Lightfall, p.16
LightFall, page 16
I would’ve cried from exhaustion and hopelessness and crushing boredom, but my eyes were too dry.
Imbril broke first, shoving aside all the books with an oath that seemed very inappropriate for a holy man. “The other lors should be here. All together, they have centuries of knowledge.”
Dyania looked up from her book. “No’Maru seemed clear that this endeavor wouldn’t be approved by the haloria.”
“Then what am I doing here?” His voice wavered toward querulous old uncle, grating on my kavé-sharpened nerves.
“What are any of us doing here?” I shot back. I had taken charge of the scrolls since some of them were so faded the words couldn’t be read anyway. I let the one under my hand roll up into a brittle cylinder and contemplated bashing the lor over the head with it, although that would just make more dust. “Of us all, you have the least at stake. Other than your yaxen eyes for Lady Dyania.” I gestured at her. “Sorry. I should’ve said Ani, since we are all going to die together.”
She sniffed. “Actually, I was the only one of us Chosen to die, so…”
“True,” Lisel muttered. “The rest of us were risking our lives just for the coin.”
“Heyo, coin?” I perked up. “No one’s paid me yet.”
Imbril coughed. “You say that, but we should probably check your pockets before you go.”
“Why is everyone yelling, ya?” Zik peeked up above the edge of the table. “Anyway, Fei keeps her valuables in her boots and under the bed, not in her pockets where anyone might look.”
I scowled at him. “What are you doing in my boots?”
“I don’t want anyone in my bed.”
We all paused to stare at Lady Dyania.
Who turned red in all her pale places. “I just…” She sank deeper into her chair. “Please, no yaxen eyes. I’m not…that’s not what I want, not who I am.”
“My lady…Ani, I’m sorry,” Imbril stammered. “I wouldn’t presume to be considered—”
“Not just you,” Dyania said. “Anyone. One of the reasons I was Chosen is because I told my brother I would not be available for his matchmaking elsewhere.”
While I could understand not wanting to be forced into a made match, yaxen eyes could be charming enough. But if getting to choose one’s match was only fair, then choosing to not match seemed just as fair.
“Never mind yaxen eyes,” Lisel said a little gruffly. “I would like to close my eyes. I think I can hear my eyelids scraping every time I blink.”
“It’s past midnight,” Imbril said. “Presumably the king had other business.”
“Other matches, other beds,” I muttered. I gazed around blearily at the chaos of books. “Did we find anything? Anything at all?”
We all looked at each other for a moment before Imbril shook his head, shoulders sagging. “How could we find anything that centuries of others have not?”
“Maybe there isn’t anything to find,” Zik said in a small voice.
So much for my optimistic little waif.
My stomach clenched from too much kavé, which probably felt nowhere near as bad as would the executioner’s sword in my guts when we failed the king.
But after a dejected moment of silence, Dyania tilted her head. “That’s true,” she mused slowly. “But just because there’s nothing to find in the past doesn’t mean we can’t make something for the future.”
“Except we don’t have much of a future,” I reminded her. Not if the king and his impatience were any indication, not to mention the auguries of upcoming catastrophe that had called for a Devouring that now couldn’t happen.
“It’s more of a future than some of us had.” Dyania gave me a meaningful look.
Zik nodded too. “I might’ve starved this winter,” he pointed out with no fuss in his voice. “Assuming my village wasn’t overrun by demons like some others.”
Neh, weren’t we all such a hopeful bunch.
Lisel nodded too. “There’s more than one way to fight, swords or blessings, pikes or…whatever we come up with next.” She flashed a crooked smile at Dyania. “Even if we don’t always get to choose what happens to us, we can make the best of how we go.”
Obviously the excessive kavé had made these people delusional, along with the late hour and impossible task, but who was I to take away their hope? Even I was not so much a thief as that.
And so the lords of the Living Lands swore their oaths to the High Keep lest all be lost.
