CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Half a dozen Irrylaish gave the group a wide berth as they galloped past, laughing and joking with the three aeosti among them. As they disappeared up the lush path that Ahearn had come to think of a grassway, he leaned over toward Elweyr. “I’ll bet they get to see this bloody Great Pool that’s apparently the center of t’universe.”
“They won’t,” S’ythreni said as she drew up alongside, moving toward the front where the two guides were now walking their horses. “They’re, well, ‘pilgrims’ for lack of a better translation. They spend several moonphases living with aeostun families that theirs have known for generations. It’s an old tradition between Irrylaish borderers and Mirroskye.”
“How old?”
“Very old. At least as far back as the First Consentium. Possibly long before.” She returned a nod from one of their guides. “We’re here. Follow me.”
The aeostu left the grassway, verging into a similar path that was narrower and more winding. Ahearn and the others trailed after them until they topped a small rise and followed along a curving sweep of granite spur which abruptly fell away, down into a small dell. A rock-strewn creek ambled through it and two stone campfire rings were set just beyond the tightly bunched boughs of thickly needled conifers. Their guides gestured to the larger of the two fire brakes and made for the other.
“Not exactly sociable, are they?” Ahearn wondered aloud as he dismounted.
“It’s part of their job not to be, when leading groups of eh’hathsha,” the dragon commented from behind. He was—once again—studying the others as they swung down from their saddles, a feat he had not yet mastered. In general, he still sat a horse rather than rode it and paid the predictable price: sore back and buttocks.
Hiding a smile, Ahearn walked around his own mount, swinging wide as he passed behind.
“You needn’t worry about kicking,” S’ythreni assured him. “They know not to. Well, unless we ask.”
Ahearn nodded, smiled and, hands on his hips, studied the horse. It turned and stared back at him—but with far less interest. “Great Pool or no, it’s pleasant traveling in your Mirroskye, High Ea—eh, S’ythreni. Particularly when it comes to the animals and mounts. It’s as if every last one of them knows how best to behave.”
She glanced at him. “Hmmm. Better than you?”
Ahearn laughed. “Why most certainly better than me! Yer lord, or lady, of the Uulamantre made that clear enough. Not that I disagree with her. I possess but one grace of use in a court: sense enough to leave it as soon as I may.” He noticed the birds and ground animals about the dell; they’d barely shown interest when the group had descended into it. “But the creatures here, well, there’s no contention with or amongst ’em, is there?”
S’ythreni’s glance became a surprised stare. “I thought you’d find them too docile.”
“Well, maybe a bit. But that’s because they also feel like, well, creatures you grew up with.” He considered the horse again. “It’s better, this way.”
Her glance became a frank stare. “Better compared to what?”
“Why, better than the way we find and use animals most everywhere we’ve sailed. For example, the horses we’ve engaged throughout our journeys. Living, feeling creatures they are, and yet rented out no different from the cart they might pull.” Ahearn shook his head. “I’ve mixed feelings about travels that take us far from home, including the creatures in our barns or at our hearths. But what’s far worse is being pressed into renting replacements for them.” He uncinched his saddle’s girth strap as he looked around the dell. “But among you Iavarain? Why, from the birds overhead to this horse standing here, all the animals feel as comfy as the ones I knew from me childhood home.”
S’ythreni’s stare had shaded toward amazement. “At no point or place in our travels did I have the faintest notion that you had such… misgivings.”
Ahearn nodded. “Strange: neither did I.” He drew in a great lungful of air. “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it only seems so now. Maybe it’s a mancery that runs wherever trees in Mirroskye make shadows, eh? If so, it seems to have improving qualities.”
S’ythreni’s eyes were wide as she turned away. “You’ll hear no argument from me.”
“Ah, now there’s the aeosti I know from long travels together.” Ahearn turned and discovered that the two aeostu were gone, but their mounts remained near the smaller firebreak, untethered and grazing.
Glancing after their vanished guides, R’aonsun broke the silence he’d kept since his exchange with Ilshamësa. “They will return in the morning?”
“Yes. When I have done what I must.”
“And what is that?” Umkhira asked.
“A visit. One I should have made long ago. We should eat and rest.”
“So,” asked Cerven, scanning the tree line, “we are alone now?”
“No.” In response to their confused stares, she added, “They are still nearby. As are several other aeostu.”
“I cannot see them,” Umkhira announced.
“They are beyond the deepest shadows. But they are there.”
Ahearn squinted, shook his head. “Ah, your kind certainly has eyes for the dark, I’ll give you that.”
S’ythreni shook her head. “I didn’t say I could see them. I can’t.”
