Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (2 page)

I accepted the cake. She smiled and leaned forward to sort through the bag at her feet. Smoke hazed the room, coming from pipes and the fireplace along the wall, and the air was damp with the smell of brandy and beer. People were still gathering, being stopped outside to give the word of the day, the word that signaled they were not one of Lord Isar’s spies. That night it was “the sun will shine again.” I have always remembered that.

Alkyone took out a box made of blue glass beads inlaid in larger squares. “These came from Allanak as well,” she said.

One of the men filling the room muscled his way through the crowd. He was blonde bearded, a northerner like me. As he approached, he scowled down at me, but spoke to her.

“
What are you up to, Alkyone?” he said.

“
Lightening my pack,” she said. “It has been heavy lately.”

“
We can’t afford to be giving away things all over the place,” he said. “Come in the back room. They wish to know what our magics are capable of, and whether yours could carry someone outside the gate.”

I opened the box, and he spoke as I saw what lay inside. “Those are your favorite earrings, Alk!”

She put her head down, looking at the floor planks between her boot toes. “I had those before we ever met, Phaedrin. My friend Jhiran gave them to me, and I may give them where I will.”

That was the end of that. I said, “When you go back to your village—wouldn’t someone there want them?”

Her face shuttered tight enough to keep out wind or emotion. “They are all gone. I will not be returning.” She reached up to close my fingers over the earrings and smiled at me again. Then she stood and followed Phaedrin back to the crowded room filled with angry argument and low-voiced discussion.

I crept closer and listened. There was no chance of sleeping that night. I couldn’t understand everything that was said. But through the door I watched her talking, worrying her lower lip between her teeth as she thought before answering questions. Phaedrin watched her as though annoyed by the conversation, but the Muark, who never trust those outside their tribe, treated her as a comrade. It was something about her, something that shone through and made you want to be a little bit better, somehow.

Everyone left before the sun rose over the city. Alkyone’s group rode away to the south-east, down to Luirs and the Tan Muark lands, vanishing into the darkness of the North Road. After they had gone away, my cousin Liselle tried to get the earrings and the box from me, but coax and threaten as she might, I would not give them up.

“
Keep your traitor-gifts then,” she said, taking a step back, face red with fury.

I didn’t know what she meant, but I knew it was bad. I pushed her down, and I hid the box and earrings in the stable-loft, where she couldn’t find them. Sometimes I took the earrings out and held them in my hand, and let them flash in the sun so the stable kittens could chase the bits of scattered light they threw across the ground.

Sometimes I pretended I was Alkyone, pretended so hard that it was as though I walked in a different skin. I would sit on the stone wall outside the inn and stare at the dust devils dancing in the road, willing them to move. My heart would leap when it would seem as though one had heard and answered. But then, inevitably, it would die away or move in a contradictory direction.

I wanted to be her, to have people listen to me instead of telling me what to do. I wanted them to smile at me as they did at her, with love and respect, and sometimes a trace of fear.

My ineffectual efforts at magic died out after a while and our lives continued. When I was twelve, there came rumors of magic outside the city. Travelers reported the undead walked the North Road at night, and no one dared journey beneath the moons. Day by day, the stories grew wilder. They said an ancient demon, the Lord of Ash, and his servants plagued Tuluk and that the Templarate could do nothing to stop him. Some said that the reason the Templarate did nothing was that they had given their power to Lord Isar.

My mother had been accustomed to using Isar’s name to threaten us when we misbehaved. Now she dared not invoke his name in threats lest she somehow come to his notice. At night we shuttered the windows and barred the doors, for fear of the sorts of travelers that might enter after the sun had set.

When I had my first woman’s blood, my mother said we would have a celebration, even though business was so bad. She braided my hair and pierced my ears and I wore Alkyone’s earrings, despite Liselle’s frowns.

The night winds were howling, and my mother lit thick cones of lanturin incense to keep away ghosts. In the middle of the meal—duskhorn steak, the wild-fed kind you can never get nowadays—the main door blew open, or so we thought at first. The youngest children were all screaming and things were confused. My mother glimpsed Alkyone’s form huddled outside, a few feet away from the lintel. My brothers pulled her in, dragged her beside the hearth, pressed hot tea and soup on her. She kept her eyes turned down, her cloak’s hood drawn up.

A few hours later, her friends arrived. They stood in the doorway. She did not look up. No one had wanted to go to bed after that, not with all the excitement, and my father had allowed us to heat watered wine and drink it, stretching out the sips to make our time awake as long as possible.

“
Alk,” the leader said, his voice half-cracked with pain. He was a plain, brown-faced Northerner, the Kuraci. “Tell me it’s not true.”

“
That what’s not true?” It was the first time she spoke that visit, and her voice was as sweet and intoxicating as the liquid in my mug. The wind outside changed pitch and tenor, softened, became melodic for a moment, a heartbeat.

He took a step forward at the words, face brightening. “Then it’s not true—the Lord of Ash has not touched you?”

She raised her face slowly—I can see that clear as day in my mind’s eye, clearer than I see most things now—and the fabric fell away, revealing that her once-blue eyes were black as coals.

“
See how he has touched me because I dared oppose him and his ally!” she said. “Like all his creatures, I’m marked. But is my spirit still my own? That I believe to be true, but I make no guarantees.” And with a bitter, brittle laugh, she pulled the hood back up around her face.

