by Karen Miller
Of course he’d guess. Barl Lindin’s brother was an astute young man. She silenced him with a warning glance.
Lord Atheling, now representing the Seventh and Eleventh districts, looked down his high-bridged nose and sneered. “Speak plainly, my lady,” he said, flirting with insolence. “These riddles of yours grow tiresome.”
Unintimidated, Dreen gave the man stare for stare. “Plainly, then, my lord, I say that every mage in Dorana should pack as much as he and she can carry, and retreat to a safe haven beyond our borders until the magical instability subsides.”
A heartbeat of shocked silence, and then the chamber erupted in protest. Unsurprised, Venette watched Dreen let the furious shouting wash over her… for a time. And then she slapped both palms hard to the table and pushed to her feet.
“Control yourselves!” she said loudly. “This caterwauling helps no-one.”
Raggedly, the dismayed councillors let their tongues run dry. One by one Dreen looked at them, her eyes icy with disdain.
“This is a terrible thing, I know, but the harsh truth is now staring us in the face. We flee… or we perish. Which shall it be?”
Dorana’s General Council chooses to flee…
The choice is not made easily, nor swiftly, nor with any kind of joy. Nor does every mage in Dorana agree with the Council’s decree. Father turns on son, mother on daughter. Brother and sister fly at each other’s throats. Husband and wife clench their fists and turn away, unforgiving. Ravaged by terror and mage-mist, Dorana falls apart. No Council can hold together what blind arrogance has destroyed.
Unchecked, the mage-mist creeps across Dorana’s unwarded borders. The princes and potentates of the magickless nations regard the blight with furious dismay. The mages of Dorana have proven themselves false. Now countless lives are on the brink of ruin.
They send their warriors into blighted Dorana.
Word of this disaster reaches Elvado. The warriors of Brantone and Trindek and Ranoush and Feen and Manemli are chanting Death to all mages! as they ride with drawn swords and spears ready to kill. In their wake they leave bodies, and silence.
At last run out of time, Venette Martain and Dreen Brislyn accept they cannot wait until every mage agrees to abandon their home. Those who would run will run… and those who cling stubbornly to denial of Dorana’s dire predicament, or who simply cannot face the terrible unknown, will remain to take their chances against the swords and spears and blight.
“I cannot tell you where we will fetch up,” Venette Martain tells the anxious crowd crammed into Elvado’s central plaza. “Or how long it will take us to get there. I can only tell you what I believe… that we will find a safe haven. And that once we are far enough from Dorana our magework will return to us, and when it does we will find a way back and heal what is so sick. This is not the end. Dorana will rise again to greatness.”
Barl wants to take Morgan with them. She is shouted down, loudest of all by her brother. Defeated, Barl falls silent. She cannot stay behind, for her magework is needed. She agrees to abandon her love.
But she weeps when she is alone, afraid she will never see him again.
Though she wears a bold face in public, in private Venette is also afraid. She fears the angry princes and potentates will not relent until every man, woman and child of Dorana is dead. She fears there might be no safe place where its mages can catch their breath… and that even if they do find a haven, by then there will be no Dorana left to heal.
Confiding in Dreen Brislyn, she learns her fears are shared. And so they decide they must take as much of Dorana with them as can safely be carried: books and scrolls of magic, of history, seeds from their most precious and beloved plants, paintings and other artworks, squares of stained glass. Representatives from each First Family that has decided to leave are called to a privy meeting and asked to help the General Council bear this grave burden. If each trusted mage carries a little, then a great deal can be saved.
The First Families agree.
The General Council convenes for the last time in swiftly decaying Elvado’s beautiful Hall of Knowledge. The mages of Dorana cannot flee north, for beyond the northern borders of Brantone and Feen there is naught but wilderness, bleak and inhospitable. They cannot seek safety beyond the east or west coasts, for Dorana is landlocked with no tradition of the sea. Nor will they find comfort in the lands of their immediate neighbours, whose warriors ride towards them with innocent blood on their hands. Dorana’s mages have but one choice: they must flee south. In fleeing south, only Manemli will stand between them and the unblighted lands of Vharne, Iringa and mysterious Benbarsk. In one of those three nations they will surely find respite.
