Obernewtyn, I thought, incredulous. It was Obernewtyn exactly as I had beheld it the very first time. The road ran around in a loop, circling the now familiar fountain and lantern. Its flame shuddered in the wind, casting shadows that lurched fitfully along the walls.
“This is—” I began, but Maruman threw himself hard against my hip, forcing me to stagger sideways.
“Away,” he snarled with enough urgency to make me obey without question. I slipped between the trees opposite the hedge and dragged the wings through after me. Turning back to face the road, I heard the sound of horses’ hooves and the grinding scrape of metal wheel rims against stone and gravel. A coach drawn by two horses burst into sight just as Maruman leaped into the trees beside me.
“Whoa, there!” the driver cried softly, pulling on the reins with a practiced hand. The coach slowed, and my mouth fell open—for the driver was Enoch, but a younger Enoch, his unbuttoned Council livery jacket flapping untidily about him. I saw fleetingly the dull flash of an enameled Council emblem on the window of the coach door and above it a girl’s pale face pressed to the glass.
Only then did I understand, for I had seen that face too many times in the mirror not to know it. The girl peering out was little more than a child to my sight now, her green eyes enormous in a thin, remote face. Yet she was me as I had been the night of my arrival at Obernewtyn.
The shock of realizing that I was seeing my own past caused the world about me to waver, and the dark trees took on a vague and cloudy look.
“Hold to dreamtrail,” Maruman warned me urgently.
“In the carriage …,” I sent. “It was …”
“Yes. ElspethInnle comes to mountains,” Maruman agreed. “Dreamtrails hold all things. Look. Remember.”
The carriage had lurched to a stop beside the broad entrance steps, and the tall, too-slender girl that I had been climbed out. She stood, and I saw fear and loneliness in her rigid stance. The girl’s hair fluttered freely in the rising wind.
My hair, I thought.
I watched myself look around, remembering vividly how forbidding Obernewtyn had seemed that first night. I watched myself study the stone walls, the fountain, and then the trees, full of blustering wind and murmurous hissing. Momentarily, my own moss-green eyes looked right at me, and an irrational fear smote me.
She can’t see me, I assured myself, not really knowing why the thought of being seen by my younger self unnerved me so. But I also remembered how, on that first night, the trees had seemed to whisper of incomprehensible secrets.
“She/you could see you if you desire it,” Maruman sent. “But if she/you did, all would distort/take on new form. Dreamtrails are not keeping place for untouchable memories. Imprints of life they are, but have their own existence and can be affected/changed.”
I did not understand. “I was really watching myself when I arrived back then?”
“Yes and no,” Maruman sent. “We visit past on dreamtrails. The past passed. It was.”
“But …,” I began.
“Watch,” Maruman sent again.
The younger Enoch’s passengers mounted the broad, low steps to the front doors to Obernewtyn. The inconsistent lamplight played over their backs as the guardian who had escorted me reached up to ring the bell. I heard it very faintly, or perhaps I was only remembering how it had sounded. There was a long wait; then the doors opened to reveal a tall, bony older woman carrying a candelabrum: Guardian Myrna.
They were speaking now. I could not hear as the door closed behind them, but I could remember. The guardian had dismissed me as defective. “You’ll get no sense out of her.…”
“Do not remember this way, or you will merge,” Maruman warned, and the sound of his voice pulled me back to an awareness of the trees shivering and rustling around us.
The door banged open and the plump guardian emerged. She crossed to Enoch, who opened the coach door to let her inside, then climbed back onto his seat and took up the reins. The carriage lurched forward, and the horses drew it back down the drive and out of sight.
I glanced at the huge building, conscious that, somewhere inside its walls, I was now being conducted to a stone cell and a night of frightened dreams.
But I was not here out of nostalgia, I reminded myself. “I must see the doors,” I sent. Hurrying by the fountain and lamp, I halted before the steps and gazed up at the deeply recessed doors. It was too dark to see them clearly, and I wondered if, after all, they were the plain ones with which we had replaced the originals after the burning.
