Miriamele pulled free from the grip of her thunderstruck guard and dashed down the hillside. Camaris sank to the ground, gasping for breath. He looked tired and vaguely unhappy, like a child asked to do too much. Miriamele glanced at him quickly to make sure his wounds were not dangerous, then took Kvalnir from his unresisting grasp and kneeled down beside Aspitis. The earl was breathing, too, although shallowly. She turned him over, staring for a moment at his bloody, shattered-doll face … and something changed inside of her. A bubble of hatred and fear that had been in her since the Eadne Cloud, a bubble that had grown chokingly large at finding Aspitis still pursuing her, abruptly burst. Suddenly, he seemed so small. He was nothing important at all, just a tattered, damaged thing—no different than the cloak draped over a chair back that had given her the screaming night-terrors when she was a small child. Morning’s light had come, and the demon had become a rumpled cloak again.
A sort of smile crossed Miriamele’s face. She pressed the sword blade against the earl’s throat.
“You men!” she shouted at Aspitis’ soldiers. “Do you want to explain to Benigaris how his best friend was killed?”
Isgrimnur stood, pushing away the lance-point of the soldier who had held him.
“Do you?” Miriamele demanded.
None of the earl’s men spoke.
“Then give us your bows—all of them. And four horses.”
“We will not give you any horses, witch!” one of the soldiers shouted angrily.
“So be it. Then you can take Aspitis back with his gullet slit and tell Duke Benigaris it was done by an old man and a girl, while you stood watching—that is, if you get away unharmed, and you will have to kill us all to do that.”
“Do not bargain with them,” Cadrach shouted suddenly. There was desperation in his tone. “Kill the monster. Kill him!”
“Be quiet.” Miriamele wondered if the monk was trying to convince the soldiers that the danger to their master was real. If so, he was a fine actor: he sounded remarkably sincere.
The soldiers looked at each other worriedly. Isgrimnur took advantage of the moment’s confusion to begin relieving them of their bows and arrows. After the Rimmersman growled at him, Cadrach scrambled forward to help. Several of the men cursed them and looked as though they wished to resist, but no one made the move that would have sparked open conflict. When Isgrimnur and the monk each had an arrow nocked on a bow, the soldiers began to talk angrily among themselves, but Miriamele could see that the fight had gone out of them.
“Four horses,” she said calmly. “I will do you a favor and ride with the man that this scum,” she prodded Aspitis’ still form, “called a ‘swamp boy.’ Otherwise you would be leaving us five.”
After more arguing, Aspitis’ troop turned over four horses, first removing the saddlebags. When riders and baggage were redistributed upon the remaining horses, two of the earl’s household guard came forward and lifted their liege-lord from the ground, then draped him unceremoniously across the saddle of one of the remaining horses. His soldiers had to ride two-to-a-mount, and looked positively embarrassed as the little caravan rode off.
“And if he lives,” Miriamele shouted after them, “remind him of what happened!”
The mounted company vanished quickly, riding east into the hills.
Wounds were tended, the newly-acquired horses were loaded with the travelers’ scant baggage, and by the middle of the day they were on their way once more. Miriamele felt curiously light-headed, as though she had just woken up from a terrible dream to find a sunny spring morning outside her window. Camaris had returned to his normal placidity; the old man seemed scarcely the worse for his experience. Cadrach did not speak much, but that was no different than any day of the last few.
Aspitis had been a shadow at the back of Miriamele’s mind since the night of the storm and her escape from the earl’s ship. Now that shadow was gone. As she rode across the hilly Thrithings-country with Tiamak nodding in the saddle before her, she almost felt like singing.
They covered several leagues that afternoon. When they stopped for the night, Isgrimnur, too, was in an excellent mood.
“We shall make far better time now, Princess.” He was grinning in his beard. If he thought less of her now that Aspitis had revealed her shame, he was too much a gentleman to show it. “By Dror’s Mallet, did you see Camaris? Did you see him? Like a man half his age.”
