The Singing (35 page)

"Well, then," said Grigar. "I myself will travel through the Weywood. I hope the spirits of the wood will permit me free entrance." He looked inquiringly at Marajan, who nodded gravely.

"I think the woods will not be hostile," she said. "As for you three, you must journey as swiftly as you may. In your time, the hours darken, although whether the world turns to endless night, or will find beyond hope a new dawn, I cannot tell. But all my love goes with you. Especially with you, young healer. There will be much need of healing, after."

Hem met Marajan's lucid gaze, and his heart swelled with sudden, unlooked-for love. He didn't know what to say, but it didn't matter. He knew that Marajan read his deepest longings, and she understood and blessed them all.

THE DEAD

A/as/
Alas! The dead have come,

The newborn babe, the withered king,

And pale Bards whose empty hands No blessings bring.

Poor shades, no hearth can warm them now.

They walk beneath the roofless skies Forlorn and lost, and all men dread

Their fading cries.

Death has robbed their limbs of love

And starved their gentle flesh to bone:

At last beneath the starless sky Each stands alone.

They pluck at me, in my dark mind

Like burning rain their voices fall, And who can count their legion ranks

Or name them all?

From
The Elidhu Canticles,
Horvadh of Gent

IT was a world neither of darkness nor light, an endless twilight inhabited by dim forms in ceaseless motion. Nothing seemed to hold its shape: there were voices whose edges seemed to glimmer with starlight, faint lullabies and lamentations who stepped out of the silence like young girls, their faces averted. Everywhere there were the marks of hands, as if every surface breathed out the heat of a body that had just touched it. It wasn't possible to see anything clearly, always there were shifting veils of light and shadow drifting and vanishing, and the eye could fix on nothing. The earth seemed no longer solid, but a mist that mingled with the vapors of the air. And everywhere the voices, the wan echoes of the dead ...

Maerad woke with a start, feeling the cold sweat sliding down her back and her forehead. She didn't know if she had cried out; it seemed to her that the echo of her own voice still hung on the night air, but perhaps it was merely a remnant of her dream. She gathered her blanket closely around her and sat up, feeling the wool's roughness against her cheek, the prickle of the dry grass, the hard ground against her buttocks—these were tangible things out of the world of solid objects, and their abrasiveness was reassuring.

She stared up, looking to the stars for comfort, as she had so often in her life. Ilion, the morning star, had long since set over the horizon, and the bright litter of the Lukemoi, the path of the dead, arced across the sky. The stars gave her no consolation. A slight wind brushed her hair back and cooled the sweat on her face. Maerad shivered, remembering that those stars marked the bridge between this world and the Gates, beyond which lay—what? Nobody, not even Ardina, knew the answer to that question. Maerad thought now that the dead did not wander through the groves of the stars, as the Bards sang. No, the Gates opened on darkness, and the dead soul stepped into that darkness and was lost forever. Perhaps, she thought, they step gladly into that darkness. She imagined walking that high path, far above the lamentations of the earth, beyond the sweat and filth and sorrow of human existence, and how her own life might fall regretlessly from her open hands—all its joy, all its sorrow, all its triumph and defeat. Yes, they might well step gladly and lightly away from the weight of being alive.

If the dead step out into the dark and leave the world behind them, she thought, what are these voices that I cannot stop hearing? They are not the voices of the living.

She clutched her head in her hands; her forehead was burning, aching, but her skin felt as cold as ice.
I have been too much out of this world,
she thought.
And now I am afraid. Something has happened . . .

When Maerad came out of her trance, it was just before dawn. She looked about with wonder, sniffing the clean, cold air that seared her nostrils and stung her cheeks. There was a thick, low ground mist wisping out of the dips and hollows, very white in the early light.

Cadvan was standing with his back to her, staring eastward at the pale hints of dawn that were illuminating the distant, cloudy peaks of the Osidh Elanor. When he turned around, she saw his face was very white, and his eyes glittered when he looked at her, with suspicion or fear or some other emotion she couldn't guess. He asked her if she had found Hem, and Maerad nodded.

"Good," he said. "Then I think we should move from this place. I'll wager my life that every Hull in North Annar will be riding hard for the Hollow Lands right now, and that it will not be long before the Nameless One himself knows that you are here—that is, if he hasn't heard already. You might as well have lit a beacon, Maerad. Anyone for leagues with the slightest touch of the Gift, down to the simplest village midwife, will have sensed you, and will know that you're here."

