“No, how did you know about the colors’ connections?” Sibéal insisted.
Kip said nothing, and they stood eye to eye. Or more accurately, eye to belly, but the pygmy didn’t let the height differential affect her in the least. She was flushing, skin turning bluer by the moment.
“Lord Guile… sometimes just understands things about magic,” Tisis said, trying to spread oil on the waters. “He’s kind of irritating that way.”
Sibéal went silent, and her grinning mouth threw Kip. He was still learning to look around the corners of her eyes and to ignore the mouth. “Conn Ruadhán Arthur’s twin, Rónán, was killed while he was fully intricated in his bear, not two months past. Ruadhán had to go kill the bear himself. The animal that held the last living remnants of Rónán’s soul. It tore Ruadhán’s heart out to kill it. But kill it he did.”
“And what happens if you don’t kill the animal?” Kip asked.
“Kip!” Tisis scolded.
“I have to know,” he said.
“It goes mad. Tries to return to its people—its human people. But the magic fades, and it reverts to animal, and the man-soul dies at last. But all too often, it gets violent, for it’s been changed, been violated. They kill people. We have many stories of attempts to save the soul-trapped, Lord Guile. None of them end happily.”
“The Briseid?” Tisis asked. “Tamar and Heraklos?”
“Indeed. Though perhaps told quite differently than you remember. The Chromeria has ways of crushing knowledge, but some truth always leaks out.”
“Not… The Seven Lives of Maeve Hart?” Tisis asked.
“That, too,” Sibéal admitted uneasily.
“No wonder the Chromeria forbids it,” Tisis said.
“What’s that?” Kip asked. He’d only heard of the last one. “Briefly.”
Tisis said, “A woman flings her soul into a hart and flees when soldiers storm her home and burn it to the ground, killing her body. Her husband Black Aed hunts the men to their homes one at a time, and murders their wives, and puts his Maeve’s soul in their bodies. But it never works, because every woman already has her own soul, so he slowly loses her, her soul slipping away, until he comes to the queen herself who had ordered the burning. And with her body, the magic works or seems to work, for she is soulless. But one night he has a foul dream, and on seeing his enemy’s face leering over him, shaking him, he strangles her. And upon seeing what he’s done, he kills himself, throwing his spirit into the stones of the old castle. He haunts it to this day.”
“Lovely,” Kip said. “I can’t wait to hear more uplifting tales from your homeland.”
“The story is actually… somewhat darker even than that,” Sibéal said. “But that’s beside the point.”
“I agree,” Kip said, not willing to answer more questions, which she seemed poised to ask. He wasn’t telling her about the cards. “So it seems like, to put it in your dichotomies, we’re talking about two different things: will-casting and… what?”
“Soul-casting.” Sibéal looked up the river. “Do we really have time for this?”
“I’m afraid we don’t have time not to do this,” Kip said.
“Have you not read the Philosopher? Before you understand anything, you must understand physics—what is in the corporeal world. Upon that you build your understanding of the metaphysics, what is beyond the simple corporeal: emotions and thoughts and so forth. From those two, you derive your ethics, how one is to act properly in accord with the facts, above that, politics, how bodies of individuals are to act toward each other, and then rhetoric and the arts, the poetics. We and the Chromeria disagree about our metaphysics, and it affects everything above it.
“If, as they believe, you tear off a piece of your soul when you will-cast, you’re doing fundamental harm to yourself every time you do this magic. It would be akin to magic powered by murdering someone—it wouldn’t matter if you did good with the magic, because at base, the action empowering that good is itself evil. Thus, the good we do they discount, whilst every ill effect that comes from our magic they say obviously springs from the corrupted nature of the whole. We can’t win, because we argue politics—the regulation of magics—when our dispute is about metaphysics.”
“This is… very complicated,” Tisis said.
“Not really,” Sibéal said. “We say the will is the breath of the soul. Like your body needs breath and will die without it, your soul needs will. But we can inspire an animal—literally, ‘in-breathe’—to do something. Of course we need to recover afterward, like you need to inhale every time you exhale. Like you breathe hard after running. You need recovery time. And yes, if you go too long without breathing, you die. Or if you deprive another person of their breath, it’s killing. This is murder if it’s a person, but the animals we inspire can also be killed thus if it’s done wantonly or clumsily or for too long, and we regard that as a serious offense, too. Will-casting with the higher souled is a profound partnership. And the animals we partner can tell if it is done with violent or disrespectful intent. And the will-caster feels their terror, too, if the partnering is done poorly or meanly. We know and love our hosts to a degree that one who has never will-cast cannot fathom.
“Soul-casting is different. Forbidden. Soul-casting is when the soul of an animal is blotted out and replaced. Its body may live for days afterward, but its vital spark is extinguished. It damages the caster, too, in more insidious ways.”
“It can be done to men?”
She nodded grimly. “Which is why to us soul-casting is a black magic. Damned magic. Always forbidden, always disastrous, as the stories of the living dead and of wolf men tell. Loathed and despised.”
“And mostly moot, because only a full-spectrum polychrome can soul-cast,” Kip said. It was partly a guess.
She looked stung. “That’s right.”
“Ruadhán and his twin Rónán, full-spectrum polychromes?” he guessed.
“Yes.”
“And Rónán soul-cast himself?”
She licked her lips with a small blue tongue. “While dying. Doubtless it is a unique temptation for those with such great power. And now you know Ruadhán’s shame.”
“No,” Kip said, “now I know why he swore fealty to me instead of taking the lead himself.” The big man had the respect of his people, and the intellect and fierceness to lead, but at the word of some prophet he had given up the lead and sworn himself to Kip? Why would a man do that?
Kip had only hatred for his own half brother, but he’d seen what a bighearted man will give for his brother. And he said a silent thanks to Tremblefist and Ironfist for that. For here, though different in culture and color and circumstances, he saw a mirror of their love. And what Tremblefist had taught him might just save his life.
Why would Conn Arthur not lead?
Not because he was ashamed of his brother, who had done something desperate as he died. There was little shame in that. Conn Arthur wouldn’t lead because he was ashamed of himself.
Because there was no way in hell he’d killed Rónán’s bear Lorcan, because that would have meant killing his brother. Rónán was out there, somewhere, trapped and going mad in the body of that bear, and nothing could stop him but death. Conn Arthur bore the responsibility to his people and to his brother to kill the animal, but that would mean admitting Rónán was dead. It would mean killing the last remnant of his brother with his own hands.
His love was his shame. But if he wouldn’t confront that on his own, Kip was going to have to make him do so before someone got killed.
But how do you reveal a man’s deepest secret shame, accuse him of heresy and cowardice, and not destroy him?
A commander couldn’t. Maybe a friend could. Kip had to give Conn Arthur time to deal with it, had to pray the forest was big enough for one crazed grizzly.
Time was up. The island was coming into view.