Full Circle (4 page)

“See to the wounded,” Leof told Hodge, and he kicked Arrow forward to her best pace. He rode into the pack of ghosts, Arrow
following her battle training, kicking out behind her to stop pursuers, allowing Leof precious seconds to swoop on the enchanter
and drag him across the saddlebow.

He almost made it. Would have made it, despite the ghosts. But the wraiths descended from where they had been perched, unseen,
on the far side of the barn roof, and flapped and clawed and spat and dragged the enchanter back into the air with them. He
looked almost despairing as he vanished into the sky.

Leof pulled Arrow away as the ghost leader aimed a huge blow at her neck. He blocked it with his borrowed sword and slashed
down at the man’s head. The blow cut right through his neck. The head didn’t fall, as a living man’s would have, but he reeled
and swayed and gave Leof enough time to back Arrow and turn her.

The other wraiths, he realised, were attacking his men. “Back!” Leof shouted. “He’s gone. Get back!”

Then the ghosts had run after their enchanter and the wraiths flew away, and they were left, the four of them, looking at
the bodies, the youth, an older woman and two young girls barely out of childhood, whose blood gleamed darkly in the sun.

I
N THE
end, we are animals, and all we can touch is flesh.

Our spirits are imprisoned in clay, and every day, every night, we yearn to break free. I know you have — surely you’ve had
the flying dream? The swimming dream? The one where you’re soaring, weightless, swooping and gliding and shifting on a thought,
on a prayer…

We’ve all had those dreams, which are the yearning of our spirits.

I think this world is punishment. My da says that if we are noble and good in this life, we will be reborn, but I think he’s
got it wrong. I think if we are good enough we are
not
reborn, at least, not as humans. Not as heavy flesh.

We are animals. That’s why they eat us, because they know us for what we are.

The first time I saw one, I was three summers old. Maybe four. We were down at the stream, Hengi and Caela and me, where we
weren’t supposed to be on our own, because of them. Hengi was showing off, the way he always does, dipping his toe into the
water, trying to prove that he was braver than anyone else.

“Come and get me!” he yelled. “I’m not afraid of you!”

It came. It snatched for his toe but he jerked back as it came up at him from the green depths, and it missed. I could hear
it hiss with annoyance, even from under the water. Hengi and Caela scrambled away from the bank and ran screaming to the cottage,
but I stayed, staring, and it stared back at me. She stared. It was a girl, no doubt.

The stonecasters say that there are moments when your life shifts its path, when what you do, what you decide, changes everything
from then on. So. That was my moment. If I’d run, I wouldn’t have seen her clearly.

I wouldn’t have seen that she was beautiful. And young. Not a child, like me, but not old like my mam. More like Ethelin,
Caela’s big sister. Her eyes were green and long, and they were green all the way, with no whites to them. They gleamed like
a cat’s. She looked at me, and smiled. Beckoned.

I wasn’t stupid, not even at four. I shook my head and kept my feet planted firmly on the ground. But I didn’t run. And then
… then she started to sing.

There are no words for it. If you haven’t heard it, I can’t recreate it. No human could. It went too high for a human voice,
and too low as well. It was like a dozen voices singing, but it was only one. It was water and laughter and silver in the
sun… It called to all the parts of me that were
not
animal. It filled my chest with hot tight longing because it spoke of everything I could never have — spirit, pure and simple,
flying free of flesh, free of earth, free of death.

I didn’t think those things then. Not at four. But I felt them. Cried for them. Sank down on my haunches and wept silently,
until my mam and the other adults came running to beat the waters and shout until she went away.

They made sure we didn’t go anywhere near the stream after that. I crept down, sometimes, but she was never there, even when
I stuck my toe in the water and shouted, “Come and get me!”

I heard her singing in my dreams, but what good was that? It wasn’t her I wanted, it was the freedom I heard in her song.

T
HE DARKNESS
covered Saker like a shield. His army was somewhere behind him and would have faded by now, with the sunlight. The wind wraiths
had deposited him next to an old mill and sped back into the air on his order, so he was safe and concealed, where no one
would look for a great enchanter.

