The Sigil Blade (46 page)

“No,” Uleth insisted firmly. “She is too much like you. She has a part to play, and I do not dare interfere with it. You will need to be the one to help her grow strong.”

Irial clearly had been influenced by this man, Edryd realized. Her certainty about who and what he was, and insisting that he must help Eithne, all had a source. It had been Uleth.

“You speak as though you know what is to come?” Edryd said, not yet prepared to believe what he was himself suggesting.

“No,” Uleth disagreed. “I am afraid I am giving you the wrong impression. I have no real wisdom or power, only a few weak tricks and bits of lost knowledge. I don’t seek to see the future. It is, I think, unwise to try, for doing so would be to seek something that does not exist.”

“But you know the fates of others.”

“I see the world, and those of us who inhabit it, as they are, or I try to,” Uleth said, trying vainly to explain himself to an uncomprehending Edryd. “I can see your place in the pattern, and the shapes you can take within it. I cannot predict what will come, but I can see that you bring change. That is all. I can tell you only this, when you act, you must try to see all ends before you decide.”

Edryd had no immediate response for this. Uleth seemed to be speaking nonsense, but that nonsense was making Edryd feel uncomfortable, and he was beginning shake. “I have not often been faulted for having acted without thought,” Edryd finally said, “only for failing to act, or for being too harsh or too selfish when I did.”

“Then they have not understood you.” Uleth’s words were quiet and full of empathy, as though he could see Edryd’s suffering. “You are not an ordinary man. You are burdened with an importance. Your choices will often be hard ones, and they will carry consequences.”

These words recalled to Edryd’s mind a similar admonishment Seoras had once given him. But where Seoras’s words had been dark, urging Edryd to seek greater power, Uleth’s words of caution were an expression of sympathy, and though Edryd took no comfort from them, he recognized the wisdom that they held. He could see Irial’s kindness in this man, and he felt instinctively that he could trust Uleth.

“You should help me then,” Edryd said.

“No,” Uleth said, even more firmly than he had when Edryd had suggested that he teach Eithne.

“I need to understand my power. I have to learn how to shape.”

“You have not been listening,” Uleth replied. “I am a sorcerer, and an incompetent one at that. I do not shape.”

“Shaping, is it something evil?” Edryd asked.

“No, it is neither good nor bad. But it is something I have no talent for, and it is an area in which you have been hobbled as well. Even if I were a shaper of great power, you would not have the ability to learn. There is a reason that Seoras failed to progress your awakening. There is nothing I can do.”

Edryd was not convinced. Clearly there were things that Uleth could do, things that even Seoras could not. “I need guidance,” Edryd pled.

“The things I could impart,” Uleth said slowly, choosing his words carefully, “are things you should not learn from me. I would be a blind man teaching a child about a world filled with light and color. I would forever distort your perceptions, and it would prevent you from seeing truth.”

Uleth went silent as Eithne returned. She smiled at Edryd and held out the samples of lanceleaf that he had sent her after. She had also harvested clusters of woodsage, and had picked several beautiful stream orchids. Edryd allowed his conversation with Uleth to end. Eithne and Edryd, dividing between them the flowers that Eithne had collected, made their way back to the road, followed by the image of Uleth, which of course carried nothing.

Falling back, so that he could inspect Uleth, Edryd noticed that the man’s feet left tracks in the ground, but they did not stir any dust into the air as they should have done on the dry earth. As soon he noticed this, small clouds began to rise behind Uleth. It might have been Uleth, correcting a flaw, but Edryd suspected it was instead a product of being made to see, whatever it was that he expected he should see.

Edryd was able to confirm this suspicion, for he found that he could make Uleth’s foot trail appear or disappear, by simply imagining that the earth of the roadway was either more hard, or more soft, than it truly was. There was a thrill in this discovery, but it left Edryd feeling unsettled. He had no idea who or what Uleth really was. These were not the questions Edryd should have been asking. Uleth was precisely who he showed himself to be. What Uleth hid, from everyone, was where he was.

