Wind Over Bone: The Estralony Cycle #2 (Young Adult Fantasy Romance) (19 page)

“
Nothing wetter than a river daughter.” Aleksei jumped up and chased the Ganadenes into a wood just below the sward. Sarid looked down and peeled scales off her fish.

“
Your father’s completely crazy,” said Savvel, looking after him.

“
So are you.” Savvel started and looked up. Aleksei was standing over him as though he’d never left, velvet jacket soaked through. “With a shadow ghastly as a bad tooth.”

“
I’m cursed.” Savvel shrugged and snapped something, a fishbone, between his teeth.

“
It was an accident,“ Sarid said.

“
Cursed?” said Aleksei.

Savvel nodded, and Aleksei grabbed Savvel’s ears and peered at the back of his head as though looking through a spyglass.

“I see no curse. Your mind’s been opened. No locks, screens, or filters.”

“
Opened?” said Savvel. “Like a door? Fancy that. Why do only the terrors and nightmares know about it, then, to come in?”

“
Oh,
them
,” Aleksei said, and laughed. “Why make room for them? Why make the world black and bitter? It all boils down”––he put another fish on Savvel’s plate––“to preference. One day you can be convinced the moon will crash down and cover the earth in cheese. Another day that everything’s going splendid. Who’s to say which day’s the madder? In fact, I’m convinced,” he said, crouching between them, “I’m convinced every conviction is a kind of madness.”

“
You’re eating your own foot, Father.” Sarid took a fish by the tail and threw it to Gryka.

“
There’s a whole spectrum,” said Aleksei. “Pick the madness you like best, I say.”

Sarid shook her head, and then stopped eating. She wondered why she’d never bothered to tell her father about Savvel.

“You do have some control over it,” she said to Savvel. “Back when you ripped my dress you made it so I had no power.”

“
I ripped your dress?”

“
Don’t act like you’ve forgotten.”

“
I didn’t do that,” said Savvel.

“
You did, though.”

He scowled and poked at his fish head.

“Everyone’s got some demon in them,” said Sarid.

“
Didn’t like the look of that one.”

“
It would really be something if you learned how to control your madness.”

“
You––” He frowned at his fish. “You really think I could?”

Aleksei was humming, knotting together a chain of golden flowers. Savvel started laughing.

“Rischa gave you a puppy and your sister a county,” he said. “Doesn’t that make you angry?”

“
What’s that got to do with anything?” said Sarid. And remembering Gryka as a long-boned puppy, she looked up and around for her.

She was crouched at the base of a tree, legs splayed, body heaving.

“What’s the matter?” said Sarid, rising. “Have you choked on a fishbone?” The dog looked at her with sad eyes, and went back to hacking.

Sarid became frightened. Her heart drummed. She took a step and stopped.

Instead of grass there was stone under her feet. Damp, muddy stone. The light went dim and watery, and she looked above her and saw stalagmites. Freezing water dripped into her eyes. She smelled something fetid, cold, like the stink of a drowned corpse.

She turned round. Her father and Savvel were sitting in mud. Her eyes wandered against her will to the platter. It was tarnished to a dull black. Upon it, sneering in death, were the rotting carcasses of three fish.

She turned and staggered to the nearest hole, into which she proceeded to vomit for a good long while.

When she was done she held her aching stomach. “Savvel,” she said, “we must go, we––”

“My dear,” said her father, who’d come up behind her, “you’re upset.” He put his hands on her shoulders. She stood up straight and wondered why her stomach was aching and her throat burning.

“
No.” She peered into the pool. “I’m weeping because I look so beautiful.” Her reflection rippled in the breeze. She was wearing a gown sewn with rubies and the winking golden eyes of humans, and on her head was an albatross beating its great, white wings. Her teeth were sharpened to handsome points, and her eyes were a dangerous, glittering jet. She was Queen Under Stone.

She walked regally back to the spread and continued eating her fish.

Seventeen

Time passed in a muted blur.

Sarid remembered winter solstice: firelight on the snow; red and white roses growing from the fir trees; Savvel in a white and black checked robe, dancing with a headless white hart.

At midnight Savvel sang. The bonfire blazed behind him, flames curling like the plumes of a giant gold bird. “It’s a Yule song,” he said, and the dark trees leaned in to listen.

“
The pines at dusk all hang their heads,

Bowed beneath a cracking fear,

Cores all frozen gainst the breath

Of the vengeful dying year.

Tell them that their sap is running,

Wake them so their boughs might shake.

Knock them from their cowardly sleep

So they might feel the mortal ache.

The oaks at dusk all knot their mouths;

Cracked and chapped, their faces leer

Through the stubborn, clapping leaves

At the vengeful dying year.

Cut their throats to make them rasp

And break their backs to make them writhe.

Teach them how to dance while they die,

To scream and stamp before the scythe.

