He thought of the young queen, sailing. He thought of Linon: that very first time, bowel-gripping terror, and power and awe. So long ago. The cold rain on his face now was a leash that tethered him to the world. He passed through Megarium and reached the walls and saw the road ahead of him through the open gates, and had his first glimpse of the Aldwood in the grey distance beyond.
He paused then, just for a moment, looking, felt the hard, mortal banging of his heart. Someone bumped him from behind, swore in Sarantine, moved on.
‘What is it? ‘ Tiresa asked. Quick one. A falcon.
‘Nothing, love. A memory.’
‘Why is a memory nothing? ‘
Why, indeed? He made no reply, went on, staff in hand, through the gates. He waited by the ditch for a company of horsed merchants to pass, and their laden mules, and then began walking again. So many autumn mornings here, remembered in a blur, striding alone in search of fame, of knowledge, the hidden secrets of the world. Of the half-world.
By midday he was on the main road, running due east, and the great wood marched with him, north and very near.
It remained there through the days of walking that followed, in rain, in pale, brief sunlight, the leaves wet and heavy, almost all fallen, many-coloured, smoke rising from charcoal pits, a distant sound of axes, a stream heard but not seen, sheep and goats to the south, a solitary shepherd. A wild boar ran from the woods once, and then-astonished in the sudden light as a cloud unsheathed the sun-darted back into dark and disappeared.
The forest remained there in the nights, too, beyond shuttered windows in inns where he was remembered by no one in the common rooms and recognized no one after so long, where he ate and drank alone and took no girls upstairs as once he had, and was walking again with the day’s first eastward breaking.
And it was there, a boy’s stone throw from the road, towards evening of a last day, when an afternoon drizzle had passed and the westering sun lay red and low behind him, throwing his own long shadow forward as he went through a hamlet he remembered-shuttered at day’s end now in the cold, no one at all in the single street-and came, not far beyond, his shadow leading him, to the inn where he had always stayed before going out in the dark before sunrise to do what he did on the Day of the Dead.
He stopped on the road outside the inn, irresolute. He could hear sounds from the enclosed yard. Horses, the creak of a cart being shifted, a hammering in the smithy, stablehands. A dog barked. Someone laughed. The foothills of the mountains that barred access to the coast and the sea rose up behind the inn, goats dotting the twilit meadow. The wind had died. He looked back behind him at the red sun and the reddened clouds along the horizon. A better day tomorrow, they promised. There would be fires lit inside the inn, mulled wine for warmth.
‘We are afraid,’ he heard.
Not Tiresa. Mirelle, who never spoke. He had made her a robin, copper-chested, small as Linon. The same voice all of them had, the wry, patrician tones of the jurist by whose new-laid grave he had done his dark, defining ceremony. An unexpected irony there . . . that nine souls of Sauradian girls sacrificed in an Aldwood grove should all sound, when claimed, like an arrogant judge from Rhodias, killed by too much drink. Same voice, but he knew the timbre of each spirit as he knew his own.
‘Oh, my dears,’ he said gently, ‘do not be fearful.’
‘Not for us.’ Tiresa now. Hint of impatience. ‘We know where we are. We are afraid for you.’
He hadn’t expected that. Found he could think of nothing to say. He looked back along the road again, and then east, ahead. No one riding, no one walking. All sane mortals drawing themselves now within walls at day’s end, barred windows, roofs, fires against the cold and nearly fallen dark. His shadow lay on the Imperial road, the shadow of his staff. A hare startled in the field and broke, zigzagging, caught by the long light, down into the wet ditch by the road. The sun and the western clouds above it red as fire, as the last of a fire.