The Gathering of the Lost

by Helen Lowe

  The smell was all Aralorn—only she was back in the Gray Lands and it was not rain soaking into the earth, but blood. The wind crying around the shrine’s eaves became a woman’s disembodied voice: “There is always a price . . .”

  “A price,” Malian echoed. She sank to her knees, her hand sliding away from the bolt, and tears seeped from her eyes and down her cheeks. Her forehead still rested against the door, too heavy to lift clear.

  I never mourned, she thought. They told me Rowan Birchmoon was dead and I felt nothing, because there was so much to be done and no time to feel . . . “Anything,” she said aloud, and the pain in her temples pounded. The tears were trickling into the corners of her mouth now and she licked them away, tasting the bitter salt. She was the Chosen of Mhaelanar—but what merit was there in picking up the Defender’s shield if she had grown arid as the Gray Lands, her feeling nature diverted into a persona such as Maister Carick, who was not real?

  Is that why my father kept Rowan with him, Malian wondered, even when he knew that he should not—because without her the part of him that was still Tasarion, and not just the Earl of Night, would no longer exist? Is that why Rowan stayed, when she, too, must have understood the risk?

  Only Yorindesarinen’s voice answered, sadly weary, in her memory. “You have grown to hard child, to sacrifice others so ruthlessly for your need. Is this the person you want to be?

  Tarathan showed his trust in me on Imuln’s Isle, she told herself, a little desperately; Kalan answered honor and duty’s call freely, in the end . . .And I did not compel the Ara-fyr.

  She slumped against the door as emotion swirled like a flood, threatening to overwhelm her. The rain grew heavier and eventually she forced herself up and got the cob into the lee of the shrine. The eaves were wide enough that he would be all right there unless the weather really set in. She left her gear strapped behind the saddle, since she was shivering too much to get it down. The door, when she tried the latch, proved to be fastened from the inside, so she wrapped herself in her cloak and curled into the deepest corner of the porch.

  The rain continued to fall as the dusk thickened into full night. Malian drifted in and out of an uneasy doze where the pain in her head became the tattoo of hoofbeats from last night’s dream. Slipping beneath it, she found herself staring into the darkness-filled opening of a cairn, with Rowan Birchmoon standing just inside the low arch.

  “There is always a price,” the Winter woman said gravely, before dissipating like blown mist. Malian was left gazing at the dark entrance, and wondered if it could be a portal in disguise. She tried to move forward, but found she couldn’t. Dimly, she realized that the shivering had increased and her teeth were chattering.

  A voice cursed through the pain in her head, and this time when the cairn appeared, the corvids’ wings spiraled around Malian and beat her away from the opening. She heard a crack, like stone splitting, and felt a curious sensation against her forehead—as though someone were writing on it. When she forced her eyes open, all she could see was darkness, filled with the sound of rain, but the pain had receded and her teeth were no longer chattering. She drifted away again and this time she slept.

  Malian woke to pale daylight. After a few puzzled seconds, she realized that she was looking up at a curved wooden ceiling. Someone had covered her with blankets, and when she put up a hand, she found a folded cloak beneath her head. I must be inside the shrine, she decided—although she felt sure the door had been locked. Water still dripped steadily, but she could no longer hear rain. She could smell smoke, though, and when she turned her head she saw that Raven was there.

  The smoke curled up in a thin stream, drawn to an opening in the roof, and came from one of the braziers used in the shrines. Raven was sitting on his heels beside it, placing twigs on the glowing coals. Whatever the wood was, it burned with a sharp, aromatic scent. As though sensing her regard, he looked around and she met his darkly blue gaze. His expression was calm and a little considering, but without the sardonic edge she had come to expect. “So you’re awake,” he said.

  “Yes.” She supposed she should sit up and demand explanations. But she was warm beneath the blankets and felt oddly peaceful, listening to the drip-drip from the eaves. “I thought the door was locked.”

  “It was. But these country latches are simple enough to lever open if you have a dagger. You could have done it yourself if you’d been feeling better.”

