Ash and Silver (12 page)

He fell so abruptly, so utterly silent, and the night was so black, I almost believed he'd gone. Or toppled from the wall.

“Commander?”

“Enough. You'll be crashing down the steps, and I'll not leap down to catch you. Be about our plan. Prepare as I've taught you. Nothing of this mission should require more of you than you can handle.” I fancied I glimpsed his blue eyes glittering. “But watch your back at every moment and speak to
no one
of seeing the purebloods at the end of the study. There are friends and there are enemies, and some that are neither one nor the other. I cannot yet sort out who is which. But be sure of this, while you're off, I'm going to find out what in all Magrog's hells you
are.”

THE TEETH OF SPRING

T
he sandy inlet up the Gouvron provided no easy mooring. I had to haul the boat up a steep bank so neither demon tide nor spring flood would wash it away, and tuck it into a tangle of tufted sedge and round-headed rushes so some wandering thief would not think it his for the taking.

All morning as I rowed upriver, I'd watched for Morgan. Listened for her singing. Called myself mad to imagine she was what I believed or that she could find me anywhere as she claimed. Once the boat was secure, I perched on a rock, ate, drank, and hoped.

The sun, thin and silver, slid past the zenith. With deflated spirits, I hefted my pack and cast a bit of magic to plump the crushed grass where I'd dragged the boat. Shorting a loop in the river left me a day's walk to the hostler. Three days' hard riding northeasterly would take me to the forest outside the town of Lillebras, where I'd wait for the signal. It was but a short ride from there to a hidden lake above the prospective battleground, where I'd meet the Marshal's spy. I'd best move.

“Lucian!”

The woman came running along the grassy bank, chestnut hair and brown cape flying. My eyes were so expectant of naked flesh and blue fire that I almost didn't recognize her. But with her every step closer, the day grew brighter.

“Morgan!”

Names were rich with association. Inek's name evoked his commanding integrity, the pillar centering two years' chaos of fear and striving. Dunlin's name evoked easy humor and brotherhood—not friendship, but shared purpose, experience, and trust. Morgan's presence struck sparks, no doubt—awe, excitement, urgencies of spirit and flesh. But her name—like the one I believed to be my own—fell upon my soul like a pellet made of lead. Though I hungered for it, it woke nothing deeper.

“I'd almost given up on you,” I said. “Is something wrong?”

“There's no giving up.” Her brow was drawn tight, and her eyes darted everywhere but my face. “Tuari's anger is grown to fury. I'm sworn to bring thee to him as soon as possible. But I've a thought how we might enliven thy memory before we face him. 'Tis a distance to travel. Please tell me thou hast no urgency to prevent our going!”

“I've four days' travel to my destination and a deadline of seven. Thus, assuming weather or ill chance doesn't delay me, I've three to spend. But not an hour longer. I cannot fail my commander.” Inek pursued a dangerous course to unravel this mystery of the Order and me. The best I could do to repay him was to execute my duties with precision.

Morgan squeezed her eyes shut, considering, then nodded sharply.

“'Tis fortunate I've lived among humankind. The long-lived do not measure or tally the sun's travels as humans do. And in truth, our tallies would not come to the same, as days spend differently in the true lands. But all should be well if we keep a good pace. Once Tuari is satisfied, I can hasten thee to thy destination.”

“And he
will
be satisfied?”

“He must.”

Not exactly the answer I wanted to hear.

“So where are we going? I've a map.” Perhaps she could point out what she named the
true lands
, and explain what in Deunor's holy fire Danae thought my magic did to its boundaries.

But the rolled skin wasn't even out of my pack when she stilled my hand. “My kind need no pages. But I do need my gards. I cannot find the way while clothed in human garb.”

She unlaced her bodice and threw off her skirts and tunic. Her feet were already bare.

Body and mind became hopelessly tangled. My eyes flicked away and back again. And again.

She laughed and thrust the bundled clothing into my arms. “You can carry these.”

Before I could get my mouth closed and the garments stuffed in my pack, she struck out south and east, away from the river, at a pace that precluded easy conversation. Just as well. Eye and mind were wholly occupied with the grace and power of her form. As the sun teased through high clouds, the marks on her skin—the gards, she called them—came to life, not in shades of sapphire and lapis, but cerulean and sky, blues so pale as to seem silver.

