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  Three fishermen from Siadal stood near the stone trading their meager catch for what butter and flour the farmers were willing to part with. The fisher folk had given warning around midwinter, though no one had taken heed, that their nets held less herring and cod with every cast. And the salmon had not returned with the first month of spring. The artisans faired less well, for now an ax-handle would not trade for one fish.

  The open shed next to Lovisa's house stood empty save for the work table and the cabinet of saws and files, sitting mute now that her husband spent his days hunting and trapping in the woodland on the eastern fringe of the valley. The door of the house was open, and Lovisa sat spinning wool in the morning light.

  "You look as if you're feeling fine today," Syliva said.

  "Yes. I slept well, and didn't feel at all sick this morning. I've had a feeling of good luck about the stranger who came to us at the singing."

  "Maybe that's because the last wayfarer from the south turned out to be so good."

  Lovisa kept spinning. "Yes. I was lucky then."

  "Is he out hunting?" Syliva asked.

  "He said the man kept babbling a name, so he thought that there could be another, perhaps injured or too weak to walk. He was going to try to backtrack the man's trail and see what he could find."

  "Hmm. Wish I had known. I could have gone with him." She went to the chair that had belonged to Lindan, Lovisa's first husband, who had been killed in a logging accident.

  Lovisa had been widowed at the age of twenty-four. Her five years of marriage were childless, and as it was well known in all the valley she was barren, she expected no suitors to come when her year of mourning ended. Strangely, a Southern man had wandered into the village three years ago, half-starved and ragged, dark-skinned with long tangled hair and a matted beard that reached almost to his waist, looking more a yeti than a man.

  He called himself Farlo. He stayed. The people of Lorendal had guessed how he came to be there even before he began to mine and smelt ore found in the mountains to the north. But they did not judge him by what he may or may not have done elsewhere. They gave him work, even though he was taciturn and solitary and spoke their language rather poorly. And he gave them an ironworks, and shod their wooden shovels and plowshares, making them independent from the seafaring smiths who took only the best things for their service. He and Lovisa had married last year on the spring equinox. On a grey midwinter day in a thick snow, Lovisa trotted all the way to Syliva's house, kicking up a spray of wet, newly-fallen snowflakes, arriving red-faced from the cold, tears welling in her eyes, saying, "I'm going to have a baby in the summer."

  Large, with a back and arms, the chair had been made in the old way, carved from one solid piece of tree trunk. Syliva eased herself into it. "Did the salve I gave you help with the pain in your back?"

  "A little."

  "What you need is a poultice of sea greens and spindlewort, but there just doesn't seem to be any sprouting right now. Maybe soon."

  "It's not too bad," the younger woman said.

  "Well, it will be worse two months from now." But Syliva was really thinking of the birth. It could go badly. Lovisa was such a frail woman, so thin and small.

  "Don't worry for me," Lovisa said, "All will be well."

  They chatted while Lovisa spun, their talk turning to the comfort of the ordinary: wool and weaving, cooking and the weather. A brief visit was all Syliva could allow herself. Celvake the carpenter was in pain from the hand he had broken two summers ago, and the entire Monjor family had contracted some sort of grippe. Aksel had told her to ask for dried meat in payment, but she already knew that she would ask for nothing. Celvake would bring them cut firewood, and the Monjors would give her butter.

  The Monjor's main house was the biggest of thevalley. Old Monjor in his day had divided the ancient family hall into two rooms, and his son Kurnt added the three separate bedrooms, each with its own small brick hearth in the corner. That was when Aksel, not to be outdone, hired Celvake to help him build the two upstairs bedrooms along with the interior stairwell. Those stairs were still talked about in Hyerkin, and the way Celvake told the story of building them made a bear hunt seem tame.

  Syliva discovered as she entered the Monjor house that Kestrin had arrived before her and had busied herself in the kitchen preparing the soup that, while it would not cure the grippe, would at least allow the family to rise from their beds and take care of themselves. Kestrin juggled soup stirring, herb chopping, and root grinding, did not hear Syliva enter the room, and started when she spoke, turning fast and breathing in audibly, her wavy red hair swishing, a glare beneath black eyebrows softening at once.

