In Stone's Clasp (12 page)

The sun was setting by the time the women emerged from the stonesteaming hut. Before she left, Kevla placed her hands on the stones and heated them again. The men would be coming, to take their turn in the stonesteaming hut, and she wanted to make sure their experience was as pleasant as hers had been.

Kevla felt marvelous after several sessions of sitting in the hot steam, and then plunging into the refreshing coldness of the snowbanks. She had not realized how much tension she had been carrying in her body until she had been able to release it with the blessing of the vision, which comforted even as it confused and intrigued her, and the
hamantu.
Once the women began to trickle back toward the village, Kevla heard a whistle. Not long after that, a trail of men began coming up the forest path. There were so few of them it pained Kevla to see it.

When they reached the village, Mylikki said, “My mother enjoyed the stonesteaming as much as any of us, but she won’t want to delay the meal. I must go help her.”

She hurried into the house, closing the door behind her. Kevla watched her go.

“You look relaxed,” the Dragon said.

“I am,” she replied, happy to be able to talk to someone. “It was lovely. I do not look forward to traveling across the snow after that.”

“Let us hope our travels will be brief.”

“I do hope that.” She sighed. “I suppose I will have to learn how to walk on those poles they strap to their feet.”

“They are called
skeltha,
in case you’re wondering. It means, long sticks.”

“Ah,” said Kevla. “A simple term for a simple thing.”

“These people respect words. They know they hold power. Things are named simply, and I doubt there was much idle chatter among the women in the hut.”

“Now that you mention it, no, there wasn’t.” She looked up at the darkening sky. “Twilight. When people start fires, if they haven’t already.” It was time, again, to attempt to locate the Stone Dancer. Kevla gathered a few sticks and piled them together.

“Burn.”

They leaped into flame, and Kevla found herself smiling as the cheery red and orange warmth chased away the blue and lavender tints of the snow and twilight. She leaned toward the dancing flames and made her vision soft. “Show me the Stone Dancer.”

The fire flickered. In its depths, Kevla thought she could glimpse the outline of a face. Her heart beating faster, she leaned closer, willing the image to focus.

With shocking speed, the unclear face disappeared and Kevla found herself looking at the sole of a boot. She jerked back, feeling for an instant as if that boot was about to come crashing down on her face. Then, nothing.

A deep rumbling sound drew her attention away from the fire. The Dragon was laughing!

“Clever, clever fellow!” he gasped between peals of bone-chilling Dragon laughter. “He saw you, Kevla. He saw you trying to find him and he stamped out the fire! It seems our Stone Dancer dislikes being spied upon.”

Kevla was embarrassed, but after a moment, she also began to laugh. She supposed if she didn’t know what was going on, a strange face appearing in the fire would alarm her, too.

“I doubt I’ll get another chance, if he’s wary of my face in the fire. We’ll have to try to find him some other way,” she said. “I will see if I can help Gelsan. It has not been so long since I worked in the kitchens. Perhaps I can assist her.”

“You must be careful, Kevla,” the Dragon said, surprising her. “You want them to like you and trust you, but they must not regard you as an underling.”

She smiled sadly. “A woman who calls flame with a thought is more to be feared than despised. A night chopping vegetables or seasoning a stew will not cost me respect.”

“Perhaps not,” said the Dragon. “But there are those who might not understand.”

“These people are better than that,” Kevla said with certainty. She entered Gelsan’s house, easing the door open and stepping to a small table where the headwoman and her daughter were chopping what Kevla realized were dried vegetables. She pointed at the vegetables and pretended to cut them.

Gelsan seemed pleased at the offer. “Certainly. Cut them into small bits and then put them in the cauldron.”

The time passed quickly, but in silence. The Dragon had been right; the people of Lamal wasted no breath in words that served only to fill the air. After a while, Gelsan tasted the stew and pronounced it ready.

“Go round up the household,” she told Mylikki, who threw on a cloak and hat and hastened to obey. A few moments later, there were ten people seated cross-legged on the cold earthen floor of Gelsan’s hut.

