But their assurance did little good. Skeelie worried for Lobon and was furious with him. She turned away from the mantel at last, her light fur robe swirling around her long legs, and began to pace the room. She was a woman bred to sword and saddle, she carried the difficult years well, as trim and agile as she had ever been. She seemed self-contained, but the younger, vulnerable Skeelie was there, the distress and love she had felt for Ram ever since she was a child pouring out now over his son to leave her shaken. What had she done or failed to do, that Lobon should grow to manhood with such shortsighted purpose?
He will grow out of it, Canoldir whispered to her, touching her mind from afar. Ramad’s blood is in him, and your own blood, my love. Lobon will come through, to be what he was meant to be.
She bowed her head, warm in Canoldir’s gentleness; but she knew she had failed Lobon. Had she not expected enough of Lobon the child? Not loved him strongly enough? Not praised him enough for successes and been strong enough with him about failures? Eresu knew, she had tried to be a gentle mother, yet give him the strength that Ramad would have given.
Since they had come to Canoldir when Lobon was eight, fleeing from the city of cones, Canoldir had been as strong and fair a father as Ramad himself would have been. Where then did that wild angry streak in Lobon come from? Certainly not from Canoldir’s treatment. And not, alone, from the child’s memory of his father’s death, she knew.
For Lobon’s anger had shown itself much earlier than Ram’s death, from the time he was a small babe demanding to be fed, demanding to be comforted, never asking or gentle. Ramad had laughed at—and wondered at—the child’s temperament. And frowned, disturbed, sometimes. For Lobon was too much like Ramad’s mother. He was, Skeelie admitted, far too much like Tayba, who had conceived Ramad out of angry defiance, borne him in anger, and nearly killed him when he was nine because of her own willful and traitorous greed. Tayba, who with her fiery temperament had been one cause of the violent clashing of evil against good that had shattered the runestone of Eresu there on Tala-charen. Yes, surely Tayba’s violent spirit was mirrored in her grandson. Could I not, Skeelie thought, could I not have prevented Lobon’s growing up to be what he is?
You could not have! Canoldir’s thoughts shouted in her mind like a roaring bear, making her smile. She let her burden relax a little, warmed by him, and paused from her pacing beside a low table near the hearth.
At last she sat down on a hide-covered cushion before the table and took up quill and ink. She sat thinking for a while longer, letting her mind ease, putting herself into a routine of discipline that had been hard to learn, yet necessary to her survival against the madness that had seemed to hold her after Ram’s death.
She had lost the first pages of the journal long ago, had left them, she supposed, in the city of cones. The memory of those days after Ram died was so twisted and painful that even now her thoughts, straying to that time, were like an open wound. She had never stopped loving Ram and never would, though she loved Canoldir too in another way, with another part of herself. Canoldir knew it. He sheltered her and soothed her, and took joy in her in spite of her commitment to Ram. She filled the page slowly, released at last of some of her distress over Lobon, then laid down her pen and sat looking into the cold fireplace. Suddenly she felt the stirring movement of the earth near to Lobon, and tensed anew. When it continued unabated, she reached out to Canoldir, frightened. The land trembles, Canoldir! The land in that time trembles steadily beneath the chasm, it—
Yes, the land trembles. I cannot stay it, Skeelie. Even the Luff’Eresi cannot stay such a thing as that.
But you—
You know what is happening to my powers, you know I do not reach out of Time as well as once I did, that I cannot snatch Lobon from danger! Nor should I!
Because of me, your powers—
We do not know that. Whatever it is, I cannot deal with fate as if it were a game. She felt his anger and turned away from him in her mind until he should calm. She did not like to distress him like this.
But she could not help her own distress. She had felt for some time that forces across Ere she could not sort out or describe were drawing together, insidious and threatening. Forces very aware of Lobon and utterly unpredictable as they moved toward him. Forces at least as powerful as those that had swept around her and Ram before the runestone split. Forces that could bring, now, even more disaster?
*
High in the black cliff overlooking the abyss, one small portal might be seen, if the shadows lay right. One would not expect a portal there. It was like a single eye in the smooth stone wall, black against black. It looked out from a room carved deep in the living stone, a dim room, square and rough-hewn. A thin figure moved inside, so pale it seemed to cast its own light. It stood looking out the portal, so the hole held a smear of white as if the eye had opened wide. The figure was still, then turned at last to look back into the room behind her where two men sat, one at either end of a stone bench carved along the back wall. Her voice was flat, cold. “Light the lamp, Dracvadrig.”
The man grunted. Flint sparked, sparked again, then a flame flared and settled at last into a greasy glow smelling of lamb fat. It threw Dracvadrig’s tall, thin shadow up the wall in such a way that he might have been in dragon form still, rearing up the wall. When he leaned across the lamp, it cast an eerie light up over his long, lined face, picking out warty skin as if the dragon in him never truly abated and making the large high-bridged nose seem huge. His eyes were the color of mud. His lank hair would take on life only when it became wattled dragon mane. His fingers and nails were long and brown and looked as if they could grow into claws with ease. His voice was dry and harsh, little different from when he took dragon form, only not as loud. He sat stiffly against the cave wall, as if he were not entirely comfortable in human form. “Something touches this Lobon, something I don’t like,” he said. “Another Seer touches him. Perhaps more than one Seer. I don’t—”
“I feel it,” RilkenDal said, cutting him short. He sat more easily than Dracvadrig. He had laid his sword on the bench between them and played now with the leather thong attached to the hilt. He was a broad, heavy Seer with greasy black hair, as dark of countenance as the ancestors whose names he bore and with a mind perhaps darker. “Yes. A female Seer touches him.” He glanced at the pale woman. “What female, Kish? What is she up to?”
“Whoever she is, we don’t need her,” Kish said. Her eyes were lidless, like serpent’s eyes. Her pale skin caught the dim lamplight like the white belly-skin of a snake. But her body was voluptuous, and she could be beautiful when she chose—at least to a man with jaded tastes . Now she was only cold, bored with her companions and showing it.
“It is a presence I cannot abide,” Dracvadrig said. “If it is female, Kish, then you must deal with it.”
Kish’s laugh was cold as winter.’ ‘What harm can she do? The boy is too filled with anger to master any subtlety of power, even with the help of another Seer.”