“Do not drink,” commanded a somber voice in my mind.
I spat out the salty water and turned to see the white dog Rasial, who had once been called Smoke. Her white coat glowed in a dappling of light falling through bare branches interlaced overhead, but even as I watched, the sunlight dimmed, mist rose and coiled about the trees, and Rasial changed. Her coat darkened and roughened until she became dear shaggy Sharna, who had died so many years before, saving my life from Ariel’s maddened wolves at Obernewtyn. Almost before I registered his identity, Sharna’s fur and muzzle shortened, his color deepened, and his ears sharpened until I recognized Jik’s companion, the Herder-bred Darga, whose coming was to mark the beginning of the final phase of my quest as the Seeker.
“Where are you?” I asked, but he only blinked his dark eyes at me.
“Elspeth?”
I turned to find Matthew standing in the thickening mist. His gaze swept over me, partly in wonder and partly in disbelief. “This dinna feel like any dream,” he muttered.
My heart leapt as I understood that he was right. This was not a dream I was experiencing. “I think it is real,” I sent. “I am farseeking you.”
Matthew looked elated, stunned, then confused. “But how can your mind reach me when I am so far away an’ over the sea?”
“I am dreaming, but I think I have drifted onto the dreamtrails. Matthew, listen to me. I, and others at Obernewtyn, have true-dreamed of you, as you have of us. I know where you are and what you are trying to do. I know that Dragon is the Red Queen’s missing daughter, and we will bring her to you as soon as it is possible.”
“Dragon is in a coma,” Matthew said sorrowfully.
“No! She has wakened, though as yet she has no memory of her life before or after the ruins. She has no memory of me or … or you.”
“Perhaps that is best,” he said, and there was pain in his eyes before he vanished.
“Elspeth?”
I turned again in hope, but it was not Matthew this time. It was Rushton, smiling at me from the center of a hot spring veiled in thick white steam. Snow lay deep on the ground, and my boots crunched through it as I walked to the rim of the pool. This is a memory dream, I realized. I could have wrenched myself out of it, but how my heart yearned for him as he floated back in the water and bade me join him. For this was a memory of the last time we had been alone together before Rushton had been taken captive by the Herders. I had ridden from a meeting at the Teknoguild caves to meet him at the spring in the foothills of the highest mountains, and we had swum together. I allowed myself to merge with my dream self to more fully experience the memory. Stripping off my clothes, I entered the water, and Rushton’s arms closed possessively about me. But when he kissed me, I did as I had always done when we were so close, drawing back from final surrender, shutting up the core of myself, for how could I surrender my body without surrendering my mind? To lay that bare would mean opening up all that I was, to reveal the quest that lay at the heart of me like a black pearl that none must ever see.
There was hurt in his eyes at my withdrawal, but no reproach. And I saw in the memory, as I had not seen in the moment, that Rushton encompassed my resistance with a grace that I had never noticed, because I had been too busy protecting my secrets. He released me and drew away from me so the misty steam veiled him. Then there was only the mist, caressing my cheeks.
“Rushton!” I croaked.
Tears blurred my eyes, and I knew with sudden, utter clarity that I had been a fool to refuse him then and all the other times. Was not the song of love like the song of the sea? One must surrender to it to understand it. What would it have mattered if I held my deepest mind apart and allowed him to make love to me? I could have taken comfort from his body, giving him the comfort of mine. What did it matter if that black pearl was kept in a hidden chamber? And the cruel final thought came to me that if I had loved him, the memory of that loving might have given him the strength to endure when the Herder priests delved so cruelly inside him.
I wept, and as the water about me grew cold, I drifted from memory of dream to reality.
I was lying on my side with rain falling on my face.
Rain!
Thirst roared to life, and I rolled onto my back and opened my mouth to drink.
