The Keeping Place

by Isobelle Carmody

When she again praised the empath singers’ moon-fair performance, I took the opportunity to tell her we had decided to send an empath and two beastspeakers to replace Dameon.

  She looked pleased. “Any of your people would be welcome among us, particularly empaths and beastspeakers. Which reminds me: You have shown us great courtesy here, and I hope you will not mind extending it further. Straaka took ill yesterday, and we have had to leave him behind.”

  I assured her that we would be happy to host the tribesman until he was fit to travel.

  “He was alone with Miryum when it happened,” she mused. “She said he was in the midst of greeting her when, without warning, he apparently fainted. It is puzzling for, as a rule, he is not a sickly man.”

  Realizing she must have questioned Miryum, I felt uneasy. The coercer would not lie well. “Perhaps the mountain air affected him,” I murmured. “It is thinner up here than at sea level. But whatever happened, we have accomplished healers. I’m sure it won’t be long before he follows you.”

  “I think that might depend more on your Miryum than on Straaka’s health,” the tribeswoman said, giving me a sideways glance.

  “Perhaps Straaka will return to Sador to await Miryum’s arrival.”

  Jakoby shook her head decisively. “He will not return to Sador without her. Either he will wait as an exile here, or he will take his life. No tribesman could prepare for a wife and then fail to bring her without being ridiculed.”

  “That seems very harsh,” I said, beginning to wonder if I had been too clever for my own good.

  We rode in silence as the sky grew steadily brighter. The moon stayed high but faded to a pale sliver against the blue, and by the time Fian left us, the sun was close to rising, and the mountains glowed gold and magenta. Riderless now, Faraf trotted alongside Zidon, and behind them Rasial padded tirelessly, offering no clue as to why she had decided to accompany us. In sight of the pass, I asked if Alad had given them a brace of homing birds so they could send back a message if they encountered Rushton or at least heard news of his passing. Bruna held up the wicker cage tied to her pack, where two birds on a swinging perch looked phlegmatic and unimpressed.

  “If you don’t hear anything on the way, would you ask Brydda to let us know what happened when Rushton was there? Who he met and spoke to, and especially who saw him last and when.”

  “You need not worry for him, surely. Your seers would foresee harm to their master,” Bruna said so loftily that I felt an urge to slap her.

  We trotted slowly down the last stretch to the pass, hailing the coercers on watch in their fortified hut. I farsent to ask if there had been any activity on the road and learned that there had been no sign of anyone as far as Guanette since the previous day.

  “That is good news,” Jakoby said. None of us dismounted, for it was not the Sadorian way to do so at partings.

  “Travel safely and give Dameon my love when you see him. Say we miss him sorely,” I said.

  “I will,” Jakoby promised. Then she put her arm across her chest and half bowed in Sadorian fashion. “I hope Rushton comes home safe and soon.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  Watching the riders break into a gallop and diminish in the distance, I wished with all my heart that I would see Rushton riding up toward me, but of course he did not appear. As Zidon turned his back on the pass, I glanced down at Rasial, wondering again why she had come.

  “The loss of a mate is a hard thing,” Rasial sent morosely. “The funaga-li killed my mate before he could sire pups on me.”

  “You are not old. Perhaps you will find another mate?” Zidon sent compassionately. As usual, animal exchanges were on an open band, so I could understand what they said to each other as well as what was directed specifically to me.

  “I will bear no pups,” Rasial sent, her strange eyes burning with a queer zealotry that reminded me of the way Herders looked during burnings.

  “I don’t see how you—” I began, but Rasial began to growl a warning. “What is it?” I demanded. When she did not respond, I sent out a probe to discover what had alarmed her. I could find nothing, though she continued growling and all the hackles were up on her neck.

  I noticed Faraf was trembling and had drawn nearer to Zidon. “What is it?” I demanded of them both. “What do you sense/scent?”

  “Funaga,” Faraf sent tremulously.

  I stared at her. “Impossible. I don’t sense any human nearby.”

