Auralia's Colors

by Jeffrey Overstreet

  He awoke to find an Abascar officer singing the Verse of the Passing of Midnight, a low, steady, murmuring melody like the quickening of spring beneath the blankets of winter.

  Slowly the world came back into view.

  One of the guards, Brevolo kai Galarand, smiled to see that her brave impulse was, indeed, calming the quakes that had shaken the sleeping leader.

  Cal-raven propped himself up on an elbow, his cape over him like a blanket. “I could kill you for singing of home…while we die here in these caves,” he wheezed.

  The officer abruptly ended her song.

  “But it did calm me in a dark dream.”

  “Perhaps,” ventured Brevolo, “we should keep that tradition, my lord, when we have a new house at last.”

  It was the first time anyone but Tabor Jan had addressed him directly in days. He let the words swirl in his head for a long moment. “When?” he finally said. “When we have a new house? You still permit yourself to dream?”

  “Not as vividly, sire, as it seems you do,” said the officer, whose forwardness left the other guard gaping. Brevolo smiled like a child testing limits. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, sire, it was difficult to ignore your shouts. We thought that some music might calm—”

  “I was shouting?”

  “I hope you’re as strong against the winter as you were against whatever monster threatened you in your dream.”

  He looked suddenly out at the night, his pulse quickening. “Forget about dreams. We are threatened now!”

  Yes, there was something. Footfalls on the rocky ground below. Heavy. Growing closer.

  “Silence. Stand back,” he whispered hoarsely, fumbling for his bow. “Arrows!”

  He crouched low as the guards pulled back. He quickly and quietly readied his bow, waiting for the first glimmer of a presence.

  Those sounded like vawn hooves.

  “Tabor Jan took no vawn,” he whispered. “We are discovered.”

  The steps went silent. Then they heard the thud of riders dismounting.

  Cal-raven cursed. He had only one arrow. Brevolo was a good archer, better than he, but she was not a trustworthy swordbearer. If these visitors bore ill will and came too close for arrows…

  And then, the Verse of the Passing of Midnight, rising again. A woman’s voice.

  Even as the singer’s face emerged from Cal-raven’s memory, he heard another familiar voice calling up to him. “Bless those singers!” Tabor Jan emerged from the dark, his voice low and tired. “These caves are tough to locate under a moonless sky. Don’t shoot, Cal-raven. I know you’re angry, but you’re also tired, and you’d probably strike my companions.”

  “I’ll fill you so full of arrows, Tabor Jan, that you’ll make a fine cloakrack.” Cal-raven rose, lowering his bow. “You deserve it for scaring us half to death. And that vawn deserves even worse for the racket it made. I should—”

  A shape leapt from the shadows, struck him full in the chest, and knocked him backward.

  “Hagah!”

  King Cal-marcus’s hunting hound pinned Cal-raven to the ground with his front paws and pressed his wet nose to Cal-raven’s cheek, plastering his face with his thick, wet tongue. The ancient dog set everyone to laughing with his ecstatic howls and yips, and then he bounded about, trying to knock everyone down with his forepaws and shoving his nose between the guards’ legs. Cal-raven stood, wiped off his face, and then brushed away unexpected tears as he embraced the guardsman.

  Over Tabor Jan’s shoulder, he saw two more figures.

  The taller woman, familiar in her tattered white cloak, was weary and sad in her crooked stride. “It is good to find that the prince is still capable of laughter.” She stepped into the torchlight. “Maybe I’ll laugh again someday.”

  “Say-ressa! Good healer. My lady, you live.” Cal-raven dropped to one knee, a reaction that startled her.

  And then she knelt too, facing him. He took her hands and kissed them. “My king,” she said to him, “I am your servant as I was your father’s.”

  “Tell me that your brave husband, the valiant captain, will return to us as well. And oh…your daughter…” He had forgotten the girl’s name again, and he sharply regretted all the disrespect he had voiced to his father in the past. “Hear this,” he whispered. “It is time for us to offer you what you have so faithfully given us. We will bring you healing.”

