Four

“Are you going to kill me?” said the child to the Dragon.

“Kill you?” The Dragon smiled at him. “Certainly not until we have been introduced.”

—Fates for Opening Night, Nia d’Eleth

The darkness tears wide, splitting as hewn skin does when the sword strikes.

This is Etachne field, all one gloomy sodden mass of misery—lead-gray above with clouds that have been pouring rain for three days now, dun and black and red below with the scattered bodies of the slain. The stench is incredible. Those who fight do so with their faces wrapped, and fall as often to the sick miasma of the air as to Reaver arrows. Fyrd are harrying the fringes of the battlefield, devouring the dead. A few hundred feet away, a maw and a horwolf and a nadder are busily dismembering a fallen woman. Her surcoat was once Darthene midnight blue. Now it is mostly red-brown.

She gulps down sourness for the hundredth time and stares across the misty valley. Somewhere over there the Reavers have retreated into cover, regrouping for the next attack, There are only about a thousand of them left, but those are more than enough to break the Darthene defense at the other end of the valley and let them out into the open lands, Once that happens they’ll begin pillaging at Etachne and leave the country burning behind them as far as Wendwen. Around her the Darthenes holding the gap are huddled, soaked through, hungry, outnumbered, waiting.

The Rodmistress is dead, so they have no idea when reinforcements may be coming. Segnbora is the only sorcerer left, and over the past few days her sorceries have been going progressively flatter—a starved sorcerer is good for very little. It was all she could do yesterday to stop the miserable rain for a little while; today her head still aches with the backlash. Oh, food, she thinks. Just oatcakes and milk—She stops herself, does a brief mind-exercise to calm down.

It doesn’t work. Her partner Eftgan has been gone for three days now, ridden off for the reinforcements; and the Goddess only knows whether she lives or not, for there’s a great silence where her mind used to be. Oh, Tegane, loved, be all right, please—She winces away from the painful thought, opening her eyes on the Fyrd again. The sickness comes up in her throat as she sees them tugging at the limbs of the woman in Darthene blue. Then sickness turns to rage and she throws her sodden cloak off savagely and stands up in the rain, fists clenched.

“Ira maehsta in? aehsta,” she whispers, as within, so without, and begins a bitter poem in Nhaired, shaping in her mind a construct. Anger-fueled sorcery is dangerous, she knows, but anger and terror are all she has left. Her desperation fuels the sorcery, scansion shapes its skeleton, meter sets the beast-shape, filling it out. Words link in sliding musculature, the hot pelt of intent furs it over, angry purpose glares like eyes beneath a shaggy mane of verse.

Uncaring of the backlash to come, she grips the shape of words and wraps it round her like a cloak—then drops to all fours in the rain, and leaps roaring at the Fyrd—

—and the darkness falls.

(—they all do that, we’ve watched them do that since we first came. Yet while they feel for one member of their kind, they still do murder on others, Sttiuh-std annikh’S—)

(We don’t understand it either. What about this one—)

Here’s the last rise before home, with the little rutted track that serves for road. Steelsheen quickens her pace a bit, sensing road’s end. The air is full of the smell of salt: beach-grass hisses incessantly on either side of the track. She makes the top of the rise—and there it is, spread out blue and wrinkled, glittering and lovely, the Darthene Gulf. The Sun is beginning to pierce through from a silver sky; the black beach glistens as the waves slide back; sandpipers dance daintily after them, poking for whelks in the bubbling crevices and tide pools. She looks across at the lonely stone manor-house built on the headland—Home!

Steelsheen breaks into a canter, They’ll be so proud. My master has never before given live steel to anyone so young. And Tegane has spoken for me to see if I can be in the royal household. To live in Darthis,in a town with walls! And Sheen, Father will be so proud when he sees her. A real Steldene, a silverdust Steldene, and I broke her myself with all the tricks he taught me!

She punches the mare into a gallop and rides into the demesne, under the old stone arch with the tai-Enraesi arms, lioncelle, passant regardant, sword upraised in the dexter paw. Chickens scatter in all directions. Dogs scramble to their feet and bounce around her, barking, as she rides in to the dooryard with a great clatter of hooves. She dismounts. A yellow cat on the doorstep opens one eye at the noise, says a rude word and closes the eye again.

