To Lanie’s cry of, “Excuse me—what?” Mak replied, “Come. I’ll explain as we walk.”
But first he paused, looked her up and down, from her dusty boots to her tattered trousers and the shirt she couldn’t be bothered to tuck in, and when his gaze rested on her face again, he said approvingly, “Ah. You washed your face. Very good.”
“Yes?” Lanie said. “This surprises you?” (She never would have admitted it to him, but it surprised her. While she had indeed washed her face that morning, she was pretty sure it was the first time that week she’d bothered.)
The corners of Mak’s eyes crinkled. “No. No, of course not.”
“This way,” Datu declared, already several steps ahead of them and impatient that they catch up.
What Mak and Datu referred to as ‘the garden’ was really a small cryptyard of old Brackenwild royals buried in the unkempt acres of wilderness that surrounded the chapel housing Queen Ynyssyll’s tomb. The cryptyard was bounded on one side by a great stone wall, on the other by a moat, and the grounds that lay between had been neglected for more than a century.
Despite this lonely setting, the Brackenwilds did not slumber in solitude. The ‘garden’ was fertilized also by favorite pets, faithful hounds, prize horses, and preferred retainers, all buried there in the days before it was mandatory that Lirian citizens be consigned to the Triple Flame19. At the bottom of the garden, where weeds and wildflowers straggled into water reeds, was the moat. Across the moat was Castle Ynyssyll—twisting and jutting and curlicuing up from the green mound of Moll’s Kopje, alongside the needle-like spire of Ynyssyll’s Tooth—and there dwelt the living descendants of the Blood-Royal Brackenwilds still.
But Datu was leading them away from the moat, towards the wall. At first Lanie thought Mak meant them all to scale the immense iron entrance gate, for it seemed sturdy and had footholds enough. It was also overgrown with briers, looked dangerously rusted, and was topped with spear-shaped finials that looked less decorative than deliberately hostile. Before she could voice an objection, Mak stopped beneath an ancient and gnarled sorkhadari tree, with its red-scaled bark and its blood-red berries. The tree’s flat needles, so green they were almost black, fanned out from the branches in such profusion that its bushy crown reminded Lanie of her own hair whenever she brushed it loose from her braids.
The sorkhadari was, at Lanie’s best guess, a thousand years older than Liriat Proper itself—and, moreover, was probably the reason the founders had chosen this location for their cryptyard in the first place. In olden days, the sorkhadari had been considered a sacred tree. Many legends still saw that tree as a place where one might encounter (or strike a bargain with) some divine entity.
“See, Auntie Lanie?” Datu cried over her shoulder. “It has got a lot of low branches! Even you can climb it!”
“Go on, Datu,” Mak instructed, ready to boost her if she asked. She did not, but swung up into the tree, scaling it quickly till she came even with the top of the wall. She crouched there, waiting for her father’s signal. He gave it, and she climbed down the branches overhanging the other side of the wall. They had obviously rehearsed this part.
Mak turned to Lanie. “I will go last,” he said. At her questioning glance, he added, “I’ll not take wing today.”
It made sense; he couldn’t very well take wing without leaving all his clothes behind, and unless he had caches of spares hidden around the back alleys of Liriat Proper, he’d be hip-deep in hoozzaplo in no time when he took human form again.
Lanie was growing more excited about their expedition by the minute. Her uneasiness at leaving the catacombs was fading; the sun no longer felt so grating, nor the bright air so stifling. Even the crowds and muck she’d encountered on her first (and last) attempt to navigate the city no longer seemed so terrifying. Company made all the difference. Still, she eyeballed the tree.
“Okay, then.”
Back home at Stones Manor, Lanie had climbed all kinds of things—staircases, ladders, bookshelves—but it had been a long, long time since she had climbed a tree. To her astonishment, Mak stepped up and made a stirrup of his linked hands.
Lanie flushed in confusion. “No, no, thank you, Gyrgardi. Datu’s right—the lowest branches are quite low.”
Before either of them could embarrass themselves further, she followed Datu into the sorkhadari. But she had not scooted all the way onto the stone wall when she felt Mak’s touch, so light she wasn’t even startled, on her ankle.
