[New Arc: The Silent Cradle]
The Sky-Hart moved like a secret that mother nature was trying to keep.
Fenn had been tracking it for the better part of an hour, padding barefoot through the soft amber moss of the lower fungal groves, close enough twice to hear the slow musical exhale of its breath. He'd seen them before, three times, maybe four, but never like this. Never alone, never this close to the Mirror Lake's western shore, never at this hour when the crystal ceiling above pulsed in its long, deep amber phase that the elders called second-dusk, though Fenn had never understood what a first-dusk was meant to feel like.
He pressed himself behind the wide, ribbed trunk of a phos-pillar mushroom and peered around it, and there she was.
She was grazing at the edge of the treeline, half in shadow, half in the slow amber light that dripped down from the geode's ceiling like warm honey. A mare, he thought, her build was slender and she carried herself with the particular unhurried composure of a creature that had simply never needed to be afraid.
Her coat was the colour of old gold, every strand catching the ambient luminescence and holding it, amplifying it slightly, so that she seemed to generate her own soft halo even in the shade. The mane that draped along her arched neck did not move like hair. It pooled and rippled in an unfelt breeze, liquid threads of pale light shifting between silver and the faintest blush of rose-gold as she turned her head, chewing slowly, magnificently unconcerned.
The horn rose from her brow in a single clean spiral, pearlescent and prismatic. When the ambient crystal light caught its facets at the right angle, it scattered small rainbows across the moss floor like dropped coins.
Fenn forgot to breathe.
He had a small charcoal pencil tucked behind his ear, he always had one, a habit his grandmother called the Nemorei way, though he suspected it was just his own particular madness, and his fingers found it without his permission, pulling it free and pressing it to the inside of his wrist where he kept a strip of pale drawing skin stretched over a thin wooden backing like a bracer. He began sketching in tiny, furious strokes. The curve of the jaw. The arc of that impossible neck. The way the light collected in the hollows of her shoulder like water finding its lowest point.
She raised her head.
Fenn went absolutely still.
The Sky-Hart looked directly at him. Her eyes were the colour of the crystal ceiling at high-noon, a pale, luminous amber with no visible pupil, just depth, endless and warm and utterly without malice. She regarded him for a long moment with the patience of something very old looking at something very young. Then she looked away, back toward the lake.
Fenn let out his breath in one long, trembling stream.
She began to walk.
He followed. He couldn't not. The pull was less a decision than a tide, his feet simply moved, carrying him along the treeline as she drifted toward the shore. Her hooves made almost no sound, just the faintest impression in the moss, and she moved with a slow, building rhythm, a walking pace that eased gradually into a trot, then into something longer and more purposeful.
Fenn matched her. His thermal-paint markings, smeared dots and curved lines across both cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, worn low enough to catch the light from below, flickered faintly as he broke into a jog, the warmth of exertion activating the pigment. In the darker corridors of Amalthea, the markings made him look like a young spirit. Out here, in the amber grove-light, they just made him look like what he was, a fourteen-year-old boy running full-tilt after a mythological creature with a drawing bracer on one wrist and absolutely no plan.
She broke into a gallop.
Oh no, he thought, and ran.
He was fast, faster than most of his age-cohort, and in the Stone-Born competitions held in the lower squares he could usually take second place over distance. But this was not a competition. This was a Sky-Hart at full stride, hooves churning the moss into brief green sparks, her mane streaming behind her like a comet's tail, and Fenn was sprinting so hard his lungs began to report grievances. He burst out of the fungal forest at full speed, arms pumping, and ahead of him the shore of the Mirror Lake opened up in all its impossible width, a freshwater expanse so still it doubled the crystal ceiling perfectly, so that standing at its edge was like standing at the boundary between two identical worlds stacked on top of each other, above and below.
The Sky-Hart did not slow at the water's edge.
She ran across it.
Her hooves struck the surface and kept going, each footfall condensing the air just below the lake with a small, bright compression, leaving momentary rings of disturbed light on the still water below her as if she were running over an enormous mirror and her reflection was struggling to keep up.
Three strides. Five. She was twenty metres out over the water and still going, her pace if anything more confident now, more fully herself, as if the solid ground had always been a compromise and this was simply how she was meant to move. She reached the edge of the air above the lake where the false sky's bioluminescence hung lowest and thickest, and she angled upward, hooves finding nothing and everything, and she lifted.
Fenn stopped at the waterline, gasping, his hands on his knees, watching.
