The hold seemed suddenly a tiny and fragile place amid all the wild waste of Hiuaj, a place where the illusion of law persisted like a light set in the wind. But the reality was the dark, that lay heavy and breathing against her shoulder.
They should not destroy him, they in their mad trust in law and their own sanity. She began to wonder if they even questioned what he was, if they saw only an exhausted and wounded outlaw, and never doubted their conclusion. They were blind, that could not see the manner of him, the ancient armor and the tall black horse, that had no place in this age of the world, let alone in Hiuaj.
Perhaps they did not want to see, for then they would have to realize how fragile their safety was.
And perhaps he would not go away. Perhaps he had come to ruin that peace of theirs—to take Barrows-hold down to the same ruin as Chadrih, to ride one last course across the drowning world, one last glory of the Hiua kings, who had tried to master the Wells and failed, as the halfling Shiua had failed before them.
She had no haste to wake him. She sat frozen in dread while the storm fell away to silence, while the fire began to die in the hearth and none dared approach to tend it.
Chapter 3
Toward dawn came a stirring outside, soft scuffing on the pavement. Jhirun looked up, waking from half-sleep, her shoulder numb with the stranger’s weight.
Came Zai, shivering and wet, stout Zai, who had run to set the beacon. She entered blue-lipped with chill and dripping about the hem of her skirts, and moved as silently as she could.
And behind Zai crept others, out of the mist that had followed the rain: the men came, one after the other, armed with skinning knives and their boat-poles. None spoke. They moved inside, their eyes hard and wary and their weapons ready. Jhirun watched and her heart pounded against her ribs; her lips shaped silent entreaty to them, her cousins, her uncles.
Uncle Naram was first to venture toward the hearth; and Lev after him, with Fwar and Ger beside him. Cil rose up of a sudden from the bench by the door; but Jinel was by her and seized her arm, cautioning her to silence. Jhirun cast a wild look at her grandfather, who stood helplessly at the stable door, and looked back at the men who edged toward her with drawn weapons.
Perhaps her arms tightened the least bit; perhaps there was some warning sound her numbed hearing did not receive; but the stranger wakened of a sudden, and she cried out to feel the push of his arms hurling her at them.
He was on his feet in the same instant, staggering against the mantel, and they rushed on him, rushing over her, who sprawled on the floor. And Fwar, more eager to lay hands on her than on the enemy, seized her and cruelly twisted her arm in hauling her to her feet. In the loft a baby cried, swiftly hushed.
Jhirun looked, dazed by the pain of Fwar’s grip, on the stranger who had backed to the corner. She saw his move, quicker than the beat of a bird’s wing, that sent his dagger into his hand.
That gave them pause; and in that pause he ripped at the harness at his side and that great sword at his back slid to his hip. He unhooked the sheath of it one-handed.
They panicked, rushed for him in a mass, and of a sudden the sheath flashed across the room loose, and the bright blade was in his two hands, a wheeling arc that scattered blood and hurled her kinsmen back with shrieks of pain and terror.
And he leaned there in his corner a moment, hard-breathing; but the fresh wounds were on his enemies and none had they set on him. The stranger moved, and Fwar gave back, wrenching Jhirun’s arm so hard that she cried out, Cil’s scream echoing upon her own.
The stranger edged round the room, gathered up his fallen sheath, still with an eye to them; and her kinsmen gave back still further, none of them willing to rush that glittering blade a second time. In the loft were frightened stirrings, back into shadows.
“What will you?” Jhirun heard her grandfather’s voice ask from behind her. “Name it and go.”
“My horse,” he said. “You, old man, fetch all my gear—all of it. I shall kill you otherwise.”
And not a muscle did he move, staring at them with the great sword in his hands; nor did they move. Only her grandfather sidled carefully to the stable door and opened it, going to do the stranger’s bidding.
“Let her go,” the stranger said then to Fwar.
