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[guardiansverse]

Spring had brought little change to the streets of Alsden. Festus leaned his head down into the wind, the bracing chill accented by sunlight. It was getting too warm to wear his uniform’s greatcoat, really. But some days he still felt a touch too shaky to take the risk.

It was quiet these days, Alsden, subdued as it sat gazing anxiously southward, waiting for news of the long and bloody struggle for succession in what had been Gabrello Attoré’s northern army. Waiting in vain, Festus estimated, which was all well with him: Ilyiga consumed in its internal ruin was a border that needed no defending while all Hyem’s resources were being readied to be hurled against Adalas. A matter of weeks now, all things progressing as they should. The capitol was waiting for him. The end of all his works. The war.

It should not have had to wait that long. He should have returned straightaway from his village once he was able to travel, not waited another week to be sure Kaspar would live. Not lingered in Traispunt pursuing the distraction of local work only to collapse with a wearying return of fever. At least he’d been able to send Karli ahead to the Fursts. She hadn’t liked the road, his niece. Not like…

The chill again. He stuck his hands deep into the pockets of the coat, forced another step forward, doggedly toward his unwanted goal. Certainly he was no stranger to such pushes. And I need to know.

Kirschen’s information had been correct, of course. Rojer Vandavern lived deep within the Ilyigan quarter, in a house well below the means Festus knew the man had. A refugee’s house, or an exile’s. The white horse and flowering rue of the Dukes of Schervo were crudely painted on the door, openly here where they interested no one. The yard was just large and overgrown enough for two children, a twin boy and girl perhaps six years old, to dive into hiding the moment Festus stepped up to the gate.

He waited there for a long moment, knowing he’d be seen, and no doubt recognized. Sure enough, the door opened, and a slight, pale, very calm man came striding out.

Rojer Vandavern didn’t stop to acknowledge his children. He was, Festus thought, almost comically the picture of the political agitator: shabby clothes but expensive spectacles, ink-stained fingers, the head-on look of a man knowing any encounter with power might turn violent, and eager for it. If he weren’t a Separatist I’d have liked him.

“Fro Rojer Vandavern,” he said as soon as the man was at the gate, on the off-chance he would run after all. “Don’t be alarmed. I’m not here for politics.”

“Land’s Own Guardian.” Vandavern’s answer was ready, a needling undertone to its bland pleasantness. He crossed his hands behind a ramrod-straight back. “I can’t imagine what else you might want from me.”

“Nothing I’ll discuss out in the street. May I come in?”

“Am I at liberty to refuse?” Vandavern said, and opened the gate before waiting for a response. Dryly he stated, “Are you here to discuss my scholarship, then.”

“I am.” That response had Vandavern stopping halfway through turning back to the house. “I want your advice on a matter relating to Guardians.”

Vandavern’s look morphed into one of open suspicion at that. It stayed that way even as they settled together in the house’s small kitchen, each holding a mug of herbal tea in the Schervon style, still richly fragrant though the mix was old and used sparingly. Festus was irked by the entire affair: Vandavern had been born to wealth, and all his renouncement of it came from his loyalty to a noble house he thought ought to be not only dukes but kings. But he had promised the man no politics, and needed him and his knowledge. And quietly. Without questions asked, without shut doors rattled.

He took a long sip of the tea. His throat had healed perfectly well and some time ago, and shouldn’t still have ached. Many things still ached in that same oblique fashion, worming into his attention as they could. He’d grow too used to it to notice, in time.

His host had wrapped his thin hands snugly around the tea mug but did not drink, sat openly staring. Festus tired of it quickly. He said, “You are a…”

“Psychographer,” Vandavern put into the pause Festus had left there. “The science of souls is still largely a matter of charting — the work of making sense via making visible. Since access to the subject of study is so restricted…” He gestured slightly at Festus with his mug.

They were the tone, the gesture of the lecture hall. A part of Festus wanted to lean back and listen. Dignity, order, gentle wisdom. None of that. Not again. “Your publications suggest you have some access.”

