3 3 “ROLAND BEGAN IT,” Ceirwan said over his shoulder as he preceded me down the narrow spiral of stairs. “He accused Miryum of pursuin’ a selfish vision of glory to th’ detriment of Obernewtyn an’ said she mun as well be takin’ coin from th’ Council fer her work against us.”
“He said that?” I muttered, but I did not doubt it. Roland was blunt and choleric at the best of times.
“Miryum asked if he was calling her a traitor, and he said he was calling her a fool but that she was too stupid to realize it. She said she pursued glory in order to make unTalented folk revere Misfits. You know how pompous she can be these days.…”
I knew. Since our return from Sador, we had applied ourselves to the problem of rendering ourselves less abhorrent to the unTalented folk of the Land, in the hope that they would someday come to accept us. Each guild had found its own means of approaching the matter.
The Empath guild had decided that they would use their abilities wherever they traveled to encourage people to feel compassion for others. More dramatically, they and the coercers had worked together to manipulate dreams so that unTalented people could momentarily experience life as hunted and reviled Misfits. During the last guildmerge, there had been a long discussion about the nature of dreams and whether or not manipulating them was any more immoral than writing a song about events that had passed, reshaping them for effect. The matter was yet unresolved, but it had become a favored topic of debate.
The Coercer guild had begun creating teaching entertainments for unTalented children using simple songs and jokes, good puppetry, and acrobatics, which made use of their hard-won physical skills. The few times they had so far performed, they had disguised themselves as halfbreed gypsies and called themselves magi. Unlike true gypsy performances, the magi show had hidden depth; beneath the jokes and stories there was always some subtle lesson designed to make the audience examine their prejudices.
Miryum had devised her own way of changing people’s thinking after reading a Beforetime book about warriors who rode about their land performing noble deeds. Inspired by these knights, who had lived by a system of ethics called chivalry, Miryum had begun riding out regularly wearing a black mask, performing good deeds, and preaching her code of chivalry to anyone who would listen. Before long, several of the younger and more volatile coercers, chafing under our new vow of pacifism, had joined Miryum’s expeditions.
No one had done anything at first, in the hope that her zeal would fade. But gossip about her eventually reached even Sutrium, and a warning came from Domick that the Council was becoming interested in talk of the mysterious coercer-knights.
Ceirwan and I came onto a narrow path that ran from the kitchen garden to the maze courtyard, and we heard Roland bellowing. “Blasted woman. You will see us all dead with your antics!”
Coming round the corner, I had a clear view of the craggy Healer guildmaster glaring ferociously at Miryum. Behind the stocky Coercer guilden were two of her coercer-knights, identifiable by the black scarves around their necks that doubled as masks. Beside Roland stood the Healer ward, Kella, a long-suffering look on her delicate features. A group of goggling youngsters stood around them.
“What is going on?” I demanded.
Roland jabbed his head toward me. “You try to make her see sense!” he growled. “She dares to claim that she is doing no worse than my healers in galloping about the Land playing the heroine!”
“Do you say we should not help people in need?” Miryum asked frostily.
“I am saying you might consider the value of a little discretion!” Roland shouted.
“To be discreet would defeat our purpose,” the Coercer guilden said with composure.
“You are naive beyond belief,” Roland said.
“Miryum.” I intervened firmly before the Healer guildmaster gave up on words and throttled the coercer. “Is it not true that at the last guildmerge, the coercers agreed to restrain the activities of the knights, given that they could cause the Council to resurrect its plan to set up a soldierguard outpost in the highlands?”
“Gevan agreed to that suggestion, not the knights,” Miryum said.
“Are your blasted knights not coercers, who should obey their guildmaster? Or do you think to replace him?” Roland raged.
Miryum did not rise to the jibe. “I do not wish to take Gevan’s place, but my philosophy and that of my fellow knights sits uneasily within the charter of the Coercer guild. I do not wish to undermine the guild’s work, but more is needed to change the status of Misfits than teaching plays. If people fear us because they see us as superior to themselves, we must ensure they know that we will use our abilities for the betterment of all who dwell in the Land.”
