The Blood Rite

He signed away the Wynmore name on the beach, at dawn, with a driftwood pen.

It was not a grand occasion. There was no notary, no seal, no witnesses in wigs. There was only a flat slab of black rock at the edge of the sea, a sheet of paper from Pike's bag, and a pot of ink made from the juice of a berry that Tuwa the herb-keeper had pressed into his hand with a sour look. The sun was coming up out of the sea. The tide was low. A gull stood on one leg on a stone and regarded him with disapproval.

He wrote in his small neat hand, as he always had.

I, Garrick Edmund Wynmore, lately styled Viscount Wynmore, being of sound mind, do hereby surrender and renounce all titles, estates, honors and privileges pertaining to the said dignity, for myself and my heirs, in perpetuity. I do this freely, in the sight of God and of such witnesses as may be present, and without constraint of any person.

He paused, with the pen over the page.

Then he added a last line.

I have found something better to be.

He signed it. He sanded it with a handful of white beach grit. He read it through once, and folded it in three, and held it out to Pike.

"Take it to England."

"Garrick—"

"Take it to Hartwell Square. Give it to the Crown's officers. Tell them it's my voluntary act, and that the estates may do as the Crown pleases, so long as every servant in the household is kept on at full wages." His mouth twisted. "Hatch will see to that. She'd haunt the Lord Chancellor else."

"I am not going to England."

"Hollis—"

"I'm not." The physician took the paper, with a rueful, crooked smile, and tucked it into his coat. "I'll send it with Gale, on the Albatross. He's a better sailor than I and a worse conversationalist. But I'm staying here."

"Staying."

"It seems I'm a man of science. I should like to know how the damn thing works." Pike glanced up at the green ridge, where the morning light was coming down through the leaves like gold coins. "I've listened to twenty-three of them this morning. Old men. Women with chest-fevers. A child who'd had a wasting-sickness since birth. Their hearts are perfect, Garrick. Every one of them. It's as though they've been born again." He shook his head. "I'd give ten years of my life to understand it. I think I'll give the rest."

Garrick looked at him.

"You are a good friend," he said.

"I'm a very curious one."

"The two are not different."

Pike smiled. Then he turned and walked up the beach without another word, and Garrick stood alone with the sun on his face and the sea at his feet.

…

He gave Odette the ring.

He did it that evening, on the terrace of the shrine, in the long gold light, with the whole hillside rustling and the birds shouting in the trees. She sat on a mat beside Mrs. Hatch, with her feet bare and her braid undone, eating a mango. She had been eating them all day. She had been running, climbing, swimming in the stream. She had demanded to be taught the names of the birds. She had announced to Tuwa, in halting Ahtelan, that she would very much like to learn to read herbs. She was the happiest creature he had ever seen.

"It's the signet," he said. "The Wynmore seal. It's the last of it. I thought you ought to have it."

She looked at the ring in his palm.

"It's no good to me. It's a lord's."

"It's a sister's." He closed her fingers round it. "It was Father's. It was Grandfather's. It carries a lot of ghosts. I don't want it anymore. But I don't want to throw it in the sea either." He swallowed. "I should like you to keep it. Not for the title. For the people it belonged to."

Odette turned it over. The gold winked in the sun.

"Do you know," she said, "when I was little, I used to put it on and pretend I was the King?"

"I remember."

"You let me. You pretended to be a courtier. You bowed so low you fell over." She smiled. "I think it was the first time I realized you were funny."

"I am not funny."

"You are, rather." She slipped the ring onto her thumb. It was far too big. "Garrick. Are you afraid?"

"Of what?"

"Tomorrow."

He thought about it.

"Yes," he said.

"Good. I should be worried if you weren't." She leaned over and kissed his cheek. Her face smelled of mango and sun. "Come back. That's all. You have a daughter now. You can't leave her with only a mother and a sister. It's not fair to the poor child."

"I'll do my best."

"No. You'll do better than that." She patted him on the knee. "You always do."

…

They took him at moonrise.

