The Sorcerers' Plague: Book One of Blood of the Southlands by Coe David B

Author:Coe, David B. [Coe, David B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Fantasy
Published: 2009-02-03T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

C’BIJOR’S NECK, SOUTH OF TURTLE LAKE

The skies above her had turned grey days ago, blotting out stars and sun, the red and white of the moons and the blue Harvest mornings. Occasionally it rained on her. Most times it was merely cold and windy. And grey. Color had vanished from her world, or so it sometimes seemed. But no, there was color still. The primrose yellow and fiery oranges, the lavenders and larkspur purple, the berry-stain reds and that startling indigo she’d found the previous year. And so many shades of brown—earth, straw, pale gold like the sunbaked grasses of the plain, warm brown like Mettai skin, flax and bay and chestnut and dead leaves and all browns in between.

Yes, there was still color in her world. Not in the sky or in the villages or in the people she encountered. But there, in her baskets. A world of color, a lifetime of color, in the weaving she had done, in the spells she had cast, in the damage she had done thus far and would do again.

She had gone farther west, beyond the Companion Lakes, deeper into Qirsi land. Always she remained to the north, though, because this was where the Y’Qatt had settled. It was hard land. Uncompromising cold during the Snows, stubborn winds that swept down off the mountains during the Harvest and the early Planting, and during the Growing a relentlessly hot sun that sucked moisture from the earth, just as the Y’Qatt believed magic sucked life from their bodies. The storms, when they came, their rain like mercy, were fierce, violent affairs. There was no sympathy in this land, no respite from its cruelty. How well she knew. This was the land that was left to outcasts. Of course the Y’Qatt would settle here. Their white-hair brothers and sisters to the south would think nothing of ceding this land to them. Just as the Eandi had ceded the land near the eastern Companion Lakes to the Mettai.

It should have occurred to her long ago, as she prepared for this last great undertaking of her life. But only after leaving Kirayde had she started to understand what should have been so obvious. She’d seen only the differences—Y’Qatt and Mettai were to each other as wraiths of the night were to creatures of day, as death was to life, as bone and dust were to blood and flesh. But as she spoke to the man in Runnelwick, the one who’d called her “Mettai” the way he might have called another woman “whore,” it had come to her like lightning on a steamy day. Y’Qatt and Mettai—opposites yes, but as two edges of the same sword. Both were outcasts from their own races, but also they were bridges to the other race: Eandi sorcerers, Qirsi who rejected magic.

There were days in the darkness of the Snows when it seemed that Morna was offering a glimpse of the Planting to come: warm breezes and sunshine that melted the ice on the lakes and began to coax buds from trees that yearned for the Growing turns.

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