smell of it. I wore it for a day, but then…” She lifted her hand and gestured, a vague motion that erased the very thing she was describing.
“We should send a messenger to the elders,” he said. “To Mor. She would want…”
“To rush here to my side.” Skylene shook her head. “No, Tunnel, send no message. None of them can help me either way. Why add to their distress? Mor left me-and you-to hold the city until she returned…”
“With the Rhuin Fa,” Tunnel said, nodding in acknowledgment of the fact that he had finished her sentence, just as she had finished his a moment earlier.
“But we have not done that here, have we?”
“Not our fault.”
“I know, but-”
“Dukish, he is just a fool! Going to mess with everything that could be so simple and good. How we going to know that before he show us it? Stupid man. Should have squashed him the first time.”
Skylene did not dispute it. “If you get another chance, do squash him. Do it for me. But otherwise… stay alive for Dariel. Be here when he arrives. That should be within a fortnight.”
“What? You know this?”
Nodding, Skylene said, “The vessel messenger who took you to the relic, he came here with a message for me, a message from Yoen.”
“You didn’t tell Tunnel,” Tunnel said, managing to convey a depth of hurt in the short sentence.
“No.” Skylene smiled. “If I had, you might not have taken those mallets to the relic. You might not have shown the good sire your backside. I needed you to act without distraction, without waiting for your Rhuin Fa. I was right, wasn’t I? Even a day’s delay would have-”
“What’s the message, then?”
“Mor and the others are returning via the Sheeven Lek. Dariel is with them.”
Tunnel smiled. “This is news.”
“There’s more. The journey has been a success in many ways. They all still live, for one. For another, they visited the Sky Watcher. Na Gamen blessed them all, especially Dariel.”
“That’s right.”
“Yoen said to expect Dariel to look different. He wears a sign on his forehead, a spirit mark that combines his name with Na Gamen’s.”
“He is the Rhuin Fa.” Tunnel leaned in close and whispered, with passion, “He is. I always told it, didn’t I?”
Skylene started to laugh, but it pained her. She choked it down. “Of course you did, Tunnel. You are the smartest of all of us, the truest.”
“Should we tell everyone?”
“No, not yet.” Skylene closed her eyes a moment, her breathing shallow. “Not yet. He is not the Rhuin Fa until the People name him so. We have all to do it, understand? Not just Na Gamen, the elders. Not just you and me. Everyone must do it. And none who don’t want to believe him are going to want to change, not without seeing him for themselves. We need to hold this news as long as we can, until they are nearly here, understand? We use it to call a gathering, but only at the last moment. We don’t want Dukish or any of the others to have time to work against him. All right?”
“Yeah, that’s all right.”
“Tunnel”-she softened her voice, rounded it and weighted it with import-“I’ve told no body else about this. If I…”
“That won’t happen.”
“But if it does, you…”
Shaking his head, Tunnel stood up. “Nah, won’t happen. You love Mor too much to die. You’ll still be lying here, waiting for a kiss, when she comes. Tunnel knows.” He glanced around. “You hungry?”
He asked it casually, tugging on a tusk as if he had nothing more on his mind than his stomach. It was not true, but he kept it up until he heard Skylene breathe out the rest of the things she thought she needed to say to him. Once she did, he pretended to wander away, foraging. In truth he stood at the far end of the room, leaning against the wall and watching, thinking, You’ll still be here. Tunnel knows, of course he does.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
When asked to describe it, Dariel said he did not remember anything. In truth, he remembered his return from death with a clarity not of an experience passed but of one yet to come. It went something like this. For a time, he was not a man at all. He was a single bubble-one of infinite millions that pressed softly against him- dislodged from the depths of an abyssal floor and rising through the black fathoms in which nothing at all lived. He knew the entire time that he might pop at any moment, might cease to be or be swallowed by some unliving mouth driven by unliving hunger, suddenly roaring out of the black. He would not have been able to explain that he became more and more terrified the closer he got to life. Nor would he ever try to describe that passing into life did not feel like surfacing or birth or waking. It felt like smashing against a ceiling of black obsidian and vanishing.
And then he was a man. He moaned the air out of his lungs, lay empty for a moment, and remembered to suck air back inside himself.
“Dariel,” a voice said.
He had a name.
He opened his eyes. Anira’s brown visage looked down on him. She ran her hands over his face and neck and chest. “Dariel, by Anet and her young… I thought you were dead. They said you would come back, but I feared…” She leaned over him and kissed him, and then, as if sensing that her relief may have been premature, she grasped him by the shoulders. “Can you hear me? Are you all right?”
He was not ready to commit just yet. His eyes darted about the small, tidy room. They were alone. He lay on a cot; Anira sat on a stool beside it. An intricate openwork band ran around the wall at eye level. Through it came the sounds of the village: people talking, a dog barking, chickens clucking their singsong rumination on the world. He could have stepped to the screen and looked through, but the sound made him hesitate. It was too mundane to be trusted.
“What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.” But saying it, he did. He had come to meet the elders. He had gone to embrace Yoen and…
He propped himself on one elbow and clawed his tunic up with his other hand. He ran a palm over his abdomen, searching for the wound he knew should be there. His skin was smooth, ridged with his muscles and curled with light hairs.
“There was a knife,” he said, but there was no knife. Not anymore. Not sticking out of his belly, nor leaving any trace that one ever had. “He tried to kill me. You saw it.”
“No, he didn’t,” Anira said.
“He stabbed me.” He clutched his abdomen for proof, but again his body denied him. “I mean… he tried to. What happened?”
“He’ll explain.” Anira stood and stepped back from him, looking him up and down. “First, get ahold of yourself. We’re on the Sky Isle, in Elder Yoen’s village. You’re not dead. Not even hurt. Tell me you don’t feel stronger than ever before. You look it. And you have this.”
She reached for his forehead. Her touch felt strange. He felt the pressure of her fingers but not the sensation of her skin against his. Pulling back, she indicated that he should feel for himself. Reluctantly, he did so. A section of his flesh was rough beneath his fingertips, raised and hard like a scab.
“Is there a mirror?”
Anira looked around a moment, twisted away, and came back, rubbing the curve of a metal saucer. The image Dariel saw reflected in it was distorted and blurry. He squinted one eye and studied what he saw there for a long time. A rune of some sort. A character in a language he could not read, drawn in short, assured swipes as if by an ink brush, black against his beige skin, a black so solid that the Shivith spots underneath the symbol did not