Segnbora laughs as she pulls off Steelsheen’s saddle, drops it on the ground, fends off various dogs with pats and scratches, and bends to chuck the cat under the chin. Three weeks she has been on the road from Darthis. Three weeks of lousy weather, an attack by bandits and a case of the flux. One cat, however grumpy, isn’t going to spoil this splendid homecoming.

“Mother, Father, I’m back!” she shouts, shoving open the front door and swaggering in.

She walks through the little main hall with its benches and carvings and hangings and firepit. Secretly she’s a little shocked by the shabbiness of the place; it never looked this run down before she went to the city, Her father’s old complaints about failed crops and the sorry state of family finances suddenly begin to disturb her—

“Mama?”

No answer. She’s in the kitchen, then. Through the hall and out into the big stone-paved kitchen and pantry. Her mother is just stepping in the far door with a string of onions from the buttery shed outside. Close behind is her father, who carries a newly dispatched chicken.

“Hi!” she shouts.

“’Berend!” says her mother, and “Don’t shout,” says her father, both at once.

She trots over, embraces them both in a huge hug, and pulls her sheathed sword out of her belt to show them. “Mama, look, I named it Charri—”

“How is your Fire coming, dear?” her mother interrupts. Her father says nothing, waiting for the answer, holding himself aloof.

And suddenly it’s all wrong. Don’t they think if I had finally focused, I’d have come in here streaming blue Fire from every orifice? Why don’t they—

“Mother,” she says, “can’t you ever ask me about something else?”

Her mother looks surprised. “What else is there?” she says; and, “Don’t talk to your mother in that tone of voice,” her father says.

“I have to rub down my horse, excuse me.” She bites the inside of her cheek hard to keep from saying anything else, and walks out the way she came—

—and then darkness again.

She staggers about, lost in the darkness of her self, and begins to understand madness.

(Stihe’h, stikeh-std annikh’S-!) rumbles the voice of storm again. It’s joined by more voices, all intoning the same rushing phrase, a litany of incomprehension and curiosity. They won’t go away. They bump and jostle her roughly when she stumbles into them in the dark, feeling for a way out.

The place where she walks is walled and domed and floored in adamant, built that way long ago to protect her inner verities. There her memories are stored. Some have been buried by accident, some she’s sealed in stone on purpose; many stand about smooth and polished from much handling.

It’s the buried ones that chiefly interest her invaders. Stone means nothing to them, it being one of their elements. Cruel claws slice down effortlessly. White fire burns and melts. Delicate talons turn over exposed thoughts—old joys like polished jewels, razory fragments of pain.

(Khai”rae todwt? Sshir’stihe’-khai’?)

(No, this moment’s fairer far. Look. I hadn’t thought they sang—)

—it’s quite dark, but she needs no light to know that the slab of marble is a handspan from her nose. The sound of her breathing is loud beneath it, and the condensation from her breath drips maddeningly onto her face. The sarcophagus-shaped Testing Bath is full of icy water, and Segnbora, naked as a fish, is submerged in it up to her face. Her hands are bound to her sides. On her chest rests a ten-pound stone. Above her is the three-inch-thick lid of the Bath, open only at the end behind her head, just enough to let in air and Saris’s voice.

This is the final test of a loremistress-Bard, which will determine whether three years of training will desert her under extreme stress. There’s no telling which of the Four Hundred Tales she’ll be required to recite faultlessly tonight, or what song, or poem, or legend. When the lid is removed in the morning, she’ll be expected to take up the kithara and extemporize a poem in tragic-epic meter on the forging of Forlennh BrokenBlade.

“Sunset to sunrise?” she had said to Eftgan this morning, before the last of the orals. “I can do that, standing on my head.”

Now she’s not so sure. She feels like she’s been in this cold, wet tomb forever. She suspects it’s more like two hours.

“The Lost Queen’s Ballad,” Saris says from outside the Bath.

Segnbora closes her eyes, hunting for the memory-tag she uses to remember that ballad, and finds it. She sings softly, in a minor key:

“Oh, when Darthen’s Queen went riding out of Barachael that day,

she rode up the empty corrie and she sang a rondelay;

and the three Lights shone upon her as on Skadhwe’s bitter blade,

and she fared on up that awful trail and little of it made;

She stood laughing on the peak-snows with the new Moon in her hair,

and she smiled and set her foot upon the Bridge that isn’t There;

She took the road right gladly to the Castle in the Sky,

and Darthen’s sorrel steed came back, but the Queen stayed there for aye ....”