Fwar thrust her free, and she turned and spat at Fwar, shaking with hate. Fwar did nothing, his baleful eyes fixed on the stranger in silent rage, and she walked from him, never so glad to walk away from anything—went from him and to the side of the stranger, who had touched her gently, who had never done her hurt.
She turned there to face them all, these brute, ugly cousins, with thick hands and crass wit and no courage when it was likely to cost them. Her grandfather had been a different man once; but now he had none to rely on but these: brigands, no different at heart than the bandits they paid the marshlanders to catch and hang—save that the bandits preyed on the living.
Jhirun drew a deep breath and tossed her tangled hair from her face and looked on Fwar, hating, seeing the promise of later vengeance for his shame—on her, whom he reckoned already his property. She hated with a depth that left her shaking and short of breath, knowing her hopelessness. She was no more than they; the stranger had taken her part because of his own pride, because it was what a king should have done, but it was not because she was more than her cousins.
He had dropped his dagger to use the sword. She bent, slowly, picked it up, he none objecting; and she walked slowly to the other corner and slashed the strings by which sausages and white cheeses were hung. Jinel squealed with outrage, provoking a child’s outcry from the loft; Jinel stifled her cry behind bony hands.
And such prizes Jhirun gathered off the floor and brought back to him. “Here,” she said, dropping them at his side on the hearthstones. “Take whatever you can.”
This she said to spite them all.
The stableward door opened, and Grandfather Keln led the black horse back in, the beast apprehensive of the room and the men. The warrior gathered the reins into his left hand and tugged at the saddle, testing the girth, but he never stopped watching the men. “I will take the blanket, if you will,” he said to Jhirun quietly. “Tie the food into that and tie it on.”
She bent down and did this, under her kinsmen’s outraged eyes, rolled it all into a neat kit bound with some of the cheese strings and bound it behind the saddle as he showed her. She had to reach high to do this, and she feared the tall horse, but she was glad enough to do this for him.
And then she stood aside while he tugged on the reins and led the black horse through their midst to the open door, none daring to stop him. He paused outside, still on the paving, already greyed by the mist that whitened the morning outside. She saw him rise to the saddle, turn, and the mist took him, and swiftly muffled even the sound of the hooves.
There was nothing left of him, and it was as she had known it would be. She shivered, and shut her eyes, and realized in her hand was still one relic of their meeting, one memory of ancient magics: the hilt of a bone-handled dagger, such as the old Kings had borne to their burials.
She looked on her kinsmen, who were bleeding with wounds and ragged and ill-smelling, which he had never been, though he came from the flood, hard-riding; and there was hate in their faces, which he had not given her, though he was set upon and almost killed. She regarded Cil, sallow-faced, with her strength wasted; and Jinel, from whose face all liveliness and love had long since departed.
“Come here,” said Fwar, and reached out to jerk her by the arm, his courage regained.
She whipped the knife across his face, struck flesh and heard him scream, blood across his mouth; and she whirled and ran, slashed this way and that among them, saw Cil’s face a mask of horror at her madness, her grandfather drawing Cil back for protection. She held her hand then, and ran, free, through their midst, out into the cold and the fog.
The shawl slipped from her shoulders to trail by a corner; she caught it and ran again, through the black brush that appeared out of the mist. The dogs barked madly. She found the corner of the rough stone shelter on the west corner of the hold, and there in the brush she sank down, clutching the knife in bloody fingers and bending over, near to being sick. Her stomach heaved at the memory of Cil’s horrified face. Her eyes stung with tears that blurred nothing, for there was only blank mist about her. She heard shouting through the distorting fog, her cousins seeking her, cursing her.
And Cil’s voice, full of love and anguish.
Then she did weep, hot tears coursing down her face. She remembered the Cil that had been, when they were three sisters and the world was wider; then Cil could have understood—but Cil had made her choice, for safety, for her children. She was a faithful wife to Ger; and Jhirun knew Ger, who was faithful to nothing, who had laid hands on Jhirun herself in the drunkenness of Midyear, careless of his wife’s feelings. Jhirun still had nightmares of that escape; and Ger had a scar to remember it.
