The Fall of Neskaya (68 page)

“Dead? You think I’m dead?” For the merest instant, Rumail looked startled rather than enraged. “I will show you what it is to die!”

He moved closer, hands raised with fingers spread as if to close around her throat. As he bore down on her, she felt his hot breath on her skin, smelled the rank odor of his sweat. She had not realized the dead could be so vivid.

He cannot harm me,
she repeated to herself, but with each passing instant, her words carried less and less credibility. Just as he was about to grasp her, she broke, whirled, and ran headlong in the opposite direction.

“Go on, little bitch! You cannot hide from me! And after I hunt you down, I will come for your precious son!”

Raucous laughter trailed her, escalating in pitch until it no longer sounded human.

Taniquel ran and ran, sometimes stumbling over her own feet, sometimes rushing so effortlessly that the only thing she was aware of was her own speed. She lost all sense of time passing. The immediate cause of her flight quickly disappeared from view and from mind. She ran, and that was all. Without visible landmarks, even variations of the flat gray sky and ground, one place looked the same as any other. Only the absence of her enemy marked any difference. He might be one mile behind her, or a hundred.

Her footsteps slowed as she realized that she had also lost sight of the crowd of shadowy figures. Regret slashed through her. She had disobeyed Amalie’s most important instruction and had lost what little bearing she had. Now, as she came to a halt, she looked around, seeing nothing but unchanging grayness in every direction. She was no closer to finding Coryn, and now her chances were even dimmer.

Yet . . . Amalie had said that distance didn’t matter in the Overworld. Only love did.

Taniquel held out the spectral handkerchief and pressed it between her breasts.

Coryn . . . Coryn, wherever you are, hear me! Answer me!
She could not tell if she had spoken the words aloud. They reverberated through her mind, through the core of her body.

No, that was not going to work. He could not answer, he could not come to her. Suddenly, she had an image of him, standing on the other side of a wall of blue flame. Words whispered through her mind, resonant with his voice.

Fire! I must find fire!
She tightened her grip on the handkerchief and put all her will into the thought. Eyes narrowed in concentration, she scanned the horizon for any trace of brightness. Though at first she saw nothing, she had the sense of flexing an unused muscle, of holding something between imaginary hands—something huge and dense—and drawing it toward her.

Out of the corner of her eyes, brightness glimmered. She turned, half-afraid that it would vanish once she faced it, but there it shone, a mote on the horizon like a fallen star. Every fiber urged her to run to it, but somehow she held firm. She could not cross this distance with her own feet. She had summoned the fire with her mind, with the
laran
she had been told she had so little of. And it was this talent she must use now to bring it even closer.

Once more, Taniquel imagined herself pulling on that heavy weight, drawing it to her. Again, she had the sensation of solidity, of inertial resistance. But as she pulled, it seemed to slide more smoothly as if, once uprooted, it had no fixed place. She wondered if she were actually moving the fire or somehow folding the space between.

Within minutes, the flickering grew larger and brighter. Her heart leaped when she made out a figure standing in its heart. For a moment of soaring hope, she forgot everything else. The sense of holding an invisible weight subsided. She had to close her eyes, concentrating, before it became quite solid again. When she opened them again, the fire appeared to be only a few paces away, as high as she could reach and twice as wide.

A man stood inside.

Taniquel crossed to the fire with outstretched hands. Her fingers brushed the outermost flames and she drew back, for although the fire gave off no heat from a distance, it burned as hot and fierce as any earthly blaze. She cried out, shoving her singed fingertips into her mouth like a child. Her eyes watered.

Within the flickering depths, the figure stirred. Somehow she knew that he had felt her pain, heard her cry. The flames thinned in places, becoming more transparent so that she saw Coryn standing there. His pale skin reflected the ghostly blue of the fire. At first, his eyes were white but as she watched, they darkened and she knew that he could see her.

“Taniquel . . .” His voice was no more than a papery whisper, yet it filled her with a rush of absurd joy. “. . . what are you doing here? Are you . . . have you . . . died, too?”

She wanted to shout, to dance, to hurl herself into the fire to be with him. “No, I am not dead. And neither are you. My body lies beside yours just outside of what is left of Neskaya Tower. I came to bring you back.” She added, “Amalie helped me.”

“You should not have come,” he said hollowly. “This is the land of the dead, or as close to it as any in the Overworld.”

“Amalie warned me I might encounter dead people, but that they could not harm me. She was right on both counts. And if I should not be here, neither should you.”

He shook his head, slowly, with an infuriating lassitude. When he spoke, she made out only isolated phrases. “I put myself here . . . brought the backlash where it could harm no one . . . anchored . . . sacrifice . . . my responsibility.”

“Coryn,” she said firmly, “you were very noble in what you did, but you serve no one by lingering here. Back—home,” she said, for want of a better word, “your body is on fire from within, and they cannot help without your active participation. I have not come all these miles and waited all these years and given up everything I thought I was—” her words came in a tumble between sobbing gasps, “—everything I had believed in, only to forsake you now.

“Beloved,” she said the word aloud for the first time, “we may not have much of a life together, but I will not give you up. I will stay here with you. I will find a way to join you in the fire if I must. But do not ask me to leave you. Loving you is who I am.”

“Oh, sweet gods.” He hung his head so that his hair, dark as clotted blood in the eerie light, fell across his face. “I do not deserve this love.”

“Coryn, come to me. Through this fire, come to me.”