Gelsan ladled the stew into bowls and passed them around. Kevla took a spoonful with a bite of meat. Her eyes widened. It was all she could do not to spit it out. Gamey, stringy, tough, it was the most unpleasant thing she had ever eaten. She chewed determinedly and got the bite down. Sipping the broth, she found it weak and flavorless. She glanced around surreptitiously and saw that everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves. They ate in silence, but they ate happily. If winter had indeed lasted for an entire year, then this must be a feast to them. She recalled how painfully thin the women seemed to her in the stonesteaming hut, and wondered how much longer they cold survive with no end to winter in sight.

Willing her stomach not to reject the food, Kevla took another bite. It would not do to insult her host, and she was sure she needed the nourishment regardless of how bad it tasted. Others went back for seconds, even thirds. Gelsan had prepared a generous amount, but even so, there was nothing left in the cauldron by the time the meal was over.

“Now it is time for some entertainment, to honor our guest,” Gelsan said. She nodded to Mylikki, who leaped to her feet and went to a corner of the room. Gelsan indicated that Kevla should sit with the others on the benches that lined the room. Mylikki returned, carrying something that Kevla presumed was an instrument.

It appeared to be made out of the same black and white wood that the houses were constructed of. Small pegs were inserted along its length, and though it was too dark to see, she assumed there were strings of some sort running down it. Mylikki sat on a small stool and put the instrument in her lap.

With the first few brushes of Mylikki’s fingers along the strings, Kevla felt a chill inside her. It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. Clear and sweet and haunting, bright and metallic-sounding somehow, it seemed the perfect instrument to have been created in this place.

It sounds like snow,
she thought.

Mylikki played for a time, weaving a web of sound about them all. Kevla barely breathed, hanging on every note produced by the strange instrument. After a while, Mylikki began to sing. Her voice was pure and clear, like the stars Kevla had seen in the night sky, but the song was not a sweet one.

Kevla gasped, and more than one fair head turned to stare at her.

Shadow.
The Shadow that was destined to come and challenge the Dancers. The Shadow that twice before had been defeated, but twice before had won. The Shadow that had erased whole worlds as if they had never been.

She dreaded what words would come from Mylikki’s lips next.

Again, Mylikki sang the chilling chorus. For the first time since she had been given her powers of fire, Kevla felt cold.

Something about this song was familiar to Kevla, something more than just the mention of the Shadow. Had not Jashemi mentioned a previous lifetime when he was a beggar boy, standing next to a
khashima
whose pregnant daughter had gone mad?

This last verse proved it. Her mind was beginning to translate for her; she somehow knew that
queen
meant
khashima,
that
castle
indicated a Great House. This could not be a coincidence.

The song unfolded, chilling in its depiction of utter despair: the food had run out, the well had gone dry. Torches were lit in a defiant, futile effort to keep the Shadow at bay.

Tears filled Kevla’s eyes. She knew that all the characters in this song had once lived, once breathed, once loved.

Including Jashemi.

The sound of the instrument, snowlike and bright, faded into silence itself. Kevla applauded politely with the rest, but as Mylikki launched into a lively song about a hunter and a farmer’s wife, her thoughts were not on the bawdy lyrics.

One thought pounded in her head.

Someone in this land was a Lorekeeper, and she had to find out who.

Kevla did not pay much attention to the rest of the stories or songs that were performed. Others drifted in during the night, and Gelsan had passed around a sweet, powerful wine made from fermented honey. After the final song, Gelsan rose and offered Kevla the hospitality of her house. Kevla realized that the ten who had joined her for dinner all planned to sleep here, on the raised areas that extended from the walls. At the House of Four Waters she had slept in a single room in the company of many women, but never with men. She knew her eyes widened.

She pointed outside. “Dragon,” she said, and hoped that Gelsan would understand.

The headwoman nodded her fair head. “You want to be with your friend,” she said. “Do you need a fur or blanket?”

Kevla was about to refuse, but then thought that a fur between her and the wet ground would be pleasant. She nodded, and selected one. It was thick and brown, but she could not identify what kind of animal it had once belonged to.

