“Come inside.” Aditu’s voice had an echo now.
Eolair moved forward once more, careful not to step on any of the bright gleams of color now gently fanning their wings on the ground around the entrance. After a moment, Morgan climbed to his feet and followed, but his face was pale and his progress cautiously slow. Eolair reached back and gently took the prince’s arm, pretending it was to steady himself.
When he had stepped through the entrance and could lift his head, the count found himself in a wide but low cavern, dark except for an open shaft that let daylight fall through the irregular stone ceiling. All together the irregular chamber was not much larger than his own bedroom back in Nad Mullach, a beloved place he had not visited in a long time, and for which he now felt a sudden, fierce longing. He felt Morgan flinch, but kept his grip on the prince’s arm. This time it was not only to steady the boy, but himself as well.
At the center of the small chamber lay a figure wrapped from head to foot in something like the kind of linen bandages in which the funeral priests of Erkynland wrapped their kings and queens for burial. Only the face was exposed—a face he recognized as that of Jiriki and Aditu’s mother, Likimeya, though her features seemed as still and lifeless as one of the statues from Nabban’s Age of Gold.
“By all the gods, what is this?” he asked, his voice quiet yet raw, even to his own ears. “She is dead?”
Jiriki, who waited beside his mother’s recumbent form, looked up. His face still had the same cold stillness Eolair had seen that morning. “No. Our mother sleeps the Long Sleep, but she is not dead. She has slept for a long time, though—for years—without recovering, and we do not harbor much hope she will ever wake again.”
“Recovering?” Eolair let go of Morgan’s arm and kneeled beside the shrouded figure. A few butterflies still remained on the cavern’s walls; a few more walked delicately across Likimeya’s body, slowly flexing their wings, seeming to burst into color once more whenever they crossed the shaft of falling sunlight that knifed down from the chamber’s roof. When Eolair drew a little closer he could see that Likimeya was wrapped not in bandages but in layer after layer of some shining white thread, an unimaginable length of the stuff. He saw the butterflies pick their way across her sleeping form and had a sudden idea who had actually shrouded Likimeya for this strange sort of entombment. “What happened to her?”
Jiriki gave him a sharp look, as though he had said something odd, then turned away. “She was shot with an arrow in the heart.”
“Murhagh’s Red Eye! Who did this?”
Aditu stepped forward, but her gaze did not leave her mother’s expressionless face. “We do not know for certain, except that the murderers were mortals.”
“Mortals?” The count was horrified. For a time he could only stare at Likimeya’s wan, golden face. “You say ‘murderers,’” he said at last, “but she has not died. The gods willing, perhaps she will still recover and identify those who attacked her so they can be punished.”
“They will still be murderers,” said Jiriki, his voice quiet but hard as the crypt’s stone walls. “They killed eleven more of our folk. Only our mother and one other survived the attack.”
“Oh, gods, no.” Eolair could not stare at Likimeya’s empty face any longer. “No. Tell me what happened.”
“We will, but not here,” said Aditu. “The Yásira—this gathering place—belongs to our mother now. We will not sully it with any more talk of the cowardly beasts who attacked her.”
As they moved toward the cavern’s entrance, Eolair saw a few butterflies drifting back in. He thought nothing of it at first, but then had to hang back for a moment as a handful more, then dozens, flew back in.
Jiriki said something sharp to Aditu in their own musical tongue. Butterflies streamed back into the cavern in force now, circling the count’s head, filling the spaces between floor and ceiling. But where was Prince Morgan? Eolair turned in sudden apprehension and saw him standing beside Likimeya’s body, staring down at her with sickened fascination, an expression he had never seen the prince wear. “Morgan! Come away,” he called. More and more butterflies were returning to the cavern, making it harder to see past the glimmer and shadow of their wings.
The prince said something Eolair could not hear.
“What? Come away!”
Morgan spoke louder this time. “She is trying to talk—!”
Jiriki sprang across the room and crouched beside his mother’s body. “Rabbit, come to me!” he cried. “It is true.”
Aditu hurried to join him. “But she has not spoken since she was first struck down, since she survived the first fever!”
Eolair too moved closer. He could see Likimeya’s face moving in her silken shroud, but barely, as though a mere tremor of dream made its way to the surface. Aditu leaned very close and put her hand on her mother’s breastbone, then put her ear next to Likimeya’s mouth. For a moment she remained, listening intently. Then at last Aditu straightened and stood up. She curled her hands around her belly as if to protect the child within, and again spoke to her brother in their own language.
“Could you understand what your mother said?” Eolair asked her.
“I could,” said Morgan, to the count’s utter astonishment. The youth looked as though his entire world had just turned downside-up; his eyes were wide and shocked, his face pale as parchment. “I could understand her, I swear! I heard it in my head! She said, ‘All the voices lie except the one that whispers. And that one will steal away the world.” The prince had an expression Eolair had not seen before, one of complete and frightened confusion.
Jiriki and his sister both stared at Morgan, then at each other. After an achingly long pause, Aditu turned back to Count Eolair, her face unusually blank.
“Our mother is silent again,” she announced. “I do not think she will speak more. We should go from this place. We have much that is new to think about—and you two still have much to learn about all that has happened between our peoples.”
Morgan could hardly feel his feet as he walked, or his head either. He might have been a smoldering flake of ash borne aloft by a fire, something lighter than air, drifting without choice or thought. The Sitha-woman’s voice had echoed in his head as though she somehow spoke from inside him—as though her words had made their way out of the marrow of his own treacherous bones. He had never felt anything like it and never wanted to feel such a thing again.
Count Eolair and the other two Sithi were talking busily but quietly. At any other time Morgan would have resented the way they kept their words from him, but at this precise instant he felt poured full as a pitcher whose contents would overspill if even one single drop was added.
“But what could she have meant by that?” Eolair asked.
“If we knew, I promise we would tell you what we could,” Aditu said. “As it is, we must consider this strange, unexpected message, and we must also speak to others of our people.” She wrapped her arms around her belly as they walked through the forest. “Our mother spoke much in the first days after the attack, as she struggled against the poisonous fever that threatened to consume her, but it was mostly meaningless—thoughts and memories torn loose by her deadly wound and the illness it brought.”
“You say poisonous.” Eolair was a little short of breath; Morgan could see that the pace was not easy for him. “Could it be anything like the envoy who was attacked—Tanahaya? She said she was poisoned too.”
“That is a question to be pondered,” said Jiriki. “But it is a painful, difficult subject, as I fear you will learn.”
“In any case, our mother has been silent since it happened,” Aditu resumed—rather quickly, Morgan thought, as though she wished to avoid any more talk about the envoy just now, “as she was when you first saw her today in the Yásira. Why she should choose that precise moment to break her silence, as well as the meaning of her words—and yes, young Prince Morgan heard the same strange warning that I heard, although in some different fashion, because the words we heard were in the tongue of the Zida’ya—I’m afraid that is also beyond our understanding at this moment.”
“But I fear I only have more questions for you,” Eolair said. “Questions my king and queen desperately want to have answered. What has happened to your people in these last years? Why have you been silent so long?”