The Sending

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘On a stone form,’ I said. ‘It looks like gadi script and that made me think of you.’

  ‘It might be, but it is so ornately drawn it is hard to make out,’ Fian muttered, all but putting his nose to the paper.

  ‘Keep it and look it over at your leisure,’ I said, striving to sound careless. ‘I would be interested to know what it means, if it means anything.’ I rose and bade him give my greetings to his master, and tell him that I would come down to see the new Teknoguildhouse in a day or so. Then I took a slice of buttered bread and set off for the Farseekers hall.

  5

  The rain stopped mid afternoon and the clouds parted in the early evening, making way for a beautiful clear golden dusk, but in the end, Bruna did not leave Obernewtyn until the following afternoon, when black rain clouds had closed over the sky again. The healer who had examined Domina had recommended a day of rest and a poultice, saying the mare had not done much more than graze her knees but it was better to err on the side of caution with horses. Alad told me later that Zade had offered to carry Bruna to the lowlands, but the tribeswoman had refused. She had put the poultice prepared by the healer onto the mare’s knees herself and then she spent the remainder of the afternoon honing her fingerspeaking skills with the help of Louis Larkin and his cows.

  The old unTalent had become a master of the art of fingerspeech to compensate for the fact that he had no beastspeaking Talent, and in truth he had become so subtle and canny at this form of communication that it was impossible not to think of him as a beastspeaker. Alad often said Louis had such empathy for beasts that it was a Talent in itself, and that this was what made his fingerspeech so rich and subtle.

  That evening, Bruna returned to the house in the brief bright dusk to eat, and after the empath musicians had performed their customary three songs, she sang a chant song about the journey made by her ancestors to the desert lands. Within the song was a tale of the laying to rest in the earth of an old woman in a dark fragrant grove of spice bushes growing in a fold at the foot of the great escarpment that reared up behind the desert lands. It made me think of Bruna’s message from the overguardian of the Earthtemple about Straaka’s bones needing to be laid to rest and I guessed she had chosen the chant to reiterate her words. Later, when the sun had set and we had shifted our chairs to the fire to talk, I asked after Ahmedri. I wanted to know if he had the slow, serious charm of his soft-spoken brother, but Bruna merely told me that he had remained on the farm and would likely do so for the length of his stay, to be close to his horse.

  It was only as she was departing the following day, with black clouds shifting and emitting surly glimmers of lightning, that I had my first sight of the tribesman who was to guest with us. He had come up with the other tribesman from the farm to farewell his companions. He was taller than Straaka and more slender of build, less handsome in his features, I thought, but it might only have been the closed look to his face and the tightness of his mouth when he spoke, as if he resented having to offer any words. Bruna introduced him to me as Straaka’s brother.

  ‘Halfbrother.’ Ahmedri corrected her so sharply that I was taken aback but she seemed oblivious to his manner. No doubt she was preoccupied by thoughts of her coming reunion with Dardelan. Despite his unprepossessing manner, Ahmedri acceded willingly enough to my request that he keep the details of his errand to himself, in particular the fact that Straaka’s spirit was supposed to seek mine out. He even agreed to ride out often enough to preserve the fiction that he was seeking Straaka’s bones. But in reality, he added sternly, he would be waiting for me to learn the whereabouts of Miryum. He did not use Miryum’s name. He spoke of her as the woman. His lips curled in distaste when he said it, making me wonder if it was the fact that she was not Sadorian or something else that made him dislike a woman he had never met.

  I had the urge to ask why Straaka’s spirit could not simply tell him where his bones were, leaving Miryum and me out of it, yet it seemed absurd to speak of Straaka as if he were not dead. I told myself the matter would be over as soon as I dreamed of what had become of Straaka and Miryum, but I could not help wondering what the tribesman would do if the dream did not come before the four ships departed for the Red Land.

