Blood Ties (30 page)

Ash

A
SH HAD
grown up walking the Road, and he fell back immediately into that easy, unhurried pace that let you walk all day. He saw that Martine did, too, and remembered that she had said something about being on the Road before. They went on for an hour or so in the sharp rain, heading up over the hills surrounding Turvite. It was a steep climb, and for a long while he concentrated solely on putting one foot in front of the other. The rain lifted as they passed the top of the first line of hills and started down the other side. He hadn’t realized how he had been hunched against the deluge, the sound as much as the cold, until it stopped.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

She turned her head and laughed at him. “Finally you ask!”

He grinned, too, and shrugged.

“We’re going north, to Hidden Valley,” she said. “To visit . . . well, let’s call her an old friend.” She looked at him again. “No, let’s not call her that. I owe you more than a social lie.”

“Elva is the daughter of two people I grew up with. There were the three of us the same age in our village, Lark and Cob and me — two girls and a boy. Lark and I were named on the same day, after the birds our mothers saw following the births — the lark and the house martin. We played together, got into trouble together, were punished together. When I was small it seemed it would always be the three of us. But, two girls and one boy . . . Of course we both fell in love with him. And when the time came to choose, he chose Lark.”

She brooded over that for three paces, then went on.

“It was because I was . . . different. I already knew I could cast the stones — you know how children play at stonecasting?”

He nodded.

“Even before I could read the runes, I could tell what the stones meant. And there were other things . . . the ghosts, the local gods . . . When he was small, Cob just accepted it, but when it came time to choose who he’d lie with in the dark of night, he couldn’t bring himself to choose someone who spoke to ghosts. He told me. So. Perhaps the gods were listening . . . because their daughter, Elva, was stranger far than me. The strangest child ever born to our blood.”

Martine fell silent.

Ash gathered his courage. “What was strange about her?”

She blinked rapidly, forcing back memory.

“There’s no color in her, nothing but white and pink — white skin, white hair, pink eyes. She cannot bear the rays of the sun. I’ve learned, since, that children are sometimes born that way, but we had never heard of it then. The village voice wanted her put out on the mountain to die, until the local gods spoke to him and said they wanted her to live. But Cob couldn’t bear to have her near him, although Lark would have loved her, I think, if he’d let her. Then she started talking to the local gods — almost her first words were to them. Cob couldn’t abide it. So I took her to live with me, with their blessing, as soon as she could walk properly.”

“And you went on the Road?”

She paused, then clearly decided not to tell him another part of the story. He tried not to feel hurt. She had a right to her privacy.

“No. That came later.”

“And then?”

“Then? We wandered. You know the life. I cast the stones, I bought our bread, I laid ghosts to rest, I tended Elva and fed her and loved her, too . . .”

Ash heard Doronit’s echo —
Why have I housed you and fed and, yes, loved you all this time? —
and lost track of what Martine was saying for a moment.

“. . . and then we were in Carlion and Ranny of Highmark came for her reading. You know what happened. I was a fool, no? After that, it wasn’t safe for Elva to be near me. Ranny would have loved to see me bereft and grieving. Elva was a woman by then, and beautiful . . . though few can see past her white skin. She left me to find her own place, five years ago, when she was sixteen. So. That is where we are going — to Elva.”

“Just to visit?” he ventured.

She looked at him in the fading twilight, amused.

“Have you tried to cast the stones, boy? You see further than most. No, not just to visit. The stones have shown me . . . warnings, about Elva, though it’s unchancy to cast for your own needs. A stonecaster rarely sees the truth about those she loves. Still, there are signs that Elva may be glad to see me, and not only because she loves me.”

They walked the rest of the daylight in silence. Ash was lost in a daydream about this beautiful white-haired girl, only one year older than him . . . It stopped him thinking about Doronit, about what she was doing, whether she had replaced him already; it stopped him imagining what it would have been like, if he’d killed Martine and gone home to share Doronit’s bed.

Martine said nothing until they reached a stream crossing the road, not far down from a camping place. “Time for fire,” she said.

