Rhapsody, Child of Blood (15 page)

Then a moment later he saw it too, a host of flickering lights, barely visible in the gray half-dark. In a heartbeat they glimmered, then disappeared again. There were hundreds, perhaps a thousand of them, crossing the distant meadows, spread uniformly out in a endless, near-invisible line, moving slowly south. A search party? he wondered.

But for what? Who or what might be so important that so many men were sent out in the dark to find it, guided only by lanternlight, here in the middle of nowhere?

Achmed closed his eyes and threw back his hood to better allow the vibrations of the oncoming heartbeats to impact his skin. He held his hand aloft, one finger in the air, tasting the wind in his open mouth to try and ascertain the source of the thousand different rhythms coming toward him. But there was nothing on the wind, no taste, no rhythm, no heartbeat. Only silence and evening breeze.

Once more he opened his eyes and stared, and saw it again, an infinitesimal flicker a thousand times over, moving steadily toward them, still far away but closer than a moment before. Movement, a twinkling light, repeated a thousand times, then darkness. Nothing on the wind.

Now the heartbeat that filled his ears, bristled on his skin, was his own.

'Gods," he whispered. Shing.

Like crows before the coming storm they gathered up the sleeping Singer and their gear and fled blindly in the direction of the great Lirin forest.

Rhapsody awoke in darkness. The moon was gone, having all but vanished the night before into dormancy, and the sky was overcast with racing clouds. Woozily she tried to sit up, then reconsidered as the pain that encircled her head stabbed her violently behind the eyes. She settled for rolling slowly onto one side and propping her head up with her hand, her elbow resting on the stony ground. The groan that wheezed forth from her chest came from a voice she didn't recognize.

Immediately Grunthor was there with the waterskin, his hand behind her neck.

Rhapsody drank gratefully, holding on to the skin with a shaking grip. When finally her thirst was slaked she sat up careful y and looked around her. Where before there had been nothing but open sky and highgrass all around them, now they were hiding within a thin copse of trees. A patch of night thicker than the rest of the air around her blotted out the dark horizon not far away.

'What's that?" she asked. All she could manage was a whisper.

Achmed looked up from behind his hood. "The forest." He smiled and looked away, but the Singer's reaction was unmistakable anyway. Her heartbeat intensified angrily; he could feel the blood rise to her face in fury.

'You carried me? All this way? How dare you." "Yeah, she says that now. 'Ow come you didn't protest at the time, eh?" Grunthor's smile disappeared in the face of her building wrath. "Come on, miss, you didn't think we could stay out in the fields, did you? Oi didn't want to just leave ya there." A thin hand with a grip like iron clasped her mouth, the scratchy voice low and deadly.

'Bad call on your end, Grunthor. Now listen carefully, Singer, and rest your throat; it will be to your advantage on many levels. We are alone for the moment, but not for long. We are in the scrub-tree line, almost at the outskirts of the Lirin forest. This barrier is far more heavily guarded than the fields.

'Once inside the forest proper it is imperative that we get to the Tree as quickly as possible. Past the first major stand of trees to the southeast there is an outpost of twenty-four border guards. Being Lirindarc, forest Lirin, they are even more difficult to discern in daylight than the ones we met before you decided to take your little nap.

What can you do to aid our avoidance of them and getting to the Tree?" He removed his hand, ignoring her withering stare.

'How do you know these things?" she spat. "Michael was not with the hunting party, which you knew somehow beforehand. The Lirinved—the In-between, if that's what they were—-saw me, and you knew it. You knew they were there from hundreds of yards away. Now you know the number of Lirindarc and where they are within the wood? How do you know this? And why on Earth would you need me to help you at all?"

The strange eyes regarded her coolly; then Achmed looked off into the distance, considering his reply. He had no intention of answering her question; his gift of blood lore, the ability to sense and track any heartbeat of his choosing, was something that only one friend and a few enemies knew of, although his prowess as an unerring assassin was legendary among the seedier element in the eastern lands. He was trying to determine how to craft his response to achieve both his goals: gaining her cooperation while returning her to a more placid state.

