:: The Diaries of Simra Hishkari ::
By Sunderlorn.
The story from the start.
The story on AO3.
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[Contains graphic violence & possible NSFW.]
First of all, I’m sorry I’ve gone so long without either updating or communicating what’s going on with this story. I want to apologise for that, and thank everyone who’s stuck with me and shown an interest in my writing over the years.
Sadly, I’m breaking that silence to say this story is officially on hiatus. It’s difficult to admit, even to myself, but I think it’s only fair to be clear with anyone who still reads it.
I’ve been busy and demotivated. I’ve been having trouble with writing in general, and with getting my head right for Simra and TES stuff in particular. Both still have an important place in my heart, but I’m having difficulty accessing it lately and it doesn’t seem to be getting easier.
I’m not abandoning Simra or this story. I want to get back to it. I just don’t know when I will. It could be next week, it could be much later down the line. Until then, the least I can do is be transparent about it.
Thanks again to everyone who’s read and enjoyed any of my work on this project. It’s been a blast, and a rewarding and educational experience. I really hope I can recapture that same feeling in the future and continue this story in the same spirit I had when I first started it.
“It’s bound to something. That’s the way with them, curses. Always are. Have to be! Like…” Llolamae screwed her face tight, almost scowling with concentration. “Imagine a knot. The complicated fisherman’s kind. There’s loops and there’s twists and there’s, like, knots tied to knots. But if you know how it got tied, you know how to undo it. See?”
“I think so,” said Simra.
The sun was setting in Vedith’s garden, already halfway hidden behind the high mountainsides that walled the valley in. Pink sky. Heat and green and growth or not, it was still Winter, and the days were short, the nights dark and sudden.
“How’s that help us?” said Simra. He was fidgety with second thoughts he was trying not to have. His knee trembled as he sat by the water, boots and footwraps off, and cleaned his feet in the cold of it.
Funny, how quick an ‘us’ had cropped up. Him and the mer he came here to kill, and the girl who guided him to the place where he could do it. Funny, how sometimes when you call something funny you call it that so as not to call it something else.
“Well…” Llolamae sat in the elbow of a thick and gnarled tree, legs crossed under her. She cocked her head, frowning. “Knots, right? A pull on the right part, and it comes undone. That’s curses. Causalities and conditions, all hung on a central contingency.” Tutored words, told off pat. She closed her eyes and nodded then, smiled a little, like she was proud to have remembered a part of some long-ago lesson.
“I understand that alright. But say you come across a knot you didn’t tie, and don’t know how to tie. Not much more you can do than just fumble at it, is there? Pick and scrabble. Hope your fingernails are just the right length and your luck’s just right to come across the right bits. See what comes loose…”
“Aye…” Llolamae admitted. “I’d best get started then.”
Simra’s back straightened and he turned full around through his waist. Raised a wet leg onto the streamside and leaned chin on hands, hands on knee. He looked at Llolamae, brows low and creased. “On…fumbling?”
“Did you not hear me?” Llolamae dropped out of the tree in a flop of feet and falling cloth. “Just sort of got to start feeling round the edges of it, seeing if I can find the thing. Contingency. The thing it’s bound to.”
On his feet now, Simra drew up close to Llolamae, lowering his voice. “Why? I mean, like it or not, I’m on this path now. I could’ve killed him. Sort of still don’t know why I didn’t. But what about you? What’s your reason? Sympathy? Loyalty? Whatever Vedith knows about the torquestone?”
Llolamae shrugged and gave a faint simple smile. “Have you not seen Master Vidanu’s Tel? I don’t want to sleep in a hole under canvas anymore, waiting for a proper spire to grow. Vedith can help.”
Simra bent low, drying his feet and picking up his boots to hide the smile that cracked across his face. “Wise is what that is!” His best imitation of Vedith; a decent one, at least. “Wise is what I call that!”
Poor taste, might’ve been, to joke about someone just as soon as you get done breaking their fingers with their own teakettle. It got Llolamae laughing though, which meant the blame was shared, halved. You take what chances to laugh as life gives you.
The old gardener had retreated inside, into the creeper-grown cottage, alone. Jokes or not, Simra couldn’t blame him. Reckoned it was best he leave him that way. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d tried to get back on talking terms with someone he’d pulled a blade on, but that was one of many things that didn’t get easier with practice. Leave it till tomorrow. He let Llolamae head inside, alone, and alone he stayed out here.
Fast shadows along the ground. They lengthened and grew with the sinking sun, then spread like damp over everything. Planting beds and plants; the root-branches and branch-roots of the tall things that weren’t quite trees. Walls of the cottage as the dusk came down and a golden light glowed up inside. Llolamae’s magelight. No windows, but it fissured out through the cracks and gaps; made it look like it was breaking apart.
Simra walked in the warm dark, between the beds, the tree-things, the trellis. Careful planted feet, going nowhere. Going nowhere, he told himself, going nowhere; reassuring himself of it, confirming it in his mind. A fragile thought, wavering like a candleflame.
Harder to keep smiling once you’re alone. He made himself breathe from his belly, hand jumping from the hilt of his sword to the sheathes on his knives to the woodbound grip of his sword, uneasy again. If he’d been one for praying, he thought, now would’ve been a good time. Sparing a life — not the kind of thing you want cause to regret. He’d’ve liked cause to do it more often.
…
It wasn’t falling asleep that came hard. Out in the warm dark open, in sweat-stiff clothes, with his mantle balled round his scarf for a pillow, sleep fell on Simra quick and heavy as a Summer’s sudden rain. He’d been so tired. Days of tumbling first this way then that, never knowing where he was headed, or how he was meant to get there. Confusion can exhaust you, same as anything else.
But he woke before dawn, mist on his cheeks and soaked into his outer shirt, world still grey and faded. Couldn’t get back to sleep after that. He picked himself up, stretched, arms above his head and back arching. Regretted it. Grunted a curse and hobbled a few steps, trying to work out the new knots he’d tied in his muscles.
He’d heard of people – swordsmen, ascetics, people with time on their hands – who’d start each day stretching. They’d move from one pose to another, each with their own special names. Scorpion Rears to Strike; Swallow Takes Flight; Spinning Silk. After that it’d be like they’d shaken off all the weight of their body and it’d go through the day light as thought, doing what it was told. Simra didn’t know any stretches like that. Part of him wished that he did. The rest scoffed at the whole idea, or at least the idea that it would work for him. Some things just hurt. Some things, once broke, stay broken.
It was still hot, cloying. The warmth down here didn’t come from the sun, didn’t leave with it either. Just pooled like water, regardless of night or shade. Made you sluggish. It was a warmth that wore you like wet clothes.
A teacup lay on its side, half-forgotten in the flattened grass where he and Vedith had fought. Knees clicking, Simra bent and picked it up, took it over to the watercourse that ran through the garden. Filled it. The cup’s dark glaze turned the water to ink. He splashed a careful measure onto the hobstone and hovered his calloused left palm above it. He felt it grow warm then hot as he fed its enchantment another splash of water.
The teapot was dented, muddy, discarded same as the teacup. He fetched his own – dark fire-blackened bronze, small and sturdy, just more than enough for one person and barely that – and made tea.
With nothing to eat, he drank the whole pot.
There was light enough to read by now. No food, little sleep, but at least he had that.
Crouching by his bookbag, he unlaced its mouth and pawed through. Paper, parchment, a book written on slats of wood, laced together like window shutters. Best not to read anything that mattered, that needed to last — not in this wet heat.
He fanned out the handbills and bounties he always had, stuffed and dogeared in the bag’s bottom. Woodcut prints of faces the law, or some lord, or the Temple had put a price on, all of them land and sea and leagues away, useless to him. Old news from elsewhere. Boat refugees from Bravil moved on by measured and merciful force from Narsis; told there’s land for settling in Vvardenfell; meanwhile, the violence in Cyrodiil rages on. Always violence, unrest, discontent — a decade of the same and getting worse each year, and they still didn’t call it a war. First the Concordat that lost Hammerfell, now this ‘violence’, and the Empire still wouldn’t admit it was anything less than whole. For certain it wouldn’t admit it was at war with itself; ablaze with a fire that threatened to spread. That was last year, last Summer, and nothing Simra didn’t already know. Caselif had told him enough for that. He stuffed the bill back in his bag, keeping it for scrap paper.
The writ stood out. It was long, not a scrap but a scroll, and made from fine silkpaper. Not block-printed in bulk, but written in his own formal hand — decent, even with the strike and scratchiness that came with employing a dip-pen to write a script meant for the brushes he’d never quite learnt to use. Ulessen’s scribe had hunched over his shoulder, watching as he wrote it. Now, with the sun rising slow, a change in the dark before it shed any light, he sat in the shade of the trellis and began to read.
It was his usual. He’d done his own writwork for years now, he’d said. Set his own terms. And he never left much room for worming out by one clause or another, not for him, and not for the client. That was the idea. Keep things stark, simple, in plain words, but lengthy enough, detailed enough, to make things seem professional, polished, planned for. In this writ, only the clause about up-front pay was changed. There was no pay at all, just a debt held over him, clear and quiet and smug, sure there was no way out from under it but the way Ulessen had offered him. A backroads lender, you could run from, hide from. A Telvanni magister, one with all the force and power of an old Tel behind them, would always find you.
A shrill from inside the cottage and Simra was already on his feet. It wasn’t the same sound as hurried him up that snowbank two yesterdays ago, and into a triangle of Kogaru with spears and sour red-painted faces. But it was still Llolamae, and it was close enough. He trampled beds, weeds, grasses. Found the door and shouldered it in, hand gone to his knives and twitching one out of its sheathe.
Vedith was asleep, on his back, on a palette of green wood and silky mushroom skin. Open mouth and pot-belly rising, falling. His broken hand was clawed shut, clutched to his chest like a pigeon’s bad wing.
Llolamae turned to look at Simra with ricebowl-wide eyes, sparkling with her grin even before he saw it in her red-gummed mouth, her mismatched child and unchild’s teeth. She shrieked again, words this time:
“I done it!”
Simra slackened and stopped. The hand on his knife-grip, the half-drawn blade, was heavy and weak now. His shoulders sagged. “You figured it out?” He said it flat. Couldn’t muster any feeling into the words, not while his heart was still pounding, choking the back of his throat and fooling his tongue dry and clumsy.
“I reckon so, aye!”
“Then why scream about it?” He saw Vedith was still sleeping, even through all the noise. Seemed Simra had strength left to feel bitter on that, at least.
Llolamae half-turned away, a slight hang to the angle of her head. “Thought you’d be pleased…”
Simra held back a grunt, a huff, and slumped against one of the cottage walls. “I am.” Seemed he had sense left to feel bad over snapping at her, at least. To feel bad all round. Aching shuddering muscles, battle-blood draining sick and away before he even knew it was up and upon him. “That’s good. Really good, maybe.”
“Sort of wondered if you’d come running again, too…” A part-moon sliver of Llolamae’s grin had stayed on her face. She turned it to him now.
Simra shrugged. He was here, wasn’t he? “What’d you find out? Can you break it? The curse.”
The kettle was caked in rust, battered with years of use. A round of thin worn grey iron, short spout tacked to one side with a knotty scar of joinery. Not a good kettle, Simra thought. Like something you’d buy from the single extortionate shop in a clapboard and mudbrick glass-rushers’ town, knowing full and well it won’t last. Not the town, not the tools you bought, and sure as sin not the promises of wealth that planted the place in the minds of those that built it. Temporary, all of it. Hoping your hopes will come good before the hope runs out and the seams run dry, and the ashwastes around you are just wastes again, and the rush-town turns ghost-town, all barren windows and doors chattering in the wind. Anycase, this kettle had been used and loved far longer than it was ever meant to be had. And it sat now on a warm flat hobstone, gurgling and shuddering geriatric as it boiled.
“Outside,” said Vedith, savouring the word. “Always best to be outside, if you can. Eat, sleep. Sit, stand. Light and air, the sound of things growing. Always feels cleaner, closer.”
“Closer to what?” said Llolamae. She’d listened intent to Vedith since he started talking. Wide eyes and questions. Talking back every chance she got. Between them they killed silence dead every time it crept in.
“Well, to everything! Out in it, eh? In what?” They said that together, then together they chuckled. One laugh like water, the other like rattling reeds. “In everything!” Vedith answered with a sigh, a nod, like he thought it was the sagest thing anyone ever said.
Time alone did this to a person, Simra knew. He’d seen that, been that. People are meant to talk. Map out their world in words and share what’s in their heads. And if there’s only their thoughts to listen as their thinking mutters out of their mouths, they’ll still talk just to talk, and listen just to hear a voice. Might be they’ll clam up in company, but just as often it goes like this. Get two people in one place, and both of them better used to being alone than not, they’ll talk about anything. Constant as cicadas, both of them used to holding up both sides of a conversation…
Simra held back. Hummed sometimes, nodded. Watched Vedith splash a last measure of water from a broad and dark-glazed teacup onto the hobstone. Watched it steam as the enchantment in it hissed to life and heat at the touch of water. A hobstone was an expensive way to do what fire could do far cheaper. Trust a Telvanni to have one, and only the world’s sorriest kettle to sit on it.
“Does it not ever get cold?” Llolamae asked. “Being out, I mean. Too cold for that, down here?”
“Oh no. Oh no no, oh no, I’ve seen to that. Things wouldn’t grow right, would they? Better for them to just keep things just so. Just the same. Much better.”
Vedith crumbled leaves between his grubby fingertips, out of a clay jar and into the simmering kettle. Green and indigo, curls and twists, shaped like insects in pain. Simra watched, wary, thinking of Bandrys and Galgas, poisoned, limblocked and staked out on the plains. Pull a trick once and all your life you’ll be wary it’s come back to bite you. But Simra only noticed the crescents of black under Vedith’s curt blunt nails. Felt his lip curl and his nose wrinkle, and tried to cover his revolt and his watching with talk. “And what’s good for the garden is good for the gardener…”
Vedith’s head jerked up. Rheumy sightless eyes, staring at nothing. He grinned straight through Simra, a grin all gaps and gums. “That’s right! Wise is what that is! Do you know, when you hear something said you’ve always thought but never thought it in words? Wise is what I call that!”
“I don’t know about that,” said Simra. It was a Temple platitude. An old holdout, so far as Simra knew, from the Imperial mission in newly opened Morrowind. An attempt to syncretise Niner doctrine into something easier for Dunmer to swallow. It didn’t work; not the way the mission wanted. Adopted by the Temple and preached out often as anything else, with no mention of Mother Mara, Steadfast Stendarr. It was nothing obscure, yet Vedith had never heard it. “Just a small thing I’ve often thought myself,” Simra lied.
“It’s good is what it is…” Vedith poured the tea into three mismatched cups, the colour different in each one against the red, the black, the pale grey lacquers. He inhaled a head full of steam and drank first, putting Simra a slight bit better at ease. “What was it you said you were, friend?”
“Oh any number of things,” said Simra. “Here, today, I’m just a messenger.”
“He’s got a letter!” said Llolamae. “It’s about the torquestone!”
“Seems everything is, around here…” Simra muttered.
“What’s that?” Vedith said.
“A letter,” said Simra.
“Well, well… Well. I don’t know who it is you’ve come from with your letter but they can’t know me. Even when my eyes were younger, I never was much of a one for reading.”
Simra felt the scratchy start of a flush at his hairline. The shaky waver of something beneath him, bending to break, to fall away. He laughed; tried to make it sound easy. “Simple mistake to make.”
But Vedith was tense now. “Really now…” Spoke like someone’s hand moving slow to their swordbelt. “Who was it?” A slow-moving hand wishing it could stay still. Less a threat and more a plea.
“Tel Branora!” Llolamae chipped in, bright and helpful as ever.
And then everything was in motion.
A flash of pain washed over Simra and he broke snarling through it. Limbs in a tangle, tugging, pushing. One reedy shriek, choked off into scarce and stolen breath, sour against Simra’s face. Then he was over Vedith, above him. Had slapped aside the teacup the old mer had thrown, its contents scalding against Simra’s arm and chest. Had tumbled across the hobstone and borne Vedith down with his weight, his speed, his youth, as he scrambled to get away. Now Simra hunched above him, stinging forearm bruising into his windpipe.
Vedith’s arm thrashed. His grubby fingertips turned the earth, the mulch, clawing for the kettle just out of his reach. But Simra saw. And things were slow now, almost still and surreal. The blood-thunder in his ears turned the world quiet. The tunnel-tight focus of his eyes made everything seem simple. Arm still trapping Vedith, Simra picked up the kettle. Emptied it into Vedith’s face in a spluttering of wet leaves, then swung it crushing down onto the old mer’s desperate fingers.
An airless squawk and Vedith’s hand curled up like a dying bug, and Simra grabbed the wrist and passed it to his other hand. Holding it fast, choking Vedith, both with the same arm, Simra felt himself reach now for his belt. Plumwood and cold iron, the tight-wrapping of leather, Simra’s fingers found the leaf-bladed knife his old spearhead had long ago become and drew it.
Vedith’s blind eyes bulged. Starved for air, or had he somehow heard the steel? Simra couldn’t hear a thing until the noise struck him.
