56. Fifty-six
Chapter 56
I rose just before dawn the next morning to walk along the river. Tarelay had cast a simple ward around our camp, but it was gone now. He was the only other one awake. He nodded in my direction, then turned to face the wind.
I stared after him for a while. How strange to think this legend still walked the world, or that he was now sworn to Kalcedon through the workings of an ancient Obeisance to the court of Sorrow. I had a million questions I wanted to ask him, but he was fae, and he looked occupied. I dared not risk disturbing him or rousing his anger.
The sky was pearly and gray, tinged with a faint pink. A low fog hung over the landscape. I could feel currents of warmth on the air, magic prickling my skin. As I walked, I tried to imagine what kind of life I could build in a place like this. I made it a mile out, then turned and headed back towards the camp.
Oraik was awake when I returned, sitting with Kalcedon beside a new fire built from the last night’s embers. Kalcedon, who had spent the night wrapped around me, was savoring the final slice of his garden’s white melon, most of which he’d devoured with frightening speed. The rest of camp was starting to come awake. Oraik looked much more like himself, though he still moved slowly. I watched him clap Kalcedon’s shoulder, then rise to meet me down at the bank.
“Hello, oh fearsome witch.”
“Don’t.” I rolled my eyes, and he smiled softly.
“Karema said they’re headed west today. Away from the Ward.” His voice turned serious.
“Alright.”
“Should we part, and cross home now? If you want to travel with them for a time, I wouldn’t mind seeing more. Whatever you’d like.”
“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Oraik. I’m sorry. The truth is… I can’t go back.”
His face went blank.
“...Can’t?” Oraik said after a moment.
“Won’t,” I corrected. He took a half step back, eyes wide. I looked down so I wouldn’t have to see his pained expression. “We’d have to bring down the Colynes stone. I won’t let the Ward fall further, not on my behalf. And Kalcedon has to stay, now that he’s the Lord here, so…” I drew a deep breath. “But if I wrote a letter to my family. You’d bring it to them, right? And you’d visit me?” I’d felt fine a moment ago. Now I was almost crying.
“Oh, Meda,” Oraik said. He grabbed me in a tight embrace.
“Younglings. There is no need for these passionate dramatics.”
Oraik and I turned around. Tarelay stood a half-dozen paces away, ankle deep in the river, his pants cuffed around his shins. “I apologize for overhearing. But the whole Ward will need to come down and be built anew. The fallen lord damaged it beyond repair.”
It was the first time he had spoken to me since the awful events of the day before.
“You really are Tarelay?” I couldn’t help but ask. “The Tarelay who built the Ward?”
The Tarelay Sorrowsworn craned his head and looked down his green nose at me.
“I am.”
“ The Tarelay?” I asked again in disbelief.
He squinted at me.
“Right,” I said. I sniffled. “And you mean to say I could go home? And see my family? Without ruining it?”
“Yes, yes. The Colynes stone will need to come down at some point or other, anyways.”
I could go back. I could see them. My family would know how many times the Ward had fallen. They might have been scared, or worried, or even hurt—though I didn’t let my mind settle on that last one. I wanted to hug them all, more badly than I had in years.
But somehow, I still knew that the Protectorate couldn’t be my home any longer. I didn’t belong on Nis-Illous. I would never trust the Temple again, and I couldn’t leave Kalcedon. But I wanted desperately to see my family. And maybe to take some of the books from Eudoria’s home.
But to only go once… I gulped. Oraik could visit us, and my father, but not the rest of my family.
“Would you consider some changes?” I asked Tarelay shyly. It felt profane to tell him he could do anything better. “If it weren’t so impenetrable. If it didn’t swallow all magic, but just kept out those who meant trouble?”
“Such a thing would be abhorrently complex,” Tarelay informed me, peering down his long nose. “It is not possible to write such a tailored limit.”
“Alright, a different idea,” I said, yanking my hand out of Oraik’s to gesture in front of me. “I thought, if you take—what was it, your seventh phrasing, I think? That defines the scope of the Ward? And add a sequence after. That would only capture a certain magnitude, like a full faerie but not a witch—”
“Insufficient,” Tarelay informed me. “It would not stop lesser spells from entering through the Ward. In such a matter, havoc would still be wreaked.”
“A limit of intention , then,” I insisted. “That only prevents those with ill-will…”
“Magic cannot do that,” Tarelay said. “It is impossible. Who among us does not harbor some small cruelty? Intentions change, or appear differently on one’s perspective.”
“No, I don’t think it’s impossible. Look, what if… I think maybe Eldredaz , do you have anything to write with? No, here—” I knelt by the riverbank’s mud and started to write with one finger. Tarelay sloshed closer, then bent over with his hands on his knees.
“Meda?” Oraik said. I turned and blinked, having nearly forgotten he was there. “I’m going back to Kalcedon. Find me when you’re done.” He squeezed my shoulder and walked away. I glanced back at Tarelay, who was looking at me intently. I blushed, feeling foolish for presuming I could show him anything.
Tarelay squinted at me, his head cocked to the side. I looked away from his eerie black eyes.
“You look alarmingly like Marael,” he told me.
“Who?”
