The Singing by Alison Croggon

  He rose quickly and walked to a nearby brook, where he splashed his face with cold water to wash away the memory. He tried not to think about his time with the snouts. Sometimes he thought it wasn't possible, even in the many moments of darkness that scarred his life, that he had lived through any­thing so terrible. But it hadn't been a dream.

  And that reality, the world of Sjug'hakar Im, marched with the Black Army. It was that reality that had destroyed Baladh and Turbansk and perhaps had already smashed the walls of Til Amon. In Sjug'hakar Im, children were turned into brutalized killers, and beauty or gentleness or courage were mocked, tormented, and destroyed. Hem had seen children who were broken beyond the hope of repair, whose empty stares spoke of suffering so unspeakable there were no words that compre­hended it; he had seen faces twisted and distorted by insanity and pain, faces blind with terror and anger, and dead faces, too many dead faces ...

  He thought of his friend Zelika. He hadn't seen her face after she died. Sometimes he didn't know whether he was grateful to be spared that memory, or whether he had been denied his chance to make a proper farewell. Her lovely, savage features rose in his mind's eye, as vividly as if she now stood before him; and his grief for her opened again inside him, raw and bloody, as if he knew it for the first time. Nothing would ever compensate that loss, nothing would ever heal that wound; even if the Nameless One were defeated and all his works should turn to dust and vanish utterly, Zelika would still be dead. In her death lay all the injustice, all the needless waste, of this terrible war.

  Hem splashed water over his head again, gasping at the cold. He didn't want these thoughts. The Dark had torn apart his whole life, but undoing the Treesong didn't mean undoing the terrible things that had happened, and he would never be rid of his memories. He set his jaw, staring unseeingly over the purple dawn-lit hills, toward the mist-shrouded peaks of the distant mountains.

  He returned to the others, and busied himself helping to strike the camp. No one argued with Cadvan's suggestion that they should travel to the Hutmoors. Hem merely nodded; it seemed like the right direction to him. An earth sense was stir­ring in his body, like a melody he couldn't quite hear, calling him north.

  Everyone seemed to feel the same urgency, as if they knew that time was running out. They packed quickly, and left soon after first light, riding northwest along the borders of the

  Hollow Lands, Hem still riding behind Hekibel on Usha. They averted their faces from the rags and bones and piles of carrion that were the only remains of the Hulls and their mounts, and pushed the horses as swiftly as they could over the low hills. There was a hint of warmth in the sunlight that fell on their shoulders, and the horses were rested and eager, and the empty lands passed by them swiftly. By twilight they had left the Hollow Lands and were approaching the Milhol River, two days' ride south of Milhol itself. A stone Bard Road ran along­side the water, following the river through the Broken Hills to Ettinor.

  Maerad stared at the brown river, with its banks of black reeds poking through the surface of the sullen water, and remembered that her first sight of a Hull had been not very far from this place, farther down the road in the Broken Hills. The fears she had felt then seemed utterly unimaginable now. Perhaps, she thought sardonically, she had since encountered much worse terrors.

  Despite her lack of sleep, she felt no tiredness at all, but her vision was troubling her. The shadow world she had first seen the night before had vanished with the morning sunlight, but as the day wore on, the veils began to return, so that sometimes she wasn't sure which landscape she was riding through—or more accurately, which time. And the hauntings were becoming clearer. Once she saw a long line of people hurrying through a mist, burdened by their belongings, and it seemed to her that they were fleeing in terror. They looked over their shoulders as if in fear of pursuit, and Maerad thought that she saw in their eyes the reflections of flames; but she shook her head and the vision vanished. Another time, near the last circle of standing stones that they passed before they left the Hollow Lands, she saw an old man with a very long beard, tall and thin as a young birch, his arms up-reached to the sky in mysterious supplication. Toward evening, a child ran in front of her, laugh­ing, and Maerad pulled Keru up sharply, fearing he would be trampled beneath her hooves, before she saw that the child was not there. There was something melancholy about all these visions, and Maerad did not speak of them to anyone.

