The Shamer's Signet

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “Is the water supposed to do that?” I said, pointing.

  Ivain heard me, and shook his head. “No,” he said. “The water broke through one night, and no matter what they did to repair the dam, it didn’t hold. Some say it’s the ghost’s doin’. In any case, it’s why the mill was abandoned.”

  “The ghost?”

  He nodded. “Auld Anya. If ye stand on the wall there, ye can hear her weep.”

  I didn’t believe him, and it probably showed in my face.

  “Come,” he said. “Callan can hold yer horse. Or… likely ye’re not so steady on yer legs yet. We wouldn’t want ye to get a duckin’.” There was a challenging glint in his gray eyes, and I felt my anger boil in response.

  “I’m fine,” I said, slipping off Falk’s back with as much ease as I could muster.

  The wall was wide, almost like a bridge. One could tell from the worn smoothness of the stones that people had been using it to cross the millstream for ages.

  “Here,” said Ivain, stopping nearly halfway across, “listen.”

  At first all I heard was the rushing of the waters. But then it came.

  “Aaaaaahhhh… aaaaaahhhh.” A drawn-out plaintive moan, a long wet sigh of sorrow.

  “It’s Anya weepin’ for her drowned child,” Ivain murmured very quietly, as if he didn’t want to disturb her grief. “At night ye can see her too, they say.” There was no gleam in his eye now, and I felt chilled all over, because it really did sound like a grieving woman. Below the wall, Laclan men had begun the miserable task of dragging the bottom, and drowned children was the last thing I wanted to think about right then.

  One of the dogs had begun to bark furiously, and there were sudden shouts, not from the men below us, but from the upper pond. Something had been found. I forgot all about ghosts and hurried back to the bank.

  “What is it?” I asked Callan, even though he could hardly know better than I. He grunted noncommittally and got a lanky Laclan boy to hold both our horses.

  “Let’s go look,” he said.

  At first all you could see was something green and shapeless below the surface, caught between the roots of a large willow. Ivain tied a rope around his waist and clambered down the steep bank to fish it out.

  “It’s a cloak,” he said, holding it out to us.

  It hung there in his hand, moss green and sodden, looking strangely abandoned without the one who usually wore it. Like a body without a soul. I had to try twice before the words would come.

  “It’s Dina’s,” I finally managed to say.

  DINA

  The Ghost Country

  My head was full of dark water.

  It made no sense, but that was how it felt. Every time I moved, it sloshed and eddied, making me seasick. My thoughts drifted aimlessly like a dry leaf caught in a whirling current.

  At some point someone tried to give me a drink of water, but it wouldn’t stay in my mouth, it ran out the side and trickled down my cheek. I didn’t do it on purpose—despite the watery feeling in my head, I felt thirsty and would have been grateful for the drink—but I seemed to have forgotten how to swallow.

  “You haven’t given her too much, have you?” someone said.

  “If we are to hold this one, it’s not enough just to tie her up, like we did with the boy.”

  “So you say. But if the brat dies on us, the Dragon won’t be happy. Nor will Valdracu.”

  “I know what I’m doing. You mind your own business.”

  The voices went away, and for a while I drifted in lazy circles, round and round. If I could lie quite still, I thought, the seasick feeling might not be so bad. But it was hard to stay still. Whatever I was lying on was moving, tossing me from side to side. It was so unpleasant that I just wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  And then a strange thing happened.

  One moment I was being rocked and shaken and tossed about, getting more and more seasick. The next, I really was somewhere else. I drifted upward and floated away, as if I weighed nothing at all, like I was a wisp of cloud and not a girl with a solid, warm body and “both feet on the ground,” as my mother used to say.

  I certainly didn’t have both feet on the ground right now. Below me, so distant that they looked like dolls instead of people, some men were riding along beside two covered wagons. They were headed toward a narrow mountain pass, along a trail that cut like a streak of yellow ocher through the darkness of the heather and the gray rock of the slopes. Being so small, they looked funny, but I quickly tired of watching them. It was much more interesting that I had suddenly learned how to fly. Or float. Flying, I supposed, required more than just hanging there in the air.

