The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (33 page)

On the sail back to Gorthan Docks in the
Keeper Fair
, Mallani went into labour.

I had managed to go to sleep—in fact, the moment I came on board, I just collapsed into the first hammock I found, closed my eyes and was dead asleep in seconds. Some time later I was aware that I was being violently shaken. At first I thought there was something wrong with the ship, and only gradually did I surface to the realisation that someone was calling my name and telling me that I was needed. I rolled out of the hammock and followed the sylv responsible, still not fully conscious.

He took me to a cabin with a bunk, and it was only then, when I saw Mallani lying there, that I really woke up. ‘She wanted you here,’ one of the sylv women in attendance said.

‘I don’t know the first thing about delivering a baby,’ I replied in protest. That was true enough; I’d done a lot of things in my life, but I’d never been present at a birth. Besides, my heart was sinking: I’d just remembered that I was ten to one certain that her baby was nonsylv—and I’d have to be the one to tell her.

Someone said, ‘She just wants to know if it’s sylv or not.’

‘That could have waited until morning,’ I grumbled, but the truth was that I was soon caught up in the wonder of what was happening. By the time it was all over I was deeply grateful that I had been there.

I suppose I should have felt the pain of knowing that I could never have children; but somehow all I could do was marvel at this delivery of life, and take joy in seeing a baby’s first breath, hearing its first cry. Somewhere along the way, as the head pushed towards freedom, it registered with me that the babe had no sylvmagic, just as I had expected; minutes later when it slithered out and the last life-giving blood pulsed to it via the cord, I realised this was not so. Blue light skittered in fanciful swirls over the child. He was leaking sylvmagic all over the place, so intense that it seemed almost purple. I stared, puzzled over what I was seeing. Then someone was tying and cutting the cord; the flow of magic to the baby stopped, the colour calmed.

In the chaos of the room full of Keeper sylvs all exclaiming over the baby and hugging the new mother, I had a moment to examine the placenta, to touch it, to feel the remains of the magic that had been there. I shivered, hating the feel of the residue left. It was
wrong.
Horribly wrong. It may not have been crimson-coloured, but I felt the touch of dunmagic, smelled its stench nonetheless.

All the pleasure I had felt during the birth drained away.

Mallani called my name, and someone pushed me forward to her bedside. She was holding the child, now cleaned and swaddled. She pulled back the blanket from around his head, and a bland little face peeked up at me making kissing movements with his lips. He looked pretty much like all new babies look, except that sylvlight played over his features. ‘Is he—?’ she asked. ‘Tell me, quickly!’

‘He’s leaking sylv blue all over the place.’

Mallani gave a squeal of delight and hugged the child to her. Then she looked back at me. ‘You’re
sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. He’s a strong sylv.’

There was laughter, exclamations of delight over the baby, a buzz of sylvmagic as the women around the bed relaxed. I edged my way out of the door, leaving them to it.

Up on deck it was good to breath in the sea air, to feel the cleanness of the wind. I knew if I looked behind me I would see the glow of fire and magic that was all that remained of Creed, so I didn’t look. I wanted to think ahead, to a future that was safe and full of things I’d never known: friendship, love. Joy. Happiness. Freedom.

No Keepers. No dunmagic. No Duthrick.

It should all have been mine. I should have been happy.

So why did I feel so uneasy, so
fettered?

###

I sat in Flame’s room in
The Drunken Plaice
and watched her as she stuffed her belongings, what little she had, into her soft leather bag. She was having trouble holding the bag while she put things inside, but I knew better than to offer to help. She would have to learn to cope.

She was as beautiful as ever. Nothing of what had happened seemed to have touched her face, except perhaps to give an added depth to her expression, an added touch of maturity that was beautiful in itself. Inside there were scars, too many of them. She hadn’t lived hard enough as a child to be unscathed by what she had suffered. Occasionally, very occasionally, I glimpsed something in her eyes that made me want to hold her, to tell her that it didn’t matter, that the part of her that counted was still inviolate. I hadn’t done so, and now it seemed I never would. I hoped that Ruarth was wise enough to give her the reassurance she needed.

