Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

Sila Diaglou claimed her dark age would be a time of appeasement, a time of cleansing, required because we had forgotten our proper fear of the Gehoum, the elemental Powers who controlled the land and seasons. The bitter wind whined through the crags, as if to answer my skepticism with a reminder of our wildly skewed seasons, and the disease and starvation that howled at Navronne’s door like starved wolves.

Gram stroked the mare’s neck and fondled her ears. “Men are driven in such varied ways, Father Prior. Brother Gildas relished his task as Last Scholar, destined to be the holder of humankind’s accumulated wisdom. Perhaps—and who can say what is in a man’s heart?—he does not relish the task of First Teacher.”

Nemesio tightened his full lips. “We have only Brother Valen’s surmise. I’ll not believe ill of Brother Gildas without some proof. So where is this pool, Brother? We must get you back before the demon prince’s heathenish servants awaken.”

I’d been to the Well only once, in conditions of light and weather so different I didn’t trust my memory to recognize the cleft in the wall. So I crouched down, recalled the passage, the grotto, and the pool, and allowed magic to flow through my fingers into the stone beneath my feet. Cold, harsh, its cracks filled with frost crystals, the stone gave up its secrets far more reluctantly than earth. But I stretched my mind forward, swept the path and the cliff, and after a moment, a guiding thread claimed my senses—a surety something like that birds must feel when the days grow short and they streak southward beyond the mountains toward warmer climes. Such was the gift of the Cartamandua bent, the legacy of my father and grandfather’s bloodline—a gift I had spurned because of its cost to my freedom. “This way,” I said, moving northward along the shelf path.

“You said Prince Osriel himself comes to Gillarine tonight?” said Gram to the prior, as they trudged behind me, leading the beasts and sharing a flask Gram had brought.

“Aye,” said the prior. “’Twas only out of respect for good King Eodward’s memory that I could stomach hosting such a visitation. How could a noble king breed such a son?”

Gram downed a long pull from his flask. “Abbot Luviar himself could not explain the ways of the gods sufficient to that question.”

Dikes of dense black stone seamed the pale layers of the limestone cliff with vertical bands. Some twenty paces along the cliff, a wide crack split one of these dark bands. “Here,” I said. “We’ll find him here.”

The gray morning dimmed to twilight in the narrow passage. We stepped carefully. A dark glaze of ice sheathed the straight walls and slicked the stone beneath our feet. Ahead of us, beyond a rectangle of gray light, lay the little corrie, centered by a pool worn into the stone.

Clyste’s Well, the pool was called, named for the Dané who had last claimed guardianship there. On one of his journeys into the Danae realms, my grandfather had involved Clyste in a mysterious theft that had driven humans and Danae apart. For his part in the crime, the Danae had tormented his mind to madness. For hers, they had locked her away in her sianou, forbidding her to take human form again. She had lived on all the years since, enriching the lands watered by her spring, including Gillarine Abbey. But no more. My every sense insisted she was dead. Murdered.

Heart drumming against my ribs, I bade Nemesio leave the ass where he stood. A few steps more and we reached the entry, the point where the passage walls expanded to encircle the grotto like cupped hands. Ah, Holy Mother… I clamped my arms about my aching middle. I would have given my two legs to be wrong.

Translucent, blue-white cascades of ice ridged the vertical walls and sheeted the smooth ground. The pool itself lay unfrozen, dark and still, no matter the wind that whipped the heights, showering us with spicules of ice. Gerard floated on the glassy water, naked, bloodless. Rain must have washed his shredded flesh clean of blood and what scraps of his abbey garments the knives had spared. The thorough savagery could have left no blood inside him. Iron spikes had been driven through his outstretched hands, tethering him to the rocky bank like a boat to its mooring. But one hand had torn through as he struggled to escape his fate, and now dangled loose in the water. Harrowers left their ritual victims to suffer and bleed, for it was both their blood and their torment that poisoned the sleeping Danae and the lands they guarded. So my grandfather had told me.

Nemesio choked, and I shoved him ruthlessly back into the passage to empty himself, though it was likely foolish to worry about further desecrating a place so vilely profaned. Gram pressed his back to the cliff wall at the entry, his pale cheeks as stark and drawn as the frozen cascades. “I cannot go here,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you with this.”

“No matter. Rest as you need.” I retrieved a worn blanket from the donkey’s back and entered the grotto. Kneeling at the brink of the pool, I touched Gerard’s tethered hand. Cold. Great, holy gods…so cold. Darkness enfolded me, threaded my veins and sinews, tightened about my heart and lungs until I felt as if I shared the terrifying, lonely end of this child’s short life, and with it, the cold suffocation of the dead guardian. I needed desperately to empty my stomach, too, to cry out my sickness, to run, to be anywhere but this dreadful place. But I could not leave the boy. Forgive. Please gods and holy earth, forgive us all.

Stretching out from the brink, I drew him close, then worked awkwardly to wrap the blanket around him. By the time I had pulled his weakened flesh from the remaining spike, an iron-faced Nemesio had rejoined me. Together we used the blanket to lift the boy from the pool, then wrapped him in an outer blanket and carried him into the passage.

As the three of us tied the gray bundle to Dob’s back, a movement caught the corner of my eye back in the corrie. A glint of sapphire brilliance quickly vanished in the gray light.

“Go on out,” I whispered, still fighting to contain my own sickness. Gram looked ill, and the prior’s teeth clattered like a bone rattle. Nemesio and I were both soaked. “I’ll be along before you start down the steeps.”

Nemesio clucked softly to the donkey. I slipped back down the passage toward the rectangle of light, flattened myself to the icy wall, and peered into the grotto.

A tall, naked man, every quat of his lean flesh ridged with muscle, knelt on one knee beside the pool. Back bent, head bowed, he extended his long arms over the water in a graceful curve as if to embrace the very essence of the pond. Red hair twined with yellow flowers curled over one shoulder. Patterns of blue light scribed his skin—a sapphire heron on his back, vines and flowers the color of mountain sky on his powerful limbs, a spray of reeds drawn in azure and lapis along one thigh and hip.

The Dané lifted his head, and a single anguished cry tore through him—echoing from the ice-clad walls, resonating in my bones. And then, stretching his arms to the heavens, he rose on his bare toes and whipped one leg around so that he spun in place. A quick step and then he spun again…and then again, moving around the pool in a blur of flesh and color and woven light, one arm curved before his chest, one above his head. The very rocks wept with his sorrow. I thought my heart might stop with the beauty of it.

When he reached his starting point, I stepped farther into the grotto. He halted in midspin and dropped his hands to his sides. He was not at all surprised to see me. And I recognized him. Three times I had glimpsed this same one of them…but never so close. Never in the fullness of his glory.

His eyes glowed the fiery gold of aspen leaves in autumn. On his left cheek the fine-drawn pattern of light scribed a dragon, whose wings spread across brow, shoulder, and chest, and whose long tail wrapped about his left arm. Below the graceful reeds that curved from his hip across his belly, a hatchling dragon coiled about his groin and privy parts. He appeared no more than thirty, but Danae lived for centuries and did not age as humans do.