The Waters Rising

the rooms appeared to have been carved in one piece, out of the core of the mountain. In this room, the lower parts of the outer walls were covered with rich tapestries that kept out the cold. The great gilded bed stood with its curtains almost closed to hold in the warmth of the braziers burning at head and foot. The room had unusually large windows, but since late afternoon they had been masked by closed shutters and heavy draperies. Xulai knew this as she knew everything about this room except why the Woman was here and why the whole of Wold was centered on this room. Were there other places in the world where women were cursed, women who could not speak, who lay silent for years while their husbands mourned endlessly and the world went on without them?

Nowhere else! Only here at Wold! The Woman Upstairs lay like a statue on a tomb, but her bed was smooth with soft linens, her pillows fluffy with down, her coverlet embroidered in gold. A thick cushion lay on the floor beside the bed, and it was there that Xulai knelt, tasting blood on her lip where she had bitten it, her face already wet with guilty tears.

She hoped, she prayed, the Woman would not ask her to go again. She hoped, she prayed, perhaps the Woman would not even speak. She touched the quiet hand. . .

And the Woman spoke! Silently, in her mind, only a few words.

“Xulai! You must. There is no more time. Only tonight or all is lost! I am lost!”

Xulai recoiled as though she had been slapped across her face. She felt a silence so deep it was like an abyss to the center of the earth, the word “lost” echoing forever downward, each echo striking at her heart like the clangor of a great bell.

There was nothing Xulai could say. She had never heard anger, terror, hopelessness, from the Woman Upstairs, never, never before! All the excuses she’d been practicing on her way up the stairs withered into nothing. All her delays crumbled and she was thrust onto her feet as though someone had lifted her from her knees and pushed her! She fled, hearing the repetition of that word. Lost! Echoes thundering down the abyss. Lost! The hammer at her heart. Lost! Her feet pattered into the hall where the footman still slept, through the hidden door onto the back stairs, down the stairs, gaining speed as she went, leaping, two and three steps at a time like a cliff goat fleeing an ice panther, a rabbit fleeing a hound, a child fleeing terror, except that her desperation took her toward the terror rather than away from it.

At the bottom of the stairs she caromed off a pillar as she changed directions, the clatter of her shoes loud in her ears as she went out her hidden door into the kitchen garden. There the gravel scattered behind her as she fled past rows of turnips and onions, almost colliding with the orchard wall. She darted through that gateway into the moon shadows of untrimmed poppleberry trees, their tangled branches wrestling with one another in the light wind. Then she was at the tall outer wall, the one the watchmen walked at night, at the big gate, barred and locked against the world but holding at its side a tiny stoop gate, one large enough only for a child, or a man so hunched over he would be unable to attack or to defend himself as he entered. Though she had prayed that she would not have to use it, the key to the little gate was already in her hand. The lock clicked; the gate swung open and shut. This time she did not hear the tiny metallic sound of the gate relocking itself, the sound that twice before had held a knife-edged snick of inevitability, cutting off all hope. Over the panicky thudding of her heart she did not hear the gate open and close again behind her.

The moonlit path stretched across open ground to the forest edge, where a sparse stand of oak saplings, their leaves dried and rattling, gradually gave way to the somber darkness of ancient pines. Near the last of the oaks, half-hidden by the evergreens, a tall pillar of white stone loomed pale against the shade. There she stopped, throwing a frantic look over her shoulder. She could not remember coming through the kitchen garden, she could not remember unlocking the gate, yet how could she have come this far without unlocking the gates? Above and behind her, Woldsgard Tower thrust its prodigious arm into the darkness, the five clustered bird lofts at its top holding back the moonlit clouds in the east. Lights burned up there in the lofts, softly yellow, and she choked down a customary sorrow at the thought of the one who lit them and watched there through the night. No time for sorrow. No time. Lost, everything lost.

She had come this far twice before, she reminded herself. The first time, her journey had ended in panicked flight back to the safety of the walls when the white stone had spoken to her. The Woman Upstairs had said nothing about speaking stones. The second time, the stone had been blessedly silent and she had gone farther into the wood, though threatened at every step by the same shadows that were piled around her tonight. They lay under the trees like pools of troubled smoke, moving uneasily as though something hungry swam within them. The thought of the possible swimmers shriveled her heart, which caught; her throat, which closed; her eyelids, which squeezed themselves shut.

“Think,” the wagon driver’s voice whispered in her mind. “Just think.”

Slowly, she forced both jaws to unclench, eyelids to open, hugging herself tightly. I’ll be very, very quiet. I won’t brush against anything. If I don’t bother them, they won’t bother me.

A fine resolution, but it was no more helpful than in the