More to quiet his nerves than from any intuition, Darien chose a door and slowly pushed it open.
He was awakened by a scream. Darien leaped up, terrified; Lin was sitting up, arms rigid at her sides, a shriek escaping her throat, a long shrill noise that sounded nothing like her. “Lin, what is it?” he cried, and grabbed her shoulders.
In the dark it was difficult to see much of her face. And suddenly her back arched; her body jerked like a marionette, once, twice. “Lin!” he said. She jerked again, out of his arms and onto the ground. Her scream died to a low rattle deep in the throat. And then, as abruptly, was still. Her eyes were open and unblinking, staring at nothing.
The dark around him spun; surely, Darien thought dimly, surely this is a nightmare. He listened for her breath, but he already knew what he would hear. Her eyes stared and she made no sound. Darien swallowed, tasted bile in his throat. He was going to be sick, here in the forest in endless dark. Don’t leave me here, Lin, he thought, and was immediately appalled by his own selfishness. He wanted to scream.
It took a moment for Darien to realize that the darkness was lifting—or rather, a light was gathering. As he watched, the light coalesced before him, over Lin’s prone shape. It began as a vertical line. As the line of light widened, it seemed to Darien as if the night were a curtain with light behind it that someone now slashed neatly with a knife. He found that he couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but watch as the light took shape.
The shape was one he recognized from his dream in the Academy library, yet even without that, he would have guessed who it was. Even without the telltale ring. A figure that flickered, translucent and glowing, clad in folds of shroudlike grey.
The man he’d summoned.
The shade of Edrien Letrell turned its gaze on Darien. Where his eyes should have been—blue-grey and thoughtful, Darien remembered—were dark holes. His face was ravaged, the flesh like rags stretched over bone. His brow contorted with fury.
Darien didn’t know what to say, or do. It had seemed so simple this morning—he would raise Edrien Letrell and ask him a few questions. Now that seemed impossibly stupid. How did one address a man who had passed through death?
Very slowly, Lin drew herself up. Darien was about to exclaim for joy when he saw that her eyes were still staring, her movements halting, mechanical. When she spoke, it was in a voice not her own. A man’s voice. “How dare you summon me here?”
With an effort, Darien found his voice. “Honored Seer,” he began. “I—I have some questions.”
“Idiot,” said the man’s voice from Lin’s mouth. It was sibilant with hatred. “I have endured unspeakable pain on account of your … curiosity. And you, a bearer of the emerald ring!”
Darien looked down, too ashamed to speak.
Edrien went on, “Then again, perhaps it is because of your damned, meddling nature that you have done this.” The gaze turned away from Darien, the tortured face became contemplative. “I had a friend like you. All these many centuries, I still have not found him in the deeps. Though I hear his voice at times, in dreams.”
The dead have dreams? Darien was filled with more regret than he had ever thought possible. “If I had known it would cause you pain—any pain,” he said, “I would never have summoned you. Please accept my apologies, and help me.”
“You want the Path,” said Edrien harshly. Lin’s face twisted in a smirk. “And you would even use the most forbidden enchantments to find it. That is why you could summon me. Why I had to venture here, when blood met moonlight.”
“And Lin?” Darien asked. “What’s happening to her?”
The shade revealed its teeth, but not in a smile. “You should know,” Edrien said. “You killed her.”
“I didn’t!” Darien said. “I used only some of the blood…”
“That would explain why my hold in this sphere is so tenuous,” Edrien replied. “I will be freed soon, and go. Another excruciating journey, thanks to you.” As if to indicate this impending freedom, his image flickered momentarily, nearly fading to black. “I had it in my hand to return the old enchantments to the world,” he said. “Why do you think I didn’t?”
“I … don’t know,” said Darien.
“You don’t know very much. I won’t tell you how I found the Path—I vowed I would tell no one, and I will not. A great Seer in the days of old could have forced the truth from me, I suppose—tortured my shade or somesuch. But frankly, boy, you lack both the power and the skill.”
“I wouldn’t want to torture you,” said Darien. “Erisen, our world is in danger if you do not tell us.”
A tunneling sound, like a great wind, from the shade. Darien realized it was a sigh. “I should be moved by such words,” said Edrien. “I should be moved and yet—it is hard, so hard now, to care about the world.” He fell silent. An owl was calling, oblivious to the strangeness of the night.
“You are the only hope we have,” said Darien. “Please, Erisen.”
Again that sigh, like the sound of ocean winds between cliffs. “One thing will I tell you. You must first lose everything.” Edrien’s voice dropped very low, almost to a whisper. “I did.”
He vanished then without a sound. Lin collapsed with a thump. Darien ran to her. To his relief, her eyes focused on his face, and she said his name. But when he embraced her she started, very quietly, to weep. He held her a long time, and she wept for a long time, as night gradually lifted to make way for the dawn.
PART IV
CHAPTER
27
THERE is a path.
