Exile's Children (49 page)

He said, “Flysse, I'd ask that you wed me.” He was surprised the sentence came out so clear, so definite. He was not quite sure from where it came.

She said, “Arcole, I will,” and stepped forward, out of the shadow that hid her face so that he could see her smile, which was bright with happiness and solemn in equal measure.

He moved toward her and this time she did not bid him back, but raised her arms to embrace him. He thought he had never been kissed like that before. Certainly he had never been in this situation before, and even as a part of him wondered what he did and where it should lead, another told him this was what he wanted.

The card was turned now, but he knew the stakes were changed. It was strange, how happy he felt.

Into her hair he murmured, “So, what
do
we do now?” Adding quickly, “I'd not besmirch your honor, but how do we go about this?”

The card turned, the step taken, he'd delay no longer than he must. Her kisses were sweet and full of promise—more, almost, than he could bear—and could he have her only in wedlock, then he'd turn that key soon as was possible.

She said, “We must go to Benjamyn, ask him. He then approaches the master for permission. Is that granted, a priest comes here to perform the ceremony.”

“You've ascertained all this, eh?” He could not help but chuckle. “Were you so confident, then?”

She leaned back against his arms to look him in the eye and blushed prettily. “Not confident,” she said, and smiled. “But hopeful.”

“God, woman,” he laughed, “you surely do speak plain.”

“Would you have me otherwise?” she asked.

Arcole shook his head and said, “No, Flysse, I'd not. I'd have you just as you are.” Which was the truth, and quite unexpectedly prompted him to answer that unspoken question he had earlier avoided: “I love you—just as you are.”

It was, he realized, an honest declaration; or, at least, as honest as he was capable of. He was not sure precisely what love was, but if it meant such feelings as he entertained at the thought of losing her to another, or seeing her each day knowing he could not have her, then, yes, he loved her. If it meant this exhilaration he felt holding her, at the thought of their being together nightly, then, yes, he loved her. But if it meant staying with her, both their lives lived out as servants of Andru Wyme, indentured until death freed them, then—he must admit—he was not sure. He could not forsake his dream of escape. He could not tell her that, nor yet feel confident of sharing his dream. The guilt he felt at that surprised him, and if such guilt was a part of love, then again yes, he loved her.

Perhaps he would tell her. Likely, when they shared a room, it would be impossible to hide it from her. He decided he would wait, like any canny gambler, and see how the cards fell.

For now, with Flysse in his arms, he felt too happy to entertain such troubling thoughts for long.

Winter came early to the mountains. The valley lay under a mantle of snow that shone bright in the light of a sun that granted no warmth. The stream froze and Arrhyna must hack through the ice to obtain fresh water. Rannach had constructed a shelter for the horses and kept a fire burning close by their enclosure, lest the wolf winds that came howling out of the mountains freeze them where they stood. What hunting he did now was done afoot, trekking laboriously through deep drifts to set traps for snowhares and whatever other creatures ventured out under the White Grass Moon, or huddling cold amongst the trees to put an arrow in an unwary deer come foraging down from the high slopes. At least it was fresh meat to augment the supplies he'd built up against the cold moons, but he could not help thinking that buffalo meat should be better, taken in the warm moons and stored ready for the cold. He could taste it, when he thought about it: the rich, fatty taste of ribs and haunches roasted over the embers of the campfire, the lodges of the Commacht all around, secure in the Wintering Ground. The men would be working on bridles and arrows, lances and shields; the women weaving blankets or softening the hides of buffalo and deer for tentcloth and clothing, sewing beads. He remembered the last winter in the lodges of his clan, when he had talked with Bakaan and the others of the spring's Matakwa and how he would claim Arrhyna for his bride.

Now he had his wish—Arrhyna
was
his wife—but he had never
thought it should be like this, the two of them all alone in the white wilderness of the valley. He worried about her: that she missed her parents, the company of other women, her moods. She seemed mostly content, but there were times when she grew sharp, her tongue cutting, and he did not understand those. Neither did he understand why Colun and Marjia no longer visited. Save … He dismissed that thought. Surely they could not be slain; surely the Grannach could not be defeated by the invaders. Surely the Maker would not allow that. For if he did, then Arrhyna was in terrible danger, and Rannach hated such ominous brooding. He pushed it aside and took the hare from the trap.

