Song of Leira

by Gillian Bronte Adams

  “But Amos wouldn’t,” she called after him, but he was already gone.

  At the fireside, Ky crouched to blow life into the sputtering flames. She dumped her armload beside him and started sorting through the mess, setting the kettle over the flames and pinching tea leaves from the bag into a pewter cup—also courtesy of Quillan. The flames took hold at last, and Ky wiped his hands off on his knees.

  “All set.” He gave a half-hearted shrug and scooted back to one of the logs that he had dragged over to serve as seats around their fire. “Should help ward off some of the chill.”

  With the arrival of late spring, the days were getting warmer, though the mountain air seemed to carry a perpetual crisp bite after dark. And yet, despite the chill, a warmth spread through Birdie’s chest that did not come from the fire. Even with this wretched tension between them, Ky had stayed, as if he knew she needed someone at her back as she faced this.

  Whatever this was.

  She waited until the kettle boiled and then poured the steaming liquid over the tea leaves and let it steep for a few minutes before adding a dash of mead. Finally, she turned to Amos. All this time she had avoided looking at him. Not because she was afraid, but because the sight of him hurt. Like someone had taken one of those twigs from the fire and jammed it, still burning, into her heart. As if his return had torn away the scab that had finally begun to grow over the wound his loss created and left it inflamed and bleeding again.

  Still as stone, the peddler sat hunched over his knees on the log where Birdie and Ky had placed him. The harsh firelight cast a lurid glow over the hollows in his cheeks and behind his eyes, on the unkempt scraggle of his beard, and on his crippled right hand—dead, grayed flesh twisted in on itself with two fingers missing: the result of chimera venom.

  Taking a deep breath, Birdie approached with the tea and the cloak. “Amos, I’ve brought you some tea.”

  He did not respond.

  She settled the cloak around his shoulders, and he clutched it to his chest. Over Amos’s bowed head, she caught Ky staring. He looked swiftly away, fiddling with the hawk’s feathers intertwined with the fringe on his lion-skin jacket, and then rose abruptly.

  “Got to go post lookouts.”

  His footsteps crunched off into the night. Once again she was on her own. Birdie knelt beside Amos and held out the cup of tea, but he did not seem to even see her. His eyes stared vacantly ahead. Labored breathing hissed over his unkempt whiskers.

  She nudged the cup toward his hand. “Amos?”

  At her voice, he started and jerked away. His eyes came to rest on the steaming cup, and he took it in his good hand, mumbling his thanks into the cup as he lifted it to his lips. One sip, and then he grimaced and pulled away. “Boggswogglin’ nasty grass-flavored stuff, right, Nisus?” A thin chuckle died on his lips as his eyes fell on her. “Birdie . . .” He said it slowly, as if he had to think about it.

  She nodded, breathless. “Yes.”

  His gaze roamed to the fire and the whispering bald-tipped trees beyond the ruined wall, and the look on his face morphed into one of disgust. “What in all the seaswoggled earth are ye doin’ here, in this o’ all places? This place is evil.”

  “He is right, Songkeeper.” Frey padded up beside the fire. “It reeks of evil deeds.”

  “It does not sound evil. Only broken.”

  “Broken, aye, ’tis broken a’right. Broken beneath the blood o’ the innocents slaughtered before they’d a chance t’ rise. Broken beneath a rain o’ flaming arrows in the dead o’ night. Broken beneath the swords and the spears of the Takhran’s soldiers. Like wild animals they were, howling for blood beneath a dyin’ moon.” A twitch seized Amos’s crippled hand, and his voice trailed off. He threw back the tea and downed it in a single gulp.

  Birdie couldn’t breathe. “You were here. This is Drengreth, isn’t it?”

  He did not respond, but his bloodshot eyes gave all the answer she needed. Drengreth. The mountain camp of the Songkeeper Artair, where Amos and Nisus and Jirkar and who knew how many others had followed him and lived as outlaws. Until Carhartan—or Oran, as he had been then—had betrayed their hiding place. The Khelari had burst upon them in the night and slaughtered them without mercy, making such a horror of the place that nearly all resistance against the Takhran in the Nordlands was squelched.

