Aloren (28 page)

I feared we were being chased by a pack of djain, until I heard the yapping and snarling.  My whole body ached, my molars ground together, and the wolves followed us through a brook.  The water splashed all the way to my hands.  It rushed over a stair of shale and into a canyon, and Liskara trundled wildly at the edge, knocking loose stones over. 
Fight, fight, fight
, she rang out. 
They are winter-hungry.

But I thought differently.  In a second of stillness I swung my legs over the horse and landed on my knees in a bush. 

Andrei shouted, and I stood up, saw the yellow eyes of a wolf.

Hackles bristled around his washboard frame.  When the others moved closer, he snapped them away.  I felt his hot breath on my face.  I thought of how dogs never could abide ghosts.  And filled with fear and rage and twenty other emotions I’d never felt before in my life, I emptied my soul between us. 

Icy fire licked from her wound, and she opened her frozen, dark mouth and howled.  The wolf shuddered and backed away. 

I commanded that they beat off the other pack, the people who hid from themselves and acted like wolves.

He and his comrades melted through the trees to assault Herist.  I couldn’t move; it felt as a though an ice storm had roared through my body.

Andrei was off the horse, telling me what a headache, and a fool, and a brave, stupid girl I was.  His pinched face whitened with the sunrise, and I got my numb feet to moving. 

Water from the brook pooled in a gully at the bottom of the canyon.  We led Liskara down a stair of scree to the pool, and knelt at the edge.  The early sun turned the pool to diamonds.  It looked as though the canyon had flowed with water once: the slate was smooth, warn into waves and hollows. 

As I rubbed down the shining horse with a rag, Floy hopped to my shoulder. “I’ll be leaving now,” she said.  Liskara gave a start beneath my touch.  We’d come to the Cheldony.  I sat on the water-worn bedrock and wept.

Floy nestled into my neck until I was done.  She promised that she and the others would be waiting in that exact spot for me to come back with the ice asters.  She left with the scurrying leaves.

***

These fell in drifts, and Andrei and I followed what was left of the Cheldony northeast.  We filled our stomachs with nuts, roots, rowan fruit and rose hips, and though we occasionally caught and ate small game, I left the wild birds alone.

Accustomed to rising early, I worked on my Marione shirt in the dawn, and stuffed it back in the bag when Andrei made signs of waking.  He saw it once or twice.  I suspected him of spying.  But I soon finished and laid the work aside, relieved.    

One day there was a fork and a great dark shelf in the bed where the river should have poured into the Grennan, another border water.  Without wetting our feet we forded it at an abandoned ferry landing.  Then we walked into a stony flatland separating Avila from Pemrenia, and left Norembry behind us, shimmering and green in the rain.

The days dragged by, and the riverbed pushed through a backbone of shale.  The wild edibles grew scarce and we ate frugal portions of Liskara’s packed food.  She had been burdened by the officer for a long winter in the north of the country, and Andrei and I would be tolerably well off for a while, at least. 

The rain stopped with the new year, and snow whipped through the air, hard and thin.  We kept our fires burning long and spread blankets over our cloaks when the sun went down. 

An oppressive silence filled the night.  As we traveled farther into the wild, it leaked into the day: stones shot from beneath our feet of their own accord, and the mellow pines and birches were replaced with bent thorns and junipers, grown fractious with wind. 

But something ahead of us kept the mischief at bay.  At a spot where the river bottom dropped between walls of slate, she stopped to have a word.

I’d found a chipping sparrow in the snow that evening, half frozen, and as Andrei kindled the fire and stirred nuts into it, I put the bird near the flames. 

I heard a creak, like snapping ice. A saebel, a river-daughter foggy with ice, walked over to the fire and smothered the flames with a hand.  Andrei sat down on a stone and watched in disbelief. 

Her eyes were green as the Swisa. I recognized her stringy hair and fishbone teeth: I’d rescued her from torment in the city. 

