“We came a long distance,” the Sitha said, then sprang down the hillside as lightly as a deer. He reached Eolair’s side in a moment, and looked him over with a slight frown. “Your face shows pain. Have you been wounded?”
Eolair smiled. “No—well, yes, I was, but that is not the cause of my discomfort now. My hip aches. It is what happens when we mortals age—our bodies do not last as long as our wits.”
Jiriki’s face remained serious. “I wish that were true for all your folk, but some appear to lose their wits very young, or never to have them at all.” He shook his head; his fine hair, caught by a morning breeze, momentarily obscured his features. Something about Jiriki was different, Eolair thought, but not in the way he looked. He was being kind and courteous, but the count could feel a subtle chill in his manner. He would never claim to understand the Sithi well, or to be able to read their thoughts in their faces, but he had been a servant of many mortal rulers and had bargained in many courts in many lands; he recognized the signs that something was wrong.
“How is the woman we brought—Tanahaya, if I have her name right?” Eolair asked. “Our mortal healers did all they could for her, I promise you. If you remember the Wrannaman Tiamak, he and his wife struggled to save her in every way they knew.”
Jiriki nodded slowly. “I can tell. And they have my gratitude for that. It is hard to say whether she will survive.” He looked down the rise to where Morgan kneeled, scooping water out of a stream and drinking deeply. As they both watched, the youth dunked his red-gold head into the water, then pulled it out again with a gasp of shock.
“Bloody Tree, that’s cold!” he shouted.
“And is this truly the grandson of Seoman and Miriamele?” Jiriki asked. “No, do not answer. I can see them both in him, bones and breath. What an awkward creature Simon was when I first met him!”
“I thought the same,” said Eolair. “But there was always more to him than showed on the surface. Miriamele too. I suspect it will also prove true with the grandson.”
“We may hope.” Something in his tone made Eolair look at him again, trying to fathom what might lurk behind the placid, high-cheekboned face. “Bring the young prince back to the fire circle when you are ready,” Jiriki said at last. “There is much to talk about. Not all will be to your liking—or mine, for that matter—but this has waited too long already.”
Jiriki turned away, leaving Eolair to wonder what he meant, but fearing the answer.
• • •
As he led Morgan up the slope toward the fire circle, Eolair was surprised to see that a fire burned in the wide pit even on this bright, warm summer morning. Several Sithi waited there, including Aditu, who sat beside the fire as if she hadn’t moved since the previous night. This time she wore a long, hooded robe dyed in many shades of blue, from pale sky to deep near-violet, modest garments completely different from the way Eolair remembered her dressing in the past—something he had never forgotten, even after so many years. In fact, every occasion on which he had met with Aditu no’e-Sa’onserei remained nearly whole and perfect in his mind. It was not just her golden beauty that made her memorable, although she was very beautiful, even to one who was not of her kind, but the lightness of her spirit—light as smoke, light as drifting ash. To be with her was to feel an odd peace. It was only after the last time they had met that Eolair had realized that Aditu seemed to have no fear whatsoever. To be in her presence, even in the most frightsome times, was to find a light in a dark place.
As they approached her, Eolair also remembered that Aditu had told him the night before that she had changed, but other than her more decorous clothing, he could see nothing different from the first time he had seen her, near the end of the Storm King’s War. So what could she have meant?
Almost as if she heard his thoughts, Aditu turned and smiled. She was the only Sithi the count of Nad Mullach had ever met whose smile seemed as natural and reassuring as a mortal’s, and by the undemonstrative standards of her people, Aditu smiled often and broadly. As they approached she stood up, and in doing so, let fall her blue-hued robe. Beneath it she was dressed more like the old days Eolair remembered, partly naked like a child and unconcerned with the discomfort it created for mortals. But that belly of hers, that round, golden belly as big as a sugar melon, was something decidedly new.
