Authors: Jude Fisher
Inside the faering was a big man whose blond hair had at some point been inexpertly dyed black: for in contrast to the parti-coloured locks on his head, the new beard that was sprouting on his chin was so pale as to be white-gold. And beside him sat a black-haired girl in a tattered red dress with huge eyes and a proud neck.
‘I know you,’ Mam breathed, staring at the man. ‘I do: I know you.’
The big man bowed his head, then looked her in the eye. ‘Erno Hamson,’ he said at last. ‘Of the Rockfall clan.’
Joz Bearhand laughed. ‘By Sur, life has a habit of making strange knots sometimes!’
‘And you?’ Mam asked his companion.
‘My name matters not,’ the dark-haired girl said in a rather stilted form of the Old Tongue. ‘I am a free woman, and I shall make my future for myself.’
Mam grinned. ‘Good girl. Still,’ her eyes dropped to the soft curve of the girl’s belly where the red fabric had dried plastered tight against her skin, ‘it looks as if someone else had other ideas about allowing you a free hand with your own life.’
Selen blushed. ‘You have sharp eyes.’ She placed a hand on her belly and sat there for a moment, considering. ‘This child shall also choose its future,’ she said at last.
‘Is it yours?’ The mercenary leader asked Erno curiously. ‘The baby?’
He looked horrified. ‘No . . . no, of course not.’
Mam laughed. ‘I like a mystery. And at least you look strong enough to manage an oar. If we don’t get some wind soon, we’ll be rowing all the way to Halbo. If you’ll row with us while the wind fails, we’ll offer you passage.’
It was a tough bargain. Erno’s heart thumped. This was the chance he needed to return to his homeland, but if it rested on Selen Issian’s uncertain temper, they might both be lost, abandoned to the sea once more. He waited for her usual outburst of indignation at the idea of having to carry out any task she might regard as beneath the standing of the daughter of an Istrian noble. If skinning a rabbit was something she would barely deign to do, even to feed herself, how she was likely to react to the idea of being taught to man an oar on a merchant vessel, of being treated like a common crewmember, and in her delicate condition, he didn’t dare to imagine. He felt the breath stand still in his chest, heard the mournful wail of a loon as it slid past overhead in search of better fishing grounds, caught a sudden sharp odour of brine and sweat off the clinkered boat that rose above them, and waited.
Selen said nothing. Instead, she got gingerly to her feet, steadied herself with a hand on Erno’s shoulder and waited for the faering to stop rocking. Then she stepped to the gunwale, took Mam’s extended hand and clambered up onto the merchant ship. For a moment she surveyed her new surroundings blank-faced. Then she grinned. The expression felt unfamiliar to her; but it was as if everything in the world was unfamiliar to her now. She turned back to the mercenary leader.
‘I’ve no idea how to work an oar, but I’m sure you will teach me. My name is Selen Issian, and I can see that this will be the start of my new life.
‘I hope you have something more practical that I can wear.’
Ten
The Three
They had had to take a long detour to avoid Gibeon, and now their provisions were running low. Alisha Skylark passed a weary hand across her face, tucked a frond of curly hair behind her ear, took hold of the stone again and tried to concentrate. The crystal was being more than usually uncommunicative this day, the interior it offered to her sore eyes being as streaked and dark and blurry as a rainwashed sky.
‘What do you see, amma?’
She almost jumped, Falo had crept in so quietly. What sort of seer was she, that she could not even intuit the comings and goings of her own child?
She held an arm out to the boy, caught him to her and buried her nose in the fragrant black fuzz of his hair. ‘Nothing, my honeybee. Nothing at all.’
