The Fathomless Fire

by Thomas Wharton

  Corr stared at Will, his eyes narrowing.

  “You don’t want the big wolf harmed. Why not?”

  “He’s my friend,” Will said desperately. “If you hurt him, I’ll…”

  “Your friend,” Corr said, his eyebrows rising. “So that’s why you’re here. You came looking for him. That’s what this whole expedition of yours was about, Finn. Now I see. The wolf is very important to you.”

  Nonn was studying Will now, too, with a look of interest.

  “Tell me, boy,” the dwarf said, “does the wolf understand our speech?”

  Will said nothing.

  “He does, doesn’t he?” Corr said. “Then I think we’ve found a better way to ensure his cooperation. You will tell him that he will fight for us, if he wants his freedom, and yours.”

  Will shook his head slowly.

  “I won’t do it,” he said.

  Corr gazed at Will for a long moment.

  “No, you won’t, will you? Very well. Commander, you have your orders. Make sure the keepers double the wolf’s dose of gaal.”

  Will tore his arm out of Finn’s grasp.

  “No!” he cried. “Please, don’t hurt him!”

  Corr signalled to two of his men. They came forward and held Will’s arms.

  “Corr, this is wrong,” Finn said. “You can’t.”

  Corr turned to his brother.

  “If this fortress comes down, we will all die. The Nightbane will break through our defences and overrun the plains and then they will come to the Bourne. Make no mistake about that. You said you would stand by me if I let your friends go. I give you my oath that when this battle is over, I will let them all return to Fable. The wolf, too, if he’s still alive.”

  “When this battle is over, there will be nothing left!” Balor roared. “We should get everyone on board the ships and head south while we still can.”

  Corr glanced darkly at Balor, then gestured to one of the guards who had followed them to the observation platform.

  “Escort the wildman and the boy back to their quarters, and make sure they stay there.”

  “Finn!” Balor shouted, as he was surrounded by four tall guardsmen with lightning staves.

  Finn turned to Balor. His face was stricken and pale.

  “Stay with Will,” he said. “Keep him safe.”

  The truth was proclaimed in a thousand tongues, it was heralded by blaring trumpets and written in fiery letters in the sky. But only when it came as a whisper in the darkness did I hear it and answer.

  – The Great Forest Book

  “I KNEW WE WOULD MEET AGAIN,” Maya said.

  They were sitting together in the little cottage. Rowen was at the table, numbly sipping a cup of tea but barely tasting it. Her grandmother was working at her loom, slowly unwinding a skein of thread that was wrapped around a short, sword-like wooden stick. As if in a dream, Rowen watched her grandmother’s hands working. She knew there were terrible things she still had to do something about, but for the moment, while her grandmother’s hands moved back and forth across the threads, those things seemed to be far away.

  “I wish I could remember,” Rowen said. “I mean, remember … you.”

  “I’m not surprised you don’t,” Grandmother said with a quick, smiling glance. “You were so young when I left. There’s no reason to feel bad about that.”

  When Rowen had first recovered from her faint, Grandmother had led her to a chair, made her some tea, then listened to her rushed, jumbled tale of everything that had happened that had brought her here. Rowen told her of the journey with Will, and the warning Freya had brought from Whitewing Stonegrinder, and the mage Ammon Brax. Rowen took out her grandfather’s spectacles. She gave them to her grandmother, who looked at them wonderingly, with fear growing in her eyes. Haltingly, Rowen told how Grandfather had been taken by the thrawl. Maya listened, holding the spectacles in shaking hands, and then she wept. Rowen wept with her, but she felt strange, sharing her grief and fear with someone she didn’t remember. And it pained her when the old woman took up her weaving while they talked, as if the tapestry mattered as much as everything they had to say to one another.

  “How long has it been?” Grandmother murmured now as she worked, shaking her head slowly. “I do lose track of time … sometimes.”

