Blood Seed: Coin of Rulve Book One (17 page)

“No,” he said. “It’s just another lie.” He pushed back from the table so abruptly that some of his soup slopped out of the bowl.

“Everything I told you is the truth.”

“As you told the truth about a holding in the north, and some uncle, and now this brother? How many relatives is this now? How many fathers? Are there any more waiting at the door?” He leaped to his feet and stood face to face with her. “Keep your toltyr and keep your stories. I want none of them.” He turned to get out of the house, into the sun and air, but she grabbed his arm.

“What you want is of no concern here. You can’t run away from this. Look at me, and don’t be such a damned coward.” 

He stared into eyes of iron. He did not know her, did not know her past or her strength or what she had endured. He did not know her, but she wasn’t lying to him. She never had and wasn’t now.

Riah let go of him and held up the pendant. “This is a sign of your calling. This belongs to you because you are niyalahn-rista.” 

He’d never heard that word, yet it crawled up his back like a cold-footed mouse. He saw she had more to say and sank down onto the bench. An incipient dread filled him, a desire to block out her words, so her lips would move, but he would hear nothing. 

She paced, speaking like some dispassionate scholar. “‘Niyalahn-rista’ is a Widjar word in the ancient language of the escritors. It is used to describe something exceedingly rare in Shunder: fraternal twins. These are children born of the same womb, but because they are free of the morue taint, they do not look alike. ‘Niyalahn’ is the word for identical twins, which morue has made common among us. These children endure much anguish, for they are cruelly separated at a young age. One of the twins stays with its family, and that one is the niyal.” Her eyes clouded. “But the other is taken by the lord, into a life of slavery. That one is the ahn.”

A log shifted in the fire. It sounded loud in the silence. He didn’t want to know any more, yet heard his voice far off. “And what about the rest of the word? The rista part.”

“A rista is a first-born single child. Such children are free from the morue that runs in the blood of almost all in Shunder. Sometimes ristas possess special powers, and these children also are taken to serve the lord.” 

She looked down at him. “But the niyalahn-ristas are all these things, and bear all this pain. They are called by Rulve, to redeem. The Creator placed seeds of power inside you and your brother, and marked you as her own. This Toltyr Arulve was made, in hope, for you.” Once again she extended the pendant to him.

It reminded him of a coin, of how Miramakamen had placed three coins in his hand.
“You will be wounded—by a child, by your brother, and by the dark.”
 

No. He had a choice. Just as in Miramakamen’s tent, he could choose. “Prophecies and pendants have nothing to do with me.” He pushed it away. “Give it to my brother.”

The iron gaze never faltered. “Your brother is dead. Shunder’s redemption lies in you alone.”

A cold feeling swept through him. In a sudden vision, he was back at the Rites, the knife opening his arm, but what emerged was a mass of tiny black root hairs. Tightly packed, they slowly mounded out. The vision rose like bile in his throat. “I can bring no redemption,” he cried, “only damnation! There are things about me you don’t know.” 

Her eyes never left his face, and she sat down next to him on the bench. “You are the niyalahn-rista. Of that there is no doubt. With this title comes both pain and power, for that is how you were born. The pain has only begun. It made you cry as an infant, because the bond between you and your brother was strained. It continues, because you are not accepted here. The power may bloom only under the Seani’s care. At one time,”—she looked briefly away, anguish creasing her face—“we believed it would flash forth in reunion with your brother. That will not happen now. But power you do have, recognized or not, claimed or not. Whether you use it for good or for evil is to be discovered, for your will is free.” 

The Rite-wound was burning, worse than before, burning through layers of guilt and shame. Again, as he had over and over the last two days, he had to reach into the center of his being and freeze everything he was. He tensed with the effort, dizzy from the icy constriction that would, once more, quench the flow of blood.

“There is something in me, but it isn’t power. It’s a curse. I’ve hidden it from you. From everyone. Since childhood.” He took a breath, then forced out the words. “Any—any drop of my blood that touches the ground draws evil out of the Riftwood.” 

For several heartbeats she said nothing. “What evil?” she asked at last. 

“The mist. Beetles. Nothing of Rulve’s.”

She pondered this for a moment. “All things are Rulve’s.”

His throat was stretched so tight he could hardly speak. “Not the Groper.”

She stared at him. “As you were growing up, I watched you, very carefully. I saw nothing.” 

“But it happened! Three times. Once when I was six and bled under the star-nut tree. That night, I went outside, and the Groper came to the spot. Then there was an accident at the harvest, just this Redstar, and the next morning the place where my blood fell had been eaten to the ground by night-beetles.” He took a shuddering breath. “And then at the Rites. Even worse.”

She shifted her gaze to the hearth. “Night-beetles are scavengers, S’eft.” 

