Perhaps when you live so long, Eolair thought, you learn to exist by such rules—learn you must exist by such rules. Forever is a long time to carry grudges, after all.
More at ease now, he entered the discussion—hesitantly at first, but when he saw that his opinion was to be given due weight he spoke openly and confidently about Naglimund, a place he knew almost as well as he knew the Taig in Hernysadharc. He had been there many times: Eolair had often found that Josua’s was a useful ear for introducing things into the court of his father, King John Presbyter. The prince was one of the few people the Count of Nad Mullach knew who would listen to an idea on its own merits, then support it if he found it good, regardless of whether it benefited him.
They talked long; eventually the fire burned down to glowing coals. Likimeya produced one of the crystal globes from her cloak and set it on the ground before her where it gradually grew bright; soon it cast its cool lunar glow all around the circle.
Eolair met Isom on his way back from the council of the Sithi.
“Ho, Count,” the young Rimmersman said. “Out for a stroll? I have a skin of wine here—from your own Nad Mullach cellars, I think. Let’s find Ule and share it.”
“Gladly. I have had a strange evening. Our allies ... Isorn, they are like nothing and no one I have ever seen.”
“They are the Old Ones, and heathen on top of it,” Isorn said blithely, then laughed. “Apologies, Count. I sometimes forget that you Hernystiri are ...”
“Also heathens?” Eolair smiled faintly. “No offense was taken. I have grown used to being the outsider, the odd one, during my years in Aedonite courts. But I have never felt so much the odd man as I did tonight.”
“The Sithi may be different from us, Eolair, but they are bold as thunder.”
“Yes, and clever. I did not understand all that was spoken of tonight, but I think that we have neither of us ever seen a battle like the one that will take place at Naglimund.”
Isorn lifted an eyebrow, intrigued. “That is something to save and tell over that wine, but I am glad to hear it. If we live, we will have stories to amaze our grandchildren.”
“If we live,” Eolair said.
“Come, let us walk a little faster.” Isorn’s voice was light. “I am getting thirsty.”
They rode across the Inniscrich the next day. The battlefield where Skali had triumphed and King Lluth had received his death-wound was still partially blanketed in snow, but that snow was full of irregular hummocks, and here and there a bit of rusted metal or a weathered spearhaft stuck up through the shrouding white. Although many prayers and curses were quietly spoken, none of the Hernystiri had any great interest in lingering at the site where they had been so soundly defeated and so many of their people had died, and for the Sithi it had no significance at all, so the great company passed by swiftly as they rode north along the river.
The Baraillean marked the boundary between Hernystir and Erkynland: the people of Utanyeat on the river’s eastern side called it the Greenwade. These days, there were few living near either bank, although there were still fish to catch. The weather might have grown warmer, but Eolair could see that the land was almost lifeless. Those few survivors of the various struggles who still scratched out their lives here on the southern edge of the Frostmarch now fled before the approaching army of Sithi and men, unable to imagine any good that yet one more troop of armored invaders might bring.
At last, a week’s journeying north of Nad Mullach—even when they were not in full charge the Sithi moved swiftly—the host crossed the river and moved into Utanyeat, the westernmost tip of Erkynland. Here the land seemed to grow more gray. The thick morning mists that had blanketed the ground during the ride across Hernystir no longer dispersed with the sun’s ascension, so that the army rode from dawn to dusk in a cold, damp haze, like souls in some cloudy afterlife. In fact, a deathly pall seemed to hang over all the plains. The air was cold and seemed to reach directly into the bones of Eolair and his fellows. But for the wind and the muffled hoofbeats of their own horses, the wide countryside was silent, devoid even of birdsong. At night, as the count huddled with Maegwin and Isorn before the fire, a heavy stillness lay over everything. It felt, Isorn remarked one night, as though they were passing through a vast graveyard.
