“I don’t suppose you’ll finally say where you’re taking us?” Marlen said. His father seemed to be deriving a perverse pleasure in revealing nothing. Once, Lord Humbreleigh would not have hesitated to strike his son for impudence, but that had been long ago.
“In a moment,” said Lord Humbreleigh. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me how my son, of impeccable bloodlines, came to be with a whore?”
Marilla’s face did not change; she had the blank-eyed expression Marlen knew well.
“I don’t pay Marilla and never have,” said Marlen. “She is not my whore.”
“Would she be with you if you were not next in line for Court Poet?” said Lord Humbreleigh with a dry laugh. “If you did not provide her with her own apartments, and jewels?”
That, Marlen could not answer. It was the question he had avoided asking that still burrowed into his mind like a spinning needle. She claimed to belong to him, yet she had betrayed him with another man. And what would she be without him? Well he remembered her room in the slums of Tamryllin. If not for Marlen, she would still be there.
“I don’t know,” Marlen said helplessly. He looked at Marilla, but she was gliding ahead. Marlen caught her wrist, stopping her. Now she looked up at him, pale, glassy eyes meeting his. He said, “Why wouldn’t you let me kill him?”
“I asked you not to,” she said. “As a favor.”
“When have you ever minded watching a man die?”
She shrugged. “Go on and kill him, then,” she said. “Cast me out into the street. If you think it is only jewels I want—I can get them. I can get many men to give me what I desire, Marlen. I don’t need you for that.”
“And Ned?” Marlen said. “What did he give you?”
A sound, then, like the crackle of fire; Lord Humbreleigh was laughing, head thrown back. “You know the answer to that,” he said. “Oh, my son. What a fool you were not to cut this whore’s throat when you had the chance.” He turned suddenly. “I think the time is now right to tell you where we are going.”
“Kind of you,” said Marlen. “I hope that means we are almost there, and will be rid of you faster.”
“Majdara has an industry that is almost unique in the world,” said Lord Humbreleigh, gesturing expansively as if he delivered a lesson. The corner of his mouth was quirked in unmistakable enjoyment. “Do you know what it is?”
“Manure?”
“Flesh,” said Lord Humbreleigh. “Nowhere else in the world is there so active a trade in slaves. Nowhere else can a man—or a woman, for that matter—find a selection of temptations as diverse or as valuable.” He leaned forward, savoring the words. “It is here, for example, that a girl of nine, whose parents were slain by marauders, might be put to lucrative use.”
“Appalling,” said Marlen. “So you intend to educate us in these atrocities?”
“To educate you, certainly,” said Lord Humbreleigh. “There are men who only find pleasure when they inflict pain. And inflicting pain on children—so much the better.” He was smiling, eyes alight with a gleam Marlen knew too well. “Marilla knows what I am talking about, don’t you, dear?”
Her eyes were still unreadable. “Like father, like son, Lord Humbreleigh,” she said. “But when you cause harm, I see you do it with so much more—intent.”
Marlen’s father’s voice lowered to a murmur. “The Path is not bound by time. We are now in Majdara of more than a decade past. The same year invading brigands raided border villages of Eivar, put men and women to the sword, and brought their pick of the children to this city. The pretty ones. The ones they thought might make their fortune in the trade.”
Marilla was staring at him. Marlen touched her arm. “Does he mean…?”
Now she reacted, flinching away, her teeth flashing at him. “Leave me be.”
“As it happens, you may recognize where we are now, if you take a moment to look around,” Lord Humbreleigh said. He motioned to a stone façade graced with slender pillars and a massive wrought-iron door. “In that house is where the nine-year-old girl was held for six months. Her captors introduced her to instruments of torment most people never see in their lifetimes. They were noble, you see. Their tastes were sophisticated.”
“What do you mean by this?” Marlen demanded. “This is low even for you, father.”
