The Eye of Night

by Pauline J. Alama

  The meal soon ended, and we guests were shown to sleeping quarters. Again, I was gratified at the lord's magnanimity: instead of being left to bed down on the floor of the room where we'd eaten, with our cloaks for pillows, Ennes and I were treated like cousins of the House of Kelgarran; we were given a real bedchamber to share. It was a snug room with a featherbed in a nest of brocaded curtains: just the thing for an unjustifiably cold spring night; and if I little relished sharing it with a stranger, it was better than sharing a thin pallet on the floor with three quarrelsome fellow-monks. A housekeeper led Trenara and Hwyn to a room in another wing amid the castle's maze of passageways. As she left the hall, Trenara turned once and gave me a look that sent blood rushing through me like a sudden spring thaw.

  Sleep did not come easily. Though the bed was the first good one I'd lain in those past seven years, perhaps some old monkish guilt kept me from enjoying it. Or perhaps I was disturbed by feelings of a less ascetic cast. When I slept at last, I dreamed a woman's voice was calling me down the corridors of Kelgarran Hall. As I followed the voice, it seemed to change: now cold and commanding, now throaty, warm, enticing. Reaching its source at last I found not a woman but a caged bird, an enormous raven pent up cruelly in a sparrow-cage. “Help me!” she cried in her human voice. I reached out to open the cage, but the raven shrank back into an egg.

  The dream dissolved then into my old, familiar nightmare, the bodies washing up on the shore, bloodless lips and lightless eyes seeming to curse me. I woke, as always, sick and shivering.

  It was still night, but for me there was no question of sleeping. Beside me, Ennes was snoring thunderously, and the noise seemed to mock my own wakefulness. I got up, pulled on my cloak and boots against the chill of the night, and lit a candle from the embers of the fire. Shielding the flame with my hand, I padded out into the corridors of the castle as silently as I could manage, past a drunken guard who snored even louder than Ennes, into the silence of the sleeping castle.

  My fingers, curved around the candle flame, cast weird shadows on the stones of the hall. If I'd hoped to dispel the visions of my dream, this was not the way to do it. I began chanting St. Tarvi's invocations of the Four Great Ones—intended to ward off evil spirits, not nightmares, but years of haunted nights had blurred the distinction in my mind. My candle flickered in a breeze sweeping down from a narrow, high window in the right branch of the hallway. The storm must have ended and the sky cleared, for moonlight streamed down through the window. It illuminated a small, bent figure walking without a candle away from me. I followed, my heart beating so hard that I think its pounding must have alerted her, for the servant Hwyn turned to face me, wide-eyed.

  “I'm lost,” she said, holding up the pitcher she'd been carrying. “I need to get water. I spilled what we had.”

  I had to smile to myself, that fancy had made me fear this figure in the shadows. “If water's what you need, you certainly are lost,” I said. She wrinkled her forehead in dismay. “No matter,” I said, “I'm sure we can find the scullery together.”

  She nodded and fell into step beside me. “What's your name, priest man?” she asked, tugging my cassock with her one free hand. In the candlelight I could see the stump of a severed finger as she drew her hand away again.

  “My name's Jereth,” I said, “and I'm no priest anymore.”

  She looked up at me so earnestly that I was sure she'd miss her step from inattention to the path before her. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were crossed; one lid habitually dragged half closed over an eye misaligned and probably useless. They were dark eyes, incongruous with her light hair, which shone almost white in the candlelight. She seemed to be made of the ill-assorted parts of various bodies, all stitched together with noticeable seams. She looked neither young nor old—probably about thirty, like me—but in some ways she seemed half child, half crone, not full-grown but as faded and worn as her colorless, threadbare sack of a garment. Along with the finger, a canine tooth was missing. Her misshapen face was so heavily scarred that there could be no question whether its deformity were natural: she had been ravaged by wounds, crushed and torn like a defeated warrior's shield. On her bare neck the candlelight revealed what was unmistakably a whip-welt. Was that another one on her cheek? I shuddered, and for the first time began to doubt if Hwyn's mistress were all she seemed.