  When they reached the Milhol River, they halted briefly and scanned the countryside. It was deserted; the stone road shone white in the late afternoon light, and nothing moved as far as the eye could see. The only sign of life was a pair of hawks circling high overhead and some gray herons stalking in the reeds.

  "No floods here," said Saliman, staring at the flat plains of Peredur that lay on the other side of the river. "Thank the Light. I've had enough of mud to last me a lifetime."

  "Aye," said Cadvan. "Luck runs with us, so far. If we cross here, we can ride north of the Broken Hills and then cross the Usk Bridge to the Hutmoors, keeping well away from Ettinor. My only fear was that the Milhol might have flooded, and slowed us down. But I think we should go swiftly here; there is something I do not like in this silence, and I don't want to stay on this side of the river."

  At this point the river was wide but shallow, with broad, firm sandbanks on either side, so it was not difficult to cross. The light was failing fast as they forded, but although the horses were stumbling with weariness, they rode on until after dusk before they stopped.

  Maerad offered to keep watch, since she felt no desire to sleep, but Cadvan, studying her with concern, forbade it and insisted that she rest. Although he did not say so, he was deeply worried about her. It was more than a day since she had used her power, but her skin still shone with the strange, golden magery; if anything, it seemed brighter than before. And he thought there was something fey in her eyes, a flickering like madness, as if she were seeing things that were not there. He remembered what she had told him about her dreams, and shrewdly guessed what she might be looking at. This night she had refused to eat at all, only drinking water and, at Hem's insistence, some medhyl, and she barely spoke.

  All day, Maerad had felt as if she were diminishing; the infi­nite power she had touched when she summoned Hem or when she had destroyed the Hulls now seemed out of reach, unimag­inable, as if it had happened to another person. Her body seemed as fragile and light as a piece of spun glass and she felt her mortality more strongly than she ever had in her life. She sensed the Treesong glowing in her skin, and a faint murmur that she knew was a presage of its music seemed still to resonate in her bones. Yet instead of filling her with power, this half music left her desolate and empty, as if she were no more sub­stantial than the shadows of the dead, an illusion glimpsed on a darkling plain that might vanish in the next instant.

  A warm south wind rose, rushing over the grasses and thrashing the branches of the trees where they had sought shel­ter. A layer of clouds spread over the sky, and the moon rose blurred and dim, casting a pale light over the empty lands around them. Hem had the first watch, and sat cross-legged lis­tening to the wind, Irc nestled fast asleep on his lap like a kitten. Hem was so tired that he didn't think anything at all: he was just ears and eyes, his senses poured out passively into the night, alert for any change in its rhythms that might signal danger.

  The moon was climbing to its zenith when Maerad joined him. He didn't need to turn to know exactly where Maerad was: her presence burned in his consciousness like a flaming torch, so that he was almost surprised when he looked at her and only saw the faint golden shimmer that rippled through her skin.

  "Aren't you sleeping?" he asked.

  "No," said Maerad, almost petulantly. "It's boring just lying there. I don't want to stop, we should be riding still, we have so little time ..."

  "We wouldn't get anywhere if the horses collapsed with exhaustion," said Hem practically. "And even if you're not, I'm pretty tired."

  Maerad didn
't answer. She was staring over the plains, and Hem, sensitive to her thoughts, knew she was watching some­thing that he couldn't see. He stirred uneasily, and she turned, suddenly aware of him.

  "Are you afraid of me?" she asked abruptly.

  Hem met her eyes. In the darkness they burned with a cold, blue light, and she seemed to be looking both at him and through him.

  "No," said Hem. "Are you?"

  Maerad looked briefly taken aback, and then laughed. "No ... yes, I am, I think," she said. "I think—maybe—I ought to be afraid." She took Hem's hand and held it, palm up, staring at it broodingly as if she could read her future there. "Everyone else is afraid of me. They sit a little distance away, and they are careful what they say."

  Hem shrugged. "Irc's not afraid of you," he said. "He thinks that you are like Nyanar."

  "The Elidhu you met?" A smile quirked Maerad's lips. "What does he mean?"

