The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight

  The giddy feeling is quickly dampened. The high nobles have waited for my lord to arrive, and now they have no patience. I pull on the four-syllable, and then on the three-syllable, to enhance my hearing.

  “Have you thought it through?” Lady Maziket, the finance oligarch. “This is our chance and we must seize it.”

  Brentann hovers, a stooped vulture. I recognize the sharpness of his voice, balanced precariously between triumph and dissolution. “A short, decisive campaign. We will take back the borderlands—”

  “You will not take back anything,” my lord snaps.

  All that I’ve told my lord about last night is that I had difficult patients. I have concealed Brentann from him, and I now see that my lord has done the same, has told me nearly nothing of his trouble. The Katra-Araigen borderlands, the bone of contention between the two great political powers of the central north; the reason for the first war, in our grandparents’ generation, and the second, ended these fifteen years ago. Certainly the oligarchs wouldn’t want to reanimate the conflict—don’t they remember the last?

  I remember.

  I refuse to remember.

  “With General Aggriu lost to Bird-knows-where, our forces will meet little resistance in Araigen. . .”

  “Fools!” my lord bellows. “Anda-Aggriu cannot be lost. If she is gone from Araigen it is with a purpose, and she will return.”

  They teach in schools here that Katra was victorious in the war. The fighting never came to the capital. But in these early years I worked in the healing room day and night. I worked myself sick trying to help the simple people returning home, foot soldiers conscripted who went gladly for the promise of regular meals and a modest sum of money at discharge. They did not bargain for the battlefield sickness; for the horrors of war to embed themselves in their minds, to bend their grids out of place as easily and carelessly as a flood bends the iron railings of a bridge.

  They came and came. There was no end of them. I was already working with Primrose, eager to train more healers to help those in need. And years later the soldiers came and came again, for me to renew the healings over and over until the changes took. Fifteen years later I am still seeing some of them, too hurt to heal completely even with my efforts.

  “According to our reports, the general went East to Laina on a diplomatic mission.” The speaker is Lady Gezála, I think, or her assistant—I sometimes confuse them. They deal with information gathering. “Royal Araigen lost all contact with her. Whatever happened to her in the People’s Republic of Laina I cannot say, but Brentann is right that we must strike now, if we are to strike at all. She is the only one who could oppose you. The borderlands—”

  Rage hovers around my lord like a swarm of red-hot stones. To speak of Anda-Aggriu with him is dangerous. That relationship burned through hatred, friendship, passion, and hatred, to emerge on the other side as something unspeakable. “Nothing can bring down Anda-Aggriu, not the Lainish, not me, not anything.”

  Brentann says, “Nothing can bring her down? She won the war because you were too cowardly to kill her—or was it because you became infatuated with her, like you always do with anything that moves!”

  I grasp the railing of the box, holding my breath for an explosion, but it does not come. My lord’s voice grows cold instead. “Nobody won the war, Brentann. We came to an agreement over the borderlands. I remember you signing the treaties alongside me.”

  “What does it matter what I signed fifteen years ago? The time is now!”

  “The war was an abomination then, when you twisted my arm to get my consent to lead the troops. You will not get it now.”

  “You filthy, ragi-loving, Bird-pecked, provincial arazéi!”

  “Brentann!” shouts Maziket, and others. Arazéi is a word in Katra for a man who dresses in women’s clothes, a man who’d rather be a woman. It is an insult as bad as ragi or worse, an insult for which there must come a reaction.

  “If you’re too soft to serve as general, I will. . .”

  I see it now. Brentann wants to goad my lord to destruction during a session, to remove him—perhaps temporarily—from his position as the war oligarch. But it’s no use to call him arazéi. There are no insults like this on the Coast. You choose your gender at the first formal gathering you attend as an adult. Ichidi is not an insult. Ichidar are a part of society.

  No, there’s only one surefire way to provoke my lord. His family threatened. A feeling of helplessness.

  They would have gotten a better result if they asked him to help Aggriu.

