The Rebellion (46 page)

“Gilbert?” I said, remembering vividly the red-haired armsman who had befriended me when I was captive in the Druid camp.

First Daffyd, then Elii, and now Gilbert. Who else would I meet out of the past, circling back to merge their lifepaths with mine? Did it mean anything or nothing?

Daffyd frowned. “You remember him? Strange that you should recall one face out of all the Druid’s men. He spoke of you but thought you were dead. Of course, I did not enlighten him.”

I nodded. The last time I had seen Gilbert had been on the banks of the upper Suggredoon, a look of helpless anguish on his face as my raft was swept away by flood-swollen waters into the depths of Tor.

The armsman went on. “Well, we parted as I said. I came
to Sutrium, and it was there that I met another from the Druid camp, a woman. She was calling herself by another name and tried at first to pretend I was mistaken, but eventually she admitted the truth. She told me she had been a slave fleetingly but had escaped being transported and sold with the help of a seaman who had fallen in love with her. He threw her clothes overboard and pretended she had drowned herself, but he warned her never to speak of it, for if the truth was known, they would both be killed.

“I asked how she had been taken by the slavers in the first place. ‘Taken’? she mocked me. ‘I was
given
to the slavers. Betrayed and sold with no chance to run or fight. My bondmate saved me, but he could not save all of us. The others have gone over the waves, wherever slaves are taken.’ ”

Kella gasped aloud. “Oh Lud. Ariel sold those he had taken from the camp to the slavers!”

Daffyd nodded. “I was a fool not to have seen it sooner. The woman told me they saw the camp burn and could do nothing. There had been men and women, hired thugs, waiting in the hills to bind them and lead them away. Ariel had sold them to Salamander.”

Daffyd ran his hands through his hair. “You know, the thing that gnaws at me is that I had been only a little distance from their camp the day they were taken out of the mountains by the slavers. If only I had been able to farseek Gilaine as soon as the storm ended.”

There was such anguish in his voice. The static thrown up by the firestorm would have prevented his farseeking, but that he had not gone looking for them at once was my fault. I had been injured terribly, and we had just found Jik’s charred body. I had begged Daffyd to take Dragon to
Obernewtyn before the pass to the mountains was closed by snow.

“I felt … helpless. Hopeless,” he went on in a barely audible voice. “It had been months since they had been sold, and they were long gone on the slave ships. For the first time, I felt they were truly lost to me. I wanted revenge on Ariel. You cannot imagine how badly. But he had gone by then to Herder Isle.

“So I turned my mind to the slave trade with the idea that perhaps I could inveigle myself a job and learn where they had been taken. It is madness of a kind to be so persistent, yet somehow I felt that if they lived, I must find them.”

Daffyd’s eyes burned with near-fanatical hatred; the search for Gilaine, Jow, and Lidgebaby defined his existence now. Truly, he was not so far from madness.

“I suppose this woman from the camp did not actually see Salamander?” Hannay asked.

Daffyd laughed harshly. “No. No one has ever seen Salamander’s face—except perhaps Ariel. It was only after the sale of the Druid’s people that Salamander moved in properly on the slave trade, killing anyone who stood against him, terrorizing the rest, and streamlining the operation into one smooth, efficient monopoly. I thought Ariel’s connection with him was a passing thing, but if he was aboard the ship with him, perhaps there is more to it.”

“I wonder what Ariel got out of the bargain. Coin?” Rushton murmured. “He would not aid the slaver for nothing.”

Daffyd’s expression hardened. “Perhaps. They are as like to one another as two buds from the same plant. Both are secretive. Both love pain and desire power.”

The desperation returned to his face.

I laid a hand on his arm. “What will you do now?”

“Survive,” he said harshly. “If Salamander wants me dead, I will live to spite him. He will have the city scoured for me when he returns, and it pleases me to think that he will be thwarted. We will have our day of reckoning. And when I am done with the slavemaster, I will find Ariel.”

35

I
T DID NOT
take much persuasion for Daffyd to let himself be shown to a bed. He was clearly exhausted far beyond his endurance.

I felt too nauseous to sleep and decided to go out on deck. Perhaps some fresh air would make me feel better.

The wind had risen, and it fluttered my clothing and snapped the sailcloth. The sea was higher, too, and slapped against the wooden hull in a broken rhythm. I shivered and pulled my cloak about me, trying to imagine what it would be like to do as Powyrs suggested and give myself to the sea.

“Wet, doubtless,” a voice clove into my thoughts.

I started violently, for draped languidly on a mast strut right in front of me, licking one paw, was Maruman!

“How in Lud’s name did you manage to get aboard?” I demanded. “And where have you been?”

For once, my questions did not rouse his ire. He stretched with slow and infuriating feline grace and jumped lightly to the deck to rub against my leg.

“There you are!” Powyrs bellowed, and swooped over to scoop him up.

I froze, but instead of scratching the seaman, the bedraggled feline lay quiescently in his arms, an alarming mixture of complacence and thwarted mischief in his single gleaming eye.

“I wondered where he had been hiding,” Powyrs said, pretending severity. He looked at me and winked hugely. “The fools I have working for me think he is a bad omen, but he is too smart for them to catch and throw over the edge as they would like. He torments them, the naughty thing. Darting out and scaring them. Twice he has made seamen fall overboard.” He beamed at Maruman with paternal pride, and I could barely stop myself laughing aloud.