“Not akin to yours — I cannot imagine I’d be a free man otherwise. Or even a living one.” Festus offered a nod; Vandavern smiled crookedly. “My main tools are deprivation and isolation. In the absence of all other sensory input, capacities normally miniscule are amplified, and I am able to obtain certain powers of perception and observation.”

“But not manipulation.”

“None at all.”

He was telling the truth. “And you have observed Guardians.”

“I can perceive the difference in the… the dimensions of the Centred soul. The lay of it within the web. How it draws in power. I fear it’s granted me little insight into the working of the centring process in and of itself. My book on the topic was largely received with disappointment by the scholarly community.” The crooked smile again. “Though no doubt, with relief by those concerned with the subversive potential of such knowledge.”

Festus put his mug down on the table. “Don’t play with me, Fro Vandavern.”

The psychographer finally took a long sip of his tea. His stance where he sat changed subtly, back straighter but shoulders looser. Finally getting what he expected in this conversation. And well-prepared for it, even with his young children just outside. More and more Festus was growing impressed with Rojer Vandavern, which meant more and more of a need to exert force. “Very well. We’ll do this on the terms you wish. I’m dealing with a situation outside the normal behaviour of souls as I know it. If you can help me understand it — and do so with honesty and, I will stress, discretion — I’ll make a case before Parliament for your return northeast.”

He could see at once that Vandavern didn’t believe him. I wouldn’t have, in his place. But something in the limited scope of the promise, not I’ll free you but I’ll make a case, seemed to give him pause. Make him consider. Utter silence outside in the meantime. The children were still hiding.

Vandavern said, “I’m listening, Land’s Own.”

Festus had lain awake many nights thinking of how to tell the tale. Here and now, his mouth was suddenly dry. Are you? Should you? Listening had come to so little, in the end.

The psychographer was looking at him, his eyes eerily magnified by the spectacles. I need to know. “Do you know of any centrings here among the Ilyigan refugees?”

Vandavern’s slow blink was already the answer. “It is possible,” the psychographer said after a moment. “Refugeedom in itself is a spiritually neutral state, unlike exile.” Festus nodded once. Did not flinch. “A soul could be centred. The difficulty would be in its ability to draw any power.”

“From a fragmented web.”

“Not precisely fragmented, or we’d have seen unification efforts in Ilyiga give way to the formation of new states. Not yet, at least, although with Attoré’s death…” Vandavern gestured vaguely with his mug. Festus nodded again and again didn’t flinch. It’ll get easier. “But no — contrary to common belief, it is not the instability of the Ilyigan web that disrupts its Guardians. It’s the lack of a fulcrum — a Land’s Own.”

“What? No.” Festus shook his head, digesting this with difficulty. “No, I can tell my Guardians draw power from the web around them…”

“Trace amounts. Power gained this way is unreliable. Your Ilyigan Guardian would find their ability accessible only in fits and starts. A distressing experience, I imagine.”

This time Festus looked away.

He gathered himself quickly. Vandavern’s gaze on him was very sharp, openly seeking leverage. That is the last thing I can allow this to be. “You paint an ugly picture, fro.”

“Civil war is ugly,” Vandavern quietly said.

“Is that all you have for me?”

“Is it enough?”

Festus raised a brow at him, saw Vandavern‘s jaw tighten as the psychographer realized he’d misspoken. “So there is more.”

There was no reason for that question. He had what he had come for, what he’d asked for. Unreliable. Whether it was the answer he’d wanted or not, he ought to stand up and live with it.

The turn and turn-about of Vandavern’s dilemma in his eyes held him in place. It might have been difficult to watch, if the man were not a Separatist, a dangerously capable one trying to drive a hard bargain. Whatever more he has, it’s significant. He knew what Vandavern would choose. He had intimate knowledge, now, of what separation from a beloved homeland did to a man.

Slowly, Vandavern said, “The Ilyigan web will not support a Guardian, but the Hyemi might.”

