Even when the tears had passed, for a time he remained oblivious to all around him, and therefore failed to notice when the man he had been waiting for finally arrived. It was several minutes before it even occurred to him that a harsh, impatient voice was speaking to him and not to somebody else.
“We won’t dally here to miss the tide. If you mean to come with us, old man, it must be now.”
The old man—no longer so old, so feeble or befuddled—glanced up with a bright, lucid, wide-awake gaze. He was weighing very carefully his own situation.
One thing he knew for certain. Broken, as he had been before, he had managed to pass Ouriána’s wards and reach this island—where otherwise he might never have come at all. He had, in fact, successfully penetrated defenses that, if he should ever decide to return as a whole man, would undoubtedly defeat him.
It was not, in the end, such a difficult decision.
“I thank you,” said the wizard Éireamhóine in his deep, calm, powerful voice, “but I think I am not ready to leave Phaôrax as yet.”
19
For Winloki, Mistlewald was as another world. The land spoke to her, at first in snatches and whispers, gradually growing more distinct and comprehensible: voices of earth, wind, and stone, the long, slow dreams of trees—she had never imagined that trees could be so eloquent. Raised in a country where wizards and great magicians were only a distant rumor, she had never suspected this brimming life in the landscape, and many days would pass before she finally realized that none of this arose from any special qualities in the place; it came of a profound change in herself.
In the meantime, her material circumstances had altered, too. The three men who had gone into the nearest seaside town to buy (or steal) horses and supplies returned with an elegant little cream-colored mare, complete with a lady’s saddle. Unable to conceal her own delight, Winloki saw a corresponding pleasure briefly add color and animation to the pallid face of the young acolyte who handed her the reins, and the same emotion even more fleetingly (but just as unmistakably) reflected on the faces of his elders.
Spirited yet gentle, the mare was a joy to ride and a vastly superior animal to the sturdy but undistinguished horses assigned to the rest of the party. Even Camhóinhann’s great grey stallion was of lesser breeding. This gift—for it was impossible to view it in any other light—along with her fine new clothes, made it clear to Winloki she would henceforth be treated as a privileged individual, a princess of Phaôrax in truth. Yet far from reassuring her, these marks of status only served to emphasize that the barrier of the Necke had placed her, once and for all, beyond any hope of rescue or escape.
As though I needed any reminders, she thought wistfully, of how very far I am from home.
And indeed, it was a very different country from Skyrra, more forest than meadow or farmland, and exceedingly flat. If there were any hills in Mistlewald they were either too far off to be seen, or so lowly and humble they never held their heads above the trees. Oak, elm, ash, cowan, and other species she could not identify until they whispered their strange but beautiful names in her ear crowded on either side of the road. For the better part of two days she spotted no farms or villages, nor even the smoke of a single hearth fire rising in the distance. It was not, perhaps, a land for men. The roots here went deep, the trees were very old, and the woods—of which these were only the latest generation—far more ancient than any wood in Skyrra. She thought she had never met a living thing of like antiquity.
One evening they stopped long before sunset to set up camp in a little dell of green grasses, and Winloki detected a stir of excitement and anticipation among the priests and acolytes unlike anything she had seen in them before. Immediately after a hasty supper, the Furiádhin and their particular servants among the acolytes all left the camp at once, disappearing among the trees.
“What is it? Where are they going?” she asked—not wishing to show too much interest in their private rituals, but so curious and apprehensive that the questions slipped out.
“By all the signs, the Empress has performed a Summoning,” said Lochdaen, who happened to be the nearest guard. “They hear her calling, and when the full moon rises above the trees they will be in deep communion with her. When this happens,” he added, dropping his voice and casting a wary glance over his shoulder, “they will often have speech with her the rest of us are not intended to hear.”
“They can speak with her across such a distance?” Winloki was frankly incredulous. She had been told that more than a thousand miles of land and sea still divided them from Phaôrax. The night suddenly turned close and breathless as she tried not to imagine what sort of rite they masked with this lie.
“She speaks to them, that is all I know,” the young guardsman replied, with another backward glance.
“Who can say what an incarnated goddess can or cannot do?”
Before the priests returned, a harvest moon the color of brass, tiger-striped with dark clouds, stood high in the sky. Finally, about midnight, they came striding into camp with the acolytes following behind them, more subdued than ever. Then it was very hard for Winloki to maintain her belief in some blatant deception meant to fool the temple guards—it was so obvious the Furiádhin had received momentous and disturbing news. Yet even when the information began to spread, moving from one campfire to the next, no one saw fit to enlighten the Princess.
By the time they were ready to break up camp the next morning, she had already decided that Camhóinhann was the one most deeply affected; his expression, ordinarily solemn and aloof, had become so grim and terrible. Dyonas, hitherto imperturbable, seemed vaguely troubled, and she could see that Goezenou harbored some gloating satisfaction.
“It is an interesting situation,” she heard him say to Dyonas. “We knew, did we not, there was little enough chance she would choose Cuillioc to rule after her—but no chance at all for Meriasec. What use will she have for the girl now? I had imagined it would be either a wedding or a knife—”
“You imagine too much!” Dyonas cut him off with a severe look. “And you would be wise to say none of it to Camhóinhann.”
This conversation occupied Winloki’s thoughts for many days. A wedding or a knife—except something had happened to the supposed bridegroom. She knew very little about Prince Cuillioc. That he had not, apparently, stood very high in his mother’s favor ought to be enough to commend him, and he and his brother Meriasec would be, she supposed, her own first cousins. So while she would never have married him, of course, she would be very sorry to hear that he was dead—and more so if it happened that his death had sealed her fate too.
It was about that same time that she began to notice Goezenou watching her more avidly than ever. If they stopped in a clearing to rest the horses or to set up camp for the night, he had a habit of hovering somewhere nearby whenever she dismounted, of never being very far off when she moved among the black tents.
She found him indescribably loathsome: his wide, sneering mouth and aggressive nose; the thick fingers, curving nails, and silvery fish-scale backs of his hands. Yet, it was more than physical deformity that made him hideous. Had that been all she would have pitied him, but every instinct told her there was mental and spiritual deformity as well. The liquid quality of the metallic eyes, which in the other Furiádhin suggested mirrors, in him reflected a bottomless hunger, a monstrous craving. He was like one being devoured from the inside out, seeking to devour others that he might assuage his own emptiness. Had he, Winloki wondered, chosen to serve Ouriána hoping she would fill him up? If so, then why did he continue to serve her when she had done no such thing?