The White Road of the Moon

by Rachel Neumeier

  Princess Tiamanaith was very beautiful, of course, but although she did not seem old in face or body, her eyes were ancient. Meridy couldn’t see how anyone in this place could fail to know what she was, that she was a sorceress and not the proper tenant of that body. Surely any witch should be able to tell, save that all the witches here but Meridy herself were the servants or allies or victims of the witch-king. For there were other witches here: half a dozen black-eyed men and one black-eyed woman, all wearing the Black Swan badge. They terrified her.

  The sorceress and her witches terrified everyone, judging by the angry stillness that gripped this hall. Once she looked around more deliberately, Meridy recognized the extremely handsome man, Lord Taimonuol, who had almost succeeded in bringing the fire horse stallion to Cora Diorr—or had succeeded, in fact, in a way. Yes, and there was his man, Connar. And there, among the others, Meridy recognized the seneschal, Lord Roann Mahonis, and beside him his brother, Lord Perann. All these men looked furious and wary, but none of them seemed to have challenged the sorceress or her witches. Plainly none of them dared. She guessed Lord Roann and many of these others had come to this place to challenge the princess-regent, and guessed as well that they had found themselves helpless against Aseraiëth and her witches.

  Carad Mereth did not pay attention to anyone but the sorceress. Stepping forward a pace, he said, with an odd kind of constraint in his tone, “Aseraiëth. I thought…I thought you might have gone.”

  The sorceress who was not Tiamanaith inclined her beautiful head. “No. As you see, my old, I am here. No, when Enchaän comes, he shall turn and face your new-made champion. And here in this place he has made for himself, with me beside him, Enchaän will take the heir and the heir’s power for his own at last, whether or not Inmanuàr has taken Tiamanaith’s brat for his own renewal.”

  “Inmanuàr has taken nothing that was not freely given.”

  “Do you think that matters, my old? No, it matters not. Enchaän may not have won all that he wished with this play, but he has not been defeated, and the ruin coming will not be his.” Her voice was as beautiful as her face, clear and warm and seductive.

  Carad Mereth answered almost gently, “Enchaän has already been ruined. He has done it to himself. Now comes the end of the long game. There are only a few moves left to play out.”

  The sorceress tilted her head and answered, “You shall find that the board belongs to Enchaän, and all your hopes shall go down to dust. No, Laìdomìdan, you have badly overplayed your hand.” And she laughed, a delicate, scornful laugh.

  Beside Meridy, Jaift flinched, and Meridy looked from her friend’s ghost to the embodied sorceress and realized that what she heard in Aseraiëth’s voice was worse than scorn. That show of derision lay over something else, and she remembered the tales that spoke of the great sorcerer Laìdomìdan and the love that lay between him and the sorceress Aseraiëth, until Tai-Enchar’s great betrayal of the High King and the Kingdom sundered them from each other and made them enemies. Meridy stared at Carad Mereth, recognizing in him the sorcerer of legend, and understanding that behind Aseraiëth’s disdain lay ruined love. That was worse than if she and Carad Mereth had always been enemies.

  “Is Enchaän’s victory truly what you desire?” Carad Mereth asked Aseraiëth. His voice shook, just perceptibly. “Are you so unwilling even yet to go into the hand of the God?”

  “That is not my Road. Not any longer, if it ever was. Ah, Laìdomìdan, my fair. You always have such hope. How can you bear it?”

  “I suppose I bear it because living without it would be…truly unbearable.”

  “Do you think so?” asked the sorceress, and laughed. Behind the warmth of that laugh lay a deep shadow of cruelty; and behind the cruelty, a deeper echo of bitterness and despair.

  Taking a step forward, Carad Mereth said, quietly and intensely, “You are wrong, and you will lose everything. It needn’t be that way. You may still repudiate Enchaän. There will be time. The hand of the God is over me, it is over us all, but I will wait that long.”

  Aseraiëth lifted her head with a swift, arrogant movement, but when she laughed again, this time she did not trouble to disguise the bitterness. “You are always so kind, Laìdomìdan! You needn’t bother. I will not stray from the path I have chosen. It will be interesting to bear witness to this confrontation, I have no doubt. And when it is over, I will rule here beside Enchaän, but you will have gone to your God. Does that not comfort you?”

