Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  “When we move on.” Kol strolled away toward the water.

  Saverian rolled her eyes as if I were a lunatic. The burgeoning clouds released their burden, binding sea and sky into a gray eternity of rain.

  Chapter 14

  Saverian pressed herself to the cliff to shelter from the rising storm. I grabbed my clothing from the sand and joined her. But the rain drove straight in from the sea, a cold sheeting deluge that soaked us to the skin—not all that far in my case—chilled us to the bone, and made it impossible to think too much about what I had just done. Certainly the ugly change to my arms and legs did naught to keep me warm or dry. Naught that I could see along the strand promised better cover, and a fire was out of the question. We could not stay here.

  “We need shelter,” I shouted at Kol over the hammering rain, the continuous rumble of thunder and surf, and the maelstrom of sounds and smells that filled my head with more images than I could possibly sort out. “Humans die of cold and wet.”

  I saw no benefit in pressing the point. The Dané would choose to help or not. I believed he would. He had squatted ankle deep in the surf and spread his fingers in the incoming wavelets, as if ensuring that their texture met his expectations. Rain sheened his long back like a cloak of transparent silk.

  “Thou shouldst not have brought the woman,” he called back without looking up. “I could have taken thee into the sea again.”

  “Did he do that?” I asked Saverian as we waited and shivered. “Take me under water? I mean, I experienced something. Naught I’d want to do again.” My antipathy for water was too deep-rooted. The gray waves churned and frothed in nauseating rhythm. “I felt as if I were dreaming of the sea…of drowning…of his voice. I didn’t think it was real.”

  “Nor did I. When you came out from your w-washing, he grabbed your shoulder and led you right back into the water.” The shivering physician grimaced and wiped water from her eyes. “The waves boiled bright b-blue around you. You both vanished. I’ve seen nothing like it…nothing ever. How did you b-breathe, Valen? It was hours before he led you out again. Why aren’t you d-dead?”

  “Hours? That’s not possible.”

  “I’m a good judge of time. I was beginning to think I would need to find m-my own way home.”

  I jabbed my fingers into my ribs. It hurt. “Well, I’m not dead. But I’m not going to try diving in on my own.”

  A reluctant smile teased at her mouth. “I’d planned to examine your new skin to see if you had scales or gills. But I’ve no paper or pens to record my findings. A poor practitioner to get caught without.”

  I could not but return her smile, grateful for her astringent practicality. Had she screamed or shrunk from me in disgust, the anxious knot lodged in my own breast might have unraveled into panicked frenzy.

  Kol unfolded his limbs and struck out northward along the shore. His hand twitched in a gesture I interpreted as an invitation to follow. Saverian must have gotten the same notion. She sped after him like a constable after a thief. The physician might miss her bed or her books, but I couldn’t imagine she would regret the absence of any person.

  I used the moment’s privacy to relieve myself and wrestle my ugly arms into my soaked wool shirt, hoping it might cut the wind and soften the impact of the driving rain. Then I set out after the others.

  Saverian’s time estimates could not be accurate. I could feel the sun hiding behind the storm. I could almost see it, in the way you see the rider in an approaching cloud of dust or envision a Syran woman’s body within her cloud of drifting veils. And it had scarce moved from the cliff top since Kol’s dance of greeting. As I marveled at this certainty, all out of nothing, a moment’s flush left me warm and cold together. I tried to hold on to the sensation, but sounds and scents and images piled one up on the other like unruly children demanding my attention, and soon I was naught but cold and wet again. Strange.

  Kol moved swiftly. Just past the slumped cliff where we’d found fresh water, the shoreline curved and took the two of them out of sight. I trotted a little faster and caught up with them just as the Dané started up a steep bank scored with rivulets of mud. The footing was tricky, and I was just as happy to be bootless, able to feel where rocks and rooted shrubs gave surer purchase.

  Saverian climbed like a goat, but with far less grace. She was confident and fast, but grabbed on to every protruding rock and twig, and her boots slipped every other step. Her black braid had escaped its bonds and water cascaded from her straggling hair down her neck and the back of her cloak. When I came up behind her—by sheer virtue of my longer legs—she was mumbling through chattering teeth. “Wretched royal b-bastard. ‘Leave your b-books and ride out with me,’ you said. ‘I need you.’ Yes…to be trapped in a city full of torch-wielding madmen, chased by Harrowers, saddled with a d-doulon-raving lunatic, frostbit, saddle-sore, bashed in the head, d-drowned, and now abandoned in a monsoon in company with said madman and a cold-blooded dancing g-gatzé. Never again, Riel. Enough is enough.” She stomped through the mud as if it might be Osriel’s face.

