The Gift (28 page)

“Hulls.” Cadvan hunched forward, and seemed to speak reluctantly, as if against his will. Long shadows thrown by the flames haunted his face. “Hulls are — or were — Bards. They have the powers of Bards. They serve the Nameless One.”

He stopped, and in the silence Maerad heard the breathing of the horses outside, the rustle of the trees, and a night bird calling. “The Nameless One, as you know, was once a Bard himself, and in order to conquer death, cast out his Name. That is a great crime, and a crime only Bards can commit. The Hulls are bound to his will, although, unlike many of his slaves, they have wills of their own. They too do not die in the ordinary way, but with this difference from the Nameless One: they can be killed. No one knows what happens to them afterward. They have bodies like ours, but after several lifetimes they become abhorrent to behold, although they can disguise themselves as we can and pass for mortals.”

He fell silent, looking into his own memories, and then spoke with a vehement anger that took Maerad aback. “I hate them. They betray everything that makes us what we are, and destroy everything that is worthy of love. I hate them more than the Nameless One himself.” Then he recalled himself, and continued more calmly. “No one knows how many there are. It is thought that no Bards have turned Hull in living memory, not since the Silence. But I have my doubts about that.”

“What do you mean?” Maerad picked up another twig and set it alight. A feeling of horror was beginning to creep up the back of her neck.

“I mean that I think there are Hulls we have not yet recognized,” Cadvan answered. “I’ve spoken of my fears to very few. Some of the problems of the Schools can be put down to petty vices like folly and greed; but I think not all of them. More often than we like, Bards are seduced by the Dark Arts, which does not mean they become Hulls. Think of your friend Mirlad; it seems likely that he was thrown out of the Schools for practicing the Forbidden Lore, but he was most certainly not a Hull. Hulls are thought to look evil, so people do not question the semblance of Bard, but I have sometimes wondered. . . . So, Maerad, place your trust with care! If there is doubt in your heart, listen to it, even over the voices of reason.”

Maerad shuddered, and thought of Usted of Desor. He had seemed merely an unpleasant man, but could he be worse? And how could you tell? She had thought Bards free from evil, even if they were imperfect, but now it seemed no one was. For a wild moment she thought of Annar as a larger version of Gilman’s Cot, where no one at all could be trusted; but she remembered Silvia and Dernhil and Malgorn, and Cadvan himself, and quietened her fears.

“Why can’t the Nameless One be killed?” she asked.

“He made a binding spell,” said Cadvan. “Bards have been trying for centuries to decipher that spell. All that is known is that such an enchantment has never been made before or since, and that its power binds him to the earth so that his soul may not depart through the Gates after death, and may reform itself in another body. It is said that the torment was so great when he said the spell that his cry echoed from the realm of Indurain over the ranges of the Osidh Annova all the way to the Isle of Thorold, from the wastes of Zmarkan even down to the Lamarsan Sea. It is held among the wise that he feels this torment still. For no human body can withstand that agony, and it seems he takes only the shapes that have the will to bear it, and they are all abominable and dreadful to the eye.”

Cadvan sighed heavily. “And so the Great Silence came to Annar. But for myself, I think I have spoken too long tonight, and we are both tired. It’s time to make a little silence of our own.”

Maerad wrapped herself in her blanket, trying to find a comfortable spot on the floor. For a while she was restless, and random thoughts flickered unbidden through her mind: Dernhil’s murder, her Name, the great raven settling on Cadvan’s forearm, the One, the Hulls . . .

None of it makes any sense,
she thought exhaustedly,
no sense at all.
It was like a bad dream, but a dream from which she couldn’t wake up.

Fear stirred in her belly like a cold snake.

IN the dark hours after midnight, Cadvan shook Maerad urgently awake. He pressed his forefinger to her mouth so she would make no noise. She was instantly alert and sat bolt upright.

She sent out her hearing and heard at once what sounded like a large animal trampling through the forest, breaking branches as it passed. It was, she judged, perhaps a mile off, and in the direction from which they had come. Cadvan had already cloaked the sleeping horses with a charm, so they would make no sound; and noiselessly as mice she and Cadvan sat and listened as the trampling came closer and closer. Whatever it was stopped every few minutes, as if it were casting about for a scent. Maerad felt uneasily for her sword. It seemed to be following their path, and she wondered what it was — too large, too lumbering for a wolf, and a single animal, not a pack.

It came to within a hundred yards of where they sat, and stopped. Maerad could hear its breathing, a rattling inhalation, and a horrible sound of slavering. She and Cadvan sat absolutely still, caught in breathless suspense. Then the creature lunged forward, away from the glade, and it was as if the blood rushed suddenly in a flood through all of Maerad’s veins, and she went limp with relief. They listened as it trampled through the forest, the noise receding farther and farther away from them until they could hear it no more.

“What was that?” she whispered, when the night noises of the forest began to reassert themselves over the unsettling silence.

“I don’t know,” said Cadvan. “A goromant, maybe; it sounded like one.”

“A goromant?

“A great beast with a tail like a scorpion’s and armor plating. They hunt by scent, and are very hard to kill. We were lucky we were in this Bardhome; it protects us.”

“Was it . . . was it sent by the Dark, do you think?”

Cadvan squinted at her through the darkness of the night. “No, I think not, Maerad. There are many creatures born out of an older power than the Nameless. And in ancient forests like these they yet live, survivors of an ancient malice. Though it’s true they may be used by the Nameless.”

“Then how do you know it wasn’t sent?”

Cadvan had no answer to that, and simply replied that he would keep watch. Shaken, Maerad lay down again. It was a long time before she went back to sleep.

