by Jane Kindred
Another of the Hidden Folk—the Recordkeeper, Cree thought—entered from the gloom behind them. “This was not how we expected to receive him, but your actions have been beneficial.”
“Beneficial?” Cree glared daggers at him. “You wanted me to kill him.”
“The poison would not have killed him,” said the Caretaker. “It would only have brought him close to death so that he would come under the hill. As you first came to us, Cree Silva.”
“I don’t understand,” Ume interrupted. “Why? Why not just let me bring him back if you wanted to see him? Why lie to Cree and put her through this?”
Cree glanced at her, surprised at her wording. She’d expected nothing but condemnation.
“We needed him to come under the hill of his own volition,” said the Caretaker. “We did not lie to Cree Silva. The boy’s blood is full of poison as we said. Left unchecked, he would have done great harm to the world.” She looked at Cree. “We told you the poison you were to give him would stop his heart. It would only have been temporary.”
“That’s not what you implied.” Cree was torn between relief and feeling even guiltier that she’d been willing to let him die.
Ume stroked Pearl’s silvery hair. “Why did he try to kill himself? Was it the madness in his blood? The Meeric poison?”
“It was your vetma.” The Recordkeeper addressed Cree.
She shook her head, scowling. “I didn’t ask for a vetma. I changed my mind.”
“You asked Pearl to relieve you of your burden. He saw in your words that your burden was the task you’d been given—as you perceived it, to take his life. Pearl chose to answer that vetma by taking his own life, that you would not have to.”
She hadn’t thought she could hate herself more. Tears were pouring again, but she no longer cared who saw them. Unexpectedly, Ume slipped her hand through Cree’s, giving it a fierce squeeze, and giving Cree a look that said she’d been forgiven. It only made the tears flow faster.
“It is time for you to return to your realm,” said the Host with the usual dispassion. “Your debt to us has been fulfilled.”
“If you don’t mind,” said Ume, “we’ll stay until Pearl is well enough to leave.”
The Caretaker regarded Ume with what was decidedly an actual expression, one of frank smugness. “You misunderstand, Ume Sky. Pearl belongs to us now. You have fulfilled your role.”
Cree dropped Ume’s hand and swatted the tears from her eyes. “He does not belong to you. He doesn’t belong to anyone. He isn’t staying here.”
“‘Here’ isn’t even here,” said Ume, her voice sharp with outrage at the realization of how thoroughly they’d been used. “If you think we’re going to physically bring him under the hill to let you keep him—”
“Your Ephemeral perceptions are so limited,” the Host interrupted, his voice dripping with scorn. The Hidden Folk were showing their true colors now. “Under the hill is wherever we choose it to be. And you are dismissed.”
The mist gathered again, obscuring the Hidden Folk, obscuring everything. Cree grabbed for Ume’s hand, stumbling toward the bed to make contact with Pearl, and with a dizzying rush of light and air and sound, as though they were falling rapidly through a tunnel, the hall was gone. And the temple was gone. Ume and Cree were alone in an empty meadow.
Twenty-Nine: Valediction
They consigned Ahr to the flames at the Autumn Bone Fire—this time, more than merely symbolic. Jak placed the first lit sheaf of rowan twigs on the pyre beneath the platform that held Ahr’s body, stepping back into the circle where Geffn waited his turn. They’d wrapped the body in MeerShiva’s cloak, soaked in fragrant oils and spices. It ought to at least come to some use. As the flames licked up the sides of the platform, they seemed to leap to the garment like kindred. Whatever magic it possessed disintegrated in the white-hot finality of Ahr’s rite. He was gone now, to a more distant land than the one from which he’d come, gone without Jak after all.
Geffn took Jak’s hand without speaking after each of the attendants had laid their sheaves, drawing close to one another to watch the blaze consume the platform. They’d stood so once before, silent in the bright light of Fyn’s pyre. It had been early spring then, just after thaw, and the moor had been bare and hard. Now it was verdant after the recent rains, sweet smelling with wildflower and clover in the late evening dusk. Chains of honeysuckle and highland primrose decorated the posts of the platform, strung by the children of Haethfalt in remembrance of Ahr, and lavender wreaths crackled their fragrance among the kindling, placed in reverence by the elders of each mound. More Haethfalters knew him now in death than had ever known him in life.
