Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  At last she jumped down from her perch, dropped straight into a crouch and listened. There were no shouts of triumph or telltale movements. Reassured, she crossed to the tree where she had put the boy, but he had climbed higher. She called out softly to him to come down, but he made no response. Glynn sighed in irritation and climbed up into the tree, only to find the boy unconscious. She was impressed to see that he had removed a belt and had strapped himself to the branch so that he would not fall. His torn leg was still bleeding slightly and, after she freed him and lowered him to the ground, she took the time to pull the bandage from her pocket and bind his leg firmly. Then she dragged him over her shoulders in a fireman’s lift and began to walk upriver, searching for a place where she could cross over to the other side.

  She walked on though her shoulders burned, but stopped when her legs began to tremble because she knew from her training that this was a sign that they were about to give out. It was moments before Kalinda rise and she guessed that she had walked about seven kilometres. Not far enough to be perfectly safe, but far enough to allow her to rest for a little. It had been tough going fighting through the undergrowth carrying her burden, but she had decided against crossing the river when she found a place where she might have done so. Instead, she had walked into the water and had trekked along this way for a kilometre before coming out at a deliberately unlikely place, choked with trees. If the trainer allowed them to follow her scent, the trakkerbeasts would lose her trail at the crossing place and it was quite likely that the searchers would assume she had gone across there, and would waste time hunting about for clues.

  Since coming out of the water, she had been working her way to the other side of Skyreach Bluff, driven by the desire to put something solid between them and the legionnaires. She had promised herself that when she reached the Bluff, she would try again to reach Solen, though she was very much afraid that she might no longer be capable of communicating with him in this way. She was acutely aware that a carriage with a waterflyt crest would even now be waiting for her at the tide gate. Fortunately, as an agent of the Shadowman, Solen was likely to hear of the Iridomi search force outside the walls of the citadel, and even if he did not know the reason for it, he would quickly realise that it had prevented her from keeping their appointment.

  Flexing her aching shoulders, she knelt beside the unconscious boy and brushed his hair from his brow to get a better look at him, but his eyes fluttered open and he stared, clear-eyed, up into her face.

  ‘You saved my life, woman,’ he whispered, the lisp in his speech clearly the result of his chipped front tooth.

  ‘More likely I saved you a beating for thievery,’ Glynn said. ‘And do not call me woman. My name is Glynn.’

  ‘And I am Anyi,’ the boy said with a touch of haughtiness, but his eyes were slightly unfocused.

  ‘I am pleased to meet you,’ Glynn said, wondering if he had been named after the mermod.

  The boy, who now gave her a puzzled stare, said, ‘I hurt my leg escaping from the legionnaires, but it was better to have my leg cut rather than my throat.’

  ‘What did you do to make the chieftain of Iridom want you dead?’

  ‘I got in her way,’ the boy said in a flat, calm voice, and for a moment it seemed to Glynn that she had mistaken his age, for there was a bitterness in the words that seemed to belong to a much older person.

  ‘We had better keep going,’ she said, and told him quickly what the legionnaires had said.

  ‘I do not think I can walk,’ he told her softly.

  ‘I will carry you,’ Glynn answered, rising. The boy stifled a groan as she hoisted him onto her back, but he did not complain. When Glynn asked again exactly what he had done to invite the fury of Coralyn, the boy was silent and she realised, from the limp weight of him, that he had fainted.

  28

  If the dark fate of the Unykorn can be Unravelled

  my own salvation must come, Lanalor said.

  LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN

  Taking advantage of the boy’s unconsciousness, Glynn set a fast pace and made good time because she was no longer deliberately choosing the most difficult path. By midday she had come upon the road again and, within an hour, she was very close to Skyreach Bluff. When the road curved away in the opposite direction suddenly, she stopped, indecisive. There was every likelihood that the road would probably wind back again, but she did not want to take the chance of having to backtrack when she was so close to her goal.