Words heard in a dream, in a waft of smoke and an old woman’s whisper. In all and none of these. Edrien could no longer remember where he had heard, or how he knew. Perhaps his grandmother, when he was very small, had told him on one of the many occasions she had set him on her knee and regaled him with a story. But that would have been many years ago, indeed, for his grandmother was long since in the ground. And it would not explain, in that case, why he only remembered now.
The mountains were cold this time of year, the trees withered. It was no time to be out wandering. Far better that he return home—he could imagine his mother telling him—lest he fall ill. And now, unlike when his mother had been alive, the cold had a way of settling into his body like an unwelcome guest. Cor would have laughed at him, beckoned him to the fireside of an inn to discuss a new technique in song, or verse. Edrien did not have to close his eyes to imagine it, his highly visual mind trained to recall every detail with ease: Cor’s plump face reddened with heat from the fire, the sharp angle of his nose catching its light in a bright thin line, the blue eyes that could see through anything. That could even be cruel, when he wished it.
Thinking of Cor made Edrien’s stomach contract, as if he were already ill.
The wind was rising, high-pitched and eerie like a ghost.
What it came down to was that there was no one to tell Edrien Letrell to come in out of the cold, not outside his own memory. The best I have known, Cor had said. High praise from an exacting, willful man.
If I could understand, Edrien thought, and stopped. People were approaching, horses. For the first time, he noticed that it grew dark.
“Sing for my supper?” he offered, almost a reflex. He had almost forgotten that he needed to eat. Funny, he had been teased often enough for his expanding girth and love of sweets. Funny to remember that now, in this place.
It seemed to be two families that approached him: two men, two women, and an assortment of thin, dark-haired children. All with eyes deep and dark as the mountains themselves. Edrien had encountered the nomadic people in his travels; he had some experience with them, and some sympathy. He had studied their myths, and in so doing had absorbed their dreams and desires as if into his blood. And there, they had become music. Years ago.
They asked him his name; he introduced himself. Was met with disbelief.
“You surely can’t be Edrien Letrell himself?” said one of the women, her voice soft but in
credulous.
“Allow me to sing for you,” he said, “and if you do not care for it, I promise you my name and reputation shall be as nothing.”
“He is about the right age,” the other woman mused. “And we can spare the food tonight. There’s no harm in it.”
One of the men—perhaps her husband—elbowed her roughly. “It is not for you to decide,” he said. Edrien noted, not for the first time, that all of the adults had lined faces even though they could hardly be past thirty. A short life and a weary one. “But yes. Just for one night, we will agree upon. For supper and a place to sleep, after.”
Edrien thanked them and, sliding to the ground, fell to tuning the strings of his harp. Soon the simple rhythms of the task began to soothe him, and the pain he carried was like a voice singing, now a corridor away, now many miles in the distance, where it became an echo, sorrowful but no longer urgent. Within his hands was the deft sureness of what he knew, and what he could still do now to make a difference.
The men built up a fire, and the women ladled food onto the plates of their menfolk and children. Darkness had overtaken the camp; now only the fire cast light upon them, for even the moon was hidden that night. Edrien found himself withdrawing into shadow. It was only when he began to play that he realized why: he did not want these people, these simple men and women and their children, to see his face.
His hands stroked the strings almost tenderly, to start, but that of course did not last. As with so many things, tenderness was only a beginning, giving way to need and to violence. And on the first chord where tenderness gave way to need, Edrien’s voice joined the music of the strings, lifted in a chant that recalled the earliest songs of the people who had wandered these mountains, the songs they had bequeathed, over centuries, to their children. That much, at least, he owed his hosts. But it was a song he had written himself, combining their traditional forms with his own inspiration as a young man. It was one of the songs that had made his name what it was.
The children were talking and laughing at first, but soon Edrien was aware that in addition to the darkness that encircled them, they were ensconced in a breathless silence that only his music filled. But only a part of him was aware, for it had been decades since he had charmed and amazed an audience for the first time; the silence was an homage that was his due. He was Edrien Letrell, in spite of everything, and whatever it might mean. Even if it meant nothing at all.
Then, as if some charm in the night took hold of them, the children jumped up and began to dance. Their parents looked on for a moment; then one of the men seized his wife’s hand and spun her along with him nearer the fire. Into the transient and wavering circle of the light.
With stirrings of wonder that he had never thought to feel again, Edrien watched these thin, tired people transformed into spirits of the mountain by his reaffirmation of their myths and dreams here on the mountainside.
To understand …
“You may travel farther with us, if you wish,” said one of the men to Edrien in the morning—the same one, he noticed, who had barked at his wife the previous night. And then, later, had led her into the firelit circle for a dance. So many contradictions in life, Edrien sometimes thought his mind could not possibly encompass them all.
“We know now that you are Edrien Letrell, and we are honored to share your company,” the man added.
“It is I who will be honored to accompany you,” said Edrien. “What is your name?”
“Aram,” said the other. “Tonight I will introduce you to everyone in our family. We go south, where there is shelter from the winter winds and food to be had in the neighboring towns. Where are you going?”
Edrien smiled then, the first time since they had met. “I’m not yet sure.”
