Full Circle (17 page)

“All spells are stolen from or traded for with the spirits,” she had said. “We have none of our own.”

Hope stirred his guts into turmoil. “Blood alone is not enough,” he said to the wraith.

“Blood and memory,” it howled.

“Whose blood?” Saker demanded.

“The blood of thy heart, the blood of thy heart’s enemy, what matter? Thy memory, thy army’s memory, what matter? Feed us
night and day, master. Day and night!” It shrieked with anticipated rapture and soared up in that fountain of movement he
had seen so often and feared so greatly.

His heart thumped. Blood and memory. He ran through the spell in his mind. Yes. There were always memories that flooded over
him at the start of the spell. He hadn’t realised how important they were. He smiled.

Blood and memory. A way to renew the spell — to constantly renew it.

His ghosts were beings of memory. And they would find blood. Fountains of blood.

H
E SAW
with the River’s eyes, which were not eyes at all. Every crack in the stone where water had once flowed was clear to Her;
every opening, even a sliver, where she could reach was mapped. She knew the Caverns as his father knew his flute; it was
instrument, where she sang, and home, and long familiarity.

“Smash it,” Ash said to Her. “Crack it like an egg.”

Was it asking too much, to demand that She destroy this long-held sanctuary? He and Baluch waited, breaths bated, hearts pounding,
humming the notes that asked Her to help. The answer was not in words.

She laughed. It was wild, alive, unstoppable: the random, untameable force of flood let loose, delighting in destruction,
wedded to change. She laughed, and the river rose.

It swirled around them as it came, sliding intimately between their clothes and their skin, tinglingly cold, pushing them
but never so hard they were unbalanced. She curled past them, the current strengthening, the quiet flow of the river turning
to rushing power, aimed like a spear at the crack where the river disappeared into the cavern wall. Like a spear, like a wedge
for chopping hardwood, like the axe itself.

She did not let the river flow too widely as the rock resisted: it built up in a straight line, a long column of water banked
only by air and Her will, far above the rocks. The water pounded in waves into the slit, against the far wall, over and over.
Sound buffeted them, and Ash could faintly hear the stone figures screaming.

She laughed again as the rock resisted, and some power in the rock also, in the Cavern itself, whatever power kept the spirits
from rebirth. He could sense it: this was the power of stone itself, as She was the power of water. The water sprites were
hers and were like her, beautiful and dangerous. The delvers belonged to the earth, and were like it, unforgiving and irresistible.
Except to water.

Ash could feel the battle building as tingling under his skin, across his hair, which stood on end.

“Give me your strength,” She said, and although he thought She didn’t really need it, not for this battle, it was his battle,
and so it was right that She take strength from him. As he had helped Safred when she was healing Bramble, he sent support
to her in a way he didn’t understand. She relished it and grew stronger, wilder, the river rising higher and pounding more
heavily until he felt, then heard, then saw the rocks at the end of the Cavern split apart like halves of a walnut and sunlight
dive in, blinding them all, and rocks tumbled and danced and leapt and shattered, hurting his ears.

“Thank you,” he said to Her.

The earth rumbled, a mixture of anger and defeat as the River sighed, “It’s an old battle. I always win.”

In the same moment, the stone figures cried out, throwing up hands and paws and tails in defence against the light.

As the sun hit the stone figures, they began to dissolve into the same slurry of water and rock that had come off Ash’s boots
when the weasel had let him go. Only bones were left as the stone melted away, some human, some animal. The weasel had really
been a weasel, by the sinuous backbone, but one of normal size. The ox was a skeleton, but flesh still covered the old woman’s
bones. Bramble knelt beside her, supporting her head. It seemed that her body hadn’t decayed before the Caverns had taken
her.

Through the tears in his eyes from the harsh light, Ash could see she was younger than the stone had made her look, not much
older than Bramble, with long blonde hair and fine clothes, the kind an officer’s wife might wear. Around her waist, where
simple women wore a belt, she had a sash embroidered with two names entwined: Brea and Calin. It was a marriage belt, sewn
by an officer’s daughter for her wedding.

