Between Worlds: the Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories (10 page)

Ilias jerked his head away, taking a sharp breath. Numb,
he pushed to his feet. He tried not to look at the growing pools of shadow
under the rocky crags, not wanting to see more small shades looking back at
him.

He stood for a long moment, shivering. The forest was
dark, the sharp contrast between the sunlight still lingering on the top of the
hill and the shadows under the heavy green branches making it look like another
world. Then he started to walk.

The ground was softer, but in the deep green twilight he
couldn’t see more than a few paces ahead or behind. Ilias had been out in the
meadows near home in the dark, and on the beach and in the orchards, but never
in the forest, not alone. He hesitated, but the path his father had used was
impossible to see. He started downhill, knowing the road had to be down there
somewhere.

Nobody talked about it, but everybody knew people took
unwanted babies to a place out in the hills to die. Ilias knew this had to be
the place. He paused, one hand on the rough bark of a tree, his bare feet
balanced on its thick roots. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he muttered, the
unwanted tears stinging his eyes again. His family wasn’t that poor, that they
couldn’t afford to feed him. And he wasn’t a baby. He helped with the herding
and the feeding and watering. He helped take care of Taelis. When he was older,
somebody like Amari would want to buy him for a marriage. And his father had
taught him to shear sheep yesterday.

I forgot to sweep out the shed.
But he had done it before he went to bed, surely they
would have seen it this morning. He gritted his teeth, remembering Castor
kicking him out of bed last night, saying he didn’t sleep there anymore.
He
knew.
Amari and the other girls hadn’t known, except for Niale, but Castor
had. He knew now that Castor hadn’t been lying when he had said Niale had taken
Ilias’ blanket. It was part of making it look like he had never existed.

Maybe Ilias hadn’t done as well at the sheep-shearing
as he had thought. Maybe it had been some kind of test that he had failed
without knowing it. But he didn’t see how that was possible. He had done well
for his size, as good as Castor who was bigger and older. It must have been
something else. He pushed off from the tree, wincing as he stepped on a
splintered branch.

He walked a long time, long after the night deepened
and he could only glimpse patches of moonlight through the branches, until the
whole world was darkness and rustling leaves and there had never been anything
else. His legs ached and his feet hurt from stumbling on pine cones and hidden
rocks. Everything he had ever been punished for as far back as he could
remember came back to him in painful detail, but none of it seemed bad enough
for this. Maybe they just wanted to scare him.

He barely recognized the stream when he heard it, didn’t
realize it was there until he tripped on a root and fell on the muddy bank. He
crawled down to it, put both hands in the icy cold water and drank.

The water set heavily in his stomach when he pushed
himself up and wiped his mouth. He was shaking with weariness but he didn’t
want to sleep here.
If I die here no one will find my body and do the rites.
He didn’t want to be a shade and he didn’t know how long it would take him to
die. He struggled to his feet, waded across the cold stream, and kept walking.

Some long time later he blinked, startled to find
himself lying on cold hard-packed dirt. He pushed himself up, yawning. It was
still night, but a little more moonlight fell through the leafy branches above,
enough to see he had found the road. He must have just collapsed on it and
fallen asleep.
I guess I wasn’t dying,
he thought in relief. He rubbed
his gritty eyes. His stomach felt completely hollow, like the inside of a
drinking gourd, sloshing with the water he had drunk. He didn’t feel like he
was dying, except maybe in his feet. Maybe the only reason he had thought he
was dying at all was that children left out in the hill place always died.

He managed to stand, stumbling and wincing. The dirt
wasn’t much easier to walk on and the openness of the road made him feel
exposed, as if things were watching him in the dark that hadn’t been able to
see him among the trees. He limped forward, biting his lip at each step, trying
to remember how far they had come before his father had turned off the road.

