“Am I to have a new name? Am I to forget you and Mama?”
Such questions from so young a child. His heart ached.
“I hope you will never forget us as we will never forget you. But a new name is a good idea, don’t you think? A temporary name for the time you are away. Would you like to choose it?”
“I will think of one.”
Days passed, falling into a rhythm of travel. Skills Regis had not used in years came back to him: how to set a pace that both rider and horse could maintain, when to rest, where to find water and food. At first, they came upon an inn or small village at the end of each day’s travel. Here they found stabling for the horse, hot meals for themselves, and sometimes a bath. As the lands grew wilder, human dwellings became scarce. Regis was leery of using the public travel-shelters for fear of being remarked and remembered. They might also encounter bandits who, caring nothing for shelter-truce, would see him as one man to be easily overpowered, his goods and horse seized. In the end, he took the risk. If he had been alone, he might have chanced finding what shelter he could. The nights were still cold and wet with freezing rain turning into snow, and he decided the greater danger was to Kierestelli’s health. Fortunately, they never met other travelers. Some god—Aldones himself—watched over them.
They reached the River Kadarin on a sullen gray afternoon. The water was turbulent with its own storms. Froth laced the slate-dark water. The far shore was rocky, the trees leafless and stark as a thicket of thorns. A bitter wind whipped down from the Hellers. The dun tossed its head, tail clamped against rump. It didn’t like this place.
Me, either. Regis remembered stories of wolves ravening through the wild lands beyond the Kadarin. Human wolves roamed there as well.
The bank curved into a natural cove where a ferry boat was tied up at a wharf. A hut and outbuildings stood nearby, and a thread of smoke curled upward from a crude stone chimney.
Regis called out a greeting. An old man emerged from the hut in response. His beard was a wisp of river foam, his back bent, and his movements spare and nimble. He halted a few paces from the horse and swung his head from side to side in an odd searching gesture. Cataracts whitened his eyes.
“We seek river passage, friend. Is the ferryman about?”
“He stands here before you.”
Before Regis could stop her, Kierestelli jumped to the ground. She showed no fear, only curiosity. Awe lighted the ferryman’s weathered features.
“Forgive me, Child of Grace! I never thought to behold one of the beautiful folk!”
Kierestelli turned back to Regis with puzzlement in her eyes. “Papa, what does he mean?”
Blessed Cassilda, he thinks she’s a chieri!
“We must cross the Kadarin as soon as possible,” Regis said.
“Aye, and on to the Yellow Forest.” The ferryman nodded, as much to himself as to anyone else. “Long have I searched for them, back in the days when I still burned with dreaming. But they would not be found. Not by me, oh, no, not by the likes of me. But you, you with this child I mistook for a moment . . .” He tilted his head, and Regis had the uncanny feeling that the old man saw far more in him than a tall man in a hooded cloak, that the ferryman saw through the Hastur beauty to the very heart of his cells and the chieri lineage of the Comyn.
“. . . I think they will find you.”
Uneasy, Regis glanced at the river. The ferryman was not only half blind, but half crazy as well. Still, who could tell about anyone who lived here, on the border of the wild lands? And who was the greater fool, the old man with his dreams of searching for a lost, ancient race in the trackless forest, or Regis for believing him?
Regis hesitated as the boatman shuffled off toward the ferry, gesturing for them to follow. Then Kierestelli pulled at his hand. She appeared to have no doubts. He decided to trust her instinct. In the end, what choice did he have? They could not cross the Kadarin on their own.
The boatman made the ferry ready and gestured for them to board. He turned his face toward the river, although how even a sighted man could make out anything in the shifting currents, Regis did not know. Kierestelli jumped, light and nimble, onto the ferry’s flat surface.
