Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (36 page)

Mathilda snorted and freed her hand to poke him in the ribs, though also under the cover of the cloth. The plates were cleared and the desserts brought in, pastries, glazed fruit-tarts, ice cream with hazelnuts, liqueurs and coffee.

“I’ll sleep on it,” he said. “Perhaps it will come to me.”

Four hours later he sat up gasping. Mathilda gave a muffled protest and then wholly woke herself. She crouched, watching him in the half-darkness of the room; the windows glowed with moonlight on snow, and there was a tiny yellow glimmer from the night-light.

“What a dream,” he whispered, sinking back and making his big scarred fist relax on the sheet. “My oath, what a dream!”

Mathilda wiggled until she could lay her undamaged left cheek on his shoulder.

“What was it about?” she asked softly; he could feel the slight warmth of her breath on his skin.

“I…can’t remember,” he realized suddenly. “No! I can, a little! I know where we must go.”

“Where?” she said; he could feel her stiffen.

“The lake,” he said. “Lost Lake.”

“There?” she said dubiously. “Well, it’s not too far, even with snow…but why Lost Lake?”

“Because it isn’t lost, but hidden,” Rudi said, the knowledge filling his mind like moonlit ice. “Not Lost Lake, really.”

“What is it, then?”

“E-e-kwahl-a-mat-yam-lshk,”
he murmured. “Lake at the Heart of Mountains. The hidden Heart of Montival to be.”

E
dain Aylward Mackenzie held up his right hand with the fist clenched.

Halt
, in battle-sign.

Behind him the men and women of the High King’s Archers halted and kicked their feet out of the skis, then sank down into cover with arrows on the strings of their longbows. There was more than enough shelter in this dense old-growth forest of Douglas fir, silver fir and western hemlock, where the trees stood like great rough-barked pillars all about and rose a hundred feet to the lowest branch. The more so as they all wore war-cloaks, mottled white and brown for winter and with bits of fir-bough tucked into the loops sewn on their surfaces.

Just pick a tree and you were concealed by trunks ten feet or more through at chest-height, at least from the front. He went to a knee behind some leafless fool’s-huckleberry brush and peered forward. It wasn’t too hard to move on foot, the snow hadn’t had time to reach the huge depths it did here in the Cascades by the end of winter. Light stabbed down through gaps in the canopy, yellow spears of afternoon into the cavelike green gloom.

The lake shouldn’t be visible yet, it was southward and downslope, but the terrain should be clear enough through patches of mist side-lit by the afternoon sun. The damp chill of the air bit, the sort that could get into your bones, and the fresh snow packed hard under his boots, wet cold against his knee above the sock-hose.

He shivered and blinked.
Or is this the land around Lost Lake indeed? I don’t recognize a fookin’ thing! I look at the ground and the peaks and the map and it’s all there, but it’s as if I’ve never been here before…Get a grip, man!

Asgerd ghosted up beside him, nearly as silent as her husband, and on his other side Gharb, his mastiff bitch. The dog was bristling, showing a little of her long man-killing yellow teeth. His wife was frowning too. All three of them had keen senses. And all three had been beyond the world of common day, little though they might like it.

He respected the Powers and gave them Their due of rite and offering; that didn’t mean he liked having Their particular attention on him. The consequences could be drastic, for good
or
ill; whether the kettle hit the pot, or the pot hit the kettle…Even a house-hob could cause bad trouble if things went wrong, and something a lot bigger than cream refusing to strike to butter in the churn was happening here. There was a reason the Fair Folk were called so when you named their kind aloud, and it wasn’t just the beauty of their faces.

“This feels…odd,” she said quietly, in the low conversational tone that didn’t carry. “Where have you led us?”

“To Lost Lake, Anwyn witness,” Edain said as softly, baffled. “This is the old
trail
, for all love.”

