“Go, my child. Choose what warriors you wish. The pilgrimage will set out one week from tomorrow.”
Voran stood, bowed, and kissed Sabíana’s hand. He looked at her with a fleeting glance that refused to engage her eyes. She had the disconcerting sense that she had slipped into a dream. Everything moved slowly, and the loudest sound in the room was her own heart beating. Voran walked out without waiting for her.
“Father, am I the only one who sees?” Her throat had gone completely dry. “Or have I gone mad? Does no one else see the parallel?”
Dar Antomír would not look at her. “Voran sees a chance to redeem his family’s name, Sabíana. Would you deny him that?”
“Father,” said Mirnían. “You once assigned a half-mad Otchigen to the Karila embassy. Now you assign a half-mad Voran to take charge of tens, if not hundreds, of city-folk, right after an omen of the skies. You expect a different result?”
“I hope for one, yes,” said the Dar. He sat down again, exhausted. “My children, I fear that dark times are coming. After the omen of the skies, the Pilgrim came to me. Pilgrims are not as other men. They are closer to the Heights, and some barriers of the natural world are but trifles to them. Some of them live for three hundred years or more. So when he came, I listened.
“We spoke of many things, most of which you will know soon enough. He told me a darkness is coming the likes of which Vasyllia has not seen in hundreds of years. He spoke of a plague that would afflict man, beast, tree, blade of grass. He spoke of a fountainhead of healing flowing from a heart of stone.”
Sabíana gasped. “A heart of stone. Voran means stone in Old Vasylli.”
Dar Antomír smiled and closed his eyes, leaning back into his chair. “You understand, Sabíana. That is why I have hope for Voran.”
And yet, the dread in her chest tied itself into knots over and over again, until she feared she would never be able to untie it.
The soul-bond between man and Sirin is unlike any other bond of love. It defies clear explanation, but it is known by its fruits. The soul-bonded man can withstand inordinate pain, can carry burdens which no man can lift, can survive in battles, though he be the lone warrior in the field. But the true nature of the bond is that it removes a man from earthly wants, calling him to desires of eternity. No man, once bonded, will find rest until he has undergone the seven baptisms of fire and climbed to the very Heights of Aer.
From “On the Nature of the Soul-Bond”
(The Sayings, Book XI, 4:1-5)
Chapter 7
Sister of the Pariah
On the third morning of the pilgrimage, the fog glimmered, pregnant with the coming sun. The birth of the sun brought spring warmth in the midst of early winter. A steaming tarn in winter usually meant one thing—dreadful cold—but the children knew before anyone else that this steam was different. It meant warmth. By the time Lebía had made breakfast for Voran, three boys already blattered in the water with their dogs, while the girls, skirts hiked up, stood at the edge, toes longingly nibbling the water. Lebía had a giggling desire to push the girls in, then to jump in herself. Instead, she sat by the porridge to wait for Voran. She would not be welcome among the laughing children, not the daughter of Otchigen, not the sister of Voran. We are pariahs.
She began to plait a new set of bark shoes, humming to herself. Already some of the younger children’s shoes were wearing down on the hard roads. It was pleasant to do something for them, even if they might not want to accept a gift from her hands because of her association with Otchigen. She would have to think of a way of gifting them without being noticed.
The music she hummed was a new song, she realized. That often happened to her. She would hear snatches of music already formed in her heart. It never seemed strange to her; how could it? She had been hearing music since she was a small child. Only later did she realize its source.
She had seen her first Sirin when she was ten, on a day when her heart-pain at her mother’s loss was like a wedge splitting apart an ash log. It was only a glimpse, but she knew it was no accident, because the shards of her heart grafted together and blossomed. After that, whenever the pain threatened to break her, the memory was enough to bring her back to herself.
The Sirin had continued to visit her, though always at a distance. Lebía sensed that the distance was more for her benefit. She had no illusions about the Sirin’s love. It was not gentle; it was fierce as fire. More often the Sirin sent her gifts of music.
The tent shivered behind her. Voran pushed through the flap, sodden with sleep. How strange that their roles should be reversed now. He was always the early riser in Vasyllia, but since they had begun the journey, he seemed incapable of getting up with the sun.
“Porridge again, swanling?” He complained, but with enough of a smile to make rejoinder unnecessary.
It was the first time since they left that he called her by his “little name,” and it warmed her more than the unseasonable sun. He had been categorically against her going on the pilgrimage. Only the most convincing stubbornness she could muster—never easy for her, especially toward Voran, who was almost a father to her—managed to sway him. He punished her with dour silence for the first day, and only spoke to her in clipped phrases the second.
“I’ve added dried apples this morning, Voran.”
He ate with the relish of a famished wolf. Poor Voran. He had changed so much since the coming of the Pilgrim. He was restless by nature, but this unquiet bordered on manic.
“Voran, what happened with Sabíana?”
Lebía couldn’t help noticing that Sabíana had left their house that morning weeping. She was not even there to see them out of the city with Dar Antomír.
“Lebía, why do you ask me such things?” His face was beet-red. “You are too young to understand.”
“Am I? Too young to see that you deliberately wounded the woman you claim to love?”
“It was not…” He stopped, breathed, and sagged a bit in the shoulders. “You are right. It was deliberate. I have not been able to put her face out of my mind since then. I do not know why I spoke to her like that.”
“Voran, I am not accusing you. I just want to understand. You know I love you.”
The creases in his forehead smoothed into his quick, winning smile. “Oh, swanling. Sometimes I forget about the weight of pain on your sixteen years. You want to know the truth?”
Lebía nodded, purposely not looking at him, intent on her fingers plaiting the rough bark. There were a few cuts on them, but only in the uncallused places.
“When I asked Sabíana to marry me, I did it like a madman jumping off a cliff. I never thought she would consider me, not after…”
He closed his eyes and sighed. His usually thick, curly black hair was mangy, hanging in strands around his shoulders. He had not shaved in weeks, but he looked the better for it, his angular features set off pleasantly by the messy chin-beard.
“Swanling, it’s a terrible thing, our human nature. We spend all our energies on getting things we never expect to receive, but if by some miracle we receive them, they start to lose their luster very quickly.”
“You didn’t expect her to say yes?”
“Well, I hoped she would. But then the Dar had to agree as well. I was sure she was being kept for some Lord something-or-other in Nebesta. When he agreed, and blessed our union wholeheartedly, I thought my joy complete. I saw my life then as it would be. Lord Protector to Darina Sabíana, a life of luxury in the palace, the love of a passionate woman whose beauty has no compare in Vasyllia, children on the bear rug before the hearth.”
“Sounds like our father’s life when we were children.”
“Exactly. That was the first thought to give me pause. Then the small, still voice deep inside me. Not enough, it said. I still longed for something with no name, or someone whose name I had not yet found. That was the first time I heard the song of the Sirin.”
