by Holly Lisle
“How very strange,” he said finally. “The last thing I recall, I was… hunting, high in the mountains and far from my camp… and a storm broke. I sought shelter in a…” He frowned. “… a cave, I suppose. After that, I remember nothing, until I woke to find myself in darkness, unable to move.”
Faia pulled at the boards that pinned him in place. Those boards lay across his chest and trapped one leg in a hollow between two tumbled boulders. “You’ll remember the rest,” she said. “You probably took a bump on the head. Such a bump can knock the memories loose for a bit. But memories come back.”
The boards resisted her—but she was no delicate city girl. She grew up plowing fields and chasing sheep and carrying water to horses and cows and goats; even after years of softer living, she was strong. She pried the scaffolding loose, and freed his chest and then his leg.
“Ah,” he sighed, and lay flat on the floor. “That hurt a bit.”
She nodded. “I’m sure. Hold still and let me look at your leg.” She rolled down the top of his boot—it was made of good leather, she noted, if oddly cut—and unbound the leather wraps of his leggings so she could slide the soft cloth up his thigh. The wrapped leggings weren’t of a style she knew well, either. Foreign, she decided—the accent should have told her as much.
The leg itself was bruised and scraped raw over the shinbone. She pressed hard on the edges of the wound, then lifted her fingers quickly. The flesh blanched, then pinkened, a good sign. The blood still traveled through the leg to the foot—the scaffolding hadn’t pressed hard enough or long enough to do permanent damage.
“It could be worse,” she told him, and frowned. The leg would heal on its own, she thought, but it would hurt him, and perhaps develop infection—and both pain and infection were so unnecessary. If only she still had her magic. She closed her eyes and turned away.
“Are you ill, then?” he asked.
“No,” she told him. “Unsettled, perhaps. It doesn’t matter. I’m just upset that I cannot do anything more to help you.” She looked at him again, and her heart pounded in her breast. She felt her cheeks grow hot, and was grateful the candle threw so little light. Otherwise, he would surely have seen her blush.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said gently. “My leg hurts, but I feel well enough to stand and follow, I think—if you know the way out of here.”
She told him the trick she used to find the exit to the tunnels.
“Clever lass,” he said. “I don’t know if I would have ever thought of that—even if I’d had the right kind of supplies.” He looked around him. “Let me go through my pack and see what I do have.”
Kirtha had been looking over his things on her own. “You have lots of clothes,” she said. She squatted back on her haunches and watched him as he stood. “What’s your name?” she asked him.
He gave Kirtha a brief flash of a smile which became a grimace as he hobbled forward. He stopped and took his weight off his injured leg, and managed another broad smile. “Gyelstom ArForst. But you may call me Gyels, young miss.” He sketched a slight bow in the little girl’s direction and she giggled.
Gyels went through his belongings—he found a cat-eye lamp full of oil, and lit that. He had spare candles, too—Faia took one to use for finding the way out, because hers was burnt nearly to nothing and the flame of the cat-eye, shielded from breezes, would not bend away from the tunnels.
Gyels threw his possessions into his bag. He was clearly as eager to escape the tomblike caverns as Faia. When he was finished, he shouldered his pack and the three of them followed both the sound of the wind and the bending of the flame through the tunnels. He hobbled, and Faia moved near him so he could put an arm on her shoulder to steady himself. He smiled down at her.
“My thanks, lovely lady. My thanks for your assistance, and for my rescue. I owe you my life—and if I could, I would show my gratitude…” He raised one eyebrow. “… in a way your… husband?… could not take amiss.”
Faia knew the meaning of that carefully posed question, and pondered her answer. She’d been ostracized in Omwimmee Trade because she’d admitted she’d had Kirtha without taking a husband in public bond first. If Gyels was hill-folk, the question would be unladen with that unspoken question of Kirtha’s legitimacy. If he were of Flatterland stock, she needed to word her answer carefully.
And she didn’t recognize his accent at all.
“I am now without a husband,” she said. She told the truth, but implied a lie. She didn’t like herself for that—but she didn’t want the man to look at her the way Flatterland men often did, with their sly, speculative smiles.
