Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  Not soon enough to tilt the world’s balance on the solstice. Not soon enough to shield Osriel or Elene from dreadful choices, or save anyone, Danae or human, from coming treachery and chaos. And I was not fool enough to believe that this glimmer of life evoked by my awkward capering meant I could ever reclaim a sianou for the Canon.

  “Best begin, then. Attend, stripling.” Kol laid his hand on the crumpled surface of the pool. Around his spread fingers the blue-cast ice began to melt, until an oval hole penetrated the thick layer all the way to the dark water. He stood up, towering over me, his dragon etched sharp against the night. “Wash thy skin. Snow and ice would be excellent aids.”

  I glanced up sharply, fear and excitement prickling every hair I had left. “I’m to go on? The third passage?”

  “No matter what else comes at the Winter Canon, thou must be a part of it. Only then wilt thou be long-lived and free to undertake this task of healing. Even a halfbreed is made new by the Canon, so that none can hinder thee without new cause. Once thou art past this change, we will speak of Tuari’s blundering and thy prince’s need, and how we might make answer to them. Those will be simple enough beside the matter of intruding thee into the Canon without dooming us both.” He blinked and softened his stern aspect for a moment. “Thou art willing, rejongai? To take on the fullness of thy being? The responsibility it entails? To accept my teaching?”

  My hands took a notion to rub my knees, even while my innermost heart told me that this was what I had come to Kol for. My answer had been given when I woke at Gillarine and saw a child had preserved my life, and in Gillarine’s garden, when Luviar had deemed me worthy of trust, and again on Kol’s own shore, when I understood that it was not disease or perversion or mindless rebellion that drove me. “I trust thee with my life, vayar. Yes.”

  A skim of ice had already formed inside the hole. I broke through the brittle layer, scooped out a handful of water, and splashed it on my face. The cold took my breath. Another handful on my head. Gods in all reaches of heaven! I scraped up shards of ice from the pond surface, and the coarse-grained snow caught in the crevices, and scoured the mud and sickness and dried sweat from my skin, rinsing with more of the damnably frigid water. Sea bathing. Wind scouring. What shape would this passage take?

  I was soon ready to declare myself clean enough for any enchantments, but the direction of Kol’s unsatisfied inspection reminded me of the exact nature of the third remasti—the passage of regeneration. Sweet Arrosa, preserve and protect!

  Steeling myself, I doused my shrunken nether parts. I thought my skull might split from the shock of it. Surely I must be sprawled in some dark alley, my body gone doulon-mad, my mind locked into these perverse dreams.

  “We shall attempt this passage here,” he said, when satisfied with my ablutions. “In the usual course for a stripling, thou wouldst encounter groves or streams, fields or hillocks whose guardian is fading or ready to move on to a new place. Across the seasons thou wouldst learn and study these places, speaking with their guardians, weaving their patterns of life into your own. And on the day of thy third remasti, thou wouldst choose one of these places to partner in thy change. But at the tide pool on mine own shore didst thou show me another way of learning.” He gestured toward the frozen pool. “So, learn of the Well.”

  Sitting on my heels, I laid one hand upon the stone bared by my crude echo of Clyste’s dancing. The other hand I dangled in the dark water through the hole Kol had made. I closed my eyes and released magic, and the story of the Well unfolded.

  Unlike the tide pool, or Picus’s garden, or the meadows near Caedmon’s Bridge, each of which teemed with layered life and growth, the grotto of the Well was a barren place. A few astelas roots lay shriveled in the cracked walls. Tucked into the rock near the top of the crags sat an abandoned aerie. But flowers and eagles had been intruders here. The Well was visited by rain, wind, and snow, but few creatures of any sort. A cold, lonely place, even in summer. The patterned music of the Danae, buried so deep in other places, lay very near the surface, as in a temple where gods and angels hover close to us. I breathed deep, exhaled slowly, and learned.

  Stars lived here, even hidden above the clouds as they were. Cold and sharp as the rock and ice, their exposed light would arrow into the pool. I scooped water in my cupped hand, and it teased my tongue and palate with bubbles like sharp cider. But a sour second taste bloomed when my tongue touched a ragged black string that lay in my palm.

