"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c10_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)
10
WIREBOUND
As Cyndere watched, her fear of the beastman diminished, overcome by revulsion at how the wires constricted and cut. Arms pinned to his sides, hands grasping at nothing, the creature snarled as if trying to frighten the snare. Then his voice faltered to a whimper. Steam curled over the blood that pooled darkly at his feet.
Deuneroi had described these contraptions to Cyndere many months ago. They were easier for soldiers to carry and conceal than the bulky metal spring-jaws. Best of all, they were likely to bind and injure but not kill their catch. The traps could help them round up beastmen for study and observation. But a demonstration of the device quickly changed Deuneroi’s mind; in the court he began to argue against their use. Their advantages were obvious, but he hated their cruelty, hated how the wires could not discern between beastmen and more innocent creatures.
Cyndere stared at the struggling beastman. He had not harmed her. Instead, he had raised a question in her mind.
She did not want the question. It prevented her from completing what she had come to do.
The plan had been so simple. She would convince her mother that she could mourn and find peace at Tilianpurth. Disguised as Emeriene, she would get Bauris to lead her through the ancient escape tunnel and into the woods so she could find the glen again.
The glen—where flirtation had given way to confessions and bold vows. Deuneroi had touched each freckle on her back, naming them after constellations, his fingertips soft and cool as these snowflakes. They had imagined a better world and arrived at a common question: Could they purge corruption from the Cent Regus and restore the people of a fallen house? They had practiced conversations with invisible Cent Regus here, dreaming ways to lure the creatures back to conscience and civility.
She wanted to bid a proper farewell to her father, Partayn, and Deuneroi. Seers had convinced the Bel Amicans that the old beliefs were superstitions and that ghosts were fantasy. They insisted that only the moon-spirits’ worshipers found life beyond the grave, led away into paradises of their own design, never to return. Cyndere could not accept such a vision. She needed a way to say good-bye. She would decorate a Memory Tree, burn those treasured belongings, and cling to what she had believed as a child—that witnesses surrounded her in clouds, listening to her appeals and laments.
Her first venture to the well had not gone as planned.
Then her visit to the prison pit shattered what remained of her confidence. Emeriene was right. She could not face such hatred alone, and no one would stand beside her to offer help. Deuneroi and his dream were gone, and she felt abandoned, purposeless. She would ask the ghosts to take her away, to set her free from this ruined life.
But now, this.
Confronted with this helpless monster, her plan was spoiled again. The opportunity she and Deuneroi had sought was before her, as if someone had brought the beastman here, right at this moment, to knock the knife from her hand. Now she too was caught in a tightening snare of indecision. She could not bring herself to rekindle the fire, nor could she bend and take up that cold, blue-lit blade. Something restrained her.
“I can’t,” she said to the darkness.
When the beastman’s legs weakened and he slumped forward, the wires dug in tighter, shocking him awake. He kicked at the slippery ground and leaned back against the tree, yelping like a wounded dog.
She studied the beastman’s face, which was layered with conflicting natures, as if he had ripped away the faces of beasts and pasted patches over his own, merging and melding them into a mask until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
“You’re not like the one we’ve locked away,” she said.
The beastman released a trembling breath. A memory rose, as if from another lifetime before she knew death and despair.
“Cyndere,” King Helpryn whispered. With his irrepressible zeal for discovery, he had crawled with her through a stand of tall grass, soil darkening his elbows, arrows in his left hand, a bow in his right.
She had thought it a game. Only seven years old, she had led her father through a maze of passages she carved through the windblown grassfields of the bluffs high above the edge of the Mystery Sea. She would show him the animals that had become her playmates. The coastland creatures were far better friends for an heiress than those children who treated her with fear or false affection.
The king had nodded patiently while she pointed out silverflies and fuzz-worms, bluebeaks, jackrabbits, and fire-coughing candlefrogs. And as they came to the edge of the bluff and looked down to the swirling inlet, she pointed out the sprawling, oil-black bodies of grawlafurrs and the leaping, dancing seals called inysh.
But it was the rapid yipping of lurkdashers that caught the king’s attention. She scrambled to keep up as he hurried ahead on all fours, crawling into the tunnels and emerging at the far edge of the field. Together they looked down a long, grassy slope to a patch of thick brush.
A batch of lurkdasher cubs were at play, hopping and wrestling and tumbling together, their long, white-tipped ears flattened against their backs, their red tails bristling and lashing about. They would engage in a furious fracas, then separate and trot on tiptoes in nervous circles, canine smiles betraying rowdy intent, only to jump on each other again and roll, limbs entwined.