As each day brought them deeper into this colorless, cheerless country, Isorn’s Rimmersmen prayed and made the Tree-sign frequently, and argued almost to bloodletting over insignificant things. Eolair’s Hernystiri were no less affected. Even the Sithi seemed more reserved than usual. The ever-present mists and forbidding silence made all endeavor seem shallow and pointless.
Eolair found himself hoping that there would be some sign of their foes soon. The sense of foreboding that hung over these empty lands was a more insidious enemy, the count felt sure, than anything composed of flesh and blood could ever be. Even the frighteningly alien Norns were preferable to this journey through the netherworld.
“I feel something,” said Isorn. “Something pricks at my neck.”
Eolair nodded, then realized the duke’s son probably could not see him through the mist, although he rode only a short distance away. “I feel it, too.”
They were nine days out of Nad Mullach. Either the weather had again gone bad, or in this small part of the world the winter had never abated. The ground was carpeted in snow, and great uneven drifts lay humped on either side as they rode up the low hill. The failing sun was somewhere out of sight, the afternoon so gray there might never have been such a thing as a sun at all.
There was a clatter of armor and a flurry of words in the liquid Sithi speech from up ahead. Eolair squinted through the murk. “We are stopping.” He spurred his horse forward. Isorn followed him, with Maegwin, who had ridden silently all day, close behind.
The Sithi had indeed reined up, and now sat silently on their horses as if waiting for something, their bright-colored armor and proud banners dimmed by the mist. Eolair rode through their ranks until he found Jiriki and Likimeya. They were staring ahead, but he saw nothing in the shifting fog that seemed worth their attention.
“We have halted,” said the count.
Likimeya turned to him. “We have found what we sought.” Her features seemed stony, as though her whole face had now become a mask.
“But I see nothing.” Eolair turned to Isorn, who shrugged to show that he was no different.
“You will,” said Likimeya. “Wait.”
Puzzled, Eolair patted his horse’s neck and wondered. There was a stirring as the wind rose again, fluttering his cloak. The mists swirled, and suddenly something dark appeared as the murk before them thinned.
The great curtain wall of Naglimund was ragged, many of its stones tumbled out like the scales of a rotting fish. In the midst of its great, gray length was a rubble-filled gap where the gate had stood, a sagging, toothless mouth. Beyond, showing even more faintly through the tendrils of mist, Naglimund’s square stone towers loomed up beyond the walls, the dark windows glaring like the empty, bone-socket eyes of a skull.
“Brynioch,” Eolair gasped.
“By the Ransomer,” said Isorn, just as chilled.
“You see?” Likimeya asked. Eolair thought he detected a dreadful sort of humor in her voice. “We have arrived.”
“It is Scadach.” Maegwin sounded terrified. “The Hole in Heaven. Now I have seen it.”
“But where is Naglimund-town?” Eolair asked. “There was a whole city at the castle’s foot!”
“We have passed it, or at least its ruins,” Jiriki said. “What little remains of it is now beneath the snows.”
“Brynioch!” Eolair felt quite stupefied as he stared first at the insignificant-seeming lumps of earth and snow behind them, then turned back to the huge pile of crumbling stone just ahead. It seemed dead, yet as he gazed at it his nerves felt tight as lute strings and his heart was pounding. “Do we just ride in?” he asked no one in particular. Just thinking about it was like contemplating a headfirst crawl in
to a dark tunnel full of spiders.
“I will not go in that place,” Maegwin said harshly. She was pale. For the first time since her madness had descended, she looked truly and completely fearful. “If you enter Scadach, you leave Heaven and its protection. It is a place from which nothing returns.”
Eolair did not even have the heart to say anything soothing, but he reached out and took her gloved hand. Their horses stood quietly side by side, vaporous breath mingling.
“We will not ride into that place, no,” Jiriki said solemnly. “Not yet.”
Even as he spoke, flickering yellow lights bloomed in the depths of the black tower windows, as though whatever owned those empty eyes had just awakened.
Rachel the Dragon slept uneasily in her tiny room deep in the Hayholt’s underground warrens.
