Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

“Here, taste this. It’s very sweet—makes Voushanti heave. But your sister told me you had a special love for mead.”

“Bless you, lord,” I whispered as the wagon jolted onward. “Bless you.” I licked what he dabbed on my lips and mourned because it tasted like pitch instead of mead. But I did not tell him so, because I was afraid he would abandon me to the dark and the visions. “Please speak to me, lord.”

“I’m sorry for my reticence, Valen. I’ve naught of cheer to report. So if you’d have me speak, then you must excuse my mentioning serious matters when you are so sick. Every hour brings us closer to the solstice, and I am in desperate need of a plan. How do I find the Danae? How do I persuade them to trust me? If you don’t get well—of course, you will—but if you don’t, I’ll be in a pretty mess.”

“Likely I’ll be sicker on the solstice,” I mumbled into the moldy wool. “Even if I survive this.”

“And why would you be sick on the solstice? I expect you to have your head clear of this cursed craving long before then. From what your sister told me, you’re never really sick.”

“Solstice is my birthday.” The effort of conversation made my head spin. “Always sick.”

“Indeed? You must have been a horrid child. Did you make yourself sick on your birthday? Too many sweets? Too much wine?”

This birthday…what was it? I had thought of something…before sickness and mania took me. Something nagged, like dirt left in a wound. Mustering every scrap of control I had left, I dug through the detritus of memory. Seven. The mystery of seven. My grandfather had confirmed it.

“On some birthdays, my disease got worse. On my seventh birthday, I set fire to my bed and ran away. On my fourteenth: I hurt so wicked, I took nivat the first time. Twenty-first: thought my prick would fall off. Almost killed a whore…” The wagon lurched and bumped. I clutched the blankets, shivering, and fought to keep talking. The dark waters of madness lapped at my mind. If I sank below the waves, I would never rise. “Gods, I am a lunatic. Always have been. But Janus says I’ll be free on this birthday—twenty-eighth. Dead, more like. Every seven years, I go mad.”

He was so quiet for so long, I panicked, flailing my arms in the darkness. “Please, don’t leave me, lord. Please!”

“I’m here, Valen.” He caught my arms and laid them gently at my side. I welcomed the searing torment as he laid a firm hand on my head. “That’s an extraordinary tale…seven, fourteen, twenty-one…and now twenty-eight. It reminds me of something in Picus’s journal. Picus was my father’s tutor, himself a monk as well as a sturdy warrior, sent to protect Father as he grew up in Danae fostering, and to ensure he learned of his own people. Picus wrote endlessly of numbers and their significance, especially seven and four. He it was who calculated the sevenfold difference in the spending of life in Aeginea. The Danae themselves pay no heed to numbers past four—the completion of the seasons that they call the gyre and their four remasti, or bodily changes: separation, exploration, regeneration, maturity…”

Moments seeped past in the dark. The horses whinnied. The cart jostled. The hand on my head quivered. My master’s voice shook when he took up again, though he had dropped it near a whisper. “You have always been rebellious…out of place…never sick, save for this peculiar disease festering in your bones. Your grandfather favored you above all his progeny…the same man who stole a treasure from the Danae…to which he claimed a right. Janus de Cartamandua, by coincidence the very same man who provided unimpeachable witnesses to your pureblood birth—his own two boyhood friends.”

Of a sudden, hands gripped my shoulder like jaws of iron.

“How blind I have been,” he said, “I, who have read Picus’s journals since I was a child. Think, Valen. Of course you can’t read. Of course confinement and suffocation madden you…make you feel as if you’re dying. Confinement within the works of man kills them. But you don’t die from it. Remember on the day your sister was to take you from Gillarine, Gildas gave you water—I’d swear on my father’s heart it was from the Well, already tainted with Gerard’s murder—and it poisoned you. But, again, you did not die, only got wretchedly sick, because you are both and neither. By all that lives in heaven or hell, Valen…”

And the truth lay before my crumbling mind, as gleaming and perfect as the golden key of paradise, as solid and irrefutable as the standing stones of my long questioning now shifted into a pattern that explained my father’s loathing and my mother’s drunken aversion and every mystery of my broken childhood. My father’s damning curse hung above it all like a new-birthed star in the firmament: You are no child of mine.

Indeed, my blood was no purer than Osriel the Bastard’s, at most only half Aurellian—and that half given me by Janus de Cartamandua, not Claudio. But unlike that of my rightful king, the taint that sullied my pure Aurellian heritage was not the royal blood of Navronne, but that of a pale-skinned race whose members were exceptionally tall, had curling hair, and could not read. Thou, who art without words, yet complete.

“…you are Danae.”

The cart bucked once more, and I lost my feeble hold on reason. The tides of pain, fire, and madness engulfed me, and I heard myself wailing as from a vast and lonely distance.

T he angel sponged my chest with warm water and chamomile. I scarcely dared breathe lest she realize I was awake—or as much awake as I ever seemed to get amid my cascading visits to hell and heaven. The sponge moved lower. A pleasurable languor settled in my belly and spread to knees and elbows. This moment was surely wrought in heaven. But who would ever have expected heaven to smell like chamomile?

She lifted the sponge, sloshed it in a metal basin, and squeezed it, the sound of dribbling water setting my mouth watering as well. Her washing was always quite thorough, the water deliciously warm, her fingers…ah, Holy Mother…her fingers strong and sure. Her hands were not the tender silk of a courtesan’s, nor were they rough and callused like those of a dairy-maid or seamstress, but firm and capable. Tough, but unscarred. Her voice named her female, but when she leaned across me to reach my sprawled arm, her body smelled of clean linen hung out in the sun to dry. An angel, then, not a woman. But her hands…

“I think you are beginning to enjoy this too much, Magnus Valentia.” The angel’s breath scalded my ear. “Either you are feigning sleep or your dreams have broached the bounds of propriety. Know this, sirrah: I would as soon tongue a goat as indulge a man’s pleasure—no matter the marvels of his birth.”

The warm sponge touched my groin…I groaned as gatzi drove me back into hell.

Magnus Valentia. The name attached itself to me in some vague fashion throughout my ensuing visit to the netherworld. As familiar spiders crept through my bowels with barbed feet, breeding their myriad children, who then flooded out of my nose and mouth and other bodily orifices, and as gatzi strung me up on a cliff of ice and lashed me with whips of fire, I examined the appellation carefully. Shoving aside pain and madness—what use to heed the twin keystones of my universe?—I turned it over and over in my ragged mind: Magnus Valentia. It wasn’t quite right. Not a lie, but not truth either. The few bits of truth I experienced—the angel’s sure hands, clean smell, and astringent tongue, the clean cold air that blasted my overheated face from time to time, an occasional taste of pungent wine, the plucked notes of a harp—had a certain rarefied quality about them, a hard-edged luminescence that distinguished them from mania.