  “No sense funaga. Smell,” Rasial sent, lifting her lip to bare her teeth in a ferocious grimace.

  I did not understand. A human who could be scented ought to be easily found with a probe. Unless whomever the animals scented was cloaking themselves coercively.

  I thought of the killing power that lay slumbering in my mind. I had drawn on it before to enhance my other abilities. Carefully, I delved down into my mind, drawing on a shred of the dark power and sheathing my farseeking probe in it. Casting it out again, I had a sense of exaltation, for it made my probe far more potent. This time, the probe located two human minds beneath a strong coercive shield.

  Asking the animals to wait for me in the clearing, I pushed through the trees toward the minds I had sensed. It did not take me long to find them physically: a girl of about twelve and a much younger boy, cowering in the bole of a huge dead tree. The boy burst into tears at the sight of me peering in at them, and the coercive cloak that had hitherto hidden them dissolved.

  “I’m sorry, Seely!” he wailed to the girl.

  “You are runaways?” I asked calmly.

  “We are, and what of it?” The girl’s belligerent answer was belied by her frightened eyes. “Who are you?”

  “I live near here,” I said ambiguously, registering that the girl was an unTalent.

  Her eyes widened in a different kind of fear. “We heard that no one lives up in the mountains, because the people who dwelt here got burned in a firestorm and them that survived died later of the plague.”

  “I don’t have the plague,” I promised, spreading my hands. “Come out. I won’t hurt you. I’m unarmed.”

  The girl hesitated before urging the boy out and crawling quickly after him. She wrapped her thin arm protectively around his chubby shoulders. There was a delicate cast to her face and frame that suggested she was not the child of a rough peasant household. The sturdy little boy might have been a peasant child, but he had a mass of golden curls and soft skin under the dirt and scratches, which marked him the son of wealthy parents, too. A prickle ran up my spine, for here was a riddle—and maybe a dangerous one.

  “Do you have food?” the girl asked, an edge of desperation in her voice. “I have a few coins….”

  “Are there soldierguards after you?” I asked.

  “They might be looking for us, but not up here,” the girl said with a glint of malice in her eyes.

  “You’re not highlanders, are you?”

  She glared at me with a mixture of defiance and fear. Clearly, she knew they needed help, and I could almost see her trying to decide how much of their story to tell. “I’ll help you,” I said bluntly, “but I need to know for certain that no soldierguards are on your trail.”

  “I swear no one knows we are here. Gavyn has hid us from soldierguards and other travelers on the road.”

  “Well and good, then. Come along with me. There’s a clearing just over here where you can have a drink, and then we’ll ride to my home.”

  “Hooray! A drink!” the little boy caroled. He turned his guileless eyes on me. “I don’t mind at all that you found us.”

  The girl looked at him, then at me. “How did you find us?” she demanded suspiciously.

  There was no point in prevarication, so I told her.

  “You are like Gavyn?” she gaped. “I thought the poor lad was a lone freak and pitied him for it. You are up here hiding from the Herders as well, then?”

  “You could say that,” I said, repressing a smile. Then I realized what she’d said. “Here, a moment
past you said the soldierguards weren’t after you, but what about the Herders?”

  Her brown eyes flared with hatred. “The bastards would like to have us, but they don’t have any idea where we are.”

  I stared, for the curse had been the sort she would never have heard in a wealthy house. When the pair of them had quenched their thirst, I felt the girl decide she might as well tell the truth of their story. Having made up her mind, she told their tale quite simply, with a weariness that was all the more poignant because it was too heavy for her years.

  Seely’s parents had died when she was very young, and she’d been adopted by distant relatives. She said little, but enough bitter visions flickered through her mind to show she had been more maid than daughter to the family that took her in. Nevertheless, she formed a friendship with the daughter of the house, who was some years older than her and who’d been promised by her parents to a Councilman. When the daughter went to her man’s house and bed, Seely went with her as her companion and personal maid.