“Please,” he said. “Do not call me ‘gyrgardi’ today. It is of utmost importance that the… that Datu’s potential schoolteachers do not guess what I am. If you will do me that favor, aunt-of-my-daughter?”
Lanie stared at his earnest face for a long moment, wanting to ask a hundred questions, but knowing that, even in the unlikely event he would answer them, Datu was on the other side of the wall, waiting.
“Of course,” she said. “Mak.”
He tilted his head as if about to tell her something. Lanie felt a frisson of fear, or something like fear.
Is he, she thought, about to tell me his name? Not the name Nita gave him—the only name I’ve ever known him by. His real name.
But then Mak jerked his chin, gesturing for her to go on. Lanie obeyed, stifling her curiosity.
Outside the cryptyard wall was the tree-lined boulevard of First Circle, clean and broad. Where the walls of the cryptyard ended, the even higher walls of the neighboring estates began. Behind them, set back on narrow but manicured lawns, were the domiciles of Liriat Proper’s richest and most privileged families: the nobles of Brackenwild Court, foreign embassies, the palaces of merchant princes and military generals. The battlements and turrets of these orgulous edifices peeped above the trees, ringing the moat that surrounded Castle Ynyssyll, which towered over them all.
Ahead of them, Datu started singing a song that named all the trees she saw. Lanie didn’t recognize the tune.
Titanwood, you are the tallest
Silktree, you’re the first to bloom
Cobblebark, your trunk’s the hardest
Quaketooth, how you shake and swoon
Sorkhadari! Sorkhadari!
Oldest of them all
Sorkhadari! Sorkhadari!
Never may you fall!
After several verses of this, Lanie asked, “Did you teach her that?”
“No,” Mak said softly. “I just tell her the names. She does the rest. Like always.”
Not for the first time, Lanie wondered if this was usual for a child. Any child. She only had Datu and her own memories to go by. Mak would know differently. Mak would know if Datu were strange or extraordinary or trailing behind where others dashed ahead. What was it that had made him seek out a school for Datu now?
The gate they would be taking, Mak informed them, was at the intersection of “First and Quarter Past.” The layout of Liriat Proper, he elucidated, with its twelve concentric circles bisected by twelve major streets “made something of a monstrous clock” when you looked at maps of the city. The map did not at all match reality, but then (he shrugged) what map did?
He narrated the route he’d chosen as they walked it, pointing out landmarks of interest or spots of wildly creative graffiti or certain puddles in the street that Datu should absolutely not, under no circumstances, jump into. He’d obviously walked their route over several times already, and even more obviously flown over it.
As they walked and he talked, Lanie heard in Mak’s voice a kind of admiration, grudging though it was, for Liriat Proper’s rough layout. She had not thought Mak could like anything remotely Lirian, and the idea that he could, along with his present kindly manner and his willingness to talk to her at all, gave her mind a great deal of gristle to chew on.
She kept mostly quiet, confining her conversation to questions relevant to the urban geography.
Datu galloped ahead of them to the street called Quarter Past, following Mak’s directions to take a right and head down the spike for Seventh Circle.
“Stop and wait before the underpass!” and “Do not cross the boulevard to Second Circle without us!” and once the inevitable “Datu! Hoozzaplo!”
Datu dodged the dangers that splashed down from the window above with admirable agility, her red-gold hair like a torch lit by bloodlight in the murk of Liriat Proper’s understory. She moved easily through the late afternoon crowd, which thickened as they left the wealthy domesticity of the inner city. She was smooth as a pickpocket, slippery as a fish. Lanie’s shoulders tensed every time she lost sight of her.
But Mak’s sharp eyes tracked his daughter. Whenever Datu flew too far, his voice called her back, surely as a leash.
Not for the first time, Lanie marveled how Mak never seemed to mind leading from behind. She’d always privately thought of this as “Quadoni parenting” but now she wondered if it was, after all, just Mak?
“So,” Lanie ventured, breaking her long silence, “what’s all this about school?”
“I aim to register Datu at Waystation Thirteen,” Mak replied, neutrally.
