“Oh, ye gods!” Leagh wept as Faraday let the blanket fall to the floor, and she saw the full extent of her depravation in the light of the fire. “How…did I get to such a state…what…Faraday? Why are you here? Where is Zared? Why am I—”
“Hush,” Faraday murmured. “One of the first things my mother taught me was that no-one can fully understand any answers when the first thing they need is a bath, a meal, and then some rest.”
“But—”
“Lift this foot. Good. Now the other one.”
Leagh gasped as she sank down into the hot water, partly in shock, partly in pain, as the heat bit into her scratches and sores, and part in sheer wonderment at the comforting embrace of the water.
Faraday rinsed out a cloth, lathered it with soap, and washed Leagh down, wondering wryly if she was to be condemned—through all her lives—to repeating the actions of her first. Here she knelt by the tub washing a pregnant Leagh as she had once sat on Azhure’s bed and washed her, feeling the malevolence that even then had emanated from the belly swollen with the infant Drago.
Now? Faraday’s hand slid gently over Leagh’s belly, feeling the life within. What had happened to it? Had it been reborn, redeemed, as Leagh had?
Or…?
Leagh’s hand closed over hers, pressing it against her belly.
“Tell me,” she said, staring at Faraday.
Faraday hesitated, then felt for the baby with all the power she possessed, bending her head down so that the ends of her chestnut hair trailed through the bath water.
Suddenly Faraday snatched her hand away and rocked back on her heels, covering her face with her hands. And then, despite her resolve of only a few minutes before, she burst into tears.
“Faraday?” Leagh cried in panic.
But Faraday slowly lowered her hands, and Leagh saw that she was crying in joy.
“Did you know,” Faraday said, “that you have a field of flowers growing within you?”
Deep in the hours after midnight Theod and Herme sat at the small table, a jug of rich ale between them. Several empty jugs lay on the floor.
“What’s happening?” Theod asked a fortieth time. His voice was hoarse, halfway between anger and desperation.
What was happening?
What?
A footstep, and both men jerked their heads up.
Zared.
He looked between the two of them, then his gaze settled on Theod.
“My friend,” he said in a voice very gentle. “I think this is something you should see.”
Theod stood up, stumbled, knocked the chair over, then gained enough control of himself to walk in a reasonably steady fashion over to Zared. Zared took his arm, and turned him for the door.
“May I?” Herme stood also, and Zared looked over his shoulder.
“Yes. If I thought it possible, I would ask the entire city to see this wonder…but I think it is a feat that perchance they will see soon enough anyway.”
Theod stood before Leagh’s bed, staring, not believing, not daring to believe. His shoulders shook, as if he was about to sob, but he gained control of himself with visible effort and stared towards Drago, standing in semi-shadow by the fireplace.
“Is she…can she…”
It was Leagh, rather than Drago, who answered. “I is,” she said, and smiled, holding out her hand for Theod. “And I am. Theod, will you not come sit beside me?”
She was wan, and patently exhausted, but it was Leagh who sat there propped against the cliff of snowy pillows, not some demented fiend, and although Theod allowed Zared to guide him to Leagh’s side, and sit him down, and even though Leagh took his hand, still Theod could not allow himself to believe…to believe…
Drago stepped forward into the light, although the leaping fire still sent shadows chasing across his face.
“Leagh has returned from death, Theod. And what I did for her, I can in some measure do for all those who screech and wail and crawl through the dirt.”
Theod opened his mouth, then his face crumpled, and he sobbed. Faraday sank down on the bed behind him, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, leaning his head against hers.
“There will be further miracles,” she whispered. “Never doubt that.”
There was a silence then, save for the crackling of the fire.
Leagh looked about the room. At her husband, whose haggard face revealed the extent of his worry for her. At Faraday and Theod sitting so close beside her on the bed, Theod weeping out his grief with silent tears that wracked his body. At Earl Herme who stood pale-faced just inside the door, but with a gleam in his eyes that Leagh had never seen there previously.
