Moth and Spark (37 page)

Corin stood. He felt sick with fear for Rois, for the villagers. “I can’t let this go on,” he said. “I’ll leave the valley now. Whatever’s trying to get in, it’s me it’s after. I think it’s more than soldiers.”

“What?” she asked sharply.

“I don’t know. It’s there in the dark place, the cold place. It stinks of death. Perhaps it guards whatever holds the dragons, perhaps Hadon means to turn it loose on me. It’s terrible. And it’s desperate. If that’s what’s out there, if it’s free, it may be powerful enough to get through the barrier.”

“No,” Rois said. “If it were that powerful it already would have. But if it is waiting for you, you must not leave the valley, you will draw it down upon you. I do not need to know what it is to know that anything from the dark place is cruel and in love with pain.”

“I’ll have to leave the valley to free the dragons.”

“Yes. But don’t go until you are ready. It is not worth the risk.”

He looked at the other people in the cottage. The power of all these wizards in one place must shine like a beacon to any creature that had the eyes to see it. Kelvan had his arm around a pretty, dark-haired woman whose face was laid against his shoulder. It made Corin feel lonely.

Rois said his name. It brought his attention back to her. He said, “The risk to me, or some other risk?”

“The risk to you. You are needed, and not just by dragons.”

He had nothing to say. He was the prince. For all he knew he might be the king now. His life was not his to risk casually, dragons notwithstanding. Hadon probably knew that, knew he would be paralyzed by duty. Once Seana had told him he had too much conscience to be king, and he had laughed and told her she was the proof he had no conscience at all, but he knew that he did. Hadon was not hindered by such things.

He watched the light on Rois’s cheek. She put her hands in her lap and he saw that they were smooth and straight, not the hands of an old woman. When she was young she must have been beautiful. Then she shifted, and it was gone. Her skin was thin over sharp knuckles. Her face was wrinkled. She looked at him and he guessed that she knew what he had been thinking.

A blast of cold air tore through the room, extinguishing the fire. Rois leaned forward and passed her hand over the wood. Flame sprang up. He had that power too. But he would not use it here in the wizards’ valley.

She drew her hand back from the flames and pulled them with her like thread off a spinning wheel. One strand, another, and another. They lay on the air, fluttering, color shifting like opals. She began to weave them together around her fingers, cat’s cradle of fire. He watched, fascinated, caught. Without looking at him, she said, “I do not know if dragons are political creatures. I do not know if they care what you are. But you have to remember it.”

“I’m not in danger of forgetting,” he said bitterly.

She stopped the weaving and turned, offered him the net of flame. Tai had done this with yarns when she was young. He had never learned the moves. It was something more than idle entertainment for Rois, of that he was certain. A spell, a warding, a prophecy.

She brought her hands together and the flames winked out. “Your lady wife, does she know what’s roused?”

His lady wife. He imagined Tam’s response to that. “No,” he said, stopped. He had run to the roof before he knew everything she saw in trance. They had not spoken of it further in the scant time they had had. That last night, they had tried to shut the world out entirely. “I don’t know. She might. She would have told me, but there was no time.”

“Does she know how dangerous it is?”

“She knows,” he said, remembering how she had tried to tell him the afternoon before the ball. “That may not stop her. She is brave. And very stubborn.” If something led her into that place, she would go, heedless of risk, determined.

“Joce can protect her against that too if it comes to it.”

Strong blue light flashed through the room again. Everything went momentarily two-dimensional. He remembered the battle with the Sarians at the inn, the way the war-lights had flickered, the white paint on their faces. He should have known then that he would go into exile.

He looked at Rois. Her eyes were sharply silver. “I need help,” he said quietly, a declaration, a fact. He would not bargain for it, nor would he demand it. If none was forthcoming he would carry on the best he could.

She was silent for what seemed hours. He expected her to tell him
that she could not or would not give him anything. He resisted the urge to look around.

