The Dark Ferryman (66 page)

“Good.” He cupped Rivergrace’s hand within his. “She’ll be in the thick of it.”

They found her behind the lines, with Bistane as he gave his father’s helmet to her, its stiff, white brush of horsehair unforgettable. Lara turned to them, holding it, her lips pale and curving downward. She looked as if she would say one thing to them, and then changed her mind. Instead, she turned the helmet in her palms. “The toll is great. Jeredon is dead. Bistel. Many, many others. I could not get here in time. The Ferryman is gone.” Lara looked around, dazed. “The Ferryman is gone. He left the banks of the Nylara and exists no more. He is a Way, and he is undone.”

Rivergrace’s heart twisted in her chest at the news, but she pressed forward. “Where is Nutmeg?”

“With the body, at the nursing wagons, I believe.” But uncertainty flashed across Lariel’s face.

She didn’t know. She had become unsure about all of what they were doing in that place, at that time. Rivergrace took a step back in realization. She put a hand to the hollow of her throat. With a look at Sevryn, she turned and ran.

Ran to the Ashenbrook where the water called her. She skirted the dead and dying, weaving across the savannah field as though it were a loom and she weaving a crazed pattern upon it. Behind her and to her flank, Grace heard Rufus grunt and the sharp cries of triumph from Sevryn as they kept her path cleared. The sky might rain arrows, but she could not think on it. At the bank of the Ashenbrook, she raised her hands and waded into its chill, turbulent waters, waters swirled with blood and gore. Rivergrace went to her very core, uncaring if she unmade herself by loosing all that she had. Sevryn would live. Nutmeg would live. Tranta. Bistane. Others. If the river took all that she offered it and more, she did not care. She called for it to rise, to rise and sweep away the fools made of flesh who would deny its power.

She could hear Sevryn call to her. Words fell on her ears, but she lost the meaning of them. Water rose to her knees, and she felt the River Goddess in them, full of hatred and fear, and she reached for the deity, and flooded her with her own essence. She gave all that she had and found more.

Fire answered her. Rivergrace blinked at the acrid stinging in her eyes and looked out on the river plains, the fighting fields, and saw flame. It burst in leaps and bounds in the dried grass and shrubs, swirled into the wind in great chimneys of heated sparks and flame. It carried its voice in a dry roar and lay across the parched land, ready to consume all in its path.

Her fire. Cursed fire of her cursed line. She stumbled back in the Ashenbrook.
No
.

Traitor.

Killer.

No
.

Cerat leaped and danced inside of her. The Demon capered with an insane joy. Hidden within the tiny spark of the River Goddess she’d carried unknowing this bit of the Demon, welded inextricably together with the Goddess it had not answered Narskap’s call. Slowly it had gained strength from Rivergrace. And now, within its element, the fiery Souldrinker took the Goddess first and then struck with all that she had given him.

Rivergrace saw the fire racing toward Rufus and Sevryn. Toward troops locked in combat. Toward Abayan Diort who’d gained a mount and raced along the river, exhorting his troops to turn and fight yet another enemy, on a fire-fury front.
No!

Her strength gushed out of her body, the dam of her flesh broken, washing her spirit away. Rivergrace took a stumbling step to fight it, to fight herself. She could feel the blasts of heat as the grass fire took hold. Wildfire would sweep the valley and then the hills. As night drew close and the wind picked up, nothing could stop it. Nothing.

Save water.

With her last coherent thought, she called again on the one thing she hoped might save them. Her serenity, her hope. She spun herself out in a singular, brilliantly blue thread. It was not enough. She took a heartening breath, tasted the bitter smoke upon it, and braided that thread with the gold of herself. The gold of abandonment and chaos, of destruction and yet as much life as water was. Water and fire. She threw it out again, seeking. Her soul thinned until it was nearly nonexistent.

She thought of him, the Dark Ferryman, the being who had ferried her across many rivers, and spoken to her,
nevinaya aliora
, remember the soul. The being who broke through the wards of Larandaril to carry her off. The being who left her underground to find herself. She spun out her love of water, her need for it, her hope for it. She called with all she had in her, her life and death and new life . . . and she found him. Time had passed. A tight ring of fighters surrounded them, all with weapons drawn, and she could hear fierce battle nearby. Very nearby. One of them reached her, wading to her, threw his arm about her waist and anchored the shell that was left of her.

