The tumult and fury of the storm continued unabated. Flames raced across the surface of the waves, fires of emerald and opal; lightning tore open the sky. As the embattled little craft plunged down an almost vertical slope, Prince Ruan could feel the boards groaning and buckling under his feet. In a moment, he knew, the entire bottom of the boat would shatter. Even if Sindérian’s voice did not give out, no spell could bind it together against such intolerable strain. The boat bucked, dived, and rolled; every moment those on board were pitched in some new direction; every moment they seemed on the verge of a watery death.
And then, quite suddenly, they broke through the wall of rain; the wind slackened. The sea remained agitated, but the wizards’ shibéath on the boat needed to hold only a short time longer. Perhaps, thought Ruan, it actually would. Faint with exhaustion, her voice worn to rags, Sindérian sank to her knees. Her eyes were closed and her lips were white, but she was still muttering spells.
Gradually, the waves settled into a more gentle motion. The clouds parted, revealing an eastern sky purple and gold with sunset. A wet and windblown Faolein perched on the thwart, preening his feathers, while Kivik and Skerry leaned wearily against the side, their faces as green as something dredged up from the bottom of the sea.
Ruan touched Sindérian lightly on the shoulder. “Rest now. You’ve brought us safely through the tempest. Leave the rest to Aell and me.” Then he went to help the man-at-arms step the mast and raise the sail.
Already he thought he could smell land. The storm had nearly killed them, but it had also helped to speed them across the channel. He thought they might even see Mistlewald by morning, for there was just enough wind, and it was blowing from the right quarter. Unless it changed direction, they would hardly have to tack at all.
They sailed into the harbor of a little seaside town with the dawn tide. After a long nap, Sindérian had revived enough to sit up and wring the water out of her hair, which was as lank as seaweed. They all had as much salt in their clothes and their hair as if they had swum, not sailed, across the Necke.
As they rounded the breakwater with Aell’s steady hand on the tiller, Ruan sat down cross-legged beside her. “Do you think Camhóinhann knew that someone was following, or did he call up the storm simply as a precaution?”
“Whatever he knew or guessed,” she said, “he can’t have known that we were following with two wizards on board. If he had known, the storm would surely have been much worse.”
In the shadow of the mast, Skerry gave a weak, incredulous laugh. “I don’t see how it could have been worse.”
Ruan was inclined to agree. Nor did he believe that Faolein, hampered by the shape he was forced to wear, had played much part in keeping them afloat. Sindérian might be too modest to say so, but she had performed a feat of which a much older wizard might be proud.
They tied up their craft among other fishing vessels above the town and stepped out on the dock, haggard and exhausted, but on the whole jubilant. No one had expected such a brief, eventful voyage.
“Nevertheless,” said Sindérian, “I am afraid the gale blew us many leagues east of any place the Pharaxions might have landed.”
“They will head south, as much as the roads allow them,” Ruan answered. “We have only to adjust our own course a little to the west.”
It took most of the day to find a fisherman willing to buy the boat, and to locate a man on the outskirts of town with horses to sell. Even then the Skyrran princes, unimpressed by the animals bred in Mistlewald, took a long time selecting mounts for themselves. By the time they found horses to suit them it was so near dark, no one protested when Ruan suggested they seek out an inn and enjoy a rare night’s rest in real beds.
They rode out the next morning before anyone else in the town was stirring. The roads in that region were good, and they made swift progress all that day and for many days afterward. Yet Sindérian felt the same urgency that had pressed on her while crossing Skyrra. At times, she thought she could smell the smoke of sacrificial fires rising in Apharos, carried a thousand miles on the world’s winds. And, linked in some way by the aniffath, she believed she could sense a growing disquiet in Ouriána’s mind—although what that meant for herself and the success or failure of the quest remained uncertain.
She woke one morning to find a white owl staring sleepily down at her from the same branch where the sparrowhawk had perched the night before. Faolein had gone through another transformation while she slept. This evening, I will begin to scout ahead after dark, he told her. In that way, I may be able to spot the Pharaxions’ campfires.
That night, Sindérian and her companions set up their own camp under the eaves of a great wood. There was abundant deadfall, so it took very little time to gather enough for a good fire. As they sat warming themselves around its cheerful blaze, Skerry posed a question that must have been on his mind—and Kivik’s, too—for many weeks.
