Now he was outside her room, and Lyman was chanting. Bernarr again stared at the figure, but could see no face under the broad-brimmed hat.
At last he saw the face of his wife, lying in agony on her bed, her face white and her eyes filled with blood. ‘Let me go!’ she pleaded.
Bernarr woke with a gasp, his heart pounding and tears in his eyes, his head lifted painfully from his pillow. He fell back with a sigh and closed his burning eyes.
He’d had this dream before. Too often in fact. But the ending was new; he’d only dreamed that she spoke to him once before.
‘I won’t let you die,’ he whispered to no one.
He turned his head toward the doorway to her room. The candles had burned down. Even though time moved slowly in her room, it did pass. Seventeen years had come and gone since that dreadful night. Each day Lyman had renewed the spell and every day he tried to find a spell that would save Elaine.
At first they had tried only white magic: seeking healers from across the land, even once, at great expense, sending to Great Kesh for one they’d heard could work miracles. Then they’d tried healing spells, none of which seemed to affect her in even the slightest way.
Each time they lowered the spell that preserved her he feared she would slip away, but each time she’d lived long enough for them to fail and then renew the spell.
Of late, they had turned to darker magic, a spell found in an ancient tome Lyman had secured from a trader from Kesh. There was something evil about that book, but Bernarr had exhausted all other options. He must try this terrible and bloody thing, or he would finally go mad.
Lyman assured him that soon they would succeed. They must succeed; or Elaine would be lost forever.
ELEVEN - Discovery
Lorrie awoke with a start.
There were the usual morning sounds; cockerels crowing, birds singing, but the smell was wrong; dusty emptiness around her, and under that too much smoke and too much dung and nothing green. And the floor beneath her was hard board, not the straw-stuffed tick she slept on.
Where—? she thought.
It crashed in on her, dazing, like a horse’s kick in the gut: I’m in Land’s End. I’m here looking for Rip. Mother and Father are dead.
It was late morning, by the look of the yellow light that filtered in through the shuttered window, a column full of dancing motes of dust. She was alone, alone enough to lie still for a moment with the tears leaking down her cheeks.
Mother! she thought. I need you, Mother!
But she would never see her mother again, and their last words had been a quarrel. Never again would she see her father coming in from the fields to smile and rumple her hair, or sit by the hearth on winter evenings and tell the old stories in his slow deep voice.
She felt like crying, but tears wouldn’t come. Instead there was a dull, aching void. She sat, scrubbing at her face. Rip is alive, she scolded herself. She had to concentrate on that. And I will find him!
But when she concentrated, she sensed something else: that Rip was no longer in Land’s End. She flung aside the cloth she’d been using for a blanket, jammed her shoes on her feet, then rose and went to the window.
She couldn’t see anyone below and though there were windows in the surrounding warehouses she couldn’t see anyone moving behind them. She’d just have to take the chance that they wouldn’t see her either. She gave one glance at the rumpled cloth she’d meant to rewind onto the bolt and shook her head regretfully. There wasn’t time to do that. Rip came first. She put one leg on the window-sill, turned and felt for the roof behind her with her free leg. The window was offset the shed roof below. She remembered Jimmy cautioning her to reach up with her left hand while using her right to steady herself on the wall, the swing to the left a little, and pull up. She determined to reverse the procedure and get to the shed roof. From there it was a short leap to the alley below.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing!’
The man’s shout seemed to come from directly behind her. Lorrie gasped and almost lost her grip. She slipped down and grabbed hard on the window-sill. For a long moment, she held motionless, her chin barely above the still, clutching the window, for her life in fact, because there was nothing below her but hard cobbles, twenty feet down. Glancing fearfully over her shoulder she saw no one. No one was looking out of one of the windows opposite either.
‘What do ye mean?’
The voices came from the main street, just beyond where the alley below joined it. Right about where the main doors of the warehouse were.
‘I mean those crates are due on the dock in less than an hour if the Crab isn’t to lose the tide. Why aren’t they on the wagons? What have you been doing all morning, standing there with a thumb up your arse?’