Given to the Earth

by Mindy McGinnis

  “I cannot kill you,” I tell him.

  “I do not feel the same,” he says.

  And runs me though.

  CHAPTER 87

  Dara

  I know battle, know death, know the smells of fear and pain. Yet I have never known them like this, a cold blade borrowing my heat as it rests inside me, a slow death as I simply grow tired on the cold ground.

  I turn my head, my cheek coming to rest against a rock. It is warm from my body like my marriage stone, still new to me, nestled in my belly. I feel it there and would tell Witt, but he is gone from my side.

  Yet I hear his voice rising above all and my brother’s as well. I hear Vincent too, far off but traveling to my ear, these boys grown to men alongside me. That I should hear them now is right, and I close my eyes, aware that new voices have joined them, a chorus of Indiri that swells from the ground.

  Calling me.

  CHAPTER 88

  Donil

  My Indiri blade punches through the Lithos’s armor like a nail through timber. He is unarmed and emptying of life, yet smiling. I was born to kill this man, but find no end in it, only a deep confusion as he drops to his knees and says my sister’s name. I step back, eyes locked with his.

  So I do not see the Pietra who spears me through the side.

  Another follows from the front, a well-trained soldier who finds the chink in my Stillean armor with the tip of his weapon. It has ended me, and I know it, backing away from the dying Lithos, my sword still embedded in his chest. I stumble to my sister to find her hand held out to mine. I fall by her side, our shoulders touching as the ground below us swells with the voices of our ancestors, answering us for all the times we have asked.

  CHAPTER 89

  Dara & Donil

  As we were born together, so we die.

  We are given to the earth.

  CHAPTER 90

  Vincent

  Vincent spurs his horse, slaying Pietra to his lee and stoneward with vicious swipes as he rides to Donil, screaming. His friend is twice run through, spears that know their work bristling from his body.

  The Pietra who ended Donil meet their own deaths by Vincent’s sword, quick work made even more deadly by his wrath. He would cut down even a Stillean who stood between him and the man he calls his brother.

  “Donil!” Vincent screams for him, dismounting at a run and barreling into a Pietra whose bloodied arm hangs limp at his side, no weapon to be had. Vincent ducks beneath a clumsy blow from the soldier, then drives a dagger into the pit of his arm, leaving him to live or die as he will.

  There are only the Indiri left for Vincent, this girl and boy who have been brother and sister to him, his life entwined with theirs as deftly as one of Dara’s braids. He falls to his knees beside them, their names on his lips, rushes to put his hands on bodies already cooling.

  But finds only dirt. For the Indiri have gone.

  CHAPTER 91

  Ank

  It begins as a tremor, the soldiers that surround me losing their footing as the swipe of a blade or the throw of a spear is adjusted, balance a new skill to be learned. The earth beneath everyone sighs, as if a great beast just below the surface is waking and now stretches, now shudders after a long sleep.

  All around me arms about to deal a killing blow are stopped, men about to die at attackers’ hands clutch each other to keep their feet. A tree to my stoneward falls drunkenly, knocking into another, and the very mountains behind what remains of the Pietran army shed stones, as if they would cast off a heavy coat.

  Hadduk, wild-eyed, finds me. “Depths, man, what is happening?”

  We hold on to each other as a fissure opens on the battlefield, men on either side running from its gaping maw, pulling one another back, regardless of whether they wear Stillean armor or Pietran.

  “The Indiri have fallen,” I tell Hadduk. “And so we have a common enemy—the very earth that we stand upon, though we will not stand for long.”

  A last great shudder knocks us, every man, down on the field, flattening each tree in sight and sending great boulders rolling from the mountains to gouge the very earth that sent them there. Beside me, Hadduk pulls himself onto an elbow, surveying the field where all soldiers have become only frightened men, and a great silence has taken the place of sword upon shield.

  “I know well enough what an enemy is,” Hadduk says, spitting onto the ground. “I suppose it’s time I learned how to make friends.”

  CHAPTER 92

  Vincent

  They gather in a hastily erected tent: Vincent, King of Stille; Ank of the Feneen; Hadduk the Mason; and Witt, the Lithos of the Pietra, Donil’s weapon still in his chest. It is a deep wound and one that Vincent knows will be fatal as soon as the sword is removed. Yet somehow the Lithos found his feet before the ground ceased shaking and, with a weak voice that still carried an air of command, put an end to the fighting. Even as he dies, the Lithos has the attention of those around him, whatever country they call home.

  “Vincent, King of Stille,” the Lithos says. “I came to you today in peace, looking for nothing less. That it did not end so is no fault of mine, and not of yours either, but the vengeance of a woman who long harbored a wrath against me that was well earned, and better hidden.”

  He stops to draw breath, and Vincent hears the gurgle of blood deep inside welling forth.

  “No fault lies with you,” Vincent says quickly, to spare the Lithos the pain of speaking. “And though many have fallen, perhaps some peace may still be gained.”

  The Lithos smiles slowly, his eyes sliding shut. “You build boats, and I give you freely my people to work alongside you, that they may have their own place when it is time to sail.”

