The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (23 page)

‘Well, let’s hope he doesn’t know about the amputation yet,’ Tor remarked as he left the room to get the bedding.

I went to sit by Flame and took her hand.

She said, ‘I’ve no right to involve you at all. Either of you.’

I ignored that. ‘How are you really?’

‘Weak, but recovering.’ She looked at her stump. ‘I can feel it, you know. It’s as though my arm is still there. I can move the fingers—everything. I have to keep looking at it to convince myself that it’s really gone.’ She gave a small heartrending laugh. ‘I’ll be able to make a new one with sylvmagic, you know. Then only you Awarefolk will know it’s not real.’

Us Awarefolk—and her. You couldn’t hold anything, or feel anything with a sylvmagic replacement. Sylvmagic illusions were just that—illusions. It has always puzzled me, though, how other people could be so completely fooled by them, to the extent of being able to touch and feel what wasn’t there.

I changed the subject. ‘Flame, about Ruarth—be very careful to conceal your friendship. Especially from Keepers. It could be used against you,’ I added vaguely.

Fortunately, Tor returned before she could ask what I meant. He laid the bedding on the floor and smiled at me. ‘Who’s first for sleep?’

‘Me. I’m—’ But I had no words to describe how I felt.

He reached out and touched my cheek. ‘I’m sorry about Niamor. Do you want to talk about it?’

I shook my head. ‘Never. Not ever.’ And I turned away from the comfort he offered.

Nothing more happened that night, except that I had enough bad dreams to supply a storyteller with a lifetime of horror tales. When I awoke to take over the watch, roused by my own nightmares, I didn’t feel rested. Fortunately Flame seemed to have slept well in the first part of the night, and she only woke up again just before sunrise. I fetched her a glass of water and as she didn’t seem to want to go back to sleep, we chatted for a while. She was uncomfortable, but there was no sign of fever, and what was left of Garrowyn’s medication kept the pain to manageable levels.

As she seemed inclined to talk, I asked her about her life in Cirkasecastle. At first, she was evasive, but I persisted and she eventually opened up. ‘You’ve been to Cirkasecastle,’ she said, ‘you’ve seen how people live there. But maybe you don’t know
why
the nobles live in the inner castle, right under the nose of the Castlelord? Because they live where the Castlelord says—and he prefers his nobles to be where he can keep an eye on them. Of course, they can go to their country estates in the summer, when the Cirkasecastle gets noisome and the summerfever starts up, but for the rest of the year, everyone lives right there within the castle walls. And everyone has a titular appointment: Keeper of the Seal, perhaps, or Mistress of the Chambermaids. You can refuse to conform, of course—but your country estate will be confiscated, and your appointment given to someone else, along with its income, and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it.

‘And so aristocratic families stay in the inner castle. Every day, the men report to the Castlelord, the women to his consort, and they decide what everyone is going to do that day. Go hunting in the country perhaps, or play one of the court games. The men might choose to go down into the city proper to carouse in the inns; the women may call their dressmakers or practise their dances. If there’s someone the Castlelord doesn’t particularly like, then he’ll give them some work to do: supervise the collection of taxes, perhaps, or preside over the legal courts. And everyone is so scared of losing their position, of losing their income, they jump to his bidding. Even the children are caught up in the politics of it: “No, dear, you can’t play with Nasko today; that wouldn’t be wise. The Castlelord doesn’t like his father any more.”’

She shuddered. ‘You know what the worst thing is? Growing up thinking that all that is
normal.
That it’s a good way to live. I would have accepted it all, been just as shallow as everyone else, just as cowered—if it hadn’t been for Ruarth and his family.’ She glanced at the foot of the bed, where the Dustel slept, head tucked under his wing. ‘The Dustels of Cirkasecastle, they taught me that there was another world out there, where things were done differently. And that it was a better place.’

I had to ask, of course: I’d spent an inordinate amount of time pondering about just how a young girl started talking to a bird. ‘Tell me how you and Ruarth—’ I began.

She laughed softly. ‘To understand that, you have to understand the kind of life I had. I spent a lot of time in my personal rooms… Children don’t mix with the adults in noble households, except for servants and dancemasters, fencing teachers and protocol tutors and such. They don’t even see their own parents except in formal settings; in our family it was one dinner a week. I didn’t see other children much either. There was an enormously complicated protocol involved when one noble child went to visit another, so those who looked after me couldn’t be bothered with it. The result was I spent a lot of time alone in my own rooms.