  “Have you been with Lady Trenara for long?” I probed awkwardly.

  “Oh, pretty long,” Hwyn said. She pointed at me, grinning. “You like my lady. I know.”

  “Pretty well,” I said, making an effort to smile back.

  We trudged on in silence a while until we came to the scullery. I helped Hwyn fill her pitcher—not quite full, remembering the spills at supper—and persuaded her to let me carry it as I guided her back to the room she shared with Trenara. It seemed improper for me to go with her all the way to their bedroom, so I took her to the end of that wing and pointed out the way. She took back her pitcher, flashed a snaggletoothed grin, and proceeded on in the dark, guiding herself with one hand on the wall as I retreated through the maze of corridors to my bed.

  I dozed a while, tired by the night's wandering, but I don't think it was for long. There was a rumble of thunder and I woke quivering, every hair standing on end, not in fear but in a strange expectancy. I rose, and when I reached to steady myself against the wall I could have sworn that it, too, was trembling. All thought of sleep gone, I regained my clothes and my candle, and stepped out again, scarcely even noticing whether I left the door open or shut. Unsure what to look for, I took a random course through the corridors, straining my ears for any new sound. I did not go far before I saw the candle of another night walker approaching me. I continued toward the light until I could see a face clearly illuminated in the halo of light around the candle: the Lady Trenara.

  “I'm looking for Hwyn,” she said.

  “What! Is she still lost?”

  “I don't know,” Trenara said.

  It struck me as an odd response, so I explained myself: “I saw her earlier in the night. She said she was looking for water, but she was hopelessly lost—not far from here, in fact. I led her to the scullery, then most of the way back to your room. Didn't she return then?”

  The lady shrugged.

  “I can't believe she could get lost again! I pointed the way out to her; it was straight down the corridor. And that might have been hours ago. I've slept since then. How long has she been gone?”

  “A long time.” She fixed me with the same profound gaze that had fascinated me at dinner, but now it only puzzled me.

  “I guess you must be used to this,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said in her refined, musical voice. “But I get frightened by myself. She won't like it that I came out to look. She told me to wait for her, when she was pouring the water on the floor.”

  “What?”

  “She told me to wait for her. She won't like it that I came out here.”

  “No, after that. What was it you said she did?”

  “She poured the water on the floor. Then she left,” Trenara said, so calmly that I thought there must be some logic to the statement.

  “Why did she do that?” I asked.

  “I don't know. She didn't tell me. She told me to wait,” said Trenara.

  “She poured the water on the floor? You mean, on purpose?”

  Trenara nodded serenely, and fixed me with that same gaze of measureless compassion. At that my sight finally cleared. A thousand pieces of a great puzzle suddenly turned in my mind and settled into a picture of such clarity that I felt I'd been a dunce not to see it earlier. Trenara's look of profound understanding changed in my mind to a fool's uncomprehending stare. Her serene, smooth brow was unclouded by thought. There had never been any sense, I realized, in anything she had said to me—only what I had read into her eyes. And if Trenara were a fool, then Hwyn could not be one. I remembered how Hwyn waited on Trenara hand and foot, cutting her meat for her, unlacing her boot
s for her; and inwardly, I cursed myself for the biggest fool of the lot.

  “Trenara,” I said, “can you wait here for me? I'm going to look for Hwyn.” I left her on a bench in the corridor, and tore off down the passageway Hwyn had taken when I first saw her on her pretended errand for water.

  2

  THE RAVEN'S EGG

  After a long while, the passageway branched, offering a path to the right and a stairway straight ahead. The right turn, I thought, seemed unlikely: it probably led back to the same rooms Hwyn must have passed on the way from her quarters. So I began spiraling slowly up the staircase, until a faint noise below me made me change my course. Hwyn was coming up from the underground chambers, panting with either exertion or fear. I emerged onto the landing to confront her just as she reached it. Her pitcher was still at her hip, and she still had no candle.

  “You find your way well in the dark,” I said.

