A Dark Sacrifice Page 17

  Sindérian shook her head, having no answer to give him. After a fortnight on the road, and every day of it living toward this moment, she was still caught unprepared. But then, she had been depending all along on the hour and the place to show her what she must do.

  And so it will, she told herself. When we have closed the distance a little more.

  In the meantime, it seemed advisable to tell the others what she and the Prince had seen. A thrill went through the entire company as the word spread. Men loosened their swords in their scabbards; all signs of weariness fell away. Even the horses caught some of the excitement and began to dance and shake their heads.

  It now seemed imperative to press on as long as they were able, which unfortunately meant putting off the meal everyone had been anticipating—a small consideration, but difficult not to think about as night fell and stomachs began to rumble.

  It was a clear sky, with the moon an almost perfect circle of incandescent silver, casting a light so bright they could see their shadows moving on ahead of them. To Sindérian’s heightened senses, the night was touched with mystery and wonder. Owls swooped overhead; frogs sang shrill, insistent songs in the rushes; every pool reflected back a galaxy of stars.

  Finally reaching higher and safer ground, they had to stop for sheer weariness. They made a fire out of dried reeds that they braided into sticks, and for a time some of the men were busy dressing and cooking the birds, while others looked after the horses.

  Sindérian woke, cramped and shivering, to a misty grey world, and sounds of the camp stirring back to life around her. She sat bolt upright, realizing with a shock of dismay that like everyone else she had drifted off to sleep almost immediately after eating. If there had been any discussion of who should stand watch, she could not remember it.

  Scrambling to her feet, she made a hurried survey of the camp and was relieved to see that all were present and unharmed. No one looked any the worse for a few hours of sleep. And though Faolein had not returned, she had not really expected to see him again so soon.

  On this morning there was no breakfast, just saddling up the horses, tightening their girths, then forcing cold, stiff limbs back into the saddle again. As the company set off, mist continued to rise from the ground in veils, wreaths, and twisting serpents.

  It smelled like an ordinary fog, Sindérian decided, sniffing the air. It felt like one, too. Yet her intuition told her it was no such thing, even if she could sense no immediate harm in it.

  After an hour’s ride, the trail simply ended at a wide expanse of ominous, dark water. Prince Ruan said he could just make out the other side, but the keen-eyed scouts could not, defeated by the fog and distance. Faced with acres of cattails barely able to keep their heads above a scummy surface, not even Ruan wanted to attempt to cross.

  “Perhaps we went astray among the pools and quagmires yesterday,” Prince Kivik suggested. “Or maybe we missed a fork in the trail, riding after dark.”

  They turned and backtracked for about a mile until one of the scouts, beating back the high grass, uncovered another path branching off from their own, which no one had noticed before. It was even more narrow than the one they had followed and was probably only a game trail, but it did head roughly south.

  At first it seemed to be the right choice; the trail ran more or less straight, and much of the time on high, firm ground. The fog lifted. A faint salty breeze blew in their faces, promising a glimpse of the sea before nightfall. Then they came to a place where the path divided—or two trails met—presenting them with the choice of three different directions. After some consultation they chose the right-hand turning—only to be disappointed a mile or two later when the path brought them up short at a particularly nasty-looking bog.

  By the time they had returned to the fork they were all missing Faolein, and his ability to soar aloft and take accurate bearings. Overhead it was bold, bright noon, and suddenly no one could remember which way was south.

  “We will stop here a while,” Kivik decided at last, “and wait until the sun gives us back our sense of direction.”

  Long before evening, everyone knew that they had been riding in circles most of the day. Trails had divided, looped, run into each other, ended at streams or at standing water, sometimes just ended for no reason at all. The one thing that no path ever seemed to do was bring them any closer to finding a way out of the fens.

  Even knowing that she took a risk in doing so, with Ouriána’s powerful High Priest not far distant, Sindérian had twice been desperate enough to extend her senses outward and ahead, trying to discover what awaited them farther down a trail—and each time she had succeeded only in becoming disoriented. In a maze like this one, she thought sourly, a person might go mad with frustration, with the winding trails and the endless gurgling and trickling of the waters.

  Then, quite suddenly, she understood—truly, she must have been addled not to see it before! She drew rein and fell back, letting the others ride past her, before she dismounted.

  She stooped down by one of the sluggish streamlets. Scooping up a handful of water, she raised it to her lips. It was brackish, definitely brackish. To anyone else it was only water, but to a wizard it was more, much more: it tasted of salt and seaweed, sharks and shellfish; it carried more than a hint of ocean depths, for it was almost three-quarters seawater. There was water here that whales had swum in and ships had crossed—the very same water that she and her friends had nearly drowned in not so many weeks ago.

  A waxing moon and a high tide. She sat back on her heels, grinding her teeth in vexation. And channels and currents and arteries of seawater running through the marshes, mixing with the fresh water.

  But most of all it was the aniffath, Ouriána’s curse. Every last bit of ill luck that Sindérian left behind when she had travelled inland, it was all flowing back to her the nearer she approached the sea, carried on those same currents of brackish water. And now the others are caught up in it as well, simply for riding in company with me.

