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Someone was shaking her. Velda turned around in bed, confusedly, and murmured, “Em, what’s the matter?” Her bed was so hard, almost like the shelf of a tomb, and she was so cold—
Memory flooded back as she opened her eyes and saw the rocky interior of the cave where she had bedded down for the night with a handsome stranger who was certainly not her husband. Albryan was crouching over her, shaking her shoulder to wake her in semi-darkness.
“We need to go now,” he said earnestly.
“What?” Velda could discern a thin line of light entering the cave at a low angle. It must be the very break of dawn. “Why?”
“She is nearby,” Albryan answered cryptically. “We need to find Hiram and leave.”
Before she could ask any more questions, Albryan had left the cave. Not wanting to stay there alone, Velda followed him out. The shoulder of the mountain was swathed in fog. Velda squinted into the east. The sun was barely visible, a wavering line of brightness driving the fog before it. She gave a sigh of relief. It would be easy to get back to her house.
“Which way do we go?” Albryan’s voice had a queer note of panic in it, and he turned round and round in place as if trying to see through the whiteness of the fog.
Despite the grave situation, despite her hunger and exhaustion and everything that had happened the previous day, Velda smiled.
––––––––
By the time they got back to the farmhouse, the fog was lifting, and landmarks could be seen yards ahead. They found Hiram on the doorstep, anxiously scanning the fields as he waited. When they emerged out of the fog, he stood up and a sudden smile transformed his face, creasing all weariness from his brow.
Over a hasty breakfast of the things Velda had sitting around in the kitchen, they explained to the old man what had happened the previous evening. Albryan did most of the talking, with Velda answering a question here and there. Hiram took all of it in with remarkable composure.
“We are leaving today, then?” he asked at last, when Albryan finished talking.
“We have to.” Albryan cleared his plate and leaned his elbows on the little table. He looked over at Velda, who was sitting next to him. She took a last bite of her toast and set it down, no more appetite.
“The necromes are gone,” Albryan continued, looking directly at her now, “but there is still danger, for me and for you as well, Velda. The sorcerer who controls them is somewhere out there, too close for my liking, and she can track me quite effectively through the magic. Whether she can find you that way—” Albryan broke off, and shrugged. “But you would be safe in Qwu’Mallorn,” he continued. “Safe—and what’s more, this ability of yours—I think that you might be able to bring the war against Arran Sylvaissen to an end.”
“The war?” she repeated, confused. “How?”
“I don’t know yet,” Albryan admitted. “But the key to all this must be in Qwu’Mallorn. I’ve never heard of anything like this ability you have.” He looked over at Hiram, who shook his head gravely, his sharp eyes fixed on Velda.
“You were preparing to leave Lynborder, were you not?” Hiram asked quietly. “Where are you planning to go?”
“Armour City,” Velda replied. “To—”
“To see if you could find any trace of family,” Hiram completed quietly, and Velda remembered, all at once, that the old man himself had come here searching for the same thing, and was the first clue of any kind she’d ever had that perhaps her family was out there after all...
“And you—you’re going with Albryan?” she queried. “To the Forest of the Morning?”
He nodded. “There are few places where one such as me can find refuge.”
“One such as you?”
“An enemy of the Vailanan king,” Hiram clarified. His voice was still soft, and he hesitated for a moment before starting to speak again.
“With all that you two have just told me—with your gift, Velda,” he began, “going to Armour City with our king on the throne would be like sailing full-mast into a storm. I do not know what your ability portends, yet it is unique, and bound to attract attention at some point. As for your birth family”—he glanced quickly away and back towards her again—“that trail is nineteen years cold. You are unlikely to find more than I have found here.”
Hiram held her gaze for a long moment, until Albryan touched her arm and she turned to look at him. The question still lay naked in his eyes.
“I’ll come with you,” Velda said, hiding her lingering doubts behind a genuine smile. “To the Forest of the Morning.”
The smile that Albryan gave her in return seemed to light up the whole room without any aid needed from the absent sun.
––––––––
They left that same day, collecting Hiram’s mule in town and loading it up with sackfuls of travelling supplies. Velda left a few notes at the monastery: where she was headed; that her pigs had escaped and could be kept by anyone who happened to catch them. Free bacon, she knew, would be a marvellous distraction from whatever they happened to discover in her wake. She was not sure what anyone would make of the heap of necromes—now freshly reduced to human corpses—that she had left in old Stein’s fields. “Best say nothing and get away quickly,” Albryan advised when she asked him, and Velda could have sworn she saw a sudden amusement dance in Hiram’s eyes as he looked on.
