by Ian Irvine
Karan reeled, clinging to a tree for support. “I’m not afraid of Llian. He would never harm me.”
“You must protect yourself,” said Shand in steely tones.
Her temper flared. “You’ve always been prejudiced against Llian, because he’s Zain.”
“I know the treacheries of the Zain better than anyone on this world.”
His bitterness shocked her. “I won’t believe that of Llian,” she said. She kicked a stone, which shot down the track, bounced high and crashed into a branch, sending down a small shower of snow. “When he comes to me, what am I supposed to do? Llian has always trusted me, no matter what.”
“But you’ve just spent the last hour telling me how worried you were.”
“I had to tell someone,” she wailed. “Leave me alone; I didn’t ask you to take over my life.” She flung herself off the path into the forest, hurtling up into a thicket where she bogged in deep snow. She hurled it about with her arms.
Shand ran after her. “This is too important to have tantrums about.”
“I’m not having a tantrum!” she said abruptly. “I just can’t do it, even if you are right.”
He led her out of the black forest into bright sunshine. Karan sat down on a boulder of schist, tracing the looping, knotted grain of the rock with a finger. Shand stared down the road, fighting some internal battle.
“I’m going back,” said Karan. “Llian’s all alone.”
“He’s all right; I looked in on him before breakfast. We’ve got to get this sorted out.”
“The only way to sort it out is to talk to Llian.”
“No!” Shand yelled. Then he lowered his voice. “That will alert Rulke. Say nothing to Llian, I beg you. Pretend that it never happened.”
“That’s how you solve your problems, is it?” she said angrily.
“It’s the best way with this one, believe me.”
“I don’t believe you; I can’t do it.”
“You must,” Shand repeated in obsidian tones.
“You’re tearing me apart,” said Karan, banging her knuckles on her forehead. “After all Llian has done for me. If he has been corrupted, it’s my fault.”
“Whatever Llian did was of his own free will.”
“You’re making a terrible mistake.”
“Who knows the Zain better than I do, Karan?” Shand said bitterly. “Watching them has been the work of half my life.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not.” He paced down the track then came back, his back bowed.
She stepped into his path. “Well, what are you going to do?”
Shand sat down on bare ice and put his head in his hands. It was hard to get out the words he needed to say. “If this was war…”
“It isn’t!” she snapped. “Llian is mine, Shand, and I will defend him with my last breath, even against you. In spite of all you’ve done for me and all I feel for you.”
“He must be taken to Thurkad and examined properly, with all the tools of the Secret Art.”
“And then? What do you do with my Llian then, Shand?”
“He’ll have to be guarded night and day. At least!”
“Be damned!” she cried wildly. “There’ll be blood spilled if anyone tries!”
“Karan,” said Shand, more gently, “you don’t know what’s at stake.”
“I know what my stake is!” She went down on her knees before him. “Shand, leave him in my custody, please. Let me take him to Gothryme. Even if he is… what you say he is, he can’t get up to any mischief there. There’s nothing and no one to spy on.”
“This isn’t a game, you know.”
“Do you think it’s a game to me? Look, can Rulke make Llian do things that are not in his power now?”
“No!” said Shand grudgingly.
“Can Llian use the Secret Art, or wield a weapon as if he was trained to it?”
“Of course not! Possession cannot confer the powers or the skills of the one that does the possessing.”
“Then even if you are right, all he can do is spy. What harm can he do in Gothryme?”
“And if he escapes?”
“I’ll send word instantly, and track him down myself.”
“I don’t like it.” He paced down the track again, arms and legs jerking. “All right, I’ll come to Gothryme,” he said reluctantly. “But on one condition.”
“Anything!” she said unguardedly.
“You must agree to do as I require.”
“Of course!” She sighed her relief.
“I saw Malien in Thurkad,” Shand said. “She said she might see you in the winter. We’ll put him under the guard of the Aachim, if they do turn up, and I’ll come home.”
“I’ll be glad to have them,” said Karan. Malien was kin and would understand her view. “Though if things are as bad as you say I don’t know what they’ll eat. And how was Tensor?”
“No better. No worse.”
“Well, what is it that I must agree to?”
They headed back again, arguing all the way, and it was not until they were almost to the inn that Karan succumbed to Shand’s demands. She felt as if something inside her had been murdered.
Llian woke with a terrible headache. The bed was empty. Where was Karan? He dressed as best he could. Every time he moved his head it shrieked and whirled nauseatingly. Downstairs he was given curious looks but felt too ill to wonder about them.
It was stiflingly hot in the kitchen. A few spoons of porridge was all he could manage. Lurching outside, he wobbled down in the direction of the woodheap. There he hung over a block of wood, too ill to move.
Later, as he began to feel better, he heard voices from the track below. Karan’s voice was unmistakeable. He wanted to run to her for comfort.
“I can’t,” she said in a frail voice. It sounded as if she was crying.
It took a few words before he recognized the other—Shand! Shand was back! Had he been capable of it, Llian would have leapt out and embraced him. Then he was glad that he hadn’t.
“Llian is the enemy now,” Shand said in steely tones. “Rulke has surely possessed him. After last night you can never trust him.”
