Shadowheart (105 page)

“Barrick, that is foolishness ...”

“Do you know what is ahead for the Qar . . . and for me? Saqri, the queen of the People, is dying. She sacrificed herself so that Zosim could be defeated—dozens of arrows and rifle balls pierced her. Only her will and her love for her people keep her alive. When she is gone, half of what has kept the Qar race alive will be gone, too. Think of that, sister—when you are planning your marriage, I will be burying my queen
and
my beloved . . . !”

“Your beloved . . . ?” Briony could only stand and gape as if struck. “Who are you talking about—not that Saqri?”

“You don’t understand anything,” he said bitterly. “Come. Come and I will show you.” He beckoned Briony to follow, then led her to a side chamber where a pair of female creatures in garb like Aesi’uah’s, but whose angular shapes were less human, knelt in silence beside a makeshift bed of straw. On it, scarcely visible in the dim light of a few candles, lay a small, slender girl who could not be even as old as she and Barrick were.

“This isn’t Saqri,” she said. “This is the girl that was in the boat with you.”

He stood over the head of the bed, looking down. “Saqri is in the center of the camp, surrounded by her people. This . . . this is the only person who truly cared whether I lived or died during this entire terrible nightmare. Her name is Qinnitan. For a year she was in my dreams and in my thoughts. She was my companion, my friend, my ...” He stopped and shook himself angrily. “Now she is dying . . . and we never even spoke face-to-face. Never touched ...” He turned abruptly and walked out.

Briony stood for a moment, gazing down at the motionless girl. If she lived, it was impossible to tell. She showed no movement of breath, no sign of the animation that plays over a sleeper’s face even in quiet slumber.

Who are you?
Briony wondered.
And what were you to my brother, really? Would you have loved him? Would you have cared for him?

“How long will she live?” she asked the two Qar women, but although they both looked up at her words, neither answered.

 

“I’m sorry, Barrick,” she said when she had found him again. “I didn’t know. But that is all the more reason ...”

“Cease, Briony, I beg you.” He moved away when she would have touched his arm. “You will say it is all the more reason to cleave to the family I have, but you do not understand.
I am no longer one of you.”

“What? An Eddon . . . ?”

He laughed harshly. “Oh, I am an Eddon all right. Everywhere I go others suffer in my stead. You must know that by now. How many of the men who came with you died so that you could regain Father’s throne? How many others because the Tollys wanted it in the first place? And how many of the Qar have died because our ancestor stole Sanasu from her own family?”

A memory struck her, from the last time she had talked to their father. “There is something you must know ...”

But Barrick did not seem to hear her. “In fact, now that I think on it, the number of current victims doesn’t matter, because eventually the Qar will
all
have died because of what our family did to them. So if I can repay even a little of the debt that the Eddons owe to Saqri and Ynnir and even Yasammez, then that is what I must do.”

The memory was washed away by anger. “You speak of
Yasammez
that way? The bitch that murdered so many of our people?”

He waved his hand. “Go away, Briony—you cannot understand. We have no more to say to each other. Soon enough the Qar will be gone from here and I will go with them. You can rebuild your houses in peace—we are too few to trouble mankind again.”

“When I saw you, I wondered at how much you had changed, Barrick,” she told him. “But now I see that in the most important ways you are no different. It’s still your own sorrows you care about and no one else’s, and you still turn away from love and kindness as though it were an attack.”

Her brother’s pale face showed nothing—he seemed as unmoved as the sea itself. Briony turned and walked out of the cavern.

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

 

 

 

H
E COULD FEEL HER TRYING not to be amused, although he did not know why. The exact nature of what Saqri found funny often eluded him.
Your sister has departed. Did it not go well?

Even as she teased him with that strange indulgence she had begun to show toward him since she had been struck down, he could feel her fighting against her own growing weakness. Unlike Saqri, he was only just learning how to politely not notice things.
Don’t mock
, he told her.
I am in pain.

It was as if the closer she moved toward death, the older she became. She seemed nearly as ancient as Yasammez now.
Perhaps it’s the nearness of eternity and whatever it brings
, he thought, but did not share it with her.

When you have finished your moment with the mortal girl,
she told him,
come to me. I would like to see you with my eyes.

