Longeye (20 page)

"Perhaps it is," Becca said slowly. "In Xandurana, it had seemed to me that the plants constantly risked themselves in the crush of everything growing at once, but it may be that I am wrong—or that the benefits reaped outweigh the risk. Certainly, I have
never
seen such results as you achieved here." She raised her unmarked right hand.

"The land is rich with virtue on this side of the hellroad," Violet Moore said, shyly. "Gran said that. Even seeds that were sung into the land, and so grew more potent plants—over there—she said, didn't have half the virtue as wild gathers do on Lady Sian's land."

"Certainly, there is no overnight healing on the other side of the
keleigh
," Becca said, "no matter if the seeds were sung over!"

"Well," Violet said, pulling down a basket and frowning into its depths. "Much depends on the injury. Your hands were cut, but the bones were whole. If I'd had to splint your fingers or your arm, you would not have seen so swift a healing." Stretching high on her toes, she put the basket back. "We need corish root, too. Well." She gave Becca a sidelong glance. "Let me show you the rest of the house, then we can do a survey of the garden."

"There's no need for me to see the rest of the house, surely?" Becca protested, though she followed Violet through an interior door and into a wide room.

"Indeed there is!" the girl said, briskly. "If you are to be our healer, then this will be your house."

"Stay! Sian did not bring me to be your healer!" Becca cried, stopping in midstep.

Violet turned to look at her.

"You were at the Speaking," Becca told her, sharply. "I am here only until the Queen sends for me." Seeing the girl's eyes widen, she softened her voice. "And, besides, I would not wish to usurp your place, Miss Moore.
You
are the healer here."

"I don't know enough!" Violet wailed. "Gran had not released me; I was still her 'prentice when she—she—"

"No one ever knows enough," Becca said, as Sonet had once said to her. "We do as much as we can, as well as we can do it. And we learn, from our mistakes even more than our successes." She sighed at the girl's stricken face. "I will teach you as much as I can while I am here. But I cannot think that I will be here for very many days." And who knew, she thought bitterly, what Meripen Vanglelauf's
sunshield
might require, other than the right to knock her to the ground and hold her helpless at whim.

She sighed. Nancy had helped her up, straightened her clothing, and made her presentable again. There were only the bruises on her rump and her pride to testify to her misadventure.

Becca shook herself, and looked about for a happier topic of consideration.

"This is a very pleasant room!" she said to Violet Moore's anxious eyes. "I would be very happy to guest here, but—"

"You must stay somewhere," Violet interrupted, "until the Queen wants you. It might as well be here. I live here, after all, and it will be—be convenient for you."

Ah
, Becca thought, and smiled to herself. "That sounds a reasonable plan," she said to Violet. "I will be pleased to stay as your guest, though you will have to bear Nancy, who I own is odd."

Violet nodded seriously. "I'll be glad to have you and your servant," she said, and this time Becca did not smile. For here was a way to fill the house with voices and motion, and to keep at bay the malicious whispering shadows of guilt.

Violet moved her hand, showing Becca the door opposite them.

"The kitchen is through here," she said, beckoning Becca to follow her. "And the garden just behind."

"You know," she said, after Becca had duly admired the pots hung on their hooks and the neat cooking hearth. "There's a saying we have here—'I'll do it in a Fey's hurry.' "

Becca tipped her head. "And that means?"

"In the sweet by-and-by," Violet said, pushing open the door and stepping out into the garden. "The Queen may not call you as soon as that."

Setting wards is a tricky business at best. Factor in monsters from beyond the ken of trees, and it approached impossible.

Meri took his time walking back along the track. He noted the near-invisible traces of Brume's passage, but saw no signs of another horse until he had passed beyond a wide curve that put New Hope Village out of sight.

There, he found signs a-plenty. He followed what must be Rosamunde's hoofprints off the path and into the brush, frowning when he found wisp of fur and a misplaced clod. Rebecca Beauvelley had let them understand that she had designed and executed her own escape, and yet here it would appear that she had enlisted aid.

