"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c25_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)
25
AURALIA’S BLUE ROOM
S
he is like me, he thought. Hunted. Alone.
Jordam slowed his passage through arcades of trees and landed lightly on a high branch. The air was dry and cold, but Bel was not shivering anymore. She stood at the cliff’s edge, leaning forward into the view—Deep Lake, with its floating icedrifts, its mirrored constellations sparkling through rips in the clouds. She seemed to dare the wind.
The recent storms had scoured the sky, and the stars seemed closer, brighter. They reminded Jordam of the mysterious lights strung from threads along the high ceilings of O-raya’s caves, suspended in delicate balance. The Expanse felt small in view of that light-dusted space so full of unknowns.
He held back, one foot on this strange new path, the other in memory. From this vantage point, he could look back and see the tree where he had struck a fleeing boy from his horse. And there, where Bel stood, was the very spot where he had stalked a singing girl, where his world had changed. He shivered, shaking off a premonition that his brothers would find her soon, that he would not be able to save her.
Climbing down, he brushed snow, twigs, and leaves from his mane. He tightened the belt of the tattered soldier’s tunic and made sure his weapons were sheathed. He crouched beside the Bel Amican saddlebags, then cleared his throat. He dared not frighten her.
“Bel,” he whispered, stepping into the moonlight. Then, “Sin-der. Come. Hide. Safe.”
She did not respond right away. After tearing strips from the lining of her cloak, she bound up her ankle where the wire had cut deepest. She pushed her hood back, ran fingers through her short, strawgold hair, and looked up at the sliver of moon. He heard her whisper sharp, bitter words but could not make them out.
Turning to face him, she said, “Show me.”
Cyndere followed Jordam along the cliff’s edge to a place where it split open as if someone had cut into it with an ax. She thought he would lead her around the crevasse. Instead, he stepped to the deepest point of the breakage, carrying the saddlebags over his shoulder, and walked down onto a steep crumble of rock that sloped to a dizzying drop.
She hesitated. “We’ll fall into the lake.”
He crouched, swept away debris, and lifted a series of wooden planks like fence posts from where they lay under the dust. This opened a deep shaft like a chimney. “Down,” he said, pointing into the pit. “O-raya’s door.”
“What am I doing?” she muttered.
She looked down inside to see him descending a long ladder. In the faint moonlight, she saw him beckon. She followed.
At the bottom they stood in a cave where rivers of air crisscrossed from adjoining tunnels like cold blood through a heart. She was too weary to fear anymore. She followed him through one of the narrow passages. This was not what she had imagined when she and Deuneroi dreamt of making contact with Cent Regus. She had envisioned herself healing them and teaching them her own ways. Instead, she felt herself being drawn into Jordam’s surprising world.
Metal buckles of the saddlebags clanked and scraped against the walls of the narrow space ahead.
“How did you find this place?” Her whispers echoed close and far away. “Are we safe?”
The walls were wet from the seeping snows, soft with burgundy lichen and hanging moss. She heard watery murmurs from distant places, cavernous spaces. Just when it seemed they had left the light behind, they would pass a glowstone embedded in the wall like a lantern.
Eventually the passage grew larger and wider. She ran her fingers along a meandering line of gold drawn on the passage wall. The colors stained her fingers. “Someone painted the stone,” she concluded. “It’s like…”
They stepped into a room where the walls were painted from floor to ceiling with the same colors that she had seen lining the wellstones of the glen.
“Auralia,” she whispered.
She wanted to stay, but Jordam led on, showing her a tunnel where the walls were lined with shelves. Most of them were empty, but in one corner there were hollows in the wall stacked high with scarves, capes, stockings, and bundles of yarn. She withdrew a heavy shawl that smelled of mildew and shook it loose of mothwings and webs, marveling as it rippled with intricate lines of radiant green.
“She did all this?”
“All night O-raya makes colors,” he answered in a reverent whisper. “No sleeping.”
“You can’t be the only one who knows about this,” she said. “Won’t we be found?”
“Safe here. rrNo one comes.” He paused, twisted strands of his beard, then shrugged. “Ale boy comes. And…cloud people.”
“Cloud people?” She puzzled over that, picking up a broom from the floor. “So. This really was her home. And you and the ale boy, you were her guests.” She swept dust, debris, strands of thread, flakes of falseglass, fragments of shells, and chips of paint. “How is it that both of you came to me? The Expanse goes on forever, but we found each other.” She propped the broom against the wall.
Jordam paused, his shape stark against the blue promise of the next tunnel. “Strange forest,” he replied.
The neighboring chamber was spacious, like one of the moon-spirit observatories in Bel Amica. Cyndere stepped in and heard a fluttering as their entrance disturbed some shadowy life in the high recesses of the cave. But before she could discern what kind of creatures they were, another mystery stole her attention.
