"Enter," Yeuhanin said after a moment's pause.
The interior of the tent was lit with the dim glow of oil lamps that also filled the air with a perfumed scent. The caliyeh sat cross-legged by his small cast-iron brazier. A half-completed prayer weaving lay across his knees. On the brazier, a teapot sent a thin tendril of steam up to the roof of the tent.
Behan laid his pack by the door and approached the brazier. He lifted his prayer knot and kissed it before seating himself across from the caliyeh.
"I am most sorry to disturb you, Caliyeh Yeuhanin," he said with his head bowed.
The caliyeh nodded, accepting Behan's respectful greeting.
"Tell me your troubles," he said.
His voice was gentle, but his eyes burned like a desert hawk's. The fire in them seemed to grow as Behan spun out his tale and then showed Yeuhanin the puzzle-box he had taken away from the tower.
"This is an evil thing," Yeuhanin said when the telling was done.
Behan nodded, apprehending the caliyeh's unspoken rebuke.
"Is... is it an artifact of the Dead God's?" he asked in a hushed voice.
The Dead God was the antithesis of Jaromund, holy be His name. Once they were brothers, but the Dead God perverted the beauty of what Jaromund, holy be His name, had created, teaching beasts to feed upon one another and men to harbor evil in their hearts. In His anger, Jaromund, holy be His name, had called forth a hero from the tribesmen to slay His brother, but even from beyond the veils of death, the Dead God whispered to the creations of Jaromund, holy be His name, urging them to turn from His blessed teachings.
Deep in the Kharanan, there had been small sects who followed the tenets of the Dead God. As the years passed, their influence was no longer felt in the Great Desert itself, for they had turned their attentions to the lands beyond the boundaries of the Kharanan, where the small sects had long since grown into a religion that overshadowed all others.
Yeuhanin gazed at the puzzle-box, a troubled look in his pale eyes. Slowly he wrapped it in its silk covering once more and tied off the braided goat's-hair rope.
"Its source is a mystery that I do not care to study," he said. His gaze rose from the covered puzzle-box to lock on Behan's eyes. "You must return it to the tower in which you found it."
Behan nodded, then swallowed thickly. He thought of the sands, rising steadily to the lip of the window.
"And... and if the sands have reclaimed the tower?" he asked.
"Then you must send it out into the world— far from the Kharanan, far from our people."
Behan thought of the traders with whom he dealt in the towns that bordered the desert. He liked some of them, for all their heathen beliefs.
"Forgive me, Caliyeh Yeuhanin," he said, "but will it be dangerous for them— for those who live beyond the sands?"
Yeuhanin shrugged. "This," he said, touching the silk covering with a brown finger, "feeds on witches and their like. The world can be well rid of their kind."
He regarded Behan steadily for a moment, before adding, "It also works an influence on those untainted with witchery. They will not be physically hurt, but like the whispering of the Dead God, that influence will prey upon their minds, stealing their sanity. Let those who do not follow the teachings of Jaromund, holy be His name, deal with the peril should you be unable to return this thing to its tower." A grim look touched his eyes. "Their souls are already forfeit."
Behan nodded. He lifted his prayer knot and kissed it, then accepting the puzzle-box back from Yeuhanin, he made a quick retreat from the caliyeh's tent.
In his own tent, he ignored his wives and children. Emptying his pack of its trade goods, he added a few more provisions and refilled his watersack from the large clay water jar by the door flap, then set out immediately for the tower, for all that he was already weary to the bone. The morning might be too late. The tower might already be gone by then.
—
He reached the spot where he had discovered it near midnight. A full moon sailed above the Unforgiving Sea of Sands, its bright light shimmering on the dunes. Behan stared down the trough between the dunes where the tower had stood earlier that day.
It was gone.
He gazed along his backtrail to where, hidden by distance, the camp of his people lay. On his back, the puzzle-box made such a weight of his pack that it was as though he marched with a full load.
