Deep Water (40 page)

The chieftains exchanged glances, nodding to each other. There was something there, Bramble thought, something they’re not
saying, not out loud. But there was an element of calculation in their assessment of Acton. Something… political.

“Kill them all,” Asgarn said softly. “We will kill them all and take everything they have and laugh while we do it. Yes. You
have the right, Acton. You will be the hand of the gods on these butchers.”

The other chieftains murmured agreement. Acton nodded and stood straighter. Ragni put a hand to her heart and then to her
mouth, as though she wanted to stop her own words. She began to sob quietly, and Baluch raised his head in her lap to comfort
her, patting her shoulder, rising to put an arm around her, rocking her.

The old man from the Moot, the one who had controlled the staff, laid a hand on Acton’s shoulder. “For this battle, you shall
be the lord of war, Acton. We so appoint you and bind ourselves to support you.”

Silence fell. Through Ragni’s tears, Bramble could read the faces of the chieftains. The old man had gone further than they
had intended. That was a mistake, old man, she thought bitterly. A bad, bad mistake.

A
FTER LUNCH
, Z
EL
and Martine buried the food scraps under a tree not too far into the Forest, in case they attracted bear or wolverine.

“We don’t have a new flint,” Zel said as she filled in the hole. “I looked all morning, but there are none around here at
all.”

“I know. I looked too, yesterday.”

“What are we going to do?”

Zel looked worried, as she should be. Martine thought about the warnings she had received so many times as a youngster: the
ritual was three nights, and all three must be completed, or disaster would occur during the following year. There were always
lots of instances cited, too: forest fires, houses burnt down, even people themselves suddenly bursting into flame. At a time
like now, with the future in balance, they couldn’t afford to anger him.

Martine had thought about the problem, but she was still unsure of her answer. “One of my casting stones is a flint,” she
said.

Zel stopped shoveling and stared at her. “Use a casting stone?” she queried. “Can you do that?”

Martine shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anyone doing it, but it was a flint before it was a casting stone.”

Zel thought about it. “Which stone is it?”

“The blank stone.”

“Dung and pissmire, Martine, are you crazy?” Her voice rose in panic. “That’s the Chaos stone! Anything could happen!”

“The blank stone represents possibilities.”

“Bad ones as well as good ones,” Zel said.

“It’s all we’ve got — unless you want to chip off a piece of the lake obsidian and use that.”

A shudder went through them both.

“No,” Zel said, breathless with horror at the thought. “No.”

“Well, then. We can’t leave the ritual unfinished. It would set him loose on us and those with us.”

Zel was silent for a moment, her face unreadable, then said, “Ask ’em. Ask the stones if you should use it.”

Martine crouched on the grass, spat on her hand and held it out to Zel. She couldn’t ask herself. A fool’s pursuit, when a
caster threw for herself, but if Zel asked it might work.

Zel clasped her hand and whispered, “Should we use the blank stone as our new flint?”

Martine’s fingers in the pouch drew five stones without hesitation. That alone told her it was a real casting, strong and
true. She cast the stones. The blank stone, first. Then Mystery, Night, Rejoicing and Sorrow.

“Shagging hells!” Zel said.

Martine smiled grimly. “Well? Will you risk it?”

“Are they talking to you?”

She shook her head. “But it’s a true casting. As true as you’ll get. We’ll have both rejoicing and sorrow, and anything could
happen.”

Zel straightened up in a smooth movement that made Martine envy her youth. She stood for a moment, staring out at the altar.

“If it gets bad, we can jump in the mere,” Zel said.

“It’d have to be pretty bad before I’d jump in there.”

They stood in silence. The breeze had died. The mere reflected the sky perfectly, so that it seemed to hold all the heavens.
Only the altar was dull, a black stain on the blue.

“The altar should not be dark on this night,” Martine said, suddenly sure. “We will use the tools we have.”

Zel nodded. “If you say so.”

Zel held the casting stone and Martine hit it cleanly with the striking stone, hard and fast as it should be done, so that
bright sparks leapt out onto the tinder. Zel blew softly to make the sparks catch, and Martine said, “Take our breath to speed
your growth.”

