The Night Voice (17 page)

The last thing he needed was to be caught here, and not just by members of his former caste or the Shé'ith. As he spotted Chârmun's faint glimmer through the forest, he heard voices behind him along the path.

“Are we nearly there?” a deep, annoyed voice demanded in Numanese.

Chuillyon froze and looked about for any place to hide.

“Yes, nearly,” answered another. “Chap, you should lead. I have already failed to find where we must go.”

Chuillyon knew that voice and ducked off the path. Momentarily tangled in leafy, damp vines, he thrashed into the dense undergrowth, hoping no one heard. There he crouched behind a dank, moss-coated oak.

An instant later, Osha pushed through along the path.

Chuillyon was quickly distracted by someone else.

A red-haired male Rughìr, or dwarf, followed closely behind the young an'Cróan.

Chuillyon recognized the dwarf, though a name escaped him. He had seen the same one in Wynn's company on her visit to his land, just before he had tracked her all the way to lost Bäalâle Seatt. And last down the path came a tall, mature, silver-gray majay-hì.

This was rather disconcerting, aside from Wynn's own black companion. Just how many Fay-born had taken to wandering the world with outsiders?

Once the trio passed by and were a little ways down the path, Chuillyon slipped out of the brush more carefully than he had slipped in. It was not hard to follow them, considering the grumbling of the dwarf, who constantly swatted aside branches and vines that got in the way of his wide body.

What business did these three have so close to the presence of Chârmun?

Chuillyon crept after them.

• • •

Wayfarer sat with her legs folded to one side upon the mulchy ground. With Shade beside her, she looked up through a break in the forest's canopy at a clear, starlit sky. And here in this place, there were always majay-hì within sight.

She had grown more accustomed to them via Shade's guardianship and comfort. Sometimes they still reminded her of their kind in her lost homeland who had spied upon her and had likely done so for years before she was aware of them. She no longer feared that.

Wayfarer had never seen—dreamed—of anything like this place.

Strange bulging lanterns of opaque amber glass hung in the lower branches of maples, oaks, and startlingly immense firs. If one looked closely into the trees' thick foliage, tiny trinkets and other odd items could be seen bound to their limbs by raw threads of shéot'a, something the Lhoin'na used to make shimmer cloth. All of those trees loosely framed a broad gully with gently sloping sides that stretched ahead.

Decades of leaf fall had hampered much undergrowth, leaving the way clear for the most part. Yet, ivy still climbed over exposed boulders and around and up evergreens. Bushy ferns grew here and there, breaking through the mulch that now crackled under loping, scurrying paws.

A pack of five adult majay-hì, along with four pups, engaged in their own form of communication all around her. Of course, the young ones were less interested in “talking” and more interested in who could stay the longest atop their rolling, running pile of little bodies. All dashed about past one another in rubbing heads, muzzles, or even shoulders . . . for they spoke with their own memories.

It was a language like no other.

Wayfarer had been learning it . . . hearing it . . . seeing it in her own mind. It now took only the barest touch of fingertips in fur.

Should she wish, Wayfarer could have reached out and touched them as they ran past. Flashes of their memories would be shared with her. If not for Shade guiding her, rather than Vreuvillä, this might have been terror rather than a revelation. But once it sank in, it changed everything.

Vreuvillä had said as much in a strange way. “They will prepare you.”

Wayfarer had not known what that meant. Prepare her for what? Then later, she did not care.

She had once believed herself an outsider, reviled and spied upon by the majay-hì of her own lost homeland. When they had come near her, hiding in the bushes and staring, she had thought this indicated their judgment that she did not belong.

How wrong she had been.

Majay-hì here were of all the colors she had known and feared. There were mottled brown, silver gray, near-black ones, and more. But there were none so black as Shade or any white like Shade's mother, the one Wynn had named Lily.

The white majay-hì—Chap's mate and Shade's mother—had set Wayfarer on the path to this place through a terrible journey.

It had taken a while, but Shade occasionally joined the others in their touching memory-talk. Not right now, though. Wayfarer leaned over and rested the side of her face against Shade's neck. Almost instantly, a word rose into her head out of her own memories—in Magiere's voice.

