by Carol Berg
I bowed to Thokki, as well, but deemed it best to keep my mouth shut. The language my body spoke was boorish enough.
“In the Canon, Thokki,” said Kol.
“In the Canon, Kol,” she called after us.
My uncle struck out across the fields without any word to me. Outside of Thokki’s warm presence, his tension was as palpable as the bitter wind. He set a blistering pace. I struggled to keep up, doing my best to ignore the returning symptoms of my craving. We made two magical shifts, and though I felt the moves clearly, I could not have repeated them.
After the second shift, the snow yielded to a cold, pounding rain. The land stretched flat and gray as far as I could see. The air weighed heavy on my shoulders and smelled of river wrack. Sweat poured from my brow, and my knees quivered.
“Vayar,” I called hoarsely as Kol began to move even faster. “We must talk. Matters of grave import. Please…”
My legs slowed on their own, threatening to give way completely as cramps and shakes racked my back and limbs. At first I thought he might abandon me in the rainy desolation, but as I willed myself a few more steps along his path, he spun and waited for me.
“What ails thee, Valen?” His speech pierced like shards of bronze. “I expected thee stronger, faster, and more attentive on thy return. I expected thee careful. Had I not kept my ears open in readiness, only cracked bones wouldst thou have to walk on this night. Thy coming rattled the Everlasting as crashing boulders, so that any who heed the movements of the air could feel it.”
He rested his hands on his hips. “That thou dost dawdle and moon along the way is my responsibility; I should have taught thee better how to curb the rising heat of a stripling till thou shouldst encounter a proper companion. But it is naught but madness to risk thy safety by broaching the sianou of a sleeping guardian—a deed no stripling of any maturing shouldst be able to accomplish. Only by fair chance didst thou choose Thokki, a merry spirit who trusts her friends. Has sense left thee entire?”
I summoned control and stood straight, determined my ragged condition would not interfere with the world’s fate. “Vayar, I bring news of the doom of the long-lived. These wild folk that poison the guardians are led by one who once lived in Aeginea. She means to destroy the Canon…destroy you all.”
“We spoke of this before, and I told thee—”
“Her name is Ronila.”
“Ronila!” His shocked echo split the air.
At the same time, pain lanced my middle, causing me to double over. He caught my arms just before my knees buckled. “Art thou injured? Broken? Come…” In a blur of pain and dark rain, he sat me on a muddy hummock, filled his hands, and poured rainwater down my throat. To my shame, it stayed down no better than any other contents of my stomach.
“I’m just sick,” I said, wiping my mouth on my arm. Not even the fires of shame could quiet my shivering. “It’s nivat—”
“Fool of a stripling! Thou art completely witless! Complain not to me of nivé, if thou wouldst ever have my ear.” He grabbed my arm and, without another word, dragged me through a series of nauseating shifts. The world dissolved in churning gray and I completely lost track of body and mind…
“So, are you more sensible now?”
Sand in my mouth. In my eyes. Everywhere underneath me. Rain drummed on my back and cascaded over my head. I squinted into the murk. The pounding in my head was not just blood but waves, out there beyond the veils of rain that merged sea, air, cliffs, and sky into one mass of gray. Evaldamon. The salty residue in my mouth evidenced Kol had dunked me in the sea at the very least.
“Yes, rejongai. Better.” I sat up, feeling scoured inside and reasonably clearheaded. Recollection of his warning postponed my questions about nivat and what he’d done to aid me.
“Tell me of Ronila,” he said.
“The priestess who destroys your sianous is Ronila’s granddaughter, raised to be Ronila’s vengeance on humans and Danae alike. But it is Ronila and her toady that I fear most. They have some scheme…”
I told him all I knew of the old woman and Sila and Gildas. Though I did not describe Osriel’s particular plan, I revealed how Tuari had pledged to spend the power of the Winter Canon into the golden veins of Dashon Ra and fuel the prince’s dangerous enchantment.
“…but once Picus told me of Tuari’s hatred for humankind, I could not believe the archon would keep the bargain. I had to warn Osriel of the potential treachery. That’s why I left Aeginea so abruptly.”