“How did she end up here?” Ash marvelled.

“Unluckily,” Bramble said. She bent and picked the body up easily and laid it out on a rock, smoothing the eyelids and crossing
the hands over the chest. There was, surprisingly, no smell except that of chalk and water. She stepped back and bowed her
head. “Brea, may you not linger on the roads, may you not linger in the fields. Time is, and time is gone.”

“Time is, and time is gone,” Ash and Medric said.

“May you find friends, may you find those you loved,” Bramble said. “Time is, and time is gone.”

“Time is, and time is gone,” Baluch joined in.

“We have no rosemary, but remember us. We have no evergreen, but may our memories of you be evergreen. Time is, and time is
gone.”

“Time is, and time is gone,” all of them said, except Acton. Perhaps, Ash thought, his people had had a different ceremony.

Ash began to gather rocks, to cover the girl over, but Bramble stopped him.

“No,” she said. “Let her lie in sunlight.”

So they left the body laid out on its rock, bathed in the white sunlight of early morning, and made their way out.

The river had sunk to its earlier level but it was still a hard, slippery climb over the rocks and out. They were huge, great
slabs of limestone that shifted as they put weight on them, and settled into new positions with no more than a gentle push.

It took them until the sun was high above to reach the peak of the rock pile and all that time the River was silent in Ash’s
head. When he balanced on the topmost rock and looked out, he thought he understood why. She had carved out half a mountain
to free them — the scar of the Cavern’s collapse cut across acres of steep ground. The cavern river now cascaded down the
mountain to join a larger river at the base. The White River? Bramble had said it was near.

The power involved… He shook a little. This had happened because he had asked for it.

“You’ll pay for it, in time,” Baluch said quietly, and it took Ash a moment to realise that he meant it literally, that he
would pay with time, his own time, as Baluch had done. Ash shivered and wondered when he would have to start paying. He didn’t
want to leave everyone he knew just yet.

“No town here, thank the gods,” Bramble said as she looked out beside him. She put her hand on his shoulder. “You have power,
Ash.”

“Not my power,” he said.

W
E START
out different, but we end at the same place.

So my mother would say to me after a funeral, after the stone had been rolled back over the burial cave. But it seems to me
we come to the same place earlier than that, no matter what our life is like, no matter if we are rich or poor or loved or
unloved.

We come to the place where we first meet Lady Death face to face and decide whether or not to take her as ally.

There were two of us; and on the surface we were alike, Linde my cousin, and I. Born the same year, within days of each other.
Grown up the same — we could wear each other’s clothes, and did, and from the back no one could tell us apart, for we both
had the same wheat-coloured locks, and we dressed each other’s hair in the knot of plaits they call the Maiden’s Prayer. From
the front — well, Linde was always prettier than I was, no doubt, but her figure wasn’t as good, so I got the boys who looked
at a girl’s body and she got the ones who looked at her face. That did not trouble me. When a boy looked at my breasts and
started breathing fast, I felt strong and alive, heady with power. It was the only power I could recognise in myself, then.
One who has no right to make choices has no real power, and I had no such right about anything more serious than how to braid
my hair.

Our fathers were twins, officers to the warlord, both of them, as their father and father’s father had been. Their lands adjoined.
They had built their houses on the edges of their lands so they could be close together, and so Linde and I and our brothers
and sisters grew up in two houses, and both of them were home.

Officers’ daughters don’t choose their husbands. There’s more to marriage than four legs in a bed, my grandmother told me.
Your task is to make alliances for this family that will keep us safe and strong, that’s your life’s work, she said.

And my mother nodded, warmly, because she’d been sent off halfway across the Domains to marry my father, to cement an alliance
between our family and Cliff Domain. “Love doesn’t count when you measure it against family and children and safety and loyalty
and strength,” she said. She touched my plaits, gently. “And you must trust your father to choose you a good husband, as mine
did.”