The lurkdashers’ father suddenly appeared from behind a shrub. His coat seemed made of several shaggy skins, shredded from day after day of crawling through tangles of barbed branches. His towering ears erect, he sniffed at the wind and gave a quick, short bark, then padded on white paws into the open, whiskers straight and bright.
Cyndere’s father had thanked his lucky tattoo—eagle wings spread open across his forehead. She did not perceive his intent. Those arrows in his hand, they seemed as much a part of him as his rings and the emblems of royalty.
But then he had drawn an arrow into the bow, set the catch so it would not fire, grasped the curve and fingered the release switch. With his other hand, he quickly sealed Cyndere’s open mouth, stopped her sudden cry. He touched the switch. The bowstring sang. The lurkdasher lay on the ground, legs in spasms at his side.
Cyndere ran, her jaw aching from the way she had wrenched free of her father’s grasp. He called after her, warned her that the creature was dangerous. But she did not look back. She stumbled and pitched forward, and a thorn pierced the palm of her hand. She ignored it, biting her lip, and continued her run until she reached the creature’s side and saw the feathered end of the arrow in its chest. Cyndere looked down the hill in dismay, only to find that there was no sign of the cubs.
The fallen dasher quivered. She reached to touch his shoulder. He snarled, drawing his trembling lips back to show a line of perfect white teeth, pink gums with black spots, a black tongue.
She wept, gripping the arrowshaft, too frightened to pull it free, while blood dripped from the thorn in her hand.
Her father arrived at her side, scolding her for approaching a wounded animal.
She began to feel faint, and her eyes met the lurkdasher’s. She saw a kind of understanding in them. With a final, shaky exhalation, light faded from his eyes.
Cyndere turned away. “No, please,” she whispered. “I can’t bear it.”
“Help.” The beastman swallowed hard, his body shuddering.
She felt foolish and useless. “I can’t do this.”
“O-raya,” he sighed, and his eyes closed.
“No!” She snatched up the tetherwing basket and drew her cloak from the tree, then stumbled away.
She climbed out of the glen and looked toward the tower. Emeriene stood framed in the window, striking the same regal pose as before, faithful and surely angry that Cyndere had crept away without warning.
“Forgive me, Em,” Cyndere whispered. “But I can’t come back.”
Cyndere seized the wig of black horsehair. It had fooled Bauris into accepting her as Emeriene on the first night and helped her slip past sisterlies into the tunnel tonight. She would not need it anymore. She pulled it from her head.
She pulled up the hood of her cloak to hide her short, golden hair. Then she turned and staggered away in no particular direction. She walked without purpose, without answers, as lost as she had been when she tried to give herself up to the ocean.
As she moved beyond the reach of the blue light, the leaves around her feet rustled. She felt a hot sting across her ankle, and she fell, shocked with pain, her legs wound about with wire. And then she felt nothing, not even the snow that began to settle on her face.
The woods were quiet. The basket lay on its side, the lid open. Sleepy tetherwings trundled about in the snow and then climbed back inside.
At the hint of another’s blood on the breeze, Jordam’s predatory instincts awoke. He wheezed a desperate breath, shocked to his senses.
The boughs above him cast snow down into the glen. Fog swirled around the glimmering well. He wanted to drift out of this bleeding body and lose himself in that light. Baring his teeth, he fought to keep from falling forward into the wires’ tension.
He focused his attention on the snare’s mechanism. He could see that it was pinned into the earth. He looked about, hoping to find a low-hanging branch he could use to prod the device loose from the ground.
The lowest of the wires was wrapped about his thighs.
An idea began to take shape.
He pressed his feet between the ridges of the apple tree’s shallow roots. He began to dig at the soil around them with his toes. The more he loosened the roots, the more excited he became. Soon he could curl his toes around two roots that ran out from the tree toward the mechanism. Slowly, forcefully, he tugged at them. The more he strained, the farther from the tree the roots broke from their shallow burial.
And then the roots ripped up from the ground on either side of the trap. They caught the flywheel’s edges and lifted it, pulling the pin half free. Jordam clenched his teeth, strained against the ground’s hold. The roots broke loose. The pin sprang up, free. The trap tilted and fell.
In another mighty pull, Jordam tore the roots free from the soil. He drew the knobby tendrils toward him, and the overturned trap rode along. As the trap came closer, the wire tension slackened.
Jordam pulled the embedded cords from his flesh. When he finally climbed free, he fell against the ground as if to embrace it. Darkness seized him, sought to overcome him, but he wrestled it, cursing.
