The Gauntlet and the Broken Chain, page 23
‘I have not swum the river,’ she said, and Aida nodded. Few had. The river below, the river that all things were in whether they knew it or not. A river that joins the world. Sami, the old witch with his beard and his smile who had been a constant in her life whenever her feet took her to Laitila had told her it was a river of connection, and when you were in it you could see the streams and currents that reached everyone and everything and drove everyone and everything onward.
‘The river takes us from birth to death, from what is before to what is after,’ Aida said, and the three of them sat in silence for a long moment. Torrenda knew it was the way of it – you would live and you would die, and perhaps would live again. Water fell from the sky and into the river, and the river flowed to the sea, and clouds grew and then the rain fell again. All was cycle, all was current. It was as simple as breathing.
‘What can we do?’ Taaveti said, and Aida drew from her bag the wineskin she had been preparing earlier.
‘I want to dive,’ she said.
Torrenda licked her lips. With no boots and no cloak and no brick of burning peat, she felt naked and weak. What am I doing?
‘That is dangerous, no?’ Torrenda asked. ‘We should tell someone, no?’
Aida shook her head and unstopped the wineskin. ‘Tell who, Shrinekeeper? Wasserchild is weeks away. We’ll tell them, but I have the herbs and I’ve done it before. I want to dive into the river deep, and see all Ona. I’ll keep the shrines in my heart and see what I can see.’
Aida sniffed the wineskin, and Taaveti slugged back her sap-leaf spirit and thumbed at her nose.
‘How does it work?’
‘I can swim the river,’ Aida said, ‘but the herbs let anyone touch the river, with this mix. They let you dive. You’ve had them before a little – it’s what is in the mead the witches give on your name day.’
Torrenda remembered her own name day – fifteen flood seasons old, standing with Karle and Jussi. The witch then was a man with hair braided to his chest, a short man like a barrel who wore string after string around his neck, on each string some totem – a lizard’s foot, a fox’s tooth. She had drunk her wine and spoken her name for the first time – Torrenda. Before fifteen flood seasons you were a child, but after that you had choice and responsibility. Your first choice was your name.
What will you be, Torrenda? the witch had asked, and she had looked at the floor when she said: Shrinekeeper. Not out of shame, but because the press of people was too much. She had drunk the mead, and seen the river for the first time – currents of light and sound and sensation, feelings she had no words for linking her to her brothers, her village, her world. It had faded fast, and then there was firelight and dancing and songs to be sung – but the memory of it was as clear now as it had been in the moment of experience.
‘I would like to do it,’ she said, and Aida and Taaveti stared at her.
‘This is not your name day,’ Aida said, ‘and this will be deeper in the river than many ever go. It might wash you away.’
Torrenda shook her head and pushed her hair back, set her jaw.
‘I know every shrine in Ona. I know two dozen tulka, and every pathway of the thousand canyons. We dive together, and I can hold them in my heart. Every last one of them.’
It wasn’t true, but it wasn’t a lie. I know more than any who is not a shrinekeeper.
‘It might work,’ Aida said, and Taaveti poured them each another shot of the sap leaf. Across the table they joined their left hands, and the fox tulka stepped delicately up to the table, its onyx claws tapping on the wood. It stood still and they stared at it, and then Aida drank deep from the wineskin.
‘Hold them in your heart,’ she said, and then Torrenda drank three swallows fast and blanched as the bitter herbs burned her throat. Squeezing her eyes shut against the pain, she felt Aida grasp her hand and then hearing fled from her, taste fled from her. When she opened her eyes all was colour and light, pattern and connection. Aida and Taaveti both collapsed into layers of light and tangle and pattern and chaos, the tumult of life. Next to them, the fox tulka stared at her and she saw that it was a fruit, a fruit grown from a million lines of thought that stretched hair thin through the air, each a different colour and strength and taste. Torrenda began to panic at the overstimulation, human senses overloaded with input from an infinite number of sources, every nerve in her body taut.
