A thought darted past like a firefly, before being swallowed in an assault of scents reminiscent of a town marketplace: baking pies, roasting meat, leather goods and perfumes, herbs, vegetables, and scented oils, horse manure, pigs. I prayed that Kol could teach me what to do with all of it.
“Even if you care naught for Navronne, you’re Osriel’s friend and servant,” I said. “What we learn here could be the keys to his future.”
“Osriel betrayed you. Why would you care about his future?”
“You’ve witnessed the havoc the Harrowers wreak in Navronne. And I promise the damage is much deeper than that you saw. Surely you saw, too, the hope he brought them, almost without trying. People wiser than me have entrusted Navronne’s salvation to Prince Osriel’s hand—but I fear that trust has been misplaced unless we can find out the truth of all this before he takes a path of desperation. This thing you will not speak of. This thing he hopes to fuel with Danae magic. I have this notion I can help him, but only if I learn enough.”
What wastrel fool had ever made so pompous a statement? But I did feel it, however foolish. If I could only see the way.
Saverian nodded slowly, her clear eyes as lustrous as jade in the white light. I had never noticed their color. “I’ll learn what I can.” Then she lowered her lids halfway and snatched the wadded shirt from my hand. “Meanwhile, I’ll dry this out. I doubt you’ll need it for a while.”
I grinned as she threw it over her shoulder and ducked into Picus’s hut. Then I set off into the trees to find Kol. Amid the cascading telltales of hunting foxes, nervous deer, and mice and moles that burrowed through leaves and earth, I heard Picus greet Saverian with concerned questioning. She reassured him as to my health. “Ah, for certain,” he said. “I’d forgot how the walls torment the odd creatures…”
Creatures…beings that had no souls. My smile faded.
Chapter 15
Kol crouched impossibly high in the limbs of a leaf-bare ash that bordered a swath of open meadow. The wind rustled knee-high grass and faded leaves, and the rain outlined odd dark shapes, barriers of timber and tied brush set at angles across the meadow. I blinked, astonished that I could see so much as that on a starless, moonless night. The air smelled of must and soured grain, of soggy earth and the small stream that bisected the gentle slope, and of a thousand other scents that had naught to do with this meadow. A wolf’s howl sent chilly fingers up my bare spine, hinting that even the magics of Aeginea could not hold back this foul winter. Naked in the night wood…I’d never felt such an idiot.
As I opened my mouth to call him, the Dané rose from his crouch and brushed bits of bark and leaf from his skin. Angling his feet, as if for proper balance on the branch, he stretched his arms skyward. His gards brightened to the cold blue of a mountain winter sky. Somewhere—in my head, in my heart, in my imagining?—music swelled. The sweet clarity of a rebec’s bowed strings twined my overcrowded thoughts in a single long note that stretched my nerves taut…and then Kol launched himself from the top of the ash.
My heart near stopped until his feet touched solidly to the grass, and he began to whirl and spin and leap through the meadow, a glory of power and strength, raising one and then another thread of melody to join in a driving gigue. Danae danced to the land’s music—or made it.
Determined to understand what he did, I pushed aside the wet leaves and pine needles at the edge of the wood, pressed my fingers into the mud, and released magic. As if lightning illuminated the symbols on a fiché, I glimpsed rowed turnips, carrots, and onions slimed and rotting underground, a plot of stunted wheat across the stream, and hungry moles panting as they excavated tunnels underneath it all, their fur patched with disease. My spirit choked at the suffocating sickness. Kol’s exuberant feet scribed silvered traces across the unhealthy landscape, his every bend, dip, and spin bringing new complexity to his insistent melodies.
I could have watched him dance until the end of days. Every note perfect…every step exquisite…exhilarating. Even when I knelt up, allowing the rain to rinse the mud from my hands, the magic he raised in Picus’s garden meadow enfolded me in such beauty as would draw a stone’s tears.
The music reached its whirling climax, and Kol stretched legs and arms to leap in one great arc across the stream, streaks of blue trailing behind him as if his gards were threads of silk, whipped to frenzy by the wind of his passing. Above and below and around me an explosion of color washed the landscape like watered ink. The healthier humors of a nearby forest glade flooded the diseased plots. Owl and hawk rose up from the wood, dark shapes diving and soaring to purge the pests, while other creeping creatures deep buried in the soil, too tiny for a human eye to see, woke to cleanse and nourish roots and stems. The waterlogged soil released its burden, riddling the undersoil with new channels to the stream. When the spinning Dané took a knee, aligning his back and outstretched leg in the position I’d come to know as completion, it seemed as if the earth gave a great sigh of contentment, while I was left roused and aching with unspent desire.
Kol held his position for a long while, and when at last he stood, his posture bespoke a man completely drained. His head came up, expression vague and lost, his sculpted features sharpening only slowly when he caught sight of me. He heaved a sigh, kneaded his neck, and started up the gentle slope, following the path of the stream. A slight sweep of his right hand commanded me to follow.
I joined him, padding through wet grass while he strode on a game trail that bordered the stream. “How do you do it?” I said, when it became clear he had no plan to initiate conversation. “Draw the music from plants and beasts and dirt clods? Use your body…your movements…to join all the parts together? Is the Canon something like this?”
“I am not here to teach thee of the dance. I’ll not speak of the Canon. Nor will I guide thee through the remasti of regeneration. No use in developing skills…and hungers…thou canst neither use nor satisfy.” He swept his dripping hair back from his face, squeezed water from it, and tied it into a heavy knot at the back of his neck.
“Regeneration,” I repeated. Osriel had said the third remasti was the passage of regeneration, when Danae first experienced the hungers of fleshly love…when they became both capable and desirous of mating. “That’s what you did to this field. Your dance healed its sickness as a human physician heals a body, diagnosing its ills and applying the proper remedy. You called forth creatures to cleanse and nourish it, changed its makeup in subtle ways to leave it healthier. But the way you accomplished it was more like mating than healing. The dance this morning touched my spirit, but this…I was honored…humbled…to witness it, relagai.”
Kol cast me a sidewise glance. Suspicious. “Thy gards tell thee these things?”
I looked down at my mottled arms and legs, so pale and ill-defined beside the brilliant clarity of his dragons, reeds, and heron. My marks no longer flashed or swirled. I doubted a human eye would even notice them were I ten paces distant. Yet though the wind had picked up, and I felt its bitter edge, the cold no longer penetrated beyond my skin.
“No. Not the gards…” I stumbled a bit, as the truth of my change settled even deeper in my gut. “I saw, or well…rather, it’s something like seeing. When I touch the earth and use my magic…my Cartamandua bent…an image of the surrounding land forms in my mind, in my senses, so I see and hear and smell what’s there or has been there in the past—plants, beasts, humans, the paths they’ve left. And I can explore the image—look deeper, learn how it fits together, as I did with the tide pool. It’s difficult to describe.”