The Dowry Blade (33 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Lorcan leapt up at the sight of Madoc; eagerly he reached out his hands. Madoc stared blankly at the mailed gloves.

‘The sword,’ Lorcan said impatiently. ‘The Dowry blade.’

Madoc’s eyes widened, horrified. Instantly he knew his forgetfulness to have been caused by witchcraft. Equally he knew he couldn’t admit it.

‘They no longer had the sword. They must’ve thrown it down,’ he said desperately, hoping he could rely on Doran to back him up. Doran nodded.

‘We found them both, and the horse – broken neck, no sword –’ he asserted, trembling in the face of Lorcan’s mounting fury.

Lorcan considered his still outstretched hands. Madoc had tangled himself firmly in that proffered length of rope, but perhaps not firmly enough. He curled one hand into a mailed fist and struck Madoc a backhanded blow across the face.

Madoc reeled under the blow, but managed to stay upright. He turned back to face Lorcan. For a moment he bitterly regretted Phelan’s death.

‘My liege,’ he said, very quietly.

‘You will find me that sword,’ Lorcan said coldly, ‘if it takes the rest of your life.’ He turned his back, calling his horse to him. ‘I’m going back to the city,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘Bring me the sword there, swiftly.’

The grey horse disappeared into the uncertain light. The men about Madoc mounted their own steeds, and moved away speedily, all save Doran.

‘They are dead?’ Doran asked again. Madoc shrugged, unready to admit his doubts. Doran grimaced, and collecting Guida by the lead rein, rode away through the trees, glancing nervously about him. Madoc turned to Devnet.

‘What are you still doing here?’ he asked.

‘You are my hand-mate,’ Devnet replied. Madoc quelled the temptation to hit her.

‘I need to find that sword.’

‘For the princeling?’ she asked scornfully.

Madoc rubbed the bloody weal across his face thoughtfully. ‘Not necessarily,’ he answered.

Kendra carried the dead Songspinner slowly, reflecting on which trees to sacrifice to the human need to dispose of mortal remains. Depression settled over her shoulders as she silently marked out the infirm and the dying among her flock. Kendra rarely used wood herself. She grieved, and tried not to think. She returned to her cave. There could be no funeral pyre until the rain finished, until she was sure the pursuers were gone.

Kendra laid her burden in the outer chamber. She stepped into the further cave, bending her head low to pass under the arch of tree roots. As she straightened, she saw that she had a visitor.

She came, as she usually did, as the Scavenger. Dressed in her tattered brown robes, her face ever hungry, she waited to tidy away the loosened ends of this human tragedy. She had come before, to wait for one she considered hers, to snatch away from Kendra the failing breath of her charges.

She sat with her face close to that of the unconscious woman, intense concentration keeping her features immobile. Kendra moved silently to stand over her ward, placing herself between the fallen one and death. The Scavenger raised her head, and her voice whispered into Kendra’s mind.

Mine.

She did not waste words. Kendra shook her head and spread her gnarled hands in a protective barrier between them. A frown flickered over the usually impassive face of the Scavenger.

Kendra had stood between death and its intended many a time. This one came in many guises, to guide the fallen, the falling, to the gate of the world. She could be the reaper of the young, the gatherer of the lost – she could be the saviour of the ancient. She was the Battle Maiden and she came often as sharp knife or burning fever. Kendra had seen her once, rolling an avalanche of smouldering rocks before her, as a child might roll a discarded wheel rim. Some said that she came as a lover to the suicide, but Kendra had not seen it, for she was death’s enemy, and Kendra could never love that one’s messenger.

This time, she was the Scavenger, hungry for any left-over, half-used soul, such as the tattered exhausted being with the ruined body that lay now beneath the protective spread of Kendra’s fingers.

The Scavenger of Souls raised her hands to Kendra’s, but didn’t touch. Kendra’s time would come, but her soul would never be for the Scavenger to hold. There was an opportunist look to the Scavenger, hoping to take advantage of the weakness of this one’s defences. Kendra risked moving her hands.

The time is not yet,
she told her visitor, and beckoned her away.

