The Dreamtrails (68 page)

“I gather he made contact with you,” I said.

“He wished to do so, but he knew only that we had a secret desert camp,” Merret said. “It was chance alone that had me in Aborium foraging for information when one of the Aborium rebels I knew recognized me. She told me that Tardis was dead and that Gwynedd had taken over the rebel group in Murmroth. She said he had begun to resurrect the rebel network, contacting survivors, encouraging them to reform proper cells with elected leaders, urging them to recruit new members. People were receptive, because they knew that most soldierguards were greedy for Salamander’s bonuses. They were weary of their children and friends being arrested on the slightest pretext, especially if they looked healthy, and being taken away across the sea to be sold as slaves. She told me that Gwynedd wanted to communicate with us, so I rode to Murmroth to speak with him.

“Thus we began to work with the rebels. Their numbers began to grow after Gwynedd staged several operations with our aid to rescue prisoners from Councilcourt cells. We also attacked the Faction. Priests out to collect tithes were robbed and sent stumbling naked back to their cloisters, and the coin
was used to buy the freedom of young men and women taken by the soldierguards. During many raids, rebels rescued groups of boys destined for the cloisters. The lads could not return to their homes, of course, but remote grubber farms began to have visits from distant cousins. Some of those saved remained in Murmroth and began to train as rebels under Gwynedd, whom they naturally revered,” Merret said.

“Did the Council and the Faction realize all of their troubles were emanating from Murmroth?” I asked, curious.

“No,” Merret said. “Gwynedd made sure we operated along the coast in all the towns and outside all cloisters. He knew a good deal about the Councilmen of the other coastal cities because of the information Seely had given him, so the Council was convinced there was another full network in operation, however much they might deny it publicly.”

“I don’t understand,” I protested. “Tomash questioned Seely, and her information about the west coast was unusable.”

“Useless to us because we knew too little about the west coast to fit Seely’s idiosyncratic knowledge into any sort of framework that would give it meaning,” Merret said. “But Gwynedd
has
the framework, and he also knew what questions to ask. It seems that Gavyn’s father was very sociable, and both high-ranking citizens and Councilmen alike were his guests. Once he bonded with Lady Slawyna after Gavyn’s mother died, he often had Herders visit as well, for his wife’s son was a Herder. Being part of the household and yet also a servant of sorts meant Seely was in the perfect position to gather information and gossip.” The coercer chuckled. “It is a nice irony that Seely has been the most useful of us to the rebels.”

I smiled and wondered if becoming useful had altered Seely’s shy diffidence.

“How do things stand now with the rebels?” I asked.

Merret shrugged. “As I have told you, there are too few of us for a proper uprising. Indeed, Gwynedd has never suggested wresting control with so few rebels. He seeks only to weaken the Faction and the Council as much as he can and to prepare us to aid Dardelan and the other rebels when they come for the west coast.”

I wondered if Merret had any idea how often she included herself when she spoke of the rebels under Gwynedd. Something in my expression seemed to convey my reserve, for she said mildly, “I do not think it a betrayal of Misfits to admire a man who has no Talent yet is gifted and honorable.”

“What made you trust Gwynedd, given that he had served Tardis?” I asked.

Merret considered the question. “In part, it was that he insisted upon being taught Brydda’s fingerspeech, and he encouraged all of his people to do the same. But the true moment of revelation came when it struck me that Gwynedd had never offered freedom to the horses with which he communicated. I wondered why until I realized that he never saw it as his to offer. From the first moment he communicated with them, he has regarded horses as fellow freedom fighters. ‘When
we
are free,’ he always says, to them and to us and to his own people. But I do not seek to convince you, Elspeth. You will judge him for yourself soon enough. Needless to say, he sees your arrival as a sign that we will soon rise against our oppressors.”

I laughed without much amusement. “A meager sign since I am only one, and instead of coming on a ship, I was washed up on the beach like a piece of flotsam.”

Merret shook her head. “If only one could come, who else should it be but you, Elspeth Gordie?” She laughed in faint
exasperation at my uncomprehending look. “Think about what you have told me! You stopped the Hedra from invading the Land. You went to Herder Isle and defeated the Faction on its own territory. You rode a ship fish across the strait, found Domick, and brought him out of Halfmoon Bay before he could begin a plague.”

“You exaggerate,” I protested. “I did none of it alone!”

“No,” Merret said, casting me a serious considering look. “No, it is never you alone, yet think how often you have been the pebble that begins the avalanche.”

“E
LSPETH
?” B
LYSS WHISPERED
. “Merret said to wake you.”

I sat up. The stars were fading, so it must be near to dawn. The others moved about quietly, preparing to leave. I got up and folded my blanket, and Blyss took it to Orys to stow as I stepped into my ill-fitting shoes and drew on my cloak. My stomach rumbled, but I ignored it, for we had decided the previous night not to eat before we left. Merret and Orys were now dismantling the tent, and I asked Blyss softly where Domick was. She pointed to Golfur, and I realized they had created a pallet along the length of Golfur’s broad back, upon which the coercer lay. A blanket had been laid over him, and when I reached up to tuck it in more securely under the ropes binding the pallet to the greathorse, I was dismayed by the heat radiating from Domick’s body. Blyss had said the previous night that his temperature had dropped, but it seemed he was hotter than ever.

Someone nudged me, and I turned to find Rawen gazing at me. She looked a good deal less a fine young lady’s horse than she had when I had first set eyes on her. Her coat was dull and dusty in patches, and her mane and tail were badly tangled, but her eyes sparkled as she told me that I was to ride her, since Golfur carried a burden already. I thanked her and would have mounted, but Merret called softly that we would walk at first.

