Rhapsody

  A stalk of dry scrub slapped her face, buffeted by the wind. Rhapsody closed her eyes against the onslaught of tiny grains she knew would be released by the bleached seedpod; she had studied highgrass in her training as a Namer. Hymialacia, her mentor had called it. Meadow grass, the fodder of the open spaces of the world. Its true name.

  Its true name. The sense of danger vanished in the clarity of the answer. Rhapsody cleared her throat, parched by the heat and the fear she had been holding within it, and began to whisper.

  Hymialacia, she said, speaking in the musical language of her profession. Hymialacia. Hymialacia. Hymialacia. Her skin hummed as the vibration she emitted naturally altered into a new pattern, pulsating, reverberating in the air around her.

  Beside her Achmed reached out and touched her back; there was a tenuousness to the contact that told her he couldn’t see her. She had blended as smoothly into the meadow grass as the Lirin; more so—for all intents and purposes, she was the meadow grass.

  Rhapsody reached a trembling hand behind her and felt for Achmed’s hand. Carefully she slid her fingers into the thinly gloved fist, whispering the song of the grass all the while. It had become a roundelay, a repetitive melody.

  I am the Hymialacia. Achmed the Snake is the Hymialacia. Over and over she whispered their names, blending into the roundelay the song of the wind, the clouds passing overhead, the name of silence. The grip tightened and pulsed like a heartbeat. Achmed was signaling his understanding.

  A moment later he whispered something in a language she didn’t recognize, and Grunthor turned his head to look at her. This would be harder: she did not know Grunthor’s true name.

  A rustle in the grass a few dozen feet ahead almost broke her concentration. The Lirin had closed the gap, were almost upon them, spread thinly but resolutely through the meadows, approaching silently, relentlessly. Rhapsody closed her eyes and touched the giant’s shoulder.

  Hummock, she sang softly. It was a word she had learned early in her training when studying herbal lore, a word she had known from her childhood treks with her father through the wide open fields, over the swales and hillocks of her homeland. A knoll, a clumped elevation rising above the ground like a mound of soil. Hummock.

  Rhapsody opened her eyes, still chanting her namesong over and over. Before her where Grunthor had been crouched appeared to be a small grassy hillock, with thin saplings of scrub trees sprouting from the ground atop it. She ran her hand over the brush on the knoll. Hummock. Hymialacia. The wind. The clouds above. Nothing here but the meadow grass.

  Through the brush in front of her she could see legs clad in fawn-colored leather boots and trousers, close enough to feel her breath. Hummock, she whispered, trying to keep her voice steady. Obstacle. Dangerous footing. Pit. Hummock.

  The gait of the approaching legs slowed, never stopping, then stepped smoothly to the south, circumventing the place where she knew Achmed was. She could see nothing there herself but the waving grass of the meadow, hear nothing above her own chant but the rhythmic buzz of hovering insects, the faint crack of the ground beneath Lirin feet, feel nothing near her but the heat of the blistering sun, the whipping of her brittle hair in the dry wind. Hymialacia.

  She chanted the roundelay over and over until the angle of the sun changed and moved into her eyes. Rhapsody blinked; midday had given way to afternoon, shafts of light now bathing the rippling fields of gold and amber grass. The namesong faltered to a stop, her voice dry and swollen from exertion.

  On her left side the grass parted. Achmed released her hand and rose to a stand.

  “They’re gone, out of range,” he said.

  Rhapsody looked to her right. The small hummock in front of her flexed and uncoiled, growing tall before her eyes again. What had appeared as the saplings of brush trees took on a more solid form as Grunthor’s myriad weapons rose with him, still jutting out from the bandoliers and scabbards on his back. The former hill turned and smiled at her broadly.

  “Well, miss, that was impressif.”

  “Indeed,” said Achmed wryly. “Are you going to tell us that was another ‘first’ for you?”

