Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  The gates ground open with a soul-scraping cacophony. A torch flared the dark tunnel, searing my eyes, but I could not mistake Voushanti’s bulk in company with the soldiers.

  “We need to see Prince Osriel as soon as possible,” said Saverian.

  “Unfortunately His Grace is not in residence,” said Voushanti. “Dreogan, prepare to close the gates. Muserre, Querz, wake Mistress Elene and tell the steward to prepare hot food and wine for the physician and the pureblood. I’ll escort them in.”

  “Where in the name of all holy gods is he?” I said, unreasonably irritated, as my bowels churned.

  Voushanti waited until the three warriors had left us. Then he turned his gaze our way, the red centers of his eyes flaring savagely. “Our master has been taken captive, sorcerer. He lies in the dungeons of Sila Diaglou.”

  PART THREE

  Ever Longer Nights

  Chapter 18

  “How did this happen?” I said, rubbing my head to keep my sluggish blood flowing. I would need to sleep soon or I’d be gibbering. But not yet. Not until I understood the magnitude of this disaster. “You’re sure the witch doesn’t know his true identity?”

  “We have no reason to believe she knows he is the prince,” said Voushanti. The mardane stood stiffly at the door of Elene’s retiring chamber. He had brought Saverian and me straight from the gates. “My lord’s saccheria struck him hard just as we left the Danae. In the physician’s absence, he chose to ride on to the monkhouse, where Thane Stearc would be able to care for him.”

  “Papa always keeps a supply of Osriel’s medicines,” said Elene, her circled eyes speaking raw grief and desperate worry. “Saverian sees to it that he knows what to do for every variant of the disease. He had to ride as Gram. No one remaining at the abbey knows him as anyone but Papa’s secretary.”

  Saverian huddled by the hearth wrapped in a dry blanket. Barely controlled fury had sealed her lips since she’d heard that all her worst fears for Osriel had come true. She clearly blamed herself.

  I perched on a window seat, pretending I was not within walls. As long as I could see the sky, my lungs did not feel quite so starved or my stomach quite so certain it was going to turn wrong way out.

  Elene, flushed as summer dawn, sat in a padded armchair, a bright-colored shawl covering what her shift and hastily donned bliaut did not. Sleep had left half of her short bronze braids unraveled, the others matted or sticking every which way. Heat rose from her as from a smoldering bonfire. “Sila Diaglou and a small force lay in wait at Gillarine for Papa to return from the warmoot. Before the priestess could remove Papa from the abbey, Osriel walked through the gate and right into her arms.”

  Anger and resentment bulged Voushanti’s fists and twisted his scarred mouth. “My lord insisted I return to the bridge with my men as soon as we sighted the monkhouse gates. He did not permit disobedience.”

  I squirmed at the remembrance of Voushanti’s battles of will with Osriel. Their hellish link of enchantment and submission still confounded me.

  Elene beckoned me to her side and thrust a crumpled parchment into my hand. “The witch dispatched two of the monks to carry this message to Renna. Can you fathom her insolence?”

  The precisely formed letters flowed into their usual incomprehensible blotches. My own cheeks hot, I shoved it back at her and returned to my window. “So tell me, what does it say?”

  Elene frowned for a moment before her expression cleared in understanding. “Forgive me, Brother. Here, I’ll read it…” She smoothed the page and began, her voice swelling with repressed fury.

  Osriel of Evanore,

  Believing our partnership holds more promise for Navronne’s future than our enmity, I extend to you my sisterly goodwill and offer an exchange of benefits. Our purposes do not and cannot coincide. I serve Powers beyond the ken of any mortal born, while you serve your own secret pleasures of a diabolical odor. Yet our interests may not conflict in every instance.

  You hold an injured monk, the chancellor of Gillarine Abbey, known to be involved in this Karish lighthouse foolishness. As your deeds exemplify no maudlin sympathies for Navronne’s peasants, I cannot conceive that this errant project holds any innate value in your estimation.

