The Compass Rose

“I don’t know.” Kallista held her hand out for it. “What?”

“It’s a ring.”

She could see it now as he held it up to the candlelight, examining it. Cold coursed through her veins.

“I didn’t know you had a ring like this. Pretty.” He set it in her hand and went back to straightening blankets.

Kallista didn’t have a ring like this. It was thick and gold, bearing the marks of the hammers that had shaped it. Incised deeply into the flat crest was a rose, symbol of the One. The ring was primitive and powerful. It called to her, demanding that she put it on. Kallista curled her hand into a fist, resisting the urge. She did not own this ring. She could not. Because it had been given to her in a dream.

She opened her hand and let the ring fall to the floor. She didn’t want it, didn’t want what it might mean.

“Careful. You’ve dropped it.” Torchay shifted to his other knee and picked it up. He held it out to her but Kallista ignored it, so he set it on the chest. “You’re too tired for words. Not breathing’ll do that to you. Come to sleep.”

She was tired. Tired of strangeness and impossibilities and mysteries she couldn’t comprehend. She wanted her life back the way it had been before the Tibran invasion, but she feared that was one of the impossible things, and it frightened her.

Torchay lay down and turned his back to her, waiting for her to set hers against it. Careful in her weariness, Kallista stretched out on her own pallet. Rather than turning her back, she tucked herself in behind him and wrapped her arm around his waist. He startled, then lay still. Too still, as if afraid to move, to breathe.

“I need to hold on to something tonight,” Kallista said. “Let me hold you.”

He didn’t reply, but the tension slid out of him. She snuggled closer, the tip of her nose just touching the top of his spine. This was against regulations, rules she had carefully kept for years. The rules had a purpose, one she agreed with. But right now, tonight, she didn’t care. She needed to hold on to something that was real, that was flesh, blood, bone, against the dreams coming again.

Aisse lay in her hiding place for a day, a night and another day. She crawled out only for water. By the second night, though every inch of her body ached, she could stand, and even walk without too much dizziness.

The noise of the camp—animals bellowing, men shouting, warriors marching—sounded much too near. Now that she could walk, she needed to move farther away, to a hiding place where they couldn’t find her no matter how hard they searched.

She crawled back beneath the tree and gathered her few pitiful belongings, then she returned to the riverbank. Aisse looked downstream, toward the camp. That way lay death. She turned her face upstream and began to walk. This direction might not hold life, but as sure as the sun rose every morning, she knew it at least held hope.

Three days later, Kallista had finished all ten of her damned notification letters and delivered them to headquarters, to be included with the next set of dispatches to the capital. River traffic had returned almost to normal. The Tibrans no longer had enough manpower to interdict travel by boat along the Taolind, and they’d never had enough boat power. The river was the best means of travel to the interior, to Arikon far to the west, and regular dispatches were getting through again.

But now, Kallista had nothing to do. She had no younger naitani to train in their magic. She had no call on her own magic once she chased the cannon from closing on the river gate. Her paperwork, the bane of her existence, was complete. She’d even had time to experiment on her hair with Torchay, settling on simply tying back her front hair in a small horsetail on the back of her head, and leaving that behind her ears to fall free over her neck. She was bored.

Boredom and curiosity had her taking the long way from her billet to the Mother Temple’s library by way of the breach in the western wall. Repairs had begun already and Kallista wanted to see how they were going.

Torchay stalked at her side like some bright avenger, scowling at anyone who came close. He didn’t like all the gossip about the “scythe of death” as the dark magic she’d done was beginning to be called. He took the epithet personally, unable to shrug it off as well as Kallista could, which wasn’t all that well. She tried to tell him it was useless to resent people for their ignorance, but he didn’t seem to hear.

The streets grew thicker with people as they neared the breach. Kallista could see the two walls of mortared stone that formed the inner and outer surfaces of the city wall, and some of the rubble filling the wide gap between the two walls that provided much of its strength. Civilians and a few companies of infantry conscripts swarmed the breach now, clearing away the broken and fallen stones so the walls could be repaired.

