Marna looked at him, unblinking. Questions were bubbling through her head, but central to them was the one she knew she must have answered.
‘What did he say to you, Gryss?’ she asked again, very quietly.
Gryss answered without hesitation. ‘He said that Rannick was in charge of Nilsson’s men.’
Marna’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘Rannick?’ she exclaimed. But she did not cry out, ‘Impossible!’ as he had half expected. Instead she said, ‘How?’
‘I don’t know. That’s all he said. “Rannick’s leading Nilsson’s men.” His voice was weak, but he was quite clear. I didn’t mishear him.’
Marna stared at him. ‘You’ve been afraid of this all the time, haven’t you?’ she said.
It seemed to Gryss that with this simple statement Marna had picked him up and shaken him violently. He felt his breathing become shallow and frequent, and his heart begin to thump.
‘Yes,’ he heard himself saying breathlessly. He stood up. ‘Yes. But how in Murral’s name did you know when I didn’t even know myself?’
Marna, alarmed at this almost explosive change in her involuntary host, shrugged helplessly. ‘Patterns, shapes, bits and pieces…’ she said, wriggling awk-wardly in her chair.
But Gryss was not listening. He found himself teeter-ing between waking nightmare and reality. He sat down again, abruptly, and put his head in his hands as he struggled to bring his rioting thoughts into some semblance of order.
‘Rannick’s tainted line is at the heart of this,’ he said, mainly to himself. ‘It wasn’t someone that Nilsson brought with him. It was someone here. It makes sense.’ Images came and went – Rannick and Farnor meeting by the slaughtered sheep – Rannick disappearing and then reappearing. Still the memory of his meeting with him refused to become clear. And the creature. What part did it play in all this? And the terrible fate of the men who had tried to go through the northern part of the valley, the fate that Farnor had indirectly witnessed?
Questions teemed through his efforts to clarify his thoughts. What was the creature? Where had it come from? Were the stories about the caves true? Who and what were Nilsson and his men, and from what distant land did they come? And why? And what was the true nature of the power that ran through Rannick’s ancestry like a diseased tap root? And had some part of it branched off to infect Farnor? If infection was the right word for the lad’s strange, seemingly harmless ability.
For an instant he had a vision of uncountable tiny causes and effects stretching back through time, each linked and interlinked, each affecting the other. He shook his head in rejection; it was too complex and, more to the point, it was of no value. Then, like a low rumbling deep beneath the earth, the thought occurred to him that he, and all the others in the valley, were but minor pieces in a game played by some greater, unknowable power. This, too, he rejected because it was of no value, but rejection proved much harder than he would have thought. There were many unknown powers in the world, why not one such? He remembered reproaching Farnor for his ignorance of the simple yellow flowers that grew outside his cottage, but then how much did he know about them? Or, by implication, about the power that lay within all living things?
He swore inwardly. These notions were but distrac-tions. Whatever the ultimate cause, if any, of these events, the effect was with him and the rest of the valley now, and that was the problem that had to be dealt with.
‘It’s a coincidence,’ he said to the now-bewildered Marna.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said as this single, detached statement appeared in front of her like part of a monologue. ‘What’s a coincidence? What’re you talking about?’
Gryss stared at her. ‘Nilsson’s being here,’ he said, his voice matter of fact. And, as if he had been explain-ing all the time, he went on, his tone becoming increasingly revelatory, ‘Rannick touched the creature, perhaps like Farnor did, but differently.’ He curled his lip almost into a sneer. ‘Probably because of his naturally curdled instincts. And now he’s controlling it in some way. Or it him. Then along comes Nilsson and his men, just by chance, by coincidence, and Rannick sees an opportunity.’ His face became thoughtful. ‘His powers… whatever they are… must have grown tremendously if he’s now apparently controlling not only the creature but also Nilsson’s men.’
Only fleetingly did it occur to Marna that the old man was rambling. What dominated her response was the fact that, whatever the truth of Gryss’s conjectures, the sense of evil that pervaded them chimed with her own feelings.
Thus, instead of debating or disputing, when he had finished, she merely asked, ‘What would Rannick want? And what can we do about it?’
Gryss had arrived at the same questions, though he too had no answers. ‘What did Rannick ever want?’ he asked. ‘Always something he didn’t have. And he compounded his folly by despising whatever he did have. If the family’s trait has been writ large in a personality like that I shudder to think where it’ll end.’
Marna did not seem inclined to disagree. ‘What shall we do?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Gryss said.
He pulled a wry face. ‘Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong,’ he said, with an airy wave of his arms. ‘It’s been a bad few days: the business at the castle, Farnor, Jeorg. I’m tired. Perhaps I did mishear him, or misunderstood him. It’s all very… wild.’
Marna shook her head. ‘You heard clearly enough,’ she said, starkly. ‘And he repeated himself. I saw that much myself. And however wild your ideas, they’re no wilder than what’s been happening to Farnor, and what happened to you and him at the castle, are they?’
Gryss’s attempted escape into elderly folly collapsed.
‘We must do something,’ Marna insisted.
Gryss remembered again the ring of swords that had suddenly appeared as he tried to release Jeorg, and once again Katrin’s words returned to him, though this time they were like a taunt. ‘Fighting men… stabbing and killing… none could stand against them and hope to live.’
‘We can’t do anything,’ he said. ‘Not against those swords… those men. And not against Rannick if he truly has the power he seems to have.’
‘We must do something,’ Marna repeated, angrily. ‘We know what’s happening. We can’t sit idly by and let them slowly take command of the whole valley.’
Gryss felt old again. He wanted to lash out and drive this damned girl away. He wasn’t stupid. Whatever happened, he had wit enough to survive. All he needed to do was avoid offending anyone, keep himself inconspicuous, do as he was told. That would be easy enough. And who would want anything from an old man with nothing other than a crooked cottage and a small plot of land? No matter what comings and goings there were through the village, he could live out his life safely and quietly. After all, what more could he ask for? Besides, how much longer did he have?
Then he felt a hand laid softly on his arm. He raised his head.
‘Please,’ Marna said simply.
Once again, Marna destroyed his escape as, with this light and delicate touch, she shattered the taut and brittle structure of his thinking. The old may send the young to war, he recalled, but this one was girding herself to go on her own. This one not only had a longer life ahead of her, she had a keen measure of the value of what she already had and, seeing the threat to it, she would fight to protect it. This young one was dragging an old one to war. No, that was unfair. This one was asking for the only thing he could give her: his advice and experience. In return she would give him her strength and courage.
Perhaps together they might indeed…
And yet they were none of them fighters. And fight-ers would be needed, surely?
‘Somehow, we’ll have to get help from over the hill,’ he said.
Marna showed no surprise. In fact, the manner in which she nodded her agreement indicated that he had merely stated the obvious. ‘I’ll do that,’ she said casually.