—Dinner?—

Wayfarer sighed and pressed her face deeper in Shade's fur. Even for all of the memories shared, she had come to like Shade's “voices” in her head almost more.

“Soon . . . not just yet,” she answered, the answer somewhat muffled.

Even Shade was such a complication, though Wayfarer had grown to need her desperately. Shade was “sister” to Wynn, ally of Chane, and even friend to Osha. Perhaps in another time and place Wayfarer might have shunned Shade as she had Osha.

Facing Osha amid all else in this new place while he still thought longingly of Wynn was too much. And so, slowly, she had cut herself off from him.

Wayfarer rolled her face out of Shade's neck to gaze down the gulley.

At its nearer end stood a vast fir tree with a trunk nearly as wide as a tower of the keep where Wynn had once lived in Calm Seatt. The hint of a dark opening showed in its bare base, closed off by a hanging of dyed wool in that doorway.

Wayfarer had been unsettled by the “made” structures of a'Ghràihlôn'na—after her initial awe had passed. Here, she found comfort within a living tree like those of her own people, even as a temporary home. The wool curtain shifted, maybe from movement inside the tree, and a muffled voice called out.

“Wayfarer?”

“Yes,” she called back.

Vreuvillä emerged from the tree dwelling, a circlet of braided raw shéot'a strips binding back her silver-streaked hair. Wayfarer had taken to wearing the same.

She had also cast aside old clothes for ones like the elder Foirfeahkan. She now wore pants and a long-sleeved tunic, as well as high soft boots, and a thong-belted jerkin, both made of darkened hide. There was also a pleated, thick wool skirt of dark forest green split down the front that could be bound around her waist as needed. She rarely wore that, as she did not like how it got in her way.

“Supper is ready,” Vreuvillä said, striding closer as some of the pack shifted and circled in around her.

“Is it so late?” Wayfarer asked, sitting upright. “I should have helped.” They normally ate well past dusk and into the night, and she always helped with everything.

“I would have called if help was needed,” Vreuvillä said bluntly before Wayfarer could apologize.

Such brusque responses—sometimes before a question was even asked—
had become almost normal. At first, Wayfarer had found the Foirfeahkan woman rather sharp. But this was just her way, and she had opened a new world before Wayfarer's eyes.

That new world had not always been comfortable and was often confusing.

Vreuvillä explained that the Foirfeahkan were—had been—a spiritual sect reaching back before what humans called the Forgotten History. And even farther and farther. Vreuvillä did not know how far back they began.

From what Wayfarer understood, the priestess was the last of them.

Their ideology was animistic, another strange word with which Wayfarer had trouble. They believed in the spiritual—ethereal—of this world rather than a theistic focus common to the outside world. They believed—somewhat like the an'Cróan but more—that Spirit itself was of this world forever and not from a separate realm. More confusing at first, the life of Existence had a heart, a center, a “nexus,” which was another word that Wayfarer had never heard in any language.

Chârmun—“Sanctuary”—was the center of all.

It was called so because its presence was why the Lhoin'na forest was the last place where the Ancient Enemy's darkest forces could not enter during or since the Great War.

The tree grew in all its mystery and beauty in what others called “First Glade.” The true place of that name to the Foirfeahkan was somewhere else nearby. Wayfarer had gone to look upon Chârmun many times, though she had often needed Shade to help find her way through the forest. At first, she had been frightened, and even Shade had been reluctant.

In a hidden, remote place in her own people's forest stood another sacred tree of a similar name—Roise Chârmune, the “Seed of Sanctuary.” Its clearing was the last resting place for the ashes of the first an'Cróan ancestors. Only the most honored dead of their people were allowed to have their ashes laid in that place. And most others only visited there once in their lives for a vision by which they took their final name.

