Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  Leaving Saverian in the vestibule, I ambled down the gallery. A sidewise glimpse confirmed the gap was a downward stair. I squatted just across from it and peered through the iron railing, as if trying to watch the events below without being noticed. Clutching the medicine bag, I considered what excuse I might devise for a venture down the stair.

  One after the other, the warlords took the place in the center of the room, gripped a staff topped with a wolf’s head of wrought gold, and recited the incursions of Ardran or Moriangi raiders who scoured the countryside for food stores, or the vile deeds of Harrower burning parties who ravaged isolated villages and farmsteads on both sides of the border. I gathered this was the third night in a row they had recounted these same grievances, determined to implant them in one another’s memory as if the offenses had been dealt against them all. When Thane Stearc took the staff, he told of the dog-faced man who led the Harrower pursuit on our journey from Palinur and how the pursuit had been thwarted only when his pureblood guide had tricked the Harrowers into a bog and drowned them all.

  As always, reminders of events in the bog left me nauseated and uneasy. Reflexively, I glanced over my shoulder. Saverian was staring at me, her nose flared in disgust. Perhaps she had never heard the story, or had only now connected it with me.

  During each report, the rowdy onlookers shouted confirmations or approvals, curses or reprimands for the speaker’s tale. When a young thanea, sized like a brick hearth and clad in scarred mail, reported that she had dreamed of shadow legions overrunning Evanore, I expected derisive hoots and laughter, but the lords thumped fists on the tables and shouted that the time had come for Evanore’s legions to take the field.

  Prince Osriel listened to all without comment. Once the staff had passed through every lord’s hand, the company fell silent. The elderly woman returned to the center of the room and began reciting. As her voice rose and fell in the fashion of talespinners, the torchlight dimmed.

  The old woman spoke of Aurellian ships come to the river country in the north and Aurellian legions crossing the broad Yaronal from the east after discovering that the small magics they worked in their distant homeland took fire with power in the lands of Navronne. But they found this favored land ruled by a stubborn king…

  It was Caedmon’s story she told, tracing his lineage into the deeps of history and telling of his rise and fall. Her tale recalled the great window in the Gillarine Abbey chapter house. In jeweled glass it had depicted the sad and honorable king who had first united the gravs of Morian and the warlords of Evanore with his own kingdom of Ardra. He had made the disparate realms into something greater than the sum of its parts, only to see his beloved Navronne brought to heel by the predatory Aurellians. The storyteller painted her portrait with words, not glass, depicting the king leading the tattered remnants of his legions to the great bridge he’d built to link Ardra and Evanore.

  Deep shadows enveloped the gallery. Saverian could not have seen my hand rummaging in her medicine bag. I snatched out a few items and stuffed them in my pockets.

  When the old woman’s tale was done, the lords began to sing. I stood up, fumbling the bag until I dropped it, spilling the loose contents on the gallery floor. That Saverian noticed. And came running.

  “What have you done, fool?” she whispered, snatching up vials, packets, and tight-wrapped bundles of linen and wool. I held the bag open as she put the things away, sensing her itemizing each article, as I’d guessed she would. She patted the floor around us and hissed, “Three packets and two small jars are missing. Holy Mother…”

  One of the lords took up another song—the Lay of Groshug, an interminable recounting of a bloody boar hunt that I enjoyed only when I was roaring drunk. They’d be bawling it for an hour at the least. Saverian would not dare risk a scene. And I gambled that she’d not dare leave her post. Her first duty was to Osriel’s health.

  “I fear things dropped through the railing,” I whispered. “I’m sorry…I’ll fetch them.” And before she could protest, I shoved the bag into her hands and darted down the stair.

  The stair dumped me into a dark vestibule, crowded with two big tables, piled with empty tankards and dirty serving platters. A wide door led back into the hall. A narrower door led outside, where an arcade fronted the long side of the building. Accompanied by the lords’ robust rendering of the chorus to the Lay of Groshug, I sped eastward through the arcade in search of the rock gate Elene had mentioned.