“Yes.” She smiled. The duke was a good man. “I saw him, Isgrimnur. It was like an old song. No, it was better.”
He woke her in the morning. She could tell by his face that something was wrong.
“Is it Tiamak?” She had a sickened feeling. They had come through so much! Surely the little man had been getting better?
The duke shook his head. “It’s the monk. He’s gone.”
“Cadrach?” Miriamele was not prepared for that. She rubbed her head, fighting to wake up. “What do you mean, gone?”
“Gone away. Took one of the horses. He left a note.” Isgrimnur pointed to a piece of the Village Grove cloth which lay on the ground near where she had been sleeping; the furl of cloth had been anchored by a rock against the stiff hill-side breeze.
Where Miriamele’s feelings about Cadrach’s flight should have been, there was nothing. She lifted the stone and spread the sheet of pale fabric. Yes, he had written this: she had seen Cadrach’s hand before. It looked as though he had done his writing with the burned tip of a twig.
What could have been so important to say, she wondered, that he spent so much time writing a note before he left?
Princess,
it said,
I cannot go with you to Josua. I do not belong with those people. Do not blame yourself. No one has been kinder to me than you, even after you knew me for what I am.
I fear that things are worse than you know, much worse. I wish there was something more that I could do, but I am unable to help anyone.
He had not signed it.
“What ‘things’?” Isgrimnur asked, irritated. He was reading over her shoulder. “What does he mean, ‘things are worse than you know’?”
Miriamele shrugged helplessly. “Who can say?” Deserted again, was all she could think.
“Maybe I was too hard on him,” the duke said gruffly. “But that’s no cause to steal a horse and ride off.”
“He was always afraid. Ever since I have known him. It’s hard to live with fear all the time.”
“Well, we can’t waste tears on him,” Isgrimnur grumbled. “We have troubles of our own.”
“No,” Miriamele said, folding the note, “we shouldn’t waste tears.”
20
Travelers and Messengers
“I have not been here for many seasons,” Aditu said. “Many, many seasons.”
She stopped and raised her hands, circling the fingers in a complicated gesture; her slim body swayed like a dowser’s rod. Simon watched in wonder and more than a little apprehension. He was quickly becoming sober.
“Shouldn’t you come down?” he asked.
Aditu only glanced down at him, a moonlit smile playing around the corners of her mouth, then turned her eyes upward to the sky once more. She took a few more steps along the Observatory’s slender, crumbling parapet. “Shame to the House of Year-Dancing,” she said. “We should have done more to preserve this place. It grieves me to see it fallen to pieces.”
Simon did not think she sounded very grieved. “Geloë calls this place the Observatory,” Simon said. “Why is that?”
“I do not know. What is ‘observatory’? It is not a word that I know in your tongue.”
“Father Strangyeard said it’s a place like they used to have in Nabban in the days of the Imperators—a tall building where they look at the stars and try to figure out what will happen.”
Aditu laughed and raised one foot in the air to take off her boot, then lowered it and did the same with the other, as calmly as though she stood on the ground beside Simon instead of twenty cubit
s in the air on a thin cornice of stone. She tossed the boots down. They thumped softly on the damp grass. “Then she is making fun, I think, although there is some meaning behind her jest. No one looked at the stars here, except as one would look at them anywhere. This was the place of the Rhao iye-Sama’an—the Master Witness.”
“Master Witness?” Simon wished she wouldn’t move along the slippery parapet so quickly. For one thing, it forced him to walk briskly just to stay within hearing. For another … well, it was dangerous, even if she didn’t think so. “What’s that?”
