I awoke again around noon, and we told Hester and Ariké about the Morul-Om while Eidahn slept. Hester expressed his doubts and concerns, tut-tutting us from behind a scowl, but he couldn’t deny any of the verifiable details: he had killed two attackers, natives of the veld, by his own hand, and the outriders had recovered their fallen comrade about half a league from camp. He did get Ariké to promise to be frank about the source of the information when providing it to Chethe, who would be meeting with the elders that night.
After this conversation, a handful of riders arrived to help Gena tie my leg to a splint, which had been carefully carved to the proper angle and planed to a pleasant, cool smoothness by one of the riders’ carpenters. Ariké corrected me when I expressed my thanks for this moving generosity, asserting that it was simply good hospitality, and also that I shouldn’t thank them yet.
“Why?” I wondered aloud.
“They,” Ariké began, gesturing to the two men, “are here to hold you down.”
“… Why?” I said again, a bit more quietly.
“Setting the leg is going to hurt.”
I did manage to whimper a thanks to them afterward, though, while the man who had tied my leg lowered it to the ground and waved the others off. They let me go, and though I ceased straining against them in the previous minute or so, I had still been straining in general, and I did my best to relax.
The last man stayed with me. He was a slight, short, middle aged man with a long mane of black hair issuing from beneath a feather-adorned skull cap. He had a hard, finely-focused look to his eyes. He reminded me of…
“Hello,” he said. “I speak… poor Ivian.”
“Ah. I speak terrible Yaria, sorry,” I replied. It was a phrase I had worn well lately.
“Sorry, sorry. Yes. We will try Yaria, sorry.”
“Alright,” I said, and then I switched over to my halting, groping Yaria. “Thank you. For… foot.”
“Our hospitality, friend. You deserve not to be bed-bound.”
“Mmm.”
“I am the Salkhin Duuchin1. My name is Tof, but few call me that any more. When I became the duuchin, that became more important.”
That’s who he reminded me of. Magister Montigo2.
“You do… magic?” I said.
“Yes, I do magic. I care for the band, all my children. Magic makes for good care.”
“You’re… young, for all them, the children.”
“Well, we can’t just make the oldest rider the duuchin, now, can we? The duuchin has to care.”
I thought I saw the point, though I worried the language barrier was doing some mischief.
“And you, too,” he continued. “While you ride with us, you are my child, too.”
“Thank you,” I managed again.
“Erdemten Gena spoke well and honestly of you.”
That word I didn’t know, but I guessed it was an honorific. And what did he mean by honestly? “She is… eager,” I said, substituting in a word for a spirited horse with fond undertones. That was probably pretty rude, I thought, after I said it.
The duuchin chuckled. “Oh?”
“She wants… sleep-teach.” I was making it worse. “Magic. Sleeping-awake. Teach,” I sputtered in a mild panic.
“Hah.” He shook his head. “She wants you to teach her magic?”
I nodded. “Sleeping-awake,” I said, pitifully. How was I supposed to convey the idea of lucid dreaming? “See-sky, closed eyes, sleeping,” I tried.
That seemed to do it. I hoped, anyway. “Night-flying,” he said. “I see. She did not mention this. She did think you might like to speak to me.”
“I do like, but…”
We worked it out slowly. I was to be under his care, and so Gena had told him about my frequent encounters with Lady Iltara, as it could affect the quality of my rest. He had pressed for more, and she and Hester had explained what little we knew about her, as well as the context and text of my conversations with her.
Understandably, this had piqued his interest. He had asked the others for some time to speak with me alone.
“She…” I began before trailing off and shrugging helplessly.
“It’s all right. They told me. She is very chickher, yes?”
“I don’t know that word. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” he agreed, chuckling to himself again. “We know of Iltara.”
“Yes?” I blurted. My heart caught in my throat, and the whole effort of being excited was causing me to feel a bit light-headed.
He paused for a second, considering his words3. “She is far away, but we have heard. She is an ekhlehk.”
“A… what?”
He frowned. “This word is difficult. She is a… salan daichin. Urvagch. Wild horse.”
My eyebrows shot up. I had been leaning back on my elbows, but now I was bolt upright. “No king?”
He nodded. “She bucked him.”
“Wow.” Desheret-Nemes had been the King of the Valley of the Sun, the Old King, since the beginning of history4. And my nemesis—my friend?—had the gall to defy him.
