Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

She tipped her head to one side and pursed her thin lips into an unflattering knot. Her brow ridges were angled slightly downward from midfore-head, giving her a forever-quizzical expression. After a breathless moment, she shrugged. “Why not? Let it never be said I granted Osriel of Evanore exactly what he desired on any occasion whatsoever.”

I didn’t think I’d ever met a person so unattached to human feelings. All the world seemed subject to her disdain. Recalcitrant logs or foolish sorcerers could cause her transitory annoyance, but I couldn’t imagine what it might take to truly frighten her, or to please her, for that matter. At least she had no red sparks centering her pupils.

Saverian sat in my room for several hours that afternoon, writing in her journal, reading from several books, annoyed when I tried to talk or ask questions.

“Sleep, if you can’t think of anything better to do,” she said, after one ill-timed query. “I’m not here to entertain you. You’ve taken enough of my time over the past few weeks.”

But my skin itched and my insides felt like a nest of ants. I could no more sleep than I could read her books. “What do you do with your time when not nursing twist-minds or demon princes? I’ve never seen anyone save monks or schoolmasters sit so long with a book.”

“Books don’t prattle. Books don’t make demands. Yet they give you everything they possess. It’s a very satisfying partnership.”

I considered that for a while, as I watched her read. Annoyance vanished as the words absorbed her attention, replaced by a fluid mix of interest, curiosity, and serious consideration. Her brow would furrow; then she would write something in her journal. Once the thought was recorded, the furrow smoothed, and she went back to reading. Books supplied companionship, perhaps, but I doubted any words on a page could do what her hands had done for me as I lay in the doulon madness. “Satisfying doesn’t sound like much to aim for.”

“Enough!” With a spit of exasperation, she scooped all her belongings into an untidy armload and headed for the door. “I’ll fetch you in time for the warmoot.”

I spent the next few hours berating myself as an idiot. I hadn’t meant to voice my musings aloud. At least she had given me something to look at beyond four walls and a bed.

One of her books had fallen to the floor beneath the table. I thumbed through it, picking out one or two letters that I knew, then watching them melt and flow into the ones next to them. Gods, useless. I threw the book across the room and went to sleep.

True to her word, Saverian returned just after a bristle-bearded serving man had lit the lamps. As I snatched a long black cloak from the clothes chest, I felt warmly satisfied that, for the first time in forever, I was both reasonably clearheaded and taking some action on my own behalf.

“You need to eat more than one bite of meat and a dried plum,” said the physician after inspecting the food tray that had arrived an hour earlier. She stuffed a slice of oily cheese into my hand. “Eat this as we walk, and I won’t find a reason to abort this venture.”

I could make no plans until we reached the fortress, but if I were to shake free of Saverian and find Elene, I would likely need magic more than nourishment. I obediently took a bite of cheese, then held out my fingers. “Can you unlock these, good physician? I feel a cripple without my bent even to know north from south.”

Her dark heavy cloak made her look taller and more than ever like a stick. She shrugged. “You assign me more skill than my due. It’s not your fingers, but only this house I’ve sealed against your magic—and that only possible because it is a peculiar house with a number of in-built protections already. I assumed you would be more in control of yourself by the time we took you out walking. Please tell me that’s true.”

“I promise I’m in possession of all the reason I was born with.” I grinned and took another bite of cheese to please her. “Honestly, I do appreciate your care.”

She blew a derisive breath and hefted a stout leather bag over one shoulder, the bag of the sort that Voushanti used to carry Prince Osriel’s medicines. The outer doors waited in a pleasant vaulted alcove I’d not glimpsed in all my wanderings. The four broad panels of the twin doors had been painted to depict the seasons, the rich hues and intricate drawing giving the depth of truth to the design. Though stunningly beautiful, the paintings left a hollow in my breast. Each panel showed a pair of dancers, their pale flesh twined with designs of azure and lapis. We pulled open the doors and stepped into the winter night.

The cold snatched my breath away. Fine, sharp grains of snow stung the skin, the particles more a part of the air itself than anything that would pile or drift on the barren ground. Across the windswept slope, bonfires and torches lit the fortress gates and walls, orange flames writhing alongside a hundred or more whipping banners that flew from the battlements.

As we trudged down the path, thick darkness crowded the light-pooled fortress and the soft-lit windows of the house we had just abandoned, as if the mountains had drawn closer under cover of the starless, moonless night. I drew my cloak tight, grateful for Saverian’s enchantment that tamed my senses. It must be that Evanore’s violent history remained raw enough to taint the night with the anguish of its dying warriors and the wails of its starving children, for the wind bore grief and despair and anger on its back as surely as it carried shouts of greeting or the smells of horses and smoke. A harsh, dry land was Evanore. I would no more touch my fingers to this earth than spit on a grave.

From the battlements sounded the low, heavy tones of a sonnivar, the hooked horn that stretched taller than me when stood on end and that rang so deep and so true its call could be heard for vast distances through the mountains and vales, guiding Evanore’s warriors home. Evanori claimed the timbre of each warlord’s sonnivar unique, so that a fog-blind warrior could identify which fortress he approached from the sonnivar greeting alone.

A party of horsemen rode over the steep crest of the valley road and cantered up the gentler slope to the gates. Gruff voices carried across the dark hillside, shouting challenges and orders until the portcullis clanked and rumbled open and the party rode through.

“Pull up your hood,” said Saverian softly, as if fearing that we, too, might be heard from afar. “And carry this.” She shoved her leather bag into my hands. I hefted the heavy little bag onto my back, as our path joined the trampled roadway to the gates.

“The password, Saverian,” said a slab-sided warrior standing to one side of the sizable detachment manning the gate tower and portcullis. “Even for you this night. And identify your friend.”

“Pustules,” said the physician. She stepped up close to him, as the sonnivar boomed again from above our heads. “Is your wife pleased with your renewed affections, Dreogan? Perhaps I need to reexamine your little—”

“Pass!” bellowed the guard. A snickering youth waited behind an iron wicket set into the tower wall. At the guard’s signal, the youth unlocked the little gate, let us through, and locked it again behind us.

“You’re on report, Dreogan!” Saverian called over her shoulder. “This is no night to be slack.”

“Deunor’s fire,” I said, “has every man in the universe got crossways with you?”

“You’ve not seen me crossways, sirrah. Dreogan would kiss my feet did I but ask. More fool he.”

More fool the man who imagined my companion a feeling woman.

The burly warrior’s curses followed us as we hurried through a passage so low I had to duck and so narrow we could not walk abreast. The close quarters set my teeth on edge. Once through, we passed without challenge across the barren outer bailey and through the inner gates into the bustling main courtyard. Thick smoke rose from torches and warming fires, as squires and men-at-arms groomed horses, honed weapons, greeted friends, and shared out provisions. A burst of cheers and oaths pinpointed a dice game on our left, and whoops rose from the milling crowd when servants rolled three carts loaded with ale casks into the yard. We kept to the quiet perimeter, dodging several sighing fellows who’d come to the shadowed wall to piss or satisfy a lonely soldier’s fleshly urges.