The White Road of the Moon

by Rachel Neumeier

  “Well, but, Hery—”

  “The boy’s right, but Diöllin’s right, too. The beast hardly seems safe to have so near.” Niniol, plainly exasperated, was measuring the beast with a professional eye.

  “He’s fine,” Meridy assured them, hoping she was right. “He’s just a little upset.”

  “You can’t blame him,” Herren protested. “It’s not his fault!”

  Meridy started to say that she knew that, she didn’t blame the fire horse at all, but the prince stepped forward, ghost blind as he was, holding out his hands and murmuring. Not in a soothing tone so much as a sympathetic one: I know, it was terrible, you started to fade, didn’t you, it’s so unfair, I’d be furious too.

  And, even though Herren still couldn’t see him and wasn’t looking in quite the right direction, Gonnuol calmed. The stallion still had his ears pinned back, but he snaked his long, elegant neck forward, not to bite, but to nose at Herren. He couldn’t touch him, not quite, not really, which they all knew, so Diöllin only hissed under her breath rather than panicking.

  Meridy, too, trusted the lack of congruence between the quick and the living far more than she trusted the stallion’s temper. But the fire horse still didn’t try to savage the boy, and now his ears were tipped forward in a more friendly manner. “That’s better,” she told Herren. “That’s a lot better. Maybe it’s true what they say about needing royal blood to ride a fire horse! But we daren’t linger. The fire horse is all right, but we need to get off the road.”

  “His name is Gonnuol,” Herren insisted.

  “Of course his name is Gonnuol,” Diöllin said resignedly, but after another suspicious glare at the fire horse, she smiled at her brother. “Of course you tamed him. I’m not surprised at all, actually. Although—” She turned to Meridy. “You must be careful if you bring the beast back into the real! But you did get Herren away, after all. So…” She took a breath as though it actually hurt her but managed almost graciously, “So, thank you.” Then she moved again to her brother’s side and held her hands out as though to lay them on his shoulders, though she couldn’t actually touch him. “I wish you could see me,” she murmured to her brother.

  “At least he can hear you. Besides, if he were a witch, he might be even more vulnerable,” Meridy pointed out, and then hesitated because it was hard to see how Herren’s position could be worse whether he was a witch or not.

  “Not being a witch doesn’t help much!” Herren said, echoing her thought. “I wish I could see Gonnuol. The rest of you can see him. It’s not fair.” He turned to Meridy. “Can’t you can make him real again?”

  “If I do, anybody could see him,” Meridy pointed out. “And those men are getting close enough to notice a horse appearing out of nothing.” At the moment obviously no one could see the fire horse but herself and the ghosts, or else those goats in the pasture would be upset, and that dog a lot more suspicious.

  But it was the men who worried her. She looked at Niniol, who shrugged and murmured, “Off the road. Let’s go.”

  Meridy sighed. This was obvious, but in all this flat country, it wasn’t obvious how to get out of sight. Jaift would have thought of something clever. She’d probably have hurried to catch up with the wagons, gained the sympathy of the ox drovers with three words, and by the time the riders caught up, she’d be walking along with half a dozen other girls, looking like she’d known them for years, and Herren tucked out of sight among the radishes and cabbages.

  Meridy herself seemed entirely out of clever ideas. Maybe she had to be desperate to think of something clever. Maybe she never did think of clever things, only desperate ones. She rubbed the dirt off her hands onto her skirt. She must look like a particularly unkempt farmer’s daughter. She studied Herren. His clothing had plainly been better, once. But he certainly didn’t look much like a prince. She said finally, “Those goats. I bet we could look like goatherds.”

  “That’d do,” agreed Niniol. “Let’s be brisk about it.” He took a step toward the pasture fence, giving an impatient little jerk of his head.

  Not hearing the ghost, Herren looked at Meridy sidelong. “I don’t know what goatherds look like.”

  “Just like us,” Meridy assured him, with another glance down at her disreputable skirt. “From a distance, anyway. We need to find switches. And to get rid of the dog.”