“I can help you,” she said finally. “But it’s not my help you need. Anything I give to you will only postpone what must happen.”

He knew what she meant. But he wasn’t ready to think it yet.

Wind blew him and Kelvan roughly about. They crashed into each other more than once. Corin barely kept himself from twisting an ankle on the uneven ground. When blue light flashed he saw the forest above tossing like the sea. The clouds tore along the sky. His eyes watered and his face was raw and cold from the force of the gale.

They reached their own cottage and hurried in. The floor was made of wood, with dips in it from years of treading in the same place. Kelvan got the fire going and they bent in front of it, warming their hands. It hardly seemed summer. The wind shrieked around a corner. It was easy to imagine voices in it. He would have worn a charm around his neck if he had had one.

He felt Kelvan watching him. He looked up. The rider was standing to the side, attentive, forceful. He remembered that as a rider Kelvan had significant power of his own in the Mycenean court. Four days was not long enough for him to know Kelvan well either. He trusted him entirely, but he could not predict what he might do or say.

Kelvan said, “Did she give you anything?”

“No. As soon as I’ve warmed up I’m going back to bed. We can make plans in the morning.” He fell silent. It was not an adequate response, but there was nothing else. He realized that he had gone to Rois like a child, expecting an answer, a magic wand, a dire sword. Disappointment was flattening his mood, damn fool that he was.

Something made a noise on the roof, and he looked up sharply. It was not repeated. A branch, probably, or a shingle blown loose. It had not had the dull thudding sound of the dead bird.

When he turned back the firelight had thickened. He looked at the soot-blackened stones of the chimney and thought that if he extended a hand to touch them they would recede ever farther into a place he could not approach. He was certain that behind him there was only darkness. The room was a stage set, Kelvan a wax figure.

Then Kelvan spoke, his voice formal. Corin nearly jumped at the sound. “My lord.”

“Yes?”

“Should I gather the riders?”

“Not now,” he said after a moment’s thought. He suspected Kelvan was as restless as he was, wanting to act. “But decide which of them you can trust, we’ll need them later.”

He was still cold but suddenly he could not stand to be in the presence of anyone else. He went into his own tiny room and shut the door firmly, lighting the candle with a quick mental flick. A straw pallet, not even a bed, covered with worn and scratchy wool blankets. One window, missing a shutter, and a piece of cloth nailed over the gap. It was rippling now in the wind. The candle was greasy and shapeless and burned smokily. It cast unsteady shadows. There was nothing to shield it from the draft. He pulled the remaining shutter closed to do its best to keep out the wind.

He left his cloak on and moved the candle on the floor nearer to the pallet. He sat down carefully. Sleep would be a long time coming, he would not even try yet. His mind was more unquiet than his body. He stretched out his legs and remembered that first night with Tam, sitting on the floor, watching her face, doing everything he could to restrain himself. She had to be safe, she had to.

Outside there was a roar and a wail and a bang. His head jerked up. The shutter crashed into the room. On the wall underneath the open window, black shadows were creeping over the sill, latticing themselves, tangling. Branches, bones. He could not move. He watched, too numb with disbelief for fear, as they thickened and extended. They covered the wall like leafless vines. He had never seen anything so dark, not even the dragon space. They left the wall and moved toward him across the floor, making a faint rasping sound. He could have wrapped his hands around them. They could wrap themselves around his hands. They groped and slithered like blind thorned snakes.

He scrambled backward and jostled the candle. Hot tallow splashed on the back of his left hand, burning painfully. This was real. Now the fear rushed over him, worse than any nightmare he had ever had.

He remembered absurdly the fairy tale of the sleeping princess and the briars, growing for a hundred years to cover the castle and all within
it. At birth the princess had been cursed to die by the bad fairy, and the good fairy changed it into sleep. They had done this to him too, he was sure of it. O dragons, he thought helplessly. The thorns were made of iron and sharply hooked. Their rasp sounded like a creature scratching at a door. He felt as though he had fallen into a pit. Darkness rushing up to meet him, his heart in his throat, his head whirling with dizziness. The blackness advanced. It was merciless and absolute.

