She had two small children sleeping with her...
She had two small children sleeping with her mother and father tonight in one of those shut-up cottages where no lights burnedShe also had a husband sleeping in the burying field, a casualty, one of so many, of the terrible battle a year ago when the numbers of the Others seemed to have grown so much larger than ever before and so cruelly, malevolently triumphant
Verzar had died a few days after that defeat, as all the victims of the night battles did
Those touched by death in the Ember Night wars did not fall in the fieldsThey acknowledged that cold, final touch in their souls, like a finger on the heart, Verzar had said to her, and they came home to sleep and wake and walk through a day or a week or a month before yielding to the ending that had claimed them for its own
In the north, in the cities, they spoke of the last portal of Morian, of longed-for grace in her dark HallsOf priestly intercessions invoked with candles and tears
Those born with the caul in the southern highlands, those who fought in the Ember wars and saw the shapes of the Others who came to battle there, did not speak in such a way
Not that they would ever be so foolish as to deny Morian of Portals or Eanna or Adaon; only that they knew that there were powers older and darker than the Triad, powers that went beyond this fendi spy bag replica peninsula, beyond even, Donar had once told her, this very world with its two moons and its sunOnce a year the Night Walkers of Certando would have, would be forced to have, a glimpse of these truths under a sky that was not their ownThere would be more claimed for death tonight, she knew, and so fewer to fight the next year, and fewer the nextAnd where it would end she did not knowShe was not educated in such thingsShe was twenty-two, a mother and a widow and a wheelwright's daughter in the highlandsShe was also a child born with the caul of the Night Walkers into a time when all the battles were being lost, year by year
She was also known to have the best eyesight in the dark of all of them, which is why Mattio had placed her here by the door, watching the road for the one Donar had said might come
It was a dry season; the moat, as he'd expected, was shallowOnce, long ago, the lords of Castle Borso had been pleased to keep their moat stocked with creatures that could kill a manBaerd didn't expect to find such things; not now, not for a long time now
He waded across, hip-deep, under the high stars and the thin light of Vidomni in the skyIt was cold, but it had been many years since the elements bothered him muchNor did it disturb him to be abroad on an Ember NightIndeed, it had become a ritual of his cartier ronde own over the years: knowing that all across the Palm the holy days were observed and marked by people waiting in silent darkness behind their walls offered him a deepened sense of the solitude his soul seemed to needHe was profoundly drawn to this sense of moving through a scarcely breathing world that lay as if crouched in primitive darkness under the stars with no mortal fires cast back at the sky, only whatever flames the Triad created for themselves with lightning out of the heavens
If there were ghosts and spirits awake in the night he wanted to see themIf the dead of his past were walking abroad he wanted to beg their forgiveness
His own pain was spun of images that would not let him goImages of vanished serenity, of pale marble under moonlight such as this, of graceful porticos shaped of harmonies a man might spend a lifetime studying to understand, of quiet voices heard and almost understood by a drowsy child in another room, of sure, confident laughter following, then morning sunlight in a known courtyard and a steady, strong, sculptor's hand upon his shoulder
Then fire and blood and ashes on the wind, turning the noon sun red
Smoke and death, and marble hammered into fragments, the head of the god flying free, to bounce like a boulder on scorched earth and then be ground remorselessly logo dolce & gabbana down into powder like fine sandLike the sand on the beaches walked in the dark later that year, infinite and meaningless by the cold uncaring sea
These were the bleak visitants, the companions of his nights, these and more, endlessly, through almost nineteen yearsHe carried, like baggage, like a cart yoked to his shoulders, like a round stone in his heart, images of his people, their world destroyed, their name obliteratedTruly obliterated: a sound that was drifting, year by year, further away from the shores of the world of men, like some tide withdrawing in the grey hour of a winter dawnVery like such a tide, but different as well, because tides came back
He had learned to live with the images because he had no choice, unless it was a choice to surrenderOr retreat into madness as his mother hadHe defined himself by his griefs; he knew them as other men knew the shape of their own hands
But the one thing that could drive him awake, barred utterly from the chambers of sleep or any kind of rest, what could force him abroad now, as he had been driven abroad as a boy in a ruined place, was, in the end, none of these thingsNeither a flash of splendor gone, nor an image of death and lossIt was, instead, over and above everything else, the remembrance of love among those ashes of ruin
Against the memory omega speedmaster replica of a spring and summer with Dianora, with his sister, his barriers could not hold in the dark
And so Baerd would go out into the nights across the Palm, doubly moonlit, or singly, or dark with only starsAmong the heathered summer hills of Ferraut, or through the laden vineyards of autumn in Astibar or Senzio, along snow-mantled mountain slopes in Tregea, or here, on an Ember Night at the beginning of spring in the highlands
He would go out to walk in the enveloping dark, to smell the earth, feel the soil, listen to the voice of winter's wind, taste grapes and moonlit water, lie motionless in a forest tree to watch the night predators at their huntAnd once in a great while, when waylaid or challenged by brigand or mercenary, Baerd would killA night predator in his own incarnation, restless and soon goneAnother kind of ghost, a part of him dead with the dead of the River Deisa
In every corner of the mainland Palm except his own, which was gone, he had done these things for years upon years, feeling the slow turning of the seasons, learning the meaning of night in this forest and that field, by this dark river, or on that mountain ridge, reaching out or back or inward all the time toward a release that was ever and again denied
He had been here in the highlands many times before on this same Ember vintage cartier watch Nig