The weariness that had overwhelmed her earlier returned. Lilli felt as if she were sinking into the wood chest like water. There’s no hope, she thought. She’ll win in the end.
“Lilli.” Nevyn’s voice was a soft whisper. “What are you thinking? Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“The dark wins in the end. The dark always sucks up the light.”
Nevyn smacked his hands together hard. Lilli came to herself with a little shake of her head.
“What?” she said. “What was that? What was I saying?”
“Naught that you need to remember. I won’t lie to you. The situation’s very grave.”
“If there was only somewhat I could do.”
“Oh, there is. If you’re willing, you can help me win this battle. I have to tell you honestly, though, that it could be very dangerous.”
“It’s dangerous already, isn’t it? But what could I possibly—oh, wait, I do see. I can be bait.”
“Just so. It’s a real risk, but I don’t know what else to do. She could wander around here for a long time. It’s a huge dun. I’d have a cursed hard time chasing her down.”
Lilli hesitated, feeling her heart pound, but she was remembering Bevyan, lying in a grave behind Lord Camlyn’s dun.
“I don’t care about the risk. I’ll do it.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am. For all I know she’ll try to kill someone else once she’s done with me.”
“She’s already done that. Practicing, I suppose. Well and good then. As much as I hate to risk you, I—wait. I can lay a double trap, now that I think of it.”
Lilli merely nodded. Her heart was pounding so loud, it seemed, that she could barely hear him. Her breath came ragged in her chest.
“I think,” Nevyn went on, “that we’ll move you to a room in another broch and put Branoic on guard at your door. I’ll be hiding somewhere nearby, and we’ll see if she falls into our trap.”
When Nevyn said he’d be hiding nearby, he meant of course nearby on the etheric plane. His actual body would lie some distance away. For the rest of the afternoon, he stayed with Lilli and kept her among other people where she’d be safe. Once night had fallen, and the astral tides were calm again after their change, he gave Branoic his orders.
“I’m going up to Lilli’s old chamber. Give me time to get there, and then take her to the new one. You stand guard outside, but remember, lad: if you hear her scream, get into the room fast.”
“You can trust me for that, my lord,” Branoic said. “Never fear.”
In Lilli’s chamber Nevyn lay down on her bed in the darkness. He crossed his arms over his chest, each hand on the opposite shoulder, then let his breathing slow into long, measured breaths while in his mind he built up the image of his body of light, a pale blue and nearly featureless simulacrum. With an effort of trained will, he transferred his consciousness into it. Even though it hovered above him, for a moment he felt as if he were falling; then he heard a rushy click, and he slipped over to find himself floating above his body. Blue light suffused through the chamber and gleamed on black stone walls gone dead, a prison around him. Turning a little he floated up to a join of wall and ceiling. Behind him the silver cord, pulsing with life, payed out, linking him to his untenanted body below.
Curious Wildfolk appeared to hover around him. Here on their proper plane they gleamed like crystals, all angles and geometry as they trembled and flew.
“Stay away, little brothers,” Nevyn sent his thoughts to them. “I’m laying a trap.”
They winked out and disappeared. Nevyn waited, but time is hard to measure on the etheric, and he began to fear that Merodda had gone directly after Lilli. Perhaps she could sense her daughter’s presence from some distance. Yet if he left too soon and she found his unguarded body, the consequences would be grim. If she snapped the silver cord, his body would die, leaving him adrift out on the astral long before his Wyrd demanded.
Nevyn dropped down to float just above his body, but before he could transfer over, he felt rather than saw another presence on the etheric nearby. Like a flushed grouse he flew up and got back into his corner just as the silvery-blue form of a naked woman glided through the black wall below.
Rather than an artificially crafted body of light, Merodda appeared in her etheric double, the matrix that had formed and interpenetrated her body during life. Faithfully it had recorded her death as well: her neck furrowed by the rope, her head flopped at an angle from its breaking. Already, however, the double was beginning to distort. Her legs seemed too long and thin; her torso, bloated and squat. Although she knew how to drain life-stuff from her victims, she seemed to lack the knowledge of how to distribute it within her etheric form.