  The session ends many hours later, with no agreement in sight. We take the carriage home. His face, strained by the effort of keeping his power in check, is bloodless and morose.

  “Brentann. . .” I begin.

  “Brentann.” He wipes his dry mouth with his hand. “I should have seen it coming. He is sixty-nine. In a year, he will have to legally cede the seat.” The oligarchs serve only between forty and seventy, and now Brentann is running out of time. “This is his last great chance for glory.” He spits the last word out like a rotten olive.

  “The borderlands must remain fallow. The land still struggles there, the grid. . .”

  “Yes, Parét. I know.”

  I do not speak again. In Little Hold we eat a simple meal, the two of us alone. He does not care to select the wine. He drinks my choice without expression and ignores my clumsy pouring of it.

  Later, he asks if he can hurt me. I consent.

  ~ ~ ~

  At night I lie awake by him, waiting for my thoughts to return. The frozenness melted from his face before the end, and now he sleeps—sprawled, with limbs outflung. His long unbound hair fans his body. He grew it out again a few years ago. I will never get tired of looking. It is the silver-black of it, and how it swings when he moves, so different and similar to when we met. It eases me to see him this relaxed.

  I was wrong to think that Brentann’s goading would slide off him like water. I see now how it has cut. At his first Coastal gathering, my lord chose to be known as a man. He has never made a different choice in public. He does not go by ichidi pronouns and other language forms. He’s shut that part of himself away. It is an old wound, of the kind few people on the Coast experience, a hurt so rare that it is unspeakable. He’s shared that hidden place with two people only: Anda-Aggriu, and myself. Perhaps there is a third, a wise and old person deep in the sands of Burri, who learned the truth from him.

  I know that one day he will ask me to heal him.

  The day I heal him is the day I’ll heal myself.

  That day the goddess Bird will come down from the sky and perch on the iron balustrade outside the bedroom in our Coastal home, the one that overlooks the sea. My lord will be asleep—not deeply like now; perhaps simply too exhausted to move. When I go out to talk to her, she will be tiny—a finch glistening with all the colors of the wave, with beryl and diamond and aquamarine. I hope I will find it in me to be kind.

  Gently I draw on my four-syllable and five-syllable, weave for myself a concealment so delicate my lord would easily tear it if he stirred. He does not stir. I slide out of the bed, tiptoe across the vast expanse of tile where we breakfasted last morning, slide out of the room. In the adjacent dressing room I pick out fresh clothes, as dark and nondescript as usual. Little Hold is huge, but nobody notices me as I slip out into the darkness.

  Brentann’s residence is in Upper Katríu, and if I don’t take a detour across the river, it will be a short walk from here. I notice, bemused and annoyed, a certain spring in my step. When my lord heals my wounds, he’s always tempted to improve. He breathes vitality into my flesh, draws out the small hurts from the joints—he knows I don’t like pain, and my health is important to him.

  I’d rather he leave me as he found me. I do not want unnecessary changes, do not want his power to be wasted on me. Do not want these minor improvements to remind me of my mind and how it ails, untouchable, untouched.

  He does not ask for my consent in t
his, and I say nothing. I often wonder if he even notices his work, or whether it is simply a side-effect of his power.

  But I suspect he knows, and shrugs off my hesitation as trivial. He protects me in all things—and I need it, I beg him for it; except sometimes I don’t. Perhaps it is because of this that I have not told him about Brentann.

  With some difficulty, I recognize Brentann’s house from before, the gray and chiseled marble structure. My lord could probably name the architect and the year it was built, but the oligarchs’ houses all look alike to me. I circle around the building, a safe distance away as to not activate the wards. Here, in a side garden full of brush and autumn blooms, I remove my ward and see, perceive without obstruction the magical defenses around the house. It is an old trick of mine—in a defensive net of any power, there would be for me gaps to squeeze through. I send a vibrating weave of my own to widen just such a small opening, and I slip through the perimeter.

