In that moment Ned thought he might cry, too. “All this time, this was worrying you?”
Rianna choked a laugh. “Worrying me?” she said. “I thought, if a child of his was inside me, I might need to use the knife on myself.”
“I am glad that won’t be necessary,” said Ned.
She laughed again, more merrily this time. “Ned,” she said. “Will you wet a rag for me in the stream? I would like to clean this up.”
* * *
THE day they reached the village of Korrit it was raining, the skies a haze of unrelieved grey. Wrapped in their cloaks against the weather, they trudged to the village gates through mud. The road was desolate, and as they hurried through the narrow streets—if indeed the dirt paths could be called thus—they met few passersby.
“If not for the shoemaker, I’d have never heard of this place,” said Ned. “And now I understand why.”
They made their way toward the inn. Rianna had begun to shiver violently; when Ned noticed, he motioned that they retreat to the shelter of a large tree.
“Rianna, what’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you cold?”
She shook her head so hard that droplets spat from her hood. “No. I just realized—he could be here now.”
“You’re right,” he said. “We’ll find concealment for you, and then I’ll find out what I can at the inn. Rayen has never met me.”
They decided she would hide in an abandoned shed that was near enough to the inn that if she called out, there was a chance he would hear. She crouched in the shadows as he left and swept the cloak across her face for concealment.
When he returned some time later, she was still there. She jumped to her feet. “Did you find out anything?” Her eyes were focused on his face so intensely that Ned could imagine them burning through him, yet he knew that this had nothing to do with him at all. She would burn through anyone, anything, on the bright lethal beam of her purpose.
“I had a drink with the barkeep.”
She clenched her teeth with impatience. “And?”
Ned drew a breath and let it out again, suddenly reluctant. “Rayen passed through here yesterday.”
“And?” she urged again.
“He was heading north on the road, through the woods and towards an outlying property. I got a description of the place. But there is more.” Ned paused, wondering how best to continue. There were implications to what he had heard, if his guess was correct. Rianna was watching him, letting her lifted eyebrow speak volumes of her irritation. Finally, Ned went on. “Rianna, the man told me Rayen wasn’t alone when he passed through,” he said. “He has a prisoner.”
CHAPTER
31
COLD was seeping into all their days, into his dreams at night. Darien Aldemoor would wake to find himself curled tight as a coiled spring in his blankets, his cloak providing an extra layer of tenuous protection. It wasn’t enough, and he knew the true chill of winter had yet to set in.
If Lin shared his concerns, she didn’t speak of them or of much else, lost as she seemed to be in her own thoughts. Ever since the night he had summoned Edrien Letrell, there had been an air of deep quiet about her, as if she were sinking away from him, like a stone down a well. She was unresponsive, almost docile, when he changed her bandages each day, her gaze fixed somewhere past his shoulder.
Yet it was due to her that they seemed to have given the Ladybirds the slip; in these woods, she was at last in her element. Once, she told him, she and Rayen had competed to find an elusive white wolf that was preying on a nearby village. It had been winter, and the wolf blended with the blanketing snow, making the hunt all the more challenging. For days, she told him, they had each subsisted alone in the woods, foraging where they could, in search of the beast.
“Who won?” Darien had asked, as Lin trailed off. It had been at night that they’d talked about this, each facing a different direction as they sat with their backs together. There was scant warmth to be had from this, but sometimes Darien imagined he could feel the small scared rhythm of her heartbeat, like that of a bird, through the drum-taut muscles of her back.
Though he could not see her face, he could hear the wry smile in her voice. “Neither of us,” she said. “When I returned home, starving and near frozen after five days, Rayen was waiting, feet propped up and with a glass of wine by the fire. He laughed at me, said, ‘Anyone else would have known when to stop.’”
“Rayen’s a charmer,” said Darien, and felt as if the blackness of the wood swallowed his small words. All she told him of her former life, he thought, was from some nightmare country beyond the use of language, even the finely wrought use of it in which Darien was skilled.
His shirt that they used to make bandages was nearly gone, but thankfully her bleeding was subsiding. Darien was no physician, but in his time with Marlen on the road, they had occasionally been forced to tend to their own wounds. Though none had been so deep as the small, expert cuts Lin had made in her own wrists.
Why did it still hurt to think of Marlen?
Darien thought perhaps the cold and solitude of the woods, and Lin’s pale silence, were forcing him too much into his own head.
“I need to talk to you,” he said finally one day as they were walking. It was a better day than usual for her; she seemed to be regaining the use of her hands, and once in a while she had broken from reverie to smile abstractly at him, as if he were an amusing child she did not quite have time for.
“What is it?” she said, immediately stopping in her tracks.
“Let’s sit a minute,” said Darien. “Please.”
She dropped obligingly to a sitting position on a fallen log, stretching out her legs. He sank to the ground nearby.
“Lin,” he said, and he suddenly wondered what he wanted to say. “This journey—what has it brought us? And with winter coming…”
“I think I know what you are going to say.” She enunciated the words with an odd disconnectedness, as if each were separate from the one that came before.
“Do you?” He wondered how she could know, when he was scarcely sure himself.
