The Singer of All Songs

by Kate Constable

  ‘I’ve done everything I can. I wish I had the craft of healing.’

  ‘I fear it may take more than craft.’ He touched the bandage lightly with his finger. His voice was grim, and he would not meet her eyes.

  Calwyn said, ‘Do you think Samis will follow us?’

  ‘I know not, and I care not,’ said Darrow sharply. He put his hand to his eyes for a moment. Then he said, a little more gently, ‘Take a watch above. I will sit with Xanni a while.’

  In the doorway, she turned back. ‘I saw him. In Mithates. Before – before the river. He came after the Clarion. He – I thought he was you.’

  Darrow stared at her. ‘Samis spoke to you in my guise?’

  She nodded. ‘He – he touched me –’ ‘He hurt you?’The question cracked like a whiplash.

  Dumbly she shook her head. Xanni groaned softly, and Darrow turned back to lay a hand on his brow. His voice turned cold. ‘It is the hardest trick of seeming, to take another’s face and voice, and stand before one who knows them well, keeping up the chantment all the while. He will be exhausted from it. That explains why he has not pursued us, even with the Clarion. He will need to rest. Hide and rest.’

  Hesitantly she said, ‘He told me – he said that it was your idea to collect the Nine Powers, that you wanted to become the Singer of all Songs. It’s not true, is it?’

  ‘By all the gods, Calwyn! This is not the time for such questions. Go now, leave us in peace!’

  Alone in the cabin, Calwyn pressed her trembling hands flat on the table until the knuckles showed white. She hadn’t realised how much she cared for Darrow. Samis had guessed it; she’d given herself away the moment she flew across the workshop into his arms. Now Darrow despised her, and no wonder. She was weak; she’d let Samis trick her, she’d lost the Clarion, and Xanni . . . She swallowed hard.

  When she climbed stiffly up onto the deck, she was surprised, in a dull kind of way, to see the faint haze of dawn beginning to lighten the sky. They were well away from Mithates Port, sailing east across the Bay of Sardi, toward the sunrise. She saw a blackened arrow sticking out of the cabin roof, and another near the prow; the archers in the watchtowers must have fired at them, and she hadn’t even known it. Tonno was at the tiller. He called her over. ‘Hold her steady. I’m going below. Keep her so that the flag points that way, and the sail like that.’

  At any other time, Calwyn would have been excited to take the tiller, especially with no one to watch over her, but now she hardly cared. There was no land for her to run into, after all. And she found that it was not so hard to hold the tiller firm and let the wind run the boat lightly over the waves.

  Trout made his way toward her, holding onto the edge of the cabin roof and looking rather green beneath his freckles. Gingerly he took a seat beside her.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Seasick,’ he said briefly, and turned his head to let the wind blow full in his face for a moment. Then he said, ‘How is your friend?’

  Calwyn tried to answer, but she found that she couldn’t. Trout hesitated for a moment, then put his hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Calwyn nodded, and blinked, gripping the tiller hard. There was a line of light now all along the horizon, and the white sail of Fledgewing shone with a pearly lustre. She saw Darrow come up from below, a dark silhouette against the dawn, and make his way to the railing. He stood there for a time, not moving, with his face turned away from them. It was growing lighter all the time. The three moons still rode high among the few stars that remained, three pale globes in the pallid sky. The time of the Spilled Cup: one half-moon tipped over sideways, and the other two, small and clear and round, like droplets of liquid pouring out, frozen midway to the horizon, not yet fallen to the earth. Not yet, not yet.

  Then she sawTonno’s head emerge from the cabin. She saw him pause at the top of the steps, at the place where he often sat to smoke his pipe, and then walk unsteadily to where Darrow stood by the rail. She saw Darrow turn, and Tonno speak, and then she saw Darrow lift his arm and grip his friend about his broad shoulders, while Tonno bent his head and wept.

  Suddenly she found that blinking was no longer enough. But she couldn’t let go of the tiller. She had to keep on steering, and so she gripped with both hands to keep Fledgewing steady on its course. She couldn’t see the sail, or which way the little flag waved at the tip of the mast. But it hardly seemed to matter now which way they went. She just kept her face turned toward the light, and the nose of Fledgewing pointing eastward, sailing on and on through a mist of tears, blindly toward the sunrise.

  six

  The Troubled Sea

  ‘I WANT TO go home,’ said Trout.