Festus stopped with the mug raised halfway to his mouth, and slammed the delicate porcelain down on the table instead. “I warned you not to play with —”

“I am not a fool,” the psychographer said, icy as a Schervon night now. His tone as he continued was the academic again, plain and level. “You must recall that virtually all scientific knowledge we possess of souls and their webs comes from fulcrums like yourself, Land’s Own being only one form they take — you know this. Good. Such fulcrums are naturally predisposed to perception of their own network. But my own observations suggest that it is the natural state of human souls to link. That they do so with the wild abandon with which all life grows. The webwork of compatriot souls, guided by nationhood, is but the strongest of the vines — those that are given sturdy supports, watered and tended. But the soul sends its scattered shoots much further. No soul links with one finite web only.”

It was utter nonsense, contrary to everything Festus knew of the world, and instantly he knew he couldn’t rise from this table until he’d heard everything. He found himself physically straining not to lean closer to Vandavern. “You’re suggesting the man we’re discussing has Hyemi roots?”

“Perhaps. Embryonic ones. I have never seen such secondary links in a developed state.”

“I’ve never seen them at all.”

“I theorize that this is a matter of spiritual resources.” Vandavern kept his carefully neutral tone up admirably. “A web on a national scale is already a massive burden on one mind and soul: what is perceived in any way as foreign is excluded. Why bother when it cannot be accessed?”

“Then it cannot —”

“Unless in the proper conditions.”

“Get to the point, damn your eyes.”

Vandavern said, “In a long-established borderland, there may be considerable cross-connection within the weave of two webs.”

They could circle all day. Someone had to voice this idea for all its sacrilege. “You are saying that within the borderland, I would be able to work with Ilyigan souls.”

“Only ones possessing a trace of Hyemi rooting.” And suddenly Vandavern was speaking much faster, as though something had come loose. His hands tangled into each other on the table. “You would likely require practice. Mental aids. A considerable investment of soul-power to force abnormal communication.” His throat bobbed once. “Your subject would need to be willing.”

“But yes.”

“But yes.”

Festus thought, This knowledge is too dangerous to let this man live.

He didn’t know if Vandavern understood this. The psychographer had offered what he knew without any attempt to evade, though of course there was little one else could do faced with their Land’s Own. Perhaps Vandavern had in turn hoped Festus would not understand the magnitude of the power he had been handed. Perhaps he simply, sincerely thought his theory impossible to translate to practice.

Perhaps he thinks it’s too obscene for anyone to try.

“Give me your notes,” he told the psychographer, “and you and your family can return to Schervo.”

The flash of agony across Vandavern’s features was the picture of a man lost and knowing it. His throat worked again, and his eyes darted to the window. To the yard, where the children were still hiding. And Festus knew, he knows I’ll have him killed, and he’ll go anyway.

The Separatist swallowed with a hint of difficulty. “Can you do it?”

“Yes.” No needless hesitation. “Do you still follow politics, Fro Vandavern?”

“Closely.”

“Then you know that soon, there’ll be very little limit to what I can do in Hyem.”

Vandavern looked at him — not strangely, if truth be told. Nothing unexpected about that vaguely nauseous look. But the psychographer said nothing more, only rose from the table to fetch his papers.

The journal handed over inside its oilskin bag weighed incongruously little. Festus kept one hand inside the bag, running a thumb over the cover as he walked away from the house. It was growing very cold outside, a heavily hanging damp; his lodging was warm, sheltered, and the desk there heavy with urgent correspondence. The Kaiser had now written twice to ask his attendance at the inquiry into Cullough’s betrayal, and the political advantage of a pointed refusal, citing the uselessness of the previous inquiry for every paper-reading man in Hyem to seethe over, was almost spent. Kirschen was now sending near-daily updates on both the readiness and the willingness of various high-ranking officers. The same from Alamann about conversations in the university quarter’s beerhalls. Even Duke Stattenholme played well enough with the bill to nationalize the steel mills, though no doubt driven by his distaste for their largely nouveau riche owners. It would be untenable, soon, to stay in the south much longer. And his journey back would have to be as purposeful and public as his travels before had been quiet and meandering. His people had never been readier. He would have all he had worked for; he need only go and claim it.

