Vokh looked away, then changed the subject: “You told them to take Var to St. Fiern's Town. To let him go free.” He laughed. “Var took a less lenient view toward your Hwyn. What mood of mercy hit you?”
“To tell you the truth, I was joking when I suggested the pilgrimage,” I told him.
“But you don't take it back,” Vokh pursued.
“And you didn't speak against it,” I said. “If you think Va r deserves death, why didn't you tell Aron what you just told me?”
Vokh shrugged. “Fine friend I'd be, to speak against you when you're taking care of me. Besides—” he half trailed off— “you may know something. They say you came from the sea.”
“Don't you begin that!” I growled. “But Vokh, you haven't answered. Why did you come back to Berall—to the lord who would have murdered you, the city that disgraced you? When all the world was leaving, why return?”
“Var was not Lord of Berall when I left,” Vokh said. “Voryon was almost as bad as his son, but the heir—”
“Lady Ruva,” I said, then leapt in the dark: “You and she—”
Vokh held up a hand to cut me short, lest I speak aloud what I had guessed, and tarnish his love's name. “Ruva,” he mused, eyes downcast. “I taught her to ride: the champion horseman teaching the young princess. A riding accident, they said later. Not if I knew my craft in the height of my career. She was perfect.” He looked up at me. “Mad, they called her. True enough, or she would not have let me become her shame and her deadly danger. Mad, indeed, she was—but splendid. He killed her; and if I had his life in my hands, as you did, he would be dead. But all the same, something in me trusts that you are right.”
“It's the local disease.” I grimaced. “Don't be too much infected with it.”
Vokh steadily gained in strength. What he had needed most was decent food, and I was finally in a position to make sure he had it. When he returned to health, I took him to my shipyard and tried to make him one of my apprentices. I say tried for a reason; soon enough I could understand how he'd fallen into begging. “All I know is horses and arms and warfare,” he would repeat ruefully. “The best of me was lost long ago.” I tried teaching him to mend sails, which I had thought an easy task in my ignorance, accustomed to the life at sea where every man can sew. But Vokh, unaccustomed to working with small things, was hopeless with a needle, and suspicious of what he called “women's work.”
I had just resigned myself to the idea that he would never progress beyond sweeping up after the defter workers, when Renn discovered what he could do. I came back to the temple one evening to find that we had a guest: one of my fishermen with a hook embedded in the flesh of his left hand. The fisherman was cursing the hook by more gods, it seemed, than were on the World-Wheel; Renn stood over him, letting him grip her hand so hard she occasionally dropped her priestly demeanor to add to the noise of profanity; and Vokh, a hub of calm in the center of chaos, was silently extracting the hook from the man's hand. He was not a trained healer, but he'd seen enough of battle to have a fair working knowledge of wounds and what could be done for them. As there was only one healer left in Berall, a good binder of wounds was a godsend to the town. Renn was delighted with him, and he with her; he took to her half as the daughter he'd never had, half as a fellow-survivor of cruel fortunes. He soon fell in with her plans for the Order of the Dawn—now to include brothers as well as sisters in its fellowship. And so Vokh, once a hero, later a beggar, was once again honored in Berall.
Things went well. The shipyard flourished. The fishing boats hauled in plenty. Planting began again on lands not drowned; and slowly, it seemed, the sea was giving up the lands it had usurped. The bounty of land and sea was shared equally. Renn saw to that—fourteen-year-old Renn who'd been the elders' pro-tégé and pawn, the maiden to be offered up to an angry saint, now a priestess, able to rebuke the rich and hearten the poor. She began to have followers, the makings of an order. There began to be prayer in the temple that was not the prayer of fear. The Feast of the Upright God was a small, timid celebration, a green shoot in a ruin, but the Feast of the Bright Goddess was celebrated with proper gaiety.
