Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  A soft slapping sound from the darkness to my left sent me to my feet like a whipcrack. A dripping Kol stepped into the ring of firelight, tossed two fish the size of my boot soles onto the sand in front of us, then walked into the night without a word.

  “So are you mad or sane this morning?”

  Saverian’s bent must signal her when a person’s awareness returned, for I’d not so much as lifted an eyelid or stirred a muscle in my nest of sand. I managed only a grunt in reply. Such early questioning left a body no time to enjoy those few moments of uncomplicated, irresponsible satiation that occur between sleep and waking. It didn’t seem at all fair.

  Of course, I had waked her with my screaming in the middle of the night, convinced the sea’s crashing signaled the world’s end and that hurricane-driven knives were flaying me. I vaguely recalled her yanking the gold disk from my neck and wrestling my thrashing limbs quiet as it sent forth its maggoty magic to quell the onslaught. Humiliating. I’d been so sure I could control her spell.

  “You’ve likely an hour until the sun’s above the cliff,” she said. “There’s fresh water in the rocks down that way where the cliff’s collapsed.”

  I rolled to all fours, spitting sand, blinking away sand, shaking my head to speed the shower of sand from my hair. The stuff had crept into my boots and my ears and every pore and crevice in between. As I stumbled through the cold gray dawn to relieve the pressure of food and drink, the grit abraded my feet, my eyes, my waist, and my groin.

  I returned to our little camp clearer in the head at least. No matter what happened with Kol, if I thought to go anywhere and accomplish anything afterward, I needed Saverian’s medallion back, along with better teaching as to how to use the thing.

  The physician was cooking some eggs on the same flat stone I had used to cook Kol’s fish. The lively fire and the replenished stock of wood testified she’d been awake much earlier than I.

  “I hope you’re not bruised,” I said, squatting opposite her as she poked her eating knife at the eggs. “Thank you. Sorry for the fight.”

  “Having to deal with your illness was a good thing, I think. It made me forget what a puling coward I felt last night with all this…strangeness…and seeing Danae in the flesh and getting whacked in the head. I began thinking as a physician again.”

  Her admission startled me, but I detected no humility in her demeanor. She wrinkled her nose at the eggs as they quickly took on the color of dirt and the consistency of drying plaster.

  “I considered what the Dané said about this ‘change’ being trapped inside you. Perhaps he holds the true remedy to your disease.”

  “I’d like to believe that. But clearly you’ve not met my mad patronn. Kol’s work is not necessarily benevolent.” I grimaced, as always, at the recollection.

  “Osriel told me your history,” she said. “I can’t blame you whichever way you choose. But you can’t go back to nivat, and I don’t know how long the disk is going to help you.”

  “Your rock is a bit too hot.” I offered her a flat piece of wood to use for a plate. If she didn’t eat her eggs soon, she could use them to bandage wounds. My stomach growled and rumbled. “Were there more of those wherever you found them? Or did Kol bring them?”

  “I’ve not seen him as yet this morning. And these were all I could find without climbing, so you might as well take half.”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “Would you stop being so polite? I’ve wiped up too much of your bodily fluids to like you, but I’m not prepared to let you starve or go mad, either one.” She scraped the leathery mess onto the wood and ran her knife down the middle, dividing them precisely in half. “But I detest dirt and cold and sleeping on the ground, and as you see I’m worse than useless at cooking, so please just get this business over with and show me the way back to my own bed. I must get back to Osriel. His illness does not wait. I can resolve my difficulties with him.”

  She pulled a spoon from her belt kit and began eating. A bruise on my hip, caused when the two Danae had thrown me to the ground, was the only remnant of my own kit. Her dagger lay wherever Kol had kicked it, and I had carried no weapon since Boreas stole my knife all those months ago. I scooped the ugly little mess with my fingers and stuffed my mouth full. A fine time for my uncle to walk out of the sea with his hands full of green stuff.

  With only a cool observation, he dropped the soggy weeds onto the sand beside us and strolled down the shore to the clustered rocks where we were to meet. His gards gleamed silver, scarcely visible in the sunlight. Instead of climbing onto the rocks to wait, as he had the previous day, he propped one foot on the rock and bent forward, leg straight, stretching his arms to touch his toes, his chest flat along his thigh. He remained there, perfect in his stillness.

