Isles of the Forsaken (13 page)

So that was what this was about. Spaeth forced down the indignant protest that rose in her throat. Argen made it sound as if they owned her.

“Harg’s not exactly a stranger,” Tish pointed out.

“No, we all know what he is, and for him to be hanging around her . . . well, it’s unseemly.”

At last Mother Pilt spoke up. Her voice was thin and piping as a bird’s, but her air was one of authority. The others fell silent. “These are unsettled times. None of us quite know how to behave. First the Torna came, and while their wealth is welcome, it caused rivalry and dissent. Then that Inning started poking into people’s affairs. Then Harg and Jory came back, and we’ve had nothing but problems ever since.”

She paused. “But there are things more worrisome than any of this. Goth is gone, we don’t know why. But there is reason to fear some grave imbalance in the world.”

Seven wary faces turned to Spaeth.

“Spaeth,” said Mother Tish, “let me see your hand.”

An irrational reluctance seized her. She forced herself to hold out her hand. Tish motioned someone to give her an oil lamp, and she held it close to examine Spaeth’s nails. She gave a soft click of the tongue and the others gathered round to see. It was only then that Spaeth saw the dark half-circles at the base of her nails.

“As I thought,” Tish said, sitting back. “The Black Mask.”

Frowning, Spaeth crossed her arms, hiding her hands away. “What do you mean?” she said.

“Has Goth never told you about this?”

She shook her head. They all exchanged significant looks.

Mother Tish leaned forward into the lamplight, her voice grave and urgent. “Spaeth, this is serious. You know that the world we live in is not a safe one. Since time began this circle has been a battlefield. The Mundua and the Ashwin have fought their shadowy war on our very shores, and mankind has survived only by tact and vigilance. We must maintain the balance of forces at all costs, or all we love will be destroyed.”

“I know,” Spaeth said.

“Pain is the inroad of imbalance into our minds. It makes us susceptible to the manipulations of the forces of disorder. That is why dhota exists: because unhealed people are a danger, not just to themselves, but to the world around them. They are cancers where imbalance breeds.

“When your ancestors by their terrible crime brought suffering into our world, they created you, the Grey Folk, to help set right what they had made wrong. They gave you the power to take on our pain so that the forces of imbalance would have no tools among us. But they could not give you that power without also giving you its sibling.”

Her voice dropped very low. “Grey Folk were not given the choice to refuse dhota. Unless they do what they were created for, the Black Mask comes upon them. First the fingertips turn black, then if they still refuse, the hands and feet, and then the disease flows inward till all their blood is poison. Gradually, their limbs, then their whole bodies dissolve and turn to slime.”

A moth had found the flame of one of the lamps and was throwing flickering shadows of its own death on the walls. Outside, a cricket began to chirp, loud and rhythmic in the hushed air. Spaeth sat rigid. Her mouth felt like sawdust.

Tish said, “If Goth were here, we would ask him to handle this. Since he is not, we must do it ourselves. Spaeth, you must fulfill your ancestors’ covenant with our community. You must give dhota at once.”

They wanted her safely bound to someone on Yora, so that she could never escape. They had begun to think that Goth would never return, and they did not want to lose her.

There was hunger in all their eyes. Spaeth looked around the circle of them, and they seemed to have changed. They were wizened shells, animated only by the desire that shone out through their eyes. Goth had given them dhota too many times. They were addicted to it.

She stood abruptly. “I’m not obliged to give dhota to you.” In the flickering light they looked half maddened by their need. She had to get away.

“No,” said Tish, also rising. “We know that. But there is someone who needs you more than we do. We have talked it over, Spaeth, and we wish to claim dhota on Jory’s behalf.”

Spaeth looked around, tense and suspicious. “I don’t know Jory.”

“Come and see him, Spaeth. He was such a handsome young man, so full of life and joy. Without you, he has no future. Your heart would go out to him, I know.”

They had all risen now, and were standing in a circle around her. It was a trick, she thought; somehow they thought they could force her.

“Dhota must be freely given,” she said. “Otherwise it will not work.”

