Sunbolt (The Sunbolt Chronicles) (18 page)

We tie our horses to a tree at the edge of the clearing that surrounds the cottage, and I follow Val to the house. The land around it is broken and muddy, with bits of plant and leaves sticking up, and I know that this must be the remains of a garden. While I cannot recall seeing gardens before, this feels familiar to me in a way that the forests and mountains we have travelled through do not. I hear the faint clucking of hens, and beyond the cottage I see goats grazing.

A woman opens the door when we are still some paces away, her pale hair pulled back in a bun, her face equally pallid. There are crow’s feet by her eyes and lines of sorrow around her mouth. For a long moment she merely stands in the doorway, looking at us. And then she says, coldly, “Breather.”

“Shelter,” Val says. “By the Laws of Old, we seek shelter.”

I wonder if she will chase us away, or close her door on us, but then she says, “Three days and three nights, by the Laws of Old. Do not overstay.”

Her home is a single room, with a loft above and a stone cellar below. We sit at her dining table and she brings me a bowl of hot stew and fresh bread. She brings Val nothing, sitting across from him in silence.
 

I adjust my cloak as I eat, and the hood slips off. I feel her gaze at once.

“This one is not well,” she says, studying me. I pull the hood back over my head, clumsy in my embarrassment.

“No,” Val agrees.
 

“Was it a fang?” She rubs her thumb against the edge of the table. “She is as pale and thin as one might expect, but,” she pauses, then clicks her jaw shut, biting off the end of her sentence. “When did she lose her hair?”

“Near two months ago,” Val says.
 

“There was a fang,” I volunteer, but at Val’s glance fall silent.

The woman watches us with only a slight crease of her brow. I think that she means to question me, but when she speaks she only asks, “Would you like more stew?”

“Please,” I say, and she refills my bowl.
 

When she takes her seat again, Val says, “There are tales about you.”

“Fools tell them.” The words are abrupt, almost bitter. She sits stiffly, her back straight as a board, her hands hidden on her lap beneath the table.
 

“Your name is Brigit Stormwind, and you are a High Mage.”
 

She shrugs, a slight twitch of her shoulders. “So much, at least, is true.”

“Did you ever hear tell of a mage named Rasheed Coldeye?”

I look up, slopping the contents of my spoon onto the table. The woman, Stormwind, glances at me quizzically. “I have.”

“Who was he?”

“The Arch Mage of Falinor. Anyone of the eastern kingdoms can tell you that.”

Val places his palms flat on the table, studying the back of his hands. “What did you think of him?”

“He was a fool to trust the people he did, and a greater fool to make the enemies he did. He should have seen his death coming.”
 

I swallow hard, setting down the spoon. She means that my father was murdered. I try to shake the thought loose, but it sticks in my mind like a prickly burr, catching on memories that lie just beneath the darkness.

Val considers Stormwind thoughtfully. “Could you see all that from your valley?”
 

“The waters of my lake are clear as crystal, breather. I do not need to leave to know what passes beyond these mountains.” She speaks roughly, an old anger brushing at the surface of her words. I wonder who belittled her before. I wonder what drove a High Mage to live as a hermit hidden in a secret valley.

“Would you have given your support to Coldeye?” Val asks. “Or was he only a different sort of trouble?”

“There are many sorts of trouble in the world,” Stormwind says, smiling thinly. “What are you asking?”

“If he needed help, would you have given it?”

“Where are your questions tending, breather? I do not trust your kind. If you want my help, tell me what you are about.”

Val looks at me. Before he can speak, I say, “My father was Rasheed Coldeye.”

“And she,” Val finishes for me, “is a Promise.”

Stormwind stiffens, her pale eyes fastening on me. “A Promise? That seems unlikely. Coldeye had no magical children.” She hesitates. “If this is true, then an untrained Promise at your age is very dangerous. You should be reported, taken in to the High Council.”
 

“You won’t catch her,” Val says, “as long as she is under my protection.”

Stormwind looks between us as if she cannot quite fathom Val’s words, what I am. “Why would a breather protect a wild Promise?”

“Because two months ago it was not a fang that touched her.”

“Speak plainly, breather,” she says, crossing her arms. She seems as tautly strung as a bow. I wait as well, my hands gripping the edge of the bench. I wonder if Val will tell her more than I remember.
 

“For the last year I have been the prisoner of the fang lord Kol—you have heard his name?” Val asks.

“I have,” the woman allows. “He took Pren Castle in Gadon some years back. That is a land that has fallen into darkness.”

“There is darkness everywhere,” Val replies blandly. “Kol kept me in a tower room, delivering me an occasional human to breathe from.” The woman regards him coolly, waiting. “Then he made a mistake. He brought me the daughter of Rasheed Coldeye. She promised to free me if I did not harm her.”

“Why would a Promise—” Stormwind begins, but Val cuts her off.
 

“She called first to the birds, and a crow brought her a needle.”
 

“Impossible,” Stormwind snaps. “No wild Promise can do that.”

“She took the needle,” Val continues, unperturbed, “and cut herself. She used her own blood to break the enchantment that held me, a blood spell that had bound a woman’s soul within it.”
 

“A blood spell,” Stormwind echoes. She gives me a long, measuring look, one that holds a certain amount of suspicion. I meet her gaze. Blood magic sounds rather dubious to me, too. But calling to a crow? That seems a wonderful thing. I wish I remembered how I did that.
 

“We escaped the tower but were recaptured in the hills. Kol was there, and he and I fought. The girl had already been beaten by him. She lay on the ground hardly able to rise.” Val leans back, his violet eyes intent on Stormwind. “I had been starved for a year, and though I had breathed from the soldiers who chased us, I was hardly Kol’s equal. I began to lose. Just as I thought he would finish me, he was struck by a bolt of lightning.”

