Lightning in the Blood Read online

  Ree said, “I didn’t realize there was a Korenat settlement in Solaike.” She’d been gone for nearly a year; that wasn’t much time for them to establish themselves here. Didn’t mean they hadn’t, though.

  But the archon said, “There isn’t. At least, not yet. We heard that the situation had changed here, and we hoped the new king would permit us to settle.”

  He still sounded optimistic, which meant their injuries weren’t the result of any official attempt to drive them out. “So who attacked you?”

  Zhutore had subsided, translating the conversation for her husband, but letting the unnamed archon do the talking. He said, “I don’t know. We came by the main road, and the guards at the border permitted us to pass—but then we were ambushed.”

  Ambushed? Ree swore inwardly. Nearly a year: it was more than enough time for the political situation here to take a turn for the worse. Had the king been overthrown? No, she would have heard about that, in Uytan if nowhere else.

  “Can you describe the ambushers?” she asked. “Were they Solaine? Did they wear armor?”

  The man she thought was Zhutore’s husband answered her questions, through his wife. “We believe they were Solaine, yes, but not soldiers. Their armor was good, but it did not match.”

  Neither did the armor of the king’s people, last time Ree had seen them. Outfitting everyone properly took a while, after a generation of guerrilla warfare in the mountains. “Were they wearing leopard pelts, or did they have leopard patterns painted on their gear?”

  The word “leopard” defeated Zhutore’s ability to translate. “Spots,” Ree said. She spat on her finger and knelt, using the wet tip to mark rosettes on one of the stones of the road. “Fur or paint.”

  “Paint, yes. In red.”

  “In red?” That wasn’t any insignia Ree knew. Had the king created a new unit? But no, they’d said the border guards let them pass. Unless the left hand was seriously failing to talk to the right, that shouldn’t have happened. “The soldiers at the border—were they the same?”

  “No, their armor was painted in yellow and black.”

  She started to ask why the Korenat hadn’t gone back to the border after the attack, but swallowed the question. Assaulted by strangers, in a land they didn’t know . . . they had no reason to think the guards would help them. “You know you’re headed away from the trade road, right?”

  The archon shrugged helplessly. “The trade road was not safe. We lost six when they attacked us. We hoped this would lead us to a village, away from the ambushers.”

  “It’s leading you from nowhere to nowhere.” Ree stood up and wiped her fingertip on her breeches. “You’ve got to get back east, or you’ll be stuck up here forever.” But they couldn’t risk the main road—not when they had no guarantee they wouldn’t just be slaughtered. She closed her eyes, calling on the familiarity built up over two years of hiding with the revolutionaries. We intercepted Saalik’s strike force not far from here, didn’t we?

  “Look,” she said, glancing up and down the track. “Continue on the way you have been for a while longer—once you’ve got that wheel repaired. You’ll come to a fork in the road, one bit leading onward and up, the other down. Follow the downward path. It isn’t in good shape, and it’ll look like it’s taking you the wrong way, but it’ll loop around and bring you to a farm village eventually. From there you can get back to the main road, but in more settled territory. It should be safe.” She tried to sound confident, and mostly succeeded.

  “Why should we trust you?” Zhutore demanded.

  The archon said something to her in their own tongue. Zhutore looked less than entirely convinced, her jaw setting hard. Ree said, “Look, I don’t care whether you follow my advice or not. But I promise you this much; I’ll carry word down to the lowlands for you. The king will want to know there’s somebody ambushing travelers on the trade road.”

  “Or you’ll tell the attackers where we are. You wear their color.” She pointed at Ree’s sash.

  And if I could have hidden it, I would have. “If I really wanted to do that, I would have killed your boys out in the forest and vanished, rather than letting them drag me back here.”

