Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The first thing Fel understood was that he was not dead, because dead people did not itch.

The second was that he was lying in a bed that smelled like mint.

He kept his eyes closed and let the rest of the world arrive in pieces. There was a soft, steady creak of wood, like a ship moving at anchor. There was a low, silvery chiming, somewhere far off, of a hundred tiny bells stirred by a breeze. There was warmth on his face, thin and golden, and under it the cool, dry, resinous smell of cut herbs, camphor and sage and something sweeter that he could not name. His body hurt. But it hurt in a different way: tidy, bound, tended, the way a bruise hurts when someone has put a cold cloth on it.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying in a hammock of woven fiber, slung beneath a ceiling that was not made of anything he knew. It was a dome of living roots, thick and smooth and pale gold, interlaced as carefully as a basket, with small round windows set into the curve like beads on a string. Sunlight poured through the windows in long amber shafts, and where it touched the roots, tiny, delicate leaves of green-silver unfurled and curled again. From the rafters hung bundles of dried herbs, strings of glass bells, and a hundred paper-thin lamps, shaped like moths, that turned slowly in the air.

“Hello,” said a voice, very close to his ear.

Fel jerked. The hammock swung. A shriek of pain went up his side, and he fell back with his teeth clenched.

Standing beside the hammock, with her chin level with the edge, was a child.

She could not have been more than six. She had skin the color of pale lavender, dark purple at the knuckles and the tips of the ears, and her hair was the pale green of new shoots, cut in a ragged bob across her forehead. Two tiny, round, black horns, no larger than acorns, poked through her fringe. She wore a tunic of undyed linen with a ring of bright red berries sewn around the collar. She was holding a wooden spoon in one hand and looking at him with huge, grave, golden-brown eyes.

“You’re not a ghost,” she announced.

“Everybody said you were a ghost. I said ghosts don’t snore. You snore.”

“I… what?”

She giggled, an astonishing, bell-bright sound. “You talk funny.”

He did. That was the odd thing. He understood her, or he understood most of her, but her words sang. They rose and fell in long, curling vowels, with the first syllable stretched and the last one clipped, the way a monk might chant a prayer. It was Common. It was almost Common. It was like hearing the language of the Gallows spoken in a very old, very formal, very beautiful hall.

“Where…” His throat was raw, and the word cracked. “Where am I?”

“In Mother Osha’s house,” said the child, as though that were an answer. “You’re not supposed to sit up. She said so. She said if you sat up I was supposed to hit you with the spoon.”

“Please don’t.”

“I won’t. I like you. You have funny hair.”

The curtain at the far end of the room parted, and a woman came in. She was old, as old as Haruvael, perhaps older, tall and straight and grey as a heron, with horns that curled back from her brow in two long, elegant spirals of silver. Her skin was the deep dusty violet of a thundercloud at the end of summer, and her eyes were the color of weak tea, set in a net of fine wrinkles. She wore a long apron stained green and brown. She carried a wooden tray, and on it a steaming bowl.

“Pim,” she said, mildly. “What did I say about the spoon?”

“I didn’t hit him.”

“Good girl. Go and tell your mother he is awake.”

The child scampered out with a flash of green hair, and the curtain fell shut. The old woman set the tray on a low stool and looked at Fel for a long time with the calm, appraising, unhurried eyes of a woman who has put a great many people back together.

“You are awake,” she said at last. Her voice was dry and soft, with the same strange singing lilt. “Good. Another day, and I would have started to worry. You have been asleep for two days and a night.”

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“Two…” He tried to sit. Her hand came down on his chest, light as a leaf, and he subsided at once. It was astonishing how little force it took.

“No. You are held together by thread and mint and a very good deal of luck. If you open that wound again, I will put you in the root cellar with the turnips.”

“Sorry.”

“Do not be sorry. Be still.” She lifted a spoon of broth to his lips. “Drink.”

He drank. It was warm and thin and tasted of salt and roots and something faintly smoky, and it was the best thing he had ever put in his mouth. He drank it all, and she gave him another, and another, and when the bowl was empty he found that he was crying, in the stupid, silent, helpless way of a boy who has been strong too long.

The old woman did not comment. She wiped his face with the corner of her apron, as if it were a perfectly ordinary thing to do.

“There,” she said gently. “That is the worst of it.”

“Where am I?” he asked again, when he could.

“Veilrest.” She said it as though it were a name that should mean something. “You are high in the cloud peaks, above the Weeping Forest, in the village of the Ilvari. Not many outsiders find their way here. Fewer still are carried.”

