At the end of the meadow, the road branched. The right branch clearly lead toward that lovely, sunlit castle. The left branch vanished into the depths of an ancient wood. Jayjay frowned. She still saw no sign of Lestovru.
Sophie looked at the road, all traces of amusement gone from her face. "Now what?"
Jay had studied the map in the front of the guidebook, tracing out her itinerary, until she imagined she could do the route blindfolded.
"There's only one road into Glenraven; that's the road we're on right now," she told Sophie. "From here, the road to the right goes to Cotha Dramwyn, and the one to the left goes to Rikes Gate."
"The road to the right looks better to me."
Jayjay agreed, but she shook her head and tucked the guidebook into the front pocket of the pack, where she could reach it more easily. "Our reservations for tonight are in Rikes Gate."
"The old man mentioned Rikes Gate."
Jayjay paused, suddenly sick to her stomach. He had mentioned the place by name, hadn't he?
They had reservations in Rikes Gate, but only Lestovru should have known that. If the old man knew, then he must have talked to Lestovru. However, he said he hadn't even seen Lestovru. If he had talked to Lestovru but didn't want Jayjay and Sophie to know it, then he must have had a major reason. And it wasn't likely that the reason was good. Robbers really did wait for them on the road to Rikes Gate, she thought. So they couldn't go there. Cotha Dramwyn was a pretty destination, but seemed obvious. If Lestovru had put so much work into waylaying the two of them, then he might be willing to try to find them to take a second stab at them, so to speak.
They didn't dare travel to the two main destinations from their current location.
However, a third destination lay within reach. Jayjay considered possibilities, and pulled her guidebook out of the front pocket of her saddlebag. She double-checked the map. The tiny town of Inzo lay to the north, on a road marked "footpath" in the guide. She flipped to the section on Inzo.
"Three kilometers (11/2 miles) north of the Glenraven/Italy border, nestled behind the easternmost arm of the Cavitarin Wood, Inzo is a tiny, primitive hamlet secluded from the rest of Glenraven. Its few inhabitants make their livings from farming, spinning and weaving, and cutting wood. Inzo burned in the Malduque Rebellion of 1040, and the besiegers reduced its once-proud castle to rubble. From that day forward, it has avoided the disputes that have marked Glenraven's long and disputatious history…"
"... there is little here to interest the visitor; the time needed to find Inzo would be better spent in viewing other, more scenic venues…"
It didn't sound like much of a tourist haven; its last excitement in 1040, its inhabitants folks who made a profession of keeping their heads low. Nevertheless, to Jay it sounded like a good first destination; if Inzo didn't have anything that would draw tourists, then robbers wouldn't have much reason to search for them in that direction.
As for the reservations…well, if the inn at Inzo didn't have any available rooms, that's why they'd packed their tents.
She told Sophie, "I found another place in here I think we should try."
Sophie raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
"Yes?"
Sophie nodded. "Yes."
Nine
Lestovru pedaled faster, wishing he carried more than a crossbow. He could hear the trees breathing, the air was so still, and the eyes of the forest watched him.
He rode hard around the outskirts of tiny Inzo, heading toward the depths of the Cavitarin Wood beyond. He could not hope for survival; he could hope he would be a successful diversion—that his death would draw attention from the heroes who headed toward Rikes Gate and safety.
He pressed his lips together in a thin, hard line. Heroes. They were women; he was going to die for two women. Yemus had been wrong, as he had been wrong so often of late, and the salvation of the Machnan was not at hand. The Machnan had paid everything they had to bring in the heroes, and for their pain they were going to get nothing.
Women.
He pedaled harder. The pathetic hovels of Inzo lay behind him; the Wood around and above him watched. His machine would bring death to him; the outland metal and plastic and rubber would call forth Her Watchers from the Wood. They would sense its alienness and they would purge it from Glenraven with a fury that would destroy it and everything near it. When they finished with it—and with him—nothing would remain.
They would come.
They would come.
