I smiled bitterly. “Easily enough, apparently. My mother died. I was a minor, and then went to Morrowlea, which runs year-round, and—you’ve studied history, Mr. Dart, you know people’s memories are malleable, especially when it comes to disagreeable and inconvenient facts. Why doesn’t Sir Hamish talk about this?”
“But to lie! They can’t have a leg to stand on—your father was no deserter! His name is on the Roll of Distinction for each of his battles, including all six in the Seven Valleys. He was decorated by the Emperor’s hand for saving General Halioren at East Orkaty, and by the Lady’s fiat for the scouting missions at Loe. Don’t you have those records?”
“No,” I said, “I’ve never heard of them. My father died—or didn’t die—what are you talking about?”
“You didn’t study history? I thought you’d planned to.”
“I had …” I made a face, though he couldn’t see it. “I started in the History of Magic, then … after I became … besotted with, with Lark, she convinced me to switch to Classical Literature. With a bit of History of Architecture thrown in. Ended up in Architectural Poetry.”
“Besotted sounds about right!”
“Mr. Dart, look, I mean it—those honours aren’t real. It’s nice for you to say those things, but Sir Vorel’s hardly going to back down for my saying so, and he has a lot more money than I do.” I laughed a bit grimly. “Most people do.”
“Mr. Buchance was rolling in it, though, didn’t he leave you any? And your mother was an heiress—oh, you said her mother disowned her.”
“Yes. As for Mr. Buchance …” I sighed. “He told me he was leaving everything to his own children, which was right, though he’d see I had enough to live on. But that won’t be available until after his will is read at the Winterturn Assizes, so I’m stuck here in Ragnor Bella keeping my head down until then.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I suppose I should have gone to Inveragory and taken law, and then I might have a minute chance of not losing what little remains to me—which is my name. Not even a good name, I’m afraid, not after what happened at Morrowlea this spring, and not if people are suggesting I was disinherited by my stepfather—ugh!—What a tale of folly this is. Come, Mr. Dart, this is no good.”
He finished wrapping the lantern. My eyes had finally adjusted to the dark. The clouds were still peculiarly light, and the shadows not as dark as they’d be on a full-moon night. An owl was hooting down by the stream. I realized the buttons on my coat had come undone in the fuss with Violet, and did them up again with hands that shook slightly. Getting cold, I thought.
Mr. Dart said, “Look, your father did win those honours. I came across them in my research. We can go to Kingsford and get copies made, if you want. We can certainly write to the Lady’s record-master at Nên Coravel.”
“And how will that help? Perhaps Mr. Buchance left me enough to pay for the fees at Inveragory. Otherwise—”
“You came second in the duchy for the Entrance Examinations, you mustn’t have done so ill at Morrowlea.”
I laughed bitterly. “Didn’t you hear Violet? Let us not discuss my tutor’s comments on my final paper. And that was before what happened with Lark’s.”
“I find it hard to believe that they didn’t—” He stopped. “They really let her get away with it?”
“I have no idea what Lark’s final result was. But they certainly let the other students pelt me with everything that came to hand, up to and including the voting stones.”
He gaped at me before catching himself again. “Jemis, that is unbelievable.”
“Morrowlea can be a strange place.”
“I thought that was just something Taran students said to make up for their jealousy of your architecture.”
I had to smile. I’d never seen Tara, but the history of architecture books I had spent most of my second year reading made it clear that Morrowlea’s campus was far finer.
“Mr. Dart, I am more grateful than I can say for your friendship. If tomorrow you decide against it—”
“Let’s not start that again,” he said firmly.
I stared at him, thinking belatedly that he had said we could go to Kingsford, we could write to Nên Corovel. We could do many things that I, Jemis Greenwing alone, could not.
Mr. Dart went on with deliberate levity. “I want to find this secret society, and find out what the hell is up with that Ghilousetten fish pie, and why your friend—”
I gave in. “Former friend—”
“Former friend Violet is giving herself a false name.”
