Though we knew we would need sleep before our journey, we never wanted to let the festival end. The Folc's love of song was at its height and we, sure that we would not easily find such a spring of music again, drank it in thirstily. But another kind of drink silenced us at last; dizzy and drowsy with spiced ale, we lay down by the beasts, grateful for the steadiness of the earth and hopeful that our turn to watch would not come too soon.
It never came. It puzzled me to wake to the morning rain and find that the sheep had already been driven away; only the priestess, her acolytes, and my companions remained. But this did not trouble me much; I guessed that a kind conspiracy of the Folc must have plotted to let us sleep and gather our strength for the road.
Seeing Hwyn sprawled near me, still sleeping despite the rain, I reached to touch her shoulder. “Hwyn, it's daylight,” I said. “The morning after the full moon. Time to travel on.”
One eye half opened lazily, and I almost laughed at the sight. Then Hwyn's hand flew to her chest; she gasped, and sprang to her feet. “Sky-Raven's Bones!” she cried. “It's gone!”
“What?”
“The Eye of Night is gone,” she said.
Suddenly I noticed that Halred had been watching us from a little distance away, her face expectant but calm. As I looked her full in the face, she said in warm tones, “What seems to be the matter?”
There was something too innocent in that question; she had been standing near enough to hear Hwyn cry out. Hwyn seemed to feel it, too. She fixed her eye on Halred and said, “Where is the Eye of Night?”
“What do you mean?” said Halred, a touch too calmly.
“It was in my pocket when I went to sleep,” Hwyn said.
“Are you saying it is not now?” said Halred.
“If anyone came near me in the night, if anyone else knew where I kept it, please, tell me now,” said Hwyn. “I don't like what I must conclude otherwise.”
“You're overwrought,” Halred said. “You don't know what you're saying. The stone must have slipped deeper into your clothing, or you put it in another pocket, and now, in the anxiety of parting, in your uncertainty whether you do right, you imagine it is gone. Look again.”
“Did you think I could believe that?” said Hwyn. “Did you think I might not notice, even for one waking moment, that the Raven's Egg had been taken from me? Even my dreams cried out. Why did I sleep so heavily? Did you know that I had not slept an unbroken night since I first touched it? What drug did you mix in that last cup of spiced ale we drank just before we slept?”
“How dare you!” Day started toward her, hands clenched. I jumped up to stand by Hwyn's side, putting a protective arm between her and the acolyte. Trenara, last to wake as usual, raised her head from the ground, saw us braced for a fight, and started to cry.
Halred held up her hand to check her acolyte's movement. “Peace now. There's no need for hasty actions. Hwyn, if you are sure the talisman is missing, then I can well understand your suspicion, but it is misdirected. Search me, if you doubt my word.”
“It is not on your person,” said Hwyn. “If it were, I would know.”
“Well, then,” said Halred, “you do not have it, and you know I do not. But we know the land still blooms and the flocks you slept among still flourish. I would say, then, that the Eye of Night has not left us: it has gone into the land, become part of all these living things. The end of your quest has come: the Eye of Night has reached its destination, awakened to its new life.”
“No,” said Hwyn.
“What makes you so certain it cannot be?” said Halred.
“I know what I know,” said Hwyn. “You yourself said I have my own way of knowing; when did you stop believing it?”
“Your knowledge is still young,” said Halred. “I am doing my best to guide you.”
Hwyn shook her head. “Good Mother, I understand well why you would do what you must have done. Neither of us could be sure what would happen to this blooming land, these flourishing fields, when the Eye of Night left. But I know the Eye of Night better than you do, and I can promise you one thing: if you imprison it, you will pay the price in tears of blood. A fortnight's prosperity must seem little after three years' anxiety, but it came to you freely and must be yielded as freely as it was given. Hoard it, and you hoard your own destruction.”
“You underestimate the blessing you have brought to this land,” said Halred. “You said once that the Eye of Night was a living thing waiting to be born. I doubted you at the time, but now I see it is true. Look around you now! All is being reborn: the land, the flocks, the customs of the Folc, and you yourself, growing toward your rightful place as a priestess among us.”