Keep them in your heart, she heard a voice say. Aida’s voice? My voice? She closed her eyes and thought of the dragon shrines.
The crossroads.
The waterfall.
The broken pillar. The twisted birch.
The painted cavern. The chimney-top. The river’s heart.
On and on she pictured them and felt her love for them. Pictured her journeys to them, her joy at finding them lit, her patience when they lay cold and dark. Torrenda could still feel the stimulus across her, her skin, her tongue, her ears, her fingertips, and when she opened her eyes she was below the clouds staring down at Ona, that labyrinth of rock chimney and canyon surrounded by the barrier mountains. All was abstract, but she could see the pattern of her land and knew it to be her land even though she had never seen it this way before, had never seen a map that came close to encompassing it.
Look.
Aida’s voice. Aida’s pattern, its hand in hers, staring down from the clouds through rain, each droplet with a path before it and a trajectory behind traced in light and heat and feeling. Torrenda pictured the dragon stones and with all her heart focused on the slick black rock.
Below, lights began to twinkle, lights of silver brighter than the surrounding pattern. Somewhere she felt her body burning with fever as she struggled to concentrate, somewhere she felt the twitch of muscles spasming as the dive took from her, took her energy even to perceive the river, even with the witch’s herbs.
Look.
Across Ona, the silver lights – dragon stones – glowed, and as she stared she realised what the twinkle was – it was a break, like a candle flickering through a broken lamp. They are all broken.
Torrenda could see them all, all of Ona – perhaps three dozen dragon stones were twinkling, and in her heart she knew every one was broken.
Are they all broken?
Her own voice, and faintly, Aida yelling… Stop!
Clouds above turned to clouds below. Torrenda tasted blood at some level as she bit through her tongue, as her body jerked at the wayhouse table in Laitila. She was back further now. She could see Ona, could see land north, could see sea to the west and the thousands of islands of the Crowns. Continents and seas beyond. Back further, and she could see it all, all of it pattern and oddity, some close, some far and some sideways. Links and currents, a river churning over all of it – not a smooth river but the churn of rapids, of white water and chaos. Twinkling lights… the dozens of dragon stones of Ona joined by hundreds more across ocean and land and mountain and deep. Some buried deep below rock, but in the river she could still see them and feel them and taste them. Twinkling. Broken.
The first seizure almost pulled her from the river, and she felt a hand dragging her from the clouds but Torrenda pulled her own hand away. If the dragon stones are broken…
Father!
In her heart Torrenda was a shrinekeeper – she walked the valleys of sodden Ona with her ever-burning brick, and she brought cheer and light and heat and a reminder of the father dragon above to the people of her land.
Below her, in the morass of tangled connection that was the world, the lights of the dragon stones fell dim as her focus turned to the father dragon. From so high above the world she saw him, and knew him at once, a point of incredible complexity even within the multi-layered madness of the river, strings of connection pouring to and from him like endless silk ribbons. A lantern shining bright through the storm. There was the faintest silhouette of form to him from so far, sinuous and graceful as he flew through the raincloud.
Father. Torrenda did not feel her body failing as she stared at the dragon. She did not hear the screams of Taaveti – they were somewhere so far down the inputs coming to her mind that they did not even register. She stared at the dragon, the shadow she had seen once in the clouds as a girl running between rock chimneys on a bridge of rope, the presence who kept the Siobh afraid of invasion, who brought the rain that brought the life to the bare rock canyons.
She saw thick streamers of connection that flew out from him and… ended. Abrupt, and torn. Frowning, she glanced across the world and she saw them.
The dragon. The snake. The bear. The wolf. The whale. The gull. The lion. The spider. A whole southern continent where there were none at all. A northern continent thick with them. Deeper, somewhere deeper, more shapes under rock and earth and water, far below. Oceans further south than any maps she’d heard of, and islands and great lands beyond, shapes and colour and hints of more. Beacons in the darkness.
Wake.
She did not feel the sweat slicking her skin, the blood coming from eyes and nose and ears. The father is one, but there are many.
Wake.