Velda had spent all her life in the same corner of the map, the eastern extremity of the Svanlyn mountains just before the range broke off into the Sea of Calms. The furthest she had ever been from home was the town of Palace, fifty miles away, slightly higher into the mountains, and half the size of Lynborder. She had never even been to Sulshome, the mid-sized mercantile town from which ships set sail to faraway destinations.
The Forest of the Morning was in truth not much further away than Palace, though it was a winding route from Lynborder down to the lowlands. At the foot of the mountain lay a wide, shallow canyon of land populated by Vailanan farmers. Known as the “land of the delta-valley,” it was well-watered, with tributaries from the mountains flowing into the mighty River Granite, densely wooded, and host to many acres of fertile farmland. The shortest way to Qwu’Mallorn was to cross the delta-valley—an easy, scenic journey, as Albryan and Hiram both described it—and then climb into the flint hills that formed the western border. The Morgei had erected some sort of magical barrier all along the border, to prevent invaders from penetrating into their sacred lands.
“We won’t be safe until we’ve crossed the Border,” Albryan warned them, more than once, along the way. “We’ll be in Vailana, on Arran Sylvaissen’s lands. We have to reach Qwu’Mallorn before he realizes we’re there.” A heavy shadow would cross Albryan’s eyes whenever he spoke thus, and Velda would think of the savage creatures she had somehow overcome, and of the people in the town she was leaving behind, and wonder whether she was making the right choice. But there was something about Albryan which drew her irresistibly to him, and despite his obvious burdens he was never anything but soft-spoken and courteous towards her.
The road down from Lynborder was a well-travelled one, yet according to Hiram it was very lonely, these days, compared to what it would have been twenty years ago. They only met one other travelling party on the mountain road, a small caravan of traders and fortune-seekers bound for Sulshome. It was late evening when they came face-to-face with the caravan’s wagons slogging up the winding road, and the three of them gratefully accepted the guard captain’s offer to camp with them for the night and trade news.
The news from Vailana did not sound hopeful. “Whole land’s going to shit,” said one of the fortune-seekers, a lad no older than sixteen who had apparently joined the caravan in Asmyth. He was one of a knot of boys from small villages and farms, seeing no future in the place they had been born. Most of them were hoping to become sailors, or somehow set themselves up in Sulshome as labourers. There were a few girls in the group as well, and a young couple with a small child.
“Watch your language, Bert,” the young father cautioned. “There’s ladies present.”
The young man scowled. “I can’t tell the truth about what our king’s doing to the country? No-one comes through Asmyth anymore except for his armies. There was a big group come marching through two weeks ago, heading for the delta-valley. Couple o’ idiots from Asmyth even joined up with them.” He shook his head. “I wanted nought to do with it. So much for our king.” He turned and spat into the campfire.
Albryan stirred. “Why were they going to the delta-valley?”
Bert shrugged. “Mother Thäle only knows. None of it makes a lick o’ sense to me.”
“There were rumours, in Armour City,” spoke up the young mother, restraining her child as it gazed covetously at the bright coals in the fire. “Sedition and rebellion. It seems some of the folk in the delta-valley were harbouring those with the Mage-Gift.”
The others muttered a little at this, and Albryan exchanged an unreadable glance with Hiram.
“Can’t they just agree on a truce?” one of the girls said quietly. “Mages stay in their land, like they always have, and they leave Vailana to us?”
“You forget,” Bert spoke up again, “the bastard who sits the throne of Vailana is as much a mage as they are. Their war has nought to do with us, but we’re the ones suffering for it.”
“Better not to speak of such things,” the father said quietly. His wife nodded vigorously, and that was the end of the conversation.
“Why has there been such a long war?” Velda asked Albryan the next day when they were back on the road, only the three of them, the caravan making its slow way up towards Lynborder. Velda was taking her turn to ride on the mule, which Hiram had named Santie. Albryan loped beside her, tireless as always, seemingly driven on by something no-one else could discern.
“Arran Sylvaissen wants Qwu’Mallorn as part of Vailana.” The answer came quickly, and Albryan’s expression turned even more grim than usual as he turned to look back at her. “With his... particular creed, however, it is anyone’s guess what he will do with us once he has it.”
