by Carol Berg
My uncle sat beside me, waves of heat radiating from his sweating body, as if he had danced the night through…perhaps several nights, judging by the starved hollow of my belly. For certain we had come here in the night. Now weak and cloud-riven sunlight glinted on the ice walls.
“If thou but knew all those of the long-lived who have attempted the Well only to emerge bruised and bleeding, weeping for their failure. Not only brash initiates, but mature dancers, worthy to take on great sianous. Valen”—I looked up at the severe pronouncement of my name to see my uncle’s eyes bright as summer and his brows raised high—“this is not at all usual.”
Weariness set me laughing this time. I tucked my head into my arms and longed for food and sleep and one of Saverian’s balms to ease the vibrant sting in my flesh.
“And now we must speak of more lessons,” I said, “and of the Canon and Tuari and those who wish to murder the long-lived, and I must learn what to do to save my king’s soul and his”—no, even to Kol I could not mention the child—“and his subjects and my friends.”
Kol sighed and offered me an insistent hand. “Lessons, yes, but I’ve brought thee sustenance, lest thy strength or attention should waver.”
Ever a slave of my flesh, the prospect of food cheered me greatly. As I accepted Kol’s hand and proceeded gingerly to the almost sunny, almost dry spot where he had laid out his provisions, I kept glancing downward, afraid to look too closely.
“Feathers, I think,” said Kol, inspecting me as I lowered myself carefully to the ground. “And braided…
something.”
Unable to imagine what such decorations might mean, I shook off the oddity and devoured his small feast: two knotted carrots, four chewy figs, and three round, sticky cakes made of hazelnuts, dried blueberries, and honey. Every delicious bite warmed and strengthened me. I could have eaten ten times the amount.
As I ate, Kol taught. “When I danced in Picus’s garden, my steps were not random. I designed a kiran, a pattern of movements to encompass a living landscape—the beasts, plants, trees, earth, stone, and water that comprise it, the air, the light, and the storms that shape it. I, and the others of our kind, dance many kirani throughout a season, not just at our own sianous, for many small places in Aeginea have no guardian of their own.”
“So the silver threads I see are the evidence of a kiran—not just any dancing,” I said, licking the honey from my fingers.
He acknowledged the point. “We bring these kirani to the Canon, dancing them in the various rounds throughout the day or night. The Chosen, the one named to dance at the Center, takes in all that is brought to the Canon in each dancer’s kirani and joins them together as I told thee, building the power that thy prince desires to feed on. At the moment of season’s change, the Chosen yields this power to the land through the Center, whence it spreads throughout Aeginea and into human realms through the connections that bind our two realms into one whole—”
“—the Well, the Mountain, the Sea, and the Plain, the sianous where the first of your kind were born of the Everlasting and took bodily form.” My hands fell still.
He nodded. “It is also the duty of the Chosen to strip away those kirani that are incomplete or poorly effected, any that might violate the harmony of the dance and reduce its power. This stripping removes the kiran-hai—the affected land—from the Canon for the season. Though an embarrassment to the dancer who shaped the defective kiran, one season’s removal does not poison the land or wreak irreversible harm. In the usual way, the kiran is repaired or improved and brought to the following season’s Canon.”
Kol braided his hair as he spoke, his wrenching twists and yanks speaking eloquently of his agitation.
He tied off the thick braid with a solid knot, then pushed aside the strands of hair that had escaped his control.
“When I was but a nestling, the halfbreed Llio, Ronila’s sire and guardian of the Plain, brought an unusual kiran into the Spring Canon. Tuari was Chosen—his first naming—and he removed Llio’s kiran as flawed, tainted with too much of human influence. Llio argued that his steps were not flawed, but only new. When Tuari refused to reconsider, Llio—impetuous, foolish, driven to rage unnatural to the long-lived
—tried to take Tuari’s place at the Center by force, a forbidden act that threatened the entirety of the Canon. In the ensuing struggle, Llio fell and broke his skull. Before the dancing ended, he had returned to the Everlasting. It was as if Llio had been poisoned of our ancient Scourge while joined with his sianou, for we could not find the Plain again, and it quickly faded from our memories in all but name. So was the Canon sorely broken.”
