Yaret missed the hollow tree. The cottage that she shared with Walen and another elderly female Warden was certainly more comfortable than the tree had been. It had walls strangely woven out of yellow-green stems that grew up from the ground – perhaps a variety of willow – and which seemed still to be alive. Inside were low beds with rustling, sweet-scented mattresses, and reed mats underfoot in every room. It had proper wooden chairs.
But she missed waking to the rain and birdsong and the sense of green: she missed the solitude of her mornings walking round the shifting pools... Although it had never been quite solitude, with the inescapable presence of the Farwth.
However, the Wardens’ cottages were undoubtedly a better environment for Eled now that his leg was healing and his alertness had improved. Yesterday she’d tried a memory game on him and he had laughed.
“We played this one last week!” He was right. He did not need her company so much now that he took frequent walks with Habend and the other Wardens. She still had her daily language lesson with him; but they did not talk so much, nor sing.
Yaret missed that too. The Wardens sang occasionally, and she had sung one or two of Madeo’s songs to them, but she felt too embarrassed to accompany herself on her little one-string gourd. In any case she sensed that the Wardens weren’t really interested in Madeo’s songs or in Madeo herself the way the Farwth was.
The Farwth had given her glimpses of Madeo’s life here. There had been four visits, not three as Yaret had thought; two of them long, the last one with a baby girl. Madeo had leaned against the massive trees and sung to them and to her child. She had been quick and restless, always moving, said the Farwth, although Yaret suspected that anyone other than the Wardens would seem restless to it.
Madeo’s hair was as brown and curled as a fallen leaf, reported the Farwth; her body as lean and sturdy as an oak sapling. She liked to muse upon her travels, picking out tunes at the same time as words.
And it seemed the Farwth liked to muse upon them too. Hence it asked Yaret several times for details of Madeo’s journeys.
“She was your friend,” said Yaret on one of these occasions, in sudden realisation. She spoke aloud, since the Wardens were not by.
That seemed to give the Farwth pause for thought.
We gave each other information. And nourishment. Does that make us friends?
“If you cared about each other, yes.”
It made no difference if I cared or not. She is long dead.
“But you still think about her.” And even though Madeo was long dead and buried, could the Farwth not commune with her bones as they decayed deep in the earth?
This was not a thought intended for the Farwth. None the less it answered.
She is still there, but changed. We do not talk.
“Can anyone talk with the dead?” asked Yaret.
I talk with her in memory, the Farwth said. Tell me more of that second journey to the north she made.
As Yaret cast her own memory back to those ballads of the north, it occurred to her that the Farwth had side-stepped the question. It was unanswerable, after all.
But to her the Farwth’s affection for the long-dead Madeo seemed clear. The Farwth was especially interested in her stories of the forests of the north – vast tracts of pine and fir and selver and other trees that Madeo had described but did not name. Yaret saw them growing in her own mind as she related the old words. Those great forests had not died as Madeo had; many of the trees that the bard had spoken of would still be alive.
Yet Madeo, commented the Farwth, hardly spoke about the homeland whence she had fled with all her people; which was what Yaret would have most liked to hear. And the Farwth itself could – or would – tell her nothing of the lands left by the Bandiran.
Despite such gaps and silences the Farwth was better company than the Wardens. They spoke mainly about their everyday concerns, showing little curiosity about the world outside Farwithiel. The exception was Habend, a tall, softly-spoken man who seemed to know Tiburé and asked Yaret wistfully for details of her life. Questions which Yaret could not answer. Everything was very gentle, very quiet, very much the same from day to day.
This morning was no different. She had just limped over to see Poda; the mare was kept in a wooded enclosure with half a dozen other horses, and was recovering her fitness more quickly than Eled. As Yaret stroked her and spoke to her in clumsy Vonnish she thought about her donkeys. More things that she missed.
Then, since Eled was occupied with Habend, she walked the two miles to the Farwth. She took a stick but barely used it. Although she limped, it was not as markedly as before.