In this grotesque simulacrum she drifted toward the bed, then stopped, staring at the unexpected sleeper. Nevyn called upon the Light and dropped like a striking hawk. In answer to his call, light came—a vast glowing sheet of it, shifting and twisting in rainbow colors like those northern lights the Dwarven folk tell of. Nevyn caught the edge with the hands of his body of light.
Merodda looked up, saw him, and shrieked—or rather, sent the thought of a wail out into the etheric where his mind heard it as a shriek. Like a fisherman throwing a net, Nevyn hurled the sheet of light at her and over her. She shrieked again, twisting back and forth as she clawed at it with both hands. He grabbed the edges and clutched them grimly, trapping her. She was beyond thinking in words; over and over she shrieked and tore and threw herself back and forth, but slowly her struggles exhausted her. She stopped moving; her shrieks turned to a thin wail of fear.
Above them both Nevyn visualized a pentagram, glowing with silver and blue, then drew round it a circle of gold. He rose, hauling Merodda with him, and flung them both through this gate into the astral plane. An indigo wind, dark as a bruise, caught them, swirled them, tumbled them around and around as they fell, rushing downward through a cloud of blown images—faces, beasts, stars, symbols, and letters in unknown scripts. The images beat against them, then flew on, borne by the indigo wind. In her net of light Merodda was screaming and twisting as she tore at the glowing strands.
“Courage!” Nevyn called out. “You go to your redemption!”
Straight ahead in the indigo a long slash of violet appeared, then swirled and thickened into a shimmering oval of pale lavender light. Nevyn called out a Name, and they fell through, tumbling at last to rest in a field of white flowers, nodding on a breeze that barely trembled their pale white leaves. Some distance away a river gleamed silver, or was it a mist? It shifted, tenuous as moonlight. When Nevyn tugged on the last tatters of his astral net, they fell away to reveal a tiny child, formed of pale golden light.
“Call upon the Light!” Nevyn said. “Call upon the Light and forswear the Darkness!”
The child wept, throwing tiny hands up in front of her face as if she feared a slap. Even though the astral wind blew so gently here, it caught her up and began to carry her toward the river. She drifted this way and that, bobbing on the breathless wind, but ever closer she came to the silver river.
“Go with the Light!” Nevyn called out. “Go in peace!”
Whether she answered, he never knew. The struggle to travel on this plane in the body of light was growing too much for him. He saw his gathering weakness as a shattering of the vision: pieces of landscape fell away, the flowers withered and vanished. Only the violet light still gleamed, and in it a rift of indigo. With a last effort he launched himself through and fell back into the wind.
Spiraling around and around, up and up it seemed, past the manic frenzy of torn images and broken snatches of strange music, he saw at last his pentacle gate of silver and blue. Soaring and struggling both at once, he reached it and slipped through, bobbing up into bluish light that glimmered on the dead black walls of the chamber. Below him he saw his body, lying twisted on its side but still joined safely to his consciousness by the silver cord. Nevyn floated to a position directly over it and hov
ered for a moment, gathering strength for his return.
Yet someone or something shared the chamber with him. All at once he felt a presence, a trembling of life within the stone space. The presence gathered strength, glittered like crystal in a corner, swelled and grew, turned into a vaguely female form, huge and menacing. When she raised cloaked arms like huge wings, he saw her long hair, streaming down black as stone over her shoulders and down her back. Her face, shadowed by a hood, he could not see at all.
“Where is she?” The thought came to him in a silky whisper.
“She’s gone to the Light, where she belongs.”
The presence considered him briefly, then vanished. Nevyn shuddered in what he could later admit was fear. He slid down the silver cord until he hovered just above his body, then let himself fall back. Another clicking sound, a long wheeze of breath, and he was back.
“It is over!” Nevyn slapped one hand hard on the mattress beside him. “May she find the Light!”
