The Dark Ferryman

by Jenna Rhodes

  She said to Barton, “But your grampa didn’t go with them.”

  “Nope. We’re Kernan. A lot of Kernan went with ’em, too, but he said, soldiering brings trouble, and no matter what a soldier said about glory, he still needed a farmer to fill his gut.”

  “I see.” The corner of Rivergrace’s mouth tugged. The Kernan sounded much like her Dweller foster father Tolby. They reached a high point, where she could look up at the smallish peaks the river had once tumbled from before running down into the valley. She still could find no sense in Diort’s destruction, although the aryn trees bordering the rim to the north stood withered as though winter had already swept through savagely and they but hanging on until the spring. Too early for that, she thought, they had only just dropped the few leaves they would let go at the season’s turning. Aryns were mainly evergreens, although they did shed a few golden leaves from their deep green boughs at autumn’s touch. Did the aryns falter here? And if so, why? They were far enough from the edges of the badlands. She frowned at that as she considered what had been river and had become flood. She pushed the aryns out of her mind as her senses attuned to the pitch of the roots of the water. Fire answered instead to her shock, heated tongues licking the inside of her mind. It leaped at her awareness of it. It wanted her to release it, and she shivered at its intensity. She took a deep breath to clear her thoughts before seeking for the water which was her Talent, her affinity, and part of her soul. It came, quietly, wet and silken as she called it, and she listened to see where water ran deep in the ground about her, also ready to answer.

  Barton waited long moments before saying, “You’re listening, aren’t you?”

  She gave him a look of surprise before answering, “Yes.”

  “I’ll be quiet, then.” He squatted down, balancing one elbow on a knee so he could cradle his chin in his palm, and he stayed there, with the patience of those who are used to farming, where seed doesn’t sprout overnight nor great things happen in a single day.

  Grace perched on a ledge. Tilting her face, she could feel moisture on the slight breeze that stirred. She was not that high, or far away from Lara and her guard, but she could look down and see that they were still deep in talk, with a little bit of hand waving and gesturing, as they gleaned details and dropped persuasions of their own. She wasn’t sure if they even knew she had wandered off, but undoubtedly they did. Little escaped Lara’s notice.

  She stretched out her hand, her palm over the rockfall. She could feel the river, blocked, down below. She could feel its ache, like that of a caged creature, knowing yet unknowing of imprisonment or how to obtain freedom. It might spring forth with heavy winter rains, or it might burrow deeper below. Sweet water, good water, despite the health of the forest edging it. No sense to that, she could not catch the pattern. She tried to see as Vaelinar did, or as she’d been told they did, although few had ever tried to instruct her in their ways or Talents. The world consisted of elemental threads of fire, wind, water, and earth, to be plucked, braided, and coaxed into a weave if one had the ability, but she could not see Kerith in that way. To her, the world was an already completed fabric, a tapestry of beauty, and she only knew that fresh water, river water, called to her. It bathed her soul, no matter how fierce or how serene. She knew sweet water from bitter, tame water from wild, and it knew her. For a moment, a fear swept over her of the Goddess who might reach through it to her, and then that fear bled away. Water was hers, whether by virtue of her Vaelinar nature or the shield she’d been for the River Goddess, and she could not deny it. She put aside whatever protest Lara might give her against working her magic, to do whatever she could. Had Lariel’s heated protest brought the flames to her mind? She had no answers, but they had gone, and water remained in its rightful place.

  Her hand tingled. She looked to Barton who watched her unblinkingly. Water needed to burst through the stone. “Think you could help me move a few rocks?”

  He stood, puffing his chest out. “I’m strong as a mule!” he declared.

  Rivergrace rose. “This one, and that one there, and maybe that one down below,” she pointed, and they stepped to.

  If she had had an affinity for earth, she thought long moments later as she paused to rub the sweat from her forehead, she might have known that rock did not move as easily as it might look like it would, and that this slide was bound and determined to stay anchored in one way or another, for as soon as they rolled one small boulder out of the way, two more tumbled into its place from above. They barked knuckles and ankles and toes more than once, yelping with pain as they skinned their hands and twanged their elbows. Barton wrestled with great enthusiasm as his face grew apple red and sweat dappled his thin tunic darkly. They finally stopped, panting, and looked at one another.

