The Gathering of the Lost

by Helen Lowe

  “The Countess herself brought it to me,” she told him, when he asked. Her voice was a whisper. “Because of last night and not being at the wedding. She’s kind,” Jarna added, and Kalan nodded, because it was true. Gently, he picked up a strand of her hair and plaited it between his fingers. When he looked up, Jarna’s eyes were fixed on him. “You want to say good-bye,” she whispered. “Don’t you?”

  His fingers stilled. “Not want,” he said, each word heavy as stone. He smoothed the hair out onto the pillow again, frowning. “How did you know?”

  “I know you.” Her eyelids sank down and he thought she might have slipped out of consciousness, but after a moment they rose again. “And I had a dream. Of white mist—and then the heralds with their one voice, saying you had begged for my life, but that your fate called you away from Emer.” Her lips trembled and Kalan closed his eyes briefly, against the pain in hers. “They said . . . that where you are going, one of the great lords took an outsider consort and she was killed for it.”

  He nodded, seeing the falling snow again and a door opening into winter. “Your dream spoke truth. Where I’m going is no place for you, Jarn.” It’s no place for me either, he thought. “But I have to go.”

  Her eyes were fixed on his, huge in her white face. “Will you come back?”

  He felt sure, then, that he never would, or not in any way that resembled the old life. Even if I live, Kalan thought, knowing there was a good chance that he would not. He wondered how much Malian and Tarathan had foreseen with regard to that, then shook his head: better not to know. He saw, too, that Jarna had read his expression. Her own grew bleak, gray as winter ashes, and he took her hands in his.

  “You’ll be all right, Jarn, you’ll see. The others will all stand by you. Audin and Alli and Raher’s families have influence, and there’s Ghiselaine, too. She’s already given you her favor to carry.”

  “But I don’t want them,” Jarna whispered, “only you.” Kalan bowed his head, still holding her hands close in his, but could find no words to reply.

  “You said . . .” Jarna’s voice wavered, then steadied. “You said, when you hung the cherries in my ears, that you would buy me real jewels, after we’d won the tourney.”

  “Oh, Jarn,” Kalan said. When he lifted his head, he saw that her eyes were closed, although the pinch to her mouth told him she was still awake. He leaned forward and placed his lips on hers. “Be well, Jarn,” he breathed, as though he could will it into her. “Forget all about me.”

  Her eyelids lifted, her eyes meeting his. “I could never do that.” He could see it was costing her to speak. “Take Madder. If it’s as dangerous as you say where you’re going, you’ll need a good horse.”

  Kalan gave her hands a little shake. “Jarn, no. You’ve trained him from a foal.”

  “Take him. As my gift.” She turned her face away, toward the wall—so he would not see her cry, Kalan guessed. How, he wondered, did you say either thank you or good-bye, in such a case? But he had to try. He put her hands down, bending close as he got to his feet. For the last time, he touched her hair.

  “Thank you,” he said softly. “For Madder. And for your true friendship, all these years. Farewell, my Jarna.”

  But although he stopped in the door to look back, Jarna did not turn her face from the wall and she did not speak.

  The road east from Caer Argent was a silver ribbon in the moonlight, the outskirts of the city giving way to farmsteads and the black silhouettes of orchards as the horses’ hooves drummed. Kalan was riding his own tall bay and leading Madder, with his armor and everything he needed for the road strapped across the roan’s saddle. Soon it would be moonset, and then the early dawn of Midsummer, and he intended to get as far along the road as he could before stopping to eat or rest. He wanted to keep moving, outstripping the farewell to friends and his life in Emer, which rode close at his back. “The path of return,” he said aloud, but the wind blew the words away.

  A few miles further on the road dipped down to a ford, with the water stippled silver over stones and willow trees a dark fringe along either bank. A fine place for an ambush, he thought, but he slowed his horse anyway, approaching the uncertain footing of the ford at a walk. An owl hooted, and his keen sight caught movement along a hedgerow. A fox, he thought, looking more closely: Maister Fox, minding his own business—as I shall mind mine.