  The geometries of such a fortress were fairly simple. A cross wall joined a long barracks building to the Great Hall. The arcade tunneled through the wall and ended abruptly in an alley at the far end of the hall. Follow the alley to the left, and you would end up in a paved yard surrounded by kitchens and bakehouses and storage buildings. Go right ten paces along the east end of the Great Hall, and you ran straight into the mountainside.

  No gate was visible where the blocklike hall merged with the rocky buttress, but I guessed that the perilously steep set of steps cut into the mottled gray and red rock would lead me there. As I half climbed, half crawled up the interminable stair, I blessed Saverian for clearing my head. With only the diffuse light from the hall’s arrow slits to illuminate the rock, I needed all the acuity I could muster. My feet were bigger than the altogether too-slanted steps.

  Elene awaited me atop the stair, like a warrior angel on a church spire. “I didn’t think you’d come, not a day out of your bed and bound by Saverian’s spellcraft.”

  “To meet with you, lady, I would even climb this god-cursed stair again,” I said, gasping. “But by the Mother, do Evanori not approve of air?”

  I bent over and propped my hands on my knees, coughing as the cold dry air rasped my heaving chest. I prayed I was not so sorely out of health as to be flattened by a hundred steps. But a squirrel could have toppled me.

  “Renna is higher than Erasku. It’s even higher than Angor Nav—the duc’s official seat. Even I notice the sparse air here.” Her face was only a pale blur in the night, but her pinched voice hinted at high emotion reined tight. “Osriel told my father you were taking him to the Danae tomorrow. Is that true?”

  “That’s what he wants,” I said. “We’ve less than a month until the solstice.”

  “Come.”

  By the time I accumulated enough breath to ask where, she had pivoted sharply and marched into the night. I followed carefully. The stair had brought us onto a steeply ascending apron of rock that skirted a bulge in the massive ridge. I hugged the rock wall on my left, for on my right, tiny, winking blots of torchlight and bonfires in a gaping darkness marked the heart-stopping drop to the fortress. The irregular path canted outward, and my boots hinted that ice lurked in its cracks and crevices.

  “I had decided to send you back to your bed,” said Elene, little more than a formless darkness ahead of me. “To show you this betrays an oath I swore on my mother’s memory, a villainous oath that should condemn me to the netherworld for the making, not just for the breaking. He chose it. Not I—stupid, mooning cow that I am to be so led into godless folly.”

  “What oath?” I caught up with her just as the path ended abruptly at an iron gate. The tall gate, anchored in the rock, blocked entry to a shallow breach in the ramparts of the ridge. “What folly?”

  The gate rattled with Elene’s violent application of her boot. “Papa refuses to come here with me or listen to what I say, because my showing him would break my oath and because the secret’s owner is holy Caedmon’s heir. I’d hoped one of the monks might listen, but I was never allowed to be alone with them. And I could never tell anyone outside the cabal. All I want is to stop this wickedness. And so this morning, seeing how you sensed his evil already—rightly so—and I was so angry, I said I’d bring you. Yet I would send you away ignorant even now if he’d not told you he was going to the Danae right away. He means to do this…to use their magic…”

  She grasped the iron hasp, touched it with a gold ring that shot sparks like fireflies into the dark,
and spoke a word I could not decipher for the half growl, half sob that accompanied it.

  “Mistress, you must excuse my confusion. Who is going to do what? Osriel?”

  Indeed, I thought my acuity must be impaired again, so little sense could I make of all this. The most daunting news I’d gleaned from her avalanche of words was that her fear outstripped her anger.

  The breach in the rocks proved to be but a crumbling wash the width of my armspan. It rose at a shallow pitch, which my lungs approved, and wound between huge boulders that were easy to spot—a good thing, as the sky was as dark as tar. I wasn’t sure how Elene could show me anything. Yet when we emerged from the gully atop the ridge, a livid haze lit the night before us, illuminating a scene of desolation.

  For as far as I could see, the ridge top had been hacked away, gouged and broken into a shallow bowl a quellé wide, at least, seamed with trenches and pocked with dark holes. Broken troughs and sluices, iron wheels, and snarls of ancient rope rotted or rusted amid heaps of crushed rock. Chiseled slabs lay tilted and broken beside a monstrous quern and a cracked mortar broader than my armspan.