  Barton said, “It’s like wrestling goats, m’lady.” He rubbed hands that must sting on his trousers.

  “You know, you’re right. That’s exactly what it’s like!”

  “You know goats?”

  “Oh, yes. I grew up on a farm and orchard. I spent my days gathering eggs, milking goats, and picking apples for cider,” she told him. If her family were with her now, they’d make short work of moving this rockfall, she thought fondly.

  “But you’re a lady!”

  She looked down at her dust-coated riding skirt and boots, standing in gravel up to her ankles. The cuffs of her shirt she’d rolled back, but red clay and silt had stained them anyway, needlework embroidery likely never to come clean again. “Hardly,” she laughed at herself. “At any rate, this looks like one billy goat I can’t wrestle into the pen.”

  “Maybe.” Barton chewed his lower lip in thought, or perhaps he was merely sucking the salty sweat from it. He jabbed a finger at the boulders. “That one,” he said. “It looks like that one is the one you need to move, if you’re trying to shift the slide in that other direction.”

  She craned her neck. “I think you’re right!” She picked her way carefully over the loose ground to the recalcitrant boulder bigger than both of them put together. A push and a shove hardly made it do more than rock a little in its place. She pulled out her sword, shoved it into a crack beneath it and began to lever it out. The metal made a deep, throbbing sound as she pried at the boulder, and Barton scrambled over to put his scrawny shoulder to the thing. It fought them both, giving a little and then sliding back into position stubborn as if it had an ornery, billy goat mind of its own. She stopped to breathe deep and finally caught Lara’s voice calling up to them.

  “What are you doing up there besides ruining a good sword?” Lariel stood, hands on her hips, head tilted up to them, the glory of her gold-and-silver hair catching the sunlight, her face creased in query. Her blue, gold, and silver eyes flashed in the slanting sun.

  “I’m . . . I have to free this.” She thumped her palm on the rock.

  A very long moment passed. She could see the disapproval flash over her features, quickly followed by a neutral expression. She swallowed, knowing that she had provoked a rare anger. Lara snapped a wave at a guard standing to the rear. “Marten, get up there if you can and help m’lady Rivergrace before she snaps good steel in two and impales herself as well.” She turned about abruptly as if to shut out the sight of Grace and the boy.

  Marten flashed a grin up at Rivergrace, before springing up the rockfall as gracefully as a stag, even with the gravel and sand that loosened under his boots and cascaded down the hillside every which way. He eased her sword from its leveraging position and handed it back to her with a tsk at the notched blade. “Which way?”

  “Thatta way.” Barton jabbed a thumb as he warily gave ground to the guard.

  “All shoulders to it, then.” Marten dug in his heels and true to his order, put his shoulder and hands to it, waited till Grace bent down and then Barton, and they took a deep breath in concert.

  Three heaves and the boulder finally gave, squirreling out of its cradle with a quickness that almost pitched all of them face first, but Marten caught h
is own balance, then the two of them by the scruff of the neck to save them from going over, as the boulder fell. The rockslide behind it gave way, moving slowly at first and then cascading down furiously. A gurgle sounded behind Rivergrace as water began to trickle up. The guardsman took her by the elbow.

  “As welcome as that looks and sounds, I fear that if we don’t move, we’re in danger of being inundated.” He steered her off the hillside back to the track that she and Barton had originally taken up, even as the font grew in size and intensity, becoming a waterfall springing from the side of the escarpment and tumbling down into the forsaken riverbed. Barton leaned over to dash his head in the water’s spray with a whoop of joy.

  “Do you think,” Lara said softly, as they sat by the evening fire, “that you will mind the boy getting all the credit for freeing the river and saving the village?”

  “Not a bit.” Rivergrace leaned forward as the Warrior Queen tweaked her ear gently. “They’ll probably remember my name when it floods.”

  “Not a doubt of that.”

  “I heeded what you said to me, but I couldn’t help it. The water called. It had to be freed, for its own nature as well as for their sakes.”

