The Four Forges (33 page)

“Indeed. As is the rumor that they are not Vaelinar but Galdarkan. Or, perhaps even another race created by the Mageborn.”

“What?”

From the noise, Sevryn knew that Daravan had leaped to his feet, perhaps overturning an ottoman or small table, and for a moment, the two rustled about, setting to right the furniture and spillage. Sevryn was grateful for that clatter, it had hidden his own sharp intake of breath. It grew quiet again.

“Only rumor?” repeated Daravan.

“So I have heard. It could be true. They are built more like us than most of Kerith, and the eyes are always veiled. I’ve not seen proof that Talent is used in the work, it’s always been the blade and the poison, for all their agility and swiftness. It could be.”

“I was blind,” muttered Daravan. His voice still carried surprise in it, and Sevryn knew he had been stunned by something he had never considered.

“The world,” Azel said mildly, “is full of possibilities.”

“Bless you for reminding me.” A bootstep. “As always, to repay your generosity, I’ll be sending meat supplies your way, as well as any tokens of journals or writings I might find in my travels.”

“Your company is always welcome, Daravan. Perhaps someday you might allow me an interview.”

“Interview?” This time, no surprise, but a carefully neutral sound in the other’s voice.

“You are obviously one of the old ones, of fullest power, yet there is no mention of you anywhere in the earliest recollections of our being lost.”

“Am I not?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you are mistaken.”

“Perhaps. But if I’m not, maybe one day you will humor an aging librarian and allow a recording.”

“One should always have a dream for the future, Azel. Always.”

Sevryn stirred then, his senses sharpened by the underlying malice or wariness in Daravan’s voice, as well as the obvious fact that the two were taking their leave of each other, and he wanted to be out the door long before either of them. He slipped out of the purple corners and into the dusk, his mind as curtained with thoughts as the day with the coming night.

“YOU CANNOT ARGUE with him, Da.” Keldan leaned out over the wagon seat, reins firmly in hand.

“He is charging us for a traders’ caravan, rot his phantom hide.” Tolby crossed his arms over his chest, chin out, and glared at the Dark Ferryman who remained immovable, implacable, hand out for the toll. Behind its ebony looming figure, the Nylara roared in its deep-cut banks, still flush with meltdown from the winter snows, angry and dangerous in spring’s floodtime. Even the reputation of the Ferryman made crossing dubious. He shifted his weight slightly. “I haven’t the coin to spare for his mistakes.”

“We’re driving one of Mistress Greathouse’s carts . . .” Keldan’s voice drifted off as Garner jumped the cart’s side and landed lightly on the ground beside Tolby. “Perhaps he thinks we’re hauling freight for her.”

Tolby ground his teeth.

Rivergrace leaned from behind Keldan, drinking in the sight of the great, fierce river, so different from and yet akin to her beloved Silverwing. So violently did it cascade past, that a fine spray misted them and she lifted her face to it, breathing in its scent. Water, everyone said, had no scent, but she could smell it. Or perhaps it was the earth it flowed over and carried within it, the brew of vegetation along its banks, the minerals of the rocks it tumbled at its bottom? She didn’t know. She climbed down from the cart, even as Keldan snatched at her elbow and missed, and went to join Tolby. The misting grew heavier as she stepped nearer, but her father seemed immune to it as it sparkled along her cloak and exposed skin. For a moment she felt as if the river could tell her where it sprouted from, in the depths of faraway mountains and pristine snowfields as far as the eye could see, but then that moment slipped away and the river merely shouted in her ears of its relentless power and drive to the sea.

She shivered and put her hands in her sleeves to warm them a bit. Tolby and the phantom both seemed to notice her, then, for the first time.

“You should be in the cart,” her father said, his voice gruff with irritation and a bit of—she wondered a bit—was it fear?

“I wanted to see,” she answered softly, and looked at the Dark Ferryman. He towered even over her, his cloak floating on the breeze, but there was nothing to be seen inside his cowl, not even darkness upon shadow. A cold chill washed out of the bottomless pit of his being, swirling in shadow upon shadow. Looking into the aching emptiness made her dizzy and she put a hand on Tolby’s shoulder to steady herself. The being rippled, and she knew she had gained his full attention, and she cowered in spite of herself.

Garner shouted from behind them. “We can camp here and cross by ourselves tomorrow.”

“The river’s at flood tide. I won’t risk my family for a few half crowns.”

“Da! That’s our seed money,” Garner protested, Lily’s voice shadowing his own. “We’ll go downstream and take our chances there. Or take Bregan Oxfort’s route,” he added, with a threat deep in his young voice.

