefully, giving herself a moment. “After Tasan and Fazare got a little older, he sang it to me in private. It was our song. ‘Just for my fairest light,’ he said. I’m not sure where you learned it, but it always made me smile to hear you. An echo of your father. If I could have asked him to sing for me one more time…” Her voice trailed away and she looked toward the garden. The tears fell, silent and bittersweet.

  “Why did you choose it?”

  “Because it was your favorite.”

  “It was like having Papa back again.” Elinasha had come into the room, and her hand on Sherakai’s shoulder drew his surprised attention.

  “It wasn’t—I sound—”

  “Like you haven’t sung in a while.” She gave a squeeze and went to sit on the couch behind Kanya. She produced a kerchief from the pouch at her belt and wiped her face. “Still just like Papa. That’s why I came. I wasn’t expecting… you.” She pressed the cloth to her nose and did not meet his eyes.

  “Do you remember, Fields of Blue?” Imarasu brought the harp to her shoulder and played the tune. It was buoyant without being frivolous, a plain working song for the harvesters of the woad fields. It mended the fraught mood and set the women to talking. Now and then they’d ask Sherakai a question, but he was content to listen to their chatter and his mother’s music. It wove a blanket of contentment that comforted him until Imarasu sent Kanya to sit with Elinasha’s napping baby.

  “How old is—he?” Sherakai asked Elinasha.

  “She is four months. Her father never saw her.”

  “I’m so sorry…”

  “Yes.” She fiddled with the kerchief in her lap. “Did you kill him?”

  “Elinasha!” their mother gasped.

  The shady green outside the open windows mocked him. “I don’t know.”

  “How,” Elinasha phrased her question with care, “can you not know?”

  Holding onto the bench, he leaned forward, arms straight and perched for flight. He couldn’t, wouldn’t go. Not yet.

  “Are you ready to do this, Kai?” Imarasu murmured. “You needn’t feel as if you must—”

  “It’s fine.” It wasn’t. He had hoped to steal a few more days, though every single moment offered danger. With a word, he could wake hatred and vengeance. Disgust. He rocked back and forth a little, caught himself, and sat still.

  “Lord Chiro changed me,” he said quietly. He kept his gaze on the fluttering hornbeam leaves. “He used magic to shape me—my body—and when that wasn’t enough for him, he infused in me the spirit of a rakeshi. Then he sent me into battle. I don’t always know what the creature has done, but I see a lot. I don’t remember seeing your husband among my dead, Elinasha.”

  Silence gripped the room. Sherakai swallowed. Waited while they absorbed the information.

  His mother moaned softly, agonized. “Oh, dear gods…”

  Chapter 52

  Pushing the harp aside, Imarasu came to her feet, wreathed in distress. Elinasha rose a breath behind, catching the older woman with a protective arm around her shoulders.

  “How is any of that even possible?” his sister demanded.

  Sherakai pressed his lips into a tight, grim line. “Shader magic.”

  “That’s ridiculous. We’d know—everyone would know—if Bairith Mindar were using adverse magic. Certainly Mimeru would.”

  “She did,” he agreed.

  Imarasu’s brow furrowed in apprehension. She worried a ring on her finger, turning it round and round. She made no attempt to break away from his sister’s protective embrace.

  Elinasha gestured toward him with her free hand. “And you’re telling us she—what? Supports him?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  She defied him and died with his crossbow bolt in her brain.

  A cruel, impossible thing to say. Thumb and fingers massaged his forehead. He couldn’t even bring himself to tell his mother that Mimeru was gone. Coward.

  “The king knows,” Imarasu ventured. “We are somewhat cut off from the usual talk, you understand, but it is said that Jansu Chiro is building an army to defeat the Romuri. This is not the first time I’ve heard about his… his experiments.”

  “And you didn’t say anything to us about this?” Elinasha stared at her mother.

  “Realizing what the jansu is and doing something about it are two different things. As far as my involvement is concerned,” Sherakai said into the thickness of the growing silence, “the jansu strictly monitors my coming and going. I see no one without his leave. I have no way of knowing what others at the keep do or don’t do.”

  Elinasha slowly tore her gaze away from their mother. “Not even your own sister?”

  “No.” A breath only. Hadn’t he said that?

  “And what is to stop you? Does he lock her in her room?”

  “I don’t know.” How dreadful to imagine her body still there. Gates of Heaven, indeed.

  “What do you know, Kai?”

  “Elinasha,” Imarasu put in, taking her daughter’s hand. “Please, let him speak.”

  “I do not want to hear his lies, and you shouldn’t either.”

  “Elinasha.” She drew a sharp breath through her nose, chin lifting and color flaring in her cheeks. “Don’t you dare take this from me—even this! I have lost my husband and all my sons. You must have some idea the miracle it is to have just one of them returned to me.”

  Tears sparked in his sister’s eyes, but she refused to let them fall. Mouth tight, she stood so rigid she might shatter at the merest touch. Sherakai ached for her as much as he feared losing her completely. “And if he is false?”

