As sunset came, they dressed and combed themselves, preparing to go out. “You may not grow invisible this evening,” Karin said hopefully.
But Roric shook his head. “I have thought that each evening since I emerged from the faeys’ tunnels.”
“I hate to have you spend all night outdoors,” said Karin, “but this time of day, right after sunset, is the only time that I will be able to smuggle you out of the castle. I can think of no way to explain your presence here to my father unless he first meets you walking up at sunrise from the harbor.”
“It will be a warm night,” said Roric with a smile, “and besides, you may want your sleep.”
When the sun touched the horizon, Roric began to fade. Karin clenched her fists, then threw herself into his arms for a final kiss.
“You do realize,” Roric said just before his voice became inaudible, “you will still be able to feel me.”
They went down the great stairway to the hall side by side, but King Kardan, looking up surprised, saw only her.
“Yes, I feel better,” said Karin. Her voice in her own ears sounded calmer, less wild than it had for several days, and her father nodded almost with relief. “I shall take a short stroll in the evening air to clear my head.”
They unlocked the doors for her, and Roric stayed at her shoulder. As she went out the great gates of the castle, she saw two members of the guard following her. She stopped, then walked up to them.
“It’s your father’s orders, Princess,” she was told. “It is not safe for a young woman to walk alone.”
She had the vague sense they had followed her the day before as well, but yesterday was a blur. “Of course,” she said, “but keep your distance so I can enjoy a little solitude.” She returned to where she thought she had left Roric and had to stifle a startled outcry when he unexpectedly took her hand.
But she squeezed his invisible hand as they walked, trying her best not to remember any more of the details of the story about the daemon lover. It was another of the old stories about a woman who had lost her man. In this story the woman had longed for her husband so passionately that he had returned from Hel to her, but had returned as a wight, without his now rotting body.
Her feet found their way down the harbor road to the headland as they had ever since she heard the ravens’ messages. The western sky was still shot with scarlet, but the light was going fast. “Perhaps I should go back to the castle soon,” she started to say, but then she caught motion on the water’s dark surface from the corner of her eye.
She hurried to the edge for a closer look. The wind had dropped at last, and the ship, with lanterns hung on bow and stern, was coming into harbor on its oars as well as its nearly slack sail. Color had faded with the onset of night, so she could not see if the sail was red.
But she still recognized the ship well-she had come here on it. It was Hadros’s ship, and the heavily-muscled man who was first onto the shore, his shield on his arm and his sword in his hand, was King Hadros himself.
She started to run, not back toward the castle but directly inland. She still clenched Roric’s hand in hers. “I can’t face Hadros-I can’t!” She did not know where she was going, but there was no way she could explain to the king so that he would understand, at least not tonight, that neither she nor Roric had killed his son.
There was just enough light to show the startled guards closing in on her.
Karin tried to go faster but could not. “I can’t outrun them in these clothes,” she gasped.
Suddenly Roric’s hand was gone. She struggled onward, then heard a surprised cry behind her. She turned to make out a shape that seemed to be struggling with the air-one of the guards. He doubled over suddenly and dropped to the ground. The second guard ran up beside the first, his sword out, but there was a sharp clang, his sword was struck from his grip, and his head jerked backwards as he was knocked down by an invisible fist.
Holding up her skirts, Karin kept running, but she smiled as she ran. In a moment she felt a hand under her arm, supporting her, helping her to greater speed.
When they had passed beyond a hedgerow she paused to catch her breath. Moonlight and shrubs made crazy shadows around her. She firmly pushed away the thought that this might be someone else from the realm of the Wanderers beside her. “I hope you didn’t have to kill them,” she said, then realized he could not answer. “Squeeze my hand twice if you did.”
He did not squeeze at all. “Good,” she said. “When my father dies they will be my guards.”
She listened but heard only the ordinary sounds of the night: a chirping of insects in the meadow, small creatures rustling in the hedgerow, and in the distance the slow sound of waves. King Hadros had apparently not yet come up from the harbor.
Karin suddenly felt fully herself again, unafraid, able to assess dangers, able to plan. In fact, since Roric did not know where they were and could not speak, she had to plan for both of them. Would Queen Arane approve of this new method of manipulating men?