The dun snorted and balked at the edge of the wharf. Regis took hold of the reins and brought the horse’s head down. Speaking soothingly, he stroked the tense neck. As far as he knew, he had no trace of the Ridenow Gift of empathy with animals, but he had handled horses all his life. The terror in the dun’s eyes faded. Its muscles relaxed, and it dipped its nose. It moved forward, lifting each foot high. Its hooves made a hollow sound on the wooden deck
The boatman cast off the mooring lines and poled the ferry away from the shore. Seized by the currents, the craft rocked and tilted. The gelding tensed but held steady. Kierestelli positioned herself at the rail and peered over the purling waves.
At first, it seemed the currents were shoving and pulling the little craft and that all the boatman’s efforts had no effect. They would surely be carried downstream or overturned to drown. The old man showed no fear. His expression, eyes half closed, nostrils flaring as if to catch the river’s scent, resembled that of a hunter closing on his prey . . . or a lover wooing his lady.
The motion of the ferry changed. The sounds of water and wind blended like music. They glided across the river, slipping through the waves like dancers moving through the figures of a set. Kierestelli clapped her hands and the boatman grinned.
When the ferry reached the wharf on the far side, Regis almost felt sorry the crossing was over. He paid the boatman more than the usual fee. The dun leaped free of the boat and clattered across the wood-plank wharf, eager for solid land.
Before them lay tangled thickets and broken rocks rising to hills covered by twisted, leafless trees. The air was less chill than over the water but also less welcoming. It seemed to Regis that winter had never lifted from this forest.
Regis lifted Kierestelli to the horse’s back and then mounted behind her. She stared at the ferryman for a long moment, but he was already turning the boat.
“He thought I was one of the Beautiful Folk of the Forest,” she said in her piping child’s voice. When Regis made no immediate answer, she went on, “That’s where you’re taking me, isn’t it?”
Even before it came into view, Regis scented the Yellow Forest. They had been traveling for days, camping cold and rough at night, forcing their way through narrow openings and up jagged trails. Regis had begun to wonder if he had made a terrible mistake, if he had risked both their lives on a panic- born impulse. More than once, he thought they were lost. Under the overcast sky, the hills looked the same in every direction. Each time his courage wavered, however, the ghost of a trail would beckon and the horse would step forward, as if on the way to its own stable.
On the fourth afternoon, the air, which had previously carried only the smell of cold wet earth, grew warmer. They had been following a path along the side of a hill, dipping and then laboriously climbing again. Gnarled black-barked trees and underbrush had blocked their view. As they came around the next curve, the vegetation thinned. The path widened, dry and gravelly, as it led upward.
They crested the rise. Regis drew the horse to a halt and breathed in astonishment. The entrance to a wooded valley stretched before them. The trees shimmered, their trunks gray, their leaves pale yellow. A breeze turned the foliage into a rippling carpet of gold.
The Yellow Forest.
The next moment, the light shifted and the forest was no longer a jewel-bright garden but only a patch of trees clinging to last autumn’s leaves. They looked old, withered. Soon they would fall, from the battering of winter storms or the simple erosion of time. New growth would take their place, according to the natural cycle. There might be a dozen, a hundred such valleys through these mountains.
Regis felt his heart sink within his chest. The air, which had seemed so sweet, turned ashen. Hope had illuminated the scene below, but only for a moment.
They were almo
st out of food and probably lost. Kierestelli had not complained, but he could see in the gray tinge around her mouth that she was near the end of her strength.
Regis nudged the dun with his legs, and the horse started downhill, tucking its hindquarters. Knowing better than to hurry the beast, he let it set its own pace.
The bottom of the slope led to an apron of gravel and wind- twisted weeds. The gelding’s hooves rang on the loose stones. The place felt empty, without even the cry of a far-off raptor or the skitter of insect or rodent. The forest seemed to be holding its breath. As Regis halted the gelding a few paces before the edge of the trees, he sensed a flicker of—vitality? awareness? or simple wariness of any encounter in such a remote and lawless place?
“Halloo, the forest!” He raised himself in the stirrups. “I am Regis Hastur, and I seek the Folk of the Yellow Forest!”
