by Carol Berg
“Inerrant thou hast come here, just as on the morn we met,” said Kol, who remained in the dark mouth of the passage. “The Well has not faded from thy memory.”
“No,” I said, hoping he would now explain. “Its location is as clear to me as on the night I first walked here.”
“Canst thou see…?” His voice trailed away as he walked toward the pool. After only a few steps, he sank to one knee and touched the ice-slicked rock. “Follow one of her paths. Prove it.”
I knelt and yielded magic, and it was as if the hidden stars came streaking into the corrie, embroidering trails of silver light upon the dark stone. Everywhere, circles and twining loops, layer upon layer of threads, as deep as I dared plunge, all quivering with light, each one that I touched with my inner eye thrumming with stretched music.
The uppermost image was bolder than those that lay immediately below, the steps larger. This was Kol’s own path, when he had danced his grief on the day we had retrieved Gerard’s body from the pool.
Carefully I studied the interlaced threads of his steps, comparing it to the images that his movements had etched on my memory. And then I peeled away that layer—as one could with the thin transparent layers of the stones that men called angels’ glass—and examined the next.
My mother’s feet had laid down a more intricate pattern than Kol’s. I began to walk the silver thread.
“She began here,” I said, touching the place at the far side of the pool. “Here a small leap.” A faint thread between a hard push and the landing. “Then a spin. A step and then another spin. The pattern repeated three more times…” As I walked I could almost feel her movements. “Here she paused, bending I think because the thread is uneven…another sequence of five steps and spins, and then here she made that twisting move as you do, on one foot, lowering her heel to mark each turn, again, and again…ten…twelve times…”
“Eppires,” he said, suffused with awe. “Thou canst truly see her steps. I recognize this kiran.”
“There are hundreds of paths here, layer upon layer. I could walk each one if you wished.”
“Do this one again,” he commanded, resolute. “And this time, shadow her moves.”
“I cannot—”
“Do not say I cannot. I do not expect thee to dance, only to move in the manner of the kiran, to feel that I may also feel.”
And so I began again. I pivoted and jumped in my own limited fashion. Wobbling. Awkward. I spun a quarter turn and tripped over my own foot, where Clyste had made three full rounds and landed on her toes. Filled with the remembrance of Kol’s grace, I knew I must appear a lumbering pig with feet of lead.
I balanced on one foot for a moment at the first spot where Clyste had paused…and felt a feather’s touch along my spine. At the next step I touched more softly on the ball of my bare foot and when I leaped to her next landing place, I recalled my leap from Torvo’s wall and drove my spirit upward with the imagining of my mother’s gift. I landed gently on my left foot, my knee and ankle bent. No wobble.
My skin flushed. Alive. Awake. As if the air spoke to me. As if a lover’s hand touched my lips. The color of my gards deepened. Eyes fixed to the silver thread, I brushed my right foot forward and shifted weight, as the pattern told me…
I finished the kiran on one knee, the alter leg stretched out behind me in line with my straight back, my fingertips touching my forehead. Only when I became aware of Kol’s gaze did I break into a sweat of embarrassment. “I got caught up in it,” I said, drawing into a huddle, wrapping my arms about my knee. I could not look at him. My crude miming must surely have appalled him.
“The ending position is called an allavé,” he said dryly. “Wert thou to stretch the spine longer, round the arms as if embracing a tree, and lower the hips, while aligning the back foot and hip properly with the correctly curved shoulder, I might call thy position…minimal. Now, touch the stone beneath thy feet.”
The ice had melted along the silvered path. The stone, warm beneath my fingertips, swelled as if with living breath. “This is not usual,” I said, half in terror, half in question, “for one of my poor skills.”
“No. Not usual.” Kol knelt beside me as my fingers traced the silver thread in awe and wonder. “In these few steps…a youngling’s raw beginning…thou hast summoned life where none dwelt when we stepped through into this place. Think, Valen, is it possible thou couldst find other kiran shadows like these, without knowing their location beforehand or their makers? Without maps or books? Couldst thou walk the world, seeking with thy hands and thy Cartamandua magic these patterns scribed in seasons past?”
“Yes, I believe—” And then did my thick head begin to comprehend what he was asking me. Janus’s map had failed to tell the Danae what they had forgotten, because they could not read the language of lines and symbols. But Clyste had seen my father’s truer magic. He had taken her into places she could not find on her own…and she had been able to coax dead lands back to life with her dancing. Danae could see only living things, and so Clyste had chosen to create a living map—a child who could find what was forgotten and dance it back into the pattern of the world.
“Thou art the answer, Valen,” said Kol softly. “Thou are the healing for the breaking of the world.”
Chapter 29
As a red tide departs a once-healthy shore, leaving behind a plague of tainted fish, so did my moment’s exhilaration rush out to leave me aghast, aching, and empty. “How can this fall to me? I’ve so few skills…
scarcely begun…God’s bones, years…lifetimes…it would take me to seek out such places without the guidance of the map.”
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 enchantme
nts, 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.”
