Close enough, Railing thought. “I spoke to it. I made all the arguments. I gave all the reasons. But I don’t know. It didn’t seem persuaded. If anything, it seemed reluctant. It kept telling me that even if it decided to grant my request, I wasn’t going to get what I wanted. I don’t know what that means.”
But he was thinking that it was surprisingly close to what the King of the Silver River had told him, and he wondered if that might be a harbinger.
“But she’s still alive? She could actually return with us?” Skint shook his head. “I would never have believed it. Not really. Even though I came on this journey with you, Railing Ohmsford. Even though.”
“She isn’t here yet,” Challa Nand mumbled.
Mirai took hold of Railing by his shoulders and turned him so they were facing each other. “You did what you could. You couldn’t have done more.”
He smiled bitterly. “I could have tried harder.”
They sat down together on the stone benches and talked about it for a while longer. Railing filled in the details, even the ones that were so painful he could barely speak of them—the tanequil’s seeming indifference to the fate of the Four Lands, Grianne’s deep commitment to her life as a spirit of the air that precluded disobedience to the tree—because it seemed to lessen the hurt he was feeling when he did so.
They were quiet for a time after that. Skint wandered off to study the walls of the gardens. Challa Nand stretched out on one of the benches and fell asleep.
Mirai moved over to sit close to him. “I am proud of you, Railing,” she said. “Proud of you for trying. Proud of you for risking so much to see if there was something that could be done. If it doesn’t work out the way you want it to, I want you to know that I will still stay with you until we find Redden and bring him home. No matter what.”
It was exactly what he had needed to hear, and his relief was so strong that he couldn’t manage a reply. He only barely managed to keep from crying.
So they sat in the gardens of Stridegate and waited for something to happen. Dusk deepened into night, and more than once Railing thought just to go and be done with it. Grianne wasn’t coming, they were wasting their time hoping she would, and the matter was decided. He kept waiting for one of the others to suggest they leave, but none of them did. They simply waited with him, staying silent, their thoughts kept to themselves.
The stars were twinkling brightly overhead when Mirai, standing a few yards off, said softly, “Railing?”
He glanced over and saw that she was staring at the bridge. He leapt up at once.
A figure was crossing the high span, moving slowly and deliberately toward them. Hooded and cloaked, its features were concealed in the dark, but Railing felt a surge of excitement. It could only be one person. Grianne Ohmsford.
They watched her come, all four of them clustered together by now, measuring her progress as she made her way toward them, her footsteps painfully slow, her efforts extreme. Her garments were old and frayed, the ends ragged and the fabric tattered. In the moonlight, she had a spectral look to her—as if she were one of night’s shadows, a wraith come out of the darkness. For just an instant, Railing wondered if she might be no more than a shade and that this was what the tanequil had been trying to tell him, but he dismissed the idea as absurd. Why would she return to him as a shade? She was still alive, wasn’t she?
But as the figure drew closer, he saw that something was seriously wrong. In the look and the walk and the posture—everything was just slightly skewed from what it should have been. He exchanged an uneasy glance with Mirai. She saw it, too.
The figure came to a stop in front of them.
“She released me, Railing. I am here for you.”
Grianne Ohmsford pulled back the hood, and the four standing in front of her recoiled in shock. Her face was ravaged by age and time so that she seemed more a haggard crone than simply an older woman, more skeleton than flesh and blood. Her features were twisted and hard, her hair white and stringy, and her skin devoid of color, washed of all but a faint gray cast. Her hands and arms, where they were revealed, were withered and spotted. She was—it was apparent, even within the cloaking—no more than a shadow of the woman she had been, and that shadow only a single step from the grave that must already be reaching out to claim her.
But it was the eyes that told Railing everything he needed to know about who she was and what the tanequil had been trying to warn him of. Her eyes were filled with a hatred and rage that ran so deep, it had no bottom. They glittered with the intensity of it, and in that glitter there was the promise of pain and suffering. There was inexorable purpose.
What you need is not what you seek.
“You have me back,” she hissed at him. “What do you intend to do with me?”
It wasn’t Grianne Ohmsford that Mother Tanequil had returned to him.
It was the Ilse Witch.
Fifteen