Goldenhand (4 page)

“And a reply?” asked Mistress Finney, breaking in on Lirael's thoughts. “To Magistrix Coelle?”

“Oh . . . please send word that I shall come as soon as I may,” said Lirael. She thought for a few moments. “I should be there within a day, I think. I'll go to Wyverley first, to consult the magistrix for directions and so forth.”

“I will send a hawk at once,” replied the falconer, but she spoke to empty air. Lirael was already clattering down the stairs in her eagerness to be on her way, to once again be so busy she had no time to dwell upon the past.

She almost ran into Ellimere halfway down, coming up rather more slowly than Lirael was descending, the princess almost dropping the sheaf of messages she was bringing for the message-hawks to send.

“You're in a hurry,” said the princess cheerfully. “What's happening?”

“Urgent message from Sam's friend Nick in Ancelstierre,” gabbled Lirael. “A Free Magic creature, they need help. I thought I'd take a paperwing and fly down—”

“Wait! Wait!” cried Ellimere. She was still smiling, but there was the beginning of a frown on her forehead as well. “Have you got the message?”

Lirael handed her the paper. Ellimere read it, her frown intensifying.

“But no formal message from the Crossing Point Scouts at the
Perimeter, or the government via our embassy in Corvere?”

“Mistress Finney only had that one,” said Lirael.

“Strange there should be nothing official,” said Ellimere. “And several hundred miles south, there's no chance it could actually be a Free Magic creature. You can't even feel the Charter that far into Ancelstierre. There must be something else going on. I wonder if it's some sort of trap, to lure Mother into another assassination attempt . . .”

“I hadn't thought of that,” said Lirael, suddenly acutely aware that she had let her eagerness to get busy overrule any deeper thinking. She should have particularly thought of a trap aimed at Sabriel. The Abhorsen and King Touchstone had almost been killed in Ancelstierre seven months before by assassins from the Our Country party, who had been secretly funded and directed by Hedge, the necromancer servant of Orannis. Though the leadership of that party and the few surviving assassins were all in prison now, there might still be some outlying groups who intended harm to Sabriel, not knowing there was no longer any purpose in doing so.

“You'd think the Clayr would have Seen anything serious coming up, too,” continued Ellimere. “I mean, the aged parents only agreed to go on holiday because it's been so quiet and the Clayr said they hadn't Seen anything nasty on the horizon.”

“The visions aren't always clear,” said Lirael, who, though she lacked the Sight to see the future, had grown up among the clan of female seers in their fortress under the Glacier. “I mean, they See many possible futures, and have to look for patterns or recurring visions. And sometimes their Sight is clouded by other magic.”

“They normally See the big stuff, though,” said Ellimere. She paused and then added, “Eventually . . .”

“Almost too late sometimes,” said Lirael, with feeling. The Clayr had been very late in Seeing exactly what Orannis was, and what it planned. “Besides, they can't See what happens in Ancelstierre, at
least not much beyond the Wall. What if there really is a Free Magic creature loose over there? They have few—or maybe no—mages apart from the Crossing Point Scouts on the Perimeter.”

“But there can't be a Free Magic creature that far south,” said Ellimere. “It just isn't possible.”

It was Lirael's turn to be silent for a moment. She was thinking.

“It may be significant that the telegram came from Nick,” she said slowly.

“Why?” asked Ellimere.

“He bore the fragment of Orannis inside his heart for a long time,” said Lirael. “I could feel the Free Magic within him. Even after . . . after . . .”

She paused to blink away an incipient tear. “Even after the Dog brought him back and gave him the Charter mark, the Free Magic was still there, inside him. Only contained by the Charter. In a way, he was like the Dog herself. Or Mogget when he had his collar on. Something of Free Magic, but also of the Charter.”

“I didn't know he still had Free Magic inside him!” exclaimed Ellimere. “Did Mother know? We should never have let him out of our sight. What if the Free Magic overcomes him? He'll be incredibly dangerous!”

“No . . .” said Lirael, though she was far from certain herself that this was true, basing her answer very much on the belief that the Disreputable Dog would not have brought Nicholas Sayre back if he was going to be a threat. “I don't think that will happen. And Sabriel did know about Nick, she wanted him to come back with us, but Nick didn't . . . he didn't want to come along, and what with his uncle being the Chief Minister and all, Sabriel said we couldn't just take him with us. She thought he would be far enough south both the Free Magic and the Charter Magic would sleep within him—”

“Maybe
he
is the Free Magic creature,” interrupted Ellimere, her frown deepening further. “Telegram could have been mixed up.”

“Whatever is happening, I think I should go and investigate,” said Lirael.

