Sorcery Rising (50 page)

Saro looked back at the healer in desperation. How could he make his father understand the truth of it? But the nomad woman was backing away now, her face distorted with terror. For a moment, Saro thought Favio’s lunatic happiness at the death of the knife-maker had upset her; but then he realised with a cold jolt that her eyes were fixed on him, eyes that were so wide with shock that he could see the yellow of her corneas all around her great black pupils. It was him she was terrified of, not his father, nor his wicked, unhealable brother: no, it was the touch of him that had brought about this change in her.

But why?

‘Don’t fear!’ he cried out in anguish. ‘Please: I mean you no harm.’

She would have to pass him to leave the room: they could both see that. It was why she was staring wildly around for another exit as a frightened cat, confronted with a snarling dog, might desperately seek an escape route that would take it even through flood or fire out of the path of its enemy.

He took a step towards her and was horrified to see her cower away from him. Crossing the floor between them in two swift strides he caught her by the shoulders, thinking to reassure her, but as soon as contact was made it was he who was swept away by the sensation. No reassurance here: nothing but sheer, mindless terror: for in front of her, touching her, was one who carried a fabled death-stone around his neck as thoughtlessly as one might wear a silver trinket. Yet all he had to do to carry her soul away into the howling wastes between the stars was to take the death-stone from its leather pouch and hold it in his hand; just the merest touch would rend body from soul, as had happened to the others. She could feel their deaths on him. Men, all of them, and fighters, to be sure; but what was to say he would not scruple to take a defenceless woman’s soul, too, in his dangerously unaware state? He had already taken three – or was it four? – lives without understanding what he did. It was hard to tell, for the ghosts of their tortured souls seethed and blurred in the dark aura that surrounded him; an aura that smelled sharply of fire and smoke, of burning clothes and hair. By the Twins, the burning times were back again, as they had heard, and surely they would all perish . . .

‘Aieeeee!’

With a shriek, the nomad woman wrenched herself away from Saro’s hold. In the stunned moment that lay between them, as Saro fought against the deluge of images that had tumbled out of her mind and into his, she took advantage of his bewilderment and ducked past him and out of the door, careful despite her desperation not even to brush his clothing as she did so.

The sound of her bare feet slapped on the wood of the stairs and the deck above them, then echoed away into the distance.

‘Well, go after her, then!’ Favio roared.

But his idiot son had collapsed onto the floor, holding his head and sobbing like a child.

For the rest of that day, and through the night and the next morning, Saro took to his bed and would not be roused, despite his father’s threats, or lately – and in some panic (for to lose one son to a wound; then another to madness was more than Favio could bear) – his entreaties. He drank the wine and the water the slaves brought and ate the bread, the spicy meats and dates they left at his side as if in a kind of daze. All the while, the images reaped from the nomad-woman spun through his head like the bright shards of a broken mirror: fractional memories that would not fit into any shape that he could make sense of, no matter how he tried to reorder them. He saw the faces of three men he did not recognise: an Allfair guard with fierce dark eyes and a tall, crested helmet; a blond northerner with plaits in his hair and a long, forked beard, his nose as hooked as a bird of prey, his pale eyes spitting cold fire; an Istrian man with a jowly face, sword raised and mouth open in a cry of fury which turned suddenly, and for no cause Saro could name, to fear.

He saw his own hand reaching out, touching the first man lightly on the forehead, saw how the guard’s eyes flared briefly to silver, then to empty black space. He saw the other two, who seemed to be fighting each other, drop dead, for no apparent reason, at his feet.

He saw himself staring down at the stone which he held in his palm; saw how it went from the red of a glowing ember to a white heat that made the bones glow through his skin as he closed his fingers over it.

Try as he might to connect these disparate images, nothing – except the thing that made his mind skitter sideways every time he approached it – could knit them together into any coherent shape.