Sighing, he turned from the road home, and began to walk along the crest of the dune towards the trading town of Sauwait.
5
Angharad found him in Avalarn, one of Cermyn's old forests, the one said long ago to have been a haunt of the wizard Puretongue. He lay in a nest of leaves, sheltered in a cleft of rocks. Above them, old oaks clawed skyward with greedy boughs, reaching for the clouds.
"I know you," he said, dark eyes opening suddenly, glittering like a crow's.
"Do you now?" she said mildly.
He was a reed-thin feral child, and she felt an immediate kinship with him. He had her red hair, and the same look of age in his eyes that she had in hers. He could have been her brother. But she had never seen him before.
"You lived in an oak," he said.
This was just another way of saying that she had a witch's sight. She rocked back on her heels as the boy sat up, and she continued to study him curiously. This was her second summer on the road, her second summer of searching out the Summerborn, and she was growing used to odd encounters.
"Are you hungry?" she asked.
When he nodded, she drew bread and cheese from her pack and watched him devour it like a cat. He took quick bites, his gaze never leaving her face.
"I lived up in the branches of your tree once," he said, wiping crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'd hear you playing that harp, when the moon was right."
Angharad smiled. "You heard the wind fingering an oak tree's branches— nothing else."
The boy smiled back. "So you were there, or how would you know? Besides, how else would a treewife play the harp of her boughs?"
His voice was soft, with a slight rasp. There was a flicker in his eyes like fool's fire.
"What's your name, boy?" she asked. "What are you doing here? Are you lost?"
"My name's Fenn and I've been waiting for you. All my life, I've been waiting for you."
Angharad couldn't help smiling again. "And such a long life you've had so far."
The boy's eyes hooded. A fox watched her from under his bushy eyebrows.
"Why have you been waiting for me?" she asked finally.
Fenn pointed to her harp. "I want you to sing the song that will set me free."
—
Angharad crawled through the weeds with the boy, keeping low, though out of whose sight, Fenn wouldn't say. The foothills of the West Meon Mountains ran off to the west, a sea of bell heather and gorse, dotted with islands of stone outcrops where ferrets prowled at night. But it wasn't the moorland that he'd brought her to see.
"That's where he lived," Fen said, pointing to the giant oak that stood alone and towering in the halfland between the forest and the sea of moor.
"The wizard?"
Fenn nodded. "He's bound there yet— bound to his tree. Just like you were, treewife."
"My name is Angharad," she said, not for the first time. "And I was never bound to a tree."
Fenn merely shrugged. Angharad caught his gaze and held it until he looked away, a quick sidling movement. She turned her attention back to the tree. Faintly, amongst its branches, she could make out a structure.
"That was Puretongue's tree?" she asked.
Fenn grinned, all the humor riding in his eyes. "But he's been dead a hundred years or better, of course. It's the other wizard that's bound in there now. The one that came after Puretongue."
"And what was his name?"
"That's part of the riddle and why you're needed. Learn his name and you have him."
"I don't want him."
"But if you free him, then he'll fin
ally let me go."
Somehow, Angharad doubted that it would be so simple. She didn't trust her companion. He might appear to be the brother she'd never had— red hair, witch-eyes and all— but there was something feral about him that made her wary. The oak tree caught her gaze again, drawing it in like a snared bird. Still, there was something about that tree, about that house up in its branches. Silence hung about it, thick as cobwebs in a disused tower.
"I'll have to think about this," she said.
Without waiting for Fenn, she crept back through the weeds, keeping low until the first outriding trees of Avalarn Forest shielded her from possible view.
—
"Why should I believe you?" Angharad asked.
They had returned to where she'd first found him and sat perched on stones like a pair of magpies, facing each other, watching the glitter in each other's eyes and looking for the spark that told of a lie.
"How could I tell you anything but the truth?" Fenn replied. "I'm your friend."
