Again came that brief exchange of glances, signs, a breathed word or two, but Atan sensed that some sort of agreement had been made.
The youngest morvende there, a teenage girl with a merry smile, said, “Numbered among your ancestors were those we trusted with the access signs, giving them freedom to come and go among us. I will show you those signs now, if you will have them.”
Atan flushed. “I know what that means. And I thank you.” Then she thought of what the responsibility meant, and her joy spun away, leaving sick fear. “Perhaps you should wait. I mean, I must go out again, and I know the enemy is waiting. But there is something I must do.” Her voice trembled. She stilled it with an effort. “If I succeed. Perhaps then.”
Again she noted the stirrings, the sense of signals, but the faces turned to her were kind and understanding, and though Grandfather smiled, there sadness in it. “We honor you for your concern on our behalf. Be at peace. The signs might come to your aid. As for being forced to reveal what we teach you, remember this, for we do, always. The Great Betrayer, who reigns now in the Garden of the Twelve—he was once one of us.”
Hinder’s mother held out her hand. “We shall begin here, with this region...”
o0o
“I think I can hear the morvende talking to Atan,” Lilah exclaimed. “Are they all close by?”
Hinder was dancing around the cave, a hopping, spinning dance that looked like fun, but he performed it with his eyes shut, as though he heard music that Lilah could not.
When she spoke, he stopped. “Well, I hate to keep saying what has to sound silly, but close and far don’t mean much here.” He hesitated, then shook his head, hard enough to send his silky white hair flying. “What I mean is, they are kind of close, yes, but your hearing is happening because you’re thinking about them, not because they’re in a cavern nearby.”
Lilah shut her eyes and thought about Atan. “Flowers... rocks. Atan is talking about flowers and rocks, or else I’m just dreaming. Well, I feel like I’m in a dream—that if I lie down, I’ll sleep for a year!” She threw her arms wide.
Hinder looked at her flushed face and recognized how close he’d come to saying what he must not say. The exhilaration of the jewel cave was turning into that dreamy state that made one want to talk recklessly. “It’s time to go.” He pointed. “Now comes another thing you will like, the warm pools. And rocks you can dive off!”
Lilah clapped her hands. “Let’s run!” She welcomed the idea of a cool dash downward with a pool at the end, after the boiling toil of the upward climb.
They began a race, laughing all the way.
EIGHT
Merewen wandered along a narrow rock bridgeway between two old tunnels, peering down into the immense cavern and admiring the subtle ways the glowglobes at various levels gave light. Up, down, and side to side had never been so interesting. The floor was not even, the walls not straight. She had never thought about it before, but the people who lived on the surface seemed to value symmetry. Here, in the caves underground and in the mountains, there was no such thing, and as a result, no view in any direction was ever boring.
With sorrow she remembered Savar’s little house, and though it had been cozy when a fierce blizzard blew, the rest of the time she’d stayed outside as much as possible. I don’t like being closed in, she thought. Is this my human side or my Loi side?
In dreams she could sometimes hear the Loi. She knew they were there but a kind of curtain divided her from hearing and seeing them in waking life. No, it was more like fog or smoke. She knew there was something she ought to be doing to reach them, for they tried and tried to reach her through her dreams, but dream images could not be trusted, and when she was awake, nothing worked.
It did not disturb her, for she knew she had so very much to learn. More troubling were the occasions when she accidentally slipped inside someone else’s dream. She hadn’t discussed that with anyone, not even Atan, who might feel obliged to tell the people whose dreams Merewen accidentally visited. She loved Atan, who ‘felt’ like clean-running stream water, whose inside—dreams, even—was just the same as her outside. But Atan made herself do what she saw as her duty, including telling people things. Merewen was not certain that some of the things she herself was learning ought to be told.
Down here in the morvende part of the world, she always knew where she was—just as she knew, somehow, that four days had passed since Hinder brought them inside in order to escape the enemy who had closed round them. Was that the Loi side or the human? She couldn’t figure that out either. She had observed that the morvende were not telling the Shendoral children that some of the pools and lakes were full of live beings, and that the water in one pool could transfer you to water in other places. Distance did not mean anything to those water beings, any more than did physical form.
This, like being in dreams, felt like ‘privacy.’ Merewen had learned about privacy when she and Atan first met the Shendoral group. Some days, the boys wanted to swim in the stream without their clothes on, and on those days, the girls went elsewhere. It was the same when the girls wanted to swim. Atan had told her that was privacy of person. Merewen could understand that concept; your inside and your outside had a boundary between. Clothing was a boundary between your physical self and the world. The boundary around dreams and emotions was harder to define.
She heard voices and glanced below. Ah! Coming down one of the steeper trails were two adult morvende, leading Irza, her sister, Julian, and a couple of the other ones who thought a lot about ancestors and titles.
Irza wanted to find the way out. Merewen had heard her say so to her sister when everyone woke up. But Irza seemed to think they were all still under the hill where they’d been found. No one appeared to realize that the bath pool had transferred them a very great distance and they were deep in the mountains. Irza might go up and up and up, but it would take days to make her way to the surface.
