“What you’re hearing,” Hope said, “is an ages-old language. Few alive now have spoken it, or if they have, then only to themselves. It’s the language of the land, Rafe. It’s the language of magic.”
“But what does that mean?” She had told him that several times now, old languages and words no longer spoken. But it made no sense. It did nothing to distract his mind from his parents’ deaths, nor explain them. He needed sleep.
Hope sighed, looked down at her hands. They twisted around each other as if trying to wring something out. She was a whore, she had told him. Those hands had done a lot.
“I’m older than I look, Rafe,” she said. “I’m a witch. I have ways and means to keep myself young.” She waved around at her room, adorned as it was with plants and roots and dead things hanging from the walls, shelves lined with old books, opaque containers scattered across every available surface, their contents hidden away. “And all my life I’ve been waiting for you.
“You must know of the magic, the old ways Noreela used to live before the Cataclysmic War? Better times. The world was at peace with itself, and as we took from nature, so it gave. All that was stolen away by the bastard Mages because of their greed and avarice, their pride in thinking they could usurp nature and make the world their own. And now, because of them, there’s no peace in the world, and the more we take the more the land dies.”
“My parents always told me there was more myth than truth in those stories.”
“Lots of myth, to be sure!” Hope agreed, laughing with little humor. “But lots of truth as well. Stories that big have plenty of both. You’ve not traveled the land, you’ve not seen how much it’s changing.”
“You’ve been waiting for me?” Rafe asked, his voice weak and vulnerable.
“My family have always been witches, Rafe, even before the Cataclysmic War. Back then, my grandmother’s grandmother’s mother used magic to help her heal, help her look after people. And since nature has taken magic back, my ancestors and I have used herbs and spices and potions, those things nature has left us with. And I’ve always, always believed that nature would forgive us one day. There’s a prophecy, uttered by a few, believed by fewer; it says that magic will come back, and it’ll be reborn in a child.”
“I’m not a child.”
“You’re an innocent. And your origins…?”
Rafe sipped the water and thought about the voices and sounds he sometimes heard, the way they seemed to know him so well, even though he could not understand them. And he thought of the day his parents had told him about when they found him, abandoned and alone on the hillside. “I know what you’re saying,” he said. “At least, I think so. I’m not sure. I’m so confused. I’m just a farm boy!”
“There are ways to know for sure,” Hope said, suddenly standing from her chair and reaching for Rafe.
He sat up and shuffled back on the bed. “What do you mean?”
“Your parents weren’t your blood parents, were they?” Hope stood with her arms outstretched, as if ready to catch him from a fall.
How does she know that? “How do you know?”
“Because they can’t have been.”
“Why?”
Hope came to him, smiling, but there was something behind the smile he did not like. Something old, and desperate.
“I can show you,” she said. “We can look together. You’re tired, Rafe. Look… watch… haven’t you ever wondered?” Hope reached for his shirt and he did not have the energy to draw back. He felt her sharp nails scratch at his stomach as she lifted his shirt, higher, and then she gasped and stared down at his stomach. “Haven’t you ever wondered?”
“What?” His voice came from a distance. He felt so sleepy.
“You have no navel,” Hope whispered. “It’s true. It’s you.” She looked at Rafe, and then smiled.
Something whispered to him, and Hope’s lips were not moving. He smelled grass in a wide, sun-kissed meadow, even though outside this room he could hear the sounds of hidden Pavisse going about its bleak business.
“You tired, farm boy?”
Rafe nodded, vision blurring as the room rocked him from side to side, and he could taste fresh mountain air taking the sting of Pavisse from his tongue.
Hope was whispering, but he no longer understood. He was listening to something else, something that welcomed him down into deep sleep with words beyond understanding. Behind it, comforting memories awaited him.
HOPE TOOK THEglass of water from the sleeping boy’s hand and emptied it into the drain. She was careful to wash the glass several times before replacing it on a shelf. A few sewer rats will be giddied this afternoon, she thought.
She sat for a while and watched the boy sleeping, staring at his bared stomach. Poor soul, he had been through so much, seeing his parents and friends slaughtered like that. He deserved a rest. Already his eyelids were twitching as he took brief respite from the ills of the world.
Hope was afraid. She had spent her life waiting for magic’s return. She called herself a witch, but one thing she had always craved was to actually live the life. She wanted to heal with magic, not herbs. She wanted to treat madness with a touch of her fingers and a few cooed words, not a mug of GG’s honey, which invariably would not work. And over the years, she had been searching.
Now she had found Rafe.
There had been hundreds of men in her bed, but few of them had she ever let sleep. They’d come in here drunk or lonely, had sex with her and then paid with talk: where they had been on their travels; who they had met; what they had seen. She had asked them whether they ever heard rumors from Kang Kang, and all but a few refused to even talk of that place. You think I’d ever go there? they would say. You think I’m mad? I don’t even listen to talk of the place, let alone think on it. Other things too. She would extract her payment through idle rumor, travelers’ gossip, whispers beneath the wind. It suited most of her customers fine, and many of them returned day after day, year after year. Sometimes, they had new tales to divulge. She was always searching for knowledge, picking through the lives of those sex-sated men for hidden truths and realities that would make no sense singly, yet considered as a whole might one day tell her what she had wanted to hear for so long: that magic was back in the land.
The boy mumbled in his sleep and Hope strained to listen, but he was talking Noreelan, nothing more.
She was breathing heavily, trying not to build her hopes on this lost lad’s fate. The world was getting harsher, and a slaughter in an insignificant little farming village was hardly news. But here she was now, staring at the living proof.
And now she knew: the whispers her mother and grandmother had carried down from their own ancestors, magicians and charlatans both, were all true. They were words she had never heard again, not all the times she had questioned those men, and she had begun to suspect that they were ideas open only to the women of the land. It was a female concept, after all. No man had an inkling of what the birth of a miracle could mean.
He’s heard the language of the land. He hears the whispers, he feels the movement of rivers through the soles of his feet, the breath of the world brushing against his skin. Don’t tease yourself, Hope! It isn’t so hard to believe.
She stood and turned away from Rafe, hearing him mumble again in his sleep. This time she could not make out the words.
Facing the walls of her little room, she took in everything that made her what she was today: a pretender; a charlatan; a profaner of magic. She had no magic yet she called herself “witch,” and some foolish people even went in fear of her. Old fears must run as deep as blood, she thought, and deeper than history. Here were a hundred spices and herbs and drugs known to anyone, and a few others unknown. Tumblespit, hedgehock, rutard, Duke’s Folly, stale fledge from several distinct regions, grass dew, hedge dew, rock dew, Willmott’s Nemesis, GG’s honey. A small earthpoison tree grew in the corner of her room, fed with the blood of rats. A selection of jars contained bodies and body parts from many creatures of Noreela, most known, some very rare, one or two little more than myth. There were lotions and potions whose uses even Hope had little concept of, handed down as they were from her mother, unopened all these years. Some of these jars had become opaque with time, and Hope had no idea what grew within.