"And if you told me that the world was round— would I be expected to believe that too?"
Fenn laughed. "But it is round, and hangs like an apple in the sky."
"I know," Angharad said, "though there are those that don't." She studied him for another long moment. "So tell me again, what is it you need to be freed from?"
"The wizard."
"I don't see any chains on you."
Fenn tapped his chest. "The bindings are inside— on my heart. That's why I need your song."
"Which can't be sung until the wizard is loosed."
Fenn nodded.
"Tell me this," Angharad said. "If the wizard is set free, what's to stop him from binding me?"
"Gratitude," Fenn replied. "He's been bound a hundred years, treewife. He'll grant any wish to the one who frees him."
Angharad closed her eyes, picturing the tree, its fat bole, the lofty height to its first boughs.
"You can't climb it?" she asked.
"It's not a matter of what I'm capable of," Fenn replied. "It's a matter of the geas that was laid on me and the wizard. I can't stray, but I can't enter the house in its branches. And the wizard can't free me until he himself is free. Won't you help us?"
Angharad opened her eyes to find him smiling at her. "I'll go up the tree," she said, "but I'll make no promises."
"The key to free him—"
"Is in a small wicker basket— the size of a woodsman's fist. I know. You've already told me more than once."
"Oh, treewife, you—"
"I'm not a treewife," Angharad said.
She jumped down from her perch on the stones and started for the tree. Fenn hesitated for a long heartbeat, then scrambled down as well to hurry after her.
—
"How will you get up?" Fenn whispered when they stood directly under the tree.
Though the bark was rough, Angharad didn't trust it to make for safe handholds on a climb up. The bole was too fat for her to shimmy up. She took a coil of rope from her pack and tied a stone to one end.
"Not by witchy means," she said.
The boy stood back as she began to whirl the stone in an ever-widening circle above her head. She hummed to herself, eyes narrowed as she peered up, waiting for just the right moment to cast the stone. Then suddenly it was aloft, flying high, the rope trailing behind it like a long bedraggled tail. Fenn clapped his hands as the stone soared over the lowest branch, then came down the opposite side. Angharad untied the rock. Passing one end of the rope through a slipknot, she pulled it through until the knot was at the branch.
Journeypack and staff stayed by the foot of the tree. With only her small harp on her shoulder, she used the rope to climb up, grunting at the effort it took. Her arms and shoulders were aching long before she reached that first welcome branch, but reach it she did. She sprawled on it and looked down. She saw her belongings, but Fenn was gone. Frowning, she looked up and blinked in amazement. Seen from here, the wizard's refuge was exactly like a small house, only set in the branches of a tree instead of on the ground.
Well, I've come this far, Angharad thought. There was no point in going back down until she'd at least had a look. Besides, her own curiosity was tugging at her now.
She drew up the rope and coiled it carefully around her waist. Without it, she could easily be trapped in this tree. Her witcheries let her talk to the birds and the beasts and to listen to their gossip, but they weren't enough to let her fly off like an eagle, or crawl down the tree trunk like a squirrel.
She made her way up, one branch, then another, moving carefully until she finally clambered up the last to stand on the small porch in front of the door. She laid a hand on the wooden door. The wood was smooth to her touch, the whorls of the grain more intricate than any human artwork could ever be. She turned and looked away.
She could see the breadth of the forest from her vantage point, could watch it sweep into the distance, another sea, green and flowing, twin to the darker waves of gorse and heather that marched westward. Slowly she sank down onto her haunches.
She remembered the foxfire flicker in Fenn's eyes and thought of the lights of Jacky Lantern's marsh-kin who loved to lead travelers astray. Some never came back. She remembered tinker wagons rolling by ruined keeps and how she and the other children would dare each other to go exploring within. Crowen's little brother Broon fell down a shaft in one place and broke his neck. She remembered tales of haunted places where if one spent the night, they were found the next morning either dead, mad, or a poet. This tree had the air of such a place.