“Hold to the moment,” Maruman warned, padding up beside me.
I pictured the doors as they had been the night of my arrival. By the time I reached the top step, I could make out the scrolled panels and the shallowly carved borders. Marisa had hidden directions to a cache of Beforetime weaponmachines in the borders, but I concentrated my attention on the panels, shifting to one side to allow the lantern light to illuminate them. Now that I was looking for it, I could see clearly that the wood of the central panels and that of the border and outer frame were quite different. The panels were formed of a darker, more finely grained timber, and studying the queer half-human beasts they featured, I felt absolutely certain Kasanda had carved them. The intricacy of the work resembled the sculptures in the Earthtemple in too many ways for it not to have come from the same hand. I squinted, trying to see if there were any words written within the figures.
“If only it was daylight,” I murmured, frustrated.
At once, the wind rose, and I turned to see the clouds speeding up again. In an instant, the sky lightened to a deep violet, and the distant mountain peaks brightened to a paler blue. Realizing my wish had hastened the night, I focused on the blue-black chilliness of predawn, and the clouds slowed.
“Commands on the dreamtrails send out loud signals,” Maruman sent in stern disapproval. “Mornirdragon will hear/smell/come soon. Must go/fly.”
“But now that it’s near morning, I might be able to see.” I turned back to the doors and saw there were letters inscribed on a banner behind the figures. They were incomprehensible but similar to the exotic lettering I had seen in Sador. Could the message possibly be in gadi?
“If only I had some paper,” I muttered frantically, reaching instinctively for my nightdress pocket. To my amazement, I discovered I was clothed, and my hand closed around Dameon’s letter. Paper! But of course I had nothing to write with. Remembering what Maruman had said about thoughts being answered on the dreamtrails, I visualized the stick of black charcoal the girl Cassy had been using to draw with. Immediately, I was holding a stub of burned stick. I laid a page of the letter over the carved script on one door and brushed the burned end of the stick gently over it, hoping the makeshift rubbing would take over the pricked lettering.
“I smell Mornirdragon,” Maruman warned. “She comes.”
“One second more,” I said, laying a second sheet of paper over the lettering on the door and rubbing the stick over it.
“No more time!” Maruman urged. He sank his teeth into my clothing and tugged me back from the doors as a screeching cry rent the air. Then I felt a sickening pull that seemed to wrench my guts inside out.
It was blazing daylight, and I was standing with Maruman on the gleaming cloud-road. I was naked again and carried neither stick nor letter, but there was no time to lament, for the red dragon appeared, hovering above us on huge scaly wings. I was thunderstruck by its sheer enormity. Its eyes stared into mine, and it gave a guttural scream of such hatred that all strength seemed to run from my legs. I was too terrified to move, but Maruman leapt forward without hesitation, butting me roughly from the path. I fell through the clouds with a scream of terror.
I tumbled mindlessly over and over before remembering that I was now a winged thing. The wings flexed, and I thought about opening them wide. I felt them move and went from falling like a stone into a flat, gliding trajectory.
As I slowed, I was overcome by a vision.
I w
as standing somewhere outside, and it was a chill, pitch-black night. All at once, I had the distinct sensation that someone was behind me. I whirled, and there was Ariel as he had been when I first encountered him: a boy with a face like an angel and eyes bright with malice. I could see him, because he glowed with an eerie pallid light.
My skin crawled at the nightmarish vision as Ariel gave a high-pitched child’s giggle, then dissolved. Before my eyes, his shining matter reformed into an exquisitely handsome young man with long fair hair and a lithe form. He looked exactly as I had seen him on the deck of the Herder ship that had carried Matthew away, even down to his cloak.
“What do you want?” I demanded.