  "Do you — I'm sorry, dear, I didn't mean to frighten you. Do you need alderclove for the soup?"

  "No," Kestrin said, turning back to finish the grinding. "I still had some of that you gave me last week."

  Kestrin had always looked older than she was. She moved and spoke abruptly, with a nervous way that made some folk keep their distance from her. Still, she had already had suitors call on her father and could be in courtship if she wished, but she had no eye for young men. Her piercing grey eyes were always on Syliva, always learning.

  No particular event had marked the beginning of her apprenticeship with Syliva, for they had been special friends since her birth. She had been only hours old when her mother died, and her father had let Syliva take her home for the first month while he recovered from his grief. Her mother had conceived unexpectedly late in life, and so her father was old enough to be her grandfather. The little red-haired girl began following Syliva on her calls in the village as soon as she could walk fast enough to keep up, and Syliva's love for her was natural as breathing.

  She watched her protégé mix the herbs into the soup and reduce it to its best potency. Kestrin looked at her.

  "That's exactly how I would have done it," Syliva said, tasting a drop of the broth. "I do believe you don't even need me here today. Well, you keep everything they give you. It will most likely be a slab of butter."

  "That's alright. Father is eating nothing but flatbread and butter anyway."

  "How much flour do you have?"

  "We have enough for about a dozen loaves."

  "Is that all?"

  "Yes," Kestrin said, unconcerned, ladling soup into clay drinking cups. "We still have a keg of cheese in the cellar, though, and can trade some to the Barlsens for millet and meal. But my father says we'll soon have to start feeding brambles to the goats."

  "Tell him to bring a nanny or two over to my house.

  My son Jonn is going to take all of ours up to the high valley to look for good grazing. He can tend a few extra."

  "I'll tell father."

  "Oh, and could you do something for me when you're finished here? I must go to the woods this afternoon to look for spindlewort and wild nionae. Would you be able to go to my house and take care of the stranger until I return?"

  "I'm done here now," Kestrin said hastily, the glint of intrigue in her eyes. "I'll go there right away."

  "No need to hurry."

  Syliva left the Monjors and walked along the axis of the village to Celvake's house, gladdened to have a reason not to bring Kestrin, for she wanted to go to the pond. After looking at the carpenter's hand in bright sunlight and finding no insect bites, no lumps, no swelling, reddening, or bruising, she gave him extract of iollaheat and said a farewell, leaving Lorendal by the path to Hyerkin.

  She soon turned away from the trail, walking north by west across what was once and would be again a pasture of tall wild grasses, now a dry patch of dirt and straw-colored stubble. Above the bare poplars bordering the field and the blue firs beyond, the Skialfanmir rose from a heavily-wooded ridge, a seamless tower of grey and gold stone soaring two thousand feet above the sea. It was the highest of all the pinnacles running northward along the coast, and the Poem of Ancient Truths made some mention that it was the home of the spirit of the valley, the spot where the land touched the
sky being an in-between place.

  The poplars looked sickly, the firs dull at the end of winter. She passed them, entering the woodland and following an unmarked way through the maze of evergreens. The twist of this pine or the lean of that fir served as pilots, and she knew that if she missed them she would never find the grove of willows, for she had tried many times to get to the pond by other ways and had always got lost. The forest is strangely hushed, she thought as she listened to her own soft footfalls on the floor of dried pine needles. Something was missing. There were no birds.

  She came to a thick copse of willow trees cradling a natural well of clear cold water. This was her place. She had found it on her own. No one in the valley knew of it, and if her own teacher had known she had never told. Syliva never planned to keep it forever secret, but she wasn't yet ready to give up the one part of herself she did not share with anyone.

  The water always lay still there, even when a gusty breeze shook the tops of the willows. It was a quiet place.

