Golden Daughter (29 page)

Sairu seemed to feel his struggle. She persisted: “I have sensed things in her chamber. Once, very strongly, our first night here in Daramuti. I sensed things, and I thought I myself dreamed. But I did not dream. I stood in her room in the dark of night, and I felt the presence of strangers moving just beyond my natural perceptions, on the borders of my mind. I believe they pose a threat to my mistress. Do you know anything of what I speak?”

“The chanting phantoms.”

“Explain.”

Jovann leaned back, raising his gaze to hers, his shoulders pressed against the wall. His face was overgrown with a young man’s attempt at a beard, which grew thickly in places and refused to grow at all in others. His hair was long, shaggy, and dirty, tied at the nape of his neck. He wore the humble, ill-fitting clothing of a Kitar acolyte, his own rags long since discarded. But his complexion and features declared to all the world his Chhayan heritage. A gurta-boy of the plains, raised on buffalo milk and buffalo jerk and the unrelenting fury of his displaced heritage.

Despite all this, there was a certain nobility to his face. Or, if not nobility, perhaps a desire for nobility that was about as much as one could expect from a young man of his years.

But he was still as predictable as any other. She could, and she would, make use of him. “Explain,” Sairu repeated. There was no smile to be seen on her face.

Jovann took a long breath before replying. “I’ve seen them twice now when I’ve walked with her in the Dream,” he said. “Formless shadows, dozens of them, a hundred. Perhaps more. I cannot see their faces, only their shadows, and . . . I don’t think they can see more than shadows of us either.”

“What do they want?”

“Lady Hariawan, I think. But I don’t know why.”

“Then I need you to find out.”

He narrowed his eyes up at her. “I do not believe that I am in
your
service.”

“No. You’re in my mistress’s service,” she replied, “and it is in her service I need you to act.”

Jovann considered her carefully. She was certainly a small force of nature all her own, and in other circumstances he might have thought her amusing. As it was, he found himself rather inclined to reach out, take one of her thin braids in his hand, and give it a sharp pull.

Instead, he drew himself up and replied in a cold voice, “Very well, little miss. What exactly do you have in mind?”

The problem with asking someone like Sairu what exactly she had in mind was that she would answer exactly. Then she would expect an exact performance. Then she would smile.

That was worst of all—that smile of hers. Jovann shivered, remembering it as he laid himself down that night in the darkness of the infirmary. It was the sort of smile that made a man promise things, even utterly mad things, just to make her stop.

And Jovann had promised. He told himself that it was all for Lady Hariawan’s sake and he must not fail to serve her. He lay awake in the darkness for some time, staring into shadows, feeling every burn and ache on his back. He wished, suddenly, that Sairu had remained to sing a lullaby to him as she had the night before.

But Sairu was in her mistress’s chambers, restored to favor and ever watchful. She had filled the room with paper lanterns to ward off the darkness of a deep mountain night, and she sat now in a corner of the room, watching her mistress.

“
Everyone wants something,
” Princess Safiya had told Sairu many years ago now. “
Once you know what a man wants, anything else you wish to learn about him is a matter of mere extrapolation.
”

Sairu’s fingers worked quietly with needle and thread over a torn hem, but her mind engaged in a frustrated game of questions without answers.

What does my mistress want?

Lady Hariawan sat cross-legged upon the floor in a manner unsuited to her elegant status. She cupped in her hands a little ball of floss. Sticky Bun, Dumpling, and Rice Cake surrounded her, yipping and wriggling and pawing at her knees, until she was finally convinced to roll the ball as fast as it would go across the room. Then they would pounce after it, crashing into one another and sending the lady into fits of childish giggles. The victor would retrieve the ball, dropping it in Lady Hariawan’s lap. She would catch it up, hide it against her bosom, and watch, smiling, as the dogs cajoled her once more to roll it.

