Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

Deep shadows enveloped the gallery. Saverian could not have seen my hand rummaging in her medicine bag. I snatched out a few items and stuffed them in my pockets.

When the old woman’s tale was done, the lords began to sing. I stood up, fumbling the bag until I dropped it, spilling the loose contents on the gallery floor. That Saverian noticed. And came running.

“What have you done, fool?” she whispered, snatching up vials, packets, and tight-wrapped bundles of linen and wool. I held the bag open as she put the things away, sensing her itemizing each article, as I’d guessed she would. She patted the floor around us and hissed, “Three packets and two small jars are missing. Holy Mother…”

One of the lords took up another song—the Lay of Groshug, an interminable recounting of a bloody boar hunt that I enjoyed only when I was roaring drunk. They’d be bawling it for an hour at the least. Saverian would not dare risk a scene. And I gambled that she’d not dare leave her post. Her first duty was to Osriel’s health.

“I fear things dropped through the railing,” I whispered. “I’m sorry…I’ll fetch them.” And before she could protest, I shoved the bag into her hands and darted down the stair.

The stair dumped me into a dark vestibule, crowded with two big tables, piled with empty tankards and dirty serving platters. A wide door led back into the hall. A narrower door led outside, where an arcade fronted the long side of the building. Accompanied by the lords’ robust rendering of the chorus to the Lay of Groshug, I sped eastward through the arcade in search of the rock gate Elene had mentioned.

The geometries of such a fortress were fairly simple. A cross wall joined a long barracks building to the Great Hall. The arcade tunneled through the wall and ended abruptly in an alley at the far end of the hall. Follow the alley to the left, and you would end up in a paved yard surrounded by kitchens and bakehouses and storage buildings. Go right ten paces along the east end of the Great Hall, and you ran straight into the mountainside.

No gate was visible where the blocklike hall merged with the rocky buttress, but I guessed that the perilously steep set of steps cut into the mottled gray and red rock would lead me there. As I half climbed, half crawled up the interminable stair, I blessed Saverian for clearing my head. With only the diffuse light from the hall’s arrow slits to illuminate the rock, I needed all the acuity I could muster. My feet were bigger than the altogether too-slanted steps.

Elene awaited me atop the stair, like a warrior angel on a church spire. “I didn’t think you’d come, not a day out of your bed and bound by Saverian’s spellcraft.”

“To meet with you, lady, I would even climb this god-cursed stair again,” I said, gasping. “But by the Mother, do Evanori not approve of air?”

I bent over and propped my hands on my knees, coughing as the cold dry air rasped my heaving chest. I prayed I was not so sorely out of health as to be flattened by a hundred steps. But a squirrel could have toppled me.

“Renna is higher than Erasku. It’s even higher than Angor Nav—the duc’s official seat. Even I notice the sparse air here.” Her face was only a pale blur in the night, but her pinched voice hinted at high emotion reined tight. “Osriel told my father you were taking him to the Danae tomorrow. Is that true?”

“That’s what he wants,” I said. “We’ve less than a month until the solstice.”

“Come.”

By the time I accumulated enough breath to ask where, she had pivoted sharply and marched into the night. I followed carefully. The stair had brought us onto a steeply ascending apron of rock that skirted a bulge in the massive ridge. I hugged the rock wall on my left, for on my right, tiny, winking blots of torchlight and bonfires in a gaping darkness marked the heart-stopping drop to the fortress. The irregular path canted outward, and my boots hinted that ice lurked in its cracks and crevices.

“I had decided to send you back to your bed,” said Elene, little more than a formless darkness ahead of me. “To show you this betrays an oath I swore on my mother’s memory, a villainous oath that should condemn me to the netherworld for the making, not just for the breaking. He chose it. Not I—stupid, mooning cow that I am to be so led into godless folly.”

“What oath?” I caught up with her just as the path ended abruptly at an iron gate. The tall gate, anchored in the rock, blocked entry to a shallow breach in the ramparts of the ridge. “What folly?”

The gate rattled with Elene’s violent application of her boot. “Papa refuses to come here with me or listen to what I say, because my showing him would break my oath and because the secret’s owner is holy Caedmon’s heir. I’d hoped one of the monks might listen, but I was never allowed to be alone with them. And I could never tell anyone outside the cabal. All I want is to stop this wickedness. And so this morning, seeing how you sensed his evil already—rightly so—and I was so angry, I said I’d bring you. Yet I would send you away ignorant even now if he’d not told you he was going to the Danae right away. He means to do this…to use their magic…”

She grasped the iron hasp, touched it with a gold ring that shot sparks like fireflies into the dark, and spoke a word I could not decipher for the half growl, half sob that accompanied it.

“Mistress, you must excuse my confusion. Who is going to do what? Osriel?”

Indeed, I thought my acuity must be impaired again, so little sense could I make of all this. The most daunting news I’d gleaned from her avalanche of words was that her fear outstripped her anger.

The breach in the rocks proved to be but a crumbling wash the width of my armspan. It rose at a shallow pitch, which my lungs approved, and wound between huge boulders that were easy to spot—a good thing, as the sky was as dark as tar. I wasn’t sure how Elene could show me anything. Yet when we emerged from the gully atop the ridge, a livid haze lit the night before us, illuminating a scene of desolation.

For as far as I could see, the ridge top had been hacked away, gouged and broken into a shallow bowl a quellé wide, at least, seamed with trenches and pocked with dark holes. Broken troughs and sluices, iron wheels, and snarls of ancient rope rotted or rusted amid heaps of crushed rock. Chiseled slabs lay tilted and broken beside a monstrous quern and a cracked mortar broader than my armspan.

But it was not the ugly spoil heaps or grinding stones that colored my soul the same bruised gray as the unnatural haze and made me want to run far from this place. All the grief of Evanore lay here. All the anger. The pent emotions I had felt on the wind, and those I had sensed when first I looked upon Osriel’s land, were but goosedown to the leaden weight of sorrow and fury that settled on my spirit. I could scarce breathe.

“What gold could be dug from Dashon Ra has been long carted away,” said Elene, standing at my shoulder. “But he says the veins yet thread the earth like a web and extend throughout Evanore. He says they are like ring mail that strengthens our land, holding a power that fires magic. Come on.”

She marched down the sloping side of the abandoned mine, hopped across a deep, narrow trench, and skirted the corner of a rubble wall—all that remained of a shed. The haze thickened, coiling violet tendrils about Elene’s boots. I followed, wishing I had never asked her to show me this. Making Deunor’s sign upon my brow and drawing Iero’s holy seal upon my breast, I prayed that Saverian’s spell would not fail me. This land held terrible secrets.

Down and down. Our boots slipped and slid on the loose tailings and patches of ice. Nearing the bottom of the slope, we ducked under an ancient leat, solid and unbroken, though only grit and gravel remained where water had once flowed. Beyond us lay the lowermost levels of the mine, a rectangular pit of iron-laced rock the size of Renna’s Great Hall, cracked and scarred by weather and men’s work. Piles of rubble littered its floor. And across every handsbreadth of the rock walls, every protrusion, knob, or broken shelf held a vessel of carved stone, votive vessels as you would find in Deunor’s temple or Iero’s cathedral—hundreds of them, some the size of bread loaves or tabors, some smaller, palm-sized like oil lamps, like the calyx I had seen in Osriel’s bloody hands in the abbey kitchen.