He would go out to walk in the enveloping dark, to smell the earth, feel the soil, listen to the voice of winter’s wind, taste grapes and moonlit water, lie motionless in a forest tree to watch the night predators at their hunt. And once in a great while, when waylaid or challenged by brigand or mercenary, Baerd would kill. A night predator in his own incarnation, restless and soon gone. Another kind of ghost, a part of him dead with the dead of the River Deisa.
In every corner of the mainland Palm except his own, which was gone, he had done these things for years upon years, feeling the slow turning of the seasons, learning the meaning of night in this forest and that field, by this dark river, or on that mountain ridge, reaching out or back or inward all the time towards a release that was ever and again denied.
He had been here in the highlands many times before on this same Ember Night. He and Alessan went back a long way and had shared a great deal with Alienor of Borso, and there was the other, larger reason why they came south to the mountains at the beginning of every second year. He thought of the news from the west. From home. He remembered the look on Alessan’s face reading Danoleon’s letter and his heart misgave him. But that was for tomorrow, and more Alessan’s burden than his own, however much he might want—as he always wanted—to ease or share the weight.
Tonight was his own, and it called to him. Alone in the darkness, but hand in hand with a dream of Dianora, he walked away from the castle. Always before he had gone west and then south from Borso, curving his way into the hills themselves below the Braccio Pass. Tonight, for no reason he knew, his footsteps led him the other way, southeast. They carried him along the road to the edge of the village that lay beneath the castle walls and there, as he passed a house with an unexpectedly open door, Baerd saw a fair-haired woman standing in the moonlight as if she had been waiting for him and he stopped.
Sitting at the table, resisting the temptation to count their numbers one more time, trying to appear as if all were as normal as it could be on this night of war, Mattio heard Elena call his name and then Donar’s from outside the house. Her voice was soft, as it always was, but his senses were pitched towards her, as they had been for years. Even before poor Verzar had died.
He glanced across the table at Donar, but the older man was already reaching for his crutches and rising to swing on his one leg towards the door. Mattio followed. A number of the others looked over at them, edgy and apprehensive. Mattio forced himself to smile reassuringly. Carenna caught his eye and began speaking soothingly to a few of the more visibly nervous people.
Not at all easy himself, Mattio stepped outside with Donar and saw that someone had come. A dark-haired man, neatly bearded and of middle height, stood motionless before Elena, glancing from her to the two of them, not speaking. He had a sword slung in a scabbard on his back in the Tregean fashion.
Mattio looked over at Donar whose face was quite impassive. For all his experience of Ember Night wars and of Donar’s gift he could not repress a shiver.
‘Someone may come,’ their one-legged leader had said yester-eve. And now someone was indeed here in the moonlight in the very hour before battle. Mattio looked over at Elena; her eyes had not left the stranger. She was standing very straight, slender and motionless, hands holding her elbows, hiding fear and wonder as best she could. But Mattio had spent years watching her, and he could see that her breathing was shallow and fast. He loved her for her stillness, and for wanting to hide her fear.
He glanced at Donar again, and then stepped forward, extending two open palms to the stranger. Calmly he said, ‘Be welcome, though it is not a night to be abroad.’
The other man nodded. His feet were planted wide and solid on the earth. He looked as though he knew how to use his sword. He said, ‘Nor, as I understand the highlands, is it a night to have doors and windows open.’
‘Why would you think you understand the highlands?’ Mattio said. Too quickly. Elena still had not looked away from this man. There was an odd expression on her face.
Moving a little nearer to stand beside her, Mattio realized that he had seen this man before. This was one who had come several times to the Lady’s castle. A musician, he seemed to remember, or a merchant of some sort. One of those landless men who endlessly crossed and recrossed the roads of the Palm. His heart, which had lifted to see the sword, sank a little.