Behind him, the tree shuddered, leaning into the place where it had lost its grip on the ground. As it did, the rest of the roots tore free. He rolled to the side, and the tree fell toward the well, branches snapping and waving. A few stubborn apples tumbled free.
He caught another trace of the woman’s blood on the air. “O-raya,” he croaked. “rrWait.” He forced himself to his feet and lurched up the slope toward the trees, following the faint sound of her shallow, quivering breath. He climbed through an overhanging patch of ferns, stalked through the brush, and found her. In his delirium he thought she was O-raya, bound up in this wicked Bel Amican wire. Her eyes were closed.
She is trapped. Hurting. Like me.
He reached for her, then paused. “rrNot…O-raya.” It was the Bel Amican woman. He remembered now. But as he leaned over her, he remembered O-raya lying on the cliff’s edge on the night that the Keeper took him down into the lake. “Not O-raya. rrLike O-raya.”
Jordam seized the anchor of her trap and pulled the pin free of the ground as easily as plucking out a thorn. Then he took the wires around her legs and slackened them, tenderly and carefully. They had not cut deeply, for she had fallen without any struggle, and the toughweed brace caught most of the snare. She would live.
He knelt there, cradling her cold, bleeding form in his arms as if she were a child. Then he lurched to his feet, carrying her. She was light, not like the bodies of men he had slain. And yet no burden had ever proved so difficult to carry, for every step he took required fierce concentration. The world spun and blurred around him. He moved toward the blue glow, then laid the woman down beside the well. Her hair, which had been long and dark, was now short and golden. He did not understand.
She woke, her eyes widening. She looked at him, looked at the fallen tree, and then looked beyond it, up toward the coil tree, where a figure stepped out of the darkness. “Do you see?” she asked, gesturing to the apparition in the shimmering veil. It held no weapons and made no move to interfere. It seemed to stare at Jordam and the woman intently.
“rrYes,” said Jordam.
The diaphanous figure raised a hand as if in greeting.
Jordam slumped against the ground and felt the cold engulf him. He wrapped his arms tightly around himself and was seized with violent shaking.
Water rushed through his mane and down through the lacerations on his arms, chest, and legs. He blinked and saw the woman kneeling and pouring the well water over him. She let the bucket fall and began to draw it out again. She was talking to herself, too quickly for him to understand. “If it’s you, Deuneroi,” she said. “One more time. One more try.”
She poured the next bucket over her own legs, seething as the water cleansed the clotting blood and sealed the wire’s stripes. As she did this, she watched the shadows.
Snowflakes drifted down like comforting whispers.
After a while she shook her head as if waking. “I must go back,” she said. She stood, wavering weakly. “Hide in the trees,” she told him. “Hide well. Tomorrow night I want you to come back. Come back here. To the well. Tomorrow night.”
“rrMorrow,” he repeated.
She grabbed a broken branch of the apple tree and began to prod about at the ground, testing it for more traps. She walked to the edge of the clearing and onto the path that led to the Bel Amican bastion. She did not look back, but he heard a deep breath, and she said, “What do I call you?”
“rrJordam,” he said. “What call?”
She did not answer.
The light from the well glinted on something made of golden glass. She had forgotten her vial of slumberseed oil. “Be still,” he said to himself, remembering her stern command. He glanced up at the tower suddenly uneasy. He wondered what had happened to his brothers.
Jordam lay beside the well, caught between desire and fear, half-awake in the light of O-raya’s blue.
Standing in her tower chamber as the sun rose, Cyndere stood naked before the mirror, the shreds of her grey shift and the broken toughweed cast scattered about her feet. Daylight coursed through an azure curtain to illuminate her skin pale blue. Her right leg appeared to have been slashed into pieces and then sewn back together, bold red stripes crisscrossing her thigh and calf. The bleeding had stopped, and the wounds had scabbed over. Already. And it was early morning, a few hours after her ordeal.
“The water,” she murmured. “Where does it come from?”
Emeriene stirred in her seat at the window, but she did not wake.
Cyndere determined to keep her ordeal a secret. She drew her winter nightgown over her head, and it draped down enough to conceal her wounds. She moved to her bed, where a pitcher of milk waited on a tray beside a plate piled with slices of fresh nectarbread.
On the night of the heiress’s first excursion out through the tunnels beneath Tilianpurth, Emeriene had begged her to change her mind. She had even volunteered to go down into the glen herself. But Cyndere would not deviate from her plan. “I must let it go, Em. I must set it all alight and speak to their ghosts.” On this second venture, she had gone alone without warning. Bauris slept, oblivious, and Emeriene had found this chamber empty.