She smiled at this thought and started walking rapidly. In the darkness it was a little better; the solidity at her shoulder felt like Roric as long as she did not look toward him. “We have a head start,” she said. “By the time they realize in the castle that I have been gone too long, by the time those guards recover consciousness, by the time Hadros comes up from the harbor and demands to see his son, we will be well on the way to the Mirror-seer’s lake. They will not think to look for us there tonight.”
Her feet found the track that led up the valley. “As long as we are both gone, Valmar and I,” she said to the silent presence next to her, “it will be hard for King Hadros to start the war again on the presumption that Valmar was murdered here. Hadros and my father may even agree that they both were cruelly deceived by you, who first killed Valmar and then kidnapped me. But I am afraid the two of them will agree together that Valmar and I will have to marry if we can be recovered.”
She felt the tension in the arm that touched hers and laughed. “No, Roric, I really do not want to marry my foster-brother. He is better looking than you,” she added teasingly, “but I thought today would have answered all your questions about my intentions. By the time he returns from the Wanderers’ realm, I will have thought of something to change Hadros’s mind-women can always outmaneuver men if they want.”
But a thought nagged at her, driving away her laughter. The Wanderer had asked all three of them if they were outcasts. He might have been deliberately looking for someone with no ties because whoever went to assist the Wanderers against fate would not be coming back.
“You probably don’t know about the Mirror-seer,” she said to Roric because she did not want to think about Valmar. The track was beginning to rise, and they had to go slowly in the dark. “It was he who told me I would find a Wanderer on Graytop-but could not tell me where you had gone. Now that the Wanderers have their mortal he’s got to tell us more.”
The way seemed much longer in the dark and on foot than it had in daylight and on horseback. The moon was well into the western sky by the time they topped the escarpment to see the lake’s surface calm before them, reflecting stars.
As she picked her way along the damp shore the calls of the frogs grew silent, and there were splashes as they leapt from shore to water, but behind her their song began again. The Mirror-seer’s house was a black, indistinct shape.
She stood hesitating on the dock before it, realizing he must be asleep, wondering if he could see anything with his mirrors in the dark. But this was no time, she told herself, for timidity. She lifted her fist and rapped boldly on the door.
There was a confused banging inside, while the frogs went silent again and a little wind sprang up among the reeds. Then through the small window she could see a candle come to life, and the door opened before her.
“Princess!” said the little round man in surprise, pulling disordered clothes more firmly around himself. His eyes were hidden by shadow. “What can have brought you here in the darkest night? And this?”
He turned toward the emptiness where Roric stood, holding up his candle. She turned too, eagerly, but saw nothing but the candle’s flickering flame.
“Then you are back in mortal lands, Roric No-man’s son,” said the Seer gravely.
“You can see him?” she asked urgently.
“Of course. And you cannot?”
He turned then, seeming to listen to something. “I understand,” he said soberly. “You were not with the lords of voima themselves but with a simulacrum of them. That is why your beard did not grow while you were there, and why in the realms under the sun you are only fully real when the sun is shining.” To Karin the Seer added, “My own voima allows me to see him. But there may be something I can do…”
“We need to find someone,” said Karin, “Valmar Hadros’s son. He walked out over the sea on moonlight to join the Wanderers.” She realized the Mirror-seer was tapping the fingers of one hand against his thigh and added hastily, “You can have this ring. It used to be my mother’s; I think it is very valuable.”
The Seer took the ring she handed him but did not look at it. “You will soon exhaust your father’s treasury with all these people you want to see, Princess,” he commented. “And you should know I cannot see someone no longer under the sun.”
“We do not need to see him,” said Karin, and from the way the Seer turned his head Roric apparently said something too. “But we need to bring him back from the Wanderers’ realm. King Hadros will kill somebody-maybe my father-unless we produce his son very soon.”
Again Roric seemed to add something, for the Seer said dryly, “Those who seek the Wanderers usually have deeper concerns than recovery of a horse.”
“If we cross the channel again,” said Karin, “and go to the stone gateway where Roric followed the-followed whatever the being was, will we be in the Wanderers’ realm?”
“There is no gateway there that mortals can pass unaided.”