The blooms at dusk all rattle their hulls,

Ugly now, and bones stripped bare.

Proud behind their grinning skulls,

They scorn the vengeful, dying year.

Though their thankless young have scattered,

They know how the seasons run––

The freezing scythe, the thickening blood,

The fearsome, resurrected sun.”

“That’s the most morbid Yule song I’ve ever heard,” Sarid said.

“
So?” He sat in the snow next to her. His dark eyes and mouth looked like checks in his white face. “Yule is a morbid time of year.”

“
We ought to make light of the longest night. Otherwise we should all be very depressed.”

“
But then,” he said leaning forward, his breath cold on her ear, “then you draw further and further away from the point of Yule––fury, death and despair. There’s grandeur in it, in a never-ending night.”

“
There’s bigger grandeur in the sun rising the next morning.”

“
Resurrection is only as grand as the death before it.” He had the hart’s antlers on his head. He looked very handsome, like a forest leshy.

“
You look very handsome in your antlers,” she said.

“
You look ravishing in your albatross.” He pulled her up to dance.

***

Later in the year Aleksei taught Sarid how to become a gust of north wind by eating cloudberries frozen in hen’s milk, and how to become a gust of west wind by blowing air into a toad raised by stoats.

She remembered the first time. She stood on a cliff above a sea of black trees and sighed. Her tongue became a lick of dust and her breath blew the dust out her mouth. Her body followed after. She rematerialized (slammed, rather) against the wall of an abandoned hut some miles away.

Everything seemed fine––until she looked down and saw that her head was on backwards. Aleksei came soon after and set it right.

She learned many things that winter: how to summon powerful saebels and bind them to her will; how to manipulate her
enna
, and cast glamors over herself and the land. She was mad enough that she could do most of it naturally.

Savvel learned things, too. His nightmares brightened, become something else. Aleksei went often into his mind, pulling the sun with him, and Sarid could only guess what the two of them were growing.

She didn’t wonder overmuch; her father kept her occupied, all the time showing her things and taking her places.

One of these was the
Kindeaghllechgonaidh
: a small, round mountain whose foot was always hidden in mist. The Eyonav, folk called it in proper language.

The mountain was covered in huge firs with trunks hard and grey as granite. As Sarid and her father climbed, it seemed as though they were on a last hump of land in a grey sea of cloud.

At the very top, under the oldest firs, was a platform of crumbling stone. Upon this platform lay seven or eight people wrapped in cloaks. Travelers, Aleksei called them. 

Sarid went up to them and saw that some were so old their faces and clothes had worn away. And some seemed newly asleep, their skin lined and porous, their clothes patched and frayed. She touched one and felt stone. They were all stone.

They had preserved their bodies so they could travel in the
Aebela,
Aleksei told her.
Worlds of the mind, parallel universes. Some for many thousands of years.

“
How?” Sarid asked.

“
Why do you want to know?”

“
Because I should like to try it sometime.”

Aleksei raised his brows. “Ought I to tell you? I’ve never done it. It may be painful.”

“I’ve experienced pain.”

His eyes lost some of their manic light. “You climb onto the platform right as the last evening light disappears. The light takes you with it. I don’t know where.”

“And my body would turn to stone?”

Aleksei ran his hand over the chipped nose of a little girl. “Yes.”

“How do they wake?”

“
Someone else has to wake them.”

She was intrigued, and told Savvel about it. They decided they would very much like to see a body turn to stone at sunset, so they made plans to capture some creature and try it.

They forgot for a while, busying themselves with other things. Until two saebels, Tilderog Fat and Tilderog Skinny, caught just such a creature wandering around the bottom of an old quarry.

Sarid wasn’t sure what sort of natural force had gone into making the Tilderogs Fat and Skinny. They were little wizened karzeleki, with long gnarled hands that looked as though they could crush stone. One had fat thumbs that dug runnels through the ground, and one had long nails that made mulch of the underbrush.

One day Sarid and Savvel were lighting fires under the pines to make them pop, when Tilderogs Fat and Skinny shuffled out of the woods, moving rubble around with their big hands and dragging behind them a very peculiar looking creature.

It looked almost like a person. Except that it couldn’t have been, because its feet were made of bent branches laced with leather.

Aleksei’s daughter,
said Tilderog Skinny,
this evil thing has strayed into our brugh. We can’t decide what it is.

We think it is a bukavac sent by Ogher of the Black Pool
, said Tilderog Fat.

Or else a big mudskipper caught in a fish trap
, said Tilderog Skinny.

“
It looks like a birch mavka who’s eaten a horse,” said Savvel.

“
I’m not a saebel, my lord,” said the creature.

“
Not a saebel!” said Savvel. “I’ve never seen such unnatural feet on a person.”

“
They’re snowshoes––”

“
Snowshoes?”

