The Singing (38 page)

"Menellin's Rules," he said. "Learned by rote by every Minor Bard in Annar. How many times I wished, as I chanted them over and over again in the learning halls and watched the sun playing outside, that he hadn't written so many! But yes, perhaps it will do to remember our first lessons."

Maerad was staring fixedly into the fire, her eyes shining.

"Afinil is the place," she said. As she spoke, it seemed to those who listened that echoes gathered around her words, as if many voices spoke behind hers. "We must journey to Afinil for the singing. Under the sign of Ura, by ash, alder, and willow, in the season of renewal..."

There was a blank silence.

"That is all very fine," said Cadvan at last. "But Afinil no longer exists. The Nameless One loathed that city above all others and scoured it from the face of the earth. Even its ruins were ground into dust and scattered on the sixteen winds. And no one living can tell where once it stood."

THAT night, Maerad didn't sleep. She lay on her back, her eyes open, staring at the blackness of the rough stone above her and listening to the gentle breathing of her companions. Hem stirred restlessly in his sleep and began to snore, and she smiled at the sound, thinking of the times when she had held him in her arms and stilled his nightmares. It seemed so long ago, in another lifetime. That was before she had even known that he was her brother. Though something inside her had known the first moment she saw him, cowering in the wrecked caravan in the middle of the Valverras.

Hem was much changed since then. It wasn't only that he had grown at least two handspans and was now taller than Maerad by a head. He had always been thin, but his face had lost the softness of childhood, and his body had the ranginess of a young colt, at once awkward and graceful. It was possible now to see clearly the young man he would soon be.

To have found Hem at last was a deep happiness that lay, like a glowing coal, in the middle of her being, and she warmed herself against it like a shivering child. Beyond that one simple thing, all was uncertain. After her reunion with Hem, what she remembered most vividly when she thought about the previous day was the flash of fear in Saliman's face when she had destroyed the Hulls. Cadvan had promised not to be afraid of her, and yet even he could not entirely conceal his own anxiety. But what were her powers? Even now, she felt she had little understanding of these forces that moved through her: she was a vessel, nothing more. The Treesong had its own imperative, and she was merely its instrument, for good or ill. The thought filled her with an aching emptiness.

It's strange, she thought. The more powerful I become, the less choice I seem to have about anything. She felt as if she were fixed on the rim of a great wheel, which was turning slowly toward the singing of the Treesong. No force on earth could stop its inevitable revolution; and yet she didn't know what would happen, what might begin or end with the undoing of Nelsor's magery. Beyond the act of the singing, everything was blank.

I might die, she thought. Hem might die. Everything I love might be swept away. Cadvan and Saliman know that, yet still they stand by me. They do not think of turning back, although they do not know what they will meet at the end. They must be allowed their fear, if they are so brave in the face of it. Am I as brave as that? Why do I feel so lonely?

Maerad stared into the darkness. She had no right to feel such self-pity. She might be in the middle of the wilderness, in mortal danger, but with her were the people she loved most in the world. Somehow, that only made her feel worse. If she failed, their lives were forfeit. She thought of Cadvan's choice to stand by her, his willingness to risk everything he believed in for his faith in her. Was she equal to such faith? She feared, deeply, that she would fail him, that she was weaker than he thought.

At last she gave up trying to sleep. She wrapped her blanket around her and wandered outside to sit with Cadvan, who was keeping the watch. He turned and smiled as she sat next to him, but said nothing. It was the coldest part of the night; the turf glittered with rime under the still moonlight, and Cadvan's breath curled white on the air.

Maerad stared over the hills, and she thought that she could feel the landscape's very bones. As she watched, it seemed to her that a dance of shadows began to unfold and dissolve before her, a dance of such intricacy and nuance that she could barely comprehend it. But she knew it was a dance of the same echoes and shadows that had haunted her dreams the past few nights.

It was a dance of the dead, but now she saw them with her waking senses. She heard their voices ringing dimly on the frosty air, and saw the soft nimbus of their numberless shifting forms. This time she was not afraid; she knew that these were not revenants, the undead who walked again, but rather their memory. Time seemed to her to move in veils that constantly shifted, one over the other, dissolving as swiftly as she perceived them, and through its layers she could follow the shimmering traces of those who had lived here. She saw not only the shadow marks of what they had made or broken with their hands, but the passions that had lived within them: their hatreds and loves and griefs and desires and fears. Every moment when time had stopped under the intense impression of feeling—the joy of a young child at the return of its father, the ardor of lovers, the moment of dying—sang faintly through the fabric of the earth, filling the Hollow Lands with an eerie, melancholy music.

