Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

“Would that we could question Picus. But not long after he and my father returned to Navronne, the monk vanished without a word to anyone. Come along.” The prince motioned for me to walk with him. “What happens or does not happen on your birthday is not the only mystery to unravel. Would you like to hear what I know of your mother?”

“Very much.” I needed to move, to walk if I could not run.

“Clyste was my father’s foster sister, making you and me cousins of a sort. I hope that does not disturb you too awfully.” We walked out of the garden, through the airy passages, and into a series of shuttered rooms. “She was daughter of the Danae archon Stian and beloved of every Danae for her joyful spirit and for the skill and glory of her dancing. When Clyste came into her season for her fourth change, the powerful Dané who had guarded the Well for time unremembered announced that he was tired and ready to yield his sianou to a younger guardian. All believed that the Well, a place revered among the Danae, had chosen Clyste. Kol told Picus that she brought an intelligence and a perfection to the Canon that the long-lived had rarely seen.”

“Until Janus corrupted her,” I said, near spitting gall. Anger burrowed under my skin and throbbed like a septic wound, poisoning the hard peace I had made with the old man on that last night in Palinur.

Osriel shrugged and strolled through a chamber littered with old paint splashes and stacks of canvas into a room hung with every size and shape of willow bird cages—all of them vacant. Someone of wide-ranging interests had lived in this house. But no longer.

“My father’s failure to return to the Danae caused much anger and grief, and as years passed, visits with Clyste and Kol and my father’s other friends among the Danae grew rare. But on one night not long after I was born, Kol barged into my father’s bedchamber. Bitter and furious, Kol told him that Clyste had been bound to her sianou with myrtle and hyssop, forbidden to take bodily form again. He left with no further explanation, and my father neither saw nor spoke to another Dané before he died.”

I held back a curtain, and we passed into what must once have been a gracious library, its dusty shelves now holding only a few scattered volumes. I guessed that the rest now sat in the magical lighthouse.

“Clearly there is even more to the story than we know,” the prince continued, “for one must ask: If the Danae knew Janus de Cartamandua had stolen you and punished him for it, why did they never claim you? It would have been no great leap of intelligence to see that the infant who appeared in the Cartamandua house at the very time of the theft must be the half-Danae child.”

I caught his meaning. “Yet if they had known I was half Danae, they would never have tried to drown me in the bog along with everyone else.”

“Exactly so. I believe that, of all the Danae, only Kol knows who and what you are. Clyste never told them that Janus had fathered her child.”

Which meant that Kol alone had driven my grandfather mad and that it was unlikely that Kol had launched the owl to drown us in the bog. If he had wanted me dead, he’d already had ample opportunities.

“Had I known all this before Mellune Forest, I might have run into the wild and begged the Danae to make me one of them,” I said, “assuming such a thing is even possible. But whatever their reasons might have been, to trick fifty people into drowning—without judgment, without mercy, guilty and innocent alike—is as despicable as the Harrowers clogging wells with tar in Palinur. To protect my friends, I had to become complicit in their evil. I won’t do that again.”

Perhaps it was my imagination that Osriel’s complexion darkened. A perceptive man as he was would surely understand it was not only of Danae evils that I spoke.

I moved swiftly to make my intent clear. “I will uphold my oath of submission to you, lord—I’ll not run—but I intend to stay out of their way until my birthday.” I had no desire to live as a stone or a tree.

Our meandering path had led us back to the passage of shields and curtained doors. “Your position makes sense,” he said as we neared its end. “But you have also sworn to serve the lighthouse cabal. As there seems to be no immediate danger to you from Kol, I must call upon your oath and bid you guide me to a place where I can try once more to speak to him. We must discover if the Danae know the cause of the world’s sickness, and we must warn them of Sila Diaglou.”

Bonds of oath and obligation, now made all the more repugnant by this deeper loathing, settled about my limbs. “But, my lord—”

“You’ll not have to face him yourself. In the hour I stand in Danae lands—beside the Sentinel Oak at Caedmon’s Bridge—I shall deem your present obligation to me and to the cabal complete, and you may choose your own course to face your past and future. Saverian will maintain her remedy for your sickness as long as you require it. You will be welcome to reside here or come and go as your health allows.” His face—Gram’s face—expressed his particular earnest sincerity that could persuade a hen to lay its neck beneath the ax blade. “After the solstice, the world and our place in it will be changed for good or ill. At that time we will renegotiate the terms of your service. So, are you willing?”

Free to choose my own course…how sweet those words, offering the one thing I’d ever begged of the gods. He was right. If Kol meant to hand me over to the Danae or drive me mad, he could have taken me at Clyste’s Well or fifty different times back in Palinur. And the deed should be possible; I had seen the great oak where only a crude illusion should have existed, where nothing grew in the human plane. I could take Osriel there, then be on my way…search for Jullian. Once the boy walked free and Gildas had paid a price for Gerard’s murder, all my oaths would be fulfilled. Free to choose…“My lord, yes. Of course I’ll take you.”

“Good. I’ll have done with my thirsty warlords tonight. If you feel in anywise fit enough, we’ll leave for Aeginea tomorrow. Time presses us sorely.”

“I’ll be ready.”

I pulled aside the blue and yellow curtain and waited for the prince to enter my bedchamber, but he motioned me to go ahead alone, bidding me to rest well.

A wolf of hammered gold adorned the wall above the archway. Its garnet eyes gleamed fierce in the lamplight. Kindness, understanding, generosity…how easily Osriel induced me to forget my doubts. No matter my chosen course, this time I must not avert my eyes.

I took a knee and touched my forehead in proper obeisance, and rose at his nod. “Tell me, my lord,” I said, as he turned to go, “if Brother Victor dies, will you take his eyes?”

The gaze he cast over his shoulder could have frosted a volcano’s heart. “Yes.”

I wanted Osriel to be worthy of his inheritance and worthy of my trust, but as the Duc of Evanore vanished down the passage, it felt as if he dragged my entrails with him. I needed to learn what Elene would tell me.

R estlessness drew me out of my bedchamber before Osriel’s footsteps had faded, and I paced the sprawling house as if paid to measure its myriad dimensions. In hopes of finding Brother Victor, I bypassed the domed garden, the painter’s room, the scavenged library, and the other places I’d walked with the prince. Wisdom advised me to seek a confidant who did not transform my loins to fire and my mind to jam as Elene did. Loyalty bade me warn the monk of his peril. I could not believe he knew of Osriel’s unsavory practices. I was already chastising myself for agreeing to my master’s plan. Why did I trust him? He didn’t even bother to mask his infamy.