Flesh and Spirit (50 page)

We could not linger. But I touched the earth once more and sent my whispered gratitude into the roots and rock, hoping that the one who aided us would hear. Would he have a dragon scribed on his face? Were his eyes the color of autumn aspen? Was that arm the same that had offered me refuge in an aspen grove as I fled Gillarine? Earth's Mother, how I longed to know.

Of course, the Danae despised humankind. How could they not, when the Harrowers' grotesque rites poisoned them? Yes, they had driven my grandfather mad, but he had stolen something precious from them. Danae were the essence of magic, the gift of beauty and grace below heaven. Even angels brought down the god's righteous fury on sinners.

We ran. Onward. Downward. Slipping and sliding on wooded banks. The owl arrowed southward ahead of us, as if scribing the path across inked vellum, and my fatigued mind gratefully relinquished the guide thread it had gripped for eight unrelenting days.

Soon the trees thinned, and a flat wilderness of mottled white spread out before us. Darker patches marred the starlit landscape as if unseen trees cast shadows on the snow. Clouds burgeoned behind the ridge we'd just descended, hiding Escalor and her companion stars. Wind gusts brought flakes drifting from the heights. We had to hurry. If any of our pursuers were yet mounted, flat ground would be our end.

The owl glided in a circle above our heads, then soared serenely toward the heart of the wilderness. Instinct affirmed that refuge was near, though perhaps not so directly across the flats.

“This way,” I said to the three who had just arrived at my elbow heaving and coughing, their collected breath enfolding us in fog. I pointed to the wing-spread owl. “She'll lead us to safety.”

I slid down the last few quercae of the steep embankment and struck out across the flats. In our weakened condition, a shorter distance likely outweighed the increased danger of exposure. Voushanti and the others trudged after, well behind me.

Fifty paces into the wilderness, I heard…or perhaps only felt…an unsettling noise beneath my feet. Instinct screamed warning. I motioned the others to halt so my dulled senses might register the sound, and I cupped my lifeless fingers over my nose and mouth, breathing out my last warmth to thaw my nostrils. Then I inhaled slowly, felt, tasted, and listened, as my father and grandfather had tried to teach me when I was small.

Water. Mud. Rot.

Appalled, I dropped to my knees and speared my hands through the snow and into the cold muck that lay just below. Dead trees. Rotted marsh grass. Burrowed frogs, cold and still. Old droppings and tufts of animal hair caught on buried willows. A harper's distant song…Ever so faintly, the sounds, the smells, and the land's retained memory seeped through the winter's blanket. And nowhere did I find my guide thread.
Fool! Blasted mindless idiot!

Dulled with cold and yearning for finer magic, I had forsaken my own path to follow the owl. And the Danae, who had no use for humankind, had brought us here.

“Stop! Go back!” I shouted hoarsely, peering at the treacherous landscape through the darkening night. I knew exactly where we were. How could my sense of distance be so far askew? It seemed impossible we could be so far south, but I had traveled here before. “Step not one quat outside our tracks. This is bogland.”

“What of you?” shouted Voushanti, wind blunting the edges of his words. “We have ropes—”

“I'll be all right. Go around, stay on the side slope, head straight southward…that way. Only two quellae to Gillarine. Hurry!”

Thank all gods, the three were in no mind to argue. Voushanti's beard and eyebrows were frosted pure white as if he had aged fifty years in an hour, and Philo and Melkire might have been but four glazed eyes in unfleshed skulls. They were in no state to fight anyone.

I watched until they had made it back to solid ground safely and vanished in the thickening snowfall. Then I shoved magic through my buried fingers and sought a path deeper into the bog. The trickster owl had vanished, leaving me no choice but to twist its vicious cleverness to my own purpose.

The route fixed firmly in my mind, I wiped my frozen, muddy hands, bundled them in my cloak, and set out across the snow-draped fens. The falling snow would blur my footsteps and mask the inadequacies of my spellworking long enough to close the trap—a snare I believed had been set for every human abroad this night, pursuers and pursued.