Watching the sisterly sleep, Cyndere ached with gratitude. Things were different now. Something unexplainable had happened in the glen, something she would keep to herself. But it gave her a thread of hope, a reason to stay another day.
Emerging from the tunnel in Tilianpurth’s kitchen, Cyndere had been surprised to find only young Pyroi the stablehand awake, sneaking biscuits before sunup. He had dropped his plate when the cupboard separated from the wall and the heiress stepped out of the darkness, shaking with cold and smeared with dark blood. He had agreed to keep her secret, and when she promised to recommend him for a promotion, he burst into tears. Sniffing and fighting to regain his composure, he had helped her return to her chamber without being seen.
She took a small bite of nectarbread, then shoved whole slices into her mouth, one after the other, closing her eyes and finding comfort in the food. After she washed down the crumbs with a cup of milk, she rose and carried the pitcher to the foot of the bed. She poured a shallow layer of milk into the empty bowl on the floor, then left the pitcher and crawled beneath the pillowy bed blankets to wait.
Behind closed eyes she could see nothing but Jordam’s large, sad face. His ragged, wild mane. His fangs. “Deuneroi, I found him. I found our beastman. Tomorrow, I’ll sketch him for you.”
As she sank back into the pillows, Emeriene awoke.
“Oh!” Emeriene paused as if questioning her own senses. Then she ran at the bed, seized the heiress by the shoulders, and shook her. “You! You gave me such…” She buried her face in the blankets, and Cyndere embraced her. Her voice muffled in cloth, Emeriene shouted, “I thought you’d gone out again!” Pulling away, she stormed about, a tangle of relief and anger—step, thump, step, thump. “I’ve been searching. I wore the headdress and stood at the window. I thought…” And then she rushed to arrange kindling for a new fire.
“I did go out, Em. I saw you in the window.” Cyndere’s hands clenched fistfuls of the blanket.
Emeriene’s mouth opened and closed several times.
“You look like a fish. Listen, Em. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t burn the Memory Tree. Instead, I…I had a vision. You must keep this to yourself. No one else can know about this. Not even Bauris.”
“You’re worse than my sons! Has your mind turned to gravy?” Emeriene wiped tears on her sleeve. “How dare you go outside the wall without telling me? Why? Do you think you’ll find a ghost?” Emeriene snapped a dry branch, then held the pieces and stared into the cold fireplace. “I say the most terrible things when I’m angry. Forgive me.”
Cyndere smiled feebly. “You’ve every right to be angry. But I need you to trust me. I’ll say more, but first, I’m just…”
“Hungry?” Emeriene struck a firestick. “I’ll get us some breakfast.”
“Sleepy.” Cyndere sank back into the pillows. “I think I’ll really sleep. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like.”
“I’ll have to teach you how to sleep at night and move about in daylight.” Emeriene rose as the fire sprang to life, and she returned to kneel at the bedside. As she took Cyndere’s hand, the sisterly’s expression took on a frightful intensity. “We’ve lost so many things,” said Emeriene. “But we can start over. Together. Two girls at Tilianpurth. We’ll tell each other everything.” She stood up and cleared her throat. “First things first.”
As Emeriene all but skipped out the door, Cyndere gazed into the flames. She let a forced smile go, felt a furrow in her brow. “No,” she said. “No, I can’t tell you everything.”
It would be complicated, slipping away again to find the beastman. And to look for a ghost.
Abascar’s people had told stories of phantoms called Northchildren. But Cyndere didn’t believe such things. She was certain that this apparition had known her, greeted her. She was afraid to let herself imagine who it might have been.
A delicate sound interrupted the memories. Drab as one of her father’s old sealskin slippers, the bat with the broken wing crawled around inside the milk bowl, his rough tongue scraping the bottom dry. He stretched his weak wings, shook them out as if letting the strength brought by the meal work its way to the edges. He blinked and sniffed at the air. Clenching his eyes, he bared his little teeth and yawned.
Cyndere did not move.
The bat crawled awkwardly until his snout met the cold crystal of the milk pitcher. He licked it. He pawed at it with the tips of his wings, as if knocking to be let in. Soon he had hooked his wingtips over the pitcher’s edge and pulled himself up. All the time his nostrils twitched. His small gray body teetered on the lip as he craned his neck to try to reach the milk.
“You’re going to fall in,” she said.
He fell.
While he splashed and choked and climbed back out again, dripping rivers of milk behind him, Cyndere laughed through her tears until she fell asleep.