  “Do you think he’s praying?” I said, wiping my sticky hands on my chausses and imagining the ache of such posture. It made the abbey practices of kneeling and prostration seem benign.

  “Did you not observe the way the other fellow moved…danced…before he set to crush your knees?” said Saverian. “Evidently even a Danae body must work to develop that kind of power and forestall damage. The sea is cold, which tightens the muscles. He’s loosening them again. I suppose he means for us to eat this green mess.”

  “You’re welcome to all of it,” I said, not so hungry as I’d thought.

  Kol shifted his stance to the other leg.

  I pulled off my boots and dumped the sand from them. Examining the brightening sky above the cliff top, I judged I had time enough to wash the gritty egg taste from my mouth. Naught was like to wash away the taste of fear or loosen the tightness in my back.

  Leaving my boots by the fire to warm, I headed up the shore barefoot. As I strode away from Saverian and her fire, and Kol and his rock, doubts crept forward, whispering that I was a fool to consider Kol’s offer. Saverian’s leathery eggs had reminded me of days when I’d had naught so fat and filling. I’d never been greedy of pleasure, wealth, or happiness. I’d enjoyed my life—eating what I scrounged, drinking, singing, dancing, albeit in my own crude fashion. I’d shared delights with women and left them laughing and satisfied; I’d worked hard and walked the length of Navronne beneath the skies of summer and winter. I’d seen marvels and talked of philosophy and nonsense with a variety of folk. What more did I want?

  Education was truly a wicked thing. Ignorance had served me well for seven-and-twenty years, and now these monks, princes, and serious women and children had forced me to take note of the world’s trouble, and got it all tangled up with honor and righteousness and good works. But I was no grand thinker. No mighty warrior. No martyr or hero or scholar. I had no plan for saving either Jullian or Navronne from Sila Diaglou, and no twisting of my brain since my recovery had devised one.

  By the time I’d located the trickle of fresh water that burbled underneath a collapsed segment of the sea cliff, washed salt and sand from face and teeth, and swallowed a few mouthfuls, I’d half convinced myself to run away. I would persuade Saverian to return the gold medallion and teach me how to control my disease. Kol had offered no remedy to prevent me going mad from stinks and noises.

  The Dané put himself through several more contortions, sitting, squatting, bending, and stretching. The fellow could not be built on bone. Not human. Gods…

  I started back.

  Kol positioned himself at the very brink of sea and shore. Facing the sea cliff, he raised his arms straight over his head, then allowed them to settle slightly lower, at an upward angle with his shoulders. He paused there, face lifted to the cliff top.

  Without reason, my steps slowed. My breathing paused. At the moment the sun nudged its rim above the sea cliff, Kol ran five mighty steps forward and leaped into the air, knees bent—one forward, one behind—lifting my heart right out of my body. Music, some marvelous discourse of pipe and dulcian, burst forth when his feet touched earth and he began a series of impossible leaps and spins, linked with sweeps of arm and hand, with slo
w turns and long extensions of leg…skyward, seaward…

  Great gods have mercy! As the rays of morning light touched my cheek, the earth shifted beneath my bare feet…breathing…rejoicing…grieving…alive. I felt the exuberant burst of its renewal, as I had felt my own upon waking in sunlight through Osriel’s window. And this…the Dané’s dance…had caused it to happen.

  Down on one knee, chest heaving, Kol extended his muscled leg and back and touched his forehead. He held the position impossibly long until his breathing stilled, so that one might believe him transformed into the very stone statue I had seen in Osriel’s garden. Perfect.

  “Magnus Valentia!” Saverian called as I passed by her. “We need—”

  “Can’t,” I yelled over my shoulder, for of a sudden I was running. Kol had risen, glanced at the barren rock, and was walking away.