“But that’s not all! I can stop any bleeding, with ice from my spirikai. I’m doing it now.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “But I didn’t do it good enough in Redstar, or at the Rites, and two people in the village died.” 

She glanced sharply at him. “You mean those deaths the council investigated? You had nothing to do with them.”

“Oh God. I think Wask was looking for me, and found them.”

Riah studied his face for a moment, then turned back to the fire. “After I left the Seani,” she said, “I was alone, with no one to guide me. I struggled against despair and emptiness, and these settle often upon my shoulders. I watched you growing up and told myself I saw Neal in you. Another part doubted and searched for the dark in you.” Her eyes met his, cool and level. “And if I had found it, I would have rid the earth of you.” 

A chill went through him and then a shaft of pain. His death would have been justice, and it would have been mercy.

“But now I know the dark cannot be separated from the light. It’s all grey, S’eft. More and more, it’s all grey. I wasn’t always a good mother to you. I carried many burdens. But that cannot be undone. What I am, what you are—these things lie in the hands of Rulve.”

“Two men died, and I’m responsible!”

“If you believe that, you will atone. Soon you will have to leave everything, S’eft. You will have to travel through the Riftwood and into Shunder. It is your part to follow Rulve’s call, bearing what you must. In turn, it is said that Rulve brings salvation to all things, through all things—no matter how terrible they may seem to us.”

He couldn’t answer her, couldn’t speak.

“I could have prevented your births,” she went on, “but children are rare in the Seani, and always a source of hope. We decided to trust that Rulve is present in all events and can redeem all things, even the most destructive. And we were right. For born to us were the niyalahn-ristas.” 

Her face swam before him, and he realized there were tears in his eyes. “There’s an end to hope,” he choked out, “and a limit to redemption.” 

“Perhaps for us humans. But not for Rulve, who is completely free, even of gender. You are as she made you, and you never intended to hurt anyone. That must not be scorned. Will you take Rulve’s pendant?”

Finely-wrought, it lay there in her hand—too holy, too clean for his pollution. It came with a title too high, a responsibility too deep, and the gap between what lived in his veins and Rulve’s call was far too wide. He pushed her hand away.

Her gaze hardened. She placed the cord over her neck and hid the toltyr under her shirt. “Accepting who you are takes courage and humility, S’eft. You have neither. I will bear this burden for you, until you are man enough to relieve me of it.”

Simmering with resentment, Sheft left the house and returned to his work in the hayfield. Riah’s demands stood in his mind as hard and hostile as a stone wall. He who’d been despised most of his life was now expected, easily and unquestioningly, to believe he was some kind of redeemer. He was supposed to wear a pendant that completely negated everything he was and march into an ancient forest riddled with danger. And if he didn’t do all that, he’d earn his mother’s scorn. He raked angrily at the hay. Riah had sounded just like that charlatan at the fair.

By the time his work was done, it was too late to walk over the fields and face Mariat. It was just as well. He’d need most of the night to piece together what he would say. 

Early the next morning, just as he was about to trudge out to Mariat’s house, Tarn informed him that, because he was feeling much better, they must go out and replenish their store of coal for the winter. Tarn’s grandfather had discovered a seam of it out in the deadlands, and since the coal came at no cost except the heavy one of digging it out and hauling it home, he had kept his valuable discovery a family secret.

Sheft retreated into the loft and wound a bandage around his arm, but after a short time in the coal-field, he found that swinging the pick-ax threatened to re-open the cut, which resulted in a constant, exhausting demand for ice. 

“What in Ele’s name is wrong with you?” Tarn cried as the pick-ax slipped for the second time from Sheft’s grasp. “Load all this loose coal in the wagon, and then work over there, lest you skewer me!”

The next morning Riah made them breakfast, but said she felt tired and achy. When they returned from another exhausting day in the coalfield, they found a cold house and no supper. Riah lay in the dark bedroom, hollow-eyed and coughing. She was shivering under her blanket, so Sheft put on another. As Tarn heated up the remains of yesterday’s dinner, Sheft tried to follow his mother’s directions to make a medicine, but ice-reaction kept driving the ingredients out of his head. Ashamed, he had to ask again and again. The coal fire was burning brightly when he crawled up the ladder to the loft, but he felt none of its warmth, only ice.

The next morning his swollen forearm pulsed against the now tight bandage, and the loft seemed to tilt as he made his way under the low roof to the ladder. When he reached the bottom, the planked floor spun slowly under his feet. It was, he realized, very late, and Tarn was nowhere to be seen. 