‘Ruarth and his family lived on my window sill and in the niches around it. It was a large and very ornate sill: lots of crannies. One thing I used to do was put out food for them. I soon found I could recognise one from another, and that there was one that seemed to be especially friendly. Ruarth, of course. After a while he used to fly in to spend time with me. I was only about four when this started. I used to talk to him as if he was a person. Gradually I learned that he was actually talking back to me, it was just a matter of understanding it… Some Dustel language is obvious. Shakes of the head for no, or nods for yes, just like everyone else. Other gestures are more subtle, but fairly easily understood—things like wait, come, here, there. A stamped foot means “I’m angry”, shrugged shoulders means “I don’t know”, and so on. The chirps and sounds, I learned those the same way a child learns speech from the adults around them: by repetition. We both learned to read at the same time, and that helped. I’d write out the alphabet, and he would peck at the letters…’

‘Did you go to school?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘No. None of the Cirkase nobility went to school. It was the mark of the despised middle class to be educated—why learn to read and write when you can pay someone to do it for you? But I learned anyway. In a way, I was lucky. My father was so busy he didn’t ever have time to worry about me, and my mother was neurotic and so often ill that I was left to my own devices even more than most. Ruarth’s mother said I should learn, so I persuaded my father’s accountant to teach me to figure and his scribe to teach me to read and write.’ She looked at Ruarth’s sleeping form fondly. ‘Without the Dustels, and without those two men, my life would have been very different…’

‘I didn’t realise it was so bad,’ I said. ‘Is it true that Cirkase is run by clerks and bookkeepers? This so-called middle class?’

‘Absolutely true. In the past it worked because the Castlelord kept a tight rein on his underlings. Now,’ she shook her head, ruefully, ‘it’s all falling apart—and so it should. It’s no way to govern. The literate class is going to overthrow the nobility one day, and they won’t know how to stop it. Why should they—the scribes and accountants and merchants—do all the work, carry all the responsibility, for very little pay? —D’you know, Blaze, as a little girl growing up in the Castle, I had seventeen personal servants. Seventeen. I never had to brush my hair, or tie my own shoes. I never had to do anything. Anything at all. And what did I do to
earn
that kind of service? Nothing. If it hadn’t been for the Dustels, I would have been the world’s most spoiled and unhappy child. It was boredom that made me take a second look at the birds on my window ledge; it was a child’s inquiring mind imprisoned in a stultifying environment that led me to question what I saw… How many other inquiring minds has the Cirkasian system stifled?’

She looked down at her amputated arm. ‘I’m glad I left. I’d do it all over again, even if I knew beforehand the price I would have to pay.’

In my heart, I knew she wasn’t talking about just her arm.

‘Yes,’ she said, answering my unspoken question. ‘Even that. If I’d stayed in Cirkasecastle, what would have happened to me would have been worse than rape. I would have been violated again and again, in subtle and degrading ways, every day of my life.’ She was silent for a while, then said, ‘A noble woman can’t walk outside without being heavily veiled. Everything you look at, you see through a layer of cloth. Lower class people aren’t supposed to see our faces. And yet our servants saw us—even bathed us. So where’s the
logic?
It was just another way of keeping people in their “place”. It was hell, Blaze. In the end I would have been married off without consent, to bring prestige or commercial benefits to my family, as if I was a commodity.’

She met my gaze. In the candlelight she looked lovely: the soft light muted her pain and blurred the edges of her beauty but, to me, it was her compassion that made her truly lovely. ‘I’m sorry; you who have had such a hard life must find my whining about the luxury of mine somewhat tasteless.’

I shook my head. ‘We all have our prisons. We just have to transcend them.’

‘Yes. The Dustels showed me how. What about you, Blaze? How did you climb out?’

I thought about that. Was it the crazy-crone, in the Duskset Hill cemetery, who taught me to rely on myself? Was it the Menod who started me on the right path with their unworldly charity? Arnado, who introduced me to elegance and his own brand of honour? Duthrick, who gave me something to aim for and a mission in life? Or was it just my anger—my rage—at the injustices my mixed birth had ordained for me.

She seemed to read my mind. ‘Don’t tell me it was Duthrick. That man is poison. Keepers are all—’

‘Oh don’t you start. I hear that all the time from Tor.’