Roland almost danced with fury. “Gevan’s plays are subtle, and people will not resist what he teaches because they do not know they are being taught. But your performances are as delicate as a hammer blow! Not only that, but they also indicate that we see ourselves as an elite. Do you think that will incline people to look on us with favor?”
“The people we aid are genuinely grateful,” Miryum said with rather touching dignity.
I could not help but admire her aplomb, but like Roland, I thought exaggerated heroics far too simple an approach to an old and complex problem.
“Miryum,” I said sternly. “Gevan is guildmaster of the coercers, and in your guild’s name, he made an undertaking to Rushton. As a coercer sworn to that guild, and an office bearer within it, you are bound by its rulings. Are you not also bound by your own code of chivalry, which demands that your word be as enduring as stone?”
Miryum was silent, and the color rose slowly in her cheeks. “You are right,” she said simply. “We will not ride out again until this matter is resolved.” She bowed to me and then to Roland, and departed, followed by the two other coercer-knights.
“Say what ye will of Miryum, but this code of hers bestows great dignity,” Ceirwan murmured as the children drifted back to their games.
Roland gave the Farseeker guilden a black look before stalking away.
“What on earth started it this time?” I sighed.
“Roland went into Darthnor and was questioned by a rabble of miners as to whether he had seen this band of murderin’ masked rebels sent out by Henry Druid,” Kella said softly.
“But Henry Druid is dead!” I said, taken aback. The rebel Herder priest had perished in the White Valley in a terrible firestorm that destroyed most of his followers along with his secret encampment. “Where would such rumors come from?”
“I dinna ken, but Roland is right in sayin’ it will make things difficult in the highlands if people start becomin’ jumpy,” Ceirwan said.
A young teknoguilder had been among those watching the confrontation. I called him over before he could leave and asked if he or others of his guild had noticed anyone snooping about the White Valley. The Druid’s encampment there had been secret, but there had been rumors aplenty. If there were soldierguards in the highlands looking for him, that was where they would go.
The teknoguilder said that he had not heard of anyone wandering around, but that in any case Garth had most of them in the city under Tor. They had learned that the Reichler Clinic had kept its most important records in the basement of the building that housed the Reception Center.
I was puzzled. “Then they are lost to us still, for the bottom of the building is under water and earth. Unless Garth has found some way to transform people into fish.”
The teknoguilder opened his mouth, then shut it again. But I received a clear visual image of someone swimming beneath the water.
“What is Garth up to?” Ceirwan sent to me, for he had seen it, too.
I told the teknoguilder to let his guildmaster know that I would call on him in the Teknoguild cave network that afternoon. But he flushed and said apologetically that Garth had gone down to Tor three days before. This surprised me, because Garth seldom left the caves just outside Obernewtyn’s wall.
As the teknoguilder hurried away, I turned to speak to Kella, but she had slipped away. “That girl is like a wraith,” I muttered.
“She grieves,” Ceirwan said gently.
My fleeting annoyance at Kella dissolved into pity, for I knew Ceirwan was right. The young healer still mourned the end of her relationship with the estranged coercer Domick.
This brought me back to the Coercer guild, for I felt sure that it was Domick’s defection that had paved the way for Miryum and her knights to consider forming a splinter group. The guild had always been somewhat troubled because of the mind-controlling aspects of its members’ Talent, and the shift to pacifism had been more difficult for them than any other.
More than ever I missed Dameon, for he had the gift of seeing to the heart of such impossible disputes.
Taking a side corridor, I came out of the building onto a path that ran along the west side of Obernewtyn. A wall constructed too close to the other side of the path meant that almost no sun reached the narrow walkway; as a consequence there were still deep drifts of snow along each side. The path would originally have been used by servitors bringing wood to the front-room fires, but there were now more convenient ways in and out.
The wall enclosed the area that had once held Ariel’s wolf pens. Bars and gates had long since been removed and an herb garden planted in the enclosure, but it still had a grim feel, as if tainted by the cruelness of our nemesis long after he had left Obernewtyn and become a Herder agent.
I went straight through the garden and out a gate on the other side of the enclosure to a flat patch of grass, as gray and dull as an old man’s hair. This was where Ariel had tortured the wolves and half-wolves he had bred. “Training them,” he had called it, curling his pretty lip.
