Changer of Days

by Alma Alexander

  Anghara, after a quiet and peaceful night, felt fresh and rested, sharp, quickened. More alive, somehow, than she had felt for…for almost as long as she could remember. “I won’t be a minute,” she said. “Is there anything for breakfast?”

  Kieran couldn’t hide his surprise, but it lasted only a split second, to be replaced by a smile of real pleasure. “I’ll have them prepare something downstairs,” he said, tossing his damp towel over the back of a fragile-looking chair which stood in the corner of their room. “I’ll meet you down there.”

  Anghara combed out the tangled chaos of her bright hair with the comb a Kheldrini woman had given her, a long time ago, when she had woken to vision on a cool desert night. That, too, had been saved for her, tucked securely into the package Adamo had rescued from the wreckage of Calabra and her homecoming. Perhaps it was asking for trouble, using something so fraught with memories, but Anghara resolutely closed her mind to all but the most prosaic of the comb’s attributes. She washed her face, pulled her travelling dress straight at her waist, and went downstairs.

  The common room was largely empty. Kieran was waiting with a dish piled with hot food, and she stopped in the doorway, laughing. “I couldn’t eat all of that even in the days when I could swallow a proper breakfast!”

  “You mightn’t want it, but I do,” he said. “It’s for both of us. There’s hard bargaining ahead.”

  Anghara giggled. She felt strange, light, as though she had shed years and was a little girl again. “What’s he like, our friend Borre?” she asked, mimicking Kieran’s own voice of earlier that morning.

  Kieran thought for a moment. “A trader,” he said at last, lowering his voice, “to his marrow. I would not be in the least surprised if he hasn’t sealed a bargain or two with Khelsies in his time although I’m far from sure on which side of the mountains that was, and he’d die rather than admit to anything. Still, he seems to know something about a passage—it seems there’s a singing rock not too far north of here, and that’s where the pass starts…”

  “A singing rock?” echoed Anghara blankly.

  Kieran shrugged. “That’s what he said last night. He was quite drunk at the time, but he seemed to be making a bizarre sort of sense.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Not as far as I could smell him, although that’s probably quite a distance. But an old trader doesn’t offer his secrets on a platter. Still—it’s a beginning.”

  They finished their breakfast and walked out into the morning; for all that it was still the dawn of spring, here on the edge of the Shaymir desert the trembling heat of summer already shimmered in the air. There was a corral at the far end of the village, partly shaded against the sun by a raised roof of thatch. Borre was bent over a camel’s foot, scowling furiously as he looked up at the sound of footsteps. The old trader schooled his face into what passed for a smile at his customers’ approach. This was a frightening sight; what teeth remained in his mouth, where they weren’t black with decay, were stained a poisonous yellow by a lengthy and intimate relationship with the strong Shaymir tobacco.

  “Well, if it isn’t my young friend from last night,” he said, his accent the flattest Anghara had yet heard, leaving her on the edge of comprehension.

  “Have you checked the horses?” Kieran asked, leaning casually on the corral fence.

  “Aye, my man looked them over this morning,” Borre said. “Two are sound enough, but the third seems lame…it might have a bearing on the price…”

  “It’s nothing a few days’ rest wont cure, and you know it. What have you to offer us?”

  Borre glanced toward a knock-kneed beast drooping disconsolately in the shade of the corral’s thatched roof, but changed his mind abruptly as he noticed a sardonic expression cross Kieran’s face. The old trader cleared his throat. “The two yonder might do you,” he said, indicating a pair of animals standing together close to the bar of the corral fence, chewing placidly at a mouthful of fodder.

  Kieran slipped underneath the fence pole and into the corral, and Anghara walked round on the outside until they were on a level. The camels watched Kieran’s approach with lofty disdain. “I haven’t had that much to do with bargaining for camels lately,” Kieran said in a low voice as he stopped before the two beasts. “I’ve long forgotten what I used to know about them.”

  “The one on the left looks old,” Anghara said softly. “Look at their teeth…and be careful, some of them have a nasty habit of trying to take a piece out of you if you give them a chance.”