Six men came for him, tall and silent, painted with white clay from brow to chin. Kesh walked in front. They led him up the mountain by torchlight, along a path that was not a path, up a long steep spine of rock, through a forest that glowed faintly green in the dark. Behind him, he heard the drumbeat begin: low, slow, like a heart. It came from every direction. It came from the trees themselves.

They stopped in a clearing.

It was a bowl of black stone, perhaps forty feet across, ringed with torches, open to the stars. At its center stood a flat altar of dark basalt, carved with spirals. The whole of the Ahtelan were gathered round the rim, hundreds of them, silent, their faces painted, their cloaks of feathers glimmering in the firelight. He saw Oma Teyra on a litter. He saw Daro, grim-faced, with his arms folded. He saw Ixara.

She stood at the front of the crowd, with the baby in a sling at her breast. She wore a gown of white bark-cloth, and her hair was unbound. Her face in the torchlight was pale and grave and very still. She did not look away from him.

I'll not be able to help, she had told him that afternoon, in the hut. I'm not allowed. Nobody is. It is the law of the rite. I may watch. I may not touch you. I may not speak. I may not call out. If I do, it is void.

I understand.

I do not. Her voice had been low and savage. I do not understand it at all. But it is the law.

He had kissed her forehead. It is all right.

It is not.

No, he had agreed. But it will do.

Now he met her eyes across the clearing, and she lifted her chin, a fraction of an inch. It was enough.

"Stranger," said Kesh.

The drumming stopped.

"You stand before the Council and the people. You have asked for the rite of the blood. You have asked of your own will, and no man has compelled you. Is this so?"

"It is."

"Do you know what it demands?"

"A cut. A burning. A trial in the cave."

"Do you accept its terms?"

"I accept them."

"Then lay yourself down."

…

The first night was the cut.

He lay on the altar on his back, stripped to the waist. The basalt was cold and smooth, and beneath his shoulder blades he felt the carved spirals like a cold hand tracing a pattern. Above him the sky was a bowl of stars, immense, glittering, silent. Kesh stood at his head. In his right hand, held high, was a blade of black glass, long as a man's forearm.

"The blood is the road," said Kesh. "The blood is the door. A man who gives his blood to the Mother gives her his body. A man who gives her his body gives her his name."

He lowered the blade.

It touched his chest, just under the collarbone. It was cold. For a heartbeat he felt only the chill of it, a thin line like the edge of a frozen leaf. Then it opened him.

The pain was precise.

It ran the length of his sternum, from the throat to the belly, in a single clean stroke. He did not cry out. He had told himself he would not. He clenched his teeth and stared at the stars, and felt the warm wet flood of his blood run down his ribs on either side and pool in the carved channels of the stone. It ran along the spirals. It filled them, one after another, in a bright red tracery, and where it ran, the basalt began, very faintly, to glow.

Kesh made a second cut. And a third. A line across each shoulder. A line down each arm. He felt each as a bright clean heat, like a thread of fire drawn through his skin. The blood ran. The stone drank it. The drums began again, soft and deep, and the people took up a low wordless chant, and the stars swam.

It is not so bad, he thought, dizzily.

It is quite bearable.

It is only the beginning.

He turned his head.

She stood where she had stood, rigid, unmoving. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her hands were clenched at her sides so hard that the knuckles shone. The baby on her breast stared at him, wide-eyed, silent, and a faint blue glow played across her tiny face.

It's all right, he said, with his eyes. Look. I'm all right.

She bowed her head. She did not look away.

…

The second night was the burning.

They laid a bed of coals in the clearing, a long trench of them, twelve feet in length, burning dull red and white under a skin of ash. Two men raked them level. The heat came off in waves that made the air ripple. He stood at the end of the trench in the dark with his arms hanging, his chest bound in linen, and looked at it.

"The fire is the purifier," said Kesh. "It burns away what is false."

"I understand."

"You will walk."

"How far?"

"As far as it takes." The austere face did not change. "You will know when you have come to the end."

He stepped onto the coals.