The first Feast of the Turning God after the one that had turned Berall into a wasteland was celebrated as a feast of repentance, turning back from the heedless ways that had reigned under mad Lord Var. Urged to join in the festival as priest, I chose instead the semi-priestly role of a clown. From behind the mask of some fabulous beast, I poured forth scorn on the elders with their full sanction, teased Renn more gently, and embarrassed her suitor till she was roused to defend him, revealing a warmer feeling for him than she had ever dared show before. When one of the Huntsmen approached, also masked beyond recognition, I pretended to mistake him for myself, and mocked Jereth of World's End: that hopeless Hope from the Sea who presumed to tell the folk of Be-rall what to do when he could not govern himself, demanding everything, satisfied with nothing.
Indeed, I knew that my scorn for Berall had become unfair. They had changed for the better, and I did not want to recognize it, did not want to love anything that survived after the drowning of Larioneth. When the Feast of the Hidden Goddess came again, I refused to enter the temple or join the festivities. I hid under an overturned boat at my workshop, stopping my ears against the temple bells. Even Renn and Evokhion dared not seek me out. When I returned to work after the fourth day of the festival, I was impatient with my apprentices, sarcastic, unjust. They held their distance until my mood softened again to the quiet desolation that had become as familiar as my name.
In many ways it was a better world born out of the Longest Night. But it was not for me. Building my boats—doing the work I had wanted in my youth, the work my father had taken from me—I marveled how the gods had finally granted my wish when it could no longer gladden me. I loved my work, but it could not answer for me the insoluble question of what new world could be worth the sacrifice of Larioneth. By day I lost my sorrows in the tasks at my fingers' ends, but my nights were given to evil dreams.
There was another insoluble riddle in this wish come true: I should not have been able to build what I built. I had never learned how. I had never learned half the things I taught my apprentices. I was working on odd hunches about the way the waves would run along a certain curve of the keel, or the wind on a certain rigging. The boat I had taken to the world's end had been good for prentice-work, for a craftsman half trained and long unpracticed; it had held together through that wild journey, which was more than I could have expected. But what I made as master-shipbuilder of Berall—that was another thing entirely. I hesitate to praise my own work, but speak of Jereth of World's End to any shipwright in Swevnalond today, and you will hear what a name those weatherly carvel-built craft have won me. There was no earthly reason I should have been able to build them. It was as if I had brought the skill back from the world's rim.
One of my creations—the first full-rigged ship we made— had to take the former lord of this land to St. Fiern's Town after my second Feast of the Rising God in Berall. Thus I had my first long sea-journey since I had returned from the world's end, and my first attempt to make sense of the altered geography of Swevnalond. But the voyage, this time, went easily. Looking at the tides south of Berall, I had come to the conclusion that the waters there were not open ocean, but a sound between our island and a mainland just out of sight. This proved true, and once we found the mainland, it was an easy matter to follow the coast, stopping from time to time to take on provisions at other towns newly turned ports. We had gold from Var's treasury, and on the mainland, that still meant something—in the new Berall, coin had become as useless as in Larioneth. But I think the folk we met would almost have provisioned us for free, so glad were they to see signs of life in the North. What's more, from the way the locals regarded me, I think my fellow-travelers must have oiled their generosity with stories told behind my back of Jereth of World's End, the Hope from the Sea.
For all the change in Berall and the new no
rthern coastlands, I found the western coast blessedly familiar. The west had felt the trembling of the earth and seen the darkening of the sky, but had kept their coastline; it seemed they had suffered no terrible losses. We left our ship in the harbor at Mereford, where it was guarded almost with reverence, and completed our journey by land, a procession that swelled with each town we passed as people flocked to see the strangers from beyond the northern waters.
We found St. Fiern's Town still a bustling city, and if its people responded without undue amazement to the upheavals in earth and sky, that was to be expected: they had always been at home with marvels. The Order of St. Fiern accepted the lunatic lord, told us we'd done right to bring him there, and offered hospitality to all our crew. I thanked them briefly and slipped away before my own story could be demanded.
The streets of St. Fiern's Town drew me: a dizzying place, furtive alleys snaking off in unexpected directions, fanciful paintings adorning even the poorest tumbledown houses with the dream-forms of birds and beasts never seen in the waking world. Here, Hwyn had wandered, a child of madness and prophecy, belonging to everyone and no one. How strange to walk these haunted streets, as alone as I had been on my bleak pilgrimage, before I met her. How strange to feel, months after the loss, the near-certainty of finding her just over my shoulder, just hidden by a taller bystander, ready to grab my hand out of the crowd and pull me down an alley to present me with a new song for our performance or a handful of stolen fruit or a kiss.
