“Let me go instead of Herne.”
“I want you with me.”
“I want,” Coren said, “to go instead of Herne. Herne is a great fighter, but he does not think. I think. And walking alive into the heart of Drede’s city will require thought.”
Rok sighed. “It is a gift,” he said bluntly, “to Sybel. You will go with me.”
“I will go with Ceneth or not at all. I am thinking of Tamlorn. What is to stop some great warrior, hot with bloodletting, from taking the life of one defenseless boy whose crime it was to be Drede’s son?”
“Ter will be with him,” Sybel said. He turned to her, and she saw again, as she had been seeing through the past days, the clear line of bone beneath the skin of his face, the curved lines beneath his eyes.
“Do you want me with Rok?”
She shook her head, her hands folded tight on the table. “Do what you must. But is it Tam you want to save? Or do you want to challenge death, ask it a riddle?”
She saw his teeth come together in his closed mouth. “You have a third eye, Sybel. But the pride in me will not let me stay behind with Rok. If I meet Drede and give you his head on my sword point, will that satisfy you?”
Her voice shook. “No.”
“What gift will, then?”
“Coren, let it be,” Ceneth murmured. “You may hate us all, but we have a battle before us, and whether you fight for us or against us or not at all, make the choice and keep it.”
“Oh, I will fight with you,” Coren said. “But I will not stay safe with Rok while you and Herne whet your swords on Drede’s hearthstones.” He turned back to Rok. “There is a young boy I know who once ran barefoot on Eld Mountain, and who will lose his father in this war, who will see his father’s guards slain before his eyes, who will have only a Falcon at his side that cannot tell him he will live to be King of Eldwold. He gave me my life once. Let me spare him some terror. Let me do at least that for him.”
Rok looked at Sybel, but her eyes were hidden, and her folded hands against her mouth. He said finally, “You and Ceneth will lead men of your own choice into the city. Ter will tell Sybel where Tam is, and she will tell Coren.”
“No,” Sybel said. Her hands dropped. “I will not go into Coren’s mind. When Ter flies out to you, you will know Tam is near. If his life is in danger, though, he will be taken by the Swan to Eld Mountain.”
“But if Drede hides him,” Ceneth said, “how will we know where to look for him? You could tell Coren—slip the knowledge in his mind—”
“No.”
Ceneth sighed. “Then tell me, and I will tell Coren. You have done so much mind work already that—”
“Ceneth,” Rok said wearily, “be quiet.”
“But I think—”
“Do you?” Coren said, and his question snapped in the air like breaking ice. Ceneth flushed under his gaze.
“I am quiet,” he breathed. “But I am wondering who exactly you are fighting in this war.”
Eorth’s broad hand dropped onto the table. “Ceneth, be quiet,” he begged. “I have forgotten half of what Rok has said already. If we are going to get this war off the table and into the field, you will all have to stop bickering.”
“That,” Bor grunted, “is the wisest thing you have ever said.”
Sybel closed her eyes with her fingers. “If Tam is in any great danger I will see to it you know. One thing I must warn you: you may see strange, wonderful beasts on the battlefield, if you are close-pressed with Drede’s men. Do not follow them. Oh, you have seen them here, but in the magic of their luring they grow oddly beautiful. I have told them to stay away from you, but warn your own men, or they may wake to themselves lost in some quiet forest.”
A sudden smile broke over Herne’s lean, restless face. “This will be a war for harpists to break their strings over for centuries.”
“Yes,” Eorth said, “but first I have to know again what was going on before the animals came in.”
Rok refilled his cup and began the weave again patiently.