And that was the truth, and the curse of it. Ever since the old woman, her mother, Fezack Starsinger, had passed on during their journey over the Golden Mountains, howling out something unintelligible about the Three even as she toppled from the wagon, it had been as if the crystal had swallowed her essence and made of it a cloud between Alisha’s vision and the far-sights of Elda. As the caravan’s scryer, she was proving to be of remarkably little use. The insights the stone afforded her were fragmentary and unsatisfactory: partial glimpses so fleeting that sometimes she could not even determine the town or even the region she was being shown. Not that any of the company had criticised her for this failure: but Alisha found herself burdened with doubts and fears and a growing lack of faith in the world’s providence. She suspected that this mistrust might in some part stem from her parentage; for misgivings were uncharacteristic in one of the true Wandering Folk, who knew with the utmost certainty that their place in the world was unique and ordained, that they each fitted into Elda’s fabric like a single perfect stitch in a vast tapestry. But the Istrian soldier who had taken her poor mother by force on the fateful day after her grandparents had unearthed the great crystal was likely a man racked by guilt and unworthiness, qualities his seed had carried into Fezack’s womb and thence into the soul of her only child. Or perhaps it was not her fault that the stone was recalcitrant; perhaps it was true what they said: that the really great seeing-stones yielded themselves fully only to those with whom they bonded in life, and that with the death of the principle seer, the gift of the crystal dwindled and dimmed.
But she sensed there was more to it than that. She had begun to find herself uncomfortable in the presence of the great stone, as if it were indeed haunted by Fezack’s spirit, or by something worse . . . Ever since the incident in the mountains, Alisha had been plagued by the sense that they were being pursued, that somehow Fezack’s death into the crystal had opened a doorway somewhere and had allowed something both powerful and possibly malevolent access into the world. But since Falo never showed any fear of the great stone, she was learning to take comfort from that.
‘Let me see, amma.’
Falo clambered up onto her lap. He was getting too big to be doing this, she thought, as his hard little feet dug painfully into her thighs, and when she made a small noise of protest, the boy turned his shining face to her and smiled. It was a smile of extraordinary, sunny charm, and at once she was cast back into painful memories of his handsome, charismatic father. Long gone now, of course. Their liaison had been shortlived, and she regretted that. You were not supposed to regret such things, as a nomad, she knew, and took it as further evidence of her mixed heritage.
She watched the boy grasp the crystal with a confidence born of long hours watching his mother and grandmother at their scrying, saw how odd gleams and shadows chased across the planes of his skin like a glamour. Sometimes he looked younger than his six years, eager and wide-eyed and opened out to life. She hoped it would last. She hoped he would have a chance to experience the best that being one of the Wanderers had to offer before he experienced the worst.
‘Can you see anything, Falo?’
The lad’s expression was one of intent concentration. The tip of his tongue protruded from his mouth; his eyes were round. He shook his head impatiently and shifted his grip on the stone, raising one shoulder slightly against her, as if to exclude her.
Alisha settled back against the wall of the wagon and let the rhythm of the passage lull her. After a moment she closed her eyes. She must try to decide what they should do next, where they might safely go to trade for food. Gibeon had been their best chance; but there had been red streaks in the sky in the morning and Elida had dreamed of buzzards alighting on a corpse. When she had interrogated the crystal, it had offered up a brief glimpse of flames and a woman running, her mouth stretched in a soundless scream; then had gone dark and uncooperative, showing nothing more than a shower of red sparks shooting through its interior like a swarm of fireflies. Three bad omens, she had decided; and they had taken the cattle road to the south of the slave-town and passed into the hills that would take them through to the Tilsen Plain and the villages where their magic samples were less likely to be regarded with superstitious horror. They were likely to go hungry before they reached them, though: all the supplies they had bartered for at the Allfair were long gone. The only member of the caravan they had recently lost to this lack was the ancient yeka, One Eye Brown One Eye Green, who had released her spirit as they threaded their way back down through the steep Skarn Mountains, and there they had buried her; for the Wandering Folk did not eat their own, nor any flesh.
Their caravan had been constantly on the move for nearly four moon-cycles now, rarely staying more than one night in the same place, skirting the towns and villages, trading warily and selling no charms. They had stopped in Cantara for a while, since its notorious lord was away in the north, and the people of the town seemed more relaxed about trading with nomads in his absence. Some of the dancing women did good business there, for the town had no whorehouse and the sight of a naked female face was a great novelty to those younger men who had not yet made the annual journey to the Allfair, and many of them had stayed, reducing the caravan further. They ate well in Cantara, and received generous gifts from the lady at the castle, too, from the lord’s elderly mother, Constanta Issian. This benefactress had sent out spiced wines and savoury rice dishes to them, a great basket of freshly baked sweet-cakes and pastries full of dried fruits. It was interesting, Alisha thought now, that she had selected the food so thoughtfully. She had sent out no killed meat, no fish or game. It was possible that the Lady of Cantara spent her time in the library, reading of their customs in one of the ancient books that told of such things, but Alisha had seen her briefly, in the crystal, and she suspected the lady’s knowledge came from other origins entirely.