Upon quenching my thirst, I realized that I was not in the water. I was lying on the sand some way above the waterline, my clothes stiff with dried salt, though the rain was now softening them. I gave a choking laugh as I understood that this was what the wavesong had been trying to tell me: land was ahead, a great dark bulk where no sea creature could venture. A vast and deadly mystery for one who could not walk on dry land and live.
I must be on the west coast! I had made it! I looked around, and through the veils of falling rain, I saw, the hazy dark outline of a city. It was not more than an hour’s walk away, but I could not tell which city it was, certainly not Murmroth. I wanted to walk there at once. I needed to find out if the Black Ship had been there.
But when I tried to move, I was devastated to discover that I was so weak, I could not even sit up. Lying there, I remembered Atthis telling me that I must rise so my body could heal itself. I had been badly injured, she had said, which was why I felt so monstrously weak. My body had drained itself of strength to heal me.
Gritting my teeth, I gathered all of my will and sat up. My head swam with the effort, and I knew that I would not be walking anywhere, at least for a few days. Fortunately, it was not cold, and the rain had enabled me to drink. I was not hungry, but I soon would be, and I would need food to regain my strength.
And gain my strength I would. I thought fiercely. For I had a plague to stop. And when I had done that, I would return to Obernewtyn and I would find Rushton and I would say to him everything I had been too cowardly to say. I would lay myself bare to him in all ways, and perhaps that would be enough to heal the breach between us.
“I am coming, my love,” I thought, and hurled the thought forward with all the will that remained in me.
for Mallory,
who found me on a table
and read me on a plane,
and for Daywatcher Whitney
and Moonwatcher Nick,
who were my guides on this
unexpected and unexpectedly
enchanting quest
I OPENED MY eyes to find a young gull perched on my chest, peering at me with a speculative black eye. When I moved, it gave a startled squawk and flapped away. It stopped atop a rock and watched me.
“Give up, for I am too big for you to swallow, little brother,” I croaked, and struggled to sit up. The night’s storm might have been a dream, for there was not a cloud in the dazzling blue sky that arched overhead. The sun was hot enough to have dried the exposed part of my hair and clothes. I had drunk as much of the brief flurry of rain as I could, but I was thirsty.
Indeed I had woken thirsty for the last few days, and it was doubtless thirst that had woken me.
Or maybe the gull had pricked me with its claws. I looked around and found it was still watching me like a small baleful sentinel. But then my gaze went past it, for beyond it in the distance, only half visible through a dense golden haze of sunlit sea spray lay the city that had occupied most of my thoughts since I had awakened the first time on the sand. While I had rested in order to give my body time to heal, I had come to feel certain that the city was Morganna, but it was impossible to be sure at this distance. I could see that it was walled, but I could not tell if it was a complete wall or merely overlapping sections of wall.
I had asked the ship fish Ari-noor to bring me to Murmroth, at the other end of the west coast from Morganna, but the currents and shoals in the strait were such that any ship wanting to travel to Murmroth had to begin its journey on the coast just past the mouth of the Suggredoon, so it could very well be that I had lost hold of the ship fish not far from Morganna.
The thought of ships had preoccupied my mind the last few days: somewhere on the sea saile
d the Black Ship with its deadly cargo of plague that the Herder leader intended to unleash upon the west coast. I had come to the west coast with the sole desire of finding the plague carrier before his sickness became contagious, but I had no idea where he would be left ashore. In a city, certainly, and in my estimation a large city, but which one I had been unable to discover.
With luck, it would be Morganna, but it might as easily be Aborium or even Murmroth. For this reason, my plan had been to call at every city and ask if the Black Ship had recently put in anchor there. But I had not reckoned on losing contact with the ship fish that had borne me across the treacherous strait or on smashing my head on a rock in a shoal and nearly drowning. Indeed it was only the aid of the mystic Agyllian birds, who had come to me on the dreamtrails, that had enabled me to reach the west coast alive. The Elder of the Agyllians had warned me that I must rest so the curative capacity the birds had taught my body could heal me swiftly. And I had obeyed.