Maerad caught her breath and turned to Cadvan, her heart beating fast, and she cried out. In that moment she clearly saw the skull beneath the skin and muscles of his face, and she knew she was seeing the future of his own death. The vision filled her with utter desolation: how could she bear a world without Cadvan in it?

Cadvan took her hand, urgently asking what troubled her. At once the vision vanished; but Maerad did not know how to tell him what she had seen, and held his hand tightly until her grief and horror began to subside.

She lifted her eyes from the earth and stared at the moon, which blazed high in the black, frosty night. She realized it would not be very long—seven or eight days, perhaps—before it waxed to the full.

"I
have been thinking that the most likely place to look for Afinil is in the Hutmoors," said Cadvan, after a long silence. "Though it could have been near Rachida. Or even Rachida itself."

"Wherever it is, we have to find it quickly," said Maerad. "We have to get there before the moon is full. Or it will be too late. Not just for us, I mean, but for everyone: for Innail, for all of Annar ..."

"I don't like our chances," Cadvan said. "But then, I never have. And yet we have come this far."

Maerad nodded. "How long would it take to ride to the Hutmoors?" she asked.

"It depends. We could get there in five days, riding hard. But where Afinil might be in that sorry, desolate place, I do not know."

"Ardina would know where it was. She went there when Nelsor was alive..."

"We need all the help we can get," said Cadvan.

Maerad thought a little longer, and then stood up and went back to the shelter. She returned with her pipes, and standing close by Cadvan, she began to play them. The tune she played was sad, and the notes echoed plaintively in the still night. But this time, Ardina did not come.

At last, Maerad gave up and sat down disconsolately, holding her pipes in her maimed hand. "Why will she not answer me?" she said.

"I don't know," said Cadvan. "But both you and Hem have spoken of how the Elidhu fear and loathe the Treesong. It could be that, now the runes are close together, they emanate a great power, and she cannot come."

"But how are we to find Afinil without her help?"

Cadvan didn't answer for a long time. Finally he said, "If we are meant to find it, we will. But you should sleep, Maerad, especially if we are to begin our journey tomorrow."

"I can't sleep," said Maerad. "I don't think I'll ever sleep again."

Cadvan was about to tell her that she must sleep, that she could not contemplate traveling on no sleep at all, but something in her face, the traces of a deep and inarticulate pain, made him bite his tongue. Maerad stared out with burning eyes over the dim hills, and clutched her blanket more tightly around her body, although she was no longer conscious of the cold.

Hem dreamed of the Black Army that he had seen marching toward Desor. In his dream, the dead soldiers that lay strewn behind the army in the floodplains had risen and were marching on rotting feet, their blank eyes staring at nothing. When he awoke, he remembered that he had seen eyes with that same horrifying blankness in his waking life. They had stared out of the faces of the snouts, the child soldiers of the Dark, when they were bewitched in battle fever.

He rose quickly and walked to a nearby brook, where he splashed his face with cold water to wash away the memory. He tried not to think about his time with the snouts. Sometimes he thought it wasn't possible, even in the many moments of darkness that scarred his life, that he had lived through anything so terrible. But it hadn't been a dream.

And that reality, the world of Sjug'hakar Im, marched with the Black Army. It was that reality that had destroyed Baladh and Turbansk and perhaps had already smashed the walls of Til Amon. In Sjug'hakar Im, children were turned into brutalized killers, and beauty or gentleness or courage were mocked, tormented, and destroyed. Hem had seen children who were broken beyond the hope of repair, whose empty stares spoke of suffering so unspeakable there were no words that comprehended it; he had seen faces twisted and distorted by insanity and pain, faces blind with terror and anger, and dead faces, too many dead faces ...

He thought of his friend Zelika. He hadn't seen her face after she died. Sometimes he didn't know whether he was grateful to be spared that memory, or whether he had been denied his chance to make a proper farewell. Her lovely, savage features rose in his mind's eye, as vividly as if she now stood before him; and his grief for her opened again inside him, raw and bloody, as if he knew it for the first time. Nothing would ever compensate that loss, nothing would ever heal that wound; even if the Nameless One were defeated and all his works should turn to dust and vanish utterly, Zelika would still be dead. In her death lay all the injustice, all the needless waste, of this terrible war.

