Chapter 54: Vivianne
A little before sunrise, Vivianne grabbed her left leg from under the knee and, very delicacely, pulled it out of bed. She held the leg’s weight with her hands until she felt the wooden floor’s veins on her foot sole. The right leg was harder to move, not only because it was immobilized, but also because of the pain. Once both legs were out of bed, Vivianne dried the sweat from her face, leaned on the little table and stood up, throwing all her weight on the left leg.
She scrunched her face anticipating the pain, but the pain wasn’t all that bad. Vivianne watched the right leg, suspicious. Coalim had said it was broken in three places. It should be hurting a whole lot more than that. She pulled the nightgown up and began to unwrap her leg.
It wasn’t broken. Black, blue and purple stains showed where the injuries had been, but there was no swelling. Vivianne probed her leg with her fingers, tried to put some weight on it. It hurt, and a lot, but it also worked. That could mean two things: Vivianne had been in bed for a lot more than a week, or the Wraith’s magic was still adting on her and had somehow healled her leg faster.
On the chair was a long dress. Vivianne didn’t like long skirts. Last time she wore one she was thirteen. She ran up the stairs with new maps in her arms, skipped on the hem of the skirt and fell down the stairs. She cried so hard that the Wraith and Marcus ran to help her, but they found her safe and sound, with a few bruises, but generally all right. So why was she crying?
‘My maps,’ she cried. ‘I destroyed my new maps.’
She never wore long skirts again, only trousers and short skirts. Now she looked around her room in the Plume, but all she found was that dress, so she put it on and went to the corridor. She had to find Rimbaud and get passage in the Caravan. Outside her room, Vivianne nearly fell down from hunger. A blond, chubby woman called Joanna, the owner of the Plum, always brought her something hot and sweet in the morning, but Joanna hadn’t got up yet. First, foor, Vivianne thought, then the Caravan.
She walked past a snore, a goran and a sigh before she found the stairs going down. Her legs shook, her back hurt, her head felt every heartbeat. Frankly, who was it that invented stairs? Nobody thinks of the injured when they build things. Except in Sátiron, Vivianne thought. The architecture of the Second Empire was accessible to the elderly, the young, anyone unable to face stairs.
If must have been nice to live in the Second Empire. How she missed her maps!
Those stairs must have been a creature od darkness, bringer of pain, maker of nightmares. Every step was a piece of hell and after all that effort, it should be Lune waiting for her at the bottom, not that icy flagstone floor.
Why didn’t I put on shoes?
Because there hadn’t been any. Nobody expected Vivianne to walk out of her room, not to mention the Plume, so there had been no shoes for her. Funny that they had given her a dress but no shoes. Was she supposed to get up, get dressed, lie down again?
Dawn probed the floor, counter and benches; the shadows stretched our, blurred and difused. Silence. The flagstone was colder than the wooden stairs. Where was the kitchen? Vivianne hungered for bread, butter, cheese and honey, maybe a steak, some chicken, peans, strawberries.
There was a man leaning on the counter, his head resting on his folded arms. One of his hands held an emptu cup. He must have died of drinking, because Vivianne couldn’t think of anyone sleeping in that position. She walked around to the other side of the counter.
She found no kitchen nor food, only five barrels of beer. Vivianne took a cup and inspected it for dirt. Content that it was clean, she opened the tap on the first cask. She meant to take just one sip, but ended up filling half the cup. Vivianne drank it all at once and let out a sigh of joy.
‘More,’ said the man with his head on the counter.
At least that’s what Vivianne thought he said. He turned his head to one side and another without raising it, and beat the counter with the cup.
‘More more more.’
When nobody picked up his cup, he raised his head. He had long, tousled moustache, naked chin, curly black hair, small eyes with short lashes.
‘You don’t do what I say,’ he said. ‘Nobody does. Olivier always knew nobody would do what I say.’
Vivianne held her cup tight. This man knew Olivier of Tuen and Olivier of Tuen was King Henrique’s right arm. Or the other way around, she was never sure.
‘He wouldn’t have made me mayor if he didn’t know that nobody would ever do what I say. I should have stayed with the pigs.’ He raised melting eyes to Vivianne. ‘My father had pigs, did you know? Good pigs. Fat, beautiful pigs. But I cried every time we had to slaughter one. I myself never did it. Slaughter. Never did it. They call me here Prince Maurice, did you know? Not mayor, prince. Because they think I’m like Frederico, the Weak. I certain, I’m quite certain, yes, quite certain in fact, that the Weak has never slaughtered a pig either.’