A shrieking in Simra’s right ear and something knocked him sideways. Tumbled his shoulder into the ground, the dirt, toppling him halfway off Vedith. His vision bloomed blue and shocking white. Too narrow before, now it had split wide, like a breaking egg behind his eyes, and he scrabbled blind, crabbed sideways and backwards and up, thrashing ruinous through a plantbed till he could almost see again.
Just silhouettes at first. Shapes and colour, clotting together. Llolamae stood, face pale and drawn in shock, the kettle braced in her hands. She’d hit him. Cracked it into the side of his head.
“Fuck’d you do that for?” Simra yelped, and it came out hoarse and stupid.
“You were going to kill him!”
Was he? He’d felt himself hesitate. “I didn’t want you to come.”
“You lied! You lied!” Llolamae stamped her feet, shrieking.
“This is why! This is why I didn’t want you along but you didn’t give me any choice!”
“You lied! You didn’t want to give him anything! You didn’t want to find out anything! You just wanted him dead!”
“I don’t want anything! I don’t even want to be here! If I had any fucking choice—!”
Llolamae screamed and threw the kettle.
Simra ducked it, jerking out the way, hissing through his teeth. “It’s just a job! I can’t not! I can’t—”
Still screaming, Llolamae’s face was red in blotches, her eyes wild and hands clamped over her ears.
“—and now I’m screaming, pleading my fucking case at an unarmed child, while I’m the one with four knives and a sword and fucking magic! Fuck!” Simra stopped and stormed a few paces off, kicking through the planting bed. He lifted a hand to where his head hurt. Hot against his fingertips, but no blood when he looked. Just a child, after all, swinging a thin and ill-made kettle at him. “Fuck…” he repeated, a rasping sigh this time. Then his eyes fixed on Vedith. “You!”
The old Telvanni was curled onto his side. Body confused, he tried to face Simra even as his legs and good arm pushed him backwards and away. His mangled hand brushed vague at his throat.
“If I’m not killing you and fucking off home…” Home? When had Tammunei and Noor become that? “…You’re gonna tell me why someone wants me to. Right now!” Simra crashed a path through the flowering shoots and saplings to come closer. Made to kick at Vedith then stamped his boot into the dirt by his face, sending him flinching, whimpering, trying to speak. “Why’s Mistress Ulessen want you dead?”
“Msstrss…Lessen?” Vedith choked out, eyes balled shut then bulging open.
Simra’s head throbbed. Llolamae was still screaming, starting to form words again after long moments of wordless fury and terror. “Will you please shut up or I swear by bones and blood I will gut him right here and leave you to clean up what’s left!”
Silence after that. Splitting-loud with the ringing in his ears – leftover like the afterburn of looking too long at the sun – but Llolamae had gone quiet. Her lip shook, face all pinched and red and sour, and he didn’t blame her. Stopped looking at her so as not to blame himself.
“…I don’t know…Mistress…” Vedith managed when Simra went back to staring at him. “Only Felisa…”
“You don’t know—” Simra started, and then something fell into place. “When did you leave Tel Branora?”
“Red Mountain. It was before.” Every word still sounded like a gasp. “Mistress Therana! I served Mistress Therana! Same as here. Never knew…to do any different.” Vedith pulled himself onto hands and knees, grimacing, then sat himself on the ground, a heap of skinny grubby limbs around his potbellied body.
Simra walked round him, wary, circling the point of his dagger in the air. “Go on.”
“Minded the Tel. Kept the spires strong, steady. Tried to at least, after she sent away Kurani, but she’d always made the plans and I kept it all growing right, kept everyone fed. I only ever wanted to serve the House. Serve the Mistress. And I never did mind her turns. I was faithful! Useful!”
“So what happened?”
“One of her turns…” Vedith chuckled without humour. “This one turned on me. Mistress Therana called me up to her. She never was much of a one for the proper ways any more. Not by then. Never speaking through Felisa like she ought to have. So she called me up and face to face, she said to me, ‘Dalvur, you’ll be here about the yams of course.’ And I said yes, I was, not knowing what she was talking about, but you don’t say as much to a magister, do you? I’ve seen what happens when you do. ‘As you’ll know, they’ve always irked me. Always! Can’t stand them! Never could.’ Said it was the smell, something like that. And I said I’d see what I could do about that. And she said, ‘Would you?’ All smiling. And cursed me.”
“What was the curse?”
“Nothing she uttered out loud. I don’t know the particulars…”
Simra crouched down next to Dalvur Vedith and met his eyes. “So tell me what you do know.” Quiet and coaxing.
“Nothing grew. Wasn’t like everything died all at once, mind, but nothing new came in. Nothing planted would shoot. The seeds stayed put in the ground like stones. The spires wouldn’t answer the spells. No growth, no repairs. There was no life in anything anymore. No fruit, no rice, no fungus. No yams — the mistress made sure of that!”
“And they cast you out.”
“Aye. I don’t blame them.”
“It didn’t help. Branoris is still barren.” And now it all made sense. “As long as you live, is that it? Is that why the new mistress sent me? To fix the old one’s mess?”
A hoarse moan and Vedith jerked away, shuffling across the ground, fraction by fraction further from Simra. “Please, ser…” His head shook, hanging, like a heavy gourd on a stem too thin to bear it. A tendon bobbed and trembled in his neck.
“They’re starving. I’ve seen it. Everyone. Both islands.” For what? The caprice of one mad wizard. Simra was sick with it. His voice ran cold and flat, almost bored with it. “It’s slow. They buy food in when they can. Mainland grain. They fish too. Course they do. But it’s never enough.”
“Ser, please…” Vedith lifted his broken hand and laid it on Simra’s arm.
Simra flinched. Twisted to throw off the hand and grip its wrist in his fingers, not tight, but holding firm. “D’you know what hunger does to someone when it never goes fully away? What it does to children born into it, growing up in it?”
Vedith’s mouth was still moving. Shaping the words, but only breath came out.
“They don’t grow right. You ought to know something about that. Two hundred years,” said Simra. “How many more left in you, I wonder?”
Fat silent tears rolled down Vedith’s lined cheeks.
One push of the knife and then he could run, Simra thought. One gentle push in the right place and he could be gone. Use the last scroll in his bookbag and be back in Tel Branora, all of this done and dealt with. He’d done worse. Some of them had even begged worse too. So why was he wavering? Something felt uncertain, unsettled. “Tell me. Think carefully,” said Simra. He spoke and kept speaking, not knowing where the words might lead. Just playing for time. Looking for a reason. “Did your old mistress say anything? Anything, when she laid the curse on you?”
“She said…” Vedith’s forehead wrinkled further. Deep creases and bunched eyes. “It was my duty. I’d still be doing my duty by the House. By her. Just a new way of doing it, she said. She…patted me. On my head?”
Sitting back on his haunches, Simra let Vedith’s wrist go. He faced out at the warm stillness of the air, the green stillness of the leaves and blossoms all round him, and saw none of it. Open eyes but they were good as closed. Every breath tasted of turned earth, dark and impersonal, and somewhere the wings of insects droned a spiraling song from flower to flower. Dim and distant, he came aware that he was furious with it. This place, this work, his place in it. And it exhausted him.
Maybe it was the mess of it all. The careless tangle the Telvanni had made of all this, blunder built on blunder. Like the song of the old mother who swallowed a spider because she’d swallowed a fly, and never stopped swallowing after. Rats, cats, dogs, bears, her hunter husband; the whole world going down her throat to fix one petty problem that got bigger with every fix. Maybe it was seeing them all rolled under it, that problem, and only a whim at the root of it all. Vedith, all of Branoris, Llolamae, him, all of them struggling to breathe in its long cold shadow.
But most of all he was tired. Disgusted with himself already. With the cling and brittleness of sweat on his skin, dried and gone damp again, drying under his clothes. With the scald on his arm and chest that was starting by now to sting, and the warm sharp smell that cut over the scent of soil and made him wonder if Vedith had wet himself in the struggle. He was too tired for it. Needed something to cling to; something solid and something solved.
“Llolamae?” he called out. “What d’you know about laying curses?”
The Kogaru were slow to be off, no matter how Simra stared at them. A pointed look, poised like a hawk on the hand and impatient in its silence. They picked themselves up and gathered to go all with the same reluctance. Simra couldn’t imagine why. Sooner they got going, sooner he’d be gone. Ought to be what they wanted.
“D’you know he’s this way?” Simra asked once they were underway.
Kaliklu was leading again, but only by a few strides. “Until the water we were only guessing.”
Simra found that less than comforting but said nothing of it. “It’s his work, then?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen it before? Been here before?”
“Yes.”
“Often?”
“No.”
“He a friend?” No response. “Should I be wary is what I’m asking? Scared? Ready for a fight?”
“Of course you should be wary.”
“Wary of what? Ready for what?”
“Anything,” Kaliklu said, curt and impatient with the questions now.
Simra kissed his teeth, loud and harsh, and walked fast to put distance between him and the elder. He’d get nothing more from him, that was clear. Old man was on enough of an edge now without Simra grinding it sharper for him. No help at all, Simra thought to himself. Ready for anything. Ready for anything always seemed a good way to be ready for nothing much. The world’s a place of specifics. A mess of specifics, infinite beyond thought, infinite beyond thought of thinking. Be ready for the world? You can’t. Best you can do’s prepare for what you know is in your closest corner of it. What you reckon’s around the bend.
And there was the thing. He didn’t know what to expect. Besides the holdout of a mage with enough power and strength to change the land for half a league around. To dig a hole in the surface of Winter and fill it with high green Spring. Besides a Telvanni turncoat, stubborn and strong enough to break from the mistress of Tel Branora and flee to the world’s wild north edge. Besides a problem big enough that Tel Branora wound launch some tieless nobody northward and into the Sea of Ghosts, to go scour a bleak little rock in that waste of ice and slate-grey ocean, and bring back news Dalvur Vedith was dead. And not knowing what to expect, he had no way to prepare. Not the slightest sketch of a plan.
The stream ended abrupt in a clearing. It was overgrown, small, but stood out stark in the thatch-thick woods. Cutting it in half, the water rested in a cool silver sickle of pond, pale lilies on the surface and purple velvet flowers with lolling hand-long petals. A dancing cloud of yellow blossom-moths, same as before, twisted like smoke through the air. Hundreds, thousands.
A kind of structure stood in the pond’s curved belly, half-surrounded. A low shape with a slumped curved roof. Growth covered it, so dense it looked made of nothing but pink and white flowering vines, woody-skinned creepers. Curlicues of bramble split off its bulk like flyaway hairs from an unkempt head. But underneath the overgrowth, Simra thought he could make out stone. Rafters and ribs, reaching up from the ground and forward, like a short hunchbacked tunnel. A skeleton of scaffolds and supports in black screw-surfaced torquestone.
A slack line of growing things made something like a trellis, meandering till they met the hut and knit over and into its side. Simra wanted to think of them as trees but it didn’t quite fit. Only thing right about them was the trunks – birch thin, fine and pale, planted in close order – and only because they were in the right places. The rest was inverted. Up top, their roots fanned out like the bare bones of a parasol, naked and tasting the air. Their branches crawled thick and tangling across the ground, clawing into the dirt, all wearing a ragged plumage of leaves. Their pattern was almost regular. Quadrangles and half-circles, traced out across the clearing floor in ledges and ridges, the edges of raised planting-beds full of damp black earth.
The roots cast a stripey shade below them. Bent over one of the beds, arms buried partway to the elbows in rich dirt, Dalvur Vedith knelt by his trellis, his hut, head bowed.
Whatever Simra might’ve expected, he hadn’t expected this. The brown tatters of a simple robe hung off his sloping back. It looked like a horseblanket. Wrapped haphazard around him and held on with complicated knots and cinching lines of faded purple braid, but a horseblanket all the same. Wisps of colourless hair floated around his small dark grey head, and tickled at his jutting ears. And when he looked up and stared, his eyes were pouchy, small and bright in a deep-lined face.
“There you are.” His voice was cracked, creaking like a disused door. “I wondered, you know. Would you ever come back? I wondered. And as I felt you in my garden, I thought: well then well then, be it what it may, but an old mer can hope…”
“We do not disturb you without need, Gurrigalattu,” said Kaliklu. “You know this. Just as you do not disturb the island beyond this valley.”
“My valley…” Vedith smiled. Holes and gums, teeth and darkness.
“Your valley,” Kaliklu was quick to agree.
“So! It’s true then? You’ve come to see me. Come to see old Dalvur?”
“I have brought someone, yes. Someone who wished to meet you.”
“A visitor!” Vedith’s head cocked and twitched on its thin neck, casting round. His eyes were hollow, half-lidded and lookless. “I count five. You’ve not brought visitors before, Kaliklu.” He sniffed, long and deep through one nostril, covering the other with a dirty finger. “To what do I owe the pleasure, old friend?”
Simra thought a moment, dry-mouthed and asking himself, how much could he say and keep all his stories straight? “I’ve searched you out to pass on a message.”
Vedith’s jaw went slack. Mouth open, his dust-coloured tongue moved fitful, like he was counting what teeth he had left. “This one’s not one of yours, Kaliklu. He speaks for himself! And doesn’t, hah, doesn’t smell so much like blood. And the other?”
Simra glanced round, searching for Llolamae, and found her beside him, toes on the edge of the water that separated them from Vedith. She was puffed up, standing straight and strident. Not a little girl but a Mouth again, like when he’d first met her.
“I’m Mouth to Master Vidanu of Tel Kogaris.”
Vedith scrambled upright and onto his feet. His robe was gathered up and girded at his waist, showing the grubby knob-kneed length of his skinny legs. His face was a blur, spasming from feeling to feeling. Through terror to joy to despairing of a hope he’d never had the time to hold. He bowed and twitched, stepping back and stepping back, till he retreated into the trellis and flinched from it with a dry gasp.
“House…” he started, struggling to find breath for the words. “House business then, is it?”
Llolamae shot Simra a look of confusion. Shrugged and angled her eyes, questioning. Simra nodded quick and insistent.
“Aye,” she said. “It is that.”
Dirt-flecked hands wringing each against the other, Vedith paced a moment, back and forth amongst the beds and roots. His mouth moved silent, teething and chawing over talk that wouldn’t quite come. Whatever Simra might’ve expected, he hadn’t expected this. An old mer falling to pieces, knowing maybe what’d come for him.
Vedith stopped. “Vidanu, d’you say? Kogaris, is it? Not — I mean, that’s to say not—”
“That’s right,” Simra cut in. “Vidanu of Tel Kogaris.”
“It’s about the torquestone!” said Llolamae.
“The torque—?” Vedith’s face slackened, all the workings under his skin laxing all at once. “The what? The stone! You mean the twisty, the twisting, the one with, the one you can… Hah!” His empty eyes rolled back deeper into his skull, eyelids fluttering. Relief. “Of course, of course. Of course! Torquestone. Good name, very good name. Hadn’t thought… Well then, come in! Come over. You must. Oh, will you take tea? I have something, somewhere, very good…”
The Kogaru had bundled together into a group, talking in fevered whispers amongst themselves. The hunter spoke most, with Kaliklu listening, nodding. They were tense, anxious here. Nerves in all their faces, the set of their shoulders and turn of their bodies. Jangling nerves in all their voices. Kaliklu peeled himself from the group and spoke to Simra:
“You have no more need of us.”
It didn’t sound like a question. Simra stepped closer while Llolamae scuttled round the pond and onto its far side, capering between the beds. “That right?” he said.
“We have already stayed too long.”
“Too long for what? Have we stayed too long too and you’re not telling us?” Simra hissed. “What about getting out of here?”
“You have only to follow the water.”
“For how long? To where? Blight, you agreed to guide me! I bled for that, bargained for that!”
Across the water, Llolamae was chattering to Vedith, bright as birdsong.
“We did,” said Kaliklu, reaching out an empty hand. “We have.” The hunter plucked the wand from his bundle and passed it into Kaliklu’s grasp. He wasn’t pointing it at Simra, but the message was clear.
Force his hand and Simra would’ve bet the wand was empty, or close to it. Or that Kaliklu’s fingers wouldn’t find its touch-runes fast enough, unpracticed and unfamiliar with it. But why gamble when there was nothing to win. Kaliklu was right. Right, and scared, and like as not to do something stupid.
“Off with yourselves, then,” said Simra. They’d played their part, done as they said they would. Even so, for the second time that day, Simra couldn’t help but feel cheated.
They upped fast, silent and impatient, making to hurry away. Sooner they got going, sooner they’d be gone, and gone was where they wanted to be, they’d made that plenty clear.
“Busy busy!” Simra muttered at their backs. “Hurry hurry. Sure you’ve got fucking caves to paint. Other strangers to ambush and extort…”
Kaliklu still held the wand as they hustled towards the clearing’s edge and back the way they came, following the water. None of them looked back. Just fled, fast as they could.
All morning they walked by water and never saw it. The tangle of trees hid it from sight, but surrounded them in its sound. The chattering run of clear bright water.
Simra’s mouth was dry and sour from the heat. He caught himself patting the waterskin looped to his belt, checking it, then caught himself checking again, hopeless and habitual, like a superstition. Why would it have changed? Blighted thing was empty that morning. Of course it was still empty now. Still empty, and still sweat stinging at his back and in his eyebrows. Feet still hurting, but when did they not?
There was no track through all this growth. Every step was a blow struck against the forest. A process of gnawing into its bulk, its mass, chased on by the sense it was healing behind you, would mend quicker than you could travel. Trap you.
