Now it was coming true.
She saw it, in a flash across her consciousness as she pushed and slid and clawed her way up a steepening incline, ignoring the shouts of panicked rescuers. She saw herself become the old callused woman she’d thought she was. She felt it happening already. She would become it in earnest, widowed, broken, bereaved past recovery. She’d found him, he’d opened her to the world again, she’d found happiness after all the dark years only to have it ripped from her. It would harden her past all cracking.
She could not permit that future. For Kara’s sake, and for love of his memory. She would not become that closed-in woman, she would not allow the heart he’d restored to shrivel and blacken. He opened her to the world. Above all he would want her to embrace it. She’d never hear the end of it from him if she let his death sever her from joy.
She would go on. She would stop and look at deadfall, rock formations, vegetables in her soup. She would engage the world, question it, make demands of it—gall it. She would laugh.
Because she’d loved him, she would be strong enough to go on after losing him.
I promise you that, Adaon. She only thought it at first, and then she was saying it, again and again, “I promise you, I promise you, [435] Adaon,” as she came to the top of the slope, to touch the Triennead holding that had meant so much to him that he’d rather die than wait just one more day to find it—so much that he’d rather die in the attempt than be killed in the riving of Eiden without ever having touched it at all.
Stone came under her hand. Carved, crafted stone. Stone shaped by human will. Triennead stone, still humming with ancient power even after the breaking of the light, the failure of the wardings.
“If you’d only waited another day, Adaon,” she whispered. “If you’d only believed you had another day.” It was the sublime moment of a lifetime, to feel this stone come under her hand. She stood with her boots dug into a slippery slope, touching the ages, poised on the brink of the future.
“Spirits willing, you lived to touch this, too.”
“All those lives,” Pelufer said. “All those ancient lives I felt. That’s who they were. The people of light in that other mage place.”
“The mists,” Louarn said, agreeing with her. He was holding Kara’s shoulders tight. She wanted to follow her mother, but that kind of grief had to be faced alone, and she could only stand and watch. “There was something about Gir Doegre. Some mystery. A puzzle to be solved. All the magelight that must have been gathered here. All the lights who must have died here, one by one over time or in whatever cataclysm buried that structure so that a hill might grow over it. There should not be hills here. Perhaps the others house structures, too. Buried by tune, or built that way, to keep them cool and safe. Your entire town may have been the holding. And its power still drew people, still called people, over all the ages. That’s why the itinerants stayed. Your waysiders. That’s why when the weather turned bad there was always a mist here, more than the river could have accounted for, or the humid air.”
“All those lives,” Pelufer said again. She wasn’t interested in structures or mists. Gir Doegre was what it was. Her home. Her parents’ home. A tradertown. But the haunts ... all those ancient, whispering haunts ...
“Yes,” Louarn said. “And if you can gain control over their voices, you might learn why they died, and when. You might tell us more than any codex any scholar ever read.”
“I don’t want to solve your puzzles!” Pelufer burst out. “I can’t solve your puzzles! I could never solve a single one of the poxy things. I just want ... I just want ...” Feelings swelled inside her and could not be sorted or understood. She did not know what she wanted. [436] Only that she wanted, terribly, desperately. To be something. To be someone. There was someone she was supposed to be. She’d never had Elora’s power, she’d never had Caille’s power, but when Lorn-hollow gave them their mother’s ways, he’d given just as much to her. All she could ever do was spew names. But there was more. She knew there was more. She’d never minded, before, not being as much as her sisters were. She’d been the quick one, the thief, the provider, the one who didn’t mind getting her hands dirty and getting in trouble so that the other two could go on shining and being powerful and safe. But now she knew that there was more, and it was all tied together with what she’d always been, but that wasn’t enough, now there was something, and if she didn’t become whatever it was she would always have this swelling yearning feeling inside her. She would never be ... happy.
“I want a prentice,” the blademaster said, quietly, from right beside her. Not as though she wanted one the way Pelufer wanted, but simply as though she lacked one.
The woman had been watching her the entire time. Watching the expressions go over her face. As if she understood what was going on inside her, the way Pelufer could understand the haunts once they had named themselves.