“Want?” he asked, and now his voice was deeper, and his features shifted slightly, growing older. If it were possible, he was more beautiful than he had been as a child. Despite all I knew of him, I was dazzled. His eyes flashed with amusement, as if he heard my thoughts and reveled in them. “I want you, of course,” he whispered, and a warm wind blew softly, as if his words and breath swelled to fill the air around me, caressing my face, playing with my hair.
I felt the blood churn in my cheeks. What was he saying? What was I thinking? “You hate me. Us.”
“There is no us, Elspeth. There is only you. And I do not hate you. I need you.” He laughed again, and his laughter grew and thundered around me.
“Leave me alone!” I screamed.
He smiled and stepped toward me. Then, all at once, his face changed. He glanced over his shoulder furtively, then vanished.
I was falling again, struggling to use my wings to right myself.
“Go down/wake!” Maruman’s voice was so urgent that I obeyed instantly, angling downward and letting myself pick up speed. Reaching the region of amorphous color, I felt my physical substance dissolve into the floating etheric light shape. Now I could see the silver thread running away from me, and I willed myself along it as if it were a rope.
In seconds, if time can be measured in such a state, I was hovering over my sleeping form. I knew I must resume my body to be safe from Dragon, but I hesitated, afraid for Maruman. What if the beast turned on him? To my amazement, thinking of the old cat transported me instantly to the Healer hall where Maruman’s body lay with Dragon’s. The real shapes of things were again only vaguely apparent beneath their shifting halos of color, but these auras seemed far less stable than the ones in my turret room. They lurched and swayed in constant dizzying movement, mingling weirdly at the edges so it was difficult to be sure where one thing began and another ended.
The center of the disturbance was the boiling mass of red and orange light shot through with livid streaks of dark red and yellow, which could only be Dragon’s aura. I was literally seeing the effect of her mental disturbance. The tumultuous swirling of fiery light about her slight form was creating a suction that violently disturbed all auras within range. Obviously, the effect would diminish the farther things were physically from her, but it was no wonder our dreams had been disturbed.
I turned to study the human forms by Dragon’s bed. The aura of the nearest person glimmered pink and gentle lavender, flecked with misty blue. Strands like spiderwebs ran between this form and Dragon’s. Without thinking, I reached out a hand to touch them. I had no sense of flesh meeting flesh, but as my hand of light entered the pale strands, I knew the form belonged to Angina and that some sort of link had been forged between Dragon and the Empath guilden. There was another thickish thread of light running away from Angina and out of the room. I dipped my hand into it and learned that it was an etheric connection to his twin.
The form alongside him had a very pure blue-white aura that reminded me of moonlight on snow or sea foam at night. I did not need to touch it to guess that it was the futureteller Dell. Beside her was yet another person with an aura of green shot through with a single festering streak of red, shading to purple at the edges like a faded bruise. I reached into the green light and discovered it belonged to Kella. The streak of red was her sorrow and guilt over Domick.
I located Maruman’s shape within Dragon’s sickly dominant aura. At first, I was frightened by the way the two auras appeared to merge, but even as I thought of the old cat, his aura sharpened and became more distinct. There were whorls of opalescent color in it and pure threads of silver, but livid streaks of yellow also tangled with the other colors. His intermittent madness, I guessed. There were seams of black, too, but before I could touch them to find out what they were, Dragon’s aura began to flow around me.
Alarmed at the thought that the dragon beast might even now be flying toward me, I willed myself to my turret room and let the silver thread of light draw me back into my flesh. Picturing my hand plucking away the thread of light and flinging it loose, I felt a sharp stinging pain, and then it fell away as I rose to consciousness like a cork bursting explosively to the surface of water.
I gasped and opened my eyes.
I was in the chair by my hearth, my skin clammily cold. I sat up with a groan. The room seemed incredibly drab after having seen it with spirit eyes.