“Carried?”

“By the huntress who found you. She brought you up the mountain on her back, with half a frog still stuck to your boot.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “We were all very impressed.”

He closed his eyes. A thin, hot wave of mortification washed over him. “I was… I was trying to eat it.”

“So we gathered. It was trying to eat you back.”

“Yes.”

“A very even contest, I am sure.” She patted his shoulder. “Now. Your swords are in the corner, in case you are wondering. Nobody has touched them. The black one makes the little ones nervous, and the gold one makes the old ones curious, and I have told them both to mind their business. You will want them back. Boys always do.”

He turned his head.

They stood propped against the wall beside a shelf of jars, side by side: Falling Star in its black scabbard, Krashing Fyr in its black leather one. Someone had cleaned them. The ruby on the hilt of the first caught the afternoon light and winked like an eye.

He did not say anything. He only looked.

“Your clothes were beyond saving,” Osha went on, as she gathered the tray. “We burned them. The ones you are wearing belong to my grandson. He will want them back, so please do not bleed on them.”

“I’ll try.”

“Do.” She paused at the curtain. “There is a young woman who has been sitting outside that door for most of two days and who will deny it if you ask. I would take it as a kindness if you would allow her to come in.”

“The huntress.”

“Veyra.” The old woman’s smile deepened. “She is a good girl, though she hides it well. Do not let her bully you.”

She went out.

The curtain swung. For a little while, Fel lay in the golden quiet and listened to the bells, and tried to put the pieces together. Veilrest. The Ilvari. The Weeping Forest. Not one of the words meant anything to him. He had been through Arboritia, through the Dichotomy, to Tohei and back, and he had never heard of a village above the clouds.

That’s all right, he told himself. I’ve never been anywhere before I got there.

The curtain moved again.

She did not knock. She simply stepped through, as lightly as a cat, and stopped just inside the doorway with her arms folded, looking at him.

It was the girl from the cliff.

He knew her at once. He knew the shape of her, tall, long-limbed, straight as a spear, and the way she stood, with her weight on the balls of her feet like someone who might at any moment decide to leave. Up close, in the clear light of day, she was even stranger than the mirage had been. Her skin was a deep, pale, luminous purple, like the heart of an iris, flushed a warmer shade across the cheekbones. Her hair hung to her waist, in a long, loose braid the color of sage after rain, and from her brow two small black horns curved back, sleek and polished as obsidian. She was perhaps eighteen, perhaps older. It was hard to tell with a face like that, so calm, so composed, so utterly unimpressed.

And her eyes were exactly as he remembered. They were violet, the clear, cold violet of amethyst when you hold it to the sun, and they were looking him up and down with an expression of faint, scientific disappointment.

She was taller than he was by half a head. He had never felt so short in his life.

“You are awake,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You were inside a frog.”

“Partly,” said Fel, with as much dignity as a boy in a borrowed shirt could muster.

“A frog,” she repeated, “the size of a cart. With your head.”

“I wasn’t inside it. I was near the inside. It’s not the same thing.”

She regarded him with the grave attention of a scholar presented with a new species of insect. Then, to his considerable surprise, her mouth twitched, and one corner of it curled up, very slightly, and was just as quickly suppressed.

“I am Veyra,” she said. “I shot the frog.”

“I noticed. Thank you.”

“Five of them, actually. The first was the one that wanted to chew on you. The other four were for being rude.”

“That seems fair.”

“It was extremely fair.” She unfolded her arms, crossed the room in three long strides, and stood beside the hammock, looking down at him. Up close she smelled of pine smoke and crushed mint, and under it, faintly, of something wild and cold, like snow on a high stone. “You are not from the lowlands.”

It was not a question.

“No,” said Fel.

“You are not from the north. You are not from the south.” Her eyes narrowed. “You speak like a monk reciting a prayer, but you have no accent that any of us know, and you carry swords I have not seen the like of, and three nights ago the sky over the Weeping Forest turned white from end to end, and the next morning I found a boy with a hole in his belly lying at the bottom of a gully full of frogs.”

Fel said nothing.

“I do not believe in coincidences,” said Veyra.

“Neither do I,” said Fel faintly. “That’s the problem.”

She looked at him for a long moment more. Then, slowly, she sat down on the stool beside the hammock, and the line of her shoulders eased by a hair.

“Good,” she said. “Then we begin by understanding each other. Tell me your name.”