Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  “…and so we are left with Sila Diaglou, entirely sane, entirely ruthless, and determined to purify Navronne and reshape it according to her peculiar vision, with Gildas, who schemes to become the lord of chaos, and with Ronila, who intends to destroy us all. They will cross Caedmon’s Bridge in little more than a sevenday. I don’t completely understand my skills, lord, but I have bound them to your father’s service, to Abbot Luviar’s vision, to Jullian’s protection and the protection of two others whose names I cannot reveal. I would use them in the service of Navronne…in your service, too, if those two are the same. Tell me what is to happen at the mine called Dashon Ra on the winter solstice.”

  Osriel’s eyes were closed, so that for a moment I thought he had fallen asleep. But he shifted and straightened and met my gaze unflinching, though his dark eyes held the bleakness of Navronne’s winter. “I will position a small force at the Bridge, commanding them to lure the Harrowers into the hills behind Renna. Thanks to preparations I have made over the years, Sila will find the vale of Dashon Ra harder to escape than to enter—now I know she is half Dané, I’ll have to consider more carefully how to deal with her own person, and her gammy’s, I suppose. With enough magic entirely channeled into the gold veins at Dashon Ra, I can free the souls I have imprisoned. Bound by blood to my will, they must and shall do my bidding. I plan to give them the Harrower legions.”

  Cold horror struck me like a demon’s hand. “Instill the dead souls in living hosts?”

  He shot to his feet at my first word, gripping one column of the great hearth as if it were all that stood between him and dissolution. “Do not preach to me of the evil of this course until you have seen the future your sister, the diviner, has shown me. Were I to send a living army down upon Sila Diaglou’s trapped legions to save this kingdom from such a future, no man or woman would fault me. Kings must command their people to die for them. Had I the slightest hope of an alternative, I would welcome it with all my heart. But I cannot condemn Navronne to centuries of starvation, disease, and enslavement for my lack of will to use what knowledge and skill I possess.”

  “But what becomes of such an army?” An army of revenants…living bodies possessed by the angry dead.

  “Under my command, they will turn on my brother’s troops. If my brother is wise, he will lay down his arms and come to terms with me. We must consummate the bargain quickly. Without an infusion of my blood, my warriors will have but seven days of life, perhaps twice that if the Danae keep their word. But those will be days they would not own had I left their corpses undisturbed on Perryn’s and Bayard’s battlegrounds. Perhaps they can make some peace with that.”

  I shook my head. “Not peace, my lord. And you well know it. Their souls’ future will be forfeit. You will force them to trade seven days of breathing for the fullness of whatever life lies beyond this one. They’ll not have even the time to seek out their families. And what of the Harrowers’ souls displaced? Are they rightfully dead or are they lost to heaven as well? Or are they, in turn, prisoned in your veins of gold? Three days ago, I shared Voushanti’s dying, lord, and such despair as I felt cannot heal what ails Navronne. If you win your throne by such means, how ever will you govern?”

  “My warlords will protect me in the beginning. From there my own deeds must tell. I’ll do what I can to hold back the night. And we must hope that the Danae, left alone and undisturbed, can heal the things I cannot.” He braced his back against the graceful column, as unyielding as the stone. “I have pondered this course for three years, Valen. Could I see but a glimmer of hope in some other plan, I would leap at it. Luviar knew about Voushanti. He knew of my work with the dead, and why I donned terror as a pureblood dons his mask. Indeed, he knew better than I of all my strengths and weaknesses, and to the very end he counseled me that his god would show me the path of right. Yet even Luviar, in all his wisdom, could not tell me another way.”

  I stepped out of the calefactory enclosure full into the wind, for it felt as if the heat muddied my thoughts. “And what if Tuari Archon betrays you?” For, of course, Osriel intended the magic of the Canon to be channeled into the veins of gold to empower his army of souls. “Ronila spoke as if Tuari was already her tool.”

  The prince riffled his hair with his slender fingers, truly puzzled. “Spite would be his only reason. I yielded every point, gave him everything he asked for. To demonstrate trust and buy the parley, I pledged him fair recompense for my father’s failure to return to Aeginea. To prove my faith, I returned the treasure that was stolen—and it is his own people who lost you again, after all. Our joined power on the solstice will end the sianou poisonings. But in the event you are right and Tuari upends the bargain, I do have an alternative. Certain rites can release the power bound in my blood as Caedmon’s heir. It should be enough to do as I want. Perhaps that is the only just solution after all.”

