The Hidden Stars

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The Hidden Stars Page 34

by Madeline Howard


  “It is growing late,” he said, rising from his seat, and shifting his shoulders where the armor lay heavily on bruised flesh and strained muscles. “I see no reason to break camp, only to have to set up again in another hour or two. And if we are going nowhere tonight…let us sleep on this question.”

  There was a mumbled protest here and there, but it lacked fire, it lacked conviction.

  He thought, By morning, the idea will have taken hold with more of them. And those who are against it now, they will be growing used to it. If I make up my mind that we will go there, I doubt anyone will try to persuade me otherwise.

  In the morning, the word went like wildfire through the camp. Kivik had scarcely made his decision before everyone seemed to know of it: “We go to the Old Fortress at Tirfang. That is a strong place, and the Prince is determined to hold it.”

  Kivik himself was somewhat taken aback by the sudden wave of enthusiasm that spread like a contagion, banishing all misgiving. Any curse that had lasted for more than ten centuries must be losing its strength by now (everyone said); any walls that had stood even longer than that must be strong indeed. They all packed up their tents with unprecedented dispatch and departed in almost a holiday mood.

  For a day and a half they followed an ancient track through the foothills, then up to the skirts of the Drakenskaller Mountains.

  Once they left the hills behind, they came upon a meandering mountain road that rose gently at first, then grew steadily steeper. The way soon became so narrow and the climb so difficult, the column began to string out. The wagons and those who traveled on foot fell farther and farther behind, until the Prince sent men back to ride as a rear guard, and to urge on anyone who showed signs of flagging.

  A damp wind came down the throat of the pass, laden with scents of pine and cedar, the promise of snow. The cliff wall rose sheer on one side, and on the other was broken by rocky ledges and terraces, by slopes only a little less precipitous, where hardy alpine plants had rooted in the scree.

  Kivik thought that country magnificent, but very bleak. From a practical standpoint, it offered little in the way of forage, and he could only hope the stories were true of wide high meadows in the vicinity of the fortress, where the ancient Witch Lords had grazed their beautiful black steeds. But, regardless, he liked to listen to the high, eerie wailing of the wind among the rocks, the sound of stony waters running in narrow channels. There was a grandeur about it that spoke to his soul.

  The mountain walls rose higher and higher, blocking out more and more of the sky. By the second night, Kivik could only see a handful of stars directly overhead.

  The next day the winds blew shriller and colder, and even those most eager to reach the fortress began to lose heart. Meanwhile, the horses, not accustomed to these ever-climbing roads that twisted and turned up the walls of mountain gorges, had taken up a wearisome, jogging gait, very difficult to endure. It was beginning to feel as though the journey would never come to an end.

  26

  How do we even know that these wraiths mean to do what they say?” asked Prince Ruan, clearly aghast on receiving the news that Sindérian now carried, on a cord around her neck, a linen bag filled with battlefield earth and spirits of the dead. “And if you take them to Skyrra only to learn that they have very different intentions from what they have promised you, what are we supposed to do then?”

  “Ghosts are very seldom devious,” Sindérian replied—with rather more confidence than she actually felt. “They only remain bound to the earth because of some overmastering passion, some absolutely compelling purpose. That usually fills them quite up, so that they have no room for anything else.”

  If the Prince was very far from mollified, in the end there was nothing he could do. The wraiths were already in Sindérian’s possession, she was determined to keep them, and she had neither asked for Ruan’s pardon nor his permission.

  As for Aell and Jago, they were no less astonished than they were unnerved, yet they seemed to regard these dealings with the dead as quite within a wizard’s ordinary business—or at least, not anything the two of them wished to know about. To Sindérian’s relief, they scarcely spoke a word on the subject over breakfast, and continued silent when it came time to saddle up the horses and take to the road again.

  After a few more days of travel, everyone began to smell the sea. Huge flocks of skua-gulls beat white wings in the sky overhead, and the water in all the little streams along the way became increasingly brackish, then finally undrinkable.

