“I thought you dwelled farther back in Darklin Reach, somewhere north of Hearthstone.” It was coming back to him now, the whole of what he knew of this shade. “How do you come to be here?”
The shade rippled and changed again, and now it was his mother who confronted him, her face stern and unforgiving. “You were told not to let anything happen to your brother, and yet you did. What sort of brother does that make you, Railing? What sort of son?”
Railing ignored the insults and folded his arms defensively. “I’m wasting my time here. If you have something to tell me, just say it. Otherwise, I am returning to my bed.”
“And you think you will sleep well knowing what you have done? How you have betrayed and manipulated those who depend on you? How you hide a gift from a Faerie creature because you are afraid to reveal your possession of it? How you have become a thing much worse than what you think me to be? Oh, I seriously doubt that you will sleep well at all!”
Railing fought back against his rising anger and deliberately kept his hands at his sides and out of his pockets. “Since you seem to know me so well, you must also know that nothing you can tell me will make a difference in how I feel about myself or my brother or my friends!”
“Nothing?” A meaningful pause. “Really?”
Railing took a deep breath. “What, then?”
“You are such a disappointment to me, Railing! Such a waste of possibilities.” His mother’s voice, cold and scolding. Then the shade rippled once more and suddenly it was a faceless being, cloaked and hooded. “It is I who shall go to bed and leave you to your fate.”
“You can know nothing of fate!” Railing’s hands were clenched into fists. “Only of secrets. You are a master of trickery and deceit. My fate is in my hands.”
The Grimpond went silent then, hovering like the fog from which it had emerged, the substance of it beginning to fragment and vanish. “If you are so convinced of that, go on your way. I am done with you. I would give you help, but you spurn me. You mistrust me, yet you refuse to see that I might have knowledge you lack. Knowledge you desire, Railing Ohmsford. Knowledge you crave.”
Railing stepped back, shaking his head slowly. “No, you would trick me with your words and your pretenses. You seek to play games with me. You did this with others in my family. The histories tell us so. You were never less than deceitful, and I will not become your latest victim.”
The Grimpond came back together again abruptly. “Why not hear my words and judge for yourself? Can mere words do so much harm that even to listen would undo you? Are so you frightened of me?”
The night closed down around the boy as he pondered a response. What should he say? Should he admit his fears and be done with it? Should he deny being afraid and demand that the other give him what he was promising? Should he walk away? The silence lengthened, and the Grimpond waited.
“I want you to do what you think you should,” Railing said eventually. “If you have something to say, I will listen. If not, I will leave.”
The Grimpond chuckled softly and shimmered once more. But this time it did not change form and did not give a quick retort. Instead, it seemed to consider.
“Hear me, then,” it said finally. “I summoned you to see what you were made of, that much is true. Had you been weaker, I might have tried to teach you a lesson. But now I will simply tell you what it is I know that you do not. You have come in search of Grianne Ohmsford. You would know her fate, and if there is a chance that she might be brought back to face the Straken Lord.”
He paused, and the boy waited patiently.
“She lives, Railing Ohmsford. She lives, and she can be what you need. She can do what you expect. If you wish that of her, you should continue on with the knowledge that what you seek is possible. Yet you should be careful what you ask for—an old phrase, but a good one to remember, because all is not as it seems. There are threads that might cause the whole to unravel, like the threads of the ring you carry in your pocket.”
Railing felt a surge of excitement. His efforts would not be wasted. His chances of finding Grianne and bringing her back to face the Straken Lord—and save his brother and possibly the Four Lands—were real. He understood what the Grimpond was telling him about things not working out as he hoped, but he had known that from the first. And any chance at all was the best he could hope for.
“Is this the truth?” he asked the shade. “Are you lying in any way?”
“Not a word of what you’ve heard is a lie, but your expectations may turn my words to falsehood. This is not my doing. Remember that. Keep the memory of what I have told you clear in your mind.”
“I will.”
The Grimpond shimmered and began to recede. “Enough of this. I came to say those words and I have said them. What happens now is up to you. I will watch your progress and record your reactions to everything that happens. It will be most entertaining for me.”
The boy watched the shade trail away like a shadow lost with the light’s passing—there one moment and gone the next. It was still visible as it reached the fog and passed through.
Then it melted away in a scattering of tiny particles and was gone.
Two
The company set out again at dawn, rising to greet a sun hung low and red against the horizon, its rays like tendrils of blood stretched out across the waking land. The intensity of the crimson light against the fading night was unsettling, and the passengers and crew of Quickening ate their breakfast in silence, with uneasy looks toward the east. The haze that caused the light to take on that color was unfamiliar even to the Rovers, and superstition hovered in all their minds.
They set sail nevertheless, and by midmorning the last of the sunrise and its aftermath had vanished into a pale silvery mist, clouds screening all but streaks of the blue sky beyond. The threat of rain loomed north and west in a massing of thunderheads. Storm coming, one or two muttered to the others, just to say the words aloud. Bad one, from the looks of it.
To Railing, sitting with his back to the pilot box—distancing himself from the others—the gathering storm felt emblematic. Once again, he was keeping everything to himself, choosing not to speak of his meeting with the Grimpond, hiding away what had transpired. Now he was keeping two secrets of great import rather than one, both of which he knew he should have shared with the other members of the company. But he still could not bring himself to reveal a thing that might spell the end to their journey. Because no matter what else happened, he could not allow them to turn back.
It was a terrible place to be. He knew the decision was not his alone to make. He knew, as well, that his actions were both selfish and dangerous. He even knew that he was probably not the best one to decide what should happen in light of his brother’s plight. But nothing he had been told by either the King of the Silver River or the Grimpond had changed his commitment or eroded his determination. He was set on finding Grianne Ohmsford and using her to save his brother. The very fact that the Grimpond had told him she lived and he would reach her was enough to cement whatever cracks might have surfaced in the wall of his resolve. It did not matter that there had been an equivocation in the creature’s words, or that they were, perhaps, meant to taunt and tease. It did not matter that he had been warned twice—once by each of his unearthly visitors—that things might not turn out as he expected.
What mattered—the only thing that mattered—was that he would be given a chance at saving Redden.