Hearthfire, page 9
Her sense of self vanished into that welcoming blackness. There was no Haveranth or home or hearth there, no Ryd or Lyah or Carin.
No she. Nothing.
Just dark.
And then it came.
Caryan.
Carin shuddered with the force of it. The name seared her, branded her, bereft her.
Caryancaryancaryancaryancaryancaryan.
She held tight to the cocoon of enveloping blackness. She tasted it on her tongue like iceberry wine. She heard it like the low drone of a halmer’s horn.
Too soon, too soon, too soon came light.
• • • • •
The light shone on faces, and Carin searched for those familiar to her. There were none to be found. No Ryd or Lyah in the brightness that burned. It chased away the comforting dark and left Carin alone in a bright sea of strangers.
There in the faces was an echo of something she knew. A pair of eyes like her mother’s. A build like Lyah’s, lithe and quick.
But Carin knew them not.
Her feet became again, and on staggering legs she walked down a tunnel of light. On the ground were stones, five of them, heavy and immovable, each bearing runes. As Carin drew near to them, she felt a pull as if they wanted her.
She pushed past them and farther, past the faces that weren’t quite known to her. Beyond them was a child.
The child did not see her, and sy did not look up. Instead sy knelt in dirt and coughed like Rina did when the smoke from the forge-fire blew in her face. The child coughed, and hys body convulsed. A harsh rattle came from hys lungs. Carin watched, horrified, as the child spit a gob of green onto the dirt, splattered with the bright red of blood.
Sy vanished.
The scent of salt air filled Carin’s nose, and the sound of waves rushed around her. She blinked, and in front of her was a band of folk, their bodies gaunt. Between them was a string of scraggly fish, half the size Carin was used to, but the people praised them as if they were precious pimia oil or a flute of halm.
Half a fish went to each person, and Carin watched as they ate slowly, taking small bites, savoring the flakes of fish on their tongues.
Again the people disappeared, and something flew by Carin’s ear with a sharp whistle. An arrow erupted from the chest of a man, the blood spreading from the wound to drip upon the ground. He fell to his knees, and from behind Carin, a trio of people with swords ran forward. One slit the man’s throat with a motion so practiced it seemed reflexive, and they moved as a single unit to relieve the dead man of his purse, his water skin, and a fine halm knife that hung at his belt. His rucksack they also took, rifling through it to remove a packet of dried meat, a carved wooden bowl, and a lump of weathered red glass.
Carin wanted to look away, but the scene drew her gaze. Her tongue felt coated in dust, and it stuck to the roof of her mouth like she’d eaten too much brown sugar candy with nothing to drink. Try as she might, she could think of no reason to kill a person for their food. Such a thing was an affront to the bounty of their land. Who could do such a thing?
When they faded with the next burst of light, Carin began to wonder if this was indeed her land she saw. Sand spread out in front of her as far as she could see. Her mother kept a glass bottle of sand on the mantelpiece, brought from the beaches of Bemin’s Fan where the river ran to greet the sea. But here the sand went on in every direction, dry and pale and hot like midday on High Lights.
A huge cat prowled the sand, its shoulders bulging and muscular. A kazytya, far larger than any Carin had ever seen. It had no tail like the tigers Carin had glimpsed in the woodlands north of Haveranth, but instead only a nub at the base of its spine. Stripes in shades of beige made the cat blend in with the sand around it, and Carin scanned the horizon to see what it might be hunting. But there was nothing, only the sand: the dry, endless sand.
The sand around her changed. From a pile of rocks, a spring burst forth, the water trickling out into the thirsty land around her. Sprigs of blue and green sprouted from the ground, then spread, then the trickle of water became a rivulet, then a stream, and finally a river flowed beside her. Carin blinked to see trees, some with heavy fruits, to see birds flitting from branch to branch. Strange birds. Unfamiliar birds. The land changed, and with it, Carin got the sense of time bearing down on her, pulling her backward from a land parched and hungry to one flowing with water and fruits.