And yet… He drank from the millrace, relieved himself against the cracked wall of the mill, went back to the loft and
wondered why he felt so… alone. He had always been alone, since the day the warlord’s men had killed his family, his
whole village. Even when he lived with Freite, the enchanter who had trained him, he had been alone. It was no different now.

But today the ghosts had protected him, defended him, drawn around him. Without that defence, he felt vulnerable. Saker frowned.
There had to be a way to enable the ghosts to stay after the sun shifted. It seemed that he could call them up for a day,
or for a night, but no longer. Sunset or sunrise drew them back into death, into the darkness before rebirth, and he had to
summon them all over again the next time he needed them.

At least the wind wraiths had gone.

“You may not stay near me,” he had said to them when they let him down from that horrifying flight. “The Warlord’s men will
see you, and after dark I am vulnerable.”

“Do not fear, human,” one of the wraiths had replied. “We will protect you.”

Saker shook his head. “You cannot protect me against an army of archers, and that is what they will bring against me if they
find me. I will summon you when I next have need of you.”

“And we will feast!” the wraiths shrieked.

“You will feast,” Saker confirmed, close to vomiting at the thought of them eating the spirits as well as the bodies of their
victims. “But now you must go.”

“We will watch from a distance,” the wraith said. “And be ready when you need us, master.”

They had streamed up into the sky, laughing and screaming.

Lying in the dark of the mill, Saker felt very small and too young, somehow, for his task. Perhaps he should raise his father’s
ghost. Call him: Alder, son of Crane. Let his own blood flow to call his father back, give Alder strength so that Saker could
lean into his embrace…

But he was too weak. He had lost a lot of blood already, raising the ghost army to defend himself against the warlord. And
he knew, if he were honest, that his father would rather plan the next battle than fold him in his arms.

His father would be right, Saker knew. He had to plan.

Turvite was his goal. He wanted to take the city that Acton had despoiled. But that day’s futile battering on the solid doors
and walls of Bonhill had shown him that taking a city would be a long, long fight. And he could not allow himself to be unprotected
each night. It would only take one assassin and the whole great scheme of reclamation and revenge would be over.

He had to find a way to keep the ghosts alive. Until their work was finished.

Y
OU CAN’T
come the River’s way,” Ash said.

“How will I get to the meeting place?” Flax asked, caught between surprise and uncertainty.

“My father will take you there,” Ash said. He had made the plan as soon as the Prowman had explained that the two of them
would have to go alone. Rowan would take Flax to meet Ash’s mother, Swallow, and then journey together to Sanctuary. It would
mean that Ash wouldn’t have to see that first meeting, his mother’s delight at Flax’s voice, their first song together . .
. Ash wondered if he was grasping at the Prowman’s offer so eagerly just to escape that.

But no. If there were a faster way to Sanctuary, he had to take it. He looked around the clearing where the other men, restored
to their normal human selves, were dressing and eating, laughing as they did so. Not demons any more, but singers and musicians,
discussing their craft. Ash caught snatches of melody as one man — Skink, the leader — pulled a pipe from his pocket and began
to play. A dawn song, greeting the day, the same one Flax had sung to him in Golden Valley.

A bass voice picked up the words and a tenor joined in, not Flax, an older man, without Flax’s purity of sound but with a
richer timbre. Ash and Flax both paused to listen.

Up jumps the sun in the early, early morning

The early, early morning

The early dawn of day

Up wings the lark in the early light of dawning

The early light of dawning

When gold replaces grey

The voices supported each other and echoed richly from the cliffs. When they had finished they began discussing the song,
the best instruments to use, the timing, all the daylight talk of the Deep. With the night gone, the Deep was almost ordinary.
Not quite. The high red-streaked sandstone walls which enclosed them were always a reminder of the need for secrecy, the need
for silence about what happened here. It had taken them days to reach it, and the way had been dangerous, but Rowan would
guide Flax back.