“The long-lived blamed it on the fact that he was a halfbreed,” I said. Llio’s curse.
“Aye. My sire and others have come to admit that the nature of the Plain as a channel to the human realm, and the nature of the Canon when we are wholly at one with our sianous, must have caused the breaking in some part, and not entirely Llio’s human violence. Tuari does not agree. But those events and those that followed—the unstable storms, our own failure to regenerate, the weakening of the bond between our kirani and the land, the increasing incidents of the Scourge—have ever preyed on Tuari, plaguing him with doubts and leading him on a wavering course.”
Kol’s silence was the quiet between rainstorms as a line of squalls moves in from the sea. And so I waited.
Eventually he sighed and began again. “When Tuari summoned me from Picus’s garden, he said he had been searching every channel of wisdom to learn how to restore the Plain and the Well, but all had failed. He had come to the conclusion that the human realm weighs too heavily upon the Canon, causing this imbalance in the world that we all see. He asked that my father and I consider abandoning our sianous for the Winter Canon to see if such removal might correct the imbalance. We refused, both Stian and I, for our kind emerged from the Everlasting in the beginnings apurpose to hold the four great sianous that join Aeginea and the human realm. Stian believes that to yield the remaining two would surely rend the world.
Tuari appeared to yield to our misgivings. Now, hearing your tale, I surmise that he has reconciled with his kin-brother’s child, Ronila, and given her Janus’s map, hoping that Picus’s teaching and her life in the human world would reveal to her its meaning, thinking she might show us a way to recover the Plain and the Well and these other lost sianous. If, instead, Ronila has spoken smooth lies and convinced Tuari that such recovery is forever impossible…”
“…the archon might instruct his consort to repair this imbalance,” I said. “And the Chosen can forcibly remove the kirani of the Mountain and the Sea from the Canon.”
“I believe this is why he names Nysse Chosen. He hopes to repair the Canon by sheering it in twain.”
After speaking this grim verdict, Kol stretched his legs straight in front of him, linked his hands behind his back, and bent his forehead to his knees, raising his linked hands skyward.
I leaped to my feet, appalled, certain that Kol’s theory was correct. Ronila had purposely destroyed the map in front of me, knowing that my news of it would be a torment to Kol and Stian. “Tuari may have yielded to your argument, uncle, but Ronila will find a way to kill you…you and Stian…and me, too, if she learns what’s happened here. She wants to ensure the Mountain and the Sea are lost forever along with the Plain and the Well.”
“I shall warn my sire,” said my uncle, his voice muffled by his knees and the effort of his stretching.
“We shall need his help to get thee into the Canon.”
This made no sense at all. “I cannot pass for one of you, no matter my gards. I cannot dance. I’ve no idea what to do.”
He released his arms, drew in his legs, and bounced to his feet. “Return here at high sun on the solstice, and Stian will instruct thee. There will be sufficient distraction in the Canon for him to slip thee into his round.”
“Distraction?”
Kol raised his arms and bent wholly to one side and then th
e other, holding each for longer than my sympathizing muscles could bear. Then he stood upright and bent forward from the waist. Supporting his weight on his arms, he slid his feet in opposite directions until it seemed he must rip himself in two. He settled his groin to the ice, then stretched his arms forward, flattening his chest to the ground as well. After a very long time, breathing slow and deep, he rose again.
“I shall issue challenge to the archon, asserting my right to dance the Center,” he said. “If I prepare sufficiently, my kiran of challenge shall be of such a nature that none shall question my right, and for certain none shall pay any mind to a new-marked dancer in a minor circle of Stian’s Round. I shall dance thy sianou, rejongai. Unusual—but then, all that touches thee is unusual. That the Well is reclaimed will ripple through the senses of the long-lived as a spring zephyr. And on solstice night when the season shifts, I shall infuse the gold veins of Dashon Ra with the power of the Canon and trust thee to put the world right again.”
