“What an odd coincidence!” Xulai replied, managing a smile. “I had been told the same thing. For some no doubt suitable reason, I was treated as though I was much younger and was enabled to look and act the part. I suppose it was a kind of protective coloration provided by the Tingawans who selected me as Xakixa. Now it is evidently time to give up that particular pretense. It’s a relief to me, in a way, for it helps me understand why I’ve been troubled for quite a long time by feelings that did not seem suitably childish.”
After a long moment’s silence, the abbot said, “It’s strange no one else has noticed these coincidences in Mirami’s life.”
Xulai nodded. “There has been some notice; covert, I should imagine. And there’s no real reason anyone should have taken overt notice. The events occurred over a period of years and in separate places. The births of Alicia and Hulix came some years before the deaths of Duke Falyrion and Falredi; there was at least a year or so between the deaths of each of King Gahls’s three young wives; the birth of the heir to the throne came years before Alicia was given the lands of Altamont and began her assault upon my . . . lord Justinian. And there were years, long years, after that before Princess Xu-i-lok died.
“To anyone hearing of these, they would have seemed separate happenings, one thing at a time, but I heard about them all at once, in the space of a few hours. It was like hearing a song, each verse with the same refrain. Death. Barren wives. Mirami.” She looked down at her hands, then up into the librarian’s quiet face. “Elder Brother, what do you know of Huold the Fearless?”
“And how did Huold get into this matter?” Wordswell asked.
Xulai had briefly thought she might tell the abbot about her real parentage and what she had learned about the duchess during her nighttime mission in the forest of Wold, but upon considering last night’s meeting with the prior, she had decided against it. She was not entirely sure he could be trusted, and those things had been Xu-i-lok’s secrets, her mother’s secrets. She would keep them until she knew it was no longer necessary. The story she could tell was true in most of its elements, and it would do well enough.
“The road to the Stoneway, north of Wold, is little used. I often sat in one of the orchard trees along the road, well hidden from any passerby, a quiet place where I could read or merely sit and watch the birds. One day the duchess went past on her way to visit her brother. She passed very slowly, stopping here and there along the way, eating Wold with her eyes as I had seen her do before. I heard her remark to her companion that she intended to find something on Wold lands that Huold had left there. I wondered if that might be why she is so set on my cousin marrying her. So she’ll have the right to scour the lands, looking for whatever it is.”
“You never mentioned this to me,” said Bear, his eyes slitted as they were when he was angry.
She smiled sweetly at him, ignoring the answering heat his tone had ignited. “Bear, I beg your pardon. It happened just before the princess died. If you’ll recall, everyone at Woldsgard was grieving and distracted. Then this journey began, almost overnight, and there’s been no time to talk quietly of anything at all. The trip has been long and tiring and dangerous, and it was more important to get here safely than to discuss the devices of ancient heroes, which, in fact, I had forgotten about until this morning.”
“But since it did come to mind,” the abbot said thoughtfully, “you thought it might be useful to know about it.”
“Yes. Exactly. Who was Huold, and what was it he hid or left or buried on the lands of Wold, assuming he did any such thing?”
“The thing he supposedly took into the Icefang range during his last journey,” said the abbot, cocking his head and staring at his librarian.
Brother Wordswell wiped his lips, shrugged, looked over the company searchingly, then settled himself. “Throughout all his many conquests, it was said that Ghastain wore or carried a mysterious thing of limitless potency which gave him great power.” Wordswell shifted in his chair, head rotating back and forth slightly, as though glancing through an index on the wall that no one else could see. “It was said that this whatever-it-was allowed him to prevail even when the odds were against him, even when vastly outnumbered, even when he attacked heedlessly, without planning. The post–Before Time historian Thrastus Danilus tells us that as Ghastain’s reputation grew, so did his pride. He thought himself invincible. He coveted the world!
“During all those years, Huold was his faithful and beloved companion, many times wounded in Ghastain’s service. He was sometimes called the Arm of Ghastain. We learn from the historian Barkamber that when Ghastain ran out of other places to covet, he amassed an armada and sailed westward to seize the isles of the Sea King. Barkamber quotes the stories of that time, which tell us that the Sea King called up the power of the deep. Waves taller than the tallest tree rose from the depths; Ghastain grasped the thing of power and called upon it, but it was of no use. He and all his men were drawn down into the sea.
“Only one man returned from the armada of Ghastain: Huold, only thereafter called the Fearless or the Heroic. He arrived at Ghost Isle on the back of a great silver fish. There’s an interesting mosaic of it, as a matter of fact, in the castle of—”
“Just the story,” interrupted the abbot. “Please.”
The librarian frowned, trying to remember where he’d left off. “Ah. He told the people of Ghost Isle
