Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

“Valen, are you ill? Did I strike you? Holy Mother, I’m sorry. You’ve been so—I didn’t mean—Let me find Saverian.”

The warming iron clanked onto the floor, the noise making me wince. Elene streaked out of the room in a blaze of scarlet, while I flung off the bedclothes and examined my naked flesh. What did I expect to see? Blue dragons tearing through my skin? Surely the doulon sickness had unstrung my reason.

But my mad grandfather’s words popped into my head as clearly as I’d heard them that last night at my family’s home. Everything is secrets and contracts…I stole from them. A treasure they did not value. I had the right, but they could not forgive the loss of it…Only, Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria was not my grandfather. He was my father.

I stumbled to my feet and strode the length of the chamber, an expansive room of whitewashed stone walls, of clean curves and arches and broad paned windows. Swelling anger gave strength to limbs too long cramped and idle. My skin buzzed as if I’d been buried in a barrel of flies.

Thou canst not know! He’ll think I told thee…Claudio exacted such a price…keeping me from thee. His babbling made sense now. I could reconstruct the history: Janus de Cartamandua, whose pureblood wife was long dead, had brought home an infant, a child of his own body, and struck a bargain with his son, Claudio. Raise this child as your own, Janus would have said, and I’ll not announce to the world that the Cartamandua bloodline is corrupted. I will even supply unimpeachable birth witnesses for the Registry.

Claudio, furious, filled with hate for the man who put him in such a position, would have agreed in a heart’s pulse…on condition that Janus stay away…never tell the child the truth…never interfere. For seven-and-twenty years Claudio had pretended to the world that the loathsome child, whose very existence promised ruin to the family, was his own pureblood offspring. And all the anger he dared not show for his own father, he had expended on the child he despised—the son of Janus de Cartamandua and a Dané named Clyste.

“Spirits of night…” Truth pierced my heart like a sword of fire, as painful as any remnant of my madness: I had heard my true mother’s voice. Beyond a barrier of mystery in Gillarine’s cloister garth, I had felt the pulse of her lingering life…experienced her grief and wordless tenderness, heard her music that had touched places within me that I didn’t know existed. But I’d not known it was she, imprisoned for Janus’s crime…trapped, condemned to slow fading. So he had described her fate. Now she was dead, and I could never know her. And I…

I propped my hands on a long bare table of scraped pine, my whole body shaking.

“Return to your bed, and I can keep the others away from you for a while longer.”

In an arched doorway stood a tall whip of a woman, dressed in riding leathers. Though her height spoke contrariwise, her nose, as long and straight as my own, her skin, the hue of hazelnuts, and her hair, straight, black, and heavy, tightly bound in a thick braid, testified unmistakably to Aurellian descent. Pureblood or very near. Tangled as I was in the unraveling of long deception and a loneliness that threatened to unman me, I had no capacity to guess who she might be.

“On the other hand, if you roam the halls of Renna, I’ll take no responsibility for the consequences, especially if you insist on wearing naught but your skin. The housemaids rarely see such sights. Evanori are a modest people.”

The prospect of visitors and questioning nauseated me. “I thank you for the offer, lady, but I doubt Kemen Sky Lord himself could keep Prince Osriel away once he hears a report of my state.” Once he knew his captive half Dané could speak.

“What state would that be?” Decisive footsteps brought her up behind me, and her leather gloves skittered onto the table. “As a physician, I propose dead as your most likely condition and that what I see before me must perforce be an apparition. Surely no human body could withstand what you have gone through this tenday and stand here speaking as if he’d a modicum of sense.”

“Physician?” I whipped my head around. She stood three or four paces away, her brows raised. “You’re Saverian…” The astringent angel.

“Please don’t bother me with ‘What an odd name for a woman,’ or ‘How could such a young woman possibly know enough to be a physician?’ or ‘You must mean hedge-witch, do you not?’ or ‘How could a modest woman bear to mess about with such nastiness as physicians must?’ So, Magnus Valentia, are you human or apparition or…something else?”

I averted my face, propped my backside on the table, and rubbed my aching head. Someone had trimmed my hair short again, disguising its telltale curl—so unnatural for a pureblood. “I don’t know what I am.”

To my discomfiture, the woman briskly installed herself in front of me and held out one open palm as if to demonstrate it held no weapon. Then she touched me with it—raised my chin, felt my forehead, and lifted my eyelids, peering inside me as if I were a vat of odd-smelling stew.

“For one, you are a doulon slave,” she said, as she retrieved my hand from my groin where it was attempting to maintain a bit of dignity before a stranger. She attended the beat in my wrist veins as dispassionately as ever Brother Robierre the infirmarian had done at Gillarine. “No matter how remarkably fast you have sloughed them off this time, nivat’s chains will ever bind you. I would be remiss if I did not say that here at the beginning. A fool should know what his stupidity has cost him.”

I examined her face, all unrelieved planes and angles. A small mouth and ungenerous lips. The pureblood nose narrow and sharp. Small creases between her dark brows, and crinkled lines clustered at the outer corners of her eyes, as if she spent a goodly time at her books, though the smoothness of her dusky skin testified that she could not yet have seen thirty summers. Naught of warmth or passion in that face. Naught of disgust either, which spoke decently of her philosophy as a physician.

Using both hands now and spitting a few unintelligible epithets under her breath, she explored my neck, strong fingers poking and prodding in search of who knew what. Yet the annoying agitation of my skin dulled, even as she produced a silver lancet and glass vial from out of nowhere and nicked and milked the vein in my left arm.

“What does that mean?” I said, watching her stopper the vial containing my blood and slip it into her pocket. “About the doulon. I’d not dared hope—”

“It means you’d best put nivat seeds right out of your head. To touch or even to smell them risks waking your craving again. And it means that you must find some other way to deal with this.” She blew on her fingers and touched my ears.

The world exploded in sound. Bleating, crunching, crackling, drumming…the noise trapped inside my skull felt as if it were bulging my eyes from the inside out.

Birds scrabbled on the roof. Pots rattled in a distant kitchen. Two women argued. A sick man moaned and mumbled in drugged sleep. A rhythmic crashing could only be someone raking hay. Horses chomped…mice scuttered…this very structure—a house of wood, not stone—creaked as the wind pushed on it. My heart rumbled like an avalanche beside the woman’s steady drumbeat.

I cringed and clapped my hands over my ears. “Blessed Deunor!”

Saverian’s warm hands covered mine and, at her muttered word, mercifully damped the clamor. Strong, capable hands. I would never mistake them.

“Thank you,” I whispered as the din in my head subsided. To my relief, my voice remained a whisper and not the onslaught of a whirlwind. “For all your kindness these days.”