  She had a better time of it then, living in luxury and traveling when the couple went about on Council business. The man had turned out not to be such a bad sort, though obviously he was too old for his bondmate. Nevertheless, he’d got her with a child. Seely helped birth young Gavyn. She had held him, weeping her eyes out, as her friend died in the bloody childbed. She stayed to care for the boy, on whom the father doted.

  Things went well enough until the man got another bondmate, Lady Slawyna; she was older and unpleasant, with a grown son from a previous bonding. Though the woman cooed and praised Gavyn in his father’s hearing, Seely quickly saw she hated the child and wanted him dead so that her bondmate’s rich holdings would go to her own son. He was a Herder, and though he could not inherit himself, his order would receive whatever he would have inherited, paving the way for his promotion within the Faction.

  Things went on in that uneasy way until Gavyn’s father died. Then Lady Slawyna took over as guardian of the heir to all her man’s wealth. Seely knew the woman would not dare to harm the boy openly, but still the girl never let Gavyn out of her sight, for she’d sworn to her friend a deathbed oath to protect him. But Gavyn grew to be a strange child, and Lady Slawyna began to cast a fishy eye on him, watching him like a cat watches a bird hopping closer and closer to its claws.

  “One night, I heard her speaking to her Herder son about Gavyn,” Seely recalled. “The son said he’d have to be examined, but if he was truly Misfit, there’d be no question of him inheriting. He promised to set the process of investigation in motion. I knew then we’d have to run.” Her eyes clouded with memory. “I never knew how hard it would be. Ye gods, we’ve run from one end of the Land to the other, and if there’s no refuge for us here…” She finished on a sob that made the boy look at her anxiously.

  “There’s a place for you here,” I promised. I was glad to think of her finding refuge after all she must have gone through, but more than that, I was excited at the thought of how much invaluable information she might have absorbed about Councilmen and Herders, given the exalted circles she’d moved in.

  She went on. “Gavyn’s abilities caused us a lot of difficulties, but they also hid us. The last time we were spotted was in Sutrium, near the ferry port. None could know whether we were trying to get over it to the west coast or had just come from it. Gavyn made it so that people could not see us.” She ruffled the boy’s curls tenderly. “After that, we traveled by night and stole what food and clothes we needed, always heading away from the coast, for I thought maybe we could find some remote hamlet where Herders and soldierguards never came. It was our last hope, truly.”

  I saw a bleak vision of her feeding the boy poison and then herself and realized she was at the end of her resources.

  “You have done an incredible thing keeping him safe and going so far,” I said gravely. “But now you need to eat and rest. Can you ride?”

  “I’ve never,” Seely admitted, staring with frightened eyes at Zidon.

  Gavyn toddled over to Faraf and patted her nose clumsily. “Gavyn ride Faraf?”

  I gaped, but Seely misunderstood my concern. “He’s not afraid of any animal that ever lived, and they never hurt him no matter how savage they are,” she said.

  “Your Gavyn is a Talented little boy indeed,” I said, wondering if she had missed the significance of the boy using the mare’s name without being told it. As well as being a strong coercer, he was probably a beastspeaker, too. “Faraf will carry Gavyn, then, and you can ride with me.” I lifted the child up onto the mare’s back, asking her to be careful.

  “I will not let him fall,” she promised.

  I climbed onto Zidon then and pulled Seely awkwardly up behind me. “Don’t fear. We won’t go at more than a walk.”

  “Do you live alone?” Seely asked with a renewed wariness that told, more than any tale, how hard a time she’d had of it. I said I did not live alone but that she need not fear my friends.

  “Who were those men hiding up on the mountain?” Gavyn piped up. “Are they your friends?”

  When I did not answer immediately, Seely said, “He probably imagined them.”

  “No,” I said. “There are two men watching the pass. They will be very surprised when they learn that you two escaped their notice.”

  “They’re Misfits?”

  I turned to look over my shoulder at her. “There are more of us about the Land than you’d guess. Most of us start out thinking we’re lone freaks. Gavyn is lucky, because he’ll grow up among his own kind, never feeling an outcast. But there are ordinary folk like you up here, too.”

