by Sarah Remy
It was larger than a fragment, but not by much. A broken corner of smooth stone, the same white rock that made the pillars in the great cavern; Everin called it limestone, which baffled Avani, because the island people knew a small green fruit by a similar name.
“It’s a shard of pillar,” Avani hazarded. When Faolan didn’t protest, she took it from his hand. “No, impossible. It’s flat, smooth, not round. Part of a plaque? Or . . . a tablet. Oh, and see. I recognize that glyph, and that one. ‘Light’ and ‘water,’ ai?” There were two clearly visible sigils etched in the stone, and part of a third. “The bit of the last is new, though. I’ve never seen a spiral quite like that.”
“But you have.” Faolan reached again beneath his tunic, drawing forth a small bronze key attached to his belt by a leather cord. A barrow key, small, sharp, and filigreed. He held the key on the flat of his hand, tracing a single bronze filigree with his thumb. “Here, see?”
Avani stroked her own finger after his, feeling the ridge in the metal. She had an eye for pattern. She’d admired the scrolling on the barrow keys before, but now, as Faolan pointed out the obvious, she realized she’d been a fool.
“It’s not decoration, the metalwork. Those are glyphs, intertwined and embellished.”
“Yes.” The aes si’s smile wasn’t quite sincere. “I assumed you’d guessed.”
“And how would I?” Avani snorted. “Mal has one key, you carry the other. I hadn’t a key at hand for reference, had I? What are they?” She studied the swirls and curls, wondering if she could commit them to memory, sketch them later.
“Powerful,” Faolan said. “That one, though.” He held the key next to Avani’s fragment of stone. “That one is ‘belief.’ ”
“Belief,” Avani echoed, enthralled. “Tell me the others.”
It was Faolan’s turn to snort, and he did it with lips pulled back, inhuman teeth bared. “I think not. Not yet. Ask me again when you’ve managed to set one alight.”
Avani jumped to her feet, paced three steps to the side, and then back. “I’ve tried. You know I’ve tried. The magic doesn’t catch.” She spread her hands. “It’s there . . . and then gone. Slippery, like a fish in the sea. Just when I think I’ve grasped it . . .” she curled her fingers into fists “. . . it wiggles away.”
Faolan rose gingerly from his pillow. “You’re not trying hard enough.” He nodded at the vocent’s ring on its true-gold chain around her neck. “You’ve the tools, and the natural ability, but you’re stubborn, or afraid.”
“Take care, sidhe, or you’ll talk yourself into a fist in the jaw.”
He only smiled, and bowed from the waist, graceful as a mountain cat.
“Thank you for the salve,” he said once more. “And the tea.”
“Goddess bless,” Avani said grudgingly. “Tell Everin I’ve ordered you out of the sun until you’re healed. Tend the vegetables after dark, if needs must.”
The sidhe’s full mouth twisted in sour amusement. He bowed again, then stepped past her tapestries and out into the afternoon, leaving Avani alone with her temper, and an enticing limestone fragment.
AVANI WAITED UNTIL after supper, then walked along the Downs and into Stonehill. She thought she’d never grow used to the blackened shell that had once been her home, buildings burnt to the ground, stone melted by the unnatural heat of an unnatural fire. A few charred outbuildings lived to tell the tale, peeked roofs caved in to what was left of interior walls.
The cobbles on the straight-as-a-pin lane that had been the village’s main thoroughfare were cracked straight through. Everin talked about replacing the street, but it was only another chore on a long list of repairs in a now uninhabitable settlement.
Avani had secretly begun to wonder if Everin was a bit mad; she’d loved Stonehill well enough, but even she knew it would never be anything more than a monument to lives lost. The gossips in the valley below held as the land was now cursed, and nothing flew faster from village to village than rumor of death and destruction. The strip of land might be the only fertile pastures on the unfriendly Downs, the only land worth farming for leagues to either side of the River Mors, but no sane man or woman would brave Stonehill’s angry ghosties.
