Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Commander Kirn made the announcement the next morning, standing on a crate in the middle of the reception hall with a scroll in one hand and the expression of a man who wished someone else had drawn the short straw.

“The final trial of this rotation will be held in six months.”

Ninety-odd candidates went very still.

“Between now and then, you will heal. You will study. The archives of the Sanctum are open to every candidate, including the records of every final trial ever held here, which I advise you to read with attention and without hope.” He rolled the scroll shut. “The trial is never the same twice. Do not mistake the past for a map. Mistake it for a warning.”

He stepped off the crate and the hall exploded into whispers. Fel, at the end of the long table with his leg propped on a bench, heard none of it. His eyes had drifted toward the far door, the one that led down to the Nightfall Wing, and the two empty seats beside him at the table.

He found Vili in the infirmary an hour later, exactly where he had been every hour for the past three days.

The Nightfall Wing was quiet. Karmina had moved Loria to the bed nearest the painted window, the one with the fake sunrise, and Fel understood why the moment he saw her. Somebody had wanted her to have something to look at if she woke up.

She did not look like the girl who had stolen his skewer in the Lantern Row.

She lay flat on her back under a thin grey blanket, wrapped in silver-threaded bandage from the collarbone to the tips of her fingers. Her right arm was strapped in a splint of ash wood and gauze, and beneath the wrappings it was the wrong shape. A thin reed tube ran from her side into a glass jar on the floor, and the jar was half full of something dark. Her chest rose and fell in slow, shallow, wet little pulls. Her braid had been cut off at the shoulder to keep it out of the wounds, and the crow feathers and silver wire lay in a small bowl beside her pillow, waiting.

Vili sat in the chair at her bedside. He had not changed his coat. His golden hair had lost its tail and hung loose around his face, and his silver-wired hand lay open on the blanket next to hers, not touching it, as if he were guarding the space.

“She has not woken,” he said, without looking up.

“I know.”

“I have been counting her breaths. Eleven in a minute. The elf says that is not enough.” His voice was calm and precise and completely dead. “I told her I would not leave until it was twelve.”

Fel dragged a second chair beside him and sat. Neither of them said anything for a long while.

Karmina found them at dusk. She came in from the far end of the ward with a tray of poultices and stopped when she saw the two of them side by side, rigid as fence posts on either side of the bed.

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She put the tray down.

“Sit,” she said. “Both of you. I am going to tell you something, and I would like you to hear all of it before you start shouting.”

Vili’s head came up. “You have found a way.”

“I have found a possibility.” She pulled a stool over and sat, and for a moment the tea-colored eyes were very old. “I have kept her alive for six days, and I could keep her alive for six more. I cannot make her whole. Her lung needs a healer with a gift I don’t have. Her arm needs bone that does not exist. If I try to force it, she dies. If I do nothing, she dies slower.”

“There is a possibility,” said Vili. It wasn’t a question.

“In my people’s capital there is a city called the Great Sanctuary Tohei.” She spoke the name softly, the way people speak of a house they’ve been thrown out of. “It grows in the roots of the oldest tree on the continent, in the Whisperwood, three weeks from here by road. It is where the dark elves keep the Great Mother’s blessing. And in its heart, in a hall of living wood, there sit six women.”

“Who?” said Fel.

“The Sages of the Great Mother. The Six Roots.” Karmina’s hands folded in her lap. “They are old, older than most kingdoms. They have mastered nearly every form of healing that exists. Lungs, marrow, sinew, blood, even the wounds of the soul. They can regrow a limb. They can knit a broken spine. And the gift is not a talent, little TeneDente. It is a bond. A bond with the Mother herself, passed from sage to sage down the generations, and it costs them the thing you would think least of.”

“What?” said Fel.

“Their feet,” said Karmina. “The Six Roots may never leave Tohei. Not once. Not for a day. The moment one of them steps beyond the city’s border, the Mother takes back the gift and the woman becomes only a woman.” She smiled without humor. “That is why I cannot bring one here. That is why I am telling you to go there.”

“We will go,” said Vili.

“They will not want to help you.”

“We will go.”

“They will refuse. They are not kind. They are old and proud and they have been begged by kings.” Karmina turned to Fel. “Every request has a price, and the price is always a task. Something hard. Something the Mother wants done that they cannot do themselves, because they cannot leave the city.” She reached up, unhooked one of the tiny silver rings from the edge of her ear, and pressed it into Fel’s palm. It was a plain circle, warm from her skin, etched with a fine pattern of roots. “Give this to Grandmother Haruvael. Tell her it is from the girl who went out through the gate. She will know.”

“You’ve been there,” said Vili slowly.

“I was born there. I trained under her for thirty years.” Karmina rose and picked up her tray. “And I left, against her will, and I have never been forgiven. If she throws the ring back in your face, do not argue. Do not plead. Simply say that Karmina sends her apologies, and ask again.”

She was at the door when Fel called after her.

“Why are you helping us?”

She didn’t turn. The little rings in her ear chimed once, softly.

“Because I have nine empty cots,” she said, “and I am a very stubborn woman.”

It took Vili nine minutes to get Kirn’s signature. It took Fel considerably longer to stop staring at the note, which said, in Kirn’s cramped hand:

Candidates 04, 07, and 33 are granted leave from the Sanctum for the term of six months for reasons of medical necessity. The Sanctum accepts no responsibility for their deaths. Return by the seventh bell of the last day, or be struck from the rolls.

Below it, in green: If she dies, do please tell her I said goodbye. — Boru

And below that, underlined twice, in Kirn’s flat, unornamented hand: Come back alive. That is an order.

“He does not like us,” said Vili, reading over his shoulder.

“He likes us,” said Fel. “That’s the problem.”

Boru opened a crow-arch at the base of the Sanctum’s eastern stair. The two claymore-bearing knights raised their blades in a silver circle, and the light bloomed and swallowed the wall, and beyond it, in the dark, stood a ring of enormous pale trees under an unfamiliar sky.

Fel and Vili carried Loria through on a litter of ash poles, the reed tube taped to her side. The arch closed behind them with a sound like a breath.

The air smelled of moss and rain.