On Wings of Bone and Glass Page 7

  “I don’t think he intended to wake anyone. He wanted to steal off alone. It was an accident that I noted it.” Amhric tilted his head as he studied me, then shook it. “Don’t, my brother.”

  “He could have confided in me,” I muttered.

  “And you would have tried to stop him.”

  Would I have? Only because I knew what such requests could cost. The angel had listened to Winifred only because she’d offered her life. Was it selfish of me not to want Chester to pay for the redemption of the elves? Even though, as a descendant of the race that had seen them cursed, he might argue that his was the price to pay?

  “Now that you’re up,” Amhric said, “I will let you stand the watch.”

  Rueful, I kissed his hands. “I am sorry. I am not as empty of sin as I could wish.”

  “You are all that I need, and that your friends desire,” my brother said, smiling. “I think that enough.”

  It was with a blush on my cheeks that I took up Amhric’s vigil, then, for who could hear such words and feel deserving of them? I certainly did not. Not knowing where Chester had gone, nor how far away, I repaired to the cold campfire. We’d found precious little fuel to burn as we’d traveled… another reason to look forward to the wooded slopes. As the cold couldn’t hurt me I’d taken to leaving my blanket over Ivy, but I was uncomfortable huddled beneath my coat as I waited. I may even have drowsed. But I woke when I felt him approach with the senses to which I’d become heir with my powers. He was a mage, and I was his prince, and his essence was all the warmth that a fire could not duplicate.

  “And here I thought I was being quiet.”

  “You were,” I said. “But you woke Amhric and that woke me.”

  Chester let himself down alongside me. I could smell the blood, taste the magic in it, in the back of my throat where tastes become thicknesses. In silence I reached for his hand and he gave it to me, where I found the long cut on his tawny palm. It looked painful: perhaps purposefully so. He could have chosen a less fraught place to slice, but if it had been intended as a symbol of sacrifice, nothing less would have served.

  I did not need to tell him to stay when I went to our packs. When I returned, he let me clean the wound and begin wrapping it in strips of cloth.

  “I failed, of course.”

  “Not for want of piety or virtue,” I said, gentle.

  “How can you know?”

  That sound in his voice that could become bitterness… I looked up at him and said, “So the man devout would place himself at the same level as the saint who founded his faith?”

  Shocked, Chester said, “Never!” And such was the strength of his reflexive negation that we both paused, and a rueful smile curved his mouth. “I am, however, obviously lacking in humility.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, smiling as I tucked the end of the strip beneath the others and gave it a tug to test the binding. “But you were preparing to turn the incident into a whip to mortify yourself with, and we will have more than enough wounds soon enough without requiring their self-infliction.”

  Chester snorted, flexed the hand. “That’s good. Thank you.” He added, quieter, “It’s just that our need is so great. I had hoped—”

  “I did too, a little. But apparently our need is not great enough yet.” I turned his hand. “I hope this won’t hobble you.”

  “I won’t let it.”

  “You did it to your writing hand,” I said, irritated.

  He laughed. “Locke. Really.” At my glance, he said, “My writing hand! As if I will be writing anything anytime soon.”

  “Fine. Your sword hand.”

  He chuckled and grasped me on the shoulder. “I trained with them both.”

  “Frustrating man,” I said. “There are grisly fates awaiting those who have an insolent answer to their prince’s every reprimand.”

  “Was that a reprimand?” Chester asked, amused, but I could tell he was asking.

  “No,” I said. Then added, “Well. Only that you insisted on not warning me before jaunting off.”

  Chester folded his hands in his lap, head lowered. “I thought about it. But it was a thing between me and God.”

  “Which is why I’m not angry.”

  He nodded. Then added, quiet, “Your brother is all that you said he would be. Even his silences are magnetic. They draw the most astonishing confessions from one’s lips, and yet one is sure they repose in him as safely as they would in a locked treasure chest.”