As she left, she caught Mylikki’s eye and waved her to follow. Mylikki looked puzzled, but grabbed her cloak and accompanied Kevla. They trudged out into the snow to stand before the Great Dragon. He had curled up into a ball and was breathing steadily, little puffs of smoke curling from his nostrils into the frosty air. At their approach, he uncurled and stretched like a mammoth cat.

“Dragon, Mylikki sang a song this evening about a queen standing alone, watching the Shadow come,” Kevla said. Mylikki’s head whipped around. “There were lines of the song that sounded familiar—like what
he
told me. I think there are Lorekeepers here.”

“I understood you!” Mylikki exclaimed. “Some of what you said, anyway.”

“You are beginning to open to this language,” said the Dragon. “Good.”

“If we can find the Lorekeepers, they might be able to help us,” Kevla continued.

“Help? Help you with what?” Mylikki asked. She seemed excited that Kevla was learning to speak her language.

“Mylikki, who wrote that song that you performed? Did you compose it?”

Mylikki’s pretty face furrowed in a frown. “What about the song?”

“Kevla wants to know if the song was an original composition,” the Dragon said. Kevla sighed; apparently her grasp of this new language was still spotty.

“
Fighting Back the Shadow?
That’s a very old song indeed,” Mylikki said, dashing Kevla’s hopes. “Several hundred years old, at least. I don’t know who wrote it. It’s rare because it’s a song sung by a woman; most of the compositions told by a narrator are male. And a woman of great power, too.”

“Gelsan has power,” Kevla said.

This was apparently a simple enough sentence, for Mylikki replied, “Only because the men are gone.” She fell abruptly silent, gathering her thick cloak more tightly about her frame and glancing up at the overcast sky. She turned to Kevla, her face a dim white smudge in the darkness. “Let us not speak of this at night,” she said, almost pleading. “In the morning. We will tell you everything in the morning.”

Impulsively Kevla reached to squeeze Mylikki’s arm through the cloak. “We have much to tell you in the morning as well,” she told her new friend. She watched as Mylikki trudged through the snow back to the smoky warmth of Gelsan’s small house.

“Something haunts them,” Kevla said.

The Dragon nodded. “Something is very wrong with their world. Of course they are haunted.”

Kevla shivered, but not from cold. She spread the fur next to the Dragon, and when she sat on it, it sank into the snow, making a little hollow. Kevla leaned against the warm strength of her friend, her hand reaching to caress the smooth scales.

Kevla awoke to the smell of cooked grains. She opened her eyes to see a bowl beside her, along with a steaming mug. She sat up carefully and reached for the morning meal, knowing what a gift it was to these people who were a few meals away from starvation. She sniffed gingerly at the mug. It smelled like tea of some kind. She took a cautious sip. It was strong and slightly bitter, but there was a generous dollop of something sweet in it. The cooked grains were also palatable.

As she lifted the mug to her lips, she turned her head slightly and almost spilled the hot liquid. Not ten feet away, every child in the village sat on the snow, staring at her and the Dragon. She smiled and waved a little at them. Uncertainly they waved back. When Kevla looked around, she saw that others were staring at the pair as well, although the adults were slightly more discreet in their ogling.

“How long have they been watching us?”

“For the last few hours, since dawn,” the Dragon replied, clearly unperturbed. “I pretended I was asleep.”

“I feel like I’m on display,” Kevla murmured, turning her attention to the meal. She ate steadily, the unknown grains hot and filling and the tea easy to drink. When she had finished, a small boy rose from where he had been unabashedly watching her to take the utensils.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling at him.

He ducked his head. “You’re welcome,” he said in a voice so soft she could barely hear him.

Kevla was not surprised to find everyone else in Gelsan’s house awake. The sleeping materials had been put away and everyone was silently finishing their bowls of grains. Kevla was greeted with smiles when she entered, but no words.

“Thank you for the meal,” Kevla said.

Gelsan stared. “You can speak our language!”