“The blade doesn’t want me,” Pelufer said. “I could feel it.”
“Yes,” the woman said. “So could I, when my father let me hold it. But it came to me in the end. Too soon. He died before he could teach me its true use.” She laughed, a hard, coarse laugh. She was a hard, coarse woman, much harder than Yuralon, much coarser than Risalyn. They were both looking at her, listening, wary, ready to snatch Pelufer from her hard, coarse clutches. She grinned at them, the most careless, soulless, dangerous grin Pelufer had ever seen. Risalyn’s and Yuralon’s feral grins were only faint echoes of that grin. Speaking louder, for their benefit, the woman said, “I only learned its true use yesterday. A little late. Maybe it’s not so late for you. You say you can hear haunts. Good. Then you know that taking a life stains you. This blade was crafted to take that stain. I think you’ve already tasted the stain, whether you’ve taken a life or not. I think you know that stain the way I know the shadow of my own hand. I thought I was that stain, that shadow. But lo and behold, this blade was crafted for something more. I think it would be willing to show you, if you’re willing to learn. We could learn together.” As if her own words were too much for her to stand, she snorted and said, “Eiden’s bloody balls, it’s got to go to someone when I die!”
“You’re kenai,” Risalyn said suddenly.
The woman nodded. “Yes. I am kenai. I am the blade.”
[437] “There’s only one kenai left in the whole world,” Risalyn said.
The woman said, “Yes. Since my father died. The other kenaila killed him, and I killed them, and now there’s only me.”
“You trained Verlein,” Risalyn said. “You trained Cheveil, and Lannan, and Eshadri.”
“Friends of yours, are they?”
“Eshadri and Cheveil, yes. They were.”
“I grieve their loss.”
“And I grieve yours,” Risalyn said. “You’re Kazhe n’Zhevra. You were Torrin n’Maeryn’s bodyguard.”
The woman spat into the dirt. “I’m Kazhe,” she said, and looked at Pelufer. “Do I have a prentice?”
Awed, Pelufer nodded.
The woman clapped her on the shoulder, gave one hard squeeze, and stalked off into the crowds down Copper Long.
“Jiondor will kill you!” Elora hissed.
“Jiondor never made that woman promise not to teach me blades.”
“She’s a drinker, Pelufer, just like Father. You can see it in her cheeks and her sliding eyes. She’s probably heading to a tavern right now. She was up on that hill drunk in the storm. That’s just the kind of thing Father would have done. She’s just like Father!”
“Just like Father,” Pelufer said, and grinned. “And I’ve had a lot of practice with that, haven’t I? I’ll do all right with her.”
“Blades kill people, Pel! You can’t kill people! You can hear haunts!”
To Elora’s shock, Risalyn said, “Who better then to have the use of blades? Who better than someone who knows the harm they do? We saw what Kazhe’s blade did. It destroyed every weapon on that battlefield. I wish she’d known how to use it sooner, but from t
he looks of it she wishes the same. That would be the right kind of blade for Pelufer, I think.”
“Pel could have stopped the battle,” Caille piped up drowsily. “I told the boneman to send her there, but he wouldn’t.”
“We went there, Caille,” Elora said. “We went there looking for you.”
“I wasn’t there,” Caille murmured, already drowsing off again.
“I know,” Elora said softly. “But Pelufer didn’t stop the battle.”
“I didn’t have time. I couldn’t figure it out. But I felt something, Elora, I felt something. I felt it when Risalyn was fighting that woman in Gir Nuorin, too.”
Elora threw her hands up, and Yuralon said, “That’s her power, Elora. You have wood and trees. Caille has flesh, and life. Pelufer has metals—blades. And death.”
[438] “She’s only nine-and-two,” Elora said, looking ready to cry.
Risalyn patted Elora on the shoulder. “I wish I’d seen my way as clear when I was nine-and-two.”
Elora looked at Pelufer, and said, “I don’t even know you anymore.”
Pelufer blinked. She’d thought the same about Elora, more times than she could count in the last few days. She didn’t know what to say.
Elora’s hard shoulders went soft. “But that’s all right. You’ll always be my sister. We’ll work it all out somehow.”
“Yes,” Caille said, from deep in dreams.
