“You!” I gasped.
“I,” she agreed caustically, her odd two-colored eyes gleaming. “I gather that is your fire back there? Your potatoes.”
“I…Yes. And there are apples and bread,” I stammered, made foolish by astonishment. She quirked a brow, saying that if this was an invitation to nightmeal, she accepted, but we had better go back and rescue the potatoes, for they smelled well and truly done to her. Not until we reached the ruin and were out of the wind did I pull myself together enough to ask, “Iriny, however did you get here?”
“The plast suit,” she said simply, kneeling and rolling the potatoes out of the fire with a stick. She knocked one toward me and set aside another to cool for herself. “The Master of Obernewtyn brought it the night he returned Darius to us. That was when we learned of the Herders’ attempt to invade the Land with the help of the traitor Malik.”
“How is Darius?” I interrupted, stupidly trying to open my potato when it was still too hot. “He was so ill when I saw him last.”
She reached into the bag Erit had given me and withdrew the dark loaf, tearing a piece and wolfing it down before she answered. “He was sick when I left, though your healer Kella was treating him.” She shrugged and ripped off another piece of bread before handing me the loaf.
I tore off a piece and ate it, asking, “You used the plast suit to cross the Suggredoon? Why?”
I was thinking of Atthis, who had told me that she used Swallow, among others, to save me when I had been near death trying to cross the strait. It would not be the first time the D’rekta of the gypsies had saved my life at the behest of the seer.
Iriny said, “Swallow dreamed that one of us needed to come here. He said it was a matter of the ancient promises. He wanted to come himself, but the elders would not permit the D’rekta to put himself at such risk when he has yet to father a child to take his place.” She gave a sour grin. “I volunteered to come, and the elders agreed. We needed a diversion to draw the attention of the watchers, so we used the rafts we had prepared for the day that we might cross the river again. Not to cross the river, for anyone trying that would be an easy target, rather, we stuffed clothes with straw and set them afire as we pushed them out into the water. It was night, and they made a wondrous bright diversion that let me slip unnoticed into the river wearing the suit.
“As soon as the soldierguards on this bank spotted the rafts, there was an uproar. I waited in some rocks until some of the soldierguards on the bank opposite me moved downriver slightly to see what was amiss, then I swam across. I am a good swimmer, and because the suit has a tube that enabled me to breathe while underwater, I did not have to expose myself.”
She pulled out a knife and skewered her potato, deftly cutting it open and scooping out its steaming contents.
She went on. “The soldierguards soon realized the burning rafts were a diversion, but they were looking for an unlit raft carrying a spy, never imagining a person would immerse herself in the tainted water. In all the commotion, it was a simple matter to reach the barrier the soldierguards have set up to keep people from the old ferry crossing and slip over it, because of course it was designed to keep people out, rather than in.
“Once I had crossed the open space between the barrier and entered a rough sort of village, I knew no one would catch me. All I had to do was get rid of the suit, so I skirted the village and went some distance onto the open plain to bury it. Then I made my way back into the settlement and mingled with the folk there.”
She leaned forward and flicked out two more potatoes from the embers. While they cooled, she went to get some water, saying that she had found herbs with which she could brew a hot drink.
Left alone by the fire, I ate one of the apples from the bag and thought of the first time I had seen the halfbreed gypsy. She had been tied to a pole, yet she had dared taunt the Herder torturing her. I had intervened on impulse, spurred on by her courage, yet the act of saving her had brought me to Swallow. Almost every meeting with the D’rekta had been somehow connected to my role as the seeker, and in a sense, Swallow knew more about that part of me than any other human. And Iriny had come here at Swallow’s insistence…
I stopped midbite and cursed myself for a fool, for surely he had sent Iriny here because Atthis had revealed to me that I would need someone to tell me exactly where the D’rekta’s son had been born so I could find the sign Cassy had left here for me!
