She looked into his eyes. He met her gaze squarely. There were times when Rapskal still seemed to be the slightly daft boy she had met on the day that she left Trehaug. Times when he rattled on endlessly, chattering about nothing, seemingly fascinated by the most trivial of oddities. Then there were times when she looked at him and saw how much he had grown and changed, not just as a youth who had suddenly attained the beginnings of manhood, but as a human who had crossed a line and was now an Elderling. He was red now, as scarlet as his dragon. His eyes had a gleam in them, a lambent light that was visible almost all the time now. She looked down at the hand she clasped and saw how her blue-scaled hand fit into his scarlet one. “Show me, then,” she said quietly, and this time, when he broke into a jog and pulled her along, she ran to keep pace with him.
He spoke as he trotted, his words broken with breathlessness. “There are a lot of memory places. Some, like some of the statues, they have just memories from one Elderling. And it’s like being that one Elderling for the time that you touch them. Those are the best kind, I think. There are other places that are all about everything. And some that are just telling the laws or who lives in a house or who a business belongs to. There are some that are poems and music. And then there are some on the avenues that are, well, everything that has ever happened there. I think you could just stand there, day after day, and see everyone who ever passed by and hear what they said and smell what they ate and everything. I didn’t see much use in that myself.”
He turned from the main avenue, away from the towering buildings, down a more modest street. These structures were homes, she found she knew. She tried to imagine a family requiring more than one door, and sometimes a second or even third story. There were balconies on some of them, and some had flat roofs with railings around the edges. Thymara had grown up in tiny structures built high in trees. If she stood and stretched out her arms in her bedchamber in her father’s house in Trehaug, she could touch both walls. And the ceiling. How could people need or use so much space?
Rapskal turned a corner, and she hastened beside him as he followed an uphill boulevard. The paved road was wide; she had never seen such a wide path. The houses here were staggered, looking out over one another toward the river. Gigantic pots held the skeletons of long-dead trees. Troughs of earth by doorways had once been small gardens. Dry bowls had cupped fountains.
She knew these things. Knew them as if someone had whispered them into her ear the moment she wondered. The gleaming stone, black with sparkling veins or sometimes gleaming white threaded with silver, spoke to her. They tugged at her with memories. She shook her head and focused herself on what Rapskal was saying to her.
“But then I found these two, and I listened to him for a while and I thought,
She was losing her breath as she trotted alongside him. “I still don’t understand, Rapskal.”
“We’re here. They can explain a lot better than I can. See? What do you think?”
She stared where he pointed and saw nothing unusual. The street ended in a cul-de-sac on the top of the hill. The entrance to the house at the top was framed by a series of open arches supported by stone pillars that glistened black and silver in the winter sunlight, marching in pairs toward the entry. To the left, they were marked with smiling suns. Those on the right each bore a gleaming silver medallion of a full moon smiling with a woman’s features.
“Let me show you. It’s so much easier than talking about it.” Rapskal pulled her forward. When they reached the first arch, he halted.
Thymara looked around. There were urns full of earth by each arch. “Vines,” she said, and abruptly she remembered them, the glossy dark leaves and the multitudes of tiny white flowers in clusters. They had bloomed in the heat of summer every year, and their sweet fragrance had scented every room in the house. There had been a fruit that followed, tiny clusters of bright orange berries that had no name in her language but were “gillary,” and every autumn, they had made a wine from them, one that kept the orange hue of the berries. It had been potent and sweet.
She swayed a little on her feet as she blinked her way back into her own life. She tried to take a few steps backward, but Rapskal tightened his grip on her hand. “Not like that,” he told her. “Well, you can, but then it’s all in pieces. Like coming up to a storyteller at a trunk market when he’s in the middle of telling the tale and only getting a part of the story. That’s not how they saved it for us. It’s all here, in order, in the pillars. We should start with the first ones. The moon ones are for you.”
“How do you know?” She still felt disoriented. For a time, long or short, she could not tell, she had been in another time. More than that, she realized. She had been another person. She pulled her hand free of his and took two steps back. “Drowning in memories! That’s what they meant. Rapskal, this is dangerous. My father warned me about stones like this! They pull you in and fill your mind with stories and you forget how to come back and be yourself. After a while, you’re just lost, not in that life and not in this one. How can you even think of doing this? You’re a Rain Wilder! You know better than this. What is the matter with you?”
She was horrified. It was bad enough that he would indulge in such a dangerous pastime. And monstrous that he had tried to drag her into it.
“No,” he said. “It’s not like that.”
She turned away from him.
“Thymara, please, just listen to me. Everything you know about memory stone and drowning in it is wrong. Because the people you learned it from, well, this wasn’t for them. It’s for us, for Elderlings. Look around the city and see how much there is of it. You’ve heard the whispers; I know you have. Would they have put this stone everywhere if it was so dangerous? No. They put it here because, to Elderlings, it’s not dangerous. It’s important. We need these stones. We need to use them to become who we are meant to be.”
“I don’t need them. I have my own life, and I won’t lose it to something stored in stone.”
“Exactly!” He looked delighted at her assertion. “You don’t lose it. You find it. Think about the dragons, Thymara. They have memories that go way back, to their mothers and great-great-grandfathers. But they don’t lose their lives. They just have what they need to know how to be dragons. Elderlings needed the same thing, but they weren’t born with it like dragons. To be companions to dragons, they needed to remember a lot more than just one human lifetime. So this is how they did it. They stored it. They stored their lives so that other Elderlings could have their memories.” He shook his head, his eyes wide and his thoughts far away. “The special stone can hold so much, do so much. I don’t understand it all, yet. But I’m learning a lot, every time I come here. And one thing I do know is that because I’m an Elderling, I’ll likely live a long time, so I have time to learn things. The stone tells you things fast, like a minstrel singing the whole song of a hero’s life in just a few hours.” He shifted his pale gaze back to her, and his whole face was lit with excitement.
“Here’s the thing, Thymara. I’ve done things in these stones that I’ve never done in this life. I’ve been places, faraway places where their sailing ships used to go. I’ve hunted for big deer and killed one all by myself. I’ve been over those mountains, trading with the people who used to live on the far side of them. I’ve been a warrior and a leader of other warriors. I live in their memories, and they live in me.”
She had been caught up in his words, tempted wildly right up until he said that. “They live in you,” she said slowly.
“A little bit,” he dismissed it. “Sometimes, in the middle of something else, one of their memories will pop up in my mind. It doesn’t hurt anything; it’s just something extra for me to know. Or maybe I want to sing a song he knew, or cook some meat a certain way. Thymara”-he cut in hastily as she tried to ask more questions-“we don’t have that much time here. Just try it with me. Just one try, and if you don’t like it, I’ll never ask you to do it again. You can’t drown in memories if you only do it once. Everyone knows that! And because you’re an Elderling, I don’t think you can drown at all, even if you do it a thousand times. Because we’re supposed to. That’s what the memory stone in the city is all about. Just try it.” He looked deep into her eyes. “Please.”
His gaze trapped her. It was so earnest. So loving. She felt her breath catch. “What do we do?” She could scarcely believe she was asking the question.
“Only what you’ve already done. Only with purpose. Here. Give me your hand,” and he took her black-clawed hand into his narrow, sleekly scarlet fingers. His scaling whispered against her skin. “I’m going with you. I’ll be right here beside you. You hold my hand, and you set your hand to that pillar, because it was hers. And I’ll put my hand on this one, because it was his. These first pillars, this is where they begin.”
His scaled hand was warm and dry in hers. The stone pillar was smooth and chill under her touch.