The sky rumbled overhead as he looked up. Another spring storm, building too fast and strong to be strictly seasonal. They’d come near-weekly since he had left the village, never too far for him to feel their lashing chill. Along the road. In Traispunt. In Alsden.

He had his answer, the last answer. He need only live with it.

He walked until he found the courtyard where Saul had killed the deserter, and sat down to read on the bench there under the great tree.

The courtyard was not large, and only one street leading to it of any size. Festus gave a start to realize a carriage, albeit only a small hansom cab, was clattering down that street, the sound of its wheels on the cobblestones melting into the now-pounding rain. Then he gave a yet greater start to see the black-and-silver livery of the driver.

The cab stopped before him. The door opened.

“Fro Detrich,” Anke Stattenholme said.

“Y— Frowe Stattenholme.” He was so shocked he’d almost addressed her by her noble title. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Staying out of the rain, to begin with.” Her voice was unnervingly soft. How embroiled she had been in her husband’s ploys, none of them had ever learned. “Might you ride with me?”

He stared at her. She was all in midnight-blue, a splendid colour on her sweetly round figure, black ermine about her throat. It occurred to him to wonder whether she was deliberate about her show of wealth in this stricken city, or whether she simply knew no other way to be herself, such as she was.

Another thought struck. “Your husband is still in the capitol.”

“He is, yes.”

“Did he send you here after me?”

“No. I…” Her eyes hazed, their only focus on the great expanse of the tree overhead. “I wanted to be… away.”

That is not how it works, Duchess, he almost said, with all due mockery, only to pull up short at the sight of her getting up to leave the carriage.

She half-turned as she did so and scooped up a bundle from the seat next to her — a sleeping child, he realized, bundled almost invisible and immobile against the chill. All he could make of little Amika in her mother’s arms was her face, beaming in some sweet dream.

The Duchess’s driver, in deepest dismay, was pleading sense, citing both propriety and the weather; but she dismissed him, carriage and all, with a flick of a hand expertly adopted from her husband, and settled down next to Festus on the bench barely built for two.

She said: “I love my husband.”

Festus kept his silence, watching. The child’s blankets were a dark sable, and her mother’s hands tangled in them very white. Plump, exquisitely clean fingers. The bare suggestion of bones standing out with tension.

“I love my husband,” the Duchess said again, “but, more importantly, I agree with his politics. Understand this. The revolution, whatever truth in its grievances, was a crime against all order in our society. You have exiled my grandfather and murdered my aunts and cousins. Do you understand?” Her voice faltered a touch. “Any deed you might believe me to have done, believe that I would have done for this reason. Do you…”

She faltered once more, but he had heard, and understood. “You wish me to see that you’re neither a smitten girl, nor a tool being used.”

“Yes.” Her tone, the shift of her hand told him she was caught off guard by the extent of her own relief.

Something in it gave him pause, in the moment before receiving her so bluntly declared enmity and returning it just as given. This was no confession. She was sitting here on the same bench as him, in the same drizzling rain, the same inadequate shelter. Hundreds of miles from her husband and home, alone with even her guard dismissed. Away from everything that gave her enmity any power at all.

The possibility of listening to her opened unnervingly before him. He let his hands rest, as loose as they would be, in his lap, and silently looked at her not looking at him.

"When my father called me back,” Anké Stattenholme said into the soft dark down of her daughter’s hair, “from Lansikaa, from school, from my — my life, I did not fight it. I knew things were different in Hyem, but I thought this, too, was a future. It is right for a woman’s future to be with her husband. And mine is charming, and excellently positioned, and a good man. I have done everything as I should, and he loves me.

“He loves me. And he has conspired with my father, my brother, and kept me unaware. With my own retainer and protector. My daughter’s protector. Against men I call enemies, but also — the boy I called friend. And I was unaware. Such work went into making me unaware." Her tangled fingers had stilled. Her gaze was on the raindrops trickling down from the leaves, and on empty air. “It does not matter what I’ve done or will do, if he is a good man or bad. It doesn’t matter if he loves me. I am a woman. He is my husband. And that is my future.”

That is how the world is. He heard that, too, revealed where her words had stripped that world down to its truth.