An irregular mound, well into the heart of the bogland, provided enough substance and variety for my purposes: a leafless willow, a sheep's leg bone, a rotted branch, a charred stick. I structured two spells, one to serve deception, one to serve fear. Then I waited, stomping my sore feet and flapping my aching arms to keep my blood moving. Dawn was near—as much of it as I was like to see with the weather closing in.

As the moments slid by in abject silence, fear nagged that I had miscalculated yet again. I could scarce muster the strength to shake the clinging snow from my cloak. While I became another stupid beast rotting in the bog, the Harrowers would follow Voushanti straight to my friends.

“Aaaagh!” I yelled in inarticulate fury, yanking my hair to force blood to my head. “Come find me! Any of you…come do what you will! Show me your face if you dare!”

My grandfather had warned me. Such torment as the Danae had wrought on him displayed a cruelty colder than this cursed winter. So whence came my sentimental folly that because they were beautiful and magical and caused my knees to grow weak with unfounded yearning, they had a benevolent interest in
me
? Perhaps the one writ with dragons had invited me into the aspen grove the better to destroy my mind.

Anger kept me living. I shivered and coughed and honed my spells, determined they would be sufficient to end this wretched journey.

They came in the purple gloom that passed for sunrise. Harrowers flowed over the ridge like a tidal surge, cries hoarse with triumph and fury when they spotted me in the open. I noted with grim satisfaction that they had dropped at least a quarter of their numbers since I'd seen them last. At their head rode the dog-faced man, his orange scarf flying, the glow of his hands like a bilious sun leading their way.

I fell to my knees and fed magic into my mound of sticks and bones, recalling the appearance of my departed companions to shape the illusions of harried travelers, stopped to succor a fallen comrade.

The yowling Harrowers swept onto the flats without pause, and even the shouts of the first to flounder did not slow the rest. When the yellow glow failed—snuffed by mud or fear—their triumph turned to dismay.

Weary and mind-numbed, they did not think to stay calm and press through the muck to seek firmer ground. Rather, weighed down with mail coats and supply sacks and weapons, burdened with legends of bogwights and sucking ponds and trickster Danae, they felt their feet sinking and their clothes waterlogged, and they panicked, as I had gambled they would. I touched the charred stick and set wispy tendrils of flame adrift from my hand until the cold numbed my fingers and I could conjure no more of them. The gloomy landscape was dotted with winking flames, and the men in the bog started screaming.

Half of the Harrowers killed each other, trying to use their comrades for stepping-stones. Others drowned quickly, pulled down by panicked horses or tangled in dead vines and rotted trees swept down from the mountains in long-ago floods. Some wandered, crying for help in the neck-deep mud, climbing on hillocks only to have them sink under their weight. After a while I could only hear them, for the blizzard rose in full fury, and human eyes could not penetrate past the length of my arm. The cold and the mud would finish them. The memory of Luviar butchered, of Nestor and Boreas condemned to slow agony, of tar-clogged wells and villages burned to ash, crushed what glimmers of mercy blossomed in my soul. These gatzi would have ridden my friends to ground.

I huddled on my islet in the center of the bogland, a driftwood club ready should one of the lost find his way to me. Only when my ears assured me that neither man nor beast roamed the upland banks did I press my hands into the muck to seek the path back to firm ground.

I jerked them right out again, then bent double and retched bile until stomach, chest, and throat were raw. The terrors of dying men and beasts permeated the pools and hillocks, and I could not find my way. I sank to the ground, buried my face in my frozen cloak, and begged the earth's forgiveness for the horror I had wrought.

V
alen fiend heart!
The mocking cry stung like a tutor's rod on cold knuckles. Cold…what wasn't cold? The world, all life, and certainly every part of me was frozen. No one ever listened when I said how I hated the cold.