“You’ve explained to us how Winloki was born on Thäerie, and how the High King and the wizards of Leal decided to hide her from Ouriána—but what we don’t know, for I suppose we never asked, is how her mother came to live on Thäerie in the beginning, or how Nimenoë and the Empress, being sisters, came to be mortal enemies.”
“Oh, but they never were that, not really,” said Sindérian, with an emphatic shake of her head. “Their feelings for each other—their entire history—were far more complicated. Nimenoë spent much of her childhood on Thäerie and Leal, while Ouriána remained on Phaôrax; that was how their estrangement began. But I see I must tell you the entire story, as my father told it to me.
“There was a treaty made between the High King on Thäerie and the King of Phaôrax, to patch up some minor dispute. Of course all the ruling houses of the old Empire lands have Pendawer blood”—she glanced sideways at Prince Ruan as she said this, and then away again—“but in spite of close kinship, Phaôrax had often been the source of trouble before.”
Sindérian stopped, shrugged, and then continued on. “Well, it is enough to say that this latest quarrel had been amicably settled, and as a gesture of good faith the King of Phaôrax sent his youngest niece to Thäerie to be fostered, and a little Pendawer prince went to Apharos. But he is not important to the story, for he lived a thoroughly unremarkable life and died an old man in his bed.
“As for Nimenoë, she was only a child of seven or eight, and no one suspected when she arrived in Pentheirie that she was magically gifted. It was the Old Queen, Prince Ruan’s great-grandmother, who discovered the truth. She was a great lady, and might have been a great wizard, had she been allowed time to develop her own gifts. As it was, she was determined to give the child the opportunities she had lacked. Nimenoë was sent to the Scholia on Leal to study for several years, and then returned to Pentheirie as apprentice to Elidûc. It was a long time before anyone suspected that Ouriána was also gifted. There were wizards in Apharos in those days but not very powerful ones, and it seems they were none of them capable of recognizing her talents. Perhaps that was the beginning of the rift between them: Nimenoë was learning so many new and remarkable things, which she dutifully wrote about in letters to her sister, and Ouriána…Ouriána was not even heir to the throne then. I am afraid she was rather neglected until the King, her uncle, died without issue.”
Sindérian threw some sticks into the fire and watched it briefly blaze up before she returned to her story.
“Nimenoë did go back to Phaôrax to see her father crowned, but I’m told she was not made very welcome. As Ouriána was then the heir, I think no one liked the confusion of having her twin at court. And they were growing into beauties by that time, you see, and perhaps Ouriána, who was finally beginning to receive the attention she craved, felt a little diminished by the presence of her sister. There was no quarrel, but from that time on there was a certain coolness between them, and the letters that went back and forth became less frequent.
“I should have mentioned that Nimenoë did not go to Phaôrax alone. It is, in its way, a most important point. Naturally, a seventeen-year-old princess, no matter how magically gifted, could not travel such a distance unaccompanied. She went with a party of noblemen and ambassadors from Thäerie, and they were joined for most of the way by a like embassy from Leal. My father was part of that embassy, and Éireamhóine and Camhóinhann—” She broke off speaking as Kivik exclaimed loudly and Skerry half rose from his seat on the ground.
“Your pardon,” said Kivik with a shamefaced look. “You took us by surprise with that name. For a moment I thought—we thought—but I see now that it can’t have been the same man.”
“Oh, but it was the same man. You didn’t know that Ouriána’s High Priest was at one time a Master Wizard on Leal?”
“We did not know,” said Skerry. “But how—? No, we will be silent and let you finish your story, and perhaps our questions will be answered in due course.”
“Camhóinhann was one of the Nine Masters on Leal: the oldest, the wisest, by far the most powerful. Éireamhóine was his apprentice, more than a century and a half ago, but as great as Éireamhóine would become, the pupil would never compare to the master. They said Camhóinhann was the greatest wizard since Mallion Penn. He was also a prince of the old Thäerian line, who refused a crown in order to devote himself body and soul to the magical arts he loved so well—but that was before the fall of Alluinn.
“I have said he was the oldest wizard on Leal, but being also the most powerful, he looked—and was—a man in his prime. And Ouriána became infatuated. Another reason, perhaps, to envy her sister, for Nimenoë had been very briefly the great wizard’s pupil. But what attraction could a beautiful, willful child have for him, when he had lived almost two hundred years and known so many great beauties? He was flattered, he was amused, he was very, very kind. Perhaps, having been raised long ago in a royal court, he was a little too courteous, a little too gallant. Her infatuation became an obsession, though nobody knew it then.