  Bruna and the other tribesman rode off, and I lifted my hand in farewell before turning to Ahmedri. I had wanted to tell him about asking the Futuretell guildmistress to scry for Miryum but he had already turned on his heel and was striding along the path that would bring him through the sodden tents that had been set up. Ceirwan had told me half of them had collapsed in the night and it was unlikely any of them would have the chance to dry before the moon fair if the rain did not let up. There was already talk of using some of the barns to house visitors. In their easygoing way, the cows had offered to sleep out in the fields so that the funaga visitors could sleep dry, for it was not cold. Cows were essentially kindly creatures and I wondered how many of the unTalents that regretted no longer being able to pen and slaughter them for meat would be as disgruntled if they took the time to get to know some cows.

  It had begun to rain again and it would not be long before yet another storm reached Obernewtyn. I sighed, glanced at the lowering sky and went back inside, turning my thoughts to the Futuretell dream-book that had arrived with Maryon’s missive that morning. Unfortunately, neither she nor anyone else in her guild had been able to come up with a futuretelling that revealed the whereabouts of Miryum, but she had scribed that they would continue their efforts. She had gone on to draw my attention to a marker she had put in one page of the dream-book, where I found a dream entry that described Miryum as lying pale and clean and utterly still on a white table, her arms alongside her body. The dreamer had scribed that she thought Miryum was laid out for burial, but I had been struck at once by the similarities with my own fragmentary dream of Cassy Duprey lying on her white bed. Of course it was only a coincidence since there could not possibly be any connection between two women who had lived at such different times.

  In truth, the mystery of Miryum’s whereabouts held my mind less than maybe it ought to have done, because Maryon had concluded her missive by saying that she had not had any more success in scrying for Maruman than the two beastspeaking futuretellers she had assigned the task.

  Several days passed after the departure of the Sadorians, in which rain fell without surcease, turning paths and lawns into a muddy brown bog and causing endless difficulties on the farms. Inside the house, the greater guildhalls and long corridors grew damp and chilly, and people hurried from one warmed chamber to another only when they had no choice, wrapped up in shawls and waxed cloaks. I spent most of my time in my chamber poring over the various dream-books, which Sarn sent up for me to look at when she and the others assigned to the task of combing through them had finished. I was not looking for information about the Red Land, but for entries that might refer obliquely to Miryum or even to Dragon or Maruman, inspired by the dream Maryon had marked for me in the Futuretell journal. But so far I had found nothing.

  We held all meetings in the kitchens, partly for warmth and partly because most of them concerned arrangements for the looming moon fair or the gathering of provisions for the coming expedition to the Red Land, and so required the kitchen master’s presence. We needed to ensure there was enough food left to last those at Obernewtyn through the coming wintertime, after the supplies we had promised for the expedition had been sent to Sutrium to be stored in warehouses before the voyage. The meetings also concerned the preparation of clothes, medicines and weapons for those who would take part in the expedition, and there were the usual numerous domestic matters concerning the running of Obernewtyn and its farms which needed attention. The long meetings strained the patience of the temperamental kitchen master, and meals suffered as a consequence, save those cooked when Freya had been in to do some baking.

  Nor was there much news to brighten our spirits. There were messages from the White Valley saying that the Suggredoon had burst its banks and that the wa
ters were so high that it was impossible to get into Newrome. Hannay returned with a missive from Rushton informing me that Dameon had left for the west coast before my message reached him, which I gathered meant it had not been delivered. I asked Hannay why the empath would had gone to the west when he ought to have been getting ready to return to Obernewtyn for the moon fair, and was told he had been summoned by Dell to Oldhaven. Since Rushton had made no mention of the summons, I guessed Dell had not seen fit to tell Dameon why she wanted him.

  The news depressed me for Angina’s sake, as both he and his sister continued their decline, but on another level the terseness of the missive from Rushton roused ugly doubts in me. Rushton had never been a man to say two words where one would do, but the stiffness and lack of emotion in his note was so much at odds with the passionate tenderness of our parting in Sador that I was beginning to fear I had been mistaken to leave him so soon after he had remembered the hurts done to him by Ariel. Perhaps I had given his battered mind reason enough to decide I had never loved him, even as Ariel had tried to make him believe. The thought that Rushton might turn from me again made me feel physically sick, and yet what else could I have done? Maruman had insisted the Agyllians wanted me to return to Obernewtyn and I had obeyed.