There was a tent in the bag Ash carried, so he set it up while Martine gathered firewood and some dry kindling from under a holly bush, disturbing a lizard, which skittered off into the growing dark. Every movement, every moment, reminded him of the long years of traveling with his parents. It was pleasure and pain, both.

They sat at the fire, ate, and then crawled into the tent, back to back, warmth to warmth. He waited until he could hear her breathing, slow and even, and then he let the tears creep out of his eyes and drip onto his sleeve, so there’d be no mark on the tent in the morning. He didn’t think at all, just cried quietly and steadily until the moon set and he slept.

In the morning they packed up and Ash doused the fire while Martine brushed and braided her hair. It was a fine morning after the rain, though the bite of the autumn air in the highland was brisk. The sun caught the shine on Martine’s hair. He stared out of the corner of his eyes, not just because she was beautiful, with her brush in her hand, standing and swaying with each stroke, but because the gleam of her hair, moving as the brush went through it, seemed to call his eye, seemed to weave shapes that he could almost make out. It was like sunlight on water, constantly changing, drawing him . . . The shapes were almost clear . . . He pulled his eyes away and went off to wait by the road. He’d heard of Travelers having the bright vision, the Sight that shows itself in light, but he didn’t want any part of it. Even among Travelers, such folk were thought of as unchancy. He had enough that set him apart from everyone else. He wasn’t minded to be any more different than he had to be.

Martine came to the road with her hair neatly braided, the plait hanging far down her back, and smiled at him. “So. Ready to go?”

They walked companionably, enjoying the still, crisp mountain air. “How about a song to pass the time?” Martine asked after a while.

Ash went red in the face and looked away. “I don’t sing.”

“Everybody sings,” she said, surprised by his reaction.

He shook his head.

“Oh, come on. You know ‘The Green Hills of Pless,’ don’t you?”

“I know lots of songs. My parents were musicians. But I don’t — I
can’t
sing.”

She looked at him curiously. “Your voice can’t be that bad, surely.”

“Yes it is.”

“Maybe to your parents, if they were professionals. But I’m just a stonecaster. What do I know about music? Give it a try. My own voice isn’t that wonderful.”

So, because he felt he owed her so much, he cleared his throat and began to sing “The Green Hills of Pless.”

I have wandered the land from Domain to
—

Before he finished the first line he saw the look on her face and stopped short. She came to a halt in the road, her face pale. He stopped a few steps farther on and looked back at her.

“It
is
that bad, isn’t it?” he asked reluctantly.

She was frowning, as though he were a puzzle she was trying to solve. “It’s the voice of the dead,” she said.

“That bad, huh?” he said, trying to be casual about it.

“No, really the voice of the dead,” she insisted. “Exactly the same.”

Ash stared at her, memories cascading over him: the look of pain on his mother’s face whenever he tried to sing as a young child; the way his father would turn away, abruptly, or walk out of the room; and, on the day he left them for Doronit, his mother saying “but music is dead to you, anyway,” as though to remind him of something he knew already. He had not known. He had not sung since he was small. Not even when he was alone. His mother was right. Music was dead to him.

Strangely, it made him feel both shaken and comforted. To have the voice of the dead was a terrible thing, but it was clearly the work of the gods. It was not his fault that he could not sing; not his fault that music did not spring from him as it did from his parents. To be the son of singers and have a mediocre voice might be shameful, but what the gods visited upon you could not be a cause for shame. Now he could put it behind him and find a new place in the world.

Martine plopped right down in the middle of the road and took out her bag of stones. “Come on,” she said, “give me your hand.”

She spread out a piece of fabric with a flick of her wrist and held her left hand out to him imperatively. He sank down to the road slowly, but he spat in his hand and clasped hers. She took the five stones out of the bag and cast them across the fabric. They were all facedown.

“The meaning hidden,” she said. She turned them over slowly. “Death. Pain. Bereavement. The blank stone, the random one. And here, look — Rebirth. But all hidden. All secret.”