“Our king was not the first to propose that mage and nonmage should live separately,” Hiram remarked from the other side of the mule, “but he was the first Mage-Gifted ever to espouse such ideals. When he appeared and started talking of driving the Morgei back into Qwu’Mallorn, extremists in the southern regions of Vailana were happy to join him.”
“But why does he want Qwu’Mallorn in the first place? Isn’t Vailana enough?”
“For people such as him,” Albryan interjected, “nothing will ever be enough.”
“Qwu’Mallorn has always been part of Vailana,” Hiram replied. “Twenty years ago, there was no magical barrier, no reason to distrust outsiders. The Morgei always had some degree of independent rule over the forest, but they had to abide by the laws of the Council in Armour City.”
“When it became clear that the people of Vailana were siding with Arran,” Albryan said, “the matriarchs in the ruling Councils of our nine regions took control.”
“Not all the people of Vailana sided with Arran,” Hiram rebutted softly, and Albryan made an apologetic face.
“Of course not. But folk in the south—Zarath, Cythece, Cygnath—they have always been strange.”
“Very few Mage-Gifted ever lived in those regions,” Hiram said. “People fear what they have never seen for themselves. Exotic magic, strange abilities. Our king was always cautious to keep his abilities private, and let his nonmage followers do most of the polemicking for him.”
The day wore on as Hiram continued to talk, of how Vailana had been in the past, a peaceful refuge for folk of all colours and creeds. He spoke of groups Velda had only heard of in history books: the monotheistic Zammùk, fair-haired Novlayans and Arvenians, the Sang people from the eastern jungles, who shared the gift of magic with the Morgei. The old man was a vast repository of knowledge, and yet Velda had, thus far, found none of the answers she sought most. Hiram was not easy to query regarding the events of his own past. Sometimes a question or simple remark would trigger a sudden silence and stare into the middle distance, a state from which the old man recovered only when prodded. It proved impossible to sustain any kind of conversation with him on topics that were apt to trigger this. Velda had already given up, telling herself that perhaps he would be more forthcoming once they had settled down, or when he got to know her a little better.
At last, on the fourth morning of travel, they reached a small bridge over a foaming stream which leapt with boundless energy down on its way to the foot of the mountain. Albryan smiled for what seemed to Velda like the first time since she had agreed to go with him.
They turned off the trade road, not crossing the bridge, and followed the stream downhill for the rest of that morning. It was a steep and narrow road, leading between great grey, shadowy boulders. In the afternoon, the footpath finally rounded the edge of a cliff that overlooked the surrounding lands. They walked from the shadow of the mountain into the bright sunlight, and stood dazzled, with a majestic view of the way they were bound to travel.
The world seemed suddenly new-made to Velda, who all her life had been surrounded by pine-and-broadleaf forest under soaring black peaks. Far below, the ground flattened and rounded into grassland glowing a green so bright it seemed ethereal. The mountain stream cascaded right over the edge of the cliff, falling into a lazy river which wound its way through the meadow. All was peaceful, the grassland basking in the warm spring sunshine. The only sounds were the rush of the waterfall as it thundered down the rocks, the lazy hum of bees foraging in flowers nearby, the excitable chatter of long-tailed mousebirds in the berry bushes that dotted the cliff’s edge.
Albryan shaded his eyes as they stood looking down, propping his foot on a rock, much as if he were trying to see somehow beyond the distance. Finally he turned.
“We can see Qwu’Mallorn on the horizon,” he announced. Velda squinted into the east. There was a dark green blur framing the broad meadowland. Albryan gazed at it with a peculiar, longing yet almost fearful, look upon his face.
“The river below us is called the Dreaming Water,” Hiram said to Velda. “We are seeing it at an auspicious time, swelled by the mountain snowmelt. Usually it runs brown, not blue.” He turned towards Albryan. “Two days’ travel, by my estimation, until we reach the River Granite.”
Albryan nodded. Velda had grown used to the range of grim and sulky expressions he had worn since their journey begun, but his face seemed touched by a particularly deep shadow at the moment. “We’ll have to camp out tonight,” he said. “We should stop early. Crossing the river will be easier in the morning.” He looked as though he might have wanted to say more, but turned away from the view and back towards the boulder-strewn path.