And she saw people, the same she had seen in the bright tunnel before. She saw them bent beneath coils of leather that licked at their backs and stung like a switch. She saw them cast out of camps, chased away.
She saw one of them bend to the ground in her fury, and when the woman rose, fire leaped from her palms.
Five pairs of people stood in a circle around a large rune stone, with all their hands red with blood to the elbows, and the stone dripped with it, red rivulets flowing down the side. The people wore the blood like a hog wore mud, as if they’d bathed in it. They stood surrounded by others, clean and dry, all who watched in silent approbation and beneath that, something more fierce and angry and wild. Carin could not put a name to what she saw in them, feeling again their cries as they bowed under whips and the shame and rage at their mistreatment. And now this fiery approval for those wearing dripping red. Bodies lay beyond the stone, piled in a heap. She had never seen so many dead.
She felt them, the dead. They screamed through her in betrayal and fury. They had—she grasped for the words—they had trusted their killers to deliver them from their torment.
They had trusted that those who promised them freedom meant they would live to see it. Instead…instead…
Carin herself watched as the five living pairs placed their bloodied hands on the rune stone, and from the ground came a terrible roar that shook her teeth in her mouth and sounded like rending rocks. The people surrounding the stone were tossed to the earth, where they covered their heads with their arms, shying from the piled bodies beyond. Carin did not fall, nor did the ten with bloodied hands pressed to the stone’s face. Again, she felt the pull toward the stone, as if it wanted her. She stumbled forward toward it, her hands outstretched, drawn to the stone and at once repulsed by its hunger.
The stone felt like Carin’s trek-starved belly, and from it came the pull, a force that drew what it desired to it, sucking something from the land, through the land, through the blood that now marked it like a goatherd’s brand.
Those with hands already pressed to the stone did not see her. The grasses around the stone began to wither, their blades turning inward as if they, too, felt the pull Carin did, and the color faded from their blades, draining them to the dullness of winter until they turned white and crumbled to dust. Still the stone ravened, awakened by the people’s fury and need into a pure, famished draw that Carin felt to her bones.
The stone would never be sated, never full.
The ten people around the stone pulled away, and for a moment, just for a moment, Carin thought she saw a web of light jet out from the stone itself, barreling off to the west and to the east as if seeking something—what, she knew not.
The circle broken, the crowd moved to the south, and when Carin turned to follow, she saw the mountains that rose in the distance, high and impassive, and she knew what she saw. The far side of the mountains she now sat within.
Carin closed her eyes against the harsh light, and she saw it all again. The hunger. The thirst. The land itself desperate for sustenance. She knew why it died around her.
She beat her eyes with her hands, wanting the vision gone, but no matter where she looked or how tightly she scrunched her eyelids closed, it did not abate.
She felt the pull from the stone even now, and although she couldn’t explain it, Carin saw the grasses around the stone continue to fade, to die, to turn to dust. The stone drained the life from the land itself.
She watched the crowd of people vanish into the mountains and knew where they went, where the power they had stolen was directed.
Her homeland. The Hearthland.
The people marched to the south, blood drying on their skin until it cracked away before it could be washed.
With them they took the life of the land, and that stolen soul followed them south to a place that would be called Haveranth, a place that would be fed life bought by far-off death.
Through the brightness around her, another name whispered through her.
Lysiu.
Carin fell to her knees.
LYAH STUMBLED into the darkness and tripped over Carin, who knelt almost prostrate just outside the cave. She landed hard on one knee next to her friend. The Quicken Moon shone down upon them, her sister at her side, full and plump and cheery.
The moonlight lit tracks of tears down Carin’s face.
Lyah crawled to Carin and took her in her arms, and the two of them wept.
A scraping behind them brought Ryd from the cave, his eyes showing bright in the moonlight.
“What did we see?” Ryd asked, his voice hoarse and grating with pain. He sounded as if he were asking the question of the night.