  “This one has teeth as bad as yours,” Kieran called back to Borre after he had obeyed these instructions. “How long do you think he’d survive if you put a load on his back?”

  “Oh, they’re hardy beasts…” Borre began.

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Kieran. “Have you any others?”

  It took a while, but eventually Kieran found himself the owner of three reasonably sound camels for the price of three horses and a further handful of Roisinani coppers. Borre wasn’t entirely happy, but he was content—he planned to go south soon, and he could unload the horses there for more than he could hope to gain on the handful of camels he had in hand.

  “Where might you be going with these, then?” he asked after they had shaken hands on the bargain. “What might you be looking for in the desert with the summer coming on?”

  “Nothing you could make a profit on, friend,” Kieran said with a laugh. He deliberately refrained from mentioning his conversation with the old trader in the common room the night before, waiting to see if Borre would bring it up.

  “If you’re planning on running as far north as the Staren Pan, you’d best be warned—the wells are low this year,” Borre offered, his face studiously blank.

  “There’s always water in the mountains,” said Kieran, countering this chess move with one of his own.

  Borre nodded sagely, as though he understood everything. “Rock and stone,” he murmured, “rock and stone.” He patted the neck of one of his camels proprietorially. “They’ll be all right, as long as there’s sweet red sand waiting for them in the end.”

  Anghara’s eyes flashed at this, and then she hooded them again, veiling them with her eyelashes. She had never seen the Shaymir desert, but to her red sand meant only one place, what al’Tamar had lovingly called Harim Khajir’i’id, the red desert of north Kheldrin. Once it would have been easy to hide her feelings, pulling a concealing cloak of Sight around her; now she had to fight her beating heart and will the color from her cheeks without the help of her gifts.

  She turned away, hearing Kieran’s voice as if from a great distance as he made the arrangements for the camels to be delivered to the tavern when Borre’s man came to collect the horses and their tack. The joy of that morning had somehow gone out of her, replaced with…she couldn’t put a name to it, a sense of expectation, of dread, even fear. Without in any way being of it, it felt like…Sight.

  “They’ll bring us saddles and bridles when they bring the camels, a straight exchange for our own tackle.” Kieran slipped out of the corral again beside her. “What is it? You’re so white…”

  She took his arm. “I don’t know,” she said slowly, her eyes wide. “I can’t help feeling that something’s about to…”

  “Kieran!”

  “…happen!” Anghara finished, whirling in the direction from which the soft female voice had come.

  Kieran had done the same, even more quickly, hand already on the pommel of his sword. But even as he turned there had been an incredulous recognition on his face. He knew that voice, although he hadn’t heard it for years…

  “Keda?”

  “Kieran…Anghara…I thought you were dead…”

  Anghara’s eyes were wide and staring, but it was she who made the first connection. What was it the landlord had said…visiting singers in his other room…husband and wife…“The singers in the other guestroom in the tavern,” she gasped.

  “You’re married?” Kieran a
sked softly, sadly, making the leap himself. “I didn’t know…”

  “Oh, Kieran…” Keda’s eyes filled with tears. “I wanted to tell you…I wanted you at my wedding…having a brother for an outlaw isn’t easy. I know you vanish to make it difficult for Sif to trace you, but I lose you as well. There have been times I haven’t known if you were alive or dead…” She stepped up to her brother and folded him into a fierce embrace; Kieran buried his face in her hair, closing his eyes, and brother and sister stood for a moment in silence. Then Keda disentangled herself, keeping hold of one of his hands and tugging at him like a child. “Come on,” she said, and her voice was pure joy, “I want you to meet Shev…and you must tell me what you are doing here…” She turned and smiled at Anghara, reaching out with her other hand. “You’ve grown…but you’re so thin, so pale…When word came of what happened to Bresse, I mourned you, and the Lady Morgan…did she escape?”

  “No,” said Anghara, dropping her eyes.

  She heard Keda suck in her breath in sudden comprehension, in compassion, in pity. “Did you ever…go home?” she asked.

  Kieran laughed, a short, harsh laugh. “Oh yes,” he said. “We found it rather hard to escape the hospitality of Miranei at the last.”