He threw hs arms over the couter trying to catch Viviann, who only escaped because Maurice was too slow from drinking. Her leg shot pain all the way to the elbow.
‘Have mercy,’ he begged, fingers still stretched toward Vivianne. ‘Give me a little cider. Today it’s been ten years, did you know? Ten years that my brother left Tuen. He’s the one who slaughterede the pigs, Luc was. When he was gone, not one more pig died. Please. Ten years.’
Maurice’s eyelids filled with tears, so Vivianne took his cup and filled it with beer. He took a sip and made a face.’
‘I don’t drink beer.’ He gulpe it down nonetheless, then gave it back to Vivianne, who filled it with cider this time.
‘Luc, he wanted to change the world, did you know? Win the war. He joined Fulbert, the most terrible king of Franária. If anyone was to win, Luc said, it would be King Fulbert of Patire. I asked him to stay. Begged. Who was going to slaughter the pigs? “I’m going to be a hero”, he told me, “while you look after pigs”.’
Maurice didn’t drink the cider. His face just hovered over the cup.
‘Never saw him again, never will. Luc is nothing more than a handfull of dust in the Mouth of War.’
Vivianne massaged the back of her neck. Never again, never more. She didn’t remember when she had learned the meaning of thos words, but every time she heard them, her throat closed and her eyes sought doors she could open for someone to come in. Who? Maybe Marcus or the Wraith, maybe even Clément. Anyone who saved her from never more.
A door opened behind Vivianne, spilling white light and the smell of hot oven. She recognized the man who came in, the red skin, the hair like coal, eyes the color of honey. Last time she saw him he was standing in front of a dragon. In Líran’s voice he sounded ethereal, more mystery than flesh; he had darkness in place of shadow. In person he was solid, human even, but a long, grey howl echoed in the folds of his cape. He was carrying a backpack and wearing very worn travel boots. He was leaving.
‘Vivianne,’ he nodded to her, then turned to the mayor. ‘Maurice.’
Maurice took his nose out of the cup and Pierre went around to help the mayor to his feet. Maurice was a lot taller than Pierre, but his back was curved. To help the mayor, Pierre had to drop his backpack.
‘It’s time to go home,’ said Pierre.’
‘Never more,’ said Maurice.
‘Can you make it on your own?’
Maurice straightened up, almost fell down twice, filled his cheeks with air. Then, with loose feet that seemed ready fo fall off his legs, he went to the door, which Pierre opened for him. Maurice lingered a moment on the threshold of morning and cider, then disappeared in the light of dawn. Vivianne massaged the back of her neck again. She needed food, shoes, and a way to get out of here.
Pierre came back to the counter with a frown, but he smiled when he saw Vivianne. She had the feeling he was smiling to calm her down. A broad, maybe too large smile; a boy’s grin on a mystery’s face. And it worked. She felt calmer.
‘You must be hungry,’ he said. ‘Take a seat, I’ll bring you breakfast.Your leg seems all right. I thought you had broken it.’
Vivianne raised a shoulder. ‘Magic,’ she said.
‘Ah.’ He disappeared through a door hidden behind the stairs.
So that’s where the kitchen was. That information was very important, but Vivianne barely registered it. She was thinking of Pierre. He wasn’t surprised when she mentioned magic and he had something, the way he walked and even the texture of his skin, at the same time young and somehow ancient, that reminded Vivianne of the Wraith.
No, Vivianne shook her head. It wasn’t skin or posture that made her think of the Wraith, but then what? Coalim said that Pierre was from the Frontier; Líran said he had been to the Land of the Banished with a wolf of Sátiron, both said he had faced the dragon in Deran. When she remembered the dragon, Vivianne thought, the smell.
Pierre came back with a tray in a cloud of cake, bread and coffee, but Vivianne also recognized the smell of ash. Much lighter than on the Wraith, Pierre’s scent was almost lost in the coffee, but Vivianne felt it. Was that the scent of the Land of the Banished? Or the Frontier? If the Wraith had a face, would his eyes be the colour of honey?