Merewen listened. The morvende were not telling her that now, either. “You might get lost,” one man was saying. How beautiful their voices were! “We do not wish harm to come to you. It is so easy to lose oneself here, for there is no sense of north and south, not the way you sunsiders orient yourselves on the surface.”
“Oh.” Irza laughed. “I didn’t think! I just explored, because it’s so very fascinating. If you could guide us to an intersection with the surface, just so we could orient ourselves, we would be less of a bother...”
There she went again. So often, Irza’s inside intent was directly opposite her outside intent. It made Merewen dizzy, as if her eyes saw double. It hurt. But to say out loud that she saw this contrast would be a trespass against privacy. Merewen understood that much.
The voices faded, and Merewen sighed. What ought she to do now?
She closed her eyes—and yes, there was Atan. Strange! She had only to close her eyes and think, and she knew where people were. She could also point to Shendoral, which lay that way—and to Eidervaen, where the magic awaited them inside its boundaries...
Merewen popped her eyes open. “I’ve never seen that before,” she whispered.
Atan had to know. That much was certain.
She raced back over the narrow stone arch and into the tunnel, then down, down to the water, and in. Beings crowded all around her, full of images and emotions too quick to pick out. They were very much like colored stars—like the gems grown in those caves where people could go to be in dreamtime, and hear the beings and be heard by them. Selenseh redian, that was the human name for those jewel caves. Sel-enseh red-yan, the old Sartoran pronunciation. Very, very, very old! Merewen knew somehow that those jewel caves had been made by these beings, as a kind of guide for humans to come and communicate—
Merewen climbed out of the water and dashed between the stones with the magic that made you dry. She found Atan alone on one of the ledges with pillows, eating some of the cakes that tasted so good.
“Merewen!” Atan smiled a welcome, and Merewen hu
gged herself, delighting in how the smile came with light from inside Atan’s spirit. “Hungry?”
Merewen discovered that she was.
“I don’t know how they get their food,” Atan said. “I was just thinking about it. They don’t have any sun to grow things, and though I know there are ways to make food by magic, that expends a tremendous amount of magic. Just think of it! You have to hold it all in your mind and do every step through spells, from seed-gathering to growing, and water and sun, and harvest and milling. Much easier to get it the regular way!”
Merewen suspected that the ways distances could be circumvented had to do with food distribution—ah. When she closed her eyes, inside was an image of the plateaus on Sky Island, where surface-living mountain morvende grew things. And there were others who traded. But she only smiled and bit into the rice-and-nut cake, and then said, “Is it good, the talking?”
“It’s strange,” Atan said, her forehead puckered. “There is so little time, and though they’ve been very nice, I could not but be aware that they were testing me with every single question. Every word. Yet I could feel how they want to trust me—” She paused, thinking, Just as I want to trust Irza.
Merewen didn’t hear the thought, but she didn’t need to. Atan’s expression was the same one she often wore when Irza talked.
Atan finished her cake, got to her feet, and dusted off her tunic. “I know they won’t mind if I test something with you also, if you don’t mind shutting your eyes at the end.”
Merewen nodded, enjoying the glee that Atan tried so hard to hide. She would also have her chance to discuss her discovery with Atan, and not have to watch for those who might want to listen.
They ran up one of the narrow tunnels, noting the transition from stone to clay-covered dirt that marked off access-ways. The clay in the old access-ways had slowly dried to a soft gray, but the newer ones were still brownish. It took centuries for the color to alter, Atan had been told.
Centuries. And immeasurable distances. And another language. She had always wanted to see where the morvende lived, but her imagination had fallen far short of reality.
She was both flattered and afraid, because they had chosen to show her not just a local access, but how to read the signs marking any access on the world—and how to activate the magic protections.
She did that when they reached the end. Atan gave Merewen an anxious glance, and Merewen obligingly shut her eyes—though if she reached with her inside self, she could see the stylized carving that Atan traced so carefully with her fingers.
Always a narrow crack existed, masked by so limited an illusion that anyone trying to sense magic would have to find the spot and touch it before discovering it, and they were always behind great stones. Then one touched the carving and said the words... and the boundary vanished.
She and Merewen stood very still, their skin roughing as cold air flowed from the outside world. There were no sounds and no sense of Norsundrians present.
Atan made the last passes and said the words that enabled them to slip out. They found themselves on a barren hillside. Above, snow clouds covered the pale winter sky. Golden shafts slanted down, and Atan blinked in pleasure.
She turned back, and panic fluttered inside her. She couldn’t see the access! But she knew the stone. So she knelt, ran her fingers over it, and was reassured when she felt the subtle indentations of the access, right where it should be. “We did it.”
“Eidervaen lies that way,” Merewen said, pointing. “I found it, inside.” She smacked her forehead. “And I know where it is you need to go.”
Atan stared at her in amazement. “You do?”
Merewen closed her eyes. “There’s magic there, needs to be free. Other magic is already free. I can feel it all around. Some of it is dangerous. Something happened there, while we were below.”
“What?”
Merewen sighed. “All I can feel is magic. Like lightning, and not.”