Lord Humbreleigh spread his hands. “I did not choose this destination for you,” he said. “I am merely your guide. It is the Path itself that chooses.”
“Very well,” said Marlen. “We are here. We’ve seen the house. Now we can go.”
“Unfortunately not,” said Lord Humbreleigh. “The journey can end only inside that house. When the door is opened and its threshold crossed. I did not make these laws, son,” he added at the sight of Marlen’s face. “What does it matter? I’m sure you can bear the sight of a tortured child. Especially knowing as you do how very much unharmed she will emerge.” He laughed again.
“As unharmed as I was by you all those years,” said Marlen. “I have destroyed the only friendship that mattered to me, gained the hatred of all poets, and was party to the death of a man—a good man. But I am alive, so I suppose it can be said—I am unharmed.”
“Marlen,” Marilla said. Her voice was as he’d never heard it, soft and faintly trembling. “Please don’t go in there.”
“You heard him,” said Marlen. “I am sorry, love. How else can we ever get home?”
“I can’t bear for you—for anyone—to see me like that,” said Marilla. “Please. Let me go in alone. Perhaps that will be enough.” Marlen began to speak, but she silenced him with a hand at his lips, a touch surprisingly gentle. “Marlen,” she said, “if you see me like that, I will have to leave you. And I don’t want to leave you. Do you understand?”
Marlen ran his hands through his hair, feeling utterly out of his depth. “Go then,” he said. She turned, her face tight with dread as she gazed at the wrought-iron door. “Wait,” Marlen said. Pulling her back to him, he kissed her for the first time in weeks. Her response was not the violence he was accustomed to, from her; there was a tender urgency in her kiss, a desperation.
It seemed to last an age but must have been only a moment. The Path is not bound by time, his father had said. She tore away again, though not without a glance behind her to where he stood.
But it was with the regal posture he knew well that she advanced, with measured tread, to the wrought-iron door.
Lord Humbreleigh stood with his hands on his hips and a curled lip. “It has been my honor to guide you,” he said. “There. I am forced to say that, also by law.”
“I know you were forced to say it, Father,” said Marlen. He saw for the first time that his father’s shoulders were stooped and that he was not quite so tall as Marlen remembered. The man who had stamped an indelible mark on Marlen’s face was long gone—had been gone even before his death. Yet in Marlen’s mind, he had always towered, and still did.
Marilla had arrived at the door. She grasped the handle, and the great metal weight swung wide on its hinges without a sound. With the same deliberate pace, she stepped inside until she was standing on the threshold, her elegantly clad figure blocking from view whatever was inside.
For several moments she was still, arms hanging at her sides. Then she dropped to her knees with a soft cry.
Marlen cried out then too, though later he could not recall what his words had been, tearing from him as the world around them went black. Most likely, he would later think, they were, I’m sorry.
* * *
DARIEN expected Hassen to guide them into the city, but instead his friend began leading them away from the main road. They ventured into hills of a green so intense it was as if they had just been refreshed with rain. Dark trees swayed with slow majesty in the breeze. “Where is this?” Darien asked. “It looks like the south.”
Lin raised her gaunt and bloodied face to the wind. “The light and the air here are like nothing I know.”
“It is the south,”
Hassen confirmed. “And here we are.”
Darien caught his breath. They had arrived in a place where the green hills and trees half encircled, like the setting of a jewel, the blue of the sea. The Blood Sea was so different, he thought, from the pale grey-green northern waters he had used to watch crash, in eternal repetition, from the cliffs of Academy Isle. Looming to the east was the wall of mountains that divided Eivar from Kahishi.
So hypnotized was he by the view that for a moment he didn’t realize that Lin was calling to him and pointing in the opposite direction, toward a grove of trees.
“I had a wager that you’d notice it first,” Hassen said to her with a grin.
Darien stared, uncomprehending. “What are they?”
“Standing stones,” Lin said with a delighted smile.
