Raffi was silenced. He knew the importance of dreams, knew that Galen would clutch at anything that might help him.
“I can’t ignore it, Raffi.”
“No,” he mumbled unhappily.
They climbed up. The turf was springy, studded with yellow gorse-bushes. Warm, Raffi loosened the fastening of his dark green coat for the first time in days. The slope was steep; Galen stumbled once and picked himself up stubbornly. The dark grove hung above them, the rooks clamoring, disturbed. Anyone for miles would hear them. Catching his breath, Raffi stopped and looked back.
The downs stretched endlessly to the horizon. Great cloud banks hung, hazed with sunlight; white darkening to ominous gray, their slow rain-curtains dragged across the green land.
He turned and walked into the gloom of the trees. Yet as he passed the outer trunks he realized that this was not many trees, but one, immensely old, its trunk fibrous and dark, centuries old, maybe even older than the barrows.
Coming closer, they saw the central trunk was hollow; split wide enough for a small room. Trunk upon trunk had grown out of it, root upon root; the bark was ridged and scored, and Raffi guessed that six or seven men couldn’t have joined hands around it. And yet it was alive. His feet sank in a thousand years of needles.
Around it, almost lost in gloom, stood three stones that might once have been some cairn or building. Pieces of rag hung from the branches. On one a piece of quartz swung and glinted in the sun.
“The Sekoi.”
“Again.”
Galen was bent under the thatch of branches. He put his hand on the central trunk. “How old this is. The secrets it knows. If I could . . .” He stopped himself. Then he sat down, closing his eyes.
“Galen,” Raffi said anxiously. “How long are we going to stay here? We should get on!” There was no answer. Shaking his head, he sat down himself, against one of the outer trunks.
By late afternoon he was still there, watching the rain come. The gray curtain swept toward him over the downs, it swallowed the barrows and was on him, the first drops pattering in the thick green growth above, but none of it came through to him; the great yew was like a hut, its central trunk and pillars, its meshed roof. With the rain came the darkness, early. The rooks cawed and settled into a cowed silence. Nothing but the pattering of drops disturbed him. Glancing back stiffly he saw Galen still meditating, a shadow.
There was no way of lighting a fire; they were so high up it would be seen, and besides, he felt the tree wouldn’t like it. Sitting there, against its back, he knew its hollows and veins and ridges; his fingers buried themselves in the woody debris, the crumbling rich stink of needles and grubs and tiny wriggling things that it nurtured. Nothing grew under here; it was too dark, but the tree’s roots spread far out under the ground, he could feel them, widening to the nearest tombs, groping deep in the chalk, to the hidden waterlines, the fractures and fissures of rock, the strange magic that moved there. And the tombs clustered around it; he saw that now. The Sekoi had put their dead here, to watch with the tree.
And deep in his mind the tree said to him, Raffi, get up and come in.
He turned, thinking he’d misheard, but Galen was standing, looking at him, and though his face was in darkness there was something about him that gave Raffi a shiver of fear.
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything.” The Relic Master stared at him in the gloom. His voice was dull with weariness.
“I thought . . . you said, ‘Get up and come in.’ ”
Galen stiffened; then he got down in the soft mulch and grabbed Raffi’s hood and hauled him closer. “It spoke to you!”
“I don’t . . I’m not sure.”
But Galen breathed out harshly. He turned to the inner trunk, the seamed split. “Sit there,” he hissed, pushing Raffi down.
Don’t fear me, the tree said, and its voice was old, textured like wind and rain on stone, the knock of a hammerbird in wood.
“It says not to be afraid.”
“Afraid!” Galen had the threaded stones off his neck; he snapped the string, tipped them out, his long fingers arranging them hurriedly into patterns Raffi didn’t know. Then he looked up, and his face was sharp and eager and desperate all at once. “Ask it to come out. To show itself. Tell it I can’t see, or hear. Get it to come!”
Raffi barely knew how. Then training took over; he made a space in his mind, opened the third eye. Please come out, he asked, over and over. He knew it was close, and could hear him.