  I shook the slimy thing off my hand, bent closer to the pool, and again plunged my arm into the cold water to the elbow. No fish, no creatures, no plants had ever lived here. But the stringy black growths slimed the smooth pale curves of the Well and even the disturbance of my touch broke off more feathery tendrils to taint the water. I reached deeper yet, toward the spring’s source, through layer upon layer of porous stone. The deeper I probed, the warmer the water, as if the Well’s source were the fires of the netherworld. I widened my exploration into the channeled rock, which spread the Well’s bounty through a vast area of the surrounding lands.

  Black slime clogged every watercourse. The channels lay barren and dry, and beyond them I found the withered roots of the forest across the vale, the starved confluence with the River Kay, sluggish and teeming with pestilence, Gillarine’s soured barley fields, disease-ridden orchards, and cloister font—it, too, slimed with black.

  Sick at heart I withdrew, sat up, and told Kol all I had found. Poison, death, blood-fed corruption throughout the lands where my mother’s gift had once spread health and life.

  “Thy learning surpasses my understanding, rejongai. Now I, too, know the Well.” Though his finger touched my cheek gently, Kol’s stern visage did not soften. “Breathe in the essence of all thou hast learned—good and ill, sweet and bitter—and weave it into thy spirit. Open thyself, as to a lover, yielding thy boundaries. Give and receive, reserving nothing.”

  Yielding thy boundaries… My heart near stopped its rattling, and every terror of confinement and suffocation rose into my throat to strangle me. I knew what he meant for me to do. Now the moment had come, my instincts screamed of danger, of entrapment, of choking death and failure. But memories of Stearc’s monumental sacrifice, of Jullian’s courage, and of Elene holding life and love so dear, put me to shame. If I could not face my own small terrors, how could I take on Osriel and those he planned?

  Near paralyzed with cold and fear, I crept gingerly onto the frozen pool. Facedown, limbs spread, I tried to imagine how to accomplish what Kol described. The bit of warmth I had engendered in the stone lay well out of reach, and the expanse of broken ice beneath me was hardly a lover’s body. Saverian’s bony substance might come close, but she was at least warm. The thought of the acerbic physician made me smile through my fear. Naked again, she would say to this. Feeling grandiose, Magnus?

  Behind me the air shifted, and I heard a quick breath and the soft impact of a landing. Kol was dancing. Like Saverian’s gifted fingers waking my skin, so did the wind of his spins brush my back and flanks, riffle my hair, and tickle my bare feet. His leaps and turns drew forth a stately drone of invisible pipes, and the countering rhythms of sawing strings filtered through ears, through skin, through the cold air I drew in with every tremulous breath. Music thrummed in my bones, and its harmonies played out in the air above me…in the ice beneath…in the tainted water below, and the earth that cupped this pool in its arms. My blood heated…and I became aware of every quat of skin where it touched ice…melting…dissolving one into the other…

  To yield. To become nothing, trapped in stone. I wriggled a little, flexing fingers and toes to make sure I still had them. In the movement, a shard of ice gashed my belly. Merciful gods…blood…water…ice. A cold sweat drenched my body…

  …and then I laughed. I rocked to and fro and rapped my head on the ice, chortling to think what Josefina and Claudio de Cartamandua-Celestine would say to this unlikely version of my doom. Never in Josefina’s wildest divinations could
she have seen me like this. Facedown in a cesspool. Great gods, I would not go back to that life. I would trade not one moment of this fear and doom and terrifying beauty for anything those two had offered me or any fate I had imagined for myself. Let it come!

  Kol’s music pulsed and drove, and a hunger deeper and more profound than nivat welled from my depths. Groaning…laughing…I let go of thought and reached out with my spread limbs to embrace the world of the Well…water and stone, forest and barley fields, streams and orchards, river and valley…reserving nothing…

  …and I plunged through the ice and into the cold, wet blackness. Spears of ice pierced my skin. I dared not scream, because I could not breathe in the water. Yet the scream leaked out of my dissolving flesh, and the cold and the water passed through me as I fell…blind, for not even my gards lit this darkness.

  Softly, rejongai, settle. Do not fight. Do not fear. Feel. Touch this place and allow it to touch thee in return. Thy laughter is surely the heart of thy magic…

  Kol’s breathless voice faded as hearing followed sight into the void. But I clung to his assurance that this was as it was meant to be. Thus I did not go mad when I fell through cold stone and gritty soil, and my thoughts disintegrated like a snowball striking a brick wall. All that remained was raging desire, as I plummeted deep into the molten fires of the earth and was reborn as the guardian of the Well.

