Ember and Ash Page 15

  She’d have to do something about him, but later, on the way home.

  She wasn’t looking forward to another night on the track. Her thighs were sore and her back ached. The Road was easier, in some ways, on foot. That was what the body was meant for, after all: walking and singing, the two unfailing comforts.

  Bass was even more unwilling to take horse again. The night was already sharp, and the north wind had picked up. The council had drawn together briefly to wish them farewell, but they were as busy as flies on a dung heap, trying hard to plan and manage an estate without fire. As Elva rode through the gates onto the north road, the stars as bright as she had ever seen them, she hoped that wasn’t an unlucky image.

  Foreverfroze was a deceptively big town. Large circles of thatched reeds around waist height were arranged in groups. It took Elva a while to realize that they were roofs—the houses were half underground, each house part of a circular group with their entrances pointing toward each other. In winter, the inhabitants would have only a few paces to go between houses, and yet each house had space around it and gardens planted, barely green so early in the late northern spring.

  They came up over a rise and saw the still harbor reflecting a dawn sky of rose and gold clouds, the long breakwater lying like a giant fishhook. Beyond it, the sea ice had broken up but parts still lay like white lace in the distance. Only one ship was in the harbor, and Elva could just make out that it had a broken mast—no doubt the reason it had not left for the fishing season which started at Icebreak.

  An edge of sun showed on the horizon and the harbor abruptly became a blaze of sunlight off water. Elva’s eyes smarted and watered, and she had to wrap her scarf around her face and let Bass lead her horse. She was sure it was beautiful, if only she could have seen it properly…

  He helped her dismount quite gently and shepherded her down some steps into one of the houses. Inside there was one large room with sleeping platforms to one side and kitchen to the other. It could have seemed primitive to someone who was used to walls and separate rooms, but instead it was full of homeliness: bright rugs across the beds and patterned tapestries on the walls, three very young children playing on tufted carpets and everywhere a smell of sweetgrass. It was warm, too. Elva unwound the scarf completely with some thankfulness, and turned to greet her host.

  There was a fire. Burning brightly, bright as if it were any other day. And Bass, standing beside it with a face of utter delight and relief.

  She looked astonished into old wise eyes in a face she knew… surely she knew it, although she had never seen it before? Dark hair gone almost white, merry green eyes—she felt as though she were falling, as though a memory was calling her from some deep place in her mind that she had never known about before.

  “You have a look of your mother about you,” the old woman said kindly. “I know she’s not your full blood, but everyone in a village shares some blood, somewhere along the way.”

  That was it. Her earliest memories, back in the village of Cliffhaven, before she and Mam went on the Road. The aunties and grammers had looked like this, just like this.

  Elva sat down on a bed and stared. There were three of them, as alike as three peas, and they patted her on the shoulder and tutted over her and said things like, “You’ve come a long way then, rest,” and “It’s a shock to see her own kind.”

  “No,” she said, rousing herself. “It’s a shock to see the fire!”

  One of them, she now saw, was younger than the others. That one came forward and sat beside her.

  “I am Sealdaughter,” she said in a lovely mellow voice. “This is Gull, and Sweetgrass. Why is the fire a shock?”

  “Because there are no fires anywhere else in this domain!” Elva said.

  “Ah.” Sealdaughter nodded at the other two and they nodded back. “What, a few days ago, was it? Sealmother was upset about something then. I’ve never known Her so angry. She asked for our strength, and we gave it to her.”

  “Whole village,” one of the other women said. “Went up to the cave and sat for an hour, singing.”

  “And then we came back here,” the last woman said, her voice like scratchy wool. “What was it all about, then?”

  Bass looked at her and said, “What are they saying?” and only then did Elva realize that the conversation had been in another language, one like the tongue she had spoken as a child, but not quite, not quite, so she shouldn’t have been able to understand it, let alone make a sentence in it. How could she have?

  “How do I know your language?” she asked Sealdaughter, and saw Sealdaughter’s eyes cloud over, unfocus. Oh, she knew that feeling—Sealdaughter spoke to Sealmother as she spoke to the gods, and with that thought came understanding.

  “Yes,” Sealdaughter said, watching her face. “The gods gave it to you so you could meet Sealmother and learn from her.”

  “Then I had better do so,” Elva managed to say, through a whirl of confusion and delight.

  “Tonight,” Sealdaughter said. “When it is safe for you, Gull and Sweetgrass will bring you. Sleep now, and eat, and be warm. This is your house.”

  The three of them harried the children out of the house and closed the woven door behind them. Bass was still waiting, so she told him what they had said.

  “I think their Sealmother is like our local gods,” she concluded. “Or else a Power in Herself.”

  “Stronger than the local gods,” Bass observed. “These fires are still burning!”

  He looked thoughtful, until he glanced across at the table. The women had left a tray of steaming hot porridge and fresh-brewed cha.

  No meal had ever tasted so good.

  Bass built the fire up and they basked in it.

  “I didn’t know how much I missed it,” Elva said.

  “Mm,” Bass said, eyes closed, a smile on his face as he stretched out his toes to the warmth.