Maybe this was the test itself. Maybe if he found his
way back tonight that would prove he was good enough to stay. But Castor’s
words kept coming back to him; there was a finality there that chilled him more
than the cold dirt and the night breeze. His mother had always loved the girls
best, but he had always thought he was the favored boy. Everyone always said he
was prettier than Castor, that he looked more like his father Timeron, and it
had always been good for extra treats on festival days. If he had known, if he
had had any warning at all, he could have tried harder to be good.

After a long painful time of limping on more or less
level ground, Ilias found himself toiling up a hill. Maybe things just felt
different in the dark, but he didn’t remember a grade this steep. The road was
rough here too, and he kept stumbling into holes. Rubbing an aching knee, he
stopped, coming to a reluctant realization: there was no hill like this on the
road home. The wagon would have trouble on this slope and he knew he would have
remembered it distinctly.

Ilias gritted his teeth against a sob and wiped his
grimy face on his sleeve, confronting two thoughts:
This is the wrong way
and
even if you find your way home, they could just take you right back to
the hill.
He shook the second one off, telling himself,
no, it’s just a
test
. He had to figure out what he had done and find a way to make it
right. And none of that mattered if he didn’t figure out where he was.

He had started out at the right point and had crossed
the stream, but he must have veered off a straight path in the forest. He didn’t
even know if this was the right road. It might not lead to someone’s farm at
all, it might lead right out of Cineth’s territory altogether.

Sudden fear cramped his stomach as he wondered if he
had gone beyond the safety of the god’s bounds, if this was a place where
wizards and curselings roamed. He turned back and stopped again, staring. In
the darkness not too far distant, he saw a flicker of firelight. In another
heartbeat it was gone.

Ilias took a couple of steps forward, squinting hard
into the dark, his heart pounding. He could just see a faint glow.
It could
be home,
a thought whispered, but he knew in his gut it wasn’t. But it had
to be a torch or a lamp in a house, mostly blocked by trees or a fold of rock. Then
the wind brought him a snatch of sound, hoofbeats on packed dirt.

Limping and stumbling, he ran back down the road. He
found the edge of it by falling into a ravine and rolling through brambles. He
scrabbled to his feet, trying to keep going straight and hoping he wasn’t doing
as badly at it as he had coming through the upper forest. He blundered into
rocks, trees, up another small rise and stumbled to a halt.

Spread out below, cupped in the darkness of a small
valley, was a big farmstead. Oil-lamps hanging in the portico lit the shadowy
outlines of a big flat-roofed two-story stone house. More torches and lamps let
him catch glimpses of outbuildings, herd pens, grapevines, orchards, and a
large garden. Several men and women were standing around in the yard talking,
the wind bringing him snatches of their voices. His heart squeezed with relief
and he took a sharp breath, wiping his nose on his sleeve. It wasn’t home, and
it wasn’t a near neighbor, though he might not be able to recognize the place
in the dark.
I did it
. He hadn’t found his home, but he had found
somebody’s home, and it had to count for something.

Ilias felt his way down the hill, his hands skimming
the lush grass. Moving parallel to the house, he finally tripped over a rock
and found the edge of a rough cart track that must lead down to the farmyard. He
padded down it, his feet throbbing with every step. The track curved around the
hill, leveling out as it approached the large dirt yard. He could hear the
horses more clearly now, he just wasn’t certain where they were.

“What’s that?” someone shouted.

Still some distance from the torchlit yard, Ilias
stopped, turning back as he heard hoofbeats. He saw horses and riders, dark
frightening shapes, and backed hastily away.

An unfamiliar voice called out, “A curseling!”

Where?
Ilias
thought, stumbling and looking around in alarm. He flinched away from a form
that seemed to materialize right out of the dark. “I’ll tell you when there’s a
curseling, you idiot.” The speaker was a sour-voiced man, suddenly standing
over him.

“What is it, Menander?” another man asked. His voice
was deep and calm, and the confusion seemed to lessen when he spoke. Ilias saw
a form swing down from the nearest horse, tossing the reins to another shadow
shape. He could smell horse sweat and leather.

