In his dream, his father was still alive.
He sat by the hearth, whittling at the iron of the broken plow, and spoke without looking at Lukan; his voice low as always, his words few as always. Bring the horses in, son. A storm is coming. Lukan walked to the door, and when he opened it, it was not the storm that came but riders. Torches, screams, and the spear that sank into his father's chest. The dream tore at the same place every night; as his father fell, the sky split with a violet light, and a hand pulled Lukan out of the world.
This time he woke not to the howl of wind, but to a woman's voice.
He opened his eyes and saw a ceiling he did not know. It was a stone ceiling, its beams cleanly cut, and from its center hung a glass sphere that burned without flame. Lukan knew every house in his village. He knew the ceiling of the mill, the ceiling of the church, the ceiling of the headman's house. This ceiling resembled none of them.
He tried to sit up and failed. His arms were heavy as wet sand. The bed he lay in was clean, the sheets were soft, and the garment on him was not his own. Someone had stripped him and dressed him in something of white linen. That thought, before all the others, filled his stomach with an icy fear.
"Father?"
His voice came out cracked. Instead of an answer there was a rustle beside the bed, and a girl rose to her feet. She looked a few years older than Lukan; her black hair was braided, she wore a grey apron, and she held a bowl of water. She said something to him.
Lukan did not understand a single word.
The words flowed, the voice was a human voice, but the language itself resembled nothing Lukan had ever heard. Not the tongue of his own village, not the tongue of the traders from beyond the mountains, not the church tongue the priest read in the rites. The girl finished speaking and waited. Lukan stared at her.
"Where is my father?" he said. "Where is my village? What is this place?"
It was plain from the girl's face that she understood him no better.
They looked at each other for a while. Then Lukan threw off the blanket and stood. Or rather, he tried to; his knees gave out at the second step, and the girl caught his arm before he struck the stone floor. She said something more, sharper this time, and its meaning was clear enough: lie down. Lukan did not lie down. He reached the window along the wall, hand over hand, because there was a window, and windows tell the truth.
Outside was a city.
Lukan had seen a city once in his life; the market town two days' road away, where he and his father had gone to sell wool. The whole of that town would have fit into a single square of what he saw now. Buildings of white stone ran in rows, broad avenues passed between them, and the avenues teemed with people. In the distance, above the roofs, stood a dome the color of gold. And behind everything, rising toward the sky, was a wall. Lukan tilted his head back to find the wall's top, and tilted it further, and the top overflowed the window's frame.
His legs failed him again. This time it was fear.
The girl walked him back to the bed and Lukan let her, because he had nowhere else to go. He sat, hands on his knees, and his mind worked to bring back the last night piece by piece. The riders had come. His father had told him to run; not shouting, he never shouted, he had said it once and with finality. Lukan had not run. Then the spear, then his father's knees folding, then a stick of firewood in Lukan's hands and the rider's shield swinging. As he lay on the ground, the sky had split. A violet light, a light the color of sin, and inside that light...
Lukan's breath stopped.
Inside the light there had been a woman. He remembered now; he had taken it for a dream, and it was not a dream. As he fell, in that long dark between the world and this room, a woman who seemed carved from glass had looked at him. Her face could not be remembered. All that remained was a feeling: of being weighed. He had been weighed, as one is weighed at a door, and he had been allowed through. The woman had not spoken a word. There had been no need; under that gaze, Lukan had felt himself gone through like a sack of seed grain.
His collarbone ached. He slid his hand inside his collar, and his fingers found something that should not have been there; a raised mark on the skin, branching like the limbs of a tree. It did not hurt. But it had not been there yesterday.
"This is a dream," Lukan said, to no one. "I will wake, and my father will be sitting by the hearth."
The girl held out the bowl of water. Lukan looked at the bowl, looked at the girl, and suddenly, at a moment he least expected, his eyes filled. He turned his head away in shame. He was seventeen, and his father had taught him when a man was permitted to weep: when hail fell on the harvest, and at the graveside. Not in a strange room, in front of a strange girl.
