For that, I had no answer. “I'd best go, and let you go to him. I'd give you my hand in peace, but I doubt you'd take it.”
“What do you know of me, ex-Tarvon?” said Turl. “Here's my hand. Now, let's find you something for that bump on the head.”
I limped back to our corner in the square in midafternoon, holding a spirit-soaked rag to the back of my head. I could not see through the crowd whether my friends were still there, but gradually I began to hear over the clamor a high, clear voice that permeated the summer air like the scent of lilacs.
I quickened my step toward the sound, threading through the crowd as eagerly as Torrin had when he slipped away from us. I saw Trenara first, swaying slightly to the music in some unfathomable dream of her own; Hwyn must be near, but still hidden by the heads of bystanders.
The song grew in my ears: one of the sea-songs I had taught Hwyn, the lament of a sailor's wife while her man is away at sea. It was well suited to her voice, and she even had the player's trick of putting a slight sob in her voice without losing the purity of the melody. When I glimpsed her between the listeners standing about her, she seemed unaware of my presence. I joined the song and watched her turn toward my voice, her face brightening. There is only one in the world, I thought, and when you have once seen it, you can be sure it will never come again. I did not know whether Torrin had chosen right or wrong, but for myself, I was certain.
5
THE SPEAKING STONE
We took the eastward road toward Kreyn the next morning, slipping away while the Feast of the Bright Goddess still flourished lest we meet Klem and Edwold in the departing crowds when it was done. Nursing regrets for the lost fourth day of the festival, I looked back many times, sorry to leave the site of our undreamt-of success, the first I'd known in years. And Trenara, as well—Trenara, so docile in Sebrin, caught a mood of rebellion on the road. Though she made no move to leave Hwyn, she did everything in her power to delay her: casting off bits of her clothes at the roadside, unpacking the knapsacks, whining and dragging her feet. After a few days of it, Hwyn lost her temper and harangued her, until the sheer futility of it made her laugh despite herself. “I might as well be talking to a tree,” she said. “It's scarcely worth the effort. To think she was as sweet as you please, all that wild ride on Lake Garran! I almost wish we'd continued north instead of turning aside.”
“We can turn any time you choose,” I reminded her.
She considered the possibility, upending her boot to shake out a pebble. “Am I being a fool?”
“How could I possibly tell?” I said. “Visions, voices, prophecies, the end of the world—nothing in the Tarvon Order quite prepared me to deal with any of these outside a book. You're the seer.”
“A half-blind seer,” she said with a sardonic twist of her long mouth. “It never ceases to amaze me how much the Second Sight leaves dark. The prophets in the holiday pageants always seem so sure, so complete in their knowledge. As for me, I know my path leads into the Troubles, but I don't know what I'll do when I'm there. I don't know what will happen afterward. It's not knowledge my dreams give me; it's a gadfly driving me, a scent on the wind to lure me. Can you understand how it feels to find your way by bare intuition, without a shred of reason to cover yourself with?”
“I'm following you,” I said. “Need I say more?”
She stared at the dirt between her feet. “You can turn away whenever you choose.”
“I don't,” I said. “Come on, before Trenara gets her boots off again.”
The way to Kreyn was hilly and hard. Worst of all were the long stretches of arid land where we sweated ourselves dry, drained our water-skins, and kept anxious watch for any little spot of greenery that might signal a trickle of water, or hold enough moisture in fruits or stems to keep us going till the next stream. Trenara whined; Hwyn cursed; I set my teeth against complaint, determined to prove to Hwyn that I would not repent my decision or weaken under the hardships of the journey.
As we wound our way down the thousandth brown hill in a row, Hwyn said, “You haven't said a word in hours.”
“Well,” I said, “in all that time, you've said, ‘Sky-Raven's Bones!’ and, ‘Curse this dust!’ and, ‘I'd give my other eyetooth for a drink of fresh water,’ several times each. And I couldn't argue with any of those, so there wasn't much to say.”
“You don't have to argue,” she said with a sly smile, the first I'd seen in miles of dusty road.
“Could I ask questions, then?” I said.
