Innowen sat down in his chair, but he pushed the wine mug away. For all the liquor he had drunk, his head was remarkably clear. He didn't want it to be. He wanted the embrace of a thick fog around his thoughts, anything to dull and blot the visions that took form in his brain. But the wine couldn't help him tonight.
"Did Drushen tell you what happened between us?" he asked Merit in a hushed voice. "Did he say why he ran away from Whisperstone that night?"
Merit hesitated, then nodded.
"Don't blame him," Innowen said firmly. "You've got to make him understand that it wasn't his fault." He wished he could see Drushen again, talk to him. He could explain to Drushen about his dancing, about its effect on any who watched. He could make him understand. But the old man's fear was too great, and he had no wish to cause him further pain. "I'll tell you something to help him understand," Innowen said at last, "and when you've told him, tell him also that I love him, just as I always did when I was little and he took care of me. Tell him that for me, and make him believe it."
Merit and Mourn both nodded, and Innowen told them how, between the sunset and the dawn, a crippled baby could walk. When he finished his tale, he twisted the bird-shaped ring around his finger. "Now, it's more important than ever that I get home," he said.
Merit drained his mug one last time, then volunteered to make the trip to the stable to fetch Innowen's horse. As he moved toward the door, his step betrayed no hint of the quantity of wine he had consumed. Innowen followed him as far as the door and watched him disappear into the night. When he turned around, Mourn was nowhere to be seen. His friend reappeared shortly, though, bearing Innowen's sword and the two bundles he had made from the Witch's cloak and his own.
"Let's move out by the well," Mourn suggested, refusing to let Innowen carry the bundles.
The square was dark and silent. The only light came from the tavern's open door. The doors and windows of all the other shops and apartments were black, utterly lightless. No one stirred in the square; no one appeared to stir behind the shutters. It was as if the town was in rehearsal for its eventual death.
The air was too warm. Overhead, though, the pale stars shone in a cool patch of black sky. Innowen and Mourn sat down on the side of the well, and each tilted back his head to look at the stars.
"Moryn," Innowen said, breaking the silence, "you've got to get out of Shanalane. Pack what you have and leave. Leave Ispor. There's a decay eating at this land, a corruption that spreads from person to person, and thing to thing. It hasn't touched you, yet, but it will, if you stay."
Mourn looked down at his hands in his lap. "Where would I go?" he said modestly.
Leaning closer, Innowen touched his friend's shoulder and squeezed it. "Go find some stories of your own," he urged. "And lay in bed some night and tell them to a handsome stranger." He gazed around the square at the uneven line of black rooftops, gaunt against the starlit sky. Slipping one hand inside his belt, he retrieved the two gold cymorens he kept there. He pressed them into Mourn's hand. "These can get you a long way, if you spend them wisely."
Mourn stared at the pair of triangular coins. The shiny metal glinted dully in the square's gloom. He closed his fist around them and craned his head back again. "As far as the stars?" he asked.
Innowen leaned over and kissed Mourn lightly. They embraced, then, speaking no more, until they heard the quiet
clip-clop
of Innowen's horse as Merit led it into the square. Innowen rose, picked up his bundles from the place where Mourn had set them, and adjusted them over his mount's withers. Next, he strapped on his sword and took the reins that Merit handed him.
"Remember," he whispered into Mourn's ear just before he mounted. "Your father walked away. So can you."
He left them in the square, taking the north road through town that Merit said would bring him to the Witch's old keep. When the last outbuildings were behind him, and night had swallowed Shanalane, the road swerved gently toward the river and followed its bank.
A few scattered pine trees rose up on either side of the river. Their feathery branches made a raspy susurrus as the wind blew through them. Off to his right, a low, ruddy moon shone through the branches like a half-closed eye that disinterestedly followed his progress. A few more nights, and it would be a full moon, and he would be in Whisperstone to share it with Rascal.
The Witch's keep rose suddenly on the opposite bank of the river. He might have missed it in the dark if he hadn't been watching for it. Its roofs were low and flat, barely visible over the wall that encircled the grounds. Innowen steered his horse across the narrow ribbon of water and up the muddy bank to the keep's once-great entrance.
The gate was a ruin. One great wooden door lay shattered on the ground as if a massive fist had smashed through it, ripped it off, and cast it down. The other hung at an unlikely angle on twisted hinges. A chill crept up Innowen's spine as he rode past them. It seemed inconceivable to him that someone had dared to vandalize the Witch's home.
Inside the gate, slender white pillars that once had lined a pebbled walkway lay broken and overturned. Black cracks in the sides of the gracefully fluted stone showed like gaping old wounds in the moonlight. In the center of the yard, a fountain was also overturned and shattered. The lawn, no doubt carefully tended at one time, had become wild with weeds and high grass. Sticking out of the thatched tangle, though, were pieces of weather-spoiled furniture too heavy for thieves to carry.
Innowen felt like an intruder as he rode across the grounds, though the place was clearly abandoned. He watched the top of the wall and the roofs; his gaze rapidly scanned every shadow, every dark nook and cranny. He should have brought a torch, he told himself. Yet, somehow, this didn't feel like a place where light would be tolerated. It was a temple to darkness and mystery, and the Witch had been its priestess.
And now, he had come, an adherent.
Something shiny lying in the grass caught his attention, and he dismounted to see what it was. Only a bent and twisted copper mirror, whose handle had been snapped off. Time and corrosion had obliterated it's once-polished surface, but a tiny spot remained stubbornly bright enough to catch the moon when he turned it in his hand.
He let it fall to the grass again. Carrying his reins in one hand, he walked toward the entrance of the main house. The pebbles on the walkway crunched conspicuously underfoot and under hoof. There was no reason to fear, he told himself.
