The two of them shared bread as the sun set, watching it transform the valley and town below into splendor. They were silent now, though on occasion they had sung together in the late summer nights. Darien enjoyed singing with Hassen—his own voice was a silvery tenor while Hassen’s was deep as an underground river; the two of them harmonized well. Almost as well as Darien and Marlen once had.
They sat and chewed in silence, stretching their legs in the sere grass of the burnt hillside and gazing out into the spreading dark. Tiny points of light were starting to appear from the town below. Darien longed to descend and explore the life there, the color and smells of people. And of course he itched to perform to an adoring crowd, an experience that had been denied them these past weeks. It was torment of a unique sort, forbidding Darien to sing for an audience. Hassen didn’t seem to mind, but to Darien the reaction of people who heard him—their rapt attention, their laughter and even tears—mattered as much as the act itself.
“Maybe no one would recognize us,” he said wistfully.
Hassen shot him a baleful look. “Don’t start. Eirne is a miserable backwater anyway. They’d have no appreciation of your work.”
Darien smiled. “Your estimation of my work is flattering, but I can think of several shamefully crude pieces that they would appreciate very much.”
An hour later, it was fully dark and they were ready to sleep. Hassen seemed pensive. Darien felt a little guilty that the man shared his peril, though it had been his own choice and not at Darien’s urging. At least, not really.
Then Darien squinted and said, “What’s going on down there?”
At the base of the hill where it pooled into a valley and just before the town walls, he could make out the figures of men carrying torches. And something large and black and vertical looming over them like a great tree.
Hassen joined Darien by the edge of the hill. “Looks like they are building a bonfire.”
They looked at each other, at a loss. Just then, the first flames burst upward from the valley. As they watched, bright orange tongues licked the night and caught on what appeared to be a mountainous pile of dry branches. Soon the individual flames had coalesced in a tower of fire. So massive was it that even from their height on the hilltop, Darien and Hassen could hear the simmering hiss of the flames. Darien thought it was as if someone sought to rip the dark of the night apart.
“What are they doing?” Hassen said, worried now.
“Wait,” Darien said. “Listen.” A strange calm had settled over him. And with that, paradoxically, the beginnings of an excitement that he could neither define nor explain. From a distance, he thought he could hear his grandmother telling him a tale. Her voice a whisper now borne upward by the voices that were drifting up toward them from the valley. The rise and fall of a chant, plain and sad and wild. A tune Darien knew well and at the same time had never heard before in his life.
“What is that?” Hassen said in a hushed voice.
Darien listened a moment longer. The tune spun circles now, collected harmonies, and lilted up and down without finding resolution. It had no resolution. Tongues of fire clawed at the sky, shooting sprays of sparks that fell to earth and died.
“If I am not mistaken,” Darien whispered, “it is one of the old rites of our land brought back.”
“Rites?”
Darien wanted to tell Hassen to lower his voice but knew that the impulse stemmed from an irrational awe that had no basis in anything that he himself believed. At least, so he thought. The aching purity of the voices tugged at his heart, but then what else could be expected of him, with the way he felt about music?
“I had thought it a discontinued practice,” said Darien. “Maybe here in the hill country … I don’t know.” He was silent, absorbing the music and the reaching glory of the fire. He looked up at the sky as if expecting a change there, but the stars and quarter moon drifted undisturbed as ever. He said, “At one time it was believed that the fires of midsummer must be … invoked to lay to rest the flames and herald the harvest time. The singing … that is part of the old enchantments. Or so it is said.”
“You don’t believe in any of that, do you?” Hassen said sharply. “What would be the purpose of such enchantments? To allow the summer to pass? It does so every year without our guidance.”
“I know,” said Darien. “Of course you’re right. I can’t explain it. I didn’t think anyone still believed…”
“I’m a fine one to talk, though,” said Hassen. “Setting out to find an enchanted portal but scoffing at enchantments. Ah.” He shook his head. “Darien, sometimes I think I ought to have been a lawyer like my father.”
