Hephron had made it no more than a few feet from his cot. He was not even fully dressed. He lay with wide, unblinking eyes, wet with moisture that had left myriad tracks across his cheeks. His forehead was marbled with sweat, puddled so that the flies alighting on him did so carefully.
“Oh, Hephron…I really would choose to remember you as you were, not as you are now. I did not fail to note your strength. Nor your anger. I bow to both these things and honor you. That is why I want to explain to you what has happened. You understand none of this, do you?”
Hanish knelt beside him. He shooed the insects into flight. “Do you know the tale of Elenet and his first attempt to create with the Giver’s tongue? When the Giver came for him and found him in the orchard, Elenet was huddled over his newest miscreation. The old tales don’t tell us what this was, but I have come to my own opinion. I believe that the first thing Elenet sought for himself was eternal life. There is no mention of death before Elenet became a Speaker. But he feared that if he had once not existed, he might come to not exist again. So he tried to arm himself against the Giver’s wrath. But in trying to make himself immortal he instead unleashed the diseases that take life. He created illness that day, and we have paid for it ever since. You are paying for it now. You see, that was the problem with humans speaking the Giver’s tongue. They were not gods and never could be. They had not the complete ability to form the words accurately. The corruptions of their mouths and hearts and mistaken intent always twisted the magic toward something foul. It is such a thing that burns within you now.”
Hephron seemed to notice him just then. His eyes moved over toward him. His pupils were dilated to nearly the size of his irises, but something in the frantic intensity of them showed that he was trying to focus on Hanish. There was a tint of red in his sweat now. Hanish found a cloth in a basin beside the bed and dabbed Hephron’s forehead clean with it. Almost instantly the pink stain seeped back up into the creases of his skin.
“Some years back-before I was even born but when my mother lived-my people first made contact with the Numrek and through them with the Lothan Aklun. Those pioneering men all suffered this illness. The first party to return from across the Ice Fields infected nearly all of Tahalian. The whole fortress was racked as you are now. Thousands died. But those that lived, we learned, never got the illness again. Nor did we stay in a contagious state long after mending. At first we kept this illness a secret out of shame; only later, through my father’s genius, did we recognize it as a weapon as well. Your people never knew of it. We never reported our numbers accurately anyway. After the fever we were glad for it. We learned that it was possible to give a taste of the illness pricked on a needle, just enough so that a person once pricked would not succumb to the full wrath of it. Later still we discovered that the spirit of the illness can live on long after fever has passed. The touch I placed on you, young Hephron, came directly from a swatch of a garment my grandfather died in.”
Hanish slipped a hand into the fabric of his thalba-just as he had before touching Hephron two days before-but this time he drew out the square of fabric pinched between his fingers. “This is the thing that defeated you here today. It carries the contagion somehow trapped in it. Impossible to believe, isn’t it? I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t learned of its truth through suffering. You did not slay me after all, Hephron Anthalar. That possibility was never within your grasp. It is I who have slain you, with nothing more than a touch. Many people, with time, recover from this, but not without days in the throes you now feel and then a period of weakness afterward. So what will happen is this: this fever will travel like a wave through your people. And behind the wave we will come reaping. Be thankful your role in this is concluded. The Akarans’ idyll is over; as it dies a new age begins. Better for you that you do not live to see it. I doubt very much you would like the shape of things to come.”
When Hanish stepped out of the tent a moment later he carried his knife unsheathed in one hand. It was wet with the marbled pattern of blood. All around him his army kept at the butchery. He raised his eyes and looked at the wall of Alecia. He would have to find the Scatevith stone before proceeding past this wall. He would lay his cheek upon it. That is what he must do. He wanted very badly to lay his skin against that stone and have it whisper to him that all of this was as it should be. All of this was just and right. It began before him and would go on after him. He was simply an instrument of a greater purpose.
CHAPTER
The chosen vessel was one of the larger fishing rigs, with two square mainsails near the midpoint and a triangular jib that danced before the prow like a kite at play, rippling and shifting so that the simple insignia that named its owner snapped into and out of view. Anyone watching from shore knew the boat well enough. It had plied Acacian waters for more than thirty years. The crewmen working the deck were slightly more numerous than usual, but it was not uncommon for the rigs to take on trainees in the late winter months, before the bonito returned from the Talayan Shoals, followed by mainland ships in need of spring crews. It floated high above the waterline, as was typical of empty hulls waiting to be filled; the time of its embarkation standard to begin the five-day loop necessary during the slack season. But none of these things were actually as they appeared.
The men dressed as fishermen were in fact Marah guards. The cargo was not to be the yellow-tailed fish the vessel normally trolled the winter seas for. Instead it carried the four Akaran children. They hid for the early part of the journey in the foul-smelling hold of the ship, each of them sullen and dead eyed, breathing through their mouths as much as possible. They wore the same look of worry under their skin, like a genetic trait passed to each of them at birth but only lately emerging. Mena kept feeling the impulse to speak, to share, to say something to break the tension. She was stopped every time by the indisputable fact that she could think of nothing reasonable to say.
Once out of the sheltered curve of the northern harbor, the vessel set a barb into the wind and flew hooked to its underbelly. It cut the glass-blue, frosted water, behind it a squall of seabirds, raucous creatures shouting out their demands. The captain of the guard invited the children up onto the deck once they had put the island some distance behind them, saying there were no eyes to spot them anymore. Mena watched the guards from the back of the boat, tasting the salty air on the wall of her throat. She wondered which of the men or few women she could see had killed before. Some among them had a part in putting down the uprising of the Meinish soldiers. The rebels had been defeated within a bloody hour, the last of them chased careening down the stairways and finally captured and slain in the streets of the lower town. Aliver, she knew, had been spirited away from the mкlйe. He did not speak about it, but she could tell he felt shamed by it. Nor was it the only insult to his pride.
She turned away from the guards and watched the wake of the boat. She was not sure what to think of this journey. Thaddeus had explained they were fleeing the island temporarily, for a week or so, no more than a month. They would be safer out of the public view and needed to stay away only long enough for the rebellion to be crushed and for the culprits who killed their father to be punished and for any other schemers on the island to be found out and dealt with. They would sail to the northern tip of Kidnaban and stay in quiet seclusion with the mine’s chairman there. Thaddeus promised that they would return to Acacia as soon as possible. For some reason Mena had not believed him. There was some other truth behind his faзade and his reasoned words, but she could not imagine what it was.