Wind Over Bone: The Estralony Cycle #2 (Young Adult Fantasy Romance) (27 page)

Twenty-Five

It was three years since Rischa had chopped down the juniper tree.

The Ravinya had a healthy baby boy. Sarid, also, had stopped taking her pennyroyal tea, and the result was asleep in a cradle upstairs. She sometimes wondered if she oughtn’t to have made another like herself, but mostly she was content.

They ran a spare household. Just themselves and the dogs and four servants––two of which were Dreida and Yoffin––living half a day’s ride north of Charevost, in a house given them by Mari.

Occasionally she and Savvel went to her father, because Sarid knew he was lonely. But Aleksei never came to them; Sarid didn’t allow it. If they wanted visitors, they sought them out.

The Pashes had been reinstated at Charevost, but they no longer lived there, except for Mari, who was acting as steward and set to inherit. Rischa and Leva stayed in the south.

Sarid heard no word of her sister from person or saebel, and the silence made her uneasy. Sometimes Savvel would ride south from Charevost to visit his brother, but Sarid never went farther south than Ningrav––she felt there was a line she should stand sentry over and not cross.

Rischa must have grown irritated by this. The autumn after Sarid’s boy was born, she received a letter requesting her presence at court, with or without Savvel. She hadn’t spoken with Rischa for a very long time. She wondered what he could want.

“A mistress?” said Savvel at breakfast, pulverizing the seal beneath his glass of milk.

“
If he hasn’t forsworn mistresses I’ll consider him a hopeless rake forever,” said Sarid.

Savvel rode with her to Charevost, where they fought, and Sarid finally terminated the argument by turning to a wind and leaving him behind.

***

She knew in her mind where he was: a place of red stone with long lines and towering buttresses. A swift river ran at its base.

Everything was bloody in the sunset. He stood looking over a balustrade at the red water. A man, not so horribly skinny now, hair darker than she remembered. His shadow fell behind him, unnaturally black.

A cloud of dust blew over the river. “Rischa,” she said. He looked up.

Irritation hadn’t written the letter. “You’ve a saebeline grandfather,” he said. His shadow was so black she wondered if he could feel it. “Unseelie. Pure malice.”

She leaned over the railing. “You’ve a son.”

“Pure malice.”

“
Takes after his mother?”

“
Leva’s a gem.”

Indeed, thought Sarid, nobody cuts sharper.

“Well, actually––” He twiddled a finger in a hole in the stone. “Maybe some. But his uncle, especially.”

“
Pity,” said Sarid. “Have they met?”

“
Yes. They argued the whole time.”

“
What’s troubling you?”

He leaned so far over the railing she thought he might fall in. “For the past three years I’ve been wrestling with this.” He turned around and said quickly, “I don’t know how to thank you. You poisoned me, almost drowned me, drove my brother mad, and I don’t know how to thank you. If there’s anything you want––Charevost, or anywhere else––”

“I have what I want,” said Sarid. “There’s something else troubling you.”

Again he looked over the water. “I’m still a little bit in love with you.”

She didn’t blink. “What else?”

“
I worry sometimes about Leva. I wish she were more of a coward.” He pressed his thumb to one eye and his fingers to the other. “And my son.” He rested his elbows on the stone and buried his face in his hands.

“
I hated poisoning you,” she said. “You’re the most good natured, generous person I’ve ever met.” His shadow was growing bigger––she imagined that it clung to her, too. “And I’m going to do something for you.”

She pushed her thumb into the crumbling stone, cut it. Blood beaded on the cut.

The drop swung out in the wind and fell into the river. She took his hands and didn’t think words at all, just pictures:
When everyone you love is gone, and you’re tired and sad, go to the river.

She kissed him on the cheek, caught the wind, and blew away.

***

She went to her father. That was the mistake. She sat still, for days it seemed, and allowed him to twine hawthorn and elder branches around her ankles and wrists, to dispel the sadness she’d caught from Rischa.

“Have you seen Thayelste?” she asked Aleksei, and winced when a thorn stuck her wrist. “Have you seen your other daughter?”

“
Funny you should ask,” he said, tucking in the end of a branch. “She’s the one prepared this hawthorn and elder for you.”

A gong sounded through Sarid’s head. “Oh, Father.” She scraped off the whips, scratching red lines into her skin. “Father, why didn’t you tell me?”

“You seem not to like each other anymore.”

Her heart hammered so loud the whole world must have heard it, and the old vision came on the wind like a sick smell: The iron swing twisting from the oak. Leva, her hand on a little blond head. The toy horse. The shell-white feet, and the red hands.

Sarid landed on her feet in Ningrav, and could barely hold herself together enough to stumble into the posting station.

“
What’s happened?” she demanded. It was midday, and the scribes and mail sorters stared at her. “What’s happened? What’s happened to Leva?” No one said a word, and she fisted her hands to keep them from melting away. “Will no one tell me?”

“
Gone,” said a man. “Ayevur rest her soul.”

“
When?”

“
The news was five days ago.”