Iriny returned but before I could speak, she said, “I should tell you. Before I left, my brother told me that you are the one referred to in the ancient promises. That he told me violates the ancient promises, and it troubled me. But I guess now that he knew you would be here, and he sent me to give you aid. If my brother is right and you are truly the one to whom the ancient promises refer, it must be that the end days are here when all promises will be fulfilled. Therefore, I will serve you in whatever capacity you require.”
I drew a deep breath and said, “As it happens, I do need help. I must find words that were carved where your first D’rekta’s son was born. I think that one of the statues in the stone garden must have once stood in the house of your D’rekta, for I have searched the ruins and can find nothing on the walls…”
She was shaking her head. “Evander was not born here.”
I gaped at her. “Isn’t this the first and only settlement your people had in the Land?”
“It is, but the D’rekta’s son was born in a rough hut constructed at the front of a cave in the base of Stonehill. It was built when my ancestors first came ashore, to shelter the D’rekta who was very near to her birthing time. They did not build atop Stonehill until later, after they had constructed the road. Not until the boy neared manhood did the D’rekta make a carving in the cave.”
“Take me there,” I said, half rising, but again she shook her head.
“A rockfall destroyed it just before my ancestors brought Evander here to die. When he learned of the avalanche, he commanded that the cave be dug out. But too much stone had fallen, and in the end, he carved the words from the cave into a stone and invoked the ancient promises when he bade the Twentyfamilies set the stone into his death cairn and tend it as if it were one of his mother’s sacred carvings. He spoke at length to his son in private, to pass on what needed to be told, and thereafter, he died.”
“Where is the cairn?” I asked with excitement, hardly able to believe that in the midst of all that had happened, when my quest was far from my thoughts, I had stumbled on another sign from Kasanda.
Iriny had risen, and now she took up a stick from the fire and went out into the night. I followed her past the walled stone garden. The night had gone still, as if the world held its breath in anticipation of what I was about to see. The cairn rose up out of the grass, formed from many rocks shaped and fitted together so perfectly that they needed no mortar to bind them. Iriny went around to the side of the cairn that faced the sea. The glow from embers at the stick’s end allowed me to read the two groups of words carved into one of the stones. The first said that these words had first been carved in the cave where Evander had been born, and under them, in a more ornate script, was carved
I come unto thee, Sentinel. Judge my hand and let me pass, for all I have done was in your name.
“Do you know what the words mean?” I asked Iriny as we made our way back to the ruins.
“I do not know nor do I think the Twentyfamilies who made the cairn knew. Once I heard a seer say that the words in the cave referred to some infamous event that had happened in the past, but they did not say what it was, for the ancient promises instruct us never to speak of the days before our people came to the Red Queen’s land. My brother may understand the meaning of the words, though, for each D’rekta has passed on his secrets to his successor through the generations.”
As Iriny added brown rock to the fire, I asked what sickness Evander had died from.
“It was not sickness but an accident,” she answered. “Our people had come from the hi
ghlands down to Sutrium to make the yearly tithe at the Councilcourt. There was a storm, and just as our wagons entered the city, a great shaft of lightning struck a building, setting its roof ablaze. Evander’s horse was young, and it reared. Though he was a good rider, he fell, and it was a bad fall. At first it seemed that he would recover, but some weakness crept into his broken body, and he began to waste away. When the healers had done all they could, it is said he smiled and announced that he was glad, for he might now return at last to the only place where he had been truly happy, for that was where he would be buried. And he bade them bring him here.”
“What if he had been killed immediately when he fell?” I asked curiously. “He would not have passed on his knowledge to his son.”
She shook her head. “One of the seers would have warned him. It happened once with another D’rekta. A seer visioned that he would die suddenly, so he told his son what was needful. A sevenday later, he died during a firestorm.”
“What if a D’rekta has no son?”
