The Dark Ferryman (30 page)

Grace smoothed her hair back from her face. Nutmeg’s rosy cheeks had gotten even rosier, but the pinch lines about her mouth grew pale. “Don’t say such things.”

“How can you not? How can you not think them? Grace, she sent you away, too. Any one of th’ guards could have gone to find Sevryn. She didn’t want you there either. I’m just a nursemaid, but . . . what are you?” Nutmeg’s gaze searched Rivergrace’s face. “Lariel hasn’t let Sevryn declare for you.”

“Sssssh.” Grace steadied her, afraid that even here in this alcove, the walls might have ears, and she had already heard much in an alcove herself. “War changes everything.”

“Not friendships. Does it?”

“I don’t know. But it won’t change mine, and it won’t change yours, and that’s what counts, isn’t it? We have deep roots, remember? And we don’t forget them.”

Nutmeg sucked in a quavering breath. “Never.”

She pulled back and kissed Nutmeg on the top of her head. “I’ve got to go fetch Sevryn. Will you be all right?”

“I will be. Upstairs, cleaning and tidying up, and maybe working on a new pattern for Mother. I’ve been neglecting things and need to put a hand to them again. Mayhap I might even find time to short sheet the bed of a certain unwelcome guest.” Nutmeg put her chin up. She spun around in a cloud of amber hair and fled down the hallway before Grace could give her another hug.

Outside, a gentle rain had begun to fall, its patter so tentative it could scarcely be felt or heard. It would have to rain like this for a handful of days to make its presence felt by the earth, she thought, hardly more than a mist yet the storm brewing overhead and upon the hills foretold a more substantial rainfall. Would it come? Or did the River Goddess meddle in waters that were not of her domain, and withhold what she could as punishment? Or was it only that these lands were in cycle for a drought, as simple and unwanted as that? She moved through it without even bothering to put a cloak on, headed for the arena, hearing by shouts and the clash of wood upon wood that the men drilled and fought regardless of the impending weather. Clusters of men let her through, their bodies dusty and muddy and bloodied, their scent strong upon the damp air, their eyes lingering on her briefly as she came around the wooden structure whose high walls seemed to shake with unseen but heard blows.

She went through one of the gateways and stood in the shadow, watching men as they struggled against one another and wondered how this could be compared to war. It was brutal and yet, she knew, not as brutal as what Queen Lariel planned. There were no war machines here. No trenches to be lined with tar and dried tinder. No pits with stakes. No catapults that could throw smashing boulders. Here, you saw the face of your enemy. Saw the sweat slick his body. Saw the blood when you split his skin. Heard the grunt when you bruised flesh or bone. Felt an echo of his pain in your own body. This was worse and yet . . . and yet, it was not, because it was accountable. It was not senseless violence where victory would be counted in numbers of the faceless fallen.

She knotted her hands in her skirt.

Sevryn stood as the solo in the middle of a two-on-one melee. The odds, even then, might not have been fair. A third man rolled on the ground, groaning, and a fourth stood with his back to the other side of the arena wall, his hand to his nose which bled copiously. Sevryn turned suddenly, lashing with his foot out and high, catching one of his opponents to the jaw that snapped his head back and dropped the soldier. He took a blow to his exposed flank, but rolled from it and came up with his fist to the other’s gut. The man doubled over with a groan and went to his knees. Sevryn merely reached out and pushed him over, saying, “Enough.”

He looked past Grace as though she were not there, beckoning to another group of four who had been watching with their elbows hooked over a side railing. She called out, “The queen commands your presence.”

Sevryn stopped in mid-gesture, and blinked. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead as though just now realizing she stood there. Everyone milled to a stop, a few of them looking to the sky overhead, where rain began to solidify a little and tumble down, wetting their heads.

“Another time,” he said, and grabbed a rag from the rails to scrub his face as he crossed the arena to Rivergrace. He stopped there for a long moment, his sides heaving as he caught his breath, and cleaned his face, and in all that time he did not look into her eyes once until finally he dropped the rag into the dust.