Darien laughed and rose to his feet. “Perhaps. It would have been less complicated, but think of the fun you’d have missed.” He could not take his eyes off the fire in the valley. “I must see who’s down there. If anything, just to hear the music better.”
“Darien,” Hassen said, and Darien felt he could hear if not see his eyebrows drawing together in disapproval.
Darien lifted a hand. “No one will know who I am. You yourself said this place is a backwater. They’ve probably never even heard of me, if that’s possible.” He grinned.
“Well, I’m coming with you then,” said Hassen. “In case it turns out that sacrificing the first person to approach them to the flames is another tidbit of these old rites.”
“Actually, I think that sounds familiar,” Darien said, and laughed when he saw Hassen shake his head in the moonlight.
The singing grew louder as they made their way down the hillside, and Darien began to see the figures of men outlined in the glow of the bonfire. There were fifteen, twenty men in all; it was hard to gauge in the uncertain light. Despite their number, each man stood with a distance of several paces around him, his long shadow unbroken by the shadow of another, as if each man sang alone. But their intertwining harmonies gave the lie to that impression: this had clearly been rehearsed. And as he and Hassen drew near, the truth dawned on Darien, and how obvious it had been all along. These men were trained in music. Academy-trained, in fact.
And now that he knew this, it grew stranger still. For what did Academy-trained poets have to do with rites in a grassy valley by night? Darien had been expecting villagers. Not his own kind.
None turned at their approach. Their song rippled unbroken into the night, blending with the hiss and murmur of the flames. Now that they were close, Darien could feel the heat on his face, and the fire seemed impossibly high.
He had an idea. Darien waited for his moment and when it came, began to sing. His voice blended seamlessly with the other voices, a new harmony that added a layer to the whole, yet could have been there all along. Hassen nudged him with a nervous grunt, but Darien shook his head and continued to sing. Now the other singers were turning to look at him curiously, surely guessing that he was one of their own. None intervened. They let him sing, and Darien felt strangely peaceful here among his own, singing a tune he didn’t know for a purpose that eluded him. Perhaps there was no purpose, and these men simply wished to honor midsummer in the old way.
At last it was done, and the song allowed to fade into silence. One of the men stepped forward to feed more wood to the flames. A shower of sparks forced the men who stood nearer the flames to step back. Darien had had a chance to look around as he was singing, and he noticed that most of these men appeared to be well into their middle years, which explained why he recognized none of them. Men his own age or a bit younger, he would have been more likely to know.
One of the poets approached Darien and Hassen, a tall man with a shock of unruly dark hair and stubbled cheeks. His clothing was the worse for wear, but the harp at his side and the gold ring on his right hand confirmed Darien’s guess. When he spoke, his voice was almost as deep as Hassen’s own. “Who are you?”
“Poets like yourself,” Darien answered. “We couldn’t resist joining you when we heard the music.”
The other man’s face rem
ained impassive. “Where then are your rings?”
Hassen tugged at Darien’s arm. “It matters not if you believe us,” he said. “We have nothing to prove. We were only passing by and shall be on our way.”
“Hold on,” said Darien, shaking off his friend’s arm. He parted the neckline of his tunic and lifted the ring that hung there for the man to see. “The ring,” he said. “It is an uncertain road we take, and so prefer to wear them thus. A precaution.”
“The road of every poet is uncertain,” said the other man dismissively, and from the poets surrounding him there was a general murmur of agreement.
“Be that as it may,” Darien persisted, “why do you do this now? I had thought it was a ceremony long dead.”
“Not dead,” said the dark-haired man. “Only forgotten. Like so many things that should not have been forgotten. Haven’t you heard?”
Darien was taken aback by the abruptness of that. “Heard?”
“We are doing what needs to be done to recover the enchantments that were lost and reach the Path,” said the man.
Darien tried not to gape, letting Hassen ask, “The Path?”