‘Oh!’
The child’s exclamation brought her sharply from her reverie.
‘What is it, Falo? What can you see?’
‘Look, amma: look there.’ Falo marked the spot with a careful finger.
Alisha craned her neck. All she could make out was a swirl of movement in the globe, and a flash of light, as if she were glimpsing a bright fish swimming in the depths of a murky pond. She frowned and placed her hands one on either side of her son’s. The great stone felt warm to the touch, and at first she thought this was due to the transferred heat of Falo’s hands; but then the crystal began to buzz, so that the bones of her forearms juddered and throbbed. She narrowed her eyes, forced her mind open to the stone. And then she was falling into its centre . . .
A great, green-gold eye held her gaze. Its pupil was vertical, a shining black slit amid all that luminous colour. Under its rapt inspection, Alisha felt herself go hot, then cold. The eye blinked, once, then withdrew as if to allow her to gain perspective and she found that she was staring into the face of a cat. It was no small domestic creature this, though: no family pet that had wandered into the vicinity of another far-seeing stone and pressed its curious muzzle at the crystal as it might on seeing its reflection in a puddle. No, this was another order of cat entirely. It towered over the crystal globe on the carved wooden table before it as an eagle might loom over a mouse, and its eyes were ancient and intelligent. Its fur was as black as night and when it opened its mouth to roar, the interior of its maw appeared as hot and fiery as the heart of a fire.
No sound emanated from the crystal, but deep in her head, like the ghost of an itch, Alisha heard a voice.
Alisha
, it said.
It knew her name. Alisha found that she was trembling.
Alisha, hear me. We are all Three in the world
, it said.
The Power is here, but divided. The Lady is taken north; the Lord lies in his prison of stone. And I, who am full of the Power, find myself drained for petty trifles and cruel play. She does not know herself; he cannot free himself, and I am in the hands of incompetents, fools and those who walk upon the surface of Elda when they should have passed beyond
—
The voice ceased abruptly and the perspective in the globe flickered and slid sideways.
When the cat appeared again it was tiny, and it seemed agitated. Behind it, a large shape moved in shadow.
Jetra
, the voice came again in her mind, and its timbre was the same as when the cat had been vast.
They are taking me to the Eternal City
—
The crystal in the chamber moved, rose into the air. A hand appeared around it, then a face. Alisha cried out and took her hands off the stone.
‘Amma? Amma?’
Falo was staring up at her, his eyes huge and round.
‘It’s all right, my sparrow,’ she said shakily. ‘It’s all right.’
She sat there with her arms around him and waited for her pulse to stop racing. The crystal sat glowering on the table before them, its surfaces gone opaque and unreflective once more.
‘Did you see the cat, amma?’ Falo asked excitedly. ‘Did you hear it talk? I did not know that cats could talk. Can I have a talking cat?’
Alisha jerked upright. ‘You heard it speak?’ she asked unnecessarily.
Falo nodded. ‘It wants us to go to Jetra,’ he said cheerfully. He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps we can get a talking cat in Jetra.’
His mother smiled, though anxiety gnawed at her.
‘Perhaps,’ she said. It seemed the easiest thing to say.
Eleven
From the Depths
Katla turned her face into the wind and felt the airborne brine thrown up by the charging waves sting her skin. Her chin-length hair – too short to tie back out of her eyes – whipped her cheeks painfully, but her eyes were sparkling and her hands gripped the good wood of the
Snowland Wolf
’s prow more for thrill than for safety. She had begun to notice that she could feel the connection between the land and the ancient oak planking
through the motion of the sea
. It was not something she could ever have explained to anyone else without having them think her mad, but it was oddly exhilarating. She had never felt so alive. A good easterly filled the sail so that the wolf depicted there seemed swelled with pride at the capture of his prey: a great writhing red dragon, its tail looped extravagantly in and out of the wolf’s legs and all around the border of the oiled cloth. They would be home in four days – less, if this big wind persisted – but she wished they could just keep sailing until they fell off the edge of the world.