The stranger had not responded to his sharp retort. He appeared, as much as the moonlight revealed, to be giving the matter thought. Then he surprised Mattio.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If I am trespassing upon a custom in ignorance, forgive me. I walk for reasons of my own. I will leave you to your peace.’
He actually turned away then, clearly intending to leave.
‘No!’ Elena said urgently.
And in the same moment Donar spoke for the first time. ‘There is no peace tonight,’ he said in the deep voice they all trusted so much. ‘And you are not trespassing. I thought someone might come along this road. Elena was watching for you.’
And at that the stranger turned. His eyes seemed wider in the dark, and something new, cooler, more appraising, gleamed in them now.
‘Come for what?’ he asked.
There was a silence. Donar shifted his crutches and swung forward. Elena moved to one side to let him stand in front of the stranger. Mattio looked across at her; her hair was falling over one shoulder, white-gold in the moonlight. She never took her eyes from the dark-haired man.
Who was gazing steadily at Donar. ‘Come for what?’ he repeated, mildly enough.
Still Donar hesitated, and in that moment Mattio realized with a shock that the miller, their Elder, was afraid. A sickening lurch of apprehension rose in Mattio, for he suddenly understood what Donar was about to do.
And then Donar did it. He gave them away to one from the north.
‘We are the Night Walkers of Certando,’ he said, his voice steady and deep. ‘And this is the first of the Ember Nights of spring. This is our night. I must ask you: wherever you were born, was there a mark … did the birth-women who attended declare a blessing found?’ And slowly he reached a hand inside his shirt and drew forth the leather sac he wore there, holding the caul that had marked him at his birth.
Out of the side of his eye Mattio saw Elena biting her lower lip. He looked at the stranger, watched him absorb what Donar had said, and he began gauging his chances of killing the man if it should come to that.
This time the silence stretched. The muted sounds from the house behind them seemed loud. The dark-haired man’s eyes had grown wide now, and his head was lifted high. Mattio could see that he was weighing what lay behind what had just been revealed.
Then, still not speaking, the stranger moved one hand to his throat and reaching inside his shirt he brought out, so that the three of them could see, by starlight and moonlight, the small leather sac he too wore.
Mattio heard a small sound, a release of breath, and realized belatedly that he had made it himself.
‘Earth be praised!’ Elena murmured, unable to stop herself. She had closed her eyes.
‘Earth, and all that springs from it and returns,’ Donar added. His voice, amazingly, trembled.
They left it for Mattio to finish. ‘Returns, to spring forth again in the cycle that has no end,’ he said, looking at the stranger, at the sac he bore, almost identical to Mattio’s own, to Elena’s, to Donar’s, to the one they all carried, every one of them.
It was with the words of invocation spoken in sequence by the three of them that Baerd finally understood what he had stumbled upon.
Two hundred years ago, in a time of seemingly unending plagues, a time of harvest failures, of violence and blood, the Carlozzini heresy had taken root here in the south. And from the highlands it had begun to spread throughout the Palm, gaining momentum and adherents with frightening speed. And against Carlozzi’s central teaching: that the Triad were younger deities, subject to and agents of an older, darker set of powers, the priesthood of
the Palm had grimly and in concert set their hands.
Faced with such rare and absolute unity among the clergy, and caught up in the panic of a decade of plague and starvation, the Dukes and Grand Dukes and even Valcanti, Prince of Tigana, had seen themselves as having no choice. The Carlozzini had been hunted down and tried and executed all across the peninsula, by whatever means executions were conducted in each province in that time.
A time of violence and blood. Two hundred years ago.
And now he was standing here showing the leather that held the caul of his birth, and speaking to three who had just declared themselves to be Carlozzini.
And more. Night Walkers, the one-legged old man had said. The vanguard, the secret army of the sect. Chosen in some way that no one knew. But now he did know, they had shown him. It occurred to him that he might be in danger now, having been granted this knowledge, and indeed, the bigger, bearded man seemed to be holding himself carefully, as if prepared for violence.
