The air reeked of blood and sweat and burning feathers, rang with the harsh metallic cries of wyvaerun. Sindérian did not want to wake. There was a pounding inside her skull, her head ached intolerably, and she did not want to open her eyes, but she knew that she must. When she finally forced her eyelids open, the sunset sky blurred overhead, then gradually came back into focus. She rolled over on her side, put her hands to the ground, and pushed herself into a sitting position.
The grass around her was littered with black-feathered bodies, but the battle raged on. Faolein’s flaming staff barely glowed; it gave off puffs of dirty white smoke. The wizard’s movements were stiff and slow—he looked, Sindérian thought, as though he were fighting underwater. The guardsmen, Jago and Aell, fought on, their faces pale and streaked with sweat; it was evident that they, too, were tiring. Even Prince Ruan moved more clumsily, his lithe body less quick and agile as he avoided the strike of an iron beak. They had killed dozens of the wyvaerun between them, but they were still outnumbered. It was a question, she realized, of how long their strength would last.
I ought to help them, Sindérian thought. If I don’t do something, we will all die. Yet a great weariness was on her, a heaviness weighed on her limbs, on her will. Halfheartedly, she scrambled to her knees, fumbled in the grass for more stones that she could throw. She picked one up, aimed, searched her mind for the same spell she had used before. Her lips moved but she could not form the words, could not even remember them—and her head ached so, she thought that perhaps she might not mind dying after all, just to be quit of the pain.
Then, unexpectedly, the surviving wyvaerun all rose simultaneously high into the air, and, as if in response to some unheard command, went winging off toward the south.
In the sudden silence that followed, Sindérian’s companions gathered around her. Speaking in low, tense voices, they took stock of their situation.
The men had sustained only minor injuries: scratched hands and faces; a deep cut over Aell’s left eye, which bled and bled as head wounds will, but did not look serious. Sindérian realized she was by far the worst. Feeling under the hair at the back of her head she found a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg, and when she tried to stand her knees buckled; the ground tilted beneath her. The dark sky was not where it should be; constellations danced, stars burst into rainbow showers around her, and a pain like red-hot iron shot down her neck to the base of her spine. Faolein threw out a bony arm to catch her and carefully lowered her to a seat on the grass.
Sindérian put her head down on her knees, drew several long, deep breaths. I will not be sick, she told herself fiercely. Yet her stomach continued to heave, the world refused to settle into place around her. She felt sticky with sweat and as weak as a kitten. Might it be a concussion? She struggled to remember the symptoms, but it was agony even to think. If she could not help herself, how could she possibly hope to help anyone else?
Then she felt Faolein’s hand laid gently on her shoulder. The life force surged in her veins, and a little clarity returned to her. Her father was aiding her in the best way he could. He could not work a healing spell, lacking the requisite fineness of touch, the trained mental reflexes, but he was pouring some of his own strength into Sindérian, so that she could heal herself.
“Enough,” she whispered after a moment, when she felt his power begin to flag. Looking up, she saw that his face had gone grey with fatigue. Out of concern for her, he had given more than he ought to have spared. She removed his hand from her shoulder, took it between both of hers, held it for a moment to her lips. “I will be entirely myself in another moment or two.”
It was a lie, and they both knew it, but he wisely withdrew. The danger might not be over; one of them had to remain as strong and alert as possible.
She dropped her head back down on her knees and allowed herself to drift off into a waking dream.
Finally, Sindérian felt well enough to stand. Shaking her hair out of her eyes, she gathered the long dark weight of it up in a knot on the top of her head, picked up the silken veil, which had fallen to the ground, and pinned it securely in place. Then she joined the men in the deep shadows under the trees, where they had begun to discuss what they ought to do next.
Their faces were grim in that failing light, and the eyes of the men-at-arms wary and a little wild.
“This was no chance attack,” Prince Ruan said, as she walked up. “That creature you saw back in Tregna, the way the wyvaerun swooped down on us without provocation. It is too much coincidence.”
“I think you must be right,” she said unsteadily. “It was the abominable Goezenou who sent the wyvaerun. And he may not be done with us.”
The men exchanged glances; their faces grew grimmer still. “You think that he saw you and knew you, that he guessed where we are heading?” asked the Prince.