A hand in her hand and then Torrenda was screaming on the floor of the wayhouse, Taaveti holding her head firm as she thrashed, Aida collapsed next to her still gripping her hand. Next to her head, its brow pressed to hers, the fox tulka, such a little thing. As the river dropped from her eyes it gazed at her. Torrenda pictured the father dragon and the broken dragon stones, the torn connections trailing from him. She grew still. From the tulka fox a sense of calm flowed into her, and she blinked until the tears drowning her eyes were just a little thing, just more raindrops.
‘Shrinekeeper,’ Taaveti panted, falling back from her crouch to sit on the floor, ‘Shrinekeeper, what in all dry hells did you see?’
Torrenda held a hand to her face and felt the slick of blood on her lips already drying, heard the rain outside.
‘I saw the gods,’ she said, and with her bloodied hand she drew the tulka close to her and embraced it. ‘They are unchained.’
DAUGHTER OF THE MIST
‘Heed the story, hear her wail, see the croft in ash,
the daughter of the Mist alone, claws of iron a-flash;
Spare my child, the farmer cries; back, ye beast! the soldier.
Wail and woe the daughter brings, and takes the debt that’s owed her.’
Final verse, ‘Three daughters of the mist,
unkind’, Undal folk song
Floré and Janos left Protector’s Keep before dawn, descending through the labyrinth of passages in silence. They passed from their rooms in the upper keep through halls wrought from worked blocks of granite and cut with high windows down to the smooth black remnants of the Ferron overseers’ fort below, and then out into the street. The gate guard gave them a nod and Floré smiled at him, but felt a shiver cutting through her. Winter was at an end and the night was still cold, but it was not the cold that sent prickles down her arm; was not the cold that had the scars all down her right arm twitching as they always did when she was nervous.
We could have had a life here, she thought, and knew it to be true. Janos led them away from Protector’s Keep and down the side street to Bellentoe’s bakery. Even with the rest of the street shuttered and silent, there was light and warmth pouring from the back door of the bakery. Floré waited with her bag as Janos slipped inside, and she heard the gruff tones of the Antian Bellentoe and then laughter. She looked away from the pooling light and back at the looming shadow of Protector’s Keep. Rank. Respect. Purpose. She clenched her fist to try and stop the ache in her arm. Starbeck had spent the last span pleading with Janos not to go, even had him summoned to a meeting with the entire Grand Council where they begged him to stay in whatever form he would. It was too late – the seed was sown in his mind and hers, and now whatever pains he felt in the city, surrounded by Stormguard, reminded every day of the hell he had wrought at Urforren, she would know they were perhaps preventable.
Have you thought about the Forest Watch? he had said all those spans ago. Floré blew out through her nose and licked her lips and shook her head. Another life had been possible at Protector’s Keep – a soldier’s life, a life of service. What am I going to be without that? Starbeck’s hurried order to her in the corridor the night before – you will keep him safe until he is needed.
‘Goat’s cheese!’ Janos said, and she blinked and smiled. He frowned. ‘You okay?’ he asked, and Floré made herself smile and stretch out her hand to his, holding the outside of his hand gently and then snatching one of the pastries away.
‘Just hungry,’ she said, and together they ate and they walked the silent streets of Undal City east, to the star gate. The mail coach was ready to ride as dawn came and there were three other passengers – Floré paid them no mind. The driver squinted to read their letter of passage in the pale dawn light and looked between them as he loaded their bags.
‘Which one’s Artollen, then? Sergeant Artollen, of the Forest Watch?’
Floré made herself smile again, and raised a hand to her chest. Bolt-Captain of the Stormguard commandos, she thought, but said nothing.
‘Aye, well, I’m from Larchford myself. You’ve a nice assignment waiting. Best fishing that side of the Unerdan in Loch Hassel. Climb up and I’ll have you to Hookstone Town by evening.’
