The Sacred Band

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Melio sat on the bench, squashed between Clytus and Kartholome, with Geena just on the pilot’s other side. The bench was too short for all four of them, but it was where a wolf of a man dragging around two hounds had deposited them after the strange events of the clan gathering. Unwashed, bruised, scratched, smeared with dried blood around their wrists and ankles, with staring eyes and faces limp with perplexity, they looked like children rammed together by a callous tutor, being punished for a game that had gotten violently out of control.

“I don’t understand anything,” Kartholome said. He had found a comb somewhere. He dragged it through his beard, causing it to frizz in a manner that he would not have liked at all if he’d had a mirror to see it.

The others grunted.

“Not a damn thing.” And then, indicating the curving metal slivers that a passing man wore as earrings, Kartholome asked, “How do you think I’d look with some of those? I feel less myself with only a single hook in. This lobe has healed up, you know?” He caressed the earlobe from which the bone earring had been ripped back when the league ship tried to run them down near the Outer Isles.

Nobody answered him.

“Is that really Dariel?” Melio asked, watching the prince from a distance.

“Of course it is,” Geena said.

As ever, Melio could not fathom where she got her certainty. The man they watched in heated discussion with a tight circle of strangely tattooed and accoutred foreigners spoke fluently in a guttural language that sounded like Numrek. His face was spotted like a running cat’s from the Talayan plains, and he seemed to have some sort of mark embossed on his forehead. He was one of them. At home amid the strangeness of them. Had Melio no known the man was Dariel-if he had not heard his voice and met his eyes-he would have had no clue to his identity. And that barely helped, for that same man had harangued a chamber filled with the weirdest-looking people Melio had ever seen. Dariel had then been stabbed in the abdomen, a killing slice if ever there was one. Instead of dying, he had shouted out, ripped off his shirt, and displayed himself, bloody and yet unscathed. How could that person be Prince Dariel Akaran? If that was him, what had happened to him? Was he still, somehow, the man Melio had been sent to find?

“How do you know?” Melio whispered.

“His chest,” Geena said. “He’s got Dariel’s physique. And his backside.”

Whatever this second, smaller meeting was, it ended abruptly. All the seated participants rose and bowed to one another. The man who might be Dariel spoke a few last words with a woman whose black hair jutted up from her head in featherlike plumes. As she turned away, Dariel seemed to remember the waiting Acacians. He cast about until he spotted them, then rushed over.

Embracing them one by one, he probed their faces, as they did the same to his. Up close it was obvious that he was the prince. The open lips of his smile revealed the spacing of his teeth, a trait Melio never knew he would recognize as Dariel’s. And yet there it was. And there was the distinctive ridge of bone high on his nose. The prince named each of them reverently, as if their names held sacred power. “Melio. Clytus. Geena… By the Giver, what are you doing here? How are you here? I can’t imagine it. Tell me. Tell me!”

For some reason, the others deferred to Melio to answer. “We came to find you,” he said. “To rescue you. Corinn sent me, and Clytus and Geena, and Kartholome.”

Dariel grinned as he absorbed that. He said Kartholome’s name a few times, memorizing it, and then he backed a step away, taking them all in. “Well, you found me. Rescued me? Not so much. Would I be boasting if I said I rescued you?”

Thinking about the short, brutal captivity they had suffered at the hands of the gray, tusked people-beatings, interrogations in broken Acacian, threats of their pending horrific deaths-Melio said, “Not at all. I think, really, that we came quite close to having a hard time of it.”

Geena barked a laugh, which set the others off as well.

Serious again a moment later, Dariel said, “Oh, there’s so much I want to ask you. And so much I want to tell you. I don’t know where to start. Also, everything is happening here now.”

“I can see that,” Clytus said.

“You’ve no idea what you’ve dropped into. I may have to ask you to go to war with me.”

“A just fight?” Clytus asked.

“Yes, absolutely.” Dariel glanced over his shoulder. A woman with facial markings like his own stood waiting for him, looking uneasy. “I have to go now. One of my friends here is hurt. I must see her. We’ll talk tonight. All of us. I want to know you, too, Kartholome. We’ll talk each other’s ears off as soon as we get a moment. I’ll leave you with Birke, to wash up and rest.” He indicated the wolf-faced youth. “He is a good friend to me. He’ll be one to you very soon.”

