The Tree of Story (22 page)

Tell me now, daughter of Skald
, the dragon said.
What do you see?

There was something at the foot of the hill, a little cottage. She knew without knowing how she knew that it had been Rowen’s home when she was a child and that it was a day’s walk from Fable. No distance at all for the dragon when it came time for him to rise again. Then her gaze seemed to sharpen, as if her eyes had turned to crystal, and she saw farther and farther.

“I see high mountains, Old One,” she said. “I see the place where you were born, a wall of ice towering into the sky. I see that you were once mightier than anything in the Realm. Your body was the rivers, the streams. The rain. Your wings were the clouds. You were everywhere.”

Our life is long. It flows forward and backward through the river of time. We are seeing what once was and may be again. If we do not fail
.

Freya wandered then through visions and memories that were both the dragon’s and her own. She saw her city as the dragon saw it, from a great height; saw her fellow Skaldings preparing for siege and war. And then her vision swooped down and she saw her father, hammering sword blades on his anvil. She saw her little brother and her mother at the doorway of the house, looking out into the dark and cold. Wondering where Freya was and what was happening to her.

She reached out a hand. They were so close, right in front of her. She could almost touch them. Her vision clouded with tears and then the voice of ice returned, thundering through her.

Turn our sight to where we are now
, the voice commanded.
Look and tell me what is happening on the borders of this country
.

Freya’s vision tore itself away from Skald and rushed back over the miles to the edge of the Bourne. It seemed that what she saw was happening at this moment, but it had also happened not long ago and yet was about to happen. She looked and then she tried to find words for what she saw.

She saw the day come, the sun lifting over the dark hills to the east. She saw the thin silver ribbons of the streams, and the deserted fields and farmhouses, and the folk upon the roads, riding and walking, driving goats and cattle, most of them hurrying southward, bringing with them the few possessions they could carry. To the north she saw a great gathering of Nightbane like a dark stain on the earth, moving along the road toward the rocky, steep-sided pass that was the way into the Bourne.

The citadel of Annen Bawn was there, an arch of stone over the place where the pass was narrowest. She saw the swarm of Nightbane flood into the gorge until it was stopped at the citadel walls like a raging torrent breaking upon a dam. She saw the defenders mustering on their battlements and walls. She saw a hail of arrows, and men and monsters screaming, falling, dying. She saw the great iron battering ram hammering at the gates, and with each blow she felt the stones of the walls shudder. The gates had been reinforced and they held. For now they held. Then her gaze swept north again, to a dark line on the horizon. Something still distant but moving swiftly, raising a great cloud of dust.

“Something else is coming to Fable,” Freya cried. “Another army, but not like any army I’ve ever seen or heard of. They are covered in metal and they have no faces.”

This army was perhaps less than two days away from
Annen Bawn, marching tirelessly day and night. The warriors were not Nightbane. She did not know what they were, but she knew that they were on their way to destroy. She was about to tell the dragon, but it came to her then that her vision was his now. It was as he had said: they would see and know as one, and that meant she had no need to speak her thoughts. Yet deep down she felt her own frail heart still beating, a tiny pulse of warmth in the depths of the icy immensity that was Whitewing Stonegrinder. She was still Freya of Skald, daughter of Ragnar, the blacksmith.

“Old One, we have to help the defenders at Annen Bawn,” she said, gasping for breath in the icy air. “The gates won’t hold. You can strengthen them. You can make a wall of ice across the gorge and seal the enemy out.”

These things you have seen are happening now
, the dragon said.
The walls of Annen Bawn are about to fall. We cannot prevent it. The defenders who remain will retreat to Fable and the Nightbane will follow
.

“But we can’t just wait here, Old One. We have to do something.”

Our powers are not yet ready. If we go to defend Annen Bawn now, we will fail and the enemy will carry on to Fable. We must wait, daughter of Skald, and draw the cold from deep in the earth. Another threat is coming that will require all our strength. A threat from the sky
.

Freya joined her gaze to the dragon’s once more and saw what he had spoken of: even stranger creatures than the faceless warriors, following them from the north on vast wings. Creatures that carried fire within them, like flying forges.

Where were they from? Freya looked northward past the fire-bearers, straining to the limits of the vision the dragon had granted her. She saw a fortress on the edge of a lifeless valley of smoke and fire, and beyond it a city in the earth,
and in the city she saw Finn Madoc. His face was pale, his arm in a sling. His eyes feverish.

Finn was dying.

“There is nothing we can do for him,” a voice said. “Many will die before this is over. We cannot save everyone.”

Who had spoken? She didn’t know if these were her own words or the dragon’s. There was no longer any way to tell. She felt the last of her tears slide to a halt on her face and turn to ice.

12

“T
HEY ARE GONE
,” M
ORRIGAN
said. “My people. They have passed into the Shadow Realm.”

Will and Rowen stared at her, too shocked and dismayed to speak.

They had followed Morrigan up the wide staircase, flight after flight, and then down a long corridor to the room she inhabited in the hotel. It was a large room, half of a spacious double suite that took up one end of the top floor, but it was almost bare, containing only an armchair, a standing lamp and a dark leather sofa. On the far side of the room from the door was a large floor-length window that looked down onto the camp, where many lanterns and torches now glowed in the deepening twilight.

