Maerad stared into the darkness. She had no right to feel such self-pity. She might be in the middle of the wilderness, in mortal danger, but with her were the people she loved most in the world. Somehow, that only made her feel worse. If she failed, their lives were forfeit. She thought of Cadvan's choice to stand by her, his willingness to risk everything he believed in for his faith in her. Was she equal to such faith? She feared, deeply, that she would fail him, that she was weaker than he thought.
At last she gave up trying to sleep. She wrapped her blanket around her and wandered outside to sit with Cadvan, who was keeping the watch. He turned and smiled as she sat next to him, but said nothing. It was the coldest part of the night; the turf glittered with rime under the still moonlight, and Cadvan's breath curled white on the air.
Maerad stared over the hills, and she thought that she could feel the landscape's very bones. As she watched, it seemed to her that a dance of shadows began to unfold and dissolve before her, a dance of such intricacy and nuance that she could barely comprehend it. But she knew it was a dance of the same echoes and shadows that had haunted her dreams the past few nights.
It was a dance of the dead, but now she saw them with her waking senses. She heard their voices ringing dimly on the frosty air, and saw the soft nimbus of their numberless shifting forms. This time she was not afraid; she knew that these were not revenants, the undead who walked again, but rather their memory. Time seemed to her to move in veils that constantly shifted, one over the other, dissolving as swiftly as she perceived them, and through its layers she could follow the shimmering traces of those who had lived here. She saw not only the shadow marks of what they had made or broken with their hands, but the passions that had lived within them: their hatreds and loves and griefs and desires and fears. Every moment when time had stopped under the intense impression of feeling—the joy of a young child at the return of its father, the ardor of lovers, the moment of dying—sang faintly through the fabric of the earth, filling the Hollow Lands with an eerie, melancholy music.
Maerad caught her breath and turned to Cadvan, her heart beating fast, and she cried out. In that moment she clearly saw the skull beneath the skin and muscles of his face, and she knew she was seeing the future of his own death. The vision filled her with utter desolation: how could she bear a world without Cadvan in it?
Cadvan took her hand, urgently asking what troubled her. At once the vision vanished; but Maerad did not know how to tell him what she had seen, and held his hand tightly until her grief and horror began to subside.
She lifted her eyes from the earth and stared at the moon, which blazed high in the black, frosty night. She realized it would not be very long—seven or eight days, perhaps—before it waxed to the full.
"I have been thinking that the most likely place to look for Afinil is in the Hutmoors," said Cadvan, after a long silence. "Though it could have been near Rachida. Or even Rachida itself."
"Wherever it is, we have to find it quickly," said Maerad. "We have to get there before the moon is full. Or it will be too late. Not just for us, I mean, but for everyone: for Innail, for all of Annar ..."
"I don't like our chances," Cadvan said. "But then, I never have. And yet we have come this far."
Maerad nodded. "How long would it take to ride to the Hutmoors?" she asked.
"It depends. We could get there in five days, riding hard. But where Afinil might be in that sorry, desolate place, I do not know."
"Ardina would know where it was. She went there when Nelsor was alive..."
"We need all the help we can get," said Cadvan.
Maerad thought a little longer, and then stood up and went back to the shelter. She returned with her pipes, and standing close by Cadvan, she began to play them. The tune she played was sad, and the notes echoed plaintively in the still night. But this time, Ardina did not come.
At last, Maerad gave up and sat down disconsolately, holding her pipes in her maimed hand. "Why will she not answer me?" she said.
"I don't know," said Cadvan. "But both you and Hem have spoken of how the Elidhu fear and loathe the Treesong. It could be that, now the runes are close together, they emanate a great power, and she cannot come."
"But how are we to find Afinil without her help?"
Cadvan didn't answer for a long time. Finally he said, "If we are meant to find it, we will. But you should sleep, Maerad, especially if we are to begin our journey tomorrow."
"I can't sleep," said Maerad. "I don't think I'll ever sleep again."
Cadvan was about to tell her that she must sleep, that she could not contemplate traveling on no sleep at all, but something in her face, the traces of a deep and inarticulate pain, made him bite his tongue. Maerad stared out with burning eyes over the dim hills, and clutched her blanket more tightly around her body, although she was no longer conscious of the cold.