  It was wonderful. But Elva slept poorly, wondering what she would learn from Sealmother. To meet any Power was a test; a trial of dignity and strength and will. And humility, but she had had plenty of practice at that.

  The two old women, Gull and Sweetgrass, pointed along the harbor to where the northern ridge met the sea. A well-worn path led to a group of caves there, dark holes like staring eyes in the shining gray rock. They were curiously disturbing. Elva shivered a little. She was feeling young and vulnerable. I am about to become a grandmother, she reminded herself, I have six grown children, but with the two old women next to her, taking an arm each and shepherding her along the path, she felt a child again, being taken by her aunties to see the Village Voice because of some naughtiness.

  The women stopped at the first cave mouth as though they, too, were nervous. Gull cleared her throat and a voice came from inside, saying “Enter.” Gull pushed her into the cave and the women both moved back. Not afraid, but reverent.

  She walked forward cautiously, comforted by the darkness after the sunset light. The cave made a natural room. In the middle was a pool, dark as ink. It drew Elva’s eyes despite her desire to look around. She felt as though it should sing like the black rock altar did. Sealdaughter came forward, holding an oil lamp, which she placed on a conveniently flat rock next to the pool. The light reflected steadily in the dark water. It was absolutely still and completely mesmeric. Elva felt dizzy. She wanted to sink into that pool, but she forced herself to look up at Sealdaughter.

  “Little Eel,” she said, in a voice deeper than any woman’s, much deeper than the mellow voice she had used before. “You are welcome.”

  She had indeed been named after the baby eels which had been splashing in a stream outside her mother’s bedroom window and were the first living thing her natural mother had seen after she was born. Only Mam, Martine, knew that. Her real mam, Lark, had been Mam’s best friend and she had been there for Elva’s birth; the first to hold her, she’d often said, as though it was meant. Elva’s eyes filled with tears. She had few memories of her early life, but it was as though these
people, this place, called them all up in her, and with them a longing, a yearning, for the mother she had once known, the family who had been taken from her. She was alive herself only because Mam had taken her on the Road, because her father, Cob, had been unable to cope with the strangeness of a child who spoke with the voice of the local gods. So her gift, her curse, her talent, whatever you wanted to call it, had saved her life, and Mam’s, because they were gone when the warlord’s son had massacred everyone in the village. And he was dead, now, too; hanged for another murder, in Turvite, twenty years ago. He’d gone unrepentant to the gallows, and she was pretty sure it would be a long time before he’d be reborn.

  The past was dead. Beyond recall. She’d made up her mind to that twenty years ago, during the Resettlement. All the Travelers had been offered land, in recompense for having been displaced from their homes and forced upon the Road when the warlords invaded. It had been a great, a momentous change, the Resettlement. She had been offered her old home back in Cliffhaven. She had said no, then, because she had a real home and family in Hidden Valley, and it had been the right decision. The past might call her, here, but it was the future which mattered.

  “Sealdaughter,” she said. “What should I do?”

  The question came out without thought or preparation. She had been exasperated herself, many times, by villagers who asked questions like that. Always she had to make them be specific. The gods needed concrete questions, or they became annoyed. But Sealdaughter did not have her limitations.

  “Enter the water,” Sealdaughter said in a much lighter voice, her own voice. “Ask Sealmother.”

  Knowing that, just like her, Sealdaughter spoke in a different voice when she spoke for others made her feel safer. She had never met anyone quite like herself before. If I had been born here, she thought, perhaps I would have become Sealdaughter, or at least we could have been friends. They were sisters, the two of them, united in service. Sealdaughter smiled as if she shared the thought and helped Elva take off her clothes. The cool air struck her skin and she shivered, aware that the water itself would be near freezing.

  “Fear not the water,” Sealdaughter said gently, her accent making the words sound like a phrase from a song. “You must learn if you are one of our people. All the Sealmother’s children enter the water when they are newborn.” She smiled, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “It is late for you. Perhaps you will not fit!” She laughed. It was the kind of mischievousness that Elva had often seen in very old women, women who had seen so much death and life and pain that any minor panic seemed funny.

  Elva held too much anticipation to laugh, but she tried to smile. She stepped toward the water and hesitated on the edge of the pool. All she could see in the pool was her own reflection, clearer than in any mirror. She half-turned toward Sealdaughter.

  “How do I—” she started to ask. Sealdaughter put a firm hand in the small of her back and pushed.

  The water took her in a rush and black swirl, cutting out light, bitingly cold. She almost gasped with the shock, but in time remembered to keep her mouth closed. Her eyes opened without volition, and she heard, dimly, Sealdaughter clap her hands and say, “Lo! She is one of our daughters, Sealmother!” She went down, further down and then, as she reached the bottom of her plunge, instead of surging up to the light, her body paused. Held in the water, flailing arms stilled, the water a pressure around her like the pressure of the gods in the mind. She was aware of something, Someone, paying attention to her. Listening. The presence had the same merriness in its heart as Sealdaughter, but it was sharper, also, like old women often are, impatient of foolishness.

  What should I do? Elva thought, as a child asks her mother.

  What you are called to do. The response was unmistakable, as clear as any message from the gods, but it came as though her own voice had been reflected back at her, just as all she had seen in the water was her own reflection.