Pierre put the tray on a table and Vivianne saw his hands. Strong, caloused, like Marcus’ – sword caluses. But it was the colour what really called her attention. A ruddy brown, different from any skin Vivianne had seen, even on Eslarians. She had read about different peoples that existed in Sátiron alone. People with different colours. Marcus had given her those books, since Vivianne only searched for architecture.
‘You are a Master of Lune,’ her brother had said. ‘You have to at least try to understand the people you rule and the people from the whole world are in here,’ he raised a book, ‘to show was ways already trod, mistakes already made, things that worked. You can rule blindly, but there’s been a bunch of rulers before us who left a lot of knowledge that can help Lune and even Deran.’
‘I learn a lot about people through architecture,’ Vivianne said. ‘What people build says a lot about them.’
‘What people say says even more,’ said Marcus.
Pierre knelt and picked up Vivianne’s foot. The shock of his hot hand after the cold slate brought VIvianne back from her memories. He took a pair of shoes from his pocket.
‘I hope they fit,’ he said.
‘Whose are they?’
‘I don’t know. Joanna keeps a lot of things at the back of the Plume.’
Vivianne changed her position on the chair (though it worked, the leg hurt a lot), spread butter and honey on a piece of bread. She waited for Pierre to get a plate, but he only helped himself to some coffee. They studied each other, eyes of honey and eyes of water dancing around each other, meeting every now and then. Then Vivianne’s eyes rested on Pierre’s chest. She knew what he carried in his pocket.
He noticed her stare and his hand went into his shirt pocket. Vivianne didn’t want to see the scale. She still remembered the sky turning red and wished never again to see that shade of death but, before she could say anything, Pierre put the scale on the table.
Vivianne expected a wave of adrenaline, memories that burnt, but the scale under Pierre’s finger looked like polished pottery and reflected the morning light in a way that inspired poetry. Poetical pottery. It was beautiful.
‘I found it in the Land of the Banished,’ he said.
Few things impressed Vivianne. Pierre saying ‘I found it in the Land of the Banished,’ with the tip of his fingers on the dragon scale was one of those things. She wondered if the calm she felt now had to do with the story Líran had told about Pierre’s meeting with the dragon on the road to Deran. The scale on the table was too delicate for a creature so terrible.
‘You scared the dragon away,’ Vivianne said.
Pierre put the scale back in his pocket and was silent for several minutes, his thoughts forming wrinkles on his forehead.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘Whether it’s wise to tell you what I know. Whether it’s stupid not to.’
Vivianne knew that feeling. She and Marcus didn’t rule Lune alone, but it was difficult to choose who to trust.
‘What do you know about me?’ she asked.
‘Little. You don’t like ruling, but when you do, you do so efficiently. I cannot say if you – or anyone else – has the courage to face what I know. Courage sides eith Franária. Fear sides with the enemy. I seek change and change is hard. Fear is lazy. It leaves things as they are.’
‘What things?’ she asked.
‘Franária and the War.’
‘And the dragon?’
‘Also the dragon.’
‘Do you know how to eliminate thd dragon?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘In that case, I’m with you,’ she said.
That was not enough, Vivianne knew. No-on had the courage to trust anyone in this broken Franária. Vivianne leaned forward.
‘You must know enough about me and Lune to understand that I will side with a man who can face a dragon.’
Pierre also leaned forward.
‘Have you seen him?’ he asked.
‘The dragon? In a flash. Before…’ Breakfast rebelled inside her stomach.
‘Look at me,’ Pierre said. ‘Do you think I’m capable of stopping a real dragon?’
Vivianne couldn’t say. His weren’t the looks of someone who could go to the Land of the Banished and make friends with a wolf of Sátiron.
‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘Líran told me.’
‘Líran is a poet in her own way, and facts arranged in verse always seem more than they are. Do you know the story of Ekiara and Quepentorne?’
Ekiara and Quepentorne. When the minstrels told that story in Lune, the Wraith always left the room. Vivianne believed he was the same Quepentorne in the legend, even if the story took place thousands of years ago and that the Quepentorne in the story was an elf, and all the elfs were dead.
