Dust & Rain

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

OH, MORNINGLIGHT, oh evenlight

How you wake me through the night

Oh morningstar, oh evenstar

How do you guide me from afar

Jevaithi’s clear voice faded amongst the trees, in the rustle of the wind through the pine boughs, and the singing of the birds.

She breathed the scent of grass and pine resin, letting the taste of it flow through her lungs. It was beautiful. It was strange; it was new. All her life, she had only seen the whiteness of the plains around the City of Glass, whenever her minders had deigned to take her, which wasn’t often.

For the first time in all her life, Jevaithi was free. There were no courtiers telling her to behave, no ladies-in-waiting telling her to wear hideous clothes; there was no Rider Cornatan watching over her. She could dance, she could sing, she could roll in the grass.

The dress was filthy, but it didn’t matter. The grass was soft and the wind was warm, although today it had been quite chilled, but she and Isandor had their furs, even if they were full of sticks and seeds, and smelled of each other.

There was plenty of food and it was easy to catch that even she, with little experience in hunting, had made two kills. Fat birds with webbed feet and funny, broad beaks. She’d learned to pluck and clean them, and cut them up for roasting. The Chevakians must keep these for eggs, because they found many of those.

There were even milking goats, although they were tricky to catch and even more tricky to milk.

But it was fun. Goat’s milk was tangy and smelly, but it filled her stomach.

They had seen no people.

The large house down the hill seemed to be empty. Once it must have been a magnificent residence, but now the paint had faded, moss covered the roof and the garden was an overgrown mess. In the fields surrounding it, the farm machines moved backwards and forwards by themselves, chug-chugging and belching steam. There was no one in those machines; Isandor had checked. How did they move?

And why was there such a large house with all these empty rooms? Why did no one look after the machines? Why were there big barns with grain just sitting there? Where were all the people to eat it? Chevakia was such a strange place, such a rich place to let all these buildings stand empty and let harvested crops uneaten.

There was the swishing of footsteps through grass.

Isandor stood at the edge of the golden wheat field, holding his hand above his eyes and squinting into the distance.

His face was so serious that Jevaithi wanted to go and hug him, but he’d been very distant ever since they had let the eagle go. He had told her that he’d wanted to be an Eagle Knight, not a leering one like the Knights who had guarded her, but an honest Knight. Of those men it was said they loved their birds more than their women. The bird that had carried them here all the way from the City of Glass had been his, briefly. As he had taken the harness off, it had flown away in the direction of the border. Isandor had watched her fly off until she became a little speck that disappeared over the horizon.

Jevaithi had asked, Where will she go?

Isandor had said, Probably back to the Aranian mountains, to the mountaintops where her kin roosts. And the roosts of the giant birds were said to be holy in the eyes of the Knights. Of course the eagle would go back where she could be free.

But Isandor was not free. He stood staring at the sky, with that expression of sadness over his face. The glare from the sun carved sharp angles in his face. Jevaithi didn’t dare ask if he was looking for the bird to come back. Her heart—his heart inside her chest—ached with his sadness and at the same time felt warm with love. He didn’t deserve sadness.

Isandor was handsome, he had the perfect royal blue eyes, black glossy hair that she loved to stroke and comb, and a few funny hairs that poked out of his chin. He tried to cut them off with the dagger and she said she liked him better with the hairs.

He didn’t need to be ashamed about being a man.

She approached him through the grass and was just about to touch him when he turned around abruptly, seemed to see her for the first time, grabbed her hand and pushed her face first against the trunk of a tree.

Jevaithi barely had time to protest. “Isandor, what—”

“Shhh!” He flung his cloak over her and pressed himself against her. Under the cloak, it smelled of sweat, wet fur and pine resin. She could feel her heart beating like crazy in Isandor’s chest. His arm tightened around her. All around in the forest, the birds were making alarmed noises.

“What is it?” she whispered in the darkness under the cloak, but at that moment there was a faraway cry she recognised: the plaintive, high-pitched trill that took her back to her tower room prison in the City of Glass, where she would stand with her nose pressed against the window watching the Knights soar past on their birds.