Riah was taken by a bad coughing fit, and he rushed to her side. Her face was flushed, etched with long grooves on either side of her mouth. He helped her sit up, and her shoulders were thin and hot. When the worst of her coughing seemed to be over, he eased her back onto the pillow. She didn’t look at him, but her hand fumbled for the braided cord around her neck. He turned away and left the room.

Intending to make tea for her, he filled a pot with water from the crock and swung the cook-arm over the flame. It was so cold under the ice that he took his sheepskin jacket down from its hook and eased into it. He sagged onto the clothes chest against the back wall, next to the bedroom, where he could both watch the pot and hear if his mother needed anything.

#   #   #

When Tarn ushered Mariat into his house, she immediately rescued a pot that had almost boiled dry and then spied Sheft sitting on the clothes chest. Even though it was warm enough inside, he wore his heavy jacket and cradled his left arm as if it were broken. She was shocked to see lines of pain around his eyes. It seemed to take a moment for him to recognize her, but when he did, his face lit up.

Her heart leaped across the room in response. But, as if he remembered some troubling dream, the light in his silver eyes faded and he looked away.

Mariat put her basket full of jars and vials on the table, removed her cloak, and addressed Tarn. “I thought you said it was Riah who was ill.”

“She is. Come this way.” He guided her past Sheft and into the bedroom. Riah was coughing from deep in her chest, and Mariat didn’t like the sound of it, nor the flush on her face. She felt Riah’s forehead, put her ear close to her chest, but a part of her was outside the door with Sheft.

“Father came down with something like this soon after Mama’s burial,” she told Tarn, “but he recovered fairly quickly.” She turned to him and lowered her voice. “We’ll have to watch Riah, though. My aunt said foreigners sometimes fare worse with certain illnesses than local people do.”

When she came out to get her medicines, Sheft was gathering himself to stand. “I have to talk to you, Mariat.” His silver eyes looked bleak, and his voice sounded frayed.

“In a moment,” she whispered to him. “You don’t look so good either.” She pressed him firmly back onto the clothes chest. “Now let me attend to Riah.” 

At that, he didn’t argue, and sank down. 

#   #   #

Through a haze of ice-reaction, he watched Mariat come and go. She made broth, prepared a potion, and disappeared into the bedroom with it. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew Mariat was sitting with Tarn at the table.

“Just do as I’ve told you,” she was saying to him, “and make sure she gets her medicine. For the next few days I’ll be in Ferce with Etane and Father, to stay with Leeza’s family. If you need help before I get back, fetch Blinor’s wife from the village.”

She turned toward Sheft, and under the warmth in her eyes he melted. “Are you sick too?” she asked gently.

His blood lured the dark and was packed with roots. He had refused to lift a heavy burden from around his ailing mother’s neck and two deaths lay at his door. Yes he was sick.

“It’s that arm,” Tarn answered her, “still, after all this time! The cut is nothing, barely this long, but he’s worse than useless with it. You should take a look at it if he is ever going to get any work done. Come here, Sheft, into the light.”

He longed to go to her and be healed. But he should not, he knew he should not. He had decided to leave her. He couldn’t allow her to touch him again.

“What in Ele’s name is wrong with you?” Tarn demanded. “Get this taken care of and be done with it.” 

After the Rites, he had hidden the wound from her, hidden everything. How could he let Mariat see what he himself did not want to look at? But he needed to be near her, just this one last time. He got to his feet, his arm falling heavily to his side, and sat down at the table across from them. Mariat helped him pull off his jacket and roll up his sleeve, and then her warm, sure fingers unwound the bandage.

He steeled himself for her reaction. She must know it was a Rite-wound.

She took a deep breath, but her hands on him did not draw back. “Not good,” she muttered.

“What can you do about it?” Tarn asked.

She met Tarn’s eyes—with an expression that seemed to say exactly what she’d like to do about the Rites—and then went back to her examination. “It’s a fairly deep cut. But didn’t seem to bleed much. Strange. That’s probably why it got infected. Bleeding actually cleanses a wound, you know.” She raised her beautiful eyes to his. “This needs to be washed out, Sheft, and then stitched.”

The cut did not repel her. She saw it as something she could repair.

Mariat laid out a cloth and a basin and came to sit at his side. “With all this swelling, I’m afraid this is going to hurt. Tarn, please pour a little of that wine I brought.”

Tarn did so and pushed a small cup across the table. Sheft was about to refuse it, because the glow of wine interfered with ice, but Mariat took the cup and downed it.

“Just to steady my nerves,” she explained.

That made him smile. She was always surprising him. How much he loved her. 

Mariat placed his arm over the basin and trickled a clear liquid—eferven, she said it was—onto the cut. It fizzed, then burned. “Ouch,” she said for him, but kept on cleaning the wound. She patted it dry with the cloth, then rummaged in the basket to find a needle and black thread. The needle she passed through the lamp flame, and the thread she coated with the green, moldy-smelling salve called burvena. “Now. Just rest your arm here and look out the window or something, and I apologize in advance, all right?”

