by Fiona Patton
3
The Wild Lands
THE AIR FELT HEAVY, portentous, and smelled of blood and salt. The dawn sun peeking above the wild lands like a great, fiery insect preparing to leap from its den, held nothing but malice in its regard. And far away, water sparkled in a cavernous darkness.
“Stop it.”
Crouched on a low rise, Graize looked down on the winter camp he shared with Danjel of the Rus-Yuruk and Yal of the Chalash Petchans. It lay deep in the midst of the Berbat-Dunya where the spirits, gathering beneath the undulating hills like pockets of low-lying marshlands, were at their strongest and most feral. Their constant ebb and flow hid him from the prying eyes of his enemies, but they also muddied the streams of prophecy, causing his mind to tack back and forth like a leaking boat on the water.
Closing his eyes, he willed himself to calm, using the protective mental cloak he’d fashioned in the Gurney Dag Mountains a year ago as a focus. Rent to pieces on the grasslands, he’d spent the last nine months carefully weaving it back together and, along with it, his fragile sanity.
The cloak held and, when he opened his eyes again, the tableau had steadied.
The air smelled of rain falling on the distant northern sea. The dawn sun cast orange fingers of light across the wild lands, sending the last of the night’s creatures scurrying for the safety of their dens. And in the distance, water sparkled in the darkness.
Graize’s gray eyes narrowed. He was not on the northern seas, so any blood spilled upon its waves was not his concern, nor was he a night creature, so the sun held no malice toward him. He could sense the distant rain and the change from night to day without the aid of prophecy. And water and darkness were obscure and unconnected.
“Get on with it.”
The vision faltered for a heartbeat, drawing the images of an armored child, a golden tower, and a dark-haired man on a snow-capped mountain ridge from deep within his mind to focus on, and Graize growled angrily.
“No.”
“I’ll never be gone from you again.”
His own words spoken to Hisar in a moment of comfort whispered through his mind and he slapped them away angrily.
“You’re mine, only mine! My God!”
The oaths he’d shouted into the storm sizzled along Hisar’s newly carved lien and he bared his teeth at it. “Hisar will be brought back under my control in due time,” he growled. “And I will not look at mountains or towers. Enough.”
Thrusting the unwanted memories aside, he reached into the pouch at his belt, drawing out a battered, old stag beetle. Using it as a focus, he forced his mind back to the imagery at hand and, grudgingly, it obeyed.
Rain would come from across the northern sea where Prince Illan Dmitriviz Volinsk was planning the invasion of Anavatan, bringing blood and salt in his wake.
But the morning sun could still reveal his plans to their enemies.
The vision wavered unsteadily and Graize rubbed his temples as his right eye dilated, causing a fine line of icy pain to stitch across his forehead.
“Begin with blood,” he growled.
Blood nearly always meant blood spilled, but blood also flowed through the body, keeping it strong. Salt was the sea, an invasion by sea brought salt to poison the land, but salt kept the body strong as well. So, the success or failure of Illan’s invasion still hung in the balance whatever the prince might think.
As for the sun . . . Graize glanced at the horizon. The sun brought clarity and heralded the end to hiding and the onset of action for those who moved about by day, but in this vision the sun held nothing but malice in its regard. It could reveal their movements, still hidden from view, to the enemy.
“Still hidden from view,” he mused. “Hidden from the malicious regard of our enemies. The malicious regard of Incasa’s seer-priests, Estavia’s Sable Company seers, and Spar. Illan’s enemies and my enemy.”
He glared at the east. “I know you’ve been looking for me, little ratseer,” he sneered into the wind. “I can feel you tickling my dreams like a bedbug in the night. But you can’t bite me; you’re not strong enough. And one day soon I’ll make you pay for trying to steal my Godling away.”
And the water in darkness?
He shook his head in a side-to-side, up-and-down, motion until the icy pain in his forehead made him stop.
