Breath and Bone by Carol Berg

Author:Carol Berg
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2008-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

The ancient wall embedded in crumbling earth…pebbles and mud washed down to the road at its base, crusted and frozen in this early morning. A gentle rightward curve…dawn smells of roasting meat, of baking bread, of damp earth…And around the next corner the sound of dribbling water—here melting ice dripping into the cistern, there the font that never froze or dried. Scrawny trees grew sidewise from the bank, branches heavy with snow drooping over the road…in my face…tickling, scratching, freezing…the smell of burning from the lower city…

I walked around the corner, and in less time than it took to think it, the narrow alley that squeezed between Renna’s kitchens and an ancient fortification built into an Evanori mountainside led me straight into the narrow lane in Palinur, more than two hundred quellae distant. The stare of an Evanori guardsman, flummoxed at the sight of an oddly naked man in the kitchen alley, now came from a ragged woman using water from the Aingerou’s Font to wash vomit off her boy child.

The boy pointed at me and cried out weakly, “Mama, look! He’s on fire…an angel…”

“Not so!” I whispered, embarrassed. “Sorry! Shhh!” But the lad’s thready cry bounced through the lane like a child’s ball, from one hushed voice to the next, for a beggars’ city jammed the lane that ought to have been deserted.

In the past, this favored quarter of Palinur had escaped the untidy truths of hard living. Evidently that was no longer the case. A few small fires smoldered here and there among makeshift tents and crude lean-tos, built from branches cut from the overhanging trees. Fortunately most of the crowd still slept.

I jogged down the crowded roadway, jumping over pools of filth, bundled possessions, and sprawled bodies, then dived over the low wall into a crusted snowbank and scrambled well away from the lane. Thanks to half a night’s rest and enough roast venison and jam tarts to breakfast a legion of halfbreed Danae, the cold did not bother me. All the same, best not dawdle. Fine houses, like those around here, would have pureblood guards and magical wards. Staying hidden in the straggling shrubbery, I donned my silk and satin finery.

Elene had somehow managed to get my pureblood cloak and mask cleaned by the time Voushanti woke me that morning. She had brought them herself, along with her thanks for my venture. “We all knew you were extraordinary, Valen, even when you were playing monk,” she’d said, touching the gards on my hand. When I inquired about her health, her courage came near breaking. “He doesn’t know,” she’d whispered, crossing her arms on her breast. “He could die this very day, not knowing of his child.”

I’d had little comfort to offer. The remembrance of her grief and the weight of her head on my chest ached like old wounds, as I slipped on my mask, hopped over the wall, and hurried up the lane. A cloud of yellow smoke and frost haze masked the lower city.

I had not expected ever to walk this particular lane again.

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