Witchlanders (35 page)

How full of magic they were. He and Falpian could stand now, their voices stronger than the beast's attraction. They stood side by side, willing the smaller creatures at the Gormy Man. Easily it swept them aside and came toward the singers. The great tree that was its arm swung down, cracking the ice, but Falpian pulled Ryder aside just in time. More gormy men emerged from the woods, the last of them now, and Ryder and Falpian willed them to the battle. The Gormy Man sent them flying into the trees. They came apart like children's snowmen, but they re-formed, swelling up out of the ground to attack again.

Ryder turned his attention to the giant itself, thinking that perhaps he could control it as he did the smaller ones.
Die,
he commanded as he sang.
Die. You are gone. You are nothing. You are not.

For a moment he thought he saw its body waver, but the creature was too strong. Lilla had poured every drop of hate she had inside it—twenty years of anger, twenty years of guilt and madness in the dark. This thing had her cunning, somehow; it had part of her intelligence. Ryder felt it as he sang and was horrified.

The Gormy Man swept out its arms, and the smaller creatures were drawn in. Their bodies flew toward it and came apart on impact. Then they were gone, incorporated into its immense body. Ryder was sure he saw the thing smile and cock its head exactly as Lilla would have done. It took a step toward him, and the ground shuddered. Still singing, Falpian and Ryder backed away.
We'll be dead in moments,
Ryder thought.

Go stand in the river.
Why was Falpian thinking that?

Go stand in the river
. It wasn't Falpian. It was his mother, his mother's voice. And then Ryder remembered. He'd stood in the river with Dassen, and the creatures couldn't follow.

Water,
Ryder thought, willing Falpian to understand. They should focus their energy on the ice, not the creature; they must start the river flowing again. On the mountain they had used wind to blow the bits of the creatures away, but water should work as well. They shared a glance, and their songs changed at exactly the same time.

Crack!
A fissure traveled out across the lake, splitting
the ice between the creature's legs.
We can't go to the shore,
Ryder thought to Falpian.
If we do, it will follow.
He and Falpian backed away, moving toward the place where the lake narrowed to river.

With a mighty booming sound, part of the waterfall collapsed, raining splinters of crystal onto the lake and ripping a dark hole in the ice. The creature lurched backward. Ryder and Falpian pressed their advantage, willing the ice to shatter.

Ryder saw Lilla stand up, seeming dazed. She stared at the black water that spurted over the falls and into the widening crevice. Great groaning sounds were traveling out across the lake and down the river. With a thundering crack the rest of the waterfall came crashing down, spewing great chunks of ice. Lilla fell to the ground again as the colossal Gormy Man stumbled back.

“No!” she wailed.

The Gormy Man slipped backward into the water. Ryder saw its arms flailing, its huge arms churning the water. Lilla screamed with rage. The creature went under, and when it came up again it had lost half its size. For the first time, Ryder heard it make a sound—a painful keening like the crying of a child. When it went under again, it didn't come back up.

Ryder started to limp toward the echo site. Neither he nor Falpian were singing now, but their song seemed to go
on without them, reverberating back and forth over the cliffs and across the valley.

“Get off the ice!” Falpian screamed behind him. “It's breaking up!”

Every step sent pain jolting through Ryder's body, but he saw that Lilla was staggering toward the rocky island, and he wasn't going to wait to see if she had any other spells she wanted to try. He reached down and yanked the dagger from his leg. For a moment the world went white before his eyes. He used every bit of his strength to cling to consciousness and kept going, holding the bloody dagger out in front of him.

At that moment the lake made a sound like the lowing of a huge animal. Underneath Ryder's feet, the ice started to shift. He fell, dropping the knife. The next thing he knew he was in the water. He was in the water, and it was cold, fatally cold.

Ryder came up gasping and saw that Lilla was in the water too, but she was far away, flailing her arms. He saw her go under.

At the edge of the lake, a dog was barking loudly. Ryder tried to call for Falpian, but the cold had stolen his breath. He slipped under the water, remembering that he had had a dream of drowning once.

His pain was receding. The light was receding. He was sinking and all was quiet. Beautifully quiet.
This is
true too,
he thought,
this deep silence. The witches are right about that.

We live between the two great silences: the silence that existed before the world began, and the silence that waits for us at the end of all things. They are the fabric the Goddess used to make the world.

He wondered how the world could be both sides of a coin at the same time: silence and song. He'd have to ask the Goddess about that. When he was dead. It wouldn't be long now. Ryder could see the Goddess swimming toward him with powerful strokes.

The Goddess certainly is ugly,
he thought.
She looks like a big, wet dog.

CHAPTER 27
RAIKEN'S FARM

Ryder opened his eyes and smiled, burrowing further into thick, warm blankets. He was alive. The air was sweet with the smell of dried hicca stalks that were the stuffing for his bed—or rather, the stuffing for the large burlap sack that was serving for a bed. The dog didn't seem to understand that the sack was just big enough for one. All through the night he had gone from Falpian to Ryder, flopping down lovingly on one or the other, unable to choose between them. Now he lay crushed next to Ryder, half on the sack and half off, with his belly to the air and his legs splayed. His broken tooth gave his face a lopsided look.

Ryder pulled his arm out from under the covers to rub Bo's belly. “Good dog,” he said. “Good boy.”

He heard the front door of the tavern close quietly and sat up. There were no windows in Dassen's storage room, but through a crack in the plank wall, Ryder could glimpse
the tavern keeper's heavy shape, making his way to the barn. It was just before dawn, but Dassen was going out already—searching for Mabis, as he did every day. Ryder felt a twinge of guilt; he should be going too.

