The Dark Ferryman (2 page)

He turned to see Rivergrace just behind him, standing cloaked in night shadows, her body filled with that serenity and sadness that was the current of the soul that ran deep in her. Damp and chill though the air was, she hadn’t brought a blanket or her cloak with her, and her breasts budded against the fabric of her blouse. He could not see her eyes or the lustrous auburn cast to her hair in the dark, but he knew them well, especially her eyes of aquamarine, of river water and sea tide, and how they would be watching him, searching his face.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve gotten other orders.”

Her gaze narrowed a bit and she looked beyond him. “Where is the lord of shadows taking you?”

Her nickname for the rogue Daravan, but an apt one.

“I don’t know.” He combed her heavy hair from her brow, burying his fingers in it for a long moment, smelling the aroma of her skin and tresses, feeling her warmth. “But I’ll come back.”

“Why you? Why not Osten or one of the captains here or someone else. She used to send Jeredon when Daravan came calling.” Her voice quavered over naming the queen’s brother.

“Jeredon is crippled.”

“Why is it always you, then? Someone else until Jeredon is ready.” She shivered a bit, as if throwing off the chill. “He heals. He’ll walk again someday, the healers have predicted it.”

“If they’re right, and that someday is not tonight, and Daravan’s need is now. Osten serves the queen best at her shoulder, and I am probably better than any of the captains who are still snoring in their blankets.”

“She sends you here and me there, and even when we’re together, she keeps us apart. I have no work to do but follow her whims.” Rivergrace took a quick breath before stilling. She closed her eyes a long moment, and he could feel her power awaken, a power that lay deeply in her as water sinks deeply into earth and stone and lies silently, pooled, waiting. He wondered if she knew she had that much strength within her. “Are you going after Quendius?”

Anger knotted in his throat at the name, but he swallowed it down and kept it there. “I don’t know.”

“You have to bring him back alive if you find him.”

“Now you ask the impossible of me. If we do find him, he won’t be taken easily, and I won’t vouch for Daravan’s plans. We can’t tell if he’s still allied with Abayan Diort or if he’s splintered off with his own mercenaries, and even if we knew, it would take a great deal to get to him.”

“He made slaves of my family and you.”

“All the more reason I’d rather see him dead.”

“I can’t talk to him if he’s dead. I can’t find out who my mother and father were and why they sold themselves to him. What price could possibly have been worth what happened to them, what they gave up?”

She had her mother’s name, but Sevryn knew she wanted more than that, she wanted to know their essence, and he couldn’t help her with that. “You’d have better luck getting a Bolger to dance than having Quendius ever tell you the truth.”

That brought a slight smile to her face as she must have pictured one of the bestial Bolgers capering about. He touched the upturned corner of her mouth. He would rather kiss it, but knew if he did, he would want to linger, and he could feel Daravan’s impatient stare on the back of his shoulders from somewhere out of the shadows where he waited. “I promise you, I shall get answers for you someday.” Sevryn leaned forward and kissed her forehead instead. “I will come back,” he repeated.

She put her hand on his chest, and he could feel her strength filling him as if he’d taken a long, deep drink of her. “Tell
him
that.” She turned and slipped away, and he watched her walk among the sleeping figures, her tall and slender body still a bit awkward as though she had not quite come to grips with herself after having been raised by compact and sturdy Dwellers. She turned once more to raise her hand in farewell, before kneeling onto her blankets, and then curling down to sleep, and he found himself with a bittersweet taste on his lips before he gathered the reins of his mount.

He led his horse away, hoofbeats muffled by grass heavy with dew, and found Daravan waiting for him downslope. Wrapped in his long gray cloak, the other looked as if he were made of fog, as still and unsubstantial on the evening air.

“She told me to tell you that I will return to her.”

“I should have told her I was taking you. Not that she’d have forgiven me any more easily.” Daravan rubbed his forehead. “How many blades do you have on you?”

“Seven.” They considered one another.

“That should be enough,” Daravan noted, finally. “We ride far and hard.” He looped his reins about his hand. “What is the first rule of war?”

