‘I’d be a bit pleasanter than that with Lord Rannick if I were you,’ Nilsson offered, softly and not ungently. ‘Whatever he used to be around here, he’s very different now. Just do as he tells you.’
Rather than let her fears show, Marna glowered at him.
He gave a shrug of indifference. ‘You’ll learn, one way or another,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
They walked only a short distance across the court-yard, but Marna felt as though she were the focus of the attention of everyone there. Clenching her fists, she drove her fingernails into her palms and fixed her gaze resolutely on Nilsson’s retreating back. The shaking began to return and her legs began to feel weak.
She heard some comments being made to Nilsson. They were spoken in his own language, but their content was unmistakable and she coloured. She took some relief however, from the fact that his terse response silenced the inquirers immediately.
‘Enjoy yourself, dear,’ a lecherous voice said, close by, as she reached a door. Someone else laughed.
The tone of the voice snapped Marna’s brittle con-trol and she spun round furiously to face her taunter. It was a mistake, she realized, even as she did it. The speaker’s leering mouth became O-shaped in mock surprise, as did his companion’s. Then they both laughed raucously.
‘That one’s mine when he’s finished with her, defi-nitely,’ one of them said.
‘She’ll be everyone’s,’ another voice called out, to further, spreading, laughter.
‘Come on, girl.’ Nilsson’s abrupt command was almost welcome. She stepped through the door with the laughter ringing about her. For a moment she stood motionless, struggling in vain to control her shaking body. The laughter seemed to go on for ever.
‘Come on!’
Nilsson had stopped at the far end of the passage and was beckoning impatiently to her. With a monu-mental effort, she forced herself forward.
For a while, her feet clattered along stone floors and steps, then after they had walked up a wide stairway, the sound disappeared. Glancing down, she saw that the floor was now carpeted. She stopped and looked at it, puzzled. Whatever state the castle might have been in after being closed for so long, it was not possible that any fabrics could have survived. The truth dawned on her. Like the women she had seen in the courtyard, the carpet must have been stolen on one of the raids that were being made beyond the valley. Suddenly she shuddered; a different shaking from the tremors that she had been fighting against since she left her father’s cottage – this was deeper, and colder. This carpet had been torn from some ordinary house somewhere far away. Perhaps a family had been slaughtered like Garren and Katrin just to obtain it, or, somehow worse, slaughtered and then robbed as an afterthought. Her toes curled within her shoes as she tried to shrink away from it. What rich memories in that woven fabric were marred forever now?
She shuddered again, and then ran after Nilsson. He was standing at the foot of a flight of winding stairs.
‘Up there,’ he said, with a flick of his head. ‘Don’t dawdle. He knows you’re here now.’
There was a quality in his voice that made her look at him. ‘How?’ she asked, somewhat to her own surprise.
Nilsson returned her gaze, though she could read nothing in his eyes but indifference. ‘He knows,’ he said starkly. Then he motioned her towards the stairs again.
The stairs were quite narrow and steep and not easy to negotiate. Like the passageway she had just left, they were carpeted, though here the close proximity of the rough stone walls made any decorative effect incongru-ous. Nevertheless, the thoughts about where, and how, the carpet had come there lingered. Her earlier conver-sation with her father returned to fill her with guilt. How could she complain about life in the valley when she compared it to what must be happening elsewhere?
Other considerations however, rose to spare her as she paused to catch her breath. Used only to simple cottage stairs, the long, steep flight of spiral steps unsteadily lit by tiny lanterns made her feel at once oppressively closed in and vertiginously exposed. She fought back her momentary panic but only to find herself assailed by other, equally fearful and more tangible thoughts about the immediate future. She struggled to reassure herself again. She knew Rannick, for pity’s sake; she could handle him. But Nilsson’s words tolled like a knell. ‘Whatever he used to be around here, he’s very different now. Just do as he tells you.’
Do as he tells you.
Her legs threatening to fold under her again, she reached out and pressed her hands against the curved walls of the stairwell. The hard stone, cold and gritty, reminded her that no matter what she felt, there was no way but forward for her.
At the top of the stairs there was a small landing and a solitary door. Hesitantly she knocked on it.
It opened with a sound like a soft, sighing breeze.
‘Come in, Marna,’ said a familiar voice. Tensing her stomach muscles she forced herself to move forward.
Farnor started as he followed Uldaneth’s pointing hand. The mountains towards which he had been journeying rose up ahead of him, seemingly only a few hours’ walk away. Though perhaps no higher than those which hemmed in his home valley, peculiarly jagged, broken peaks and sheer cliff faces gave them an ominous, brooding quality. The effect was heightened by the trees which swept up the ramping sides then petered out as though exhausted. It was as if the mountains had suddenly burst through the Forest and the trees had attempted vainly to restrain them.
From where he was standing, Farnor could not see much of the northern horizon, but what he could see was filled by the mountains.
‘I’d no idea I was so close,’ he said, a little awe-stricken by the suddenness of this revelation.
Uldaneth nodded. ‘Woodland terrain’s very decep-tive. But you’d have found out within the day,’ she said, with some amusement.
‘How far do they go?’ he asked, gesticulating to-wards the mountains, vaguely.
‘A long way,’ Uldaneth replied unhelpfully. ‘Like your own mountains, they’re part of the same upheaval that caused the great ranges to the north.’
Farnor looked at her, startled. ‘You know where I come from?’ he asked.
‘I like to get around,’ Uldaneth replied offhandedly. ‘But it’s a long time since I’ve been there. A very long time.’ She pointed again before he could pursue any inquiry. ‘That’s where you need to go,’ she said. ‘That’s the place where they’re most ancient. That valley.’
Farnor looked at the gap between two mountains to which she was pointing. From this vantage, it seemed in no way unusual.
‘It’s a strange place,’ she went on, nodding pensively to herself. ‘Very strange. Haunting, beautiful.’
‘I thought they didn’t allow anyone in there,’ Farnor said suspiciously.
‘Nor do they,’ Uldaneth admitted. ‘But no one both-ers about a wandering old teacher.’
Abruptly Farnor asked as he had before, ‘Tell me about the trees.’
Uldaneth looked at him and then at the mountains. ‘I can’t tell you anything that will be of value to you,’ she said reluctantly.
‘I think you can,’ Farnor said, quietly but resolutely. ‘You’re an outsider, like me, but you know both the Valderen and the trees well enough to be allowed to come and go freely. You’ve learned a lot about me, but I know nothing about you except that there’s a damned sight more to you than meets the eye. Just tell me what you can, teacher, I’ll judge its value. You’re bound to tell me more than I know at the moment.’
Uldaneth’s hand twitched a little, as if she was about to dismiss him, then she pursed her lips and smiled a brief, enigmatic smile.
Farnor sensed an advantage and pursued it. ‘You’re here of your own choosing,’ he went on insistently. ‘I’m here because they left me no choice. They say they want to question me, whatever that means.’ Despite his endeavours to remain calm, he bared his teeth angrily. ‘Personally, I’d like to take an axe to them, to be frank about it, but I don’t know what – who – I’m dealing with.’