Twilight closed over the hundred eyes of fires ringing the Sirle house. Sybel, leaving the rest of the planning to the warlords under Rok’s command, watched the fires’ patternless flickering from her high window. Coren came in eventually as the night deepened. She rested her face against the cold stones, listening to the sound of his undressing. She heard the rustle of cloth against cloth drawn back, the whisper of his breath across candle flame. She drew off her clothes, slipped into bed beside him. She lay awake, knowing from his restless breathing his own wakefulness. The night wind stirred between them, traced her cheek with a cold finger. She heard his breathing deepen finally; she lay awake long, watching the curve of his arm and side change and fall with his breathing in the faint moonlight. Then she turned away from him, one hand over her eyes, and thought of Drede lying awake among his own stones, watching the torch flame wash across his walls. Coren stirred, disturbing her thoughts. He quieted, then shifted again with a little, sharp cry. She felt then, in the quiet darkness, a shadow over her own thoughts, as though she were watched, secretly. She turned abruptly.
The Blammor stood over her. She had no time to cry out before the crystal eyes met hers, aloof as stars, and then the darkness overwhelmed her and she heard all around her the thick, imperative beat of her own heart. Visions ran through her mind, of a wizard lying broken on his rich skins, of the death faces of men through the ages meeting the core of their nightmares one final time in rooms without windows, between stone walls without passage. A wet air hovered with the darkness, carrying the cloying scent of pooled blood, of wet, rusted iron; she tasted dry, powdered dust, the withered leaves of dying trees, heard the faint, last cries like a dark wind from some ancient battlefield, of pain, of terror, of despair. And then her thoughts lifted away from her into some plane of terror she had never known, and she struggled blindly, drowning in it.
A vision hovered white as the Blammor’s eye somewhere beneath the terror. While a part of her cried helpless, voiceless against the welling darkness, a thought, trained, honed to a fine perception, detached itself, probed toward the misty image. It lay drifting at the bottom of her mind; she searched for it as though calling through the deepest places of Eldwold, and finally, beneath her mind’s eye, the image clarified and she found a moon-white bird with twisted trailing wings, lying broken, the curve of its smooth neck snapped back against itself.
She whispered, “No.” And then she found herself on the floor, her face against the stones, her breath coming in whimpering, shuddering gasps. She lifted her head, felt tears drying on her face in the cool air. Then she felt the darkness full around her of a looming Thing that watched, waited. She drew herself up, shaking, weak. She stepped toward Coren, but he lay a stranger, as though he were in a dream beyond her. She stood motionless, looking at him, until her trembling eased. And then soundlessly she dressed.
She made her way through the winding stone corridor, slipped like a shadow past the guarded hall, past the inner wall where the slow steps of men paced back and forth above her head. She opened the gate to the gardens, held it wide in the moonlight, and the whisperings came to her of animals wakened, moving toward her in the night. She saw the great shape of Gules Lyon first, and she reached out to him, clung to his mane.
What is it, White One?
I am going back to Eld Mountain. You are free.
Free?
The Black Cat Moriah brushed against her. She looked deep into the green eyes.
You must do what you will tomorrow. I ask nothing of you. Nothing. You are free.
But what of you, Sybel? What of Drede?
I cannot—there is a price for his death I cannot pay.
Sybel, said the flute-voiced Swan, free to fly the gray autumn sky once more? Free to taste the wind on the wing tip?
Yes.
But what of Tam?
I will ask nothing of you. Nothing. You must do as you will.
She touched Gyld’s mind, fou
nd him awake, with slow thoughts revolving in his mind of a wet-walled cave deep in a silent mountain, with a tiny stream in it that trickled across pieces of gold and pale bone.
You are free.
But what of Drede? Shall I slay him for you first?
I do not want to hear his name again! I do not care if he lives or dies, if he wins or loses this war—I do not care! You are free.
Free. The various voices brushed in her mind like the sounds of instruments.
Free from the winter... free to run gold as the sun beneath the desert sun’s eye.
Free to fly to the world’s edge on the rim of twilight.
Free to be stroked by fat-fingered kings in the Southern Deserts, to hear the whisperings of moon-eyed witches.
Free to dream in the silence of one treasure greater than them all.
Free, said the silver-bristled Boar. Answer me a riddle, Sybel. What has set you free?
She stared into his red eyes. You know. You know. My eyes turned inward and I looked. I am not free. I am small and frightened, and darkness runs at my heels, in my running, watches.
