The Black Raven

At that Dera did look up, and the warmth of her smile glowed like the spreading fire.

‘I’ll look forward, then,’ Dera said. ‘It does my heart no good, all this looking back.’

‘I’ve got somewhat else for you to look forward to, Mam. I’ve not had my monthly bleeding.’

Dera rose, studying Niffa’s face.

‘Now here, don’t you be getting your hopes up, lass. Grief will do strange things to a woman; it well might dry her up for a while, like.’

Niffa felt tears rise, choked them back, and turned away. She felt her mother’s gentle hand on her shoulders.

‘I know how much you did love your Demet,’ Dera said. ‘Mayhap the goddesses will bless you after all. There be a need on us to wait and see.’

When Dallandra woke in the morning, she lay in bed for a while, considering Jahdo’s sister. How had Niffa got into the Gatelands of Sleep, and why did she seem so at home there? Later in the day Dallandra tracked Jahdo down, finding him at the servants’ hearth in the great hall with Cae, an orphan boy who worked in the kitchens. On the smooth stones in front of the fire, they were playing with little wooden tops. For a moment she watched as each boy set his top spinning with a flick that bumped it against another. She waited until Jahdo had lost a match, then called him away. They stood to one side where they wouldn’t be overheard.

‘I want to ask you somewhat about your sister,’ Dallandra said. ‘And it’s a very odd question.’

‘Very well, my lady,’ Jahdo said. ‘Niffa be a very odd lass, so fair’s fair.’

‘Odd? How do you mean, odd?’

‘Oh, all the folk in Cerr Cawnen, that’s what they did always say. Our Niffa, she be an odd little soul.’ Jahdo thought for a moment. ‘She did see things. And she had dreams.’

‘Tell me a bit more about that.’

‘We’d be sitting at our fire, and you’d look at Niffa, and her eyes – they’d be moving back and forth, and she’d smile, too, at whatever it was. Or in the lake, she’d be seeing things. And the clouds sometimes too. And then there be her dreams. Mam stopped her from telling them after a while, because when they did come true, our neighbours and townsfolk would be ever so scared by it.’

‘No doubt! Well, my thanks, Jahdo.’

‘But my lady, what be your question?’

‘You just answered it, lad. Now run along, go back to your game. The other lads are waiting for you.’

Only later did Dallandra remember that Jahdo was desperate for news of his family. How selfish of me! she thought. I’d best see what I can find out from Niffa – well, if I ever see her again! A girl little older than a child, with a raw gift for dweomer, wandering unknowingly around the astral plane – she might never stumble upon Dallandra’s vigil again. And yet, as she thought about it, Dallandra realized with an odd certainty that she would see Niffa again in the lands of sleep. The thought was so clear that she knew it must be a message from the Great Ones. Why they’d sent the message was a question of the sort they never answered directly, but Dallandra could venture a guess. No doubt Raena was continuing to work her evil magicks. And no doubt, Dallandra thought, it’s fallen to me to stop her.

‘And just where, pray tell, have you been?’ Verrarc felt his voice catch and growl.

In the pool of lantern light Raena half-crouched against the wall. Her cloak dripped wet snow onto the floor.

‘As if I knew not!’ Verrarc went on. ‘Up in the ruins, bain’t, with that cursed Havoc creature?’

‘And what’s it to you?’

‘What be it to me? Ye gods, have you gone daft? If the town should find out – you up there, consorting with evil spirits – ye gods! I could be ruined! And you – think, woman! They love you not as it is. If they thought you to bring evil among them –’

With a toss of her head Raena tried to push past him. Verrarc caught her wrist in one hand and pulled her round to face him. He held the lantern high and let the light shine down upon her. In the flickering glow her lips seemed bruised, her entire face swollen.

‘And just what might be so cursed important, Rae, that you would risk so much to have it? I’ll have the truth, and I’ll have it now.’

‘Let me go!’ She tried to pull her hand free, but he held on. ‘Oh very well! Truly, it were time. Let me go, and I’ll tell you.’

When he released her she walked a few steps away, then took off the damp cloak. Except for the dancing gleam of his lantern, the great room lay dark around them, silent in the dead of night.

‘Come into our chamber,’ Verrarc said. ‘I’d not have the servants waking to hear this.’

