The Skeleth (24 page)

T
he water slapped at the ox-skin sides of the boat, threatening to come over and wash into the bottom. Tom knelt at the front and tried to work out why everything he did with his paddle seemed to make things worse. Through the hanging limbs of the trees on the banks he thought he could see a jut of land to his left. Perhaps the little lake he was on had joined another, and that was what was making all the waves. He tried to turn by jamming his paddle into the stream, but had not the least idea if he should be turning left or right.

He felt a tap on his back. “Just paddle straight, Tom.” The Elder knelt up behind him. “You're making things harder for the sternsman.”

“Oh.” Tom returned to the one thing he had been taught, drawing simple strokes on his right with the paddle. Soon after, the boat hauled around so that it crested straight over the
waves. The rocking motion stopped, and with it the feeling that they might tip over and fall into the water.

“There.” The Elder reached out to guide his arm. “Straight back—good, and slide it sideways from the water, and return. Much better—now continue just like that.”

A second boat drew level with Tom's. “Revered One!” The young woman who had held the mallet back in the hut stood up in the middle. “I beg you not to stir yourself, to consider your venerable age and leave the boy to—”

“Curse you for a ninny, Oriel—I was paddling boats before your mother could walk!” The Elder's retort bounced off the water, off the humped hills and island fields. “Now sit down before you flop into the river and make me swim after you!”

The sternsman of Tom's boat raised his voice just enough to let it carry. “Revered One, begging your pardon and all, but we pass a goodly number of places in the dark. Places to be ambushed, like. Mayhap we'll want to keep our silence.”

“Fairly spoken.” The Elder arranged herself on the wooden frame in the middle of the boat. She returned to her task, crouched over Jumble with her walking stick laid out alongside and her leather sack opened between her feet. Scents poured from the sack into the air, most of them smells Tom knew: rosemary and mugwort, lavender and feverfew. Every time Tom spared a glance over his shoulder, it looked as though the Elder was doing something different. Sometimes she murmured words he could not catch. Sometimes she prodded at Jumble's wound, cutting at the bad flesh with a small knife. Still other times, she simply ran her hands along his fur with
a look of care upon her face that Tom might have expected if Jumble was her own dog, or even her child.

After a while of waiting, the question simply burst from him. “What is it that you are doing?”

She touched Jumble's forehead. “Do all things in life have a balance, child?”

Tom found himself wishing to answer, wishing very much to be as clever as Edmund. “I don't understand what you mean.”

The Elder drew something from her sack. “If I eat this apple, you do not.” She demonstrated her point with a bite down to its core. “Are all things so in the world?”

Tom thought hard about it—too hard, perhaps. He had the feeling that the answer to her question was something he already knew.

“The folk who call themselves wizards hold that all things are in balance.” The Elder kissed Jumble on the nose three times. “If a wizard heals a body, he must balance that change in the world with another change. The easiest way is simply to wound another body. There are those of us who think such a thing is not worth doing.”

She wrapped the wound with expert care. “There. Time must mend him now.”

The currents merged and mellowed, and after a while of staring about him, Tom got some idea of how the land was laid. They were no longer on a lake—they had joined a river, not nearly as big as the Tamber back in Moorvale, but steep of channel, with a rapid flow that belied its glassy face. Shapes glided past, moonlit on the banks: a fishing cottage set on poles
over the water; a daub-and-wattle barn upon a bare slope; a stand of leafless trees perched as though about to fall into the river at any moment.

The answer seemed to come to Tom out of the silver-topped water. “Is wisdom such a thing? Is it one of those things without a balance?”

He heard no answer, so he turned around. He found the Elder sitting as a girl would sit, arms clasped under bent knees, Jumble lying crosswise on her lap. The breeze rippled her long gray hair against her chin. He failed at first to read her face, and for an awful instant he thought she was going to tell him that Jumble had just died.

“It is indeed,” she said. “When you give someone wisdom, you still have it yourself.”

She stretched out a hand under Jumble's nose, and to Tom's delight Jumble raised his head to sniff at it. His tail quivered—not quite wagging, but neither was it just a twitch.

Tom shipped his paddle across the bow at a whispered signal from the sternsman. He sat back on his haunches. “Are you a wizard?”

“I am not.” The Elder rubbed at Jumble's belly. “Who is a good dog? You are. Yes, you are.”

