Kinshield's Redemption (Book 4) (37 page)

Gavin scooped up some water and poured it over the stone, while Cirang pressed her finger into the grooves of the rune’s symbol. She retraced the symbol the way Rarga had, again and again, but nothing happened. The water didn’t make it sizzle. No smoke rose from it. All she was doing was dragging her finger along the lines.

“Keep trying,” Gavin said as he continued to scoop and pour.

“I can’t,” she said. “It’s not working. I must be missing something.”

“You’re not pushing with your intent,” he said. “From the belly. Push.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she kept tracing the rune anyway, imagining herself pushing from within. Over and over she traced the rune.

“You’re not pushing,” he said, frustration deepening his tone.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to push. Please tell me how to do this.”

Gavin shook the water off his hands and stood. “You watched her. Didn’t you see how she did it?”

“I did see, but I didn’t see her pushing anything. I only saw her finger make the path.” Her eyes began to burn. She hated that King Gavin was angry with her. She hated disappointing him.

He let out a growl of frustration. “Guardians, why isn’t this working?”

All Cirang heard was the gurgling of the stream and the birds in the trees. The king seemed to be listening. His face changed, becoming less angry and more sympathetic.

“Sorry I hollered at you,” he said. “I didn’t realize...”

“What did they say?” Daia asked.

“The talent for carving is in you, but it’s in your soul—the part of you that’s Sithral Tyr. When we’re born with a special talent, like Daia’s conduit or Feanna’s empathy, the talent is of the soul, but it manifests through the essence. Your essence belonged to Cirang, not Tyr, and so your talent for carving never made it through.”

That coincided with how she felt inside—that the talent was there, yet distant like a memory.

“So does that mean she’s worthless?” Daia asked.

“O’course not. It means we got to pull it out. Infuse her essence with it. Make it Cirang’s talent, not just Tyr’s.”

A quiet warning whispered to Cirang in the back of her mind. “How do we do that?” she asked. Her voice was small like a child’s.

“I got to reach in and pull it out. I’ve never done anything like that afore now, but the Guardians assure me it isn’t dangerous, even if I don’t get it.”

A memory surfaced from Tyr’s life.

He was tied to a pole, his arms lashed to a crossbeam, and a leather disk shoved into his mouth to bite down on. The clan shaman, holding a leather-wrapped wand with a gold bulb at one end, began chanting. A pain more intense than his mind could even comprehend started in his belly and crept through his entire body as if something inside was burning its way out.

That something had been his soul, torn from his body and imprisoned in a green porcelain cat figurine.

Cirang shuddered, and her shudder became a quiver, an uncontrollable shaking.
No, no, no.
Her instinct was to run, but he would stop her with magic and pull her back, the way he’d pulled those vicious dogs off her in the other realm. Her teeth chattered, and she clamped her jaw tightly shut to hide her fear.

“Do you trust me?” the king asked.

How could she answer that? He’d never done this before. He’d never even heard of this before. It was like a child preparing to cut out a tumor and asking if she trusted him.

He put his hand on her shoulder, so warm and comforting. She wanted to trust him. She had to. There was no other choice. Swallowing down her misgivings, she nodded.

Chapter 48

While King Gavin listened to the Guardians, she watched his face. He appeared to truly believe they existed; he looked at a particular spot, he nodded, he questioned them about details. Still, Cirang couldn’t shake the notion that somewhere along the way, he’d gone raving mad, that the only voices he heard were those of insanity, of people who existed only in his mind.

“Awright,” he said, now setting those intense brown eyes on her. They looked determined and confident, not mad. “It should only take a minute. I can see the skill deep inside you. It’s attached to your spirit, out o’your essence’s reach. I got to pull it a bit—not all the way out but enough for it to get, I don’t know. Lodged. Yeh, enough for it to get lodged in your essence.”

She took a reflexive step backwards, though she felt herself nodding in acquiescence. Her heel hit something, and she stumbled, flailed, and caught herself.

“You’re afeared o’this,” he said in a gentle tone. “I promise you’ll be glad for it when it’s over. You want your talent back, don’t you?”

Again she nodded, swallowing the grit that was stuck in her throat. Her body quaked even harder, and she couldn’t stop it.

“Let’s get it over with,” Daia said from behind. “King Gavin wants to get home to his wife.”

Cirang flinched and turned. They were trying to trap her, to strap her to a pole and rip her soul out.
Run
, her instinct told her. Her feet felt light, as if they were ready to obey.

Daia gripped her upper arm. “You owe him your life. If this is to be your death, then so be it. You don’t have a say in this. Submit willingly, or Hennah and I’ll make you submit, but you’re doing this one way or the other.”

“Get a hold of yourself, Cirang,” Hennah said, grabbing her other arm. “Your king needs you. Put aside whatever fear you have.”

It was easy for them to say. They’d never had their souls ripped out. “I’m trying, but the memory is so clear, like it only happened this morning.”

“What memory?” King Gavin asked.

“Of the separation. When my soul was torn from me and trapped in the porcelain cat.”

The three of them looked at each other with wonderment in their faces. She’d never talked about it. There hadn’t been any reason to.

“That’s not what I’m going to do,” King Gavin said. “I promise. I need your talent, Cirang. I need you to carve runes for me. I wouldn’t do anything that would make that impossible.”

She swallowed again. “Will it hurt?” Her voice was not the deep voice she’d grown accustomed to, but small like a little girl’s.

“I don’t know. If it does, I apologize for that, but this, I got to do.”