  But it was not the ugly spoil heaps or grinding stones that colored my soul the same bruised gray as the unnatural haze and made me want to run far from this place. All the grief of Evanore lay here. All the anger. The pent emotions I had felt on the wind, and those I had sensed when first I looked upon Osriel’s land, were but goosedown to the leaden weight of sorrow and fury that settled on my spirit. I could scarce breathe.

  “What gold could be dug from Dashon Ra has been long carted away,” said Elene, standing at my shoulder. “But he says the veins yet thread the earth like a web and extend throughout Evanore. He says they are like ring mail that strengthens our land, holding a power that fires magic. Come on.”

  She marched down the sloping side of the abandoned mine, hopped across a deep, narrow trench, and skirted the corner of a rubble wall—all that remained of a shed. The haze thickened, coiling violet tendrils about Elene’s boots. I followed, wishing I had never asked her to show me this. Making Deunor’s sign upon my brow and drawing Iero’s holy seal upon my breast, I prayed that Saverian’s spell would not fail me. This land held terrible secrets.

  Down and down. Our boots slipped and slid on the loose tailings and patches of ice. Nearing the bottom of the slope, we ducked under an ancient leat, solid and unbroken, though only grit and gravel remained where water had once flowed. Beyond us lay the lowermost levels of the mine, a rectangular pit of iron-laced rock the size of Renna’s Great Hall, cracked and scarred by weather and men’s work. Piles of rubble littered its floor. And across every handsbreadth of the rock walls, every protrusion, knob, or broken shelf held a vessel of carved stone, votive vessels as you would find in Deunor’s temple or Iero’s cathedral—hundreds of them, some the size of bread loaves or tabors, some smaller, palm-sized like oil lamps, like the calyx I had seen in Osriel’s bloody hands in the abbey kitchen.

  The bruised haze hung above the vessels as does the stench above a midden. Dread rose in my soul like fever. “This is where he brings them…the eyes of the dead.”

  “He seals each vessel with his own blood. When he brings it here, he unseals it and empties it into the earth. That dark blotch at the center is a bottomless shaft. Though the vessels are no longer needed, he names them sacred because of what they carried, so he leaves them here.”

  “Not sacred,” I said, revulsion clogging my throat. “This is no holy place. No temple. It is a prison.” As my gaze roamed the desolation, I clamped my hands under my arms as if some accident might make them touch this violated earth. I didn’t want to hear those trapped here. I didn’t want to feel their fury and confusion and hatred more clearly than I did already. Madness had owned me for too many days.

  Elene scooped up a handful of crushed stone and dirt, then allowed it to rain through her fingers onto the dry earth. “He plans to work some terrible magic here. When he brought me here three years ago to show me—to end what we had begun in happier times—he said he hoped with all his being that he would never have to set his plan in motion, for it would be such a sin as would end his last hope of heaven. Truly, Brother Valen, it is not for his own glory, but for Navronne he strives, yet he does not listen that hope cannot be bought with sin.”

  The bilious light sapped all color from her warm skin. The tears rolled down her cheeks like gray pearls, and her palms pressed flat across her belly as if to shield the child that grew inside her. “I put my hope in Luviar and his noble lighthouse to show him the way of right. For one blessed hour on that same night you escaped from Gillarine, I thought his loneliness had led him back to love. And though that hope proved false, I believed my dearest prayers answered when he told us of the Harrower hiding place you’d found, and that his brothers had agreed to join him to oppose Sila Diaglou. But a tenday ago, while you lay ill, reports came that Sila Diaglou had abandoned her hidden fortress and, at the same time, raised her own banner in Palinur alongside his brother’s. A light went out of him that day. Within hours he left Renna with only Voushanti accompanying him. And since he’s come back, he has not spoken to me, not looked at me, not told anyone where he went. I’ve begged him, yelled at him, pleaded with him to explain to the cabal what he plans next, but he refuses.”

  She waved her hand at the bleak scene before us. “Three years ago, he told me that his own power might not be enough to accomplish what he wants, and that the more certain way would be to ask the Danae’s help to join their magic to his. And now you are to take him to the Danae. Whatever this is…he’s decided to go through with it. By the Holy Mother, Valen, you’re a sorcerer and his friend—the only one not blinded by fealty or awe or fear. Only you can stop him…save him.”