He paused, not sure if he truly wanted an answer. Then a notion came to him that whether or not the last of the chieri lived here, he ought to request permission before entering.
“I ask your leave to search for them here.”
He waited for a long moment, and then another. There was no response. Of course not. What had he expected, that the trees would part and open a path for him? That one of the Beautiful Folk would step forward, hands raised in welcome? Keral himself?
Keral . . .
The chieri had come down from these mountains to seek Regis, to offer help during the crisis of the World Wreckers. At first meeting, Keral had seemed a tall boyish figure with the exquisite beauty that marked Regis and all his kin. The chieri was deceptively strong and yet possessed an endearing uncertainty. How much courage it must have taken to leave everything safe and familiar, to journey into a land of strangers and their machines.
Keral, no longer in neuter phase but fully female, dancing in ecstasy, silken hair rippling around the slender body . . .
Keral’s radiant smile as he gazed down upon his own baby, the first chieri to be born in so many years . . .
After the departure of the World Wreckers, Keral and his child had gone back to the Yellow Forest, or so it was supposed. His mate, a Terran doctor, had disappeared about the same time. Keral’s child would be the same age as Kierestelli . . .
The dun had started moving forward of its own accord, neck arched, each foot placed with ceremonial precision. Regis sat, hands quiet on the reins, trusting the animal’s instinct.
They passed the edge of the forest, moving through dappled shade. Dry leaves crackled under the horse’s tread. A breeze ruffled branches overhead. Again came that hint of sweetness in the air, that stirring of life . . .
With it came a faint mental touch, so delicate that Regis could not be sure he had sensed it. Kierestelli shifted her weight, pressing against him. She took the reins from his hands. In trust, he closed his eyes, lowered his mental barriers—reached out with his laran.
Regis? Is it you, my friend?
Keral!
As quickly as it had come, the contact vanished. Regis shuddered with the recoil. No easy fading this, but a severing, brutal in its finality. Only a moment ago, his mind had been filled with the aliveness of the forest and the presence of Keral. Now he felt only an aching absence.
He would have given up in utter desolation, would have surrendered to a loss too great to bear, had the horse not kept going. The beast never paused in its careful stride.
How long they continued like this, Regis could not have said. He lost all awareness of the swollen Bloody Sun creeping across the sky beyond the canopy of wind-kissed leaves. Unshed tears left him half-blind. After a time, he became conscious of someone singing. He could not make out words, only a melody compounded of hope and regret, of joy remembered and echoed.
The singer sat in the saddle before him, his own daughter.
The horse came to a halt in a clearing. Slanting light touched the grasses and the low brush that, against the order of the season, bore a profusion of star-bright flowers. Regis breathed deeply, inhaling their perfume.
Kierestelli gestured that she wished to get down. Regis dismounted and helped her to the ground. She walked to the center of the clearing and halted. He hesitated, unsure if he should follow. Beside him, the gelding stood as if rooted in the layers of fallen leaves, head up, ears pricked, nostrils flaring.
Suddenly Kierestelli laughed and glanced back at Regis, her face alight. The next moment, something flickered in the forest directly ahead, a shift of light-filled shadow.
A chieri stepped into the clearing. Regis caught his breath, but it was not Keral. This creature was far older, more ancient even than the trees behind him. Like Keral, he was tall, willowy thin, and seemed to dance rather than walk across the grass. He wore a flowing garment of the same opalescent silver as his hair. Bones arched, delicate and strong, beneath milky skin. The eyes that watched Regis with wary regard were likewise pale, almost colorless. And cool, neither welcoming nor hostile. Measuring.
“Child of Grace . . .” Without conscious intent, Regis formed the traditional greeting. He wanted to rush forward, to fall on his knees before this being of a race that had traveled the far reaches of space before his own kind had learned to walk upright.
Keral had been a child, lost and overwhelmed in the land of men. This chieri was old, experienced, and in his own territory.