“You could,” she said, “as long as you know I may not answer.”
“You don't have to tell me a great thing, a secret thing,” I said. “But surely there's something you could tell me about yourself that wouldn't touch on those things you can't speak of. About your childhood, maybe.”
She looked at the dust. “That's where the ghosts are.”
“All right,” I said, “then tell me about the place where you were happiest.”
She tipped back her head, not seeming to see the bright hot sky over us, but some shining vision out of the past. “All right: St. Fiern's Town, when I was very small. The whole town was like a year-round festival, with the pilgrims coming in from everywhere, and the minstrels following the pilgrims in and out of town—no end of music and pageants and strange stories. I learned to sing from the minstrels, and the pilgrims would fuss over me and give me sweets.” She smiled at the memory. “That was before I was deformed, of course. I went back, years later— ah, gods! There's no going back.” The smile faded, and she was silent a while. At last she said, “What about you? Where were you happy?”
I thought about it long. “I don't know,” I said finally. “Gods, that's pathetic. I've been almost everywhere—Swevnalond, Magya, Greater and Lesser Kettra, Iskarron, the Islands—and I don't know. Wherever I was, I always wanted to be somewhere else.”
Hwyn squinted up at me, looking puzzled or perhaps distressed. “Why did you ask me that question if you couldn't answer it?”
“On the boat,” I said at last.
“On boats?”
“I mean, on the rudderless boat on Lake Garran, escaping from Kelgarran Hall, with the whole world ahead of us. That was where I was happy.”
“Really?” she said, with that puzzled squint again. “Escaping a ruined castle, jammed in a defective boat with two strangers at the whim of a ghost?” She considered it a while, then smiled. “So was I.”
“I wish Lake Garran were in front of us right now,” I said. “I'd drink it.”
As we neared Kreyn, the land turned greener, fed by streams flowing south from the Hills of Penmorrin. Our water-skins were full, but our money drained away. The folk along the road, cowherds and vineyard-keepers, would give no crust of bread for work, much less for song, but would eagerly take the coins we'd earned at the festival, hoarding them away for rare trips to the market, sure to buy twice the goods that they'd doled out to us. By the time we reached Kreyn, our pockets and stomachs were empty, our spirits low.
“We'll eat at the lady's table tonight, or I'll be hanged for forcing my way,” Hwyn boasted on our first day in Kreyn. But the city was large, and there were many splendid houses—their high walls painted rose or gold, their glazed windows reflecting the sun—that were nonetheless not Kreyn Hall. Of poor hovels there were also many, scraps of wood patched together with mud like birds' nests. Among the tangle of streets and alleys without coherence, we poor strangers could not find the hall of the Guardian of Day.
Small help we had from the passersby! Not a soul would give us directions, much less anything else. They would neither stop for Hwyn's singing—a sign of either dull ears or impoverished souls—nor pity her seeming helplessness in idiot's guise; minstrels and beggars were both too plentiful to regard. They wanted no day-labor from foreigners; poor laborers were plentiful as well, willing to work for food or the hope of it. Ragged children thronged the roads, begging for crumbs, clinging to Trenara's skirt with a pleading look, offering to fetch a
nd carry. Hwyn found one girl's hand in her pocket. She caught it and extracted it emphatically, giving the child a grave look. “Now, learn by this,” she began, but the child twisted away and ran, leaving Hwyn staring after her with haunted eyes.
Toward the end of the day, when Hwyn made a motion to leave the town limits, I thought perhaps she'd given up—and to be honest, my heart rose at the prospect, despite the harsh road we'd have to follow to retrace our steps. But when we camped in the shelter of a brushy hollow, she pulled from her pockets the reason for our retreat: a few crumbly seed-cakes of the kind she liked, which I'd heard hawked in the Kreyn market-square at an alarming price.
“Where did you get those?” I asked stupidly.
“Corner booth at the market. Poorly guarded,” she said. “The merchant can afford the loss, I assure you: his purse was bulging, and his prices were robbery of the purest kind.” I must have looked disapproving, for she added defensively, “We tried all else. I won't beg when I can earn, and I won't steal when I can beg. But I won't starve when I can steal, either.”
