Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

“Why too late?”

“She told them naught of our bargain. So the others locked her away to punish her. Chained her with myrtle and hyssop so she could not take bodily form. Bound her to slow fading. So young…”

The others. Other Danae. She was one of them.

I tried to ask more about the Danae, but every question became a knife thrust, wrenching sobs from his bony body. I had to try something else.

“Look, Capatronn, I’ve brought my book.” I pulled it out of its bag and eased around beside him. “I thought you might look at it with me as we did when I was a boy.”

His spasms waned as I allowed the weight of it to rest on his knees and opened it, ready to snatch it away if he tried to harm it. But his finger hovered over the title and then glided, not quite touching, over the glorious elaboration of gryphons and angels wrought in emerald green, scarlet, and gold that glinted in the lamplight. “I made this. I. When my head was right. The finest maps ever in the world. Mine.”

“Yes, indeed.” Madness had clearly not dimmed his self-admiration. “Remember, you gave it to me when I was seven. Patronn was furious.”

“Spited Claudio with the giving. He exacted such a price…keeping me from thee. Beastly. Shamed me to bargain with my own blood. So it pleased me to spite him. But my mind was forfeit…failing…and I had to give the book early.”

“And I was a wild, horrid child who never appreciated the gift. You made me swear to use—”

“Only after eight-and-twenty!” He snatched my hands away from the book and crushed them in his bony fingers, still incredibly strong. “Go not into their lands until thou art free. Only then. Thou gave me thy promise. Swore on the aingerou with thy blood. Thou must be careful with the book…Wait until the time is right and thou canst walk every corner of the world without bond or bowing to any. Thou’lt remain as thou art. Promise, Valen. Promise! I betrayed her so thou couldst be free.” His eyes and hands and head twitched.

“I always thought you meant I’d be free of Patronn, free of this house. But you didn’t, did you?” I eased my hands from his grip. He clenched his gnarled fingers to his breast and I enfolded them in my palms. “You meant something else altogether.”

“Free of them. Free of their Law, free of their dread summoning. Thou shalt be the greatest of the Cartamandua line. Our family will be powerful beyond dreaming. Thou shalt map the whirlpools of time, the vales of memory, perhaps even the very bounds of heaven and hell. But I cannot tell thee. Forbidden. Punished. Mad…” His eyes flared hot and wild in the dim light.

“It’s all right, Capatronn. I’m here and safe.” I changed course again to soothe his rising agitation, tacking toward answers like a sailing ship against the wind.

I turned a few pages of the book. “Let’s look at the maps—tell me again how their magic works so I can use them after I turn eight-and-twenty.” Time was running, and I had to calm my own frenzy. “Anyone else must read the spell in the cartouche or the border, but I—You knew I could not read words and might never learn. So how could I ever use the maps?”

“Foolish boy. I taught thee.” He shuffled through the pages to the first map and tapped his finger on a tiny mark at one corner. “I opened this book to thee, who art without words, yet complete. For thee only, every map has one. Feed it magic…trace thy path and feed it, too…and the land will open its arms to thy skills. Not yet though…not yet.”

I nudged his dirty finger aside and uncovered a grinning aingerou. He had put one on every page. “So I touch the aingerou and release magic into the page. Then I trace the route, feed it magic as well, and I can find my way without reading. Is that right?”

He clapped his hands and chuckled. “Clever, is it not? And thine own power will take thee farther yet, for thou art of my blood, thy bent incomparably strong.”

It was all I could do to hold back my finger from the page, but I dared not work spells here.

“Earth and air and sky are one whole,” he said. “At the boundaries of thy knowledge—the boundaries of the world’s map—walk and listen and feel the joining of earth, air, and sky, seeking thy desire. Take up thy pen. Thy blood—Cartamandua blood—bears the magic; thy fingers will funnel it through pen to page and the way will be clear. Travel the way thou hast scribed, and begin again.”

“But I don’t use—” No. No need to confuse him. I had never needed pen or ink to envision a route. When he had enjoined me to “feel the earth” back when I was a child, I hadn’t understood that he meant some abstract “sensing” of the universe that would only take shape when marked on paper. I had believed he meant for me to lay hands on the dirt as we did when tracking footsteps.

“Claudio never could do it. He draws only what he sees, for his mind is clay. Thou, lad…thou art quicksilver.” His trembling fingers turned the leaves, one by one, touching, but not quite touching, the inked features, the bright drawings on the grousherres, the elaborate designs of frames and cartouches. “Thou shalt find the places even I could not.”

But unless I could get free of Osriel, I would have no opportunity. Someone other than me would have to lead the cabal into Aeginea. “Tell me, must others use the aingerou as well—before they can use the written spells?”

“No. The book is thine alone—not for Claudio, not for Josefina, not Max or the rest. With the gryphon charm canst thou permit others to use it as it was made. Thy choice.”

The gryphon charm…great gods…no wonder he’d had me recite that bit of doggerel until my head split. “So I touch the gryphon—this one”—I pointed to the gilded beast on the front cover—“work the charm with a person’s name, and that person can use the book. My choice.”

He bobbed his head happily. “Thy choice. Thine own book forever.”

“Tell me, Capatronn, do any of these maps show a way into Aeginea?”

His fingers paused in their explorations, and he raised his face, stricken. “Go not to this place where I am, Valen…to this dark place…this mad place.”

“No, no. I just want to see the map you used to find Eodward. It must be very fine. Beautiful. Showing the power of your blood, of your art and magic. Then I’ll know which map not to follow until I’m eight-and-twenty.”

He leafed through more pages until he reached the very heart of the book. The open page displayed a wholly unremarkable fiché, little more than a line drawing without colors or gold leaf or any other elaboration. Very little lettering. One might have thought it a preliminary sketch bound into the book by mistake. The landform outlined so vaguely was certainly Navronne.

“No map can show the way,” he said. “Aeginea is everywhere. Nowhere. But this”—his tremulous finger drifted across the page from small notations of a tree and an arch to five rosettes scattered here and there in no particular pattern—“depicts its heart and its mystery.”

His chewed and broken nail touched a rosette, causing another symbol to appear beside it like a shadow, only to fade as he moved on to the next. I glimpsed the symbol for a mountain and another for the sea. A third, located beside the rosette at the top of the map, I didn’t know, but the fourth showed the same waterfall symbol he had used for Clyste’s Well. If that one did indeed depict the Well, then the tree and the arch must certainly be Caedmon’s Bridge and the Sentinel Oak.

“This is the Center,” he said, reverently, as he touched the fifth rosette, which was nowhere near to being the accurate center of the other symbols or the page itself. If the arch was Caedmon’s Bridge, then it lay well south in Evanore. Its shadow symbol was a bolt of lightning, a notation I had never learned. “Here is where the Chosen dances to bring all life to joining.”