Not so much as a crack of the Light’s earthly counterpart gleamed around the hide over the window. It was late, then. He sat up, stretching his cramped muscles, wondering over the presence. A god form, perhaps? It inspired the same kind of cold awe as one of those created embodiments of raw power. And yet it seemed too personal, too individually concerned with Merodda to be a goddess. With a shrug he got up, but as he was hurrying across the ward to Lilli’s refuge, he was thinking about the presence in black. The only lore he could connect with her was what Aderyn had told him about the Guardians, those strange beings attached to the elven group-soul. But what would one of them be doing in Dun Deverry? He cast that explanation aside, which in the long wheel of events proved to be most unfortunate.
By the light of a candle lantern Branoic was standing guard, leaning against Lilli’s door. At the sight of Nevyn he straightened up, all tense expectation.
“Does Lilli fare well?” Nevyn said.
“As far as I know, my lord.” Branoic spun around and pulled open the door.
Lilli nearly fell into the corridor. She managed a laugh.
“I was leaning against it,” she said. “I wanted to stay right by it, you see, so Branoic would hear me if I screamed.”
“Very wise,” Nevyn said. “But it’s over. She’s well and truly dead this time.”
Lilli let out her breath in a long raspy sigh.
“Thank the Goddess,” she whispered. “And a thousand thanks to you, Nevyn.”
“Oddly enough, I did it for her sake as well as yours. But be that as it may, she’ll never trouble you or any other soul again.”
Yet he knew that even as he spoke the truth, he was lying, that while Merodda would never trouble anyone in this life, she would have other lives in which to work her enemies harm. No doubt she would remember them all, even in her new bodies and new lives. Now that she’d learned to welcome evil, evil would seek her out. He hoped and prayed that she would renounce it when it presented itself to her, but he had no way of knowing if she would or not. One thing only he could be sure of: sooner or later in the long skein of lives, her thread would tangle round Lilli’s once again.
PART THREE
The
North Country
WINTER 1117
Sleep and Trance are Lord Death’s twin sisters. A master of the dweomer befriends all three.
—The Secret Book of
Cadwallon the Druid
Much to Niffa’s surprise, Verrarc and Raena came to her wedding. By whining and begging and generally clamping on to the subject like a stubborn ferret, she’d talked her mother into allowing the wedding early, on the first day of the new year, which Deverry folk call “Samaen.” During their long years of slavery, the people of the Rhiddaer had adopted the holiday and brought it with them to their new home. Although they considered the eve as ill-omened as we do in Deverry, they judged the first day of the new year itself a splendid time for starting something new.
When the sun hung nearly to the horizon, Niffa and her family trudged up the hill to the assembly ground near the peak of Citadel. In front of the stone council hall, which sported a colonnade and a flight of shallow steps, stretched a plaza paved with bricks. The servants of the Spirit Talker were sweeping it free of snow with brooms made of twigs, while Werda herself stood beside the heaped wood of an unlit bonfire. A tall woman, thin as the twigs, she wore her long grey hair down free, a sweep of silver over her blue cloak. In the fading light her hair seemed to gleam like the moon, the home of the spirits she had mastered.
Demet’s family, a veritable crowd of brothers and sisters, their wives, husbands, and children, came hurrying across the plaza, all talking and laughing except for Demet, who was smiling in tight triumph. When she saw him, Niffa felt her own blood pounding at her throat. He looked so handsome that night, blond and tall, and they had shared so many kisses and caresses. Tonight, finally—
“Niffa!” Dera’s voice snapped. “Stop smirking like that! It be unseemly.”
“I will, Mam.” Niffa wiped her smile away and tried to look composed and aloof. “I do apologize.”
Demet and his family stood on one side of the bonfire while Niffa and hers took the other. Werda’s manservant knelt and began fussing with flint and tinderbox; in this cold he struggled to raise a spark, but a wedding fire had to be kindled fresh, not lit from a hearth. Niffa looked round at the crowd of guests and saw off to one side Verrarc and Raena, splendid in a blue wool cloak with a huge clasp of gold and moonstones at one shoulder.
“What be her business here?” Niffa whispered to her mother.