She looked like a child of five playing on the dirt floor of some peasant’s hovel. But Sairu could not begrudge her this stolen moment of fun. Lady Hariawan’s life was possessed of few joys. And besides, no one was around to see her disgrace herself with this unladylike behavior. What did it matter so long as she smiled?

What does my mistress want?
Sairu wondered again and again. Like her dogs after the ball, she pursued this thought, only to find herself always returning to the same place, a place of pure ignorance. Because Lady Hariawan did not seem to want anything. Oh, now and again she insisted upon her own way. With Jovann, for instance, when she had compelled Sairu to heal him and bring him with them to Daramuti.

But did she
want
anything from Jovann? Did she even remember that he existed?

Sairu smiled grimly and bit off the end of a thread. She inspected the garment she was mending and discovered one sleeve to be frayed. So she threaded her needle and went back to work, picking at the loose edge with almost as much determined ferocity as she picked at the questions in her mind.

Very well, if she could not fathom what her mistress wanted . . . what did the Besur want? What did he hope to gain by sending Lady Hariawan away to Daramuti? Now this was a question to which she should be able to discover an answer. Lady Hariawan was a Dream Walker—Sairu had not doubted this for a moment since the beginning. Nor did she doubt that the Besur had plans in mind to use her powers, though what those plans might be, Sairu could not begin to guess. Not yet.

But she could guess one thing, and she was almost certain she was right. The Besur had sent Lady Hariawan away to prevent her from dream-walking. Sairu watched her mistress and the little dogs. She gazed at the soft cheek where the evil burn spread, looking fresh and painful still in the light of the paper lanterns. Lady Hariawan had encountered someone—or something—in the Dream. And the Besur wanted to be certain she did not encounter it again.

What he failed to realize was that Lady Hariawan did not need the support of the temple in order to pursue her skill.

The floss ball rolled across the room and stopped beside Sairu’s foot. Three yapping hunters fell upon it, crashing into Sairu in their eagerness, pulling the half-mended garment to the floor. “Oh, Anwar’s elbow!” Sairu cried and shooed her dogs away. The needle was lost somewhere, and she was obliged to search for it, discovering it at last caught in the threads of the opposite sleeve. Frowning, she folded up the robe and put it away to be finished later. Then she snatched the ball from Dumpling’s mouth and hid it in her robe, turning a deaf ear to the dog’s protesting whines and barks.

She turned to Lady Hariawan. “All right, my mistress,” she said, extending a hand, which Lady Hariawan tentatively took, allowing Sairu to help her to her feet. “It is late. Time you were in bed.”

Lady Hariawan made no protest as Sairu assisted her out of her daytime robes and into a soft sleep gown. She obediently climbed into bed and allowed Sairu to cover her with blankets. She raised her deep black gaze to Sairu’s face. “May I have the dog?” she asked.

Sairu raised an eyebrow. “Will you promise to sleep and not play?”

Lady Hariawan nodded meekly. So Sairu picked up the favored Sticky Bun and placed him by her mistress’s side, where he curled up at once, his head resting on her stomach, and began to snore. Lady Hariawan gently stroked his head, running her finger down his pushed-in nose. His lip curled and he put out his tongue to lick at her finger, making her giggle.

“No, no,” said Sairu sternly. “Sleep.”

So Lady Hariawan closed her eyes, and Sairu went around the room and snuffed all the candles in the lanterns. Then she resumed her seat in the corner, Dumpling and Rice Cake arranging themselves at her feet. She folded her hands, her eyes wide and bright, and she watched the sleeping form of her mistress.

There would be no harimau spice. There would be no chanting or meditation. If she could help it, she would not allow her mistress to dream-walk tonight.

