by R. K. Hart
***
For the first time, Lida counted down the hours until the afternoon ride. She spent some time at the hot springs, but she missed the comfort of Alys’ chatter. She tried to read, but she could not concentrate. For a while, she breathed herself into a trance and practised pushing through her memories to the white place and back, but she’d done it so many times that it was no longer a challenge. For a moment, she was tempted to linger in her memories, but she knew from experience that she would feel much worse when she came out.
In the end, she rolled out her mat next to the foye fe and did a five-iteration sequence of l’salut.
After lunch, when Aaron finally poked his head inside her tenat, he brought with him the scent of sandalwood and cinnamon and sweat. Lida wrinkled her nose.
‘Not to your taste?’ Aaron said, raising one fair brow. He only ever spoke to Lida in Brinnican, ignoring her completely if she slipped back into Eilin.
‘You might have bathed, Aaron. You smell like a temple.’
He grinned. ‘Luckily, you do not have to like it.’
‘No, but I still have to smell it.’
‘You know the solution to that, little bird. Pick your own posy. I have time; my cousin’s dark eyes have everyone distracted, it seems.’ He gave a disdainful snort. ‘What poor taste novelty makes.’
Lida’s stomach twisted, but she managed to curl her lip. ‘No, thank you,’ she said primly.
He laughed. ‘Come then, cold Eilin sprite. You may choose where we ride today. Make it close; I have not slept.’
She clutched her stomach and mimed a disgusted retching, then chose the western snow plain, as she always did. There were no deer, but there were snow hares, and one pair had a tiny, very late-born kit, which sat trembling by its mother’s side as Aaron and Lida slipped quietly by.
Lida spent some time gathering bluebells for the tenat. Aaron had stretched out in the snow, his arms behind his head; he was dozing, but opened his eyes when Lida came back, eyeing her speculatively. She glowered at him.
‘These are not for you,’ she growled.
‘No? Someone else caught your eye, Sivasdotter?’
‘No, ass. They are for me.’
He laughed, disturbing a blackbird singing in the birch tree above them. ‘Even Eilins must know that dancing is better with a partner,’ he said, flashing a smile that Lida imagined was supposed to make her weak at the knees.
She rolled her eyes instead. She knew he didn’t actually mean dancing; in Brinnican, the word dans was also slang for both bedding and fighting. Lida thought it was apt: all three seemed to be intertwined for the Brinnicans, and proficiency in one was supposed to indicate prowess in another. Aaron was aggressive and domineering in the training ring, and scarcely less so when he danced; Lida had no interest in testing the third facet to the theory, at least not with him. She still endured the speculation of her friends and of the Kali’s Court gossips, who, she knew, theorised endlessly about what it was she and Aaron did during their afternoon rides.
‘I imagine it rather depends on the partner,’ she said tartly.
‘You should stop imagining and find out for sure,’ he said, smile widening.
‘Gods above, do you ever stop? Be quiet and weave your shield again.’
Mercifully for her, he did. The illae-shield was his own particular gift, one that Lida thought Tiernan would have been very happy to get his hands on. She loved to watch him weave it. She felt the familiar shiver of illae over her skin as he drew, and she sank down onto the snow and closed her eyes to watch him pluck glowing threads from the air, weaving them together in a tight shield around himself until all she could see was plaited gold. When she opened her eyes, it was as if he sat behind a beaten mirror, his image distorted and rippling behind the illae. When she reached to touch it, her fingers found something smooth and solid.
He had always known that it protected him from illae attacks, but had never tested it physically before Lida came, and they had spent a number of nerve-racking afternoons shouting at one another as Lida hurled one weapon after another against the gold with shaking hands. The first time she’d closed her eyes, not opening them again until Aaron’s hand closed over her shoulder and shook her gently. The knife she’d thrown lay in the snow, and Aaron didn’t have a scratch on him. I felt it, he’d said, his eyes wide, but it did not go through. Lida, it worked. They’d tried again, with different knives, then with spears - javelins, Aaron insisted - and then, most frighteningly of all for Lida, a shortsword, which Aaron ordered thrown at his chest. She’d aimed for his feet instead, and watched the shield ripple with the impact. It did not fail.
