They exchanged another glance.
"Well, then, maybe you'd better call for the Widow Davis after all."
Kayla smiled politely. "If you think she isn't already on her way, you don't know Riverend all that well."
* * *
But Kayla knew something was wrong.
The Widow Davis did, indeed, arrive; she scattered the children with a sharp inquiry about the current state of their chores, and an even sharper glance at the children who had the temerity to tell her they wanted to stay with the Companions, and then eyed the saddlebags the Heralds carried with an obvious, and deep, suspicion.
"Kayla, go mind the children. If you can't teach them to heed their duties, no one can. I'll deal with the strangers."
Kayla felt her jaw go slack, but she hid the surprise that had caused it as she nodded to the widow and retreated. These were Heralds, not medicants, and she had never heard the Widow Davis be rude to a Herald before. She was glad that the children had been sent back to their work.
She did not see the Heralds leave, but when she had time to glance outside again, they were gone, the white of their uniforms, and the white of Companion coats, little glimpses into the heart of winter, a hint of the future.
And when she at last tucked in for bed, she fought sleep with a kind of dread that she hadn't felt since she had slept in the arms of her own mother, at a time of life so far removed it seemed centuries must have passed. The nightmares had been strong then; they were strong now.
Many of the village children dreamed. They found a place in her lap when they wished to make sense of all the things that occurred only after they closed their eyes, and she had spent years listening, with both wonder and envy, to the hundreds of broken stories that occupied their dreamscapes.
Not so her own.
* * *
She had two dreams.
There was a black dream and a white dream, set against the mountain's winter.
As a child, the black dreams were frightening, bewildering; she would wake from sleep to search for her mother; it never took long. Her mother would come, precious candle burning, and sit by the side of her bed.
"What did you dream of, Kayla?"
"The dragon."
She had never seen a dragon; the stories that the old wives told described them as terrible, ancient beasts who had long since vanished from the face of the free lands. Books in the hold were so rare they were seldom seen, and books with pictures tipped in were rarer still.
But there was something in the shape of shadow that reminded her of those pictures.
"What was he doing?"
"Crying."
"Ah. Try not to listen too carefully, Kayla. Dragon tears are a terrible thing."
"I think...he's lonely."
Her mother's smile was shallow, even by candlelight. "Dragons are lonely; they sit on their cold, cold gold, their hard jewels, and they never come out to play."
"He would," she would tell her mother, "if he could find us."
"I think it best that he never find us, Kayla. Riverend is no place for such a creature."
* * *
The white dreams were different.
The snows were clearer and cleaner, and the pines that guarded the pass stretched beyond them to cut moonlight and hide it. But the light was strong enough to see by, and she always saw the same thing: the white horse.
He was the color of snow, of light on snow. And in the hold, in this place just one edge of rock and mountain, where spring came and went so quickly and summer's stretch was measured in weeks, snow was the color of death. Even as a child, she had understood that.
He did not speak to her until her father died.
"You can talk?"
Yes. A little. It is difficult now. But... :I heard your voice, little one. I heard your singing.:
"Singing?"
:Aye, song, a dirge, I think, to break the heart for its softness. I heard you sing years ago, and your song was so light and so joyful, I waned all of my compatriots to stand, to listen, to feel. There was such love in that song. And in this one. In this one, too.: She knew what he spoke of, and said nothing, but looked down at the back of her hands. They were child's hands; smooth and unblemished by calluses and dirt. Because it was a dream, she did not ask him how he had come to hear her heart's song.
:If I asked you to come with me, what would you do?:
And because she understood something of the nature of dreaming, she allowed herself to be honest. "If you had asked me as a child, I would have tendered a child's answer. But I have children now, and they need me greatly, and you are not a creature to be confined to a place like Riverend."
He had met her eyes with eyes, she thought, that saw whole lives as if they were the course rivers ran, beginning to end, and he might map them out, might remark on where the rapids lay, and where the oceans, at last, waited, for the movements of rivers to cease. And he said, :Tonight then, dear heart, I will not ask.:
But she knew that the time was coming when he would, and she was afraid of it.
Because Riverend was her home, and she wanted to leave.
* * *
He came to her often in her dreams after that, and she spoke with him, he with her. But his was not the only dream which changed.
For one night, huddled alone in the cold, she dreamed the black dream, and it was different: The dragon took flight. It searched; it searched for her. She could hear it roar when it opened its lips, and its voice was a song of death and desire.
And when it sang, she heard over voices as well, thin and terrible, the wailing of children, of grown men reduced to that earlier state, of women whose losses were so profound that silence-even the silence of the grave- seemed to offer mercy. They were lost, these voices; she knew it. They were lost to the devourer, the shadow, the dragon.
And if she were not careful, if she were not silent as mouse, and hidden in the darkness of a hold's small room, it would find her, it would consume her, and it would add her voice to its song.
She woke, sweating, her voice raw; the walls of the hold were solid, but she could hear footsteps in the halls beyond her room. They paused a moment outside her door, but no one knocked; no one entered. Her mother was gone.
* * *
After that, she dreamed of the darkness often. It grew stronger and stronger, and she, weaker.
On the morning of the worst of these dreams, the Heralds had come with their ominous gifts, and she had left them with Widow Davis.
Tonight, the darkness had not yet fallen across the field of her vision. He was waiting for her, cold beauty.
She felt the howl of winter wind through passes closed by snow and storm; memory of spring and summer faded until only the cold remained, essential and eternal. The ice glittered from the heights of the mountains' peaks; caught light in a skirt around the fringes of the evergreens that stretched a hundred feet in height to the edge of her vision.
The snow did not swallow him; is weight did not bear him down, down through the thin crust of snow. Silent, he waited for her.
As he always waited.
But it was different, tonight, and she knew it.
She said, "You cannot carry an Oathbreaker."
He met her gaze and held it, but she heard no voice, and she found the absence unsettling, for in dreams like these, she had spoken to him for much of her life.
"Did you send the Heralds? Did they bring gifts that were meant to take my place?"
He offered no reply.
And she was afraid. Her arms were cold; the day was fading. Night in the mountains was bright, if not brighter, by moonlight, but the colors-winter colors, to be sure-were leached from the landscape until only shades of gray remained beneath the black and white of sky and star.