Cat had already started Dream Chains to Bind It to hold the Sending where it was. Bets was busy with her book of charts, judging where we were and how long it might take us to come south. We had figured it several times before, but we had been farther north and east then. I simply stood there in a state of shock, unable to move or think or say anything. Peter. Did they really hold Peter? How could they? My loving, Shifterish Peter. Murzy put one hand on my shoulder and said three hard, sharp names. The world steadied and I became icy calm.
I waited until Dream Chains to Bind It was finished, then asked the wraith, “Where is Bryan? Where did you leave him?”
“Sleeping,” cried the wraith. “Sleeping in his crib in the gatehouse of the Bright Demesne. The crying we used to decoy Peter outside was only pretense. Bryan lies sleeping.”
I found myself coldly hoping that either Mavin or Thandbar had been at the Bright Demesne and had been conveniently located when Bryan had wakened.
“We’re going to have to use her to carry the message back,” said Murzy. “There’s no way to get around it.”
“Can we limit it?” asked Sarah. “Dissolve her as soon as the return message is given?”
“Limit it, and send her by a route north of here,” said Cat. “So that the Witch cannot find where we are.”
“Why limit her suffering?” I asked. “She betrayed Peter.” Immediately there was a pain in my head and I gasped with it. “No. No, I didn’t mean that,” I said. There’d been a sharp, revelatory gleam in my mind, like a sword of light. Oh, Gamelords, I had been acting as though there were some bao here, something that could be taught. There was nothing, only a wraith. It could suffer, but it could not learn, and to impose suffering on something that could not learn was . . . was a bad thing, I told myself, wondering where I had learned it. Evil. The purest kind of evil. “Let us do as Cat suggests. Let’s limit it.”
So they began to weave Dream Chains to Bind It into a complex thing, a fabric, a basket, a holding that would untie all knots as soon the return message was delivered. They ended the spell with Inward Is Quiet, the same one I had used on the creatures at the Sanctuary, and I felt ashamed to have felt anger toward the pathetic thing.
“What message?” I asked. “Don’t let Huldra hurt him!”
“I think it unlikely she’ll hurt him much, girl. Not until you arrive. Then, likely, she’ll try to kill you both, but we won’t allow that. Come now. Don’t fall apart like this. You’ve been endangered before and known him to be endangered without going to pieces. Stand yourself up her and deliver the message. It must be in your voice; you can trust Huldra to check whether you sent the reply yourself, and she must not know we are with you.”
So I stood and delivered. “The Sending finds me fourteen or fifteen days’ travel from the Ice Caverns. Jinian will come as she is bid.” Actually, we felt the distance was something like ten to twelve days’ travel, but we had decided to overstate the time it would take, both to mislead the Witch and to allow for accidents on the way.
Then we let the Sending go. It rose into the sky, still crying, this time, “Bryan, Bryan. . . .” to flee first toward the southeast, then turn sharply toward the north. It would go some distance that way before turning southeast once more. We had done all that we could to mislead the one who had sent it. However, we had first seen the direction it would go to meet Huldra.
“Ah,” said Cat, who had tracked its southeastern flight against the stars. “Then Huldra is not yet at the caverns. Let me see your charts, Bets.” They bent over them, measuring and nodding. “That line of flight will intersect a line between the Bright Demesne and Bannerwell at about . . . here. It may be she is as far from her destination as we are. So. If we speed ourselves, we may come there two to five days before them.”
We went as quick as we might along the rolling road, among live forests and dead ones, smelling the stinks of distant fumaroles as though they had been the stinks of a body decaying, waking sadly in the mornings and walking the day through no happier, urgently going, driven by our own need to do whatever it was needed doing without any real hope that it would do any good at all.
As we went, I did as I had promised and told them about Ganver’s teaching, not once but many, many times. They tried, as I had tried, to unravel it, with as little success. Whatever the secret truth of the stareye might be, thus far the Oracle had been right about it. Its power, if any, was beyond me. It might as well have been merely symbolic, as the creature had said. Only stubbornness and respect for Ganver’s pain made me continue to believe otherwise.
10
PETER’S STORY: HULDRA
While the Sending was away, Huldra had amused herself by making me acutely uncomfortable. This was mostly by way of mockery and jeering, companied by some rough cruelty without much subtlety to it. It was enough to make me sweat, nonetheless; sweat and fear for the future. After a day or so of it, she tired of her amusement and left me in the care of a warder, who sat beside me, took me out among the bushes from time to time, and fed me twice each day. They
