Breath and Bone Read online

  As if even that alteration was a small thing! How would I walk the streets of Palinur again, with blue light glowing on my skin? “Surely it will be different for one who is part human.”

  “Certainly the result will differ.” He visibly forced himself patient, closing his eyes, whose color had shifted from a deep sea green to aspen gold. “What hand or eye is entirely the same as any other? What walking step or standing posture is the same? The long-lived tread the path of perfection, but we each find our resting posture somewhere along the way, our own talents and our bodies’ limits determining our place. Even tainted blood does not preclude one attempting the path. Now we must begin or even the slow days of Evaldamon will carry us to the Everlasting with thou yet unprotected.”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again. Answers would come. With no more hesitation, I moved to the edge of the water. “Tell me what to do.”

  “We will begin by acknowledging our bond as vayar and tendé. Then, when I give thee a sign, thou must wash. Especially thy arms and legs. Sand is an excellent aid.”

  “Wash…here? In the sea?” Water and cold, my two least favorite aspects of nature, and not entirely because a diviner had once named them my doom.

  “Yes.”

  The wind had risen, frosting the waves with foam. A haze paled the sky and sunlight, and a layer of deep gray banded the horizon. No chance Kol intended for me to stay clothed. Gods, I was damp to the skin, and now he wanted that skin bare. However Danae managed to stay warm as they ran about naked in winter weather, I had not inherited that gift. I glanced along the shore and over my shoulder. A trail of smoke rose from our fire, but I could not see where Saverian had got off to. “All right, then.”

  Kol bowed with all the formality of a pureblood head of family, then clasped his hands behind his back. He dipped his head in approval when I returned the bow without prompting. “The season has long passed for thee to leave thy parents’ side, nes—”

  His dragon gard drew up as he cut off this pronouncement. “What name dost thou prefer? Thou art very big for such address as nestling or wanderkin.”

  This slight break in his formality nudged me toward an unlikely grin. Indeed, though he could likely break me over his knee, we were quite evenly matched in size. “I answer most to Valen. Is there some proper title I should use for you? I’ve no wish to be rude.”

  “Name me relagai—mother’s brother—or vayar. To address an elder by name requires a harmony we shall never share.”

  I ignored his coldness and bowed to acknowledge his point. “Relagai.”

  He took up where he’d left off. How much “elder” was he? Likely centuries. Gods…“Freed from thy parents’ side, Valen, thou shalt have license to wander the world and learn of its wonders and its evils, to learn the names and natures of all its parts. I have accepted the duties of vayar given me by she who gave thee first breath and who nurtured thee for the long seasons of thy borning. I pledge with all honor and intent to provide thee truth and healthy guidance and to protect thee from harm to the limits of my being and the Law of the Everlasting. Come to me with thy questioning, with thy fears and troubles, with thy joys and discoveries, and I will hear thee…without judgment…and answer thee as far as I am able. Thy own part of this joining is but thy pledge to explore and learn and come to me if thou art troubled. If thou wilt accept my teaching, Valen, give me thy hands.” He extended his own hands, palms upward.

  I had not expected so solemn a swearing. The cost to his pride could not be small.

  “Thy pledge honors me, relagai,” I said, inclining my back in deference. “All the more for our disharmony.”

  At least my own part seemed uncomplicated—unlike the other oaths that bound me. I laid my palms over his, and the world—sunlight, colors, shapes, and outlines—dimmed and faded, as if reshaping themselves. Moments later, when he released my hands, the cast of the world returned to its normal state, as if I had but waked. He gestured toward the foaming sea. Time to wash.

  I hesitated. It was not that I was shamed. Nakedness in the proper time and place was comfort and pleasure, not wicked. But somehow, when I glanced at Kol, I imagined myself as one of the transparent shrimp standing beside the scarlet sea star. And somewhere Saverian would be watching…ready, no doubt, to catalog my lacks.

  My vayar raised his eyebrows and inclined his head toward the water. Waiting.