A half step away, he paused. “Melio, would you come with me? We could speak a little as we walk.”

Melio joined him. They walked quickly, part of a small group that cut across courtyards, passing from inside to out and back again, down a mazelike series of corridors that occasionally offered views over a stunning cityscape. As on Acacia, a contingent of guards shadowed Dariel. Not Marah but a motley, deadly serious crew, armed with a hodgepodge assortment of weapons. Judging by the sidelong glances they fixed on him, they did not yet trust Melio to be so near Dariel.

What is going on here?

“How are my sisters?” Dariel asked. “Tell me the last news you had of them.”

Melio’s attempts at this got him virtually nowhere. So much had happened since Dariel had left the Known World with Sire Neen that each thing he mentioned was predicated on explaining something else. That, in turn, affected something else that he needed to loop away from, enough so that he was soon unsure he was doing anything other than tying them both in troubling knots.

Stopping at the door into which the others entered, Dariel took his arm. “But they lived? When you left, they both lived?”

“Yes. And-” Melio cut himself off. He could not tell Dariel what Corinn had said about Aliver. It might not have been true. It would be cruel to say it now, in the midst of whatever was happening here.

The prince motioned to someone just inside the door that he would only be a moment more. “And what?”

“I can’t say it now. Later, when we can truly talk.”

Reluctantly, Dariel nodded. He stepped inside. Melio followed him. The entrance opened onto a large living room, filled with silent people. On a wide couch set against the far wall lay a woman, propped on her back, blankets pulled snug across her chest. Her shoulder bulged with bandages. What the injury was Melio could not tell, but that it was grave was obvious. The woman’s skin was a light blue. Her eyes were large in their sockets, her cheeks sunken. The woman with the running cat spots had already reached her. She clung to one of the woman’s hands, speaking close to her, kissing her face with a passion and sadness that made Melio feel he should look away.

Dariel exhaled a long breath. “Oh, Skylene…” Just a whisper. He did not go to her until sometime later, when the spotted woman lifted her head and pointed him out. The blue woman found him and bent her lips up into a weak but sincere smile. On that invitation, Dariel went forward. He kneeled by the spotted woman at the side of the bed and took one of Skylene’s hands. He touched her forehead with his own and they spoke close, too quietly for Melio to hear.

Watching them, Melio realized he had forgotten all about doubting this man’s identity. He was Dariel Akaran. Somehow, he had found a new family in Ushen Brae, a new conflict that he was at the center of. He had a sense of purpose that positively glowed as if a flame burned inside him. Melio did not yet understand what was going on here, but it felt perfectly right that he had come. Mena would want him here. She would want him fighting beside Dariel, shoulder to shoulder with the same guards that, for the moment, looked at him with suspicion.

I’m with him, Mena. I found him. Now I’ll just fight this war with him-whatever that entails-and then I’ll bring him home.

T hat night, while Mor and Tam went to another meeting of the clan leaders, the others talked well into the dead hours. There was so much to tell. It proved impossible to convey any of it in perfect order. Instead, they made a stew together. With Dariel and his friends Anira and Birke and Tunnel on one side of the pot, and the new arrivals ringed around the other, they all tossed in what they could about the situation in the Known World as they knew it, about their voyages across the Gray Slopes, about Dariel’s betrayal by Sire Neen, the extermination of the Lothan Aklun, the bloodbath that was the prince’s first meeting with the Auldek, the confusion in this city, Avina…

It went on and on. When Melio thought the time was right, he offered the tale he’d heard of Aliver’s resurrection and of Corinn’s confirmation to him that it was true. He just told it plainly, worrying that he was stirring hope for something that sounded too fantastic to be true. Dariel sat with it in silence for a long time, then looked up. “Is she so powerful as that?”

Melio had mentioned the defeat of the Numrek in Teh already. Now he described how it was accomplished. After he had, the others sat through another long silence.

Dariel eventually shook his head. “Not even a year away and one sister’s the most powerful sorcerer since Tinhadin, the other is facing the worst invasion in history, and my brother… he’s defeated death.”

“And you-the Rhuin Fa,” Tunnel said. “Strange family you have.”

