Ashling

by Isobelle Carmody

  I fell silent. The troublesome quest Maryon had sent me on was becoming more impossible. Fleetingly I was tempted just to give up. After all, the Futureteller guild-mistress had, herself, said that futuretellings were often wrongly interpreted.

  Yet, I could not just sit back and hope Maryon had made a mistake, when Obernewtyn's future and my own life were in the balance.

  "Where do gypsies camp when they stay in the city?"

  Kella gave me a quick, comprehending look. "They are permitted to camp on any green, but most go to the largest green over near the Suggredoon."

  "Both half and pureblood gypsies?"

  She nodded, clearly troubled. "Gypsies don't think in terms of physical boundaries, so in spite of the Great Divide Twentyfamilies camp alongside halfbreed wagons. But that does not happen often. Twentyfamilies gypsies come to Sutrium only in the Days of Rain, when they are to tender the yearly tithe. Otherwise they avoid cities." She hesitated. "If you go there you might encounter the Twentyfamilies man who followed us. Perhaps you could wait a few days until they have gone."

  "I dare not wait," I interrupted. "I will have to risk it."

  I sighed and wished Maryon's prediction had been more explicit about where in Sutrium the gypsy woman must be taken!

  Domick and Dragon were seated at the kitchen trestle when we entered, but Matthew had gone. No doubt he had departed when Dragon came in. I shook my head in disgust.

  "What happened?" Domick asked.

  "She will tell me nothing. I will have to go among the gypsies after all, and see what I can winkle out."

  "You must be careful," Domick said worriedly, and for a moment he seemed like his old self. "I spoke to you of Faction and Council spies but, remember, the gypsies themselves are dangerous to cross. They may value the woman, but your knowing about her makes you a risk. The best way to protect her and themselves would be to kill you. The fact that you are a gypsy might stay their hand, but if they guess for a moment you are not what you pretend to be ..."

  "I will be careful," I promised.

  "Have you decided whether to meet with the rebels?" Domick asked, as I dippered a mug of fement from a pot just boiled and fragrant.

  "I have," I said. "I am going to do it. Rushton wants to know where we stand with the rebels, and this meeting will give us an answer one way or the other. As soon as it is over, we will go at once to Obernewtyn."

  Domick nodded soberly. "That is best. But be careful tomorrow, for all our sakes." He rose and reached for his cloak.

  "You are going out again?" I asked, surprised.

  "I have to go back to the Councilcourt. There is some sort of delegation from Sador arriving tonight."

  "Sador," I murmured. There had been a lot of talk about the distant province of late; Herders taking a mission there, Councilmen coveting Sador's spice-bearing groves, rumor of war. And now a delegation of Sadorians. A year ago, no one but the few seamen who plied that part of the coast had known of Sador.

  "I sent a report to Rushton when the Council sent Herders and a contingent of soldierguards to Sador, not long after the road was opened," Domick said, thinking my silence indicated confusion. "The plagues spurred them on. To begin with, they saw that it might be useful to have a distant province to retreat to if such a thing should come again. Now, there is also the lure of the spice groves."

  "You said the Sadorians are sending a group to the Council?" I asked.

  He nodded. "They are coming by ship. I expect they will request the removal of the Faction mission from their domain. They have been sending delegations to that effect from the first sevenday the Herders dwelt among them." He pulled on his cloak. "The Herders are interfering in the Sadorian religion and they don't like it. The Earthtemple in Sador controls how much spice is harvested, and it will allow only a small yield. It is my guess the Herders have been sent by the Council to erode the power of the Earthtemple and take it for themselves. Then they will increase the spice yield."

  The coercer departed with a perfunctory farewell that obviously distressed Kella. I felt for her, but my mind was filled with all that Domick had said of Sador. Garth would be fascinated.

  "I should alter my appearance again. I dare not go out as a girl since the soldierguards have my description, or I would have to have a coercive cloak the whole time and that's a risk with all of these natural shields growing in people." I was talking, to give Kella time to compose herself. "Since that Twentyfamilies gypsy saw me as a boy, I will have to think of something else. Perhaps I could remain a boy, but cut off my hair.... "

  "No!" Kella looked horrified. "It is so long and beautiful. Like black silk."

