The Shattered Vine (9 page)

Ximen would show them no less honor, now.

“Boys,” the voice next to him muttered. “Weak-chinned boys hiding behind their little knives.”

“Be respectful, or be silent,” Ximen said, barely moving his mouth as he spoke, to hide the rebuke from their audience. He did not know why the vine-mage had chosen to travel with him; he had not summoned the man, had not told him of his plans, merely walked out in the morning to find him there, leg slung over a wild-eyed beast who shied away when
a stable girl came to take the reins and would not settle until the mage was off its back and paces away.

The older man scowled, but fell silent. His cloak was raised to protect his skin from the sunlight, and the hood pulled forward to shade his aged face. If it weren’t for the belt double-wrapped at his waist, the long-handled spoon dangling at his hip, he would look like a flesh-eating shade out of legend, hiding from the natural light, intent on doing harm to the living.

Ximen shut down the thought that such legends often came from truth, and focused on the men waiting for him. They were strong and brave, their features sharp and intent, their skins weathered from exposure to the elements, eighty-four scions of the strongest blood of the Grounding. Most had the broad cheekbones and bronzed coloring of the native families, but occasionally a narrow-boned face, pale-colored hair, or startlingly blue eyes like Ximen’s own appeared, a throwback to one of the original Grounded.

“Next week is the Day of Grounding,” he told them, letting his voice carry on the rising breeze, willing it to travel over the assembled ranks, down the line and beyond, out into the danger-filled hills and whatever might be listening there. “The day that commemorates how our forefathers came to this land, full of hope, only to be dashed against the shores by betrayal and greed.”

Others might hear and believe only the softer version of history; how their forefathers explored under the flag of the old world, and, on arriving here, cast away that flag and struck out on their own. These men, though, who gave up their lives for the safety of others; they knew some of the truth.

Some. Not all. That alone was the Praepositus’s burden to carry.

“But they did not let that betrayal break them,” Ximen went on, warming to his speech. “They did not let that greed overwhelm them, or make them bitter. No! They landed on their knees but rose to their feet, and claimed this land they had been promised by the lords of the old
lands. Here they built their homes, here they tended the soil, and made it into a home.”

A home? A prison, more like. Bounded by the too-wide seas on one end and the hills at their back, where even these men went only in patrols of ten or more, heavily armed, and counted themselves fortunate if they were not attacked by things howling out of the night. . . .

As he, Praepositus, was bounded and hounded by the man at his side. Ximen kept a shudder of revulsion from ripping his skin as the vine-mage stepped a pace too close. The man was bathed and groomed as befitted his station, no different from any other day in all the years Ximen had been forced to deal with the mage, and yet there was something rotted in his smell today that made Ximen feel much as the gelding had; the need to throw the man from his back and race away.

Like the gelding, he could do no such thing. They were bound together, he and the vine-mage, for good or ill, to achieve their goals.

The thought made him ill, but now was far too late to reconsider the wisdom of that alliance; events were in motion and the men were waiting, hanging on his words as they carried through the air, down the lines. “Next week we will venerate those men who had such courage. And you will be with us on that shoreline in spirit and in courage, if not in flesh. We carry your sacrifice as we carry theirs, and we will honor you in the flames, even as we honor them.”

His voice made it a promise; they would not be forgotten. They would not be abandoned. Whatever happened in the years to come, they would be part of it.

He could practically see the ripple pass through the lines as they stood a little taller, their spears and bows held so that the metal tips caught the morning sunlight and reflected it back off the walls rather than blinding anyone within—a gesture they must have perfected over the years and handed down to each new man on the wall.

These men were the best the Grounding had. He hated knowing that he lied to them.

*   *   *

“I
NEED TWENTY.
”

“No.”

“I am not here to Negotiate, Ximen.”

