show through it.
“What in the Giver’s Name is that?” he demanded, feeling curiosity more than rage, but letting anger drive his words anyway.
“Your destiny. Your name. Come, meet Yoen again. He’ll explain everything to you. Yoen said to-”
“Not him!” Dariel sat up. He swung his legs over the cot and drove his feet down against the floor. Standing upright so quickly made his head swim. “Not…” Though his eyes did not close, the world went black.
T he second time Dariel awoke, he took care to sit up slowly. This time, there was more than one face to take in. Anira perched on the edge of the cot down near his knees, her hands clasped around one of his. Tam and Birke stood against the wall. The latter flashed his canine smile when Dariel’s eyes passed over him. Mor was saying something to a white-haired matron with Shivith clan spots on her face, like Mor’s. Like his, he remembered. Even as his gaze moved he knew that they had yet to settle on the person they must. He felt the presence beside him, sitting where Anira had sat before. He wished for anger as he shifted his gaze to the old man. Wished for anger and prepared for fear and… felt neither.
Yoen’s expression of sad joy was etched in every crevice of his features. His eyelids drooped at the outer edges, giving his face an almost puppylike softness. He said something, his voice kind as he leaned forward. Dariel did not understand it, and the old man realized as much. “Forgive me,” he said. “When I forget myself I speak Auldek. Mor teases me for it. Don’t you, dearest? What she doesn’t know is that it embarrasses me that the language of my enslavers comes faster to my mouth than the one of my native land. But we’re not here to speak about me. I should explain to you what happened. Do you want to hear it now, or should we wait until you feel stronger?”
Lying there, feeling weak and yet refreshed at the same time, with the memory of death so near him still, Dariel knew there were a variety of things he could say in response. Angry things. Defiant and accusatory and indignant ones. He just could not remember what they might be. Instead, he said, “I want to know now.”
“Of course you do.” Yoen smiled, a quick grin full of large teeth so healthy that they seemed mismatched with his elderly face. “All right. I’ll tell you a brief version of it. We can talk more later, but you should understand this much. You died.” He did not smile again, though the pronouncement had the ring of a joke’s revelation. “And then again you didn’t.”
Dariel just stared at him.
“The Sky Watcher Na Gamen did something to you, didn’t he? He told you things and showed you things, and he did something else. What was it?”
“You mean… the blessing?”
“Is that how you think of it?” The old man said something else, which at first Dariel did not catch. And then he did. Yes, tell me of the blessing, Yoen had said.
“He…” Dariel stopped, realizing that he wanted to know where the sentence was going before he began it. What was the blessing? A small thing compared to the wonders that Na Gamen had showed him: yet it was this that came to mind. He could think of nothing else in answer to the question. “He…” And he had to pause again. The thing on his forehead. The rune raised out of his skin. He felt like he should understand before he spoke, but it was not working that way. It was hard to get his tongue around the words. “He… wrote upon my forehead with a stylus of sorts. A Lothan Aklun thing.”
“Yes, he did,” Yoen said.
Dariel reached as if to touch it again, but let his fingers just hover near it. “It wasn’t like this. He wrote but there was nothing. No ink, or…”
“He was not writing with ink, Dariel Akaran. He was writing with his life soul. He wrote with the energy that was his true being, his first, the soul he was born with. He put that into you through that stylus. He asked something very precious of you, Dariel. He asked that you carry him here to be killed, so that in dying he might join with you. That’s what he did. It was something different from what they did with the soul catcher. This time, it wasn’t really you who died. And it wasn’t really Na Gamen. It was a little bit of both of you. You are now both yourself and him. He gave you the knowledge that you will need to fulfill the destiny written in this character. I imagine his soul is very strong, older and larger than a normal person’s. You have more than a normal measure of life within you.” The old man reached out and touched the raised symbol. “This will be hard to understand, so don’t try to. There is more to it, I believe, but that’s for you to figure out in time. Right now… Well, you already know more than you realize. Listen to the words I am speaking. Do you hear them? You do, yes?”
Dariel nodded.
Without breaking eye contact with him, Yoen asked, “Mor, what language have I been speaking since I began explaining the ‘blessing’?”
“Auldek.”
“And what language did he speak in response?”
“Auldek.”
Dariel looked at her. She stood straight and beautiful, her face as astonished as he had ever seen it. The others’ as well. They all stared at him with gravity enough that he almost believed them. “But I don’t know Auldek,” he said.
“Considering that you are speaking it,” Yoen said, “I think you do. I think you will come to realize you know many things that you did not before. Now”-he looked around, squint-eyed as if he had forgotten his spectacles someplace and was looking for them-“I should show you the village, and show the village you. Come, walk with me.”
As improbable as it seemed, even as it happened, Dariel rose. He set his feet more carefully this time, and stood with Anira’s aid. She led him past the others and out into a humid, overcast morning.
It looked just as it had sounded from inside the small room: a village among the trees, with the peak of the volcano rising to the west. Small cabins, simply made from the slim, purple-skinned trees of the area. Hard-packed dirt lanes running through them. As they stepped into the light, a gaggle of hens scattered from the cluster they had formed at the door. Eavesdroppers.
The people in the street stopped what they were doing, as if their labors had been but an excuse to position themselves to see Dariel step out among them. They wore peasant clothes, brighter hued than what he would have expected in the Known World, but similar in their simple, functional construction. Two old men, a woman with gray hair tied back, another who wore Lvin whiskers tattooed on her cheeks, several others of middle age, with varying clan markings. A boy of twelve or so stood entrapped within the wooden framework of some tool. He had been carrying it, but he froze and just stood gaping. Just like the rest. Just like Dariel himself.
Cashen came bounding into view, his nose held high and his tail whirling in circles. He caught sight of Dariel, dropped the stick he was carrying, and sprinted toward him. Bashar was not far behind.
T hat was, what? Four, five days ago? Dariel was not sure. He was not yet free of the vision of death he had awoken with, so that each time he burst back into consciousness he was unsure for a time whether he was truly alive. He knew he had slept and woken several times, but the waking hours of each day were something of a blur. A strange blur, quiet instead of noisy. A blur of faces seeking out his face, touching his forehead, and speaking their names to him. A blur of conversations, questions asked and answered, which led to new questions to be asked and answered. The days passed as if disconnected from normal time. Dariel knew that was not really so. It was wishful thinking. He was not with Na Gamen anymore. Behind the peaceful workings of his days in the village he knew the world went on. This reprieve was to be brief.
So, on whatever day this was-the fourth or fifth among the Free People hidden on the Sky Isle deep within Ushen Brae-Dariel stood, sharing a long silence with Yoen. They had climbed out of the village and were taking in the settlement from a bend on the path that led up to the pear and apple orchards.
“Do you see that tree there, in the center of that clearing?” Yoen asked.
Dariel saw it. Not as tall as the trees that grew around the base of the volcano’s rich slopes, it had a gnarled, aged quality to its twisting limbs, which stretched wider than it was tall. “It looks like an acacia tree, except that they don’t grow that large.”
“Here they do,” Yoen said. “It’s a very ancient tree. It’s sacred to us. Na Gamen himself planted it there from a cutting taken from the original. It is, as you say, an acacia tree. Another transplant to this land, yes?” He lifted his cane. He speared the ground ahead of him and began his slow ascent again.
Dariel knew him well enough to know that was all he had to say on the subject of the tree. He walked, taking in the view. The village was such a small part of it, dwarfed by the trees that hung over it and the volcano and the
