The Dowry Blade (34 page)

Brede did not mind the lack of answer. She wasn’t really expecting the creature to speak. She tested her injuries: they were starting to mend. She tried to judge how long it must be.

‘I ought to thank you,’ she said, feeling beholden, and ungrateful.

Kendra shook her head, understanding her reservations, smelling them in the tone of her voice. Brede recognised that Kendra had answered her, that they could communicate. Curiosity overcame her grogginess.

‘I am Brede,’ she offered.

Kendra inclined her head, and made a sign with her hands. It was the sign for her name, which was the same as the sign for wisdom. Brede blinked, taking in the sign, divining that it was a name, but she could only guess at its sound. Kendra made the sign for
strength
, and inclined her hands towards Brede. Brede accepted her interpretation of her name, without understanding what it was.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Try as he might, Madoc couldn’t remember seeing the sword in that clearing with the dead horse, and he had come to believe that perhaps Brede had thrown it down after all. So his search was slow and methodical, covering ground he had walked twice already. The persistent rain, almost blinding in its determination to fill his eyes, his ears, and his mouth made the search more difficult. Away from Kendra’s confusing influence, Madoc no longer believed Sorcha was dead. He saw the smoke from Kendra’s fire, but said nothing to Devnet.

She barely acknowledged Madoc’s existence, and took no part in his search. Unimpressed by the significance of the sword, Devnet followed Madoc at a leisurely pace, apparently oblivious to his anxiously bent back, his searching eyes. Having made her choice to stay with Madoc, Devnet was uncomfortable in his presence. She brooded on Brede’s words, wondering why she was so adamant in her accusations. She watched Madoc’s search as though she could divine the truth from the way he moved. It took two days to reach the edge of the gorge, by which time Madoc’s thoroughness had driven Devnet from scorn to rage.

She stood at the brink of that drop and peered cautiously over the edge.

‘You think they survived this?’ she asked incredulously.

Madoc shrugged.

‘They weren’t there. Plenty of blood. Perhaps, perhaps not.’

‘And that smoke?’

Madoc sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, irritably.

‘I’m not taking my horse down there,’ Devnet said, developing a deep unwillingness to discover what lay at the bottom of the gorge.

‘I wasn’t planning it,’ Madoc agreed. ‘It’s hard enough on foot with the rain.’

He looped his horse’s reins into a bush that clung to the edge of the precipice, and started cautiously down the slope with scarcely a glance at Devnet. She followed unwillingly, slipping in the mud, clinging to thorny bushes to slow her descent. She reached the floor of the gorge covered in mud, bloody of hand and in a raging temper.

‘It had better be here,’ she muttered, as she waited for Madoc to complete his slow descent. He hung from the bushes and gazed carefully about hoping for a glint of metal among the bushes and boulders. Reaching the foot at last, he rested against a rock, and inspected his cut palms. Devnet hauled him to his feet.

‘You came here for a purpose, look for your blasted sword, and then let’s get away from this place.’

Madoc glowered at her, trying to remember why it had seemed such a good idea to hand-fast with this bitch. He rubbed the blood from his hands onto his jerkin and strode away to where the remains of the horse lay.

Devnet recoiled from the crow pecked corpse; she was fond of her horses. Madoc quartered the ground around the beast, but found nothing, not even his own footprints. Devnet wandered away, and he thought nothing more about her, until he heard her sharp exclamation.

Madoc raised his head at Devnet’s call, and leapt up to follow her, almost colliding with her as she backed away from her find. Madoc found himself automatically providing a comforting and protecting arm, and to his surprise, Devnet accepted his support. Madoc gave her a reassuring hug, and went past to see what had caused such unexpected weakness.

Ashy remains of a large fire. The torrential rain had prevented the fire from completely destroying the bones at its centre. Madoc’s stomach turned in response. He retreated swiftly, and resumed his embrace of Devnet, as much for his own benefit as for hers.

‘We don’t burn our dead,’ Devnet said softly. ‘Brede wouldn’t do that.’

But the witch would,
Madoc thought, assessing the situation. If the witch was alive, and she took time for funeral rites, she might still be somewhere in this wood. And what kind of grudge would she hold now? He shuddered, the recovery of the sword fading in importance.

