But until we return from Rimmersgard, I can do nothing to aid the work except send the occasional letter to the master mason and pray for patience—
A sudden gust from the faded blue mountains to the north pimpled Tiamak’s exposed skin, and although the wind had been blowing all day, the strength of this chill surprised him, pushing deep into his very substance, bones and innards. Without even thinking, he made circles of his forefingers and thumbs to repel bad luck, as he had done when he was a child.
If I were back in Village Grove, he thought, I would be certain that She Who Waits To Take All Back had just breathed on my neck, reminding me that she has plans none of us know about.
Which was true, of course, as it always was. He was letting sadness over Isgrimnur make him fretful, jumping at shadows, cringing from sharp breezes.
While Tiamak was trying to gather back together his hopeful thoughts about the library, he heard someone come riding swiftly up behind him. He looked down from his high seat to see one of Eolair’s servants pacing the carriage on a tall, dark horse.
“Your pardon, Lord Tiamak,” the rider said. “The Lord Steward bids me give you this. It came with the dispatches from Erkynland.”
Tiamak looked it over as Eolair’s servant rode away, and his heart lightened a bit. He knew who it was from instantly because of the odd seal pressed into the red wax: instead of a heavy metal stamp or a signet ring, his wife Thelía always pressed a small dried flower into the melted wax. Because she had sent the letter several months back, in Feyever, she had chosen one of the first wildflowers that bloomed in Erkynland every year, a bright yellow bloom called sunlion or sometimes coltsfoot. He knew she would have picked it herself as she gathered herbs and simples in the castle gardens, and it should have warmed him just to see its sunbeam petals, still bright despite its long travels, but he was still feeling the effects of the chill that had surprised him a few moments earlier. He unfolded the letter and began reading, hoping for good news, or at least an absence of anything worrisome. Her opening words were in her usual, conversational tone—Thelía seemed interested only in sharing various workaday matters, a few decisions on the library materials she hoped he would be able to write back about, and a question about wild marjoram and what he knew of its use in his boyhood home in the Wran. But then he reached the final paragraph.
One last thing, my patient husband, a small but odd and interesting tale.
I was called in your absence to practice physick on one of the kitchen workers, an old fellow of Hernystiri blood who had fallen into a fit on the floor of the buttery. I do not know if you know him. His name is Riggan, and he is a thin, gnomish fellow, three score years old or even more, with large, bleary eyes and rough skin. He was not badly hurt, but his command of the Westerling tongue is poor, so I asked Countess Rhona to help me. She asked him in his own speech what had happened, and he said, “I hear the Morriga talking to herself. Every night and I cannot sleep.”
Countess Rhona looked a bit startled, I thought, and told me the Morriga was an ancient Hernystiri goddess of death and battle, no longer worshipped among her people but still feared, still blamed for nightmares and other foul things. Then, before I could ask another question, this Riggan said something else in that tongue, and this is what I thought would interest you. His words were, “She summons us back. She summons us all back. She is the silver-masked Mistress of Tears.” Now I ask you, husband, does that not sound as though the Norns’ Queen Utuk’ku, once a real, living menace to all mankind, has somehow become a demon-fable for kitchen workers? The Sithi friends of the king and queen thought her power was utterly destroyed when the Storm King was defeated, and I pray that is true. If she is now nothing but a legend, a fading nightmare, then I thank our merciful God for preserving us all from her evil.
I did not want to spend long with the man Riggan once he seemed recovered, because he disturbed me more than a little, with his strange face and goggling, fishlike eyes, and it was also disquieting to see calm, wise Countess Rhona look so pale at hearing the name of the Morriga—the ‘mother of all demons’ as Rhona named her. My Aedonite sisters would call this man’s malady the work of the Devil, but my learning has been so shaped by yours, dear Tiamak, that I suppose it instead only the confusion of an illness of his mind with tales he might have heard in childhood. In fact, I deem it proof of what you always say, my wise husband, “Truth and falsehood walk a long way together before they go their separate ways . . .”
Had he received her message just a few days earlier her tale of the kitchen worker’s fit would have been a mere curiosity to turn over in his spare moments; but instead this story of a madman who dreamed of the Norn Queen made Tiamak feel like a traveler abroad at night who hears something following him through the trees. On the night the royal party had left Hernystir, Count Eolair had told Tiamak and the king and queen of Queen Inahwen’s worries about Lady Tylleth—that she and some the courtiers were worshipping the terrible ancient goddess, the Morriga, and now here was that name again.
It has to be chance, Tiamak told himself—Eolair himself had said that stories of the goddess were as old as Hernystir itself. But even as he soothed himself, his earlier chill returned, and this time without any cold wind to blame.
The silver-masked Mistress of Tears . . . A deep dread clutched at his heart. Something is coming that will threaten all, he thought helplessly—my library, the royal children, the throne. I can feel it. He took in a long, shaky breath, his heart fluttering behind his ribs like a trapped bird.
The driver flicked his whip to keep the horses together, oblivious to anything but the jingle of harness and the thump of hooves. The sky was still blue overhead, the sun still shone, but Tiamak felt as though he had stepped on what should have been solid ground and found nothing beneath him but yawning emptiness.
7
Island of Bones
The other four members of the Queen’s Hand sat silently on the beach below, waiting for the ship to come. They had already waited on the graveled strand for hours, still as statues while the wind strengthened and the afternoon died with the sun, and would likely sit that way without moving for many hours more, but Nezeru had never before seen the ocean. She had been so taken by its immensity, its vitality, its ever-changing surface and colors that she had climbed the cliffs above the isolated beach to get a better view.
It was not only the size of the ocean that fascinated her, astounding as it was: the snowfields north of the great mountain back home seemed equally boundless. It wasn’t the colors, either, as magnificent and unexpected as they were, the startling jade translucence of the waves, the grays and blues and blacks and ragged whitecaps, because to Hikeda’ya eyes the great icefields of the Nornfells were full of color, too. No, it was the alive-ness of the sea that stunned Nezeru, the constant motion in different directions, the intersection of wave against wave that could turn water into weightless froth and throw it high into the sky. And it was not just the water itself that was alive: seabirds rose and sank on every swell, or drifted above the waves in rotating clouds, their squawking cries filling her ears, filling the sky. Most of them were hunting the silvery fish that sparkled in almost every wave. Life was everywhere. Nezeru knew that if she gathered a sack of Nakkiga barley the size of a house and dumped it onto the snowy ground outside her mountain home, not a thousandth of this array of living things would come to it. There would be crows, a few waxwings, and with nightfall the rats and mice, but the land around Nakkiga could boast nothing like this chaos of noise and movement.
She crouched on the hilltop and watched the sun dive down toward the sea, where it tipped the waves with copper. As the last sliver of the daystar dropped behind the horizon it flashed green, and as that moment came and passed Nezeru happened to look down at the cliff face beneath her feet. Something pale sat only a few arms’ lengths below her, shining in the day’s last light.