Darien blinked. Indeed, he could see now that the vast pillars of rock in the grove formed the shape of a ring. “I’d thought King Eldgest dismantled them all in his crusade,” he said. “Naming them blasphemous of the Three.”
“Yet these remain,” said Hassen. “Perhaps Eldgest died before he could complete his work. People of the nearby city—those who still, in secret, worship the old gods—sometimes come to this place. Here by the Blood Sea, gateway to the far east, some of the most ancient beliefs live on.”
“Hassen, that sounds like a song,” said Lin.
“So it may be,” he replied. “Now watch.”
* * *
THEY did not have long to discover what he meant: in that moment a woman, slender and with long dark hair, stepped out from the trees. Her skin was an unnatural white, as if the blood had been drained from her, and her dress that trailed in the grass was white. A man followed after her, greying, weary, a harp at his side.
The woman turned toward them so they could see the glint of her blue eyes. But this was not necessary for Lin, who had known them both at once.
Just as suddenly as she had looked toward them, the woman looked away, and Lin realized: They cannot see us.
“Did you bring me here to inflict more pain?” the man said, breaking the stillness. “I love you, Myra. You know this.”
“It is so like you,” she said, “to accuse me of causing you pain. Simply by wanting what every woman wants, I tortured you. Isn’t that so?”
“Tell me why you have brought me to this place,” he said. “Please.”
The wind caught her hair, flung it in a long black banner behind her head. Even in memory, Lin thought, Edrien Letrell’s paramour was not so proudly beautiful as she was in life. And then: My thought, or his? Lin’s memories were becoming so merged with those of Edrien Letrell that she feared she would soon not know the difference. Soon it would be as if she herself had made love to this woman in the shadow of these standing stones.
Made love to her and then left the next day. “I’ll find someone who will love me,” Myra had said with quiet fury just before slamming shut the door to her home, and she had sent his harp flying into a wall, denting it forever.
Edrien never fixed those dents, nor ever used a different harp.
“It is not I who has brought you here, but the Path,” said Myra. “I am but your guide—secondary to you here, as I was in life.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Edrien. “You are not, have never been secondary. You are everything. Since you died I’ve had terrible dreams.”
“Perhaps your dreams were whispering what the Path has brought you here to know,” said Myra. The harshness had drained from her voice; it had grown soft. Still there was a thread of steel in the set of her face. Lin found herself remembering a heady mix of joy and frustration, days of passionate battling followed by nights of equally passionate reconciliation. Life with Myra had demanded everything of Edrien—perhaps that was why he had not stayed?
The uncertainty as much as the memories, Lin felt sure, were Edrien’s own. Perhaps these were even the thoughts that occurred to him as he stood here now, facing his dead love on the Path.
“What must I know?” Edrien asked.
Her eyes, fixed on him, held a kind of compassion, contrasting with the rigidity of her face. “I did not die of the plague, Edrien.”
“What do you mean?” But he stumbled back as if he did not want to hear. His hand sought the support of one of the moss-covered standing stones.
“It was the child you gave me, that last night here,” said Myra.
The knuckles of Edrien’s hand that gripped the stone had gone white. “The … child?”
“It came too early, just four months after you had gone,” she said. “The blood wouldn’t stop.” She approached Edrien where he stood, and prying his hand loose from the stone, held it against her face. “I am sorry, love,” she said. “I didn’t want you to ever know.”
* * *
IT seemed like an age but also not nearly enough time before they at last drew apart. The wind on the cliff tore at them as if it sought to sunder them from one another or send them plunging from the great height to their deaths. Ned gripped Rianna’s waist in both his hands and thought she didn’t feel fragile to him now. “I don’t know how you can love me,” he said, “but I don’t want to ever let you go.”
She laughed a bit breathlessly. He thought it must be a dream.
“I feel the same,” said Rianna. She held up her hands to his face. The nails of some of her fingers were cracked or broken, and all were caked with blood. All traces of a smile had left her eyes as she gazed at him. She did not need to look up—they were nearly of a height. She said, “Can you love someone with these hands?”