  He wouldn’t meet Darrow’s eyes, or Calwyn’s, but stared obstinately down at the table top, where the remains of their last meal lay scattered. Since the morning that Xanni’s white-wrapped body had slipped quietly beneath the green waves, no one had cared about tidying anything away. Tonno was not down in the cabin, but up on deck, steering through the night. He preferred it; he would not speak to anyone, but stood at the tiller, alone with his ship and the wild sea and the stars.

  ‘It is no use bleating on the same refrain like a nanny goat,’ said Darrow impatiently. ‘How many times have I told you, we cannot take you back. Your life is forfeit to Samis as much as ours.’

  Trout turned a cup one way, then another. ‘You say he’s your enemy. All right. I’m from Mithates, I understand hatred, I understand enemies. But his quarrel is with you. Why should he care about me?’

  ‘Because you helped us!’ Calwyn leaned across the table. ‘Surely you can see that we can’t turn back. We can’t risk meeting him. You can’t risk meeting him.’

  ‘You have defied him,’ said Darrow wearily. This was not the first time he and Trout had had this argument. ‘Samis will not let defiance go unpunished. That is one way to protect his power. Do you understand me?’

  ‘No,’ said Trout. His mouth was a stubborn line. ‘I haven’t seen anything of this power of his, I don’t believe he has any power. I must get back to my studies. If I’m away too long, I’ll fail the whole term. I’m going to be in trouble enough as it is, consorting with foreigners without the Masters’ authority.’

  ‘How can you say that you haven’t seen Samis’s powers?’ exclaimed Calwyn. ‘You were in the workshop when he changed his face. He stopped your mouth with your own shirt! And you were on the river when he made the ground seem to shake like an earthquake.’

  ‘I didn’t see anything like that,’ saidTrout, blinking his blue eyes behind his lenses. ‘All I saw in the workshop was an old man forcing himself on you. Not nice, but not magic. I got a mouthful of my collar in the dark. So what? And on the river I was busy managing the boat, so you and your friends could run away, which you haven’t thanked me for, by the way. I don’t believe in these crafts you’re always talking about, these chantments of yours.’

  ‘You need not believe in chantment to know yourself in danger,’ said Darrow. ‘It was cold steel, not magic, that killed Xanni.’

  There was a small silence. The timbers of Fledgewing creaked softly, and there came a faint, irregular murmuring from the waves creaming along the prow. Calwyn swallowed hard. Even now it was hard to believe that Xanni wasn’t leaping about on the deck, that he wouldn’t come whistling down the ladder at any moment. She swept some crumbs into a little pile with her hand, and stirred them with her finger.

  After a pauseTrout said, ‘Anyway, he will have left Mithates by now. He’s got the little horn. You said that was what he wanted.’

  Abruptly Darrow got to his feet, knocking a spoon onto the floor, and limped up the steps to the deck. Trout stared resentfully after him. ‘I helped you,’ he said accusingly to Calwyn. ‘You said so yourself. I helped you, and now you won’t help me. Take me back. He won’t be there any more. There’s no reason not to take me back.’

  ‘It’s too dangerous now,’ said Calwyn. ‘We can’t go back yet. Not until –�
�� She stopped. Until what? Their quest, which had been so urgent, seemed all but abandoned. Day after day, night after night, they sailed on to the east, but when Calwyn asked Tonno if they were heading back to Kalysons, he said nothing, but shook his head so fiercely that she didn’t dare speak to him again.

  Now Trout turned her own question back to her. ‘Then where are we going?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Calwyn sadly. ‘It makes no difference.’

  ‘It makes a difference to me,’ saidTrout, and he went down to his bunk and yanked the curtain behind him.