“No,” Hwyn said again. “This is not the place that calls me by name. Tell me what you have done with the Eye of Night and let me go, for your own people's sake, if not for ours.”
“What do you know of the good of my people?” said Halred.
“I know what I brought among you, which you dared not even name before them. I know its power.”
“You are still green in the ways of power,” said Halred. “You will learn better—”
“I am not so green as you claim—and you once knew this; you said you would not only teach me but learn from me. How, then, can you treat me like a fool at a festival, to be distracted with sweet stories while my pocket is picked?”
Halred drew herself up to her full height, towering over Hwyn. “I took you in when you had nothing and made the Folc accept you. I shared my home and food with you. I healed your friend of his wounds and began teaching you the lore no one had bothered to teach you before. What have I done to deserve your distrust?”
Hwyn was silent a while. “We owe you more than we can repay,” she said. “It pains me to distrust you again, after having trusted you more than anyone but Jereth. If I have accused you wrongly, I am more sorry than I can say. But you must admit that appearances are against you. Only you knew where I kept the Eye of Night; only you and your acolytes were with us when we woke. You could easily have drugged us—and we were certainly drugged, to sleep through the taking of the Raven's Egg and the driving out of the flocks. Your motive for taking the Eye of Night is all too strong—a noble motive, one that might well soothe a tender conscience over such a small matter as a few words not true by worldly standards.
“I cannot be sure that your love for truth is as strong as your love for your people,” Hwyn said. “But I can trust your devotion to the goddesses you serve. If you swear by the Bright Goddess and the Hidden Goddess that you had nothing to do with the Eye of Night's disappearance, neither taking it nor helping another to take it, I will retract my words with humblest apologies and beg your counsel to find it again.”
It was some time before Halred spoke; but when she did, it was in a voice as hard as the bones of the mountain. “I asked no oath of you when you first told me your story.”
“And I told you no lies,” said Hwyn. “Nor do I lie now: the Eye of Night will leave here, whether by my hand or another's. Even if it is bound by necromancy—even if I die trying to unbind it—this land cannot hold it. And better for you and this land if I bring it away before it feels the walls of its prison.”
She swept past Halred, and Trenara followed, tears running down her face. I followed too, but not before I had seen the stricken look on Halred's face, as though she might almost have called Hwyn back. She did not, however, come after us.
When we had passed beyond earshot of the sheepfold, rain pouring down on us like Trenara's tears, Hwyn said, “Dear gods, this is the last thing I expected. And with this rain, I can scarcely trace the path she must have taken. What can I do now?”
“You found the Eye of Night once, though it was hidden beneath a stronghold. You freed it though it was tangled in the bonds of necromancy,” I said. “You will free it again.”
“Will I?” said Hwyn. “Will it not think I have abandoned it, and abandon me in turn?”
“Where should we look?” I
said. We were instinctively moving downhill toward the fields, but that was only habit.
“To tell you the truth,” said Hwyn, “what frightens me most is that I ought to sense its presence, as I sensed it from afar when I journeyed toward Kelgarran Hall—but I do not. Oh, gods! Do you think—you don't think she's telling the truth, and it really has gone into the land? Have I accused her unjustly?”
“Do you believe that?” I countered.
Hwyn stopped in her tracks and shut her eyes for a second. “Not really. It—it's a beautiful story, yet it doesn't ring true. But I can bring no firmer reason against it than that.”
“Did you have a firmer reason to look under Kelgarran Hall for the Eye of Night?” I said.
“Well, I—I knew the House of Kelgarran had long been powerful, more powerful than seemed quite right. But there are many powerful houses. No, it was all dreams and the shadows of dreams, promptings from a source I could not name.”
“Well, then,” I said.
“You mean I should trust those inner promptings again,” she said. “But at the moment they lead nowhere.”
“Be patient,” I said. “It must be a shock, losing the Eye of Night. Your senses may need time to recover.”
She nodded, and was silent.
“To answer your question,” I said, “no, I did not think Halred might be telling the truth. She looked ill at ease, like someone who dislikes lying but is trying desperately to brazen it out. And she has, as you say, too strong a motive to put this story forward.”
