Daughter of Blood (14 page)

For Haarth, too, Kalan thought, although he knew that was rarely foremost in Derai thinking. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“I believe you are.” She pushed the waterproof package toward him. “Take back your belongings, Khar of House Blood. I will retrieve the money I gave Rayn when I'm next in Grayharbor.”

The package's contents had betrayed him once, and Kalan did not want to risk it happening again, particularly in the Red Keep. He moved the package back. “Will you keep them for me, until I return again?”

“And if you don't?”

He considered that. “Then return them to Falk of Normarch, the lord who gave me the dagger, together with whatever word you may learn of my fate.”

Che'Ryl-g-Raham was silent, before finally nodding. “I will keep them for you. Until you return again or news of your passing reaches us.”

“Thank you.” Kalan rose and bowed. “When I do return”—he would not say
if
—“the coin I shall offer to redeem them will be the whole of my truth.”

Her smile was warm this time, with no edge to it, whether of steel or mockery. “You name a fair price, Storm Spear. I shall look forward to that day.”

“As shall I.”
The mindvoice was light rippling on water.
“In the meantime, Kalan-hamar, I bid you carry our name with you, as we shall remember yours.”
The voice sighed, or it could have been the sea, curving along either side of the ship.

I know who you are,
Kalan had said only a few minutes before, but now doubt seized him and he waited for the voice to name itself.

“Now we are many, but once, in the time before, we were
Yelusin, the Golden Fire that infused the Sea Keep.”
Stillness and light enclosed Kalan, the voices of wind and wave ebbing away.
“It is not only our name that we ask you to bear, but a spark of our power concealed within yours so that we may join again with our brother, Hylcarian. We were severed from him and all our conjoined Fires on the Night of Death, in the instant before Yelusin-that-was disintegrated. Afterward, we thought we alone had survived—until we saw our brother in your memories, alive still in the Old Keep of Winds.”

The Night of Death, Kalan repeated silently, feeling the full weight of that bitter, five-hundred-year-old history. Every Derai child learned it young: how the peace feast meant to end the civil war had ended in bloody slaughter, and the priestess, Xeria, had broken the Alliance's oldest law, calling down the Golden Fire against the Derai. Kalan had been with Malian, six years before, when Hylcarian, the now-remnant Golden Fire of the Keep of Winds, had described Xeria's act as a soul wound that nearly destroyed him.
“And dispersed
you
among the Sea House fleet at the same time,”
Kalan said now.

“Without the ships, nothing of Yelusin-that-was would have survived.
Even then, it was a long time before our fractured consciousness reemerged.”

A time, Kalan knew, in which the starvation and plague that followed the loss of the Golden Fire had continued the civil war's decimation of the Alliance. He frowned, recalling how he could not touch Hylcarian's twelve-sided table in the heart of the Old Keep—because although born to the House of Blood, he was not of
the
Blood, the kindred of power bound to the Golden Fire since the beginning.
“So I may not be able to carry your power.”

“
You are of the line of Tavaral, the Faithkeeper. That is as much honor as most Derai who call themselves the Blood can lay claim to, in these days. And the power you will carry is no more than the fragment of a fragment.”
The murmur of memory and regret strengthened.
“We have also seen who
you
are, Kalan-hamar, and that your
road leads to the Keep of Winds and our brother. It is enough.”

“By way of the Red Keep,”
Kalan cautioned, as the sounds of the day returned. He registered Che'Ryl-g-Raham's focused look and wondered how much she had absorbed of his exchange with her ship.

“Am I
her
ship? It would be as true to say that she is
my
navigator.”
The voice of light was amused.
“As for the Red Keep, you'll need me, as well as your layered wards, if the wyr hounds there are not to bay whenever you pass by.”

Wyr hounds: Kalan felt the trail of winter's fingers down his spine.
“And this business of being a Storm Spear?”

“For that reason, too,”
Yelusin replied, as Che'Ryl-g-Raham spoke.

“The ship holds that if a Storm Spear is to enter the Sea Keep again and visit our memorial, then he should do so under his true colors.” She smiled faintly. “In this matter, we are of one mind. With your permission, I'll have our ship's armorer engrave the Storm Spear device onto your mail and weapons before we make landfall.”