Ahearn frowned. “So you, eh, feel them? Through the Great Weave?” She nodded. “But I thought you had no real sense of direction from it.”
She nodded. “Except with Uulamantre, that is usually the case. But our sense of each other and the Great Weave becomes more acute when we are this close to so many tha’huu.”
“Er… ?” began Ahearn.
“The trees that enfold us for rebirth,” she translated.
Umkhira was peering peevishly into the darkness. “But why do the other aeostu stay back?” Umkhira wondered.
“They are… uncomfortable,” S’ythreni replied vaguely.
Ahearn tsked sharply. “Ah, so it’s the company you’re keeping, eh? More high-and-mighty disgust at the thought of rubbing elbows with barbarous, er, ey-hashas? Well, I’ve had just about enough of—”
“No,” S’ythreni said in a flat tone, “they are uncomfortable with me.”
Ahearn stared, as did the rest of the group.
“Let us eat and sleep. I must be up before first light.”
Elweyr frowned. “And us?”
“You may do as you wish, but for any who might return to Mirroskye in the future, it would be best for you to accompany me.” Having finished seeing to the needs of her mount, she walked toward the firebreak.
“Accompany you where?” Ahearn asked after her.
She did not reply.
Elweyr put out a hand that was only partially visible in the predawn glow that filtered through the forest canopy. “We follow S’ythreni at a distance.”
Ahearn watched her slender form begin to fade into the dim mists between the trunks. “Why? Mightn’t she need our help?”
“She called it a ‘visit,’ not a fight.”
“Hmm… so do you know what she’s about?”
Elweyr resumed walking. “Do I know? No. Do I suspect? Yes.”
Ahearn sighed. “Do I have to pull it out of you with tongs, man?”
One of Elweyr’s dog-teeth came down on his lower lip. “I’m not sure it’s my place to say.”
“Well, she did invite us to follow. More or less. So she means us to see what she’s up to.”
Elweyr considered, then blurted out, “She trusted my family.”
“A bit more detail would be welcome.”
He sighed. “It happened when I was away studying up in Eld Shire. My parents found her… or she found them… after she almost killed herself.”
Ahearn stopped. “I’ve never heard of Iavarain taking their own lives.”
Elweyr towed him forward. “They don’t, but if the one to which they are bound is slain, some have been known to throw themselves at the killers. Without regard to their own survival.”
“And S’ythreni did? Because she was, er, bound to someone?”
“As best I can tell, yes and yes.”
“‘As best yeh can tell?’ Gods, mate, how can you be friends with someone and not know for certain? You know her favorite foods, but not this?”
Elweyr glanced at Ahearn sharply. “I seem to recall that you’ve tried to get information out of S’ythreni that she didn’t want to share.”
“A fair point, that. But if she’s not shared the tale with you, how do you know any of it?”
“My parents. They mentioned it in the last letter I received in Eld Shire. No names, but they mentioned helping an aeosti who’d been badly wounded in both her body and soul. By the time I got back to Menara, they were gone.”
“But she wasn’t, eh?”
“Well, she wasn’t waiting for me, but a moonphase later, she arrived. She never stayed long, but checked in often enough.”
“And did she have any inkling of what happened to your parents?”
“No, but when she was away, she was always looking for some clue as to what had become of them.”
“And she never said a word about what had put her in such need of your parents’ help, or how she’d met them to begin with?”
Elweyr shook his head, waved Ahearn into a crouch: S’ythreni had stopped before a tree that bore no resemblance to any he’d seen before.
“Well, my friend, you’re a damned patient man, not pressing her for those details.”
Elweyr shrugged. “You know I’m not that patient, but she always avoided the topic and became testy when I tried to speak of it. And inasmuch as she was kind enough to keep coming back and to keep looking for my parents in her travels… well, what sort of gratitude would it have been for me to push for details she did not want to share?” He looked toward her; she was kneeling before the strange tree: not in supplication, but as one might beside someone sleeping on a low pallet. “One day, in her own time, I assumed she would begin to reveal the story of what happened. And here we are.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, ‘shut up—and watch.’”
As they did, she rested her palms against the vine-wreathed trunk. Over the course of several minutes, the pattern of the vines changed. It was as if—slower than an impatient human eye could see—they had entwined themselves around her fingers.
The tree itself was oddly shaped. In Ahearn’s experience, most tall trees—this one towered over nearby oaks—had wide, straight trunks that didn’t send out branches until they were well off the ground. This one didn’t rise more than two yards before it bifurcated, creating a narrow crotch not much wider than the span of Ahearn’s shoulders. Following each branch upward—it looked more like twin trunks, actually—they each split again, perhaps thirty feet above the ground. The pattern continued up into its lightless canopy.