“Take the horses,” Ash said to Flax. “For all our sakes, get them back to Bramble safely!”

Flax grinned at that, but seemed uncertain still. “Are you sure I can’t come with you?”

Ash was reminded of his promise to Zel, to look after Flax as if he were his own brer. It made him feel guilty, but he reasoned
that if Flax
were
his own brother, he would do exactly the same thing — entrust him to his parents.

“My father wants you to meet my mother. She’s a singer like you, you know — better than you!” He was deliberately provocative
to get Flax bristling, but instead the youngster’s face lit up.

“She’ll teach me? Certain sure?”

“Certain sure,” Ash confirmed, a sour taste in his mouth. Teach him and rejoice. He pushed the thought away, all thoughts
away except the miraculous one that the River was waiting for, and wanting,
him
. Not Flax or his father or any other in these long, long years. Him. He was overtaken by a sense of his father’s vulnerability,
out there in the world which contained murderous ghosts and unknown terrors. “And — look after my father, too.”

Flax nodded, as though he’d been given a task by the gods. He would have to do something about that hero worship, Ash thought
as Skink handed him some fresh-cooked fish. He ate hungrily without tasting the food and walked over to Rowan.

“Sanctuary,” Rowan said musingly as he approached. “I know it. A cursed place, they say it is. There’s a song…”

“Yes,” Ash said, surprising himself by finding a need to be gentle with his father, who was not accustomed to fighting or
fearing or struggling with anything except a difficult melody. “I know the song. But it is just a meeting place. Get there
as soon as you can.”

Rowan nodded and embraced him, and it was only as Ash raced into the cave to meet the Prowman that he realised it was the
first time he had given his father a direct order. Yet it had seemed so natural. This was his craft, it seemed — action.

He said as much to the Prowman as they made their way back to the inner cave, where Ash had climbed down only the night before.

“Action and music,” the old man agreed. “That is our craft, to meld the two.” He grinned. “And, I’m afraid, to do as we are
told. We are followers, boy, not leaders.”

Ash digested that. It struck a sour note, but he knew it was true. He had always followed: his parents, Doronit, Martine,
Safred. Even Bramble, half-conscious, had made the decisions. And now the River.

“If you are to survive Her,” the Prowman said, “you must know yourself.”

Filled with a sudden impatience, Ash snapped, “That’s the sort of thing old men say.”

The Prowman laughed. “Aye, that’s so! That is so indeed. Well, lad, perhaps you know yourself too well already. Perhaps what
you need is to lose yourself in Her instead.”

Ash grinned, sure suddenly that he could speak his mind as freely as he liked. Somehow, he was at ease with the Prowman as
he had never been at ease with anyone before. “Enigmatic,” he teased. “Very like an old sage from the stories.”

The old man smiled and flicked him on the shoulder with the back of his hand, as boys do to each other. “Race you to the water,”
he said.

Together they ran through to the caverns where the green stars on the walls never faded, following the winding, crooked path,
laughing as they went, and as they came to the final cave, the final cliff, and Ash slowed, the Prowman called back over his
shoulder, “Trust Her!” and leapt out high over the rushing water.

As he disappeared from sight, Ash took a deep breath, full of sudden joy and sudden fear, and leapt after him.

There was music.

He couldn’t recognise the instrument, and that frightened him, but the River’s voice soothed him with wordless harmonies.
Home
, She said,
Belonging
, and he was calm.

But not still. Ash was rushing, rushing past rock walls, rushing through openings surely too small for his body, spinning
and splashing and sliding. As fear left him and he let the music fill him instead, he was equally full of joy and something
he’d never known before… but the feeling, like the instrument, had no name, because it was outside human experience.
It was not happiness, or joy, or satisfaction. It was all of those.

A sense of purpose — of
being
the purpose, rather than fulfilling one.

A sense of power.

Liberation.

Speed.

Deep, deep calm and stability, hidden in the middle of the rushing, as water, swung in a bucket quickly over one’s head, stays
firm in the centre and cannot fall.