  He seemed quieter, Malian thought, less hard. Different—although the edge, she suspected, was still there, just held beneath the surface more. “I imagine I could have.” She continued to watch him, still reluctant to move. “You did something. Wrote on my forehead.”

  “I did. A rune of closing, for the third eye.”

  She remembered the opening in the cairn and the way she had been drawn to it. “What happened?” she asked. “Did someone work sorcery against me?” And if they did, she thought, why didn’t either Nhenir or I sense it?

  He shook his head. “I think you caught a fever. It can happen easily enough when you’re tired and traveling rough. Some of the wayside inns are riskier still. But you must have been exhausted, because when you began feeling ill your innate power reacted as though you were being attacked on the psychic plane.”

  “So I turned on myself and the whole process kept escalating.” She wanted to shake her head, but refrained in case the headache came back. “How did you know what was happening? Or what to do?”

  Raven fed a few more scraps to the brazier, apparently absorbed by the task. “I’ve seen it before.” He dusted his hands against each other. “Not often, though, because it usually only happens to those with very great power who may be at low ebb for other reasons—because of a battle wound, or grief.”

  Malian’s heart lurched. He knows, she thought, every doubt of him rushing back. Or suspects, at least. She knew she should feel afraid and be reaching for her weapons or her power—but despite the initial lurch, she still felt that odd sense of peace. She closed her eyelids briefly, and when she lifted them again he was frowning at her. “The questions will keep,” he said, with a trace of his old roughness. “You need to rest.”

  If he meant her harm, then he had already let ample opportunity pass by—which, Malian decided, made her as safe as she was likely to be in this world. This time, she let her eyes stay closed.

  She dreamed of the solitary tower outside Butterworth with a chill wisp of moon rising overhead. When she called out, just as she had a day and a night ago, only silence answered. The season was later, she thought, noticing the spectral trees: this was autumn, the dying season of the year. My vision, Malian realized: I saw this, too, in Yorindesarinen’s fire. Is that why I failed? she wondered. Would the Lost have answered differently if I had come to them in late autumn, rather than at summer’s end?

  Foreseeing is just possibility, she reminded herself—but cried out anyway, coming half awake with her need to change the vision, to make it work out this time. Gently, a hand pressed her back. “Let it go,” Raven’s voice said. “Sleep.”

  Malian sank down, and when she woke again watery sunshine was slanting through the open door of the shrine. She stretched beneath the blankets and saw that her gear had been stowed by the entrance. Nhenir—this time in the guise of the silver cap—was still tied to her saddlebow and the almost invisible Band sigils on ties and buckles were undisturbed. Raven was sitting on the threshold with his helmet between his hands and his face turned to the sun. His eyes were closed, although the line of his body told her that he was awake. He had woven fetishes of bone and feather into his helmet crest, she noticed, a style he had abandoned while serving Lord Falk.

  “ ‘But you’re not,’ ” she said quietly, meeting his eyes as they opened. “Kalan told me that’s what Rhike said to you, before she died. What did she mean?”

  “You know her name?” he asked, and she nodded, waiting. “Not what,” he said after a moment. “Who. A case of mistaken identity.”

 
“Who?” she echoed, making it another question.

  Raven’s answering look held a weighing quality. “Emuun, I imagine.” His eyes never left hers. “My first kinsman. Our mothers were twins and we have always looked more alike than brothers, at least when he was wearing his own face.” He shrugged. “Emuun is Nirn’s hound, bringing down anyone the sorcerer names. He could well have been hunting in Emer—and none of the Swarm’s other hunters would have expected to see me.”

  Darksworn, Malian thought, shaken. He really is Darksworn. It explained so much, particularly his knowledge of magic. Yet Lord Falk and Manan, and the rest of the Oakward in Normarch had seemed to trust him. What had Solaan said at The Leas—“behold the raven of battle.” As if, Malian thought now, she knew more of him than just the rough hedge knight.

  Very slowly, she sat up, avoiding any gesture that might appear threatening. She still had her hideout weapons, she realized; he had not disarmed her. And he had not moved when she did, but remained seated in the doorway, his hands quiet on the helm with its fetish crest.