  And below it all, the deep, wordless song of Emer that he loved.

  The horses clipped closer to the ford and Madder snorted, his ears pricked forward. Kalan looked again, every sense alert—and this time he made out a cloaked shape standing amidst the willows closest to the road. His breath caught as he remembered another cloaked figure he had met once before amidst dark trees. But that had been deep within the Gate of Dreams, whereas this was the waking world. Kalan released the held breath and eased his power around him at the same time, his hand sliding close to his sword hilt as the bay closed the last few yards to the ford.

  “Kalan.” Tarathan of Ar’s mindvoice spoke, and Kalan stopped the horses. He stared hard at the herald’s face as Tarathan stepped forward into the moonlight. Although even seeing a face clearly, he reflected, would not help in the case of a facestealer.

  “We thought that you would take our road to Port Farewell.” The heralds’ mindvoices wove together as one. “We decided to wait for you.”

  “You mean Tarathan foresaw it.” Kalan knew they would hear his bitterness. “Just as Malian has seen me back on the Wall.” He could make out Jehane Mor now, further back in the trees with the gray horses, all standing motionless as statues.

  “I cannot answer for what Malian sees.” Tarathan spoke alone this time. “What I perceive is currents, the paths by which the stream flows, which can change at any time, just as this brook here may be dammed or switch course.”

  Kalan frowned. “So I can affect my own fate?”

  “We all can.” The heralds spoke as one again. “No one’s path is ever graven in stone—or if it is, even stone may be eroded by weather and time.”

  Kalan wondered if that was Malian’s hope—that the Derai were not as rigidly bound by the Blood Oath, and to prophecy, as the tenets of the Wall life proclaimed. And if she was right . . . He took a deep breath, then let it silently out again. “I wanted to stay here, to be Hamar in truth and live as an Emerian knight.”

  Tarathan’s eyes met his through moonlight and shadow, keen-edged as a lance. “When honor and duty call, we cannot always have what we desire. But that is not the same thing as fate.”

  Kalan gazed up at the vast river of stars overhead. The idea that he might not be bound by their patterns felt like the world falling away beneath his feet, with myriad possibilities twisting away into a vast unknown. Terrifying, yes—but exhilarating as well. He breathed out again, deep and soft, and felt the tension that he had not known was in his shoulders ease. Later he might talk with the heralds about the dream they had sent Jarna, and many other things besides, but not now. He looked away from the stars to where they waited, stillness spreading out from them like age rings in the heart of a tree.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Not least for waiting for me.” But mostly, he added to himself, for showing me that the road I take now is not about a destiny to fulfill, but one to make. He glanced back at the sky, then drew out Yorindesarinen’s ring from where it hung concealed around his neck. The black pearl gleamed, a moon rising through midnight cloud, as he slid the plaited band onto his finger. “ ‘A friend gave it to me, long ago . . .’ ” Kalan repeated the hero’s words, spoken out of his own past—then shook his head, clearing it of all thoughts of both past and future. “We should press on, if we’re to get clear of Caer Argent.”

  Overhead, the stars continued their slow march west, traversing the short Midsummer night, while three riders and four horses crossed the ford and rode east, their backs to the slowly setting moon and their faces toward the dawn.

  Part V

  Summer’s End

&nbs
p; Chapter 53

  The Solitary Tower

  Malian worked her way east and south from Caer Argent, eating the road dust of summer as she rode toward the Ormondian hills and southern Aralorn beyond. Initially, the roads were clogged with Midsummer travelers, every inn overflowing with people talking about events in Caer Argent. Some of the merchants spoke of unrest everywhere, the Ijiri troubles earlier in the spring and conflict along the desert border of Ishnapur, but most of the Emerians simply viewed it as another chapter in their tumultuous history.

  “The Cendreward won’t follow Ombrose Sondargent, you’ll see,” one local knight asserted, as dusk settled around an innyard between Gulesward and Griffonmark. “If the Duke doesn’t catch him first, he’ll end up in Lathayra, causing the Castellan of the Southern March grief by raiding back across the border.”