  Glad to have distracted her, I was nonetheless embarrassed by her words. "I don't care about hair."

  "But gypsies do," she said insistently. "They do not cut their hair—men or women."

  That was true enough. I had forgotten for the moment. Well then. Perhaps I must go as a grown woman again. Or as an old woman. I had not tried that yet.

  "Cut?" Dragon said. She was holding a knife in her hand and looking so hopeful that both Kella and I burst into laughter.

  Dragon hooted along happily.

  "What's so funny?" Matthew asked lightly, coming in with his hair wet from a bath.

  Dragon's laughter died and her eyes followed the ward as he moved across the kitchen and peered into the pot.

  "I hope that is not for us," he quipped, sniffing at the herbal preparation.

  He could not have helped being aware of the empath's obsessive regard, but he made out that he had not noticed her.

  "What about something to drink?" Kella asked Matthew.

  He sat down and nodded.

  "And will you sit and be waited on?" I snapped, disliking the lazy way he expected the healer to bring him his mug. He flushed and rose to help her and I found myself thinking of him as he had been when first I came to Ob-ernewtyn, with his thinness and his limp and his quick dark gaze. A child then and not yet a man now, for all he looked like one.

  "Dragon will drink," Dragon said, looking up at him with pathetic eagerness.

  The farseeker scowled, but he filled a mug with the steaming liquid and handed it to her ungraciously. Dragon took it and drank with the solemn air of a Herder acolyte performing a sacred rite.

  Matthew turned pointedly away and I felt my temper stir. He might not relish Dragon's adoration, but mere was no need for him to be so unkind. He had used all of his charm to make her obedient when he was developing her powers so that she could defend Obernewtyn, but now he was refusing to deal with what he had set in motion.

  If it was anyone's fault Dragon had fallen in love with Matthew, it was his own. He had used her affections to manipulate her and now he wanted to stamp them out because he had no use for them.

  I forced my anger back, knowing Dragon would detect it if I was not more careful.

  Matthew went to refill the empty pot from a stone jug on a bench and Dragon trailed across the kitchen in his wake, drawn as if by some force she could not control. The farseeker did not notice her standing at his elbow and, when he turned back, cannoned hard into her, sending both the full pot of fement and Dragon's mug smashing to the floorboards.

  "Fer Lud's sake, ye idiot!" he exploded. "If ye'd drunk th' stuff instead of gollerin' at me like a fool, this wouldn't have happened!"

  Dragon's face was white as paper. She turned and ran from the room without a word.

  Matthew was left standing amidst the debris of broken mugs and steaming fement, looking from one to the other of us. "Ye dinna understand!"

  "I understand that was unnecessary," I said coldly, furious that he expected me to pity him.

  He paled and ran his fingers distractedly through his hair. "Ah Lud, damn it. Yer right. I'll go an' apologize."

  "Why?" Kella demanded fiercely. "She should not be surprised. More fool her for expecting anything more of you."

  "Kella I'm sorry.... " Matthew began, but the healer

  tossed her head, blue
eyes flashing.

  "Don't tell me!" she said stonily. "I'm not the one you should be talking to. You don't deserve her love, Matthew. She's worth ten of you but you're too stupid to see it."

  "She's a savage," Matthew flared, stung by the disgust in her voice.

  Kella laughed contemptuously. "You don't have the slightest idea about who or what Dragon is, even after all these months you've spent with her. She's a lot of things, but she's no savage. Eating with fingers and having dirty clothes doesn't make a person a savage. Cruelty and thoughtlessness do. That makes you the only savage here."

  I was amazed to hear the gentle healer speak with such passion. Matthew glared at her, then turned on his heel and stalked out. A moment later the stair door slammed. I felt as though a firestorm had roared its destructive way through the room.

