The Lost Heiress

15

There no trouble will be;

There the summer will linger.

There I will speak to my people with the water’s tongue.

Flain to Artelan, Artelan’s Dream

RAFFI WAS AWAKE BUT he didn’t open his eyes.

Instead he lay curled in the warm heavy fleeces, completely relaxed, hearing somewhere outside the trickle of water over stones, an endless liquid ripple. Behind that was birdsong, a robin or pine-finch, and beyond that, silence, a tranquil silence with no worry.

He dozed again, but the oily wool tickled his bare shoulders. Scratching, he rolled, yawned, opened his eyes. Then he sat up.

The house was large and pillared, swept clean, the door open, letting sunlight in. Raffi fingered the bites on his face. It was afternoon; he’d slept too long.

Getting up he found his clothes, washed, amazingly soft; as he pulled them on he tried to remember the last time they had been clean, and couldn’t. He splashed in a silver bowl of water, soaking his hair and neck. As he dried himself, the Sekoi’s shadow darkened the doorway. “So you’re awake!” It looked cheerful, despite a swollen eyelid.

“Where’s Galen?”

“Near. He hasn’t slept much. Spent most of the morning talking with Tallis.”

Raffi frowned. He had only glimpsed the woman last night, had felt a great sense of age, a bent figure in the dark. “Is she the only one here?”

The Sekoi grinned and winked at him. “She’s the Guardian. Whether there’s only one of her I haven’t worked out yet.” And it went back out, bending under the low door.

Puzzled, Raffi followed it.

Outside, he stared around in a sudden warmth of delight. The house stood among green lawns, studded with ancient oaks and calarna trees, and beyond were apple orchards; even from here he could smell the ripening fruit. Near him were phlox and high banks of overripe daisies and some red gentians still in flower, and foxgloves with the fat bees fumbling in their speckled bells. The sky was blue and warm. Beyond the trees, a strange hill rose up almost to a point, an eerie humped outcrop with a buzzard circling over it, just as Artelan might have seen it in his dream.

The Sekoi was grinning at him. “Hard to believe, little keeper?”

“How is it here? How has it survived?”

It shrugged. “Ask the Guardian. It seems the Order has more power left than my people thought.”

Galen was sprawled on the grass, under a calarna tree. He looked oddly clean too, wearing a green shirt, and on his face was the look of grave content that Raffi had not seen there before. Beside him was a woman. She stood up stiffly, and he saw she was very old; a small, bent woman in a russet dress, her hair white, her face shrewd and wrinkled.

“Welcome, Raffi. Have something to eat.”

“Thanks.” He crouched down at the half-empty plates, littered with cuts of ham and cheeses and crusty bread that broke white and soft. There were different fruits too, currants and pears, and hot pies full of blackberries and jugs of cream. Relentlessly he began to eat.

They watched him for a while. Then Galen said, “When will I begin?”

“Tomorrow.” The woman’s eyes, palest blue, watched Raffi in amusement.

“Begin what?” he muttered, swallowing.

“The Ordeals.” She looked out at the orchard. “Galen has told me why you’ve come. To find out where this child, this Interrex, is, he will have to drink from the spring, and that needs preparation if it is to be safe. A time of fasting, of prayer, the pilgrimage of repentance around the island, a night alone on the peak. Then, when he’s ready, he will drink.”

Raffi cut himself a big slice of pie. “How long will it take?”

Galen shifted, the awen-beads shining. “That depends on the Makers.”

“And on you,” the woman said softly.

He nodded. “Yes. On me. We may be keepers, Guardian, but life outside has changed us. The teachings are in fragments and we’ve lost so much. Too many days spent running and hiding, not in prayer. Too few relics. And the Maker-life in the trees and leaves and stones curling up, harder to reach.”

For a moment she watched him. “It hurts you,” she said.

He glanced up, eyes dark. “Yes. But this place . . . Here the life is strong. How have you kept it?”

The Sekoi came and sat down, its long fingers picking at the damsons. She nodded at it. “Our friend here has a belt full of gold coins wound about his body.”

The Sekoi almost choked.