After completing his survey, Ahearn glanced back toward the base of the tree, where S’ythreni still knelt. If Elweyr’s gaze had wandered at all, there was no sign of it.
Ahearn waited a minute. “Mate, I don’t see anything happening.” No response. “Do you?” Ahearn counted twenty breaths. “How do we know she’s all right? I mean, it’s just not natural, the way—”
Elweyr sighed. “Ahearn, have you noticed that everything connected to the Iavarain tends to be subtle, not obvious?”
“Well, yes, but—”
One of Elweyr’s eyebrows climbed slightly.
“Oh, all right.” Ahearn crossed his arms, tried to find a more comfortable position in which to sit the vigil. “After all, how long can it take to commune with a tree?”
“You do understand that she is actually communing with that tree, don’t you?”
“Why… What? How is such a thing possible?” He’d thought all the Iavarain references to their connection with the trees was more figurative than literal, but now—“So is that a… a rebirthing tree?”
“A tha’ha,” Elweyr corrected, “and yes, I believe it is. What else would it be?”
Well, the bloody mancer has a point. “So that’s where they—they are made youthful, again?”
Elweyr shook his head but did not take his eyes off S’ythreni. “Much more than that. It’s where they change.”
“Change?” Ahearn frowned, puzzled—then abruptly felt what he’d dismissed as foggy myth become crisp reality. “So they actually do change sex? In the tree?”
Elweyr shrugged. “They don’t speak about it to outsiders, but it explains much.”
Ahearn nodded, discovered he was breathing hard. Not at the shock of the discovery, but at the realization of how blind he’d been. “That’s why the differences between their sexes are so… so unclear. They have it in them to be both.” Questions and uncertainties and contradictions and curiosities ran out from that revelation like rings spreading out from a handful of pebbles cast into a pool of the possible, all intersecting and spawning new rippling patterns. “So all the talk of buggery”—which was in my own mouth, often enough!—“is… is… ”
“Is ignorant bigotry of the first order,” Elweyr finished for him.
“And you knew? And you didn’t tell me?”
“No, I didn’t know—but I was pretty sure. And as for telling you”—he turned to glance at his friend—“without proof, you’d have been as stubborn as a mule. And ten times as annoying.”
Ahearn would have disagreed had he been able to find a flaw in any of his friend’s assertions—but he couldn’t. “Well,” he said. “Well,” he started again, “this changes everything.”
“Does it?” Elweyr asked. “S’ythreni is still S’ythreni, no different than she was before the hammer of truth finally corrected your vision with a blow between the eyes.” He glanced over. “It’s you who’ve just changed, Ahearn, which you’ll realize as soon as you’re no longer stunned.”
“I believe you’re right,” the swordsman muttered, settling down next to his friend again. “I do believe you are right.”
Six hours later, S’ythreni edged away from the tree, the vines leaving her hands slowly, almost dragging: as if they were unwilling to do so. She rose, turned and, wordless, strode toward—and then straight past—them.
She remained silent during the entire walk back to the dell. The others rose when she emerged from the tree line. There was still no sign of their guides; their horses had drifted to the other side of the dell.
Varcaxtan approached her. “How long has it been?”
S’ythreni’s eyes were suddenly bright, then her face hardened. “Far too long. I do not deserve to be paired to so fine a tha’ha. Or to any, for that matter.”
Varcaxtan moved so he still looked into her eyes. “And does the tha’ha feel so?”
S’ythreni did not meet his eyes. “That is unimportant.”
“Oh, no, Alva S’ythreni,” Cerven said earnestly, “it is not. You must know that.”
S’ythreni wiped at her eyes. “I have no idea what I know… if anything. But I have made what amends I may for my absence, and those who wished to have seen the soul of Iavarain.” She glanced almost furtively at Umkhira. “You did not wish to see that?”
“I did not deserve to see that,” the Lightstrider said, chin high—but quivering. “My people and yours… there is much spilt blood between us. To be made welcome in your lands puts me in a debt I cannot repay.”
S’ythreni looked at her more directly. “Yes, you can repay it.”
Umkhira stood straight, hand resting firm atop her axe. “I shall. This instant. Name the price.”
“Your friendship,” S’ythreni whispered, “unmeasured by debts or deaths or past wars between our peoples. All so that, next time, you shall be willing to see what we truly are.”
S’ythreni’s words seemed to open Umkhira like an eviscerating dagger. “You have it,” she said, her jaw out, face rigid, but voice thick and low.
Cerven looked at the older faces surrounding him. “And now?”
“And now,” R’aonsun drawled knowingly, “we wait.”
“For how long?”
S’ythreni’s chin came up; her voice was firm. “For as long as it takes.”