On the other side of the grass was the outer wall that surrounded all of Obernewtyn. A scraggy line of dead-looking shrubs ran parallel with it, continuing to the greenthorn wall of the maze. At a glance, it looked as if the maze and outer wall were one, but in fact there was a hidden lane between them.
I pushed my way through the shrubs to where a weathered bench stood against the wall. Behind it, a creeper hung in spidery tendrils that spring would transform into a thick, shiny tapestry. Beside the bench grew a small rosebush that offered the deepest crimson blooms right through spring and summerdays and even the Days of Rain, if it was not allowed to run to seed.
I did not know how the seat or the rosebush came to be there, and I could not ask without giving away my secret retreat. Only Maruman knew of it. Sitting, I realized I had half hoped the old cat would be here, but no doubt the snowdrifts had put him off.
I never thought of Maruman as intruding on my solitude. He spent so much time with his mind curled around mine that my shield took him as part of my own self and would not keep him out unless I concentrated on excluding him.
The lane was choked with weed and tough shrubs gone wild, but cleared, it would make a swifter route to the farms than the maze path, which had been designed to confuse. The maze was now clearly marked by carved posts, and some sections of the wall had been removed for ease of access on the other side of Obernewtyn, but it was still slow going during wintertime when the snow clogged every turn. My conscience pricked me, and I knew that I should mention the path. It would mean the loss of my retreat. But, after all, it was only a matter of time before one of the teknoguilders discovered it. A greater number of them explored the grounds of Obernewtyn more than even the submerged ruinous city beneath Tor.
Ever since we had stumbled on the Reichler Clinic Reception Center in the Beforetime city, the Teknoguild had been obsessed with learning more about it. We knew that the clinic had been a Beforetime organization devoted to researching Talented Misfits, then called paranormals. This was proof that Talents existed before the Great White and were a natural development in human evolution. Our amazement was redoubled when we discovered that the Reichler Clinic had been founded by a woman whose second name was the same as Rushton’s—Hannah Seraphim. Hannah had had some dealings with a man named Jacob Obernewtyn, who we believed had constructed a home, the ruins of which provided the foundations of our current Obernewtyn.
The real Reichler Clinic, too, had been sited in our valley, although there had been an earlier Reichler Clinic in a different location, which had been destroyed. The establishment of a “reception center” in the city under Tor had been a ploy to divert the attention of the Beforetime organization called Govamen, which had developed a sinister interest in the use of paranormal abilities as weapons. The Reception Center served to distribute what Beforetimers named misinformation. Anyone who tested paranormal was immediately spirited away to the real Reichler Clinic.
Hannah and her people had begun publicly to falsify their researches, claiming the abilities they had detected were weak and generally uncontrollable, but Govamen continued its surveillance. This led Hannah to undertake her own inquiries, whereupon she discovered that the destruction of their original headquarters had been contrived by Govamen to cover the kidnapping of a group of paranormals. The Teknoguild had found documents detailing the prisoners’ whereabouts and the various experiments performed upon them—documents that indicated Hannah had had a spy within Govamen. The last clear information the Teknoguild had compiled suggested Hannah had intended to rescue the paranormals. Whether or not she had done so, we had no idea, for the time of the holocaust was nigh.
Most of us accepted that we would probably never know the true history of the Reichler Clinic, and Rushton openly disapproved of time being spent on historical puzzles. He could not see any point in learning more about Beforetimers, because they were all dead and gone. What did it matter if he was related to Hannah Seraphim? It neither helped nor hindered us in our struggle to find a legitimate place in the Land.
But the teknoguilders continued to pick at the mystery like an old scab. Suddenly I had no doubt Garth had deliberately timed his trip to the White Valley to coincide with Rushton’s absence. Which meant the Teknoguildmaster was almost certainly up to something he knew Rushton would not like.
There was a crackling sound, and I glanced up to see the Futuretell guildmistress, Maryon, push her way through the shrubbery. Her expression was so blankly preoccupied that I thought she was in a trance. But then her eyes widened in surprise.
“Elspeth! I was just thinkin’ of ye.”
I did not much like hearing that. I was all too conscious that I appeared often in the futureteller’s inner journeying.
