In moments it was over, and the demons had faded into nothingness like a dream.
Kaiku shivered in the rain and the wind, the girl still clutched to her, her terror not lessened in the least by the departure of the shin-shin. For the great spirits now turned their ghastly eyes back upon her, and they came close until they loomed over her again. She had nowhere to go, not even an inch she could back away to without plummeting to her death.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Gods, would it have been better to have jumped than to face this? Were these creatures any better than the shin-shin? She felt as if her soul could take no more, racked as it was with fear and pain and weariness. Get it over with, then. Have it done.
She opened her eyes again, and found herself face to face with one of the Children of the Moons.
The spirit was down on one knee, bringing herself to Kaiku's level. Her vast and fearful face was only a foot from Kaiku's own, her nose and cheeks seeming to dissolve and reform with the slight inclinations of her head, her eyes like pits into the aether. Kaiku felt her blood cool and slow as she looked into them.
Then the spirit brought her hand up, and with the long, curved nail of her index finger she touched the bundle in Kaiku's arms, the lightest pressure on the blanket that enwrapped the Heir-Empress. Kaiku felt a shudder run through her, a soft charge of something so sublime that she had no name for it. She felt herself lifted from within, as if her body had become suddenly buoyant, a rush of ecstasy such as she had only felt before when she had touched the hem of death and looked into the Weave. A joyous awe threatened to swallow her whole, and she saw suddenly the nature of these awful beings that stood before her, saw them for the unfathomable, magisterial vastness they embodied, so far beyond humankind's understanding that she felt like a mote in the ocean in comparison. She saw into the world of the spirits for an instant, and it humbled her.
And then a gust of wind blew a stinging wave of rain across her face, and she shut her eyes against it. When she opened them again, the Children of the Moons were gone.
She stood on the edge of the precipice, the rain swirling around her and the moonstorm slashing the clouds with lightning in the sky behind. Shakily, she stepped away from the drop, staggering to the safety of solid ground. The trees rustled emptily, a hollow audience to the wonder and terror of the last few moments. She raised her face to the sky and felt the rain lick it with warm spittle, and she could not think of a single thought or word that would sum up the experience of gazing into the face of one of the great spirits, of being touched by it. Stunned with awe, she barely noticed the child in her arms stir, nor did she see when the Heir-Empress opened her eyes. She only noticed Lucia was awake when the child put her arms about Kaiku's neck and hugged her.
'Did you meet my friends?' Lucia asked, and Kaiku nodded and laughed and cried at the same time.
Thirty-Five
Weeks glided into months, and the summer grew old. The Libera Dramach maintained a perpetual readiness in anticipation of any retaliation from Axekami, their spies ever alert in the streets of the capital and all over the Xarana Fault; but as time drew out they began to believe they had no need of such rigid vigilance, and they relaxed somewhat. The Heir-Empress really had been stolen away unobserved. Saramyr was a vast place, and a thousand men might search for a thousand years and never find her. She had vanished without trace, and out of the sight of the world.
Most of the Fold had no idea who the new girl was. A large proportion of them had taken to this life amid the pleats and valleys of the Fault simply to escape their fetters outside, or to avoid the Weavers. Their interest in the politics of the Libera Dramach was non-existent; they simply had lives to live, and they had found a place to live them. And so it was only the core of the Libera Dramach who knew the secret of the girl in their midst, knew of the power she wielded and who she truly was. For the common folk of the Fold, Lucia was just another new girl, another refugee from one conflict or another, and that was not unusual.
Lucia herself recovered from the burns she had suffered, but she never lost the scars. Her upper back and the nape of her neck were wrinkled and puckered, and though the redness faded over time, they were still an abomination against the clear, unspoilt skin that surrounded them. Lucia, converse to expectations, chose not to grow her hair back to its previous length, but instead had it cut boyishly short. When Zaelis gently pointed out that long hair might hide her scarring, she simply gave him one of her unfathomable looks and ignored his advice.
At first, Zaelis was protective of Lucia and acted as a father to her. His broken leg had healed badly and left him with a pronounced limp, but it did not stop him keeping her apart from the other children and away from harm. Of all people, it was Mishani who finally talked him into letting her run free. Lucia had never tasted freedom, never lived a life outside a gilded cage, always too important to be risked. But on the day of the new Emperor's accession to the throne, Mishani went to Zaelis and spoke with him. She was ever the persuasive one.
'She is not the Heir-Empress now,' Mishani pointed out. 'And she should not be treated like one. You'll make people suspicious.'
Zaelis finally demurred, and allowed Lucia to enrol in the school rather.than be taught by him. Kaiku and Mishani took it upon themselves to act as elder sisters to her. She was a strange and distant girl, but there was something about her that drew people in, and within days she had been integrated into the close community of the Fold children, scars or no scars. Zaelis fretted and worried until Cailin pointed out the ravens that had taken to gathering on the rooftops of the buildings lately, and which roosted in the trees in the next valley.
'They will look after her much better than you can,' she said.
For herself, Kaiku found an odd sort of happiness after the kidnapping of the last of the Erinima line. Here she no longer thought of herself as Aberrant. It was a meaningless term now, and one that had lost all the connotations of shame and degradation it had carried for the greater part of her life. For the first time since the Weavers had murdered her family, she could simply be herself, to drift for a while without a pressing purpose to spur her on. Her oath to Ocha was there, of course, always present in the back of her mind; but she had her whole life in which to fulfil it. And besides, she had already struck her enemies a crucial blow. Her discovery that the witchstones were responsible for the blight on the land, for the Aberrants themselves, had caused a furore among the Libera Dramach, and plans were already afoot to deal with the problem. Let them plan, she thought. She found she could hold her cares away for a while in the lazy days of late summer. The Weavers could wait. Their time would come.
But first she had to learn. She applied herself to Cailin's lessons, and those of the other Sisters, who periodically returned from their secretive errands in other parts of Saramyr. Gradually her kana became less of an enemy and more of a friend, and she learned not to fear it but to treasure it. Though mastery of her abilities would be a long and arduous journey, she had taken the first steps, and they brought her greater joy than she might have imagined.
She and Mishani shared a house, in one of the middle tiers of the cascade of rocky plateaux that formed the backbone of the Fold. It had stood empty for a long while, so Zaelis gave it to them in recognition of their actions, and they took it and made it their own. The friendship between them was better and stronger now than it had been for years, since Mishani went to the city to learn the ways of court. They supported each other through the days when they felt bleak, when they grieved for the loss of their families or friends. Kaiku remembered Tane often, more often than she would have liked. For someone who had been such a brief episode in her life, he had made more of an impact on her than she would have believed at the time. Only when he was gone did she realise it, and by then it was too late.