A drum pounded and sent a snarl rolling over the hills like the crack of thunder. Deep voices roared in challenge in some strange tongue, voices unlike any that Myrrima had ever heard.
Blinking the sleep from her eyes, Myrrima climbed from her bed there in the lee of the rocks, the warm ferns crushed from her weight, and peered out in alarm in the cool morning mist, trying to find the source of danger.
But there were no armies clashing in the distance, and as she woke it seemed to her that the sounds faded, as if they could be heard only in dream.
She stood panting, trying to catch her breath, clear her head. She blinked, looking around. Erin’s body still lay there on the grass not a hundred yards off, her face pale, her lips going blue. Sage was sleeping soundly in the ferns.
Nearby, the Walkin clan was still sleeping, too. Myrrima was the only one who had wakened.
Her heart ceased to hammer so hard; she stood for a moment, thinking.
It was only a dream. It was only a dream. All of Borenson’s talk last night stirred up evil memories of battles long past. Or perhaps her vision of Erin that she’d had not more than a couple of hours ago had conjured an evil dream.
What ever the cause, the sounds of battle had faded. Myrrima sat in a daze, wondering.
“What is it, Mother?” Sage asked, stirring from her sleep.
“Nothing,” Myrrima whispered. She searched about camp. Borenson and Draken were still gone.
Yet as she sat in the early dawn, she heard the sound of water tinkling in the streamlet nearby, the discreet cheeping of small birds in a thicket.
Other than that, the morning was utterly still. The sun was just rising in the far hills, painting the dawn in shades of peach and rose. It was that time of morning when everything is still, even the wind.
Yet there she heard it again—the deep call of a war horn in the distance, and the sound of men clashing in battle.
She strode toward it with a start and cocked her ear. The sound seemed to be coming from the far side of the old river channel.
Straining to hear, she crept over to the cliff, her feet rustling dry grasses, and stood for a moment. The sound had faded again, but she could hear it now—a deep rumbling in the ground, as if horses were charging into battle, the blare of horns. She could almost smell blood in the air.
She peered across the channel. Its waters were dark and muddy, filled with filth and jetsam. Mists rising off of it made the far shore nearly impossible to make out. Could there be a battle over there? But who would be fighting?
Yet as she stood at the edge of the cliff, peering about, there was no sign of troops in the distance, and the sound seemed now to be coming from below her, from the still waters in the channel.
Myrrima clambered carefully down the steep slope a hundred feet, until she stopped at the water’s edge.
The sounds of war came distant now, so distant. She wondered if she was listening to the remnant of a dream.
Suddenly, out in the water a body floated to the surface not forty feet from shore, a woman with wide hips, someone who would have made her home in the village of Sweetgrass. Thankfully, Myrrima could not see her face, only her stringy gray hair.
The corpse bobbed for a moment, and then the sounds of battle suddenly blasted in Myrrima’s ears.
“Internook! Internook!” a barbarian cried. “Hail to the Bearers of the Orb!” Men cheered fiercely all around her, and she heard them running, mail ringing and jangling.
She peered off in the mist, and let her eyes go out of focus, and then she saw it: a castle a hundred miles north of the Courts of Tide, its battlements all lit by fire. It was dark there, and she could not see the enemy— except for a mass of great beasts out beyond the walls, giants with white skin and startling white eyes, wearing armor carved from bone.
“To battle!” some warlord cheered. “To battle!”
And then just as suddenly as it had come, the vision ended, as if a portcullis gate had slammed down, holding the vision at bay.
Is this a vision of the future? Myrrima wondered. But a certainty filled her.
No, it is a battle happening now, far across the ocean. Dawn had come to her home here in Landesfallen, but night still reigned on the far side of the world. As Borenson had warned, the wyrmlings were greeting their new neighbors.
The vision, the sounds, both seemed to be coming from the water, and that is when Myrrima knew.
She had wondered whether to follow Borenson across the ocean into his mad battle.
But water was calling to her, summoning Myrrima to war.
Borenson will find a ship, Myrrima realized. Water will make a way for us to reach that far shore. My powers there will be needed.
A giant green dragonfly common to the river valley came buzzing over the water nearby, a winged emerald with eyes of onyx. It hovered for a moment, as if gauging her.
Myrrima knelt then at the edge of the old river channel and laved dirty brown water over her arms, then tilted her face upward and let it stream, cold and dead, over her forehead and eyes. Thus she anointed herself for war.
There had been a time in Myrrima’s life when she’d made a ritual of washing herself first thing each morning. As a child she’d loved water, whether it was the sweet drops of a summer rain clinging to her eyelashes, or the tinkling of a freshet as it darted among the rocks. It was her love of water that gave her power over it. At the same time, water had power over her, too—enough power so that she often felt pulled by it, and she found herself wanting to go lie in a deep river, so that the water could caress her and surround her and someday carry her out to sea.
Six years back, she had purposely given up the ritual, afraid that if she did not, she would lose herself to water.
But this morning was different. Worries wormed their way through her mind, and she had seldom felt so tired.
So when she reached camp, she found Sage and led her to the nearby stream. It was only a trickle at this time of year. A little water roamed down from the red-rock above. In the winters the rain and snow would seep into the porous sandstone, and for centuries it would percolate down through the rock until it hit a layer of harder shale. Then it would slowly flow out, and thus seeped from a cliff face above. Myrrima was so attuned to water that she could taste it and feel in her heart how long ago it had fallen as rain.
Not much water escaped the rocks, barely enough to wet the ground. But there was a boggy spot where the streamlet stole through the moss and grass.
Wild ferrin and rangits often came to drink here, and so had trampled the grass a bit.
So Myrrima took Sage and with stones and moss they dammed the small stream, so that it began to rise over the course of the morning.
Rain came to help them, bringing some clay that she had found nearby. As they padded clay between the stones of the dam, Myrrima told the young women of Borenson’s plan to return to Mystarria.
“It may be a dangerous journey,” Myrrima said. “I can understand why you would not want to go. I hesitate to ask you, Sage. Landesfallen has been your home for so long, I will not force you to come.”
“I don’t remember Mystarria,” Sage said. “Draken sometimes talks about the vast castle we lived in, all white, with its soaring spires and grand hallways.”
“It wasn’t grand,” Myrrima said. “I suppose it must have seemed so to a tot like him. Castle Coorm was small, a queen’s castle, set in the high hills where the air was cool and crisp during the muggy days of summer. It was a place to retreat, not a seat of power.”
“I should like to see it,” Sage said, but there was no conviction in her voice.
“Much has changed in Mystarria, you understand?” Myrrima said. “It’s not likely that we’ll ever live in a castle again.”
Rain had just brought some mud, and she halted at the mention of Mystarria, her muscles tightening in fear. The girl knew how much the place had changed far more than Myrrima did.
“I understand,” Sage said.