Eolair stumbled a little and was furious with himself, afraid that it would look like the feebleness of age. Aditu was with child. What did that mean? Did it have any bearing on the years of silence between the Sithi and the Hayholt?
By the time they reached the fire pit she had pulled on a short, flimsy jerkin that covered her down to her hips, making it a bit easier for Eolair to look at her without feeling discourteous. He took her hand in his, as he wished he had done the previous night, and brushed it with his lips.
“It is good for my heart to see you again, Lady Aditu,” he said. “Or is it ‘Princess’?”
“You should not call me that, Eolair,” she said, but her tone was gentle. “It is not a word we use or even truly an idea that we have. That was only a bit of Yeja’aro’s unhappiness coming out.”
The way she said it, the suggestion that she apologized for Yeja’aro, caught Eolair’s attention: it seemed he meant something to her. Could he be the father of her child? Eolair realized he knew almost nothing of how the Sithi dealt with such things. Did they marry? “Then at your insistence,” he said, “but to my pleasure, it will be Aditu and Eolair.” He smiled, simply because looking at her again after all these years made him want to smile. “It was good to see Jiriki, too. I thought he was going to join us here.”
“We will see him very soon. But, as always, there are things that must be done, my good Eolair, and they must be done certain ways. You understand that, I think?”
“I think I understand that as well as any mortal man alive,” he said, and laughed at the truth of it. “I have lived most of my life waiting for things to be done in their certain ways, in every capital in every country. As I look back, I marvel at how much ceremony I have endured without going mad.”
“Our ceremonies are very different than yours,” Aditu began, then interrupted herself. “Oh! Please, Prince Morgan, I ask your pardon. Count Eolair is an old friend and my heart was very full. It made me forget my manners! Welcome to H’ran Go-jao, the most easterly of the Go-jao’e.”
“Go . . . jow . . .?” said Morgan.
Eolair suspected the prince was repeating the word so slowly not because he was particularly interested in it, but because he was fascinated with Aditu and a bit befuddled by her. It showed that the young man had good judgement in at least one respect, anyway.
“Go-jao’e—little boats,” Aditu explained. “You will learn about them soon, I think, but now I see my brother waving to us. Come!” She sprang to her feet so nimbly despite her large belly that Eolair could only smile again. “I think that you, of all people, Count Eolair, are a person who understands ceremony, and the difference between those which are empty or only for show, and those which have true meaning.”
“I’d like to think I do, my lady.”
Aditu smiled. “So formal! Remember, we are to dispense with such things. In any case, now that my brother is ready, I think that it would be fitting for you to see our mother again.”
“Likimeya?” He would never forget Jiriki’s and Aditu’s fierce parent, although even in memory, the leader of the Sithi still made him uneasy. “Of course. I would be grateful for the chance to pay my respects.”
“Then you shall have it. Prince Morgan, you come too.” Aditu placed herself between them, took the prince’s arm and Eolair’s, and moved toward Jiriki, who waited beside a wide crevice in the tumbled rocks of the hillside. When he saw them coming, Jiriki ducked back through the opening.
“They will be confused by you,” Aditu warned them as they approached the crevice. “Do not be startled.”
&n
bsp; “Your pardon, lady,” Eolair asked, “but who are are ‘they’?” The black crack before him looked like the entrance to one of the old hill-tombs on the eastern part of Nad Mullach, tombs the local inhabitants claimed went back to Hern’s day, in the Dawn of Time.
Aditu did not answer his question. “Do not be startled,” she repeated.
She stepped ahead as they approached the opening and led them into the crevice. Eolair had only just ducked his head to follow her when suddenly the air seemed to burst into a thousand mad pieces around him. He would have shouted in surprise but so many flying things filled the air he feared they would get into his mouth. He stumbled back from the opening and the cloud of fluttering shapes followed him out, gushing past him like beer frothing out of a tumbled barrel.
