Dariel nodded.
Without breaking eye contact with him, Yoen asked, “Mor, what language have I been speaking since I began explaining the ‘blessing’?”
“Auldek.”
“And what language did he speak in response?”
“Auldek.”
Dariel looked at her. She stood straight and beautiful, her face as astonished as he had ever seen it. The others’ as well. They all stared at him with gravity enough that he almost believed them. “But I don’t know Auldek,” he said.
“Considering that you are speaking it,” Yoen said, “I think you do. I think you will come to realize you know many things that you did not before. Now”-he looked around, squint-eyed as if he had forgotten his spectacles someplace and was looking for them-“I should show you the village, and show the village you. Come, walk with me.”
As improbable as it seemed, even as it happened, Dariel rose. He set his feet more carefully this time, and stood with Anira’s aid. She led him past the others and out into a humid, overcast morning.
It looked just as it had sounded from inside the small room: a village among the trees, with the peak of the volcano rising to the west. Small cabins, simply made from the slim, purple-skinned trees of the area. Hard-packed dirt lanes running through them. As they stepped into the light, a gaggle of hens scattered from the cluster they had formed at the door. Eavesdroppers.
The people in the street stopped what they were doing, as if their labors had been but an excuse to position themselves to see Dariel step out among them. They wore peasant clothes, brighter hued than what he would have expected in the Known World, but similar in their simple, functional construction. Two old men, a woman with gray hair tied back, another who wore Lvin whiskers tattooed on her cheeks, several others of middle age, with varying clan markings. A boy of twelve or so stood entrapped within the wooden framework of some tool. He had been carrying it, but he froze and just stood gaping. Just like the rest. Just like Dariel himself.
Cashen came bounding into view, his nose held high and his tail whirling in circles. He caught sight of Dariel, dropped the stick he was carrying, and sprinted toward him. Bashar was not far behind.
T hat was, what? Four, five days ago? Dariel was not sure. He was not yet free of the vision of death he had awoken with, so that each time he burst back into consciousness he was unsure for a time whether he was truly alive. He knew he had slept and woken several times, but the waking hours of each day were something of a blur. A strange blur, quiet instead of noisy. A blur of faces seeking out his face, touching his forehead, and speaking their names to him. A blur of conversations, questions asked and answered, which led to new questions to be asked and answered. The days passed as if disconnected from normal time. Dariel knew that was not really so. It was wishful thinking. He was not with Na Gamen anymore. Behind the peaceful workings of his days in the village he knew the world went on. This reprieve was to be brief.
So, on whatever day this was-the fourth or fifth among the Free People hidden on the Sky Isle deep within Ushen Brae-Dariel stood, sharing a long silence with Yoen. They had climbed out of the village and were taking in the settlement from a bend on the path that led up to the pear and apple orchards.
“Do you see that tree there, in the center of that clearing?” Yoen asked.
Dariel saw it. Not as tall as the trees that grew around the base of the volcano’s rich slopes, it had a gnarled, aged quality to its twisting limbs, which stretched wider than it was tall. “It looks like an acacia tree, except that they don’t grow that large.”
“Here they do,” Yoen said. “It’s a very ancient tree. It’s sacred to us. Na Gamen himself planted it there from a cutting taken from the original. It is, as you say, an acacia tree. Another transplant to this land, yes?” He lifted his cane. He speared the ground ahead of him and began his slow ascent again.
Dariel knew him well enough to know that was all he had to say on the subject of the tree. He walked, taking in the view. The village was such a small part of it, dwarfed by the trees that hung over it and the volcano and the rolling landscape that hulked off to the west. The peaks of Rath Batatt were hazy shapes in the distance.
“I’d expected there to be more of you,” Dariel said. He spoke Auldek. He believed it now. He could switch between it and Acacian with complete fluency. The word structures and grammatical rules were vastly different, but both languages were equally clear to him, neither one more or less foreign than the other. “Mor made it seem like… like I’d find a paradise of Free People thriving out here.”
“Is that not what you see?”
“In a manner of speaking, I guess.”
“Mor sees not just what is but what she hopes will be. The two live in her at once. Give her purpose. You must consider this when you speak with her; but, no, we are not numerous, Dariel. If we were, the Auldek might have had cause to destroy us. That was why we split into smaller villages, spread out along the rim of the mountains.”
“Did they attack you often?”
“Years ago they hunted us for sport, but they grew tired of that over the centuries. Many of us were unwanted anyway. To beings enslaved by their immortality, the aged are no welcome sight. We make them uneasy. We remind them of themselves. You saw all the gray hairs in the company and fewer teeth than our numbers might suggest.” In contradiction to this, Yoen smiled. “What immortally young person would want us around?”
“You’re not all old.”
“Oh, not all. No, no. Some of the young ones the Auldek deemed defective for some reason. Not many, but occasionally the Aklun missed a frailty of mind or body. And some suffered injuries not easily healed. Ones like that the Auldek did not concern themselves with if they disappeared. I’ve lived these many years not sure what the Auldek think of us.”
“Look at these here!” the elder exclaimed. He careened off the path at what seemed a dangerous burst of speed, into an orchard of manicured trees that hung heavy with fruit. “The size of these! Aren’t they beauties?”
Dariel admitted to never having seen pears so large. He had to cup one in a two-handed grip to tug it free. Yoen was more selective. Dariel watched him sort through the branches, testing different fruit beneath the pressure of his thumb. “The season is perfect for them. Mor will like these, I think.”
“She could have walked with us,” Dariel said, “except that she can’t stand to be around me. I thought she had softened after I helped destroy the soul catcher. She seems to have forgotten all about that.”
Yoen looked at him for a long moment. “It’s not a matter of hatred. She fears you. She wants desperately to believe you are the Rhuin Fa. She wants you to help us make this nation of ours, and she hates it that she wants that so much. She has waited all her life for this, never knowing if change would come in her lifetime. Now it has, and part of it arrives bearing the name Akaran, a prince of the very family that enslaved us. You can see her point, I trust. It would have been easier for many of us to recognize the Rhuin Fa if he arrived with Akaran blood on his hands.”