They descended the steep hill-shoulder in single file. The narrow path would not allow it any other way, winding round and round towards the foot of the mountain. The air grew steadily more humid as they went. By the time they reached the bottom, they were all sticky, and the mule was switching her tail against the midges, laying her ears flat against her head.
They did not go far before Albryan called a halt. There was scrub forest and shrubland where they stopped, beside a brook which presumably also flowed into the Dreaming Water somewhere ahead. It sang through the shady trees, and the water was clear and cold as ice. They left Santie grazing happily on the soft grass beside it. Albryan found an enormous thorn-tree, probably the biggest one in those woods, and built a campfire just outside the reach of its spiky branches.
With the glow of the fire on her face and the trunk of the great tree shielding her from the intermittent breeze, Velda felt reasonably cosy, even though she was unused to sleeping outside. As darkness began to fall, she undid her hair from its bun and combed it out with her fingers in the light of the fire. She was thinking about putting it in braids, when suddenly she looked up and saw Albryan in front of her, standing uncertainly, his arms crossed over his chest and his face clouded with worry.
“Velda,” he said softly. She felt a sudden pang of anxiety, and looked around for Hiram. He was nestled in a hollow nearby, wrapped securely in his cloak and bedroll, but his eyes were still open.
“Could I have a word with you?”
Velda nodded and moved to make a space for him to sit down, but Albryan shook his head.
“Alone.” His voice was barely audible.
Something in his face made Velda forget all about her hair, and she stood up. She glanced back towards Hiram as they made their way into the woods, away from the campsite. He made no motion to indicate that he had seen them. Velda wondered if Albryan had asked him to keep his distance. For what? she wondered, and could not shake a sense of unease.
They were about a furlong away from the camp before Albryan sank down upon a fallen log, motioning for Velda to sit beside him. He glanced briefly around as she took her seat, knotting his fingers together in a way that betrayed tension. Velda wondered what on earth he wanted.
But the young man seemed in no hurry to explain himself. He sat silently for a long moment in the dusk, not looking at her. Velda grew impatient, but didn’t try to push him.
“We are not far from my homeland now,” Albryan finally said, folding his arms as if he were trying to stop himself fidgeting. “I have tried to bring you there as fast as I can possibly manage.” He drew his shoulders up, crouching forward. “I suppose I have seemed out of sorts all day,” he said. Velda’s mouth quirked, but she let him continue without interruption.
“Your ability,” he said abruptly, and turned towards her. “You truly had no idea what you were capable of?”
“Absolutely none.”
“And you’d never seen magic ever before? Never had anyone perform magic on you, near you?”
Velda shook her head. “Magic is unknown in Lynborder.”
Albryan’s eyes, shadowed grey-green in the dusk, betrayed a strange expression. It seemed almost like fear.
“And you can’t explain how the power works? What you felt when you undid that dark magic?”
Velda hesitated. “It didn’t feel... quite like me,” she finally admitted. “It was more as if there was something—something else, beside me. I can’t explain it. But I wanted to defend you—and the other thing, whatever it was, it wanted to help me. I know that sounds nuts,” she ended lamely.
Albryan gave her a long, measuring look, his eyes both seeing and not-seeing her for a brief moment. “Well, I confirm that you’re alone in there right now,” he said softly. He put a hand on the back of his neck, then quickly drew it away in the same movement, as if he had touched something that pained him. “I owe you a lot already,” he continued, dropping his voice even lower. “But I... I have to ask you to help me. Yet again.” He sounded so stricken that Velda’s breath caught in her throat.
“What’s the matter?” she whispered.
“Hiram and I explained to you how we met in the dungeons of Armour City.” She nodded briefly. Albryan took a deep breath and continued, “But I haven’t told you—haven’t told anyone—that when I was captured, they did something to me.” Velda searched his face, not understanding, as he continued to speak. “I don’t know how much you understand about magic, but it—” He broke off, seemingly searching for the right words. “For those of us who are born with the Gift, it lies at the core of our being, entwined with everything that makes us who we are. Arran Sylvaissen has put something in there, somehow, that is not me. That is wrong.” He shook his head. “Subtle, yet I have felt it grow every day since leaving his dungeon. I don’t know what he intends to do with it, whether perhaps it will grow into something dark and terrible, or somehow give him control over me, and I cannot return to Qwu’Mallorn with it still there.”
