The gathering, p.28
The Gathering, page 28
part #1 of The Cleaved World Series
Mya cast her eyes around the circle of her party. People she’d come to think of—to know—as her family. Was any of it real?
Callyn caught eyes with her and tilted their head. They signed, The doubts you feel, youngling, are boons. It is right and good that you should seek the range and limit of your power. When you know what you can do, you will learn to choose when to do it. For now, trust that bonds you make are as real to others as they are to you. If you have no intent to warp feelings, then your power will not warp them. Only draw them.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I understand all of Callyn’s signs, but I know what they tell you,” the Rider said. “Your power is one of light. To make light magic cause harm or deceive takes intention and focus. You might shape ill feelings enough to prevent immediate harm to yourself, but you cannot passively shape good feeling toward you that did not already lean your way. Unless you’re really trying to do something, to make somebody feel something, using your power with purpose, it will only nudge toward your safekeeping. All you’ve done is help us make a choice when we were torn, and remind us to care for you when we were distracted.” She looked to Xian in particular. “Nothing any of us feels for the girl is false. Only sometimes more at the fore than it might have been.”
Mya let out a breath. It shook against the insides of her chest and throat as it found egress. She turned again to Xian, who lifted his hand and cupped the side of her face. His smile was real. She could feel his doubts easing.
“Is it so unusual to know how others feel?” she asked. “How do you converse with each other?”
He chuckled. “Often badly. We have to trust our eyes and ears, our memories and our instincts.” His smile faded a bit. “I have to ask a question of your elders now, and I do not mean it ill. Fair and well?”
She nodded and prepared herself, and Xian turned to the others.
“If she is an empath, that is heart magic, yes? Feelings are of the heart.”
“Yes,” the Rider said. Callyn nodded at the same time.
“Farborn magic is heart magic. It is dark magic. And yet you say Mya’s power is light. How can that be?”
Mya had tried to prepare herself, but she had failed. That question opened a wound deep in her soul—fear of the answer, and of the doubt that prompted Xian to ask it
“Magic itself is neutral at its core, Xian,” the Rider answered. “It is in its use that it turns one way or another. Over time, the magical races developed a tendency of use, toward heart or head, and it became innate unto each. Lightness and darkness is more personal, more connected to the bearer’s own soul, the way they think and feel, and use their power.”
“Then how can Mya’s magic be light? She didn’t know she had power, so she hasn’t used it.”
“But she has. Not with intention, but passively, to protect herself. Likely, it is why Tantaren kept her with something like kindness in captivity. She knew not why, but she had an urge to take care of her. Looking at what she’s wrought on Ellerema, can you think she’d have been gentle with Voss’s heir for any other reason? If Callyn is right, and I believe they are, Mya’s power is what it is because of Mya herself. Because she is something new, there was no innate tendency in her power toward heart or head, dark or light. The girl feels deeply and freely, so her power is of the heart. She is good and gentle, so her power is light.”
“And is your power light?” Xian asked.
The Rider didn’t answer.
“Is yours?” he asked Callyn.
They answered in a flurry of hands, and Mya knew the words were too fast for the others to follow completely. She used her voice to make Callyn’s speech. You ask the wrong question, warrior. For those who’ve lived long lives, power is not so easy to cast to one side or the other. Magic is shaped by its use, and by its intent. Sometimes, dark deeds are done with good intent. How would you name that magic? One that might have killed an innocent but in the doing saved many more? Better to ask if our aims are good, than if our power is light.
Xian waited for a moment, but when no more words filled the air, he demanded, “So? What is that answer?”
The Rider sighed. “Since I have walked in exile, I have striven to right the balance. To make a right where a wrong exists. If that is a good aim, then yes. If that makes my magic light, then it is.”
He turned to Callyn, who smiled. Not with humor, or with affection. With a mood Mya didn’t fully comprehend. Like a knowing, but with a sharp edge. As if they were nearing their limit of endurance for the pest Xian had become.