  “Wounds like these don’t heal, my king.” Her laughter was bitter. “But that does not mean I cannot find comfort. Music helps, as this one has taught me.”

  Suddenly recognizing the younger woman as she knelt in respect, Cal-raven laughed and took her up in his arms and spun them both in a circle while she cried onto his shoulder. “You’ll write a song, Lesyl!” he shouted.

  “Perhaps there is a song of your own that will find its way onto my strings, my king,” she said, and he observed that she seemed different—audacious and free.

  Tabor Jan grasped his arm and pulled him away. “There are more alive, Cal-raven. Maybe two hundred more.”

  Cal-raven looked back to Ark-robin’s widow.

  “In the Blackstone Caves,” Say-ressa said. “We lit a fire tonight, a rare thing, to warm the caves for some who have caught a chill.”

  “Two hundred more…reached the Blackstone Caves?” Cal-raven asked.

  “The boy led us. The boy who saved us from the fires.”

  “The boy? What boy?”

  “I swear I will only have the strength to tell our story once more.” She pressed a hand to her forehead, stroked back her tousled hair.

  Cal-raven slumped to the ground. Hagah returned to nudge him happily, then rolled onto his back to present his snow-flecked belly for a scratch. “Only a few even know how to find those caves…”

  “Apparently you told an ale boy, my lord,” said Tabor Jan.

  Say-ressa picked up the tale. “You showed him some small stone figures that you carved in the Blackstone Caves. And then you showed him a map. This is what he told us.”

  “The ale boy. Of course.”

  “He is full of secrets, this boy,” said Lesyl. “He said you still believe in the Keeper. That you still have dreams about it.”

  Say-ressa looked to Tabor Jan, a question on her face. He laughed.

  “You may speak of these things,” Cal-raven assured the singer, “so long as I am king. In our house, it will not be a crime to admit our dreams. We’ll need them, especially during the winter. But how…You say he led you out of the fires?”

  “There was fire everywhere,” said the singer. “He knew the way out, somehow. There were so many of us trapped there.”

  “I’ll think of some reward for him.”

  “I wish you could. But the boy went back to Abascar to search for others. More did come to us, following his directions, but the boy has not returned.” Lesyl bowed her head. “Perhaps my song should remind us of him.”

  “This is stranger than dreams.” Cal-raven looked out into the night. “The poor child.”

  “Missing, like so many.” Say-ressa’s shoulders shook, and Cal-raven rose to embrace her again.

  He held her, overcome by the unfathomable loss. He would have welcomed his Promised again, even with all her failures and flaws. He would have welcomed those in the dungeons who had earned their judgments. He would have welcomed any if he could draw them from the earth.

  “We will not forget,” he said as he held her. “Your brave husband. Your beautiful daughter. We will honor them in our new house. And you shall remain our chief healer. Many have asked for you in their fevers.”

  “My lord,” said Tabor Jan, holding out a small gift.

  A cold stone fell into Cal-raven’s outstretched hand.

  “I told you if I found any Northchildren, I’d drag them back with me.”

  His touch recognized it before he could lift it into the light.

  “The children were so afraid, but when the ale boy gave them these figures and told them they belonged to Prince C
al-raven, they stopped crying. He told them they would be like rings of trust, and they would protect them from all danger along their way to a new and better home.”

  “And so he was right,” said Cal-raven quietly. He remembered the boy now. That smudged and timid boy who marveled at the sculptures, who had been so glad to hear that the prince dreamt of the Keeper. The boy who had told him of Auralia, who had seen the Keeper in the woods. It seemed another lifetime, ages and ages ago.

  Cal-raven closed his hand over the figure. “We will leave these caves tomorrow and join you in those corridors of Blackstone. Perhaps some of the children will have the gift for stonecarving.” He looked into the bear caves, thought of the names and faces he knew so well, of the hundreds more he soon would know. “The Expanse will be our house for now.”

  “I might ask,” Lesyl ventured in a sad and urgent whisper, “if we are to be a house, my lord…perhaps we should give it a new name, one we can speak without trouble.”