She lies there expecting to be asked for the rest of the history—the suicide of Queen Efmaer’s loved, and her journey up to Glasscastle, where suicides go, to get her inner Name back from him. But no, that would be too easy.

“Jarrin’s Debt,” says Saris.

Segnbora sighs. “As long ago as your last night’s dreams, and as far away as tonight’s,” she begins, “the Battle of Blue-peak befell ....”

—and the darkness in the Bath is suddenly the darkness inside her mind.

Damn you! Damn you all to Darkness! Get out of here!

—the courtyard is fairly large, but its size is no help; there’s nowhere to hide from Shihan’s sword, which is everywhere at once.

She dances back and swings her wooden practice sword up in a desperate block—a mistake, for no conscious act can possibly counter one of Shihan’s moves. He strikes the practice sword aside with a single scornful sweep of Clothespole, then smacks her in the head with the flat in an elegant backhand—a blow painful enough to let her know she’s in disgrace. Segnbora sits down hard with the shock of it, saying hello to the hard paving of the practice yard for the millionth time.

“Idiot,” Shihan growls. He is a Steldene, black-haired, dark-skinned, with a broad-nosed face, a bristly mustache, and fierce brown, eyes. He stands right over her—a great brown cat of a man; lithe, muscular, and dangerous-looking. He is utterly contemptuous.

“‘When will you learn to stop thinking!” He glares at her. “Save thinking for your bardcraft and your sorcery and the Fire you keep chasing, but don’t bring it here! Sweet Lady of the Forges, why do I waste my time on walking butchers’ meat?”

She gets up, slowly, resheathes the practice sword in her belt and settles into a ready stance: one hand gripping the imaginary sheath, the other at her side, relaxed. She’s seething, for the other advanced students, starting to eat their nunch, are watching from the sides of the courtyard. Maryn, around whom she danced with insulting ease this morning, is snickering, damn him.

Even as her eyes flick away from Maryn, she sees Shihan drawing. She draws too, spins out of reach as she does so, comes around at him from his momentarily undefended side and hits him—not a hard blow, but so focused that his whole chest cavity seems to jump away from it.

Quite suddenly, to her absolute amazement, Shihan is on his left side on the ground, with the point of her practice sword leaning delicately against his ribs. Shihan’s eyes close with hers like steel touching steel, and bind there, a bladed glance. All around the courtyard people have stopped chewing. No one in her class has ever downed Shihan. Segnbora starts to tremble.

“Good,” Shihan says in a voice that all the others can hear. “And wrong,” he adds more quietly, for her alone. “Come and eat.”

They step off to the far side of the courtyard, apart from the other students, and settle under the plane-tree where Shihan’s nunch-meal lies ready—blue-streaked sheep-milk cheese, crumbly biscuits, sour beer. Shihan silently casts a few crumbs off to one side and spills a few drops of beer as libation to the Goddess, then starts eating.

“Was it your anger at Maryn that caused you to stop thinking?” Shihan asks.

“Yes, sir.”

“Feeling when you strike is all right,” says her master. “First time I’ve seen you do that. There may be hope for you yet. Provided,” and he glances up with a frown, “that it’s the right kind of feeling.”

She sits quiet while he eats.

“Listen,” Shihan says. “Don’t try to figure this out: just hear it, let it in. When you strike another, especially to kill, you’re striking yourself. When you kill, the other takes a little part of you with them, past the Door. If you do it in anger, what they take is the part of you that feels.” Shihan wipes his mouth on his sleeve. His eyes burn with the intensity of one imparting a sacred mystery to a fellow initiate. “Kill in anger often enough and your aliveness starts running out too. Soon there’s nothing left but a husk that walks and speaks and does skillful murder. Were you angry at me?” He shoots the question at her sudden as a dart.

“Master! No.”

“But I’m the one that anger struck down. See how easily it used you?”

Segnbora stares at the ground, her face burning.

“Shihan, I didn’t think—”

“I noticed,” he says, for the first time smiling. “Keep that up.”

