“No,” I said.
“Pity. We have none now. Old Father Wendlac was such a rough old bear that he could not keep an acolyte from one feast-day to the next; and our priest of the Rising God, Anlaf, is not of my way of thinking.”
“I was in the Tarvon Monastery, devoted to the Rising God— but I left without final vows,” I said.
“And now you follow Hwyn,” Halred mused, “who has secrets to keep. I wonder—I have heard tales of the Priestesses of the Hidden Wisdom …”
“The likeness has been observed before,” I said, with a sly smile at Hwyn.
“And in error,” Hwyn concluded. “I have no order, nor any learning at all. I wish I had been taught by you, Good Mother. I might then be better able to understand the dreams that drive me.” She looked up at Halred like a schoolchild at a favorite teacher. Their eyes seemed to meet, and I watched her shed yesterday's suspicious like unneeded winter garments in the sunshine. “Maybe you could explain what has eluded me, even now.”
“I won't deny you pique my curiosity,” Halred said. “Do you mean to speak of these dreams, then, or only to add riddles on riddles, like St. Lar's Vision of the Hidden Goddess?”
“I think now that I was wrong to mistrust you,” Hwyn said. “And yet it is hard to speak plainly of what is still misty and dreamlike to me. So much of what I know seems to lie below speech, out of my willing grasp.”
“That must burden you,” Halred said softly. “And it may be true, as you say, that learning would have made all clearer and simpler. Ye t dreams and visions are not given amiss: they are given to those they are meant for, whether scholars or plain laborers or outright fools. It might be that the hand of a teacher would have lain too heavy on you to let you feel the subtle pull of your own calling—or that understanding the portents too clearly would only frighten you from the course you must take.”
Hwyn smiled ruefully. “Now you speak as if you knew the last twists of my journey. I went to Kreyn because I heard that an oracle-stone kept by Lady Goldifer Kreyn held some prophecy about—about me, it might be.
“I went there seeking answers; what I found was almost death for all three of us, for in seeking the stone we offended Lady Goldifer, who reigns almost as a priest-queen, high in the reverence of the people. Her guards chased us into the hills. Now, thanks to my curiosity, Jereth has been hurt, we have strayed far from the path I must travel, and what little I have learned at this cost can only frighten me—it cannot help me complete my task.”
“Nor may my counsel help you,” Halred admitted. “I am not a visionary; my wisdom is in things I can touch with my two hands. And though you may be untaught, no one who heard you bolster your case for secrecy with verses of St. Ligaiya would call you unlearned. You may have gleaned your knowledge by following the reapers, but it is as much as many have harvested with a teacher's help. It may be that what you know is enough, if you could but trust your own knowing.”
“Maybe,” said Hwyn softly.
The healer moved closer to Hwyn. “You said you had strong reasons to keep your secrets. Now, I won't lie to you: everything you say makes me hungrier to know what you're hiding. I am one of those people whose appetite to know is never satisfied. And besides, if you are some kind of prophet, you may have some knowledge that would help my people. But I would be ashamed to coerce that knowledge from you. You must not feel you owe me your secrets because I poulticed your friend's wound.”
“It was not that—or not only that,” Hwyn said. “But something you said made me think you might understand, as so few can understand.”
Halred smiled. “Maybe so. But I admit you touched a sore point when you said you would tell me what you must to pay for Jereth's healing—to pay! Bright Goddess defend us!
“My teacher in the mysteries of the Bright Goddess took her lore from a long tradition of healer-priests, stretching back before the dawn of memory, and none have ever asked payment for healing. We lived on the free bounty of the Folc. But if the changes I see run their course, I will need to ask payment; everything will be mine or yours or his or hers, nothing everyone's or no one's, no free bounty for healing or worship.
“But enough talk for now,” she said, returning to her kettle by the hearth. “We must hasten, for we have an ordeal ahead of us. Jereth, I am sorry: I ought to be able to promise you a day and night of uninterrupted rest, at least. But with the Folc in disagreement over you, you must appear at the Assembly Stone to be judged. Let me give you a bit to eat before we go. There will be more time to talk along the way.”