He looked like he would have continued to speak, to try to make her understand, but Velda moved forward. She reached for his hands, clasping them in both of hers. At the first mention of Arran Sylvaissen’s name, something had surged up inside her, and she had immediately recognized what it was.
Standing outside of her, the power helped her to read Albryan’s feelings in their physical contact. Strongest of all, the twin emotions of shame and fear, underwritten by a complicated nest of longings which she instinctively shied from. There was the feeling of guilt, for being captured in the first place; self-blame, for the mistake that had led him to fall into the hands of the blood sorcerer. And overlying everything, radiating from him, the strong sense of violation, wrongness, something within the self that should not be.
She leaned towards him, willing herself to go deeper, to find the source of that wrongness. Albryan’s eyes widened and flicked over her as if seeing her for the first time. His breathing came faster than usual, as she began to discern something new about him. The golden substance which flowed through him, ebbing and rising with the beating of his heart, more visible now that he was agitated, shining from within him like the natural luminescence in the heart of deep caves. She was struck by the sheer beauty of it for a moment, until she saw the blight.
Black and fragmented, swelling and pulsating like an abscess with its own blood supply, it skulked in the shadow of that golden light, sending out spiderweb-lines that reached towards his limbs, towards his lungs and heart, all from its base where it sat just below his head. Close to the source of the golden substance, too close.
Velda was suddenly transported into memory, five years back when she had still been living at the monastery. A wood-cutter had accidentally chopped off half his own hand in a remote part of the forest. It had taken his companions two days to get him to the monastery. The wound had gone a similar colour, an abscess seeping angry pus in a way that resembled what she now beheld.
At fourteen, Velda had already been well-versed in the healing arts, having learned almost everything the monks had to teach her. She was particularly gifted at stitching, with small hands and a sharp eye. But she had never seen an infection like that before. It had seemed to her to be almost alive, drawing the strength from the man as he weakened, seeking to steal his life for itself. Despite all their efforts, the man had died from the wound, and the memory, of the pus and the stench, turned Velda’s stomach even now.
She was suddenly afraid, but the outside power propped her up, fed her strength, whispered to her. She felt it calm her, infusing her with a sense of purpose as cool and calm as the mountain breeze.
We must heal him, she told the will that moved in tandem with her own.
We will heal him. She could not tell whether the reply originated in her own mind, or whether there really was someone else there with her, lending her confidence and strength, guiding her hands as she prepared to go to work.
Velda took a deep breath, and reached for the evil knot of dark sorcery.
––––––––
She could not tell how long it had been before she finally emerged, to find that somehow Albryan had collapsed to the ground and she had fallen across him. It seemed as though many hours had passed, yet the night was as she remembered it just before becoming immersed in his golden light. Frogs sang in the brook nearby, and moonlight shimmered between the new leaves of the thorn-bushes.
For one dazed moment, Velda allowed herself to feel everything just as it was. She felt Albryan’s warmth through his shirt, smelled the sweat of the day’s exertion on him. He stirred, opening his eyes to find her close to him, so near she could feel the whisper of his breath on her cheek.
The blood rushed to her face, and she began to draw away, but Albryan reached out and found the soft shadow of her hair beside her cheek, sliding his hand into it. Their eyes met, and suddenly she felt dizzy. The fear in Albryan’s eyes had been replaced by something else. He was looking at her as though she were a lifeline in the storm.
That moment, when she realized what lay in his eyes, was too much for Velda. She drew back, trembling. Albryan seemed to sense the refusal behind the movement, and set her away from him as slowly he drew himself into a sitting position on the ground. It was a long time before either of them broke the silence.
“Velda...” He seemed to be searching for the right words to say. “I... thank you.”
She remembered, then, what she had just done, and a sweet sense of accomplishment flowed through her. She remembered the way the dreadful tumour had disintegrated and turned to silver, dispersing in the golden glow. She remembered how it had resisted, and how she had fought back with determination until she found it... found the key to undoing the dark spell. It had been difficult. The spell had been intricate, woven in a far more complex way than the magic that gave being to the necromes, but she remembered the lingering thought, if there is ever a next time, it will go faster.
She was able to give him a genuine smile, then. “Please don’t mention it. I would have done it for anyone.” She hesitated. “That thing... it was like a disease. What kind of person would think of doing something like that to another?”
If Albryan found the question childish, he gave no sign of it. “The kind that practices blood magic,” he replied quietly. “This is why we have been at war for so many years.”
