The Spirit Stone (32 page)

‘Our squabbles always end the same way,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I said anything, all right? I won’t say another word.’

He stared at her, his mouth twisted into a wry smile. She thought the matter settled, but after a little while he abruptly spoke.

‘You’re saying I can’t hold my drink. That’s insulting.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Oh? What else does staggering drunk mean?’

Val found herself tempted to scream at him, but she choked the impulse back. Maybe a smile would soothe his temper? She tried laying a loving hand on his arm as well, but he shook it off.

‘Very well, then,’ Jav said. ‘If you’re going to mock me, I’ll go home.’

Javanateriel stood up, took a staggering step to restore his balance, then walked off, heading in the direction of their tent. Valandario started to get up to follow him, but one of the other women caught her arm.

‘You’re the Wise One, but I’m a good bit older than you,’ she said. ‘It’s best to let the men just sleep it off.’

‘Maybe so.’ Val sat back down. ‘If I go after him now, we’ll only fight some more.’

The woman smiled, nodded, and hurried away, disappearing among the tents. Valandario returned to watching the dancing, but something nagged at her. As she thought about it, Val realized that she’d never seen her before—a tall woman with honey-blonde hair, darker than usual for one of the People. She turned to a man sitting nearby.

‘Who was that?’ Val said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She must have come with some other alar. She’s not a part of yours?’

‘No. It’s odd. I can’t even picture her face, and here she just spoke to me.’

The dweomer cold seized Valandario in claws of ice. She got up, trembling and gasping for breath. The fellow she’d been speaking with rose, too, caught by her alarm.

‘Wise One?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ Val said, ‘but Jav’s not.’

She turned and ran, dodging through the crowd. Dimly she was aware of other people following her, of shouts of alarm, of cries that the Wise One needed help. All she could think of was Jav, off alone somewhere—
our tent,
she thought.
He said he was going home.
By the time she reached her alar’s part of the campground, she was panting for breath and soaked in the cold sweat of sheer terror. Their tent stood in the midst of others. She dodged her way around and through. As she ran up, Wildfolk appeared in swarms, gnomes at her feet, sprites in the air, clustering around her, drenching her and the tent flap in silver light.

Valandario flung back the tent flap and ducked inside. Jav lay sprawled on his back, his mouth open, his eyes staring at nothing, his shirt soaked not with mead but blood from the dagger wounds stabbed into his chest. All around him lay tent bags and their contents, spilled and kicked this way and that. Val took a few steps and flung herself down beside him, too out of breath to scream. She could hear the others, swearing, yelling back and forth, but their words made no sense at all.

‘Jav?’ she whispered. ‘Jav?’

She grabbed his right hand—still faintly warm—but she knew he was dead. She dropped into trance as fast as she could, found her body of light waiting, and transferred into it. All around her the Wildfolk shone and sparkled, lines of light and crystalline shapes in a multitude of colours, their true appearance on the etheric. In this glimmering crowd she rose up to the tent roof. She should have seen Javanateriel’s etheric double still hovering around his body, but she only saw the dead flesh and the blackness of the objects scattered around him. She rose higher and sailed through the tent’s roof out into the night sky, where the blue light billowed around her. Far above the moon shone like an enormous silver scowl.

‘Jav!’ She sent her thought out in a scream of pain. ‘Jav! Think of me so I can find you! Call my name!’

Someone was approaching her through the blue, but it was the simulacrum of a woman, an abnormally tall woman with honey-blonde hair. She wore the semblances of leather leggings and an elven tunic, and she carried a golden bow in her right hand, while a golden quiver nestled at her hip.

‘I took him to the lavender meadow and sent him across the white river,’ the woman said. ‘He interrupted us.’ She sent out an exhalation of regret like bitter perfume, then disappeared, completely and suddenly gone.

Only Valandario’s long years of training saved her from joining Jav there and then. A lesser dweomerworker would have screamed and raged and flown this way and that until her silver cord broke behind her. Instead, Valandario slid down the cord back to her body, transferred her consciousness over to the flesh, and banished her body of light with the proper ritual. Yet when she opened her eyes, she saw that she’d fallen forward into the pool of drying blood on Jav’s chest. She screamed, screamed again, could not stop screaming and sobbing, reached up to claw at her hair and face with her fingernails. Hands caught hers and stopped her.

