“You were.”
“Did you kill the bad man? Will you dig up his bones and put them in the bone place?”
“His bones will not be here,” Kieri said. “And as for killing—I am not sure what happened. But we have friends, Falki, who are stronger than either of us, and they helped me. I think they killed him, and his own evil made him … disappear.”
“Was Tilla brave?”
“Yes. She was quiet, remember?”
“He didn’t touch her.”
“No, he did not. But you are both brave children; I have seen that before. And now—” Kieri had seen the arrival of the Council members. “And now it is time for you and Tilla to have a run in the gardens in case it rains again. Lieth will take you. If it starts raining again, you can visit the stables.” A rare treat he hoped would put the recent past out of mind.
“Grown-up talk?”
“Grown-up talk. We will meet at dinner.”
“Thank the gods for the spring rains,” Sier Halveric said.
“As long as it doesn’t delay planting.” Sier Belvarin looked out the window. “We don’t need another flood.”
Sier Davonin ignored them. “Why did all the elves come running this way yesterday?”
“We had a little problem with iynisin,” Kieri said. “It’s over.”
She gave him a long look, then shrugged. “As the king says.”
“It is a time to rejoice,” Kieri said. “Yesterday a great evil was defeated, though at great cost. Let me tell you.” They listened, shock and horror at first on every face, fear passing to relief, even as he had felt it when those things happened. “The bane of my life that I thought long dead … is now finally certainly gone. Falki lives, unharmed, and—judging by this morning—has taken no lasting hurt. Tilla had a restless sleep at first but woke happy. There may be more iynisin, but we have elves now who do not dispute their existence and are ready to fight with us, to defend us.”
“Perhaps we need not consider those things we came to discuss,” Sier Davonin said. “At least until tomorrow. By the king’s leave, I would suggest a day of thankfulness.”
Others nodded.
“Then,” Kieri said, “let us do exactly that, Sier Davonin. With my thanks for your good sense. Unless someone has urgent need …” None did. “Let us be as extravagant as the good fortune shown us,” Kieri said. “We will meet three days hence, and in the meantime—feast and be merry.”
“Three days,” the others said, and dispersed.
Kieri went in search of the twins and found them in the kitchen gardens, wet to the knees and not a little muddy, trailed by a half dozen hens. Lieth stood at the end of a row, grinning.
“They’re turning gardener?” he asked her.
“Not exactly, though they are picking caterpillars off the vegetables and feeding the hens. The hens were already doing that, but—”
“Da!” That was Tilla. “Caterpillars come out of eggs, Lieth says.”
Kieri cocked an eyebrow at Lieth.
“They do,” she said. “My gran showed me. Moths and butterflies lay eggs; caterpillars come out of them.”
“Lieth knows,” Kieri said.
“So … if a hen eats a caterpillar, will the hen’s egg hatch caterpillars and not chickies?”
“No,” Kieri said. “Only chicks come out of hens’ eggs.”
“Good.” Tilla plucked a caterpillar from a leaf and handed it to a speckled hen. “I like eggs, but I don’t want to eat caterpillars.”
“Nor do I,” Kieri said.
“I ate one,” Falki said. “It tasted like the leaf.”
Kieri glanced at Lieth again. She spread her hands. “Before I could catch him. Just grabbed it and put it in his mouth. Luckily, one of the smooth ones, not the hairy ones.”
“We should go inside now,” Kieri said. The twins looked at each other, then at him.
“No more, hens,” Tilla said to the line of chickens. “Da says no more. You have to find your own.”
“We’ll go in through the scullery and get some of that mud off you,” Lieth said to them.
“How were they?” Kieri asked quietly when the children ran ahead.
“Fine, I think. Though Tilla said something about Falki being afraid and holding—I think that was the word—his fear so he could sleep.”
“That’s … not supposed to be possible,” Kieri said. Then he laughed. “But with these two, who really knows?”
