Daughters Of The Storm (59 page)

‘You should go out and look for him. He might be on the side of the road hurt,' Rose said.

‘I'm not going out to look for him.'

‘Then I'll go.'

‘And where would you look?'

‘Along the route to Stonemantel. He went to Stonemantel.' She swallowed hard. ‘Didn't he?'

Again, the silence. Rose closed the door and leaned her back against it. Bluebell turned around to face her from across the house. Willow put aside her sewing and watched. Rose's pulse fluttered at her throat.

‘Where is Heath, Bluebell?' Rose asked, her voice constricted.

Bluebell's mouth was hard. She folded her arms. ‘He's gone.'

‘Gone? Where?'

Bluebell shrugged.

Rose grew mad with infuriation. ‘Answer me!'

‘I can't answer you. He's gone.'

‘You sent him away.'

‘It was his choice.'

The words stung, as they were no doubt intended to. But she gathered herself. ‘And what choice did you give him? Leave or
die?' Even that wasn't enough. She wanted him to say he would die for her. How could he fear Bluebell so greatly? She was only a woman.

Bluebell uncrossed her arms, gestured to Willow with a tilt of her head. ‘Out,' she said. ‘This is between me and Rose.'

Willow left swiftly and wordlessly.

When they were alone, Bluebell said, ‘Heath knew leaving was best for you and for Rowan. That's what he said.'

‘Did he say anything else?' A declaration of eternal love? A promise to return? But Bluebell was already shaking her head and she knew that Heath would not be so foolish as to say such things in front of her. ‘But you told him to go, didn't you?'

‘I suggested it. Yes.'

Rose could feel her face contorting from the effort of holding back angry sobs. ‘And do you love me, sister?'

‘More than you know.'

‘You say that, and yet you have barred me from my two greatest happinesses.'

Bluebell opened her mouth to speak, but then changed her mind. Instead, she crossed the room and laid her hands on Rose's shoulders. ‘I can say nothing that I haven't said before,' she said. Then she walked past Rose and out the door, letting it close behind her.

Rose gave in to her sobs. Willow returned a moment later and gathered Rose in her arms, but Rose took no comfort. Emptiness, nothing but emptiness waited for her. Long, hollow years. The two stars by which she guided herself forever hidden.

Ash rose before Unweder and crept out of the narrow house and down towards the stream. Every few feet she stopped and reached out with her mind, searching for the border of the dead zone
around Unweder's house. When she found it, she stood with one foot inside it and one foot outside it. For the first time, she looked closely at the dead and dying trees that surrounded Unweder. If a tree grew beyond the border, it was fine and well, and its supple limbs and green leaves spread into the dead zone without harm. That's why the extent of the blight around her had been so hard to see at first. But inside the border, everything was spotted yellow, or shrivelled to brown. The rocks were slimy with moss. The pools of water that sat after rain were stagnant and smelly. She had thought that Unweder might be keeping the saplings in check near his house, but she realised now that no new trees could grow in the dead zone. The leaf-fall was thick and greasy. Whatever had happened to the elementals around Unweder's house had made them unable to perform their duties.

Ash closed her eyes and quieted her mind, then reached out for a tree elemental with inaudible words. She asked it to go over the border into the dead zone and immediately felt its resistance. Its weightlessness grew dense, dragging away. This was more than resistance, this was fear. The kind of mute primitive fear cattle exude when on their way to the slaughter. She released it with a snap, and it disappeared into the bark with an almost-audible crack. She didn't want to be responsible for sending the elemental into that silence. She opened her eyes and was surprised to see Unweder standing ten yards away, very still, watching her. A slight speeding of her heart. A little fear and a little guilt.

Ash stepped back over the border and approached him. ‘Good morning.'

‘What are you doing?'

‘Practising.'

His good eye considered her unblinkingly for a few moments, then he sighed and spread his hands. ‘Things don't grow well around my house, Ash. I take it you've noticed?'

‘Yes, I have.'

‘I have to move every six or seven years. Everything turns to dust around me and eventually the wood in the house starts to rot.'

Ash turned this over in her mind.

‘Do you know what it is?' he asked, and she could tell he was trying to guard the hope in his voice.

‘There's a numbness around your house. No elementals. As though they've been suffocated.'

His eyebrows shot up. ‘I see.' He glanced around him at the yellowing leaves, the autumn that held even in spring. ‘Is it possible to get them back?'

‘I tried to make one cross over into the dead zone. It was terrified. I let it go.'

Unweder's attention returned to her. ‘You let it go?'

‘I did.'

He smiled weakly. ‘You're a compassionate woman, Ash. That's a rare quality in an undermagician.'

She couldn't tell if this comment was meant as a compliment or a criticism, so she didn't reply. Questions burned inside her. Why did this dead zone follow him about? What had he been doing to create it? Or was it something about him that frightened elementals away? Or destroyed them? She didn't ask any of them, because she was still afraid of upsetting Unweder after being caught snooping yesterday. So she held her tongue, and they gazed at each other across the dying wood.

Finally, he said, ‘I think it's time I told you what I do.'

Ash nodded calmly, despite a flash of excitement.

He beckoned her forwards and she went to him. At first she thought he was offering his hand to her — which was odd because he rarely touched her — but then she realised he was holding one of the little glass pots that he used.

‘What is it?' she said.

‘Take it.'

She did as he said.

‘Now uncork it and drink it.'

She hesitated and he grew impatient.

‘Go on,' he said. ‘What reason would I have to poison you? Would it help you to know that I drank this same draught yesterday and it helped me to see you prying in my chest?'