  “Pity the Southern March then,” a merchant said. “He didn’t get the name ‘wolf’ for nothing in that last border war.”

  The talk, Malian found, was much the same in Griffonmark, but by the time she climbed into the Ormondian hills, keeping away from the densely settled valleys to the south and west, both the settlements and road traffic had grown sparse. The more isolated the land, the more suspicious of strangers those she met became, taking their time to look her over before coming close enough to exchange a greeting. She found herself sleeping in barns and copses more often, as both inns and temple guesthouses became rare.

  She had left both Mallow and the identity of Carick behind in Caer Argent. Now she rode a sturdy gray cob and called herself Heris—a name that could equally well originate on the River or in northern Emer—an itinerant scribe on a pilgrimage to all the shrines of Serrut in Emer and Aralorn. And maybe Lathayra, although the shabby scribe was undecided on that point whenever his plans were discussed. Lathayra, he had heard, was a dangerous place for those not adept with the weapons of war.

  “Perilous far, too,” one farmer deep in the Ormondian hills opined. He had allowed Malian to sleep in his barn, which was little more than a drystone hut built into the side of a hill. The farmhouse, too, was small: both buildings and man dwarfed by the surrounding terrain. “Even Aralorn’s a tidy step from here.”

  If Emer was not the River, Malian reflected, then the hills of northern Ormond were a vastly different world to Caer Argent. Farmsteads gave way to shepherd’s cots, and fields to flocks dotted across the otherwise empty hills. A waist-high stone, sitting crookedly on the crest of a pass, marked the border into southern Aralorn. She camped that night beneath a spreading oak and studied the Aralorn sky, with constellations she had never seen before rising above the southern horizon.

  Malian found it strange to reflect that the path she was following was the reverse of the route that Tarathan and Jehane Mor had traveled to reach the Guild house in Terebanth. The same path, she now knew, that brought the Derai fugitives south to the border country between southern Aralorn and Jhaine. And if what Lord Falk had told her was correct, the silent watchers who had come out of the woods the day that Tarathan and Jehane Mor crossed the boundary river must have been the Lost. Malian wondered, suddenly, if that was where the heralds had learned to speak Derai.

  She stretched out on the hard ground, thinking about the network of contacts and safehouses that had passed the two Jhainarian fugitives north—a different kind of river, flowing strong and secret underground, but a route through Haarth nonetheless. For all these years it had been sweeping the lost Derai south as well, far from the Wall and anyone who might know to send word of the renegades there. She remembered the hill farmer and grinned, for if he thought Lathayra was perilous far, she doubted he would even comprehend the vast leagues that separated Aralorn and the Derai Wall.

  So many people, though, must have been involved with this underground river: in Grayharbor and the River, Aeris—if she had gotten the route right, although there could well, she supposed, be more than one—and Emer, and finally Aralorn. Malian was amazed that the secret had remained so well kept. Although when she reflected again, between the Patrol and the Shadow Band, the Guild of Heralds and the Oakward, both Emer and the River were full of those whose business was the keeping of secrets.

  And Elite Cairon? she wondered. For nearly five years I’ve been working the River every summer and hunting down trails that always came to nothing—yet he is an Elite of the Shadow Band, with its network of listeners and agents. All along, he must have known.

  Bastard, Malian thought, entirely without surprise.

  “Perhaps,” Nhenir said coolly, “he distrusted your recklessness in those early years—the harm you might have done.”

  “And you?” Malian queried, just as cool. “How much have you known, all this time?” But Nhenir, of course, did not answer.

  Was I reckless? Malian wondered. She supposed she might have been, in her determination to develop her strength and skills, marrying her Derai inheritance with the disciplines taught by the Shadow Band.

  “As I said.” Nhenir’s mindvoice was very dry: “Reckless.”

  Malian grinned, just a little. “I’ve grown more responsible.”

  “Like trying to perceive Nindorith’s essence, that night in the garden?”

  Malian was silent, reliving that moment. ”You didn’t exactly help,” she observed.

