The Fall of the Dagger (The Forsaken Lands) (27 page)

Then ripples shine their brightest…”

He stopped.

She waited for him to finish, feeling that there had to be another line. She turned in his arms to face him. “Go on.”

“Maybe now is not the time.”

“Yes. Now. There may never be a tomorrow.”

“Then ripples shine their brightest,

And our hearts meld beneath the stars.”

He ran a finger down the side of her face from her temple to the corner of her lip. “I love you.”

His whisper was so light that the wind whisked it away almost before it was heard – but it had been said and etched into her memory nonetheless, every nuance. He’d said it before, when there had been no time to think about it. Now there was. Now she could revel in the joy, in the way time stopped as if the world had held its breath, as if breathing was unnecessary. She could have sworn that the air between them thickened, saturated with their longing.

Yet it was she who shattered the moment. “If you love me, then you know what I will say.”

He gave a sad smile. “Yes. And I honour you for it. I could not love you half so well if you did not put Piper first.”

“And I, you, if…” She waved a hand instead of enumerating all his obligations.

They laughed together, softly, ruefully. He said, “We both have our – what’s the Ardronese word? Pri – prio-something.”

“Priorities. I will tell the Pontifect that I will only go to Vavala if you are with me.” She turned to climb down the rope ladder to the shrouds, but at the last moment she glanced back over her shoulder. “I do love you, you know.”

She saw the flash of his gun by starlight and heard his intended, “I know,” whisper on the breeze.

T
he following day, Ardhi, Sorrel and Fritillary Reedling began their journey at the Twite oak shrine. Before they started, Fritillary lectured them on what it would be like, her stare as hard as her voice.

“This will be dangerous,” she said. “Do not leave the path. It’s the root of a shrine-oak, or perhaps the spiritual essence of it, reaching through time. Its connection from this tree to the root of the next will keep us safe. Leave this living path, and you will never find your way back. Tonight we’ll sleep in the Shenat Hills, in another hidden shrine. The next night we’ll be at the shrine on the border, then somewhere in Valance, and by the end of the fourth day we’ll be in Vavala. I suggest you look neither right nor left. If you need to relieve yourself, drop back, but
do not leave the path
.” She looked from one to the other and they both nodded, infected by her solemnity. “Do not interact with anything. Whatever is here inhabits a different timeline.”

Sorrel remembered how close they had come to losing themselves searching for the shrine at Hornbeam. She remembered her glimpse of Heather. Or maybe not Heather, but an image taken from her own hopes and fears.

She shivered. Ardhi reached out and touched her hand. “I’m all right,” she said and tried to smile. They were still standing under the outer canopy of the Twite oak, on the far side from the entrance, looking out through a break in the foliage. If she let her gaze wander, she saw those who had been living in hiding around the oak. If she looked straight ahead and focused on the path, the beginning of which was a knotted root underfoot, she saw a straight pale line stretching into a colourless nothingness.

They moved off in single file, carrying only water. Fritillary was in front of her and Ardhi behind.

She tried not to look to either side. They were walking through a blank whiteness. Not a mist, she decided, because it lacked clamminess and had no hint of water.
A fog of forgetting, perhaps.
That thought skittered a shiver up her spine again. Occasionally, she saw figures off to the side, or heard people calling, or laughing, or weeping, but if she did glance sideways, she could never bring anything into focus. Fritillary walked with a steadfast pace, her gaze fixed straight ahead.

If she can do that
, Sorrel thought,
so can I
. She squared her shoulders and disciplined herself not to look, even when she thought she heard Heather’s voice calling to her.

Nothing changed, not the light, not the mist, not the path. The passage of time remained strangely unfelt. It wasn’t until they reached the next shrine that she realised they had neither spoken to one another nor stopped to rest throughout the whole journey. She had no idea of how long it had taken them. Fritillary collapsed on to a bench in the shrine, her face drawn and tired.

The shrine keeper was blind, a man old beyond normal reckoning if his archaic speech was any indication. He felt his way around as he fetched them water and food and bedding. He evidently recognised Fritillary by her voice, because he greeted her, saying, “Your Reverence? Ye’ve done come agin so soon? Daft as a rabbit, are ye? Ye walk these paths and the years run away from ye like tears down your cheeks! How much longer will ye last, be ye skipping through time?”

She did not reply.

“An’ tell me, lady, how much longer are we to be hid here, liken us were rabbits in the warren too scared to wave a whisker in the air, else the fox snap at it? What’s old Mother Alder going to do iffen her heifer gets sick again, when Hyacinth Knapweed is the animal-mender around about and she be sittin’ yonder, twiddling her thumbs, instead of caring for the village kine? When can we open up the shrine again?”

