Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

“Brother Valen? What’s wrong? Why do you look like that?”

“Strike me…please…use anything!” Lest I be driven to roll in burning lamp oil or gash my hands with shards of glass, damaging myself beyond recovery.

Wind tearing at his hair, Jullian backed away and pressed himself to the door.

“Do it now, boy! Make it hurt!” My heart rattled my ribs, threatening to burst. My lungs strained for air enough to feed the raging power of enchantment. I screamed at him. “By holy Iero’s hand, strike me! I beg you!”

His twelve-year-old limbs had done their share of labor around the abbey. He broke the second chair over my head. It was enough.

A bolt of joyless ecstasy shot through my head and heart and gut, wiping clean the canvas of agony, settling the shards of life and mind into their proper places. I roared in release and rapture.

As ever, the sensation abandoned me as quickly as it had come, and I collapsed across the table, dull, lead-limbed, sick. Only this time my head and shoulders felt as if I had rammed into a tree. And this time it was Jullian weeping.

Though I could not lift my head from the table, I clung to conscious thought, heeded the crackle of dying flames, the smoky stink of cheap lamp oil, the blessedly cold wind—anything to keep me sensible for one moment. The two gatzi had left the boy and me to enjoy this vileness alone.

I stretched out my hand across the table, palm up, and beckoned him nearer. “It’s all right, Archangel,” I croaked, near weeping myself when I felt him step closer. I did not deserve such trust. “You did well. Thank you. Just…give me a little time.”

He tiptoed across to the bed and sat, and I fell into blackness.

“Brother Valen.” The whisper came from a thousand quellae distant. From another world. I turned my back on it and slipped again into my sinful dreams.

“Brother Valen.” The whisper touched me again, like the soft pecking of a chick.

I reached for my wits, caution nagging that I had been unconscious much too long. Mud clogged my veins. Every pore and sinew begged for sleep, and I longed to drag my leaden limbs into a badger’s burrow and hide. From what?

“Brother Valen.” Quiet. Patient. Terrified.

Like a rain of sewage, the abasement of the day fell on my head. I located my hand and raised it, hoping he would see I was something awake. Then I turned my face to the windows, inhaling wind and cloud and winter to sweep away the detritus of sin. The sun, fallen far into the west, hid deep behind Navronne’s shroud of storm. I willed it to sear away these aches and guilts as if it were a cautery iron.

I had no more time for sleep. Soon would come nightfall and Malena. Goddess mother, even after all this, the passing thought of the hateful wench…so ripe and willing…heated my core. I had no time for that either.

I raised my head a quat or two. Blotted my mouth on the back of my hand so as not to drool before the boy. Which seemed a silly matter now he’d seen my worst. “Are you well, lad?”

“None’s harmed me.” The terse declaration spoke more description than a warmoot’s worth of tales. Jullian, the scholarly boy who read books I would never comprehend, had no words to explain what his captors had done. What I had just done. So, Valen Lackwit, let anger banish lust and shame.

“Sorry I took so long to find you,” I said, shuddering as a howling gust billowed the shirt on my back. “Not much of a rescuer, eh?”

“I knew you’d come.”

Needing to be still before my skull cracked, I lowered my head onto my hand, where a sea star nestled in the grass. “A few matters came up along the way. Some ugly…like what you just saw. Some wondrous…unexpected.”

“Guessed that.” The bed creaked. His sandals scuffed a step or two in my direction. I felt his eyes on my glowing arms and feet. “Are you a demon?” he said softly.

“Great gods, no. Or…I believe not.” I grinned into my hand. “I’ll show you later. Just now”—I opened my ears; no one on the stair as yet—“we need to prepare for visitors. In the chest, there’s a bag of knucklebones.”

He scrambled to the task. Before I could lift my head up again, the canvas bag sat in front of my nose, alongside Gildas’s small lamp, relit from the dying flames of the spilled oil. “Do you know about the others held captive here—Thane Stearc and Gram?” he whispered over my bent back. “They need rescuing more than me. When I heard you’d come, I thought…”

“Aye, I know of them. We’re all getting out.”

“I don’t think—” His breathing came heavy and fast. “I don’t think they could possibly—I’ve heard Thane Stearc since they brought him here. Why would they do that to anyone? They’ve kept me just down the passage from his cell. They wake me so I can hear. I pray…” His voice quivered. “I pray for him to die.”

“The pr—Gram. Have you heard him, as well?” Jullian did not know Gram’s true identity.

“Coughing. Crying out. Mumbling madness like with a fever. Gildas complains he’s dying and can’t tell them what they want.” Good to hear the boy’s touch of anger. He should be angry. “Gildas says Stearc will open the lighthouse or they’ll burn off his—”

“Doesn’t matter what the gatzé says, Jullian. We’ll get them home.” I ignored the way the room sloshed like the waves of Evaldamon and lifted my head higher where I could look at the boy, so he might believe. His aspirant’s gown had been replaced by scraggly leggings and a thin yellow tunic, belted with rope. Dirt and grease matted his red-gold hair, and his ruddy cheeks were pinched with cold and fear. But his hands held steadier than mine, and his slender jaw jutted firm, willing to work with a demon to free his friends.

“Father Abbot would be proud of you, Jullian. There’s naught you could have done to help Stearc. Stearc himself would tell you that. The god knows it, too.”

I had once imagined Jullian to be Eodward’s youngest bastard, a Pretender to the Navron throne, hidden at Gillarine until his majority. Though I knew better now, he was well worthy of it—likely more so than any of the three men who stood in line.

“Gildas said I would stay here with you from now on, save when your…woman…came.”

“We’ve a thing or two to teach Brother Gildas.”

I fumbled Saverian’s vials from the knucklebone bag, wishing one of her medicines might help what was most wrong with me. I drained the blue vial. If we were going to be rousting dungeons, my stomach would need calming. The prince’s vial I stuck in the pouch at my waist, along with the vial of yellow broom. On the floor the silver needle gleamed in the lamplight, and beside it lay the little mirror, cracked through the middle. The nivat bag lay soaking up the unburned lamp oil. Even shamed and sickened, I dared not touch them.

“Those things I was using…toss them through the window bars. Quickly, before I tell you different.”

“What are they?” he said, retrieving them gingerly. “I thought you were working some powerful sorcery. Or dying.”

“Something of both.”

“While I waited…I touched you…to make sure you were breathing.” Gods, he was apologizing.

“The enchantment is called the doulon, Jullian. It is a sinful weakness, a poison that enslaves the mind and body. When I was scarce older than you, I used it to run away from terrible things. But the doulon itself is more terrible than any of the things I ran from. Someone may tempt you to it some day. Gildas may. But don’t allow it. Not ever.”

I did not watch as he disposed of the implements of sin, lest I grab them away. Instead I pressed my eyeballs back into their sockets and tried to think how to go about what we needed to do. Last time Gildas had given me an excess of nivat, I had experienced recurring attacks of thickheaded confusion for most of a day. Abbot Luviar had died because of it. I could not allow that to happen again.