Raena threw the cloak onto the floor and stomped off into the bedchamber, where a small fire burned in the hearth. She flopped down on the edge of the bed like a sulky child and began to pull off her wet boots. He set the lantern down on the mantle and took a chair opposite her. Once the boots were off she calmed. She set them carefully to dry near the hearthstone, then perched on the bed again.

‘Truly, I did promise that you should know,’ Raena said. ‘I were but angry that you did snap at me.’

‘I be frightened, Rae. That’s the sad truth of it.’

She stopped on the edge of speaking and considered him.

‘Not of you,’ Verrarc went on, ‘nor truly of what witchery you might work, but of the town and for the town. I’d not have any more of my fellow citizens murdered by your treacherous little spirits.’

‘Well, that be fair, and my heart does ache for poor Niffa.’ Raena sounded surprisingly genuine. ‘But there were a need on me, a desperate need, Verro, to learn a thing Havoc could tell me.’

‘It must have been desperate, all right, to risk so much for it.’

‘It is, truly it is.’ Raena looked at the fire and frowned, thinking. ‘It be such a hard tale to start, my love. Here – what would you say if I did tell you that there be a new goddess in the world?’

For a long moment Verrarc could only stare at her.

‘A what?’ he said at last. ‘A goddess? This be the last thing I thought you’d –’

‘No doubt.’ All at once Raena smiled in gathered confidence. ‘It came as a strike of lightning to me as well, such a strange and marvellous thing it were. But she did reveal herself to me, and she did mark me out to be her priestess, to serve her all my born days and to live with her ever after in her glorious country beyond death.’ She paused, and never had he seen her smile this way, as if she looked through the dark snowy night around them to the warm light of a spring day. ‘Her name, it be Alshandra.’

Verrarc felt like a sudden half-wit, stripped of words.

‘What?’ he managed to say. ‘What do you mean? A new goddess? How can there be such a thing? The gods did make the world, and they’ve been in it always.’

‘Mayhap I speak wrongly, then.’ Raena considered the fire and frowned again. ‘She were hidden before, you see. Always has she been in the world, off in her own true country, but she never did show herself to the world.’

‘Ah.’ He felt his mind turn to an ugly thought: had Raena gone utterly mad? ‘But she did show herself to you. Somehow.’

‘It be a simple tale. When I was still the wife of my pig of a husband I did spend long hours weeping. You do remember that, I’m sure. And I would leave Penli and go walk among the trees, and I would sit upon the ground and weep some more. One afternoon she did come to me and ask me why I wept.’ Raena’s voice dropped, heavy with awe. ‘She were huge and tall, floating down from the sky to stand before me, and she were so beautiful, too, and so kind, I did fall to my knees before her. That pleased her. She did tell me how to call to her, and when I would call, she would come to me.’

‘Wait! Why did you not tell me about her, back then?’

‘I did think you’d mock and say that she were but my fancy, and truly, I see naught but doubt upon your face now.’

‘How could I not doubt, since you did never so much as mention her before?’

Raena shrugged his objection away.

‘She did call me her chosen one,’ Raena continued. ‘She did tell me that she had watched me always, long before I were born, even. Oh, she did tell me so many marvellous things, and she did take me to her beautiful country, where there were green meadows and a river like silver, and strange cities to walk within! Gone now, all of it but the meadows, because her enemies, and she does have many, all of them evil in their very hearts, but they did destroy it to spite her. But she has another country, she told me, where there be no Time and no Death, and those that worship her shall travel there with her, to live forever in joy.’

Her eyes seemed to glow from within, all silver. She spoke so warmly, so sincerely, that Verrarc found himself wondering if she could possibly be speaking the truth.

‘It would be a grand thing,’ he said, ‘never to die.’

‘And with her there shall be no death, Verro. I have seen her country, and I have seen her miracles. I do more than know these things, I ken them, I tell you. They be the deepest truth that ever a woman could see.’

‘Here, think you that she’d show them to me?’

‘Ah, that’s the bitter thing. She has withdrawn to her own true country, and she shows herself not to men or –’ She hesitated, stumbling on some word, ‘or to women either.’

The doubt rose up strong. Daft! he told himself. What if she’s gone daft?

‘My love, ponder this.’ Raena leaned forward, suddenly urgent. ‘In the past, when we did study witchlore together, could I call down the silver light and invoke mighty spirits?’

