Battleaxe

by Sara Douglass

  Faraday had become abruptly and uncomfortably aware of the new relationship between Yr and Timozel the first night they made camp. The covert movements and soft sounds drifting across the campfire from their blankets had first made her wriggle in embarrassment, and then struggle to suppress her own curious thoughts about what it would be like to bed with a man. Images of Axis and Borneheld mixed in her mind, confusing her, and she tossed uneasily, sleep eluding her for several hours.

  Jack watched Faraday toss restlessly within her blankets from where he sat huddled watching the flames, his face unreadable. He was more concerned than ever at Timozel’s presence with them, and wondered if the young man would disrupt their purpose. Ogden and Veremund had told him that Timozel had a good if troubled heart, but Jack wondered if that goodness had survived unscathed through the Chamber of the Star Gate. Like Yr, he had noticed the subtle changes in Timozel over the past few days, the increasing confidence and maturity, and wondered exactly what the changes would lead to. Jack could only hope that his devotion to Faraday would serve her well. That Timozel shared Yr’s blankets and body at night meant nothing; Yr would eventually leave Timozel alone to pursue her purpose. Jack sighed and tossed a few more of the dead rosenberry branches onto the fire. Even in this wet and cold weather, if one reached deep enough into the thick rosenberry bushes there was always dry and dead wood at hand for a small campfire. He hunkered down inside his blankets, grateful for the added warmth they gave him, closed his eyes and tried to snatch a few hours of sleep. They were only three or four days away from Fernbrake Lake, and he and Yr would have to talk to Faraday before they reached it. The Sentinels had told Faraday she had two very important tasks to perform without which Axis would not succeed in his battle against Gorgrael. The first was to keep Borneheld from murdering Axis in a fit of jealous rage. That she already understood. But at Fernbrake Lake Faraday would have to begin her journey towards fulfilling her second important task, that of Tree Friend.

  After ten days of travel they reached the Bracken Ranges. Jack led them towards a narrow gully which would take them into the low mountains. It was the easiest passage, he explained patiently to a protesting Timozel, but Timozel walked off in a huff. Faraday sighed and made as if to walk after him, but Jack had held her back.

  “Dear one, Yr and I need to speak with you for a moment. Let Timozel go.”

  Faraday gazed at Timozel striding ahead with the mule, upset at his constant arguing with Jack, but she nodded her head.

  “Sweet child,” Jack began soothingly, “you are the one that the Sentinels have trusted so much to. Aside from ourselves you are the only one who understands who the StarMan is. Faraday, please keep that trust. Do not tell Timozel too much; the lad might well betray Axis with an unwary word. Do you understand?”

  It ached Faraday’s heart to keep secrets from Timozel; he was, after all, her Champion.

  Yr smiled and took Faraday’s hand. “I will stay by your side for the time being, sweet girl. Share your doubts and secrets with me if you must speak them. It will be far safer that way.”

  Yr’s touch reassured Faraday and she smiled a little and nodded. “I will do anything I can to protect Axis,” she said softly. “You know that. I have told Timozel nothing and I will continue to keep Axis’ true identity from him.”

  Jack looked ahead to check that Timozel was still out of earshot. “Sweet child, tomorrow we will reach a lovely lake in the centre of the Bracken Ranges. While we are there we will show you some of what your second task will be.”

  Faraday frowned. The pass that Jack had indicated was only a few minutes’ walk away. “You would not tell me what that was, Jack, when I asked before. Will you tell me now?”

  Jack nodded. “Dear one, do you remember that night by the Silent Woman Woods when the trees sang to you?”

  Faraday’s face paled and Jack hastened on. “Remember that what the trees sing is often confusing. Their truth is sometimes not as we understand it. Remember that.”

  Faraday nodded curtly but Jack’s words did not comfort her. None of the images the trees had shown her were positive. No matter how she rearranged them time and time again in her mind, Faraday could not see how the vision could depict anything except pain.

  Jack and Yr watched Faraday’s face close over. They hoped that her horror at the vision had not turned into a complete rejection of the singers.