  “So why are you here?” she asked. “What is your business with me?”

  The look he gave her back was steady. “I have something that belongs to you,” he said. “I wish to return it.”

  “To me?” she queried, genuinely puzzled now. To compound matters, her stomach rumbled sharply and he grinned, the old familiar twist to his mouth.

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “I had better get some food into you first.”

  “No,” she said, because she was still Heir of Night and would not let a Darksworn mock her, even if her memories called him a friend. She stood up, trying to think of what she might have lost. “What do you have that is mine?”

  Raven rose to his feet as well, setting the helmet aside and keeping his hands in sight as he moved to his own gear, drawing out a leather-tied bundle. He sank onto his heels and untied the bundle with one hand, his eyes never leaving hers. “When your hero and the Chaos Worm both fell, fighting each other,” he said, “it was our House, led by Khelor, who reached the battleground first.”

  “What House?” Lost, Malian thought, I sound lost.

  “Fire,” said Raven, and she shut her eyes. The House of Fire—but then she had stopped deluding herself that the Darksworn were anything but Derai who truly had gone over to the Swarm ever since se saw her own reflection in the planes of Nherenor’s dead face. She drew her ragged breath and opened her eyes, because there must be no truth too hard to be faced, even an enemy wearing the face of a friend.

  Nhenir spoke for the first time since Butterworth, its voice both ice and fire. “Or a friend who wears the face of an enemy.”

  Too difficult, Malian thought, and made herself concentrate on Raven.

  “We reached the battleground first,” he said again, “and since mutilating dead enemies was never Khelor’s way, he gave orders that both bodies should be buried. Not together,” he added, reading Malian’s face. “We searched, but could not find the helm, and the shield was broken. But the hero’s blade still lay beneath her hand.”

  Malian’s heart began to slam, the blood like sea-surge in her ears as Raven rose and held out a sword. The scabbard and baldric were both plain black, and well worn; the hilt plaited black leather below a round pommel, with a simple guard. It is the sword from the cave, she thought. Despite the weapon’s unadorned simplicity it still asked to be grasped in the way that she remembered—held aloft and wielded against one’s foes. Yet the armring beneath her sleeve remained inert, and Nhenir, too, was silent. She stared at Raven. “What happened?” she asked, her voice a thread although her seer’s sense was alight.

  “Khelor took the sword.” She recognized the expression on his face now, full of grief and weariness despite the underlying sternness. “It was the greatest prize of all our long war. Or should have been. But as soon as Khelor grasped it, the blade laid a geasa on him—and through him, on us all: to conceal and protect it until the hour it returned to the One-to-Come. The sword was made by a god,” he finished grimly, reading Malian’s doubt. “Do you think it could not do it?”

  She shook her head, not knowing what to think. “You must have tried to break the geasa.”

  His brief smile was mirthless. “Yes. But also no. Amaliannarath felt that one reason it could place so strong a working on us was because we were already apt to its will. Weary to death of our endless war and its destruction.”

  Amaliannarath, Malian repeated to herself. She could feel Nhenir’s waiting silence as Raven half drew the sword from its scabbard. If the helm had been animate, she would have sworn it was holding its breath. Like the unsheathed weapon in the cave of sleepers, the drawn blade was gray as pewter. “Are you sure?” she said at last. “Yorindesarinen’s sword was known as the frost-fire blade.”

  Raven clicked the hilt home again. “It was like this when we found it. But we would not have held to our course so long for any lesser weapon.”

  Her thoughts whirled as she recalled the cave of sleepers: row on row of armed warriors with their companion beasts, horses and hounds and hawks, sleeping beside them. She remembered the biers beneath the three banners as well, two empty and the third holding a captain with a stern face, his expression filled with weariness and grief.

  “I saw you,” she told Raven, “asleep with the sword on your breast. I spoke with the ghost that guarded you all. She told me that it was not yet time for you to wake.” She thought about everything that the hedge knight had seemed to know, the years of his experience, glimpsed like a river below winter ice. And when she walked the path of earth and moon at Midsummer, the cave had been empty, the sleeping army gone. “What I saw was far back in time, but I think you have been awake for many years now.” The disbelief caught in her throat. “Concealed in plain sight for over a thousand years,” she whispered. “Yet no one knew you.”

