I was Mambura. I was standing with my back against Ranior’s monument, but I could not feel the spirals and lines pressing into my skin: I felt only Mambura’s skin, inside and out. It burned. It remembered sunlight and cloud scattered by wind. It remembered moss and earth, pebbles caught between toes.
Mambura’s skin remembered and so did Ranior’s.
They walked around the Hill, Ranior taking long jerky strides and Mambura taking smaller steps. They walked and circled each other and walked again. This place was a memory. Ranior’s eyes saw it from this height and Mambura’s from below. They saw each other, Bird and Hound. Their Otherworlds crackled with slow, brightening flames.
Teldaru and I stood and sat and stood. Teldaru lay on his back and laughed; Ranior’s mouth gaped, and he thrust his sword up toward the sky that was turning from blue to gold. From blue to gold to crimson, in the west, and the heroes remembered sunset.
Hours passed. It was the longest the men had stood, hefting wood and metal, and they were strong—even Ranior, whose flesh was loose around his joints and whose left foot was turned inward and dragged, a little. Teldaru and I, though, were hunched against the stone. Teldaru was panting; I hardly seemed to be breathing at all. Our sagging shoulders touched. I stirred once; I knelt, and Mambura stumbled, and Teldaru cried, “No! Stay, Nola! Longer . . .”
from his mouth and Ranior’s. I did. I collapsed back against the stone. Mambura threw his spear in a gentle arc. It lodged in the slope below and he walked to retrieve it. He slipped twice but did not fall.
He stepped back onto the hilltop. He stopped walking. No one else was walking, and yet pebbles slithered down a slope. Feet crunched and slid. Teldaru and I heard this and our heads turned. Mambura and Ranior’s heads turned.
Haldrin and Bantayo crested the hill side by side. Bardrem was behind them, and Neluja behind him.
Teldaru and I knew these faces, even though the crimson and gold of sunset were very bright. We knew but did not move, at first. At first Mambura and Ranior did not, either. But then Borl came trotting up behind the king.
Mambura had never seen Borl—never while I had been inside him, anyway, filling him with strength and vision. Now the dog was all he saw: the hunting hound, with his lean, heaving flanks and his lolling tongue, and the teeth that had been so sharp, the last time Mambura stood upon this hill. The teeth that had torn at his flesh while his people broke and fled like a great retreating wave behind him.
Mambura’s Paths lashed and bent. I tried to cling to them, and to my place upon them, but I fell. The flames were all around me, blotting out the images, but it did not matter: Mambura remembered a rage so strong that I had no strength myself.
Mambura wheeled. He was very close to Ranior, whom he had been seeing for days—but now the dog had made him recognize the man. Mambura was too close to throw his spear so he jabbed it instead, while I tried to find my hand in his, my arm in his—while I writhed and groped, trying to get out.
The spear grazed Ranior’s side. It tore the white tunic Teldaru had put on him earlier that day. It made a dark, puckered line on Ranior’s bruised skin. Ranior did not react. Bantayo started forward. Haldrin and Bardrem did too, each seeking a single direction, but Bantayo was ahead of them, his body low and lithe. He was just paces away from Ranior when a piercing cry came from above.
A bird wheeled among the streamers of cloud. The bird was sunset: scarlet and gold and blue. Her cry was island and blood-drenched plain, and Ranior remembered. He turned his eyes from the bird to the man who was also island, also memory. Ranior lifted his sword, and Teldaru, within him, shrieked his joy and hunger.
Bantayo had a curved knife in his hand. He charged Ranior—bore him to the ground and sank the knife into his gut. Black seeped into the white cloth. Bantayo leaned back, already relaxing. Ranior reared forward, his right fist coming up and in. It caught Bantayo on the chin with a crack and sent him sprawling. He lay on his back, twitching and gasping.
Haldrin was upon Mambura. The king had no weapon: just his hands, which he wrapped around Mambura’s forearms. He was small, though, and Mambura was a dark, burnished mountain. Haldrin strained, and Mambura dropped his spear, but the Belakaoan’s hands were free, and they closed around Haldrin’s neck.
No, I thought, from the Otherworld. No to the rage, and my own need for it. No to the feel of skin and tendons between my hands—Haldrin’s skin; Mambura’s hands.
Haldrin wrenched himself away. He faced the stone, cried “Daru! Nola! What is this—Daru . . .” Then he lunged for Bantayo’s knife, which was now lying on the ground. He hacked at Mambura’s chest and slashed his arms, swift and deep. Mambura oozed black but did not fall. He struck Haldrin again and again, from face to jaw to belly, until the king stumbled to one knee. Mambura picked up his spear. Haldrin looked up into Mambura’s face, his blue eyes wide and unafraid.
Mambura plunged the spear into the fleshy hollow of Haldrin’s collarbone. Haldrin toppled slowly, in a shower of bright red blood.
No! I screamed—and at last, too late, I was the stronger one. I tore my fingers and arms away from Mambura’s. I tore my feet away from his snake-Paths. I clawed my way through flame and foaming water and suddenly I was only myself, lying on my side beneath a tall, carved stone.