Maerad met his eyes, and saw that he spoke the truth. Her lips curled. "Hulls?" she said, tossing back her hair from her face. "What of them?"

Cadvan's face darkened, as if her scorn were directed toward him as well. "I do not like Hulls," he said. "Especially I do not like the thought of many Hulls riding our way, while we camp in the middle of nowhere with no means of defense."

"I have no fear of Hulls," said Maerad. "I'm not going anywhere. Hem is coming here, he is on his way, and I will stay here and wait for him."

"Surely Hem would be able to sense you, wherever you are," said Cadvan. "And if we are to be visited by Hulls or wers or any other servants of the Dark, I would prefer to have walls around me, than not."

"What walls?" said Maerad.

"I was thinking that we could ride to Innail," Cadvan said, glancing at her sideways.

"We'd be no safer there than here," said Maerad. "In any case, you are probably safer with me than with any other person in Edil-Amarandh." She smiled, meeting Cadvan's eye, and she saw him blench, as if he had glimpsed something that raised the hair on his scalp with horror.

"Maerad," he said, very softly, so that she had to lean forward to hear his voice above the sound of the wind that soughed over the hills. "Maerad, I think you must remember what the Winterking said to you. I say this not only for my sake. Beware, Maerad."

Her gaze faltered, and she looked away.

"I cannot beware, Cadvan," she said at last, her voice as soft as his. "It's too late for that now. But I am afraid that I have made you fear me, and that hurts my heart."

There was a long silence. "I
am
afraid, Maerad," said Cadvan. "I'm afraid of what I see in you, and of the storm that is gathering beyond these hills and that will soon break over our heads. I should be mad not to be afraid."

"I'm not afraid anymore, even though I don't know what will happen." Maerad's voice dropped to a whisper. "Or perhaps I am so afraid that I no longer feel it. I know there are so many things to fear, but Cadvan, please, don't be afraid of
me."

Cadvan, who had been brooding and staring at his hands, looked up and met her eyes again. This time he smiled, and to Maerad's astonishment his expression was unguarded and joyous, a reckless smile that gave her a vivid glimpse of the wild, fearless young man he once had been. Maerad's heart leaped in her breast.

"A pact then," he said. "I promise not to fear you, and you promise not to squash me like a beetle by mistake while you're busy pulverizing Hulls. You're right. It's too late for fear."

"There is a storm coming," said Maerad. "And we must ride it."

"I'm not sure I packed the right kind of saddle."

"It's too big for saddles, and it has an evil eye," said Maerad, smiling. "It's either bareback and hanging on by the mane, or be trampled."

After that, there was no more talk of moving on. The days were long, cold, and wearisome, but they both kept themselves busy. Cadvan scouted around their area and found a site close by that he said was more defensible, and they moved their belongings and the horses there. They patched their rough shelter with turf to keep out the wind, and made a proper hearth.

Maerad spent most of the day scanning the horizon, in between furious bursts of activity. Cadvan filled in the days by preparing defenses of magery. He set awareness in stones in a radius around their camp, so they would have early warning of anyone's approach. He spent hours working on his sword, laying it on the ground and charming the tempered metal with new mageries, and when there was nothing more to do, he did the same with Maerad's sword Eled. He set wards and scored a line into the ground with a flint knife, making a wall of magery that wers could not pass, and as she watched him at his labor, Maerad remembered the first time she had seen him do this, the night they had taken refuge in a ruined tower, pursued by the Landrost's wers. The memory was distant, as if it had happened to someone else.

At times she thought that barely a single night had passed since she had called Hem. More often it seemed to her that she had been in this one place since the beginning of time, that she had already been here when the forgotten people who lived here had so laboriously raised their stone circles to be their inscrutable witnesses, and that she had watched as they faded forever into the dim mists of forgetting.

Sometimes, Maerad felt that she knew these stones like she knew her own skin. She had watched the slow, patient, weathering of the years; she had noted each shade of light, moonlight and starlight, the many moods of the sun and the seasons, and how they changed the colors of the rock through an infinity of hues—from deep purple to bloody red, from rich yellow to a delicate blue-gray. She had watched as the bright lichens spread over their flaking faces. She had been there in the mild days of summer, when wild bees wove their slumberous song through the flowering heathers, and in the numberless harsh winters that threw down bolts of freezing rain and filled their veins with ice and split them open. She was almost rock herself.