  At this, the young prince brightened. It made him seem, for the first time, almost like a normal little boy. “Gonnuol could drive him off! And then we could take the goats back to the barn and see if the farmer has sweetleaf. And then we—you—could make Gonnuol real again and we could ride to Surem.” His mouth tightened at the thought of that long journey, the little-boy eagerness already fading. He was definitely fighting exhaustion, Meridy thought, and probably the lingering effects of terror. She sure was.

  But she only said, trying to sound cheerful, “Surem, then. But first, goatherds!” She turned to the fire horse. He immediately arched his muscular neck and half reared, raking his claws through the dirt when he came back down.

  “Gonnuol seems impatient,” Meridy told Herren. “I think he’d be glad to drive off any number of dogs. I just hope he doesn’t send the goats into a mad panic….” That might be tricky to arrange. She stared toward the pasture. Off to the side of the road, the fire horse tossed his head and snorted, mincing away sideways, looking for that one moment so much like an ordinary horse that despite everything, she wanted to laugh at him.

  Herren fell into step beside her as she started toward the pasture.

  “Gonnuol likes you a lot better than he likes me, even if you can’t see him,” Meridy told him. “He really is wonderful…as long as he keeps deciding to do what we want him to do.”

  “He knows you’re his anchor,” Herren told her again. He sounded confident about it. “I just wish I could see him,” he repeated, sounding for once almost like the child he was.

  The fire horse made a series of stiff-legged bucking hops, each one a little closer than the last, and snapped at Meridy, his ivory tusks clashing with a jagged, dangerous sound that she could almost hear. No matter how beautiful he was, those tusks looked at least as dangerous as the killing weapons of a wild boar. Meridy tried not to recoil visibly. She added, “As long as you’re right about him not trying to kill us.”

  “I’m right,” the young prince promised. “He won’t. You’ll see.”

  —

  Herren was right about the stallion, fortunately. Though it proved difficult to get Gonnuol to chase off the dog without terrifying every goat for a mile around. Iëhiy might have done it, surely, but the wolfhound was still missing—having gone back to guard Jaift and make sure she was all right, Meridy hoped. Or perhaps to Inmanuàr, wherever he was. Or even to Carad Mereth—maybe the dog would find him, rescue him from any strange terrible prison in which the witch-king might have imprisoned him so she wouldn’t have to try herself….She had no idea what Iëhiy might do, but by now she trusted the hound to be where he ought to be. She wished she were as confident that she and Herren were where they ought to be. But heading toward Surem, surely that was right. If it was wrong, Inmanuàr or someone was going to have to appear long enough to say so.

  But at least Gonnuol turned out to be quite good at terrifying goats, which was fine, for when frightened, the goats quite sensibly fled straight for their barn. It was easy enough to follow them. By the time the riders, whoever they might be, passed by, Meridy and Herren must have been far enough from the road and looked enough like farmer’s children that they didn’t draw attention.

  The actual farmer, a big darkish man obviously carrying more than a trace of Southern blood, and with three equally big sons even darker than he, was puzzled at what could have so frightened his animals. But he was willing to let Meridy and Herren have a little sweetleaf despite that mystery, when Meridy explained her little half-brother had bad dreams.

  “Goats ain’t so flighty as sheep, usually,” the farmer rumbled. “But I guess someti
mes they get ideas in their heads.” And when Meridy asked, he kindly traded Herren’s fine but much-abused shirt for a decent undyed homespun garment that had belonged to his youngest daughter, a girl a year older than Herren and close to the same size. “Nice work in’t,” he told Meridy, admiring the embroidery on Herren’s shirt. “M’wife’ll find good use for the cloth, you can be sure.”

  He was too kind to ask any questions about where Herren might have come by such a fine shirt or what the boy had been up to, to wear it so hard. Instead, he gave Meridy and Herren each a meat pie left from the day before and pointed out a farmer’s track—a rutted path that wound between fields. “That ’un runs mostly north,” he told them. “Our tracks, they goes back and forth a bit, but keep’n eye on the sun and mind you mostly go north and you’ll come out some’re on the Border Road by an’ by. No one cares if somebody takes our private tracks, so long as they ain’t thieves or ruffians, but mind, those folk up there in Moran Tal, they ain’t so easy as us with someone as is carrying more’n a drop of Southern blood, witches or no, even for a girl your age as is looking after her brother just as she ought. But a nice-mannered little thing like you as bespeaks a man all polite, you ought to get along all right.”

