The Rebellion (96 page)

I thanked Dardelan for defending the Misfits’ honor. “You are beginning to make a habit of it,” I said.

“Malik is a disgusting man,” he answered. “He has no scruples, and I am more than glad the Battlegames showed him for what he is. It will be purely thanks to your people that this rebellion will not become a slaughter. I truly feared it, especially when it looked as if Malik would become our leader.”

“I just hope that whatever help we give will be remembered afterward,” Gevan said.

“It will,” Dardelan promised. “But we have not met yet. I am Dardelan, son of Bodera, rebel chief of Sutrium.”

“I am Gevan,” the Coercer guildmaster said, standing to
bow formally. “I have heard much of you and your father.”

Serba interrupted to bid us farewell, and when she departed, Gwynedd, Cassell, and Yavok’s proxy, Tilda, went with her. Whatever their inner struggles, it seemed that the west coast rebels were far more united than those in the rest of the Land.

As Brydda secured the barn, he told Dardelan he would collect Sallah and meet him at the crossroads on the other side of town. Then Brydda, Gevan, and I walked back to the gypsy encampment together.

“You found nothing,” the big rebel said as we picked our way over a shadowy wheat field with the wind in our faces.

“Nothing in those we were able to probe,” Gevan admitted. “We could not touch Elii’s mind or Gwynedd’s, and Malik was unreachable because he wore one of those demon bands the Herders have been selling.”

Brydda gave him a startled look. “These bands block your powers?”

“Unfortunately. Though, given our lack of reaction during the meeting, I bet Malik is wondering now if they work or not.”

“Do you suspect him of the kidnapping because he wears the band?”

“Not truly,” I said, sighing. “As you said at Obernewtyn, it just doesn’t make sense that he would force us to join you.”

We walked in silence on the narrow track running along the cliff, listening to the churning roar of the sea at its base. The wind was chilly enough to make me draw the edges of my coat together, but its astringency revived my flagging spirit.

“What now?” Brydda asked when the magi wagons were in sight.

I shrugged. “I’ll leave for Obernewtyn tonight, and Gevan can follow in the morning. Then we’ll send some of our people to each rebel group as promised and go on looking for Rushton. There is nothing else we can do until we have some clue as to who took him and where.”

He nodded absently. “You did not need to agree to be decoys in Malik’s foray. You realize it makes you sworn allies, for all your talk of limitations.”

I wondered if I ought to feel we were betraying Rushton and our ideals, but instead I felt we were doing the right thing. We had talked in guildmerge of abstaining from violence, but we had never considered that we might actively work against it.

The rebels seemed genuinely committed to a bloodless rebellion, and with our help, this might be possible. Wouldn’t helping them be a different sort of adherence to our oaths?

Gahltha and I cut around the perimeter of the town as before, avoiding the narrow, winding streets clogged with revelers. Getting through the cluster of tents was less easy. The moon fair was drawing to an end, and there were twice as many as when we had gone in the other direction. People were becoming increasingly uninhibited. Everywhere there were campfires and clots of people laughing and singing, blocking the makeshift roads.

After I passed the outskirts, the road became easier. Most travelers endeavored to reach their destinations before dusk, given the robbers who prowled the dark hours. There were only one or two men driving empty carts, and they eyed me suspiciously.

The stalls at the crossroad were boarded up, their owners having presumably joined the revels. I passed them and took
to the main road. Far ahead, the Gelfort Range was a jagged smudge.

The moon rose slowly, at first low and golden and then fading to white. It was odd to think that right now in Sutrium, Kella or Ceirwan might be looking at this moon, and in the high mountains perhaps the Agyllians gazed at it, dreaming past and future dreams. Maybe Jakoby looked up at it, too, somewhere in the Sadorian desert, and far out to sea, ship fish would be leaping out of the silvery waves into its faint light.

There was no secret from the moon. Perhaps even now, it illuminated Rushton’s face.

The thought of Rushton came to me as the weary ache of a bruise that has been bumped too many times. I asked Gahltha to gallop, but as we thundered along the empty road, I seemed to hear Rushton’s name over and over in the beat of his hooves. We galloped until Gahltha wearied, and then he walked and trotted alternately, following his own inclination.

After some hours, exhausted by emotion, or the repression of it, I stopped to get some food at a roadside tavern, a rough ale pit reeking of spilt drink and vomit. The customers leaning over the bar were all male and glared at me suspiciously or with repellent lust, so I did not linger. Taking my purchases, I rode another hour up the road to the Brown Haw Rises before stopping. I climbed a low hillock that overlooked the road in both directions, laid my travel blanket under a single ravaged Ur tree that stood on a jutting mound, and sat down with a sigh. Emeralfel was a looming black shadow whose presence I could discern only because it blotted out a great jagged triangle of stars. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and I hoped it would not rain before I got home.