  She knew the spell might release them eventually; she was reasonably confident it would. It might even lose its grip on her in a day or two, when the moon decreased and the tides lost a little of their force. It would not be the first time she had somehow managed to survive in spite of Ouriána’s ill will.

  But long before that happened it would be too late; the Furiádhin would have reached the coast, where they could buy, steal, or conjure up a boat. They—and Winloki with them—would have already set sail.

  16

  Winloki stood on a low bluff overlooking the sea, watching the waves advance and retreat, fascinated by their constant motion. Winds swirled around her: that from the land pushing her forward, that from the sea cold and stinging with salt. Beyond her vantage point there was nothing but air and water so far as the eye could see. She felt as if she were balanced at the end of the world, on the edge of forever: behind her everything she knew, directly ahead an unknown and unfathomable future.

  When she turned to look over her shoulder, back toward the land, she caught another tantalizing glimpse of a tiny town situated across the narrow inlet: an irregular line of gabled roofs, stacked-stone chimneys, and untidy storks’ nests, partly screened by sand dunes and dune grass.

  A party of guards and acolytes had been dispatched to replenish provisions and to look for a boat capable of carrying fifteen people in reasonable comfort and safety across the channel. Though hardly more than a fishing village, this was the largest settlement they expected to find within hundreds of miles—and in all likelihood the last little bit of Skyrra and the Skyrran people Winloki would ever see. Her wish to be there was so intense, she could almost smell the woodsmoke and boiling cabbage, hear the washerwomen gossiping over their soapy cauldrons and the creaking of cart wheels in the streets.

  The winds blew a lock of red-gold hair into her eyes, fluttered the ragged skirts of her gown. When she reached up to brush the hair from her face, she felt a familiar tug on the silver chain joining
the manacle bracelets, constricting her movements, preventing her spells—most of all reminding her that she was a prisoner. Time and again she had tried to break the bracelets or force them open, but as delicate as they looked, they remained impervious. Nor could she ever learn the knack of removing and replacing the chain, no matter how many times she saw Camhóinhann perform that action.

  She glanced at the armored youths standing to her right and left, her guards, her shadows: Marrec and Efflam, Lochdaen and Kerion. They were, she had learned during these last weeks of captivity, simple men and not unkindly, pledged to the temple in Apharos since they were boys of fourteen or fifteen, in order that their families or their villages might gain dispensations, with no choice in the matter at all. One might call them prisoners too, except that they had no desire to better their situation. They worshipped Ouriána, so far as Winloki could tell, with a pure and simple faith, but her white-haired priests they feared and obeyed—and no amount of proximity could lessen that fear or call that obedience into question.

  Well, she admitted with an inward sigh, no reasonable person could fault them for that. For her part, she was growing accustomed to the Furiádhin in this much only, that sometimes when she looked at them she saw men, not monsters. Yet they were just as terrifying in what remained of their humanity as in what they had become: Goezenou, that bottomless well of hunger and devouring need; Dyonas, fierce, brilliant, and utterly heartless; and Camhóinhann, the enigma, the riddle she had no wish to unravel.

  They had eldritch powers, did Ouriána’s priests. They could do uncanny things. But the worst by far, in Winloki’s estimation, was an ability to inflict frenzy or paralysis, to compel the temple guards and acolytes to absolute obedience, without lifting a hand or saying a word.

  With that thought, the wind suddenly felt colder and sharper; the Princess shivered and hugged the tattered brown cloak more closely around her. No one had seen fit to chastise her, but she felt the threat of it always. She countered that fear by resisting the priests in every way that she could, though her gestures of defiance had so far been met with perfect indifference. Sometimes she did sense strong passions moving between them, for which she was the apparent source—but it seemed that she roused those emotions merely by being, not by anything she did or said.

  At sunset, the wind dropped, the sea turned a sullen red, and those who had visited the town returned. “We looked at many boats,” said Rivanon, the chief acolyte, “and some were large enough and sound enough to suit our purpose, but none that the fishermen were willing to sell.”

  Which means that they are going to steal somebody’s boat, Winloki thought bitterly, watching the men break up their temporary camp and prepare the horses for the short ride into town. It was not to be supposed that Camhóinhann and the rest would allow the wishes or the rights of mere fishermen to stand in their way.

  By the time they reached the outskirts of the town, a huge lopsided moon hovered over the housetops, and the peaked roofs made long shadows on the ground. Winloki rode through the narrow, unpaved streets breathless and watchful. Bats squeaked, swooping overhead; a door slammed in another part of town; yet the way to the harbor seemed strangely quiet. No light leaked out between closed shutters or glowed behind windows made of glass or horn. Even a little tavern they passed—which ought to have been overflowing with business at this early hour—was as silent as a graveyard.

  Winloki swung around in the saddle to accuse Dyonas. “What have you done to the people who live on these streets?”

  “The people in these houses will sleep until morning,” he replied carelessly. The acolytes riding before and behind him were mere blots of darkness, but the robes of the priests had turned a deep wine-red. “Why should we wish to harm them? They are less than nothing to us.”