  Well, that’s a lot of help! She couldn’t prevent the thought and tensed in case Sealmother resented it, but She laughed.

  The Powers are too strong for single humans, child, and Fire is not the worst you have to fear.

  Tell me.

  Ice comes. Humans alone cannot withstand Him. Humans together may have a slim chance. A better chance, humans together with your gods… if you can convince them to fight for you.

  How do we fight Ice? The very thought of a Power of Ice was terrifying. The Ice King, she realized. That’s who the Ice King is. For the last twenty-three years she had lived in the mountains, where cold was the enemy as much as the attackers from the other side of the mountains were. More, because they could be beaten, but cold could only ever be held at bay.

  Yes, Sealmother said. Hold him at bay.

  Her mind flooded with waves of images, sounds, prayers. No one she knew, not even Mam, would have understood. But she had had a lifetime of interpreting for those greater than herself, and she could take it all in and understand it later. Love, song, connection, loyalty… a wall of strength to keep out the cold.

  There must be no gap in the defense, Sealmother whispered, no longer laughing, or He will sweep in like a spear.

  Her mind and heart overflowing, Elva began to rise in the water, to float as she should to the top, toward the light and Sealdaughter’s waiting hands.

  She clambered out of the pool exhausted and sat on the edge, huddling her knees to her chest, water streaming from her hair. Sealdaughter produced a linen towel and began to dry her as though she were a child. She roused at that and dried and dressed herself slowly, squeezing the water out of her plait until it stopped dripping.

  Sealdaughter smiled kindly at her.

  “Sealmother liked you,” she said. “You are one of her children. But you do not belong here.”

  “No,” Elva agreed. “Not now. But I might have, once, if I hadn’t met Mabry.”

  She was swept by a longing for Mabry, for the real home not the remembered one, for the real family, messy and loud and happy and sad and arguing and content, all the work and joy and simplicity and complication of six children and a husband and a farm to run. She wanted to go home.

  But she couldn’t. She had learned a lesson, and she would need to put it into practice, soon, for the sake of those same children, and of many others.

  Bass was waiting for her outside the house, eager and hopeful.

  “Do you know how to get the fires back now?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “It’s too late for that. But we have to get back fast. There are more problems on the way, and I may know how to stop them.”

  He asked nothing more, just went for the horses while she thanked Gull and Sweetgrass. She was still shivering a little, and dazed from the encounter with Sealmother, but she remembered her manners like a good child and thought even Arvid would have approved of her diplomacy. She even thought to organize shipments of smoked fish and other foods to the fort, promising payment on delivery.

  “Warm food before you go,” Gull said firmly, and when Bass came back with the horses ordered a young boy to hold them. She led them down to another house where there was grilled rabbit and fried onions and a big mug of cha to wash it down. They sat at a round table by a roaring fire with children who had clearly been allowed to stay up late to see the strangers.

  Loving children, Elva always gained energy from talking to them and making them smile, so by the time they had finished eating she was warm and ready to ride. Sweetgrass brought them parcels of food for the journey—smoked salmon and lovely fresh bread, pickles, snowberries. A feast, for later.

  As they rode west, into the last light lingering on the horizon in slabs of lilac and pale green, she wondered what her children would be eating that night, and where they would be sleeping.

  I’ll have to get Arvid to call back Poppy and Saffron, she thought. Before Ice comes.

  Northern Mountains Domain

  An hour’s riding and they were approaching trees again, but these were not the unbroken spruces
and larches of the Forest. Some larches there were, but they poked their sharp heads out from kinder foliage: the spring green of elms and oaks, and the brownish-red of young leaves on horse chestnuts, the almost yellow of unfurling beech leaves.

  Birds were calling, too, a medley of calls and songs: larks and thrushes, robins and nuthatches, crows and doves. As they approached the seedlings which surrounded the wood, Ember waited for the calls to stop, or change to the alarm calls. But even when they rode past a lapwing nest in the grass, the bird simply went on feeding her young. Ember reined in Merry and watched. The nest was well hidden, but it was clear enough; the mother bird flew in with a grub, and appeared again with complete unconcern.

  Ash glanced back and saw what she was watching. They were so close Ember could see the green sheen on the bird’s back.

  “She should be pretending to have a broken wing,” Ember said, worried. “She should be leading us away from the nest. They always do that.”

  Cedar was following her, and stopped his chestnut to smile.

  “She’s not afraid of us,” he said. “Perhaps that’s a good sign.”

  “I don’t think so,” Tern said. “It’s just unchancy. They say the Northern Mountains Domain makes animals mad.”

  They rode on, but Ember wasn’t sure if the lapwing should have made her more hopeful, or more afraid. She was both, caught in a mixture of feelings that also included sheer, pure curiosity.

  Entering the shade of the trees she braced herself for the same feeling of panic she had felt going into the Forest, but there was nothing. Just dappled light, and birds calling, and a rabbit hopping away from them in unconcern, its white tail bobbing slowly.

  A squirrel chattered above, but not at them—at another squirrel, cleaning out a hole above in an oak, scattering brown leaf fragments onto the one below.