Tiamak found it a labor just to sit upright in the stern of the boat, wrapped in a blanket, and call directions through his chattering teeth. He told them they had nearly reached the Wran’s northern fringe, but he had already told them that many days earlier, and the Wrannaman’s eyes now had an odd, glazed look. Miriamele and Isgrimnur were being careful not to let each other see they were worrying. Cadrach, who more than once seemed on the verge of coming to blows with the duke, was openly scornful about their chances of finding the way out. Isgrimnur at last told him that if he made any more pessimistic predictions he would be thrown over the side, so that if he wished to make the rest of the journey it would have to be by swimming. The monk ceased his carping, but the looks he directed at the duke when Isgrimnur’s back was turned made Miriamele uneasy.
It was clear to her that the Wran was finally wearing them all down. It was not a place for people, ultimately—especially drylanders.
“Over here should do well,” she said. She took a few more awkward steps, struggling to stay upright as the mud squelched beneath her bootsoles.
“If you say so, Lady,” Cadrach murmured.
They had moved a little way from their camp to bury the remains of their meal, mostly fish bones and scaly skin and fruit pits. During the long course of their journey, the inquisitive Wran apes had proved all too willing to come into camp in search of leavings, even if one of the human company stayed up and sat sentry. The last time the offal had not been removed to at least a few score yards from the campsite, the travelers had spent all night in the middle of what seemed a festival of brawling, screeching apes, all in mad competition for the rights to the finest scraps.
“Go to, Cadrach,” she said crossly. “Dig the hole.”
He gave her a quick sidelong look, then bent and began scraping at the moist soil. Pale wriggling things came up with each stroke of the hollowed reed spade, gleaming in the torchlight. When he had finished, Miriamele dropped in the leaf-wrapped bundle and Cadrach pushed the mud over it, then turned and began to make his way back toward the glow of the camp fire.
“Cadrach.”
He turned slowly. “Yes, Princess?”
She took a few steps toward him. “I … I am sorry that Isgrimnur said what he did to you. At the nest.” She lifted her hands helplessly. “He was worried, and he sometimes speaks without thinking. But he is a good man.”
Cadrach’s face was expressionless. It was as though he had drawn some curtain across his thoughts, leaving his eyes curiously flat in the torchlight. “Ah, yes. A good man. There are so few of those.”
Miriamele shook her head. “That is not an excuse, I know. But please, Cadrach, surely you can understand why he was upset!”
“Of course. I can well understand it. I have lived with myself for many years, Lady—how can I fault someone else for feeling the same way, someone who doesn’t even know all that I know?”
“Damn you,” Miriamele snapped. “Why must you be this way? I don’t hate you, Cadrach! I don’t loathe you, even though we have caused trouble for each other!”
He stared at her for a moment, seeming to struggle with conflicting emotions. “No, my lady. You have treated me better than I deserve.”
She knew better than to argue. “And I don’t blame you at all for not wanting to go into that nest!”
He shook his head slowly. “No, Lady. Nor would any man, even your duke, if they knew …”
“Knew what?” she said sharply. “What happened to you, Cadrach? Something more than what you told me about Pryrates—and about the book?”
The monk’s mouth hardened. “I do not wish to speak of it.”
“Oh, by Elysia’s mercy,” she said, frustrated. She took a few steps forward and reached out and grasped his hand. Cadrach flinched and tried to pull back, but she held him tightly. “Listen to me. If you hate yourself, others will hate you. Even a child knows that, and you are a learned man.”
“And if a child is hated,” he spat, “that child will grow to hate itself.”
She did not understand what he meant. “But, please, Cadrach. You must forgive, starting with yourself. I cannot bear to see a friend so mistreated, even by himself.”
The steady pressure with which the monk had tried to pull away suddenly slackened. “A friend?” he said roughly.
“A friend.” Miriamele squeezed his hand and then released it. Cadrach pulled back a step, but went no further. “Now please, we must try to be kind to each other until we reach Josua, or we shall all go mad.”
“Reach Josua …” The monk repeated her words without inflection. He was suddenly very distant.
“Of course.” Miriamele started to walk toward the camp, then stopped again. “Cadrach?”
He did not reply for a moment. “What?”
“You know magic, don’t you?” When he remained silent, she plunged on. “I mean, you know a great deal about it, at least—you’ve made that clear. But I think that you actually know how to do it.”
“What are you talking about?” He sounded irritated, but there was a trace of fear in his words. “If you are talking about the fire-missiles, that was no magic at all. The Perdruinese invented that long ago, although they made it with a different sort of oil. They used it for sea-battles. …”
“Yes, it was a clever thing to do. But there is more than that to you, and you know it. Why else would you study things like … like that book. And I know all about Doctor Morgenes, so if you were part of his—what did you call it? The Scroll League …?”
Cadrach made a gesture of annoyance. “The Art, my lady, is not some bag of wizard’s tricks. It is a way of understanding things, of seeing how the world works just as surely as a builder understands a lever or a ramp.”
“You see! You do know about it!”