Following the Kogaru, Simra stepped where they stepped, weeds and grasses, and Llolamae traipsed behind him. They weren’t comfortable here, he realised. No more than he was. Didn’t know how to move through forest like this, all crashing feet and the cutting switch of a spear against the knit of green ahead. Their people had lived on this island since before time had a name for itself. Generations and generations, living in the icewastes of the coastlines like as not. Life and living balanced between the sea and the hotcaves. Might be this place had still been the greenest piece of the island in Kaliklu’s younger years, but Dalvur Vedith brought the forest. It was recent; newer than anything like this ought to be. Not a forest, Simra corrected himself. A garden.
The light changed. One moment, filtered yellow sun and shadows of midnight green. Now things were luminous, sallow. Fungus reached in fronds, thin-stemmed up to left and right, like fences of growing willow. They ended capless in paintbrush tips, like blossoms almost, or the tendril-mouths of something that lived too deep under the sea to be understood by anything that didn’t. No glow to them that Simra could see, but then again there was no sunlight either. A smell on the air, like wax and turned earth and the sweetness of boiled milk.
Underfoot, nettles and weeds grew high as Simra’s waist. Pale-leafed and sticky on Simra’s clothes, they spooled and hedged together like messes of twine, and he tramped through them in long high clownish strides. Not a path, too thick-grown for that, but then why did the fungus either side feel like it’d been waiting for them? Ushered them into itself. Grown round them, maybe. A tunnel, a passage, a funnel.
To one side a tree was trying to grow, crashing up through the wall of fungus. Colourless craggy bark, dried up, and all its leaves starved to bones. The weeds crowded its trunk and had clambered choking into its branches. They sagged under the weight, overburdened, but up amongst them the weeds were flowering. Each was a pair of petals, lurid yellow and palm-sized, with a long smug purple needle hanging down.
Simra felt his mouth twist and tighten. He strayed as far as the fungus fence would let him, not keen to be under the weed-choked tree. Something pinched at his vision as he passed it by. Motion. He snapped his head up, back. His hand went for his belt, then slacked.
Butterflies. Moths maybe. A swarm of them, all big as his palm, swarmed between the branches in billowing stormclouds, wheeling scattering loops. Simra felt himself frown. Their wings were bright yellow and they searched the air with flickering tongues, thistle-flower purple.
“What in the—…”
Llolamae whooped and clapped her hands. Stopped and turned in place to watch them, mouth open and jaw hanging.
“There a reason Telvanni do things like that?” Simra said, stuck between the wonderment and wrongness of it. “Or is it just for the spice of it. See if they can.”
“Might have a reason.”
“Seeing if you can’s not a reason.”
“Might be an important one, even!” said Llolamae, neck still craned, keeping track of the moths.
“A weed that – let me straight this out – kills trees to make flowers that turn into moths, and then…fuck knows where that journey ends.”
“Seeing if you can’s important sometimes. That’s what Master Vidanu says. Testing principles, intit? You start small, and it might look like nothing, might even seem like a waste. But then who’s laughing when you reapply it somewhere else and of a sudden you’ve up and cured autumnsbone or gripe!”
“With moths…”
“Maybe.” Llolamae looked down, looked full at him, squaring her hips and shoulders.
“Fuck…” Simra muttered. “Well if I was waiting on a sign we were getting close… Come on. Let’s get this done.”
The fungus ended but Simra couldn’t quite place when. Gone in the time it took not to look at it. No fungus, no breeze, and back to daylight through the still leaves overhead, littering the ground like scraps and shatters of noontime gold. The weeds had given way to a dark velvet of moss, tending slippery and slow downhill.
Simra looked up from watching his feet, not wanting to stumble. A bright gap showed ahead in the closure of ferns and trees. The Kogaru disappeared through as Simra watched. He forgot the footing, his care of it, and hurried after them, muttering again, “Come on.”
With one hand he parted the greenery, opening the gap to fit through. Stiff hairy stems, one broken and bleeding what looked like bile. Delicate fronds, complex and intricate. Tiny leaves fitting together like tiles in a mosaic, like teeth in a clenched mouth. His other hand itched anxious at his belt, hovering between the hilt of his sword and handle of his knives.
“Come on…” Didn’t know if the words were meant to speed Llolamae behind him or steel himself for what was ahead. It was this place. Turning him round, putting a fear up him at seeing – what? – a stand of ferns. Then, sky, stark and open. A cut through the woodland, ten strides broad.
A deep narrow ribbon of water cut across the way and the Kogaru haunched down beside it, drinking from their cupped hands. Only the hunter stood back, leaning on his spear and glaring as Simra came through the ferns. Without looking down, the hunter lowered a hand to the bundle slung across his shoulders and brought out a flattened leather bottle, throwing it beside the youngest Kogaru who set to filling it.
Simra eyed the water. Crouched down beside it and sniffed, careful of it. Moss, moths, fungus that found you in the wilderness and fanfared your way with steepled stems — hadn’t yet found a thing in this basin he trusted. Just because he liked the look of this water didn’t mean he’d start trusting it too. How long had they walked beside it while it hid from them?
He wet his cracked lips. Unhitched his own waterskin, crushed the air out, and submerged it, giving it the side of his gaze as it filled. The water was so clear, seemed almost so still and steady in its running, that he scarce knew his hand was under it except by the chill of it. Deep and sharp, flooding up his wrist and into the bones of his arm. He was already longing for it. Thinking how it would ache in his teeth and unparch his throat. Freezing, high-mountain cold.
Wincing, Simra stood up and and passed the skin into his other hand, fluttering the wet one like that might fidget some feeling back into its fingers. Llolamae lurked by him and he passed her the uncapped skin. “Hold this a moment.”
Straight away she made to drink.
“Tscht! Hold on!”
She hesitated, mouth still open and skin raised almost up to it.
“I said hold it.” Simra cocked his eyebrows and jerked his head at the Kogaru, watching a moment. They were drinking free and open now, and weren’t dead yet, but all the same, all the same... He shuffled his old leather satchel round to his front. Picked through, staring into it, and came up with a length of plaited twine round his fingers, the coin-slight weight of a bronze medallion dangling from its length. It was wide across as a fingerjoint and tarnished green-blue by water — centuries of patina, he might’ve thought, if he hadn’t watched the streetmage etch her enchantment into it himself less than three years ago.
“What’s that do?” Llolamae asked.
“Makes water safe to drink,” he said, taking back the skin. Safe, unless someone put poison in it by design.
“By magic?”
He nodded. “Small thing, but it’s saved my life more times than any other blade or bit of magic I’ve ever owned.” Anycase, he liked to think it had. He’d never really know, not while it did its job, but since half the camp at Gelan-Telai went down with a blood-tinged flux, Simra reckoned one never could be too careful.
The medallion went into the neck of the skin and came out wet. No more tarnished though. Simra liked to think that meant something. He drank a measured draught. One clean, cold sip, then a long glug, cheeks filling, throat filling, then stomach cold and glad with it. “Ghosts…” he gasped. “Good.” He swilled out the sour corners inside his mouth, washing away the taste of thirst, and turned his back to Llolamae. Spat.
She took a quick gulp when he passed it to her then drained it dry.
Taking it back, Simra crouched to fill it again. Thoughtless, he found himself thinking, and something he thought stuck like a fishbone in the throat of his mind. Might be nothing. Maybe so, but it still itched. Looking down at the cut of the stream through the forest, it had no banks. No silt, no pebbles or gravel. Just the clean cleave of it, a deep brief trench through the moss and the pale solid stone beneath it. Like a gutter, sliced neat. Like something brand new.
Chewing the inside of his cheek, he dipped the medallion again and made himself look away from the water. Its stone bed, its strange slow run. There’d be no standing up for falling down if he let himself get tripped up on every scrap of strangeness in this place. Best just to carry on. Get this done. He’d been away long enough already.
Kaliklu made a scoop of his fingers, pawing out meat from the thing’s black shell. White ribbons of flesh, like the insides of a stringsquash. “Iron, you said.” He sat cross-legged with the other Kogaru, pale sun on their red backs, sucking cooking-juices from their fingertips and frowning.
Far side of the small fire, Simra crouched on his haunches, and picked at the section of shell he’d already eaten clean. “And salt. Spices. Tea. Whatever barter you might want, there’s a good chance I have it.”
The Kogaru spoke amongst themselves, muttering in their own tongue. Then the hunter looked back to the youngest. Went back to feeding him, morsel by morsel of the meat, all gentle motions and gruff stern sounding words. He was the only one with food left. Smallest, weakest among them, and they’d served him the most.
Kaliklu spoke for the three of them. “Knives, you said.”
“I did.” Simra felt the set of his mouth change. He’d sooner keep any blades he had. This was bad country to be without them, he reckoned. “Good edges, strong blades. I’ll even sharp them for you. I’ve got the gear for it. But I’ll need to know I’m getting what I want in exchange.”
Kaliklu snorted.
“Am I? How do I know you know anything I want to know?”
Another noise, tight-mouthed but it was the closest Kaliklu had come to laughing, so far as Simra had seen. “An outsider, you said. That is who you are looking for?”
“I did.”
“Do you think there are many of you here? Outsiders? I know of one other.”
“Well? Name him.”
Crack and gravel at the side of Simra’s hearing. Llolamae was capering, crawling along the side of the stone ledge where they sat. She’d started by searching out pebbles, skipping them through thin air and into the trees below. Now she’d turned to rocks, the biggest she could find, throwing them down the slopeside and watching them break as they fell.
Little enough harm in it, Simra thought. The biggest rocks she could lift weren’t big enough to cause trouble. Just wished she’d do it quieter. He thought of telling her to stop – change back to the pebbles at least – but couldn’t bring himself to it. What was he, her mother? Besides, it briared at the hunter. He’d stopped his feeding to stare needles at Llolamae, trying to keep his face straight and failing. It was worth the noise just to twitch the sour bastard’s temper.
“We have a name for him,” said Kaliklu.
“Dalvur Vedith?”
“Perhaps. I do not think ours is the name you use. We have another for him.”
“Then what is it?” Simra caught himself chewing at the inside of his cheek, impatient.
“No. First you will tell us, why do you want him?”
“Fine. Fine fine fine…” said Simra, thinking. Kaliklu was guarded, chary of showing his hand. But it’s a player with something to lose who takes so much care in hiding it. Some way or another, he cared what happened to Vedith. “I’ll show you.”
Simra creaked upright and onto his feet, buying time. He ducked into the cave, down into its height and shadow, and grabbed up his bags to drop them heaped by the fire. Humming inside his closed mouth, he loosed the drawstring on his bookbag and brought out a leather scrollcase. The Sermons of Vivec, twelve to twenty-one, with commentaries and reflections from whatever pious inkstains the Temple in Suran asked and paid for their thoughts. What were the chances the Kogaru could read?
“Here,” he said, mouth dry, gesturing with the scrollcase. “It’s from where he’s from. Research he started, and another finished. I don’t know more than that. Only that someone paid good money to have it brought to him.” Simra shrugged, gave a half-smile, as the lie came together just tight enough. Don’t claim to know the whole story and you won’t be asked for it. “Telvanni…”
A sharpness showed in Kaliklu’s eyes and Simra’s heart staggered. “Good money, you said… Then you can afford a high cost for our help.”
Simra’s relief soured no sooner than it had come. He ungrit his back teeth by force. “I reckon so.”
“You are Zainab,” Kaliklu said, a small shadow of a smile on his face, like he’d won. “I knew that you would understand.”
Simra wondered how many Zainab the old Kogaru had ever met to have such a strongfounded opinion of them all. “Fair is fair. What’s your price? How many knives are we talking?”
“Just one.” Kaliklu’s smile widened, worse somehow for it. “The one that cuts air. You used it to maim one of us from afar. You will give it to us as payment, and to make wrongs right. Blood for blood, and the weapon that wounded. That is the price of forgiveness.”
The wand. Simra paced, then stopped pacing. Arms crossed, drumming his ribs with his fingers and cursing the corner he’d backed himself into, he thought it through. Thrusting a hand through his hair, forcing it to go slow, he resigned himself to it. “Fine.” The blighted wand was losing its power anycase, its attitude getting worse year by year. Better not to rely on it. Better to sell while it would still fetch a price. Still, the thought of being without it was a naked fearful thing. “Fine fine fine. You drive a high price, but if that’s what it’ll take…” He was giving them faulty goods. So why did it feel like he was the one being cheated?
“We’ll need food too!” Llolamae called over. “Nother one of those bugs made of meat. Nother one of those and we’ll call it a deal.”
Simra tilted Llolamae a questioning look. Hadn’t known she was paying the deal any mind. The surprise lasted only a moment. “You heard her.” He bent slow to unhide the twisted tin length of the wand from his boot. “I right the wrong we did each other, gift you this, help as I can. That makes me a friend. A stranger in your care while you take me to Vedith. We’ll need treating like guests. Fed as you feed, safe while you’re safe. Right?”
Kaliklu huffed but did not object.
“I knew you’d understand.” Simra crouched back down by the fire and returned to picking at the shell he’d left. “I share with you, you share back.” Dull black shell, scorched to chalk by the roasting of the flesh inside it. He chucked it onto the smouldering fire, like a potshard into a midden. Watched the cough of sparks, and the shuddering resin-smelling smoke of the branches the fire was built on. Watched Kaliklu’s face through it, axehead-hard and still.
“We call him Gurrigalattu…” the old Kogaru said, slow, like unfolding some close-kept mystery.
“And that means what in your tongue exactly?”
Kaliklu pursed his mouth and worked his tongue thoughtful inside it. The youngest Kogaru winced as he leaned in, and murmured something to his elder, who hummed, gave a solemn blink, and translated. “The one who…greens? Or seeds. Makes thrive what would not without him. The one who makes things grow.”
“So…the Gardener?” Llolamae said.
Simra looked past the fire, the three Kogaru, the ledge and out into the basin below. The cone-trees and birches, the ferns and spindle-stemmed wide-spreading mushrooms, at the bottom of a slope thickgrown with flowers and brambles. No wilderness. No accident. A garden.
They gathered themselves up after that, shells left to bleach and crack in the wintertime sun. They left the fire too, still burning to burn itself out.
Simra stripped down to his jacket, his two shirts, the days of sweat from the cold and the heat under his clothes and stiff on them. He tied his mantle over his gathersack and tied his scarf round its strap, scratching at his neck. Good to let his skin breathe. A good choice, as they picked along the slope and headed down it, under the treeline and into the shade of it, hot and growing hotter the lower they went.
Llolamae’s face flushed, shining with damp. Like her body didn’t know what to do with this much warmth. Like she didn’t know what to do with it either — for all the heat, she kept her flapped hat on.
“Work both ways, you know. Hats.” Simra walked beside her, keeping the red backs of the Kogaru in sight up ahead. “Stop you losing heat out your head when it’s cold, but when it’s hot..? Like I said. Both ways.”
She gave him a dazed look, then went back to watching her feet, careful of the roots and thick growth that choked round their knees in the forest at the bottom of the basin. They’d gone another twenty, thirty trudging strides before she raised her hand like a sleepwalker and dragged the hat from her head.
“Better?” Simra tried.
“Never thought you could be too warm…” she slurred, rumpling the hat between her hands.
“It’s just as bad, trust me on that. Worse! Cold, you can always put more on, light a fire. Too hot though, once you’re down to skin and shame and sweat and you’re still sweating, suffering? What d’you do then?”
“What do you do then?”
“Tell you when I figure that out.”
They went high-kneed through deep and dew-damp weeds that left Simra’s trousers smeared wet to the hip. Low, bare sun-starved branches, thin as wind-troubled hair that tickled at his neck and cheeks and made him flinch, blink, angry of a sudden and then forgetting why.
“The research,” said Llolamae.
“What?”
“That scroll for Vedith. It’s about the torquestone, intit? Like what Master Vidanu’s learning about. Like you said.”
Simra’s heart stumbled again. He’d said so, hadn’t he? “Think so, but it’s not like I know much about the finer points.”
“Master Vidanu’d be ever so grateful to know though, wouldn’t he? What it says, I mean.”
“I’m sure. Mistress Ulessen though? Not so grateful. Not if I showed him.” Simra gave a dramatic shudder, making Llolamae smile a little. “Doesn’t bear thinking about, what she’d do to me.”
“Dunno what else a Telvanni’d find to be interested in round here. Master Vidanu says it brought him all across a week of sea just to come see it and see about it! So it must be really special? Don’t know about anything else special round here…”
“Are you not seeing what I’m seeing? A bowl poured full of high Summer when all the rest’s deep Winter outside?”
“Oh, aye… Well there is that.” Llolamae sniffed. “Any Telvanni can make things grow though. Have you not seen Master Vidanu’s tel?”
Simra didn’t reply. Couldn’t sound impressed about that mess and keep a straight face. That was one lie too big and too many for this morning.
“Course he did all that without any help at all. Except from me. Just a bit.” Llolamae pinched her fingers together and grinned, puffed up and proud. “If Vedith can do all this with the torquestone, and him not even a real wizard? Think what Master Vidanu could do!”
“You think the torquestone’s what makes this place like it is?”
“Course! Got to be! I mean, you did say.”
