He stood impatient.
“I’ve thought about it all these years.”
“So have I! As you told me to!”
“And I knew I could do nothing without you.”
He nodded.
“Mother raised Ash up to more than he was, yes. But he always had powers beyond his shipbuilding. He’s not in her power—she’s in his power. Yes! Listen. He can make her crawl to him when he likes. I have seen it. He’s cruel. If you face him, challenge him, I fear for you. He’s an old wizard, you’re a young one. We can’t defeat him with his own power—we must kill him by a trick, by deceit. Once he’s dead she’ll be freed of his spells, and you can free Father without fear. No, listen to me, Clay”—for he had more than once shaken his head and begun to speak—“I know how we can do it. I’ve done it in my mind a thousand times but never could finish it, because you weren’t here. But you are here now and we can do it! Listen! I send Clover up to the house begging Ash to help me, saying I’ve been witched and can’t move my body. He’ll come, because he hates witches and likes to show that his powers are greater than theirs, and because he wants to have me in his power, too. I know that. I’ve thought about this so often. I know how it will be. He’ll come, and I’ll be in the bed there, lying as if helpless, and he’ll be tasting his power over me and drawing it out. And you, you’ll be behind the door, with Father’s long dagger, the one he left for you—I stole it from the house before I ran away, I hid it away, long before Father came home, because I didn’t want Ash’s hands on it. It’s here now, up in the rafters. It’s long and thin and sharp. And you’ll have it ready in your hands. And you’ll kill him, stab him in the back as he deserves, through the heart. Or cut his throat from behind, like you would a sheep. And not a soul in this domain will say a wrong was done.
“And then, once he’s dead—I never thought that Father could be freed of the stone even if Ash was dead—I never thought of that! But if you can free him, then it will all, all be set right! That is more than I could ever think of! I never thought past killing Ash. What does it matter what becomes of her? She was lost long ago. Hollowed out.”
“She is the witch. She betrayed my father and me. I am going to keep the promise. I will set my father free, and he’ll punish her as she deserves.”
“But Ash—”
“Sister, I need your help, not your doubts. Living here in this sty, with these people, what can you know of these things? I do know them. As Lord of Odren in my father’s stead I tell you that you must trust me, and I trust you to obey me. Do nothing and say nothing to anyone. Keep the farmer and his daughter and Hovy all in the house here tonight. And when evening comes, I’ll do what I must do.”
She stood still. She looked at her brother full in the face for a while, then past him at the hill that rose above the farmyard. The dry grass was the color of amber in the afternoon sunlight. A few sheep grazed up near the oak-grove at the crest.
“All these years,” she said—“no, hear me, Clay—I’ve thought and thought how it was and how it must be. Sometimes thinking gets to be like seeing. I see Father at table in our hall that night he came home, laughing, holding me, holding you to him. Then I see Ash lying across my house floor face down and his blood spreading out like spilled washwater. Then sometimes it all goes thin, like a fog or a wisp of veiling, the farm and the hills and the people, it all fades into the sunlight, and I see strange things. I see the valleys all covered with stones and great houses and crowds and crowds of people, no farms or sheep or anything at all but the faces of people everywhere, and they speak but I can’t understand them, and none of them see me though I’m there among them, but they pass and pass and pass not seeing, and their voices are a roar like the sea, and there are great lights among them, flashing and blinding, and still there are more of them, more of them. And I tell myself, the hills are there, the farms are there, they must be, they’ve always been, and as I say it the blind people begin to fade away, and I come back here at last and hear the little sounds of the animals and birds in the stillness, and the leaves in the wind. And then for a while my thoughts about Father and Mother and how to destroy Ash all shrink away and leave me in peace. But at night they come back. And I think, how many times must this happen?” She fell silent.
Clay, puzzled, impatient, half listening, said nothing.
Bees hummed around the red bean-flowers in the kitchen garden, and the leaves of the willows by the farmhouse stirred.
“Well, then,” he said, “this evening I go to the Standing Man.”
For a while she did not speak. “Go in the morning,” she said, her voice soft, defeated. “Before light. I go there every morning. I take food and water to Father. Ash knows it. He came once years ago to watch me. He laughed and went away. He won’t be there, though. They sleep late at Odren. It would be better in the morning.”
Clay resisted, pondered, and at last said, “I’ll stay the night here, then.”
His sister nodded and turned toward the house.
The fog crept low on the fields in the darkness at about waist height. The lantern Weed carried swung above it sometimes, illuminating the ragged, pale surface around like a dim circle of foam or snow. Where the fog rose higher the light shrank into a misty sphere. Clay had told her not to bring the lantern, but she said, “Best to do as I always do,” and lighted the candle in the lantern of brass and horn. She went first, unhesitant. Her brother followed, sometimes stumbling or pausing to get his footing on ploughland or uneven pasture ground. The glow of the lantern descended before him. He followed it, feeling his way. They came into the small valley and to the standing stone.
“Put it out,” he whispered.
She blew out the light. The fog seemed to darken, then lighten around them. Sky and air were paling to grey. It was silent except for the pulse of the sea below the cliffs.
She stood still, at some distance from the stone. Her brother was also motionless. After a long time she murmured, “It’s getting on to day.”
After a time she heard his voice, very low at first. At the sound of the words the hair on her head moved, her whole body shuddered. She stood with her hands clenched, following the spell with all her being, willing it to take hold, to open the stone. Her lips moved silently: “Father, Father, Father . . .”
The valley was full of dimness now, not dark, yet nothing visible.
Clay spoke again, louder. A deep groan broke across the words. The air quivered, rippled, waves of blackness ran through it. There was a cracking, splitting sound and a rattle of broken rock.
Silence followed.
She could see the stone, barely, grey in grey. Her brother stood close to it, motionless.
He raised his hands up and outward. The sister shrank away seeing that remembered gesture. She crouched down in ungovernable fear.
He spoke again, louder, clearly, still louder, and stepping forward put his hands on the stone, pushing and spreading as if to split it open. It groaned again and the groaning grew louder, deeper, with an intolerable shrieking, grinding noise in it. Clay drew back hastily, clenching and unclenching his hands. He stood staring as the hideous noise went on and on and the Standing Man shuddered and lurched and labored, growing dimmer in the dim light and seeming to lose outline, looming up, then shrinking down. Fragments dropped from it, shards of stone. The noise dulled at last to a kind of painful, toneless moaning. The Standing Man stood there, rocking or trembling, stone-shaped, man-shaped.
“Father?” the young man said, his voice hoarse and faint.
Weed stood up. She opened her mouth but said nothing. She saw a bulky body, but if it had a face she could not make out the features. The light of day was growing but the shape and the face were as if still in twilight.