When he did, she took a half step back. A light gleamed in his gray eyes, a witch light, like one off a swamp at night, a greenish glow that her brothers Garner and Hosmer used to tease them about with scary tales. A Demon light, they’d said.

They had been teasing her and Nutmeg, but as she looked up into Sevryn’s battered face, she realized that their old wives’ tale had been based, once, upon truth.

He passed his hand over his eyes as if he could clear them that way. It helped a bit, the light dimming until she could almost tell herself she hadn’t seen it, but it lingered in the darkness of his pupils as though it watched her from that depth. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Then tell me where I should be.”

“Not here. Not now. I wouldn’t have you see . . . this.”

She examined the arena and the men helping each other stand, as they took stock of their injuries, and spoke to one another in low, wary tones. “You don’t fight them. You fight yourself.”

He considered her face. “Yes.” He gave a dry, mocking laugh.

“Can’t Lariel help you? Or Jeredon?”

He closed the ground between them. “They can’t know.”

“They’re your friends.”

“This part of me has no friends. If I cannot control it, if I cannot excise it, then I’m dangerous to everyone. She will exile me.”

“Do you wish to control it?”

He did not quite look at her, but at someplace beyond her when he answered quietly, “It gives me power. It fills me with a passion, a heat, that makes me able to do things I can’t do otherwise. It might keep me alive if I can learn to use it.”

“What if it uses you?”

He lowered his voice. “There is no such thing as being Demon touched. One touch, and it wants nothing less than possession. And nothing comes without a price.”

“Do you think you’re the only one who would be paying it? Is that how you make the bargain with yourself, that Cerat touches no one but you? It’s not a matter of control if you would trade yourself, bits of yourself, moment by moment. It will betray you. I carried Cerat, too. I know the echo of its voice.”

“But he didn’t stay with you.” Sevryn’s gray gaze flickered over her face.

“No.”

“If I can’t excise it, then I must control it. Trust me, Grace, to do what I can do.” He touched a tangle of her hair to smooth it back behind her ear. He traced the curve of her cheekbone, and it felt like both fire and ice upon her skin. She wanted to grab his hand and press her face to his palm but did not. “I can’t be near you like this until I do.” He took a deep breath. “Where is she?”

“In the conference room.”

“I take it the ild Fallyn is here, then.”

“And Tranta as well.”

“Him, too?” Sevryn frowned. A bit of blood leaked from the corner of his mouth, and he rubbed at the fleck with the ball of his thumb. “Tell her I’ll be up as soon as I clean myself.”

“She’ll wait impatiently. I’m not to be there.”

“No?” He looked as though he might be searching for something and could not quite grasp it. Finally, he tilted his head back and said, “It’s drizzling.”

“Only a little. It will pass.” She gathered her skirt slightly to step away from him, adding, “Only it will pass too soon and too easily. This storm is one we need.” She felt his stare as she left, crossing the yards which had begun to muddy slightly, his stare which held a heat and an intensity that made the hair rise at the nape of her neck, a frisson that ran through her entire body before she moved out of his sight and reached the safety of the back kitchen doors.

Quendius watched Narskap as he crouched to the ground, one hand stirring the marks of many hoofprints, the dirt and leaves stirred up, as the wind held the smell of rain growing near. There were those who said water had no smell, but he thought it only a defect on the part of human flesh to be unable to scent it. Animals certainly could. He’d seen them migrate across continents in search of it, dig in the ground in hopes of finding it in sandy bottoms, and race in front of pounding storms in search of shelter. This would be no pounding storm when it hit. Barely enough, perhaps, to satisfy the earth. Larandaril suffered as the rest of the provinces of First Home did. A dry winter did no one any good except those like himself who trafficked in misery and ill times.

Narskap finally stood. “Too far ahead of us for the border to still be open.”

“Pity. Still, I should be able to get us through.”

Narskap unbound the horses’ reins from a small shrub where he’d tied them, saying only, “It isn’t far in front of us.”

“I want you ahead of me. No sense in alerting them that we are here if I blunder into it.”