The cool darkness was a balm on Lyah’s eyes, and she hugged Carin tight to her chest, her fingers grasping the soft wool of Carin’s cloak.
No one answered Ryd for a long time.
When finally Carin pulled away, leaving Lyah to sit in the grass while Carin slowly gathered twigs and tinder and built a fire, Lyah scooted close to the flames.
“Did Jenin say anything more to you?” Lyah looked at both Ryd and Carin, hoping for some clue as to how they felt. When neither of them answered, she rolled her next words around in her head, wondering if she wanted to give them voice.
“Sy told me our names were as much choice as they were discovery,” she said finally.
Ryd’s head snapped up, and Lyah thought she heard a whisper in her mind. Ryhad.
Her heart gave a thump, and her breath fought the bellows of her chest as she tried to inhale. Had she just heard his name? Motes danced in front of Lyah’s eyes, like sparks in front of the fire. She looked at Carin, but saw nothing. Lyah had heard that last breath before the cave expelled her into the night, from brightness to the still darkness of the Hidden Vale. She had heard the name Lysiu and felt it sink deep within her. But she knew even then as she watched her oldest friend and heard no whisper that Lysiu was not Lyah’s own true name; Lyari was the name that came upon the tide of magic in the cave. Lyari was who Lyah would become when she returned to Haveranth as Merin’s apprentice.
The thought struck her dumb. Merin knew all their names. Lyah was Merin’s apprentice. She looked at Ryd and saw Ryhad there. She stared so long at his face that she didn’t hear him speak.
“I’m sorry,” Lyah said. She stood by the fire and brushed grass and dirt from her breeches. “What did you say?”
Ryd watched her closely. “I asked what you meant, about our names being choice.”
Carin did not speak, but her eyes were just as intent, and the light of the fire danced against the deep sapphire blue of her irises.
“I don’t know what sy meant,” Lyah admitted.
She could still smell the stink of the gob of green the child had coughed onto the ground in the cave. It smelled of death, and from the depths of her memory of Merin’s lessons, she drew forth a word. Illness. The child had illness. Something twisted inside hyr body that made hys lungs seize up and try to expel poison. Illness and hunger and thirst—that was what existed outside the Hearthland. What their ancestors had saved them from and cast a spell to ensure their safety for all the coming generations.
“What did we see?” This time Carin asked the question, and her words fell like shards of glass through the air, as shattered as a broken vase.
“We saw the history of our people,” Lyah told her. “How we came to be here.”
“Did you know this?” Carin drew a ragged breath and spat into the fire. Her saliva hissed and jumped on a rock, then burned away into nothing.
“No,” said Lyah. One cycle of the moons past, if Carin had been angry or hurt, Lyah would have reached out and drawn her into the circle of her arms. They would have gone to the Bemin and hurled stones into its depth until their muscles ached and the upset was gone. They had done it a cycle past, when Dyava was on his Journeying and Carin’s loneliness for the lack of his company had made her short tempered and uneasy. And now Dyava might be dead and it was their own Journeying. Moments before Lyah had held Carin close to her, felt her breathing in rhythm with her own. Fyahiul. They had shared their pillows and their hurts both for seventeen harvests. And now, the fire between them felt like they were instead standing on two mountaintops, leagues apart, their bodies cold and uncomforted.
Her mouth sour and dry, Lyah shook her head violently. “I didn’t know any of this.”
“I thought we were only coming here to find our names.” Ryd sat with his legs pulled up to his chest, his arms tucked tightly beneath the crook of his knees.
“As did I,” Lyah said.
“You’re sure that is our history?” Carin’s body was as still as the pond on Jenin’s farm at first light. “Our ancestors did this thing?”
“This thing?”
“They starved the land to feed themselves. They starved people.”
Lyah started. Her fingers trembled at the question. “You saw the same as I did. They were treated like unruly goats. Worse. Beaten and abused. They found something that could save them from depending on harsh masters.”