“Oi!” Dabrena called to the rescuers who were trying to struggle up to her, expecting any moment for her to come sliding and crashing down the slope. “Bring me a shovel, one of you!”
“There’s no one up that far!” a woman cried from below.
“It’s not bodies I’m after!” Dabrena called back, and turned to start groping along the stone, looking for something that might have been a window once. She would finish the task for him. She would open the first way into the past.
She lost her foothold and nearly did slide down the slope when a spade burst through the earth not two feet to her right and two pale eyes peered out from the gloom inside.
“Not even this body?” said a muffled voice. “It’s awfully glad to see yours.”
Dabrena clawed and flailed and dragged herself up over the ledge that was the holding’s roof. For long moments, as Adaon dug his way out through the window below her in a racket of breaking shutter slats, she just lay there, waiting for her heart to slow and feeling to come back into her limbs. When his arms and shoulders lifted his bald pate up through the hole he’d made and his grinning mud-smeared face popped up beneath her, she said, “I am going to kill you.”
“Not before you imperiously order some local to fetch you a lantern so you can come in here and see what I’ve found,” he said.
Then she kissed him, leaning out over the ledge, faint with the beloved taste and scent of him, alive, alive—and slipped over the edge and grabbed him round the neck and shoulder just in time, and nearly lost her grip anyway, but hung on, laughing, dangling and kicking, kissing his ear, his head, his thick neck, anything she could reach.
The rescue woman made it up to them at last, in boots with cleated iron strapped on, and helped Dabrena flip over and set her rear [439] securely on a lodged rock. “Sweet Eiden’s breath,” the woman said, “a survivor!”
“Not quite,” Adaon replied, winking at Dabrena. “I beat you all out here, that’s all, the moment the weather changed. I pulled who I could find out of the mud, and then I went round and found a way in where it’s not so treacherous. There’s a nice staircase made of tree trunks, if you just go round that way a bit.”
“You weren’t out in the storm?” Dabrena said. “Risalyn and Yuralon were afraid that you’d—”
“That I’d gone completely daft? Well, I thought about it, I admit. I did come out here, armed with lantern and shovel. I thought we were done for. I wanted to spend my last moments trying to reach my goal. But the storm got much worse around midnight. It beat me back. I took refuge in the nearest cottage to wait it out.” He looked around. “Convenient of the weather to start the excavation for us, don’t you think?”
“You’re both daft,” the woman said. “Get down from here. There’s real work to do.”
Adaon looked at Dabrena. “Well?” he said. “Come on, now. Imperious. Your best holding bluster. I know you can do it.”
Dabrena cursed him cheerfully, then said, “Come down and say hello to Kara. Look, she sees you, she’s going mad down there.”
“Well, we can’t have all three of us in that condition,” Adaon said. “And I suppose we really should be helping with the rescue.”
“It’s over,” Dabrena said as they started down, hanging on to each other, heels dug in, sliding down by the rear. “They’re only digging for the bodies now. Most folk got out of their shanties and into proper shelter.”
“The first cottage I sheltered in lost its roof,” Adaon said. “Torn right off, and everything inside tossed like a salad. I carried a boy with a broken arm to the next cottage. His sister had a bad gash on her head. I think her skull was cracked.” He looked sidelong at her. “I don’t suppose you know anything about why that boy and girl are good as new today?”
“It’s going to take some explaining,” she said, as they came down far enough to stand, and walk-slide the rest of the way back to Kara and the others.
Some searchers had broken off to help clear the Knee Road, but most stayed, with their dogs. Risalyn and Yuralon joined them, after hearing Adaon’s account of himself and offering to kill him for Dabrena if she wasn’t up to doing it herself. Kara had to be restrained from telling him her entire adventure right then and there. Unwilling [440] to give his attention up, she pointed at a gray-black pall in the Haunchward sky, and said, “What’s that?”
He regarded it thoughtfully, then for some reason looked at Louarn. Louarn, as though responding to words Adaon had spoken aloud, said, “There are sulfur springs at the head of Maur Lengra.”
“And a caldera, though old and weathered,” Adaon said. “And the soil is rich, and the growth a verdant green.”
