Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

I started back.

Kol positioned himself at the very brink of sea and shore. Facing the sea cliff, he raised his arms straight over his head, then allowed them to settle slightly lower, at an upward angle with his shoulders. He paused there, face lifted to the cliff top.

Without reason, my steps slowed. My breathing paused. At the moment the sun nudged its rim above the sea cliff, Kol ran five mighty steps forward and leaped into the air, knees bent—one forward, one behind—lifting my heart right out of my body. Music, some marvelous discourse of pipe and dulcian, burst forth when his feet touched earth and he began a series of impossible leaps and spins, linked with sweeps of arm and hand, with slow turns and long extensions of leg…skyward, seaward…

Great gods have mercy! As the rays of morning light touched my cheek, the earth shifted beneath my bare feet…breathing…rejoicing…grieving…alive. I felt the exuberant burst of its renewal, as I had felt my own upon waking in sunlight through Osriel’s window. And this…the Dané’s dance…had caused it to happen.

Down on one knee, chest heaving, Kol extended his muscled leg and back and touched his forehead. He held the position impossibly long until his breathing stilled, so that one might believe him transformed into the very stone statue I had seen in Osriel’s garden. Perfect.

“Magnus Valentia!” Saverian called as I passed by her. “We need—”

“Can’t,” I yelled over my shoulder, for of a sudden I was running. Kol had risen, glanced at the barren rock, and was walking away.

“Kol, wait! I want…” Breathless, I came to the rocks and called after him, heedless of duty, fear, or pride. As if a sword had opened my breast to expose a wildcat in place of my heart, a lifetime’s worth of dissatisfaction, of restless searching and unfocused longing made some kind of sense. I had never imagined such possibility as my uncle had just revealed. If I wanted to help my friends, I had to live. If I wanted to live, I had to take this chance. I could not let fear and caution make me run away—not this time. “Please. Teach me.”

“S eason upon season does it require to learn the dance. The fullness of a gyre at the least to grasp the very beginning positions.” Kol’s hands flew up in empty offering, demonstrating the futility of what I begged. His every word and gesture spoke the extent of his scorn. “For a body half human, unpracticed, grown fixed in its working, for a mind distracted by human concerns and unprepared even by the remasti, the breadth and extent of the Everlasting would not be sufficient.”

Not even such denial could discourage me. Could I but find the proper words to describe this revelation…this certainty that lived in my very breath and bone…I could convince him.

“I am not wholly unpracticed,” I said, following as he strode along the shore, incoming wavelets lapping at his feet. His gards shimmered palest silver in the cold sunlight. “I’ve run since I could walk, danced since I first heard a flute in the marketplace. And I’ve vigor and endurance beyond other humans—I see that now.” My pleas sounded weak and pitiful beside a hunger that left the doulon but a passing whimsy. All my life’s desires and longings had come together in those moments of Kol’s dancing. Could I but grasp this purpose, surely all other matters—duties and vows and promises—would fall into a pattern I could comprehend. I was meant for this.

“To master the correct line of a jeque—the simplest leap—and how to balance, how to approach, how to land, how to shift weight and control the strength required while bringing grace and smoothness, takes practice—every day, every night, season upon season, constant work to develop the flexibility of the hip and the power of the leg and the understanding of how these work together. A sequence of three eppires—spins on one foot—happens not in all the seasons before a wanderkin becomes a stripling. And these are only the movements. The wanderkin and stripling study the land and seasons, the growing things, the beasts. Even more difficult…the maturing student must learn to work with the music of the Everlasting, so he may devise sequences of steps to conjoin all these elements, else the dance is but exercise with no effect. And once these are mastered, even yet must one learn the lore of the Canon and how to work a sianou. Thou art far beyond teaching, even were I willing to take on such a task.” He had drawn his brow so tight his dragon’s upper wing curled into a knot.

“A lifetime of practice…yes, I can see that. Like a swordsman’s training. I could not do what you do in any matter of months or years. Even the moves that appear simple are built on layers of strength and precision. But the other learning…Music lives in me; I hear it everywhere…even across the years, when I use my bent. And I’ve not spent my life without eyes or ears. Likely I picked up much of the worldly lore in all these years. It’s just the movements…” My limbs and spine longed to stretch and spin and soar. My heart and lungs ached to fuel such power as I had seen.

We rounded the curving end of the shallow cove and came to a point where sand yielded to a cobbled shore, carved with tide pools. White-winged gulls flapped and rode the wind, while bearded ducks and thin-necked grebes pecked at sea wrack abandoned by the tides.

Kol took out across the cobble, and I followed, abruptly aware of my bare feet on the cold hard knobs. The Dané halted and pointed at a crescent-shaped pool near the water’s edge. One could not mistake the challenge. “Share your knowledge, halfbreed. Tell me what lives here.”

Having worked for a time in the ports of Morian, I knew something of shore birds and fish and shelled creatures. But to recite them as for a schoolmaster…Kol’s expression echoed my every childhood tutor’s disbelief. Ignorant plebeiu. Stubborn, ill-mannered whelp who refuses even to try. Have you some disease, Magnus, that you cannot pick out one simple word from a page, or is this but the incurable hardness of your spirit?

I forced past failures aside. This was the dance, life that linked sunlight and sea and earth. Even the Cartamandua bent could never again bring me to this crossroads of possibility.

Kneeling on the hard cobbles, I peered into the clear water, the sunlight dazzling my eyes. I saw little but rocks and a few sea plants with long stalks and filmy red leaves. One tiny fish darted into the rocky shadows. The carnage the hunting birds had scattered on the cobble told me more. “There’ll be crabs and mussels here,” I said. “Those bunched green fronds are a snake plant stuck to the rock, I think. When the tide goes out, it withers.”

“But does it live or die? Guesses and simplicities hardly suffice.” Kol stood straight as a post. What did he want? Such creatures as lived in pools hid among the rocks and weeds. Who could know them all?

Irked by his contempt, I plunged my hands into the pool. Perhaps my bent might reveal what passed here in the same way it allowed me to distinguish footsteps. Elbow deep, the cold water wet my sleeves and crept upward toward my shoulders as I loosed magic to flow through my fingertips. I listened, smelled, tasted, stretched my mind into the crevices and crannies. Slowly, I began to comprehend what my senses uncovered: threads of color, of stillness and movement, of life and death.

“Fish live here,” I said. “Shannies and bearded rocklings—and tiny shrimp, almost transparent, and the warty yellow lump that is a slug, not a pebble. And this”—I touched a dark, twisted knot of a shell—“is a dog whelk that Hansker milk for purple dye. The strawberry growing on that bulging rock is no plant, but a tentacled beast that stings its prey—the smaller creatures who hide in these forests of leaves, like the glass shrimp brought in by the tide and the mitelings of the dog whelk…”