Into the Dark Lands (10 page)

Very gently she leaned down and smoothed out Erin's hair. The darkness of it glistened with hints of deep red; Cordan's heritage. She hesitated, not wishing to wake her child. It had been years since she could sit so.

Nor would she have too much time to enjoy it; in a few hours she would have to see to the rationing of supplies and make sure that those who carried them knew their routes well enough to take alternates in case of trouble.

But then, finally, she would have a few weeks, sandwiched between the comfort of daughter and mother—the Lady of Elliath.

It was from you, Lady, that I gained my power
. She sighed, letting rings of light cascade idly down her fingers.
But from father all else.

I used to think you so cold, so distant
. She cocked an ear, listened carefully, then turned back to her thoughts.
Maybe I didn't understand. Maybe distance is what you need if you have to live forever in this world.

Instead of distance, Kerlinda had been forced to cultivate a peculiar numbness; to continue to heal the injured solely to send them, armed and ready, to the waiting fields. The deaths didn't hurt her as much now as they had when she'd lived at home in Elliath. There, life was almost normal, and what you lost to war was so clear and so blindingly sharp. But here, amid the noise and pain, it was easy to forget that death was loss.

Cordan,
she thought,
was this the life you knew? Perhaps there is peace, not in dying, but in death.

She leaned down once again, hovering over her daughter like shadow.

 

“Kerlinda.”

She smiled up at the familiar face framed in its golden red. “I'm almost ready.”

“You've been saying that for well over an hour now. You've got a few minutes more, but the last of the wagons is nearly loaded.” He put an arm out and tapped her gently on the shoulder. “They'll survive well enough without you for a few weeks. They've done it before.”

She nodded, a gesture that had no force behind it.

They shouldn't have sent you out here without training you first. Gordaris frowned. It wasn't the first time he'd thought it. The whole world is too large a burden for any ane of us to try to bear.

Erin quietly carried what her mother had given her, slipping into the wagon she thought of as hers. Between bedrolls and supplies, she put down her mother's clothing. Maybe, if the Bright Heart smiled on her, she wouldn't have to watch her mother leave again. If she could somehow attain her True Ward, she would be adult—she could go with her mother back to the front to fight in the cause of God. Everybody told her she'd be adult soon.

She straightened the bedrolls, calling light to alleviate the darkness of the enclosed wagon.

 

The Lady of Elliath stood at the edge of line holdings. The grass, broken by the shadowed outlines of scrub, wavered inches below her feet. No building, no Great Hall, touched the horizon; no people, and no sound. Only here could she feel certain that Latham's power would not find her before she had proper warning.

It was dark.

She held herself very still, felt the breeze touch and gently lift her pale hair.

Once . . . once I would have walked . . .

But she did not look up at the stars; she did not seek the face of the helpless moon.

Is it darkness alone that I yearn for?

Her fingers bit bloodlessly into her palms. It helped to still their shaking.

It has not happened
. She looked up now, seeing in the night sky all that she had seen in her five-year trance.
It has not happened
yet
. Her feet suddenly touched the ground as she spun around to look almost wildly at her woods. She took a step forward and then let her knees collapse.

Yes, she was alone here, and the better for it. It would do no good to let Latham find her in such a state. Although her actions were rarely futile, she allowed herself this one indulgence: She covered her face with her cold, cold hands, feeling them as slim, ivory bars.

She waited. It was the most horrible thing that she had ever been called upon to do.

Time ends the burden of all mortals. I envy you.

It had not happened yet; she knew it because she knew the exact position of the moon in the clear sky. But it would happen; she would do nothing to prevent it.

The wait, the interminable, terrible wait, was almost over. She counted the minutes. She saw again the darkness, the flash of red-fire. She heard the terror and pain of Lernari screams.

She made no move to rise. This decision had been made almost fifteen years ago, and the cost had been accepted then. But she shook as she waited, curled against the living grass.

And when she raised her white face, her eyes were dark.

Kerlinda
. . .

 

It was dark; in the years to follow, Erin would remember this clearly. Their camp fires burned cheerfully, lighting rock and leaves alike. They sat around them, playing with the images that each could find out of the burning of the wood. It was pleasant; a cool wind blew gently through the air, moving the low flicker of firelight as it pleased.

She sat beside her mother, too old to huddle in the curve of her arms, but too young to need to sit at a distance to prove her age. Gordaris and Trevor were there as well, resting their arms on their knees and conversing quietly.

All around the camp fires the wagons were huddled like walls, and between these, tents housed their weary travelers

“Kerlinda.”

Her mother looked up, eyes drawn away from the fire that seemed to hypnotize her.

Gordaris gave a tired smile. “To bed, I think.”

“Bed?” She stretched, feeling almost idle. Leather chafed slightly at her arms, but it was a familiar feeling; no warrior went without armor except in the home of his line. “I've not had this much sleep since . . . since . . .”

“Since the last time you traveled with me, I'll warrant.” He stood, stretching his arms. “But you'll have it now, Erin.”

She stood up before her mother did; four weeks of traveling with Gordaris made his friendly tone impossible not to obey.

“Leaving me already?” Kerlinda smiled wistfully. “You've grown so much. I'm not sure I should let you out of my—what was that?”

The smile that had warmed her face fell away, and Erin saw clearly for the first time how lean her mother had become. Firelight shadowed the hollows of her cheeks as she spun around, her head tilted upward.

“Kerlinda?”

She stood thus a few moments as if listening, and then her face paled. Wheeling, she grabbed her daughter by the shoulders.

“Go,” she said, her voice brooking no argument. “Not the tent. The second wagon. Go now. ”
Not here, Bright Heart!
Her daughter's face loomed before her like an accusation. Not now!