“You want to be quit of all this,” she said. “To stop seeking the Path. And escape to Kahishi, I suppose? There would be no life for you in Eivar, the way things stand.”
Darien stared at his hands rather than look at her. He wondered when he had become someone who could be this sad, this torn within himself. “It seems like ever since we began, only terrible things have happened,” he said. “And I fear I am becoming something terrible. What I did to you…”
“What about Rianna Gelvan?”
“What about her?” Darien said tiredly. “I’m sure I could get her out of the country somehow. If she’ll still have me after the mess I’ve made of things.”
He felt pressure on his shoulders and looked up, surprised. Lin had risen, in catlike silence, and made her way to him as he stared at his hands. She rested a hand on each of his shoulders, a phantom smile on her face. “Darien, it’s not for me to tell you what you should do,” she said. “If you want to stop now, that is certainly your right. Just as it is my right to keep going, if I choose.”
“You can’t go alone,” Darien protested.
Lin shrugged, moved away from him like a boat adrift, hands loose at her sides. The bandages at her wrists were like tattered bracelets. Her face was turned up to the small bursts of light that were breaking through the trees; there was a cold yellow sun today. “That’s not your concern,” she said. “So tell me. Have you decided?”
“I must think on it,” Darien said heavily.
Lin nodded, ran a hand through her hair. It brushed her shoulders now, but was grimy and matted from days on the road without washing. “I think I’ll go stretch my legs a moment.”
“I’ll come,” said Darien, beginning to pull himself up.
“No, thank you,” said Lin. “I won’t be long. I think both of us should have some time alone.”
“Why?”
Lin smiled.
“For one thing, you just said you wanted to think about your choice. So I suggest you do that while I’m gone. Think.” Before he could say another word, she melted into the trees in that maddening way she had.
Darien wished it were safe to play his harp. It was only with his fingers to the strings that the densely tangled problems in his mind took on a pattern and shape. Perhaps that was the answer, then: Kahishi, a land of golden desert, mountains and remote gardens; a place where Darien could build his life anew, his music freely sounding amid foreign sands and stones.
* * *
LIN felt strangely light, as if her legs were not a part of her, as she flitted from one tree to the next. It was not how she usually navigated the forest terrain, but today—she did not feel entirely in possession of her body. She didn’t know if it was fatigue, or the shock of Darien’s words … though if she were honest, she had to admit that it had not really been a shock. The only surprise was that he had persisted this long, in light of all that had befallen them. What Path could be worth so much loss, so much pain?
For her it was different, of course.
She had meant to end her own life that night in the woods. She still didn’t know how to feel, that she was still here, her baffling life still unfolding. She didn’t know how to live her life now that she knew what it was to have a dead man fill her, down to the dregs of her soul; to feel his essence and dreadful agony like a thousand-ton rock.
In the moments that Edrien Letrell had possessed her, it was as if she had swallowed in one terrible rush every thought, every experience and loss in the course of his life. Images and sensations raced one into another: a golden court, the sharp taste of Kahishian rice dishes, the silk and scent of women in the dark, one woman’s eyes large with pain—and it was as if these eyes were the center: they kept reemerging throughout the rest of the memories, cropping up amid sensations of taste, of music, of erotic conquest. If Edrien’s life could be compared to a song, there had been a recurring theme.
In her waking life, that was all Lin could remember. Sometimes a cobweb of memory would drift through her consciousness, and it took a moment for her to realize that it was not one of her own memories.
Nights were another story. When she slept, the life of Edrien Letrell came calling, events haunted with familiar melody. His songs had different meanings for him than they’d had for Lin, and now she could feel that, too. She would awaken exhausted as if she had actually lived these events—a life not her own.
For that reason Lin drifted through the days, unspeaking; she was afraid of what she might say if she did speak. She was afraid of this new life devouring hers, and battled to hold fast to her own thoughts, her own memories. Her own music. Her songs were the essence of her; and never had Lin understood this more than she did now, with another man’s music vibrating from the depths of her skull down to the root of her spine, memory and music together.
I need Valanir Ocune, she thought more than once during those days. Not even the Academy Masters had his knowledge of the enchantments. Perhaps he would be able to tell her if she was losing her soul.
Now in the depths of the wood, mulling her conversation with Darien—for she had given him a half-truth; she needed to think, as well—Lin wondered if she could give up the search for the Path now. Something deep and obscene had happened to her the night Darien had used her blood, and the Path might be the only place where it could be made right.
If it could be made right.
She knew that if she could consciously explore the pattern of Edrien’s memories, she would find clues to the Path. But that was a part of what was so disturbing: she could not control the access she had. And she guessed that the events of the Path were buried deep, as Edrien Letrell had wished them to be.
She thought she knew what Darien’s decision would be. He had done his best. But with the Tower of the Winds out of their reach and the summoning of Edrien Letrell unsuccessful, what was left for him to do? And perhaps he was right. Valanir Ocune had clearly been wrong about Lin—perhaps that meant he had been wrong about other things.
Lin turned to make her way back, a cold weight of certainty in her heart. She would give him her blessing to seek a new life. He would soon forget her, and she would get lost in the mountains and find the Path, or not. More likely not. The nightmare of their journey together, she and Darien Aldemoor, would trail away into oblivion, without the satisfaction of an ending.