He had thought he knew pain. He had thought, in the cellar of Lanternhold with a ball in his shoulder, in the pit at Blackfriars with his throat in the Magister's hands, that he had touched the bottom of it. He had not. This was something else. It was not a sensation of heat. It was a sensation of absence, of the ground vanishing, of his feet ceasing to exist, and in their place a roaring white column of light that shot up through his legs and burst in his skull.

He screamed.

He did not mean to. It tore out of him, raw, animal, a sound he had never made. He stumbled. His knee buckled. He fell forward onto his hands, and the coals bit into his palms, and the world went blank with agony.

Get up.

It was not a voice. It was a presence, vast and green and quiet, coming up through his hands from the ground.

Get up, child.

He got up.

He did not know how. He found himself standing, swaying, with the smell of his own flesh in his nostrils and his feet on fire. He took a step. Another. The pain was a living thing, a wolf, devouring him from the legs up. He walked. He counted. He counted as she counted, in the hold, in the house, in the cell: one, two, three, four. The coals hissed. The smoke boiled round him. His vision tunneled to a pinpoint of torchlight at the far end of the trench, and a white figure standing in it, with a child on her breast.

Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.

I will not fall.

Twenty-three.

I will not.

At the thirtieth step, the world went dark, and he knew no more.

…

He woke in the cave.

He did not remember being carried. He lay on his back on a floor of cold sand, in absolute darkness, with a roof of rock over his head. The air was damp and still and smelled of earth. Somewhere, a long way off, water dripped. His feet were wrapped in leaves. His chest was bound. His throat was dry as ash.

He lay motionless for a long time.

"Hello?" he said, at last.

His voice came back to him, a dozen times, from the rock.

No one answered.

Three nights, he thought. In the cave of the Mother.

Alone.

He tried to rise. His body would not obey. He lay on the sand and listened to the dripping, and felt the cold seep up through his bones, and the darkness pressed in upon him like a hand. It was not the darkness of a closed room. It was a living darkness. It had weight. It had breath. It listened.

And in it, one by one, they came.

…

He saw his father first.

The old man stood at the foot of the library stairs, in his powdered wig and his black velvet, with his hands behind his back. He looked as he had on the day of the funeral. His face was long and gray and perfectly composed, and he looked down at his son with the same cool, patient, unreadable regard that had marked every conversation of Garrick's childhood.

You have done a shameful thing, he said.

Yes, sir.

You have disgraced the name.

Yes.

You have thrown away the estates.

Yes.

You have taken up with a foreign priestess and fathered a child beyond the edge of the map. The old man's lip curled. I did not raise you to this.

No, sir. You did not. Garrick found, to his astonishment, that he was smiling. You raised me to sit in a library and measure the world. You raised me never to touch it. You raised me to think that love was a weakness, and that a gentleman bears all pain in silence. He pushed himself up on one elbow. I am afraid I have a different idea, Father.

What idea?

That it is better to be broken than to be empty.

The old man stared at him. Something moved in the long gray face. It might have been anger. It might have been grief. He opened his mouth, and the figure wavered like smoke, and dissolved.

Garrick lay back.

His mother came next.

He had never seen her. She had died when he was sixteen, in a winter bed, with his sister in her arms. But he knew her at once. She was young and fair, in a plain gown, with a lock of dark hair falling across her cheek. She knelt beside him in the sand. She laid a cool hand on his brow.

My brave boy, she said.

Mother.

You were always so serious. You were such a grave little thing. You used to sit on the stairs with your hands over your ears. She smiled. I'm sorry. I should have held you more.

It wasn't your fault.

No. But I'm sorry all the same. She stroked his hair. You did well, my darling. You kept her safe. You kept her alive. I could not do that.

I did it badly.

You did it with love. She bent and kissed his forehead. That's all anyone does.

She faded. He lay weeping quietly in the dark.

They came one by one, all that night and the next. Brandt, with his arms spread. Tom Hake, falling like a tree. The boy Ned. Perry, with his hands at his throat. A thin brown man on a sunlit terrace, whose son would never know why his father died in the autumn. A girl in a cloak of purple feathers, asleep on a dais. Each looked at him. Each said nothing. And he lay on the cold sand and let them look, and did not turn away, and did not make excuses, and did not hide.