Kol sat on his haunches, his mouth buried in his hands as he listened to my story. Through a sheen of raindrops, his dragon suffused his lean face with a sapphire glow. “Though my sire and I disagree with the archon on many matters, Tuari has always attended his responsibilities faithfully. He does not make bargains he has no intent to keep; nor would he ever compromise the Canon. When he failed to name me Chosen—the one of us who dances at the Center—none could understand it. My dancing is unmatched in this season.” Honesty, not pride, birthed his claim.
“As Picus told thee, Tuari is least likely of all of us to join a human—especially Eodward’s son—in any endeavor. Yet Dashon Ra is the Center of the Winter Canon, and he has named his consort Chosen. She could do this thing—divert the wholeness of the dance into the veins and not the land itself…” The words faded. His thoughts drifted deeper.
This was not what I wanted to hear. “Janus said the Chosen dances at the Center to ‘bring all life to joining.’ All life—human, Danae, birds, beasts…everything?”
“The dance of the Chosen joins all that is brought to the Canon by the long-lived—trees and rivers, mountains, stones, sea and shore, earth and all that grows, as well as all thou hast named.”
“But only the lands you remember. You can’t include the parts of the earth that are corrupt.”
Kol straightened abruptly. “I have told thee, I will not—”
“I know that you and your kind forget places that have been poisoned, Kol. Janus once created a great map, hoping to show you the places you had lost. But he didn’t understand that Danae could not make sense of such patterning. Somehow Sila Diaglou got hold of that map and was using it to judge her success in forcing your kind out of Aeginea.” I could not let him avoid the subject any longer. “Vayar, you vowed to provide me truth and healthy guidance. As you see I need both of those now more than I have ever done, else we have no hope of untangling this mess. My mother intended me to help. You know that. I’ve just no idea how. Permit me to do so. Please, uncle, teach me.”
Kol scooped a handful of sand, allowing the rain to wash it through his fingers. Only when his palm was clean did he respond. “Janus said he would help us reclaim the Plain. It is only a name in our tales of the Beginnings, yet we believe its importance equal to the Sea, the Mountain, and the Well. Thou hast judged rightly; we cannot bring it back into the Canon if we cannot find it. We cannot find it if we cannot remember. In the same way each of the sianous lost to the Scourge falls out of our memory and thus out of the Canon. Only the names linger to remind us of our loss.”
Sorrow, grief, and shame clothed him as new gards. “Clyste traveled with Janus as he marked his papers,” he continued, “returning joyful, for her eyes had seen these dead places. For one or two she was able to work a kiran to bring to the Spring Canon. With Janus’s magics we would be able to find these places again and reclaim them all. But when at last the Cartamandua returned and unrolled his great skin, we could see naught but scrawling that twisted our eyes and turned our heads wrong way out.”
“Ronila could read it,” I said. “But in her spite, she told no one. She must have taken the map from Janus then, or perhaps Picus gave it to her when he came back to Navronne. The hag burnt your only hope to find the dead lands. Sila wants you to forget Aeginea and interbreed with humans. Ronila wants to ensure you never remember. Ronila wants you dead.”
Kol scratched his head. “Neither of those could have taken it. Ronila was long away from Aeginea when Janus brou
ght the great map. Picus too. I know that because the Cartamandua brought the skin map on his last visit, the same visit that Clyste lay with—”
He whirled about sharply, his golden eyes as bright as small moons in the gloom. Before I could ask what insight had struck him so forcefully, he yanked me to my feet. “Come, rejongai, we must resume your lessons. Take me to the Well.”
“We’ve no time. And I cannot—”
“The long-lived do not grasp humans’ constant invocation of time. Before and after, soon and how long seem to us but walls built to imprison you. But indeed, the change of season bites the air, and I see such danger and such possibility as tell me I have lived blind until inhaling this very breath that leaves my body.” His hands near burnt their image into my shoulders. “If thou wouldst justify Clyste’s fate, Valen Cartamandua-son, then do as I say, without thought, without distraction, without artifice, living only in the embrace of the Everlasting.”