“Hoy there!” A figure waved in shadow from a dock at a bend in the stream. “News! I've got news!”

“That's no Skeleth,” said the sternsman. “Still, let's have a care.” He waved the third boat in their party of perhaps a score of fleeing folk toward the banks and bade the others in their little fleet to stop paddling but stay at the ready.

Tom knelt at his position in the bow. He watched about him, ready to spring for his paddle at the first sign of trouble, while the third boat drew in to converse with the man on shore.

The Elder picked bits of grass and nettle from Jumble's matted fur. “Do you thrill to danger, Tom?”

“I do.” Tom brought up a borrowed gutting knife, putting it near to hand in the bow of the boat. “I never would have thought it, but I do.”

He looked back. “Is this a flaw in me?”

The Elder trailed a wrinkled, calloused hand in the water. “What is time, child?”

Tom could not quite get used to the leaps the Elder seemed to take with her words. “It's . . . how some things happen after other things, I think.”

“Is it a road?” The Elder flicked drops of water at him. “Or is it a river?”

Tom thought he halfway understood. “You are asking if the future is a thing we make, or a thing that happens anyway.”

“One of the hardest questions our Order has ever considered is what to do if time is a river, after all,” said the Elder. “Float, or paddle?”

“Paddle,” said Tom. “Paddle and hope.”

The Elder scratched Jumble's ears, pondering long in silence. She nodded, with a look of satisfaction. “Then you know why danger thrills you, and you know it is no flaw.”

The third boat cast off again behind them. “Word of the danger's spreading through the eastern villages, Revered One.” Their bowsman called over the water. “They've got riders on
the way to Queenstown and Bale. No trouble on the roads, as of yet, no more sign of those creatures.”

The Elder patted Tom's shoulder. “There, my child. Our warning goes swift and sure across the land.”

Tom glanced back and found the sternsman handling their boat without trouble. The current drew them on in silence, so he took his chance for a rest. He turned to sit backward, facing the Elder, almost touching knees. “May I ask more questions?”

“You have answered mine. It is only fair.”

“How do you know Lord Tristan?”

“We are dear old friends,” said the Elder. “I know John Marshal, too. I suppose you would think it odd for me to call him a poor, sad boy.”

Tom thought about it. “No. It wouldn't.”

The Elder looked out over river and sky. “We did things together, long ago—he and I and some others—things that I believe we were right to do, though they never seemed to bear the fruit we hoped.”

Tom touched the ornately carven box that lay on the bottom of the boat between them. “How were the Skeleth sealed away, all those years ago? Lord Tristan said that it took two kinds of magic, and one of them was the kind you know.”

The Elder smiled sadly. “No one remembers.” She shifted the sun-disc buckle at her belt, shifted it again, then took it off. “Believe me, if we still knew how to stop the Skeleth, we would have done it by now.”

Tom folded in his arms, feeling the hard edge of the wind under his shirt. “Then why were you attacked first, out of all the places the Skeleth might strike?”

The Elder bundled up the oversized peasant dress that had covered her blue-and-white robe. “I don't know that either, unless it is simply that my sister Warbur hates me more than I had ever guessed. We were assembling for our supper late last night, and were struck without warning, and . . .”

She trailed off. “There are folk very dear to me who were alive yesterday.” She ran her fingers over the top of Jumble's head. “My sister had them all killed.”

Tom turned around. He picked up his oar and started paddling hard.

The sternsman whispered on the breeze. “Hoy up there. You can rest—current will take us.”

“Not fast enough.” Tom got his back into his work, and after a while felt the sternsman adjust to keep them straight. “Where are we going?”

“Garafraxa,” said the Elder. “A castle on a lake. The Earl of Quentara lives there—Isembard, a good and loyal man.”

Tom dug his paddle deep. “We'll get you safely there, and then I'll go north to find Edmund. Between us all, we'll find a way to stop the Skeleth. I won't give up until we do, and I won't let anyone hurt you anymore.”

The Elder poked his back. “The perfect hero, you are.”

“I don't want to be a hero.” Tom reached back to touch Jumble between the ears. “I want to be like you.”

Their boat shot ahead of the others, down a long curve of river running through a land of joining lakes. The work was not much different to Tom than threshing grain or pitching hay—there was a way to do it right, to pull the boat along with the greatest speed for the least effort, and just like the other
work he had done in his life, once he found the rhythm, he let his mind drift in peace.

