The raven blinked its golden eye, then uttered a harsh noise and took wing. The tattered curtain fluttered where it passed out through the window and into the stinging wind.
“Please, may I hold him?” Maegwin extended her arms.
With a worried look on her dust-smeared face, the young mother handed the baby to her. Maegwin could not help wondering if the woman was frightened of her—the king’s daughter, with her dark mourning clothes and strange ways.
“I’m just so afraid he’ll be wicked, my lady,” said the young woman. “He’s been crying all day, till I nearly run mad. He’s hungry, poor little thing, but I don’t want him screaming ’round you, Lady. You’ve more important things to think about.”
Maegwin felt the chill that had touched her heart thaw a little. “Never worry about that.” She bounced the pink-faced baby, who did seem to be on the brink of another outburst. “Tell me his name, Caihwye.”
The young woman looked up, startled. “You know me, Lady?”
Maegwin smiled sadly. “We are not so very many, any more. Far less than a thousand in these caverns all told. No, there are not so many people in Free Hernystir that I have trouble remembering them.”
Caihwye nodded, wide-eyed. “It is terrible.” She had probably been pretty before the war, but now she had lost teeth and was dreadfully thin. Maegwin was certain that she had been giving most of what food she had to her baby.
“The child’s name?” Maegwin reminded her.
“Oh! Siadreth, my lady. It was his father’s name.” Caihwye shook her head sadly; Maegwin did not ask after the child’s namesake. For most of the survivors, discussions about fathers, husbands, and sons were sadly predictable. Most of the stories ended with the battle at the Inniscrich.
“Princess Maegwin.” Old Craobhan had been watching silently until now. “We must go. There are more people waiting for you.”
She nodded. “You are right.” Gently, she handed the child back to his mother. The small pink face wrinkled, preparing to shed tears. “He is very beautiful, Caihwye. May all the gods bless him, and Mircha herself give him good health. He will be a fine man.”
Caihwye smiled and jiggled young Siadreth in her lap until he forgot what he had been about to do. “Thank you, Lady. I’m so glad you came back well.”
Maegwin, who had been turning away, paused. “Came back?”
The young woman looked startled, frightened she’d said something wrong. “From under the ground, Lady.” She pointed downward with her free hand. “From down in the deeper caverns. It is you the gods must favor, to bring you back from such a dark place.”
Maegwin stared for a moment, then forced a smile. “I suppose. Yes, I am glad to be back, too.” She stroked the baby’s head once more before turning to follow Craobhan.
“I know that judging disputes is not so enjoyable a task for a woman as dandling babies,” Old Craobhan said over his shoulder, “but this is something you must do anyway. You are Lluth’s daughter.”
Maegwin grimaced, but would not be distracted. “How did that woman know I had been in the caverns below?”
The old man shrugged. “You didn’t work very hard to keep it secret, and you can’t expect people not to be interested in the doings of the king’s family. Tongues will always wag.”
Maegwin frowned. Craobhan was right, of course. She had been heedless and headstrong about exploring the lower caverns. If she wanted secrecy, she should have started worrying about it sooner.
“What do they think about it?” she asked at last. “The people, I mean.”
“Think about your adventuring?” He chuckled sourly. “I imagine there’s as many stories as there are cookfires. Some say you went looking for the gods. Some think you were looking for a bolt hole out of this whole muddle.” He peered at her over his bony shoulder. His self-satisfied, knowing look made her want to smack him. “By the middle of winter they’ll be saying you found a city of gold, or fought a dragon or a two-headed giant. Forget about it. Stories are like hares—only a fool tries to run after one and catch it.”
Maegwin glowered at the back of his old bald head. She didn’t know which she liked less, having people tell lies about her or having people know the truth. She suddenly wished Eolair had returned.
Fickle cow, she sneered at herself.
But she did. She wished she could talk to him, tell him of all her ideas, even the mad ones. He would understand, wouldn’t he? Or would it only confirm his belief in her wretchedness? It mattered little, anyway: Eolair had been gone for more than a month, and Maegwin did not even know if he still lived. She herself had sent him away. Now, she heartily wished that she had not.
