Heriot (25 page)

C
ayley woke, lying naked under her coat – the coat of the Wellwisher, the braid of her dyed hair twining out, a scarlet serpent among the wild grass. As she opened her eyes Heriot, sitting beside her, turned and looked at her. They stared at each other for a moment … a moment in which it seemed their two glances twisted into each other and became an invisible tether tying them together.

‘Good morning!’ said Heriot.

‘You look like a different man,’ Cayley said, smiling and drowsy, but also a little puzzled. ‘You really do.’

‘That’s because I am,’ Heriot replied. ‘Do you want breakfast?’

Cayley continued to stare at him. ‘What’s happened to you?’ she asked at last. ‘I mean it’s not just morning, is it?’

‘I might find it difficult to tell you,’ said Heriot. ‘I know what’s happened, but words are not enough. What about you?’

‘Almost free,’ she said. ‘Except there’s that one thing set down in me. I’ve told you. That one thing …’

‘I know,’ Heriot said. ‘I felt it fall away for a moment back there, and then I felt it building itself back into you again. But it’s been true transformation for me. Remember I told you about what happened to me when I was a child … Izachel swooping in on me, feeding on that sleeping power in me and tearing me in two. I grew up to be myself and my own occupant as well … two of us in the one head.’

Cayley nodded.

‘Well, during the night,’ Heriot went on, ‘during the fire and explosion of us making true love – I felt that occupant move towards me. It took a strange energy to move across the gap, but you and me – we created that energy, and my occupant couldn’t resist. And as you and I melted into each other, there was this other melting inside me. Old injuries healed. I’ve become what I should have been from the beginning.’

He was telling her, but he couldn’t really describe the overwhelming moment when he not only felt himself becoming part of her, but also felt his own completion. The division within him had not been able to withstand the simultaneous assertion and surrender of self. He had been transformed.

‘You restored me,’ he said.

They kissed, but gently now.

‘That’s my story,’ he said. ‘Tell me yours.’

Cayley gave him an unusual look, somehow unsure and humble. ‘I can’t tell it yet,’ she said, ‘I want this mood to last for a bit, before that old stuff takes over. Which it’s bound to do, it’s my first direction.’

‘Well then, let’s have breakfast,’ Heriot said. ‘Let’s have a day or two of rest. Then, maybe, we can start all over again.’

R
iding out, alone and lonely through a wild land, Linnet suddenly felt she had made a great mistake. It had been disconcertingly easy, and once on the road, in the beginning at least, there had been a huge exhilaration in cantering off through the early morning with an old moon in the east, fading from bright silver to blue, half bracketing the new day. She was off and away … off to warn Dysart about his strange brother. She was becoming a heroine of the heart.

I’m free, she had found herself thinking. I’m out in the world. I’m not just a lady of Hagen, I’m a true adventurer.

She came to a familiar crossroads, and turned left.

‘They’ll look for me down the central road,’ she told herself, and then further down the road she had chosen, she reached yet another crossroads, where she turned north, making for Diamond. But after that things became rather more complicated. She stopped, dismounted, sat down by the roadside and unrolled her map.

That way
, she thought, tapping the paper with her forefinger, and then felt doubtful. Was the road she had taken actually marked on that map, flapping in front of her as if it were desperate to escape her and fly off on its own? Travelling the central road she would have had some idea of how time and distance should correspond – she had travelled along it several times and its geography was familiar, but this wasn’t true of the
road on which she now found herself. She had expected to ride through villages, those minute names on the map, but the roads she traced with urgent fingers seemed to unravel under her touch, breaking down into a maze of lines – tangled threads – dwindling to dotted tracks going nowhere. Linnet knew she was lost.

‘But I’ll find myself again,’ she said aloud, reassuring herself. ‘I knew it wouldn’t be easy once I left the main roads.’

The day wore on. Though she was used to riding, she found she was beginning to ache and decided to camp in a small glade.

From the beginning, Linnet had known she would take days to arrive in Diamond. She had known she would need to sleep on the ground and had brought a folded blanket. What she was not prepared for was just how uncomfortable it was. At first, since she was very tired, she slept easily enough. Later she woke in the dark, her right hip and shoulder hurting, the earth below her seeming determined to reject her. It was some relief to turn on to her back for a while, but, all too soon, her back began to ache. Hours went by, as she commanded herself to sleep, only to find herself incapable of carrying out her own commands. Twisting right and left, desperate to find a comfortable position, she comforted herself.
It’s part of the adventure.
Be brave! Be strong!
And then, at last, morning began to stain the sky with its first light, and she was off and away, glad to be on her horse again, glad to recognise the pattern of the map stretching out on the land in front of her.

