by R. K. Hart
She tried to wrench her arm from his grip. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ she hissed.
Aaron looked down at her, his face impassive. ‘You have training.’
‘And I will come,’ she said, relieved, ‘once I’ve dressed and eaten something.’
His face didn’t change. ‘I said dawn.’
Lida looked outside. The light was barely filtering over the mountains. ‘Two minutes,’ she said.
‘I gave you two minutes already.’ He began to walk again, dragging a struggling Lida with him.
‘Stop it, Aaron!’ she cried. ‘You’re hurting me!’
He loosened his grip on her wrist, but did not stop. Bronwyn emerged from her tenat to see what the noise was and watched disinterestedly as Aaron hauled Lida through the snow, kicking and swearing.
‘Stop it,’ she spat. ‘I’ll walk. I’ll walk.’
He stopped abruptly and let her go. She rubbed her wrist resentfully, glaring at him, and shifted her weight to her toes, poised to run.
‘If you run, I will catch you,’ he said dangerously.
Lida’s eyes flickered, taking in her surroundings. She wasn’t confined here, as she was in the training ring, and she was fast: she could try to lose him in the circles of tenats.
He read her, his eyes sharp. ‘You are fast,’ he agreed, ‘but I am a hunter, Sivasdotter. You will not lose me. Consider well what you do, for training you to dance is my price for helping you at night.’ He took a step closer, towering over her. ‘Do you want to use your gift?’
Lida’s cheeks flushed with anger. The choice he was giving her was no choice at all: there was no one else to teach her. It took all her self-control to keep her feet still, to not step back.
She turned on the spot instead and walked around him to the training ring.
She stood soldier-straight when she got there, pulling her shoulders back and lifting her chin at the near-dark. She ignored him as he started to move gracefully through l’salut. A chill breeze was blowing down from the mountains, and every now and then a flurry of snow stirred around her knees. She was lucky she’d slept in a pair of fur leggings and a thick jumper; even with them on, she was cold, and she began to shiver.
‘You will die if you do not move,’ Aaron said expressionlessly, as if he didn’t care much either way.
Lida wrapped her arms around her chest and watched the sun slowly rise between the mountain peaks. It should have been beautiful, but the morning light illuminated the cruel, jagged summits of the mountains, bare of any cover but white, and Lida could not look away. She started to shake, digging her fingers into her forearms.
Aaron had completed three versions of l’salut, each a little more complex than the last, before Lida was cold enough to walk up and down on the spot, rubbing her hands up and down her arms to keep warm. She tried to draw, to use the power to heat her skin, but she was so drained from working in the dreamscape during the night that she could barely keep her mindshield in place. She judged it more important than her body.
On his fifth iteration of l’salut, Lida joined him, her anger overwhelmed by her body’s need to move in the cold. Aaron made no comment, but Lida knew she’d lost the battle.
She didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, even when he took her to a hidden plateau deep in the mountains, the one he’d shown her in his dreamscape. They were so high up she felt as if they might touch the clouds, l’Cour du Kali visible occasionally through the falling snow, but she made her face stay cold and she didn’t acknowledge a thing he said to her.
When night fell, she considered staying away from his dream. She deliberated long in the white place, staring angrily down at his dreamline for some time before reaching to touch it, drawn by the memory of illae flowing so readily from her hands. He had prepared a fleeting image of Siva cooking for him, singing sweetly as she worked, and Lida realised that he had the perfect weapon and there was nothing she could do to protect herself against it. What little defiance she had shrank until it might well have died. She couldn’t reach for it, under her mother’s green gaze. Lida wanted to see her too badly.
Aaron didn’t let her use her power that night. Instead, for hours on end, he made her practice moving through her memories and into the white place, back and forth like a restless spirit. After her success the previous night, it felt like a slap in the face. When he was satisfied that she had made the journey a little more smoothly than before, he rewarded her with a memory that seemed particularly warm: Siva telling him a story about some animals in a boat. It was not a story Lida had heard before, and she listened with almost as much eagerness as Aaron’s younger self, laughing when he did as the animals’ overladen boat was sunk by a tiny sparrow landing on its bow. Siva told it well, with different voices for each animal, and pauses in all the right places. Her hair was braided back from her face and pinned over her right ear in the Myrae style, and she had a tiny emerald shining on one side of her nose. Lida hadn’t noticed it, in her own single memory of her mother, and she wondered what had happened to it.
