“Do you intend to rebuild it?” Did they know that WolfStar had come back through the Star Gate? Had Axis or StarDrifter told them?
Apparently not. One of the Enchanters shrugged, unconcerned. “No, I think not. You may not realise, Faraday, but the ninth Enchanter-Talon, WolfStar, is not well remembered among the Icarii. If his Barrow collapses, then none of us truly care. It is well that he be totally forgotten.”
An unlikely event, Faraday thought. “And the Star Gate? Have you reached that yet?”
“Yes,” StarRest replied, smiling. “Yes, we have. If you have been into the chamber of the Star Gate you know that there are many entrances, not only through the Barrows.”
“I know. We exited through an ancient tunnel that Jack told me was once your main entrance to the Star Gate. But that collapsed after we had scrambled free. Have you dug it out again?
StarRest shook his head. “I know the tunnel you refer to. No. That is totally destroyed now. But there are several others that lead down, one of them here among these Barrows that apparently your Sentinels did not know about. It is only small, but we have all been down.” He paused. “We have all gazed into the Star Gate.”
For a long time there was silence. Faraday remembered the power and the beauty that the Star Gate contained, remembered the multicoloured stars and galaxies singing as they reeled across the cosmos. Remembered the lure of the Gate as it called to those who gazed into its depths. “So what will you do?” she asked eventually.
StarRest sighed and stretched his hands towards the fire. “Wait. Wait until more of the Icarii have flown south. Wait until StarDrifter has relit the Temple of the Stars. Wait,” he looked at Faraday, “until the Barrows are once more enveloped by the trees. Then we will have a ceremony to reconsecrate this ground. Though I imagine that few but Enchanters will ever see the Star Gate. It is too beautiful . . . too dangerous. You have been blessed, Faraday, to have seen it.”
Faraday took a deep breath, turning the conversation away from the Star Gate. If she thought any more on its beauty and power she would burst into tears. She had been filled with so much hope then, had expected so much. “Have you had much trouble from the Acharites about here?”
“No,” StarRest said. “The borderlands between Tarantaise and Arcness were sparsely populated to begin with and, with the signing of the Treaty of the Barrows -”
Faraday’s eyes widened. She had forgotten that Axis and Raum had signed the treaty with the Barons Ysgryff and Greville that gave most of this land back to the Avar and their forest at this spot.
“- the few farmers that were here have moved south and west to new farms.”
“Yes,” Faraday said. “I noticed how lonely the plains are.”
One of the male Enchanters leaned forward, concerned. “Faraday, we know what you do here. You are Tree Friend and you replant the great forests. Would you like company? Assistance? This is a hard task for one person, and we cannot help but notice -”
“No,” Faraday interrupted harshly. “No,” she repeated, softening her tone. “I am well enough, and this is a task I must accomplish on my own.”
And I cannot bear to have any Icarii with me, she thought, for your eyes and your power remind me too much of Axis. But thinking of Axis made her ask if they had heard any news of the StarMan or Azhure over the past few weeks.
“Almost nothing, Faraday, and what news we have is old. We know that Axis leads his army north into Aldeni to meet the Skraeling horde and we heard that the Enchantress has sailed for the Island of Mist and Memory with StarDrifter.”
StarRest smiled. “Soon this small flame will not be the only beacon lifting into the stars.”
From Tare the Goodwife Renkin marched resolutely east. After she had left StarShine EvenHeart in the market place, the Goodwife wasted only enough time to entrust a brief message to her husband and the coins from the sale of the ewes with a sheep-herder returning to northern Arcness, and restock her pack with food before leaving the town.
Poor Lady, poor Lady Faraday. Fancy travelling into the rolling plains all by herself. What could she be thinking of? What can she be doing out here by herself? I should never have let her leave my home, the Goodwife berated herself. Never let her leave the warmth of my fire.
“She needs a friend,” the Goodwife muttered every morning when she rose at dawn and shouldered her pack. “She needs someone to help her.”
And as she marched, the Goodwife remembered many things.
First, the recipes and spells that her granny had told her bubbled to the surface. Every day, with every step, another memory resurfaced and the Goodwife was constantly stopping, her eyes round with astonishment. “Oh!” she would breathe, “how could I have forgotten that?”
And as she walked, she would spy a herb, and she would pause to touch its leaves, muttering to herself its purpose and the words that needed to be spoken to augment its particular powers.
Occasionally she picked a plant, or plucked a few leaves from it, and placed them carefully into the pocket of her coat. After several days, the Goodwife found she had accumulated such a collection that she spent an entire day drying them before carefully packing them in her pack.
Some of the things the Goodwife remembered she knew her grandmother could never have told her, nor could she ever have witnessed for herself. She remembered struggling out of a cave, with those other few people who had managed to survive, only to see the world they had known devastated by fire that had fallen from the sky – and the great craters they had left in the earth, now gradually filling with steaming water until, within only a few weeks, they were hidden beneath gentle and wondrous lakes.
She remembered standing on a mountain and seeing a great forest, a sea of emerald swaying in the gentle breeze. Bright-hued butterflies fluttered from tree to tree, but when her memory deepened and strengthened, the Goodwife realised that they were not butterflies at all, but more of the beautiful flying people she had spoken to in Tare.
Many fluttered about pastel-coloured spires reaching from the forest canopy into the sky.
She remembered a time when flying people were not the strangest folk she could expect to meet in her local market, and when song and music were so widespread that life was lived among their phrases and according to their beat.
She remembered a time when the stars were closer and when there were more gods, more than Artor, who walked the land.
At that memory the Goodwife paused and stamped her foot on the hard soil. “And damn that plough,” she muttered, “for it did nothing but wreck my good man’s back and keep his feet mired in the mud day after day.”
After several days of walking (or was it longer – she had been so mired herself in memories that she’d lost all sense of time), the Goodwife approached the Silent Woman Woods. For many hours she stood at its southern border and stared into its dark depths. All her life she had been taught to hate the forests that had once covered this land, but the Goodwife felt no fear gazing at these trees. The teachings of the Seneschal had receded so far by this stage that she just stood and admired, and thought that the Woods’ depths were not so much dark as pleasantly shaded from the sun.
And the trees spoke to her, although she could hear no words.
After a while, the Goodwife nodded, then turned and walked north-east, hefting her pack more comfortably onto her back.
The next day she reached the first seedling.
The Goodwife stood and looked at it for a very, very long time. Poor thing, struggling to survive here in this wasteland, the tough grasses waving three times its height over it. Lost and lonely it was, a little like the Goodwife imagined the Lady Faraday was at the moment.
The Goodwife grunted and scratched her chin, thinking. Shouldn’t she do something at this point? Wasn’t there something about these seedlings that she should remember? So lost, so lonely, so tiny, struggling for life in this hostile soil.
It reminded the Goodwife of her first child, her daughter, a baby born so small and still that no-one thought she would survive. All night the Goodwife had sat in her bed, her husband
snoring at her side, holding the baby, willing her to live. Then, as the dawn light had crept through the cracks in the door, the Goodwife – very hesitantly, and making sure her husband was still soundly asleep – had hummed a lilting cradle song over the baby, one of the few tunes she had retained from her granny’s teaching. It was a pretty song, and the baby had taken heart from it and had thrived from that morning on.