The Bone Queen

by Alison Croggon

  This was surprising enough: but then she let down the hood of the cloak that covered her face, and he saw that it was Ceredin. She stood before him, her dark hair loose about her shoulders, in a white dress that he remembered she had worn on the night of his poetry duel with Cadvan. Their eyes met, and Dernhil drew in a sharp breath. It was Ceredin to the life: her delicately arched eyebrows, her full lips and dark eyes, the tiny, faint freckles scattered over her nose. A dim illumination, delicate as starlight, seemed to inhabit her skin, but otherwise she appeared as solid and real as Dernhil himself.

  For a few moments he was frozen with wonder. He wasn’t at all afraid, but it seemed to him that he must be dreaming.

  “Nay Dernhil,” said Ceredin, although he hadn’t spoken aloud. “You do not dream.”

  At last he found his voice. “How are you here?”

  Ceredin smiled, and sat down by the fire, next to Cadvan’s sleeping form. “I am not here,” she said. “The Circles are bleeding and the ways are broken. I can’t find my way to the Gates. I can see you on the Shadowplains, almost as lost as I am.”

  Dernhil felt a stab of fear. “I walk already with the dead? Do you mean I’m dying?”

  “All of us walk with death from the moment we are born. There is part of your being that wanders in your waking life, and it is that I see in the Shadowplains. It is a living thing, and shines, and I know your form.”

  Dernhil shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t understand at all. Why are you lost, Ceredin?”

  “Sometimes I think I see the Gates in the distance, and I am hopeful and walk towards them, and then they fade and shimmer and I find myself alone, on a dark plain, with whispering all around me. I cannot see who whispers, but I know there are many of them, and I think they are the voices of those who are lost like me.”

  Ceredin spoke without any emotion in her voice, as if she were speaking of something distant from her, but at this Dernhil reached forward without thinking, to take her hand in his, and she drew back hastily.

  “You mustn’t touch me,” she said. “I am not here. I only seem.”

  Dernhil sat back, staring at Ceredin. There was, to his eyes at least, nothing insubstantial about her presence: he was torn between astonishment and a disconcerting sense that this encounter was, despite everything, absolutely ordinary.

  “Should I wake Cadvan?” he asked.

  “Cadvan cannot hear me, sleeping or waking,” she said. “His longing fills his ears and drowns my voice. He cannot hear me, no matter how many times I say his name.”

  “Yet he burns to see you,” said Dernhil.

  “Yes.”

  Dernhil was silent for a time, pondering. In most tales, when the dead visited the living, it was to tell them something urgent. “Is there something I should tell him, then?” he asked. “Or is there something I should do?”

  “There is a rift,” said Ceredin. “It opens beneath the feet of the dead and the living. It opens within the World. There is a rift in the hearts of those who dream on the edges of the World, where the future opens like a wound. There is a great malice, broken into three and three. Each malice seeks the others.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Cadvan is hidden from himself, there is a shadow within him,” said Ceredin, fixing Dernhil with her gaze. “Through Cadvan the rift has opened. The malice burned through him, and through him finds its shapes.”

  “Ceredin, I really don’t understand,” said Dernhil.

  Ceredin didn’t answer. She shivered and drew her cloak about her, as if a cold wind had sprung up, although the night remained still. “The Circles are bleeding,” she said. “I am nowhere, yet everywhere hunted. I long for rest, Dernhil.” Her voice, until now cool and distant, filled with yearning, and despite himself Dernhil leaned forward, knowing he must not touch Ceredin, yet wanting to comfort her.

  “How?” he asked. “How may I bring you rest?”

  But Ceredin stood up hurriedly, looking over her shoulder, and without speaking stepped outside the circle of firelight. As soon as the night enfolded her, Dernhil knew that she was gone.

  He sat motionless for some time, caught in the strangeness of what had just happened. Then he realized that he was still clutching his tin mug of tea, and that it had gone cold. He tipped it out, and hunted through his pack for his fast dwindling supply of medhyl, the drink Bards used to stave off exhaustion. He knew that sleep was now impossible, and he wanted to think. Ceredin’s words baffled him: the only part he really understood was that she was lost in the Shadowplains, a spirit caught between one world and another. He had read of such things, and they were always sad stories: the thought that Ceredin should be so forlorn tore his heart.