“You said your archon was disturbed when I spoke of others of your kind who were marked in silver,” I said, when she stopped to scoop water from a rain pool nested in a lonely slab of rock. “But yours . . .” I pointed to her arm, though I dared look at it only sidewise.

“'Tis the sunlight fades my gards. And wearing human garb too long causes them to vanish almost entire. But these are not what you described to Naari. The sentinel's gards were
bright
silver, you told him, drawings inked in starlight. We've lore that speaks of such, but few have seen the like. Come”—she hurried me away from her clear discomfort with the subject—“we've no time to dally.”

The rock-strewn barrens yielded quickly to softer country laced with willow-banked streams. No matter the summer solstice just past, spring had scarce touched the land. The silver birches and spreading chestnuts dotting the grasslands still sported new green.

As I marveled at Morgan's sure navigation through drenching rain, I noticed oddities in our course. When we climbed out of a wet green vale onto a heath, startling a flock of dithering crakes from the oat grass, I would have sworn the cone-shaped hills on the horizon were not those I'd seen when we descended into the vale. And the grass was bone-dry.

I blamed the stormy light. But over the next hours, I carefully studied the sky and the distant uplands. In late afternoon, we emerged from a woodland of deep-green yew and beech into a sunlit landscape of hillsides that were similar, but certainly not the same as the ones carved on my memory. If magic was responsible, it was wholly undetectable—which was entirely worrisome.

“Hold, lady.”

She turned around, the sun paling the glistening gards that had deepened in color in the wood. As before, her eyes darted behind me and to either side. “We must keep moving.”

“I need explanation.” At the least, if she could so confuse me on the journey, how in the Sky Lord's mercy would I ever find my way back? We'd not come near so much as a farmstead, much less a village or a road. “How is it that what I see ahead when we leave the wood is not what I saw when we entered? I'm not mistaken.”

“We cannot dally, Lucian. Tuari is surely hunting us by now. He'll know I've met thee, and his displeasure will grow hugely—worse than that, if he thinks I've spoken of matters humans are not meant to know.”

My patience was worn thin with all the things I was not
meant to know
.
“I've trusted you for all these hours,” I said. “But you've told me neither where we're bound nor what I've done that so offends your lord. My first duty lies behind us, and I daren't go farther without understanding.”

“Oh, friend Lucian, canst thou not touch the ground here and call up thy magic to understand the paths we walk?”

“I touch ground to detect traces of magic. I've tried it along the way and found nothing.”

“But thou didst once read
history
from the land.”

History! That made no sense at all. “You mentioned that I studied history, but— Why would I touch the earth?”

“To see images of the past, you told me, to hear music or scraps of words, to follow threads of meaning. It was the magic thou didst value more than art, more than me.”

“That's not possible.” She had described the signs of a magical bent for history, yet the portrait witnessed that Lucian de Remeni's bent was portraiture. Dual magical bents were exceedingly rare, and
no one
carried both to maturity. The Registry required one to be excised in childhood, for two mature bents led inevitably to madness . . .

Lead settled in my belly. Was that it? Had incipient madness prompted my family to consign me to Evanide?

“Perhaps I only wished for such a skill.”

Morgan spun sharply and sniffed the damp breeze from behind us. “We must go, Lucian.”

I smelled naught but the mingling of damp earth and the land's late greening. No trace of the sea. Despite our speed, that seemed impossible.

“Even if reading history with magic was my talent, it is dead or muted. Please, lady, just tell me what's going on.”

“I dare speak only this,” she said. “Those of my kind spend our lives learning the land, its shapes, smells, and sounds, the life that abounds in every field or pond, stream or hillside. We can use this familiarity to find our way . . . quickly . . . from one place to another that is very like. This—”

“No. You speak of magic. You couldn't hide such enchantments from me.”

A smile softened her worry lines, a rich, sweet sadness flowing from her like a spiced tisane. “'Tis not magic, but what we are. What I am. It's why I could not stay with thee in Montesard. It's why I could never stay with thee, no matter the delight we shared in those days or our childish whimsies of abandoning families and traditions and making a life together. It's why I
must answer to Tuari and not thy commanders or kings. Though we share the same form, gentle Lucian, I am not human.”