Lanie, wary that Mak’s portcullis would crash shut if she said the wrong thing, spoke carefully. “That’s… a departure.”
Datu’s education wasn’t something they’d ever discussed with each other, although Lanie had once eavesdropped on a particularly epic argument on the subject between Mak and Nita. Historically, Stoneses were all educated at home by private tutors (in Lanie’s case, mostly dead ones, via written or ectenical media). Nita had been an exception—and she would have been the first to say that she had proved the rule.
No, Nita had declared, Datu would be educated at home. Lanie would see to it that Datu learned all that was needful for a Stones to know. If Mak might endeavor to teach the child her letters and numbers—proper Lirian ones—then Nita would undertake Datu’s instructions in the killing arts. What more could a young person need?
Mak, it turned out, had strong opinions about that. But he had never conveyed them to Lanie. Until now.
His hands rose, shaped a response in the air that he did not voice, and fell again.
“It was not possible to send Datu to Waystation Thirteen. Before.”
“Nita was… certainly set against it.”
“She did not love Quadiíb. Nor anything that so much as trailed a scent of Quadiíb.”
It was so wild an understatement that Lanie could think of no immediate response. Again, she began cautiously.
“I read all about Waystation Thirteen back when it opened a few years ago. Knowing how I… I enjoy the Quadic language, Canon Lir sends me—used to send—all the Quadoni ex-pat newspapers. I remember the journalists couldn’t seem to make up their collective mind about whether the school should be celebrated as a multi-cultural institution or a hotbed of heresy.”
“Newspapers,” Mak murmured, “thrive on controversy. “
“Datu... doesn’t.”
He smiled—he actually smiled a little!—at that. “She will thrive at Waystation Thirteen. A traditional Quadoni school would not have done for her, not at this stage. Traditionally,” he explained, “there are twelve Waystations along the Caravan School road in Higher and Lower Quadiíb. They started as caravanserai that were built up over reliable oases, places where the Traveling Palaces stopped to teach, take on new students and supplies, and release older erophains into the world when they were ready. Ylkazarra—Waystation One—is oldest and largest. A great city! It boasts five universities, twenty-seven colleges, at least a hundred trade schools. Of course, Ylkazarra is exceptional—”
He had been growing increasingly animated but now stopped talking abruptly. Lanie watched his face. Usually stern and colorless, it had begun glowing pink. Mak stared straight ahead, saying nothing for several minutes.
Finally, Lanie assured him, “I don’t mind, you know. I love hearing about Quadiíb.”
“I… I know.”
Both of them knew, too, that Mak had always withheld his sacred memory of Quadiíb from her. It was a part of his ongoing vengeance, which Lanie at all times both resented and felt she deserved.
What does it mean, she thought, that he speaks to me of Quadiíb now?
The idea of his having forgiven her the wrong she had done him so many years ago almost frightened her. She skirted around the thought.
“Mak,” she said, “I have to ask—is it… is it a good idea that Datu attend a public school—among strangers—at this present time?” She heard her own nervousness, almost querulousness. She sounded cowardly.
But Mak turned to her and said, in the gentlest voice, “Mizka.”
Lanie looked up at him, startled. Only Goody Graves ever used that name for her.
“Sacred Datura is but one child. One child—with no friends and a great enemy. What I would give her right at this present time are great alliances, brilliant eyes and minds to watch over her, protectors who might willingly take her in should both you and I be—”
“I see,” Lanie interrupted quickly. She didn’t want even a hint or a suggestion of his to spark her allergy. She read in his face what he was remembering: Nita, laid out upon her bed, eyeless, tongueless, surrounded by feathers. Or perhaps they were only her own memories, crashing upon her like a tide of blood and brine and jasmine.
Mak met her eyes, still smiling a little, possibly in gratitude. “Do not let this trouble you too much prematurely,” he advised her. “This is only our first foray into Datu’s future education. Waystation Thirteen hosts a weekly cultural event in the brewpub below their establishment. I thought we might just go and… mingle.”
“Mingle?” Lanie asked, fascinated and appalled. “Can we—I mean, Mak, can we even do that?”
“That, Mizka, is what we are going to find out.”
19 See footnote 13.