Ash

FLAX LED THE way through Golden Valley.

“We’ve been this way a hand of times, back from Foreverfroze to see our grandam. It’s always best to take the back roads, yes? We don’t sing here, or tumble. It’s too small a place, Zel says, and they don’t like foreigners much. So. East or west?”

“East,” Ash said.

They veered off the main road and went by smaller paths and back lanes, avoiding the towns and the big horse farms that filled the valley bottom, and by mid-afternoon Ash was sick and tired of hearing “Zel says.”

Away from the rich river flats the valley was rocky and wooded with spruce and birch as well as the poplars which gave the valley its name. The eastern trail wound up and down foothills that were surprisingly wild for such a settled, prosperous valley.

“We should be all right,” Flax reassured him. “In the daylight it’s a nice ride, Da says. A chance to get off the roads and into the woods.”

Rowan and Swallow, Ash’s parents, stuck to the well-worn roads, the roads dotted with big inns where silver could be earned. The idea of taking a “nice ride” in the woods was alien to Ash. The only time he had been “off the roads” was when his father took him to the Deep.

Just thinking about the Deep felt wrong. That’s what he had been taught, what all the boys had been taught: once you leave, wipe it from your thoughts like chalk from a slate. It doesn’t exist. Don’t talk about it to each other, don’t even think about it. If Acton’s people found out, heard even a whisper of Traveler men meeting in secret, there would be massacres. Ash knew that was right. He had passed enough crossroads with full gibbets and pressing boxes leaking blood from the executed. That was what warlords did to all wrong-doers, even to their own people. For Travelers suspected of plotting, there would be no mercy.

Boys, or men, who talked about the Deep were shunned their whole lives, cut out of Traveler society as though they had the plague. They didn’t last long, Rowan had said seriously. “We of the old blood need each other, and without that contact… we sicken and die, or worse.” Ash remembered one man, a dry-stone fencer, who wandered through the Domains like a ghost, talking to no one except the shopkeepers who served him reluctantly, as they served all Travelers, until he stopped even going into shops. He had jumped from a quarry cliff and broken his neck, or drowned in the deep green water, but before that he had thinned down to a wraith with haunted eyes. Ash had been sorry for him, but his father had said, “Leave him be, Ash,” in that tone which could not be disobeyed, because it was used so rarely. “He spoke too much,” his father explained quietly, and it was the year after Ash’s first visit to the Deep, so that he understood, and his eyes grew round with astonishment, that anyone would — could — disobey the demons.

In the old days, those who talked, even to each other, were hunted down and killed by the demons. That death might have been kinder, Ash thought. At least it was quick.

Ash couldn’t question the prohibition. It was what had kept the Deep safe for a thousand years, and the Deep was all they had left.

They met no one all morning, not even charcoal burners.

“Zel says the valley lot don’t come up here much. Scared of bears and wolves, she says.”

Ash kept a better lookout after that, and did see bear scat in a clearing. There were wolf tracks by the small pool where they stopped to water the horses. Cam and Mud didn’t want to drink there, shifting nervously and showing the whites of their eyes. Flax gentled them and again quoted his father.

“Da says they’ll never settle within scent of wolves.” So they moved on quickly, eating in the saddle. Heron had made bacon rolls for them, and packed more food that would keep for a couple of days: hard cheese, dried apples, flat biscuits.

They had reached well into Golden Valley by sunset, and found a camp by a stream edged by birch trees. Ash had almost ridden past it, but realized in time that it was up to him to name the camping place. This was the first time he had been the oldest member of a Traveling party, and it was both unsettling and pleasant to take responsibility. Because Flax was certainly not going to.

Over the course of the day, Ash had passed through intense dislike to a simpler annoyance. Flax was so young. He rode along with a sunny smile, a song constantly on his lips. He didn’t even realize he was singing, most of the time; it was as normal as breathing. His singing irritated Ash intensely.

At first he thought his irritation was because every pure note reminded him of his own inability to sing. But eventually he realized that it was because he carried his own songs with him, in his head, all the time, and Flax’s singing cut across that internal music.

He had never thought about the music in his head before, except on odd occasions when he was particularly relaxed, as he had been the first night at Elva and Mabry’s. But now, in competition with Flax’s simple songs, he discovered complex layers of melody and harmony, the sounds of flute and drums and pipes and human voice, intertwining and shifting as the day lengthened and his mood changed.

The realization was disturbing. As though he had been living all this time with a stranger in his head; a stranger who could actually make music, even if it were music no one could hear. He wondered how he had remained unaware of it all this time. The question forced him back in memory to the days when he Traveled with his parents. He remembered days of intense concentration as his father taught him the songs; nights of intense listening as his parents performed. There had been no room in his head then, for any other music.

There had been one day, a lovely, calm summer day when they were in Carlion, staying down near the harbor. He and his father had sat side-by-side on the dock, watching the fishing boats go out at sunset. Ash couldn’t remember how old he had been — ten, maybe, or eleven. The evening sky had started a phrase of flute music in his head. He remembered wanting to share it with his father, and not knowing how. He couldn’t sing it, he couldn’t even hum. He had tried to learn flute the year before and had done badly, and at that moment he had wished intensely that he had persevered, so that he could at least share this fragment of melody with his father, even if he would never be good enough to play for customers. Then he had had a wonderful idea.

“Is there any way to write down music?” he asked his father. If he could write it down, he could teach his father the melody and then his father could play it!