She dreamed that she was again in her old room, the chambermaids’ room that she knew so well. She was alone, and in her dream she was angry: her foolish girls were always so hard to find.
Something was scratching at the door; Rachel had a sudden certainty that it was Simon. Even in the midst of the dream, though, she remembered that she had been fooled once before by such a noise. She went carefully and quietly to the doorway and stood beside it for a moment, listening to the furtive noises outside.
“Simon?” she said. “Is that you?”
The voice that came back was indeed that of her long-lost ward, but it seemed stretched and thin, as though it traveled a long distance to reach her ear.
“Rachel, I want to come back. Please help me. I want to come back. ” The scratching resumed, insistent, strangely loud....
The onetime Mistress of Chambermaids jerked awake, shivering with cold and fear. Her heart was beating very fast.
There. There was that noise again, just as she had heard it in the dream—but now she was awake. It was a strange sound, not so much a scratching as a hollow scraping, distant but regular. Rachel sat up.
This was no dream, she knew. She thought she had heard something like it as she was falling off to sleep, but had dismissed it. Could it be rats in the walls? Or something worse? Rachel sat up on her straw pallet. The small brazier with its few coals did no more than give the room a faint red sheen.
Rats in stone walls as thick as these? It was possible, but it didn’t seem likely.
What else would it be, you old fool? Something is making that noise.
Rachel sat up and moved stealthily toward the brazier. She took a handful of rushes from her carefully collected pile and dipped one end into the coals. After they had caught, she lifted the makeshift torch high.
The room, so familiar after all these weeks, was empty but for her stores. She bent low to look into the shadowy corners, but saw nothing moving. The scraping noise was a little fainter now but still unmistakable. It seemed to be coming from the far wall. Rachel took a step toward it and smacked her bare foot against her wooden keepsake chest, which she had neglected to push back against the wall after examining its sparse contents the night before. She let out a muffled shriek of pain and dropped a few of the flaming rushes, then quickly hobbled to her jug for a handful of water to put them out. When this was done, she stood on one foot while she rubbed her smarting toes.
When the pain subsided, she realized that the noise had also stopped. Either her surprised cry had frightened the noise-maker away—likely if it were a rat or mouse—or merely warned the thing that someone was listening. The thought of something sitting quietly within the walls, aware now that someone was on the other side of the stone, was not one that Rachel wished to pursue.
Rats, she told herself. Of course it’s rats. They smell the food I’ve got in here, little demon imps.
Whatever the cause had been, the noise was gone now. Rachel sat down on her stool and began to pull on her shoes. There was no point trying to sleep now.
What a strange dream about Simon, she thought. Could it be his spirit is restless? I know that monster murdered him. There are tales that the dead can’t rest till their murderers are punished. But I already did my best to punish Pryrates, and look where it got me. No good to anyone.
Thinking of Simon condemned to some lonely darkness was both sad and frightening.
Get up, woman. Do something useful.
She decided that she would set out more food for poor blind Guthwulf.
A brief sojourn to the room with a slit of window upstairs confirmed that it was almost dawn. Rachel stared at the dark blue of the sky and the faded stars and felt a little reassured.
I’m still waking up regular, even if I live in the dark most days like a mole. That’s something.
She descended to her hidden room, pausing in the doorway to listen for the scraping noises. The room was silent. After she had found suitable fare for both the earl and his feline familiar, she donned her heavy cloak and made her way down the stairwell to the secret passageway behind the tapestry on the landing.
When she arrived at the spot where she customarily left Guthwulf’s meal, she found to her distress that the previous morning’s food had not been touched: neither man nor cat had come.
He’s never missed two days running since we started, she thought worriedly. Blessed Rhiap, has the poor man fallen down somewhere?
Rachel collected the untouched food and put out more, as though somehow a slightly different arrangement of what was really the same dried fruit and dried meat could tempt back her wandering earl.
If he doesn’t come today, she decided, I’ll have to go and look for him. He has no one else to see to him, after all. It’s the Aedonite thing to do.
