Seven

“You are cruel,” Efmaer said. “More cruel than any legend has ever told.”

“No more cruel than humans to themselves, who keep hope as a precious jewel.”

Then the Shadow vanished, and Efmaer filled the air where it had been with curses, and rode away after the soul of her loved ...

—Efmaer’s Ride, traditional: Part the Second

 

Segnbora unsheathed Charriselm and went off eastward through the standing hay. Another hedge loomed up before her, without stile or hedge-gate. With Charriselm she cut an opening, making certain that it would be too small for a cow to escape through in the morning, and squeezed through.

The sour mind-stench she had smelled got stronger by the second, becoming so terrible that Segnbora wondered how she could have missed it from fifty miles away, let alone from the town. At the edge of the field the ground under her feet seemed to be burning with it. Her inner hearing buzzed and roared as if two powerful hands were choking her. She stopped and held still, forcing herself not to gag. The stench was coming from beneath an old yew with peeling bark and drooping branches.

She walked under the tree and went to her knees. The fallow ground had been plowed almost up to the tree trunk. The furrows lay neat and seemingly undisturbed, yet when Segnbora thrust her hands into the still soft ground and turned it over, she sat back on her heels, sick to her stomach and sicker at heart. There is no mistaking the smell of a grave, especially a shallow one.

Nor was it the only grave. When she found strength to stand again, the death-taint led her to four others scattered around the edges of the field. All were deeper and better concealed, and all were older: the oldest perhaps three months old, the newest about three weeks.

So much for Eftgan’s messenger, Segnbora thought, standing over the last grave. From the intelligencer’s grave and three others, the souls were long flown, despite the brutality of their deaths. But from the one under the yew tree came a sensation of vague, scattered, helpless loss. There were two souls trapped there, shattered by their murder, trying to coalesce in time to find the Door into Starlight before the strength to pass it was lost.

Segnbora swore bitterly, torn with pity for the struggling dead and her own inability to do anything for them. Sorcery has no power over the opening or closing of that final Door. She knew the protocols for the laying of the dead, but without Fire they were useless to her. But Herewiss, or Eftgan—

She headed back for town at a run, pausing outside the postern gate to remove the sticktights and hay blades from her clothes. The inn’s common room was, if possible, noisier than it had been. There were perhaps one hundred people there, laughing, joking, singing—Segnbora’s hair stood up at the thought that any one of them might be a murderer several times over.

She found Freelorn relieving the barmaid of another bottle of potato wine, and swung him aside. “Lorn, where’s Herewiss gone?”

“He’s still out talking to—” Lorn stopped short of saying the Queen’s name, then looked more closely at Segnbora. “You’re shaking!”

“Lorn, never mind. Smile! There’s something very wrong and we’re not supposed to know about it. Take your time but find Herewiss—”

“—so if the others agree, we’ll go to Barachael,” Herewiss’s voice said suddenly as he came up behind Freelorn from the other side. “It’s as good a place to hide as any, and it’s a lot closer to Arlen than we are now ... What’s wrong?” he said, looking at Segnbora. His underhearing brought him an answer that made his eyes go wide with shock. “Show us,” he said. “Lorn, go out the front way. I’ll take the side. By the postern gate?”

Segnbora nodded and went out the way she had come, doing her best to take her time. Lorn and Herewiss were through the postern and into the hay ahead of her. She tied up her gown again and hurried after.

“Eftgan’s gone to readjust her Door,” Herewiss said when she reached them. “It may take her a little while—seven people, six horses, and Sunspark are a larger group than usually uses that gateway.” He lowered his voice. “I think she’s ready to back Lorn against Cillmod, openly. She’ll give us the details tomorrow, at Barachael.”

“That’s wonderful,” Segnbora said, “but with the problems she’s been having she’s hardly in a position to leave Barachael for a campaign in Arlen.”

“True. However, I believe I can help her, and thus free her to help us in return. You see, the Reavers are pouring through Chaelonde Pass, and it’s a simple enough matter to close that avenue—”

“But the Queen’s Rodmistresses have been doing illusion-wreakings there for years,” Segnbora objected. “They’re no longer strong enough. People have been dying in that pass for centuries, and the built-up negative energies are enough to ruin even the best Rodmistress’s work.”

