Pilgrim. Sara Douglass
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it behind her. She snatched at another bone, and threw that with the ribs. She scurried a little further away, reached under the thorn bush and hauled out its desiccated treasury of bones, also throwing them on the pile.
She continued to snap and snarl, as if she had the rabid fever of wild dogs, scurrying from spot to spot, picking up a knuckle here, a vertebrae there, a cracked femur bone from somewhere else.
The pile of bones grew.
“I want to hunt,” she whispered, “and yet what must I do? Find your useless framework, and knit something out of it! Why must I be left to do it all?”
She finally stood, surveying the skeletal pile before her. “Something is missing,” she mumbled, and swept her hands back through her hair, combing it out of her eyes.
Her tongue had long since licked clean the tasty morsel draining down her chin.
“Missing,” she continued to mumble, wandering in circles about the desolate site. “Missing … where … where … ah!”
She snatched at a long white hair that clung to the outer reaches of the thorn bush and hurried back to the pile of bones with it. She carefully laid it across the top.
Then she stood back, standing very still, her dark blue eyes staring at the bones.
Very slowly she raised her left hand, and the circle of light about its ring finger flared.
“Of what use is bone to me?” she whispered. “I need flesh!”
She dropped her hand, and the light flared from ring to bones.
The pile burst into flame.
Without fear the woman stepped close and reached into the conflagration with both hands. She grabbed hold of something, grunted with effort, then finally, gradually, hauled it free.
Her own shape changed slightly during her efforts, as if her muscles had to rearrange themselves to manage to drag the large object free of the fire, and in the flickering light she seemed something far larger and bulkier than human, and more dangerous. Yet when she finally stood straight again, she had regained her womanly features.
She looked happily at the result of her endeavour. Her magic had not dimmed in these past hours! But she shook her head slightly. Look what had become of him!
He stood, limbs akimbo, pot belly drooping, and he returned her scrutiny blankly, no gratitude in his face at all.
“You are of this land,” she said, “and there is still service it demands of you. Go south, and wait.”
He stared, unblinking, uncaring, and then he gave a mighty yawn. The languor of death had not yet left him, and all he wanted to do was to sleep.
“Oh!” she said, irritated. “Go!”
She waved her hand again, the light flared, and when it had died, she stood alone in the stony gully of the Urqhart Hills.
Grinning again at the pleasantness of solitude, she turned and ran for the north, and as she did so her shape changed, and her limbs loped, and her tongue hung red from her mouth, and she felt the need to sink her teeth into the back of prey, very, very soon.
Scrawny limbs trembling, pot belly hanging from gaunt ribs, he stood on the plain just north of the Rhaetian Hills.
Beside him the Nordra roared.
He was desperate for sleep, and so he hung his head, and he dreamed.
He dreamed. He dreamed of days so far distant he did not know if they were memory or myth. He dreamed of great battles, defeats and victories both, and he dreamed of the one who had loved him, and who he’d loved beyond expression. Then he’d been crippled, and the one who loved him had shown him the door, and so he’d wandered disconsolate — save for the odd loving the boy showed him — until his life had trickled to a conclusion in blessed, blessed death.
Then why was he back?
Faraday kept her arm tight about the man as they walked towards where she’d left Zenith and the donkeys. He’d grown tired in the past hour, as if the effort of surviving the Star Gate and then watching the effects of the Demons flow over the land, had finally exhausted him both physically and mentally.
Faraday did not feel much better. This past day had drained her: fighting to repel the horror of the Demons’ passage through the Star Gate and fighting to save Drago from the collapsing chamber, then emerging from the tunnel to find Tencendor wrapped in such horrific despair, had left its mark on her soul. For hours she’d had to fight off the bleak certainty that there was nothing anyone could do against the TimeKeepers.
“Drago,” she murmured. “Just a little further. See? There is Zenith!”
Zenith, who had been waiting with growing anxiety, ran forward from where she’d been pacing by the cart. A corner of her cloak caught in the exposed root of a tree, and she ripped it free in her haste.
“Faraday! Drago! Drago?” Zenith wrapped her arms about her brother, taking the load from Faraday. “Is he all right, Faraday? And you … you look dreadful!”
The staff Drago had been clutching now fell from his fingers and rolled a few paces away.
“He needs some rest,” Faraday said. She tried to smile, and failed. “We both do.”
Zenith looked between both of them. Her relief that Faraday was well, and had managed to ensure Drago’s safe return, was overwhelmed by her concern at how debilitated both were. Drago was a heavy weight in her arms, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow, while the only colour in Faraday’s ashen face were the rings of exhaustion under her eyes. She had clasped her arms about herself in an effort to stop them shaking.
What happened? Zenith longed to ask.
“The cart,” she said, and half-dragged, half-lifted Drago towards it.
“Let me help,” Faraday said, and took the weight of his legs.
Between them they managed to lift Drago into the tray of the cart, then Zenith helped Faraday in.
“Sleep,” she said, pulling a blanket over them. “Sleep.”
Drago and Faraday shared the bed of the cart, and shared the sleep of the exhausted; and they shared a dream, although neither would remember it when they woke.
But over the next few days, as they wandered the forest, the scent of a flowering bush occasionally made one or the other lift a head and pause, and fight for the memory the scent evoked.
Zenith watched them for a long time. She was torn between relief at their return — thank the Stars Drago was alive! — and concern for both Faraday and Drago’s state. What both had endured, either with the Demons, or within the Star Gate Chamber itself, must have been close to unbearable. Even though she had been protected by the trees of Minstrelsea, Zenith had felt a trickle of the despair that had overwhelmed Tencendor when the Demons had broken through, and she could only imagine what Faraday had gone through so close to the Star Gate.
But Faraday and Drago were not Zenith’s only concerns. She wished she knew what had happened to StarDrifter. He’d been at the Star Gate towards the end, trying to help her parents to ward it against the Demons.
Would she see him again?
It didn’t occur to Zenith that she hardly thought about her parents. Now that she knew Faraday and Drago were safe, she needed to know that StarDrifter was as well. To think that he was dead … or somehow under the Demons’ thrall …
Zenith shivered and pulled her cloak closer about her. She could feel how deeply disturbed the forest was … were the Demons secreted within its trees? Were they even now creeping