  She had said she was hunted. He thought that part of the riddle was more easily understood than the others: it must be the Bone Queen who sought her. He cursed himself for not having the presence of mind to ask her directly. Surely she would have said? Yet perhaps she couldn’t be clear. She had seemed different from the Ceredin who had visited his dream last autumn: then she had been the woman he had known in life, but now she was estranged; even speaking seemed hard for her, as if she were seeking the meaning of words as she said them.

  Then he wondered how he was to tell Cadvan. He could not conceal this encounter from him, but he quailed at the thought. Cadvan was sure to be angry, or pained, or full of self-contempt; or most likely, all three at once.

  At dawn the wind changed to the west and the sky cleared, but it brought a sun with little heat in it. Dernhil and Cadvan pushed their reluctant horses across the ford at the confluence of the Lir and Cuna Rivers and started westward towards Lirigon. At noon, they found a sheltered dingle where they stopped for a midday meal. Out of the wind the sun was gentle and warm, and Dernhil stretched out on the grass with a sigh, closed his eyes and fell fast asleep. Cadvan watched Dernhil for a few minutes and then unsaddled and brushed the horses. He had noted the exhaustion on Dernhil’s face that morning, and now decided that they would go no further that day.

  By the time Dernhil stirred, the sun was low. He blinked and sat up, swearing softly. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he said, moving over to the fire, where Cadvan was stirring a stew of dried fish in a pot.

  “You were sleeping so blissfully that I didn’t have the heart.”

  Dernhil rubbed his hands near the flames; the air already held an evening chill. “That was unusually merciful of you.”

  Cadvan said nothing. Dernhil watched his face for a while, bent in concentration over the pot. “Something odd happened last night,” he said, clearing his throat. “I had a visit from Ceredin.”

  Cadvan glanced up sharply, his face expressionless. “Yes?”

  Dernhil told his story swiftly and plainly, with a Bard’s accuracy. Cadvan listened intently, his face averted, and when Dernhil finished, there was a long silence. Then he announced abruptly that they needed more firewood, and walked off. Dernhil watched him out of sight, shrugged and stirred the stew. It wouldn’t do to let it burn.

  Cadvan returned after sunset, with a smallish bundle of wood that he had clearly picked up as an afterthought. It was scarcely needed anyway: there was a good pile already that he had collected while Dernhil slept. Dernhil wordlessly doled the stew into bowls and they ate, staring into the leaping flames as darkness settled around them. After they had cleaned up, Cadvan brewed a camomile tea, and the two sat side by side, blowing on the hot liquid.

  “Why do you think she can’t speak to me, Dernhil?” said Cadvan, in a low voice.

  Startled by the question, Dernhil didn’t answer at once. “I think … she knows that you long for her, and it is that very longing that makes it impossible for you to hear her.”

  “It’s so … unfair.” He turned to Dernhil. “You know that poem of yours… Could I but call you now, and hear your voice…”

  Dernhil finished the couplet. “And yet my very anguish seals my loss.”

  “Ye
s, that one. I read all your poems again, after … when I was still in Lirigon. I was unjust to you, Dernhil. There are many ways in which I have wronged you, but I’m not sure I ever apologised to you for so stupidly criticizing your poems.”

  Embarrassed, Dernhil gestured dismissively, but Cadvan continued.

  “Anyway, I feel like that poem.” He leaned forward and poked the fire with a stick. “It’s perhaps what wounds me most when I hear of Ceredin speaking to you. No, that’s not the worst. What wounds me most is that she sounds as if she is afraid…”

  “Abandoned in the infinite…” said Dernhil softly, quoting another poet.

  “The immortal Lorica,” said Cadvan, smiling painfully at Dernhil. “I think your work approaches her poetry, you know, in how you express… But I am not saying anything very well tonight. Forgive me for telling you this. I know what I feel about it is of the least importance.” He paused. “Maybe I am talking about poems because they are the only place where it’s possible to speak such difficult and complicated things.” He gestured helplessly. “And it’s not what I meant to say at all, anyway. I’ve been turning what Ceredin said over in my head, trying to understand…”

  “I have been too,” said Dernhil. “With small success.”