  On the last day of the month of Duilligir, they crested a hill and caught their first glimpse of the bustling seaside town of Aurvang inside its massive timber walls, and of the blue-grey waters of the Necke, sparkling in the distance.

  All the ways of Aurvang twist and turn, and all the buildings have high-peaked roofs in order to shed snow during the winter. Because of this, many of the courts and alleys near the center of town are dark and overshadowed winter and summer, existing in a perpetual twilight.

  In later years, it would become a great center for trade, drawing merchants from ports as far distant as Tirhene and Pehlidor, and if in these days it was far less crowded and considerably less sophisticated than it was destined to be, it was still a busy and colorful place.

  “We won’t be such pariahs here,” said Prince Ruan, eyeing with approval the guildhalls and warehouses, the forges and workshops lining the streets, the market square filled with stalls and carts and wheelbarrows selling such varied items as eggs and live poultry, fleeces, embroidered cloth, lodestone, tin kettles, baskets, pins, and gingerbread. “There are foreigners here every bit as exotic as we are.”

  In the gathering dusk they rode toward the harbor, where tall masts of many ships loomed dark against a sunset sky. Gradually, the streets became more and more empty. At last, passing by a humble little inn not far from the water, a spill of firelight through an open door and the savory scent of cooking beckoned Sindérian and her friends in. At the thought of a civilized meal her stomach growled. She felt suddenly faint with hunger and anticipation.

  As she dismounted in the inn yard, the falcon, who had ridden on her shoulder since they first entered the town, flapped his wings, soared into the air, and disappeared into the windy night.

  I will know where to find you in the morning. It seems I no longer care for roofs and walls and firelit rooms, spoke Faolein in her mind.

  Leaving Aell and Jago to stable the horses, Sindérian followed Ruan through the open door and into a smoky room. Ropes of onions and dried apples hung from the beamed ceiling; a side of beef sizzled on a spit inside an enormous fireplace; and something that smelled like mulled wine was bubbling in a cauldron.

  Soon, they were all seated at a long, scarred table, squeezed in between two traders from Weye and a party of travelers from Mistlewald, eating pease porridge, mutton pies, smoked salmon, new cheese, and baked pears. After the privations of the road, it seemed like a feast.

  As she chewed, Sindérian listened with half an ear to the conversations going on all around her. The babble of different dialects and accents confused her, perhaps because she was more than half asleep. In any case, it all sounded exactly like the type of stories—exaggerated, contradictory, fantastical—one might hear in dockside taverns or hostels anywhere.

  I will sort it all out in the morning, she promised herself.

  Soon after that, she stumbled upstairs to the room and the bed she was to share with three other women. Slipping out of her stained and threadbare gown, she stood by the open window in her patched linen shift, drinking in the scents of sea and night.

  Then she tucked the bag of earth inside the neck of her shift and crawled under the blankets with her already snoring bedfellows. Stuffed with prickly straw and none too clean, the mattress was nevertheless welcome to one whose only couch had been the ground for so many weeks.

  Her last thought before sliding into sleep was, Only a few days more and we will be in Skyrra. The longest and hardest par
t of our journey is over.

  But it was not to prove nearly so easy, as they learned the next day, and those stories Sindérian had been so ready to dismiss when she heard them recounted in a room reeking of pipeweed and the stale fumes of ale became at once more believable and sinister when repeated on the midday street.

  In truth, the whole town was buzzing with tales of sea serpents and giant eels, of ghost ships and maelstroms fifty—sixty—a hundred miles across. As Sindérian and her friends were to learn after tramping for hours upon hours along the docks trying to find a shipmaster willing to carry them across the channel.

  “There aren’t many reckless enough to hazard that crossing in these times,” said one sea captain, a heavyset man with a shock of grey hair. “Most of us think it dangerous enough to sail up and down the coast—and we wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t our livelihood. No, keep your coin,” he added, as the Prince drew out his purse. “Even if I thought it worth the risk, I could never find a crew.”

