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“What’ll we do?” she asked, but her question echoed in the room, taking up the space where there should have been an answer. Quickly, Lirael looked back, but there was no sign of the Disreputable Dog. She had simply disappeared.
“Dog?” whispered Lirael, eyes scanning the room as tears started to blur her vision. “Dog? Don’t leave me now.”
The Dog had left before when people might have seen her, and every time she did, Lirael harbored the secret fear that her one and only friend would never come back. She felt that familiar fear uncoil in her stomach, adding to the fear she felt from what she’d learned. Fear of the secret knowledge she felt seething and broiling in the book she held under her arm. It was knowledge that she didn’t want to have, for it was not of the Clayr.
A single tear ran down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away. Aunt Kirrith wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing her cry, she decided, tilting her head back to keep further tears at bay. Aunt Kirrith always seemed to expect the worst of Lirael, seemed to think that she would commit terrible crimes and never amount to anything. Lirael felt that it was all because she wasn’t a proper Clayr, though some part of her mind had to acknowledge that this was the way Aunt Kirrith treated anybody who departed from her stupid standards.
Lirael kept her head proudly tilted back until she took her first step on the bridge, when she had to look down, down into the roiling mist and the fast-rushing water. Without the Dog’s solid, sucker-footed body at her side, she found the bridge much, much scarier. Lirael took one step, faltered, then started to sway. For a moment, she felt she would fall, and in a panic she crouched down on all fours. The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting shifted as she moved, and it almost fell out of her shirt as well. But Lirael shoved it back in and started to crawl across the narrow bridge.
Even crawling took all her concentration, so she didn’t look up until she was almost across. She was now also acutely aware that her hair was burnt and her clothes totally soaked by the spray that kept washing over the bridge. And she was barefoot.
When she finally did look up, she let out a stifled scream and made a reflexive hop like a frightened rabbit. Only the quick hands of the two closest Clayr saved her from a potentially fatal fall into the swift, cold waters of the Ratterlin.
They were also the people who had given her the shock, the last two people Lirael would expect to see looking for her: Sanar and Ryelle. As always, they looked calm, beautiful, and sophisticated. They were in the uniform of the Nine Day Watch, their long blond hair elegantly contained in jeweled nets and their long white dresses sprinkled with tiny golden stars. They also held wands of steel and ivory, proclaiming that they were the joint Voice of the Watch. Neither of them looked a day older than when Lirael had first met them properly, out on the Terrace on her fourteenth birthday. They were still everything Lirael thought the Clayr should be.
Everything she wasn’t.
There were a whole lot of the Clayr behind them, as well. More of the highest, including Vancelle, the Chief Librarian, and what looked like more of the Nine Day Watch. Quickly counting, Lirael realized that it probably was all of the current Nine Day Watch. Forty-seven of them, lined up behind Sanar and Ryelle, white shapes in the darkness of the Rift.
But the total absence of Aunt Kirrith was the worst sign. That meant that whatever she’d done was punishable by something far worse than extra kitchen duties. Lirael couldn’t even imagine what sort of punishment required the presence of the entire Watch. She’d never even heard of them leaving the Observatory, not all together.
“Stand up, Lirael,” said one of the twins. Lirael realized that she was crouching, still supported by the two Clayr. Gingerly, she stood up, trying to avoid meeting their gaze, not to mention all the other blue and green eyes that she was sure were noting just how brown and muddy her own eyes were.
Words rose up in her mind, but her throat closed when they tried to pass. She coughed, and stuttered, then finally managed to whisper, “I . . . I didn’t mean to come here. It just . . . happened. And I know I missed dinner . . . and the midnight rounds. I’ll make it up somehow. . . .”
She stopped as Sanar and Ryelle glanced at each other and laughed. But it was kind, surprised laughter, not the scorn she feared.
“We seem to have established a tradition of meeting you in strange places on your birthday,” said Ryelle—or perhaps it was Sanar—looking down at the book poking out of Lirael’s shirt and the silver panpipes glinting from her waistcoat pocket. “You need not worry about the rounds or a missed dinner. You seem to have claimed a birthright of sorts tonight, one that has waited long for your coming. Everything else is of little consequence.”
“What do you mean by a birthright?” asked Lirael. The Sight was the Clayr’s birthright, not a trio of strange magical devices.