The opportunity to explore the nature of the illusion did not last long, as they had not been far from the cottage. Arriving before the lonely structure, the scene of violence that had been in front of the building the day before was gone, with all traces of blood having been swept away. The bodies of the men that Ruach had killed had been moved a great distance away and burnt in a fire, accounting for the smoke that they had all seen earlier.

A crowd of men maneuvered massive stones off to the south of the cottage. They were constructing the cavity for a funeral barrow. Three women were not far away, weaving meadowsweet through the recesses of a funeral pyre that had been built up earlier out of stacks of dead wood. Neither Edryd nor Eithne knew these people, but those present had known Irial it seemed, and they had come to show her the honor and respect that she was owed.

Edryd felt numb as he entered the cottage. Krin was there, at the larger of the room’s two tables. He was drunk, and it did not appear that he had slept. His left forearm had been heavily bandaged and he had an ugly red cut just beneath his left eye. Upon seeing Edryd and Eithne he moved from his seat, and Edryd was caught unprepared as the large man unexpectedly crushed him in a great enveloping hug. He released Edryd just as quickly, and as Krin pulled away, the Ascomanni captain did not appear afraid to show everyone that he had been crying.

“Logaeir told me that you did justice for her,” Krin said. “I thank you for that.”

“Where is Logaeir?” Edryd asked.

“He will be here before nightfall,” answered a young woman keeping a vigil next to Irial’s room.

Everyone turned to face her. “This is my daughter, Ruelle,” said Krin, introducing her. Like Krin, she also appeared to have been crying, the strongly sun affected skin of her kind face streaked with tears. Edryd was a little surprised. He hadn’t imagined Krin as a father.

“I looked to her as a sister,” Ruelle said. “A great many of us did.” This comment made Edryd think of Eithne, the young girl beside him now whom Irial had cared for as a true sister would.

Edryd took Eithne’s hand, and together they entered Irial’s room. She lay in the bed positioned as she had been the day before. Eithne placed her flowers atop her sister and stood beside the bed. She remained silent for a long while before turning away and running to her room, just ahead of the tears that she could no longer hold back.

Not knowing how to comfort Eithne, or even himself, Edryd pulled a chair over beside her door and waited. He wished that he too could hide somewhere. A part of him was glad that he was not known to many of these people, and especially glad that they did not know him as the Blood Prince, but he did feel like an intruder here, beside so many people that he did not recognize. It did not feel like the home he had known for the past little while. Krin pulled over another chair and sat down beside him.

“I knew her for longer than you did, and I will miss her, but I know how you felt about Irial. We could all see it,” he said.

Edryd was taken aback. Krin was speaking of something Edryd had hardly admitted to himself, but it didn’t matter any longer. It was not something to hide. “She did not return those feelings,” Edryd said. He couldn’t think why she should have.

“She did care for you,” Krin said. “She held you in the highest possible regard. I think though, that maybe, she thought that you were a little too young.”

Edryd would have done almost anything to change the subject, but Krin wasn’t the sort to cooperate, and the man was drunk.

“I was supposed to protect her,” Edryd said, choking back tears.

“You did everything you could,” Krin said, grabbing a hold of Edryd’s shoulder. “You did everything that anyone could.”

His friend was trying to help, but it was not working. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t come here,” said Edryd.

“No, none of this would have happened,” Krin agreed. “This island would still be under the control of demons and criminals, and my people would be facing the threat of starvation in the winter, persisting on the margin of an ever dwindling supply of food, if you had not come here. Without help from you and your men, our attack yesterday would never have succeeded.”

“I was not responsible for any of that,” Edryd protested.

“And neither were you responsible for what happened to Irial. That it might not have happened had you never come to An Innis, does not make it your fault.”

Edryd understood the truth in Krin’s words, but he wasn’t prepared to accept it. He wasn’t going to be able to forgive himself so easily.