Rivergrace felt a tug on her thread, a pull that nearly unraveled what was left of her, and then an answer.

He coalesced in front of her, a towering wraith wrapped in dark and shadow, hooded and caped, and when he raised his head, she saw his face.

Daravan pushed back his hood, storm-gray eyes filled with sadness as he looked down at her, and asked, “What do you need?”

Sevryn bunched to spring at him, but Rivergrace held him tightly by the hand, her fingers laced in his. “Give me the Ferryman. Turn the waters,” she said, “Master of Rivers. Wash the battlefield clean. Answer the fire with the only defeat it will accept! Bring me the Ferryman, Daravan.”

He shrugged his black cloak from his shoulders and looked at his hands as if they were strangers to him, then looked at her again. “I am the Ferryman. Before I was torn asunder and anchored to the Nylara. But I am still a Way.”

Sevryn said, low and urgently, “Forget him. Grace, they’re breaching. We have to run now.”

Locked in his solemn gaze, she could not move. “It’s not you. Stand aside, Daravan, and let the Ferryman through.”

Flames had driven the fighters close by to the brink of the Ashenbrook. She could see Lariel from the corner of her eye, and Diort stood with his war hammer defending her, his body in front of hers, hers stained and blossoming with blood, her hair wild about her shoulders, and she wore Bistel’s helmet. She could see Rufus wrestling with a Raver and bringing it down. She could hear Nutmeg, muted, crying, “And take that from a Farbranch!”

Daravan looked at her, his eyes creased in sorrow. “Don’t ask this of me.”

“It’s for all whom we love. How can you not ask it of yourself?”

Sevryn set himself between Daravan and Rivergrace. “He’ll mislead you. He’s unnamed from the beginning, a traitor from the first day he dealt with the Suldarran.”

“Suldarran.” Daravan shook his head slowly and set his gaze on Lariel. “We were never the lost, my queen. We were always the Suldarrat, the exiled! I was sent with the first, to watch, to guard, to obstruct, to meddle. I had but one love, Trevilara, and I did all that I did in her name, even forsaking the mother of my son. You are the Vaelinars who warred and yet broke from her when she planned a weapon to end all wars. From both sides, you met to carve out a peace, and she unleashed her powers on you, sending you ripping through the planes of existence to another place. You are
Suldarrat
, the exiled, and I am meant to keep you here.”

Smoke filled in about them, like a fog off the river. Flames licked toward the lowering sun.

Rivergrace reached for Daravan and pulled at his shadow-cloaked form and drew it out, a single obsidian thread glittering in the air. An icy jolt numbed her, but she felt a familiarity in it, and then the being was there, the Ferryman, as like to Daravan as a twin, but his face was abyss and his form was phantom. Daravan let out a despairing groan.

“Brothers . . .” murmured Sevryn.

“One broken by the journey. The other bound by it. Yes, we’re brothers although he is truly only a shade of himself. Together we were a bridge. He wandered until a House reached for a deity of water and air to navigate the Nylara and he could not resist answering. He hadn’t the strength, and he was trapped. You freed him, but you cannot heal him. He can’t raise your waters, Rivergrace. Not alone.”

“None of us are alone.” Rivergrace stepped into the arch of both men

She felt Sevryn move to her back. She had no time to argue with him. She put her hands out, and let her anger rise in her. Anger at the blood and the pain and the desecration of life around her. Let the silvery blue fire fill her and she called to the Ashenbrook and she swung about so that she could fill her vision with the sight of the Ravers and the Raymy as they swept through the flesh of her people. She did not deny the fire. She wanted to, as it grew in strength and speed but instead, she let it herd the enemy toward the tide the Ferryman raised.

And the river answered. It gathered the bloodied, the hissing, the vicious enemy and bore down on the savannah to crush them, curved in a never-ending crest. A tide came from all rivers and even the sea with its sharp salted water in answer to their call, crashing down to drown the wildfire and sweep across the battlefield. The Revela filled and could not hold them all, the tide of warriors, even in her sharp and narrow bed of flooding water.