As the tinder caught and small flames started to lick upward, she felt him come. But there was no gradually building arousal,
no heat in her loins, no sense of being desired. There was just fire, shooting upward.

She hurriedly moved back, dragging Zel with her.

A lifetime of living with the gods hadn’t prepared her for this. The fire roared up, higher and higher, far beyond the capacity
of the fuel they had given it. The heat was intense; they fell back further, to the edge of the island. Martine hesitated:
should they turn and run, or would that make it worse?

Then the choice was taken from them.

Obsidian Lake responded. Around them, in a perfect circle, the waters of the mere rose like a rampart, shielding the Forest
from the fire, cutting off their escape. The waters began to move, to spin skyward, becoming a whirlpool with standing sides,
rising higher and higher until they were stranded between fire and water, both roaring, both rearing, enemies confronting
each other, implacable.

Zel stood immovable, eyes wide and fixed on the fire.

Martine looked where Zel looked, and saw him.

She had thought she was old enough to be invulnerable to the lure of the wild boys, the bad boys with full mouths and piercing
eyes. She had thought she was too old for the promise of unbridled sex, unconstrained, unashamed — that she would never give
anyone complete surrender, not even him.

But if he had looked at her as he was looking at Zel, she would have thrown herself into the fire without a second’s thought.

Zel took a step forward. He reached out a hand. He was everything puberty promised but never delivered: intensity, ecstasy,
freedom.

Zel took another step, her gaze never leaving his.

Martine was torn. Should she stop Zel? Did she have the right? Was it her choice, or Zel’s? Or his? In desperation, she found
her voice.

“We are daughters of the fire,” she said to him. “Will you destroy your daughter?”

He turned his head and stared at her. Then he smiled and she saw death through his eyes, as a glorious transfiguration into
flame.

She was transfixed, longing herself for that exaltation. The heat from the past two nights had come back as soon as he looked
at her, wilder, stronger, more insistent. The aching need for him felt as though it would split her in two. She took a step
toward him. But he didn’t want her. He looked back to Zel. The young one.

Too late. When he looked back Zel was no longer staring at him, but at the ground.

“Hazel?” the fire said, in a voice of rushing wind and crackling power and deep, deep longing. Martine was filled with envy,
wanting him, oh, wanting him to look at her like that, to say her name.

But Zel’s mouth was set like stone. “I have to look after Flax,” she said.

It was enough. He would never plead, never beg. He invited. Or he took. Martine grabbed Zel and began to pull her back, away,
toward the wall of water. Better drowned than burnt, as he would burn them now. The heat escalated suddenly, harsh on their
skin where it had been loving. He reached for them and the flames began to spread outward from the altar.

As though Zel’s rejection of him had given the waters strength, they began to grow higher, curving over at the top so that
the altar was almost enclosed in a dome of waves, an impossible inverted whirlpool. The air was sucked upward through the
small opening at the top, and Martine staggered as the wind whipped around them, blinded them, caught their breath away, dragged
them toward him. Waves from above crashed onto the island, plumes of water splashing down on the base of the altar, drenching
them. Every drop stung like acid but the fire was so strong that their clothes dried again almost instantly.

Martine forced herself to turn around, fighting the pull of the wind toward the center, the heat scorching on her back. She
and Zel clung to each other, crouching at the very edge of the water, Zel’s head in Martine’s arm, hiding her eyes against
him as though she didn’t trust her own resolution. She was trembling violently.

The flames were struggling, now. He could live without fuel, but not without air. Surely he would not let himself be extinguished?
Martine looked back at him.

As if in response to her thought, he stared straight at Martine and then the fire rose in a single great column, pure flame,
no sign of him left, and pierced through the narrow opening between the waves. Steam hissed. The water faltered and the spin
slowed, droplets falling and spitting on the altar. The column of fire left the altar, shooting straight up through the waves,
rising impossibly fast toward the night sky until it became another star, and was gone from sight.