Fearful but resolute, Maegwin had never softened the cold words she had spoken to Count Eolair down in the buried city of Mezutu’a. They had barely conversed during the few days that passed between their return from that place and his departure in search of Josua’s rumored rebel camp.
Eolair had spent most of those days down in the ancient city, overseeing a pair of stronghearted Hernystiri clerks as they copied the dwarrows’ stone maps onto more portable rolls of sheepshide. Maegwin had not accompanied him; despite the dwarrows’ kindness, the thought of the empty, echoing city only filled her with sullen disappointment. She had been wrong. Not mad, as many thought her, but certainly wrong. She had thought the gods meant her to find the Sithi there, but now it seemed clear that the Sithi were lost and frightened and would be no help to her people. As for the dwarrows, the Sithi’s once-servants, they were little more than shadows, incapable of helping even themselves.
At Eolair’s parting, Maegwin had been so full of warring feelings that she could muster little more than a curt farewell. He had pressed into her hand a gift sent by the dwarrows—it was a glossy gray and white chunk of crystal on which Yis-fidri, the record-keeper, had carved her name in his own runic alphabet. It almost looked as though it might be part of the Shard itself, but it lacked that stone’s restless inner light. Eolair had then turned and mounted his horse, struggling to hide his anger. She had felt something tearing inside her as the Count of Nad Mullach rode away down the slope and vanished into the flurrying snow. Surely, she had prayed, the gods must bear her up in this desperate time. The gods, though, seemed slow to lend their aid these days.
Maegwin had thought at first that her dreams about an underground city were signs of the gods’ willingness to help their stricken followers in Hernystir. Maegwin knew now that somehow she had made a mistake. She had thought to find the Sithi, the ancient and legendary allies, to force her way in through the very gates of legend to bring help to Hernystir—but that had been prideful foolishness. The gods invited, they were not invaded.
Maegwin had been mistaken in that small thing, but still she knew that she was not altogether wrong. No matter what misdeeds her people had done, the gods would not so easily desert them. Brynioch, Rhynn, Murhagh One-Arm—they would save their children, she was sure of it. Somehow, they would bring destruction to Skali and Elias the High King, the bestial pair who had brought such humiliation on a proud and free people. If they did not, then the world was an empty jest. So Maegwin would wait for a better, clearer sign, and while she waited, she would go quitely about her duties ... tending to her people and mourning her dead.
“What suits do I hear today?” she asked Old Craobhan.
“Some small ones, as well as a request for judgment that should prove no joy,” Craobhan replied. “That one comes from House Earb and House Lacha, which were neighboring holdings on the Circoille fringe.” The old man had been king’s counselor since Maegwin’s grandfather’s day, and knew. the fantastical ins and outs of Hernystiri political life the way a master smith knew the vagaries of heat and metal. “Both families shared a section of the woods as their vouchsafe,” he explained, “—the only time your father had to declare separate rights to forest land and draw up a map of possession for each, like the Aedonite kings do, just to keep Earb-men and Lacha-men from slaughtering each other. T
hey loathe each other and the two houses have fought forever. They barely took time to go to war against Skali, and they may not have noticed that we lost.” He coughed and spat.
“So what is wanted of me?”
Craobhan frowned. “What would you guess, Lady? They quarrel now over cavern space—” his voice rose in mockery, “‘—this place is for me, this for thee. No, no, it’s mine; no, mine.’ ” He snorted. “They squabble like piglets over the last teat, even as we all shelter together in danger and poor conditions.”
“They sound a disgusting group.” Maegwin had little temper for such petty nonsense.
“I couldn’t have said fairer myself,” the old man said.