“I understand,” I said hesitantly. “You and Trenara divide them: you're hungrier than I.”
Hwyn opened her mouth as if to make a rebuttal, then stopped herself, reconsidering. Finally she bowed her head. “All right, then. I understand.” She gave most of the booty to Trenara, saving only one cake for herself. I tried not to stare at them as they ate, but without success; and all the while she ruminated over her one cake, crumbs in her skirt, a sheen of butter on her fingers, Hwyn eyed me with a strange solemn stare—I might almost have said a hungry look. I went off to search the brush for wild berries, but found none. There was a clump of what looked like blackberry bushes, but other scavengers had picked them clean.
That night I lay long awake, stomach twisted with its emptiness. After trying valiantly to will myself to sleep by staying still—or at least to lie quiet for the others' sake—I lost patience. I writhed and curled myself around my crying stomach, muttering curses.
“Are you all right?”
The voice came so unexpectedly that I jumped up, quivering in every nerve, before my eyes adjusted to the pale starlight and my reason caught up with me. I saw Hwyn before me, sitting uncomfortably upright, one hand pressed to her chest. Trenara, of course, slept soundly.
“Yes,” I lied. “Are you?”
I would not believe her if she said yes. Hwyn's brow was knotted with worry, and though the night was warm, she shivered. “I feel—strange—that's all,” she stammered.
“Is it a pain in your chest?” I pried, suspecting that such a hard-used creature might well be consumptive.
But she looked blankly at me. “No. Why should you think—? Oh!” Noticing as if for the first time the position of her hand, she extended and uncurled it to reveal the Eye of Night. “It's this. I think it's speaking to me.”
“Of what?”
“I can't tell. It's like a thousand voices calling all at once and none in unison: no clear words, just a babble of tongues. But it calls to me. Maybe in time I'll understand.”
I nodded.
“Or maybe—” She held it out to me. “Take it. Can you hear them?”
I hesitated. She put the stone in my hand, curled my fingers around it; I was startled to feel the Eye, curiously warm, and her fingers, curiously cool in the humid night. I felt life in the stone. Then, moved by much the same instinct that draws one to babies or kittens, I pressed it to my heart. Hwyn leaned toward me, avid, hopeful. But I shook my head. “No voices. A faint sense of life, nothing more.” I put it back in the hollow of her hand.
“Are you sure?” she asked, as she returned it to the breast of her smock.
“I have no ear for such things. But you surprise me: you thought I might hear what eluded you?”
“I had some hope,” she said. “I don't know yet what you are, and what deeper purpose there might be in your coming with me. You might have held the key.”
“And you trusted me to take the Eye of Night and return it, even if my powers had been great?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “If you'd understood its message, you would have told me.”
“How do you know?” I challenged, though of course it was perfectly true.
“Because you're defenseless.”
“Thank you very much,” I drawled.
“I mean that in the best sense,” she amended. “You have no guile, no stratagems; you go at things headfirst. You get a lump on the head from a self-deluded man and accept it as the wages of truth-telling. You'd set your bare heart as a shield between a child and a wolf. I'd trust you with my life.”
“But not your name?” I couldn't resist adding.
Hwyn shrugged, opened her empty hands to the starlight. “‘A name is more than life; for what shall you hope to gain when you have lost yourself?’ Revelations of St. Ligaiya.”
I could not, at some hour past midnight, on an empty stomach, recall a trenchant commentary to that scripture, so I only grunted, wrapped my arms around my middle, and rocked myself like a discontented infant.
Suddenly Hwyn tipped back her head like a dog scenting the wind. Her gesture made me notice that there was, indeed, a spicy scent in the air that I had thought the product of my hungry imagination. She rose and beckoned me to follow her into the brush. Tangled in the bare branches of a dead bush, she showed me a vine, invisible in the dark thicket but plain to the touch and scent. “Wild slakings,” she said, plucking a few leaves and thrusting them into my hand. “Nothing to fill the belly, but they'll calm its complaining a while.”
