As soon as the road dropped back down into the trees, a stream emerged to cut directly across it, forming a crossroads of water and earth. The stream was usually little more than a narrow rill and in summer it sometimes dried up completely, but it had evidently been swelled by the rains.
Gahltha stopped and bent his head to drink. I slid off him and knelt to scoop some of the icy water to my own mouth. Avra was drinking too, and after a hesitation, Ahmedri got down from Falada and stood watching while she drank. Rising, I wiped my hands dry on my trews, and on impulse, asked the tribesman if he had been to the White Valley yet, since that was where his brother had fallen.
‘Bruna pointed it out as we passed but we rode directly to Obernewtyn,’ he answered stiffly, glancing at me under his heavy brows before his gaze returned to the swift-running stream. It was still cold enough that a thin wreath of mist hovered over the water, turned to golden gauze where the sun touched it. I marvelled at the difference between Ahmedri and his brother. Straaka had been an easy companion because, while he too had been a man of few words, there had been warmth and an attentive kindness in his manner that the dour and taciturn Ahmedri lacked. The latter also had a haughty, rather suspicious manner that made me feel he doubted every word I spoke, though it was not fair, perhaps, to imagine these things on the basis of two meetings.
I was careful to keep resentment from my tone when I said, ‘I asked because we are not far now from the watchhut and my meeting there is about a private matter that will take some time. It may be better if, instead of simply waiting, you rode down to the White Valley. You need only to follow the main road through the pass, and then take any of the trails leading into the valley. There are teknoguilders living and working there and any one of them will be able to take you to the place where your brother died. You might even discover something that the coercer-knights failed to note, which could help us understand what became of Miryum and Straaka’s body.’
The tribesman gave me an unfathomable look but said nothing. Shrugging, I pushed my way into the trees growing along the bank of the stream, knowing it would bring me to the meadow at the edge of which the watchhut had been built. It had been decided not to clear a proper path from the main road to the watchhut or do anything that would make it obvious to any approaching rider that there was a turn-off, in order to protect those at the watchhut, but this meant it was impossible to ride once you turned from the road. It did not trouble me to walk. Gahltha came after me, followed by Avra, and when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw with a sinking heart that Falada and Ahmedri were bringing up the rear instead of adopting my suggestion that they went down to the White Valley.
It was still night in the shadows under the trees where the slanting rays of the newly risen sun did not yet reach, and the scent was all wet greenery, wet earth, wet stones. At one point the canopy closed over our heads completely, turning the track into a dim tunnel, and the chill mist that floated over the stream thickened, making the air icy. I drew up the hood of my coat and tried to distract myself from the cold by listening to the beastspoken conversation of the horses behind me. It focused on the manner in which humans and equines had of necessity to depend upon one another in the desert lands. Avra was asking Falada if she did not find this dependency distasteful, but the desert mare appeared to find the question meaningless.
‘It is no different/harder to rely on a funaga companion than on a beastfriend. All are individuals with individual strengths and flaws,’ the mare sent mildly. I was fascinated, for her nature truly seemed utterly different from her rider’s, and I wondered how they had come to choose one another. In truth, the desert mare impressed me, and I thought she had impressed Avra, too.
It was not more than a half hour before the stream flowed out of the trees and across a meadow that glistened in the pale early-morning sunlight. It was a beautiful day and the sound of birdsong rang in the air, but it was cold, too, and there were long skeins of cloud running in bars across the sky that might mean rain later. I turned my attention to the high knoll at the edge of the clearing, atop which the watchhut had been built. It was tucked well back into the trees, but when I moved into the middle of the meadow, I could see the front porch.
Gahltha moved past me to a patch of sunlight where tiny white flowers grew in dazzling clumps, and after nuzzling at them, he lifted his head and gave a soft neigh. I recognised it as a summons even as I heard an answering neigh, and a moment later, three mares emerged from the trees on the far side of the clearing. I identified two Obernewtyn horses, and knew the coercers keeping watch must have ridden them to the watchhut, but the third was a dark stocky animal with a white blaze on her nose and unknown to me. Yet the Twentyfamilies favoured such sturdy horses, with strength enough to pull a laden gypsy wagon, and I guessed the mare had brought Iriny up from the White Valley.