Dorrin came to herself again lying on fragrant but prickly herbs, the midday sun beating down on her. She pushed herself up. The land around looked nothing like anything she had seen in Aare. She was on the slope of a hill, and beyond another hill she could see a straight line of darker blue against light blue sky. It must be the sea. But which sea, and which direction should she go? She wore the sea-stained and torn clothes she’d had on under the white gown the Guardians insisted on; she had nothing else. No water and nothing to put water in. No food.
She had not expected to wake at all. She had seen dragonfire coming toward her and … and nothing. She felt no pain; she had no blisters. Was this a dream to ease her dying? Or had the dragon been a dream before?
A shadow passed over her; she glanced up. Not a dragon. A bird—another bird—circling lower. Corpse eaters that must have wondered if she was dead. “HAI!” she yelled at them, waving her arms … the lowest tipped a wing, caught air from the hillside, and rose back up and away. Surely a dream would not include such birds behaving so naturally like birds.
Hilltops gave better views. Dorrin turned to climb upward and only then realized her boots were still wet enough to squelch and the left had a long gash down the side; the upper flopped over. She felt at her belt. No dagger. Her hair—she found the leather thong still entangled in it, worked it free, and tied the boot to her shin with it. Her hair blew into her face. She ignored that and climbed.
From the top of the hill, she saw more of the water—blue, sparkling, stretching out on either hand—but the coast itself was hidden by the lower hills except in the hazy distance, where a headland of some sort jutted out. Between her hill and the next one seaward she saw nothing but low scrub and patches of grass. Off to her sword-side, an island poked out of the sea, mountainous, cone-shaped.
She looked all around. More hills, and in the distance away from the sea, a suggestion of higher ground. She squinted. Farther—right at the edge to her heart-side—dim purple shapes against the lighter blue. Mountains. But which mountains? Mountains she had seen before or mountains in some land where she had never been? If this was Aarenis, for instance, the sea would be to the south and those mountains in the west.
The hill had a grassy top, showing gray-white stone between the clumps; the sea side, where she’d woken, was patched with more of the fragrant plant she’d been lying on. She didn’t know the name, but she knew it grew in southern Aarenis. Was she in southern Aarenis? She had no way to be sure. The far side of the hill, down at the crease between it and the next hill, had a line of scrubby trees. The slope down was a little steeper than the slope she had climbed. A faint game trail led downward in zigzags.
With a last look around, Dorrin decided that the game trail and trees offered the best chance of water. She started down, watching her footing carefully. The trail, scarcely a foot’s width, twisted and turned around clumps of tough grass and mounds of aromatic scrub. She came to a steeper part and braced one hand on a rock outcrop to edge around it.
And found herself face to face with a man a little below her height. She straightened up and stared. He stood scarce an armspan away … a man who might have been her height had he stood straight, but he was a little stooped. Rough-cut hair, mostly gray … brown eyes … a scar across his face from some blow that had misshapen his nose. He wore a brown tunic over brown trews, and his feet were bare, brown as his trews. He looked back at her and smiled, goodwill radiating from him like the sun’s heat from the rocks.
“Well met, Daughter,” he said. “I am glad to fin
d you so far advanced.”
Dorrin frowned; that made no sense. “I do not think I know you,” she said. “My name is Dorrin—”
“Verrakai, yes.” His smile widened. “And you know me better than you think. As I know you and have long known you.”
Dorrin searched her memory but found nothing. “Do you know where I am?” she asked.
“Here with me,” he said at once, as if that were a full explanation. “Do you know where you are?”
“No,” Dorrin said. “And—forgive me, ser—I have no memory of you.”
“Do you not?” Amusement danced in his eyes, lighting them from dark brown to amber. “Then tell me, Daughter, what is it you lack?”
Lack? Everything … or … she was alive, so not lacking life. What she lacked was knowledge. “I do not know where I am,” she said. “Or which way to go to find my home. Or where to find water, or food, or—” She pointed at her ripped boot. “—a cobbler or anything to pay the cobbler.”