  Yet it seemed I was required to do nothing but wait.

  One night, after visiting the Healing Hall to gaze helplessly at Angina and Miky under the imploring gaze of Hannay, I went back to my bedchamber and trimmed the wick of a fresh candle so that I could work my way through a pile of coercer dream-books which Tomash had brought up earlier that evening. I had assigned him, and the older woman, Wila, to work with Sarn on the task of producing a book of information about the Red Land. There was a note from Wila inside the first page of the top journal, directing me to a pair of fragmentary dreams that referred to Straaka, saying that it was the only mention of him or Miryum she had found. I had asked the threesome to make note of any mention of Straaka in the dream entries. I did not have to explain my interest since by now everyone at Obernewtyn knew that Ahmedri was on a quest to retrieve his brother’s bones.

  I read the entries Wila had flagged, both of which had been penned several months after Miryum’s disappearance. Both dreams had the tribesman walking across desert lands and I guessed they had been sparked by the stories Straaka had been wont to tell of his homeland. His tales had always been full of his love for the desert, and the tribesman had possessed a gift for storytelling that made those who heard him remember his words.

  It saddened me anew to think that the tribesman had never returned to his home after leaving it to seek Miryum. His love for the coercer had cost him dearly. Wila noted that these were the only mentions of Straaka and I was puzzled by this as well as by the fact that there were no dreams of Miryum, for those of the guild to which a person belonged were more likely than any other guild to dream of them, especially in the wake of a dramatic disappearance. That was why members of my own guild tended to dream more than any other guild of the farseeker Matthew.

  I sat bolt upright and slapped my forehead, cursing myself for a fool, for Straaka had not spent his time at Obernewtyn with coercers any more than Miryum had done! Both of them had spent their time with the coercer-knights, for by the time the tribesman had come to Obernewtyn, Miryum had been all but mistress of the de facto guild. Since that guild gave its direct allegiance to the master of Obernewtyn, I was suddenly sure that the knights had given up recording their dreams in the Coercer dream-book. I would have marched off to ask Linnet there and then if it had not been so late. As it was I sent the little lad who brought up my breakfast the next morning scurrying off at once to summon the leader of the coercer-knights.

  Linnet did not arrive until the evening, explaining that she had been down on the farms for the day helping to harvest crops that were like to rot in the endless rain. She immediately confirmed that the coercer-knights did not scribe of their dreams in the Coercer dream-book. I was about to tell her to go back and have her knights scribe every dream they could recall of Miryum or Straaka when Linnet added that the coercer-knights kept their own guild journal and dream-book.

  ‘I never submitted it to Gevan because I was not sure of the protocol. The coercer-knights are still officially part of the Coercer guild,’ she explained, adding that she had assumed Maryon would ask for the journals if she needed to cast her eyes over them for her dream maps. It had not occurred to her that Maryon would assume, as I had done, that the coercer-knights were recording their dreams in the Coercer dream-book. Their absence had not been noticed because dreams were largely anonymously scribed.

  Contrite and sheepish, Linnet offered to take the Coercer-knights dream-books to Maryon at once, but I bade her have them sent to me instead. Once I had read through them, I would see that they were delivered to the Futuretellers hall. Later that night, the books were delivered by a young woman I had never met, who introduced herself as Hilda and told me shyly that she had come with the group of children and young people from Oldhaven. They would train all winter and most were resolved to return to Oldhaven in the spring, but she wanted to be a coercer-knight and so must remain at Obernewtyn.

  ‘You know that the coercer-knights are not a guild,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Mistress Linnet told me the matter of choosing to be a coercer-knight would have to be taken up at guildmerge, since the knights are not officially separate from the Coercer guild.’