Under normal circumstances the anger or dismay of a hostage would mean nothing to him, but this one was decidedly different. In addition to her obvious power and potential, there was something soothing about her when she was calm, an almost pleasant rhythm to the vibrations she emitted. It had an agreeable effect on his skin.

Perhaps it was the result of her musical training. He took a deep breath and measured his words.

'We don't need you to help us at all. The Lirindarc do."

Her face went slack in shock. "Why?"

'Because you may be the one thing that can guarantee their safety if they come upon us."

Rhapsody's eyes narrowed. "What does that mean?"

The piercing gaze fixed on her again. "We have no need to harm these people.

They, unlike the rest of the complacent fools in this land, are not asleep. The Lirin we met in the fields and the Lirindarc are attuned to the world around them. They know what is coming, or at least that something is."

Even in the dark Achmed could see her go cold. "What's coming? What do you mean?"

An ugly laugh came from beneath the veils. "How can a Singer not feel it, not hear it? Was it all the noise of Easton that drowned it out, kept you innocent, Rhapsody?

Ironic; an innocent whore. Or are you just oblivious?"

Even in the dark Achmed saw her green eyes clear, and a hard, resolute look come into them. "Tell me."

'No, Rhapsody; you tell me. The Lirindarc from the eastern outpost are making their way here now; they'll be upon us shortly. Grunthor and I need to get to the Tree, and get there in all due haste. We will allow nothing—and I assume you know what I mean by this—to get in the way. Now, what can you do to ensure that no harm comes to them?"

The staunch expression on her face crumbled. "I—nothing. I've never been here before, I don't know where I am. How can you expect me to ensure anything?"

Achmed turned east and sighted his cwellan. "I suppose I can't. Grunthor, ready your bow."

Horror replaced the confusion. "No, please! Don't do this Please."

The robed figure turned and looked at her without dropping his weapon. "Once more, then, I'll ask you: what can you do? After this afternoon, I would think you'd have a less pathetic answer."

A large hand came to rest on her shoulder. "Come on, now, miss, surely you can think o' somethin'. Think 'ard, now."

Rhapsody took a deep breath and cleared her thoughts, one of the earliest techniques Heiles, her first mentor in the science of Naming, had taught her. After a moment she heard a voice in her mind, a voice that had told her the only tales of these woods she had ever heard.

Mama, tell me about the great forest.

It's as wide as your eyes can see—bigger than you can possibly imagine—and, full of the scent and sound of life. The trees within it grow in more colors than you have ever seen, even in your dreams. Tou can feel the song of the wood itself, humming in every living thing there. The humans call it the Enchanted Forest because many of the things that grow and live there are unfamiliar to them, but the Lirin know it by its true name: Tliessan, the holy place.

Achmed could see the change come over her face. "Well?"

The Lirin know it by its true name: Tliessan.

Rhapsody looked up at the stars. "Its name," she said softly. "I know the name of the forest." Her eyes cleared, and when she looked back at the two men her face was calm, the expression in her eyes deadly. "But let us be very clear, as we will be parting company shortly: I use it for their protection, not for yours."

'Fair enough," said Grunthor, grinning.

When the Lirindarc patrol passed directly in front of the three strangers a few moments later, they saw nothing unusual, heard only the sound of the wind singing in the trees of Yliessan, and continued on their way into the night.

i23y morning they had arrived at the outskirts of the Lirin forest. A gentle wind had picked up with the dawn, and Rhapsody loosed the black velvet ribbon in her hair, letting the breeze blow through it, cleansing her mind of the painful memories that lingered from the day before.

She stood before the unbroken wall of trees, her eyes trying to penetrate the forest edge and look into the greenwood, where in the distance she could see verdant leaves of every hue, dark and cool as the night even in daylight.

Her mother's image was with her still. Rhapsody felt a catch in her heart as she tried to imagine her as a young woman, a girl really, at the beginning of her Blossoming Year, standing at the threshold of the forest where she was standing now.