“My sympathies for your sorrow.” He glanced over, and in the dim and flickering light, his eyes seemed full of sadness.
She nodded. Then, so she would not have to add to her lie, she said, “Look. The candle flame bends further.”
They stopped walking, and all three stood quietly, watching the flame dance and bend—the breeze had become strong enough that Faia could feel it brushing against her cheek.
“We’re close,” she whispered.
Kirtha said, “Listen to the ghosts, Mama.”
The moaning of the wind was louder—Faia could almost catch words in the voices of the wind. Those eerie voices sounded sad—and yet they spoke to Faia of freedom.
“That way,” she said. She pointed, and Gyels nodded.
A few more steps—a turn and then another turn—and suddenly snow whipped against her cheeks, and a gust of wind blew out the candle. The flame in the lantern lasted a moment longer, while the three of them trod into the middle of a snowstorm. Then it blew out, too.
After the light, her eyes had to adjust to darkness again. The golden glow of the emeshest no longer overlaid the city. Faia looked for landmarks. Their tunnel opened to the lowest aboveground level of the ruins. She could see little because of the storm, but the towering bulk of the ancient First Folk library was unmistakable.
The library held many of the answers to the mysteries of the First Folk; until slightly more than a year earlier, the scholars of Arhel had assumed that the first civilization on Arhel had been a human one. It was a reasonable assumption—the only people in Arhel were human and no one had found anything that would have suggested that things had ever been different. At least, no one had ever found any evidence of that sort until the expedition that uncovered these ruins—the most complete anywhere in Arhel. And the astonishingly well preserved mummified corpses of First Folk, hidden in a secret burial ground below the library and accessible only through a hidden passage in one of the back rooms.
Scholars were still reeling from the ramifications of that single find. If the first civilization in Arhel wasn’t human, then when did human civilization begin… and how? What had happened to the first settlers, now extinct? Had the human and First Folk civilizations grown up together, or had one risen and died before the birth of the second? Faia had wondered about all of those things herself, and in her talks with Kirgen and Medwind since the discovery of the city, had gone round and round with both of them without ever hearing a satisfactory answer, or coming up with one.
Kirgen, Medwind, and Roba had chosen to set up their base close to the library; they’d wanted convenient access to the treasure trove of information. When Witte had shown her their images in his magic mirror, all three had been in the library—but Faia and Kirtha and Gyels had been a long time finding their way out of the maze. Faia didn’t imagine her friends were all in the library any longer; she would have gotten out of there as quickly as she could once the emeshest disappeared. She pointed out the scholars’ base to Gyels. “First on the end belongs to Medwind Song,” she shouted. “We’ll go that way!” She picked up Kirtha; then she and Gyels trudged out of the cavemouth, into the biting wind, over uneven ground, and through piles of drifting snow toward shelter.
The false hard winter had arrived in the mountains. Icy air burned her lungs and left frost crystals on her eyelashes and the tiny hairs on the insid
e of her nose. Her breath streamed out in long white plumes that raced into the night. The Tide Mother had vanished—hidden by storm clouds.
They struggled and slipped on the icy ground, keeping to the lee of the ruins as often as they could—the ancient walls provided some shelter from the wind. At last, gasping from the cold, Faia and Gyels stumbled into the curving stone tunnel that formed the entrance to the First Folk dome Medwind had been using as her dwelling. Once inside, Faia leaned for a moment against the wall, catching her breath. “Lady knows it’s miserable out there,” she told Gyels.
He nodded but said nothing. He crouched, rubbing his injured leg with both hands.
“Is it hurting worse?” Faia put Kirtha down and went to his side.
“I fell against a stone and hit the place I’d already injured—it hurts much worse than I thought it would.”
Faia puzzled that out for an instant. It hurt worse than he thought it would? That was an unusual thing to say. Then she shrugged her confusion off. Gyels’s accent made her fairly certain that his first language was not Arissonese—no doubt he had simply translated his wording directly from his own language, whatever it was, and the idioms had no exact equivalent in Arissonese. She’d had the same problem when she’d been trying to learn Huong Hoos from Medwind. Huong Hoos had been horribly idiomatic, while her own Arissonese seemed to her to be quite simple and direct.