And Fwar; she knew she had scarred him badly. He would have revenge for it. She had taken the petty measure of him before them all, and he could not live without revenge for that. She sat trembling in the cold white blankness and clutched against her breast the gull-token of the dead king, and the bloody dagger with it.
“Jhirun!”
That was her grandfather’s voice, frantic and angry. Even to him she could not explain what she had done, why she had turned a knife on her own cousins, or what set her shuddering when she looked on her own sister. Fey, he must say, which others had always believed; and he would sign holy signs over her, and cleanse the house and renew the broken warding spells.
It was without meaning, she thought suddenly, the chanting and the spells. They lived all their lives in the shadow of world’s end; and her children to Fwar or any man would be born to a worse age; and their children to the end of the world. They tried to live as if it were unimportant that the sea was eating away at the marsh and the quakes shaking the stones of the hold. They lived as if gold could buy them years as it bought them grain. They sought safety and warmth and comfort as if it would last, and saw nothing that was real.
There was no peace. The Barrow-king had swept through their lives like a wind out of the dark; and peace was at an end, but they saw nothing.
To accept Fwar, until she had no spirit left; or until she killed him or he killed her, that was the choice she was given.
She drew a great mouthful of air, like one drowning, and stared into the white nothingness and knew that she was not going back. She gathered her limbs under her, and rose and moved quietly through the mist.
Her kinsmen were down by the bank, calling to each other, seeking whether she had left in the boat. Soon they found the gold that was left there, abandoned in the night. Their voices exclaimed in profane greed. Already they were fighting over the prizes she had brought.
She cared nothing for this. She had no more desire for gold or for anything that they valued. She moved quietly round by the stable’s outside door, cracked it so that she could see in without being seen. The goats bleated and the birds stirred in the loft, so that her heart froze in her and she knew that the houseward door would be flung open and her presence in the outer stable discovered upon the instant. But there was no stir from the house. She could still hear the shouting down by the boat, distant and angry voices. There would be no better chance than this.
She slipped inside, went to the pony’s stall and eased the gate open. Then she took the halter from its peg and slipped it on him, backed him out. He did not want to leave his stable when she reached the outside door, laid back his ears at the weather, but he came when she tugged on the rope—stolid, thick-necked little pony that bore their burdens and amused the children. She grasped the clipped mane and rolled up onto his back, her legs finding pleasant the warmth of his fat sides, and she nudged him with her bare heels and set him moving downslope, having to fight him at first: he thought he knew the trail she wanted, and was mistaken, and had to be persuaded otherwise.
The water had sunk away in the channel this morning, and kept to center. The pony’s hooves made deep gouges in the mire, betrayal when the sun should clear the mist away, and the pony had careful work to find a way up the next bank: marshbred, the little beast, that knew his way among the flooded isles, far sturdier for such travelling than the slender-legged horse of the stranger-king. Jhirun patted his neck as they came up safely on the next hill, her legs wet to the knees; and the pony tossed his head and blew a puff of excitement, moving quickly, sensing by now that things were not ordinary this morning, that it was not a workday.
In and out among the Barrow-hills they travelled, in places so treacherous she must often dismount and lead the pony. Her bare feet were muddy and numb with cold, and the mist clung as it could on chill days. She felt the aches of her flight of the night before, the weariness of a night without sleep, but she had no desire to rest. Fwar would find the tracks; Fwar would pursue, if none of the others would. The thought of him coming on her alone, without his father and brother to restrain him, made her sick with fear.
Eventually in the mist she found the way she sought, the stones of the old Road, and solid footing for the pony. She climbed astride again, absorbing the warmth of the pony’s sides, her damp shawl wrapped about her. She congratulated herself on having eluded pursuit, began for the first time to believe she might make it away clear. Even the pony moved gladly, his unshod hooves sounding hollowly on the stones and echoing back off unseen hills.