Three in one morning—a good catch. Enough that he felt justified in returning to Arrhyna; so he slung the carcass with the others on his belt and turned back toward their lodge, less needfully than only to see her and touch her and know her safe. He had done all he could, banished as he was, to make her life comfortable. Their lodge was warm and he had an ample supply of wood set by, no less sufficient meat. There were deer hides and the pelts of rabbits for winter clothing. They had furred boots and hardy garments to see them through the cold moons, and the stream still held sluggish fish for the hooking. But yet there was something about his wife that troubled him, as if sometimes she was about to speak of some momentous thing but then held back and kept it from him. He did not properly understand that, nor her appetite, which was large.

He supposed he did not much understand women; and they were, anyway, in strange circumstances. But he would have welcomed conversation with his mother, or with Marjia, that he might know better how to please and satisfy his wife. But his mother was far distant and forbidden him on pain of death, and Marjia … Marjia was not there, nor any sign of her coming.

The snowshoes he'd made crunched against the frozen crust. Lonely ravens clustered on the branches behind, optimistic that he left some tidbit. Overhead, the sky burned steely, like metal in flame save it was only cold, and when he looked to where the Maker's Mountain stood, the peak glittered, a blinding white pinnacle defiant of observation.

He was banished from Ket-Ta-Witko, promised death did he return to the lodges of his clan: this valley was all his world now, and Arrhyna, and he must be content with that. Which, mostly, he was; only sometimes he wondered how the Commacht fared, and missed Bakaan's jokes and Hadustan's laughter and Zhy's solemn comments. Even his father's stern face.

But he had Arrhyna: he smiled as he saw her.

She sat beneath the raised entry flaps of the lodge. The outside fire
burned bright before her, and her hands moved deft over a hide, one of the needles Marjia had gifted her sparkling as she wove beads into the skin.

“What are you making?” he asked, even as she looked up and said, “Three hares, eh? Good hunting, husband.”

He dropped the hares and bent to kiss her. She said, “A shirt. For you to wear when the New Grass Moon rises.”

“Not until then?” he asked.

“It's deerhide,” she said. “Until then, it will not be warm enough.”

He smiled and sat beside her; set to gutting the hares. “Shall I wear it to the Matakwa?” he laughed, then stopped. “What's that?”

“What?” Arrhyna glanced up from her needlework.

“That sound.” He looked from the open flaps of the lodge along the valley. “Like distant thunder.”

The sky was all steely, neither quite blue nor gray, but colored at some midpoint between. There was no sign of any storm, neither clouds building nor lightning flashing, but when Arrhyna cocked her head and concentrated, she heard it—a faraway rumbling as if rocks moved, or some great force wended through the mountains.

She said, “I don't know.”

It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It was like the sound of the migrating herds, when the buffalo ran in all their glory and the earth shook under their hooves. But there were no buffalo here.

“Perhaps the Grannach move the mountains,” Rannach joked.

Arrhyna thought it a poor jest. She looked to where the Maker's Mountain loomed, but that great peak stood silent and immobile.

“Or an avalanche,” he said.

Arrhyna wondered if he entertained the same doubt, the same fear, she felt—that the sound was of no natural making but something else. But if he did, he kept the thought from her. Nor was she prepared to voice it, as if the saying of it might flesh out the fear, so they both held silent and only listened to the distant rumbling.

He could still not understand how he lived: he ate nothing, he drank only the snow that melted in his mouth. He had fallen down over rocks that should have shattered him, and into snowdrifts that buried him and should have held him frozen until the spring thaw, and dug his way out and found handholds where none existed with hands that no longer contained any feeling. He could only assume the Maker wished him to live and so kept him alive.