“Do ye mind if I sit by ye?” she asked.
“Of course not,” I lied.
Sitting down, she gave me a wry sideways look, and I was uncomfortably reminded that she discomposed me.
I did not dislike her. I did not know her well enough for that, and this fact alone said much, for I had met Maryon at the same time as I had met Roland, Alad, and Gevan. I thought of the latter three as friends but not Maryon. I had almost hated her when the young Herder novice Jik was taken on an expedition at her futuretelling insistence, only to die. In addition, she had allowed the young empath Dragon to follow me secretly to Sutrium, knowing this would lead to her current comatose state. All because her visions demanded it.
It was this quality of remoteness from the things she foresaw that disturbed me. Possibly I was being unfair, for many novice futuretellers lamented their helplessness in the face of what they saw. Older futuretellers were silent, perhaps becoming resigned to what they had learned could not be changed. Certainly it seemed that futureteller remoteness was not a personal trait but part of what they did with their minds and Talent. Like all coercers and some farseekers, futuretellers used the Misfit ability known as deep-probing. But whereas coercivity used a deep probe to dig into the unconscious of other minds and bend another’s will, futuretellers delved only into their own minds.
Their training focused on enabling them to descend through the conscious and subconscious layers of their own minds, all the while shielding themselves at the levels where minds lose individual focus. Here, dreams and longings both dark and bright swim like exotic fish in a thick, seductive soup. A descending mental probe could easily become lost in a memory or a nightmare or some delicious imagining. It was their goal, and I sometimes thought their addiction, to descend to the point where the barriers between all minds faded. This was the level at which myth moved from mind to mind and generation to generation. Beneath this level lay the glittering mindstream, which called to all minds to merge and surrender their individuality. This surrender would mean individual death, but twice in my life I had come so dangerously close to it as to hear the unearthly loveliness of its call-song to a final merging.
Futuretellers spent a good deal of their time hovering above the mindstream, and perhaps it was the effort of resisting the longing for that lovely death that caused their remoteness. They saw much as they hovered in this way, for the mindstream threw up bubbles of memory from the minds absorbed. Occasionally, bubbles of what would be rose, since the stream contained both all that had been and could be, but it was not the express purpose of their delving to see into the future. The futuretellers’ desire, as far as I understood it, was to know themselves deeply and, through this, to know life. They claimed that thinking intensely of a matter at this level drew thoughts from the mindstream of others, long dead, who had pondered the same questions. They believed that knowledge could be best obtained on the brink of dissolution of the individual.
Their purposes seemed strange to me, and oddly self-centered, but it was not my place to judge them. Indeed, their ability to penetrate minds had profoundly enabled them to draw healers deeper than they could go alone, and on more than one occasion, this had saved someone’s life or sanity.
“I have sometimes wondered who made this wee garden,” Maryon said, breaking her silence at last. It seemed an innocuous enough comment, but I was not deceived. Futuretellers took charge of the dreariest household duties, because the monotony allowed their minds to soar. If Maryon was talking of gardens, I had no doubt her attention was on something far more complex.
“I suppose it must have been part of Lukas Seraphim’s design,” I said blandly.
“No. The maze existed before Lukas Seraphim had Obernewtyn built. He simply had the maze replanted.”
I stared at her in surprise, for I had always assumed the maze had been the creation of Obernewtyn’s reclusive first master.
“I dreamed of Rushton last night,” Maryon went on, and now her eyes were distant and fey. “I saw him swimmin’ in dark waters.…”
Her words made me think of the image I had seen in the young teknoguilder’s mind. “Was it a true dream?”
She gave me a long look. “If ye mean was he truly in th’ water, I can nowt say. Of late, clear futuretellin’ has been difficult.”
“Difficult?” I echoed.
“It happens from time to time that there are disturbances. Lately, much of our futuretellin’ is of th’ past. ’Tis as if a storm rages above th’ mindstream, wrenching up what has been an’ drivin’ it at us like rain afore wind.”
“Do you think Rushton is in danger?” I pressed worriedly.
Maryon sighed. “I said nowt of danger.”
I debated telling her of the picture I had seen in the young teknoguilder’s mind that so disquietingly paralleled her dream, but she went on before I could speak.
