Breath and Bone

by Carol Berg

  I gulped great breaths of air before descending the stair to Saverian’s den. You’re being wholly irrational, I told myself. What difference does it make what she thinks of you? No answer made itself known, and would have made no difference anyway. I needed to see her.

  “Saverian?” I tapped on the open door.

  “I’m here.” The rattling and banging going on inside the low-ceilinged chamber where we had revived Voushanti served as evidence enough of that.

  It was impossible to tell what she was doing, beyond removing every bottle, box, and packet from her well-ordered shelves and putting them back again. I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, waiting for her to turn around to see who had come.

  I cleared my throat. “I thought you might be interested…as my physician…as a matter of your studies…” Weak. Insipid. “As you weren’t with me this time, and I found myself thinking about you right when something most astonishing happened. I fell out of my body—”

  She spun about, a nasty-looking pair of sprung forceps in her hand. “You damnable, god-cursed, splotch-skinned toad. How can you let him do this? I’m to bleed him? Watch him suffer? Watch him die? And then perform this despicable enchantment to bring him back to lead an army of dead men?”

  I felt unreasonably stung. “I tried to talk him out of it. I thought you knew what he planned.”

  “About the dead men’s eyes, and giving the Harrowers to the dead, yes. That’s vile enough. But not the other. Not murdering him. And of course Riel chooses to explain my part in his villainous little scheme after you vanished without saying anything to anyone. No one knew where you were going or when or if you might come back, and then the boy told us what Gildas did to you, and I can’t conceive of how your mind or body can deal with the doulon again so soon. And every moment I thought we’d have to take Voushanti through another death ritual. He must either taste your blood soon or die again—it’s surely some marvel of your damnable blood that he has survived this long. So comes tonight, and after worrying myself half sick, you stroll through the door all politeness and deference to Riel, and offering such kindness to poor, half-crazed Elene, and such honor to that brave child—able to work this magic of yours, twisting them all inside out for love of you. But I won’t do any of it. Not for you, not for him, not for anyone. By this unmerciful, coldhearted, god-forsaken universe, I won’t.”

  But, of course, she would, because she loved Osriel and believed in him, though it ripped her asunder. And somehow hearing that concern for me had some small part in her fury scratched the itch that had driven me down into her pit of a workplace to stand in the way of this outpouring.

  “Please believe me, Kol is doing all he can to see that Danae magic will carry Osriel through what he needs to do. If all goes well, you’ll not need to retrieve him from death. And I yet hope that somewhere in the great mystery that’s to happen on that night, we’ll find him an alternative to his legion of revenants. As for Voushanti…I’ve already told the prince that the mardane will not die again. I’ll let the man suck my marrow if that prevents it.” I stepped close enough I could feel the heated air quivering about her, and I could smell the salt in the tears she would never shed. “You know why Osriel’s chosen you for these hard things—because he knows of no one more clever or sensible, no one more skilled. Because he knows you will do it only if you are convinced it’s right, and we have no choices left. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where I was going. I was already half out of my head when I left. But I’d like to tell you what’s happened, because you were with me through the other, and I need—I think you might understand the parts I’ve not told anyone…”

  I told her all of it—about my doulon sickness, about my guilt over Luviar and my shameful liaison with Malena, and my horror that she might carry a child of my loins. I told of exploring the Well, and how awkward and ungainly I had felt tripping over my feet in my mother’s footsteps, and how quiet and lonely it had been to be the Well, and how terrified I was of losing myself, and how it was the memory of her touch and her good humor that had soothed my fear, so that I had been able to yield my boundaries when I had to…

  When I began to sweat and hold up her ceiling for fear of it crushing me, we moved outdoors—and still I babbled as I had never done in all my life. She asked sensible questions, and gifted me with thoroughly unsentimental encouragement when I confessed my doubts that Valen de Cartamandua could possibly be destined to heal plagues and pestilences, and she laughed when I told her of stinging tentacles and blue-scribed feathers in unlikely places.

