Chapter 25

The water slapped at the ox-skin sides of the boat, threatening to come over and wash into the bottom. Tom knelt at the front and tried to work out why everything he did with his paddle seemed to make things worse. Through the hanging limbs of the trees on the banks he thought he could see a jut of land to his left. Perhaps the little lake he was on had joined another, and that was what was making all the waves. He tried to turn by jamming his paddle into the stream, but had not the least idea if he should be turning left or right.

He felt a tap on his back. “Just paddle straight, Tom.” The Elder knelt up behind him. “You’re making things harder for the sternsman.”

“Oh.” Tom returned to the one thing he had been taught, drawing simple strokes on his right with the paddle. Soon after, the boat hauled around so that it crested straight over the waves. The rocking motion stopped, and with it the feeling that they might tip over and fall into the water.

“There.” The Elder reached out to guide his arm. “Straight back—good, and slide it sideways from the water, and return. Much better—now continue just like that.”

A second boat drew level with Tom’s. “Revered One!” The young woman who had held the mallet back in the hut stood up in the middle. “I beg you not to stir yourself, to consider your venerable age and leave the boy to—”

“Curse you for a ninny, Oriel—I was paddling boats before your mother could walk!” The Elder’s retort bounced off the water, off the humped hills and island fields. “Now sit down before you flop into the river and make me swim after you!”

The sternsman of Tom’s boat raised his voice just enough to let it carry. “Revered One, begging your pardon and all, but we pass a goodly number of places in the dark. Places to be ambushed, like. Mayhap we’ll want to keep our silence.”

“Fairly spoken.” The Elder arranged herself on the wooden frame in the middle of the boat. She returned to her task, crouched over Jumble with her walking stick laid out alongside and her leather sack opened between her feet. Scents poured from the sack into the air, most of them smells Tom knew: rosemary and mugwort, lavender and feverfew. Every time Tom spared a glance over his shoulder, it looked as though the Elder was doing something different. Sometimes she murmured words he could not catch. Sometimes she prodded at Jumble’s wound, cutting at the bad flesh with a small knife. Still other times, she simply ran her hands along his fur with a look of care upon her face that Tom might have expected if Jumble was her own dog, or even her child.

After a while of waiting, the question simply burst from him. “What is it that you are doing?”

She touched Jumble’s forehead. “Do all things in life have a balance, child?”

Tom found himself wishing to answer, wishing very much to be as clever as Edmund. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

The Elder drew something from her sack. “If I eat this apple, you do not.” She demonstrated her point with a bite down to its core. “Are all things so in the world?”

Tom thought hard about it—too hard, perhaps. He had the feeling that the answer to her question was something he already knew.

“The folk who call themselves wizards hold that all things are in balance.” The Elder kissed Jumble on the nose three times. “If a wizard heals a body, he must balance that change in the world with another change. The easiest way is simply to wound another body. There are those of us who think such a thing is not worth doing.”

She wrapped the wound with expert care. “There. Time must mend him now.”

The currents merged and mellowed, and after a while of staring about him, Tom got some idea of how the land was laid. They were no longer on a lake—they had joined a river, not nearly as big as the Tamber back in Moorvale, but steep of channel, with a rapid flow that belied its glassy face. Shapes glided past, moonlit on the banks: a fishing cottage set on poles over the water; a daub-and-wattle barn upon a bare slope; a stand of leafless trees perched as though about to fall into the river at any moment.

The answer seemed to come to Tom out of the silver-topped water. “Is wisdom such a thing? Is it one of those things without a balance?”

He heard no answer, so he turned around. He found the Elder sitting as a girl would sit, arms clasped under bent knees, Jumble lying crosswise on her lap. The breeze rippled her long gray hair against her chin. He failed at first to read her face, and for an awful instant he thought she was going to tell him that Jumble had just died.

“It is indeed,” she said. “When you give someone wisdom, you still have it yourself.”

She stretched out a hand under Jumble’s nose, and to Tom’s delight Jumble raised his head to sniff at it. His tail quivered—not quite wagging, but neither was it just a twitch.

Tom shipped his paddle across the bow at a whispered signal from the sternsman. He sat back on his haunches. “Are you a wizard?”

“I am not.” The Elder rubbed at Jumble’s belly. “Who is a good dog? You are. Yes, you are.”

“Hoy there!” A figure waved in shadow from a dock at a bend in the stream. “News! I’ve got news!”

“That’s no Skeleth,” said the sternsman. “Still, let’s have a care.” He waved the third boat in their party of perhaps a score of fleeing folk toward the banks and bade the others in their little fleet to stop paddling but stay at the ready.

Tom knelt at his position in the bow. He watched about him, ready to spring for his paddle at the first sign of trouble, while the third boat drew in to converse with the man on shore.

The Elder picked bits of grass and nettle from Jumble’s matted fur. “Do you thrill to danger, Tom?”

“I do.” Tom brought up a borrowed gutting knife, putting it near to hand in the bow of the boat. “I never would have thought it, but I do.”

He looked back. “Is this a flaw in me?”

The Elder trailed a wrinkled, calloused hand in the water. “What is time, child?”

Tom could not quite get used to the leaps the Elder seemed to take with her words. “It’s . . . how some things happen after other things, I think.”