“It is knowledge you lack,” he said. “And perhaps I can aid you. Where you are—as I said—is with me. For the time being, that is all you need to know. To guide you to your way home will require some time and conversation. But as for water … consider where you stand.”
Dorrin looked. The outcrop she had come around … another two or three boulders as tall as she. Here on the side of the slope, more than halfway down, they formed a cleft. She would not have been surprised to see a trickle of water coming out from under one of them—a spring made sense here. But there was no spring, only a fringe of dry, brown fern leaves.
“A spring was there,” she said. “But it’s not there now.” She looked back at the man. He nodded, saying nothing. “It’s dry,” she said. He still said nothing. What he might mean seeped into her mind. If he knew—but how could he know?—that she had once had water magery—“I’m not the same,” she said. “That’s all gone.”
“Is it?” he asked. “Do you not think the land honors those who heal it?”
Dorrin frowned again. “I was certain …”
This time he laughed aloud, and a breeze sprang up, shaking the leaves of trees and shrubs alike, as if they also laughed. “Daughter,” he said, his voice still amused, “you might at least ask the water’s grace.”
Moved by an impulse she did not understand, Dorrin turned, found a sprig of pale blue flowers on the aromatic shrub, and stooped to lay it in the mouth of the opening below the higher stone. She put her hand on the rock. “May the gods bless this spring,” she said, “and may water nourish the land.”
“Eshea valush,” the man said.
Dorrin stared. A tongue of clear water flowed from beneath the rock; as it moistened the fern fronds, they lifted, greening even as she watched. It spread, wetting the soil outside the rock’s shade, overflowing the lip of the ferns. More water emerged from under the other rocks; the trickles joined, and the little stream ran off downhill.
“Thank you,” Dorrin said.
“Eshea valush,” the man said again. Then, to Dorrin, “You are thirsty, Daughter. Drink.”
“You are my elder,” Dorrin said. “Please—drink first.”
The man bowed, as one who has been taught grace, and knelt by the little stream now running clear between them. He put his hand down, let the water fill it, and lifted it to his mouth. Twice he drank as Dorrin watched—noting the scarred, callused hands, the signs of age and poverty on his feet as well. “And now you,” the man said, rising.
Dorrin knelt and let the water fill her hand. It tingled with life, as Arian had taught her to feel it, as her own magery felt it. She drank one handful and then another. Cold, clean … joy filled her with the water, as if it sparkled in her veins. She looked up at the man, who stood watching her with a mix of pride and amusement. All at once she knew who this was. “Lord Falk,” Dorrin said. Her voice failed for awe; she could say nothing more.
He nodded. “Yes, Daughter … you are correct in your surmise. This is the form in which I choose to appear.” He reached across the rivulet, offering her his hand. “Come, now. You and I should walk together this day; there are questions to be asked and answered.”
Dorrin stood and took his hand. Warm, dry, the strength of his grip no more than companionable … and she was on the other side of the rivulet, where the game path ran on downhill into the shade of the trees. “I didn’t know …” she managed to say.
He shrugged. “It is no matter. Now you do.”
When they reached the trees, the path led in among them to a glade near a tumble of rocks with puddles between them.
“It will take some little time for the stream to rise again,” Falk said. “All the springs hereabout are small.”
“Are they all rising?” Dorrin asked. “Just from one—”
Falk chuckled, folding himself down onto a rock and gesturing to her to sit on another. “Daughter, you do not know your own power even after what you have done. Do you remember what that was?”
She had not thought about it, she realized, since she found herself on the hillside. Now, as if through thinning mist, she regained a memory of herself … herself on a ship … in the water … on a barren sandy beach … walking somewhere through red and black rocks rising from the sand. A weight on her head, a box she must carry, no matter how tired she was. Smooth stones beneath her feet, forming a path. Figures in white robes, walking nearby, urging her on. Clearer and clearer … the heat, the dry mountains, the dry plain beyond, three white towers piercing a heat-hazed sky … and the great empty bowl of rock near it. Designs … water. Water and water and something … a dark shape …
He went on. “What you did, returning Aare’s water … that was more than well done. So you and I have been granted this space, this time, for your rest and recovery and for you to think how to live the rest of your life.”