  “What’s done is done. You would do well to remember my words in the future, though. We have been through a lot of heartache over this, Grace, and you’d be a fool to toss away our experience.” Lara rubbed her hands together, bringing Grace’s gaze to them, to the missing finger on her left hand, wondering if it ached in the cold the late fall night brought to them. Lariel did not often go ungloved in public, but this was not public, this was the queen leading a war troop on a scouting sortie, and when she did not have gauntlets on, she went bare-handed like any other trooper.

  Rivergrace looked back to the ground, remembering the finger Lara had taken off to work deep earth magic, for the blood and flesh sacrifice to lead them on another quest, much different from this one. They had won through that. She didn’t know if what they did now in pursuit of Abayan Diort would bring victory or defeat, or even if it could be ended in their lifetime. He came from a line of Galdarkan who’d been created to guard Mage Kings and fallen, and what ruled his mind generations later, none of them knew. Lariel had set a destiny in motion. It would be like trying to wade across the great sea, knowing that it stretched much farther than the eye could see or even imagine, and that you might fail before you accomplished reaching the other side.

  And for the hundredth time since he’d left, she wondered how Sevryn fared.

  Chapter Two

  DARAVAN DROVE HARD into the night, taking the horses as fast as they could go over even ground, leading them over treacherous stony impasses where they could not safely ride. Following him was like racing after a storm cloud, wrapped in ash gray as he was, as elusive as Daravan appeared to be in the threads of darkness around them. His horse moved under him as though not needing bridle or stirrup to guide him, spurred only by the will of the man he bore. He reminded Sevryn of Gilgarran, the only man on Kerith who’d taken notice of him as a half-breed living by his wits on backwater streets and decided he was of merit, not only because of his Vaelinar blood but because of who he’d become. Sevryn carried the Vaelinar magic in his veins although he did not have their remarkable eyes. Impossible to have the Talent without the multicolored eyes, the eyes that could see into the elements of the world around them . . . but he had it. Everyone until Gilgarran had overlooked him and Daravan, often called the lord of storms, was very like his old mentor. Daravan would weigh you with his eyes, gray and silver as he was himself, the gaze not piercing, so you’d never guess that he’d taken your measure within a pinch of your soul. Then, like Gilgarran, he’d keep the secret of what he’d learned buried deep within himself until he needed to draw it out.

  For all of that, Sevryn wondered how and why it was that Daravan had plucked him out of Lariel’s troop. When they dismounted to lead the horses through a thinning copse of trees, he asked. “What luck drew you to me?”

  He got no answer until they’d reached the other side, and he’d almost forgotten the question. “You were snoring loudest when I came through. I said to myself, that’s the one I need, he’ll be well-rested.” Daravan stopped his horse, twisted the stirrup to put boot to it, and swung up to settle lightly.

  “My luck, indeed,” Sevryn said dryly. “To what do we ride?”

  Daravan grinned. “Cutthroats, assassins, and Vaelinar honor. I have hopes that you’ll stand at my back, and prove of some use there.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  They reached a wide, rolling river much later in the evening, and Daravan reined to a halt. He sat his horse calmly on the riverbank as if waiting for some divine sign before crossing, and perhaps he did.

  Sevryn dismounted to let his horse get a breather and eyed the sky. No lightening yet on the horizon, no sign that dawn might be near, although the night predators seemed quiet and those who rested and hid in the darkness stayed silent naturally. After very long moments, when he feared the calm would put him to sleep on his feet, he asked, “Are we waiting for a third?”

  “No, the Ferryman.”

  Sevryn’s eyes widened. He knew he had not slept in the saddle nor could they have traveled far enough in half an evening to bring them to the banks of the swift and angry Nylara River where the phantom Ferryman docked his Way, his Vaelinar-created ability to negotiate a ferry across a treacherous river no ordinary being could tame. No one could safely cross the Nylara without him, and all paid the Ferryman’s toll although the traders had always chafed under the paying. From one side of the deep and wide-cut river to the other, the Ferryman went back and forth as though chained to those waters, but Sevryn knew better. He’d discovered quite by accident that, if he’d a mind to, the Ferryman could bring you from the bank of the Nylara across to the bank of an altogether different river if one had the strength of will to ask. He’d paid a toll in coins and wondered then if the Ferryman would ever request or collect another sort of payment altogether.