  “Zhutore.” The archon spoke quietly, but it carried weight. The woman fell silent, and he said to Ree, “Please, join me. We cannot go anywhere until the wheel is repaired, so Zhutore will be satisfied, because you will not be able to tell anyone where we are until we are no longer there. And I will be satisfied, because I will have a chance to offer you hospitality, after this unfriendly welcome.”

  She eyed him warily. Was he seimer or gemer? Every archon had two aspects, one more or less creative, one destructive, but they manifested in different ways for different archai. Seimer wasn’t always nice, and gemer wasn’t always bad. Without knowing anything about this archon’s story, she had no way of guessing what he might do.

  “I don’t even know your name,” Ree said, stalling.

  “Mevreš,” he said. “Will you join me?”

  That wasn’t his true name, of course. He would never offer that up to a stranger—assuming he even knew it. “Ree” was just a piece of her true name, the only piece she remembered, and too small to be of use to anybody else. She ground her teeth, but his question was more in the nature of a command. Ree sighed and followed, keeping her hand from her blade.

  Mevreš took her around the edge of the caravan, skirting the fire where the blacksmith was still working, and arrived at a wagon with an awning propped up along its side. He pulled out a small, padded bench, then began searching in the back of the wagon for something. Ree perched on the bench and tried to think of small talk.

  She failed to come up with anything that didn’t sound inane before Mevreš rejoined her, carrying a small bag the size of his two fists together. A girl-child of about nine ran up at the same time, carrying a leather-wrapped flask that turned out to contain boiling water. Mevreš poured this into two cups and began to whisk in a powder from the bag. The scent was rich and bitter, and Ree closed her eyes to hide the echoes it called up in her mind. She’d had that drink before, in another life. She could almost taste it on her tongue, but the memory kept slipping through her fingers.

  “You don’t have to mask yourself.”

  The words hit like a shock of cold water. Ree opened her eyes to find him offering one of the cups. She took it by reflex, eyeing him warily. He smiled, all friendliness. “I’ve been around for long enough to recognize my own kind. Even masked.”

  So much for hoping he hadn’t identified her. Ree felt like she’d walked into some kind of trap, even though there was no reason to panic. If he wanted to gain an advantage over her, he would have been better off not saying anything, letting her think he didn’t know.

  Well, no point hiding now. “Is that why your veins were glowing red?” Ree asked, and let her appearance shift.

  Even unmasked, she could pass for human at a glance. She hadn’t been around for long enough to acquire the distinctive features that tended to mark archai. Her eyes were too perfect a black, and left to its own devices, her clothing darkened to the same color; her sash was the only spot of brightness, and a few touches of silver on the leather vambraces that held her sleeves close against her forearms. But a mortal who didn’t know much about archai would just think she was foreign—which she was, everywhere she went—or had strange taste in clothing.

  Mevreš laughed at her question. “You saw that, did you? No, I don’t need to show myself to spot an archon. After a while, you just learn to tell.”

  A wisp of smoke rose from his lips on the final words, curling too perfectly in the air to be natural. He’d dropped his own mask again as he spoke, and now the differences that marked him as an archon were visible. Ree openly studied his veins, where they showed past the collar and the sleeveless edges of his vest. They didn’t precisely flow; it was more of a shifting metallic glitter, only visible in dim light, or from the right angle. His hair was black, but it held a red highl
ight the same shade as his veins. And he was less human-looking than she’d thought, though apart from the smoke it was hard to put her finger on any single detail that marked him. He managed to radiate an intense familiarity, as if she ought to know him, even though her memory insisted that she didn’t.

  “How long have you been in the world?” she asked, curious.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I stopped counting ages ago. Fifty years? Sixty?”

  She almost dropped her cup. A spill would have hurt; the liquid inside was still too hot to drink, more than hot enough to scald. “You’ve been bound for fifty or sixty years?”

  “Not at all,” Mevreš said. “The Korenat woman who summoned me freed me after less than a year. Once she realized that I came from her people.”