Last night? What was Shand talking about? A fragment of the nightmare dribbled back.
“No!” cried Karan. “How can you ask?”
“Llian is no more than a tool moved by Rulke, and a deadly one,” said Shand. “Do as I say or our bargain is broken. I’ll betray him if you don’t. I can’t compromise, Karan.”
“I thought you were my friend,” she wept.
“I am. You must put your feelings aside. The fate of a lot of people may rest on what you do now.”
“And Llian is one of them.”
“Karan!” Shand’s voice was as frigid as a glacier.
She broke. “I will do as you say,” she said in agony. Her words froze Llian inside.
“Say nothing to him about it; don’t even mention it.” They moved on up the path, out of Llian’s hearing.
Llian sat there for ages, staring at the tramped-down snow through the cage of his fingers. Karan had abandoned him, cast him aside and he didn’t have the faintest idea why. He wanted to flee but was too sick and sore. He wanted to die.
* * *
It was noon and the inn was serving lunch when Karan and Shand came downstairs again. Llian was sitting beside the fire, an untouched bowl in front of him. There was a huge bruise on the side of his head. His hair looked as if a rat had died in it. His skin was a sickly yellow color and his cheeks were burning, fever red. His eyes were red too, glassy, but his hands were blue.
“Shand!” Llian said coolly. “You’re back!” Karan would not meet his eye. She had been crying. “It’s good to see you, Shand. I need to talk to you.” Then he caught Karan’s eye on him and scowled. “I’ve such a headache, and I can’t seem to remember why.”
He rubbed the bruised side of his head, then winced. His fingers came away with a smear of fresh blood on th
em. He stared at the stains, looking confused. “I must have fallen down the stairs. I can’t remember anything.”
“Oh, Llian, what are we going to do with you?” Karan said. He looked sick and sad, and a little foolish, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. She disappeared through the door, almost running.
Shand stayed behind, plying Llian with wine and talking merrily about past times. Llian could not comprehend what had happened, for he had no memories of the night. One day he had been going along merrily, the next he was treated like a criminal.
He was not fooled by Shand’s pretense at friendliness. Karan was hopeless at hiding her feelings. Something had gone terribly wrong, and it had something to do with the wild dreams of last night, but he did not know what.
That night, after Shand went to bed, Llian caught Karan in the corridor.
“Karan, please tell me what the matter is.” He took her cold hands. “I’ve always trusted you.”
Karan’s hands lay limply in his. She was in agony. If she told Llian, Shand would betray him. She pulled away.
He put out his arms to her. “Please!”
She just stood there. A tear leaked from each eye and ran down her cheek. “Don’t, Llian,” she whispered. “Don’t do this to me. I can’t bear it.” Then she fled.
Llian was devastated. It was all over. Everything they had made together was broken. What was he to do?
And that night, and for many nights after, in his worst moments he wondered if he might not have betrayed them to Rulke after all, and not even known it.
Karan lay in her cold bed and could not sleep. Why? she kept thinking. Why had Llian done this? Or had he done it at all? She couldn’t tell. Once she would have relied on her own judgment but Shand had broken that defense. Why did I say yes to Shand? He’s wrong, I know he is.
Please come to me, Llian, she thought a hundred times that night. Come into my bed. Don’t say anything, just hold me in your arms and make everything like it used to be. I’ll break my word. We’ll run away into the mountains where no one can find us.
Then, when dawn was breaking and she still had not slept a wink: Why didn’t you come? If only you had come we could have worked this out.
But Llian did not dare. The rejection had broken him. He could not face the thought of it happening again.
35
* * *
HOMECOMING
Two days later they left Tullin, heading east toward the pass and Bannador. The sun came out the day they departed, turning the snows to mud and slush. That made the trip harder but they were seasoned travelers now and the week’s journey was uneventful, like most of the past months. The last day was the hardest, a slog through mud that was sometimes calf-deep. A slow silent trip, each preoccupied with their own troubles.
Llian had fallen behind. Shand came up beside Karan. It was his first chance to talk to her for days.
“Tell me about the dreams,” said Shand. “When did they begin?”
“In Flude!” she said.
“Have there been any more since Tullin?”
She did not feel like talking. She felt betrayed by Shand. The friendship between them had been fatally undermined. She forced herself to be polite.
“I haven’t!”
“And Llian?”
“He never speaks about them, but he often has them.”
They came down into what were called the Hills of Bannador, though they would have been mountains anywhere else. It was a land of steep ridges and deep gullies, barren after yet another dry year—a land dotted with little hamlets and isolated steadings each with its meager flocks of sheep or goats. They met no one that day, for the track followed the stony, waterless ridges.
After a day heading southeast they crossed into granite country: rounded rocky hills covered in straggly pines and broad valleys where there were crops and larger towns. From this point they saw signs of war everywhere—burnt fields and forests, broken bridges, ruined houses and, not far from Gothryme, a village reduced to ashes. The last building had been a stable, for the fire-scarred skeletons of half a dozen horses still lay among the rubble.
On they trudged. The anticipation became a hard lump in Karan’s chest, a tingle in her stomach. Even the terrible problem of Llian sank into the background before the prospect of being home again.