10
WIREBOUND
As Cyndere watched, her fear of the beastman diminished, overcome by revulsion at how the wires constricted and cut. Arms pinned to his sides, hands grasping at nothing, the creature snarled as if trying to frighten the snare. Then his voice faltered to a whimper. Steam curled over the blood that pooled darkly at his feet.
Deuneroi had described these contraptions to Cyndere many months ago. They were easier for soldiers to carry and conceal than the bulky metal spring-jaws. Best of all, they were likely to bind and injure but not kill their catch. The traps could help them round up beastmen for study and observation. But a demonstration of the device quickly changed Deuneroi’s mind; in the court he began to argue against their use. Their advantages were obvious, but he hated their cruelty, hated how the wires could not discern between beastmen and more innocent creatures.
Cyndere stared at the struggling beastman. He had not harmed her. Instead, he had raised a question in her mind.
She did not want the question. It prevented her from completing what she had come to do.
The plan had been so simple. She would convince her mother that she could mourn and find peace at Tilianpurth. Disguised as Emeriene, she would get Bauris to lead her through the ancient escape tunnel and into the woods so she could find the glen again.
The glen—where flirtation had given way to confessions and bold vows. Deuneroi had touched each freckle on her back, naming them after constellations, his fingertips soft and cool as these snowflakes. They had imagined a better world and arrived at a common question: Could they purge corruption from the Cent Regus and restore the people of a fallen house? They had practiced conversations with invisible Cent Regus here, dreaming ways to lure the creatures back to conscience and civility.
She wanted to bid a proper farewell to her father, Partayn, and Deuneroi. Seers had convinced the Bel Amicans that the old beliefs were superstitions and that ghosts were fantasy. They insisted that only the moon-spirits’ worshipers found life beyond the grave, led away into paradises of their own design, never to return. Cyndere could not accept such a vision. She needed a way to say good-bye. She would decorate a Memory Tree, burn those treasured belongings, and cling to what she had believed as a child—that witnesses surrounded her in clouds, listening to her appeals and laments.
Her first venture to the well had not gone as planned.
Then her visit to the prison pit shattered what remained of her confidence. Emeriene was right. She could not face such hatred alone, and no one would stand beside her to offer help. Deuneroi and his dream were gone, and she felt abandoned, purposeless. She would ask the ghosts to take her away, to set her free from this ruined life.
But now, this.
Confronted with this helpless monster, her plan was spoiled again. The opportunity she and Deuneroi had sought was before her, as if someone had brought the beastman here, right at this moment, to knock the knife from her hand. Now she too was caught in a tightening snare of indecision. She could not bring herself to rekindle the fire, nor could she bend and take up that cold, blue-lit blade. Something restrained her.
“I can’t,” she said to the darkness.
When the beastman’s legs weakened and he slumped forward, the wires dug in tighter, shocking him awake. He kicked at the slippery ground and leaned back against the tree, yelping like a wounded dog.
She studied the beastman’s face, which was layered with conflicting natures, as if he had ripped away the faces of beasts and pasted patches over his own, merging and melding them into a mask until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
“You’re not like the one we’ve locked away,” she said.
The beastman released a trembling breath. A memory rose, as if from another lifetime before she knew death and despair.
“Cyndere,” King Helpryn whispered. With his irrepressible zeal for discovery, he had crawled with her through a stand of tall grass, soil darkening his elbows, arrows in his left hand, a bow in his right.
She had thought it a game. Only seven years old, she had led her father through a maze of passages she carved through the windblown grassfields of the bluffs high above the edge of the Mystery Sea. She would show him the animals that had become her playmates. The coastland creatures were far better friends for an heiress than those children who treated her with fear or false affection.
The king had nodded patiently while she pointed out silverflies and fuzz-worms, bluebeaks, jackrabbits, and fire-coughing candlefrogs. And as they came to the edge of the bluff and looked down to the swirling inlet, she pointed out the sprawling, oil-black bodies of grawlafurrs and the leaping, dancing seals called inysh.
But it was the rapid yipping of lurkdashers that caught the king’s attention. She scrambled to keep up as he hurried ahead on all fours, crawling into the tunnels and emerging at the far edge of the field. Together they looked down a long, grassy slope to a patch of thick brush.
A batch of lurkdasher cubs were at play, hopping and wrestling and tumbling together, their long, white-tipped ears flattened against their backs, their red tails bristling and lashing about. They would engage in a furious fracas, then separate and trot on tiptoes in nervous circles, canine smiles betraying rowdy intent, only to jump on each other again and roll, limbs entwined.