Before they finished him, he hoped to kill a few of them, to strike a dying blow for the doomed Machnan.
He heard the sound of their approach, the rustle of leaves through the branches of the windless Wood. He looked for someplace to make a stand, some opening free of underbrush that would block his field of fire. He did not know the Wood around Inzo; if such a place existed it would be luck for him, the first in long and longer. He would not ask for luck, not with his death growing green in the long grasping shadows. The Wood was no place for the luck of a Machnan.
Dead leaves tumbled across his path; above and behind him branches rattled. He shuddered. Coming. They were coming. Soon he would have to stop; he would have to fight them. He pedaled faster. The ground beneath his tires grew spongy and sucked at his wheels; the Wood itself conspired against him. Treetops rattled and swayed; the sweat that dripped down his forehead had nothing to do with his exertion. He reeked of fear.
Closer.
They were closer, closing, hurrying.
Coming. For him.
Away, he thought. He needed to lead them away; he prayed they would not discover he had not been alone. Let them believe he was a renegade; let them kill him quickly, never thinking to drag out of him the secrets he knew.
Let the heroes be real heroes, he prayed; his last prayer and then the time for prayer passed. He saw movement in the shadows, pacing him on either side.
The flickering of light, shimmering carpets of tiny lights that raced along the ground. Soft giggling whispers. The underbrush dragged at him with clawed and thorny fingers; he had no good place to stand and die, but he was Machnan, and they would bleed to take him.
He braked and slid off his bike, unslung the crossbow from his shoulder, shoved his back against a tree. Then Her Watchers, so long silent, chittered and snarled; the shadows and the lights moved nearer, though not so near he could name them. He told himself if Her Watchers rose up within his arm's reach, he had no guarantee he could name them.
Rumors. He had nothing but rumors, the speculations of living men on the manner of death of the dead.
Without a clear target, he aimed the crossbow and shot the first bolt. A flurry of movement, the flare of light, the swooping wings of darkness, the billowing of the shadows he could see; he could see nothing concrete, nothing definite. Only silence rewarded the flight of his bolt. Complete silence. They waited. Watched him. Silence.
Drawing, dragging silence, while he knew they moved closer, while he knew he was helpless to move at all.
Suddenly the wind roared around him, out of nowhere, and the lights that had flowed like water along the ground rose up and melded with the billowing shadows, and took shape. They moved toward him. Her Watchers. He saw them clearly for the first time then, and his mind refused to comprehend what he saw. His arms fell to his sides and the crossbow dropped to the ground; he felt it fall and didn't care. Instead, he smiled.
And death stepped out to meet him.
Ten
Aidris Akalan danced through the long, empty corridors, past the hollow-eyed portraits of her dead-and-gone family, with the blood burning in her veins, with her heart thudding powerfully, with her muscles burning from the joyous exertion. Her back was straight, her waist lithe, her joints limber.
She leapt into the air, spun, landed with the grace of a doe, pirouetted, laughed out at the crushed-rose sky and the stretching shadows.
For this, I would sentence them all to death again, she thought, rejoicing. She stopped in fron
t of the portrait of her immediate family: father, mother, a single brother, two younger sisters. Her own face stared back at her from the ancient canvas, unchanged from the face that looked back at it. She gave her family and her past a mocking bow.
"You are dead and I live," she told them. "I live.
"And I will live as long as life."
Eleven
Sophie's mood had improved during the trip to Inzo. While she and Jay had been cautious, nothing bothered them. No one attacked them. In fact, they saw no one at all on the road to Inzo.
When they got there, Sophie could understand why. "My God, Jay, this place is unreal." She felt like she'd fallen through a time portal. The tiny stone cottages along the narrow, twisting dirt street huddled beneath steeply pitched split-shake roofs. Cows ambled down the center of the street, herded by a scrawny blond boy in leather shorts and knee socks. Young women in full-skirted, tight-waisted dresses stopped their field work to lean on their hoes and stare at the two mounted strangers who rode into town. The older women and the town's men came out of doorways and stood in the street, frankly staring, as she and Jayjay reined in.