“She does,” said Hwyn. “Why was I so trusting?”
I smiled. “In the last stage of our journey, you rebuked yourself for being too slow to trust. It's not easy. Is there anyone we can still trust to help us?”
“Ethwin and Paddon—I think,” said Hwyn. “But Ethwin will be away in the wilds now, impossible to find. And I would hate to make Paddon our first ally. He's a foreigner here, as we are. If the Folc doubt his loyalty, he may lose yet another home.”
“Guthlac will be in the high pastures by now,” I said. “But when he comes back, I think I would trust him. He could charge Halred before the Assembly.”
Hwyn shook her head. “Halred is two of the nine voices in the Assembly—and she's too good at swaying others to her side. Remember how easily she gathered supporters when we first came here? Besides, even those that disagree with her may make trouble for us when they find out I'm the Night-Bearer. No, Jereth, I'm not bringing this before the Assembly if I can help it. Whatever the Folc may say, the Eye of Night must leave here— and every instant that it is imprisoned risks all their safety.”
“All right, then,” I said. “So it's up to us. Where would you put the Eye of Night if you'd stolen it to make the land fertile? Bury it in the fields?”
“If it's only that, I'll be relieved,” said Hwyn. “She'd have a hard time keeping any sort of necromantic circle undisturbed in the furrows. If it's there, we can dig it up and leave.”
“Good. We may as well look, then,” I said. We started downhill, skidding on mud as the rain coursed down over us. “It was a clear night,” I grumbled. “Where did the rain come from?”
“It rained after the Rite of Increase,” Hwyn reminded me.
“The water in the darkness,” I mused. “The Eye of Night must have power over water. You don't think she dropped it in the lake, do you?”
“No. Then she'd lose control of it forever—unless she knows some way to dredge it up off the bottom,” Hwyn said.
“I'm a pretty fair swimmer, but I couldn't see myself fishing up a stone from the lake-bottom mud,” I said. “If it were in the lake, it would have gone into the land—or at least the water—for good. And I have a hunch you're right: Halred would not want it so irrevocably out of her hands.”
“Buried in the earth would be better,” Hwyn mused. “You could always dig it up again if you wanted its power somewhere else—or if you realized that crazy little woman was right after all, and it didn't belong. I hope it's there. Can you see the fields from here? Is anything out of the ordinary?”
“It's raining too hard to see clearly,” I said. “Besides, the other changes didn't happen at once. It might take another night to manifest itself in the land.”
“I suppose so,” Hwyn said. “Still, it nags at me that I don't have any sense that the Eye of Night is nearer than it was when we started.”
“Do you think we're going the wrong way?” I said.
“It's not that I have a sense of moving away from it,” she said. “I just don't sense it anywhere, as though it were in another world. It's frustrating, like losing my eyesight all over again. The only power I can feel anymore is that constant air of strangeness from the mountain itself, from the Hall of the Dead.” She stopped suddenly. “Jereth, what a fool I've been!”
“It's there,” I finished for her. “The ghostliness of the cave is masking the Eye of Night's own ghostliness.”
“It must be,” said Hwyn. We reversed course and began struggling back up the muddy slope. “Upright God defend us! That cave is the likeliest place for necromancy in all Penmorrin.”
“But you've foiled necromancy before,” I reminded her. “You'll prevail.”
“I'm not so sure of that,” she said. “You don't know what it took to free the Eye of Night from Lord Dannoth's spells. It was a near thing, and I'm not sure I could do it twice. And the danger! Even if she's used no binding circles, I'm not sure what the Eye of Night will do to the ghosts we both sensed in that cave. It's too great a risk for all three of us. You'd better take Trenara to a safe place and wait for me.”
“No,” I said. “Rather, you guard Trenara while I go. With the Gift of Naming, I can keep the ghosts from harming me, even make them tell me where the Eye is hidden. And I hope you trust me by now not to hoard the Eye of Night for myself when I find it.”