  “Kol, wait! I want…” Breathless, I came to the rocks and called after him, heedless of duty, fear, or pride. As if a sword had opened my breast to expose a wildcat in place of my heart, a lifetime’s worth of dissatisfaction, of restless searching and unfocused longing made some kind of sense. I had never imagined such possibility as my uncle had just revealed. If I wanted to help my friends, I had to live. If I wanted to live, I had to take this chance. I could not let fear and caution make me run away—not this time. “Please. Teach me.”

  Chapter 13

  “Season upon season does it require to learn the dance. The fullness of a gyre at the least to grasp the very beginning positions.” Kol’s hands flew up in empty offering, demonstrating the futility of what I begged. His every word and gesture spoke the extent of his scorn. “For a body half human, unpracticed, grown fixed in its working, for a mind distracted by human concerns and unprepared even by the remasti, the breadth and extent of the Everlasting would not be sufficient.”

  Not even such denial could discourage me. Could I but find the proper words to describe this revelation…this certainty that lived in my very breath and bone…I could convince him.

  “I am not wholly unpracticed,” I said, following as he strode along the shore, incoming wavelets lapping at his feet. His gards shimmered palest silver in the cold sunlight. “I’ve run since I could walk, danced since I first heard a flute in the marketplace. And I’ve vigor and endurance beyond other humans—I see that now.” My pleas sounded weak and pitiful beside a hunger that left the doulon but a passing whimsy. All my life’s desires and longings had come together in those moments of Kol’s dancing. Could I but grasp this purpose, surely all other matters—duties and vows and promises—would fall into a pattern I could comprehend. I was meant for this.

  “To master the correct line of a jeque—the simplest leap—and how to balance, how to approach, how to land, how to shift weight and control the strength required while bringing grace and smoothness, takes practice—every day, every night, season upon season, constant work to develop the flexibility of the hip and the power of the leg and the understanding of how these work together. A sequence of three eppires—spins on one foot—happens not in all the seasons before a wanderkin becomes a stripling. And these are only the movements. The wanderkin and stripling study the land and seasons, the growing things, the beasts. Even more difficult…the maturing student must learn to work with the music of the Everlasting, so he may devise sequences of steps to conjoin all these elements, else the dance is but exercise with no effect. And once these are mastered, even yet must one learn the lore of the Canon and how to work a sianou. Thou art far beyond teaching, even were I willing to take on such a task.” He had drawn his brow so tight his dragon’s upper wing curled into a knot.

  “A lifetime of practice…yes, I can see that. Like a swordsman’s training. I could not do what you do in any matter of months or years. Even the moves that appear simple are built on layers of strength and precision. But the other learning…Music lives in me; I hear it everywhere…even across the years, when I use my bent. And I’ve not spent my life without eyes or ears. Likely I picked up much of the worldly lore in all these years. It’s just the movements…” My limbs and spine longed to stretch and spin and soar. My heart and lungs ached to fuel such power as I had seen.

  We rounded the curving end of the shallow cove and came to a point where sand yielded to a cobbled shore, carved with tide pools. White-winged gulls flapped and rode the wind, while bearded ducks and thin-necked grebes pecked at sea wrack abandoned by the tides.

  Kol took out across the cobble, and I followed, abruptly aware of my bare feet on the cold hard knobs. The Dané halted and pointed at a crescent-shaped pool near the water’s edge. One could not mistake the challenge. “Share your knowledge, halfbreed. Tell me what lives here.”

  Having worked for a time in the ports of Morian, I knew something of shore birds and fish and shelled creatures. But to recite them as for a schoolmaster…Kol’s expression echoed my every childhood tutor’s disbelief. Ignorant plebeiu. Stubborn, ill-mannered whelp who refuses even to try. Have you some disease, Magnus, that you cannot pick out one simple word from a page, or is this but the incurable hardness of your spirit?

  I forced past failures aside. This was the dance, life that linked sunlight and sea and earth. Even the Cartamandua bent could never again bring me to this crossroads of possibility.

  Kneeling on the hard cobbles, I peered into the clear water, the sunlight dazzling my eyes. I saw little but rocks and a few sea plants with long stalks and filmy red leaves. One tiny fish darted into the rocky shadows. The carnage the hunting birds had scattered on the cobble told me more. “There’ll be crabs and mussels here,” I said. “Those bunched green fronds are a snake plant stuck to the rock, I think. When the tide goes out, it withers.”