  She let out a breath as she passed under the bare branches and into the sun-splashed clearing. Out of the earth, between the outcroppings of lichen-covered rock, a few dry shoots of last year's foxtail peered upward at her. She circled the silent spring with twenty quick steps looking for signs of sprouting spindlewort among the foxtails and the beginnings of furry catkins on the tips of the willow branches. She saw none. And she finally knew that the land had been truly blighted. If there were any place in the valley where things would be growing it would be here.

  She sat at the edge of the pool and looked at herself in its stillness. She wasn't afraid. The folk must keep faith with the spirits of earth and sea and sky. Winter was hard and unforgiving, but not cruel. People could be cruel, but not the world. And certainly the spirits of people couldn't be stronger than the spirits of the world. Certainly not, she thought, trying to look into the depths of the well. But an old dry twig fell from a willow branch into the spring, sending a ripple across the water.

  1st INTERLUDE: An Object of Desire

  The compulsion to touch it was overwhelming. He ran his fingers lightly along its inward-curving side, his breath coming more quickly now. Silk. That was what it felt like, silk, not wood.

  He wondered if he should remove it from the trophy room and place it closer to his own.

  Libac looked at his other trophies. The emerald serpent — virtually priceless, the gold yeti-mask from Baskillia, the shaman's staff from the Silekai Isles, the jade bowl from Tassa — a lucky find, he had bought it in the marketplace for only thirty silver kandars. But their monetary value was unimportant to him. Each piece seemed to hold something of the spirit of its maker, something completely singular, not like Sorrow of the Angels. Rastini's famous masterpiece often moved him as he sat gazing at it late at night in his library, but Rastini had produced at least eighty paintings, and every week one of his dozen protégés loosed upon the world another work of the school of Rastini. No, his collection was a menagerie of uniqueness. And it manifested his own uniqueness. Even among his peers, the most powerful of the local nobility, it was proof that he was a singular man.

  He thought of Conarra, the inventor from Sevdin. When they had first met, Libac knew at once that they were of the same ilk. Conarra, who first dreamed of rising above the earth on a winter's morning, suspended beneath sails of hot air, and then did so.

  He let his hand flow along the dark seamless wood, the last of many to touch it, perhaps thousands of hands over dozens of generations polishing it to smoothness. It looked somewhat like a little house, did it not? Convex on its top side, a pointed dome, it was slightly concave on its five other sides, all the curves flowing together in perfect smoothness with no hinges, joints, or openings, as if it had grown that way as a seed-case from a monstrous tree. It was certainly hollow, though. One had only to rap on its surface to know this. And he could never have hefted it alone had it been solid. Yet the wood of the roof was thick enough to support a deep inlay of ornate gold scrollery.

  He had asked his furniture maker to explain the apparent hollowness. The reply had been that it was indeed hollow, would have been made in two pieces and was simply the work of a master craftsman. The seam where it had been glued with dowel joinings was undetectable, but he must rest assured it was there.

  Libac had then borrowed his cousin Ranni's most powerful Syrolian glass, the one he used for dissecting insects, and spent an entire afternoon scrutinizing the artifact. With the glass he could make out imperfections in the wood's grain that were invisible to the naked eye: tiny nicks, miniature scratches, signs of weathering of course, yet nothing so ungainly as a continuous seam, not even one perfectly fitted.

  Finding it, of course, had been an unexpected delight. The shrine had lain austere with centuries of disuse, the only surviving statuary being the guardians, each weighing over half a ton. In some ways the expedition had been extravagant. Connara's fee for building and piloting the new airship had alone exceeded the cost of manning and outfitting the old sloop for a three-month voyage. And he remembered how the two men working the propellers had struggled even in the light pre-dawn airs. They had been lucky indeed to successfully land on that mountaintop. Foolish, rather. And the descent in the airship had been even more dangerous. They all could have been killed.

  His hand slowed in its caress of the artifact and drifted away. Touching it felt good. More than good, it felt revitalizing, gave him some of its own radiance. This was his best thing. In time, he would loan the other pieces to the Museum of the Royal Library, or even donate one in return for a favor. But not this. With this he would never part.

