Full Circle (50 page)

“Speak your story; tell your truths; show your selves; speak and be satisfied; speak and be at rest,” he sang, his voice fully
human.

The ghosts were pressing in closer, the song drawing them, their lips working as they tried to talk, but the spell was incomplete.

Finally, Ash flung up his arms and cried “
Speak!
” on a long high note.

They spoke. It was still loud, but each voice was its own again. Acton moved from group to group, trying hard to listen, to
hear, to understand.

Each of those alive was trying to listen, understanding somehow that Saker was right: in order to repair the wrong done, the
wrong must first be understood, the pain given voice, the injustice exposed. But they could not possibly hear them all.

Safred was kneeling, her face upturned, transfigured by a kind of ecstasy as the words, the stories, the secrets, poured over
her.

A pretty girl, with the mark of a cut throat, said to Sorn:
I were ugly, ugly as an unkind word, my gran used to say
… The small beaded ghost spoke to Acton:
I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t even realise the village was being attacked, until they burst the latch like it wasn’t there
… A grey-haired man had found Bramble, whom he seemed to know, and told her:
It began on Sylvie’s roof. My hands were cold…
Maryrose, Bramble’s sister, spoke to Ranny, a half-smile on her face.
Before you were born and after the sun first shone, there was a girl
.

Zel and Flax, where were they? He found them finally, at the back of the crowd, listening to an older woman who strongly resembled
Zel. Their mother? Zel spoke to both her and Flax:
Murder’s an ugly word, don’t never doubt that. But it’s a solid one, like a stone in your hand
. Saker stood next to her, attentively.

He found Doronit. She’d been waiting for him:
It’s true my parents were Travellers by blood, but they were as settled as can be by nature
. He listened to her story with horror and pity, and held her hand as her throat constricted with grief and she found it hard
to go on. Understanding her, at last, he found a way to love her with a father’s love, with sorrow. So much grief, all around
him. So much anger, so many lives cut short.

Da came round the back of the milking shed in the middle of the morning
, a girl said to Thegan’s sergeant.

There were fishers on the bank
, Cael said to Gabra, and Gabra’s eyes were intent.

Ash found Acton listening to an older woman who smiled at him as though he were the centre of the world. She was dressed in
ancient style. Was she his mother?
The women stay in the women’s quarters. Yes, of course
, she said, ironically.

An old woman in animal skins grabbed his arm, the cold sliding through his muscles.
Listen to this one
, the River said sharply, so he focused on her bright eyes and listened hard.
My Aunty Lig was one of three sisters, as her mother had been, and her mother before her
, she started, and he took it all in, open-mouthed. The wrath of the Fire god! he realised, astonished, and wondered what
the River would do if he rejected her.
I do not kill my lovers
, She said, amused.
They never leave me
.

Ash turned and noticed Baluch standing with a woman who carried a crutch; they both listened to a small man with a weak chin
who faced them half-defiantly, half-ashamed:
I’d do it again. Even having to kill her, I’d do it again
.

What good was it? Where was the use? I had served, worked, been loyal
—
for what?
Merroc knelt by a fair woman in her forties and, astonishingly, cried.

They were all listening, with Safred in the centre. So many stories.

In the end, we are animals, and all we can touch is flesh
.

I always wanted to be beautiful, like my little sister, Osyth. She had that Traveller kind of beauty, dark and elegant and
lithe
.

There’s no saying what will happen next. That’s what I learnt, that summer, that winter, watching her change
.

A stonecaster walked up to Ash, pouch hanging at his belt, a man with no hair at all and no eyebrows, with terrible burn marks
down one side of him. He noted the pouch at Ash’s belt and weighed his own pouch in his hand.

The desire to know the future gnaws at our bones
, he said, and Ash listened.

T
HE STORIES
flowed out of them like honey, like vinegar, like wine and water and vitriol.

So much grief. So much joy. So many questions unanswered. Safred knelt still through it all, drinking it in. Around the circle,
the living humans also sank to their knees under the weight of the emotions pouring out around them. Most cried, or clutched
their chests in shared pain, or sighed yearningly for those lost, long ago.

