by Sharon Lee
He followed the trail, admiring its essentially linear tendency—Brethren in the lead, horse following, dainty of her footing, but clearly moving in haste, but with no attempt to conceal themselves. That seemed odd to him. Had they thought that Sian would not come after? Or had all the care gone to putting distance behind them before they went to ground? If the Brethren had a lair nearby—but would it lead a Newoman there?
It was then that he found the frizenbush, and understood the Brethren's plan.
Straight into the heart of the bush went the tracks, and so did Meri. At the hollow center, he shook his head in disgust at the wreckage of twigs and leaf, the hopelessly muddled ground, and the broken gap in the sheltering branches, already beginning to weave themselves tight.
Meri hunkered, needles sticking into his back, and considered what he saw before him. The Brethren had thought to hide them in the frizenbush, trusting it to shield them from Sian. Which it might have done though Meri thought Brume would not have been so easily fooled. Also, there was the question of Rebecca Beauvelley's cursed brightness. Even the natural dampening powers of the frizenbush might have been overcome by such a display.
He frowned down at the hopelessly churned soil. Had they found the monster hiding in the heart of the bush, waiting for prey?
No, he thought, after a moment. That rupture in the basket of branches had been made from something thrusting inward. Meri leaned forward, spying a fan of bloody drops across blue-green branches. Someone, he thought, had scored a hit. His wager was that it had been Rosamunde, though that might have been his newfound affection speaking.
He came to his feet, scrutinizing the branches for a sign of the mare's departure. A glitter of dusty gold drew his eye upward, to a long strand of brown hair caught among the needles. No need to ask to whom that belonged. Carefully, he reached up, untwisted it from the needles, and slipped it into his pouch.
"She has," he said to nothing and to no one in particular, "less wisdom than a seedling."
There was no answer, which was, he supposed, just as well.
He stepped through the branches and considered the options available to him. The end of Rosamunde's flight, he knew, and though it was probable that he should follow it, if only to be sure that the mare's idiot rider hadn't left any other ragtags of kest strewn carelessly about, it would seem that backtracking her pursuer's route would be the more . . . instructive.
It was hot.
It was always hot in this place. No matter if he sat, or walked or slept or thought, the heat did not abate.
If he wished, he could indeed produce a breeze, but it failed to cool unless he invested more of his thought and energy than he wished to give, and in the end he was just as uncomfortable for all that he was master of himself.
He had begun to wonder, recently, if this unremitting heat were a deliberate, and vital, segment of Zaldore's plan of betrayal. His preference for comfort and order were well known. Perhaps she had confused preference with need, and plotted that he would use all of his time and expend all of his kest seeking comfort, rather than rescue.
That he had turned his thoughts first to rescue proved yet again that he was Zaldore's superior, in all ways. That he had failed in his attempts to secure that rescue . . . well. He was not defeated yet.
If only it were not so hot.
He did miss his Rebecca, not only for her kest that he might draw on to his own benefit, or for the additional small comforts that she might offer, but for her naïve observation. One to whom everything was strange must naturally ask questions of an elder. And he had found Rebecca's questions—very often—illuminating. It was a matter of thought and direction.
For example! It had been he, Altimere, who had realized that the very rotation that contained the keleigh created a spiral that might be traveled by those of good fortitude and a strong mind, and since the first one or two dispatched to attempt this theory had not returned, he had gone himself to prove it.
He done much walking between the worlds. While he was not so foolish as to think that he knew the keleigh in all its changeable faces, yet in his travels there, he had seen torrent and snowstorm, wind, anomalous fogs, and, yes, heat. Nothing endured, within the keleigh; all and everything was subject to change.
This heat, changeless and unremitting . . .
He shook a kerchief out of the mist and mopped his brow, noting that he was leaning against a ralif, and trying to recall if he had caused it to be there.
That was one of the known dangers of traversing the keleigh, after all; its nature clouded not only vision, but also thought and recall.
Heat.
He was no ordinary adventurer, to have so often ventured into the other world, but a seeker after truth and insight. To some he was a philosopher. But no, that would not do. Altimere was no mere philosopher, observing and analyzing, only to write a report which was bound into a book, of interest only to other philosophers.
No, he was a creator of the first water, an artist of artifice.
He slipped his hand into his pocket, feeling for, and finding, the top he had used in his demonstration of kest and motion. Top in hand, he stood there, recalling the party, and Zaldore's interest. It seemed very long ago.
Waving his hand to inform this odd world that a glass cube now existed on the generosity of his will, he spun the top onto the cube and watched it, absorbed, thinking of the heat.