  When the stars had spun out their rounds, and she sat pinched and shivering in the well yard, no matter that I had given her the heavy cloak and wrapped her in my arms, I bent down and laid my forehead on her hair, inhaling its clean scent. “I thank you for this,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me. Next time, you must do the talking.”

  She pushed me away, quirked her mouth, and stuffed the cloak in my lap. “Perhaps I’ll conjure myself into a tree, and you can dance around me—or I’ll come to you when you are living as the Well and can’t talk back.”

  I slept long and deep that night, and I dreamed of dancing around her and of hearing her speak in the rustling of leaves and bubbles of starlight and the silence of stones.

  “I presume the lighthouse is still at the abbey,” I said when Brother Victor joined Jullian, Elene, and me in Renna’s well yard on the morning before the solstice. “Never thought to ask.”

  “It is,” he said through the windings of scarves and cowl and the extra cloak Saverian had insisted he wear for our short journey. Jullian carried a leather case filled with medicines, each labeled with uses and doses. Saverian must have been awake preparing them all night after I’d left her in the well yard.

  I glanced up and all three of them were staring at me expectantly. I tried to take on a properly sober expression. “Well, we should be off, then. I—You must excuse me, mistress…Brother.”

  Embarrassment quickly heated the still and bitter morning, as I wore naught but my gards beneath my cloak. I removed the cloak and draped it over Jullian’s shoulders. Trying to concentrate, I motioned for them to follow me down the colonnade.

  Once we walked Gillarine’s cloisters, I held the others still for a moment, while I ensured no Harrowers lurked nearby. Jullian grinned as if he had invented me. I snatched my cloak from the boy, while Elene and Brother Victor gaped at the abbey ruins.

  The little monk clenched his fist at his breast, his odd features lit from within. “Great Iero’s wonders! Who could imagine that it might take us longer to reach the lighthouse from the west cloister, than to reach the west cloister from Renna?”

  Victor led us around the north end of the cloister, past the church and the carrels where the monks had pursued their studies in the open air and around the corner by the half-ruined chapter house. He stopped short of the worst of the blackened rubble and turned down the alley that had once marked the ground-level separation of chapter house and scriptorium.

  Just beyond a mountain of fallen masonry and charred timbers, a perfectly intact arch supported what remained of the upper-level passage that had connected the two buildings. Set into the wall beneath the arch was a niche where a soot-stained mosaic depicted a saint reading a book.

  “Now, mistress,” said Brother Victor, “I need you to lay your hands in the niche as we discussed.” The monk placed his own small hands atop Elene’s and closed his eyes.

  A rainbow of light reived the day with magic, scalding my gards and near blinding me. The air crackled like burning sap and tasted of lightning. Neither Elene nor Jullian seemed to notice anything beyond the door that now stood open in the wall and the lamp that hung just inside, ready to show us the way downward.

  “Brother, I am happier than ever that I never crossed you in my novice days,” I said, shaking my head clear of sparks and glare.

  He smiled and motioned us into the doorway. “You had naught to fear. Only in the service of the light
house am I exempted from Saint Ophir’s proscription of sorcery.”

  While Jullian and the chancellor inventoried pallets and lamps, blankets and pots, to see what extra supplies they might need brought from Renna, Elene and I explored the two great domed rooms. Though her father had been one of the lighthouse founders, she had never been inside.

  The walls of one room were devoted to thousands of books, while the storage cases that lined the narrow walkways held the collected tools of physicians, masons, tailors, and every other craftsman. The second room held the collections of seeds, as well as plows, looms, lathes, and every other kind of implement the human mind could invent.

  “Ah, Mother of Light,” whispered Elene as she gazed at the searing glory of Osriel’s domed ceilings—the overlaid wedges of jeweled glass that shone as if the sun itself hid behind them. “These are the very image of his soul…”

  She expressed a wish to be alone; thus I wandered back to the other room. The books were useless to me, but I found the tools fascinating. Beside a case that held a collection of pens and inks, measuring sticks, compasses, and the like, stood a tall shelf holding a collection of scrolls and flat maps. Many bore the Cartamandua gryphon. On the lowest shelf sat a number of books.

