Jaer opened her eyes.
Before them, the body on the bed rippled, features melting and flowing as though the person before them was not one but a multitude, as though a legion battled for mastery within the wakened body. Terascouros called out, ‘Jaer, hold on, let me …’
But Jasmine had already flung herself forward to cling to the flowing insubstantiality before them, crying Jaer’s name. As the others laid hands upon the body, it stilled and became. Medlo found himself staring into Jaer’s eyes, remote and vague as a misty horizon seen from a high mountain, blank and directionless. Medlo shook the shoulder he held.
‘Jaer. It’s Medlo. We are with the Sisters at Gerenhodh.’
Momentarily, someone who looked almost like Jaer was there with them, putting her hand to her throat, murmuring, ‘Thirsty.’ One Sister, more practical-minded than most, had prepared a cup of broth. Jaer drank deeply, eyes closed, then belched, a tiny, very human sound in the unearthly quiet. Someone giggled. Jaer searched for the sound. Not Jaer anymore, but someone – anyone else.
She was standing in a tall grey vault of stone, watching the smoke rising like visible prayer in the light of the high windows, hands raised to the knife and the images …
… walking through the marketplace of a port city, servants trotting behind him, carrying the ledgers, the air heavy and damp with noon, smelling of rotting fruit and the bite of dye …
… drifting through a moss glade, naming herself woods-walker, moving as quickly as the flicker of a hawk owl’s flight in that long, dropping curve …
… at the forge, hammer in his hand, the blows falling sure on the red iron as the bellows chuffed in the amber light…
… high on the scarp, tugging at the hides in which the bloody meat was packed for the long trip down to the place where hunger waited…. Who are those who unger? Where are they?
‘Who are those who hunger?’ she asked. ‘Where are they? In Cholder?’
An indrawn breath hissed from the Sisters in the cavern, Old Aunt blanching at the name of the place. ‘Only dreams, Jaer. There is no one here from Cholder, no one from that place.’
At the sound of her name, Jaer flickered into being once more, was gone again. Those who watched could see others within her, others who changed her face, her eyes.
She was spiked to a bed by a faceless, hard body, her mind exploding in amber and purple …
… falling into the endless softness of woman, wheels of fire in his head, spinning sparks into the caves of loneliness …
… on the pitching deck as the wind drove salt ice into his face …
… captive in the woods tower, watching from the narrow window as clouds went by like startled sheep …
… in the cavern of Gerenhodh, where familiar faces ringed her, saying ‘Jaer, Jaer,’ again and again, imperatively, ‘Jaer.’
‘I have,’ she murmured, ‘more lives than I was given.’
Sisters mumbled at the bedside, ran away for cups and vials, mixed and muttered, offered a potion. Jaer drank, was silent, then seemed to come forward from some vast distance.
‘I know you,’ she said to Thewson.
‘Yes. I am Thewson.’
‘Not only Thewson,’ she said. ‘The pattern, from before…
They urged her to drink again. This time Jaer emerged without the flicker of other presences moving behind her face. This time she looked at them herself.
‘It was Cholder,’ she said to Old Aunt. ‘And the runes on those gates are the same as those on the stones of Owbel Bay. I wish I did not know why that is, but I do.’
Old Aunt said huskily, still pale, ‘I wish you did not know it, child. It is important to you now?’
To which Jaer replied, ‘No, it doesn’t matter. It is only part of the pattern, the endless pattern of all these people within me. Do you know what has been done to me? Every story told to me while I slept passed into reality, became persons, became persons with stories of their own to tell which became persons, with more stories yet…. They live! They are as real as I. As I!’ She laughed until she choked, bending forward to put her head between her knees, rising up again with eyes glowing in a kind of madness. ‘What is that singing?’
They had become so accustomed to the endless song of the Sisters that for a time they could not think what singing she meant.
Terascouros identified it. The Sisters. Singing to keep the ghosts of Murgin at rest. The ghosts which came from…’
‘I know.’ She nodded her head. ‘I was there.’
‘You were wounded. Unconscious.’
‘I was there. Leona told me, Medlo told me – I saw it each way, through each one.’ She mused. ‘I remember a ring of fire. You did it to us, Terascouros. Put us in that ring of fire. We were threaded like beads on that ring, the fire bleeding from one to the other of us, staining each with the flavour and colour of each. I remember it myself.’ And within her, multiple voices cried out, ‘Myself? Which self? What self?’
‘I want to see.’ She stood, tugged erect by Medlo’s hands to totter a moment before moving slowly out of the cavern, turning in the direction of the distant door which gave upon the ridge over the prison valley of the ghosts, moving surely, as though she had known these passageways since childhood. From time to time she leaned weakly against the stone, only to move on again when she had rested a little. The practical Sister walked beside her, offering the cup of broth again and again, and with each sip Jaer seemed to grow stronger.
At last she stood in the jagged arch of tunnel which looked down upon the roiling below. Medlo thrust in beside her, the jangle on his back strummed mournfully as it touched the stony wall. He flipped it over with an absent-minded slap which resonated in the tunnel. Jaer reached out