She was not the first he had seen in such a moment, come to the revelation that justice was not simply kindness writ large. He said, “It isn’t so, for women in Lansikaa.”

“No, Fro Detrich. No, it is not.”

“It oughtn’t be so here.”

“No.” She straightened abruptly, and turned to look at him at last, and it took him a moment to realize it was denial, not agreement, hardening in her face. “I see where you mean to lead with this. I will not hear it. You are the butcher of the revolution: you will not have my heart.” She shook her head hard enough to rattle the perfectly placed pins in her hair, just one or two wisps escaping. Then a deep bracing breath, and: “But he will not, either. Not Amika. Whatever I must do, Amika will have better than me.”

She had drawn herself straight to defy him, but it hadn’t lasted: as she spoke, the small weight of her child in her arms had seemed to pull her close to it, to half-curl her into something else, tense and hard despite the softness of her body. Something that harboured violence.

Better than me. She was his enemy: he couldn’t ask her, with any sincerity, What is better?

He found himself wetting dry lips. “Why are you telling me any of this, frowe?”

She uncurled slowly, clearly collecting herself. A shift back of her head, a rounding of the shoulders. Once more the Duchess Anké Stattenholme. “I wanted the air clear between us before I told you what I am really here for.”

“And what is that?”

She said, “Saul is here in Alsden.”

Festus choked on a lungful of spring air.

The Duchess started in alarm, eyed him as though unsure he would resume breathing. He coughed once, then feigned a handful more, rough and violent, but knew he couldn’t keep from her the strength of his reaction. He’d thought it finished, one thing finished, except of course for the fact of living with it. Thought he had the last answer right there in Vandavern’s journal. He had fought the war, and this — what was this after?

The Duchess was speaking on, her eyes averted with perfectly mannered politeness from the sight of him still gasping. “He arrived here shortly after you, I believe. I am not sure how he found me, but he asked to stay under my roof and I could not turn him away. He said he no longer traveled with you, but not why —”

“Is he well?”

His own voice rang unnervingly hoarse to his ears. A useless question: he had the answer already, right there in his hands, in Vandavern’s notes. From the corner of his eye, he could see Anké Stattenholme consider.

“He is healthy,” she offered at last. “He is… solid. It is difficult to describe otherwise. When I knew him before, there was always something — he seemed as though if one pressed hard enough, one could puncture through all of him, to some great emptiness. Now he seems tangible. Immovable even. And, I think, much the happier for it.” Then, just as Festus thought he might try to breathe again, she added, “Except…”

The Duchess' words continued to come, slow and measured. Precise, now, in their cadence, as though describing something distant and abstract. “During last week’s storm, he went outside. I watched him through the window. I do not know if you will believe me, but the lightning came to him. Three — no — four strikes, each within inches of where he stood. And he unharmed. Then the clouds began to scatter, and he to shout. He screamed unspeakable curses at the sky. I have never seen a man so angry. Then he fell all at once, as if shot dead where he stood. For a day we could not rouse him. For two more days he was an empty shell. Not insensate — I could see his eyes focus on me when I would enter the room, and he swallowed when we made him drink. But nothing woke in him any will to move and live. Like… I have never seen anything like it. Not even among exiles.”

She would not have: but Festus had. Like a broken Guardian.

Sun’s mercy — he began to think, then stopped. What damned mercy had there ever been? He thought he had given it, in the village. Thought he had given something, broken though it was. This was not the pain he was used to, that might get easier, that might be lived with. This was the world mocking him to his face.

The blood was hammering in his ears, in his half-frozen fingertips. He looked down to where they were pressed hard into the oilskin bag, against Vandavern’s journal that lay inside. Of course it had all been a desperate madness from the start, thinking he could make a Guardian. That he could take such power into his own hands, as he had in the revolution — he had —

He thought, I am going to finish this.

“Frowe Stattenholme.” Her attention had moved back to her child while he’d sat thinking, but it had turned again now, and he could see that whatever was in his face unnerved her. He ignored it as he had Vandavern’s look of queasiness. Instead he studied the child. Sweet Amika, only a year old. At this age her roots were just forming, new though already ferocious in their growth as they tangled into the soul-web of the country. Reaching out to link to everything they could. Her face faded before his other sense, and there it was before him: her bright and budding soul, that had never in its little life known even a moment of cruelty.