  As Rhapsody opened her mouth to reply, the clouds lurched overhead and the sky tilted at a strange angle. Achmed’s hand shot out and grabbed her elbow, assisting her shaking descent to the ground. Once down she lay on her back and stared at the pinnacle of the sky above her, noting the swimming blue circles that hovered in the air. “Water, please,” she croaked, then slipped into throbbing unconsciousness.

  Dusk settled over the field like a gray mist, and still Rhapsody had not awakened. She lay silent, without moving, in a state of deep sleep the men had rarely seen. The girl was given to nightmares, and over the course of their journey they had become grudgingly accustomed to her fretful whispering and the occasional moans, as she tossed and trembled in the grip of night terrors that sometimes ended in her bolting upright with a heart-stopping gasp.

  “No wonder she gave up the bizness,” Grunthor had commented after one particularly wrenching performance. “Oi imagine ’er customers didn’t get much sleep one way t’other.” Achmed had just smiled.

  Now she shifted slightly on her side, then lay quiet. The sun disappeared beyond the world’s far rim, and the night watch passed from Achmed to Grunthor, who had been busy tallying and repacking the remaining supplies they had pilfered from the saddlebags of Michael’s soldiers.

  The Dhracian handed the Bolg Sergeant the waterskin from which he had been giving occasional drops to the unconscious Singer, then lay down on the northern side of the camp to sleep.

  As the twilight deepened, Grunthor squinted for a moment, then strained to look harder into the distant horizon. After a moment he shook his head and settled back into his watch, only to sit forward again. He extended a foot and nudged the sleeping Dhracian, who did not move but opened his eyes.

  “Oi see somethin’.”

  Achmed rolled to his side and sat up, looking off in the same direction as Grunthor. His vision was generally superior to his companion’s, especially in the open air, but he saw nothing. After a moment’s concentration he could sense no heartbeat drumming in the distance, a more certain sign that they were alone. He shook his head.

  Grunthor shrugged, and Achmed started to lie down again, only to freeze as the Bolg quickly stood up.

  “There it is again, sir. Oi’m sure. Far off, but somethin’s there.”

  Achmed rose to a stand as well and walked to the top of a grassy swale, the crest of a rolling wave of earth. He stared off northward into the night, still seeing nothing. He waited.

  Then a moment later he saw it too, a host of flickering lights, barely visible in the gray half-dark. In a heartbeat they glimmered, then disappeared again. There were hundreds, perhaps a thousand of them, crossing the distant meadows, spread uniformly out in a endless, near-invisible line, moving slowly south. A search party? he wondered. But for what? Who or what might be so important that so many men were sent out in the dark to find it, guided only by lanternlight, here in the middle of nowhere?

  Achmed closed his eyes and threw back his hood to better allow the vibrations of the oncoming heartbeats to impact his skin. He held his hand aloft, one finger in the air, tasting the wind in his open mouth to try and ascertain the source of the thousand different rhythms coming toward him. But there was nothing on the wind, no taste, no rhythm, no heartbeat. Only silence and evening breeze.

  Once more he opened his eyes and stared, and saw it again, an infinitesimal flicker a thousand times over, moving steadily toward them, still far away but closer than a moment before. Movement, a twinkling light, repeated a thousand times, then darkness. Nothing on the wind.

  Now the heartbeat that filled his ears, bristled on his skin, was his own.

  “Gods,” he whispered. Shing.

  Like crows before the coming storm they gathered up the sleeping Singer and their gear and fled blindly in the direction of the great Lirin forest.

  6

>   Rhapsody awoke in darkness. The moon was gone, having all but vanished the night before into dormancy, and the sky was overcast with racing clouds. Woozily she tried to sit up, then reconsidered as the pain that encircled her head stabbed her violently behind the eyes. She settled for rolling slowly onto one side and propping her head up with her hand, her elbow resting on the stony ground. The groan that wheezed forth from her chest came from a voice she didn’t recognize.

  Immediately Grunthor was there with the waterskin, his hand behind her neck. Rhapsody drank gratefully, holding on to the skin with a shaking grip. When finally her thirst was slaked she sat up carefully and looked around her. Where before there had been nothing but open sky and highgrass all around them, now they were hiding within a thin copse of trees. A patch of night thicker than the rest of the air around her blotted out the dark horizon not far away.