Devnet pulled out of his arms. She had to remind herself that she had wanted to kill Brede herself only a few days ago, but this was different, and she wept: not for the woman who forced her to question her certainties, but for the woman of ten years past, who had laughed with her, who had sung with her, who had shared her blankets. Devnet looked up into Madoc’s grim face, her hands flat against his chest, thinking about his single-minded pursuit of that sword. She had seen the blade, it was nothing special, but she understood the struggle for power that the blade had engendered. Devnet thought about Madoc’s eager searching after power, and her heart went cold within her.

Walk away,
she told herself.
Walk, while you still can
.

‘Brede spoke of you,’ Devnet said quietly, knowing the risk she was taking, but unable to keep silent.

Madoc saw the way Devnet’s eyes narrowed, the way her trembling stilled.

‘She said that you led the raid against the Horse Clans. She said you held her sister in captivity until she died and that you sold her next-kin to an inn-keeper.’

Madoc said nothing. Devnet waited for him to answer her accusation, and the moment stretched. She listened to the water dripping from the leaves about her and she stared at her hands, where they pressed against Madoc’s rib-cage.

Walk away,
she told herself again.

Devnet did not look him in the eyes again. She took a careful step backwards, and withdrew her hands from Madoc’s body. A bloody palm print remained on the fabric of his coat.

‘You are not my kin.’ She turned away, feeling that sudden loss as a freedom. She walked between the trees, towards the faint noise of a river, listening, listening; waiting for Madoc to come after her. She held her head high, expecting a blow to her unprotected back. It did not come, and the sense of freedom grew and the trembling tension loosened her limbs, until Devnet felt she might fly. She did not look back.

When next she woke, Brede was alone. The pain was slightly less. She moved cautiously, testing her limbs, trying to work out what was injured, and how badly. One arm seemed usable. Brede ran her unimpeded hand across her body, telling over broken bones and bruising and worse, and wondered at her waking. She longed for enough light to see by. Her seeking fingers found the string of stones. She clutched them compulsively.

There was a greater pain then, a wave of desolation, threatening to drown her. The hollowness inside her, the aching silence that should contain Sorcha. In the darkness Brede could find nothing to cling to except those stones and she held them tightly; feeling them bite into her flesh, and in spite of herself remembered the touch of Sorcha’s skin against hers.

Well then
, she told herself.

She stared into the pressing darkness, building a picture in her mind with slow deliberation. She put together impression after impression, the tangle of Sorcha’s hair in the mornings, the way the light fell across her shoulders on one particular evening, the touch of her hand, the touch of her lips on Brede’s closed eyelids – Brede cursed. Nothing could make her believe it.
She would not believe it.

She peered at the stones in her hand. She tried to remember their colour. Blue, she decided, concentrating on the texture of the surface. Not all quite the same colour, shading into almost grey, dusty looking. She rubbed her thumb across them, feeling the slight variation in size. They were in the wrong order. They had been taken from their string, and rethreaded without care. She tried to tease the knot loose, using her teeth. The leather thong came loose only gradually. She was tired. The knot untied, there was no way of keeping the stones safe whilst she sorted them. She could get them off the thread, but would not be able to put them back, nor retie the knot. Brede leant her head back, wrapping the end of the thong around her finger, and let tears roll down the side of her face.

Kendra felt threatened now, and protected the boundaries of her domain. Only someone who knew for a certainty that her woodland existed would find a way into the green dusk of her land. None of the many search parties that Lorcan sent after the Dowry blade could find a way in, and only Madoc remained to disturb Kendra’s uneasy quiet.

In time, Madoc believed he understood this place. Devnet’s theft of his horse helped determine his continued search. The gorge was full of sounds, but no voices. It was not Madoc’s natural habitat and he was made uneasy by it. He liked voices, preferably loud ones. Trees and rivers and small animals and birds made him feel isolated, and when Madoc was isolated he feared, and what he feared, he wanted to destroy; but there was still the sword. Madoc’s certainty that the sword lay somewhere in that gorge kept him there, searching.

Brede believed she had allowed herself enough time to heal. She had unbound her ribs; she had stretched and strengthened her damaged arm. She strengthened the muscles in her back and arms much as a fledgling bird prepared its wings for flight, with furious bouts of determined exercise. She had been patient, but time was an uncertain thing in the darkness. She balanced her craving for light and certainty against the pain – diminished, but still there, gnawing at her.