Asgerd
had
never been here before, of course; they’d met in Norrheim on the shores of the Atlantic, in what the old world had called northern Maine. He went on:

“Look you, I spent many a summer here in the north country with the Chief as a lad, his months with the Regent and Mathilda. I’ve hunted and fished and walked these woods before, swum in that lake…with him and now and then by myself. Yes, and spent nights with my bedroll spread not long bowshot from this very ground, with no more thought of anything of the Otherworld than to ask the land’s permission to take deadfall
or to make the offerings to Cernunnos and the Mother from a kill. It’s a bonny place and no dispute, very fair indeed, but now it feels
different
. It’s a puzzlement.”

“It feels as it did on Nantucket,” she said starkly.

He started to shake his head, then nodded unwillingly. “Not as strong…no, say not as
fearful
as that,” he said.

“Nantucket would have frightened a
God
,” she said. “But this is…fey and eerie. Not fell or dire, not threatening, surely not evil, but I’ve a feeling that I’m not supposed to come any closer. That I might come to grief if I did, not through ill intent, but as I would if I leapt off a cliff or ran face-first into a tree.”

Edain shivered agreement. Then he turned, sure that every pair of eyes would be upon them. He held out his string-arm, bent the elbow until the fingers pointed down, rotated it in a circle around that point, waggled the hand, then tapped two fingers at his eyes.

Scout in a circle. Report.

He and Asgerd waited as the skis hissed away; you didn’t split into groups smaller than two, so there was always someone watching over your back. Edain stared past hers, blinked again at the glimmer that wasn’t there when he looked directly, and swore softly. He knew he was a man of strong will…

Inherited from Da, most likely, though the Lady knows me mother…but I have this feeling that if I
weren’t
determined and if we weren’t under orders, it’s far away we’d be by now, without really knowing why save that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

After a while the patrols returned. He wasn’t surprised that the brief reports showed no human presence and even less so that none of them had gone closer to the Lake itself. After that they dispersed and waited with the patience of scouts and hunters, until Rudi and Mathilda came up.

They were dressed for the wilderness, she in Portlander hunting garb of green wool and padded leather, he in kilt and winter jacket and ordinary wrapped and pinned plaid. They leaned their skis against a tree and joined him.

“The sleighs aren’t all that far behind,” Rudi said.

They exchanged a snort; the amount of gear the panjandrums had insisted on hauling along for a short trip was something of a scandal. Juniper Mackenzie could make do with very little, but some of the others…

“What’s the matter, then?” Rudi went on.

“I’ll go on down there if you say so, Chief,” Edain said when the High King knelt beside him. “But I thought it would best to wait for the order until you’d, ummm, seen for yourself. Look. Really
look
.”

“Good man,” Rudi said, and thumped him on the shoulder. After a moment: “It does feel…a bit strange, the now, does it not?”

“Aye, a
bit
strange. And we went a
bit
of a long way on the Quest, and that mountain—” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, to the peak of Mt. Hood southward “— is a
bit
of a bulk and has a
bit
of a height upon it. What’s happened? This used to be a spot no different from others, or no more than having a pretty lake and a fine view of the mountains to admire as you lay and fished on a summer’s day.”

Rudi was silent a long while; after a moment he stroked his short-clipped beard and let his other hand fall to the moonstone pommel of the Sword. Then he spoke, his voice a little remote:

“I’m not sure myself, mind you. But I’d say that the Change was a beginning, not an end. After what…happened…on Nantucket, well, that was a change as well, if more subtle. One of the things the Change said to us of the human-kind was
there are things to which you should not put your hand
. Perhaps this is one that says other things, among them:
And also, there are places where you should not ordinarily go. Not unless asked and ordered, so.
”

“And it’s ready to heed hints to stay away I am, and that beyond all doubt or question!” Edain said.

Rudi nodded. Just then Edain saw Mathilda catch his eyes with hers, then flick her gaze to the branches of a big silver fir not far away. He followed the gesture automatically himself; they’d all done a great deal of skulking and scouting together on the Quest. Two large ravens were sitting side-by-side on a branch, and he hadn’t noticed them before. They launched themselves into the air in a wide circling gyre with loud
gruk…
gruk…
cries, dodging amongst the tall trees, then headed off down the slope towards the water along the overgrown trail. Mathilda crossed herself twice, and her lips moved in prayer.