  I squatted beside the shelf and ran my fingers idly over the spines. I pulled out one book, but it was all text, not maps. The age and the decoration of its thin leather cover named it Aurellian…which reminded me of a small puzzle.

  “Jullian, back at Fortress Torvo you told me that Gildas used an Aurellian book to interpret my grandfather’s maps. Why did he need such a thing? What did it tell him that the maps could not?”

  The boy unrolled a palliasse, releasing a cloud of dust. “He didn’t use the Aurellian book so much to interpret the maps, as to tell him what to look for. It was a book of legends of the Danae. He said the stories told him where the holy places…the guardians…might be. And then he would know which maps to use to locate them.”

  The world held its breath. “Did he ever mention something called the Plain? Or the legend of Askeron?”

  Jullian’s brow wrinkled. “Not that I heard. But he’d not even worked a tenth of the way through the book. The Aurellian script was an ancient kind, written by some adventurer long before the invasion.”

  My brief hope sagged. Surely bringing some news of the Plain to the Canon might bolster Kol’s challenge.

  “Narvidius,” said Brother Victor, poking his head from the storage room. “Narvidius, Viator. I know that book.” He craned his neck to scan the vast shelves. “We have a copy here somewhere. That’s how Gildas knew of it.”

  “Find it,” I said, my excitement rising. “By Iero’s hand, Brothers, find it before tomorrow.”

  Chapter 31

  Vermilion streaks scored the ragged black scud whipped from the peaks of Evanore. The mountains themselves stood black, still, and immense, untouched as yet by the fire to come. Despite the livid ground fog that seeped through the iron gate of Dashon Ra to twine my feet, the air between the wakening mountains and this rocky perch snapped clear and brisk on this solstice morning.

  My fists drummed softly on the rocks at my back. My stomach had surely shrunk to the size of a nivat seed. Every untimely bird squawk came near sending me crawling up the cliff. I tried to concentrate. I sensed the plodding hoofbeats and harsh breathing of thousands of men and horses advancing relentlessly from the north. Only light, dry snow had fallen in the past weeks—crystalline fluff that you could blow off surfaces as if it were dust. Sila’s troops would experience no delays on the road to Renna.

  I deemed myself fortunate to be in command of my senses and in control of this fiendish restlessness. Today was my birthday. The day I was to become one of the long-lived. The day the world could plummet into the abyss.

  Firm, heavy footsteps approached from the direction of the stair behind Renna’s Great Hall, and moments later, Voushanti strode past the outcrop where I stood waiting for him. Not an hour since, Osriel had passed through the gate and vanished into the fog-choked gully behind it. Before Voushanti could do the same, I stepped out of my hiding place and called after him. “Mardane, do you endure well?”

  The warrior whirled around, sword in hand. “You’re not supposed to be here, sorcerer.”

  “I searched for you half the night, Mardane. More than ten days have gone since our blood-bond was created.” Saverian suspected Voushanti did not want to be found. “The prince told me that you are to lead his personal defense tonight, while he works his great magic.”

  “But this morning I am to bleed him. That is what you command me, is it not—to aid him in this madness and then save him from it?” If words could slash skin, so his would have done. “I need naught else from you.”

  “I would not have you weaken, no matter what the day demands. I may not be available to succor you later.”

  He turned as if to continue on his way, but his feet did not move. Though his broad shoulders held rigid beneath his mail shirt, his neck bent forward. “Indeed, I flag,” he said at last. “Do you know what to do?”

  “Saverian gave me the words.”

  Voushanti pivoted smartly and waited for me, the unscarred half of his face gray and sagging in the half-light. His knife’s fiery kiss on my thumb burnt like the solstice sunrise.

  “Live, mortal man,” I whispered, frost pluming from my mouth, “all desire and worth bound to my will until heart stops, bone crumbles, and breath fails.” A sour odor crept through the air as I fed magic to Saverian’s spell and pressed my bleeding thumb to Voushanti’s cold lips.