“Not but two miles more, Tom.” The sternsman's voice murmured from behind him, just loud enough over water and wind. “We've made a good pace. You're stronger than you look.”

The land curled low, then high and then low again along the banks. It bulged and shifted—tree and bridge, field and farmhouse. The Elder fell into a doze, curled up with Jumble at the bottom of the boat.

“And there.” The sternsman pointed with his paddle. “Past the bridge. See it?”

The sight woke both wonder and hope in Tom—he felt the tingle of knowing that it is possible for something to exist by seeing it for the first time. He had seen castles before, but had never dreamed of one like that which he saw, standing high above the waves, its smooth dark walls plunging sheer into the water, an island of carven stone.

“Garafraxa, stronghold of Isembard, Earl of Quentara and Lord High Steward of the kingdom,” said the sternsman. “We'll be safe enough in there, if we're safe anywhere, and Isembard will get you to Elverain as quick as can be done, Tom—depend on it.”

“Hmm?” The Elder woke and yawned. “Are we there?”

“Almost.” Tom switched sides to even out the strain on his arms. “Looks like a mile or so, once we are out on open water.”

The bridge over the river loomed ahead, a haphazard span strung on rickety wooden pilings. The closer the boat got to it, the more plain it was to Tom that it marked land's end—just past it the banks fell away along a rush-lined shore, leaving
open water on the run toward the castle. The lead boat steered to avoid the pilings below, gliding near to the banks. Tom felt his sternsman shift to follow. It was not until they had nearly passed under the span that the figure stepped out between the posts above, and all of Tom's growing hopes choked and died.

“Sister, I fear this is our last goodbye.” Warbur Drake kept her hands folded in the sleeves of her dress, standing alone at the top of the bridge. “I wish that you had heeded me, all those years ago. We might have done much together.”

E
dmund raced up behind Ellí and grabbed her by the sleeve. “An army?” He spun her around to face him. “An
army
?”

“The army's not important—they're not even meant for Elverain.” Ellí shrugged him off and kept her pace down the broad slope of the vale. “They're camped in the ruins of an old fortress town. I should have understood before that this was once King Childeric's stronghold, his tower and tomb. We must get in, we must get past them, and—”

“What do you mean they're not meant for Elverain?” Edmund jabbed a finger westward. “This road leads right to Moorvale, right over the bridge to my village!”

Ellí shot a glance at him sidelong. “They're not going to Elverain, they're going through it. That's why Lord Wolland's at Northend. He's parleying with your lord Aelfric.”

Edmund drew up all he knew of the world in his mind. “Quentara.” He followed the path of the army, down through
Elverain and beyond into the settled lands west of the Tamber. “Rushmeet, Umberslade, the Hundredthorn. They're going south.”

“A strike by surprise, from a direction no one suspects, and at the very edge of winter.” Ellí nodded her head. “By the time anyone can muster a force to react, it will be too late. Lord Wolland will be king of all the north.”

Edmund looked out across a bleak bowl of land that seemed like an inverted curve of starless sky. The glow rose from a ring of fires spread across the hollow. Within the rough circle they bounded moved a swarm of shadows, men and horses in restless camp. A pair of smiths beat their hammers out of time. A laugh sounded, loud and harsh, while someone else played a tune upon a flute.

“Do you see it?” Ellí pointed. “On the hill, there, right in the middle of the fires.”

Edmund peered ahead. The flat expanse of the vale confused his senses, making him think at first that the shape on the hill ringed by the fires was just another hump of rock, but it was too regular in form to be a work of nature.

“It looks like the big tower of the old keep back on Wishing Hill, the one where I found the tomb.” Edmund followed the stonework upward to the jagged line where it gave way to starry black. “But it's broken off halfway up, and all tumbled over.”

“Three brothers, three kinsmen, three kings of the Pael—just like the book said.” Ellí threw back her cloak and quickened her pace. “If only I'd understood the first time I was here.”

Edmund followed at a horrified stumble over treeless
heath, toward the ring of fires around the broken tower. “But if Lord Wolland's got an army already, why does he also need the Skeleth?”

Ellí walked a few paces onward, deep in thought. “King Childeric believed that the Skeleth could make his army invincible.” She turned to Edmund. “Lord Wolland believes the very same thing. He's made a deal, a bargain with a wizard who told him that the Skeleth could bring him certain victory.”

