“Were you cheating?” I teased.
His eyes glittered like stars over the sea. “Most likely. I remember arriving with aRhi’Ahrescort, leaping out of the longboat, and swimming to the shore. Meeting the Priestlords and feeling their rebuke. Scaling the mountain and knowing the chimeric as a true and dangerous thing. And I remember the first time I saw the RuneTree…”
He struggled as if to catch his breath, as if the memories actually ached at the telling.
“Kirianae, the RuneTree, a thousand years old, born from chimeric and the blood of old Dreadmages. She was so tall, her branches full and reaching for the skies. Her trunk grew along the mountainside, her bark thick and covered in rune. She was glorious, Aro’el. I heard her voice the moment I set foot in the sand of the bay.”
Kier Gavriel, she said, her voice faint.Beloved, come home.
“There were seventy mages living on the island, all older than I, but that was the way it was run. The old ones taught the younger, and when a new acolyte arrived, a seasoned one returned to theirking, to counsel and to guide. There were so many books, and I was an eager reader. I was not allowed to climb the Tree, but every night, I would take a book, scale her branches, all the way to the top, and read by the light of the moons.”
I smiled to myself and gazed up at his shelves, countless spines of boundless knowledge.
“I never slipped. I never fell. And when I would fall asleep, she would keep me safe until morning. She would not let them chasten me, either, for she had grown protective of me and my reckless, fearless ways. I took Kier as my Lore name to honor her.”
Kier. I loved that name. It sounded like the cry of a winter hawk.
My Beloved. My Kier Gavriel. Honor Aro’el.
“I was there but a year when a midnight raid came from the North. I was asleep, hidden in her canopy, and I awoke to the crack of a flint. And then another and another. Bonavanczek had ordered them all slaughtered, with his soldiers and his shot. The screams of my order are seared in my ears as they died in a hail of gunpowder.”
He looked down at me, and I could see memory hollow the lines of his face.
“I tried to help them, though in truth, I could not. I was a child of seven, could barely cast a shield. Kirianae refused to let me go, held me fast in her branches, and I watched in horror as the fusiliers dragged bodies from the Heart of the Cloud. They chopped them all to pieces, in case some arcane magik could bring them back. That very night, they fled with trophies for the war room of the king. She let me down at dawn.”
He slid his leg out from under him and leaned forward, clasped his hands between his knees.
“I had never seen blood like that, Aro’el. I had never seen bones and brains and shattered faces once filled with life. My teachers,my friends, slain the way you might pick flowers, and we didn’t know why.”
Forge, I wanted to soothe him, comfort him, but I didn’t know how. I laid a hand upon his back. I don’t think he felt it, but somehow, it seemed right.
“And then I was alone. Alone on an island at seven suns of age. I cannot tell you the times I nearly died of starvation or thirst or exposure or wounds. I learned to fish and hunt and make fires from water-damp wood. I became skilled at knowing which berries would feed my body and which would spin nightmares that would last for days. It was a long, painful, treacherous time, and I know I would have gone mad if I did not have the books…”
He looked up at me now, a weak smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.
“Oh, the books, Aro’el. And they were mine. I devoured each and every one. Books on magecraft and books on rune, some written inRhi’Ahrand others in Overland. I read them all, and I grew strong in magik and skilled in rune.”
This was the reason for his formal speech, I realized. Hehadbeen raised in a library, as I had once mused, but his teachers weren’t scholars or sages. They were the very books themselves.
“I could hear her then, when she was glorious and wise. Kirianae taught me the only language she knew. Magik, wylde and Archaic. She taught me how to cast and how to spin. She knew every spell that had ever been, for the chimeric was the sap in her veins. She was the heart of the Worldrune, knew the location of every web and knot, and which to pluck and which to strum and how to make them sing. She also had the patience of lifetimes because, moons know, I was not an easy learner.”
My heart swelled at the thought of this ancient being, this goddess tree, loving a little boy and teaching him the mysteries of the world simply because she could.
“She was the one who taught me to mirror. We could be equals,she said, so that, like her, I could soar…”
He lifted his hand, twisted his wrist. His arm became a wing before I could blink.
“What better way to protect the island than as a hawk that could survey all on the wings of the wind, completely at home by air, land, and water?”
I could get both hands to form wings now, could grow feathers all along my neck and spine. My feet could shrivel, and my toes could shrink, and tiny tips of talons could form across them. It was a mad, exhilarating, excruciating thing.
Another twist, and his wing was gone.
“It was easy to live as a hawk,” he said, “to hunt and fish and sip from the bay. I slept in her branches by night, and I grew in rune by day, and she was my only companion for ten years. My heart, my soul, my protector, mykel’yion.”
Family, friend, closer than either.
My heart thudded in my chest as I realized he’d answered my question. It was there in the lines in his face, in the shape of his smile. The goddess wasn’t his lover. She was his mother.