  This time Ree decided to put the cup down until it was cool enough to drink, or Mevreš stopped saying things that made her want to drop it. It wasn’t unheard of for an archon to find their way back to their place of origin, the people who first told the story from which they sprang—assuming those people even still existed, so many ages later. The world was littered with the relics of lost kingdoms and empires.

  But even getting a chance to return home was damned rare. There was no guarantee that anybody who tried to summon an archon out of the apeiron would get one from the tales of their own land, instead of a creature from the other side of the world; summoners skilled enough to be that precise were vanishingly rare. Ree herself had started this lifetime in a country called Tábh Rig, and wherever she was from, it sure as hell wasn’t there.

  And starting out in the wrong country was just the beginning of the challenge. Humans only summoned and bound archai when they had some problem that needed solving, something beyond their own mortal abilities. When that problem was gone . . . most of the time they dismissed the archon, sending them back to the realm of non-existence they came from.

  “Dismissed” being a polite way of saying “murdered.”

  “What about you?” Mevreš asked. “Did your summoner free you?”

  It happened sometimes, but not often. “No,” Ree said. “I broke free on my own. You’ve been with these people that whole time?” She thought, but didn’t say, When you could have gone anywhere?

  “Not with this koton, no. I visit many groups of Korenat—as many as I can.”

  She remembered him saying that Zhutore and the others were Nevati Korenat, implying that he himself wasn’t. Now it made sense: Korenat, but not of this particular group. He’d found his people . . . but they were everywhere, scattered all over the world. The thought made her ache inside. “So what are you, then? Some kind of guardian?”

  Mevreš eyed her narrowly over his cup. He’d already taken a sip from it; maybe his nature made him immune to burning his tongue. “You haven’t spoken to many archai, have you.”

  “I try to avoid it.” Ever since the first archon I met in this life stole something from me. No, that wasn’t fair; Ree had traded it away, of her own free will. She just didn’t get to choose what she gave up, or even know what it had been.

  He nodded, unsurprised. “Inasmuch as we can be said to have any kind of society amongst ourselves, we don’t generally ask one another so bluntly. To know another archon’s story is, in a way, a kind of power.”

  Because archai were bound by the rules of their individual natures. If Mevreš’s story was that of a guardian to his people, Ree could manipulate him by threatening the Korenat; he would feel compelled to protect them. If he was some kind of peacemaker, Ree could cut him down where he sat, and he might not even be able to fight back. If he was a trickster, all bets were off. She would find out his nature eventually—after so much time in the world, he was so intensely attuned to it that he couldn’t even think of going against it—but she understood not volunteering that information to someone he’d met only a few minutes ago.

  “Do you not like your drink?” Mevreš asked, before she could decide whether she wanted to apologize or not.

  Ree picked up her cup and blew on its contents until it seemed cool enough to risk. The liquid burned in more than one way; there were spices in that powder, mixed with a bitter base. It shouldn’t have tasted as good as it did. “I think I’ve had this before—in another lifetime.”

  “Do you remember its meaning?”

  She froze. Mevreš smiled—more of an apologetic grimace. “I’m afraid I tricked you, but only for my people’s protection. Now that we’ve shared šokol, I will not offer violence to you, and you will not offer violence to me. At least not before the sun sets—and I hope not after.”

  Bastard. A masked archon was little better than a human; the price of concealing their nature was that they couldn’t draw on its strengths, either. But Mevreš had been in the world for decades, remembering his past, rebuilding his power. And this, it seemed, was one of the things he could do . . . so long as he unmasked first.

  Ree thought about throwing the cup in his face, and couldn’t tell whether she didn’t because she wasn’t actually that angry, or because his prohibition against violence stopped her from doing it.

  “I don’t know you,” he said, by way of explanation. “But you walk armed, and we’ve suffered enough losses already. I couldn’t risk it.”

  She put the šokol back down. Her taste for it was gone. “I gave you advice. And I promised to carry word of the attack to the king’s court.”