“She is not the first ekhlehk. Maybe not the last.”
“Oh? I had not know of… ekhlehk.”
“She is only one we know of now. Every few korinjil… er, two-ten-years, you see. Distant towns buck him. Not for long.”
“Yes,” I said, substituting for I see. In the west we tend to think of the Old King’s rule as absolute and spare no further thought to it. But the truth is more robust than that: sometimes, his subjects do defy his rule, but any time it begets open conflict, they are crushed, and his rule remains unbroken.
“Will she… beget open conflict?”
“Foolish. She has been alive too long to be so foolish.”
“Will he, then?”
“As surely as the sun rises over the valley.”
“I…” hoped we wouldn’t be there when that happened, but I failed to find the word for hope. So I settled for “I see.”
Tof—the duuchin—and I spoke more that afternoon. As a wise man and a magic practitioner—a very similar role to the one I was being trained for, as it happens—he had amassed an enormous variety of skills and breadth of knowledge. As a lifelong member of a traveling Yaria band, he had walked and ridden across much of Anteianum, Orland, and East Arc. He had spoken to thousands of people in all walks of life, and he had the ability to borrow and read written works (and, indeed, was often entrusted to bear them from one place to another) from all over the kingdoms. His ear for Ivian was rough, but he had a knack for reading it (mostly by way of long hours and dogged patience).
His learning defied the academic structures I was used to. Instead, he seemed to give all of his knowledge, collectively and individually, two aspects: the nuut, or the mystery of the knowledge itself, and the üildel, the acts supported by that knowledge, like leaves on a tree.
His mastery of magic was primarily the understanding of the interconnected nuut of the wind and the skies and the flow of life throughout them. And the üildel were many and delightfully diverse. The first he had learned were spells that would calm wild animals and still turbulent winds. Neither he used much now in their original forms. But the skill to calm animals could be used on humans just as well, though generally only on willing subjects (such as certain nervy strangers who were in desperate need of convalescence). “People’s minds are even more stubborn than goats’”, he remarked.
His most important duty as a magic practitioner was as his namesake: influencing the wind and weather.
It was a delicate job to be undertaken with great caution. It would be tempting to work magic to keep camp dry at all times—warm fires and dry clothes are welcome all times of year—but too much of that, he said, can distort the land and even the skies over the long years of a duuchin’s life, and especially across the long centuries of a band’s life. It would do the band little good to be dry for one night if their sons and daughters would trod barren earth in thirty years.
That night was a night worthy of the effort. A funeral was to be held for the fallen outrider (a man named Kyrgh, survived by a wife, four children, a brother, and two sisters) and the assassins. I was surprised that the murderers would be accorded honors, especially alongside one of the Windvalley Riders’ own. The duuchin replied that it was really a two-part rite: the assassins would be given last rites and buried, and then Kyrgh would receive the honors befitting his long life as a dutiful father, husband, and member of the band.
We both glanced over at Eidahn. He was still asleep. He hadn’t been awake very much.
I shook my head. I still didn’t know the word for “hope.”
“We do what we can,” the duuchin said.
The band would rest for as long as necessary for Eidahn and myself to be fit to travel again. For me, it wouldn’t be long. My rattled head was healing nicely, and though a few days of bed rest wouldn’t heal my leg, I was expected to regain enough strength to ride on a wagon, or even perhaps spend a few hours on donkeyback or horseback. For Eidahn… it was uncertain. The duuchin seemed to think it would be a week before we knew more. He had been plying his trade the best he knew how—thorough care, constant examinations with the aid of Gena’s second set of trained eyes, and sweet sky breezes enchanted with life. But Eidhan’s abdominal wound was deep and treacherous, and all depended on whether his organs could continue to sustain him while they repaired.
After resuming our journey, we would be only a week shy of our first major destination. We would pass through a small stretch of Orland, skirting the hinterlands (being careful not to trample any farmers’ fields) and stopping by several small villages. Then, we would part ways with the riders, who would pass north to their lowland summer pastures. Gena, Hester and I—if I were in any condition to—would cross the Orlan Blue at Paupersbridge5 and follow well-traveled roads through East Arc to their terminus at Hester’s ancestral home, The Watch on the Rock.
And then, we would hazard a perilous climb up and then down through the Wituk Pass. And then we would be in the Valley of the Sun.