For a second she could feel despair starting to mount. Coming here had been useless, at best a temporary delay until she had to face the two kings, whose men were even now doubtless searching the woods for her.
But she was not going to give up now. She set her jaw and asked, “I am not asking you to see anything by darkness. I only want information. Before you told me where to find a Wanderer. Now I want to find the rest of them-and the knowledge you tried to keep from me before.”
“I kept no knowledge from you,” said the Mirror-seer, but he seemed uneasy, and his turned his face away toward the lake.
“You told me that an end is fated for everyone, even the Wanderers. Now tell us what role they want all of us-Roric, Valmar, and me-to play as they fight against that end.”
For a moment the Seer played with the heavy ring, tossing it up and catching it one-handed. The gold glinted in the candle light. Then suddenly he closed his fingers around it. “I am not doing this for a piece of jewelry,” he said. “But you are the heiress of the kingdom in which, after all, I have to live. The mirrors will sometimes show something different by night…”
He turned then abruptly and disappeared back into his house. Karin stood waiting on the dock, listening to the little waves against the shore. Although she strained to hear, there was no sound of pursuit from the castle. It grew colder, and Roric put an invisible arm around her shoulders.
In twenty minutes the Seer was back, completely draped with black cloth, so that at first the candle he held up seemed held by a disembodied hand. She pressed against Roric, either to reassure him or for reassurance herself.
“This is for you, Roric No-man’s son,” said the Seer, holding out another black cloth. Roric let go of her, and in a second the cloth had disappeared, although with the moon low virtually everything outside the range of the candle flame was invisible.
The Mirror-seer went to the edge of the dock and held up the candle so that its light was reflected in a dozen shining shards on the waves below. He held a mirror over the candle, then went perfectly still. He kept his eyes turned to the mirror, bringing his face closer and closer as the candle smoke gradually spread a dark stain over the glass. To Karin, waiting with indrawn breath and heart pounding, the Seer seemed to stand motionless for an hour.
Abruptly there came a loud splash, followed almost instantaneously by another. The candle light was gone, but something was thrashing in the water by the dock.
Karin froze in terror and uncertainty. “Help me out, Princess!” came a voice from the water, the Mirror-seer’s voice.
She knelt down and extended an arm over the black water. The Seer seized it so powerfully that she was almost pulled in, and had to brace herself to tug him out.
He came up all dark and wet. She could only make out a lighter gray spot that must be his face as she helped him onto the dock and he pushed back his drapings. A short distance down the shore there was further splashing, as though something very large was coming up on land.
“You are halfway back,” said the Seer, his face turned away from her. “When you reappear at sunrise, you shall be fully returned to the land of the mortals.”
“Roric?” said Karin tentatively, but if he answered she could not hear his voice.
“Listen to me, Kardan’s daughter,” said the Mirror-seer then. “I have seen more than even a Seer can safely see. If I tell you this now, I shall be unable to tell you anything more for a long, long time, if ever. It is your choice-difficult information now, or many small seeings in the years to come.”
“We may not have years to come,” she answered. “Tell me what you know, and tell me plainly.”
But the Seer did not speak at once. He sat on the dock, Karin beside him, and water dripped from him onto the planks. He seemed to be trembling, either from the effort of his seeing or from chill. She could feel exhaustion stinging the backs of her own eyes. This night already seemed to have lasted years, and it was not over.
“No one can choose their fate,” he said at last, so low that she had to bend close to him. “Not even the Wanderers. Their realm of endless day must sometime move toward night, only to be reborn if new powers take control.”
“I knew it,” said Karin between her teeth. “I knew they had no ultimate strength.”
“But they do,” said the Seer, even more quietly. “Mortals cannot choose not to die. Although the Wanderers cannot avoid their fate, they have a way to alter it…”
Karin thought about this for a moment. “What would happen to mortal realms if the Wanderers died?”
“If no one replaced them-then chaos like the chaos out of which the earth was originally formed.”
“But there are other beings of voima! Won’t you still be here?”