“I did, yeah…”
But Simra remembered the coarse porous stone of the ruins, the screw-spiralling rock growing up out of the hilltop, and it seemed nothing like the strange glassy walls of the cave here, or the chalky ledge or light-brown shale of the slopes. Then again, what did he know about rocks? Then again, in the ruin at the top of the torquestone hill, hadn’t he also been warm? Black stone, not hot to the touch, but with something to it. Not a flake of snow would settle…
Simra ran a thinking hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face. It was stiff-cloyed and oily with nights spent outdoors. Days spent sweating in the scanty warmth of his clothes surrounded in cold. Days where he’d been too weak to charm himself clean again, needing his strength saved for fire and light and bare-boned survival. But here in the cave’s glassy-walled gut, it was warm enough that he’d tucked back his mantle over his shoulders and held his scarf in one loose hanging hand like a wrung out and well-coloured rag.
In front of him the corner, red as rust and clayed and smeared. Palmprints showed at its edges in the daylight that crept down the tunnel behind him. The sectioned ghosts of fingers, caking the colour onto it, and themselves made of colour. It was hard to stare at. Like it had a gaze of its own looking back at you. Simra turned his eyes and they settled on the tips of his fingers, nails undered with black. Disgusting.
“It needs blood?” Somehow he’d known, in some back-dark cloister of his brain. Of course it did. He tried to say it like it was nothing, but feeling came in at the hems of his voice. Interest, apprehension, stirred and muddled. “Why?”
Kaliklu thought a moment. “Blood is a tie.” He brought his hands together, fingers knit. “Like family. You, a mother, a sister…” His hands pulled apart. “Like that, but still you are tied, do you understand? That is blood.”
Sisters and separation. That struck a nerve. Like he knew, thought he knew, presumed to know. A flash of anger rose up in Simra but banked down quick – just a coincidence, the wrong words said to the wrong person – but the sour taste of it stayed in his mouth. “It connects, then? Joins distant things?”
“Yes.”
“And things share across that joining? The heat of the earth here? This paint and your paint, tied together. Do you feel like you’re here when you’re painted like that? Warm like here wherever you are?”
“If the magic is strong.”
Might be he was flattering himself, but Simra reckoned he caught a hint of something in Kaliklu’s face at that. Not respect, nor even quite appreciation, but an admission, a gratitude. Simra had grasped it, straight to the root. It made a satisfying kind of sense now he saw it, clear as smoke in a cloudless sky.
“And my help…” Simra began. “How much d’you need?”
“Enough. Not a lot. Only enough that there is blood in the mixing.”
Simra’s back teeth set and started to grind. “Can it not be other blood? An animal?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t have any though, do we?” The thing outside, all white flesh and shell — Simra had watched the other Kogaru butcher it, but hadn’t once seen it bleed.
“You said that you would help.”
“I will,” Simra said, harder than he’d meant to. “Just trying to understand.”
Kaliklu crouched to the floor of the cave, dry packed dirt amongst all this glassy stone. There was a shallow pit holed out before the painted corner, a bowl two hands across. Kaliklu placed a hand at the edge of it, showing Simra.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Fine fine fine.”
Reaching into the hidden padded pocket of his jacket, Simra brought out the razor he kept there with careful fingers. A wedge-shaped blade of bronze, almost like an axe-head shrunk down to size. Its thin tang curled to a spiral and Simra gripped it by that, delicate as he could.
Kishewyr had sworn by bloodletting, Simra remembered. Some High Rock assumption about balance in the body. It’d always seemed a fool thing to Simra, imagining a body could have too much blood. Rather that than too little. But Simra had watched a time or two, half-drunk and curious as with the careless slow focus that came from his pipesmoke, Kishewyr found his letting kit, found a vein…
Now Simra took off the braided string from his neck, old arrowhead hanging from its end. Rolled up a sleeve and twisted the cord tight partway up his arm till it bit and the skin swelled either side. Left hand, he’d decided. His right had suffered enough, all old scars and new scabs. He flexed, watching the tendons move, fighting a rising sickness and trying not to think. The veins showed raised, pink-blue through the grey back of his hand. Do it. Now, before you can think too much. Easy as stubbing your toes in the dark, done before you know it’s done, and impossible to do if you’re trying. First came the bloom of red from the vein he’d found on the back of his hand, and then the blossoming pain. The welling and drip of blood from his knuckles and into the packed dirt bowl.
Simra didn’t look. No need anymore. Just a small cut, he'd seen to that much. None of that showy palm-gashing and prick-swinging that came with the swearing of blood-oaths in the old Nord sagas and songs. Too much risk that you'd cut something that wouldn't fix right. Just a small cut, that's all the situation asked. Still, his head felt full of air. He couldn’t stop thinking of what to wipe the blade on. Scarce anything on the blade to wipe, but the thought kept coming back. He’d done worse to himself by accident; others had done worse and he’d done still worse to them. Almost funny that this was so difficult, then. Made him feel sick as it did. It wasn’t the blood or the cut. Just some other something, better left nameless.
“That is enough,” said Kaliklu. He had brought out a skin-wrapped knot of grease, white-yellow. He warmed it to melting in his hands. Mixed it in the bowl with the blood, spitting too now and then till a thick red paste had formed.
Amazed and repulsed the old mer had so much so much spit in him, Simra untwisted the cord and looped it off his arm. Standing, arm held awkward above his head to slow the blood, he hurried over to his bags and fished one-handed through them till he found a strip of cloth, same as had bound his right hand. Muttering, fidgeting and unsure what to do next, he licked the wound and spat too. Copper on his tongue. He wrapped the back of his hand tight.
“What now?” Simra said. “Need tears now too, do you?”
“No.” Kaliklu didn’t look up. “Wake him. The one you hurt. He needs it most.”
The youngest Kogaru woke with a bleary-eyed grimace. He straightened, leaning on a patchy-painted arm with his twisted leg stuck out along the ground in front of him. He wasn’t shivering now. Only making faces when he set his weight wrong, or forgot, and moved the wrong muscle. Seemed a night in the warm cave had done him good. He and the elder spoke in their own tongue, and Simra gave up listening.
The sound of striking stones, the starting of a fire, echoed down into the chamber. The elder crossed to the bowl of dirt and paint again, and chanted as he smeared the wall. Another red handprint, shining new, and then he came back to the boy. Smoke-scent from above.
Simra thought, as the elder mended the patches in the boy’s paint with careful hands and low murmuring words. As the hunter above made fire with stones on stones and set his kindling burning. He wondered about this binding with blood, this sharing across spaces. If they did it with warmth, could they do it with fire? They wouldn't use magic to call one from nothing, but maybe they could borrow across distance. If warmth, then why not the rest of a flame — its light and its hungry violence. He thought about what Noor had said about sigils, about writing that wasn't writing, songs that store themselves even when the singer is silent. But they still needed a singer, she said. A sigil doesn't cast itself. There was something in that, half-hidden from him, but huge just beyond his knowing. Like seeing a sliver of an island out to sea, and knowing it’s a mountain beneath the water. Or maybe not. He’d have to think on this, sound out that connection. Watch the Kogaru and see where that took him.
The painting was done now. Kaliklu turned his attention to the boy’s leg. The skin was wrinkled and wrong in one snarled spot. Beneath it, the muscles bulged and knotted. Clucking in his throat, Kaliklu rubbed his hands together, still cloyed with paint and blood, and pressed down with both palms. A long sigh, and he worked into the flesh with the undersides of his knuckles. Simra saw the tendons in the old mer’s neck stand taut as he pushed hard. His shoulders sunk and slumped, all the weight of his effort and patience down over the boy’s leg. And when his hands came clear, the skin was still wrong, but the muscles had laxed. They tensed, twitched, but the worst was gone.
If it was magic or not, Simra couldn’t say. Might be someone like Noor would claim wisdom was there even in things that took no magic to do. Wisdom, the real wide range of it, was in knowing what others don’t. How to slaughter a guar without sight of the knife souring its meat. How to turn the milk of its ralk into curds and then cheese. How to bring a baby out into the world when the baby won’t let itself come. And now this too. Simra felt bitter over it, covetous and lack-hungry with all he didn’t know. Cheated somehow too, in some cold part of himself. He'd seen the spell in his wand do worse by far to a body. Here it had been weak, easy to fix.
The smell of sizzling flesh, cooking meat was coming down into the cave. The sweet-ripe firm smell of shellfish, but with no tang of the ocean. The other Kogaru was cooking his kill.
Simra could hear Llolamae talking, asking questions, and getting nothing back. He curled and uncurled the fingers of his hand, twisted his wrist this way and that, wary for anything amiss. Nothing, except that the blood wouldn't stop. The rag was red with it now, soaked through.
“Sure you don’t need any more?” Simra muttered.
“It is enough.”
“Still coming. Let me know if your mind changes.” Simra’s lips pulled back, showing a bitter flicker of teeth. If Kaliklu heard the tone of his words, he did nothing to note it. “Well that’s my part of the trade done, anycase. What about yours?”
“Wait. If we are to help you—”
“If?” Simra echoed. The slow seeping away of his blood was doing nothing for his patience. “Wish I’d known there was any ‘if’ about this before I cut myself for you… Help. Will you or won’t you?”
Kaliklu was silent a moment before he spoke. “Yes. But we will give the help in our time, not yours. Or would you try to force us again?”
Simra tried to ignore the temptation in that. Two against one. He still had the razor in his right hand. His mouth felt dry and stiffened. He could do it, but it would only give them reason to lie, trick him. He needed this done, dealt with, worse than he needed it done soon. “In your time,” he said, though his tongue was sour with it.
“Come then. We will eat. Then we will talk more of trade.”
Simra crouched and Llolamae sat on her heels. Between them was the ragcloth bundle Llolamae had carried all this way, spread out like a mat with their provisions.
Eating after so long spent hungry. The first filling of an empty belly. Simra knew how that went and he tried to start slow. Took timid bites from a panbread, telling himself once this one was gone he’d let it settle a moment, then set on the rest, eat his fill. There were crisp dried slices of chalk-coloured turnip. There were seedpaste balls, savoury and dark, and dark in their sweetness, and rolled in crushed dried herbs that tasted faint of medicine. But Simra already knew nothing would be better than this first panbread. Soft still with the oil that coated it, it tasted golden and good as he chewed each bite, counting the workings of his jaw.
Llolamae tore through her share, unrestrained. She set on the paste balls first, eyes closed and nodding her head to the rhythm of her chewing. Her teeth showed red from them, flashing whenever her mouth opened.
Simra held back from telling her to slow down. Who was he, her mother? She could get cramps if she wanted. Instead he enjoyed the round panbread, nibbling it through all the phases of a moon. From fullness to shrinkage to halfness, through crescented waning to nothing. Then he licked his fingertips clean of the oil and waited.
“They steam their bread in the South, you know.” Simra spoke for something to do before he started eating again.
A lump of seedpaste worked down Llolamae’s neck, half-chewed. “What, always?”
“Not always. Sometimes they do it in a pan like this. Sometimes in a clay oven. Sometimes dry, sometimes with oil or fat.”
“Why say as it’s what they do then, when they do other things too?”
“They do other things,” Simra allowed. “But when you think of bread up here, it’s panbreads. When they think of bread? Steam.”
“Huh…” Llolamae pursed her mouth and her tongue worked around inside it, cleaning red from between her teeth. “What’s it like?”
“Depends what it’s made from. But on the ordinary? Generally talking? It’s…soft.”
Saying it, Simra realised he missed it. Steamed buns. A filling of poached or pickled meat, diced vegetables, sticky preserves. But then, go south, and he’d miss panbreads all over again. He knew how missing things went. You long for what’s not there, and when you have it you’re hungry for something else. Not like luck to ever let anyone just be satisfied.
“Soft sounds alright,” said Llolamae, eyeing one of the panbreads on their mat. She bobbed up and down a moment, legs jigging under her, then she snatched it. In one bite, half of it was gone.
Simra took some crisped turnips and ate them one by one from the palm of his other hand. Enjoyed the risen sun on him and the strange welcome fact of how warm it was here. The scents on the breezeless air. Scrub and brambles, strong and woody; distant pines from the basin floor.
The grim-faced Kogaru, aged middlest of the three, picked his way up the slope. He came over the ledge’s lip as they ate. A small flash of disgust on his face as he looked at Simra and Llolamae – was it the food, or something inherent in them? – and then it was gone. He shrugged something down from over his shoulder to fall dusty at his feet.
It was some animal Simra had no name for. Fleshy worm-pale body divided in rings, patched all over in an irregularity of dull-black chitin, like scales sown onto a shirt for armour. No face but a round pucker of mouth — or else what Simra hoped was a mouth. All its eight stubby caterpillar legs were bunched at that end and the rest of it was thick tail. All told it was maybe the size of a small pig.
The Kogaru had brought out a knife, incurved along its edge. Not bone or stone or glass, but forged iron, tang sheathed in wood and leather. Traded or taken? With who? From who? Simra wondered, watching out the side of his eye as the hunter prised the scales from its tail.
Might be this was meant to impress him. Intimidate them. Metal knife and mighty prey. Of all the fool ways to flex your fierceness on a stranger, Simra thought… The beast didn’t even look like it could run, let alone fight back. He turned his attention full back to Llolamae, making a point of paying no heed.
“Course they’ll have rice more than bread.” It didn’t need saying. He was talking to fill silence; to show how deep his inattention went. “Seven, eight times in ten?”
Llolamae chewed and grunted in response. He’d lost her. She was watching the hunter, the beast as he butchered it.
“At least that’s the way with everywhere but the mountains, hills. Fucking Sadras, they’ve got the coin for it now, the land. Still won’t eat or grow anything but millet, sorghum. Never had the chance to ask one why, but I reckon it reminds them where they’re from. What they are. Keeps their hearts in the hills. Tscht. Well, they do say it, don’t they? Fastest way to the heart…”
Simra tailed off at last. Let a sigh rattle free of his throat and turned his neck to half-watch. The Kogaru was paring a long thick fillet off the thing’s tail, like Tammunei easing the flesh from a fishspine. Like a fish, this thing had a bone down its middle. First Simra had ever seen of such a thing. Bones both outside and in, it had the same wrongness as a cliffracer’s toothed beak, or the child-cry of a fox in the night. What was it? He wanted to ask, but didn’t. He’d get no answer anycase. Not from this one.
Finished with the fillet, the hunter called out. “Kaliklu!”
It had the feeling of a name to it. The elder’s, maybe. It was him that answered, coming from the cavemouth.
Crouched beside his breakfast and outnumbered by painted strangers, Simra felt it again. The slipped illusion of safety. Like being near an animal stronger and faster than you, and knowing the safest course is calm, but not knowing if it’ll save you for certainty. It was a rush of nerves, a sudden awareness of how far his hands were from his swordbelt, and how that hunting knife could be in him quicker than his own sword could come out.
Simra’s tongue flickered snake-careful out his mouth and wet his wind-chapped lips. He put them into a smile for the elder. “Is that your name?” he said. “Kaliklu?”
“It is.” The elder said it like Simra had cheated him out of some secret.
“Simra,” said Simra, touching his chest. “Of the Zainab. And Llolamae.”
Her head angled up, mouth full of crisped turnips, eyes wide. She pointed at herself with both thumbs and gestured with her palms open, like a smile of the hands while her mouth did other work.
“We met badly,” Simra said. “But you’ve been kind to us. Led us safe to warmth in the night. Will you share our food?” He was too tired to get by on threats; too wary of a fight he might not win.
Spindly legs and bending show-boned back, Kaliklu crouched next to the ragcloth spread and took up the last round of bread. Eyes on Simra’s eyes, he took a thoughtful bite and chewed.
Llolamae swallowed and stared. “This had to last us…”
That was something, coming from her. She’d scarfed half their provisions in one meal. Simra kept those thoughts to himself. “Sharing alike’ll last us longer.” He pointed at the fillets of pale flesh with his eyes.
“Thank you,” said Kaliklu. “I do not think you wish to harm us.”
It was a start. “I want to believe you don’t want to harm us either. I threatened you before. I’m sorry for that, but I’ll do so again if threatened. I don’t want to, but I will, and worse.”
“There was another thing you wanted. From us.”
“Yes. But I’d rather trade for it. Exchange. Share.” Simra tried for words, making sure he was understood. “I give, and you give.”
Kaliklu shifted his shoulders on their joints. A shrug. “You are Zainab.”
“Yes.”
“And you want to find someone.”
“Yes. And in return – in trade – I can give you things you want. I have salt, spices, works of magic. I have metal. Good iron knives.”
The elder ate, thinking. He didn’t agree, but didn’t decline. “There is something to do first.”
He stood and Simra stood with him, straightening up from his crouch-stiff haunches. “If I can help, I will.” It was half to earn good will, but only half. The rest was curiosity.
Llolamae shifted, uncertain, where she sat.
“As you helped carry our kinsman?” said Kaliklu, brows raised.
“Yesterday I hurt one of yours. Today let me help you. To trade, it helps to start equal. Even. In balance. D’you see?”
This is particularly relevant for here. Depending on what Tumblr looks like in a month, I don't know if I'll ultimately carry on updating here or not, but I will keep posting chapters on AO3.
The air changed, the cold growing weaker as they travelled deeper into the basin. No snow any longer, and sometimes something like a breeze, but hot and damp as breath. Vapours, waterscents, the cling and waft and heft of steam, and everywhere a sound like hissing, almost too quiet to hear.