I retched and sobbed and ground my palms against my eyes to clear them. I needed to see. Mambura face-down next to Haldrin, whose blood was leaving him in streams now, not gouts. Bantayo struggling to sit. Ranior sweeping his sword in whistling arcs, at no one. Teldaru propped an arm’s length away from me, his mouth dribbling spittle and blood. Bardrem crouched on my other side, his eyes darting everywhere at once—Bardrem so close that I could have touched his twisted hand or the toe of his boot. Borl lying with his muzzle in my upturned hand.
And Neluja, standing straight and still at the crest of the hill, watching the bird circling above us all.
Help us, I wanted to say. You are the only one who can help; you are the only one who might understand any of this.
Bardrem took a step. It was small and clumsy because he was crouching, but I could see his eyes, through the black splotches in mine. He was looking at Teldaru. He took another step. His foot was against my drawn-up knee. I moaned and uncurled my body. He gazed down at me and I moved my chin and one of my hands—Look there, Bardrem, at my belt. . . .
He saw my knife—his knife, really. He reached and plucked it free. He wrapped his good fingers tightly around it and smiled at me. He stepped over Borl, whose eyes rolled, following the sound or sense of him.
Teldaru’s face was angled away; he was watching Ranior and his sword (though he would be seeing flames too, I thought, and ancient, Other things). He did not see Bardrem easing himself closer. Bardrem was nearly upon him. He raised the knife, and the last of the burnished light danced on its small, slender blade. Teldaru did not see the glint through his own eyes, but he did through Ranior’s. Ranior blinked and sprang forward, his sword descending as Bardrem’s knife did. And the sword was faster. It was heavier and so much larger—surely it should have been slow—but Ranior had been a warrior and a king, and Bardrem was just a man.
The sword sliced into Bardrem’s exposed side. He hit the stone and heaved himself around so that he was facing Ranior.
I began to crawl.
Ranior pierced Bardrem’s shoulder and belly. When the knife fell it struck Teldaru’s thigh. Teldaru was laughing silently, watching now, through all the layers of both the worlds.
I was nearly to them.
Ranior raised his sword once more. There was a wind, just then—a sweeping of feathers and a slicing of talons. Uja was diving. She grazed Ranior’s head with her talons and beat upward so that she could attack again.
I dragged myself over Bardrem’s legs. I had the knife, but could not feel it in my hand. I lowered my head to draw a deep breath—and fingers grasped my braid. They pulled and pulled, and I was too weak to resist. My head was up, back; my eyes swam with tears, but I saw him anyway, staring down at me. The black and gold of him.
He tugged my hair sharply and I cried out. His other hand was around my throat, stroking, tightening. I saw bursts of white light and then darkness. I heard my heart thudding—and other sounds, too: snarling and snapping and one high, broken shout.
I was free. I coughed and sucked in air that made me cough more. The darkness flowed away.
Teldaru was on his back. Borl’s front paws were on his chest; Borl’s teeth were in his throat, or what was left of it. Teldaru’s feet and hands twitched wildly. And that was all. He was limp and ragged, and he stared up, unblinking, into the first of the stars.
Bardrem’s lips bubbled with blood. He had been lying on his side when I pulled myself up to sit beside him. I had rolled him so that his head was in my lap. Now I bent close to the slow, uneven thread of his breath. My hair was half-unbound; it dipped both our faces in shadow. There was just enough light left for me to see his eyes.
“Don’t go,” I said. My dress clung to my legs, sodden with his blood.
His lips moved.
“Hush,” I said, even though I did not think he was trying to speak.
“Nola.” It was a gurgling—a wet, uneven word—but I understood.
“Tell me,” he said, as I bent even closer. Tendrils of my hair brushed his forehead.
“Yes?” No “hush” any more, because I needed to hear his voice, even as it was.
“Tell me, because you should . . . oblige me now, at least. At last.” He smiled. Foam gathered and stretched at the corners of his mouth. “What has your Pattern been? What Paths . . . have brought you here?”
I thought, at first, that the shivering was all his. I thought that I was flushing only because my head was down and I was sick with weariness and grief.
I wish I could tell you. But Teldaru cursed me . . .
“Teldaru cursed me.”
I was shivering. I was fever-hot.
“You will not be able to refuse a request to Othersee,” Teldaru had said, so long ago, in a prison room. “If the words of command are spoken, you must answer.”
Not Pattern-yet-to-be; Pattern past. Paths already walked. Questions asked that must be answered, as the swaying shadow-streaks of my hair wove my own Otherworld around me. And I could see it—I was in it because Bardrem had held a mirror up to my face and told me to look.
“He cursed me with Bloodseeing—I have been his, and mute, for eight years, but now you have returned my words to me with yours.”
My head and chest were aching. My throat felt open and raw. My hair had turned to silver ribbons that rippled outward to distant hills. Many of these were cinder-black, and most stayed that way—but one, then two flooded with climbing green. The Paths looped around them and back to me, and in. My veins throbbed with change.
I could see him through my Otherworld, and my Otherworld through him. Bone lattice lay beneath him. He lifted his hand and it trailed ivy, which he twined in my unravelling braid.
“Nola,” he said again. His mouth stayed open. I kissed it. I kissed his scar and I closed his wide eyes and kissed them. I wound him in silver and held him.