I must have been looking about wildly, for a stranger stopped to ask, “What are you looking for, pilgrim?”
“Pilgrim? Not this time,” I laughed dryly. “Not a pilgrim to the Mirror of St. Fiern, at any rate.”
“Lucky for you, then,” the man said. “You'd be searching till snowfall. The Mirror's lost underground; an earthquake buried it. But never fear,” he added, seeing the shock in my face, “we will find it again. Our strongest are searching the rubble for it; they shift stones carefully and pray. St. Fiern will not hide her eyes forever.”
I bowed my head. “May you find what you seek,” I said doubtfully.
“And you,” the man said, “can I guide you to what you've been seeking so desperately?”
“No,” I said, wanting to say more, to tell him what ghost I sought—but my heart was caught in my throat. “No,” I murmured hoarsely.
“I might have known,” the man said. “You have the eye of those who look for the gods. And you may find them in these streets—but no one can help you.”
I looked at him wide-eyed. “Are all the people here prophets?”
“No,” he said, “but at least we learn from them. Do not despair. Good journey, pilgrim.”
I thought, then, that I ought to rejoin Lord Var's escort at the Lunar Temple, but my feet dragged as I went, my mind grasping about blindly for anything that might set it at ease: If only I could be at sea already. If only I could be back in my shipyard. If only I could be in Larioneth, lying in Hwyn's arms, and all that happened since then a dream.
I found myself drawn almost against my will to the place where my adventures had begun, the hill behind the Lunar Temple where the Mirror of St. Fiern had been. Fitting that I should seek it again now, I thought: a lost man to a lost oracle. Maybe now that it's dead and buried, it will at last deign to give me some sign. And so I crept silently past the temple, avoiding my companions and the Order of St. Fiern, to take the stony path through the hills.
At last I came upon the spot: a barren mess of broken stones where once a spring-fed pool had waited under a willow-tree, now lightning-blasted and dead. I would never have recognized the place without the knot of workers, gray-faced with rock dust, digging gravel or setting their shoulders to huge stones as a priestess in black chanted softly above them. Suddenly the faint drone of chanting was broken by one man's cry of pain and another's shout, “Don't just stand there! Give us a hand or it's on your head when Donerth's maimed!”
I hastened toward them to add my strength to the three men straining at a slipping boulder, and for a while noticed nothing beyond the weight of the stone we struggled against. When at last the stone rested on higher ground and we sat on our heels, panting and sweating, the man who had shouted at me came toward me, holding out his sinewy hand. His somewhat swaggering walk, the muscular bulk of his shoulders, seemed vaguely familiar; his voice left me in no doubt. “Sorry I barked at you. I thought you were one of the work crew, back from an errand. And thanks—” He broke off, suddenly, blinking as if he had just emerged from a tunnel into the light. “I have met you before, haven't I?”
I hesitated to confirm it, given the tone of our parting, but in the end, my curiosity was great, and my desire for self-protection small. I nodded. “You saved me and my companions from the guards of Kreyn. What are you doing here, Warfast?”
He peered at me more closely. “Gods on the Wheel! The prophet, the priest, and the fool. And you're the priest!”
“Not anymore,” I said. “I'm a shipwright and fisherman. Jereth, in case you've forgotten.”
Just then another worker, farther off, called out, “Warfast, who's that talking to you?” and started toward us, wiping rock-dust out of guileless blue eyes that I remembered well.
“Sky-Raven's Bones!” I said. “Is that Ethwin the Hunter, so far from Folcsted?”
“Jereth?” he shouted, and ran toward me, a spade still in his hand, in a welcome much simpler and warmer than the outlaw's. The two of them retreated with me to a distance from their fellow-workers, as if they were used to each other's company, and the others used to regarding them as a team apart.
“Hidden Goddess!” Ethwin babbled, “Jereth, I scarcely expected to see you anywhere again within the world's rim, let alone here.”