The man’s voice was like a snake, curling and uncurling, hiding under leaves until it could strike. The very sound of it made Ximen ill. The Praepositus took a deep breath, the way Bo always reminded him to, and let it out, slowly, carefully, listening to the sound it made, a soft puff of wind in the otherwise still room. “And I am not here to give you my men for your workings. Is that not why you have slaves? Use them.” He did not know what the vine-mage needed the men for. . . .

No, that was a lie, and while he might mislead his men to achieve a further goal, Ximen would not lie to himself. He knew. He never spoke of the pits where bodies lay, unnamed and unmentioned. He never spoke of the sacrifices—the unacknowledged deaths—that fed both the vine-mage’s magic and Ximen’s own ambitions. But Ximen knew. He knew of the outbuilding where slaves went in, but did not come out. He knew that there were things that his vine-mage did that could not be condoned, and yet he condoned them by his silence.

“Pfaugh. Slaves are good for much. For most of my workings, they are what I require. But in this instance, I need not magic but strength, not sensitivity but courage. And I require the best. Give me twenty.”

The vine-mage was serious. He sat there, a goblet in his hands, and asked for the lives of twenty men as though requesting a sheet of paper.

And it would be their lives; Ximen had no doubt of that. Twenty, plus the season’s Harvest . . . no. Slaves were the vine-mage’s to dispose of as he would, but these were his men. He would sooner give his own arm to a wild dog. The Harvest sacrifices were tradition, those chosen publicly honored, a means of tying the community together in shared loss and honor. This . . . this would be mere slaughter.

The vine-mage had no such qualms. “You owe me,
Praepositus
. For the plans you needed for your ships, for the safety I give your men, the ability to power your dreams . . . you
owe
me.”

He remembered the look of the men on the Wall: proud, eager,
willing to do anything he asked of them, because he carried that title. The smell that rose off the vine-mage had faded, here within the stone enclosure of the Wall-House, but it still lingered in Ximen’s nostrils, making him wary and not inclined to give the other man anything more.

“You promise, and you reassure, and you demand . . . but you have shown me nothing, yet,” he said instead. “We are nearly at the day of announcement, years in the planning, and all I have is your assurance that the Old World is ripe for the taking, that their lords are in disarray and distracted, that their mages are weakened to the point of being no threat. And, yet. I have no proof.”

Ximen knew full well that there was no way to gain proof of the sort he desired; it was too far a distance to fly messenger-birds, and the few fireposts they had built carried news up and down the coastline, not across it. The Grounding had never been able to build ships that could cross back over the great waters, not safely. They had neither the skills nor the materials, their few ships slighter things that needed to hug the shoreline, not speed into the deeps.

That was why he had needed the vine-mage, originally, to conjure the sketches and plans, steal the knowledge of how to build the ships they needed. And now he asked his people to go beyond all that they knew, making ships that would carry them out of sight of the life-giving shore, to travel the waves that had brought them here seven generations before, without any idea what might await them in those far distant lands. All was ready, waiting only his announcement, the unveiling of his Great Plan, to tell them what they had been working for.

Ximen had thought, in the beginning, to return in triumph; surely there had been some there who mourned the loss of their men, who remembered the ships that did not return, and would welcome them, the long-lost sons and their new lands, claimed for the family’s name. When, at what moment, had that dream turned to bitter mint in his mouth?

But if he did not know when, he knew full well
why
.

Everything, every plan, every dream he had based the future on
was built on the assurances of the old man who now sat across from him and demanded the lives of free men,
his
men, as though they were naught but game pieces, of no value save the use he put them to.

For the first time in too many years, Ximen looked into the vine-mage’s rheumy eyes and let himself see what lived within. They stared at each other, unblinking, and a part of Ximen wondered, uneasily, how much of that madness had infected
him
.

J
erzy had seen
the way Kaïnam looked at him, cautiously, studying him in the aftermath of his collapse in the village, and he understood the concern, but there was no need. The healing spell itself had been surprisingly simple, and once he recovered from the shock of what he had felt, his only driving desire was to put his feet down on familiar soil.