The terrible exodus begins.
Within a day, they are dying from mage-mist. There is no time for funerals. The dead are left behind. Thousands of mages struggle and straggle across blighted Dorana, bewildered by these unimaginable events. Their bludgeoning fear is a blessing. It makes them docile, and easier to lead.
Soaked in grief and guilt, Barl rides in a pony cart, desperately working on the magics they will need to escape, letting her brother and Venette Martain and Dreen Brislyn and the General Council shepherd the frightened mages of Dorana towards the unknown.
The princes and potentates command many warriors, but not enough to encompass Dorana’s entire border. Imperfectly shielded by Barl’s blurring magics, the fleeing mages cross into northern Manemli, where blight has chased the inhabitants south. The General Council decides they will seek shelter in Vharne. Though its people are warriors, they are kindlier than the Iringans. Surely they will understand the mages of Dorana mean no harm.
But the very old, the very young, the sick and infirm, they travel too slowly. The princes and potentates’ pursuing warriors find them before they reach the border with Vharne. Terrified, the mages try to defend themselves with magework. Blood is spilled on both sides.
And in spilling warrior blood with magic, Dorana’s mages seal their fate.
Chased and chivvied and harried, they are scattered like pigeons by the falcon as it stoops to strike. With wildfire word spreading of the warriors killed by magework, warriors of Vharne and Iringa sharpen swords and spears and join the hunt. Every hand is raised against Dorana’s mages. No kindness, no mercy, no impulse to forgive. They have proven themselves the enemy. Nothing Doranen can be trusted. The only good mage is a dead mage… and mages can die.
In the weeks that follow, Dorana’s homeless are hunted out of the lands that once welcomed their magework and paid good coin for the privilege of its possession. The weakest perish, the strong survive. They are a proud people reduced to beggary, to the startlement of rabbits. They are hunted into Benbarsk, where the princes and potentates fear to tread. Benbarsk is a harsh land, as deadly as any sword or spear. Its reclusive people are unfriendly, suspicious of the outside world. Vharne and Iringa know better than to rile them.
So the princes and potentates reach an agreement: warriors of every nation will line the Benbarsk border, keeping the hated mages safely penned. Let Benbarsk finish what they were forced to start. Let Dorana die there, in that strange, brutal land.
Let it be forgotten… and good riddance.
One by one, in the brutal aftermath of flight, the trapped mages of Dorana find each other in Benbarsk’s wilderness. Thin and ragged, they come together to count the cost of their flight. So many left behind. So many dead. But they have their magework and their memories. Not all is lost.
They look to Venette Martain, Barl Lindin, her brother Remmie and Dreen Brislyn for leadership. They despair of ever seeing Dorana again. They look around them at the rich emptiness that is Benbarsk, and wonder. Could this be their new home? Could Dorana be reborn here?
And then Barl has a dream…
Snared in his beloved’s perfidy, trapped by her poisoned love, Morgan pursues his escape with a bitter, dogged patience. Though he is trapped, cocooned in magic, bound and bound again, still there are tears in him. Still he
can weep. He weeps when he’s not screaming. He screams when he can no longer weep.
You left me. You left me. Barl, my love, how could you? You bitch, you slut, you treacherous whore.
He can feel her, of course. There is nowhere beneath the sun that she can run to where he’ll not feel her. Won’t find her. Will fail to know. And when he breaks free of her binding… when he is once more a man…
You will say you’re sorry. You will… apologise… to me.
Through Barl’s fading incants he can feel Dorana’s writhing, rotting anguish. The unbalanced magics lash like a wounded snowcat’s tail. But he can use them. They feed him. They make him stronger with every slow breath. In binding him, Barl has freed him. In being bound, he’s found himself.
My love, without meaning to you have done me a favour.
But that does not mean she is forgiven. Oh, no.
Nursing his strength, coddling his fury, Morgan pursues his escape.
