Faolein is dead. That was Sindérian’s first thought on waking—as it had become, almost invariably, her last thought at night. There had been a time, not so long ago, when she woke to painful memories of Gilaefri’s fall, of Cailltin’s death, but now it was Faolein’s loss that greeted her each new day. As she propped herself up with one elbow on the stony ground and rose from her uncomfortable resting place, this third day of traveling through Hythe, she wondered if that was how she would reckon her life in after years, with a growing litany of her dead.
Shivering in the half-light of dawn, she rolled up her blankets and bound them securely, then joined the others for a hasty cold breakfast: goat cheese and dry, gritty seedcake, a mouthful of ale. As they saddled up the horses and broke camp, thunderclouds, violet and gold, lay heaped on the eastern horizon; a chill wind came whipping down from the north, smelling unseasonably of snow.
“Queer weather this time of year,” said Aell, narrowing his eyes against the stinging gale.
“Curious weather whatever the year or season,” Sindérian muttered under her breath as she swung up into the saddle.
The others mounted, too. One of the first things they had done on shaking off the dust of turncoat Mere was to buy more horses in one of the border towns, so that no one need walk. That should have made for swifter travel, had it not been for a long series of mishaps and near-disasters that had plagued them along the way. Too many such mishaps, Sindérian considered, by far too many all to be happenstance.
They set off along the same road they had been following for days: that straight road which arrows through the countryside from Dacre on the border to the rocky foothills of the Cadmin Aernan. Before they had gone more than a mile or two, the rain came down, swift and cold. Thunder pealed in the distance, and branched lightning lit the sky: white, blue-white, blue-violet.
Trees creaked in the icy blast; leaves and branches tore loose and whirled in the air like bats. Jago’s grey, Gilrain’s black mare, both reared up, raking the air.
“This,” said the Ni-Ferys, shouting to be heard over the tumult, “is no ordinary storm.”
“No,” Sindérian answered, breathless after a tussle with the chestnut gelding. The hood of her cloak had slipped back, and her hair was streaming with water. “This is Thaga’s doing.”
To her wizard’s sight, the very landscape seemed perilous, full of dark omens. In the straggling woods to either side of the road, uncanny lights, violet and indigo, danced from branch to branch and tree to tree. Hungry mud sucked at the horses’ hooves, and the wind raged at them with shrieking maledictions. “Just as the bridge that began to collapse under us yesterday was Thaga’s work. And the fire in that cottage where we stopped two nights ago—Dreyde’s men wouldn’t dare to follow us across Prince Bael’s lands, but the mage’s spells respect no borders.”
There came another violent crash of thunder directly overhead. The air crackled with electricity. “Lady, is there nothing that you can do?” shouted Prince Ruan.
Sindérian turned an angry white face his way. He had scarcely deigned to speak with her these last several days, and typically, she thought, he broke his silence only to give her an order. “I am doing more than you think. We would all be dead by now if I had done nothing. It’s no easy thing,” she added, with a curling lip, “to deflect lightning from those of our party who ride about dressed in iron.”
They rode for several miles more in the drenching rain, with water down their necks, soaking through their heavy garments. The horses plodded on with their ears laid back, with draggled manes and tails, looking utterly miserable. Clouds boiled overhead, and lightning struck on all sides. First one, then another of the horses would refuse to go forward, eyes rolling white, fighting at the bit until the foam flew.
Exhausting enough, Sindérian reflected wearily, just trying to sit upright in this battering wind, without contesting for every yard of the road as well.
An oak ripped up out of the ground and crashed into the road ahead of them, setting all the horses bucking and dancing. Almost simultaneously, a vivid bolt of lightning struck a beech less than twenty yards away. It burst into flame, showering sparks like a torch in the rain.
“Is there no place where we can take shelter?” growled the Prince, curbing his dun stallion with a heavy hand.
“There’s Kemys just over the hill and beyond the wood.” Gilrain blinked back the water that was running down his high white forehead and dripping into his eyes. “A den of thieves by reputation, though in my experience they’re more likely to cheat—” The rest of his sentence was lost in another rolling chord of thunder.
Sindérian gritted her teeth to keep them from chattering. There was sleet mixed in with the rain, and it grew steadily colder. Her hands on the reins felt numb and lifeless, her feet, in the well-worn boots, like wooden blocks. “Then take us there. If we’ve a roof over our heads, walls around us, I can set wards.”
