He grunted assent and took in the rest of the room. The small table had been set with bowls and spoons and a pot of something steaming that smelled excruciatingly good. Beside it sat Jenseny, who had evidently just finished eating; her empty bowl had been set to one side so that she could concentrate all her attention on the little metal puzzles Tarrant had provided for her. As Damien approached the table, Hesseth produced another bowl and a ladle and spooned out a hefty portion of the steaming concoction. Some kind of grain-based porridge, he guessed. He didn’t recognize the vegetables floating in it, nor did he care what they were. He’d have eaten swamp mud if it was hot enough.
The girl glanced up as he sat down opposite her, and cast him a fleeting, nervous smile. He tried to smile back, aware that between stubble and dried mud and rain-mussed hair he must look particularly gruesome. Hell, if she could face that in the morning, she could handle anything.
They let him eat in silence, Hesseth nursing a mug of some sweet juice she had heated over the fire. Like the grain and the vegetables it was not from their own stores but from among foodstuffs kept in the cabin. One more thing to pay for, Damien thought. Surely if they left a generous amount of money for the owner, he could manage not to feel guilty about all this. What man wouldn’t happily trade a few tins of cereal and a can or two of vegetables for a handful of coins? He’d leave enough to assure fair payment and then some. Let Tarrant scorn him if he liked. Fair was fair.
“I had a dream,” he said at last, pushing the twice-emptied bowl away from him. It seemed to him that his words hung heavy in the silence, and that the air cooled somewhat for having contained them. He pushed back his chair a bit so that it was closer to the fire; the heat on his back was reassuring. “Bad one?” Hesseth asked.
“Yeah.” The child had stopped her play and was watching him now. For a brief moment he thought of sending her elsewhere (but where? It wasn’t like the cabin had another room), and then the total idiocy of that hit home. She had signed on to follow them into this sorcerous realm, knowing that they were facing death and worse. And even forgetting about that, look at where they had found her: among the Terata, sole witness to the true nature of that cursed tribe. And he, Damien, was going to protect her now by sending her away so she wouldn’t hear about his nightmare? He remembered how she had cringed in the streets of Esperanova, how the pain and the suffering that clung to the streets of that city had come nigh onto overwhelming her. She sees more horror in a walk down Main Street than most of us see in a lifetime . . . and she’s still hanging in there, despite it. How many other children her age could manage that? She’s a lot tougher than she looks, and it’s time we gave her credit for it.
So he described his nightmare to both of them, both the images he’d seen and the emotions attending them. The latter was what was truly horrible about the experience: not the rakhene laughter, not the crystal skulls, not even the image of Calesta. It was his own feeling of utter helplessness as he lay upon that sterile plain, paralyzed by God alone knows what power.
Jenseny’s eyes were wide as he described the scenario, and her toys lay forgotten on the table before her. Though she didn’t interrupt Damien in any way, he could feel the tension building in her, and it didn’t surprise him when, after he finished, she was the first one to speak.
“The Black Lands,” she breathed. “Those are the Black Lands.”
Damien grimaced at the revelation; he would much have preferred to believe that his dream represented some symbolic vista, rather than an actual landscape. It was left for Hesseth to prompt the girl, “Tell us about the Black Lands.”
The tidal power must have been strong then, for before she could begin to speak an image took form before her, hovering over the center of the table. A glistening black surface, that reflected the moonlight in ripples and whorls much like the surface of the sea. The image had barely become clear when it disappeared, too quickly for Damien or Hesseth to study it.
“He said . . . the Prince lives in the Black Lands.” Her brow was furrowed tightly as she struggled to remember what her father had told her, so very long ago. Who had ever thought that she’d need to recall it all? “He said the land there looks like the sea, or like a river, only it’s black and it’s frozen in place.” Again the image appeared before her, but this time only a flicker. She seemed not to notice it. “He said . . . nothing grows there. He said it’s a desert. And it’s flat, so that the Prince can see everything.”
“No sneaking up on that bastard,” Damien muttered. Force of habit, assessing the enemy. The last thing he wanted to do this time around was go calling on the enemy face-to-face. Luck had been with them in Lema—not to mention forested mountains and a rakhene guide—but here, out on that open plain . . . they wouldn’t stand a chance.
A man doesn’t get that lucky twice, he thought grimly. “Go on,” Hesseth urged.
“He said . . . the Prince lives in crystal. But not like a jewel, not like in his ring. He said that crystals can grow just like plants, and in the Black Lands there’s a forest of them. That’s where he lives. That’s where he rules from.” She looked up at him hopefully. Obviously she wasn’t all that sure that the information she was providing was what they wanted. “You’re doing fine,” Damien told her, and he took one of her hands in his own and squeezed it. “Go on.” There was a flash of images in front of her: white trees, black earth, a strange knotted tube that turned inside out as they watched it. It took Damien a second to realize that the last was one of her puzzles.
“There’s the Wasting,” she told them. Her voice was slowly growing stronger as she gained confidence in her narrative. “The Prince put it between where humans live and where the rakh live, so that if one side gets angry it won’t kill the other. He said he had to put it there because humans and rakh don’t get along, and they always want to fight. But now it’s hard for them to start a war, because no one can get through the Wasting without the Prince’s help.”
“Why not?” Damien asked.
She said it with the simple candor of childhood. “They die.”
“How?” Hesseth asked her.
The young brow furrowed tightly. At last she shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think he knew. He just said that all things die in the Wasting, except things that normally live there. And . . . he said he saw it from a distance once and it was really weird, all black like the Prince’s lands but it had white trees, only they had no leaves and he couldn’t see anything else alive there . . .” She shook her head sharply, frustrated. “I don’t think the Prince told him anything about how it works.”
“Of course not,” Damien muttered. “As far as he knew, the Protector might still turn against him. Why give a potential enemy more information than you have to?”
“It sounds pretty grim” Hesseth muttered.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It does at that.”
“But necessary. I wondered how humans and rakh could live together—”
“And now we know. They don’t.”
“They do in the Prince’s house,” the girl told them. “Humans and rakh work together there, and even though they don’t like each other everybody behaves. Because the Prince is a human now, but he was rakh one time, so they don’t fight because of him.” Her eyes, previously unfocused with the effort of remembering, fixed on them: first Damien, then Hesseth. “Does that make sense?” she begged. “I think that’s what he said.”
Damien drew in a deep breath. “Apparently the Prince . . . transforms, somehow. It must happen when he becomes young again; he can change his species or gender when he rejuvenates.”
“That’s a strange kind of sorcery,” Hesseth mused.