The girl who had come in with Drago earlier, the strange waif called Katie, sat by the fire, her face downcast, alternately scratching and then smoothing the feathers of the lizard.
Then Leagh turned her face and looked at Drago.
He was staring directly at her, his face showing the marks of exhaustion, as if he had recently been through some trial. Nevertheless, his eyes were soft, and he smiled a little at her regard. His legs were slightly apart, and his hands were folded before him, and as she watched he moved one of them slightly, as he were…
…as if he were tossing a flower into a field of flowers!
As Faraday had been overwhelmed by a vision of a field of flowers, so also had Leagh been visited by a vision which, though similar to Faraday’s, was also different.
She had been in a dark, dark forest, the trees completely stripped of leaves so that only dead limbs reached out. There was no sun, only a thick grey fog. The ground was thigh-deep mud, and this mud simmered about her legs; hot, horrid, sucking her down.
She was in a land called hopelessness.
Then a voice had called out. It had called a name, although she did not know she had a name. She looked up, and there, leaning comfortably in the fork of a nearby tree, was a man. A wonderful, glorious man, with a strong face and copper hair, and such dark violet eyes that they seemed to absorb all the grey fog into them. He was dressed only in a white linen hip wrap, as if he were about to leap into a bathhouse pool, but at his hip swung a golden sword, with an oddly shaped hilt that she could not immediately discern.
A fairy sword, and yet she sensed that it was sharp and deadly, and somehow hungry.
A movement caught her eye, and she looked away from the sword.
In his hand he had held a large, pure white lily.
“This,” he said, holding out the lily to her, “represents your life.”
And she had cried, for the lily was so beautiful, its scent was so extraordinary, that she knew it could not possibly represent her life.
“Please take me home,” she had whispered.
With a sweeping, graceful gesture, he’d thrown the lily out into the mud.
And suddenly there was no mud, and no fog, and no bare dead trees.
She was standing in a field of wildflowers, an infinite field under an infinite blue sky.
And she had felt his hand in hers. “Welcome home,” he said.
So now Leagh looked at Drago, and her eyes filled with tears, and his smile deepened very, very slightly, and she knew that he, too, was remembering the field of flowers.
“You are a magician,” she said quietly, and at her words, Faraday lifted her head and looked at Drago herself.
“And you?” Drago asked Leagh.
“I am different,” she answered and realised that, indeed, she was different.
She had now taken her place within the infinite field of flowers.
In that moment, Leagh had her first, true understanding of what Drago would do to Tencendor, and she gasped, and looked away, shaken beyond belief.
“The night beyond the next we will go to the Western Ranges,” Drago said into the very quiet room. “All of us in this room, save Herme who will stay to watch Carlon.”
Leagh looked at Faraday, and then both women looked at Katie.
“We will go to sow flowers,” the
girl said, and laughed.
57
Gorken Pass
Axis, Azhure and Caelum left Star Finger immediately after Caelum had destroyed the Hawkchild—and very nearly himself.
“There is no point sitting here and practising, or brooding,” Caelum had said, unusually assertive and almost confident. “The TimeKeepers quest, and we but waste away here in this mound of rock and ice.”
“Where?” Axis had said, accepting Caelum’s leadership. “Grail Lake,” Caelum replied, and had picked up the Enchanted Song Book and walked from the chamber.
It felt strange…no, worse than “strange”, that she should set out on such a dangerous and desperate mission with nothing more to fight with than an ordinary bow. She had asked Caelum if they could detour via Sigholt to collect the Wolven, but he had shaken his head and said that it would be useless in the battle before them. But it was not only the lack of the Wolven that made Azhure feel so naked. As she had lost the Wolven, so also had the Alaunt gone. Azhure kept looking over her shoulder, but they were never there.
Where were they? Where? They’d disappeared in the hour or so after Drago had gone.
Had they gone with him?
