Stonewiser: The Heart of the Stone, page 8
Sariah closed her eyes and sensed her body reach a compromise with the lake. Kael's touch gave her buoyancy and something else—a burst of warmth spreading from the small of her back where his hands lingered, a strange sensation paired with an unfamiliar thrill. The night's noisy silence was a wonder to her ears. The moon was a gift for the eyes. She was floating without direction or intent, free. Free.
She listened to Kael's breathing above her. She opened her eyes and found his face upside down, looking at her, framed by the moon and the stars.
“So this is freedom,” she whispered.
“This and more sometimes.”
She smiled because her shift clung to her body in a close embrace and made her feel wonderfully comfortable and bold. She smiled because even his black eye was soft in the silvery light and his lips were touched with an odd smile that, like the stars, sparkled briefly, and only for her.
TEN
THEY CAMPED ON the small lakeshore beach that night, a hard-earned concession that Metelaus, Lazar and Sariah obtained from a reluctant Kael. Kael, however, didn't stay with them but rather disappeared without a word as he often did. Metelaus snored placidly. Sariah feared going to sleep. The feebleness was strongest when she woke and she was uneasy. Her hands itched for a wised stone's weight. Her mind craved the tale's sweet seduction. She clutched the purse, fingering the stones beneath the leather. She wondered how it would feel to wise these twin stones. What if nothing happened? What if the Council was right and the tale she'd wised was her own hallucination? What if her mind had created this whole terrible tale and there was nothing to her claims after all?
“How's your hand?” Lazar sat beside her.
“Much better. Metelaus's wart root ointment is remarkable. The Guild's healers would do well keeping some of it at hand.”
“Then let's apply some more.” Lazar produced the small pestle and mortar where Metelaus had mixed his last batch. “To a clean wound, only good medicine, a New Blood saying goes.” He worked the ointment into the healing wound with a delicate touch and then helped Sariah bandage her palm with the dry cloth she had washed in the lake. He thumbed the back of her hand gently, gazing at her with his luminous eyes.
“The New Blood aren't so different from the Goodlanders,” he said. “We're a good people and you'll do well to look ahead and plan to make a life among our kind.”
“I have every intention of fulfilling my pledge to the New Blood.”
“There's more to life than stone pledges,” Lazar said. “I'd like to help you to be happy among us. I give you my pledge too.”
“Oh. Well. Thank you.” Sariah reclaimed her hand from Lazar. The look in his eyes struck her as strange. For reasons she couldn't understand, she wanted to bolt from his side. She rose calmly instead.
“Don't go too far off,” Lazar said.
“I need my privacy,” she said. “I'll be a while.”
She made her way to an outcrop of rock she had spotted earlier. When she was sure Lazar hadn't followed her, she drew the twin stones from the purse and placed them on the ground before her. They were identical, equally matched in weight and shape. They were beautiful too. Sculpted to the oval's perfection, a silvery patina imbued the fine-grained obsidian with an iridescent shine. No wonder Arron boasted about his twin stones. They were indeed an extraordinary pair.
She held one of the stones in her good hand. Slowly, cautiously, she pressed it to her palm. The passion of its fiery birth roared through her veins, an irresistible promise. She'd waited long enough. She was ready and eager, and wising stones, even twin stones, was many times easier than trying to understand the look Lazar had given her earlier or the New Blood's strange ways.
The night was warm and a light breeze stirred the water. Sariah took a deep breath, unwrapped the bandage from her hand, and flexed her fingers. Her hands were trembling when she touched the stones again. Her wising at the Sacred Vaults had been a disaster, but it didn't need to be so again. This time, nobody would be trying to kill her.
“What are you doing?” Kael startled the wits out of her. “What by Meliahs’ rotten dung heaps do you think you're doing?”
It took Sariah a moment to recover from the fright. He was indeed a fearsome sight, tall and fierce, wearing his weapons belt loaded with his remarkable twin swords, a couple of slings, and an assortment of serrated tusk-knives. Did he really need all those weapons?