"Oh, boy," Jayjay murmured.
Sophie counted fifteen houses in Inzo. If the village had any more than that, it hid them well. The rubble of a ruined castle glared down at the tiny hamlet from a hill at the edge of the forest; it had been a long time since that had been anything but a pile of stones. "I don't think they're going to have a hotel here, you know?"
Jay fumbled through her pack. "The guidebook said something about a place to stay in Inzo," she said. "Let me find the passage…" She flipped through pages wildly while Sophie tried to count the little kids hiding in their mothers' skirts. "Yeah! I found it." She put her finger on the page and read the entry. "'Retireti's. Family-run, with two available rooms in a quaint setting,' it offers an up-close look at the lives of Glenraven's common folk. Cash or barter, primitive facilities. Inexpensive."
"Barter?" Sophie clicked her tongue. "Shucks. And here I am, fresh out of beads. I can just imagine what they mean by primitive facilities, too. I got a whiff of that when the wind shifted."
Jayjay raised an eyebrow and said in a voice that mocked only herself and the fact that she had brought the two of them to this place, "Where is your sense of adventure?"
"Waiting for a hot shower, madam."
"The natives look clean…mostly." Jayjay poked her nose into the guide again. "Okay…more Useful Phrases." She tried the phrase that had eventually worked at the border, asking if anyone spoke English.
She got nothing but blank looks.
Sophie wasn't surprised. "You could ask them how to reach the bus stop, and tell them you'd like a cocktail and caviar while you're at it." She studied the people of Inzo. The term "ignorant peasants," rude though it was, had never seemed to fit any group of people more.
Jayjay glanced down at them. "I guess finding an English speaker here was hoping for too much, huh? That's all right. This should do the trick. 'Where is…?' That's 'SAY-hoo something hay-LER-oh.' So I would ask 'Seihau Retireti heilero?'" Jay sighed. "The guidebook insists we can get rooms in Inzo."
"And authentic stir-fry at the five-star restaurant, too."
Jay snorted. "You are a pain in the ass sometimes, Soph." She cleared her throat. "Seihau Retireti heilero?" Sophie could tell Jayjay was trying to sound confident, mostly because she was trying too hard. The folks of Inzo didn't seem notice, though.
"Retireti," they said to each other, excited. They began to smile; Sophie noted a lot of bad teeth in the bunch and tried not to cringe. Even if Jay was right and they did bathe occasionally, the natives certainly hadn't discovered the wonders of fluoride. With a lot of hand waving and chattering, they pulled one of their number forward. He was an unprepossessing young man, rail thin and unkempt. His watery blue eyes peered out from beneath thick straggly eyebrows; his nose jutted over a chin notable only by its absence. If he'd had acne, Sophie thought, he would have looked like ninety percent of the Bob Dylan wannabes with whom she'd gone to college. He glared up at them sullenly; the rest of Inzo, which now included even the girls who had been working in the fields and young men who hadn't been apparent anywhere, looked—relieved.
Sophie frowned. Three lean farmer types held the young man in place, and they all looked pleased to have him in the spotlight. Odd.
Jayjay's nose was back in the book. "These useful phrases are only useful when you can find the one you want," she grumbled. Oblivious to the little drama being played out in front of her, she said, "I'd like a cigar, I'd like a map, I'd like the key to the ladies' room. Dammit, where is it?" Then she grinned. "Here! I'd like a room." She looked down at the captive Retireti and said something else in Galti.
Retireti's expression went from sullen to baffled. His smug neighbors stopped smiling and stared at each other. He babbled something lengthy and complicated, gesturing wildly as he did so; as if his life depended on his passionate speech. Sophie wished she knew what the hell he'd said; she was sure it would have been enlightening. But that was the trouble with guidebooks; they suggested all sorts of questions to ask, but didn't give any help with translating the answers. And Sophie had discovered that as soon as people heard a foreigner speak any three intelligible words in their language, they assumed that foreigner could, in fact, understand them.