  Why had the Song led her here?

  The hollows in Amos’s cheeks deepened as he clenched his jaw. Then he rose abruptly, swaying slightly on his feet, and threw aside the cloak. “It’s not safe here. Ye’ll leave at first light. Ye must seek shelter elsewhere.”

  “But . . .” Birdie scrambled to retrieve the cloak. “What about you, Amos?”

  “I remain.”

  He limped off into the dark, and Birdie started to follow him, but a warning from Frey begged her to stay. Still clutching the cloak, she sat on the log beside the deserted fire. Hours passed and still neither Amos nor Ky returned. Finally, she curled beneath the cloak beside the embers and waited for sleep to claim her. But all through the long night, she could hear Amos pacing . . . pacing . . . pacing . . .

  •••

  Armored feet tramped across rock. Chains clinked. And a voice moaned in pain. Birdie rode upon the currents of a high, wailing melody that had zipped her across mountain ranges and foothills, and then plunged her down through the jagged, three-peaked cone of Mount Eiphyr and into the depths of the Pit.

  A single firepot guttered in the riverbed beside one of the twelve stone columns. With a click, three iron restraints sprang open, one after another. A body slumped to the ground, unseeing eyes filling her vision. And then the armored feet crowded in, dragging a barefooted person between them. Bare heels struck the column. The restraints clicked into place.

  The Takhran’s voice drifted toward her. “Twelve there were. Twelve there will remain.”

  The shiiiinnng of a drawn knife set her heart hammering. She dove back into the wailing melody. Begged it to take her away. Searing white-blue light shot across her vision.

  She did not hear the knife fall.

  •••

  With a thunk, Amos dropped a loaded knapsack beside her and stood with one foot propped on the log where she sat, arms crossed over his chest, scowling down at her.

  “Good morning.” Birdie smiled at him. She held up her bark bowl of mashed oats that one of the freed slaves, a woman named Helyn, had made for breakfast. Three days in the ruins of Drengreth and a way of life was emerging, with tasks divided as all pitched in to provide the necessities—food, shelter, protection, fellowship. Ky had done well organizing all of it. “Are you hungry? There’s plenty left in the pot.”

  “Ye lot are leavin’ today.” He shrugged aside her offer, but she had already risen to fill another bowl. “’Tis been three days already. ’Tis time ye were gone.”

  “I can get you tea too, if you like.”

  Amos seized the bowl from her hand and tossed it aside. “Ye know well enough I can’t abide the stuff, but that’s beside the point. Three days ye’ve put me off. Said that folk were worn down and needed rest, but ’tis time ye were movin’ on, not buildin’ shelters and cookin’ breakfast.” Crimson flooded his face, just like it always did when he got angry. It made him look more like the old Amos and not the pale, frightened, trembling ghost who had emerged from the Pit in place of her friend.

  Even thinking such a thing made her feel a traitor.

  “’Tisn’t safe for ye here.” He nodded toward the knapsack. “Ye’re packed and ready t’ leave. Best get an early start. Ye can cover more ground before nightfall that way.”

  And then he turned and walked off.

  Birdie bit her tongue. How many times had she dreamed the impossible, dreamed that Amos was still alive, dreamed that he would come back . . . And here he was. And yet it was nothing like she had imagined. Suddenly the pain was too much to hold inside anymore. It broke loose and flooded out of her. She stormed after Amos. “You were dead. For months you were
dead. We mourned you. All of us.” Her words rebounded from his broad back. He did not turn around. “And now . . .”

  Now that she had found him again, he wanted nothing to do with her. Sought to send her away without so much as a kind word or any sign that he had missed her as much as she had missed him. It was almost as if . . . as if he blamed her for what had befallen him in the Pit.

  The thought snuffed out her anger like a drop of water on a spark. Her yelling had attracted a crowd. All around the ruins, folk had stopped what they were doing to gape at her and Amos. She flinched before the weight of their stares.

  “The Song led us here. We’re not leaving.”

  And then she turned and fled.

  21

  “You can come out, Frey.”

