Restoration (43 page)

“Kryddon was very excited that he was close to remembering his name, and even more so because he'd remembered he had a brother named Sirto, and he was off to search for him. And he said to tell Denas ... you ... that Vyx was still wrong about fruit and birds. He said you must give them a try when you come and settle the argument once and for all.” She grabbed a piece of the peeled orange, popped it in her mouth, and looked up at me, awaiting an explanation.

“They always argued about food,” I said, impatient at the digression. “Kryddon and Vyx ... about what would be worth eating if they could taste what it was really like. Vyx said that roasting birds would be a waste of time, but that roasted fruit would be a delicacy worth savoring. Denas hated it when they talked of such things. He detested being so dependent on flesh to tell him the truth of the world, and despised himself for craving food and sleep and ... everything. He would prefer to give up eating altogether.” As ever, it was strange to speak so of Denas when he was inside of me listening, when we would soon be one being instead of two. “So they're able to use their senses properly when they shape their bodies?”

“So they say. You've given them such a gift, Seyonne. They hold you and Denas in such honor, you cannot imagine it.”

“I'm glad things worked out.” Good to know that between Blaise and my son and the rai-kirah, something worthwhile had come out of all this, no matter what the future brought.

But Fiona's tale was not done. “I learned all this on my first visit,” she said. “Even then Kryddon mentioned that a few of the rai-kirah had stopped looking for their families. Some didn't even seem to be interested in finding their names. He didn't understand it. Names would make them whole, he said, bind their forms of light to forms of flesh so they could truly live.”

She leaned forward as if to reinforce her telling. “When I went back a few weeks ago, things had changed a great deal, even in the short time I'd been away. I would walk for days and see no one. Houses sat half built. Fields that had been newly planted were growing wild. Few of the rai-kirah that I did see were wearing bodies, and even their forms of light seemed less ... substantial. Colors that had been so vivid now seemed pale. I sought out Kryddon again, and found him sitting beside a stream in a meadow, still in his body, but not quite holding it together. Parts of him—legs or face or torso—would shift into light form, but then he would stroke the grass or dip his hand in the stream, and his body would be complete again. I asked if he had found his brother, and he said he wasn't sure. I could scarcely induce him to talk. He had not yet remembered his own name, but he was more worried about the other rai-kirah. Most had decided that physical bodies were too taxing, he said. Sleeping, that's what they didn't like. He was having a hard time with it himself. They would wake up more tired than when they started, therefore many of them had stopped shaping bodies to avoid it. But stopping didn't seem to help anymore. They were all so tired, and some seemed to have disappeared altogether. No one knew where they'd gone.”

“He's using them,” I said. “Now they have bodies and sleep, he can touch their dreams, too, and being so close to him ... when they're in this state ... he wants their strength for himself. Somehow he can take it from them.” Fiona looked at me oddly, and I realized I was talking to myself. I was finding it difficult to concentrate on her tale. “What of the prisoner, Fiona? Did they say anything about the one in Tyrrad Nor?”

She shook her head, having to get through another fit of coughing before she could go on. “On my first journey, I asked about it,” she said. “Of course I did. No one knew who or what was in the fortress. They weren't even sure where the place was, except that it was high in the mountains beyond the gamarand wood. They wouldn't go into the wood. Said they couldn't remember anything about it, save that it was a holy place, a terrible place, and such things were best left undisturbed until they remembered. But you needed to know, so I couldn't just leave it—”

“You went there!” I crouched in front of her, working to keep from grabbing her shoulders and shaking the words out faster. The woman in green had bade me go to the gamarands.