  He brushed off Meridy’s promise they were neither thieves nor ruffians.

  “Anyone’d see you ain’t,” he said gruffly. “Mind you ask polite when you come to a house and don’t just up and head for the well or a seat in the shade. And you’ll likely get on best if you stay out of pastures; there’re those as have bulls in ’em. But you’ll find we’re friendly folk out here, mostly.” And with a short nod he turned his back and strode away to see to his goats.

  “Who did he think we are?” Herren asked, once they had left the farmer’s house and followed the rough track around the pasture. “He can’t have guessed anything like the truth?”

  Meridy had no idea, but Niniol said briskly from beside her, “You with your eyes, Mery, he probably thinks you’re running away from a master who’d got ideas about what use to make of a witch. As for His little Highness, I imagine he’s got a notion the master also had ideas about extra duties for good-looking boys.”

  “Oh,” said Meridy, and then, “Oh!” as she understood what he meant.

  “He thought what?” Diöllin pivoted, drawing herself up in outrage to glare after the farmer. “How dare he think such a thing!”

  Niniol said sardonically, “Better you commend the man for generosity to runaways, Your Highness. There’s those as would hold ’em and wait to see if someone came looking—especially with the boy’s shirt being so fine. You’re lucky that one had more than a touch of Southern heritage himself, and likely his wife more than a touch, or he might not have been so generous to a girl like Meridy, with or without His Highness playing her half brother.”

  Diöllin sputtered wordlessly, still glaring.

  “What?” Herren asked. “Liny? What did he think?”

  “Never you mind,” Meridy told him firmly, feeling her face heat.

  Diöllin was still stiff with offense, but Niniol was hard to argue with, and anyway the princess was distracted by the fire horse, who danced around them, tossing his head and snorting and every now and then snapping his jaws so his tusks clashed alarmingly.

  “I guess Gonnuol wants to run,” Meridy said, glad to change the subject. “You’d think he’d at least think he was tired. Listen, Herren, can you make Gonnuol understand that if he wants to run, he has to let me pull him into the real”—she only hoped she could—“and get up on his back again? And wait, are we going to Surem? If you’re sure that was where the witch-king was taking you, maybe we should go somewhere else after all.”

  But Herren was shaking his head. “We have to go to Surem. I mean, Inmanuàr said Moran Diorr, but I suppose we have to go to Surem first, and then we can think about how to—how to reach Moran Diorr. I never knew how to do that, but, Meridy, you can take us into dreams….”

  “Wait,” said Diöllin. “Who said you have to go to Moran Diorr? Herren, did you say Inmanuàr wants you to go to Moran Diorr? You don’t mean Inmanuàr Incuonarr?”

  Though he couldn’t see his sister, Herren looked away from her voice.

  Meridy hesitated. She asked Diöllin almost reluctantly, “Didn’t you know that Inmanuàr’s been talking to your brother for years? That long before Carad Mereth made me an anchor for Inmanuàr, he made Herren an anchor for him?”

  “What?” Diöllin plainly hadn’t known anything of the sort and, from her disbelieving stare at Meridy, wasn’t at all sure she believed it now. Her gaze went from Meridy to her brother, snagged on Herren’s white-faced stoicism, and jerked hastily back to Meridy. “Why?” Then she visibly gathered her wits and went on quickly, “You must have misunderstood. He couldn’t have done anything of the kind, or Tai-Enchar would have been drawn after Herren long ago!”

  “Well, I kind of think Inmanuàr didn’t have to worry about that,” Meridy said. She couldn’t think of any way to be gentle about this. She said baldly, “From what happened to your mother, and from what Herren tells me, and from one or two things Inmanuàr’s said, I’m almost sure the witch-king has actually always had his hand over Herren. Since before he was born.”

  “Wait, no!” cried Diöllin.

  “Listen,” Herren said. “She’s right, Liny. Just listen.” He didn’t speak loudly, but the tired resignation in his voice, so wrong for a child his age, struck his sister to silence.