We’ve cleared your path of unkind things
, she said. 
Walk it longer and you’ll burn your toes.  Your choice.
  She took a chestnut and ate it, hull and all. 
That was our choice.
 

She scraped up some earth, squashed a grub, and ate it. 
Our choice.

She shoved her hand down a hole and yanked up a mouse. 
Our choice
, she said, and ate it. The creature slid, still wiggling, down her throat. I could see it through her skin.

She reached for the sparrow huddled near the fire,
Our choice–
  But I scooped the bird into my hands and backed away.

Her neck bubbled and cracked.  She bared her teeth.  
You stole our choice, Gralde. You smashed it, mangled, crushed it like an egg.

She made a multitude of horrible faces and pulled shards of ice from her eyes, and moved so close to me I thought she meant to stab me with one. 
We’ll take our choice back, Gralde.
  Her breath reeked of rotting fish. She turned toward Liskara.  The horse picked up her feet and flattened her ears.

A snake in the horse’s stomach,
the saebel said, and pointed at the horse; her arm cracked and grew stiff. 

Something long and sinuous pushed out from Liskara’s belly.  The horse dropped with a scream.

The ground jumped.  She writhed on her back, biting at the worm in her stomach, foam flying from her mouth.  She rolled and rolled, shaking the stones from their beds, and edged close to the drop, the escarpment that fell in steep pleats to the river bottom.

Andrei, fool that he was, went and stood between the horse and the edge of the cliff, and yelled at Liskara as though she were a person. 

I felt the sparrow’s heart humming in my hands.  The saebel stared at it hungrily. 
Crush him, warm heart. Make the little bones snap and crack, or the boy will tumble.

Liskara’s hind legs kicked out.  Andrei looked over his shoulder and crouched, hands scrambling forward, boots pushing shale over the edge.  The stones shattered far below.  My fist tightened, and the sparrow’s bones squeezed together and broke.

Liskara lay on her side, flank heaving.  The sparrow’s head flopped in my fist, and trying not to think of Floy, I knelt to scrape for the poor creature a hole in the ground.

The saebel stroked her arms, and water dripped off her long fingers and froze there. 

“Nasty girl.”  She spoke Gralde, smashing through the vowels.  “Those ugly hands took the poor birdie and squeezed her life out––”

“You did it,” said Andrei, who’d made it past the horse.  “And you put out our fire as well, you wicked block of ice.” 

She smiled with her fishbone teeth.  “Ass breath, human.  You make ass breath.”  She spoke to me in saebeline, which Andrei couldn’t understand:
You drop blame like a burning stone, because you are broken.  You can’t use our help, you are broken.

She spat at Andrei again. 
But not so broken as ass breath.  He’s Enelden.  He throws blame so hard it makes cataclysm.

She cracked her knuckles. 
You don’t know them.  Back when the world was ripped asunder they only wanted to help sew the world back together.  So they jumped the black crack with needle and thread, jumped too far, and broke their spirit bonds, broke from us.  They dropped the needle and thread real quick, we can tell you.

Their spirits bonds are broken, and they’re alone and proud and can’t carry anything.  So they throw blame as far from their broken spirits as they can and make cataclysm. 

She spat at Andrei one last time, and dug in the ground for the sparrow. She ate the dead thing and picked the feathers from her teeth.

We were disappointed you chose ass breath. Human flesh is delicious.

I reached out to grab her, to ring her neck.  Sh
e dissolved, leaving my fist lacy with frost.  I squatted and pressed my hands between my knees.

Andrei had already forgotten, as humans will.  He brushed ice from his face and watched as it melted on his fingers.  His breath sailed into the air.  “Has winter been here in person?” he said.  “We’d better sleep under the same blanket.” 

I looked up, but he hadn’t meant anything by it, and was already scraping flint with steel.

***

When the fire had burned low, I lay awake, teeth rattling in my head, feet vibrating in my boots.  My whole body shook beneath the blanket and I began to cry. 