  Whusssh. Two ravens streaked by, close enough for one black wing to touch… no, it didn’t touch. There was nothing to touch. The wing sliced right through my hand as if it wasn’t even there. What had happened to me? I stared at my hand. It looked perfectly normal, five fingers, five nails, and so on… except that there was a strange bright edge to it, a weird kind of glowing.

  I began to get scared. Down there on the ground, the men and the wagons were getting smaller and smaller. I was rising—slowly, perhaps, but steadily upward all the time, and this couldn’t possibly be healthy. I wasn’t meant to hover among the clouds like a falcon or an eagle. I tried to flap my arms as if they were wings, but that did no good whatsoever. Then I tried a few swimming strokes, although of course air and water weren’t the same thing. Nothing helped. I just kept rising.

  This was no longer interesting or exciting. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be home. Home with Mama.

  It was as if someone had hooked me on a string and was pulling it. The wagons and the mountain pass disappeared. The blue sky disappeared. For one long, endless moment everything, every color, every sound, disappeared into a shining gray mist. Then there was suddenly a window. A window, a bed, and a voice I knew.

  “Thank you, Rose. That’s just what I need.”

  Mama.

  I was exactly where I had wanted to be, and I was so happy and relieved that I almost forgot how I came to be there. I stood between the bed and the window, watching Mama. She was still very pale, but she was sitting up, and she was able to hold the bowl of broth that Rose had brought her.

  “Mama,” I said quietly, so as not to startle her.

  She didn’t hear me. She sipped her soup and didn’t even look my way.

  “Mama!” I tried again, somewhat louder.

  “Do you want me to open the window for a bit?” asked Rose. “It’s such a lovely warm day.”

  “Please,” said Mama, still not showing any signs of having heard me. And Rose walked toward the window, toward the window and me. Through me. Like I wasn’t there. It was worse than the raven’s wing. Much worse.

  “Mama!” I screamed, and without thinking I used the Shamer’s voice, because that was what you did when you wanted people to listen.

  The bowl dropped from my mother’s hand, and hot soup spilled across the bedclothes.

  “Dina,” she whispered, looking uncertainly toward the window, but not quite at me. With a startled exclamation, Rose fell to one knee by the bedside, dabbing at the soup stain with her apron and murmuring apologies and frightened questions.

  “I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry, I should have held the bowl for you. Do you have a fever?”

  Mama paid her no attention. She was still staring at the window and me.

  “Dina,” she said sharply. “Turn around. Go back. What you are doing is dangerous. You can die from it.”

  “Mama.”

  “No! Turn back. Now!”

  She used the Shamer’s voice too, and she was much better at it than I was. Mama and Rose, the bedroom, and the soup-stained quilt all disappeared with a jerk, and I was once more whirled back into the shining gray mists. “Turn back,” she had said, but I didn’t know the way. The mist was everywhere, above me and below, and gradually inside me as well; dense and cold it went right through me and m
ade it harder and harder to think. I couldn’t see anything, but there were sounds, this time. I heard voices, faint like distant echoes, and I clung to the sound because there was nothing else. The voices were calling, searching. And one of them was searching for me.

  “Dina…” It was so distant that I could barely hear it, but it tugged at me like the longing for home had done before Mama forced me to go back.

  “Dina!”

  It was Davin. And he wasn’t whispering. He was shouting at the top of his lungs. He was crouched over Falk’s neck although anybody could see that he belonged in bed, and his poor battered face was completely desperate and wet from tears. He forced Falk to trot along the millstream bank and paid no attention to our gelding’s snorting attempts to shy away from the frothing, roaring water.

  “Dina!” Again and again he called.

  “Davin!” shouted Callan, close on his heels. “Halt. Stop it.” Callan urged his robust bay gelding alongside Falk and seized the reins. “Stop it, lad!”