~ From the Chronicles of the Lyrac Accords
CHAPTER 12
THE NEXT DAY started much the same with all of us back in the library, except this time I avoided the kavé. I had tasted it in the back of my throat all through last night as I tossed and turned on my cot in the dressing room—after checking my hiding place underneath to see what Zik had left.
But all the various little treasures I’d accumulated since our arrival at the High Keep—nothing too incriminating, since I didn’t have a secured hiding place for any purloined items much less a fence to bargain for me, even less a bolt hole set up in the event of the previous going wrong—were still tucked away, and I apologized to Zik in my head.
But even having my few worldly goods secured under me didn’t let me sleep. Through the last remaining hours of deepest night, I held the obsidian shard like a worry stone, circling the pad of my thumb over the sheared facet. In the blind dark, I caressed the flawless glass, gliding my fingertip lightly, oh so lightly, along the broken edge, always on the threshold of cutting myself but never quite.
Or so I thought. When Zik woke me the next morning—I’d fallen asleep after all, it seemed, but I rolled out of bed sullen and unrested—I went to the privacy chamber to try to splash some wakefulness over my face only to find a myriad of crisscrossing white lines on my finger, not a one deep enough to bleed but marking me nonetheless.
When we were all assembled in the library, Dyania took a place at the head of our table where all the pointless efforts of the day before were still scattered, looking even more chaotic and hopeless now that we’d had a night’s rest, such as it was. The lady gazed at us all solemnly.
“I had a dream,” she started. “A dinzah dream.” When Imbril sucked down a startled breath, she gave him a wry smile. “Not last night. My brother didn’t believe that I would go to my fate with appropriate decorum, so he made sure I was insensible through the most awkward part of the transition”—she looked away—“the part where I would’ve said goodbye.” She shook her head, not so much a repudiation of her brother, I thought, as annoyance with herself for even mentioning it. “On the way here, I dreamed that the earthbone road carried me to the black tower…but it gleamed bright as a star.”
Lisel frowned. “I thought after not finding anything yesterday, we would find a new way,” she said. “Not cling to the same old thing.”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” Dyania explained. “Prince Aric has been used as a weapon, yes, but one wielded without care, as likely to cut a friend as the enemy.” She gazed around at us until her dark-light focus stopped on me. “Feinan, you said he must feel untrusted, not heard even. Why would he fight for us when he knows we’d let him die?”
“Why do you?”
She ignored my question and continued, “I think we must seek him out, ask him what no one else seems willing to: if of his own volition he will save the Living Lands.”
Lisel frowned. “You were granted an unexpected reprieve when the Devouring could not continue. You would hand yourself back to his mercy?”
“Mercy? No. That’s not what we need from him at all. But maybe we can give him a taste of it in return.” She pursed her lips. “That is the purpose of a Feast, after all—weaving pure auras into a chain to bind the beast. But what if we offered him some…some sort of kindness, not a sacrifice—a gift instead of guilt?”
“My lady, your gentleness and thoughtfulness do you credit,” Imbril said. “But I think you imagine an honor in the prince that doesn’t exist—can’t, considering his demonic corruption.”
Dyania looked at me. “You’ve spoken to him, several times. What do you think, Fei?”
I spread my hands in front of me to block their curious looks. “I don’t think anything.” That wasn’t true, of course; I thought all the time, but it rarely proved advantageous. But thinking about or speaking to the Dragon Prince seemed to me a particularly poor idea. “The king and the haloria and no’Maru all think the Dragon Prince is trouble, so…” I shrugged.
She lifted an eyebrow at me. “Feinan no’Sevaare, you of all people calling out trouble seems unfair.”
With a scowl, I slumped lower in my chair. “You warned me to take nothing from the Dragon Prince, but now you want to take a chance with him?”
Imbril and Lisel made similar unhappy noises while Zik sat straighter in his seat. The lady smiled at him. “Yes, Zik? You have something to say?”