“After the coronation, Nimenoë went back to Thäerie, and she did not return to Phaôrax to see Ouriána crowned two years later. Only one invitation to that coronation went to Leal, and of course it was Camhóinhann Ouriána sent for. He could hardly refuse. To insult the new Queen of Phaôrax—to let the whole world gossip and speculate as to the reason—would have been unthinkable. In any case, he told Faolein, she would surely outgrow her inconvenient attachment when kings and princes started suing for her hand.”
“But he was wrong?” said Kivik, across the fire.
“When he arrived on Phaôrax it seemed he had not been wrong. It was almost as though their positions were reversed,” said Sindérian, brushing back a lock of dark hair. “He wrote once to Éireamhóine to say that the Queen was very cool to him—but changed, wonderfully changed! Her small gift—so minor the Pharaxion wizards had not even seen it—had grown into a prodigious one, and she was radiant with power.
“He wrote a second time to say that she had gathered around her a circle of magicians, and they were experimenting with fragments of Otöwan sorcery she had dredged up from somewhere. The dangers she faced were obvious, and so he had warned her, but he was in no position to dictate to her in her own kingdom, no matter how young and inexperienced she might have been. That was the last letter that Camhóinhann sent back to Leal. No one knows what happened between them after that. But later, when Ouriána announced her ‘apotheosis’ and named him as her High Priest—then you may believe there was astonishment and great consternation on Thäerie and on Leal. Even so, it was not until word came of his terrible transformation that the wizards at the Scholia abandoned all hope of his return and named another to take his place among the Nine Masters.
“But I have strayed from the tale that I meant to tell you,” said Sindérian. “We were speaking of Ouriána and Nimenoë. When Ouriána declared sovereignty over all the old Empire lands—when the High King on Thäerie, and all of the kings, princes, and dukes who owed him allegiance, refused to pledge her their fealty and she declared war on them—Nimenoë did lend her strength to the wards around Thäerie and the Lesser Isles. But not then, and not ever after, did she oppose her sister in any other way. When the prophecy became known, when it came into the minds of a dozen seers at once, when it was repeated again and again over the years, no one—not anyone who knew her—thought of Nimenoë, it was so certain she would never attempt to depose her sister. It was only on the day Nimenoë wed Prince Eldori that Ouriána cursed her to barrenness, fearing a son or daughter of that union as she would never have feared Nimenoë herself.
“But it is a dangerous thing, a spell of that sort, particularly when both parties involved are so very powerful. Things get twisted. So Nimenoë died giving birth to Guenloie. Yet even then, I can’t say that the sisters were truly enemies. I was there when Nimenoë died, and she did not seem to bear her sister any hatred or think Ouriána had willed her death. She might have cursed Ouriána in return, you know—a deathbed curse can be very powerful—but she took no such revenge.”
Her story concluded, Sindérian sat gazing into the flames, trying to catch a memory, trying to remember a tower room and a dying princess. Might there not have been forces at work that a twelve-year-old apprentice healer, so young, so ignorant, had failed to detect? Things get twisted, she had said it herself. And with a dying wizard of Nimenoë’s power a final turn was not impossible. Had there not been, after all, some last spell, some final magic…
“It is a tangled history,” she heard Skerry say across the fire, and the memory she had been trying to conjure became faint and faraway again. The white owl, returning from his evening flight, settled on her shoulder, and the memory receded even further.
“A very tangled history,” she acknowledged with a deep sigh. “And it may be a long time before all of the knots are untied.”
As they journeyed across Mistlewald, Sindérian’s lessons in magic resumed. Sometimes it seemed to her that Faolein was as urgent to teach as she was eager to learn, and though nothing was ever said, she felt that he believed as she did: events were everywhere hurrying on toward a crisis of catastrophic proportions.
When you make the werelight, he said during one predawn vigil, you do not create illumination out of nothing, but gather together in one place all of the light that is present, no matter how faint. This you already know. But even in total darkness we carry some light with us: sunlight, starlight, moonlight, firelight, we are absorbing it all of the time. That light, too, you can draw upon, but it is a finite quantity. If you were locked away in darkness for many days or weeks, you would soon exhaust it.
Likewise, he went on, blinking his round yellow eyes, you can draw water that is mixed with air and gather it in a cup, or in any vessel you choose. Mist to water and water to mist are the easiest transmutations of all, for both are already inclined toward change. It is a useful skill to have if you are ever at sea and the fresh water runs out. In the same way, you can gather water out of the soil. But you can perform these spells only where earth and water are already mixed. To the ignorant it may appear that you change one into the other, when all that you really do is summon whatever moisture is present.