  Yr squeezed Faraday’s hand gently as it lay in hers. “Dear one, no human has ever before heard Tree Song, and even very few of the Avar, the forest people, have. Faraday, it is important that the forest has a friend who can lead them to Axis. You must be Tree Friend.”

  “I hate the forest!” Faraday said tersely. “It is dark and evil and I will have nothing to do with it!” Her voice rose and Yr and Jack exchanged worried glances.

  Jack placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and opened his mouth, but Faraday rounded on him. “Don’t you dare enchant me into submissiveness,” she said in a low fierce voice, her festering anxiety over the vision finding release in anger at Jack. Although Faraday genuinely liked Jack and Yr and was prepared to trust the Sentinels if it helped Axis, she wondered about the secrets they kept and occasionally resented their obvious manipulation of people about them.

  Jack hastily removed his hand. “None of us will force you into anything,” he said firmly, but Faraday turned on him again.

  “You did not hesitate to trick me into placing my hand on that tree with your deceptively simple face, Jack.” Faraday wrenched her hand from Yr’s. “And if you worry about Timozel learning some of your dark secrets, then perhaps you should worry more about what Yr whispers into his ears during the long night than what I might innocently say to him during the day!” She glared at Yr for a moment, then turned back to Jack. “If your precious Prophecy needs a Tree Friend then it will have to find one elsewhere,” she snapped and turned her back on the pair of them, lengthening her stride to catch up with Timozel.

  Jack held Yr back from following her. “Leave her awhile,” he muttered softly. “We will have only one chance at Fernbrake Lake. If we cannot present her to the Mother some time over the next few days then we are all doomed to endure the long dismal slide into complete destruction.”

  That evening they made camp well into the pass Jack called Pig Gully. They had followed the gully for about a league, deep into the mountains, before Jack had called a halt as it narrowed to an end. With the mountains on either side of them they were sheltered from the worst of the winds, and there were plenty of scattered bushes to provide a leaping fire.

  While Timozel unpacked and rubbed down the mule, Yr prepared the evening meal, cutting thick slices from a smoke-cured ham and one of the remaining loaves Goodwife Renkin had packed for them. As she laid out the portions on plates Faraday joined her.

  “I’m sorry for what I said earlier,” Faraday said stiffly. “I was upset.”

  Yr looked up at her carefully, and motioned Jack closer. Faraday glanced at Jack as he approached and her stiffness increased. “I understand that you are bound to the Prophecy. I understand that. And I accept that I have my role to play.” She paused, but neither Yr nor Jack said anything to help her. “Why do the trees need a friend? Why do they need me?”

  “The trees and their people need someone to speak for them. They have picked you. Faraday, someone has to bring the trees behind Axis. He must unite Tencendor. If the trees do not join him then he cannot do that.”

  “Veremund assured me that my second task would be less distasteful than my first. Did he speak the truth?”

  “Faraday. You will come to love the trees almost more than life itself.” Yr paused, thinking. Tree Friend’s role was far more than bringing the trees behind Axis. But it was not the Sentinels’ place to tell Faraday that. “The trees have chosen you for a reason, Faraday, and that reason contains only joy. No sadness. Believe me.”

  A shadow crossed Faraday’s face. “They were so sad,” she whispered, remembering the Tree Song. “Yet so
beautiful.”

  “They were slaughtered across Achar, dear one. Few remain. Lovely lady,” Jack moved to change the subject, “tomorrow we will take you to Fernbrake Lake. But you must understand that Timozel cannot, must not, come with us. He is an Axe-Wielder and he would be in danger there.”

  Faraday looked alarmed, but Yr reassured her. “We will have to enchant him a little. He will know nothing. He will simply sleep, unaware, while we visit Fernbrake Lake. Trust us.”

  Faraday sighed and nodded. “I wish I had never left Skarabost,” she said quietly and turned away.