“Or I to see you,” I said, “so far from the Hills of Penmorrin, and in company with Warfast the—Warfast of Kreyn. How do you two know each other? And why in the Wheel of the World are you here?”
“As for me, need you ask?” Warfast said. “I took Hwyn's advice. Can you really have doubted who won that argument? What an extraordinary little creature. I may have shouted her down in the moment, but her words stuck like burrs to my heart, till I had to listen. I have left my old way of life, and come seeking an oracle to find my new path. How she will laugh, I expect, when she sees how she triumphed!” Then the lurch in my heart must have shown in my face, for the outlaw's eyes widened a little, and when he spoke again, his tone was unexpectedly gentle: “Gods, man, what happened?”
“Hwyn is dead,” I said, my voice harsh in my ears. “She died on the Longest of Longest Nights.”
Ethwin cried out wordlessly. To my surprise, it was Warfast who put a hand on my shoulder. “I'm sorry,” he said. “She was a rare one, to be sure.”
“There is none like her,” I said.
Ethwin stammered, “Jereth, I—I'm so sorry. I know you loved her, just as I—oh, gods, I remember when you said we should take the quest together, you and I, and leave Hwyn and Trenara safe in Folcsted. But they went, and I stayed, and—oh, gods. Is Trenara safe, or—”
I put a hand on Ethwin's arm. “She must be alive, for the world has not died, nor the grain ceased to send out roots in the earth. She is the Hidden Goddess.”
Warfast's mouth fell open and stayed that way. Ethwin dropped the shovel, which clattered down among the stones. “Oh, gods,” he whispered. “Oh, have mercy. What will become of me? I lay with her. I lay with the Hidden Goddess, as a man with a woman.”
I kept my grip on him steady, saying, “You were singularly beloved of the goddess, Ethwin. Many men loved her, but you were the only one she asked to come with us. She must have cared for you.” His eyes remained round as platters, but at least he seemed to be breathing. I turned to Warfast. “As for you, I seem to recall, she said you had kind eyes.”
“Hidden Goddess!” swore Warfast, then checked himself. “Yes. I remember. What a strange thing to say! And she was the Hidden Goddess—the simpleton? What a strange worl
d this is! And Wilgar assaulted her. No wonder he went mad.”
“I can see we have a great deal to tell each other,” I said. “Will you come with me to some inn so we can moisten our throats as we talk? I think we will go through many pitchers-full in the telling.”
“By all the gods on the Wheel, I could use a drink,” said War-fast, adding to the bewildered Ethwin, “you too, eh, shepherd boy?”
“But others will want to know this,” Ethwin said. “The Order of St. Fiern—”
I shook my head. “I'm done with priests and orders. You tell them if you want. You have both well earned an explanation, for each of you came to our rescue, and aided the Hidden Goddess in the perils of her earthly journey. I will tell you alone; choose for yourselves what you'll do with the story.”
“All right, then,” said Warfast. “But not now. While the sun shines, we have work to do here. Come back toward the end of the day, and we'll contain our curiosity till then.”
“Why should I go? It seemed you needed another pair of hands,” I said.
I worked by their side until the sun hung low, and then we found a dark tavern full of inviting scents and slipped into chairs in a corner where we could nurse our ale over long talk undisturbed. I was glad that the gold of Berall enabled me to pay for all we drank and ate, playing host to two men who'd known me as a beggar.
When we were well settled with brown ale, fragrant stew, and fresh bread, Warfast said, “Well, Jereth, will you finally satisfy our curiosity what you meant when you called Lady Trenara the Hidden Goddess?”
“It's a long tale,” I said. “But first I want to hear how you two came to know each other, and how you came here. Surely that will be a shorter tale than mine.”
“Not necessarily,” said Warfast. “But since you've given us drink, we owe you news, at least. I'll begin; Ethwin can eat while I talk, and be ready to bear his part when it comes.
“I was never the same after you and your friends stumbled into our northern stronghold with that magic stone Hwyn carried. None of us were. We rejoined the rest of my troops, but we could never really go back to living as we had: it all seemed empty.
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