“The Path to the Otherworld, once found by Edrien Letrell,” said the man patiently. Firelight glinted in his eyes, and Darien could see there were streaks of silver in his hair. “Can it be that you have not heard? We are Seekers. We follow Darien Aldemoor.”
* * *
IT had been so simple. The poet was not of the disposition to withstand pain for any length of time, and the information Marlen Humbreleigh wanted had slid out of him like oil. Still, Marlen had not been able to resist battering the man as he lay on the tiled floor of Marlen’s front room. The cries made it worse; they were like an intoxicant. For days, Marlen had felt a rage building in him that he’d had to suppress as he groveled and glided from one artificial blandishment to another. And all that rage had now found its focus. Darien, he thought as his fist made contact yet again. Leander screamed. Always the lucky one. Even now.
By this time the words Marlen had wanted had long since left Leander’s lips. He shouted them again from where he lay, broken and bleeding, as if perhaps Marlen hadn’t heard them the first time. “Kimbralin Amaristoth!”
A rush of disgust had overtaken Marlen, and that, too, he turned outward as he took rough hold of the man and threw him out on the street. It was done.
The implications of these new facts had only begun to filter into his mind, so clouded was it in a red haze of fury and gratification. Amaristoth. Her brother was here in the city. He had glimpsed Rayen at the fair. He would no doubt be happy to hear that his sister was alive and, though ugly as ever, quite well. And only a few weeks’ journey ahead of him by foot.
Marlen rubbed his fist, which ached. There was blood on the heretofore pristine tiles of his floor. Moans outside … Leander, lying there, or a passing animal? He didn’t want to know.
When at last he stepped outside the house, the poet was gone. It was very late, and the moon rode high. A quiet night, not another soul stirring abroad that he could see. There was only him, and the shadow that dogged his steps, and the moon overhead.
He knew the way as if it were to the place where he was born, or as if sinews in his body had been stretched along this path and he only followed them back now, to reclaim what was his. He heard the call of a nightbird from a tree, and a second cry out in answer. There was a world beyond his just out of reach, a night world of gleam-eyed cats and the rustle of dark wings, of shadows that stirred under the moon. He was among them now.
When he knocked at the door, she opened it immediately, her eyes coolly surveying him as if he had been expected all along. Her hair hung in a thick black rope down her back, leaving bare the lines of her fragile face. “So it’s you,” she said.
Marlen grabbed her upper arms. He tightened his fingers until he could almost feel bone. “I need you,” he said. “I’ll never leave you again.”
Marilla smiled up at him. “Come in,” she said, and touched his cheek. When she drew back her hand, Marlen was shocked and sickened to see that red stained her finger where she had touched him. She examined it, smiling widely. “You have been busy tonight,” she said, and sucked the finger, lingering at it with her eyes on his. Marlen felt his mouth go dry. It had been a long time.
She shrugged off his grip as if it were nothing and pulled him inside. “So very busy,” she said, smiling again. “But I hope you’ve saved some for me.”
* * *
THAT night Darien could not seem to fall asleep. Long after Hassen’s audible breaths indicated that he was in the realm of dreams, Darien was still staring up into a sky aswirl with constellations. The Rider, the Longship, the Great Tree: quiet glitter amid the scattered clouds. Darien clasped his hands beneath his head to cushion it. After a bone-wearying day of tramping the hills in the burning sun, there was no reason he should be wakeful now. Except.
The fire, the group chanting, and its aftermath had opened a well of dread within him. Or perhaps dread was the wrong word. Unease. We follow Darien Aldemoor, Algur had said. The poet who had told them who the Seekers were and what they sought to do. A whole movement inexorably rippling throughout Darien’s own community, and he unaware of it until tonight. And it was him they claimed to be following!
“How do you follow Darien?” Darien had asked Algur cautiously, as the other poets stood in silence all around them. They seemed to answer to Algur, as if he were their leader. It made sense: he was an imposing man, and handsome, with a voice that sounded as if it could drive deep to the core of the earth. “Do you know where he is?”
Algur shook his head. “Darien Aldemoor was ever known as wily and clever, as Edrien Letrell was in his day. That he is journeying to the mountains is certain, but that is all.”