Butterflies, he realized after the first few overwhelming instants. As the insects burst out into the sun they exploded into color—blue, brilliant orange, red and sunflower yellow, thousands upon thousands of butterflies all surging around and upward in a great maelstrom of shimmering wings. Beside him, Prince Morgan had stumbled backward and was now sitting on his rump, staring at the cloud as it seethed and fluttered all around them, filling the air so that Eolair could see little else. At last the creatures began to settle on the naked rock of the valley’s edge and in every tree and shrub.
“Brynioch’s rainbow!” said Eolair. It was not merely an oath, but also a description. On the ground beside him, Morgan goggled like a drunkard who had mistaken a second-floor window for a door.
“Come inside.” Aditu’s voice had an echo now.
Eolair moved forward once more, careful not to step on any of the bright gleams of color now gently fanning their wings on the ground around the entrance. After a moment, Morgan climbed to his feet and followed, but his face was pale and his progress cautiously slow. Eolair reached back and gently took the prince’s arm, pretending it was to steady himself.
When he had stepped through the entrance and could lift his head, the count found himself in a wide but low cavern, dark except for an open shaft that let daylight fall through the irregular stone ceiling. All together the irregular chamber was not much larger than his own bedroom back in Nad Mullach, a beloved place he had not visited in a long time, and for which he now felt a sudden, fierce longing. He felt Morgan flinch, but kept his grip on the prince’s arm. This time it was not only to steady the boy, but himself as well.
At the center of the small chamber lay a figure wrapped from head to foot in something like the kind of linen bandages in which the funeral priests of Erkynland wrapped their kings and queens for burial. Only the face was exposed—a face he recognized as that of Jiriki and Aditu’s mother, Likimeya, though her features seemed as still and lifeless as one of the statues from Nabban’s Age of Gold.
“By all the gods, what is this?” he asked, his voice quiet yet raw, even to his own ears. “She is dead?”
Jiriki, who waited beside his mother’s recumbent form, looked up. His face still had the same cold stillness Eolair had seen that morning. “No. Our mother sleeps the Long Sleep, but she is not dead. She has slept for a long time, though—for years—without recovering, and we do not harbor much hope she will ever wake again.”
“Recovering?” Eolair let go of Morgan’s arm and kneeled beside the shrouded figure. A few butterflies still remained on the cavern’s walls; a few more walked delicately across Likimeya’s body, slowly flexing their wings, seeming to burst into color once more whenever they crossed the shaft of falling sunlight that knifed down from the chamber’s roof. When Eolair drew a little closer he could see that Likimeya was wrapped not in bandages but in layer after layer of some shining white thread, an unimaginable length of the stuff. He saw the butterflies pick their way across her sleeping form and had a sudden idea who had actually shrouded Likimeya for this strange sort of entombment. “What happened to her?”
Jiriki gave him a sharp look, as though he had said something odd, then turned away. “She was shot with an arrow in the heart.”
“Murhagh’s Red Eye! Who did this?”
Aditu stepped forward, but her gaze did not leave her mother’s expressionless face. “We do not know for certain, except that the murderers were mortals.”
“Mortals?” The count was horrified. For a time he could only stare at Likimeya’s wan, golden face. “You say ‘murderers,’” he said at last, “but she has not died. The gods willing, perhaps she will still recover and identify those who attacked her so they can be punished.”
“They will still be murderers,” said Jiriki, his voice quiet but hard as the crypt’s stone walls. “They killed eleven more of our folk. Only our mother and one other survived the attack.”
“Oh, gods, no.” Eolair could not stare at Likimeya’s empty face any longer. “No. Tell me what happened.”
“We will, but not here,” said Aditu. “The Yásira—this gathering place—belongs to our mother now. We will not sully it with any more talk of the cowardly beasts who attacked her.”
As they moved toward the cavern’s entrance, Eolair saw a few butterflies drifting back in. He thought nothing of it at first, but then had to hang back for a moment as a handful more, then dozens, flew back in.