His confidence…his courage…left me breathless. “And if you fail, uncle? Or if Stian is caught bringing a halfbreed into the Canon? Or if Ronila—?”
“Be off, Valen rejongai. I’ve work to do.”
Chapter 30
The few-quellae walk took me from the Well into the ruin of Gillarine, and only twenty or thirty steps more transported me from the cloisters into Renna’s well yard. The high walls left the yard in gray-blue shadows. A leaden afternoon—a proper reflection of my spirits. Flicks of sensation—a taste of moisture in the air, the feel of damp earth beneath my feet, the spongy moss between the stones—afflicted me with a yearning like that of a traveler on an evening road, hoping to see a warm and well-lit house over the next rise. And my gut felt uneasy.
I sighed and strolled toward the stair. I dared not hope that this third passage had somehow cured my doulon craving. I must speak with Saverian. I needed clothes. I needed sleep. I needed to know what day it was.
“Who’s down there?” The gruff challenge came from high atop the wall that separated the well yard from the inner bailey. Someone had spotted me. “Gatzi’s thumb! What’s that?”
“There you are!” This shout, emitted in the squawking timbre of a young male, came from much closer. “Did you fall out of your head just because you spilt a bit of dye on you? You’ll freeze out here, and His Grace won’t like you tainting the well with dye!”
Confused, I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see a great bat flying across the yard, only I realized, as the dark mantle of wool fell over my head, that it was but a boy carrying a very large cloak. No sooner had I twisted the heavy folds so that my face poked out of the hood rather than into it, than Jullian shoved me into the deeper shadows of the colonnade.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Brother Valen,” he whispered, as the guards on the wall speculated quietly on the likely parentage of a fool who’d walk naked in the freezing well yard after spilling dye on himself, and wasn’t it an odd kind of dye to shine so brightly. “I didn’t think you’d want to be seen…this way.” He sounded disapproving, but then, he persisted in calling me Brother.
“I’m grateful,” I said, fastening the clip at my neck. “It feels right to wear only the gards when I’m in the wild, just as wearing a cowl feels right in an abbey. But when I’m back amongst the rest of you, it’s damned awkward. Tell me…how long was I gone?”
“A sevenday, it’s been.”
“Seven days!” Dismay erased what smattering of confidence I’d held on to. The solstice was but two days hence. Sila Diaglou would likely be crossing Caedmon’s Bridge this very night.
“Everyone’s worried, but no one will speak what’s on his mind, especially to me. There’s going to be a battle here, isn’t there? A magical battle that will mean the dark age is come?”
“Yes.” Jullian was no longer a child to be sheltered with sweet lies.
He straightened his back. “I knew it. They keep saying I need to be hidden in some fortress along with Mistress Elene and Brother Victor, but Mistress Elene vows she will ride out to war tomorrow. Mistress Saverian insists Brother Victor is too weak to travel anywhere, but he winks at me when she says it. We believe—Brother Victor and I—that there’s only one place we ought to be when this battle comes. Prince Osriel told us how you took him there so quickly, and if you were to take us that same way, then Brother Victor wouldn’t have to ride out in the cold. We’ve no other Scholar.”
His boldness stilled my churning thoughts. “You want to go to the lighthouse.”
He bobbed his head.
Simple logic and the boy’s stalwart stance testified to the rightness of such a course. Brave Jullian, the brightest student the abbey had ever nurtured, with the wise and capable Victor to mentor him, could become a Scholar well worthy of those who had died to give the world hope. To deny these two the chance to honor their vows to their god and their brotherhood would be to forswear my own.
I bowed to him with sincere solemnity. “In the name of the lighthouse cabal, I would be honored to transport the Scholar and his mentor to their duties. Teneamus. ”
Jullian released a deep-held breath, no doubt erasing the pent arguments he’d held ready to hand, and squared his shoulders for the next challenge. “I suppose we’d best tell the others.”
I grinned and started up the stair. “I’ll tell them. But I’d give a good deal for a shirt and a mug of ale first.”
“I’ve tunic, braies, hose, and all over here. The physician gave them to me to hold for you.”
“Just tunic and leggings, I think. No braies today.” The walk from the Well had kept my new gards stinging.