  Resisting the impulse to rest for a bit, she set a straight course for the now looming hill, which rose from the flat plateau about it rather like Uluru rising from the desert, though it was not as great in girth. There was a lot of bare and weathered-looking rock showing and, although it was relatively steep, she thought it would take her no more than two hours to climb the hill. The lack of cover meant that the climb would have to be done at night, because even though she was coming up on the blind side of the hill, someone might ride from the opposite direction and have a story for the searching legionnaires about a figure climbing the bluff.

  She would tend to the boy and make some sort of camp, because of course she would not be able to carry him up with her. She wanted to see where the legionnaires were, and also get an idea of the terrain about. She was also hoping to reach out to Solen from the heights.

  But for now, she had better think about finding food. Water was no problem because she had passed numerous small streams, but she was light headed and hollow gutted from hunger. She had gone past gnawing hunger pains into a sort of heightened mental state that was the usual purpose of fasting, but when this passed, she would be weak and sluggish and there would be no possibility of climbing a steep hill, let alone tramping for kilometres with a boy slung over her shoulders like a sack of wheat. Her thought processes would dull as well, which meant there was far more chance of her making mistakes when she most needed to have her wits about her.

  She felt sick at the thought of eating meat, but if it was a matter of survival, she would do so without feeling her ethics compromised too much.

  She found a smooth, grassed area under a thick-trunked tree and gently laid down the unconscious boy. To her dismay, she found that one whole side of her clothing was saturated with blood. The bandage she had applied had fallen off somewhere, and the boy’s leg had begun to bleed again. It might even have done so the whole time she was walking, for the boy’s face was as white as paper and his skin clammy cold with shock. Swearing to herself for failing to check the bandage, she ripped at the ragged hem of her dress and bound the leg up firmly and efficiently, this time taking care and using two thin branches to splint it lightly. She did not worry about cleaning the wound because the running blood would have flushed it out. She laid down her coat and rolled the boy into it, then covered him with a thick eiderdown of dry leaves and soft grasses. Next she found a streamlet, saturated her dress and came back to dribble the moisture between the boy’s lips. To her intense relief, his throat worked slightly. She went back and forth until he ceased to drink.

  Only then did she return to the stream to slake her own thirst and wash the sweat and blood from her skin, but it was not until she had removed her dress and was pounding the blood from it that she saw fish nibbling at a bulbous-looking plant growing from the bank under the water. Her stomach growled and she wondered if this was the secret of foraging on Keltor. She reached down and felt for the plant, twisting off one of the bulbs.

  It had a coarse brown skin like kiwi fruit, but felt softer inside. She peeled back the skin and found a pale pinkish pulp with a bland scent. She did not dare taste the flesh in case it was a poison as virulent as curare or snake venom, in which case one lick would be the end of her. But she harvested a skirtful of the water bulbs, and also some tube-like water berries, carrying them carefully back to where the boy lay. He would identify them when he woke.

  Inspired, she became more ingenious and soon she had gathered thick, cucumber coloured pods she had found han
ging on the underside of some leaves, and a tough fibrous root that grew, potato like, under small lumps in the ground. She also found some tiny sticky red seeds at the base of a spiky plant, and her triumph was to discover a bowl-like gourd whose contents might or might not be edible. Once she had scooped the mess out onto a leaf, she would at least be able to collect water in the gourd. By the time she had scoured the gourd out with sand and flattened her dress on a rock to dry, the sky was the colour of tomato soup and her energy was definitely beginning to flag.