“Frowe Stattenholme,” he said again. “I have a proposal for you. One that would relieve Saul’s troubles and mine, and put your daughter beyond anyone’s power to harm. I’m not yet certain it can be done, and I am certain many would think it obscene. But if…”

He trailed off there, leaving the worm of hope to work its way into her before he followed with the point of the knife. He knew she’d recoil from the idea in its entirety. No response could be more reasonable. Yet he knew, also, that they were both past reason.

Quietly, she said, “I would hear more.”

She would recoil, when she did, but he had her. He knew it, and there was a cold and grand satisfaction in the knowing: that she saw the same truth of the world that he did, that there was nothing but to meet it on its own obscene terms, and push back harder.

And with that, the reality of his proposal was beginning to sink in. Beyond what it would make of Saul or mean for the Duchess or even for Amika. To what it would mean for Emen Stattenholme, who had torn Karli’s future to pieces. I said, didn’t I, one day I’ll take all his hopes…

“I will need a week,” he told Anké, “to test an idea. Then I’ll send word for you. You’ll have to arrange to travel to the borderland — with Saul and your daughter and no one else. I will guarantee your safety.”

“You ask a great deal of trust,” she murmured.

“I know.”

“What do you mean to do, Land’s Own?”

“I mean to tie their souls together.”

She stared at him with her mouth hanging open, too shocked even to recoil.

There was no mercy to offer her, so Festus spoke on. “Saul is a Guardian now, but one who can’t draw on his own soul-web. He pulls in crumbs of power, and every time they flow out from him again he feels as if he is breaking. He needs an anchor that would let him access a steady stream. Your daughter’s soul is in the process of rooting — it links easily with others. I believe I can – I can graft them to one another. Saul will draw power through Amika, but he is a dead end in the web. So the power must flow back, too. And therefore Amika, though Uncentred, will be a Guardian.”

“Their souls.” The Duchess’s voice was strangled.

“It can be done.”

“It is — you would —”

“And she’d have a power like no other alive. A Guardian who cannot be broken. Beyond your husband’s reach, beyond anyone’s. No one would command her but her country.”

“And you,” Anké Stattenholme said.

It seemed to Festus he would have flinched at these words, once. This naked accusation. The power belongs to the people. It isn’t for my benefit. But he thought of Karli again. I have every right.

He looked at her levelly and said, “And me.”

The butcher of the revolution, she had called him to his face. He saw her weigh it, just as Rojer Vandavern had weighed his own bargain, his life for his children’s future in their own place. And, once again, he realized he knew what her answer would be. Sometime in the past few weeks, he had finally learned.

~*~

The borderland: gaping in every direction, a place outside places. Stony hills, spring scrubland slowly recollecting its green. The edges of the Hyemi soul-web running against and recoiling from the Ilyigan rags. A warm wind from the south pulled at the strands loose from Festus’s haphazardly bound hair as he stood probing along that strange, sensitive edge.

He’d told Anké Stattenholme to take her carriage to the bordermark, then send it away before she and Saul crossed the last hill to meet him, alone. The Duchess came first down the slope, a little breathless with her squirming daughter in her arms. Little Amika thrilled and babbling, reaching out a hand to grab at an early butterfly gliding past. The Duchess herself very pale, seeming to have managed about as much sleep as Festus himself had that past week. Her soul — he’d have preferred not to see it, but after days of working within the web he sometimes slipped into that other sight without meaning to. Her weariness and his melted together, but he would not permit the same of her fear.

He greeted her with a nod. Her answering gesture was a jerk of her head. She asked, “You have… tested your idea?”

“Well enough.” She didn’t need or want to know the details. No one did.

“I have been thinking.” She sounded distant. “All you’ve explained — that the power would not come to her straightaway, that we cannot predict its appearance or its form, all of this, I understand. But considerable power — you are certain.”