“I—what?”
“Redshank,” he said impatiently. “As if anyone is actually called that! Seriously, I should have thought memorizing the works of Fitzroy Angursell would be all of a piece with Morrowlea’s radical politics, haven’t you read Aurora since we went away?”
“Well, of course—”
“Redshank’s the name Aurora’s serving-maid Tenebra uses when she goes undercover in Book Twelve. Your Miss Violet is not what she seems.”
“Lady of Mercy,” I said, “you’re seeing conspiracies everywhere, Mr. Dart. Let’s go find your secret society and a passel of other people as bored with Ragnor Bella’s polite society as we are.”
“Were.”
“Were, then,” I said, grinning, and we set off up along the side of the road with all the stealth an addiction to poaching could give and a much lighter heart than I’d expected.
Chapter Eleven
To my great surprise, we arrived at the crossroads to find two men hanging about it. They were not trying to be particularly cagey about their presence; one was smoking a pipe, and the other was playing with his sword.
They were wearing fully hooded long grey cloaks and masks.
“A sword, no less,” I murmured, to distract myself from superstitious unease at being at the crossroads. (Because, of course, certainly it was superstition.)
“Just don’t sneeze,” said Mr. Dart. “Please try not to.”
“I always try not to,” I replied in an indignant whisper. “What kind of secret society meeting is this, anyway? They’re not even hiding.”
“Shh,” he said. “There’s the third one coming.”
A third figure in long cloak and mask hastened out of the dark along the north road. A couple of furlongs away a few lights shone at the Green Dragon. I had a brief moment wondering if it were possibly Violet, but the figure was shorter and substantially stockier than she.
The man with the pipe said, “Who comes to the cross-road?”
“One seeking wisdom,” said the newcomer in a soft but masculine voice. “Who waits at the crossing?”
“One to protect,” said the man with the sword, flourishing it.
“One to guide,” said the man with the pipe, puffing mightily.
They shook hands. It did look like a complicated gesture, involving symbolic movements over their torsos and touching knuckles together. They all appeared to be wearing rings, or something that made a clacking noise when they touched each other. Then they stood, one on each road except for the one leading west to Ragnor Bella, and chanted:
“Over the sky and under the earth, west of east and east of west, by the stars and the stargazers and the watchers at the gate! We call upon the spirits of the old gods to guide us to our heart’s desire.”
Then they each made a threefold obeisance to each of the four directions. When the third one, the ‘seeker of wisdom’, had struggled to his feet—he was a portly man, and puffing with the exertion of kneeling and banging his head on the ground twelve times in short succession—the man with the pipe said, “Turn thrice and thrice and thrice again, and we shall guide you to the heart of desire. But as the Wisdom that you seek is secret, and the heart of desire a mystery of mysteries, it is meet and proper that your temporal eyes be covered that your spiritual eyes may be opened. O Seeker, prepare yourself.”
Seeker stood still in the centre of the crossroads. The pipe-smoker clenched hi
s pipe in his teeth and drew out a long sash or scarf from somewhere inside his cloak. He advanced on Seeker and blindfolded him, the sash long enough to go round his head several times. He backed up, puffing thoughtfully, then glanced at the sword-wielder, who said: “The way is clear, the seeker is pure, and the night awaits our passionate embraces. Hurry up, Guide, we’re going to be late.”
“Sorry, Guardian,” said Seeker, his voice muffled. “I had difficulty getting away in time.”
“We don’t want to miss the opening, or we won’t get anything to drink,” Guardian said, dancing his feet a little.
Guide heaved a sigh we could hear, and said, with more solemnity, “Guardian, be thou most alert to the dangers on the path to wisdom! Seeker, be thou prepared in thy soul! Both of you, follow me!”
He grasped Seeker’s hand and led the little party south down the old Astandalan road towards the Woods Noirell.
“Well,” said Mr. Dart, when they had gone a little ahead, “I told you they were from a secret society.”
“Sounds like a drinking society to me. Shall we follow on the road or in the woods?”