I had brought oats and carrots for Gahltha, and he munched hungrily as I unwrapped bread and soft cheese for
myself. It grew colder, and as I gazed down at the shadowy world where everything was so eerily still, it seemed it was holding its breath in the calm before a storm. By the time I finished eating, Gahthla had wandered away to graze. I lay back against a tree root and stared up at the dark canopy of leaves, silvered here and there where the moon penetrated the clouds.

“Rushton,” I whispered, feeling the name in my mouth and on my tongue.

I wept a few useless tears out of frustration and sorrow and confusion before falling into a dull mindless state. I did not mean to sleep, but sleep I did, and deeply.

I dreamed of Matthew walking under the glaring sun along a red-earth street bordered by slablike buildings of red stone with small windows and flat roofs.

At first I barely recognized him, for his hair was very long and hung in a gleaming tangle around broad shoulders. His upper torso was naked, and he was impressively muscled and very brown. For the first time, he looked a man rather than a boy stumbling into manhood. His face had a new maturity, and the lines etched between his brows told me he had suffered.

He seemed to be searching for something, for his eyes scanned the street on both sides constantly. A number of times he cast quick glances over his shoulder as if he feared he was followed. He stopped outside a brown door set deep in a stone wall and looked about again before knocking just once. The door swung open and a girl beckoned him inside.

I gasped, or I would have if I had mouth or breath to do it with, for the girl was unmistakably Gilaine, the mute daughter of the renegade Herder Henry Druid, and the long-sought
beloved of our ally Daffyd. She had since been sold to the notorious Salamander by none other than my own nemesis Ariel. I opened my senses and heard her welcome Matthew telepathically. The light inside the hall was dim, falling from a set of slits near the roof. In it Gilaine looked older than I remembered, though no less lovely, her moonbeam-pale hair bound into a long plait.

“You were not followed?” she sent to him.

“No. But, Gil, I saw something. A carving on the temple wall …”

“It is the lost queen of the people who once ruled here.”

“What happened to her?” asked Matthew.

Gilaine shrugged as they entered a windowless room containing two low, worn couches and a simple wooden table. The only ornament in the room was a square of green cloth fastened to the wall. The light from slits near the roof fell directly onto it, causing it to glow and cast its cool hue over the room.

“Some say Salamander sold both her and her daughter over the waters,” Gilaine sent. “Our masters don’t tear down the temple wall that shows her face, because they know the people will not revolt so long as they believe she will return.”

Matthew had a queer expression on his face. “How old was the daughter when she disappeared?”

“A child,” came a new voice. A dark-eyed woman with long, unbound, blue-black tresses entered the room, carrying a tray of tall glasses. “Five or six years old.”

“Bila, how are you?” Matthew asked gently.

“As well as I can be,” the woman said almost indifferently, but there was a quiver in her voice and raw pain in her eyes that told another story. Gilaine came to take her hand and pressed it to her cheek.

“Perhaps he lives …,” Matthew began.

The woman shook her head. “No one lives who enters the pit.” A tear rolled down her cheek, and she dropped her head and wept without embarrassment. Gilaine and Matthew exchanged a worried look over her head.

“This can’t go on,” Matthew sent to Gilaine. “They have to find the courage to stop this.”

“You don’t understand,” Gilaine sent gently. “It is not that they fear to rise. They simply believe they must not until the queen comes again. That is their prophecy, and it is all that holds them together.”

“Their prophecy keeps them enslaved!” Matthew sent. “And it’s only a matter of time before I am sent to the pit, too.…”

I blinked and squinted to find I was lying on my back with the sun full on my face. I sat up, bewildered, and realized the whole stony face of Emeralfel was shining in the sunlight. Cursing, I stood, finding my clothes wet with dew.

Gahltha was nearby, cropping contentedly on a clump of clover. I reproached him for failing to wake me.

“You needed sleep,” he sent.

I wet my hands on the dewy grass and washed my face as best I could, then changed into a dry shirt. It was still very early as we rejoined the road, and my annoyance faded.

The road curved around behind the Gelfort Range to avoid the sullen mists of Berryn Mor, and I pondered my dream. It had felt like a true dream, but it would be an incredible coincidence if Matthew had ended up in the same place as Gilaine.

Yet perhaps it was not so extraordinary, considering that they had all been taken by Salamander. No doubt he returned to the same markets to sell his wares, like any trader. Matthew
had never met Gilaine when they had dwelt in the Land, but he might have sensed her abilities, as he had mine when we’d first met.

I wondered if Matthew ever dreamed of us or of a dragon flying at him in the night. Then I reminded myself that for now I must focus on the rebellion and the need to find Rushton. Once the Land was secure in the hands of the rebels, and Rushton in his rightful place as Master of Obernewtyn, I could pursue the signs and dreamtrails with renewed purpose.

23

A
LAD TOLD ME
that there had been no news of Rushton, not by bird nor from the returned coercer-knights nor from the futuretellers.