She galloped upward at a shallow angle like a ship climbing a long swell. The light from the crystal ceiling gathered against her coat and she blazed, briefly, magnificently, a golden shape ascending through amber into pale white, her mane dissolving into pure light at its trailing edges. He could hear, very faintly, the sound of her breathing, deep and rhythmic and slow, completely unbothered, until the height swallowed it.
She rose until she was a bright point among the bioluminescent formations above, and then she was gone, folded into the light.
Fenn straightened up.
He stood there for a moment with his hands hanging at his sides, the charcoal pencil still clutched in his right fist, a stupid and involuntary smile spreading across his face until his cheeks pushed against the thermal-paint markings hard enough to make them glow.
That, he thought, is going in the book.
He was already reaching for his bracer to add detail to the rough lines he'd scratched in during the approach when his eyes, drifting back down from the sky, settled on the shoreline to his left, and he stopped.
There were two people lying on the grass.
He approached them the way he approached most uncertainties, immediately, without sufficient caution, and with his neck craned forward like he was trying to read a sign from a distance.
They were face-down, both of them, half on the dry grass and half in the shallows, their clothes waterlogged and dark. The older one, taller, probably older by several years, his skin a warm brown and his short, tightly coiled hair pressed flat and dripping, was sprawled on his side, one arm extended, fingers curled loosely around nothing. The younger one lay a little further up the bank, smaller, folded in on himself the way very small animals lie when they've been frightened into stillness.
Fenn crouched between them and looked from one to the other.
He poked the tall one on the shoulder. Nothing.
He poked him again, firmer. Nothing.
He went to the small one and leaned close, close enough to see the shallow, rapid flutter of his breathing, fast, too fast, chest hitching like it couldn't quite complete its own rhythm, and noticed immediately that the boy's face was wrong. Not in feature, just in temperature.
He was visibly flushed, a bright, unnatural flush that stained his round cheeks and the hollows of his eyes even through the pallor underneath, and when Fenn rested two fingers against his forehead the way his grandmother had taught him, the heat was instant and startling, like pressing your hand to a kettle that was only just short of the boil.
He pulled his fingers back and sat on his heels.
His first thought, plainly and clearly, was, I should go get the guards.
His second thought arrived almost simultaneously, crowding the first thought out entirely, and it was, But they'll take them, and I'll never find out where they came from.
He looked at the false sky where the Sky-Hart had gone. He looked at the two strangers. He looked at the vast emptiness of the western shore, unmarked by any path or gate or fisherman's post, just open grass and the very edge of the fungal forest folding back into shadow.
There were no homes out here. No trapper's shelters, no Outrider staging points, nothing. Just the shore and the forest and the still Mirror Lake. People did not simply appear on the western shore. That was not a thing that happened.
Interesting, thought Fenn, who was constitutionally incapable of leaving interesting things alone.
He stood up and thought rapidly and practically, which was his best mode when he had already committed to something inadvisable. He was not large, but he was wiry and accustomed to the specific labour of the lower tiers, hauling supply lines, carrying material up the narrow stairwells between Amalthea's levels, the ordinary physical grammar of underground life. He assessed the two strangers with a builder's eye.
The small one was slight. Very slight. Too slight, now that he was looking properly, the wrist that lay turned upward on the grass was narrow in a way that had nothing to do with youth and everything to do with having not had enough, for a long time.
The boy's clothing, waterlogged as it was, still clearly hung from him like it had been made for a different, larger person, and the shape of his face, though Fenn was no healer, had that particular hollowed quality Fenn associated with the old ration-story illustrations his grandmother kept in the second drawer of her cabinet. Stories from the surface. Stories from before.
The older boy he couldn't assess as easily, more muscle, better fed, though the dark circles under his closed eyes were pronounced even in sleep.
He could carry the small one. The older one he would have to drag.
Fenn removed his wool waist-belt, a long, woven strip of dark green and rust-brown, twice wrapped and knotted, good heavy Nemorei weave, and spent two minutes fashioning a serviceable enough harness, looped under the small boy's arms and knotted at his own shoulder, then the trailing end wrapped twice around the older boy's wrist and tied in a carry-grip.
It was not elegant. His grandmother would probably have suggestions about the knot. He hefted the small boy up across his back, adjusted his grip until the weight settled, and then took the trailing line in his left hand and leaned forward.
He started walking.
Dragging a person across dry ground, he discovered, was substantially harder than dragging supply line. The older boy's shoes caught on the uneven grass and Fenn had to shift his angle twice to find the smoother path, sweating through his shirt inside the first minute.