  She had scouted back to the road during her foraging, seeing no sign of legionnaires or anyone else, and as the Keltan wilderness seemed not to contain any dangerous wild animals, she decided to sleep. She was so tired that she was unlikely to be able to force herself to stay awake in any case. She would have to trust to what remained of her feinna instincts to wake her if there was danger. She checked the boy, feeling his skin and pulling back the coat and his shirt to press her face to his chest. His heart and breathing were steady. Covering him again, she carefully loosened the bandages to see if the bleeding had stopped and was startled to find herself sniffing for infection, although her human sense of smell would not have been able to detect it until the smell of putrefaction set in. Refastening the bandages, she stretched out alongside him, wondering again exactly how much remained of her feinna abilities. When she had the time and leisure, she would do some tests. She drew the edges of the coat as close as they would go about the two of them, and scraped a layer of leaves over them again before closing her eyes. For a moment the world seemed to spin as it did after swimming in a strong surf, but Glynn sent up a brief prayer to the powers that be to let them sleep undiscovered and unharmed and fell asleep almost at once, utterly worn out from tension, physical activity and lack of food.

  For some time, she slept deeply and dreamlessly, but later she drifted into a peculiar dream that seemed more about smelling than seeing. She had the dim impression that she was sniffing and snuffling at the base of a cliff where a cave had been obscured by a rock fall. She could smell something sweet and enticing and was anxious to find what had caused the scent. She-feinna? Younglings? Only gradually did she realise that the scent was very, very old, and her disappointment was intense as she turned away.

  She woke suddenly, wondering if the dream meant that she was still linked to the feinna at some level. If so, then its search for its own kind had so far been fruitless. She hoped, for its sake, that the dream had been only that, and the youngling was even now learning to live among its own kind.

  It was dark, but she had no way of knowing how long she had slept. On impulse she decided to try to reach Solen again while she lay there. She closed her eyes and concentrated, imagining her longing rise up and weave into a reaching spar. She seemed to feel her will groping outward, but it lacked focus and it did not connect, not that time nor the next time she tried, nor the next after that. Disappointed, she gave up, wondering sadly if the reaching out she had seemed to feel was no more than the phantom limbs some amputees claimed they felt itching.

  The boy beside her began groaning and muttering in his sleep and Glynn turned on her side and stroked his head gently and absently, wondering what she ought to do next. She could climb the bluff but, not knowing the time, she might be halfway up the edge and find dawn approaching.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Glynn looked down to find the boy awake and gazing up at her. To her surprise, he shifted suddenly and put his arms around her. She was startled and slightly mortified to feel that he was not so much a child as she had imagined. She pushed him away and got up hastily, reassessing his age upwards.

  ‘I thought you were a myrmidon when I ran into you, and you certainly acted like one. But you are not, are you?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not,’ Glynn admitted, ‘but looking as I do has caused me a dreadful lot of bother.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ the boy said with a grin of sympathy. He struggled to sit up, wincing slightly at the movement.

  ‘I was going to climb the Bluff and see if the legionnaires are still searching the road but I’m afraid it might be too close to daylight to risk it,’ Glynn said.

  The truth was that she was also too deeply disheartened by her inability to make the slightest contact with Solen to want to try again, even from the heights.

  ‘There is no point. Even if the legionnaires are not visible, you can be sure that they will be watching the city gates for me,’ he said firmly. ‘They can not afford to let me get in and talk to anyone, you see. Then he frowned at her in sudden bemusement. ‘Did I tell you my name was Anyi?’

  ‘You did, and I told you that mine is Glynn. But we have more important things to do than to exchange names and addresses.’

  ‘Dresses?’ Anyi echoed.

  ‘Never mind,’ Glynn sighed, and warned herself to be a little more careful with the things she said. ‘Is there any way we can get into the citadel without going through the gates?’

  Anyi shook his head and the colour left his cheeks. ‘You had better not move around too quickly. You lost a lot of blood last night,’ Glynn warned. ‘Maybe you’d better lie back down.’

  ‘No. I just felt dizzy for a bit. You are a caster?’

  ‘You might say that I have been casting about for some time now,’ Glynn said laconically. ‘What did you do to make Coralyn imprison you and then want to kill you?’

  The boy looked at her for a long moment as if he were trying to understand something. Then he shrugged. ‘I overheard something I should not have heard, and now, I must tell it to those who need to hear it. You must help me.’