  On the other hand, your position as Evanore’s lord makes your defensive strength dependent on a handful of ancient families who demand certain strict loyalties and protocols. Unfortunately, one of your warlords seems to have connived with these Karish librarians, and I have caught him at it. But he has convinced me he cannot work magic.

  Perhaps you are strong enough to control your clansmen even while abandoning one of them to your adversaries. But if you prefer to avoid a disruption among your supporters, I can offer you this bargain. I will return your errant Thane Stearc in exchange for the monk Victor. To sweeten the offering, I will include your pureblood’s catamite. I doubt your warlord’s diseased scribe could survive the journey, but if you prefer him to the boy, you may have him instead. I believe we shall both be well pleased with the outcome of the trade, and our relative strengths will remain in balance.

  I require this bargain be completed before the solstice. Do you agree to it, take the monk to the crossroads at Gilat on the Ardran High Road and send word to me at Fortress Torvo.

  In the glory of the Gehoum,

  Sila Diaglou

  “Damnable…vile…” Rage threatened to cut off what remnants of use remained in my exhausted brain. “Gods ship them all to the netherworld!”

  “Does anyone else find this letter’s language odd?” asked Saverian, her fiery anger banked by curiosity. “I thought the woman disdained learning.”

  “She didn’t write it,” I said. “Gildas did. Who else would slander a child?” I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead as if it might prevent my skull’s imminent disintegration. “Why would they trade one for the other? Stearc can open the lighthouse as well as Brother Victor, right?”

  “No.” Saverian returned to the hearth stool. “The opening requires two paired warders—one embodying the unlocking spell, one with power to release it.”

  “And Gildas knows this?”

  “Not unless they’ve tortured it out of someone,” she said. “Until this hour, I’ve been the only person outside the four warders themselves who knew. Luviar and Brother Victor were one pairing. Stearc and Osriel the second. The priestess and her monk don’t understand what they have.”

  “Neither my abbot nor I revealed the secret.” An ill-favored little man wearing a black cowl and an eye patch shuffled through a side door not three paces from me, leaning heavily on a cane.

  “Brother Victor!” I popped up from the window seat. Only fear of crushing his fragile bones kept me from embracing him. Which would have been an entirely unseemly greeting for the chancellor of Gillarine, and an act I would never have contemplated when I lived there. But I could not help the surge of pleasure as I bowed, cupping one palm in the other and extending them in an offering of Iero’s blessings.

  He smiled back, stuffing his cane under one arm long enough to return the blessing. “Dear Brother Valen, one of my three blessed saviors”—he nodded graciously to Voushanti and Saverian. “It is a grace to see you returned safely to our company. Though, as always, you present yourself at inconvenient times.”

  As I helped him settle gingerly into the chair beside Elene, he glanced curiously at my hands and then quickly to my face. I snatched my hands back under my cloak, hiding the marks that had paled to silver. I’d not told Elene or Voushanti of my own particular adventures in Aeginea as yet. Osriel’s predicament preempted every other concern.

  “These secret pairings…” I began, returning to the lighthouse secret. Elene could not work magic, but Brother Victor was a pureblood sorcerer. The puzzle pieces shifted. “So, Mistress Elene, Osriel didn’t send you back here to assume Brother Victor’s burden, but to partner with him. To take Luviar’s place.”

  She dipped her head, tears brightening her eyes. “We dare not le
ave my father and Osriel there together. Sila Diaglou will give them up only so long as she believes that only one warder is necessary. A pureblood warder. Dear, brave Brother Victor has agreed to the exchange.”

  “Brother!” Saverian looked up in shock. “You can’t. You’re scarcely walking!”

  “And what of Jullian?” I snapped. “You don’t think the priestess will notice you choosing to retrieve a sick man over a healthy, innocent boy?” That no one seemed concerned over the boy made me irrationally angry. I had yet to admit that Osriel’s life was worth the saving.

  “If there is the slightest hope to rescue our prince, I must do it,” said Brother Victor. “I can transfer my wardship to another. And we must certainly do whatever we can to retrieve young Jullian as well. Perhaps I can speak to Gildas’s conscience…”

  Perhaps they hadn’t told Victor about Gerard. “Gildas owns no conscience,” I said.