Instinct or training or the dragons moved him. He grabbed the candle and held it up to the shadows. Begone! he thought. He said it aloud, commanding, while he reached to the mind of the dragon outside. The flame flared up so brightly he closed his eyes.

When he opened them again the shadows were gone and the room was ordinary. The wind was still blowing hard, but it no longer frightened him.

For a while he sat, trying to make sense of what had happened. Heat-sweat cooled on his skin. Firelight from the other room seeped under the door and around the edges. He rubbed the tallow-burn on his hand, which hurt. Then he went to inspect the damage.

The shutter had been wrenched off at its hinges, but the wood was still intact. There was no chance of rehanging it now. He lifted the cloth and stuck it back on its nails. There was a good-sized rip where it had been torn away, but it held. He felt it between his finger and thumb. It was coarse, a thick weave with little prickles where stem or seed of some plant had not been carded out.

He was sure the shadowthings had not been hallucination or vision. Things had been roused. Rois, for all her power and knowledge, was not going to give him counsel. He was in too deep for what she knew and remembered.

You’re going to kill yourself if you try to do this alone,
Tam had said. He let the cloth fall and went back into the other room to talk to Kelvan.

T
he Sarian language was full of short words and hard sounds. In the last hour Tam had become far more familiar with it than she had ever expected to. One of her legs had gone numb from being motionless so long. She was hiding close enough to the stream that the rushing water would cover any noise she made in moving, but that would not help if the soldiers saw movement in the brush on a windless night. Joce was a dozen feet or so away from her, completely quiet. She knew where he was and she still couldn’t see him.

It was not the first time they had been forced to hide in the brush. She was briar-scratched, insect-bitten, and sunburned. They had abandoned the horses days ago, leaving them in a pasture whose owner would either swoon with his good fortune or go running to the sheriff to avoid being taken as a horse thief. But this was the longest time they had been hidden. The Sarians were searching far more extensively than was justified by the size of the small one-room cote. The war-lights cast hard shadows over the clearing and tangled the shadows in the trees.

It had occurred to Tam several times that perhaps she and Joce were not the targets of the search. Perhaps the Sarians were looking for a magic ring or a lost love letter. Something smaller and more important than a prince’s wife. Or, more likely, they were playing wait-it-out. There were four of them, heavily armed. They had swept their war-lights through the bushes and up and down the trees. Only Joce’s ability to hide them with illusion those few seconds the light had been on them had kept them from discovery. Her skin had tingled when he did it.

She was not even frightened anymore, just bored and uncomfortable. And hungry. She was always hungry, it seemed. They moved and slept, moved and slept, and ate when they could, which was not often. She had been practicing with her power, practicing that slide into stillness and quiet, and that made her hungrier. It was not starvation, she knew what starvation was and this was not even close, but she was losing weight.

Finally the Sarians gave up. They took their horses, huge and unbelievably fast beasts, and went back west along the path from the cote. Tam heard the gallop of hooves through the ground for a long time after they reached the road.

She waited for Joce to call. The first time they hid she had come out as soon as she thought the danger was gone. He had been very angry with her.

The bushes rustled as he moved. “It’s safe,” he said. She crawled out slowly. Her leg burned as it woke up.

She lay on her back and flexed her leg while looking up at the tree branches and a strip of clear sky. A small reddish star was directly overhead.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“They knew we were here.”

“How? They didn’t have dogs.”

“We must have been seen on the road. We passed a few people.”

Tam remembered them. A boy of about twelve, a woman carrying a baby, a tinker with a skinny donkey and an empty cart. All of them had looked afraid. None of them would have lied to an armed man, especially not a Sarian. She hoped whoever had told had not been killed. She had seen too many bodies in the past few days to think it was a realistic hope.