“Which wizard?” said Edmund. “Vithric?”

“No, my teacher.” Ellí trembled. “Her name is Warbur Drake.”

Edmund watched her in silence, trying not to simply fall back into mushy-headed sympathy. He started to wonder whether Katherine might have seen something in her that he could not.

“Come closer.” Ellí reached into her belt. “We'll need to get past the sentries without being noticed.”

She threw the dust, spoke the words of her spell, and the night warped around Edmund. He fell with Ellí under the Sign of Obscurity, and it seemed to him that the moon hung above him without giving light.

“There.” Ellí beckoned Edmund onward. The spell left trails of her smile in the night air. “Come with me.”

Men and boys crossed the road in front of Edmund, and behind, trampling down the heavy grass around the sentry fires. Many wore livery, the crests of ram, rook or boar upon their chests, and in the dizzying churn of the spell it looked as though they had sprung to life on the chests of their wearers. Someone barked an order, and a rough circle of torches
drew in like a swarm around an oddly shaped structure by the verge. The swelling light revealed it for a tent spread out over the ancient stone foundations of a house—around the tower such dwellings grew more dense, making it look like an odd, half-ruined village. Dozens of horses raised their heads as Edmund passed their makeshift paddocks, and a chorus of whinnies resounded through the camp.

Edmund did his best to focus his mind past the confusion of Ellí's spell. He shot glances left and right along the road, and marked a horse for every man, many of them fine stallion chargers worth more than most peasants made in a year. The fires burning in the hollow around him bounded a circle wide enough for hundreds, but not thousands. He could only guess that he stood amidst an army of knights, second sons of noble birth who owned no land, and so hoped to make their ways in the world by conquest.

He nudged Ellí's side. “Do they have any archers?”

“Forget the army. They don't matter.” Ellí turned off the road toward the ruined tower, which stood on a hill just to the north, surrounded by more tents and paddocks.

Edmund could not quite bring himself to forget a camp full of hundreds of armed and hungry-looking men not ten miles from his home, but he followed all the same. He let his hearing widen out, trying to grasp the meaning of all that reached his ears. Men led horses to and fro along the road, while squires—many of them boys his own age—carried hauberks of chain armor big enough to weigh them double. An old man sharpened swords in another ancient, ruined house on the apron slope around the tower. A warhorse reared and thundered, but
a squire got him down again with the offer of a turnip. Harness jingled in the hands of men brushing past on either side, the metal polished to a gleam that caught the moon.

“Richard!” A man in rough river furs stepped out from behind the tented ruin, surrounded by the torches—a guard of men dressed in like fashion to their leader. “Richard Redhands, say that we must wait no longer! Say that soon we ride!”

One of the men passing next to Edmund turned around. “We await the word of our lord and commander, Hunwald, just as we have these past days.”

Edmund froze in fear. Sir Richard Redhands strode onward, passing Edmund by without paying him the slightest notice, so near that some of the slowly falling dust from Ellí's spell landed on his sleeve.

“You ask me, sir knight, we've no need of waiting.” The furred man spoke with a guttural drawl that forced Edmund to listen very closely to make out the words. “Once we're across the bridge, there's nothing Aelfric can do to stop us. We could be in Quentara by tomorrow night!”

“We do not ask your counsel, Hunwald of the Uxingham Hundreds.” The spell made the scowl on Richard's face look all the worse. “You have been promised a great deal for your aid—do not presume that the banner of command was part of the bargain. Await your summons to battle, just as we do.”

Hunwald turned away, grumbling with his men. “We're going to starve to death out here,” said one. “Where's that accursed grain they promised?”

Richard Redhands strode off in the opposite direction. “It
sickens me to bring such men along.” He muttered it under his breath to the young knight at his side. “I can hardly stand the smell of them.”

Ellí tugged Edmund's arm. “Hurry, now. My spell won't last much longer, and if we get caught out here, we're both in deep trouble.”

Edmund stepped over the wind-shot bones of what must once have been a castle wall. The foundations of the tower ahead stood intact to just beyond twice his own height, in front of a standing stone that looked just like the Wishing Stone back home. The double doors lay smashed inward, leaving a gap just wide enough for a man to crawl between them.