“Before winter arrives,” she said and patted his crinkled hand with its bulbous knuckles and crooked thumb. “I promise.”

His blind eyes held on to their opaque blankness, but his face lit up. “Earth and oak,” he said, “thanks be! To serve folk, one must be
among
folk, no?”

“Contain your joy, old man,” she said gently. “War is coming. All those with a witchery, the ones who can walk, must travel to Vavala by the timeless paths before then – or else fight here in Ardrone. Walking the paths once or twice is not going to hurt anyone.”

“And how many miles have you walked through the timeless lands?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Who knows?”

After they’d eaten, picking at the food for none of them was hungry, Sorrel wanted to sleep. Fritillary had other ideas. She wished to know all about Ardhi and about the Summer Seas and the Chenderawasi Islands, their politics, people, trade, climate, belief systems and everything that had happened to them there. Sorrel, her eyelids drooping, struggled to stay awake, and left most of the answering to Ardhi. When the questions were too awkward, he pretended he hadn’t understood and went off at a tangent, enumerating the advantages of a regulated trade between equal partners. Sorrel doubted Fritillary Reedling was deceived by Ardhi’s veneer of an innocent and gullible islander with nothing to hide.

The next day, and the next, were much like the first. On the final day, when they sighted the Great Oak through the mist and knew they were arriving in Vavala, Sorrel found herself weeping with gratitude. That misted world with its long periods of silence punctuated by occasional ghostly cries or whispers of truncated conversation, the long tedious hours of walking, followed by penetrating questioning from Fritillary – she felt worn thin, like the sole on an old shoe.

Ardhi slipped his arm around her shoulders as they stood on the path and stared ahead at the leaves of the greatest oak of all. His breath shifted the strands of her hair as she leaned into him.

“The kris is aware of the ancient
sakti
of that tree,” he said. “The wood is alive and strong and true.”

“But we are only flesh and blood.” She feared, but didn’t want to give words to her dread. What if the ternion died? What then, for Piper?

His arm tightened about her, the hardness of his muscles both a comfort and a tantalising seduction. “Together we are strong,” he said as he wiped away a tear on her cheek with his thumb. “I will never leave you.”

Fritillary, standing in front of them, turned. “Come,” she said, “let’s find out what’s been happening in Vavala.”

Sorrel grasped Ardhi’s hand as they stepped under the canopy of the Great Oak.

In Proctor House, Horntail and Gerelda were training, yet again. Day after day, always training, honing their fighting skills. Horntail had taken it upon himself to teach her what he called a battle mind.

Perie watched as they fought each other with practice swords they’d found in the basement.
Lunge, parry, thrust, interrupt the beat… Try this, try that, go for the unexpected, expect the bizarre…

In war, Horntail said, there were no rules. Everything was not only possible, but desirable. If you could cheat, deceive, kick, bite, scratch or throw boiling water at your opponent, then you did it. What mattered was winning, not rectitude. What mattered was surviving to fight another day, not dying heroically.

Come to think of it, that was a philosophy Perie had once agreed with wholeheartedly, but no more. Now… he wasn’t so sure. There’d been too much killing. Too many deaths. Now he just wanted it all to be over. More than anything, what he desired now was peace and rest in a place where there were no more sorcerers. In his bleakest moments, he dreamed of a quick death. When he confronted those thoughts, though, he found the idea of an overgrown grave beneath an oak tree more comforting than gloomy.

“No, no, no!” Horntail said. “Don’t wait for your opponent to recover. Catch him off-balance!”

Poor man, he still didn’t know who he was and he swore black and blue that he couldn’t possibly have a name like Buttercup. When he wasn’t practising with her, he prowled the rooms like a frustrated cat looking for a way out.

“How much longer?” Horntail asked, as he brought the practice bout to an end. He rubbed his already dirty sleeve over his sweaty brow. “Proctor, I’m be lard-bloated if I have to stay inside a moment longer. When is this confounded Pontifect of yours coming back? Yesterday, you said today. The day before that, you said yesterday…”

“You know as much as I do,” she lied, examining the damage he
had inflicted on her knuckles. “She got my message and said she’d contact me in about ten days. Which was up yesterday.”

“She knows where we are, though.”

“Yes, Buttercup. I sent a message. And I’m just as impatient as you are. I think we’ve found out all we can about the palace without actually going inside. I don’t think you’d be so impatient to leave the building if you knew what the streets are like out there.” Fear saturated the city. No one smiled in Vavala any more.

That night, as the three of them sat around the fire in the common room in gloomy silence, someone rapped at the brass knocker on the main door.