  Branches rustled behind her. Birdie rested her elbows on the low stone wall surrounding the well and gazed down into the pitch black below. She did not need to look to know that the saif approached. Since the argument with Amos, he had been following her, and she had led him on a merry chase as she explored the ruins. Rambling steps had carried her down the far slope of the hill to a hollow. A paved path, so overgrown by moss and vines that she could scarce make it out, had led her through a grove of weeping thrassle trees to the well. And there she had stopped, struck by the sudden realization that her rambling steps had not been quite so random. The deep, hollow note that had intrigued her when they first arrived emanated from the well shaft.

  Frey glided up beside her. “I thought perhaps you wished to be alone.”

  A considerate thought that meant little when she could hear his melody nearby and knew that he spied upon her unseen. “No, not alone.” She turned back to the well. Dragon’s tongue vines crawled up the sides and sent tendrils reaching down inside. Deep within, the melody pulsed. It clearly emanated from this spot, and yet it was still distant. Somehow . . .

  Birdie pressed her palms against the top of the wall and pushed up, trying to angle her head to see farther down into the shaft.

  But daylight could only penetrate so far.

  The saif sighed. “A thousand times I have seen that expression upon Quillan’s face, and it never foretold any good.” His eyes narrowed at the quizzical look she sent him. “The expression that says you are about to do something reckless. It is a well. Climbing inside is pointless. It is no doubt filled with water.”

  Birdie shook her head. She wasn’t sure how, but she knew the well was dry. Still, there was no harm in testing it. She dug a stone out of the earth, leaned out over the well, and dropped it in. A breath passed until she heard the clack of stone striking stone. “No water.”

  The saif sighed again and somehow managed to make it sound both long suffering and good natured. She wondered if that was another thing that friendship with Quillan had taught him. In all honesty, she had not intended to venture down the well shaft before Frey spoke, but now that the idea had been planted, it itched at the back of her mind. Something about this place felt eerily familiar. It was a nagging sensation that rippled beneath her skin.

  What harm could a little exploring do?

  “Come, Songkeeper.” He turned those liquid eyes upon her, and his whiskers drooped in an expression so pitiful that only an iron heart could have resisted. “Nothing reckless.”

  Birdie laughed at that. “Is it reckless if I fetch a rope first?” After all, Quillan was an old man, and he went scampering along cliff faces in the dead of night.

  “A rope . . . and a friend.”

  That didn’t seem unreasonable. With four cloven hooves, the saif wasn’t going to be clambering down well shafts beside her. She needed another two-legs for this.

  •••

  The shelter-building project was in full swing, and Ky was in the thick of things as usual when she found him. He tramped toward the ruined outer stone wall from the ring of bald-tipped trees with his arms full of dead wood and harvested branches. Beyond, Gull and Obasi roved between the trunks, collecting their own loads. It did not surprise her to find them nearby. Thick as thieves, the three of them were—or at least she thought that was the expression Ky would have used for it.

  She waited for him in the gap.

  He halted when he saw her. “Birdie.” A branch started to slip, and he lurched to steady his load. “We’re collecting wood. For shelters.”

  “Do you have a moment? There’s something you should see.”

  “I shouldn’t really leave right now.” He cast a glance over his shoulder as Obasi emerged, dragging what looked to be the top of a tree behind him. “Everyone’s working.”

  “Of course.” Swallowing disappointment, she slid past him and started for the ring of trees. If exploring the well wasn’t an option at the moment, the least she could do was pitch in.

  “No, wait.” Half a dozen more branches slipped from his grasp. Birdie bent to collect them and looked up to find his head cocked, studying her. A faint grin flashed across his face. “I’ll go with you, but it can only take a minute. Just let me drop this load off first.”

  After Ky disposed of his bundle of tree limbs, Birdie led the way to the well, armed with a rope and an unlit torch. She secured the rope around the base of the well, knotting it off with a few Waveryder-worthy knots that she had learned securing livestock at the Sylvan Swan, and then let the free end slither into the hole. Grasping the rope in both hands, she swung over the edge. She hung there for a moment, watching as Ky tucked the unlit torch into his belt, and then down they both climbed into the well. With each hand-over-hand repetition, Birdie felt the echoes of the Song growing until it reverberated within the circular well shaft.