“It seems as though I can,” Kevla said, understanding the words that rolled off her tongue although she knew it was not her native language. Perhaps this, too, was part of the gift of being a Dancer. “Gelsan, I must speak with you. In private.”

Gelsan nodded, her eyes searching Kevla’s. “Help us clean up and we will talk.”

Kevla obliged, gathering up the bowls and taking them outside to be scrubbed with snow. The young man who had rashly attacked her when she had first arrived—Olar, she believed his name was—lugged out the heavy cauldron. His long yellow hair was tied back in a ponytail and fell to the middle of his back. His young body strained with the effort of hauling the iron pot. Kevla now saw a resemblance between the three she hadn’t noticed before. When Olar went back inside, she said to Gelsan, “He’s your son.”

“Yes. And grateful I am that you burned only his torch, not his flesh.”

“You must forgive him,” Mylikki said, whispering lest her brother overhear. “He tries so hard to act like a man, but sometimes he doesn’t understand how. Ever since the men—”

“Mylikki!”

Mylikki drew herself up to her full diminutive height and gave her imposing mother stare for stare. “I told Kevla we would tell her,” she said. “She deserves to know.”

“And I have much to share with you,” Kevla said. “You don’t yet know what is at stake. Why my task is so important.”

“Few things are more important to me than the well-being of my village,” Gelsan said.

“I understand. And I hope to help you.”

Gelsan sighed. “Bring in the bowls.” They returned inside. Olar knelt on the floor, trying to get the wood to catch.

“Olar, we need to be alone for a time,” Gelsan said.

He nodded his head. “Yes, Mother. I will go with Ranin and get more wood from the forest.” He looked shyly at Kevla. “Will…will the Flame Dancer heat up the stones for the hut again today?”

“Of course,” Kevla said. Olar’s young face brightened. She watched him go. “How old is he?” she asked.

“Thirteen sum—” Mylikki caught herself and smiled without humor. “We count ages by summers, but as we have not had a summer for so long it seems silly to phrase it thus. Will you help with the fire, Kevla? Olar was not able to get it going.”

“I’ll do better than that,” Kevla said. She thought about the room being warm, and it became so. “No need for the smoke.”

Gelsan shook her head. “You
taaskali
are remarkable,” she said as she pulled up a stool. She reached for a large sack and withdrew two garments and a small box. Handing one dress to Mylikki, she said, “Mylikki and I’ve mending to do. We do not have the luxury to simply sit and talk.”

Kevla nodded her understanding. The other two women fished out what looked like bone needles and sinew. For a moment Kevla watched the bone needles darting through the brightly colored fabric, and when at last she spoke, it was in a hushed voice.

“Tell me about the men,” she asked.

Gelsan inhaled swiftly. A bright spot of blood appeared on the garment. She sucked her finger for a moment. “Your words first, Fire Woman.”

“I have told you who I am. I am Kevla-sha-Tahmu, and I am the Flame Dancer. The Dragon is my Companion. You have seen the sort of power I possess. I do not know the term
taaskali,
nor what it means, but I do know that while I am unique in my particular abilities, there are others who have similar ones.”

Mylikki’s hands had stilled and she regarded Kevla with wide eyes. Gelsan kept her eyes on her work and her needle never slowed, but Kevla knew the headwoman was listening intently.

“One such is the man I seek,” continued Kevla. “He is the Stone Dancer.”

“What abilities does he have?” Mylikki’s expression had changed slightly.

“I’m not sure. But his element is earth, as mine is fire. Whatever his abilities are, they would center around that.”

Mylikki opened her flower-bud mouth to speak again, but Gelsan interrupted her. “Why do you seek him?”

Kevla suddenly realized what the older woman was thinking—that perhaps Kevla and the Dragon had come to harm this man.

“The Dragon and I need his help,” she replied.

“For what?”

Instead of replying directly, Kevla seemingly changed the subject. “Your song last night,” she said to Mylikki. “You said it is an old song. It’s a story about standing against a Shadow, a Shadow that will wipe out everything in the world as if it had never been.”

Mylikki nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Were there any other verses? About a beggar boy, about a Dancer lying dead in the streets?”

