After the morning’s rain the wind had freshened considerably, but the trees on either side of the hedges were absorbing the brunt of it. Although I could hear the wind, down in the green channel between hawthorn and holly the air was still and close and unexpectedly hot.
It didn’t occur to me to look behind to see where Hal and Mr. Dart were. I dismounted and tethered my horse to a convenient branch, straightened my coat and neckcloth and hat, and walked slowly and deliberately along the remaining thirty or so yards before the pool.
The Lady’s stones, as a rule, consist of a flat offering stone, placed usually just above the water’s surface, to the eastern side of the man-size or taller upright stone anchored in the centre of the pool. The hawthorn and holly hedges continued around the circular glade, leaving perhaps five feet between the shrubs and the stone coping of the pool.
If the Ellery Stone, up in the Coombe by the Lady’s Pools, was where the children of Ragnor barony went to scare themselves silly with ghost and monster tales, the Dragon Stone along the Greenway was where youths went to pray for assistance in matters of the heart—and the loins. Heart, loins, and feet are sacred to the Green Lady of Summer; head, lungs, and hands to the White Lady of Winter.
I had always vaguely assumed that the Dragon Stone took its name from the nearby tavern, but from the way the living dragon was perched, I was no longer so sure. It fit neatly into the space: haunches on the offering stone, tail coiled around the lip of the basin, neck curved into the surfaced of the upright, wings arcing perfectly to fit the space, casting green shadows on the grass, underlit by wavering ripples of light.
Perhaps tavern and stone were named for real dragons, not the other way around.
I looked at the dragon. It looked at me. I bowed, politely, slightly extravagantly, slightly ironically.
The dragon inclined its head. Paused a moment. Spoke.
“Between the green and the white is the door. Between the race and the runner is the lock. Between the sun and the shadow is the key. In the bright heart of the dark house is the dark heart of the bright house. And therewithin, if the sap of the tree runs true, is the golden treasure of the dark woods.”
It paused there, the riddle like the first lines of a haiku, awaiting the turn, the twist, the closure.
The demand, the reward, the cost.
And then it said, its voice soft, incongruously reasonable, “The way of the woods has many turns and few branches. The branch of the woods has many turns and few ways. The turn of the woods is the way of the branch, for good, young sir, or for ill.”
“Whose good?” I said. “Whose ill?”
The dragon unfurled itself from around the stones in a single sinuous movement, head motionless, eyes on mine, horns gleaming polished gold. It smiled, even more disquietingly, its eyes too aware, too cold, too ironic, even as its wings lifted green and gold in the sunlight, against the rushing clouds, white and blue.
“That is, of course, up to you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Mr. Dart has Another Idea
“WELL, OBVIOUSLY THE first thing to do is go to the Woods Noirell,” said Mr. Dart.
“I don’t know my grandmother,” I replied, trying not to take my aggravation out on them.
“What has that got to do with it? If anything, that increases the adventure.”
I glared up at Hal, who had said this last—not that Mr. Dart was not evidently also thinking it—knowing he was right, and not finding the knowledge appealing. “I don’t want an adventure. I don’t want to be embroiled in the Honourable Rag’s folly, I don’t want my uncle making trouble with Mrs. Buchance for my own good, I don’t want everyone to bet on me for the Fair, I don’t want to knock on my grandmother’s door, and I sure as hell don’t want to be playing games with a dragon!”
I laughed harshly, then regretted it when I started to cough. I sat down on the edge of the pool coping, trying to govern my emotions, or at least my face.
Why did the world have to be so bloody confusing?
Hal and Mr. Dart were arguing above me. I propped my chin on my hand and looked into the water of the pool. It was still moving wildly in reaction from the dragon taking flight.
“But how,” I said presently, after both pool and inner self had calmed down, “does it know this about me?”