And so he went on, unthinking—driven by that memory of the
flame-voice that burned inside him and somehow sustained him—down the cliffs and the precipices, across the deep-drifted ravines and the fragile ice bridges, down to where the People were, knowing now that all were the People—the clans of Ket-Ta-Witko and the Grannach and the poor, lost Whaztaye, and all the other folk of all the other parceled worlds that were the Maker's creation, and all as important as each other and all threatened by the Breakers who would rend and destroy that fine fabric of coexistence, even those strange ones from the other world or time that he had glimpsed in his revelatory dreaming. And he was the only one in all the worlds to know, which was a terrible duty and a burden he labored under and would have cast off, save if he did, then all the Maker's creations must come unraveled and be destroyed, and he be as guilty as the Breakers for that undoing.

So he fought his way through snow-filled valleys, where the white powder caked his face and sometimes overtopped his head so that he must tunnel like some snow mole, and he walked over the ice that encased rivers, and through it when it lay too thin to support his weight. And he felt neither the cold nor any hunger, but burned with purpose, intent only on bringing that dread word which he could not be sure any would heed or believe. He did not sleep: it was as if the Maker shifted his limbs and drove him on, a container of purpose or a messenger, cursed.

And he came down from the holy mountain to where the Grannach lived and they found him there, moving like a blind horse through the wastes, driving only onward so that they must hold him and pin him down as they looked to minister to him, not knowing how any man so wasted could be alive.

“Is
he alive?” Colun stared disbelievingly at the emaciated body. The Morrhyn he remembered was a hale man, tall and sturdy, with a head of thick, dark hair. This poor fellow was gaunt as a desiccated corpse, all jutting bones and sharp angeles, his hair the color of snow. Was he truly Morrhyn, then he looked as the wakanisha surely would after he had been dead some little time. “Where did he come from?”

“We found him out on the snow,” Nylj said. “He cried out and collapsed when we approached. I think he's blind.”

Marjia knelt close, then glanced up. “He lives, though the Maker alone knows how. Look at him! He's starved.”

“I do not understand this.” Colun scratched a leathery cheek. “He looks like Morrhyn, but surely Morrhyn is with his clan.”

“Be he Morrhyn or some other unfortunate, he still needs care.”
Marjia rose, bustling past the curious menfolk to call the women to her. “See he's wrapped in warm blankets and build up that fire. Prepare broth.”

Colun grunted, still intent on the skeletal figure. It was Morrhyn, he decided—the angle of those sunken cheeks, that ax-blade nose, those were Morrhyn's. But what in the Maker's name was the Commacht Dreamer doing here, and where had he come from? It was a mystery he supposed would be answered if the man lived—which, were he frank, seemed unlikely—and one he could have done without. The Maker knew, there were mysteries and troubles enough in these dark days.

He tugged at his beard as the women brought heated blankets and Marjia set to stirring the broth. There was little enough food and, despite their losses, too many Grannach to eat it. He let his eyes wander over the cavern, thinking they already had wounded enough to tend, and felt the darkness cloud his soul. It was no consolation to know his fears proven true, to know he had been right and the others wrong. The outcome was too dismal.

His people had debated as the invaders continued their advance, and long before any conclusion was reached, the strangelings had come deep into the mountains. They had swarmed into the high passes like some vast ant army, pushing remorselessly forward to sweep the defending Grannach from their path as a storm wind blows away chaff. The only unity the Grannach had reached was the agreement that the western tunnels be all sealed, but by then it was too late, for the invaders came in by the lesser entrances and the high, secret ways, and the Grannach were sealed up as he had prophesied, like frightened rabbits in their warrens.

Too many had died, and too many more acted foolishly. Janzi and Gort had sealed their families in the ancestral caves, and for all Colun knew, they remained there, likely to starve. Daryk had died fighting the invaders as they came into the Basanga caverns, and scarce a hundred of his family had survived to flee to the Javitz: sad refugees in their own mountains. Menas, at least, had shown some sense at last and come with all his Katjen to join Colun's folk, but too late. Menas had been wounded, his side pierced by a lance, and was dead now. His last words had been a plea that his family accept Colun's leadership, and that Colun protect them as his own.