Kalan was about to say he could do it himself, then realized he did not know what the device was. Che'Ryl-g-Raham's smile was so bland that he guessed she suspected his dilemma, while beneath wind and wave and the fall of light, he caught the ghost of Yelusin's laughter—echoed by the firefly spark settling deep within his mind.

N
hairin's leg, overworked from constant travel and too many detours to avoid long-range patrols, finally gave out when she was crossing a bare stretch of plain. To stop where she was meant death, so Nhairin crawled on for what felt like hours, until she reached a pile of tumbledown rocks. Once she had worked her way between the outlying stones, she found a narrow path among the larger boulders that eventually led into a small cave where the ground was more sand than pebbles.

Once inside, Nhairin collapsed into the sleep of exhaustion, despite the agony of her leg. When she woke—whether hours or days later, she could not be sure—her entire body was so stiff that moving was anguish and the lame leg still would not bear her. But it was only when thirst, and the need to relieve herself, made her crawl outside, that she realized the sense of an invisible thread guiding her was gone.

Initially she was too exhausted, and then too hungry, to feel the same level of fear that had driven her away from Westwind Hold. The first few days among the rocks she mostly slept, only dragging herself as far as the small seep of brackish water on the Jaransor side of the rock pile before crawling back into her hideaway. Once, she roused to the
sound of voices. Derai voices, Nhairin thought, but the wind blew the voices away and she decided they must have been a hallucination. She thought the hound was a hallucination, too, when she woke to a rare, clear dawn and saw it standing in the entrance to her cave.

I know you, Nhairin thought. By the time she was fully awake the hound was gone. Later, though, she found pawprints in the entrance, so knew the dog had not been either the aftermath of a dream or a figment born of exhaustion and gnawing hunger. Curiosity drove her outside, and this time she climbed higher up the rockpile in an attempt to work out where she was.

Closer to the Wall than I would like, Nhairin decided, frowning. She had not realized the thread was leading her back that way. A cairn lay in the opposite direction, marking the far side of a hollow that lay just beyond the seep. She did not have to get closer to recognize the cairn as a Derai burial marker, the sort raised for captains or ruling kin who fell a long way from House and keep. The hound was lying in front of the cairn as though keeping watch, its nose on outstretched paws. And although it did not look her way, Nhairin felt certain it knew she was there.

I really do know you, she thought, studying the hound's long, graceful body and white, feathery coat. I might, she added, even be able to name you, in which case . . . She stopped, reluctant to pursue what the identity of the hound and its presence here suggested, but eventually moistened her cracked lips. “Falath,” she whispered. Nhairin thought she had barely spoken aloud, but the hound's elegant head lifted, turning as though the dark eyes could look through rock, straight to where she lay.

“You're Falath,” Nhairin whispered again. Her hunger, weariness, and fear were all temporarily forgotten, for if this was Falath, then the cairn the hound guarded must mark Rowan Birchmoon's grave. Yet the Winter Woman, Earl Tasarion's consort, had been alive and well when Nhairin left the Keep of Winds . . . Which made her wonder again, as she had several times on her stumbling progress across
the plain, exactly how long the Madness had held her in its thrall. Still, at least she knew now that it could not be longer than a hound's lifetime.

We were friends once, the Winter Woman and I, Nhairin thought—in our way. Or perhaps, honesty compelled her to admit, in my way. She had liked Rowan Birchmoon well enough, while simultaneously resenting her hold on Earl Tasarion, who was Nhairin's childhood companion as well as the leader of Night—and head of the Derai Alliance, in name at least. Old emotions stirred, including Nhairin's bitter conviction that the Nine Houses would never follow an Earl who had demeaned himself, and by implication the Derai, by taking an outsider consort. Sometimes I did wish her well gone, Nhairin admitted, chewing at an already ragged nail. But never dead. Despite the whispers and the Madness, she felt certain she had never wished that.

And Nerion?
her misgivings answered.
What might she have whispered into your mind that you were never consciously aware of, or concealed even from yourself?
Self-doubt shook her, until Nhairin reminded herself that when the Madness took hold, Rowan Birchmoon had still been alive. And until the mysterious song roused her, she had been confined in Westwind Hold. The relief was so great she almost cried out, and afterward risked using her bow as a walking stick, so she could make her halting way to the cairn and greet Falath.

