by Voima
He did not like to say anything to Karin, who looked forward to seeing Roric with a joy that bordered on pain. Her face was openly eager, and her eyes looked right past him to the ocean beyond. But the message to beware of Roric suggested that something important had changed. Had he come back from the Wanderers’ realm with no back?
Three ships came into the harbor that day, but none of them bore Roric. As the sun grew lower, Karin’s eagerness became mixed with misgiving. She stared at the waves, rough under a strong wind, and kept murmuring about the Cauldron Rocks until Valmar realized that that was where her older brother’s ship had foundered.
She would not return to the castle that day even for meals, but ate the bread and cheese Valmar arranged to have brought to them while standing on the headland above the cove, straining to see into the distance. She was dressed like a queen in gold brocade, but under the imperious façade lay the terror of a girl whom Valmar longed to take in his arms and comfort.
But he did not dare. He knew that her expression had nothing to do with him. The moon was rising, when at last he took her by the elbow.
“Karin, listen to me. No more ships will arrive tonight.”
She turned toward him sharply, as though she had forgotten his presence, then clutched at him for support. “Do you think— Do you think—” He could sense all the questions she could not ask: did he think Roric’s ship had gone down, did he think Roric might have fallen overboard during the crossing, did he think Roric had been knifed in the night?
“I think he will be here tomorrow, or perhaps the next day.” He had both his arms around her, his beard in her hair, and rocked her gently as though she was a child. “You know there are not nearly as many merchant ships that cross the channel as there are that stay on this side,” he murmured reassuringly. “None of the ships we saw today came from the north. And you know that with the sea this rough the ships will postpone their crossing anyway. It may take Roric a few days to find a ship coming here—I doubt my father will lend him his! Or he may have to take passage to another of the southern kingdoms, then ride over here.”
“Then he may already be back at the castle!” cried Karin.
“No, no, of course not.” Her face was clear and pale in the moonlight before him. “You know they would have sent word. But you have already frightened your father enough. Come back home now, and be yourself again.”
“I could do it in Hadros’s court,” she murmured, mostly under her breath. “Why cannot I do it here?”
They walked slowly back toward the castle. She shivered without a cloak, so he wrapped his around both of them. His arm went around her shoulders, and hers around his waist. The west darkened, but the eastern sky was light where the nearly full moon floated. He could feel her breath warm against his neck, her softness against his side. This, he thought, was how lovers walked.
What was he going to do? If Roric was suddenly here, he would have trouble explaining that he was merely supporting her as a solicitous little brother, yet he would not care to have his foster-brother furious with him. He might be able to conceal his feelings from Karin, but could not imagine him fooled. If Roric appeared tomorrow, their brotherhood could be broken forever. Would Valmar have to fight him, either kill him or be killed himself?
Anyway, Karin loved Roric, not him. This was terrible, he thought, tightening his grip around her. One point however was clear. In the last few days he had changed his mind. He would much rather marry her than Dag or Nole.
They had walked over half the way back to the castle and could see its lights beckoning them when Valmar abruptly stopped. Karin stumbled and caught herself with both arms around his waist.
There was a third person on the path beside them.
He wore a broad-brimmed hat that hid his face from the moonlight. “I have spoken with the others, Karin Kardan’s daughter,” he said conversationally, as though his presence there was unsurprising. “We can indeed use you.”
Karin clutched at Valmar. “It’s the Wanderer,” she hissed. “The one I met on Graytop.”
He stood frozen, unable to move, while the Wanderer tilted his head as though looking toward him. “You are a long way from home, Valmar Hadros’s son. Have you perhaps been outcast?”
But Karin did not give him a chance to answer. She broke away from Valmar to whirl on the Wanderer, her fists on her hips.
“Do not come here,” she said in a low, furious voice, “picking out mortals you think you can use like someone picking out apples at a market stall. You may think you want me, but I have no use for you!”
There was a momentary silence. “This outlook will certainly make things more difficult,” the man then said dryly. “Would you like to tell me why?”
“That is why! Because you do not know anything! You make us pay a terrible price, but then do not even give us the little information we ask for that price!” Her voice was shaking, but she still had it under control.
Valmar remembered his wild surmise of what that price might have been. If she was already Roric’s even more truly than he had thought, that meant— He did not know what it meant, except that he could never ever tell her now what he felt.
“I had thought I did you a favor,” commented the man, “rather than exacting a price. And I think you tell the story wrongly—the woman was not visited by a lord of voima, but by a lord of death.”
Karin gave a half-choked cry, almost a scream. Valmar tried to take her arm, but she shook him off.
“I must say,” added the man in the broad-brimmed hat, “that your absolute commitment to what you believe helps make you appealing to us. Since we do not take mortals against their wishes, it certainly is irritating to have that stubbornness turned against us . . .”
Karin managed to answer, coherently if furiously. “Lords of voima, the great, terrible beings to whom we burn offerings! And all you do is try to make us carry out your will, without any ultimate power or knowledge of your own.”