“We know that. Just come and see him. Then you can go home if you want, and make up your mind.”

“I need to think it over.”

“That’s right. Just see his situation, and then you can take all the time you want.”

“You promise?”

They all nodded. It seemed like a way out. She would just look at him to satisfy them, then escape.

They all set out down the path together. When they came near Agath’s house, Spaeth could see through the trees that the lights were burning and the front door stood open. A loose group of people was waiting in the yard. When they saw her coming, one man went inside. She pushed past the gathering in the yard without a word to get into the safety of the house.

Inside, Agath’s house was crowded full of friends and relatives. Every eye in the room turned to her in expectant silence. In a glance she saw that Goth’s bowl and knife lay waiting on a table. Someone must have gone up to her cottage to fetch them so they would be here for her, so she would have no excuse to leave.

The people from the yard crowded in behind her and closed the door. Stiffly, Spaeth said, “Where is he?” Her words sounded muffled, as if all the listening ears had eaten them as they left her lips.

“Over here, Grey Lady,” Tish said soberly.

The title made Spaeth feel like a stranger. Goth had slipped so effortlessly from symbol to person and back again, they all thought she could do the same.

Jory was sitting on the edge of a low cot in one corner, dressed only in shorts. Tish had been right, he was a handsome young man, well built and muscular; but every few seconds he twitched convulsively, his muscles contracting and head jerking to one side.

Spaeth could feel the eyes beating on her back as she approached him. “Jory?” she said softly.

He looked up at her. His face was drawn with exhaustion and frustration at the battle he was having to fight with a body that seemed possessed. His eyes pleaded with her. “Grey Lady,” he whispered. “Can you help me?”

At the sight of his suffering, everything else fled from her mind. He was fighting so bravely even to sit up straight, it made her heart sore; she could not simply walk away. Impulsively, she reached out to take his face between her hands. The instant she touched him, she could feel the damage in his head. She ran her fingers through his curly hair, feeling the indentation in his skull. There was something underneath it, a dark place of clotted blood and scar, and a jagged shard of black metal still embedded. It was a horrible, savage wound that frightened her even to touch.

He was looking at her with desperation. “Can you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. It wasn’t an evasion, just the truth. She had never encountered an injury like this before. But she found she couldn’t let go of his brave, tortured body. She felt a maddening urge to help him, no matter the consequences.

She closed her eyes and swallowed with an effort. This was why Goth had told her about the need for steely self-discipline, to control the delicious yearning that human pain would always wake in her, so she would not be a victim of blind instinct. But before she could gather her resistance, his muscles convulsed in her hands, and a keen desire pulsed through her body. In that instant, all her resolutions shattered. She had to do it.

“Give me the knife,” she said. Her words sounded slurred. Tish placed the stone blade in her hand, and in a rational remnant of her mind Spaeth realized that the elders must have known this would happen, just as it always happened to Goth. But she had no time left for resentment; the yearning had grown too acute.

She had to breathe deeply for a moment, to get control of her shaking, sweaty hands. Carefully, reining in her sense of urgency, she found a vein in her arm and made a small cut. Never having done it before, she did not cut deep enough, and no blood came. Steeling herself, she cut again, deeper, and this time a trickle of wine-coloured blood ran down her arm. Tish held out the silver-lined bowl, and she let the blood fall into it. When there was enough, she dipped two fingers into it and touched it to Jory’s forehead, then his temples, then his throat. Almost at once the blood lost its deep colour and turned clear as water, disappearing into the skin. As she touched the last of the blood to his chest, just above the heart, she could feel his mind stirring and waking inside hers.

“Look at me, Jory,” she said.

For the first time in days, the quivering in his body stilled, his muscles relaxed, and he turned to her. His pupils contracted as if he looked into a bright light. “Who is it?” he whispered.

She wanted to caress him, to press her cheek against his. She held back; in a few moments they would share an intimacy far deeper than that.

“I am going to come into you,” she said. “Don’t resist. We’re going to go together all through your body. When you find anything that doesn’t belong, push it into me. With every breath, breathe out the evil. Let me take it from you.”

