The Castle Of Hape. Caves Of Fire And Ice. The Joining Of The Stone

Lobon watched Meatha kneeling in the gray dawn, tending Feldyn, her dark hair tumbled over one shoulder, the pale skin of her neck like silk against the wolf’s dark coat as she leaned to lay her cheek against his head. He rose from his stone bed. The gash across his shoulder was stiff and sore, not healing properly, for they had no healing herbs. Meatha looked across at him. “We need birdmoss. For you. For Feldyn.” She said nothing about her own burns. “Michennann could bring birdmoss, carry a little in her mouth. Somewhere where the valleys are green there will be birdmoss beside a running stream. . . .”

“It will do little good to be healed if the sick mare dies and there is only one mount to carry us out. Michennann had best stay with her. It’s a slow business, carrying grass. . . .”

“It’s no good to have a mount, Lobon, if you’re dead of festering wounds!” Kneeling, her hand on Feldyn’s shoulder, she spoke out in silence to Michennann, ignoring Lobon’s advice.

When she raised her head at last, she Saw the gray mare in sharp vision rising into the morning sky, flying swiftly beside the black cliff, saw her rise to keep clear of the bad-tempered lizards. “She will bring birdmoss,” she said, glancing at Lobon. He looked back at her. He guessed she was right. He knew she was beautiful. His need of her began again to run wild; he turned and moved away from her deeper into the cave. “Bring water,” she called after him, her own voice tight with restraint.

He filled the waterskin, which Kish had inexplicably returned to them. But what else would Kish do? She could not breed a son from would-be lovers who were dying of thirst, Or maybe she thought that with less time spent carrying water in cupped hands, there would be more time for idleness, and so for desire. He returned and knelt beside Feldyn, to tip the waterskin to the wolf’s mouth. Meatha moved away at once. As Seers need, so Seers cleave, and in cleaving bring new life. The heat of Kish’s curse never abated.

They ate at last from the bowl Kish had left, sharing the mass of boiled roots and reptiles equally with the wolves. The wolves thought it delicious. It made Meatha and Lobon retch. Feldyn licked the bowl clean.

“When Feldyn is healed,” Meatha said, “we must go from this place. We cannot—” She looked at him pleadingly. “We cannot stay here together.”

He stared at the locked gate.

“Could we—go deeper into the cave?” she asked. “Could there be another way out? I can—sometimes I think I can feel something there. Not very clearly, but does something call to us from deeper in?”

He looked at her, tried to answer, and found himself reaching for her. She rose and moved away.

“You could go,” he said, deflated and miserable. “If I could make Kish open the gate, if I could trick her, you could call Michennann down, you . . .”

“Trick her how? And where would I go? Except—except to find the seventh stone.”

He frowned at her, puzzled. “The seventh stone?”

“Kish carries six. If we—”

“She carries the stone that was Dracvadrig’s. The two you took from Carriol. And three that were Ramad’s. But the seventh stone is here.” He held the wolf bell out to her. “Inside the belly of the wolf.”

Meatha stared, and she reached to touch the rearing bronze wolf; but at once she drew her hand back.

“I thought you knew,” he said. “The dark seems unable to touch it. The power of the wolves—or maybe Skeelie’s power reaching . . .”

“Skeelie? Skeelie of Carriol?”

“She is—Skeelie is my mother. My father was Ramad,” he said simply.

It was moments before she spoke. He could feel her confusion, and her sharp interest. When she did speak, her voice was barely audible. “Ramad—Ramad lived generations ago.” But her eyes were wide as she considered the truth. “Ramad—did move through Time,” she whispered. “How—how can such a thing be?”

He tried to give her a sense of Ramad’s life, the same sense, the same scenes that Skeelie had given him so often, Time warping and thrusting Ram forward into generations not yet born in his time. And as Lobon wrapped her in the visions of Ramad’s life, a change swept Lobon himself, twisted his very soul, the final changing sense of what Ramad was, what Ramad’s life had meant.

And so what his own life meant.

She sat Seeing it all, sensing with him the power of Ramad’s quest for the shards of the runestone, gripped by Ramad’s commitment, by the urgency that Ramad had felt, even in his own time, for the salvation of Ere.