  Raven’s eyes held hers, a certain wryness in their depths. “No one saw our faces—and the Derai keep to themselves, in any case. But after we woke we saw an opportunity to help rebuild the world broken by their cataclysmic arrival.”

  Involuntarily, Malian touched the wall to steady herself. She had already guessed, but hearing him say it still set the day spinning around her—or perhaps that was her illness and lack of food. “I can’t believe it,” she breathed. “Almost since the Cataclysm, Darksworn have been keeping the River safe.” And helping send the Derai Lost south: secrets within secrets, she thought dizzily.

  He smiled, his face resembling that of the warrior in the cave far more than it did the hedge knight from the Long Pass. “We have not really been Darksworn for a very long time,” he said. “More Forsworn, like Tarathan and Jehane Mor.”

  She stared at him, unable to look away, even to the sword he held between his hands. “So who are you,” she asked, “when you are with the Patrol?”

  “I am the Lord Captain—the last from all three lines of the Blood of Fire.” His voice did not change, but she heard the depth of loss. “Raven is a shortening of my real name, which is Aravenor.” He looked down at the weapon in his hands, then back up to meet her gaze. “We have kept this for you for a long time. Will you take custody of your sword, Heir of Night?”

  Slowly, Malian took a step forward. She still felt light-headed and hesitated even when he extended the blade toward her. Nhenir remained silent and no fire blazed from Yorindesarinen’s armring. Could the sword itself be a trap? she wondered. She studied Raven’s—Aravenor’s—face, but could read nothing there except patience. Delicately, she probed at the sword with her seeker’s sense and felt the geasa bound into it. No, she thought after another moment, a geasa within a geasa: the first binding that had been placed on Khelor and his House; and a second that waited for her alone.

  “A promise made to the dying.” The mindvoice whispered out of the blade, but she recognized it from the cave of sleepers. “I brought both the sword and the House of Fire here, to this world of Haarth, in exchange for a pledge.”

  Sh
e raised her eyes to Aravenor’s again, and now his look was quizzical as well as patient. He doesn’t know about the second geasa, she thought, her truth sense sure. “But you do,” she added to Nhenir. “It bound you to silence as well, didn’t it? And through you, the armring.”

  “The arms of Yorindesarinen are one,” Nhenir told her, “as well as three. And a pledge made to the dying is binding across worlds and time.”

  Malian was silent, her eyes fixed on the unadorned sword. In its way, it was as shabby as Raven had been, the day they first met in the Long Pass. Her stomach grumbled again and his lips moved, the slightest twitch, although he still said nothing, just waited for her to take back what was hers.

  “ ‘I brought both the sword and the House of Fire here,’ ” she repeated aloud, and his brows arched up. The images replayed themselves in her mind: the cave of sleepers and then the secret helms of the Patrol, keeping Road and River safe for over a thousand years. I am dead, the ghost voice whispered out of memory. I died a long time ago, so that they might live.

  “So now I can’t have one without the other.” Malian extended her hands and placed them beside Aravenor’s on the scabbard. His eyes met hers again and she saw the dawn of understanding there. Her heart began to pound, because of the Ara-fyr, although she kept her voice steady. “But will you have me?” she asked. “That is the other part of why you rode into Emer, isn’t it?”

  Aravenor nodded. “As soon as I heard your name spoken by Jehane Mor in the very early spring, the sword woke and began to draw me to you. Yet we have served as the Patrol for a long time. Like the Ara-fyr, we have found a place in this world. And we have seen how far the Derai have fallen. The sword is yours by right—but the House of Fire is not for giving over to just anyone because of a title and a scrap of prophecy.”

  No, Malian thought. “And now?” she asked. “Having looked me over?”

  His mouth twitched again, but his gaze did not waver. “I found a great deal to like in Carick the scholar, and I admired the Shadow Band adept’s abilities. But I still needed to know more of who Malian of Night was.”