I stood up and reached out to pat him. Powyrs’s muscles tightened as mine had done moments before, but he relaxed as the cat allowed himself to be petted.

“Well, you are honored. Usually he will suffer no one to touch him but me,” he said, sounding astonished.

“He is magnificent,” I said, repressing a grin at how utterly Maruman had beguiled the burly seaman.

“Of course,” Maruman sent haughtily.

“He can be savage,” Powyrs warned. “You’d best leave him be, except when I’m holding him. He’s used to me. Reminds me of the sea, he does. My father said to me when he advised me against being a seaman; ‘The sea is a wild beast that eats the lives of those who would try to tame it.’ ”

“You didn’t listen, then?” I smiled.

He shrugged. “I never liked tame things, even as a boy.” He glanced over and noticed one of his seamen mending a sail. Snorting in derision, he set Maruman down gently before stomping over to instruct the seaman on his deficiencies.

“Well, I see how you managed to get yourself aboard,” I sent, grinning at him.

Maruman made no response. He leapt up onto a box beside me, and I felt a surge of pure happiness as he climbed onto my arm and clawed his way up to my shoulders to drape himself about my neck. I breathed deeply, taking in the
slightly fishy smell of his coarse fur, as if it were the scent of fresh flowers. Oddly, I no longer felt sick.

I yawned and decided I would go to bed. For the first time in many days, I felt content.

“I am glad to see/carry/smell you,” I sent, repressing my usual instinct to cuddle him close and tell him I loved him.

“I am glad also,” Maruman sent with rare sweetness.

The tiny cabin I had chosen contained only a bed and was no more than a closet. Its virtues were that it was situated on the main deck, which meant there was no need to grope my way down ladders in the darkness, and I would have some privacy. In a short time, I was leaning down to let Maruman jump onto the narrow bed, which was fixed to the wall under a small round window looking out to sea. The moon slid out of its envelope of cloud, and the old cat sniffed suspiciously at the pillow where its silvery light fell. Then he turned to me, his eye filled with moonlight.

I froze in the act of taking off my sandals.

“The oldOne sent ashling to Maruman/yelloweyes. Say come. Maruman coming. Say: tell Innle. Maruman tells,” he sent.

“Tell me what?” My heart pounded.

“Maruman flew the dreamtrails with the oldOnes. Saw Innle on blackdeathroad. Going to the endmost means end of barud. Obernewtyn finished and all gone for Innle.”

I stared at him. Atthis had sometimes called my quest a black road. Maruman seemed to be saying that if I completed my quest, Obernewtyn would not be there anymore. But what did that mean? That it would be abandoned? Destroyed? And why would Atthis want him to tell me this now?

I took my sandals off and climbed into the bed, shifting
Maruman to make room for myself. Maybe I was misunderstanding him. After all, beastspeaking obeyed no rules. Communications were entirely idiosyncratic, dependent on how much Talent a beast possessed, their mood at the time of communication, their relationship to the human with whom they communed, and, sometimes, even on what was to be told. Beasts interchangeably used their own odd dialect, human words, and imagepictures enhanced by empathised emotions. And Maruman was harder than most because of the distortions of his mind.

Maybe Maruman had not meant that Obernewtyn would fall but that it would be lost to me. The Agyllians had warned me that my quest would lead me away from my friends. But I had always assumed that, when that quest was over, my life would be my own. It disheartened me to think this might not be so.

I remembered Ariel saying in my dream, “Do what you wish, and you do my bidding.” Was that my mind’s way of warning me that free will was an illusion and that my life would never be mine to command?

“It would be a little late now to decide that we would not live our lives by the whimsical wisdoms of futuretellers, don’t you think?” Rushton had asked the previous day.

And it was too late. My sworn quest was the central and defining truth of my life now. Just as Daffyd’s long search for Gilaine shaped him, so my quest shaped me. If there was a black road, then I was on it already and had been all the days of my life. And I would walk it to the end—no matter where it led me. Even if it meant I could not go back to Obernewtyn.

Then it came to me. Perhaps Atthis had sent Maruman to test my resolve.

“Rest/sleep,” Maruman sent insistently. “All things seem
dark under the whiteface.” He curled against my chest, and we slept.

I dreamed I was on land, walking through country as Ludforsaken and desolate as the drear vista of the Blacklands I had once seen from the top of the high mountains. The road beneath me was black, and I saw that its darkness had climbed into my limbs, staining them a sickly purplish yellow—the livid shades of advanced rotting sickness that told me the road was poisoning me.

I wondered then if Maruman had meant that I would not be able to return to Obernewtyn because I would be dead.

I woke to unexpected stillness.

It felt as if the ship were not moving at all, and I wondered if at last my senses had realigned to shipboard life. There was a weight against my arm, and I opened my eyes to find Maruman sprawled alongside me, his head resting on my elbow. I eased myself out from under him and turned on my side to watch him sleep. Poor, dear muddled Maruman filling me up with his garbled thoughts and gloomy predictions. In the daylight, such cryptic nonsense did not seem so terrible.

I leaned forward and kissed him very softly, knowing he would be furious if he caught me.

Kella poked her head in the door.

“Oh good, you’re awake, Elspeth. Come and see this.”

I put a hasty finger to my lips and pointed to Maruman. The healer’s eyes widened at the sight of the cat asleep in the rumpled bedclothes, and she backed out of the room. I climbed from the bed, ran my fingers through my hair, and laced on my sandals.

Kella was waiting for me outside. “How in Lud’s name did he get here?” she demanded.