However, she hadn’t gone very far before the stiffness of the night she had just struggled through began to reassert itself. Linnet set her teeth. ‘We’re not going back,’ she told the horse. ‘Look ahead! There’s a road.’ It was a road and more than a road. She was trotting down the hill into a village.

At first Linnet felt relief, but almost at once this pleasure
faded. For the first time she found herself wondering what she must look like, dishevelled and tired, a woman riding, unattended, out of nowhere. People in the village came out to stare at her, mostly with curiosity but sometimes with something approaching fear, as if she were a tangled witch dashing in on them. And some of the men in particular studied her with curious, blank expressions she found hard to define.

She spoke to the people, asking if she could buy food, holding out a few silver coins and found, to her astonishment that, though they certainly spoke the same language, she could barely understand them, and that, judging from their frowning faces, they could barely understand her. Then one man sidled forward, staring at her intently.

‘Food,’ he said. ‘She needs food. Bring her some bread and cheese. Could you do with beer as well?’

His question was asked rather insolently, and several of the villagers laughed.

‘Where are you off to, little miss?’ asked a second man, smiling up at her in a sickly fashion she couldn’t help mistrusting.

‘I’m riding to Diamond,’ Linnet said.

‘Riding to Diamond? Just fancy, all that way. And you’re right off the track,’ the second man said. ‘You should have turned back there …’ He sketched unintelligible lines in the air as he spoke.

Someone brought bread and cheese along with a bag of apples, and Linnet packed it into her saddlebag, before passing over a silver piece. She could immediately feel people’s attention focus on her money, felt their eyes flick from the hand that had received the payment, then back to her face, and then to her saddlebag.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m grateful.’

‘It’s good you’re rich,’ said one of the men. ‘That’ll help you on your journey. Now if I were you, little miss, I’d make off
along that path there and ride on … up and over until you come to the wood. You can go around the wood or …’

‘She should go through it,’ said the second man. ‘It’s quicker.’

‘Would you like us to ride with you, little miss?’ asked the first man. ‘We know the paths round here well.’

Linnet would have loved a guide, but the two men frightened her. She couldn’t explain why, for their questions and comments had been reasonable enough. Perhaps it was because they were both looking her up and down with a curious calculation, not quite a threat but certainly not friendship. She scrambled on to her horse, irritated to find herself suddenly clumsy at doing something she knew very well how to do, and, though she had longed for the certainty the villagers might give her as far as her road was concerned, she left the village behind her with enormous relief.

At first she rode through open farmland, but, as she moved on, up and over the slopes of a small hill, the hedges gave way and she found herself on a rolling heath … bushes, straggling trees and coarse grasses seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of her. A teasing wind blew as she took the bread and cheese from her saddlebag, for by now she was starving. While she ate greedily, her horse walked on up and over a rise. The heath stretched ahead of her for what seemed to be leagues, but in the distance she could make out a smudge against the horizon … trees. The men in the village had mentioned a wood. And the road ahead was striped with the tracks of cart wheels, bracketed with the prints of horses, coming and going. This was sustaining in a way. It meant other people must use this road regularly. But for all that … ‘Where am I?’ Linnet asked herself over and over again, wondering just how tired her horse might be. Sure that this well-used road must finally link up with the central road from Hagen to Diamond, she persisted,
trying to recapture that first feeling of adventure. What had the men back there said? She could go around the wood or through it … I’ll worry about that when I come to it, Linnet thought. Slowly the forest advanced out of the distance, vanishing as the road sank down between the hillocks, reappearing as she was lifted by a wave in the land only to sink again as she rode patiently on.

It was the end of a quiet day, though a faint, warm breeze was blowing, toying with the grasses and the bushes on either side of the road, and because of the quietness, she suddenly became aware that she was being followed. At first the beat of those pursuing horses came to her more as a vibration. Coming to a standstill, to drink a little water and to rest her horse, she began to feel a rhythm coming up out of the ground and into her very bones – the rhythm of a chase. Linnet was immediately sure the two village men who had watched so keenly as she took the silver coin from her saddlebag were after her. No doubt they’d gone out into some field beyond the village to get their own horses and now they were tracking her down.

Linnet had a good lead on them, but her own horse was weary. Forced into a canter, it responded valiantly, but the riders behind were overtaking her. The vibration coming up out of the ground became a sound, the distant beat of hoofs, and, looking over her shoulder, she could see them on the top of one of the hillocks she had ridden over only a little earlier, momentarily standing out against a darkening sky, before vanishing into a dip in the land.

Despair at her heels, but at the same time the forest ahead of her offered hope. If she could reach it before her pursuers reached her, if she could ride in among the trees, she could lose herself in shadows and silence. Filled with desperation she
struck her horse again and again. It stumbled as it tried to gallop, but it did not fall.

‘Go!’ she screamed. ‘Go! Go!’