  “I had the strong impression you only did that in the hopes of getting away from us.”

  “Well, yes—but that doesn’t mean I was lying.”

  “What good would it do us for you to tell people in the lowlands there are outlaws up here? They won’t send soldiers to rescue a Korenat caravan. They have no reason to care what happens to us.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  Mevreš leaned forward, his gaze intense. “You know these mountains. We don’t. We fled Hezâre because there was sickness there, and when that kind of thing happens, Korenat make a convenient target. Uytan wouldn’t let us stay; their council would only let us pass through their territory, for fear we carried the sickness. Which, I assure you, we do not. So we came into Solaike—but the first thing we encountered here was an ambush. We cannot assume that our luck will improve. My people could die up here; we don’t have enough food to survive in this kind of wilderness. We need more than advice on which path to take; we need a guide. And you’re the best hope we have.”

  Ree stared at him. “Me. Your best hope. A complete stranger, an archon who walks around armed. Someone you trust so little, you decided to spiritually bind her not to attack you.”

  He spread his hands. “Take a look around. Study our other hopes, and then tell me which one surpasses you.”

  She didn’t have to look around. She knew the region, and she’d seen their caravan. Children, wounded adults, carts and wagons not meant for this terrain. They had no better hope. Except to wander along these mountain paths, praying they wouldn’t take a wrong turn in a landscape that had twenty of those for every right one. They’d find their way out eventually, she imagined . . . but not before they lost more people to starvation, predators, and accidents.

  Ree gritted her teeth. She didn’t like knowing that Mevreš had trapped her in this position—but she also didn’t like the idea of just abandoning these people. “If I help you, what do I get in return?”

  He raised an ironic eyebrow. “You won’t do it out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “Seeing into people’s hearts is clearly not your gift.”

  His laugh was heartier than the joke deserved, but it released a little of the tension that had built up. “Very well. I offer you stories.”

  Did he have some way of seeing into her soul after all? It was better bait than it should have been, but she hid her reaction. “Stories don’t get me very far.”

  “You haven’t been in the world very long, have you? I have—long enough to remember a great many of my previous lives. I have been to lands all over the world
, whether summoned by humans or traveling with the Korenat. If I share those stories, they may spark memories that would be of use to you.”

  Ree’s jaw tensed. An archon had offered her a similar deal once, at the very beginning of this lifetime. But Mevreš was not the Lhian, and this was not the trap that had been. The Lhian had offered Ree her own stories—knowledge of her own past, her true nature. For the archai, memories were power, the path to regaining their strength and gifts. But if Ree had taken the Lhian’s bait, she would have put herself into the other archon’s control, probably forever. All Mevreš wanted was a guide out of the mountains.

  Assuming Ree believed him.

  “Mask,” she said, “and then offer that deal again.”

  He did as she ordered. It wasn’t a guarantee—there were no guarantees, when dealing with an archon—but at the very least he wasn’t using any hidden gifts to sway her mind while he said it.

  “Fine,” Ree said. “I’ll get you out of the mountains. Now, while your blacksmith finishes with that wheel, start talking.”

  * * *

  Mevreš was as good as his word, and a splendid storyteller. It took them three days to get out of the mountains, five to reach the capital of Taraspai, and he talked the whole way, except when Ree told him to shut up. Which she only did when they needed silence, because his stories fed a hunger deep inside her.

  It wasn’t even that his voice carried any particular power, at least not that she could tell. The smoke that occasionally rose with his breath wasn’t drugged or anything like that. Mevreš, she thought, just enjoyed talking. He told her about the places he’d been, in this lifetime and ones previous, until she started to think there was no corner of the world he hadn’t visited. At one point Ree almost asked if he’d ever encountered an archon called the Lhian, but she closed her mouth before the words came out. If she asked that, she would wind up telling her own story—the tale of how she encountered the Lhian, and the deal she’d struck. She wasn’t ready to admit that to a near stranger, however friendly he might be.