They reached the Ryme, the river that flowed through her land, watered the fields around the town of Tolryme and passed out of the valley east toward the sea. Karan pulled her hat down as they entered her town. She did not want to meet anyone, or explain anything, before she got home.
Tolryme was a poor but pretty place, an overgrown village really—a couple of hundred cottages, a handful of merchants, a market square, a library and a temple, all built in pink granite and gray-green slate. It was in sad shape: many of the cottages were reduced to blackened walls. The bridge across the Ryme was broken, the central arch a scatter of stones in the river. That did not matter at this time of year but it would in the spring, when the snow melted in the mountains and turned the Ryme into a torrent.
They forded the river and followed a winding track between high hedges. Through gaps in the hedges they saw trampled crops and the bones of slaughtered stock, long since picked clean.
Gothryme Manor was set in the upper part of a broad valley. The ridges that ran down on either side were grasscovered, their slopes broken with boulders and copses of small trees. They climbed the hill. The chimneys of Gothryme appeared. Home at last! Karan choked back tears. Nearly five hundred days had passed since she’d left with Maigraith for Fiz Gorgo, thinking to be away just two months. How young, foolish and afraid she’d been back then. So what had changed?
Karan felt self-conscious taking Llian and Shand home, seeing every deficiency, shabbiness and rusticity through their eyes. What would Shand, who had traveled the world and seen all of its splendor, who had once been wealthy and powerful, think of her home? What did Llian perceive with his all-seeing chronicler’s vision? Would he one day mock Gothryme in some rustic tale, an idle yarn spun in some barroom bawdy session?
Gothryme was small, just a battered keep of pink granite, with younger buildings of the same material extending in two wings from the rear. The keep was more or less oval in shape, and squat, only three storeys. It had a simple conical roof of green slate, a bare flagpole and a brass weathervane in the shape of a flying goose, though it had once been struck by lightning and the long goose neck hung limp.
The wings had originally been two-storeyed, roofed in slate, with small windows on the outside. Sometime later, long verandas had been added on the inside, and the open end enclosed with a low wall to which lean-to trellises had been attached and covered in vines. The kitchen gardens were further up the hill, on the sunny northern side. It all had a rustic, home-made look, but the gardens beside the front door were neat and the gravel path freshly raked.
Behind the garden was an orchard then a steep slope of grass, brown with boulders and huge outcrops of granite. Half a league further on, a broken cliff wall of pink granite blocked the way to the mountains. A narrow path wound its way up the cliff to the uninhabited uplands, rocky ridges and deep wet valleys, and her magnificent but useless Forest of Gothryme.
As they approached Karan saw that the stonework of the keep was battered at the front and most of one wing had been burnt to a stone shell. The other wing was also damaged, while some of the surrounding walls had been reduced to rubble.
“It might have been worse,” she said, though she was shocked at the destruction, and more so at the state of the town below. If this was mild damage, how must the rest of Bannador have suffered? Winter’s boot was on the threshold. After years of drought there were no reserves left. There would be famine before spring.
Despite their quiet approach the news had come before them and a small group waited on the front steps. They included Mavid the cook, small and pale with brown flour all over her apron, Nutan and Mara, leathery gnomes who had been gardeners since before sh
e’d been born, Old Mid the handyman and master brewer, as round as the barrels in his cellar, two cook’s helpers, one carrying a mop and the other a scrubbing brush, and Galgi the weaver, tall, longlimbed and twiggy-fingered, to say nothing of half a dozen children including mischievous Benie, the cook’s boy.
“Karan, Karan!” Benie screamed, dancing around in a circle.
At the head of the group stood Rachis, her steward, looking at least ten years older than when she’d farewelled him last year. Even then he’d been an old man, and looked it. Now he was gaunt, his cheeks sunken and his hair just a few sparse white threads. Rachis shuffled forward, looking beaten down, but his smile was genuine.
“Karan-lar,” he said, putting out his long arms. “This is the answer to a prayer. How long have we waited and longed for you to come. Welcome home.”
Karan dropped her pack and ran up the steps. “Rachis, I’m sorry! I should have been here.”
She flung her arms around him. He towered above her but was so very thin. His embrace reminded her of her childhood. After the death of her father, and then her mother, he had been the only one to treat her kindly.
“So I’ve said more than once. It has been a sore trial for us, this last year. But having heard your part in this, it would have been the worse had you been here. The Ghâshâd came through quite a few times, asking after you. But for all that they treated us better than Yggur’s Second Army did, or his First! Come inside.”
“Where is everyone?” she asked. “They are not—”
“We were more fortunate than our neighbors—no one from Gothryme was killed. A miracle! Everyone else has gone hunting or a-gleaning, for we have little left to eat and nothing for the winter. Some also went down to the town to help rebuild.”
She went around the rest of the group, Benie last of all. Karan shook his grubby hand. “I missed you, Benie. What say we go for a walk after tea? You can show me the garden and the animals. Tell me, have you been teasing old Kar lately?”
Kar was an old black swan, a fixture on the pond for many a year. Benie burst into tears. “Kar’s dead! Those rotten soldiers ate her!”
