by Tad Williams
“Teach me something, then,” she said heavily. “What else do I have left?”
“You have learning, yes,” Utta told her. “But you also have prayers. You must not forget your prayers, child. And you have Zoria’s protection, if you deserve it. There are worse things to cling to.”
*
Finished examining the boy, Chaven reached into his pockets and produced a disk of glass pent in a brass handle. Flint took it from him and looked through it, first staring up at the flickering lamp, then moving it close to the wall so he could examine the grain of stone in the spaces between the tapestries.
Maybe he’ll make a Funderling yet, thought Chert.
The boy turned to him, smiling, one eye goggling hugely behind the glass Chert laughed despite himself. At the moment, Flint seemed to be no more than he appeared, a child of five or six summers.
Chaven thought so, too. “I find nothing unusual about him,” the physician said quietly as they watched the boy playing with the enlarging-glass “No extra fingers, toes, or mysterious marks. His breath is sweet—for a child who seems to have eaten spiced turnips today, that is—and his eyes are clear. Everything about him seems ordinary. This all proves nothing, but unless some other mysterious trait shows itself, I must for the moment assume he is what your wife guessed him to be, some mortal child who wandered beyond the Shadowline and, instead of wandering back again as some do, met the riders you saw and was carried out instead. “Chaven frowned. “You say he has little memory of who he is. If that is all he has lost, he is a lucky one. As I said before, those who have wandered across and returned before now have had the whole of their wits clouded if not ruined.”
“Lucky. Yes, it seems that way.” Chert should have been relieved, especially since the child would be sharing their house for at least the present, but he could not rid himself of a nagging feeling that there was something more to be discovered. “But why, if the Shadowline is moving, would the the Quiet Folk oh-so-kindly carry a mortal child across the line? It seems more likely they would slit his throat like a rabbit and leave him in the foggy forest somewhere.”
Chaven shrugged. “I have no answer, my friend. Even when they were slaughtering mortals long ago at Coldgray Moor, the Twilight People did things that no one could understand. In the last months of the war, one company of soldiers from Fael moving camp by midnight stumbled onto a fairy-feast, but instead of slaughtering them—they were far outnumbered—the Qar only fed them and led them into drunken revels. Some of the soldiers even claimed they mated with fairy women that night.”
“The . . . Qar?"
“Their old name.” Chaven waved his hand. “I have spent much of my life studying them but I still know little more than when I began. They can be unexpectedly kind to mortals, even generous, but do not doubt that if the Shadowline sweeps across us, it will bring with it a dark, dark evil.”
Chert shuddered. “I have spent too much time on its borders to doubt that for a moment.” He watched the boy for a moment. “Will you tell the prince regent and his family that the line has moved?"
“I expect I will have to. But first I must think on all this, so that I can go to them with some proposal. Otherwise, decisions will be made in fear and ignorance, and those seldom lead to happy result.” Chaven rose from his stool and patted his bunched robe until it hung straight again. “Now I must get back to my work, not least of which will be thinking about the news you’ve brought me.”
As Chert led Flint to the door, the boy turned back. “Where is the owl?" he asked Chaven.
The physician stiffened for a moment, then smiled. “What do you mean, lad? There is no owl here, nor ever has been one, as far as I know.”
“There was,” Flint said stubbornly. “A.white one.”
Chaven shook his head kindly as he held the door, but Chert thought he looked a little discomposed.
*
After checking to make sure none of his servants were in sight, the physician let Chert and the boy out through the observatory-tower’s front door. For reasons he did not quite know himself, Chert had decided to go back aboveground, out through the Raven’s Gate. The guard would have changed at midday and there should be no reason for those on duty now to doubt that their predecessors questioned Chert closely before letting him and his young charge into the inner keep.
“What did you mean about the owl?” Chert asked as they made their way down the steps.
“What owl?”
“You asked that man where the owl was, the owl that had been in his room.”
Flint shrugged. His legs were longer than Chert’s and he did not need to look down at the steps, so he was watching the afternoon sky. “I don’t know.” He frowned, staring at something above him. The morning’s clouds had passed. Chert could see nothing but a faint sliver of moon, -white as a seashell, hanging in the blue sky. “He had stars on his walls.”
Chert recalled the tapestries covered with jeweled constellations. “He did, yes.”
“The Leaf, the Singers, the White Root—I know a song about them.” He pondered, his frown deepening. “No, I can’t remember it.”
“The Leaf . . . ?” Chert was puzzled. “The White Root? What are you talking about?”
“The stars—don’t you know their names?” Flint had reached the cobblestones at the base of the steps and was walking faster, so that Chert, still moving carefully down the tall steps, could barely make out what he said. “There’s the Honeycomb and the Waterfall . . . but I can’t remember the rest.” He stopped and turned. His face beneath the shock of almost white hair was full of sad confusion, so that he looked like a little old man. “I can’t remember.”
Chert caught up to him, out of breath and troubled. “I’ve never heard those names before. The Honeycomb? Where did you learn that, boy?”