He nodded again, though unsure of what she was reaching for. “You’ve seen what Saul can do.”

“Yes.” Her lips tightened minutely. But her eyes remained faraway. “Yes. That is not the power of some local Guardian or temple keeper. That is the power of a Capitol Guardian, who might be called to war.”

Festus said nothing, only held out his arms.

The weight of the child was nothing at all. Amika blinked when her mother stepped back from them, then the ribbon in Festus’s hair caught all her attention. Festus let her catch and gnaw on it and turned to look again toward the hill, seeing, at last, Saul coming down.

The noon sun limned him, sharp and hard and golden. He’d lost weight, Festus noted, then thought that it suited him: that ranging, hunting look, not starved yet not sated enough to be safe. Still wearing the jacket and boots Festus had had tailor made for him in the capitol, but back in haphazardly stolen clothes otherwise, in yellow and red and the brightest sky blue. Ilyigan colours. Perhaps he thought to return, once done with whatever it was he’d meant to do by following Festus all through the south.

He stopped a handful of steps away. “Domé Detrich,” he said.

There was no mistaking it: the angles of the body, the shoulders, the tilt of the head upon the neck. The breath with its even rhythm. The sense that here was a man, fully a man, who knew his own power so deeply and completely that no other power in the world might move him. And no mistaking, either, that the power had a predatory edge to it. That it was power longing to be used. Here it was, what Festus had made.

And what has it made of me?

He said only, “Saul.”

He might mend it yet, he thought, a moment’s idle dream. Tell Saul the truth of their last talk and the fight. That his supposed lie had itself been a lie, said only to provoke Saul’s attack, to put an end to trust between them and bring Saul to fight and win the greatest battle of his life. Tell him, I made you a Guardian, this is the best future I can give you, and explain – but what then, what after? Nothing in the world would change. Least of all Festus himself.

Perhaps Saul, too, knew this. The young man looked at him for another long moment — a deep look, searching, not finding — then finally broke the silence. “Doma Anké told me what you said to her. About my power, and what you can do to —” he hesitated, then switched to Ilyigan, spoke the verb used for bones “—to set it.”

“Did you understand it?”

“I don’t know. What does it mean, to graft souls together?”

Bright and curious as ever, honest, unafraid. Festus answered with all due honesty: “Urging souls to link to the web when they struggle to do so on their own is a common task for the Land’s Own. For children who don’t learn to speak and the like. You’ve been in Hyem for months — I’ve reason to believe you have some rudimentary roots —”

Saul’s eyes narrowed sharply. “I’m not —”

“Not Hyemi, no. And you never will be. But your soul came here… injured, from exile, and seeking to link with others. That gives me something to work with.” Saul hadn’t relaxed, he saw, but was listening intently. “I can’t join you fully to the Hyemi web. But I can create a solitary, specific link to a soul that’s receptive to it.”

He tilted his head toward Amika, asleep on his shoulder. Saul started faintly, but did not protest. Well enough, if he saw the girl as nothing but that useful tool.

The scheme sounded simple, put like that. Deceptively so. Festus added, “But there is one difficulty.”

Saul had been waiting for one, he saw — Saul, whose trust in him Festus had himself bent and broken. Meanwhile Anké, who had been quietly listening in, spoke up, slightly nervous: “You have not mentioned anything to me.”

“I wasn’t aware, when I spoke with you.” No one needed to know what had happened since. “On Amika’s side the matter is still straightforward. Her soul is in the pliant condition we require. But Saul’s is still linked to the Ilyigan web, and in that state it will neither reach out nor be able to link to another outside that web. It would have to be forced.” He watched Anké’s face turn the colour of cold ashes, braced himself.

Before he could speak up, Saul did. “You mean to uproot me.”

It wouldn’t do to jar little Amika awake, Festus thought, and stayed still. The Duchess’s horrified exhalation of “You cannot mean it,” he thought, told Saul all the young man might not already know or suspect about the proposal laid before him.

He held his ground. He looked Saul in the eye. This is what I have to give.

Saul was pale, but there was no fear in his eyes. No fear. “You said no one survived that.”