Azhure shook her head, struggling to reconcile within herself the years of ingrained distrust she had for Drago, and that instant of overwhelming love she’d felt from him and for him when he’d looked into her eyes in that dank basement.
Something was going on…something was changing—but what?
Who was Drago?
Azhure gnawed at the thought as she might worry at a troublesome tooth.
Had she ever hated him, even after he’d proved so foul as to ally himself with Gorgrael against Caelum? If she had hated him, and thought him completely beyond redemption, then surely she would have killed him atop Sigholt, rather than just reversing his blood order. Wouldn’t she?
What had stopped her doing that? Hope, or maternal blindness?
Or, some other guiding hand?
Caelum had loathed Drago since their babyhood, and had feared him even more than he’d hated him. Yet now Caelum and Drago seemed to have reconciled. Why? How?
Axis had told her of Caelum’s insistence that should he die, then the Enchanted Song Book must go to Drago.
“DragonStar,” Azhure whispered into the cold northerly that whipped her words away over the mountains. “Could you still be there?”
Is that why the Alaunt had gone to him?
Then a thought so devastating hit Azhure that she stopped dead in her tracks, staring unseeing at Axis and Caelum striding away before her.
Like Caelum, Drago had also been conceived wrapped in the magic of Beltide night. The infant DragonStar, so powerful, so amazingly powerful, had always claimed to be StarSon. No-one had believed him. No-one, because they were always blinded by the fact Caelum had been born first. Because Caelum had been so loved.
The Maze Gate had named the Crusader as the StarSon a year after Caelum’s birth. They had thought it was because it was then sure that Caelum was the Crusader, and it was then that Axis named him StarSon. But was it, in fact, because DragonStar had just been born?
“Stars, Caelum,” she murmured, her eyes thick with tears. “Is that why you now work in tandem with Drago? Why you insist that the book go to Drago?”
Was it…was it because Caelum expected to die? What was the understanding between Caelum and Drago?
“Mother?” Caelum had walked back to her, and now stood with an expression of such complete love on his own face that Azhure almost broke down completely.
No! No! Not Caelum! No! Not him!
He lifted a hand and gently wiped a tear from her cheek. “Mother, whatever I do now, I do with such joy in my soul, and such love for you and my father, and this land which we all strive for, that you do not need to cry. Please.”
Azhure lowered her head. When she finally raised it again, her eyes were bright with naked pain…and acceptance.
She looked past Caelum to where Axis waited impatiently for them. “Does…does he realise?”
“No.”
“Dear Stars above, Caelum, I cannot tell him!”
Caelum stepped forward and enveloped Azhure in a tight hug. “Azhure,” he muttered, “you and Axis have another son worth as much love as you expend on this one. Tell him that, if nothing else.”
“Caelum?” Axis called. “Azhure? What is it?”
“How can I ever tell him that the son he loves so much is going to—”
Caelum stopped her mouth with a hand. “Axis will need to acknowledge Drago one day, Azhure, he must!”
“But—”
“I have welcomed him into the House of the Stars, but Axis and you must also do the same, and Axis must also acknowledge him as—”
“I know, I know.”
She pulled out of Caelum’s embrace. “No-one will ever take your place in my heart,” she said. “No-one.”
And she pushed past him and walked down the narrow trail towards Axis.
Late that afternoon, as dusk approached, they camped in one of the final gullies of the western Icescarp Alps. In the morning they would enter Gorken Pass.
“Gorken Pass,” Axis said softly as they sat within a small cave, its mouth blocked by a fire. “At Gorken Pass I had thought to have freed Tencendor once and for all.”
No-one said anything to that, but they all remembered the strange battle that had been fought in the pass. The tens of thousands of Gorgrael’s Ice Worms and Skraelings, the Gryphon lurking among the rocks, and all defeated by Azhure and the trees of the great forests to the east.
It had brought a pause, nothing else.