It was the only Road left in all Hiuaj, khal-made and more ancient than the Kings. Any who followed her must find her if she delayed; but they must come afoot, and she had the pony’s strength under her.
Somewhere ahead, she believed, rode the stranger-king, for a northward track had brought him to Barrows-hold, and there was no way but this for a rider to take. She had no hope of overtaking him on that fine long-legged horse, not once they had both reached the Road itself; but in her deepest hopes she thought he might expect her, wait for her—that he would become her guide through the terror of the wide marsh.
But already he faded in her mind, a vision that belonged to the dark; and now things were white and gray. Only the gull-image at her heart and the bone-handled dagger in the waistband of her skirt proved that he had ever existed, and that she was most coldly sane, more than all her kinsmen.
In her common sense she knew that she was bound for grief, that she was casting herself into the hands of marshlanders or worse, who would learn, as her cousins knew, that she dreamed dreams, and hate her, as Chadrih-folk hated her, Ewon’s fey daughter. But all the terror her nightmares had ever held seemed this morning at her back, hovering about Barrows-hold with a thickness that made it impossible to breathe. Death was there; she felt it, close, close and waiting. Away from Barrows-hold was relief from that pressure; it grew less and less as she rode away . . . not to Aren, to hope for that drab misery, within constant reach of Fwar. She chose to believe that she travelled to Shiuan, where holds sat rich and secure, where folk possessed Hiua gold. It was not so important to reach it as it was to go, now, now, now: the urgency beat in her blood like the heat of fever, beyond all reason.
Socha had smiled the morning she parted from them; Jhirun recalled her wrapped in sunlight, the boat gliding from the landing as it parted into that golden light: Socha had taken such a leave, at Hnoth, when madness swelled as the waters swelled in their channels. Jhirun let herself wonder the darker thoughts that she had always chased from her mind, whether Socha had lived long, swept out into the great gray sea—what night might have been for her, adrift in so much water, what horrid plunging of great monsters sporting near the shell of a boat, and in what mind Socha had come to the end—whether she had wept for Barrows-hold and a life such as Cil had accepted. Jhirun did not think so.
She drew the gul
l amulet from between her breasts, safe to see it now in daylight, safe where no one would take it from her; and she thought of the king under the hill, and the stranger—himself driven by a nightmare as her own drove her.
The white rider, the fair rider, the woman behind him: day and white mist, as he was of the dark. In the night she had shuddered at his ravings, thinking of white feathers and of what lay against her heart, that seventh and unfavorable power—that once had prisoned him, before a Barrows-girl had come where she ought not.
The gull glittered coldly in her hand, wings spread, a thing of ancient and sinister beauty, emblem of the blankness at the edge of the world, out of which only the white gulls came, like lost souls: Morgen-Angharan, that the marshlanders cursed, that the Kings had followed to their ruin—the white Queen, who was Death. A nagging fear urged her to throw the amulet far into the marsh. Hnoth was coming, as it had come for Socha, when earth and sea and sky went mad and the dreams came, driving her where no sane person would go. But her hand closed firmly about it, possessing it, and in time she slipped it back into her bodice to stay.
She could not see what lay about her in the mist. The pony’s hooves rang sometimes on bare stone, sometimes splashed through water or trod on slick mud. The dim shapes of the hills loomed in the thick air and passed her slowly like humps of some vast serpent, submerged in the marsh, now on this side of the Road and now on the other.
Something tall and thin stood beside the roadway. The pony clopped on toward it, and Jhirun’s heart beat faster, her fingers clenched upon the rein, the while she assured herself that the pony would not so blithely approach any dangerous beast. Then it took shape clearly, one of the Standing Stones, edgewise. She knew it now, and had not realized how far she had ridden in the mist.
More and more of such stones were about her now. She well knew where she was: the ruined khalin hold of Nia’s Hill was nearby, stones which had stood before the Moon was broken. She rode now on the border of the marshlands.