Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

“Please believe me, Kol is doing all he can to see that Danae magic will carry Osriel through what he needs to do. If all goes well, you’ll not need to retrieve him from death. And I yet hope that somewhere in the great mystery that’s to happen on that night, we’ll find him an alternative to his legion of revenants. As for Voushanti…I’ve already told the prince that the mardane will not die again. I’ll let the man suck my marrow if that prevents it.” I stepped close enough I could feel the heated air quivering about her, and I could smell the salt in the tears she would never shed. “You know why Osriel’s chosen you for these hard things—because he knows of no one more clever or sensible, no one more skilled. Because he knows you will do it only if you are convinced it’s right, and we have no choices left. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where I was going. I was already half out of my head when I left. But I’d like to tell you what’s happened, because you were with me through the other, and I need—I think you might understand the parts I’ve not told anyone…”

I told her all of it—about my doulon sickness, about my guilt over Luviar and my shameful liaison with Malena, and my horror that she might carry a child of my loins. I told of exploring the Well, and how awkward and ungainly I had felt tripping over my feet in my mother’s footsteps, and how quiet and lonely it had been to be the Well, and how terrified I was of losing myself, and how it was the memory of her touch and her good humor that had soothed my fear, so that I had been able to yield my boundaries when I had to…

When I began to sweat and hold up her ceiling for fear of it crushing me, we moved outdoors—and still I babbled as I had never done in all my life. She asked sensible questions, and gifted me with thoroughly unsentimental encouragement when I confessed my doubts that Valen de Cartamandua could possibly be destined to heal plagues and pestilences, and she laughed when I told her of stinging tentacles and blue-scribed feathers in unlikely places.

When the stars had spun out their rounds, and she sat pinched and shivering in the well yard, no matter that I had given her the heavy cloak and wrapped her in my arms, I bent down and laid my forehead on her hair, inhaling its clean scent. “I thank you for this,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me. Next time, you must do the talking.”

She pushed me away, quirked her mouth, and stuffed the cloak in my lap. “Perhaps I’ll conjure myself into a tree, and you can dance around me—or I’ll come to you when you are living as the Well and can’t talk back.”

I slept long and deep that night, and I dreamed of dancing around her and of hearing her speak in the rustling of leaves and bubbles of starlight and the silence of stones.

“I presume the lighthouse is still at the abbey,” I said when Brother Victor joined Jullian, Elene, and me in Renna’s well yard on the morning before the solstice. “Never thought to ask.”

“It is,” he said through the windings of scarves and cowl and the extra cloak Saverian had insisted he wear for our short journey. Jullian carried a leather case filled with medicines, each labeled with uses and doses. Saverian must have been awake preparing them all night after I’d left her in the well yard.

I glanced up and all three of them were staring at me expectantly. I tried to take on a properly sober expression. “Well, we should be off, then. I—You must excuse me, mistress…Brother.”

Embarrassment quickly heated the still and bitter morning, as I wore naught but my gards beneath my cloak. I removed the cloak and draped it over Jullian’s shoulders. Trying to concentrate, I motioned for them to follow me down the colonnade.

Once we walked Gillarine’s cloisters, I held the others still for a moment, while I ensured no Harrowers lurked nearby. Jullian grinned as if he had invented me. I snatched my cloak from the boy, while Elene and Brother Victor gaped at the abbey ruins.

The little monk clenched his fist at his breast, his odd features lit from within. “Great Iero’s wonders! Who could imagine that it might take us longer to reach the lighthouse from the west cloister, than to reach the west cloister from Renna?”

Victor led us around the north end of the cloister, past the church and the carrels where the monks had pursued their studies in the open air and around the corner by the half-ruined chapter house. He stopped short of the worst of the blackened rubble and turned down the alley that had once marked the ground-level separation of chapter house and scriptorium.

Just beyond a mountain of fallen masonry and charred timbers, a perfectly intact arch supported what remained of the upper-level passage that had connected the two buildings. Set into the wall beneath the arch was a niche where a soot-stained mosaic depicted a saint reading a book.

“Now, mistress,” said Brother Victor, “I need you to lay your hands in the niche as we discussed.” The monk placed his own small hands atop Elene’s and closed his eyes.

A rainbow of light reived the day with magic, scalding my gards and near blinding me. The air crackled like burning sap and tasted of lightning. Neither Elene nor Jullian seemed to notice anything beyond the door that now stood open in the wall and the lamp that hung just inside, ready to show us the way downward.

“Brother, I am happier than ever that I never crossed you in my novice days,” I said, shaking my head clear of sparks and glare.

He smiled and motioned us into the doorway. “You had naught to fear. Only in the service of the lighthouse am I exempted from Saint Ophir’s proscription of sorcery.”

While Jullian and the chancellor inventoried pallets and lamps, blankets and pots, to see what extra supplies they might need brought from Renna, Elene and I explored the two great domed rooms. Though her father had been one of the lighthouse founders, she had never been inside.

The walls of one room were devoted to thousands of books, while the storage cases that lined the narrow walkways held the collected tools of physicians, masons, tailors, and every other craftsman. The second room held the collections of seeds, as well as plows, looms, lathes, and every other kind of implement the human mind could invent.

“Ah, Mother of Light,” whispered Elene as she gazed at the searing glory of Osriel’s domed ceilings—the overlaid wedges of jeweled glass that shone as if the sun itself hid behind them. “These are the very image of his soul…”

She expressed a wish to be alone; thus I wandered back to the other room. The books were useless to me, but I found the tools fascinating. Beside a case that held a collection of pens and inks, measuring sticks, compasses, and the like, stood a tall shelf holding a collection of scrolls and flat maps. Many bore the Cartamandua gryphon. On the lowest shelf sat a number of books.

I squatted beside the shelf and ran my fingers idly over the spines. I pulled out one book, but it was all text, not maps. The age and the decoration of its thin leather cover named it Aurellian…which reminded me of a small puzzle.

“Jullian, back at Fortress Torvo you told me that Gildas used an Aurellian book to interpret my grandfather’s maps. Why did he need such a thing? What did it tell him that the maps could not?”

The boy unrolled a palliasse, releasing a cloud of dust. “He didn’t use the Aurellian book so much to interpret the maps, as to tell him what to look for. It was a book of legends of the Danae. He said the stories told him where the holy places…the guardians…might be. And then he would know which maps to use to locate them.”

The world held its breath. “Did he ever mention something called the Plain? Or the legend of Askeron?”