‘Truly, you couldn’t. And I do wonder, Rae, just where you might have learned it.’

‘No doubt! It was Alshandra. She did teach me, she did lay her hands upon me, and she did give me freely of her power, that I might work magicks in the world. And those that will see them, well, then, they will believe what I say, that Alshandra is a goddess who blesses her worshippers. Where else might I have learned these things, Verro? Do you know a teacher somewhere in the Rhiddaer where I might have studied?’

‘I don’t.’

‘And would I lie to you, the man I love second only to her?’

Verrarc was tempted to say that after all, she’d lied to him often enough before. But this time she was looking him straight in the face, her eyes focused on his, as if she were wishing she could show him her goddess by forcing the image into his mind. What if, just what if this were true, that her goddess would give him magical power beyond any he’d hoped to have? And if there would be no death –

‘If only I could take you to her,’ Raena said, and her voice stumbled in sheer urgency, ‘if only you could see her!’

‘Truly, I do wish I could. Why has she –’

‘I know not.’ Raena’s voice shook, and she looked away.

There she was indeed lying; he recognized all the signs from past experience. Paradoxically, however, this lie brought home the truth of what she’d said before, just by the contrast in her telling.

‘It be the reason that forces me to summon Lord Havoc,’ Raena went on, staring at the far wall. ‘There be a need on me to find out. Never have I felt such a desperation, Verro! It be like – well, it be like I were an orphan child, starving on the streets, and she were the wife of a rich guildmaster. And she did take me up and bring me to her home. She did feed me, and she did teach me a craft so that never again would I be poor and starving. But then, somewhat did anger her, and she cast me out again.’ Tears sprang up in her eyes. ‘And here I be, wailing and alone.’ The tears ran, but silently, and she made no move to wipe them away.

‘Ah,’ Verrarc said. ‘Then it were somewhat you did that did drive her away?’

‘Somewhat I did not, that I should have done.’ The truth sprang out, as sudden as the tears. ‘She did lay upon me a sacred charge, and I did fail in it. Ah ye gods, that I should have been so weak and unworthy of her love!’

Verrarc moved to sit down with her on the bed. She turned into his arms and sobbed, while he stroked her hair and whispered ‘there, there’ over and over again. At last she quieted, but she clung to him.

‘Well, now,’ Verrarc said, ‘this charge be best done, then, and mayhap she’ll return to you.’

‘So I do hope, though it be not such an easy task. It were about a thing that had been stolen from her, you see, and it does lie now in the midst of her enemies. She did ask me to restore it to her.’

‘What might this thing be?’

She looked up, and he could feel her trembling in his arms.

‘That I can never tell you, Verro,’ she whispered. ‘I beg you, demand not that from me. My secrets you shall have, when the time be ripe for the telling of them. But it were a blasphemy were I to tell you her secrets.’

For a long moment he studied her face. Was she lying or not? He simply couldn’t tell.

‘Well and good then,’ Verrarc said at last. ‘What lies between you and your goddess be not mine to meddle in, anyway.’

Once, long ago, in some immeasurably ancient time, Evandar and his people, Alshandra among them, had dwelt between the stars as beings of pure energy and no form. Somehow, when the Light birthed the vast panoply of worlds, they had been ‘left behind’, as Evandar put it to himself. How or why, he could no longer remember. Yet, since they had been born to follow the path that all souls must take into the physical plane and the world of matter, they had longed for a solid existence in the beauty of a world. To sate their hunger for life he had built that area of the etheric plane he called the Lands, a perfect illusion of the world of Annwn, with its grassy meadows and rivers, its forests and hills – a shadow world so lovely that they had spurned the real world waiting for them on the physical plane.

He had woven them bodies, too, out of the astral substance, modelling them on the elven race he had come to love. Over the aeons Evandar’s dweomer had grown so immensely powerful that he had for a time thought himself as powerful as a god, until the destruction of the Seven Cities of the Far West had stripped him of his arrogance. No matter how much raw dweomer power he expended, no matter how hard he fought with every sort of weapon, in the end the Hordes had won and destroyed every beauty of the elven world. The lesson lived with him still, that as soon as he left his own lands, he too was a slave of change and death, even though his own being seemed immune to both.