  She smiled, and said nothing.

  “You're no idiot,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Hwyn, in a tone I had not heard before, a laugh lingering at the edge of her voice.

  “You're no faithful family servant, either.”

  “Never said I was,” she said.

  “Why the masquerade?”

  “Oh, it's not much of a masquerade. Trenara is a lady, as far as I know. At least, I didn't teach her those high-table manners, as you can well believe. And when I said I serve her, it was no more than the truth. I do everything for her, though no one compels me.”

  “You're using her for cover,” I pressed.

  “Oh, you righteous soul!” she spat back. “Using Trenara? If you could care for her better, please, take her. I don't need lords' hospitality, and in my own class I can make my way easier without her. Why, where do you think she'd be if I left her? How do you think she got her living before she met me, this unworldly beauty?”

  With this, she tried to push past me and leave. Daunted by her fury, and sensible of my own audacity in accusing her, I almost let her go; but just as she might have escaped me, something impelled me to reach out and touch her arm. She jumped as if stung.

  “Hwyn,” I said, “I'm sorry. I had no right to say such a thing.”

  She turned back toward me, but did not stand too close. I continued, “All the same, it seems very strange that a woman who is no idiot could be so badly lost twice in one night.”

  “It takes no idiot to be lost in the dark, in a strange house.”

  “And to search for water up and down the house only to pour it out on the floor? Come, Hwyn. What are you roaming the halls for, really?”

  “Maybe I'm meeting a lover. Why should you care? I might as well ask why you're out walking the halls tonight. It seems to me you're up and about quite a bit, for a weary stranger who had to beg lodging. What honest purpose could you have, eh?”

  “Me? I had a strange dream—”

  “Well, so did I,” Hwyn said. She pushed past me again and went on down the hallway; I followed, keeping at arm's length but determined not to let her get away without some answers. Abruptly she turned to me again and said, “Did your dream, by any chance, include a raven's egg?”

  “Holy saints!” I seized her by the shoulder. “How do you know what I dreamed?”

  But even as the words left my mouth, Hwyn started at some sound I could not hear, and motioned me to be still. As soon as I stopped speaking I could hear it too: a distant scream.

  “It's Trenara!” shrieked Hwyn, and broke into a run. The pitcher dropped to the floor and shattered. I took off after her, stumbling on shards of pottery, wondering where we were heading and what I would do when we got there. My candle went out, and I was left to navigate by sound. The screams continued, and I heard them more clearly as I neared the place, even above the noise of Hwyn's cursing.

  I lost my bearings in the dark, and so was surprised to find myself not far from my own room—not far from where I left Trenara on the bench, either. As Hwyn began pounding on one of the doors, I tripped over a body in the hall. Lifting it in my arms, I found that it was Ennes, dead, bleeding from the chest. Poor boy—had he fallen in Trenara's defense?

  Meanwhile, Trenara was sobbing behind the door that Hwyn pounded with both fists. “Let me in!” Hwyn shouted. “You've got the wrong person. I stole the Eye of Night!”

  She had to repeat herself a few times before anyone responded—perhaps the noise of her pounding drowned out her words. When the door finally opened, I followed her in to find Trenara bound to a chair, and a guardsman in the Kelgarran livery threatening her with a hot poker. Presiding over this scene was our gracious host, Lord Dannoth Kelgarran.

  “Let her go!” Hwyn cried. “Can't you see she knows nothing? I'm the one you want.” The lord seized her roughly, twisting her arm behind her, and called the man with the poker to bind her. I threw myself at Lord Dannoth with all my force, and managed to make him drop Hwyn as he and I fell to the floor in a heap. With more luck than skill, I kicked away the blade he tried to draw. But the advantage of surprise gone, I was not strong enough. Lord Dannoth might be more than twice my age, but his reflexes were sharp as a youth's, the force of his arm like the grip of fear. The lord recovered himself, pinned me to the ground, and grasped me by the throat, so that I was sure the end had come.

