As Karigan tried to digest his words, another thought occurred to her. “You are not the person who stole me off the street.”
“No, not personally, but a friend did so at my request,” he replied. “And I’d rather not say stole, but brought to safety. I do have a reputation for helping unfortunates.”
Especially those garbed in historic Green Rider uniforms, she thought. “I am not an . . . unfortunate, and I’d like to be released. You’ve no right to hold me here.”
“Yes, I can see you are a proud one, but trust me, my dear, you do not wish to find yourself on the street again. We shall care for you as Mender Samuels has decreed. In the meantime, I hope you will tell me how you came by those artifacts and learned your history.”
“I will leave of my own accord then,” she said, tossing her covers aside to do just that.
“Where will you go attired in only your nightgown?”
“Darden!” she snapped.
The professor blinked in surprise, clearly not knowing what she was talking about, and shook his head. “Please rest. Mirriam informed me you turned down a dose of morphia. Perhaps I should have her administer one anyway?”
Karigan heard the inherent threat in his words. “You’ll find yourself seriously injured if you try,” she said, tensing, ready to spring into action, but he did not move.
“I do not doubt it,” he replied. “My friend said you’d fought admirably against those Dregs the other night, which is also curious. No genteel lady would have managed it, had the skill.”
“I am no genteel lady. I am a Green Rider.”
“So be it. I will not force you to stay, Karigan G’ladheon, or whatever your real name may be, but I hope my hospitality will suffice to keep you peaceably abed until your wounds heal. Just know that the outer world would not be so kind. But perhaps you are beginning to understand that.” He rose and gave her a curt bow. “I’ve no wish to see you come to harm.”
He strode across the room, but paused at the door. “Another thing. The name you have given me would incite too many questions from the wrong people. Do not speak it again. We shall use another name. Let us call you Kari Goodgrave. Several Goodgraves have married into the Josston family out east, so it makes sense my niece should be one, too.”
After he left, Karigan stared at the door for a long time trying to digest it all. It was forbidden, at least dangerous, to speak of the past—her own present. What had been Sacoridia was now part of an empire, and she could only conclude that Mornhavon the Black had defeated her people. She needed to learn details about how this occurred so she could take word of it home and tell the king. Maybe some advantage could be gained in advance warning.
And just how would she get home? The looking mask had brought her forward, but she hadn’t even the shards that had stuck in her flesh.
Her thoughts returned to the professor. If knowledge of the past was forbidden, or at least certain parts of it, then how had he acquired it, even as an archeologist? And how was it that archeology was permitted under such conditions in the first place? She did not understand the contradiction. In any case, she guessed that one reason for holding her here was to prevent her revealing his knowledge of this secret history to others, thus endangering him. And then there was the issue of her name. He had not wanted her to use it—her name was known in the forbidden history.
Why would the empire repress the true history, and what stories did it promote instead? No doubt those that glorified Mornhavon and made the queens and kings of Sacoridia’s past appear terrible tyrants. Anything to ensure the populace saw their circumstances as better than what had come before.
She shook her head. Too many questions and too few answers. It was all giving her a headache.
Then she barked a laugh. “Goodgrave!” Of all the possible names. How very appropriate.
RUINS
Lhean Lifeson, child of leaf and wind, born beneath the verdant eaves of the Vane-ealdar, the forest of Eletia, now found himself curled in a crevice of tumbled rock and earth. A shaft of daylight plunged through the narrow opening overhead. It occurred to him that this must be what the graves of the mortal dead were like—deep, desolate, though infinitely darker than this.
How did the mortal humans stand it, knowing their lives were so short, spanning but a mere breath of an Eletian’s eternal life? That this was where it would end for them, deep in the earth, fodder for worms? And how they struggled to fill that brief life with all the passions humankind could muster. They struggled, struggled as the salmon swimming upstream, only to end, to end forever in nothingness. He did not understand why they did not just collapse in despair, but perhaps he could better appreciate why they clung to myths of their gods and an afterlife—these beliefs of theirs, false or not, gave them hope, allowed them to continue on.
Lhean shook his head. One day, perhaps, he would discuss the peculiarities of mortals with Ealdaen or maybe Telagioth. He never used to care, but now that he had traveled among and with humans, he’d become curious and taken an interest. But that was for another time; at the moment, it appeared he had a problem.
The rupture force of the shattering of the looking mask had thrust him—and likely his other companions—out of Blackveil. One moment he’d been standing in the dying remains of Castle Argenthyne, and the next he’d found himself in this crevice somewhere else. He uncurled himself to climb up, mindful of loose rock that tumbled clattering down if he misplaced his weight. When he reached the rim, he peered cautiously over it, observing only more rocky rubble awash in thin sunlight and stunted scrub trees growing from between black-flecked, gray granite blocks. The air smelled poorly and unclean, of acrid smoke that burned the back of his throat.
He pulled himself the rest of the way out, noting that this upheaved terrain was not just a rending of the land, but the obliteration of some great human work, for the edges of the rubble had not been formed by nature, but by tools. There was also evidence of some great conflagration, for soot adhered to the bottoms and fissures of rock not exposed to weathering.