And she could almost feel Rider Cornatan’s presence, always watching her. She could feel his gaze burn through her thin dress.

The eagle was sure going to see her; eagles could spot a snow fox on an ice floe from heights where you couldn’t even see the rider on the bird’s back. Soon, the bird would come down, and bring its mates. There was no way they could fight a couple of trained Knights. She should run, while she still could.

But Isandor’s arm enclosed her like a vice, keeping her pressed to the trunk of the tree.

“Keep as still as you can,” he whispered. “Eagles can only see you if you move.”

Every nerve in her body was telling her that he was wrong, but it made sense. He had been an Apprentice after all. He knew eagles better than she did. She kept still, controlled her shivering muscles which were aching to run, and hardly dared breathe.

Those moments under the cloak felt like eternity, but eventually, Isandor relaxed. He retreated, leaving a cold and sweaty spot where their bodies had touched.

Jevaithi pushed the cloak off her head and squinted at those bits of blue sky peeking between the trees.

“Is it gone?” she asked.

Isandor was squinting at the sky, too. “I think so.”

“It wasn’t your bird, wasn’t it?”

He shook his head, looking serious. “Lucky that we let the eagle go. She would have given us away.”

“Please do your best to hide us from them. I don’t want to go back. I want to stay with you always.” She hadn’t thought that the Knights would find their position so quickly.

“It’s not going back that worries me,” Isandor said. “If the Knights catch us, why would they take you back to the City of Glass? It suits them if the Queen has had a terrible accident and won’t ever come back. That way, with no Queen and no heir, they can do exactly what they want, and Rider Cornatan won’t ever need to give up his power as regent. He can just call himself king. He’s probably already done that.”

He was right. These Knights weren’t here to capture her; they were here to kill her. She had thought there was nothing worse than having Rider Cornatan in her bed, and of course she’d been stupid. There were worse things. Much worse.

“Please, Isandor, help me.”

The worried expression on his face hurt her. He held her close, but another chilled wind blew through the forest which suddenly seemed very harsh and foreign. And there was a tang in the air. If she hadn’t known any better, if she hadn’t been in Chevakia, she would have thought it was a flare of icefire. That couldn’t be. There were barriers. She had seen them herself, felt their eerie influence, endless walls cutting through the landscape, made from metal plates set at an angle. She didn’t know how they stopped icefire, but just watching them from the back of an eagle they gave her the shudders. There was no icefire here.

“I’m cold.”

He didn’t meet her eyes. Would he feel it, too, the tang in the air?

Huddling together, they studied the alien intense blue sky. The sun was much further above the horizon than it would ever be in the City of Glass, and cast harsh shadows over the grass and Isandor’s pale skin.

He said, “We should probably get under cover. The door to the shed down there is open. I tested it, and there’s no one in there. It will be safer, and warmer. I’ve found some hay that will make a nice bed . . .” He gave a wolfish grin. “Come.”

He took her hand.

They gathered up whatever little things they had brought and carried the filthy bundles through the field. The grain came up to her knees and when the ears hit her legs, they tickled. She no longer laughed at the feeling. The sight of the bird wheeling in the sky had awakened a deep fear in her. Running away might work well for Isandor, but could she ever feel safe?

The shed looked rather forbidding, a structure without windows, made from a material that was grey and had countless longitudinal waves. If she hadn’t known any better, she would have thought it would have come from ancient times. But this was most certainly Chevakian-produced.

Isandor opened the shed door; it creaked.

Jevaithi followed him into semidarkness and a musty smell of dry grass. There was a big dark shape inside, like a big crouching animal. Jevaithi hesitated; she felt so small and nervous. “What’s that?”

“It’s one of their machines. I know it looks scary, but it doesn’t do anything. Come over here.”

