by Holly Lisle
But when I turned to her, she smiled at me as if she could see me as clearly as I saw her.
“I was twelve when the slavers came,” she said. “They caught me away from my home, and thus had from me no more fight than I could provide alone. Compared to the fight they would have had from a taak full of furious Tonk, that was not much fight at all. I rode in the filthy slavehold in the bottom of one of their ships, and I lived, and the sera came down from the Citadel to the market, as they came for you. They took me, even though they worried over the meaning of the mark on the palm of my hand.”
I had such a mark on my own palm—tattooed into the skin, faded and blurred with time. Three horizontal lines of differing lengths, the shortest on top, the longest on the bottom, and beneath the longest line, a curve like a cat’s tail. I held out my left hand and looked down at it, and the oracle put her own left hand atop mine, palm up. The marks matched.
Her hand in mine felt like nothing but bird bones covered by cool, loose, papery skin.
“We are kin, you and I,” she told me. And then, before I could consider how that fact might affect my future, she said, “To the best of my knowledge, I was the first Tonk ever to become a slave in the Citadel, and I proved a challenge for my masters. I had talents they wanted. I had Tonk magic, and a language they had never heard, and a dozen interesting, useful skills. But I was forever finding new ways to escape. I wanted no stone eyes; neither did I fancy a life lived within the Citadel’s walls. I got out a number of times, the last time taking other young women with me.”
“They didn’t feed you to rats?”
She laughed. “I had something they wanted. I couldn’t give it to them if I was dead. So they made me one of them instead. It was their first mistake, but not their last.”
Inside of me, some little part of the terror that held me released its hold. She was something like me, was Hawkspar. She had once been kin, of a sort, and she had once planned her own escape. She had failed. I, too, had clearly failed. But I suddenly realized that I might yet live.
The oracle fell silent. She sat facing forward on the rosewood bench, stick thin, ghost pale. I watched her, and saw a quick flicker of amusement cross her face.
“Have you noticed how many of the Order have similar marks on their hands?”
“Yes, Oracle.”
“That wasn’t by accident. Only a few of the members of my conspiracy are still alive. But as other Tonks have become full seru in the Order, we’ve brought them into what we were doing. We never gave up on what we wanted—we simply discovered there was something bigger to fight for. Since then, we’ve been quietly buying up every Tonk girl from local slave markets. We buy a handful of the ones who appear in our local market, but have other buyers picking them up for us, too—we don’t want it to be known that we’re specifically looking for Tonk girls, because we could create the demand that would encourage slavers to hunt down more of them. The problem is bad enough already.” She sighed. “We’ve been accelerating promotions of Tonk within the Order. Five Oracles are Tonk now, so we have a majority of one. That’s enough for simple votes. All but a handful of old-guard Obsidians are Tonk, because we’ve worked very hard to get our people into that calling. Of the seru in the other specialties, we have either a majority, or at least parity.”
I’d noticed a lot of young women bore tattoos on their left palm, as I did. I hadn’t realized that meant anything, though. I didn’t remember getting the mark. No one ever said anything about it. The girls and women whose hands bore the tattoos weren’t treated differently than anyone else—not that I’d noticed, anyway.
But we had been, evidently. I sat staring at my hand, at the mysterious tattoo. Being Tonk meant something in here? What? Why?
I knew I’d been Tonk. I still spoke the language. It and more than twenty other Great Languages, plus as many local dialects as we could wrap our minds around, were drilled into every penitent as part of our daily training, which also included fighting, basic magic, history, and the duties and offices of the Cistavrian Order of Marosites, of which the Ossalenes were a small, solitary, and rich offshoot rite.
But it had never occurred to me that anyone but me still considered me Tonk. That my urgent prayers at sunrise and sunset, offered to a god other than Vran Vrota, the dual male and female god of the Marosites, might be offered by others as well.
It had never occurred to me to notice that most of the Obsidians wore tattoos on their left palm.
It had never occurred to me to notice a lot of things.