She sighed. One hand lifted to the harp at her shoulder. She fingered the smooth length of its small forepillar.
The harp was a gift from Jacky Lantern's kin, as was the music she pulled from its strings. She used it in her journeys through the kingdoms of the Green Isles, to wake the Summerblood where it lay sleeping in folk who had never known they were witches. This was the way the Middle Kingdom survived— by being remembered, by its small magics being served, by the interchange of wisdom and gossip between man and those he shared the world with— the birds, the beasts, the hills, the trees...
Poetry was the other third of a bard's spells, she thought. Poetry and harping and the road that led into the green. She had the harp and knew the road. Standing then to face the door, she thought, perhaps I'll find the poetry in here.
She tried the wooden latch and it moved easily under her hand. The door swung open with a push, and she stepped through.
The light was cool and green inside. She stood in the middle of a large room. There were bookshelves with leather-bound volumes on one wall, a worktable on another with bunches of dried herbs hanging above it. A stone hearth stood against another and she wondered what wood even a wizard would dare burn, living here in a tree.
The door closed softly behind her. She turned quickly, half-expecting to see someone there, but she was alone in the room. She walked over to the worktable and ran her hand lightly along its length. There was no dust. And the room itself— it was so big. Bigger than she would have supposed it to be when she was outside.
There was another door by the bookshelves. Curious, she crossed the room and tried its handle. It opened easily as well, leading into another room.
Angharad paused there, a witchy tickle starting up her spine. This was impossible. The house was far too small to have so much space inside. She remembered then the one thing she'd forgotten to ask Fenn. If the wizard had caught him, who had caught the wizard and laid the geas on them both?
She wished now that she had brought her staff with her. The white rowan wood could call up a witch-fire. In a place such as this that had once belonged to a treewizard, fire seemed a good weapon to be carrying. Returning to the work bench, she looked through the herbs and clay jars and bundles of twigs until she found what she was looking for. A rowan sprig. Not much, perhaps, but a fire needed only one spark to start its flames.
Twig in hand, she entered the next room. It was much the same
as the first, only more cluttered. Another door led off from it. She went through that door to find yet one more room. This was smaller, a bedchamber with a curtained window and a small table and chair under it. On the table was a small wicker basket.
About the size of a man's fist...
She stepped over to the table and picked up the basket. The lid came off easily. Inside was a small bone. A fingerbone, she realized. She closed the basket quickly and looked around. Her witcheries told her that she was no longer alone.
Who are you ? a voice breathed in her mind. It seemed to swim out of the walls, a rumbling bass sound, but soft as the last echo of a harp's low strings.
"Who are you?" she answered back. No fool she. Names were power.
She felt what could only be a smile form in her mind. I am the light on a hawk's wings, the whisper of a tree's boughs, the smell of bell heather, the texture of loam. I dream like a long-stone, run like a fox, dance like the wind.
"You're the wizard, then," Angharad said. Only wizards used a hundred words where one would do. Except for their spells. Then all they needed was the one name.
Why are you here?
"To free you."
Again that smile took shape in her mind. And who told you that I need to be freed?
"The boy in the forest— the one you've bound. Fenn."
The boy is a liar.
Angharad sighed. She'd thought as much, really. So why was she here? To spend the night and see if she'd wake mad or a poet, or not wake at all? But when she spoke, all she said was, "And perhaps you are the liar."
The presence in her mind laughed. Perhaps I am, it said. Lie down on the bed, dear guest. I want to show you something.
"I can see well enough standing up, thank you all the same."
And if you fall down and crack your head when the vision comes— who will you blame?
Angharad made a slow circuit around the room, stopping when she came to the bed. She touched its coverlet, poked at the mattress. Sighing, she kept a firm hold of the basket in one hand, the rowan twig in the other, and lay down. No sooner did her head touch the pillow, than the coverlet rose up in a twist and bound her limbs, holding her fast.