  I agreed that it was so, and wondered if our conversation that morning had prompted Linnet to do something about the status of the coercer-knights once and for all, or if it was Hilda’s approach that had sealed the matter. The use of the young woman to bring me this message was a clear announcement that she meant to force guildmerge to address the question of the coercer-knights being established as a separate guild. It was something I and the other guildmasters and mistresses had been resisting ever since the coercer-knights had first separated themselves from the Coercer guild. We had suggested the knights serve Rushton originally, in the hope that they would eventually become reconciled to their former guild. But the knights had proven themselves an important and useful independent resource to the master of Obernewtyn, and rather than returning to the fold of the Coercer guild, they had become more and more independent in their activities and philosophies.

  Therefore why not allow them to be a separate guild? That would be Linnet’s argument, and in truth I could not find any real reason to refuse her. Gevan would oppose the proposal of course, claiming that any coercer who joined the knights was lost to his own guild, but I thought I would probably vote aye if it came to it.

  The fact that Linnet would take such a step also meant that she was beginning to accept that Miryum’s absence might be permanent. She simply could not imagine Miryum being taken prisoner, let alone being held for months on end. Her doubt aligned with my own, and with the fact that the futuretellers had still not seen the missing woman in their scrying. Yet, unlike Linnet, I could not so easily dismiss Bruna’s message from the overguardian of the Earthtemple. But perhaps the most likely thing was that Bruna had misunderstood the overguardian’s message as Maryon and Ceirwan had suggested, and I would dream of Miryum, and in this way learn what had happened to her and to Straaka’s bones.

  I had questioned Linnet at length that morning about her search for her mistress, and the coercer-knight had reiterated that she and her fellows had found nothing but a faint trail in the White Valley leading towards the mountains. When asked to speculate on who might have taken Miryum and be holding her captive, she had finally said the only ones who might have done it were the bands of robbers and thugs that patrolled the main road through the Land, whose ranks had been swelled by renegade, Misfit-hating Herders and soldierguards. But she had added that, until very recently, their activities had been confined to the upper lowlands and there was nothing to suggest Miryum had gone in that direction. Besides, even if a group of this kind had chanced to be in the highlands and had taken Miryum prisoner,
they would either have ransomed the coercer-knight to us or killed her outright as a loathed Misfit.

  I opened the first Coercer-knights dream-book and skimmed through entries until I came to one that described a muscular, dark-haired woman lying still and white as if in a coma. The dreamer speculated that the woman might have been dead had not her lashes flickered and her eyes moved restlessly under the lids. The entry ended with the observation that it was very strange to dream of a person dreaming. The dreamer had not named Miryum, but it was too similar to the dream from the Coercers’ dream-book, which did name her, for it not to be her.

  Several pages later I found three entries describing a dark man crossing desert lands. All of these dreams appeared to have occurred in a single night, though they were clearly scribed by different people. The central figure of the dreams was undoubtedly Straaka, though none of the dreamers named him. Another dream several pages on described a strong, dark-haired woman dragging a man on a travois. Although the faces in the dream were described as indistinct, the dreamer concluded that the woman was almost certainly Mistress Miryum and the man Straaka. The same hand, a few pages later, recorded a dream of Miryum toiling across steep, rocky terrain, a tall lean man striding along beside her. The man was described as being made of smoke, with a rope running from him to Miryum. The description gave me a nasty start, for a spirit link between two people did look like a rope, though it was only visible to spirit-eyes.

  I read on until I came to a memory-dream in which Straaka was explaining the tribes’ belief that all crime was theft; theft of property, of reputation, of life or of love. The dreamer had a gift for description and reading the entry, I seemed to see Straaka’s dark, handsome face lit by firelight as he spoke in his deep, soft voice. The same dreamer reported a second dream of Straaka on the same night. In it the tribesman was again formed of smoke, but this time he was leaning over an unconscious and obviously ill Miryum, his face full of grief and longing. The dreamer observed that the second dream appeared to be a reversal of reality, since it ought to have been Miryum leaning over Straaka’s body.