  Carad Mereth drew a breath that sounded pained. Meridy, recoiling from the depth of anger and grief between the two sorcerers, could see that the hand of the God was indeed over him, and over Jaift. A brilliant pressure poured through her friend and infused the very air surrounding Carad Mereth, until it seemed almost easier to cease breathing than to bear it.

  Then the light folded open. Meridy had seen this often enough now—she could hardly mistake it. Or maybe she recognized the way Carad Mereth lifted his head, the mocking twist to his mouth meant to hide fear. He was afraid, she knew that—she was afraid, too, not only for herself and for her ghosts, vulnerable to all these witches and to their terrible king, but also for all the ordinary people here in this place.

  Aseraiëth took an eager step forward, lifting her hands.

  Flinching from the sorceress and the rippling light, Meridy said to Carad Mereth, half a cry of protest, “But what will happen?”

  “We shall no doubt shortly discover,” he said, not quite smoothly. “I suspect there may not be much of Cora Diorr left at the end. That’s yours to manage, young Mery, if you find the way to open the White Road for the living as well as the dead. I won’t have the attention to spare. Besides, Jaift is your friend and will make an effort to listen to you even while she has one foot set on the God’s Road.”

  He smiled at Jaift, who seemed, to Meridy’s worried glance, to have both her feet on the White Road.

  Meridy began, worried, “But—”

  “Make no mistake, child: it is indeed the ending of an age.”

  Meridy had no doubt of this. She was almost certain Moran Diorr had risen from the waters of the bay—the real and the ethereal had been impossible to sort out, there at the end—but she found she could quite easily believe that the City of Spires might fall. She wanted to say, But what will you do?

  Then Tai-Enchar stepped out of the air, and he was here, and there was no more time for questions or for fears.

  “Enchaän! Welcome,” said Aseraiëth, lifting her hands, which were filled now with light.

  The witch-king had been disembodied, and so his insubstantial form was hard to see. But it took a moment to realize this because even dead, the witch-king held power that loomed across and through the tower like a black storm. Like Inmanuàr, he seemed both more strongly present in the world than an ordinary ghost and at the same time less real. Meridy could hardly bear to look at him. She wanted to back away, but she couldn’t move. She tried to hold harder to Jaift’s hand, but it was cool and insubstantial in hers, and Meridy found her fingers closing on air.

  Then Tai-Enchar passed across the chamber like a wraith and held out his hand to one of the witches, who drew back, but not quickly enough. The witch-king’s ghost seized his hand and vanished, and immediately the witch blinked and opened eyes that were blacker and emptier than the eyes of any natural man. His shadow spread out above him and before him, not like an ordinary shadow, Meridy saw, but simultaneously there and not-there, like a ghost. It was Tai-Enchar’s soul, too powerful to be entirely contained within his stolen body.

  “No,” whispered Jaift, taking a small step toward the possessed man. “No.”

  Meridy gave her an agonized glance, knowing that this was exactly what Tai-Enchar had done to her friend, and that seeing him do it to someone else must be so much worse for Jaift than for the rest of them. She tried again to take her friend’s hand, but still Jaift was too insubstantial and she couldn’t even manage that.

  The possessed witch had been an
older man, stocky and strong, with dark hair and a grizzled beard and weathered skin. But the presence that now looked out of his eyes was nothing that belonged to that face or that body. He said to Carad Mereth in a voice like iron, “One is hardly astonished to find thou hast come here to this place before me, poet. But this is a place of mine now, and all your effort will not avail thee. I shall take for my own the champion thou hast made, and thou wilt witness the crumbling of all thy hopes.”

  “Not my champion, but the God’s,” Carad Mereth answered evenly. “Or why would you have been forced to flee to this place?”

  Before the witch-king could answer, if he intended to, Aseraiëth stepped forward, demanding attention. “Tai-Enchar! I will serve you, lord! Together we can still defeat our enemies. All I ask is that you restore Tiamanaith’s daughter to life! Look, there is her soul.” She pointed to Diöllin’s translucent form with a terrible, covetous ambition. Diöllin glared, but the sorceress ignored her and went on, speaking to the witch-king, “You need only make a body for her—for me! A daughter of the High King’s line, bearing the right to his power and his sorcery and his kingdom; am I not due that? Then I will help you defeat Laìdomìdan, for all he fancies himself the servitor of the God. And when Inmanuàr arrives, you, too, will take the body that is rightfully yours!”

