He stares toward it for a long moment, waiting for it to vanish, the way every other fucking thing does around here.
When it doesn t, when it holds and beckons to him off the surface of the cold gray sky, he grunts and sets off in that direction. The cold wind at his back, hustling him on.
Well. What else you going to do now, Gil stop?
From time to time, the stone circle flickers in and out around him as he walks. But it feels less like a prison now, and more like armor.
When his ghosts start to show up, he s almost pleased to see them. This, at least, is something he s used to.
Yeah, it s all right for you. Skimil Shend plods gloomily along beside him in cracked leather boots, poorly patched breeches and a white court blouse that has seen far better days. You re not stuck in some stinking garret back in that miserable feces-reeking apology for a city. You re not an exile.
Actually Ringil pushes the pace as hard as the soggy ground and his shaky legs will let him I am.
Oh, you call that exile? Chartered ambassador to the Majak plains, a sinecure purse and the writ of the city to cover your extravagances? That s not an exile, that s a license to plunder horny-handed horse-breeder arse. All those iron-thighed young things. Some punishment that s going to be. I Shend thumps his chest with bombastic self-pity I suffered for my art.
Oh, shut up.
But he has to wonder, just briefly and for all he s trained himself against such things, what shape his life must have taken in the world this alternative Shend belongs to. A Shend who never got to go home after all, and a Ringil who
The aspect storm is a warp in the fabric of every possible outcome the universe will allow, Seethlaw once told him, camped out in the Gray Places with the aplomb of a Glades noble at a picnic. It gathers in the alternatives like a bride gathering in her gown. For a mortal, those alternatives are mostly paths they ll never take, things they ll never do.
He makes the aspect storm, he knows, every time he walks in the Gray Places. It blows around him in barely visible cobweb vortices, and the fragments of those alternatives swirl to him like storm waters pouring down into a drain.
You d be living inside a million different possibilities at once. The slightly drunken opinion of a scholar in dwenda lore he knows back in Trelayne. Imagine the will it would take to survive that. Your average peasant human is just going to go screaming insane.
It certainly sounds like insanity: a Ringil not disowned, a Ringil cherished enough by family yeah, or maybe just soft enough to bend to family will that his transgressions meet with no worse sanction than an iffy diplomatic posting. He sees himself hurried urbanely out of that other Trelayne with face-saving rank, appointment, entourage. Sent in genteel disgrace a thousand miles northeast to the steppes, a place where his appetites can no longer bring the name of House Eskiath into disrepute because no one in Trelayne will know or care what he does there.
He wonders vaguely if he d meet some alternative Egar out under those aching, open skies. An Egar who s perhaps not quite so resolutely and exclusively dedicated to pussy.
There s a feeling in his chest now, dangerously close to longing.
What if he stamps down on it.
You don t do that shit, Gil. There are no alternatives. You live with what is.
And you don t let your ghosts rent room in your head.
But he glances sideways at Shend anyway, can t quite repress the impulse, and it s not a pretty sight. The poet s once-fine features have sagged and bloated with his years away, and his hair is stringy with lack of care. His nails are bitten down to the quick, his belly hangs like a money changer s apron at his waist. That he woke up one morning in exile and just gave up is written into his flesh like branding.
Pouched eyes give Ringil back his stare. What you looking at? See something you like?
Look, Hinerion s not that bad, Ringil says uncomfortably.
Really? Then why are you leaving?
I m not leaving. Some unlooked for puzzlement in his voice at this. I m
Sudden, crushing image of a black sail on the horizon. dying?
Shend sniffs. Looks like leaving to me. And in such exalted company.
Ringil staves off a shiver.
I just don t see what the big thing is about life in Trelayne, he tells the poet. You were broke more than half the time back home, always borrowing money off Grace of Heaven or the Silk House boys, then scrabbling to find the payback. How s that worse than pensioned exile in Hinerion?
Shend stares morosely off across the marshland.
I don t expect you to understand. Why would you? You always did like to immerse yourself in the filth. I imagine you re quite as comfortable rubbing hips with our dusky southern neighbors as you are with any other riffraff.
Well, yeah. I fucked you, didn t I?
Oh! Oh! The Shend that Ringil remembers was more articulate. Not as shrill. So it s come to that, has it? Well, I m not the one with refugee blood running in my veins. I m not the one with skin that tans in the sun like a marsh peasant s. I mean, how dare you! You re practically straight out of the fucking desert on your mother s side.
Which, aside from shrill, is also inaccurate enough to be termed open slander and see steel drawn, at least in Ringil s version of the world. The southern refugee connections lie a good several generations back Yhelteth merchants, driven out in some religious schism or other as the fledgling Empire convulsed yet again over clerkish points of doctrine and by the time Ringil s mother was born, the lineage had been mingling pretty freely with the local blood for a while. In fact, rather too freely, some maintained, pointing to a number of unfortunate outlying branches on the family tree where marsh dweller ancestry was, let s say, hard to deny.
But Shend isn t likely to call that one out like a lot of the petty nobility in Trelayne, the Shend clan itself has more than a few points of lineage with the whiff of the marsh about them. The trace physiognomy is there for all to see. Ringil chooses his riposte with cruel care.
You know, you shouldn t knock southern blood, Skim. Maybe if your mother d come from the south, she could have arranged for you to have some cheekbones.
And you should just just fuck off and die! die, die, die!
The last word seems to echo, inside Ringil s head or across the sky, he isn t entirely sure which. He grimaces.
Perhaps I will.
Raw silence, pressing in his ears, and the soft squelch of his steps in the marsh. Ringil looks around and sees that the poet, perhaps in some terminal paroxysm of offense, is gone, faded out with the echo of his parting words.
That scrap of fire-glow at the skyline doesn t seem to be getting any closer, either.
Later, as if she s somehow heard and been drawn by shend's slurs on her lineage, Ishil Eskiath puts in an appearance. Carefully skirting the fringes of another marsh spider infestation at the time, Ringil s surprised by how hard this is to take. He can t tell how far removed this woman is from the mother he knows back in the real world, but she seems genuinely happy, which to his mind suggests some considerable distance.
Lanatray, she insists brightly. You always loved it there.
I nearly drowned there, Mother.
He can t help it, the snap in his voice. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her pull a face, but she says nothing. Another switch the Ishil Eskiath he knows would never let him have the last word, least of all when he s just hurt her.
He sighs. Look, I m sorry. But you don t know me, Mother. You think you do, but you don t.
Oh, Ringil, don t you suppose that s what every boy thinks about his mother?
She lays a hand on his. He flinches a little from the contact there s something cool and not quite human about it. The ghosts in the Gray Places seem to lack the normal warmth of living things, and he supposes they must draw off some of his heat to keep going as they circle him. Perhaps that s what draws them, like moths to a