At first, strength flagging, Simra’s ember-light had spat and dimmed. Failing, refusing to be all he asked of it, heat and light and both at once, it demanded more of him just to keep it burning. A solvent feeling inside him, not quite in his gut but below his lungs, and hollowing him from there. He took to muttering, a kind of makeshift mantra like the cat-whining spell that Clovis had taught him to heal himself, years ago, lying hurt in a cart heading southward. But this was a mess of calling-words, strung together haphazard, not flowing like the old Altmeris healing spell. Fire-callings were sharp or blunt things, spitting stamping words, but Simra slurred them, each into each, a pleading cajoling murmur, a prayer against the black.
Hard to say if it helped. Maybe. Or maybe it might’ve, in another time. Tonight it was in vain. He couldn’t hold the spell. His mind had muddied too far now. Like a breathlessness of the brain, Simra felt a blankness, a hollow forgetful ache. It made him stop, leaning over himself, eyes clenched shut, feeling sick.
Muttering voices behind his back and he deserved them, didn’t he? Stupid and slackwit. No staying power, and less than a lick of good judgement, good sense, or else why would he be here in the first place. A deal with a Telvanni was one thing. Debt was another. Stupid, afraid, and desperate. Blame it on luck all you like, Simra, but don’t think for a moment there weren’t choices made…
But when he opened his eyes again, the dark was gone, driven back in gold. Llolamae had mustered a light of her own. A good one, he thought, just like in the dug-out at Vidanu’s tel. Her hands shook, her eyes half-flat, as tired as he was or worse, but it was enough. Just the barest cantrip, but Simra had never been prouder or better pleased with as simple a working — not from someone else.
“You keep us warm,” she said. “I’ll make sure you don’t break yourself falling over.”
And after that it wasn’t long. Simra brought back a whisper of fire and the two of them went forward, huddling around it.
The hissing air grew louder, but wider and more open like some broad and stopless sighing. Llolamae’s light showed it glittering when they got close — a narrow cavemouth, just under man-high, and misty with flowing steam. Warm. Warm, just looking at it.
“Oh, thanks fucking be…” Simra breathed. Knees weak, he felt of a sudden like laughing. He let his fire go out.
They ducked inside. The Kogaru with the spear first, then the elder and youngest. Llolamae followed, leaving Simra a moment in a new gathering dark before he stooped in after the others.
Dense rough-pitted rock, black beneath his feet and fingertips. Steam full in his face now and fogging lazy past him, hot as a bath and getting hotter. The tunnel was hunching-narrow, angling deep into the hillside. The waterscent was gone and the steam smelled of something else. A memory of the saltflats, the sulphur-smelling springs and the wide tan brine-streaked lands of the southern Eastmarch.
They filed downward, ears full of each other’s foot-shuffling, Simra sightless at the back of their line. And then the tunnel opened. A chamber, a cave with walls like glass and almost round, almost perfect. Like some alchemist’s jar, Simra thought — a bulb-based retort, smooth-sided and seamed in veins of glistering minerals. Steam flowed like sweat from the walls and escaped up the cave’s long throat and into the far-off night. Water reset and dripped from the ceiling, and fanged it with saltgrowths, dull crystals and tidemarks that sparkled in Llolamae’s magelight. A cramped space already with all of them in it, but unworldly-strange. And maybe it was the lateness, the tiredness, the hunger and hollowness, but it felt worth crying over. Holy…
Simra tugged his bags out of the way, backed into a wall and slumped down. Held a crouch on his haunches a moment, then gave up, collapsing to sit on the cave floor. He was sweating. Would’ve hated it, should’ve hated it, but here and now it just meant heat after cold, feeling coming back into feet and toes, into his hands till he could feel his fingertips. They were scorched, stiff and stinging a little, but he could feel them.
“Please. Please say we’re stopping here?” he said.
The elder eased the limping youngest of the Kogaru onto the floor to sit, eyes closed, face blissful and blank. The spearmer leaned against a wall.
“Seems that way,” said Llolamae.
“Good…” Simra tilted his head back, the crown of it touching the wall as his eyes slid closed. He felt half-asleep already. Or else he was dreaming. He’d heard of the cold killing people with kindness like that — a dream of warmth then nothing. Some small stirring of terror at that, but helpless beneath the bliss of it all. He forced his eyes open again, curious.
Llolamae was sitting too, heaped on herself in the cave’s middle. They’d crammed themselves all into two-thirds of the space, horseshoed away and around one corner. Hard to see for the dark stone, the dimming light as Llolamae relaxed, but Simra squinted at it. Its texture was different, like near-black rust, clagged, smeared to the wall. The elder sat closest to it, something guarded in his posture. Like he’d stop Simra or Llolamae if they drew too close.
A strange thing lost in strangeness. Nothing but normal then. Not now, Simra thought. His head hung back again. Tired through to his bones. Blood sluggish and heart slow. A hapless smile pulled at the corners of his mouth and his eyelashes twitched, fluttered together. Shouldn’t sleep. These Kogaru had been enemies earlier that day and who’s to say they’d stopped. His lip curled. A last stirring of the guljana, sharp in the back of his brain. Ought to cling to it, make as wakeful as he could from it. But sleep came on sweet as ignorance over him, and he let that last stirring slip.
…
Hand to his sword and pulling. A fingerslength of blade free and white knuckles, awkward digits, trying to remember how to hold the thing. In a shout of motion, Simra came awake, all starting eyes and his spine sudden-hunched forward. But there was no danger. Didn’t even know what’d done it — that he’d gone to sleep fretting or that he’d dreamt something awful, a cry in his mouth where no sound would come. No danger, he told himself again. No more than there had been before.
Simra hid the length of blade back into its sheathe, bashful. He tried to calm his breathing. Hoped no-one had seen. Little enough chance of that, dark as it was in the cave. He leaned back against the wall. Second night in the last three he’d slept sitting up and his back was feeling it. Grunting at the shift and catch of his spine, the tightness in his neck, Simra felt and crawled a way out of the cave.
Day outside. Or at least, night making itself scarce enough you’d start to call it day. His body must’ve felt the dawn, even buried away from it. There was no sun in the sky, but no stars either. Just the dove-coloured beginnings of brightness, and a world of soft shadow below.
Simra straightened from the stoop he’d taken to leave the cavemouth and shambled across the craggy ground it led out onto. Arched his back and turned his yawning mouth skywards, trying to work a small wrongness from the low of his back. No use. On instinct his hands went into his jacket and under his arms to warm them, hunching again over himself. But still the cold was less than he’d expected. Scarce enough of an edge on the air to hurt his hands just being out in it. A small mercy but he’d welcome it with all his slow half-wakeful heart.
It was a brief ledge just outside the cavemouth, not quite flat but bare. A gentle-curving roughness of rock, with thickets of coarse brush on most sides and the path they’d walked last night beaten through it. But in the growing halflight he could make out the whole of the scape they were in, not just the moving patch of magelight, black-bordered.
He walked the ledge, slow, staring round him, back up the slope then down it, beyond and to the basin bottom. It went little deeper but stretched far along its floor, maybe a half-hour’s walk before you’d reach the other side. The slopes were sparse, interrupted by growth. Patches of wood-hardy stems, creep and crawling, thorned like dogrose or brambles, but toothed sometimes in tough green needles, growing strong. Simra even reckoned he saw a stunted flower in one of the tangles. Just a small pale thing, fold on fold of petals, but still a flower in Winter. So far strange enough. But the basin floor made him stare. Thickets of cone-trees stood out from the morning mist, skinny but strong, and stands of paper-barked birches. Roughage and scrimmage of pale soft green that might’ve been ferns or tall grasses. Dark crescents and laydowns of water, steaming. The sunshade shapes of tall mushrooms…
All that space, wide and deep and hidden from everything but the sky. It felt like a piece of somewhere else, a piece of a different season, cut out and hidden jealous in the hills here. If he shouted, Simra thought, called his own name, how long before it’d come back to him? How many echoes? He stopped himself for the stupidity of it before he could so much as try. Too hard to tell if they had the basin to themselves and were safe in it. He settled instead for a whisper:
“What in all the fucking world…”
But it made a kind of sense once the shock was done with him. The earth here had heat to it, steam shot through it — like under the southern Eastmarch but unlike it, not sown with salt and barren. That heated the air, made the soil put out plenty, turned this whole place to a strange pocket of Springtime even deep into Winter.
“How in the fucking world…”
Simra worked his mouth, chewing on one side of his cheek and rubbing idle at the under of his jawline with two fingers like feeling for his heartbeat. He let himself think and question, walking a little, dawdling along the ledge.
Could be fire under the earth, buried deep. Could be a fire mountain, like Red Mountain itself to the south, but sleeping sounder. Much sounder, thanks be. Ash in the soil to make what’s green grow. Tammunei had told him that was what did it for Morrowind, ash giving kindness after its first cruel falling. Ash is fire too, they’d said, whatever that might’ve meant. And if fire made for good growing then this place put proof to that. A fire mountain then, Simra reckoned, and could this basin be its long-sealed jaws?
“Tssht. And what d’you know about fire mountains, hm?”
Less than he’d like, Simra answered his own question. But wasn’t that true of most everything? He enjoyed the curiosity while he could, before the unknowing of it started to itch, same as it always did.
The air was mild. Enough that Simra could sit out in it without suffering. See the mist move down the basin’s sloping sides and gather in its belly, appreciate it a moment, then find his mind fidgeting, getting bored. He crouched down onto his haunches and thought about going back into the cave to fetch his bookbag. But by then he’d settled into waiting. Restless he might’ve been, but not enough to move.
He drew his sword again, the full of it this time, and looked down its spine. Short and knife-shaped, awkward in the hand. He’d fought with it time and again, but never quite got happy holding it, never quite knew how best it would swing. He fussed his fingers on its raw wood handle and tried to find the right grip until he convinced himself there wasn’t one. Some causes are lost before you find them. Some hopes founder before they’re fostered.
“Fuck it…” he muttered, and sheathed the blade once more, hungry as envy and waiting for someone else to wake. Hungry enough that it hurt, and that it made him patient.
The gulley had bottomed out and fed out onto a rib, a ledge of land, girding round the hillscape. A night spat full of stars loomed ahead and they strove towards it, no path anymore but upward, and picking that way however they could.
On Simra’s left a sheer rise of shale. Banked and mortared with snow, but moment by moment, Simra swore he heard it click and rattle with falling stones. Felt every sound from it like the start of something worse. He tried to get his bearings. Imagined the sea to his back, huge and invisible, only sound and spray in the pitchdark. But it was only an imagining. He'd long since lost their facing. There was just the rise, and on his right a ragged fall.
They'd loped in single file. Walked in grey twilight till night came on like sudden murder out of the sky. A walling sudden blackness; a thunderclap of dark.
Simra had called a magelight. A reflex, it cut in before he could think on it. How it was a choice, or ought to’ve been. He could call fire to his hands and heat to his limbs, or light the black around them, but not both. Didn't have the strength, not sapped like this, hungering, half-frozen. Instinct took the choice from him, in a snap of fear. Now the light hung there, cold and red, a mistake. In the noise of his silent thoughts, Simra cursed it.
They reached the end of the shale slope. Hard to say if it had inclined, down and down towards them, or they’d been walking some subtle climb and reaching its height with time. But it kicked at Simra inside to double back now, climbing along its scree-coarse top and returning almost the way they’d come. A waste of time and boot-leather; this whole idiot errand writ small. He felt his throat swell, a gasping rising upset, and then he choked it down, shamed of himself. Being here was waste enough without crying about it. Not worth throwing thought at, or breathing into speech.
There was no peak, no summit or stopping point. Just the top of a brief ridge, a few strides across and carrying on to left and right. Another false-futile little victory, and beyond it another descent.
The feeling came back stronger. Some sharp and creeping tension up through his shoulders and into his neck, aching in his temples and across his brow like a circlet, tight and growing tighter and squeezing his head. For a moment he wanted to shout, kick something. And then he felt like crying, head heavier than he’d ever known, still standing but not knowing how. It passed and sank, swallowed into a numb blank helplessness. Can’t be helped. Nothing much can.
Arms crossed, Simra hunched over his hungry belly. Focus on that; you can change that, fight that and win. Soon and sooner all the time, with every step. There's food for you when you stop. Standing at the far edge and looking down he made himself breathe, and breathe, and got what clarity he could from it. Made his teeth ache and his gums dry with the cold air he let into his mouth.
“How far now?” he asked, voice thick with the stiffness of his jaw.
The elder and wounded Kogaru stood a little along the ridge, conjoined at the shoulders and breathing hard. Resting like beams collapsed into each other, held up by their mutual fall.
The wind was high, thrumming in Simra's clothes, ringing and biting in his ears. They hadn't heard. He said again, louder, a twitch of impatience at repeating himself. “How far?”
A weak shout back from the elder: “We follow this for a time.”
“And then?”
“Down.”
“What's down?”
“A bowl. Hidden, covered. Our destination, but not tonight.”
One deep inhale and Simra stretched upward. Let it go in a hissing sigh that slacked his spine — a sound like a kettle coming down from the boil. “Right…” he muttered. “Right right right. Fine.” The words rattled. He was shivering.
Bringing his shaking hands up to his mouth, he huffed warmth over them, life back into them. Mustered himself and half-emptied himself. Then he hid his hands again, back under his arms and under his mantle, stuffed into the breast of his jacket.
The spearman was watching him. Simra felt it as a prickle at the edge of his senses, and a certainty when he glanced up to meet his gaze. He was stood behind the other two, leaning on his spear and staring at Simra, weighing him.
A feeling of having faltered stuck in Simra’s throat like a fishbone. His hands were empty, wand back in his boot. Had been since he'd called the magelight. Knew it. Knew it was a mistake soon as you did it and did that stop you? When does it ever. His face twisted, mouth skewing to one side as he held the spearman’s gaze, tired and withering, wishing he had a name to curse the bastard by. He was pride-stricken, Simra reckoned. Looking for recourse, revenge, a way to restore himself. No smartness or subtlety to it, just a blunt and puffed up urge. Simra kissed his teeth. No time to play that game, and less still in the way of inclination. He looked away.
Llolamae had shied towards him, close to his arm now, close enough to grab. Simra thought he could hear her chattering teeth, feel the faint shudder of her shoulders.
The younger Kogaru was starting to shake too. His paint was smeared. Patchy at his bony shoulder, his stark-ribbed chest and back. Dapples and mottles like islands in a claggy red sea where his fall in the snow had washed it away. Where the paint was gone, the cold was seeping in.
“What’re we stopped for?” Simra snapped. “Standing here in the fucking wind, teeth chattering down to fucking chalkdust…”
He paced and turned, staring down the far side of the ridge and into blackness. With a gesture the magelight lowered, hovering down to light the drop ahead of them. Might as well make itself useful, blighted fuck-up of a thing. Its glow showed nothing worse than scree and coarse scrub.
Simra turned back to Llolamae. “Still be cold as death down there, but at least it'd be out of the wind... They can't go down, leg like that, but we'll only be up here. You could—”
“What? Down there on my own?” Llolamae scowled, head tilted up to challenge him. Her face was stiff in the shadow of her hat, nose running ice down her upper lip. Her eyes were pink-rimmed, puffy and her voice quavered, afraid. “I’m fine!”
“You're freezing is what you are.”
No response.
“Well. Well fuck it then.” Simra pulled away from Llolamae, starting along the ridgetop. “Fuck it, reckon we'll just hope there's a smoother way down somewhere. Or something. Soon. Or something.” He doubled back, pacing, muttering. Twisted his head sharp to look at the Kogaru. The youngest one shuddering, his face long gone blank and vacant. He was scarce standing by himself anymore. Not walking with help so much as being carried. “Fuck.” And if it wasn't soon? If the cold deepened as the night drew on? Like it would, like as not. Like of course it would. Never a scrap of luck; never a single joy.
Bringing a hand from inside his jacket, fretting it out from under his mantle, Simra groped at the chill air, calling the magelight back and close to him. His head ached with it already, something between drink-dull and sleep-starved. An ache knotted itself together in the center of his forehead like a muscle twisted with frowning. The light hovered chest-high, and he looked into its heart, imagining the cold blue stillness at the heart of a candleflame. Imagined reaching out and touching it. The heat, then the pain. Asked it, why couldn't it be two things at once? Light and heat.
“What are you—?”
“Wait!” Simra snapped.
He reached inside himself. Empty belly, stuttering heart. With a numb and fumbling hand he went for his satchel and found a twist of dried guljana, stuffing it into his mouth to chew. Spitless and dry, furious, cloying, but the sharp in it seeped into his mind, his blood.
He tried again, wringing energy out of his exhausted limbs, his sluggish blood, his hollow growling belly. The light flickered, sparking and drooling flecks of light, dripping colour. Tremblings of blue and scattering white, like the blazing flecks of filed iron and whitesteel from an alchemist’s bomb. Simra's face tightened, contorted. A twist and wrench in his guts. It pulled a moment in agony and then came free, almost like something tearing.
There was heat on his face. Bright warmth, like sitting at a hearthside. The light twitched and danced now, hung heavier somehow, a dark core veiled in dim and shifting colour, like an ember. In the high dark hill-cold air, just stretching his hands towards it – feeling it on his cheeks and eyelids – made him sigh.
Llolamae was there too, angling closer again, inch by inch.