  Stung by the utter indifference in his quicksilver eyes, she could not resist challenging him. “Then why meddle with them at all? It can’t be that you fear these people.”

  “If the whole town rose up against us they could not stop us. But were they to cause us any inconvenience—that would be their misfortune.”

  The words she had been about to say froze in her throat. The image of Camhóinhann riding down Haakon and Arvi at Tirfang remained painfully clear in her mind; she knew that just as the Furiádhin had killed to take her, they would surely kill to keep her.

  At last they came to the little harbor. In spite of her fears Winloki looked eagerly around her. Though she had no actual memories of sailing vessels, she dreamed of them often. Yet her first glimpse of the fishing boats brought a stab of disappointment. These shabby wooden tubs, with their weathered hulls and fishy odors, fell far short of her expectations—and the way they rose and dipped with every movement of the water made her stomach feel queasy.

  After a brief inspection, Camhóinhann singled out one of the larger boats. She had two masts and was nearly as broad in the beam as she was long, but he seemed to think her seaworthy. Several of the men jumped lightly on board, where they began doing things with ropes and canvas that Winloki could in no wise understand. The rest unloaded the packhorses, unstrapping bedrolls, saddlebags, and knapsacks.

  Through all this activity, Winloki sat with her hands clasped together under her cloak, struggling with a sickening panic.

  I simply can’t do it, she told herself, terrified that once she left Skyrran soil she would never find her way back again. If they mean to kill me, let them do it here. With such thoughts running through her brain, when Marrec reached up to help her down from the saddle she instinctively thrust out both hands to stop him.

  “Walk or be carried,” hissed a rough voice, and looking back over her shoulder, she saw Goezenou watching her with malign satisfaction. “Either way, you will go aboard.”

  The idea of being touched by his snakeskin hands made Winloki physically ill. She plucked up her courage and slid down from the saddle—disdaining the young guard’s offered assistance—and stood on unsteady legs, willing them not to give way.

  “You are robbing some family of their livelihood.” She tried to say it haughtily, but her voice wobbled and came out much smaller than she had intended.

  “And enriching their neighbors,” said Dyonas, coming up beside her. “We have no time to become horse traders—it could be weeks before we found anyone with the price of so many fine horses in a town the size of this one. We will leave them behind, along with their saddles and bridles, for whoever finds them in the morning.”

  At last everything was ready. Tents, food, and other supplies had been transferred from the horses to the boat, and Winloki had reached the point where she had no choice but to follow them on board.

  Not like a coward and not like a prisoner, she decided, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin. She accepted the offer of Efflam’s hand getting over the gunwales, allowed somebody else to guide her to a seat. The remaining men scrambled over the side after her and found places for themselves in the bottom of the boat.

  Someone moved between her and the moonlight, and Winloki looked up to see Camhóinhann standing over her, with his white hair floating on the wind and his legs braced against the pitching and tossing of the boat. The light made a halo around his head.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, over the frantic drumming of her heart. “Will we be sailing to Phaôrax?” She had little idea of geography, and only the vaguest notion of distances.

  “No. The seas have lately become perilous, even for us. It would be folly to attempt a long voyage, and doubly so in a fishing boat.”

  Folly however you look at it, Winloki thought. Yet she could see that the men were pleased and excited, as if they were quite at home in this preposterous vessel, as if the ocean might be something more to them than a watery wasteland.

  Catching her eye, Marrec smiled encouragingly. “We are islanders all—and islanders know the sea like shepherds know sheep, or farmers the soil. Have no fear: we will take you safely across.”

  As the boat slid silently away f
rom the dock, the lights burning in distant parts of the town gradually receded until they were nothing more than yellow sparks shining in the dark. Long before they reached deep water, Winloki had already resigned herself to drowning. The way the boat groaned and protested, it sounded as if she were being battered to death by the waves. One moment a great billow would lift her up, up, up, under that tipsy moon. The next there was nothing beneath her but air, and the boat would drop, hitting the milky water with stunning force, sending up fountains of drenching spray. The sensation of falling was so unnerving, the Princess was convinced each time that the boat would be pitched with all on board into some deep abyss of the sea.

  Instead of creeping inside the tent some of the men erected for her use in the stern, Winloki sat up all night. Yet by the time dawn crept like a shadow over the ocean—and the boat had not been swamped or sunk—she began to share, tentatively, some of the confidence the others felt. And when the rim of the sun rose up from the waters, setting the entire ocean on fire, she had to allow that there was something rather fine in this battle the men fought with wind and wave.

  But in daylight the ocean appeared much wider, the horizon less defined, as if sea and sky were all one element. Without landmarks she was unable to gain any true idea of their progress; it seemed they might hang suspended forever in this vast blue nothingness.

  Then Camhóinhann moved past her, his red robes whipping in the wind, and there was a flash of silver as he drew one of his long knives.

  And so it comes, she thought on an indrawn breath, bracing herself for the worst, closing her eyes so as not to see the blow when it fell. Long moments passed, during which she counted each heartbeat. But the blow never came.