She frowned, squinting against the sun’s fierce brightness. The scene seemed familiar, as if she had been here before. A woman dressed in darkest blue straightened, beckoned to the child carrying the water bucket. And there—two men used iron bars as levers to pry up a larger stone. And the brown-haired woman in red lifted the shoulder yoke holding two filled baskets and staggered toward the dump. Kallista clutched Torchay’s arm as terror froze her in place.

“What’s wrong?” Torchay looked outward, hunting the threat.

She couldn’t answer. This was her dream. She had dreamed it four nights in a row, always the same. Now, the man in the white tunic would call his daughter down from the pile of rock. He did. Her eyes snapped to the southern edge of the broken wall. The thin trickle of sand poured from the mortared interior.

“Get back!” she shouted, throwing herself forward. “Get away from the wall! It’s going to fall!”

Unlike her dream, heads turned. People heard her. They started to move, slowly at first, uncertainly. But when the trickle of sand became a stream of gravel, they ran.

“Hurry!” Kallista snatched up the disobedient girl and thrust her into her father’s hands. “Run! That way!”

Torchay grabbed Kallista and shoved her into the shelter of a deep doorway just as the first of the dressed stone fell from the top of the mortared wall to shatter on the street’s cobbles. He held her there, shielding her with his body until the thunder of falling rock ended and he allowed her to push him away.

Fine dust clouded the air. Kallista coughed as she peered into the collapse, trying to see broken limbs, crushed bodies.

“This was your dream.” Torchay’s voice held no doubt.

“Yes.” There should be casualties. A child’s body there, beneath that largest stone—but no, Kallista had given that child to her father. And the woman who should be moaning, trapped over there with her face bloodied—Kallista had seen her run into an alley two houses over.

As the air cleared, people began to emerge from the cover they had taken, staring about them from frightened eyes in dust-whitened faces.

“Who’s hurt?” Kallista shouted. “Is anyone missing?”

“My sedil, Vann,” a man called.

“No,” another answered. “I’m here. Not hurt.”

The workers milled about, shouting an occasional name, but in the end, all were accounted for. The cuts on Torchay’s legs and back where the shattered rock had struck him were the worst injuries. He and Kallista had been closest to the collapse.

“But how did you know?” the mason in charge of repairs asked. “How did you know it would fall? Even I had no warning.”

Anxious to get Torchay to the temple for healing, Kallista did not want to take time to answer. Torchay hung back. “Do you not see the blue of her tunic? She is a North naitan. She can read the earth and the things carved from it. Not often. But sometimes. When there is danger.”

“Ah.” The mason nodded in understanding as Kallista urged Torchay on.

“Your back is still bleeding badly,” she scolded. “We do not have time for these delays.”

“Better to give them an explanation they can swallow than leave them to wonder and invent something even more outlandish than the truth.”

“Fine, fine. It’s done.” Kallista lifted her hand from the deepest cut to find it still bleeding. She put it back, but it wasn’t easy to maintain sufficient pressure as they walked. “Just don’t bleed to death before we reach the temple.”

Torchay chuckled. “Such tender concern for your underling.”

She pressed harder, knowing it hurt him, but wanting the bleeding to stop. “Hush.”

For a while he did, but she knew it was too good to last. “While they’re tending my back,” he said, “I want you to talk to Mother Edyne. Tell her about the dreams. Tell her everything.”

Kallista scowled. She didn’t want to. If anyone else knew, it would somehow become more real. “I’ll consider it.”

“Tell her, Kallista. You must. It’s no’ normal, what’s happenin’ to you. What if you stop breathin’ again and I can’t bring you back? I didn’t last time.”

“Yes, you did.” They hadn’t talked about what happened, though they’d slept back-to-back every night since then. She didn’t want to talk about it now, but it appeared Torchay was of a different mind. “You called me back.”

“Back from where?” He stopped at the temple door and gripped her arms, the light, clear blue of his eyes blazing almost white as he glared at her. “Where were you? It wasn’t a dream, was it? You don’t know what’s happening to you. I certainly don’t. You need to find someone who does.”

“You think that’s Mother Edyne?”

“I don’t know. Neither will you until you tell her.” His hands tightened, digging in till it almost hurt. “Promise me you’ll do it.”

She dragged her gaze away, stubbornly silent. She couldn’t make that promise. She just couldn’t.