“You should never interrupt a wising,” she said. “It's not safe.”
“Where did you get these?” Kael crouched on the ground and examined the stones. “You stole them from Arron. Didn't you?”
“No, nay, well … maybe.”
Sariah swore the New Blood Kael was two men in one. His black eye dominated his stare, scolding her without need for words. His green eye focused on her face in perfect tandem with the black eye and yet it seemed gentler, calmer, maybe even concerned. His black eye belonged to the warrior, a man who had seen horror beyond terror, a cynical, bitter soul. The green eye granted his face a boyish quality, depth and understanding that confused her, and a luminous promise when he looked at her as he was doing now.
“Sariah, I can't judge you harshly for your actions. Meliahs knows, I would've done worse if it had been me at Arron's mercy.”
He knew then. What she hadn't been able to say.
“But do you know what the penalty is for wisers who steal stones from the Guild?” he asked. “Do you?”
Sariah had made a great effort to forget. “A stonewiser's life is empty without stones, useless without truth. But why am I telling you this? You can't understand, let alone care.”
“Try me,” he said, perfectly serious.
Sariah considered the man before her. That he wanted to know was odd enough. Most people wanted nothing to do with wiser business, and feared Guild business even more. The look of resigned impatience on his face was hard to resist.
“You were at my judgment. These stones can prove that my claims are good, that twin stones tell transcendental tales, that those tales are forcefully buried in the Sacred Vaults, that the stone truth has been betrayed.” She sounded like one of Meliahs’ own doom prophetess pretenders, speaking drunken nonsense to the dumb and deaf, well deserving of the strap and the lash. But he was still listening.
“Who knows what truth these stones can tell? They're well worth the risk.”
“Bad odds are sometimes worth the gamble if the reward is the truth.”
Perhaps he understood a little.
“But there are times when the price isn't worth the wager. And by my estimation, the stone is never worth the flesh.”
Perhaps he didn't understand at all. “And how is it that a man like you comes to make your own estimation on matters of stone and flesh?”
“That's for a man like me to know.”
“An answer that's not an answer.” She waved him away. “Take your wisps of wisdom and let me be. I have little time before the sun rises and lots to do.” Sariah closed her eyes and placed her hands over the stones. Her throat was parched.
His voice broke the silence. “Are you scared?”
“No, nay, no. I'm a stonewiser.”
“The wound in your palm isn't healed yet.”
“And how is that your concern?”
“You didn't look well the last time you wised twin stones.”
Sariah opened her eyes only long enough to flash him a cutting look. “I'll wise these stones tonight despite your interruptions.”
“You're stubborn. You ought to have a minder.”
“Is there a minder about?” This time, Sariah's eyes were wide open.
He smirked. “It ought to make for interesting sport.”
Sariah was loath to recognize that the offer reassured her. “It's not so difficult—”
“Even a New Blood can do it.”
Damn his wicked grin. “Watch and feel to make sure the stones cause no harm. If you spot trouble, take the stones away slowly to avoid a mind shock.”
“Understood.”
“Sit behind me.” She showed him. “You'll feel me better that way. You'll feel the stones’ power coursing through me.”
“Like this?” He sat cross-legged behind Sariah and stretched his arms beneath hers. His body brushed lightly against her back.
The contact sent shivers down her spine. “Not so close.”
She clutched the stones and pressed them to her palms in a hurry. Wising was the safer deed this night.
A swoosh rewarded Sariah's caution. A trance reached out to caress her mind with a soothing touch. Her body quickened to the rush, her skin prickled with the sensations. Warmth flowed through her arms and bubbled through her spine, an exquisite flood. The stones seduced her into readiness, persuading her senses to accept the tale entering her mind.
A crowd surrounded a high dais where fourteen men and women stood within the ruins of a broken temple. The earth trembled under her feet. A whiff of toxic release stung the air. Some in the group cried, some whimpered, some cursed. A familiar figure climbed the dais. She wore a black veil draped over her head, cascading down her shoulders together with her straight white hair. Her face was younger than her white hair might suggest and her eyes were sharp blue and penetrating.
