CHAPTER TEN

Venetia’s Hut in the Marshlands, Escator

T ell me what you know, Ravenna,” Venetia said. “Tell me why you have left Lord Drava and returned to this world.”

They were sitting at the table, conversing in quiet tones.

Everyone else was wrapped in blankets, and lying in various spots about the fire, but neither Ravenna nor her mother would be able to rest until they had spoken with each other.

“There is something coming,” said Ravenna. “Something about to move between this world and…another. Not from the Land of Dreams, but from a far darker world. Drava spoke often of it, and I felt it, too. I think you have as well, Venetia.”

Venetia nodded. “My dreams have been greatly disturbed these past months, and not just with my sense of the woman, Salome, who StarDrifter abandoned.”

She paused, one hand rubbing at her forehead, as if to worry away her memories. “I feel as if the world is about to pull apart, Ravenna. Like dough that has been rolled and stretched too far on the pastry board. Something is stretching reality too thin in order that it might cross over. A terrifying, raging beast. I feel as if…”

Ravenna smiled, a little sadly. “I think it has come time for us to say good-bye, for the time being, to these comforting marshes.”

They sat in silence for a little while, each lost in her own thoughts, then Venetia roused, and smiled a little.

“Tell me, Ravenna. Do I have a grandchild yet? I have often wondered. Did you give Drava a child?”

“No,” Ravenna said, “I wanted no child. Not of his. He was not what I wanted.” She gave a small shrug.

“I had been thinking of leaving for a very long time. The darkness that now besets us finally gave me the courage to actually leave.”

Venetia stretched her hand across the table, resting it on Ravenna’s arm. “And I for one am glad to have your company again. It has been a lonely time here without you.”

She gave her daughter’s arm a pat. “And what a coincidence, my darling, that you should reappear just as Maximilian has lost his wife. Be careful, Ravenna. I sense deep sorrow about this, such abiding sadness, such loss, that I worry for you.”

“Venetia, do not worry. Maxel is my friend. He cannot hurt me.”

Maximilian lay wrapped in his blanket in a quiet corner of the hut, listening to Venetia and Ravenna’s muted conversation. His shoulder still throbbed, but Venetia had rubbed an ointment into it earlier that had reduced both the pain and swelling, and Maximilian thought it would be well enough within a day or two.

He was tired, but for the moment he did not sleep.

Strangely, he felt content for the first time in many months.

The sudden appearance of Ravenna, a girl—now woman—to whom he’d once entrusted his life, he took as an omen of very good fortune. Maximilian had felt a distance between him and Garth, but Ravenna…he was glad to see her again, and he thought she would be a boon on his journey into Isembaard.

Maximilian knew without a shadow of a doubt that she, as her mother, would be accompanying him farther south.

More important, the Weeper accounted for his strange state of contentment. He’d known the instant he’d touched it on the beach that the bronze statue was somehow intimately connected with Elcho Falling and with himself.

That moment on the beach had been a shock, and he’d leapt back, asking Ravenna to pick up the statue.

But now…when StarDrifter had laid the Weeper into his arms earlier, Maximilian felt as if an intimate part of him had been returned. He had no idea what, or even how, but the Weeper suddenly made him feel…vindicated. Doing something positive and riding after Ishbel had been the right thing, after all.

The Weeper was near his bedroll, not quite touching one of Maxel’s hands as it lay outside the blankets.

Maximilian knew his Persimius ring and the queen’s ring, secreted away in a pocket of his jerkin, were communicating with the Weeper. Not in words, and not in any manner that Maximilian could understand, but communicating they were.

Somehow, they were old friends.

For the moment Maximilian felt contented, and he felt safe, and he felt optimistic, and none of these things had been close companions for many, many months.

Maximilian finally succumbed to his weariness and slept.

The rings and the Weeper chatted throughout most of the night.