Jordam stood before a wall thinly curtained in rippling water that shimmered and spilled away through cracks in the floor. Behind that quiet, glistening sheen, blue constellations pulsed and glittered intermittently, like faint notes of music.
“How?” Her own voice surprised her in chorus as the word flew about the great space and returned. Moving forward, she felt like she was falling into a night sky. “The snow…it’s melting.”
Jordam watched her approach, and she saw something like jealousy in his eyes. “rrNever showed this,” he whispered, half growling. “Never.”
She touched the wall, opening a tear in the cascading water, which flowed around her fingertips. “It’s beautiful.” The blue light enveloped her hand through the water, and she did not know what moved her more, the ghostly lights or the dark spans between them. “Spring’s beginning. At last.”
“rrBlue from flowers.” He set the saddlebags onto the larger of two broad boulders in the middle of the floor, then climbed up to sit back against them. He folded his legs beneath him and rested his chin on his hands.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. She took the blue from the flowers and painted this wall.”
“O-raya made blue,” he said. “She gave blue to me. I climbed the wall. Put the blue there, there, there.” He reached out, touching places in the air as if reliving the work.
“You did this?” Jordam looked down at her, his eyes so wide she could see white around the dark irises. A smile spread across his face as she exclaimed, “You did this!”
They stood together staring into the blue.
“O-raya,” he said, his voice like small stones cracking under a great weight. “O-raya.”
“What does the blue make you think about?”
He narrowed his eyes, tapped his claw tips on the stone. “Like…windows. Windows to good places.”
She sat down on the floor, leaning against the boulder, and tilted her head back to look up at him. He hunched forward, looking into her face. “What was it, Jordam, that changed you? Was it Auralia? Or the colors?”
“Yes.” He touched his browbone absently, then pressed his hand to his chest.
“You’re sad. Sad she’s gone. You miss her.”
“Miss her. O-raya gone to Abascar. I searched there. Found the colors, but then”—his voice curdled—“rrCent Regus took them.”
“Cent Regus came here?”
“No. They took O-raya’s colors from Abascar.” He lay back and stared up at the ceiling, his head on the saddlebags. “Someday I get them back.”
He continued, the words coming with greater ease as he relaxed. He described the days he had spent here, wounded by his fall but enthralled by O-raya’s colors. O-raya had brought him fish, apples, water. “Good water. Deep water,” he added. “Brown cup.”
“From the lake?”
“No.” He gestured back to the adjoining passage. “rrWater from caves. Deep. Like the well.”
Cyndere liked the sound of Jordam’s voice here. It had lost its jagged edge, resonating instead like those sad bass horns in the bands that once played for the departure of ships. She could almost imagine what he might have sounded like had he been an ordinary man. He was taking time, she noticed, to become descriptive. The colors calmed him, gave him a safe place to remember and piece things together, to give his feelings shape.
“Once, I look for O-raya,” he continued. “Crawl through many caves. No O-raya. But water. And lights. rrMany lights. Lights on the water. Colors grow there, on the water. Like weeds. Like leaves. Like blankets.”
“Colors growing in secret caves.” She shook her head. “I’ve never imagined it. Every question answered asks another.” She saw his eyes searching about, trying to interpret her words. “Why did you leave Auralia? Why did you go back to your brothers?”
Jordam explained that he had departed Auralia’s caves for fear of his brothers—especially one called Mordafey. And he was drawn away desiring power and strength. She knew he was speaking of the Cent Regus curse.
“But you came back here.”
He spread his hands in the air as if searching for something, then dropped them to his sides. He was quiet for a time. Flies buzzed about his nose and lips and crawled on the crooked line of his browbone. His face was so strange to her. It was as if a man were trying to escape an animal that had consumed him.
“You can stay here, Jordam. You don’t have to go back. There are probably plenty of fish in the lake and birds in the wood. Not to mention berries and roots. You could live here.” She thought of the speeches she had rehearsed with Deuneroi, pleas to help the beastmen find their way to healing. “You could sleep here.” It was so different from what she’d expected. She had assumed she would have to persuade him. But he had made his desires known, and now her words came easily, for she was answering a friend, and he was listening. “You could be the first. A new Cent Regus man.”
He closed his eyes and winced. His massive chest rose and fell. He flared his fangs in a yawn.
“Those blankets in the corner. Who slept there?”
“Ale boy.”
“You haven’t told me, Jordam, what happened to him.”
The beastman did not answer. She heard his breathing deepen.
She stood and found that he had stretched out on the rock, calm and quiet, just as her viscorcat basked in the heat of a fire back home.
While Jordam slept, Cyndere wandered through Auralia’s caves, eating wedges of dried sour apple from Tilianpurth, passing rooms full of gems, shells, and tree cones. She began to imagine a small hand tucking a nest of red thread or puffgoose down into the silver whirl of a snail shell or the empty glossy cup of a nutshell. She was content to leave signs of Auralia’s work where they lay, moving deeper into the labyrinth.