“If you need anything, if you ever need anything, you only have to ask,” Krin said, grabbing Edryd’s shoulder once more in his broad hand. He gave Edryd a solid reassuring nudge, before releasing his grip and walking away, leaving Edryd to sort through his grief.

Edryd realized how selfish he was being. He had been directly responsible for a handful of deaths himself yesterday, but hundreds more had also died, all of them in some way under the name of the Blood Prince. Edryd had much more to answer for than just his failure to protect Irial. There would be other people here who were mourning the deaths of people that they had loved, and many more than that had been hurt. One of those people had been Ruach, injured performing a duty Edryd should have been there to do himself. He was here now, recovering.

Feeling a guilt that came from not having given thought to Ruach since arriving at the cottage, Edryd rose and walked the short distance to his old room. His friend was sleeping peacefully on the bed as Edryd entered. Ludin Kar, who continued to attend to him, slept too, slumped over in his chair and resting his head on a table beside the bed. Edryd remembered now where he had heard the man’s name before. Ludin Kar was the author of the book that Irial had borrowed from Uleth about the Sigil Order. The man was Aelsian’s friend. That might prove useful in the days to come. Edryd brought a chair in, and grateful for a reason to break away from the people gathered in the open hall, he closed the door behind him, and waited for evening.

Logaeir did come, along with dozens of others, as darkness fell. Eithne and Edryd walked behind as Irial was placed upon the pyre by a group of women, some of them young and some of them old. Everyone then watched as Irial’s body was consumed in an enormous column of fire and smoke that seemingly towered to an impossible height, reaching straight out into the stars of the night sky. Edryd saw Uleth then, staring at the pyre, with tears falling from his eyes. What Edryd saw might only be an image, but he knew that the pain in those eyes was something real. Uleth did not look back at Edryd, who continued to look on with the strange feeling that that he might not ever see this man again.

In the morning, the ashes would be placed in the cavity that had been created out of two great stones which supported an even larger monolith that rested flatly atop them. The structure looked something like a giant table. Earth and stone would then be piled up in a mound around the grave, covering the stones over entirely. It was the sort of tribute afforded only to a person of great status.

As people began to break away and leave, Edryd realized he had given no thought to where he would go now. He couldn’t bear to think of sleeping in the cottage. Logaeir approached and solved the matter before Edryd could begin to worry over it.

“Aelsian has arranged rooms for you and Eithne aboard the
Interdiction
,” Logaeir said. “You should head there tonight. It will be as safe a place as can be found for the two of you, and it will be a good place to sort things out in the days to come as well. I will meet with you there tomorrow.”

Edryd didn’t normally like to accept any of Logaeir’s suggestions, but he was not about to argue with this one. There was nothing but sympathy and sorrow in the Ascomanni strategist’s eyes, and Edryd knew that he had misjudged this man. It wasn’t that he had been wrong in any of his conclusions about Logaeir, but Edryd had not tried to understand the depths behind the facade that Logaeir presented on the surface, and he been too slow to forgive him. Logaeir would never be someone in whom he could completely trust, but he was a loyal ally and friend.

They gathered a few of Irial’s things and a few articles that belonged to Eithne, and walked together on through the night, enjoying the silence and the stars that shone brightly in the sky. When Eithne grew tired, worn out by the turmoil of the day, Edryd carried her over the remainder of the distance to the harbor. Aelsian was asleep when they arrived, but his men showed them to their rooms aboard the ship.

Eildach was still holding out, but a sort of normalcy had developed quickly within a few short days. Men and women, and even entire families from the settlements near the Ascomanni encampment, had begun to flow in, many of them returning to a home they had been forced to flee years ago. Order was kept under the banner of the Blood Prince. On this particular subject, seated at a table in the great room aboard the
Interdiction
, Edryd and Logaeir were having a heated argument that was being ineffectively mediated by Aelsian. Logaeir was losing the argument.