Horntail gave a grunt that could have meant anything. “So,” he asked as he strapped on his sword belt, “how do we tell if that’s friend or foe?”

“Open it?” Gerelda suggested.

Perie snatched up his staff and made sure his spiker was accessible. “It’s not a sorcerer.”

They all trooped out into the main hall. Gerelda and Horntail stepped to either side of the door.

“You’re the sacrificial chicken,” Horntail said to Perie, grinning. “Open it and then get out of the way.”

The precautions were not needed. Fritillary Reedling stood in the doorway, with two people behind her.

“Good evening, Perie Proctor,” the Pontifect said. “May we come in?”

Even as she asked, she was already stepping into the hallway, the two others close behind her.

Peregrine’s first thought was
Pox, she’s got so old!

He didn’t know the other two people. One of them was a woman and the other was brown-skinned and barefoot.

“We’ve been walking all day,” Fritillary said. “So, as you can imagine, we’re tired. We just stopped long enough for me to find your message at the shrine. This is Mistress Sorrel Redwing of Ardrone, and Ardhi, from the Summer Seas. Friends of Saker Rampion.”

The woman’s face broke into a smile as they followed Gerelda to the common room. “Sergeant Horntail! Prince Ryce has been worried about you. He will be so glad to know you are still alive.”

Horntail looked at her blankly. Gerelda explained and there was
an awkward silence before he mumbled, “I have no idea who you are.”

“Oh, nobody important,” she said. “You probably never knew who I was anyway, but I remember you. You headed Prince Ryce’s personal guard.”

Horntail continued to look blank.

“Maybe you can settle an argument for us,” Gerelda said as she gestured for them all to precede her into the room. “Is his first name really Buttercup?”

“What? Whose?
Buttercup?
Sergeant Horntail, is that
true
?”

He sighed.

The mattress on Sorrel’s bed had a musty smell of damp. She picked up the pillow for a closer look, which revealed it was covered in mildew. She pulled a face, threw it across the room and decided it was better not to examine the rest of the bedding.

Hoping Ardhi would seek her out if he saw a light under her door, she left her candle burning, climbed into bed – and woke hours later when the morning sun streamed in through the long windows.

She groaned at her tactless inability to stay awake and hoped desperately that he had not come after all. How could she have been so – so
feeble
as to fall asleep the moment they had a chance to be alone? Someone had been in the room already that morning; there was a ewer of hot water steaming on the washstand. When she poured it into the washbowl, white scented flowers floated to the surface. She touched the petals with a finger, blushed, then laughed.

After flinging on her clothes, she hurried downstairs to find Gerelda in the kitchen chatting to Ardhi. Outside the door, Horntail was talking to Fritillary in the kitchen yard, his heavy frown an indication that the conversation was giving him trouble.

Gerelda had an odd expression on her face, as though she was not sure if Ardhi was making fun of her. Sorrel shot a look at him. His innocent smile told her that Gerelda was right to be suspicious.

“I think your friend here,” Gerelda growled, “should’ve been a lawyer. He is an expert at saying a lot without actually telling you anything.”

“Oh, he probably did study law! He seems to have done everything else: oceanography, hydrography, cartography, navigation, astronomy—” She glanced at him. “What have I forgotten?”

“Pilotage.”

“Right. So you were having fun at my expense.” Gerelda glared at Ardhi. “He told me he was a swabbie.”

“That too, for a time. Also third mate on Lord Juster’s privateer. Do you have anything to eat? I’m ravenous.”

Gerelda cut her some bread and cheese. “Fritillary told me you’ve been with Saker. I haven’t seen him in so long, not since before he was nulled. We went to university together, you know.” The smile that lit her face spoke of pleasant memories.

She hadn’t known, and felt a moment’s pique, as if no one had the right to have known Saker longer than she had.
Ninnyhead.
“You were good friends?”

“The very best at one time. We squabbled a lot too, as I remember. Fun student days, you know. And I met him once since too. Let me think… three years or so back? No, more. Just before he went to Throssel Palace as spiritual adviser to the young royals.”

“He’s coming here with the prince and Lord Juster Dornbeck – and an army. Soon, we hope. In the meantime, we have to rescue Princess Bealina and Prince Garred,” she said.

“Just like that?” Her sarcasm was undisguised. “How? I mean, we haven’t had any luck at finding out where they’re being kept, let alone worked out a way to rescue them.”

“Oh,” said Ardhi wearing his innocent expression again, “that’s Sorrel’s job. She’ll just walk in the front gate. It’s what she usually does.”

Gerelda’s eyes narrowed. “Why, oh why do I have the idea that I really ought to believe that?” She sighed. “Who the pox are the two of you?”