“Neither but both,” Rivergrace said to herself, and she fell back against Sevryn, spent yet whole.

Raymy boiled down the mountain, a diminished tide but still in numbers they could not meet. The Ashenbrook and Revela crested to sweep over them with no place for the tide to carry them.

Daravan reached for Rivergrace but Sevryn knocked his arm aside and the three of them stood linked, Ferryman, Sevryn, and Daravan. The very air quivered about them in shock as they contacted. Daravan looked at Sevryn in a mixture of disbelief and discovery.

“The bridge is rebuilt. Water, air, earth, and fire.”

Daravan raised his right arm as if in benediction, and the air shimmered under it. The seeming of another place came to sight. A world of such beauty that Rivergrace’s heart keened to see it. She could see fairness and beauty and flowers that had never bloomed on Kerith and her being longed for it. Lara cried out, “Trevilara!” and would have leaped for it, but Diort’s hammer blocked her way as he parried a blow meant to take her head from her shoulders as she stared into wonder. Warriors rose against them, herded by fire and flood.

The Ferryman swept up the Raymy as if they were nothing but a scattering of toys, swept them and flooded them into the window of the world they beheld. “We can hold them,” Daravan said. “For a time. A season. Maybe ten years of seasons but then the Way, this bridge, will weaken and they’ll be back.” With that warning, he, the Ferryman, and his charges disappeared.

Driven by fire, Quendius crawled to the outcropping where he had left Narskap’s body. He would loot his hound of all the weaponry he could find, crafted by a man who could coax and cage both God and Demon into his steel. They would serve him well even as their maker had. His army lost, he would take the Pathways in retreat but not defeat. Yet he crouched over a rock stained with blood and nothing remained. Not flesh or bone or ash. Quendius ran his palm over the killing ground. He felt an essence he did not know, neither dead or alive, but undead.

And no sign of Narskap.

RIVERGRACE LIFTED HER EYES to the sky, dappled gray and lowering over her, the sky that remained sterile despite all their hopes, and then looked down to the trampled ground, to the ashes of the fire pits and the pools of blood that the earth might never be able to soak up, there was so much of it. They had been burning the bodies for days now and finally finished. Sevryn walked beside her quietly, his presence bolstering her, his love warming her. She lifted her hands, palms up, and a shudder ran through her at the inescapable gravity of so much death. No matter what she had done, it hadn’t been enough. The incredible loss weighed on her so that she could hardly breathe, hardly even feel. He put his arm about her waist in comfort, but there was not comfort enough for what she saw and felt.

She’d left Nutmeg behind, in mourning, with Lariel, and she’d taken Sevryn because only he could understand and feel as she did about death. And because she loved and needed him.

A veil lay over her sight, a translucent curtain of men and women still locked in combat upon the river plain, still fighting, still falling, still dying, a vision of which she might never be rid. So many dead. So many maimed for the rest of their lives. So many. She would name the ones she could, but it seemed a gross injustice for the many lost that she could not name. Sorrow shivered through her body, dancing upon her skin when it emerged like tears. It sighed through her. It fell from her as a tree sheds its leaves in the fall, without thought or hesitation because that was the way of things, naturally, to let go. It took the veil from her eyes as it fell.

Drops began to fall from above. Large, cold, hugely wet drops. They fell in hesitation, and then steadied into a pattering rhythm upon the parched and trampled earth. Blood washed away in rivulets, and puddles began to form in beaten hoofprints. Ash dissolved. The world seemed to let out a sigh born of relief and need. They stood unmoving for the longest time before she looked at Sevryn as it soaked them. She could feel the dampness upon her face, at the corner of her eyes, and skittering down her cheeks; she saw it upon his lined face and glistening in his hair and spotting the shoulders of his cloak. Wonder lightened her face.

“I can make it rain,” she said.

THE MILLER, HIS FINE VEST strained to its buttons over his chest which was ample even for a Dweller, took a deep breath and began to regale them.

“This,” the tale-spinner said, after filling and tamping his pipe to perfection, lighting it, and sitting back, “I heard from a Bolger chieftain himself, and since we’ve had hardly any stories from these folk, I remembered it well. Knowing that they are a people but not as we reckon people, I cannot say whether it is the truth or not, but only as they view it. This is how they say they came to be.