I smiled. It was a byword around the Domain, how my parents loved each other. I realise now that that was a bad thing for
me. It brought me up to expect better than I was ever likely to get, being portioned off for strategic purposes as all girls
must be.

At least I was not ugly, I thought, and
would
get married, unlike my aunt Silv, who was hare-lipped and squint-eyed and kept mostly to the kitchen and the linen closet.
No one had even tried to find her a husband.

Linde went first. My uncle found her a young one, an auburn-haired officer from Western Mountains Domain, one of the warlord’s
officers who lived at the fort. Cenred, the warlord, was old and this officer was one of his son’s best friends, so it was
a good marriage. The bridegroom’s name was Aden, and he came, blushing, to collect her.

“How you’re going to miss her!” the aunts all said, because Linde and I spent all our time together, though we fought like
water sprites when their backs were turned. We lived a layered life, she and I. On top, we were the good girls, the obedient,
friendly, happy girls. Underneath, there was more going on and always had been.

We’d decided to do it that way one afternoon when we’d both been sent to Linde’s room for pulling each other’s hair. We can’t
have been more than seven or eight.

Linde climbed up to the wall slit and looked out into the golden autumn afternoon. “It’s not worth it,” she said. “Fighting
with you isn’t worth missing nut-gathering for.”

I agreed with her.

“We shouldn’t do it,” she said. “We shouldn’t fight in front of them.”

“I don’t like you,” I said.

“I don’t like you either,” she snapped back. “But they don’t have to know that.”

It was a new idea to me, the idea of deceit, but Linde had been lying a long time. That was one of the reasons we fought —
she put the blame on me for things she’d done. I saw a way to stop that. I remember feeling very clever and crafty at that
moment, satisfied with myself, as young children are sometimes.

“I’ll stop fighting in front of them if you stop getting me into trouble,” I said.

She considered it, then slid down off the chest she was standing on and came over to me. She spat in her hand and held it
out to me. I spat in mine and we sealed the bargain. And from then, we were known as best friends, the best in the world,
though we snarled and scratched at each other in private.

It was excellent practice for marriage.

Because we were always together — therefore always chaperoned — they let us have more time alone than the other girls. And
we became experts at stealing extra hours, at sneaking off and exploring the places we should not have known about. It even
bought us time truly alone, because after a while they stopped verifying our stories, and we could go off by ourselves, ready
with an alibi.

Linde found the enchanter’s house, off the road to town, back from the road up a narrow drive lined with yew trees.

Freite, her name was, and she was dark haired but not a Traveller, because Travellers have pale skin and she was brownish,
like someone from the Wind Cities. So we were unsure of the etiquette when she invited us in. A Traveller we would have scorned.
But an exotic like Freite…

We drank cha with her in a lavish room full of carpets and cushions, with glass winking from shelves. There was more glass
than I had ever seen in one place, more than the warlord had in his hall.

Linde was fascinated. Here was a woman who owned her own house, a woman who, she told us, made her own decisions. A woman
of power. It was hard to know how old she was but I thought,
old
, though her face was unlined.

Linde wanted all the kinds of power there were, but Freite just smiled when she asked questions. It was like she was fishing
for something, like she was using Linde to get something she wanted, but it wasn’t Linde. She wasn’t interested in Linde,
though my cousin couldn’t see that truth. She wanted me.

Half a dozen times she made a move as if to touch me — not as a man would touch, for pleasure, but just a gesture. A pat on
the arm to get my attention, say, or reaching to brush a hair away from my collar. I pulled back, each time, sure somehow
that no good would come of a touch from her. Her eyes grew angrier and darker as the time went on and I became nervous.

“We must get back,” I said to Linde, but she was headstrong as ever and concentrated on getting this woman to reveal something
— anything — about how she had come to this marvelous position, of being on her own, with wealth of her own, with no man to
control her.

I stood up and said firmly, “We must go now.”