Zeminaya. She was the white-haired woman who had intruded in the stone birth tale she'd wised at the Sacred Vaults, but in this tale, Zeminaya was a woman of her time, a participant who carried herself with great dignity. She unrolled the scroll she carried and began reading.
“The order of gravities from the lesser to the greater is as follows: Firstly, that they broke the pact twice. Secondly, that they unleashed the land's destruction. Thirdly, that they meddled with the forbidden blood-making craft. Fourthly, that they divided the blood. Fifthly, that they conspired to conceal the truth.”
Sariah was stunned. The ancient proceeding she witnessed was unmistakably a judgment, perhaps even the most important judgment of all times, the execration of the New Blood. Only this tale was very different from the tale taught at the keep. The Guild's stones maintained that the New Blood were execrated because they brought the rot to the land. Those tales didn't mention other gravities, nor did they show Zeminaya presiding over the judgment. If her first twin stone wising had been strange because it told an unknown tale, this one was alarming. It told a different version from the other Guild tales. She wondered, and not for the first time, if Ashmid had ventured to wise twin stones, if he'd found the same discrepancies and paid for it with his life.
“As appointed by the Council, I find the gravities true.” In the tale, Zeminaya's voice faltered but she drew a visible breath and continued. “For their trespasses, they will be execrated.”
The crowd gasped with Sariah. Wails and cries rose from the people. Seven of the fourteen men and women on the dais were led away. Chaos ensued. A crowd that had stood as one was now forcibly divided. Grief poisoned the air along with the stink of corruption.
The intrusion snatched Sariah's mind without warning. Sariah flinched, caught by surprise. She braced herself as best she could to withstand the assault. Dressed in blue, Zeminaya walked between the divided crowds. Her shape was boldly outlined but faint and translucent in the center. She was an intrusion again, not a part of the tale as she'd been moments before, but a trespasser who had managed to insert herself in the tale after the fact, against the Guild's strictest rules.
“Two tell a truth but five yield the seventh and only seven grants the truth.” The intrusion looked straight into Sariah's eyes. “I'm Zeminaya the Just, the hand of the execration, wall between the guilty and the fair, killer of my blood. The burden was mine, and mine alone. And they were judged for their trespasses and condemned. And I saw them go willingly to their deaths. And I killed them—I, who stood with them throughout the destruction, destroyed them now, then, and forever.”
The enormity of all she didn't understand struck Sariah then. The image flashed, and the intrusion ceased to be. Sariah was back in the stone tale, watching as Zeminaya buried her face in her hands and cried. The burden of her grief crushed Sariah like a massive boulder. Zeminaya's pain was endless like a bleak horizon. Sariah sunk in the awful sorrow like a dying sun.
ELEVEN
“HUSH, SARIAH, YOU'RE free from the stones and unhurt,” Kael whispered in her ear. She lay in his lap, limp and wasted, crushed by the burden of Zeminaya's anguish, wet with her tears. Her grief seemed to pour unrestrained to join centuries of excruciating sadness, and suddenly she was mourning her own execration as well, the loss of all that she knew and believed, the unbearable loneliness that faced her. Caught in the stone tale's gloom, she was at once frightened by her dismal prospects and overwhelmed with the crushing grief. She couldn't stop the tears.
“You'll be fine, wiser, I promise you.” His breath was warm against her cheek and her head fit nicely against the hollow of his neck. “Take heart, with a little labor and sweat, Meliahs will heed us.”
He cradled her tenderly in his lap as if she was but a small child. He embraced her, a gentle squeeze of his body and a flutter of lips against her temple. The smell of him was the scent of consolation. Fresh laurel and wild herbs with a hint of sweet spice soothed her nostrils and freshened her lungs. She tasted his breath, rejecting the grimness of Zeminaya's world and the hopelessness of hers, in favor of the feel of him.