They looked down at me in equally arrested surprise. It was quite a long way down, as they were still both mounted, Hal leading my horse by her reins behind him. Mr. Dart, of course, had only the one good arm, and couldn’t manage two horses. I felt deeply shamed by his courage—but—
But perhaps I was a coward, I thought glumly. I was grasping at reasons not to go to the Woods.
“How does it know I am connected to both the Woods Noirell and Arguty?” I clarified.
“Everyone knows that about you,” said Mr. Dart.
“Even dragons?”
“Especially dragons,” he replied with unperturbed good humour. “Come, come, Mr. Greenwing—a name never so apposite—you can’t want Roald to hog all the glory. Where is your sense of adventure?”
“I seem to have lost it somewhere between Morrowlea and Lind,” I said wearily, wishing for the coherent clear world of mortal danger back again. That mood or mode or what-have-you had broken with their arrival, when the dragon winked at me, uncoiled itself the rest of the way from the standing stone, and launched itself aloft.
“Jemis.” Hal sounded distressed.
“I need to keep my head down until the Winterturn Assizes. I can’t—if anything else happens—I already missed my stepfather’s funeral and the Midsomer Assizes. I can’t do anything to jeopardize the reading of the will this time.”
“Are you in such high expectations?” Hal asked, a question so far removed from proper discretion I nearly laughed at his following embarrassment.
“No, not more than a small competence, but the law in Fiellan is that the will can only be read in the presence of all named parties at one of the Assizes. No one else—my stepfather’s wife, his business partner—everyone else has to wait until—”
“I see.”
I swallowed down a lump of regret and cowardice.
(Was I not my father’s son?—He had come home to ignominy and disgrace, and he—No. No. He was the hero of Orkaty, the hero of Loe, the man who had come home against all the odds.)
I touched my hand into the water and silently asked the Lady’s blessing. She did not reply, but after a moment I felt better, and was able to look up and smile. “But no. I don’t want to let the Honourable Rag win.”
“Good man,” said Mr. Dart, grinning.
WE WENT BACK TO RAGNOR Bella first, Hal having agreed with me that we could not in good conscience pay a call on my eccentric grandmother in yesterday’s battered clothing, however well the Darts’ housekeeper had brushed and mended it. Mrs. Buchance and all the children were out, meaning the house felt eerily quiet after the previous day’s chaos.
We left the horses tethered in the back garden, where they could lip at the grass and contemplate whatever horses contemplate when left alone by their riders. “My room’s upstairs,” I said, leading the way to the chamber Mrs. Buchance had allotted me the fortnight before. It still didn’t feel like home, but then nothing did, really.
Hal and Mr. Dart looked around curiously as we went through the upper hall. I realized that Hal, at least, had probably spent very little time in a bourgeois gentleman’s residence.
“They bought the house while I was at Morrowlea,” I said, opening my bedroom door. Mrs. Buchance had given me the best guest chamber. Hal and Mr. Dart looked around the sparely furnished room; I had about as many belongings at Dart Hall as I did there.
“There wasn’t much to acquire at Morrowlea,” I said into their silence. “The university supplied all the books and materials and even the robes, and the village hadn’t much in the way of stores. Then this summer I was walking, and didn’t get more than a handful of books for disinclination to carrying them home wi
th me.”
Hal made a snort of laughter, walking over to my desk to look at the portraits there. “Did Sir Hamish paint these? They must be your parents.”
“Yes,” I said.
“They look very happy.”
“Yes.”
Mr. Dart wandered over to sit on my bed, while I looked around the room and tried to think. “I suppose I should take a gift to the Marchioness.”
“Nothing very grand,” Hal said.
“I don’t have anything grand to offer,” I replied, hoping that didn’t come out as bitter. I had a dozen books added to the few left from my childhood that had not yet migrated to the girls’ nursery, an embroidered hanging that had been a gift from Mrs. Kulfield after my mother’s death. “Roald still has my pen,” I said, frowning at the blank notebooks awaiting some inspiration that had never yet been forthcoming.
“What are in those chests?” asked Hal.
“My inheritance,” I replied, kneeling before the three small wooden chests set under the window.
