“You’re gonna be fucking miserable to live with for a couple of weeks,” he said at last.
“Probably,” said Locke with a rueful chuckle. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, we should case this place and pack everything useful we can lay our hands on,” said Jean. “Clothes, food, tools. We don’t have to go after Sabetha, but we’d best have our asses on the road before the sun peeks over the horizon.”
“Why?”
“Karthain hasn’t kept up an army or maintained its walls for three hundred years,” said Jean. “In a few hours, it’s going to wake up to discover that the only thing keeping it protected from the world at large has vanished during the night. Do you want to be here when that mess breaks wide open?”
“Oh, shit. Good point.”
Locke stood up and looked around the room one last time.
“Key, crown, child,” he muttered. “Well, fuck you, Patience. Three things must you kiss before I let you spook me for good. My boots, my balls, and my ass.”
Locke pulled his boots on and followed Jean down the stairs, impatient to have Karthain at his back and slowly sinking into the horizon.
EPILOGUE: WINGS
1
THE BOY IS six. He stares at the Amathel, breathes the lake air, the wholesome scents of life and freshness. He stares at the glinting lights, the jewels in the blackness, the secrets of the Eldren scattered in the depths. The dock folk claim that fishermen in the water at night have been driven mad by the lights, have dived down toward them, pulling frantically, as if toward the surface, until they drowned. Or vanished.
The boy is not afraid of the lights. The boy has power the dock folk can only guess at. He feels a pressure in his temples when he stares out across the waters. He hears something lower and lovelier than the steady wash of the waves and the cries of the birds. The power of the hidden things calls to the power of the boy.
The boy knows the Amathel took his father. He has been told this, but he remembers nothing. He was too young. There is no memory to mourn. The lake of jewels means only life, beauty, soothing familiarity.
All these things. And the power that waits for his power to match it. To reveal it.
2
THE BOY is four, the boy is ten, the man is twenty. His body shifts in this place. Sometimes he is whole, sometimes he is pleased, sometimes his memories are bright and vivid as paintings glowing with the fire of the gods in every speck of pigment.
Sometimes he speaks in a rich rolling voice. Sometimes he moves his hands and feels the fingers there, feels them brushing over surfaces and picking things up. He does not know why this pleases him, why he feels something like the hot pressure of tears behind his eyes, why the joy is so bittersweet.
Sometimes he walks in a fog. His thoughts are wrapped in dull cotton. Sometimes he is on a street and he is confused. He is bound with rope, throbbing with pain, his hands and his mouth caked with blood. His own blood. The rain comes down and men are staring at him, studying him, afraid.
Sometimes he is gazing out across the Amathel, feeling the life of the bird for the first time. A gull, an elegant white thing, wheeling in tight circles. The boy feels its needs, its hunger, the elegant simplicity of the thing at the center of it all. The boy visualizes this as a wheel, a piece of clockwork, a logic circle turning without friction or remorse. Strike, eat, live on the wind. Strike, eat, live on the wind.
The boy moves his fingers to call up his untutored power. He reaches out and takes the life of the bird like a humming thread in the hands that nobody else can see, the hands of power his mother has taught him to use.
The bird is startled.
Its wings fold awkwardly. It plummets twenty feet and bounces hard off a rock, then plops into the water, fluttering and squawking agitatedly, lucky its wings aren’t broken.
The boy needs practice.
3
THE BOY is ten. The boy has run across the hills and forests north of Karthain all night with blood in his mouth. The boy has crouched in the center of a web, still as stone, with venom in his fangs and the faintest sensation of movement rippling across his fur, the air currents of prey fluttering ever closer. The boy has swept high into the sky, chased the sun, learned to strike, eat, and live on the wind.
“You must not,” his mother insists. His mother is powerful, his mother is teaching him her gifts, but she will not let him teach her his own.
“It is not highly thought of, among our kind,” she says. “You are a man! You will think as a man! There’s no room for a man in those tiny minds.”
“I share,” said the boy. “I command. I don’t feel small. If they really are tiny, perhaps I make them big whenever I go inside!”
“You will grow more and more sensitive,” says his mother. “You will tie yourself more and more tightly to them, do you understand? Their lives will become yours, their feelings yours. If they are hurt, you will share all their pain. If they are killed … you may be lost as well.”
The boy doesn’t understand. His mother tells him these things as though there were no compensations. The boy knows that he is alone, among all the magi his mother has presented him to, in his willingness to share the lives of animals.
There is no dissuading the boy. He has tasted life without regrets, life without remorse, life lived on the wind. It is what he is; he returns to himself after each communion feeling that part of the wild has come with, to live inside him.
His mother could make him stop. Even at ten, the boy knows what she holds over him, burns with shame at it. But she will not use it. She lectures and begs and threatens, but she will not speak the thing that would lock his will in an iron strongbox.
She cannot, or will not, but it doesn’t make the boy forgive her. He casts his awareness into hidden places for owls, ravens, hawks. He hurls himself into the sky carrying anger from the ground, and hot blood runs on his talons. He soars to forget he has legs. He kills to forget he has rules and expectations. He never shares this experience with anyone else. He goes alone to the woods, and dead songbirds fall like rain. When he is shamed in his studies or rebuked for his attitude, he remembers the blood on his talons, and he endures with a smile.
4
THE BOY is gone, the man is twenty-five, the man is … lost.
Sometimes he is in the dead gray place. His legs refuse to move. His hands feel like crippled lumps. His tongue throbs with a phantom pain, an electric tingle. He is trapped on a bed as though nailed to it. He cannot remember how he came to be in this place. He sobs, panics, tries to claw his way to freedom with his missing fingers.
Only the smell of the lake relaxes him, the cool fresh scent of the water, the occasional piquancy of dead fish or gull shit. When the wind blows these things to him he can bear the confusion and the torture of the dead place.
When the wind is wrong the shadows around him pour something cold and bitter down his throat, and he goes into the darkness cursing them wordlessly.
5
THE LAKE air blows through the dead place. He takes it in as though no other air will sustain him. It is night; the darkness is offset by the light of a single lamp. Everything is strange; he feels a buoyant force inside his chest, something rising through him like bubbles in a spring. The room is clarifying, as though layer after layer of gauze is being removed from his face.