The woman who had stood watch was weeping though. She was very beautiful, though not in the way of Alienor, whose every movement, every spoken word might hint at a feline undercurrent of danger. This woman was too young, too shy, he could not make himself believe in a threat from her. Not weeping as she was. And all three of them had spoken words of thanks, of praise. His instincts were on guard, but not in a way that warned of immediate danger. Deliberately Baerd forced his muscles to relax. He said, ‘What have you to tell me, then?’
Elena wiped the tears from her face. She looked at the stranger again, absorbing his square, neat, quiet solidity, his reality, the improbable fact that he was here. She swallowed with difficulty, painfully aware of the racing of her heart, trying to move past the moment when she had seen this man emerge from night and shadow to stand before her. And then the long interval when they had faced each other in the moonlight before she had impulsively reached out to touch his hand, to be sure that he was real. And had only then called for Mattio and Donar. Something odd seemed to be happening to her. She made herself concentrate on what Donar was saying.
‘What I tell you now gives you power of life and death over a great many people,’ he said softly. ‘For the priesthood still want us destroyed and the Tyrant in Astibar will bide by what the clergy say in such things. I think you know this.’
‘I know this,’ the dark-haired one echoed, equally quietly. ‘Will you say why you are confiding in me?’
‘Because tonight is a night of battle,’ Donar said. ‘Tonight I lead the Night Walkers into war, and yesterday at sunset I fell into a sleep and dreamt of a stranger coming to us. I have learned to trust my dreams, though not to know when they will come.’
Elena saw the stranger nod, calm, unruffled, acknowledging this as easily as he had acknowledged her presence in the road. She saw that his arms were ridged with muscle under his shirt, and that he held himself as a man who had known fighting in his days. There seemed to be a sadness in his face, but it was really too dark to tell so much, and she chided herself for letting her imagination run free at such a time.
On the other hand, he was abroad and alone on an Ember Night. Men without griefs of their own would never do such a thing, she was certain. She wondered where he was from. She was afraid to ask.
‘You are the leader then, of this company?’ he said to Donar.
‘He is,’ Mattio cut in sharply. ‘And you would do well not to dwell upon his infirmity.’
From the defiance of his tone it was clear he had misinterpreted the question. Elena knew how protective he was of Donar; it was one of the things she most respected in him. But this was too huge, too important a moment for misunderstandings. She turned to him and shook her head urgently.
‘Mattio!’ she began, but Donar had already laid a hand on the blacksmith’s arm, and in that moment the stranger smiled for the first time.
‘You leap at a slight that is not meant,’ he said. ‘I have known others, as badly injured or worse, who led armies and governed men. I seek only to find my bearings. It is darker here for me than it is for you.’
Mattio opened his mouth and then closed it. He made a small, awkward gesture of apology with his shoulders and hands. It was Donar who replied.
‘I am Elder of the Walkers, yes,’ he said. ‘And so mine, with Mattio’s aid, is leadership in battle. But you must know that the war we are to fight tonight is not like any battle you might know. When we come out again from this house it will be under a different sky entirely than the one above us now. And under that sky, in that changeling world of ghosts and shadows, few of us will appear as we do here.’
The dark-haired man shifted uneasily for the first time. He glanced downward, almost reluctantly, to look at Donar’s hands.
Donar smiled, and held out his left hand, five fingers spread wide.
‘I am not a wizard,’ he said softly. ‘There is magic here, yes, but we step into it and are marked for it, we do not shape it. This is not wizardry.’
The stranger nodded at length. Then said, with careful courtesy, ‘I can see that. I do not understand it, but I can only assume you are telling me these things to a purpose. Will it please you now to tell me what that is?’
And so Donar said then, finally, ‘Because we would ask aid of you in our battle tonight.’
In the silence that followed, Mattio spoke, and Elena had an idea how much pride he swallowed in saying: ‘We have need. Very great need.’
‘Who do you fight?’ the other man said.