  “The priestess will never yield a living captive.” Voushanti’s opinion interrupted the discussion with the subtle grace of a crossbow bolt. “Go through with this exchange and you but confirm she has a prize in hand. Then she will redouble her efforts to extract the truth from Thane Stearc. Whether or not he tells her what she wants to know, Thane Stearc is a dead man. His endurance is all that stands between Prince Osriel and Sila Diaglou’s questioning.” He glared at Saverian as if it were her fault Osriel was taken.

  Voushanti’s reasoning—and its implication that Osriel was as good as dead, too—silenced us all. Elene closed her eyes and pressed folded hands to her mouth.

  There had to be some other way to save three lives than to send this good man to certain death. I rolled the priestess’s message over in my mind. With every skill of memory I had developed through the years, I reviewed the exact phrasing, my thoughts focused as if heeding the whispers of stone. “She wants to have it done before the solstice,” I murmured.

  Then truth struck home like a cudgel to the knees. “Of course!” I blurted out. “Max has settled her bargain with Prince Bayard!”

  Saverian and Victor had not heard the details of Osriel’s meeting with his two half brothers at Gillarine. Thus I had to explain Osriel’s agreement with Bayard to join him in confronting the Harrowers, and how my brother Max, as Bayard’s negotiator, had been charged to drive a false bargain with the priestess over her demands for control of Evanore, the lighthouse, and me. “…and so Prince Osriel told them that either the joined might of Eodward’s sons defeats Sila Diaglou on the winter solstice or the world we know will end.”

  “By the Mother, Riel!” Saverian’s harsh whisper split the despairing silence.

  The problem, of course, was that without Osriel, his plan, whatever it might have been, collapsed like an empty sack. What hope had we of preventing Sila Diaglou from doing whatever she wished on the solstice? She could make Bayard her puppet king or crown herself. As long as she possessed the book of maps and the traitor Gildas to use it, she could eventually find every Danae sianou and work her poisoning, further corrupting the Canon. Harrowers would lay waste to Ardra. The warlords might hold Evanore against the combined legions of Harrowers and Moriangi, but what light would ever draw them from their caves as night and chaos drowned Navronne? No more savior princes waited hidden in Aeginea.

  “Osriel commanded the warmoot to muster at Angor Nav on the solstice,” Elene said numbly. “He promised they would ride for Palinur the next day to enforce his claim to Navronne.”

  No need to remind us that Angor Nav lay more than eighty quellae from Caedmon’s Bridge or to state the logical conclusion that Osriel had no intention of confronting Sila Diaglou with his Evanori legion. The prince had believed victory lay in the deserted gold mine of Dashon Ra, and if any knew what that dread solution entailed, it was Saverian. She looked as if she could snap bone with her teeth.

  “Our first responsibility is to preserve the lighthouse,” said Brother Victor, always a man of practical reason. “Whatever plan Prince Osriel formulated and whatever he learned from the Danae that might aid him are imprisoned with him. So we must devise a new plan on our own.”

  “Unless you’ve learned what we need, Valen,” said Elene, forcing her voice steady. “Perhaps he told you his intent before you were taken? Or perhaps you heard what he learned from the Danae?”

  I heard her truer inquiry. Had I kept my promise to learn of Osriel’s dire enchantment and dissuade him from it?

  I met her gaze and shook my head, then spoke to all. “We learned nothing from the prince or his meeting. But Saverian and I did learn that the Canon has been broken for a very long time. The Danae themselves are in decline and have found no answer for it. With each Harrower poisoning—what they did with Gerard and tried to do by killing Brother Horach—another part of the Canon is lost.”

  Even as I spoke, many things seemed clearer in my own mind. On the day we retrieved Gerard’s body at Clyste’s Well, Kol, in his anger, had handed me the first clue. You lead me here, cleanse the Well so I do not sicken, return it to my memory so I cannot escape knowing what is lost—though I must lose it all over again. And Picus’s failing garden had given me the second.