Yaret did this walk daily now: at first it had been hard on her leg – on both legs – but now they seemed to be toughening up as she adapted to the wooden limb, and her muscles had almost returned to their former strength. She just needed to be careful not to overdo it.
Later on she would practise her sword-play, or at least the basic moves Eled had shown her; and privately, a few more complex moves that she had seen Parthenal employ that morning when she’d watched his sword drill. They had been difficult and she probably did them wrong. Eled’s sword was too long and heavy for her, and would have been dangerous; so instead she used a length of wood.
Her exercises would be of little practical use in an actual fight, she thought, but she could feel her muscles growing stronger. She enjoyed the stretching that was involved, and sensed that the sword-play was good for her balance. Her leg didn’t seem to mind it either. She was on her second wooden leg now: the first had ceased to fit after a while. But this one felt right.
You are faster today, the Farwth said.
“I am faster every day.” She could have talked to the Farwth from Walen’s little hut, but it seemed unmannerly with other people around her who could not hear it when she did. She assumed that at times it spoke to Walen or another Warden, for she would see their eyes glaze and their lips half-move. It felt strange and intrusive to be watching that.
So she sought solitude amidst the great trunks near the Farwth. Today she first walked over to see what shape the pools assumed; they were scattered with leaves, and she looked up at the reddening boughs and speckled golden fruits hanging high above her.
She thought she could climb a number of the trees now if she tried. But when she attempted to plan the footholds on those branches, she immediately imagined herself falling, plummeting endlessly as she had so often in her dreams. Then she had to look down at the pools again until the dizziness receded. I was found, she told herself. I was found. I am still here.
After visiting the pools she walked over to the great hollow tree for old time’s sake. It was almost three weeks since she had slept here – Eled’s scroll now held forty marks, and she had been amongst the Wardens for the last eighteen of those. It felt like longer.
How far could you walk now?
“A few miles more, I think,” said Yaret.
And ride?
“I haven’t tried that yet.”
Try it. You may need to ride before too long. When you leave here.
She was startled. “Really? How soon do you think I can leave? The Wardens haven’t said anything about me going home yet.”
The Farwth did not answer immediately.
Not too soon. Not too long. I have not heard you singing for a while.
“I’ll sing now if you like,” said Yaret, and she went to sit on the grass facing the green mass of the Farwth.
A song by Madeo, it said.
“Most of them are.” Although she had been writing her own songs recently, they were not what the Farwth wished to hear. She thought she had probably emptied her mental store of Madeo’s songs by now, and was singing repeats. She had not forgotten that she had previously been searching through them for the mysterious skeln. However, if the skeln had ever been in any of Madeo’s songs, it still refused to surface in her memory.
Today she found herself singing the Long Walk that she had sung the day before the Riders had departed.
“The light on the hills is beckoning me
“As I set my foot on the track
“And its beauty calls me forwards
“And bids me not look back.
“When I reach the summit the light is gone,
“But a further mountain beckons me on…”
Where were the Riders being beckoned to now? From Eled she had gained a sense that they were carried along by history, by events, and had no fixed destination nor proper home. None that he could describe to her, at least. Although she knew they were in exile from Caervonn, Eled could tell her little of that place, having been a child when he left. He was unable to add anything to what she had heard of it from Rothir.
In any case she did not think the Riders could return there. In her imagination they galloped across endless plains, always seeking out or escaping from their foe. Galloping away from her into a separate future.
Well, she would be glad enough to be crossing the endless plain herself soon. And it would not be endless at all, not for her. Once she could see the Coban hills it was not much more than a two week journey on foot to reach Obandiro; with a horse it would be less. She would not have to backtrack as far as the Darkburn Loft, which was a relief, although she also felt for that wild region something almost like nostalgia. It seemed more untouched than any other place that she had visited. Or touched by something different. After she had sung the last refrain she asked,
“Do you have lin here, Farwth?”
No answer. She tried to elaborate. “A sort of tree spirit, or earth spirit maybe, which just pops up when–”
I know what lin are. