Jarka Ruus

  Khyber stared, transfixed, not yet fully awake and not yet come to terms with what she was seeing.

  The Skatelow passed overhead and when she had gone a short distance beyond where the Elven girl stood watching, somewhere above the bluff east, she wheeled back and slid across the star-scattered firmament a second time, more slowly, as if searching.

  Then, abruptly, she started to come down, making a slow and cautious descent toward the grasslands that lay just beyond the woods in which Khyber and her companions slept. As she did so, Khyber saw what she had missed before. Three ropes dangled in a ragged line from the yardarm, pulled taut by the weight of the bodies attached.

  “Pen!” Khyber hissed, reaching down quickly to shake the boy awake, galvanized by sudden shock and a rush of fear.

  Penderrin Ohmsford jerked upright at once, eyes darting in all directions at once. “What is it?”

  Wordlessly, she hauled him to his feet and pointed, leaving Tagwen still stretched out and asleep at her feet. Together, they watched the Skatelow settle toward the grasslands, a ghost ship dark and ragged against the moonlit sky, the bodies at the ends of the ropes swaying like gourds from vines. The light caught those bodies clearly by then, illuminating them sufficiently for Khyber to identify Gar Hatch and his crewmen, faces empty, mouths hanging open, eyes wide and staring. There was a wizened, drawn cast to their features, as if the juices had been drained from them, leaving only skin and bones.

  “What’s happened?” Pen breathed.

  Then his fingers tightened sharply about her arm, and he pointed. She saw it at once. Cinnaminson stood in the pilot box, a thin, frail figure against the skyline, her head lifted into the wind, her clothing whipping against her body, her arms hanging limply at her sides. One end of a chain was attached to a collar about her neck; the other was wound about the pilot box railing.

  Khyber scanned the decks of the sloop from end to end, but no one else was visible. No one was sailing the airship, no one acting as Captain and crew, no one visible aboard save the three dead men and the chained girl.

  Then Khyber saw something move across the billowing mainsail, high up in the rigging, a dark shadow caught in a swath of moonlight. The shadow skittered down the lines like a spider over its webbing, limbs outstretched and crooked as it swung from strand to strand. Nothing more of it was visible; its head and body were cloaked and hooded, its features hidden. It was there for just an instant, then gone, disappeared behind the sail and back into the shadows.

  Khyber took a deep breath. It was the thing that had chased them through the streets of Anatcherae—the thing that had tried to kill Pen.

  A shiver ran down Khyber’s back when Cinnaminson turned her head slightly in their direction, as if seeing them as clearly as they saw her. In that instant, her features were clearly revealed,and such anguish and horror were mirrored there that Khyber went cold all the way to her bones. Then the Rover girl looked away again and pointed north. The thing that hung from the mainmast moved quickly in response, leaping through the rigging, changing the set of the sail, the tautness of the radian draws, and thereby the direction of the airship. The Skatelow began to lift away again, turning north in the direction Cinnaminson had pointed. The crooked-legged thing darted back across the moonlight, then fastened itself in place against the mast, hunching down like a huge lizard on a pole.

  Seconds later, the airship disappeared behind the rise of the bluff, and the sky was empty again.

  In the dark aftermath, Khyber exhaled sharply and exchanged a hurried look with Pen. Then she jumped in fright as Tagwen stood up suddenly next to her, rubbing at his bleary eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Don’t do that again!” she snapped furiously, her hands shaking.

  They told him what they had seen, pointing north at the empty sky. A look of disbelief crossed his rough features, and he shook his head, blinking away the last of his sleep. “Are you certain of this? You didn’t dream it? It wasn’t just the clouds?”

  “It’s tracking us,” Pen answered, his voice dismal and lost-sounding. “It’s killed Gar Hatch and his Rover cousins, and now it’s using Cinnaminson to hunt us.”

  “But how did it get aboard the Skatelow?”