  "I think he means kind of—wild and sad. You don't feel like an Elidhu to me, though."

  "What do I feel like, then?" Maerad looked at him challengingly.

  "Like my sister." Hem glanced at Maerad, and then looked away. "I think I am afraid for you," he said, after a silence. "I mean, none of us knows what all this means. And sometimes I just think it means that soon we'll all be dead, no matter what happens, and that seems so unfair." He paused. "And right now you look as if you have a terrible fever, and you ought to be in bed."

  "But I don't have a fever."

  "I know you don't. You just look as if you do. And it's bad that you're not eating and sleeping, and I think that it must be the Treesong inside you somehow, or something like that, that won't let you go. I don't feel it like you do, but I can kind of feel it in you. And I think it's not something that a human body can bear for very long, and I wonder how long you can go on."

  Maerad's eyebrows lifted in surprise, and her gaze faltered.

  "I'm a healer," Hem said, his voice low. "If I touch you, I can feel that your body is like—like one of the strings on your lyre, and it's humming with a note that I can't hear, and it's so awfully tight. But I know you can't stop it happening. So, yes, of course I'm afraid for you. But I'm not afraid o/you."

  "You're a healer?" Maerad studied Hem with a new respect. He spoke with an authority she had not heard in his voice before. Her hand closed tightly on Hem's. "It's strange," she said. "Since we—since the Treesong almost happened, I've been feeling so lonely. I didn't know why . . . but I think that the Elidhu have gone away. I think that they used to be with me all the time, Ardina and Arkan; even when I didn't know they were there, they knew where I was, and they were— beside me somehow. I didn't know until they went away. And now they're gone, and it's so empty."

  "I'm here," said Hem stolidly, and he took Maerad's maimed hand between both of his.

  Maerad's hand shook, and he heard her gasp. "Yes," she said. Her voice was muffled.

  "It won't ever be like it should have been," said Hem. He was suddenly very aware of Maerad's smallness: he was already taller than she was, and the bones in her hand felt fragile, like those of a bird's. "We should have just grown up together in Pellinor, quarreling and playing together, like chil­dren do when you see them. It wasn't like that, and it's not ever going to be like that. I hate the people who did that to us. You're my sister, and I always knew that you were, and I missed you all those years, even without knowing that I did. Even if we don't get through this, I'm glad that I'm here. And I love you, no matter what happens."

  Maerad sat very still, and the light within her seemed to burn more brightly. At last she turned to Hem, her eyes shining with tears. "I love you too, my brother," she whispered.

  She leaned forward and kissed his brow, and the gentle touch of her lips was like a brand on Hem's soul. Then she stood up and walked away into the night, wrapping her cloak tightly around her against the wind. Hem watched her pacing restlessly to and fro, a faint golden light in the darkness, and it seemed to him that he had never seen anyone so lonely.

  Over the next few days, Maerad's sense of confusion deep­ened. She felt that in some indefinable way she was losing touch with herself. It was a struggle to remain in the present, to be aware of the landscape through which she was travel­ing; sometimes she felt as if she were trapped in an endless, shadowy dream. If she concentrated hard on shutting down her Bard senses, or if she pinched her flesh, she found sudden moments of clarity in which she was just Maerad, nothing more, in a single present. These moments were a profound relief.

  In some ways, it was more difficult because she found it hard to adjust to traveling in company. Over the past year she had never journeyed with more than one person, and the pres­ence of Saliman and Hekibel, much as she liked them, dis­rupted the casual rhythm of her intimacy with Cadvan. Maerad was surprised to feel a stirring of jealousy. Cadvan was trans­parently pleased to see Saliman, who was, after all, one of his oldest and closest friends, and the two Bards usually rode side by side and often talked long into the night. She understood, with pained surprise, that Cadvan, too, had been lonely over the previous weeks, that their friendship was compromised by the anxieties he felt about their quest, by his doubts, even by his worry for Maerad herself. The thought filled her with a drag­ging regret; she thought about how much she leaned on his support, and wondered at her own thoughtlessness. At times Cadvan and Saliman seemed completely carefree, as if, now that they were nearing the unknown end of their quest, they could allow smaller anxieties to fall away; and Maerad realized that it had been a long time since she and Cadvan had laughed together. Perhaps their friendship was not as strong as she had thought.