“Something I should know about you and my mother?” Ryder had asked the day before.

“Well, your Fa was your Fa, if that's what you're asking,” Dassen had answered. The idea that he wasn't hadn't even occurred to Ryder, but he hid his surprise at the comment. “No,” Dassen continued, “it's just the old story, hardly worth telling. Two best friends love the same wild girl. She picks the one, and that's that.”

In the tavern courtyard, Ryder heard the jingling of a harness as Dassen led his pack pony to the road. The truth was, Ryder didn't want to go with him. He was afraid of what they'd find. But he told himself that Dassen wouldn't have let him come in any case—Ryder wasn't well enough yet.

Gingerly he lifted his covers and looked down at his thigh. The day before, Dassen had allowed him to take the bandage off. It was an ugly scar—twisted and puckered with the stitches still in. Dassen had sewed him up with waxy string while Ryder lay on one of the tavern tables, but he barely remembered that—thank the Goddess.

On the other side of the storage room, Falpian slept. Their minds were so close now that it was hard to stay awake while Falpian dreamed. Ryder yawned.

And then he was by the sea again, sitting near a great rock with Bo at his side.

“Falpian dreams of this place a lot,” Ryder said, but the dog only looked out onto the water. The two little girls had come to wade again, wearing blue to mourn their brother. Their long hair was unbound now and black as dye. Where the ends of their hair touched the water, they left black stains on the sea.

From out of the sea came a head, then a face, then the body of a man. He looked in every way like Falpian, the same slender frame, the same pale skin, the same black eyes. His clothes were perfectly dry.

“You're not Falpian,” said Ryder.

The man came to sit next to him on the beach, and Bo lifted his chin for him to scratch, as if they knew each other.

“This is where I drowned,” he said. “They never found my boat.”

Ryder nodded. The sea breeze blew through his hair. “People say that as long as you remember someone, they're still alive.”

“It's a lie.”

“I know.”

The man looked out toward the waves. “Falpian will never know if he is remembering me correctly, or if he's just making me up. And he'll never know if I drowned on
purpose, if I drowned myself because I knew we weren't talat-sa.”

“Did you?”

The man shrugged. “There's no way to tell. I'm not Farien. This isn't Bo. We're just ideas that Falpian has. I am a memory, and every day I fade.”

A white seabird flashed by, and Ryder turned away for a moment. When he turned back, he was alone but for the dog. He felt a hollowed-out sadness inside his chest, but he didn't know if the feeling belonged to him or to Falpian.

Bo lifted himself up on his front legs, yawned, and settled back down into the warm sand. Ryder stroked the top of his head. The dog's eyes were closed, but his ears were cocked back, listening.

“When we were on the ice, I thought I heard my mother's voice,” Ryder said. “I kept expecting her to appear. I kept thinking, why doesn't she come back? If she's still alive, why isn't she here? Bo, I think my mother . . .”

The dog moved over and put his head on Ryder's knee.

Ryder woke again at Skyla's knock. “It's the dog,” she said, poking her head through the door. “He's in the kitchen, and Dassen's hired girls won't go in when he's there.”

Falpian held his covers up to his neck. “They just have to call him,” he said. But of course, they wouldn't; the hired girls were terrified of Bo.

“I think he's eaten all the butter,” Skyla added.

Falpian rolled off his sack bed as soon as Skyla was gone and began looking around for his clothes.

“Ash on your face,” said Ryder. He knew they were both thinking about their dreams, but neither wanted to talk about them.

Falpian rubbed his cheek. “Beard. Haven't shaved in days.” He picked some leggings off the floor and quickly pulled them on, jumping a little to keep his balance.

“Shaved?”

“My face.” He found a shirt in the corner, gave it a few sniffs, and put it on. “I asked Dassen for a razor the other day, but he just stared at me like I was going to slit his throat with it. Forgot you people didn't cut your beards.”

Falpian was out the door before Ryder could respond. Just when he thought he was beginning to understand his talat-sa, Falpian would blithely reveal something incomprehensible like that. Cut his beard?

A moment later Skyla slipped into the storage room, wearing a plain brown dress borrowed from the blacksmith's wife. She sat down on the floor next to Ryder's bed, hugging her knees. It was so cold in the storage room that Ryder could see her breath, though he was perfectly warm under his blankets.

“I was thinking . . . I might go back today,” she told him.

Ryder sat up again, surprised. Skyla had returned to the coven once already; he knew she'd had a long conversation with Sodan, but she hadn't told him what they'd said. “Really? You mean, to the coven? But you haven't been wearing your reds.”

“Oh. Did you think . . . ?” She paused, looking at her feet. Mabis used to hug her knees in just the same way, Ryder noticed. “The villagers—they've known me all their lives, but if I'm wearing reds, I can't get a word out of them—they just start bowing at me and praising Aata.”

“Since when do you care what the villagers think?”

“I don't!” Skyla pursed her lips. “It's just . . . We've always lived so far away from the valley. I just wanted to see what I was missing for a few days.” She smoothed the rough fabric of her dress as if it were a fancy gown she would regret giving up. “But I always knew I was going back.”

“In the catacombs,” he started carefully, “it seemed like you had changed your mind about being a witch.”

“I know, but so much has happened. . . .”

Ryder couldn't hide his disappointment. In his mind, he'd started to formulate a plan to rebuild the cottage. After all they'd been through, he wanted them all to be together. It was odd: Seeing the tomb of Aayse had made Mabis want to leave the coven, but it made Skyla want to stay.

Falpian entered, pulling Bo by the scruff of the neck. “Bad dog!” he scolded. Bo barked a complaint and sat down in a corner, licking butter from his paws.