He kept talking to himself quietly in the way he always did when working through something difficult, a half-whispered, running commentary that was partly practical and partly just the sound of his own thoughts escaping...
"Okay. Okay, not so bad. Not so bad. Just, there we go, around that bit, grandmother is going to, she's going to ask a lot of questions and I am going to not have any answers, which is fine, I never have answers..."
The small boy on his back made no sound, just breathed that fast, shallow, alarming breath, and occasionally Fenn felt the heat radiating off him like a coal wrapped in cloth.
"You're going to be alright," Fenn told him, in the same tone he used for small creatures that sometimes wandered in from the deeper tunnels, confused and frightened. "I'm taking you to my grandmother. She's old and she smells like herb-salt but she knows what she's doing. Mostly."
Her house was a ten-minute walk from the western shore along the low path between the grove's edge and the first stone terraces of the outer city, and Fenn made it in fourteen, grunting the last stretch up the gentle incline to the stone-paved yard where her copper wind-bells hung from the doorframe and turned in the geothermal current that eddied out of the lower vents.
He kicked the door twice, hands full.
Maret opened it almost immediately. She was a small woman, his grandmother, barely taller than Fenn himself now that he had finally, at great personal effort, begun to grow, with grey hair cut close to her skull and deep-set eyes the colour of the phos-pillar spores, a dark and dusty blue. She had the face of someone who had once been sharp and lovely and was now something more useful than either, all the prettiness resolved into a kind of permanent competent calm. She wore her working apron, which meant she had been at the pressing table, and her hands smelled of lantern weed.
She took one look at the boy on Fenn's back and the unconscious teenager being trailed behind him like a reluctant sled, and her face went through three expressions in the span of two seconds, surprise, assessment, decision.
"Inside," she said.
"I found them," Fenn said, which he felt covered the essential information.
"I can see that." She was already moving, holding the door wide. "Where?"
"The western shore. Near the lakegrass, past the last phos-grove."
She stopped. Just briefly, a half-second pause, before she continued ushering him in. "That's a strange place to find anyone."
"I know. I thought that too."
He got them both through the door with considerably less grace than he'd have liked, knocking the older boy's boots against the threshold and having to reverse and angle him differently, and then they were inside the warm amber light of the front room with its low ceiling and its drying racks of pressed herbs and its cluttered shelves of labelled jars, and Fenn set the small boy down with exaggerated care on the woven floor-mat and stood up straight and rolled his shoulders and tried to pretend he wasn't as out of breath as he was.
His grandmother looked at him. Her dark blue eyes crinkled.
"You are such a kind child," she said, and reached up and pinched both his cheeks simultaneously with warm, herb-scented hands. He made a sound of protest. She ignored it and was already moving to the boys on her floor, kneeling with the careful, practiced economy of someone whose knees had an opinion about sudden movements but were not yet running the operation.
She checked the older boy first, pressed two fingers to his throat, lifted his eyelid briefly with her thumb, studied the grey quality of his skin. "Alive. Breathing alright, no obvious..." She tilted his head, noted something. "Waterlogged. He'll come round."
Then she turned to the younger one and everything shifted.
She placed both hands on him, one to his forehead, one to his sternum, and she went very still in that way she did when she was listening to something Fenn couldn't hear.
"This one is sick," she said, without looking up. "Bring me the blue basin from the scullery, the one with the cracked handle, and fill it halfway from the cold tap. Not the warm side, the cold. And my herb cabinet, the third shelf, there's a brown envelope marked with two lines, bring that."
Fenn was already moving. The scullery was two rooms back and narrow, smelling of stone-mineral and river-weed, with the twin copper pipes that ran from the geothermal system disappearing into the wall above the taps. He found the basin, filled it, cold, cold, the underground freshwater was never entirely warm, and carried it back without spilling more than a little on his shirt.
His grandmother had already gotten the boys moved. She worked quickly and without waste, and Fenn understood now that she'd been assessing the situation the whole time he'd been talking, had probably already formed a plan before he'd finished his second sentence. She directed him to help her settle them onto the two narrow cots in the side room she usually used for storage and occasional guests, and while Fenn stripped the excess clutter from the shelves to make room, she began methodically removing the outer layers of waterlogged clothing from both of them.
"Top half," she told him. "Just the outer layers. Be careful with the small one, I don't want him jostled."
"What's wrong with him?" Fenn asked, working the wet cloth from the older boy's arms, he was heavier than he looked, built through the shoulders, and folding it over the room's single chair.