Narskap nodded and moved past him, his ragged, spare body looking as though a strong wind might cut him down, but it would not. He was steel under his skin, not sinew like others but steel and bone. Nor did he say what both of the two knew was obvious: Narskap would see and sense the border while Quendius could not, not until he had triggered its alarm and its repellent ward which might be strong enough to drop him on his ass. Narskap could see, well, Quendius was not sure what Narskap could see. The man had never tried to explain it to him nor had Quendius asked. Others had. One he had tortured until the explanation came gushing out like the blood and vomit he was spewing, but it had made no sense. He was blind when it came to seeing the threads and elements that wove the world together. What he did see was the abyss which hung through those threads, a complete and total darkness which he found quite absolute and threatening. He did not think, from the few Vaelinar magic workers who had talked with him that they saw it. There was a bleakness to the world, yes, there was always balance. Night for day, evil for good, disease for health, and so on. Quendius had never met anyone who had seen the fathomless, the null, the absolute absence of the universe as he did between all those brightly promising threads others observed. It was more than death. It was nothingness. Death gave rise to life all the time. One only had to look at the natural world to see it. This took everything and returned nothing. He feared it as little else he had ever experienced. It was not a flaw in himself. It was a reality he used.

He watched as Narskap stopped and put his hand out, almost as if sifting through a current in the air. A damp wind stirred around them. One of the horses lifted its head, ears flicking back and forth, but did not whicker. Narskap had trained them well, a man who could do much when he put the shreds of his mind to it. Quendius had come to depend upon him. Perhaps too much. Perhaps this was the time to make utmost use of him.

Narskap tilted his head and looked back at him, an unreadable expression on his face, and said quietly, “We are close. Stay here.”

Quendius stayed, shifting his weight, feeling the bow upon his back as the leather quiver moved and settled a bit between his shoulders. He watched Narskap take two more cautious steps forward before stopping abruptly. “Here. Do you wish to cross here or have me follow along the border?”

“Here is as good as anywhere. They will be after us once the wards alert the Anderieon rabble.” There was timber upon these hills, which would give him cover until he got closer. Once upon a time he had been in the eastern range, where he made an altar that desecrated the font of the sacred river Andredia. That altar had been built to bless the forges he erected in the mountain holding, the slag of mining and processing the ore, corrupting the Andredia further. He wondered if rivers could remember such a thing, and if it would shriek out at his presence to betray them. He decided that if it had been possible, it would have happened when he first befouled it, not decades later when its corruption was finally halted.

He joined Narskap and reached for the woman who sat slackly on his horse. A small string of drool glistened on her chin as her mouth hung to one side, but a fierce light fired in her eyes and then died out. It seemed for a moment that Tiiva knew him and might even think of fighting him. The coppery stink of old blood and putrefying flesh rose fully from her, in a suggestive aura. He dragged her down by her injured arm and a sharp cry came from her misshapen mouth.

He stroked her lank and greasy hair. “The border knows her. It should let us pass.” Quendius released her and gave her a sharp shove to the small of her back. Tiiva stumbled down the rest of the rough foothill, weaving and wavering as she walked. She dragged one foot slowly after the other, the hem of her long, luxurious dress torn and filthy.

She moaned and shambled to a stop and fell to one knee. She undoubtedly felt, as he did and Narskap did, the scalp-crawling assessment of the warded border though it let them through. He had heard, though it had never been proven, that the wards could slay a trespasser. More likely it would be the quick response of the armed rangers patrolling here. He did not doubt, however, that the unwanted might be stunned, stupefied, and made easy targets.

Quendius waited until Narskap passed him, horses trailing after him. He drew his sword. He circled around Tiiva until he confronted her. He lifted her chin with a fisted hand until her dull face looked up. The sword caught a ray of sun. He took her head off.

Then, with three more slaps of the sword, he topped a young sapling and sharpened its trunk into a crude stake. A last swing of the sword and Quendius slapped an arm, silken-sleeved with a lacy cuff, onto its new perch, slender hand pointing down into Larandaril. He laughed.