“Sparkling water in darkness,” he amended, shaking an admonishing finger at the stag beetle. “Water doesn’t sparkle in darkness, does it? But spirits in water sparkle all the time because they have an inner power that lights them up like little fireflies. So . . .” He leaned back on his heels. “There are spirits in a darkness, in a cavernous darkness. But there are no caverns here. So where are the caverns?”
Reaching out, he plucked several strands of the thick wild lands grass, twisting them together to make a simple fetish the way Danjel and the Yuruk had taught him. Tossing it high, he watched as the wind caught it, and spun it about his face. For a moment, he half expected Hisar to come swooping down to knock it from the air as the Godling had liked to do in the past. But the sky remained clear of Its distinctive shimmer and he banished the thought with a sharp jerk of his head, bringing his mind back on task as the fetish finally came to rest on the ground to the east.
“The shining, sparkling, glowing, betraying city of Anavatan lies to the east,” he said in the singsong cadence he used when his thoughts were elsewhere. “Is that where you are, my spirit-filled caverns?”
He lifted the fetish, tapping it lightly against his lips as he considered the entire vision. The ice on the northern sea would be breaking up soon and Illan’s invasion fleet would set sail. All of the Volinski prince’s years of plotting and planning like a night creature scuttling along a wall would be complete.
“But they’re not complete yet,” he mused. “He still needs to be cautious or they’ll be discovered.”
He gave a disdainful sniff. “Why should discovery matter now?” he sneered, curling his lip. “If everyone’s held to Illan’s ambitious timetable, all of Anavatan’s enemies from Petchan to Yuruk to Skirosian will be mobilizing soon. Hardly subtle, my beetle; that much movement to a single purpose will have lit up the future streams like a pillar of fire on the water already. Every Anavatanon seer from the lowliest street prophet to Incasa Himself will have felt it in their bones and will be preparing a response. So tell me clearly, my all-knowing little creature, what hidden element hangs in the balance that would make its discovery so dangerous at this late stage?”
The cry of a hunting bird sounding overhead jerked him from his reverie just as the answer started to shimmer into view. A small, red hawk wheeled in the sky, then dropped. When it rose again, a mouse dangled from its talons. For a split second, the sun etched a fine patina of copper fire across the hawk’s feathers; then, as its owner arose from the grass almost at his feet, Graize’s answer vanished.
He grimaced. “Yal.”
The Petchan woman raised an eyebrow at his tone. Of an age and of similar medium height and build, she and Graize could have been mistaken for siblings save for the pale blonde hair, blue eyes, and tanned complexion that marked her as a Petchan compared to the light brown hair and gray eyes that hinted at Graize’s possible Volinski ancestry. Like him, she was dressed in the Yuruk style, hair worn long and braided with bits of cloth and feathers, brown sheepskin jacket and fleece cap worn to ward off the winds with heavy woolen pantaloons stuffed into black leather boots. Only the hint of a green felt tunic underneath revealed the colorful preferences of her own people.
As she joined him on the rise, she crossed her arms with an unimpressed expression. “And good morning to you too, Graize-kardos,” she noted, keeping one eye on her hawk as it tore into its breakfast.
He waved a hand at her in annoyance. “It was a good morning to go vision-fishing until your bird-delin became entangled in my net, Hawk-Kardos,” he said, using her animal-fetish term that Danjel had gifted her with last winter.
“The nearest river is so
me miles away,” she retorted. “Maybe you should use a vision-bird to hunt in the skies instead of a vision-net; you’d get farther. I could have killed you a dozen times while you stood looking for fish where there’s no water.”
“Had you been an actual danger, I would have sensed you,” Graize replied, touching one finger to his temple. “As it was, your appearance and your bird-delin’s merely muddied the streams.”
“Clouded the sky?” she pressed.
“If you like.” He raised his face to the faint light and warmth from the east. “The dawn sun heralds a change from inaction to action. Time to move. Time to see the mouse before the strike.”
Used to his ramblings, Yal just frowned at him. “Action on a small scale or on a large?” she asked, ignoring the rest of his words with practiced ease.
“Both.”
“And the strike?”
“Also both.” He glanced at her quizzically. “Why?”