  “Let go,” Davin hissed, beside himself, and tried to jerk his reins from Callan’s grasp. But Callan wouldn’t yield.

  “Lad… it’s no good. She’s gone. It’s an evil thing, but there’s no help for it. Chargin’ along just askin’ for a fall—what good will it do? Is it not bad enough that we must tell yer mother that… that Dina has drowned? Come home now, lad. At least she’ll have you.”

  Drowned? Had I drowned? Was that why my head was full of dark water? Was that why people could walk right through me, as if I were a ghost?

  “You go home,” said Davin wildly and bitterly. “I’m not going back.”

  “Have ye lost yer wits, lad? D’ye think I can come home without ye?”

  “Do you think I can go home and face my mother now? I can’t, Callan.”

  Hesitantly, Callan let go of Falk’s reins.

  “What will ye do?” he asked.

  “Search. Hope. As long as they haven’t found… haven’t found a body, Callan, I have to believe she’s still alive.” But although he was trying to sound hopeful, there was a toneless, dispirited ring to his voice. He looked so miserable that I felt like hugging him.

  “Davin.” I wasn’t sure he’d be able to hear me. Maybe only Shamers could, and contrary to me, he had inherited no hint of my mother’s gift. But he started and looked about him wildly.

  “Dina?”

  I wanted to tell him that I didn’t think I had drowned. That he shouldn’t despair so. But something seized me by the arm and I was jerked back into the shining gray mist. And this time, I wasn’t alone.

  “Riana! I found you. I found you!”

  A gaunt woman was clutching my arm with cold fingers. “Where have ye been, sweetheart? Mama has looked so hard for you!” She drew me into an embrace that felt as cold as her fingers. “Wicked child, to scare me so!”

  She was not just cold. She was wet too. Sodden with water, as if she had just risen from the Mill Pond. Suddenly, Tavis’s story came back to me: She’s lookin’ for her drowned child. Auld Anya. Tavis’s great-great-grandmother, who had drowned herself so many, many years ago.

  “Let go,” I pleaded, struggling to escape her wet embrace. “I’m not your little girl!”

  “Wicked child,” she said, clutching me still more firmly. “Wicked child, I told ye to stay in the garden. I told ye!”

  “Let go of me. Let go.”

  “No. This time I’ll not let ye go. This time ye’ll stay right here with me!”

  “If I have to stay here, I’ll die!”

  “No. Mama will take care of ye. Mama will take such good care of her little girl.” She began kissing my cheek and throat, kisses cold and wet like toad’s skin.

  “Let me go. I’m not your child!”

  She released me as abruptly as if I had chopped off her arms. Her hungry, searching eyes met mine. And, like the living, she too looked away.

  “I did not mean to,” she moaned. “I was only gone for a minute! How was I to know she could climb the fence on her own. I could not know that!”

  Her hair was as soaking wet as the rest of her. It stuck to her face in dark streaks. She wrapped her wet gray shawl more closely around her shoulders, as if she herself could feel how cold she was. Around her, the mist was less dense. I could see the waterwheel behind her, and the slumping outline of the mill.

  “Riana,” she whispered. “I want my Riana back.” And she moaned so plaintively that it cut me right to the soul.

  “Riana is dead,” I told her as gently as I could. “And so are you. You must stop searching.”

  She raised her head, and her eyes gleamed with rage.

  “I want my Riana! What did ye do to her? Where is she?”

  She snatched at me with skinny fingers and would have seized me again, but I threw myself backward and wished myself far away—far, far away. I whirled through the fogs of the gray ghost country and closed my ears to all the calling voices. For a moment, I hung once again in the blue air above the mountain pass, with the wagons and the men below me. This time I didn’t try to flap my arms. I just closed my eyes and willed myself down, down to the wagons, back to my place in the normal, living world, with a body that weighed something, a living body that other living people could see.

  “Come on, girl! Wake up. Sandor, get me that water, damn you!”