“You know that alone amongst the Clayr you have never been Seen in the visions,” the other twin began. “Never a glimpse, at least till now. But an hour ago, we—that is, the Nine Day Watch—Saw that you would be here, and in another place also. None of us even suspected that this bridge existed, nor the room beyond. But it is clear that while the Clayr of today have not Seen you in their visions, the Clayr of long ago Saw enough to prepare this place and the things you hold. To prepare you, in fact.”
“Prepare me for what?” asked Lirael, panicked by the sudden attention. “I don’t want anything! All I want is to be . . . to be normal. To have the Sight.”
Sanar—for it was Sanar who had spoken last—looked down at the young woman, seeing the pain in her. Since their first meeting five years before, she and her sister had kept a cautious eye on Lirael, and they knew more about her life than their young cousin suspected.
She chose her words carefully.
“Lirael, the Sight may yet come to you in time, and be the stronger for the waiting. But for now you have been given other gifts, gifts that I am sure will be sorely needed by the Kingdom. And as all of us of the Blood are given gifts, we are also laden with the responsibility to use them wisely and well. You have the potential for great power, Lirael, but I fear that you will also face great tests.”
She paused, staring into the billowing cloud of mist behind Lirael, and her eyes seemed to cloud, too, as her voice grew deeper and became less friendly, more impersonal and strange.
“You will meet many trials on a path that lies unseen, but you will never forget that you are a Daughter of the Clayr. You may not See, but you will Remember. And in the Remembering, you will see the hidden past that holds the secrets of the future.”
Lirael shivered at the words, for Sanar had spoken with the truth of prophecy, and her eyes were sparkling with a strange, icy light.
“What do you mean by great tests?” Lirael asked, when the last faint echo of Sanar’s words were lost, drowned in the roar of the river.
Sanar shook her head and smiled, the moment of the vision lost. Unable to speak, she looked at her sister, who continued.
“When we Saw you here this evening, we also Saw you somewhere else, somewhere we have labored for many years to See, without success,” said Ryelle. “On the Red Lake, in a boat of woven reeds. The sun was high and bright, so we know it will be in summer. You looked much as you do now, so we know it is in the summer coming that you will be there.”
“There will be a young man with you,” continued Sanar. “A sick or wounded man, one we were asked to seek for the King. We do not know exactly where he is now, or how or when he will come to the Red Lake. He is surrounded by powers that cloak our vision, and his future is dark. But we do know that he lies at the center of some great and terrible danger. A danger not just to him but to all of us, to the Kingdom. And he will be there with you, in the reed boat, at the height of summer.”
“I don’t understand,” whispered Lirael. “What’s that to do with me? I
mean, the Red Lake, this man, and everything? I’m just a Second Assistant Librarian! What have I got to do with it?”
“We don’t know,” answered Sanar. “The visions are fragmented, and a dark cloud spreads like spilt ink across the pages of possible futures. All we know is that this man is important, for both good and ill, and we have Seen you with him. We think that you must leave the Glacier. You must go south and find the reed boat on the Red Lake, and find him.”
Lirael looked at Sanar’s lips, still moving, but she could hear no sound save the cry of the river. The sound of the water rushing to be free of the mountain, flowing away, away to some distant and unknown land.
I’m being thrown out, she thought. I don’t have the Sight, I’ve grown too old, and they’re throwing me out—
“We have also had another vision of the man,” Sanar was saying as Lirael’s hearing came back. “Come, we will show you, so you will know him at the proper time, and know something of the danger he is in. But not here—we must go up to the Observatory.”
“The Observatory!” exclaimed Lirael. “But I’m not . . . I haven’t Awoken—”
“I know,” said Ryelle, taking her hand to lead her. “It is difficult for you to gaze upon your heart’s desire when you may not possess it. If the danger were any less, or someone else could shoulder the burden, we would not press you so. If the vision were not of this place that resists us, we could probably show you elsewhere, too. But now we need the power of the Observatory, and the full strength of the Watch.”
They walked back along the Rift, with Sanar and Ryelle on either side of an unprotesting Lirael. Lirael briefly felt what the Dog had called her sense of the Dead, a sort of pressure from all the dead Clayr buried throughout the Rift, but she paid it no heed. It was like someone far away calling someone else’s name. All she could think of was that they were making her leave. She would be alone again, because the Disreputable Dog might not come. The Dog might not even be able to exist outside the Clayr’s Glacier, like a sending that couldn’t leave its bounds.