Small trees seemed to spring up, their leaves waving in the wind like green fingers wildly beckoning. A narrow path spun sidewards into the wood and she veered aside from the main track to follow it. In minutes she was in a different world … moving into a darker space, and moving with much less certainty, for the forest path was not only darker but thinner … indefinable in patches.

As she struggled on, Linnet heard her pursuers enter the wood. They had slowed too, but for all that they were still catching up with her. There would not be time to hide properly, there could be no escape. She was about to lose her money, her horse and possibly her life.

Something slid backwards and forwards on the ground ahead … not an animal, not a forest breeze, but a shifting light. She looked right … looked left, and saw something leaping and flickering ahead of her. A fire. Someone had built a fire in the forest.

‘Hey, little miss!’ shouted a voice from behind. ‘Entertain us and we might let you go.’

Linnet’s horse stumbled again. She came to a decision. Listening to her pursuers, so close behind, she dismounted and slid sideways, making for the firelight, knowing as she did that it might be a treacherous beacon. But, once off the track, a girl might hide where a horse could not. At the same time she was quickly aware, as she struggled through fern, fallen branches and leaves, that she was making enough noise for the pursuers to know exactly where she was going. Her one advantage was that she was now taking a path no horse could easily follow and they might be content with taking her horse and leaving her to the mercy of the trees and the intensifying twilight.

But those voices still sounded behind her, speaking urgently to one another. Even the moments of silence seemed shot through with tremors of action. Then she heard a more definite sound – a resumed but altered chase. The men behind her must have dismounted just as she had done, must have paused, perhaps, to tether their own horses and were now after her once more.

‘Wait till we get you, bitch!’ a voice yelled almost exultantly, a violent voice she was sure belonged to the one she thought of as the first man.

A moment later Linnet burst into a totally unexpected space among the trees. She could hardly believe it. She was running along a street … an overgrown street but a street for all that … lined with empty cottages … all doors broken, all windows dark, though that light off to one side, that firelight, painted empty windowsills and tilting doors with an uneasy orange glow. She had stumbled into another village – a village where, surely, nobody lived. But there was a fire …

Astonishment brought on hesitation in spite of the crashing so close behind her now. Hesitation betrayed her. A hand grabbed her arm.

‘Got you!’ shouted the first man.

Linnet swung around on him, beating at his face as well as she could. Some of her blows must have gone home because he yelled with indignant pain. The other man caught her flailing arms and twisted them up behind her back.

‘Be good now, little miss,’ he hissed in her ear. She felt his breath on her cheek. ‘Be good and we just might let you live.’

‘Let her go,’ said another entirely unexpected voice, a curious voice, rough and husky but with an undertone of music for all that. And it was somehow familiar. She had heard that voice before.

‘Yes, do let her go,’ said another voice, certainly a man’s voice this time.

‘She belongs to us,’ shouted the first of the village men. ‘We got her first.’

But then, suddenly, he did release her, so suddenly that she crashed forward to sprawl on to the ground. Twisting around, she scrambled to her feet and then heard herself exclaiming in amazement. For there, beside her, was one of the King’s Wellwishers, and behind him rose the shape of a very tall man, a giant, almost blotted out by shadow. All the same Linnet had recognised in the few words he had spoken the trace of a country accent he had never quite shed.

‘Heriot Tarbas!’ she gasped.

‘Linnet of Hagen?’ he said, sounding every bit as astonished.

‘Linnet of Hagen?’ the first villager echoed incredulously. There was more than incredulity in his voice. He was suddenly alarmed – more than alarmed, confronted by a giant, a Wellwisher and a noble lady.

‘Go!’ said the second man decisively, and both men rapidly peeled off into the forest.

As they crashed away Heriot stepped forward to steady Linnet and brush the leaves from her hair and shoulders. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, but she ignored his question, crying out one of her own.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘More to the point, what are
you
doing here?’ he answered.

‘My horse!’ Linnet cried. ‘It won’t have gone far, but …’

‘I’ll get it,’ said the Wellwisher and vanished into the shadows.

‘What are you doing here?’ Linnet repeated, peering at Heriot’s firelit face. Then she said, half whispering, ‘You’ve changed. What’s happened to you?’

‘You first,’ said Heriot.

‘I think Betony Hoad is plotting treachery,’ she exclaimed. ‘I think my father might know something about his plans. I think,
perhaps, Betony might have promised to turn Hagen loose to join the Dannorad. And I think Betony Hoad plans something against Dysart. I’m only guessing, but I’m afraid …’ her voice died away.

Heriot was silent for a moment. ‘I think those might all be good guesses,’ he said at last. ‘I think Betony might want to destroy Hoad, and maybe even himself along with it. It would be a grand way for him to go, bringing all Hoad exploding around him … punishing it for not being astonishing enough. Well, if that’s his plan we might have to interfere.’