‘Val, Val!’ It was Enabrilia’s voice. ‘No! Don’t hurt yourself! He wouldn’t want that.’

She turned blindly towards her old friend and wept. Enabrilia threw her arms around her and pulled her close. Other women clustered round, murmuring, and helped them stand.

‘Come out of the tent,’ Enabrilia murmured. ‘Let’s go outside.’

Without their support Valandario never would have been able to walk those few steps. They half-led, half-carried her into Enabrilia’s tent while she wept, trembling with it, choking on her grief, gasping down air only to weep again. They helped her sit, then huddled around her, while the sprites hovered above and wrung tiny hands.

A man’s voice cut through her tears. ‘I thought maybe Loddlaen could help, but none of us can find him,’ he said. ‘His horse and mules are gone. His tent’s here, but it’s empty.’

Rage flared and burned into the grief. Valandario choked down her tears and looked up. ‘Was it him?’ she whispered to the sprites.

They nodded, then winked out like blown candles. She realized that Danalaurel was standing in the doorway.

‘Was it Loddlaen who killed him?’ Danno’s voice trembled as badly as hers, but with rage. ‘His own foster-brother, and he killed him?’

Valandario nodded. Words lay beyond her.

Danno turned and shouted to someone outside. She heard answering shouts, then Danalaurel turned and ducked out, yelling about fetching horses.

‘Why?’ one of the women said. ‘Why would he do—’

‘Thievery, most likely,’ another woman said. ‘Didn’t you see how everything was all thrown around in there? Everyone knows that Val carries a lot of gemstones with her.’

A memory began to rise in Valandario’s mind. Gemstones, Loddlaen wanting—

‘The black pyramid!’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go back to the tent!’

‘Not just yet.’ Enabrilia grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Let the others—’ She hesitated briefly. ‘Let the others finish what they’re doing in there.’

‘Do what?’ Val whispered. ‘You mean taking Jav away.’

Enabrilia nodded. Valandario began to weep again, hugging herself and rocking back and forth like a child. When another woman brought in a clean tunic and leggings, Enabrilia helped Val out of her blood-soaked clothing and into the clean as if she really had been a child.

‘I’ve got to tell Aderyn,’ Valandario said. ‘He can’t just ride in and hear about this.’

‘Yes, he can,’ Enabrilia said. ‘I think it’ll be kinder, actually, to tell him about it to his face. We can all try to comfort him that way. It’s not long before dawn, anyway, so he’ll be here soon.’

No one slept that night. Two and three at a time, the men rode back to camp to relay messages, then rode out again to resume searching. By dawn they’d all returned with the bad news that the search was hopeless. Although they’d sent out parties in all directions, Loddlaen and his stock had vanished, apparently without leaving a single hoof print on the ground.

‘He has dweomer, doesn’t he?’ Danalaurel said. ‘It’s no wonder we can’t find him.’

With the pale light of day Valandario’s first flush of grief had spent itself. Danno’s remark reminded her that she had dweomer herself, more powerful than Loddlaen’s, and she tried scrying for him. She could see nothing, no matter how hard or how carefully she focused her inner vision.

‘He might have taken ship again,’ Valandario told the others. ‘I wonder if someone was waiting for him down at the coast. It’s only a few miles away.’

At daybreak Valandario, Enabrilia, and two other women returned to her tent to sort through the tent bags and other possessions scattered around. Since Valandario couldn’t bear to remove them, the others packed up Javanateriel’s clothing and possessions. Val searched through the scattered goods left behind. As she worked, she carefully repacked each tent bag and hung it in its usual place to force her mind to do something besides mourn. She found that Loddlaen had left two handfuls of gemstones behind—a small fortune in gems, in fact—but sure enough, the black obsidian pyramid had disappeared with him.

‘Everything else is here,’ Valandario said at last. ‘As far as I can tell, anyway. My mind—I just can’t seem to think.’

‘Of course,’ Enabrilia said. ‘Do you think you can sleep?’

‘I doubt it, but I’ll try.’

Despite her doubt, as soon as she lay down, Valandario did fall asleep. She dreamt of Javanateriel. She saw him walking towards her, laughing at the jest he’d played on her. She berated him for pretending to die, but when he caught her hands, she forgave him—only to wake and remember that no, he truly had been murdered. She sat up, feeling that she might be sick at any moment, sure that the smell of his blood still lingered in the humid summer air. Enabrilia was sitting near by, watching her.