“I did not expect to live,” Dorrin said. “Not when I went into the sea and not when the water rose around me. And not when the dragon showed me the fire.”
“I know,” Falk said. “I did not expect to live when I saw the look on that man’s face as my brothers walked out free. And yet—” He grinned at her. “I lived a long time after that, you know. And here I am, still meddling in the world’s affairs.”
“I … should go back,” she said.
“Back to Tsaia?” he asked. She nodded. “You have no oath to the king now,” he said. “He released you.”
“But my people—”
“Do not expect your return,” he said. “You told them so, if you do not remember. A desperate chance, you told them. Your heir, young Beclan … I am not sure he is mine, in the end. With all the turmoil in Tsaia, he may go to Gird … but either of us will be glad to claim him.”
“You … know Gird?”
Another chuckle. “In a way. Yes. The way the high gods chose. We do not walk together, exactly, but we know … I am sorry, Daughter, but this is not possible to make clear to you. Gird has taught me; I think I have taught him. Camwyn and Torre have given us both lessons we needed.”
“Torre … of the Necklace?”
“Yes, of course. Did you think she was legend only, while I once walked on earth? We are all people who once lived and also aspects of the gods’ will.”
Dorrin wanted to ask which gods but thought better of it.
“Even now,” Falk said, “I cannot comprehend the high gods. I know names—names used in this place and that, each people trimming the gods to their own measure, to their own understanding. Esea Sunlord and Barrandowea Lord of the Sea and Alyanya of the Flowers: those my father taught me when I was a child. But Adyan Namer, Sertig Maker, High Judge, First Singer … these are names for powers far beyond me.”
Dorrin thought of the night she had lain on sand in the desert, staring up at stars that seemed to recede—layer after layer of patterns, endless, beyond comprehension, into the darkness.
“Exactly so,” Falk said, once more recognizing her thought. “Is there but one power above all, or do they s
hare equally? No one can be sure. What we can know is that we—you and I and all others who have walked the earth—are not the high gods. And yet we are more than grains of sand or drops of water.” He reached out and touched her knee with one finger. “As you have shown, Daughter.”
Dorrin said nothing. She heard water dripping now, saw rings spread across the surface of the puddle she’d been watching. Then, long before the drip could have filled it, the water’s surface lifted, overflowed its rock lip, and ran down into the next puddle. Upstream, more water sounds approached—the chuckle of water over rocks, the gurgle of water along a creek bank. Had she really started this?
“Will it do harm?” she finally said. “Bringing water in a dry season if it’s supposed to be dry?”
“No,” Falk said. “Once these springs ran in wet season and dry. Like your well, they were dried by a curse, and you have lifted that curse.” He looked around. “Are you hungry, Daughter?”
She was, suddenly. Her stomach cramped with hunger. How long had it been?
“We have only a short way to walk,” Falk said. “Come.” Once more he held out his hand, and once more she took it. He led her upslope beside the stream, with its laughing waters, and after a time they came out of the trees to a grassy bowl centered by a pond. “There,” he said. “Walk into the water, my daughter, just as you are, and bring back what you find.”
Dorrin looked at the water—limpid, crystalline. She could see all the way to the bottom … see water plants waving in the current from the springs there, the sand disturbed by the uprising water. She looked at Falk, who said nothing, waiting for her response.
Well. He was her patron; she wore—she had worn—his ruby. She walked to the edge and took a step into the pool, then another. The water drew her in; she sank into it, and as she did, she felt its life enfolding her. Down, down … she looked up for a moment at the silvery wavering surface and then down again. What was she supposed to bring back? Her feet touched the sand, tickled by the water plants … Her boots had disappeared, and as she realized that, she knew her clothes had disappeared as well. A box lay at her feet that had not been there a moment before. She crouched to look at it, picked it up, and the water lifted her to the surface, to the pool’s very margin.
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