Callyn signed, and Mya spoke. I have been long in captivity, warrior. There, I sought only to survive. Before, I thought I worked for the good of my people, but I did dark things when I thought the cause was just. I turned against my own family to save a people not my own. Is that a good aim or ill? I betrayed my sister and meant to kill her. Even now, I work against the interests of my own blood, Vulas. What say you, warrior who would sit in judgment of his betters? Am I dark, or am I light?
Mya gasped as she uttered the final words, which had so much more sharp feeling in them than Callyn had ever shown before. The Rider went tense as well. But Xian only smiled back, that same strange emotion shaping it. Some kind of tension pulsed between the warrior and Callyn and Mya couldn’t ken it.
“More powerful you are, indeed. It has not escaped my notice that I sit here alone, the only still soul in a circle of magic-bearers. I recognize that my earthbound prowess is not your match. But you are not my better, strange one. I am not the one who must hide myself wherever I travel because my true self is so reviled that near all I encounter would kill me on sight, or flee in terror. No, that is not me. That is you. So keep your tongueless mouth quiet where it would speak on my worth.”
The circle crackled with tension while that challenge rang softly above them. Then, Callyn dipped their head. Part nod, part bow, Mya understood it to be concession.
So did Xian. His posture eased, his tension settled, and he said, “We have long been distracted from the main of this meeting. Ellerema. Benon, and Crookhand, and where we go from here.” He turned to Mya, and she saw in his eyes the affection she’d come to count on. She felt it reach out from his chest, his heart, as well. “If you say he is good, Mya, then I will trust that.” He shifted to the Rider. “But I do not know what that means for us now.”
It was Callyn who answered. Mya didn’t speak this time. We need to go to Tevondrill. To the place the Crooked Hand was killed.
“The air and ground are poison there,” the Rider said. “And Crookhand is dead, his lair destroyed. Whatever secrets he had, they are lost to us now.”
Not all. Did you not mark it strange, how the soldier described his death?
“Tantaren cast a fire spell. One unknown to me, but my knowledge of Farborn magic is not compendious.”
Not Farborn. If Benon told it well, it would be a casting unknown to me also. But I do not think it was a casting. I do not think it was simple fire. I think she pulled the magic from the ground and bound him in pure power.
“What?” The Rider asked, her voice rising. Astonishment and fear pulsed from her in nearly visibly ripples. “That cannot be. No being can withstand the touch of pure power. It would incinerate her from the inside out the moment she drew it into use. Besides, Tevondrill is many days’ journey from the nearest point of the Vraelon border. Even were she strong enough to withstand that much power—and to wield it—there is no Farborn magic closer than that to draw from.
Unless she drew from the coresource. No place is any farther than any other from the coresource.
“But that’s madness.” The Rider stared at the floor as if she could see through it to the earth beneath. “If she can draw from the origin point of all magic, if she can bear it and wield it, then we are all doomed.”
And yet we defeated her after she killed the Crooked Hand. She perhaps has found a way to use coremagic, but not without a price.
“What is it you know, Callyn?” Xian asked. “You say you know our path, and what is to be, and yet you speak in halves and riddles and seem surprised when events come to pass. What do you see?”
What I see is like a map. I know the path we are meant to be on, and where it is meant to lead us, I know the major markers along the way, but all is not foretold. Like any journey, we must take the steps, and make our choices. Each step, each choice, each encounter, adds to the story, fills in the map. I know when we leave the path, in the way you would know if we no longer headed in the right direction. But I do not know all the things that would obstruct us, or aid us. I know our path, not our journey. You will trust that, or you will not. That is your choice to make.
“So what is our path now?” The Rider asked.
Callyn turned to Mya. Speak for me, Mya, please. Even if my words confound you.