There was a path. He had sung about it many times, but he had never believed it existed. And, indeed, there was no reason to believe that it did, save a vaguely tuned instinct that was little more than a whisper, yet insistent, waking him from dreams he could only barely recall upon awakening. And when awake, a pall hung over his thoughts, for the music was no longer enough, had never been enough, and now there was no turning away from that truth. Not when Cor was gone. And Myra.
He had laughed when she had suggested they marry. Had laughed. For what use is a married life to wandering artist such as himself? And what if—he knew this now—what if he wearied of her? He had never admitted that thought even to himself, but now he understood, for as a young man he had wandered half the world and into a great many beds, and marriage would have been the end of that. If he had known how soon Myra would be taken from him, perhaps he would have indulged her. Given himself a memory less bitter than that of the slammed door, the silence. And then, weeks later, news of her death after the onslaught of the great plague of that year.
Many years ago that had been, and Cor had told him the pain would go away. But it still arose when he least expected it. Sometimes all it took was the sound of a woman’s voice lifted in song; at other times, the sight of running children and the thought: what she wanted. Perhaps Cor had spoken from experience, from a preternatural ability to exorcise his own ghosts with ease. Yet somehow, remembering his friend, Edrien doubted that now.
You thought to be kind, by being cruel, he thought fondly. Old bastard gone to the Underworld, and I the only one left. Why?
One of the women came up to him now, offered him water. Her smile was nothing like Myra’s, guarded and shy like a wild thing, while Myra had been the essence of cultured life, a winter rose. Yet this woman’s smile, the sadness in her eyes, made him think of Myra all the same.
A good memory, the very best. And not always a gift.
The path was through the mountains—this much, he knew. He would find it, or his old blood would freeze and he would die, and few would be left to mourn him. He, thinking of it, did not mourn. He had seen many lands, sampled the courts of kings and sultans; yet he could think of no better end to his days than here, amid the stones of his own land, in search of the one story from his childhood that was perhaps no story, after all, but truth for the poet who sought it out.
Aid me to understand …
* * *
LIN’S eyes fluttered open. Through the trees she could see the moon, ghostly against the grey of dawn. Curled up in his blanket beside her, Darien’s breathing was regular and subdued. His face was wet with her tears, so close had he held her for much of the night.
She would not tell him about her dream, Lin decided there in the dark. Her wrists ached. If it was a dream.
CHAPTER
28
THE air where he sat was thick with smoke and smelled faintly of incense. Head bent toward his chest and arms tight at his sides, gazing sightlessly ahead, he would have appeared to an onlooker to have been in a drug-induced trance. Before him on the low table sat a porcelain cup of khave, abandoned, congealing. Its smoke had long since ceased to rise.
There were no onlookers. It was nearly dawn, and there was no one else in the khave house save himself and its owner. And the Seer had known the owner for many years. Neither man communicated much to the other, but the passage of time—and other events—had shaped a curious bond between them.
Earlier that evening, one of the cityfolk had told of a shooting star spied descending across the sunset. It exploded on the way down. In Eivar, they thought little of such things, with astrology remaining only the tales of country folk, those who were believed to be ignorant. But in the east, the study of the stars was as much in evidence in the royal courts as it was in the villages. A falling star that exploded in its descent portended a disturbance in the world. A disturbance—he himself believed, being of the Academy—that signified contact between the world and some Other.
The opening of a portal.
And so he sat now and reached out with his mind, with all the accumulated knowledge of his art, and searched.
There was blood on the horizon; he could taste it, salt and metal gritty on his tongue. Entire threads
of event that tasted of blood. A brief image flashed before him: a heavyset, bearded man lying in a casket, a mortal slash black against the dead white of his neck.
He kept searching and tried to ignore the sensations of guilt and grief that rose within him. Laying them aside, as one would a plowshare in time of war.
And then an image that filled all his senses: the smell of pinewoods, the silvered dark of a moonlit night. A cry of such agony that it broke the night. And beyond this, a voice that whispered one word. A voice Valanir Ocune had never heard before in his life, but nonetheless recognized instantly.
The word was Myra.
* * *
THE path ahead of him was dark, and he was sweating, even though the night was cold. A jungle of thorny pines clawed at his face. Marlen Humbreleigh cursed as he stumbled over a rock and was nearly sent sprawling to the ground … a ground he couldn’t see.
That voice. He had to get away from that voice. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he didn’t, but it promised cold, and a void that stretched an endless black within his mind.
“Wait.” A woman’s voice behind him. He turned. He saw a small, slender woman with dark hair whipping in the breeze. That was all he could see in the moonlight.
Until she drew a knife. The blade gleamed in her pale hand. “He gave me the key.”
It was Lin Amaristoth. He was suddenly close to her. Her eyes loomed large before him, like tunnels, her lips forming words. “I am the key.”
When he awoke, Marilla was in bed beside him, outstretched on the coverlet. She wore a red satin shift with black lace, a gift from him. Her coils of hair were a river over one shoulder as she watched him. Eyes cold as the void in his dream.
“You were thrashing,” she said. Behind her, the draperies were drawn to reveal a whitening sky.
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