Gilrain swung the black mare’s head around, skirted the fallen tree, then urged the mare off the road and up a steep slope, following a trail so faint that Sindérian could barely make it out in the sheeting downpour. Pulling up her hood, she leaned forward in the saddle to avoid as much of the wind as possible, and muttered a béanath under her breath.
The village of Kemys was a labyrinth of slatternly old timber houses and squalid little beehive huts, all packed together inside a stone wall rotten with time and neglect.
Scant welcome and even scanter hospitality our travelers had there. Stabling for the horses and shelter for themselves, all crowded together in a hut with a leaky roof, this they obtained from the village headman in return for a handful of copper coins; and the other villagers sold them firewood and cider at extravagant prices.
Inside the hut, Sindérian made a little blue-grey bubble of werelight to work by, and everyone was busy for a time, unsaddling the horses and rubbing them down.
Then, while the men hung up their sodden cloaks to dry, shook water out of their hair, and emptied it out of their boots, Sindérian set her wards. As she felt them take hold, some of the tension in her neck and shoulders relaxed. There, at least, was safety, no matter how temporary.
Meanwhile, Gilrain had succeeded in coaxing a fire from the few sticks of uncured wood the villagers had sold them. Even a wizard might be hard-pressed to start a blaze under such conditions: the wood green, and damp at that. Was this simple woodcraft, Sindérian wondered, or some fairy spell?
The Prince was right: I know less than I should about the Faey, she thought with a lump in her throat.
The sad truth was, her ignorance in many areas was likely to get them all killed, now that she was the wizard the rest depended on. Her whole life up until then began to feel like a fraud and a waste. Had she spent the last six years studying on Leal, instead of mending broken bodies in Rheithûn only to send them out to be slaughtered more efficiently the next time, she might almost be fit for the task before her.
It should be Faolein here now, she thought miserably. Why was it my father who died and I who lived? Either the Fates are against us, or they’ve gone mad and senile.
But that was a thought too impious even for her, and she felt an immediate twinge of remorse. Perhaps the Fates were simply punishing her for her crisis of faith. Yet Faolein would say that Servants of the Light did not mete out punishments, that they were wholly beneficent and kind, though their ways were often mysterious. Of late, they had been far too mysterious for Sindérian.
Making supper under such damp, crowded conditions soon became an adventure. The horses’ hooves and tails seemed to be here, there, and everywhere; among the two-footed, knees, ribs, shins, and elbows appeared to exert a magical attraction, with many bumps and bruises resulting. The small smoky fire went out twice and had to be rekindled.
And when Jago jostled Gilrain’s arm, tipping a cauldron of broth into the flames, Prince Ruan gave a snort of disgust, left his seat on the ground, and stalked outside.
“Much good a warding spell does us, when we insist on inviting ill luck inside with us!” he said over his shoulder, as he passed through the doorway.
Bristling up, Gilrain scrambled to his feet, but Sindérian threw out a hand to restrain him. “Please do not,” she said. “You’ve no need to defend yourself. No one, not even the Prince, really blames you for our bad fortune.”
The Ni-Ferys settled down again with a rueful look. “I shouldn’t allow him to provoke me. Nor should I find so many ways to provoke him. It is a curious thing: the Prince and I were both raised among Humans, and as a general rule we consider ourselves Men rather than Faey; I have even heard it said that Ruan is entirely estranged from his mother’s people; but throw us together in the same company…”
He smiled and shrugged. “No doubt to you our two tribes are practically indistinguishable; but believe me, we are no more alike than chalk and cheese. We regard them as insufferably proud and high-handed, and they see us as sly and insinuating. Perhaps there is fault on both sides.”
Sindérian shook her head wearily. “Who am I to judge the Ni-Ferys and Ni-Féa, when Men have been at war my entire life? Some of the grievances between Thäerie and Phaôrax go back for hundreds of years, when the truth is they are kindred peoples, who ought to live together like brothers and sisters. But the years pass, and still we go on slaughtering each other.”
Gilrain sat gazing into the fire for a long time before he spoke. “It may not be a war of Men only—or of Men and half-Men like myself and the Prince—for much longer.” In the pale firelight, his eyes were luminous like a cat’s, and his fair hair tinted with all the colors of the flames. When he spread his hands, there was a thin, translucent webbing between his third and fourth fingers, which Sindérian had noticed before. Another hybrid anomaly that was, like the color of Prince Ruan’s eyes.