  “It is his gentleness.” I stared at the cold firepit, as if the memory of the flame there could still mesmerize. “There is no power in the world that can resist gentleness. It may take time, but....”

  Chester nodded. “I find I adore him. But you spoke more truly before.” When I glanced at him, he said, “You are my prince, Locke.” He grinned then, and it was an expression more suited to my face than his: wry, touched with something too close to self-mockery for my taste. “Do you find it absurd?”

  “I suppose others might. But I have fallen in love with a king. If it is absurd, it’s a failing we share.”

  “At least the king was unknown to you! You have been... well... you.” He shook his head. “Do you recall how we met?”

  “Vividly,” I said. “Classics I, and I was asleep on my desk.” I remembered it too well, how my illness had stolen my strength and made me look the delinquent: absent from class, or sleeping through it like someone who’d misspent the evening before. “I thought when you stopped to look at me that you were preparing to chastise me. Were you?”

  “I don’t know,” Chester admitted. He smiled, and this was a gentler chagrin. “I thought about it, but something stayed me at the last moment.”

  “And I woke and thought you passing judgment....”

  “And you schooled me!” Chester laughed. “Rattled off quotations from the last seven texts we’d been examining. That was a difficult class. Baybery wanted us to memorize the entire canon, I sometimes thought.”

  “Sometimes!” I snorted. “If I hadn’t been reading those books before I took the class, I would have foundered. It’s a rare cruelty, their requiring it first as a ‘survey’ of ancient literature.”

  “In Baybery’s defense, by the end of the class, you had indeed surveyed just about every author of note from the previous thousand years.”

  I chuckled. “Only if by ‘survey’ you mean ‘deeply studied.’”

  Chester nodded, lips pursed in mock gravity. “They had to winnow out the dilettantes somehow.”

  “Poor Baybery!”

  “Poor Baybery.” Chester paused. “Locke. Tell me truly. Carrington—why?” When I hesitated, he said, “She was the one who spit you, wasn’t she?”

  “You make assumptions based on little evidence,” I murmured.

  “You have not refuted my assumption, and that is the evidence that convinces me.”

  How could I explain what I did not myself understand? “They left her the duty, yes, but I was too far gone at the time to make complaint.”

  Chester leaned toward me, close enough to see my face. His eyes were hard. “She raddled you with knives, Morgan.”

  “She thought me already dead,” I said. “And my body did not answer her like a living one. You have seen it yourself, when I fell from the balcony. What remains for a time is not flesh, Chester. It’s meat. Confronted with my actual living self, she couldn’t bring herself to continue the task.”

  “My, how comforting! She is only capable of atrocity when lacking witnesses.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “I would have thought ‘I am capable of putting a sword through another person’s flesh’ would be very simple.”

  “Have you?” I asked, and when he paused, I said, “I have. I have killed an elf, Chester, and it is hideous.”

  “You had cause—”

  “She thought she had cause. But even when she did, she found it difficult.” I drew in a deep breath. “God counsels forgiven
ess.”

  Chester squinted.

  I tried, “Even the sages of Classics I believed it. ‘Be you not wise, for the quest for wisdom leads to wrong thinking and condescension. Strive rather to be kind, for even striving one is molded into finer shape.’”

  Chester drew back, just a little. His mouth twitched. “Said by?”

  “Darles Crell. In The Book of Living Platitudes.”

  “Are you sure? I thought it was the second volume of Proverbs.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “I ate, drank, and slept all four volumes of Proverbs. It was definitely the Platitudes.”

  He snorted. Grinned. “I concede. I don’t recall clearly.” The smile eased from his face. “Why did you do it? Really, this time.”

  I glanced at him, then to where Carrington slept, curled up in a blanket and stubbornly apart from everyone. “Eyre loves her.”

  “And you trust him.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether I do,” I said. “He loves her. And I find it impossible to part them, when we might not live another month.”