  “He is your brother. He has the right to tell us his story, and I have the right to hear it. Now sit down and keep a civil tongue in your head.”

  How she struggled, torn between loyalty and outrage. “As you wish, Mama,” she finally managed, stiff as a wayward mare. After she guided Imarasu back to her seat, she sat on the couch again, but nearer to Imarasu.

  With both of them looking at him, Sherakai felt trapped. Where to start? At the beginning, he supposed. “He was waiting when we left for the capital. Captain Nayuri pushed us hard in the hope we’d outrun them, but Bairith’s men ambushed us and killed everyone. I thought Chakkan died, too. He tells me Nayuri saved him.”

  Imarasu nodded. “Chakkan brought word of the attack. Your father set out at once to demand your return. Bairith denied having anything to do with it. He told us his men came upon the reavers and freed you.”

  “We f
ound his badge on the scouts tracking us.”

  “Of course.” Elinasha’s patience was painfully thin. “His men trying to help you against the Romuri raiders.”

  He dropped his gaze to his hands. “Well, these Romuri raiders put a sword through Nayuri’s throat while I held him. Then they marched me to Nemura-o pera Sinohe with a bleakstone bit shoved in my mouth. The mage in charge of the soldiers became one of my trainers soon after we arrived.” He lifted his head and was instantly sorry he’d been so blunt. His mother’s face had lost all its earlier color.

  Elinasha, on the other hand, clung to her disbelief and criticism. “Why would Bairith do such a thing, or cause it to be done? You are his brother-in-law, after all.”

  “He wants me to be his son.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Imarasu clenched her hands in her lap, trembling.

  “He asked Papa for me. Papa refused and tried to send me to the college in Kesurechi.”

  “Yes,” his mother confirmed, her voice still faint. “Your father and I decided that would be best. Safest. And he chose to—to take you anyway?”

  “Bairith would not go against Papa’s wishes.” A trace of uncertainty went contrary to Elinasha’s declaration.

  “I can tell you he would. Papa—” His brow wrinkled. “How did Bairith say it? ‘Your father had something I needed, something unique.’ Papa wouldn’t give me up, so Bairith ruined him. He wanted all of us; to test our magic. I should have been with them that day. They asked me to hunt with them and I stayed back. To flirt.” His smile was sorrowful, wistful. “Tasan died fighting the men that came for them. Bairith killed Fazare later. Imitoru… is likely dead, too. He had Mama’s brother and all the cousins in Kelamara murdered so there’d be no one for us to turn to for help.”

  Imarasu pressed her hand over her mouth again. It did not prevent new tears from falling, but she kept her back straight and dignified.

  “I suppose you have proof of this?” She’d lost the shrill note of accusation, but continued to challenge him just the same.

  “He is your brother!” Imarasu exclaimed. “Why would he lie about such a terrible thing?”

  “He’s not the same person he used to be, Mama. Tell us, Kai, why are you so special that Bairith had to go through four Tanoshi men to get his hands on you?”

  “My magic.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead again. “For reasons he has not shared, he needs me to regain his inheritance. He thinks—thought—I could become a prime.”

  “A prime?” Imarasu echoed, gripping her hands together more tightly.

  “You’re mad.” Elinasha widened with incredulity.

  Sherakai squinted at his sister. “I most likely am mad, but it’s not because of anything Lord Chiro believes I can or can’t do.”

  “You can manipulate all the spheres?” Imarasu pressed, ignoring the accusation.

  “Maybe. I did things I’d never done before. I might one day have managed all of them, but he broke me.”

  “How?” Elinasha asked.

  For the briefest moment, Mama’s sitting room disappeared. He saw instead the white-washed chamber with its strange lights and the herbs hanging from the ceiling beams. The table and the leather straps were cold against his bare skin. “They tore—” No, no! He wouldn’t give them those nightmares. “They tore—the magic. My magic. When they put the rakeshi inside me. There were smoke and shadows. Real shadows, not tricks of the light. They used them to hold me together. Like—like thread. The smoke made me lost. It confused me.”

  “Smoke?”

  “Hush, love,” Imarasu murmured, “it was a drug.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “He needed me cooperative. I remember…impossible things. Some of them overlap.” He waved one hand as if to disperse the cobwebs of dreams. He was still haunted by the image of his father tied to the column across from him, so real, so mortal. The harshest things, the things that wounded him the most, were those he remembered best.

  “You are not making sense, Kai.”

  “I’m sorry.” He rubbed the back of his neck, searching for a way to continue that didn’t include the bloodshed that had followed. A way to hide his own shame.

  “Here.” Elinasha put a hand on his shoulder. He looked up to find a plain wooden cup in front him. “Water.”

  “Thank you.” The drink gave him another moment or two to order his thoughts. His sister banked her anger behind an iron grate of self-defense. Mama’s face had acquired a distinct pallor. “He had the rakeshi brought in. I never imagined I’d see one. Who does? It was big. Heavy. It looked like a cat, but much bigger. Dappled. A bit like the Children, but with skin like a lizard. I didn’t know they had two rows of teeth, did you?” He glanced at them again, his mother horrified and his sister taken aback.