“Oh, I’m not planning mere illusions. I’m planning something more powerful, and less subtle: a sealing.”

“You mean physically closing the pass?” Freelorn said, stunned. “Shaking down a few mountains?”

“That’s right.”

“You call that simple?”

“Simple, yes. And dangerous, too. It will require much Power, but then it’s also less likely that something will go wrong ...”

They slowed as they approached the spot Segnbora had sensed before. Herewiss looked at her as he let drop what he had been saying. A long moment passed.

“How long have the people in the grave been dead?” he asked her.

“Grave?”

“A week or so, I think. They’re weak. They were getting along in years, I believe, and the shock of their death was considerable. You have the protocols—”

“I have them.”

“Protocols, what protocols?” Freelorn said.

“For raising the dead,’“‘ Herewiss said. “Stay close, Lorn, I’m going to need you ... Oh, sweet Mother,” he added as the sour smell of murder hit him. Segnbora was already tearing—the psychic residue of violence became not easier, but harder to handle with exposure.

“Goddess, what is that,” Freelorn said, and coughed.

Both Segnbora and Herewiss looked at him, surprised.

“You smell something?” Herewiss said.

“Don’t you? Like a charnel pit.” Freelorn coughed again.

Herewiss looked most thoughtful, for the graves were covered and the night air was sweet even here; the stench was purely a matter of the undersenses.

They came to the yew tree, and stopped. Quickly, for the smell was now overwhelming, Herewiss reached over his shoulder and drew Khavrinen. Its Fire, suppressed all through the evening, now flared up, a hot blue-white.

Concerned, Segnbora threw a look over her shoulder at the walls of Chavi.

“Only our own people and Eftgan will be able to see the Fire,” Herewiss said, quiet-voiced, slipping into the calm he would need for his wreaking. “Now then ...”

The wavering of Flame about Khavrinen grew less hurried as its master calmed, yet there was still a great tension in every curl and curve of the Flame. With the tip of the sword, Herewiss drew a circle around the tree, the graves, Freelorn, and Segnbora. Where Khavrinen’s point cut the fallow ground, Fire remained, until at the circle’s end it flowed into itself, a seamless circle of blue Flame that licked and wreathed upward. Finally, when the three of them had stepped inside the circle, Herewiss thrust Khavrinen span-deep into the soft dirt, laid his hands, one over the other, on the sword’s fiery hilt, and began the wreaking. “Erhn tot ’mis kuithen, dstehae sschur; nsven kes uibrm—”

The words were in a more ancient dialect of Nhaired than any Segnbora had been taught. Even in Nhaired, which held within it many odd rhythms, the scansion of this wreaking-rhyme was bizarre. Freelorn was fidgeting, watching his loved with unease as Herewiss reassured the trembling yew and the murder-stained earth that he was about to end their pain, not make it worse. He stood and called the Power up out of him, sweating. The circle’s Fire reached higher, twisting, wreathing, matching the interlock of word with word, of thought with rhyme—

Herewiss poured out the words, poured out the Flame, profligate. Power built and built in the circle until it numbed the mind, until the eyes saw nothing anywhere but blue Fire, and a man-shaped shadow at the heart of it, the summoner.

Segnbora was overwhelmed. She did the only thing safe to do—turned around inside herself and fled down to the dark place in search of Hasai. His Power, he has too much! No one can have that much! she thought. Once in her own depths she could see nothing but burning blue light, but at last she stumbled into Hasai and flung her arms around a hot, stony talon. Concerned, the Dragon lowered his head protectively over her.

Outside, after what seemed an eternity of blueness, tension ebbed. Segnbora dared to look out of herself again and saw the pillar of Fire that wreathed about Herewiss diminish slightly as he released his wreaking to seek outside the circle for the fragments of the murdered people’s souls. He spoke on, in a different rhythm now, low and insistent, urging outward the unseen web the Fire had woven of itself, moving it as an ebb tide pushes a thrown net away from shore. When the web had drifted across the entire field, he reversed the meter of his poetry and began pulling it in again.