Sybel, said the Black Swan, I will take you to Eld Mountain. And then I will fly to the lakes beyond North Eldwold that lie like the scattered jewels of sleeping queens.
I will take you, Gyld said. And then I will wind my path again deep, deep into my sweet cave.
Take me then, she said, and felt his lumbering movements in the cave. She bent down, held Gules Lyon’s mane, looked deep into his eyes.
“Gules,” she whispered, and felt his mind drift away from hers, leaving the memories of him like things shadowed in a dim room. She loosed him and he left her, running huge and silent across the Sirle fields. She turned to the Cat.
“Moriah.”
The great Cat slipped, shadow-dark, into the shadows, its green eyes winking back at the moon.
“Black Swan,” she whispered, and it rose above her, circling slow, the great span of its wings black against the moon, curving to a line of breathless wonder.
“Cyrin.”
The marble-tusked Boar stood a, moment before her. “The Riddle Master himself lost the key to his own riddles one day,” he said in his deep, reed-pure voice, “and he found it again at the bottom of his heart. Farewell, Sybel. The Lord of Dorn ran three times around the doorless walls of the house of the witch Enyth, and then walked into the wall and it vanished like a dream.”
“Farewell,” she whispered. He ran out of the open gate, moon-bright across the fields of sleeping men. She straightened, called Ter from his post beside the sleeping Tam in the stone walls of Mondor.
Ter. You are free.
No.
Ter. You are free to do as you will, to go from Tam or to stay with him, king’s bird. But one thing I ask of you. One thing for my sake. Do not touch Drede. He is mine and I choose to forget him.
But why, Ogam’s child? Where is your triumph?
Gone, in the night. I have awakened, alone and afraid.
Afraid?
Afraid, fearless one. You are free.
She whispered his name, and it fell without answer in the still night. She rose, mounted the green-winged Dragon. She rode high with him through the star-flecked night, high above the war fires of Sirle, of Mondor, to a high mountain and a white hall of silence, where she loosed the Dragon forever from her. She went into the doors of Myk’s cold, empty house and locked them behind her.
TWELVE
* * *
Seven days later the King of Eldwold rode with his guards up the winding path of Eld Mountain. He rode past the tiny house of the witch of Maelga, with the doves in its yard and the black raven on the worn stag’s antlers above the door. He stopped at the closed gates of the wizard’s white hall, and saw through them the motionless, tangled garden, the covering of pine needles across the stone path between the gate and the closed door. A breath of wind stirred pale strands of his hair across his face. He brushed them aside and dismounted. “Wait here for me.”
“Lord, she is dangerous—”
His face turned abruptly upward, the bones of it forming sharp beneath his skin. “She would never hurt me. Wait here.”
“Yes, Lord.”
He tried the iron railings of the gate with his hands, but they were shut fast. He stared at them a moment, his brows knit over his eyes. Then he wedged one foot into a high crevice in the stone wall, gripped the jutting stones with his hands, pulled himself up. Cloth of his black tunic ripped against a sharp finger of rock; he loosed self absently and found another foothold, and another, until his hands closed, splayed and bloodless, on the smooth molding of marble on top of the wall. He swung a leg over and dropped on his knees onto the soft earth below.
He rose and dusted his stockings. The wind fell, leaving the gardens silent. His eyes searched, narrowed, puzzled through the dark shadows of underleaves, through the smooth, sun-rich trunks of great pine, but no movement answered his moving eyes. He went down the walk slowly, and turned the door latch. He shook the door slightly, knocked on it. One of the guards called hopefully from beyond the gate,
“Perhaps, Lord, she is not there.”
He did not answer. The windows of the house stared blindly outward, like eyes without a flicker of thought behind them. He stepped back a little, his lips between his teeth. Then he bent swiftly and picked up a smooth stone beside the path. He tapped it gently against a diamond of thick glass in a window and it cracked into a web of a thousand lines, then fell showering to the inner floor. He picked out teeth of glass still clinging to the rim, then slid his arm through to the elbow and groped for the window latch.
