Fire roared up behind them. The forest before them seemed to dance, and their own shadows blinded them to the ground they must tread. Raian thought they were running upslope, or perhaps that was only the nightmare sense of trying to outrun the pursuing peril.
Their shadows vanished as the treetops above caught the blaze. Smoke gusted about them. Once again they were knocked to the ground as the earth shivered. Merciless gods—have You all turned against us? Raian thought. He smelled burning hair.
A glimmer of white beneath the blazing trees caught his eye. To his right, a stag, a white stag dipped its great rack and turned, and walked coolly away. Raian grabbed Wolf, redoubled after Deorgard, pointed out the stag to him and ran after it.
No doubting it now: they struggled uphill. And the fire, borne on a rising wind, outstripped them. The stag vanished, but Raian ran on.
And pulled up short at the edge of the world. Wolf skidded on the rocky edge and fell on his buttocks, his boots dangling over emptiness. Deorgard, two paces behind, lurched over them. Pebbles loosed by Wolf’s save splashed ten fathoms or more below. Maglad swore, as Raian and Wolf scrambled back from the edge. Deorgard peered down.
What the water might be, mountain lake or ocean of mystery, they could not see in the smoke, but coolness wafted from it and there was no steam. Then screams behind them turned them back: a wall of flame roared up in the last trees, a handful of their companions burst through it, Deorgard set one foot back towards them and a limb thick as a tree dropped blazing towards him.
He looked up, shifted to dodge, Raian flung himself into his chest and bore them both over the edge. He just had time to roll free of the king and prepare to hit, and to grin as from far above him came a faint “Wooo-haah!”
A madness of bubbles thundered up around him. Only then did he think to fear the depth, or the lack of depth, but down he plunged, touching nothing. The water was warm, warm as a gentle bath. And still he plunged, nor slacked his speed until, wondering how long he could go on falling, he opened his eyes.
A pearly city gleamed below his feet. Amazed, he turned about and swam for it. Silver gates swung open for him at the touch of beautiful, strong youths with floating hair and flashing white teeth, and giggling girls surrounded him and brought him into a palace of many arches and glimmering halls. Tutors came and instructed him in deep arts and he studied for several years, till an old priest, whitehaired but hale, summoned him: We will Prove you at last, he said—
—and Raian coughed and coughed and coughed, as though trying to expel his lungs through his burning throat and Wolf said, “Yah, Rai, come on back to me, boy!”
Sand gritted under his cheek. It seemed to be night.
“He’ll live?” growled Deorgard’s voice.
“Can’t kill this one!” Wolf retorted in scorn.
Raian crushed his eyes shut against a drumming headache and sat up slowly, trying to sort out what was real. “Where are we?”
“That island—we made it.”
Raian pried his eyes back open, and stared up at Wolf staring back down at him. “Island?” Wolf’s face above his beard had a gleam of burnished bronze, in the light of a palisade of fire along a cliff-top and its rippling reflection below. Lightning silvered it erratically, but the thunder seemed to be withdrawing.
“Don’t know what happened to you, sinking like that. I thought maybe something grabbed you, and I wasn’t having any of that! You all right now?”
“Island?” Raian repeated stupidly.
Deorgard’s great arm swept him up by his belly, and he pounded Raian’s back.
“Gaaaah—all right, all right, I’m fine!”
They were seven on the island: Raian and Wolf; Deorgard and Maglad; the young Kerrnev, the first to spot the snow lions so long ago; the Dunmanan junior bard Jav, and a short, redhaired Cardrogh, Shilka—King Harka’s younger brother. They had swum perhaps two furlongs to reach the island, that Raian had been the first to point out, they said, once they realized there was neither beach nor ledge beneath the cliff on which to rest. Of others who jumped with them, some had never come back up, and some, poor swimmers at best, had not made it so far. Wolf gave Raian a quizzical look then. Raian was an excellent swimmer. What happened to you? Wolf wanted to know, but Raian had no recollection of swimming at all, and could only shrug. He half-feared entering the lake again, lest he go searching for that dream-palace. If Wolf had been just a little slower to pull him out, would he be dead now—or a man Proven?
They slept by turns on the little beach. The lightning and thunder ceased at last, and rain began, heavy, and like the lake, curiously warm. By dawn the fire on the cliff had almost faded, though smoke still curled from it.
The circuit of their island was little more than six furlongs, and rose to a central peak crowned by one ancient, massive holly tree that left no room for more than three of them to stand there at once. The peak itself rose above the tops of the tallest trees on its flanks, and gave a fine view of their trap: a lake walled by smooth cliffs, in parts maybe as much as two hundred feet high, lowest at the place whence they had jumped, and often undercut—as where they had jumped, or they had been smashed just above the water’s edge. They could make out no crack or gap in them, though that might have been a trick of the rain. There was one huge hole, big enough that an oak tree could have grown on the lip and had room to spread, but its lower edge had to have been four or five man-lengths above the water.
