Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight Read Free

against his throat and backed him off, step by step. My littlest sister gasped and hid her face in my mother’s skirts.
    “ Could Kul cure her, perhaps?” the Muark asked.
    “ Perhaps, if he had the crown of Fel Karren—but no such luck yet.”
    “ What about Arianis?”
    “ You have not heard? Arianis is dead.”
    Alkyone paled further. “Arianis gone? But he was the best of our leaders, our only guidance! No wonder the Lord of Ash stretched out his hand to take me so easily!”
    She lowered her face into her hands and wept. And those men, they fell into silence and stood there looking at her in the way you would a stone that has become a scorpion, or a stick that writhes and becomes an adder.
    When those black pits had been concealed by her long-fingered hands, I could move again. I put my mug down, and went forward to embrace her. I buried her head in my shoulder so I did not have to face that black gaze, but even so, I held her and did my best to conceal the terror that shook me, like an earthquake that sets the world ashiver.
    For a frozen time—a dozen breaths?—she let me hold her, she clung to me.
    Then a hand fell on my shoulder, and my mother pulled me away, begged their pardon, and took me off to shake me hard and tell me never to meddle in matters of magic or witchcraft.
    It was half in me to demand what about my father. Wasn’t he as steeped in magic as Alkyone, whether or not he hid it? But something in the way my mother looked made me hold my tongue on that subject.
    “ Is Alkyone the Lord of Ash’s now?” I asked, and my mother shook me again, so hard my neck popped on its spine, which startled me, because she’d never been one to strike us in anger.
    “ Magicker business!”
    No one spoke about Alkyone after she’d gone. No one said anything, even though I tried to ask. My mother hissed me into silence, and my father—when he was there—would not speak of it.
    A half year later I was outside emptying slop buckets when I saw lights in the sky. Stars and comets, dancing lights, far to the south. I ran inside to fetch the others, but by the time my family came out into the yard, the lights were gone, and they only made fun of me.
    Months later, though, I was vindicated when travelers spoke of the night the lights had flashed in the sky to mark the last battle with the Lord of Ash. They said Alkyone helped defeat him, but that it was a joint effort, really—the J’Karr and the Tan Muark, and a handful of magickers joined together. That their dead friend Arianis had come back as a gwoshi to help them defeat the Lord of Ash, that there had been a fierce fight nonetheless, and Kul had offered no aid—he’d been off in the North on his own expedition, searching for ways to defeat Isar.
    They said down in the Salt Flats there was a statue of the Lord of Ash, what he had been, turned into black stone—obsidian. My eldest once traveled down to see it, and said it was large and wicked, and that she dreamed of it for three nights running. The Muark still make the trip there once a year, to piss on its feet and curse it.
    Phaedrin had turned out to be working with the Lord of Ash. He died on those sands as well and no statue marked his grave.
    Time wore on, and my mother entrusted me with more and more of the inn’s running. My father was taken away by Lord Isar’s people under suspicion of being an unlicensed elementalist. Every week my mother went to ask news of him and every week there was none. They never said officially whether or not it was true. He was gone, either way, and he didn’t come back. People disappeared in those days, just as they do now. That’s always been Tuluk’s way, no matter who sat in power.
    I had my first boyfriend. Liselle stole him and broke him so when he came back to me, he wanted me as little as I wanted him. I listened to travelers’ stories and the news that the bards passed along in their songs, the few bards that still existed under Lord Isar’s hand.