by Tad Williams
“Come back,” the voice whispered. “Step out and join me, manchild. The light is good here.”
He did not know who he was or who spoke to him. He did not know where he was, or why the darkness that surrounded him felt so immense—a place where you could fall for a thousand years before you even realized you were falling . . .
“Come back.” A minute flicker of light, the faintest possible glimmer, appeared before him. “Come here. Come and run in these green fields with me, child. Where you were going is too cold.”
He opened his eyes, or at least that was how it seemed: the blur of light spread and deepened. Green and blue and white, the colors burst out, and he felt like he drank them down as a thirsty man gulps water. The clouds, the grass, the distant hills . . . and what was this new thing? Something white skimming toward him down the gray sky, a great bird with wings so wide they seemed as if they would brush a cloud with each tip: it was Saqri, of course, wearing a dream-form—or perhaps he was learning something deep and true about her that could only be experienced here.
“Run with me!” the swan called to him in the fairy queen’s gentle, musical voice. “Run! I will follow you.”
Fixed on the beautiful white bird, his senses swimming with delight, he spread his own wings to leap toward her, only to realize he was not a winged thing at all but a creature of hooves and strong legs and long strides. As he bolted out over the green meadows there seemed little difference between what he did now and what he would have done with wings. It was a wonderful freedom—it felt right.
“Where is this place?” he called.
“It is not a matter of ‘where’ but of something different . . . ‘how,’ perhaps ...”
He found he did not care. It was enough simply to run, to feel the wind making his mane and tail snap, to thrill to the thunder of his own hooves as they tore the grass beneath his feet into flying clods.
She skimmed past him and for a moment was content to fly just a little way ahead, matching his pace so that she seemed to float, rowing herself through the air with her vast pinions, black-beaked head on a neck long as a spear. “Are you weary, child?” she called. “Would you like to stop?”
“Never!” He laughed. “I could do this forever.” And it seemed like he had never said anything more true—that there would be no greater heaven than to run here forever, fit and strong and free of everything.
But what is this place? His stride faltered a little. Where am I? I was . . . I’m not . . . He felt his powerful body carrying him across the face of the world on four striding legs. But I’m not a horse . . . I’m a man . . . !
Heaven. Is this heaven? Does that mean I’m dead?
And suddenly he shuddered to a stop, the hills suddenly high and close, the sky darker, everything near and threatening. “Where am I?” he said again. “What have you done to me?”
The swan banked and circled. “Done to you? Those are hard words, Barrick Eddon. I brought you back when I could have let you go. I brought you back.”
“From where?”
“From what is next.”
“I was . . . dying?” A chill stabbed him deep in his center. Even through this fevered excitement, he could suddenly feel how close he had come.
“Do not fear it. It is a road all of us must tread one day . . . all of us except the gods, that is.”
“What do you mean?” He was trying to look down at his curious body but his head and neck were not well-shaped to do so. It felt unfamiliar—but also strangely familiar. “You mean everybody dies? But you don’t. You and the king and all your ancestors . . . you don’t.”
“We will see. If the Fireflower leads you to share our fate, you will be able to judge for yourself what kind of immortality our gift gives to us.”
The great bowl of meadow surrounded by hills seemed to grow darker still, as if a storm rushed in overhead, but in truth the mixed skies had not changed. “And this place? If I’m not dead, this isn’t Heaven.”
The swan stretched her beautiful neck. “It is not—although names are at best troublesome in these lands. It is another place. One that I could not be certain you would cross, or even reach, as you began to slip away from the places of the living—there is much I do not know about your people. But it was the only place I could have found you before it was too late, and the only place where I could be strong enough to hold you until you could make your own choice to return to the world or not.”
Suddenly, as if a door had been thrown open, letting light in, he remembered. “It was the voices—all the . . . the things I knew. The Fireflower. And it felt like I was knowing more every moment . . . !” He felt his four feet restless beneath him suddenly, his entire body tensed to run.
“Of course,” she said, and for the first time since he had first heard it he found her voice soothing. “Of course. It is difficult enough for one of our kind—how much stranger and more painful for one of your folk. That is why we are seeking help for you.” A flicker of spread wing, a sunbeam of white blazing before his eyes, and she was off again. “So follow! We will go where mortals do not venture, except for those rare few that can dream a path. Those travelers pay for their journey with their happiness and their rest. Who knows what those like us, we who have neither rest nor happiness, will be asked to pay?”
Up into the hills he ran, following the dim form of the swan as it darted low over the grass ahead of him. The trees snapped past him like arrows and his legs drove him tirelessly as he ran from twilight into true darkness.
He ran so fast he could not feel the air, but nevertheless the cold grew in him, crystals of ice forming in his blood as they might on the surface of a slow-moving river as winter settled in. And as the cold and darkness grew, he crossed into a land where the hills grew naked of grass and great piles of stones loomed, each one somber and alone despite the thousands of others that surrounded it. The light now was as pale as that which fell from a waning moon, but there was no moon, only a black sky and a glow that painted the standing heaps of stone as though they were not whole things with weight and breadth but only spirits of stones gleaming in an unending midnight.