Floré did not look back at the walls of Undal or the towers of Protector’s Keep as they left, did not allow herself to. Look forward, girl, she said in her mind in her mother’s voice. She could still remember her mother’s voice, if nothing else. Together she sat with Janos and watched the coast roll by, fishing crofts and wash-houses where the washers were already arriving, laden with baskets of dirtied linen and cloth from the rich houses of the eastern half of the city. It was a clear day and already sheets were strung between the wash-houses, the wind blowing them in from the sea, blowing them north. They strained against their pegs and ties. Floré caught a line of a chorus sung high – kiss your daughters, count their toes, hear the daughters, wail and woe – and then repeated low, and the sound of laughter. Then the cart was past, and the smattering of crofts and houses began to give way to barns and fields and drystone dykes.
‘Do you know that song, my love?’ she asked, her eyes lingering on a flock of sheep held fast behind a fence of woven willow. Some of the sheep were on the wrong side of the fence. How did you escape?
‘Three daughters of the mist, unkind,’ Janos said, his voice low. The other three passengers were asleep or feigning it. ‘It’s an old Undal folk song. The three daughters are great bogles, relu, godlings – spirits. The song is about the last daughter. While she sleeps long seasons, her mother is killed by the Undal to protect their sheep. One sister flees to the north, and another spirit kills her to defend its territory. One sister tries to fight and is killed by the Undal. The final daughter wakes, and one by one she takes the children of the village as they play or work, until a man speaks to her and offers her a deal – a tribute of meat and flowers each Chainday, forever more, for her forgiveness and her mercy.’
Floré pushed her hand through her hair, feeling the curls untangle. ‘Cheery stuff,’ she said, and Janos smiled at her, eyes crinkling.
‘The old Undal were not a cheery folk,’ he said, ‘but it’s a hell of a song. Catchy. Remind me when we are off this blasted coach and I’ll give you my best rendition.’
Onward they rode and the sun climbed high. The three merchants or whatever they were woke and demanded a piss break, and then they were passing through the village of Dal. The driver stopped at the eastern edge of the village by a Stormguard garrison and jumped down to deliver his mail and packages, and Floré took Janos to the top of a wee hill at the edge of the town. As she crested the hill she turned back and saw Undal City in all its glory on the horizon, the high walls and spires, the Ferron lighthouse standing proud in the water just off the harbour, slick black stone rising to an orb of hazed glass above, dim in the morning light. A dozen ships could be seen waiting their turn to dock, two dozen smaller boats rushing between them or out on their own quests. Floré felt a twist in her gut.
‘It was a good year,’ she said as Janos caught her up, out of breath. He followed her gaze and held her hand.
‘Aye, love,’ he said, squeezing her hand, and she felt his wedding ring touch hers. ‘We’ll have more to come.’
With a gentle hand he turned her, and Floré took in the sweep of the sea to the south, iron water and whitecaps, distant ships with sails catching the sun, bright and white. A matching lighthouse to the one at Undal City’s harbour sat in the water just off the short cliffs to the south of Dal. He kept turning her, and Floré allowed herself to be turned, breathed out and put Undal City behind her. Facing east with the sun high above, she could see the Star Coast. I’ve never been this far east before. Floré had served a year in the bogs east of Aber-Ouse, up near the Blue Wolf Mountains working with the lancers fighting back raids from Tessendorm, but never had she seen this half of her country.
Ahead of her under blue skies the Star Coast spread out, inlets and cliffs and sandy beaches, and within view a handful of black rocks ranging in size from a dog to a bullock – the fallen stars that gave the coast its name. Turning inland, rolling hills, herds of cattle and sheep, dozens of crofts and farms and groves of trees. The wind pulled at them both and Janos leaned into her and pointed to the north-east and she saw a distant blur of green, a green that spread up and back into hills, a green that ate half the horizon. Floré had ranged through the Slow Marsh in the west of the protectorate, fens full of streams and stunted trees and fields of bullrushes. She remembered the gorse and heather of Tollen, when she was a girl, and the bogs and lichened stone of the borders with Tessendorm. She’d travelled from the Stormwall down to the city and seen the farmland and tame orchards of the south coast. Never something like this.