They had circled Caithenor slowly over the past week and were now five or six miles to the south, on the Dele road. They saw Mycenean soldiers frequently, Sarians less often. They passed the smoking shells of farmhouses that appeared to have been burned for the fun of it, torched fields, slaughtered cattle. Dragons constantly crossed the sky. None of them had tried to reach her mind again.

She drew her knife and felt the edge. Had it not been for the war, it would have been a pleasant night. The air was mild. Owls hooted occasionally. The moon was up by now, blotching the ground with silver where it showed through the trees. The frogs were noisy.

Lying on the earth, Tam felt power underneath it. It was strong here, stronger than other places she had been outside the city. She could not possibly say how she knew. She felt it as distinctly as she felt sun or moisture or cold air on her skin. If she had the time to lie peacefully on it, it would seep into her. But she did not have the time. She had not learned yet how to draw from it. She wondered if it had something to do with how long the Sarians had searched.

Joce said, “If those soldiers are going back to the palace, we may soon have a bigger problem on our hands.”

Back to the palace
threw her into vision, as phrases sometimes did. A row of bodies dangled from the balcony in the Great Hall, turning a little with the air. It was too dark to see faces. War-lights blazed green-white at the gates. A Sarian rode up. He was bare-chested, and the light gleamed greenly on the rings in his nipples. His face was painted white. A body lay casually over the back of his horse. A pack of barking dogs raced toward him. He tossed the body down to them and rode on toward the stables.

Tam pulled out. If there had been any food in her stomach she would have vomited. She sat up. The sudden movement startled an animal in the bushes. She said, urgent, “Where does it come from, Joce? How do I make it stop?”

As though he were speaking to a restless horse, he said, “Easy now. Wherever you just went, you came back. It will take experience to close it faster, that’s all.”

“But what is it? What is my power?”

“Whatever you have, my lady, is not what I have. The powers that are left to the wizards are powers that serve for hiding and escape. You See through those things. You may eventually be able to Change things as you See them.”

You don’t know yet how much power you have
, Aram had said. She shivered. She saw a darkness pass quickly over the sky and knew it was a dragon.

“What about the dragons?” she asked.

“I know nothing about dragons.”

She sighed and returned her knife to its sheath. “What did you mean by
bigger problem
?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they return with reinforcements. They seemed to have a good sense that we were there.”

“We should go back into the city where it will be easier to hide.”

“I agree,” he said.

For once. She managed not to say it.

He said, “We’ll go back in tomorrow if we can. And once we are there, I will find a place where you can hide safely and I will go learn what is happening.”

“Is there such a place?”

“A few.”

That was all she was going to get. She wished suddenly, painfully, for Corin. She said, “Are we sleeping outside or in the cote?”

“It smells better outside,” he said.

Joce made a small fire. Tam went to the stream and washed her face and hands. They wrapped up in their cloaks and lay down. That was how it had been for days. Her hair was filthy. She listened for hoofbeats, but the earth stayed silent.

Mycenean soldiers lined the Dele Road where it met the Southern Ring Road. It was a hot day. The road was paved, and Tam could feel the heat of the stone through her boots. She kept her head down and let Joce put his arm around her with hand lower on her buttocks than any well-bred lady would ever countenance. His touch was so cool and impersonal it might as well have been glass. She was sweating with nervousness as well as heat.

“Your sword—they’ll see it,” she whispered.

“No,” he said.

Her skin tingled under her knife sheath. Illusion, she thought.

They were not stopped. Just two tired country lovers coming to see what the city could give them now. She supposed the guards would spend much more time scrutinizing anyone of her description who was trying to leave.

