Now the voice in his thoughts trailed away and the figure before him became only one shape again—the king’s servant, Harsar. For a long, dizzy moment Barrick could not make sense of anything. What had happened? Where was he?
“Still in the Hall of Mirrors,” Harsar answered him, though Barrick had not spoken. He could see the servant’s mouth move, could hear Harsar’s carefully uninflected voice in his ears, but he heard it in his thoughts as well, and what it said there was subtly different. “The First Stone sleeps. The Daughter of the First Flower asks for you.”
The soundless whisper blew through him again: Success she lives but we are fruitless we cast our seed on the wind just as we roll the bones. It was nothing as simple as a voice in his head, but… an idea, quiet as grass stretching toward the sun. Barrick tried to sit up. Why was he lying on the ground? Why did his head feel like a sack overfilled with gravel and threatening to rip its seams, while all these thoughts words ideas sounds smells crackled in his head like pine knots bursting in a fire? He lifted his hands to his head to keep his skull from breaking open. After a moment the sensation faded, although his head still felt disturbingly full and the world around him seemed tenanted by ghosts of itself, as though he watched everything through poorly made glass.
“Come forward,” Harsar said. “The Daughter of the First Flower ...”
Saqri, Sister, Wife, Granddaughter, Descendant… the silent voices in his head murmured.
“… is waiting for you.”
In the Place of Narrowing. The Crossroads Hall. Beneath the thorn boughs, as in the First Days, when the People were young…
Barrick’s head felt like a beehive—it was all he could do not to raise his hands and swat at the swarming thoughts. “But what about the king… where is Ynnir?”
“The Son of the First Stone is in the Hall of Leavetaking,” he said out loud.
... Has passed to the Heart of the Dance of Change, his thoughts said.
“Come,” he said aloud. “She will take you to him.”
Barrick could not speak anymore: it was all he could do to follow Harsar up the aisle while the new thoughts swirled like dust flecks in a windstorm—names, moments, glimmers that felt like memories, but were memories of things he could not remember seeing and did not entirely recognize. And with all these flecks of meaning bedeviling him, there was more: everything in the hall—the benches, the mirrors on the walls, the swirling tiled designs on the floor—seemed to have a kind of glow, a shine of realness unlike anything he’d experienced before. Even the most familiar objects of his own childhood had never seemed as much a part of him as the beams above his head, the dark, ancient wood shaped into prickly holly leaves and sinuous vines. Everything had a texture and shape that could not be ignored; everything had a story. And like everything else in Qul-na-Qar, the hall itself was a story, a great story of the People.
Then he saw her, waiting in her shimmering white robes.
Just the sight of her crashed onto Barrick like an ocean wave, battering all his senses, submerging his mind in memories he had never had before—a forest full of red leaves, a smooth shoulder, pale as ivory, her upright form on a gray horse with snow dappling her cloak.
Saqri.
Wind Sister.
Last of the line.
Beloved enemy.
Lost and returned.
Queen of the People…
The memories crowded in until there was almost nothing left of Barrick himself at all, but at the same moment something far more powerful and far more pure struck him as well, as if a beam of brightest light pierced his eye at the same moment that a silver arrow pierced his heart.
He swayed. He could not stand. He fell to his knees before her and wept.
Saqri was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, so powerful and complicated that it hurt him just to look at her: one instant she seemed made of gossamer and cobwebs and dry twigs like a child’s doll from a hundred years gone, so old and fragile that she might fall apart under the gentlest handling, then a moment later she seemed a statue carved of hard, gleaming stone. And her eyes—her eyes, so black and deep! Barrick could not look into them without his head reeling, without feeling as though he would fall and fall without ever touching bottom.
The queen looked back at him, her face as unmoving as a mask, a mask stranger yet more familiar than any face in the world. The smallest curve at the corner of her lips made it seem as though she smiled, but her eyes and his inexplicable memories told him that she did not.
“So this is what is left of my daughter Sanasu’s precious blood?” She spoke aloud as if she could not bear to touch his thoughts. Her voice was without warmth. “This jest, this piece of strange lost material, this is what comes back to me at the end of days?”
He knew he should be angry but he did not have the strength. Just standing before her was too overwhelming. Was it her or the Firef lower that filled his head with colors and noise and heat? “I am what the gods made of me,” was all he could manage.
“The gods!” Saqri let out a short sound that might have been a laugh or a sob, but her face did not change. “What have they ever made for us that did not turn its sharp edge? Even Crooked’s greatest gift has been proved a torment.”
Even the shadows seemed to draw back as if from a terrifying blasphemy. A part of Barrick recognized that what she said was spoken from the depths of an anguish he could not begin to understand. “I am sorry… if what I am displeases you, Lady. I didn’t choose to come here and I didn’t choose the blood that runs in my veins. Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.”
She looked at him for a long time with eyes so dark and fierce he could barely sustain her gaze. “Enough,” she said. “Enough of talking. I have a husband to mourn.”
The queen came down from the dais as lightly as if carried on a breeze, her billowing robe barely seeming to touch the ground. As Barrick followed her back down the center of the hall a thousand fairy-queens and a thousand mortal princes surged toward the doorway, reflected in the mirrors on either side. Some of the Barricks even turned to look back at him. Some of the faces were nothing like his, but it was the expressions worn by some of those most like him that he found more disturbing.
They stepped out into the great chamber beyond the door of the Mirror Hall and found it thronged with fairy folk of a hundred different sorts, apparitions that were completely strange to Barrick’s eyes, and yet somehow he recognized them all—redcaps, tunnel-knockers, trows tall as trees—and even knew that the place where they were waiting was known as the Chamber of the Winter Banquet. As the queen moved past with Barrick just behind her they joined in behind, the weeping women and the small men with animal eyes, the winged shadows and others with faces like unfinished stone, swelling the procession until it filled the corridors and extended back beyond Barrick’s sight, a river of uncanny life.
He followed Saqri through a maze of unknown corridors, but names and ideas seemed to slide across them like a reflection on a still pond—Sad Piper’s Rest, the Groaning Solar, the place where Caution and Swimming Bird parted. At last they moved out beneath the open sky, across a garden of stone shapes twisted as though in uneasy sleep where the rain spattered his face and wetted his hair. The sensation was something so old and so recognizable that for a moment the other thoughts fell away and he was simply himself again, the Barrick he had always been, before the Shadowline, before the Dreamers, before Ynnir’s kiss.