  “That time may have passed,” Hadduk mutters to Vincent, as another small shudder passes through the earth, sending the torchbearers who light the tent into a carefully controlled tilt to keep their flames from the cloth.

  “Not yet,” Ank says quietly. “Too much has been lost, and there is little to be saved, yet we will see it done.”

  “Little,” the Lithos says, eyes opening again. “Hadduk . . . see to it that the little ones who would train as Lithos have the choice to go by sea.”

  “Yes, my Lithos,” the Mason says. “And who of them shall lead?”

  “None,” Witt says. “Let them be children.” The Lithos locks eyes with Vincent, his will the only thing keeping him from dying. “Hadduk shall lead what remains of Pietra.”

  “I am not fit,” Hadduk protests.

  “No,” Witt agrees. “But Nilana is.”

  A small laugh passes through the group, and Vincent crouches before Witt, sensing that he has not much longer.

  “Is there anything else you would ask for your people? Say the word, and I will see it done. So much blood has spilled that the earth itself breaks beneath it. No harm shall come to any Pietra by my command, as long as I live.”

  Witt shakes his head, life leaving him. “Only that you make haste, for the sake of all. Do not bury the dead who lie here, for there is no time. Boats are for the dead, but yours will take them to new life. Go to it now. Do not look back.”

  Vincent reaches out, his hand brushing the hilt of Donil’s blade. Witt nods to him, and Vincent jerks it free, Witt’s blood leaving him along with a sigh of a life lived as it was called to, but never for itself.

  And so passes the last Lithos of the Pietra.

  CHAPTER 93

  Vincent

  Vincent rides for home, the remnant of his army traveling with him. They navigate a changed landscape, hills that previously stood now gone, new ones where they do not belong. The path they traveled is broken in places, blocked in others. One unfortunate Stillean climbed the trunk of a fallen Hadundun to glimpse the path ahead, only to lose his footing and fall through the low branches, cut to the bone in more places than could be counted. His blood pooled, spent for nothing,
as the tree itself was past drinking.

  There is little talk among them, their voices lost in horrors witnessed for the first time—some of them having killed and others having seen the killing. Vincent pushes them on, the camp not complaining when they do not stop for a meal on the first day and only for cold rations on the second. The earth continues to roll beneath them, like a stomach whose meal sits unsteady, but no more tremors come that drive people and animals alike to their knees.

  A wretched cold night is spent among wet trees that hang limply but do not take lives. Vincent visits each fire in the Forest of Drennen, learning every face and speaking with each man in his army. Sleep does not come for him, and his horse is saddled before his men awake, cropping gently at grass and nickering to his rider, who leans against him for warmth in the low light of morning.

  Stille is on the horizon when a rider approaches from the castle, grim faced. Vincent can think only that news of their losses and the death of the Indiri have preceded them, but the messenger brings his own ill words.

  “Your mother, my king,” he says, head low. “She wishes to see you straightaway.”

  Vincent finds Dissa in the great hall, a fire burning there, though the hearth is cracked through, more stones from the walls littering the shadows. A flat section of the ceiling has fallen, shattering the dining table and sending splinters the length of Vincent’s arm to each end of the room.

  “Mother?” he calls, when she does not turn at his footsteps.

  “I have news, Vincent,” she says calmly. “I would rather you hear it from my mouth than the wandering tongue of a sconcelighter or dairymaid.”

  The heart he had thought stopped on the battlefield accelerates with fear, and Vincent goes to Dissa’s side. “Khosa? Is she well?”

  His mother reaches for him, hand clasped in his. “After the earth moved, I went to her chambers to see to her safety and found her crouched against the wall, curled like an infant in its mother. She can barely speak, Vincent, so great is her pain.”

  He would go to his wife straightaway, her deception aside. Though she has caused him misery, he would not wish the same upon her, yet his mother’s hand stops him.

  “Dara?” she asks hopefully.

  “No,” Vincent says, his voice closing over the simple word. “Nor Donil.”

  Dissa’s hands go to her temples, the loss of her adopted children a fresh wound to bear up under. But she has suffered much, and endured more.

  “Go to her.” She waves away Vincent. “Go to your wife.”

  He leaves too quickly to correct her.

  CHAPTER 94

  Khosa

  Khosa could only wish that a wall stone had struck her in the temple when the earth shook, her pain was so great. To pass unaware of time and torture was what she would have asked, and it was too much. Since the quake, all of her spasms have left her body, traveling instead to her center, then rising to her head where they congregate in a sharp point of pain, as if one of Dissa’s needles had found its way inside her skull and would force itself out. It does not crest or come at random as the dance did, but remains insistent, terrible, and inescapable.

  When Dissa tried to pull her to her feet and toward the door, the pain showed her that there was something beyond torture—agony. Writhing and feral, Khosa had spit and clawed at Vincent’s mother. The only relief that shaved down the misery to something bearable was to be found when she pressed herself against the wall of her room, her ear to the sea.

  Her husband finds her there, past a place where tears can follow.