Slight; neither Rhapsody nor her mother was particularly tall, perhaps her mother's golden hair twined in the intricate patterns plaited by the Lirin for practicality and ornamentation. Dressed in a billowing tunic and borilla leggings made in accord with the old ways, the traditional woven leather mekva at her waist. Eyes gleaming in quiet excitement. Had she been happy then ? Rhapsody wondered, knowing that if she had been, it did not last.

Her mother had spoken rarely of that time. Her pilgrimage to Sagia was made, in the tradition of her race, just as she was coming into adulthood. The time she had spent in the forest, learning its secrets, was a mystery to Rhapsody, as her mother had been loath to talk about it. It was only when Rhapsody was entering her teen years that she learned why.

Upon the completion of her Year of Bloom, the second year of her pilgrimage, her mother had returned to the fields to find her longhouse decimated, her family gone. It was only her absence that had saved her, and for many years thereafter she had mourned, wishing she had not been the sole survivor, the only one spared.

Had she been able to turn back Time, she would never have left the longhouse, would have preferred to die with them all, rather than face the world alone. Any happiness that she had found afterward had come in the wake of that memory, leaving Rhapsody to wonder if her mother had ever really gotten over it.

Now Rhapsody stood in the same place, feeling the same awe, the same anticipation that she supposed her mother had felt. Her Lirin ancestry had lain dormant in her for her entire life, though in recent years she had seen and come to know more full and half-caste Lirin than she had in childhood.

Easton was the thoroughfare of the eastern seaboard, so in her time there she had seen travelers of many different races and backgrounds. Perhaps now that she had come to Yliessan she would finally find welcome and acceptance among her mother's people. Perhaps she would finally find the strength to return home.

iOy sunset they had come to the forest proper, the exterior copses of trees and thickets becoming dense in the transition to the greenwood. The three travelers waited until the night was in full flower before venturing in, watching intently for eyes glittering in the dark.

Many times in the course of coming this far Rhapsody had whispered the namesong of the forest, singing the roundelay over and over again: Yliessan. Yliessan. Yliessan. It had seemed to her that the branches had moved aside in answer, that the brambles and scrub of the forest floor had not sought to hamper them in any way, allowing them to pass quickly, silently, in the dark.

All around her, in the sound of the wind through the leaves and the birds in the tree branches above them, she felt the greenwood answer back, as if calling her to itself.

Yliessan. A sense of welcome, innate and primal.

There was a richness to the air in the forest that Rhapsody had never felt before; she drank it in eagerly, filling her lungs and finding them cleaner upon exhaling. She wished they had been able to arrive in light, because she would have loved to see what the forest really looked like. Though it was a sacred place to the Lirin, and only the Lirin knew its name, the legends of the enchanted woods and the Tree were common even hundreds of miles away in Easton among people who would never see a forest in their lives.

Unlike the exhaustion that had consumed her after she had hidden herself and the two men within the highgrass, the sensation she felt during their disguise as part of the forest was invigorating. From the first moment she had matched their vibrations to the signature of the forest, Rhapsody had been filled with a bright, calm sense of home, a cool serenity that cleared her mind and spoke in gentle tones to her half-Lirin heart.

Yliessan. Welcome, Child of the Sky. Yliessan.

'Any ideas?" The words, spoken softly by the still-unfamiliar voice, caused Rhapsody to jump a little. Achmed was speaking into her ear, though a moment before he was nowhere near her.

'What do you mean?" she whispered back.

'The Tree; do you feel where it might be?" The tone held a strong tinge of disgust.

She closed her eyes and let the night wind brush over her face, and listened again to the music it made as it passed through the branches and leaves all around them. The rustling was not unlike the sound of the sea down the coast of the city, far enough away from the port to be free of its noise.

After a moment of careful attention Rhapsody could hear a low, deep tone resonating through the ground and hanging in the air above it. It was clear and singular, with a faint harmonic around it, and the more she concentrated the more she could hear its voice. She had no doubt that it came from the Tree.

She pointed southwest. "There," she said.

Achmed nodded; he had felt the tone as well. Silently they passed through the underbrush, making their way carefully in the dark. Eventually she found she was leading, but it was not a problem for her, as the tone was growing deeper and louder; she could now feel it through her feet.