“My worries are… small, for his,” I tried, gesturing at Eidahn. “But… I need my foot.”
The duuchin turned from his own contemplations to meet my gaze.
“Iltara may give… sleep…” I gestured at the leg, trying to indicate “healing” somehow.
The duuchin nodded.
“Is… can do?”
After a brief pause, he said simply: “Do not accept.”
“But… can? But don’t.”
“Perhaps she can. We know her to be a mighty ilbechin. But fearsome.”
“Fearsome?” I had my suspicions, but I wanted to hear it from him.
“She defies the king, for one thing. No small act.”
I nodded, taking his word for it but not truly appreciating it. Not until later.
“And for the other… she gathers up friends. And the friends she gathers… are ill friends indeed. The Morul-Om. The Teeth of the Mare.” At my inquiring look, he elaborated. “A band like ours in the dry northwest of the valley. They are eager to fight. Raid. Take. And her other friends are… in Ivian they call them road fellows?”
“Highwaymen,” I said in Ivian, tickled.
“Right. She gathers up these. She surrounds herself with swords and bows.”
“What’s she give them?”
“What they want,” he said, shrugging. “Gold. Power. Good morodol.”
Dreams.
“So… I do not want to be her ill friend,” I worked out. “No.”
“I am glad you see.” He scratched his chin. “Perhaps you would instead do your own?”
“I am a young learner,” I said. Apprentice wizard. “And…” I shuffled around for my pack, and in it retrieved the bound tome Lorea had given me. Beautiful, but empty. Empty, but thereby beautiful, by another perspective. I showed it to the duuchin.
His eyebrows rose. “Did you lose yours? Or are you younger than I thought?”
“Lost. Maybe,” I said. “I have some remembered. But need to… remember others.” I sighed.
“Let me help. We will cshynix together. Work-learn.” Study.
“That is good for me. Thank you. But I do not… cannot… leg. Not with what I can remember.”
“Ah. No matter. Magic… nuut and üildel, they are good for the spirit. And…” he said, before adding in Ivian: “Be patient. The correct problem to solve is not always the one before you.”
“Magister Montigo.”
“The Wizard of Ilianath is wise.”
“… Yes.”
The funeral was held that night. The assassins were buried with terse respect, and then Kyrgh was laid to rest as a warrior fallen at war. The Yariagar know no greater honor6.
All who could stand stood upon the wild grasses. I was not expected to, but I wanted to. Gena and Hester helped me make the effort to join them.
Kyrgh’s widow rose above the crowd, facing the pyre, saddled atop her husband’s favorite horse.
The duuchin stood alone, a dark figure about five hundred paces away. There, he stared at the sky, holding back the rainstorm that had swept over the plains that evening. A wide, cylindrical sheet of rain surrounded us, its edges occasionally crackling with tiny branching darts of lightning. Mist flooded through into the gathered band, filling the scene with a dense, billowing fog, mingling with smoke.
I do not feel disposed to write much more about the night. The grief belongs to them—Kyrgh’s family, his friends, his folk—not to us.
literally “Gale Singer,” I would learn. ↩
I had once asked her if she resented the fact that visitors to court, especially plain folk, called her just “wizard” more often than not. She said: of course not. That was what was important about her to them. In a way, it was more true a name than her given name was. There was a certain kind of respect to be found in that. And, anyway, it was a waste of her time and energy to be offended by the truth of what she was. ↩
All told, he did an impressive job adjusting for my vocabulary. You never really get to appreciate things like that in the moment. ↩
Quite literally. The earliest surviving records on the southern continent, besides the Word itself, are construction proclamations and corvée orders issued by the Old King himself. ↩
Properly, “The Wyde Crossinge As Provisioned By Ye Goode King Trulieaux I,” but Trulieaux II had undermined that legacy by imposing an outrageous toll on the bridge. ↩
The nomads of the veld and their cousins on the northern continent, the donghu, both claim to be the heirs of a tradition going back to the God of Wandering, Tormus-Iliath, who was slain as he led the great cavalry charge that broke the Lord of Agony and ended the Century of Torment. The Yariagar in particular are short on ritual and explicit acts of piety: their god is long gone, they do not feel it necessary to flatter him with words. Rather, they hold that their very way of life, that which he bequeathed to them, is holy: to ride upon the endless grasses, to sing under the open sky, to give one’s life to the battle against evil. ↩