The Stone of Farewell (92 page)

Simon trailed his fingers along the wall and found that it was as exquisitely soft as it looked, but curiously strong; it slid beneath his hand as smoothly as gold wire, yet was warm to the touch as the down of a baby bird and quivered with the wind's every breath.

The featureless corridor soon opened up into a large, high-ceilinged room that, but for the instability of its walls, looked much like a room in any fine house. The turquoise hue of the cloth near the entrance shaded imperceptibly into ultramarine. A low table of dark wood stood near one wall, with cushions scattered all around it. On the table sat a board painted in many colors; Simon thought it a map until he recognized it as a place to play the game called shent, which he had seen Jiriki do in his hunting lodge. He remembered Aditu's challenge. The pieces, he guessed, were in the intricate wooden box sitting beside it on the table top. The only other item on the table was a stone vase containing a single branch from a flowering apple tree.

“Sit down, Snowlock, please.” Aditu waved her hand. “I believe Jiriki has a visitor.”

Before Simon could follow her suggestion, the room's far wall began to billow. A section flew up as if it had torn free. Someone dressed in bright green, whose braided hair was a jarringly contrasting shade of red, stepped through.

Simon was surprised at how quickly he recognized Jiriki's uncle, Khendraja‘aro. The Sitha was muttering gruffly in what seemed to be fury—seemed, because Simon could see no discernible emotion on his face at all. Then Khendraja'aro looked up and spotted Simon. His angular face blanched, as though the blood had run out of him like water from an upended pail.

“Sudhoda‘ya! Isi-isi'ye-a Sudhoda'ya!”
he gasped, his voice full of an anger so astonished as to seem like something else altogether.

Khendraja‘aro dragged his slender, beringed hand slowly across his eyes and face as if trying to wipe away the sight of gangly Simon. Unable to do so, Jiriki's uncle hissed in almost feline alarm, then turned on Aditu and began to speak to her in rapid, quietly liquid Sithi that nonetheless strengthened the suggestion of spitting rage. Aditu absorbed his tirade expressionlessly, her deep, gold-shot eyes wide but unfrightened. When Khendraja'aro had finished, she answered him calmly. Her uncle turned and regarded Simon once more, making a series of strangely sinuous gestures with his splayed fingers as he listened to her measured response.

Khendraja'ro took a deep breath, letting a preternatural calm overtake him until he stood motionless as a pillar of stone. Only his bright eyes seemed alive, burning in his face like lamps. After several moments of this overwhelming stillness he walked from the room without a word or sideways glance, padding silently down the corridor to the door of Jiriki's house.

Simon was shaken by the unmistakable force of Khendraja'aro's anger.

“You said something about breaking rules... ?” he asked.

Aditu smiled strangely. “Courage, Snowlock. You are
Hikka Staja.”
She brushed her fingers through her hair, a curiously human gesture, then pointed to the flap where her uncle had entered. “Let us go in to my brother. ”

They stepped through into sunlight. This room, too, was made of fluttering cloth, but the fabric of one long wall had been rolled and drawn up to the ceiling; beyond this opening the hill dropped away for some dozen paces. Below lay a shallow, peaceful backwater of the same river that passed before Jiriki's front door, a wide pond with a narrow inlet neck, surrounded by reeds and quivering aspens. Little red-and-brown birds hopped about on the rocks at the center of the pond, like conquerors strutting the battlements of a captured stronghold. At pond's edge a bale of turtles basked in the sun streaming down through the trees.

“In the evening the crickets are quite splendid here. ”

Simon turned to see Jiriki, who had apparently been standing in the shadows at the opposite end of the room.

“Welcome to Jao é-Tinukai'i, Seoman,” he said. “We are well-met.”

“Jiriki!” Simon sprang forward. Without thinking, he grasped the slender Sitha in a tight embrace. The prince tensed for a moment, then relaxed. His firm hand patted Simon's back. “You never said farewell,” Simon said, then pulled away, embarrassed.

“I did not,” Jiriki agreed. He wore a long, loose robe of some thin blue cloth, belted at the waist with a wide red band; his feet were bare. His lavender hair descended in braids before either ear, and was gathered atop his head with a comb of pale, polished wood.