But perhaps the fact that no one thought to notice was part of the oracle’s plan.
“You’re wondering why we’re doing this, no doubt,” Hawkspar said.
“Yes, Oracle.”
And she ran a finger over the mark on her own hand. “This mark is Eskuu,” she said. “It tells you which clan of the Tonk you were born into. Did you know that?”
“No, Oracle.”
“You and I are both Eskuu Tonk. We share a clan, a history, and blood. And we share a mission.” She laughed softly. “You still say your prayers every day.”
“All the penitents do,” I said, my mouth dry with fear.
“They might,” Hawkspar laughed, “but you still say the Tonk prayers, morning and evening. Haabudaf aveerzak each sunrise, Gitaada each sunset.”
“You … knew?”
The oracle smiled a slow, secretive smile. “Oracles have sight unlike anything you can imagine. And with that sight, I have watched for my successor these long years—there was a girl thirty years ago who could have done what would need to be done, but our time to act had not yet come. The river had not yet flowed to the rapids … .”
She sighed. “You cannot understand what that means yet, but … you will. In any case, I have seen a great horror coming for a long time. But until now, anything we tried to do to stop it would have ended up discrediting the Order, and us, and wasting our one chance to end a hidden war and an unimaginable evil. Had it been the right time, I would have died and let that earlier girl inherit the Eyes. But I did not know if she could remain steadfast, and the time when the trouble would come was not yet clear to me.”
I longed to ask the oracle what she wanted from me, but a penitent would never dare such forwardness. So I kept quiet.
“Times make the hero,” the oracle said softly. She turned to me, lifted my chin with her cold, paper-skinned hand, and forced me to look at her Eyes. “The time has come for sacrifice,” she told me. “For a young leader with a plan to become Hawkspar. The oracles will be told that you are the penitent the Hawkspar Eyes have chosen to be my successor.”
That seemed to me a strange wording, and I am of a suspicious nature. “Am I?” I asked.
“No,” the oracle said. She laughed out loud, merrily, and it occurred to me that before this meeting, I had never heard her laugh at all. She seemed in this blue-lit room very different from the oracle I had served for my season. I tried to imagine her as a young penitent planning her escape, but I kept seeing myself. “The Eyes would confer themselves on a senior acolyte, one who loves the Order above all and seeks advancement with her every step, and who would gladly serve the interests of the Citadel. Whereas you despise the Order and have already set into motion the mechanism of your escape.”
“I do not want the Eyes, Blessed One,” I said. “I have never wanted the Eyes.”
She wrapped an arm around my shoulders and hugged me quickly.
“The Eyes of War would make you, arguably, the most powerful woman in the world, able to direct the courses of wars and declare the paths of peace. The Eyes of War can make their wearer a goddess, child, with powers you cannot conceive. Men will give you anything you ask if you will make them kings, and with the power of the Hawkspar Eyes, you can make a man a king, or make a king a pauper. Or a corpse.”
“I never doubted that,” I said, trying to sound humble and to avoid arguing. “But I … I love the sight of the sun, Oracle, and to see the stars. The colors and shapes of roses and dai
sies, the shimmer of glass, the beauty of clouds on a stormy day. The green of grass, the blue of sky. I fear blindness. And the pain.” I looked into the Hawkspar Eyes, gleaming gold and brown in the old, thin face, and they held no emotion, no cue.
By all accounts, the oracles and the seru saw what mere humans could never see. The flow of time, the shape of magic, the links between what had been, what was, and what might be. Some said they could read our thoughts; others, that they could see what we would do, and sometimes punished us for sins in the future rather than sins in the past.
I did not know what they could do—nor did I care. What I knew was that no magical power equaled the beauty of the sun as it rose each morning and touched my face.
The seru—the Holy Wearers of the Sacred Eyes of Ossal—were blind to a one. When they became seru, they were taken to the Arena and in a ceremony attended only by other seru, their eyes were ripped out and the cold stone Eyes of a dead sera were removed and placed into their bleeding sockets, at which time they assumed their Eyes’ names, and inherited their magic.