“Lord, be careful!”
The window opened abruptly; he swung with it sideways against the white wall. He drew his arm back. Within, dust drifted in the placid sunlight to the floor. He blinked into the dimness, listening for any sound, but the rooms were still as though no one walked or breathed in them. He heaved himself up, his feet slipping against the smooth marble and brought a knee over the ledge.
“Sybel?”
The word hung in the sunlight with the golden, dancing specks of dust. He turned his body, swung from the window onto the floor. He rose and walked through the silence to the great domed room beyond and saw the moon-pure crystal of it arched pale above him. And then he saw beneath it, sitting in white silence, a woman with hair the color of sun-touched frost sitting still, as though cased in ice. Her black eyes were open, blind.
He went forward, his steps soundless on the thick fur. He knelt before her, looked into her eyes.
“Sybel?”
He touched her lightly, hesitantly, his brows crooked. The white face, the bones clear beneath it, seemed formed of stone, so still, so secret. The slender hands, the bones outlined at every curve and joint, folded motionless. He stared at her, his own hands moving flat, restless, up and down his thighs, and a little, incoherent sound came out of his throat. He drew breath again and shouted suddenly,
“Sybel!”
She started, stirred faintly, and a little color came into her face. Her eyes focused on his face, and he smiled, wordless with relief. She leaned forward, one hand moving slowly out of the sheath of her hair to touch him.
“Tam...”
He nodded jerkily. “Yes—” Her hand touched his mouth, wandered across one shoulder. Then it dropped. Her eyes dropped; she drew a long, endless breath. Her face bowed until he could scarcely see it. He reached out, drew her hair back.
“Sybel, please. Please. Do not go back where you were. Please. Talk to me. Say my name.”
She covered her eyes with her fingers. “Tam.”
“No. I am not Tam anymore. I am Tamlorn. Sybel, I am Tamlorn, King of Eldwold.”
She saw him then clearly, his hands gripping his bent knees, his pale hair neatly trimmed, capping his lean, brown face. She saw the tense set and play of his mouth, the shadows beneath his eyes and the bones beneath his skin. The rich black tunic he wore caught the color from his eyes, darkening them. Sh
e stirred, feeling stiffness in every joint and bone,
“Why did you bring me back?”
“Where did you go? Sybel, why? Why?”
“I had no place else to go.”
“Sybel, you are so thin. They said you were not in Sirle, and I had to find you, to ask you something. So I came here, and your gates were locked. So I climbed the wall, but your door was locked. So I broke a window and climbed in and found you, but I could not reach inside you. You sat so still, as though you were made of stone and your eyes stared at me without seeing. Sybel, why did you go? Was it—what my father did to you?”
“It was what I did to myself.”
His head moved briefly as if flicking away her answer. He reached out, touching her hair again, drawing with light, eager touches strand after strand of hair away from her face.
“My father told me what he did to you.”
“He told—”
“Yes. The night before the fighting started. He told—he told me. Sybel, he was so frightened of you, he—I did not even know him, those days before the war. Then, when he told me why, I understood.” He paused a moment, and a muscle beside his mouth jerked and was still. His eyes came back to her face. “Sybel, he said he came back to the tower to get you that day, and the door was wide open to the wizard’s room and he went in and you were gone and—the wizard lay dead on the floor with his eyes—torn and every bone in him broken. And then he began to be afraid. And then you married Coren of Sirle... He rarely spoke after that, except to give orders, to consult with people, He seldom spoke to me, but sometimes, when he sat alone in his rooms, with all the torches lit, just sitting, staring at nothing, I would go and sit with him, silently because I knew—I knew he wanted me with him. He would never speak to me, but sometimes he would put his hand on my hair, or my shoulder, for a moment, quietly. Sybel. I loved him. But somehow, when I heard what he had done to you, I was not surprised, because I knew that you were angry with him for something that was his fault. It was too late to be surprised. and that—that night he died.”
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld Page 17