Raven's Ladder (24 page)

“I miss the sky,” Bauris sighed. The bird flew, and one of its feathers drifted back in through the window and came to rest on his open palm. He looked at it, water spilling from his eyes. “I miss the sky so much.”

Cyndere pulled the curtain back to open the whole window. “The view’s clear now, Bauris,” she said, kneeling to look into his face. “The sky is right there.”

“The troublemaker.” Bauris reached out and pinned the feather through the hair just above the heiress’s ear. “She’s come back.”

“Yes, yes, I’m here, Bauris,” Cyndere said. “It’s such a pleasure to hear your voice. We thought that you—”

“No,” he said, grasping at her sleeve. “You don’t understand. She’s come back. The witnesses will come in greater numbers now just to watch it happen. This is my favorite part.”

Cyndere combed her tousled hair back with her fingertips, perplexed.

“The sky was closer,” he said. “For a while it was very, very close.”

“The sky’s right there, Bauris,” said Emeriene. “Right where it’s always been.”

Cyndere went and sat beside Emeriene. “I have a smaller favor to ask you.”

“I hope I like this one better.”

Cyndere touched the toughweed cast on Emeriene’s leg. “I need a disguise.”

Emeriene remembered the many times at Tilianpurth that she had loaned her cast and gown to Cyndere as a disguise, while she posed as Cyndere so no one would know the heiress was out meeting a secret friend in the woods. “You want to trade places again for a while. Is that it?”

“I need to dress like a sisterly so no one notices me. Just for tonight.”

“If you’re thinking about returning to Tilianpurth without me—”

“No. No tetherwings. No beastman waiting for me in the shadows. No, this time I must slip through my father’s secret tunnels on an urgent errand. Those passages are the only way to get past the Seers unnoticed anymore.”

“And if your mother comes looking for you? I can’t shut the door against her.”

Cyndere thought for a while. “Mother’s head is full of celebration details—the parade, the voyage to the islands, all the madness ahead. Just remind her how much she likes birthday surprises.”

“And are you preparing a surprise?”

Cyndere smiled. “For everyone. And for you, perhaps, most of all.”

S
even hundred and sixty-two stones—angular fragments of turbid green glass—puzzled the wall of Cal-raven’s prison.

He had counted them. Reflecting tremulous light that shifted with the movement of buoyant clouds, they were a quieter sight than the world beyond the window.

In the years since his last visit, House Bel Amica’s simple wooden boats had become larger, sleeker. Few bristled with oars. Now most were tugged by ugly seabulls, their bulbous white heads surging through the waves like boiled eggs bobbing in brine.

He might have enjoyed the spectacle, but gulls buffeted the air about his window, seeking entrance so they could poke about for food. Farther out, the birds besieged the Bel Amican ships, frantic, fighting for perches along the masts. Fat birds. He hated them. He wished for a bow and arrow.

Busying his mind with plans, he tried to ignore the birds’ maddening din, the ache of his bruises and wounds, and his worries.

And there was good reason for worry. The eye of his cell opened to water in unsettling proximity, and a stiff wind would bring the waves right in; the barnacles clinging to the sill were testament to that.

Trust Cyndere
, the beastman had told him. Again and again he sought to recall exactly what the beastman had told him at Barnashum. The creature could have killed him but had saved him from a deadly fall instead and had tried to convey some urgent message.
Trust Cyndere and nobody else
.

Long ago Cal-raven and Cyndere had explored rocky tide pools together while their fathers held conference along the sandy shoreline, out where the
inlet opened to the Mystery Sea. Cal-raven had sworn that someday, when he was sovereign, he’d make Cyndere his Abascar queen. As they were still children and Cyndere’s older brother, Partayn, had not yet been slain by beastmen, she was not likely to inherit House Bel Amica’s crown. But they had been only six or seven years old, dreaming childish dreams. Cal-raven’s father, amused, had patiently explained to him that such rash alliances were foolish. At the time Cal-raven had not understood the bitter regret in his father’s words.

Cyndere said she would give me whatever I need. I need to be back with my people
.

