Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [7]
And I tried not to worry about the distance that yet lay between us, the shortening days, the trees growing increasingly barren of leaves, the chill in the air.
Here and there, I found folk who remembered Bao’s passage. He might not have stood out as unmistakably as I did, but he was memorable in his own way. Even from the beginning, there had been an air of coiled intensity to him, a feral glitter to his dark eyes that put me in mind of my own people. It was not unthinkable; although the Maghuin Dhonn have dwelled in Alba for time out of mind, there are tales among us of an older time, when the world was covered in ice and we followed the Great Bear Herself out of a frozen wasteland to warmer climes.
That was when there were still great magicians among us, shape-changers capable of taking the form of the Maghuin Dhonn Herself. We lost that gift generations ago when the magician Berlik broke an oath he swore by stone and sea and all that they encompass, on his very diadh-anam. Now, only small gifts remain to us; or so I had thought. My mother taught me to summon the twilight when I was but a child, a gift meant for hiding and concealment.
But as I’d grown to adulthood, I’d found it has other uses. To summon the twilight is to take half a step into the spirit world. It could also serve to make a gateway that allows the energy of the spirit world to spill into ours.
I discovered first that I had a knack for coaxing plants to grow. It seemed a simple and benign gift, mayhap a legacy of my father. Although he is a child of Naamah through and through, the lineage of Anael, the Good Steward, also runs in his veins.
It was Raphael de Mereliot who discovered that my gift could be used for other purposes. In a twisted way, I supposed I owed him a debt of gratitude. Had he not done so, had he not used my magic to work miracles of healing, my lovely father would have died of an infection of the lungs. Had Raphael not persuaded me to help him summon fallen spirits, I would not possess the gift one of them gave me on a whim, a charm to reveal hidden things. Were it not for that charm, Snow Tiger would have drowned in the lake below White Jade Mountain with the pearl that lodged the dragon’s soul hidden in her mortal flesh.
Gods, the links that bind one person’s ambition and desire to another’s fate are complicated things! One could go mad thinking on it. But I knew for a surety that if Raphael had not used my gift thusly, Bao would still be dead. Master Lo Feng would never have known to use my gift to exchange his life for Bao’s.
Being touched by death had changed Bao. Its touch clung to him, lent him a faint aura of shimmering darkness. Bao had died, and yet lived. He alone in the world was twice-born. So it did not surprise me to find folk who remembered him along the way.
And having guessed at his purpose, it should not have surprised me to come across the village of his birth as I followed in his tracks.
Yet somehow, it did.
FOUR
The village was called Tonghe. There was nothing to distinguish it from the dozens of others through which I had passed along the way, and I would not have chosen to stay there if my inquiries in the market had not proved fruitful. When I described Bao using a combination of dialect and gestures, an elderly woman selling squashes nodded vigorously and pointed across the square toward a handful of men huddled over a set of dominoes.
Even though my diadh-anam assured me that Bao was many, many leagues away, my heart soared, and I had to look twice to assure myself he wasn’t among them. The squash seller tugged my arm and spoke volubly.
“I’m sorry, Grandmother.” I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
She scowled at me, then gave a penetrating shout. A boy of some ten years came at a pelting run, listening and nodding as she spoke to him.
“Greetings, Noble Barbarian Lady!” Despite his rough-spun attire, he addressed me in the scholar’s tongue, speaking with careful precision. He bowed three times in rapid succession and then straightened, his