  Reluctantly I shed my layers and tossed them onto the sand above the tide line. My bare feet had become something inured to the chilly sand, but the cold wind stung, my manhood retreated, and my first step into the water was a badger’s bite. By the time I’d submerged to the knees, my teeth clattered like hailstones on a tin roof. If I were to be done with this before my blood congealed, I’d best move faster. I lunged a few steps farther into the oncoming waves and sat.

  “G-g-great Iero’s m-m-mercy!” Unfortunate if some ritual silence was required.

  Once sure my heart had not stopped, I scooped sand from underneath me and hurriedly scrubbed at my flesh. The waves slammed into my back and lifted me from the sea bottom, threatening to tumble me over, but I splayed my legs and dug in my heels. For the most part I managed to stay upright and keep the salt water out of nose and mouth.

  After the briefest service to every spot I could reach, I floundered and lurched toward the shore, only to discover what I should have expected. Emerging wet into the wind felt far, far colder than sitting in the water. “C-c-could we be quick about this?” I mumbled.

  A scowling Kol moved to my side and cupped his hands about my right shoulder. Warmth flowed from his touch and again the world shifted. The sunlight dimmed, and the shore receded as if a great fog had settled over it. I no longer felt the buffeting wind or the gritty sand, but only Kol’s warm hands and the sea that crashed and gurgled about my ankles, tugging at me…breaking the bounds of my skin…pouring into me…filling me. Drowning me…

  Do not be afraid, Valen. Kol’s sharp command interrupted my growing panic. To make this passage, we must step outside the bounds of bodily form. This sea is myself and will not drown thee.

  I lost myself—limbs and torso, head and privy parts dissolved. His hands yet anchored me—one solid point of heat, a tether to the world, all that stood between me and blind terror. All else was embracing water, as if I were the immortal sea star tucked securely in the tide pool, knowing that any broken part of me would form another self, and that the tide would bring me all I needed to live. I trusted Kol, and so I drifted…tasting salt and fish and sand. I smelled green sea plants, felt the tickle of wind on the surface and the great heavy urging of the god of tides—everything a curiosity. I wondered at the endless play of daylight in the shallows and shied from the shadows of the boundless deeps. Fish in silver armor darted past me…through me…

  For a nestling, such life as this is the greater part of what he knows—the safety and comfort of a parent’s sianou, its myriad parts, its voice and texture, and the elements that make it live. Kol’s voice existed everywhere around me and inside me, though I could not say I heard him. The remasti of separation shifts a nestling from an existence sheltered and constrained by sire and dam into one shaped by his own body—a much greater change for most than for thee, one who has lived across a multitude of seasons constrained by flesh—however ill-fitting. Now, thou must choose to step beyond this place and allow thy true nature to reshape thy flesh. Let my hand guide thee.

  From the anchor point, warm strong fingers began to re-create my invisible arm, moving down its length as a sculptor’s fingers might smooth his clay. Only this sculptor’s fingers left traces of fire and blade in their wake. Cutting, burning, tearing…

  Pain and panic bade me fight, but I could not locate the rest of my body. Nor could I find voice in the sea to scream or beg that he should stop before what flesh I yet owned was left in tatters.

  Be easy, Valen, he said, as he released the fingers of one disembodied arm and shifted his touch to the place where another ought to
be. I but release what is bound in thee. It is so difficult, I believe, because thy true senses lie buried deeper than those of a nestling. Be easy and dream of the wide world. I shall not harm thee.

  Both arms now pulsed with agony. While the greater part of me yet floated insubstantial in the gray-blue water, I existed amid the frothing surf and freezing wind as well. Great gray masses of cloud boiled on the horizon, reaching for the sun.

  Kol’s hands left my fingers and began to sculpt a thigh. Great gods among us…

  By the time his hands released my second foot, I existed wholly in the familiar world, sprawled on my face with my mouth full of sand. Though fire raged in my legs, my arms had fallen numb. I was afraid to move. I was afraid to look.

  He relinquished my burning toes. “Stand now, Valen, that we may end this passage properly. Thou art free to wander Aeginea, and none may hold or hinder thee without our argai’s consent.”