  “I dared not. He would have known me.”

  “He goes back that far?” Malian lay very still. “To Yorindesarinen?”

  “Farther. Look in the first annals of the Derai Alliance, Child of Night. You will find Nindorith there.”

  Malian sat up, wrapping her hands around her knees as she stared into the warm night. “That is why I need the Lost. We have let ourselves grow too weak, our powers fading further with every generation since the Great Betrayal. Even with Kalan—the two of us couldn’t withstand a power like that, not on our own.”

  “You will need an army,” Nhenir said simply, and Malian knew the helm did not mean warriors with swords. “Or the Golden Fire of the Keeps as they used to be.”

  “Ornorith always turning the face that smiles,” Malian said—grimly, since fickleness was the innate nature of the Two-Faced Goddess. Yet even with the Lost, she still would not have the sort of strength that Nhenir meant. She rested her forehead against her knees, sitting like that for some time before lying down again.

  Sleep eluded her, so she studied the new constellations instead, trying to see patterns in them. One, she thought, could be a swordsman raising his blade, like Telemanthar in the old stories, or Kalan at the Midsummer tourney, or—“Nherenor,” she whispered, recalling how he had sprung down to meet her on the roof of the Sondcendre ruin. “He was so young, yet he had an empathy link to Nindorith, whom you say is ancient.”

  “I did not know this Nherenor.” The helm was neutral. “Or what he could have meant to Nindorith.”

  All the same, Malian thought, there was something about him. That I liked, she wanted to say, but could not, even to herself.

  Eventually she slept, although her dreams were jumbled, showing her Kalan on a moonlit road, riding in company with the heralds. Even in sleep she veered away from that vision, because she had resolved, after Imuln’s Isle, not to seek for Tarathan through the Gate of Dreams. Thwarted, her vision focused on another road, empty as the one she rode now but overhung by a storm’s threatening gloom. Slowly, a darkness appeared on the road, and Malian thought she could detect the shape of a man at its heart.

  She remembered both dreams when she woke and hoped that the dream of Kalan traveling with the heralds had been a true one. The second dream she found more problematic, because the figure in darkness did remind her of the shadow cloak and she had been thinking about Nherenor before she slept. The vision could simply have been a manifestation of that—but it could also be a warning. Malian checked her back trail with greater care as she rode on, and extended her seeker’s sense, as unobtrusively as possible, over the terrain ahead. Once or twice she thought she caught the echo of a horse’s hooves behind them, b
ut although she lay in wait each time and continued to seek out vantage points with a wide view of the surrounding country, she saw no other rider.

  Gradually, the high hills gave way to more rolling country, with villages clustered around crossroads and fords. Flocks of sheep still predominated, but Malian began to see geese grazing beside streams, and groves of olives and nut trees by farmhouses. Inns became more frequent, some little more than a village alehouse, while larger settlements boasted a secure stable and rooms for hire. Wherever possible she would stop: to water her horse and drink a mug of ale in the heat of the day, or to eat an evening meal and sleep afterward in the stable hayloft, avoiding the stiflingly hot attic rooms that were all an itinerant scribe could afford. At every halt, whether short or long, she would listen to the conversations around her, alert for any indication that there was more to this community than any other sleepy Aralorn village.

  The language of Aralorn was yet another dialect of that spoken in Emer and on the River, although the accent was broad and she began to encounter unknown words. She was careful never to ask questions beyond directions to the nearest shrine of Serrut—or Serru, as they said it here, dropping the final consonant altogether. Instead she listened for any difference that rose naturally to the surface of local conversations. But the talk, Malian found, whether in Hayfield, or Oakwhistle, or Forge Crossing, was always the same. People discussed the weather and harvest prospects, and gave consideration, whether serious or idle, to the qualities of horses, dogs, and prize rams. Their outlook matched the Ormondian hill farmer’s view of the world: “As far away as Ishnapur,” they would say, giving it the same sound as “beyond the rim of the world.” And they had never heard of the Derai Wall.