But Regis was Comyn, and Hastur. Whether his own lineage descended from the first Hastur, son of Aldones who was Lord of Light, or whether from the interbreeding of lost Terran colonists with this ancient race, his heritage was still a proud and honorable one. Respect he would offer, for respect was certainly due, but not groveling.
He came forward and bowed. “S’dei shaya, Noble One.” You lend us grace.
“What seek ye here?” The voice was light and clear, the words an ancient form of casta.
“I am Regis Hastur, friend to the one of you known as Keral, and I seek protection for my child.”
For a long moment, the chieri stared at Regis. Meeting that gaze was like looking into the heart of a living starstone.
“Keral has told us of your people, who kill their own young.”
Regis held himself erect, although he wanted to cover his face in shame that humans could threaten children, even babes in their cradles. His throat closed around the cry—“No, not all of us!”—but it was true. Whether by direct assault, by abuse or neglect, his kind did not always cherish their children or protect them from those who meant harm. He had lost enough of his own nedestro offspring, had seen the horrendous damage done to those who survived, even Lew’s daughter Marja, even Lew himself . . . even he, Regis . . .
The truth, then.
Regis opened his mind to the slender, gray-eyed creature before him. Chieri were telepathic. Let this one look into his heart and see the good and the ill, the honor kept and betrayed, the hopes cherished, all his failures revealed. Under that uncompromising regard, he had little confidence in his own worthiness, but he had every faith in Kierestelli’s.
Not for my sake, but for hers, I ask this.
He offered the image of his own brother, learning the ways of power from the likes of Valdir Ridenow . . . allowed that power by Regis himself.
The time for making excuses for Rinaldo, for rationalizing and temporizing, had passed. No matter how much Regis wanted to think well of his brother—and there was goodness in Rinaldo, albeit colored by fanaticism—Regis could no longer stand by, tacitly cooperating with the abuse of power.
If you will keep my child safe so that I may act without fear of retaliation upon an innocent, then I will stop him.
Silence, waiting. Then: How?
In that question, Regis sensed the chieri’s abhorrence of violence. Chieri did not kill, Keral had insisted; they did not even eat meat.
Truth, came from the chieri’s mind. Truth, not fine words.
“I do not know,” Regis said aloud, “I will find a way.”
The chieri shifted his gaze from Regis to Kierestelli. A gust of a
ir, warm with the scent of flowers, ruffled the silver-gilt hair. Kierestelli took a step and then another, and then she burst into a run. The chieri scooped her up in his arms. With a smile of heartbreaking radiance, he glanced once at Regis, then faded into the forest.
“Wait!” Regis had anticipated time to say his farewells, to reassure Kierestelli that he would come for her once the danger was passed.
To tell her that he loved her.
The chieri had disappeared, leaving a rustle of dead leaves and a sudden chill in the air. With a shiver, Regis wondered if he would be able to find this place and its inhabitants again. He envisioned himself riding through these hills, straining to catch a hint of gold in the trees, each time returning with a heart filled with ashes. He saw Kierestelli grow more and more apart from the human world, cherished but always an outsider. He felt the bitterness festering within her spirit as if it were his own.
He said he would come for me, but he never did. Is that how she would become a woman, how she would think of her father?
Memory nudged him, offering comfort: What had the ferryman said?
“They will find you.”
29
Through the return journey, slower because of the weariness of the horse, Regis tried not to anticipate what he would find. On those occasions when he allowed his thoughts to leap ahead to Thendara and what might have unfolded in his absence, ill-omened images assailed him.
His absence had gone unnoticed . . . he had been declared a traitor . . . Linnea and the baby were safe, and Ariel back with her family, all forgiven . . . Linnea was imprisoned, Danilo executed—no, the thought was too devastating to contemplate—J avanne and Gabriel were outlawed . . . the Federation had intervened and Rinaldo was now a prisoner . . . there was open fighting in the streets, the Terran Zone blockaded . . . Rinaldo was beside himself with worry, eager for a reconciliation . . .