The first and smallest held a book of haikus. I took it out and placed it carefully on the desk beside Hal. “This was my mother’s wedding-present to my father,” I said, turning over the pages.
The shadow-cut illustrations were as sharp and clear as they had ever been, the Old Shaian ideographs in calligraphy both superbly beautiful and superbly legible. There were items pressed between the pages: a curling red feather, a fern frond, a spray of cherry blossoms, a handful of tawny petals still sumptuously and hauntingly scented of the yellow rose of Ysthar.
“My father took it with him through all his campaigns,” I said, moving the wafer-thin cross-section of a lotus seed-pod to find the grebe half-hidden in the waterlilies. “He was so pleased to go to West Voonra and walk where Lo en Tai had walked, see the poems inscribed on the waystones of the narrow roads. When he came home he used to tell me the stories behind the poems, show me the feather he had won from a red-tailed hawk, the rose from when he went to Astandalas to be presented to the Emperor ...”
I swallowed hard. “He brought it home with him when he came back, but he left it when ... it was where I found the note.”
The note was still there, the last insertion into the book. I had not been able to throw it away, that last communication from my father. I passed it to Hal, my eyes feeling full, my head light. “Read it aloud. I can’t.”
Hal looked doubtfully at me, but he unfolded the thin paper, cleared his throat, and spoke:
“Jimmy—I’m sorry. Take care of your mother. She needs you to be strong. Your papa Jack.”
“I would have gone with him anywhere,” I said. “My mother had Mr. Buchance, and Lauren and Sela. I had ...” I stopped hard there, my voice breaking. I fished out one of my handkerchiefs from their basket, and did not even try to pretend I was sneezing.
“I’m sorry, Jemis,” Hal said quietly, when I had control of myself.
“It was a long time ago,” I said. “Almost seven years.” I closed the lid of the first chest and set it on the floor next to the second, which was rather larger. I hadn’t opened these since I went away to Morrowlea, did not remember well what had been put in them in the days following my mother’s passing.
The second chest held three items wrapped in heavy felt. I set them on the bed next to Mr. Dart, and unwrapped them one by one. The first was a pair of silver combs set with tiny blue stones, the geometrical pattern looking deeply foreign. Some gift to my mother from somewhere far away, I thought, wrapping them away again. There were so many things I did not know of my father’s life, who he had been, why he had done what he had done, good and bad.
The second item was the Heart of Glory, the great golden pectoral my father had received from the hand of the Emperor. It looked like a theatrical prop sitting there on the plain grey coverlet, a fortune of gold and black diamonds and yellow topazes. The sun-in-glory etched into the central plaque was the size of a dinner plate, and inset with tiny yellow stones. It spattered the whole room with sunlight.
“By the Emperor,” breathed Mr. Dart.
“And they dare suggest your father was a coward and a traitor,” Hal said, spreading out the links in the chain so we could admire the workmanship of every detail. “Emperor Artorin presented five of these in his whole reign.”
“I thought that had been sold,” I said, staring at it, and feeling better to know it was still there.
Hal clasped me on the shoulder. Mr. Dart braced the third object, a squat cylinder, against his stone arm, and used his good hand to unwrap its felt covering. “What is this?” he asked, in almost equal surprise.
“It’s my mother’s honey crock,” I said, as the green and white jade was revealed. “It is the same colour as the dragon. That was what the dragon reminded me of, this jar. I wondered what had happened to it. Mr. Buchance made containers, you see, Hal, that was where his money came from.”
“And he didn’t like this? This is almost as superb as the pectoral.”
“It’s true,” said Mr. Dart, running his fingers along the pattern etched into a band near the top and bottom of the crock.
“I’d forgotten about the white portion. There were stories she’d tell about the pattern.” I reached out to the crock. the smooth striations where green jade became white, feeling the carvings that were nearly invisible to the eye unless you held it to a candle.
When my hand touched the jade, the red stones on my ring flared, and the ring itself felt suddenly warm. I sneezed.