So Sindérian practiced gathering water out of the air, separating water out of a handful of soil. Once learned, the spell was easy for her to perform. And as you grow more skilled, said Faolein, you may find you can summon water from a greater distance: from that rain cloud a mile away or the underground river that passes beneath us.
She knit her brows, working that out as far as imagination would take her—for she had learned by now that every lesson, every spell, foreshadowed another. And the force that runs along the ley lines?
Yes, he answered, after a brief hesitation, you can summon that power in much the same way that you summon light or water. But that is a spell better left to the greater adepts. A momentary lapse in concentration could fill you with such power you could never hold it.
Whenever they met other travellers they asked the same question: had anyone seen a large party riding south or west? Again and again the answer was no—until one day they met a man with a cart full of casks and a story of “white men in red robes, and a beautiful lady riding with them.” It had been two days, he said, and almost fifteen leagues. That meant that the Furiádhin were still well ahead.
“But at least,” said Skerry, “we know for certain we are on the right road. And that is encouraging news.”
Four days later they reached the foothills. No more than Winloki did Sindérian care for that country. Though better able to ward herself against voices in the night, she could not entirely shut them out—and if no ill dreams haunted her sleep, the ruined cities had enough tales to tell during daylight; the ghosts who haunted that region were so present, so voluble.
They had believed in an endless cycle of reincarnation, viewed time as a maze of many twists and turns, so that they were always looking to the past or the future, with little thought for present joys or sorrows. Many had lived only to die, making elaborate plans for the life to follow, or dreaming strange dreams of a life before—which might lie ahead when they turned the next corner. So their minds had become like mazes, too, continually running in crooked paths. In their memories Sindérian saw shadows of an old, old power, neither of the Dark nor of the Light, but pitiless, greedy; slaves to that power they had enslaved others. In their history she saw omens of things to come: what had been in ages past, what might be in days ahead, if bindings broke and ancient evils were let loose in the world again.
Meanwhile the year was withering around her. In the mornings, frost tingled in the air; in the evenings, she saw the moon as if through a thin haze of ice. So much time had passed, and she had hoped by now to be returning with the Princess to Thäerie.
Then one night Faolein returned much later than usual, just as Aell was waking Sindérian for the predawn watch—and this time he had news that sent everyone’s spirits soaring. He had flown as far as the camp of the Furiádhin and he had seen the Princess.
If the rest of you could grow wings and fly as I do, you might overtake them before sunset, he told Sindérian. As it was, given the nature of the terrain, she knew it might take two or three days.
Yet the gap between them and the Pharaxions had narrowed. Relieved of all urgency since crossing over from Skyrra, Camhóinhann and his party must have been travelling at an easy pace, while she and her companions continued to press themselves.
“They don’t know that we are here,” said Kivik as they ate a hasty, cold breakfast and sipped lukewarm tea.
“It is certain they do not, or we would never have been able to travel so swiftly and so safely,” answered Sindérian. “But even if they did know, I doubt they would consider a party the size of ours a threat, or hurry themselves because we were following.”
“Yet you continue to think that we can hinder them in some way?” said Prince Ruan, with a lift of his brows. “Four men and two wizards—one of whom has no voice or hands to work spells?”
Sindérian turned away rather than meet that keen gaze of his. “The world is full of many unfathomable chances,” she said, “and even the Furiádhin can’t always predict where lightning might strike.” Yet a desperate plan was beginning to form in her mind, she was beginning to understand what she must do. And it was not a plan she was willing to share with him—or anyone.
Though the smell of rain was often on the air, they had continued to travel dry, with the weather always ahead of them. The mountains were now so near, it looked as though it might be possible to reach out and touch them in the clear air. So when Faolein failed to return at all one night, Sindérian tried not to think of the updrafts and the downdrafts that would make flying in the high country up ahead so perilous.
She was not prepared for the news he brought with him when he finally landed on her saddlebow late the next morning. They have disappeared.
Her first joy at seeing him rapidly faded. What do you mean?
I cannot find them. And I have spoken to every bird within miles. They are not the most reliable source of information, as you may know, for their minds cannot hold a thought for very long, but they all say the same thing: Camhóinhann and the rest disappeared yesterday morning. They went under the ground—gone to earth like foxes.