“You’ll do no such thing! He’s a robbing beast, but I’ll pay it.” Tolby dug in his pants pocket, deep, where he had his small leather bag of coins stowed safely away, his shoulder shrugging out of Rivergrace’s hold, sending her off-balance.

It was the phantom that caught her. His icy touch cut through her like a sharp blade and she gasped, and the pain ebbed almost immediately, but he kept his transparent ebon hand upon her wrist.

“Aderro,” the Ferryman said to her, his voice hollow, yet the tone somehow warm.

Rivergrace blinked up into that cowl, searching for a face, a hint of one, a soul, too, perhaps, something stirring deeply in her mind. Not the joyous hail of her family, Derro!, but aderro, with an unfamiliar accent, the same word yet not. She stared at the Dark Ferryman, her thoughts as tumultuous as the Nylara thundering past them.

He said more to her, then, but she understood not a word of it, the language lilting and flowing, and when the phantom came to a halt, he paused, as if waiting for her to respond. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” she managed, as Tolby reached out and gently took her wrist back from the Ferryman’s hold.

“Leave her be,” her father ordered. “Get back in the cart, Grace.” He clenched his coin bag in his other hand.

“But . . .” she paused, unable to say what she felt, shivering in the chilled presence of the other. “I should know, shouldn’t I?” She looked at Tolby. He raised his hand then to brush her hair back from her brow.

“Now is not the time. Let me settle with the Ferryman first, and then we’ll talk.”

“He knows me,” Rivergrace said firmly, and the realization grounded her. She lifted her chin, frowning, to look back into the emptiness leaning over her. “I speak common,” she said. “And we are not traders or haulers. This is all we have left after a raid. We can’t pay the toll you ask.” Talking to the Ferryman was like throwing small pebbles into the deepest, darkest pool of water in the Silverwing when the river was quiet at late summer, flood tide gone, rains waning, the water still and moving deeply. She and Nutmeg used to do it, just to see the ripples that would spread outward in serene circles. Once, they’d frightened a bottom-dwelling fish and it came leaping out, thrashing and splashing and like to scare a year’s growth out of both of them. She waited now for a reaction from the Ferryman.

He flowed over and through her, before drawing back and coalescing in front of Tolby again. “Toll,” he said, “one silver crown bit.”

Tolby blinked rapidly. He undid the string to his little pouch and fetched the coin out, dropping it into the outstretched inky palm. The coin sank into sooty nothingness and disappeared. “Board,” the phantom ordered, and turned his back on both of them.

Tolby tossed her onto the cart where Garner and Keldan caught her, and he jumped up to his seat beside Lily on the wagon. The fare was a pittance compared to what the Ferryman had asked before, and Tolby wanted to get across before the capricious being changed his mind a second time.

Both carriages jolted onto the rough wooden bed of the barge, and the Ferryman leaned into his rudder and cast off, unbothered by the force of the river or any other nature other than his own. Rivergrace hugged herself as she settled down next to Garner.

Nutmeg put her arms around Grace. “Mistress Greathouse dropped the apple right out of the tree. It’s time, and past time, we tell you.”

Grace leaned against her sister as she tried to fold her long legs and settle in between them and the bales of goods. “If you’re going to tell me I’m not Dweller-born, I think I know.” They held each other, laughing on the edge of tears, as the carts rocked roughly back and forth against the Nylara’s swell, and the Ferryman fought to take them safely across. The laughter seemed to work against the forces of nature which tried to beat them back, for the river settled a little, and other than a constant bucking against the current, the ride was smoother than anyone anticipated.

 
Campfire light glowed over all of them, as the night air smelled of burning wood and supper and herbs steamed for drinking. Lily pressed a warm mug into her hands, and sat down next to Rivergrace, settling with a soft rustle of her skirts. “It’s not that you have Vaelinar blood,” she started. “We all know you do, and you know you do, surely, by now.”

She hadn’t thought of it, before the fair at Stonesend, but it had stared her in the face there, much as the Ferryman had stared into her face that morning. The only question would be, “How much, do you think?” Grace tilted her face to look up at Lily, for she sat on the ground, and her Dweller mother on a keg.

“We think . . .” Lily paused, wrapping her own slender fingers about her drink, the knuckles showing white. “We think full-blooded. You’ve the eyes, which we can’t hope to hide in Calcort, and the height, the slenderness . . .”