  “Don't harm him,” Hwyn said behind him. I saw him stiffen, and though I didn't quite put it together then, I knew later that she'd been holding a knife at his back. The man with the poker hovered, but would not strike for fear she'd kill his lord.

  “Do as I say,” said Hwyn, “or you'll never see the Eye of Night again. Only I know its hiding place. These two had nothing to do with the theft: let them go. I won't show you the stone until I'm sure they're free. Jereth, will you guide Trenara out to safety? I can deal with this alone.”

  But Dannoth Kelgarran would have none of it. “Drop your blade, or one of your friends will get a poker through the skull.”

  “If you kill either of my friends, you'll never find the Eye of Night. I might surrender it for their lives, but not for my own. Do you think I treasure my life so highly, marred as I am? I'd die before I'd give the Eye of Night to a man who'd killed my friends; then the secret would die with me.”

  I wondered whether she meant these passionate words; wondered, too, when I had become one of her “friends.” Most pressingly, I wondered if Lord Dannoth believed her threat.

  “Bring me the Eye of Night,” said the lord, “and I will release them; but not before I see it.”

  “You must follow me to its hiding place,” countered Hwyn. “My friends must be with me and able to walk. Otherwise, I can only assume that you mean to kill us all after regaining the Eye. In that case, it would be better for us to die now for the Eye of Night than to die later for nothing. If I'm to surrender the Eye, all three of us must be free to escape.”

  Lord Dannoth's knee was on my chest, and his tremendous hands half gagged me. I began to expect that, regardless of the outcome, I'd suffocate by the time they finished arguing, never to know in what battle I had perished.

  “Agreed,” said Dannoth. “But first you must drop your blade. I can't have you killing me the moment I get the Eye back.”

  “Untie Trenara first,” said Hwyn.

  The lord gave the order, and after a pause, I heard Hwyn's blade clatter to the floor. In one quick movement, the lord took his hand from my neck and scooped up the knife. He moved back a step. “Get up,” he said to me. I got up. He waved the dagger at me: “Turn around.” I turned, and he pinned my right arm neatly behind my back, using his other hand to hold the knife poised at my throat. The other man held Trenara at sword's point. He motioned to her to pick up a candle to light our way, but she did not understand; at last he thrust it into her hands, spilling hot tallow on her fingers, so that she cried out and I almost got myself stabbed moving instinctively to help her. “Enough. Let's go,” said Lord Kelgarran. We filed out of the room, first Hwyn, arms clasped nervously in front of herself; then
Lord Kelgarran, holding me in front of him; then the other man with the whimpering Trenara.

  We pushed on in silence a while. Hwyn began guiding herself with one hand along the wall, as she had done the first time I met her in the corridor. In the terrible quiet, I could hear the soft scrape of her fingernails, searching. “Hurry,” said the lord.

  “It's close,” Hwyn said, “very close.” We reached an intersection of two corridors. “Yes, let me see.” She groped along the wall with one hand as though she were counting the bricks to find her stash, but I thought I saw her other hand slip something out of her pocket: a luminous white stone the size of a robin's egg. She turned to Lord Dannoth Kelgarran: “Here—catch!”

  She tossed the stone high in the air, above Lord Dannoth's head. He had to release me to catch it, lest it fall to the stone floor. As soon as I felt his grip slacken I sprang away. I turned to confront the man who still held Trenara.

  “Release her,” I said in the most menacing tone I could manage. To my surprise, he dropped his sword and let the lady go, a look of dread on his face. But he was not looking at me. I turned and followed his gaze to Lord Dannoth Kelgarran.

  The lord held the white stone but looked as though he would gladly drop it. Vapors rose from the gem and formed themselves into the semblance of men: tall, broad-shouldered swordsmen still bearing what must have been their death wounds. Slashed throats and torn chests oozed spectral blood.

  Lord Kelgarran shrieked and wailed, holding the stone as far from his body as he could, trying vainly to cast it aside. By the time he managed to release his grip, I smelled burnt flesh. He sank to the floor whimpering as seven ghostly warriors glowered at him from all sides.