The artificers—they named themselves mechanics—of the world beyond the keleigh were fine craftsmen; he admired their ability to work with objects of stern form and gain understanding of their peculiar natures. He marveled at their ability to build new devices that were based, not on generations of lore, but on self-acquired knowledge and perception. Those mechanics and chemists and mathematicians were much closer to him in thought and practice than the courtly philosophers who never dared venture into danger to prove their cherished theories.
The top twirled slower and slower, till, at last, it toppled over.
Heat!
In that other world, he had seen demonstrations, theoretical and practical, regarding the nature and workings of heat. Heat was the key to moving things, heat was the key to melting things. Heat could be added, but the act of compression could also produce heat. Constraining and shrinking the room available to a gas concentrated it, and made it hot.
Sometimes, to the point of explosion.
Now he snatched up the top, now he grabbed away the table of glass, now he stared into the mist, recalling experiments going well, recalling the glorious explosive failure of the steam wagon.
He sat down at the base of the ralif.
There was not one wall between freedom and himself, but two.
Zaldore had much to answer for.
The monster's trail was more subtle than he had expected, given its entirely unsubtle attack on Rosamunde. Meri followed with interest, marveling at the creature's lightness of foot. Perhaps it had assistance?
"The Low Fey who were partners in the attack against the Gardener and her allies," he said to the trees. "Are they known to the trees?"
There was silence while he backtracked his quarry around a clutter of brush and low-growers.
Such arise from time to time, Ranger, a culdoon said diffidently. The eldest think their kind is recent and not well rooted.
This was hardly useful, but culdoon were not wise. And it was notable, Meri thought, that it was one of the lesser trees who had made answer, while the great ones remained silent.
"Thank you," he said. "It would be . . . of interest of me, to hear when the trees next notice another branch of this Low Fey."
We will watch, Ranger, the culdoon promised, which Meri knew that it would do, until it forgot.
The ground sheltered by the low-growers was damp; Meri clearly saw the imprint of the monster's hooves, growing more defined for the next half-dozen steps, as if it had leapt in and landed hard—
From nowhere.
Meri stopped, staring at the ground. Directly befor
e him the hoofprints were carved into the damp soil, precisely as if the monster he backtracked had leapt down from a height, and landed firm, an illusion made more compelling by the fact that there were no prints, nor any other sign of passage beyond.
He cast along the angle, looking up, but there were no trees in the proper place or of necessary height to produce those prints. The wood here had given over to low-growth for a space, as if there had been a fire, or—
A gleam of silver beyond the bowing fronds of a tall weed captured his eye. His belly froze, but he forced himself to creep forward, as if stalking dangerous game, and keeping the good green of living plants all about him.
There, only a few steps past those green fronds under which he now sheltered, was the flat shine of silver against the air, and the cold sense of something neither alive nor decently dead.
Meri shuddered. The . . . apparition hovered twice his height above the floor of the forest—a flat rectangle of dead air, boiling with languid grey mists.
It was, he thought, glancing behind him for another look at that first, impossible pair of hoofprints, high enough to account for their angle and depth.
Meri sat back on his heels and closed his eye.
"Did they—the Low Fey—accompany the beast out of this . . . thing . . . ?"
Yes, Ranger, the culdoon answered. They rode on its back.
"Is that object—of—the keleigh?"
There was no answer.
Meri opened his eye, glaring at the rectangle. Its edges seemed to be becoming less . . . definite, smokier, and he had a moment's dread, that the mists it enclosed would, unconfined, pour free out into the unsuspecting wood.
The edges continued to fade, and the mists, as well, until—abruptly—it was gone, leaving behind a disagreeable taint on the air.
"How," Meri asked the wood about him, "am I to ward against that?"
There was no answer.
After a time, he rose and, taking care with it, crafted a simple repulsion ward. He reasoned that it did no good to spend a great deal of kest—even had he a great deal of kest to expend—to ward a road that faded in and out, and might never manifest in this exact location again.
When the ward was in place, and he had rested, he spoke to the wood.
"It would assist me, a Ranger in the service of the trees," he said formally, "if I were informed of the manifestation of such beasts and Low Fey as attacked the Gardener yestereve."
His words echoed slightly, as if they traveled a great distance. Meri waited, and at last came the thin, papery voice of a very old elitch, indeed.
We will be vigilant on your behalf, Ranger.
Violet had decreed tea and bustled off to make it, leaving Becca blessedly, if temporarily, alone on the bench beneath the bitirrn tree to overlook the garden.
It was a pleasant place, with neat rows of cultivated herbs, clusters of vegetables, and a border of mary's gold; winberige grew with abandon over a low arbor, heavy fruit nestled amid alternating leaves of dark green and parchment. The air was a-buzz with honeybees, and gay with flutterwisps, their wings almost as brilliant as Nancy's.
