“What else?” murmured Melanie, with a shocked look at the others.
She started to speak, started to scream, then held it in, clamped down upon it. “Nothing,” she murmured. “Nothing. Only the sea, the waves of the sea, the surf breaking on the serpent rock. You must bring Aufors there …”
Joncaster shared a look with Melanie, half awe, half skepticism. “You’ve seen enough to keep us all busy, Genevieve,” he said at last. “The rest of you head for the standing stone. Jorub and I know where both the other places are.”
They began to bustle, unloading and reloading the sleds, while Genevieve sat with her head down, concentrating. The last of the dream. After she had seen the serpent rock. She was there with Aufors and the baby. Someone . . . someone was threatening her. Someone said, “Genevieve knows, she’s such a clever, clever girl . . .” and then someone else pursued her, and she climbed onto that horned rock, with Dovidi. Oh, Dovidi. She climbed that rock, carrying the baby and then . . . then . . .
She looked up, shuddering.
Joncaster put his hand upon her shoulder. “What is it, Genevieve? Something else we should know?”
Her eyes focused and she took control of herself. She would not speak of the stone. Not yet. “My father wants to kill you, and then he will give me to the Prince.”
“Gilber can circle behind your father to keep him off you. Jorub will go to the bird rocks, and I’m taking Etain with me,” said Joncaster, nodding toward the men from the marae. “If your husband is at red cliff, he’s still near where the bodies are, and if he hasn’t moved them all, perhaps we can finish the job. The Aresians mustn’t find out what they’re there for . . .”
“I’ll circle out behind your father,” said Gilber. “You’re sure he’s out there alone.”
“Yes,” said Genevieve, positively, almost pityingly. “He’s always been alone.”
* * *
From a rocky height some distance to the west, the Marshal peered down at a straggling and almost invisible track leading toward the rocky wilderness along the coast. He had followed the track all day, even catching recurrent glimpses of the travelers. Once he had seen a line of sleds sliding over the top of a dune and had counted the people on them: seven drivers, plus one.
The one was surely Genevieve. He had not believed she had gone elsewhere, no matter what Ybon Saelan had said. Genevieve had inherited her mother’s unwarranted cleverness, her mother’s ability to gather information she should not have any inkling of and put it together to draw a conclusion that was always and infuriatingly correct. Women were quite bad enough when they were as stupid as they were expected to be. When they were intelligent, perceptive, when they saw through each courteous evasion to the facts one would prefer not to discuss . . .
Why should a man be labeled a monster by laying his motives out in that way when a few harmless evasions would allow his reputation to be unstained and his family to be comfortable? Genevieve’s mother could not have been comfortable in paradise! The questions she used to ask! The way she worried at things! The answers she came up with! She had probably known all about P’naki years before he did. He was certain of it. He remembered her looking at him almost pityingly, with those strange, all seeing eyes. . . .
The previous afternoon, when he had sneaked close to the ones he was following, downwind of them, he had heard his wife’s voice, coming over the sands. He had actually looked up, expecting to see her, before realizing it was not wife but daughter he heard. Genevieve was like her, so like her, with that same voice, that same cleverness. Oh, depend upon it. She knew! She knew all about it.
Women were not supposed to know the truth! They had their youth, their comforts, their purity of soul to guarantee them an eternity fluttering like butterflies among the flowers of paradise. So the Invigilator had said. Being butterflies wasn’t an immortality a man would want, but no doubt it served for women. Thank heaven Genevieve’s mother had died. Knowing what he knew now … he was glad she had died.