  Calwyn looked at the mess on the table, but there seemed no point in clearing it away. It would be time for breakfast soon enough. Why go to the trouble of putting everything into the lockers when they would just have to take it all out again? In any case, they weren’t eating together, and no one was cooking proper meals; each of them took food when they pleased, and half the time ate it in their hands, on the deck. Dully she got up, and shut herself into her little cabin in the bow, and lay down on her bunk. She ought to practise her breathing exercises; the last time she’d gone through the nightly ritual was when she was alone on Fledgewing at Mithates Port, waiting for the others to return.

  And that thought was enough to set off the accusing voice inside her mind. She should never have left the boat, never gone ashore, never met Trout or found the Clarion, never let Samis deceive her, never tried to fight him, never started the commotion that brought Darrow and Tonno and Xanni running into the streets. If she’d let Samis have the Clarion from the beginning, Xanni might be here now, clattering dinner dishes in the bucket.

  Her heart was sore with misery and homesickness. She missed the sound of the bees in the hives. She missed the cold air of the mountains and the changing colours of the snowy peaks at sunrise and sunset. She missed Marna’s hand on her hair, and the echo of the sisters’ singing in the great hall. She whispered into her pillow, just as Trout had done, ‘I want to go home.

  ’ Now she would never be made a full priestess. When midwinter moondark came, the others would go to the sacred valley, where the cold dark pool and the waterfall would be stilled by the chantment of the priestesses, turned to black ice beneath the black sky. The silver stars, seen clearly only when the three moons were all in shadow, would be sparkling like icicles. The bare branches of the blazetree would be thrusting upward, lit by the leaping flames of the bonfire on the shore, and the thread of the chantment would rise up, too, thin and clear in the cold air, as the novices who were to be initiated set out one by one across the sheet of ice, each girl alone holding up the surface beneath her feet. If her lone chantment faltered, if the ice cracked, she would be plunged into the freezing water, in the dark, to drown. But if, by the will of the Goddess, she reached the other side, to embrace the frozen column of the waterfall and return to receive Marna’s kiss, then she would step onto the shore again as a full priestess. This winter it would have been Calwyn’s turn to step out across the black ice. But now the others would go through the ritual without her. Would they remember her then? Would Marna be thinking of her?

  She ought to comb out her tangled hair, and plait it again. In a moment she would get up and look for a comb. But she didn’t move. Presently she closed her eyes.

  The next day she went to stand beside Darrow at the tiller. There was not much wind; he turned the rudder this way and that to catch the breeze in the sails. Calwyn watched him. ‘Can I take a turn?’

  ‘No. This is not a task that you are ready for.’

  ‘Then teach me.’

  ‘I am in no mood for teaching,’ he said grimly.

  Fighting her misery, Calwyn looked away. It was the time of the Fingernail and the Quartered Apple; the third moon was a fine sliver, so delicate and pale in the highest reach of the sky that it was almost invisible. These were the days, at the turn of the season between summer and autumn, when the apples ripened and hung heavy in the orchard, and all the sisters turned out to help the men pick them, the older women holding the baskets to catch the fruit that the novices let fall from the higher branches. There was always much giggling and hilarity on the days of the apple harvest, the one time when it was permitted to climb the trees of the orchard, though no one ever questioned how the little girls had learned to climb so expertly, when it was officially forbidden for the rest of the year.

  Calwyn said, ‘PerhapsTrout’s right. Perhaps we should take him home.’

  ‘This is Tonno’s ship,’ said Darrow shortly. ‘He sets the course, not I.’

  ‘He would change course in an instant, if you asked him.’

  ‘I don’t thinkTonno is inclined to do anything I ask, just at present. It was at my asking that we went to Mithates the first time. I hardly think he will agree to go back there.’

  ‘But we must go back some time. You still have to find a chanter of fire.’

  ‘There are no chanters of fire,’ said Darrow, and his voice was filled with bitterness. ‘They are all gone, every one. We were there for long enough to make sure of that. The chantments are lost beyond recovery. The only thing left of all that body of magic is the Clarion of the Flame, and Samis has that now. There is nothing for us in Mithates.’

  Calwyn was silent, shocked. Then she said, ‘Does that mean we’re giving up the quest?’

  ‘By the bones of Ceb’atroth! What quest can there be? He has ice, and fire, and iron, and tongue, and seeming. He was strong enough to persuade you, in Mithates, that he was me, and he touched you –’ Darrow broke off, and took one slow breath. ‘If he had hurt you –’ He left the sentence unfinished, and Calwyn’s face burned.