“No!” his father said sternly. “Never! Music must never be written down. From mouth to ear, from fingers to eye, from heart to heart, that is how music must be shared. Do you understand?”

Sternness was so rare for his gentle father that Ash had nodded, startled, the melody vanishing from his mind. He had known that songs mustn’t be written down; but hadn’t understood that the prohibition included all music. Looking back, Ash realized that that was the moment he had stopped paying attention to the music in his head — because what good was it, if it could never be shared with anyone?

As he and Flax put up their tents — separate, thank the gods and Cael — Ash wondered about that prohibition for the first time. He knew it was all of a piece with the philosophy of the Deep, but he did not really understand what purpose it served. He had followed his father’s teachings with blind loyalty until now — but if his father had truly withheld songs from him, that loyalty had been… mistakenly given. The thought made him feel sick, but it stayed with him. And, ignoring a guilty sense of doing something shocking, he started once more thinking about writing down music.

They did without a fire — Ash felt that the less attention they called to themselves the better. So they sat beside the stream to eat their cold beef and bread and dried apples. Flax pitched a crust into the chuckling water and asked, “Where are we going?”

Ash’s first thought was that he shouldn’t say, but Flax would know, sooner or later. He remembered asking his father the same thing, the first time they had left his mother with her sister near the Lake and taken the Road by themselves. His father had stared at him, as though weighing his words, and said, “I am going where I must go, and you are going with me. That is all you need to know.”

From father to son, that was reasonable. From man to man, it would be intolerably arrogant. But he couldn’t tell Flax what they were going to. Or exactly where.

“The wilds near Gabriston,” he said reluctantly. Gabriston was on a bluff downstream of the Lake. The Hidden River, which ran from where the Lake plunged into a gorge just below Baluchston, came out at Gabriston. The many streams which fed the Hidden River had carved the local sandstone into innumerable canyons and gullies. The place was as wild as still existed in the Domains, and it had a bad reputation.

Flax’s eyes widened. Although it was just past sunset, Ash could see him clearly enough. He looked like a little boy being told a story.

“Zel says that place is haunted by demons and ghosts!”

“Well, real ghosts are nothing to worry about. And as for demons — I’ll introduce you to a few when we get there.” Ash grinned. He couldn’t resist the temptation to scare the boy a bit. Just a bit. But while Flax was young, he wasn’t stupid.

“So they aren’t real?”

“Oh yes, they’re real. But they’re probably not what you expect.”

Frowning, Flax took up the napkin his dinner had been wrapped in — probably by Zel. She had trained him well. He shook out the crumbs, folded it carefully, and tucked it back into his pack.

“What path will we take?”

“I’d rather not go into Thegan’s territory,” Ash said, reluctant to explain why. The man he had killed to protect Bramble had been one of Lord Thegan’s men. He remembered the man’s friend, Horst, saying, “You’ve made yourself a bad enemy today,” and knew that he’d spoken the truth. Thegan was a very bad enemy to have made; but there was nothing he could do about that now, except avoid him. “So when we reach the mouth of the valley, we’ll ride east into Far North Domain and swing around to come to the wilds below Baluchston.”

Flax nodded. He glanced at Ash quickly, as if gauging his mood.

“What’s wrong with Thegan?” he asked.

As they were Traveling together, Flax had the right to know. Slowly, Ash explained, “When Martine and I first came into Golden Valley on our way to the Well of Secrets, we found two of Thegan’s men attacking Bramble. So I stopped them. One of them got killed.”

“You stopped them? You killed a warlord’s man?” Flax’s voice was high with excitement and his eyes were round. “How? What happened?”

At first, Ash misread his reaction for that of a youngster wanting an exciting story, and it annoyed him. Then Flax continued, “I didn’t know you could fight them!” and Ash realized that the wonder in his face was because a Traveler had stood up to a warlord’s man and survived. Conquered. He looked at Ash with complete hero worship, which made Ash feel sick.

“Don’t you try,” he said. “I’ve been trained as a safeguarder. You haven’t.” He’d meant it as a dismissal of his own skill; to imply that that skill was nothing special, just an outcome of training, but Flax took it the other way. He nodded solemnly, even more impressed.

“Can you teach me?”

Could he teach Flax? Well, he could — but whether he should was another question.

“We have too far to ride and you have too many other things to learn when we get there,” he said, not wanting to refuse outright. “Maybe later.”

“Is it a long way?” Flax asked, disappointed but philosophical about it.

“A few days’ ride.”

“Zel told me not to sing for my supper,” he said. “How will we eat?”

“Don’t tell me you always do everything Zel tells you?” Ash said.

Flax grinned and got up. “Not always,” he said. His smile was an invitation to share confidences, but Ash wasn’t in the mood.

“Let’s go to sleep,” Ash said.

Flax nodded and moved to open his tent flap, but paused halfway inside. “You could sing with me,” he said. “There are some good drinking songs that need two voices.”

Gods, that boy was annoying. “I don’t sing.”

Flax shrugged and disappeared into his tent. Ash lay in his own tent and deliberately didn’t let himself think about the stonecasting he could not do, which might have paid their way. Instead, he sent his thoughts out to Bramble. Tonight was the Spring Equinox; whatever journey she was going on would start tonight, he was sure.

“Gods of field and stream, shield your daughter,” he whispered into the night, and felt better for it.