Ширли Мерфи - The Castle Оf Hape. Caves Оf Fire Аnd Ice. The Joining Оf Тhe Stone

By dawn she was standing outside the locked gate, watching the two within with cold distaste. Idiots. Sleeping as far apart as they could in the wide cave. She watched the girl stir, then wake, and Kish drew back into the shadow of the cliff, blocking. Perhaps the girl would go to the boy now, touch him. But no, she knelt beside the dark wolf and began to dress his wounds. Stupid child! The two were as dense and sexless as any humans she had ever encountered.

They must breed! What else was there to do, male and female alone! What else, when her curses tied them so strongly!

At last she fetched food from the ogres’ cave and set it inside the bars, then left them, sick at the sight of them. She would not let them starve, though. That was not part of her plan.

Lobon woke, sensed her approach, watched her come to the bars and shove the bowl inside. He did not move. The sense of her was always around them, growing stronger or weaker as she moved about the abyss, suffocating them when she stood close, tolerable only when she was above in the valley.

He and Meatha could speak to the mare up there, but the poor creature was so miserable and sick she had ceased to say much, so weak from mistreatment, from lack of enough food that they were not sure she would live. Even Michennann was able to do little for her except to bring mouthfuls of green grass when the warrior queen had gone.

Lobon watched Meatha kneeling in the gray dawn, tending Feldyn, her dark hair tumbled over one shoulder, the pale skin of her neck like silk against the wolf’s dark coat as she leaned to lay her cheek against his head. He rose from his stone bed. The gash across his shoulder was stiff and sore, not healing properly, for they had no healing herbs. Meatha looked across at him. “We need birdmoss. For you. For Feldyn.” She said nothing about her own burns. “Michennann could bring birdmoss, carry a little in her mouth. Somewhere where the valleys are green there will be birdmoss beside a running stream. . . .”

“It will do little good to be healed if the sick mare dies and there is only one mount to carry us out. Michennann had best stay with her. It’s a slow business, carrying grass. . . .”

“It’s no good to have a mount, Lobon, if you’re dead of festering wounds!” Kneeling, her hand on Feldyn’s shoulder, she spoke out in silence to Michennann, ignoring Lobon’s advice.

When she raised her head at last, she Saw the gray mare in sharp vision rising into the morning sky, flying swiftly beside the black cliff, saw her rise to keep clear of the bad-tempered lizards. “She will bring birdmoss,” she said, glancing at Lobon. He looked back at her. He guessed she was right. He knew she was beautiful. His need of her began again to run wild; he turned and moved away from her deeper into the cave. “Bring water,” she called after him, her own voice tight with restraint.

He filled the waterskin, which Kish had inexplicably returned to them. But what else would Kish do? She could not breed a son from would-be lovers who were dying of thirst, Or maybe she thought that with less time spent carrying water in cupped hands, there would be more time for idleness, and so for desire. He returned and knelt beside Feldyn, to tip the waterskin to the wolf’s mouth. Meatha moved away at once. As Seers need, so Seers cleave, and in cleaving bring new life. The heat of Kish’s curse never abated.

They ate at last from the bowl Kish had left, sharing the mass of boiled roots and reptiles equally with the wolves. The wolves thought it delicious. It made Meatha and Lobon retch. Feldyn licked the bowl clean.

“When Feldyn is healed,” Meatha said, “we must go from this place. We cannot—” She looked at him pleadingly. “We cannot stay here together.”

He stared at the locked gate.

“Could we—go deeper into the cave?” she asked. “Could there be another way out? I can—sometimes I think I can feel something there. Not very clearly, but does something call to us from deeper in?”

He looked at her, tried to answer, and found himself reaching for her. She rose and moved away.

“ You could go,” he said, deflated and miserable. “If I could make Kish open the gate, if I could trick her, you could call Michennann down, you . . .”

“Trick her how? And where would I go? Except—except to find the seventh stone.”

He frowned at her, puzzled. “The seventh stone?”

“Kish carries six. If we—”

“She carries the stone that was Dracvadrig’s. The two you took from Carriol. And three that were Ramad’s. But the seventh stone is here.” He held the wolf bell out to her. “Inside the belly of the wolf.”

Meatha stared, and she reached to touch the rearing bronze wolf; but at once she drew her hand back.

“I thought you knew,” he said. “The dark seems unable to touch it. The power of the wolves—or maybe Skeelie’s power reaching . . .”

“Skeelie? Skeelie of Carriol?”

“She is—Skeelie is my mother. My father was Ramad,” he said simply.

It was moments before she spoke. He could feel her confusion, and her sharp interest. When she did speak, her voice was barely audible. “Ramad—Ramad lived generations ago.” But her eyes were wide as she considered the truth. “Ramad—did move through Time,” she whispered. “How—how can such a thing be?”

He tried to give her a sense of Ramad’s life, the same sense, the same scenes that Skeelie had given him so often, Time warping and thrusting Ram forward into generations not yet born in his time. And as Lobon wrapped her in the visions of Ramad’s life, a change swept Lobon himself, twisted his very soul, the final changing sense of what Ramad was, what Ramad’s life had meant.

And so what his own life meant.

She sat Seeing it all, sensing with him the power of Ramad’s quest for the shards of the runestone, gripped by Ramad’s commitment, by the urgency that Ramad had felt, even in his own time, for the salvation of Ere.

When the vision faded, she sat silent. He could not remember having moved so close to her. It was impossible to keep from touching her. Now she shared Ramad’s life with him, shared his memory with him. When he took her hand, she startled; but she rose and moved away. Then she turned a forbidding look back at him that only made his desire stronger. He stood up, meaning to go to her, but a stir of wind at the bars made him turn back. Michennann was there, her wings flared against the sky. As she thrust her soft gray nose between the bars, Meatha ran to her, then hugged her through the bars and wept against the mare’s cheek as Michennann nuzzled her.

At last Michennann drew back, placed her muzzle in Meatha’s outstretched hands, and spit a great wad of birdmoss into her palms, shaking her nose afterward at the sharp, bitter taste. She nuzzled Meatha’s cheek once more, then she was gone, in a lifting hush of wings, almost straight up through the abyss. They could feel her terror of the abyss, her repulsion. Meatha watched her out of sight, then turned to dressing Feldyn’s wound with a little of the birdmoss.

When Feldyn was comfortable, she made Lobon lie down, and bared and dressed his shoulder. The birdmoss was still damp from the stream. He watched her, and he wanted to hold her.

“We must not,” she said coldly. She tied the bandage and left him, rubbing the birdmoss from her hands into the burns that scarred her arms. The remaining moss she laid on a stone.

His passion remained like a fever, he could not turn his mind from her. His dreams of her soared and swept him away so he woke exhilarated and needing, then woke fully to feel only frustration. He knew his passion was of Kish’s making, that its results if ever it were let free would threaten all of Ere, but still he was miserable. He did not know what Meatha dreamed, though at times her desire reached burning to him.