She ladled porridge from the cauldron into clay bowls and set them on a closed chest as on a table. We sat on the floor around it and dug in eagerly with our fingers, for we'd been half starved ever since we left faraway Sebrin, and my appetite was returning with my health. Not entirely returned, however: the thick porridge of oats and peas seemed so heavy after days of berries and odd leaves that I found it slow work to eat it. “I'm not sure I need this much,” I told Halred.
“Finish it,” she commanded with a healer's authority.
As they waited for me, Hwyn began tentatively to speak: “I've been thinking about what you said—that night is a healer as well as day. And I wonder, in this remote land, have you heard of the Troubles in the North?”
“That we have,” Halred said. “We see few strangers, but in recent years, most have come down from the North, fleeing from earthquakes or angry ghosts or towns fallen into lawlessness— or telling stranger tales than those.
“One hunter said the paths turned under his feet, more and more with each passing day, till he could not find his way home again. Farmers said that when spring bothered to come at all, they could not be sure that what followed it would be summer. And we ourselves, with three years' late springs and three years' lean harvests, fear that we feel the first blows of whatever destruction is coming down from the North.”
Hwyn paused a while, and I watched her as eagerly as Halred to see what she would say. “Whether your land's troubles are part of the same upheaval, I cannot say,” she said. “But since I half drowned in a sacred pool, I have had a sort of dark sight, a knowledge of things beyond the grasp of reason. And whatever fills my night with visions has taught me to see the Troubles not as destruction, but as the coming of Night over the world.”
Halred shook her head. “If it is, it is a crueler night than I want to imagine. You don't know what it means to live in a land that is dying, among a people that is losing its soul.”
“Maybe not,” Hwyn said. “I have rarely stayed in one place for long. But everywhere I have traveled, I have found things stirring like the air before a storm that will wash away all before it: old ways and new, rulers and subjects, kings and priests, wrestling each other to a stalemate, neither able to gain the upper hand, neither able to surrender. In every city, in every least village, I feel something about to burst.
“It is like the moment before the clouds open with rain, the moment before the dam bursts, the moment before the fever breaks, the moment before the womb opens. And the only thing that keeps me from running mad in this chaos—save Jereth's friendship—is something that whispers to me that these are the pangs of birth.”
“I want to believe you,” Halred said. “I want desperately to believe that you have some power to help my people, when we most need it. And there is some power in you, I am certain. I felt it when you sang the Bright Goddess's call to Jereth last night, in half-voice, as if hardly using your strength, and yet I half expected the green shoots to pierce through the stone floor in response. And I want to believe that the power you bring is for the good of this land. But what I see around me looks like the pangs of death, not birth. Though I have attended many a desperate-seeming childbirth, I can see no new life amid this darkness.”
“Here,” said Hwyn, “is new life in the darkness.” And to my amazement, she drew forth the Eye of Night from its hiding place. “Any power you sensed from me must be traced to this.”
“Why? W
hat is it?” Halred breathed, stretching out a hand toward it hesitantly, as if she longed to touch it, but dared not.
“It is the egg of the Sky-Raven that sheltered the world in the dawn of time,” Hwyn said.
“Gods on the Wheel!” Halred gasped, backing away from Hwyn. “There are prophecies about you: Bearer of Night.”
“Not evil ones, I hope,” said Hwyn with a nervous smile.
“Some good and some ill,” Halred said, “and taken together, impossible to fathom. Some say the Bearer of Night will come in a time of confusion, and all will be made clear. Some say you will bring division, doubt, and strife. Some say that the Bearer of Night will restore what was lost—or take away what we most desire. Some say the visitation betokens the end of the world.” She looked at Hwyn, who sat on the floor with eyes downcast, shoulders hunched, as if ashamed. “Mind, it does not say any of this will be your fault, but that your coming foreshadows things to come—what things, I can hardly say. There is also a prophecy that your coming foretells the coming of the gods—whether that means the world's end or something else, my two teachers could not agree.”