“Well, it were needful I invite Verro for the formality of the thing. Never did I think he’d come, but if he did, well then, his woman be welcome, too.”
“No one did ask me if she be welcome.”
“Hush! And will you start your married life a miser, grudging hospitality?”
Niffa scowled down at the snow. She refused to apologize. Never would I have asked a viper to my wedding, either, she thought. Yet why was she so sure that Raena would somehow bite and poison them all? The patch of snow she so assiduously studied suddenly turned gold, and she heard the crackling of flames on kindling. She looked up to find fire blazing in the center of the heaped-up wood and spreading gold flames along the tendrils of dry twigs. It seemed to her that she saw the doom of Cerr Cawnen in that fire, that Raena would be the spark that burnt them all.
“What troubles you?” Dera caught her arm. “You look like death.”
“Naught, naught.” Niffa swallowed hard. “I uh, I well, I’ll be missing you, Mam, and living at home with you and the weasels.”
“Ah.” Dera patted her arm. “It be a hard thing, to leave your mother’s hearth, but truly, you’ll dwell nearby, just across the lake. At least you’ll not be going to some strange village. And we can spare you a ferret for a pet, like, when a litter comes.”
“If my new mother do allow.”
Demet’s mother, Emla, was standing next to her son. She smiled and waved at Dera and Niffa impartially. A tall grey-haired woman with a long sharp jaw, she was beaming with excitement. At least Demet’s family had wholeheartedly approved of his choice for a wife rather than spurning the ratter’s girl. Since Demet’s father had married a cousin, their family carried a strong stamp: like Demet they were all tall, blond, and rangy, even young Cotzi at ten summers, with angular faces that were handsome on the men if a bit unfortunate on the women. Small and dark as she was, Niffa felt like a ferret about to frolic with greyhounds. She could only hope they wouldn’t bite.
The ceremony itself went fast. With a sweep of one arm Werda called Niffa and Demet up to stand next to her near the fire. The crowd stood facing the three of them.
“Before us stand a young man and a young woman who would marry,” Werda began. “When we fled our homeland, when our homes were stolen from us by the Slavers, our gods did travel with us to the free lands. Thanks to them we did survive, and in return, they demand of us that we grow mighty in numbers,
that we may worship them always and tend their earthly homes. Demet, a man must father many sons to gain the favor of the gods. Niffa, a woman must birth many daughters to gain the favor of the goddesses.” Werda paused to look at each of them. “Be you ready to lift up the burden of your people?”
“I am,” they answered together.
“Then the gods will bless you.” Werda paused again, this time looking over the crowd. “Kinsfolk and friends, you have seen these young people speak out in front of you. From now on, Demet is Niffa’s man, and she is his woman. It be needful for all of you to honor their marriage.” She was looking directly at Raena and Verrarc. “It be a holy thing, marriage. Let none meddle with it, for such do shame their tribe and kin.”
Niffa could see Raena wince and look down at the ground. Verrarc’s smile froze, but he kept it as he stared right back at the Spirit Talker. Silence hung over the crowd as a few at a time everyone turned to watch. At last Verrarc broke and looked away. With a little smile Werda continued.
“May the gods bless you always with health and children. May you always have enough food to feed your family, Demet, and may you, Niffa, divide it up evenly among them.”
Demet caught Niffa around the waist, pulled her close, and kissed her. The crowd broke out cheering and clapping. When she took another kiss from him, everyone laughed. She let him go and turned to wave just in time to see Verrarc and Raena slipping away into the darkness. Good! she thought. I’ll not have that woman poisoning our rejoicing time!
The rest of the guests all trooped downhill to Dera and Lael’s house, where Verrarc’s gift of a barrel of ale stood open and ready. All of the guests had brought their own tankards and some food, too, to make a resplendent feast of bread, sausages, cheese, and other winter foods. Niffa and Demet stood by the door and greeted each guest in turn. While Dera heaped wood on the hearth for light, Lael placed himself by the ale barrel and started dipping it out into the wall of tankards thrust his way. The women began handing out food; everyone was laughing and talking.