Ned clasped them both, raised them to his lips. “I love your hands.”
She pulled him close again and buried her face in his shoulder. Ned closed his eyes and tightened his arms around her. I’ll never let you go.
“Touching,” said a voice behind them.
Ned opened his eyes but did not loosen his grip. He immediately recognized the man who stood in the shadow of the trees, green eyes like arrows trained upon them.
“Forgive me,” Valanir Ocune added as he advanced toward them. “Love is not to be mocked, not in this otherwise merciless world of ours.” It looked to Ned as if the Seer had recently encountered this mercilessness firsthand: his face looked haggard.
“Where are we?” Rianna asked, disengaging from Ned and turning toward the Seer. “Do you know?”
“So you are real, then,” said Valanir Ocune. “I am not sure whether to be pleased or not. This is a place of danger, and from what I recall, neither of you is equipped for that. I am not sure where we are,” he went on, “but it is not the world we know. The Path has brought us here.”
“The Path,” Ned said. “Is there no way to be rid of these damned poets?”
Rianna laughed, said teasingly, “You have nothing to fear from them.”
And then Marlen Humbreleigh and Marilla were there, appearing out of the air. They stared around wildly as if fearing an attack.
Marlen was first to recover, spotting Ned. His eyes narrowed. “You.”
“Yes,” said Ned.
“Stay away from him,” said Rianna.
“I have no wish to harm him,” said Marlen. He took one of Marilla’s hands in his. Ned was shocked to see tears running down her face, her eyes large and blank as a doll’s.
“Is she all right?” said Ned. “What’s happened?”
“This gods-cursed Path had its way with us,” said Marlen. “The songs of Edrien Letrell failed to mention what a sadistic exercise it is. But I daresay we still look better than you two.” His eyes fell upon Valanir Ocune. “So you’re here. This is starting to become interesting.”
“I’m flattered,” said Valanir Ocune. Then all at once his eyes widened, he backed away a step. “Marlen,” he said, and it was clear he was trying to keep his voice level. “How are you feeling?”
Marlen looked confused. “What?” The next moment his face spasmed, his mouth gaping, his eyes bulging in their sockets. Rigid, drawn up to his full heigh
t, he crashed to the ground like a felled tree.
Marilla dropped to her knees, tried to turn Marlen’s face to hers. In an uncharacteristically shrill tone she cried, “Help him.”
But when Ned and Rianna tried to run forward, Valanir cast his arm imperiously before them, bringing them up short. Marlen was making horrible strangled sounds.
“Stay back,” said Valanir Ocune. He seemed to have grown taller, towering over them, his voice tight with contained fury. “He’s here.”
* * *
THE scene had changed again, before Darien had a chance to think; they now stood at the foot of a bare cliff that clawed empty sky far above a cobalt sea. Until now, Darien had been able to identify where they were, but this place, he sensed, was different. The sea was a blue that seared his eyes, its music so plangent he could have wept.
It was a song of loss, he thought.
“Hang on,” he said, glancing at the bare stretch of stone around and about them. “Where is Hassen?”
“I will not think of the road’s end,” said Lin.
Darien shook his head. “What?”
She looked sad. “It’s just a song.” Then she said, “Look, Darien—the tree.”
A lone tree sprung crookedly from the apex of the cliff. Darien had seen it at once, but had not observed anything remarkable about it. He had failed to see, at first, that its branches and leaves sparkled silver in the sunlight.
“The Silver Branch,” he said. “Is this it, then? Do we take it?”
Just then Edrien Letrell appeared before them, his face turned toward the sea. Behind him, Myra stood. The white of her dress and skin seemed to fill with the sunlight like a glass chalice, her eyes sorrowful. “What I will tell you now is not what I want to tell you,” she said. “But I do because I must.”
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