She thought she heard the patter of feet. At first she told herself they were echoes, for when she paused, the sounds stopped. “Cloud people,” Jordam had said. She thought of the apparition she had seen at the well. Her father’s courage awoke within her.
“Mother would say you’re a moon-spirit come to study my choices.” She began to walk slowly to show that she was not afraid. “House Abascar…they would have called you a Northchild.” She watched the path before her, every corner cast in a glowing sphere of a different hue. “I don’t know what to call you. I only know what I wish you were.”
The footsteps began again and seemed to be just around the bend, leading.
“Deuneroi would have loved this secret palace. He would have told elaborate stories about its history. They would go on and on, and I would have no idea where he was taking me. He wouldn’t either, probably.”
She began to whisper a song, one that Deuneroi had often asked her to sing. As she passed a curtained chamber, the echoes faded entirely. She stepped back and looked at the curtain. It was woven from strands of inkblack weeds. Unlike the other chambers, the space gave no evidence of light beyond. The curtain wavered in a flow of air. Something shuffled in the distance behind it. She drew it aside, and cold engulfed her, spilling out from the dark. She took a cautious step into the opening.
“rrStay out,” said Jordam. He was standing behind her.
She looked back, but she did not let go of the curtain. Something within her needed to go on into the dark.
He cocked his head, then gestured into the blackness. “Stay out. That place is bad.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but the cave’s deathly air seemed to suck all heat from her body and leave her aching and tired. “I think…I think I need to sleep.”
“rrStrength,” said Jordam. “Sin-der needs strength.” He stood aside and let her walk back down to the cave. She wanted to tell him to leave her alone. But he did not follow. She walked into Auralia’s blue cave and over to the ale boy’s bed.
She pulled the frayed, damp blankets over her head, cocooning herself in darkness. “Again someone else decides where I can and cannot go.” In her dream she crept back to the door of that void and leaned in.
“Eat,” Jordam gruffed.
As the cave came into focus, Cyndere saw him standing in a flourish of daylight in the passage beyond the cave. She heard pebbled shores murmuring in the lake’s wavering shallows. She smelled smoke. And fish.
She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and sat up. “You cooked for me?”
She found coals crackling in a pit under a mesh of stripped branches on the shore near the entrance. Resting on those branches, three large shells emanated steam and a strong aroma of seared meat. He lifted one of the hot shells and placed it on a painted clay plate before her.
“Beastmen put their food on plates?”
“O-raya’s way.” He gave her sharpened twigs to use in prying apart the shell. Then he broke another with his bare hands and consumed all of its contents in a gulp.
She prodded at the shell. “Thank you.”
“rrThat cave. Dark cave. Trouble,” he said.
“What’s in there?”
“One day O-raya gone. I looked. Found her there.” He shuddered to imitate her condition. “Carried her out. Something bad happened there.” His hands were shaking. “Then later O-raya gone. Did not come back.”
“How long have I been asleep?” she asked.
“Sun down. Sun up.”
“They’ll be in a panic at Tilianpurth. Poor Emeriene.” She tried to stand, but her legs shook.
“Stay.” He sounded distressed. He watched her pick at the meat with the twigs. “Good,” he said.
She peeled one of them until it was sharper, then speared a piece and put it in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully. “You should bring your brothers here someday. Maybe the colors would help them too.”
“Mordafey comes, bad. Jorn comes, bad. Goreth comes… rrGoreth is like me.”
“Bring Goreth. Cook fish for him. Show him the colors.”
Jordam seemed to think about this. “Danger,” he said.
“I’d like to speak with Goreth the way you speak with me. Maybe we could help the rest of your brothers—”
“rrNo,” he said flatly. “Brothers finish all people. Cent Regus. Bel Amica. Abascar. They finish anything that runs.” He grasped a stone and flung it. It landed far out in the lake with a plup. They sat and watched the ripples expand and then disappear as if nothing had disturbed the water. “Goreth is like me,” he sighed. “Not so fast. But someday.”
She thought about that as he brought her a fat yellow fish. She took a small knife from her bag and skinned the fish on the stone. He watched, fascinated.
“Would it hurt you if your brothers killed…I mean, if they finished me?” she asked softly.
“Yes. You helped me.” He opened his hands. “Would you hurt if…?”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“I am Cent Regus.”
“Yes.”
“rrCent Regus finished Deuneroi.”
“I know, Jordam. But you did not hurt Deuneroi. Remember? You told me so.”
“Would you hurt Cent Regus who…who finished Deuneroi?” He would not look at her.
“Yes. No. I…” She put the fish aside. “I am very angry. It is not good to do anything when you’re angry. Cent Regus who kill people should be stopped. But they are born under a terrible curse. They will kill unless they have powerful help. Look at you, Jordam. You found help. You’re growing stronger all the time.”
