Ширли Мерфи - The Shattered Stone [calibre]

“ We? If there were others, why didn’t they help you?”

“I sent them on, Loke and the others. I told them I was all right. It was only a wound, I didn’t think . . .” he stared at her. “Where is Anchorstar? You’re supposed to be with Anchorstar.”

“He—the attack came too soon, right as the fires were lit. I’m afraid something has happened to him.”

“Maybe—maybe he just couldn’t reach you. But the Children . . . Where are the Children?”

‘They’re with Tra. Hoppa. On the mountain. They’re all safe. All who are left. Meatha—Meatha and Clytey are dead.” She swallowed and looked at her hands. “Meatha tried the runestone on a girl, on Clytey Varik. She . . . Clytey had a vision of the attack and started screaming and . . .” she looked at him helplessly. “Oh, Thorn. They took them to the death stone.”

“I see,” he said, and they remembered Anchorstar’s words: It would be difficult to train the older ones—Kearb-Mattus does not want you, you three are a threat to the Kubalese. They stared at each other, the pain of Meatha’s death linking them.

“And Shanner?”

“Shanner is dead.” She swallowed. “I dug his grave, in the burned field.” Tears came then, and she knelt by the bunk, crying against him.

It was not until the wound was cleansed, Zephy fretting over what to do for the festering, that they realized they had been speaking to each other in silence, feeling revulsion at the Cloffi ways and at the Kubalese tyranny, and sensing a commitment, too, that increasingly grew and held them.

“And the stone,” she responded at last, though she had tried to avoid thinking about it. “The stone is gone.” And she knew he felt, with her, the searching in the gutters, her despair.

“The prophecy,” Thorn said, “the prophecy about the stone— found by the light of one candle, carried in a searching, and lost in terror . . .”

“It was lost in terror. That has all happened. And then,” she said, remembering Anchorstar’s words, “Found in wonder, given twice, and accompanying a quest and a conquering . . .”

“Found in wonder,” he said with an effort. His pallor had not diminished. “And who will find it? Given twice?” His eyes searched hers.

“ And accompanying a quest and a conquering—”

Would they see the whole prophecy come to pass?

“I brought food,” she said at last. “Let me help you sit up.” She laid out the mawzee cakes for him. “But you can’t walk. I’ll have to soak your leg, it won’t be better until I do.”

“Soak it with what?”

“Birdmoss, maybe.”

“There’s birdmoss in the river near the village.”

“There are Kubalese on the mountain, searching for something—for your people, do you think? For you?”

“I don’t know.” He turned to look through the wagon’s little window. “We’ll wait until darkness. I can’t run, we’d be sitting targets. See what you can find in those cupboards. Weapons, rope . . .”

She gathered together everything that would be of use to them, and when darkness came, they made a pack with the blankets and slipped out. She had found a small hoard of mountain meat, and some tammi leaves to make tea.

“What if Anchorstar comes back? What if he needs this bit of food?”

“I hope he has gone on along the mountain or is waiting for us. I don’t think he would come back here very soon, with the Kubalese searching.”

If he is alive, they both thought. If they haven’t killed him.

Getting down the steps of the wagon was not easy, and when they had gone only a little way across the grass, she began to wonder if they could manage. Thorn’s weight against her was considerable, and his jerking pace jolted them both. His shallow breathing, from the fever, made her heart lurch with pity, and she could feel his effort and exhaustion increasing even before they entered the dark cave.

It seemed an eternity, that trip to the mouth of the cave. There they rested for a long time, Thorn exhausted and Zephy aching from her effort. But night was coming down; the darkness would protect them. They started at last along the river, and where it foamed in a pool above Dunoon she found birdmoss and knelt to wrap his leg.

“It stings.”

“It’s supposed to. Should we go through the village?”

“Up behind it at the edge of the rocks where there’s some cover, where it’s hard going for horses.”

It was hard going for them, too, and longer this way, the dark climb slow and difficult. She wished she had stolen the Kubalese horses. “Be careful, can’t you!” Thorn growled. “You jammed my leg against a boulder.”

“I’m trying, Thorn. You’re heavy as a dead donkey.”

She could feel him try to take more of his own weight then, and she was sorry she had said anything. At last, high above the plateau, they rested among the sheltering rocks. “Why would a wound make me so weak and give me such a fever? Even if it festers, it—”

“It’s filled with poison. That’s why it festers. The moss will draw it out.” She sounded more certain than she felt. His weakness made her afraid. She had kept seeing Thorn in her mind standing tall on the mountain, his face ruddy with health, his green eyes challenging her. Now his eyes were so pale, and he seemed to have little challenge left in him. Their blind hopping progress must make the pain a hundred times worse. If only they could have a light. But they could not have brought the lantern, it would have been like a fire on the mountain for the Kubalese to see.

At last the moons began to rise, lifting up over the sea beyond Carriol and lighting the stones ahead of them, casting a silver wash across the grassy clearings and up the peaks and cliffs on their left. Now with the moonlight they could go faster. They rested less often, surer in their progress and not blundering into boulders. They felt much easier when they were well away from Dunoon, pausing once beside a trickle of water to fill Thorn’s waterskin and sit on a boulder, staring down at the moon-touched land below them. A few lights still burned in Burgdeeth. Was one of them the Inn? Zephy had a terrible longing for Mama, was gripped by emptiness when she thought of her, alone at the mercy of the Kubalese; without help, if she should need it. Zephy turned away from Thorn, biting back tears.

“She wanted to stay,” Thorn said softly. “She’s a grown woman, Zephy. It was what she chose to do.”

She stared at him. He had seen it in her mind as if it were his own thought. She shook her head and tried to smile.

He put his arm around her, and they sat silently, the comfort of his concern washing over her. His strength, in spite of his illness, wrapped around her so she was soothed by it.

The moonlight made the cleared fields below look pale as ice, the land all awash with patterned silver like the dreams she had once cherished, as if Chealish castles lay there, and wishing springs and the towers of sacred cities.

“As it should be,” Thorn said.

“As Carriol is,” she whispered, her heart lifting.

He looked at her with surprise. “But Carriol’s not like that, not magic, Zephy. It’s only a country, it has bad as well as good. Don’t think to find it perfect.”

“I only thought—the way I always imagined it . . .” It had been magic, the way she’d thought of it. How foolish, she’d never realized. “Still . . .”

“Yes. Still it is free. It is a place to grow in, to become what you were meant to be, maybe.”

“Yes. What we were meant to be.” Then, “Where would Kearb-Mattus have taken the other Children? To Kubal, do you think? But that means,” she said slowly, “that we must go there too.”