I trudged onward. One step. Then a rest. Another step. Hip-high drifts covered the path that would take me away from the treacherous bog. Perhaps the insulting name, a relic from childhood, etched itself so vividly in my imagination because I longed so fiercely to believe that another living person existed in this wintry desolation.

Fiend heart…
Soon I'd be imagining I heard
iron skull
or
lead wit
or
gatzi prick,
though the damnable girl would lob that last stone only outside adults' hearing. I smiled…more of a grimace, I imagined, as I could not feel my face.
Lassa, please be real.

My sister had once enspelled a connection between her favorite insults and my ears, so I would never fail to hear them. I'd never learned the skill, but on one precious occasion, I had managed to reverse her spell and bind one of mine to her. “Toad witch,” I mumbled into the folds of my cloak for the fiftieth time on this dreadful afternoon. If she were within ten quellae, she would hear.

“Magnus! Magnus Valentia!”

“Brother Valen!”

I paused and surveyed the gloomy distance. No one in sight. I pulled my hood tighter and fretted that these faint voices, too, were naught but wishing dreams.

Hellish dreams of mud and ice and suffocation had clung to me like draggle weed as I had crawled out of the bog hours and hours ago, too tired and too afraid to walk, unable to bear another route seeking lest I buckle under the weight of guilt and horror. That I managed to reach solid earth, that I was not drowned or dead, astonished me. I had dug a snow cave to wait out the blizzard and had drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming of long limbs marked with blue sigils embracing me, choking me, setting me afire.

The wind mourned over the frozen fens. Did beasts feel this way after emerging from their winter sleep, as if ice crystals flowed in their veins? I feared the oncoming night.
Find me, someone. Please. I hate the cold.

Lights moved around the hillside toward me. Torches. Spits of gold against a sky the color of ripe blueberries. I sank to the ground, closed my eyes, and rested my back against a boulder. Let someone else break the path through the drifts. Friend or enemy, wraith or bogwight, I didn't care.

“Gracious Mother, Valen, what have you done this time?” My breathless sister's painted eyes swam huge and worried from her fur-lined hood. “This Voushanti said you were facing fifty Harrowers alone in a bog, and that you'd saved Stearc and Gram and these Evanori lords. But they couldn't find you in the storm. I called and called—No one believed when I claimed to hear you, but I knew. How is it you're not frozen dead, fiend heart?”

“B-been thinking w-warm thoughts of you,
serena
toad witch. Whatever are you doing in the neighborhood? Did you bring them my boo—?”

She hissed, pressed her hot hand on my lips, and jerked her head backward. Several shapeless figures approached from behind her, one leading a donkey.

“Watch your tongue, Valen. And I do mean that. The answer is yes.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Listen carefully: I came to continue my negotiations over new sheep pastures for the Temple and was shocked to discover the shambles. Do you understand?”

“Shambles?” I croaked, wretchedly confused.

But she had squeezed her painted eyes shut, and her words kept flowing, so softly no one but I could have heard them. “Who or what is this Voushanti? I See naught but death about him—blood and fire and torment. He says he's taking you to Evanore as soon as the weather breaks. Bound to the Bastard…Holy Mother, Valen, I cannot help you more. I must return to Palinur immediately. With Luviar lost, Victor captive, and what's happened here, the lighthouse may depend on my office.”

The aura of her divination tickled my spine, as the newcomers joined us, their faces taking recognizable shape in dark wrappings. Indeed, Voushanti brought an ill odor with him everywhere. But I was more confused about her passing hints. “Lassa, I'll be all right, if I c-can just get warm. But what shambles—?”

“Silos!” She snapped, jumping to her feet. “He needs hot wine! And get a mask on him before I report him to the Registry. Good monk, bring your linens. No diviner is needed to see to the pitiful whiner. Lord Voushanti, take up your charge, though even my scoundrel brother is unlikely to run today.” Excessive sisterly sentiment would never burden Thalassa.