  “Bairith started chanting. The rakeshi screamed over and over again, but he turned it into a cloud and shoved it into me.” He remembered that, too, with perfect clarity.

  “He couldn’t do that.” Elinasha didn’t sound so confident anymore. “You are Tanoshan; you have rights. Are you so spineless you couldn’t fight back?”

  “He was a boy!” Imarasu cried.

  “I was bound by magic.”

  “What?” His mother stared at him in frank terror.

  With a sigh, Sherakai set aside the cup and rolled up his sleeve to show them the mark Bairith had given him, now the dark rusty red of old blood. “He created a bond to help us communicate with each other. To control me.” He was savagely glad it hadn’t worked well.

  Elinasha traced the elegant line of script with one finger. “You’re the almighty prime; break it.”

  “You have all the advice, tell me how.”

  “I am no mage.” She lifted her chin, but her eyes betrayed her wavering conviction. “Perhaps you should go to the school in Kesurechi.”

  “Yes.” Imarasu latched onto the slender thread of hope. The beautiful, awful tattoo held her gaze captive. “You will find help there.”

  “Bairith will not allow me to get anywhere near the school.”

  “How do you know if you don’t try?” Elinasha asked.

  “I have a short leash.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  He jabbed a finger at the tattoo. “It means he can compel me to return to him, that he can use magic to make me come back to him.” Frustration coursed through him. Elinasha didn’t help with her critical censure. He surged upward to pace the crowded space.

  “Then fight him!”

  “Don’t you think I’m trying?” he shouted and immediately regretted it.

  Imarasu shrank back.

  The rakeshi stirred within, wary and always seething.

  Sherakai forced himself to stillness. He folded his arms tight across his chest and letting out a breath of harsh air to rid himself of tension.

  “Are you going to—”

  “Be quiet a moment.” Unable to stay still, he rocked into motion again. He tried to keep the strain out of his voice, keep it soft. “Don’t make me angry.”

  Whatever softening he’d imagined fled. “Oh, you poor, fragile baby! Because you’ve suffered so much more than any of us, we should coddle you?”

  “No, because I’m afraid of what the rakeshi will do. And I don’t need coddling, I need a few minutes of you not talking.”

  “Very well.” Her prim acceptance lasted half a minute. “Quit acting like a needy child and use your magic, Kai. Rein it in like you would the horses. Talk to it. Command it. Deal with it.”

  He spun to face her. “Have you listened to nothing I’ve said, Eli? I can’t!”

  “That will be enough,” Imarasu cut in. “Sherakai, do what you must to calm yourself and the creature. Elinasha, it would be helpful if you would turn your mind to discovering solutions instead of accusations.” With a sniff, she gathered her skirts. “I am going to lie down.”

  She took two steps, raised one hand to her cheek, then crumpled.

  Sherakai crossed the space in a blur. He cau
ght his mother, instinctively lowering the both of them to the floor to ease the jolt.

  To her credit, Elinasha did not shriek in reaction, but knelt beside them. “Stars. Mama? Can you hear me?”

  Imarasu’s lashes fluttered. The color completely fled her features, leaving her wan and hollow.

  Cradling her easily in one arm, Sherakai felt for her pulse. “Fetch the healer.”

  “Give her to me, you go. You’ll need to go to the village.” She moved to take Imarasu. Though their mother was frail enough that Elinasha might have handled the weight with little trouble, Sherakai resisted.

  “I’ve got her,” he said shortly, rising to his feet. Elinasha came behind him, pausing once to send a servant for the healer, then calling out for her sisters-in-law. When they reached the private chambers upstairs, he laid his mother tenderly on the bed. Rila and Esume pushed past him while Elinasha whirled on him, fury sparking in her eyes.

  “Mama is not well, Kai,” she informed him, voice crisp as winter. They all regarded him with thinly veiled expressions of accusation and distrust. “Even you can see that.”

  He had from the beginning, when Imarasu had come to him so thin and fragile. Her eyes didn’t look right, either physically or emotionally. She vacillated between strength and despair. “I want to sit with her.”

  “Haven’t you done enough?” she hissed, taking his arm and dragging him to the hall. She pulled the door shut behind them. “I don’t know how you could allow this terrible thing in the first place, but then to bring it here? How could you put that burden on Mama? What is wrong with you? Get yourself—get it—under control, Sherakai. Until you do, stay away from Mama. In fact, stay until she is well enough that you can say goodbye, then lie to her Kai. Lie for her. Tell her you’ll see her soon and then go. She doesn’t deserve this.”

  “She doesn’t deserve a lie, either. You want me to leave her waiting for the gods know how long?”

  “Better a thin hope than an early grave.”

  And just like that, she disappeared into Imarasu’s room and shut the door in his face.