Full of worry, Rachel made her way back to her room.
The sight of Binabik seated on a gray wolf as though it were a war-horse, his walking-stick couched like a lance, might have been comical in other circumstances, but Isgrimnur felt no urge even to smile.
“Still I am not sure this is the best thing,” Josua said. “I fear we will miss your wisdom, Binabik of Yiqanuc.”
“Then that is being all the larger reason for me to begin my journey now, since it will be ended so much more soon.” The troll scratched behind Qantaqa’s ears.
“Where is your lady?” Isgrimnur asked, looking around. Dawn was creeping into the sky overhead, but the hillside was deserted except for the three men and the wolf. “I would think she’d want to come. and say farewell.”
Binabik did not meet his eye, but rather stared at Qantaqa’s shaggy neck. “We were saying our farewells in the earliness of the morning, Sisqi and I,” he said quietly. “It is a hard thing for her to see me riding away.”
Isgrimnur felt a great wash of regret for all the unwise, unthinking remarks he had ever made about trolls. They were small and strange, but they were certainly as bold-hearted as bigger men. He extended his hand for Binabik to clasp.
“Ride safely,” the duke said. “Come back to us.”
Josua did the same. “I hope you find Miriamele and Simon. But if you do not, there is no shame in it. As Isgrimnur said, come back to us as soon as you can, Binabik.”
“And I am hoping that things will be going well for you in Nabban.”
“But how will you find us?” Josua asked suddenly, his long face worried.
Binabik stared at him for a moment, then, surprisingly, let out a loud laugh. “How can I be finding an army of grasslanders and stone-dwellers mixed together, led by a dead hero of great famousness and a one-handed prince? I am thinking that it will not be difficult obtaining word of you.”
Josua’s face relaxed into a smile. “I suppose you are right. Farewell, Binabik.” He raised his hand, exposing for a moment the dulled manacle he wore as a reminder of his imprisonment and the debt he owed his brother for it.
“Farewell, Josua and Isgrimnur,” said the troll. “Please be saying that for me to the others as well. I could not bear to be making good-byes to all at once.” He leaned forward to whisper something to the patiently waiting wolf, then turned back toward them. “In the mountains, we are saying this:
‘Inij koku na siqqasa min taq’— ‘When we meet again, that will be a good day.’ ” He sunk both his hands into the wolf’s hackles. “Hinik, Qantaqa. Find Simon. Hinik ummu!”
The wolf leaped forward up the wet hillside. Binabik swayed on her broad back but kept his seat. Isgrimnur and Josua watched until the strange rider and his stranger mount topped the hill’s crest and vanished from sight.
“I fear I will never see them again,” said Josua. “I am cold, Isgrimnur.”
The duke put his hand on the prince’s shoulder. He was not himself feeling either very warm or very happy. “Let’s go back. We have near a thousand people we need to get moving by the time the sun is above the hilltops.”
Josua nodded. “So we do. Come, then.”
They turned and retraced their own footsteps in the sodden grass.
4
A Thousand Leaves, A Thousand Shadows
Miriamele and Simon spent the first week of their flight in the forest. The traveling was slow and painfully laborious, but Miriamele had decided long before her escape that it would be far better to lose time than to be captured. The daylight hours were spent struggling through the dense trees and matted, tangling undergrowth, all to the tune of Simon’s grumbling. They led their horses more often than they rode them.
“Be happy,” she told him once as they rested in a clearing, leaning against the trunk of an old oak. “At least we are getting to see the sun for a few days. When we leave the forest again, we’ll be riding by night.”
“At least if we ride at night I won’t have to look at the things that are tearing all the skin off my body,” Simon said crossly, rubbing at his tattered breeches and the bruised flesh underneath.
It was heartening, Miriamele discovered, to have something to do. The feeling of helpless dread that had gripped her for weeks faded away, leaving her able to think clearly, to see everything around her as if with new eyes ... and even to enjoy being with Simon.