He tied the reins around the leg of a huge, broken marble table that someone had apparently dropped from the balcony of the upper level. Like Parendur, most of the estate was of two levels, the upper supported by rows of painted columns. Here, too, the main doors had been smashed inward.
All within was darkness. He went only a few paces inside and breathed the air. It was dust and oppression. The toe of his foot stirred some unseen bit of debris, a fragment of crockery perhaps. He went no further, but stood there until his courage failed him. He retreated outside.
The moon floated just above the wall, barely enough light by which to explore the grounds. As he moved around the eastern side of the house, a sudden movement and a dark shape startled him. He jumped back, one hand clutching at the hilt of his sword, before he recognized his shadow stretched upon the wall and staring back at him from an equally frightened posture. He drew a deep breath and moved on.
He was not looking for anything. His original intent had been only to see where the Witch had lived. Now, there was a greater reason. Could it be that he had been born here? A child should have some memory of the place where it was born, but he had none. All he saw in his mind was a dark road, and that was no memory, he realized, only an image put there by his anger.
He moved past several outbuildings whose walls had been caved in. The tall weeds scratched at his legs, but he ignored the irritation, examining each ruin as closely as he could without light.
Behind the main house, he found another pathway. It, too, had once been colonnaded, but like the other path, its columns were now shattered chunks of stone. With a suddenness, he realized that no vandals had done this damage. It was too systematic, too thorough.
This was Kyrin's work. No doubt, after chasing the Witch from her home that rainy night five years ago, the new king and his men had come here and shattered her gates, pillaged her estate, seized anything that pleased them, and destroyed the rest. The townspeople would never have done this. To hear Merit talk, they had loved the Witch, thought of her as a mother and a protector. Nor would common thieves have broken down the walls, as well as the doors, of the outbuildings. Mere vandals might have broken the fountain and
some
of the columns, but not every single one.
No. Everywhere he looked now, Innowen saw Kyrin's handprint.
His hands curled into fists. He had never hated a man as he hated Kyrin. Koryan's son, or not, he was no fit ruler for Ispor. The land deserved better. Mourn and Merit, Baktus and Rarus deserved better.
But did they deserve the Witch in Kyrin's stead?
There was no reason for him to waste any more time here. There were too many questions whose answers lay at Whisperstone, and no one would keep those answers from him any longer. He went back around to the front of the estate and stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at it. Moonlight edged its points and angles, making the darkness behind its splintered doors and broken shutters seem even darker.
It was a temple, yes, he thought again, and if there had been anything to make a fire, he would have burned it all to the ground.
As he gathered his horse's reins and started back down the walkway, the wind blew across the grounds, causing the weeds to shift and rustle. He thought he heard the laugh of a child, and turned around suddenly, remembering Merit's stories. But when the wind blew again, he knew where the laughter came from. It laughed at him, the wind, as it brushed across his face like the breath of old ghosts.
Shut up,
he told the wind, speaking to it, as he so often did, as if it knew his thoughts. He turned his back resolutely on the ruined estate and mounted his horse.
I know the night is passing. But I will not dance here, not on this cursed ground.
He rode through the gates. Halfway across the Kashoki river, he stopped and slid off his horse again, and washed himself quickly in the water, before he climbed out on the opposite side. It was more than the dirt of Shanalane he wanted to wash from his body, but that would not be as easy. Nor could water accomplish the task.
Now he danced in the road, not to the wind, but to a music born of his own anger. It sang, rising from within, drowning out the rush of air and the shaking of the trees. Every line and angle and turn of his body described power, every gesture screamed.
It was a dance that shouted defiance at the squat, black structure watching in silence on the far side of the river.
Chapter 20
Innowen had spent too much time at the Witch's estate to make it all the way to Whisperstone before the sun came up. The sky was turning indigo in the east when he came upon an abandoned farmhouse and decided to wait out the day there. He tied the horse to a spoke of a broken cart wheel, which lay against the front of the house near the door, took down his bundles and the water bota that Mourn had given him, and went inside.
The house was a single bare room with a dirt floor. Not so much as a stool remained. Innowen set down his things and opened the crude shutters on the only two windows to let in the breeze. Then he leaned on the sill of the one facing east, and watched the colors of dawn spread across the sky. Just before the sun appeared over the distant horizon, he sank down with his back to the wall, put his sword across his lap, closed his eyes, and slept.
When night fell again, he drank and washed his face with the last of his water and thought about the fitful snatches of dreams he still remembered from his sleep. He was hungry, but he hadn't thought to bring food from Mourn's tavern, so he took his bundles, mounted his horse, and left the farmhouse behind.
The air was still hot, as if day were reluctant to release the earth, though darkness had come. The landscape was cragged with broken weeds and dead bushes and clumped patches of grass that sprouted sticklike from the cracked, gray soil. In every direction he looked, the land had the same texture as the skins of mummies he had seen in ancient Samyrabis.
Why not? The land was dead. Ispor was dead.
But what of Akkadi? What of the Witch's dream? Could she bring life to a dead land again?
Such were the thoughts that troubled him all the way to Whisperstone. He barely noticed when the hills became plain, and the plain became forest. Before he quite realized where he was, he rode into the village that had grown outside Whisperstone's walls.
It was early for him, but most of the villagers were already abed. This was just one more thing that set him apart from normal people, he reflected morosely. The ride had done that to him, caused him to look inward too deeply, to those places that were often better left alone.
Sometimes, when he passed a door, he heard voices. He paused in the road to listen, and rode on, feeling cold despite the heat. What might it have been like, he wondered, to never have met the Witch or Minarik, to never have left that cottage where he and Drushen had lived? What happiness might he have found in that simple life, the lives these villagers lived?