Hawkspar

by Holly Lisle

  It didn’t seem real to me anymore. It was ghost and shadow, slippery fluid, changeable time, sand through my fingers, water spilled from a glass.

  And in it, Aaran and I danced around each other, trying to step out of shells of remembered pain, and seeing in the future more pain.

  “He should not face more loss,” I said.

  “Life is loss … and getting through it. You will eventually hurt him by dying, or perhaps he’ll hurt you in the same way. But either way, you see him too clearly. You see what he was, and is, and will be. He loves you. But he fears you, too. How can he not?”

  “I see everything too clearly,” I whispered. “And I see nothing at all. I would be as I once was. I would put the Eyes away from me and give up the power they bring, and I would see sunrises and sunsets and never the truth that lies within the actions of men.”

  “But you can’t do that, either.”

  I stopped. “No. I can’t. I took this burden on not understanding what it was. I only knew that it mattered. Now that I see what it is we face, I am every day more deeply bound to this task that has been set before me. I have been given a gift, Tuua. I have been given the power to save my people. And the opportunity to use that power.”

  We walked in silence. My sides ached, and though the salt air was good for me, I was already wearied from one simple trip from the fore of the ship to the afterdeck.

  “How do you feel about Aaran?”

  “I love him,” I said. “This is the worst of times for love. The worst of situations. I am the least suitable of women.” I lifted my chin and said, “And I can barely even call myself Tonk. I know so little, remember so little. I feel like I’m home, but at the same time, I feel that I haven’t earned it.”

  Tuua helped me back down the stairs. “Consider that now maybe all you have. Unless those Eyes of yours give you better news than what we’ve all been anticipating.”

  “They don’t.”

  “Then I’ll give you a musing from a lesser philosopher, and let you make of it what you will. ‘All of time is now. There is no other, no better, no finer moment. There is no other moment at all.’”

  And then we were down the stairs, and he turned me over to Aigret of the Moonstones, who took one look at me and said, “You’re to have a hot drink now, and sit. And then you’re doing another breathing treatment.”

  The hot drink would be something that tasted horrible, and the breathing treatment would hurt, for I would be exhaling air into a bladder I could barely get to stretch, and she would not give me a moment’s peace until I had stretched it to her satisfaction. And then the drink would make me so sleepy I would fall into my bed and lie there like one dead, until someone came to wake me again.

  I would have neither the time nor the inclination to consider Tuua’s words for a long while.

  44

  Aaran

  They’d reached Askag Bay, and the town of Danaskataak. Tonk merchants greeted them on Tonk docks, speaking Tonk. Aaran took Hawkspar around—she hadn’t been to a taak, ever. He took her first to Ethebet’s temple, and watched her walking along the rows and stacks of books, fingers trailing the covers, her face wistful.

  “I wish I could read them all,” she said. “I wish I could read any of them.”

  And in a burst of gallantry that he hadn’t intended, he said, “I’ll read them to you.”

  They went to a shop where he helped her pick out traditional Tonk clothing. To eateries where she got to taste the local Tonk dishes. To a dance in the Faaverhend, where for the first time since she was a child, she heard songs sung to pipes and drums that her family had known and sung. He watched her weep.

  She walked through the proscribed stables where horses that could be sold to none but other Tonk were kept, and ran her hands over horses, and told him what she remembered of the horses she’d ridden as a child. Of their golden color, their dark stripes, their shaggy manes. Eskuu horses, fedderhorses, that had still existed when she was a child. She ran her hands over the flanks of the Danaskataak horses, and smiled.

  All of it sang to her. In the few days they were able to pretend they had a future together, he got to see her not as the Eyes of War, not as a creature half of magic, but as the woman she could have been. Was, before she took on the burden of the Tonk’s survival.

  If he had loved her before, he loved her twice as much after. He could see himself living out his life with this happy, laughing young woman. She was so far away from the mystical, from magic. Everything was almost new to her, and he got to bring it to her and let her rediscover who she was, and who she had always been meant to be.

  “I want to stay here,” she said one afternoon. The sun beat down on them, and he’d just been thinking that it never got so hot in Hyre, that the trees were all wrong, that the sky was the wrong color and the sun in the wrong place.

  But it was Tonk. The first truly Tonk place she’d been since she was stolen from her home and her family and the future she should have had. She kept saying, “This is how it felt when I was a child. This was how things were.”

  She loved getting up before sunrise and stepping out into the street, and with the rest of the people who were out and getting ready to go about their day, saying her greeting to the sun. She loved raising her hand, and hearing the exclamations of shock when people saw her clan mark, and came up to her asking her if she was truly Eskuu.

  “Hyre has the same walls,” he’d told her. “The same temples, the same ways. But in Hyre, we have true winter, with snow and ice, and summers when the sun never sets. I would show you the fields where I hunted as a boy, and the temples of Kopataak. The temples have all been rebuilt after the Feegash treachery of fifteen years ago, but they’re magnificent. Most of the old books have been replaced, and new ones added. And there are taverns for Senders and Shielders that have taken in the new magics now, too. You’d love them. The food is better than anything you’ll find anywhere else, and …”

  “And it’s your home.”