Raffi laughed aloud. “How did you know?”

“Oh, I know. But he keeps his treasure hidden, under the surface, and so do we, here. Flain made this island holy. The ground has deep lines of energy, the water strange properties. While the swamp spread around us, year by year, we worried, but the island has stayed untouched. Some keepers still came in the troubled years, we heard what was happening: the Fall of Tasceron, the Emperor’s death. But the swamp thickened and fog rose out of it and we were lost. The Watch never found us.”

Raffi rubbed a finger around his empty plate. Into the silence he said, “Us?”

Tallis looked at him, her smile sharp. “Did I say us? There’s only me.”

She tried to stand then, and Galen had to help her. When he crouched to collect the dishes, her gnarled hand caught his shoulder. “No. You prepare yourself, keeper. The boy will help me—in return I will give him his lessons, while you’re busy.”

Galen nodded gratefully. “He needs it. Work him hard.”

She met Raffi’s eyes and smiled. “Oh, I will.”

But after the dishes were clean she let him go exploring, wandering through the long grass of the orchards. The branches were heavy with apples, russets and pippins and medlars falling into rotten, wasp-tunneled softness in the grass. The air was rich with scent and the buzz of honey-bees. At the end of the fields was a gate, and coming through that he found himself on a track, green and overgrown, the tall umbels of burrwort and hemlock and hare’s-ear turning to heads of seed and fluff that drifted in the slightest breeze. Birds whistled; from the elm trees a few leaves pattered, caught on webs, spinning. It was so warm he took his jacket off and hung it on the hedge and walked on, humming, wondering at how happy he felt. It was as if they had stepped out of some endless heartbreak. Here, time stopped. Nothing could get in.

He left the track at a stile and began to climb the hill, quickly at first and then more slowly, the sweat cooling on him, the breeze whipping his hair. Soon his chest thudded with the steepness; he dragged in huge breaths, laboring on, and whenever he looked up, the smooth green slopes hung out over him, so steep he almost had to pull himself up with his hands.

When he scrambled over the top he was breathless; soaked with sweat, he crumpled in the spiky grass. Below him the island lay warm in the evening light. Beyond orchards and woodland the sun was setting; a great red globe shimmering in the cloudbanks, the strange shifting veils of mist that hid the marsh. He watched it sink, breathing deep, fingering the blue and purple awen-beads. This was how it should be, how it had been. This was the rule of the Order, all that Galen was fighting for. Odd memories moved through his mind. Slowly, over hours, the color drained; the island became a purple twilight of moths and owls calling from the distant woods. He stared down at it, still, unmoving.

That night Galen lit the log fire in the house, and the candles were arranged. The Sekoi watched, curious. “Can I stay?”

“If you want,” Galen said drily. “You might learn something.”

Two of the cats that lived there came in over the window ledge; one climbed warmly onto the Sekoi’s lap, curling itself up, the other coming and purring at its ear. The creature purred back, as if it spoke to them. Then it said, “I apologize for my behavior in the marsh. You were right, as we see.”

For a moment Galen’s hand was still. Then he lit another candle. “This time,” he said quietly.

Raffi turned as the door opened. To his amazement a young woman came in, with long red hair braided and loose. She sat down next to Galen.

“Are we ready?”

“When you are, Guardian.”

She glanced across archly. “Raffi?”

They were grinning at him, he knew. He tried not to look bewildered. “I’m ready.”

So they sat, the three of them, and Tallis began, because he knew it was she, the same woman, somehow impossibly younger. In a shimmer of candles and bells they chanted the long sonorous verses of the Litany, the praises of the Makers, and it sounded more mysterious to Raffi than ever before, until Galen and Tallis went on into chants and chapters he hadn’t learned yet, full of the sorrows of the broken world and the echoes of ancient words.

Later, when he slept in the warm bed, the words ran through his head, endless as the rippling water outside.

ON SARRES, DAY BLURRED INTO DAY. Scarlet calarna leaves fell silently into the grass. Galen fasted, and spent long hours meditating in the quiet garden, as still as if he slept. On the second day he walked barefoot up the hill; from below Raffi watched him, sprawled in the warm sun. They prayed the prayers together, morning and sunset, and then Raffi had lessons from Tallis, or fed the hens, or helped picked the endless crop of apples and pears.