“I would have died in the woods if you had not helped me,” Simon said abruptly, then gave an awkward laugh. “If Aditu had not come, that is.” He turned to look at her; Jiriki's sister was watching intently. She nodded her head in acknowledgment. “I would have died.” He realized as he spoke that it was absolutely true. He had begun the process of dying when Aditu had found him, growing more distant each day from the business of life.

“So.” Jiriki folded his arms before him. “I am honored I could help. It still does not discharge my obligation, however. I owed you
two
lives. You are my
Hikka Staja,
Seoman, and so you will remain.” He looked over to his sister. “The butterflies have gathered.”

Aditu replied in their lyric tongue, but Jiriki held up his hand.

“Speak in a way that Seoman can understand. He is my guest.”

She stared at him for a moment. “We met Khendraja'aro. He is not happy.”

“Uncle has not been happy since Asu'a fell. No plans of mine are likely to change that.”

“It is more than that, Willow-switch, and you know it.” Aditu stared hard at him, but her face remained dispassionate. She turned to look briefly at Simon; for a moment, embarrassment seemed to darken her cheeks. “It is strange to speak this tongue.”

“These are strange days, Rabbit—and
you
know
that.”
Jiriki lifted his hands toward the sunlight. “Ah, what an afternoon. We must go, now, all of us. The butterflies have gathered, as I said. I speak lightly of Khendraja'aro, but my heart is uneasy.”

Simon stared at him, completely baffled.

“First allow me to take off this ridiculous clothing,” Aditu said. She slipped away through another hidden door so quickly that she seemed to melt into shadow.

Jiriki led Simon toward the front of his house. “We will wait for her below. You and I have much to speak about, Seoman, but first we must go to the Yásira.”

“Why did she call you ... Willow-switch?” Of all his countless questions, this was the only one he could put into words.

“Why do I call you Snowlock?” Jiriki looked closely at Simon's face, then smiled his charming, feral smile. “It is good to see you well, manchild.”

“Let us be off,” Aditu said. She had come up behind Simon so soundlessly that he gasped in surprise. When he turned a moment later, he gasped again. Aditu had shed her heavy snow-clothing for a dress that was little more than a wisp of glimmering, nearly transparent white cloth belted with a ribbon of sunset orange. Her slim hips and small breasts were clearly silhouetted beneath the loose garment. Simon felt his face grow hot. He had grown up with the chambermaids, but they had moved him out many years before sending him to sleep with the other scullions. Such near-nakedness was more than disconcerting. He realized he was staring and turned hurriedly away, his face coloring. One hand made an involuntary Tree before his chest.

Aditu's laugh was like rain. “I am happy to be shed of all that! It was cold where the manchild was, Jiriki! Cold!”

“You are right, Aditu,” Jiriki said grimly. “We find the winter outside easy to forget when it is still summer in our home. Now, it is off to the Yásira, where some do not want to believe that winter exists at all.”

He led the way out his strange entry hall to the sunsplashed corridor of willows beside the river. Aditu followed him. Simon brought up the rear, still blushing furiously, with no choice but to watch her springy, swaying walk.

 

With the added distraction of Aditu in her summer finery, Simon did not think about much of anything for a while, but even Jiriki's lissome sister and Jao é-Tinukai‘i's myriad other glories could not distract him forever. Several things had been said lately that were beginning to worry him: Khendraja'aro was angry with him, apparently, and Simon had distinctly heard Aditu say something about breaking rules. What exactly was happening?

“Where are we going, Jiriki?” he asked at last.

“The Yásira.” The Sitha gestured ahead. “There, do you see?”

Simon stared, shielding his eyes from the strong sunlight. There were so many distractions here, and the sunlight itself was one of the strongest. Only a few days before he had been wondering if he would ever be warm again. Why was he yet again allowing himself to be dragged somewhere else, when all he wanted to do was flop down on his back in the clover and sleep... ?

At first the Yásira seemed like nothing so much as a grand and oddly-shaped tent, a tent whose center pole mounted fifty ells into the air, made of a fabric more shifting and colorful than any of Jao é-Tinukai'i's other beautiful structures. It took another two dozen paces before Simon realized that the center pole was a gigantic ash tree with wide-spreading branches, whose crown rose into the forest sky high above the Yásira itself. He drew another hundred paces closer before he saw why the fabric of the vast tent shimmered so.