  And then I put together the clues and understood what he had planned all along. No wonder Saverian would not speak of it. Sila Diaglou had once demanded a scion of Caedmon’s house to bleed in her penitential rites, and Osriel had told me that blood consecrated to Navronne would be supremely potent. He had told Elene that his plan would end his last hope of heaven, but he had not meant that merely as an acknowledgment of a monstrous crime.

  “You think to have Saverian bleed you as Sila would,” I said, appalled at what I envisioned. “You die in torment to release this power in your veins, and she returns you to life to use it. You would yield your own soul to win this battle.”

  He let his head fall back against the pillar and closed his eyes. “Actually I intend Voushanti to do the bleeding part. I’ll need him back from you before we begin.”

  To spend one’s entire life dependent on the blood of others—whom would he choose? Saverian herself…his loyal childhood friend coerced into this macabre partnership? Not Elene. He had pushed her away, for love must surely wither in such a feeding. Voushanti…their survival linked one to the other like conjoined twins?

  “I’ll not put Voushanti through another death to change guardianship, lord. Though I know he will obey you, even in this, it is cruel and inhuman and unworthy of you to ask it of him.”

  “We must all heed cruel necessity—whether prince, warrior, or half-blood Dané, whether man or woman.”

  And then did another consideration chill me. “Ah, lord, what did you promise Tuari to redeem your father’s betrayal?”

  “Only that which I shall make sure never to have—a firstborn child for them to nurture in my father’s place.”

  “Spirits of night, but you—” I bit my tongue. I was sworn to secrecy on the matter. Of course the Danae would require balance in such a bargain, and if Osriel’s firstborn was the price of the parley itself, this bargain would stand…no matter what happened on the solstice. I was sworn to protect Elene and the child, whatever that might mean in the future. Osriel could not know. “Could you find naught else, lord?”

  He dropped his head between his stiff shoulders and laughed—a sad, despairing humor. “How far you’ve come, friend Valen, from the rogue who tried to steal my nivat offering. You lack even a sprout of wings, yet I feel as if the judgment of heaven rests in your word. Can you not see? My father left his beloved kingdom—his people—in my protection. Do I wait another season, I’ll have naught left to save. How can I ask of others what I would not give myself?”

  I stared into the broken, snow-drenched cloisters of Gillarine and sought answers. Ruin lay in every direction that I could see. To stop Osriel left Navronne at the mercy of Sila Diaglou. But I had no confidence that even so determined a warrior as Sila could outfox the witch who had made her—and that made our end far worse. No wheat would grow from an earth of Ronila’s harrowing. And Gildas, the monk who aspired to godhood, was the blind bargain in the game. At some point he would strike out on a separate course from his malignant partner. He intended me to be a part of it, and the hunger lurking even now in my blood gave me the unsettling feeling that my escap
e from Fortress Torvo had not concerned him as much as it should have. Though even a victory would tally an unsupportable cost, who else but Osriel had the remotest chance of stopping these three?

  Not I. If I had a part in this conflict…in this world…it yet remained hidden from me. My mother’s purposes were unfathomable. The impossible yearnings waked by my contact with my Danae kin seemed selfish and trivial beside the magnitude of the ruin we faced. And so I was left only with tangled vows and awe for those who would give so much for naught but sheerest love. I felt in sore need of counsel.

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead and approached the drooping shape braced upright by the pillar. “Come, my lord, let me take you home to bed.”

  He cocked his head. “No argument? No fiery sword?”

  I gave him Saverian’s vial. When he had drained it and some of the rigidity had left his stance, I offered him my arm. He relinquished his pillar and allowed me to slip my arm under his shoulders. As we moved slowly through the cloisters, a flurry of bats flew out from the burnt undercrofts.

  “Just…wait for me, lord,” I said as I walked us back to Renna. “Don’t tell anyone about your plan, and don’t do anything irretrievable until I get back. I doubt I’ve the wit to find you another way, but perhaps my uncle does.”