His urgency made my heart race. And as dearly as I desired to determine my own course, the past months had taught me faith and trust. I trusted Kol in the same way I had trusted Luviar, when every mote of common wisdom said to distance myself from plots and conspiracies. In the same way as I trusted Osriel when the accumulated witness of my eyes and ears clamored for me to slay, not save him. But I hungered for answers as I hungered for spelled nivat. “I will obey, vayar, but I beg you answer one question: What have you guessed?”
“Many things, but only one sure. Tuari has given Ronila the map.”
No matter how I pestered, Kol was adamant. He would explain no more until I led him to Clyste’s Well. I had no capacity to judge what it might mean for the Canon if Tuari had been duped by his half-brother’s daughter. Duped, to be sure, for if the archon was a person who attended his responsibilities faithfully, and who would never compromise the Canon, then he could not possibly have read Ronila’s true intent. Yet no warning from Kol or from me could stop whatever scheme Tuari had devised. The archon had no use for either of us.
I had come to Kol for guidance. Thus, over the next hours, I indeed left everything behind and gave myself into the embrace of the Everlasting. We traveled the length of Navronne. Again and again I sank to my knees, placed head and palms on the mud, snow, or rocky ground, and released careful dollops of magic to seek a route to the Well. Though Kol’s dunking had eased my immediate sickness, the yearning for nivat dogged my heels like an unwanted hound, as I sought out landmarks…rivers, seas, mountains…anything that might tell me where we stood and where we must go next. Subtle steps on this journey; I needed naught else to make me heave.
When storm and night and weariness left me too confused to continue, I attempted what I had never done before, seeking through the wind-whipped clouds above me to find the guide star. Fixed and firm, Escalor took its place in the landscape of my mind with the brilliance of my uncle’s gards. Using its anchor, I knew which way to go next. Thou shalt map the very bounds of heaven, Janus had told me, and wonder and gratitude swelled within me.
Happily, the harder I worked to juggle the fruits of senses and memory with the direction of magic and instinct, the less my nivat cravings troubled me. Not just in the way focused attention masks a nagging distraction, but in truth. My gards grew brighter as night closed in.
When my steps flagged, Kol taught me how to sniff out a Danae cache—a small stone vault filled with provisions and marked with an aromatic cluster of horsemint seed heads. I devoured every morsel of the dried apples and walnuts we found in the store. Kol watched me eat and eased my concern when my full stomach at last waked my conscience. “Replenish the cache next time thou dost walk these hills, and it will serve another who lacks time to hunt,” he said. Beyond that he refused to speak, save for an occasional, “Attention, stripling. Thy mind doth wander.”
My first shift after the cache took us from one ledge of rock to another and into calmer weather. The strip of blackness west of the ledge was the valley of the Kay. Only a few steps more and I led Kol down the slotlike passage through the cliff and into the high-walled corrie of my mother’s sianou.
Saints and angels…it felt as if we plumbed the very heart of winter. Ice as thick as my thigh sheathed the walls of the Well, glinting eerily with the reflected lightning of our gards. The pool had shrunk. Crumpled, broken ice hid its sunken surface. The wind moaned softly through the heights, swirling dry snow from the crevices.
“Inerrant thou hast come here, just as on the morn we met,” said Kol, who remained in the dark mouth of the passage. “The Well has not faded from thy memory.”
“No,” I said, hoping he would now explain. “Its location is as clear to me as on the night I first walked here.”
“Canst thou see…?” His voice trailed away as he walked toward the pool. After only a few steps, he sank to one knee and touched the ice-slicked rock. “Follow one of her paths. Prove it.”
I knelt and yielded magic, and it was as if the hidden stars came streaking into the corrie, embroidering trails of silver light upon the dark stone. Everywhere, circles and twining loops, layer upon layer of threads, as deep as I dared plunge, all quivering with light, each one that I touched with my inner eye thrumming with stretched music.