  Entirely wrung out, I moved slowly to all fours. Every quat of my length felt something different from every other. Frozen or scorched or nothing. Worst…I could not feel my hands at all. “What’s wrong with me?” I croaked.

  He offered me his hand, but I was loath to touch him again. I stumbled to my feet and stared at my skin. My chest and abdomen and groin remained as they ever had been, cold pale flesh and dark hair caked with sand, but the now-hairless skin of fore and upper arms, of hands and fingers, of thigh and leg and foot, appeared an ugly mottled gray. Dead. No pattern was discernible, and certainly no beauty or power. And as the fire of Kol’s touch died, every particle of that flesh lost all sensation. I shook my lumpish hands, kneaded them, slapped my arms and dying legs with no effect. “By Kemen Sky Lord, Dané, what have you done to me? I can’t feel anything!”

  Knitting his brow, he reached out to take my arm. I jerked away and stepped back, wincing from the fire in one foot, stumbling over the deadness in the other. “Stay back.”

  “Does not the world speak to thee?” he said, puzzled. “Thy gards will clear as thy senses waken, and take on their design as you walk the days. Touch the wind, rejongai.”

  “I can’t feel the wind, not with dead limbs! Is this your clever vengeance? What of Danae justice that punishes only the guilty?” I could not strangle his long straight neck, for my blighted arms could be used as naught but bludgeons.

  “No, no. All was done as prescribed. Thou shouldst discern more than before. More intently. More delicately.”

  His conviction did naught but unravel me the more. My chest and stomach seemed stuffed with sodden wool that thickened and compacted with every breath. I dropped to my unfeeling knees and plowed my hands into the sand that might have been silken pillows or hot coals for all I could tell. Wrenching my focus tight, I sought magic, but no warmth flowed through my dead fingers. I sat back on my heels and roared in rage and frustration. “You’ve killed me, you cursed gatzé.”

  Kol crouched beside me, for once unwrit with scorn or anger. “This is not of my doing, rejongai. Why would I pledge thee care and teaching, and then set out to make my own words false? The remasti is a work of reverence for the vayar, a work that becomes a part of his kirani—the patterns he dances—as much as any jeque or eppire. No joy or use can be derived from such betrayal. It is why the long-lived fail in understanding of human ways.”

  “Then what’s wrong?” I gasped, my chest laboring, my throat swelling shut as if a door had closed behind my words. I was suffocating.

  He reached out again, and this time I had no strength to resist. I watched his fingers touch my arm and trace my sinews, but I could feel naught of it. “I experienced resistance as I released thy change,” he said, puzzled, “but I assumed it to be thy years of restraint and thy intractable nature. It felt as if some other skin sheathed thee.”

  His surmise stung me as a slap on my cheek. “Get the woman,” I whispered. “Hurry. Please.”

  The daylight blurred and wavered. I did not see Kol move, for I curled into a knot on the sand and concentrated all my strength on drawing air into my lungs.

  “All right, all right, you can let go of me. Am I to be punished for watching?” Her dry voice rattled like a stick in a pail fifty quellae distant. “Egad, Magnus, you look even worse close by. Is this part—? Gracious Mother, what’s happening to you?”

  “Undo your spell,” I croaked. “It’s stopping the change. Can’t breathe.”

  Praise be to all gods, she did not hesitate. She ripped the delicate chain from her leather pocket and pressed the gold medallion to my forehead. The maggots crept outward, only this time they left life, not deadness, in their wake.

  With a great whoop, I inhaled half the sky, clearing throat and lungs and head. When she took the disk away, I stretched out on my back and flung my limbs wide, reveling in the delights of properly working heart and lungs. “Mother tend you in your need, good physician…”

  No more had I begun to speak than the wind caressed my arms and legs. Of a sudden I drowned in sensation: the overwhelming scents of the salt and sea wrack, and the lingering aroma of our cook fire, last night’s fish, and the morning’s ill-favored eggs. I smelled a distant winter—rank furs and damp wool, the smokes of burning coal and pine logs, the damp earth and scat and piss of animal dens, the dust of empty grain barrels, the ripe sweat of lust beneath old blankets. And from other senses…Not only did I hear the crash of waves and the gurgle of the slops between the rocks, but I perceived the rustling of the red-leaved sea forest in the tide pools and the rippleless darting of the shannies. Not only did I feel the salt in the wind, but I knew that in its wanderings the air had once kissed a church, drawing away the scent of beeswax and marble dust, the sweet smokes of incense and oil of ephrain, the pungent perfume of ysomar, used to anoint the sick and dying…And still there was more.