Though Vreuvillä revered Chârmun, as the last Foirfeahkan she did not truly worship it. She saw it as sacred in being integral to everything, as were the majay-hì and other Fay-born. Because of this, she could share memories with the majay-hì . . . as could Wayfarer now. “How” was still a puzzle, and, though it was never said, Wayfarer often wondered about Vreuvillä's physical appearance.

The priestess looked in some ways like an an'Cróan or a Lhoin'na and yet neither. This was mostly because of her dark hair—like Wayfarer's—but there was something more.

Was Vreuvillä also of mixed blood?

Was it the same with all past Foirfeahkan?

Vreuvillä never spoke of this, even when asked, though from other things, Wayfarer knew there could be no form of heritage for this calling. All who had become Foirfeahkan did not inherit it; they came to it, as she had now done. In that, her taken name before the ancestors had better meaning.

Sheli'câlhad, “To a Lost Way.”

And even that was not the final naming, according to her new teacher. Vreuvillä once mentioned that all Foirfeahkan took a name by their new calling. It was a name of their own choice. Even so, Wayfarer wanted no name but the one she now had, created for her by Magiere, Léshil, and Chap.

At first, she had not known what to expect in coming here, but after initial explanations, Vreuvillä did not spend much time with instruction. Rather, she encouraged Wayfarer to simply exist and feel what was real for herself.

“Commune among the majay-hì,” she said, “and with First Glade . . . the true one . . . when the need calls you. These will teach you far more—more quickly—than can I. And after that, there is even more.”

At first, and only at night, when even the trees slept, Vreuvillä had taken her to the true First Glade. It was a clearing with a broad circle of slender aspens at the far side. Those trees looked no different from others of their kind, but perhaps they were too pristine for a wild place. Within their circle,
the grass was low and clean. And when Vreuvillä breached that circle to stand at its center surrounded by the aspens, her hair suddenly glistened as if she had stepped into a spring dawn.

Silver streaks in her locks turned almost white. Her amber eyes sparked as she raised her face upward. The majay-hì paced softly around the tree ring.

On that first visit and others later, Shade always remained at Wayfarer's side.

The priestess spread her arms low to the sides with palms forward and whispered in a tongue difficult to follow. It sounded like an'Cróan or Lhoin'na but perhaps older. That Vreuvillä heard or felt something answer her was clear, for it was the only time all traces of harshness vanished from her face.

But Wayfarer had neither seen nor heard anything, and Vreuvillä never explained.

Wayfarer had gone to this First Glade several times with only Shade. Though she tried to copy what Vreuvillä had done in clearing all thoughts from her mind, nothing happened. She felt nothing and heard nothing each time; ask as she did, Vreuvillä only answered, “You will receive an answer when they think you are ready.”

And when Wayfarer asked, “When who thinks I am ready?”

“That is part of the answer you will receive.”

There were too many nonanswers like this.

Days and nights passed much the same, except for “listening” to majay-hì memories in Shade's company. In that, she was almost at peace in forgetting things she had yet to understand. Freedom was hers for the first time among the pack, until Vreuvillä mentioned something else.

Wayfarer pressed about why the Foirfeahkan lived isolated from the world, and the priestess hesitantly whispered . . .

“Jâdh'airt.”

Wayfarer frowned. Much as that sounded like a word of her people, it made no sense. Her only guess was something like “an overwhelming desire.”

Vreuvillä's jaw clenched, and walking away, she uttered in a low voice, “The true wish.”

Again, that was not enough. Other than being just a youthful nothing, it did not seem such a horrible thing. Wayfarer headed after the priestess.

“How is that different from just . . . a wish for something wanted?”

Vreuvillä slowed but did not look back. “Nothing can be created or destroyed in such a way. Only changed . . . exchanged.”

Striding on, she had offered nothing more.

Tonight, Wayfarer pressed all such things from her mind. She was glad for the company of Vreuvillä and the pack, and in this moment, she was determined to think only of following the priestess back to the dwelling—and eating dinner together.

The two of them had taken only a few steps when . . .

A leggy, light brown majay-hì ahead to the left whirled from watching over tussling pups. She lunged down into the gulley and stared toward the far end. In less than two breaths, others of the pack stopped and turned.