She tried to shake off the overpowering sadness crushing her. Meliahs help her. What kind of spineless fool had she become? Without a hint of good reason, his arms seemed safe to her, able to buttress the bulk of her sorrows. But her pride would not allow her to linger. By the time she managed to contain her grief's flood, she didn't know if she had mastered her overwrought emotions or if her body had simply run out of water to make tears.
“Better now?” His voice was kindness made sound. “The stones made heat and you started to shake. I removed the stones. I don't think they hurt you.” The twin stones stood on the ground before her like a double offering.
“I think you may have pulled me out of a consuming gloom.”
“I'm glad you're back from such grief.” She could have sworn he kissed her then, a trail that began on the top of her head and ended behind her ear. “Why was the tale so sad?”
“There was a woman, a wiser. Her grief was beyond words. She was the execration's hand.” She didn't tell him about her own grief. That was hers to endure. She was beginning to feel stronger now, but she was comfortable in his lap's snug fit. It was odd to be so close to a stranger, a man who was not even her lease. She had never been held like this before, with tender regard, as if her feelings mattered, as if her body was worth the time. Meliahs help her. She needed to get a grip on herself.
“Did you witness the execration of the New Blood?” he asked.
“What other execration is there? I wonder if there's an intrusion in all twin stones?”
“An intrusion?” Kael's broken eyebrow rose high on his forehead. “I thought the Guild forbade intrusions.”
“Under penalty of death. But there's an intrusion in both pairs of twin stones I've wised and it's the same woman. She said something similar in both tales. A riddle, I think.”
“Let's have it,” Kael said. “I was raised on riddles.”
He was an odd man, but Sariah saw no harm in telling him. “Two tell a truth but five yield the seventh and only seven grants the truth … Two—”
“Stones?”
“Twin stones,” Sariah realized.
“So two pairs of twin stones tell a measure of the truth,” Kael said. “And seven tell the whole truth?”
“Something like that,” Sariah said. “Imprinting an intrusion is dangerous and difficult, some say impossible. The woman was a powerful wiser if she did it several times.”
“Perhaps she was desperate. Persecution is a powerful incentive. Are you sure she wasn't of the New Blood?”
“Her eyes were blue. Matching blue.”
“Pity.”
“There are seven. Seven pairs of stones.” In the Guild, findings such as these could bring a wiser great fame and wealth, death too, as she had discovered. “I wonder if Master Ashmid knew about that, about the intrusion.”
“I could have told you there were seven pairs.”
“Oh?” The man could hack the joy out of her as thoroughly as a butcher could carve a carcass on market day. “How?”
“New Blood legends, I guess.”
“What kind of legends?”
His face was blank as ever, but Sariah felt him squirm. “Spoken tales. About New Blood redemption. That's all.”
“Redemption from what?”
“The execration.”
“Do you resent the execration's justice?”
“Justice?” His body turned wooden under hers. “We contest the New Blood's annihilation.”
“Surely, you exaggerate. The Guild aims to protect the Goodlands from the rot.”
“Do you think that the New Blood brought the rot to the Old World?” His lap no longer seemed as appealing as before. “Do you think we carry the rot on the soles of our feet?”
Sariah scooted from his lap in frank retreat—just in time, too, because he was on his feet, pacing the rock like a caged bear with a toothache.
“Do you also think the rot flourishes in our spit?” He spat on the ground, a frothy spittle that pooled on the rock and dripped on the sand. “Ashes anyone? Ashes to squelch the New Blood rot?”
“No need to be rude.”
“Watch closely. If the legends are true, any time now, the rot will bubble from the earth. No rot? Why, that just shows wisers like you the ignorance of Meliahs’ chosen.”
The insult burned in Sariah's cheeks. A moment ago, they had been fine, more than fine. Now they faced each other like mortal foes.
“Look now, I mean the New Blood no offense, but how do you explain that the rot exists only where the New Blood dwell? The Goodlands prosper, unlike the Rotten Domain. I'm not one to praise the Guild in my current circumstances, but I'll admit, they've protected us well.”
