“Nor do you want to meet them, I presume.” There was a note of challenge in that. She was using a tone sharp enough to bring blood to the cheeks of any fighting man. Certainly she stood in no awe of Herrel. If she knew what he was . . . I had a strong suspicion that she did. Perhaps she had had dealings with his kind before and knew best how to gain answers. “Why do they seek to entrap those who offer them no harm?”
“We do not know. Thas are Thas. But such as this”—he glanced down at the churned earth, what had been a camp and was now only a morass of disturbed soil—“I have not seen before. There is—” His frown grew deeper.
“Perhaps you wish to say that there is something new—an awakening somewhere in this land,” she answered him. “Shapechanger, have you been so long safe in the refuge of your kind that you do not sense a stir—or know that there is a new element ready to invade the Waste? Old things can be stirred into life by those having the proper key—and the power to turn such. If this is done wrongly, then all, no matter who or how they seek to stand aloof, can be drawn in—into a battle where forces, blindly awakened, cannot be easily controlled—or laid—again!”
Herrel had been studying her face. His mount moved restlessly, sidled away from her. I did not believe the Wererider had any fear of the woman, rather he was moved by an instinctive wariness, which was a part of his heritage.
“You have Power,” he observed. “Ask any questions of those or that which you can summon. We have no dealing with the Thas, nor”—now he looked from her directly at me—“do we want any with those who can awaken aught here. Carry no assurances of any aid now to your lord. Dalesman-by-half. If the Waste stirs we shall have other affairs to deal with.”
With no more words and no backward look, he sent his mount trotting for the wood, the horse’s hooves throwing up clods of the loose earth as he went.
It was my turn for questions. Who were these two, and what did they mean about another who had been trapped in the earth? Again it was the woman who spoke.
“You are Kerovan.” She did not ask, she named me as one she had known well.
Her familiar use of my name was disturbing. Had she and this fighting man been sent after me by Imgry (who was the type, I was sure, to always strive to make certain any plan by a double protection)? He could very well have caught within his search net this woman (I was sure she possessed the talents Herrel had i recognized by instinct) and dispatched her also, with the same orders he had given me.
“I am Kerovan,” I admitted, “and you?”
I waited for her to tell me of Imgry, but all she answered was, “I am Elys, and this is Jervon.”
The Dalesman only nodded. He stopped to catch up a tuft of grass and began wiping the soil from his blade.
“We came,” the woman continued deliberately, “with my Lady Joisan.”
I froze. Of all the explanations I had been prepared to hear that one was the most impossible. For a long breath I could not believe I had heard her aright. Joisan here? But—where—and why?
As I looked around wildly, Elys then added, “She was engulfed—in that . . .” To my growing horror she pointed to the hole where Jervon had been digging.
“You—you lie!” I was caught now in such bewilderment I could only deny and deny that such an impossibility could be so. This was trickery, the kind of trickery those of the Waste might use to entrap one. “Joisan is in Norsdale. I set her free—she is safe—she is . . .”
That which welled in me now was an anger deeper, a fear greater, than I thought any one could hold. Now I knew—fleetingly—why I had felt so cold. This was the fire that had been in me, that I had willed so fiercely into an inner prison.
Jervon strode toward me, his sword point rising, aimed at the small hollow left bare between my chin and my mail.
“My lady does not lie,” he said with dangerous softness. “The Lady Joisan was here and the whirlpool of the earth swallowed her down. She came out of her concern for one Kerovan, who, it would seem, lacks any concern for her.”
Madness . . . either they were—or I was—mad! Hallucination—could this be some spell born perhaps from that meeting in the Wereriders’ Hall? To have any dealings with those who possessed Power was always dangerous and tricky. This could be some subtle attempt to try and influence me by awaking emotions I dared not allow to trouble my mind—or my heart.
Save that now Elys told me in detail of how the two of them had met with Joisan in the Dales, and of her great desire to find me, of how they decided I might have gone into the Waste because of a scrying in which Joisan took part, of how they had come here to what they believed was my camp—and then of the attack . . .
This was all true! I could not deny it any longer, and at that moment I could have thrown back my head and howled like any winter-haunted wolf. That Joisan had followed me! She had no part in my life—just as I had no right in hers. I was bound to a dark past, perhaps a worse future. She must be free of me.
That she had been taken, buried, caught in an evil web of the Dark spawn because of her mistaken value of me—that I could not bear. Only I must—I had to accept the truth, hard as it was.
I crossed the ruts to the hole where Jervon had dug so fruitlessly and then I looked up from that shallow pit to ask just one question. Though I already knew what the answer must be and how I would stand condemned by it, in my own eyes, as long as I lived. “How long?”
Elys had followed me. Now her fingers just touched my arm. I did not deserve any sympathy, but I was still too frozen without, too a-fire within, to reject her out of hand.
“I do not believe she is truly buried.”
I glanced at her, turned my eyes once more to the earth. There was no use in her trying to reassure me thus. Joisan was gone into the Dark. I was just beginning to realize what a loss was mine. I had believed when I rode out of Norsdale that I had armored myself, that I accepted in full the bitterness of what my life would be from that day forward. Now I knew that I had not sensed even a hundredth part of what fate had brought to burden me as long as I walked the earth that had taken her.
Now Elys’s fingers tightened their grip. She gave a tug, which brought me to look at her again.
“She is not dead.” Her words were quiet but delivered with conviction, a conviction I could not accept, caught as I was in my inner hell.
“Lady”—I spoke in the same quiet tone also, with a remnant of the old great hall courtesy—“you well know there is no way she could be buried so and still live.”
“We shall see—and I promise you this shall be true seeing.”
She made a summoning gesture with her other hand. Jervon had already gone to where a saddlebag lay half-hidden in up-thrown soil. From that he brought her a wrapped bundle.
Twilight was now upon us, but when Elys let fall the wrapping there appeared a concentration of what light was left, centering on the thing she uncovered, a silver cup that shone with a moon’s full light, as if the moon’s beams themselves had been forged into it,
I watched, dull-eyed, as she mixed pinches of dried herbs, which she took from small bags carried in her belt pouch, shifting them into a very small measure of water Jervon poured from a saddle bottle. I saw her lips move soundlessly as she twirled the cup. Then she held it out to me.
Against my will I accepted it. Not that I denied she could use some talent to so summon sight of Joisan, but because I was so sure of, and so feared, what I might see. On my wrist blazed the band, rising to a glow that matched that of the cup—no warning there—could it be a promise? I would not allow myself to believe that.
Holding the moon between my hands I looked down—into its hollow bowl.
As I had expected—darkness. No! The liquid within had taken on life of its own, swirled, though I held the cup steady. Now it climbed the wall of the hollow, filling it to the brim. Still I stared at a surface that remained dark. Then . . .