“O shluagh!
” Edain swore, to avert the attention of the Fair Folk and ask their aid if they did notice him.

He made the sign of the Horns, and the Invoking pentagram as well. Asgerd touched her valknut, and Hammer-signed the air. To his astonishment Rudi stood and laughed, loud and long and with genuine merriment in it, hands on hips as he shouted to the sky:

“And it’s a meddler and a troublemaker you are, Old Man, wandering about the world and sticking your spoon in any number of stewpots!”

He pointed his index finger at the departing birds: “As for you two…could it be, just, that you’re giving me a message the now? You could make it plainer, that you could…pull a little written sign through the air behind you, say, or dance a merry jig about us and tootle a march on the bagpipes the while!”

The laughter died, but his blue-grey-green eyes were still lit with it. “We’ll be on our way, then, Edain. There’s no danger…or at least none that blades and bows could guard against. You and the rest will be safe enough, I’m thinking. But if I were you, I’d not hunt just here today, nor take any wood that wasn’t already fallen.”

“The Mother-of-All have pity, no!” Edain said sincerely.

“And I would so advise the others when they arrive. We may be a while,” Rudi warned.

Edain shrugged. “We’ve only been on the trail two days and a bit, and at a pace a six-year-old could have bettered. We’ve bread and butter and cheese and cold pork and apples, and for that matter cakes and ale from the Lodge. It’s a poor excuse for the High King’s fighting-tail we’d be if a night or two in the woods was a hardship. The complaints of their high lordships, that’ll be the hardest thing to endure.”

“Then await us,” he said. “When the others arrive, don’t let them go more than a quarter-mile nearer; that bit of a level spot, you know it. They should be able to see…something…from there.”

“I’ll have no trouble with them keeping their distance,” Edain said
grimly. “Even the mighty mucks who think so well of themselves. I may have to boot the odd arse to get them that close.”

Rudi nodded. He and Mathilda set their skis down and slipped the toes of their boots into the loops.

“Are you sure I should be here too?” Mathilda said.

“As sure as sure, as sure as the beat of my own heart, love,” Rudi replied. “We will hold this land together; and our children after us. We are one, and the land with us.”

Before the Change there had been log cabins here at the northern point of Lost Lake and a small store. In the first year fugitives had passed through, often to their deaths, which was where most paths had led in that time. The passing years and resurgent life had long since reclaimed their bones.

“It’s the same,” she said, looking around. “But…how long did it take us to get here? It wasn’t very far and downhill most of the way but it felt like…a long time. Like things were
stretched
, somehow.”

The men of the budding Association had come through in the high summer of the Change Year as well, hunting the bandit gangs and little pockets of refugees trying to live by the hunt; by then the Lord Protector had been short of labor. They’d wrecked or torched the buildings to keep outlaws from using them. Afterwards men came seldom, between the green-clad enforcers of the Forest Law based out of Timberline and the anti-bandit patrols from the baronies on either side, and sheer remoteness from the tilled fields that fed humankind. Those who did were invited guests.

“I don’t think that’s a question with an answer, Matti. I think this is the place we know and also…not.”

“And getting here is partly following the trail we know…”

“…and also not.”

Rain and snow, insects and clinging roots had returned ash to the soil and reduced metal to rust and glass to fragments. Mounds of berry-bushes covered foundations and were well begun in the long toil of grinding them back into the earth, the canes standing in tangles through the knee-deep snow.

Rudi and Mathilda dropped their packs, planted their skis upright, then walked to the water’s edge hand-in-hand, looking about.

More snow stood on the boughs of the tall conifers that crowded to the rim of the lake, thick and clinging as a froth of whipped cream on the dark green and brown. The water was a purpling blue as the sun sank, and in the distance bands of crimson lay against the western sky. The same color flecked the clouds scattered in mare’s-tails above and painted the cone of Mount Hood, and the image of mountain and clouds repeated itself in the mirror of the water, broken only for a moment when a trout leapt with a tiny audible
splash
and re-forming as the ripples died. There were shapes moving in the clouds, like the patterns in the Sword’s blade. A loon cried somewhere, its haunted call echoing through the quiet.