“Yes,” said Ellimere. “Perhaps Sam should go with you—”

Lirael shook her head. She'd just been in Sam's workshop for the final adjustments to her hand, and he had been in a hurry himself. He was leaving to go and meet the leaders of the Southerling refugees, and take them to see the lands they were to be given by the crown. Sam had promised the Southerlings a place to settle, guaranteeing it with his word as a prince shortly before the final battle with Orannis, in order to make them get clear of the incipient destruction. Sorting out where they were to go, and attempting to overcome their cultural disbelief in magic, had become a big responsibility for Sam.

“Sam's got the Southerling leaders here, trying to get them used to Charter Magic and everything before he takes them off to their new lands north of Roble's Town. I'm sure I'll be fine by myself.”

Lirael wasn't entirely sure she would be fine. But she did know she needed to get away for a while, to be kept busy, to escape the long nights in her chambers in the palace, grieving for the Dog. A grief made worse by the fact that she knew the Dog would be cross with her for this and would probably have bitten her to stop her feeling sorry for herself.

“You'd better stop at Barhedrin and pick up a troop of the Guard,” said Ellimere. She turned about and started back down the stairs. “I'll write a letter to the captain there; they can accompany you to the Wall and make sure you get an escort from the Perimeter garrison to go with you farther south. I'd better let the consulate in Bain know as well; they can send some people north to meet you. Bodyguards, with guns and so forth. Oh, and the embassy in Corvere will need to be informed.”

“I thought I'd go to Wyverley College first and talk to Magistrix Coelle, to see if she knows more,” said Lirael. She felt rather like a horse who has convinced another to bolt from a corral but can't keep
up. Ellimere was now even more enthusiastic about the mission than Lirael was herself.

“Good idea, but don't go past the Wall without an escort,” said Ellimere. “Just in case this is all a trap for Mother, since it could as easily be a trap for you. Those Our Country idiots would be as happy to kill an Abhorsen-in-Waiting as the Abhorsen herself. Do you have everything you need to take?”

“As much as I can fit in a paperwing,” said Lirael. One of the first things Sabriel had taught her was to be ready to be called upon at all times. The Dead and Free Magic creatures did not wait on the convenience of packing a traveling kit.

“You settle on a new sword?”

“One that will serve, for now,” said Lirael. She had also lost her sword Nehima in the binding of Orannis. With the royal armories open to her, she had tried several swords, good weapons of fine steel imbued with Charter marks, but none felt entirely at home in her hand. Sam had said he would make her one, but the hand came first, and in any case it would take him a year or more. But as she had told him, the latest blade she'd tried from the armory was good enough.

So she had a Charter-spelled sword, her armored coat of gethre plates, and the seven bells of an Abhorsen. Few would dare stand against her, so equipped.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I'm not waiting . . . I'm going!” said Lirael. “I mean, I'm talking to you, then I'm going.”

Ellimere laughed and gave Lirael a quick hug, before taking several quick steps up the stairs toward the mews, pausing there for a few final words.

“You're too easy to tease. I'll come see you off in the paperwing courtyard in half an hour. With a letter for the Barhedrin captain, and I'll have Mistress Finney send a hawk to Wyverley now. I've got a bunch of messages to answer anyway.”

“Anything important?” asked Lirael.

“Don't think so!” called out Ellimere, once again racing up the stairs. “The Bridge Company reporting some incident with the nomads, a few other things. Routine!”

But she was wrong. It wasn't
routine
trouble with the nomads.

Greenwash River, Northern Bank

F
erin finished tying off the bandage and inspected her handiwork. The quarrel hadn't gone through her leg as she'd initially feared, instead scoring a deep furrow on the side of her calf just above her ankle. If it had been in the middle and higher up she would probably be already dead, the bone fractured and blood pumping out too fast to stop.

She'd been lucky, so far at least. But the wound could still turn bad, despite the healing paste she'd liberally smeared on it, hoping to stave off infection. Now her leg stank of bear fat and gwassen berries, the principal ingredients of the paste. The smell made her a little homesick. It was a long way from the mountains and the squat gwassen bushes with their bitter, restorative fruit.

With the bandage secure, Ferin gingerly hopped up on her good foot. She was concealed in a thick clump of black alders by the riverbank, but she still took care to move slowly and stay hidden. She hadn't got close enough to be sure which clan the horse nomads who'd caught up with her came from, but it didn't matter. The shaman's immediate unleashing of the wood-weird confirmed her early suspicions: the word had spread to all Twenty Tribes now, to find the Athask woman far from her mountain. Find her and kill her.

All the clans that gave tribute to the Witch With No Face would obey that instruction. Which, as far as Ferin knew, was nineteen of the Twenty Tribes. Only the raft people who drifted across the bitter sea in the far west had managed to avoid the tribute and the
retribution of the Witch With No Face, by the simple expedient of taking their rafts to the far side of their salty waters. The horse-folk of the steppe, and even her own mountain-dwellers, they all gave the Witch With No Face the required offerings.