“Then his brother or sister or his daughter becomes D’rekta, and if there were none of these, the seers would have warned of that, and he would have adopted a son or daughter by the blood rites and passed on his knowledge. If the child was a babe, the knowledge would be passed to a guardian D’rekta. That, too, happened once. The seers named an old woman as the babe’s guardian D’rekta.”
I marveled at the determined fidelity of the gypsies to their vows as Iriny wiped her knife on the grass and put it away. I wiped my sooty fingers and thought of Evander calling Stonehill the only place where he had been truly happy. “I suppose Evander must have loved his mother very much, and that is why he wanted to come here at the end.”
Iriny shrugged. “I think it would be an uncomfortable thing to have a mother so full of destiny and so preoccupied by a future that she and no one else could see. My father…” She stopped, licking her fingers. “Well, those who must love their duty have little left for other things, and the first D’rekta had a very great and terrible duty.”
Her words made me wonder if Evander had meant that he had been happy on Stonehill because his boyhood had been free of that heavy duty he had been forced to assume as a young man. It was sad that his life had seemed an exile from his golden youth.
“Did you notice the carving of a girl shading her eyes?” asked the gypsy. I nodded. “She is not a Twentyfamilies gypsy, but she came to the Land with my ancestors from the Red Queen’s land as a toddler. It is said that the D’rekta loved her like a daughter and that Evander loved her, too, though apparently not as a brother loves a sister. She went away to the mountains after his mother was taken by slavers. Some say she went because Evander desired her and she felt toward him only sisterly love. Still others say she went to the mountains to seek her own mother. Whatever the truth of it, Evander sought her out whenever the Twentyfamilies’ wanderings brought them near the place she settled in the highlands, but in the end he bonded and bore a child to a Twentyfamilies pureblood as he was duty-bound to do.”
There was sadness in her face, and I knew she thought of her own halfbreed mother, set aside by Swallow’s pureblood father for a Twentyfamilies girl when he was forced to become D’rekta after his brother died childless. Suddenly, Iriny rose to her feet, as lithe as a snake at the sound of hooves.
“It will be Rawen,” I told her, and we went to greet the mare, who was drinking thirstily from the stone cauldron I had filled. I shaped a probe to tell her who Iriny was, but as I did so, I noticed that Iriny was making rudimentary beastspeaking signals to the mare.
“She does not know beastspeech,” I said aloud, conveying the meaning of my words to Rawen. “We met in Morganna, and I suppose no beast has ever been there who knew it.”
I was surprised when Rawen lifted her dripping muzzle and disagreed, commenting that some creatures in Morganna had spoken of a special sort of signaling some humans used to communicate with beasts, but she had thought it a myth. Then she asked if I still wanted to go back to Halfmoon Bay. That made me realize that I had not yet told Iriny about Ariel and Domick.
I told her as succinctly as I could of the overthrow of the Faction on Herder Isle and of Ariel’s journey to the west coast to deliver someone whom he had deliberately infected with a deadly plague. Painfully, I explained my discovery that it was Domick, whom she had met. Iriny’s frown deepened as my tale unfolded, but she did not interrupt. I concluded that I was going back to Halfmoon Bay to take Domick from the city before his sickness became infectious. “In case I fail, you should go to a safehold we Misfits have here until the plague runs its course, for all who contract it will die.”
“I will remain with you and give what aid I can,” Iriny said in a voice that brooked no argument.
I replied, “You understand that Domick might be contagious now.”
“I will come with you,” she reiterated simply.
Seeing that she would not be swayed, I suggested we descend. We did so using the road the Twentyfamilies had built, which was somewhat less precipitous than the path I had taken earlier.
“Evidently, they had some special device from the Beforetime that enabled them to cut through rock as if it were butter,” Iriny said, explaining the impossible smooth ness of the road spiraling down. She glanced at me and asked why the Herders wanted to kill all who lived on the west coast. “Are not their own people here as well?”