  A name came to mind. One name clearly, and he touched the finger that had borne his ring of royal trust.

  But they remained House Abascar in memory of those they had lost and in loyalty to a kingdom that had fought so hard for some measure of honor. It was a history fraught with error, greed, and weakness, but that history was far from over.

  The days of heavy snow at the Blackstone Caves seemed endless, so the people of Abascar spoke often of their dreams.

  One of those dreams, burning in Cal-raven’s mind both day and night, came true on the first morning of open skies, as sunlight caught the forest by surprise and stunned sleepy birds into a frenzy of chatter. As he walked cautiously out of the silent canyons and into the ice-barked trees, dawn broke within his heart as well. He turned a familiar corner on a trail he remembered from childhood ventures with his mentor. Hagah, bounding about and sniffing at trees, suddenly barked and bared his teeth. A human figure loomed in the path ahead, hand raised in greeting.

  It was a statue, carved from blacklode, manifesting such a lifelike form, yet so simple of features, that it seemed haunted. Half-alive.

  Cal-raven knew that such masterful art came from only one set of hands. He recognized the clearing. Here Scharr ben Fray had taught him how to know direction when no stars were visible. And now here stood the very likeness of the mage, pointing the way to a mystery.

  “Did he know I would come here, Hagah?” Cal-raven asked the hound, who was cautiously sniffing the statue.

  The familiarity of that face, round as the moon and scribbled with age, brought tears to Cal-raven’s eyes for the first time since the reunion in the Blackstone Caves. But he laughed in spite of them, for he could see that Scharr ben Fray still imagined himself a handsome man.

  He solemnly read aloud the script etched along the edge of the figure’s stone scarf, a script he, being Abascar royalty, could read. “North. Hurry. Fifteen passages of the stag. Twelfth new moon. Between old cloudgrasper and tall pine. Midnight. Wait.”

  He smiled, drawing his sword and chipping at the icicles that hung from the figure’s raised arm. “Of course I’ll be there,” he said, turning in the direction of the mage’s pointing finger. “We’ll talk about dreams again. And we won’t have to whisper.”

  Hagah stiffened and barked at something through the trees to the north. “Have your senses come back to you, Hagah? That’s good. We have tracks to follow.”

  On a second thought, he touched the elaborate textures carved into the scarf and recognized them.

  The mage had seen her after all. Scharr ben Fray had watched those colors unfurl. He had wondered at Auralia’s mysteries and pondered the part she was playing in the story of the Expanse.

  Cal-raven did not realize it at first, but somewhere along the path back to the caves he began to sing the Morning Verse. He was distracted, looking for the textures and colors of Auralia’s work reflected in the wild woods around him while the snow melted and the season changed.

  EPILOGUE

  W hen the scent of dust and death from Abascar’s fall reached Cent Regus dens, the half men swarmed into the Cragavar woods. Most were dragged along by their powerful appetites. They smelled smoke, trouble, blood. Into the fray they charged, all claws and jaws, killing and feasting wherever they could.

  But some possessed a sense of restraint, having trained themselves to conspire for a greater reward. They prowled through the charred and crumbling ground, ensnaring those who fled and gathering treasures for their chieftain.

  Beastmen were short-lived creatures unless they drank from the source of the power that had changed them. That secret reservoir, which in reverent whispers they spoke of as the Essence, was their wellspring. The chieftain controlled the Essence and determined who deserved to drink of it.

  So they strove to please the chieftain in order to win more life, more power. He gave them deep draughts that numbed the pain of their grotesque evolution, even as it fueled far greater distortion.

  Like all house leaders, he had ambitions and appetites of his own. Abascar’s fall affirmed his conviction that House Cent Regus was gaining an advantage. It had become his strategy: since the beastmen by their nature could not ascend, perhaps they could make the other houses fall.

  His minions might have lost the advantages of wit and wisdom, beauty and order, but they had lost desire for those virtues as well. They wanted only to grow stronger, to seize and devour. And now Abascar’s survivors were his slaves.