He’d shown her how to weave the shield in the dreamscape, challenging her to do it faster and faster and then to hold it for hours on end. He made sure there were no weak points in her weaving; that part she hated, for he sent a pack of dream-wolves against her, and she spent half a night huddling behind the gold as they threw themselves against it, howling and snapping. She didn’t think she would ever need it for so long: nightmares tended to be of short duration, though they always seemed longer to the dreamer in the midst of them. Lida reasoned that if she was ever scared enough to need the shield for hours, she would simply step out of the dream.
As Aaron let the illae dissipate back into the cold, Lida pulled up her hood and lay down in the snow, staring up into the white branches above. It was so much easier to move in and out of dreams now, easier to shift the dreamscape, easier to direct the sleeper’s story and create one of her own. It sometimes frightened her, how easy it felt, how natural it was: she was so used to Aaron fighting her that when she tested her skills in other dreams, on other sleepers, she slipped in and out of their dreamscapes like water over stone. Nightmares shifted into sunshine and greenness with the merest wave of her hand. She knew now that even if the sleeper did not remember her efforts when they woke, there was some impression left, somewhere in the corners of their mind. She had joined Alys one night after seeing the black pulse through her dreamline, and had hidden behind a tree and watched with considerable pride as Alys produced her starlight candle and lit it calmly in the face of her menacing fae.
But the dangers in the dreamscape were not just physical, Lida had discovered. To see one’s dream was to see them stripped open and raw; there was no filtering in sleep. To see one’s dream was to see their hopes and fears and complexities naked and exposed, wrapped in a veil of mixed-up memory and unbidden feeling. Sometimes, the results were beautiful, and goodness shone through; sometimes Lida woke with bile in her throat, and she thought she might know something of how Ava felt, when she saw the insides of people. Lida tried to be forgiving, knowing how little control dreamscapes gave to those who owned them, but it didn’t stop her from avoiding certain people. She never wanted to find out how close to the surface their dreams really were.
The exception seemed to be the clear memory-dreams. She knew now that they were not common: they were the result of the gifted moving through their strong inner shield and walking through their memories. This was the skill that Aaron pressed her hardest to master. He made her create dreamscapes from places she’d only seen once or twice, forcing her to walk in her memories to find all the details. He said that Siva had insisted that he practise this over and over, so it must have been important for Lida to know.
Lida thought often of the Illara Dana as she worked, and of how Dana had driven King Lucius mad, but Lida had no idea how she might reach the memory mist of other people. She had little inclination to do so, anyway. Memories helped to shape dreams, and she did not wish to see the memories that shaped some of the nightmares she’d experienced.
Lida and Aaron arrived back at l’Cour du Kali just before nightfall. They rubbed down the horses in companionable silence, and when they finished, took their places near the cuer fe. Bronwyn brought them plates of food. Without speaking, Aaron speared his smoked trout on his knife and transferred it to Lida’s plate, while she gave him her potatoes. When they
had eaten, Lida set her plate down and turned, settling to lean her back against his solid warmth as Bethan began the night’s heartfire tale. Aaron pressed a quick, rough kiss to her hair. He refused to translate for her, so Lida concentrated as best she could, and built a story from what she understood. She enjoyed it - even though she wasn’t sure how true her understanding was - for the tale that night was not of a god, or one of the star people, as the heartfire tales usually were, but rather about a mortal woman who had gone on a journey to save her sister. There were not enough stories about normal people, Lida firmly believed, though she herself liked hearing about gods and star people and past Kalis very much, losing herself in tales that were as foreign to her everyday life as the moon.