  Silence then, but a less uncomfortable one than I’d feared. After a time, Chester looked north, his eyes losing their focus. “About now,” he murmured, “I would have been preparing for tomorrow’s classes. What do you suppose it would be if we were there? I can’t even remember the day of the week.”

  “Neither can I,” I said, rueful.

  He smiled, picked at the now worn knee of his breeches. “I fear I find myself missing some of the simplicity of the life we’ve abandoned, Morgan.”

  “I’d be surprised if you didn’t. Even I do, and I have good cause to want never to return to those days. Besides, we didn’t abandon it. History thrust us into the crux of events that would have engulfed us anyway.” I grimaced. “Think, if I had not been what I am, then you would have been in Evertrue now, married to Minda... and about to be drafted into an army to fight the unkillable dead.”

  Chester ran a hand over his brow. “Sadly, the most dreadful part of that scenario is the vision of being Minda’s lawfully wedded spouse.”

  “Fortunately for you, she’ll probably want nothing to do with you when you return.”

  “You think! More like she will see me as a war hero associated with a powerful new ally and wish all the more to marry me, that some of that cachet might devolve onto her.”

  “Devolve is right,” I muttered, and he laughed.

  “What are you two doing up?” Ivy asked, shuffling into view.

  “Reminiscing,” I said as she sat and rested her head on my shoulder.

  “About what?”

  “Baybery,” Chester said.

  Ivy shuddered against me. “Loving God, don’t remind me.”

  We all laughed, low. I slung an arm around her, grateful for her warmth and weight and the love and trust that served far more than any blanket. Chester set a hand on my knee, cautious, and I answered him by covering it with my own. The bandages were tight. I would check them again later.

  Many difficulties lay before us, and we might not return at all, much less as the war heroes I’d evoked. The knot of illness toward which we rode figured larger in my heart with every step north we took, and sickened me the closer we approached. And time, I knew, was racing us, and winning. But I found myself content with my choices. What little I could control, I was. The rest was in God’s hands, and apparently God had not decided we required divine intervention... yet.

  5

  The following morning did not find us in charity with one another, however. I was saddling the drake, which had gone hunting before dawn, when I heard Ivy say, “Oh, but this is outside of enough!”

  I met Chester’s eyes over the back of the drake, then turned to see what had pricked forth Ivy’s ire. She was standing, hands on her hips, facing down Carrington who was avoiding her gaze by making a study of the straps and buckles on her mount’s tack. None of which needed the tightening, if I was any judge.

  “I am talking to you so there’s no use pretending otherwise,” Ivy said. “You can’t honestly let this continue.”

  “What’s this now?” I asked when it became clear that no one wanted to throw themselves on the pyre.

  “She’ll slow us down! Or rip herself open on her own horse. It’s ridiculous. It can be fixed!”

  Eyre had drawn nigh now, concern drawing his voice taut. “Mary? Are you hurt? You didn’t say anything—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “She’s bleeding,” Ivy said, scowling.

  “All women bleed,” Carrington said with frosty dignity.

  “Not that way. You’re bleeding from saddle sores, for God’s sake, and I can make them go away!”

  “Mary!” Eyre was distressed now. “Is this true?”

  Carrington drew away from us, putting her back to her horse’s side. “There’s no call to make such a fuss over it.”

  “There is if it slows us down,” Chester said. “Ivy’s right. If you’re galled, you need to be healed.”

  “Besides,” Kelu said, “I’m not the only thing that’s attracted to the smell of blood.”

  Carrington paled. “I won’t be ensorcelled.”

  “Or touched by demon powers, yes, we know,” Ivy said. “But I’m not an elf, you’ll note.” Her exasperation faded. “Please, just… let me fix it. It’s hard to watch someone suffering and not make an attempt at the healing. Especially when doing so involves the evocation of something precious and wonderful. And you’ve never experienced it! You will not think it demon-brought when you feel it, I assure you.”

  “Many foul things feel fair,” Carrington said. She grabbed the pommel of her saddle and dragged herself astride with a wince she hid from nearly everyone; I saw it only because my time among the elves had sensitized me to even the faintest sign of pain. “I can go on.”