They could work out their linguistic confusion after they found Faia’s friends. To that end, she rose and went all the way down the curving passageway to the main entry arch.
“Medwind! Heya, Medwind! Are you in?” She peeked past the arch. A fire burned in the central firepit in the main room. For an instant, Faia was drawn into the mosaics of tile and stone that covered the inside of the dome—she never could get over the lively murals of Arhelan life the builders of the city had left behind. But then she heard movement, and Faia realized that someone was crying. Choufa, Medwind’s adopted daughter, ran through the doorway from the back room toward her.
The girl was still tiny, and looked as undernourished as she had when Faia first met her. The tattoos that covered her face were as dark and subtly disturbing as ever—but Choufa’s hair had grown out to a thick, long mop of glossy brown, and in spite of her swollen eyes and sniffles, she managed to look pretty. She slammed into Faia and wrapped her arms around Faia’s waist.
“You’ve come! You’ve come!” she sobbed into the thick wool of Faia’s erda. “Oh, please, please! You have to help Mama! Please!”
Faia picked up Kirtha and glanced over at Gyels, whose forehead creased in a worried frown. Faia shrugged. “What’s the matter with her, Choufa?”
“I do not know!” the girl wailed. She turned away and buried her face in her hands, and Faia could see her shoulders heave as she sobbed.
Faia felt sick dread knot her belly and dry her mouth. She tried to be reassuring. “Whatever it is, I’ll do my best to help.” She was bereft of her magic, though—whatever help she might give would be strictly mundane.
Choufa got herself under control, though; either reassured by Faia’s words or out of tears, she beckoned both Faia and Gyels toward the smaller rounded doorway that led into the second room of the ancient First Folk dwelling, and to the side of a crone who sat huddled next to the fire burning in the brazier on the floor. Faia looked for Medwind; she saw no one else in the room.
“Faia!”
That single word from the old woman’s lips dragged the ice from outside to freeze the blood in Faia’s veins. The wavering old voice was sib to one Faia knew nearly as well as her own. She looked into the ancient’s eyes—eyes that were pale as the moon, intense as magefire, even though they rested in folds of wrinkles and the shadows of deep hollows.
The crone smiled and struggled to her feet, and said “Thank every god in Ariss you’re here. And Kirthchie—by Thiena’s tits, she’s grown. And him…?” Her sharp gaze raked over Gyels, and the old woman shook her head. “I don’t know him.”
Faia tried not to show her dismay. “Medwind? Is it really you?” She rested her hands on the woman’s frail shoulders, and looked down at her. She could see only the faintest traces of the young woman she had known—the Hoos warrior who had turned mage and scholar. But in the old face the young eyes remained unmistakably fierce and proud, and Medwind still showed unmistakable traces of her former barbaric beauty. “Oh, godsall,” Faia whispered, “it is you!”
“It’s me. Hell of a mess. Do you remember when Nokar was dying, after we escaped from the Keyu?”
Faia nodded. She would never be able to forget any of that nightmare time.
“I couldn’t stand to let him die,” Medwind said. “I loved him so much, and I hadn’t had him for very long. So I studied the remains of the spells he’d used to prolong his life, and saw how I could repair them—if I used part of my own life energy as a sort of… glue.”
The old woman shook her head ruefully. “I gave him part of my life, but I had no way of knowing how much. It would seem from the evidence,” she held up her bent, age-spotted hands and frowned, “that I gave up most of whatever time I had.” She looked away, and her voice grew quiet and sad. “And he died anyway.”
“When did you grow old?”
“Only just. When damned Delmuirie’s pillar released me—”
“That was the emeshest.” Faia interrupted.