The hurt ran on daggers up my arms and legs, and not able to stand it anymore, I sat up.  I walked over to where Andrei slept, and crawled under the blanket next to him. 

Twenty-Nine

We walked a hard road, over chasms and hills and plateaus, and it would require another story to detail its progress here.  An uneventful story––our wicked saebel cleared the path ahead so that we were troubled only by passing shadows. 

The worst of the shadows was the wind.  It bore into my head, mocking me with voices from the past until I was lulled to sleep each night with my mother’s singing and woken in the morning by my father’s laugh. 

As we ventured farther north the nights stretched longer and longer.  The sun barely scraped past the horizon and the dark was thick and even as water.  The riverbed was shallow here, growing ever more so, and the slate shimmered with veins of strange, beautiful minerals, smoothing, and then luffing, like sails in a capricious wind.

The wind threw the snow into frenzy when we came among the ice people.  They were all sorts, dotting the path like an infantry.  We looked down and saw we were stepping on faces, arms, legs.  They lay beneath the ice, layers and layers of them, wind-worn and smooth. 

As we walked, we saw ice trees, too, and castles, cities, and mountains, all in miniature, all perfect, all ice.  Like colorless dreams.  Further on, the faces of the people grew grave and sad.  The palaces and cities took on a haunted, hollow look; they became mammoth, some almost life-size, and the people grew slim and tall, reaching up on either side of the riverbed, faces obscured by the blowing snow.

I looked along the Cheldony until her bed ran out, and kept looking, eyes smarting with the wind.  A pale light poured from a thinning in the snow ahead, and a twilit sea of ice stretched endlessly, blurring with the snow and then coming into view.  Before this, just ahead, the great banks of the Cheldony came together.

There was water there.  The river’s head: a deeply sunken pool with its edges iced over.  The black center stirred in the wind.

Liskara’s breath steamed through my mitt, warming my hand.  The world rolled on to evening, and the wind steepened, hiding the pool behind a curtain of snow.  My mother sang, low and loose, and so true to memory that I looked to my right and saw her standing before me
. 
Her song was strange:

The door opens beneath the water,

But he won’t help you.  

And my father stood beside her: 

The door opens beneath the water,

But the key is a light too vivid for him to look at.

You’re not real,
I thought back at them.

The door won’t open,
my mother sang.

“You’re not real,” I whispered.  They were the first words I’d spoken in over a month.

The door won’t open.

“What door?  What the hell door are you talking about?”  This rang through the wind and startled me.  Andrei stared.  “They don’t like you at all.” My voice was rusty, sticking like an old key.

The color in my mother and father’s faces had faded to white.  I took off my mitt and touched my mother’s cheek.  Ice-cold.  The ice infantry had grown by two. 

“Not real,” Andrei said.  He avoided looking at them, as though they were private.  I suppose they were.  “The
Tolrenaimon
.”  He rubbed snow out of his eyes.  “A gate.  Right out of our old tales.  Before going on you have to leave memories, dreams, other things––”  He stopped. 

To his right, behind the wind and snow, stood a tall woman.  The wind took the snow another direction, and her gilt eyes lit on Andrei.  As if compelled, he drew his arm back and cracked Faiorsa across the face.  His hand struck flesh.

I reached for the knife in my boot, paused.  Her eyes were utterly flat, without glint.  She opened her mouth and there was no wet there.

“You’re not Faiorsa,” I said to her.  “You’re a djain.” 

Andrei stepped back, bewildered.  The djain-Faiorsa slowly turned her head; I wondered if she were mute, and Andrei followed her gaze, looked past her, looked at my ice father, at his broad shoulders and curly hair.  He turned as ashen as my father.

“Princess,” said the djain-Faiorsa.  She unfortunately
wasn’t
mute.  “You have been a terrific nuisance.” 

“And you,” she said to Andrei.  “Why do you ignore me?”

Andrei stared at me, at my hands.  Hatred froze his face. “Where’d you come from?” he said to the djain.

