C. Dale Brittain (59 page)

2

Karin awoke before dawn.
 
For a moment she could not remember why she was here, in her own bed.
 
Were all the events of the past few months a particularly vivid dream?

She sat up and remembered.
 
Last night, the arrival at Hadros’s castle, the unsuccessful struggle to hold off wild despair, Valmar’s attempts to comfort her, were all very vague.
 
But the image of Roric guarding their retreat was vivid.
 
He had wanted to die.

She gulped once, but all the tears had been cried out of her and her sorrow had settled down to a burning ache.
 
With blood-guilt on him and the guilt of incest, no future left for him here in mortal realms, he had saved her and Valmar by letting Eirik’s men kill him.
 
All that was left of him was the song Valmar had said they would make for him.

But where was Valmar?
 
In the pre-dawn dimness she could just make out the shapes in the hall, and she did not see him anywhere.
 
Karin pulled on her shoes and went to the door, which was unbolted.
 
She seemed to remember Valmar driving out the others and bolting it when she had begun to weep last night.
 
A thoughtful gesture—the castle’s mistress should not be seen to break down so completely.

But
was
she this castle’s mistress?
 
She opened the door and looked out into the quiet courtyard.
 
She had ruled here for years, and if she married Valmar she would again.

The thought that now that Roric was dead there was nothing to keep her from becoming Valmar’s wife came as a sharp blow, threatening to destroy her aching calm.
 
She took a deep breath and stepped into the courtyard, thinking that she should build up the fires in the bath house—she and Valmar could both use a bath.

Then she saw that the great gates were ever so slightly ajar.

Valmar had gone, then.
 
He had returned to help Roric once he had gotten her home to safety.
 
Men might fight against each other, but they were united in trying to keep the women out of their fights.

She squeezed through the gate and began to run.
 
The sun was not yet up, and there might still be time to reach the faeys’ burrows before they retreated underground.
 
The eastern sky was yellow; at least so far mortal realms were still functioning as they always had.
 
Her feet kept stumbling, and she had to throw up her arms against low-hanging branches that appeared abruptly out of the dimness before her, but she never slowed her pace until she tumbled, gasping for breath, into the faeys’ dell.

It was not too late.
 
Their green lights still burned as she gave through parched lips the triple whistle to tell them she was there.

“Karin!
 
Karin!”
 
They clustered around her, tugging at her skirts.
 
“We don’t understand!
 
Why didn’t you tell us last night how you’d gotten into our burrows?
 
Where did the other young man go?
 
Are you going to marry him instead of Roric?”

For a second she relented and sat down, squeezing their hands and patting them on their heads.
 
They had been her friends for years when no one else had been.
 
But then her need to know overtook her again.
 
“Did Valmar come back here?
 
Yes, the man I was with last night.
 
Is he here?
 
Did he go back into the Wanderers’ realm?”

In spite of the faeys’ insistence that there was no door from their burrows into the realms of voima, they reluctantly admitted that Valmar had appeared in their dell a few hours earlier, had pushed by them to crawl back into the tunnels, and had not reemerged.

“We think he’s been swallowed by the earth,” said the faeys confidently.
 
“But
you
won’t be, Karin, if you stay with us.
 
It’s time for us to go inside now.
 
Do you want some raspberries?”

“Don’t do anything to close the rift,” she said, accepting a handful of berries and stuffing them into her mouth.
 
She immediately began to crawl deeper into the tunnels, the way Valmar must have gone.

When Dag and Nole found them both gone in the morning, she thought, swallowing the berries, they would wonder if they had ever really been there, or if their appearance after dark and disappearance by dawn meant that they were wights from Hel, allowed in mortal realms only to announce their own deaths.

Karin dismissed all thoughts of what the people in the castle might think.
 
She had enough concerns of her own.
 
If Roric was dead, she wanted to bring his body back from the realms of voima, and after having braved so much to save Valmar she was certainly not going to let him go off alone into danger with some thought of protecting her from it.

She crawled rapidly into darkness, keeping her head down, until the sounds of the faeys’ high voices faded away behind her and before her came the rhythmic splash of waves.

Waves?
 
What had happened in the realms of voima?
 
The smooth surface under her hands was bone dry.
 
Karin paused for a moment, then shrugged and pushed on.

And felt a cold, salty wave break over her.
 
Struggling, she kicked out, finding nothing but water—no tunnel, no floor or ceiling.
 
She tried to swim, fighting in the direction which seemed to lead upward.

She emerged, streaming and spitting water, in the surf by a rocky shore.
 
The sun was just rising, chasing shadows down the slopes of high mountains.
 
She splashed forward, found a footing, and came ashore dripping wet.
 
Before her a dark cave led into the rocks.
 
She was back in Eirik’s kingdom, back to the spot where she and Roric had dived into the sea and into the realms of voima.

No use hesitating now.
 
She spun around and dove back into the surf.

Again salt water closed over her head, and when she got her feet under her and surged back to the surface the dawn light still lay across the steep slopes of the Hot-River Mountains.

She pulled herself up out of the waves.
 
With water pouring off her, she scrambled into the sea-cave.
 
Maybe the Witch of the Western Cliffs could help her find Valmar.

But the passage down which she and Roric had come had disappeared.
 
She groped wildly in the darkness, finding what she thought was the entrance, but if so the air had turned to stone.
 