  At last her feet touched solid ground. She released the rope and inched away. Moments later, Ky landed with a grunt, and she heard him fumbling for torch and tinderbox. It took several sparks to catch the torch aflame, then the light flared up, dancing across the pale oranges, blueish grays, and soft pinks streaking the rocks around them. They were in a wide, low space—part of a natural cave system, it seemed. Beyond the well shaft itself, the ceiling was only a few feet above her head, made lower by a bed of stalactites. Here and there, stalactites and stalagmites met, forming uneven columns that aided in the overall feeling of a small, cramped space. In some places, jagged shards of crystal protruded from rifts in the rock.

  Birdie halted before one crystal bloom that was larger than her hand and watched the way the torchlight played across the facets of the stone. “It’s beautiful.”

  Ky just grunted.

  She wandered to the edge of the torchlight and then a little beyond, basking in the deep, throbbing hum that filled the tunnel. The echo of the Song still had that strange sense of distance to it, and yet it seemed to be centered here. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of location as it was of timing. It felt like an old echo that had faded with the passage of many years.

  Words spoken by the Takhran in Tal Ethel rang through her mind. They were some of the few words that she could recall clearly from that night. “There are places in this world where the master melody runs truer than in others.” If anything that he said could be taken as true, then Tal Ethel and the Hollow Cave must have been two of those places.

  And maybe this was another. Drengreth had been the mountain camp of the Songkeeper Artair. It made sense that he would establish himself in such a place.

  She turned back toward Ky to explain what she had found, but he paced back and forth beside the rope, head down, chin tucked, brooding. It dampened her excitement and left her feeling foolish for dragging him away from the work up top. She had meant it as a show of friendship, a sign that she wished to move past the terrible downfall of that wretched night and the strain it had placed between them.

  “Leave the torch with me if you want to go back.”

  Ky startled and had the grace to look a trifle sheepish. “No, it’s fine. It’s not that.” But Birdie couldn’t help but notice the knot between his brows as he went back to pacing. His melody, too, was a tangled mess of battling contrad
ictions that finally drew her from the wonders of the cave to his side. She didn’t say a word, because she knew his stubbornness well enough to know that he would not answer a direct question. Instead, she relieved him of the torch, sat cross legged on the ground with the torch resting on her knee, and waited.

  It didn’t take long.

  “Obasi’s talking about the slave camps now.” He fixed his eyes on the spare feet of rope coiled at his feet. “Seems to think I’m some sort of a hero because I escaped the chimera.” A stifled snort of disgust. “Claims I’m a lionheart, or some such desert warrior legend, and that somehow I must succeed in freeing the slaves.” His voice had grown in volume with each successive word until the echoes ran down the tunnel.

  Birdie kept quiet, waiting.

  He paced back and forth a half dozen steps before snapping to a halt in front of her. “Paddy’s out there. I know it, and I’ve got to find him. I’ve got to. But I made such a mess of it last time. I know I did. How can I ask them to go back out there, knowing they might die because of me?”

  Another few steps, back and forth. He dragged his eyes to meet hers. “It was my fault.”

  The brokenness in his voice begged her forgiveness, but still, Birdie did not know how to respond. It was his fault. The mission had gone awry from the start, and he had refused to turn back. He had abandoned them, dashed off into danger, and led Gundhrold into it as well. But the moment she tried to lay the blame with him, she had to admit that some of it fell upon her. If at any point she had chosen to turn back, Gundhrold would have gone too.

  Could she simply lie and tell him that all was well? She knew that she could not.

  Shoulders slumped, Ky turned away. He seized the rope with white-­knuckled hands and was about to start climbing when Birdie found her voice.

  “Peace.”

  He stood still.

  “That’s what filled Gundhrold’s melody in the moments before he died. This overwhelming sense of peace. I can’t even describe it, but it was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.” Recollection of the voice of the Master Singer singing to her upon a hillside beneath a crown of stars flashed through her mind, and she amended her statement. “Well, almost the most beautiful thing. It stuck with me . . .”