  “What’s that?” she asked. All she could manage was a whisper.

  Achmed looked up from behind his hood. “The forest.” He smiled and looked away, but the Singer’s reaction was unmistakable anyway. Her heartbeat intensified angrily; he could feel the blood rise to her face in fury.

  “You carried me? All this way? How dare you.”

  “Yeah, she says that now. ’Ow come you didn’t protest at the time, eh?” Grunthor’s smile disappeared in the face of her building wrath. “Come on, miss, you didn’t think we could stay out in the fields, did you? Oi didn’t want to just leave ya there.”

  A thin hand with a grip like iron clasped her mouth, the scratchy voice low and deadly.

  “Bad call on your end, Grunthor. Now listen carefully, Singer, and rest your throat; it will be to your advantage on many levels. We are alone for the moment, but not for long. We are in the scrub-tree line, almost at the outskirts of the Lirin forest. This barrier is far more heavily guarded than the fields.

  “Once inside the forest proper it is imperative that we get to the Tree as quickly as possible. Past the first major stand of trees to the southeast there is an outpost of twenty-four border guards. Being Lirindarc, forest Lirin, they are even more difficult to discern in daylight than the ones we met before you decided to take your little nap. What can you do to aid our avoidance of them and getting to the Tree?” He removed his hand, ignoring her withering stare.

  “How do you know these things?” she spat. “Michael was not with the hunting party, which you knew somehow beforehand. The Lirinved—the In-between, if that’s what they were—saw me, and you knew it. You knew they were there from hundreds of yards away. Now you know the number of Lirindarc and where they are within the wood? How do you know this? And why on Earth would you need me to help you at all?”

  The strange eyes regarded her coolly; then Achmed looked off into the distance, considering his reply. He had no intention of answering her question; his gift of blood lore, the ability to sense and track any heartbeat of his choosing, was something that only one friend and a few enemies knew of, although his prowess as an unerring assassin was legendary among the seedier element in the eastern lands. He was trying to determine how to craft his response to achieve both his goals: gaining her cooperation while returning her to a more placid state.

  Under normal circumstances the anger or dismay of a hostage would mean nothing to him, but this one was decidedly different. In addition to her obvious power and potential, there was something soothing about her when she was calm, an almost pleasant rhythm to the vibrations she emitted. It had an agreeable effect on his skin. Perhaps it was the result of her musical training. He took a deep breath and measured his words.

  “We don’t need you to help us at all. The Lirindarc do.”

  Her face went slack in shock. “Why?”

  “Because you may be the one thing that can guarantee their safety if they come upon us.”

  Rhapsody’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

  The piercing gaze fixed on her again. “We have no need to harm these people. They, unlike the rest of the complacent fools in this land, are not asleep. The Lirin we met in the fields and the Lirindarc are attuned to the world around them. They know what is coming, or at least that something is.”

  Even in the dark Achmed could see her go cold. “What’s coming? What do you mean?”

  An ugly laugh came from beneath the veils. “How can a Singer not feel it, not hear it? Was it all the noise of Easton that drowned it out, kept you innocent, Rhapsody? Ironic; an innocent whore. Or are you just oblivious?”

  Even in the dark Achmed saw her green eyes clear, and a hard, resolute look come into them. “Tell me.”

  “No, Rhapsody; you tell me. The Lirindarc from the eastern outpost are making their way here now; they’ll be upon us shortly. Grunthor and I need to get to the Tree, and get there in all due haste. We will allow nothing—and I assume you know what I mean by this—to get in the way. Now, what can you do to ensure that no harm comes to them?”

  The staunch expression on her face crumbled. “I—nothing. I’ve never been here before, I don’t know where I am. How can you expect me to ensure anything?”

  Achmed turned east and sighted his cwellan. “I suppose I can’t. Grunthor, ready your bow.”