Hem dreamed of the Black Army that he had seen marching toward Desor. In his dream, the dead soldiers that lay strewn behind the army in the floodplains had risen and were marching on rotting feet, their blank eyes staring at nothing. When he awoke, he remembered that he had seen eyes with that same horrifying blankness in his waking life. They had stared out of the faces of the snouts, the child soldiers of the Dark, when they were bewitched in battle fever.
He rose quickly and walked to a nearby brook, where he splashed his face with cold water to wash away the memory. He tried not to think about his time with the snouts. Sometimes he thought it wasn't possible, even in the many moments of darkness that scarred his life, that he had lived through anything so terrible. But it hadn't been a dream.
And that reality, the world of Sjug'hakar Im, marched with the Black Army. It was that reality that had destroyed Baladh and Turbansk and perhaps had already smashed the walls of Til Amon. In Sjug'hakar Im, children were turned into brutalized killers, and beauty or gentleness or courage were mocked, tormented, and destroyed. Hem had seen children who were broken beyond the hope of repair, whose empty stares spoke of suffering so unspeakable there were no words that comprehended it; he had seen faces twisted and distorted by insanity and pain, faces blind with terror and anger, and dead faces, too many dead faces ...
He thought of his friend Zelika. He hadn't seen her face after she died. Sometimes he didn't know whether he was grateful to be spared that memory, or whether he had been denied his chance to make a proper farewell. Her lovely, savage features rose in his mind's eye, as vividly as if she now stood before him; and his grief for her opened again inside him, raw and bloody, as if he knew it for the first time. Nothing would ever compensate that loss, nothing would ever heal that wound; even if the Nameless One were defeated and all his works should turn to dust and vanish utterly, Zelika would still be dead. In her death lay all the injustice, all the needless waste, of this terrible war.
Hem splashed water over his head again, gasping at the cold. He didn't want these thoughts. The Dark had torn apart his whole life, but undoing the Treesong didn't mean undoing the terrible things that had happened, and he would never be rid of his memories. He set his jaw, staring unseeingly over the purple dawn-lit hills, toward the mist-shrouded peaks of the distant mountains.
He returned to the others, and busied himself helping to strike the camp. No one argued with Cadvan's suggestion that they should travel to the Hutmoors. Hem merely nodded; it seemed like the right direction to him. An earth sense was stirring in his body, like a melody he couldn't quite hear, calling him north.
Everyone seemed to feel the same urgency, as if they knew that time was running out. They packed quickly, and left soon after first light, riding northwest along the borders of the
Hollow Lands, Hem still riding behind Hekibel on Usha. They averted their faces from the rags and bones and piles of carrion that were the only remains of the Hulls and their mounts, and pushed the horses as swiftly as they could over the low hills. There was a hint of warmth in the sunlight that fell on their shoulders, and the ho
rses were rested and eager, and the empty lands passed by them swiftly. By twilight they had left the Hollow Lands and were approaching the Milhol River, two days' ride south of Milhol itself. A stone Bard Road ran alongside the water, following the river through the Broken Hills to Ettinor.
Maerad stared at the brown river, with its banks of black reeds poking through the surface of the sullen water, and remembered that her first sight of a Hull had been not very far from this place, farther down the road in the Broken Hills. The fears she had felt then seemed utterly unimaginable now. Perhaps, she thought sardonically, she had since encountered much worse terrors.
Despite her lack of sleep, she felt no tiredness at all, but her vision was troubling her. The shadow world she had first seen the night before had vanished with the morning sunlight, but as the day wore on, the veils began to return, so that sometimes she wasn't sure which landscape she was riding through—or more accurately, which time. And the hauntings were becoming clearer. Once she saw a long line of people hurrying through a mist, burdened by their belongings, and it seemed to her that they were fleeing in terror. They looked over their shoulders as if in fear of pursuit, and Maerad thought that she saw in their eyes the reflections of flames; but she shook her head and the vision vanished. Another time, near the last circle of standing stones that they passed before they left the Hollow Lands, she saw an old man with a very long beard, tall and thin as a young birch, his arms up-reached to the sky in mysterious supplication. Toward evening, a child ran in front of her, laughing, and Maerad pulled Keru up sharply, fearing he would be trampled beneath her hooves, before she saw that the child was not there. There was something melancholy about all these visions, and Maerad did not speak of them to anyone.