He looked stunned that she’d noticed. “I believe, my lady,” he said, “that we can’t do this alone.”
As that truth was sinking in—to me more bitter than the remains of kavé at the end of the day—the faint sound of a ruckus reached us through the library window. With Zik still basking in the lady’s smile, Lisel rose to go peer out.
Her shoulders stiffened before she wheeled around. “The resupply train has returned—in pieces. I must go. The rest of you, stay here.” She ran from the room.
The rest of us glanced at each other in alarm and then rushed to the window.
From our tower, with just a few clear panes in the stained-glass glorification of Ormonde, we had only an awkward sideways glimpse of a slice of the outer bailey, but it was enough to see the flurry of frantic activity pouring inward—harts and yaxen, guards and palace servants and rougher-garbed folk, chariots and wagons, all in a tangle like spectrum threads and homespun carelessly and blasphemously knotted.
“What happened?” Imbril’s voice trembled.
Zik’s reply was even more beaten. “It looks like the morning after Velderrey.”
Dyania put her hand on his bent shoulder, although I wasn’t clear whether she was comforting him or supporting herself. She glanced at me over his head. “Fei.”
In answer to her unspoken request, I nodded. “I’ll find out.”
“Go carefully,” she said.
Imbril stiffened. “We’re in the High Keep. What do we have to be careful of?”
If anyone answered, I didn’t hear it as I was already out the door.
Not that I’d wished any ill fate on the caravan, but getting out of the library was a relief. I sped down from the tower as quick as my boots and gravity would take me. But when I emerged in the bailey…
Ah, I should not have chafed at the serene, solitary scholarship. Out in the yard, all was commotion. Not chaos exactly, since the guards and servants obviously knew how to give and take orders. But this seemed more than anything they’d dealt with before.
Some of the draught animals were wounded, their legs slashed, and their bellows of fear and pain tore at me. The caravan conveyances were in worse shape, the sides scored with long gashes, many of the spokes in the wheels shattered. And the people…
I swallowed hard, my stomach churning even without kavé. I recognized those sad bundles from the aftermath of the Velderrey. For all the impression of turmoil from above, down here it was clear that the situation wasn’t as unfamiliar as I might’ve hoped. The guards and servants divvied up the wounded and dead, clearing the worst of the wreckage as I looked for Lisel.
I found her in conversation with a man in hartier garb, leaning heavily on a splintered pike. She clamped her hand on his shoulder, straightening him, and he nodded, though his eyes remained downcast. Not that I needed any confirmation of what had occurred, but I drifted up beside them.
Lisel glanced at me, giving me a small shake of her head. As interminable as our time in the library had seemed, in truth the slow, laden caravan had only been gone a day and a half. If they’d been attacked by demons and then escaped back to the High Keep…
That was close, closer even than Velderrey.
Before Lisel could speak—not that I needed the gory details of the explanation when it was so clear what had happened—I caught a glimpse of a face familiar through streaks of blood.
“Gryner!” I rushed toward him, my throat tight.
But he held up a hand, wrapped in a rough, filthy bandage, pausing me at a distance. “Hold, Sevaare,” he ordered gruffly. “I…I am demon-touched.”
I stumbled forward one more step before my knees locked inadvertently. “Are you…?” I swallowed the rest of the question. Of course he was certain. No one would say it if it wasn’t so.
Though he might not be hollowed quite yet, his sunken eyes were already haunted with the knowledge of what would come. “I wanted retribution for what they did to Torbar.” At the name of his friend who’d died at Velderrey, his voice broke. “I was a fool. It was worse, much worse than Velderrey.”
I couldn’t imagine. I didn’t want to imagine. “I know one of the lors,” I said quickly. “There are blessings, maybe salves or unguents or some such…”
He didn’t even bother shaking his head. “At least you didn’t come with us,” he said gruffly.
As if the horde wasn’t coming for all of us.