  Horror replaced the confusion. “No, please! Don’t do this. Please.”

  The robed figure turned and looked at her without dropping his weapon. “Once more, then, I’ll ask you: what can you do? After this afternoon, I would think you’d have a less pathetic answer.”

  A large hand came to rest on her shoulder. “Come on, now, miss, surely you can think o’ somethin’. Think ’ard, now.”

  Rhapsody took a deep breath and cleared her thoughts, one of the earliest techniques Heiles, her first mentor in the science of Naming, had taught her. After a moment she heard a voice in her mind, a voice that had told her the only tales of these woods she had ever heard.

  Mama, tell me about the great forest.

  It’s as wide as your eyes can see—bigger than you can possibly imagine—and full of the scent and sound of life. The trees within it grow in more colors than you have ever seen, even in your dreams. You can feel the song of the wood itself, humming in every living thing there. The humans call it the Enchanted Forest because many of the things that grow and live there are unfamiliar to them, but the Lirin know it by its true name: Yliessan, the holy place.

  Achmed could see the change come over her face. “Well?”

  The Lirin know it by its true name: Yliessan.

  Rhapsody looked up at the stars. “Its name,” she said softly. “I know the name of the forest.” Her eyes cleared, and when she looked back at the two men her face was calm, the expression in her eyes deadly. “But let us be very clear, as we will be parting company shortly: I use it for their protection, not for yours.”

  “Fair enough,” said Grunthor, grinning.

  When the Lirindarc patrol passed directly in front of the three strangers a few moments later, they saw nothing unusual, heard only the sound of the wind singing in the trees of Yliessan, and continued on their way into the night.

  By morning they had arrived at the outskirts of the Lirin forest. A gentle wind had picked up with the dawn, and Rhapsody loosed the black velvet ribbon in her hair, letting the breeze blow through it, cleansing her mind of the painful memories that lingered from the day before.

  She stood before the unbroken wall of trees, her eyes trying to penetrate the forest edge and look into the greenwood, where in the distance she could see verdant leaves of every hue, dark and cool as the night even in daylight.

  Her mother’s image was with her still. Rhapsody felt a catch in her heart as she tried to imagine her as a young woman, a girl really, at the beginning of her Blossoming Year, standing at the threshold of the forest where she was standing now.

  Slight; neither Rhapsody nor her mother was particularly tall, perhaps her mother’s golden hair twined in the intricate patterns plaited by the Lirin for practicality and ornamentation. Dressed in a billowing tunic and borilla leggin
gs made in accord with the old ways, the traditional woven leather mekva at her waist. Eyes gleaming in quiet excitement. Had she been happy then? Rhapsody wondered, knowing that if she had been, it did not last.

  Her mother had spoken rarely of that time. Her pilgrimage to Sagia was made, in the tradition of her race, just as she was coming into adulthood. The time she had spent in the forest, learning its secrets, was a mystery to Rhapsody, as her mother had been loath to talk about it. It was only when Rhapsody was entering her teen years that she learned why.

  Upon the completion of her Year of Bloom, the second year of her pilgrimage, her mother had returned to the fields to find her longhouse decimated, her family gone. It was only her absence that had saved her, and for many years thereafter she had mourned, wishing she had not been the sole survivor, the only one spared.

  Had she been able to turn back Time, she would never have left the longhouse, would have preferred to die with them all, rather than face the world alone. Any happiness that she had found afterward had come in the wake of that memory, leaving Rhapsody to wonder if her mother had ever really gotten over it.

  Now Rhapsody stood in the same place, feeling the same awe, the same anticipation that she supposed her mother had felt. Her Lirin ancestry had lain dormant in her for her entire life, though in recent years she had seen and come to know more full- and half-caste Lirin than she had in childhood.

  Easton was the thoroughfare of the eastern seaboard, so in her time there she had seen travelers of many different races and backgrounds. Perhaps now that she had come to Yliessan she would finally find welcome and acceptance among her mother’s people. Perhaps she would finally find the strength to return home.