Fiona nodded, illness and fatigue dismissed in the excitement of her telling. “All during my stay I was trying to find evidence, something to prove or disprove what we thought happened.” She spoke to Catrin. “Our ancestors lived in both worlds. The mosaic taught us that. But for some reason that we don't completely understand—something to do with Tyrrad Nor and a prophecy—they decided that it was too dangerous for them to live in Kir‘Navarrin any longer. Those who lived here—the builders, we've called them—chose to destroy all their works, so that no one would remember Kir'Navarrin and try to go back. But from what Seyonne was able to tell me, the ones who lived in Kir‘-Navarrin on the day the magic was done just walked away from their towns and villages, left their gardens and fields, dropped their tools, left their books open on their tables. I hoped to find some of it—villages, artifacts, artwork, something. But I found nothing save bits of walls and hearths still standing here and there, until I went into the gamarand wood.”

She was speaking to me again. “I explored it for days. The feel of that forest ... I can't describe it. Such a sad place and so beautiful. No signs that anyone ever lived there and no rai-kirah. I was about to give up, when I came on a stone tower, covered so thickly with moss and vines I thought at first it was a tree, huge and impossibly old. But on looking closer, I found stonework under the moss. I've never felt anything like that stone ... warmer than it should have been and oddly textured ... almost as if it were alive. But there was no door anywhere, and I thought I would go mad to get inside. Finally I remembered your vision of Vyx pressing himself into the prison wall, and I thought perhaps I had to push myself through it. Three days it took me to work out the enchantment. It took everything I had and a bit more besides, but with words of opening and passage, I eased myself through. Inside the tower, everything was perfectly preserved: furnishings, dishes ... You must go there yourself. I've drawn a map ...” She tore a page out of her journal and gave it to me. “It's where they planned it, Seyonne. They sat in a high room in that tower, a room where you can see the peaks of the mountains, and they decided what they had to do. They wrote it down on scrolls of parchment in a language I can't read, but they drew pictures, too, so I could guess what they'd done.”

“The split, you mean. Where they planned the split.”

“No. Long before that.” She opened her book to another page and showed me her sketches of the drawings she'd seen. “Everything was neat and tidy, and the scrolls were laid out on a table with a fresh candle beside them, as if ready for anyone who got through the door spells to examine them. I didn't dare bring them out of the tower; think how old they must be. Seyonne, it's where they planned the prison.”

Of course, I recognized what was depicted in the detailed plans. I had walked those ramparts in my dreams. I had explored that garden and touched that bounding wall in my siffaru. Fiona had copied down the text, too, and like Fiona, I was unable to read it. But unlike Fiona, I recognized some of the words.
Madonai, Kasparian,
and
Nyel
were interspersed throughout the text.

“Can you translate this?” asked Fiona, watching me.

“No.” I gave it back to her. “Anything else?”

“One more thing,” she said. “The strangest of all. High on a shelf, dusty and out of the way, I found a small wooden box. Inside was a cube of black stone about the size of my fist. A word was engraved on it. I'd not have thought one simple word was all that important until I decided to record it with the rest of these things. Seyonne, I couldn't remember it long enough to ink the pen. I'd look at the stone again and repeat the word in my head, but the moment I took my eyes away, it was as if I'd never seen anything. I tried to copy the word blindly, fixing my eyes on the stone, but nothing showed up on the paper. No matter what I tried, I could neither speak nor write nor remember it. So you'll have to look for yourself to see if you can make any sense of that.”

Fiona talked awhile longer ... of encounters with the fading rai-kirah, of her illness that began on setting foot in Kir‘Navar rin and worsened each day that she remained, preventing her from any attempt to ascend the massive bulk of the mountain beyond the gamarand wood. She had concluded that humans were not meant to live in Kir'Navarrin, and I knew it was true. Knew it with certainty. Before very long, her narrative trailed off. “You're ready to go, aren't you? Halfway there already, I think.”

The three of them were staring at me as I paced in circles about them, my arms wrapped about my gut as if I were cold or injured, or as if I could hold onto my soul if I could only get a tight enough grip on my body. “He's waiting for me,” I said. “I promised him I'd come back. You need to understand about him. He's not what we've thought.” The words sounded feeble. Hurried. Meaningless, without the story that went behind them. These three were friends I loved, but they were wasting my time. All my dilemmas and uncertainties and speculations had vanished like windblown smoke. I needed to go.