  28

  FERNBRAKE LAKE

  Hours before dawn the next morning Yr raised herself from Timozel’s side and looked about. Jack stood waiting silently a few paces away, staff in hand. Their glowing eyes met, but neither said a word. Yr looked down at Timozel, deep in sleep, his youthful face boyish in repose. She carefully spread her hand across his face, fingertips at his temples, thumb on the point of his chin. Blue light pulsed lightly from her fingertips. She glanced at Jack and he stepped forward and gently laid the knob of his staff on the back of Yr’s hand where it rested on Timozel’s face. The blue light around her fingertips intensified twenty-fold, and both squinted a little in the sudden brightness. Jack’s lips moved silently, while Yr’s face was a mask of concentration.

  Faraday watched from a safe distance. Poor Timozel, caught up in an adventure that he had not wanted. Unwillingly subjected to an enchantment about which he knew nothing and that he would loathe and fear if he did know. She fidgeted, feeling nervous about the day ahead. Why had the Prophecy sprung to life in hers and Axis’ lifetimes?

  Precisely because it is your lifetimes, a small voice echoed in her head, and she noticed Jack looking at her. Had he invaded her head as well?

  Timozel’s breathing slowed gradually until he breathed only once every minute. Yr scrambled to her feet and slipped her rough worsted dress over her head, cinching it tight about her waist at the same time as she wriggled her feet into her boots. She twisted her hair into a knot behind her neck.

  “What have you done to him?” Faraday asked quietly as she stepped up beside the Sentinel.

  Yr glanced at her. Faraday seemed drawn and pale in the faint light emitted by the coals left from last night’s fire. “What I have done, with the help of Jack’s staff, is to move him slightly outside the normal flow of time. What would normally be another three hours of sleep will now extend into three days, if not more. He will wake with no sense of having slept that long.”

  “Will he be all right? What if it rains…snows? How will he keep warm?”

  Yr stroked Faraday’s cheek soothingly. “Hush now, sweet child. We are well within the protection of Fernbrake Lake at this point. The Lake knows we are coming, and the Lake knows that Timozel, the pigs and even the mule require the same protection as ourselves. She will keep him in Her care until we return. He will stay warm and safe, and the mule and the pigs will remain close by. The worst of the weather will pass well overhead.”

  “She?” What did Yr mean, talking of the lake as if it were alive?

  Jack stepped up behind them, handing them their cloaks. Protected or not, the air was still close to freezing. “Come. The Mother awaits.”

  Faraday shifted her eyes nervously between them. “The Mother?”

  Jack smiled gently, and his eyes were soft. “Faraday, do you remember how scared you felt before you walked into the unknown Chamber of the Star Gate?” Faraday nodded. “And do you remember how you felt when you gazed into the Star Gate itself?” Faraday nodded again, more strongly this time. She would never let that sight fade from her mind. “Faraday. The Star Gate is one of the most magical and powerful places in this land of Tencendor. Fernbrake Lake, or the Mother, as it is anciently known, is another. You are caught up in an adventure that you did not ask for and did not want. But, think on this sweet lady, you are witnessing wonders that none of your race have seen for close on a thousand years.”

  Faraday pondered Jack’s words, and the stress lines on her face slowly began to ease. She had seen the Star Gate, and even if she never saw it again it was enough simply to know that it was there, that it existed.

  “Yr. I know so little. Will you tell me of Tencendor as we walk?”

  Yr took Faraday’s hand between both of her own. “Gladly, sweet child. Gladly. Today we will see a part of Tencendor that still survives, that still lives much as it did before…before the Seneschal started to murder this beautiful land.”

  “Come,” Jack’s voice was brisk. “We will have to climb most of the day.”

  The two women shouldered the smallish packs that Jack had prepared for them. Faraday paused a moment by Timozel’s side, then touched his cheek gently. “Rest well,” she said softly. “I will return safely.”

  Jack finished checking the camp, hefted his own larger pack onto his back, and gestured impatiently. Yr led Faraday towards the end of Pig Gully where a trail wound up into the mountains. When they turned their backs Jack leaned swiftly down to Timozel’s side and placed his hand over the man’s face. Faint green light glowed at his fingertips. After a moment Jack lifted his hand off, puzzlement written over his face. He wiped his hand through his blond hair, considering. Veremund had told him clearly what he had felt when he had tested Timozel in the Silent Woman Keep. A good heart, but shadowed with unhappiness. The promise of troubled choices in his future. Yes, all that was there, but there was also a taint of something strange that Jack could not identify and that made him very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable indeed. He stood up and hurried after Yr and Faraday. Again he wished he had led Faraday and Timozel into some other Barrow than the one he had. Any Barrow but that of the ninth Enchanter-Talon. But Jack could not deny the Prophecy, and none of the marked could ever evade the Prophet’s hand.