I know, he said to each. I know. I am sorry. I carry you.

I will carry you for the rest of my life.

…

On the third night, the cave began to glow.

He saw it first as a faint green flicker in the dark, at the edge of his vision. It grew. It spread. It crept across the rock in veins and threads, a fine tracery of living light, branching and rebranching, like the roots of a vast tree seen from beneath. The cave filled with a soft emerald radiance. And in the center of it, on the sand beside him, sat a child.

She was a little girl, three or four, in a white shift. She had black hair, braided, and a round solemn face, and two eyes, one gray and one green. She sat cross-legged on the sand and looked at him with a grave and tender attention.

Hello, said Sennet.

She had never spoken. She had made no sound but the single bright syllable in the boat. Yet he heard her clearly, a small clear voice in the center of his mind, as though the stone itself had learned to talk.

Hello, he said. Is it you?

It is me. And it is not. She tilted her head. I am here, and I am there. I am what I will be, and what I am. It is difficult to explain. You would call it a trick of the light.

I would not. He smiled. I have given up that kind of explanation.

Good. She patted the sand beside her. Sit.

He struggled up. His body ached in every limb. He crossed his legs, awkwardly, in front of her, and the green light pulsed in time with his heart.

You did well, said the child.

I did what I had to.

You did more. Her eyes were clear and steady. Most men who come to this cave do not come to the end. They hide. They fight. They run from the faces. You did not. A pause. That is why you are here.

Why am I here?

Because there is a thing I must tell you. She leaned forward. And you must be the one to hear it.

…

He never knew, afterward, how long she spoke.

It might have been a minute. It might have been a night. She spoke in no language, but in pictures, in a steady unrolling procession of images that filled the cave and filled his mind. He saw a vast blue sea, and on it ships, hundreds of them, thousands, with sails like white clouds. He saw them come out of the east, out of the mist, out of the dawn. He saw them in long lines, wave upon wave, with their flags flying and their guns run out. He saw them land. He saw the beaches of a thousand coasts swarming with men in red and blue and white, with muskets and Bibles and iron.

He saw the green forests burning.

He saw villages in flames. He saw rivers running red. He saw whole peoples, tall and proud and brown, driven before the guns like cattle. He saw chains. He saw ships heavy with human cargo. He saw a vast continent crossed by roads of fire, and the great trees falling, one after another, and the birds rising in clouds and falling silent.

He saw it go on for centuries.

What is this? he whispered.

It is what will come. The child's voice was quiet. It is what is already coming. They have found the way. The men who sent you, the Duke, the Magister, the Admiralty, the Court of France, they are only the first. They do not come for the stone. They come for the land. They come for everything.

I know, said Garrick, with a terrible clarity. God forgive me, I know. I was one of them. I was their agent. I opened the door.

You were. And you have closed it, a little. She smiled. But it will open again.

How do I stop it?

You cannot.

Then—

I can.

He stared.

That is what I am for, said Sennet.

…

The green light pulsed.

They think I am the Key, she said. The old women. They think I was born to wake the Heart. To bring it home. And I did. That was the first Gate. Her small face was grave beyond its years. But there are two. The first calls the Heart. The second calls the Warrior.

The Warrior.

The one who will lead. She looked at him. Not only the Ahtelan. All of them. The peoples of the green places and the high places and the long coasts. The ones who hear the Mother. They will need a voice. They will need a hand. They will need someone who can look at the ships and the guns and the Bibles and say, No. Not here. Not now. Not this way.

You.

Me. She nodded. I will be sixteen. I will stand on a cliff with a spear in my hand, and a hundred ships below me. And I will tell them to go back.

Will they?

Some. A faint, strange smile. Some will not.

And then?

And then it will be a war. A very long one.

He sat motionless. A great cold stillness had come over him.

That is why I was born in a storm, said the child. That is why I was born of a priestess and a sailor. I have your eyes, Father. I have her ears. I can hear the Mother and I can read a chart. She tilted her head. I will need both.