Later, Lin would think it was the heaviness of these thoughts and the effort of keeping Edrien Letrell’s memories at bay that distracted her, made her vulnerable to what came next.
* * *
SHE was flying on winds that swept through the mountains, for once in a dream that was her own. Alyn was in the air beside her, golden hair dancing in the wind, smiling into her eyes. Lin smiled back, achingly happy in that instant. You came back for me.
His hand was on the nape of her neck, his voice as she remembered it. I was always coming back.
When Lin awoke, her head pounded a dull ache in her temples. She groaned, tried to move. She felt heavy in every limb, as if flattened beneath a great weight. “Darien?” Her mouth shaped the word with an effort.
“Wake, my love.” A voice she had heard only in dreams this past year.
She would have screamed, had she the voice. But she realized now that he must have used some kind of hallucinatory substance on her. Her memory stopped, she realized, by the trunk of that tree. She tried to lift her head. Now she was beginning to feel a dull pain in her wrists, and she realized that they were bound, the ropes chafing at her wounds. Her legs were bound as well, and beginning to tingle unpleasantly.
“Darien,” she said again, this time with dawning horror. If Rayen had found him on his way to finding her, the poet would not have had a chance.
His face appeared above her, dark hair framing the ivory carving of his face. His smile made him even more handsome, she thought, or would have if she could see him as anything but hideous. “I believe we left your friend somewhere in the more southerly part of the forest,” he said. “He is a very lucky man, my love, that I did not come across him when I stole you away, or he would not have lived to harp another day. Oh—that rhymed! Perhaps I should become a poet. Was this one after my money, too?”
Lin gritted her teeth. She felt that the effort it cost to speak might kill her. “What’s wrong, Rayen?” she said, though barely above a whisper. “Did you miss me so much as that?”
Rayen only laughed. He seemed genuinely cheerful, which frightened her more than anything else.
At least Darien was unharmed, though he would wonder what had happened to her.
If I could only have said farewell, she thought. She had no doubt that for making a fool of him all this past year, Rayen would kill her, here in the forest under a hushed canopy of green. Completing, at long last, what he had started years ago.
“You know,” she said, “I’m honestly touched that you’ve spent all this time looking for me. I thought I wasn’t your type.”
“What is my type?”
Her stomach was a knot. Get it over with quickly, she thought, lifting her chin to expose her neck. That would be a quick death, if she could goad him sufficiently. “Blond and stupid,” she said. “And rich.”
“Alas, you’re right,” he said, unperturbed. “That explains the last one, certainly. I believe you may know her.”
The knot tightened. “I’m sure I don’t.”
“I see you’ve guessed already,” he said with a grin. “Poor Rianna Gelvan, pining for her Darien. In truth, that’s why I let him live. Because it would spoil all my work if he is never to witness it.” He snapped one of his gloves, a habit that had always irritated her.
Your work. She closed her eyes. It had never occurred to Lin that she herself might represent Rayen’s “work.” But no. She had run. That had not been a part of his plan.
“Now,” he said, “I’m going to untie your legs if you behave. Unless you want to be carried very r
oughly and unconscious from here to where we’re going.”
“Why not just kill me here and save yourself the trouble?” She put a challenging edge into her tone, the goad again.
“That would be a waste of valuable resources,” said Rayen. “No, my dear … You don’t get to die yet. Not until after you’re married.”
A hollow laugh rattled in Lin’s throat. “Married,” she said with disbelief. “You intend to keep me imprisoned until I am in someone’s bed?”
“Not exactly,” said Rayen. “I’ve done Nickon Gerrard a good turn, and in exchange he has promised to use his powers in my service. For one small task.”
Lin’s hands clenched. “What are you talking about, Rayen?” She tried to keep her voice calm. If he knew how much he was frightening her right now, her chances of goading him to kill her would be lost. He would enjoy this torment instead, far too much.
In his gratified smile, though, she could see that she had failed. He knelt close until she could feel the warmth of his breath on the side of her face, his sibilant whisper in her ear. “Ah, at last Lin the poet has met something she fears more than death,” he said. “In return for my help amassing evidence against the detestable Galician merchant, Nickon Gerrard has promised me a docile sister—a lady who knows her duties and will be a credit to our house. He cannot make you anything resembling a beauty, alas, but he can play the strings of your heart as he does his harp. So he has promised me.”
Lin breathed deep, trying to calm her heart. “Rayen, what if I promise to marry whomever you choose? And whatever else you require?”
He laughed. “Too late for that, love. It’s not that I don’t trust you, although of course I don’t. But I also really like this idea. You must admit it’s intriguing. My sister the lady, her only desire to please her man—oh, and her husband, of course.” He laughed again, and Lin wondered if he was as mad as their mother. “I think I’ll have a tapestry woven of this hunt,” he went on. “In the last panel, instead of a unicorn surrounded by spikes, there will be the foolish figure of a female poet. For Lord Gerrard has promised that although your manner will be forever changed, deep within there will be the part of you that knows—that will always know—which of us has won.”
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