Osriel, Elene, Saverian, and Brother Victor were taking supper in a small dining chamber. The sight of my friends tucked away in the homely warmth of the firelit room struck me with a terrible sadness, poised as we were at the verge of the abyss.
Word of my arrival had preceded us. The prince had abandoned his meal and stood stiffly by the hearth. “Welcome, Valen,” he said, gesturing to the table where two fresh bowls, spoons, and cups had been set. “Refresh yourself. You, too, young watchman. We’ve sent for more.”
“Thank you, lord.” I took a knee, hoping to reassure the prince that I wasn’t planning to abduct him again. “It is fine to see you recovered from your ordeal.” Though he was gray-skinned and gaunt as always, naught of weakness marred his posture, nor any outward sign of his saccheria.
As soon as he gestured me up, I turned to Elene. Her skin bloomed a much healthier hue than his.
Even from across the room, I felt the robust life in her. Only her great eyes betrayed knowledge and grief beyond bearing. “Dearest mistress, forgive my not coming to you on our return from Palinur. Anything…
anything…you need of me, please ask.”
She lifted her chin. “Later this evening, after you have paid your service to His Grace, I would appreciate a private word. I wish to hear of my father’s death.”
“Of course, Thanea.” I bowed deeply. Osriel would have a deal of trouble preventing his newest warlord from riding out to face her father’s murderers.
Beside Elene sat Brother Victor, resting his diminutive chin on folded hands. I smiled and cupped my palms together. “Iero’s grace, Brother.”
He smiled and returned the gesture. “Good Valen. Well met.”
I had saved Saverian for last. As I’d pulled on the clothes she’d left me, I had imagined her ironical smirk as she attempted to pry out what I’d been up to by inspection alone, and I had prepared a properly humorous and mystifying retort.
But her dark eyes smoldered, and she seemed on the verge of explosion. “Gratifying to see you’ve rejoined us, Magnus.”
“Saverian,” I said, swallowing my jests unspoken. How had I offended this time?
I took the vacant stool between her and Jullian. The boy was already laying a fine-smelling portion of meat over a thick slab of bread in his bowl. Timely and agreeable as Kol’s provender had been, my stomach yearned for th
e hot and savory. I dug in and rejoiced when a serving woman brought in another tureen. Perhaps the uneasiness in my gut was just this and no warning of perversion.
The small room vibrated with unspoken questions. Yet, though they had already finished their meal, the company gave me time to eat by sharing news. Elene reported that Prior Nemesio and his monks were safely bedded at Osriel’s remote hold at Magora Syne, that Thane Boedec and Thanea Zurina had arrived with their house warriors three nights previous, and that scouts had reported Harrower troops on the approaches to Caedmon’s Bridge.
“I’m glad to hear the brothers are safe,” I said as I refilled my bowl. “I presume Prince Bayard’s legion accompanies the Harrowers.”
“They follow,” said Osriel, “but they appear to answer only to my brother, not the priestess.”
“Thanea Zurina and her men rode out yesterday to meet the Harrowers at the Bridge,” said Elene, a simmering anger scarce contained. “But Boedec’s force is ordered to remain here along with Renna’s garrison. His Grace seems to believe such a strategy does not condemn Zurina’s house to annihilation.
Though my liege forbids me, I’ve sworn to ride after her come the dawn and lend her my household’s support.”
I glanced up at Osriel, whose dark eyes had not left me, and at Saverian, who brooded and bristled, mouth tight as a pinchfist’s heart. Then I blotted my mouth and decided I’d best forgo a third portion of the well-seasoned mutton, lest the tensions in the room crack Renna’s thick walls.
“I’ve had a strange journey,” I said. “I’d like to think I bring some small hope for this confrontation, but I’d best let His Grace judge. However”—I stood, raising my cup that brimmed with its third filling of Renna’s best ale—“as this might be the last feasting night of the lighthouse cabal for a goodly while, I would like to wish godspeed and all good hopes to our new lighthouse Scholar and his mentor. Luviar himself could not have chosen better or braver.”