‘He’s right. If it weren’t for the Keepers, who prop up the creaking aristocracy in Cirkase because they find it easier to deal with tyrants, our islandom would be a better place. Keepers preach equality and the election of leaders, but in practice, in other islandoms, they think it threatens stability and so they make sure the tyrants remain.’

‘I think Ruarth must be an anarchist to have taught you all these things,’ I growled. ‘You and Tor are a pair. Have you any idea what sort of government you’d get if all the Islandlords suddenly disappeared? There’d be chaos!’

She snorted, an unladylike sound, and we both retreated from the subject for fear we would end up arguing. We chatted a little more, but then she stirred restlessly, trying to get comfortable. I gave her more medicine and she drifted off to sleep, holding my hand in hers.

###

I woke later to find that I had slept sitting at her bedside, my head on her bed. She was still sound asleep. Ruarth was nowhere about.

It was the sound of Tor moving around the room that had awakened me. ‘Flame’s fine,’ he said.

I stood up and groped for equilibrium. In retrospect, what had happened during the night seemed unreal. ‘Tor,’ I said slowly, taking care to keep my voice down, ‘why didn’t either you or I rush out of the room and run a sword through the bastard? We don’t have to fear his magic.’

‘D’y’know, I think it might have been what he wanted us to do? I think he’s a little afraid of us—of you, anyway. How much he knows about me is uncertain. Perhaps he thought you
would
rush out of the room in search of him.’

I thought about that. ‘You think it was a trap? Someone like Domino—several of them—waiting with him, swords drawn.’

‘It’s possible. I’m sure he must have been protected, but perhaps his main intent was just to tease us.’

‘But…I never thought of attacking.’ I was taken aback, and oddly shamed. ‘He had me so frightened, I was almost paralysed.’

He gave a grim smile. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? That he bothered, I mean. He’s more afraid of us than is warranted. He just doesn’t know what it’s like to have Awareness.’

I knew what he meant. We weren’t just made
aware
of the presence of dunmagic, we felt, and smelled, its
wrongness,
its evil; we could sense its terrible capability. When faced with Janko’s power, our senses were almost overwhelmed with the horror of what he was, of what he could do. The night before I hadn’t the slightest doubt that he could have submerged a string of islands beneath the sea, and laughed while he was doing it. It was no wonder we had found it hard to act.

‘Dunmagickers, Tor: who—
what
are they?’

‘Menod texts say they are manifestations of the Sea Devil.’

I gave a grunt of dissatisfaction. ‘That tells us nothing. Are they born, or are they made?’

‘You’re wondering if they all start off life as sylvs, and are later subverted.’

I nodded. I’d asked the same question of Duthrick; I just wanted confirmation.

He shook his head. ‘No. There are definitely cases of dunmagic babies born to sylv mothers who were raped or bedded by dunmagickers. Just as many nonsylv women have sylv children when the father is a sylv. And I rather think that dunmagicker women always tend to have babies contaminated with dunmagic.’

‘What makes them different? Why do they seem to feed on pain and the despair of others?’

‘I don’t know. The Menod belief is as good as any—that all evil comes from the Sea Devil.’

‘To believe in the Sea Devil, one has first to believe in God,’ I said.

He gave a faint smile. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But then, I do.’

I didn’t want to think about that. I changed the subject. ‘What do you know about the inundation of the Dustels, Tor?’

He pulled at his ear, as if that would help him to remember. ‘There are so many tales, it’s hard to say what’s rumour and what’s fact. I must admit I always dismissed the idea that a single dunmagicker could drown a whole chain of islands as just plain popped bladder-wrack. Empty of substance… Not proven. I do know that the Dustels had a lot of problems immediately before the islands disappeared. The usual sort of thing: the outer islands of the group thought they were badly treated, paid too much in taxes and didn’t get enough in return… It’s a common enough complaint, and we in the Stragglers have heard similar moans. A wise ruler does something about them before things get out of hand. From what I remember of my history, in the Dustels the ruling family ignored the complaints and there was a civil war. One of the Rampartlord’s sons joined the rebels. Some terrible atrocities were committed by both sides. Worse still, outsiders got involved: the Keepers stuck their nose in as usual; the Menod patriarchy were somehow involved, because there was a big monastery complex on one of the outer islands; the Stragglers supported the ruling house. Just before the islands disappeared, the rebel islanders were defeated in a huge battle and many of those that remained were executed. The ruling army was, however, decimated as well, so it wasn’t a happy victory. That’s about all I know.’