They rose at dawn the next day and continued through the Weywood. In the peace that now surrounded them, the incident overnight seemed like a strange dream. But Cadvan pointed out the track of the beast’s passage: clawed footprints in the soft mud by a stream, and freshly broken saplings and branches. The prints were very deep, and Maerad shuddered at the weight they implied; it must have been monstrous.

Dewlings hung from each twig, sparkling in the shafts of sunlight that penetrated the canopy above the track. Looking to each side, Maerad saw the trees were here more thickly grown, wrapping the forest in shadow. Sometimes in the distance she saw a vagrant patch of sun where a great oak had crashed to the ground and lay twined with ivies and mistletoe, or where gray outcrops of granite rose suddenly out of the forest floor. The ground was thick with patches of bracken, pushing out of the copper wreckage of winter its mild green fronds, and near the track flourished all sorts of plants: celandines and bluebells, ground ivy, clumps of nightshade and hemlock, thickets of nettles and briars. Cadvan identified them as they rode, once dismounting to pluck the modest star-shaped green flower of the oneberry. “Also it is called moonwort or true love, and by Bards, martagon,” he told her. “Each flower bears a single red-black berry later in the year, which if powdered has virtues against poison. And some say it has other virtues beside, and if taken as a tea, it gives rise to marvelous dreams.”

The track was heavily strewn with rotting leaves, which dampened the sound of their hoofbeats, and was punctuated by frequent stony fords from the many streams that crossed it. They were now deep in the Weywood, heading north. As the day drew on Maerad began to feel oppressed by the silence, and she and Cadvan spoke less and less frequently. She thought often of the great beast they had heard the night before; there was no sign of any such creature now. The only sound she could hear in the forest was birdsong, but the birds remained hidden in the branches. Once she thought she saw the red form of a deer disappearing, swift as thought, between the trees, but it was so brief it could have been a trick of her eye; otherwise she saw no living thing.

Cadvan was turning over in his mind the best route to Norloch. He had turned from the West Road into the cover of the woods as soon as possible, and already they were diverted from their most direct course. He now debated with himself the opposing virtues of discretion and speed. The straightest way was also the most perilous, but to tarry had dangers also. He was deeply disturbed by Maerad’s revelation of the night before, and in his dilemma wished he could be certain of the truth of Dernhil’s death. He had to decide which way would best suit them, whether to follow the roads to Norloch or to push across wilder country away from habitations. Either route had virtues and risks. He didn’t need to make up his mind until they left the Weywood, some days ahead, but then that choice was irrevocable.

That night they stayed at another Derenhel, again planted around a rock face in which there was a cave, and this time with a pool in the center of the dingle. They kept watch in shifts, but they heard nothing sinister. The following evening they made camp under a huge oak near the track, again keeping watch. They lit no fire, for Cadvan would do nothing to arouse attention in the forest, and Maerad slept uneasily, feeling unprotected. She was beginning to find the forest’s stillness unnerving.

As they traveled, Cadvan passed the time by teaching her more of the Knowing and the mysteries of the Speech, of the histories of the Seven Kingdoms and the realm of Annar, of the behavior of wild birds, and the properties of plants. He told her the different legends about the appearance on the continent of the Bards, called in the Speech of the Starpeople the
Dhillarearë,
and how none were agreed on their origins; and sometimes he recited lays from the time of the Great Silence about the desperate battles of the Light against the Nameless One. He explained how the Light in that time retreated to the outer reaches, now called the Seven Kingdoms — Culain, Ileadh, Thorold, Lanorial, Amdridh, Suderain, and Lirhan — and was almost driven from Annar altogether. They did not mention Hulls at all.

Most evenings they drew out their lyres and played together. Maerad learned in these days how to listen anew to the songs she knew already by heart, and to understand them in a different way: not simply as stories made to lull away the tedium of winter evenings, but as enactments in which the ancient secrets of the Knowing were brought into the present and made real. After the shock of Dernhil’s death, and all the events that had preceded it — everything that had happened since she met Cadvan in the cot — she was grateful for this peace. She wished they were merely journeying, and had no urgent quest; she pushed away thoughts of being the Chosen One, the Fated, all those important words that seemed to have nothing to do with her.

On their third day in the forest Maerad felt the sense of oppression increase, as if they were being watched. Cadvan appeared unperturbed, so she said nothing. They made camp under a tree that night; again there was no fire, and as she huddled miserably in the cold on the verge of an uncomfortable sleep, she started awake with the feeling that she had tripped and was falling into deep water. Her eyes opened on another pair of eyes, gleaming yellow like a cat’s, looking straight into hers from less than ten feet away. She sat up in alarm, but they immediately vanished; and when Cadvan asked her what was wrong, she said she thought she had seen an owl, or some other animal.

She was beginning to tire of the Weywood, and longed for a breeze on her face and the clear sight of stars or the sun. For the first time since they had left Innail she yearned for a bath; her skin felt sticky and filthy, and she remembered with regret the sweet-smelling oils in Silvia’s house. The next morning she saddled Imi discontentedly.

“How long have we got in these forsaken woods?” she asked Cadvan. “Or do they just go on forever?”

“Not forever,” said Cadvan. “I would rather be unseen, and the Weywood is an excellent place for hiding, but I know what you mean.” He grimaced, buckling up Darsor’s girth strap, and swung up into the saddle. “Another two days, and we’ll be in plain sight of the sky again.”

Maerad’s feeling of unease grew again throughout the day, and she began to itch to leave the forest and wished Cadvan would pick up his pace. Now she was beginning to feel sure that something was watching them, although she could never see anything. If she looked over her shoulder, she sometimes felt a figure had just flicked out of sight; or she saw movements in her peripheral vision that might have been leaves moving in the wind, had there been any wind to move them. Were they pursued? And if so, by what? By late afternoon she was jumping every time one of the horses stood on a twig.