She was unexpectedly lonely with Dylan and Alys gone, even though her hours were still full of training and Aaron’s smirks. She missed Alys making her a cup of tea in the morning, and her relentless cheerfulness. She missed Dylan’s exasperated eye rolls and his unexpected hugs. She even missed his snoring. yyyyyy
To try to make herself feel better, she wrote long letters to her father. Word had spread that she was Cathan’s daughter, and apparently, that meant something. There was rarely an evening when a stranger did not seek her out at the cuer fe and tell her some new story about her father. There were stories about his healing, and his love of horses, and – Lida’s favourite – stories about him trying to distil his own whiskey, which was abruptly put to a stop when the barley grain he was drying caught alight in the kiln and took a number of tenats with it. Lida carefully filed that story in her memory for when she was back home. She kept a list of all the stranger’s names and sent each added one in her letters to Cathan, along with accounts of Sacred and descriptions of her daytime training with Aaron. She left out the dreamscapes and the parts about throwing knives and the injuries she’d accumulated courtesy of the Brinnican man, deciding that Cathan didn’t need that much detail. She asked her father questions, too, about Maya and Marnie, about Kingstown and his work. She knew that there was no way she’d receive a response, both due to Cathan’s writing habits and the sheer amount of time it would take for her letters to arrive in the south - they travelled up through the mountain ranges to the Northern Sands, before infrequent Myrae ships took them down the west coast to Port Royal - but it made her happier to write to him, even if the conversation was one-sided.
Lida wrote to Ava, too. She missed her, but the letters were guarded, confined - boringly, Lida thought - to remarks about Brinnica, the weather, and a litany of details about Aaron’s training, with considerably more embellishment than Cathan received. Lida didn’t want Ava to feel caught in the middle, and she knew that she would not be the only one sending letters from the snow.
***
A week later, Lida stomped into the tenat, sweaty and cross after training, muttering under her breath about the new cut to her forearm, which would almost certainly scar. She stopped still when she saw Alys sitting by the foye fe, staring blankly into the flames.
‘Aly!’
Lida rushed forward to hug her. Instead of returning the embrace, Alys caught her arm and gripped it with a healer’s unyielding strength, exclaiming wordlessly as she blotted at the blood with her shirtsleeve.
‘What did this?’ she demanded.
‘A knife,’ Lida answered warily.
‘An actual knife?’
Lida decided there was no point in lying. ‘Mmm.’
Alys swore vehemently. ‘You’re only a few months in, Lida. He should be using practice knives. The ass.’ She examined the wound closely. ‘Do you want me to heal it?’
Lida knew that Alys found wounds difficult, and that it would drain her for days to illae-heal the wound. ‘No, it’s fine, Aly.’
‘It needs stitches, then. Do you want me to ask Ella?’
‘No,’ Lida said, though Ella’s stitches were a good deal smaller and neater than the ones Alys produced. Lida didn’t much care what the stitches looked like: a scar was a scar, and she’d collected several new ones since she’d arrived in the north. ‘Can you do it?’
Alys made an ice pack from snow and numbed Lida’s arm, then set about stitching the cut. It was quite long, running almost the entire length of her forearm. Lida looked aside, grinding her teeth, as Alys moved the stitching hook and thread through her flesh. When Alys finished, she bustled about, making a poultice of comfrey and chamomile, which she spread over Lida’s arm. When she’d bound everything up, Lida felt her draw; a moment later, a wave of warmth spread through Lida’s body and some of the pain ebbed away.
Lida gave Alys a grateful smile. The Brinnican woman did not smile back, shaking her long hair over her face.
‘What’s wrong, soer?’
Alys took a long time to answer. ‘I am glad to be back.’
Lida gently pushed Alys’ hair behind one ear. It was almost as fair as Aaron’s, though it had a faint wave that his lacked. ‘What can I do?’
‘Will you come to the springs, Lida?’ Alys said plaintively.
The springs were quiet. Alys chose a shallow pool and kicked back so that she floated, staring up at the sky, her ears submerged. Lida held her freshly-bandaged arm out of the water and awkwardly washed her hair and scrubbed her skin. When she was done, she sank down to sit on the spring bed, waiting.
It took almost half an hour for Alys to be ready to talk. Lida was examining the puckering of her fingertips when Alys sat and slicked back her hair, wrapping her arms around her knees.