  Only inside do I realize that I have acted, and have not stopped to think or hesitate, since I left my master’s bed. He has improved more than my joints; but that, I’m sure, is only accidental spillage of his spirit that will wear off, will be washed off me shortly. I will do what I need, while I can.

  I walk alongside the house, calf-deep in decorative grass. Brentann likes his gardens wild, overflowing. It is beautiful, lush, and it reminds me uncomfortably of the university, of the night I got in trouble and first met my lord. I was barely seventeen when I’d sent that probe to listen in on a secret conversation and heard, for the first time, that the land’s naming grid is ailing. It took me a decade to send another such probe, and after that only at times of greatest need—but I will have to do so now to find Dedéi’s room and talk to her.

  How will I get up there? I eye the vines that cloak the house with doubt. I’ll find the location of the room first, I decide, then change my plan as needed, maybe even go through the house, though this is bound to be more dangerous. I draw on the five-syllable, too long and delicate to be useful on its own. I draw on the four-syllable next, and breathe power through it into the five-syllable. To be on the safe side, I draw on the three-syllable as well. Thus the configuration is complete, three increasingly shorter names stacked and relying on each other. I have named it the Healer’s Trapeze. Never before have I seen a description of multiple long names, but the book Dedéi named is unfamiliar to me.

  I send a probe to circumnavigate the house, and follow it through gardens drowning in blossom until the location is pinpointed—high above me. Dedéi is in a tiny room, more of a closet—I can’t believe an oligarchy family would put a child there, even a child whose very life shames them. Within the room, Dedéi’s mind is wide awake. I feel her pace, hear a latch being carefully opened—careful for her, I gauge, but loud enough to wake an observer, if such could be found.

  I freeze where I stand, torn between pulling my names back to construct invisibility for myself and maintaining the probe. While I dither, she climbs out the window, grabs the vines, and begins to descend. Her deepnames are engaged. The short one latches to the vines and secures her hold. The long name flails about, thin and insubstantial as vapor, its aimless swinging only aggravating the short. Every time the long name makes an impact, the shorter one shudders with what I perceive as disgust. Below I am frozen in a contemplative reverie about the nature of deepnames, the semi-sentience I perceive in them, how they might work together or be at odds with each other. My lord’s spirit has evaporated from me.

  “Pluck-pluck-pluck—” Dedéi whispers, fierce and desperate. The vine Dedéi hangs on swings about, and a loud creak of a nearby shutter reawakens a flock of pigeons asleep under the eaves. I pull my probe back and reform the structure, sending a noise-dampening bubble to where Dedéi swings. The pigeons fly away as she regains her grip on the vines and shouts, within my noise-dampening bubble, “I do not want to be remade!”

  I speak inside it. Nobody else will hear. “I am not here to remake you, Dedéi. I swear I will do nothing. I just want to talk about deepnames.”

  “About deepnames,” she echoes.

  “Yes.” I wonder for how long she’ll keep her grip, how long the vines will hold without a stronger reinforcement. “You seem to know a lot about deepnames. I have never read the book you mentioned, about rare configurations.”

  “Maruta Gostano’s Postulating the Improbable in Magical Geometry. Most named strong only take one deepname, a three-syllable. Everything else is rare.” She slides down a bit, still too far from the ground. “The most common two-deepname configuration is the two- and three-.”

  “I just want to talk. You do not know me, but I very rarely do anything except when people ask.”

  Dedéi has stopped moving. “Configurations are either stable or unstable. An unstable configuration is prone to change. In such a configuration, the longer name would be shortened. So a two-four, which is unstable, will become a two-three.”

  I give up and follow her lead. “But you took a two-five. I have never heard about such a configuration. . .”

  “Took a two-five. Yes. The Odd Angle. It is stable—and rare.” Her hands give out and she slides a foot lower, then another; regains her grip. I do not interfere. She has not asked for help.

  “Why did you take it?”

  “It is stable, and rare,” Dedéi reiterates, and I can see now she is proud of it. She adds, “It’s cheery.”

  I smile despite myself. It’s been a over year since the children left, and I miss the young people’s language, I miss—but I cannot allow myself these thoughts.

