«However long, it is still too long.» Kermadec stretched his massive arms over his head and yawned. «What is the point?»
It was a rhetorical question and she didn't bother to attempt an answer. It had been a dozen years since her efforts at finding a solution had broken down, and since then she had been preoccupied with troubles much closer to home.
«You are due for a change of guards,' Kermadec offered, handing her his aleskin. «Maybe you should think about a change of Druids at the same time.»
«Dismiss them all and start over?» She had heard this argument from him before. Kermadec saw things in simple terms; he thought she would be better off if she did so, too. «I can't do that.»
«So you keep saying.»
«Dismissing the order now would be perceived as weakness on my part. Even dismissing the handful of troublemakers who plague me most would have that effect. The nations look for an excuse to proclaim the Druid Council a failure, especially Sen Dunsidan and Kellen Elessedil. I cannot give them one. Besides, if I had to start over at this point, no one would come to Paranor to aid me. All would shun the Druids. I have to make do with things as they are.»
Kermadec took back the aleskin and looked out over the countryside. They were just at the edge of the Streleheim, facing north toward the misty, rugged silhouette of the Knife Edge. The day was bright and warm, and it promised another clear, moonlit night in which to explore the ruins of the Skull Kingdom. «You might think about the impracticality of that before you give up on my suggestion.»
She had thought about alternatives frequently of late, although her thinking was more along the lines of restructuring and reordering so as to isolate those most troublesome. But even there she had to be careful not to suggest an appearance of weakness to the others or they would begin to shift allegiance in ways that would undo her entirely.
At times, she thought it might be best if she simply gave them all what they wanted, if she resigned her position and departed for good. Let another struggle with the problem. Let someone else take on her responsibilities and her obligations as Ard Rhys. But she knew she couldn't do that. No one else had been asked to shoulder those responsibilities and obligations; they had been given to her, and nothing had happened to change that. She could not simply walk away. She had no authority to do so. If Walker's shade should appear to tell her it was time, she would be gone in a heartbeat—though perhaps not without disappointment at having failed to accomplish her task. But neither Walker's nor the shade of any other Druid had come to her. Until she was discharged, she could not go. The dissatisfaction of others was not enough to set her free.
Her solution to the problem would have been much easier if she were still the Ilse Witch. She would have made an example of the more troublesome members of her order and cowed the rest by doing so. She would not have hesitated to eliminate her problems in a way that would have appalled even Kermadec. But she had lived enough of that life, and she would never go back to it. An Ard Rhys must find other, better ways to act.
By late afternoon, they had crossed the Streleheim and flown through the lower wall of the Knife Edge into the jagged landscape of the Skull Kingdom. She felt a change in the air long before she saw one on the ground. Even aboard Chaser, several hundred feet up, she could sense it. The air became dead and old, smelling and tasting of devastation and rot. There was no life here, not of a sort anyone could recognize. The mountain was gone, brought down by cataclysmic forces on the heads of those who had worked their evil within it, reduced to a jumble of rocks within which little grew and less found shelter or forage. It was a ruined land, colorless and barren even now, a thousand years later, and it was likely to be a thousand more before that changed. Even in the wake of a volcano's eruption, in the path of the resultant lava flow, life eventually returned, determined and resilient. But not here. Here, life was denied.
Ignoring the look and feel of the place, even though it settled about them with oppressive insistence, they circled the ruins in search of the site where the fires and the flashes had been observed. After about an hour they found it at one end of a long shelf of rock balanced amid a cluster of spikes that jutted like bones from the earth. A ring of stones encircled a fire pit left blackened and slick from whatever had been burned. When Grianne first saw it from the air, she could not imagine how anyone could even manage to get to it, let alone make use of it. Rock barriers rose all about, the crevices between them deep and wide, the edges sharp as glass. Then she amended her thinking. It would take a Shrike or a Roc or a small, highly maneuverable airship to gain access, but access could be gained. Which had been used in this instance? She stored the question away to be pondered later.
Guiding Chaser to one end of the shelf, they dismounted and walked back for a closer look.
«Sacrifices of some sort,' Kermadec observed, glancing around uneasily, his big shoulders swinging left and right, as if he were caged. He did not like being there, she knew, even with her. The place held bad memories for Trolls, even after so long. The Warlock Lord might be dead and gone, but the feel of him lingered. In the history of the Trolls, no one had done more damage to the nation's psyche. Trolls were not superstitious in the manner of Gnomes, but they believed in the transference of evil from the dead to the living. They believed because they had experienced it, and they were wary of it happening again.
She closed her eyes and cast about with her other senses for a moment, trying to read in the air what had happened here. She tracked the leavings of a powerful magic, the workings of a sorcery that was not meant to heal or succor. A summoning of some sort, she read in the bits and pieces that remained. To what end, though? She could not determine, though the smells told of something dying, and not quickly. She looked down at the fire pit and read in the greasy smears dark purpose in the sacrifices clearly made.
«This isn't good,' she said softly.
He stepped close. «What do you find, mistress?»
«Nothing yet. Nothing certain.» She looked up at him, into his flat, expressionless features. «Perhaps tonight, when darkness cloaks the thing that finds this dead place so attractive, we shall find out.»
* * *
She tethered Chaser some distance away, back in the rocks where he couldn't be seen, giving him food and water and speaking soothing words to steady him against what might happen later. Afterwards, she ate a cold dinner with Kermadec, watching the light fade from the sky and the twilight descend in a flat, colorless wash that enveloped and consumed like smoke. There was no sunset, no change in the look of the land and sky save an almost rushed transition from light to dark. The sensation it generated in Grianne was one of possibility draining into despair.
She pushed such dark thoughts away but could not change her feelings for the place. It was wretched ground for living things, a wasteland in which she did not belong. The pervasive feelings of hopelessness and isolation gave notice that for some transgressions there could be no redemption. If she lived another thousand years, she did not think to see a rebirth of life in the Skull Kingdom. Perhaps, given the types of life that might find purchase in such a land, it was for the best.
«Sleep,' she told Kermadec. «I will keep watch the first half of the night.»
He grunted agreement and was asleep in seconds. She envied him a rest that came so easily. She watched him for a time, his rough skin looking smooth in the darkness, his hairless body and nearly featureless face giving him the appearance of a smoothly faceted shape hewn from stone. Sleek—that was the way he struck her. Like a moor cat, big and powerful and smooth. She liked him better than almost anyone. Not so much for the way he looked as for the way he was. Direct and uncomplicated. That wasn't to say he was slow–witted or combative; he was neither. But Kermadec didn't complicate matters by overanalyzing and debating. When something needed doing, he spent as little time and effort as was possible in getting it done. He had a code of conduct that served him well, and she did not think he had ever varied from it. She wished her own life could be as straightforward.
Time slipped away, and Grianne watched the moon rise and the stars paint the sky in a wash of white pinpricks. The rocks around her remained silent. The fire pit, its rings of rocks looking like hunched Gnomes in the gloom, sat cold and untended. Perhaps nothing would happen this night, the one night she was here to see it happen. Perhaps whoever built the fires and created the flashes had sensed her presence and would stay away. She wondered if she could force herself to keep watch another night if nothing happened on this one. She had no good reason to do so; her presence now was generated mostly by her instinctive reaction to the possibilities of what she feared might happen, not to what actually had.
Then, as midnight approached, the fire pit abruptly flared to life. It did so without warning or reason. No one had appeared to tend it; no fuel had been laid or tinder struck. It burned sharp and fierce on nothing more than