And so the quiet of Hulan’s night fell upon Daramuti, and the hours crawled slowly by. Jovann, lying in the darkness of the infirmary, stared into the shadows, willing himself to sleep. But even if he slept, he could not guarantee that he would enter the Wood. The handmaiden seemed to think that he could step in and out of worlds at will, and he hated to disillusion her, to admit that such powers were not within his grasp. Perhaps her Lady Hariawan could do as much. But Jovann could only follow the voice of the songbird when it called. If it did not call, he would lie here all night, only to wake in the morning helpless, frustrated, and enslaved.

Even as it had earlier that day, the thought stole over him,
I must return to the Khla clan. I must warn my father.

He could rise even now, slip from the infirmary out into the temple grounds. No one watched, no one stood guard at his door. He could find a storehouse and gather supplies, just enough to get him started. And a weapon. He was a man of the Tiger, after all, and he knew how to survive in the wild if he had only a knife. These mountains were cold and high, and he found any exertion a strain on his unaccustomed lungs. But he was cunning. He could hide from any search party they sent. He could . . . he could escape . . .

But there was no use in entertaining such thoughts. He knew he would not leave Lady Hariawan.

Closing his eyes, Jovann sank into the tumult of his mind and the pain in his back. Peace eluded him at every turn, and he felt his heart racing. He would never sleep now, never dream-walk, as the handmaiden called it.

He breathed deep and pushed himself, grimacing, up into a seated position. Arranging his legs before him, he sat with his hands cupped. And he whispered, “The pain is here. In my hands. I hold it in my hands.”

The pain of his captivity.

The pain of his heartache.

The pain of his people’s hatred, their centuries of displacement, of abandonment, of hopeless, helpless rage. All this he held, there in the dark. And it was a tremendous burden for anyone to bear. He did not feel he had the strength or the wisdom to hold it any longer.

Then across the leagues of worlds and boundaries no mind could fathom, he heard the wood thrush singing.

Won’t you follow me, Jovann?

With a gasp of relief, he stepped out of his own body and into the white emptiness, then beyond into the Wood Between.

The Grandmother Tree welcomed Jovann even as it might have welcomed a grandchild. Its language was unknowable to a mortal mind, and its emotions could not be expressed in terms of mortal understanding. But somehow, as he stepped into the clearing out of the empty nothing, Jovann felt gladness, or something as like to gladness as an ancient, ageless tree may express.

Though there was no breeze, the enormous branches overhead moved softly, leaves shushing against one another in hundreds of tiny whispers. Jovann walked beneath this canopy to the trunk of the Grandmother, and stood upon one of its gnarled roots, gazing up at the lower boughs.

“I am here,” he said. “I followed you.”

The silver bell of a voice rang sweetly above, and the bird itself appeared as though by magic, its eyes bright as two small stars.

“I am going to show you something, Jovann,” said the bird. “Something you will not wish to see. And you will tell yourself that you do not know what it is, that you do not understand. But in your heart of hearts, you will know and you will understand. And the pain of that understanding will be the beginning of your new birth.”

Jovann sighed. Sometimes he wished the bird would just tell him clearly what it meant and what it wanted. But then, he decided, most birds don’t talk at all, so it was perhaps a little unfair of him to expect this one to do more than it did. “Another vision?” he asked.

“No,” said the bird. “Another path.”

Even as it spoke, Jovann felt the path open beneath his feet. He looked down but saw only the Grandmother Tree’s great roots and the gentle green grass that spread across the clearing floor. There was nothing to indicate a path, and yet he knew it was there. He knew that he looked right at it, that he could follow wherever it led, even to the Netherworld and back.

He addressed himself once more to the bird. “My Lord,” he said, “I must find the phantoms who plague my Lady Hariawan. Will this path take me to them?”

“It will,” said the bird.

“Ah.” He’d almost hoped for a different answer. “Well. That’s good then, yes?”

“No,” said the bird. “But it will be good.”

With that, it spread its wings and swooped down so close that one wingtip brushed Jovann’s hair even as he ducked. Then it sped off, flying in the same direction Jovann felt the invisible path must lead. It disappeared into the trees and the deeps of the Between, but Jovann could still hear its song ringing gently through the shadows.

