The Dark Ferryman (44 page)

“I agree, it’s too cold.” Grace brought her mount to a halt and peered at the body of water cutting across their path. Cold but not deep, certainly not deep enough to make it dangerous to ford. Runoff from the hills and mountains had not hit to swell the rivers and brooks they’d come across. Too dry. Where had all the winter rain and snow gone? She wiped one eye with the back of her hand. She wanted to be with Sevryn, to tell him what she’d learned and what she feared. Would she be able to read an expression on his face, a face he had schooled to keep his emotions silent, a face that he had schooled in the service of Lariel? Would he accept her? Could he? He had suffered the worst degradations a man could endure under Quendius and Narskap. If he left her the slightest hope, she would fight for him, fight for both of them. But only if he could give her the faintest glimmer of hope. She needed that, as the most stubborn blade of grass needed the slightest drop of rainwater and hint of sunlight.

“Grace? Grace, are you in there?” Nutmeg squinted up into her face as she pulled her recalcitrant hat back onto her head.

“I am. Just thinking.”

“That library gave us a bushel to think about, didn’t it?”

“It gave me a whole cartload, I think.” Grace smiled briefly at Meg. “I’m sorry I’ve been thinking too much.”

“You’ve always been the quiet one,” she answered. “I’m used to that.”

“You’ve been quiet a lot lately, too.”

“I have thoughts running around in my head like two squirrels fighting over a nut.” Nutmeg fussed a moment with her thick and lustrous hair, trying to tame it under her hat without much success. It had started out the morning braided, but with every bouncing step of her mount, it had slowly come unwound.

“Jeredon.”

“Aye. Am I so foolish, Rivergrace?”

“Maybe.” She looked away for a moment, not wanting to see any hurt in her sister’s eyes before looking back again. “You can’t love him.”

“But I do, and I thought he loved me, too.”

“Oh, Meg.”

“I used to think it was meant to be.” It was Nutmeg who looked away then, unable to meet her gaze. “And when we . . . whenever he made love to me . . . I thought the world had stopped and started again.”

"Meg ...”

“No. Don’t be disappointed in me. I couldn’t bear it if you were, or Da or Mom.” She sighed. “I couldn’t bear it. And now he won’t even look at me, and I should have known, I should have, that it couldn’t be. He tried t’be telling me. I wasn’t for accepting. But it was in the books, Grace. In all the books and scrolls. Vaelinars have never taken a Dweller to wife. Never.
Never
.” Her voice trailed off.

“It has nothing to do with you. He’s Vaelinar, and I’ve begun to learn that has meaning far deeper than any of us could know unless we were born and raised as one.”

“You’re an outsider, too.”

“Yes.”

“But not Sevryn.”

“Oh, he is. Just not at Lariel’s side. She raised him up, and she can cast him down, too, if she wishes. But he’s a half-breed, and the others don’t forget that.”

“We picked a fine pair, didn’t we?”

“They
are
a fine pair. I’m just not sure if we can hold onto our dreams with them.”

Nutmeg looked to her then. “You wouldn’t leave Sevryn.”

“I would if he didn’t try. It’s like a pony and cart, I think. It’s a partnership, or neither goes anywhere. I won’t do all the work. I’ll walk away first because part of love is respect, and if he doesn’t have it for me, I won’t hang on and hope he finds it somehow. I can’t give him all my strength for what faces us if he doesn’t value it and give back his.”

“Respect,” echoed Nutmeg. She nodded. She pointed at the river. “That’s settled, then, I think we should get our respectable butts home.”

SEVRYN OPENED HIS MAP AGAIN, carefully, the paper protesting with a crackle as he did so. Years had made it ever more brittle and even with care it would not last long as he used it, but he hadn’t taken time to have it copied. Nor, he reflected, would he want it scribed by someone else. The slightest bit of error or straying or overlook would give him an entirely different document than the one Gilgarran had secreted. A fast horse and the peculiar work of the Ferryman had brought him here and quickly. Aymaran lifted a hoof as if to stomp in protest against the skirling wind and icy mist that gusted off the escarpment, but he put it down in silence as Sevryn used his Voice to soothe and quiet him. Carefully, he returned the map to its original folds and stowed it away. He kneed the horse down off the ridge a little, getting as close to the weathered structures he’d found as he dared without encountering a sentry.