Morrigan stood at the window, tall and regal in a dark green gown. She had taken off the shrowde cloak when they
first entered the room, and it had slid away across the thickly carpeted floor like a snaking tendril of white fog, curling up at last in the farthest, darkest corner.

“How can that be?” Rowen said, the colour draining from her face. “How can they be
gone
? Your people are powerful and wise and …”

Morrigan turned from the window. She was as beautiful as Will remembered, but her dark eyes burned with a terrible half-mad light. Will had seen that look before, in the eyes of her brother, Moth, when he faced Lotan the Angel. It was the look of someone who had abandoned all hope and lived only to die for the sake of what she held dear.

“Tell me what you see,” Morrigan said now to Rowen, her voice low and urgent. “You have the gift of the loremasters to see into the weave of things. Use it now.”

“What I see? You mean of your people?”

“Yes. Tell me what happened to them in this place.”

“I saw them when we were in the Weaving, but now …” Rowen shook her head. She was sitting upright on the leather sofa with her hands braced on either side of her, like someone who’d just been through an earthquake and was waiting to see if any more tremors would come.

“You are like me when I first found this place,” Morrigan said. “You do not wish to admit what your heart already knows. Tell me what you see.”

Rowen drew a deep breath, then she nodded.

“I do see them,” she said in a hollow voice. “The Fair Folk. I didn’t want it to be true. But it is true, isn’t it? Your people revealed themselves here to the Night King. It was like the sun emerging from behind clouds. The way we see them most of the time—the way we see you right now, Morrigan, wearing a disguise to keep yourself hidden. Your people took off their disguise.”

She closed her eyes.

“It happened down there, where the camp is now. I can see their bright armour. Their horses with snow-white manes. I can hear their spurs jingling and their banners snapping in the wind. And they’re singing. I don’t know the words, but I can tell what the song means. They’re singing a farewell to the Realm. To everything.”

She kept her eyes closed and did not speak for a while. Her brow furrowed and her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. She swayed a little as she stood and Will was startled to see beads of sweat on her forehead.

“What else?” Morrigan said. “Tell me.”

“Wait,” Will said. “Just let her rest, Morrigan. That’s enough for now.”

Rowen opened her eyes. “No, Will,” she said. “I need to do this. I’ll tell you what I see, Morrigan. There’s a shadow rising in front of them, a huge dark shadow as tall as the sky. It’s
alive
. It’s a cloud of tiny flying things, so many of them they’re filling the sky. The cloud is growing larger. It’s blotting out the sun. I can hear it, too—a roaring sound, getting louder.”

“I have seen and heard this cloud, as well,” Shade said. “Long ago, when we battled the Storyeater.”

Rowen stared at the wolf as if she hadn’t understood what he’d said. Then she looked past him and seemed to be searching for something beyond the walls of the room.

From below came faint sounds of voices raised in shouts and laughter. The Scholar’s play had begun.

“But the Fair Folk are still there,” Rowen said at last. “I can see the light in their eyes, their faces. So bright. They’re raising their swords and their spears and charging forward. And they’re still singing. They’re riding into the cloud, and now it’s being torn open. It’s like a black curtain tearing and falling to pieces. The earth is shaking, and the light …”
Rowen put a hand in front of her eyes. “It’s just the way Grandfather used to tell of the war long ago, when the Shee first battled Malabron. But this time the Fair Folk are alone. There are no Stewards. Your people are alone, Morrigan, against all the hate there is.”

Tears slid down Rowen’s face.

“Then the cloud returns,” she said in a whisper. “It returns stronger than before.” She shook her head slowly.

“What is it?” Morrigan. “Go on.”

“It swallowed them up. Their light went out. It took them. The Shadow Realm took them. All of them.”

Her voice broke with a sob. Will put a hand on her shoulder. He looked up angrily at Morrigan and saw that her eyes had gone cold and hard.

“Yes, this is where it happened,” she said, and her voice was like her gaze: there was no trace of the feeling with which she’d spoken when she first met them in the hotel lobby. “Or this place came to be because of the battle.”

“What do you mean?” Will asked. “The battle created the Fair?”

“My people know of many hidden paths between the realms, Will. Paths that people from the Untold have stumbled upon from time to time, as you did. I think that my people took one of these hidden paths in the hope of approaching Malabron’s realm undetected. They arrived at his borders and revealed themselves there or were discovered. Then the battle tore through the walls that keep the worlds apart, so that they have become entangled here. Like three broken threads knotting together, into something that was never meant to be. Now Malabron’s nightmare is bleeding into our realm, Rowen, and yours, Will, and poisoning them both.”

“My world, too?” Will asked, and a cold dread slid through him. “But how could that happen? The Untold isn’t
part of the Realm. It has nothing to do with any of this.”

“You’re certain of that?” Morrigan said.

For a moment Will caught a glimpse of Morrigan as he had first known her, the sleek coal-black raven who perched on Moth’s shoulder and fixed everyone and everything with a sharp eye. She had been enchanted by Lotan, a prince of the Shee who’d been corrupted by Malabron and turned against his own people. For years she’d been trapped in that shape, and so it didn’t surprise him to see that the raven was still there within this sad and beautiful young woman.