He saw it again, and understood. Not the world, but the water. Something huge was moving just under the surface.
He kept backing up, but he remembered that being far from the water hadn’t helped the people of Whitraff.
The water mounded up suddenly, and something rose above it with the sluggishness of a monster in a dream that knows its victim can’t outrun it. He had only an impression of it at first, of sinewy form and sleek fur or possibly scales, and of immensity.
And then it called in a voice so beautiful that he knew he’d been wrong, that this creature was no destroyer of life, but was the very essence of it. He’d come to the place where life and death changed, where hunter and hunted were one, and all was peace.
Relieved beyond words, Aspar lay down his bow, stood straight, and walked to meet it.
4
Borderlands
Someone began shouting just as Anne and Austra reentered the ruined city of the dead. Anne whipped her head around and saw two fully armored men on horseback charging down the hill.
“They’ve seen us!” she shouted unnecessarily.
She ducked behind the first building, practically dragging Austra with her, looking wildly around for somewhere to hide.
Death or capture lay in every direction—the orderly rows of grapes on either side of the valley offered no real protection; they might elude their pursuers for a little longer, but in the end they would be run down.
Hiding posed the same problem, of course, and there really wasn’t anyplace to hide.
Except the horz. If it was as thickly grown as it looked, they might be able to squeeze into places where larger, armored men couldn’t follow.
“This way,” she told Austra. “Quickly, before they can see us.”
It felt like forever, reaching the walled garden, but as they passed through the ruined arch, the knights still weren’t in sight. Anne got down on her hands and knees and began pushing through the gnarled vegetation, which if anything grew more thickly than in the horz Austra and she used to haunt in Eslen-of-Shadows. The earth smelled rich, and slightly rotten.
“They’re going to find us,” Austra said. “They’ll just come in after us, and we’ll be trapped.”
Anne wriggled between the close-spaced roots of an ancient olive tree. “They can’t cut their way in,” she said. “Saint Selfan will curse them.”
“They murdered sisters of a holy order, Anne,” Austra pointed out. “They don’t care about curses.”
“Still, it’s our only choice.”
“Can’t you—can’t you do something, like you did down by the river?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said. “It doesn’t really work like that. It just happens.”
But that wasn’t really true. It was just that when she had blinded the knight outside the coven and hurt Erieso in z’Espino, she hadn’t premeditated it, she’d just done it.
“I’m frightened of it,” she admitted. “I don’t understand it.”
“Yes, Anne, but we’re going to die, you see,” Austra said.
“You’ve a point there,” Anne admitted. They had gone as far into the horz as they could. They were already lying flat on their bellies, and from here on, the plants were woven too tightly.
“Just lie quiet,” Anne said. “Not a sound. Remember when we used to pretend the Scaos was after us? Just like that.”
“I don’t want to die,” Austra murmured.
Anne took Austra’s hand and pulled her close, until she could feel the other girl’s heartbeat. Somewhere near she could hear them talking.
“Wlait in thizhaih hourshai,” one of them said in a commanding voice.
“Raish,” the other replied.
Anne heard the squeak of saddle leather and then the sound of boots striking the ground. She wondered, bizarrely, if anything had happened to Faster, her horse, and had a painfully clear flash of riding him across the Sleeve in sunlight, with the perfumes of spring in the air. It seemed like centuries ago.
Austra’s heart beat more frantically next to hers as the boot sounds came nearer and the vegetation began to rustle. Anne closed her eyes and tried to work past her fear to the dark place inside her.
Instead she touched sickness. Without warning it swept through her in a wave, a kind of fever that felt as if her blood had turned to hot sewage and her bones to rotting meat. She wanted to gag, but somehow couldn’t find her throat, and her body felt as if it had somehow faded away.
“Ik ni shaiwha iyo athan sa snori wanzyis thiku,” someone said very near them.
“Ita mait, thannuh,” the other growled from farther away.
“Maita?” the near man said, his tone hesitant.
“Yah.”
There was a pause, and then the sound of something slashing into the vegetation. Anne gasped as the sick feeling intensified.
Austra had been right. These men showed no fear of the sacred.
She pressed herself harder against the earth, and her head started to spin. The earth seemed to give way, and she began sinking down through the roots, feeling the little fibers on them tickle her face. At the same time, something seemed to be welling up from beneath her, like blood to the surface of a wound. Fury pulsed in her like a shivering lute string, and for a moment she wanted to catch hold of it, let it have her.
But then that, too, faded, as did the nausea and the sensation of sinking. Her cheek felt warm.
She opened her eyes.
She lay in a gently rolling spring-green meadow cupped in a forest palm of oak, beech, poplar, liquidambar, everic, and ten other sorts of trees she did not know. Over her left shoulder, a small rinn chuckled into a mere that was carpeted with water lilies and fringed by rushes, where a solitary crane moved carefully on stilt legs, searching for fish. Over her right shoulder, the white and tiny blue flowers of clover and wimpleweed that were her bed gave way to fern fronds and fiddleheads.
Austra lay next to her. The other girl sat up quickly, her eyes full of panic.
Anne still had her hand. She gripped it harder. “It’s all right,” she said. “I think we’re safe, for a moment.”
“I don’t understand,” Austra said. “What happened? Where are we? Are we dead?”
“No,” Anne said. “We aren’t dead.”
“Where are we, then?”
“I’m not sure,” Anne told her.
“Then how can you be certain—?” Austra’s eyes showed sudden understanding. “You’ve been here before.”
“Yes,” Anne admitted.
Austra got up and began looking around. After a moment she gave a start. “We’ve got no shadows,” she said.
“I know,” Anne replied. “This is the place where you go if you walk widdershins.”
“You mean like in the phay stories?”
“Yes. The first time I came here was during Elseny’s party. Do you remember that?”
“You fainted. When you woke, you were asking about some woman in a mask. Then you decided you had been dreaming, and wouldn’t talk about it anymore.”
“I wasn’t dreaming—or not exactly. I’ve been back here twice since then. Once when I was in the Womb of Mefitis, another time when I was sleeping on the deck of the ship.” She gazed around the clearing. “It’s always different,” she went on, “but I know somehow it’s always the same place.”
“What do you mean?”
“The first time it was a hedge maze. The second time it was a forest clearing, and on the ship it was in the midst of the forest, and dark.”
“But how? How did we come here, I mean?”
“The first time I was brought here by someone,” Anne explained. “A woman in a mask. The other times I came myself.”
Austra folded down into a cross-legged position, her brows knitted. “But—Anne,” she said, “you didn’t go anywhere, those other times. I wasn’t there in the womb of Mefitis, but you were still on Tom Woth, that day. And you were still on the ship.”