Jiriki said something sharp to Aditu in their own musical tongue. Butterflies streamed back into the cavern in force now, circling the count’s head, filling the spaces between floor and ceiling. But where was Prince Morgan? Eolair turned in sudden apprehension and saw him standing beside Likimeya’s body, staring down at her with sickened fascination, an expression he had never seen the prince wear. “Morgan! Come away,” he called. More and more butterflies were returning to the cavern, making it harder to see past the glimmer and shadow of their wings.
The prince said something Eolair could not hear.
“What? Come away!”
Morgan spoke louder this time. “She is trying to talk—!”
Jiriki sprang across the room and crouched beside his mother’s body. “Rabbit, come to me!” he cried. “It is true.”
Aditu hurried to join him. “But she has not spoken since she was first struck down, since she survived the first fever!”
Eolair too moved closer. He could see Likimeya’s face moving in her silken shroud, but barely, as though a mere tremor of dream made its way to the surface. Aditu leaned very close and put her hand on her mother’s breastbone, then put her ear next to Likimeya’s mouth. For a moment she remained, listening intently. Then at last Aditu straightened and stood up. She curled her hands around her belly as if to protect the child within, and again spoke to her brother in their own language.
“Could you understand what your mother said?” Eolair asked her.
“I could,” said Morgan, to the count’s utter astonishment. The youth looked as though his entire world had just turned downside-up; his eyes were wide and shocked, his face pale as parchment. “I could understand her, I swear! I heard it in my head! She said, ‘All the voices lie except the one that whispers. And that one will steal away the world.” The prince had an expression Eolair had not seen before, one of complete and frightened confusion.
Jiriki and his sister both stared at Morgan, then at each other. After an achingly long pause, Aditu turned back to Count Eolair, her face unusually blank.
“Our mother is silent again,” she announced. “I do not think she will speak more. We should go from this place. We have much that is new to think about—and you two still have much to learn about all that has happened between our peoples.”
Morgan could hardly feel his feet as he walked, or his head either. He might have been a smoldering flake of ash borne aloft by a fire, something lighter than air, drifting without choice or thought. The Sitha-woman’s voice had echoed in his head as though she somehow spoke from inside him—as though her words had made their way out of the marrow of his own treacherous bones. He had never felt anything like it and never wanted
to feel such a thing again.
Count Eolair and the other two Sithi were talking busily but quietly. At any other time Morgan would have resented the way they kept their words from him, but at this precise instant he felt poured full as a pitcher whose contents would overspill if even one single drop was added.
“But what could she have meant by that?” Eolair asked.
“If we knew, I promise we would tell you what we could,” Aditu said. “As it is, we must consider this strange, unexpected message, and we must also speak to others of our people.” She wrapped her arms around her belly as they walked through the forest. “Our mother spoke much in the first days after the attack, as she struggled against the poisonous fever that threatened to consume her, but it was mostly meaningless—thoughts and memories torn loose by her deadly wound and the illness it brought.”
“You say poisonous.” Eolair was a little short of breath; Morgan could see that the pace was not easy for him. “Could it be anything like the envoy who was attacked—Tanahaya? She said she was poisoned too.”
“That is a question to be pondered,” said Jiriki. “But it is a painful, difficult subject, as I fear you will learn.”
“In any case, our mother has been silent since it happened,” Aditu resumed—rather quickly, Morgan thought, as though she wished to avoid any more talk about the envoy just now, “as she was when you first saw her today in the Yásira. Why she should choose that precise moment to break her silence, as well as the meaning of her words—and yes, young Prince Morgan heard the same strange warning that I heard, although in some different fashion, because the words we heard were in the tongue of the Zida’ya—I’m afraid that is also beyond our understanding at this moment.”
“But I fear I only have more questions for you,” Eolair said. “Questions my king and queen desperately want to have answered. What has happened to your people in these last years? Why have you been silent so long?”