Voushanti loomed over me like a frost giant, but he said naught as the others ministered to me. A somber Silos took Thalassa's place and offered me a steaming wineskin. My fingers couldn't grasp the leather, so he poured the stuff down my raw throat.
O, great Mother Samele, grant my glorious sister a place at your side!
Silos's masked face drew up in disapproval as I hooked my elbow about his, preventing him from removing the skin until it was half empty. “Careful,
plebeiu.
You cause everyone trouble when you're out of your head. Have you a mask with you?”

He pulled the half mask of purple silk from the pocket I indicated and slipped it on me. Cold, wet…it felt like fish skin.

Thalassa threw a blessedly dry cloak about my shoulders as Brother Anselm, the piebald lay brother from the Gillarine infirmary, examined my hands and feet. I despaired of ever being warm, shivering uncontrollably as he marveled that I showed no signs of true frostbite after crawling in the snow for most of a day. Voushanti refused to consider a fire, though I assured him that the dog-faced man and his Harrowers were no longer a threat. I could not bring myself to tell him why.

They insisted I ride Brother Anselm's bony donkey back to the abbey. As the monk led the plodding beast along the embankment, I looked out on the flats—still and silent, the horrors of the morning hidden beneath the mantle of fresh snow. My sister walked alongside me, and her gaze followed mine. “What happened out there, Valen?”

I shook my head and shuddered. “Just don't walk there, Lassa. Don't ever.”

“When did they strike?” I said.

Brother Anselm, the donkey, and I slogged up the last slight rise between us and Gillarine. I had dismounted the balky ass. Walking eased my stiffness and kept the blood flowing in my hands and feet. Save for the marrow-deep chill and a general weariness, I'd come out of the day's events astonishingly well. But all relief had fled when the shy assistant infirmarian at last explained Thalassa's references to “shambles.”

“'Twas on Saint Eldred's Night, Brother Valen. You were not a fortnight gone from here. Some hundred or more raiders, both Moriangi and Harrowers, come twixt Matins and Lauds. Their fire arrows and torches took the scriptorium first. Then the church. Then the rest.”

“Great Iero's mercy!” We had reached the top of the little rise, and the sight took my breath. The windows of the abbey church, whose brilliance in sun and candlelight had spoken of angels' wings, gaped black as hell's maw; the groins and buttresses mimed the naked ribs of a skeleton. The wooden buildings—infirmary, brewhouse, stables—had vanished, their remains hidden beneath a pall of gray snow. Gillarine Abbey stood broken and dark.

“We were blessed most walls were stone.”

But the slate roofs had fallen when the supporting timbers burned—a pureblood firemaster attached to the Moriangi raiders would have seen to that—smashing at least a third of the inner courts to jagged ruin. Only the gatehouse and walls stood unmarred. The damnable cowards had marched straight through the sanctuary gate to wreak their holocaust.

“What of the brothers, Anselm? By the One God…” So many good men lived here: the kindly, skilled infirmarian, Robierre; garrulous Cadeus the porter; old Nunius, who reveled in holy minutiae…

“Eleven passed to Iero's heaven on Saint Eldred's Night, three succumbed to injuries since then, and five more fell to lung fever—Abelard and Nunius, the eldest and weakest of us who breathed too much smoke or bent to the cold. Dear Brother Robierre died saving poor Marcus from the fire. With the ground so hard frozen and neither hands nor time to spare for digging, we've had to lay them in the cellars.”

“Ah, Brother…” The physical ruin paled beside such a loss. What words could express sorrow enough? Neither sympathy nor helpless anger could repair this wound or ease the future it boded. The survivors' trials were only begun. They would yet have more than twenty to feed and clothe. “What of your stores? And, blessed saints, what did they do to the orchard?” The trees still standing looked leprous, not burned, bark hanging in rags, trunks gouged and seeping, branches broken. More than half had fallen, bare roots frosted like nests of white snakes.