Sindérian shook her head and regretted it; the motion made her so wretchedly ill. “He recognized something; he recognized one of us. I don’t flatter myself it was I. What was one more healer on the battlefield to Goezenou?”
“It is likely that I am the one the furiádh recognized,” Faolein admitted with a sigh. “It was so long ago that we met on Phaôrax, and we have both changed so much, I never thought he would see me to know me again.”
The horses and pack mules had bolted during the attack, and had yet to return. Faolein sent out a spell to call them back, but soon realized they were still too agitated to respond. “They have run so far and in such a panic, they may not return at all,” he told his companions. “It is hard to speak to them at this distance. And impossible to calm them.”
“We would be fools to walk back the same way we came, with our enemy, very likely, on the road following us,” said Ruan, speaking between clenched teeth. “So long as we are afoot and he and his men are mounted, the advantage will all be theirs.”
Faolein nodded wearily. “Speaking for myself, I don’t fear Goezenou very much. But I think of those other galleys we saw, and I wonder who else came with him into Mere. To meet two or three Furiádhin in this lonely place—I must admit that I dread the outcome if that was to happen.”
“We are five days’ march from the fortress at Saer,” said Ruan, apparently retaining a clear mental picture of Faolein’s map. “Perhaps less, if we leave the road and cut across country.”
“That would be best in any case. On the road, we are too exposed.”
All their food and supplies, all their bedding and extra clothes, had been lost with the horses and mules, except for some leather flasks that Jago had filled at the stream shortly before the wyvaerun attacked. Fortune, or the Fates, had been with them in that much. Otherwise, they had only those things they carried on them: armor and weapons for the Prince and his men, Faolein’s staff and the contents of his pouch, some packets of medicinal herbs that Sindérian kept in a pocket of her cloak. They had also the Prince’s heavy purse, still weighted with the High King’s gold—but much good that was likely to do them, without a town in sight. If they wished to eat, they would have to forage, and so early in the year the land would not have much to offer.
Before they set out, they each knelt on the bank by the stream and took a long drink. There was no saying how soon or how often they would be able to refill the flasks. The country they were about to travel, the sparsely wooded hills to the northeast, was higher and drier than the marshy ground they were leaving behind.
They abandoned the road, scrambled up a slope where the scree slipped and slid dangerously underfoot, pushed through scrubby bushes of heather and broom until they found what looked like a path. A game trail it might be, for it was very narrow and rough, winding through the trees and the waist-high brush; and once, bending low in a patch of moonlight between the trees, Sindérian spotted the hoofprints of a deer pressed into the earth.
Faolein called up a tiny breeze to cover their tracks; he would not keep it up long, for the lledrion itself might also betray them—magic left its own trail, even if that trail was difficult to detect. “It is possible,” he said, “that Goezenou and his men will be distracted for a time following our horses.”
“If they bother with us any further at all,” said Sindérian, putting a hand to her head, which still ached fiercely. “It is one thing to call up a flock of wyvaerun to harry us, another to turn aside from their own road—particularly if they are in any sort of hurry to go somewhere.”
“Somewhere meaning Skyrra, seemingly,” muttered Jago, under his breath, trudging along just ahead of her. “But what if they are heading for Saer the same as we are?”
Faolein considered that in silence for several minutes before he spoke. Glancing back over her shoulder, Sindérian saw him rake his fingers through his beard, then shake his head. “It is the next large settlement, yet I hardly think they will choose to go there. Or that they would be welcomed inside if they did. Where the loyalties of our sometime ally the Duke of Mere lie now is a matter for debate, but the same can hardly be said of his liege man Goslin of Saer. He’ll have no dealings with Ouriána or her Furiádhin. He lost his two sons and all three of his brothers in the war.
“And Saer,” he added, “is a place they would find it difficult to enter without an invitation.”
Letting his breeze die down, the wizard went ahead of the rest, edging past Sindérian, Jago, Aell, and the Prince, who had been in the lead before. Ruan fell back without demur, and took a place at the rear of the party, behind Sindérian.
She tried to ignore his presence, though he walked so close behind her. He moved so lightly, she could not even hear his booted feet striking the hard earth, but she was keenly aware of him all the same: his bright eyes and glittering golden torc, his watchful posture, the way he kept his hand on the hilt of his sword. She was as sure of those things as if she could see him, flowing like quicksilver through the dappled moonlight.