  It was the same answer whomever they approached, and that answer was too often accompanied by hard, suspicious glances, or a string of oaths that made Prince Ruan flush to the eyebrows and finger the hilt of his sword.

  “Perhaps we will find someone who is willing tomorrow,” said Sindérian, as she and the Prince, and the two men-at-arms, returned to the inn at sunset. “New ships come in every day.”

  But the next morning nothing had changed. By afternoon, they had stopped looking for a ship and were combing the docks for any owner of a fishing boat valiant enough or venial enough to make the voyage.

  “We might buy a boat and sail it across ourselves,” Ruan suggested at last. He himself had often sailed in his boy-hood, while Aell had spent all the years of his youth either rigging the sails or hauling in the nets, on a fishing boat belonging to his father and his older brothers.

  “But have we the price of a boat?” Sindérian asked, thinking how carefully Ruan had counted out his bits of amber and ivory last night at the inn. “I must suppose that the purse you had from the High King is not—inexhaustible.”

  “It is not,” said the Prince, a bit stiffly, as though discussing these things went against his pride—as no doubt it did. “Yet what we have left, it should suffice—particularly if we sell the horses. We can walk across Skyrra if we must, but we can’t walk there, across the channel.”

  Yet buying a boat they could sail proved just as impossible as purchasing their passage. Nothing smaller than a carrack, nothing larger than a rowboat would anyone offer for sale, except for one ancient clinker-built fishing boat with a broken mast and so many warped planks that the hull must leak like a sieve.

  “It seems impossible there is not even one seaworthy vessel in Aurvang that someone will sell,” said Sindérian, so tired and vexed she could weep, as they trudged back to the inn. Her ankle was finally healing, but this long day on her feet had brought on a series of tearing pains that often made it difficult for her to catch her breath. “I begin to feel that someone or something has set their will against ours.”

  That will, though Sindérian could not know it, belonged to Ouriána, as she stood in her secret room among the retorts and alembics, the bottles of inky liquids and the baleful symbols, looking at the tangled pattern she had created, and scowling most horribly.

  Since the first hour of its conception the aniffath had grown, in extent, in complexity, as the Empress refined it day by day: adding a knot of difficulty here, attaching a new thread of peril there. By now, it had become a fiendishly deadly and intricate curse.

  And yet, as time and again Sindérian found a way to sidestep danger—as she survived bandits, werewolves, festering wounds, and even an encounter with the dead—as she caused thread after thread to snap or unravel, and by so doing dealt blow after blow to Ouriána’s pride—the Empress became more and more determined to remove this source of irritation, to punish this presumption.

  Who was this girl, after all, this daughter of Faolein? she had seethed inwardly at each new escape. Who was this Sindérian to challenge the schemes of the Empress of Phaôrax, to flout the will of a goddess?

  So that now, gazing at the partial ruin of her own artistry, of this complex and marvelous thing she had created with such consummate skill, Ouriána’s rage knew no bounds.

  All through the night she worked. She sent her spirit ranging through the palace and even into the town below, harvesting the sleeping minds around her for the materials she worked with: spite, envy, brutality, treachery—every last festering resentment or cherished bit of malice that human minds could compass. Out of all these things she spun more and more threads, while the sleepers sweated in their beds and muttered of barbarous sensations and tormenting visions.

  “You have survived a great deal, you have endured much,” she said with a hiss, as she wove in strand after fatal strand, filament after mortal filament. “You may have escaped dangers innumerable on land. But you won’t escape this.”

  27

  In Aurvang, Sindérian woke to the sound of wings beating outside her window. For a moment, the darkness confused her, until she remembered that the shutters were closed. She threw off the covers, jumped out of bed, and felt her way in the dark until she found the catch and pushed the shutters open. A dim, moist moonlight came pouring in, and the peregrine falcon landed on the windowsill and ruffled up his feathers.

  We must leave this place tonight.

  Sindérian shook her head, scarcely comprehending. How shall we leave? And why?