Neither House Lacha nor House Earb benefited much from Maegwin’s presence. Their dispute proved just as petty as Craobhan had predicted. A tunnel to the surface had been dug out and widened to useful size by men from both houses with the additional help of Hernystirmen from other, less important families who shared the common cavern. Now each of the feuding houses insisted that it alone was the tunnel’s owner, and that the other house and all other cavern-dwellers should pay a tithe of goatsmilk for taking their flocks up and down the tunnel each day.
Maegwin was mightily disgusted by this and said so. She also proclaimed that if such rank nonsense as people “owning” tunnels ever came up again, she would have the remainder of Hernystir’s fighting men gather up the malefactors, take them to the surface, and throw them from the highest cliffs that craggy Grianspog could provide.
Houses Lacha and Earb were not pleased by this judgment. They managed to put aside their differences long enough to demand that Maegwin be replaced as judge by her stepmother Inahwen—who was after all, they said, the late King Lluth’s wife, and not merely his daughter. Maegwin laughed and called them conniving fools. The spectators who had gathered, along with the remaining families that shared the cavern with the feuding houses, cheered Maegwin’s good sense and the humbling of the haughty Earb- and Lacha-folk.
The rest of the suits went quickly. Maegwin found herself enjoying the work, although some of the disputes were sad. It was something she did well—something that had little to do with being small or delicate or pretty. Surrounded by lovelier, more graceful women, she had always felt herself an embarrassment to her father, even at a rustic court like the Taig. Here, all that mattered was her good sense. In the past weeks, she had found—to her surprise—that her father’s subjects valued her, that they were grateful for her willingness to listen and be fair. As she watched her people, tattered and smoke-smudged, she felt her heart tighten within her. The Hernystiri deserved better than this low estate. They would get it, somehow, if it was within Maegwin’s power.
For a while, she managed to forgot almost entirely about her cruelty to the Count of Nad Mullach.
That evening, as she lay on the edge of sleep, Maegwin found herself abruptly falling forward into a darkness vaster and deeper than the ember-lit cavern where she made her bed. For a moment she thought some cataclysm had torn open the earth beneath her; a moment later, she was certain that she dreamed. But as she felt herself slowly spinning into emptiness, the sensation seemed far too immediate for a dream, and yet too strangely dislocated to be anything so real as an earth tremor. She had felt something like this before, those nights when she had dreamed of the beautiful city beneath the earth....
Even as her confused thoughts fluttered in darkness like startled bats, a cloud of dim lights began to appear. They were fireflies, or sparks, or distant torches. They spiraled upward, like the smoke of a great bonfire, mounting toward some unimaginable height.
Climb, said a voice in her head. Go to the High Place. The time is come.
Swimming in nothingness, Maegwin struggled toward the distant peak where the flickering lights congregated.
Go to the High Place, the voice demanded. The time is come.
And suddenly she was in the midst of many gleaming lights, small and intense as distant stars. A hazy throng surrounded her, beautiful yet inhuman, dressed in all the colors of the rainbow. The creatures stared at each other with gleaming eyes. Their graceful forms were vague; although they were man-shaped, she somehow felt sure they were no more human than rain clouds or spotted deer.
The time is come, said the voice, now many voices. A smear of leaping, coruscating light glowed in the midst of them, as though one of the stars had fallen down from the vaulting sky. Go to the High Place....
And then the fantastic vision was bleeding away, draining back into darkness.
Maegwin woke to discover herself sitting upright on her pallet. The fires were only glowing coals. There was nothing to be seen in the darkened cavern, and nothing to hear but the sound of other people breathing in sleep. She was clutching Yis-fidri’s dwarrow-stone so tightly that her knuckles throbbed with pain. For a moment she thought a faint light gleamed in its depths, but when she looked again she decided she had fooled herself: it was only a translucent lump of rock. She shook her head slowly. The stone was of no importance, anyway, compared to what she had experienced.
The gods. The gods had spoken to her again, even more plainly this time. The high place, they had said. The time had come. That must mean that at last the lords of her people were ready to reach out and aid Hernystir. And they wanted Maegwin to do something. They must, or they would not have touched her, would not have sent her this clear sign.
