“I did not mean to intrude,” she said, flushing a little. “But I have keen hearing, and a keen understanding of what is going on. We are all feeling terribly sad, lonely, and lost. We began to feel so when the whatever¾it¾was happened yesterday. We must not make the mistake of thinking those emotions are our own.”
She sounded very like Himaggery in that instant. I was amazed.
Silkhands shook herself like a river beast coming out of the water, a single hard shudder to shed a weight of wet. “You’re right, Jinian. Always good for the instructress to be taught by her student. Well. It is wise and perceptive of you, no doubt, and good of you to tell us so firmly. I am beginning to melt from my own misery.”
“You and Peter and I,” said Jinian, pouring herself more cider and taking another crisp, oaty cake from the basket, “feel the same, but I know my only reason for sadness is that the two of you have planned to share something in which I was to have no part, that you would go on to an adventure without me. Well, so I have decided I will not let you go on without me. I have heard your story, read your book, felt your wind, heard your music. I know as much of all this as you do. So I will not be left behind.”
“But King Kelver will be in Reavebridge,” objected Silkhands.
“So,” said Jinian. “Let him be in Reavebridge.” And we could get nothing further from her, even though Silkhands tried to argue with her several times that morning.
All day we waited for something to happen, another silence, another voice. Nothing. We rode in warm sunlight, bought our noon meal from a farmwife¾fresh greens, eggs, and sunwarm fruit just off the trees¾and came down to the banks of the Boneview River at sunfall. We were grubby and dusty, and the amber water sliding in endless skeins across the pebbles could not be resisted. We were in it in a moment, nothing on but our smalls, pouring the water over us and scrubbing away at the accumulated dust, when it happened again.
First the silence. River sounds fading. Bird song softening to nothing. Then the fragment of melody, tenuous, fading, at the very edge of hearing. Kinsman, help.
Just there the river ran east and west in a long arc before joining the northerly flow. We were near the bank, looking down the glittering aisle of sunset beneath the graying honey glow of the sky. Against that sky moved the shape of a man, moving as a cloud moves when blown by a steady wind, changing as a cloud changes. Time did not pass for us. We watched him against the amber, the rose, the purple gray, the vast swimming form filling the sky until stars shone through its lofty head, arms and legs moving in one tortuous stride after another, slow, slow, inexorably walking the obdurate earth toward the north. Fragments of mist shredded the creature’s outline only to be regathered and reformed, again and yet again, held as by some unimaginable will, some remote, dreaming consciousness expressed as form and motion. The idea of this came to all of us at once so that we turned in the direction it moved, toward the north, to stare beyond the lands of the River Reave to the mighty scarps of the Waenbane.
“A god,” whispered Silkhands.
I thought not. Or not exactly. Something, surely, beyond my comprehension, and yet at the same time something so familiar I felt I should recognize it, should know what it was¾who it was. There was something tragic about it, pathetic for all its monstrous size. We were silent, in awe for the long time that darkness took to cover it. Then:
“Are we going there?” demanded Jinian. “Where it is going? North?”
“Peter and I,” began Silkhands wearily.
“All of us,” said Jinian. “I won’t be left out, Silkhands. I won’t.”
“King Kelver…”
“Devils take King Kelver. I’ll spend my whole life weaving an alliance for King Kelver, warming his bed, bearing his children, but not until I’ve done something for myself. I won’t be left behind.”