Watching her mother made Lida at once gut-wrenchingly sad and strangely buoyant. She could see why Cathan had loved her for eighteen years after she’d gone, and why Maya’s memories were so golden: Siva was lovely and lively and she shone with an inner light. She moved continually, shifting her weight or moving her hands or stretching her fingers. It was something that countless teachers had tried to train out of Lida, with very little success; in Siva it was less fidgeting and more graceful, somehow birdlike, an awareness and readiness rather than a lack of self-control.
When Siva finished telling the story, she bundled the child-Aaron up in her arms to take him to bed, and Lida’s heart hurt so badly she thought it might burst.
The next morning, she realised that her monthly bleeding had started, and she was so tired that she couldn’t feel anything at all. Aaron didn’t drag her from bed, but he didn’t allow her time to change or to braid her hair. She dully followed him to the training yard without comment and did everything he asked until her head spun and her knees gave way and she collapsed into the snow, cradling her cramping stomach. Gentle hands appeared a second later to help her up, and Katrin shouted angrily at her brother over Lida’s head. They spoke too swiftly for Lida to catch everything, but Katrin accused Aaron of being deliberately cruel, and he made a series of disparaging remarks about the way the Illarum prepared its apprentices before he walked away.
‘You will come tonight, Sivasdotter,’ he threw over his shoulder as he strode into the snow. ‘And tomorrow you will train properly.’
Katrin put Lida to bed for the day, but Lida still obeyed what Aaron said. She didn’t deliberate over his dreamline that night, eager to use her power again or to see Siva - or both. For hours she practised shifting images from one thing to the next under his watchful eye, though her power seemed more sluggish than usual, the illae harder to draw as her body directed its energy elsewhere. As if it wasn’t hard enough, Lida thought, a dull headache building as she worked. She didn’t have the energy to fight Aaron’s instructions, though he fought her every step of the way. By the end of the night, Lida was so drained that when she woke she fled her bed and retched into the snow, her stomach growling and cramping with the need to eat, but she had managed to change his dream snowfield into a warm, green Eilin summer’s day. Aaron had given her a nod of approval, though she had barely noticed it; if she had realised how infrequently those nods came, she might have paid more attention. She didn’t care how tired she was, or how, over the next few weeks, continual illae-sickness would eat at her body and make her far too thin. She was too busy basking in what felt like newfound power: drawing in the dreamscape came so easily, so naturally, and most excitingly, she could channel out, a skill that continued to elude her in the waking world. In the dreamscape, she could use the illae she drew to herself; it didn’t just uselessly dissipate like mist in the sun. In the dreamscape, she wasn’t mindbound. She could use her gift, and it was stro
ng.
She hadn’t even realised something had been missing. All she knew was that in Aaron’s dreams, with illae flowing from her hands like water in a stream, and with the prospect of seeing her mother each night, she was newly, glowingly whole.