She did not look at them, but they looked at her. Five men, all from the crowd that had gathered to discuss Isar so long ago: the brown man, and Phaedrin, and a stocky little fellow, one of the kinless half-blood, and another man, thin but with the bleary reddened vision of a spice-smoker, and another of the Tan Muark.

“
His evil lives in you—you are his servant now!” Phaedrin said, but the Tan Muark had a blade against his throat and backed him off, step by step. My littlest sister gasped and hid her face in my mother’s skirts.

“
Could Kul cure her, perhaps?” the Muark asked.

“
Perhaps, if he had the crown of Fel Karren—but no such luck yet.”

“
What about Arianis?”

“
You have not heard? Arianis is dead.”

Alkyone paled further. “Arianis gone? But he was the best of our leaders, our only guidance! No wonder the Lord of Ash stretched out his hand to take me so easily!”

She lowered her face into her hands and wept. And those men, they fell into silence and stood there looking at her in the way you would a stone that has become a scorpion, or a stick that writhes and becomes an adder.

When those black pits had been concealed by her long-fingered hands, I could move again. I put my mug down, and went forward to embrace her. I buried her head in my shoulder so I did not have to face that black gaze, but even so, I held her and did my best to conceal the terror that shook me, like an earthquake that sets the world ashiver.

For a frozen time—a dozen breaths?—she let me hold her, she clung to me.

Then a hand fell on my shoulder, and my mother pulled me away, begged their pardon, and took me off to shake me hard and tell me never to meddle in matters of magic or witchcraft.

It was half in me to demand what about my father. Wasn’t he as steeped in magic as Alkyone, whether or not he hid it? But something in the way my mother looked made me hold my tongue on that subject.

“
Is Alkyone the Lord of Ash’s now?” I asked, and my mother shook me again, so hard my neck popped on its spine, which startled me, because she’d never been one to strike us in anger.

“
Magicker business!”

No one spoke about Alkyone after she’d gone. No one said anything, even though I tried to ask. My mother hissed me into silence, and my father—when he was there—would not speak of it.

A half year later I was outside emptying slop buckets when I saw lights in the sky. Stars and comets, dancing lights, far to the south. I ran inside to fetch the others, but by the time my family came out into the yard, the lights were gone, and they only made fun of me.

Months later, though, I was vindicated when travelers spoke of the night the lights had flashed in the sky to mark the last battle with the Lord of Ash. They said Alkyone helped defeat him, but that it was a joint effort, really—the J’Karr and the Tan Muark, and a handful of magickers joined together. That their dead friend Arianis had come back as a gwoshi to help them defeat the Lord of Ash, that there had been a fierce fight nonetheless, and Kul had offered no aid—he’d been off in the North on his own expedition, searching for ways to defeat Isar.

They said down in the Salt Flats there was a statue of the Lord of Ash, what he had been, turned into black stone—obsidian. My eldest once traveled down to see it, and said it was large and wicked, and that she dreamed of it for three nights running. The Muark still make the trip there once a year, to piss on its feet and curse it.

Phaedrin had turned out to be working with the Lord of Ash. He died on those sands as well and no statue marked his grave.

Time wore on, and my mother entrusted me with more and more of the inn’s running. My father was taken away by Lord Isar’s people under suspicion of being an unlicensed elementalist. Every week my mother went to ask news of him and every week there was none. They never said officially whether or not it was true. He was gone, either way, and he didn’t come back. People disappeared in those days, just as they do now. That’s always been Tuluk’s way, no matter who sat in power.

I had my first boyfriend. Liselle stole him and broke him so when he came back to me, he wanted me as little as I wanted him. I listened to travelers’ stories and the news that the bards passed along in their songs, the few bards that still existed under Lord Isar’s hand. Poet’s Circle, where they had once all lived, was boarded up and guarded.

I wore the earrings Alkyone had given me each year at Isar’s Festival. One year I had a daughter with my broken boyfriend, and then two years later another with a man who wasn’t broken, and who loved my first as his own.

Thoughts of Alkyone, somehow, pulled me through. I listened for news every night in the inn’s common room. I heard she had died. I heard she had never died or that she had come back. I heard that she was sometimes an elemental and sometimes human, and sometimes something in between. Rumors said Kul was in exile. He’d tried to kill Isar after retrieving some artifact, and had been driven to live with the Tan Muark. Some people said he’d married a Muark woman who’d fallen in battle a few days later. We did not see the tribe much after that, and you couldn’t get blue silk ribbons for years. They were the only ones with the secret of the dye.

No one knew what would happen.

Then a few Muark appeared, began passing the word to watch out, that on the night of Isar’s Festival, rebellion would break out. That something was happening, that the last of the rebel magickers were planning something. That we should hide that night, and be ready the next day to take the city.

No one knew what to expect. No one dreamed how bad it would be. But we hid like they told us, for all the good it did most of us.

That night, elementals walked through the city, beings from planes outside our own. The city shook with their passage all night long. My family and I hid in the cellar with four crates of Reynolte wine and a keg of spiced brandy. The Tan Muark had brought up a great wheel of cheese on their unexpected visit two days earlier, and we ate half of it that night because there wasn’t anything else to do.

I wondered where Alkyone was. Surely she was part of this? Had the Lord of Ash returned, was she out there helping defeat him once again? Who had brought the elementals to destroy the city? Were her friends with her still, was exiled Kul there to defend his home? Did she remember giving me her honey cakes, back when I was as young as the child huddled against me?