The Burning Stone
Page 20

Did he understand the fire she held within her, which Da had tried to protect her from? She didn’t want him to see its existence, her knowledge of its existence, as if some change in her might betray it to his penetrating gaze; she was sure he watched her so keenly to see what she might unwittingly reveal. Da always said there were two ways to hide: to scuttle from shadow to shadow, or to talk in plain sight on a busy road at midday. “Talk too much about nothing, or be silent about everything,” he would say, but Wolfhere couldn’t be misled by babble, and she no longer dared hide behind silence. Once she had thought silence would shield her. Now she knew that ignorance was more dangerous than knowledge.
“I was afraid to ask you questions before,” she said finally, not without a catch in her voice. “Even though I wanted to know about Da and about my mother. I was afraid you would make me tell you things. That you were one of the ones hunting us. But I know you were one of the ones hunting us.”
“I would not have phrased it so: ‘hunting’ you.”
“Aren’t you named for the wolf. Doesn’t the wolf hunt?”
“The wolf does what it must. Unlike humankind, it only kills when it is threatened, or when it is hungry—and then only as much as it needs.”
“How did you come to know my mother and father?”
“Our paths crossed.” He smiled grimly, remembering as well as she did the conversation, more like a sparring contest, they had had last spring in the tower at Steleshame. “What do you know of magic, Liath?”
“Not enough!” She reconsidered these rash words, then added, “Enough to keep silent on that subject. I’ve only your word that you made a promise to my mother to protect me. But she’s dead, and Da never once mentioned your name. Why should I trust you?”
He looked pained, as at a trust betrayed or a kindness spurned. “Because your mother—” Then he broke off.
She waited. There was more than one kind of silence: that of the indifferent forest; that of a man hesitant to speak and a woman waiting to hear a truth; the silence that is choked by fear or that which wells up from a pure spring of joy. This silence spread from him into the forest; the sudden stillness of birds at an unexpected presence walking among them; the hush that descends when the sun’s face is shrouded by cloud. His face had too much weight in it, as at a decision come to after a hard fight.
When he finally spoke, he said what she had never expected to hear. “Your mother isn’t dead.”
6
TEN steps, perhaps twelve, on a path through a dessicated forest whose branches rattled in a howling wind brought Zacharias and the woman to another hard bend in the path. Coming around it, coils of air whipped at his face as he followed the Aoi woman through a bubble of heat. The ground shifted under him, and suddenly he slipped down a pebbly slope and found himself slogging through calf-deep drifts of sand. The horse struggled behind him, and he had to haul on it to get it up a crumbling slope to where the Aoi woman stood on a pathway marked out in black stone. Barren land lay everywhere around them, nothing but sun and sand and the narrow path that cut sharply to the right.
Disorientation shook him, his vision hazed, and when he could see again, they walked through forest, although here the trees looked different, denser than that first glimpse of forest he had seen, like moving from the land where the short-grass grows to the borderwild beyond which the tall grass of the wilderness shrouds the earth and any who walk in its shadow.
The Aoi woman spoke in a sharp whisper, holding up a hand to stop them. Zacharias yanked the horse to a halt. In the distance, he heard a moaning horn call and saw a green-and-gold flash in the vegetation; someone was on the move out in the forest. They waited for what seemed an eternity, although Zacharias drew perhaps twenty breaths.
“Hei!” said the woman, waving him forward. She looked nervous, and her pace was brisk.
This time when the path veered left, Zacharias knew what to expect. The ground shifted, but he kept his balance, only to lose it as his boots sloshed in water and a salty wind stung his lips. Water lapped his ankles. He looked up in surprise to see waves surging all the way to the horizon. He staggered and barely caught himself on the horse’s neck. Where had all this water come from? Where did it end?
On his other side, mercifully, lay a long strand of pebbles and beyond it hummocks of grass and scrub. A gleaming path shone under the water, cast in bronze.
“What is this place?” he whispered. The woman did not answer.
The ghost lands, his grandmother would have said. The spirit world. Was he dead?