  Ivy began to protest but I quelled her with a touch to the shoulder. “Very well. But if you delay us, we will treat you.”

  “I won’t delay you.”

  I left her to Eyre, who walked to her horse’s shoulder to begin a whispered, impassioned discussion. Ivy, trailing me, said, “You should have let me.”

  “If it’s as bad as you say, she’ll have no choice but to accept treatment soon enough,” I said. “Perhaps she’ll be more grateful for it then.”

  “Or more resentful because you had to save her,” Kelu muttered.

  “The genet speaks truth,” Last said once I’d mounted. “Delay does no good, perhaps much harm.”

  “The elves forced much upon me against my will.” I wound a hand in the mane of the drake. “I won’t force anyone else, unless we have no choice at all.”

  I led again, guiding us blindly toward the source that pulsed its distress and sickness; as if I was returning to what I was before the Archipelago, when my life had been circumscribed by pains I didn’t understand. If Carrington suffered, she did admirable work hiding it from us, and we ran abreast of the chill wind as it streamed past our beasts’ hot flanks. I slowed us near midday, and we dismounted to eat, stretch, let the mounts rest. Then we resumed our labors, and rode hard until sunset, when I allowed us to fall back to a gentler pace as we sought a good campsite.

  “Master,” Almond said, hesitant. “Is it true that all women bleed?”

  Of all the topics she had brought to me, this one caught me the furthest off my guard. I wrenched my attention from scanning the horizon for some small rent or hummock that might make us a good place to stop for the night and was trying to formulate some answer when Kelu stepped into the breach. “All natural female creatures do. That doesn’t count elves or us.”

  “Elves are natural,” I said.

  “Elven women don’t bleed,” Kelu said.

  “What?” Ivy nudged her mount over until it was trotting alongside the drake. “What do you mean they don’t bleed?”

  “They don’t.” Kelu shrugged, a movement I felt against my back. “I was around Amoret’s humans enough to notice the difference.”


  “But how can they have children without bleeding?” Ivy asked, perplexed.

  “They don’t,” Kelu said.

  “Not often, at least,” Almond added, apologetic, for Ivy looked stunned.

  Amhric spoke little during our discussions, when we had them. When he chose to make his contributions, everyone grew still, as if sighting something rare and precious that might flee if approached. “Immortality made us infertile.”

  “Probably for the best,” Eyre said. “Or you would have overrun your islands soon enough. No one dying, and yet the population being replaced at the same rate as before it could no longer die? A recipe for disaster.”

  “Yet who would trade that for no children?” Ivy asked.

  “Children are a burden.”

  Carrington’s intrusion into the discussion was so unexpected that she garnered a silence similar to the ones that surrounded Amhric’s speeches.

  “Children are not a burden,” Ivy replied, irritated. And then, self-consciously, “At least, they can be, but they’re a joyful burden.”

  “And you would know this how?” Carrington squinted at her. “You are here, aren’t you? Did you leave some precious bundle of joy behind to gallivant off to fight demons?”

  Ivy flushed. “I’m not yet married.”

  “Exactly. Because such adventures come to those without the burdens of parenthood.”

  “Fathers fight wars,” Eyre said after a moment.

  “Fathers do, yes. Mothers don’t.”

  “Female elves do.” Last startled them into quiet.

  “Magic makes equals of all of us,” Chester said, nodding. “Ivy’s skills are as needful as mine.”

  “And neither of you up to a sorcerer,” Last said.

  “Puts us in our place, doesn’t it,” Ivy muttered, but she was smiling a little.

  “Do you think,” Almond said after a moment, “if we bled, we might have children? Real ones, like humans do. Not like we were made, out of the blood of the Fount, and fully grown.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It would take a sorcery beyond any we know to change you, though.” When her ears drooped, I squeezed her. “But we will seek an answer for the genets as well. There must be one.”