This then, was where Quendius had withdrawn. A thin curl of blue-gray smoke rose from the main fortress building and a large outbuilding to the rear. One would be for the kitchen chimney and the other, unless he was greatly mistaken, would be the forge. The fires in the forge would be banked, coals only, kept going mainly for minor repair work and to avoid having to lay an entirely new fire if needed. He could see a lone man pass by every now and then, bent against the stinging wind, cloak wrapped tightly about his body. On occasion it would be a Bolger. But as Sevryn assessed the area keenly, he could see that whatever forces Quendius had held here had been moved out. This had been a training facility and barracks as well as forge. He could see the working arenas, the targets, the trenches. He knew what he looked down upon. The only thing he did not know was where Quendius had taken his men, but he thought that obvious.

Both the Vaelinar and the Galdarkan armies would have their backs to his raiders. Both would be equally vulnerable in the aftermath of their battle.

Sevryn turned his horse off the ridge and dug his heels into Aymaran’s flanks, hard as Time spurred him. If sentries spied him, they’d still have to catch him.

At the first hard-flowing river he could find to cross, he reined up, steam rising from Aymaran’s warm body and his. He dismounted to stand with the toe of his boots in the water and he called for the Ferryman. He knew that, if the Ferryman had taken him from the banks of the Nylara to another river, the Ferryman would also show up to return him, as if the trip were a circle and must be completed. So had the journey Daravan taken him on worked. Summoned and crossed, then he was there to summon again for a return crossing. But Sevryn was not at all certain how Daravan could order up the Ferryman otherwise or if the phantom would obey anyone else. There had been payment promised between the two and when the specter had thought to garner the same from Sevryn, Daravan had denied the Ferryman. Would there be a payment required now, if the Ferryman appeared, and could he afford the price?

His arm ached. He rubbed it through his cloak and shirt. The wound healed quickly, as if the dire arrow of Quendius had barely struck him, but it had drilled deeply before rejecting his flesh. He couldn’t call it anything else. The arrow had rejected him, denied itself the taking of him as prey as its brethren had taken Osten. He could only be happy that it did, but he knew Cerat’s voice when he heard it, knew the Demon’s touch when he felt it. Quendius had imbued the Demon into his arrows. Why, then, had Cerat not killed him? He knew the sliver of Cerat he carried inside himself called for anger and rage, blood and death. Would he not have been the desired target? The meat that Cerat could not resist? Would he not?

Or, perhaps, like bards and toback shop tale-tellers liked to posit, there is a time and a season for all things, even death.

If the Ferryman would take a chunk of Cerat as his toll, he would gladly pay.

Sevryn’s mouth eased into a thin, dry smile. He kicked at the lip of the river. “I’ve no caravan or goods, all I have is need, Ferryman. Come, and take me across.”

He waited. A falcon winged high overhead, its cry swallowed by the wind. Trees sounded like a restless tide on both sides of the river. The water itself rushed and gurgled and spun away from him. Aymaran lowered his head to drink, slowly, wise horse not to drink too fast or too deep after a hard ride but unable to resist a drink at all. He squatted and cupped the freezing water for a drink himself.

A vision stabbed through his eyes, a lightning moment, a view of Rivergrace and Nutmeg at water’s edge. He felt her as keenly as he felt the stabbing cold of the river he touched.

But how and why did she ride as he did? Why wasn’t she back at Larandaril’s hold, safe for the moment where he’d left her? He cupped the river again, thrusting his arm fully into the whitecaps meeting the shoreline but no other sight came to his eyes. Had the two been alone or riding with Lariel? Did the queen hasten her way to war and to join Bistel?

He pushed both hands into the water, making Aymaran throw his head up with a snort and back away as he cried out, “Aderro! Rivergrace!” The illusion had no answer for him.

A dry voice over his shoulder said, “ Aderro? That is how you cry for me?”

Sevryn pivoted in a spray of icy water and the Dark Ferryman stood waiting with his cowled head lowered to look upon him. Did the being have a sense of humor or need? Had it ever been part of the living world? Sevryn would have sworn not, but he’d just been greeted by a voice filled with irony. He looked into the abyss of the cowl and saw nothing.

The Ferryman held out his hand to seek payment. “Who will you die for?”

