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

For some time she was silent. She wished she had the power of Seeing so they could speak with one another. Sometimes, lying in the brush at the edge of the hidden valley, she had known just from their actions what the winged horses must be saying to one another with their silent, loving ways.

AgWurt meant to break this winged horse’s will. He meant to subdue her until she was as nothing, make of her a tame, domestic animal submissive to him. He meant to do the same to her colt, to clip its wings and make it slave to him. He did not dream that that was impossible—to AgWurt nothing was impossible if he put enough force to it. Telien knew such a creature would die first, before she would be slave; that she would likely kill her colt rather than let AgWurt lay hands on it. AgWurt envisioned himself mounted on a winged horse of Eresu; he thought he would be like Ramad of the wolves then, like Jerthon of Carriol. An invincible warrior. AgWurt’s dreams sickened her. “I saw you with your stallion,” Telien said softly. “He is—he is like fire! Like flame in the sky!” To think of a winged colt born to the captivity of AgWurt’s heartbreaking treatment, earthbound and fenced, was unbearable. “I will get you away from him somehow— somehow I will!

The mare shifted then and turned to look straight at her, lifting her head in pride, and Telien knew suddenly and with terrible joy that she did, indeed, understand her. She didn’t know how, without Seer’s skill to link them. She didn’t care how. The wonder of it made her tremble. She said softly, “Meheegan, Meheegan,” for the mare had given her her name. That sudden illuminating knowledge was like honey, like a song within Telien. “You will be free, Meheegan. I promise you will.” She knew she would kill AgWurt if she must and hoped she would be brave enough.

*

Ram pounded again, swearing. Klingen must sleep like a stone. He was chilled through, his temper gone, his wound painful from the long ride, his bandage soaked with rain or blood or both. Beside him Anchorstar was silent, lost in incredible patience. At last Ram lifted the latch and kicked Klingen’s door open, stepping back in case someone else was there. He had no taste for battling some errant band of Herebians in the middle of this cursed wet night.

No candle flared. No voice rang out. He edged in at last, cautiously, felt Anchorstar behind him, found flint and a small taper under his leather cape and struck light.

But the light showed nothing. There were no walls. He was not inside the cabin though the doorframe pressed hard and real against his arm. Anchorstar touched his shoulder, Ram felt the man’s fear. They faced not the homely cabin room but a void: inside the door vast space yawned, swallowing Ram’s light so the taper’s glow was only a useless pool lost at once in the emptiness. They had come through Klingen’s door, where Ram had come a hundred times—Ram knew a cot should stand just there, a cookfire there with a pot at the back—but he stood instead on the brink of empty blackness and felt Anchorstar draw his breath in fear. Incredible space loomed inside that door, empty space filled with a monstrous cold as if the world ended at their feet.

A voice whispered out, barely discernible yet echoing, a cold voice calling to Ram from no direction and from all directions, and it did not speak in words but soothed him and enticed him; the emptiness soothed and reached around him, holding him as a woman would, so his pain and hunger were gone and he was warm and incredibly comforted. He forgot Anchorstar. He just had to step forward, be soothed—he froze suddenly with the sense of BroogArl all around him, the sense of HarThass himself risen from death to haunt him with the bones of living skeletons from his childhood agonies. Drawn forward against his will, he clung to the doorframe sick and shaken as BroogArl reached, enticed—BroogArl would fling him into the endless dark, and Ram could not resist . . . He spun away from the door, jerked back into the rain, stumbled terrified into the welcome drenching.

He stood shaken and weak, clinging to Anchorstar, and felt hands on his shoulders then guiding him into the hut where a welcome fire blazed.

Anchorstar pushed him into a chair, and old Klingen held his arm as though he might fall. The kettle was boiling, the hut warm and homey. Klingen stared at him puzzled, his brown seamed face and brown hair hardly distinguishable from the rough wood walls of the hut, as if part of the hut itself had come alive to produce the old man, brown wrinkled skin, brown rough nightshirt like bark, even his voice creaking like too-dry wood.

“Iee, Ram, you give me a scare! What was you two doing standing there staring in at me like you’d seen a living ghost and me having to ask you five times to come in before you ever so much as heard me! Come, off with those clothes, both of you, and get yourselves up to the fire.” Klingen turned and began to stir up a pot hanging at the side of the fire, then reached an earthen jug from the shelf and poured out generous lacings into mugs, poured in hot water from the kettle. “Here, you two, this’ll take the chill off’n ya.”

Ram drank the hot liquor so greedily it burned all the way down.

“There, lad, take off the bandages too—I’ll rout out some clean rags.” Then, staring as Ram undid the bandages, “Sure you took one right in the liver near, didn’t you.” Ram was relieved to see that all the wetness was no more than rain, that no blood oozed. Anchorstar sat quietly at the table wrapped in something shapeless of Klingen’s, watching them both with a puzzled look; a tall thin man he was, with hair white as loess dust and eyes—Ram stared. He had never seen yellow eyes in a man. In a goat, perhaps, in a wild creature. The wolves had yellow eyes. But never yellow eyes in a man, eyes completely strange under that shock of white hair. And in spite of his quiet repose, he seemed ill at ease in a way, as if this world of log hut and friendly fire were almost foreign to him.

As Klingen stirred the pot, a fine aroma filled the hut, and soon enough the old man set bowls of steaming stew before them rich with gravy, and new bread, and refilled their mugs with the strong honeyrot and hot water, very little of the latter so that soon a fine maze filled Ram’s mind and, with full stomach, he wanted only sleep. But the two older men had set to talking, and Ram could not close his eyes for the strangeness of the conversation as Klingen tried to winnow out Anchorstar’s identity as a mouse would winnow out grain from sealed stores. Where had Anchorstar come from, and why? Anchorstar, at first reluctant, began at last to speak of the far mountains and of lands where none of Ere had ever ventured, to speak of the old mythical animals that still existed there, of the triebuck and the great dragoncats; and of the gantroed, which Ram knew well from the time on Tala-charen. He spoke of wonders Ram had only dreamed, but he did not speak of when he had gone into the far lands, of how many years ago, or from whence he came. When he rose at last to open his pack, he took from it a small leather pouch and spilled out across the table a cluster of shimmering jewels. Ram and Klingen stared. Never had Ram seen such, stones, deep amber, filled with light. Ram held one before the fire and its colors flashed as if it had absorbed the fire, and from its center a gleaming star shone out.

“How are they called?” Klingen asked, drawing in his breath.

“They are starfires; they are said to bring luck, though I cannot vouch for that. They are said by some to bring . . .” He paused, stared at Ram with that deep, yellow-eyed look that Ram could not plumb. “They are said to give to man a lightness of spirit, a lightness of being that will—that can do magical things. Though not,” he added, “not like the runestone of Eresu.”