“Offerings,” whispered Ferin, and smiled. That was how she had gotten her use-name. The name she had been given at birth was lost, all record and memory of it destroyed when she'd been chosen to be a tribute to the Witch. But later, her very smallest not-sister had tried to call her “offering” like the adults did, but only “ferin” had come out. While the adults carefully always called her Offering, as was traditional, nearly all the children called her Ferin.

At least they did when she was allowed to see them, which was not very often. Each clan's chosen offerings had to live away from the rest of their people, a league or more from the main camp, to be overseen by the tribe's best teachers, who ensured the offerings would grow up to be physically and mentally strong. Fast and lithe, supple in mind and body, trained with bow, sword, and knife. Taught to speak the common language of the clans and the Old Kingdom, even to read and write as well, something most nomads never bothered with unless they were to become a witch or shaman.

The Witch With No Face wanted only the best when it came time to move into her new body.

Ferin grimaced, both from the thought of that and from the pain in her leg. No muscle or tendon was severed, and it would support her weight if absolutely necessary. But it hurt, a pain that not only inhabited the wound but sent stabbing outriders up her leg and into every toe.

The tribute had been going on for centuries, the Witch With No Face demanding girls be kept ready, choosing one every dozen years or so, depending on how hard she had treated her current body. When that grew too old—and her bodies aged far faster than they would have simply from the normal passage of time—or was injured,
the Witch With No Face would leave her old body and move into the new one.

If an offering achieved the age of seventeen without being chosen by the Witch, she was killed and her body burned, the ashes sent to the Witch as proof of the deed. After all, there were always plenty more. If one clan ran out, another would have a suitable candidate, a new body for the Witch With No Face.

But not anymore, thought Ferin with grim satisfaction.

Something had happened to the Witch some eight moons past, a great defeat that had completely destroyed the body she inhabited. This had briefly been a cause of rejoicing, on the first news, until it became clear that the death of her body did not mean the Witch With No Face was actually dead herself.

She had returned from Death as a terrible spirit, something like the entities which inhabited wood-weirds and Spirit-Walkers, or even the tiny, malignant things trapped in spirit-glass arrowheads. But much more powerful, because the shamans and witches could not control her, and even the most powerful spirit-glass arrows simply enraged her, instead of ensuring her final end.

The usefulness—or not—of spirit-glass arrows against her had been tested several times, to the archers' cost. There were many among the clans who hated the Witch, and had lost children as offerings. Now the survivors had even more reasons to hate her, but were powerless to do anything about it.

There had been a brief hope that on becoming a bodiless spirit, the Witch With No Face wouldn't need any more offerings, and would even let the current crop walk out of their solitary dwellings and return to their tribes. But this was not to be. Word had come that they must all be killed, their bodies burned on pyres, stacked high with fuel and kept extra hot.

For some reason, the Witch either feared the offerings, or perhaps wanted them killed to remove a reminder of the bodies she
could no longer inhabit, the physical life she could no longer have.

All through the north, the offerings had been slain, and urns containing their ashes dispatched as evidence that the order of the Witch With No Face had been carried out.

Except in one place. The people of the Athask, the red-stitched goatskin-clad people of the mountains, had sent an urn containing human ashes, sure enough, but they were
not
those of their offering.

They did this because another witch had told them so. A witch who had died some nine years before and had stayed properly and sensibly dead. This witch had told the elders what was to come, Seeing it in the frozen waterfall that hung jewel-like in the winter, above the summer camp, the highest point in the mountains where the clans regularly pitched their tents.

Ferin had only vague memories of the Cave Witch, as her people came to call the visitor, but she recalled a woman with blue eyes and skin a different shade of brown than the mountain-folk, her hair the color of dry grass. Ferin had been told how the witch had appeared one summer, taking up residence in a cave off the mountain trail between the winter and summer camps. She had slain five of the clan-folk soon after her arrival, including a lesser shaman. They had tried to kill her and take the rich and strange things she had brought with her, along with the two mules that had carried her goods. Mules were rare beasts on the mountain, and tasted even better than horse.

But the Cave Witch had killed her attackers with unusual magic. Old Kingdom magic, from the far south across the great river. Recognizing her power, the elders treated with the foreign sorceress. Normally they would have also sent word to the Witch With No Face, but this was one of the first things the Cave Witch told them not to do, as it would bring them ill luck. As she also correctly told them about an imminent raid from the Ranash people—the Moon Horse clan—who lived in the highest part of the steppe, close to the mountains, they listened to her. When she told them other
useful glimpses of what was to come over the years, they continued to listen.