  PART FOUR

  Canon

  Chapter 28

  I crouched in the lee of a limestone scarp—the only shelter in the storm-blasted wilderness—and vomited up nothing for the fiftieth time in an hour.

  Had my throat not already taken on the character of raw meat, I would have screamed into the earth as my limbs seized with cramps, my gut twisted into knots, and my skin felt like the vellum of Sila’s map as it charred into ash. Instead, I writhed and moaned and cursed, ready to devour the frozen mud or my own flesh did I have the least imagining it would taste of nivat.

  The hunger had come upon me as I had traveled the first shift from Osriel’s gates, as if my body knew that my responsibility for others’ safety had ended for the present and it could now indulge itself. Determined to seek my uncle’s counsel, I had ignored its warning and traveled the meadows beyond Caedmon’s Bridge to the Sentinel Oak. Once in Aeginea, I shifted straightaway into the terraced land where, in the human plane, Ardra’s prized vineyards lay dying. I had no notion of how to find Kol, even assuming the archon had not turned him into a beast or locked him out of his body. But if I could just find my way back to Picus, surely he could tell me how to locate my uncle or Stian.

  Over the hours my craving had deepened, and the blizzard that had struck with the sunless dawn grew so violent I could not see. The onset of familiar cramps and tremors banished all my suppositions that relinquishing this renewed craving would somehow be easier than what I had undergone before. I could have torn through steel with my teeth to find the makings for a doulon. And this time I had no Osriel or Saverian to hold me together.

  Miserably lost and dreadfully sick, I had wandered in circles for more than a day. And when my strength failed, I had crawled to this meager shelter to escape the storm. So much for great vows and resolutions.

  A bout of coughing and sneezing felt like to push my eyes from my head. Somewhere in my mindless wandering, I had lost my bundle of clothes and provisions, which left me naught for wiping my streaming nose or eyes and naught to keep me warm now my gards could not. My shivering could have rattled even Renna’s stout walls.

  I tried to muster the sense for a seeking. Grateful that the sky did not shatter with my first movement, I rested my forehead on the snowy ground, pressed my palms to the earth on either side of my head, and forced magic through my fingertips. Instead of a nicely measured flow, power gushed through my wretched body in one enormous surge.

  What felt like a hard-launched stone struck the center of my already tender forehead…which made no sense at all as my forehead yet rested on the snowy earth. But the image of the landscape struck me clearly: rolling meadows…not barrens, as they seemed in this grim weather. Dormant, yes, with the waning season, but in summer, thick with hazel and dogwood, grouse and falcons, roe deer, and myriad other creatures. The undersoil smelled rich with life and health. Well tended.

  As I lifted my head a little and pressed the heel of my hand onto the unbroken flesh centering my forehead, a rush of warmth flowed up and around and over my back, flooding me with scents of clover and meadowsweet. Azure lightning threaded the snow all around.

  “What thinkest thou to do here, ongai?” A woman’s words peppered my skin like wind-driven needles. “To break my sleep without greeting…to broach so deeply. Such blatant rudeness requires explanation before I report thee for sanction.” And then a bare foot struck me in the chin.

  I fell back on my heels, clutching my rebellious stomach as a trickle of blood tickled my raw throat. Sanction…captivity…breaking… Panic near shredded my wits. I scrambled backward…and then I saw her.

  Long arms wrapped about her knees, she sat in the snow—no, perched atop the snow like a bird, so weightless did she appear. Tousled curls the silvered rose of winter sunrise framed her round face. A butterfly, its lace wings tinted every hue of sunlit sky, hovered on her ivory cheek and trailed threads of dewy cobwebs down her shoulders and arms. What scraps of wit I had left escaped me.

  “Thou’rt but initiate!” Her face blossomed in surprise as she looked on mine. She tilted her head, and her eyes traveled downward. “I could have thee sanctioned for—” Her examination halted in the region of my groin, wrinkling her glowing face into a knot. “No initiate, but a stripling male of full growth. You’re failed, then. Hast thou no shame to come poking around my sianou like a mole in the heath? Unless thou’rt but some odd dream come to warm me this winter…” Her pique trailed off in whimsy. “I’ve a fondness for dream lovers.”