  No more water, I thought, I never want to be wet again! But nobody paid any attention to what I wanted. A cold wet cloth was placed on my forehead, and somebody was patting my cheeks in the most irritating way, so hard that it felt like he was hitting me.

  “‘Trust me, Lord. I know what I’m doing!’ Wasn’t that what you said, Sandor? I remember it quite distinctly. If the brat dies, you may have the privilege of explaining it to the Dragon!”

  “It’s just witch weed, Lord. Nobody dies from witch weed! It was Herself as gave it to me.”

  “For the mother, fool. Not the girl.”

  “Pardon, Lord, but it was for the mother and the girl. We were told to be just as careful with the brat.”

  I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to go back to the ghost country to wander searching through the mists, cold and restless like Auld Anya.

  “Stop hitting me,” I mumbled. My head hurt quite badly enough. Like one huge toothache.

  The slaps stopped, and I slowly opened my eyes. The face of the false Ivain hovered over me, and I gradually realized that he was crouched next to me, a wet rag in one hand. I was no longer lying in the wagon, but on some stiff yellow grass. I wrinkled my nose; there was a smell of vomit, and I was afraid that it came from me.

  The false Ivain straightened and looked at somebody standing behind me.

  “It’s your lucky day, Sandor,” he said. “It seems she has decided to live after all.”

  Shortly after that, we went on. I lay in one wagon, still feeling weak and unwell, but at least this time they’d given me something to cushion the jolts—two heavy cloaks bordered in black and blue. The colors of the Skaya clan, I thought. Where had they got those? For the first time I was able to pay some attention to my surroundings. The wagon was loaded with thick bundles of cloth, some Skaya-colored, others in the green-and-white of the Kensies. Next to the bundles was a long wooden box that I kept bumping into whenever the wagon wheel hit a rock or a bump in the road. I eased the lid open and looked inside. Straw. A boxful of straw? Not very likely. Fumbling in the straw, my fingers touched something cold and sharp. It wasn’t something I was used to holding, but I recognized the shape. Swords. The box was full of swords.

  I let the lid drop. Clan cloaks and swords. Where was the false Ivain going with such a load?

  DAVIN

  Fault

  For three days we searched, from daybreak till it became too dark to see. Except for Dina’s cloak we found no trace of either child, alive or dead.

  “We have to go tell yer mother,” Callan said on the fourth day. “She has to know.”

  I didn’t want to; nor did Callan, judging from his
expression.

  “I heard her voice, Callan.”

  “Aye. So ye say.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  Callan moved his shoulders uneasily. “Aye. There’s more than most folks ken of this world and the one beyond.”

  He was thinking of ghosts, I knew. “She wasn’t dead,” I said. “I don’t think she was dead.”

  Callan looked down at his hands. “That’s as may be. But lad… folks rarely hear the voices of the livin’ in that fashion.” He tightened the laces of his pack and swung it across his shoulder. “Well? Are ye comin’?”

  “I suppose so.” What else could I do? It was as Callan said: Mama had to be told.

  Callan went down to get the horses ready. I called on Helena Laclan to bid her good-bye and to thank her for the Laclans’ long searching. They had spared no effort. That they had also been looking for a Laclan child made no difference. I might not be a Highlander, and the Tonerre family was not a clan, but still I knew that Tonerre owed Laclan something now.

  As I came down to the courtyard, I saw a woman in a black shawl, standing by the Ring of Iron. She was staring at me, rigid and unmoving as a pillar, so that I became uneasy and tried to hurry past her. But she stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop.

  “Tonerre.” Her voice was iron hard, and her eyes as gray and cold as Ivain’s had ever been.

  “Medama?” I said in my politest tone.

  “Are ye happy now?”

  “Happy? Medama, I don’t—”

  “Ye came to take a life,” she said in a voice that raised chills down my back. “And when ye could not have Ivain’s, you and yer witchy sister led my Tavis to his death.”

  I stood there, openmouthed, and could think of no way to answer her. How could she think I… that Dina…