He stood over Qinnitan for a long while, trying not to think. Before he left he lowered himself to his knees and took her hand, but it was so limp and cold, he could not bear to hold it. He kissed it and laid it back on her breast.

 

Saqri was on a bed that Barrick had asked be made, although if the queen of the fairies had been given her way, she would have been laid on the naked rocks and covered only with her cloak.
If we are given the choice of how to die,
she had said,
we of the old ways, then we prefer the elements just as they are. It is good to learn to deal with the chill of night, because as it comes, death also blows its cold breath upon us. We learn to move less and think more.

But you aren’t being given any choice
, Barrick had told her, and so the Daughter of the First Flower was kept comfortable and warm because she was too weak to have it be otherwise.
I will not let you die here in this place,
Barrick had sworn to her.
I will return you to the People’s House.

You saw your sister,
she said.
She burns more brightly than I had guessed. She would have made a good mate for you.

Barrick could only stare at her.
That is disgusting.

She smiled at him. It was such a small wrinkle of her lips that someone watching less carefully might have missed it. “
All can be foretold,” as the Oracles say. In truth, I think you should stay with your people . . . I am sorry, Barrick Eddon—with your other people.

She went on as though he had not responded.
I meant no insult. You have earned your blood with us as well, there is no doubt. Even the smallest and most distant of the People’s clans will know about you.

Barrick didn’t care about such things—what did any kind of fame matter when the rest of his life would be little better than a long funeral procession as the Qar and their knowledge slowly died away? And at last he would die, too, either alone among a people that his family had helped destroy or as an alien in the land of his birth. Either way he would be a stranger to those around him.

Be of good cheer,
Saqri told him.
Life is short at best. Even the long span of Yasammez was a mere flicker beside the stars, and the stars too will go dark some day.

There was nothing to be said to such a blindingly joyful sentiment. Barrick nodded and turned away.

No,
she said.
Come back. Please sit beside me.

When he had seated himself, he looked at her more carefully. Saqri seemed almost translucent, like a candle that had become little more than a shell, its wick burned far down inside it. Though he knew her blood was red like his, it was not apparent from the outside just now; she seemed to be something other than flesh, like the petal of a white lily.

Why did it all happen?
he asked at last.

She did not need to ask him what he meant.
It had to, dear manchild. The balance was too precarious to last forever. When Crooked finally died, everything tumbled loose. Now our time is over.

Almost a smile again.
No, they need not lie down and die, Barrick—but our great age of blooming is over. Perhaps something will come after . . . perhaps . . . but I cannot see it. . . .

She was growing tired, he knew, and he dared not waste her strength. Still, when she was gone, there would not be another person on all the earth who would understand him.
Have I told you what I have found?

Her eyes fluttered but stayed closed.
No, tell me, manchild.

It was just like the time before he knew the full horror of his father’s illness, those days when Olin would move and talk like a man who had spent the previous days unpleasantly drunk.
Poor, blighted man. He understood what plagued him less than I do, and I still cannot fathom it all . . .
To Saqri he said,
I learned from some of the Xixian prisoners that there may still be tribes of the People living in the southern deserts and the hills—the Xixians call them Khau-Yisti. And there are tales of beings who must have some kinship to our People in the islands to the south and west of Xand as well . . .

He realized that Saqri was not listening anymore—she had fallen back into her deep, deep sleep, a retreat to a place just this side of death. Each time it was harder to draw her out, each time she returned there more quickly. Soon the other half of the Fireflower would be gone forever.

But that voice had also fallen silent.

“Elan, just speak to me. Surely that is not too much to ask from a man who has loved you as truly as I have?”

She frowned at him, but not in anger. “You know I care for you, Matt. I will always be grateful that you tried so hard to rescue me from Hendon.”

“Tried? Did!”

“Of course. For a time. But things have changed now—you must see that.”

“See what? That you are throwing me over for a dying man . . . ?”

She drew back from him. “Gailon won’t die! Back at Summerfield Court, he will have the best physicians. He can’t die! The gods would not let such a miracle occur only to snatch it away!”

After the past weeks, Matt Tinwright had a different view of what sort of thing the gods would and wouldn’t do, but he knew it was pointless to argue. Elan had loved Gailon Tolly since she was a girl, and now she would be able to nurse the dying man through his last months.