  I could not breathe. Could not move. Could not see. Sated, conjoined with flame and left hollow as a burnt-out stump, I could but exist for a while. Thus I did not panic when waking mind insisted I no longer had a body.

  First, I knew the water. I flowed in stately rounds, cooling as I rose from steaming depths to surface ice, brushing against rocks and clumps like a purring cat’s tail, and then sinking again to dissolve and dance in the fire. Starlight bubbled in my shallows—not so much as I would prefer—but tart and sweet, as intoxicating as the laughter of angels.

  The black tendrils, on the other hand, tasted of decay, sapping my pleasure. My solid faces, cracks, and crevices—the curving walls that existed in and of myself—burned with the painful gnawing of the invasive slime. I grieved for the tormented dead whose blood had fed this poison, even as I swirled around it, prying it from my bones and dragging it down to the fire.

  My veins were dry, clogged with the foulness, so that my fair limbs—my fields and groves and waterways that lived in the light—withered and languished. With rising anger I slammed against the barriers of corruption, shifting them enough that I could slip through—a few droplets, then a trickle to begin the healing. I had always been a quick healer.

  Valen! Draw in thy sense and spirit. Reach for my hand. Already, I do feel thy life in the land…a glory, rejongai, but we must go forward…

  The summoning waked tales and memories that had been scorched away in my passage: the tale of the world’s end, the waiting legion of the dead, the friends depending on me. I could not rest here to scour and clean and repair my wounds. I could not sleep. Other duties called. Regretfully, I retreated from earth and bone. With what my mind insisted was a hand, I reached upward…

  My uncle dragged me, coughing and gagging, from the frigid water. I collapsed on a skid of ice, kicking, writhing, and scraping at my skin. My groin was tangled in strings that stung like the tentacles of a bladderfish. “Get them off,” I cried hoarsely. “Holy gods, get them off!”

  “Easy, easy, rejongai.” Kol held my arms as I writhed and flailed, coughing up water and trying to breathe. “’Tis only thy new gards. Breathe. Be patient. The soreness will ease.”

  “Soreness?” I croaked, as I clutched my knees and curled into a quivering ball around my wounded parts. “It feels as if I’ve been whipped. And drowned before that. And before that…”

  I could not fathom what had happened to me. Remembrances of overpowering need, of raging fire, of immeasurable release lurked somewhere below my present thoughts, too immense to bring into the light. And then I recalled my bizarre impersonation of water and stone, more vivid than doulon dreams.

  “The Well has chosen thee, rejongai. Marked thee. I have danced here, and it lives in my memory as it has not since Clyste faded.”

  My uncle sat beside me, waves of heat radiating from his sweating body, as if he had danced the night through…perhaps several nights, judging by the starved hollow of my belly. For certain we had come here in the night. Now weak and cloud-riven sunlight glinted on the ice walls.

  “If thou but knew all those of the long-lived who have attempted the Well only to emerge bruised and bleeding, weeping for their failure. Not only brash initiates, but mature dancers, worthy to take on great sianous. Valen”—I looked up at the severe pronouncement of my name to see my uncle’s eyes bright as summer and his brows raised high—“this is not at all usual.”

  Weariness set me laughing this time. I tucked my head into my arms and longed for food and sleep and one of Saverian’s balms to ease the vibrant sting in my flesh.

  “And now we must speak of more lessons,” I said, “and of the Canon and Tuari and those who wish to murder the long-lived, and I must learn what to do to save my king’s soul and his”—no, even to Kol I could not mention the child—“and his subjects and my friends.”

  Kol sighed and offered me an insistent hand. “Lessons, yes, but I’ve brought thee sustenance, lest thy strength or attention should waver.”

  Ever a slave of my flesh, the prospect of food cheered me greatly. As I accepted Kol’s hand and proceeded gingerly to the almost sunny, almost dry spot where he had laid out his provisions, I kept glancing downward, afraid to look too closely.

  “Feathers, I think,” said Kol, inspecting me as I lowered myself carefully to the ground. “And braided…something.”

