Bones of the Past (Arhel) (31 page)

“Sometimes, people fear what they not understand. They hate what they fear. That the way of some people.”

“It’s a bad way.”

Medwind Song nodded. “Yes. You right.” She placed a few more twigs and broken branches on her fire and sighed. “You out of that place, safe from those people. Now what you want to do?”

That was the source of Choufa’s new fear. She had no idea what would happen next. She and her fellow sharsha were away from the hated Keyunu—but they had no place to run. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Where are you going? Can we go there?”

“We hunt lost City of First Folk. Tagnu lead us there.”

Choufa made a face. The other woman noticed and cocked her head to one side.

“You and tagnu, you no like each-each?”

Choufa shook her head slowly. “The tagnu are bad.”

Medwind wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her chin on her forearms. She fixed Choufa with an intense stare. “You think so? Why?”

Choufa squirmed. “They—they had to leave the village.”

“Yes. Why they had to leave? You know?”

Choufa licked her lips. Her mouth felt suddenly very dry. “Um—the Keyu made them leave.”

The pale-eyed woman nodded, and an expression of satisfaction crossed her face. “Same Keyu who say you bad and had to be sharsha. You really bad? You should be tree-food?” she asked.

“No!” Choufa snapped.

“Right. They not really bad either.” The pale-eyed woman stared out into the darkness. “I think Keyu picked tagnu because they had no
magic
, and you sharsha because you had lot-lot
magic
.”

“
Magic
?” Choufa stumbled a bit over the foreign word.

“Power.” Medwind frowned slightly. “How you made the airbox fly today. Tagnu not know that word in your tongue, so I not know it.”

“No word for it,” Choufa told her. She thought about the
magic
for a moment “It is what the Godtrees do—and no one could talk about that. We prayed to them and asked them for things, but no one who wasn’t Keyunu could say their name. And I don’t think even the Keyunu dared to talk about them.”

“Feed the
hrun
ing trees little children. I
bet
they not want talk about that.” Medwind spat into the fire, and it hissed.

“
Hrun
ing trees?” Choufa asked.

The woman winced. “That a bad word. Forget it, you understand?”

Choufa grinned at her and said nothing. Hrun
ing
, she thought. Hrun
ing
… hrun
ing
… hrun
ing
.
“Magic” is a good word, but I bet “
hrun
ing” is better
. She decided under no circumstances would she forget that word.

They sat together without speaking for a long time, listening to the croaking and buzzing and grumbling of the night things, and the whispers of wind through the grass. Finally, though, Choufa asked, “Medwind Song, can we go with you to this city? We could help you.”

Medwind gave her a sad little smile. “You can come. But—we not know what we find there. First Folk city maybe very dangerous. Maybe you not want come.”

Choufa studied the complex patterns of green and tan that curled up both her arms; heyudakkau, symbols of everything she hated in the Silk People—and she wanted to laugh. Any situation that contained even a chance of survival at the end of it didn’t seem dangerous to her. She didn’t doubt for an instant the other sharsha would feel the same way. “We’ll come,” she said.

* * *

Roba remembered fire—red-on-black-on-red, hellish trees, smoke and pain and more pain; drums and chants. She remembered being sure she was going to die. She even thought she remembered dying, but that memory, at least, appeared to be false.

The morning air was cold on her cheeks. Every breath was a new and separate agony, and every word burned in her ruined throat. She could see Kirgen’s hand curled around hers—but she couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel anything below her neck. Her body seemed to belong to someone else—someone who had gone away and wasn’t intending to come back. The really disturbing thing was, she still felt she had a body—the only problem was that it wasn’t the one she could see. Her invisible but tangible body was bathed in amorphous pain. She kept trying to move her hand, to rub away the pain, and although her mind told her the hand had moved, she could see damned well it hadn’t.

“I will send my spiritself into the whitecord,” Faia said. She sat cross-legged on the floor of the tent on the other side of Roba.