As we crossed the road, I glanced along it in the direction of Murmroth and then in the direction of the Suggredoon, but there was no sign of movement. I wondered how long it would be before the Hedra returned. The people who had camped near us would speak of us when questioned, but Merret had spent some time the previous night coercing memories into key people in the groups, one of whom had us heading toward the ocean at about midnight, and another would swear to have seen us angling back toward Halfmoon Bay. I noticed Orys and Blyss carefully brushing away our tracks with swatches of cloth to disguise our true direction.

By the time Merret gave the command to ride, my heels were bleeding and painful. Before I mounted, I removed my heavy shoes with relief, pushing them into one of Golfur’s saddlebags just in case I needed them.

We had spoken little while we walked, and we continued in silence, conscious that voices carried far on the plain, but soon we were approaching the fantastic and distorted shapes of vegetation on the badlands: bizarrely shaped giant shrubs and spiked green tubers rising above the ground. I had never been here before, and the reality defied any description I had heard of its strangeness. But it was a narrow enough strip that allowed me to see the dark jagged form of the immense mountain range that ran along the Blacklands.

Blyss rode up on Zidon to offer some small hard twigs of food. “We will have a proper firstmeal a bit later, Merret says, but these will take the edge off your hunger,” she promised.

I did feel uncomfortably hollow, so I took two of the graying twigs and crunched one gingerly. I was about to comment on its tastelessness when Blyss asked why Ariel and the Herders would unleash a plague on the west coast when so many of their own people would die as well.

“It is a question I have asked myself many times,” I said. “There is no satisfactory answer. The One approved the plan, but Ariel was behind it.”

“And the Raider approves?” Orys asked. “Surely he would rather have people alive so they can be sold as slaves?”

Before I could answer, Merret said, “Who knows truly what the Raider desires? With all the slaves he has traded, he must have amassed wealth enough for several lifetimes. And yet his slaving continues. At least it did until recently. So maybe his desire is not for coin.”

“I think both he and Ariel gain pleasure from the suffering they cause,” Orys said, nodding to Domick’s prone form on Golfur’s back. “And if hurting one person is pleasurable, imagine how much more delicious the suffering of thousands.”

“Stop it!” Blyss whispered, white to the lips. “I have never heard anything so ugly.”

“Forgive me,” Orys said remorsefully. He looked at me. “I fear I have become somewhat obsessed with Salamander—the Raider as we have come to call him, like those on this coast. I have made it my business to try to learn more of him, and there are stories aplenty of his readiness to kill and maim.”

“Tell me what you have learned,” I said.

“That he is fanatically secretive and instinctively deadly and always seems to know if treachery is intended or if he is being lied to; that there are rules he seldom breaks; that his entire head and body are always covered, of course, and that these days he only comes ashore in a ship boat with an enormous mute to inspect the Council’s offering. Then he gets aboard the ship boat, the mute rows him back out to his ship,
and someone else comes to strike the bargain and load the slaves.”

“We know most of this already,” I said.

“Exactly,” Orys said. “In all the months I have worked on trying to learn more about him, I have discovered almost nothing. And I wonder why he maintains such secrecy.”

Conversation lapsed again for a time, and at length dawn broke. I watched birds pass across the silver-gray sky in arrowhead formations. Above, high skeins of cloud shifted constantly in a wind that slowly descended to scour the earth. There was sand enough in it that I was glad of the cover of the misshapen bushes and weirdly oversized plants, but eventually it was so strong that we stopped to tie cloths about our mouths and those of the horses. Gahltha had once told me horses had a hundred names for the wind, which could not possibly be translated into human speech. According to the stallion, funaga senses were too dull to pick up minuscule but important differences between degrees of dryness in the wind or slight shifts in angle or direction, or even the smells carried on the wind, all of which required a specific name.

We struggled on for another hour before Merret shouted that we must stop, for Ran had signaled to her that the wind was about to whip up a series of small but dangerous dust demons. Having no idea what these were, I dismounted hurriedly because of the tension in the coercer’s voice and the speed with which Orys and Blyss reacted. I went to help untie Domick’s pallet, but Merret said there was no time and signaled Golfur to get down. The other horses did the same, and Rawen took her place alongside the enormous Golfur, her skin twitching with excited apprehension. Orys and Merret quickly distributed blankets with ropes at the corners, which I was bidden to grasp as tightly as I could. By the time the
dust demons struck, we were all huddled beneath the blankets.

For half an hour, we were buffeted but unharmed by a shrieking wind. I did not know what dust demons looked like, but their voices were dreadful.

Then the wailing stopped abruptly, and the wind was gone. Merret and Orys threw off the blankets and began shaking them free of dust and refolding them while the horses stood and shook themselves. All save Golfur, who knew what he carried and stood still as Blyss checked on Domick. None of the others seemed shaken by the dust-demon assault, but my legs still trembled as I stood and brushed away the fine powder of sand that had seeped through the blankets.

Merret suggested that we might as well have a bite to eat and wash the dust from our throats. Without ceremony, we ate rolls with cheese that we had prepared the night before and passed around a small bladder of water while the horses ate some oats and drank water from the wooden bowls Orys prepared.

I was eating and gazing absently across at the Blacklands when Blyss came to stand with me, asking, “You know what I think about when I see them?” I realized she was speaking of the Blackland mountain range and shook my head. “I think of how they are part of the same range that encircles Obernewtyn. You cannot imagine how I have sometimes missed greenness and misty rain.”

“We even missed the snows of wintertime,” Merret laughed, coming to stand beside Blyss and ruffling her flyaway golden curls.

Ran lifted his white head and whinnied. As he stamped and twitched his ears to explain to the others what he sensed, I impatiently entered his mind to find that the stallion could
smell a host of riders moving back toward the Suggredoon.