The Grandmother Tree rustled its leaves again, and one of its old boughs groaned. Jovann glared at it. “Yes, yes, I’m on my way!” he said and, straightening his shoulders, stepped off the root and pursued both path and bird. He hesitated again at the clearing’s edge. He’d only ever passed over in company with Lady Hariawan who was, he believed, far more powerful in this world or worlds than he himself. But the path was clear to his heart, if not to his eyes, and he did not think it would lead him astray.

The leaves overhead burst into sudden earnest rustling. At their urging, Jovann shook himself and passed out of the clearing into the great Wood.

He walked. Trees slid from his path, and undergrowth of brambles, ferns, even wildflowers seemed to slide away from his footsteps, always just a few paces ahead of him. Even the shadows dispersed, leaving his way filled with golden light, though the canopy of leaves above him never cleared enough for him to glimpse the sky. Sometimes he picked up his pace and trotted. Sometimes he even ran. But mostly he walked, on and on. Sometimes the path led him down into low, rocky valleys, and he felt that things watched him from behind boulders. Sometimes it led him up hills lined with young saplings of a type he had never seen in Noorhitam, with strange lavender trunks and silver leaves that chimed like various musical instruments. Sometimes it led him through ferns so tall and thick they could have hidden any number of beings, though his own way remained clear before him.

But always there was more Wood. Unlike when he walked with Lady Hariawan, the trees did not thin away and vanish into mist. There was no sign of the Dream.

“How am I supposed to find it?” he whispered, speaking to a friendly-looking young pine that stood nearby, watching him curiously. “She always led me there before. She knew the way. But this path . . . it seems to go on and on forever but never get anywhere! Did the songbird—” He stopped, not liking to voice aloud the thought in his heart. But the thought was there anyway.

Did the songbird make a mistake?

The pine, which did not need to hear words in order to understand, looked suddenly disapproving. It is an unsettling feeling indeed to be disapproved by a tree. Jovann scowled at it and continued on his way.

Time followed him wherever he went, for he was mortal and could not escape it entirely. It flowed around him like water or light, and thus he could not count the hours as he would have in his own world. Since he had left his mortal body behind, he did not tire so quickly as he might have. But a mortal mind will eventually become exhausted, and Jovann suddenly found that his was spent.

So he sat there in the middle of his path. Around him stood tall trees with rich red trunks and broad leaves so dark green they may have been black. The shadows were deeper here, and the ground was covered in thick-growing ivy from which tiny flowers, shaped like stars, peered out and shone with their own secret light. They were pretty, Jovann thought, and also kind. He reached out a finger and gently touched the face of one. It felt no different from a flower in his own world.

But he discovered, a few moments later, that the vine had crept into his lap and lay there like a kitten, flowers gently touching his arms and hands and even reaching up toward his face. This startled him at first, and he wondered if he were being smothered alive. But no, this was a friendly vine. He stroked a nervous finger down one of its long, winding stems, and soon found his hand wrapped, but not restrained or constricted, in green leaves and shining flowers.

“How am I supposed to find the Dream?” he whispered again, speaking now to the flowers. “I fear I am lost, though I know I haven’t strayed from the path.”

The flowers looked as though they wished they might help. But since he didn’t understand the language of flowers, their wishes were in vain. He sighed heavily and bowed his head, resting it in one of his hands, elbow propped on a vine-draped knee. “What am I supposed to do?”

Let me help you.

Jovann screamed. The flowers and vines vanished, racing back into the shadows with a great slithering, leaving Jovann alone with that voice, which reverberated inside him like a hammer striking an anvil. A brilliant light fell through the heavy leaves to the forest floor, blinding and glorious beyond the words of men. Jovann fell back, flattened and ready to die.

Then the light shook itself, dimmed. Cé Imral, the blue star, stood before Jovann in the shape of a unicorn, gazing upon him with inquisitive, endless eyes.