“It bothers you that we are not all-powerful, that even we are governed by fate? I would have thought a mortal would be flattered to be asked to help at all.”
“I doubt if you have any powers at all!” Karin shot back. “I am going to live here on earth, then go to Hel when I die, and never associate with anyone but other mortals!”
“Oh, we have powers all right,” said the other, sounding amused. “I had assumed you would prefer not to see them.”
And abruptly the ground beneath their feet was gone, and they were suspended in the air over a pit of orange flames and molten rock. They swung ever so slightly back and forth, as though suspended by a thread no stronger than cobweb. A belch of hot gas broke through the lava, then suddenly the road was again solid beneath them.
Valmar and Karin clung to each other. But she had not changed her mind. “Try to frighten me all you like,” she got out between chattering teeth. “Ever since I saw you on Graytop I have not been mistress of myself. I do not belong to you, and I will not belong to you. I am Roric’s alone!”
“By the way,” said the other, “I meant to tell you. You were asking about Roric No-man’s son. He was spotted in our realm.”
“And again you do not know the real truth!” she said triumphantly, though the tears were pouring down her cheeks. “He is back under the sun, and he is coming to me even now!”
They still had not seen the man’s face. He turned his back toward them and addressed his remarks to the sky. “You certainly have courage and will, but as I say we force no one to our bidding.”
He began then to walk away, and as he walked it seemed that his feet did not touch the road, but rather that he walked on moonlight. He grew smaller and smaller as he strode on the moon’s rays up over the headland.
Valmar stared immobile after him. Karin had shoved him away, sobbing hard, when he tried to put his arms around her again.
And suddenly Valmar began to run, pounding back down the road toward the harbor. Moonlight washed all around him.
The man stopped and turned toward him.
“Wait for me!” Valmar cried. “I’m coming with you!”
CHAPTER FIVE
1
“No, of course I am all right,” said Karin to her father. She tried to stay out of the direct light to hide the tear streaks on her cheeks, but he had already seen them. “I am only upset because Valmar has left.”
“Left! But where has he gone? Has he returned home already?”
At this rate, she thought, swallowing the sobs before they could break out, she could give lessons to Queen Arane. “He has always wanted adventure, I gather, and when we were coming home from the harbor just now we ran into someone—someone I had known before—who gave him an unexpected opportunity. He had to take it immediately.”
“But to leave so suddenly— And I was growing fond of the boy—” He tipped up her face toward his with one finger under her chin, as Hadros sometimes did. “Karin! Are you sure he did not have some kind of accident that you are trying to conceal from me?”
“No! I told you, he simply left!”
“Well,” said King Kardan in wonderment, “I do hope he will be all right. What shall I tell his father?”
“I shall write to Hadros myself, next time there is a messenger or a merchant going from here to the northern kingdoms.”
She turned to retreat to her room, glad now that she had her mother’s private parlor. But her father took her arm. “Karin, I can see you are terribly upset. Are you quite sure you had not set your heart on this boy?”
“Quite sure,” she said, meeting his eyes with an effort of will.
He kept hold of her arm, studying her face. At last he said in a low voice, “Would you like to tell me what really happened? I know there was something more.”
For a second she had the terrifying sense that he suspected her of having murdered Valmar, of having pushed him over the cliff. It was that fear that made her say, even though she knew he would not believe her, “Valmar went to join the Wanderers.”
He shook his head and turned his face away. “I hope that you can learn to trust me again some day,” he said, so quietly she barely heard him.
And then she remembered something the Mirror-seer had told her. “Listen, Father!” she said, wanting to take at least some of that heart-wringing bitterness from him. “You know there is a Wanderer often seen at Graytop at twilight! Well, it’s the same one, I believe, and he—”
But Kardan looked both puzzled and alarmed. “Karin, where have you heard these stories? In all the years I have been king here, within sight of Graytop, I have never heard of a Wanderer walking there, or at least never one visible to mortal eyes.”
2
The broad-beamed merchant ship came into harbor at dusk. It had been a difficult crossing, and indeed the wind had come up so briskly that most of the other ships setting out from the north shore of the channel had soon set back into harbor. Then they had been blown far off course and had reached the southern shore of the channel nowhere near where either Roric or the merchants wanted to be. They had had to beat against the wind almost an entire extra day to reach here, and only the size of this ship had allowed it to weather the waves. Roric’s arms and hair were caked with salt.
In the final light he could see someone standing alone on the headland looking down into the harbor, someone shining like gold in the dimness.
But she could not see him.
“Well,” said the captain, once they had secured the lines, “that castle you were asking about—” And he looked straight through Roric. He shrugged. “Gone already,” he said to himself. “Good thing I had him pay in advance,” and slapped the new knife in his belt.
And then Roric did go, vaulting over the gunwale, running up the road from the sheltered little inlet where ships made harbor.