“I think the priests regard their order as more important than any individual priest, or even any cloister. But it was the One who rules the Faction who desired this terrible thing, and he was a madman. Mind you, it was Ariel who shaped the notion in his mind.” I looked at her to see if she understood who I meant, and she nodded. “As to why he would want to kill so many people, I cannot say. But he is defective, so perhaps it is foolish to try to come up with a rational reason for his actions.”
“There is still reason in madness, though it be flawed,” Iriny pointed out.
I shrugged. “In one of his fits, the One said something about the destruction of all life here being a wonderful example of Lud’s power and wrath.”
“But it would be the Herders’ might that would be shown, their power.”
“The One did not see it so, and if the other priests had known what he planned, I think many of them would have approved and called it Lud’s judgment,” I murmured. “Or maybe I should say that it would serve the Herders to see it so. The Herders preach that Lud made people in his image, though we are flawed and so must strive for perfection. But I think the Herders made Lud in their own image, to serve as scapegoat and excuse.”
“How can people make Lud?” Iriny asked.
“I do not know, but look at the Lud of the Gadfians who regarded women as less than beasts and beasts as nothing. The men of that race believed that Lud made women for no other purpose than to beget and nurture more men who would worship Lud. As the men believed, so their Lud was said to believe, and if he disagreed, he never told anyone so.”
“Did their Lud not desire the worship of women?”
I shrugged. “According to the Gadfians, Lud desired only fear and obedience from women, not love or worship. That is why the women and a few men left and formed a new exiled race in Sador. They rejected their ancestors’ Land and Lud. And how should a Lud be left behind like a land from which one has sailed, unless he was no more than the invention of the men of that land?”
Iriny looked thoughtful. “Even if this Lud had some hand in the making of humankind, as the Herders preach, might not he have planted us like a gardener plants a seed, tending it for a time and then leaving it to grow as it will?”
“That is an interesting idea,” I said. “But if there were such a Lud, I wonder what it would make of the intolerant Lud of the Gadfians or the punitive Lud of the Herders.”
“It would not think of them at all,” Iriny said.
Once at the base of Stonehill, Rawen, insisted she could carry both if us as long as we did not ask her to gallop, and we
rode slowly to Halfmoon Bay. It was nearly four in the morning when I bade the mare stop and let us down. A quarter league from the city, I could hear the muted sounds of laughter and music as we dismounted, which suggested that many were still celebrating the coming masked moon fair in advance. Rawen cantered briskly away along the sand, promising not to stray too far so that she could come swiftly when I summoned her. Then we walked the rest of the way along the shore on foot. I had no fear that we might be seen, because the moon had set now and it was very dark.
The sea gate was not completely open when we reached it, for waves still nibbled at the base of the wall, but I decided not to wait. When I turned to say as much to Iriny, I saw that she was already unlacing her sandals. I took off my own boots, wincing at the blisters on my heels, and followed her as she waded through the water around the end of the wall and into the city.
“What now?” Iriny asked after we had replaced our shoes.
“We will go to Rolf’s house. Erit must have been delayed,” I said. I had told her in more detail, as Rawen plodded along, all that had occurred in Halfmoon Bay before I had come to Stonehill.
The sound of boots marching in unison on the cobbles made us exchange one swift glance and then dive under the boardwalk that ran along the seaward edge of the city. When the tide was in, the waves would run right up under it, but now it was dry enough, though the sand was too wet to sit on, so we crouched down to wait.
I held my breath, listening as the boots came closer. Iriny lifted four fingers to indicate four walkers, and I rolled my eyes. Then there was the sound of wood thudding. The boots came to a halt almost directly over our heads, and I sent out a probe. That I could not reach the minds of any of the walkers told me they were soldier guards wearing demon bands. They began to speak of the morrow, one congratulating the other for having managed to be off duty on the first day of the masked moon fair. The other grumbled that women were much more inclined to smile at a man in uniform. Better if he had the last day of the fair off, having had the chance to flaunt himself first in his uniform. The other laughed, sneering at him for needing such trappings.