Yes, but who are you? What holds you at your core, Lady Hestillion? All the tiny disparate pieces, what threads them together? What single thing?
Hestillion briefly found herself lost for an answer. Ygseril sounded strange – alert somehow, engaged in a way she hadn’t felt before – but she hadn’t the faintest idea what the god was getting at. She went for the obvious answer.
‘You, my lord.’ She collapsed the vision of the plaza, and instead summoned a vision of Ygseril himself, silver branches spreading over the palace roof. ‘Your roots are what hold me together at my core.’
Only silence answered her.
‘Ygseril? Are you there?’
As if her words were the catalyst, the god-light began to fade, moving so fast she could not follow it, and then she was alone in the netherdark, the cold press of dead roots all around her.
‘But you are not dead,’ she told herself. ‘Not dead, after all.’
Slowly, she came back to herself. Her legs were numb from sitting curled on the hard roots, and there was a deep chill in her bones, but she hardly felt it. Ygseril was not dead, simply hiding. He might be inert, but he was reachable. Turning to face the door, she thought first of going to Aldasair, but would he even understand what she had discovered? And then she thought of the humans, swarming outside their gates, eager to help but also eager to help themselves. They brought trade, and life, and attention; these were valuable things. But perhaps . . . perhaps the salvation of Ygseril was her destiny after all. Who else had stayed? Who else had kept the small seed of hope?
‘Only I,’ she murmured through cold lips. ‘And this shall be my own secret, a little longer. Just until I bring him back.’
26
It’s possible to see, with a great deal of optimism and imagination, how the Greenslick region was once quite beautiful. There are the enormous scars in the landscape which were once the great lakes, some as deep as mountains are high, before the Jure’lia’s so-called ‘maggots’ came and drained them dry (there is nothing at the bottom of these chasms, not a single fish bone – all living things were consumed) and if you close your eyes and squint, you can imagine that the great swathes of shining green are the grasses of picturesque valleys. But if you go and look closer, of course, and let go of your optimism, you will see that the greenish covering is hard as steel, and there are bodies suspended in it, carrying their final, terrified expressions as the varnish trapped and suffocated them.
Greenslick was once called Trisladen, and it was ancient and beautiful. A great many fanciful stories came out of Trisladen, with its kings and queens, and its heraldic knights. They were the sorts of stories I demanded from my nanny when I was a child. ‘Tell me of brave Princess Guinne, and her quest for the enchanted jewels at the bottom of Witch Lake.’ You know the sort. In fact, there was a time when the mythology of Trisladen rivalled Ebora itself, and indeed, from what I can gather from the sources that are left, it was a place with a long and meandering history, and a great love of art and murals in particular. Even in recent times, it was a rich place, mining gold and copper from its hills and fish from its lakes. The Eighth Rain put a swift end to all of that. The Jure’lia found it very much to their tastes, I’m afraid, and that particular invasion put a great deal of its weight there. The maggots descended, the armies of Trisladen were eaten or hollowed out, and the magnificent castles were lost. It is a wasteland now, an eerie place fit only for the mad and the lost.
Greenslick does have one item of note: the lands of Esiah Godwort. His family lived on the very borders of Trisladen for generations, and it was on their lands that a Behemoth crashed at the very abrupt end of the Eighth Rain. I can imagine Godwort’s ancestors, half afraid and half stubborn, refusing to leave lands poisoned and left ragged by the Jure’lia. And eventually, perhaps, they came to realise that there might be profit to be made from the gigantic corpse that happened to land in their back garden. At any rate, they built an enormous wall around the thing, and reinforced it over the generations until it truly is a fortress. I can no longer tell you if they hoped to keep the ghosts in, or keep pilferers out.
Extract from the journals of Lady Vincenza ‘Vintage’ de Grazon
Out from under the cover of the thorn forest it was an anxious journey. Tor found himself glancing at the sky frequently, expecting a flittering movement across the sky to herald their doom, while the landscape around them offered little else to look at. Vintage assured them that the border of Greenslick was no more than four days’ ride, that the region was hidden from view by the elevation of the land, but that had been all the scholar was willing to say. She kept her own counsel, her eyes on the horizon. Tor sensed that she was now so focussed on reaching Godwort’s compound that she had thrust all thought of the Winnowry’s retribution to one side. She could be very wilful when she wanted to be. Which was all the time, in his experience.
The girl, at least, seemed to share his concern. More than once she caught his eye after they had both been scanning the clouds, and she had raised an eyebrow ruefully. That had surprised him. It was as though the further away they travelled from her old prison, the more she was becoming someone else. Finally becoming herself, perhaps. However, when they stopped for the night her sleep was always disturbed, tossing and turning as though tormented. Tor did not venture into her dreams again – not with Vintage so close at hand – but he did ask her about it one morning. She rubbed at her eyes, and shook her head.
‘I’ve no more akaris,’ she said. ‘It was the only thing that kept the nightmares away. Well, most of them.’
‘When you have bad dreams—’
‘Not the one about the worm people. I’ve not had that since the Winnowry. These are just –’ She lifted her hand to her mouth, and briefly touched her lips to a loose piece of skin on her thumb. ‘When I have the nightmare, it’s just the same memory over and over again. A broken one.’
Tor nodded, looking away. He thought of a small girl, a wooden sword in her hand, and a sense of impending doom. ‘A memory of the thing that happened to you when you were a child.’
‘It didn’t happen to me. I happened to other people.’ She squeezed her eyes shut and when she opened them again, her expression was urgent, desperate almost. ‘I can’t remember what happened. Not all of it.’
‘What do you mean, you can’t remember?’
‘I know what the consequences were.’ She lowered her voice. ‘No avoiding those. But the rest of it. And it’s really important I don’t remember. It’s dangerous to remember. Dangerous for everything.’
Tor frowned. ‘If you can’t remember, how do you know it’s dangerous? Memories can’t hurt you.’