Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

“Brother Victor…how fares he?” I’d heard a sick man struggling to breathe and wondered if it was the little monk. “I’d like to visit him. And Jullian…have we word of his fate? Plans for his rescue?”

His expression grave, Osriel clasped his hands behind his back. “We’ve had no further word of Jullian, and no word on the negotiations between my brother and Sila Diaglou. Be assured I remain committed to getting the boy back safely. As for Brother Victor…he improves daily, but his injuries were dreadful. Saverian has kept him asleep as she works to repair them. We hope he’ll wake again when they’ve healed enough to cause him less pain. Best leave him in peace for now.”

I was hardly surprised at his putting off my visit to the chancellor. “Later, then. As soon as he’s able. I would never have guessed Victor pureblood.”

“A humble man is a rarity among purebloods.”

“True,” I said, glancing at the magnificence above us. “For certain, I am no judge of men.”

I longed to pour out my myriad questions to my friend Gram, but I dared not expose my ignorance to Osriel. Which was a wholly foolish sentiment. After weeks of raving mania, what part of me could be left private?

We ambled down one of the paved walkways that interlaced the garden, pausing when we came upon a fountain tucked into a grove of elders. Water bubbled from the feet of a statue depicting a tall, nude woman with an eagle taking flight from her upraised hand. Beside her, a sculpted man bent one knee and stretched the other leg behind him in a straight line with his muscled back. His fingers touched the center of his forehead in a gesture of respect, as his stony eyes gazed on a small tree bursting from the earth just beyond his bent knee. My skin slithered over my bones when I noted the fine whorls and images carved into the figures’ marble flesh.

The prince stood at my shoulder. “My obstinate physician declines to reveal what the two of you discussed this morning. So I must ask if you remember our last conversation?”

I stared at the statues and forced my voice steady, as if on every day I spoke the unthinkable. “Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria sired me. The Dané named Clyste was my mother.”

“It explains a great deal, don’t you think?” he said. “So you believe it’s true?”

“Yes.” Though questions piled upon questions, like a flock of sheep at a narrow gate, each pushing to get through. “I wonder…did they lock her away in the earth for lying with a human or for allowing a human to steal me away?”

I stole a treasure they did not value, but could not forgive the loss of, so Janus had said. I could not yet think of the old man as my father.

“Almost certainly the latter,” said the prince. “My father and the monk Picus left Aeginea well before you were born. But I have Picus’s journals, where he recorded all he learned of the Danae. He wrote that once past the third change—the passage of regeneration—a Dané is capable of mating and can choose his or her partners at will. As long as a joining is consensual, none may gainsay it. Certainly for Clyste to conceive a child could have been no accident. Danae females are fertile on the four days of season’s change and no other. No matter that her family, the archon, and every other Dané would disapprove her choice, we must assume she chose Janus, and she chose to make a child with him.”

They’ll never have thee. I saw to it. The mad old man’s words hung in my memory like stars in the firmament, sharpening the familiar aching void in my chest. Of a sudden, no caution could restrain my questions. Half my life had been denied me, the other half twisted out of all recognition, and this prince held some answers at least. “Then why would she let him take me? Everything he said leads me to believe she consented.”

“Danae dislike halfbreeds”—he squatted beside the fountain and ran his fingers over the marble branches of the new-birthed tree—“but they believe no one else has any business raising one of their blood. Unlike Aurellian purebloods.” He flashed a grin up at me. “Once our blood is proved tainted, the Registry cares naught what becomes of us. Perhaps you’d like to send the Registry a notice of your changed status?”

I had already considered that. “They’d only believe it another of my lies.”

“Mmm…likely so.” He removed a stone cup from a niche beside the fountain, scooped water from the font, and drank it down. I declined his offer of the cup, and he replaced it in its niche.

“So Clyste’s child vanished,” he continued. “The Danae believed the child belonged with them and punished her. But as to Clyste’s purpose…A Danae mother is responsible for her child’s education, including preparation for the remasti. She selects the child’s vayar—the dance master. This preparation is the most serious and sacred duty among the long-lived. Perhaps she meant for Janus to bring you back at some time.”

I hadn’t even known the right questions to ask that night in Palinur, and my grandfather’s ragged mind had skipped from one thing to another. But there had been something…“He said she bade him destroy his maps to keep other humans away from the Danae lands, because he could ‘keep his promises’ without them. And he said he’d failed her. But that could mean a thousand things.” It was all very well to explore past intents, but the future concerned me more. “Why did he say I would be free when I turned eight-and-twenty? What happens then?”

“Four times in their lives—at the ages we would name seven, fourteen, one-and-twenty, eight-and-twenty—Danae undergo these bodily changes they call remasti or holy passages. We know little about the passages, save that each results in new gards—their skin markings. They consider the whole thing very private. Most of what Picus learned of them came from the confidences of one disaffected Dané female—a halfbreed girl named Ronila who left Aeginea before making her fourth change. He knew only the results of the fourth: The newly matured Danae are bound to a sianou and allowed to dance in the Canon itself for the first time, and from that day they are free to walk the world as they choose, subject to no person, law, or duty save the Law of the Everlasting as interpreted by their archon.”

“But Janus had no intention of me living as a Dané. He wanted me to stay clear of them until I passed my birthday.” ’Tis no life for thee, he had told me. “Perhaps that was it. He had promised Clyste that he would send me back and then changed his mind.”

Osriel nodded as he picked dead blooms from the violets massed about the fountain. “Therein, too, lies freedom of a sort. Picus wrote that those Danae who choose not to undergo the fourth remasti, or are forbidden to do so, or are incapable of it, lose the power to become one with a sianou. They revert to an ordinary life span—longer than humans live, but far short of the centuries a mature Dané would expect. It sounds as if you will become wholly human on your birthday. That must be what Janus wished.”

“There must be something more,” I said. “He told me I would be the greatest of the Cartamandua line. He said our family would be powerful beyond dreaming.” Dawning understanding knotted my hands and heated my cheeks. For a lifetime I had hated Janus de Cartamandua with every scrap of my strength. But he had given up his mind to the Danae, and in the throes of despair and weak-minded sentiment, I had come to believe he’d done it to protect me from harm. But now matters became clear. It was never for me—child or man. All was for the Cartamandua bloodline. “He must have thought staying free would strengthen my bent or change it in some way. He thought I would make our family ‘magnificent.’”