Roba looked at the hill-girl—lean, graceful, young, and very, very beautiful—and she hated her. She hated the girl, and the girl’s lithe movements. She hated the compassionate healer smile Faia gave her—and she hated just as much the nervous, uncertain glance the girl threw in Kirgen’s direction.

Faia said softly, “I cannot promise this will work right. I cannot promise it will work at all. I do promise I will do everything I can.”

Kirgen gave the hill-girl a grateful smile, and for an instant Roba hated him too.

“This thing you must know,” the hill-girl said, speaking only to Kirgen. “Once we start, you must not violate the shield or touch either one of us, no matter what you see, or what we say. You understand?”

“No. Can’t I even hold her hand?”

“No.” Faia looked at him. “You cannot. Not one touch.”

Kirgen started to argue, but Faia was already taking a long, slow breath and closing her eyes. She traced an arc around her from the ground to the point over her head. The air inside the sphere she drew began to glow blue.

“Amazing,” Kirgen whispered.

Roba found herself impressed even through her haze of pain.

Then the blue glow stretched out and engulfed her. Faia toppled to one side, and Kirgen instinctively moved toward her. At the same instant, Roba heard Faia’s voice inside her head.

Do not touch me!
the voice demanded.

“Stop!” Roba croaked. “I can—hear her inside me. She says—don’t touch.”

“Oh. Well… Kirgen sat back and looked anxiously between Roba and Faia. He pushed his hands onto the ground in front of him and chewed on his bottom lip.

Here it is
, the voice muttered. Roba felt a few errant tingles at the base of her neck and one sudden blaze of pain in her left hand that immediately vanished back into nothingness.
I have found the top of the whitecord. For a little while, I will be a part of you. Both of our lives depend on how you react—I am matching your whitecord to mine, but if Kirgen or you
or anything else causes me to lose my concentration, the whole spell could snap
.

Roba responded directly to the hill-girl for the first time.
And what a pity that would be, I’m sure. Then you will walk away, and I will die, or go on being a cripple—which will leave Kirgen free for you. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You and Kirgen and Kirtha—and me gone!

The voice in her head was mild.
Not precisely, Roba. Both of us occupy
your
body right now. If the spell snaps, then my whitecord will configure itself to yours—and we will both end up dead or crippled.

The rush of shame that overwhelmed Roba kept her mind occupied through the arduous, painful procedure that followed.

* * *

Medwind had spent most of the night in meditation. For a while, the little sharsha kid, Choufa, gave her a diversion from her worries, but when the girl went back to the airbox to sleep, the worries returned to fill the void.

Morning came too soon and offered too few answers. She could feel the edge of Faia’s dangerous magic from Roba’s tent. She could feel Nokar, hanging on to his life by the thinnest of threads. She could feel her own weakness, and her own inadequacy for the task before her. She sat outside the tent, staring at the last stars as they faded on the western horizon and wished she could take herself and Nokar back in time to a place where they were both young and strong.

She considered what lay ahead. A spell that could give Nokar back his life would be one that required subtlety and enormous skill and incredible amounts of power. She would have to figure out how Nokar had created the spells-inside-of-spells with which he had held back the plunderings of time. She would have to discover how he made those spells call on each other, what each separate spell did, and where each had fragmented when the magic faded. She would have to bring him back to health, rejuvenate his failing organs, and repair the shattered spells—and at her best, in full health, she simply wasn’t that good.

In the last hour of night, she’d thought of an alternative. It was clumsy and heavy-handed. More than that, it would cost her, and cost her in such a way that she would never know the extent of the price she paid.

She could give him part of her own life, slice the years off of her own time, and graft those years on his life. By the very nature of the gift, it was something she could give and never miss—

I’ll never know how many years I’ll have—except I’ll know some of them are gone
, she thought.
Even so, if I could give him a year for a year, I would not question. I would simply give.

If only it were so clear-cut.

The magic would not work that way. It would eat up part of the fabric of her life in the removal, part in the transfer, and part in the grafting on, so that a year of her life might only bring him a week, or a day, or an hour.