  He tilted his head, fixed her with a fiery golden eye. The Furiádhin are here in Aurvang. Camhóinhann, Dyonas, and Goezenou: I saw them, but it seems they did not sense me. And if we sail tonight, we may reach Skyrra before they do.

  She yawned and stretched, massaged a cramped muscle in her neck. I don’t suppose Ouriána’s priests will have any more success than we did buying a boat or paying for their passage.

  He walked along the windowsill, raised and lowered his wings as though impatient to be gone. And do you also imagine they would hesitate to use force, or magic, or even theft to gain a ship, once they realize that none is going where they want to go? If we mean to leave Arkenfell ahead of them, we must find a way to do so tonight.

  Yes, I see. Sindérian struggled to retrieve her scattered thoughts. But are we to steal a boat?

  Not steal. We will buy the one that is available, and make her seaworthy. I will teach you the spells.

  She sat down very abruptly on the bed, her hands knotted together in her lap. You want ME to repair the boat—with magic? But I’ve never done anything remotely like that before. I doubt I am capable. And if my spells fail, then what becomes of us, out on the water in a leaky boat?

  There is some risk, he admitted. But what else can we do? This thing is not beyond your abilities, it is simply outside your knowledge—and I can provide what you lack.

  Though still unconvinced, Sindérian began to dress.

  In any case, she thought, it was altogether likely that the old man who owned the boat would refuse to see anyone at this advanced hour—altogether likely that even if he did answer his door, he would refuse to do business. Then she could go back to bed.

  But what about the horses? she suddenly remembered to ask. We had no time to sell them, and we can hardly take them with us on such a little boat. Even without them we are going to be cramped.

  We will have to leave the horses behind. The falcon fluttered up and landed on her shoulder. That is unfortunate, but it can’t be helped.

  At malanëos, the darkest hour of the night, Sindérian, Faolein, the Prince, and his men, quietly left the inn by a back door. They stepped outside into a thick, swirling mist. The cobbles on the street were slick with moisture, and condensed fog dripped from the eaves of all the houses.

  With the fog muffling their footsteps, they moved toward the docks. In that damp air, the town smelled strongly of fish, rope, wood shavings, smoke, pitch, and seawater—comforting, homey, civilized scents that remin
ded Sindérian irresistibly of Leal.

  The air was not quite so thick down by the water. While Ruan and his guards headed for the little tumbledown house of the man who owned the fishing boat, Sindérian and Faolein went on to a narrow strip of sand where the boat was beached.

  But as she knelt in the sand, all her former doubts came trooping back. She thought, How am I to do this thing? And if I can’t do it, how will we ever reach Skyrra and Winloki?

  The falcon nudged her gently with his beak. I will guide you.

  Feeling that she had no choice but to try, Sindérian listened while her father explained the spells, slowly and carefully. It did not sound so very difficult, she had to admit. Taking several deep breaths, she rested her hands on the weathered hull.

  She began by straightening the warped planks. While Faolein poured the knowledge and the power into her mind, she provided the hands to shape the wood, to draw the glowing runes in the air. These spells, she realized, were not so different from healing, except they did not require the same empathy, or the same precise and sensitive delicacy of touch. It was only a matter of using lines of force to push things back into place, to mold them into a form that she desired—rather than gently pouring strength and intention into living flesh so that it might grow back together, essentially healing itself.

  When the hull was sealed and sound, they moved on to the shattered mast. Before long, Faolein withdrew and she continued on her own. All doubt had vanished; she felt an increasing confidence, an almost giddy euphoria.

  Exactly when Prince Ruan and his men returned, Sindérian could not be certain, she was so absorbed in the work. She went into the wood and out of it again. The runes she wrought took on a deeper meaning. Govanidan—that was the passion of the craftsman. Theroghal—that was the yielding of the material. As those mysteries unfolded in her mind, she became one and many: She was the weaver, the loom, the thread, and the shuttle. She was the hand that molded the clay, the clay itself, and the force spinning the potter’s wheel. She was the smith, the hammer, the fire, and the metal.

 

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