Not human. Wordless, breathless, I nodded.

My intellect had spoken it from the moment I saw the portrait. Spirit had disagreed; she was so vibrant, so womanly, her emotions and expressions so recognizably . . . human. Now, surrounded by woodland and meadow, her gards taking fire again as daylight failed, my spirit, too, believed. She was no human's sister or daughter or lover. She was lightning.

“Trust me. I mean only thy good, and I'll do all I can to protect thee from Tuari's wrath. But we
must
pry open thy memory, else matters will become very difficult for us both.”

Robbed of answer, I motioned her onward. But as her long limbs devoured the steep slope ahead of us, I stayed close and kept my eyes open.

“So then, at least tell me where you're taking me to get my memory pried open and how you think to accomplish it,” I said. Perhaps her kind had their own sorcerers.

“We're to join my partner, Naari. He suggested a way to crack this mud clot. His plan seems well reasoned, if a bit . . . risky. 'Tis more likely a stick will break the clot than a feather, yes?”

My blood rushed hot as if the tide horns had sounded. “What
stick
? I'm trusting you—”

She pointed to the horizon. “Atop those twinned hills lies a spring in a mossy crevice. When we ascend the next slope, we shall look down on the great city men name Palinur.”

“Palinur! The royal city? That's not possible!”

Of course she had just told me how it was possible. But it would take an inordinate amount of faith to accept that we had walked from the Western Sea in the far northwest of Navronne to Palinur in the kingdom's heart in half a day. “You're saying we've walked more than seven hundred quellae! And without glimpsing so much as a plowed field.”

She shrugged. “We have walked the true lands, where measuring has no meaning. And my kind do not plow any more than they build. As I told thee, time spends differently here, which means we must hurry on if we're to get thee back to do thy duty.”

And so we continued. It was unnerving, at best, to contemplate what
stick
awaited me from beings who could drag me across Navronne in a day's walking.

• • •

T
he city that sprawled across the grassy hills was indeed great Caedmon's city—the royal city of Navronne. Neither its massive size, the thousand flickering lights, nor the clashing bronze of so many bells sounding the quarters had convinced me. The grand gates and thick walls might have belonged to any number of northern cities, and I told myself the dead vineyards might once have harbored some hardy northern grape and not the exquisite vintages of the Ardran hills. But as we crossed the great roads that funneled mobs of travelers into the city, threading a path through hostlers, food vendors, bawling taverners, scurrying pickthieves, and smirking procurers who thrust half-dressed girls and youths into our paths, I knew it must be Palinur. Only Navronne's greatest city would be so alive and so wicked, so late.

I had refreshed the
obscuré
spell on my mask, and Morgan—her Danae light hidden under bodice and skirts—had pulled up the hood of her cape, so none paid us mind as we hurried along the ring road outside the city walls. Though she'd indicated that our destination lay on the “sunrise side” of the city, we passed up the calmer easterly gates just as we had the chaotic southern portal.

Morgan adamantly refused to say how they thought to make me remember.

Neither of us said much. The long day wore on me, and once past the gates, a profound stillness fell on the road. We encountered no travelers, no vendors, nor even the beggars' village one might expect outside any city's walls. No stock pens accounted for the foul wind coming down from the north.

Watchfires atop the city wall illuminated scorch marks, stains, pits, and gouges in its smooth face. The ground itself was broken and pitted, too. Here and there the cart road squeezed through heaps of rubble or circumnavigated some gaping pit or a pile of tar-splattered beams and metal—telltales of Bayard's fruitless siege two years' past. This destruction would be but a dusty corner of history compared to what might come now Bayard had allied with Sila Diaglou.

My legs expressed their gratitude when a steep portion of the looping track at last reached more level ground. My lungs would have, as well, save that the foul stench I'd noticed earlier was ten times worse on the windy flat.

Morgan didn't slow. She left the road and headed toward the gray strip of the city wall that had climbed the same hill, only in a straighter path.
Watchfires marked the wall's bend around this high plateau before straightening again on its northward course.

“Come on,” she said over her shoulder. “We're looking for a gap in this wall.”