Nhairin was not sure how close the hound would let her come, or whether he would drive her off if she intruded on what he considered his territory. She stopped as soon as he stood up, taking the opportunity to rest her leg, but saw the feathery tail was beating a slow welcome. “Do you remember me?” Nhairin asked, meeting the dark eyes fixed on hers. Momentarily, gratitude for the companionship of another living creature tightened her throat, before she limped nearer. Falath whined softly in greeting, his tail continuing to wave when she rested a hand on his warm, silken head. Oh, Falath, she thought.

Someone had brought him food. Nhairin's stomach
rumbled sharply when she saw the neatly cut joint, because there was still meat on the gnawed bone. She realized, too, that the Derai voices had not been a hallucination after all. Her thoughts leapt between resolving to take care and brush away her tracks, and wondering if she could persuade Falath to share the bounty, especially since the hound seemed glad of her company. His vigil, she reflected, must be as lonely as the grave he guarded, despite the visits of those bringing food.

Had it been a long one as well? Nhairin wondered, her eyes on the gray hairs about his muzzle—then shook her head, unable to recall whether she had ever noticed the hound was growing old.

Before now, she added uneasily, but made herself look past Falath to the low arch and the darkness beneath it that marked the cairn's entrance. Rowan Birchmoon's name was carved into the stone, together with the images of beasts and birds that had always been embroidered onto her clothing. So perhaps she asked to be buried here, Nhairin thought—where the small creatures of the plain come and the wind sometimes blows out of the Winter Country, rather than lying in the vaults beneath a Derai keep. She wondered, too, whether the Winter Woman had died as a result of accident or by an enemy's hand. Nhairin had certainly seen enough darkspawn sign, coming here, to make the latter feasible, even so far into the Gray Lands.

The last thought made her glance uneasily around, before studying the cairn again. The darkness within its mouth both drew and repelled her at the same time, yet Nhairin could not shake the feeling that in passing beneath the low arch she might meet herself—as she had been, not as the filthy, emaciated creature she was now—within the tomb's stillness. “But I can't go in,” she whispered, clinging to Falath's warmth beneath her hand. She dared not. The darkness reminded her too much of the Madness, so that for a time she could not move at all.

“May it find you out, Nhairin, wherever you are
. . .”

Nhairin jumped violently, certain the murmur had breathed out of the cairn's mouth. Shuddering, she clutched at Falath's head with one hand, while the other tightened on her bow. The hound did not move, just continued to gaze
up at her, his dark eyes calm, and the whisper did not come again. Slowly, Nhairin's heart returned to a more normal rhythm. It was only then she realized that the reason her guiding thread might have vanished, was because this was where it had been leading her all along.

T
he realization drove Nhairin back into the cave, where she remained for the rest of the day. When she finally crept out again, the stars were icicles in the blackness overhead. Watching their cold brilliance, she tried to imagine the heavens resounding with their song, but all she could hear was the music that had roused her from the Madness. Nhairin shivered—from cold, she told herself—and listened to Falath pace the hollow instead. He stopped when his patrol brought him abreast of where she sat by the seep, but uttered no sound before moving on. Afterward she crept back into the cave, eating the last scrap of food and huddling into one corner in an attempt to stay warm.

Tomorrow she would have to set snares, or try hunting the small game that could be found closer to Jaransor. Tomorrow, too, she would have to think about what being led to the cairn might mean, and whether lingering was feasible now that she knew Derai came here. Especially since they would be of Night: that seemed certain if they were feeding Falath. Nhairin's stomach grumbled, thinking about food, but although she feared hunger and cold might prevent sleep, she was just nodding off when the wolf howled.

The sound jerked her upright, her heart pounding wildly for the second time that day. A wolf
here
, in the Gray Lands, Nhairin thought, shocked because Haarth's larger predators, like their prey, rarely ventured so close to the Wall. She lay awake for a long time, tense with listening, but heard nothing more—although when sleep finally claimed her, a fiery-eyed wolf stalked through her dreams.

A nightmare, Nhairin reassured herself, waking again. Yet when she finally crawled out of her hideaway in the chill dawn, she found a pair of brush fowl dropped by the entrance, with the mark of a wolf's paw beside them in the dirt.