I see.

Do you?

I think so. He drew a slow breath. You are not here to save a people. You are here to save a world.

A part of it.

A part is enough.

Is it? She looked at him with something very like pity. It will cost a great deal. It will cost me my childhood. It will cost her, my mother, every night of sleep she has left. And it may cost you your life.

I have already spent that.

Yes. Her eyes shone. I know. That is why I wanted you.

What can I do?

Teach me.

Teach you what?

Everything you know. She leaned forward. The stars. The tides. The way a ship turns. The way a fleet is broken, and the way a line is held. The shape of the guns and the weight of the shot. I will be among men who have learned war in a hundred battles. I have only sixteen years. Her small hand closed on his. You are the only man in the world who can teach me.

He looked down at the little hand in his.

It was warm. It was strong. It was the hand of a creature who had not yet been alive three months, and it held his with the grip of an old, old woman, patient and fierce.

I am a scholar, he said. I am not a soldier.

You are a scholar who led a fleet through the Thames in a gale, to break a priory and rescue a woman. She smiled, and for an instant she looked like her mother. I think you will do.

He closed his eyes.

A thousand thoughts went through his head. Fear, and grief, and a great, dizzying vertigo. He thought of Ixara, asleep with her head on his arm. He thought of Odette, laughing on the shrouds. He thought of a cell, and a fire, and a boat in a storm. He thought: This is not what I wanted.

He thought: It is what I am for.

He opened his eyes.

Very well, said Garrick Wynmore.

…

They found him at dawn, sitting at the mouth of the cave.

He had walked there himself. He had crawled, rather, on his hands and knees, up the long rough passage into the light, with the leaf-wrappings torn from his feet and his chest bleeding through the linen. He sat on a stone at the entrance with his back against the rock and his face turned to the sun. His eyes were closed. He was breathing.

A shadow fell across him.

He looked up.

Ixara knelt in front of him. She wore the white bark-cloth. Her face was gray with sleeplessness and swollen with weeping. The baby was asleep on her shoulder. She did not touch him. She had not been allowed. She knelt a yard away, trembling, with her hands clenched in her lap, and looked at him as though he were something she had been told was dead.

"You live," she said.

"Yes."

"You are whole."

"Mostly."

She laughed. It broke. Behind her, he saw the whole Council coming up the path: Kesh, with his face unreadable; Tuwa, with her gourds; Daro, grim and silent; and in the middle, borne on her litter, Oma Teyra, with her white cloak and her yellow eyes.

They halted. They stood in a semicircle. No one spoke.

Kesh stepped forward.

He looked at Garrick for a long moment. Then he laid his hand flat on the scarred ruin of his chest. It was a gesture he had made to no stranger in forty years.

"You have given the blood," he said. "You have walked the fire. You have faced the dark. The Mother has looked at you, and has not turned away." His voice was deep and slow. "You are of the blood. You are Ahtelan."

A murmur rose from the crowd.

Daro took a step forward. His face was hard. He stood a long moment, looking down at the man on the stone. Then he unslung the spear from his back and laid it at Garrick's feet, point away.

"My father is dead," he said stiffly. "I do not forget it. But I saw you walk." He swallowed. "I will not ask you to be my friend. But I will not be your enemy."

"That is more than I deserve."

"Yes," said Daro. "It is."

He turned away.

Ixara moved.

She did it so quickly that he had no time to brace. She flung herself forward, onto her knees, into his arms, and he gasped at the pain and held her anyway. She buried her face in his neck. She was sobbing. She was laughing. She was saying his name over and over, in two languages, in a voice that cracked and broke and soared. He held her. He held the baby between them, warm and sleeping, and the sun came up over the sea, and the whole green mountain woke and sang.

"I could not help you," she said. "I could not. I stood there. I watched, and I could not—"

"You did not need to."

"I wanted to."

"I know." He stroked her hair. "You were the reason I walked."

…

It was Oma Teyra who told them the rest.