Said the legend that, when the planet was young, dragons dived down from the stars to play in the world’s force of gravity. They played games of magic and fire that, for dragons, was the equivalent of skipping ropes. Those games devastated the world. Every time a dragon came down from the skies, millions of lives evaporated. The minstrels sang only of humans, but Vivianne imagined the elves suffered too, since the hero from the legend was an elf. She imagined the death of forests, wild creatures and castles, for there was architecture already at the time.
Vivianne had once found a book on the architecture at the Age of Dragons. Underground buildings, human hives, wondrous strucures dug and carved in the earth with inexplicable technique, lost in time. Sáeril Quepentorne made them obsolete. He put an end to the Age of Dragons.
First he tried to commuicate, but dragons and people, even elves, are too different and it would have been easier for Vivianne to learn how to talk to grass. For years he tried to call the attention of the celestial beasts with his magic.
Then, the elf in the legeng used such magic as was never seen before or after. He killed a dragon. Vivianne vaguely remembered what came afterwards: the planet’s mourning, magic’s own mourning for the loss of a magical creature of that magnitude. She never really got that part, to abstract, too poetic. What happened later was that an emissary of the dragons descended upon the world and, together with Sáeril Quepentorne, developed a way to communicate with the living creatures of this planet. She was a dragon the colour of cobalt. Her name was Ekiara.
‘What you are saying,’ Vivianne said, ‘is that it took a mage with immense power to kill a dragon. But what about the mysteries? There are more legends about dragons bending to mysteries than about dragons dying. A mystery could defeat a dragon. Besides, Franária’s dragon could be one of Luikin’s fake dragons. And those can die by the hands of humans.’
‘The red dragon is a real dragon,’ said Pierre. ‘And I am not a mystery.’
‘But the dragon left.’ And you have the scent of mysteries, she thought.
‘He left.’
Vivianne pushed the tray to the side and put her elbows on the table, bringing her nose close to Pierre’s nose.
‘He is killing people.’
‘Not him,’ said Pierre.
‘It was his fire which I felt.’
Pierre took Vivianne’s wrist and hit a spoon with her hand. The spoon fell to the floor.
‘Who dropped the spoon?’ asked Pierre. ‘You or me?’
Vivianne narrowed her eyes.
‘The hand was yours,’ he said.
‘My hand is not a dragon. How do you force a dragon to do anything?’
‘With darkness.’
She grew up with the Wraith and knew things most people couldn’t imagine. Darkness could be used to control magical creatures, tethering them like puppets. However, darkness was just a power, it didn’t have a mind. Like magic, water and fire, darkness only follows its nature; it wouldn’t attack a magica creature. Not unless someone commanded it.
‘Who controls the darkness?’ Vivianne asked.
‘The War.’
Ever since I arrived in Lune I’ve felt na eerie presence, a soft dark purring. The Wraith said that when winter was young.
‘A creature of darkness,’ said Vivianne.
‘The War is Franária’s true enemy,’ said Pierre.
‘And it has a dragon.’
‘Not yet. He resists.’
‘He did destroy Fabec and attack Clément’s camp.’
‘He is fighting against War,’ said Pierre. ‘If you and I were to struggle here, things would break. The War is desperate, that is why it tried to take control over a real dragon.’
‘Desperate?’
‘I met a wolf in the Land of the Banished. He tolf me the War is alive since the first century of confrontation, but hid inside the Mouth of War. There it waited and prepared itself against an enemy I do not know. Like a spider spinning its web. A four hundred year old web,’ said Pierre. ‘But now something happened that put it in action. Something pulled the War out of its lair.’
I had hoped my web wouldn’t catch anything, the Wraith had said.
‘You know what scared the War,’ said Pierre.
Vivianne remembered the few stories the Wraith had told her about the wolves of Sátiron, that they read minds.
‘Can you read my thoughts?’ she asked.
Pierre smiled and once again Vivianne thought that boyish grin didn’t match a man who carried the scent of darkness and a dragon scale in his pocket.
‘I can read faces,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been good at reading people. What I just told you made you remember something important.’
‘The Wraith,’ she said. ‘He discovered the War.’
‘That is why it stopped hiding.’
‘But why did it hide before?’
‘It might have been afraid of your Wraith, the mage of Lune,’ said Pierre.
‘You said the War has been there since the beginning. The Wraith arrived in Lune when I was four.’
‘Then the War was hiding from something else,’ said Pierre.