  His eyes locked with mine, resentment and shame flaring scarlet in his depths. Though every instinct prompted me, I did not turn away.

  The moment passed. The enchantment resolved. I removed my hand.

  Voushanti wiped the last traces of blood from his mouth with his sleeve, averting his gaze. “May I go now? His Grace awaits his torturer.”

  “Heed this command, Mardane: Obey Prince Osriel exactly in this dread matter. In all else protect him unto the limits of your life…no matter his orders.”

  The warrior bowed curtly, stepped past, and vanished into the gully.

  I did not follow. Osriel did not wish any to witness what he was to endure at Voushanti’s hands. No matter Kol’s intent to yield the power Osriel needed, the prince could not be certain of it. Only a long, slow bleeding into the earth would generate magic enough to raise his revenants, and so he must initiate his grotesque alternative early on this still, cold morning, hoping that I would bring him news of Kol’s aid before he was too weak to pull back.

  Did Kol’s challenge fail, Osriel would use the word trigger bloodwitch to summon Saverian to carry out her grim assignment. He had refused her plea to set up a second trigger in case he changed his mind. Furious, she had disobeyed his command to stay away, hiding herself and a supply of medicines, surgical instruments, and blankets in one of the stone sheds left by those who had mined Dashon Ra. From there she could observe Osriel throughout the day and ensure he did not fail too quickly.

  Osriel’s first scream rent the brightening morning. I shuddered. What faith he must have in the mardane. Voushanti had to take the prince to the precise juncture of torment without death, to induce him to forget hope, that Osriel’s despair might create power for redemption. Faith and honor, love and duty…I could not deny the virtues that drove the prince and his servants. But with every breath, in every bone, I knew this horror was wrong.

  So I did not go to Saverian, though I hated the thought of her lonely vigil. And I did not drag Osriel away from his torment or Voushanti from his cruel task. The only way I could prevent the dread conclusion of this harsh beginning was to take up my own part in the day’s events. By midday I must be back to the Well, where Stian would be waiting to take me into the Canon. The situation of Dashon Ra, the silhouette of its rocky parapet against the sky, the thinness of its air, and the gouged and damaged bowl carved from its heart already lived in my memory, read
y to bring me back here again.

  “Who’s there?” Two warriors stood watch at the bottom of the rock-gate stair. They whirled and presented arms as I descended, clearly surprised to see anyone approaching from the direction of the heights. It was ginger-bearded Philo who challenged me, along with Voushanti’s other faithful lieutenant, the dark-haired Melkire.

  I lowered my hood. “At ease, friends. It’s just Valen.”

  The two men lowered their swords. “Should have known you would be a part of all this strangeness, pureblood,” said Philo. “Perhaps you can tell us why we’re posted here behind the hall and kitchens, instead of in the field.”

  “We’ve heard reports that the Ardran prince and Sila Diaglou herself are but half a day out in hard pursuit of Thanea Zurina,” intruded Melkire.

  “The Ardran prince…Perryn rides with the priestess? Does Bayard, too?” It could be disastrous if Bayard brought a Moriangi legion here.

  “The messenger said no Moriangi regulars rode with Sila yestereve,” said Philo. “Only Prince Perryn and a handful of Ardrans. It was their route worried him the most. Zurina is leading them straight for the eastern approaches, showing them the secret ways not even the Aurellians could find. If they come upon Renna from the backside, they’ll drop these rocks right on our heads.”

  This bursting unease from two well-disciplined warriors but reinforced my beliefs about this day’s battle. Naught would be held back today—no secret, no life, no soul. Ronila and Gildas would unravel their plots, too, and like these two, I didn’t know whence the attack would come.

  “Zurina is no fool,” I said. “She’s surely got her reasons—and her orders. And certainly Thane Boedec and his warhost will be ready to meet whatever comes. Does Voushanti know that Perryn rides with Sila?”