  Although the Ferryman had come to the Nylara River when the Vaelinar created the Way for the boat, no House claimed the creation of him, and no House or Hold or Fortress knew where the tolls he collected went. Had the Vaelinar-created Way chained a God, one of the Gods of Kerith who had abandoned their peoples in anger, to mortal waters? They did not know. They only knew when they’d needed a boatman, one came, and they dared not turn him away, or so whispered Vaelinar tales said. The making of Ways was an art forbidden centuries ago, yet there were those bloodlines who still attempted it although the knowledge of how to do so had been secreted away by those jealous of their power. The thought of the phantom being traveling from his anchor on the Nylara stopped words in his throat.

  “I promised a price,” Daravan said flatly, “a long time ago. The Ferryman answers to me.”

  The tone of his voice said that he would not be explaining further. Sevryn swung back into his saddle and waited for the impossible. They had ridden into the depth of the night, into its darkest tide, when souls floated out in their sleep never to be drawn back to the flesh again, when unspeakable Gods demanded even more unspeakable deeds of those who sought them out, and when mortal men plotted to gain immortality. He stared across the wide river and thought again of Rivergrace whose mere touch changed the water she approached, who could not tame the tides or currents but rode them. The river ahead, little more than a steep-sided brook, looked still enough he thought they might be able to ford it easily, but Daravan had other needs than just to cross this one span. He needed to cross country and quickly. It could be their escort might not show till dawn or later. The Ferryman had been known to keep certain personages waiting, as if out of spite. If a being without material needs in this world could hold a grudge, this one did. The Oxfort caravans were often kept waiting half a day or more, but then the young heir to the trading dynasty, Bregan Oxfort, had once cut the Ferryman down. The fury and magic unleashed had
cost him most of the movement in one leg and arm for a decade of his young life until he recovered slowly, and as for the Ferryman, he’d disappeared entirely for a few breaths and then reappeared out of nothingness again, as intractable and unknowable as before, as if those who watched had merely closed their eyes for a long blink. Many learned from Bregan’s foolhardiness. The Ferryman was not untouchable, only nearly so. Out of Sevryn’s reverie and a darkness gathering on the farthest bank, a specter emerged.

  A deep black hood and long cloak hid whatever shape, body, and face he might have. He strode across the river without breaking the surface of it, an eerie apparition that seemed solid but whose passage did not affect the water. A shiver ran down Sevryn’s spine. This being strode through the nightmares of all the children of Kerith whose parents had ever met the Ferryman, and although he knew it well, Sevryn took a step backward himself. Daravan did not seem to notice as he dismounted.

  The Ferryman halted. To Daravan he said, “Half a silver.” To Sevryn, he added, “You cannot cross.”

  “He travels with me.”

  “He cannot cross.”

  Daravan’s jaw tightened, and he slapped the end of his reins across the palm of his hand, but Sevryn stepped between the two. “He’s only a tool,” Daravan told the Ferryman, “but one I deem necessary for this journey.”

  “Let me accompany him.” Sevryn pitched his tone carefully, bordering on the Voice of persuasion that was part of his Vaelinar Talent, but he didn’t dare coerce the phantom as he would an ordinary being. The darkness within the hood turned to face him. Sevryn knew from past encounters that he would see nothing within, but he looked in reflex anyway. An abyss faced him for a fleeting moment and then a wisp drifted across the vision. He looked into a flat surface, like a pool of deep water, still and reflective, a bottomless pool facing a night without stars or midnight sun. Slowly, an image floated into view upon the surface. Indistinct, it wavered before his examination. Sevryn fought to envision it, and a blur of a face stilled in front of him, a blur that gained focus, until it grew distinct. He stared for a moment, expecting himself and not recognizing the features that sharpened in front of him. Then he caught it. The face he looked into, hidden in the depth of the Ferryman’s hood, was not his own but that of Daravan. He looked sharply, and the likeness remained, the wrongness of it striking Sevryn to his core. Then the moment passed by, and he stared back into the abyss. Whatever else he might have said to persuade the Ferryman, he lost.