“How then do you follow him?” Hassen said. Darien didn’t need to look at him to see that he was as disturbed by this turn of events as himself was.
Algur drew back a little, as if this was a private matter for him, and in the firelight his face was angled black. “We seek what it is he seeks, and in reviving the ancient enchantments we hope to find it. All across Eivar, fires like this one burn tonight. The Seekers are abroad.”
By now it was obvious that Darien could not reveal his identity to this man. He wasn’t sure what Algur would do—idolize him, abduct him, or both. “It is a worthy quest,” he said. “Alas, my companion and I are not made for such lofty ideals.” He was careful to keep his voice devoid of irony. “We shall leave you to your quest, and wish you much luck.”
Algur had nodded and turned away with brusque indifference. Darien and Hassen had silently departed, with Darien turning only once to look back at the flames. The surrounding men were staring into the fire they had built as if a tale or a prophecy were painted there, but Darien saw only a riot of color and light and felt the crushing heat on his skin.
And now, trying to sleep, he recalled that fire and the impassioned spirits around it, even now keeping vigil over the remaining flames at the base of this hill where he lay. The singing … he could still hear it, as if that fretwork of voices was a solid thing that hung now in the night air with nowhere to go. Voices, weaving in and out, just beyond the edge of the Otherworld they so desperately sought to reach.
The very edge.
He was in the Academy again, in a corridor very like the ones he had spent so much of his youth traversing as he made his way from one lesson to another. Only then, he had always been trailed by a posse of friends and admirers, their laughter and talk the rhythm by which he lived his days. Now emptiness ahead and behind, and silence. Many doors that all looked alike, doors that he passed knowing somehow that they were not for him. But which is it, then?
At last he came to a door that although the same as the others, hung partly ajar. A sign, he thought to himself, and pushed the door open the rest of the way. He almost collided with a masked Rianna Gelvan, who stood in a white gown, her hair a drift of gold around her face and down
her back. It made him ache to see her, even in a dream. “My Snow Queen,” he said, and touched her hair.
Her eyes behind the mask seemed full of sorrow. “My love,” she said. “You have to come back.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry, my dear one. Not yet.” He reached to clasp her waist and the sensation was surprisingly real: he could feel the texture of the fabric and, through it, the warmth of her skin. Like no other dream, he thought dazedly, and lifted the white sparkling mask from her face.
And now it was Marilla who smiled back at him, her blue eyes agleam. “A kiss?” she purred.
Darien cursed and pushed her roughly away. She laughed as she fell into the arms of Marlen, who stood in the shadows, where he had been all along. “You never learn,” he said. With his free hand, Marlen held out the white mask to Darien. It looked frail and trivial in his hand. “We have ever created our own dreams,” he said. “This dream is yours.”
This dream is yours. Darien stared at the mask, uncomprehending. Conscious more than anything else of bitter disappointment and the hurt of seeing Marlen again. “I don’t want it,” he said coldly.
Marlen raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”
And Marilla added in a singsong tone, her head tilted back on Marlen’s shoulder, “Queen of ice and snow and dream, do you renounce her now?” She laughed again.
Darien turned and slammed the door shut, cutting off the laugh. No one followed. Silence reigned once again in the corridor.
He walked faster now, wishing the dream at an end and himself awake. Sorrow in his heart like a squeezing sensation in his chest. Rianna’s eyes becoming Marilla’s eyes. His lost love still lost, and by his own doing. But even if he were not being pursued, he could not yet go back. Something drew him, something that he could sense more strongly here than in the waking hours of the day. He had about convinced himself that he had undertaken this journey only for the fame, if not for the satisfaction of thwarting Marlen and amusing himself along the way. But here … Here he heard the voices again of the men who had been singing by the fire that night. The unearthly quality of the melody as it spiraled in the air, which even now seemed to follow him in the corridor. This strange and familiar corridor of his dreams.
Last Song Before Night Page 16