  “Some things are clear. She is speaking of the Shadow Circle. There is a rift in the hearts of those who dream on the edges of the World, where the future opens like a wound.”

  “She said that you are hidden from yourself,” said Dernhil. “That there is a darkness within you…”

  “That’s not so hard to riddle,” said Cadvan. “Nor this: The malice burned through him, and through him finds its shapes. It is clear how I opened this rift, and how the malice burned through me. Clear to me, anyway. But how does it find its shapes through me? I am a – conduit, perhaps? An unwitting doorway for Kansabur? How can that be so, and I not know it? Is this why you’ve been sent to find me?”

  Dernhil met his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “To be honest, all I know for sure is that my nightmares stopped once I started looking for you. And I’d rather ride about the wilderness, even with you, than suffer those again.”

  Cadvan laughed. “If you were plagued with dreams like the one I had, I don’t blame you,” he said. “But listen: A great malice, broken into three and three. What does that mean?”

  “Kansabur is divided into many, perhaps?”

  “How is that so? It makes no sense. How can a spirit be split into different parts and yet exist? It makes me fear that I called more evils than Kansabur from the outer Circles…”

  “Perhaps. But think you, Cadvan. Ceredin said this to me: There is part of your being that wanders in your waking life, and it is that I see in the Shadowplains. How can that be so? Yet Ceredin says it is. Are we less whole than we think?”

  Cadvan was silent a long time. At last he said, “I know I am not whole. I think I never will be.”

  Dernhil glanced at him with quick sympathy. “I burn to speak to Nelac,” he said. “Of all the loremasters, he is the one who might be able to solve these riddles.”

  “Aye.” Cadvan drew his cloak closer around him. “I’ve missed him sorely. He can set a lamp in the darkest places. I know that better than anyone.”

  After that conversation, much of the constraint between the two Bards vanished. Dernhil, used to Cadvan’s reserve, was surprised by his confiding in him, and liked him better for it. To his own chagrin, he was also pleased by what Cadvan had said about his poems; he didn’t like to admit it, because it felt petty, but Cadvan’s scorn had hurt him. On his side, Cadvan found that his anger had subsided. To speak of Ceredin with Dernhil had been painful, but it was also a relief.

  Aside from a couple of showery days, the weather remained kind, although the summer was now over. They rode through pretty, if desolate, country. The Lir wound its way through the tumbled landscapes of the Redara, where twisted towers and strange cliffs of weathered stone poked through the forest canopies, sometimes bare white rock, sometimes fringed with grass. The region was loud with birdsong: great flocks of swallows and starlings that nested in the cliffs swept through the sky, beginning their migration south for the winter, as falcons and other hunting birds circled high above them. The Bards followed a track that hugged the river until at last they emerged from the Redara to the grass plains that stretched westwards across Lirhan, all the way to the sea.

  They began to encounter people again. In the past week they hadn’t seen a single soul, but here there were small, isolated villages, or the lonely huts of shepherds, and they could beg a bed of hay in a barn rather than sleeping in the open. From here it was an easier ride to the Fesse of Lirigon, and they made it in a few days. They arrived in the village of Bural, an hour’s ride from the School, on an overcast afternoon, with a rising wind behind them and the smell of rain on the air. Bural was on the other side of the Lirigon Fesse to Cadvan’s home village, and he thought it unlikely that he would be recognized.

  “I won’t be sad to sleep in a proper bed tonight,” said Cadvan, as they stabled their horses at the village inn, which a sign over the door proclaimed was called The Fat Hen. “It looks as if a storm is building. I think we’ve seen the last of summer.” He studied the inn’s front room with approval: it was comfortable and clean, with promising smells wafting in from the kitchen.

  “For my part,” said Dernhil, “I want a meal that isn’t composed of dried meat and pulses. I never want to see a pulse again.”

  Cadvan laughed. “Do you know how long it is since I tasted a loaf of good Lirigon bread?” he said. “Or a trout pie? Or a round of soft cow’s cheese?”

  “I can guess,” said Dernhil.

  “Too long. Much longer than you. Don’t ride off to the School tonight, Dernhil. What hurry is there? I insist that you stay here. Food is best eaten in company.”