Segnbora swallowed hard. Light followed the blue-glittering weave; dusts and motes and sparkles drifted inward, small coalescing clouds of pallid light. They drifted inward faster now, coiling into two separate sources; they grew brighter and brighter, tightening to cores of light that pulsed in time with Herewiss’s verse. A last sharp word from Herewiss, a last burst of blue light, dazzling—

The Fire of the circle died down to a twilight shimmer, though about Herewiss and Khavrinen, Flame still twined bright. Segnbora found herself looking at two solid-seeming people—a man, shorter than herself, middle-aged, stocky, with a blunt, worn face; a woman of about the same age, still shorter, but more slender for her height. They both looked weary and confused. Segnbora gazed at them pityingly in that first second or so, seeing strangers—

—and then knew them.

She could not move.

“Kani, what happened? We were in bed ...” the man said, looking at the woman with distress.

His voice, the voice that had frightened her, praised her, laughed with her. The woman turned to him. Her face. The sight of it made Segnbora weak behind the knees, as if struck by a deadly blow.

“Mother,” she whispered.

“Hol, no,” Welcaen said. “The innkeeper woke us up, he said the horses were loose—” She broke off, horrified by the memory. Segnbora was stunned. That beautiful, sharp, lively voice was dulled now, like that of anyone who died by violence. “They tricked us into coming out here,” the voice continued, finally. “He had an axe. His wife had—”

Her husband’s eyes hardened, a flash of life left. “Why did they bother with such illusions? We have no money—”

Herewiss stood without moving, although through her shock Segnbora saw him swallow four times before he could get his voice to work. “Sir,” he said, “madam ... It was no illusion that was wrought upon you.”

“Hol,” Segnbora’s mother said, stepping forward to get a better look at Herewiss. She moved like a sleepwalker. “Hol, this isn’t one of them—”

Holmaern looked not at Herewiss’s face, but at his sword. “That’s impossible. Men don’t have Fire!” The words came with a flash of disbelief and scorn. Segnbora remembered too well his bitterness over the fact that, despite all the money he had spent, she had never focused.

“This man has it,” her mother said, a touch of wonder piercing the sleepy sound of her voice. “Sir, did you save us?”

“Lady Welcaen,” Herewiss said. “I didn’t save you. Of your courtesy, tell me what brought you to the inn here.”

“Reavers,” she said, dreamy voiced, as if telling of a threat years and miles gone. “They came down through the mountains at Onther looking for food, and overran the farmsteads. We and a few of our neighbors had warning. We got away north before the burnings, and told our news here, to the innkeeper, so he could spread it among those of this town. And tonight he woke us up—”

Holmaern turned to his wife, slow realization changing his expression to a different kind of dullness. “‘Kani,” he said. He reached out to touch her, but it was plain from his expression that she didn’t feel as he expected her to. “‘Kani, we’re dead.”

Segnbora saw her mother’s eyes go terrible with the truth. “Oh ... but then ... where is the last Shore?”

Herewiss stared down at Khavrinen, and Segnbora felt him calling up the Power again, a great wash of it. This time it took a strange and frightening shape, one she didn’t know.

“I am the way,” he said, speaking another’s words for Her.

He let go of Khavrinen and lifted his arms, opening them to her mother and father. They gazed at him in wonder. Freelorn, across the circle, went pale. Segnbora trembled at the sight of him. Herewiss was still there as much as any of them, but within the outlines of his body the stars blazed, more brilliant than they had been even in Hasai’s memory of the gulf between worlds.

Herewiss trembled too, but his voice was steady. “Who will be first?” he said.

Holmaern held Welcaen close. “Can’t we go together?”

Herewiss shook his head sorrowfully. “I’m too narrow a Door,” he said. “Besides, even at the usual Door, everyone goes through alone ....”

Husband and wife looked at one another. “We have a daughter,” her mother said after a moment. She glanced around the field, but saw nothing. “Will you send her word—?”

Segnbora’s heart turned over and broke inside her.

“Segnbora d’Welcaen tai-Enraesi is her name,” her father said, and even through the dullness it came out proudly. “She was eastaway in Steldin last we heard. Please tell her ... tell her that we love her.”