Jevaithi walked past the machine, running her hand over the smooth metal and breathing its strange scent. The machine was almost as tall as a house and was one block of metal bigger than she had ever seen before. It had a large wire cylinder on one end and stood on a set of tractor wheels. At the top was a long arm. She wondered what it was for.

Isandor had collected a couple of the strange rectangular cubes of hay as they had found stacked up in another shed. One as a table, two as chairs. A plank held treasures they had collected so far: a rusty fork, a broken pot and a couple of flat rocks for the fire. There was also the clumsy basket she had woven from straw, with three eggs, and a couple of pieces of fruit they had collected.

Isandor spread his hands. “Behold, our first home!”

She forced her worries from her mind and threw herself in his arms. He stroked her hair, but didn’t say anything. He was worried, too. She could feel that in the way his heart beat in her chest.

“I think we can’t keep running,” she said. “We should hide instead. We should become farmers. We can keep goats and keep these funny birds.”

“They’re called ducks.”

“Never mind. We’ll look like Chevakians, and no one will recognise us.”

“We don’t know how to be farmers.”

“That doesn’t matter. The machines know how to be farmers. We can just let the machines do the work for us.”

But her words had a hollow ring to it, and even Isandor would feel that they were fake. They would never be farmers. They didn’t even eat anything that had come from a plant. Plants were treasures that took up important decorative positions in rich nobles’ houses in the City of Glass. While her body frolicked in the grass, her mind was back in the palace.

She wondered how Rider Cornatan would use his power now that she was gone. Abuse it, rather, because she no longer watched him. And she wished she could stop thinking about the City of Glass, about how the people might suffer in her absence, because the thoughts made her feel guilty.

She had always thought that she had no power, but she did stop the Knights taking power completely, because the people wanted to see and hear her, not the Knights, and the Knights served her. But there was no point in having these thoughts, and it was not fair for those feelings to creep up on her.

“I think we will go back, one day,” Isandor said softly. “It’s not right, being free while the people we care about aren’t.”

No, it wasn’t. Her room servants, those people closest to her, might be punished. They might be turned out into the street without a way to support themselves. Was that the way she wanted to reward them?

The people of the City of Glass loved her. They stood along the roads and cheered, and while she held herself proud and waved and envied them for their freedom, for those people, that love was very real. She challenged the Knights where she could get away with it. Even through her horrific illness and dark moods, her mother Queen Maraithe had raised her with pride. You must always honour the people. If it wasn’t for the people, you wouldn’t be what you are. No she wouldn’t. Without the people, the Knights would have raped and murdered her long ago.

The people in the City of Glass would miss her. They might revolt; they might be repressed by the Knights. They might accuse the Knights of making her disappear, and the Knights wouldn’t take kindly to such accusations. Rider Cornatan would make sure that all those dissenters would be punished, and that would make the people only more angry, and would play into the hands of the Brotherhood of the Light and the sorcerer Tandor, whose motives she didn’t understand, but who would be sure to stir up unrest. A shiver crawled over her back. Her escape might lead to the deaths of many people. She’d acted selfishly.

“Then what do you think we should do?” she asked, and she hated how discomfort laced her voice. And she hated how his words cut through the dream of being free.

“I think we’ll need to hide for a while until the Knights stop looking for us,” Isandor said. Which wasn’t really an answer. “Then we can find somewhere to live.”

She nodded, but knew it wasn’t so simple. As long as she, or a child of hers, was alive, the Knights would hunt her.

His worried face broke into a smile. “Hey, don’t look like that. We’ll survive. I’ll always be with you.”

She smiled, too. “I love you.”

His lips sealed on hers.

They rolled in the hay, clothes discarded along the way until they lay naked and panting, in the afterglow of lovemaking.

He whispered, “I love you so much it hurts me here.” He held his hand to his chest.

She put her ear on the bare skin next to her hand. Their hearts beat in unison; she could never get enough of hearing it.

She would never leave him, never, never leave him out of sight, wherever they went.

“Love me again,” she said. “Love me again and again.”

He did.

But love did not solve her deeper worries.