Becca sighed. Though she had been long months in the Vaitura, the mingled dry leaves and green among clusters of the same plant struck her eye—and her Gardener's heart—as wrong.
"Was the Vaitura always without seasons?" she asked, expecting no answer, nor did she receive one for the space of time it took a flutterwisp to drink its fill from a mary's gold bloom and rise on the back of the sweet breeze.
There were seasons, a voice—a very old voice, so it seemed to Becca—said laboriously. There were seasons, and great storms of rain, and lightning, and snow.
"Why did it change, then?" she asked, when it seemed clear that the tree was not about to speak further.
It changed . . . the old voice wavered, as if uncertain of the meaning of either her question or its answer. It changed, it said again, more definitively.
"But something must have precipitated it," Becca argued. "Change does not simply occur."
A light step and the clink of pottery warned her. She pressed her lips firmly together. It would not do to be seen talking to herself, she thought.
"Thank you," she said, as Violet Moore set a cup on the bench next to her. She picked it up so the girl would have room to sit, and sipped cautiously.
She smiled as the simple taste cleansed her mouth: fremoni tea, sweetened with honey. Comfort in a cup, as Sonet had used to say.
"Well," the girl said, with a brightness that sounded forced to Becca's ear. "What do you think of our garden, Healer?"
"I think it a very fine basic medicinal garden," Becca said truthfully. "All of the healer's friends are present, saving those—such as marisk, cadmyon, and corish root—that do not thrive under cultivation. I wonder . . ." She paused, and sipped her tea, considering the sudden thought. But really, she said to herself, why not?
"I wonder," she continued, "if I might plant something of my own here?"
Violet opened her eyes wide. "I don't see why not," she said, and without a doubt the bright tone was forced. "After all, this is your garden."
Rosamunde's trail was considerably less subtle than that of the monster which pursued her. She had simply attempted to outrun her attacker, and thus preserve her rider's life. Meri could hardly fault her; indeed, the simple strategy might have served her well, had she been a full Fey horse, rather than a quarter-breed accustomed to the very different horrors that prevailed on the Newmen side of the keleigh.
Or, if she had been pursued by a creature bound to the laws of the land.
He marked the moment that the monster left off its pursuit; it had paused, and sunk back on its haunches, the action driving its hooves deeper into the ground, and from that ungainly position it had leapt, small stones and crumbs of soil rolling away from the scars in the ground.
Afraid of what he might see, Meri nonetheless sighted along the line of that jump, but if there had been a similar fog-filled rectangle overhead last evening, it had since dissipated.
Unsettled, he continued, following Rosamunde's trail alone, now, until he came to the place where they had been beset, the enemy that should have fallen behind suddenly appearing at the fore.
He stood there for a dozen heartbeats, surveying the scene, the torn trees and trampled ground a fitting setting for the monster that his arrow had dropped not a hand's span from Rosamunde's front hooves.
The monster was not where he had left it. He had not, by this time, expected that it would be.
In the interests of thoroughness, he searched the area until he found the place where it had leapt into reality again, and he searched again, with his back against a ralif tree, for any untoward workings or unclaimed kest, but all he found was another strand of Rebecca Beauvelley's pretty hair, sparkling gold among the disordered grasses.
He untangled it and and put it with the other one in his pouch, his thoughts on darker matters. Deliberately, he crossed back to the ralif and put his back against its trunk.
"There was the carcass of a beast here," he murmured, tipping his head back and closing his eye.
Ranger, there was. It went to mist. They all do.
"All?" Meri opened his eyes in startlement. "How many have there been?"
Ranger—across how many sunrises? The elders believe that they have become more common.
"Will it aid anything to set wards here?"
There was a pause, not long enough for him to grow restive.
The elders believe that a simple ward, such as you have constructed once this day, will suffice. A much shorter pause, then, You may draw upon my kest for the working, Ranger.
Meri sighed.
"Thank you," he said softly, regretting the necessity, yet unable to deny the need.
He centered himself carefully, brought the image of the ward to the front of his mind, and drew a green draught of the ralif's kest. His blood sparkled, the air tasted of brandy, and the wind filled his ears with seductive music
. The image of the ward faded, and he panicked, terrified that he had drawn more than he could administer in his reduced state.
Will is the master of power, his mother's voice told him sternly from memory. Apply your will, Meri Wooden Head, or learn to enjoy subjection.
He took a deep, intoxicating breath, and concentrated his will. The ward wavered to the front of his thought; he touched it with the tree's rich kest—and shouted wordlessly as it blazed into actuality, spitting green fire; shouting dismay and distress.
Meri shook his head, not terribly surprised to find himself on his knees. He pushed to his feet, shivering in the absence of the tree's power, and made an unsteady bow.