Some stories were longer than others, so that the voices fell out one by one until the last drifted to a close:
I wished the tanner was still alive so I could try his spell one more time
…” It was Osyth. Zel and Flax were next to her, listening hard, tears on their cheeks, and as she finished she reached
out to them and they went to her as babies go to their mothers, with trust and love.

Acton touched Bramble gently on the shoulder, the cold sliding through her and settling her. Then he stepped forward to Safred
and helped her up. She stumbled, white and unsteady, but her face was full of a kind of joy, of completion.

“I have them all,” she said in wonder. “I was empty and now I’m full.”

Baluch moved next to Acton, took the knife from his own belt, and poised it over his hand. Acton hesitated. He shot a look
at Ash, as if to ask for guidance, and then squared his shoulders. She had seen him do that once before, when he spoke to
the Moot as a young man. He had convinced his audience then; would he be able to now?

Saker waited; he looked exhausted. Bramble prayed that Acton would find the right words.

“I am Acton, Lord of War,” Acton said, and in his own voice his words were strong, and her throat tightened. “I have heard
you. I acknowledge the truth of your lives. And I say: What was done to you was wrong. What you have suffered should not have
happened. What you have witnessed should never have occurred. What you have lost —” His voice faltered, as if he were remembering
the many stories he had heard. “Those you have lost should have remained with you. And I say to you: Whatever I have done
to make these things happen, I regret from the depth of my heart. From the centre of my soul, I am sorry.”

Some wept softly, some looked to the ground, others away, as if his words had unlocked a part of themselves that had been
separated for a long time.

Then Acton glanced at Baluch and he moved forward. “I am Baluch, second to the Lord of War,” he said, his singer’s voice reaching
out like sunlight. A buzz of amazement went through the crowd.

“I was part of the landtaken and I regret my actions. I acknowledge my guilt and offer blood for blood in reparation.” He
hesitated. “I have killed others, of my own people, in defence of the Lake, and to those, too, I offer reparation. I offer
myself as symbol of repentance.”

He brought down the knife and cut the back of his hand, then held it out. Acton stood behind him, unmoving, his hand on Baluch’s
shoulder, so that they were offering tribute together.

One by one, they came and took blood. A few drank, but most simply touched.

One of the ghosts, the one Ash had called Doronit, hesitated for a while, until Ash went over to her.

“There’s a new stone in this bag, remember,” he said, showing her his stone pouch. “It says Evenness. Fairness. Say what you
think.”

She made a face at needing his help, but she spoke, “You think it means what?”

“I think the world is changing.”

“The world is always changing, and rarely for the better,” she said, with a shadow of charm. But she moved forward, and touched
her hand to Baluch’s, and smeared her face with his blood.

There were so many.

The whine started almost too low to hear. It crept into Bramble’s head, slightly, very slightly, louder with each ghost that
took blood. She shook her head to try to clear it, but the sound kept on, a high unpleasant vibration, like very loud screaming,
very far away. She saw that Safred, Martine and Ash heard it too.

Baluch began to grow pale, and Ash and Martine rolled a rock over for him to sit on.

Bramble wasn’t sure what she had expected — perhaps that as each ghost took the blood, it would fade, as ghosts did after
a quickening. That didn’t happen. They merely took their places back in the circle, and waited with inhuman patience.

The noise, now, was loud enough to give her a headache. Then, at the corner of her eye, she seemed to see movement, but when
she turned her head there was nothing there. She walked over to Safred and Martine. Ash joined them, his hands at his ears.

“Can you hear that?” Bramble asked.

“It’s the soul eaters…” Safred said, her eyes white-rimmed.

Bramble went cold. This —
this
— was what the gods had feared. This was the battle they had been fighting, against a myth, a story to frighten children:
be good or the soul eaters will get you after death. If the soul eaters were here, in the land of the living, what would that
mean?

“They came when we were at Obsidian Lake,” Martine said, “but they faded once you were back.”

