Which was better than the smell of the hoveclass="underline" sweat and hides, sour milk, pungent smoke-dried meat, and a body that would not see a proper bath until spring.
“Did you find the ride difficult, Khirnari?”
Seneth started as Belan ä Talía leaned forward into the circle of firelight. “What have you learned, my friend?” she asked them both. Belan was a seer, a rarity among their kind and probably due to her mixed blood. The rare intermarriage with the Retha’noi had gradually become tolerated, since the hill folk had proven to be staunch allies and kept to the valley as jealously as the ’faie, if not more so. Breeding with an outsider, though? That was unthinkable, and strictly prohibited.
“The tayan’gil is in Aurënen,” Belan replied. Belan and Turmay had been searching together ever since they’d had their first visions of the tayan’gil.
“Aurënen? Are you telling me that the Aurënfaie would create such a creature?”
“Who can say, Khirnari? We only know that one is there.”
“Where in Aurënen?”
The witch opened his eyes at last, and she saw that they were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “I can show you, though I don’t know the name of the place.”
He lifted the wax mouthpiece of the oo’lu and settled his lips inside it. Puffing out his cheeks, he began to play. This horn was almost four feet long, and he had to shift to keep the end of it out of the fire.
It was not music, though the strange buzzing, hooting, booming drone produced by the oo’lu was not unpleasant. If you listened attentively, you could hear the sawing song of summer cicadas, the bellow of a bull, the peeping of tiny marsh frogs, and birdcalls. The patterns were complex, when played by an expert. It was impossible for those not trained to it to get more than a breathy farting sound out of it.
Turmay played a soft song this time, with the hiss of wind over snow and owl calls mingled with the slow drone.
“Close your eyes and touch the oo’lu,” Belan told her.
Seneth did so, and the horn, smooth and warmed by the witch’s breath, vibrated against her palm.
Light flared behind her closed lids as if she’d stepped outside again, then she had the dizzying sensation of flying up through the smoke hole.
Confused images tumbled across the surface of her mind—the blurred glimpses of brown steppes, mountains less jagged than those that protected her fai’thast, and the flash of sunlight across a great broad expanse of water.
The Great Lake, near the Tírfaie town called Wolde. Years ago she’d ventured from the valley as an Ebrados rider, and they’d stolen through the sleeping town. She could still remember the reek of the place, and the filth. But that lake! Standing on the shore under a full moon, she’d never seen anything so beautiful.
Yet Turmay’s magic carried her on, farther and farther from anything familiar, over forests and grasslands, and over a body of water that made the lake seem no more than a puddle.
The sea, the witch whispered in her mind through the droning of the oo’lu. My people once lived all around its shores, until the light-skinned people drove us into the mountains. We were fishermen and sailors, and the cries of the gulls are still in our bones. The oo’lu song shifted to a strange, high-pitched call, like that of the white birds she’d seen circling the lake. Beyond, and beyond again lies your true homeland, Seneth, daughter of Matriel.
They passed over a mountainous island, and then over the sea again to a land unlike her own except for the spine of mountains bleak against a dark blue sky.
“Aurënen,” Belan told her, sounding very far away.
The swath of land between the mountains and the sea was pale and dry like a bone. Turmay’s magic carried her to a town on the shore. The tiny houses along the water looked like nubs of white chalk set in sand, with familiar domed roofs.
The white child is here.
Can you show it to me?
I cannot see it, but I feel its presence like a canker in my mind.
“I can’t see its face in my dreams, Khirnari,” whispered Belan. “It has some magic about it that I can’t break through. But it is small like a child, and it has no wings.”
“But you’re certain our blood runs in its veins?” Seneth murmured. The blood of the First Dragon, the one from whose blood the ’faie had sprung, ran deeper in her people, giving them strong magic. Since coming here and marrying among themselves, a few children had even been born with tiny appendages like wings on their backs, or eyes the color of moonlight on steel. Somehow the Tírfaie dark witches in Hâzadriël’s day had discovered the secret of their blood and found a way to use it to make tayan’gils, whose powers of healing surpassed anything seen before. Rumor had come down through the centuries of other uses the witches made of the creatures and their white blood—the White Road, as they called it—to create elixirs with great powers, though no one knew what, exactly.
“Yes, there is no doubt,” Belan told her. “But it’s not pure. It’s not right.”
Not pure. Seneth’s heart quickened at the possibility that those words embodied.
“It will take months to reach Aurënen,” Seneth mused, concerned. Who knew what disasters might happen by then? There was no way of knowing what the power of this strange tayan’gil would be, but the uneasiness that had plagued her since Belan had first come to her was stronger now. If a tayan’gil born of impure blood somehow harmed an Aurënfaie, the shame would rest with her and her clan. The gulf of centuries that had opened between them and their Aurënfaie ancestors could not change that. Atui could not be circumscribed by time or place.
This tayan’gil must be reclaimed and so the Ebrados would ride—no matter how long the trek, no matter what the risk. It was the way of her people—one that had preserved them down all the centuries since Hâzadriël had brought the chosen to safety in the north. It was the honor and the burden of the Ebrados, guarding the White Road and there was no other way.
Slowly, the vision faded, and the hot, heavy air closed in around her again.
“Thank you, my friends,” she said, anxious to get outside again. But something had been niggling at the back of her mind since the first night Belan had brought the witch to her.
“Turmay, why did you see this ‘child’? It’s nothing to do with the Retha’noi.”
The old man shrugged. “The Mother sends the visions. I follow them.” His fingers moved over the oo’lu, tracing a patterned band. “It’s written here, in the journey path. So I will go with your seekers.”
Seneth regarded him in surprise. As far as she knew, the Retha’noi never left the valley. Then again, they kept to themselves and did not answer to her. Who knew their comings and goings? Moreover, she reasoned, a witch with such powers would certainly be an asset for the search. “Thank you, my friend.”
Emerging from the hut, she pulled on her mittens and shielded her eyes for a moment against the glare off the snow, inhaling deeply. The sun had moved less than an hour across the sky.
The unpleasant odor of the hut clung to her hair and clothes. Mounting her shaggy mare, she led the way down the trail and through the Retha’noi village, then took the steep, packed snow road beyond at a gallop, enjoying the rush of sharp, clean wind against her face.
Turmay sat staring into the fire for some time after Belan and the khirnari had gone, running his fingers around the journey band; the balance must be kept. The length of the journey between the doors of life and death was for the Mother to decide, and those journeys—like a river—flowed in only one direction. The white child changed this. The Mother was angry.