Galen crouched at his shoulder, his hand gripping tight. When Raffi looked now he saw rain, glinting on the trunk, dripping in places from above. The yew was huge; one edge of the split a bent contorted angle of wood, but as he looked closer he saw that he was mistaken, that it was a man, an old man in russet flaking, shapeless clothes, his eyes deep as knotholes, turning toward him.
Galen’s fingers shook him.
“Has he come?”
Raffi nodded, silent.
The yew-man smiled at him and nodded too. I’ve come, keeper.
“He can’t hear you,” Raffi muttered, his throat dry.
How is that?
“There was an accident; he was hurt.”
Glancing up, Raffi saw Galen’s wild excitement. “Go on! Ask him! Can he help me!”
“There was an accident,” Raffi said again, stumbling for words. “The keeper has lost . . . He can’t enter the land now, or hear it when it speaks to him.” He felt torn with awe at the yew-man’s eyes, and embarrassment at Galen having to hear this.
The yew-man, too, seemed fascinated. He turned his brown old gaze on Galen, moved a fold of cloak to show two gnarled hands clasped on a root.
That must torment him. There is no loss as great as that.
“Yes . . .” Raffi wondered if Galen could hear. “Can you help? The yew is a tree of poison and healing. Do you have some way . . . ?”
No. The old man shook his head. Only the Makers can give back what they have taken.
“But the Makers are gone.”
Tormented with impatience, Galen hissed, “What does he say about the Makers?”
But Raffi waved him back.
Yes, they are gone. The old man sighed. I remember them, long since.
“Remember them!”
I’m old, child, older than anything here. I guard the bones of the cat-kings, but before them all, I was. And when the Makers came and walked on the grass I saw them when they were young, Tamar and Therris and Flain. Even Kest, whose sorrow burns us all. They could have helped your master.
“But . . .” Raffi grew dizzy; he shook his head, stunned.
“Hold on to it!” Galen’s voice snapped. “Hold on!”
“The Makers are gone. We can’t speak to them. The only messenger was the Crow.”
The Crow is still here, the yew-man said calmly.
“Here!”
In this world. In this body. The Crow lives, for without him the world would die. The voice became slurred, a harsh gabble of sound, then clear again. Stone and tree miss the keepers. Other men do not speak to us. We do not know how to speak to them.
The tree blurred before him.
“Hold on!” Galen muttered.
Sweating, dizzy, Raffi gripped his hands tight on the old man’s. “Where is the Crow?”
In Tasceron. In you. In your master, if he knew it.
“But where?”
The answer was harsh and garbled; the sound distorted as if down tunnels and veins, deep in the earth. His hands clasped a wooden knoll. He felt sick and retched, choking.
“Hold it!” Galen was yelling.
“I can’t! He’s gone! He’s gone!”
Sweating, he was hauled up, dragged out from the tree on hands and knees. He collapsed in the grass, sick, shivering uncontrollably, his head throbbing with flashes of light and pain. After a while he realized Galen was holding him. Rain had soaked them both.
“Sorry.”
“You did your best.”
The keeper eased him against the tree, dragged the pack over, and pulled the blankets out. “Get these around you. It’s aftershock. We should have a fire.”
“Not safe.”
“What did he say, Raffi?” Galen clutched him on both arms, as if he couldn’t bear the suspense. “Can he cure me?”
Raffi shook his head. He looked away from the keeper’s face.
“He remembered the Makers. He said . . . only they can give back what they’ve taken. He said the Crow is in Tasceron. And in us, if we knew it.”
“In us?” Then Galen stopped.
Another wave of nausea shuddered through Raffi. “What’s wrong?” he croaked.
Galen had leaped up. He was looking down the hill, into the dark, and there was something in his look that made Raffi feel for his sense-lines.
They were all in shreds.
He staggered up and stood there, the blankets falling.
“Why don’t you come up,” Galen said grimly, “and see us from a little closer.”
A dim shape was down there just beneath them, crouching on the dark turf.
“Come on!” Galen’s voice was murderous.
The figure stood up, small and indistinct. Then the tiny moon, Pyra, came out. The light from it, ruby and warm, flickered over the girl.