Chapter Thirty-five
Brimful of foreboding, unable to sleep, Jervale left his wife snoring and slipped outside their crumbling mud brick cottage to wait for dawn. Lur’s night sky was cruelly clear, not even a hint of cloud… and no moisture in the air, either. Underfoot, the dead grass made a helpless, crackling sound. Three years, was it, since the last spit of rain had fallen on the cottage’s roof? No. Longer than that. Closer to four, by now. Must be. He’d given up properly counting. Too sad a pastime, that was. Not that he had any right to complain. Other hamlets had been rainless almost twice as long. In these dry, dispirited days his wet childhood felt like a dream.
As he pottered down the starlit cart track to his favourite rock by the good-as-dead creeklet, passing his neighbours’ unlit mud-brick dwellings, he caught the low, fretful wail of Tam and Rinna’s new baby. Poor little mite. It’d be dead soon. He’d seen it. But he’d not told Tam and Rinna, for what was the point? Knowing wouldn’t save their baby. There was no medicine could save a sickly life born too soon. Besides, like most folk, Tam and Rinna wanted to live in hope.
Grunting only a little bit, surefooted in the near dark, he climbed the weathered lump of sandstone that was the best fishing vantage point above the creeklet. Used to be, anyway, back when there was water. And fish. Twice a man’s height, in daylight it let him see all the way down to the creeklet’s lazy bend on the hamlet’s western edge. Looking t’other way, with eyes shaded he’d see east to the cliff above Fogget’s ravine.
Settling his bony arse onto the rock, he shivered. The cliff. Eleven days since Ma Gammil had pitched herself off it, to smash herself to pieces at the bottom. Why hadn’t he seen that coming? He’d have stopped her jumping, if he had.
But no. Aside from a quick glimpse of that poor little baby, all he’d seen for weeks now was the starved, terror-pinched faces of the strangers with pale yellow hair, who climbed over the mountains dragging death behind them. The strangers he’d dreamed as a small boy, who he’d not dreamed again ’til three round moons ago.
Now he dreamed them every night, snatches and flashes of other lives, other places. He dreamed a beautiful city fallen into decay. Terrible winged creatures with eyes that used to be human. A young woman and an older man, their long hair sunlight golden, their eyes startling blue as they pulled fire from thin air. He wept when he dreamed them, for the love and the loss.
His belly rumbled, complaining. He ignored it. What kind of father filled his own belly and left his child’s empty? Tilda was a growing girl. They’d buried three babes before she was born. He and Bene were agreed. No matter what they suffered, their daughter would survive the grinding hard times that had Lur beaten to its knees and whimpering.
She has to survive. For she’s like me, my Tilly, and Lur needs her to live.
He couldn’t say why he was so certain of that. He only knew he was, that the feeling was a lot more than a father’s love for his child… and that if he ignored his quiet, insistent, inner voice he might as well pitch himself off the cliff.
The waning night was so silent. Lur’s drought had killed a lot of birds. It was slowly killing everything. He didn’t need his dreams to know that. He was an Olken, born hearing the earth’s song… and the earth had stopped singing. It was weeping now. Wailing. And not even Lur’s best earth-singers knew a lullaby to soothe it.
Why can’t I dream a lullaby, instead of these strangers?
As he sat on his sandstone rock, waiting for the future to become the present, he watched the stars fade and the sun rise. Looked down into the parched creeklet, counting skeleton fish and dry rocks. Last of all he looked north, to the smudge of mountains on the distant horizon. He’d dreamed them, too. Dreamed them shimmering and golden, filled with a power that stole his breath. They didn’t have a name. They were simply the mountains. No-one knew what lay beyond their high jagged peaks. No-one cared to find out. The Olken weren’t an adventurous people. They lived small and peaceful lives.
At least we used to. But that’s about to change.
He might not know exactly how, but he was certain it would be soon. The crawling sensation between his shoulder blades never lied. The leaping pulse of his blood, that was a truth-teller, too. Lur was about to get itself tipped topsy-turvy. As fervently as ever he wished for rain, he wished he was wrong, but he wasn’t. The things he saw came true. Always. That was his curse.
Tilly laughed when he walked into the mud brick cottage’s kitchen, and waved her little spoon at him. The old whittled wood was yellow with egg.