  “Little though I require thy labor on my behalf,” answered the witch-king, “yet thy service over these long years does deserve recompense.” And he turned his terrible gaze thoughtfully upon Diöllin.

  Meridy ran to Diöllin and grabbed her hand, a hand that returned faint and desperate pressure, not quite tangible, not enough to hold her. So Meridy caught the princess with her will and her heart to hold her, but despite all she could do, they both cried out as the binding between them snapped. Dust whirled and condensed, and almost at once another body lay there, a second Diöllin, more solid and real than the ghost Meridy still tried to hold, but empty. It should have been impossible—it was a sorcery beyond anything Meridy had ever imagined—but Tai-Enchar had done it. And so fast. It was wonderful and terrible, this untenanted body that had never lived and was not truly dead; truly a thing of dreams and of nightmares.

  “No!” cried Diöllin, soundless and desperate, but Aseraiëth only laughed.

  “How dare you?” Jaift whispered. “How dare you?” But no one heard her except Meridy, and there was nothing either of them could do. Diöllin took several small, reluctant steps toward the new-made body. It was plain that the body drew her, plain that the witch-king or the sorceress or the sheer weight of the newly created body could compel the ghost to enter it.

  Meridy could not believe how fast everything was unraveling. She looked around desperately, but Inmanuàr still did not come.

  “Aseraiëth, listen to me,” Carad Mereth said, low and urgent. “You made no bargain with Diöllin! It is not fitting that you should bend your efforts to take her life for yours, nor did Tiamanaith ever have the right to give away any life but her own. You act against the natural order and against the God, in whose hand the dead rest.”

  The sorceress ignored him. She knelt over Diöllin’s new body and impatiently held out one hand toward Diöllin, who helplessly took several more steps toward her; and very quickly, even though both Meridy and Jaift tried to hold her, the ghost of the princess faded as she entered the body Tai-Enchar had prepared for her. The body opened her eyes and sat up, Diöllin once again a living girl—but she flinched away from Tiamanaith, shuddering. “Mother! No!” she cried, and then Herren, hovering translucent and intangible over his sister’s new body, said it too, half a sob, in the all-but-noiseless voice of a ghost, “Mother!”

  The sorceress opened her mouth to speak, then threw back her head and made an inarticulate choking sound instead. From reaching out toward Diöllin her hand went to her throat, and Meridy, fascinated and horrified, watched vivid expressions of fury and grief and outrage chase across the sorceress’s face, and realized that Princess Tiamanaith was fighting to reclaim her own body from the sorceress to whom she’d given it—that she was fighting Aseraiëth in a last desperate effort to protect her daughter. Meridy could see them both in that struggle, like seeing both a living person and her ghost at the same time, except that Meridy was really seeing two people struggling for dominion within a single body, both Tiamanaith and Aseraiëth, one overlying the other. It was unspeakably horrible, and worst of all, she could tell that Aseraiëth was going to win. She was almost certain that Tiamanaith was able to resist for this one moment only because the sorceress had been preparing to leap from her body to that of her daughter, and she could see that Tiamanaith’s strength was already failing—

  “Mother!” said Herren, voiceless and desperate as any ghost, helpless as any ghost to reach out into the solid world and touch his mother. He pulled away from Meridy, flickering toward his mother in the quick not-quite-there movement of a ghost. Meridy reached for the binding between them, to stop him, but she was too late, they were both too late. The sorceress had already laid her hands on Diöllin’s shoulders, and the princess stood frozen and helpless.

  Meridy couldn’t stop Aseraiëth; she’d been too slow. But she did something else. In the moment the sorceress’s soul leaped free of Tiamanaith and began to enter Diöllin’s body, Meridy laid her will on that soul and lifted it free of both bodies. She held Aseraiëth’s furious soul, and cried out, “Aseraiëth! By your name I bind you to me and to the world!” And she held and bound and ruled the ghost of the sorceress exactly the way she would have held and bound and ruled any other disembodied ghost.