Later, visions of the one Dariel called the Sky Watcher, Na Gamen, led Melio into sleep. Against his will he followed the slim man around his mountaintop aerie. He could not help thinking of him with avian features, some blending of him and the injured woman Skylene, perhaps. His version of Na Gamen showed him the way to sleep, walking, explaining to him the unimaginable things that Dariel had just tried to explain.

W hen Melio woke it was to birds as well. Yellow finches flew through the room in a rush. His eyes fluttered open as they skimmed the ceiling above him, darting away down one of the corridors. It’s funny, he thought. In Avina I can never tell whether I’m inside or out. The birds can’t either.

Geena lay on the mat beside him, her sleeping warmth curled toward him. He sat up. Around him the others slumbered where they had passed out, on mats and wrapped in light blankets, all of them near the fire pit carved out of the stone floor. The warmth of it had somehow radiated through the stones themselves, fighting back the mild chill of the night.

Dariel sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, watching him. “It’s okay,” Dariel said when Melio reflectively scooted away from Geena. “I know how she is. She already told me you did nothing to dishonor my sister.”

“I never would,” Melio said. “I want nothing more than to get back to her alive. We have a child to make, Dariel. She promised me. I want to hold her to it.”

“I hope you do. In any event, I’m no one to judge.” Dariel poked the coals in the fire, atop which a kettle hung from a thin, delicately constructed framework. “I don’t suppose you caught all of what we argued about at the meeting?”

“None of it,” Melio said. He rose stiffly and moved closer. One of the hounds pressed against Dariel’s hip sniffed in his direction. The other simply stretched. “The lot of you spoke Auldek.”

“Well, let’s just say I’ll have some explaining to do when I get back.” He tossed his poking stick into the fire. “You’ll know what I mean soon enough.”

Melio already had some idea. He had noticed the way Dariel and Anira tended to stay near each other, how she spoke to him in touches on the wrist and back. “When you get back… When will that be? I get the feeling you don’t plan to leave until you’ve finished what you’ve started here.” He let his eyes drift around the sleeping forms. “I like these people already. Birke. Tunnel. What kind of name is Tunnel?”

Dariel smiled. He poured a viscous liquid from a carafe into two glasses. He offered one of the glasses to Melio, who took it, squinting warily at what looked, as near as he could tell, like frog’s eggs. “The tea’s not ready, but try this. It’s good. Just try it.” He did so himself.

Turning the glass in his fingers, Melio said, “You’re at the center of something here. I know that already. I’m surprised you didn’t go to the clan leaders meeting last night. I haven’t figured out your role here yet.”

“Nor have I, entirely. I’m no clan leader, though. Mor is the leader of the Free People. It’s for her to speak with her peers, not me. I’m… something different.”

One of the sleepers stirred. Birke rolled over and then settled again, on his back in a manner that moved his steady breathing toward a snore.

Melio leaned forward and said, “I have to ask: Can we take you home? Now, I mean. There’s a league clipper that…”

“I’ve been thinking about that all night,” Dariel said. “The things you all told me. It goes around and around in my mind like mad. But no matter how much I want to go home, I can’t. I’m already committed here. I allowed this.” He ran a finger over the symbol emblazoned on his forehead. Melio almost did the same, wondering at the texture of it. “I wanted this. It’s part of me now. And the thing is, Melio, all of this-all of these people-they’re part of our story already. If I can, I have to close the circle.”

“What circle?”

Dariel frowned as if he did not like hearing his own expression spoken back to him. “Do you know that when I sleep I have dreams in which I speak to people all around Ushen Brae? Individual conversations, with individual people, and yet somehow I speak with thousands each night. The number is only increasing, and, sometimes, I feel a part of myself-or of Na Gamen-speaking with them even as I move through the world. Even right now, this very moment.” Dariel stared at the rim of his glass. His eyes were still, but Melio saw hidden motion in them, as if the surface of his brown irises hid other eyes beneath them, ones that moved in response to things that were not in front of the Dariel sitting here with a glass in his hands. “I can’t go home until I’m done,” he said. “That’s all there is to it. I can’t go home unless I’m done. One thing depends on the other.”

“All right,” Melio said. “I had to ask. Corinn would”-he was going to say skin him alive, but, considering what he’d seen at Teh, the expression lost its humor-“be displeased with me if I didn’t.”

Tam and several of the others strode through one of the open doors. Dariel looked up, nodded at them. “Well,” he said, “we wouldn’t want that, would we?” He pushed upright with the unfolding of his legs and walked to meet them.