Chapter Twenty-One: Absence
On the morning that Alys and Dylan left l’Cour du Kali, Aaron allowed Lida her first morning-long rest in over two months. She stretched out in bed like a cat, arching her back and revelling in the fact that the sun had risen and she had slept through it, warm in the cosy tenat. Usually, as the sun rose, she was muttering under her breath as Aaron barked instructions - or derisive comments, or expletives - directed at Lida’s inept l’salut, or her inept knife skills, or her inept grasp on her staff, or the ineptness of Eilins in general, who Aaron seemed to think of only in the collective, with Lida as their single encompassing representative. Eilins, according to him, were lazy and slow and thoughtless, and their responses to taunts were decidedly not amusing, no matter how much they themselves laughed. Despite Lida not knowing one crop from the next, he delighted in telling her she was a slow green farmer, better suited to wielding a pitchfork than a knife, fit only for mucking out stables. Lida, who quite enjoyed mucking out stables, didn’t pay much notice until he’d settled on his recent favoured taunt, which was to tell her that if Siva saw how useless her daughter was in the training ring, she’d die all over again from shame. That provoked a swift response, in the form of a punch thrown directly at his smirking face; her fist hadn’t gotten anywhere near him, though her boot had found his shin with all the force her anger could muster. His smirk had shifted to surprise, and he’d looked almost proud before he reciprocated with an open-handed blow to her ribs, from which bruises blossomed for a week. He’d said the same thing so many times that it had almost lost its sting, though Lida thought he knew he’d hit a nerve, as every time he said it he took her afterwards to the western snow plain in a kind of silent apology. It was her favourite place, bounded by forests of white birch growing bluebells and snowdrops in their shadows. They often saw herds of white deer there, and prides of tiny hunting cats, and when the sky was grey and heavy with snow the plain was so beautiful it stole Lida’s breath away.
She wasn’t sure how much of the half-day rest was for her, and how much was for Aaron, who had muttered about things he needed to do and needy Eilins taking up too much time before stealing away from the cuer fe the night before. Lida wasn’t fooled; she’d seen a bunch of beautiful hellebore flowers, carefully bound with thick green ribbon, left at the door of his tenat two days ago and concluded that the things he needed to do were not, in fact, chores. She wondered idly who might have left the hellebore as she sat up, yawning, and pushed back the curtains around her bed, the only thing in the tenat that maintained the illusion that she had any kind of privacy.
‘I saw the hellebore, too. I wondered if it was you.’ Dylan stuffed a shirt into his pack. His hair was braided back unusually neatly, and though he was trying to hide it, Lida could see the tenseness in his shoulders and his mouth.
‘Don’t be an ass,’ she said, annoyed. ‘As if I’d leave a bed-gift for Aaron. And if I did, I wouldn’t leave hellebore. They’re poisonous.’
‘He calls you cheri every two seconds and you do everything he tells you. What are we supposed to think?’ Dylan tossed Lida a length of twine. ‘And I think you would leave hellebore. Or belladonna. Or stinging nettles. Or those plants that grow in Seti, the ones that have teeth.’
‘What is Lorcan supposed to think?’ Alys chimed in, ignoring Dylan’s assessment of Lida’s character, poking at the foye fe.
Lida set her jaw; it had become an old argument. ‘I’m not Ava,’ she snapped. ‘How would I know what he thinks?’ She gathered her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck and tied it in place with the twine. ‘I haven’t even seen him in two months.’
‘Because you sent him away,’ Alys shot back.
‘I didn’t send him anywhere.’
‘No, you just ignored him until he went of his own accord.’ Alys let the fire alone and picked up her full pack, shouldering it with a glare at Lida. ‘I have never met anyone as stupidly obstinate as you. I wish you would talk about whatever happened. I cannot believe Lor would do something so bad as to deserve this. He is too polite to say anything. Just she must have her reasons.’
‘Alys -’
‘You will need to speak to him eventually, Lida,’ Dylan said firmly. ‘Aaron can’t train you forever.’
‘I don’t need to do anything, Dylan.’
‘Enjoy the trip back south then,’ Alys snapped.
‘What do you mean?’
Alys chewed her lip and pushed her braid over her shoulder. ‘Nothing.’ She sighed. ‘I will see you soon, soer. L’prochenne.’
Lida stood to give her a tight hug. ‘L’prochenne, soer bi-aime. I will miss you.’
‘I would miss you more if you were less stubborn,’ Alys muttered under her breath as she pushed her way out of the tenat, to where Lida could see her fair-haired brother waiting with Silk and a second hardy-looking pony in hand.
As the door closed, Dylan narrowed his eyes. When Alys was around, he tended to keep his temper. Lida warranted no such consideration, but she didn’t really mind; after a while, she realised that he did it because he trusted her - loved her, even - and she gave as good as she got.
‘You are lucky you are pretty and warm, Lida,’ he said warningly. ‘Not many people have her patience.’