  “It’s cheery,” I agree.

  In darkness, Dedéi feels much less agitated to me. She is not calm—her hands shake a bit on the vine, but she is strong, and she maintains her grip. Her speech is mostly flat, but there is intonation. She speaks clearest when she is uninterrupted, and says the most about a topic she loves. She repeats, yes—it seems easier for her to repeat than to make new sentences—but it is not nonsensical. We are having a conversation. She attends to my words and responds in turn.

  I see nothing in Dedéi that would merit shame and secrecy and threats of remaking. And just how isolated has she been?

  “Have you attended school, Dedéi?”

  She’s silent. The longer name flails about. My dampening bubble prevents this from affecting anything outside its sphere, but that only intensifies the reaction inside the bubble. The vines snap, and she slides down in an avalanche of stripped leaves. I reform the structure to dampen her fall. So much for not meddling.

  Dedéi is on the ground. I reform the structure once more to reestablish the dampening bubble.

  She gets up shakily, kicking the torn leaves off her pants. I step back a bit, giving her more space, and bow. “Forgive me, please. I said I would not interfere.” I feel guilty for this—if I wasn’t here to distract her, she wouldn’t have lost her grip on the vines.

  She does not look at me. “Last year they had to bring a doctor to fix my knee. She called me names and talked about ligaments.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I always fall, or smash into something.” She digs the ground a little with her left foot. “I like the garden at night. It is quiet. Nobody yells.”

  “Do you want. . .” I stop myself. I will not offer to heal her. I am not sure if clumsiness can be healed. She was like this before she took her configuration, and now her magic reinforces it.

  “Ligaments are cheery, but not as cheery as deepnames. I like deepnames.”

  I’ve told Brentann that there’s no problem with her mind. But it is of an unusual shape, positioned at an angle towards the world. I am sure there are things that I can help her with, but she fears to be remade, fears her self taken away. Whatever help I can give her, I cannot offer it callously. “I like deepnames too.”

  “What kind of a configuration you have?”

  I hesitate. My secrets, and my lord’s, churn on my tongue. She trusts me—does she trust me? But I, do I trust? How can I tru
st any Brentann after all that has happened?

  At last, I give her a truth of me. “I have a three, four, and five-syllable.”

  “The Foundation!” Dedéi jumps up and down, excited.

  “I call it the Healer’s Trapeze. I wasn’t aware it is described elsewhere in literature.”

  “It’s rare, very very rare! Gostano never met anyone with it!”

  I notice that Dedéi has not repeated a sentence of mine in a while. Perhaps she only does so when she’s upset or frightened?

  For whatever reason I feel slightly light-headed, as if the air I breathe does not quite reach my lungs. “My son wields it. He took his last, the five-syllable, while on his quest.”

  He wrote to me. It is too painful to recall. I have not written back.

  Dedéi sounds hesitant. “I’ve read about quests. What kind of quest?”

  “A Kekeri quest. It’s a coming-of-age ritual in my family, a long journey alone to learn one’s truths. . .” So easily had my family slipped from my tongue. The children went together, or as together as they could. All four of them. I push the thoughts away.

  “They don’t let me out of the house.”

  So much for schooling. “Will they let you attend university?”

  Her gaze is on the ground. “Grandfather says the other kids will beat you bloody because you are broken.”

  I do not contradict. I remember my own university days all too well. “I was expelled,” I say.

  She is silent.

  “They hated me. I thought I was broken.” I often still think so, but this I do not say. It is a word, a word that says nothing. We’re all broken, all of us who’ve ever lived a life. Even Brentann, a man with money, station, power, ease, whose desires align with what is proper in Katra; yes, even Brentann. We’re all in need of healing. Me, my lord, the wounded soldiers who came to me begging. Brentann. Dedéi. My wife’s killer. The children. We all are vessels of our brokenness, we carry it inside us like water, careful not to spill. And what is wholeness if not brokenness encompassed in acceptance, the warmth of its power a shield against those who would hurt us?