She did it that evening, in the temple, with the two of them kneeling before her and the Heart singing in its niche. The old woman sat on a mat of woven reeds with her hands folded in her lap, and her yellow eyes, in the light of the stone, were bright with something between joy and sorrow.

"He told you," she said to Garrick. "In the cave."

"Yes."

"The child."

"Yes."

"And you accepted."

"I did."

"Good." She nodded. "She said you would."

Ixara looked from one to the other.

"What did she tell you?" she said. "Garrick, what is it? What did she say?"

He turned.

He took her hands. They were cold. He had not known how to say it, all that day, sitting beside her at the feast, and watching the people dance, and the children laugh, and the baby sleep in a hammock hung from the branches of the teyu tree. He had tried a dozen ways. Now, in the ringing hush of the shrine, with her eyes fixed on his, he found there was only one.

"Ixara," he said. "The first Gate was not the last."

She went very still.

"Sennet was not born to save the Ahtelan. She did that. She did it when the stone came home." He drew a breath. "She was born for something else. There is a second Gate. A second purpose. The old songs call it the Warrior. It is the reason that the Heart sent a stranger to the island, and a priestess to the ship. It is why the child has my eyes and your voice."

"What does it mean?"

"It means there will be ships."

He told her.

He told her all of it, as the child had shown him, in a low steady voice, while the old woman nodded and the Heart sang. He told her about the fleets. The beaches. The fire. He told her about the cliff, and the spear, and the hundred ships. He did not soften it. He did not dress it. He watched her face go white, and then gray, and then blank with a horror so deep that it could find no expression.

When he finished, she sat motionless for a long time.

"Sixteen years," she said.

"Yes."

"My daughter." Her voice was a husk. "She is to stand against all of that. At sixteen."

"Yes."

"With a spear."

"And a mind."

"She is two months old, Garrick!"

"I know."

"She cannot even speak!"

"She spoke to me." He held her hands tighter. "She said that she would need us both. She said she needed to be taught. By you, in the old ways. By me—" He faltered. "In the new."

Ixara said nothing.

She looked at the baby. Sennet lay in the crook of Oma Teyra's arm, asleep, with her fist against her cheek and her black lashes lying like crescents on her round brown cheeks. She looked so small. She looked so much like any child in any cradle in any country in the world.

A tear rolled down Ixara's cheek.

"I wanted her to have a home," she said. "I swore it. In the cell, in the dark, I swore that she should have a green place, with trees that sing. I wanted to give her peace."

"You have."

"For sixteen years."

"For sixteen years," said Garrick. "And she will have the rest of her life to fight for it."

She laughed. It was a small, broken, terrible sound.

"You are asking me to raise her for war."

"I am asking you to raise her for victory."

"There is no victory in what you've shown me."

"There may be." He met her eyes. "Not everywhere. Not always. But somewhere. For someone. A forest saved is a forest saved. A people who stay free are a people who stay free." He took a breath. "Ixara. I have spent my life measuring. I have spent it learning the weight of things, the speed of things, the way a force can be turned. I never knew what it was for. I thought it was for its own sake. I thought it was for knowledge."

"And now?"

"And now I know." His voice shook, and steadied. "It was for this."

Silence.

The Heart sang. Oma Teyra sat very still. Outside, in the dusk, the new leaves rustled, and a night bird began to call.

Ixara looked at the child for a long, long time.

Then she lifted her head. Her face was wet, and white, and fierce. It was the face he had seen in the Hall of the Meridian, in the light of the stone, when she had walked alone across the black marble to touch the thing that burned.

"Then you will teach her," she said.

"Yes."

"Everything."

"Everything I know."

"And I will teach her the rest." Her voice rang, low and hard, in the quiet. "The stars and the songs and the roots. The Mother. The names of the trees." She drew breath. "We will make her ready."

He took her face in his hands.

"We will," he said.

He kissed her. He tasted salt. Outside, the stars were coming out, one by one, over the great green back of the island, and somewhere over the horizon, in the dark beyond the edge of the world, the sea was empty and waiting.

"Then I will teach her how to win."