Hwyn looked up again, half smiling. “People say, ‘Where are the gods?’ and, ‘Will the gods return to us?’ But the gods are always among us. St. Ligaiya, of course. As for the end of the world—I don't know. There is so much I don't understand. Change is coming, and it may be the end of the world—or the end of one and the beginning of the next. But this—” she held out the Eye of Night in a cupped palm, “this, this living thing, this child, it calls me, it murmurs to me in language I scarcely understand. I feel it yearning, longing to be free, longing to be born, and I cannot deny it. And it gives me hope: blind, unreasoning hope. Do you understand?”
Halred was silent a while, looking at Hwyn with curiosity and kindness in her eyes. “I see that a heavy destiny has been laid on you,” she said at last, “and to harden you to endure it, some rare understanding or some rare madness has been given along with the burden. It may not be mine to understand. And yet—I often feel my wisdom is in my hands. May I touch the egg?”
Hwyn held it out farther toward the healer. Halred hesitated, uncertain, before covering Hwyn's hand with her own. Only slowly did her fingers relax, curling around the white stone, touching Hwyn's bony, calloused hand. For a moment, they held the Eye of Night between them. I held my breath, wondering whether Halred would sense something that had been hidden from me when Hwyn had placed the strange stone in my hand.
Slowly, Halred withdrew her hand, shaking her head. “It feels, as you say, alive, like a small creature in need of healing. Beyond that, I cannot say. Its language is not for me.”
For a time she brooded, staring at her hands as though to find the defect in them that could not sense what Hwyn did. But as Hwyn returned the stone to its hiding place, Halred roused herself and pulled on her worn boots. “Enough time in the misty heights of prophecy. You've slept away the day, and now we must go, or the Assembly will begin without us—and decide against us.”
“But do you still want to defend us before your people, now that you know what I am?” Hwyn said.
“You are my guests,” Halred said firmly. “That much I understand; let the rest fall as it may. And you, Hwyn, though you may be the Bringer of Night, I cannot see how I should blame you for it. Some god's hand is on you; should I stand against it? Besides, if I learned nothing from the Raven's Egg, I may have learned something from the hand that held it: and I sensed there an innocent heart.”
We made our way up the feet of Summerbride, the mountain north of the valley. As we neared the meeting place, we began to see the flocks of the Folc, small soft-eyed sheep and wiry white goats munching the grass and wildflowers. The first dog I saw among them, I took for Seeker: as large as any I'd ever seen, with the same blunt black snout and thick black coat. But when I'd seen more of the formidable creatures running about the edges of the flock, keeping the sheep within bounds, I realized that it was simply a local type, as common here as skinny yellow dogs had been on the wharves of Swanroad in my childhood.
Most of the shepherds, too, were of a type: tall, spare, and big-boned, with large hands and feet, high cheekbones and a low-bridged nose. Most had hair as straight and black as any Magyan's, though there were also a handful as redheaded as the Bright Goddess in Halred's icon, and some with hair like rich brown earth broken with veins of clay-red and loam-black. The women wore their hair in one braid down the back, the men in two over each shoulder, like Ethwin and his father. All their eyes were blue or light gray; Hwyn's dark gray, my hazel, and Trenara's brown eyes were the darkest to be seen. Their clothes, too, showed little variance: sturdy knitted woolen tunics of green, rust-red, ochre, or blue, with patterns of leaves or flowers stitched at the wrists and throat, over undyed shifts or breeches or bare legs.
They called to Halred as they saw her, “Good day, Good Mother!” or, “Blessings on the day, Mother Halred!” One drew her aside to ask her advice on an ailing ewe. She bent over the animal as attentively as she had examined my wound, prodding at its sores and forcing its mouth open to look at its tongue in a way that made me feel for the beast, fellow-sufferer of her healing arts. She and the shepherd spoke some time about what the sheep might have eaten, and what it might be given, while Trenara, suddenly taken with the animal, petted it and made much of it.
The shepherd turned from Halred little by little to stare at the elegant lady kneeling in the grass. “So this is the reason for our Assembly,” he said at last, gesturing at the lady.