  “You’ve been gone for more than ten years,” Rowen said. “Grandfather told me that you went into the Weaving not long after my mother and father…”

  Grandmother’s hands halted in their busy work. She closed her eyes a moment, then looked up at Rowen.

  “That long,” she said in a trembling voice. “But of course. Look at you now. A young woman. And so beautiful.” She smiled, nodding at the plate of little honey-coloured cakes beside the teapot. “Eat something. You need to recover your strength.”

  Rowen picked up one of the cakes, but didn’t put it in her mouth. She glanced around the interior of the cottage again. There was the old wooden washbasin, hanging from a peg on the wall. Her father’s flute rested on the mantel.

  “It’s just as I remember it,” Rowen said, her heart full.

  “When I first came here I needed something familiar,” Grandmother said, “to keep me from losing my way. So I made this cottage in the likeness of your home on Blue Hill. I stayed there for a time after you were born, to help your mother. It was the happiest place in the world to me then.”

  “So we’re still in the Weaving,” Rowen said. Everything was so much like her memories that she began to wonder if they had somehow returned to the original Blue Hill. “But … the house looks so real and solid. As though it’s not about to vanish, like everything else here does.”

  “We are deep within the Weaving,” Grandmother said. “Deep within the past. Things are not so uncertain here. I told this house, and the forest around it, from the fathomless fire. Then I told him.” She gestured to Riddle, who was lying on the woven rug in front of the hearth, lazily running his tongue over his paws. In the firelight his striped form seemed to ripple like slow waves.

  “He doesn’t seem to know me any more,” Rowen said.

  “He remembers what he is now. I suppose that means he has no need to speak. He has become once more what he always was: the fathomless fire.”

  “Riddle is the fire?”

  “He is one face of it, as is everything here. It may look as if he’s just lying on a rug napping, but he’s also out there, with the sunlight, the trees, the birds and the creatures in the grass. You called him Riddle, did you?”

  “He gave himself that name. He didn’t know who he was or where he had come from.”

  She looked again at the tiger, lying sleepily on the hearthrug.

  “That’s why you couldn’t stay in one shape for long,” Rowen said to him, suddenly understanding. “Because you never were someone…”

  “That’s a good way to put it,” Grandmother said. “The fire never stays still, not for a moment.” She paused, and her brow wrinkled. “I should have realized,” she said at last, “what might happen when I sent him to … to your grandfather.”

  “You sent him?”

  “He was supposed to find Nicholas and show him the way here, to me. That’s why I gave him the shape of a tiger, like the toy that your grandfather carved the night … the night your mother was born. I knew Nicholas would see the tiger and understand I had sent it, and follow him back to me. But something must have gone wrong. Riddle, as you call him, went astray.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I can’t say for certain, but I wonder… When I sent Riddle to find your grandfather, I hadn’t been here long and I didn’t understand the fathomless fire as I do now. I think it was wrong of me to confine Riddle to one shape, when change is his nature. That must be why he lost his way. He tried too hard to become something, so hard that he forgot what he really is. Which is all of this.”

  She raised her hands, gesturing to the room and what lay outside it.

  Rowen nodded silently,
overwhelmed by all the feelings rushing through her. She was glad to be here and have all of these strange things explained, but there was still something missing, something she felt as an ache deep inside her. This woman had loved her since the day she was born, but they didn’t know one another. She didn’t remember her.

  Fighting back tears, she looked down at the little cake in her hand, then without thinking dipped it in the tea and took a bite. As the taste of the cake and the tea mingled in her mouth, she was startled by a memory that came sharp and piercing, like a pain and a joy all at once. She dipped the cake again in the tea, took another bite. Yes, now she remembered. A long time ago she had eaten cakes like this, dipped in tea. She had done this before, when she was very small. Sitting like this with someone nearby working at knitting, or was it at a loom, dipping cakes in tea…

  She looked at the old woman, who had stretched a length of thread taut between her fingers and was examining it closely.