“Magic?” said Mr. Dart, eyes lighting.
“Or dust.”
The third chest held bundles of letters tied up with green ribbons. Each bundle had a tag in my mother’s hand, saying things like From West Voonra, 11-12 A.Ar. or From Orkaty, 14-15 A.Ar.
A.Ar: Aitune Artorin, the years of the reign of the Last Emperor.
I closed my eyes against the press of tears, and for good measure added my fingertips.
“You don’t have to read them,” Hal said gently, taking the bundle I was holding and placing it back in the chest. I could hear the rustle of the papers, the slight thunk as he closed the lid. “They’ll be there when you’re ready.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Way of the Woods
“DEAR EMPEROR,” SAID Hal, reining in abruptly.
We had crested the last rise of what were somewhat euphemistically known as the Foothills and there before us were the Woods.
The real foothills to the Crosslain Mountains began somewhere deep in the Woods, out of sight until they suddenly reared into the upper slopes of the mountains. We crested that last rise and everything between the edge of the Woods and the glaciers was green.
“Dear Emperor,” Hal said again.
This was not the Hildon Woods we had traversed earlier that afternoon, friendly with holly and hawthorn and the sounds of birds. It was not even like the Arguty Forest, whose trees were ancient and huge and mysterious but whose thickets were crisscrossed with paths made by animals and people, where you might turn a corner to run into bears or boars or highwaymen.
These were the Woods Noirell, where if you took a wrong turn you might end up in another world.
On the northern slope of that last rise, and all the way back north to Ragnor Bella, the landscape was the familiar patchwork of pasture and arable field, interspersed with small woodlots and clustered farmsteads. As we had ridden south from town the land had grown emptier and wilder, until the last half-mile or so had seen primarily abandoned and semi-ruined buildings, overgrown pastures, fields overrun with weeds. No one really wanted to get close to the Woods any more, Mr. Dart had said into my silence. I was still fighting to keep my emotions in check, and ascribed the uneasiness I felt to half-a-dozen causes, of which magical malaise was low down in priority.
On the southern face of the last foothill, the land was a smooth green lawn as perfectly manicured as if it lay before a gentleman’s manse. Close-cropped and daisy-free, it ran up to the deep swift stream that formed the boundary o
f the Woods. On one side, lawn: on the other, trees. There was little undergrowth, but even so we could see only a few yards in.
The Imperial Highway ran due south from its northern terminus at the old military city of Yrchester in Middle Fiellan. Made of huge blocks of pale stone, it was as smooth and level and straight now as it was when it was first built three centuries before the Fall. Ahead of us it ran dead straight to the stream, as it did at any river or stream or lake to our north, and the bridge looked much the same as any of those built by the Astandalan road-makers, the same great square blocks with the graceful balustrades carved with the runes and ideographs of all the spells attendant on such strategic elements of infrastructure.
This bridge had one element I had never seen otherwise, though my father had said it was what marked the Border crossings throughout the Empire: the Sun Gate on the other side of the stream. This was a perfectly round archway, twenty feet in diameter, made of something—what exactly depended on many conditions—covered entirely in gold leaf laid on in layers (so I had read in one of my History of Magic texts, before Lark turned me away from them to Architectural Poetry), each of which was accompanied by chains of spells.
The Empire of Astandalas had covered five worlds, bound together by the great highways, and this was the beginning of a Border crossing.
“Well,” I said,” here are the Woods.”
“Dear Emperor,” said Hal for the third time, but he was no longer looking at the gate: he was looking at the trees, and his expression was thunderstruck. “Those are Tillarny limes.”
“THERE WILL BE FIVE gates between here and the Border,” I said, a bit nervously. We had stopped with one accord on the bridge to look at the great round archway looming over us. The gold leaf was bright and untarnished, though the runes were blurred and scored with decades of disrepair. “One for each of the elements. This is the water gate.”
“There are four elements,” Mr. Dart objected.
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