‘Where’s Ruarth?’ I asked.

‘Oh, around somewhere. I believe there was a local lovely he wanted to say goodbye to.’ She meant a Dustel, of course, but it took a moment for me to understand. She smiled, a lovely smile of love, and my heart caught at the tragedy—and her courage.

‘Doesn’t…doesn’t that worry you?’

She looked surprised. ‘Why, no. Of course not. He’s a bird. And I’m human. How can we have more than we have at the moment? But we both have…other needs.’

‘It doesn’t make you jealous?’

She shook her head. ‘No more than Ruarth was jealous of Noviss. Holdheir Ransom, I mean. What Ruarth and I feel for each other is too special to be changed by such affairs. Ruarth knows that I live for the day when he can hold me in his arms. In the meantime, I use his name as mine.’ She said all that lightly enough, but there was still something in her eyes that told me of her pain. I didn’t think she was ever free of it, not really.

‘I have found a passage on board a mullet boat going to Mekatéhaven,’ she added. ‘It sails with the tide, around sunset. So…I suppose this is goodbye.’

She clumsily tied the strings at the top of her bag and straightened, then she conjured up some sylvmagic and made herself a make-believe arm. She held it out to show me. To me, it flickered with silver and I could see right through it, but it was good enough to deceive the non-Aware. ‘Not bad, eh?’ she asked. ‘Although…I’m not sure why I bother. It doesn’t seem as important as it did at first.’ Then she looked at me, serious, and said again, ‘I guess this is goodbye, Blaze.’

I felt almost sick with sorrow. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘You’ll stay with Tor?’

I nodded.

‘I’m glad. Although…well, I’m sorry about the two thousand setus.’

I shrugged. ‘I still have part of what the Holdheir gave me.’ I was leaning against the wall, watching her, thinking how much I’d miss her. She was friend, sister, family, all the woman that I wasn’t and would like to be; with her, I was somehow whole.

And in those last moments I couldn’t hide from her the truth that I’d kept hidden so long. Something in my expression—a hint of cynical laughter in my eyes?—told her.

‘You know, don’t you,’ she said quietly, and it was a statement, not a question.

I nodded.

‘Since when?’

‘Ever since you told me about Ruarth. And Ruarth’s mother. You see, the main reason I felt sure you weren’t the Castlemaid was that you knew how to use sylvtalent. I thought the Castlemaid could never have learnt, even if she had been born sylvtalented. Then you told me about the Dustels, and how Ruarth’s mother had sylvtalent, and I realised that she could have taught you as you were growing up. Would have thought it her duty to teach you, in fact. And the Castlelord and his staff need never have known.

‘That was why I didn’t want Duthrick to find out about Ruarth—he could have reached the same conclusions as I did. He met up with Ruarth yesterday, of course, when I sent that cloth message to him, but I’m hoping he thinks the connection is between me and Ruarth, not between the two of you. As Keeper Councillor, he must know a fair bit about the Dustels, I would think. You must be careful.’

She looked rueful. ‘No matter how much I admire you, I still seem to end up underestimating you, Blaze. You’ve been laughing at me all this time, you sodding great lunk of a halfbreed.’

I grinned. ‘Rubbish, I’m not so petty.’

Lacking any other weapon, she hurled her coin purse at me. I caught it and threw it back. ‘Of course, once I realised that you could talk to the Dustels, that you had been in close contact with them ever since you were a child, then a lot of things about you that had puzzled me fell into place. At times you were so innocent, so lacking in knowledge about the realities of the world—just as a Castlemaid, brought up in close seclusion, would have been. At other times, you could be as shrewd and as cunning as an octopus after the bait in a trap—just as someone taught by the Dustels, who must surely see so much human folly and cruelty, could have been.