Tallis bewildered him. Sometimes she was old, and sometimes a woman of about twenty, her red hair swinging, full of energy, climbing the apple ladders and whistling. And once, as he fished in the narrow lake for carp, he saw her come out of the trees and call him, and he sat up, cold, because now she was a little girl, barely ten, her voice high and petulant.

“It’s time to come in for tea.”

He stood. She was small, her face plump, her red hair tangled. The russet dress was short, showed bare legs.

“Who are you?” he breathed. “How can you do this?”

The little girl grinned. “I’m the Guardian,” she said. Then she stuck out her tongue at him and ran away.

He asked the Sekoi about it, because Galen was too busy. The creature had made a hammock for itself between trees in the orchard; it spent hours there, slumbering in the shade, lazily.

Now it fanned itself with a chestnut leaf, one leg dangling. “You’re the keeper.”

“But I don’t understand! Is she . . . Have the Makers given her this ability? Which age is she really?”

“Really is a word with no meaning.” The Sekoi closed its eyes. “My people have stories of similar beings. After all, we have our past ages somewhere inside of us.”

Raffi picked a stone out of the grass and turned it over. “You mean she’s not human?”

“Why not? I’m not.”

“Yes, but . . . Well, there’s your people and ours. That’s all.”

“And the Crow?”

He glanced up; the Sekoi was looking at him with one eye open.

“What?”

“What I mean is, small keeper, the Makers remade this world and then Kest warped it. Who knows what beings are here?”

Raffi thought about that for a while. Then he said, “I’d like to live in this place forever.”

But either it was asleep, gently rocking, or it had no answer for him.

Next day he was memorizing Artelan’s dream when he looked up at her. She was sewing the tears in his coat, so old now, her face drawn and wrinkled, her hands stiff, knobbly with arthritis. “Tell me about the well,” he said. “In all the time we’ve been here I’ve never seen it.”

“All the time?” she mocked gently. “How long is that do you think?”

“Six days. Seven?”

“Four.”

He was astonished. “Is that all?”

She brushed wisps of gray hair off her cheek. He saw how the skin sagged in folds under her chin. “That’s all. As for the spring, it’s not far. You can hear it, can’t you?”

“I’ve heard it since we came.”

“If you want to find it, you can. And Galen will be ready soon.” She looked at him, her eyes pale. “Your master is a strange man. Something has entered him.”

He looked back at the tattered book in his lap. “I know.”

Watching him, she said, “A man hard to live with?”

“He always was.” And he lay down on his back in the grass and closed his eyes, the book on his chest.

Later, after supper, he went out across the dim lawns, following the ripple of water. Behind him in the house Tallis sang in her little-girl voice, and the Sekoi lounged by the fire, joining in tunelessly. He didn’t know where Galen was.

The evening was purple, faintly misty. Far off three moons hung, Cyrax, Karnos, Lar, the last a pale crescent nearly setting. Stars glinted in the branches. Everything was so still that his feet sounded loud in the grass, the low branches he brushed aside sharp rustles and cracks.

The ripple was louder. It sounded like a voice now, an endless song of secrets and lost lore. He pushed under a thick yew, and found that its huge ancient trunk grew out from a mass of splintered rock, and beneath it the water ran from a deep crack, falling into a small pond edged with mossy stones. Chained to the brink was a silver cup, lying on its side.

He squatted and touched the water. It was cold, and looked black. A few dead leaves floated on the surface and he picked them off. Then, without thinking, he picked the cup up and filled it, seeing the seven moonsigils of the Order on its side, almost worn smooth from the wear of hands that had used it.

The water rippled and splashed into the pool.

He knew he shouldn’t do this, that he hadn’t prepared, but it was only water, only a sip, and he was so thirsty all at once, and if something happened, really happened, then Galen might be pleased that he could do it, that he was fit to be a real keeper.

He put the cup to his lips, and drank.

It was cold.

Once he’d begun, he couldn’t stop until it was empty.