Mylikki’s blue eyes grew enormous. “Yes, there are,” she whispered. “The song has many verses and is almost always shortened for performing. Where did you hear them?”

“I never heard that song until last night,” Kevla told her. “But I know the story behind it. I know because—because someone I knew lived that story in a life before this one. He was the beggar boy on the parapet, and I was the Dancer lying murdered in the streets.”

She had their full attention now. They stared silently at her, mouths slightly open.

“That man was called a Lorekeeper,” Kevla continued. “The Lorekeepers are the only ones who remember what has happened in the past. They find the Dancers and help them remember.”

“Dancers?” Gelsan’s voice was sharp with disbelief, but Kevla noticed that she had stopped mending the garment.

“That’s what we’re called,” Kevla said. “I’m not sure exactly why.” She took a deep breath and decided to reveal everything she knew.

“I am the element of fire incarnate. The man I seek is earth. There are three others—water, air, and spirit. We five have lived four times before, fighting to protect the worlds into which we are born. We stand against the Shadow and somehow—I don’t yet know how—we try to hold it back. If we win, that world survives. If we fail, it is engulfed by the Shadow, erased as if it had never been. Twice we have won, twice lost. This is the final time—the final Dance. The fate of more than one world rests upon what we do here.”

Gelsan made a dismissive noise, but when she spoke, her voice trembled. “Kevla, forgive my disrespect, but—this sounds more like a fantastical song that a
huskaa
would perform than anything close to fact.”

“I didn’t believe it either, at first.” Kevla swallowed hard. “Someone I loved had to die before I fully understood what was happening.” It was the first time she had mentioned it to anyone since beginning her journey, and she felt the pain and guilt wash over her yet again. She fought it back.

“So that is why I need to find this man. And also any in your village who might be Lorekeepers.”

“How would we know such a thing?”

“My people didn’t know about the Lorekeepers and the Dancers, either,” Kevla said. Her mind went back to the dreams she had had, of the Dragon repeatedly breathing sheets of flame upon her in an effort to force her to acknowledge her identity. To the dreams Jashemi had had, that he had been afraid to utter. “The truth kept trying to come through in dreams the Lorekeepers had. I think whoever wrote that song was a Lorekeeper. Has anyone here mentioned troubling dreams, or visions?”

Gelsan, who had returned to her mending, grunted. “I don’t think anyone would openly speak of such things,” she said. Then, more gently, “But if it is important to you, I will ask.”

“I have told you how important it is,” Kevla replied. “And now you know whom I seek and why.”

Gelsan cleared her throat. “I do not know if this has anything to do with your—your quest. But I will tell you what has happened here. Mylikki is right—you should know.”

Kevla waited, barely breathing.

“I understand that Mylikki told you that winter has been visited upon us for over a year. We had stored enough supplies to take us through a normal winter, but quickly went through most of that. We have turned to relying almost exclusively on what we can hunt. And now even the animals are starving. The meat we thought you had come to steal—that and a few sacks of grain and dried vegetables are all we have left.

“Our hunters ranged farther and farther afield in search of food, and just…didn’t come back. Others seemed to go mad, leaving to terrorize other villages, to kill and take what they wanted. Strange storms come out of nowhere, do terrible damage, and then disappear. Women in Lamal are not men’s servants, but there are clear divisions of duties. We have had to take on the responsibilities of the men in addition to our own. We have learned to hunt, to butcher meat, to cure hides for protection against this cold that will not depart.”

Her eyes locked with Kevla’s. “This can be no natural winter. The spirits that live in the forests are silent. Dead or simply too afraid to show themselves, I do not know. We do not know if this is punishment for something we have done, or an evil spell by some powerful
taaskal,
or—” and she smiled, as if embarrassed to say so “—or if the Ice Maiden of the
huskaa’s
songs is real and is locking us in her winter. And into the midst of this you come, with your strange but welcome powers, and speaking of others like you and dreams and the end of worlds. We need your help, Kevla Flame Dancer. We need you to somehow bring back spring.”