Louarn nodded. “There must have been a volcano under there.”
“A volcano?” Kara asked.
“A vent for molten earth deep under Eiden’s body,” Dabrena said.
“They were known to erupt at times, spewing boiling rock,” Adaon said, his throat tight, as though he was trying not to laugh.
“It sounds like me,” said Pelufer.
“Among other things,” Louarn said, and Adaon grinned.
“I hope it didn’t hurt too many people,” said Elora.
“It doesn’t look like it was a very large one,” Adaon said. He was losing his battle with laughter. “Or the whole sky would be black with ash.”
“It should make for lovely sunrises over the next couple of ninedays,” Louarn said, succeeding far better than Adaon at keeping his face respectful of Elora’s concern.
“A volcano in the Crotch,” Adaon said—and finally he couldn’t resist: “At least we know for certain that Eiden’s male!”
News traveled as fast as sound in the tradertown, and friends of Elora and Pelufer and Caille came rushing up to them. With promises to meet everyone again in the Mute Swan, the traders’ tavern, after supper, the girls went off happily with the sweetsmonger Jiondor and the barrow boy Nolfiander. “It would be Mireille who spotted us,” Pelufer said as they moved off into the crowds that were lugging repair supplies one way, covered dishes of food another, a controlled mayhem that would have looked all at cross-purposes to anyone but Dabrena, who knew how such things worked. “Let’s just get you home and fed before the alderfolk demand a word,” Jiondor said, as their voices faded into the cries and calls and sounds of shovels, hammers, saws.
This town had lost no time in throwing itself into its own repair. But she would have expected no less, from what she’d seen before. Their wrecked stalls would be put right by the next day, all their wares displayed once again.
Dabrena, with Ada
on and Kara, was left standing beside Louarn.
“Will you stay for a while?” Dabrena said, starting off down Copper Long in the vague direction of inns and public houses and food and rest.
[441] “How would you know I’d go?”
“I can see it in your eyes. You’re already gone. You’re a journeyer.”
“A lad-of-all-crafts, so,” Louarn said in a Strong Leg accent as they passed Hunger Long. Then his face hardened. “I set out some time ago to do a thing. It remains undone.”
“We all have a great deal to do. Excavate that holding. Tell Pelkin about the light’s return.” She gave Adaon a look that said, I know, I know. I’ll explain everything. “Rebuild.”
“A thing more urgent than any of that, I’m afraid.” As they turned onto Bronze Long, Louarn cast his gaze about as though he was looking for a quiet place in which to do it. The boy who could dream passageways. The man who could dream little girls’ spirits back into their bodies. Dabrena had breathed for that body, worked its chest, to hold it ready. But they’d saved the child together. It would never make up for the baby’s life she had forfeit. But it was something to be grateful for.
“Well,” she said, “my first stop is with Verlein, since she’s right over there, leaving that inn. Won’t you come with us? We could use your ... varied talents, in putting a stop to her delusions of conquest once and for all.”
Louarn turned, only half paying attention, perhaps making a connection in his mind between a vacated room in an inn and a quiet place where he could go to sleep and dream his powerful dreams.
Then he went rigid, and said, “Kara. Fetch Risalyn and Yuralon. Now.”
He saw Verlein. A woman Mellas knew. The woman who had stabbed a man by accident seven years ago in the Neck because she was trained to a fine edge with blades she was far too inexperienced to wield safely. The woman who crossed the Black Mountains intending to assassinate the Ennead. The woman who would have used him if she could, a boy in the nine-colored cloak of an Ennead runner. The woman who’d fought shadows beside him, who’d nearly died in a mudslide with him, who’d spoken the truth when Purslane stood crippled by a shattered hock, said that it was best done quickly, putting him out of his pain. He remembered that now, though in his tortured memory it had been the mud that killed Purslane, and he had looked on this Gir Doegre landslide with an old blade going through his heart. But it had been the illuminator’s hand, with a knife. He had been unable to do it himself. And that woman, Verlein, had turned back from her death mission, beaten by shadows and the [442] mountain. That was the last he’d seen of her. That was seven years ago. She looked profoundly changed. So was he. He still had nothing to say to her.
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