We went along, Queynt stopping from time to time to talk with settlers, giving some of them money, waving his arms, talking persuasively. All of this was much as he had remembered it, except for the sadness. He hadn’t remembered the sadness, and Peter didn’t feel it. I seemed to be the only beneficiary, and I could have done well without it. When the tears started flowing down my face like a river, Peter took time to dry my face and make tender sounds, which helped a little. After that, I held on to his hand. The fact he couldn’t feel the pervasive emotion seemed to ameliorate it somewhat. There was a certain hard pragmatism about Peter—probably inherited from his mother, Mavin, since I hadn’t noticed it in his father, Himaggery, very much—that cut through sentimentality like a knife. Sometimes I hated it, but now I blessed him for it.
Lom remembered night, and night came. Lom remembered morning, and morning came. Lom remembered the rocky height Queynt had described. There were more trees than he had mentioned, more and closer. His rendition on the wood instrument was less expert and more plaintive than he had told us, and the tears flowed down my face again. By the time three days had passed and the Shadowperson moved out of the trees to stand singing upon the moor, I was in full flood. The beauty of what ensued evidently had captured the world’s attention as it did mine, enough at least to distract it from its sadness. There was no sadness in that singing, and it was more glorious in Lom’s memory than it could possibly have been in reality.
We sat upon the moor for several days, which was probably not really more than an hour or two. We saw the gift of the blue crystals from Shadowperson to Queynt. Queynt had said they were small; he had showed them to us, and they were quite small, no larger around than the nail of my littlest finger. Lom remembered them as large, glowing, a sapphire radiance that the Shadowman could barely hold in his two cupped hands.
“You were right, Jinian,” Peter told me, awe-stricken. “The world considered those blue crystals to be important. Terribly important.” We followed Queynt and the Shadowman as they went north to meet the Eesties.
We saw the Eesties.
And Peter had to hold me to keep me from running.
Ever since my recent captivity in the cavern of the giants, I’d had this horror of the Oracle—Oracles, one or many. Every time I thought of the creature or his minions, my mouth went dry and the Dagger of Daggerhawk burned on my thigh as though it were made of hot coals. I thought of trickery and evil. I thought of pain and malice. Long ago in Chimmerdong I’d taken food from the creature’s hands, and it had pretended a mocking friendship while it toyed with me. More recently it had plotted my death. In Chimmerdong it had put a dreadful weapon in my hands; in the cavern of the giants, it had set that weapon outside my reach. In short, it had played with me, trifled with me, amused itself with me, and I hated it.
So now, deep in the remembered dark of the Shadowmarches, two Eesties came out of the shade to stand before Vitior Vulpas Queynt, and I shuddered at the sight. They wore ribbons and precursive suggestions of that fanciful cloak the Oracle had worn, and they, too, had faces painted upon their upper ends. They were as like the Oracle as one thrilp is like another, each unique, perhaps, but still instantly recognizable as what it was.
They didn’t see me fall apart in incipient hysterics. Peter did, catching me as I was about to flee, holding me while the shivering stopped. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “They—they look like the Oracle.”
“They can’t both be the Oracle,” he said in a reasonable voice. “And unless they live forever—which I suppose is remotely possible—then it’s likely neither of them is.”
“You—you don’t understand,” I stammered irrationally. “I don’t think it matters which individual was the Oracle. I think they all are, so to speak. All. Each. Like a hive of warnets. If one knows me, then all of them do.”
“Perfectly possible,” he said calmly, “but not then.”
Which was true. They might all know me now, whenever now was, but they had not known me then, a thousand years ago, when Queynt had walked upon the marches. For which, in that moment, I was extremely thankful.
Queynt, on the other hand, had nothing to be thankful for. He had not told us they had trussed him up, which they had. And he had not told us what they had said to one another in their own language, because he hadn’t known. I, on the other hand, looking on, could understand every word, both when they talked to him and when they talked to one another. Which meant Lom had understood it, too.
They began by accusing him of being of a filthy race that carried destruction with it. Queynt apologized for this but said many humans were trying to rise above their destructive natures. The Eesties twitted him then, comparing him to the Shadowpeople, whom they seemed to hold in contempt. Shadowpeople, who were no more than beasts, no more than animals, who aspired to “elevation,” who were “above themselves.”
They wanted him to leave the world and take all mankind with him. So much was obvious. Through it all, Queynt was calm, fairly reasonable, polite. He kept trying to understand them. He didn’t hear what they said to one another, however.
“How could Lom claim to find bao in this filth?”
“How could we be so