“Grow?” He seemed surprised by the word.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I think we’re both growing.”
A black bat skittered over their heads and disappeared into Auralia’s caves, retreating from the brightening daylight and moving up the passage. Cyndere smiled.
Jordam pushed pebbles and debris over the coals to squelch the smoke.
“Are they close?”
He shrugged. “No. rrMordafey must have gone away. Plans.”
“What is he planning?” She hugged her knees to her chin. “Is it bad?”
Jordam expression was pained. “Would you hurt if brothers…finished Cal-raven?”
“Why? Why do you ask this?”
“Cent Regus. rrMany Cent Regus hunting Abascar people.” He gestured toward the south and east. “Cent Regus finish them. Take weapons. Treasure. Clothes. Everything.” He sighed, held his head. “rrMordafey hunts Cal-raven. Soon.”
She got to her feet. Her answer was forceful, urgent. “Yes, Jordam. I will hurt if Mordafey finishes Cal-raven. We must stop him.”
“Can’t,” Jordam barked. “rrMordafey too strong. Many Cent Regus help him.”
Cyndere took the platter of fish and threw it out onto the rocks. She got up and walked down to the water. She could feel her heartbeat pound out an alarm.
“rrCome back,” he snarled. “Sit here.” He bent to pick up the pieces of her meal, trying to reassemble it. “I catch more fish for you. Talk more. Talk of everything.”
“I want to talk with you, Jordam. About everything. But not yet. We don’t have time.” She was punishing him, even as he tried to serve her. She knelt to help him pick up the pieces. “I’m sorry, Jordam. But I’m angry. I want to help Auralia’s people escape this attack just as you helped me escape the snare. If we get there before your brothers, we can warn them.”
“rrCent Regus will finish me.”
“You’re stronger than they are.”
“No. rrMordafey.”
“Could Mordafey have rescued me? Could Mordafey have run away from the Cent Regus strength? Could he have caught me a fish and cooked it without eating it himself ?”
Jordam carved up fistfuls of stones and crushed them in dusty explosions. Then he slapped his hands over his ears, dusting both sides of his face. “Lost O-raya,” he groaned. “Lost colors. Lost ale boy. rrJordam loses too much.”
“We’ll both lose much more if we stay, Jordam. If you won’t go warn Cal-raven, I’ll find a way.”
“No.” He waved his hands.
“Would Auralia hurt if your brothers finished Cal-raven?”
He looked back into the caves, and she thought she heard him stifle a whimper.
“Find Cal-raven, Jordam. You can. Tell him we want to help him.”
“You want this?” he asked.
“I want this,” she said. “This is how we show that we are strong, Jordam. We do what is difficult. This is what Deuneroi was trying to do when he was killed in Abascar. Help people in trouble.”
He turned away and walked down the pebbled bank to the edge of the lake. The shores were quiet as if the lake were listening, waiting for him to decide.
She followed, watching water swirl around his legs. She searched for another appeal, but he strode further out, deeper, deeper, until he was submerged. The waters stilled.
“Deuneroi,” she whispered, “can you hear him learning to speak with me? Can you see him?”
Jordam broke the surface and strode onto the shore, water streaming from his savage expression. He splashed up toward the caves. “A plan,” he said. “rrJordam’s plan.”
She started to follow him, but he barked a refusal. “Too dangerous,” he said. “Many Cent Regus.”
“I’m tired of being told to stay!” she shouted.
“Dangerous. Mordafey has his plan. rrThis is mine. Help people in trouble.”
“Then what is mine, Jordam? I have no plan. Am I to sit in this cave or go back to the tower and wait while you never come back?”
“I come back,” he assured her. He described how he would have to run to reach Cal-raven in time. She would be safer here, he insisted, in Auralia’s caves.
She grabbed his arm, closing her eyes. “I’m sorry. I know you’ll come back.”
He looked up at the cliff face. “rrStay inside. Hide.”
“Wait. I have one more thing for you to take.” She led him back into the caves and reached into the pocket of her woodscloak. “Keep this.” She opened her hand, revealing the stonemaster’s whistle. “If anyone comes, I’m going to hide deep within the caves. But if I hear the whistle, I’ll know it is you. And I won’t be afraid.”
It was a stone, but someone had troubled to sculpt it in the shape of a reptile’s remains. For a beastman, a bone was something worthless, a scrap, something to cast aside. Jordam stared at the whistle as if Cyndere had handed him an empty nutshell.
Cyndere blew softly through the cavity at the back of the skull. A resonant, mournful tone sang through the eyes of the whistle, filling the caves and continuing, the earth becoming an extension of the instrument.
Color all around her blazed in response, as if Auralia herself had come home to a welcome. Deep beyond, the echoes went on and on and on.