She pales, and it takes her a moment to find her words. “What you are saying cannot be.”

“Kol,” Val smiles, “turned to ash before my eyes. She burnt like a blazing star and breathed smoke and still coughs cinders.”

“A wild Promise cannot … that is a working of the highest order.”

“Perhaps,” Val suggests, “she is not wholly untrained. I agree that her survival was miraculous. I thought her dead at first, and you know that I can scent life in every creature.”

“Rasheed Coldeye,” Stormwind mutters. She chews her bottom lip, her eyes roving over my features. “Your father trained you?”

“A little, I think,” I say. Clearly Val believes it’s true, so I must have told him so at some point.

“He did not take you as his apprentice?”

I glance towards Val.
 

“They hid her, taught her in secret,” he says for me.

Stormwind looks back at me. “Your mother was also a mage.”

“Yes. Hotaru Brokensword.”

“How did she die?”

I meet her gaze, bewildered, remembering the woman dressed in blue silks. Why would Stormwind suppose my mother dead? I take a breath, pushing farther into the dark corners of my mind, knowing that the answers are waiting there for me.
 

And, suddenly, the memories blossom like flowers opening towards the sun. My father, lying pale and still on his bed, his eyes wide and staring, dead. My mother, her chest heaving in coughs that spatter blood on her kerchiefs, insisting that she and I travel to Karolene, seek help from a mage there. And, finally, Wilhelm Blackflame when I first met him, after my mother had gone to him and never returned. He looked at me as if I were a cursed thing, a piece of filth marring the perfection of his courtyard. His words ring in my ears as they did that first time, distant, hard.
Hotaru Brokensword is dead. Do not come here again.
 

In the silence while I remember, Val speaks, his words half-mocking, “Did your waters not show you?”

“I did not look,” she says stiffly.

“We went to Karolene to seek help,” I tell her finally. “After my father died. But my mother disappeared.”

Stormwind stares at me, her lips parted slightly, for the first time neither suspicious nor aloof. Instead, she appears to be struggling against mounting horror. “Karolene? Why Karolene?”

“My mother thought Master Blackflame would help her. He didn’t—or perhaps he did. I followed after her, once she didn’t return, and he told me she had died. But …”

“But?” Stormwind asks, her voice sharp. Everything about her seems sharp, on edge.
 

“But she’s still alive, and living in his home. I saw her.” I glance towards Val, wondering why the memory feels empty, like an image painted on a backdrop of lotus flowers and blue skies, a picture I might have seen somewhere. How much of me was burnt away with the spell I cast?

“I see.” Stormwind drops her gaze to the tabletop. She breathes slowly, evenly, focused inward. After a moment, she looks back up and it is as if I had never mentioned seeing my mother. She says, “Your parents could not have taught you very much in secret. How did you make your lightning bolt?”

I don’t recall my parents teaching me anything at all, but the spell—that I remember. “It wasn’t lightning. It was sunlight.”

“The sun was still rising,” Val objects, then presses his lips together. He had not meant to contradict me, but he hasn’t really. He doesn’t know what I did when I killed Kol.

“I gathered it from where it slept in every creature around me, in every thing that had ever been touched by a ray of sunlight.”

“Gathered it,” Stormwind echoes. “But you didn’t know how to channel such power.”
 

I shake my head uncertainly.
 

“She has lost much of her memory, Mistress Stormwind,” Val says. It seems he has finally decided to trust her with the truth of how damaged I am. “She knows only pieces of her life before she made her casting.”

Stormwind nods. “I expect it burnt its way right through her and took everything it touched. A fire requires fuel.”

“I want to remember,” I say.

Neither Stormwind nor Val answer me. Instead, Val rises from the table. “We will be pleased to stay with you these three days.”

“Indeed.”

“By the Laws of Old,” he begins. She looks at him, her expression so cold and sharp it might have cut glass. He smiles as he continues, “I offer any help I can while I am here. Have you any needs?”
 

Val spends the bulk of that day and the next on the cottage roof, fixing broken shingles and cutting out rot. I climb up beside him, though he doesn’t let me do much beyond that. “Just sit,” he admonishes me. “She’ll give you work soon enough.”

“But we’re leaving after tomorrow,” I point out on the second day when she still hasn’t given me any chores.
 

“I am,” he says. “We breathers have a rather dark history when it comes to mages. I dare not stay beyond the three days.”

“You’re not taking me with you,” I say slowly.

“Not if Stormwind will keep you. She can train that Promise of yours.”

“She wants to turn me over to the High Council.”

Val hammers down a new shingle. I watch him, and it occurs to me that he is unexpectedly good at mending roofs. He sits back on his heel to look at the lake. Framed by the mountains rising around it, and unruffled by any wind, it looks like a mirror, perfectly reflecting the sky.
 

Val tells me, “Stormwind respected your father. She’s now thinking about what he meant to do by keeping his own daughter’s Promise a secret. She’s looking into who you were and where you lived and what happened to you. She knows that your casting was of a higher order than many mages ever achieve. She will take you on as her student despite her misgivings. Here, in this valley, you can learn from her and will be safe from prying eyes.”

He turns back to the roof. “Nail.”
 

I hand him another nail. Five shingles later, as he peels off a splintering scrap of wood and studies the touch of rot beneath it, I ask him, “Where will you go?”

“I have sworn allegiance to a prince of my people. I will return to serve him. He will want to hear what I have to tell of Kol.” Val smiles grimly.

“What’s his name? I’ve never heard of a breather prince.” At least, not that I can remember. Which isn’t saying much at all.

“Names have great power,” he says, his eyes catching mine. “I will tell you that he lives in the Amara Mountains.”

I have no idea how far the Amaras may be. “Will you come back?” I ask.