  Every day his doglike drones prodded a line of prisoners through the throne room before driving them to their humiliating chores. Torchlight cast shadows across the captives’ features, which were hollowed with grief, hunger, and fear.

  It was no secret that the chieftain despised the company of the uncursed. He brought them into his throne room only to mock, disfigure, and destroy them. While he could not imagine surrendering the Essence, even so there was a subtlety and a purity to the people of the other houses that maddened him.

  But there was one prisoner, one trophy, he kept close at hand, ready to flaunt her at new captives.

  He savored their responses if they recognized her. Some trembled, called her name, and wept. Some reddened with rage and spewed bitter words of blame.

  He paid careful attention, as much as a beastman could, to what her survival required. Bread. Water. Meat. A barred chamber where she could sleep on furs and skins. But his urge to make her drink the Essence—that urge he had resisted so the prisoners would recognize her.

  And on this day, as he felt the ground about his branches and roots forget winter’s cruelty, a sniveling, cowering guardbeast approached him.

  The chieftain sat high on a magnificent throne carved into the trunk of a black and twisted tree. The tree’s roots, bulging with blue veins, crossed the dais and disappeared into the floor. Its boughs spread wide and pressed against the ceiling far above, shoving into the stone there and worming their way toward the surface. In the ground above these dens, the branches spread like wild ivy. Their barbed limbs wove through the soil, ready to ensnare any living thing, trapping animals for predators and travelers for enslavement. This was the chieftain’s growing influence. This was his plan.

  His body was in many ways that of a man—or rather, a corpse—from his common size to his pale flesh. But the curse was plainly evident in his shriveled legs and decaying feet, which hung useless before him. And in his doubled jaw, one very human mouth spoke in a child’s pinched voice, while the other grinned broadly below with a hundred interlocking teeth. His skin adhered to the throne with gluey secretions through which he absorbed unnatural nourishment. The roots of his throne-tree tapped deep into the Essence far below, which pumped through his veins, increasing his subversive powers.

  He beckoned with a long and curling claw. “Closer.”

  The messenger hesitated. While Abascar prisoners were passing through the room, the chieftain was agitated, excited, bloodthirsty. On a whim, he might devour his own trembling servants.

  The chieftain could
see that this simpering guardbeast was afraid to make his report. Since the creature had come from the cell of the chieftain’s favorite prisoner, it could only be bad news.

  “Master of Expanse,” the guardbeast whimpered like a dog who awaits a beating, “your favorite, she is weakening, master. Sick with fever. We feed her; it does not help. We carry in water from beyond the wood; it does not help.”

  The chieftain blinked, absent for a moment. One of the long, bulbous roots coiled around the guardbeast’s waist and lifted him up, carrying him close to the chieftain’s lidless eyes.

  “Keep her alive,” said the beastman on the throne.

  “H-h-how?”

  “Make her think of Abascar.” The chieftain waved the guardbeast around as his mind fumbled for an idea. “Give her…Abascar things. Spoils. Toys. Trinkets. Make her remember that she is Abascar’s queen. Make her feel important. It is what she likes.”

  As a guardbeast slammed the two-wheeled cart into the bars of her cage, the clamor summoned the prisoner from sleep. Again he rammed the cart into the bars.

  She made her way to investigate, her chains snaking along behind her. She reached through the bars and began to draw the clutter of remnants into the cell, pausing to examine each piece as if searching for its name. Two copper cauldrons. A jewel box. A humble clay cup. Three musical instruments she did not know how to play—a lynfr scorched with smoke, a karyn with a broken key, and a perys with only half its strings. A child’s hand puppet, limp and missing one of its eggshell white eyes. A rusty pair of garden shears, which she held for a long time in her trembling hand.

  And then she reached for the fabric that lay beneath it all. And when she touched it, it emanated a faint light as if she had shaken loose a cloud of golden dust.

  “Yes,” sneered the rodent-faced creature, “I find this…in barrel of water. Fire did not burn it. You see?” The beast reached into the strange glow and unfurled it before her, a cloak, a weaving so radiant that Jaralaine felt both fear and desire.