Roger Taylor - The Return of the Sword

Farnor closed his eyes. This last was burned into his mind. The bruising and stiffness from his fight with the creature were easing, but he must surely remember for ever the hauntingly beautiful worlds that lay beyond this one: worlds which Rannick, or the creature, or both, had somehow torn a way into and which drew Rannick to his death as, in his lust for yet more power, he had reached ever deeper into them.

Farnor was trembling. His mouth was dry and his brow was damp when he opened his eyes again. It was always so when he thought about what had happened. And he could not avoid thinking about it – over and over. Sometimes, for no reason that he could understand, it seemed he was actually back in the heart of those desperate moments again. He held out his hand as he had then, vainly reaching out to save Rannick while at the same time sealing the rent that had been torn between the worlds.

His hand returned to the top rail of the gate and he gripped it tightly.

What was he? How had he done such a thing?

He shied away from the questions.

Looking down he saw the old timber, weathered and polished smooth with years of usage. The sight and the touch of it were deeply ingrained in him, yet even this was different now. The last few days, the days he had intended would be a beginning, had had a quality so unreal about them as to be almost that of nightmare. Every least task, tasks he had performed for years, had felt false and empty. All the things that should have enabled him to gather together the threads of his old life had instead seemed to conspire to tear him apart.

The questions returned but this time he did not shy away from them.

He squeezed the rail affectionately, as if absolving it from blame for his dark mood. He had no choice, he knew now. It was not possible that he could become Farmer Yarrance in the stead of his murdered father. It was not possible to bring back what had gone, nor any part of it.

What was it his father used to say? ‘Celebrate what you have while you have it. It helps when it’s gone.’ A remark that, notwithstanding his father’s deeply optimistic disposition, he had thought rather gloomy at the time but that, like most parental remarks, had largely passed over him anyway. Now he suspected he was perhaps beginning to understand. He had always felt a contentedness – a stillness – in his father, underneath his everyday moods in the face of the daily exigencies of farm life. And there had been something similar in the four who had come in pursuit of Nilsson, though people more different from his father it would have been difficult for him to imagine. Yengar, straightforward and, when all was over, quite genial. Olvric, quiet but unsettling. And the two women who had made such an impression on Marna. Even now Farnor found it difficult to accept all the stories he had been told about the way Jenna and Yrain rode and fought.

They had suggested that he go with them to their own land. ‘There are people there who will understand your strange gift and what should be done with it,’ Yengar had said to him. ‘And people who can help to ease your deeper pain.’

‘Knew me better than I knew myself,’ Farnor said out loud to the dimming sky. He patted the gate and turned back to the farmhouse. The sight of the old building, still partly gutted from the fire that Rannick had set, and cluttered with the planks and ladders and general paraphernalia of repair work, jarred with his memories of how it should be and confirmed the rightness of the decision he had just made.

He would go after them.

A few days later he was well on his way.

The parting had been harder than he had anticipated, especially parting from the stock, and particularly his dogs, but he had been able to shed such tears as he needed to shed as he rode alone, north towards the Great Forest. It had helped him that Gryss, the Senior Elder of the village, had agreed with his decision. It had helped him even further to note the almost sprightly air that was pervading the old man. He remarked on it.

‘The whole business has given me a shaking that I probably needed, young Farnor,’ Gryss said with a smile that was not without sadness. ‘Perhaps we all needed it, though, pity knows, I’d have wished it in a happier form; so many people have been so cruelly hurt. But what’s happened has happened and it’s up to each of us to make what we can of it.’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘The very least we’ll have is a change of drinking stories. And it’ll be interesting to see how much they do change over the next few months – how many trembling legs and churning stomachs are conveniently forgotten.’ Then he looked at Farnor keenly, his mood sombre again. ‘You’ll be missed, Farnor, not least by me. But you’re right to go. Don’t have any doubts about that. To be honest, I was rather surprised you didn’t go with them right away.’ He lowered his voice. ‘There’s something very special about you, Farnor, and you must learn about it. There’s no one here who can help you, and if you stay, choose to ignore it…’ He hesitated. ‘Perhaps it might fester unseen… like Rannick’s. Who can say?’

It was a dark thought, touching as it did on the knowledge hanging silent between them that, in so small and isolated a community, Farnor and Rannick must surely have some common ancestry, common blood. Hadn’t Rannick called him ‘cousin’ at the end? ‘All this time you’ve been the same as me and we never knew.’

Scorching, frightening words. Perhaps more than anything else, it was these that disturbed Farnor and urged him forward.

The rest of his conversation with Gryss had been full of the practical details of his intended journey – horses, food, clothes, and, not least, the tenanting of his farm during his absence. They parted with an unexpectedly long embrace and, after a day’s preparation, Farnor left the valley quietly, in the half-light before sunrise. He forced himself not to look back along the dark-stained trail he had made through the dew-sodden grass.

His journey into the Great Forest was markedly different from the first time he had made it. Then he had been frantic with terror, clinging for his life to his equally terrified mount and heading towards a world about which he knew nothing save old fireside tales. Now, he was riding at ease and feeling the welcome that the trees were offering him. Yet even so, there was a hint of urgency about his journey that was due to something other than his need to catch Marna and the others.

Before entering the Forest he had sought its permission, after the way of the Valderen.

‘You are ever welcome, Hearer,’ had come back the many-voiced reply. ‘Much has changed. The spawn of the Great Evil is gone from this place and the darkness in you is not as it was.’

‘I’m following my friends to a place where I might learn about that darkness.’

The Forest had trouble with the idea of friends, of such strange togetherness and separateness, but he felt their approval. Yet he sensed also an unease beneath it.

‘What troubles you?’ he asked.

Then had come the faint but recognizable voice of the heart of the Great Forest, reaching out to him from that vast and silent enclave of trees to the north where few were allowed to travel and which the Valderen knew as the place of the Most Ancient.

‘The worlds are troubled still, Far-nor. And the Great Evil still strives to return.’

The worlds!

As he heard the words he was almost overwhelmed by a flood of images. He had experienced them during this early contact with the Forest, yet still they meant nothing to him. And still they were deeply disturbing.

For a moment he was tempted to seek an explanation but he knew that it would serve no purpose. Though the Forest trusted him, and though he could communicate with it as apparently no one had been able to do in generations, what they held in common was the merest flickering candle in the deep darkness of their differences.