Tad Williams: Shadowheart

And she flew on with Barrick running behind her, the dream of a man in the dream of a horse, chasing the queen of the fairies across the endless, empty lands.

The darkness was almost complete but Barrick was not frightened. He could see only what was in front of him, and that barely. Nothing spoke in his head but his own thoughts. Occasionally Saqri broke her long silences to give him encouragement or make some cryptic remark. At last they had gone so far into the valley that the barren hills climbed high on either side and the darkness became a sort of tunnel, with Saqri’s whiteness the only thing he could see. “Where are we going?”

“We are there… I believe.” Her thoughts were strangely hesitant. “The Valley of the Ancestors. I hope it is so, anyway ...”

“Hope so? What do you mean? You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

She actually laughed. It had an edge of wildness. “How could I? These are the lands beyond—where the dead go. And I am still alive… !”

“But you… we’re ...” Suddenly the darkness and the deep-shadowed hills twisted , becoming something even deeper and stranger than before: Barrick felt as though, instead of running on a broad greensward, he now was galloping across an impossibly narrow bridge with nothingness yawning on either side.

The dead lands. The Valley of the Ancestors. The fear was growing so thick he could scarcely breathe. What has happened to my life?

“Quiet now.” Saqri’s voice was music in a haunting minor key. “We are close. We must not frighten them.”

“ They’re frightened?”

“Only of life. Of too much care. Of the pull and grasp of memory.” He could feel deep sadness in her words. “But I must bring all that and more to my brother.”

Things moved around him now in the inconstant darkness, forms with some kind of independent existence from the grass and the hills. He could not see them, exactly, could only sense them as a man can feel when someone stands close behind him. These new forms seemed distant, almost empty, little more than wind and the impression of existence.

“These are the long dead, or perhaps the impressions those left behind when they moved on to other places.” Saqri’s voice seemed distant, her light scarcely more visible than the empty shapes around him. “Do not fear them—they hold no harm for you.”

But he did fear them, not because they menaced him, but because they did not even seem to notice him or anything else. Were they simply shadows left behind, as Saqri said, or were they sunk so deep in death that they could not even be understood anymore by the living? It terrified him to imagine becoming such a thing some day.

“There.” Saqri had moved a little closer, her swan-form faint as foxfire. “I see them—they are in the glade.”

She led him into a murk of shadows that stood like trees. They were silvered ever so faintly by radiance from above, though no source was visible, as though the moon had let some of its light fall like dew before disappearing from the sky.

He saw them, then—a cluster of smeared, dully gleaming shapes that wavered as if seen through deep water or ancient glass. They were deer, or at least each bore a shining filigree upon his brow that might have been antlers. They moved restlessly as Barrick approached, but did not run.

“Do not go closer,” Saqri told him. “They can smell the life on you. They may not remember it but they know it is foreign to this place.”

Now he could see something brighter in the wavering light—eyes. The deer-shapes were watching him. “What do we do?”

“You? Nothing… yet. This first task is set only for me.” And he felt her voice stretch out as her wings had, gently enfolding the herd before them with her words. “Listen to me, all you lords of winds and thought. I seek the one who in life was Ynnir, my brother. I am Saqri, the last daughter of the First Flower.”

Barrick heard a voice, or felt it sighing like the wind in a tangle of branches. “What do you want? You do not belong here. Do the black hellebores still bloom in the Dawnflower’s garden, or has the Defeat finally come?”

“It has not come yet, but it may be upon us with the next breath, my fathers. I have no time to waste, even in this timeless place. Send me Ynnir.”

“The youngest of us… comes ...” The voice was fading even as it spoke.

And then another shape appeared before them, closer and clearer than the others, a great stag whose gleam was far more vibrant than those of its older brethren. A lavender glow hung between its spreading antlers, the warmest thing in all of that cold, dark valley.

“Saqri?” it said after a long silence. “Beloved? How have you come here?”

“By roads I should not have traveled, and on which I may not find my way back, even if you help us.” Her voice was as calm as ever, but some tight-drawn note in it told Barrick that this was not a happy meeting. “If there is to be any chance at all we must be swift. Come back with us, Brother. Your manchild is overwhelmed by what you have given him—his blood boils with it. Come back and help him to live with the terrible gift of the Fireflower.”

The great stag lowered its head. “I cannot, Sister. Every moment it is harder to think as you think. Every moment the current pulls me farther into the river of forgetfulness. Soon the only part of me that will still touch the world will be that part which is of the Fireflower.”

“But you must… !”

“You do not understand. You do not understand… what it would cost me.”

Saqri was silent for a long moment. “Even to save the manchild, you will not come? You would abandon your own last and greatest gamble?”

The great stag raised his head. His eyes for a moment took on the same lavender gleam as the light that shimmered above his brow. “Very well, my sister… my most beloved enemy. The victory is yours. Every instant I stay in the between-lands, the House of Forever draws away from me… but I will do my best.” The beast lowered its pale head like a prisoner awaiting the headsman’s ax. “I will give what I have. I hope that it is enough.”

Briony thought that traveling with even a small army—and Eneas kept reminding her that his Temple Dogs made an extremely small army, scarcely even a battalion—was like living in a movable city, one that had to be taken down every morning and set up again the next evening. Even with a group of men as hardy as the prince’s troops, swift riders who needed little in this spring weather beyond bedrolls and some source of water, they still could travel each day only as far as caution permitted. Few people were on the roads in this strange year, and those who were often had traveled no farther than from one walled town to the next, so information about what lay beyond the Southmarch border was scarce.

Every day took them farther north, winding up King Karal’s Road (named after one of Eneas’ most famous ancestors) out of Syan and through the lands that lay between it and the March Kingdoms, mostly tiny principalities who offered token allegiance to the throne in Tessis or the throne in Southmarch, but which only existed because the long era of peace had allowed them to keep their soldiers at home. Now that the north was in chaos they were less happy and less hospitable than they had been in the past.

They had discovered one such county seat near Tyosbridge. The land’s master, Viscount Kymon, had refused to let Prince Eneas and his men inside the walls, although it would have brought a great deal of money into the pockets of the town merchants. Eneas and his dozen or so officers (with Briony among them) had been invited to spend the night at the viscount’s hall but Eneas had refused, furious at the implication that his men could not be trusted—or worse, that he himself could not be trusted. They had spent the night instead camped outside with the men, something Briony admired greatly as a gesture. Still, a part of her could not help regretting the lost chance at a night on a decent bed. Between sleeping on the ground with the players and the same now with the Syannese soldiers, she had largely forgotten how it felt to sleep on the soft beds of Broadhall Palace, although she remembered very clearly that she had liked it.