Bramble looked over at Baluch. The noise had started, when? When Alder had tried to kill Thegan, when the soldiers’ ghosts
had tried to kill Saker, when the ghosts had bled a captive so they would not fade.

“The dead should not kill the living,” she whispered. In the corner of her vision, shapes writhed. She let her eyes go out
of focus, and saw them more clearly: distorted human shapes, elongated or swollen almost past recognition. Repulsive, hungry
for life, for spirit, for everything that they were not.

Safred was nodding. “I think when the dead walk the land in solid bodies, and especially when the dead kill the living, the
barrier between life and death grows thinner. If it grows thin enough, they will break through.”

“What do they want?” Ash seemed paler than before, but he spoke forcefully.

“Life,” Safred said.

Martine reeled, as if she had Seen something terrible. “They want to eat,” she said. “Everything. All life. Not just humans.
Everything.”

“Once the ghosts are gone…” Bramble said. “The barrier will be strong again.”

“Baluch will die, though,” Martine whispered. She was ashen, and clung to Arvid’s hand. “That one death might be enough to
breach the wall.”

“The ceremony’s started,” Arvid said. “Can we replace him before he dies? Can I give blood?”

As one, they shook their heads. Bramble wasn’t sure why she was so certain, but she was. If this was going to work, it had
to be Acton and Baluch, the ones who had begun it all.

“We just have to hope that the barrier can take one more death,” Safred said.

When Baluch finally fainted, Acton sat on the rock, his friend’s body lying across him. He supported Baluch’s neck and laid
the bleeding hand over his own, ready for the ghosts.

The whine had grown and the shapes filled half of Bramble’s vision now, the writhing forms strangely overlaid on the real
world, as though they were a thin curtain she could see through.

The ghosts came, and kept coming, in their thousands.

The leader of Saker’s army, a ghost with beaded hair, approached last, when Baluch’s blood had almost stopped flowing.

He came reluctantly, staring at Acton, and stood over Baluch but did not reach for him. His face was impossible to read, emotions
changing on it rapidly.

Ash took pity on him. “Speak,” he said gently.

“I swore revenge for the death of my wife,” he said. “I thought she’d wait for me… but she hasn’t. She’s gone on.”

“Perhaps she is waiting in the darkness beyond death,” Ash said.

“I swore revenge,” he repeated, as though it were the only truth he knew.

Acton smiled mirthlessly. “One more will finish him off. Take your blood and you’ll kill the friend I held dearest in the
world. Will that satisfy you?”

The man looked into his eyes and his face calmed. “I thought revenge would be sweet.”

“So did I,” Acton replied. “But it’s like poisoned mead — sweet at first and then a spear in your vitals.”

The ghost nodded and reached out to touch Baluch’s hand; he smeared the blood across his face. “I am Owl. I release you from
your debt,” he said.

A sigh went up from the ghosts and Acton laid Baluch down, tears ice white against the paleness of his face. He knelt for
a moment beside the body, his hand on Baluch’s chest. Bramble thought of their two baby heads crowding together over a bowl
of soup, a thousand years and a lifetime away, and her throat was too tight to speak. She put a hand on Acton’s cold shoulder.

Ash came forward to Baluch and hesitated, looking at Saker.

“No,” Acton said. “Leave him be. No need to bring him back.”

Ash nodded and touched Baluch’s face, as if saying goodbye. The ghosts watched. Some even wept.

Now, Bramble thought. Now they’ll fade. But they did not, and the shrieking of the soul eaters rose higher and higher in a
triumphant scream.

N
O FORGIVENESS
,” Alder said flatly, staring at Owl in disgust. “Never.”

Saker was huddled on a rock to one side. He raised his head, slowly, exhausted, the sound in his head driving him to madness.
Of course his father would refuse. The chance to exercise power? He couldn’t resist it. Hadn’t he heard those stories? Hadn’t
he understood what they meant?

He went to his father. “We have a chance to find peace. For everyone. Justice for the future. Fairness.”

Alder sneered at him. “They’ve cozened you, boy. They’ll back out of it as soon as we’re gone and you’ll have done it all
for nothing.”