  “You are…so…lovely.” As I stammered this inanity, the surge of blood that spoke the goddess Arrosa’s will seemed to flush the sickness from my veins. Though my state was no more sensible, at least I might not vomit on the small, pale feet that glimmered not a quercé from my knees. I inhaled deeply, dabbed the back of my hand against my bleeding lip, and tried to remember the polite address for an unrelated Dané female. “Shamed…yes, engai. Forgive my rudeness. I’ve been wandering. Ate something I should not. I seek my vayar to discuss my future and, in my confused state, mistook the place.”

  “Ah, I once mistook mustard seeds for nivé, and they roused such a storm inside me, I could not dance the moonrise.” Her smile set my gards afire. She touched my knee, releasing sparks of silver and blue. Did all Danae have moods that switched from storm to sun faster than flickers’ pecks?

  I leaned forward. Inhaled again. The afternoon smelled ripe as an autumn orchard. “Surely the moon wept on that sad night.”

  Pleasure rippled the brightness of her gards. “Sweetly spoken, stripling! Perhaps I should feed thee belly-soothing tansy before I sleep again. Thou’rt lovely, as well, and bring a powerful presence and a lusty vigor to my meadow.” As she brushed her finger over my bruised lip, a veil of disturbance dimmed her starry brightness. “How is it possible thou art failed? More important, how is it possible a failed stripling can broach my sianou?”

  “His blundering feet but sounded a dream, Thokki.” Kol’s voice cleaved the thickening air as the bells of Matins shatter a monk’s wistful dreams. “Envisia seru, sweet guardian.”

  The female jumped gracefully to her feet, a move that did nothing to calm my urgent admiration. Woven spidersilk draped from one shoulder front and back. A girdle of strung pearls, wound thrice about her, caught it loosely at her hips, whence it fell to her knees. The veil hid naught of importance.

  “Too long since the sight of thee hath delighted my eye, Kol Stian-son! Why are—?” A catch in her throat signaled alarm and wonder as her gaze switched back to me. She stepped away, arms crossed on her breast. “This is the Cartamandua halfbreed. The violator.”

  Kol spoke up before I could protest. “He is no violator, Thokki. T
uari’s long-soured spirit speaks blight upon my rejongai. Blight upon my sister for her choice to bear him. Blight upon me for choosing to spare him the pain of breaking. Yet I have released his true being and found him reverent and gifted, though indeed clumsy as a bear in spring.”

  “Willing, then, I yield to thy judgment.” Brow darkening, she touched Kol’s arm. “Is it true they have passed over thee, Kol? That Nysse is the Chosen for the Winter Canon?”

  He nodded stiffly. “But I am neither locked away nor beast-captive. I need not be at the Center to dance my part fully. And come spring”—he shrugged—“perhaps eyes will be clearer.”

  “Winter already bites deep, thus I have bedded early.” She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms about herself, allowing her gaze to travel the gray dome of the sky and the wilderness of snow. “But I shall wake for the Canon and make my voice heard to argue this decision. I’ll not be alone in it. Thou shouldst challenge Nysse, Kol. The world is injured, and any who keep thee from dancing the Center tear at its wounds. Thou’lt have a care with this halfbreed?”

  Kol stepped close, took Thokki’s head gently between his hands, and kissed her hair. “I shall chastise my tendé for blundering so crudely into thy dreams, and then commend him for his choice of beauty to admire. Wilt thou partner me for a round this Canon, Thokki?”

  She flushed cheek to toe—a fetching glory, to be sure. I near swallowed my tongue.

  “I—” She tilted her head and looked askance at my uncle. “Thou needst not offer such a gift to keep me silent about this encounter.”

  Kol bristled. “I do not use a Canon partnering for bribe or payment.”

  “Of course,” she said quickly. “I never meant insult. That thou wouldst mark my dancing in anywise near thy level humbles me. Honored and joyful would I be to partner thee.”

  “We shall be on our way. Come, rejongai.” My uncle’s curt command brought me to my feet and into a respectful bow, determined not to shame him further in front of Thokki. I sincerely hoped that he had not compromised his honor to prevent her telling tales of me. I wasn’t sure he could forgive such a necessity.