She shakes her head, confused. “Master, in killing in war or in self-defense, if I’m not supposed to feel angry—what should I be feeling?”

He looks at her. “Compassion,” he says, gruff-voiced. “Anguish. What else, when you’ve just killed yourself?”

(-ae”wnh khai-pfaaa ur’ts’shatiineh rahiw?)

(I don’t know for certain; all I felt there before was a memory of cold dirt. It must be something interesting. See how thick the stone is over it? Several of us will be needed—)

OH NO YOU DON’T!

—maybe it was the momentary burst of outrage that let her briefly out into the light again.

Whatever the reason, suddenly the world was bright and clear, though it seemed, very small, and the creatures that moved through it were earthbound and crippled of mind.

She was not in the Morrowfane country anymore. This was some twilit camp under the lee of a hill. She could feel the warmth of a fire against her side. She lay on her back, her limbs aching so much that she couldn’t move. To her left sat Lang, warm in the firelight, gazing down at her with a bleak, helpless expression. Her distress at her immobility fell away at the sight of him. Lang mattered: He was stability, normalcy, all embodied in one stocky blond shape.

In all her life before this terror she had never cried for help but once, and that time help had been refused. She had never asked since. But now she had lost her mind, and surely there was nothing else to lose. Oh Lang, she tried to cry, I’m crazy, I’m scared, I can’t find my way out, but I’m here—

But the words caught on a blazing place in her throat, got twisted out of shape and came out hoarse and strange. “R’mdahe, au’Lang, irikhe’, stihe-sta‘ae vehhy’t-kej, ssih haa-ht—” Not far away Herewiss and Freelorn lay together with their backs against a rock, holding weary conversation with the campfire that burned between them and the place where she lay.

(—indeed not,) the campfire was saying. Sunspark’s eyes, ember-bright in the flickering fire, threw a glance of mild interest in her direction. (There aren’t that many things in this bland little corner of the Pattern that can bother my kind. But we used to come across other travelers among the worlds, and some of them told of being unseated in heart or mind after coming to a world too strange for them to understand. They lost their languages, some of them—)

“Did they get better?” Freelorn said. His tone indicated that he desperately wanted to hear that they did.

“Lorn,” Herewiss said gently, putting his arm around his loved and hugging him, “we’re going to have to leave her somewhere safe. She can’t ride, she can’t talk, she can’t take care of herself. The arrow-shot she got from that last batch of bandits would have been the end of her if I hadn’t been to the Fane first and learned what to do.” Freelorn didn’t answer.

“I went as deep as I could last night,” Herewiss said. “I couldn’t hear anything but a confusion of voices, and if I can’t reach her there’s nothing more we can do. Look, tomorrow afternoon—tomorrow night, maybe—we’ll be riding through Chavi to get the news. We can leave her there; they’ll be glad to have her. She’ll take her time, get better, and follow us when she can. Face it, Lorn, the Shadow’s after us. We can’t care for an invalid from here to Bluepeak.”

“She saved my life,” Freelorn said, his voice breaking harshly out of him. He wasn’t angry at his loved, but at the unfairness of the Morrowfane, which had done this to her and left him untouched. “Several times ...”

“She knew what she was doing, all those times,” Herewiss said. “She knew what she was doing when she went up the Morrowfane. Lang told us so. And shell know why we’re doing what we’re doing, and understand.”

But there was little hope in his voice—

—the blackness swallowed her again. All around her the rush and swell of inhuman voices was beginning, faintly, as if for the first time the sources of the sound were at some distance from her. But soon enough they would drown her resistance beneath their implacable song, close in on that one untouchable memory, rip it untimely from beneath the rock and make it come as real as the others.

She shuddered violently. No, oh no. And in any case I won’t be left behind at the next inn as if I were a lamed horse!

Her bruised and battered pride got up one more time from the hard floor to which it had been knocked, and made itself useful. I am a tai-Enraiesi. If my ancestors could see me they would laugh me to scorn! And I’m a sensitive trained in the ways of the inner mind, Fire or no Fire. I won’t stand inside here and do nothing!

Off to one side, distantly, she could still hear Freelorn and Herewiss talking. Gulping with terror, Segnbora turned her back on them, concentrated as best she could, and began making her way toward the huge voices, deeper into the dark ...