“I cannot. The fire—I am what binds it here, where it can do no harm. I cannot let it go, or allow it back into the material world.”

This is the Overworld,
she thought.
Towers appear out of thought, space folds on itself at a command. Dead people go rushing about their own business. Anything can happen. Distance doesn’t matter, only love.

“Then let go of whatever you must,” she said. “Just so the rest of you comes back with me.”

“It is my
laran
that holds the fire.”

She wanted to stamp her foot and scream that she didn’t care about his
laran
. She had been judged by hers, found wanting, and valued at no more than what bloodlines and alliance she could bring. His love had given her value in her own right.

“Then leave it,” she said. “I care as much for it as you do for my kingdom.”

For a long moment, he hesitated. Perhaps he was weighing her words, trying to decide if she meant it. His doubts shivered over her skin. For a
laranzu
of his rank, such a choice must be agonizing. Who would he be without his Gift? Where would he go? What would he do?

No, as the moments passed, she realized it was more than that. It was choosing to live blind and deaf, or in a world without taste or color. There was no way she could make it up to him, no matter how much she loved him. She had not thought any of this through. Perhaps she had wronged both of them in asking.

But she had asked, with her heart rather than her reason. It was all she had to give him.

The flames parted, and he stepped through, a man of fire and flesh. The fire died, leaving only a pale man collapsing in her arms.

T
aniquel stayed in Neskaya for the rest of the season, a guest along with Coryn in one of the richer houses, until falling night temperatures threatened an early winter. As it was, she stayed longer than she should. Word had come that Acosta’s occupiers surrendered after only a brief siege. She was needed there. Julian was still in her uncle’s castle, safe but growing into a sturdy boy without her. Their separation ached like a wound in her heart. Sometimes in the middle of the night, she would look out toward Thendara and feel as if she were being torn in three different directions at once. Then she would look down at Coryn, sleeping, the few remaining patches of blue fire casting a pale illumination across his features, and know that she would not for all the world have chosen differently.

Coryn would not be able to travel for some time. After he had tumbled into her arms in the Overworld, she awoke beside his physical body to find him regaining consciousness. For many tendays after that, he drifted in and out of sleep. Each time he awoke, Demiana and the others were able to reduce the luminous patches further and strengthen his ravaged energy channels. Often it took all his stamina to eat, meditate, and take the small amount of exercise allowed him. Demiana had absolutely forbidden him to leave Neskaya until the fiery patches had disappeared. Now Taniquel had to accept that would not be until the spring thaws, but she could not wait that long.

As Taniquel prepared for the journey to Acosta, sitting with Coryn in the chamber they shared and going over the lists of supplies while he dozed, a commotion from below drew her attention. Exclamations from their host’s adolescent daughter blended with men’s voices, indistinct but recognizable as belonging to her Acosta guards. Taniquel got to her feet, the papers sliding off her lap. Coryn’s eyes opened.

“It’s all right, beloved. I’ll see to it,” she said, then paused as she noticed his smile. He did not smile very often, the lines etched deep crevasses into the landscape of his face. She had been afraid it was news from Tramontana, where the devastation had been even worse. Several of his closest friends, including a man named Aran, had been badly hurt in body and mind. It was the nature of the
laran
injuries that sometimes improvement was followed by an abrupt turn for the worse.

“No,” he said. “Let her come.”

Footsteps clattered down the corridor, heavy boots and a lighter tread, then a knock sounded. Taniquel drew herself up and lifted the door latch. Outside stood Esteban’s nephew and another Acosta man, little Raquella, and a woman with startling green eyes and straw-pale hair, disheveled as if she’d just come from a long and windy journey. She wore a half-length cloak over a jacket and a skirt split for riding, all of thick soft
chervine
wool, dyed dark blue and edged with snowflake embroidery, the sort of warm, beautiful clothing Taniquel would have chosen for travel at this season.

“Excuse me,
vai domna
,” the woman said without the slightest trace of deference, and slipped through the door. Only the hem of her cloak brushed against Taniquel. Her unselfconscious poise reminded Taniquel of Lady Caitlin.

The next instant, Taniquel recovered herself. Who did this woman think she was,
comynara
or commoner, to enter here without leave? She glared at Esteban’s nephew and drew breath to command the woman’s removal.

But the green-eyed woman had rushed to Coryn’s side and taken him in her arms. Over her shoulder, Taniquel glimpsed his face, eyes closed in an expression of uncomplicated joy. He hugged her with equal fervor, rocking gently. She murmured something Taniquel did not catch.

Regaining her composure, Taniquel dismissed the guards and closed the door on the host’s inquisitive daughter. In a matter of minutes, the story would be through half of Neskaya and all the old busybodies of both sexes would want to know who this stranger was. A sister, perhaps? She frowned, for none of them that he’d mentioned fit this description. Especially not the one who had gone off with her uncle’s men to join the Sisterhood of the Sword.

“I never thought—” Coryn murmured.

“Of course, I had to come,” the woman said, then drew back, regarding him with a practical and unabashedly fond expression. “Even at Linn, we heard what happened.” Her eyes flickered to Taniquel’s flushed cheeks. “You should introduce us, you know.”

“I’m sorry. Tani, may I present Liane,
leronis
of Tramontana Tower, once my enemy and now my oldest friend.”

Taniquel felt giddy with relief. She inclined her head. She barely heard Coryn’s next words, only the gentleness in his voice as he called her
my beloved
. Liane gave her a smile so radiant and without jealousy that Taniquel immediately began to like her.