‘My hate is silent,’ Torrent said. ‘It has nothing to say.’
‘But I have been feeding it nonetheless.’
His eyes widened. ‘This fever comes from you, witch?’
‘No, it ever lurked in your soul, like a viper in the night. I but awakened it to righteousness.’
‘ Why? ’
‘Because it amuses me. Saddle your horse, warrior. We ride to the spires of your legends.’
‘Legends that have outlived the people telling them.’
She cocked her head in his direction. ‘Not yet. Not yet.’ And she laughed again.
‘ Where is he? ’ Stavi screamed, her small fists lifted, as if moments from striking her.
Setoc held her ground. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied levelly. ‘He always returned before.’
‘But it’s been days and days! Where is he? Where is Toc?’
‘He serves more than one master, Stavi. It was a miracle he was able to stay with us as long as he did.’
Stavi’s sister looked close to tears, but she’d yet to speak. The boy sat with his back against the lifeless flank of Baaljagg where the huge beast lay as if asleep, nose down between its front paws. Playing with a handful of stones, the boy seemed oblivious to his sisters’ distress. She wondered if perhaps he was simple in the head. Sighing, Setoc said, ‘He turned us into the east-and so that is the direction we shall take-’
‘But there’s nothing out there!’
‘I know, Stavi. I don’t know why he wants us to go there. He wouldn’t explain. But, would you go against his wishes?’ It was an unfair tactic, she knew, the kind meant to extort compliance from children.
It worked, but as every adult knew, not for long.
Setoc gestured. The ay lifted to its feet and trotted ahead, while Setoc picked up the boy and cajoled the twins into her wake. They set out, leaving behind their measly camp.
She wondered if Toc would ever return. She wondered if he’d any purpose behind his taking care of them, or had it been some residue of guilt or sense of responsibility for the children of his friend? He had left life behind and could not be held to its ways, or the demands it made upon a mortal soul-no, there could be no human motivation to what such a creature did.
And the eye he’d fixed upon her had belonged to a wolf. But even among such beasts, the closeness of the pack was a tense game of submission and dominance. The bliss of brother-and sisterhood hid political machinations and ruthless judgements. Cruelty needed only opportunity. So, he had led this paltry pack of theirs, and his lordship had been uncontested-after all, he could hardly be threatened with death, could he?
She understood, finally, that she could not trust him. And that her relief at his taking command had been the response of a child, a creature eager to cower in the shadow of an adult, praying for protection, willing itself blind to the possibility that the true threat was found in the man-or woman-standing over it. Of course, the twins had lost everything. Their desperate loyalty to a dead man, who had once been their father’s friend, was reasonable under the circumstances. Stavi and Storii wanted him back. Of course they did, and they had begun to look upon Setoc with something like resentment, as if she was to blame for his absence.
Nonsense, but the twins saw no salvation in Setoc. They saw no protector in her. They’d rather she had been the one to vanish.
The boy had his giant wolf. Would it protect them as well? Not a notion to rely upon.
And I have power, though I can’t yet make out its shape, or even its purpose. Who in their dreams is not omnipotent? If in sleep I grow wings and fly high above the land, it does not mean I will awaken cloaked in feathers. We are gods in our dreams. Disaster strikes when we come to believe the same is true in our real lives.
I wish Torrent was here. I wish he’d never left me. I see him in my mind even now. I see him standing atop a mountain of bones, his eyes dark beneath the rim of his helm.
Torrent, where are you?
‘They looked near death,’ Yedan Derryg said.
Riding beside her brother, Yan Tovis grimaced. ‘They must have awakened something-I told them to protect themselves, now I’m thinking I may have killed them both.’
‘They may look and act like two giggling girls, Twilight, but they aren’t. You killed no one.’
She twisted in her saddle and looked back down the road. The light of torches and lanterns formed a refulgent island in the midst of buildings at the far end of the city. The light looked like a wound. She faced forward again. Darkness, and yet a darkness through which she could see-every detail precise, every hint of colour and tone looking strangely opaque, solid before her eyes. As if the vision she had possessed all her life-in that now distant, remote world-was in truth a feeble, truncated thing. And yet, this did not feel like a gift-a pressure was building behind her eyes.