Farnor looked at her, held by her quietness far more than he could have been by any amount of impassioned urging.
‘We have Marken bursting in, half fearing for his sanity, so vivid was the Hearing he had. Telling us we had to find something… something that was disturbing them… in the south, of all directions, when our ranges are all to the north. And then we find you, lying there. Black-headed and black-horsed, like something out of a dark dream. There’s something very special about all of this; about you, and your being here. You’re here for a reason. You must stay.’
Farnor began to look about him, as if for escape. ‘I just rode here by accident, that’s all,’ he said, with a helpless gesture. ‘Or rather, the horse carried me here. The last thing I remember is…’ He faltered as the horror of the pursuing creature returned to him. ‘… is hanging on to the horse and then… blackness.’ Taking a deep and shaking breath, he reached up and began patting the horse’s neck nervously. ‘There’s nothing special about me. Nothing at all. I’m just an ordinary person. Just as you never leave your forest, so no one from my village ever went over the hill – out of our valley – until…’
Edrien snatched at a passing thought. ‘Until some-one from the outside came to you, and drove you out,’ she said, eyes wide with realization. ‘And now you’ve come from the outside to us.’
‘No,’ Farnor said defensively, moving round to the other side of the horse to hide his face.
‘Yes,’ Edrien insisted, following him. She seized his arm and swung him round. Again, despite his confu-sion, he was surprised at the strength of her grip. ‘They came from the outside to destroy your life, and now you’ve come from the outside to us. What for? You’ve got to stay and help us find out what it all means.’ She was almost shouting. ‘They’ve never let an outsider in before. Not ever. They want you here. You must…’
Farnor yanked his arm free. ‘Must! Must! Must!’ he shouted full in her face. ‘I don’t have to do anything, girl. And I certainly don’t have to listen to this foolish-ness about them any more.’ He waved his arms about wildly. ‘They’re trees out there. Just trees. Plants, like flowers and grasses, just bigger and older that’s all. Things you climb in and lie under and chop down. They’re not gods, thinking creatures, they’re… they’re just lumps of wood, for pity’s sake.’ He snatched out the knife from his belt and drove it several times into the side of the stall, prizing out great splinters of wood. ‘Look. That’s all they are. Plain old wood. For making planks and beams, or bowls and knives and forks, and whatever else you people make of the damned stuff.’
Edrien backed away from him, her face a mixture of alarm and anger.
Suddenly Farnor felt as if he were being borne away on the echo of his own ranting voice. He seemed to be looking at the great root chamber from some other place, a pounding mixture of fear and rage swirling through him, possessing him. To the heart of his being he knew that he must destroy the cause of all this pain and horror. He must return to the valley and destroy Rannick utterly, and if needs be, any who stood before him or espoused his cause, no matter what the cost to himself. As his fury consumed him, he felt his will rise up like a screaming wind. Then it was moving across the Forest, towards the mountains that lay to the south, time and distance set at naught. Angry, malevolent. Seeking, searching. Hideously intent.
Abruptly, he was overwhelmed. Some greater power rose up and engulfed him; returned him brutally to his body in the great root room.
For an instant, he found himself staring again into the pale, fearful face of Edrien, then he plunged into darkness.
As he fell, a deep, powerful voice rang through his entire being. ‘No, Mover. Not until more is understood of your true purpose.’
Chapter 7
Farnor opened his eyes abruptly; suddenly wide awake. He was greeted by the sight and sound of Bildar, starting away from him violently with an agitated cry. ‘You frightened me to death,’ the old man gasped, patting his chest vigorously. ‘I thought you were unconscious.’
Farnor found that he was sitting on the ground, leaning against the uneven wall of the stables. He looked around. Derwyn, Angwen, Edrien, and several other people had formed a loose semi-circle about him. Like Bildar, they all looked startled. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘What’s happened? What are you all doing here?’
Edrien stepped forward and knelt down by him. ‘You fainted,’ she said. ‘You were shouting at me, then all of a sudden your eyes rolled up and you fell over.’
‘Fainted,’ Farnor blustered, as he leaned ungallantly on her to struggle to his feet. ‘Nonsense. I’ve never fainted in my life. I must have slipped on something.’
Derwyn and Bildar exchanged hesitant glances, but Edrien stormed in. ‘You fainted, you donkey,’ she shouted. She shuffled her feet vehemently in the dusty straw. ‘You’re as natural-born a faller as ever I’ve seen, but even you couldn’t trip over straw.’ Her tirade rose to a climax. ‘Especially as you were standing still at the time.’
‘I’m afraid you gave Edrien rather a bad fright,’ Bildar intervened hastily, with an air of conciliatory concern.
‘No, he didn’t,’ Edrien lied angrily. Derwyn put a hand on her arm.
Farnor clung to the easiest release from this strange predicament. ‘Well, whatever happened, I’m fine now, and I’m leaving,’ he said to Derwyn. ‘Too many odd things are happening to me here. And I’m causing nothing but difficulties for everyone. I belong in my own village, with my own people. There are things that I have to do.’
Derwyn stepped forward and gripped both of Far-nor’s arms supportively. ‘We’ll pack your things, Farnor,’ he said. ‘We’ll happily give you supplies. And we’ll take you to where we found you and accompany you as far south as we dare, back along your own tracks.’ There was reservation in his tone. Farnor stared at him, expectantly. ‘But I doubt you’ll get far. My every instinct tells me that you’ll be back here before night-fall.’ He paused significantly. ‘And I think yours does too.’
Farnor shook himself free from the grip, impa-tiently. He was going to sneer, ‘They don’t want me to leave, I suppose?’ but the venom was gone. He might perhaps choose to deny to the Valderen that he heard the voices of… someone… talking to him, but he could not deny it to himself. Just as Nilsson had effortlessly destroyed any pretensions he might have had about being a fighter, and as Rannick and the creature in full cry had left him with nothing except headlong and desperate flight, so the power that had just drawn back his hurtling will, and the voice that had spoken to him, had told him that he was no longer wholly master of his own destiny.
He looked round at the watching group. There was more in their faces than concern for a fallen boy.
‘What happened?’ he asked again. ‘Why are you all here?’
There was an awkward silence. Angwen stepped forward and took his arm. ‘Something moved us,’ she said, her voice, like the way she moved, at once gentle and irresistibly strong. ‘Derwyn and I were already down when we met Edrien running for us.’ There were various nods and mutters of agreement from the others.
Uncharacteristically, Farnor probed Angwen’s reti-cence. ‘What moved you?’ he asked coldly.
There was no hesitation however, and again Ang-wen’s straightforward gentleness swept his antagonism aside. ‘Edrien said that it was talk of the trees that agitated you, but it was they that we Heard. Not well, not clearly – we’re none of us true Hearers – but it was unmistakable.’
Farnor lowered his eyes from hers, and slowly she released his arm. ‘And it was unlike anything any of us have ever known,’ she concluded, the softness of her voice tinged with awe.