“Let’s practice our stealth,” said Mr. Dart, sounding as if he was grinning as much as I, and so we sneaked parallel and a bit behind the three men as they strode down the road.
***
After about twenty minutes Guide stopped, ostentatiously turned Seeker around several times, and then led him off into the woods on the east side of the road. I tried to visualize where the path led. Down into the lower part of the Coombe, I thought, south of Ragnor Parva. I hadn’t run this way the other morning, not wanting to get too close to the Woods Noirell.
“We’re heading towards the South Rag,” Mr. Dart whispered to me as we crept along behind the three men, who were going rather more slowly now that they were off the main road. The Astandalan highway was the best road in Fiellan, as smooth and wide and hard as when it had been built; this was a muddy bridleway, showing evidence of much passage in the mud churned ankle-deep. Mr. Dart and I, creeping through the damp leaves of the woods to the side, had an easier time of it. “This is getting close to Littlegarth and the springs.”
“Perhaps they have their meetings at the Lady’s Pools,” I replied, but although the path was probably leading towards the hot springs and their shrine, our quarry turned off before we reached it.
We’d been going steeply downhill through a scanty mixed woodland, with fallen-over foxglove spires and miscellaneous fernery the main undergrowth, but as the path rounded a rocky outcropping and continued down to the Lady’s Pools, a side trail split off and wound its way back uphill, along the other side of the outcropping and into a pine wood full of chest-high bracken.
We stopped to let them go ahead, because despite being wet from the day’s rain, the bracken was still noisy. The three men hadn’t spoken since they left the highway, but we could hear a sudden rise of voices in the near distance. No one was coming along behind us; they seemed to be the last of the society. “Look,” Mr. Dart breathed, pointing, “firelight.”
“Uphill or down?”
“Down,” he said, after a moment. “They must be holding their meeting at that flat spot before the standing stone. There’s an elder thicket between it and the upper pool, we should be able to see from there.”
“I trust you haven’t been picking mushrooms by the Lady’s Pools.”
He laughed softly. “No, no, just praying.”
Which I supposed was possible.
***
Mr. Dart led me down through the bracken out of the pines and into a stretch of mixed hardwood, much denser than higher up, and into the promised elder thicket. They were old shrubs, heavy with berries and a great deal of dead growth.
It was hard to see where we were going in the dark, and I wasn’t sure how we were going to get through without snapping all the dead branches, but Mr. Dart clearly knew where he was going and led me onto a game trail. After a few yards he pushed my shoulder to indicate we should crawl the rest of the way.
“I thought you said you didn’t come poaching up here,” I whispered as I pushed my way through the leaf mould. It was damp and didn’t rustle too much, but did feel unpleasantly slimy under my hands.
“Not for salmon in the Lady’s Pools,” he replied. “Pheasants, now … they seem strangely attracted to Justice Talgarth’s sweet peas this year. Can you contain your sneezes if we go close enough to see?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You seem to have gotten much worse since you went away. Even since you visited me at Stoneybridge. Was that really two years ago?”
“Since I had a bad cold last winter,” I agreed, and resolved not to sneeze though I should be desperate—though wishing had never helped prevent an attack in the past. I pulled my second handkerchief out of my pocket and stuffed it down my sleeve just in case. The strange unpleasant cat-piss scent of broken elders tickled my nose.
We eeled forward under the elders until we came to the edge of the thicket. It was awkward going, uphill, and we had to go through a patch of blackberries, but the noise of our passage was masked by a gentle wind soughing across us down the length of the valley, and by the rising babble of the secret society ahead of us.
I was gratified both that my sneaking skills hadn’t entirely left me in my time at Morrowlea and that Mr. Dart clearly knew the area well, for when I came up beside him at last we were in a good position to see the gathering.