Despite the solemnity of this first night, the Bone Fire was the beginning of a week-long celebration to usher in the harvest, and people began to withdraw from the pyre grounds as the rite finished to take part in the open-air festival. Jak watched the children chasing fireflies through the warm-weather qirhu pen. Above them, lit by autumn’s Sanguine Moon and the bright pyre, the night sky was a soft azure. It reminded Jak for a painful moment of the sparkling ceiling at Temple Ra.
“We don’t have to participate in the festivities,” said Geffn, watching Jak. “Everyone will understand.”
“It’s not that,” said Jak, glad of Geffn’s presence. “I was just thinking of…her.”
They began to walk toward the festival. “Do you think she’ll come?” asked Geffn. “I mean, not here, not now, but eventually. Do you think she means to return?”
Jak sighed, watching as the wicks were lit on the whip torches at the festival center and the fire dancers began to swing them slowly in orange arcs over the moor, getting their rhythm. “No. I don’t think she will. I told you MeerShiva was there at the City of End?” Geffn nodded as they headed down the hill toward the sensuous arcs of flame. “She was—well, you’ve seen her. She has a commanding presence.”
“That’s a word for it.”
“She seemed to be there to take charge of her.” Jak couldn’t even utter the name. Ra had become something else, something Jak didn’t know. She had become Meer. “I don’t think we’ll see either of them again. We’re not their kind.”
Where would a Meer go? To another of its kind. Ahr had said it once, when Jak had asked where Ra might have been bound in the Delta that impossibly long-ago winter—only a few months past, but it seemed to have happened to another Jak in another life. Jak had followed, like a fool, with less sense than one of the children in the fairy tale of Caeophes, lured from their homes and turned into swallows. Jak had followed Ra with the same snow-blind trust, as if Ra had been the shining seer in the cloak of white, leading Jak into uncharted territory. Like a child, Jak had run away from home, willing to change into something else, anything else, as though Rem and Peta had been the unkind parents of the story. But Jak had left the unkind parents long ago. There had been no need to run.
Ahr had understood that, as Jak never had. Ahr had respected the place of things. What possessed him, in the end, to return to Haethfalt, Jak could only guess.
At the base of the hill, Mell waited for them, watching Keiren dancing fire. She fell into step beside them, slipping an arm through Jak’s as they ducked through the bower of twisted rowan branches braided with bright ribbons, the sheen of the glinting firelight caught in their colors. In the Autumn pavilion, erected for the occasion on the green, Rem was fiddling with an ensemble of Oldmen, his fingers still nimble, while Peta and Dar, of Mound DarSevineMaraJun, spun crackling sugar wands for a group of waiting youngsters at a nearby fire circle.
“I wanted to give you this.” Mell held out a thin parcel wrapped in a handcrafted parchment of periwinkle and cornflower petals as they stopped to listen to the fiddlers.
Jak unwrapped the parcel and found a small, budded rowan twig within, twined with red ribbon. In the knot of ribbon at the end, a circle of metal was nestled—a ring
of gold set with three small rubies like a tiny crown at its center. It was Ahr’s ring, the ring that had bound him to his past, to his lost child and to MeerRa.
“I hope it was right to give it to you,” said Mell anxiously. “I didn’t know if you’d want it—if it would be a good token or a bad. But it seemed wrong to burn it. I thought you might—”
Jak stopped Mell’s worried babbling with a kiss on her cheek, and even in the shadowy lights, Mell’s blush was visible. Jak smiled. It was nice to know some things didn’t change.
“It’s beautiful, Melly. It’s perfect. Thank you.”
Geffn pulled them both down to the grass, and the three of them snuggled with their heads together, watching the unearthly spinning of fire to the accompaniment of fiddlers’ music and the scent of flowers and warm sugar—the last gasp of the highlands’ lingering summer, stolen from autumn’s grasp.
Out of the bracken in the copse at Mound Ahr, a pair of nightjars fluttered noisily into the air, spinning and twirling overhead to catch a scattered trail of nocturnal insects against the firelit sky. Like the birds, Ahr’s spirit soared somewhere in the darkness.