In truth, as far as Avani could tell the buildings were free of uneasy haunts. Stonehill’s restless spirits tended to linger near the low cairn Everin had built on gentle hill east of the village. He and Avani and Faolan had piled what corpse bits they could gather, and laid them to rest in a desert ceremony that appeared to consist mostly of piling heavy stone over flesh and bone to keep the scavenger animals away.
Avani avoided the cairn. Island tradition had it was best to let the dead be, unless the spirit was one’s ancestor, and could be counted on to dispense wisdom. The one time she’d wandered near the grave, chasing after an errant ewe who’d slipped her pen, the Widow’s ghost had been loudly unhappy to see her and Avani had suffered head pain for an entire twelve-day after.
Fragile spring flowers grew up in between cobblestones; purple crocus and early-blooming tulips, and the soft yellow flowers Faolan called butter-smock. Vegetation of another sort invaded the burned-out buildings. Ground vines snaked over fallen stone, sending newborn tendrils up over melted lintels and collapsed foundations. The brilliant green ferns that seemed to prefer the barrows poked questing shoots out of the ash-rich ground, feathers tentative.
“Best stay out of direct sunbeam,” Avani grumbled as she hopped over a particularly large specimen. “Barrow things aren’t meant to see summer.”
“If you’ve a mind to converse with the plants, black eyes, go and speak to my spring lettuces. They need cheering.”
Avani stopped and smiled, and eyed the soot-darkened mountain of graystone that had once been Stonehill’s finest home.
“Ai, Everin, best not be stealing from the blacksmith, now. Jim Smith was a madman, and would like as smash your head with an anvil as sell you his wares.”
“Lucky he’s dead, then.” Everin stuck his head around a cornice stone. “Come and see what I’ve found in your blacksmith’s cellar.”
“It’s not a missed corpse, we’d have smelled him by now.”
“Shame, Avani. You’ve grown hard. “
“Practical,” Avani corrected. She walked around the side of the ruined home, found Everin crouched above what had once likely been the blacksmith’s root cellar. Clapboard doors were burned away, only disfigured bronze hinges remained, half-buried in the earth.
Everin was covered in a dusting of the same earth, and had it in his hair. He’d shaved his chin bare a season earlier, for hygiene, he’d claimed, although Avani suspected it was vanity, and razored his normally wild hair short, but he hadn’t quite managed to escape the grime of his adventures. Even his shorn crown managed to attract mud and gobbets of dust webbing.
“Spent a day moving rock to clear it,” he said, smiling up at Avani. “But it was worth the effort.”
Avani wrinkled her brow, doubtful. “You’re not trying to tell me Jim’s canned tomatoes survived the burning? We’ve had no luck with any of the other cellars. The fire was too hot.”
“Aye, well, yon blacksmith may have been mad, but he was right clever, too. I don’t guess he was expecting a conflagration, but he was a-fearing something, and he meant to survive it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come.” Everin slid over the square cellar mouth, dangled his legs. “There’s no ladder left, but it’s not deep at the entrance. Watch your head.” And he slithered into the pit.
Curiosity whetted, Avani scrambled after. The big man was right, after a short drop, the cellar floor curved gently away below the foundation, more slope than proper room. The earth was damp, and rich with worm and plant root. A single fat candle smoked and danced several lengths on. The smoke carried a sweet perfume, honey and bayberry.
Avani
gawked, then scrambled the rest of the way into the pit.
“How is that possible?” she demanded, snatching the candle from the dirt, holding the flame at eye level. “That’s a festival candle. Thom orders them in special, from Low Port, and they cost near as much as knot of good silk thread. He gives some away, one or four, at first snow, but mostly he sells them to those can afford it. Rather,” she corrected herself, “he did.”
“Blacksmith managed to get himself twelve,” Everin said. “And that’s not all. Look at this, it’s a wonder.”
He was bent near double against the low cellar roof, leaning over a man-sized stone box. Avani, who had spent some time in flatlander graveyards, thought she recognized the box for what it was. Only the hue was unusual: a deep black so smooth it reflected candle flame.
“We missed one,” Everin agreed. “This one, though, I suspect he’s been here awhile. He’s not fresh bones.” He took the candle from Avani’s hand, held it over the tomb. “Whoever he is, he’s was layin’ there a long time, before he got mixed with the pantry.”