Other than my apprehension about finding the plague carrier in time, it had been far from unpleasant to sit on the sloping white sand and gaze out to sea. Spending such long periods of time in the water with the two ship fish and hearing the wavesong, or feeling it, for it seemed as much to be felt as to be heard, had given me a deeper appreciation of it. The wavesong had flooded me with appreciation for those I loved, for those who had come to my aid.
The thought of love brought to my mind an image of Rushton, but it was too painful to let my thoughts dwell on the Master of Obernewtyn, given our estrangement. I thought instead of my two protectors, Gahltha and Maruman. I missed them terribly, though I knew they were aware that I was safe because Atthis had sought assistance from their spirits in order to save me.
I turned my head to look out to sea. Despite the day’s clarity, I could not see even a shadowy outline of Herder Isle. Two Islands, I reminded myself, for although the Herders had long ago destroyed the isthmus once connecting the two islands, the link had been renewed when the high wall surrounding the Faction Compound had fallen into the channel, creating a stone path from one to the other.
The dangerous, terrifying period I had spent inside the Herder Compound, first at the mercy of the Herder priests and then through the fall of the Faction on Herder Isle, seemed as if it had happened ages ago, rather than only a few days earlier. There had been much still to be done to secure victory when I had left for the west coast. I wondered for the hundredth time what was happening there and whether the Norselanders, the shadows, and the renegade novices had managed at last to overcome the ruthless captain of the Hedra force and his remaining warriors. I wondered if the Stormdancer had been repaired yet. I had meant to travel across the strait in the ship, but it had been damaged when the Herders tried to invade the Land, and the shipmaster, Helgar, had told me it would take at least a sevenday to make the ship seaworthy. I had felt such despair hearing his words, knowing it would be too late then to cross the strait and find the plague carrier in time to stop him from infecting anyone.
Only later that night had I thought of calling to the ship fish, Ari-noor, who had rescued me already. She had not come, but her pod-sister, Ari-roth, did.
Against all odds, I had reached the west coast. I reckoned that since the Black Ship had to travel from Norseland, having first provisioned itself and made whatever repairs it needed after its last trip, before weaving through various shoals and currents to reach the west coast, the Black Ship was only just now likely to be setting its plague carrier ashore. And it would take some days for the plague to become effective. So I had a few days in which to act.
The thought that the ship might even now be anchoring on the west coast made me uneasy. I was glad that I had left instructions for the Stormdancer to travel straight to Sutrium so the rebels could be alerted as to what had happened on Herder Isle and to warn them that no one must cross the Suggredoon, in case I failed.
I had ensured that the plague would be contained if I failed. But it sickened me to think of how many would die on the west coast.
“All,” had said the One, the supreme leader of the Herder Faction. “All will die.”
The memory of these words was enough to thwart my attempt to relax. I sat up and massaged the stiffness from my muscles while looking out over the shimmering waves. I thought of the true dream I had experienced when I had almost died, of Cassy Duprey and Hannah Seraphim’s first meeting.
It had been fascinating to see Rushton’s Beforetime ancestor Hannah Seraphim, for my Beforetime visions of the past had always centered on Cassy Duprey, a Beforetime sculptress whose father had been director of the Govamen program working on the computermachines that had caused the Great White holocaust that had destroyed their age. I had known that Cassy and Hannah Seraphim had met, but I had not previously seen them together.
I pictured Hannah’s pleasant face with its striking brown eyes and expressive smile and felt suddenly that Jacob Obernewtyn had loved her, and this was at least partly why he built Obernewtyn and funded her research into the Beforetime Misfits’ Talents, called paranormal abilities by the Beforetimers. I had hoped to dream of Hannah again as I lay hour after hour, drowsing rather than waking or sleeping, but past dreams were not something I could control.
I had mulled over the dream endlessly, though.
The meeting between Hannah and Cassy had obviously taken place before the young woman had invaded her mother’s mind to prove that she possessed paranormal abilities. The vision held no trace of the grief I had witnessed in Cassy, and I guessed from this that Cassy’s Tiban lover had not yet died when she had met Hannah.