“I do not ‘do magic,’” he said firmly. “I have, once or twice, used the knowledge I have from my studies.” Despite his straightforward tone, he could not meet her eyes. “But it is not what you think of as magic.”
“But even so,” Miriamele said, still eager, “think of the help you could be to Josua. Think of the aid we could give him. Morgenes is dead. Who else can advise the prince about Pryrates?”
Now Cadrach did look up. He looked hunted, like a cur backed into a corner. “Pryrates?” He laughed hollowly. “Do you think that I can be any help against Pryrates? And he is the smallest part of what is arrayed against you.”
“All the more reason!” Miriamele reached out for his hand again, but the monk pulled it away. “Josua needs help, Cadrach. If you fear Pryrates, how much more do you fear the kind of world he will make if he and this Storm King are not defeated?”
At the sound of that terrible name, a muffled purr of thunder could be heard in the distance. Startled, Miriamele looked around, as though some vast, shadowy thing might be watching them. When she turned back, Cadrach was stumbling across the mud, headed back toward camp.
“Cadrach!”
“No more,” he shouted. He kept his head lowered as he vanished into the shadowy undergrowth. She could hear him cursing as he made his way back across the treacherous mud.
Miriamele followed him to camp, but Cadrach refused all her attempts at conversation. She berated herself for having said the wrong thing, just when she had thought she was reaching him. What a mad, sad man he was! And, equally infuriating, in the confusion of their talk she had forgotten to ask him about her Pryrates-thought, the one that had been tugging at her mind the other night—something about her father, about death, about Pryrates and Nisses’ book. It still seemed important, but it might be a long time until she could bring up the subject with Cadrach again.
Despite the warm night, Miriamele rolled herself tightly in her cloak when she lay down, but sleep would not come. She lay half the night listening to the swamp’s strange, incessant music. She also had to put up with the continual misery of crawling and fluttering things, but the bugs, annoying as they might be, were as nothing compared to the irritation of her r
estless thoughts.
To Miriamele’s surprise and pleasure, the next day brought a marked change in their surroundings. The trees were less thickly twined, and in places the flatboat slid out from the humid tangle onto wide shallow lagoons, mirrors compromised only by the faint rippling of the wind and the forests of swaying grasses which grew up through the water.
Tiamak seemed pleased with their progress, and announced that they were very close to the Wran’s outermost edge. However, their approaching escape did not cure his weakness and fever, and the thin brown man spent much of the morning slipping in and out of uncomfortable sleep, waking occasionally with a startled movement and a mouthful of wild jabber before slowly coming back to his ordinary self.
In late afternoon, Tiamak’s fever became stronger, and his discomfort increased to the point where he sweated and babbled continuously, experiencing only short spans of lucidity. During one of these, the Wrannaman regained his wits enough to play apothecary for himself. He asked Miriamele to prepare for him a concoction of herbs, some of which he pointed out where they grew along the watercourse, a flowering grass called quickweed and a ground-hugging, oval-leafed creeper which, in his weakened state, he could not name.
“And yellowroot, too,” Tiamak said, panting shallowly. He looked dreadful, his eyes red, his skin shiny with perspiration. Miriamele tried to keep her hands steady as she ground the ingredients already gathered on a flat stone she held in her lap. “Yellowroot, to speed the binding,” he mumbled.
“Which is that?” she asked. “Does it grow here?”
“No. But it does not matter.” Tiamak tried to smile, but the effort was too much, and instead he gritted his teeth and groaned quietly. “Some in my bag.” He rolled his head ever so slightly in the direction of the sack he had appropriated in Village Grove, which now held all the belongings he had guarded so zealously.
“Cadrach, would you find it?” Miriamele called. “I’m afraid I’ll spill what I have here.”
The monk, who had been sitting at Camaris’ feet while the old man poled, stepped gingerly across the rocking flatboat, avoiding Isgrimnur without a glance. He kneeled and began to lift out and examine the contents of the bag.
“Yellowroot,” Miriamele said.
“Yes, I heard, Lady,” Cadrach replied with a little of his old mocking tone. “A root. And I know that it is yellow, too … thanks to my many years of study.” Something that he felt beneath his fingers made him pause. His eyes narrowed, and he pulled from Tiamak’s bag a package wrapped in leaves and tied with thin vines. Some of the covering had dried and peeled away. Miriamele could see a flash of something pale inside. “What is this?” Cadrach eased the wrappings back a little further. “A very old parchment …” he began.
“No, you demon! You witch!”
The loud voice startled Miriamele so much that she dropped the blunt rock she had been using as a pestle; it bounced painfully on her boot and thumped down into the bottom of the boat. Tiamak, his eyes bulging, was struggling to lift himself.
“You won’t have it!” he shouted. Flecks of spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. “I knew you would come after it!”
“He’s fever-mad!” Isgrimnur was more than a little alarmed. “Don’t let him tip the boat over.”
“It’s just Cadrach, Tiamak,” Miriamele said soothingly, but she, too, was startled by the look of hatred on the Wrannaman’s face. “He’s just trying to find the yellowroot.”