The walls moved, or seemed to. In his weariness he felt as if he were trapped in a wavering boat. Mist wafted in, sometimes in fine drifting clouds, sometimes in sudden cold spray. He sank down onto the bench and closed his eyes. The pulsing white burn in his vision seemed to be fading.

In his mind’s eye he stood again in the crown of Tammos Raak’s tower. Light through the farglass flowered into Auralia’s colors. He felt himself drawn to the eyepiece. Instead of seeing the piercing light, he watched a wave rise, Seers borne upon its curling crest, lashing their seabull steeds. Light passed through the wave, and he saw all the riches of House Bel Amica sweeping forward. In a moment they would flood his cell.

He shook himself awake, gasping. Breathing deep and slow, he quieted his heartbeat. Water trickled down the black mortar between the stones to seep through the floor of porous sediment. This went on endlessly—water coming in, water draining out.

This could drive a man into madness
.

Just inside the door lay a pitcher of water, a tray of fresh bread, and strips of dried meat.

Others all around had awakened to rations of their own and hissed their disgust. He joined the chorus, carving a clump of rock from the wall and hurling it against the door, where it splatted and stuck in a star-shaped clod.

To keep himself from further nightmares, he sang a Barnashum tune. He saw Merya rocking her child to sleep, saw Tabor Jan reassuring the people, saw the triplets sculpting stories. He walked among the statues in the Hall of the Lost. He imagined his own voice in harmony with Lesyl’s. Despite her frequent appeals, he had never sung along with her, not loud
enough to be heard. But now he raised his voice and sang as if the words might summon her. It was good to think of her and not the constant chaos.

Toward the end of the second day, he began to discern voices—other prisoners shouting through the pinprick pores of the wall’s solid sponge. He pressed his ear to the rough surface and listened.

A speaker was coming to the end of a tale about hunters at sea preying upon oceandragons. “Best leave the monsters alone,” he intoned. “We were not meant to know everything. And the moment we think we’ve mastered the mystery, it will turn on us and tear our ships open to the sea.”

That night, lulled into drowsy discomfort, he heard the voices again, this time in labored prayers; prisoners were calling to their moon-spirits for deliverance.

Meanwhile, the bruises and gashes on his face, his ribs, his hands and feet pulsed their own aching laments.

In the morning he had a visitor. A pink sunclinger had crawled through the window.

Cal-raven gingerly pried its seventeen legs free, which took a very long time. Once the last leg gave up its grip on the stone, he examined its headless, star-shaped body, bejeweled with sparkles, tough and gritty as the bottom of a pan when the stew’s burnt dry. He turned it over and watched countless white filaments flailing in the air beneath its grand legs as they slowly bent to find a new hold. In the center of that star was an open mouth, eager and ravenous, ready to accept whatever those limbs would carry in.

Cal-raven threw it back out to the inlet.

At once a torrent of birds cycloned from the sky to clash in competition, feathers flying. The splashing frenzy ended as quickly as it had begun. One of the gulls remained floating on the water, head bowed with the weight of its catch.

Cal-raven choked when he saw what was happening. The gull was trying to swallow the sunclinger and had worked two of those long legs into its gullet. But the other limbs had wrapped around the predator’s throat, adhering and holding tight. The weight was wearing down the bird. Slowly the
sunclinger throttled its attacker. Eventually the bird would either choke to death or drown, and the sunclinger would break away to its undersea abode.

Cal-raven cursed the bird. He cursed the sunclinger. He cursed the spray that had saturated his garments during the night. He felt sick from breathing the salty mist.

Turning back to the wall of glossy green stones, he ran his fingers along their rugged, broken spans. He surrounded one of the stones with ten fingertips and applied soft pressure, concentrating on contours. His wounds flared in protest. With a deep breath, he released all other thoughts. A channel of softer lode shifted slightly. His fingers sank into the mortar, encircling the hard green block, and he drew it smoothly from the wall.

He cupped it in his battered hands, molding it as if it were a brick of green clay. Without considering his intention, he began to shape the Keeper. It was the first time he had done so since seeing the creature in the waking world.