A short time later, the entire party, awake and sipping hot tea, listened to the news Tam had gathered. It was more than the dark tattoos under his eyes that made him look tired. “Mor was with the clan leaders all night. She has gone to Skylene now, but she asked me to report to you, Dariel, so that you know what’s being proposed. The clans are agreed. They will sign binding declarations of unity. They wish for some autonomy, so that those who want to can retain clan identity, but they all agree to be grouped collectively as the People. They agree to have both clan councils for their own affairs and to send representatives to sit on a council that oversees the People. They will even respect a separate body, the Council of Elders, as another voice in decision making. Dividing up the holdings of Ushen Brae will be complicated, but they have agreed, in principle, to abide the boundaries we’ve proposed. They’ve put this in writing.”

That’s a lot of agreement, Melio thought.

“They’ve accepted everything we’ve worked for?” Anira said, pitching it somewhere between a question and exclamation.

“Not exactly,” Tam said, “but damn close.”

Tunnel took hold of one of his tusks and yanked on it. A strange gesture, but one that seemed to express mirth. “I told you all, the Rhuin Fa would make it so!”

Tam looked away from him, apparently not wanting his official facade to crumble yet. “They found Dariel very convincing, but it sounded like many of them always had this in their hearts. They just let the wrong voices rule them. Dariel helped give them courage. Not everyone agreed, but those who fought it saw their own people turn against them. Dukish has been stripped of his clan leadership. The Anets did that themselves because he carried a weapon into the gathering.”

“And used it,” Birke added, scowling.

“By the gathering codes, the clan could be exiled for that. The Anets voted new leaders for themselves and are begging for mercy. They say Dukish deceived them and that they will see to his punishment. The other clan leaders want to know what we wish them to do. Should the entire Anet clan be exiled? Or do we accept that they kill Dukish for his crimes? Or would you have him as a slave, Dariel? They could… wound him.”

“Wound him?”

“So that he would be a good boy,” Tunnel said. “The Auldek had ways of doing that to the troublesome ones. They knew it; we know it.”

Dariel had his response ready. “I don’t believe we should punish the Anet. We must get beyond that and quickly. If we can-and they can-it will be for the better. The Anet and Antoks should cede all they grabbed back to the People, and they should swear that their allegiance is to the Free People. They should help us fight the league. Dukish should be imprisoned for now, until the conflict is over and we can decide, in time, what should become of him. This way would be better for as all. No revenge, just justice. That’s what I think.”

Tam shifted. Melio was not sure how to read the movement, until he grinned. “That’s exactly what Mor said when I told her. She wasn’t sure you’d agree, though. There are other developments,” Tam continued. “Dukish had sent word to Sire Lethel about Dariel.”

“They know that Dariel is here?” Clytus asked. “That he’s your Rune Fan?”

“Rhuin Fa,” Tam said. “Dukish wanted to capture him and serve him up to the league. It would have been the gift that cemented their partnership.”

“Ah,” Geena said with a smirk, “if they hadn’t wanted to do you all in before, they certainly will now.”

Looking disgusted, Clytus emptied his tea on the coals. “The damned league… We shouldn’t have stopped with blowing up the platforms. Should have done it right the first time. Should have squeezed every last one of their pointed heads!” He scowled his way around the gathered faces, lingering on Melio and the others who had come across on the Slipfin. He seemed to see what he wanted to in them. He said, “All right, what do we have to do to finish this? Let’s get it done.”

“Yeah,” Kartholome said, “let’s get it done.”

“One night and you are willing to fight with us?” Tunnel asked. “I didn’t think we were as charming as that.”

Geena strolled over, squeezed the man’s bulging, gray-hued bicep, and then hung from it. Melio felt a twinge of jealousy. “Don’t think of it that way. One night and you’re willing to help us finish our business with the league; that’s how I see it. A good deal for us. This is a muscle. Do you all see this thing?”

“If you mean it,” Dariel said, looking from Geena to Clytus to Melio, “you fill me with joy. You see, I thought a lot about how to proceed last night. I think I have it, but I do need my brigands to aid me.”

“You have us,” Clytus said.

“Then we have a fighting chance,” Dariel said. “First, let’s send the good leagueman a message… in Dukish’s name.”