The Scavenger came readily. She could afford to wait, to play games. All things fell to her hand eventually. She seated herself beside Kendra, as though they were a pair of longtime companions, a couple of gossips waiting out a deathbed. Although they had sat like this before, with Kendra’s will pitted against the impassive certainty of the Scavenger, Kendra could feel a difference this time, and a dull dread, for it was not Kendra fighting this battle. The Scavenger did not recognise this yet; Kendra provided a distraction. She saw only the nearness to death, waiting to claim her prize for her mistress. Kendra did not think that she could.

Will you play the stones for it?
the Scavenger asked, casually, as though wagering for some petty trifle.

She had asked this often over the years. Kendra had always refused. It was a game, a trick. The Scavenger only offered this when not certain of her catch. And this time, when the Scavenger should be sure, she was not. Kendra stared into the cold of her fathomless eyes.

Yes, I will play,
Kendra smiled.
But I will only play with these stones.

Kendra untied the knot in the hem of her shirt. The four blue stones rolled onto the ground at the Scavenger’s feet. She stretched out her thin brown hand, but her fingers could not touch.

What have you done, Kendra?

She reached her hand towards Brede, as though she would rip the living heart from her, an expression on her withered features that Kendra had never thought to see there.
Grief
. Why would the Scavenger grieve?

This is wrong, Kendra, you must undo it.

It is not my doing.

It is not what this one wants, she wants to die.

Kendra would not believe her, were it not for that startling grief and pity on the face of the Scavenger of Souls. The Scavenger shook her head. She placed her papery hand on Kendra’s shoulder. Cold seeped in.

You will have to work hard with this one, Kendra. I think that perhaps this will be the last time we argue over the fate of one of your scavengings.

Kendra rubbed her shoulder. The cold ache would not leave.

I look forward to our next meeting.

The Scavenger turned on her heel, giving Kendra a careless wave, an old friend, a neighbour; not an enemy. The harbinger of death walked out of the cave, alone.

Kendra sank gracelessly to the floor and rested her face in her hands. The stones pressed against her, moulding her flesh, making her uneasy. She rethreaded them for safety, and laid them beside Brede.

She was depleted, irrationally grief-stricken. She wanted to return to her sleep, her dreams, her silence, but she had a responsibility now. She believed that her charge would survive, although the recovery must be painfully slow. She would not sleep as she wished to sleep for many turns of the moon.

Kendra breathed deep of the damp earth, its promise of growth, trying to rid her mind of the smell of death, and the anger that battered at her heart. She sighed restlessly and went out among her flock to collect the wood for the pyre.

Kendra made her sacrifices, gave the dead one her rites and puzzled over the Songspinner’s web, woven from the threads of her song, of her ebbing life; stronger than any Kendra had yet met: even the Scavenger could not break it.

She did not stay to watch the flames.

Returning to the cave, Kendra settled once more on the cold earth. She closed her eyes wearily. For the first time in her conscious existence, she didn’t know what she should do for her foundling. She drifted into herself, she wasn’t needed yet, and there was time to seek rest and nourishment from the earth and silence that sustained her.

Brede woke in darkness. Pain roared through her and she couldn’t understand how she had shut out the raging for so long. She stilled the whimpering fear, her training overcoming her desire to scream aloud.

Enemy territory?
She forced herself beyond the pain, listening.

Silence?
Not quite – there was a soft dripping of water onto earth, a constant soughing of distant steady rain, unless it was a river? An irrational dread followed that thought. She stretched her perceptions, but couldn’t persuade herself that she knew what she could hear. She tested the air, heavy, dark, earth-laden, but she could sense that there was space about her, and that gave her hope.

She concentrated, forcing the drugging confusion of pain away: There was light, or at least, a lack of total darkness. She was in some kind of cave, alone.

Brede allowed some of the tense alertness to leech away, and the pain flooded back. She fought it, identified each hurt, told herself this hurt is only so much, and this, even less – forcing her body to believe her.

She could tell that her wounds had been tended, but she was so weak. She did not try to move. She allowed her mind to range, seeking out an explanation for how she came to be here, searching her memory for a time and place of which she could be sure, and found Sorcha. Involuntarily, she moved, trying to reach out to her memory. Pain lanced her, but it was nothing compared to the fear.