“I have been wantin’ to speak wi’ ye on th’ subject of dreams,” she said. “All folk dream, an’ most sometimes dream true whether they ken it or no. Even unTalents. We recognize a true dream because it recurs. If it comes only once, whether or no it feels true, we dinna mull on it. But lately I have come to believe that true dreams can recur in a number of people, rather than in only one, an’ so my guild has begun to create dreamscapes that show th’ patterns of our dreams. T’would make the dreamscapes more accurate to include the dreams of those of other guilds, but it is impractical for my guild to record all dreams. Dell suggests that each guild keep its own dream journal.”
“So long as it does not require another meeting,” I said. Maryon’s mouth curved into a rare smile, but almost immediately a breeze blew up out of the stillness, and as the bare branches of the trees clattered together, the futureteller gazed up at them, her expression once again distant and serious. My own vague apprehensions hovered and refused to settle.
I wondered if Maryon knew anything about the dreamtrails Maruman spoke of and, on impulse, asked. She gave me a long look. “Dreamtrails is too tamish a name fer them. It suggests some windin’, pleasant path to wander on. Dream-rapids, I would sooner call them, or perilous dreamslopes.”
“Have you traveled on them, then?” I persisted.
“Traveled? I would nowt say so. I have stumbled onto them by accident, an’ sometimes I have been affrighted by encounters on them. But I will nowt speak more of them. There are many things better left unsaid. Ye’d ken that well enow, Elspeth Gordie.”
Her eyes were again on my face, as pure and direct as a beam of sunlight. I felt suffocated under her intense regard. I told myself that she must once have been a child, playing and singing, a girl who had loved and hated and feared as passionately as half-grown folk do when trying out their emotions. But it was impossible to imagine her as anything but a lofty futureteller. Wanting to break through her shell, I asked how she had come to Obernewtyn.
She lifted her dark brows, unperturbed by the personal nature of my question. “A man desired me, but I rejected him. I had foreseen he was cruel an’ violent behind his honeyed mouth an’ pretty eyes an’ made th’ mistake of sayin’ so aloud. He gathered friends an’ tried to take me. My family defended me an’ died fer it. I saw my sister killed by his hand, an’ my wits left me. I remembered nothin’ more until one day I woke here. I found that I had been condemned defective, but rather than sendin’ me to th’ Councilfarm, I was sent to Obernewtyn. Or sold mebbe.”
Maryon told her story without any visible emotion, but I could not blame her for that. I had seen my parents slain in front of my eyes, and when I thought of it, something in me turned to stone, too. More gently, I asked if her family had known she was a futureteller.
She answered in the same clear, distant tone. “I had no name then fer what I was. I nivver considered that seeing what would come from time to time made me Misfit any more than peepin’ round a corner ahead of friends. My family knew of it an’ did not speak of it as evil but only warned me nowt to tell anyone. We were seldom among folk, as our farm was remote, so there was little danger of givin’ myself away. Th’ night before they attacked our farm, I had a nightmare that my sister would die. It was so terrible, I could nowt believe it. I was even ashamed of it, because I had quarreled with her over a length of ribbon th’ day before an’ thought th’ dream some nastiness of mine comin’ out. If I had spoken, my father would have acted, fer he trusted my visions mebbe more than me. I could have saved them, but I didna speak.”
“I’m sorry,” I said inadequately.
She looked at me calmly. “There is no need fer sorrowin’. I ken now that my nowt speakin’ out back then was fer a reason, as was th’ death of my family. I dinna ken what that reason is, but I have faith that life’s purpose is finer an’ more profound than th’ purposes of me or my sister or father, an’ I serve it with my whole self willingly. That is what bein’ a futureteller means.”
She was silent for a time; then suddenly she said, “ ’Tis cold here without th’ sun. I will go in now.”
I watched her depart and found myself pitying her for the first time. I could see that she had given herself to fate as its instrument as a way of bearing the destruction of her family. Possibly, learning to see things in the way she did now was all that had enabled her to return to her senses.
I shivered, realizing she was right. The breeze had developed a sharp edge. Pulling my coat tight around me, I rose and made my way back inside.