Mya did. There is much today that has changed how I see what comes after this moment. I am still trying to understand all I have learned that I did not know before. Tevondrill is not Mya’s home. The Crooked Hand was her carer, not her grandfather. I do not know your origin, youngling, you are beyond my knowing of this world, but you are without doubt the heart of this party. I think we might never know what the Crooked Hand gave you, Rider, to secure Mya’s freedom, but that is the key that set us on our path. He gave you that token in Tevondrill, and Tantaren went to destroy him as soon as she was free. She used a new power to do it. We must travel there. From there, more details of our path will be shown. They paused and turned to Xian. Do you trust me, warrior?
Xian turned to Mya. “You have my trust, Mya. Never doubt that. If you tell me to trust Callyn, I will.”
Mya didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to make him feel something against his inclination. Finally, she said something that was simply true. “I trust them.”
He nodded. “Then I will as well.” Turning to Callyn, he put his clenched fist to his chest. “You have my axe and my word, Callyn. We are bonded by purpose and party.”
The next morning, they ate in the barracks with the soldiers, sitting on benches at the end of one of three long tables. The food was gloppy and colorless, and its pasty scent made Mya wrinkle her nose.
Benon, sitting nearby, saw her expression and leaned over the table toward her. He winked one eye and grinned. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead, and his complexion had taken on a yellowish tone. He was pained and feeling ill, but strove not to show it.
“It’s full of things to make you strong, little sprite. The food will be prettier at midday, but a soldier always starts their day with cream of barley and a mug of sweet mead.”
Mya smiled back and took a spoonful of the glop. It didn’t taste as awful as she’d thought it would. Like liquid bread. With squishy chunks.
Benon was good. Now that she knew she could feel his real self, that her impressions were more than merely that, but were real knowings, she had no wariness around him. Yet there was a darkness about his edges Mya didn’t understand, a violence he was capable of. But he was a soldier, so it must be only that. There was a like kind of shadow in Xian, and a deeper one in the Rider.
Benon turned to the Rider, at his side, and picked up the conversation that had been underway. They were debating the plan. As the party last night had finally wound its fraught talk to its end, they’d agreed to allow Benon to join them on their journey to Tevondrill. Now, though, he wanted to bring two other soldiers along as well: a large, fearsome-looking woman, with skin dark as rain-soaked earth, called Yndra, and another large man, paler than the others, almost as pale as Callyn, but with a large halo of straw-colored hair. He was called Kirken. They, too, were of Tevondrill, and van riders of Ellerema. Both bore many dark drawings on their skin, like Benon.
“They are the friends of my arm,” Benon was saying, keeping his focus on the Rider. Always, he spoke to the Rider when he wanted to be persuasive. He understood her to be the center of their party. Mya didn’t think that was true, though she was the hero people knew. Their party had no center.
Unless it was her. Is that what Callyn had meant, when they called her the ‘heart’ of them? It was a heady notion, and Mya set it aside, as she’d set aside all wonderings about this power she had.
“I do not travel with a large party,” the Rider insisted. “And you say the air and earth are poison, there far more than here. We might well perish in this endeavor. I cannot fathom why you would wish to join us, and to bring your friends along to suffer as well.”
“We are van riders. The strongest and bravest of the strongest and bravest. Our lives have been given to the knowledge that we will die in pain and violence. We have no fear of such a death. And we three are of Tevondrill and Falisle, and have lost our home. These others of our comrades”—he waved a massive arm around the crowded barracks—“who hail from the south or the east, or the farther northern reaches, they know pity for us, but they don’t know our loss. If there were any good I could do, even if only to find the bones of loved ones and give them their rightful rest, I would gladly die in agony to do it. And I will bring my friends who feel the same.”
“Then why have you not gone before now?”
“Many times, I have gone, on rescue missions. Only two days past did that work end. There is no rescue left. No hope. Now I can see to my own heart.”
The Rider looked to Callyn. Xian looked to Mya. Mya waited for Callyn to turn her way. What say you, youngling? they signed.
They wanted her to decide, to tell them whether they could trust the soldiers. Mya tried to feel her power and send it out, but she didn’t feel anything happening. Instead, she simply trusted her instincts.