“I do trust you,” said Hwyn, “but this is my task. I am bound to the Raven's Egg. It knows me, and I hope it still trusts me. And its absence is like a hole in my heart. I want to go. I must go.”
“Very well,” I said, “but not alone. I will go with you to speak to the ghosts.”
“Then who will guard Trenara? We have lost our chief friend in this place.”
“Who will blame Trenara for what we have done?” I said. “She's probably safer without us. And we have not lost all our friends.”
“The herdsmen and Ethwin are far off—”
“But Girnhild will be in her kitchen,” I said. “Can't we trust her?”
Hwyn considered. “I think so. All right.”
When we burst into the kitchen of the Red Oak house, Girnhild and Godrun were stirring a pot of lukewarm milk and rennet over the hearth to start a cheese, while Wylf sat at the churn and a little band of children played on the floor. But at the sight of us—Hwyn panting with exertion, Trenara weeping—the children stared and pointed, the old woman jumped up, Godrun put a hand to her mouth, and Girnhild whirled around, spoon in hand, scattering drops of milk all over. “What's happened? What's the matter?”
“My Lady Girnhild,” said Hwyn, “I scarcely know where to begin. I must ask you to trust us in a very strange matter, and if our places were reversed, I'm not at all sure I would be inclined to trust.”
“Don't make a long story of it,” said Girnhild. “Tell me, and I'll see.”
“The thing I carried with me into the Hills of Penmorrin, the thing that has brought healing to this land, was taken from me in the night,” Hwyn said.
“What thing? Tell me plainly,” Girnhild said.
“The Sky-Raven's Egg,” said Hwyn, “the Eye of Night.”
“Gods on the Wheel!” cried Godrun; the other two women simply stared, eyes wide, mouths open. Only the children and Trenara, who had joined them playing on the floor, showed no signs of alarm.
“I swear by all the gods that I mean no harm to this land or to any of the Folc,” said Hwyn. “I'm sorry I kept this secret from you, but it was not from malice. There are dark
legends about the Sky-Raven's Egg in this country, and when I showed it to Halred, she warned me not to speak of it. When the wonders began, I told two others what I carried, but not where I kept it. I would have spoken of it in the Assembly, but Halred silenced me.”
“And now she has it?” Girnhild guessed.
“Not on her person,” Hwyn said. “But I suspect she has hidden it—probably in the Hall of the Dead.”
“This grows worse and worse,” said Girnhild.
“What will you do?” said Wylf. “Pour out the ashes of our ancestors to search for the—the thing you have lost?”
Hwyn stood silent a moment, as if daunted by the image. “I hope it does not come to that,” she said at last. “I have come to love this land, these people. It would grieve me to do you any dishonor. But I will do what must be done to free the Sky-Raven's Egg. It is a living thing with needs of its own, and today it needs to move onward.”
“And this thing—the Sky-Raven's Egg—this is what brought new life to our land?” Girnhild said. “I thought it was supposed to bring the world's end.”
“It may, if it is not set free,” Hwyn said. “It is not evil, as some would have it, but it does not bear imprisonment meekly.”
“I scarcely know what to tell you,” Girnhild said. “We could bring this before the Assembly—”
“I would rather act now, before the Raven's Egg feels itself caged,” Hwyn said. “But I must see to Trenara's safety. She is used to traveling with me, but I cannot take her into a lair of ghosts to wrestle with forces as great as the world. And unless I am utterly mad, it is the world at stake here. So I have come to ask you to guard Trenara while Jereth and I seek the Sky-Raven's Egg—and to give her a home if we don't survive.
“I know how extravagant my request is,” Hwyn continued. “I am asking you to take the word of a stranger against your own priestess and the legends of your people and common sense itself.”
“Not against common sense,” said Wylf. “I have known Halred for good and ill all her life. She is a kind healer and a wise priestess, but the love of power is strong in her; she holds two of the nine voices in the Assembly, and sways as many of the rest as she can. And you brought a thing of great power, a temptation greater than any she had seen before. No, my girl, it makes all too much sense. She would not let so much power slip away.” Wylf sighed. “I don't like it, but I believe you.”
The Eye of Night Page 27