25
AURALIA’S BLUE ROOM
S
he is like me, he thought. Hunted. Alone.
Jordam slowed his passage through arcades of trees and landed lightly on a high branch. The air was dry and cold, but Bel was not shivering anymore. She stood at the cliff’s edge, leaning forward into the view—Deep Lake, with its floating icedrifts, its mirrored constellations sparkling through rips in the clouds. She seemed to dare the wind.
The recent storms had scoured the sky, and the stars seemed closer, brighter. They reminded Jordam of the mysterious lights strung from threads along the high ceilings of O-raya’s caves, suspended in delicate balance. The Expanse felt small in view of that light-dusted space so full of unknowns.
He held back, one foot on this strange new path, the other in memory. From this vantage point, he could look back and see the tree where he had struck a fleeing boy from his horse. And there, where Bel stood, was the very spot where he had stalked a singing girl, where his world had changed. He shivered, shaking off a premonition that his brothers would find her soon, that he would not be able to save her.
Climbing down, he brushed snow, twigs, and leaves from his mane. He tightened the belt of the tattered soldier’s tunic and made sure his weapons were sheathed. He crouched beside the Bel Amican saddlebags, then cleared his throat. He dared not frighten her.
“Bel,” he whispered, stepping into the moonlight. Then, “Sin-der. Come. Hide. Safe.”
She did not respond right away. After tearing strips from the lining of her cloak, she bound up her ankle where the wire had cut deepest. She pushed her hood back, ran fingers through her short, strawgold hair, and looked up at the sliver of moon. He heard her whisper sharp, bitter words but could not make them out.
Turning to face him, she said, “Show me.”
Cyndere followed Jordam along the cliff’s edge to a place where it split open as if someone had cut into it with an ax. She thought he would lead her around the crevasse. Instead, he stepped to the deepest point of the breakage, carrying the saddlebags over his shoulder, and walked down onto a steep crumble of rock that sloped to a dizzying drop.
She hesitated. “We’ll fall into the lake.”
He crouched, swept away debris, and lifted a series of wooden planks like fence posts from where they lay under the dust. This opened a deep shaft like a chimney. “Down,” he said, pointing into the pit. “O-raya’s door.”
“What am I doing?” she muttered.
She looked down inside to see him descending a long ladder. In the faint moonlight, she saw him beckon. She followed.
At the bottom they stood in a cave where rivers of air crisscrossed from adjoining tunnels like cold blood through a heart. She was too weary to fear anymore. She followed him through one of the narrow passages. This was not what she had imagined when she and Deuneroi dreamt of making contact with Cent Regus. She had envisioned herself healing them and teaching them her own ways. Instead, she felt herself being drawn into Jordam’s surprising world.
Metal buckles of the saddlebags clanked and scraped against the walls of the narrow space ahead.
“How did you find this place?” Her whispers echoed close and far away. “Are we safe?”
The walls were wet from the seeping snows, soft with burgundy lichen and hanging moss. She heard watery murmurs from distant places, cavernous spaces. Just when it seemed they had left the light behind, they would pass a glowstone embedded in the wall like a lantern.
Eventually the passage grew larger and wider. She ran her fingers along a meandering line of gold drawn on the passage wall. The colors stained her fingers. “Someone painted the stone,” she concluded. “It’s like…”
They stepped into a room where the walls were painted from floor to ceiling with the same colors that she had seen lining the wellstones of the glen.
“Auralia,” she whispered.
She wanted to stay, but Jordam led on, showing her a tunnel where the walls were lined with shelves. Most of them were empty, but in one corner there were hollows in the wall stacked high with scarves, capes, stockings, and bundles of yarn. She withdrew a heavy shawl that smelled of mildew and shook it loose of mothwings and webs, marveling as it rippled with intricate lines of radiant green.
“She did all this?”
“All night O-raya makes colors,” he answered in a reverent whisper. “No sleeping.”
“You can’t be the only one who knows about this,” she said. “Won’t we be found?”
“Safe here. rrNo one comes.” He paused, twisted strands of his beard, then shrugged. “Ale boy comes. And…cloud people.”
“Cloud people?” She puzzled over that, picking up a broom from the floor. “So. This really was her home. And you and the ale boy, you were her guests.” She swept dust, debris, strands of thread, flakes of falseglass, fragments of shells, and chips of paint. “How is it that both of you came to me? The Expanse goes on forever, but we found each other.” She propped the broom against the wall.
Jordam paused, his shape stark against the blue promise of the next tunnel. “Strange forest,” he replied.
The neighboring chamber was spacious, like one of the moon-spirit observatories in Bel Amica. Cyndere stepped in and heard a fluttering as their entrance disturbed some shadowy life in the high recesses of the cave. But before she could discern what kind of creatures they were, another mystery stole her attention.