And as they passed farther and farther into this quiet, disheartening realm, the swan flickering low on the horizon was the only thing that reminded him of what daylight had been. A little of who he was and what he was doing came back to him.
Barrick Eddon. Son of the king of Southmarch. Brother of Briony . . . and of Kendrick.
He had fought all the way to the heart of Faerie because Lady Yasammez had commanded it. He had carried a mirror containing part of a god’s essence all the way to Qul-na-Qar because Gyir the Storm Lantern, Yasammez’ servant, had begged him to. And now he was carrying within himself the painful gift of the Fireflower, the life and thought and memory of all the kings of the Qar since the god Kupilas had fathered the line.
My blood comes from a god’s blood. No surprise I have this dreadful storm in my head ...!
But he didn’t, and that was what finally struck him: since he had crossed over into this land, he had felt nothing in his head but his own thoughts: the Fireflower voices and memories had gone still. He had fallen back into the familiar glory of this solitude without even realizing how strange it now was.
“Saqri! Saqri, where have the voices gone?”
“If you mean the Fireflower ancestors, you cannot hear them now but you will again. Here you are no longer in your own land, where they can speak only into the ears of Crooked’s children. We have crossed over into lands you have only glimpsed in the deepest and strangest of dreams. We are with the dead . . . and the slumbering gods.”
And she flew on with Barrick running behind her, the dream of a man in the dream of a horse, chasing the queen of the fairies across the endless, empty lands.
The darkness was almost complete but Barrick was not frightened. He could see only what was in front of him, and that barely. Nothing spoke in his head but his own thoughts. Occasionally Saqri broke her long silences to gi
ve him encouragement or make some cryptic remark. At last they had gone so far into the valley that the barren hills climbed high on either side and the darkness became a sort of tunnel, with Saqri’s whiteness the only thing he could see. “Where are we going?”
“We are there . . . I believe.” Her thoughts were strangely hesitant. “The Valley of the Ancestors. I hope it is so, anyway ...”
“Hope so? What do you mean? You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”
She actually laughed. It had an edge of wildness. “How could I? These are the lands beyond—where the dead go. And I am still alive . . . !”
“But you . . . we’re ...” Suddenly the darkness and the deep-shadowed hills twisted, becoming something even deeper and stranger than before: Barrick felt as though, instead of running on a broad greensward, he now was galloping across an impossibly narrow bridge with nothingness yawning on either side.
The dead lands. The Valley of the Ancestors. The fear was growing so thick he could scarcely breathe. What has happened to my life?
“Quiet now.” Saqri’s voice was music in a haunting minor key. “We are close. We must not frighten them.”
“They’re frightened?”
“Only of life. Of too much care. Of the pull and grasp of memory.” He could feel deep sadness in her words. “But I must bring all that and more to my brother.”
Things moved around him now in the inconstant darkness, forms with some kind of independent existence from the grass and the hills. He could not see them, exactly, could only sense them as a man can feel when someone stands close behind him. These new forms seemed distant, almost empty, little more than wind and the impression of existence.
“These are the long dead, or perhaps the impressions those left behind when they moved on to other places.” Saqri’s voice seemed distant, her light scarcely more visible than the empty shapes around him. “Do not fear them—they hold no harm for you.”
But he did fear them, not because they menaced him, but because they did not even seem to notice him or anything else. Were they simply shadows left behind, as Saqri said, or were they sunk so deep in death that they could not even be understood anymore by the living? It terrified him to imagine becoming such a thing some day.
“There.” Saqri had moved a little closer, her swan-form faint as foxfire. “I see them—they are in the glade.”
She led him into a murk of shadows that stood like trees. They were silvered ever so faintly by radiance from above, though no source was visible, as though the moon had let some of its light fall like dew before disappearing from the sky.
He saw them, then—a cluster of smeared, dully gleaming shapes that wavered as if seen through deep water or ancient glass. They were deer, or at least each bore a shining filigree upon his brow that might have been antlers. They moved restlessly as Barrick approached, but did not run.
“Do not go closer,” Saqri told him. “They can smell the life on you. They may not remember it but they know it is foreign to this place.”
Now he could see something brighter in the wavering light—eyes. The deer-shapes were watching him. “What do we do?”
“You? Nothing . . . yet. This first task is set only for me.” And he felt her voice stretch out as her wings had, gently enfolding the herd before them with her words. “Listen to me, all you lords of winds and thought. I seek the one who in life was Ynnir, my brother. I am Saqri, the last daughter of the First Flower.”
Barrick heard a voice, or felt it sighing like the wind in a tangle of branches. “What do you want? You do not belong here. Do the black hellebores still bloom in the Dawnflower’s garden, or has the Defeat finally come?”
“It has not come yet, but it may be upon us with the next breath, my fathers. I have no time to waste, even in this timeless place. Send me Ynnir.”
“The youngest of us . . . comes ...” The voice was fading even as it spoke.