She sank into him them. Every nerve in her body thrilled; she felt fuller than she had ever been. When she penetrated his mind there was a tremor of fear and he choked, his body instinctively trying to repel her. She stroked his chest, calming him till she had entered deep inside him. All his memories, his guilts, his passions and hurts, were hers as well.

The injury was like black rot in a fruit, reaching deep into his brain. She made him see it, so he could push it from his body. There was no way to be rid of it but to tear it out, pull it by the roots. He tried, then stopped, groaning with the pain.

“I know it hurts,” she whispered. “But you have to do it. A little at a time.”

He clenched his jaw and steeled himself to carve out the first patch of rot from his own flesh, gasping with the effort. When she turned him to the next one he held back, clutching at her. She stroked his forehead and whispered encouragement in his mind, waiting till he was ready. There would be no cure unless he did it himself.

Bit by bit Spaeth gathered the blackness into her own body. She could not yet feel its effect, only the intense pleasure of sharing Jory’s pain. With every minute, the bond grew between them, like a strong, elastic cord from heart to heart. Already she felt a tenderness for him so intense it made tears start to her eyes.

Jory was exhausted with the effort at last; his weakened body could take no more. “You’re very brave,” she said. She felt an intoxicating love for him. She wanted to stay buried in his mind forever.

This was the most dangerous moment. She could not stay linked to him; against all instinct, she must sever the bond. Yet no effort of hers would be sufficient; there had to be some sudden shock, as of pain, to draw her out.

She groped for the knife; Tish pressed it into her hand. Far away behind her there was a stir in the crowd of onlookers. She said to Jory, “I have all your injury inside me now. I am going to take it away, and you must give it to me. Are you ready?” He nodded, gazing at her still and entranced.

She paused, steeling herself. The instant she withdrew, all his injuries would flood into her at once. They couldn’t kill her, but they could make her far more ill than Jory.

There was a tumult behind her. “Stop this barbaric rubbish!” someone shouted. “It’s stupid and useless!”

She swayed, distracted; the words flamed across her vision. For a moment she thought the knife had cracked in two; then she realized it was the bond with Jory that had snapped, recoiling into her face with stinging force. She spun around.

Three men were trying to restrain the Inning from striding forward and seizing the knife from her hand. His face was hot with indignation. He said loudly, “This man has had the best medical care in the world. No sacrifices or mutilation can do him any good.”

Anger roared in Spaeth’s ears. She wanted to bury the blade in his heart. Instead, she bared her arm and slashed deep across it, the cut that was supposed to seal the dhota bond.

The Inning gave a cry of horror.

“Get him out of here!” she commanded. Three men forced him from the cottage. Spaeth watched till he was gone, the precious blood dripping unheeded from her arm onto the floor. When she turned back to Jory, she knew with a glassy clarity that it had not worked. The bond had broken prematurely. The evil had flowed back into him, not into her.

She stood numbly as Mother Tish rubbed ashes into the cut to make it scar, then bandaged it tight. People were filtering out, thinking the drama was over. They did not know yet. They thought it had gone well. In all their years they had never known dhota to fail. Neither had Spaeth.

“You should lie down, Spaeth.” It was Mother Tish, speaking in that voice she reserved for children, sick people, and dhotamars.

“I feel fine,” Spaeth’s voice grated. That was just the problem. By now she should be in the grip of Jory’s injury. He had fallen back unconscious on the cot. She longed to press him close, to gather him back to her, but she fought for self-control. There was no bandhota bond between them; the Inning had broken it.

“Would you like to go home?” Tish asked.

“Yes,” Spaeth said. “I need to be alone.” She had to get away before they found out she had failed.

The night was cool outside, and the wind that touched her hot cheeks still had the smell of the departed rain. She walked home from Agath’s house, listening to the trees sigh and rustle. Far off in the east, thunder growled hungrily. She did not see the shadowy form waiting on the porch of her cottage till she was almost upon it, and he rose to meet her.