Trailing to the ground from the ash tree's widest branches were a thousand threads, so slender that they seemed little more than parallel glints of light as they fell a hand-span apart all around the tree. Clinging to these strands from top to bottom, lazily fanning their iridescent wings, huddling so closely that they overlapped each other like the shingles on some impossible roof were ... a million, million butterflies. They were of every color imaginable, orange and wine-red, oxblood and tangerine, cerulean blue, daffodil yellow, velvet black as the night sky. The quiet whisper of their wings was everywhere, as if the warm summer air itself had been given voice. They moved sluggishly, as though near sleep, but were otherwise bound in no way that Simon could see. Countless chips of vibrant moving color, the butterflies shattered the sunlight like an incomparable treasury of living gems.

In that moment, as Simon first saw it, the Yásira seemed the breathing, glowing center of Creation. He stopped and abruptly burst into helpless tears.

Jiriki did not see Simon's overwhelmed response. “The little wings are restless,” he said. “S‘hue Khendraja'aro has brought the word.”

Simon sniffled and wiped at his eyes. Faced with the Yásira, he suddenly thought he could understand the bitterness of Ineluki, the Storm King's hatred for childish, destructive mankind. Shamed, Simon listened to Jiriki's words as though from a great distance. The Sitha prince was saying something about his uncle—was Khendraja'aro talking to the butterflies? Simon didn't care any longer. This was all just too much for him. He didn't want to think; he wanted to lie down. He wanted to sleep.

Jiriki had at last noticed his distress. He took Simon carefully by the elbow and guided him toward the Yásira. At the front of the mad, glorious structure, butterfly-laden strands trailed on either side of a wooden doorway, which was no more than a simple carved frame wound round with trailing roses. Aditu had already stepped through, and now Jiriki led Simon in.

If the effect of the butterflies from outside was one of gleaming magnificence, the view from within was entirely different. The multicolored shafts of light leaked down through the living roof, as if through stained glass that had somehow become unstable. The great ash tree that was the Yásira' spine stood bathed in a thousand shifting hues; Simon was again reminded of some strange forest thriving beneath the inconstant ocean. This time, however, he was beginning to find the thought a little much to bear. He felt almost as though he were drowning, floundering helplessly in an opulence he could not entirely understand.

The great chamber had few furnishings. Beautiful rugs lay scattered everywhere, but in many places the grass grew uncovered. Shallow pools gleamed here and there, flowering bushes and stones around them, all things just as they were outside. The only differences were the butterflies and the Sithi.

The chamber was full of Sithi-folk, male and female, in costumes as variegated as the wings of the butterflies that quivered overhead. One by one at first, then in clusters, they turned to look at the new arrivals, hundreds of calm, catlike eyes agleam in the shifting light. What seemed to Simon a quiet but malicious hiss rose from the multitude. He wanted to run away, and actually made a brief, stumbling attempt, but Jiriki's grip on his arm was gently unbreakable. He found himself led forward to a rise of earth before the base of the tree. A tall, moss-netted stone stood there like an admonishing finger sunken in the grassy ground. On low couches before it sat two Sithi dressed in splendid pale robes, a woman and a man.

The man, who was seated closest, looked up at Simon and Jiriki's approach. His hair, tied high atop his head, was jet black, and he wore a crown of carved white birchwood. He had the same angular golden features as Jiriki, but there was something drawn at the corners of his narrow eyes and thin mouth that suggested a life of great length filled with vast but subtle disappointment. The woman who sat beside him on his left hand had hair of a deep, coppery red; she, too, wore a circlet of birchwood on her brow. Long white feathers hung from her many braids, and she wore several bracelets and rings as black and shiny as the hair of the man beside her. Of all the Sithi Simon had seen, her face was the most immobile, the most rigidly serene. Both man and woman had an air of age and subtlety and stillness, but it was the quiet of a dark old pond in a shadowed wood, the calm of a sky filled with motionless thunderheads: it seemed entirely possible that such placidity might hide something dangerous—dangerous to callow mortals, at least.