All her life as both a Nilmarion man and a Viragon Sister, she’d been strong, the one others counted on to keep a clear mind and step in front of whatever dangers threatened her people. Now, she felt nothing but fear, perhaps a side effect of having drunk the tainted water. King Gavin had told her that her essence was completely zhi now, the opposite of what she’d been for the last several years of Tyr’s life. She wondered whether he could fix her too—to find someone in the yellow realm with whom to exchange her essence and make her more like the person she’d been before committing her first murder. Before slipping on that enchanted necklace Ravenkind had given her. Before darkness and chaos had begun to infiltrate her mind.

With all the will she could muster, she forced her body to stand still and stop shaking. “Yes,” she said, her deep voice returned. “I understand. I submit willingly.”

They found a place to sit, with Daia to King Gavin’s left and Cirang facing him. Hennah stood by, ready to react in whatever way she was needed, though none of them knew what to expect.

His eyes rolled back slightly beneath his lowered lids and started to quiver the way they did when he was using his so-called hidden eye. A tickling sensation in her gut told her he’d begun.

The tickling became a vibration, like how the shock of a sword tip striking rock rippled up the blade to the hilt. She felt something like a fist reaching into her, burning as it went deeper. She gritted her teeth, and her hands flexed, groping for something on the sides of her hips to hold onto. All she found were weeds and grasses, and she ripped them out and groped for more. The pain grew more intense as the burning deepened. She growled, trying to contain it, her hands groping and ripping. A hand grasped her wrist and put something into her palm—something leather. With both hands, she pulled it and dug her fingers into it while she endured the pain.

Soon, it’ll be over
, she thought.
A bit more.

Except it wasn’t just a bit more. It was only beginning. The burning became a searing, like her bones were blackening and growing brittle. She couldn’t even beg him to stop, so intense was the pain. She gripped the leather in her hands and tensed all her muscles as if she could push the pain out.

“Breathe, Cirang,” Hennah said quietly.

She huffed quickly through her gritted teeth. That didn’t help, and she held her breath again.

Just kill me
, she wanted to say. Death would be a kindness. If she could have spoken, she’d have begged for it. She willed herself to die, to give up and let it take her. The fire inside consumed her and she no longer fought against it, hoping it would only last another moment. But one moment became another, and the pain began to draw outward again. Perhaps it was her soul being pulled out once more, this time to be released into the afterlife, whatever that might be. This time, she would be free.

Something within her awakened, no longer submitting to death. The searing lessened to burning and then to a dull ache before fading away completely, leaving behind a feeling of profound creativity, the likes of which she had never felt before. Ideas and feelings combined into images in her head. Images of wood blocks morphing into shapes. Images of symbols drawing themselves onto the surfaces of not only rocks but of wood and leather. She needed to release them through her hands.

“Cirang?” King Gavin asked. “You awright?”

She opened her eyes and found herself lying on her side. Hennah helped her sit up, thankfully, since her muscles felt completely drained. Her hand trembled with exhaustion as she reached up to pull a sprig of grass from her hair. She looked around at her companions, unable to hide a smile. “Yes, I’m fine. I’m more than fine. I’m a bloody carver.”

The three of them cheered and clapped her shoulders and rubbed her hair. For the first time since her days as a Viragon Sister, she felt needed and valued. She felt like she truly belonged.

“Let’s try the rune again,” Daia said.

“I’m betting Cirang needs a rest first,” King Gavin said. “Maybe something to eat.”

Cirang nodded and struggled to get up to start the preparations.

“You rest,” Hennah said, standing. “I’ll take care of it.”

“My thanks,” Cirang said, collapsing back to the ground.

The sun cast an orange glow across the still water of the lake, and a fish broke the surface to grab an insect that had flown too low. The urge to carve it onto the surface of a wood plank made her fingers twitch. Even as Tyr, her talent hadn’t been so crisp or compelling. Yes, she remembered awakening in the night with ideas for sculptures and boxes and scrollwork, but the need hadn’t been this deep. It hadn’t burned within him.

By the time supper was prepared and eaten, night had fallen. She saw patterns in the stars she’d never seen before, stories in the sky that were meant to be retold in wood or stone. Though she was tired, she was too excited to try sleeping. The passion within her needed to be released.

“Eager to get started?” King Gavin asked. The glow of the cookfire between them lit his scarred and scruffy face with an orange glow.

Cirang hadn’t realized she’d unsheathed her dagger and was turning its handle around and around in her palm. She smiled. “Yes, the talent is not only awakened. It’s restless.” A chisel would have been easier to use for this, but she worked with what she had.

He dug into his coin pouch and pulled out a stone, which he tossed to her. She caught it and studied it—the Rune of Summoning—and ran her finger along the grooves. Now she felt the lines of the rune—the true lines, deeper than those on the surface. The ones that were the source of the magic within them.

She looked up at the king, puzzled. Sithral Tyr had found the summoning rune a few years earlier in the cellar that had once belonged to Crigoth Sevae. The talent she had now had been Tyr’s, and yet he hadn’t felt the lines the way she did now. Something more was involved here. Had King Gavin given her something extra? Perhaps left behind a touch of his own magic to enhance the natural talent within Tyr’s soul?

He must have sensed her question, because he winked at her and immediately glanced at Daia as if to say,
Don’t tell. She won’t approve.

She struggled to her feet, eager to try the etching but almost too tired to do it. By the light of the king’s magic light ball, she made her way to the stream and let her knees collapse, sitting hard on a rock. He straddled the stream and squatted low enough to scoop water with both hands. The part of her mind that was giddy now imagined him losing his balance and falling arse first into the stream. She giggled.

“You all right?”

“Just happy,” she said.

With the rune stone in her left hand, she began to re-etch and renew the lines with her dagger, pausing now and then to feel them freshen and clear away the signature of the previous summoning. It reminded her of a time, years earlier, when Tyr sat by his dying son’s bed and rubbed the ward lines on the boy’s sleeping face, trying to stir them to action, to stimulate the magic within them, to enable the innocent child to commune with the gods and receive their protection.