Or had she?

Meri crouched down, the better to study the signs. Brethren were as curious as cats. It could have been that one had dawdled nearby, enchanted by the Newoman's aura, or the novelty of someone riding blindly into the wood after dark.

So. The Brethren had waited, here, and then had followed—?

Meri raised his head, seeking, found the sign again, farther on, and rose, finding the place where its path intersected the horse's route—and where the Brethren took the lead.

"Well," he murmured, "it would appear that Rebecca Beauvelley has allies."

The Gardener dressed his wounds
, a ralif offered.
He was obligated to come, when she sent for him.

"
Obligated
," Meri muttered. The Brethren were usually more canny than to allow themselves to become
obligated
. Still, it could have happened—and especially if there was blood in it.

He followed the trail, admiring its essentially linear tendency—Brethren in the lead, horse following, dainty of her footing, but clearly moving in haste, but with no attempt to conceal themselves. That seemed odd to him. Had they thought that Sian would not come after? Or had all the care gone to putting distance behind them before they went to ground? If the Brethren had a lair nearby—but would it lead a Newoman there?

It was then that he found the frizenbush, and understood the Brethren's plan.

Straight into the heart of the bush went the tracks, and so did Meri. At the hollow center, he shook his head in disgust at the wreckage of twigs and leaf, the hopelessly muddled ground, and the broken gap in the sheltering branches, already beginning to weave themselves tight.

Meri hunkered, needles sticking into his back, and considered what he saw before him. The Brethren had thought to hide them in the frizenbush, trusting it to shield them from Sian. Which it might have done though Meri thought Brume would not have been so easily fooled. Also, there was the question of Rebecca Beauvelley's cursed brightness. Even the natural dampening powers of the frizenbush might have been overcome by such a display.

He frowned down at the hopelessly churned soil. Had they found the monster hiding in the heart of the bush, waiting for prey?

No, he thought, after a moment. That rupture in the basket of branches had been made from something thrusting
inward
. Meri leaned forward, spying a fan of bloody drops across blue-green branches. Someone, he thought, had scored a hit. His wager was that it had been Rosamunde, though that might have been his newfound affection speaking.

He came to his feet, scrutinizing the branches for a sign of the mare's departure. A glitter of dusty gold drew his eye upward, to a long strand of brown hair caught among the needles. No need to ask to whom that belonged. Carefully, he reached up, untwisted it from the needles, and slipped it into his pouch.

"She has," he said to nothing and to no one in particular, "less wisdom than a seedling."

There was no answer, which was, he supposed, just as well.

He stepped through the branches and considered the options available to him. The end of Rosamunde's flight, he knew, and though it was probable that he should follow it, if only to be sure that the mare's idiot rider hadn't left any other ragtags of
kest
strewn carelessly about, it would seem that backtracking her pursuer's route would be the more . . . instructive.

It was hot.

It was always hot in this place. No matter if he sat, or walked or slept or thought, the heat did not abate.

If he wished, he could indeed produce a breeze, but it failed to cool unless he invested more of his thought and energy than he wished to give, and in the end he was just as uncomfortable for all that he was master of himself.

He had begun to wonder, recently, if this unremitting heat were a deliberate, and vital, segment of Zaldore's plan of betrayal. His preference for comfort and order were well known. Perhaps she had confused
preference
with
need
, and plotted that he would use all of his time and expend all of his
kest
seeking comfort, rather than rescue.

That he had turned his thoughts first to rescue proved yet again that he was Zaldore's superior, in all ways. That he had failed in his attempts to secure that rescue . . . well. He was not defeated yet.

If only it were not so hot.

He did miss his Rebecca, not only for her
kest
that he might draw on to his own benefit, or for the additional small comforts that she might offer, but for her naïve observation. One to whom everything was strange must naturally ask questions of an elder. And he had found Rebecca's questions—very often—illuminating. It was a matter of thought and direction.