The lurkdashers’ father suddenly appeared from behind a shrub. His coat seemed made of several shaggy skins, shredded from day after day of crawling through tangles of barbed branches. His towering ears erect, he sniffed at the wind and gave a quick, short bark, then padded on white paws into the open, whiskers straight and bright.
Cyndere’s father had thanked his lucky tattoo—eagle wings spread open across his forehead. She did not perceive his intent. Those arrows in his hand, they seemed as much a part of him as his rings and the emblems of royalty.
But then he had drawn an arrow into the bow, set the catch so it would not fire, grasped the curve and fingered the release switch. With his other hand, he quickly sealed Cyndere’s open mouth, stopped her sudden cry. He touched the switch. The bowstring sang. The lurkdasher lay on the ground, legs in spasms at his side.
Cyndere ran, her jaw aching from the way she had wrenched free of her father’s grasp. He called after her, warned her that the creature was dangerous. But she did not look back. She stumbled and pitched forward, and a thorn pierced the palm of her hand. She ignored it, biting her lip, and continued her run until she reached the creature’s side and saw the feathered end of the arrow in its chest. Cyndere looked down the hill in dismay, only to find that there was no sign of the cubs.
The fallen dasher quivered. She reached to touch his shoulder. He snarled, drawing his trembling lips back to show a line of perfect white teeth, pink gums with black spots, a black tongue.
She wept, gripping the arrowshaft, too frightened to pull it free, while blood dripped from the thorn in her hand.
Her father arrived at her side, scolding her for approaching a wounded animal.
She began to feel faint, and her eyes met the lurkdasher’s. She saw a kind of understanding in them. With a final, shaky exhalation, light faded from his eyes.
Cyndere turned away. “No, please,” she whispered. “I can’t bear it.”
“Help.” The beastman swallowed hard, his body shuddering.
She felt foolish and useless. “I can’t do this.”
“O-raya,” he sighed, and his eyes closed.
“No!” She snatched up the tetherwing basket and drew her cloak from the tree, then stumbled away.
She climbed out of the glen and looked toward the tower. Emeriene stood framed in the window, striking the same regal pose as before, faithful and surely angry that Cyndere had crept away without warning.
“Forgive me, Em,” Cyndere whispered. “But I can’t come back.”
Cyndere seized the wig of black horsehair. It had fooled Bauris into accepting her as Emeriene on the first night and helped her slip past sisterlies into the tunnel tonight. She would not need it anymore. She pulled it from her head.
She pulled up the hood of her cloak to hide her short, golden hair. Then she turned and staggered away in no particular direction. She walked without purpose, without answers, as lost as she had been when she tried to give herself up to the ocean.
As she moved beyond the reach of the blue light, the leaves around her feet rustled. She felt a hot sting across her ankle, and she fell, shocked with pain, her legs wound about with wire. And then she felt nothing, not even the snow that began to settle on her face.
The woods were quiet. The basket lay on its side, the lid open. Sleepy tetherwings trundled about in the snow and then climbed back inside.
At the hint of another’s blood on the breeze, Jordam’s predatory instincts awoke. He wheezed a desperate breath, shocked to his senses.
The boughs above him cast snow down into the glen. Fog swirled around the glimmering well. He wanted to drift out of this bleeding body and lose himself in that light. Baring his teeth, he fought to keep from falling forward into the wires’ tension.
He focused his attention on the snare’s mechanism. He could see that it was pinned into the earth. He looked about, hoping to find a low-hanging branch he could use to prod the device loose from the ground.
The lowest of the wires was wrapped about his thighs.
An idea began to take shape.
He pressed his feet between the ridges of the apple tree’s shallow roots. He began to dig at the soil around them with his toes. The more he loosened the roots, the more excited he became. Soon he could curl his toes around two roots that ran out from the tree toward the mechanism. Slowly, forcefully, he tugged at them. The more he strained, the farther from the tree the roots broke from their shallow burial.
And then the roots ripped up from the ground on either side of the trap. They caught the flywheel’s edges and lifted it, pulling the pin half free. Jordam clenched his teeth, strained against the ground’s hold. The roots broke loose. The pin sprang up, free. The trap tilted and fell.
In another mighty pull, Jordam tore the roots free from the soil. He drew the knobby tendrils toward him, and the overturned trap rode along. As the trap came closer, the wire tension slackened.
Jordam pulled the embedded cords from his flesh. When he finally climbed free, he fell against the ground as if to embrace it. Darkness seized him, sought to overcome him, but he wrestled it, cursing.