  “Holy Mother,” I whispered, wrapping my arms about my head to prevent its bursting, “how can I ever sort it all out?”

  “Are you well, Valen?” said Saverian, sitting on her heels at my side, the gold disk clutched in her hand. “What’s happening to you? I can moderate the spell if need be and reimpose it.”

  Unlike the experiences I had named a disease, this barrage of scents and sounds neither seared my nostrils nor made my ears bleed. Nor did my eyes revolt at the daylight’s complex textures of gray, blue, and silver or the impossible shapes of distant rocks that would have been a blur an hour before. I could make no sense of much that I perceived, but none of it drove me mad.

  “For now, yes, I’m all right. Thank you. I think—” I swallowed hard, took a shaking breath, and stretched my arms skyward so I could see them. The gray mottling had brightened to the same pale silver as Kol’s gards, though that could be but a trick of the shifting light. I could yet discern no pattern to the marks. My stomach hitched, and I folded my arms across it and stopped staring at myself. “There’s just so much.”

  “So your disease is indeed of your own nature,” said Saverian, kneeling in the sand, as matter-of-fact as if on every day she witnessed madmen transformed into Danae children. “As I predicted.”

  “Thy perception is quite limited as yet,” said Kol, looking down at me. His handsome face expressed naught but tolerance—no more of concern or bewilderment. “’Tis the task of wanderkins to learn the source and nature of what they perceive and to extend the boundaries of their skills. As they learn to walk in quiet, layers unexpected reveal themselves. Having lived in the world so long, thou shouldst have an easier task than most.”

  “You mean, there could be more?” How ever could a child manage all this?

  “Always more. Subtleties. Grand things that might once have seemed whole display their sundry parts. The reach of thy experiencing shall widen from this small shore to distances and deeps. Wert thou a true wanderkin, destined to dance and live as one of us, such discrimination would be necessary to thy duties.”

  “And I’ll perceive whatever exists in the human realm as well as Aeginea,” I said, sitting up. Indeed, I was already exper
iencing many things far beyond this shore. No ale-sodden hunter lay snoring beneath fouled blankets anywhere near here, I’d guess. No wheezing practor in a freezing church anointed a woman dead in childbirth, unless…Perhaps those places existed as did Fortress Groult or the Sentinel Oak—visible in only one plane, though I could touch their very rooting place in the other.

  His nostrils flared in distaste. “No. To experience the sensations of human works we must depart from the true lands and immerse ourselves entirely in the human world.”

  I glanced up sharply. “But I—” His certainty made me doubt. Perhaps my long-distorted senses were but remembering things I already knew. My finger crept up my ugly arms. The lack of hair was disconcerting, but I could not feel the marks themselves. I brushed at my skin, half expecting the pale mottling to fall away like dry flakes from a charred branch. Perhaps nothing at all had happened to me, save a blessed remission in my disease.

  “A true wanderkin’s primary tasks are exploration and the perfection of sensory knowledge.” Kol took on his schoolmaster’s aspect, as if I were indeed a new-changed Danae child. “I can teach thee closure…to silence one sense or the other…to quiet levels thou dost not wish to perceive. Control and discipline will ease thy confusion.”

  “Yes, I’d like that very much…”

  Learning to manage this oversensitivity that had plagued me my whole life would be a grace indeed. But more awaited me. I was sure of it. My mother had believed that Kol could protect me from the Danae’s crippling blows and instill in me what I needed to make sense of the world. If she knew Janus de Cartamandua at all, then she knew how unreliable his character. She would never have based her whole plan for me on his promises. I inhaled deeply, buried apprehension, and averted my eyes from my body.

  “…and then I’d like—How soon can we move on to the second remasti?”