She’d been gone five days?
Sarid’s hand crept to her waist and loosened the ribbons there. “How?”

“
Beasts.”

“
Beasts?”

“
That’s what they’re saying.”

“
And her son?”

The man coughed; it sounded like
beasts
.

“
You know it wasn’t beasts.” Her voice went louder, and paper blew around the room. “You’re all idiots. Beasts? Leva killed by beasts?” She pulled a bit of paper from the air and scribbled on it what she knew instinctively:

The boy’s alive––C. H.

A courier sat in the corner. She walked over to him and slammed three gold pieces on the table. “To the Ravyir.” He pushed his meal away and ran out the door with the letter in his pocket.

She watched his horse gallop down the street. Then she sat in the doorway, and put her head in her hands, and moaned like all the nightmares in the world had poured into her. “Oh, Rischa,” she said, rocking back and forth. She longed for her black-eyed baby to hold in her arms.

***

She blew open the front doors of Charevost. Mari had gone south.

She called for the new Chamberlain. The lady came huffing downstairs, fat and flustered. “Is Savvel still here?” Sarid said.

“
Yes, my lady,” said the Chamberlain. “Locked in.”

“
Why?”

“
Will you come and see him?”

“
Yes.”

The Chamberlain called to three servants. The five of them went to the tower and stopped outside the door.

“
He won’t drink,” said a maid.

“
He said he’ll only eat the head of a fox,” said another.

“
Did you give him one?” said Sarid.

“
Yes. He said it wasn’t the right fox.”

Sarid took the key from the Chamberlain, unlocked the door. “Careful, my lady,” said one of the girls. “He’s turned wolfish.”

Sarid went inside and shut the door. Her heart went sick. Savvel was sitting against the wall next to a foul-smelling bucket. His shirt hung on his gaunt body like a cobweb.

“
Savvel,” she whispered. He was muttering something over and over. She walked closer.

“
Heart, liver, and lungs,” he said. “Heart, liver, and lungs.”

He looked up. He scraped her face with his nails, just missing her eyes. Then he grabbed hold of her and she could taste and smell his hunger, his animal reek. He bit her on the shoulder.

She remembered Oluindre’s enchantment, and she thought the words in her head and turned him to a sparhawk.

One filthy wing was spread out. His breast hummed, his yellow eyes dilated and rolled.

“What am I going to do?” she asked him. As if to say,
nothing
, his talons curled and his eyes filmed over, and he stopped moving. She put a finger on his breast, felt the faint thrum of his heart.

She picked him up and opened the door. “I’ve turned him into a hawk,” she said to the Chamberlain and maids. They stared at her, not comprehending.

A girl looked over Sarid’s shoulder and said, “Where did he go?”

Sarid walked past them and carried Savvel down to the kitchens, where she plied him with rags soaked in milk and broth. He didn’t respond, would take nothing.

Finally she brought him outside, laid him in the grass, and glared at him. He looked insolent, vulgar as a dirty rag. She knew where he’d gone.

“
I’m taking you into the mountains,” she said to him.

Then she collapsed onto her knees and took great, gasping breaths. She slammed fists into the ground and sobbed, because it was so unfair––she had gone through so much, suffered so much, because of this stupid, almost-dead bird.

***

She climbed up the Eyonav with the bird in her arms just as the last sunlight split through the trees.

The platform with its sleepers glowed amber, and she laid the sparhawk over the worn, cracked stone, alongside the stone girl with the chipped nose. She changed him back to a man. His black eyes stared blankly, and she closed them. His legs and arms were folded in, and she straightened them.

“
You’ll come to yourself,” she said, “and turn back, and I’ll wait for you. I can wait for a very long time because I’m saebeline.”

But he wouldn’t turn back. The sun moved up his legs. Dust and needles blew across the stone.

“You’ll keep going.” She twisted her hands and rubbed her arms. “Looking for the other side.  Of reality. Whatever that is. A thousand years’ll pass, and there’ll be nothing of you left, just some dust.” She thought of her baby at home and put hands on her stomach: he’d been there just a year before. Needles blew into her eyes and mouth, stuck to her wet cheeks.

The sun moved up Savvel’s chest, drawing behind it a blanket of shade.

She kissed him on his cracked lips.

The shade crept forward inexorably. She couldn’t stand it––she turned away. A great pit seemed to open before her, to swallow the black firs and wind and purple clouds. She turned back and climbed onto the platform. She heaved him over on his side, to face her.

The cold stone burned through her dress. She held his  hands, and thought of her baby, her poor baby. She pressed against him––he was like a stone––and the sun blazed around them briefly, and then the night took them.

***

The trees were bare, and the ground was freezing. The wind blew hard. She held her hair back and looked ahead into the trees.

She began to run. Her breath caught painfully in her chest. She ran until her feet were ragged and bloody and warm, until he stopped and looked behind him.

She took his hand. Then they were gone, like a star winking out in the dead of night.

And on the mountain the wind lashed the stones and drove the leaves back, and in time the two became a faceless one.

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