Flint was walking again. “I used to know a song about the stars. I know one about the moon, too.” He hummed a snatch of melody that Chert could barely make out, but whose mournful sweetness made the hairs lift on the back of his neck. “I can’t remember the words,” Flint said. “But they tell about how the moon came down to find the arrows he had shot at the stars . . .”
“But the moon’s a woman—isn’t that what all you big folk believe?” A moment of sour amusement at his own words—the boy was but Chert’s own height, even a little shorter—did not puncture his confusion. “Mesiya, the moon-goddess?”
Flint laughed with a child’s pure enjoyment at the foolishness of adults. “No, he’s the sun’s little brother. Everyone knows that.”
He skipped ahead, enjoying the excitement of a street full of people and interesting sights, so that Chert had to hurry to catch up with him again, certain that something had just happened—something important—but he could not for the life of him imagine what it might have been.
6
Blood Ties
A HIDDEN PLACE:
Walls of straw, walls of hair
Each room can hold three breaths
Each breath an hour
—from The Bonefall Oracles
She did not make her dwelling in the ancient, labyrinthine city of Qul-na-Qar, although she had long claim to a place of honor there, by her blood and by her deeds—and by deeds of blood as well. Instead, she made her home on a high ridgetop in the mountains called Reheq-s’Lai, which meant Wanderwind, or something close to it. Her house, although large enough to cover most of the ridge, was a plain thing from most angles, as was the lady herself Only when the sunlight was in the right quarter, and a watcher’s face turned just so, could crystal and sky-stone be seen gleaming among the dark wall stones. In one way at least her house was like great Qul-na-Qar: it extended deep into the rocky ridge, with many rooms below the light of day and a profusion of tunnels extending beyond them like the roots of an old, old tree. Above the ground the windows were always shuttered, or seemed that way. Her servants were silent and she seldom had visitors.
Some of the younger Qar, who had heard of her madness for
privacy, but of course had never seen her, called her Lady Porcupine. Others who knew her better could not help shuddering at the accidental truth of the name—they had seen how in moments of fury a nimbus of prickly shadow bloomed about her, a shroud of phantom thorns.
Her granted name was Yasammez, but few knew it. Her true name was known to only two or three living beings.
The lady’s high house was called Shehen, which meant “Weeping.” Because it was a s’a-Qar word, it meant other things, too—it carried the intimation of an unexpected ending, and a suggestion of the scent of the plant that in the sunlight lands was called myrtle—but more than anything else, it meant “Weeping.”
It was said that Yasammez had only laughed twice in all her long life, the first time when, as a child, she first saw a battlefield and smelled the blood and the smoke from the fires. The second time had been when she had first been exiled, sent away from Qul-na-Qar for crimes or deeds of arrogance long since forgotten by most of the living. “You cannot hide me, or hide from me,” she is said to have told her accusers, “because you cannot find me. I was lost when I first drew breath “ Yasammez was made for war and death, all agreed, as a sword is made, a thing whose true beauty can only be seen when it brings destruction.
It was also said that she would laugh for the third time only when the last mortal died, or when she herself took her final breath.
None of the stories said anything about the sound of her laughter, except that it was terrible.
Yasammez stood in her garden of low, dark plants and tall gray rocks shaped like the shadows of terrified dreamers, and looked out over her steep lands. The wind was as fierce as ever, wrapping her cloak tightly around her, blowing her hair loose from the bone pins that held it, but was still not strong enough to disperse the mist lurking in the ravines that gouged the hillside below like claw-scratches. Still, it blew loudly enough that even if any of her pale servants had been standing beside her they would not have been able to hear the melody Lady Yasammez was singing to herself, nor would they even have believed their mistress might do such a thing. They certainly would not have known the song, which had been old before the mountain on which she stood had risen from the earth.
A voice began to speak in her ear and the ancient music stopped. She did not turn because she knew the voice came from no one in the stark garden or high house. Secretive, angry, and solitary as she was, Yasammez still knew this voice almost better than she knew her own. It was the only voice that ever called her by her true name.
It called that name again now.
“I hear, O my heart,” said Lady Porcupine, speaking without words.
“I must know.”
“It has already begun,” the mistress of the ridgetop house replied, but it stabbed her to hear such disquiet in the thoughts of her beloved, her great ruler, the single star in her dark, cold sky. After all, this was the time for wills to become stony, for hearts to grow thorns. “All has been put into motion. As you wished. As you commanded.”
“There is no turning back, then.”
It almost seemed a question, but Yasammez knew it could not be. “No turning back,” she agreed.
“So, then. In the full raveling of time we will see what new pages will be written in the Book.”
“We shall.” She yearned to say more, to ask why this sudden concern that almost seemed like weakness in the one who was not just her ruler but her teacher as well, but the words did not come; she could not form the question even in the silence of shared thought. Words had never been friends to Yasammez; in this, they were like almost everything else beneath the moon or sun.