‘When I am at the Illarum, I miss the north so badly that it makes my stomach hurt,’ she began without preamble, her voice glum. Alys usually spoke Eilin to Lida, but this was all in rapid Brinnican. ‘I miss the cold and I miss the snow and I miss my family. I miss the lake and I miss skating and I miss our house over the river. The Illarum is too hot and the sun is too bright and the summer makes me itch. Eilins are too prudish and Auterans too unfeeling and Setiians make me cross with their nonsense about the moons. Even Erbidans grate my nerves, that I must watch every twitch of their hands or shoulders to tell what they are feeling - why can they not just smile or frown like a normal person, Lida?
‘I was worried for my grandmother, but mostly I was just excited to be coming home. I have not been back for five years, so when Katrin told me she was taking you, I jumped at the chance. The trip was so long, and then when we got here, I could not leave you when you were so tired and so sad, and so I was … what do you call it in Eilan? Chasing the bit?’
Lida gave a slight smile. ‘Chafing at the bit.’
‘That is it,’ Alys agreed. ‘We say jumping at the hunt which is a little different. Anyway. I was happy to be going home.
‘But when I got there … when I got there, I did not have a place. My family love me and they were happy to see me, but they treated me like a guest. My brother is doing the jobs that should have been mine, and my bedroom has been given to him, and our cat no longer recognises me. I cannot begrudge it, of course, but …’ She cast about for the words, tilting her chin to the sky.
Lida coughed, knowing something of the feeling. She did not speak it, but rather thinned her mindshield and thought it, as loudly as she could, trying to convey how she’d felt as she listened to her father speak in Kingstown.
Alys looked across at her, brows raised. ‘You’ve been practising,’ she said. ‘Yes. That is it, exactly. I am missing my own life. As if there were two paths, and by following one, I lost sight of the other.’ She skirted across the pool to lean on Lida, who wrapped her arms around her shoulders. ‘I had no purpose at home. At Yoss Lake. There is more meaning for me here, tending to you and Katrin, and your demands on my time are not great. It is hard to feel so apart.’
‘You are my anchor, Aly,’ Lida said quietly. ‘And I have not been as thankful as I should. But you are more than just a tender to the Kalisdotter and a stray Eilin. You are more than what you are to the people around you. What do you want to do?’
Alys sniffed. ‘I want to go,’ sh
e said, her voice wavering. ‘I want to go home to the Illarum.’
Lida kissed her head and they sat in the spring, unspeaking, until Lida felt an impatient push on her mindshield. She sighed and stood, pulling Alys with her.
‘Come, soer,’ Lida said. ‘We’re going riding.’
Alys climbed easily from the pool, then held out a hand to help Lida up. ‘Won’t you have to ask Aaron?’
Lida smiled grimly, thinking of what Dylan had said. He was right; she had been doing everything that Aaron demanded. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to ask.’
***
Aaron accepted the addition of Alys with a slightly raised eyebrow, but he raised no objection, which gave Lida a satisfied thrill of triumph. He led them to the plateau, which was his favourite place; he took Lida there far more often than anywhere else, and he would sometimes go a long time without speaking as he looked over l’Cour du Kali and across into the mountain range. In Alys’ company, he was unusually expansive, chatting easily; they seemed to get on well enough, though Alys blushed every time he spoke. Lida sat on a rock with her arms wrapped around her knees and watched Alys’ pink face with a smile, then turned her gaze upwards to the low cloud blanketing the sky.
Alys continued to join them on the afternoon ride each day - Lida wondered what the gossips would say about that - but it was only for a few weeks, as the winter grew harsher and colder, the snow deeper each day, the winds stronger. Their rides became shorter and shorter, until they were beaten back to l’Cour du Kali by the wildness of the weather and the severe cold. Then one night the snow came properly, and when Lida woke, the Kali’s Court was half-buried.
‘What do we do?’ she asked Alys, astonished, pulling back the tenat door to look at the freezing wall of white that blocked their way out.
Alys didn’t stir from her bed. ‘Close the door, Lida, gods above. We wait for them to dig us out.’ She yawned. ‘Feed the fire, soer, then go back to sleep. You won’t be training today. You deserve a rest.’
