Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (80 page)

1

We headed east along a hunting trail. I had expected we would make camp in the open woods, but we pressed forward past sunset, stopping only to water the horses at one of the creeks that descends out of Suvrin Caladur.

I felt the house before I saw it, beyond the twist of a creek, standing in a grove of trees. The outlines of the cottage loomed over us as we approached, and the women hurried forward and dismounted. We others followed, but more slowly, as one of the women struggled with a ring of keys and the other beckoned us forward. The house was neither large nor grand, but, unlike anything we had used for shelter lately, it had an aura of solidity. We entered through a door in good repair into a narrow antechamber; we carried our packs and crept into the center of the cottage, where Karsten lit an oil lamp stored in a cabinet.

We stood in a comfortable room, recently swept clean of dust and cobwebs, furnished with chairs, ottomans, cushions and thick carpets. The red-haired woman knelt by the broad stone fireplace and lit a fire; the wood had already been laid and waited only for the touch of roch in her hand. That she carried roch surprised me but I assumed one of the twice-named had given it to her. She glanced at me and smiled. She had the broad face of the people of Vyddn, a smattering of freckles across her nose. Timid, she turned quickly away. But I had time to note her beauty, the strength of her limbs, the clear milk of her skin beneath the freckles.

Kirith Kirin had stayed outside with Imral and the black-haired woman, one could hear them settling the horses. I had time to look around, noting the good hangings on the walls, the clean stone floor, the rooms that opened off this one, a small eating room and a kitchen, a narrow closet for winter gear, a study of some kind, a narrow stair; this was someone’s hunting lodge, I guessed, though it had been out of use for a while. The adjoining rooms were not in such good order as the sitting room where the fire was burning. Karsten caught me snooping and said, “Curious?”

I shrugged. “A little. What is this place?”

“A summer lodge. A place we knew about, where we could be safe for a night.”

When the others came inside the black-haired woman laid out food in front of the fire, real stuff like I hadn’t seen since I’d wakened, fresh cheese and winter fruits, salted hams and dry breads, even a flagon of wine and Drii brandy, a feast after what we’d found for ourselves on the road. We sat down anywhere we could find a space and drank and ate, and I sighed at the comfort of the fire, the cushions, the gentleness of the room. We might have been dropped down into some peaceful time, I might almost have believed that, except for the anxiety on all their faces, the ones I knew and the ones I didn’t. Hardly anyone spoke while we ate, till the wine and the fire had warmed us some. Outside the wind had picked up, one could feel the teeth of the cold through the walls. Imral remarked, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see a storm tonight.”

“We might get snow, so close to the mountains.” The red-haired woman had a rich voice, like a low flute, that one could feel as well as hear.

“I’d be glad of that,” Karsten said, “to cover our trail.”

“You think we’re being followed?”

“If we’re not, we will be.” She told the story of Cormes and the soldiers in the hostel courtyard while the red-haired woman stirred the fire. The other woman listened attentively, glancing at me once, then away.

“That would be Cormes,” she agreed, when Karsten said the name. “It would make sense that he’d send her.”

The red-haired woman said, “I’d wished for a better head start.”

“It can’t be helped.” The black haired woman was watching Kirith Kirin when she said this, and he nodded agreement. Something about the tilt of her chin, the way the firelight caught the bones of her face, told me who she was. But she turned away and the moment passed; I would pretend not to know if that was what she preferred. After only a few moments in general company, she and her friend retreated to another chamber.

Kirith Kirin, Imral and Karsten sat up a while longer. I drowsed against Kirith Kirin while they talked, idle stuff, mostly, fretting about our route north, whether we would be spotted, whether the witch Cormes would follow us, whether the trails would be safe. But even then, even in that comfortable place, I felt distant from any need to speak. My anchor was Kirith Kirin, and he was all that held me in the room, at times. Without him there, I might have floated clean away.

There was only one question I wanted answered, and I asked it when their conversation had burned away to embers like the fire. “Where is Drudaen now?”

The sound of my voice must have surprised them. “I thought you were asleep, you’ve been so quiet,” Kirith Kirin said.

“I’ve been listening.”

He poured himself the dregs of the wine and settled beside me again. “He’s camped in front of Drii with an army.”

“Though he may have left there if he knows we have you awake again,” Karsten said quietly.

“He knows.”

2

For safety’s sake we slept in the sitting room, pulling the heavy furniture aside; there were bedrooms upstairs but they would be too cold for sleeping in the winter night, and Karsten and Imral decided we should not risk another fire. They were afraid the light would be seen from the trail, since patrols might already be searching for us in this part of the Onge. I might have told them that anyone who found us here would be sorry for it, but I said nothing and let them fret. Kirith Kirin found the conversation amusing too, and looked at me. We spread our pallet in a corner where we could see the fire. We lay awake watching it a long time, wrapped in the safety of each other.

What to call my silence of those days? Was it detachment, did I truly care for no one except Kirith Kirin? Even meeting Athryn Ardfalla, as I had that night, and her lover, the redhead, Sylvis Mnemorel; even the news of Drudaen, the fact that he had Drii under siege; all this meant so little. Had I lain in sleep so long that I was condemned to numbness?

The feeling continued in the morning. We rose and everyone made a show of putting the lodge to rights, getting rid of the ashes from the fire, leaving the place as if no one had been there; and I might have spared them trouble, but I said nothing. We rode through the long day and into the night again, and took shelter in a cave for the night. The winter wind was howling. We had borrowed better clothes from the lodge and were warmly dressed, at least, but the night would be a bitter one, unless we had a fire. Sylvis was afraid to light one, there was a chance we should be seen. Karsten countered that we’d freeze unless we took the risk. They argued back and forth while Kirith Kirin watched me, and he was smiling at me without any visible change of expression, and finally, that time, I relented. “We won’t be found,” I said quietly, and the women stopped talking and looked at me. “We’ll be safe.”