We lay beside another rocky outcropping at the lip of a small flat space scooped out of the hillside. To our right and left the hill was quite steep, rocky and tree-covered with a mixture of pines and some sort of hardwood I couldn’t identify in the dark. The rocks formed a kind of bowl, with a shallow cave going back directly in front of us. Someone had lit a large bonfire in front of the cave, at the base of the old standing stone that guarded the main path down to the Lady’s Pools.
The Ellery Stone, as it was called, was sacred to the old gods from pre-Astandalan days. Every boy (and probably girl) in the barony made their pilgrimage to it at one time or another, tracing the blurred carvings on the stone and adding their names to the cliff wall’s graffiti. Older boys made fires in the hollow, and told ghost stories; the Honourable Rag, Mr. Dart, and I had done so in our day, scaring ourselves silly with tales about the sacred monsters that lived in the Lady’s Pools and in the old drowned clay pits near the Talgarths’ house down where the Ladybeck met the Rag.
Clustered around the stone, mostly to the right side where the path came in, were a dozen or fifteen figures in the same heavy cloaks, hoods, and face masks as the three we’d followed from the crossroads. They were chatting and drinking and obviously having a good time. The masks meant they had to use straws, but careful experiments I had participated in at Morrowlea had determined that that was the quickest way to get drunk, so that was probably all right.
“I think we could have just walked up,” I murmured, and Mr. Dart grinned.
After a few minutes someone starting banging a large gong, and the society members all hastily rearranged themselves into a semi-circle around the the bonfire, mostly along the edge of the cave, so they stood facing us across the level ground.
Mr. Dart said, “That’s good, they won’t be able to see us at all with the fire between us.”
“You must have gotten up to some interesting things at Stoney-bridge.”
“Shh … the gonging is coming closer.”
The well-trodden trail to the main road was to our right. The percussionist was banging the gong in threes—dong dong dong—dong dong dong—and as it neared we could hear it accompanied by some sort of rattle.
Then there was a pause, and then somebody cried out from the darkness: “Seekers after Wisdom! Guardians of the Truth! Guides along the Way! Sing forth your prayers!”
The assembled began to chant. It wasn’t clear at first, then after a few moments the ragged chorus blended into solid words. It didn’t sound quite right. I frowned, and realized
they were chanting in Old Shaian.
“O Valdin, hear us. O Nestre, see us. O Ettin, know us. O Dark Kings, embrace us. O gods of fire and blood, have mercy on us.”
Mr. Dart’s face was just visible to me in the light from the bonfire. “What are they saying?”
“Truth, truth, truth.”
“Uh … it’s Old Shaian,” I whispered. “They’re calling on the old gods … Valdin, Nestre, Ettin, the Dark Kings …”
“They’re not,” he breathed, wide-eyed.
“Chaos, strength, power, truth.”
I felt as wide-eyed. The figures on the other side of the bonfire were beginning to sway and stamp their feet. The gonging was doing a double heart-beat now, and somebody had added a drum, coming from the hillside above us so it echoed. I could feel the rhythm in the ground under me, where my bones touched the earth. The secret society no longer looked quite so foolish.
“Truth, truth, truth.”
“They’re asking for truth,” I said.
“Not if they’re calling on the Dark Kings.”
I had come across a few references to the Dark Kings in my History of Magic classes, although the Shaian lords of the Empire had done their best to suppress the old religions of Alinor for being untidy and far too disorderly. I hadn’t thought anyone did still believe in the gods of the underworld and the ancestral flames and the blood.
“Truth, truth, truth.”
Someone—a woman by the high pitch of her voice, though she was as anonymous in her robes and mask as anyone else—started to keen a high descant above the chanting. Her voice wailed across harmonics, not in tune and not intended to be, scraping the hairs up along the back of my neck. Mr. Dart shuddered.
“Chaos, strength, power, truth.”
The old gods of Alinor had been powerful, in their day, until the Empire came. Their worship had shrunk to the wild baronies and the nomads who refused Astandalas, sputtering rebellions breaking the Imperial peace. The early history of Alinorel magic was largely an account of the subduing of the old ways under the tightly-woven net of Astandalan Schooled magic.
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