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

Who had touched her mind so briefly? So welcome. A girl, but who? As close as a sister, someone . . . the loss of that brief encounter sickened her further, set her adrift again utterly, more chaotically than before.

She stood in a rough field. She remembered a rushing city moments before where she had wandered the streets among crowds, seen men strung from crosspoles and cut open like oxen, butchered for pleasure because they were Seers. Terror accompanied her. She knelt in the little field, trembling, her very will all but gone.

Her mind reeled with a hundred generations, a hundred sights. She had seen women and children kept like animals while ruling Seers wallowed in luxury, seen fields and towns burned with the fires of the mountains flooding down and the people kneeling amidst the burned land to supplicate the gods. Seen men enslaved and driven mad at the pleasure of corrupt rulers.

She raised her face to stare at the field and was suddenly not in the field, but in near-darkness—in a small, dark space, damp and close, and strong with the sense of death. She touched a wall, shivered. As she grew accustomed to the near-dark, she could make out a man lying at the far side of the cave. She knew that he was dying.

He spoke, startling her anew, spoke in a rasping whisper. She did not want to hear that voice, did not want to listen; but knew she must listen, was horrified, was compelled by some force to listen, felt she almost knew what he would say. The smell of dying mingled with the damp smell of the cave. His voice was faint. His words made her shiver. “A bastard child will be born . . .” She trembled, covered her ears, could not block out his voice.

“A bastard child will be born. And he will rule the wolves as no Seer before him has done . . .” He was speaking of Ram, surely. How could it be that he could speak of Ram? In what time was she? In what place?

“A bastard child fathered by a Pellian bearing the last blood of the wolf cult. My blood! My blood seeping down generations hence from some bastard I sired and do not even know exists!

“A child born of a girl with the blood of Seers in her veins. A child that will go among the wolves of the high mountains, where the lakes are made of fire. Wolves that are more than wolves. And that boy will seek a power greater even than the wolf bell, a power that even I could not master.”

Telien drew in her breath. The runestone! Surely he spoke of the runestone!

The man had stopped speaking. He coughed, lay with his life draining away. She went to him, repelled by him, yet drawn to him beyond her will. She touched him once, shivered uncontrollably, leaped up and ran from the cave—and was running fast through a sunlit wood, running in terror from that wasting corpse that lay, now, somewhere in distant time.

She stopped herself with effort It did no good to run. She crouched down into a fetal position in a patch of sun between trees. She had nothing to hold to. Nothing. She wanted Ram, wanted him to tell her what was happening to her. She wanted him to hold her so she could not be swept away, never again be swept away.

The wood vanished. She was in another cave. But this was a high domed cave, and light. A hairy gantroed like a great bristling dragon lay wounded across the floor; and the earth was rocking; thunder filled her ears.

A dark-haired young boy stood beside the gantroed. She did not understand who he was, but his very presence made her heart pound. Then she saw the round stone in his cupped hands, a stone glowing deep green, and she understood. Ram! Ramad! She stared at him with terrible need, with terrible longing for this child who was Ram.

The fire struck suddenly, a long jagged bolt of brilliant light. The jade orb turned white hot. It shattered, lay in nine long shards in Ram’s cupped hands. And the mountain trembled again, and a long jagged scar opened in the floor of the cave and the dragon gantroed began to slip down into it. Then, as the jade in Ram’s hands began to cool and deepen in color, Telien saw other figures appear out of nowhere around Ram. And Ram looked up at her once, puzzled, as if he should know her; and in her hands lay one slim green shard of the shattered runestone of Eresu.