She hesitated, half-euphoric, half-afraid.
“Do not let them dry, and do not pull away. The moment you do, it is done,” Ivo barked.
She raised her palms to her eyes and pressed them against her lids.
“Show me Hody,” she said.
There was a sense of falling, as though she’d thrown herself from a cliff, but the landing never came. Instead, she became formless, and the sanctum around her was no more. She resisted the urge to withdraw her hands—she still felt them there—to catch herself, just as Ivo had instructed.
His back was bare, and he stood in the water up to his waist, his arms to his sides, palms touching the waves as they rolled past him. She despaired that she could not see his face, only to find herself looking at him from a new direction. His shoulders and chest were muscled and his abdomen notched from top to bottom, but his ribs and collar bones were too pronounced, and he’d let his hair grow. It bristled from his head and jaw like he’d just emerged from months of hibernation. She saw it then, a resemblance to Banruud, and she almost lowered her hands.
He shuddered, his back stiffening like he’d caught a chill. He cocked his chin, the way he did when he was listening, and his pale eyes were striped with shadows like they’d been that night on the hillside.
“Ghisla?”
“I am here,” she said, but her voice had not made the journey with her, and the runes were played out. The sanctum settled back around her and the sound of the sea and the scent of the brine was replaced by incense and old men.
The blood on her hands was smeared, and the Highest Keeper stood over her, his hands folded on his scepter.
“He could not hear me.”
“No.”
“But he looked well,” she whispered. She would not cry in front of Master Ivo.
“It is better this way,” he said again, almost pleading with her, and she wiped the blood from her hands and face. But it was not better for her.
Later that night, when she was alone and the temple was slumbering, she returned to the sanctum. She had a ceremony of her own to perform and didn’t want to do it huddled in the cellar or creeping through filthy tunnels. She had sharpened her small knife so it would not require too much skill or pressure to break the skin. Carefully, her lip tucked beneath her teeth, she drew the rune Master Ivo just taught her—the rune of the blind god—into her left palm. From left to right and top to bottom, one crescent, and then the other, with the arrow piercing them both through. Blood beaded in the wake of her blade, but she was pleased with the result. Neat, exact, and centered, just like Hod himself.
She set down her blade and with a deep breath, she said his name.
She hadn’t known what to expect or if she should expect anything at all. But if she had to wear the king’s mark on one hand, she would wear Hod’s mark on the other.
The world went black—the darkness sudden and absolute—and she gasped, both elated and afraid.
“Hod?” she whispered. The rune was working.
She waited, sightless, resisting the need to catch herself. But she wasn’t falling. The smell of incense still warmed the air around her, and the stone bench was firm beneath her thighs. She wasn’t falling or flying; she was blind.
She closed her fist around her bleeding left hand and patted the area around her with her right. She was still in the sanctum. She blinked, trying to restore her vision, but the inky darkness was complete. She had given her eyes to the blind god.
“Hody. Hody. Help me,” she moaned. But Hod was far away. Her hand was wet with her blood, and she blotted it frantically, trying to wipe away the effects of the rune, but it wasn’t just a mark made in blood. It was a mark carved into her skin.
She stood and felt her way forward with searching feet and one hand. At the altar, her knuckles grazed the side of the bowl where the Highest Keeper washed his hands. The bowl rocked and water sloshed, splashing her feet and dousing her hands. She steadied it with her right hand and carefully immersed her left, washing the blood from her shallow cuts, but it wasn’t enough.
She stepped back so her movements would not upend the bowl or brush against anything else and awkwardly loosened the sash at her waist. She wrapped the fabric around her hand, making a bandage from the cloth and pulling it tight. She needed the blood to stop.
She waited for an hour, hovering in the sanctum, listening to every groan and creak of the floors, to every whisper of the wind against the colored panes high on the stone walls. If the candles kept vigil beside her, she did not know, though the incense remained.
It was only when her tears came, the darkness and her fear breaking her down, that the idea came too. She unwrapped her hand and held it to her face. The salt of her tears stung her wounded flesh, but she began to sing, holding it there.
Cry, cry, dear one, cry,
Let the pain out through your eyes.
Tears will wash it all away,
Cry until the bruises fade.
Her tears came harder, and the sting intensified briefly, but then, with her song, the rune began to close and the darkness began to lift.
When she crept into bed just before dawn, her eyesight completely restored and her new rune scabbed over, she vowed to never tempt or test the runes again. The blind god had finally answered her.
18
SPELL SONGS
Arwin did not recover quickly. His ribs were broken and his heart was weak, or mayhaps it was his ribs that were weak and his heart that was broken. But he was not himself. He was shaken, scared, and befuddled.
“We will not give up, Hod. We will not give up,” he groaned, and Hod wondered if Ghisla had felt the rage that filled his breast when he’d said the same thing to her.
He nursed Arwin for months, his days and nights running together until he lost all sense of both. Arwin was asleep more than he was awake, and he was so weak and unwell that Hod feared that if he left for any length of time, Arwin would slip into the great unknown.
Ghisla was as silent as she’d been in the early days, and his fear for her well-being and his longing for her voice was almost unbearable. He comforted himself with the strong heartbeat he’d heard on the hill just before he’d found Arwin; whatever the clansmen from Adyar had been referring to, she was in the temple—alive and well—when he carried Arwin down the hill.
He slept little, and when he finally succumbed to exhaustion and slept for hours at a time, he would wake in horror thinking Arwin had cried out or Ghisla had sung, and he’d been too unconscious to hear either of them. He traced the rune on his palm in blood and tried to will her to answer, but there was never any response, no burning on his palm or tingling in his fingers. And there were no songs. It was as if their link had been completely severed.
He grew so desperate to know how she fared that he drew a seeker rune on his palms that sent him hurtling into the darkness. But the seeker rune did not give him eyes, and the things he heard and felt were muted and distorted by distance and dissonance. What sounded like a voice lifted in song could just as easily have been birds cawing in the bell tower.
One night he fell asleep in the chair beside Arwin’s bed and woke to his master moaning and tugging on his hand.
“I have failed you, Hod,” he whispered, and Hod could hear his tears. He disentangled his fingers and checked his mentor for fever. His head was warm, but not alarmingly so, and Hod pressed a drink to his lips and wiped his mouth. Warm tears dribbled from the corners of Arwin’s eyes, and he wiped those too.