And now Time was pursuing him, it seemed, determined to force the lesson home another time. After untold centuries of a perfect spring, the Lands lay besieged by winter. Evandar returned to find his meadows frosted white, his streams frozen, his trees stripped bare, and his people huddled miserably together by the bank of a silver river. When they saw him they cried out.

‘Bring back the spring! Give us summer!’

‘I did that before, and the winter returned to us anyway. Mayhap we’d best just ride the winter out.’

In a screaming pack they rushed forward and surrounded him, yelling, begging, weeping all at once. Evandar raised his arms and shouted for silence. Slowly the babble died.

‘Well and good, then,’ Evandar said. ‘Spring you shall have.’

In his mind he visualized a gigantic silver horn, and in the Lands what Evandar saw appeared for all to see. His folk gasped and moved back to give him room as the horn floated into the air, an apparition the size of a horse and wagon. Through it Evandar called down the astral light. He saw it as a golden surge of raw power that flowed through the horn’s tip and spread out across the meadowlands and into the river. Suddenly the air turned warm; the grass sprang up green; the trees burst into full leaf. On the river bank a cloth-of-gold pavilion sprang into existence.

‘Let us feast,’ Evandar cried out. ‘Let us have music!’

The crowd laughed, calling out his name and cheering him. Yet once they were settled at their feasting, Evandar slipped out of the pavilion. He ran a few steps across the grass, let his elven form dissolve, and as a red hawk he sprang into the air. As he flew in a vast spiral over the river and meadows, he called down the astral light in a hawk’s harsh voice.

Below him snow melted, and grass sprang up, green and lush. Flowers bloomed in an instant, dotting the lawns with white and yellow. In every direction, as far as he could see with a hawk’s long sight, Spring returned, laughing. The hawk cried out once, then broke from his spiral and flew steadily toward the forest at the meeting of the worlds. Shaetano was hiding somewhere, most likely in the part of the Lands that had once been his. Evandar intended to find him.

Down in Deverry, the same storm that was casting its etheric shadow over Evandar’s Lands raged over the northern territories. For three days snow trapped Dun Cengarn in a cage of white. The gwerbret’s men spent their days in the great hall near the two huge hearths and their ever-burning fires, though they made brief forays into the stables to tend their horses. Some even brought their blankets from the barracks and slept on the straw with the servants.

Rhodry stayed mostly among the company of Prince Daralanteriel’s escort of ten elven archers, the last of the large troop he’d assembled for the past summer’s war. With provisions so scarce at Cengarn, the prince had sent the rest of them home long before. Even though his kingdom lay in ruins in the mountains of the far west, by Deverry standards royal blood still ran in Dar’s veins, and he ate and sat at the honour table with Gwerbret Cadmar. Protocol, however, seated his men among the warband, under the captaincy of a pale-haired archer named Vantalaber.

Since the cold draughts bothered the Westfolk men less than it did the human members of Gwerbret Cadmar’s warband, they took the table nearest the back door – they were farther from the human stink that way, too, as the archers often remarked. Just like the human men, they diced to pass their time, although the elven game was a fair bit more complex. Each player took a handful of brightly-coloured wood pieces – cubes and pyramids both – shook them hard, then strewed them in a rough line. Counting the points amounted to another game in itself, with a lot of argument and token cursing from the other players. At times during these sessions one or another man from the warband would stroll over to the elven tables and watch their game, but they never asked to join, and no one invited them, either.

Every now and then a servant girl would come to the table to pour the men ale from a dented flagon or set out a meagre basket of bread. One particular evening, Rhodry realized that it was always the same girl, a buxom little blonde, when she stopped for a moment to chat with one of the archers, Melimaladar, a dark-haired fellow whose eyes were a smoky sort of green, unusual even for one of the People. They whispered together, head to head, until something he said made her giggle, and she trotted off, still smiling to herself.

Vantalaber took a sip of the ale she’d brought and nearly spat it out.

‘Ye gods, it’s watered!’ the captain snarled, but in Elvish. ‘Thin as swill!’

‘The dun’s running out,’ Rhodry said in the same language. ‘Soon enough the steward will be breaking out the vinegar.’

‘What? Why would anyone drink vinegar?’

‘You don’t drink the stuff for itself. You just put a dollop in a tankard of well water. To make it safe, like.’

‘Well, the way these people live in filth, I’m not surprised. But I don’t mean to insult all of humankind. Gwerbret Cadmar’s a fine man in his way.’