  No one could answer him. Khyber stared at the empty sky, trying to reason it through. Was there a connection between the creature and the Druids? Could it have gotten aboard the Skatelow while the Galaphile had the Rover airship in tow? That would mean Terek Molt had deliberately lied to them about sending the Skatelow safely on her way. But why do that? For that matter, why bother to put the creature aboard the Skatelow at all if the Druid intended to hunt Penderrin on his own anyway?

  Whatever the answer, someone was going to an awful lot of trouble to prevent the boy from attempting to rescue his aunt. So someone must think he had a very good chance of succeeding, even if the boy himself thought he had very little. It was an intriguing conclusion, and it gave her unexpected reason for hope.

  Pen was staring at her. “Do you think the Elfstones could be used against whatever’s got Cinnaminson?”

  She gave him a doubtful look. “We don’t even know what it is, Pen. It might be human, and the Elfstones would be useless.”

  “It doesn’t look it.”

  “Whatever it is, we’re not going to fight it if we don’t have to.” She motioned toward the bluff. “Let’s get out of here. We can stop and eat when it gets light. I don’t want to chance it coming back again.”

  Pen stood his ground, his mouth a tight line. “Did you see the way she looked at us?”

  Khyber hesitated.

  “She saw us. She knew we were here. Yet she turned the ship the other way.” His voice was shaking. “She’s being made to track us, Khyber. Maybe her life depends on whether or not that thing finds us. Yet she steered it away. She saved us.”

  Tagwen shook his bearded head. “You don’t know that, young Pen. You might be mistaken.”

  The boy kept staring at Khyber. She had a sinking feeling in her stomach as she realized what he was about to ask. She had to stop him, even if it meant lying to him about what she had seen. But she could not bring herself to do that. That was the coward’s way out. Ahren would not have lied in that situation. He would have told Pen the truth.

  “We can’t do this,” she said.

  “We have to!” he snapped. His face had an angry, almost furious look. “She saved us, Khyber! Now we have to save her!”

  “What are you talking about?” Tagwen demanded. “Save who?”

  “She’s not our concern,” Khyber pressed. “Our concern is with your aunt, the Ard Rhys.”

  “Our concern is with whoever needs our help! What’s wrong with you?”

  They faced each other in stony silence. Even Tagwen had gone quiet, looking quickly from one face to the other.

  “We don’t have any way of saving her,” Khyber said finally. “We don’t know anything about that creature, nothing about what it will take to overcome it. If we guess wrong, we’ll all be dead.”

  Pen straightened and looked off to the north. “I’m going, whether you go with me or not. I’m not leaving her. I have to live with myself when this is over. I can’t do that if something happens to her that I might have prevented.” He glanced back at her, the angry look suddenly pleading. “She isn’t the enemy, Khyber.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then help me.”

  She stared at him without answering.

  “Khyber, I’m begging you.”

  He wasn’t asking Tagwen; he was asking her. With Ahren Elessedil dead, she’d become the unofficial leader. She was the one with the Elfstones and the magic. She was the one with the lore. She thought about the choices she had made on the journey and how badly many of them had turned out. If she made the wrong choice here, it might cost all of them their lives. Pen’s heart ruled his thinking; she had to remember to use her head.

  She found herself wondering what Ahren would do in that situation but was unable to
decide. The answer would have come quickly and easily for him. It would not do so for her.

  She looked off into the trees and the night, into the shadows and darkness, searching for it in vain.

  Thirty

  When Grianne Ohmsford reached the rim of the Forbidding’s version of the Valley of Shale, Weka Dart was gone. Fled out of fear, she decided, too terrified to remain once the Warlock Lord appeared. Even so, she took a moment to look for him, thinking he might be hiding in the rocks, his sharp-featured face buried in his hands. But there was no sign of him.

  He would be back, she told herself. No matter what happened, he would be back.

  She wondered at her certainty about this, and decided rather reluctantly that it was fostered in part, at least, by the comfort she found in his presence. In a better world, such as the one from which she had come, she might not have tolerated him at all. Here, she had to take what friendship she could find.