When these fits took her, she could be silent for hours on end. Cadvan would speak to her and she did not hear him: and yet she was not absent, but rather more intensely present than she felt she had ever been. At last something would shake her out of it—perhaps Keru might come up and nuzzle her, wanting some company, or Cadvan might touch her hand, trying to wake her from an enchantment he did not understand, and Maerad would jump, as if she were surprised, and smile vaguely. Then she would try to haul herself back into ordinary things with some task: grooming Keru or Darsor perhaps, so their coats shone, or mending every tear in her clothing, or polishing her boots, or gathering firewood.

The dreams had begun the day after the summoning. It was as if a wall in her mind had cracked, and through this crack she could hear the voices of the dead. And the more aware she became of them, the wider the crack seemed; she felt as if she were gradually filling up with these lost voices, as if they were seeping into her consciousness through a slow leak. Every night she seemed to wander deeper into a dreamland in which she could find no bearing.

As the surge of power ebbed from her being, her fearlessness had ebbed as well. Now, although she did not admit it to Cadvan, she felt small and vulnerable, and she was afraid of her magery, and would not use it, even to try to contact Hem again. Cadvan sensed her fragility, and treated her gently. Although he wondered anxiously whether it was certain that Hem was journeying toward them, he did not urge her to attempt to mindtouch him, or to use any of her powers. He watched her as she sat by the edge of their camp, staring westward, as if Hem might at any moment step out of the distant horizon, and his face was often shadowed with anxiety and pity.

This strange period of suspension, when time seemed to have stopped, felt to Cadvan like a release, a slow taking of breath before some unimaginable struggle. He did not know what to expect; he didn't know whether he had made a good decision, or the most terrible mistake of his life. He only knew that he could not have chosen otherwise. For the first time since Maerad had known him, he had put aside his harsh self-judgment, and there was a peace in his expression that had not been there before. If it was mixed with sadness, Maerad noticed that Cadvan seemed more lighthearted than he had ever been, and she turned to his lightness as a flower turns its face to the sun, and tried not to see the shadows that gathered behind her.

It was eight days since she had summoned Hem. She and Cadvan hadn't spoken of that night. It wasn't that either of them wished to avoid the subject, but more that neither of them had the words, and they both obscurely felt that to speak about it without being able to express precisely what they meant was somehow perilous.

At sunset on the eighth day, Maerad saw two horsemen climbing the long, slow rise to their camp from the west. She had been sitting all day on a low, flat rock, lost in a trance, listening to the quickening of the earth beneath her feet as it wakened to springtime, her eyes fixed on the horizon. She often played her lyre as she watched, and she held it now, her maimed hand straying idly over its strings. She played no particular melody, but the constant gentle fall of the notes soothed her. When she saw the riders, she leaped to her feet with a cry.

Cadvan had been setting snares for rabbits and so was a little distance away, but he ran over to Maerad at once.

"It's Hem!" she said, pointing. She was trembling all over. "At last!"

Cadvan shaded his eyes with his hands and looked. The riders were far away, and he could tell nothing about them; but they carried with them a sense of hidden power that caused him grave misgivings.

"Are you certain it's Hem?" he said at last, turning toward her. "I am not sure that they are not Hulls. I have felt the shadows of the Dark stepping in my mind these past few days, and I fear they draw ever closer."

"I'm sure it's Hem," Maerad said.

"Have you made certain?" asked Cadvan. "Have you spoken to him?"

The light in Maerad's face went out. "No," she whispered, and turned her face away.

"I think," said Cadvan, an edge in his voice, "that it would be as well to make sure, before these people, whoever they are, come close enough to cause us harm."

"But—" Maerad lifted her hands and dropped them helplessly. She didn't know how to tell Cadvan about how she feared the voices seeping into her dreams, how she was afraid that every time she used her power, she opened the breach in her mind that gave them entrance.

"Maerad, if you have the power, use it. Or are we just going to wait for anyone to come here and strike us dead, because you refuse to pick up the sword at your feet? Did you not tell me that you had no fear of Hulls?"

Maerad pressed her lips together and made no answer. Cadvan stared at her, his eyes darkening with anger.

"The last thing I expected was that the price of opening your powers would be that you would lose your courage," he said, after a long silence. "Or perhaps it is simply that the Dark now has a means to enter your mind and so disables you with fear. I do not know, Maerad, and I am too angry to care."

"You don't understand," said Maerad, stung. "You—"