Behind him, the tree shuddered, leaning into the place where it had lost its grip on the ground. As it did, the rest of the roots tore free. He rolled to the side, and the tree fell toward the well, branches snapping and waving. A few stubborn apples tumbled free.
He caught another trace of the woman’s blood on the air. “O-raya,” he croaked. “rrWait.” He forced himself to his feet and lurched up the slope toward the trees, following the faint sound of her shallow, quivering breath. He climbed through an overhanging patch of ferns, stalked through the brush, and found her. In his delirium he thought she was O-raya, bound up in this wicked Bel Amican wire. Her eyes were closed.
She is trapped. Hurting. Like me.
He reached for her, then paused. “rrNot…O-raya.” It was the Bel Amican woman. He remembered now. But as he leaned over her, he remembered O-raya lying on the cliff’s edge on the night that the Keeper took him down into the lake. “Not O-raya. rrLike O-raya.”
Jordam seized the anchor of her trap and pulled the pin free of the ground as easily as plucking out a thorn. Then he took the wires around her legs and slackened them, tenderly and carefully. They had not cut deeply, for she had fallen without any struggle, and the toughweed brace caught most of the snare. She would live.
He knelt there, cradling her cold, bleeding form in his arms as if she were a child. Then he lurched to his feet, carrying her. She was light, not like the bodies of men he had slain. And yet no burden had ever proved so difficult to carry, for every step he took required fierce concentration. The world spun and blurred around him. He moved toward the blue glow, then laid the woman down beside the well. Her hair, which had been long and dark, was now short and golden. He did not understand.
She woke, her eyes widening. She looked at him, looked at the fallen tree, and then looked beyond it, up toward the coil tree, where a figure stepped out of the darkness. “Do you see?” she asked, gesturing to the apparition in the shimmering veil. It held no weapons and made no move to interfere. It seemed to stare at Jordam and the woman intently.
“rrYes,” said Jordam.
The diaphanous figure raised a hand as if in greeting.
Jordam slumped against the ground and felt the cold engulf him. He wrapped his arms tightly around himself and was seized with violent shaking.
Water rushed through his mane and down through the lacerations on his arms, chest, and legs. He blinked and saw the woman kneeling and pouring the well water over him. She let the bucket fall and began to draw it out again. She was talking to herself, too quickly for him to understand. “If it’s you, Deuneroi,” she said. “One more time. One more try.”
She poured the next bucket over her own legs, seething as the water cleansed the clotting blood and sealed the wire’s stripes. As she did this, she watched the shadows.
Snowflakes drifted down like comforting whispers.
After a while she shook her head as if waking. “I must go back,” she said. She stood, wavering weakly. “Hide in the trees,” she told him. “Hide well. Tomorrow night I want you to come back. Come back here. To the well. Tomorrow night.”
“rrMorrow,” he repeated.
She grabbed a broken branch of the apple tree and began to prod about at the ground, testing it for more traps. She walked to the edge of the clearing and onto the path that led to the Bel Amican bastion. She did not look back, but he heard a deep breath, and she said, “What do I call you?”
“rrJordam,” he said. “What call?”
She did not answer.
The light from the well glinted on something made of golden glass. She had forgotten her vial of slumberseed oil. “Be still,” he said to himself, remembering her stern command. He glanced up at the tower suddenly uneasy. He wondered what had happened to his brothers.
Jordam lay beside the well, caught between desire and fear, half-awake in the light of O-raya’s blue.
Standing in her tower chamber as the sun rose, Cyndere stood naked before the mirror, the shreds of her grey shift and the broken toughweed cast scattered about her feet. Daylight coursed through an azure curtain to illuminate her skin pale blue. Her right leg appeared to have been slashed into pieces and then sewn back together, bold red stripes crisscrossing her thigh and calf. The bleeding had stopped, and the wounds had scabbed over. Already. And it was early morning, a few hours after her ordeal.
“The water,” she murmured. “Where does it come from?”
Emeriene stirred in her seat at the window, but she did not wake.
Cyndere determined to keep her ordeal a secret. She drew her winter nightgown over her head, and it draped down enough to conceal her wounds. She moved to her bed, where a pitcher of milk waited on a tray beside a plate piled with slices of fresh nectarbread.
On the night of the heiress’s first excursion out through the tunnels beneath Tilianpurth, Emeriene had begged her to change her mind. She had even volunteered to go down into the glen herself. But Cyndere would not deviate from her plan. “I must let it go, Em. I must set it all alight and speak to their ghosts.” On this second venture, she had gone alone without warning. Bauris slept, oblivious, and Emeriene had found this chamber empty.