  After a pause, Darrow went on. ‘Did you not hear him by the river? Let us prolong the hunt a little longer. It’s a game to him. He is more than halfway to his goal. It is finished.’

  Calwyn’s heart was pounding. She reached out a hand to Darrow, but he flinched as if her fingers were made of ice. ‘Halfway is not the whole way!’ she cried. ‘He still has to find the Power of Beasts, and the Power of Winds. And the Power of Becoming. You said that nobody knows the chantments for the Power of Becoming, or even what people were entrusted with them by the Ancient Ones. He’ll never find them.’

  ‘Depend upon it, there is some land, some people, in some corner of Tremaris, where those secrets are known. And he will find them. He is like a hunting dog to the scent of magic. If they are there to be found, he will find them. Or perhaps the Powers he has already will be enough to draw the others to him, like ants to honey.’

  Calwyn stamped her foot. ‘I think you want him to become the Singer of all Songs! Why don’t you just go back and help him? Why are you giving up so easily?’

  Darrow rounded on her. ‘I? I give up too easily? You are a fine one to make that charge, Daughter of Taris! You who handed over the Clarion, our last hope, without so much as a whimper. Did he win you over with his fine words and his princely manners? How dare you speak to me of giving up!’

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’ Calwyn shouted. ‘Do you forget the danger you were in? How could I have borne it, if he had killed you?’ The words almost choked her, but anger swept her on. ‘You should be thanking me, for saving your life! How many times is that now? Three, or is it four?’

  Darrow said nothing for a moment, staring ahead at the horizon. Then he turned his grey-green gaze to her. ‘I would rather you had let me perish four times over, and saved Xanni just once.’

  A sob burst from Calwyn’s throat. Groping blindly, she pushed her way pastTonno along the length of the boat to the prow, where she hung over the edge as far as she could, so that the fine spray from the waves splashed at her face, and she could no longer tell the difference between the salt of the sea and the salt from her own tears.

  Presently she became aware that someone had lowered himself to sit beside her, and then she felt a hand on her shoulder. Roughly she shrugged it away.

  ‘I am sorry for what I said.’

  But she didn’t answer, and after a few moments
she heard Darrow struggle to his feet again and limp away.

  That night she was woken by the sound of voices overhead: Tonno’s angry rumbling, and the plaintive squeak of Trout. Moonlight streamed in through the little porthole above her bunk; she had forced it open to let out some of the heat that built up in her small cabin during the day, and now snatches of Trout and Tonno’s argument were carried in on the cool night wind. She lay still for a moment, listening: not too late to turn around – listen to what a pipsqueak like you says – not my fault your brother –

  Calwyn heard Tonno spitting onto the deck, and then an inarticulate roaring, and desperate shouts. She rolled off her bunk and headed out onto the deck, clutching at the rungs of the stepladder as Fledgewing swayed beneath her. The boat was pitching more violently than usual; at first she thought they must have caught a stronger wind, but once she was up on the deck she saw thatTonno andTrout were wrestling over control of the tiller. Trout must have caught Tonno off his guard, or he would never have got a hand to it, but now he struggled breathlessly to hang on, pale and frightened, but utterly determined. Tonno’s face distorted with rage as he tried to prise Trout’s hands from the tiller, but Trout kicked out and winded him so that he doubled over gasping.

  ‘Stop! Stop it!’ cried Calwyn, running forward. The wind knocked her sideways; the moonlight dimmed as if a lantern had gone out, and she missed her footing on the plunging deck.

  ‘Get away, lass!’ Tonno bellowed, staggering toward Trout, who was hauling recklessly on the tiller, trying to turn back. But that meant sailing against the wind; the timbers screamed and the canvas of the sails cracked like whips, and the boat tilted onto its side so that Calwyn had to grab at the cabin wall to stop herself falling.

  ‘Trout!’ Darrow’s voice was quiet, but somehow they all heard it over the roar of the wind and the fierce slapping of the waves. He was balanced in the hatchway, swaying with the ship. ‘Let Tonno have the tiller.’