And finally, again and again and again, from many different angles, as if he were in more than one place at once – somehow approaching from the right, then the left, and once, disconcertingly from above – he saw the Eyran girl (
Katla
,
Katla
,
Katla
, his broken heart echoed piteously) bound to a stake. He saw the smoke from the pyre billowing in great black clouds into the air. Then he was back in himself, graced with a single viewpoint that was recognisably his own, so that he was able to see with a terrible and unwanted clarity how the toes of her leather boots crisped and bubbled; how the bonds cut deep into her bare skin; how her eyes filled with hatred as she saw him coming towards her through the lung-scorching fumes; how her mouth opened and closed on a stream of words he could blessedly no longer hear.

After that he had seen nothing else; and even now, despite the nomad healer’s touch, he could still recall nothing more beyond these events until he had woken up the day after Katla’s burning in his own bed in the Vingo family pavilion with a sense of awful doom, a foreboding of cataclysm. When his uncle had entered the chamber at noon (he had known it was, for he heard the priests calling the observances, their cries falling loud and haunting into what seemed even then to be unnaturally still air) to check on his well-being, he had clutched Fabel by the arm and demanded to know what was happening; why he sensed imminent disaster. Why it was so quiet out there.

And Fabel had thrown back his head and laughed.

‘You’re a hero, lad!’ he’d cried. ‘All Istria will hear how you waded fearlessly into Falla’s fires to make sure with good Forent steel that the Eyran witch’s soul reached the Goddess’s judgement before her sorcery could save her.’

‘I killed her?’ Saro was aghast. His heart had thudded painfully against his ribs. His mind raced. He could never raise a weapon against Katla Aransen, surely there was some appalling error, a joke made in the worst of taste? ‘I took my sword to the Eyran girl?’

‘We all saw you, my lad,’ Fabel had said proudly. ‘It was a noble attempt, a hero’s act. They’re already making songs of it, I swear, even though it was in vain.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sara’s heart had stopped its beating; he had felt it flickering in place like a hummingbird poised in the most delicate of motions. ‘In vain?’

‘The witch used her sorcery to escape the fires, or so they say.’

‘But how?’

Fabel shrugged. ‘Who knows the ways of witches, Saro? Disappeared into the air, she did, leaving nothing behind but that outlandish shawl she had wrapped about her head.’

The shawl. Somewhere in Saro’s smoke-hazed mind he recalled the shawl, a thing of many colours, glowing with a light of its own amidst the flames.

‘And how – how did I get here?’

Fabel smiled fondly and his chest swelled with pride. ‘Ah, well, that was me, you see, lad. The smoke and fumes had done for you, it seemed: you’d fallen down on the edge of the pyre, would have been burned yourself had Haro Fortran and I not seen you there. We came in after you, dragged you out and I carried you back here. Amazing the strength you find in yourself under dire circumstances,’ he pronounced smugly. ‘Haro already has half a song written for you. “In battle’s heat, midst flame and fight / He drew his sword in blackest night / To give the witch to Falla’s might / Such was the act of a true knight.” Rather good, I thought. He’ll be delighted to hear you’ve come round, I know he’ll want to perform the rest of it for you.’

‘But I’m not a knight,’ was all Saro could say.

It was inexplicable, bizarre; profoundly disturbing. He had turned his face to the pillow and wept, though for what, exactly, he could not have said. Fabel, embarrassed by such an unmanly display, had left silently.

And that was all that Saro had managed to discover, from Fabel, or anyone else, to this day. He had been visited by fragments of nightmare, a dull, vague sense of failure and misery; and worst of all, he had been haunted again and again by the vision of Katla’s eyes, the searing hatred she had turned on him as he came toward her through the flames. For all the evidence, though, he would never accept that he had meant to kill her, or the men whose faces the nomad woman had shown him, for surely it was not in his nature. But no matter how strongly he urged himself to believe this, still more strongly the suspicion grew that although he had not intended their deaths, he was still, in some terrible, incomprehensible way, fully responsible for them.

Twenty

Homecoming

B
ut Katla Aransen had not died, though she lay as one dead.