Epilogue: Retribution and Desire
Their clothing and appearance gave them away as Deltan, though they came into town from the west. MeerShiva procured a room for the night at a small inn on the outskirts of a trading post northeast of Mole Downs. Ra, in an archaic kaftan and braids, was slight and shapeless from months of deprivation, and despite her Deltan height surpassing that of the average falender, Shiva towered over her, and they took her for a boy.
Ra was sedate in the stupor of Shiva’s blood, for once at peace with the absence of memory’s weight. There was nothing important beyond MeerShiva’s winter hue, pale as rice paper laid upon a soft network of tiny rivers, tributaries intersecting and dividing into the delta of precious veins. Upon each tributary, an hour’s meditation might have passed, and Ra had found herself in one moment on the restored stone bridge of Munt Zelfaal, in the next crossing the highlands, then, as swiftly, in the scattered pine forest beyond the mound-riddled moor. At length, the moon limned Shiva’s path, and Ra had been content to follow as though Shiva were the moon’s avatar, slowly gliding over an earthly reflection of night’s ocean.
In the morning, they dined in the tavern at the inn, deserted but for the two of them at the early hour. The tavern keeper, roused with ill grace to serve them at MeerShiva’s cool insistence, set cold fowl before them and hard bread. He had flat eyes Ra didn’t like, his gaze passing over them as it might pass over a chair, seen but accorded no significance. It was an unusual lack in perception that could disregard the eminence of MeerShiva.
For Ra, such was unthinkable. Her head was full of nothing but the whispered vetma of shivashivashiva as she picked at the bird’s flesh and nibbled at the bread. Beyond the corona of Shiva’s presence, Ra watched the blue-gray profile of Munt Zelfaal in the distance through the tavern windows. Painted letters divided the pane, visible through the glass: N R E V A T S L O K. Ra followed the peeling white letters from one side to the other, noting where they fell on Zelfaal’s crags without shadow, ghost clouds of insignificant shapes.
“You should tell your boy to eat up.” The tavern keeper stood watching Ra, flat eyes keen. He set an earthenware jug before Shiva without looking at her. “A tall lad,” he appraised Ra. “But skinny.”
He put his hand on Ra’s arm as though to feel the muscle, and Ra jerked from his grip with a gasp, her skin tingling with feral apprehension. There was something chilling and unclean in his touch. If the Meer were divine, here was the opposite of reverence. Ra could not place the feeling of unease, though its cold presence was familiar, like something forgotten in a dream. Behind him, N R E V A T S L O K danced over the pane.
“The wine, fool,” said MeerShiva, her eyes dark with impatience.
The proprietor made a stifled noise of disrespect in his throat and tipped the wine jug into Shiva’s cup.
She raised it to her mouth and took a sip, scowling and setting it down with force. “You call this wine?”
He gave MeerShiva a look that bordered on contempt. “It’s good enough for the kind that come to my tavern.”
His calculating gaze returned to Ra, and the feeling of disquiet grew stronger. Beads of sweat had begun to dance on her forehead, and what little she’d eaten was threatening mutiny in her shrunken stomach. Ra leapt to her feet, fists at her sides, trying to still the wave of unrelenting nausea. MeerShiva watched her over the earthenware cup.
“Your privy chamber?” she managed, and found she couldn’t meet the proprietor’s eyes.
He jerked his thumb toward a door in the back of the tavern, and Ra excused herself, flushing hot and cold as she weaved toward it. By the time she reached the door that led onto a dark, foul little out-room jutting into the alley, her limbs were shaking uncontrollably. She huddled before the crude hole cut in a plank seat—no Haethfalt miracle of running water here—and trembled, arms hugging her chest. But there was nothing to retch. Shaking again, Ra unlaced the sash of her kaftan and drew the fabric up over her legs. Her womb was seized with an agonizing ache, and she folded into a crouch over the seat, gasping and dizzy.
He had hurt her, here in the privy, invading her dispassionately as though her body were the dead flesh of an animal.