  There was something deep here, and Keda sensed it, threw up her own guard. “Not here,” she said, squeezing the two hands she held, one in each of her own. “Come, let’s go back to the tavern. Shev will be waiting for me. It’s all right, you can trust him,” she added swiftly, noticing Anghara’s eyes quickly seek Kieran’s face. “Oh, come—we have to sing in the tavern tonight, it’s part of the bargain with the landlord—and there’s so much…How long are you staying?”

  “We were hoping to leave within two days,” Kieran said, falling into step beside her.

  “So soon…”

  The next questions were obvious—what were the two of them, deposed queen and Roisinani outlaw, doing together here in Shaymir, and where were they headed? But Keda had already schooled herself against asking anything more here in the street. And Anghara, who had been desperately fighting to keep at bay a flood of old memories, finally failed. Her vision faded into a buzzing whiteout; she stumbled at her next step and would have fallen had Kieran, with some strange sixth sense, not reached out with a supporting hand. Here were the last three survivors of Anghara’s first wild brush with her power; there was a link somewhere, a link she could not deny, but one which carried oblivion in its wake—an oblivion rooted deep in Sight, whose touch was now so dangerous to her. She couldn’t seem to make her legs obey; walking was completely beyond her. Kieran lifted her up without another word and carried her back to the tavern.

  Keda, Kieran’s true sister, flinched when Kieran mentioned their destination—was there nothing on this side of the mountains that could help Anghara? Were they sure? But, again like Kieran, once she accepted the necessity she did so in a deeply practical way. Her husband Shev hailed from the deep desert; Keda pumped him for any information which could help the two voyagers.

  “I’ve never been to Kheldrin,” he said, holding up both hands in mock self-defense, “but I know a song about a Khelsie caravan and a singing rock…”

  “Singing rock?” said Kieran sharply, turning his head. “Borre mentioned something about a singing rock last night. What is this place?”

  “I passed it once, on my way south,” said Shev. “It isn’t a place I’d have wanted a closer look at. Nobody has said anything definite about it in terms of a passage to anywhere—but there is a song about it…and singers often cast into song truths they don’t wish to discuss out loud.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose nervously with his hand. “I’ve seen Khelsies but once,” he said slowly, “a handful who seemed to have done the impossible—they emerged from the Staren Pan in broad daylight, and were alive to tell about it. They spoke our language—after a fashion. But I dreamed of them after, and they were not pleasant dreams. There is something truly…alien…about that folk.”

  “No more than we seem alien to them,” said Anghara, who had recovered enough to join the conversation.

  Shev gazed at her with something like awe. “To live with them for two years…I don’t think I could have done it.”

  “Are you sure…” began Keda again, twisting her fingers together.

  “There is no other way,” said Anghara quietly, but with an iron conviction.

  Shev took a deep breath. “Then,” he said levelly, “I will show you the way.”

  7

  It had taken many words—some harsh, at the last, spoken in private between husband and wife—but in the end it was arranged. Keda would stay behind in the tavern, discharging their responsibility to the landlord until Shev returned…and Shev would ride with Kieran and Anghara, guiding them to the singing rock.

  They reached the landmark in three days. The wind and the sand had sculpted a stone obelisk with a narrow oval eye at the top, an opening which drew a constant sighing wail from the wind threading through. That sound, the otherworldly lament of the wind, had been a travelling companion for some time before they sighted the rock itself, and Anghara had hated it. Kieran could see her shuddering every so often in the high saddle on her camel. Now he could see the imprint of Kheldrin on her, the easy balance of a rider used to the jolting rhythm of the desert beasts—and wondered at it. But Anghara, whom the sound took inexorably back to Khar’i’id and the memory of Gul Qara, didn’t trust herself to tell him the story. Not here. Not yet. Not after every promise of Gul Qara seemed to have been buried in the dungeons of Miranei.

  She was doing very little to guide her mount, and when Shev’s and Kieran’s stopped, next to the eye-stone, Anghara’s lurched to a standstill beside them with a disgruntled comment. Anghara looked up briefly. “Here?”