He turned and found a face of stone staring back at him, its sculpted planes cracked and stained, its beard crumbled away, the remnants of a crown about its temple. The rest was lost beneath the rubble. Despite the ruins and the ill air of the place, it confirmed he was no longer in Blackveil. He knew this place, and he did not. The etherea was nearly gone, sick, dying. A being infused with etherea, as all Eletians were, he could sense inside himself its waning light. It was not just that it was tainted, but that it was almost gone from the land, from existence.
And so it was with his home. No matter where an Eletian may be he could always sense Eletia, the water running through the Alluvium, life throbbing through root and leaf, the spirit of his people. Even in the depths of Blackveil he had felt Eletia as a strong presence within.
He placed a trembling hand on his breast plate, over his heart, seeking but failing to feel a stronger awareness of his people. So alone, so bereft, the despair almost broke him to weeping.
Instead he turned his attention to the devastation around him, the jutting angles of hand-cut stone, rotting, sooty timbers. The ruin was upon a high hill, and more stretched all the way to its base where a city, a human city, stood. It was all symmetrically laid out, long rectangular buildings set in precise rows, their huge chimneys spewing filth into the sky. False streams glinted among them, too perfect to be made by nature. Humans called them canals.
He made out streets straight as swords, and more buildings of varying size and shape but still precisely placed. There was little green among the structures and nothing of nature in the design, no curves, no turnings, which made it all so foreign to Lhean’s Eletian eyes, so difficult to reconcile in his mind. It was an injury to the land, and the injury extended even beyond his long sight, for the city had beat back the forest that once stood there and much of the farmland, as well.
A clack
ing of rocks started him to caution again, and he crouched, tugging his gray cloak around his shoulders to conceal the brightness of his armor. He scanned the ruins and discerned two men encumbered with tools, making their way uphill over piles of rubble. They were some distance away, but Lhean’s keen hearing was good enough, he could pick up every word they spoke.
“—thought I saw someone up there,” said a fellow wearing a brimmed hat.
“Some of the stones look like people and, depending on the light, looks like they’re moving.”
“Still . . .” the first trailed off, his breath ragged from the effort of climbing over treacherous ground.
“Could be Ghouls,” the other replied, “hunting for relics.”
“Could be, though they’d be in big trouble if they got caught without a license.”
“Enough’ll take the chance if they think they’ll find something good.”
The man in the brimmed hat paused to catch his breath and mop his brow with his sleeve. His companion also stopped, removing an implement from his shoulder and leaning it against a block of granite. He arched his back and kneaded the small of it with his knuckles.
The man in the hat took a long look up the slope. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “I think there are real ghouls in these ruins.”
His companion laughed. “You’re letting all the old stones get to you, friend. Come, if we don’t finish the survey today, we’ll be the ones in trouble, especially if we’re the cause of a delay for getting that drill emplaced.”
His friend shuddered, and they began making their painstaking way, wobbling on loose rocks, sending debris skidding down the hill behind them.
Lhean slid back into his crevice and huddled at the bottom with his knees drawn to his chest. He knew with certainty where he was: these were the ruins of Sacor City, and the one structure in the city that had created so much of the rubble on the crown of the hill was the king’s castle.
The force capable of tearing it down must have been terrible beyond imagination, for the strength of the castle was not merely in stone but subtle touches of magic, far less than what was used in the crafting of the D’Yer Wall, but enough to reinforce it. He’d felt the will to endure in the stone when he’d visited King Zachary with Graelalea and Telagioth at the end of winter. He’d felt the castle’s confidence and pride even though it was several centuries old. He was also certain the humans who inhabited it, worked and lived within its walls, were entirely deaf to the life in it.
But now it was gone, the castle dead, echoes of memory.
Since Eletians did not see time as necessarily linear, Lhean was not surprised he had traveled forward. He could not sense Ealdaen or Telagioth, so either they had not come here with him, or they lay dead. As for the others, his human companions? He could not say.
It did not matter. He must find some way of returning to the time he’d left behind. Otherwise, in this land where etherea had dwindled to almost nothing, he too, would sicken and fade until he was no more.
In the Present:
YOLANDHE’S ISLAND
The waves rolled Yap onto the pebbly beach. He dug his fingers between the pebbles into silt and sediment to keep the ocean from dragging him back into the deathly deeps. The retreating waves pulled relentlessly on him, hissing over stone and sand, pebbles clicking together. Yap scrabbled forward so he would not lose ground, even while retching all the sea water he had inadvertently drunk.
He managed to reach the crest in the beach that marked the high tide line, and he lay there atop knots of dead rockweed, panting and resting, relieved to have made it to land.
Not food for the fishes today, he thought, as he had often thought after surviving a bad storm on the Mermaid, a pirate ship on which he’d served.
Despite having spent much of his life aboard ships, he had never learned to swim. Most mariners never did. Why, learning to swim was bad luck for a sailor. It was like inviting the gods to send disaster, a wave to sweep you overboard or sink the ship.
