Again and again she had seen how the guards and acolytes tried to avoid attracting his notice—he was so liable to find fault with even the most instant and complete obedience. His magic was formidable, he could command the elements, yet he seemed to gain greater satisfaction from petty displays of power over his own servants.
In his eyes she saw a rage of envy and desire—not an ordinary desire of the flesh, but something darker, more obscure—and why either of these emotions should center on her she did not know.
When she could bear it no longer, she began asking her guards, one after the other, “What does he want of me? Why does he look at me in that way?” One after another, they shook their heads. If they knew, not one of them dared to say so. Finally, she appealed to one of the acolytes.
Longest in service to the Furiádhin, Rivanon was of them all the most like his masters: wan, hollow-cheeked, angular, with ash-white hair. Yet he had no deformity that she could see, and his eyes were dark and utterly human. There had been times when she had seen him shield the younger men from Goezenou’s wrath and she thought he was a kind man, for all his silence and reserve.
When she asked her question a series of emotions crossed his face inside his hood of coarse black cloth.
A thought or a memory seemed to be simmering just below the surface. For a moment she thought she was about to receive an honest answer. But the moment passed. All she could see in his face, in his eyes, was the same closed, secretive expression she knew so well. “If you are afraid, or if you believe anyone has insulted you, you should speak with Camhóinhann.”
Bitterly disappointed, she turned away without even thanking him for his advice. She had not yet grown so desperate as to seek Camhóinhann’s protection. Untutored in magic she might be, but she knew enough to understand: when it came to someone as powerful as Ouriána’s High Priest, one did not go asking favors. A favor asked, a favor granted, no matter how trivial, was a dangerous proposition. Let him once place her under the least obligation and there was no reckoning the consequences.
How many days they rode Winloki did not know, for she had stopped counting. With nothing to hope for at the end of her journey, days and distances hardly mattered. But after perhaps a week, the trees started thinning out, until most of the country was farm or grazing land. They no longer had the road to themselves: they passed farmers in carts piled high with fruit or grain; herdsmen driving their flocks to market; peddlers riding on donkeys, or on foot dragging their wares on sledges behind them. She and the guards had fallen into an easy way of things in the wilderness, but now the men turned watchful again, surrounding her in a close circle whenever they approached a village or came near other travellers. Then she was doubly bound to silence, knowing that a reckless word from her would endanger innocent strangers, knowing also that it would certainly result in heavy punishment falling on one or more of her guards.
So I become my own gaoler, Winloki thought ruefully. There was, perhaps, a fine line between wisdom and cowardice, between complicity and common sense, and how to tell the difference she did not know, but she had seen enough bloodshed in Skyrra.
And it was a strange sort of captivity, after all, with her mind opening up to so many new experiences.
On clear nights, she thought she could hear the stars humming, a thin, tuneless drone. She could sense the pulse of the tide as it rushed in and out all across the world, and envision subterranean rivers and streams spreading out beneath the lands like a net of shining silver. The beauty of these things would sometimes tear at her heart, bring quick tears to her eyes. She could not know that young wizards on Leal, and at the few remaining schools of magic elsewhere, learned to control these perceptions at an early age, to summon them or banish them at will, lest they lose touch with the human world altogether.
She could spend a timeless time in dreamlike communion with nature, then come suddenly back to herself, her ears filled with the jingle of harnesses, the dull beat of horses’ hooves on a packed-earth road. In her dream, the trees had been straight and shapely, clothed in leaves like living jewels; they drank in the sunlight like wine. Here the air was cold, the trees gnarled and bent under a weight of years, clad in faded rags of autumn; sad drifts of leaves covered the ground. All the voices that sang in her mind so recently were stilled. How long had she been so absorbed? It felt like half the day—though in truth, by the position of the sun it had been practically no time at all.
And with these glimpses came a hunger for more knowledge, more understanding. She feared that she never would know, never would understand. It was Camhóinhann’s spell on the boat that had expanded her senses so wonderfully, and she knew that he might, if he chose, open her mind to even greater mysteries. But then she would remember to what uses he had turned his own powers—and Ouriána, whose name had become a byword for atrocities! Oh, there were times when she could have wept for all she had missed over the years, for all that she might yet have in years to come, and would not—must not.
There was, too, another danger beyond the lure of power. It was growing harder and harder to view the men she travelled with as an alien, incomprehensible breed, the embodiment of wickedness. It had begun, of course, with the guards, those earnest young men in their shining, dark armor, but by now even the acolytes, only superficially identical in their drab black garments, their silence and pallid looks, had emerged as distinct personalities.
How easy it was to hate an abstraction. The Eisenlonders, whom she knew only by their terrible deeds, who had never come close enough to look in the face…But with these men she had looked too closely and too long.
Rivanon, Morquant, and Lasaire, the three eldest, could work small magics, lighting fires, calming nervous horses; perhaps they could do more than that but refrained out of humility. Adfhail, Uinséan, Féhlim—though scarcely older than she was herself they had travelled far; they had seen so much that their worldliness put her ignorance to shame, yet for all that, they were not proud. And all of them practiced a passionate celibacy, an unremitting discipline of mind and body. “Every sacrifice we make is a sacrament,” Adfhail told her. “As surely as anything done in the Temple.”
As for the three priests, she could not help seeing that Dyonas was as far above Goezenou as Camhóinhann was above him. Where Goezenou’s personality was distilled from many small cruelties and petty hatreds, Dyonas was as lacking in malice as he was in pity. All his passion was for his goddess and his religion. When he performed the rites, when he sang hymns of praise in his beautiful voice, it was impossible for Winloki not to see, with that new vision of hers, how Dyonas burned with a bright inner flame, impossible not to accept that he, at least, had an unshakable belief in Ouriána’s promise of a world transformed.
More than once she had glimpsed under his robes of velvet and silk brocade a garment of coarser stuff, likely to chafe, and she had been surprised to discover that he wore bracelets similar to her own—although his were made of iron, with tiny barbs inside that scored his flesh. Skyrran religion did not demand, would not have approved, these excesses of devotion, yet she could not help feeling a grudging admiration for the terrible certainty that informed his faith. He was, she reminded herself, just the sort of man who drew other men into evil and misguided causes. He could turn right and wrong upside down, he could make black into white and white into a muddled grey.