The small matters of the day just passed were now swept from her mind. The high place, she told herself. She sat for a long time in the darkness, thinking.
After checking carefully to make sure that Earl Aspitis was still up on deck, Miriamele hurried down the narrow passageway and rapped on the low door. A murmuring voice inside fell silent at the sound of Miriamele’s knock.
The reply came some moments later. “Yes? Who is there?”
“Lady Marya. May I come in?”
“Come.”
Miriamele pushed against the swollen door. It gave grudgingly, opening on a tiny, austere room. Gan Itai sat on a pallet beneath the open window, which was little more than a narrow slit near the top of the wall. Something moved there; Miriamele saw a smooth expanse of white neck and a flash of yellow eye, then the seagull dropped away and vanished.
“The gulls are like children.” Gan Itai showed her guest a wrinkled smile. “Argumentative, forgetful, but sweet-hearted.”
Miriamele shook her head, confused. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Bother? Child, what a foolish idea. It is daylight, I have no singing to do for now. Why would you be a bother?”
“I don’t know, I just . . .” Miriamele paused, trying to collect her thoughts. She wasn’t really certain why she had come. “I ... I need someone to talk to, Gan Itai. I’m frightened.”
The Niskie reached over to a three-legged stool which appeared to serve as a table. Her nimble brown fingers swept several sea-polished stones off the seat and into the pocket of her robe, then she pushed the stool over to Miriamele.
“Sit, child. Do not hurry yourself.”
Miriamele arranged her skirt, wondering how much she dared to tell the Niskie. But if Gan Itai was carrying secret messages for Cadrach, how much could there be that she still did not know? She had certainly seemed to know that Marya was a false name. There was nothing to do but roll the dice.
“Do you know who I am?”
The sea-watcher smiled again. “You are Lady Marya, a noblewoman from Erkynland.”
Miriamele was startled. “I am?”
The Niskie’s laugh hissed like wind through dry grass. “Are you not? You have certainly told enough people that name. But if you mean to ask Gan Itai who you truly are, I will tell you, or at least I will start with this: Miriamele is your name, daughter of the High King.”
Miriamele was curiously relieved. “So you do know.”
“Your companion Cadrach confirmed it for me. I had suspicions. I met your father, once. You smell like him; sound like him, too.”
“I d
o? You did?” Miriamele felt as though she had lost her balance. “What do you mean?”
“Your father met Benigaris here on this boat two years gone, when Benigaris was only the duke’s son. Aspitis, Eadne Cloud’s master, hosted the gathering. That strange wizard-creature was here, too—the one with no hair.” Gan Itai made a smoothing gesture across her head.
“Pryrates.” The name’s evil taste lingered in her mouth.
“Yes, that is the one.” Gan Itai sat up straighter, cocking her ear to some far-away sound. After a moment she turned her attention back to her guest. “I do not learn the names of all the folk who ride this boat. I do pay sharp attention to everyone who treads the gangplank, of course—that is part of the Navigator’s Trust—but names are not usually important to sea-watchers. That time, though, Aspitis told me all their names, as my children used to sing to me their lessons about the tides and currents. He was very proud of his important guests.”
Miriamele was momentarily distracted. “Your children?”
“By the Uncharted, yes, certainly!” Gan Itai nodded. “I am a great-grandmother twenty times over.”
“I’ve never seen Niskie children.”
The old woman looked at her dourly. “I know you are a southerner only by birth, child, but even in Meremund where you grew up there is a small Niskie town near the docks. Did you never go there?”
Miriamele shook her head. “I wasn’t allowed.”
Gan Itai pursed her lips. “That is unhappy. You should have gone to see it. We are fewer now than we once were, and who knows what will come on tomorrow’s tide? My family is one of the largest, but there are fewer than ten score families all together from Abaingeat on the north coast all the way down to Naraxi and Harcha. So few for all the deep-water ships!” She shook her head sadly.
“But when my father and those others were here, what did they say? What did they do?”