The man I had believed to be my father.
As I talked, the djeli assayed a bowed melody here and a plucked tune there. Her feet rapped a rhythm on the earth. Now and then she spoke in response, or sang a phrase to punctuate my story: It's true. I hear you.
How or why or when sleep overtook me I did not know. I only knew I slept because I woke between one breath and the next, as if a melody had called me out of an entrancing dream that had something of Andevai in it, curse him. A fiddle played a graceful tune as sinuous and proud as the stroll of a cat. I touched tongue to lips and wiggled my fingers and toes; yes, I was awake. Warmth drenched my back.
I looked over my shoulder. The young male cat sprawled along the other half of the length of my stone bench, ears twitching with cat dreams. All the cats were drowsing except for the big female, who watched with interest as I stirred. The sky had grown dark, as with night; the fire burned as it ever had; the djeli played her music.
I sat up cautiously, not wanting to startle a saber-toothed cat. The music ceased as the djeli pulled a flourish out of her bow and lowered the fiddle. Fire and shadow flatter women, so it is said, but her rosy youth was not the fire's flattery. I recognized her as the same djeli who' had been here from the very first, only now she looked a mere decade older than I was.
The cat stirred, rolled, and with its weight pushed me right off the stone. I shrieked and, without thinking, shoved it back, and it batted at me, claws sheathed. It did not know its own strength. The paw, connecting with my shoulder, sent me spinning, but I laughed and steadied myself against the brick wall surrounding the fire. This hearth was a center point set equidistant from the three exterior points of oak tree, dun, and well. A triangle, in fact. Bee, with her mathematical mind, would have seen it from the first. Andevai had clearly understood it when he'd dragged me back into the shelter of the oak to escape the tide. This place was warded. Beyond the wards of oak, tower, and well lay the spirit world in all its danger and beauty; here, one might rest without fear.
"Why did the cats not kill him?" I asked. "When we first crossed over, they leaped on him. I see now they were protecting me. But why did they not kill and eat him?"
She frowned. "Marriage does not stop at two. A woman and a man may marry, but they are not alone, her and him only. His family and her family also are bound by obligations and rights. To have devoured him just like that would have shown very little respect for the relationship, don't you think?"
"You're saying these cats are my kin."
The young male yawned, showing his teeth, but the gesture offered no threat. He was just slow to wake up. He leaped- more like a flow of muscle and flesh-down off the stone.
"And how," I continued, as questions like rain fell into my head, making a great deal of noisy splash, "did you even know Andevai and I are-were-married?"
"How could I not know? It breathes in the air between you."
I bit my lip. Maybe she had not meant desire. Andevai and I had been chained into a contract by magic, a chain anchored in the spirit world. It was likely the denizens of this place could recognize such bindings even if they seemed invisible to me.
"What does it mean to walk the dreams of dragons?" I asked.
"Like you I am curious."
I laughed. "Spoken truly. How are you come here?"
"I bide where my chains bind me."
"What do you mean?"
"Everyone has troubles."
I nodded, respecting her limits. It was time to go. "How do I cross back into the mortal world, maestra?"
"There is a door, is there not?"
A door! I looked at the dun, with its closed door and shuttered window. A forbidding place because of its air of emptiness. But it might not be empty. It might be full. An entire world might lie inside the dun.
I laughed bitterly as I made ready to depart, layering on my cloaks, the humble covering the fine. Hidden in plain sight, like a sword that appears to be a cane in daylight. I tied bottle and coin pouch to my belt, fixed my sword so I could draw it easily, and drew on my gloves.
"May your day pass well, maestra," I said to the djeli.
"And yours. May your journey go well."
"And your fire burn strongly."
One could go on in this way for a while, both coming and going, but she released me.
"May we meet again when it is proper to do so," she said, and put the fiddle to her chin and played such a sprightly tune that my feet wished to walk. I hurried across to the dun. I eased the blade from its sheath just enough to make a tiny cut on my little finger. Sweat prickled on my back and neck as a drop of blood welled from the skin. I touched it to the latch, then pushed. It clicked down with a resonance as deep as that of a struck bell, ringing long and low through the stone. The door swung easily open.
I sucked in a breath of suddenly raw, cold air and braced myself for the temperature change. Just as I stepped through, a shadow leaped from behind and knocked me forward and down to my hands and knees. I felt the hot tremor of a monster's breath on my neck, and with my heart thundering in a panic, I scrambled forward through rubble until I slammed my knee against a jumble of stone blocks and the pain brought me up short. A dusting of snow covered the ruins of an ancient dun, its walls standing only head height with the crumbling courses resembling teeth with gaps between. The sun shone in splendor, but no heat touched the frozen earth. My nose turned to ice. The air I sucked in was so cold it stabbed in my chest. My fingers had already begun to stiffen. After a dazed moment of paralysis, I floundered out of the ruins through cold-whitened grass.
Ahead stood a venerable oak tree so ancient that its trunk was as vast as a house, and it was actually bulging, almost as if two trees had grown together to become one. A faint buzzing tingled on my tongue; I could almost taste the sound.
"My pardon, maestra! Where did you come from?"
I turned.
A young woman stood beside a humble well ringed with stones and covered with a thatched roof. Bundled in heavy winter clothes and a man's long wool coat, she looked used to hard work and to laughter between times. Two empty buckets sat at her feet; she held a pole in her right hand, ready to whack me.
"Ah," I said wisely. I staggered a step sideways and caught myself on the tip of my cane. In daylight, in the mortal world, my sword appeared again as a simple black cane. "I was just… in the ruins. I'm traveling, and I had to stop and… ah… relieve myself."
"You don't want to be stopping here." She did not lower the pole. "There was a jelly buried in that oak a hundred years ago. She haunts this place still. They say she was a powerful and wicked woman, Lucia Kante, and that she eats children. That's what my mam told me when I was wee and inclined to go wandering off. I'm sure it's not true, because only the savages who live in the Barren Lands eat babies, and they're not civilized enough CO have jellies. But it's still better to keep your distance. You know how jellies and bards will mock you if you don't give them what they want."
"Oh," I said, displaying my gift for fluent and clever speech. The buzzing of bees spiked until it rattled in my head, then ceased as abruptly as if a door had shut.
Suddenly, it seemed I had got my bearings and could see beyond dun and oak and well. Some paces past the well ran a load. A pair of wagons, one coming and one going, rolled along, their occupants paying no attention to us. The road led to a town sprawled from the height down a gentle slope that led to the flat Levels below. A very old stone wall contained the town, and even from here I marked its arched gate with the name LEMANIS carved across the lintel.
"I'm Emilia," she added, lowering the pole. "It's cold weather to be traveling."
"Well met," I said, "and the gods' blessings on you. I'm called-"
She shrieked.
A striking young man sauntered out of the ruins. He had a reddish brown cast of skin; his coal-black hair, straight and lovely, fell unbound halfway down his back. That he was lithe and long, well muscled and well proportioned, was easy to see since he was stark naked.