Somehow he’d made it to land without knowing how to swim. He bet if he knew how, the currents wouldn’t have been favorable, and he’d have drowned. The storm and breaking up of the gig notwithstanding, fortune was smiling on old Yap and had brought him ashore alive.
He groaned. But how his head and lungs hurt, and how exhausted he was from his ordeal. He spared a thought for his master. Lord Amberhill was a landsman—surely he did not know how to swim either. Yap hoped it was so. He hoped that fortune had pulled Lord Amberhill ashore, too.
Yap lay there on the stones, oblivious as a hermit crab scuttled by his fingers. He closed salt-rimed eyes against the brightness of the sun uncloaked by the parting of storm clouds.
• • •
Later, Yap awoke with a start. His belly ached badly, very badly. He shivered. His back was dry from the sun, but his front wet from lying prone. Waves tickled his toes, which meant the tide was on its way back in. He rubbed his eyes, knocking his specs askew. Somehow they’d stayed with him through the disaster. He tried to polish the residue of salt water from them with his shirt, but when he put them back on, he found he’d only smeared them. It was then, when he looked up to see his surroundings, he realized he was not alone.
First he saw her bare feet and ankles, then he looked up her long legs to the simple kilt of seagrass green. She wore a necklace of pearls and sea glass. Her long hair tousled away from a face he’d seen before. A tremor of fear ran through him, threatening to disgorge the contents of his already upset gut. He writhed on the ground and floundered about in an attempt to crawl away. He’d crawl back into the ocean if he had to.
“Where do you go, small man?” she asked.
Yap squeezed his eyes shut, wanted to clap his hands over his ears, but he knew it was no good, her voice held such power, for she was the sea witch, Yolandhe. She had long, long ago cursed him and his crew to be held stranded on a windless sea, trapped in a bottle for all time until someone had dropped it, releasing the spell. Oddly, the Mermaid had materialized in a house nestled deep in the forest, far away from the sea. Yap was the last of his crew who lived.
“I believe,” she said, her voice the calming rush of the tide combing the shore, “you took something that is not yours when last you were upon my island.”
“N-no,” he croaked.
“Give. It. Back.” She did not shout, but the command had the power of a storm in it, the crashing waves, the shrieking winds.
An upwelling in Yap’s gut caused him to vomit, first only salty fluid, but then more came up, a viscous mass of globules that, when deposited on the ground, was a small pile of pearls slimed with bile. More heaving produced coins of silver and gold, an emerald, a pair of rings, a necklace of gold links, more pearls, a brooch of a dragon, and worst of all, a long dagger with a gold hilt and ruby pommel. He thought it would slice his insides as it came, that it would choke the life out of him as it caught in his throat. When the hilt reached his mouth, he pulled it out and tossed it aside, and yet more pearls gushed out. When it seemed he was finished, he lay there shivering.
Yolandhe did not move. She waited.
Waited for what? Sweat poured down Yap’s face. His belly ached, but this time it was from all the heaving. Then he hiccupped and a diamond pendant popped out of his mouth.
Yolandhe nodded. She walked on as if he were no more than driftwood. She didn’t even pick up any of the precious objects he’d spewed at her feet. Perhaps that they had been returned to the island was enough.
He rose shakily to his knees, feeling much, much lighter. “Wait!” he called. “Have ya seen my master? We was wrecked in the storm!”
Yolandhe paused, the sea breeze tossing her hair back. She spoke softly, almost delicately, but the breeze carried her words to Yap with no difficulty.
“Yes,” she said. “I have found him. He has returned to me.”
PLUMBING
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br /> Karigan decided she was not a good patient. Not a patient patient. Following her conversation with the professor, she was up and down, pacing despite the pain lancing through her leg. She windmilled her good arm and stretched her back. Too much time in bed and her muscles would grow weak and limp. Arms Master Drent would never approve.
She further occupied herself by seeking out the privy Mirriam had mentioned. When she found it, she paused in awe, gawking at the shiny porcelain bowl supported by four bronze mermaids, its seatback fashioned into the shape of a breeching whale.
“Oh, my,” Karigan murmured. She peered into the bowl and saw that it contained still water. This was different than the privies she was accustomed to. There’d been shacks with holes and finer closets with aqueducts of actual running water coursing beneath. Selium had a fine system of piped water to deal with the unmentionable.
A brass lever, filigreed with twining seaweeds and periwinkles, jutted from the floor adjacent to the bowl, reaching to the height of her hips. It was not clear to her exactly what the lever was for, but its proximity to the bowl suggested it was integral to its functioning. There was only one way to find out. She pulled on the lever.
It drew back with a clack-clack-clack-clack that emanated from some hidden mechanism beneath the floor. When she pulled it back as far as it would go, she released it and the roar of water made her jump. She’d expected something to happen, but it still surprised her when it did. She watched in fascination as the water in the bowl whirled out of existence in a forceful vortex through a hole in the bottom.
As the lever slowly returned to its starting position, with additional muffled clicking and clacking, a trap door opened from above the seatback and a brass fish emerged. A stream of water spouted from its mouth and cascaded neatly into the bowl until it was refilled. Then the fish backed into the wall, and the trap door slammed shut.