Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

When storm and night and weariness left me too confused to continue, I attempted what I had never done before, seeking through the wind-whipped clouds above me to find the guide star. Fixed and firm, Escalor took its place in the landscape of my mind with the brilliance of my uncle’s gards. Using its anchor, I knew which way to go next. Thou shalt map the very bounds of heaven, Janus had told me, and wonder and gratitude swelled within me.

Happily, the harder I worked to juggle the fruits of senses and memory with the direction of magic and instinct, the less my nivat cravings troubled me. Not just in the way focused attention masks a nagging distraction, but in truth. My gards grew brighter as night closed in.

When my steps flagged, Kol taught me how to sniff out a Danae cache—a small stone vault filled with provisions and marked with an aromatic cluster of horsemint seed heads. I devoured every morsel of the dried apples and walnuts we found in the store. Kol watched me eat and eased my concern when my full stomach at last waked my conscience. “Replenish the cache next time thou dost walk these hills, and it will serve another who lacks time to hunt,” he said. Beyond that he refused to speak, save for an occasional, “Attention, stripling. Thy mind doth wander.”

My first shift after the cache took us from one ledge of rock to another and into calmer weather. The strip of blackness west of the ledge was the valley of the Kay. Only a few steps more and I led Kol down the slotlike passage through the cliff and into the high-walled corrie of my mother’s sianou.

Saints and angels…it felt as if we plumbed the very heart of winter. Ice as thick as my thigh sheathed the walls of the Well, glinting eerily with the reflected lightning of our gards. The pool had shrunk. Crumpled, broken ice hid its sunken surface. The wind moaned softly through the heights, swirling dry snow from the crevices.

“Inerrant thou hast come here, just as on the morn we met,” said Kol, who remained in the dark mouth of the passage. “The Well has not faded from thy memory.”

“No,” I said, hoping he would now explain. “Its location is as clear to me as on the night I first walked here.”

“Canst thou see…?” His voice trailed away as he walked toward the pool. After only a few steps, he sank to one knee and touched the ice-slicked rock. “Follow one of her paths. Prove it.”

I knelt and yielded magic, and it was as if the hidden stars came streaking into the corrie, embroidering trails of silver light upon the dark stone. Everywhere, circles and twining loops, layer upon layer of threads, as deep as I dared plunge, all quivering with light, each one that I touched with my inner eye thrumming with stretched music.

The uppermost image was bolder than those that lay immediately below, the steps larger. This was Kol’s own path, when he had danced his grief on the day we had retrieved Gerard’s body from the pool. Carefully I studied the interlaced threads of his steps, comparing it to the images that his movements had etched on my memory. And then I peeled away that layer—as one could with the thin transparent layers of the stones that men called angels’ glass—and examined the next.

My mother’s feet had laid down a more intricate pattern than Kol’s. I began to walk the silver thread. “She began here,” I said, touching the place at the far side of the pool. “Here a small leap.” A faint thread between a hard push and the landing. “Then a spin. A step and then another spin. The pattern repeated three more times…” As I walked I could almost feel her movements. “Here she paused, bending I think because the thread is uneven…another sequence of five steps and spins, and then here she made that twisting move as you do, on one foot, lowering her heel to mark each turn, again, and again…ten…twelve times…”

“Eppires,” he said, suffused with awe. “Thou canst truly see her steps. I recognize this kiran.”

“There are hundreds of paths here, layer upon layer. I could walk each one if you wished.”

“Do this one again,” he commanded, resolute. “And this time, shadow her moves.”

“I cannot—”

“Do not say I cannot. I do not expect thee to dance, only to move in the manner of the kiran, to feel that I may also feel.”

And so I began again. I pivoted and jumped in my own limited fashion. Wobbling. Awkward. I spun a quarter turn and tripped over my own foot, where Clyste had made three full rounds and landed on her toes. Filled with the remembrance of Kol’s grace, I knew I must appear a lumbering pig with feet of lead.

I balanced on one foot for a moment at the first spot where Clyste had paused…and felt a feather’s touch along my spine. At the next step I touched more softly on the ball of my bare foot and when I leaped to her next landing place, I recalled my leap from Torvo’s wall and drove my spirit upward with the imagining of my mother’s gift. I landed gently on my left foot, my knee and ankle bent. No wobble.

My skin flushed. Alive. Awake. As if the air spoke to me. As if a lover’s hand touched my lips. The color of my gards deepened. Eyes fixed to the silver thread, I brushed my right foot forward and shifted weight, as the pattern told me…

I finished the kiran on one knee, the alter leg stretched out behind me in line with my straight back, my fingertips touching my forehead. Only when I became aware of Kol’s gaze did I break into a sweat of embarrassment. “I got caught up in it,” I said, drawing into a huddle, wrapping my arms about my knee. I could not look at him. My crude miming must surely have appalled him.

“The ending position is called an allavé,” he said dryly. “Wert thou to stretch the spine longer, round the arms as if embracing a tree, and lower the hips, while aligning the back foot and hip properly with the correctly curved shoulder, I might call thy position…minimal. Now, touch the stone beneath thy feet.”

The ice had melted along the silvered path. The stone, warm beneath my fingertips, swelled as if with living breath. “This is not usual,” I said, half in terror, half in question, “for one of my poor skills.”

“No. Not usual.” Kol knelt beside me as my fingers traced the silver thread in awe and wonder. “In these few steps…a youngling’s raw beginning…thou hast summoned life where none dwelt when we stepped through into this place. Think, Valen, is it possible thou couldst find other kiran shadows like these, without knowing their location beforehand or their makers? Without maps or books? Couldst thou walk the world, seeking with thy hands and thy Cartamandua magic these patterns scribed in seasons past?”

“Yes, I believe—” And then did my thick head begin to comprehend what he was asking me. Janus’s map had failed to tell the Danae what they had forgotten, because they could not read the language of lines and symbols. But Clyste had seen my father’s truer magic. He had taken her into places she could not find on her own…and she had been able to coax dead lands back to life with her dancing. Danae could see only living things, and so Clyste had chosen to create a living map—a child who could find what was forgotten and dance it back into the pattern of the world.

“Thou art the answer, Valen,” said Kol softly. “Thou are the healing for the breaking of the world.”

A s a red tide departs a once-healthy shore, leaving behind a plague of tainted fish, so did my moment’s exhilaration rush out to leave me aghast, aching, and empty. “How can this fall to me? I’ve so few skills…scarcely begun…God’s bones, years…lifetimes…it would take me to seek out such places without the guidance of the map.”

Not soon enough to tilt the world’s balance on the solstice. Not soon enough to shield Osriel or Elene from dreadful choices, or save anyone, Danae or human, from coming treachery and chaos. And I was not fool enough to believe that this glimmer of life evoked by my awkward capering meant I could ever reclaim a sianou for the Canon.