The lip of the sarcophagus came as high as Avani’s hip bone. She stood on her toes to see past shifting candlelight and into the depths. She saw the skull first, gape-jawed and yellow, and next to it a regiment of squat clay jars, plugged with cork, the maker’s thumbprint still visible in sealing wax.
Past the jars, more skeleton, scattered, displaced. Then a clutch of the before-mentioned candles, a bundle of long matches, two wicked-looking knives, and a neatly folded bundle of fur and linen.
“He put up supplies,” Everin said, as proud as if the idea had been his own. “Packed a war kit in with the old bones. Expecting trouble, without question.”
“Trouble?” Avani shook her head. “Until recently, Stonehill went three generations in happy isolation. I chose the Downs for good reason; the people here were a private sort, and let their neighbors be.”
“Look under the clothing,” Everin suggested. “Your blacksmith might not have been mad as you believe.”
Scraping her belly on the edge of the tomb, Avani leaned past bone and blade and gently nudged the pile of fabric and fur aside. She froze in disbelief.
“Ai, no.”
“Ai, yes.” Everin mocked her accent without humor. “Another one.”
The barrow key was hung on a braided floss cord. Avani drew it from the sarcophagus, conscious of the skull and its empty stare. In the shifting light the key looked identical to the one she’d examined over tea and biscuits; now that she knew where they were, it wasn’t difficult to see the glyphs in the scrolling.
“Another little puzzle,” Everin said. “We’ll probably never know; what was yon smithy doing with a sidhe gate key?”
“Are you sure it was Smith?” Avani wiggled her fingers over the open sarcophagus. “Who put all this up?”
“I wasn’t, till you told me his name.” Everin reached into the tomb, selected a clay jar, and twisted it a full turn. There in the sealing wax, directly opposite the thumbprint, were the initials JS.
Avani folded her hand around the barrow key.
“And why didn’t it burn?” she wondered. “Like all the rest?”
Everin knocked the tip of his boot against the side of the sarcophagus. “I’m not certain, but I imagine it has to do with the container. The top was sealed tight as a desert lord’s coin purse, the lid weighed well more than two of you, black eyes. You’ll note the rock didn’t melt; most of the graystone did.”
“Why?”
Everin rolled his shoulders, then blew out the candle. Light fell in a scattering of midday from the cellar opening; the contents of the tomb gone once more, shadowed and invisible.
“I don’t know. Stone’s not one I know, black like that. Mayhap it’s resistant to flames. Mayhap it’s spelled. The vocent might have a thing or two to say about it. Whether Smith knew his luck in it or not, I couldn’t say.”
“I’m keeping the key,” Avani said.
“I’ll not argue with you,” the big man replied. “But if you have take it in your head to make use of it, I’d appreciate fair warning.”
Avani nodded. He’d quickly learned she disliked being managed, shepherded like an errant ewe, and she understood it was in his nature to do exactly that. They’d fought frequently that first spring, using words and silence as blade and club. He resented her solitary wanderings below ground, imagined every exploration her last. She hated that he coddled; she’d thrived for so long on her own, she couldn’t imagine any different.
They’d settled on an uneasy compromise. So long as she remembered, she’d give him notice before she went wandering, and unless she was unduly late back, he resisted the urge to shadow her through underground caverns.
“I’ve started the kitchen,” Everin said.
“Have you?” Avani asked. “I’d like to see it.” She tucked the barrow key into a pocket, and offered him a companionable hand up the slope and into fresh air.
EVERIN, WHO AS far as Avani knew had never laid eyes on Stonehill before its destruction, was managing to put back the pieces of the Crooked Creek Inn with such exact a hand that Avani was a wee bit suspicious the Widow didn’t somehow have her part in the reconstruction. She’d gone as far to accuse him of consorting with ghosts, but Everin had only laughed.
“There’s no need to resort to necromancy,” he’d promised. “Most of it I can see in the lines of the foundation; the rest I hear from your own tongue.”