For a moment the waves loomed over them and Martine wondered if the mere needed some acknowledgment, some recompense for the
trouble they had caused. But she was not minded to apologize to water.

“We are daughters of the fire,” she said clearly. “What was done was done with respect and reverence.”

The water slowed its spin, sinking gradually back toward the surface of the mere. Zel and Martine stayed where they were,
not too near the altar which still gave off a startling heat, as the waters became calm again.

Before she moved, Martine forced herself to wait for one moment more, though every instinct was shouting at her to run. She
took Zel’s hand and squeezed it.

“The fire . . .” she prompted, waiting for Zel to catch up with her. Zel’s eyes went wide but she cleared her throat with
some difficulty.

“The fire,” she said, and they completed it together, as it had to be said, “will never die.”

Martine felt a slight easing in the tightness around her heart, as though the fire had heard them and acknowledged their fealty.
The water paused in its movement, as though stopped in time. Martine went cold. Had they offended the mere? But the ritual
had to be safely ended, or the fire could return whenever he wanted. That was part of the bargain. Perhaps the mere knew that,
because after a heart-shattering pause it allowed the waters to continue settling.

When the water was once again clear and flat, reflecting the sky, they went back, holding hands, shaking, expecting Safred
and Cael to meet them full of questions and exclamations.

But the camp was quiet, Cael and Safred still asleep. Martine and Zel sat well away from the campfire, shoulder to shoulder,
still shaking.

“The ground was dry,” Zel said finally, as though grabbing onto something real.

“What?” Martine said. Her mind felt overloaded, like a mill race with too much water going through it. She couldn’t concentrate
on anything except her memory of him.

“On the island, the ground was dry. As though the waves hadn’t been there at all.
We’re
dry. My skin — the water felt like it burned… but there are no marks.” She paused, indicating Cael in his blanket and
Safred’s tent. “They didn’t hear anything. Did it — was it real?”

Her tone was wistful. That jolted Martine into paying attention.

“If you mean, would you have burnt to a crisp if you’d walked into the fire, yes, you would have,” she said tartly.

Zel bit her lip, tears rising in her eyes. “He’ll never forgive me,” she said.

“No. He never forgives.”

“I’ll never be able to do the ritual again.”

Martine nodded, thinking it through. “You’d be too much of a risk to the others with you.”

Zel looked down at the ground, her head hanging. “But we saw him,” she whispered.

Martine felt the triumph, the astonishment, and finally the exaltation he had promised them. She smiled slowly. “Yes. We saw
him. Remember,” she touched Zel’s shoulder, “it was you he wanted.”

Zel turned curious eyes to her. “You didn’t mind?”

How to answer that honestly? Martine felt again the agony of realizing it was Zel he was staring at. The envy. The despair.
The longing.

“I minded,” she said. “But now that he’s gone, I know he was right. Of the two of us, it should have been you. I have not
enough passion left for him.”

She believed the words as she spoke them, but as soon as they had left her mouth she knew them to be a lie. Every breath taken
in the memory of him told her that she was as made of passion as he was. She had forgotten it, but now her body remembered,
and she and Zel wept in each other’s arms because they were alive, and without him.

A
SH SAT IN
the dark stable for more than an hour, sliding the stones through his fingers, listening as they whispered their names: Love,
Chaos, Murder, Revenge, Child, Woman, Death, Evenness . . .

Each stone was different, and each fitted his fingers and his mind as if crafted especially for him. He knew that a stonecaster’s
stones and his soul became entwined, and he could feel it happening, slowly, feeling the stones become
his
; only his. The process was both terrifying and exhilarating; scary and deeply comforting. There was nothing else that was
his.
He began to understand why stonecasters all seemed to have an unshakeable air of calm around them. The center of their lives
was not touched by time or circumstance; their souls were as safe as stone.

Unlike Flax’s singing, the stones didn’t cut across his own mental music; rather, they seemed to harmonize with it, giving
it more depth and color. He longed to use them. Flax was sitting beside him, nursing the last of his ale. He had the gift
of happily doing nothing, which Ash had never mastered.