A chill danced upon Sevryn’s neck, as the Ferryman eerily echoed what Daravan had said only so many days ago to him. He answered, “For my lady Rivergrace. And for my queen.”

With a nod and a beckon to follow, the specter moved past him, into the river. Sevryn caught at his arm as he did. “Wait!” The shock of contact rocked him onto his heels, but he did not let go as the being looked down at him again. Sparks flew along his sleeve and the robes of the Ferryman as he held him. But the being paused.

“The Andredia. Can you take me to the Andredia River?” Sevryn was not, could not be sure, that the Ferryman even existed in the same time and place that he did, for all its actions and reactions. A Way of the Vaelinar, yet not a Way that any one admitted to creating or directing, the Ferryman did what he did.

The abyss of its face looked into his for a very long moment. “Payment will be rendered,” the Ferryman said flatly. He shook off Sevryn’s hand and waded back into the river. Sevryn grabbed for Aymaran’s reins and hurried to follow. A deal seemed to have been struck. He did not know the payment or when it would be collected. Too late to worry about the consequences, he strode in the Ferryman’s wake.

The river rose before them like a wall, a tidal wave coming in from the sea, and its silty bottom grabbed at his steps as if it were quicksand. Aymaran whickered in alarm as Sevryn bent his head low, forcing himself into the spray as water threatened to curl over them, wiping them all out. Yet it never engulfed the Ferryman. Every step he took, the wave retreated, still towering, still undulating, still threatening, but never crashing down upon them. Icy water soaked him to the bone, and his horse slogged behind, moaning in pain. Sevryn put his hand to the chin strap, rubbing Aymaran, encouraging him with a hope the river’s bank lay only a few more strides away.

The water assailed not only his body but his will. The river threatened to drag him down and swirl him away in its current, never to surface. It promised to suck the air from his lungs and rush into its place, drowning him. It railed at his intrusion against its natural place in the world. Sevryn put his arm up to shield his face as the spray and wind all but tore his cloak from his body. The ragged cloth flapped about him like shredded, sodden wings. Aymaran staggered and went to his knees behind him, squealing as the river inundated him. Sevryn put his shoulder to the horse’s and urged him up, back on his hooves, both of them shaking with the winter ice of the water, their teeth rattling, and the implacable figure of the Ferryman barely seen ahead of them.

Sevryn realized he could not lose the phantom. He dragged on Aymaran’s bridle to hurry the frightened horse. He could lose his mount if he had to, but he dare not lose the Ferryman.

The tide rising against them, the tremendous wave towering over them, began to curl further, whitecapped froth crowning it. Sevryn looked into it, blinking, his face drenched. He thought of the Andredia as his horse tugged desperately on the bridle, balking at being led any farther. The simple river they had faced had become a torrential ocean, and they seemed no closer to crossing it than they had been when they started, but the Ferryman did not falter.

It was he who held them back. Sevryn scrubbed a hand across his face. The insurmountable barrier was himself! The Andredia knew him. Its priestess Lariel had given him free passage across its waters and into its valley kingdom. He knew well the river in its seasons, in its sweetness and in its bitterness when Quendius had poisoned it. He knew the river as well as he knew Rivergrace’s voice and touch. And it was the Andredia whose shore he desired to trespass on now.

The wave broke over them. But it died before it did, shrinking down upon itself until it was but a frothy veil of water that curled over their heads and then receded to the riverbank. The Ferryman emerged, turned, and waited for Sevryn to urge Aymaran from the riverbed. The horse put his head out and shook vigorously, like a dog, shedding drops everywhere. Sevryn patted the beast in apology. “I nearly drowned us, lad. Sorry for that.”

The Ferryman held his hand up in farewell and in a swirl of his ebony veils and robes, disappeared into a darkling mist on the shore. Sevryn wiped his eyes, and looked again onto the swift-flowing and no longer angry sacred River Andredia. Now he had only to find both his love and his queen.

"WHAT IS IT?”

Rivergrace paused, one boot in the water and one boot out. How could she possibly explain what she’d just felt, that Sevryn had been at a crossing, too, and they’d seen each other for the smallest flash of a moment. Would her sister think she was daft? She pursed her lips a moment to find the words. “Did you ever get a feeling you see our family? When you know you couldn’t have, but you get a flash of him at the cider press or her at her tailoring table?”