  I scrabbled upward, wondering if she’d find it amusing if I accused her of whining. Likely not. “You’ve not traveled with the prince all that much, then? On his visits to Gillarine? Or to…battlefields?”

  Locked in her grumbling misery, she perhaps forgot what she considered my business and what not. “Stearc keeps him to his regimen when traveling. I give the thane spells and medicines enough to get Osriel home if he gets very bad. Of course, now Stearc’s commanded to stay at the abbey, it’s left to the dead man to see to Riel. The god-cursed fool oughtn’t travel at all…”

  The dead man…Voushanti? An extra chill raised my neck hairs. Her commentary flowed like the mud around our feet, and I didn’t want to interrupt it, but someday I’d get her to explain.

  “…and certainly not in winter. The cold torments his joints, and swells his lungs and air passages. One day he’ll fall off his horse and die, and then what of his grand plans? What of his father’s wishes? What of his warriors and his subjects and his—The rest of them? Blasted, mite-brained, cold-blooded, soul-blind idiot.”

  The rest of whom, physician? Another question to save for a better time. “He told me that life is pain and only movement makes it bearable.”

  “Pssh.” Saverian dispensed disdain as innkeepers dispense gossip. “His father spewed that drivel when Osriel was a boy and he was trying to coax the child out of bed on a day when every move Riel made was agony. He’d put Osriel on a horse or force him to run races with him. It wasn’t fair. The child would do anything to please his father, though it caused his saccheria to flare and he suffered for days after, and King Eodward knew it. The king called this torment love.”

  “But Osriel got out of bed.”

  “He did. He does it every day. Honestly, I’ve no idea how. His father’s love left his joints like broken glass and his soul a grinding stone.” Saverian slipped again and only her grip on a pine sapling saved her from falling face down in the mud. “The Mother spare me any such love.”

  I didn’t think she had to worry. Loving the physician would be as rewarding as romancing the dunes we’d just left behind.

  Mud squished between my toes as I climbed. I could well imagine robust, ruddy Eodward prodding his sickly child to be strong enough to survive in a brutal world. Yet I had received a privileged glimpse of the king’s nature once when I was a young soldier under his command, and I surmised that the pain Osriel experienced on those hard days did not outstrip that his father felt at forcing him to it. Eodward had been rewarded by seeing his sickly child grow to manhood, an uncommon fate for a victim of saccheria. Saverian was right, too, though. Pain could change a man. Make him hard.

  “Did you love the prince…when you were children?”

  “No. We were friends. Playmates. My mother was his physician.” As if she realized, of a sudden, the personal turn the conversation had taken, Saverian tightened her jaw and hauled herself upward even more forcefull
y. “Where is this creature taking us?”

  That, too, was a most interesting question, for a glance back over my shoulder showed naught but rain and a valley of trees. No sea, no shore. Even more unsettling…the sun, yet buried deeply in the clouds, now lay behind us, what my instincts deemed west, though our path had not turned and scarce an hour had passed from my recovery. What daylight the storm had left us was rapidly failing.

  I pressed my hand to Saverian’s back, hoping to speed her steps. The Dané would likely welcome an excuse to abandon us. When we crested the steep slope, Kol’s sapphire gards were just visible through a scattering of saplings that bordered a darkening wood.

  “Come on.” I took Saverian’s hand, and we pelted after him through the trees. The gloom of the deeper woodland enveloped us.

  Saverian slowed. “Valen, look.”

  “Best keep up. He’s using no track I can travel on my own.” I tightened my grip on her wrist. What with the rain, tired legs, a head packed with fears and nonsense, and Kol’s disconcerting route finding, the shifting of north and south, of before and after and here and there, was twisting my instincts underside up and forepart behind. Our every step moved across time and distance in ways not even a Cartamandua could fathom.

  But the willful physician snatched her hand away. “Stop! Look at yourself, Valen.”