“Come on, Hol,” her mother said then. “We’ve got time to go—”

Herewiss opened his arms. Welcaen moved into them, throwing a last glance at her husband on the threshold of true death. “I’ll wait for you,” she said.

Herewiss embraced her, and she was gone.

Next Holmaern stepped slowly forward. When he was still one pace away, however, he paused, a last glimmer of earthly concern showing in his eyes. He spoke to Herewiss. “Sir, you will tell her, won’t you? She is my daughter, and although I have been slow to say so, she is very dear to me.”

“Your message has already reached her,” Herewiss assured him.

Holmaern looked relieved. With a nod of thanks, he gathered Herewiss close, passed through, and was gone.

Khavrinen’s Fire went out, and the circle faded to a blue smolder and died. Beside his now-dark sword Herewiss went slowly to his knees, and sobbed once, bitterly.

“That’s not the way it is supposed to be.” He gasped again. “Lorn, it was supposed to be life I give—”

Freelorn went to him, and held him close. “And what kind of life would they have had, dead and on the wrong side of the Door?”

Segnbora stood still, seeing behind her eyes, with the immediacy that came of Hasai’s presence, old lost times: summer mornings in Asfahaeg, rich with the smell of sunlight and the Sea; winter nights by the old hearthside in Darthis; afternoons weaving with her father, riding with her mother; laughter, anger, argument, joy, the sounds of life. She turned and walked away, back toward town.

The purpose behind her stride caught up with her at about the same time that Freelorn and Herewiss did, in the middle of the hayfield. They stopped her, looked at her as if expecting her to lapse again into a state of madness like that she had experienced after the Fane.

“Well? What’s the problem?” she asked, her anger hot and quick.

“What are you going to do?” Freelorn asked warily.

Charriselm’s grip was sweaty in her hand as she thought of the innkeeper—hurried, merry, sharp-faced, with eyes that wouldn’t meet hers. “I’m going to kill someone,” she said, and shook out of their grasp.

“’Berend—” Freelorn said.

She ignored him, hurrying off through the hay. Didn’t he realize that it wasn’t only because of her parents that she had to do this? Lorn’s people might easily have been the next victims, bringing—as might be thought—news from the South. She at least would have to be killed, since she wore the same arms as two others who were silenced, and was thus probably in search of them.

Behind her she could feel Fire stirring again. Herewiss had begun another wreaking. She understood why. He was a strategist. He would count it folly to kill a spy, and thus alert the spy’s superiors to the fact that that someone had discovered the game they played. He was building around the innkeeper a wreaking that would later cause the man to believe he had murdered those whom he was duty-bound to murder, when in fact they would go on their way, unnoticed and unharmed. It was all perfectly sensible, and Segnbora despised the idea.

(My way is more efficient,) she said, silent and bitter. (He won’t know what’s happened to him until a second after I hit him, when he tries to move and falls over in two pieces. And as for his wife—)

She went quietly through the postern, expecting an empty street. Instead, Moris and Dritt were there. So was Harald, standing about silently with their horses. Lang had just joined them, along with Eftgan, who had her cloak about her shoulders and her unsheathed white Rod in her hand.

Segnbora would have brushed past the Queen to take care of her unfinished business in the inn, but Eftgan’s hand on her arm, together with her look of deepening concern at the taste of Segnbora’s mind, stopped Segnbora as if she had walked into a wall.

“’Berend? What happened?”

Segnbora looked down at Eftgan’s brown eyes, so like her mother’s, and flinched away, unable to bear it.

“Oh, my Goddess,” Eftgan said. “Herewiss?”

A breath’s worth of silence sufficed for Herewiss to show Eftgan what Segnbora had found, what he had done for her parents, and the dream-wreaking he had woven and implanted in the innkeeper, and afterward in his wife.

“Can we get out of here now?” he said, sounding deadly tired. Sunspark paced to him in its stallion shape, and Herewiss leaned on it, sagging like a man near exhaustion. It looked at him in concern.