“You,” she said.  “You’ve been chipping away at yourself.  Didn’t you know what you would find down in the deepest pit?”   She grinned.

“You’re lying,” he said.  “You’re lying, you always lie.” 

He turned to me, “Did you bring me up here to kill me?”  Sweat was running down his temples, freezing into beads.  “Why haven’t you yet?  My mother murdered your whole family, every last one, for my sake. Where’s your rage?”  I turned into the wind but his voice was like thunder: “Is your spirit too ruined to feel anything?”

“Yes,” said the djain.  “Kill her and have done.”

Andrei turned away, began to walk, was forced to stop.  Because the city of Ellyned stood in his way: chin-high, glittering––every tower and shack made of ice. 

“You can’t mess with water.”  He looked back at the djain.  “It’ll break you.”

“That’s not mine,” said the djain.  “It’s your dream.  You’re a prophet.”  She had his attention now and her smile deepened.  “Look at your city.” She pointed at the tiny harbor, the delicate ice ships and cloud spray.  “Do you see the sails?  They’re a new sort: the stars of Even-Alehn, promised, sent for, and finally come to restore the natural order.  But your words have spread and the city believes no Lauriad exists.  So the Even-Alehn troops will assist the one who comes next.”  She ran her dry tongue over her lips.  “You.” 

“Herist has joined forces with Caveira to bully the Lorilan Ravyir, and he controls the Ombenelvan contingent with only his word.  But these mercenaries are treacherous.  And backed by Even-Alehn and your silver pendant, you can persuade them to switch to your side, and then you can do whatever you like with Herist and Caveira.  Something ghastly, I hope, and when you’re through, by all means, continue bullying Lorila.  But first you must get past me.”  The snow blowing round her head darkened to violet.  Her eyes turned to holes; she smiled and her tongue was black.  “You’ve spoken ill of Norembry before, but I know you love her and want only to improve her standing.”

“Yes.”  It came out as a bark.  He was caught, heart hooked.

“You may yet prove your love, given a few concessions.”

“Go on and say them.”

“Your pendant.  You can keep it for negotiating––I only want what’s inside it, and then I’ll leave you alone.”

My eyes widened.  This thing had followed us all the way up here for that? “You’re the Ombenelvan god,” I said.  “The one who wants the
Aebelavadar.
”

“I have many names,” she said.

She turned back to Andrei. “The other concession is the girl.  If she were more tractable you might have taken her back and wedded her, strengthening your claim.  But she’s wild and she hates you. Best not leave the weed uncut and spilling seed.”

She slid her hand under Andrei’s cloak and placed his dagger into his mitt.

Panic welled in me.  My hands made ready to draw the knife, to tear at him. 

“Master Djain,” he said, and turned the blade over in his hand, as though wondering how it had got there.

“What?”

“My pardons to Norembry, but I care rather more for the girl.”  He looked up at her.  “And you’re not getting my pendant.  Not any of it.”

The wind blew hard and fast, and the lady’s eyes glowed like firebrands.  Her figure went rigid, sucking the last light from the sky.  “Aloren––”  Andrei looked sick, now, like he had purged himself and there was nothing left inside him.  

He raised his hand as if to thrust the dagger into the djain’s breast, but I pulled his arms behind him.  “Are you stupid?” I yelled.  “You can’t kill it. You’ll drop dead.” 

He pushed me away.  “Which should be some consolation to both of us.”

“You bastard.”  I pounded on his back.  “You selfish, selfish bastard.”

He pushed me away again, and plunged the dagger into the djain.

The darkness spread, blotted out the snow and the wild sky, swallowed Andrei and Liskara and the ground I stood on, until I could see and feel nothing.

***

A hole opened right before me, pinching off my thoughts, my emotions.  I looked away from it, trying to clear my mind, looked to the side and saw Andrei’s pendant. 

The light burned white through its silver urn, white as chalk on a slate.  My eyes adjusted––Andrei had had fallen against me. The hole crouched before us like a great cat.