“It’s a boy.” The sour-voiced man sat on his heels to
face him. People came toward them from the farmyard, one man carrying a torch. As
the light fell on them Ilias blinked sweat and dirt out of his eyes to see that
Menander was a man older than his father, inland Syprian, with light-colored
hair braided back in a long queue. “Now who are you?”

“Ilias.” He heard his own voice sound raspy from the
dust of the road. He stared at the sword hilt poking up above the man’s
shoulder, wishing he could touch it. It was carved with a ram’s head, the
scrolled horns delicately detailed.

“He’s not from Andrien village, and there’s no other
farms near here.” That was the deep-voiced man, standing beside them now. Startled,
Ilias looked up to recognize the man he had seen at the market days ago,
Ranior, who had been lawgiver. The man with the boy Chosen Vessel. He was
wearing a sword too, its hilt carved like a gull’s wing. The men in Finan House
never wore their swords, and Ilias desperately wanted a closer look at these. “No
curses?” Ranior asked, frowning slightly.

“Not a one.” Menander reached down to touch one of
Ilias’ feet, frowning at the bloody dirt that came away on fingers.
Curses?
Ilias thought, baffled, then realized with a shock that this must be the
Menander, the Uplands’ Chosen Vessel, who was watching over Cineth now that
Livia was dead. “You’ve walked a long way, haven’t you?”

Ilias wasn’t sure how to answer that question, so he
kept silent. Menander didn’t press, asking instead, “Are you alone out here?”

That one he could answer. Ilias nodded. “I was on the
road and I saw the light from the house.”

“Where did you come from, son?” Ranior asked quietly.

“I--” Ilias looked up into the man’s kind face and for
a moment couldn’t speak. This morning he would have told them the truth without
a heartbeat’s hesitation. He had never been a liar, except to Castor and his
sisters and cousins. He knew the difference between lying to annoy a sibling or
to get an extra helping of dinner and a serious lie. But that was this morning,
and this day had made it all different. “I got lost,” he finished. “My father
said we’d go to the market, but I got separated from him and I’ve been trying
to get home. But I took the wrong way through the forest and missed the path,
and I think it was the wrong road. I don’t know where I am.”

He must have sounded every bit as miserable as he was,
because no one questioned it. Menander lifted his brows and pushed to his feet.
Ranior leaned down and scooped Ilias up, carrying him toward the house.

The yard was a confusion of horses and people and
torchlight. Ilias winced away from it, relieved when Ranior carried him up the
steps and into a lamplit entry hall. Ilias caught a glimpse of double doors
opening into the atrium and dull red walls. The floor was a mosaic of a
seascape with galleys sailing among forested islands. Ranior carried him
through to another room, past two men who seemed to be guarding the door. 

This room had dark blue walls, with border paintings
of olive and laurel leaves. Bowl-shaped oil lamps, smelling sweetly of good
olive oil, lit the room. There was an older girl there, the girl Ilias had seen
with Ranior in Cineth, sitting on a cushioned bench with her legs curled up. She
looked up, staring in surprise as Ranior deposited Ilias next to her. “Who’s
this?” She wore a sleeveless yellow shirt that was too big for her and a pair
of doeskin pants with grass stains on the knees. The kind of clothes girls and
women wore to ride or take sheep to market or sail on a boat, not that the
women in Ilias’ house ever did those things.

“We found him on the wagon track, lost,” Ranior told
her, already heading out of the room again. “Take care of him for me, Irissa.” He
stopped to ask the two guards, “Where’s Treian?”

“He’s taking a look around the atrium,” one told him. He
had a badly scarred face. The other man was missing his right arm below the
elbow. They both looked like fishers or gleaners, wearing shabby sun-faded
shirts and the short kilts most people wore on small boats, their only
ornaments made of wood or shell. Except they had swords across their backs,
soldiers’ swords, plain unornamented steel, with leather wrapped around the hilts.
The man hesitated, watching Ranior worriedly. “They’re saying it’s the one that
got Livia. Is that true?”