“Because it needed doing. Because . . .” Unver gave the spoke a couple of more heavy blows, then abruptly dropped the maul. “I am tired of answering your questions. Your head must still be broken, to make you ask so many. You should go and lie down.”
Fremur knew when he was being dismissed, and he also knew that it would be no wiser to anger Unver than it was to anger Odrig. Unver would not beat him as his brother would, but he would stay angry for days or even weeks, and Fremur didn’t want that. “Enough, then,” he said. “Thank you for not leaving me behind.”
“It is better to be alive than dead,” said Unver, which was probably the closest he would ever come to replying in kind.
As Fremur walked away he thought he could feel Unver’s fury beating out from where he stood like the heat of a bonfire, but somehow Fremur didn’t think that it was him or even Unver’s poisonous stepfather that made the tall man so angry.
He burns, Fremur realized. Sometimes the embers are low, but they never go out. And some day he will burst into flame. Fremur thought again of how he had seen Unver the night before, stretched against the billowing flames and dark sky, and he trembled, just as he had when his mother had told him stories of the vengeful spirits of air and grass that surrounded them.
A terrible flame.
25
Example of a Dead Hedgehog
Something was wrong. The air was heavyhot, the sky thick with mist. Even the clear waters of Sumiyu Shisa had turned dark, and bubbled like boiling soup. Tanahaya stumbled along the banks of this counterfeit place that should have been her home, her heart, the vale of Shisae’ron she knew so well. She headed toward Willow Hall and the place of her birth, but found it difficult to walk. The ground was muddy, almost boiling, and the steamy air choked her. Again and again she found herself slipping backward, as though she were trying to climb a long, steep slope.
At last she reached the riverside glen where her family home stood, but this too had changed beyond recognition.
Fallow. Unharvested. The waste—!
Even the front stairway, a graceful construction of carefully arranged white stones, had become a thing of mud and rubbish. The hall, roofed only by the great willow trees themselves, was now a fleshpicked rib cage of leaning posts slowly declining into the ooze.
“Mother?” she called, but only silence was at home.
Fearful now, Tanahaya tried to find her way into her childhood refuge, but as if her own memory rejected her, the drooping willow branches were slimy and the leaves came loose in her hands like hair from the head of a corpse. The deeper she went into the house the less she recognized, and the harder it was to fight through the choking heat and sinking floor. Every way she turned some fallen trunk blocked her way, or a jumbled nonsense that should have been a patterned stone floor mocked her. All that kept her moving was the fixed idea that she had some reason to be here, that she had returned for something important, although she could no longer remember what that might be.
A section of ground dissolved beneath her feet and she almost tumbled down into a tangle of muddy roots that waited for her like some sea creature. Pitched forward onto her hands and knees, she kept crawling toward the center of the house, the place where her mother had tended the fire and sang her sweetling soothe-songs, but the roots of the willows squirmed beneath her, coiling and writhing like snakes, and it was all she could do to inch forward, her hands and arms now slick with black mud, her eyes full of hot, stinging mist.
“Mother?” At last she could see the hearth, and to her joy she saw that it was whole, the only part of the house not chewed by decay and collapse. All was as her mother had made it and wished it, the fire pit of orderly white stones, the ritual objects set on their low table of carved wood, jars and bowls and bundles of grassy calmcares and other simples Tanahaya had seen all through her childhood, objects so familiar that even to view their shapes again was to feel a fierce longing for days that were gone. But in the center of the table, as though her mother had only put it down an instant before, sat something Tanahaya had never seen before—an egg made of gleaming, polished witchwood, its pearly gray marbled with a dozen other colors amost too subtle to make out. Just to see that beautiful ovoid made her want to take it up and protect it. Why had her mother left it behind? What was Tanahaya supposed to do? Everything she knew was changed—changed and ruined—and yet this puzzle remained.
She heard a noise behind her then—not a footfall, but a long, sucking, slither of a sound. Before she could see what was there, the ground beneath her gave way again and dropped her into hot, sticky darkness. All else—the house of her childhood, the gleaming witchwood egg, even the thing that was Tanahaya-I-myself—vanished back into smothering oblivion.
? ? ?
She was fighting a war, a terrible struggle against a powerful enemy, and so far she had lost every skirmish. But Tanahaya could not retreat because the battle was taking place inside her own body.
In her moments of clear thought she knew that it was some kind of poison that was destroying her, not the wounds. Like all of her people, Tanahaya had deep reserves of strength for fighting illness and injury, but each day she was growing weaker. She could feel the filth inside her trying to make its way through her blood to her heart, like savage raiders rowing their warships upriver to attack a great city. She knew that before much longer the corruption would overwhelm her.
But this poison that smeared those arrows and crawls now through my veins must be the creation of mortals. If it had been crafted by our cousins the Hikeda’ya, I would have lost the battle long ago.
It still made scant sense: what mortals would go out of their way to destroy her? If it had been ordinary arrows that had struck her down she could believe it had been merely the fearful response of a human poacher seeing something strange—the mortals, the Sunset Children, tended to attack that which they did not understand, as all the Zida’ya knew. But the venom coursing through her was something no poacher would use, since it would poison any game it struck down. What sense for a hungry man to risk death or imprisonment to shoot something that couldn’t be eaten?
No, the venom on the arrows had been meant to kill, and only a child of her sturdy, ancient race would have survived this long. Tanahaya could imagine an enemy who might not want her to reach this place and its king and queen, a mortal who hated Tanahaya’s people and meant to keep her away at all costs, but how could such a person have known she was coming? It reminded her of Sijandi and his still unknown fate. Surely in such dangerous times Lord Jiriki and Lady Aditu would never have told anyone about her mission but those they trusted most. But even if one of Tanahaya’s own kind wanted her dead for some incomprehensible reason, why would they give that task to mortals?
During her moments of respite from the arrow-fever, thoughts like these swam through her head like startled fish; but those interludes of sense were growing less frequent. Tanahaya knew if something did not change soon, she would lose this fight.
? ? ?
When she thrashed her way up from the darkness the next time, it was to find a face hanging over her, a young mortal woman, features pinched tight with fear and her hands pulled tight against her breast for fear she might accidentally touch the sick creature lying in the bed.
“Get . . . healer . . .” was all Tanahaya could say. “Need . . . healer . . .”
The woman stared at her in horrified fascination for a moment. Tanahaya realized she had spoken in her own tongue, not in the common speech of mortals. She tried again. “Bring . . . the healer.”
That was all the strength she had. The dark, the heat, and the rot reached out and dragged her back down into boiling black depths.
“Why do you put water on plants, Aunt Tia-Lia? Why don’t they drown? I saw a mouse drown in the moat once. I couldn’t reach him, and Grandfather Osric wouldn’t help me get him out. He swam for a long time, but then he died.”
“You drink water, little Lillia, and yet you don’t drown. A little water is good for living things—in fact, it is necessary. Too much, though, is bad. Now hold that candle a little closer, please.”
The princess thought about this. “How much is too much?”
Aunt Tia-Lia was still looking at the plants, not at Lillia. “There is no single answer to that question.”
Lillia loved Tia-Lia, but she didn’t always like the answers she gave. “Can a plant drown?”