  I wanted to laugh at the idea of me stopping Osriel the Bastard, the rightful King of Navronne, the sorcerer who called up red lightning and performed rites that reeked of brimstone, from doing anything he chose. But Elene’s grief and fear for the prince tempered my answer with sobriety, at least. “Lady, I cannot even begin to imagine what spells might be worked with…whatever lies in this place. And indeed the prince has good reasons to go to the Danae, the same he has stated all along. We must know what they can tell us of the world’s sickness and its remedy. If he gives them warning of Sila Diaglou and Gildas, perhaps they will shelter our Scholar and give light to his lighthouse. It is his right and his duty to speak to them for us. But I promise you I’ll do what I can to discover his plans and persuade him to some alternative.”

  I had no faith in my promise. Nor did she, though she thanked me and pretended it so. I took her in my arms as she wept, wishing naught but to offer comfort. For indeed the least significant, yet most painful discovery on this night of dread revelation was that I would willingly suffer any danger to serve Elene, though her heart was not—and had never been—mine to win. No wonder at her agonies if that ebullient heart—and the child she had conceived—belonged to the Duc of Evanore. And no matter the course of past or future, a love already tested by the trials of grim necessity, of denial and sacrifice, of illness, war, and unholy sorcery, was unlikely to be swayed by the fingers of a feckless vagabond, whatever the marvels of his birth.

  Chapter 11

  Down, down, interminably down. The steep descent from Renna to the borderlands of Evanore in the driving blizzard was unrelenting misery. Hold your seat. Keep your back straight. Legs forward. Trust the beast. The distance was not so far, so I was told. Two days, three in such weather. But my backside was already hot and raw, and every other part of me was frozen, save two fiery strips on my fingers where the leather cinch straps, made into knife edges by the cold, had sliced my flesh. My back and shoulders ached…as did my spirit, weighed to breaking with the memory of those thousand empty vessels.

  I had spent the dreary hours speculating on how I could possibly accomplish what I had promised Elene. To set myself as intermediary between Osriel and Stearc’s daughter was only slightly less witless t
han setting myself between my friend Gram and his dangerous royal self. What in the name of heaven did he think to do with Danae magic and thousands of imprisoned souls? And how could I possibly stop it? Elene had sorely misjudged my capabilities.

  Stearc rode point, the dark expanse of his shoulders our guide staff through the world of white. Five of his own warriors rode alongside him. They were to escort him back to Gillarine and relieve the troop he’d left there, while Osriel and I hunted the Danae.

  The prince and I followed close behind the thane. In the presence of Stearc’s men, Osriel rode as Gram. He had insisted I wear my pureblood garb and return to pureblood disciplines, playing Prince Osriel’s contracted servant sent upon a private mission. The mask and cloak felt odd, as if they belonged to someone else.

  Voushanti guarded our rear, along with his trusted warriors Philo and Melkire. Just ahead of them rode Saverian, brought along to tend Osriel’s health. She had been furious at the prince’s insistence that she accompany us and had taken her vengeance by calling hourly halts and forcing him to drink her potions. Saverian reminded me of thyme or savory—useful in small amounts, but like to gag you in too great a quantity.

  I’d no more questions about how to rattle her temper. On the previous night, when I had come round the end of Renna’s Great Hall from the rock gate stair after bidding farewell to Elene, Saverian had pounced like a starved wolverine.

  “Are you entirely without intelligence?” Clearly the question was not meant to be answered. She grabbed my cloak and dragged me past the doorway that returned to the hall, where Osriel’s warlords were cheering. “Do you think me blind or just some thick-witted troll? What a striking coincidence that you dropped my things—which I had damned well better get back, by the bye—at exactly the same time the heiress of Erasku slipped out of the hall. I’m truly surprised not to find you naked again! Ah, yes, I forget: a Dané dances naked and reportedly can seduce a brick wall does he but sigh. So it is but your inborn nature to put the moon-mad little warrior at risk of a flaying from her father, and surely the annoying physician can fend for herself when the guards alert Prince Osriel because the woman’s servant has gone missing at a warmoot!” Astonishing how she could raise such a lather in a voice that none could have heard five steps away from us.