For example! It had been he, Altimere, who had realized that the very rotation that contained the
keleigh
created a spiral that might be traveled by those of good fortitude and a strong mind, and since the first one or two dispatched to attempt this theory had not returned, he had gone himself to prove it.

He done much walking between the worlds. While he was not so foolish as to think that he knew the
keleigh
in all its changeable faces, yet in his travels there, he had seen torrent and snowstorm, wind, anomalous fogs, and, yes, heat. Nothing endured, within the
keleigh
; all and everything was subject to change.

This heat, changeless and unremitting . . .

He shook a kerchief out of the mist and mopped his brow, noting that he was leaning against a ralif, and trying to recall if he had caused it to be there.

That was one of the known dangers of traversing the
keleigh
, after all; its nature clouded not only vision, but also thought and recall.

Heat.

He
was no ordinary adventurer, to have so often ventured into the other world, but a seeker after truth and insight. To some he was a philosopher. But no, that would not do. Altimere was no mere philosopher, observing and analyzing, only to write a report which was bound into a book, of interest only to other philosophers.

No,
he
was a creator of the first water, an artist of artifice.

He slipped his hand into his pocket, feeling for, and finding, the top he had used in his demonstration of
kest
and motion. Top in hand, he stood there, recalling the party, and Zaldore's interest. It seemed very long ago.

Waving his hand to inform this odd world that a glass cube now existed on the generosity of his will, he spun the top onto the cube and watched it, absorbed, thinking of the heat.

The artificers—they named themselves
mechanics
—of the world beyond the
keleigh
were fine craftsmen; he admired their ability to work with objects of stern form and gain understanding of their peculiar natures. He marveled at their ability to build
new
devices that were based, not on generations of lore, but on self-acquired knowledge and perception. Those
mechanics
and
chemists
and
mathematicians
were much closer to him in thought and practice than the courtly philosophers who never dared venture into danger to prove their cherished theories.

The top twirled slower and slower, till, at last, it toppled over.

Heat!

In that other world, he had seen demonstrations, theoretical and practical, regarding the nature and workings of heat. Heat was the key to moving things, heat was the key to melting things. Heat could be added, but the act of compression could also produce heat. Constraining and shrinking the room available to a gas concentrated it, and made it hot.

Sometimes, to the point of explosion.

Now he snatched up the top, now he grabbed away the table of glass, now he stared into the mist, recalling experiments going well, recalling the glorious explosive failure of the steam wagon.

He sat down at the base of the ralif.

There was not one wall between freedom and himself, but two.

Zaldore had much to answer for.

The monster's trail was more subtle than he had expected, given its entirely unsubtle attack on Rosamunde. Meri followed with interest, marveling at the creature's lightness of foot. Perhaps it had assistance?

"The Low Fey who were partners in the attack against the Gardener and her allies," he said to the trees. "Are they known to the trees?"

There was silence while he backtracked his quarry around a clutter of brush and low-growers.

Such arise from time to time, Ranger
, a culdoon said diffidently.
The eldest think their kind is recent and not well rooted.

This was hardly useful, but culdoon were not wise. And it was notable, Meri thought, that it was one of the lesser trees who had made answer, while the great ones remained silent.

"Thank you," he said. "It would be . . . of interest of me, to hear when the trees next notice another branch of this Low Fey."

We will watch, Ranger,
the culdoon promised, which Meri knew that it would do, until it forgot.

The ground sheltered by the low-growers was damp; Meri clearly saw the imprint of the monster's hooves, growing more defined for the next half-dozen steps, as if it had leapt in and landed hard—

From nowhere.

Meri stopped, staring at the ground. Directly before him the hoofprints were carved into the damp soil, precisely as if the monster he backtracked had leapt down from a height, and landed firm, an illusion made more compelling by the fact that there were no prints, nor any other sign of passage beyond.