Being invisible at night had been very difficult on the ship, where he had had to crawl in between boxes of cargo each sunset to conceal his fading away. He could emerge again once it was fully dark, but always with the danger of being stepped on by the sailors. But here, he thought, invisibility would be an advantage. He would stalk Valmar, learn what Karin really thought of this marriage Hadros had planned.
But seeing her standing on the cliff alone drove jealousy, at least temporarily, from his mind. She had gotten his raven-message, then, and must have been waiting for him through the long days of contrary winds on the channel. If she was waiting for him, did this mean she did not love Valmar after all?
She had now started back toward the castle and did not hear his feet coming up behind her. “Karin,” he said urgently, getting in front of her, “surely you can see me, even between sunset and sunrise.”
She kept on walking without any response, and he got out of her way. If she touched him without being able to see or hear him, she would be terrified. He could not see her face well in the twilight but it already looked anguished.
He went at her shoulder up to the castle, longing to take her into his arms and not daring. On either side he could just see armed men walking parallel to the road, watching her. She did not appear to notice.
He looked around in amazement at the size of the castle and the intricacy of the masonry as she walked through the great doors. The warriors came in behind them.
Karin went to speak to a gray-haired, richly dressed man who must be her father. Roric prowled the candle-lit hall, stepping quietly out of instinct even though no one would hear him, looking for Valmar, catching fragments of conversation from the others there but nothing about the prince. He kept expecting to be seen when someone looked toward him, and kept feeling when they did not that his very existence was only a creation of his own mind.
There was no sign of his foster-brother. Where could he be? This was like no castle Roric had ever seen, but it seemed Valmar ought to be here in the hall if he was in the kingdom at all.
Karin then took a candle and went up a broad stone staircase, Roric hurrying to climb beside her. They passed through a wide chamber with an enormous bed in the center, then into a much smaller room. He just managed to dodge in before she shut the door in his face.
Inside, she turned the lock, set down the candle, and stood for several minutes with her face in her hands. Then she slowly undressed, dropping her luxurious clothes carelessly on the floor, unbraided her hair, and got into bed. When she snuffed the candle he could no longer see her in spite of the faint moonlight through the window, but he could hear her softly crying.
Roric clenched his fists. The woman he loved was within a few feet of him, but she might as well be a thousand miles away. She was crying because of him but he could do nothing to comfort her. All that the strange Wanderers’ realm had earned him was the inability to touch the woman he longed for.
That is, he hoped she was crying for him and not for Valmar. He shook his head hard. Since he had defied King Hadros, and since the Wanderers apparently no longer wanted him, Karin was all he had left. Besides, he thought with a grim smile, if she was crying for Valmar it might be because that prince had already had a fatal accident.
After a minute he started rubbing at the caked salt on his arms. He had not seen a bath house in the castle, and although there must be one he did not want to leave this room to try to find it. But in the corner the moonlight showed him a pitcher and basin. He pulled off his own clothing and began to wash. It felt good to clean away the sweat and salt. Karin did not hear the splashing. He used her comb on his wet hair and crossed back to the bed.
She was asleep now, the deep sleep of exhaustion. The pale light had shifted and touched her smudged cheeks and the dark hollows under her eyes. But her breathing came evenly.
After looking at her a few minutes, Roric lifted the covers and slipped in. She gave a little snort but did not waken. He settled down carefully on the far side of the bed from her.
The linen sheets were startlingly luxurious against his skin. He had not slept between sheets since before he could remember, since— But then he did remember. He had b
een very small then; it was even before Valmar was born. He had slept with King Hadros and his wife in their cupboard bed, and he could just remember the reassuring bulk of the queen when he had wakened from a nightmare.
He lay back with his hands behind his head. He was exhausted from the journey, and in a few minutes he too was fast asleep.
Sometime in the night he awoke, wondering at first where he was. Karin’s warm back was snuggled against him. He rolled over, put his face in her hair and an arm around her, and went back to sleep.
He awoke again at dawn. Karin slept on, her eyelashes long on her cheeks, her russet hair spread across the pillow. At sunrise, ever since he had returned from the Wanderers’ realm, people could see him again. He gently pulled her to him and began to kiss her cheek.
Her arms went around his neck even before she opened her eyes. Then she abruptly gasped and pulled back, realizing this was no dream, and her eyes flew open.
He watched her expression from two feet away: dismayed shock that there really was a man in her bed, then recognition and disbelief, and abruptly a joy that made her glow as brightly as the early sun. She threw herself on him and kissed him passionately.
In a moment she turned her lips from his, and he loosened his grip enough that she could lean back and look at him. “Roric! I’ve been waiting for you for so long . . .” Her smile covered her entire face, and her eyes were so intense he could barely meet them. “How did you come here?”
“I came in on the last ship into the harbor last night. You did not see me, but I followed you back to the castle.” He would explain later his invisibility at sunset. “I slipped in here with you during the night.”
She laughed and kissed him again. “My father will not be pleased with his guards! He knows I have been awaiting you and will be happy to meet you, but for you to come in unseen! It is good we are not at war if the watchmen are so careless.”