Its edges and lines were complex, and he liked the possibilities. If he pressed, he could feel a difference in the stone’s density, find a line, clear away all that was unnecessary. This was where most sculptors went wrong—finding a line, they immediately pursued it. It was just as important to explore all around it, for sometimes there were stronger lines hiding deeper or fractures waiting to be discovered. Any hasty work would come out crooked and crude. Without this patient study, a sculpture would not last. But a shape consisting only of the soundest stone—that would weather storms. It would speak of something pure and true. It would unite generations.

The cell had seemed like such an ugly place, but now it was alive with opportunity. Everywhere he turned, he saw suggested lines, contrasts waiting to be broken, cracks waiting for pressure.

Hours passed. The work absorbed his attention. When he awoke from the effort, he was seated far from the window. As he lifted and turned the sculpture of the Keeper, it filled with light as if it might come to life in his hand. It did not much resemble the creature that had found him on that violent Barnashum night, but it was a good figure. He put it down and stared hard into that radiance. As he did, the white flare in his left eye suddenly returned, bright and harsh.

He set the sculpture of the Keeper in the window, then lay down, folding his arm under his head. As he gazed past its silhouette, the voices began again, murmuring beyond the wall like the waves.

The prisoners’ voices wove into his dreams. He did not know how many hours had passed—perhaps a night and a day—when he seized suddenly upon one word, bold as a knot along a thread of speech. Had he heard it or dreamed it?

Auralia
.

The name startled him, like the face of an old friend suddenly appearing in a crowd of strangers. He pressed his head against the porous stone as if he might push right through it.

And again,
Auralia
.

A woman’s voice was raised in the fever of a story. He could catch only pieces, but he began to sense that the tale as he knew it had been very much revised. The real Auralia had not organized a revolt against his father. And the Keeper was not “Auralia’s moon-spirit.”

A blare of horns shattered his attention and drew him to the window. The tones flared high above him. He could picture them sounding from a hundred towers encircling the house, flags lashing at the sky like torchflame. Bel Amicans would be congregating on great platforms to see some wonder or receive some proclamation. How easy it would be to climb out the window and slip unnoticed through the masses.

Don’t make me come find you, Cyndere. I’ll trust, but only for so long
.

He slumped to the floor.

Hunger and thirst began to get their claws in.

On the fourth morning the king awoke to find another meal waiting for him, and the sculpture was gone from the windowsill.

He drank half of the water, devoured the bread, then chewed the meat to a flavorless plug and spat it out the window. Again the birds came down.

The harbor was busy. Broad flats floated past, bearing subdued huddles of people listening to instructions from their guards.

The flats moved between fishing boats and vanished for a time behind
a magnificent ship drawn by a team of seabulls. Sunclingers held to the ship’s wet hull just above the water, gleaming brighter and brighter, absorbing the light. Useless creatures. But glorious.

Wooden planks creaked above him, making him aware of a walkway and of other witnesses to this spectacle. Some steps were heavy—a large man, perhaps. The others were light and quick, two children. And then the laughter confirmed it—a man with two, no three, children. He must have been carrying the third. The children were counting and naming the sunclingers—Slimey and Grasper.

When the ship had moved out to sea, the crowded flats were far away, drawn to dock at the edge of the inlet. He thought he could see people moving off of them and into a series of spacious white tents.

“Can we go see the strangers, Papa?” a child asked.

Cal-raven heard a cough from somewhere beyond the wall, somewhere close. As he turned, he felt a flaring pain from his neck down his back—a cramp from a night sprawled on a wet stone floor.

Even though he was alone, he began to feel pressed upon from all sides, as if people were looking in and listening through the walls.

He woke to darkness and a quieter sea. Loose threads of scented oil touched the air. Somewhere voices were raised in dissonant litanies.

Do they think the moon hears their prayers?

And yet how many times had he addressed the empty air? How many times had he heard his father ranting in solitude as if someone might hear?

The ale boy sought the Keeper and was led to save so many lives. I spoke to my father as if his ghost might hear. I told him I wanted direction. And the Keeper appeared
.