29
The Exiles
—1892, August 13: 7-Hour 57—
I have also noticed interesting tendencies in how the various traditions imagine good and evil. In some traditions, notably in the Closed Empire and the Papal States, evil is external and unalloyed—what is evil has always been and will always be evil. What is good is in peril, threatened by the potential corruption of evil. In contrast, the Elodeans (Eerie) almost always characterize evil as something that comes from within, and it can coexist with good. That is, a person is not entirely good or bad—she can be both. And it is not just a matter of changing over a lifetime—good falling into disgrace, evil redeeming itself—but actually preserving the two in oneself at the same time.
—From Sophia Tims’s Born of the Disruption: Tales Told by Travelers
“WHAT DOES THAT mean?” Sophia asked, in disbelief. “An Age of her own making?”
Nosh shuddered and turned away, as if avoiding her question. Bittersweet and Smokey stared at the cold ashes of the fire. “You said Goldenrod told you that one of the Elodeans had tried to practice the Ars, did she not?” Bittersweet asked.
“Yes, but she didn’t say what that meant,” Sophia pressed.
Smokey cleared her throat. “Well, let us be frank,” she said. “Neither one of us has been there, so much of what we know is secondhand. What we know is this: Borage, Ash, and Sage were—are—Weatherers like Bittersweet. Wildly talented, so that even to the Elodeans their feats sometimes seemed like magic.”
“I never knew them,” Bittersweet put in, “but my mother is full of stories. Some are good stories.” He smiled. “Once, my mother said, the three sisters helped lead a pair of lost children out of the wood by sending them a cloud of fireflies.”
“Not everything they did was so charming,” Smokey continued. “Borage, in particular, the most talented of the three, grew vengeful as she grew older. She hated the way people of the Territories treated the old one, and once, in her fury, she brought a weirwind that left more than a dozen settlers dead. The Elodeans cast her out for it, and she came here. For a time, we accepted her. There were some who called her a murderer and would not look her in the face, but we pride ourselves on taking in outcasts here, and most tried to countenance the three sisters. Until Borage revealed her plan for Oakring.” Smokey shook her head. “She decided that it was not enough to speak with the old one and influence its actions. She wanted more. She wanted to be an old one herself.”
Sophia caught her breath.
“But what would that even look like?” Theo asked skeptically.
“That is the part we do not know, for we forbade it. Borage wanted to claim Oakring and the land all around it, making it her own. We banished her. She went north, with her sisters, to the Eerie Sea, and it is there that she attempted to create and inhabit an Age of her own.”
“What we hear,” Bittersweet said, “is that every tree and rock and blade of grass there is an animated expression of her consciousness. Even the animals—and there are also creatures of her own making. But it is hard to say, for few have ventured there. Ash and Sage spend all their energies attempting to contain her.”
Although Sophia found the portrait Bittersweet and Smokey had painted unsettling, she could imagine worse. She thought about other ways the armies of New Occident might be stopped, and all of them seemed more outlandish and more dangerous: surrounding the grove to protect it; provoking the army to march elsewhere; persuading the commanding officers on the strength of her conviction alone. Traveling into the Eerie Sea still seemed the better option.
“It sounds strange but not dangerous,” Casanova said, voicing Sophia’s own conclusion. “I will go.”
“The three of us can go,” Theo said. “Her grudge is against the Eerie and all of you from Oakring, right? So we should be fine.”
“You, Theo, are not ready to travel,” Casanova objected.
“He may not be,” Bittersweet said, “but Theo is likely the only way you will find them. It is quite difficult to find the shores of the Eerie Sea. We have no maps, and none of you is Eerie.”
“What do you mean, I’m the only way?” Theo asked.
Bittersweet and Smokey exchanged a glance. “You have the Mark of Iron, do you not?” asked Bittersweet.
Theo held up his hand. “Yes.”
“Well, what did you think it was for?”
“For?” Theo echoed.
Nosh let out a breath that sounded uncannily like a laugh. “That’s unkind, Nosh,” Bittersweet remarked, but he was trying to control his smile. “Many people in the Baldlands don’t know its meaning.”
