In the night he woke in a strange bed, in darkness, and went to the window. There were rights burning in the palace, on the upper floors where the beleaguered young queen would be. Someone else awake, it seemed. Not his grief. His gaze went beyond, to the east. There were stars above Varena in the clear night. They blurred in his sight as he stood there, holding memory to himself like a child.
CHAPTER V
They walked for a long time, moving through a world becoming gradually more familiar as the mist continued to lift. And yet, for all the re-emergence of the ordinary, Crispin thought, it had also become a landscape changed beyond his capacity of description. Where the bird had been about his neck there was an absence that felt oddly like a weight. There were crows in the field again, towards the woods, and they heard a songbird in a thicket south of the road. A flash of russet was a fox, though they never saw the hare it pursued.
At what must have been mid-afternoon they stopped. Vargos unwrapped the food again. Bread, cheese, ale for each of them. Crispin drank deeply. He looked away to the south. The mountains were visible again, rifts in the clouds above them showed blue and there was snow on the peaks. Light, shafts of colour, coming back into the world. He became aware that Kasia was looking at him. ‘She . . . the bird spoke,’ she said. Apprehension in her face, though there had not been in the forest, in the grey mist of the field.
He nodded. He had made himself ready for this during the silent walking. He had guessed it would come, that it had to come.
‘I heard,’ he said. ‘She did.’
‘How? My lord?’
Vargos watched them, holding his flask.
‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘The bird was a talisman given me by a man said to be an alchemist. My friends wanted me to have such a thing for protection. They believe in forces I do not. Did not. I… understand next to nothing of what happened today.’
And that was not a lie. Already the morning felt to be a recollection of being wrapped in mist, with a creature in the Aldwood larger than the world, than his comprehension of the world. Thinking back, the only vivid colour he could remember was the red blood on the bison’s horns.
‘He took her, instead of… me.’
‘He took Pharus, as well,’ said Vargos quietly, pushing the stopper back into his flask. ‘We saw Ludan, or his shadow today.’ There was something near to anger in the scarred face. ‘How do we worship Jad and his son after this?’
Real anguish here, Crispin thought, and was moved. They had lived through something together this morning. Wildly different paths to that glade seemed to matter less than one might have expected.
He drew a breath. ‘We worship them as the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do.’ He surprised himself. ‘We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another?’ It was posed as a rhetorical question, a flourish, but the words hung in the brightening air. A blackbird lifted from the stubble of the field and flew away west in a low, sweeping arc, wings beating.
‘I do not know,’ said Vargos, finally. ‘I have no learning. Twice, when I was younger, I thought I saw the zubir, the bison. I was never sure. Was I being marked? For today, in some way?’
‘I am not the man to answer that,’ said Crispin.
‘Are we … safe now?’ the girl asked.
‘Until the next thing comes,’ Crispin said, and then, more kindly, ‘Safe from those who followed, yes, I believe so. From whatever was in the wood? I … also believe so.’ He doesn’t want the girl. He came for me.
It took a certain act of will, but he kept his mind from calling out again to the silence. Linon had been with him for so little time-abrasive, unyielding-but no one else, not even Ilandra, had ever been within him in that way. My dear, she had said, at the end. Remember me.