Page 64 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

He could be anyone, this could be anywhere. He might be mad, and not even know it. There might be no Emperor, no dragons, no broom—no castle of Kiamo Ko before that, no Nor abducted from it a half a lifetime ago. No occupying force in the provincial capital of Qhoyre. No parents slinging their daughter clear of the burning bridge. Candle might have riveted his comatose mind with a battery of pretend memories so as to distract him from something more important.

Though she spoke Qua’ati, and so did he. She wasn’t likely to be that skilled a player that she could have taught him a whole new language in his coma.

2

THE FIRST NIGHT HE COULD MANAGE IT, they pulled two chairs into the open doorway to watch the stars come out. “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

She lit a candle, charmingly. Even more wonderfully, she pulled a bottle of wine from out of nowhere. “Mother Yackle gave it me, along with a few other things filched from the mauntery’s pantry,” she admitted. It took some ingenuity to remove the cork, but when they’d succeeded, they sat with their legs entwined, and sipped from old clay mugs with broken handles.

She told of her past. He tried to listen. After a while he realized that he was waiting for clues to prove that he had been comatose for several years, not merely weeks. He wanted her to be the Quadling girl tossed from the bridge at Bengda, grown up and magically restored not just to life but into his life. How he wanted to provide for her—to begin the impossible task of reparation.

It was hard to shake off this hope, but in order to hear of Candle’s real life, he had to try to still his own rackety guilt.

Candle was raised in Ovvels, in all of Oz the southernmost town of any size. Well, hardly a town, as she described it: a network of cabanas built in the rubbery limbs of suppletrees above the salty damp of flooded groves. As a child she hunted charfish with her spear. Like most of Quadling Country, her settlement had become economically blighted in the decades of the Wizard’s ascendancy. She thought prosperity must once have been possible here: great tiers of granite blocks, eighteen feet at their highest, were set together in long broad curves. One could have driven a horse along the top for nearly a mile. Nobody alive could imagine what such massive structures had been used for, nor how they had been erected; there was no granite anywhere nearby. The locals used the place for fixing their marsh nets and for drying fish.

Beyond that, Candle had little else to say. Her father had lit out long ago, her mother being rather wiftier than was useful in a wife. Food had grown scarce, and some of her relatives had set out to try their luck as itinerants. She’d learned to play the domingon while traveling with her uncle.

“But how did you come to stay in a mauntery?” asked Liir. “The Quadlings aren’t unionists.”

“In general, Quadlings are inexpressive about holy matters,” said Candle, “which means they’re not easily offended by other traditions. However, you’re wrong about southern Quadlings. A whole passel of Quadlings from Ovvels converted to a kind of unionism several generations ago when a missionary and his entourage came through. I heard my great-grandmother speak of it once. A sickly group of do-gooders, prone to being afflicted with mold in our climate. Frankly, it’s a wonder they had any effect. But they did. I was raised on a cushiony variety of unionist thought, so I don’t mind the chapel and the devotions that the maunts engaged in. Nor the custom of caring for the sick, either. It seems a decent way to spend one’s hours.”

“You played for me on that—domingon. Where is it from?”

“It was a gift of my uncle,” said Candle tersely, and would answer no further questions on the subject of the instrument or her uncle, either.

“You cared beautifully for me.” Liir noted the rue in his voice. “I remember what it was like to fall through the air and see the ground rush up with a speed you can’t imagine. It was all a brown blur of wind and earth.”

“I couldn’t have saved you if you had fallen very far,” said Candle. “Likely you imagine it worse than it was.”

“But my bones are healed. I can move,” he said. “I didn’t bleed to death.”

“The maunts who tended you first were more capable than they let on. In any case, I am still not clear on why you came to be airborne,” said Candle.

He ripped the skin off a wild winter orange she had found in the woods somewhere. The pungency stung his nose with eclipsing sweetness. “With all I seemed to relive in my dead sleep, there’s a lot I can’t remember,” he said at last.

“Do you remember what happened to your broom?”

“I suspect it fell to the ground. I’m not sure. Or maybe the dragons took it, though why they’d bother I can’t imagine.”

She didn’t press him further. It was Liir who did the asking. “Why did you take me away from there? Why did that one you called Mother Yackle lock us in the tower together, and release us when she did? What did she say to you about it?”

“Mother Yackle is well known to be wandering in her mind. In the short time since I arrived at the mauntery, I never knew her to cause trouble nor even, often, to speak. Somehow your arrival engaged her, though whether it was into a further madness or a mysterious clarity, I can’t say. Perhaps we were locked in so…”

“Finish your thought.”

She couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She merely smiled at Liir. “It’s nice to speak Qua’ati again. They thought I was simple at the mauntery. I didn’t mind that, really; I suppose I am simple. And my small voice doesn’t lend itself to public utterance. But I find it is nice to speak with words again, as well as with music.”

“How did you learn your skill with music?”

“We all have skills,” she said. “I mean the Quadlings from Ovvels do. They emerge in different ways. We can—see things—is that how to put it?”

“Can you see the future?” said Liir. He gripped her hand. “What is our future?”

She blushed a little; he hadn’t known a Quadling who could blush. “It isn’t like that,” she answered. “I can tell you—I suppose—a little bit about the present. It’s not the future.”

“Tell me about the present,” he said.

“I did already.” She pouted, a jest only. “I sat by your side for days and days and played the domingon to you. It gave you your present.”<

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