“The beauty,” finished Keldan. He cleared his throat and picked up another skewer of meat and turned his attention to that.

Family, she thought, and took a sip of her drink to savor that. Other family. “If you knew I was Vaelinar from the beginning, why . . .”

“Why didn’t we return you?”

Nutmeg said petulantly, “You were mine. I found you. I pulled you from the river.”

Grace nudged her booted foot with her own. “You’re my only sister. That won’t ever change. I want to understand what Mistress Greathouse meant.”

Tolby knuckled his daughter’s head with the bowl of his pipe. “Let your mother talk.”

Reaching down, Lily lightly traced the marks on Grace’s wrist. “These scars, faint now, were raw and fresh wounds then from the shackles that made them. It wasn’t just a chafing or rubbing. They were gouged and branded, horrible to see even though they’d mostly healed by then. You were someone’s slave, and there was no way we intended to give you back. You were barely alive when the Silverwing brought you to us. Wars were fought with the Strangers over their slavery, and it was ended, but some Vaelinars still manage it. And for one to enslave another, an even deeper crime. It would have meant your life, and possibly all of ours, to unknot the question of where you came from and how to return you.”

Rivergrace took a long, slow breath. “I escaped.”

“Somehow, yes. If there were others with you, they never made it. Your raft was little more than kindling and splinters and falling apart bit by bit even as Nutmeg pulled you out.”

“The Bolgers came looking for me.”

Tolby lit his pipe. “We don’t know that. They always raided before, and there’s little doubt they’ll raid after we’re long gone.”

“And the Ravers?”

He shook his head again. “No more murderous around you than they are around any living thing of the First Home. We do not hear of Ravers for years upon years, and then they be back, raiding, then gone again. No sense to it. Fear, if you must, Grace, but fear your own. They’re the ones who put shackles on you, and if you had family . . .” He paused. “You’ve a much longer life to live than we do, and time to find the answers.”

“Time,” she echoed. “And care.”

“Yes.” A puff of grayish smoke wreathed his head and faded away in the night air. “When you search, you must do it very carefully.”

Hosmer slept by the fireside, but groaned a little as he tried to roll and couldn’t, for Lily had bolstered his leg so that he couldn’t do just that when he slept and twist or hurt it. She moved to his side to stroke his temple and quiet him. Rivergrace stared across the tiny sparks and motes of glowing ash that drifted upward and burned out. There would be a time when her Dweller family would leave her, like it or not, for her years would be different from theirs, and the thought settled about her uneasily, for she’d never really considered it before. Her drink grew cold long before she remembered to drink it down, as Nutmeg spoke up about the adventure facing them, and the others broke into noisy plans, noticing but forgiving her silence.

When she put her head down to sleep, it was with the faint roar of the Nylara still in her thoughts, underscored by the voice of the Ferryman who had spoken words to her she didn’t understand.

Or had part of her remembered? And would that part whisper it to her in her dreams? And if not in tonight’s dream, then when? She closed her eyes uneasily.

 
 
Sevryn stood in his saddle a moment, easing his legs and ass and thought that if Gilgarran could catch him now, he’d get a swift slap to the head for being saddlesore after so brief a time. Gone soft, he had, although the ride from the Stronghold to Larandaril, and then to the great library and then angling back toward ild Fallyn had scarcely been an easy one. Still. He chewed on his lip briefly. Gone soft.

The knowledge scarcely eased the pain.

Sevryn laughed at himself as he reined his horse down toward the river plain where the Nylara cut through like a hot knife through soft butter, and the Ferryman awaited his duties. Although the rolling hills gave way, the ride took longer than the vision promised, and the sun held a high throne by the time he made the ferry dock. No caravans or farmers waited; he pulled up alone and dismounted, waiting for the Ferryman to notice and appear. It gave him time to catch his breath and stretch his legs and ease the kinks, and he looked longingly at the northern mountains. Far beyond them, a good week’s ride or more, lay the ridges which circled the ild Fallyn Stronghold, made passable only by the bridge which their House had made, a bridge which only Vaelinarran engineering coupled with Talent could have even attempted, the Work of a lifetime. It was the Work which had established ild Fallyn as its own Stronghold, its own dynasty, in a world which magic had left, and the Vaelinars regained their own, strand by twisting strand. A Work like that was not done by one individual but by several, working in concert, braiding their Talents and molding their world to fit their dream. It had destroyed a few. A few of the Ways had been horribly corrupted. Most had never come into being at all. He wondered at the strength of the Vaelinars who’d attempted a Way and if he could ever have dared.