“Farewell, then. We will speak again soon, when your great task reaches fulfillment. You have my gratitude.”
Then Lady Porcupine was alone again with the wind and her thoughts, her strange, bitter thoughts, in the garden of the house called Weeping.
*
The longer, heavier sword skimmed off Barrick’s falchion and crashed down against the small buckler on his left arm. A lightning flash of pain leaped through his shoulder. He cried out, sagged to one knee, and only just managed to throw his blade up in time to deflect the second blow. He climbed to his feet and stood, gasping for breath. The air was full of sawdust. He could barely hold even his own slender sword upright.
“Stop.” He stepped back, letting the falchion sag, but instead of lowering his own longer sword, Shaso suddenly lunged forward, the point of his blade jabbing down at Barrick’s ankles. Caught by surprise, the prince hesitated for an instant before jumping to avoid the thrust. It was a mistake. As the prince landed awkwardly, the old man had already turned his sword around so he clutched the blade in his gauntlets. He thumped Barrick hard in the chest with the sword’s pommel, forcing out the rest of the boy’s air. Gasping, Barrick took one step backward and collapsed. For a moment black clouds closed in. When he could see again, Shaso was standing over him.
“Curse you!” Barrick wheezed. He kicked out at Shaso’s leg, but the old man stepped neatly away. “Didn’t you hear? I said stop!”
“Because your arm was tired? Because you did not sleep well last night? Is that what you will do in battle? Cry mercy because you fight only with one hand and it has weaned?” Shaso made a noise of disgust and turned his back on the young prince. It was all Barrick could do not to scramble to his feet at this display of contempt and skull the old Tuani with the padded falchion.
But it was not just his remaining shreds of civility and honor that stopped him, nor his exhaustion, even in his rage, Barrick doubted he would actually land the blow.
He got up slowly instead and pulled off the buckler and gauntlets so he could rub his arm. Although his left hand was curled into something like a bird’s claw and his forearm was thin as a child’s, after countless painful hours lifting the iron-headed weights called poises. Barrick had strengthened the sinews of his upper arm and shoulder enough that he could use the buckler effectively. But—and he hated to admit it, and certainly would not do so aloud—Shaso was right he still was not strong enough, not even in the good arm which had to wield his only blade, since even a dagger was too much for his crippled fingers.
As he pulled on the loose deerskin glove he wore to hide his twisted hand, Barrick was still furious. “Does it make you feel strong, beating a man who can only fight one-armed?”
The armorers, who today had the comparatively quiet task of cutting new leather straps at the huge bench along the room’s south wall, looked up, but only for a moment—they were used to such things. Barrick had no doubt they all thought him a spoiled child. He flushed and slammed down his gauntlets.
Shaso, who was unstitching his padded practice-vest, curled his lip. “By the hundred tits of the Great Mother, boy, I am not beating you. I am teaching you.”
They had been out of balance all day. Even as a way to spend the tedious, stretching hours until his brother convened the council, this had been a mistake. Briony might have made it something civil, even enjoyable, but Briony was not there.
Barrick lowered himself to the ground and began removing his leg pads. He stared at Shaso’s back, irritated by the old man’s graceful, unhurried movements. Who was he, to be so calm when everything was falling apart? Barrick wanted to sting the master of arms somehow.
“Why did he call you ‘teacher’?”
Shaso’s fingers slowed, but he did not turn. “What?”
“You know. The envoy from Hierosol—that man Dawet. Why did he call you ‘teacher?’And he called you something else—’Mor-ja.’What does that mean?”
Shaso shrugged off the vest His linen undershirt was soaked with sweat, so that every muscle on his broad, brown back was apparent. Barrick had seen this so many times, and even in the midst of anger, he felt something like love for the old Tuani—a love for the known and familiar, however unsatisfying.
What if Briony really leaves? he thought suddenly. What if Kendrick really sends her to Hierosol to marry Ludis? I will never see her again. His outrag
e that a bandit should demand his sister in marriage, and that his brother should even consider it, suddenly chilled into a simpler and far more devastating thought—Southmarch Castle empty of Briony.
“I have been asked to answer that for the council,” Shaso said slowly. “You will hear what I say there, Prince Barrick. I do not want to speak of it twice.” He dropped the vest to the floor and walked away from it. Barrick could not help staring. Shaso was usually not only meticulous in the care of his weapons and equipment, but sharp-tongued to any who were not—Barrick most definitely included. The master of arms set the long sword in the rack without oiling it or even taking off the padding, took his shirt from a hook, and walked out of the armory without another word.
Barrick sat, as short of breath as if Shaso had struck him again in the stomach. He had long felt that among all the heedless folk in Southmarch, he was the only one who understood how truly bad things had become, who saw the deceptions and cruelties others missed or deliberately ignored, who sensed the growing danger to his family and their kingdom Now that proof was blossoming before him, he wished he could make it all go away—that he could turn and run headlong back into his own childhood.