When they reached the Milhol River, they halted briefly and scanned the countryside. It was deserted; the stone road shone white in the late afternoon light, and nothing moved as far as the eye could see. The only sign of life was a pair of hawks circling high overhead and some gray herons stalking in the reeds.
"No floods here," said Saliman, staring at the flat plains of Peredur that lay on the other side of the river. "Thank the Light. I've had enough of mud to last me a lifetime."
"Aye," said Cadvan. "Luck runs with us, so far. If we cross here, we can ride north of the Broken Hills and then cross the Usk Bridge to the Hutmoors, keeping well away from Ettinor. My only fear was that the Milhol might have flooded, and slowed us down. But I think we should go swiftly here; there is something I do not like in this silence, and I don't want to stay on this side of the river."
At this point the river was wide but shallow, with broad, firm sandbanks on either side, so it was not difficult to cross. The light was failing fast as they forded, but although the horses were stumbling with weariness, they rode on until after dusk before they stopped.
Maerad offered to keep watch, since she felt no desire to sleep, but Cadvan, studying her with concern, forbade it and insisted that she rest. Although he did not say so, he was deeply worried about her. It was more than a day since she had used her power, but her skin still shone with the strange, golden magery; if anything, it seemed brighter than before. And he thought there was something fey in her eyes, a flickering like madness, as if she were seeing things that were not there. He remembered what she had told him about her dreams, and shrewdly guessed what she might be looking at. This night she had refused to eat at all, only drinking water and, at Hem's insistence, some medhyl, and she barely spoke.
All day, Maerad had felt as if she were diminishing; the infinite power she had touched when she summoned Hem or when she had destroyed the Hulls now seemed out of reach, unimaginable, as if it had happened to another person. Her body seemed as fragile and light as a piece of spun glass and she felt her mortality more strongly than she ever had in her life. She sensed the Treesong glowing in her skin, and a faint murmur that she knew was a presage of its music seemed still to resonate in her bones. Yet instead of filling her with power, this half music left her desolate and empty, as if she were no more substantial than the shadows of the dead, an illusion glimpsed on a darkling plain that might vanish in the next instant.
A warm south wind rose, rushing over the grasses and thrashing the branches of the trees where they had sought shelter. A layer of clouds spread over the sky, and the moon rose blurred and dim, casting a pale light over the empty lands around them. Hem had the first watch, and sat cross-legged listening to the wind, Irc nestled fast asleep on his lap like a kitten. Hem was so tired that he didn't think anything at all: he was just ears and eyes, his senses poured out passively into the night, alert for any change in its rhythms that might signal danger.
The moon was climbing to its zenith when Maerad joined him. He didn't need to turn to know exactly where Maerad was: her presence burned in his consciousness like a flaming torch, so that he was almost surprised when he looked at her and only saw the faint golden shimmer that rippled through her skin.
"Aren't you sleeping?" he asked.
"No," said Maerad, almost petulantly. "It's boring just lying there. I don't want to stop, we should be riding still, we have so little time ..."
"We wouldn't get anywhere if the horses collapsed with exhaustion," said Hem practically. "And even if you're not, I'm pretty tired."
Maerad didn't answer. She was staring over the plains, and Hem, sensitive to her thoughts, knew she was watching something that he couldn't see. He stirred uneasily, and she turned, suddenly aware of him.
"Are you afraid of me?" she asked abruptly.
Hem met her eyes. In the darkness they burned with a cold, blue light, and she seemed to be looking both at him and through him.
"No," said Hem. "Are you?"
Maerad looked briefly taken aback, and then laughed. "No ... yes, I am, I think," she said. "I think—maybe—I ought to be afraid." She took Hem's hand and held it, palm up, staring at it broodingly as if she could read her future there. "Everyone else is afraid of me. They sit a little distance away, and they are careful what they say."
Hem shrugged. "Irc's not afraid of you," he said. "He thinks that you are like Nyanar."
"The Elidhu you met?" A smile quirked Maerad's lips. "What does he mean?"