  “So the song says,” Shev said. Despite the levity of his tone, his face was drawn and serious. For him, the shadows in the gray rocks beyond were full of staring golden eyes.

  Kieran hesitated; this was the point beyond which mistakes became deadly, and he knew very little about what lay ahead. He had to take too many things on trust—on trust, or not at all. But after that brief hesitation he lifted his head and his eyes sparkled with determination. This, upon reflection, seemed as good a place as any to plunge into the unknown. “Well, here goes,” he muttered, casting a yearning glance toward the familiar land they were leaving, whose chief attraction quite possibly lay in the fact it was not Kheldrin.

  Shev leaned over to lay a hand on Kieran’s arm. “Be careful, your sister could not bear to lose you again.”

  Kieran grimaced. He planned to be as careful as he could, under the circumstances. He wished he had more idea of what he had to be careful about. “We will,” he said aloud, choosing not to bring up his misgivings with Shev. “Take care of Keda.”

  “You sound as though you don’t mean to come back.”

  “Oh, I do,” said Kieran, quite adamantly. “Just as soon as I can.”

  “Well, then, good luck,” said Shev after a short, awkward pause. “May the Gods be with you.”

  He’d looked away to Anghara, and didn’t see Kieran glance back over his shoulder, and shiver. There would indeed be Gods with them in the mountains, but they were hardly the tame, benign Gods whose protection Shev had been invoking.

  Shev didn’t wait to see them go, nor even turn to watch them take the first step into the mountains. He’d wheeled his own camel and urged it into a ponderous run, turning his back resolutely on the two by the singing rock. There were some things a man would rather not set eyes on. He didn’t have the Sight, didn’t even come from a family in which it ran, but sometimes it was given even to ordinary mortals to sense something of that other world in which the Sighted moved. And there was something about the young pair setting off on this journey that raised Shev’s hackles. It might have just been the distant memory of half-forgotten Kheldrini traders, alien and golden-eyed, who had made such an impression on a little boy long ago—but even had Shev neve
r set eyes on a Kheldrini he would have sensed something about Anghara’s going. Roisinan-born, Kheldrin-fostered, she had become the link binding together the shattered shards of a world, a world whose fate turned on that first step she took into the shadows of the mountain.

  There was a path, but not for long. As he saw it vanishing onto bare rocks, Kieran’s heart sank. Had the old songs been no more than a trap, set to lure the unwary and the reckless to their death? But then Anghara peered ahead and pointed, “There is a ledge,” she said. “Look.”

  It was steep and worn, but it was the only way they had. They forged ahead, single file, Kieran in the lead followed by Anghara and the pack camel. The ledge twisted and turned, following the cliff face, until it presented them, some hours later, with a triple fork. From this point one path ran level, straight ahead of them, until it folded out of sight behind an outcrop of rocky shale; one climbed steeply upward, even more tortuous than the one they had been following; the third, deceptively gentle, dipped subtly downward and vanished into the shadow of a gigantic overhanging rock. Kieran stopped, peering down the alternatives.

  “I wish I could trust this level one,” he muttered darkly. But he trusted nothing in these mountains, and an easy path laid out at his feet was instant cause for suspicion. “The one going down…it’s too early to start descending. So it’s this, or uphill. What do you think?”

  Anghara’s eyes, when she looked up, were oddly muddy, and her face was flushed as though with fever. “Left,” she said, speaking as if it took a great effort to do so. “Up.”

  Kieran turned his camel in that direction, ignoring the snort of disgust the animal offered when presented with its rider’s choice.

  They were lucky that time. Not only did the path straighten out on a high shoulder after a while, but they also discovered a shallow cave which housed a coy spring, well hidden in the darkness deep inside the cavern’s maw. It slopped over the edge of a shallow rock basin and quickly vanished into a crack in the stone. There wasn’t much of it, but it was fresh and clean, and Kieran camped by this place, taking the time to refill all of their water bags. There was no guarantee anything like this would offer itself again once they crested the mountain and began descending the parched slopes on the Kheldrini side.