Or I could give him a year—or ten—and watch him die in the next instant anyway. How much would be enough to save him?

How much am I willing to give for love?
she wondered.
How many of my days are one of his smiles worth? How many sunrises can can I willingly forgo to gift him with a glimpse of this city of his dreams?

She clenched her fists and stared into the dying embers of the campfire.
How much can I pay, knowing when the time I’ve given has gone, I’ll lose him anyway?
She felt the oppressive weight of guilt. Gifts, she had always thought, would be freely given, and the price never questioned. She stared out across the lands that lay to the west and yearned for a simple answer.

There were none. But then, in a perfect world the gods would never put a price on love.

* * *

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl and Dog Nose lay in the tall meadow grass, and kissed, and fumbled, and rolled on the ground.

“This would feel better if you took off your myr,” Dog Nose whispered. “I’ll take mine off, too.” He tugged at the front flap of her loincloth.

She pushed his hands away. “I know it would feel better,” she whispered back, “but we said we weren’t going to do that until we got back to our city.”

“We’re almost there.” Dog Nose’s voice was plaintive.

We sure are
, Fat Girl thought. Her heart raced, and her lips trembled, and she really, truly wanted to take off her clothes and, well—

But she and Dog Nose had agreed to wait.

She didn’t
want
to wait. They were out of the wind, hidden by a little depression in the meadow. The late afternoon sun on her skin was warm. The grass was soft and smelled sweet. Dog Nose pressed against her and wrapped his arms around her, and his skin felt like hot silk where it touched hers.

She wrapped one leg over his back and pulled him tighter to her. He rolled on top of her, and balanced his weight on his arms, and leaned down and kissed her—slowly and gently.

She shivered, and when they finished kissing, she pulled him close enough that she could nibble on his neck. He tasted salty, and felt wonderful—and when she nibbled just right he groaned quietly.

But they were going to wait.

Dog Nose pressed warm little kisses behind her ear, and into the soft hollow at the base of her neck, and down the line between her breasts. With tiny movements, he nibbled his way to one breast, and kissed and licked and nibbled until she gasped for breath, and dug her fingernails through the grass at her sides to the cool earth beneath.

It feels so good
, she thought.

He moved over her again, and pressed his body on top of hers, and this time rested his weight on her so that the lean, hard muscles of his chest crushed her breasts. The rest of the world seemed to vanish—she could hear nothing but their breathing, which grew faster, and the pounding of her heart in her ears.

We were going to wait
, one tiny voice in the back of her mind whispered, but she had heard enough of that voice. She tugged at the band of her myr, and pushed at it until it was down out of the reach of her fingers. Dog Nose rolled away from her long enough to pull the myr down her legs and off. He stripped his own off, too, and moved over her again. He smiled shakily, and squeezed his eyes shut as he covered her body with his.

Their skin touched from cheek to chest to thigh to ankle. He slipped his hands under the small of her back and then held very still.

“Oh,” he whispered, “you feel so good.”

“Yes.” She marveled at the pleasure of their bodies so close together, the wonderfulness of skin against skin. She ran her hands in long, slow lines from his shoulders down to the lowest point on his thighs that she could reach. The smooth, hard curves of his body felt so beautiful, and so right.

He slid one knee down between her thighs to push her legs apart, and she moved with him, wrapping her legs around his back and locking her ankles together; pulling him tightly to her—

“Ummm—please forgive interruption,” a voice said from right next to them in the grass.

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl yelped. Dog Nose rolled off of her, and over onto his stomach, and sighed hugely. Then he beat his head on the ground.

Fat Girl stared at his antics. She couldn’t help herself. She giggled. He looked over at her, and shook his head; then he grinned.

She peeked through the grass toward the sound of the voice. Faia stood politely at the edge of the depression, with her back to them and her hands in the pockets of her tunic.

“It time we go now. Everyone looking for you so we can leave.”

Fat Girl sat up and tied her myr back in place. She gave Dog Nose a cockeyed little smile, which he returned. “So we wait until the city after all,” she whispered.