“Done,” said the Queen, and gestured with her Rod at the ground where she stood. The wreaking she had been maintaining until they arrived leaped upward from the stone and wove itself on the air, a warp and weft of blue Fire that outlined a small squarish doorway. The doorway flashed completely blue for a moment and then blacked out—but the black was that of a different night, a long way off. The Door sucked in air. On the other side they could see smooth paving, a better road than that of the damp cobbles of Chavi.

“Hurry up,” Eftgan said. “It’s a strain to hold it for this many, and the Kings’ Door is unpredictable.”

One by one they went through, each leading a horse. Eftgan stood to one side of the Door, Flame running down her Rod and keeping the lintels alight. Lang stepped through before Segnbora, his eyes on her, looking worried. Numb, she followed him. The one step took her from the wet lowland air of Chavi, air stinking of death, into air colder, purer, but not entirely clean of the taste. Her ears popped painfully.

The night was perhaps an hour further along here; the stars had shifted, in one part of the sky they were missing entirely. She looked around the paved courtyard where Freelorn’s people milled, among horses and men and women in the midnight blue of Darthen. Over the low northward wall she could see faintly, in the starshine, the valley where she had sometimes lived as a child, with the braided Chaelonde running through it. Many a time she had stood down there looking up at the place where she stood now—Sai khas-Barachael Fortress, the black sentinel perched on an outthrust root of one of the Highpeaks.

Dully, she looked southward to where the stars were blocked from the sky. Looming over khas-Barachael, shadowy dark below and pale with starlight above, the snows of Mount Adine brooded, impassive and cruel.

“It’s late,” Freelorn was saying. “We’ll meet in the morning, all of us. Meanwhile, does the Queen’s hospitality extend to a drink?”

Segnbora saw to Steelsheen’s stabling and made sure her corncrib was full, then followed Lang (who seemed to be beside her every time she turned around) to a warmly lit room faced in black stone. There was hot wine, and she drank a great deal of it. The explanations went on and on around her, but she was never as dead to them as she wanted to be.

Snatches of conversation and random thoughts faded in and out of hearing, as they had when she had first come down from the Morrowfane. She would have welcomed Hasai’s darkness to flee to again, but she couldn’t find it. He and the mdeihei were, for once, too remote. They wanted nothing to do with her, the mdeihei. She was too familiar with the kind of death to which they couldn’t admit. She was carrier of a contagion of terror and impossibility. The more she tried to approach, the more they fled her, afraid of any death in which one could lose oneself.

Somehow she found her way off to the tower room they had given her, and to bed. Lang was there too. He held her, and she clutched him, but she found no comfort in his presence. Her thoughts were full of graves, bare dirt, eyes that looked right through her. Her mind talked constantly, again and again making the most terrible admission a sensitive could make: I never felt you die. I never felt it.

Tears were a long time coming, but they found her at last; and Lang, more hero than she had ever been, held her and bore the brunt of her blows and cries and impotent rage. Bitterness and a shameful desire for vengeance; they were all still tangled in her at the end, but she knew at least she would be able to sleep. For tonight.

Over the bed and the room and the fortress, like a great weight, loomed the thought of Adine, and a line from the old family rede, which now might have a chance to come true: There will come a time of ice and darkness, and then the last of the tai-Enraesi will die. Flee the fate as you may, you shall know no peace until the blade finds your own heart, and lets the darkness in ....

Darkness. That was the key. One Whose sign and chosen hiding place was darkness was coming after Herewiss and Freelorn. She had chosen to ride with them, and to defy It. And It hated defiance, and never failed to reward it with pain of one kind or another.

She could leave Lorn now, and her troubles would cease, or she could stay with him, and they would almost certainly get worse. The Dark One obviously had it in for her. But what could be worse than a head full of Dragons, and to suddenly find oneself orphaned, she couldn’t imagine.

Beside her, Lang turned over and started to snore.

She lay there for a long time with the tears running down the sides of her face into her ears. And chose again.

Shadow, she thought at last, it’s war between us from now on. I’ll die soon enough. But You won’t get Lorn—or anybody else, if I can help it.

The darkness about her teemed with silent, derisive laughter. She turned her back on it and went to sleep.