She pulled the black veil down over her face, lowered her head, set her jaw, and forced herself to concentrate on the uneven path before her.
For many hours they kept on moving, plodding through that stony, slanted country—always, it seemed, uphill. At last, in the cold dark time between midnight and dawn, they came to a hollow sheltered on all sides, where Faolein thought they might safely camp for what remained of the night.
Aell and Jago and the Prince threw themselves down on the ground. Sindérian wrapped herself up in her cloak, stretched out with a sigh on the coarse, moon-silvered grass, and was almost immediately asleep.
Faolein made a small smokeless fire. While his companions slept, he kept watch, his staff at his side, feeding his fire with twigs and bits of bark and dried moss.
It was a clear, starry night, and the wizard was very much aware of the immense waxing moon overhead—westering by then, but not to set for another hour. It was a weight upon the sky, upon the hills. Under its influence, the earth rumbled from time to time; only the smallest tremors for the moment, but as the moon continued to grow these would increase in power and frequency. In another day or two, when it was quite full, there might be earthquakes, this whole region was so unstable.
Sitting cross-legged by his fire, Faolein felt himself drifting off, despite his best efforts to stay awake, and caught himself just before he slipped away. He was unutterably weary; age, it seemed, was finally catching up with him. He could remember a time, eighty years ago when he was in his prime, when he could walk all day without fatigue, when sleep was a mere distraction, and one that he could, as often as not, easily dispense with. He ached to the very bone; if he could only lay his head down, close his eyes, and rest for a moment—
As the darkness swept over him he felt it: a light touch at first, then a deeper and more insidious probing by another mind. He struggled against it, fought his way free, came up out of that bottomless well of sleep and black magic gasping and fighting for air like a drowning man.
Then he sat by the fire, trembling with reaction and horror. When at last he felt strong enough, he left his seat, crept past the others where they slept, and bent over to wake Sindérian.
It took no more than his dry fingertips brushing her face. She sat up at once, muzzy with sleep but obedient to his word, gazing up at her father with bruised dark eyes. It cut him to the heart to have to disturb her when she so clearly needed rest and healing, but the danger was simply too great.
“We ought to set wards with our enemies so near,” said Faolein, very low. “He—they—whoever is on the road—he hasn’t forgotten us. He is seeking us through the night.”
“Who? Who was it you felt, out there in the darkness?” she whispered back. Gathering her feet under her, she clasped the hand that he was offering her, letting him pull her up so that they stood shoulder to shoulder. “It was never Goezenou who frightened you so. Who else is there?”
Remembering that brief, terrifying contact with a clear, cold, powerful intelligence, Faolein shook his head. “I would rather not say, rather not guess. To say or even think the name when he is trying to find us—” As his voice trailed off, he saw the pupils of her eyes grow large with fear and speculation; reflexively, she signed a béanath. “Turn your thoughts in some other direction…but don’t let down your guard for a single instant.”
While Faolein wove ropes out of grass and used them to bind sheaves of heather into a kind of primitive lintel, Sindérian gathered sticks and placed them on the ground around the campsite so that they formed a perfect square. Then she hunted up a large flat rock to serve as the corridrüis, the door-stone, or threshold.
Hallowing these structures with fire and with water, with herbs of great virtue and protection, they set the charm with care. But it was only makeshift, and the boundary they had established would only continue to exist because they willed it so. Whether or not it could withstand a determined assault by a mind as powerful as the one that Faolein had detected earlier—that was by no means certain.
And when the wards were in place, when Faolein resumed his seat by the fire, and Sindérian cast herself down in her former spot on the ground and tried to rest, the most she could achieve—the most she would allow herself—was a light, fitful doze.
In dreams one was vulnerable. So long as they remained under threat from without she dared not give herself up wholly to sleep.
The moon set. In another hour, the fabric of night began to fray, and a pale-hued light shone through. The tops of the trees on the crests of the hills turned to fallow gold; dew glistened like drops of silver in the grass. Faolein woke the Prince and his men. Breakfast was water and a handful of sloes, not quite ripe, which Sindérian gathered from bushes on the slopes of the hollow. Then they set off walking again.