But the two younger Kogaru had all but started from their skins. The break-nosed one sprung forward, snarling with bulging eyes and tongue out in a war-mask rictus. His spear was levelled at Simra now and its point dancing like he was something to fight, fend off.
Simra stumbled back, instinct pulling him out of thrusting distance. He realised his hand had thrashed out, grabbing Llolamae’s arm to yank her along with him. It stuck out now, stiff and stupid, a barrier in front of her.
The light twisted and spat violence between Simra and the spearpoint. The elder only looked up at it, eyes full of the firelight and face frowning. “From where do you draw that? How and from whose teaching?”
The cold was creeping up Simra’s back again. He drew the firelight closer, towards his breast. “From myself.” He let it stand as reply to both questions. To the first it was truth. To the second, irritated, he lied out of spite.
“You dare!” The break-nosed mer bristled forward, spear jostling, and Simra rounded on him, wary, keeping his distance as the Kogaru snarled words he couldn’t understand. “Only a Nulrugosh! Only a Nulrugosh could!”
“He breaks our ways. Should you do the same?” the elder chided the spearman. “All the more reason that I should speak to the outsider. Only me!” And he too hurried into speech too fast, too unfamiliar for Simra to follow.
You don’t speak their tongue, Simra realised. All along it had been the elder, trying to speak something Simra could understand. When they spoke to each other, it turned to nonsense, half-meanings, words like and unlike what he knew.
“What did he call me?” Simra cut in. “Nulrugosh? Am I being insulted?”
“He says you are…an accident of wisdom. Self-taught.”
“Is that a problem?”
“That,” the elder nodded, wary, at the hovering ember, “is a problem.”
Simra glanced to the break-nosed mer. There was vindication in his livid eyes, and the glittering fear that comes before a fight. “Why?”
“It is no fault of yours,” the elder said. There was pity in his face, almost. “If no one taught you then no one told you. Only tame fire can be trusted. To draw fire from inside you is to start a wild fire in your belly and give it leave to feed. A problem.”
“Freezing’s a problem. Dying here’s a problem. This is a solution,” Simra snapped. “Step away if you want. Freeze if you want. Your young one there’s already looking gone behind the eyes. But till you come up with something better, me and Llola are staying warm.”
Before they went back to walking, the elder gave Simra a look. Half disgust, and half curiosity. Simra felt the same. How isolated must they have been here, from other Velothi, from other peoples, to balk at burning Magicka? In a desert you drink what water you're offered. In a tundra you'd think to take warmth from what heat's on offer. Anything else is madness, but it was clear enough they managed. How? Their paint, yes, some magic in it — but that was the flower of an answer, the leaf of it, so where and what was the root? The start of a fascination stirred. A hope not just that he’d live, but that he’d live to find out.
The three Kogaru were two creatures now, loping across the landscape. The injury had made them that way — the injury, or Simra. One was three-legged, carrying the single spear they shared between them. They leaned on it, pick and pull, up the slope as they broke into the hills. The other limped four-legged, carrying their crop-headed youngest with his arm gripping strain-taut over their back, his hand clawing into their shoulder.
Simra and Llolamae walked in their wake. Trod the snow they’d beaten down just paces before: a ragged upgoing gouge, pricked out with the press of feet, and trenched through by the drag of a twisted leg.
Strange, watching them. They were nameless. One small shift of circumstance and they’d’ve been faceless too — three more corpses left behind as Simra walked away, starting out on a long path towards forgetting them. Not the right thing, that, but a simpler one. Now it felt complicated, wrong. Like following a stranger home as they struggled through the dark and street-mud to get to their door and the bed behind it. A stranger and their legless-drunk friend. The tension and threat of before, replaced with this prickling awkwardness. This feeling of invasion.
The ruck of the land had started slight. Roughness and crags; ridges and sumps like creases in a wide white cloth. But the land had narrowed and heightened, exaggerating itself as the afternoon closed in around them and came to its ending.
The Kogaru stopped. Bunched together to change who carried what. A grunting, a reaching of arms and bracing knees. Third time since they’d started out. Nothing new in it, except the scene, the deepening shadows. High walls of stone-riddled earth and earth-mortared stone rose up either side of the course they walked. A gorge, deep-cut, like the scar left behind when a river runs dry.
Simra misliked it, mistrusted it at once. This timing, this place. Watched by the heights above them, hemmed in by the slopes to each side, snarly with
a thatch of parched weeds. Could you climb that, need be? Get out of this pit, this trench, at a scramble, not knowing what’s up top, but knowing behind you, below you, is death? He remembered the breach at Gelan-Telai. Felt it, almost, in the half-warm unwashedness of his body beneath his clothes – not even cantrip clean, not for days – just prickling, disgusting, and somehow all he could focus on before the wordless panic came.
It never came. No ambush, nor any of the blind wallbacked rat-bravery that comes in being faced with so much certainty. Still Simra’s heart took its time to slow — to lower, back to his chest from choking his throat. He’d moved. Crashed through the snow to one side of the gulley and into what cover he could, shrinking against the scrub, the sparse and struggling undergrowth. The hand with his wand in it had come out of his jacket, out from under his goatskin mantle, and into the chill air. An empty threat, but it’s better to be armed with just a bluff than armed with nothing at all.
If they were planning a trap here it ought to’ve sprung by now. Instead the Kogaru were still wrestling their wounded kinsman from being a burden on one to burdening the other.
A long and clumsy moment stretched out as Simra watched, half-pitying, half-embarrassed. Then something caught. A gasp and wheeze and panicked groping. Simra flinched, legs tight with the urge to run. From what? Whatever was happening. But it was only the wounded mer, stumbling as he tried to stand his own weight on two feet.
“Fucking waste…” Simra hissed under his breath.
There was no cry. Nothing he could hear over the wind that rushed off the sea up the gulley behind them, keening on the rocks, whispering with snow. But even soundless he saw it. A flash of suffering in the younger mer’s sudden white knuckles. The deep dig of his fingers in the elder’s stark-boned back, almost pulling him down. They caught each other. Stood straight and settled back into their roles – crutch and crippled – but their breath panted out in clouds of steam and scratches showed pale-grey in the elder’s red paint. Bare skin scored through the red, turning pink with the scrape of nails.
The third of them hadn’t moved. Older but not quite old. Break-nosed with a coarse shock of steel grey hair, and harsh bones in his face that the shadows made crueller. He stood by, leaning on the spear as he stood it in the earth, and rolled a stiffness from his shoulders, an ache from out his neck. Not moving, not starting off to forge on alone — but it was clear as clear that he wanted to.
Simra set his jaw. Watched and wondered what they were. In themselves and to each other, who were they, and what bonds bound them? His bare hands were buried now, back inside his jacket. Not that it helped. Not that anything much did besides that paint they wore. They seemed not to feel the cold. Simra felt cold just looking at them.
The elder fretted over the youngest. Felt responsible, like as not. There was a cord between them – father and son, grandson maybe – and at every wince or stumble Simra’d watched it draw tight, dragging the elder in close and frowning.
The other one, the spear-carrier now, felt none of that. There was something flat and cold in his eyes that Simra halfway-recognised. How some people can know someone a moment, or a lifetime, and for all that time feel nothing. How all it takes is a whisper of friction – an obstruction, a jagged edge of envy – and they realise in the root of their belly that it wasn’t ever nothing. Just something silent and waiting to sharp their tongue or steel their hands or harden their heart to pity.
“Could’ve tangled his arm up.” It was Llolamae, fussing across Simra’s new break of snow to stand beside him, close enough to talk quiet. “Do you not think it might’ve been better to hit his spearhand?”
“You try hitting an arm with no time to aim,” Simra said. “See where that gets you then. Fucking waste. Stopped him, didn’t I?”
“Stopped the rest of us too though.” She wasn’t looking at him but back the way they’d come.
Simra followed her gaze. The seaward distance was night-dark. The frozen fenlands were disappearing so fast you could see it happen — mist and shadow, gloom and time. The sun had never set, just gone. And she wasn’t wrong. That was the worst of it. They were making bad time. Trekking out into who knew what weather, who knew what kind of land, what kind of traps or treachery. Again, Simra thought it might’ve been simpler to’ve killed them. Not a pleasant thought, but pleasanter than it should’ve been.
“You prefer I’d left you to them?” Simra prodded. “Let them eat you?”
Llolamae glanced at him, head snapping round. She was carrying the wounded Kogaru’s spear, almost twice again as tall as she was, propped casual over one shoulder. But her mittened hands were braced loose against it, and shadowed inside her hat, her face had gone sour and heavy. Her tired eyes went wide a moment, her lower lip ledged out, cracked and worried at with cold. Looked for a moment like she’d start to cry, but she snatched her face into a scowl.
“I’m fucking cold too,” Simra grunted. “And low on patience for this whole fucking fly-blown errand. Blight…” He could go on but didn’t reckon he could spare the heat his lungs would lose in speaking. Went back to walking instead, cutting a new swathe towards the Kogaru’s tracks.
He couldn’t stand to look at Llolamae. Not right now, when she looked so miserable. He gave her his back. The napped flesh-side leather of his goatskin mantle, across his shoulders and hanging to his waist. The dusk made it all look one colour; the same purple-dun as the netch-leather patches he’d stitched into it to repair old rents and piercings. Wasn’t it her who insisted she come all this way? Of the two of them, she’d had her choice of it. He’d been plunged into this, unasked for, with no choice but a choice that was no choice at all. Simra hung and shook his head, half-swallowing a nervous hiccup of sound. Might’ve been laughter, or the start and end of a sob. Absurd, he thought. All of this. Like some senseless dream he’d yet to wake from. No reason, little premise, and only the faintest glimmer of a goal.
There was a long wet sniff behind Simra. Then a whimper that choked off into the sound of footsteps following on. Something pulled in him, wanting to turn. Turn and then what? What then, he asked himself. Tell her he wouldn’t leave her? That was half a truth at best when he just as surely couldn’t turn back, couldn’t fail in this whether she followed or not. Play the fool then? Ape and act the stoic hero, trying for a laugh, a smile? Tell her she reminded him of someone, himself maybe — and what then? Best not lay that curse on her, on top of all the rest. This mess they were in was enough.
“Your daughter,” said the elder. In a few uphill strides Simra was level with him. “Is she well?”
Simra’s mouth tightened, the scars at its corner bunching painful in the cold. “She’s not my daughter.” The thought alone terrified him, almost choked him.
The elder cocked his head. He had more questions but only asked one. “Should we stop?”
“Here?”
“It seems she needs it.”
“Soon,” said Simra, leaden-tired and guilty with a feeling that sat like oil in his belly above and around his hunger. “Not here if you know somewhere better. Near, that is. Do you?”
“There is a place,” said the elder. And almost as one the Kogaru turned and started again to walk. “We have been going there all this while.”
Simra suffered himself a glance behind. Llolamae was fighting her way along his tracks. Almost twice again as long as she was tall, the spear wavered above like a tall sapling. Her grip was unsteady but tight and her face was turned down.
“They say we’ll stop soon,” Simra tried, gentle as he could. “If it helps to know…” He wondered if she’d have been better left with the Kogaru after all. Just a child. They might not’ve hurt her. Might’ve cared for her, like it seemed the elder did. It was little enough, but it might’ve been better than him.
Simra burst up to stand from the snowbank, the wand in his smarting right hand. Body-warm, boot-warm metal. He judged ten paces between them. Him and Llolamae and the red-painted strangers. In this cold, hand hurting, fighting against three, the wand would serve him better than a sword.
Two had spears. Long lances of age-smoothed wood and barbed at their tips with pale-yellow bone. They circled Llolamae. Something of the hunter in their gaits, knee-bowed and spry and careful, patient and watchful, stepping smooth. But their red hands shifted uneasy on their spears, and their backs hunched them forward, looking at her, catching sight of Simra, pulled eitherway and taut in the neitherness of it.
The third of them was empty-handed and wore his painted skin slack and tight by turns across his bones. Older, a leader like as not, and maybe with magic to him — enough that he could go unarmed and seem a deal surer, less vulnerable than the younger mer. They looked to him, heads snapping round and back. They paced and fretted like hunting hounds not given the go. In a glance, Simra could tell it was the older mer who held their leash and muzzled their teeth and could set them loose in a moment.
Behind them all, a spurlike ridge of snow and stone that ran to rise into a higher hillside. A spindly tangle of scrub clung to the slope, murmuring in the wind and clodden with white. A jagged horizon, broken with passes and gullies, and crested in frost-chased black rock.
Ache of wind in Simra's ears and the ache of breath in his chest, short from wresting his way up the slope. Half-crouched like he was ready to spring or run, Simra leveled the wand at them, arm outstretched. Felt sweat tease a line down his back, pulling his focus. Always bothered him worse than in warmth, to sweat when the weather was cold. A waste.
“Let her go!” he called above the breeze, speaking Velothis. Ashlanders, she'd said, and they'd come as if by speaking she'd summoned them.
One of the spearmen, hair close-cropped to a shadow of stubble, jerked his head to look again at Simra. Wavered his point in the air towards him, away from Llolamae. The other, with a knot-and-ropey scar puckering the skin of his belly and low chest, cast eyes to the elder, questioning, but kept his spearhead trained.
“Let her go you dirt, you worse-than-dirt, or I'm warning you...” Simra aimed the wand from one spearman to the other, thinking hard. He was afraid. For Llolamae, for himself, for himself more and more. A wide-thrown net of panic, closing and tightening round him till he could feel it score and checker his insides.
The stubble-headed spearman peeled away from the others, weapon angled full towards Simra now as he approached. The scar-bellied mer spoke after him, softer than Simra had expected. Too quiet and half-stolen by the wind to tell if it they were words he recognised, but the tone gave warning, urged caution. No knowing if they understood him either. The fear shrilled up at that mute helplessness. It set his teeth on edge; scared him single-minded; took the corners from his vision. He'd make them understand.
A ribbed shudder of sound. The wand bucked in Simra's hand as he joined the runes on its handle. A bolt of seething twisting air struck out from it and scourged the snow between the nearer spearman's feet. A flurry of white and waterspray, dirt and grit as it warped the ground. A warning shot. The echo of it cracked around them, sounding to the hillside and coming back like the creaking voice of a glacier.
“Understand now?” Simra shouted, heart pounding. Six strides left between them. Almost nothing to a man with a spear in his hands.
But the spearman stopped. An uneasy pause, testing his weight from one foot to the other.
“I want to talk,” Simra warned him. “Why don't you talk?”
The spear moved. His grip changed, shifting to bring it overhand from under. He was making to throw.
Simra reacted. Hard to miss at this distance. Not hard to kill, even. Just a twitch of the fingers to follow the eye. With a sick lurch he pulled himself back from the brink of that ease and aimed down. In the span of that same rippling sound, that same tangling of space, the spearman half-turned and fell sidelong into the snow. His step staggered and collapsed under him, the leg gone twisted and weak at the thigh, with a cry more surprise than pain. Simra was already skirting round, forging away from the fallen mer, raising the wand again to train it on the other two ashlanders. One casting left in it, and that if he was lucky. Not that they'd know it. Not that they had any way to know.
“This isn't a fucking dagger I'm pointing at you!” Simra snarled above the wind. “You raise a hand to her or me, you get the same as him.” He nodded at the collapsed spearman. He was struggling now to rise. “Worse than him maybe. Him, I showed mercy.” Small mercy, Simra thought, giving the fallen mer the corner of his eye. He was clutching at his thigh, wide-eyed, where the flesh was warped. “One wrong step and you're maimed at the least. Not like I want to kill you both, but the point is that I could before you so much as bared your teeth at me. So…step away from the girl.”
Far more confidence mustered in those words than Simra felt behind his grit teeth and strident voice, and far too much staked on their understanding. He could have killed them soon as he saw them. Made an ambush of it. Gone cold, put them down in shock and silence, and carried on to let the snow cover them and Spring find them. Why hadn't he?
But the other two mer edged away from Llolamae. The other spearpoint turned skyward and the scarred spearman leaned on its shaft. The elder held out his palms to Simra, empty, immobile — not that it would make much for minding if there were magic in him.
A breath hissed out between Simra's teeth, almost a laugh. It'd worked. Long odds, but his luck had held for now. He didn't lower the wand, but it rested in his fingers a little.
“What did you say to them?” Llolamae asked, half-turning her head to him but staying rooted. "What did you do to him?" Fear made her voice run, still fast and tight, and her eyes jumped in her head. Simra, spear and spearman. Elder, the spear that the shaven-headed mer had dropped in falling. “Don't ease up now! They're still dangerous! Have you not just given them cause to hate you more now?”
“Someone can hate something plenty and know it's still stone-stupid to move against it,” Simra said, then changed to Velothis again, walking careful strides towards the two red-painted mer. “Do you understand me? You understood anything of what I've said?”
“We hear your sense,” said the elder. “But not all of how you speak it.” His speech was a flint-stiff kind of Velothis. Old, closest to how Noor spoke when storying, or when she was at her most self-righteous, but leaning deeper into that wide formality. Compared with the Morayat's patois, or what went between Simra and Tammunei, it seemed stagnant and brittle and clumsy. Almost bad play-acting.
“Then let's speak,” Simra said. “I'll go slow. You're Velothi?”
“Kogaru,” answered the standing spearman, eyes fixed hard and searching on Simra. His nose was broken and crooked low across its bridge, his eyes small and hooded and sharp.