This was the future I was fighting so hard to escape. This was the future I’d been leading my courageous band of followers to escape. This was the reason I did illegal magic each day, the reason my allies and I had hidden stores of food, weapons, and supplies all around the Citadel.
Because neither I nor my fellow conspirators wanted to take Eyes.
I had no intention of hurrying myself into this hellish future. I was not even an acolyte; in theory, Oracle Eyes only went to acolytes who had attained the highest level. In theory, I could not be accepted for Oracle Eyes.
Not everyone shared my aversion to the Order and to becoming seru. Some of the penitents practiced walking about blindfolded so that they would be ready to assume their Eyes when the time came. Some talked endlessly about the ceremony and what it must be like. They eagerly sought out any work that they thought might win them favor and get them moved into Brevon Hall—the acolytes’ house.
I had done none of that. I was senior penitent in spite of myself.
Hawkspar said, “The pain can be terrible, girl. The blindness is no joy. The nightmares are a terror. The moments of possession are horrible.”
Pain I knew well enough. I’d been beaten more than once for my attitude or my actions. My back bore the tale of my infractions in raised and thickened scars.
Nightmares I already had. In my dreams, the slavers still came and ripped me from my mother’s arms and murdered her before my eyes. In my dreams, I watched those who had threatened the Order tossed into the Arena in cages, and fed to starving rats.
Blindness I feared above all things, but I knew about it—knew it came with the Eyes.
But … Possession? What possession?
Hawkspar was still talking. “But you have not sought power, and when I offer it to you, you still don’t want it—and this makes you special to me.”
Not all that special, I thought. I didn’t want the Eyes before you mentioned possession. Now? Now I will do anything—anything—to get myself out of whatever it is that you intend to do to me.
She said, “In you, I see someone like me. You will not sell your power to those who do not deserve your aid, you will not be swayed by the gold of kings or the lands and slaves of emperors or the seductions of Ossal. You will use this power for our people’s fight.”
Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, the little voice inside me screamed. But I broke every rule of the order, spoke as a penitent, out of turn, to an oracle, and asked, “What fight?”
And she did not strike me dead. Instead, she said, “The Tonk are in a war they do not know they’re fighting. The men who took you slave and killed your family are part of a larger plot. You were not unique, your taking not an accident, but part of a plan by an enemy whose hand moves invisibly through a hundred other peoples. I am too old now to do what must be done. But I have worked my whole life to make the ground ready for your feet, to make the doors open for your hand.”
“Not me,” I said. “You haven’t done this for me. You want someone else. I watched my family die, Oracle Hawkspar. I was so young—but my mother’s face is with me always, the anguish in her eyes, her hands reaching out to pull me back from the barbarian who pulled me from her. My father is dead, my brothers and sister, dead or gone. I am alone.”
“You are Tonk. Tonk are never alone. You touch your family, your people, morning and evening when you whisper your prayers. Can you not feel them beside you in those moments? Uplifting you? Strengthening you?”
I could. I whispered “Haabudaf aveerzak” to the rising sun, and all around me the voices of others seemed to whisper the same words. I could almost feel hands linking into mine, could almost imagine a place with great broad plains and free-running horses, and no stone walls to pin me to one place. “Yes,” I told the oracle. “When I pray, I can feel them.”
“Your family is all of the Tonk, and the Tonk are losing ground to an enemy who will see all who love freedom enslaved. Every virtue and ideal the Tonk value is in danger, child, and your sacrifice may save more than you can imagine. More than you can even comprehend until the moment when the Eyes accept you. You have a fire in you strong enough to control the Eyes instead of letting them control you. You have a talent for bringing together and making strong those who might otherwise live quietly and in fear. You have a hunger for freedom that you have pursued at risk of your own life.”
Her voice broke. “You are Tonk, child. We are of one flesh and blood and spirit, you and I. If I could make these old bones young again, I would go out and fight. But all I can do is offer you the key to the gate I’ve been building my whole life, and beg you to take it and use it. The river has flowed past me; now it flows to you. Dare to step into it.”