Shading her eyes with one hand, Yal peered at the distant hills. “Danjel’s not back yet.”
“Ah.” Graize gave her a knowing nod. Her bi-gender lover—his adopted kardos—had been tending a herd of wild ponies all winter, taming them for the spring migration, and had left the day before yesterday to begin rounding them up. They would be leaving the winter camp to join with Danjel’s people just as soon as the Yuruk wyrdin returned.
“Has your prophecy shown you any sign of Danjel?” Yal pressed.
Closing his eyes, Graize laid his hands against the ground, feeling the grass scratch against his palms as he pushed his fingers through it. “No whisper of seer-horse-herding lovers or swallow-birth-fetish couriers on the plains, Hawk-kardos. Wait an hour, play again, the game may have changed,” he answered, his tone dropping back into the singsong cadence. “But.” He opened his eyes. “There will be rain to the north.”
“We’ll be riding north within the next day or two. Will it catch us up?”
“Not in this next day or two if the future holds to its present course,” he answered with unusual clarity. “But that’s the real trick, isn’t it, holding the fickle future to its course.”
“As tricky as changing the course of a waterfall,” she agreed. “Easier to just go with it, I’d think.”
“Unless it pours you down a crevasse.” He shrugged eloquently. “You’d get soaked either way, wouldn’t you? But that way you might drown. In a future day or two we’ll all get soaked with blood and salt. Only time can tell if we’ll get drowned.”
“And time will tell when, Graize-kardos?”
“When it pleases.”
Yal favored him with a doubtful grimace before returning her gaze to the plains. She’d come to the Berbat-Dunya with Danjel, a powerful seer, or wyrdin as the Yuruk called them, after Danjel had carried Graize, screaming and raving with madness, from the southern grasslands last summer. They’d spent the last nine months tending to his broken mind amidst the concealing wild lands, but every time he’d looked to be recovering, something happened to destroy the fragile stability they’d built up for him. He’d been fairly lucid for the last week and Yal’d had high hopes that the onset of spring would bring him added strength, but Danjel wasn’t so sure. The Yuruk wyrdin believed that Graize’s mind would never be truly strong until he reconciled with the God-spirit, Hisar, whom he’d driven away on the grasslands.
As her hawk returned to her wrist, its feasting over, Yal shook her head, the protective beads of her people clicking together with the motion. She didn’t understand the bond between Graize and the God-spirit. When he’d first come to Chalash, Graize had told her that he controlled Hisar, but that summer the creature had betrayed him, throwing in with his enemies and helping one of them to escape. To her mind, that was not a bond she’d want to maintain. Danjel could not properly explain what to the Yuruk wyrdin was an instinctive relationship, and Graize would not speak of Hisar at all, so Yal had simply put it down to the strange ways of her new foreign family and had left it at that.
Her own people did not consort with the spirits the way the Yuruk did. The mountain spirits were too dangerous, too unpredictable, and always too hungry. There were countless stories told by their own seers, or sayers as they called them, of shepherds falling to their deaths at the urgings of the mountain spirits. Even though there were no cliffs here, only endless stretches of plains and marsh, the spirits lay so thick across the land that, even to her non-prophetic gaze, it shimmered with their power, lying deceptively calm and dormant, waiting for the unwary to move among them. And either drown them as Graize had mentioned or simply devour them.
She’d voiced her concern to Danjel when they’d first arrived, but her lover had just laughed. Giving a high whistle, the wyrdin had called up a dozen spirits, tossing seeds of power to them like Yal might have tossed actual seeds to feed the tamed yellow birds back home. They’d spun about Danjel’s face like a swarm of mad fireflies, buzzing and singing in a melodic, high-pitched tone. It had teased a rare smile of pleasure from Graize that had seemed to take years off his age, but Yal had remained unmoved. Everyone knew that the singing of the spirits could drive you mad. She was sure that was what had happened to Graize: he’d spent far too long listening to Hisar sing. But neither Graize nor Danjel had heeded her warning.