“Is it a road?” The Elder flicked drops of water at him. “Or is it a river?”

Tom thought he halfway understood. “You are asking if the future is a thing we make, or a thing that happens anyway.”

“One of the hardest questions our Order has ever considered is what to do if time is a river, after all,” said the Elder. “Float, or paddle?”

“Paddle,” said Tom. “Paddle and hope.”

The Elder scratched Jumble’s ears, pondering long in silence. She nodded, with a look of satisfaction. “Then you know why danger thrills you, and you know it is no flaw.”

The third boat cast off again behind them. “Word of the danger’s spreading through the eastern villages, Revered One.” Their bowsman called over the water. “They’ve got riders on the way to Queenstown and Bale. No trouble on the roads, as of yet, no more sign of those creatures.”

The Elder patted Tom’s shoulder. “There, my child. Our warning goes swift and sure across the land.”

Tom glanced back and found the sternsman handling their boat without trouble. The current drew them on in silence, so he took his chance for a rest. He turned to sit backward, facing the Elder, almost touching knees. “May I ask more questions?”

“You have answered mine. It is only fair.”

“How do you know Lord Tristan?”

“We are dear old friends,” said the Elder. “I know John Marshal, too. I suppose you would think it odd for me to call him a poor, sad boy.”

Tom thought about it. “No. It wouldn’t.”

The Elder looked out over river and sky. “We did things together, long ago—he and I and some others—things that I believe we were right to do, though they never seemed to bear the fruit we hoped.”

Tom touched the ornately carven box that lay on the bottom of the boat between them. “How were the Skeleth sealed away, all those years ago? Lord Tristan said that it took two kinds of magic, and one of them was the kind you know.”

The Elder smiled sadly. “No one remembers.” She shifted the sun-disc buckle at her belt, shifted it again, then took it off. “Believe me, if we still knew how to stop the Skeleth, we would have done it by now.”

Tom folded in his arms, feeling the hard edge of the wind under his shirt. “Then why were you attacked first, out of all the places the Skeleth might strike?”

The Elder bundled up the oversized peasant dress that had covered her blue-and-white robe. “I don’t know that either, unless it is simply that my sister Warbur hates me more than I had ever guessed. We were assembling for our supper late last night, and were struck without warning, and . . .”

She trailed off. “There are folk very dear to me who were alive yesterday.” She ran her fingers over the top of Jumble’s head. “My sister had them all killed.”

Tom turned around. He picked up his oar and started paddling hard.

The sternsman whispered on the breeze. “Hoy up there. You can rest—current will take us.”

“Not fast enough.” Tom got his back into his work, and after a while felt the sternsman adjust to keep them straight. “Where are we going?”

“Garafraxa,” said the Elder. “A castle on a lake. The Earl of Quentara lives there—Isembard, a good and loyal man.”

Tom dug his paddle deep. “We’ll get you safely there, and then I’ll go north to find Edmund. Between us all, we’ll find a way to stop the Skeleth. I won’t give up until we do, and I won’t let anyone hurt you anymore.”

The Elder poked his back. “The perfect hero, you are.”

“I don’t want to be a hero.” Tom reached back to touch Jumble between the ears. “I want to be like you.”

Their boat shot ahead of the others, down a long curve of river running through a land of joining lakes. The work was not much different to Tom than threshing grain or pitching hay—there was a way to do it right, to pull the boat along with the greatest speed for the least effort, and just like the other work he had done in his life, once he found the rhythm, he let his mind drift in peace.

“Not but two miles more, Tom.” The sternsman’s voice murmured from behind him, just loud enough over water and wind. “We’ve made a good pace. You’re stronger than you look.”

The land curled low, then high and then low again along the banks. It bulged and shifted—tree and bridge, field and farmhouse. The Elder fell into a doze, curled up with Jumble at the bottom of the boat.

“And there.” The sternsman pointed with his paddle. “Past the bridge. See it?”

The sight woke both wonder and hope in Tom—he felt the tingle of knowing that it is possible for something to exist by seeing it for the first time. He had seen castles before, but had never dreamed of one like that which he saw, standing high above the waves, its smooth dark walls plunging sheer into the water, an island of carven stone.

“Garafraxa, stronghold of Isembard, Earl of Quentara and Lord High Steward of the kingdom,” said the sternsman. “We’ll be safe enough in there, if we’re safe anywhere, and Isembard will get you to Elverain as quick as can be done, Tom—depend on it.”

“Hmm?” The Elder woke and yawned. “Are we there?”

“Almost.” Tom switched sides to even out the strain on his arms. “Looks like a mile or so, once we are out on open water.”

The bridge over the river loomed ahead, a haphazard span strung on rickety wooden pilings. The closer the boat got to it, the more plain it was to Tom that it marked land’s end—just past it the banks fell away along a rush-lined shore, leaving open water on the run toward the castle. The lead boat steered to avoid the pilings below, gliding near to the banks. Tom felt his sternsman shift to follow. It was not until they had nearly passed under the span that the figure stepped out between the posts above, and all of Tom’s growing hopes choked and died.

“Sister, I fear this is our last goodbye.” Warbur Drake kept her hands folded in the sleeves of her dress, standing alone at the top of the bridge. “I wish that you had heeded me, all those years ago. We might have done much together.”