“So can I.” Carys knelt up eagerly on the crushed needles. “Thank you. So now I won’t need this.” She lifted the bow.
“Maybe,” Galen said stiffly. “Maybe we’re not so safe as you think.”
“I think you are.” She stood up against the sky. “I’ll bring my horse up.” Then turning, she said, “You didn’t tell me your names.”
Galen looked into the dark. “Galen Harn,” he said, his voice quiet. “And Raffael Morel.”
When she was gone he looked across. “Well?”
Raffi pulled the blankets tight. He felt better now, but tired. “She seems all right. And she’s on her own. She won’t be any threat.”
“But is she telling the truth?”
“I don’t know!” His throat was dry; he swallowed a few drops of rain from the ends of his fingers. “I don’t know how to tell.”
Galen was silent. “Once I knew when people were lying to me.”
Raffi winced. The keeper turned on him suddenly as the horse harness clinked in the dark. “One thing. She’s not to know about what happened to me. Understand? She’s not to know!”
Sadly, Raffi nodded.
Journal of Carys Arrin Agramonsnight 9.16.546
The boy’s asleep. Harn has drifted into some sort of trance; he sways and murmurs prayers in the dimness. I’m taking a chance but this book’s small and easy to hide. It may be my last chance to write for a while.
First of all, the tree. I was lying out in the long grass—it was dark, but it seemed to me the boy was speaking to the tree and it was answering. I heard no words, but there was a sort of . . . tingle. I know this is heresy and I know it can’t be real. But why make an illusion if they didn’t know I was there? And the boy believed it.
I heard one thing that puzzled me. The boy distinctly said the Crow was in Tasceron. I remember the stories of the Crow from my training, but I’d always thought it was a figure of myth, a bird that talked. The bolt was on the crossbow; I had it aimed right at the middle of the keeper’s back—but those words stopped me. After all, dead or alive are the orders. And they know something about this Crow. It may be the name of someone real, high in the Order, like an Archkeeper. A code name. It seemed worth a risk to find out.
So I let them see me. Harn is wary; he asked a lot of questions. I told them a story that would get them on my side, make us all enemies of the Watch. I was surprised how easy they were to deceive. The boy looked ill; they both seem half starved.
(Note for Jellie—the psychic defenses the records mention can’t exist. I’m certain they didn’t know I was there.)
I’ll try and stay with them as long as possible—to Tasceron, because I’m sure that’s where they’re going. I know the city is enormous, but if they find this Crow I’ll be with them. To catch Harn and his boy would be good, but someone higher, a real chance to get into the secrets of the Order—that would make old Jeltok sit up. He always said I’d never make an agent.
I’m hungry, and the rain’s started again. On foot we’ll be slow. But they won’t get rid of me now.
12
Tamar called the Sekoi to him and said, “We have brought life to the world, new trees, new animals. What gift have we for you, tall people?”
The Sekoi spoke among themselves. Then they said, “We ask no gifts of you. You are not our Makers. We were here before you. We will be here after you.”
And Tamar was angry with the Sekoi, and turned them away.
Book of the Seven Moons
FOR TWO DAYS THEY TRAMPED the endless downs. They lived on water and whinberries and dried fish from the pack, and Raffi took it in turns with Carys to ride on the horse, which he enjoyed. Galen bluntly refused, and limped ahead.
Over the slow miles of chalk, Carys talked. She told him about her village, the school there, the ruined keeper’s house beside it, and about her father, a small, shrewd man with red hair, though Raffi noticed if he asked too many questions she fell silent after a while. She must be worried sick, he thought guiltily.
The Sekoi tombs still bothered him. They were watchful, and eerie at night. Galen was silent most of the time. After the night at the tree he hurried them on, and Raffi knew that the promise of Tasceron tormented him, the lure of the Crow, of the cure he might find. He pushed them on all day till they were worn out, but even at night Raffi woke to see the keeper sitting up in the moonlight, turning the pages of the Book, while the were-birds moaned over his head.
“What’s wrong with him?” Carys whispered once.
Alarmed, Raffi shook his head. “Nothing. And quiet, he’ll hear.”
“So? You seem scared of him.”
He shrugged. “No. It’s just . . . we’ve been through a lot.”
“He doesn’t treat you very well,” she said archly.
“He doesn’t treat himself very well.”
“That’s no excuse.”
She had plenty to say and said what she thought. She made him laugh, and he hadn’t done that for a long time. He realized how he had longed for company of his own age—at home there had been seven others. Though he’d missed them bitterly at first, he’d gotten used to Galen’s morose silence. Or thought he had.
“How did you come to be a scholar?” she asked as they half slid down a slope of slippery grass, coaxing the horse. Galen was ahead, far below. Raffi pulled a face. “I lived on my mother’s farm. There were eight of us.”
“No father?”
“He’d died. Galen turned up one night, about four years ago.” The sun broke through as he said it, and he had a dream-flash of his mother turning from the door, her eyes full of surprise, the man’s gaunt shadow behind her. “He stayed three days. I remember how he watched all of us. He scared us a bit.”
Carys grinned. “I’m not surprised.”
“No . . . Then he picked me. He didn’t say why. Just caught my arm one day and made me sit down and talk to him. Asked me about my dreams. Looked into my mind, my spirit-web.”
Carys stumbled over a tussock. She brushed hair from her eyes. “He can do that?” she asked, her voice strained.
“Yes. At least . . . Well, sometimes.” Raffi looked up at a wan yellow cloud blotting out the sun. “He asked me if I wanted to go with him.”
She looked at him sidelong. “That’s all? No payment?”
“Payment! Keepers have no money. My mother was honored, and I think a bit relieved. It’s hard to feed eight. And as for me . . .” He shrugged. “I knew it would be dangerous, but that was exciting. And I wanted to learn. The Litany, the mind-webs, the opening and closing, all the rites and the Branches of power. I wanted that. I still do. I haven’t learned half of it yet. They knew so much, Carys, these people! Before the Watch destroyed everything.”
She was silent, nodding.
“The Watch are always after us. A while back I had a feeling they were on our trail. It’s petered out now . . .”
“Raffi!”
Galen’s yell was urgent. He was rigid, staring up at the sky.
Raffi raced down. “What is it?”
“That!”
Before them the sky was sour, a hissing yellow haze. It seemed to shift and swirl as if some enormous insect swarm blew toward them on the rising wind.
“Fireseed!” Carys breathed, beside him.
Galen nodded. “You’ve seen it before?”
“Heard of it.”
So had Raffi, and the sight filled him with terror.