‘Mind you, I was still puzzled by how you worked the coming-of-age tattoos. In the end I decided that the original tattoos must have been faked—they were a sylvmagic illusion. Somehow you avoided having real tattoos made. I guessed you had reasoned that in Cirkasecastle palace there was little risk of ever meeting one of the Awarefolk who could see through your illusion. I don’t know why it occurred to you to fake them, though. Were you planning to run away even then? When you were only eighteen?’

She nodded, and bent to thread her purse onto her belt. ‘I was already in love with Ruarth, you see. I knew I’d never want to marry anyone else. We decided to fake the etching of the tattoos…I used sylvmagic during the ceremony. The ghemph tattooist never knew it was not really marking my hands.’

I chuckled. ‘Oh, I rather think that it might have done. Ghemphs have a certain amount of Awareness, I think.’

‘Have
they? Well, I’ll be damned! It never said a word.’

‘Perhaps it was reluctant to have anyone know that ghemphs have any Awareness. Perhaps it didn’t want to get you into trouble. They are very kind-hearted.’

She gave me an odd look, wondering how I knew so much about the creatures, but she didn’t comment. She went on, ‘Well, after the ceremony, it was easy to maintain a sylvmagic illusion of the tattoos. I didn’t flee, though, until my father produced the Breth Bastionlord as a potential husband. Ruarth had insisted I wait until I was older, you see—he wanted me to be very sure of my own mind before I did anything that was irrevocable. After all, he had nothing to offer me except his friendship, and Lord knows, I wasn’t used to material hardships. But when that child-molesting pervert caught sight of me and pressed my father for my hand, then even Ruarth had to agree it was time to go. I had no idea then, of course, that the Bastionlord would go to the Keepers and ask them to find me, or that they would send someone after me.’

‘And the slavers always knew you were the Castlemaid, of course. In fact, you never were a slave.’

‘That was just a cover. I paid for my passage. The whole thing was arranged by a palace servant, an old nurse of mine who sympathised. We pawned some of my jewellery to finance it all. Mind you, the slavers thought to double-cross me, and earn a second fee from my father by selling me back to him, but Ruarth overheard them and I flummoxed them with sylvmagic. In the end they brought me to Gorthan Spit.’

I grinned. Those slavers had more than they bargained for when they took on Flame and Ruarth. I said, ‘But one of them told Janko—Morthred—about it?’

‘Yes. We ran out of luck. Someone must have told him who I was, and that I was a sylv.’

‘He shut them all up with dunspells, and thought to subvert you to dunmagic. Then, doubtless, he was going to return you to Cirkase.’

She shivered. ‘Yes. I would have been his pawn. Through me, he would have controlled both Cirkase and Breth one day. Blaze, you say he’s been weakened. How long will it be before he’s able to subvert sylvs again?’

‘How can I tell? I can’t even begin to guess. It took him a hundred years or so, first time around. This time… Weeks, months, years? All I can say is that I feel it will happen, one day. He is just too powerful to remain crippled. And it won’t be a hundred years, not this time.’

‘Then he’s too dangerous to be left alive. I will never feel safe, for a start. And with the ability to subvert sylvtalents, he’ll end up controlling the Keepers and the Keeper Isles.’

I caught her meaning immediately. ‘You intend to go after him,’ I said flatly. ‘With Ruarth. Of all the stupid, dangerous, shrimp-brained…’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah. I know all of that. But I have to. Because he has to be stopped. And because while he’s still alive, Ruarth is still imprisoned in his blessed feathers.’ She looked fierce. ‘I
need
him, Blaze. Ruarth, I mean. I need him as a
man
. I
don’t give a damn if he turns out to be a hunchback with a face like a sea-slug, I want him
human.
I want him in my arms, in my bed, inside of me. You love Tor, you must know how I feel.’ There was a desperation there, birthed perhaps by her longing, but edged now by the suffering she had endured on Gorthan Spit.

There was nothing I could say, so I just nodded. Inside though, I wondered if I loved Tor quite as much as she hungered after Ruarth… ‘What makes you think he’s gone to Mekaté?’

‘Something he once said to me, when he thought I was safely subverted. He has more dunmagickers there, another enclave.’