I glanced around for her then I heard a low whistle from above. Squinting against the sunlight, I saw the statuesque gypsy leaning against a front porch post of the watchhut, gazing down at me. Her arm flashed with silver as she lifted a hand in greeting. I responded, noticing that she wore full gypsy skirts of green and orange and a loose green shirt under a thick coat. Her hair was the great wild dark mop that I remembered, bound at the brow with a woven thong. There was no sign of either of the coercers, but a faint smudge of blue smoke rising from the watchhut suggested one of them was preparing firstmeal. The other would be in the tower keeping watch on the pass, I realised.
I climbed the steep slope to the top of the knoll and Iriny came down from the porch a few steps to meet me. Panting, I apologised for arriving late and thanked her for waiting.
‘I told you I was at your service when I last saw you, Guildmistress of the Farseekers,’ she said. Then she broke off and looked behind me, lifting her brows. Suppressing a sigh, I turned resignedly to introduce her to Ahmedri who had followed me up the steep slope. I saw his eyes widen as he took in Iriny’s miscoloured eyes, one blue as the sky and the other brown as peat, but he returned her greeting with a perfunctory obeisance and a terse if polite-enough greeting. Then I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and saw that, although Avra and Falada were grazing with the other horses, Gahltha, too, was coming up the slope.
When he reached us, Iriny greeted him laboriously in fingerspeech.
‘You are getting better,’ I said aloud after he had answered her with grave, careful signals of his own.
‘Practice,’ she said and then fixed me with her gaze. ‘What do you want of me?’
I was not surprised by her forthrightness, but instead of answering, I shrugged off the pack I carried and held it out to Ahmedri, asking him to take it inside the hut to the coercer and tell her there was food in it that could be added to whatever was being prepared for firstmeal. The tribesman bridled, ignoring the proffered pack.
‘I will not stay here and eat,’ he said brusquely. ‘I will ride down to look at the place where my brother was treacherously slain.’ His tone suggested that the treachery had been mine, but I merely nodded blandly and, after a slight hesitation, he turned on his heel and stalked back down the knoll.
‘A tense man,’ Iriny observed mildly, as we watched the tribesman march across the meadow to get Falada and lead her back along the stream toward the road. The gypsy was regarding me quizzically, but before I could say a word, the coercer, a cheerful woman called Jil, came out of the hut and called a greeting to me.
‘I thought I heard voices. I am making porridge if you have not eaten, Guildmistress. We have grains and flour enough, but sadly there is not a nut or a dribble of honey in the hut to sweeten it.’ In answer I gave the pack to her, saying she might find something in it to add to the meal. She brightened then hesitated and asked, ‘Will you not come inside? It is chilly out here. I can go up and sit with Alden in the watchtower if you need privacy.’
‘I do not wish to drive you out, especially when you are preparing a firstmeal feast for us,’ I said with a smile. ‘But perhaps you have somethi
ng hot for us to drink out here while we wait and talk?’
She grinned almost mischievously. ‘I have just the thing.’ She vanished inside and then came out almost at once with two mugs. I was startled to smell the rich, sweet odour of Sadorian choca and guessed it had been filched by one of the coercers from Javo’s store. There would be hell to pay when the irascible kitchen master discovered its loss, but I was too greedy to protest.
Iriny came to the porch to accept the proffered mug and sipped at the brown liquid in it with slight suspicion. Then her eyes widened in startled appreciation and she drank the rest quickly, despite the heat of it. Jil grinned triumphantly at me and went back inside.
We sat on the bottom step of the porch.
‘I never did get the chance to thank you for the help you gave me with Domick on the west coast,’ I said, ‘or apologise for abandoning you when you were taken prisoner. Rolf promised he would see you free but if it had not been so needful to get Domick out of Halfmoon Bay, I never would have left it to him.’