“All right.” Obediently, he looked away.

Muttering something about Padiky, Tarn left the house.

Sheft soon found that he needed the ice again and had to dredge up yet more. Mariat must not see a single drop. The needle pricked in and out of the throbbing already present and caused him to stiffen, but she only murmured “Sorry,” and went on.

At last she was finished and slathered on more of the burvena salve. Sheft glanced at a neat line of stitches on his arm. He slumped in relief, not because the pain was gone, for indeed it seemed worse, but now he could finally withdraw the ice and clear his head. He was stitched together, spared for now the threat of emerging roots, and nothing would spill out of him to cry out from the ground. “Thank you, Mariat,” he breathed. “Thank you.”

“Glad to be of service,” she said, and smiled into his eyes.

Her gaze held him and he could not look away. He wanted to reach out to her, touch her cheek, her hair. But he did not.

As if she knew what he longed to do, Mariat picked up his good hand and held it.

Only a thin layer of skin lay between her fingers and his root-filled veins, between her warmth and the numbing ice. He knew he must pull away, but couldn’t do it. He ached to put both arms around her tightly and stay like that, but he couldn’t do that either. All he could manage was to look at her without hope.

Her smile faded, replaced with a kind of puzzled tenderness. “You said earlier you wanted to talk to me. What is it, my dear?”

The beautiful word she called him twisted into his heart, and would lodge there forever.

He didn’t know how to begin. Tarn might reappear at any time and there was no way he could tell her in only a few minutes about the terrible accusations that had emerged, and the deaths, and his shadowed parentage. In spite of himself, his right hand clung tightly to hers, but his left arm, stitched against roots, he kept under the table. She waited for an answer, and it occurred to him that he could at least tell her part of the truth, a part that might be enough. “Mariat, it’s much worse than what you heard after the fire. Now the villagers are saying that—that I molested a child. A little boy, at the market-fair.” He felt as ashamed of saying it as if he had in truth done it, and could hardly meet her gaze.

She took his hand in both of hers and her eyes filled with hurt for him. “I know, Sheft. Etane heard all kinds of rumors in the village and tried to keep them from me, but I heard him tell Father. At the fair you didn’t notice me looking, but I saw you with that little boy. He wanted to learn carving, and you were gentle with him and patient. You never tried to hurt anyone.”

“But that’s not the point, Mariat. An entire faction in the village believes it.” Nor was that all they believed, nor all that was wrong with him, but he couldn’t get into that now. “I—have to go away. Right after your brother’s wedding in Herb-Bearer.”

“Go away! Why?”

“There’s trouble on the council over me. If I don’t leave, it will only get worse. For everyone.”

She was silent for a moment, still holding his hand. “But you said ‘I’, that ‘I’ must go. Where is the ‘we’ in this?”

For her sake, there should have never been a “we.” He spoke as gently as he could. “I have to go alone.”

She took her hands away, and left his empty. “I think I understand. We’ve spoken of this before, on the way home from the market-fair. You said you had nothing to offer me, that any man in the village could give me a better life.”

He nodded miserably.

“But what if I don’t want this so-called ‘better life’? What if I don’t want a life without you?

Sheft, I love you and want to go where you go. No matter where, and gladly.”

She had no idea about what he was, yet looked at him in utter simplicity and handed him her whole life. She tore his heart in two.

“Mariat, you don’t under—”

Tarn came through the door. “Padiky has lost a shoe. If I’m to get you home, Mariat, and then take her to the smith’s and be back before dark, we must go immediately.” He held up her cloak.

“I’ll take her home and go on to Rom’s,” Sheft said. He jumped to his feet, but the room spun around him and he had to grab the edge of the table for support.

Two “no’s” rang out. One was Mariat’s, out of concern for him, and the other was Tarn’s. “I told you to stay out of the village,” he growled, and left the house.

Behind him, Sheft heard his mother coughing again. 

“Give her more of this now.” Mariat handed him Riah’s medicine, then the small jar of green salve. “Put this on your cut in the morning and at night. After I get back from Ferce, I’ll come to check on Riah and also take out those stitches. We’ll talk then.” She gave Sheft a swift kiss on the cheek and went out the door. The light left with her.

He had told her parts of the truth, which amounted to a monstrous lie, and now he’d have to begin all over again. 

Sick at heart, he gave his mother the medicine, then offered a cup of broth which she barely tasted. Mariat had left a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese, which was their dinner when Tarn returned. Soon after, Tarn climbed up to the loft, saying Riah’s coughing kept him awake and he needed a good night’s sleep.