‘It’s noon,’ Enabrilia said. ‘Do you feel like coming outside?’

‘Yes,’ Valandario said. ‘I’ve got to have some fresh air.’

They walked outside to find the camp oddly quiet. Children stayed close to their parents, who stood or sat in little groups, talking in subdued voices. Even the dogs had picked up the mood and lay near the tents with barely a wag of a tail or a whine.

‘They never found him,’ Enabrilia said. ‘Ah by the Black Sun! I wonder what his mother’s going to think of this, if we ever see her again to tell her about it, anyway. Dalla was my closest friend, you know, when we were girls. Thinking that her child—ah gods.’

Distantly, at the edge of the camp, someone howled out the word ‘no’, followed by a long shriek of mingled rage and grief. Everyone turned to look in that direction.

‘I’ll wager that’s Aderyn,’ Valandario said. ‘Someone must have told him.’

Aderyn came striding through the tents, his silver hair swept back from his face, his eyes dripping silent tears, his mouth set and grim. Everyone turned to watch him without speaking a word. When he saw Valandario, Aderyn stopped, then drew himself up to full height and hurried to meet her.

‘My poor child!’ Aderyn said. ‘My heart aches for you!’

When he held out his arms, Valandario ran to him. She felt like a child, indeed, that young, frightened apprentice once more. Aderyn held her close and stroked her hair with one hand while she wept against him.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Please forgive me.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said through her sobs. ‘I don’t blame you.’

They wept together while all around them the People stood watching. On the edge of the crowd someone began a mourning song, and slowly, a few at a time, the others joined in, until the entire camp chanted its grief.

In the hot weather, the death ground at the Lake of the Leaping Trout lay too far north for his alar to take Javanateriel there for the last rites. The Deverry merchants and their men gave them every stick of firewood they’d brought along with them for the funereal pyre. The women in the alar wrapped Jav in a linen sheet and laid him on the pyre, then poured flasks of olive oil from Bardek over him and the wood. Before they lit that final fire, Valandario brought out the pair of wooden cups and tucked them one into each flaccid hand.

The fire burned much of the night. With the dawn, when the ashes had cooled, Valandario let them scatter in the rising wind. As she watched them drifting away, she knew that she would never love another man, no matter how long the life ahead her.

On a late afternoon that threatened rain, Nevyn was digging up comfrey roots out in a fallow pasture when he felt Aderyn’s mind reaching out to his. He lay down his trowel, sat back on his heels, and used the gathering grey clouds as a scrying focus. When Aderyn told him about the murder, Nevyn was so shocked, so bitterly surprised, that for a moment he could say nothing at all. Finally he found words.

‘I never ever thought Loddlaen would do such a thing,’ Nevyn said. ‘Never in a thousand years!’

‘I can’t tell you how it gladdens my heart to hear you say that,’ Aderyn said. ‘I’ve been berating myself, thinking I should have known what he was capable of.’

‘Don’t! The Loddlaen we knew wasn’t capable of it. Besides, do you really think he intended to kill Jav? It sounds to me like he panicked when Jav came into the tent.’

‘So I thought, too. From what Val told me, one of the Guardians was mixed up in this as well—Alshandra, most likely.’

‘Worse and worse! Why would she have wanted the obsidian piece?’

‘I have no idea. The message from Evandar in it, mayhap? Or maybe to allow one of her worshippers to travel in her country the same way Dalla did, all those years ago.’

Nevyn felt old grief troubling Aderyn’s mind. It took some time before Aderyn could continue.

‘If only I had seen,’ Aderyn said. ‘If only I’d seen what you saw, all those years ago.’

‘You couldn’t have. Now, look, you told me that Val doesn’t blame you. Well and good, then. Don’t you blame yourself, either.’

‘My thanks.’

The words reached Nevyn on a wave of sincere gratitude. With them he felt the breach between him and Aderyn, caused all those years ago by Morwen’s death, finally close and heal.

‘What hurts me the most,’ Aderyn continued, ‘was the way he wormed himself into Val’s trust, telling her he’d come to see me, and all the time he was planning on stealing the gem. I suppose he dragged me into it in order to punish me somehow. I was so happy, thinking he’d come home at last.’