She removed the splints from her mangled leg; she tested her joints, flexed and stretched her injured limbs. The pain made her dizzy; she sweated with the effort it cost her to make those small movements. She shook helplessly with fatigue, but gradually, as days stretched into weeks, it took less and less effort, to bring her knee to her chest, or any of the other tasks she set herself. She was afraid of the uncertainty of time here. She didn’t know how long she had lain in the darkness. She knew only that she had neither hungered nor eaten. She wondered if this was what lay beyond the Gate, if this was, in fact, death. Only the pain persuaded her otherwise.

Brede used her voice less and less, in deference to Kendra’s silence. The silence gave her too much space to think, and she filled her time with her desperate exercise, and with learning the signs she needed to speak to Kendra.

The shapes and signs that Kendra made on her hands, slowly impinged on Brede’s brain, and she repeated and elaborated on those signs, until she could ask questions and understand the answers. In the darkness, those signs were read by touch, and Brede was astonished at the roughness of Kendra’s skin, which was as creviced as the bark of an ancient tree, and made the gentleness of her touch all the more remarkable.

In her mind, Brede called Kendra
Tree
, despite having found that the sign for Kendra’s name wasn’t the same. Discovering that her own name sign meant
Strength
made her wonder whether Kendra chose that sign for her as encouragement.

Once Brede had achieved her ambition, and threaded the Singer stones back onto their thread in the correct order, she tied them into the hem of her shirt, and put them, and Sorcha, from her mind.

Kendra’s hold on her territory was firm, and Madoc had no hope of finding the cave, any more than he had a hope of seeing Kendra when he looked straight at her. He only sensed a strangeness, a disjointedness, as though shadows fell where there should be no shadow. He was drawn to watch those uncertain places where the trees weren’t quite as they should be, where there was a silence in the constant roar of wind through the branches, but there was nothing to see.

Kendra was aware of the watcher, aware of every bough he broke, every twig he burnt, every fish he stole from the waters of her river. She watched as he searched, and recognised him. She remembered him sniffing the air like a questing dog. Kendra saw how he recognised the confusions she set him, not for what they were, but for their existence. She wondered if she drew him towards her with those disguises, and so she set arbitrary confusions all about her domain, finding spots where the light fell strangely, where silence gathered, encouraging Madoc to spread his search, to spend hours staring at an uncertainty in the air that hid – nothing.

Kendra wasn’t immediately aware of Brede’s first faltering attempts to stand. It wasn’t until Brede fell and Kendra felt her cry of pain and rage and despair that she broke her communion with the earth to seek out her foundling.

Brede was hardly aware of the arms that gathered her up and laid her gently back on to the makeshift bed, as though she were no more than a child.

She turned her head away from Kendra, feeling betrayed by her body, and angry at her own weakness.

Kendra forced Brede’s fist loose, and spoke on her fingers,
Too soon
, and closed Brede’s hand back into its fist.

She watched the tears running back from Brede’s eyes into her hair. Brede coughed, and wiped her nose angrily on her sleeve.

I know
, she signed, then let her hand drop limply onto her chest, too worn to even pretend she was not crying.

Kendra stepped away into the darkness, unwillingly reminded of something that might help. She returned, carrying an object that she held awkwardly. She placed it beside Brede, wiping her hands against her legs.

Brede turned her head, not understanding what it was that lay beside her. She reached her hand to touch, and recoiled from the coldness of metal.

The Dowry blade.

Of all the things she had hoped never to see again. The cold of metal clung to her fingers, and she closed her hand, trying to warm her fingertips, but the icy sensation crawled through her arm, across her chest and clutched at her heart, a caress of darkness, a hand catching her lower ribs and tugging sharply. Brede gasped in shock and flung herself away from the sword. She sat up, twisting round to get her legs over the side of the bed.

Kendra watched, puzzled. She reached for the sword, meaning to offer it once more. As her hand closed over it she felt the calling in it. Kendra dropped the blade at once. Her eyes met Brede’s. She raised her hands to try to warn, to explain what the sword was, and could find no words. Brede ignored those hesitantly raised hands. Slowly she pulled the blade to her once more, feeling the cold as a comfort, a right-ness. She hefted the sword, and placed its point against the earth by her feet. If Lorcan could only see his precious sword being used as a crutch.