Axis sighed, and stirred the fire. “It will be a long journey south, Caelum. How can we reach Carlon in time?”
“If we merely walk south, then we never will,” Caelum said. “So we will continue west towards Seal Bay. Surely there must still be a sealer or two waiting out the winter there. We can voyage south on the Andeis in one of their whalers. They are well equipped to withstand the fiercest storms.”
Axis shared a glance with Azhure, and frowned slightly when she dropped her eyes from his.
“The sealers rarely linger on the coast at this time of year, Caelum,” he said, looking back to his son. “They see out the winter on Straum Island and do not come back until late spring.”
“Then we can light a beacon fire,” Caelum said, unperturbed by his father’s pessimism. “One or two will surely sail across the bay to sate their curiosity.”
“Surely it would be best to turn south and seize what horses we can find running loose in Ichtar—”
“No,” Caelum said. “We will go to Seal Bay.”
And with that he rolled himself up in his blanket and said no more.
Axis looked again at Azhure. She was curiously silent, and avoided his eyes. He shifted around the fire towards her, and smoothed the glossy black hair away from the face he loved so much.
“What have I said to annoy you?”
She shook her head slightly. “Nothing.”
Axis’ mouth quirked. “You forget how well I know you. Something is bothering you…frightening you.”
She finally lifted her dark blue eyes and regarded him directly. “And nothing is bothering you?”
He hesitated. “Azhure, I had never thought to utter this, but I fear I might be growing too old for adventure. I hope,” his eyes flickered across the fire to where Caelum lay rolled up in shadow, “I hope my son can fully take his place as the hope of this land.”
“I am sure our son will do so,” Azhure said, and suddenly hope suffused her, leaving her wide-eyed. Was that all it took, she thought? Belief in him? Was that all it took?
“Azhure?” Axis murmured.
She smiled. “Nothing. For now. No more words. Not now.”
He smiled, moving his arm to encircle her shoulders, and he lowered his face to hers. There were some things Axis did not think he would ever grow too old for.
In the morning, they
stepped down into Gorken Pass and met what, perhaps, Caelum had all along suspected they might.
Urbeth sat in the snow, hind legs splayed before her for balance, leaning back on one forepaw and cleaning the tufts of fur between the black pads of the other.
Her black eyes flickered at them as they stopped at the sight of her, then she waved them over. Behind her was a great barrel of what appeared to be fresh fish.
“It has been a long time, Axis, lost God of Song, and Azhure, lost Goddess of the Moon.”
She dipped her head at Caelum, but did not speak to him.
“And a fair morning to you, Urbeth, strange bear of the north,” Axis said, a hard edge to his voice. “Have the TimeKeeper Demons driven you out of your den in the ice-pack?”
“My cubs have all grown and now seek their own way in the world,” Urbeth said. “I have nothing to interest me in the ice any more.”
Azhure glanced up the Gorken Pass. “How do the Ravensbund fare, Urbeth? Have you seen them?”
Urbeth heaved a melodramatic sigh and rolled her eyes. “When the Demons struck I had every expectation they would appear at the edge of the ice-pack once more,” she said, referring to the time when Gorgrael’s Skraelings had driven the Ravensbundmen onto the ice where Urbeth had been forced to protect them by changing them into trees. “But for once they found their own methods of dealing with the bad hours,” she continued. “They hide in their holes, and chafe at the fact they can no longer ride the ice-pack in search of seal.”
“Ah,” Azhure said. “The holes.” The Ravensbund chief, Ho’Demi, had once shown her and Axis the holes: gigantic subsidences in the earth that sheltered warm springs, game and shelter.
“What do you here, Urbeth?” Caelum finally asked.
“Well,” Urbeth said slowly, and stood up, shaking herself so rigorously the other three had to stand back. “It came to my attention that your good self, as your parents, seemed to be intent on getting to Carlon. And yet, pitiful creatures that you be without your powers, I thought to myself, how do they expect to manage it?”