“What did he say?” Theo asked indignantly.
Bittersweet hesitated. “He finds it amusing that you don’t use the Mark,” he said, clearly editing Nosh’s comment.
“The Mark is a compass, Theo,” Smokey said, reaching out to press his scarred right hand. “People in Oakring with the Mark of Iron use it for way-finding. That’s what it’s for.”
• • •
THEO WAS INCREDULOUS, then furious, and finally, after a time, elated. Though it seemed a disgraceful waste to have lived almost seventeen years without knowledge of the Mark’s power, he decided that the most important thing was to waste not a minute more. The lethargy brought on by the strain of recovery vanished. Insisting that time was short, he persuaded Smokey to take him into Oakring.
True to the story Lichen had told them, there were both people with the Mark of Iron and people with the Mark of the Vine in Oakring. Sarah Smoke Longfellow, as the town’s medic, knew them all. She decided that they would ask a man named Everett, a renowned tracker, to teach Theo how to use his hand. Theo could hardly contain his excitement. As he headed off with Smokey and Casanova, leaving Bittersweet and Sophia behind, he seemed to have forgotten his injured shoulder entirely.
“You and I have our own work to do,” Bittersweet said as he joined Sophia at Smokey’s kitchen table. “Do you have the tree ring?”
Sophia took it from her satchel and put it on the table. “Here it is.”
“Have you been able to read it yet while waking?”
“Not yet.”
“Try again. You may find a new purpose in doing so.” He touched the wheel of wood. “When I looked at it the other night, I saw something interesting. This tree has memories of the three sisters.”
Sophia’s eyes widened. “It does?”
“It would be an advantage to you, I think, to see them in this way before you venture north into the Eerie Sea.”
Sophia regarded him. “What will you do while we head north? Will you stay here with Smokey?”
Bittersweet shook his head. “Thanks to your uncle’s map, I have a fair idea of where Datura will be next. I aim to get there ahead of her this time.” He stood up. “I will leave later today, and I have plans to make with Nosh. Good luck with the reading,” he said with a smile. “I’ll be back to say good-bye.”
Sophia turned her attention to the disc of pinewood before her. Every time she had tried to read the map while awake, it had remained silent. Maybe now it will be different, she said to herself, trying not to struggle against a sense of frustration. Maybe now that I have seen the grove and understood what it means to perceive rather than see.
She rested her fingertips on the wooden surface. Closing her eyes, she focused on the texture of the pine. It felt the way it always did. She willed herself to lose track of time, so that the moment expanded loosely, making a protective room all around her. Her arm felt heavy, then surprisingly light. The pine was smooth and slightly warm, but the warmth did not register as temperature; the warmth was something else.
Sophia paused in her observations, realizing that something important had happened. Warmth was not warmth; wood was not wood. Her fingertips no longer seemed to rest against a solid surface. In a way that Sophia did not understand, in a way she urgently, deliberately did not question, her fingertips were touching memories. She could feel them brushing up against her skin like filaments of fine thread. It was the memories that made the heat.
The memories lay before her. She could see them just as she would in a memory map made by human hands: snowfall, spring mornings, summer storms, autumn evenings, another snowfall. People came and went. A girl climbed the trunk and clambered up the branches, laughing. An old man rested against the exposed roots, tired and aching, catching his breath. A furtive boy dug and dug in the ground, making a deep hole and dropping a sack into it before covering it again with dirt. The wind howled; the moon waxed and waned.
Then three women of middle age sat on the ground side by side, looking out over a town, which Sophia now recognized as Oakring. She could see only their backs. They were laughing. The bright colors of sunset were spread across the horizon, and the air smelled of clover. One of them reached out to cup a firefly, and the action sparked Sophia’s memory. The three sisters, she thought. “Don’t let it go to your head, Borage,” one said to the woman holding the firefly.
“And why not?” came the light reply. Her voice was low and rich, with a pleasing musicality. “It’s true. We can see thoughts as they take shape. We can call on the wind and the rain. The old ones love us. Through our guiding hand, they shape the future. It’s not just that we seem like the Fates. We are the three Fates, sisters.”