“Pa! Pa! There you are, Pa!”
“Yes, there you are, Pa,” said Bene, half-smiling, half-frowning, seated beside their daughter at the weathered wooden table. “And where have you been?”
As always, his heart skipped when he saw his wife. Twenty-one summers had passed since the first time, at the winter fair the year he turned nineteen, but he still felt like a young lad tumbling headfirst into love. It upset her when he slipped away while she slept. His dreams upset her. It was hard for her, knotted with a man who oft could see what would be more clearly than what was. He’d long ago told her what he waited for. He and Bene had no secrets. But Tilly was a bright child, and he didn’t want to alarm her.
“Counting crickets,” he said lightly, and kissed Tilly’s cheek three times, noisy fat splutters that made her kick and squeal. “Is there egg for me?”
He and Bene shared a small, scrambled yolk, and drank hot potle tea. Tilly guzzled goat’s milk, coaxed from the hamlet’s little flock. A good thing goats were hardy. The last milkless cow had been butchered weeks ago, for its stringy meat and thin blood.
A knock on the cottage’s front door just as breakfast finished had Tilly squealing again. It was Fern, Mag’s youngest, who minded the hamlet’s little ones during the long, hot days while their parents toiled to keep everyone alive.
“Jervale?” With Tilly safely gone to play with her friends, Bene stopped pretending. She dropped their spoons in the drawer then folded her arms. “Is it happening? What you’ve been dreaming? Is that why you couldn’t sleep?”
Feeling wretched, he tipped grease-stained scouring sand out of the fry pan and into its wooden pail on the end of the kitchen bench. “I reckon so.”
Her brown eyes wide with trepidation, Bene sat on the rickety kitchen stool. “Oh, Jervale. What are you going to do?”
He’d been thinking about that. He wasn’t ready to tell anyone else what he knew. They’d never believe him… and even if they did, it wouldn’t make a difference. He was bound up in this, as a bone was bound in muscle. The dreams were his. And so was the saving of Lur.
“Well,” he said slowly, knowing Bene wouldn’t like it, “when word comes from the Black Woods that these yellow-haired folk have appeared, there’ll be a call to council. I’ll put my hand up to speak for the hamlet. It’s a long cart ride to the mountains. Merrin won’t want to go.”
“So you’ll go?” Bene twisted her fingers in her lap. “And then what? Jervale, what can you do about these folk?”
Her lips trembled. “You’re needed here.”
She understood how important this was. She wasn’t really trying to stop him. He kissed her fingers, then her trembling lips. “We’ve a little time yet. I’ll work hard ’til then, I promise. I’ll make this up to you, Bene. I won’t leave you wanting.”
Her laugh had weeping in it. “Jervale, you always leave me wanting. Too much of you is never enough.”
Suffocated with love for her, he crushed her close to his chest. And then they joined their friends and neighbours in the hamlet’s struggling fields, where they foraged and toiled and charmed survival from the weeping land.
Three days later, the hamlet’s elder, Merrin, called everyone to the hall.
“Something’s happened,” the old man said, his voice quavering. “There’s word come through the stone.” His gnarled fingers touched the chiming crystal that kept Lur’s far-flung hamlets and villages connected. “Strangers have come into Lur, from over the mountains.”
Theirs was a small community. One hundred and twelve folk didn’t quite fill the meeting hall… but they made a lot of noise when they were taken by surprise. Seated two bench rows from the front, Jervale took Bene’s callused hand and dropped a kiss to Tilly’s dark head.
“Settle now, settle,” Merrin said, waving them quiet. “And I’ll tell you what I’m told. They’ve travelled a long way, these strangers, from far, far to the north. Their homeland fell into a sickness, worse even than our drought. If they wanted to live, they had to flee. So they did. Now it’s our help they’re asking for.”
Murmurs and mutterings as the hamlet’s folk shifted restless in their seats. Lur was a land apart, and the Olken liked it that way.
“Are they saying there ain’t other folk beyond the mountains to lend a hand?” That was Mag, ever the first to speak. “Sounds odd to me, that does. And how did they cross the mountains, Merrin? Everyone knows they ain’t passable.”