Jordam stood before a wall thinly curtained in rippling water that shimmered and spilled away through cracks in the floor. Behind that quiet, glistening sheen, blue constellations pulsed and glittered intermittently, like faint notes of music.
“How?” Her own voice surprised her in chorus as the word flew about the great space and returned. Moving forward, she felt like she was falling into a night sky. “The snow…it’s melting.”
Jordam watched her approach, and she saw something like jealousy in his eyes. “rrNever showed this,” he whispered, half growling. “Never.”
She touched the wall, opening a tear in the cascading water, which flowed around her fingertips. “It’s beautiful.” The blue light enveloped her hand through the water, and she did not know what moved her more, the ghostly lights or the dark spans between them. “Spring’s beginning. At last.”
“rrBlue from flowers.” He set the saddlebags onto the larger of two broad boulders in the middle of the floor, then climbed up to sit back against them. He folded his legs beneath him and rested his chin on his hands.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. She took the blue from the flowers and painted this wall.”
“O-raya made blue,” he said. “She gave blue to me. I climbed the wall. Put the blue there, there, there.” He reached out, touching places in the air as if reliving the work.
“You did this?” Jordam looked down at her, his eyes so wide she could see white around the dark irises. A smile spread across his face as she exclaimed, “You did this!”
They stood together staring into the blue.
“O-raya,” he said, his voice like small stones cracking under a great weight. “O-raya.”
“What does the blue make you think about?”
He narrowed his eyes, tapped his claw tips on the stone. “Like…windows. Windows to good places.”
She sat down on the floor, leaning against the boulder, and tilted her head back to look up at him. He hunched forward, looking into her face. “What was it, Jordam, that changed you? Was it Auralia? Or the colors?”
“Yes.” He touched his browbone absently, then pressed his hand to his chest.
“You’re sad. Sad she’s gone. You miss her.”
“Miss her. O-raya gone to Abascar. I searched there. Found the colors, but then”—his voice curdled—“rrCent Regus took them.”
“Cent Regus came here?”
“No. They took O-raya’s colors from Abascar.” He lay back and stared up at the ceiling, his head on the saddlebags. “Someday I get them back.”
He continued, the words coming with greater ease as he relaxed. He described the days he had spent here, wounded by his fall but enthralled by O-raya’s colors. O-raya had brought him fish, apples, water. “Good water. Deep water,” he added. “Brown cup.”
“From the lake?”
“No.” He gestured back to the adjoining passage. “rrWater from caves. Deep. Like the well.”
Cyndere liked the sound of Jordam’s voice here. It had lost its jagged edge, resonating instead like those sad bass horns in the bands that once played for the departure of ships. She could almost imagine what he might have sounded like had he been an ordinary man. He was taking time, she noticed, to become descriptive. The colors calmed him, gave him a safe place to remember and piece things together, to give his feelings shape.
“Once, I look for O-raya,” he continued. “Crawl through many caves. No O-raya. But water. And lights. rrMany lights. Lights on the water. Colors grow there, on the water. Like weeds. Like leaves. Like blankets.”
“Colors growing in secret caves.” She shook her head. “I’ve never imagined it. Every question answered asks another.” She saw his eyes searching about, trying to interpret her words. “Why did you leave Auralia? Why did you go back to your brothers?”
Jordam explained that he had departed Auralia’s caves for fear of his brothers—especially one called Mordafey. And he was drawn away desiring power and strength. She knew he was speaking of the Cent Regus curse.
“But you came back here.”
He spread his hands in the air as if searching for something, then dropped them to his sides. He was quiet for a time. Flies buzzed about his nose and lips and crawled on the crooked line of his browbone. His face was so strange to her. It was as if a man were trying to escape an animal that had consumed him.
“You can stay here, Jordam. You don’t have to go back. There are probably plenty of fish in the lake and birds in the wood. Not to mention berries and roots. You could live here.” She thought of the speeches she had rehearsed with Deuneroi, pleas to help the beastmen find their way to healing. “You could sleep here.” It was so different from what she’d expected. She had assumed she would have to persuade him. But he had made his desires known, and now her words came easily, for she was answering a friend, and he was listening. “You could be the first. A new Cent Regus man.”
He closed his eyes and winced. His massive chest rose and fell. He flared his fangs in a yawn.
“Those blankets in the corner. Who slept there?”
“Ale boy.”
“You haven’t told me, Jordam, what happened to him.”
The beastman did not answer. She heard his breathing deepen.
She stood and found that he had stretched out on the rock, calm and quiet, just as her viscorcat basked in the heat of a fire back home.
While Jordam slept, Cyndere wandered through Auralia’s caves, eating wedges of dried sour apple from Tilianpurth, passing rooms full of gems, shells, and tree cones. She began to imagine a small hand tucking a nest of red thread or puffgoose down into the silver whirl of a snail shell or the empty glossy cup of a nutshell. She was content to leave signs of Auralia’s work where they lay, moving deeper into the labyrinth.