And it was true the big man asked her endless questions about details Avani wasn’t sure she could remember: the number of paces down the length of the east wall, or the span of the ceiling in the commons, the number of windows in the kitchen. Avani, who had spent most of her time at the Crooked Creek shoving bartered food into her mouth and then escaping the Widow’s disapproving eye as hastily as possible, could help Everin little when it came to the kitchens, or the bedchambers on the second floor.
“It won’t look the same, not from the outside,” he’d said that first winter, as he’d watched snow fly beyond Avani’s tapestried curtains, and sketched his plans on borrowed paper with seamstress chalk. “Graystone isn’t native, not to the Downs. Someone, some age ago, I’d wager, paid to have an entire village-worth of stone hauled up from the valley. Frivolous, when there’s perfectly good clay for bricks on hand.”
Avani, in the throws of putting her battered house back to rights, had paused and looked her friend in the eye. “Barrowman clay, you mean? For barrowman brick? The spelled sort as almost killed me not so long ago, Everin?”
His yellow stare was placid. “I learned brick making in the desert, black eyes. And as I’m no magus or sidhe, to weave spells into soil; you can expect naught but good, solid brick.” He cracked his back, stretching against a pile of Avani’s cushions. “Best don’t start giving them belittling titles, Avani. Those that notice won’t be pleased.”
“Barrowmen, you mean?” Avani asked, puzzled. “But it’s Faolan himself who calls his people so.”
And Everin had frowned, expression thoughtful, and shook his head and gone back to his sketching and dreaming.
HE’D BEEN TRUE to his promise; he was a deft hand at brickwork. Brick making, Avani learned, was a tedious process, and at first Everin spent more hours mixing, setting, and firing bricks than he did building anything solid. She’d helped him mix and mold those first few bricks they’d later used to build his small kiln, and she’d been pleased enough when the first lighting and firing proved that Everin did indeed know the trade.
“I thought it was just another lie,” she’d admitted, as they stood together and watched flames lick the mouth of the clamp. “The tale you told about soldiering for a desert lord.”
“Nay,” he’d smiled into the flame. “It was the first thing I did, once I’d bargained my freedom from the aes si. The Aug’s line is desert blood. I wanted to see how my f
orefathers had lived, walk where they’d walked, taste the dry desert air.”
“And learn the way of bricks.”
“That I did.”
Brick making wasn’t just tedious, it was also slow going. In that first turning of the seasons, Everin managed enough for the inn’s ground-floor walls. He’d built a chimney for the great stone hearth out of cracked, blackened graystone culled from the building’s corpse. Now, as they rolled through their second spring on the Downs, the Crooked Creek Inn had a first floor, complete with door and four square windows, and the beginnings of a kitchen.
Avani thought the brick facade made the building look more dignified the second time around. The lopsided chimney made her smile. And if she didn’t look too long at the packed-earth floor, she could almost forget she’d nearly followed the Widow into death there beneath as-yet-unbuilt stairs.
“Come and see,” Everin insisted. “I’ve had to make do, some. Guess where the second chimney connected, and the width of the hearth. Also, it’s likely the back door was here, straight out to the Widow’s veggie shed. Avani?”
“You put the irons back,” she said. “In the hearth.”
“Nay,” he said. “They’re a sidhe thing, the fire didn’t touch them. The magic’s still there. Reach for the trapdoor even now, and you’ll believe your fingers are smoking to ash.” He shuddered. Avani wondered if he’d tried it himself.
“The barrowmen have nothing to do with iron. Faolan says they call it man’s metal.”
“So they do,” Everin agreed. “It took a man to craft the canny hidden door, and the pretty iron handles. And an aes si to set the spell.”
Avani frowned down at the flicker of phantom flame. “What man would willingly aid the sidhe?”
Everin laughed, loud and long. “What woman would feed a sidhe acolyte her best healing tea, and provide him an ointment for his tender skin?”
Avani felt her cheeks flush. “It’s not the same.”
“Isn’t it?” the lost son of the Aug challenged, thoroughly merry. “Well, black eyes, if there’s a difference, I don’t see it.”
