I pressed my hand to Saverian’s back, hoping to speed her steps. The Dané would likely welcome an excuse to abandon us. When we crested the steep slope, Kol’s sapphire gards were just visible through a scattering of saplings that bordered a darkening wood.
“Come on.” I took Saverian’s hand, and we pelted after him through the trees. The gloom of the deeper woodland enveloped us.
Saverian slowed. “Valen, look.”
“Best keep up. He’s using no track I can travel on my own.” I tightened my grip on her wrist. What with the rain, tired legs, a head packed with fears and nonsense, and Kol’s disconcerting route finding, the shifting of north and south, of before and after and here and there, was twisting my instincts underside up and forepart behind. Our every step moved across time and distance in ways not even a Cartamandua could fathom.
But the willful physician snatched her hand away. “Stop! Look at yourself, Valen.”
“We daren’t lose—” Iero’s grace! I stopped. Threads of pale lapis-hued light snaked about my fingers and bare legs. I shoved one sodden sleeve higher. The light—some threads fine, some thick—shifted and blurred beneath the raindrops. The knot in my breast burst. A cold shaft of terror pierced me head to feet. I had become…other.
“What’s happening? Is it uncomfortable? Pleasurable?” She made her odd little open-palm gesture asking permission, but touched my arm before I could refuse it. The traces sparked silver and blue under her fingertips.
“I’m—No. It just itches. Stings.” As if a swarm of ants had taken up residence on…or inside…my flesh and took it in mind to bite me every once in a while.
“Do you feel it atop the skin or deeper? Perhaps it’s like a lizard’s coloring that changes with its surroundings.” She bent my arm at wrist and elbow, which caused the marks to squirm and blur. “Look at that! If I just had my lenses…better light…”
Queasy and embarrassed, I jerked my arm away. The shifting marks seem to be connected straight to my gut. “We’d best go. He’s waiting for us.”
I stumbled forward, clutching my bundle of clothes and boots, unable to keep my eyes from the unstable patterns on my bare legs and feet. Saverian grabbed my sleeve and guided me around trees and stumps.
A flare of white welcomed us into a rain-swept circle of trampled grass amid the trees. A starlike cluster of twigs, the source of the pale, magical light, dangled from an overhanging branch, unaffected by the rain. The light revealed several ramshackle sheds and lean-tos nestled beside a thatch-roofed hut. Kol stood at the open doorway of the hut, engaged in conversation with a man in a dirty white gown and a brown—I wiped the rain from my eyes. Not a brown cloak, but a cowl, and a well-delineated tonsure that bared half his scalp. I was speechless.
“…Well, of course, I’ve been gi’en to welcome the stranger, and to hear a voice of home would put me out of mind in heavenly thanks, though I’ve renounced all such. But a woman born…Brave Kol, could ye not ask me please to slash my throat or draw down the poison of the hemlock, but ye must put me in the way of my sin? Half a century’s turn must I have fasted and prayed by now—not to say, great God of all, that I’ve complaints or believe by any chance that I’ve full expiated my guilt, for certain not”—he raised a bony hand to address this side comment to the heavens—“but to come to this moment to find myself in the full occasion of repeating my defilement—more likely, e’en, being half mad as I am—’tis a sore deterrent to hospitality!”
The white light bathed his face as he stuck his head around Kol’s rangy form and squinted into the rainy night. “Did ye not say ye’d brought two human folk? Or is it—?” As his examination took in my odd and soggy self, half dressed, legs flaring blue like miniature lightning, his own ruddy complexion lost all color, and he circled his breast with Iero’s seal, completing the gesture by clutching his chest as if his heart might fly out of it. “Mighty saints protect me, Brother Kol, ye’ve brought me a halfbreed.”
Assuredly his claim of fasting was no lie; the monk had scarce a citré’s weight of spare flesh on him. But he had once been a robust man, perhaps a half head less than Kol or I, and his meatless bones were broad and thick. Gray-stubbled chin and tonsure appeared as ragged as his garb, and assuredly no cleaner. But despite his self-deprecation, his voice boomed clear and the pale eyes gleamed as sharp as a well-honed dagger.
“Is the woman also mixed blood?”
“Only the male,” said Kol. “He is newly a wanderkin and cannot warm himself as yet. His companion has fallen afoul of Tuari, and the wanderkin would not leave her to the archon’s retribution. She needs shelter.”
“Ye’ve saved him from the breaking, have ye not, Kol? Put yourself in the way of burying, and if this girl aided ye in such an enterprise, then right and mercy it be to protect her. But how came ye to involve yourself with any human offspring, who’ve sworn never—?” The wide-eyed monk inhaled sharply. He stepped around Kol, and unheeding of the rain soaking his cowl and gown, grasped my arm and dragged me underneath the twiggy lamp. His fingers a manacle about my wrist, he swept my face as he might study his holy writs. “Merciful Iero, Liege of Heaven!”
“He is born of my sister,” said Kol.
“The cartographer relinquished him at last?” The monk’s fingers pinched my chin with the bite of a hungry dog on bloody meat and twisted my head side to side. “All count of human years has escaped me, but this one cannot have much time left before his maturing. Ne’er did I imagine your cruel penalty would budge the Cartamandua mule.”
Kol stiffened. “Humans are not fit to judge cruelty.”
“Strip off yer righteous skin, Brother Kol, and we’ll argue it again,” said the monk cheerfully, spinning about to face the Dané so quickly that his garb snapped my bare legs, causing a shower of blue and silver sparks. He tapped his own broad chest. “Would ye wrestle me to answer which of us has the One God’s ear? I’m not what I was, but if blessed Iero doth keep this heart thuttering, a human sinner will yet crack your long-lived spine. Fasting and hard labor strengthens—”
“Janus did not send me,” I interrupted, too curious to endure their jousting. “What, in Iero’s glory, brings a Karish monk to Aeginea? You’re not from Gillarine.” The threadbare brown cowl and white gown were not the black garb of Saint Ophir’s brotherhood. A century’s turn, he’d said. Names and faces, plots and schemes flew through my overcrowded head—the abbey, the lighthouse, the succession, Luviar, Osriel, Janus, Kol, Eodward…“By heaven, are you Picus?”
Then I, too, drew Iero’s sunburst upon my breast, for to see a man two centuries old and not dead drew truths of dread mystery and mortality all too near. Caedmon had sent a monk to the Danae with his infant son, a man charged to educate young Eodward as befit a human prince. But the fellow had vanished mysteriously some few years after Eodward’s return to Navronne, and only rumors had ever said where he’d gone.
“Picus?” Saverian tilted her head to one side, looking him over. “Osriel has a set of journals written by a man of that name. He was King Eodward’s—Mother save us!” Even the cool physician could not contain her astonishment.
The monk’s pinched face blossomed into such a joyful alignment as coaxed my own spirit to a smile. “I’m not forgot, then?” He quickly raised his hands as if to stay a legion. “Nay, nay, don’t tell me. Be it honorable memory or ill repute, I must not care. Penance is a narrow road. But here we bide in the deluge, and this lady’s lips blue as a wanderkin herself! And the lad doth appear as he were a goat who’s been witched into fasting. Prithee, come inside my cell and take what meager comforts I’ve to offer. Yes, the both of you. Should my weak character keep a drenched and freezing woman in the rain, ’twould be another sin to my account.” Picus pulled back the hide curtain that served him as a door and waved us in.
“My gratitude, Brother,” said Saverian as she hurried inside.