She stared at the stones intently.

“I can’t make them speak,” she whispered. “They know your secret, but they are dumb to me, as ghosts are.” She paused, thinking. “Tell them to speak.”

“What?”

“Tell the stones to speak.”

He shook his head. “No . . . If they’re dumb, maybe I’m not meant to know. Maybe it’s better not to know.”

“I spend my life seeking knowledge. I don’t think it’s ever better not to know.”

He shook his head again, stubbornly. “You seek knowledge for those who want to know, who come to you to find things out. This was your idea, not mine.”

She let his hand go with a sigh. “So. Maybe . . . maybe. For now, at least.”

Then they’d had to dodge a cart full of cabbages, whose driver swore at them for feckless Travelers, sitting in the dirt and getting in the way of hardworking folk.

They grinned at each other, and kept walking.

They went on like that for days, stopping at villages where Martine exchanged castings for food and shelter. They slept in barns, shepherds’ huts, on the floor of inn stables, in the tent. The hedges and trees were full of birds, and at evening and morning the sky was full of flocks making practice flights before their journey south for winter. Ash had forgotten the high, soaring skylark song and the way that, passing through a dell, the grasshopper shrill seems to deafen you.

They grew used to the smell of their own sweat until they didn’t smell it anymore. But every Traveler knows that if you don’t wash regularly, the townsfolk won’t have anything to do with you — which is funny, his mother used to say, for most of them don’t wash from one week to the next. But Traveler sweat smells strange to them, and unpleasant.

So they stopped at creeks and pools, thankful that it hadn’t been a dry summer, and washed, each taking a turn as lookout for the other, and Ash trying not to think about what Martine looked like bathing when it was his turn to guard. He looked away when she brushed her hair each morning, too, determined not to be snared into the bright vision of the Sight. He filled his head with fantasies about the white-haired girl instead, and refused to think about Doronit.

There was no sign of Doronit’s or Ranny’s men on the road behind them, and in the end it felt almost like a holiday, except that Martine was worried about Elva. She didn’t say it, but he could tell. She would walk for a while in silence, her face gradually becoming more severe, a frown appearing. Then she would shake her head and turn to him almost desperately, saying, “How about a song, then?”

She’d discovered that even though he couldn’t sing them, he could recite the verses of all the ballads, histories, and love songs, though love songs didn’t work so well as walking songs. And some of the histories were very old.

“What’s the oldest one you know?” Martine asked him one day.

“Oh, that’s the invasion song, ‘The Landtaken Ballad.’”

“I haven’t heard that one.”

So he began, although it was a song that always left him both excited — stirred up, as he often was by songs of battle and glory — and angry at how
happy
Acton’s men had been as they had killed his ancestors.

Bright in the morning shone the spring sun

Bright in the sun shone the spears of our host

Bright the fierce eyes of Acton the bold

As they took the cold road that led to Death Pass.

Death Pass was where Acton and his men had come over the mountains in the first invasion. They had come at the first sign of spring thaw in the lowlands, plowing their way through chest-high snow, moving as silently as possible so they would not trigger the terrible avalanches that gave Death Pass its name. It was an insane thing to do, which was why they were able to massacre the people living on the other side of the pass. In previous years those people had armed themselves well against the annual summer raids of Acton’s tribe, but they had been taken by surprise when their enemy appeared out of the snow and mist, swords and spears in hand.

Bright flowed the blood of the dark-haired foe

Red flowed the swords of the conquering ones

Mighty the battles, mighty the deeds

Of Acton’s companions, the valiant men.

No one had been left alive, not even the babies. In the past, the tribe from beyond the mountains had raided, killed some men, raped some women, loaded themselves up with booty and gone home again. This time they stayed. The
landtaken,
Acton called it, the theft of land; it was the biggest theft there had ever been. And when Death Pass cleared in spring, across the mountains came the women and children of the tribe, and they moved into the empty cottages, while the men swept down into the lowlands, killing and keeping what they overran. That first village was renamed Actonston, of course.