Curiosity won her over. Was it some kind of seeing potion? She uncorked the bottle and put it to her lips. The liquid was greasy, foul-tasting. She swallowed it, screwing up her face involuntarily, then handed it back to Unweder.

‘No, don't close your eyes,' he said. ‘Keep them open.'

She had been expecting something to change in her brain, pictures to overlay themselves or distant voices to become audible. But instead, she felt the changes in her body. An awful, squirming feeling in her stomach, her muscles, her bones. As though they were becoming soft and pliable and she was in danger of falling over and never rising again. Her heart panicked and she reached for Unweder, who stepped back and let her pitch forwards. Strange muttered words surrounded her, and she realised they were Unweder's. In the moment that it took her to fall to the ground, her body experienced an excruciating sensation of compression and she assumed this was death crushing her.

But it wasn't death. Because the next thing she knew, she had spread her wings and lifted off, leaving the ground far behind. She was light, made of airy bones and weightless feathers, a tiny hot heart tapping away inside her. Up she went, up above the blighted wood and now she could look down and see the lichen-covered roof of Unweder's house disappearing as she sped on above the world, towards distant trees and plains, then circling back again,
then down and down, called by Unweder with his strange mutterings, then soft as snow landing on the undergrowth.

‘It's going to hurt, Ash,' Unweder said, his voice distorted and muffled by her bird ears. He crouched before her, seeming a giant with heavy hands and a head made of rock. But then the pain returned, worse this time, as her bones and sinews grew dense and heavy. She cried out, but heard only a bird's squawk. Then her own voice returned, and she was lying curled on her side in the leaf-fall, her entire body feeling as though it had been hammered from within.

Unweder helped her up. She'd been sure she couldn't stand, but was surprised to find her feet were firm on the ground. She gasped, staring at him. She hadn't realised such magic existed in the world.

‘You can turn yourself into a bird?' she asked.

‘Any living creature,' he said. ‘I was watching you from the roof beam yesterday.'

‘You were the rat?'

‘Yes.'

‘And the animals in the chest?'

‘I steal their form. They are dead, but must be kept safe and whole by magic. If I had destroyed the swallow while you were up there, you too would have been destroyed.'

A cold breeze rose up and stirred the leaves at her feet. She shivered. ‘I am astonished,' she said at last.

He smiled tightly. ‘There's more.'

She tilted her head curiously.

‘Let's go inside. I think the rain is coming back.'

They went inside and Unweder fed the fire in the hearthpit, while Ash sat and gathered herself. Her body was recovering; she felt like herself again. But her mind was reeling. She glanced at
the chest, knowing that her bird form was in there somewhere, dead but not quite dead. In an unnatural sleep.

Unweder sat across from her, knees apart, hands clasping and unclasping in front of him. Ash waited while the fire popped softly, and the rain began to fall. Finally, he said, ‘Do you think the elementals have left because of my magic?'

‘They haven't left,' she said, certain of it, though unsure how she was certain, ‘they are in an unnatural sleep. Like the animals in the chest.'

‘No, no. The animals in the chest are dead.'

‘How did you kill them?'

‘I catch them then suffocate them, then when there is less than a quarter of a breath left in their lungs, I bind them with magic so they are still, so that all the grains of dust that are them, that make them, suspend and hold. They don't rot, they don't get softer or stiffer. They simply ... stay.'

‘So they aren't really dead.'

‘I've stopped them living. That's death, isn't it?'

Ash realised she was repressing a shudder. There was something horribly macabre about what he was telling her. ‘When you bind them, the magic must be leaking out around the house. It's suspended the elementals as well.'
Stopped them living.

He nodded. ‘Can you bring them out again?'

‘I don't know. It's as if they aren't there. Perhaps when I'm stronger, better at my craft. Or perhaps if you release the animals they —'

‘No,' he said quickly, sharply. ‘I can't risk ... Ash, there are things I need to tell you and I can see you already think me a magician of death. But nobody blinks to kill a deer for food, or a rabbit for its skin.'

‘I suppose you are right.'

He dropped his head and her skin prickled lightly. He was about to tell her something she wouldn't like. She found herself
leaning closer to the fire. The rain intensified outside, hammering on the roof.

‘There are others,' he said. ‘They can't all be kept in a box. I prefer small animals, ones that aren't hunted, that are overlooked by most. It gives me freedom. But I've been every kind of animal.'

‘Where are their bodies?'

He pointed between his shoes. ‘Under the floor. A horse. A wolf. And ...'

Her feet went cold.

‘I aspire to higher and higher forms. If only my body held together properly, I would hunt a dragon and become one.'

She shook her head forcefully. ‘There are no dragons left in Thyrsland.'

‘I know there is one. I have seen it with the eye of my mind, and I am certain it lives and breathes on the rocky edges of the known world.' He turned his own hands over in front of his face. ‘I do it for good reasons, Ash,' he said. ‘It isn't just a whim to change my shape and form. I am experimenting right on the edge of undermagic. I ask the oldest question known to mankind: where is the border between life and death?'

‘Life and death?'

He nodded, held her gaze with his good eye while the sightless one wandered to the corner of the room. Here it came, the thing she didn't want to hear. ‘I have lived for a hundred and twelve years,' he said, his voice soft. ‘When this body wears out, I will simply go and find another.'

Ash's ears rang as she comprehended what he meant. She pointed at the floorboards. ‘You mean ...?'

‘The man I ... became, yes. He is under there with the horse and the wolf.'

‘What happened to your old body? Your original one?'