Sevryn studied him but found no answer on the man’s stern face. He thought of Gilgarran. Like his dead mentor, this man moved along paths he shared with few, for reasons he seldom revealed, yet Sevryn found himself trusting Daravan. He brought forth one of Gilgarran’s lessons. “No regrets,” he answered.

Daravan dropped his chin in agreement. “And no prisoners. We shall be lucky to stay alive ourselves.”

Sevryn nodded as a stillness settled in his chest.

She thought she heard a horse being led quietly away as she lay with her cheek to the ground, feeling the dampness of the night draped around her. She waited until the soft thud of its muted hoofbeats faded entirely away before rousing slightly, peering out from under her blanket at the sleeping camp. Raised in mining caverns for the first, near-forgotten years of her life, no night held the darkness it might for others. She could see in hues of gray and sepia, brown and muted blues, reds, greens, all the colors that would lie sparkling before her at dawn’s first turning. And because she was who she was, who she had been, a vessel for a being much greater than herself, she could feel the hand of the River Goddess upon them all, in every drop of dew that touched them. Perhaps that touch even ran in her blood, in the bodily fluids of her existence; she could not be sure.

The only surety she held was that the Goddess bent very close to her this night, an oppressive weight in her thoughts and her heart. She rose, even more quietly than before, disturbing no one but the blanket which fell from her shoulders to the ground in a soundless ripple of cloth. Her steps took her to the small runnel of fresh water that bordered the field camp, no bold river or even a stream, but a brooklet, if that. By the time she reached it, dewdrops covered her like fine, gossamer clothing, tiny diamonds catching the barest illumination of the night and its stars, cloaking her from head to toe. She knelt at the edge and dipped her hand down to touch the running water. Since her earliest memories, that was how she’d found her comfort. A mother’s hug she could not remember, but the play of water upon her fingers, encircling her hand, that she could remember and often sought. Icy, cold, or tepid, the temperature of the river did not matter; it brought her cleansing. It filled her with strength. It washed away disquiet and fear and left serenity pooling behind it.

Behind the touch of the river lay the soft nearly unheard sound of a woman’s voice. Grace tilted her head to listen the better amidst the quiet of the forest and meadow. She could not catch words, only a melody, a song of nearly unbearable loss and mourning. The dew about her fell away as if loosened, becoming moon-tinged teardrops that rained about her. They gathered into small pools that caught the moon’s glitter.

They were not her tears. It was not her sorrow. Yet it flooded her, rose in her throat, surrounded her like tiny orbs of the silver-and-blue moon itself. She did not pull her hand from the water. It would do her no good to do so, and the dirge beat upon her senses.

A loss. A nearly incomprehensible loss. Not hers, though her father and mother had been torn away and an unborn sibling she had known nothing of until the Goddess granted her the barest touch of the other’s soul. The loss, then, was of the Goddess. Did she mourn the sundering of their forms? That seemed unthinkable. The River Goddess had never acknowledged her openly all the years that Rivergrace had sheltered her within. She had lived most of her life unaware that her body had been a shield, a vessel, for one of the essences of Kerith summoned forth unwillingly. But with the destruction of the Souldrinker Cerat, the Goddess had been freed. Why then did she now weep as if inconsolable? Cold water ran through her fingers like the questions for which she could find no answers.

The formless element seized her. Suddenly, Grace found herself yanked down to the ground, her entire arm and shoulder immersed, her hair soaked and trailing upon the waters. What had been a babbling of water became a roar in her ear, a cascade of furious tide surging against her, drawing her down into it.

“Return to me what is mine.”

Water filled her mouth as she tried to answer. Grace spit it out to manage, “I have nothing.”

“Thief. I am emptying!”

She could feel the silvery strands of herself drawn thin and fought the unweaving, the unraveling of her very being. She had been through this before, when the loose Goddess unmade her to free herself entirely and then remade her in gratitude. This was death and dying, and she had already made that sacrifice. She fought it this time, gently, protesting that she had nothing left to give that she had not already given. “I carried you in my heart and soul for decades. How can you not know me? How can you not know the truth in what I say to you?” Grace thought her heart would break as the elemental railed at her, about her, and then the tide began to ebb.