“And naught. And naught!” Atan said, and laughed. “Ah, Merewen, we will have to make our try soon.” Fear and delight, and excitement and dread, swooped inside her, making her giddy. “But I must make myself ready. Thinkest thou we shall one day be the subject of great ballads?”
She had dropped into the old-fashioned Sartoran that some of the morvende had spoken to them. Its quaintness was instantly familiar to Merewen, who had been read to from very old texts by Savar.
“Mayhap,” Merewen said, delighted to play with the language she’d heard every day as a small girl, and never since. “I should like me a great ballad with all our names enflowered amid heroic deeds.”
“Better that than to be mere examples of woe and sorrow.” Atan wrinkled her nose. “Oh, now let me see. I shall have Sana write it but insist she shall cast it in most proper pompous language, full of praises—”
“Old-word praises,” Merewen said happily as they neared the top of the hill. “I myself would be yclept fair and—”
“Fell! Nay, that would be our enemy, sore afraid—”
“Wouldst thou,” began Merewen. “Full of dole—”
“Hark! Believeth-me there is yonder a—”
“Flapdoodle,” Merewen supplied, remembering one of Rip’s favorite insults.
She gripped her elbows, laughing inside—too delighted with their game to note much beyond the fact that they’d discovered another person, but since the tall—boy? young man? sitting on a rock at the bottom of the ravine did not raise any sense of alarm in her, her interest was fleeting, and she scrambled through memory, trying to find more words.
Atan had stopped. Her first instinct was danger—she felt horribly exposed, being on the outside again. But she’d come to rely on Merewen’s instincts, and Merewen was just smiling at the fellow with no indication of worry or distrust. “Let us step yonder and inquire of him his wherefores and forebyes!” She wondered if she had just encountered her very first Sartoran citizen, outside of the Shendoral orphans.
As she and Merewen picked their way down, the fellow stood up—and up and up. He was the tallest boy Atan had ever met, and she was tall for a girl her age.
He was also older. Not grown, for his hands were larger yet, his wrists bony, and there was no hint of beard on his face; she knew that that started when young men crossed the puberty threshold, after they were full-grown. Though this one must be near, for he was quite tall indeed and broad through chest and shoulder.
He had a long face with strong bones, deep-set dark eyes, an abundance of badly cut waving dark hair, and a generous mouth, an interesting face.
He said, “I’m looking for the Landis princess.”
“Why, that is I,” Atan exclaimed. She was so surprised that at first she did not register the muted clack and clatter that indicated they were not alone in these hills.
The boy turned his head, his hand out, and then he looked back, his mouth grim. “They did find my trail again. I’m afraid I brought danger on you.”
Horse hooves! Pursuit?
Atan looked helplessly at Merewen, who waved her hands and keened, “Take him in! Take him in!”
Atan relied on Merewen’s instincts. “There’s a morvende tunnel near here.” Atan looked around fearfully. “But we daren’t use it if they can see us.”
For answer, the fellow ran a few steps down the little ravine, cupped his hands, and shouted something in another language.
Then he returned, bent to pick up his pack—and they heard horse hooves clattering on the other side of the hill.
“Fast, fast,” Atan whispered as they scrambled back up the trail. They reached the rock, but how to protect the access? She could not betray the morvende—despite the danger!
Merewen said, drawing the fellow’s attention away, “Who are you?”
“Rel,” he said, and he obligingly kept his gaze averted.
With shaking hands Atan did the magic, the tunnel opened, they slid in, and she made the sign to close the place behind them.
They stood in the narro
w tunnel, Rel stooping his head.
“You’re here to help,” Merewen observed, looking up into his face.
“Well, yes,” Rel said, and gave her a brief grin, barely discernible in the weak light reflected from down the tunnel. “But I hope you don’t want me taking on Kessler Sonscarna and Dejain alone.”
“Dejain?” Atan asked. “There was one called Zydes, but I don’t remember mention of a Dejain.”
“Magician. Considerable ability. Not good, finding her here.”
Atan understood then that Rel had been making a joke about taking on the enemy alone. He didn’t laugh, and his deep voice hadn’t changed, but there was a suspicious narrowing of the eyes, and the realization was so unexpected that she did laugh.
It was a merry sound, free and unaffected. Rel was amazed that a daughter of the legendary Landises, rulers of the world’s oldest kingdom and emblems of what history, song, and story claimed to be the most sophisticated court in the world, should be so ordinary of countenance—except for those distinctively shaped eyes, which had stared out of so many old portraits and histories—dressed in an old-fashioned, threadbare riding tunic and trousers. No, not ordinary. That word did not encompass that sense of fun, the quick alertness, the concern for others, or the mannerisms natural and free, not in the least court-trained.
The little one asked him questions, gazing at him with an unblinking blue stare. He answered very much at random, trying to marshal his thoughts.
Why could he not think? Perhaps it was hunger and thirst, or the residue of whatever spell had held him in Eidervaen until he’d gotten too weak to move, and then there had been the discovery of Kessler and Dejain—
“You’ve never heard of Eidervaen?” the little one asked.
“The capital,” Atan said. “We will be going there soon, to destroy Norsunder’s spells if we can.” She glanced back, tense and concerned. “How did you come to be here?”