‘He is that,’ Rhodry said. ‘Though I worry about his health. He doesn’t have a son to inherit the rhan, and the last thing the Northlands can afford is a cursed feud over rulership.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense. What about his daughters?’

‘Van, they can’t inherit. They’re women. If Cadmar were only a tieryn or a lord, maybe his vassals would back a daughter, but she could never rule as gwerbret.’

Vantalaber rolled his eyes in disgust. Melimaladar, who’d been watching his blonde as she served other tables, leaned forward to join the conversation.

‘The daughters have got sons, right? What about them?’

‘Cadmar can designate a grandson as heir, yes,’ Rhodry said. ‘But the High King will have to approve it.’

‘Huh.’ Mel paused, thinking. ‘It’s a strange place, Deverry. I don’t like it. I feel like riding out right now, snow or no snow.’

‘We’ll all be leaving in the spring,’ Rhodry said. ‘What’s so wrong?’

Melimaladar exchanged a look with Vantalaber. All the archers at the table had fallen silent, Rhodry realized, to listen.

‘Well, look,’ Van said. ‘Here’s our Prince Dar, and he is a prince; none of us would deny it. But he’s a prince of the People, not one of your lords, and before this he’s always known what that means and how he should take it. Now look at him! He’s learning to give himself airs, isn’t he? With all the Round-ears bowing and scraping every time he walks into a room!’

Rhodry slewed round on the bench to look across the great hall. Near the honour hearth Cadmar was sitting in his carved chair with Prince Dar at his right hand and his favourite hounds lying at his feet. Once Cadmar had been a powerful man, but now his hair was white and his face somehow shrunken. Every now and then he would rub his twisted leg and its old injury, as if it pained him despite the warmth of the nearby fire.

By contrast Daralanteriel seemed all youth and strength, even though he sat still, contemplating the enormous sculpture of a dragon that curled around the hearth with its stone back for a mantel. He was an exceptionally handsome man even for one of the Westfolk, and Rhodry could see how a young girl like Carra would have followed him anywhere once he’d been kind to her. Over the winter his pale skin had turned even whiter, setting off his dark hair and violet eyes.

As they watched, Cadmar leaned forward to bark an order at the boys playing by the hearth. Two of them jumped up and ran off to do their lord’s bidding, but not before they’d bowed to both prince and gwerbret.

‘That kind of grovelling around,’ Vantalaber said. ‘I don’t like it. None of us do.’

‘Notice how the boys made their bow to Dar first?’ Melimaladar put in. ‘And how he smiled?’

‘And look at what he’s wearing,’ Vantalaber went on. ‘All the time now.’

Rhodry obligingly looked, though it took him a moment to see what Van meant. Around his neck on a golden chain the prince wore a gold pendant. In the firelight a jewel winked and gleamed.

‘By the Dark Sun herself!’ Rhodry whispered. ‘It’s Ranadar’s Eye.’

‘We all know he’s royal,’ Vantalaber said. ‘He doesn’t need to flaunt it.’

‘Just so,’ Rhodry said. ‘Huh. I’ll try to have a word with him. You’re right. The People will never stand for this, not out on the grass.’

* * *

Despite the cold in the tower room, Dallandra often stayed up late, reading one or another of Jill’s books by the silver light of the Wildfolk of Aethyr. Usually her studies led straight to her sleep work, when she went to the Gatelands to renew the magical wards that kept Rhodry’s dreams safe from Raena. That particular evening she had just finished restoring the flaming stars when Niffa joined her there. For some while they merely considered each other in the red and gold glow from the wards. She was a little thing, to Dalla’s elven way of thinking, not much more than five feet tall and slender with long dark hair that she wore loose over her shoulders.

‘There be a need on me to thank you,’ Niffa said finally. ‘Your news about our Jahdo did do my mam’s heart much good.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Dallandra said. ‘He worries about her and the rest of you as well.’

‘Well, if you’d be so good, do tell him that Mam fares well, though in truth, she be sick again. There be naught he can do, so far away, and I’d not have him fret.’

‘I’ll do that, then. Is there a good herbwoman in your town?’

‘One of the best, or else I’d be sore troubled about my mam. Otherwise, there be much trouble upon us and our town. Tell me if you would – Raena, is it that she does cause grief to you and yours?’