I imagined the ceremony of the Eyes, and horrors I did not want to contemplate. A lifetime of blindness. New nightmares. New pain. And the mystery of possession.
I wanted to tell her no. I wanted so very much to walk away. She had brought me in to ask me to take the Eyes, which meant I had some form of choice.
But she knew of my plans to escape, of the steps I had taken, and of the people I had involved. If I refused her, I could not hope that we would be permitted to proceed.
And if I refused but could not escape, some Moonstone sera or some Obsidian or some Amber would grow ill, and her Eyes would choose me to take her place, and I would suffer the same pain, the same dangers, the same loss—but for nothing.
I would save no one.
I would do nothing more than what the seru had been doing for the lifetime of the Ossalene Rite.
Perhaps outside the Citadel walls I did have a family who needed me. Perhaps I could find my way to freedom. Perhaps I could spend my life on something of value.
I was afraid of everything that would come.
But the future would come whether I chose the moment or not. It would take me and use me, or it would leave me behind.
So I chose.
“I will do as you ask, Oracle Hawkspar. I will become your disciple, and serve you until the Eyes come to me.”
“I thought you had it in you to do that,” she said. “Understand that you do not have much time. I have stretched my life long past its natural length. When the time comes—and it will come soon—I will simply let go of it, and within moments I will be gone. I will choose the day and hour of my death to give you and your plan the best chance to succeed—”
I interrupted her. For this, I knew I could have been beaten until I bled, but … “My plan? To escape?”
“I’m going to help you and everyone you’ve brought under your leadership escape. But you’ll escape as the Oracle Hawkspar, and you’ll take full seru with you—as many as you and I can bring into this. You’ll have your freedom after a fashion. You’re going to hunt down the invisible hand that is destroying the Tonk, and you’re going to do your best to destroy it.”
“Will I succeed?”
“Your chances
are poor. But if you fail, the Tonk of the world will be gone within your lifetime.” She shook her head slowly. “You cannot consider failure. You can only move forward and fight to succeed. I’ve started helping your plan already. I’ve strengthened the magic in your rescue plea, and have guided it to the currents the Eyes showed me. Someone has heard you. Someone will come.”
Someone would come. Spoken from an oracle, my vague hope became a thing almost of solid fact. Someone would come, I would flee the Citadel, I would not die here.
And then the oracle stood and asked me a question I could not answer.
She said, “What is your name, penitent?”
My name.
I had a name once.
It bound itself tight to pictures in my mind: of horses galloping in great thundering herds; of my mother singing to me in darkest night while outside our waxed felt walls a great storm raged; of my father walking beside me as I rode my first horse. I could see the faces of other children in these images—so many. My brothers and sisters, they might have been, but I had long ago forgotten.
My name died in fire and blood, when I watched my parents slaughtered and when I was bound with the other children around me and dragged to a ship and thrown into darkness.
In darkness I found weeping and prayer. I felt pain. Manacles around my ankles, a metal collar around my neck. Some around me coughed out their lives in the darkness and died—unheeded, untended, unmourned.
When darkness birthed me back into daylight, I stood naked on an auction block, blinded by daylight, and women from the Citadel of the Ossalenes came to the slave market and examined my teeth and my hands and feet. Something in me satisfied them, and money changed hands.
I became Slave.
And Slave I remained. Alongside Redbird, whose secret call for me was Mouse, I carried water, scrubbed floors, made soap, washed cloths for the oracles and the seru and the acolytes and the penitents. Along with other girls, some who arrived and stayed, some who were sold back to slavers because they were unsuitable for life in the Citadel, and some who would eventually be chosen as penitents, I toiled from first light until last, and ate my meager meals, and slept on a mat on a stone floor with two hundred others just like me. Evenings I studied with the rest of the slave girls at the feet of a succession of stone-eyed seru who taught the lot of us morning and evening prayers, manners and courtesies, languages, and the rudiments of unarmed combat.