  “You made these cakes for me,” she cried. “When I was little. I remember. I remember eating them, with the tea.”

  The old woman looked at her in surprise, then nodded her head.

  “Yes, I did,” she said eagerly. “I had forgotten that.”

  “I remember you now,” Rowen said excitedly. The taste of the little cake had brought back so much, like an immense book opening to her gaze. That washbasin: her mother had bathed her in it. And the flute: she and her mother had danced while her father played. And there was someone else there, just on the edges of the memory, someone singing and clapping her hands while Rowen danced. A kind voice, laughing eyes.

  Tears slid down Rowen’s face.

  “You were there too, Grandmother. I remember … standing in the doorway, crying. My parents had gone somewhere and left me at home. I was sad and scared. I wondered if they were coming back. And then … you were there, and you brought me tea and cakes, and showed me how to dip the cakes in my teacup. You told me … ‘It makes them taste much better.’ I remember you saying that. Then I felt safe, and warm.”

  “We spent a lot of time together, you and I,” the woman said softly. “Your mother was often away with the Errantry. I’m so happy you remember, and that we can be together again, but…” A look of pain or fear crossed her face. “You cannot stay here much longer.”

  To Rowen’s dismay, Grandmother turned back to the tapestry.

  “So much to do,” she murmured. “Hand me that comb, will you?”

  There was a basket near Rowen’s feet with several balls of thread and oddly shaped pieces of wood piled in it. Hurt and bewildered, she picked out the object that looked to her like a comb and handed it to her grandmother, who took the white thread she had been pulling from the sword-like stick and began to work it with the comb into the already woven tapestry threads. As the white thread was woven into the design, Rowen was able to see more of it, as if the new thread had illuminated the other threads around it. There was a pattern there, but as soon as Rowen thought she had grasped it, seen what it was, it seemed to change, become something else that eluded her effort to give it a name.

  “What are you making?” she asked, surprised at the anger in her voice. What was so important about this tapestry?

  Her grandmother looked over at her and a sudden understanding came into her face.

  “I’m sorry, Rowen. You’ve probably been wondering why I insist on sitting here at the loom when we have so much to say to one another. If I could, I would set aside these tools. But it’s too late for that now. This tapestry is the Weaving. And I am one of its weavers.”

  “But I thought all of this…” Rowen gestured around the room and out of the open door. “I thought all of it was the Weaving. I thought we were inside it.”

  “We are. Everything is. And the Weaving is inside us. The Weaving is as small as a grain of sand and wider than the sky. It’s the tiny spark in the dark of your mind that grows into a world. Don’t try to think your way around it. No one can. Only when you simply allow it to be so will you understand.”

  Mystified, Rowen studied the tapestry again. She noticed that many of the edges were ragged, and that there was a tight tangle of thread in the centre, a knot of darkness that seemed to have drawn many of the threads towards it, leaving gaps and holes where the weave had been pulled out of shape.

  “You’re repairing the tapestry,” Rowen said.

  “Attempting to, yes. But one story is growing so powerful that it’s changing and warping everything, even the past. That knot at the centre is Malabron’s story, and he is bending all his powers now upon Fable. If it falls, the tapestry will tell only his story everywhere and for ever. No one will remember there was ever anything else before, or imagine that things might be different. There will be no more beginnings or endings, no more princesses or brave knights or woodcutter’s sons. Or tigers, for that matter.”

  Rowen’s heart went cold.

  “Those holes in the weave,” she said after a long silence. “There was a rift, an empty place that Balor Gruff of the Errantry stumbled into, near Fable. When Grandfather found it, the rift was already almost sealed up again. Was that you?”

  “I have repaired many holes in the weave, so it may well be. I rarely leave the loom any more, but despite all I do the darkness grows and is already beyond my power to heal. And it is spreading faster now than ever, as if it has woven all of its long-prepared threads and is moving them at last, to seize its prey.”

  “Prey … you mean Fable, and the raincabinet?”