“Voima persists even without the lords of voima. The change has come before. I believe-I hope-that someone will take over-the same Wanderers reborn, those who now challenge them, or even, perhaps, those others that took Roric No-man’s son. The Wanderers’ realm should not be an empty night for long. But then- Mortals may still burn offerings, but the answers they will receive will be very different…”
There was another long silence. “But what do the Wanderers want with us?” she asked at last. “And why do they want outcasts?”
The Seer shifted as though unwilling to answer, but when he spoke it was louder than anything he had said so far. “There is only one solution for the present Wanderers if they want to reverse their fate. And that solution is in Hel.”
“But there are no Wanderers in Hel!”
“Exactly. It is reserved for mortals. That is why they need a mortal: to go there, to find what they need, to bring it back.”
“And that is?”
The Seer shifted again, and she thought he was shaking his head, though it was hard to be sure. “I am not an ordinary mortal. I do not know.”
“Well,” said Karin abruptly, determinedly, pushing herself to her feet. “I for one am not going into Hel on behalf of the Wanderers. And I will not let them send either Valmar or Roric. None of us will sacrifice the rest of our lives for them. You say the Wanderers want a mortal to bring something to them, but that person would come back as a wight, without a body.”
“That is possible,” said the Seer colorlessly.
“There is one thing you still have not told us,” she said, standing over him now. “How can we find the Wanderers, get into their realm to rescue Valmar? Will I still find that Wanderer on Graytop, the one who told you to send me there?”
“He will not meet you there again,” said the Mirror-seer, still in that distant, expressionless voice, confirming her guess that he had been instructed to send her there.
“Can we reach their realm through the faeys’ burrows?”
“There is only one path you can take, Karin Kardan’s daughter, only one route mortals may now pass unaided. And that is far to the north of here, far beyond the channel, in the mountains of the hot rivers.”
“The Hot-River Mountains?” said Karin thoughtfully. “They are indeed far to the north. In fact- I think there is a king there who was outlawed at the All-Gemot. How will we find the right place in the mountains to enter immortal realms?”
“When you find it, you will know it.”
“That is not an answer.”
The Seer rocked back and forth in the damp pool his wet drapes had made around him on the dock. “Then ask for the Witch of the Western Cliffs when you reach the mountains. She will direct you to the doorway. And that,” he added in a louder voice, “is the only way you will reach the Wanderers, and the only answer you will have from me.”
She stamped her foot abruptly on the planking. “It is not the only path to the Wanderers’ realm. But I see it is the only path they intend to let us take. Are they still testing our ability and resolve? We shall certainly go there, go there at once, but only to recover Valmar from being persuaded to offer his own life for beings whose fated end has already come.”
She turned, took two steps, and turned back. “Thank you,” she said gravely to the Seer. “If I ever become sovereign queen here, unless the world is changed beyond recognition, I shall ensure that you have the respect and the comfort any Seer would want. Roric?”
She held out her hand to emptiness, and someone or something took it. If this was not Roric, she thought grimly, if something else had climbed out of the lake and taken his place, then she would find out at dawn.
Karin kept stumbling on the dark, uneven track as they went back down the valley. She had not eaten all day and was almost unbearably weary. When they had ascended, her own footsteps had been the only sound; now there was the sound of another set of feet beside hers.
“I think we shall be at the harbor shortly before sunrise,” she said. “We cannot stop for conversations with my father or with Hadros. As long as they are uncertain what has happened to any of us, that uncertainty will bind them together-I hope.”
She pictured Hadros flying into a rage and running her father through in the middle of his own hall. A gasp of horror almost escaped her, but she closed her mind against the image. If it was going to happen, it had already happened, and she could not find out without exposing Roric and herself to new danger.
“We could flee to Queen Arane’s court,” she said thoughtfully. “I think the queen would take us in-she even asked about you when we first met. But that would do nothing to save Valmar.” She realized she kept waiting for Roric to make some response, but she alone would have to make this decision.
“No, we will have to find some way to cross the channel. There may be a skiff down at the harbor that you and I could sail alone. We have to get up north, have to rescue Valmar before he reaches Hel-if the Wanderers have not sent him there already. Bringing him alive to his father is also the only way to rescue you. We could try to explain that there was not enough time between when you left Hadros’s court and Valmar’s disappearance for you to kill him, but he will not be interested in dates and times. The only thing that will interest him will be his son…”
She was so tired it was hard to think clearly, but suddenly she laughed. She heard the sound of her laugh disconcertingly loud, almost wild again, but still she smiled.