The near inaudible song surrounding her, all but drowned out by the frothing of the brook rising to claim her, stilled for a moment. Then it began again, quietly, resolutely, a new melody, of incalculable puzzlement underlaid with strength, and the whitecapped waters about her slowly receded until she found herself lying across the small freshet once more, soaked, shivering, and alone.

Grace sat up, hugging herself against the cold, and combed her hair from her face with her fingers, hand shaking. What happened to the world when a Goddess began to die? What would happen to her?

She staggered to her feet. A warmth came out of the dew still blanketing the ground, a soft current of air which swirled about her once, twice, thrice and then faded away, leaving her dry, except for the icy core of fear inside her. The Goddess had given her back her life. Yet was this a gift Rivergrace could hold onto? Was it being reclaimed from her? She put her hand out, looking at it. Unbidden, the stalwart form of her sister Nutmeg swept through her thoughts, bringing with her the cinnamon spice of her words and nature, an upwelling of optimism and sass. Nutmeg would have had words about the Goddess, no doubt about that. The weave of life was greater than one mortal or immortal strand, and gifts given were like flowers gone to seed on the wind, out of sight, out of mind even if never out of heart. Grace closed her hand as if she could feel Nutmeg’s hand within her grasp, keeping her always anchored to the practical nature of life.

She made her way back into the sleeping camp and fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

Lariel watched her silently from her tent canopy, the night framing Rivergrace’s slender form as she gave way. She could only wish the evening would embrace her again, but she doubted it would. She had too many thoughts running through her mind for sleep to calm her again. She’d seen Daravan go to Sevryn and take him away, and then Grace follow, and none of it had been a surprise to her because he’d pierced the wards she’d set up, alarming her. Like a knife parting shadows, he’d slipped into the camp, and none had sensed it except for her. He did not even know he’d awakened her. She wondered if she should have challenged his boldness at taking her Hand from her, and had decided against it. Daravan kept his own counsel and it was unlikely he would tell her his plans lest she block him. He would report to her later. His presence had been a surprise, awakening her from a dream which she still saw vividly in her mind: Abayan Diort standing on a bed of flames and wearing a fiery crown. A woman watched him from a distance, a slender graceful woman but the dream had bled all color from her, casting her in shades of dusk. Was it Rivergrace who watched him . . . or herself? Omen or a shred of restless sleep? Lara had no way of judging, and even if she should fall asleep again, she knew that the moment had been lost to her.

Nor could she let herself dwell upon it. That way would take her down a path Lariel could not afford. She must keep her eyes upon the horizon which stayed boundless, and if a singular, undeniable path presented itself, then and only then would she let herself travel it. As her grandfather had told her shortly before he died, when she began to dream, to truly dream, it would be the death of all that she knew to be Vaelinar.

She could not let that happen.

A slight pain arced through her left hand, and she looked down to see her fingers crabbed into a tight fist, the scar of the missing finger pulsing in soreness. Lara opened her hands slowly. A hundred twisted paths and one true one might lead into the future, and a hundred true paths and one twisted one might lead away from it. Of all the Talents Vaelinars could summon, the one they could not was certainty. No one could sift through destiny and its myriad of choices and say, this is the one you must take, this is the best and only road. She was as blind as anyone.

As for Rivergrace, Lara knew that she had come to a fork in their friendship when she must assert herself as a queen. That Rivergrace had Vaelinar blood in her veins seemed certain, although her maternal lineage had been untraceable and her father’s line altogether unknown. Lara saw that which Grace did not: why would two Vaelinars allow themselves to become enslaved to one such as Quendius, giving up not only their lives but that of their child? They had made a pact with a Demon, surely knowing that they did so, but to what advantage? They had to have been outlawed or in hiding, and if they had been, there would have been good reason to cast them out. Lara did not want to lay the burden of her parents’ past upon Rivergrace’s shoulders but the truth needed to be known. Grace held unknown qualities within her, and as Warrior Queen, Lariel had to be able to assess them. She would not have another traitorous line such as the ild Fallyns facing her, if she could help it.