  “Once a sianou is poisoned, they can’t find their way there anymore,” I said. “And the rest of the land, despite their care, keeps failing. I saw what they do, what they fight, and I would wager on my hope of heaven that this failure is the root of our plagues and pestilence, our weather disturbances, too, for all I know. Prince Osriel went to the Danae hoping to gain use of their magic on the solstice, and we’ve no way of knowing what answer they gave him. But what Saverian learned is that no matter what they promised the prince, the archon’s enmity for humankind is so deep-rooted that trusting the Danae in any matter whatsoever increases our peril.”

  As I laid out these truths, I saw no hope for Osriel or Stearc. Even if the thane had endured Sila Diaglou’s torments thus far, in the moment the priestess paraded her prisoners before Bayard, the game would be up and Osriel would die. It was only a matter of time.

  “How long have we been gone?” I said. The confusions of Aeginea had destroyed my concept of time. Were we but a day or two from the solstice, I could see no course but to hide Elene and Victor and whatever monks we could salvage from Gillarine. Unbreached, the lighthouse might survive. But if those who could read the books and work the tools fell to Sila Diaglou’s holocaust, what matter if the priestess took her time to find her way inside? On the other hand, had we a sevenday, something more might be done, though I had no idea what.

  “Six days have passed since you were taken.” Voushanti’s harsh intrusion grated on my spirit. “His Highness was made captive that same night. I returned to Renna only two days since.”

  I spun to Saverian. “Only six! How could that be right?”

  “Picus explained that it is not the days themselves, but the spending of human life that slows seven for one in Aeginea,” she said, with only vague attention. “Though time itself is fluid there, as we saw, the years pass side by side in the two planes, the sun’s passage marking the season’s change at the same hour.”

  Saverian fell back into her own silence, distracted far beyond the matter of dirt and dishevelment and exhaustion. Her eyes flicked now and then toward Voushanti. But I accepted her word. Osriel had said something much the same.

  Only six days…Perhaps we had a little time to work after all. “We’ve yet a fortnight until the solstice,” I said. “When is the anniversary of Eodward’s coronation? Has it passed? The prince was supposed to send to Bayard on that day to confirm their agreement.”

  “The anniversary is three days hence,” said Brother Victor. “Mistress Saverian, did you say Picus?” She didn’t look up.

  “A small, fast force might be able to intercept the priestess between the monkhouse and Palinur,” Voushanti broke in, his mailed bulk seeming to grow and fill the door. “One word and I can have the prince’s elite guard riding.”

  “You will do nothing without my leave, Mardane,” said
Elene harshly. “Renna is the gateway to Evanore. I’ll not leave it defenseless. As Prince Osriel’s appointed castellan, I command you stay here until Thane Boedec and Thanea Zurina arrive.”

  “You cannot travel, Mardane,” said Saverian. “You know it.”

  Voushanti folded his massive arms across his chest and looked away. I blinked, rubbed my own arms, and reached for better control of my wayward senses, for it seemed, just for a moment, that the edges of his flesh rippled like the surface of a wheat field. Though none acknowledged her comment, everyone looked as if a foul odor had wafted through the chamber.

  “Sila Diaglou has several days’ head start and can call up remounts and reinforcements throughout Ardra,” I said, impatient with their secrets. “She’s likely back at Fortress Torvo already. We’ll have to take the prince from her there.”

  My vow to preserve the lighthouse demanded Osriel’s rescue, no matter my grievances with him. And my vow to Jullian demanded my participation, for I could rely on no one else to protect him.

  Brother Victor tapped his walking stick on the floor idly. “We would need to be sure Osriel and Stearc are inside the fortress. We’ve heard that Palinur is in confusion. Perhaps we could send in a small party, shielded with enchantment. Strike quickly.”

  Elene’s head popped up. “You could locate them, right, Valen? Your magic…”

  “Of course…yes.” I knew Jullian and Osriel well enough that I could locate them if I had a clue where to start.

  Yet a direct assault on their prison was out of the question; the ancient fortress where Luviar had bled out his life sat in the heart of Palinur. And negotiations of any kind could allow Sila Diaglou to discover the prize that lay in her hand. Our plan must use stealth. Something unexpected…