“Really?” Medwind’s eyebrows rose, but after a moment she nodded. “That makes sense. More probable the light is the aura of a god than anything else.” She sighed. “Anyway, we first noted some additional spread in the boundaries of the… the emeshest… some weeks after it caught Thirk. Kirgen went down to study it, trying to fathom the reasons for its encroachment. He noted and documented an increase in available magic—not a large increase, but still, measurable. But Delmuirie’s pillar showed no further changes, and after a while, we tired of watching it do nothing at all. All of us, including Kirgen, went back to our regular studies. Then two idiot Bontonards came to these ruins to study; they nosed into everything, disrupted our work, and I don’t doubt did whatever it was that set the pillar off again. One minute I was working, the next, trapped in light and music and a sensation of infinity. Very peaceful, that, but too much like what I suspect death will be. But then, though no time seemed to have passed at all, we were released again.”
“That was because of me,” Faia said.
“Good.” Medwind nodded again. “I should have guessed that you would realize something was wrong and come after us. I imagine we would have been trapped in there forever had you not come. And I’m glad you did. The emeshest was such a joyous place it almost hurt to be set free—” Medwind turned away, and walked back to the fire. “—But it wasn’t living.”
Faia saw her friend’s shoulders slump, and heard her say, “This isn’t much like living either, though. Because I rode the Timeriver, my body never showed signs of age. With magic I could have prolonged my existence for perhaps several hundred years; but now my magic is gone, and the touch of the Timeriver is gone—and I’m old. I’ve only lived thirty-six years, Faia—but look at me. My body could be ninety.” Medwind looked down at her dried, frail body with disgust. “I’d be lucky to live out the year like this.”
Faia clenched her hands into fists and willed herself to silence. Medwind’s spirit seemed to have grown as old and weak as her body. If the eyes remained young, they were all old age had saved of the Medwind Faia knew—it did not seem possible that the same woman who rode the Timeriver and charged headlong into the search for the First Folk could be the same timid, despairing creature who huddled by the fire bemoaning her fate. Could mere age so completely destroy a great spirit?
Faia felt tears start at the corners of her eyes. She wanted her old friend back—and she was helpless to restore her. “My magic is gone, too,” she admitted.
“All of it?”
“As far as I can tell. I can’t even conjure a faeriefire anymore. I refused the Dreaming God—well, Edro
uss Delmuirie, though he thought he was the Dreaming God. I refused to stand up and face my destiny—and the Lady cursed me for my cowardice.”
“Destiny, eh?” Medwind turned back to face Faia, and her eyes sparkled. “That’s rarely something we recognize when it spits in our faces. So what was this destiny of yours, girl?”
Faia quickly told her about her suspicion that she had been fated to stay with Delmuirie in order to free her daughter and her friends.
Medwind snorted. “Pah! That would be a silly destiny! The gods don’t waste the talent of their best followers on grandiose gestures of self-immolation. That’s the sort of nonsense you’d hear in those peasant songs of yours.”
“The Lady leads, and I follow,” Faia huffed. “Most of the time, anyway.”
“The Lady. She’s a cowardly excuse for a god, anyway.”
“Just because she doesn’t lead me to collect heads or futter goats like those monstrosities you worship—”
“Futter goats! Etyt and Thiena futter each other, thank you, and leave the goats to your ecuvek hill-folk shepherds!” The old woman glared at Faia through narrowed eyes.
Faia glared back, crossing her arms over her chest. Perhaps Medwind had become senile as well as old. She certainly seemed ruder than Faia remembered.
Gyels cleared his throat and both women turned to see what he wanted. He coughed and said, “I think I’ll be waiting out in the, ah, cold.” He ducked out of the room.
Faia felt heat rush to her cheeks when he departed “Oh, that was childish.”
Medwind sighed. “It was. I apologize.”
“Me too.”
The two friends looked at each other across the fire, and Medwind began to chuckle. “Childish… that has some possibilities. What about Kirtha? She had quite a bit of ability. Does she still?”
Faia said, “I didn’t even think about what Kirtha could do! I suppose I wasn’t thinking at all.” She knelt beside her daughter and asked, “Can you light a fire for me, Kirthchie? Just a little one—” She fumbled through her waist pack and came up with the candle.