The uppermost image was bolder than those that lay immediately below, the steps larger. This was Kol’s own path, when he had danced his grief on the day we had retrieved Gerard’s body from the pool. Carefully I studied the interlaced threads of his steps, comparing it to the images that his movements had etched on my memory. And then I peeled away that layer—as one could with the thin transparent layers of the stones that men called angels’ glass—and examined the next.
My mother’s feet had laid down a more intricate pattern than Kol’s. I began to walk the silver thread. “She began here,” I said, touching the place at the far side of the pool. “Here a small leap.” A faint thread between a hard push and the landing. “Then a spin. A step and then another spin. The pattern repeated three more times…” As I walked I could almost feel her movements. “Here she paused, bending I think because the thread is uneven…another sequence of five steps and spins, and then here she made that twisting move as you do, on one foot, lowering her heel to mark each turn, again, and again…ten…twelve times…”
“Eppires,” he said, suffused with awe. “Thou canst truly see her steps. I recognize this kiran.”
“There are hundreds of paths here, layer upon layer. I could walk each one if you wished.”
“Do this one again,” he commanded, resolute. “And this time, shadow her moves.”
“I cannot—”
“Do not say I cannot. I do not expect thee to dance, only to move in the manner of the kiran, to feel that I may also feel.”
And so I began again. I pivoted and jumped in my own limited fashion. Wobbling. Awkward. I spun a quarter turn and tripped over my own foot, where Clyste had made three full rounds and landed on her toes. Filled with the remembrance of Kol’s grace, I knew I must appear a lumbering pig with feet of lead.
I balanced on one foot for a moment at the first spot where Clyste had paused…and felt a feather’s touch along my spine. At the next step I touched more softly on the ball of my bare foot and when I leaped to her next landing place, I recalled my leap from Torvo’s wall and drove my spirit upward with the imagining of my mother’s gift. I landed gently on my left foot, my knee and ankle bent. No wobble.
My skin flushed. Alive. Awake. As if the air spoke to me. As if a lover’s hand touched my lips. The color of my gards deepened. Eyes fixed to the silver thread, I brushed my right foot forward and shifted weight, as the pattern told me…
I finished the kiran on one knee, the alter leg stretched out behind me in line with my straight back, my fingertips touching my forehead. Only when I became aware of Kol’s gaze did I break into a sweat of embarrassment. “I got caught up in it,” I said, drawing into a huddle, wrapping my arms about my knee. I could not look at him. My crude miming must surely have appalled him.
“The ending position is called an allavé,” he said dryly. “Wert thou to stretch the spine longer, round the arms as if embracing a tree, and lower the hips, while aligning the back foot and hip properly with the correctly curved shoulder, I might call thy position…minimal. Now, touch the stone beneath thy feet.”
The ice had melted along the silvered path. The stone, warm beneath my fingertips, swelled as if with living breath. “This is not usual,” I said, half in terror, half in question, “for one of my poor skills.”
“No. Not usual.” Kol knelt beside me as my fingers traced the silver thread in awe and wonder. “In these few steps…a youngling’s raw beginning…thou hast summoned life where none dwelt when we stepped through into this place. Think, Valen, is it possible thou couldst find other kiran shadows like these, without knowing their location beforehand or their makers? Without maps or books? Couldst thou walk the world, seeking with thy hands and thy Cartamandua magic these patterns scribed in seasons past?”
“Yes, I believe—” And then did my thick head begin to comprehend what he was asking me. Janus’s map had failed to tell the Danae what they had forgotten, because they could not read the language of lines and symbols. But Clyste had seen my father’s truer magic. He had taken her into places she could not find on her own…and she had been able to coax dead lands back to life with her dancing. Danae could see only living things, and so Clyste had chosen to create a living map—a child who could find what was forgotten and dance it back into the pattern of the world.
“Thou art the answer, Valen,” said Kol softly. “Thou are the healing for the breaking of the world.”
Chapter 29
As a red tide departs a once-healthy shore, leaving behind a plague of tainted fish, so did my moment’s exhilaration rush out to leave me aghast, aching, and empty. “How can this fall to me? I’ve so few skills…scarcely begun…God’s bones, years…lifetimes…it would take me to seek out such places without the guidance of the map.”