‘The fools did not manage to hold me long enough for anyone to rescue me,’ Iriny said scornfully. Then her expression changed. ‘I liked Rolf. It is good that they made him a chieftain.’
I thought of the big, dark-haired blacksmith with his crippled leg. ‘I do not think he had any expectation of it. Indeed, he argued against it.’
‘That is why he is a good chieftain,’ Iriny said. ‘That and the fact that he understands that a leader’s purpose is not to be served by the people he rules, but to serve them.’
‘You sound as if you have been keeping an eye on him,’ I said, remembering how impressed he had been with her and wondering if the feeling was mutual. So far as I knew she had never looked at another man since the murder of her bondmate Caldeko by a Herder priest. But maybe she had found a man to match him in Rolf. I wondered if she knew that he was coming up to Obernewtyn for the moon fair.
Unaware of the turn my thoughts had taken, Iriny said, ‘My brother led us to Stonehill after the Faction fell in the west and we have dwelt there these last months repairing buildings and tending to the stone garden as we had been unable to do for some time. Rolf came riding up on that monstrous greathorse that is all but bonded to him while we were there. The boy Erit rode with him. He is a good deal taller, and cleaner, than when last you saw him, but I think he chafes at his new status as squire to a chieftain. He has the spirit of a rogue, that one. Chieftain Rolf asked my brother formally if we would like to come to live in Halfmoon Bay. He said that we would be welcome, but Swallow told him that the gypsies would claim Stonehill and make a settlement of it, because it was the first place our people dwelt when we came to the Land and it was sacred to us. Rolf said that he was glad of it for our sakes and he hoped we would travel often into Halfmoon Bay. He said that we would always be welcome at his table.’ She was silent awhile, a pensive look on her face.
‘Your brother sounds as if he is preparing to end the wandering of the gypsies,’ I murmured.
Iriny shrugged. ‘Swallow says all that was given the Twentyfamilies to do by the D’rekta who bought us to this Land has been done now, save one last thing, and then we gypsies might cease travelling or not as we choose.’
My heart leapt, but I managed to ask calmly enough, ‘What is that last thing?’
‘This,’ she answered, gesturing to herself and to me. ‘My brother said you would summon me for you would need something I had. That is why he sent me on ahead to the White Valley.’
I licked my lips. ‘Did he tell you what I wanted?’
She shook her head and I sighed.
‘In truth, I hardly know why I asked you to come up and meet me, save to have the chance to thank you for your help and to make my apologies for abandoning you when we were trying to escape from Halfmoon Bay last year. But now that you have spoken, it seems to me that there is something you can do for me.’
‘Ask it,’ she commanded.
‘It is not a thing to do but a memory you have that I need,’ I said. ‘Iriny, have you ever seen the statue that your D’rekta carved to mark the safe-passage agreement with the Council? I believe it is in Saithwold.’
‘It is there and I have seen it.’
‘Can you describe it for me?’
She frowned. ‘The ancient promises forbid any gypsy, even my brother, from speaking of it,’ she said.
I was taken aback. ‘Then it seems I must travel to Saithwold after all. I had hoped to avoid the necessity of such a trip.’
Iriny went on speaking as if I had not said a word. ‘I swore upon Stonehill that I would aid you in whatever you asked of me and I do not make such oaths lightly.’ Iriny gave me a sideways look out of her mismatched eyes. ‘There is only one way I can obey the ancient promise and fulfil my oath to you, and that is to show you my memory of the statue.’
‘You will permit me to see your memories?’ I asked, elated, for this was far more than I had hoped for.
‘You entered them once before without asking my permission,’ she answered drily.
‘To save your life.’
‘Also without my permission,’ she reiterated, but mildly. ‘I will summon up a memory of the statue now, if you wish.’
Jil interrupted to say that I had not been joking when I had mentioned a firstmeal feast, for I had brought a positive cornucopia of delicacies with me.