“I know who it is,” Tiamak snarled. “And I know just what he is, too, and what he wants. Curse you, demon-monk! You wait until I am ill to steal my parchment! Well, you may not have it! It is mine! I bought it with my own coin!”
“Just put it back, Cadrach,” Miriamele urged. “It will make him stop raving.”
The monk, whose initial look of startlement had changed to something even more unsettled—and, to Miriamele, unsettling as well—slowly eased the leaf-wrapped bundle back into the sack, then handed the whole thing to Miriamele.
“Here.” His voice was once again strangely flat. “You take out what he wants. I cannot be trusted.”
“Oh, Cadrach,” she said, “don’t be foolish. Tiamak is ill. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“I know.” The Wrannaman’s wide eyes were still fixed on the monk. “He gave himself away. I knew then that he was after it.”
“For the love of Aedon,” Isgrimnur growled, disgusted. “Just give him something to make him sleep. Even I know the monk wasn’t trying to steal anything.”
“Even you, Rimmersman?” Cadrach murmured, but with none of his usual sharpness. Rather, there was an echo of some great hopelessness in the monk’s voice, and something else, too—some peculiar edge that Miriamele could not identify.
Worried and confused, she turned her concentration onto the search for Tiamak’s yellowroot. The Wrannaman, his hair damp and tousled by sweat, continued to glare at Cadrach like a maddened blue jay who had found a squirrel sniffing about his nest.
Miriamele had thought the entire incident merely the product of Tiamak’s illness, but that night she woke up suddenly in the camp they had made on a rare dry sandbank, and saw Cadrach—who had been delegated the first watch—rummaging through Tiamak’s bag.
“What are you doing?!” She crossed the camp in a few swift paces. Despite her anger, she kept her voice low so as not to wake any of the rest of her companions from their sleep. She could not escape the feeling that somehow Cadrach was her responsibility alone, and that the others should not be brought in if she could avoid it.
“Nothing,” the monk grumbled, but his guilty face belied him. Miriamele reached forward and plunged her hand into the sack, closing her fingers on his own and the leaf-wrapped parchment.
“I should have known better,” she said, full of fury. “Is there truth to what Tiamak said? Have you been trying to steal his belongings, now that he is too sick to protect them?”
Cadrach snapped back like a wounded animal. “You are no better than all the rest, with your talk of friendship! At the first moment, you turn on me, just like Isgrimnur.”
His words stung, but Miriamele was still angry to find him doing this low thing after she had given him her trust. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“You are a fool,” he snarled. “If I wanted to steal something from him, why would I wait until he had been saved from the ghant’s nest?!” He pulled his hand from the sack, bringing hers with it, then took the package and thrust it into her hands. “Here! I was merely interested in what it could be, and why he turned goirach … why he became so angry. I had never seen it before—didn’t even know that it was there! You keep it, then, Princess. Safe from grubby little thieves like me!”
“But you could have asked him,” she said, more than a little ashamed now that the heat had passed, and angry to feel that way. “Not come creeping after it when everyone was asleep.”
“Oh, yes, asked him! You saw the kindly way he looked at me when I merely touched it! Do you have any idea what it is, my headstrong lady? Do you?”
“No. Nor will I until Tiamak tells me.” Hesitantly, she stared at the cylindrical object. In other circumstances, she knew, she would have been the first to try and find out what the Wrannaman was protecting. Now, she was caught by her own high-handedness, and she had offended the monk as well. “I will keep it safe, and I will not look at it,” she said slowly. “When Tiamak is well, I will ask him to show it to us.”
Cadrach stared at her for a long moment. His moonlit features, touched with crimson by the last few embers of the fire, were almost frightening. “Very well, my lady,” he whispered. She thought she could hear his voice hardening like ice. “Very well. By all means keep it out of the hands of thieves.” He turned and walked to his cloak, then dragged it to the edge of the sand, far from the others. “Keep watch, then, Princess Miriamele. Make sure no evil men come near. I am going to sleep.” He lay down, becoming only another lump of shadow.
Miriamele sat listeni
ng to the night noises of the swamp. Although the monk did not speak again, she could almost feel his unsleeping presence in the darkness a few short steps away. Something raw and painful in him had been exposed again, something that, for the last few weeks, had been almost completely hidden. Whatever it was, she had thought it might have been exorcised after Cadrach’s long revelatory night on Firannos Bay. Now Miriamele found herself wishing desperately that she had slept through the night tonight and not awakened until morning, when the light of day would have made everything safe and ordinary.
The Wran fell away at last, not in a single broad stroke, but with the gradual dwindling of trees and narrowing of waterways, until finally Miriamele and her companions found themselves floating across an open scrubland crisscrossed with small channels. The world was wide again, something that spread from horizon to horizon. She had grown so used to the hemming-in of her vision that she found it almost uncomfortable to be confronted with so much space.
In some ways, the last stage of the Wran was the most treacherous, since they had to carry the boat over land more frequently than before. Once, Isgrimnur became stuck in a waist-deep sandhole, and was only rescued by the combined efforts of Miriamele and Camaris.