When it spoke, its voice was singular, not the vastness of the starry host all rolled into one.

“I have been watching you,” said Cé Imral.

Jovann, panting hard, propped himself up on his elbows. Then, slowly gathering his strength and courage, he got back to his feet. The last time he had looked upon this particular star, it was flaming and furious and, he had believed, ready to kill him. But it seemed much smaller now, here in the Wood, away from Hulan’s Garden. Its flanks were dappled with shadows from the trees, but no shadows could touch the horn on its brow, which gleamed with all the richest, deepest opal fire.

It was a creature of beauty, and infinitely lovable. Jovann felt himself a little boy, longing to fling his arms around the creature’s neck as he once had flung his arms around the neck of his father’s oldest, proudest hunting dog. But he would never dare.

“I have been watching you,” Cé Imral repeated, “since you came to my Mother’s Realm. I do not usually take interest in mortal doings. But my Mother entrusted you with her Great Secret. This makes me curious.”

Jovann didn’t know what to say, so he kept his mouth shut.

“You search for the Dream, do you not?” the star persisted. “And for that which hides inside the Dream?”

“I . . . I am trying to find those who have twice now set upon my Lady Hariawan when she walked there,” Jovann said, his voice small and stammering.

“Yes.” When the unicorn nodded, its horn flashed and its mane shimmered. “I know of whom you speak. The Chanters, who do not sing, but who build and sustain with their voices. I have seen them. I have sung of them. I will take you to them.”

And with that, the unicorn turned and began walking through the Wood. Jovann took a step after, then paused. After all, he had been given a path to walk. Yes, it had proven an endless, infuriating path that led him nowhere at all. But was it wise to leave it?

Was it wise to not?

After all, what was a songbird compared to the glory of a unicorn? Compared to the glory of one of the great Dara, children of the Moon?

The debate lasted mere moments, but in the Wood it felt far longer. And he might have debated with himself for longer still, had he not glanced down at his feet.

The path he had been following was gone.

“Are you coming, mortal?” called Cé Imral from the shadows.

Jovann bit back an angry curse. Then he hastened after the unicorn, leaving behind the starflower vines and the tall red-bark trees. The unicorn, seeing him coming, turned its horn forward again and took three paces.

Within those three paces, the Wood gave way. By the time Jovann had caught up to the unicorn, he found himself no longer sheltered by trees but standing on the edge of the Dream.

How could he have been so very near without realizing it? But then, distances were not the same here, beyond the mortal world. A thing might be near and far all at the same moment. Mist shrouded him, at his feet, in his spirit. But his eyes were filled still with the light of Cé Imral.

“Come,” said the unicorn, and moved off into the formlessness.

Jovann followed, and together they penetrated the Dream. Shapes began to emerge from the mist, and Jovann glimpsed the forever-distant mountains, green and gold and magnificent. The Highlands, Umeer’s daughter had called them. But they vanished again, replaced by a different range of mountains, much lower, much nearer, much more forbidding. And now the mist gave way beneath his feet, and Jovann stood on a cracked, dry wasteland of endless dust.

The chanting reached him. As though it had been going on for ages, but his ears only just now opened to receive it. A rich, deep boom of many voices working together as though building a tower of sound. Each voice was its own brick, fitting with all the others to form the enormous whole.

Cé Imral stopped, and a shiver rippled over its body. Its light flickered and lessened so that its flanks turned deeper blue, and it looked more solid as it stood on the dry dirt. Its cloven hooves stamped uneasily, churning up the dust.

“What is it?” Jovann asked, drawing up alongside his guide. He almost could not make himself ask the next question, but forced the words out anyway. “Are you afraid?”

“No,” said the unicorn. “I am . . .
hungry
.”

In the depths of its midnight-blue eyes gleamed a spark of red fire.

Jovann shuddered and turned away. And when he turned, he found himself suddenly gazing upon the temple.