  “And you, Rowen. I think that when you stepped into the black river, the Night King saw you clearly for the first time, saw what you could become, and that is another reason for his sudden haste.”

  “Can’t anything can be done to stop him?” Rowen cried. “What about the Stewards? Grandfather said you went into the Weaving to find out what had happened to them. Did you find them? Can they help us?”

  Grandmother pulled the comb away from the tapestry and turned to Rowen.

  “I have learned much about the Stewards here,” she said. “I know now that they did not begin the Realm, as we once thought, they only shaped and tended what was already there. The Weaving, the fire, has no beginning. Stories come only from other stories. And now the story of the Stewards is over, it is a part of the ancient past that the Night King has almost completely consumed, so that few remember it. Now it is the task of others to save the Realm, if they can.”

  “You mean me,” Rowen said heavily, and the doubt and fear she had set aside settled on her again like a terrible weight. “Maybe … I can stay here with you, and help you with the tapestry. Maybe if we work together…”

  “That cannot be,” Grandmother said. “If one stays too long in the Weaving, one can never leave it. One cannot weave without being woven. In a way, you could say I have become the Weaving.”

  “Then that means … you can’t leave here,” Rowen said in anguish. “Why not, Grandmother? I don’t understand.”

  It seemed for a moment that her grandmother hadn’t heard. She was looking down at her hands lying in her lap, as if they were now empty of something she had once been carrying. Then suddenly she raised her head and gazed long at Rowen, her eyes filled with love and sadness.

  “I came here … because I saw that one day you would be more powerful than any loremaster who has ever been. I knew you would have a great gift, and a great purpose, and that this would put you in terrible danger. I wanted to help you, protect you, by bringing back the secrets of the Weaving. But I discovered I could do more for you if I stayed and worked at the loom, even if it meant I could never return. That was my choice. To leave you, when you were a child, so that I could help you when you were grown. And that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done … leaving you.”

  “Grandmother…” Rowen said, her voice breaking. “I didn’t know.”

  Hesitantly the old woman reached out and gently brushed back some stray locks of Rowen’s hair.

  “My child,” she said softly.r />
  Rowen threw her arms around her grandmother. They held each other for a long time. Then Grandmother took a deep breath and sat back so that she could look into Rowen’s eyes again.

  “I did what I could here for you, such as it was,” she said. “The snugs in the forest, the knot-paths…”

  Rowen stared in wonder. She couldn’t help looking at her grandmother’s hands. They looked so frail. An old woman’s wrinkled, almost translucent hands.

  “You made those things?”

  “I wove them into the world, yes.”

  Rowen remembered the cosy snug they had stayed in on their way home to Fable. As always when they stayed in one of those mysterious little rooms, she had wondered why they were there and who had prepared everything in them for weary travellers.

  “But Grandfather said the snugs and the knot-paths were made by the Stewards,” she protested, “ages and ages ago. They’ve always been there.”

  “From this place, I discovered, I could reach into the way things were, even the most ancient times, and weave them anew.”

  “You mean you … changed the past.”

  “Here in the Weaving one learns that time is … well, it’s not something we have, it’s what we are. We weave with it, and are woven by it. And now I have become part of the past that I wove. That is why I cannot leave. But at least I have been able to change a few things for the better, though I had to be careful. Too much meddling with stories and one starts down the road to becoming another Malabron. But I knew that one day you and your grandfather might have need of safe refuges, or secret ways to flee far from danger. And so I came up with the idea of the snugs, and the knot-paths. And once I’d woven them into the past, it was as if they’d always been there, since the beginning.”

  Rowen thought of Will then, and how he had saved them from the Angel by finding one of those mysterious paths. She had never known, never suspected that the path was only there for Will to find because of her grandmother.

  “You were right about us needing them,” Rowen said, then a strange new hope came to her. “If you can change the past like that, what about the future? Couldn’t you just make it so that Malabron will be defeated in the end?”