Kirith Kirin had already begun to build a rock circle, and Imral gathered wood, and soon we had a fire, burning big and bold in the mouth of the cave, while Athryn laid out our meal and I spread the bedding close to the warmth.

We rode northward for several days after that, and we did encounter patrols, and other folk. The Onge forest is not like Arthen; there have always been people living in it, and there are even small villages along the road on the banks of the river, and houses and lodges in the hills. One saw wrecked cottages along the road, and everywhere one found evidence of the poverty the people endured, but these places had survived better than others had, judging from what I had seen. The forest offered some protection, being nearly as old as Arthen, and having a reputation for unfriendliness to wizards' armies. The Verm avoided forests whenever possible, and Drudaen cared little for the place, and so the Onge-folk had been spared some blows of the long war. Two nights we slept in the villages, but most often we found a hunting house away from the trails, and a cache of supplies in the houses, and I always suspected that the lodge belonged to someone in our party, or someone known to one of us, but I never asked. Some nights we slept in the open, with the wind howling down from the Caladur peaks and the hand of winter closing.

Only one patrol came anywhere near us, at the place where the River Isar runs into the Deluna, where we had to cross the main bridge. Soldiers held the bridge, a party of a hundred or more, and there was a witch with them who saw me, for a moment, till he forgot me as Cormes had forgotten me, and we passed over the bridge, following the Isar. The main road leaves the Onge there, headed west for Ibraxa and the country around the Krom Hills, but we traveled east away from the road, following old trails, where we would be hidden.

I had no notion of our destination until we had traveled nearly as far north as the forest could take us, and we reached the place called Chalianthrothe.

We had followed the Isar to its source, or at least to the place where it surfaces out of the deep mountains. To the Orloc this is a holy river; they say it runs under the mountains all the way to Zaeyn, and this, then, is one of their holy places, but was given to the Jisraegen long ago, when the Orloc left the surface for good. We rode the horses along a narrow valley which ascended at first gradually, then more steeply, and we came to a place where the Isar formed a perfect, round pool on a terrace of rock. The surface of the terrace had been polished and inlaid with cunning designs that were part writing and part picture, and the lip of the pool was carved in intricate shapes to resemble flowers and vines. From one side of the pool, framed in immense, old cedars, a series of broad, deep stone steps mounted toward another terrace. We dismounted and led the horses up, climbing alongside the craggy face of a spur of the mountain. The surface of each step had been worked by hand with more of the designs, and the faces of each step were carved in reliefs, a parade of dwarf-men on animals I had never seen before, an army passing, the faces of crowned women, a gathering of people at market, a series of panels telling a story; I had only time to glimpse it all. We arrived at the highest terrace and found ourselves facing a double gate cut into the stone. Carved into the stone were the same figures as before, but along with this script were words in archaic Jisraegen, spellings and shapes of letters I could hardly make out, though I was able to read a name, Jurel Durassa.

The gate opened when Athryn Ardfalla touched it with her hand. She gestured to us and we led the horses inside, where we found an inner courtyard, bright and full of light, where there were ample stables for the horses, and some bales of hay and fodder to feed them. Around the stables were various rooms, including what looked to be armories, and beyond, another courtyard where a fountain glittered and sang. Athryn opened a sealed door to reveal other rooms, all lit as if by daylight, when in fact we stood inside the mountain, with solid rock over our heads.

Several chambers were clustered together, each opening onto the other, separated by pillars carved out of the native rock, twisting upward in precise spiral patterns, capped by bursts of leaves and branches that were marvels of stonework; the floors of marble and granite and chalcedony and other kinds of stone I could not name. Some of the walls had been worked to a perfect polish and smoothness and others had been shaped but not finished, so that the stone presented itself rough and full of textures; the vaulted ceilings rose up in graceful domes, mixed of gold-leaf and true-silver designs, interspersed with what the eye would have sworn were skylights. The chambers were neither grand nor large, and there were not so many of them; the place had a cozy feeling, being furnished quite sparsely in the central chambers, though the outer ones had cushions and chairs and carpets. I saw a stairway in one room, carved out of the mountain rock, descending to a level beneath ours, and in the smallest chambers fireplaces nested in the walls. Wood had been laid in one of these, and packs that I guessed contained more food, but these mundane objects appeared out of place, prosaic amid the gemlike beauty of the rest. I walked from place to place and drank the beauty into myself, as though it were some kind of restorative. As though it could make me feel gratitude, and a sense of belonging. The others were making a fire in the small chamber, and settling us in for the night, and I wandered away from the noise of that, down the stairway I had seen to the level beneath.

The stairs spiraled down much farther than I had reckoned, and I passed through a library, or what had once been a library; the shelves bare. This room is important, I thought, pay attention, and it was the empty shelves I noticed most. The dust on each shelf contained outlines of books, I touched them, and I knew what the books had been. One of Jurel’s libraries. The Sisters had discussed the books he studied, their links to older knowledge from the River City. Some other of these objects were as old as that, including the stone worktables that stood here, a painter’s easel, some instruments used for navigating on ships. The room smelled of cedar. It had a tidy, compact feeling to it. Light entered from the ceiling, as in the upper chambers, fresh and bright, and I wanted to wander in it, to sit at the table, to lift the brass telescope. But the stairs continued downward and my curiosity drew me deeper, for something farther down was aware of me.