  ‘I thought I was helping you. What did you hear that was so dangerous?’

  Anyi hesitated again, then he said. ‘I heard Coralyn and Kalide talking about imprisoning Chieftain Fulig after the bonding ceremony between Unys and Kerd the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘She can’t do that!’ Glynn cried. ‘Kerd would never forgive her.’

  ‘I doubt he will come to know of it, if Coralyn has a hand in it. But you speak of Kerd as if you know him,’ the boy observed.

  ‘I do. He is a friend,’ Glynn said and, despite all that had happened and even her grief at losing her contact with the feinna, naming Kerd a friend gladdened her.

  ‘Oh, you have food,’ the boy said suddenly, and leaned over, wincing, to examine the fruits of her foraging. Glynn watched him take up one of the brown water bulbs, break it open and bite into the soft pulp, then she did the same. It smelt bland but tasted of the lightest, creamiest cheese, and saliva spurted into her mouth as she ate. Between them, they finished the bulbs and then the boy frowned at the brown roots, before peeling and eating several as dutifully as if they were a not-much-loved vegetable. Glynn did the same and grimaced, finding it like a ginger root, both in taste and texture. She was disconcerted when Anyi took up one of the tube-like water berries and wagged it at her with a mischievous smile. Puzzled but concealing it, she ate one and found it sickly sweet, but once she had swallowed it, her whole mouth tingled and she felt more alert. So, it was some sort of mild stimulant and maybe more than that given the boy’s leer.

  But when he uncovered the sticky red seeds, the boy looked aghast and then suspicious. ‘Why do you have killseeds?’

  ‘You never know when they might come in handy,’ Glynn answered lightly, feeling slightly sick at the thought that she had almost given in to the temptation to eat one of the tiny seeds.

  The boy studied her then he said, ‘You will have to dry them out before they can be used or the taste will warn the person you want to kill.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Glynn said loftily, getting to her feet. Then she thought of something. ‘There must be people wondering where you are. Your mother and father, or friends?’

  The boy gave her a peculiar look. ‘My mother and father are upon Fomhika, and so will know nothing of what has happened. And my friends and allies were told by Coralyn’s legionnaires that I am ill and can see no one. She knows t
hat I would be believed, for who would doubt Tarsin’s heir?’ He sighed heavily. ‘I only wish I knew what happened to Feyt. She went to the city on the day I was caught to see someone. I fear that the legionnaires captured her when she returned, to stop her letting people know I had vanished.’

  Glynn gaped at the boy. ‘You … are the mermod?’ she stammered incredulously, unable to take in that the much-mentioned successor to the Holder’s throne was little more than a child!

  ‘Of course I am,’ Anyi said. ‘That is why Coralyn wants me dead.’

  Glynn stopped and stared across the mirror surface of the lake at the tiny hut on the other side, and wondered if she was doing the right thing. It might be better just to leave the boy now and go rather than risk getting mixed up with the soulweaver to the Holder. It was odd how her determination to see the soulweaver had so completely reversed, but it now seemed to her that there were many good reasons to avoid her, not the least of which was the chance that the Unraveller might be with her. But Solen had talked of contacting Alene for advice when they had last spoken, and with the gates to the city blocked and no feinna abilities to aid her, there had seemed little choice but to acquiesce to the young mermod’s command that he be brought here.

  But what if the Unraveller was here as well? She had sworn to herself not to go anywhere where she might encounter and therefore endanger him. Yet it was idiotic to turn away on the very doorstep of the soulweaver’s hut, and surely the Unraveller must be on his way to Darkfall by now, especially given that the Edict bell had been rung again, freeing ships to depart. And the soulweaver would be able to tell her why she had come to Keltor and how she was to get back home. Besides, Anyi had to be got to the hut. He had fallen unconscious again and, if she just left him, it might be hours before he was discovered.