I forced myself to get up, marveling at the extent of my exhaustion. Traveling the dreamtrails was much harder work than traversing any true road. I threw a few sticks of kindling on the fire, hooked a pot of water over it to boil, then pulled on my jacket. Resuming the chair, I held my fingers out to the flames and wondered anew at my strange adventure. I was fascinated at the way in which auras revealed not only the nature of the thing they shaped, but also even what ailed it. Surely a healer who could use the dreamtrails would be better able to treat illnesses.
It was some time before I remembered the purpose of the night’s adventures. With an exclamation, I groped in my pocket and withdrew Dameon’s crumpled letter, unfolding the paper and gaping at the streaks of charcoal on it. Maruman had insisted that what happened on the dreamtrails could have an impact in life, and now here was the proof of it.
Drawing the candle near with shaking fingers, I flattened the letter carefully. Of course, I could no more read the rubbed letters now than when I had been on the dreamtrails, but I could see I had managed to get a good, clear imprint of them. Whether it was clear enough to translate, only time would tell.
The water began to boil. I laid the pages aside and set about preparing an infusion of herbs. Feeling weary, I coerced a small mental net to trap my fatigue so that I would not unwittingly fall asleep. Dragon was sure to be waiting. It hurt me to think of the killing hatred I had seen in her eyes as she attacked me. Ironically, every time I evaded her, it increased her feelings of abandonment. Yet I could not stand and let her kill me to prove I loved her.
I shuddered, and the movement rustled the charcoal-rubbed pages of Dameon’s letter on the table. I remembered I had yet to read it. Stirring honey into the scalding liquid, I settled myself back in the chair.
11
THE PRICKED WORDS on the previous page had been obliterated by the rubbing, but the last page was untouched. It began halfway through a sentence:
the Sadorians have offered to make me an honorary member of their tribe. An asura. This will allow me to become privy to all that is known to the tribal leaders and to the Temple guardians. Fian has probably said as much to you, but he will not have told you that the overguardian is dying. Fian does not know it, nor does Jakoby or anyone outside the Temple. Traditionally, such knowledge is kept within the Temple community, and it says much that I have been given access to it. That is the true reason for my delay in returning to Obernewtyn. The overguardian tells me that one day his successor will simply appear in his stead to the tribes. There is no beauty or peace in his dying, and maybe that is why they choose to shroud it in secrecy and ritual. He will suffer great pain before the end, which no drug will be allowed to alleviate. Other guardians use a spice drug that gives them pleasant dreams when the pain of their deformities is beyond enduring. But he cannot have recourse to it, because in the worst extremity, he is supposed to see a vision that will reveal hi
s successor. Maybe it is true, but the thought of his suffering horrifies me, for already he undergoes certain agony. That is why I could not refuse him when he asked if I would stay with him at the end. He asked it in a time of terrible pain, and it was as if a child begged me. He is frightened of what he must endure, and he knows I can empathise a calmness and acceptance in him, without affecting his clarity of mind. It will mean sharing his suffering, and truly I fear it for this reason. Yet I will endure it. Witnessing his dying fills me with the determination to learn why the boy and the other Temple guardians are so terribly afflicted. I have asked him openly about their deformities, and he says that I may know the truth of that only when I am named asura. So I am patient, or try to seem so.
I must finish this now. But it lightens my heart to think I will see you and Obernewtyn very soon, and I pray that all is well there.
My love,
Dameon
I sighed, my fingers lingering on his name. Given what we had learned about Dragon, I wished more than ever that the empath was on his way to Obernewtyn.
There was a knock at the door, and I opened it to find Roland with Maruman in his arms. As the Healer guildmaster set the old cat carefully down, I noticed with alarm that his hind leg was heavily bandaged.
“What happened?”
“We don’t know,” Roland said soberly. His eyes met mine. “Claw marks, left by no animal that exists. I fear they can only be the dragon’s doing.…”
I bit my lip at the memory of Maruman leaping between Dragon’s beast and me, and of the odd black streaks I had later noticed in his aura. Claw marks!
“It is my fault he’s hurt,” I cried.