She thought she heard the patter of feet. At first she told herself they were echoes, for when she paused, the sounds stopped. “Cloud people,” Jordam had said. She thought of the apparition she had seen at the well. Her father’s courage awoke within her.
“Mother would say you’re a moon-spirit come to study my choices.” She began to walk slowly to show that she was not afraid. “House Abascar…they would have called you a Northchild.” She watched the path before her, every corner cast in a glowing sphere of a different hue. “I don’t know what to call you. I only know what I wish you were.”
The footsteps began again and seemed to be just around the bend, leading.
“Deuneroi would have loved this secret palace. He would have told elaborate stories about its history. They would go on and on, and I would have no idea where he was taking me. He wouldn’t either, probably.”
She began to whisper a song, one that Deuneroi had often asked her to sing. As she passed a curtained chamber, the echoes faded entirely. She stepped back and looked at the curtain. It was woven from strands of inkblack weeds. Unlike the other chambers, the space gave no evidence of light beyond. The curtain wavered in a flow of air. Something shuffled in the distance behind it. She drew it aside, and cold engulfed her, spilling out from the dark. She took a cautious step into the opening.
“rrStay out,” said Jordam. He was standing behind her.
She looked back, but she did not let go of the curtain. Something within her needed to go on into the dark.
He cocked his head, then gestured into the blackness. “Stay out. That place is bad.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but the cave’s deathly air seemed to suck all heat from her body and leave her aching and tired. “I think…I think I need to sleep.”
“rrStrength,” said Jordam. “Sin-der needs strength.” He stood aside and let her walk back down to the cave. She wanted to tell him to leave her alone. But he did not follow. She walked into Auralia’s blue cave and over to the ale boy’s bed.
She pulled the frayed, damp blankets over her head, cocooning herself in darkness. “Again someone else decides where I can and cannot go.” In her dream she crept back to the door of that void and leaned in.
“Eat,” Jordam gruffed.
As the cave came into focus, Cyndere saw him standing in a flourish of daylight in the passage beyond the cave. She heard pebbled shores murmuring in the lake’s wavering shallows. She smelled smoke. And fish.
She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and sat up. “You cooked for me?”
She found coals crackling in a pit under a mesh of stripped branches on the shore near the entrance. Resting on those branches, three large shells emanated steam and a strong aroma of seared meat. He lifted one of the hot shells and placed it on a painted clay plate before her.
“Beastmen put their food on plates?”
“O-raya’s way.” He gave her sharpened twigs to use in prying apart the shell. Then he broke another with his bare hands and consumed all of its contents in a gulp.
She prodded at the shell. “Thank you.”
“rrThat cave. Dark cave. Trouble,” he said.
“What’s in there?”
“One day O-raya gone. I looked. Found her there.” He shuddered to imitate her condition. “Carried her out. Something bad happened there.” His hands were shaking. “Then later O-raya gone. Did not come back.”
“How long have I been asleep?” she asked.
“Sun down. Sun up.”
“They’ll be in a panic at Tilianpurth. Poor Emeriene.” She tried to stand, but her legs shook.
“Stay.” He sounded distressed. He watched her pick at the meat with the twigs. “Good,” he said.
She peeled one of them until it was sharper, then speared a piece and put it in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully. “You should bring your brothers here someday. Maybe the colors would help them too.”
“Mordafey comes, bad. Jorn comes, bad. Goreth comes… rrGoreth is like me.”
“Bring Goreth. Cook fish for him. Show him the colors.”
Jordam seemed to think about this. “Danger,” he said.
“I’d like to speak with Goreth the way you speak with me. Maybe we could help the rest of your brothers—”
“rrNo,” he said flatly. “Brothers finish all people. Cent Regus. Bel Amica. Abascar. They finish anything that runs.” He grasped a stone and flung it. It landed far out in the lake with a plup. They sat and watched the ripples expand and then disappear as if nothing had disturbed the water. “Goreth is like me,” he sighed. “Not so fast. But someday.”
She thought about that as he brought her a fat yellow fish. She took a small knife from her bag and skinned the fish on the stone. He watched, fascinated.
“Would it hurt you if your brothers killed…I mean, if they finished me?” she asked softly.
“Yes. You helped me.” He opened his hands. “Would you hurt if…?”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“I am Cent Regus.”
“Yes.”
“rrCent Regus finished Deuneroi.”
“I know, Jordam. But you did not hurt Deuneroi. Remember? You told me so.”
“Would you hurt Cent Regus who…who finished Deuneroi?” He would not look at her.
“Yes. No. I…” She put the fish aside. “I am very angry. It is not good to do anything when you’re angry. Cent Regus who kill people should be stopped. But they are born under a terrible curse. They will kill unless they have powerful help. Look at you, Jordam. You found help. You’re growing stronger all the time.”