Ra’s stomach tightened into a ball of agony. Beneath her, the pot had filled with dark, viscous blood as if she’d expelled a full menses with a violent convulsion, or the beginnings of some misbegotten child.
She stumbled back and sank into the dark corner, the kaftan still bundled in white fists. Would he come in here? Would he find her? Please don’t let him come in. “No. No, please,” she whimpered, trying in vain to keep the memory at bay. Without realizing it, she’d begun to rock, her head lightly thumping against the privy wall with each unbidden thought.
The door was thrown open on the stale backroom of the tavern, and Shiva regarded her with a look like menace in her storm-green eyes.
“Don’t let him come in!” cried Ra, her voice catching like moths’ wings in her throat.
Shiva reached down and yanked Ra forward by the collar of the kaftan, slapping her hard enough to make her head ring. “You are not this child,” Shiva hissed against her cheek. She stroked Ra’s arms then in an oddly tender gesture, and spoke in a placid voice. “You are MeerRa of Rhyman, ShivaRa of my blood.” Her lip curled upward, and her eyes and voice hardened. “It is time to return the poison to its master.”
Shiva drew Ra to her feet and retied her sash, smoothing the rough silk of the kaftan, before turning Ra toward the dimly lit tavern with its only windows in shadow—shadows that spelled out N R E V A T S L O K. In the mirror over the bar, the name of the establishment was clearly legible, the backwards view turned forward again: KOL’S TAVERN.
The tavern keeper looked up from his stool at the bar. He had eyes like an owl.
MeerShiva murmured intimately at Ra’s ear. “Madness, my dear, may be focused to a purpose.” She drew the back of one nail lightly over Ra’s throat. “I found him in the Meeric flow, not dead after all, as was his lot. Are you pleased?”
“He’s not dead,” whispered Ra. “He’s here.”
“He’s here.” The Meer began to wind her wine-dark hair in her fist, knotting it high behind her head so that its length hung down behind her back and out of her way. She crossed to the door that led onto the street, gliding elegantly across the dank little room, and threw the bolt.
The tavern keeper stood. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Kol,” hissed Ra. The word was like grit between her teeth. She tasted in it all the terror that had been Jak’s childhood. Jak, whom she had forgotten for a day in the sweet nepenthe of Shiva’s blood. Jak, whom this abomination had violated in body, mind and soul. Jak, whom Ra had violated with words. The violent contraction of her womb seized her once
more, and she cried out.
Kol stared at Ra in growing alarm. “Madam,” he stammered, as Shiva stepped closer to him. “What is wrong with your son?”
“My son,” laughed Shiva, “had his skull split open by a band of rabble. This is not my son. She bleeds.”
“Fyn’s husband,” said Ra, and the empty holes of Kol’s eyes turned on her. Ra saw the past in those hollows: the girl, Fyn, filled with a sense of futility, whom he’d reduced to a pale projection of the woman she might otherwise have become; the rages to which her early attempts at autonomy had driven him before he’d broken her; the sense of entitlement he felt from the world; and his nearly transcendent pleasure at the power he’d wielded, only hardened to arousal by the pain and fear of a small child at his mercy.
She saw the fall from the ridge at Munt Zelfaal that ought to have killed him, rock crumbling away at his feet into the gorge while an older, hardened Fyn stepped back from his reach with grim dispassion, while half a continent away, the Meer were falling to the Expurgation. She saw Kol’s hike through the gorge on a shattered leg, his collarbone broken, his own pain as meaningless to him as the feelings of others, the sense of entitlement driving him on.
Ra saw another pale child with the closed look of Jak to her, pressed against a privy door at the mercy of Kol’s excavation, enduring, enduring, enduring, beyond what any child, or even hardened warrior, ought to endure. He’d grown bold in his undiscovered years at the trading post, and the thrill had increased with the drawing of blood.
Ra clutched the bar top as another sharp twist of pain went through her, her nails gouging deep troughs in the wood. “Fyn’s husband!” she hissed again.
The blood drained from Kol’s face. “Who are you?”
“Ahlman,” said Shiva, moving slowly toward him. “And Zelman. The beginning and the end. Your end.”
Kol backed away from her. “You’re insane!” He stumbled over the stool, scrabbling against the bar for purchase.