Midmorning found them in country more heavily wooded than before; the trees drew together in thickets, birch and cowan and ash, their branches tangling overhead. The ground underfoot was thick and fragrant with fallen leaves. There were broad pathways weaving between the trees, and the occasional scent of woodsmoke, as plain a sign as they could ask for that the land was inhabited. But whenever Faolein smelled smoke he turned aside to lead his companions down some other pathway. He had no wish, he told them, to approach any village or settlement, to meet anyone before they came to Saer, where they might be sure of finding allies.
As he walked, staff in hand, Faolein let his senses go wide: sight, hearing, scent, touch, and that other, extra sense. He moved through the world as only a wizard can, in communion with rocks and hills, wind and water, trees and grass, yet always apart from them, uniquely himself. Squirrels chattered in the branches overhead; tiny brown field mice and shrew mice went scurrying for their nests under the roots. Red foxes in their dens peered out with bright, inquiring eyes. Nowhere could he detect any threat. He could almost believe that they had eluded their enemies, that they were not being followed, had it not been for that stealthy touch he felt in the night.
Sindérian walked a little apart, her head still aching. At times, she felt muddled and stupid, and there was an occasional giddiness, when the landscape reeled—though whether that was lack of sleep or the head injury she could not be certain. Such injuries were difficult to heal, and dangerous work for a healer not in full command of her faculties. She had done all that it was safe to do under the circumstances; nature must do the rest.
Her feet hurt. Her boots had never been meant for walking; she could feel every rock, every pebble, through the thin leather soles, bruising the flesh. Her pulse beat with a sullen, irregular beat, and there was a stitch in her side, a sharp, tearing pain, which grew steadily worse the longer she walked.
She gritted her teeth. All those weeks of soft living on Leal, and I’m fit for nothing. Prince Ruan was right, though I’d die before I told him so: I bitterly regret embarking on this hopeless enterprise, this journey where things have gone wrong from the very beginning.
They took a path leading downhill, where the trees grew denser. Sindérian began to smell water, and soon they came upon a trail—scarcely worth the name, it was so steep and treacherous—where a damp trickle began to follow their course down the slope.
The trickle met other rills, and finally became a stream at the bottom of the hill. Ferns grew there under the trees, along with hart’s-tongue, pennymint, and stinging nettle. White-flag, spiky purple iris, and golden marsh marigold sprang up where the ground was boggy along the margin.
“This will be Ceriolle, which flows into the Saille,” said Faolein. “If we follow its course, it will lead us to Saer.”
Little fat silvery fish, no greater than the palm of a hand, swam in the shallows, and Prince Ruan proved surprisingly adept at catching them with his bare hands. “They make poor eating,” he said, passing one over to Aell, who wrapped it in green leaves to keep it fresh, “but I fear we can’t afford to be too dainty in our tastes.” Sindérian wondered, absently, where he had lived that he had eaten such fish before.
In another hour, they came to a place where a mossy stone bridge curved over the stream. The stonework was very old, the weathered granite of the balustrades crumbling away, but the bridge was solid underfoot, and they crossed over safely in a single file. Higher up the hill, the Prince spied the evidence of some ancient delvings.
“There will be Gnomes living somewhere hereabout,” he said. “They are a peaceable, hospitable people—”
“Too peaceable,” replied Faolein, with a worried frown. “I would not expose those kindly little folk to the furiádh and his men—not for the sake of hospitality we can live without.”
At erién, when the sun sent shafts of golden light down between the trees, the wizard suggested that they stop and rest. Without waiting for a further invitation, Sindérian sank down where she was, leaned her back against the trunk of a tree, and closed her eyes to shut out the light.
She listened to the sounds of the others setting up camp: gathering firewood, preparing Prince Ruan’s fish and some edible roots for cooking. She felt utterly dislocated from her surroundings, floating like a soap bubble on the wind, sick and bodiless. But she came back to earth at the Prince’s approach, the crackling of leaves underfoot, the soft sigh of his breath as he sat down near her. When she opened her eyes again, he was perched on a fallen log about three feet way, watching her intently.