The girl set the bowl on the edge of the bed and said nothing. For that, Lukan was grateful to her.
After a while, when the silence had stretched long enough, the girl touched her own chest. "Rona," she said. Then she pointed at Lukan, and waited.
Lukan understood that word. Every language in the world could say that much. "Lukan," he said.
"Lu-kan." The girl tried the word in two halves and nodded. Then she pointed at the water bowl and spoke a word in her own tongue. Lukan repeated it. She pointed at the window and spoke another. Lukan repeated that too. At the third word, the corner of the girl's mouth curved upward, only a little, and Lukan felt, for the first time in this unknown world, the knot in his chest loosen by a finger's width.
There was a knock at the door.
Rona sprang up and straightened her apron. The door opened, and a grey-haired man came in, thin, plainly dressed. Two armored guards stayed at the door behind him. The man was old, but his bearing was not, and from the way Rona's back bent when he entered, it was clear that this man owned the place.
He drew a stool to the bedside, sat, and looked at Lukan. The look was neither hard nor soft. It weighed. Lukan knew that look; his father had looked at horses that way before buying one.
Then the man spoke. It was the girl's tongue, fluent and foreign. Lukan stared blankly. The man paused, considered a moment, and spoke in another language; this one was harsher, deeper in the throat, and Lukan understood it no better. The man tried a third tongue. Then a fourth. Each time he read Lukan's face, each time he saw a door close, and the patience in his own face never broke.
Then the man shut his eyes for a moment, as if taking something down from a deep shelf of his mind, and spoke in a heavy accent, the words rough as if cut from stone.
"Do you... understand me?"
Lukan went still in the bed.
The words were crooked. The accent was heavier than that of the old monk from beyond the mountains, and some of the sounds came from the wrong place. But the language was the language of the church. The tongue the priest read in the rites, the tongue carved into gravestones, the tongue his father had called the speech of the ancients. Lukan had never heard it spoken like this, between living people. But he understood it.
"I understand," Lukan said. The church words sat crooked in his mouth, but they came. "I understand. Where am I? Where is my father?"
Something shifted in the man's face. It was a very small thing; a momentary widening of the eyes, a breath arriving half a beat late. As if the man had tried a door and been surprised that it opened, even though he had hoped it would. Then the small thing vanished, and the face returned to its order.
The man turned to the girl and asked a short question in their own tongue. Lukan caught only a single word of it, because the word belonged to the language he had just heard; something like do you understand. The girl hesitated a moment, then bowed her head and answered quietly. The man's eyebrows rose. He said something more to her, and the girl, turning now to Lukan, spoke in the tongue of the church, slow and broken but clear enough.
"I... speak little. This tongue. Little."
Lukan looked from one to the other. In a foreign world, in a foreign room, two strangers were speaking a language he had counted among the dead, and the thousand questions piling into his throat crushed one another; where am I, where is my father, send me back, who are you. From among them all, the smallest one, the most childish one, broke free and fell out.
"Are you... a priest?"
The man laughed. It was a short, real laugh, and for a moment it softened his face. "No," he said. He chose his words one at a time, with care. "I am not a priest. I am a... teacher. My name is Ogmios." He leaned forward and folded his hands on his knees. "We will have a long talk, Lukan. But not today. Today you need to know only one thing."
The man paused, and in that pause Lukan saw something being set carefully into place on the face before him; not a mask, an expression, a kindness chosen with precision.
"You came here for a reason," the man said. "And what you have lost... will be spoken of. Everything will be spoken of. Rest."
The man rose, gave the girl a brief instruction, and walked to the door. Lukan watched him go, and beneath the thousand questions he wanted to ask, a single thought pressed down on all the others; nothing the man had said was an answer, but his voice, for the first time since the night his father died, had told him that someone was in command of what was happening.
And Lukan, seventeen years old, in a foreign world, having nothing else to hold on to, held on to that.