Edmund looked at Ellí. “You passed right by this place, and you didn't go in?”

“I was just trying to stay out of trouble.” Ellí would not meet his gaze.

Edmund approached the tower. “There's something scratched into the walls here.” He traced his fingers on letters that seemed chiseled into the stone with little care and even less craft, scrawling larger and then smaller across the door. “It's Old Paelic. Stranger beware, it says. Open not this door.”

The letters crawled and twisted under the false light of the spell. Edmund thought he heard his own voice screaming again, just as he had the first time Ellí had cast the spell on him. This time, though, he thought he could almost make out words.

“Can you fit through?” Ellí stood a few paces back of him. “We should go through.”

Edmund gave the broken doors a tentative push—they did not move, but there was more than enough space to squeeze between them and into the dusty blankness beyond.

“If someone sees us up here, we'll be caught.” Ellí hovered over him, her voice hushed and urgent. “We should go inside before my spell fails.”

More chiseled letters drew Edmund's eye. “Look—there it is again: Open not this door.” He felt along the cracks of the letters, pulling dust and blown weeds aside to trace their shapes. “This place is defiled. It is poison. Open not this door. And that:
Ahibanas dhuguni . . . Mek dhiti ghav.
That's Dhanic, again—another warning.”

“Hurry,” said Ellí. “Please.”

“And these here—Gatherer symbols.” Edmund touched them. “They're done wrong, but I think I can read them:
Death-Below-Crawling, Away-Flee-Always.
”

Edmund stood and looked back, around him at the ring of fires and the shadowed army. “A warning, in three languages.”

Ellí came up to his shoulder. “I can light the lantern once we're inside.” She took his hand again—she quaked, but when he held her firm, she stopped. “I'm not so scared when you're with me.” She ran her thumb up his palm.

Everything tumbled in Edmund. He started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the way he had always felt about Katherine was a childish thing, something that would wear off as he grew up. He opened his mouth to speak, though he did not know what he was going to say.

Ellí did not let him speak. She pressed her lips to his.

Amidst the rapture of it came a thought. His first kiss was not Katherine. His dreams had not come true.

“All right, then.” He turned to the door. “In we go.”

She squeezed his arm. “I knew I could count on you.”

Edmund turned back to the staved-in doors. He climbed up their splintered faces and felt out into the gap with one booted foot. He thought he touched solid ground beyond, but when he set his weight, his footing gave way with a snap, and with nothing to brace against he tumbled inside, into the darkness of the chamber beyond.

“Edmund?” Ellí hopped into the chamber after him. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, no. I'm fine.” Edmund flailed out a hand and grabbed what he had broken, an old wooden stool that had survived the centuries intact, only to be splintered by his misplaced foot. “If this place is anything like the one in Moorvale—”

“Yes, it should be down from here.” Ellí was already across the round chamber. She scuffled in shadow. “Stairs, yes, down. I'm letting go of my spell now, so don't raise your voice too loud.”

Edmund picked himself up from the floor. “Should we light the lantern?” His skin began to crawl, but he could not tell why.

Ellí shook her head. “Let's wait until we're well out of sight.”

“I don't think anyone down the hill will see a light from here.” The feeling came to Edmund that something about Ellí was different—the way she spoke, and something about the way she looked—but it was too dark to see her clearly.

“Very well.” Ellí knelt down in shadow—from the sounds
of it, just by the top of the stairs. She set down her woven bag and riffled through it.

Edmund felt his way over to her side. “I liked what we did, outside.”

“So did I.” She drew out an iron lantern.

He set down his own sack on the floor. “I've never done that, before. Kissed someone.” He knelt to help her, feeling through her woven bag for the tinder and flint. “Was I . . . um . . . was I any good at it?”

“What?” Her voice sounded breathless. “Oh, yes, wonderful. Give me space to light this.”

Edmund looked around him. “It's just like the southeast tower back in Moorvale.” His eyes grew accustomed to the deeper dark within the tower. “Lilies, the serpent, even the double spirals.”

Ellí turned her back to him. “Just a moment.” She sparked the tinder—yellow light flickered under her. “Will you please go down first? I'm scared.”

“Of course.” Edmund stepped onto the first stair, the
Paelandabok
under one arm and his other hand on the hilt of his brother's dagger. “I've done this sort of thing before. It's all right to be scared.”