  Kella let out a great sobbing breath and sank into a chair. I crossed to sit by her and lay a tentative hand on her arm. "Dragon will be all right. It wasn't as bad as all that.... "

  The healer shook her head. "It's not Dragon, Elspeth. Matthew was wrong, but I should not have spoken to him like that. It... It is Domick. You saw how he was tonight. I've tried and tried not to see, but I can't lie to myself anymore. He no longer cares for me. Sometimes I think he hates me. He has changed." She looked at me with tormented eyes. "That is why you did not tell him what Maryon said, isn't it? I know it. Of course, I know. Oh Elspeth, I just want to go home to Obernewtyn."

  She began to weep in earnest.

  I stared at her helplessly. After a long minute, I crossed to the sky window and stared up. Rain fell lightly but steadily on the glass.

  "Perhaps it is time for all of us to go home," I said softly to the night.

  XV

  I sank into the hot, soapy water with a sigh.

  My backside and legs ached from hours of riding about Sutrium and I was chilled to the bone by the constant icy drizzle that had fallen.

  It had been altogether a miserable and fruitless morning. I had gone to the biggest green, and then to as many other greens as I could find. At each, I had tried to farseek gypsies at random, but every single one I had tried had been naturally shielded! The two Twentyfamilies gypsies I had tried to penetrate were even more tightly blocked than the halfbreeds. I had been forced to assume that all gypsies possessed natural mental shields, though of varying strengths.

  As I had done with the gypsy woman, I could have entered any of the gypsies at a subconscious level, but there was simply no point. I would not find what I needed in their underminds.

  In desperation, for now there was no other course, I had tried to talk to some gypsies clustered around a well, thinking to draw them gradually to talk of the gypsy woman who had escaped the Herder fires, but Domick had been right. They were impossibly suspicious of strangers, even of gypsies who were unknown to them. I had not needed empathic Talent to be immediately aware of their hostility.

  I might have kept on, but for the patches of static arising from the buildings. This had puzzled me until it came to me that the Council might be using stone from Oldtime ruins to build within the city. The amount of residual poison was not high enough to cause the rotting sickness, but it stole my energy having to circumvent it. The other problem was the mysterious, strong static given off by the sea and the Suggredoon. There were several smaller greens close enough to these to make farseeking difficult, if not impossible.

  I had returned to the safe house an hour past, exhausted and disheartened, and convinced the only hope of success now lay in letting the gypsy go and following her. I was not sure that would qualify as returning her to her people, nor even if it would enable me to learn the meaning of the word swallow, but what else could I do?

  The trouble was that it would be some time before she could walk unaided, let alone hike across the city on foot Unless she could be maneuvered into taking Jaygar.

  Kella had interrupted my depressive account to suggest a bath. "You can't think properly when you are all tied up in knots, cold and tense and miserable."

  I had been too tired to argue, though peeling off my garments I had wondered how I could possibly relax.

  I sank deeper in the hot water and felt some of the stiffness melt from my bones.

  Strange, how little I could believe that I would die if I failed to return the gypsy. But perhaps imagining death was not a thing anyone could do easily.

  I closed my eyes with a sigh. As sinew and muscle unknotted, even as the healer had promised, things began to look slightly less bleak. After all I had only been trying for a few hours. Surely mere were gypsies with less than half Twentyfamilies blood, whose minds might be penetrated. I would try again.

  It would be unwise to be seen moving about the greens and asking questions two days running. Since I could not cut my hair, perhaps I could tip flour into it to make myself seem older. Coercion would do no good, since so many gypsies had natural shields. That left physical disguise.

  My mind drifted a little and I found myself wondering if snow would have fallen in the highest valleys yet. Gahltha and I had loved to ride through the early snowfalls, scattering the powdery whiteness high.

  My thoughts moved down to the valley where Obernewtyn lay, as if I rode there on Gahltha's back. I visualized the farms and orchards visible from the foothills of the higher mountains. The last crops would be readying themselves for harvest and Alad's beastspeakers would soon be working hard.

  I smiled at a fleeting memory of picking berries with the farseeker novice, Zarak, and the irrepressible beastspeaker, Lina. Bonded in spirit as children, it was likely this would become formal as they grew up. Our laughter had disturbed Maruman, who had departed in a grumpy huff with rude things to say about noisy funaga. That had made us laugh all the more.