  “We daren’t lose—” Iero’s grace! I stopped. Threads of pale lapis-hued light snaked about my fingers and bare legs. I shoved one sodden sleeve higher. The light—some threads fine, some thick—shifted and blurred beneath the raindrops. The knot in my breast burst. A cold shaft of terror pierced me head to feet. I had become…other.

  “What’s happening? Is it uncomfortable? Pleasurable?” She made her odd little open-palm gesture asking permission, but touched my arm before I could refuse it. The traces sparked silver and blue under her fingertips.

  “I’m—No. It just itches. Stings.” As if a swarm of ants had taken up residence on…or inside…my flesh and took it in mind to bite me every once in a while.

  “Do you feel it atop the skin or deeper? Perhaps it’s like a lizard’s coloring that changes with its surroundings.” She bent my arm at wrist and elbow, which caused the marks to squirm and blur. “Look at that! If I just had my lenses…better light…”

  Queasy and embarrassed, I jerked my arm away. The shifting marks seem to be connected straight to my gut. “We’d best go. He’s waiting for us.”

  I stumbled forward, clutching my bundle of clothes and boots, unable to keep my eyes from the unstable patterns on my bare legs and feet. Saverian grabbed my sleeve and guided me around trees and stumps.

  A flare of white welcomed us into a rain-swept circle of trampled grass amid the trees. A starlike cluster of twigs, the source of the pale, magical light, dangled from an overhanging branch, unaffected by the rain. The light revealed several ramshackle sheds and lean-tos nestled beside a thatch-roofed hut. Kol stood at the open doorway of the hut, engaged in conversation with a man in a dirty white gown and a brown—I wiped the rain from my eyes. Not a brown cloak, but a cowl, and a well-delineated tonsure that bared half his scalp. I was speechless.

  “…Well, of course, I’ve been gi’en to welcome the stranger, and to hear a voice of home would put me out of mind in heavenly thanks, though I’ve renounced all such. But a woman born…Brave Kol, could ye not ask me please to slash my throat or draw down the poison of the hemlock, but ye must put me in the way of my sin? Half a century’s turn must I have fasted and prayed by now—not to say, great God of all, that I’ve complaints or believe by any chance that I’ve full expiated my guilt, for certain not”—he raised a bony hand to address this side comment to the heavens—“but to come to this moment to find myself in the full occasion of repeating my defilement—more likely, e’en, being half mad as I am—’tis a sore deterrent to hospitality!”

  The white light bathed his face as he stuck his head around Kol’s rangy form and squinted into the rainy night. “Did ye not say ye’d brought two human folk? Or is it—?” As his examination took in my odd and soggy self, half dressed, legs flaring blue like miniature lightning, his own ruddy complexion lost all color, and he circled his breast with Iero’s seal, completing the gesture by clutching his chest as if his heart might fly out of it. “Mighty saints protect me, Brother Kol, ye’ve brought me a halfbreed.”

  Assuredly his claim of fasting was no lie; the monk had scarce a citré’s weight of spare flesh on him. But he had once been a robust man, perhaps a half head less than Kol or I, and his meatless bones were broad and thick. Gray-stubbled chin and tonsure appeared as ragged as his garb, and assuredly no cleaner. But despite his self-deprecation, his voice boomed clear and the pale eyes gleamed as sharp as a well-honed dagger.

  “Is the woman also mixed blood?”

  “Only the male,” said Kol. “He is newly a wanderkin and cannot warm himself as yet. His companion has fallen afoul of Tuari, and the wanderkin would not leave her to the archon’s retribution. She needs shelter.”

  “Ye’ve saved him from the breaking, have ye not, Kol? Put yourself in the way of burying, and if this girl aided ye in such an enterprise, then right and mercy it be to protect her. But how came ye to involve yourself with any human offspring, who’ve sworn never—?” The wide-eyed monk inhaled sharply. He stepped around Kol, and unheeding of the rain soaking his cowl and gown, grasped my arm and dragged me underneath the twiggy lamp. His fingers a manacle about my wrist, he swept my face as he might study his holy writs. “Merciful Iero, Liege of Heaven!”

  “He is born of my sister,” said Kol.

