Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight Read Free Page A

Poet’s Circle, where they had once all lived, was boarded up and guarded.
    I wore the earrings Alkyone had given me each year at Isar’s Festival. One year I had a daughter with my broken boyfriend, and then two years later another with a man who wasn’t broken, and who loved my first as his own.
    Thoughts of Alkyone, somehow, pulled me through. I listened for news every night in the inn’s common room. I heard she had died. I heard she had never died or that she had come back. I heard that she was sometimes an elemental and sometimes human, and sometimes something in between. Rumors said Kul was in exile. He’d tried to kill Isar after retrieving some artifact, and had been driven to live with the Tan Muark. Some people said he’d married a Muark woman who’d fallen in battle a few days later. We did not see the tribe much after that, and you couldn’t get blue silk ribbons for years. They were the only ones with the secret of the dye.
    No one knew what would happen.
    Then a few Muark appeared, began passing the word to watch out, that on the night of Isar’s Festival, rebellion would break out. That something was happening, that the last of the rebel magickers were planning something. That we should hide that night, and be ready the next day to take the city.
    No one knew what to expect. No one dreamed how bad it would be. But we hid like they told us, for all the good it did most of us.
    That night, elementals walked through the city, beings from planes outside our own. The city shook with their passage all night long. My family and I hid in the cellar with four crates of Reynolte wine and a keg of spiced brandy. The Tan Muark had brought up a great wheel of cheese on their unexpected visit two days earlier, and we ate half of it that night because there wasn’t anything else to do.
    I wondered where Alkyone was. Surely she was part of this? Had the Lord of Ash returned, was she out there helping defeat him once again? Who had brought the elementals to destroy the city? Were her friends with her still, was exiled Kul there to defend his home? Did she remember giving me her honey cakes, back when I was as young as the child huddled against me?
    And what color were her eyes now?
    It was a long night. None of us slept. We sat listening to the cries and feeling the earth shake whenever some monstrous thing passed in the street outside, nibbling at our cheese as though it would quiet the nervous snakes in our stomachs.
    In the morning, the city was gone.
    Our inn still stood, but other buildings near us had been burned and flattened.
    Survivors recounted stories of a great fire-winged hawk from the plane of Suk-Krath, and a stone tortoise from Ruk, and a girl made of water from Vivadu. Liselle was dead. They wouldn’t let me see the body, but I heard the whispers. The water elemental had drowned her with a kiss.
    No one knew what happened, but they knew Lord Isar was defeated. Kul and his soldiers marched through the streets with Lord Isar in chains before them, hunched over, looking small. The prisoners in his dungeons were freed, but my father wasn’t among them.
    Kul came to the Inn that night. I knew it was him. Hadn’t I seen him during the march? Hadn’t he waved to the crowds, perhaps even seen me there? For a moment when he entered, lean and rugged, flanked by two soldiers, I dreamed that he had noticed me, had come to claim me for his bride.
    But his gaze was perfunctory. He went to the back room. On his head was a high crown made of wrought metal, green with verdigris. Others came—high ranked merchants, the Kuraci, the young general, Garas, who had helped defeat Isar’s troops.
    Alkyone came in after most of them, two Tan Muark men with her. When she entered the back room, voices were raised. I maneuvered myself near the door, tried to overhear what was happening.
    Kul was ordering every magicker out of Tuluk.
    “ How can I trust any of you, after this?” he demanded. “We are so weak that even now