‘We call them the Others,’ Elena said herself, as neither Donar or Mattio spoke. ‘They come to us year by year. Generation after generation.’
‘They come to ruin the fields and blight the seedlings and the harvest,’ Donar said. ‘For two hundred years the Night Walkers of Certando would battle them on this Ember Night, and for all this time we were able to hold them in check as they come upon us from the west.’
Mattio said, ‘For almost twenty years now, though, it has grown worse and worse for us. And on the last three Ember Nights we have been very badly beaten. Many of us have died. And Certando’s droughts have grown worse; you will know about that, and about the plagues here. They have—’
But the stranger had flung up a hand suddenly, a sharp, unexpected gesture.
‘Almost twenty years? And from the west?’ he said harshly. He came a step nearer and turned to Donar. ‘The Tyrants came almost twenty years ago. And Brandin of Ygrath landed in the west.’
Donar’s gaze was steady as he leaned on his crutches looking at the other man. ‘This is true,’ he said, ‘and it is a thought that has occurred to some of us, but I do not think it signifies. Our battles on this night each year go far beyond the daily concerns of who governs in the Palm in a given generation, and how they govern, and from where they come.’
‘But still—’ the stranger began.
‘But still,’ Donar said, nodding his head, ‘there are mysteries to this that are beyond my power to grasp. If you discern a pattern that I do not … who am I to question or deny that it might be true?’
He reached up to his neck and touched the leather sack. ‘You carry the mark we all bear, and I dreamt your presence here tonight. Notwithstanding that, we have no claim upon you, none at all, and I must tell you that death will be there to meet us in the fields when the Others come. But I can also tell you that our need goes beyond these fields, beyond Certando, and even, I think, beyond this Peninsula of the Palm. Will you fight with us tonight?’
The stranger was silent a long time. He turned away and looked upwards then, at the thin moon and the stars, but Elena had a sense that his truer vision was inwards, that he was not really looking up at the lights.
‘Please?’ she heard herself say. ‘Will you please?’
He made no sign that he had even heard her. When he turned back it was to look at Donar once more.
He said, ‘I understand little of this. I have my own battles to fight, and people to whom I owe a sworn allegiance, but I hear no evil
in you, and no untruth, and I would see for myself the shape these Others take. If you dreamt my coming here I will let myself be guided by your dream.’
And then, as her eyes began brimming with tears again, Elena saw him turn to her. ‘Yes, I will,’ he said levelly, not smiling, his dark eyes grave. ‘I will fight with you tonight. My name is Baerd.’
And so it seemed that he had heard her, after all.
Elena mastered her tears, standing as straight as she could. There was a tumult, a terrible chaos, rising within her though, and in the midst of that chaos it seemed to Elena that she heard a sound, as of a single note plucked on her heart. Beyond Donar, Mattio said something but she didn’t hear what it was. She was looking at this stranger, and realizing, as his gaze met her own, that she had been right before, that her instincts had not misled. There was so deep a sadness in him it could not possibly be missed by any man or woman with eyes to see, even in night and shadow.
She looked away, and then closed her eyes tightly for a moment, trying to hold back something of her heart for herself, before it all went seeking in the magic and the strangeness of this night. Oh, Verzar, she thought. Oh, my dead love.
She opened her eyes again and took a careful breath. ‘I am Elena,’ she said. ‘Will you come in and meet the others?’
‘Yes,’ said Mattio gruffly, ‘come in with us, Baerd. Be welcome in my home.’
This time she heard the hurt that came through in his voice, though he tried to mask it. She winced inwardly at that sound, caring for him, for his strength and his generosity, hating so much to give sorrow. But this was an Ember Night and the tides of the heart could scarcely be ruled even by the light of day.
Besides, she had a very grave doubt, already, as the four of them turned to go into the house, whether there would be any joy for her to find in what had just happened to her. Any joy in this stranger who had come to her out of darkness, in answer to or called by Donar’s dream.
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