"He's running a very high fever. Something in his blood is working against him." She paused. "Or he's been given something. Or both." She turned the small boy's thin arm over, gently, and studied the inside of the elbow. Then the other arm. Her expression didn't change but something in her eyes did, a tightening. "Come here and look at this."
Fenn came around to her side and looked.
The small boy's arms, both of them, were mapped in small, faded marks. Not bruises, not exactly. The particular discolouration left by repeated needle puncture, the tiny collapsed constellations of old sites that healers learned to recognize. They ran up the interior of both forearms in lines, most of them faded to grey-yellow, some older still, and one or two that were more recent, still carrying the ghost of deeper colour.
"Oh," said Fenn quietly.
"Yes." His grandmother covered the arm again with the blanket and began checking the boy's temperature at the throat, the wrist, the sole of his foot. "Hand me the basin."
He handed it over and watched her begin to work, folding dampened cloth, applying it methodically, nape of the neck, inner wrists, the soles of his feet, her movements the same as they always were when she worked, unhurried and absolutely sure. The copper wind-bells turned outside. The geothermal current moved through the wall.
Fenn went and sat against the wall between the two cots with his knees drawn up, the charcoal pencil turning slowly between his fingers. He had gotten his bracer off while setting up the room, it was damp, and the drawing skin would warp if he left it wet, and now he held the pencil over nothing, thinking.
He looked at the older boy's face.
Fifteen, maybe. Not much older. The amber eyes were closed, and without them open the face was quieter than Fenn expected, guarded, somehow, even in unconsciousness, like a room where all the windows had been shut from the inside. There was a tattoo on his left shoulder, a crow, wings not-quite-spread, black and clean and very deliberate. Fenn studied it for longer than was strictly polite, tilting his head. Whoever had drawn it knew what they were doing. The line-weight was confident and the negative space was being used. He turned his pencil over and thought about crows.
He had never seen a crow. There were no birds in Neth-Solara. Well there were, but they were native to the lands and couldn't be found anywhere else... that's what they thought in school.
He thought about that.
"Grandmother," he said.
"Mm."
"His tattoo. That's a surface bird."
A pause in the turning of the cloth. "Yes."
"And the small one." He was quiet for a moment. "The marks on his arms. They're from needles."
"Yes."
"Someone was giving him things. For a long time." He picked at the edge of the damp bracer in his lap. "The elders' stories say that the surface-people ran experiments. On our people." He looked at the small boy's sleeping face, the round, tense set of it even now. "He's one of us, isn't he. He looks, his hair. The shape of his face."
His grandmother did not answer immediately. She folded the cloth and redampened it and replaced it. "I don't know yet who he is, we don't jump to conclusions" she said carefully. "But you may be right about what he's been through. His body has been asking questions for a long time and no one has been giving him the right answers."
Fenn was quiet.
"They're not surface-fighters," he said after a while. "The older one, he's not big enough to be a soldier. And the little one is just a child."
"No," she agreed. "They don't look like fighters."
"How do you think they got to the western shore?" He tilted his head back against the stone wall. "There's nothing out there. You said so yourself. No paths, no boats, nothing. I was watching from the grove and there was just, the hart, and then when she went up, there they were. Like they'd always been there. Like they'd just, dropped."
The word hung in the warm air between them.
His grandmother looked at him over her shoulder. In the amber light of the side room her face was serious, and the dark blue of her eyes carried something that was not quite fear and not quite recognition and was something between the two.
"Like they dropped," she repeated.
"I don't know what else to call it."
She turned back to her work and did not say anything more for a long time. The room was quiet except for the small boy's too-fast breathing and the faint sound of the wind-bells and the deep, distant vibration of the geothermal system moving through the rock beneath the floor.
Fenn watched the rise and fall of the older boy's chest and thought about the Sky-Hart rising into the false sky, and about birds that didn't exist in this world, and about the inside of a child's arm mapped in old needle-marks, and found that he had too many thoughts to fit into any kind of order, so he did the only thing that had ever reliably helped, he pressed the charcoal pencil to the inside of his wrist and began to draw.
The hart first. The arc of her neck as she turned skyward.
Then the crow from the boy's shoulder, wings not-quite-open.
He was sketching the crow's eye, small and unblinking and knowing, when the older boy on the cot coughed.
It was not a small sound. It was a full, violent, convulsive sound, the kind of cough that comes from lungs that have been holding water and have made a collective decision to be rid of it, a deep, rattling heave followed immediately by the wet, percussive splat of water expelled onto the stone floor, and then another cough, weaker, and then gasping.
Fenn's pencil stopped.
He looked at his grandmother.
She was already rising.