They had a comforting smell, like an herb my parents' cook had called gammage—perhaps it was the same thing. “Thank you,” I said, and pressed her hand before I put one of the leaves in my mouth. It was soothing, not all at once but little by little. In time fatigue took its rightful place over hunger. My head drooped. Thickly I realized that Hwyn was saying something, and I jerked awake. “Hmm?”
But she laughed softly. “Never mind. Go to sleep, righteous man.” She'd called me something similar once before, in mockery; the laugh was still in her voice, but now she spoke the words gently.
“What about you?” I said.
“Either I'll learn to ignore the voices, or listen till I understand them,” she said. “I'll tell you which in the morning.”
But when I awoke in the morning she was sound asleep, one arm flung out carelessly, looking as defenseless as she claimed I was, looking so fragile that the sight caught at my heart. Trenara never looked fragile in sleep; she looked perfectly whole, an enchanted maiden sleeping a hundred years under a guardian's spell, a forest asleep under snow. It was with an effort that I turned away from them to look for more gammage. When I returned I sat quietly chewing a leaf, watching my companions sleep, marveling what a strange fate had brought such a pair together—and how much stranger that I should be their companion.
We returned to the city in the day, to be met by frustration. Our luck had not improved. If Hwyn filled her pockets with anything, she did not show me, and I did not ask. In the heat of the day, I pulled her aside into a shaded alley and whispered, “Could you teach me to steal? I don't think I can hold out much longer.” She looked so horrified that I almost laughed. “Come now, you can't disapprove of my doing what you do yourself. You laughed at my overscrupulousness; well, it's worn thin quickly enough.”
“Do you think I'm eager to see you as marred as I am?” she whispered back. “Never mind learning. Next time I offer you something, don't ask where I found it.”
“No. I can't let you take risks for both of us. Teach me.”
“You'd never learn; you're too old. You'd get caught. Everyone does, at first. Look at this,” she held up her right hand, displaying the stump of her severed finger. “They did this to me for theft. And I was a child then. You're a grown man: they'd take your whole hand. This town is not gentle.”
“All the more reason not to let you take risks for me,” I said. “Forget tha
t I asked. I'll manage.” I walked out into the crowd again, and she followed. Luck was with me, for I was in time to see a mangled bread-roll tumble from a merchant's basket into the roadside dirt. I dove for it with an ardor I'd have found comic a few days earlier, then retreated into a corner with my quarry, dusting it off as best I could. Hwyn settled down beside me, and I offered her half, Trenara being somewhere astray out of sight.
Hwyn took the offered morsel absentmindedly, but did nothing with it. As I attacked my half of the bread, scarcely pausing to rub the grime away on my sleeve, she squinted up at me. “You shouldn't be here,” she said. “I did wrong to ask you to come with me.”
“Why? Do you have someone better?” I retorted, missing for a moment the sorrow in her voice.
She responded at once: “No, Jereth, of course not. But look at you! You didn't have to be here, scrounging bread out of the gutter, starving on a fool's errand. You weren't brought up to this.”
“And you were?”
She shrugged. “I don't know. I suppose I wouldn't call anything that happened to me ‘bringing up.’ But that's not quite what I mean, anyway. Trenara and I—we're marked, set aside, ruined already. What's a few more scars? But you're different. You weren't brought up to this. I brought you to this.”
“I came here on my own legs,” I said. “You couldn't have brought me anywhere without—what's this?”
A herald came elbowing past the people in the market-square. “Make way! Make way for Her Resplendence!” Pushed as far back against a glove-shop wall as we could be, we still had to flatten ourselves thinner against the press of people clearing out of the street. I stood, as much to get my long legs out of people's way as to see what was coming. Mounted guards rode by, splendid in white and gold livery, followed by four milk-white horses bearing an ornate litter. On it reclined a graceful lady dressed in yellow silk, her fair hair sparkling with jeweled combs. The people bowed before her, grubby beggars and plumed gentry alike. But in the midst of her procession she called to the horsemen to stop and, to their astonishment, leapt down from the litter, shouting, “Cousin Luith!”
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