“The world is in flux,” he went on, after another silence. “Silüren uilédani amffüriandem—isn’t that what the wizards say? All things under the moon are changing. It’s been true for more than a century, but it seems to be more true now, and even a half-blood Ni-Ferys like me senses this increasingly.”
In his words, Sindérian caught an echo of her own worst fears. And she wondered what perceptions the Faey had to know these things, what knowledge and powers that even wizards lacked. Faolein might have known the answer to that, but she did not. One thing she remembered that her father had said, back at Tregna: “It is bad enough when our enemies take us by surprise, but when it is our friends who prove unpredictable and untrustworthy—”
Sitting back on her heels, she said with a sigh: “If Prince Ruan dislikes and mistrusts you, he seems to like me even less. I’m afraid that I said things back at Brill that he will never forgive. I would set things right if I could, but I fear the breach is already past mending.”
Much to her surprise, Gilrain began to shake with silent laughter. “To do the Prince no more than justice,” he said, his voice colored with amusement, “I think you are wrong. You are merely the victim of Prince Ruan’s peculiar idea of chivalry. He thinks it proper to keep you at a distance. Have you never considered the evils of your situation, now that your father is gone? A lone female, traveling with a party of men—
“But I see that you have not,” he added, when her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “Your pardon, Lady Healer, if I’ve made you uncomfortable. Perhaps I should never have mentioned it.”
She felt the hot blood rising in her face, and not because of the fire. “I’m well able to defend my own honor, should it come to that,” she replied stiffly. “In any case, there are far more important things I should be thinking about now. I can’t allow myself to be distracted by what you call ‘the evils of my situation.’”
“Yet Prince Ruan seems to be able to think of little else,” said Gilrain, with an odd little smile. “I wonder why that is?”
They rode out the next morning in a fine, misting rain, with a cold wind blowing in their faces. The worst of the storm had passed; but as Sindérian sniffed the air and tasted the wind, she was keenly aware of ripples in the world of matter, of currents and eddies—the aftereffects of Thaga’s spell. Power, restless and chaotic, shimmered on the air, and a whole series of tiny vibrations moved like ants across her skin. The horses seemed to feel it, too. Prince Ruan’s dun trembled and fought at the bit, and the chestnut gelding blew out a nervous breath and shied at nothing.
That wretch Thaga’s unseasonable thunderstorm, Sindérian thought. It will be muddling up the weather in Hythe and Mere for the next half year. Not to mention what it might do to all the fertility spells and birthing charms of all the village midwives and wisewomen between the border and the mountains.
And who would suffer if the crops rotted in the fields, if the flocks dwindled? Not the likes of Dreyde and his tame sorcerer, certainly. It was the ordinary people in tiny villages like Brill and Kemys, in towns like Dacre: they would suffer, they would do without, their children would go to bed hungry.
It filled Sindérian with an impotent rage just to think of it, the more so because she felt partly responsible. She and her companions had come into the region like a wandering curse, and who knew how long afterward the suffering and the hardship they left behind them would last? How could people who already lived in such appalling poverty as they had seen in Kemys survive a bad season, when they could hardly scrape out a miserable living as it was?
“Are we really so different from Ouriána and those who serve her?” she wondered out loud.
“I would hope,” said the Prince, startled into answering, “that we are as different as night and day.”
Sindérian bit her lip. If only it could be that obvious to her! “Don’t both sides use people like counters in some horrible game, gambling castles and cities and kingdoms, hazarding lives and futures on the very narrowest of chances, rationalizing it all in the name of some distant—and possibly unreachable—higher good? Who decides when the cost is too great? Who reckons up the value of a life lost now against lives spent later? Wizards? Princes? The Fates? Or that vast and incomprehensible power the Fates are supposed to serve, that Men call the Light?”
To this Ruan had no answer; he could only shake his head.
Yet she knew what Faolein would say, if he were there. Our lives are the clay the Fates use to shape a better world. Only Faolein was not there, nor would ever be again, and so far as Sindérian could see—for all that she had done and experienced so far, for all the myriad questions that swarmed in her brain—the world became more and more a perilous place to live in, and one harder and harder for her to understand.
But then, all at once, she was furiously, breathtakingly angry with herself.
Sitting up straighter in the saddle she took the reins more firmly in her hands. What gives you the right to self-pity? You ought to be ashamed! You may be orphaned, but you’re young and strong and whole, which is a good deal more than many can say. And you have a home to return to, when there are thousands left homeless by the war.
How dare you even begin to feel sorry for yourself.