On their island, apples grew, and hazels, and oaks. The five Geillari turned up their noses at Raian and Wolf’s acorn harvest, laughed at Raian sacrificing the remains of his tunic to use as a soaking-bag for them, but when the aroma of their roasting rose from the deadwood-fire, they began to reconsider. Deorgard stared his stare at Raian when he silently offered the king a palmful, then turned and stared pointedly at the cliff from which Raian had knocked him clear of the fire. Then he stared again at the boy.
You have to be high king so that I can save my people, at least for another generation, Raian thought, meeting his stare.
Deorgard tried an acorn. So did the rest. Thereafter, though they rolled their eyes or sighed when facing another meal of acorns, they ate all that the two Wyrdlings could provide. Fortunately, the dry summer that had made the fire so potent had done the same by the acorn bounty.
Clouds hung over them for a week, and it rained often, as the long drought broke at last and the Lady of the Rains caught up on Her work. They caught birds, even a swan once; turtles; and a thick, copper-colored snake. They had no further fear of eating of the Myrinine, or their fear of starving proved the greater. But never a fish did they see in the warm blue waters about them. Noting this, even Wolf refrained from swimming again: of all the marvels they had seen, a lake without fish came close to being the most uncanny of them all.
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Jav sang for them, shyly offered one or two of his own works. And they talked—or Kerrnev did, dreaming of what heroes they would be when they were home at last. They would be earls, and Jav would be King of the Bards with his lay of their deeds.
“And you will be high king of all our people!” he crowed to Deorgard. “Men will flock to the banner of the conqueror of the Demonwood!” Deorgard stared at him, but Kerrnev was too intoxicated with his prophecy to notice.
Jav sat combing out Deorgard’s hair. The young bard kept his comb as close as other men kept their knives or closer as, in the swim, Deorgard himself had let the steel gift of Dunare fall to the depths. And by now Raian had learned that what he thought was his first humiliation was nothing of the sort. Among the “wild” Geillari, men dressed men’s hair. Only the most love-besotted husband suffered his own wife to touch his locks, and Deorgard would no more have permitted a woman to comb him than to bathe him.
Now Jav murmured as he worked, “Well you might, lord. And well you should.”
“Should?”
“Is it not what we came into this land for, under Berulf? I am proud of my little Fenustad: we are prosperous and skilful, and none are braver. But we are only a little land, after all.”
“But now we are Maldan, all of us Maldan together, being yours!” Kerrnev joined in exultantly. “One day we—we!—shall be Peria. Let it be soon, lord!”
Deorgard grunted and stared out across the lake, dimpled under yet another rain, though the seven were dry enough in their leafy lean-to. Suddenly some unseen fire roared up in the great cave across the water, lighting up its roof, and rumbled with a sound more felt than heard. They exchanged glances, but no one felt moved to speak.
That night a keen wind drove the rain away, supplanting it with a sharp, clear chill. The clouds fled and they saw by the stars that they were facing south, the first hint of orientation they had had in many days. Huddled for warmth, all seven watched together for the dawn, and Jav led a cheer as Areolin’s fire burned the tree-fringed cliff and blue leaped into the sky. Breakfast was a merry meal in the welcome light.
Raian climbed their little peak, to get out from under any tree-shade. Again he looked upon the weary sheerness of the gray walls, as much as three furlongs distant towards the west. Some shores had steep, narrow beaches, as well as he could make out, and the occasional tree or shrub had managed to root itself in some tiny crevice, but nothing looked like anything he was willing to try scaling; not yet. Perhaps they should try to weave a raft to get closer. The darkness of the rock obscured any detail from a distance. That jump in the dim dark stripes, for instance, just east of the great cave: was it a trick of the eyes, a break in the pattern—many places in the Uissig butted angled rock layers against quite vertical stripes—or a split in the wall?
A split, he thought, the more he looked at it, and his heart fluttered. He should swim over and see—with a log, he thought, looking down into the strange water, clear to an awesome depth. Water was always said to be blue, but in his experience it was usually green; the profound dark-turquoise-colored expanse below puzzled him. He looked away from it, back to the irregularity. It led to easily the highest point in all the ringing wall—but there were no trees up there.
The others agreed eagerly that it looked like a crack or cleft, and it grew more convincing as the Sun rose and crossed the south. The log they had been using for a bench they rolled down the beach for him, and Wolf tore at his beard for worry.