The thought crept in that mayhaps Kaï was right to worry, that he could not be certain the malaise had been entirely driven out, but he felt well enough to go on, and that was the important thing now: getting back to the House, and the yard.

Once they parted ways with the solitaire, he tried to lose himself in the familiar landscape. The road passed along gently rolling, plowed fields of wheat and barley, ringed by wooded groves whose trunks were thick around with age, their leaves turning with autumn colors. The villages became more scarce as the ground became less fertile, low fences running across the landscape at irregular angles, the occasional red-patched cow or shaggy-coated sheep stopping to watch them as they rode past. It all looked as it should, and yet the closer they came to home, the more uneasy Jerzy felt. The malaise in the village had not
been able to touch him, driven out by the residue of magics within him, the tangle of legacies flooding his blood, but he could feel it now, everywhere around him. The village had been a pool, but the malaise seeped everywhere, slowly enough to raise no alarms, nothing more than a grumble of discontent at ill luck and bad weather.

How long had it been here? Had he been blind, before?

Jerzy shifted on the wooden bench of the wagon, first stretching his legs and then twisting, trying to work out a crick that didn’t exist, causing the patient horse in the traces to stop and wait for new instructions.

“Enough,” Mahault said finally. She swung off her horse, even as Jerzy pulled up the reins to the cart horse in surprise, making the beast stop once again. “You, take my horse and work out whatever’s itching you. I will drive the wagon.”

Rather than ride, however, Jerzy tied the horse to the wagon’s rail and walked alongside, stretching his muscles and letting his feet make contact with the soil.

It wasn’t the same as when he’d walked barefoot in the field, but even through the soles of his boots he could feel the earth respond, the sense of something alive, if not aware. Under the malaise, the land still knew him, responded to him.

That awareness brought home something else as well. So intent on returning to The Berengia, of ensuring that Ao would have access to the proper spellwines to heal and that he would be able to regain his own strength among the vines of his proper legacy, Jerzy had not let himself think overmuch about the passing of the seasons. Now, he could think of nothing save that.

He had left in the growing season. He had missed Harvest. The grapes would have been picked; Detta had promised him that, and as House-keeper she could make it so. But without a Vineart . . . the fruit would have been crushed and abandoned, the vats of mustus waiting in vain for a Vineart’s touch. The things he had not allowed himself to think of, had not time or energy to think about, on their journey, settled
against his neck now, as heavy as the wagon trundling along next to him.

As they walked, the wheels of the wagon and the clomp of the horses’ hooves a steady accompaniment, a nightbird sang somewhere, and when he looked up, narrow blue and pink clouds gathered in the sky, giving a foretaste of night.

The days were becoming shorter, cooler. Soon it would be Fallowtime, when the earth lay still and Vinearts turned their attention to other matters, clearing away the debris of the growing and harvest seasons and mending their equipment, buying new slaves and sorting inventory in the cellars, incanting the slower-maturing spellwines, and deciding what to sell and what to keep.

Jerzy suspected there would be little of that routine for him; his time would of necessity be turned toward arts more martial than magic, of clearing the damage done rather than preparing it for new growth, and the thought was actual pain.

Guardian?
he thought, almost barely daring to reach out for fear that he would still hear nothing, even this close, and was rewarded by the cool weight of stone slipping into him, taking some of the burden off his neck even as it pressed—comfortingly—against his heart and lungs.

Almost home,
he told it, and felt the stone dragon let out a distant growl that rumbled down his spine, like a cat’s purr grown immensely deep.

The moment the growl reached the soles of his feet, it was as though his awareness of the ground expanded, went even deeper, until he could feel not only the soil itself but the roots that still lay several hours away, the vineyards of the House of Malech.

His vines.

That easily, that suddenly, he could hear them whispering to each other, soft murmurings, like the morning wind over waves. The whispers said nothing, communicated nothing, but merely affirmed:
We are
. They were. And in their being,
he
was.