Beside her, Graize was now studying her hawk intently. The morning sun illuminated its feathers with fire and his eyes lit up suddenly, echoing their brilliance as a vision danced across his mind. “An answer-fish has finally been caught in my sky-net,” he said. “Feathers spotted with blood and painted with power. We’re going to have company.”
“People company?” Yal hazarded with a worried frown.
“Panos and Hares,” he answered.
“Ah, the southern oracle and her teyos, the mapmaker. I remember you speaking of them before.”
“Yes.” Graize nodded, as the image grew clearer in his eyes. “They are traveling north to reunite with her lover, Prince Illan of Volinsk, when his fleet sails down the Bogazi-Isik Strait, but they must travel overland to avoid the malice of the sun.”
“The sun?”
“The seers of Anavatan. They can’t take the water-path up Gol-Beyaz because the sharp eyes of the Anavatanon seers will spot them as the enemies they are, so they have to walk the plains-path through the heart of the Berbat-Dunya instead.”
“Isn’t that dangerous without a sayer born to the wild lands?” Yal asked. “I thought the only reason we were safe was because we were with Danjel.”
Graize showed his teeth at her. “Panos is not afraid of spirits, wild or otherwise. To her, they’re no more dangerous that a swarm of midges. But she can’t eat them, not like I can, poor little golden prophet. And she’d find their singing so much to her taste if she could; as tart and sweet as berries dipped in honey.”
He glanced slyly at Yal. “They’ll have landed far west of Anahtar-Hisar and journeyed through the coastal foothills and up into the mountains, stopping at Chalash to bring word from King Pyrros to Haz-Chief and bring away word from Maf, beloved but cranky abia to Yal-Delin, long absent from her home.”
“Just the two of them?” Yal asked, refusing to be distracted by mention of her mother.
“They’ll be guarded,” Graize answered dismissively. “But the number’s not important.”
“It is if we’re expected to feed them,” Yal answered dryly.
“Very true. How practical you are, Hawk-kardos. Two, possibly four, then. We’ll know more once their footprints carry across the land.” Graize glanced at her bird again. The creature stared back at him with a disconcertingly intelligent expression much like Hisar’s. “The hawk has flown high and dropped low and now it rests comfortably in between, its belly full and its beak smeared with the blood of prophecy.”
He lay back in the grass, arms behind his head. “We’ll know how many more mice we’ll have to provide before the sun reaches its zenith,” he stated.
“And Danjel?” Yal pressed.
Graize gave an explosiv
e sigh. “Tell your nether regions to be patient, Kardos; we’ll know of Danjel by then as well.”
“You’ve seen this?”
Graize waved a dismissive hand at her and Yal grimaced back at him. “Typical sayer,” she muttered, shaking her head. As the movement disturbed the hawk on her wrist, she sent it back into the air. “Mice will not do. Find me a warren of fat rabbits, Delin,” she told it. “We’re going to have company. Hungry company.”
“Yes,” Graize agreed with a faint chuckle. “Very hungry company.”
Miles away, in the heart of the wild lands, the dawn sun sent streaks of orange power feathering across the landscape. Clinging to each stalk of grass, hundreds of tiny spirits, born of wind and rain, lifted their feral regard to its light, drinking in its strength to fuel their minute allotments of prophecy. A herd of ponies grazing placidly among them swallowed grass and spirits alike, spots of silver power sparkling in their shaggy coats like dew. Now and then, one would send its tail swishing through the hip-high stalks, raising a cloud of spirits and midges to swirl about their heads, tangling in their manes and eyelashes, before settling back down again.
Riding with the easy grace of one born to the saddle, Danjel moved slowly through the animals, his two young herding dogs keeping pace beside him. He carried the white yak’s tail standard of the shepherd held loosely in the crook of one arm even though there were no other Yuruk nearby to signal to, and kept his jade-green eyes trained on the horizon even though his prophetic abilities had already told him there was no enemy or predator nearby. As the morning breeze caressed his cheek, he reined up, changing form from male to female in a single, fluid motion.