  “After a fashion. Like yours, my true home is gone, but I’m a citizen of Kopataak. And as someone whose clan was destroyed, you could be taken in as a citizen, too. We could …” He stopped. He’d been about to suggest that they could have children together there. He’d envisioned a fine little horse house on a hill, looking down over the river. He’d imagined the two of them teaching their children to ride, and to go to temple, and to read.

  But that was too far in the future to see.

  Too far to even dare contemplate.

  He slid an arm around her. He had avoided kissing her, or holding her; he had been afraid of all that he had to lose.

  She turned her face up to him, and said, “I want so many things, Aaran. I want to have the future to enjoy them.”

  “We may not.”

  “We probably won’t. Time wraps itself around me and whispers death to me. I have seen all of us die a thousand times in a thousand horrible ways. I can see possible survival, too. Not so many chances, and no matter how we win, if we win we still lose many of those we love.”

  “You and I may never have a chance to be together,” he told her.

  “We have that chance now. We have another day before all our supplies are ready to go.”

  “I … don’t want us to be distracted.”

  She laughed, but the laugh had the notes of a sob in it. It was the saddest sound he’d even heard. “I’m going to be distracted no matter what. I know what it feels like to have you touch me. Desire me. Take me. I want that again, and if we wait past today, I may never again know what it is to be loved by you.”

  He took her arm and led her away from the dock and the ships, away from their friends and colleagues. “I don’t know what’s right. I don’t know if we should wait. I have told myself I would never do this again; that you and I could never be. And yet, here we are and you are all I can think about.” He stroked her hair and pressed his cheek against the side of her head. “I would love you forever, if I had the chance.”
>
  They went to an inn, him with his arm around her, her with her arm around him. He wanted her then. He got a room for them, and had a good supper brought up. Venison and bitter greens, diced potatoes with red peppers and eggs, and black bread, which was a specialty of the Tand clans. And clear, cold water to drink.

  And when they were done eating, they stood in the room together, palms of their hands pressed together, bodies not touching but so close he could feel the heat coming off her.

  And he looked into her eyes, and all that looked back was stone.

  Stone that glimmered and sheened in the flickering light from the oil lamps in the room. Pretty stone, gold and amber and brown.

  But stone. Her eyes were not windows to her soul. They were walls around it. He could not see into her, but she could see into him. She could see everything he had ever done.

  “Aaran, what’s wrong?”

  He kissed her. “Nothing.”

  “Something,” she said. “I felt you start to pull away from me.”

  “I didn’t.” He pulled her closer and kissed her again. He closed his eyes and banished hers. She was not her eyes. The Eyes. She was the woman he loved, and when he felt her relax and kiss him back, he could forget about them. He blew out the oil lamps, and darkness descended.

  For a while, the world and all its worries fell away, and their universe was each other.

  Hawkspar

  Aaran, Eban, and I hiked with our packs on our backs, leading a heavily laden packhorse. We pretended to be a family; we dressed like peasants and traders from the area, and we kept our heads down, trudging along the wide, paved highway, following other laden horses and carts and wagons going in the same direction we were; and passed by others, minus their loads, heading in the opposite direction. The road was the Sijguik High Pass, famed throughout the world for its steady traffic and its smoothness. It led up into the heart of the mountains like a fat serpent, so broad twenty horses could walk abreast, straight to the Sijguik Gate, one of two public entries into Ba’afeegash.

  I’d been told that Ba’afeegash was a nation scarcely two long leagues from one end to the other, yet it held a population of more than one hundred thousand people. I could not imagine so many people in such a tiny place. Citadel Island had held, with its village below and the hermitage above, less than three thousand people, and it had been much larger.

  Peaks rose over our heads, and on those peaks I could make out guard towers. Guards paced along the tops of the towers, and from time to time I could catch them waving their arms in regular patterns while holding sticks.

  “It’s a code,” Aaran said when I asked him. “They’re keeping each other up to date on anything questionable that’s coming up the road.”

  “We hope that wouldn’t be us,” I said.

  “Indeed we do,” Aaran agreed.

  Eben would show us the place where we would step off the road. According to him, there was a single pass that connected the road to the Ba’afee-gash Valley, where Feegash shepherds grazed their flocks. And near the place where this pass crossed into the valley, a gate called the Shepherds’ Gate provided quick entrance to the flocks and herds in case of emergency. So long as no alarm had been raised about us, we should be able to go in through the gate without raising any notice, if we did it in twos and threes, and not too frequently. Once the gate had been barred, Eban said, it was impenetrable, as was the rest of the enormous city-state. But if some of us were inside, we should be able to find ways to get the rest of us inside.

  Eban was in the lead with us because he was familiar with the terrain. He would take us off the road, and we would leave a tiny marker at the turning point for the rest of the marines, Obsidians, and sailors to follow. Each group, strung out down the side of the mountain like beads on a necklace, would then veer off casually, as if taking a moment to eat a meal, and would, once out of sight, continue along the hidden path to Shepherds’ Gate.