  “We heard a group of riders go by just now,” Seely said slowly. “I thought maybe they were hunters, though I’d heard no one comes up here because it’s haunted.”

  “Well, the haunts and shades are the watchers’ doing,” I said, letting a smile infuse my voice. “And the riders you heard were friends. But it’s true that very few people come up here. You are the first in ages, and I would not have known you were here at all if it hadn’t been for Rasial.” I nodded at the ridgeback.

  “She smelled us,” the boy said, his eyes fixed on the white dog. Rasial lifted her head, and an extraordinarily long gaze passed between her and Gavyn. I had a feeling some communication had taken place between them, though my senses detected nothing.

  As we rode through the gates to Obernewtyn, Seely’s arms tightened around my waist. “This is the place they said was burned out by firestorm.”

  “I’m pleased to tell you that there never was any firestorm, nor plague either,” I said. “Those were all illusions to keep the Council and Herders from taking an interest in us. Some of the Misfits here can make a proper building seem like it is in ruins, just as Gavyn can make people see nothing where there is something.”

  When Obernewtyn came into sight, Seely gasped aloud. “What sort of place is this?”

  “Home.” I smiled as Zidon came to a quiet stop alongside the stone steps leading to the entrance. I slid down and helped Seely off. Gavyn dismounted before I could help him, agile as a squirrel. He patted Faraf and kissed her nose before squatting in the dirt beside Rasial and staring intently into her silver-white eyes.

  Without warning, the front doors banged open and Ceirwan rushed out. Seely shrank back with a cry of fright.

  “I’m sorry,” Ceirwan said in contrition, holding up his hands to her, “But when th’ guildmistress farsent me to say she’d found ye both, I was burstin’ with curiosity.” He held out a hand to her with a friendly grin. “Ye mun be Seely.”

  She shook his hand gingerly. “You…you’re a Misfit, too?”

  “I am,” Ceirwan laughed. “But listen, I fergot how overwhelmin’ this place can be. I near burst into tears the first time I saw it.”

  “I’m not far from it, truly,” Seely said with a watery smile.

  Zidon sent that he and Faraf would return to the farms, and I turned to thank them. The boy’s mind chimed in clear as a bell alongsi
de mine, saying goodbye. There was a strange sweet ringing in his tone that reminded me somewhat of Angina empathising.

  “His mind sings,” Faraf agreed.

  I stared at the boy, wondering if he could be an empath as well as a beastspeaker and a coercer. No other Misfit had a combination of coercion and empathy, and I had always imagined the two could not coexist. Ceirwan was ushering Seely inside, and she called over her shoulder to Gavyn. Still kneeling in the dirt with Rasial, he told her that he wanted to stay with the dog.

  Before Seely could argue, Rasial beastspoke the boy. “I will come with you.”

  I watched in wonder as she mounted the steps. Gavyn followed contentedly, his fingers wound into her thick fur. Seely shook her head wearily as if this sort of thing was common to her and asked if I minded that the dog came inside. Though she was aware of Gavyn’s affinity with animals, she seemed to have no idea that he could actually communicate with them.

  “You’ll find that beasts have pretty much the same status as humans here,” I told her mildly, thinking it would be better not to give her too much to take in immediately. She was looking white and stretched beyond her limit. I farsent to Ceirwan to get them both some food and ensure they were not bothered by questions until they had had a chance to rest.

  “Go with Ceir now,” I told Seely. “We’ll talk again later, but don’t worry about anything. Consider Obernewtyn your home for as long as you wish.”

  “I do not know what to say, my lady,” Seely whispered.

  I ignored the honorific and said, “There is no need to say anything. Go and be welcome.”

  Eating a very late bowl of somewhat lumpy firstmeal porridge, I refused to let myself dwell on Rushton’s continuing absence, knowing it would lead me to despair. Instead, I turned my attention to the day ahead and the things that needed doing. Gevan must be told about Gavyn, given the boy’s Talent. Alad would need to examine him as well, and perhaps Angina and Miky. Wila would be the best person to question Seely about the Herders, and Tomash was the obvious choice to question her about the Council.