In the months before she died of the wasting sickness, the Cave Witch told them of her most important vision. She foresaw that the Witch With No Face would be killed but not killed, and would no longer need her offerings of young women. Instead, she would require something more, something that would end in the complete ruin of the clan, the death of the Athask people.

The blue-eyed woman told them the only way to stop this from happening was to send a messenger to her own people, and it was then she told the elders about the tribe of seers who lived around and under and beside a glacier in the Old Kingdom.

People she called the Clayr.

She'd written a message to be sent to them, in particular for her own daughter. She'd repeated that, over and over. Saying her daughter's name as if it meant everything.

Lirael.

Lirael of the Clayr.

The elders had taken the message, but had not sent it. The foreign sorcerer had not
always
been accurate in her foretellings, and they thought there was a chance she was wrong.

But then the Witch With No Face
was
killed, and she came back from Death, and two moons past, the messengers had come with the new demands that were exactly what the foreign sorcerer had said would lead to the end of the Athask people.

So the elders had belatedly decided they must send the message to the Clayr. And who better to take it than the Offering, the best of her people, whose life was in any case forfeit?

Ferin had that message now, secure in her head and safely memorized, for anything written could be stolen or lost. She had to get across the river and go to the glacier, to deliver the message and save her people.

Without being killed by those who served the Witch With No Face, who almost from the moment she had left the mountains to cross the steppe had pursued her as if they knew what she was, and where, if not where she intended going.

But Ferin didn't spare any thought for how her enemies were always close behind, or on anything else, like the fact that she had no idea where the Clayr's Glacier was on the other side of the Greenwash. She lived in the moment, and was entirely focused on her immediate goal.

To get across the river.

She looked out over the water. The snow was still falling, but lightly, and the last sliver of the sun was disappearing in the west, so she couldn't see very far, certainly not to the other side of the river. The Greenwash was at least three thousand paces wide here, and was roaring with snow-melt, its furious current made visible by the chunks of ice that whirled past, remnants of winter that had lingered in the more sheltered parts of the banks until the spring floods scoured them out.

There was no way Ferin could swim across, even if she were uninjured. The current was far too swift, and the water too cold. She would be drowned or frozen before she got even part of the way.

The bridge was now out of the question. The only way onto it was through the North Castle, and the shaman and his keeper would have been only the vanguard of other nomads who would be watching there, waiting for her to approach. If there were enough of them, they might even start searching along the riverbank and to the north, in case she'd doubled back. But it was more likely now they'd wait till morning, and light.

Which meant Ferin had to somehow get across this great, swollen, ferociously cold river in the darkness.

She tore off a strip of the alder bark—it was good for wounds—and chewed on it thoughtfully, looking along the riverbank in the
fading light. There was a large clump of some kind of rushes nearby. Not the same as the ones that grew in the high alpine lakes of her home, but similar.

Ferin lifted her head and listened to the noises about her. The rushing waters of the river were so loud she had to focus deeply to hear anything else. But her hearing was acute, and well trained. She stood silently, behind the alder trunk, putting all the small sounds together. None of them suggested other people, particularly people sneaking up on her.

Ferin left the alders and crawled carefully along the bank, making her trail look like some small animal's so she left no obviously human marks in the snow and mud. When she reached the reeds, she stopped and listened again, while watching for any signs of movement in the knee-high grass beyond the riverbank.

Again, there was nothing untoward. Ferin drew one of the tall reeds down and examined it as best she could in the fading light, and by touch. Its long stem was hollow, like the lake reeds she knew, but it had a large, flowery head instead of a closed, spearlike point.

Ferin cut it off close to the base with her knife and laid it down in front of her. Again, she waited and listened, then slowly cut another and put it down, before listening once more.

In this patient, laborious way, she spent the next several hours watchfully cutting reeds. It grew colder as the sun departed, but it was nothing like the piercing winter cold of the high mountains, at least not under the
athask
cloak, reversed so the white fur warmed her, and the goatskin lining, deeply oiled, shed the snow and did not give her away.

The snow eased off around this time, and the clouds began to move away, revealing a crescent moon and a bright swath of stars. Ferin scowled at the brightening sky, for she did not need the light, but those who hunted her might be encouraged to set out at night now, rather than wait for the dawn.

Ferin had spread the reeds into nine separate bunches. She quickly bound each of these bundles together individually, and then made a raft, using four bundles for the base and one on each side to make low gunwales. The ninth she only bound halfway and splayed the other end, for a makeshift paddle. All of this took every bit of her available cordage: the twine normally employed as the first stage of lofting a rope by arrow or grappling hook; six ells of the beautiful braided silk rope all the Athask people coveted; and three of her four spare bowstrings.