  I dreaded being so near our target. I feared the moment when I would have to sit down and slide into the waters of time again, and see if I could uncover the third way that Aaran kept talking about and that I kept sensing—the way in which we could take Ba’afeegash while sparing the innocent who we knew would be in there somewhere. Children like Eban; people like Aaran’s sister trapped in slavery. The ones that the top Feegash used and abused.

  We did not want to destroy them, which meant that we did not want to hit the crowded city with Greton fire. We had the Greton fire with us, of course. Each of us lugged a few of the carefully packed glass balls up the side of the mountain, and all of us were gentle in setting our packs on the ground, too.

  Aaran had his tracking fixed firmly on his sister. He could not connect to her—the wizard who kept her in confinement had her shielded against magic. I had gone through him to her, but Aaran could not do that.

  He did, however, have the mark I’d placed as near her as I could get. And since she did not ever move from the place where she was confined, he knew where to go to get her. His handpicked team of marines and Obsidians and one Moonstone would go in to free her; they walked in several groups just behind us. Behind them, we had more marines and sailors, and more Obsidians and Onyxes and Moonstones—only a handful of marines and captains drawn by lot, plus the Ambers, stayed behind to guard the fleet. They made up few of our total number.

  We came over a rise, and suddenly Ba’afeegash lay before us. I had not known what to expect. I could not make out the whole of it, for part of it lay behind dense mountains; what I could see, however, left me stunned.

  I had not been able to imagine how so many people could live in such a small space. But looking at the stone and wood buildings, I no longer had any doubt. In the section near us, buildings rose as high as six stories, and were shoved together so closely in places it would be impossible for a person to walk all the way around one without squeezing between its sisters on either side. These close-packed buildings gave way at intervals to park-like open spaces, but the greenswards, filled with trees and water, were walled off and gated, and each held a large house of two or three stories at its center.

  I could not guess how all these buildings were used, but to the northwest I could see a place with open fields and crop rows. For the size of the place, the surrounding fields seemed terribly small.

  But the Ba’afeegash would be dependent on imports for their survival, wouldn’t they? If they had so many people living on such a small patch of land, they could not be a self-supporting nation.

  “No wonder they have to be allies with everyone,” I told Aaran. “They would starve in days if they didn’t have these wagons constantly bringing them more food.”

  Aaran chuckled, but his laughter quickly died away. “They would,” he agreed. “But a blockade of their roads would not do what we would want it to do. The poor and unimportant would starve, certainly, and be sent to fight against us for their own survival. They would be used as fodder by the Ba’afeegash mercenaries. The rich and powerful would have the supplies and the means to wait out any siege we might manage. And we have no supply lines. We’re counting on raiding the Feegash in order to return.”

  We drew near the place where Eban would take us off the road. “Here,” he said. Eban took my hand and tugged my arm, and I followed him over a deep ditch, up a grassy slope, and onto a small flat meadow ringed with rocks. Aaran lingered for a moment, painting an inconspicuous mark on one of the spires of stone that rose out of the bedrock at the point where we slipped away.

  Then we followed Eban, with Aaran marking rocks as we passed them. Some of the marines were excellent sight trackers, but not all. We didn’t want to lose any of our people when we were already at a disadvantage.

  At last we came to a high green overlooking the Ba’afeegash Valley.

  “This is as close as we’ll get today,” Eban said. “Come nightfall, the flocks will return to the city, and we can go down and graze the horses. But not now, or we’ll raise the alarm.”

  I sat o
n grass with a slab of rock at my back, with the sun warming my face, soothing me and filling me with comfort, and I wished I could see more of the valley than the stark, toothy shapes of rocks or the lighter layers of loam and grass. I admired the delicate, meandering tracery the stream cut through its center. But I could imagine it vibrant green, and full of wildflowers in red and yellow and pink and blue. I could see our horses galloping over the ground, and sitting there, suddenly I saw the woman dressed all in white approaching me.

  I knew where I was. I was sitting above the shepherds’ valley, just out of sight of the watchtowers of Ba’afeegash. But the meadow before me rose up, growing wider and vaster until it rolled away in all directions in gentle undulations, with nary a stone spire or mountain peak to be seen.

  The woman came to me and crouched beside me where I sat, not moving. “She loves her people,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Ethebet. She loves all of you who found your way to this place. Some of you will join her beyond life after this battle, but she asks you—her daughter now marked Hawkspar—to look without the Eyes.” She reached out to me and touched the stone Eyes, a curious expression on her face. “They lie, you know. They show you only the streams the herd follows. But her people are not the herd, and this time the herd would trample heedless toward its own destruction. Look beyond the Eyes, daughter, and give your people a new way.”

  “Can’t you tell me?” I asked her.

  She shook her head, a sad smile on her face. “I am only permitted to tell you to look. I cannot tell you what to see.”

  She leaned forward, still crouched, and kissed my forehead once. And then she was gone, and the clear day with the bright sunlight was gone, and the breathtaking colors of the meadow and the flowers and the horses were gone.

  And I sat in blackness once more, the heat of the day on my face and a warm rock at my back, a woman whose Eyes lied.