  “Khosa,” he says gently, approaching as if she were a cornered Tangata. “What is it, wife?”

  The one word sends a fresh grief through her, eyes barely dried now pricked with new weeping.

  “Vincent,” she manages to say, pitching forward. He grabs her midfall, her pulsing head against his burnt face. She cries for the pain, both what she suffers and what she has caused, and because Khosa knows that for Vincent to come to her first means that Donil will never follow.

  “Where are you hurt?” he asks, hand cupping her chin.

  “It’s in my head, Vincent,” she says, resting her temple against their bedroom wall. “Every dance I’ve ever done waits there now, each step pressing on my skull.”

  “What can I do?”

  Khosa shakes her head, both in denial that he can still care to help her and in the knowledge that it is futile to offer. “There is nothing. To go toward the sea brings some relief, but to move away . . .” She shudders, aware that to increase her suffering could easily bring madness. She rests against him for a moment, curling into the blanket he pulls from the bed to wrap around her.

  “It’s the land that calls me, Vincent,” she says. “Whatever hope was still here . . .”

  “I know,” he finishes for her. “It left with the Indiri.”

  They hold each other as the sun sets, both of them aware it is the first time they have done so with no roil of Khosa’s stomach or crawling of her skin, but neither hopeful enough to believe it is not the last.

  CHAPTER 95

  Vincent

  I won’t leave Bessie, and that’s all there is to it,” Daisy says, chin jutting proudly for a moment before she remembers to add, “My king.”

  Vincent sighs, scratching the stubble of three suns that covers his cheeks, while he casts a leery eye upon the dairy cow Daisy stands beside, lead in hand. Bessie appears unimpressed with him, her cud of higher importance.

  “Daisy,” Vincent tries again, his patience wearing thin, “I cannot give space on a ship that could go to Stilleans to a cow.”

  “Why not, when the cow will make milk for the Stilleans?” she shoots back.

  “Only if she is properly fed, which means taking along grain and hay—more space where people could be put.”

  “And what if they don’t want to come?” she asks. “Winlan’s boat will carry the Hygodeans and their goats. Surely if there’s room for a whole village on one, I can put my cow on the ship meant to carry Stilleans.”

  It’s not a bad argument, and he tells her he’ll consider it—not adding that Bessie might be called upon as meat for Stilleans as well as milk if land isn’t spotted before their stores run low.

  Packing the ships has fallen to Dissa, her Scribes following her skirts like baby oderbirds with their mother. Lists have been made, provisions weighed against passengers—still too few, by far—and what can be moved to the beach taken there. One ship sits in its dock nearly finished, lacking only the deck. Sallin wanted to run a gangplank and load the lower decks, but Winlan warned that weighing it down before it found deeper waters was unwise. Small boats have been built, manned by oars, waiting to ferry provisions back and forth once the ship sails freely. Looking upon that makes Vincent think of the Lithos, and the fear he saw in him, that Vincent would abandon his word and leave the Pietran people as soon as his sails filled with wind.

  Vincent looks in the direction of the Stone Shore, even the horizon there changed from the earth ripples that arrive each sun without fail. No Pietra have come, and time grows short. He closes his eyes against the sun and listens to the sounds of trees being made into timber, and timber into ships. If he must choose between leaving the Pietra behind and the sanity of his wife, he knows what he will do.

  “Make haste,” Vincent says, his words meant both for those who stand near to hear, and for those cannot.

  CHAPTER 96

  Ank

  Though I never lived there, I always thought of Stille as home, and it fills my heart when we crest the ridge to see it.

  “Lost a spire,” Hadduk says moodily when he reaches me.

  “As have you of late,” Nilana adds, from her harness on his back.

  I ignore the pair, my eyes caught upon two ships at sea, sails bright against the water.

  “Depths,” Hadduk says, spotting them as well. “They�
��ve done it.”

  “And a third to join,” Nilana says, tilting her head to the frame of a ship that rests in a dock, stones waiting to be pulled away from the mouth so that the tide may take it out to sea.

  “Call the men,” I tell Hadduk. “They should see what awaits, if they put their backs into the work Stille sets for them. I know they are not wainwrights or farmers, but they’ll set their hands to both if they want to ever be soldiers again.”

  Hadduk sighs, closing his eyes against the truth. “What a world we live in.”

  “Yes,” I agree, my eyes going to what trees remain standing and the Tangata huddled there among the high branches. “A dying one.”

  CHAPTER 97

  Vincent

  A boat overturned today, taking flour to the Hyllenian ship,” Vincent tells his wife, hand on one side of her face while she presses the other against the wall, her face a rictus of pain. She nods slightly, and he continues.

  “We lost an oarsman,” Vincent says, wishing he had not begun the tale. “And when he did not resurface, three more Stilleans asked Mother to take their names from the passenger list. I’ve lost five this week, added only two.”

  He scratches at the side of his face, where the last of his burns heals, though the skin there will be forever smooth and pink. Khosa reaches for him to offer comfort, though she grinds her teeth against the pain of her head.