She had done so for day upon day as the
Fulmar’s Gift
cut its way home to Rockfall through the churning waters of the Northern Ocean and was aware of no more of the voyage than the fiery sting of salt on her face and the dreamlike sensation of falling endlessly through the peaks and troughs of that hostile sea. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she heard the voices of the crew as from a great distance, and to her they sounded like the cries of carrion birds over a battlefield, a battlefield from which she fled over and over in her dreams: on foot, on her hands and knees; lashed to a dark horse that galloped tirelessly through the night.

No one, it seemed, could do anything to ease her from her fugue. They had put to sea in such haste that Aran had had no time to locate a healer, deciding rightly that to escape the killing grounds of the Moonfell Plain must be their foremost concern. Once out of sight of the fires, and beyond pursuit of the inferior Istrian vessels, he had bathed her burns himself – treating them with seawater and covering them gently with strips of his best linen tunic, which he had torn to pieces with shaking, furious hands, cursing his own failings all the while – but for the hurts he could not see, which were the deepest of all, he could do nothing.

In the two weeks it took for the passage – weeks in which the winds blew steadily and the currents ran true – Katla’s hair began to grow back, a fiery red that graded through to the coarse and patchy black; an uncompromising colour that looked violent and ugly against the dark burns and scabs left by the fire. But the fact that it had appeared again even on the side where the fire had caught her – as if Erno’s shawl had truly acted as a magical shield between her body and the pyre’s worst destruction – offered hope. Every day Aran Aranson came and touched this new growth, the feel of it as soft as down against the callused pads of his fingers, as if it gave some sign if the inward health of his daughter, and prayed (for the first time in his life to the women’s deity, Feya) for a miracle.

The miracle came on the day before they made landfall.

Fent was sitting beside his twin, as he did between watches and chores, knotting twine and making nonsense verses and riddles. Today, he had made a new one for her:

There was the smallest of movements from the huddled figure beside him and then, with the utmost clarity, a voice said: ‘The sea.’

Surprised, Fent stared around. Halli was the closest to him of the crew, but his back was turned and he was in conversation with Kotil Gorson, the navigator, and there was no one else in hearing range. Frowning, he went back to his knots.

A moment later the voice came again. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I said, “the sea”. Too easy – far too easy: the seabed and tides, the silver fish and the sky and all. Pity your rhyme scheme is so lacking. Old Ma Hallasen’s goat makes a better poet!’

Looking down in astonishment, Fent found his sister’s eyes – as deep and indigo as the ocean itself – were wide open and fixed upon his face, glinting with amusement.

He grinned from ear to ear, then let out an ear-splitting whoop: ‘Da! Da! She’s awake! Katla’s awake!’

Such a fuss
, Katla thought,
over one who’d just been asleep
. She tried to lever herself up into a sitting position and was utterly defeated by the effort it entailed.
Sur’s nuts, such pain! And how odd, for Fent not to react to her gibe
. . .

Suddenly afraid, she reached up and tried to catch Fent by the sleeve, but her hand felt heavy and weak: she couldn’t feel her fingers. ‘How long have I slept?’

Exhausted by even this slight exertion, she sank back down, her eyes closing involuntarily. Confused images of a frantic pursuit overtook her at once: a chase between tents, along a dark, moonlit strand in the shadow of a great rock; in and out of a crowd of people from which familiar faces loomed and then vanished in turn: Jenna; her father, Finn Larson, his red lips all wet with greed; Halli with the wood-adze raised above his head; Erno entwined with a strange dark woman; a blond-bearded Eyran man, his mouth open on a scream, the head of a spear protruding from the centre of his chest; and an Istrian coming at her, his sword raised, a strange, pale, silvery light burning in his eyes . . .

With a sudden convulsion, she brought her right hand up in front of her face and stared at it. It was a bundle of cloth: a great, swaddled club of a thing.

‘What happened to me?’

The thought came, swift and sure, that the man with the sword had cut off her hand, that this clumsy, bandaged stump was all that was left. She would never climb again; never beat the iron, never wrestle, never even feed or clothe herself easily . . . Made desperate by this certainty she started to tear at the cloth with her teeth.