Hem splashed water over his head again, gasping at the cold. He didn't want these thoughts. The Dark had torn apart his whole life, but undoing the Treesong didn't mean undoing the terrible things that had happened, and he would never be rid of his memories. He set his jaw, staring unseeingly over the purple dawn-lit hills, toward the mist-shrouded peaks of the distant mountains.

He returned to the others, and busied himself helping to strike the camp. No one argued with Cadvan's suggestion that they should travel to the Hutmoors. Hem merely nodded; it seemed like the right direction to him. An earth sense was stirring in his body, like a melody he couldn't quite hear, calling him north.

Everyone seemed to feel the same urgency, as if they knew that time was running out. They packed quickly, and left soon after first light, riding northwest along the borders of the

Hollow Lands, Hem still riding behind Hekibel on Usha. They averted their faces from the rags and bones and piles of carrion that were the only remains of the Hulls and their mounts, and pushed the horses as swiftly as they could over the low hills. There was a hint of warmth in the sunlight that fell on their shoulders, and the horses were rested and eager, and the empty lands passed by them swiftly. By twilight they had left the Hollow Lands and were approaching the Milhol River, two days' ride south of Milhol itself. A stone Bard Road ran alongside the water, following the river through the Broken Hills to Ettinor.

Maerad stared at the brown river, with its banks of black reeds poking through the surface of the sullen water, and remembered that her first sight of a Hull had been not very far from this place, farther down the road in the Broken Hills. The fears she had felt then seemed utterly unimaginable now. Perhaps, she thought sardonically, she had since encountered much worse terrors.

Despite her lack of sleep, she felt no tiredness at all, but her vision was troubling her. The shadow world she had first seen the night before had vanished with the morning sunlight, but as the day wore on, the veils began to return, so that sometimes she wasn't sure which landscape she was riding through—or more accurately, which
time.
And the hauntings were becoming clearer. Once she saw a long line of people hurrying through a mist, burdened by their belongings, and it seemed to her that they were fleeing in terror. They looked over their shoulders as if in fear of pursuit, and Maerad thought that she saw in their eyes the reflections of flames; but she shook her head and the vision vanished. Another time, near the last circle of standing stones that they passed before they left the Hollow Lands, she saw an old man with a very long beard, tall and thin as a young birch, his arms up-reached to the sky in mysterious supplication. Toward evening, a child ran in front of her, laughing, and Maerad pulled Keru up sharply, fearing he would be trampled beneath her hooves, before she saw that the child was not there. There was something melancholy about all these visions, and Maerad did not speak of them to anyone.

When they reached the Milhol River, they halted briefly and scanned the countryside. It was deserted; the stone road shone white in the late afternoon light, and nothing moved as far as the eye could see. The only sign of life was a pair of hawks circling high overhead and some gray herons stalking in the reeds.

"No floods here," said Saliman, staring at the flat plains of Peredur that lay on the other side of the river. "Thank the Light. I've had enough of mud to last me a lifetime."

"Aye," said Cadvan. "Luck runs with us, so far. If we cross here, we can ride north of the Broken Hills and then cross the Usk Bridge to the Hutmoors, keeping well away from Ettinor. My only fear was that the Milhol might have flooded, and slowed us down. But I think we should go swiftly here; there is something I do not like in this silence, and I don't want to stay on this side of the river."

At this point the river was wide but shallow, with broad, firm sandbanks on either side, so it was not difficult to cross. The light was failing fast as they forded, but although the horses were stumbling with weariness, they rode on until after dusk before they stopped.

Maerad offered to keep watch, since she felt no desire to sleep, but Cadvan, studying her with concern, forbade it and insisted that she rest. Although he did not say so, he was deeply worried about her. It was more than a day since she had used her power, but her skin still shone with the strange, golden magery; if anything, it seemed brighter than before. And he thought there was something fey in her eyes, a flickering like madness, as if she were seeing things that were not there. He remembered what she had told him about her dreams, and shrewdly guessed what she might be looking at. This night she had refused to eat at all, only drinking water and, at Hem's insistence, some medhyl, and she barely spoke.