“The undercrofts were gutted for the most. Naught burns like spilled oil and dry grain. We've a few bales of wool left, though smoked and charred, and Brother Jerome, Iero welcome his cook's soul, fell to a Morian blade defending his last root cellar. But the orchard now”—the lay brother's wide face crumpled like an old rag—“that weren't the soldiers. No man, but only the One God himself sent us that trial. A root rot, Brother Gardener said, that spread through the trees at the same time the murrain come to the sheepfold. It's the sickness in the world, as Father Abbot so often warned of, come to Gillarine at last…and now we've heard tidings of his own passing.”

Anselm's stolid presence faltered but did not break. His gaitered sandals crunched the snow, and he encouraged the tired donkey with a soft pat and an assertive tug on the lead.

“Prior Nemesio has taken us well in hand. And the good God grants us fortitude. To share the trials of his poorest in this land must surely bring us grace. A blessing we've none with
your
appetite to feed.” He chuckled softly, then sighed. “We could use a cheerful story adventure as you're wont to tell, though. We rejoice that our brothers live with the saints, and we know that Iero will give us all we need, do we but ask, but truly we feel a dreadful sadness come upon us with this untimely winter.”

Sadness. Yes. More than the failing light and ruined buildings. More than so many good men dead.
Gods grant you peace and care, good Robierre, as you gave so many, and Jerome, may you feast at the god's own table.
A pervasive sorrow held the abbey in its grip, a grieving in the stones and earth that felt as if the sun would never relieve this falling night. The thick dry cloak Thalassa had given me felt thin as gossamer.

As Anselm and I led the donkey across the field toward the gatehouse, the shy lay brother continued his stories of the raid and its aftermath. I'd never heard so many words from the infirmarian's assistant in all the weeks I'd lived at Gillarine. Perhaps trials did bring out new strengths in us.

Behind us, on the road that stretched northward toward Elanus and Palinur, Thalassa, her faithful Silos, and her five temple guards had vanished into the darkening forest, determined to reach Elanus before nightfall. My sister's parting kiss yet burned on my forehead. A kiss from Thalassa. She must believe I was going to die in Evanore. Unfortunately, I could not ease her concern. What use would the Bastard find for a mind-dead former doulon slave?

“Thank you for rescuing me yet again,” I'd said after she yanked my head down and planted that unexpected kiss. Then I'd stooped to whisper in her ear, “
Teneamus.
”

I'd never seen her smile like that. Genuine. Pleased. Sad. “Hold on to your soul, little brother,” she'd said as she mounted her palfrey. “Be well.”

“I'd be happy enough with
warm, Sinduria serena
.”

She'd rolled her eyes and ridden away. I was happy she hadn't told me whether I would ever see her again.

“I'll put old Dob to shelter; then we'll find you a bed and a bite,” said Anselm as we slogged through the gatehouse tunnel. A snarl of thick ropes and harness protruded from the drifted snow, and the wooden gates lay twisted from their hinges. “I needs must ask Father Prior if you're to be housed in the dorter—which is now moved to the abbot's house as it's got a roof—or in the guesthouse. That new lord's come today is most forbidding, I'll say.” He nodded at Voushanti's retreating back. The mardane had hurried off ahead of us to see where Philo and Melkire were bedded down. “Some folk I knew as a lad would call him marked of the Adversary. You've not renounced your vows, have you, lad, or been dispensed from them?”

“Just taken on new ones, Brother,” I said, feeling an unexpected heat in my cheeks. “Lord Voushanti is my new master's proxy.”

We trudged through the Porter's Gate and into the trampled gardens in front of the dark church. Anselm frowned. “So you'll to the guesthouse, then. We've a fire laid. And you'll need dry clothes. Secular garb. You take a good rest tonight, and I'll put a flea in Father Prior's ear to ask if Lord Stearc might have left some things would come near fitting you. I'll send a posset as well, to stave off chills and damage from frostbite. Not so excellent as Brother
Badger
would have made for you, of course.”