  Unable to imagine what such decorations might mean, I shook off the oddity and devoured his small feast: two knotted carrots, four chewy figs, and three round, sticky cakes made of hazelnuts, dried blueberries, and honey. Every delicious bite warmed and strengthened me. I could have eaten ten times the amount.

  As I ate, Kol taught. “When I danced in Picus’s garden, my steps were not random. I designed a kiran, a pattern of movements to encompass a living landscape—the beasts, plants, trees, earth, stone, and water that comprise it, the air, the light, and the storms that shape it. I, and the others of our kind, dance many kirani throughout a season, not just at our own sianous, for many small places in Aeginea have no guardian of their own.”

  “So the silver threads I see are the evidence of a kiran—not just any dancing,” I said, licking the honey from my fingers.

  He acknowledged the point. “We bring these kirani to the Canon, dancing them in the various rounds throughout the day or night. The Chosen, the one named to dance at the Center, takes in all that is brought to the Canon in each dancer’s kirani and joins them together as I told thee, building the power that thy prince desires to feed on. At the moment of season’s change, the Chosen yields this power to the land through the Center, whence it spreads throughout Aeginea and into human realms through the connections that bind our two realms into one whole—”

  “—the Well, the Mountain, the Sea, and the Plain, the sianous where the first of your kind were born of the Everlasting and took bodily form.” My hands fell still.

  He nodded. “It is also the duty of the Chosen to strip away those kirani that are incomplete or poorly effected, any that might violate the harmony of the dance and reduce its power. This stripping removes the kiran-hai—the affected land—from the Canon for the season. Though an embarrassment to the dancer who shaped the defective kiran, one season’s removal does not poison the land or wreak irreversible harm. In the usual way, the kiran is repaired or improved and brought to the following season’s Canon.”

  Kol braided his hair as he spoke, his wrenching twists and yanks speaking eloquently of his agitation. He tied off the thick braid with a solid knot, then pushed aside the strands of hair that had escaped his control.

  “When I was but
a nestling, the halfbreed Llio, Ronila’s sire and guardian of the Plain, brought an unusual kiran into the Spring Canon. Tuari was Chosen—his first naming—and he removed Llio’s kiran as flawed, tainted with too much of human influence. Llio argued that his steps were not flawed, but only new. When Tuari refused to reconsider, Llio—impetuous, foolish, driven to rage unnatural to the long-lived—tried to take Tuari’s place at the Center by force, a forbidden act that threatened the entirety of the Canon. In the ensuing struggle, Llio fell and broke his skull. Before the dancing ended, he had returned to the Everlasting. It was as if Llio had been poisoned of our ancient Scourge while joined with his sianou, for we could not find the Plain again, and it quickly faded from our memories in all but name. So was the Canon sorely broken.”

  “The long-lived blamed it on the fact that he was a halfbreed,” I said. Llio’s curse.

  “Aye. My sire and others have come to admit that the nature of the Plain as a channel to the human realm, and the nature of the Canon when we are wholly at one with our sianous, must have caused the breaking in some part, and not entirely Llio’s human violence. Tuari does not agree. But those events and those that followed—the unstable storms, our own failure to regenerate, the weakening of the bond between our kirani and the land, the increasing incidents of the Scourge—have ever preyed on Tuari, plaguing him with doubts and leading him on a wavering course.”

  Kol’s silence was the quiet between rainstorms as a line of squalls moves in from the sea. And so I waited.

  Eventually he sighed and began again. “When Tuari summoned me from Picus’s garden, he said he had been searching every channel of wisdom to learn how to restore the Plain and the Well, but all had failed. He had come to the conclusion that the human realm weighs too heavily upon the Canon, causing this imbalance in the world that we all see. He asked that my father and I consider abandoning our sianous for the Winter Canon to see if such removal might correct the imbalance. We refused, both Stian and I, for our kind emerged from the Everlasting in the beginnings apurpose to hold the four great sianous that join Aeginea and the human realm. Stian believes that to yield the remaining two would surely rend the world. Tuari appeared to yield to our misgivings. Now, hearing your tale, I surmise that he has reconciled with his kin-brother’s child, Ronila, and given her Janus’s map, hoping that Picus’s teaching and her life in the human world would reveal to her its meaning, thinking she might show us a way to recover the Plain and the Well and these other lost sianous. If, instead, Ronila has spoken smooth lies and convinced Tuari that such recovery is forever impossible…”