"I think he means kind of—wild and sad. You don't feel like an Elidhu to me, though."
"What do I feel like, then?" Maerad looked at him challengingly.
"Like my sister." Hem glanced at Maerad, and then looked away. "I think I am afraid for you," he said, after a silence. "I mean, none of us knows what all this means. And sometimes I just think it means that soon we'll all be dead, no matter what happens, and that seems so unfair." He paused. "And right now you look as if you have a terrible fever, and you ought to be in bed."
"But I don't have a fever."
"I know you don't. You just look as if you do. And it's bad that you're not eating and sleeping, and I think that it must be the Treesong inside you somehow, or something like that, that won't let you go. I don't feel it like you do, but I can kind of feel it in you. And I think it's not something that a human body can bear for very long, and I wonder how long you can go on."
Maerad's eyebrows lifted in surprise, and her gaze faltered.
"I'm a healer," Hem said, his voice low. "If I touch you, I can feel that your body is like—like one of the strings on your lyre, and it's humming with a note that I can't hear, and it's so awfully tight. But I know you can't stop it happening. So, yes, of course I'm afraid for you. But I'm not afraid o/you."
"You're a healer?" Maerad studied Hem with a new respect. He spoke with an authority she had not heard in his voice before. Her hand closed tightly on Hem's. "It's strange," she said. "Since we—since the Treesong almost happened, I've been feeling so lonely. I didn't know why . . . but I think that the Elidhu have gone away. I think that they used to be with me all the time, Ardina and Arkan; even when I didn't know they were there, they knew where I was, and they were— beside me somehow. I didn't know until they w
ent away. And now they're gone, and it's so empty."
"I'm here," said Hem stolidly, and he took Maerad's maimed hand between both of his.
Maerad's hand shook, and he heard her gasp. "Yes," she said. Her voice was muffled.
"It won't ever be like it should have been," said Hem. He was suddenly very aware of Maerad's smallness: he was already taller than she was, and the bones in her hand felt fragile, like those of a bird's. "We should have just grown up together in Pellinor, quarreling and playing together, like children do when you see them. It wasn't like that, and it's not ever going to be like that. I hate the people who did that to us. You're my sister, and I always knew that you were, and I missed you all those years, even without knowing that I did. Even if we don't get through this, I'm glad that I'm here. And I love you, no matter what happens."
Maerad sat very still, and the light within her seemed to burn more brightly. At last she turned to Hem, her eyes shining with tears. "I love you too, my brother," she whispered.
She leaned forward and kissed his brow, and the gentle touch of her lips was like a brand on Hem's soul. Then she stood up and walked away into the night, wrapping her cloak tightly around her against the wind. Hem watched her pacing restlessly to and fro, a faint golden light in the darkness, and it seemed to him that he had never seen anyone so lonely.
Over the next few days, Maerad's sense of confusion deepened. She felt that in some indefinable way she was losing touch with herself. It was a struggle to remain in the present, to be aware of the landscape through which she was traveling; sometimes she felt as if she were trapped in an endless, shadowy dream. If she concentrated hard on shutting down her Bard senses, or if she pinched her flesh, she found sudden moments of clarity in which she was just Maerad, nothing more, in a single present. These moments were a profound relief.
In some ways, it was more difficult because she found it hard to adjust to traveling in company. Over the past year she had never journeyed with more than one person, and the presence of Saliman and Hekibel, much as she liked them, disrupted the casual rhythm of her intimacy with Cadvan. Maerad was surprised to feel a stirring of jealousy. Cadvan was transparently pleased to see Saliman, who was, after all, one of his oldest and closest friends, and the two Bards usually rode side by side and often talked long into the night. She understood, with pained surprise, that Cadvan, too, had been lonely over the previous weeks, that their friendship was compromised by the anxieties he felt about their quest, by his doubts, even by his worry for Maerad herself. The thought filled her with a dragging regret; she thought about how much she leaned on his support, and wondered at her own thoughtlessness. At times Cadvan and Saliman seemed completely carefree, as if, now that they were nearing the unknown end of their quest, they could allow smaller anxieties to fall away; and Maerad realized that it had been a long time since she and Cadvan had laughed together. Perhaps their friendship was not as strong as she had thought.
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