  She had not eaten a meal nor slept since they had left the Hollow Lands, and yet she felt no hunger, nor any diminishment in her energy. Cadvan offered her food every night, and she felt a rebuke in his silence when she refused, even as she was relieved he did not pressure her. Cadvan's silence was tact rather than disapproval, but she did not realize this; nor was she aware of the concern in his eyes when his gaze rested on her. Cadvan's expression was almost always guarded, but at times his fear for Maerad appeared nakedly—when he saw her standing outside at midnight, staring at things visible to no one else, or once when she almost rode Keru straight into a tree that she had not seen because her eyes perceived a landscape that was no longer there. Although he didn't speak of them, Cadvan was more aware of the shadows that troubled Maerad than she knew.

  And both he and Saliman were very conscious of Maerad's fragility. Without drawing attention to it, they made sure that she took no shifts on the watch at night, so that she was never alone. Nights bored her. Sometimes she lay down as if she were sleeping, feeling her body humming with the living power that never left her, or she walked restlessly through the grass, gazing south to the jagged peaks of the Broken Hills, where she sensed a great, heavy shadow, or west toward the Hutmoors. But most often she would sit with whoever kept watch.

  On the second night, she shared a long watch with Hekibel. She found that Hekibel was unexpectedly charming company, with an unspoken gift of understanding that was leavened with a sharp wit. Her conversation soothed Maerad, and for a time it was no struggle to remain in the present, and her ghostly visions vanished. Hekibel passed the time by telling Maerad comic sto­ries about her life as a player. She told them well, and Maerad's laughter echoed over the empty plains and startled a hunting owl, which swooped sharply away from them, hooting in alarm.

  The wind had shifted during the day and died down. There had been a light rain earlier in the evening and the good smell of damp spring earth rose in the night air. Maerad felt more lighthearted than she had since leaving Innail. When Hekibel asked Maerad about her childhood, she answered without discomfort. It was pleasant to talk to a woman, to lean into Hekibel's sympathetic, unjudging ear.

  Maerad asked Hekibel why she had not chosen to go to Innail with Grigar when they had left Desor, where she would have been safer than she was journeying through the wilderness on their uncertain quest. Hekib
el, who liked to keep her hands busy, was rubbing fat into her boots, and when Maerad asked this question, she paused, her face serious, and did not answer for a time. Finally she looked at Maerad ruefully, and laughed.

  "I fear very much that I have fallen in love with Saliman," she said. "And I think I would follow him to the ends of the earth."

  For a moment Maerad didn't know what to say. "Oh," she said, and then she blushed. "Does—does Saliman know?"

  Hekibel was silent for a time. "I can't imagine that he doesn't," she said. "You Bards can see things that others can't. He is always very gentle when he speaks to me, but I rather think that is because he pities me." Hekibel grinned wryly. "It is difficult not to feel a little foolish."

  Maerad clasped her hand. "Oh, no, please don't feel fool­ish," she said, with a rush of warmth. "It isn't foolish to love. Cadvan said to me once that to love is never wrong. It may be disastrous; it may never be possible; it may be the deepest agony. But it is never wrong. I've never forgotten it; it seems true to me." She met Hekibel's eyes, her own gaze suddenly clear and present. "In any case, I think that Saliman does love you."

  Hekibel turned her eyes away. "If he does," she said, "I don't know how anyone would know. He conceals it well."

  Maerad studied Hekibel's profile, the dark blonde hair that curled out from her hood, her soft, sensuous mouth. She envied Hekibel's beauty: next to her luscious roundness, Maerad felt thin and sharp. Hekibel's skin had the golden bloom of a winter apple, smooth and rich, but her sweetness was never cloying: she was too intelligent, too strong. Of course Saliman loved this woman.