  They climbed solidly until the sun crested the mountain ridges that rose far above them. No-one had any breath left for talking once they started to bend their backs into the steep mountain path out of Pig Gully. For a long time the only sound was the crunch of their booted feet on the gravel of the path. Once the sun was well clear of the mountain ridges Jack called a halt. Yr and Faraday sank gratefully against the rocky mountain wall of the path, legs outstretched. Faraday wondered vaguely if all of Tencendor’s wonders existed at the very top of the world or at the very bottom.

  “All others have been destroyed,” Yr gasped by her side. “Only those at the top and the bottom of the world have survived.”

  Faraday closed her eyes in weariness. She would never get used to the Sentinel’s unnerving habit of reading thoughts. Yr leaned over and patted her hand. “We do not do it all the time, dear child,” she muttered. “We try to be polite.”

  “Oh, Yr! What thoughts did you catch as you wandered the corridors of Priam’s palace?”

  Yr’s grin faded a little. “Not always pretty ones, dear one, not always pretty ones.” She thought about some of the more irksome and surprising knowledge she had picked up at the palace, not to mention the troubling secrets she had gathered on her regular forays to the Tower of the Seneschal. Thank the Mother that Axis was away from the Tower for the time being. Perhaps, just perhaps, his journey north would open his eyes to some of the lies that enveloped him. The sooner he was freed from their falsehoods the sooner he would find his own truths.

  Jack sat a little further up the track watching them. He was immensely relieved that they had been able to leave Timozel behind. When he and the other Sentinels had discussed spiriting Faraday away to Borneheld, they had wanted the opportunity to train her as much as possible before events overtook them. But he and Yr had been severely restrained by Timozel’s presence, and Faraday still had to step firmly onto the path that the Prophecy had chosen for her.

  He passed out thick slices of ham, crunchy currant biscuits, and tawny, dried summer apples. If Timozel had been an unplanned nuisance, then Goodwife Renkin had served her purpose far better than he could have hoped. “Yr,” he muttered
around a mouthful of ham, “perhaps you can tell Faraday of the Sacred Lakes while we breakfast.”

  “Sacred Lakes?” Faraday’s eyes were round. “Is the Fernbrake, the Mother, one of them?”

  “Yes, sweet child.” Yr nibbled delicately at the core of an apple. “There are four of them. The Fernbrake, or Mother, whom we will visit today. Can you think of any others?”

  Faraday licked her fingers; the ham was exceedingly delicious. She wondered if it was smoked over peat or wood fire. Perhaps the Goodpeople Renkin smoked it over dried pig manure. She thought about that very hard for a moment, concentrating on forming a clear image in her mind.

  Jack gagged and spat out the last mouthful of ham that he had been chewing on. Faraday let the image go and laughed delightedly, clapping her hands like a small child. The two Sentinels looked wryly at each other. Caught. “Not polite,” Faraday laughed.

  Yr repressed a smile. “The Lakes, dear child. Can you think of any others?”

  Faraday concentrated. “Why, the Cauldron Lake. In the Silent Woman Woods. That must be one of them. Timozel told me how strange it was.”

  Yr inclined her head in agreement. “But there is one you know even better.”

  Faraday blinked her eyes in confusion. “What other strange lakes are there, Yr? There are no other large lakes in Achar except…oh! Surely not!”

  “Ah,” Jack winked at Yr. “I think she has it.”

  “Not Grail Lake,” Faraday breathed.

  “Precisely, my sweet. But Grail Lake has buried its enchantment deep over the past several hundred years. Of all the Sacred Lakes, it has been the most exposed to the works of man. And of the Seneschal.”