Avoiding that arrogant gaze of his, her glance fell, as if for the first time, on the silver brooch fastening his cloak. It was simple and well made, set with gems of no great value, and its design contained two of the ordinary runes used in writing: the Tree Runes these were called, to distinguish them from the Wizard’s Runes, which contained so much power. The runes on the brooch were aethin and piridwen—furze and spruce—set side by side as if it were a monogram or cypher.
“A and P,” she said aloud, without even thinking. “Was it a gift?”
The Prince smiled slightly. “If you mean was this brooch a lady’s favor, no,” he replied coolly. And realizing that her question had implied something of the sort—and therefore suggested rather too much interest in his affairs of the heart—Sindérian felt the heat rise in her face.
“As for the initials, they are my own,” he went on. “My mother, who is of the Ni-Féa Faey, named me ‘Anerüian’ for the hour at which I was born. It is a common practice among the Faey, to name their children for seasons and hours. But when I went to live with my father’s people on Thäerie, they thought it strange that one so pale-skinned and light-haired should be called ‘Midnight.’ And so, to make more sense of it and me, they shortened the name by degrees: first to ‘Rüian,’ then to ‘Ruan.’ I’ve long since learned to answer to that name, but I could hardly mark my things with an R and a P, which is my grandfather’s cypher.
“And now,” he said, as Sindérian sat sifting leaves through her fingers, “now that I have told you so much about myself, may I ask you a question?”
She nodded reluctantly, having an idea what he would ask. But it was only a fair exchange; she could not, in courtesy, refuse him, having asked her question first.
“I see that you wear the color of mourning, though your father does not. Have you suffered a personal loss, or do you wear it as certain warriors I know—because they served at one time in Rheithûn—in memory of a valiant people now enslaved?”
Because she was so very tired—surely that, for the pain was an old one—she felt the salt tears scalding her eyes. Resolutely, she blinked them back. “For both reasons. I did serve as a healer six years in Rheithûn, and I was betrothed to Cailltin of Aefri. We intended to be married if”—her voice broke momentarily; she took several deep breaths, then went on—“when the war ends. But he died along with so many other brave men when the last fortress fell.”
“You were there?” asked the Prince, leaning forward in his interest. “You saw the fall of Gilaefri—the executions after?”
Sindérian felt her face grow stiff, her throat go dry. “No,” she whispered, feeling the old sickness, the old shame. She crushed a handful of leaves between her fingers, watched them crumble. “No, I wasn’t there. I was on my way to the coast, shepherding a party of women and children.”
The Prince sat back. “You have no reason to reproach yourself,” he said, speaking more gently than she had ever heard him. “You couldn’t have saved him. When the Furiádhin threw down the walls, when they put all the commanders to the sword, what could you have done, then, for Cailltin of Aefri—or anyone?”
She swallowed the hot retort that rose to her lips at the familiar platitude. She only answered, in a stifled voice: “I could have died with him.”
“Which would have been some comfort to you perhaps, but none at all to the noble Cailltin. Whereas now you can live to avenge him.”
Sindérian sighed and gave a dreary little laugh. “You would say so, of course. I’ve heard the Ni-Féa believe in revenge—that they will pursue a grudge as long as seven generations. Wizards, however, live by a different rule. To seek after vengeance goes against everything they teach us at the Scholia.”
His strange eyes glittered in the shadows under the trees. “The Ni-Féa believe in justice,” he said, with a light emphasis on the last word. “Though to those raised as you and I were, their ideas of gratitude, fair recompense, and injury may seem exaggerated. But the desire for revenge in the face of some insult or injury—real or imagined—is no mere article of faith, no quaint cultural artifact. It is an inborn hunger, a fierce compulsion, the consummation of which may be postponed for a day, or a year, or even a decade, but never completely denied.”
Sindérian bit her lip. She was tired and cross and on the defensive, as it seemed she always was in his presence. And she was not really interested, just at that moment, in the ways of the Ni-Féa, though she might have been curious any other time. Yet she was glad enough for the change of subject.
“And do you share that compulsion, Prince Ruan?” she asked, in her most offhand manner.
His face went very still. For a moment, his eyes were veiled by his silvery eyelashes, then a fierce emotion shone out. He was remembering something or remembering somebody. He spoke very quietly. “Half-blood that I am, I find the compulsion much less insistent, more easily suppressed, but it is still far from absent.”