“You know what a Witness is, Simon. Jiriki gave you his mirror. That is a minor Witness, and there are many of those still in existence. There were only a few Master Witnesses, each more or less bound to a place—the Pool of Three Depths in Asu’a, the Speakfire in Hikehikayo, the Green Column in Jhiná-T’seneí—and most of those are broken or ruined or lost. Here at Sesuad’ra it was a great stone beneath the ground, a stone called the Earth-Drake’s Eye. Earth-Drake is another name—it is difficult to explain the differences between the two in your tongue—for the Greater Worm who bites at his own tail,” she explained. “We built this entire place on top of that stone. It was not quite a Master Witness—in fact, it was not even a Witness by itself, but such was its potency that a minor Witness like my brother’s mirror would be a Master Witness if used here.”
Simon’s head was whirling with names and ideas. “What does that mean, Aditu?” he asked, trying to keep from sounding cross. He had been doing his best to remain calm and well-spoken once the wine had begun to wear off. It seemed important that she see how much he had grown in the months since they had last met.
“A minor Witness will lead you onto the Road of Dreams, but will usually show you only those you know, or those who are looking for you.” She raised her left leg and leaned backward, her back arched like a drawn longbow as she bent gracefully into balance, looking for all the world like a little girl playing on a waist-high fence. “A Master Witness, if used by someone who knew the ways of it, could look on anyone or anything, and sometimes into other times and … other places.”
Simon could not help remembering the night-visions of his vigil, as well as what he had seen when he had brought Jiriki’s mirror to this place on a later night. He pondered this as he watched Aditu tilt backward until her palms touched the crumbling stone. A moment later, both her feet were in the air as she swayed upside down, standing on her hands.
“Aditu!” Simon said sharply, then tried to make his voice calm. “Shouldn’t we go see Josua now?”
She laughed again, a swift sound of pure animal pleasure. “My frightened Seoman. No, there is no need to hurry to Josua, as I told you on the way here. The tidings from my folk can wait until morning. Give your prince a night of rest from worries. From what I saw of him, he needs some relief from woe and care.” She inched along on her hands. Her hair, unbound, hung down over her face in a white cloud.
Simon felt sure she could no longer see what she was doing. It frustrated him and made him more than a little angry. “Then why did you come all the way from Jao é-Tinukai’i, if it wasn’t important?” He stopped following. “Aditu! What are you doing this for?! If you’ve come to talk to Josua, then let’s go and talk to Josua!”
“I did not say it was not important, Seoman,” she replied. There was something of her old mocking tone, but there was a hint of something sharper, almost angry. “I merely said that it would best wait until tomorrow. And that is what will happen.” She brought her knees down between her elbows and delicately placed her feet between her hands. Then she lifted her arms and stood up all in one motion, as though preparing to dive out into empty space. “So until then I will spend my time as I please, no matter what a young mortal might think.”
Simon was stung. “You’ve been sent to bring news to the prince, but you’d rather do tumbling tricks.”
Aditu was wintery cool. “In fact, if I had been given my choice, I would not be here at all. I would have ridden with my brother to Hernystir.”
“Well, why didn’t you?”
“Likimeya willed otherwise.”
So quickly that Simon barely had time to draw in a surprised breath, she bent, catching the parapet in one long-fingered hand, then dropped over the edge. She found a grip on the pale stone wall with her free hand and lodged the toe of one bare foot while probing with the other. She descended the rest of the way as quickly and effortlessly as a squirrel skittering down a tree trunk.
“Let us go inside,” she said.
Simon laughed and felt his anger ease.
Standing beside the Sitha made the Observatory seem even eerier. The shadowed staircases which wound up the walls of the cylindrical room made him think of the insides of some huge animal. The tiles, even in the near-darkness, glimmered faintly, and seemed to be assembled in patterns that would not quite lie still.
It was odd to realize that Aditu was almost as much a youngling as he, since the Sithi had built this place long before her birth. Jiriki had once said that he and his sister were “children of the Exile,” which Simon understood to mean that they had been born after the fall of Asu’a five centuries ago—a short time indeed in Sithi terms. But Simon had also met Amerasu, and she had come to Osten Ard before a single stone had been set on another stone anywhere in the land. And if his own vigil-night dream had been correct, Amerasu’s elder Utuk’ku had stood in this very building when the two tribes had separated. It was disturbing to think of anything living as long as First Grandmother or the Norn Queen.