  “But does it live or die? Guesses and simplicities hardly suffice.” Kol stood straight as a post. What did he want? Such creatures as lived in pools hid among the rocks and weeds. Who could know them all?

  Irked by his contempt, I plunged my hands into the pool. Perhaps my bent might reveal what passed here in the same way it allowed me to distinguish footsteps. Elbow deep, the cold water wet my sleeves and crept upward toward my shoulders as I loosed magic to flow through my fingertips. I listened, smelled, tasted, stretched my mind into the crevices and crannies. Slowly, I began to comprehend what my senses uncovered: threads of color, of stillness and movement, of life and death.

  “Fish live here,” I said. “Shannies and bearded rocklings—and tiny shrimp, almost transparent, and the warty yellow lump that is a slug, not a pebble. And this”—I touched a dark, twisted knot of a shell—“is a dog whelk that Hansker milk for purple dye. The strawberry growing on that bulging rock is no plant, but a tentacled beast that stings its prey—the smaller creatures who hide in these forests of leaves, like the glass shrimp brought in by the tide and the mitelings of the dog whelk…”

  I told him of death and birth, of how the whelk’s tongue scoops the flesh of the mussel between its closed shells, and how an entirely new creature can grow from the broken arm of the scarlet sea star that hid beneath a wave-smoothed rock. The pool was a world to itself, fed and ravaged by the god of the tide, as Navronne was fed and ravaged by our fickle gods.

  When my hands grew numb from the cold, I had to stop. Bundling my fingers beneath my arms, I sat up, shivering and blinking in the watery light.

  Kol sat on his haunches beside me, staring into the water. “As I have watched thee walk the land and sound the streams of the earth in company with humans, I assumed thy works a preening deception—the arrogance of the Cartamandua passed on in his seed. Again, I have erred.” He shifted his gaze to my face as if he looked on me for the first time. “For a gyre—a full turn of the seasons—I studied this very pool, and only then did I understand so much. Thou hast a grace for seeing, rejongai. Did the gyres wheel backward, I would press thy sire earlier…convince him to bring thee to me for teaching, not wait, as I did, for him to fail.”

  He rose to his full height. “But no wishing can recapture lost chance.
Clyste was wrong. Were all accomplished as she hoped, even then thou couldst not dance the Canon. Human blood flows in thy veins, and the archon forbids tainted blood nigh the dancing ground. Naught can change the lessons of the past. We will speak no more of the Canon. I can gift thee the gards of separation and exploration and the teaching of their use, as I said, and that only.”

  But the vehemence of his denial was no longer directed at me, but at himself. Pride had caused him to fail Clyste, a sister whom he loved. For the first time since I had seen him greet the morning, a spark of hope burned inside me. I would not push too hard. He would bend. Whatever the “lessons of the past,” I believed as I believed naught else in this world that my mother had meant for me to dance.

  “What must I do?” I shoved up my sleeves and stretched out my arms as if they were sword blanks to be heated, hammered, and shaped.

  He motioned me to follow him back around the headland to the sandier shore. “As I said, each change lies buried within thy flesh already—the three suppressed and the great one yet to come.”

  “Then why didn’t I change when the time was right? I suppose it’s more difficult for ones like me. Halfbreeds. Which means this will likely be uncomfortable—” Memories of battle wounds came to mind, and those horrid birthdays when I’d gone half mad with pain and lashed out at anyone within reach, driven by an agonized restlessness that naught but violence or spelled perversion could still.

  No matter my desires, dread shivered my marrow.

  “It is neither fault in thee nor a factor of thy mixed birth that thou art unchanged. A remasti is impossible to accomplish alone. The vayar must guide the immature body to express its power, and the gards are the visible signs of its accomplishment. Other halfbreeds have taken the remasti without difficulty.”

  Kol motioned me to stand before him at the edge of the water, but I held my ground in the dry dunes. My nerves would not permit my mouth to be still. “What will I feel? What will change besides the…marks?”