  She started back down the mountainside. Silence enveloped her, a hush that felt strange in the wake of the disappearance of the shades that had tormented her on the way in. They had all vanished, drawn back down into the netherworld with the Warlock Lord. Yet the memory of them haunted her, voices whispering at the back of her thoughts, damp fingers trailing lightly across her unprotected skin, an insidious presence.

  The sun was rising, turning the eastern horizon the color of ashes, gray and damp against the departing night. Another day of low clouds and threatening skies. Another day of colorless gloom. She felt her already battered spirits sink at the prospect. She wanted out of this miserable place, out of this world of savagery and despair. She pondered on the words of Brona’s shade. A boy is coming. The pronouncement confounded her, no matter how often she repeated the words in her mind. What boy? Why a boy in the first place? It made no sense to her, and she kept thinking that it must be a puzzle of some sort, the secret to which she must find a way to unlock. Shades were famous for speaking in riddles, for teasing with half-truths. Perhaps that was what had happened here.

  She stopped for a moment and closed her eyes, feeling dizzy and weak. Her encounter with the Warlock Lord’s shade had left her battered of mind and body, light-headed and unsteady. She could feel an aching not only in her muscles and joints, but also in her heart. Just standing in the presence of the shade had left her sickened. Its poison had permeated the air she breathed and the ground she walked. It had infused the entire valley, though she had not been aware of it until now. Evil—in its rawest, most lethal form—had infected her. Though she had resisted the Warlock Lord’s offer to embrace it, it had claimed her anyway. She wouldn’t die from it, she thought, but she would be a long time ridding herself of its feel.

  The dizziness passed, and she walked on. A boy, she kept thinking. And she must wait for him. She could do nothing from this end, nothing that would set her free. She did not believe it; there was always something you could do to help yourself in any situation. There was always more than one way in or out of any place, even this one. She need only find what it was. But even as she told herself it was so, she found reason to doubt the words. No one—until now—had ever found a way out of the Forbidding, not after thousands of years. No one had ever found a way in, once the wall of magic was set in place. It was a prison that did not allow for escape.

  It was light by the time she reached the base of the mountains: the same sooty gray light that seemed to mark every day, the clouds slung low against the earth, fused with mist and darkened by the threat of rain. Weka Dart was sitting on a rock at the trailhead, chin in his hands, looking south across the flats, but he leapt to his feet on hearing her approach and was waiting eagerly as she came up to him.

  “I thought you weren’t coming back, Straken,” he announced, not bothering to hide the relief in his voice. “That shade, so terrible, so threatening! It didn’t want you?”

  She shook her head. “Nor you, so you needn’t have run away.”

  He bristled with indignation. “I didn’t run! I chose to wait for you here!” His cunning features tightened as he prepared to lie. “I realized that you could not afford to be disturbed during your summoning and decided to come back down here to keep watch against . . . whatever might intrude.” He spit. “It worked, didn’t it? Were you bothered in any way? Hah! I thought as much!”

  She almost laughed. The truth wasn’t in the little Ulk Bog, but she didn’t find herself angry or even disappointed. It was simply his nature, and there was no point in hoping for anything else. Candor was not a quality she was likely to see much of in Weka Dart.

  “If I had thought you needed protection from that shade, if I had not believed you to be a Straken of great power and experience, I would have stayed to see that you were kept safe!” he continued hurriedly, clearly not knowing when to stop. “But since there was no reason for worry, I came down here, where I knew I could be of more use to you. Tell me. What shade was it you spoke with?”

  She sighed. “A warlock of immense power.”

  “But its power was no greater than yours or you would not have dared summon it. What did it tell you?”

  She sat down next to him. “It told me I must go back to where you found me.”

  Instantly, his demeanor changed. “No, no!” he insisted at once. “You mustn’t go back there!”