  Meridy said, “I think Tai-Enchar has always been ready to reach out and take Herren when the time was right, but I also think Carad Mereth and Inmanuàr had their own plan about how to—how to use Herren against him. Then the witch-king had to move before he wanted to, because you weren’t supposed to die yet. Just your father. I think when the fire horse killed you, too, things went wrong between Tai-Enchar and your mother—I mean, the sorceress who’s taken your mother’s place. Aseraiëth. But I think…I think things went wrong for Carad Mereth and Inmanuàr, too, and everyone had to move suddenly even though they weren’t ready.” She looked at Herren, who gave a noncommittal shrug.

  “No, but, Herren—” Diöllin began, stopping as Niniol laid a hand on her shoulder, which to Meridy’s surprise the princess did not seem to resent. Instead she gave Niniol a look almost of entreaty. “You don’t think it could be true?”

  “It could be,” Niniol said quietly. “Who can tell? Does it make any practical difference at this moment? It’s clear Surem is a place of power in all this, and I think we must go there.”

  “Moran Diorr,” Herren said. “Moran Diorr’s the place of power.”

  Diöllin shook her head, not exactly disagreeing, but hating everything about the whole situation, Meridy could tell.

  The princess said, “I don’t…Look, keeping my brother away from Tai-Enchar, that would protect him—”

  “He can find me,” Herren said thinly. “He can find me in my dreams.”

  Diöllin stared, struck wordless.

  “Ah, well. Of course he can.” Niniol rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers.

  Meridy said apologetically, knowing how much Diöllin would hate this, “That’s why I asked that farmer for sweetleaf. I know it’s not really good to take every day, but it keeps him from dreaming.”

  Diöllin said, “Herren…” Then she stopped.

  “I wanted to tell you, Liny. But it’s always been that way, and there wasn’t anything you could do.”

  “There still isn’t, apparently,” the princess said wearily. She went to her brother and tried to lay her hands on his shoulders, murmuring in his ear so that he would know she was right there with him. Herren sighed and closed his eyes, obviously wanting to lean against his sister, except he couldn’t.

  Meridy looked away, sorry for them both and more than a little afraid that it was only going to get worse. She said, “We’ll go to Surem, then, and think about how to get to Moran Diorr, and if we can find a way into dreams, then maybe we can stil
l follow Jaift’s plan….” She wished again she knew for certain that Jaift was safe but tried not to let herself think about it. She made herself finish firmly. “Jaift’s plan to free Carad Mereth. Then he can oppose Tai-Enchar, as I guess he has been doing for hundreds of years, and maybe then—”

  “Then I’ll tell him he has to use someone else for his plans and leave my brother alone!” Diöllin declared fiercely.

  Meridy wished she thought that was possible. “I was going to say, maybe we can help Carad Mereth defeat the witch-king once and for all, and then we’ll all be safe.” She tried to sound like she believed this, but she couldn’t help glancing quickly at little Herren.

  “Yes,” Herren said firmly, but without meeting her eyes. “Then we’ll all be safe.”

  The farmer’s track led to another, and that one to another, and if the trampled pathways weren’t so smooth or straight as a highway, they were at least far less trafficked. And if an occasional farmer caught sight of Meridy and Herren riding by on the semivisible ghost of a horse, at least Gonnuol was so inexhaustibly fast that the glimpse was probably too brief for anyone to realize what exactly had passed by.

  The journey from Cora Diorr to Surem, the capital of Moran Tal, which sprawled along the shore of Moran Bay, ought to have taken weeks by wagon. Or if they’d been riding a normal horse, at least seven or eight days. But they crossed the border into Moran Tal two days after leaving Cora Diorr, and then two days after that, late in the afternoon, struck the Suremne Highway half a day’s ride from Surem.

  “Three hundred miles in four days!” Meridy said, marveling at such speed. It was almost beyond belief. Though her backside and thighs believed it. She wished very much that Gonnuol had been wearing a saddle when he’d been killed, and she’d have felt more comfortable with a bridle, too, although the fire horse had proved willing to accommodate them once Meridy had demonstrated that she would let him fade back into the ethereal if he turned too far away from the route she needed him to take. She knew now that Herren had been right: Gonnuol understood that she was his anchor and that if he wanted to run faster than a person’s walking pace, he needed to carry her. If all fire horses were as smart as Gonnuol, no wonder they were so dangerous to hunt and difficult to capture.