  CHAPTER 3: The Song of Returning

  When he woke, she was standing near the window, veiled by smoke rising through the sunbeams. He lay pinned under thick wool blankets on a mattress of sheepskin over straw, his head heavy, his ankle stiff and feeling like it was sewn with iron filings. She saw him and smiled, coming to his side to gently push him back down as he propped himself up on one elbow.

  "Thank you," he croaked in what he hoped was intelligible Pallenor. "Thank you, very much."

  Her eyes widened slightly, and she spoke to him with a soprano voice in her musical northern tongue.

  "I'm sorry," he said again in her speech, "I do not understand. I speak only a few words of your language." He knew about two dozen vital phrases in Keltassian, Baskillian, and Pallenor, and when he travelled to those lands he was always amazed at how much it helped, and at how many other travellers from Avic-speaking lands never bothered, causing confusion and ill-feeling simply because they could not say, "How much does this cost?" or, "I would like your cheapest meal."

  "Not a trouble," she said as if she really meant it. Pointing to her heart, and with a nod, or bow of her head she said, "I am Kestrin."

  "I am Reyin," he said, holding out his hand in the custom of the Avic people.

  Hesitantly, lightly, she touched it, and they looked at one another, and he saw a light in her eyes. She dropped his hand, looked down, muttered something about food, and went swiftly out the door of the little house.

  She returned a short time later with a tray bearing a large piece of thin crusty bread which served as a plate holding cheese and butter, and a huge bowl of fish stew, and a cup of milk and honey in which floated some very bitter rust-colored roots. He ate all of it with an urgency that surprised him. When he finished, she unwrapped his bandaged ankle and bathed it in a soothing greenish water. All this time she looked at him with only a kind of impartial compassion, as she would do for any injured creature. Her eyes, no longer windows, had become mirrors.

  It was easy to like her from the very start. He lay sick and injured, and she was his rescuer, his fair maiden of mercy and comfort. He had been dangerously ill in the wilderness, had seen his own death, and she was his caretaker in this warm safe haven. And she was beautiful. Not a soft, girlish beauty — hers was strong and fierce, like that of a sea eagle.

  Kestrin took away the dirtied tray, and
Reyin dozed fitfully through the afternoon, finally coming acutely awake, curious and bored. At last the door swung wide and an older woman came into the room, her face made kind by an easy smile and soft eyes. She had a stillness about her, like one of pure being, like those Reyin had met who knew mystic ways: warriors, at one with the sword spirit, or magicians, at one with the Essa.

  She sat heavily in a chair near the fire pit, smoothing her coarse woolen skirt with one hand. "I am Syliva. You speak some of the Pallenor tongue?"

  "A bit. Very little."

  "Do you travel atengis?" His lack of comprehension must have been obvious. She tried another tack. "You go alone?"

  "Yes, I travel alone."

  She seemed relieved. "There is no more danger for you," she said, trying to use simple words. "One week, you'll feel well; in two weeks, you will walk."

  Reyin nodded. "I understand. May I stay here?"

  "Yes," she smiled, showing him her palm, fingers down and spread wide.

  He had a good guess what that meant. His trousers hung from a peg on the near wall. He got them down and slid a finger into the hidden pocket in the waistband. Yes, it was still there. He took out the coin, a silver kandar, and reached to give it to her, but surprisingly, she let out a little gasp, withdrew her hand, and motioned it back to him, apparently in awe of its value. In Kandin, the largest city in the world, it would be three days wages for a laborer; in this remote place, it might pay for three month's lodging.

  Reyin turned to find a wiry man in his mid-fifties, white-haired with an equine face, no doubt the woman's husband, standing at the threshold and glaring at him openly. Syliva spoke a few quick words and scowled at the man, who stepped back out of sight.

  A thought came to Reyin suddenly. "My things," he said to Syliva, "my baggage?" Let it all be looted, just keep safe my mandolin.

  Syliva shrugged. "Maybe Farlo. Maybe tomorrow." He nodded, the need to lie down growing very strong.