Watching the sisterly sleep, Cyndere ached with gratitude. Things were different now. Something unexplainable had happened in the glen, something she would keep to herself. But it gave her a thread of hope, a reason to stay another day.
Emerging from the tunnel in Tilianpurth’s kitchen, Cyndere had been surprised to find only young Pyroi the stablehand awake, sneaking biscuits before sunup. He had dropped his plate when the cupboard separated from the wall and the heiress stepped out of the darkness, shaking with cold and smeared with dark blood. He had agreed to keep her secret, and when she promised to recommend him for a promotion, he burst into tears. Sniffing and fighting to regain his composure, he had helped her return to her chamber without being seen.
She took a small bite of nectarbread, then shoved whole slices into her mouth, one after the other, closing her eyes and finding comfort in the food. After she washed down the crumbs with a cup of milk, she rose and carried the pitcher to the foot of the bed. She poured a shallow layer of milk into the empty bowl on the floor, then left the pitcher and crawled beneath the pillowy bed blankets to wait.
Behind closed eyes she could see nothing but Jordam’s large, sad face. His ragged, wild mane. His fangs. “Deuneroi, I found him. I found our beastman. Tomorrow, I’ll sketch him for you.”
As she sank back into the pillows, Emeriene awoke.
“Oh!” Emeriene paused as if questioning her own senses. Then she ran at the bed, seized the heiress by the shoulders, and shook her. “You! You gave me such…” She buried her face in the blankets, and Cyndere embraced her. Her voice muffled in cloth, Emeriene shouted, “I thought you’d gone out again!” Pulling away, she stormed about, a tangle of relief and anger—step, thump, step, thump. “I’ve been searching. I wore the headdress and stood at the window. I thought…” And then she rushed to arrange kindling for a new fire.
“I did go out, Em. I saw you in the window.” Cyndere’s hands clenched fistfuls of the blanket.
Emeriene’s mouth opened and closed several times.
“You look like a fish. Listen, Em. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t burn the Memory Tree. Instead, I…I had a vision. You must keep this to yourself. No one else can know about this. Not even Bauris.”
“You’re worse than my sons! Has your mind turned to gravy?” Emeriene wiped tears on her sleeve. “How dare you go outside the wall without telling me? Why? Do you think you’ll find a ghost?” Emeriene snapped a dry branch, then held the pieces and stared into the cold fireplace. “I say the most terrible things when I’m angry. Forgive me.”
Cyndere smiled feebly. “You’ve every right to be angry. But I need you to trust me. I’ll say more, but first, I’m just…”
“Hungry?” Emeriene struck a firestick. “I’ll get us some breakfast.”
“Sleepy.” Cyndere sank back into the pillows. “I think I’ll really sleep. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like.”
“I’ll have to teach you how to sleep at night and move about in daylight.” Emeriene rose as the fire sprang to life, and she returned to kneel at the bedside. As she took Cyndere’s hand, the sisterly’s expression took on a frightful intensity. “We’ve lost so many things,” said Emeriene. “But we can start over. Together. Two girls at Tilianpurth. We’ll tell each other everything.” She stood up and cleared her throat. “First things first.”
As Emeriene all but skipped out the door, Cyndere gazed into the flames. She let a forced smile go, felt a furrow in her brow. “No,” she said. “No, I can’t tell you everything.”
It would be complicated, slipping away again to find the beastman. And to look for a ghost.
Abascar’s people had told stories of phantoms called Northchildren. But Cyndere didn’t believe such things. She was certain that this apparition had known her, greeted her. She was afraid to let herself imagine who it might have been.
A delicate sound interrupted the memories. Drab as one of her father’s old sealskin slippers, the bat with the broken wing crawled around inside the milk bowl, his rough tongue scraping the bottom dry. He stretched his weak wings, shook them out as if letting the strength brought by the meal work its way to the edges. He blinked and sniffed at the air. Clenching his eyes, he bared his little teeth and yawned.
Cyndere did not move.
The bat crawled awkwardly until his snout met the cold crystal of the milk pitcher. He licked it. He pawed at it with the tips of his wings, as if knocking to be let in. Soon he had hooked his wingtips over the pitcher’s edge and pulled himself up. All the time his nostrils twitched. His small gray body teetered on the lip as he craned his neck to try to reach the milk.
“You’re going to fall in,” she said.
He fell.
While he splashed and choked and climbed back out again, dripping rivers of milk behind him, Cyndere laughed through her tears until she fell asleep.
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