“I did.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then you must never use your Guardian’s power.” At that he saw Saul’s fingers spasm. “Every time it’s voided of soul-power, your Centre strains and cracks. That is the reason for the episodes you’ve been having after your storms. Eventually you’ll break for good.”

“Can’t that heal, like a broken leg?”

“Some things don’t heal.”

“Saul.” The frayed edge of a plea in Anké’s voice — and then silence. And Festus thought, She can’t say to him, what power could you gain that would be worth such a thing?

Saul glanced once over his shoulder — just once, southward, to Ilyiga. A long and lingering gaze. A quiet breathing in. The wind from the south, the faint whiff of wisteria, of a snowless land cradled by a warm sea, a sky of a different blue. All things Festus knew he himself would never know.

“Fortune favours the bold,” the young man said, turning back. And said, not with a snarl but with a look of cocky challenge, “I won’t die.”

He obeyed readily when Festus instructed him to lie down, though Festus felt him shudder a touch when Festus himself, still holding Amika, laid down and pressed close. The borderland earth was soft under Festus’s back, even with the stones knobbly against his scars, the infant warm where she curled up under one arm and Saul breathing slowly under the other. He closed his eyes and thought the scene might even have seemed peaceful.

Then he reached out to open up both of them.

The borderland made for a poor theatre, his power sluggish like muscles on a frozen morning when blood wouldn’t pump into stiff arteries. A cramping push against the grain. He found Amika first, began with what was easy: her soul he could grasp almost without thinking of it. A small seed quickening even in his grasp, all tendrils and apertures pushing through a thin film of a new and easily malleable membrane. He touched a froth of sight–sound–taste impressions, studded through with solid nodules that were Mama’s face, Papa’s voice, the smell of snow crocuses in the garden. The taste of sweet rolls and cream. Liebling, schatzi, blütechen. And around them thickening, I am I am I am, every one an anchor being tossed out into the world. To his own soul. To her mother’s. To a thousand others already. To Hyem.

On his other side was nothing —– or nearly nothing. The faint suggestion of substance, revealed by the way the two webs wove around a weight within them. The weight of a Centred soul. Eddies revealing where a rock had plunged in. Its truth wasn’t his to touch: an Elsewhere had shaped it, other senses and other knowledge. Its I am was a grown and sealed skin.

Or then it had been.

It was sound enough, Vandavern’s theory of interconnection in the borderland. It was what allowed Festus to perceive Saul’s Ilyigan soul in the first place. But he had quickly enough learned that perception was not a grasp. A grasp required some handhold, some opening. And there it was, the sudden impression of the ground dropping out from below — the frayed place left by the ritual of exile.

It yielded to Festus’s touch like a wounded animal frozen with shock, and at the same time like plunging a hand through a thin sheet of ice into freezing water. Instantly it was in the back of his throat: the memory, his memory, of the first desperately lonely night in the capitol. The lost boy in the room. A neck-deep, eyeballs-deep pit of it. Like to like. Soul to soul. A thread he could pull on, and more would come unravelled. Now he was bringing up, inseparable from the memory, the pride of place that had made exile such a hideous betrayal. The layer of Saul that was all boiling blood and sizzling smoke, a wonderful armour and nest fashioned of them, the Saul that was a giant and a monster and the favoured child of a god. Soul to soul to the part of Festus, torn out of where he kept it so jealously folded away, that stood in classrooms full of light and recited law.

He had known what it would be like. He had known. He pushed them aside, the sucking edges that threatened to unravel him too, felt through the blood and smoke to the warm smoothness of gold beneath. Flimsy, flaking gold. The shell of an unhatched egg. A memory to match, again, Professor Aberhern''s We had such high hopes for you. Easy to crack through the fine lines of engraved sunbursts, work his way past the golden light they sputtered. And the rush of cold within, the smell of salt and open air, the sense-memory of squinting at a horizon —

And there it was, under it all. There it was. A quivering handful, trailing light that was viscera that was light. Swollen with astonishing power, and frail in Festus’s hands as only living tissue could be. All sunshine. All salt. All blue.