“Look,” said Raian levelly. “It’s either the rest of our lives here or—that.” He waved at the water. “We made it once, didn’t we? And this time we go charmed. I’m well-rested, well-fed—” and mad to get out of here, he did not add aloud, and at last they let him go. He went, he said, because he was smallest and fastest; true enough, but the greater truth was that he could not have borne waiting on the shore, idle and helpless.
It was a cleft. He could see the dark and darker banding in the rock shift as he drew nearer, and then he glimpsed the fingertip-twigs of thrawn pine trees growing further in. He grew quickly too warm in the warm water but he thundered on, and crawled out onto a steep patch of black shingle and looked up the crevice. Yes! They could do it. He turned and sent up a spray of gold magelight stars.
The rest had not remained idle and helpless, but anticipated triumph, or a last desperate gasp, by collecting flotables of their own. Soon enough they all stood on the shingle, and surveyed their climb. This split in the wall leaned back, but steeply, half-choked with rock litter: a scrabble, rather than a climb or a walk, two hundred feet and some, and they would be free of their lake prison.
Slowly, not to send loose chunks bouncing down on the heads or hands of the ones below, they climbed through the last of the afternoon. Raian reached an uncertain point, when the last two fathoms proved sheer but the walls squeezed close together; he paused to consider his route and the others rested for a moment. And a rumble like a smithy-fire roaring up from a forge for giants reverberated from all the walls, followed by a vast, soft thump that sea-wise Geillari would have thought a giant’s sail catching the wind, and then it whumped again. A darkness fell over them in their crack, a monstrous shadow; another thump of the air and a great downdraft pushed them into the rock, trees bent and soughed, and the sun shone clear again.
The seven companions looked up and down at one another, but no one spoke. Just then no one wanted to know what it was; so long as it did not bar their way, it was welcome to be Marennin herself. Raian wedged himself in the crack and inchwormed to the top. With a little help from shared linked belts, all soon crawled up, and stood in the cold free wind rushing over the top of the world.
A magnificent view spread out below them. The mountainside fell away southward, smooth and bare as a floor or a wall and unable to decide which to be, before vanishing, a hundred yards down, under broad smoky firs. To their right the sinking Sun turned the uttermost west to a blinding glare; then, half south again they looked along the line of the Dur Rusannmar, peak after green shaggy peak, some taller than their own barren pinnacle, out to a confusion of shoulders and shouldering cloud, and the rugged southern rim of the world. There, ten, twenty leagues away marched a dim palisade, receding still further south as it stretched east. Raian, who loved geography, knew it must be the Dur Mathlune, that guarded the rich vale of the Hallowdale, the heart-land of the Sferiari.
And beyond that again, a guess and no more of the vast snowy crests of the Dur Nefraith, the southern wall of Peria.
The shadows of the Dur Rusannmar and their own height stretched far over the green dells and swells of the east, but brighter, greener arcs streaked the dimness, where loftier hills still caught the golden light. Rushing thither, eastward and a little south, a pale torrent dashed along the southern feet of the Myrinine, down out of some hidden glen in the Rusannmar: the Sionane, Raian figured.
Quietly, in the blent Geilli-Sferan that the Uissigari folk used, Raian pointed out the Mathlune mountains to Wolf, and then had to repeat for the quick-eared king, though in his own dialect. Deorgard listened with his noncommittal stare.
“This river?” he demanded next, nodding down at the grey ribbon a mile or so beneath them.
“The Sionane—you’d think it was the headwaters of the Holywell, but that’s over there—” he pointed to a fine silvery hair glinting here and there below the Mathlune ridge. “It flows out of Ceisaa Lake in the Hallowdale. And that’s the Sindasawood, beyond Sionane there.”
“Another wood,” murmured Kerrnev wearily.
“Reputation?” demanded Deorgard.
“Very beautiful. They say Ceidha-folk live at its heart.”
“Mph,” said the king.
“And there,” said Jav, helpfully and hopefully pointing to the nearby shoulder of their own mountain that hid all their view of its eastern skirts, “that is Fenustad. Your—Sheeonanni?—we call the Kalleoda. My father’s holding stands right on its banks—the Last House of Fenustad.”
“The First,” Shilka corrected, and they stared at him. “For us, aye?”
And they hurried down into the trees. They pushed on well into the night, as long as Raian and Jav’s magelights held out and they had a sure downward path. For a few hours only they slept, just before dawn. Twice the next day they had to skirt sudden gorges across their path, but they reached the banks of the Sionane by twilight, and thundered upon the gates of the fence of the First House at midnight.