She thought about how to say what she was thinking without alerting those around them to any strangeness in their group. She signed back, I am frightened, but I will go where we should. I do not fear Benon and his friends.
“You and your two friends may join us,” the Rider said. “To Tevondrill, but no farther.”
They rode out shortly after their meal. Xian and the Rider were surprised to find their packs fully restocked. They both went through everything and ascertained that nothing had been removed, only added—food for a long journey, skins heavy with water and mead, furs against the winter cold. Only the soldiers could have resupplied them, and only Benon would have led them to do so.
Mya felt a wry satisfaction she thought might be the ‘smugness’ the Rider sometimes accused Xian of; Benon was worth their trust, as she’d assured them.
The city was quiet as they rode to the bridge that would lead to its northern gates. People who had work or other reasons to leave their homes had not yet done so. What was left were the people so ill or poor they had nowhere to be but the streets. They slept in huddles together against the walls of buildings and in narrow alleyways. Mya could feel their pain and need, rising up like a cloud over the city, too great for her to discern one aching heart among the many.
She tucked her covered face deeper into her fur and tried to shield herself from the pummeling pain of others. Now she understood that this feeling was hers alone to bear, and she felt lonely in it.
They rode through the valley and up its northern slope, and still Mya felt that wrenching pulse of others’ suffering. Xian had described to her a city and a world of beauty and glory, but Ellerema was no longer that—at least not in this portion of it.
The air was just as murky and amber as it had been the day before, and the day before that. In fact, as they rose above the valley, where Xian had said the air would improve, instead, they were immersed in a fog the color of a wound’s corruption and nearly impenetrable no more than a few wheelturns ahead.
The party stopped, clustered together.
“It is worse than ever it has been,” the fierce woman named Yndra said. “As if it feeds itself. I cannot tell north from south.”
With their faces covered, it was hard to know if anyone meant to speak in answer. They stood in frozen silence for a few moments.
Then Benon fell from his massive horse. The beast dipped its ivory head and nudged his soldier’s inert body.
“Benon!” Yndra leapt down from her own steed. All the others did as well. The Rider reached him just as Yndra did, and they turned him over.
The murk was deep, but in its swirl, Mya saw that he’d paled greatly, and his face and hair were dripping sweat. He was in an agony. More than her eyes told her so.
“A fever has him,” the Rider said.
“Not fever,” Yndra corrected. “The fire.” She grabbed his bandaged hand without much gentleness and began yanking the wrapping from it.
Every soul in the party gasped when it was exposed. His skin bubbled and oozed while they watched, and the fire had moved deeper through his veins—was moving even now, fast enough to see, to his shoulder. Farther.
Xian had hold of her, and tried to shield her from the sight, but Mya was drawn closer. She wriggled from Xian’s hold and approached Benon’s supine form, as if he pulled her to him himself.
“We need to get him away from here,” Kirken said. “The magic that did this is too strong here. It lingers and gains power as we reach the path of the beast.”
“It’s too late,” the Rider said, and pointed to Benon’s neck, at the top of his armor. The veins there pulsed and blackened. “If it’s reached his neck, it’s reached his heart.”
Callyn flung their hand out and grabbed Mya’s arm, with such force it hurt, and Mya looked down as she tried to free herself. It wasn’t the wizened, sun-darkened hand of Urna, the Carrican woman, that grasped her but Callyn’s own white, long-fingered hand.
They had dropped the glamour, and they had their other hand around Benon’s neck. Yndra and Kirken yelled in a chorus of shock and stumbled backward. They drew their weapons and charged as one at Callyn, and at Mya.
“NO!” Xian shouted and leapt into their path, brandishing his axe. The Rider leapt over Benon’s body and stood with him. For a terrifying, long moment, the venomous air rang with the sound of war, as Xian and the Rider fought off two powerful soldiers. Mya tried to see, but the air was thick, and what Callyn was doing hurt, it hurt her in her chest and belly, her head, everywhere; it made her tired and drew all her thinking into darkness.