And then another shape appeared before them, closer and clearer than the others, a great stag whose gleam was far more vibrant than those of its older brethren. A lavender glow hung between its spreading antlers, the warmest thing in all of that cold, dark valley.
“Saqri?” it said after a long silence. “Beloved? How have you come here?”
“By roads I should not have traveled, and on which I may not find my way back, even if you help us.” Her voice was as calm as ever, but some tight-drawn note in it told Barrick that this was not a happy meeting. “If there is to be any chance at all we must be swift. Come back with us, Brother. Your manchild is overwhelmed by what you have given him—his blood boils with it. Come back and help him to live with the terrible gift of the Fireflower.”
The great stag lowered its head. “I cannot, Sister. Every moment it is harder to think as you think. Every moment the current pulls me farther into the river of forgetfulness. Soon the only part of me that will still touch the world will be that part which is of the Fireflower.”
“But you must . . . !”
“You do not understand. You do not understand . . . what it would cost me.”
Saqri was silent for a long moment. “Even to save the manchild, you will not come? You would abandon your own last and greatest gamble?”
The great stag raised his head. His eyes for a moment took on the same lavender gleam as the light that shimmered above his brow. “Very well, my sister . . . my most beloved enemy. The victory is yours. Every instant I stay in the between-lands, the House of Forever draws away from me . . . but I will do my best.” The beast lowered its pale head like a prisoner awaiting the headsman’s ax. “I will give what I have. I hope that it is enough.”
2
A Letter from Erasmias Jino
“It is agreed by all men that the holy Orphan was born of lowly sheep herders in the hills of Krace during the reign of the Tyrant Osias.”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
BRIONY THOUGHT THAT TRAVELING with even a small army—and Eneas kept reminding her that his Temple Dogs made an extremely small army, scarcely even a battalion—was like living in a movable city, one that had to be taken down every morning and set up again the next evening. Even with a group of men as hardy as the prince’s troops, swift riders who needed little in this spring weather beyond bedrolls and some source of water, they still could travel each day only as far as caution permitted. Few people were on the roads in this strange year, and those who were often had traveled no farther than from one walled town to the next, so information about what lay beyond the Southmarch border was scarce.
Every day took them farther north, winding up King Karal’s Road (named after one of Eneas’ most famous ancestors) out of Syan and through the lands that lay between it and the March Kingdoms, mostly tiny principalities who offered token allegiance to the throne in Tessis or the throne in Southmarch, but which only existed because the long era of peace had allowed them to keep their soldiers at home. Now that the north was in chaos they were less happy and less hospitable than they had been in the past.
They had discovered one such county seat near Tyosbridge. The land’s master, Viscount Kymon, had refused to let Prince Eneas and his men inside the walls, although it would have brought a great deal of money into the pockets of the town merchants. Eneas and his dozen or so officers (with Briony among them) had been invited to spend the night at the viscount’s hall but Eneas had refused, furious at the implication that his men could not be trusted—or worse, that he himself could not be trusted. They had spent the night instead camped outside with the men, something Briony admired greatly as a gesture. Still, a part of her could not help regretting the lost chance at a night on a decent bed. Between sleeping on the ground with the players and the same now with the Syannese soldiers, she had largely forgotten how it felt to sleep on the soft beds of Broadhall Palace, although she remembered very clearly that she had liked it.
The next day Eneas marched his men back onto the Royal Highway. He scarcely g
lanced up at the viscount’s walled stronghold on the hill, but more than a few of the soldiers gave it a wistful look as it disappeared behind them.
“It’s just as well,” Eneas told Briony and his chief lieutenant, a serious young knight named Miron, Lord Helkis, who treated the prince with the respect normally given to a father, though Eneas was only a few years older. “They would only lose their edge in a city, anyway. Cities are terrible places—full of idlers and thieves and wicked women.”
“Truly?” Briony asked. “That seems a strange thing to say. Don’t your father and the rest of your family live in Tessis, the grandest city in Eion? Don’t you live there yourself?”
Eneas made a sour face. “That is not the same, my lady. I live there because I must, and only when I must, but I prefer to live in camp—or in my hall in the mountains.” His handsome face was serious—a little too serious, Briony thought. “Yes, that is a place you must see, Briony. From the upstairs windows you can see all the way down the valley—not a person in sight but a few shepherds and their flocks in the high meadows.”
“It sounds . . . very pretty. And I’m sure the shepherds like it, too. But is there nothing good to be said about cities—or the royal court?”
He looked at her a little mistrustfully, as though she might be trying to trick him. “You saw what a court is like. You heard them whispering about you. You saw what they did to you, because you are from a quieter, smaller place and not used to their ways.”
Briony raised her eyebrow. Her problem in Tessis had been that she had enemies, one of them the king’s mistress, not necessarily that she was an innocent country girl who did not understand how to protect herself. As if no one had ever tried to kill her until she got to Syan! She wondered if that was part of what Eneas liked about her—that he thought of her as little more than a peasant girl, although one who had a stubborn, forward streak.