... to stand across the fathomless gulf from the light ... the one of darkness ...
Oh gods, have mercy, what was I doing?

I stopped my pacing and stepped away from the three of them, and just as if they had fallen off the edge of the world, I no longer sensed their presence. Only the presence waiting beyond the portal was real—the portal and the world beyond it that loomed larger than the landscape around me.

“Seyonne, what's wrong?” The voice might have come from the bottom of a well.

“Who's waiting?”

“Maybe you should stay awhile. Tell us what's happening to you...”

Beware, fool! This is the moment of danger! Listen to me
... With boundless rage, this new voice screamed at me inside my head, smashing through the walls of my enchantments.

Yes, danger. Danger from Nyel's unknown power. But danger, too, from inside myself—my own corruption. Ezzarian tradition taught that allowing a demon into one's soul could cause us to lose the demon war. I had done so, and we had lost. I could not ignore the possibility that all my newfound certainties were wrong.
I cannot listen to you, I said. I have important things to do.

...
I must remember ... give me the time ... we need to know ... yield to me ... give way. You will prevail in the end. This soul is yours and will ever be. Yield.

I cannot yield,
I said.
I can't take the chance.
I needed all of myself for this venture.
We'll remember what's needed,
I said.
If you question, I'll find the answers.
I forced Denas silent once again ... for the last time, I hoped.

Only one last thing to say, one matter of importance dredged up from the fading remnants of my past life like a gemstone dug out of the sand. “Tell Aleksander I didn't want to wake him this morning. Tell him ... my faith is stronger than ever. I believe he will change the world.”

“Seyonne, wait!”

“Stop him!”

With a sweep of my hand, I batted away their feeble attempts to stay me. Instead, I turned away from everything I knew and walked into the land that was my true home.

I stepped past the first pair of pillars. The fury in my head fell quiet, as when a storm passes overhead. I braced for the onslaught beyond the eye. Nothing. I kept walking.

Past the second pair. The night was warm and profoundly still. No stirring of wind or night bird's cry. No creature rustling the grass. No rai-kirah anywhere that I could detect. Above me sprawled a dome of stars, an array so brilliant that the shadows of the pillars lay across the white dust of the path as sharp-edged rectangles.

When would it begin? With every step between the ranks of white pillars I expected it ... the fire, the pain, the struggle for control, the horrifying certainty of invasion.

By the time I had traversed the length of the gateway, through the sixty pairs of pillars that were the reflection of the ranked columns in the human world, the smudge of light that marked the portal was no longer visible behind me. Before me, the silent countryside was bathed in starlight. Stands of gigantic trees in full leaf stood here and there, absolutely still in the silvered light, as if their very growth was suspended for the time. The ponds that lay in the hills and meadows might have been breeding pools for stars.

I stepped past the last pair of pillars. Still nothing.

I gazed out across the rolling landscape, yet every sense was turned inward. What was my name?
Seyonne, of course.
No hesitation. No confusion.

How old was I?
Thirty-eight.
Could that be all?

Who was my family?
Gareth, a gentle man who loved books, a tenyddar, required to work the fields of Ezzaria because he had no melydda, slain by a Derzhi sword on the day I became a slave. Joelle, a Weaver, the powerful protector of our settlement in southwestern Ezzaria, dead of fever when I was twelve. Elen, bright and loving elder sister, dead, too, struck down too young as she tried to defend our land from the invading Derzhi
...

Slowly, carefully, I released my breath. Despite the warm night, I shivered as would a man afflicted with ague. My palms were dripping—blood, not sweat as I discovered when I unclenched my fists and examined my hands. My own hands. I could tell the tale of each scar: the knuckle graze from a slip of my first knife, the ragged tear made by a razor-edged dragon wing in a long-ago demon combat, the callused ridges about my wrists from slave rings, and now these bleeding gouges made by terror ... My scars. My tales. My blood. Mine ...