“These are my guests,” Mother Halred said emphatically. “This kind gentlewoman is the Lady Trenara. Hwyn, here, is a wise woman—perhaps a prophet, as the gods may choose to reveal—and may bring some sign for our enlightenment in this time of fear. And Jereth, who was found sick and hurt on Wildhelm, brings knowledge from the Tarvon Monastery. My friends, this is Aldworth of the Ashwood Clan.”
Hwyn extended a hand to him, and when Aldworth's eyes had strayed from Trenara enough to notice it, he clasped it hesitantly. “Are you indeed a wise woman?” he said.
Hwyn shrugged. “I'd better say no, lest I disappoint you.”
He smiled, then, as though that moment of uncertainty touched him. “Never mind that, good sister. You are welcome to this land.”
Halred smiled in return. “I knew we could count on your kindness, Aldworth.”
And so, as we met the Folc along the way, Halred mustered her allies: as one asked advice for a lame sheepdog, another for her husband's aching back, another for his wife's late childbirth, she introduced us to all who sought her counsel, and we entered the gathering-place in the company of Drict, the largest man in the village and a person of some influence, once Halred had given him something for his headache. In fact, it was Hwyn's own willow bark she gave him; I wondered, idly, whether Hwyn might in other circumstances have been like Halred, healer-priestess of some village, living on the gratitude of her neighbors instead of the scraps she could beg or steal from strangers. Surely she was a likelier priest than I had ever been.
One by one the Folc gathered, shepherds leaving their flocks in a common paddock nearby or under the care of their sons or daughters; tillers of the soil climbing the same donkey-trails we had followed; mothers with babies at their hips; old women with distaffs busy in their fingers, old men mending harnesses while they waited for the meeting to begin. Ye t I did not see our first friend among the Folc. “Where can Ethwin be?” I asked Halred.
“As far away as his father can send him, if I know Edwach,” Halred answered.
We clustered on a high meadow ending in rocks and rubble before a sheer wall of stone cleft with the mouth of a cave. A few yards before this gateway into darkness, a huge, flat-topped stone marked the boundary between the stony waste and the grassy stretch beyond it. Even lying on its longest side, the stone stood shoulder-high to the tall men of the Folc.
As we entered the crowd, people made way before us, bowing to Halred or greeting her warmly, c
alling merrily to Drict, staring at us travelers in unconcealed curiosity. Someone took the donkey's reins, and Drict unassumingly helped me to dismount and half supported me through the press of people, who gave way without ado, to sit on the thinning grass before the great stone.
On the broad face of the Assembly Stone, I saw a single emblem: a circle graven with four leaves of different shapes at its compass points. By its narrower ends, smaller slabs of stone were piled like stairs. To one side, the crowd cleared around what I now saw was a small fire-pit.
As the sun sank low on the western slopes, a powerfully built man in a berry-red tunic noted the position of the Assembly Stone's shadow and raised a leafy branch above his head as a symbol to the crowd. Three other men approached, carrying branches of their own. With a start, I recognized one of them as Ethwin's father, Edwach. He seemed to catch my eye, but did not return my nod of acknowledgment.
A man in a plain undyed cassock now threaded his way through the crowd, which parted around him as it had around Halred and Drict. He mounted the Assembly Stone from the edge of the fire-pit and stood stone-still, waiting for the people to seat themselves and be silent.
“Anlaf,” Halred whispered to me, “our Priest of the Upright God.”
She had no need to tell me his vocation, nor would I have been in much doubt even if he had changed clothes with one of the shepherds. If he were not a priest of the Rising God, he could only be a minstrel playing the part of one. He was the very type and caricature of my own order: his back straight as a temple pillar, as if he took the epithet “Upright God” too literally and made a spiritual exercise of good posture; his whole frame gaunt and ascetic as his undyed clothing; his jaw, stripped of its beard, too narrow; his head too bony, shaved high up the back to leave only a pitiful fringe of white hair; his gaze abstracted, as if he were unused to contemplating anything in the visible world but books. This man might never have left the Hills of Penmorrin, where I had never been before—yet I had met him countless times before.
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