‘Change is coming,’ he said. ‘But what kind of change?’
Later, Aldasair found himself wandering the corridors of the palace again. He hadn’t thought of the Hill of Souls in decades, but now that he had, random memories kept floating to the surface, like frogs disturbed on the bottom of a pond: himself and Tormalin arguing over which war-beast they would make, competing to see who could make the better one; the sight of the Hill when the lights had been lit, a beacon like a great eye, looking out over Ebora; his mother burning the soul-cakes and laughing over it, even though he knew it embarrassed her.
The idea that it could all be as it was . . . Bern had seemed so earnest, but he was also human; humans were used to their lives being fast, everything changing overnight. No human had spent a hundred years in silence, watching as everything slowly fell apart.
Without realising it, Aldasair had walked to the doors of the Hall of Roots. It was the deep heart of the evening now, and outside in the plaza people were cooking food and talking, but inside the palace the silence was still as thick as fog. He raised his hand, meaning to knock at the door, or perhaps just rest his hand against it, when it suddenly swung open, revealing Hestillion’s face. She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before, and then neatly stepped out into the corridor, slamming the door behind her.
‘What do you want?’
Aldasair opened his mouth, and closed it again. Hestillion’s eyes were wild, her mouth a thin colourless line, while the tops of her cheeks sported two bright blotches of pink. Seeing him struggling for words, she hissed with impatience.
‘What are you doing here, Aldasair?’
‘Our guests.’ He cleared his throat. ‘They want to know when they will see Ygseril. They are here to help, after all.’
She reached up and pushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. ‘Of course. That is why they are here. And they will, they will help him, I’m sure of it. But I need more time.’
‘More time? For what?’
She shook her head, irritated again, as though he had asked the wrong question.
‘I must do all I can, first.’
Aldasair raised his eyebrows. He was thinking of the incident with the wine merchant’s boy, so many years ago. ‘What are you doing? What have you done?’
‘Oh nothing, don’t give me that look. Go and look after our guests, and let me do what I need to do. Please. Trust your cousin, Aldasair.’
With that, she opened the door and slipped back into the Hall of Roots, making certain to shut it firmly behind her. Aldasair stared at it for some time, trying to make sense of her words, and her mood. He had never seen Hestillion so flustered.
Eventually, he turned and walked away, heading towards the lights and noise of the plaza with what he would later identify as relief.
32
‘Are they winnowfire?’
Tor laughed, and for a wonder, Noon wasn’t annoyed. They were crouched inside the mouth of a dark cave, while outside a rain storm surged and thundered across a murky patch of marshland. The darkness wasn’t complete, however: here and there floated great orbs of pale blue light, apparently unaffected by the rain. They cast eerie glowing patches onto the churning water and mud below them.
‘Not winnowfire, no,’ he said. He was staring out of the cave alongside her, looking pleased with himself. He enjoyed surprising her, she was starting to realise. ‘I tried to poke one with my sword once, and it just skittered away. They’re a type of gas, supposedly, but I met a hermit in this bog who claimed they were ghosts. I ask you, witch, what sort of gas jumps away from a sword?’
‘What sort of ghost does?’ she asked mildly, and he raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Where did you say this was?’
‘In Jarlsbad, some way north of their Broken River. I was here, oh, forty years ago. Isn’t it a sight? I slept in this cave one night, and they all came and gathered at the entrance, like they were seeking an audience.’
As he spoke, the eerie blue orbs floated towards them out of the dark, filling the small cave with a glow that was somewhere between daylight and moonlight.
‘I’m getting good at this.’
‘Why were you out here, in the middle of nowhere? All your fine clothes, soaked. I dread to think what it would do to your hair.’
When he answered he didn’t meet her eyes, looking instead out across the marsh. ‘I was wandering. I wanted to see everything. I had spent so long looking at the same empty corridors, the same empty streets . . .’ His voice trailed off, and then he took her arm, pointing with his other hand out into the dark. ‘Look! There goes the hermit now, do you see?’
An oddly elongated figure was passing by in the distance, a black shape against the teeming rain. It took Noon a moment to realise that it was man on tapering stilts, picking his way across the marshes like a long-legged bird.
‘Sorry,’ Tor let go of her arm, and cleared his throat, ‘I forgot that you prefer not to be touched.’
For a brief second Noon had a vision of crouching over him in the narrow bed, her bare arm pressed to his mouth, his hand pressing at the small of her back. She banished the memory – it was hazardous to think such things here.
‘It’s all right.’ The rain was a soft curtain of sound, almost comforting. She hadn’t thought of it that way in a long time. ‘You have been to so many odd places. I’ve been nowhere.’
‘You’ve been to the Winnowry. You’ve been to the Winnowry a lot, I think.’
She punched him on the arm.
‘Fuck you.’
He cleared his throat again. ‘I would be very curious to see it, actually. Up close. I’ve seen it from Mushenska, of course, ugly great spiky thing that it is, but the inside is a mystery that intrigues me.’
Noon pressed her lips together. There were times when she was sure he was about to mention Vintage, but he never quite managed it. She did not know if that were deliberate, or if in this odd, dreaming state, it did not occur to him.
‘Mystery my arse.’
‘Again, something I have seen from a distance and greatly wish to see up close—’
She hit him a little harder this time. ‘Even if that shit hole were worth showing you, I can’t just mess about with dreams like you can.’