“What are you, to speak a cut of our tongue?” the elder said.
Simra thought a moment. “Zainab.”
“So there still are Zainab?” The elder raised his brows; clucked with his tongue.
A small flicker of rage — the kind that comes when ignorance is threatened by unwelcome truth. A bar of colour flushed across Simra's nose and cheeks. A flicker of rage and underneath that a fear at what he'd said. “I'm here aren't I?” he shrugged, but the words came out pointed. “And you? Where do you camp from here?”
“You want to know where we sleep? Where our children play and learn and are loved and learn to love safety?” The elder bristled. He gestured in the air and Simra's fingers twitched over the runes on the wand, ready to strike him down if he called magic or moved against either him or Llolamae. “Why would I tell this to an outsider?”
“Because you're the one on my leash, not the other way round, and you'd do well to remember it. Because we came here to find you. To talk, ask questions, nothing worse. It was your kin there that moved to hurt me even past my warning, and it was me that stayed my hand when I could've stopped his heart. Twisted it full of bones and smothered it in his own skin. But I spared him – chose to spare him – and ghosts and bones I'll even carry him for you if I have to! That's if you'll believe I mean no more harm and take me to where your hearths are lit and your tents are pitched.”
The elder considered him. Looked him up and down across the strides between them. Simra, cold and haggard, clothed for Autumn and ill-prepared for the island, the season, the weather. Snow gone all to melt, staining his boots in saltmarks. The stiff outreach of his arm and his teeth ungrit now and starting to chatter. And all that next to the elder, wearing paint and near-nothing besides, and still seeming untouched by Winter. His nostrils flared and his eyes softened.
“If I bring you to our hearth, what is it you hope to find there?”
“I have questions. Looking for someone. An outsider like us. That's all.”
That struck something in the elder. Stung at him somehow. It showed just an instant in the sit of his face, but the tight-stretched skin of it shifted, twitched, and something showed in his eyes. Fear and then gone as he hid it, worked to hide it. And that said as much to Simra as the fear itself. There were secrets here, under the surface — maybe some of them even worth knowing.
“Follow,” the elder said. “You will return with us.”
The fallen spearman was sitting up, handling his wounded thigh. Grim curiosity showed in his face like a child picking at a skinned knee. Like a child loosening the gum round a tooth they were ready to lose. He was younger than Simra had let himself see at first. A youth with less than a score of Summers to him. Simra followed his wide unfocused eyes to the leg. There was no blood, no splintered bone, only flesh crudely folded on itself and bunched muscle inside. The spellstrike had been glancing. So much for small mercies, Simra thought. He'd given one greater than he'd meant to.
“Llola?” he beckoned her over and she hurried to his side, only now with her shoulders starting to shake. “And you,” he said to the other spearman. “Carry your kin.”
“You said—”
“I said if I have to. Turns out I didn't.” And he couldn’t keep watch on the others so well if he was straining to carry one. Better keep his weapons close and his pressed once-enemies less so. “He's not hurt bad. Not like he could be. He'll just be slow.”
"We will all be slow," the elder said, grave as prophecy. As if he weren't pointing out the bitter and blighted obvious.
Llolamae led an aimless way up the island, slow on her shorter legs. Simra, yearning through the waste and white of this place, walked silent in her tracks, treading the same trench through the snow. His tongue was stiff and dry with thirst and the cold had set his jaw. But his eyes raced and his mind worked, gnawing at anything, hungry for anything, breaks in the boredom, the crisp sharp sameness.
Wheels of birds whirled overhead, like the stone in a sling before it’s loosed, and like a slinger’s stone sometimes one would swoop and shrike like lightning earthward. Simra wondered if there might be hares here, hid white against the glare to all eyes but the eyes of eagles, hawks, buzzards — whatever they might have been. But who was to say they were hares? Simra wouldn’t bet on it here. Wouldn’t even bet the flying things were birds, and anycase he wasn’t about to ask.
They crossed a low part of the island that in warmer times might’ve been marsh. Turned along that fencourse to strike a path inland. Reeds quivered up from frozen water; ill-footing over snow-worried ice. It was eerie to feel all this emptiness. A world so inert and so ancient with cold it might as well have been dead for how deep and sound asleep it was.
Winter’s many things, Simra reckoned, and a foreign country is one of them. A land buried beneath itself. A land that lays itself over the land; a second half-world of its own. And he asked himself, then told himself: Tammunei would’ve felt life here. Wouldn’t they? They would. Frogs that turned to ice and unfroze with the creeks and the mud come Spring. Something like that. But alone he didn’t know what to make of it. Nothing but nothing. He was who he was, and ought to have understood Winter, but no season’s more opaque.
“Turf pit,” said Llolamae, stepping cursory round a deep hack taken from the ground. “Must be we’re close now.”
Simra stood and hugged himself; craned to look down. A square trench, sides patterned almost like tiles or bricks with the careful cut and delve of a spade. Speech unstuck his jaw. His teeth began again to chatter. “Close to what? You still haven't told me."
“Well, people, for one.” She made a face, nose wrinkled, eyes bugged and skewed. “Or have you known turf to cut itself?”
Simra’s mood was fouled already. The place, the time, the cold. Might be all the water here was frozen, but still damp was finding its way into his boots, and he couldn’t remember when last he felt his toes. “You making an idiot of me? If you are, you’d better not be.” He growled it, regretting every word as soon as it came out. Stupid, even without her say so. Silence would’ve been better, but the chance for that was already past. So Simra leaned full into talking now. Started, and let it go. “Keep me in the dark to keep yourself needed, right? I get that. Been there. But sooner or later you’ll need to tell me what’s up here and how you reckon it’s got a single spitsworth of relevance to Dalvur Vedith. I can be patient, but I’d sooner it was soon.”
Llolamae pouted and set her face. Looked like she was holding back some kind of break, like she had in her disappointment, last he’d mentioned Vedith’s name. She’d never heard it before; went stiff-faced and stubborn with sadness at feeling she couldn’t help.
Simra softened his shoulders, unsharped his eyes and tongue. Hungry, cold, footsore, and lost for all he knew — none of that made him feel better for having barked like that at a child who’d done him no wrong. “Look, I’m sorry…” he began. “That wasn’t good of me. Just…I’m trusting you here. I’d rather that trust cut both ways.”
She shrugged like it was nothing. Had never been other than nothing. “Not like I know much to tell you about the island’s north. Just that folk in the south don’t know much about it, and if anyone Telvanni was hiding here without Vidanu’s knowing it, it’d be there.”
“People, though. That’s what you said?”
“Ashlanders.” Another shrug. Her feet shuffled and she looked quick over one shoulder at the way they ought to be going. She wanted to be off again — or else not being asked questions she couldn’t answer.
“Ashlanders?” Simra’s stomach sank and rose with a lurch. “What kind?”
“The bone spears and cut-up faces kind?” She pulled a fraction of that face again; the one that made him out to be dim-witted. “The dangerous kind you don’t go near to know much about.”
“I mean what tribe.”
“Why would I know?”
“Reckon it’s quicker to ask what you do know about them then.”
In Llolamae’s eyes, the start of a grin. “That they walk the island’s north, yearwise, and have different camps for different times. That they don’t wrap up for the cold and instead they mix paints up from seal grease and other things – blood maybe – to magic themselves warm. That they bury food and treasure all around the island for when they’re next camping near, and they leave their ancestors in the ground with it to protect it. Or maybe the food and treasure’s for the ancestor-ghosts to eat? You hear it different from different people…” Her arms wheeled and thrashed in the air. Her breath steamed heavy from her grinning gurning mouth. “That they eat any flesh that’s going, fish, beast, mer – anything! – and they eat it raw and you oughtn’t to go up island ever for that reason!”
Simra chewed his lip. “If they use magic paint to keep themselves warm,” he said, “and they don’t cook their food, why would they need to cut peat?”
Her wheeling arms and talking hands stopped and fell silent. “…like I said, you hear it different from different folk.”
“Reckon we’ll find out soon,” Simra offered.
…
They walked into higher land, maybe tending northward. The frozen riverbed changed from wide narrow fen, stiff and sleeping, to a cut between rising banks. Ice in its middle, slopes of thick-lodged snow either side. Higher and higher those snowbanks loomed, and deeper he walked through their shadow, Simra worried they'd fall. Collapse and bury him. Made him afraid to speak. Afraid of the sound of his footsteps, scuff and scuffling over the ice. Short strides now, sliding one foot in front of the other.
“Don’t like it down here,” he hissed, almost a whisper. “Like everything up there can see down onto us, but we’re blind to everything except what’s ahead. Even that only to the next bend.”
“Want me to climb up, take a look round, do you?” Llolamae didn’t turn to face him. She was watching her feet too.
“Be nice, yeah. If you don’t, I will.”
A thinking silence, and then Llolamae rolled her shoulders. Shifted the weight of her hat on her head with a careless hand. “Alright.”
Simra sighed a cloud of mist, relieved and grateful. “Alright. Call down what you see? Only…don’t shout, alright?”
She did look round at that. A puzzled look, but she didn’t ask why. Just stretched, slapped her mittened hands each against the other, and choose a likewhile piece of bank. Began to scramble up it, hands and feet and speed, back hunched and toes kicking holds in the snow.
She went out of view as she overed the top. Left Simra with nothing but sky, and the muffled blue shade of the dead river, the trench.
“Hills,” he heard her say. “Bald high places. Stone and snow.”
“Not missing much then?” Simra said.
No response. He walked on. He’d spoken low, too quiet maybe to hear. But in seven paces, Llolamae screamed.
Swearing under his breath, Simra made for the nearest bank. Half-slipped in his haste on the ice. Wallowed with furious slowness up the bank, feet and fingers digging into the loose snow as it kicked down in chunks and slides behind him, beneath him. In his head, in his motions, he was fighting already. Fight up the bank. Find her. Fight whatever fight was waiting. Bone spears, he thought. Bone spears and cut-up faces.
He crested the lip of the bank on hands and knees. Numb, he fumbled for his sword. Found it, and his hand stung against the pommel, the one brief quillon. The palm was still skinned from climbing the tangle of torquestone on the hill two nights ago. Tender now, and wet with snow. He’d forgot till that moment, and now forgotten everything else. Just his stinging hand, just that scream, and the sudden lurch of space and wide snow around him that crazed his eyes for searching it.
It took only a moment to see them. Three skinny figures, near-naked and painted in dull greyish red. And like a fish hooked on two lines, stuck taut by the two-way pull of them, Llolamae was frozen between the threat of their lowered spearpoints, coiled to bolt and pinned in place.
Tea and then gone, out into the day, tin-bright and brittle. Felt like it was waning no sooner than the dawn had finished and the sun got into the fullness of its rise.
Llolamae and Simra hurried their way through the morning. Tramping shuffling feet through the snow as the cold set it stiff and their boots crushed and packed it. They went quick. The hustle that falls just short of a run, hard to keep up, harder still to keep time, keep gait. No matter how gliding your walk or graceful your run, that mixed gait always comes graceless.
They’d kept an incomplete quiet so far. Breath short from a long time keeping up their loping pace; wind invasive and aching in their ears, for all Simra had shawled his scarf up and over his head. But Simra’s thoughts were loud, and sometimes it was hard to say nothing when there was someone around to hear him, even if the wind would steal his words like as not. Better that way maybe, to talk and not be heard.
He’d asked questions. Pointed out what stuck out, interrupting the snowfields. Hard not to, when a surprise comes so sharp at you out of all that sameness. A rock carved with a worn old face. Shrubs labouring up through the snow and out of the stony soil, fighting the breeze in vain for their right to be trees one day. Shrubs, their fingertips blistered with small stiff purple flowers, their wood looking it might be fragrant when burnt: dry, corded and twisting, all perennial with hidden resin maybe, or why else would they flower and leaf this late in the year. Simra asked if he ought to go over. Who knew when they’d next see wood for burning. Llolamae said nothing. At first he reckoned she hadn’t heard, and he asked again. Leave them alone, she said. Why? Simra asked. They poisonous? No, she said, just doing their best in a bad place to do it. And Simra kissed his teeth and went on shivering. Said at least it wasn’t snowing again. At least they weren’t wet as well as cold.
The headland was the next thing he called out as it sheered from the distance. The sea chased deep into the land ahead, cutting a curving channel through the island’s side. A long peninsula spurred high and stony on the far edge of it. Along their side, a low rocky headland bearing slow and northward.
They crested up and along it. The sea spat and raced on their right. He didn’t know which way the tide was turning but whether in escape or assault the run of the water was furious.
Here the rock was too rough or dark somehow for the snow to have settled on. It had turned straight to rain. That was what caught his attention, even from afar. A ragged crackle of black in all this scorching whiteness of snow. Salt, Simra realised. The stone was crusted with it, sprain up from the sea and warding the snowfall away. Putting out his tongue to wet his lips, he tasted it too. On a sunny day – a dry day – the rocks might have glittered. What became of this island in Summer? What Spring might come after a Winter that cuts the rest of the year from memory, from imagining, till all you can think of is snow and shuddering, frozen mud, like that’s all a year might be made of? It was that way in Windhelm. Maybe here too. Or maybe just inside Simra. Some leftover linger of Eastmarch, never quite gone from him.
“Got a question,” he said, breaking the silence again. He wasn’t panting, from the way up the headland, but exertion still made his words taste wrong. Sour, strange, cold.
“Ask it then,” said Llolamae. Didn’t turn her head. Simra watched her back, draped with a shapeless coat of sealskins stitched together and billowing lazy with the wind and their own thick heaviness. “Don’t reckon I could stop you, could I?”
“S’nothing important. Just a curiosity. Just…Yianni. What is she? Some auntie of yours?”
Llolamae gave a bleating laugh. “Not hardly. She’s just an old widow is all.”
“Yeah?”
“Heartshare was a fisherman, see? Only he got lost at sea, like fishermen do. Came back after days out there, adrift, but he came back with a chill and that carried him off, like chills do. But even after that she had five children. Way back, way way back, mind. All gone to sea, in their time, and not come back. One out in a fisherboat, saw a dreugh in the water, and that’s luck you know – a good catch – and she stayed out too long on too bad a sea chasing that catch. Lost the same way as her father. The others off on boats bound for the red lands – Vvardenfell – maybe to get rich in ways folk can’t here. Chasing trueglass and such.”
Llolamae paused a moment, hands on hips, in front of a shoulder-high ledge in the headland. Then scrambled up in a kicking of feet and wrench of arms. She turned and faced Simra, crouching, face framed small by a big hat of waxed leather with earflaps hanging long to the level of her chest.
“Why you come over so curious about her?” she says.
“Maybe I’m just hungry,” he said. “Might be she surprised me. Kind, right?”
Llolamae’s face fidgetted between expressions. Flash of disbelief, flickering confusion, a purse-mouthed scowl of disbelief. “Do folk not feed each other where you’re from?”
“Feasts, summoning days, yeah. But not like that, just because they’re — what? Worried? For someone else’s child?”
“Strange.” A flash of pity, then gone into a wrinkled nose and squinting eyes. “Not like she’s made to. She likes to is all. Whole town knows she’s lonesome, and bored worse than that, and still keeps the best kitchen-garden on the island. She’s got the habit leftover from birthing five babies, feeding and clothing ‘em, and that doesn’t just go away.”
“I reckon not.” Simra glanced along the ledge. No better way to get up than here. He set his hands and reached with his leg and shinned up and onto it to crouch then stand beside her. “D’you have kin though?”
“Wouldn’t have Vidanu if I did.” She shrugged. “Not since I was a fry. Ma and Da got dust-sick one Summer and I’ve been a Mouth since then.” She stood up and shrugged again, and turned and walked on.
Simra stayed rooted a moment, a downcurl in the corner of his mouth as he chewed the inside of his cheek. He found himself hoping Vidanu fed her right, knowing full well that he didn’t, or why else would she know Yianni so well as she seemed to? Found himself hoping at least Vidanu was kind when he wasn’t absent. That he treated and taught her well. An uncertain unwelcome pang of something that might have been pity or sadness or foreboding. Anger, almost, at what this child had been given for a childhood.
A twisting deep-reaching feeling, then, like a frown with roots that gnarled in his belly, conflicting him. In between pitying her, Simra realised he envied her. What must it be like, growing up with a teacher, in letters and magic and how much else besides? Knowing that however little you have now, you have prospects, and promise, power all laid out ahead of you, bright and better things. Not just the place you started out, sucking like mud around your feet and trying to trap you, keep you, sink you to the neck and deeper unless you struggle your way free of it…
Stepping fast to catch up, Simra followed after her. Shook his head and closed his eyes for a long blink and told himself there was no good comparing. The past was the past and behind him, and the future was his to set forth. She couldn’t say the same. Not like he wanted to be a Mouth anycase. Not like he’d do it if they begged. Bad enough to be a left hand for some magelord like he was now. How much worse would it be, to be a whole body for them?
Llolamae scampered over the rocks ahead, meandering just for the joy of movement, playing her way across the island. Simra watched as he walked, and went back to feeling sorry for her. Outclipsed by pity, his envy shrank up so fast it turned almost to shame.
The night’s snow seemed to close around him, but Simra got no colder. More like he lost feeling, sinking into a space of thought and sight and blunted hearing. Nothing here to touch; nothing that could be touched. Everywhere he looked, the world had blurred and smeared. Life through a grimy window, a grit-damaged lens. Fog.