“By becoming those same masters?” Carin’s shoulders shook now, and she licked her lips, the firelight glinting on the sheen left by her tongue. “By becoming worse than abusers and beaters? By…”
Carin’s mouth moved as if her tongue tried to find the right words but could not.
“By becoming the sort who would end life to take for themselves,” Carin said at last. “Taking what was not theirs. Taking and not sharing.”
Ryd looked back and forth between the two of them, his mouth agape. “Carin,” he said.
“Everything,” she trailed off, and her lips drew together.
Lyah knew the gesture. She’d seen it countless times growing up. Carin would speak her mind no more, but keep her thoughts locked within her.
“I want to go home,” Ryd said suddenly.
“Merin knows magic.”
Again, Lyah felt surprise at Carin’s words. She nodded mutely, feeling as though the bond between her and Carin had been sliced with one of Rina’s blades still hot from the forge.
“Do you?” Carin plucked a pebble from the ground. “If I threw this in the air, could you stop it from landing?”
“No. I don’t know.” The words sounded hollow even to Lyah’s ears, and her heart pounded the sides of her head like a stick against a drumskin. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. She wasn’t supposed to reveal what she was taught in her apprenticeship. Her eyes darted to Ryd, but he stared straight ahead, not looking at either of them anymore.
“But you know some magic.” Carin pressed. “You know some.”
“Some little, yes.”
“You never told me.”
There was a heaviness in the air like one of the neighboring mountains had decided to lean forward over them, and Lyah felt as though it were leaning specifically on her.
“I couldn’t. Merin said—”
“Tell me what you know.”
So fierce was the light in Carin’s eyes that Lyah couldn’t help but respond. She would rebuild the bridge across this sudden rift between them, and if it took sharing this knowledge, what little bit she knew, Lyah would do it or rot.
RYD HEARD the two girls speaking, but he could not bring himself to heed their words. His breath was a thin rushing in his chest, and his mind faltered on the knowledge that swam in his head, competing with everything he knew about his homeland.
He knew Carin was right, that their ancestors had done this thing, this terrible thing. He knew then that his home was built on the bones of children, whose flesh had shriveled with pain and hunger and that horrible seizing cough he could not explain.
But he knew it was his home.
Like Carin, Ryd had built himself a house on the outskirts of town. He’d been careful to pick a plot of land far from Stil the carpenter, whose bratty sprig of a child was often the instigator in the plans to knock Ryd to the ground and sit on him. While he was no halmer by far and no great worker like Carin, he had built a serviceable home. He liked to whittle. His trestle table had heaps of little figurines in the center. Squat and comfortable, with a wide central hearth and a hearthstone he had chosen himself from Haverford Quarry. He had chiseled his runes into it with his own hands, just as Carin had done for her own.
He could not atone for the transgressions of his ancestors; there was no way for him to reverse time and alter their course. Ryd al Malcam va Haveranth was who he was, and he would return home Ryhad va Haveranth, a man of his own making, ready to prove himself to the village and take his place three harvests hence.
Somehow, though, he could not stop his throat from swallowing, over and over.
Standing, he ignored the conversation between Carin and Lyah and walked some ways away into the vale. The pattering and splashing of the Hanging Falls filled his ears, and above him stars glittered in the rich black sky. Quicken Moon hung heavy above, and Ryd looked up to see the constellations that circled the singular hearthstar that even now pulsed with a pale green hue. The Tiger in Repose everyone knew, as they knew the Great Halm, which now seemed to rise out of the mountains on the horizon. Others Ryd had learned himself from Merin’s scrolls and books. The Saiga that grazed upon a cluster of three small white stars. The Cookpot, small and faint but resting on two stars that had a reddish glow. And there, a handspan above the mountaintops to the north, the Nameless. Whether no one had named any stars between that figure and the others or whether none could make out shapes in his surroundings at all, Ryd did not know. But the Nameless stood silent and alone, far from the Saiga and the Tiger and the shelter of the Great Halm’s branches.