Jayjay repeated her question, saying the words slowly and pronouncing them carefully.
The three farmers let Retireti go, and he smiled a little. That was the only thing other than acne that could have made him homelier than he already was. He answered briefly, and Jayjay said, "Yes. He said yes, he has rooms. That's what 'jen' means."
"Good. Now ask him if you only get a hot shower if you sleep in the barn under the cows, and if the beds do or do not come with hot and cold running parasites."
"If I didn't know better, I'd take you for a city girl." Jayjay seemed enormously cheerful since the two of them had found a room. The villagers were clearing a path, backing toward their homes with nervous glances at the two strangers on horseback and the suddenly happy and voluble Retireti.
Voluble—an adjective that sounded like the phenomenon it described. Sophie thought the syllables were a perfect mirror for the stream of liquid sounds the young villager poured out at them. He'd glanced from Jay to Sophie initially, but to Sophie, he might as well have been speaking pidgin Bantu, and she was sure her face reflected her total lack of comprehension. So he turned his attention completely toward Jayjay, who in Jayjayesque fashion nodded from time to time, thumbed through the back pages of her guide, and made little murmured "jens" and "niques." If Sophie hadn't known better, she would have thought her friend understood the conversation.
Who knew? On some subliminal level, maybe Jay did; getting the gist of a conversation in a language she didn't speak wouldn't be any stranger than some of the other oddball stunts she'd pulled off.
Finding Glenraven in the first place came immediately to Sophie's mind.
Retireti led them to a house that looked no different than the others in the village; its roof sagged, dead insects and dirt and mold stained its tiny oilcloth windows, scrawny dogs sprawled across the dirt pathway that led up to the narrow front door.
Retireti led them behind his house and helped them groom and stable and bed down all four of their horses in a grim little shed attached to the back, then led them around to the front again, and with wide, enthusiastic smiles welcomed them inside.
"Oh, my God," Sophie muttered under her breath. She nodded at Retireti and tried a smile, though it hurt her face to do it. "I thought the guidebook described this as quaint."
Even Jayjay seemed taken aback by the obvious poverty and squalor of the place. She cleared her throat. "Well," she managed at last, "I suppose in a certain light, this might be considered quaint."
Sophie studied the dirt floors, the low ceilings festooned with herbs and cobwebs, the chickens roosting in little shelves along one wall. She tried to avoid breathing; t
he stink of live chickens and garlic and primitive sanitation permeated everything. And she muttered, "In a certain light? Only in the dark."
Twelve
Jarenne and her three-year-old daughter Tayes and her six-year-old son Liendir lay in the dank, stinking straw in one tiny cell in a cold, dark dungeon. All three of them had been held prisoner for days; brigands—three rogue Kin-hera and their Kin leader—had stopped Jarenne's carriage on an isolated stretch of road as she and the children headed home from the Festival of the Watch. They killed her Machnan driver outright, and kidnapped her and both children, blindfolded, bound and gagged them, and dumped them here. Wherever here might be.
For the first time since she took vows, she found herself cut off from Dommis, her eyra. The walls of the cells were imbued with old magic, Aregen magic, that broke the otherwise unbreakable bonds of the Kin lifemates. Dommis would know she wasn't dead; if she had died, he would have died too. But he wouldn't know where she was, and although he would know what had happened, since he had still been linked to her when the attack occurred, he would have no way of finding her. The prison that severed the soul-bonds between them also hid her away. She imagined he must be frantic, trying to find her.
Jarenne wondered if she and the children were being held for money, wondered if he would have to pay to have her and their children safely returned to him. She had discussed the possibility with the woman in the cell to her left, a young and well-born Kin named Adeleth whose pregnancy had reached the fifteenth and final month and who mentioned frequently that she hoped to be home before she delivered her baby.
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01] Page 6