A moment’s confusion; almost panic. Simra made himself breathe. Concentrated on the sound of that – the tremble of his inhale and the shake of its outhale – and realised how much sound it was in a world that had fallen silent. He thought his own name. Thought it hard. Thought himself back to how he’d got here. He’d held the sword. Read the sending scroll. He was the sending. What he sent was himself.
And then he was somewhere else. Not Yianni’s yard anymore, among the raised beds and the falling snow, and the cloud-blind starless skies. But he wondered if he was still there, bodied there, and brain throwing thoughts and sense out across the world. No matter, he tried to convince himself. Just semantics. But it stuck in the back of his mind like a fishbone.
He squinted, thought hard, like by thinking he could see through the fog. It half worked. There was bald rock beneath his boots. The sense of a wide night sky in a high and airy place. The sense of a tall overhang of rock. And at the heart of it, an enclosure of familiar things: knotted cord, stretched hide, spars of bone that felt noisy to think about, hard to focus on. Tammunei’s yurt.
Fuck this, he thought, half amazed by it all. Being here and not here. Being almost nowhere. Being no longer where he was, and holding tight to who he was with a whole hard-working part of his mind, like it could slip his grasp, flit off and be gone, like a scrap of paper carried away in a gale.
He forged himself forward. It wasn’t quite walking. More the thought of walking, and the memory of it, as a way to push the idea of him closer to where he knew the yurt was. Was he here? To what bent and blurred extent was he here? The more he focused on one thing, the more the rest seemed to shift and shiver. Like he was walking in a memory. Like there was no ground under him unless he kept it in sight. A gaping hungry fog at his back as he looked and moved himself forward, and this whole world ready to blink from existence whenever he closed his eyes.
“Hello?” He called it out. Again that sense of sound giving edge and enormity to the silence. He halfway hated it. Was almost cowed into not speaking again. But wasn’t that the whole blighted point of a sending? To talk? “Tammu! Noor? It’s Simra. I … I don’t know?” Simra winced, closing his eyes. Let slip the world and made himself and his voice the whole of what he knew. Tried to, at least. It was hard. Let the world slip and have faith he could make it come back. “Can you hear me?”
Someone else now, drawing their careful way closer. Not sight so much as a collection of memories, signed on the surface of his thoughts, and recognised as clear as a face. Sea-wet fabric and stoneflowers. Freckles and wet red hair.
“Tammunei?”
“Who’s there?” The voice was faraway, creased and cut with echoes. There – there there – air. “Simra..? Are you there? Where are you?”
Simra focused on the sound, the speaker, making them clearer and closer. Almost lost himself and his place as he did it. No knowing how long he was there, stunned and stuck, struggling for how to answer. “I’m—” No, not the whole truth. Just what mattered. “—I’m here. Don’t know for how long.”
Tammunei coalesced closer. Almost a shade, small and slump-shouldered. Simra could almost make out the shape of them through the fog when he opened his eyes a moment to see if that helped bring them closer, make them clearer. It didn’t. Tammunei was still a shimmering fragile something — tremulous, like an eye itching to let go tears. Simra could feel it. Nerves and uncertainty. Relief brimming up like drink past the top of a cup, but held rapt and impossible in meniscus. Just a moment before it crests and breaks, and spills lostwards out of itself.
“No you’re not. Not here.” The words broke up. “Simra, I don’t know where you … don’t know how you … but you’re safe?”
“I’m safe. I’m alright.”
“Ancestors, Simra, I thought you were — I thought I was hearing you. I was afraid. You were gone and then back like this? I thought—”
“It’s a sending,” Simra cut in, not wanting to consider what Tammunei was suggesting. Is that what would happen? No Ghostline to go to. Just a voice in the minds of the only people who cared enough to remember him? “They gave me a scroll.”
“Why can’t I see you? If I stare – if I half-close my eyes like I’m staring into the sun – I can almost see … snow? Dust, dancing? Snow, and a shadow in it.”
“It’s snowing here, yeah.”
“Was it the Telvanni? We went to the tower, or we tried to. We couldn’t cross because they wouldn’t let us. What did they do to you?”
“I’m safe. Nothing done. Nothing bad. Just gave me this scroll for a sending so I could tell you, but … it’s hard?” Hard just to have things straight in his mind. Like time was twisted here, and wild to hold. “Needed some tie to you so I could come through clear but I don’t know, didn’t have anything good, so it’s like I’m not anywhere and you’re not here and I can’t quite hear?” Simra wheezed a small laugh, powerless, confused. “It’s fucked, but I have to — dunno how long I’ve got, so…”
A listening silence.
“I’m alright,” Simra began, speaking slow. “Just far from where you are. Up at the tower. Telvanni gave me a job and I couldn’t not take it. Couldn’t take anyone else either. I’ll try explain, just not now. Some day. Soon, honest. I’m somewhere … North I think?”
“Noor was angry. She thought—”
“I’m sure she fucking did. Tell her I’m not gone. That I couldn’t help it. And tell her I’m coming back, soon as I can. Just as soon as I—”
And then the fog was all he could see, eyes closed or not, whether he was trying to see or not. A whiteness that stole his breath and his words, and a silence that filled him like water.
It was cold back in Yianni’s yard. At first he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Just the glaring painful fact of being bodied again, feeling again, and seeing the snow as it fell around him. It had settled on his shoulders. On the bowed top of his head. His jaw ached and the teeth inside it hurt, like they’d strained all this time, trying to chatter. His bare hand was clutched round the scabbard of a sword, stinging in the blue-knuckled cold. He thought again how he ought to get himself some gloves. It was long past time. Long, long past time.
…
Next morning, the sky was dull as tin. Clouds moved flat across it, smooth and fast, like the surface of a stream. Simra looked outside, slipping back into his boots and going out to piss a hole in the new-fallen snow. His footprints from the night before had already filled in, with no sign he’d ever been out. But even the snow had stopped by now, and settled into a slow half-hearted dawn. He wondered if it’d be full-broken by the time they came to leave.
Inside, Yianni was already at the hearth, breaking up the ashes and clearing fresh space in the dust. Bent over it, hunched towards it, cold and poking at the cold stones and cinders. The morning made her look more her age, whatever that might’ve been. Cold light and white ashes.
“Let me.” Simra tripped out of his boots again and passed over to the hearthside.
“T’lonya.” She said it with a dip of her head and slitted smiling eyes. Like it meant gratitude and not infant, pride of my crib, swaddled thing. Good child. “You’ve a long journey ahead of you, as I hear tell, and I don’t know that you’ll breakfast yourself right if I don’t take a hand to it… But lighting fires? That you can do.”
She went to the corner where her pantry was kept between pit and preserve-chest. Left Simra feeling strange. T’lonya. It pulled at him, unexpected. His mother had called him almost the same word, long ago. Long and long ago, but often. Seemed Yianni would mother anyone, given the chance. He could think of worse things than staying a while. Lighting fires and eating well, his feet warm and dry. Feeling younger than he was for once. Probably he was tired from a night broken into pieces, but it put a thickness in his throat and the first threat of an ache in his eyes to think of it. Home, and here, and how he hadn’t stayed then, and couldn’t now.
Instead he steepled up fuel in the hearth and with his hands and a word set it burning. Went to his packs and unhitched his kettle. Boiled water for tea.
It played in his thoughts though, what he could’ve used the sending scroll for, and what he hadn’t.
He’d not written home since Balmora. Waiting there among the broken bits of the town four days longer than he’d have liked just to beg passage for a piece of folded paper on a boat bound to Blacklight, where maybe it would find another headed to Windhelm. He’d written it while he still could, back by Lake Amaya, not knowing it would be one of the last things he wrote for a stretched sparse year. He had always meant to take it seaward for sending but never found the time, back when his days were so full of nothing. And by the time it finally got to Balmora, it felt like a letter from some stranger – like he was only carrying it for them – so much had changed since he wrote it. None of that got into the letter. He couldn’t have written it in, not even if he’d wanted to. He sent it all the same, for all that time had turned its words to lies: all’s well with me…
He could’ve sent home and spoken with his mother like he was there. So why didn’t he? Could even have sent to Soraya, wherever she was, whoever she’d become. Might’ve been easier, even — in the rattling pouch amongst his bags he had better ties to them both than the sword that’d been Tammunei’s. But he didn’t send to them. Might be he’d taken the sensible road, the responsible one. Might be he’d done what asked least of him — least courage, least hope and blind faith. Anycase, it was done with. Gone and past.
Under her table, Llolamae stirred, thrashing free of the cloak she’d slept in. She ducked out and into the open, and shuffled over to the hearthside, cloak held shut in a fist at her throat. “Smelled tea,” she said, groggy.
It was black, fermented, smelling of malt and mushrooms as it steeped in Simra’s kettle. “Mhm,” he said, distracted. He was remembering pine-needle smoke, and the crude tea of the Grey Quarter, cut with roast barley, and bought in bulk whenever they could afford it.
“Tea and then gone,” she said. “Not a lot of daylight in the days this time of year.”
They had an expedition ahead of them. The Mouth-Child said they ought to see about provisions, and took Simra back into the hamlet. Here.
It was a hut among other huts, long and well-made, like it might’ve housed a big family once. Just one old woman now, here in the low dark space, with every shadow smelling of trapped smoke. Walls of plaster below the ground, and stone above it, caulked tight with mortar. A shallow roof of slate and tar above that.
“. . . I’ve a mind to tell you this is the last time, Llolamae. Can’t have you just comin’ round here every once he forgets to feed you. Can’t have that be your habit, comin’ round here every once you find you need something.”
“Why not? Does you credit. D’you not feel it does? Stands you in good stead with the neighbours. Old Ma Yianni, they say, she ain’t got mouths to feed anymore but does that stop her? Does it Trouble! Good to know there’s someone whose kindness goes out beyond their doorway, they say. And not just with the neighbours. With him too, up in the Tel. I put in a good word every time, I promise you. He’ll say he’s grateful one of these days, I’ll see to it he does. Or do you not trust me?”
Simra hung back close to the doorframe, watching the Mouth-Girl and the older woman talk. All moist eyes and lined slack cheeks shivering as Ma Yianni shook her head, threw up her strong blunt worker’s hands, stared up like she was begging the ceiling for patience. All crossed arms and leaning hips from Llolamae, the little Mouth, as she crowed and praised, plied and pleaded.
Almost like a play, he reckoned. Something done often enough that it felt rehearsed, ritualised. Girl and matron, both of them knew their roles, wore their masks well, and walked the walks their parts asked of them.
But all the while they seemed to argue, Yianni bustled round her long low home, gathering and preparing. Bunched herbs and braids of onions hung amongst the rafters. She picked at them, puttered along to lift the stone off the pantry-pit an reach inside, then back to the hearth-fire, back to her cooking.
Heat and light of it on her face, licking and fluttering as she hammered out dough for panbreads. Practiced hands and forearms like a forester’s, heavy and unglamorous with the slabby muscle of long doing. Water, salt, coarse flour the colour of wet sand, a dab of wet sour mother-mix from a jar. She’d murled them together and let the lot rise. Now she slapped rounds of it onto the breadpan – a lipped shelf of seasoned iron that half-circled the growling fire – and they sizzled with oil and heat while she spoke.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Llolamae! Saints know I do my best. Only I don’t know how you’ll repay me, I’m sure I don’t.”
“When I’m up at Sadrith Mora, voice on the Assembly and all, course! Then I’ll see to it you get your fairness, and more besides.”
Yianni sighed so loud Simra heard it over the fire. Heard it across the room, in the cold and the draught of the closed doorway at his back. Then she smacked the last panbread down, and trudged over to a chest, sounding all of cluttering jars and knocking ceramic.
“And . . !” said Llolamae. “And I’ll unsnow your yard.”
“When you’re back, is that it? And only once you ever come back at all, I suppose. Gone gadding with some stranger from off-island, hm? In snows and Winter cold. Your parents’re rattling their urns right and proper over this, I tell you, and do I blame them one jot? Do I Trouble!”
“Not like we’re going all that far, Ma Yianni! Only over to the—” Llolamae stopped herself. Say too much and Simra might think he didn’t need her any longer. She knew her game, and Simra knew she knew it.
“Not far, you say? Then will you not be needing all these?” Yianni spread out an arm, winglike and expansive, at the panbreads, the simmering scuttle-kettle on the fire, the growing bundle of provisions in the old ragcloth on the worktop next to her.
Simra stopped studying the dry reeds on Yianni’s fastidious floor. Pushed himself with a foot off from leaning on the doorframe and took a careful step forward. “I’ll pay you for any extra, sera. I’ve got coin . . .”
She turned on him, bustling forward till she was armsreach, then in past armsreach. Stared up with eyes appraising and sceptical, small and red under her old heavy brow. Bent and broad, she came barely chest-height on Simra, but there was power and haste and drama in everything she did.
“And what’d I do with coin, stranger?” She prodded the air in front of his chest with a short powerful finger. Didn’t touch him, but Simra half-stepped back like he was pushed. “And in Winter? You see any merchants come shipping in on your way through the docks now did you? I think not.”
And then she’d stormed round, back to her work again. Simra didn’t reckon he could be blamed for trying, but didn’t reckon he’d try the same tack again.
“Now . . .” Yianni continued, voice softer. “If it was that you were to come by any oil on your doings. Trade for it, say, with them who—”
“Aye, Ma.” Llolamae cut her off. “Aye aye, and that’s a promise. We’ll be sure to!”
...
By the time the panbreads were done, and Llolamae had wrapped them in a clean rag and stowed them in her back-basket of woven reeds along with everything else, Yianni had opened the door for them, and pretended at surprise it was dark out.
Cold too, she said. Same drama in it as near enough everything else she said. Pronouncements and portents, even if she was only tutting over a cobweb in the corner of her dug-out hut. But age gives you that liberty, Simra reckoned. Gravity and the world’s slow decline in everything you say, and everything a symbol of something: the cricking of your knees and moving of your guts, playing out like omens that things aren’t what they were. Crowshit, but it keeps them entertained . . .
Yianni said they were staying. No question about it. Her fire was still burning. Only just put on another half-pale of coals and another round of panbreads for the night — too many for just one old woman. Simra found no fault in that logic. Dry, warmth, dinner, and bedding down under a roof. That made the simplest kind of sense before another long trek in the snow come morning. But Llolamae fidgeted and whined, like she was eager to be off, night or not.
Rustic breads but soft in their centers and golden with oil, patched and streaked black with the taste of smoke. They used them to mop up a stew of white fish and herb-infused vinegar, and onions simmered down to sweetness. Crisp salty long-pickled turnips too, up from storage, and pale stems of nutty pickled mushrooms.
Nothing much, said Ma Yianni. And at another time Simra might’ve agreed. For now though, he told her he didn’t remember having better. More than a half-truth, that, and hardly just flattery. When had he last had fresh baked bread, or something bordering onto a good square meal? Not since the mainland, seemed like, and that felt a far-fling from here.
Simra kept her fire fed. Least he could do was save her some fuel, for all the guest-graciousness she’d shown him. With Llolamae curled up in a travelcloak under a table, and Yianni gone to her pallet, screened off with panes of stretched hide, Simra laid his bedroll down by the hearthside. Stared into the flames – the dancing dark and aching night-blind light – whispering a gentle flow of power into them until he almost fell asleep.
He came back to with a jolt. The sending scroll! The blighted sending scroll in his book-bag, still unused. If not now then when? How long could he trust nothing stupid to happen because he’d disappeared with no tell left for Noor and Tammunei as to where he’d gone?
Hissing through his teeth, he uncoiled from the fireside and padded in wrapped feet over to his packs. Glower of firelight, murmuring its wax and wane like the sound of a heartbeat, sometimes fast and sometimes slowing to almost nothing. He went by touch mostly, pawing over the bags until he found the waxed leather of his book-bag and unfastened the drawstring and flap that sealed it. Brought out the tight roll of paper, fought into his boots, and half-guessed a path to the door.
Out into the night before he finally dared a magelight. Red cold glow, and new snow ghosting down into it. Of course. A journey to go the next day, and of course he was out here, hacking chunks off his sleeptime and shivering in the same snow that’d make tomorrow a time or two crueler. Of course.
He stamped through the yard outside, getting his bearings. Raised beds, empty for winter, with flat heads of stacked up snow. A fence of old rope and pile-driven poles, bordering round Yianni’s claim. He spotted a low rick, fermenting urns inside it, big as fat children squatting under its little roof. Simra forged a path to it and crouched amongst them. A little shelter was better than none.
The scroll unfurled in his hands. A long narrow ribbon of paper, like he imagined you’d tie to the leg of a messenger bird. Funny almost, how this served that same purpose. He turned it, getting the script and sigils the right way up. He let go with a hand and slapped the palm flat into his forehead.
“Stupid . . .”
He’d need something to make it work. Sympathy. A connection. Something of Tammunei or Noor’s. He thought for a long moment, head bowed and the back of his neck stretching tight, then warm and soft under the weight of it.
“Well fuck me for not carrying round a lock of hair from everyone with the sour luck to keep my company . . .”
Then Simra clicked his fingers, clenched a fist. A thought. He stormed back into the hut and groped for his sword-belt, bringing out the blade. It had been Tammunei’s for a time. A short time, but it’d have to do.