“One of mine,” he answered and took me by the chin to turn me this way and that. I let him. The rush of fae magic from his touch did not alarm me as much as it should. “Hundreds of years past. Yes, remarkable. I rather think you are .”
“ Yours ?”
“Go on, little illsruer,” the faerie said.
Tarelay’s? I was related to Tarelay?
“What’s an Eels-roor?” I breathed as he let go of my face. He waved the question away with a long-fingered hand.
“A rare gift, one you and I share. It means one who speaks the dragon tongue. I am surprised to find it in such a weak witch.”
“ Dragon -tongue?” I sputtered. Tarelay smirked.
“Go on. Show me what you would write, after that.”
Karema’s band left in late morning, after she handed her younger brother a series of amulets and growled at him to stay put, because there would be other relatives who wanted to meet him.
We spent that night around a fire: Kalcedon, Tarelay, Oraik, and myself. Tarelay had offered to raise a hall of the Silver Palace for shelter. I didn’t ever want to step foot in that mountain again, but Kalcedon saved me from having to say so.
“I’d rather sleep under the stars,” he said.
They were everywhere. Even the column of smoke from our crackling fire could not hide that fact, as tree-cover had the night before. A million lights sparkled across the sky, and a smudge of blue haze that Tarelay said was neither Ward, nor cloud, but rather worlds beyond our own.
“I’m finding it very hard to wrap my mind around all this,” I admitted. Kalcedon lay with his head in my lap, staring up at the sky as I leaned back on my elbows to do the same. Oraik hummed as he roasted river fish over the flames.
“Around what?” Kalcedon asked.
“Everything. It’s changed so quickly. And to think your father was the Sorrowing Lord… why now ? Why, after almost forty years?”
“Maybe I wasn’t useful to him before,” Kalcedon suggested. He lifted his head to glance at Tarelay, who appeared lost in the flames. The faerie blinked, and peered down at Kalcedon.
“No,” Tarelay said. “In truth, for many years, he did not know you existed at all. It took time for rumor to reach his ear.”
“That’s funny,” Oraik commented, quirking his lips as he turned each fish. “I thought gossip was normally quite fast.”
Tarely shrugged.
“I have little sense what life is like inside my Ward,” he informed us. “Very little news comes to us from inside. But rumor came, eventually—oh, three years past, I think—of a gray half-faerie of your age. We do not sire children easily. He puzzled it out.”
Perhaps that was why Kalcedon’s mother had chosen Nis-Illous. As far from Sorrow as she could get, and as quiet, with little contact from the rest of the Protectorate.
“Still. Three years,” I said.
Tarelay laughed silently.
“Three years is no time at all,” he informed me. “And he was, ah… delayed by my refusal to tell him how to enter the Ward.”
“He turned you into a bird.” I remembered the blurry vision from Eudoria’s mirror.
“I turned myself, actually,” Tarelay said morosely. “I could not break the Obeisance, and I was going to tell him against my will. I became a bird so that I could only speak in song. I will admit it was foolish. He found someone who could speak rock-thrush and stole the secret from me. And then he stopped me from turning back, to punish me.”
“What was he like?” Kalcedon wanted to know. “Was he truly terrible?”
“I think these are done,” Oraik interrupted. “They might be over done. I hope nobody minds burned food.” He slipped the fish off their wood skewers onto broad leaves Tarelay had gathered.
“Demanding. On himself, and others,” Tarelay answered. “A fair ruler, but not a beloved one.”
“ Fair ?” I straightened up off of my elbows. “He stole Kalcedon’s mind, and his mother’s! He trapped you—”
“Your rules are not ours,” Tarelay said. He looked at me, half his face lit flickering red by the fire’s glow, sharp ears and high cheeks, eyes like black pools. “Doubtlessly, a mouse finds a cat monstrous. Is a trapper a living nightmare, to a rabbit?”
“But we’re people.”
“You are human,” he corrected. “You live your whole life in the time it takes one of us to mature. Most of your kind is blind to magic, with dull senses and duller brains.”
“You are heartless,” I said.
“No,” he answered sharply. “We are not heartless. We are different . I do not condone how my kind, most of them, treat humans. I do not think it is ever appropriate to take another’s will. There are those who agree with me. Most do not.” He turned to Kalcedon. “You will need to be prepared. The Obeisance can be outwitted or tricked. Even a Sorrowsworn may avoid being commanded, if you have left holes in your commands. Do you understand? This is how some of them will see you—like a fish on a fire. They will seek to use you, devour you, or destroy you entirely. You must be on your guard.”
“Nothing new about that,” Kalcedon said sourly.
“Then he can’t stay here.” My palms felt slick. “If it’s that dangerous…”
“Whether he knew or not, he was born to rule,” Tarelay answered without emotion. “You may as well tell a bird to avoid the sky.”
“Isn't anyone hungry?” Oraik asked hopefully.
“I am,” I told him, and stretched out a hand. Oraik quickly handed me one of the fish.
Tarelay kept speaking.
“Think over what kind of ruler you want to be, Lord Kalcedon, if only so somebody else does not make the choice for you. Should you wish it, we have a chance to move these lands forward to a new age.”
I felt the deep breath Kalcedon took, and watched as his eyes fell shut in deep thought.