Tilderogs Fat and Skinny tugged on the creature’s legs. “My lady,” it shrieked, “oh my lady, stop them, they’re hurting me––”

“What’s this?” said Sarid. “I’m not a lady. I’m Queen under the Dark Mountain. You’ve driven it insane, Tilderog. Bring it here.” The Tilderogs dragged it by its gigantic feet to where Sarid stood. It cowered there for a moment and then loosened the cords around its legs and pulled the feet off.

“
You see?” It started crying. “I’m not a saebel. Don’t you recognize me, my lady?” It pulled its cowl off, revealing a nest of golden curls.

“
Saebels don’t cry,” observed Savvel.

“
Look at these.” Sarid yanked the curls. “Did you steal gold from my father’s trees, wicked creature?”

“
It’s my hair.” It pulled the hood back up. “Don’t you know me? I was your lady’s maid, and I’ve come to fetch you back. Your sister, she’s stealing children from the village, and when they come back they’re not right in the head. And she eats songbirds, folk in the kitchens say, and I think it’s something to do with––”

“
It chitters like a mad sparrow,” said Savvel.

“
And your brother, my lord,” the creature said, “he flogs them cruelly, them that speak out, that don’t go south. And some disappear. My uncle disappeared when they took his girl and he went up to the hall with our butchering knife––but we’re not allowed weapons, and he’s gone, dead we fear.”

“
Creature,” said Sarid, “you won’t have so many worries when you’re traveling in the
Aebela
and your body’s a stone. Bring her to the Eyonav,” she said to Tilderog and his brother, “and bind her to the platform.”

***

When rills of violet had spilled from chasms, and flooded the valleys, and the top of the Eyonav shone like a lump of gold in the late sun, Sarid and Savvel climbed the mountain.

The Tilderogs had bound the creature with spiny brambles, and placed it on the stone platform.

They stood by as the light slipped off its legs. And finally only its hair was lit, a fizz of gold, and Sarid fancied the rest of it, the pale, wet face and skinny limbs, looked stony enough already. She heard sobbing, and her mood became sad rather than eager. She thought to herself that she did good by the poor, unhappy thing.

But she turned and saw the sobbing came from Savvel. “Don’t let’s do this,” he said. “It reminds me of someone. My mother.”

She didn’t like to see Savvel sad. She made the Tilderogs Fat and Skinny untie the creature and carry it down the mountain. There they let it go. Sarid kept the snowshoes to show to her father.

“
Fascinating.” Aleksei plucked at the laces. “Did it say where it got them? I should like a pair of my own.”

“
No,” said Sarid, “but it squawked and gibbered, mostly about birds. Songbirds and children.”

“
Songbirds and children?” Her father put his foot on the snowshoe, and broke the laces. “Sounds like the Smick.” He picked up the broken snowshoe and looked at it with a nostalgic expression. “I did it once. Smicked a a girl in Pengrava. But she clung to me, and I grew sick of her and gave her to the Maids of Heartache who punish bad men.” He tossed the snowshoe behind him.

“
What’s the Smick?” asked Sarid.

“
You eat the heart of a baby bird, and put your mouth to a child’s ear, and suck and suck, and pull the stubborn blind trust out of his head. After this he dies because he doesn’t trust food enough to eat it. When the trust is still in your mouth, you put your mouth on someone else’s mouth, and breathe the trust into her. And she imprints on you like a bird. And follows you like a shadow and scorns everyone else.”

“
I rather think Savvel’s Smicking me,” said Sarid.

“
I detest that accusation,” said Savvel. He threw a stone at a scolding jay.

***

Some time after this Aleksei stopped going into Savvel’s head. Sarid went instead. It was fascinating; the sun was red and the lakes violet, and irony hid beneath every grand thing and made it tremble.

When Savvel was troubled he would cast snow off mountains and flood valleys. When he was content snow would fall and fall, and the two of them would lie buried under it like two giants sleeping at the warm center of the earth. She thought it all extraordinarily amusing.

There came a time when Savvel was able to pick, as one chooses clothes from a drawer, the particular madness that suited him on a particular day.

It was late winter. Sarid had just come into his head, and they were standing under three pear trees on a high hill. The late sun shone through the trees, and all around and far below a thorny winter forest stretched in all directions. She felt the cold more keenly than usual, and looked down at herself.

“I’m naked.”

Savvel moved his mouth wordlessly for a few seconds. “I didn’t do it.”

“Yes you did,” she said.

There was wildness in the sharp blue grass, dripping like dew off the yellow pears. She was colored in wildness, shaped by it.

Savvel looked away, as though uninterested. She thought it silly, and walked up behind him and put her hand on his back. He tensed under her palm.

She pulled his breeches down.

She turned him around and ripped his shirt off, and his baldric. It wasn’t hard. “Does it make you happy,” she said, dropping the rags, “that you’re much bigger than you act?”