“Thy senses comprehend the particular changes I brought to this land?” Surprise and skepticism boiled out of him like seepage from a wound. “Without study or examination or practice?”
“The changes—the hunting birds you called forth, the water channels, the rest—yes. The paths of your movements that link them all together appear to me as threads of silver across the landscape. I can see the threads even as you draw them, and those of other Danae from earlier times.”
He halted in midstep and glared at me, his aspen-gold eyes like flame in the darkness. “Thou canst see the paths of the kiran—the patterns left behind from the dance?” His tone dared me to affirm it.
“I could walk them as you do this track under your feet.”
He clamped his mouth shut and stomped faster up the path. When a dead limb blocked his way, likely fallen from Picus’s fence making, he snatched it up and threw it farther than even my improved eyesight could make out in the middle of the night. Had it struck a fortification, even at such a distance, I would wager on the stick to penetrate the stone, so vicious was its launch. I’d thought he would approve my increased understanding. Perhaps I had trespassed some protocol by observing Danae mysteries or speaking of them. I trailed along behind him, my bare feet tormented with sticks and rocks, narrowly avoiding wrenching my ankle in some burrower’s entry hole, and near giving up on comprehending my uncle.
As the vale sloped upward, the land grew rockier, so my battered feet could attest. The path soon vanished, as did the stream, replaced, almost before I could imagine it, by rills and rivulets that trickled across the hillside from thick forest on either side of us. The soil beneath my feet thinned. At least the rain had slackened, holding somewhere between a drizzle and a mist. Kol’s gards flared brighter.
Of a sudden, I realized that we had traveled farther from Picus’s meadow than our steps could justify. Alert now, I began to feel a shifting when Kol invoked his magic—when the path took a sudden turning or broke dramatically uphill. When the scent of pine and spruce entirely supplanted the scent of oak and ash and hawthorn in the space of twenty paces. When the air grew sharply colder and very dry.
“Your gards carry power that enables you to move from one place to another,” I said, pushing my steps to keep up with the fast-moving Dané.
“Aye. After the second remasti, the stripling’s growing familiarity with the world becomes a part of the walking gards and can be called on as desired.” The brisk walk seemed to have restored his calm. “The particular slope of a grass-covered hillside recalls that of a mountain meadow. The sound of one stream echoes another that happens to feed a mighty river. Just here”—he pointed to a stand of evergreens—“the odd shape of that tallest tree’s crown recalls to me the outline of another tree against a different sky, thus forms a path from this place to the next. I can walk there if I will. It is all a matter of similarity and recollection, for all places are bound one to the other in ways a human—most humans—cannot perceive.”
“Sometimes we do,” I said. “We come to a new place, yet feel as if we’ve been there before. Or we meet a stranger and feel as if we know her already.”
“Perhaps.” A grudging admission.
By the time I wrenched my eyes from the fork-tipped fir, disappointed it had not belched fire or displayed some other obvious magic, we walked a slightly steeper path amid widely scattered trees. My breathing labored. Around another corner and we were traversing the shoulder of a conical peak outlined against a star-filled sky. Mist floated like a gray sea below us.
A half hour’s hard climb and we had left the last stunted trees behind. We came to a rocky prominence—a thick slab of pale stone, some twenty quercae in height, that poked up in gloomy isolation from the mountainside. Kol propped one foot on a broad flat shard, long split off from the standing rock and toppled to the grass.
“We begin thy teaching here,” he said. “Thy gards draw in the sights and sounds, tastes and smells from forest, vale, and shore, as well as the dust of Picus’s foolish babbling and the stink of his dwelling place. No doubt rememberings of thy usual days intrude upon thy perceptions, as well. Likely it is some confusion of these impressions with the observation of my kiran that caused this seeing thou hast reported.”
So he had not entirely dismissed his disturbance at my claim. “Yes, my eyes, nose, and ears are overwhelmed, but what I saw back there, the silver traces—”
“Thy task is not to think or speak,” he snapped. “I’ll give thee ample opportunity to question. ’Tis the deeps of the night here on Aesol Mount, the time when the world is quietest. Best for listening to voices that cannot be heard in the day. Best for learning control.”
I shut my mouth, suppressed my resentful urge to kick him, and bowed. I needed to learn.
As before, the politeness seemed to take him a bit off guard. “I should not have taken the time to shape a kiran for Picus’s plantings. Thou didst not linger within his walls as long as I thought a halfbreed might, thus my hurry opened the way for this misunderstanding. So, no matter.” He waved as if his willing could dismiss my beliefs. “A wanderkin’s task is learning of the world, thus the separation gards are the most sensitive and most subject to confusion. Thou must seek perfection in their use, as in all things. For now, I promised to teach thee closure and control. Sit before the rock”—he pointed to the featureless slab—“and listen. Stone speaks softly but with utmost authority. Seek its voice. Listen for it alone, and it will root thee firmly. Once thou canst hear the speech of stones, thou shalt begin to understand closure.”
Were he anyone else, I might discount such instruction as lunacy. But the man who had made love to Picus’s garden, tending it, infusing it with life, must be granted trust despite our other disagreements. The effects of his work yet fired my blood. Feeling exceedingly awkward, I sat cross-legged on the damp ground facing the rock and reached out.
“Do not touch the rock!”
I snatched my hand away.
“Our purpose is to develop and exercise thy control of the gards. Human tricks have no place here. Heed the stone. Work at it.”
Balls of Karus, the man is difficult! The task seemed impossible with him standing not two paces behind me, with the riot of smells, sounds, and tastes from my senses swelling my skull to bursting. The traveling had, at least, reduced the uncomfortable involvement of my privy parts, but had presented its own myriad questions. And somehow in this clean and pungent air, my charge to Saverian kept repeating itself in my mind…
I needed to understand Llio’s curse, which condemned halfbreeds to crippling. My sudden conviction that my own existence was intimately entwined with the fate of Navronne had surprised even myself. But surely my life had taken no random course—not from the day I was conceived, not from the day I happened upon the book of maps, not from the day three months past when I lay bleeding in a ditch, only to stagger, blind and ignorant, straight to my mother’s sianou, where a Karish abbot had built his lighthouse. Clyste, a dancer so powerful that the earth itself had chosen her for a guardian, had laid the preservation of the lighthouse…of Navronne…at her son’s feet. My feet. Of a sudden that seemed so obvious. And terrifying.
Listen for the stone. A hand clamped my bare shoulder as a dog’s jaws grip a bone, infusing my body with my vayar’s will. I had to learn before I could act. And so I shoved aside fear and looming destiny for the moment and set to work.