I took the pendant, the
Aebelavadar,
in my hands.  “What is this thing?” I said to the hole, which must be the djain.  I felt calm, almost incomplete, as though all my fear had been eaten away by the hole.  “You went through an awful lot to get this close.”

“Give it to me.”  It tore words into the air.

“What is it?”

“A light.”

“Obviously.”

“A strong light,” said the djain, “to shine so next to me.” 

“You’re just a hole,” I said, “you ain’t even there.”

“I am.  I am being realized as we speak.  I am growing stronger and stronger.”  It sucked at my skin.

“I, I, I,” I said, still oddly fearless.  “It’s all your kind think of.  You think so hard and so deep about I that you scrape it away until nothing’s left.”

“Give it to me.” 

It blew its ragged breath on me, and the light in my hand burned against the cold.  “Why?”  My fingers glowed around it, looking transparent, insubstantial.  I was reminded of little Daira, the way she burned in my arms.  “It’s a soul, in’t it?”

“Give it here.”

“Whose is it?”

“I followed it from Lorlen.”

I stared at my bright hands, wondering that I hadn’t been stricken dead.  “A Simargh soul?” 

“Yes.”

I remembered the stolen Simargh baby––the one from long ago, whose soul was stamped out.  The Simargh that became a djain.

“What do you want with it?” I said.

“Give it here.”

“Funny how you haven’t just taken it.  You can’t, can you?  Cause it don’t belong to you.  It belongs to him.”  I pointed to Andrei.  “I don’t know why or how he got it, but you can’t use it without his permission.”

“He’s dead.” 

Something trickled down my neck.  Fear, giving me weight, a shadow.  Everyone knew the djain told half-truths.

“If that’s so,” I said, forcing it down, “it belongs to me now, and I ain’t givin it to a nasty hole.” 

And I thought about what Andrei had said, that at the end of the path there was a hiding place, a portal to another world, some sort of door.

I said silently to myself, “The door opens beneath the water.”  That’s what my ice mother had said.  I didn’t know how much my ice mother knew, but she’d sounded fairly certain about the door.  The door must be there somewhere. In the water. 

The djain couldn’t do any mischief in any sort of water.  But I didn’t know where the water was, so I put Andrei’s arms over my shoulders and stood to find it.  His head lolled next to mine, and the Simargh soul dangled from his neck.  My feet were suspended in the air; there was nothing beneath me, nothing around me.

“Let us alone,” I said.  The hole’s black breath made cracks in my thoughts.   “You can’t have it.” 

A searching wind blew at my back, confusing me: who was this dead boy, why was I so cold?  I wanted so badly to lie down and sleep. 

But I held onto one thought––the water––and walked through the air, dragging the dead boy behind me.  The light cast a path, and finally ice crunched under my boots.  The cat-shaped hole followed on big paws.  The ice groaned, and water pressed up against it; the dark of the pool spread beyond my feet.  There was a door somewhere beneath it.

“He will drown,” said the cat-hole.  When it lay down between us and the open water, a great crack spread through the ice.  I stepped across it.

“But he’s dead,” I muttered.  I slid the knife from my boot with a free hand and wedged it in the crack.  My boot stamped hard on the handle.  The ice screamed and buckled under my weight.  The cat leaped, and the boy and I fell through into the pool. 

Water jammed into my nostrils, ears, throat, whole body.  Silence thumped around me.  I couldn’t feel anything for the cold, and I hung onto the boy. 

His light cast an orb of blue around us.  Outside the blue a wall of blindness spread: the cat opened its maw, forced us between its jaws.  It moved us back in its mouth and tried to swallow.  I saw the pit of its throat, a sickening void.  I closed my eyes, trying not to vomit. 

But we might as well have been encased in a diamond.  All the sudden the tortured water shrank back with a terrific thrust.  A snap filled the universe, and a fissure appeared in my vision.  The fissure widened, swallowing the djain.