  Dernhil smiled, and they both bespoke rooms with the landlord, a stout red-haired man named Stefan, and met in the cosy dining parlour downstairs a couple of hours later, washed and brushed. Cadvan ordered a jug of the crisp Lirigon wine and they had a long discussion with Stefan about their meal. They settled for rabbit in ginger sauce with a dish of peas and saffron, a borage-flower tart and the local cheese.

  “I could wish for clean clothes,” said Cadvan, leaning back in his chair. “But otherwise, I am content.”

  Dernhil had been covertly studying Cadvan with some surprise: he seemed light-hearted, even joyous, as if he had temporarily forgotten everything that weighed him down. Dernhil had never seen this side of him before, and felt for the first time the force of his charm. It had often puzzled him that people he respected liked Cadvan so much, but now he began to understand why.

  Dernhil raised his glass. “I think it’s a cause for some celebration that we made it to Lirigon without a single argument.”

  “Yes. We could have stabbed each other to death out in the lonely wilds. Our bones might have been found years later, scattered by wild animals, an enduring mystery to the passing traveller…”

  The meal arrived, and they ate with relish, pursuing a nonsensical conversation that touched on none of their serious concerns. Afterwards, as the storm that had threatened in the afternoon buffeted the trees outside, they sat together by the hearth and argued passionately about poetry. It was well after midnight when they made their way to their beds.

  Dernhil lay awake for a while, thinking. He had seldom enjoyed an evening more: Cadvan had given his mercurial mind full rein, showing a wit, knowledge and depth of insight that made him a rare companion. Dernhil had travelled with Cadvan for two weeks without seeing a glimpse of this aspect of him. Why not? he thought with a flicker of anger; it would have made their journey so much more enjoyable. He had braced himself for all sorts of thunderclouds from Cadvan when they arrived in Lirigon, the scene of his disgrace, only to find himself confronted with an amusing, charming companion. No wonder his friends so often spoke of him with loving frustration.

  Just before he f
ell asleep, Dernhil wondered if he was beginning to think of Cadvan as a friend. After everything that had happened between them, he thought, that would be odd beyond imagining: no one had caused him more pain. It was Cadvan who had opened the underworld in his mind, awakening shadows he had never suspected lived within him. Ought he to be grateful?

  He would rise early tomorrow, he thought. He needed to see Nelac for his own reasons.

  XI

  THE storm blew out after midnight, bringing in its wake an eerie stillness. In her small chamber at the School of Lirigon, Selmana laid down her pen and slumped back in her chair. She had spent the evening making notes on metallurgy from some obscure scrolls she had found in the Lirigon library. Since Nelac had given her private lessons, she had discovered an unexpected fascination with these writings; although she still struggled to read them, she had begun to wonder if she would write something herself, as Nelac had once suggested she might.

  Tonight that seemed a very distant possibility. She stared dully at her notes: “Wherefore smelting is necessary, for by this means earths, solidified juices and stone are separated from their metals so that they obtain their proper colour and become pure…” The words had ceased to make any sense, she was too tired. She stood up and opened the casement, throwing back the shutters that she had closed earlier against the storm, and leant on the windowsill. The cold air was a balm and she breathed in deeply. It was a moonless night, very black, with a few vagrant stars peeking through the ragged clouds. She lingered for a while, huddling a shawl about her shoulders, and stared blankly over the dark roofs of the School.

  Her first thought was for her mother. She looked east, wondering, as she had every evening for the past fortnight, if her mother was safe. Selmana had returned to Lirigon reluctantly after the ugly incident with the boar, feeling that she ought to stay at the farmhouse in case something else happened. Nelac had said that he thought Berdh was in no more danger than anyone else in the Fesse, which was, when Selmana thought about it, little comfort. He had put wards about the farmhouse, as he had promised, and assured Selmana that it was most unlikely that Kansabur, if it were she, would return to the same place. But Selmana found it was impossible not to worry. She was having trouble sleeping: sometimes she startled awake, her heart pounding, terrified that a malign spirit was outside her window, or reliving the foul sensation as the revenant had tried to possess her. Even the memory made her break out in a sweat.