“I know how we can cross the channel,” she said to the presence beside her that she hoped was Roric. “We’ll steal Hadros’s ship!”
He pulled her to a stop, and she felt hands on her shoulders. “No,” she said firmly, “it is no use arguing with me. I cannot hear what you say. And this will work! Come on.” But she did not start walking at once. Instead she asked, against her will, “Are you sure you are Roric?”
For answer he took her in his arms and kissed her. She laughed again as he released her, this time in relief. “If you are not Roric, I think I like you even better! Now, we must make haste to be there before Hadros sails again.”
She gave his hand a tug and began to walk. “Men worry too much about rule and honor. I like my kingdom, like its luxuries-the food is better than Hadros serves, and no one expects a princess to toil! But I will cheerfully give it all up to save you.”
Karin hurried down the track with new energy, her slippered feet finding a sure footing. No longer was she bound by the generations who lay in the burial mound, or by the necessity to hold herself in check in a court where she was an outsider. She and Roric together were fleeing for their lives, and she smiled as she squeezed his hand.
The darkest part of the night had passed and the eastern sky was lightening toward yellow when they came down the harbor road. Roric was still invisible. “Wait here behind these bushes,” Karin told him, thinking that men really were much easier to deal with if they could not raise objections. “As soon as the sun rises come join me. No one should observe you regaining visibility. We want the sailors to obey us, not fear us as dead wights from Hel.”
She straightened out her clothes as well as she could by the half light and took the narrow road down to the edge of the sea. She would know in a moment whether Hadros had told his men why he had suddenly decided to come here, or whether, as she hoped, he had given the orders but no explanations.
One longship, its dragon prow unmounted, lay upside down and covered with a tarpaulin on the shore. Another ship, its awnings spread, floated on the tide. The sleepy men guarding it heard her approach and jumped up. They recognized her after only a second in spite of her rich clothing.
She scanned the men on board surreptitiously as they woke and came to greet her. “Are you coming home then, Karin?” one asked eagerly. “The maid you left in charge knows nothing of your herb chest, and spends all day screeching at the other women. And we have had but poor fare since you went away!”
There were only a few warriors here with the seamen. Hadros must have taken the rest with him to the castle and spent the night there-which suggested, she thought with hope, that the king and his men had not gotten into a fight with her father and his much more numerous guards, or the survivors would have fled.
“Is the king ready to sail?” asked another seaman.
She did not answer but instead made a show of looking around. “Is Roric not here?” she asked carefully, watching their reactions.
But they only seemed puzzled. “Don’t you mean Valmar? Is Roric here too? He was home for less than a day before he left again.”
The edge of the sun was just peeking over the horizon. “Hadros sent me to sail home with you now,” she said clearly. “Take down the awnings and prepare to set out at once. The king will be detained at my father’s castle for some weeks, busy with affairs of the All-Gemot.”
“Or arranging your marriage!” said one man slyly, but the others shushed him.
“Roric said he would accompany me,” she continued, deliberately ignoring this remark. “He was going to meet me here.”
Even if they rescued Valmar from the Wanderers, even if they all lived past the change of the world the Seer could not describe, she did not know how she would escape this marriage, which kept seeming more and more imminent until even Roric half believed in it. If Valmar had already descended into Hel for the Wanderers, this would no longer be a problem. But allowing him to die was no solution, even if Queen Arane might have thought it one.
Direct sunlight now came rippling across the sea. The sailors were loosening the awnings from the pegs. Karin cupped her hands and turned toward the headland. “Roric!” she shouted. “Are you up there? We are ready to sail!”
And he appeared, himself, solid, coming down the steep road in long leaps. “We must leave at once,” she said, even before he reached the shore. “Sails up! Oars out!” By the time Roric reached the narrow quay and vaulted into the ship, the sailors were releasing the mooring lines.
“Just in time,” he said in her ear as they came out past the shelter of the headland, and the wind bellied out the red sail. “I saw a group of people heading this way from the castle. Another five minutes and they would have had us.”