She had been falling.

Sorcha isn’t here.

Someone had bound her injuries, that someone must be Sorcha.

Sorcha would not need bandages, would not leave her in such pain; Sorcha would not leave her.

Sorcha is not here.

The need to find Sorcha welled up in her, trying to voice itself in a gasp of impotent fear.

Brede felt a disturbance of air close by and her heart quailed. Something detached itself from the wall of the cave and came to her side. In the darkness she could see only that it was unthinkable. So tall, so roughly made, so almost human, so outside her understanding. It reached out a hand and Brede shrank away. It did not attempt to touch her. It picked up something from the edge of the makeshift bed where Brede lay.

She focused her eyes with difficulty. Hanging from the creature’s immense hand, swinging slightly, there was a thread of beads. Despite the darkness, she identified them. Not beads:
stones
. Four of them.

Brede struggled to find her voice, to deny what her heart told her. There was only one way that those stones would have left Sorcha’s possession.

All that disturbed the thick silence was an incoherent, ragged gasp. Brede heard the sound and could make no connection between it and what her mind held – such a shallow meaningless gasp for the ravaging of grief and terror that was ripping her apart. She could not bear the sight of those swinging stones. Behind her closed lids the movement continued. She closed her mind against it, the winding pain in her bones a welcome distraction now.

‘No,’ she whispered to herself, her heart shrinking within her, recoiling.

Kendra sensed the withdrawal, the hopelessness. She closed her hand about the blue stones, angry with herself. She had just undone all the healing of the last days. The scent of despair rankled in her. She strode out of the cave. There were others in need, who would not fight her with despair. She stayed away for days, and when she returned she expected to find a corpse.

Brede stirred uneasily in her determined sleep, pain and grief forcing themselves to the surface of her mind. She cried out, and in her turn, Kendra drifted back into consciousness, out in the forest of her own sleep. She pulled herself back into the world and walked reluctantly back to the cave, and the stirring that might mean life, or might mean death. There was a sense of crowding in the cave, of waiting, of many lives twisting in an uncertain knot, a smell of damage. Perhaps this was the time. She glanced about, filled with unease.

I’m looking for the Gate
, Brede said to a being that she could barely see.

Death nodded.

Kendra listened to Brede’s breath wane, smelling the despair that leeched from her pores, begging for release.

I am the Gate
, Death said, puzzling over the mortal and her shadow.
I am the Gate of the world, all things pass through me. No one comes who is not welcome. No one leaves. There
is
no Gate.

But Brede couldn’t hear. The thread that bound her to life pulled her back, winding itself tight about her. She didn’t struggle; the spell that bound her was too strong for her to break.

Brede stirred once more, and her breathing changed, gasping, fighting, choking. Kendra reached protectively and found another’s hands there before her. She felt flesh she couldn’t see, she heard a soft murmur of comfort, a skein of words, from a mouth closed by death. Kendra shuddered, and stepped well clear.

Death thought about the shadow. It kept Brede away from her and it understood the Gate. There would be another time. All things passed through her, for she was the Gate.

The presence had gone. The silence of the cave was the deeper for that absence. Kendra waited beside her foundling. Consciousness rose; she felt the reluctance with which it came. The eyelids flickered and closed tighter in protest.

Kendra smiled, tasting acceptance. She had given up on dying; now she would start to mend.

Brede’s eyes opened. It was still dark, but not as dark as the last time. She was ready for the pain, ready for the gaping loss that surrounded the island of her self. She was not ready for Kendra.

She gazed silently for a while, accommodating the fact of Kendra’s existence to her knowledge of the world. She had to stretch her mind to do it.

‘How long have I been here?’ she whispered.

Kendra shrugged. She didn’t measure time the way Brede measured it. There were dawnings, but she didn’t see them all, there were turns of the moon, but she could never be sure it was the same turn each time she greeted that silver light. She judged time by the fall of leaves, the growth of bark. There was the growing season and the waiting season. She couldn’t answer Brede’s question; insufficient time had passed to register on her reckoning of such things.