‘I thought you didn’t think me pretty,’ she said lightly.
‘What I think doesn’t matter. I don’t much like lilies, either, but others are wild for them. Alys thinks you pretty, and you are perfectly capable of using that to twist people around you finger, and you know it. She worries about you, and she is trying to help you, and at cost to herself. She has stitched your wounds and bathed your bruises and held you when you cried. She deserves a better friend.’
Lida crouched to poke at the foye fe, pretending that the flush of shame in her cheeks came from the flames. Dylan’s eyes were fixed unrelentingly on her face, unfooled, and after a moment she nodded.
‘I will be better,’ she said, half to herself.
He gave a curt nod. ‘Good.’ He paused. ‘Will you be all right? By yourself, I mean.’ His voice was rough.
Lida bit back a teasing response, touched by his concern. ‘I will be fine. I’ll find Katrin or Ella if I get too sick of Aaron.’
‘Find Lorcan instead,’ he said pointedly.
Lida knew that both Dylan and Alys thought her cold, or cruel, even, but she never told them that she did find Lorcan, every night. She cursed herself for it, but every time she fell asleep, she would move carefully through the white place until she found his dreamline. She would stare at it for a few minutes, her fingertips tingling, before she went back to find Aaron’s. Lorcan’s dreamline had the scent of dried grain and whenever she got close enough, something would move over her skin like the charged current in the air before a storm; sometimes she thought she could hear thunder too, and the sharp crack of lightning. It made her shiver. She should have kept away, but there was something in it she was drawn to, something that she wanted badly to touch. It sang to something in her, something she could have sworn was exactly the same.
Lorcan had started having nightmares with concerning regularity, and though her hands twitched every time she saw the black pulse move through the gold, she didn’t go to help, because there were often nights, too, when his dreamline glowed a deep, lovely red. Lida had found out what that meant when she’d seen Dylan’s dreamline glow the same, and had reached out, curious. She hadn’t expected to see Dylan entwined with a blonde-haired man, their gasps echoing around the dreamscape; Lida had fled, and hadn’t been able to look Dylan in the eye for days afterwards, even though he hadn’t seen her, too intent on the dream-Jed moving in his arms. She didn’t think she could bear to know who featured in those dreams of Lorcan’s. Though rumours swept f
reely and often through l’Cour du Kali - Brinnicans had little to do in the colder months other than gossip - she still didn’t know where Lorcan was sleeping. She was sure it wasn’t Bronwyn’s bed, or they would have seen him, but that didn’t mean anything at all; it could still be with Rose, or someone else entirely. It certainly hadn’t been the one in Lida’s tenat for over six weeks.
She shook her head and gave Dylan a hard hug. ‘L’prochenne, cil frere.’
‘I don’t know when I’ll see you again,’ he said glumly, clinging to her.
‘We will come and see you, if it is too long. I’m beginning to doubt the Kali’s existence. I don’t think Aaron was born. He was spawned from some Brinnican hell instead.’
He snorted. ‘We don’t have a hell. And soul walks aren’t some Eilin stroll through the flowerbeds, Lida. Some of them last years. Would that I could be sent on such a one.’
She leaned back, tucking a stray strand of hair behind his ear. ‘Dylan,’ she said carefully, ‘can you not just tell your mother the truth?’
His face fell, but he didn’t ask about what, or how Lida knew. ‘You don’t know her,’ he muttered.
‘Could whatever she said be worse than a loveless marriage? Don’t be such a coward.’
He shrugged her away angrily. ‘So I gamble my birthright for someone, when I have no idea of how they feel, and no way to speak with them about it?’ He glowered at her. ‘You call me a coward. At least I fear a real consequence. At least there is a real barrier in my way. You are afraid of yourself. Of your own feelings, of being vulnerable. Everyone is afraid of those things, Lida. Careful you do not shut out joy for the fear of embracing it.’
Lida glared back at him. Eventually, he sighed.
‘Please come and see me, soer bi-aime,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘I will, cil frere.’
He nodded and slipped from the tenat, and Lida was left alone to poke at the foye fe.