The gull’s caw startled me from my reverie, and I looked up to see it flap into the air, just escaping the sharp claws of the plains cat that had been stalking it. I sent a greeting to the cat, and she came gliding over.
“Red meat would strengthen ElspethInnle,” said the tiny black cat with its enormous tufted ears and wild eyes. “Better than ubu.” She dropped next to me several of the prickly cactus fruits that she and her mate had been bringing me since I first beastspoke them for help. She sat down to clean herself.
“My thanks, Mitya,” I told her, feeling my heart seize with longing for Maruman, who had cleaned his ears in exactly the same fastidious way.
The plains cat ceased her ablutions to watch me as I rose carefully to my feet, her nose twitching daintily. I walked back and forth, testing my strength. For two days I had been practicing standing and walking, but this was the first time since I had awakened on the beach that I felt neither pain nor dizziness, and the double vision I had suffered since waking had finally abated. My heart quickened at the realization that I was finally well enough to begin my quest. Despite my fears about the plague, I thought eagerly of reaching the city that had been so tantalizingly out of reach, because it meant food and water. My stomach rumbled loudly.
“ElspethInnle should eat some bloody meat,” said Mitya again.
I said nothing, for I had already made vain attempts to explain to the single-minded little plains cat that I did not eat the flesh of anything that lived, for I could live well enough on fruits and vegetables and grains. She and her mate had not believed me, and they had brought me several tiny dead furry plains mice. I had finally convinced them to eat their kill. They had departed with it and returned an hour later with some of the prickly ubu. The cactus fruits had ensured my survival, but they had little taste and scant nourishment; even as I ate those Mitya had brought with her, I thought longingly of a hot bowl of vegetable stew with fresh baked bread and a bowl of rich honeyed milk. It made me salivate like a starved dog.
“I will go to the city now,” I beastspoke the plains cat when I had finished my brief meal.
“Many are funaga-li that dwell there,” said Mitya disdainfully.
“Nevertheless, I must go there to find my friend,” I told her. “Where is Guldi? I wanted to thank both of you for helping me.”
“Guldi prepares a den, for soon I will have kits,” Mitya sent. She gave me
a look of glimmering pride, and I told her they were certain to be as beautiful and clever as their parents.
“Of course,” she said complacently.
I cast one last glance around me, needlessly, for I carried nothing at all with me; then I bid the little cat farewell again.
I set off toward the city, glad that I was able to walk along the sand, for I was barefoot, having left my shoes from Cinda on the shore at Hevon Bay on Herder Isle. It angered me that I had not had sense enough to tie them to my waist before I entered the water. Aside from needing them to walk, there was a real danger that, barefoot and utterly bedraggled as I was, I would be judged a beggar and refused entry to the city. Of course, I could coerce my way out of any trouble, but given that I was still weak from my ordeal, it would be better to do nothing that would require exertion beyond walking. Certainly not before I managed to find some food.
It would be best to slip into the city along the shoreline, thereby avoiding the guarded entrances, but it would depend upon where the tide was when I arrived.
Driftwood lay scattered along the beach, and I began to gather it, reasoning that if I had to go through a gate, I could claim to be bringing wood into the city to sell. Once inside the walls, I would simply leave the wood somewhere and coerce shoes and some respectable clothes from a storekeeper. I needed to smarten my appearance if I did not want anyone to question my possession of a horse when I tried to leave. I would have to steal the horse, of course.
But first I would find food and water, and then I would go to the waterfront and find out whether the Black Ship had anchored there recently.
By the time I was close enough to see that the town was fully walled, I had a good-sized armful of wood. This was fortunate, since the tide was high enough to make it impossible to enter at the shore. The walk had fatigued me, but it had not left me shaking and sickly as even a short walk had done two days past. My body seemed to have finished healing itself, and I was sure that once I had some proper food and water, I would be completely renewed.