Several palace guards approached, their faces as white and sharp as the points of their pikes leveled toward us. “You were touched?” one of them asked Gryner.
He jerked his head in a nod. “I’ll come, no fight—”
“He fought for us,” I said angrily. “He volunteered to accompany the cavalcade of Chosen Ones, and he fought in Velderrey and now again. You can’t just take him away.”
A heavy hand on my shoulder made me whirl on Lisel. “Tell them,” I urged her.
But they were already guiding Gryner—not quite at pike point, but the threat was there—toward a huddle of a few others, their shocked expressions fading to hopelessness like death masks slipping over them even as they stumbled toward the outer gate.
Numbly, I watched Gryner and the others go. “What will happen to them?”
“There’s a haloric cloister in the outer ward near the dawn well,” Lisel said softly. “They’ll be examined. If they aren’t blighted, they’ll be sanctified and released.”
“And if they are deemed to be demon-touched?”
She gave me a hard look, her mouth twisting into a grimace. “You are no fool, Feinan no’Sevaare. Why do you ask when you don’t want the answer? You already know it anyway.”
I’d lived with loss and privation and uncertainty my whole life, and coming to the High Keep had seemed such a grand opportunity. Yet even in the darkest alleys in the worst neighborhoods of the lightkeep where I’d been abandoned, I’d never encountered such bleak futility as I felt now.
To be demon-touched was to lose everything of the light, to fade into the darkness forever, to become one with the horde.
I twisted to go after Gryner and the rest, but Lisel caught me by the elbow. “The clerks of the cloister won’t listen to you. And knowing you, you’ll only make it worse for the suffering.” She closed her eyes for a moment when I made a faint noise of dismay, then she looked at me again and said in a gentler voice, “Maybe there is something Imbril can do for your friend.”
“Since he’s been so useful, he and the other holies,” I said bitterly.
Her fingers flexed on my arm in warning before releasing me. I turned my face away, glaring helplessly. One of the yaxen was standing on three legs, the fourth held gingerly off the packed, scuffed dirt of the bailey. A stableman scratched the beast’s humped shoulder for a moment and began to lead it slowly away—not for the stable but in the other direction, toward the butchery.
My whole body tight but shaking, I raced back the way I’d come, to the library. The lady, Imbril, and Zik were all at their piles of books again, but they all stood immediately when I crashed through the doorway, so obviously they’d been waiting for me. I burst out with all I’d seen then turned to the lor. “What will happen to Gryner?”
Imbril wrung his hands together. “There’ve been demon-touched at the cloister before,” he said hesitantly. “But I’ve never been charged with their care. All I know is what I studied back at the hall.” His eyes closed briefly. “It’s not going to be what you want to hear.”
At his inadvertent echo of Lisel’s words, I glowered. “What is the point of all the blessings if they don’t make things better?” I slammed my fists against my thighs, pacing in front of the hearth. After running through the palace, sweat prickled under my arms, but I felt so cold.
The lady gazed at me. “Fei, I’m sorry about your friend—”
“I barely know him,” I objected, even though my eyes felt more prickly than my armpits.
“Be that as it may, it’s clear he matters to you.”
I let out a harsh sound. “It’s where we’ll all be if things go on like this.” I couldn’t exactly tell them that I could’ve been part of that caravan if I’d taken the opportunity to run away. I whirled toward the lady. “We have something we can try,” I said urgently. “We have the rune, the one you used on the candle with your blood that lured the demons. If you could extract them from Gryner and the others who were touched…” I found myself clenching my hands together like Imbril, entreaty and doubt together in a weak pleading. I spun toward the lor. “And you must have some sort of invocation to destroy the demon once it’s out of them, yes?”
“Of course. And sometimes it even works, but—”
“This is all we have so far,” I said decisively, as if I had any say at all. “This will be our trial.”
I left them to gather what they needed—Imbril said he could bring the others to the cloister—and I ran down again. So many steps, so much sweat, and yet I could not feel warm.