Pounding on it only bruised her fists.
 
The Witch was talking to someone else—or did not want to see her again.

Slowly she turned, emerged from the cave, and made her way along the shingle, walking in the waves half the time, shivering from wet and cold without even noticing.
 
Gulls wheeled overhead, calling sharply.
 
The sun rose slowly higher.
 
The salt water dripping from her hair down her cheeks could have been tears, but she had no tears left.

But there was still her father.
 
At the thought of King Kardan she lifted her head.
 
He had been so happy to see her when she came home from Hadros’s kingdom, and she had given him nothing but worry ever since.
 
Then she remembered that he might be Roric’s father as well as her own.
 
If so, he had a right to know that his last son was dead.

Someone had spotted her.
 
She heard a shout that was not the gulls and looked up to see a warrior, perched high above her, signaling to someone.
 
Eirik’s men? she thought, freezing.
 
But it was someone she recognized, one of Hadros’s warriors.

It was nearly evening before they would answer her questions or even let her speak.
 
Men, she thought disgustedly, with the energy that came from sleeping most of the day and having had hot food again.
 
But Queen Arane was just as insistent as the kings that she rest.

“We haven’t seen this King Eirik or any of his men,” said Hadros, “or for that matter anyone for the last three days.
 
I was ready to start for home, little princess, but your father insisted we wait in case you were still alive.
 
He’s almost as stubborn as you are!
 
Glad of it,” he added gruffly.

The sun was sinking over the western sea.
 
When she looked at the sunset, long ribbons of red-tinged clouds seemed to carry her hundreds of miles across the waves toward the dying sun.
 
The moon climbed the sky behind her.
 
She had not yet tried to say anything about the sun setting in the realms of voima.

“And where have you been all this time, Karin?” asked Queen Arane, gently in spite of an irritated undertone in her voice.
 
“Both your father and foster-father have been almost mad with wondering and waiting.
 
We waited even when hope was dulled and gone—your father saying it was too late to begin again.”
 
As the sun set, the long shadow cast by the burial mound of the slain warriors melted into the general darkness.

“We were in the Wanderers’ lands,” Karin said slowly, deciding to keep the story as simple as possible, “Roric, Valmar, and I.”

“They keep on giving us the same story about the Wanderers,” commented Hadros, half under his breath.
 
“At this rate we’ll have to believe the lords of voima really might be interested in people like us.”
 
Karin could see her father consciously keeping himself from asking questions.

“I escaped from King Eirik,” she went on, “the outlaw king who attacked you here, then Roric and I escaped from the dragon.”
 
It did sound in her own ears like one of the more fantastic of the old tales. “Then he and I went through a doorway the Wanderers had opened—
 
But that door is closed now.”
 
But the Wanderers had let Valmar back through before closing it, she thought.
 
Men again, acting together against the women.

“Eirik and his men followed us into the Wanderers’ realm,” she continued, “and Valmar was already there.”

“Then that’s why the outlaw wasn’t in his castle,” muttered Hadros.

“We stayed in that realm for a little while.
 
Then, although I do not entirely understand how it happened,” which was true, “the lords of voima wanted me back in mortal realms.
 
Valmar, as far as I know, is with the Wanderers.”

“And Roric?”
 
That was Queen Arane.

“Roric,” she gulped and went on, her voice steady, “Roric is dead.”

Karin forced herself to lift her eyes to meet those of the two kings and the queen.
 
All looked startled and, she thought, sorry, but that might only have been sympathy for her.
 
Well, the time for subtlety was long past.

When she trusted her voice again, she said, “Yes, even in the realms of voima mortals can die.
 
I loved him.
 
He was the lord of my heart and my body.
 
And I hope I am carrying his child.”

She had expected Queen Arane to give her a reproving glare, both for her frankness and for allowing herself to be with child at all.
 
But the queen’s look was distant and strangely expressionless.
 
King Kardan reached out impulsively toward his daughter, as though to draw her in like a little girl, but he stopped.

Once Karin had begun there seemed no reason not to continue.
 
“Now that he is gone it may not matter—but it does matter to me and to our child.
 
Was Roric my brother?”

“No!”
 
All three spoke at once, Hadros and Kardan and Arane, then became flustered, rewrapping their cloaks against the cool of the evening air, meeting neither her eyes nor each other’s.

“Why are you all so sure?” she asked, looking in surprise from one to another.
 
“Is there something you have kept from me?”
 
When they all shook their heads emphatically she added, “Both the Weaver back home and the—well, a creature of voima we met seemed to suggest that, that … that I was his sister and for him to love me was incest.”

“Like the old stories?” asked Hadros, recovering first.
 
He shot Queen Arane a look, thrust out his chin, and went on.
 
“It wasn’t my secret but I don’t mind telling it.
 
He was born at Arane’s court, though I brought him home as a tiny baby to raise in my own castle.
 
Roric was the son of Arane’s serving-maid and, I think, me.”

“Oh, dear.”
 
The queen put her graceful hands over her face, and the jewels on her rings winked in the firelight.

“
Your
son?” said Karin in bewilderment to the king.
 
This changed everything.
 
“But why would anyone do to his son—”
 
She stopped, not wanting to get into that issue now.
 
She whirled toward Kardan.
 
“Tell me,” she commanded, her eyes intense in the shadows, “is there any chance that a baby born to Arane’s serving-maid could have been fathered by you?”