“Grow?” He seemed surprised by the word.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I think we’re both growing.”
A black bat skittered over their heads and disappeared into Auralia’s caves, retreating from the brightening daylight and moving up the passage. Cyndere smiled.
Jordam pushed pebbles and debris over the coals to squelch the smoke.
“Are they close?”
He shrugged. “No. rrMordafey must have gone away. Plans.”
“What is he planning?” She hugged her knees to her chin. “Is it bad?”
Jordam expression was pained. “Would you hurt if brothers…finished Cal-raven?”
“Why? Why do you ask this?”
“Cent Regus. rrMany Cent Regus hunting Abascar people.” He gestured toward the south and east. “Cent Regus finish them. Take weapons. Treasure. Clothes. Everything.” He sighed, held his head. “rrMordafey hunts Cal-raven. Soon.”
She got to her feet. Her answer was forceful, urgent. “Yes, Jordam. I will hurt if Mordafey finishes Cal-raven. We must stop him.”
“Can’t,” Jordam barked. “rrMordafey too strong. Many Cent Regus help him.”
Cyndere took the platter of fish and threw it out onto the rocks. She got up and walked down to the water. She could feel her heartbeat pound out an alarm.
“rrCome back,” he snarled. “Sit here.” He bent to pick up the pieces of her meal, trying to reassemble it. “I catch more fish for you. Talk more. Talk of everything.”
“I want to talk with you, Jordam. About everything. But not yet. We don’t have time.” She was punishing him, even as he tried to serve her. She knelt to help him pick up the pieces. “I’m sorry, Jordam. But I’m angry. I want to help Auralia’s people escape this attack just as you helped me escape the snare. If we get there before your brothers, we can warn them.”
“rrCent Regus will finish me.”
“You’re stronger than they are.”
“No. rrMordafey.”
“Could Mordafey have rescued me? Could Mordafey have run away from the Cent Regus strength? Could he have caught me a fish and cooked it without eating it himself ?”
Jordam carved up fistfuls of stones and crushed them in dusty explosions. Then he slapped his hands over his ears, dusting both sides of his face. “Lost O-raya,” he groaned. “Lost colors. Lost ale boy. rrJordam loses too much.”
“We’ll both lose much more if we stay, Jordam. If you won’t go warn Cal-raven, I’ll find a way.”
“No.” He waved his hands.
“Would Auralia hurt if your brothers finished Cal-raven?”
He looked back into the caves, and she thought she heard him stifle a whimper.
“Find Cal-raven, Jordam. You can. Tell him we want to help him.”
“You want this?” he asked.
“I want this,” she said. “This is how we show that we are strong, Jordam. We do what is difficult. This is what Deuneroi was trying to do when he was killed in Abascar. Help people in trouble.”
He turned away and walked down the pebbled bank to the edge of the lake. The shores were quiet as if the lake were listening, waiting for him to decide.
She followed, watching water swirl around his legs. She searched for another appeal, but he strode further out, deeper, deeper, until he was submerged. The waters stilled.
“Deuneroi,” she whispered, “can you hear him learning to speak with me? Can you see him?”
Jordam broke the surface and strode onto the shore, water streaming from his savage expression. He splashed up toward the caves. “A plan,” he said. “rrJordam’s plan.”
She started to follow him, but he barked a refusal. “Too dangerous,” he said. “Many Cent Regus.”
“I’m tired of being told to stay!” she shouted.
“Dangerous. Mordafey has his plan. rrThis is mine. Help people in trouble.”
“Then what is mine, Jordam? I have no plan. Am I to sit in this cave or go back to the tower and wait while you never come back?”
“I come back,” he assured her. He described how he would have to run to reach Cal-raven in time. She would be safer here, he insisted, in Auralia’s caves.
She grabbed his arm, closing her eyes. “I’m sorry. I know you’ll come back.”
He looked up at the cliff face. “rrStay inside. Hide.”
“Wait. I have one more thing for you to take.” She led him back into the caves and reached into the pocket of her woodscloak. “Keep this.” She opened her hand, revealing the stonemaster’s whistle. “If anyone comes, I’m going to hide deep within the caves. But if I hear the whistle, I’ll know it is you. And I won’t be afraid.”
It was a stone, but someone had troubled to sculpt it in the shape of a reptile’s remains. For a beastman, a bone was something worthless, a scrap, something to cast aside. Jordam stared at the whistle as if Cyndere had handed him an empty nutshell.
Cyndere blew softly through the cavity at the back of the skull. A resonant, mournful tone sang through the eyes of the whistle, filling the caves and continuing, the earth becoming an extension of the instrument.
Color all around her blazed in response, as if Auralia herself had come home to a welcome. Deep beyond, the echoes went on and on and on.
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