She tried to make sense of that and could not. There might, of course, be caves in the mountains ahead, but she could think of no reason why the Furiádhin should go into one of them and stay for a day and a night. Perhaps, she said, the birds are confused. Or perhaps Camhóinhann has cast some spell of concealment.
But from whom would the Furiádhin be hiding? She shook her head, for it defied explanation. It had been a long time since she had believed in benevolent powers, powers that took a kindly interest in the affairs of men. At best, the Fates were indifferent. But she had never imagined they could be so cruel as to allow her to come so close, only that those she followed might disappear, without reason, without sense. Even now she could not—or would not—believe it.
I will not tell the others just yet, she decided. It may turn out that the birds are mistaken.
Until now, Sindérian had been careful to move quietly through the world, using as little magic as possible, hoping in that way to avoid attracting Ouriána’s attention, to go undetected by those ahead. But with the disappearance of the Furiádhin and their prisoner she grew reckless, throwing her senses wide, soaking in all the influences of the countryside around her.
The ghosts and their dark history she already knew. Otherwise, it was an ordinary record of suns and moons and passing days: the flight of a hawk, a dim memory of some traveller bolder than the rest who had braved the hill country until night terrors drove him back. She searched through it all, found the thread she was looking for, and followed it to the lower slopes of Penadamin, in the Fenéille Galadan. Her companions, not quite understanding what she was doing, allowed her to lead them on.
All this brought her to an ascending track, where it did not take a scout or a tracker to see that a party of twenty or more had passed in the last few days, the prints were so clearly marked where mud had dried and captured them. And when they came to the cleft in the mountain and entered the rocky gorge, the stench of black magic, the smell of recent bloodshed, were unmistakable.
But when the trail abruptly terminated at the base of a cliff with the carcass of a dead horse, four puzzled faces turned in her direction.
“They can’t—they can’t have walked or ridden through solid stone,” said Kivik.
“No,” she answered grimly. “I am afraid that the mountain opened up to receive them.”
There was a long, dumbfounded silence, during which she fervently wished she had warned the others what to expect. Then Prince Ruan said, “You think there is a hidden entrance?”
“I know there is an entrance. A pair of doors—I can’t see them but I can feel them—just there.” She indicated the place with a weary gesture.
“And you can open them?” Skerry asked with a hopeful look.
“That I don’t know,” she answered, swinging down from the saddle and skirting the body of the horse. In warmer weather, the smell would have been unbearable, yet it was not the carcass that made her stomach twist into knots or her scalp crawl. “But I mean to try.”
There are magics here it would be unwise to meddle with, said Faolein’s warning voice in her mind. And look at the horse: there ought to be scavengers somewhere about, but nothing has touched it. That isn’t natural. We should be away from here.
Sindérian was scarcely paying attention. A reckless mood was still on her, and in that mood good advice generally fell on deaf ears. Those spells are easiest that encourage things to do what is already in their nature. Faolein had said so himself. And it was the nature of doors to let people in, as much as keep them out.
But hours later, sitting on the ground and glaring at the place where she knew the doors to be—having run through every likely spell she could remember or devise on the spot—she was finally forced to admit defeat. A series of runes and other signs were scratched in the earth before her, where she had been drawing them and rubbing them out for what felt like weeks. “The spell that seals these doors is far too ancient. No one studies that sort of magic on Leal—we haven’t for hundreds of years!”
Blinking back angry tears, she tried to think what she ought to do next. But she was physically exhausted, her mind a tangle of charms and spells—all of them quite useless—and the effort required to form even the simplest plan suddenly seemed far too great.
“I suppose,” said Kivik, rising from his seat on a nearby boulder, “that it will take us weeks to go over the mountains in the ordinary way?”
Without looking up, Sindérian nodded, one short, sharp motion of her head.
“Then I think we had best begin. It is not so late, and surely we can ride for at least an hour before dark overtakes us.”
There was a rustle of movement and a clink of mail rings as the other three men stood. Hooking a strand of dark hair behind one ear, Sindérian raised her eyes to look at them. One after the other, the faces of her companions were hardening into lines of determination.
“After all,” said Skerry, “we have come this far with very little hope. I can think of no reason why we shouldn’t continue on in the same way a while longer.”
Prince Ruan offered her his hand. Too tired to refuse him, she allowed him to pull her up into a standing position.
His turquoise eyes were blazing. “As Lord Skerry says, from the very beginning we’ve had very little hope and no real plan. I don’t see that anything has changed, do you?”