But the most disturbing thing of all was that the Norn Queen, unlike Amerasu, was still alive, still powerful … and she seemed to have nothing but hatred for Simon and his mortal kind.
He did not like thinking about that—did not, in fact, like thinking about the Norn Queen at all. It was almost easier to understand crazed Ineluki and his violent anger than the spiderlike patience of Utuk’ku, someone who would wait a thousand years or more, full of brooding malice, for some obscure revenge. …
“And what did you think of war, Seoman Snowlock?” Aditu asked suddenly. He had sketched for her the bare outlines of the recent struggle as they exchanged news during their walk to the Observatory.
He considered. “We fought hard. It was a wonderful victory. We didn’t expect it.”
“No, what did you think?”
Simon took a moment before replying. “It was horrible.”
“Yes, it is.” Aditu took a few steps away from him, sliding into a spot beneath the wall where the moonlight did not penetrate, vanishing into shadow. “It is horrible.”
“But you just said you wanted to go to war in Hernystir with Jiriki!”
“No. I said I wanted to be with them. That is not the same thing at all, Seoman. I could have been one more rider, one more bow, one more set of eyes. We are very few, we Zida’ya—even mustered together riding out of Jao é-Tinukai’i, with the Houses of Exile reunited. Very few. And none of us wished to go into battle.”
“But you Sithi have been in wars,” Simon protested. “I know that’s true.”
“Only to protect ourselves. And once or twice in our history, as my mother and brother are doing in the west now, we have fought to protect those who stood by us in our own need.” She sounded very serious now. “But even now, Seoman, we have only taken up our arms because the Hikeda’ya brought the war to us. They entered our home and killed my father and First Grandmother, and many more of our folk as well. Do not think that we rush out to fight for mortals at the waving of a sword. These are strange days, Seoman—and you know that as well as I.”
Simon took a few steps forward and tripped on a piece of broken stone. He bent to rub his toe, which throbbed painfully. “S’Bloody Tree!” he cursed under his breath.
“It is hard for you to see here at night, Seoman,” she said. “I am sorry. We will go now.”
Simon did not want to be babied. “In a moment. I’m well.” He gave the toe a final squeeze. “Why is Utuk’ku
helping Ineluki?”
Aditu appeared from out of the moon-shadow and took his hand in her cool fingers. She seemed troubled. “Let us talk outside.” She led him out the door. Her long hair lifted and fluttered in the wind, caressing his face as he walked beside her. It had a strong but pleasing scent, savory-sweet as pine bark.
When they were out on open ground once more, she took his other hand in hers and fixed him with her bright eyes, which seemed to gleam amber in the moonlight. “That is most certainly not the place to name their names, nor to think of them too much,” she said firmly, then smiled a wicked smile. “Besides, I do not think I should let as dangerous a mortal boy as you be alone with me in a dark place. Oh, the tales they tell of you around your camp, Seoman Snowlock.”
He was irritated but not altogether displeased. “Whoever ‘they’ are, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Ah, but you are a strange beast, Seoman.” Without another word, she leaned forward and kissed him—not a short, chaste touch as she had given him at their parting many weeks ago, but a warm lover’s kiss that sent a shiver of amazement running up his back. Her lips were cool and sweet as morning rose petals.
Far before he would have wished to stop, Aditu gently pulled away. “That little mortal girl liked kissing you, Seoman.” Her smile returned, mocking, insolent. “It is an odd thing to do, is it not?”
Simon shook his head, at a loss.
Aditu took his arm and tugged him into motion, falling into step beside him. She bent to pick up the boots she had discarded, then they walked a little farther through the wet grass beside the Observatory wall. She hummed a brief snatch of melody before speaking. “What does Utuk’ku want, you asked?”