  She stared at him in surprise. His distress was reflected on his rough features, revealed by the way the furrows on his brow deepened and knotted and his mouth tightened.

  He seemed to realize he had overreacted. “What I mean to say is that you’ve already barely escaped a Dracha. What reason would you have to risk another encounter? I thought we had decided we would go to . . . I thought . . .”

  He trailed off. “What did we decide, exactly? Why did we come here? You never said.”

  She nodded, amused by his confusion as much as troubled by his distress. “We came here so that I could speak with a shade, Weka Dart. I was not given a choice as to which one.”

  The Ulk Bog nodded eagerly. “But you did speak with one. What did you ask it? Why did it tell you to go back to where you had come from? What was its reason for doing so? It must be trying to trick you, perhaps to see you hurt!”

  She considered her answer carefully. “I don’t think it wants me hurt. Not in the way you suggest. What I asked was how to find my way home again.”

  Weka Dart bounded up from the rock to face her. “But you won’t reach your home from there! You were lost already when I found you! Anyway, that place is too dangerous! There are dragons everywhere, some worse than that Dracha you encountered!” He was practically jumping up and down now, his hands balled into fists. “Why do you have to go back there to find your way home? Can’t you find it from somewhere else?”

  She shook her head, watching him carefully. “No, I can’t. Why are you so upset? Are you frightened for yourself? If so, don’t come with me. I can find my own way. Go west, where you were headed when you met me.”

  “I don’t want to go west!” He practically screamed the words at her. “I want to stay with you!”

  “Well, if you want to stay with me, you have to go back to where you found me. What’s wrong with you? Are you afraid I can’t protect you from those hunting you? Is that what this is all about?”

  He flew at her in a rage, catching himself just before he got within reach, wheeling away again, then stamping the earth with both feet until she thought he was in danger of breaking his legs. “Aren’t you listening to me?” he screamed at her. “Don’t you believe me? You can’t go back there!”

  She came to her feet, ready for another attack. “Are you coming with me or not? Make up your mind.”

  He hissed at her like a snake, his face twisted into a grotesque mask, and his fingers extended like claws. She was so astounded by the transformation that for a moment she thought she had better summon the magic and immobilize him before he lost all control. But then he seemed to get hold of himself, going so still that he was frozen in his bizarrely aggressiv
e pose. He took a deep breath, blew it out, wrenched his fiery gaze away from her and directed it out onto the flats.

  “Do what you want, Grianne of the foolish heart,” he said quietly. “Go to whatever doom awaits you, whatever fate. But I will not be caught up in the net, as well. No, I will not come with you.”

  Without another word, he stalked away, moving off at a rapid pace, no longer darting from side to side as he had done all the way there, but proceeding straight ahead, south into the Pashanon. She watched him incredulously, not quite believing he was giving up so easily, certain he would turn around and come back after he had gotten far enough away to make his point.

  But he did not turn around or come back. He kept walking, and she kept watching him until he was out of sight.

  She found a stream from which to drink, then began retracing her steps west. She was near exhaustion from her encounter with the shade of Brona, but she didn’t think she should try to sleep until she reached less open country. She was hungry, as well, but as usual there was no food to be found. She thought she might find some ground roots when she reached the forests again, but there was no way to be certain. Grudgingly, she admitted that having Weka Dart along would have solved the problem, but the Ulk Bog just wasn’t worth the trouble. It wasn’t entirely his fault, of course. He couldn’t understand what she was trying to do, and that frustrated him. It was better that he was gone.

  Nevertheless, she couldn’t help puzzling over his extreme reluctance to return to where he had found her. He was adamant about avoiding that place, and she thought there was more to it than his fear of encountering the tribal members he had fled. Something else was going on, something he was keeping to himself. Had she wanted to, she could have used her magic to force it out of him, but she no longer did things like that just to satisfy her curiosity. That approach to problem solving belonged to the Ilse Witch, and she was careful to keep it in the past.