‘Take your time preparing it,’ I told her.
Taking the hint, she nodded and went back inside. I set down my mug on the step beside me and looked at Iriny expectantly. She turned her eyes away from me to look out over the sunlit knoll and below it to the trees blanketing the land leading up to Obernewtyn. Indeed, from this angle and facing out from the porch of the watchhouse, I could actually see part of the wall about Obernewtyn rising above the trees in the distance. I turned my attention to the gypsy and saw that her expression had grown abstracted, so I formed a probe and entered her mind, unable to help feeling anxious, since the last time I had done this, Iriny had nearly dragged me with her into oblivion.
I was careful to move slowly and to go no deeper than the upper conscious level of her mind. The memory she had summoned up was waiting for me, and even as I prepared to insert a probe into it, I heard her thought that I should enter the memory rather than merely observing it from without.
Surprised and not quite clear about her meaning, I projected myself into the memory. I was startled to find that Iriny had entered it as well, and so there were two of her; the rememberer who stood by me, and the younger Iriny who was the subject of the memory. We were standing in a moonlit garden and the younger Iriny was looking about her with a frown of deep concentration. She had never been beautiful but she had an animal vitality and strength and a vividness of expression that made her compelling to watch. She could not see us for we were not part of the memory, and yet the memory itself was so vivid and visceral that I might truly have been standing in a somewhat neglected and overgrown garden.
‘Where is the statue?’ I whispered.
‘There is no need to whisper,’ the gypsy said, though in fact she spoke more softly than usual, too. ‘This is a memory of the first time I saw the statue and I did not know exactly where it was. I thought this would be a better memory than later visits to the statue, because I did not look so closely ever again. See.’
Her younger self seemed suddenly to make up her mind which way to go, and when she pushed her way through some raggedy-looking clumps of may bushes, we followed. I felt the prickle of sharp-edged leaves through my clothes and a fine spray of tiny cold drops splattered against my cheek when a branch sprang back after Iriny released it, and I wondered how we could interact with the environment of the memory when its subject could not see us.
The younger Iriny reached a little clearing and my heart leapt at the sight of a white statue in its midst, half overgrown with coiling creeper. A single glimpse was all I needed to identify it as Cassy’s handiwork, but as I came closer, I saw that it was finer work than the gl
ass statue that she had created in the Beforetime, yet less refined than the wall friezes she had created inside the Earthtemple. This fitted with the statue being created during Cassandra’s final days in the Land, before she came to Sador.
I glanced at Iriny, who was watching with a curiously blank expression as her younger self approached the statue with evident reverence. It was of a powerful, broad-shouldered man of middle years with a hawkish nose, high cheekbones and eyes that slanted up at the outer edges. His was not a beautiful or handsome face but one full of strength and character. He was hunkered down as Khuria had once described, gazing away into the distance as if contemplating which trail to take. There was a deep scar etched in one cheek and a good deal of pride in his expression and in the tilt of his head.
All at once it came to me that I knew his face. Surely it was Cassy’s son grown to manhood. But that was impossible since Cassy had left the Land long before Evander had reached middle age. She might have modelled his face from a futuretelling, of course, but the more I looked at the statue the less it resembled Evander, whom I had seen as a young man and a child in carvings on Stonehill. The jawline and brow of the statue differed from the youth’s and he had not possessed the authority and quiet strength that I saw in this older face. Yet there was resemblance enough between the two that I guessed this might be a statue of his father, the brother to the Red Queen, who had died before Cassy had ever left the Red Land. That he had been royalty would explain the certainty in his face bordering on arrogance, and it seemed to me, too, that there was a tenderness in the execution of the statue that might reflect the sculptor’s feelings if the subject was especially beloved.
No doubt the knowledge that she was so soon to leave her son must have roused painful memories in Cassy of her lost bondmate. He was even an appropriate subject, given that the Redlander had died just before her departure from his land, having been slain by the very same Gadfian raiders into whose hands she was about to give herself.
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