But power recognized power; this rule she understood clearly. And somehow—Bright Heart's blood, somehow—seventy miles from enemy lines, red-fire was burning.

Erin stumbled forward at the force of her mother's push. She righted herself and turned to see that her mother had already unsheathed the small sword she carried.

“Gordaris, call the alarm!”

Gordaris's sword already glinted in the darkness, his face the mirror of Kerlinda's. He nodded, and the sharp bark of his voice filled the clearing. Nothing remained of the friendly, absent-minded driver that Erin had come to know so well.

Red-fire,
Kerlinda thought.
The taint of the Dark Heart. But it's strong—it's never been so strong before.
Without thinking, she blooded her blade, her finger skimming along its edge.
Why is it so strong when they aren't among us yet?

And then she knew.

“Erin!”

Erin had been watching in confusion. She fumbled with her sword a moment, her hands shaking. Her fingers would not cooperate for long enough to release the sword from the scabbard. In frustration, she called forth light.

Nothing happened.

Biting her lip, she closed her eyes and began to concentrate.

Someone slapped her. Her eyes flew open and she saw her mother's face, white with either fury or fear.

“Go!”

This time she obeyed, her legs shaking even as they carried her into the covered wagon. Her mouth was dry as she shook her head; no words spilled out. She stumbled across the open ground, scraping her leg against a rock. The wagon was close.

Hide.

She stumbled into the wagon and stopped, her knees bent against the wooden boards. In the darkness she could make out very little, but her hands told her where she was; spare bedding was kept here, and tents.

Hide.

She scrambled beneath bedrolls, pulling them above her head. Her breath came in short, shallow gasps. God, something was
very
wrong.

She could smell the sweat of horses and hear them begin to trumpet the same panic that now gripped her. Her face was all but crushed into the wagon floor; the scent of aged wood clogged her nostrils.

Death—there was death in the clearing. And it would be her death, if she didn't stay very, very still. She tried to hold her breath and failed.

She was curled up as tightly as one her size could be—and for the first time in years, she felt her smallness and was glad. The Lernari hearing that she had always been so proud of caught each supernatural crackle of red and white meeting in the air above the ground; she could hear the screams, the shouts, and the rasping clang of metal against metal. The hands, her hands, over her ears could not prevent that.

Worse, though, was the sudden silence that followed. And much worse, the muffled screams.

She felt she would never be free of the physical feel of fear: the way her heart drummed so loudly against her chest, and the way her breath cut in and out so sharply it hurt. She grabbed a handful of bedding and tried to cram it into her ears, but her hands were numb and shaking. The screams—dear God, the screams—twisted into her body while she lay still and hidden, too paralyzed even to cry.

Then the screams stopped. She knew a moment of relief before they started again. She could not help but recognize whose throat they were torn from, no matter how distorted by pain the voice was.

And she could not move. She lay silent, writhing in darkness.
There was the taste of blood in her mouth from where she had bitten through her lip.

Bright Heart let it stop please let it stop!

And then, for a moment, it did. There was a silence so total it was almost deafening. And Erin saw, for the very first time, the shadowy visage of Lady Death, with her long white hands and her ebony nails. It might have been delirium, it might have been vision, but whatever it was, it was clear.

It struck her like a dull sword.

Lady Death had come for her mother. And she, cowering in the wagon, hoping—praying—not to be noticed, had done nothing, nothing at all, to prevent it. She was a warrior—she was warrior-trained . . .
She
was warrior trained.

What had Telvar said? That the warrior, the true warrior, knew how to die. Die a clean death.

Her fear sharpened unbearably and shifted.

Her mother was going to die if Lady Death couldn't be prevented from speaking her name, because Erin had done
nothing
. Her mother was going to die—her mother, no warrior.

The bedding toppled away as she jerked up, her hands finding the sword that Telvar had given to her. She stumbled over the disordered tents and bedrolls to reach the wagon's closed flap.

With a wild, incoherent shriek, Erin stumbled out of the wagon onto the dry grass. It was dark, Bright Heart—and the light wouldn't come.

But the moon glared balefully down until her eyes could clearly see the wreckage of her mother's body. Surrounding it there were four: three armored figures and one—one . . .

“No!”

They turned at once to see her. She stood, raised sword in hand, shaking with shame and fury. One of the four said something and stepped forward. He was pale and cloaked in a shadow that was stronger than night.

It was the first time in her life that she had seen a Servant of the Enemy.
Nightwalker.
He was tall, too tall, and ice seemed to form in the shadows he cast upon the still ground. Not even the firelight touched his blackness.

Telvar's words echoed dimly in her mind.

Against a nightwalker of the Enemy you stand no chance. You are overmatched by the power of his Servants; if you see one, and it is walking—flee.

And it didn't matter. For the sake of her cowardice she had sacrificed her mother. Because of her fear she had lost, in a few
moments, the one thing her life had centered around. What if the walker hurt her, made her scream, made her suffer what her mother had suffered? What if he chose to feed on her lifeblood; to play with her spirit in an endless game of agony while he slaked his endless hunger? She deserved it.

The Servant came forward as she stood, feet planted firmly on the ground, arm raised to strike. She could not see any expression on his face; the shadow he wore obscured it. Nonetheless, she knew what was there.

“You are the last.”

She did not reply.

“We felt your power, little one. It is almost as strong as hers was.” He stepped closer still and lifted one hand. “It will never be used against us.”

There was death in the clearing.

Erin saw his hand draw closer, but before she could move, she was surrounded by a nimbus of brilliant, glowing white. Her brown tunic, her pale leggings, seemed somehow transformed as the light flared like a wall.

The walker screamed, a signal to all of the enemy that the lines had come.