The city streets were mostly empty. The air was stifling. The smell of smoke, burned wood and burned flesh, still hung over everything. They walked through an area that had not been touched by fire, but the doors and windows of the houses were shut. Already it had that desolate air of a place abandoned. The few shops they saw stood with open doors and ransacked goods. Some buildings had been defaced with crudely scrawled obscenities. A thin dog approached, then slunk quickly away when Joce touched his sword. Grey ash coated the bricks of the buildings and the tree leaves.

They stopped in an empty public park to stand in the shade of a large oak. The fountain was not running. Birds wandered about and flitted from bush to bush, looking for scraps of food that no longer existed. Tam wiped the sweat from her face with the edge of her hand. Joce handed her the water flask.

“What next?” she asked, after a long drink.

“I know where I want to take you,” he said. “It will take some time to get there.”

“What if it’s no good?”

“Then we’ll try the next place.” He went abruptly taut. “There’s someone close. Come,” he whispered. He reached for her hand.

They walked quickly out of the park. On the way they passed the body of a hanged man dangling from a tree branch. It was recent enough that he did not smell yet. His shirt was ruined silk and his feet were bare. They were soft. He had been rich.

When they were on the shadeless streets they stayed in the center, well away from any places someone might slip out of. Joce did not let go of her.

It was not long before they came to a burned area. Fire-blackened buildings stood with empty window frames and sagging roofs. Many were gone entirely, just a pile of shattered bricks and twisted bits of metal left. Seeing them, Tam thought of contorted insects or spiders. Stone buildings had survived better than brick, but the insides were empty caverns of ash. Dragons making a dragon-land. Here and there a building that the fire had skipped stood pristine amid the rubble.

“What are we running from?” Tam asked after a while.

“It was either soldiers or looters, I did not want to find out which.”

She nodded. The destruction was making her feel numb. The heat haze and the grey ash and the black char made everything seem colorless.

Block after block it was the same. Single walls standing in the midst of piles of fallen stone. Blackened timbers leaning drunkenly against one another. Dusty lumps of glass made from fragments that had fused together with heat. Steel tankards jumbled together beside the staveless hoops of beer barrels. A grimy porcelain teapot that had survived, its bold Liddean pattern still bright. Rain had mudded down the ash and now it was thick and stiff where it had settled. Some parts of the streets looked like riverbeds, swirled and drifted with current. Leafless charred trees rose desolate from the plain of ash. Her boots acquired a thin coat of ash, and her throat was dry.

Other buildings were standing in the distance, and when Tam raised her head she could see the tallest towers of the palace. She wondered what it was like inside. A husk, a deserted place of haunts, or a prison,
full of rats and fear and suffering. Mycenean soldiers were said to be honorable and well disciplined but if the Sarians were there it would be hell, especially for the women. Better to have burned. She thought of Cina and felt sick.

Once shadow flickered over them with a smell of sulfur, and she looked up to see a dragon swooping low. It was close enough that she could make out the rider on its back. She clenched her fists and looked away. She waited for a stab of pain in her mind, but none came.

Slowly they drew nearer to the edge of the devastation. They passed houses and shops that were singed but intact, and then they came into another area that fire had not touched. It had once been a fashionable shopping district. Now the stores were boarded against looters, and the vendors sitting cross-legged on the bare street were selling flour and onions and dried beans.

Tam was thirsty, and they stopped in the shade of a tall building that still gleamed silver with sun. She drank deeply. As she was returning the flask to Joce, four Sarian soldiers walked by. They seemed immense. All of them had swords and knives, and two of them had bows, with black-feathered arrows. She froze.

“Look down,” Joce hissed as he took the flask. She obeyed. A dragon cried overhead. This time the pain spiked through her. She thought Corin’s name.

Joce took her hand again and pulled her softly to a walk. The soldiers had passed.

She was jumpy after that. Real fear set in. The dragon had found her, what if it told its rider? She kept herself from looking over her shoulder time after time, but her eyes scanned rapidly from side to side ahead of her. Joce let go of her but stayed very close.