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His hand smarted. He was very thirsty, but she offered him nothing to drink. He was abruptly so tired that, trembling, he leaned against the stone walls—
“Grandson.”
He jerked back. “What is that?” he demanded. “There’s something alive in the stone. It’s speaking to me in my grandmother’s voice.”
“There is nothing alive here,” she said firmly. “We have entered churendo, the palace of coils. Here the three worlds meet. Do not be surprised by what you see and hear.”
“What are the three worlds?” he asked, but she had already started walking left, deocil, and he had to follow her with the horse in tow. “What’s the use of walking around again?” he demanded of her back. “Isn’t there a path that leads up?”
She stopped abruptly and turned. Her stare shut his mouth, and when she began walking again, he followed silently, humbled.
They walked the dusty path, grit scuffing and slipping under his toes. They circled the hill deocil, as they had outside, but when they returned to the ebony gate it was no longer ebony; it was no longer the same gate but rather a gate of palest rose stone. He gazed out to see the sea surging and rising below. Craning his neck, he could even see the corbeled entrance that marked the ebony gate, now half underwater below them. Then he saw the moon. They had been walking for a scant hour yet the moon lay low on the horizon, almost swamped by the sea, a waning quarter moon surely a good six days past full. Feeling dizzy, he swayed and caught himself, bracing a hand on the stone. But when he touched the stone, he saw through rose quartz onto a different sea, not a sea at all but a river snaking up through sharp-spined hills.
Ships ghost up the river, slender and predatory. The prow of the lead ship is long and lean, carved into the shape of a dragon’s head. Creatures like men but not men stroke at the oars and sometimes, as they skate the shallows, their oars break through a skin of ice. Stone and metal spearheads gleam as sun catches them, rising low over the northeastern hills. Ahead, the river swirls white around a series of posts; someone has staked the river so that ships can’t sail up it.
But the creatures in the ships merely anchor their ships to the stakes and from this base they harry the countryside, burning and killing. Halls and cottages blaze under the pale light of a sun that never rises more than halfway up the sky. Soon night falls, gray and icy. Fires dot the slopes and valleys like an uneven procession of torches. Late into the night they gutter and fade as a storm sweeps in. There is only darkness.
She vanishes around the curve of the lane, still winding up deocil. He grabbed the horse’s reins and followed. He did not want to be left behind. He felt the ground slope under his feet, growing steadily steeper. They were climbing.
The next gate shone with a pale iron gleam. The tide was low. Dawn’s light rimmed the eastern horizon, a sullen gray along the rocks. Stars gleamed fiercely above. He saw no moon. Was that its reflection in the torpid waters below? He leaned forward, pressing a hand against the gate.
* * *
A woman sits in a chair carved with guivres. She wears the gold torque of royal kinship at her throat and a coronet on her brow. Her hair runs to silver, and her face is lined with old angers and frustrations. Her tower chamber is elaborately and richly furnished, but the two guards standing just on the other side of the door betray its purpose: it is a prison, nothing more. She lifts a hand and beckons forward the messenger who has come, a nondescript woman dressed in the robes of a cleric.
“What have you brought me?” she asks in a voice too low for the guards to hear, and in any case they are bored and at this moment chatting with an unseen comrade out on the stairs. “You are certain Biscop Constance knows nothing of this?”
“Nay, Your Highness,” replies the cleric. “The biscop had a new cote built, but this pigeon came to the old one. That is how I came to know of it, through certain faithful of your servants who do not approve of a Wendish biscop being set over them as liege lord and biscop both.”
“Give it to me,” orders the woman. The cleric obediently hands it over, and the woman unrolls a thin strip of linen, rather dirty and damp, marked with letters. She returns it to the woman. “Read it to me.”
The cleric puzzles over it for a while, since some of the letters are stained and blurred, but at last she reads aloud. “To she who is rightfully queen over Varre and Wendar. Hold fast. Do not despair. There is one who has not forgotten you and who will return to aid you in time.”
“That is all?” demands the woman.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“What of the mark, there, at the end?”
“It is some kind of sigil, but I cannot make it out.”
The woman grunts, then, and gestures toward the fire “Burn it.”
A shutter has been taken down to admit air. Through it, he sees the dawn sky and the distant moon: the last sliver of the waning crescent moon setting below trees that range alongside a broad, noble river.
“Pale Hunter, protect me,” he gasped as he shoved himself away from the gateway and staggered backward, colliding with the massive wall behind. There was no way up, no way down, except the way he was going. But maybe he shouldn’t be praying to the Pale Hunter at all. Maybe he should be praying to the Hanged One, who killed himself for wisdom, hanging nine nights and nine days under an ash tree while ravens fed on his liver. But he doesn’t remember. That was a long time ago, and his grandmother’s ways were a curiosity to him; he already believed in the Circle of Unity and the Mother and Father of Life because his parents believed, because he obeyed them, because he liked the sermons given by the frater and later because the words written in the Holy Verses rang so sweetly in his ears that he memorized them, every one.
Now, standing alone with the horse in the narrow lane, he couldn’t recall a single word of all those psalms he had once known by heart; he could only remember his grandmother’s prayers. She hadn’t been blessed with beautiful words or elegant phrases, but she had known how to get straight to the point.
“Oh, Fat One, here are the first leeks from the garden. They’re a little small, but very sweet. Please let my daughter have the second child she longs for. Here are some apple pips I saved over from last harvest. The fourth tree on the left didn’t produce well this past autumn. If you choose not to honor it with fecundity this year, then I’ll have my son-in-law cut it out and we’ll plant a nice hazel tree instead in your honor. I’ve a nice sapling down by the river in mind for you, a good strong one that’s not yet too big to be transplanted. I’ll lay a stick of it here, next to the pips, so you can smell how holy it is.”
That next winter, he remembered, she had had his father cut out the apple tree and planted the hazel instead; his mother had borne a strong, healthy daughter, whom she had named Hathui. Hazel tree and Hathui had flourished together, and every autumn his grandmother secretly set out an offering of the first hazelnut porridge before The Fat One’s altar, by the spring in the hills behind their holding. He always went with her; he never told.
She was gone.
She was long dead. And his companion had vanished up the path, away around the curving walls.
He shook himself free of memory, terrified of being left behind in this place of visions and shadows. The horse plodded stolidly behind as he hurried forward, and his legs burned as he hurried to catch up. At last he caught sight of her. She seemed so high above him, and the air shimmered strangely as though they pressed through another substance entirely, something outside of air, beyond air. His knees hurt. His throat burned. The sun shone with a light as pale as the marble walls.