  I thought of the brief summerday evenings, redolent with the scent of silvaein blossoms and talking quietly of the future with Dameon.

  Unbidden, the image of Rushton came to me with a queer ache.

  I saw him as he had been in my earliest days at Obernewtyn. Having bidden me from Ariel and his killer wolves at great risk to himself and his friends, he had told me how to escape from Obernewtyn. I had slipped away from his soft-voiced farewell, running as much from the intensity in his green eyes as from Ariel's wolves.

  I had been little more than a babe then, all prickles and fears, and Rushton had been a man. No wonder I had been afraid of what I saw in his eyes.

  The inner vision changed and, again, I saw myself departing Obernewtyn for the dangerous journey to the coast that had brought us Dragon and the treasures of the hidden Beforetime library. I had been angry with Rushton that day but, standing on the steps to Obernewtyn, he had waved to me.

  And only a few days past I had, again, left him on the steps. But this time, he had not waved.

  I blinked and the image faded, leaving me to ponder what it was about Rushton that made me feel suffocated and tense whenever I was with him, and yet think of him so often when we were apart. A queer contrariness, yet it had always been that way between us. When we had met, he had been pretending to be a farm overseer at Obernewtyn, hiding his true identity from Ariel and his masters. My first sight was of him carrying a squealing, struggling piglet.

  The memory made me smile though, at the time, I had sensed his latent powers and feared that he had sensed mine and would report me to the masters of Obernewtyn. 1 had been no more content at his attentions than the pig! But he had not reported me, and in time we had become allies. Yet, in truth, we had never been friends.

  I tried to decide what I felt for him. Not revulsion, or hatred or even dislike. It was ... I struggled for an emotion.

  It was fear.

  I stared unseeing into the water, shocked at the word that seemed to have risen up from my deepest mind. Once said, it would not be dismissed.

  Was I afraid of Rushton?

  Surely not. I had saved his life and he mine more than once. We shared a vision for Obernewtyn and the Talented Misfits of the Land, and once
a partial mindbond. I would trust him with my life, so how could I be afraid of him?

  My mind delved deep beneath layers of denial and deception to the truth. Yes, I was afraid, but not of him. Of myself. Of giving into that force that drew him toward me; of what it would do to me.

  I thought of Dragon trailing helplessly after Matthew, and shuddered. Starkly, I heard the words Rushton had rasped to me once in delirium: Elspeth love. I had tried to rob those words of their meaning, and to tell myself his emotions were latent or distorted—that he did not truly feel love, but some lesser thing because of our mindbond.

  But it was not true. None of it.

  He loved me and I knew it. Had always known it.

  And I?

  I became aware that my hands were trembling violently where they rested on the rim of the bathing barrel. I thrust them under the water and wrenched my mind forcibly away from Rushton.

  I thought of guildmerge, and my emotions calmed.

  There was something infinitely reassuring about the thought of the huge circular room where guildmerge was held, with its enormous fires and towering bookshelves stuffed with volumes. It was the heart of Obernewtyn. No matter that it had once been a hellish laboratory where Misfits had been experimented on. We had made it into something new, driving out the demons of the past.

  The memory I had conjured up was again so real that I could almost smell the smoke from the fire, and hear the crack of mountain pine above the hum of conversation. I seemed to feel Avra's breath tickling the hair at my neck, for the mountain pony always stood at my side during guildmerge. Sometimes she would reach down and touch her nose to Maruman, who invariably slept on my lap. Other times she would nudge Alad, signaling her desire to communicate, or to reproach him for failing to interpret her clearly enough.

  Ceirwan always sat on my other side, saying little but measuring everything with his dark-blue eyes, storing up impressions for our own guild meetings.

  Life at Obernewtyn revolved around the guildmerge and what it stood for: community and purpose. In contrast, Sutrium was dark and chaotic, devoid of hope or purpose. All at once, I felt a longing to be home at Obernewtyn as savage and powerful as a hot knife in my belly. The strength of it took my breath away.