  “The cartographer relinquished him at last?” The monk’s fingers pinched my chin with the bite of a hungry dog on bloody meat and twisted my head side to side. “All count of human years has escaped me, but this one cannot have much time left before his maturing. Ne’er did I imagine your cruel penalty would budge the Cartamandua mule.”

  Kol stiffened. “Humans are not fit to judge cruelty.”

  “Strip off yer righteous skin, Brother Kol, and we’ll argue it again,” said the monk cheerfully, spinning about to face the Dané so quickly that his garb snapped my bare legs, causing a shower of blue and silver sparks. He tapped his own broad chest. “Would ye wrestle me to answer which of us has the One God’s ear? I’m not what I was, but if blessed Iero doth keep this heart thuttering, a human sinner will yet crack your long-lived spine. Fasting and hard labor strengthens—”

  “Janus did not send me,” I interrupted, too curious to endure their jousting. “What, in Iero’s glory, brings a Karish monk to Aeginea? You’re not from Gillarine.” The threadbare brown cowl and white gown were not the black garb of Saint Ophir’s brotherhood. A century’s turn, he’d said. Names and faces, plots and schemes flew through my overcrowded head—the abbey, the lighthouse, the succession, Luviar, Osriel, Janus, Kol, Eodward…“By heaven, are you Picus?”

  Then I, too, drew Iero’s sunburst upon my breast, for to see a man two centuries old and not dead drew truths of dread mystery and mortality all too near. Caedmon had sent a monk to the Danae with his infant son, a man charged to educate young Eodward as befit a human prince. But the fellow had vanished mysteriously some few years after Eodward’s return to Navronne, and only rumors had ever said where he’d gone.

  “Picus?” Saverian tilted her head to one side, looking him over. “Osriel has a set of journals written by a man of that name. He was King Eodward’s—Mother save us!” Even the cool physician could not contain her astonishment.

  The monk’s pinched face blossomed into such a joyful alignment as coaxed my own spirit to a smile. “I’m not forgot, then?” He quickly raised his hands as if to stay a legion. “Nay, nay, don’t tell me. Be it honorable memory or ill repute, I must not care. Penance is a narrow road. But here we bide in the deluge, and this lady’s lips blue as a wanderkin herself! And the lad doth appear as he were a goat who’s been witched into fasting. Prithee, come inside my cell and take what meager comfort
s I’ve to offer. Yes, the both of you. Should my weak character keep a drenched and freezing woman in the rain, ’twould be another sin to my account.” Picus pulled back the hide curtain that served him as a door and waved us in.

  “My gratitude, Brother,” said Saverian as she hurried inside.

  When I moved to follow the monk, Kol stayed me with a gesture. “Warm thyself, Cartamandua-son. I’ll await thee, that we might advance thy teaching as the night settles in. If I can convince my sire of the need, I can gift thee the walking gard at next dawning, and so shall we be quit of each other the sooner.”

  “Tonight? Certainly…but…” I hadn’t expected to go out again. Yet it was really just morning down by the sea. The rain pounded Picus’s thatched roof, the tumbledown sheds to either side of it, and the thick mat of leaves beneath the bedraggled maples and copper beeches. “Won’t you come indoors with us, vayar? I’ve so many questions. We could talk where it’s dry.”

  Kol reached for a sturdy branch above his head, and in one smooth motion lifted his shoulders above the branch until he supported his whole weight on his stretched arms and hands. A graceful swing of his legs, a twisting motion, and he sat on the branch, knees drawn up in his encircling arms, perched as easily as a cat. “Thou’lt not be long inside.”

  Whether this was a statement or a command, I wasn’t sure. Kol’s manner was a bit wearing. If my mother was beloved of all, then surely her brother must have something to recommend him. I just hadn’t seen it…save, of course, the grace to protect my physical well-being against Danae spite. From the sheltering doorway I watched him turn his face up, allowing the cold rain to bathe his face and stream his long red hair down his back.

  “He is beautiful, is he not?” Picus stood at my shoulder, the ripe aroma of unwashed flesh and a diet heavy with wild onions souring the autumn pungency of old leaves and wet pine bark. “No Ardran rose was ever so lovely, no Morian stag ever so regal, no Evanori boar ever so stubborn as Kol Stian-son. Had he a soul, the Creator would not know whether to name him Archangel or condemn him to eternal fire for daring rival Him.”