  Aseraiëth and Tiamanaith alike cried out, but the voice of the ghost was a high-pitched furious whisper, while the living woman gave voice to an alto cry of anguish. Tiamanaith, once again alone in her body, crumpled to the floor. Herren, for once as frantic as any little boy, hovered around his mother, patting her arms with his insubstantial hands, desperate to comfort her and be comforted though she could not see him and showed no sign that she could hear him, either.

  And Diöllin, no longer under siege from Aseraiëth, ran her hands down her new body and then raised her living hands and stared at them, overcome to the point of speechlessness.

  “Well done!” Carad Mereth said to Meridy. “Hold the sorceress fast. But I must warn you, ghost or no, she is still dangerous, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to hold her long.”

  Meridy was sure he was right. She could already feel a strange kind of tension in the binding. Aseraiëth was not only ragingly furious but also doing something to the binding that Meridy didn’t even understand. She could hardly spare a second to worry about that, because now the witch-king was studying at her. He had noticed her, maybe for the first time, and she would have given almost anything to be unnoticed again.

  As though he’d picked Meridy’s greatest fear out of her heart, Tai-Enchar said to her, “As yet thy strength is but little. Yet it shall grow, and thou shalt become a most valuable servitor.”

  “No!” whispered Jaift.

  Meridy wanted to shout defiance, but she couldn’t make a sound. She shook her head, denying the possibility, yet she knew if they didn’t defeat the witch-king now, today, in this moment that had brought everyone together in this place, he would do it. Tai-Enchar didn’t even mean it as a threat. He would make her into one of his servitors just as he had done to Jaift, just as he’d done to that poor man he possessed now, because he thought she would be useful, and because she couldn’t stop him, and he would think no more of it than a normal man would think of bridling a horse or chaining a dog. Less.

  Dismissing Meridy from his attention, Tai-Enchar said to Carad Mereth, “Though thine allies may purchase for thee one moment and another, it will never be enough for thee. Thou and I are aware that thou hast not the strength.”

  “Though a cup of water is nothing, no one can hold back the tide when it rises,” Carad Mereth answered. “The tide has turned, Enchaän, and even you will not stand against it, no matter how you may plant your
feet and rail against the moving sea.”

  Tai-Enchar laughed and moved forward. All his witch-servants moved with him, to encircle Carad Mereth, who stood quietly, making no obvious move to defend himself. Meridy shrank back, but Diöllin leaped forward, catching one of the servitors by the arm and slapping him across the face with a sound like the crack of a whip. The man shook his head impatiently and hit her, an open-handed blow much more powerful than hers, and Diöllin stumbled back and fell, trying unsuccessfully to catch herself, and hit the floor hard.

  Immediately Roann Mahonis, though he was unarmed, stepped up and hit the servitor, not any casual slap but a hard twisting blow aimed up under the ribs, a brawler’s move that even in that moment startled Meridy for what it implied about the man’s past—suddenly he seemed a great deal more like the kind of man Diöllin might have fallen in love with.

  The witch staggered, gasping, and went to one knee, glaring up at Roann. He lifted a hand—he was going to snatch out Lord Roann’s living soul. Meridy caught her breath, feeling that she should be able to stop him, but even after all that had happened, she did not know how. And then Aseraiëth made an effort to break free, and Meridy was caught up in a different and even more imperative struggle she didn’t know how to answer.

  But Lord Roann’s brother, Perann, swearing at Roann and the servitor with equal violence, kicked the man in the back from behind, and suddenly it was a brawl, ordinary men against the witch-king’s servitors, nothing like any high battle in a tale, but ugly and confusing and brutal. The handsome Lord Taimonuol had snatched a slim dagger from some hidden sheath and efficiently stabbed one of the witches, but then he fell himself as his soul was flung violently from his body. Meridy, staggering from Aseraiëth’s assault, nevertheless tried to catch Lord Taimonuol’s soul and keep him safe from the witches, while his man Connar, plainly too furious to be afraid, bludgeoned the witch with both fists coming down against the back of the witch’s neck, and then Meridy lost track of that fight because too much else was happening.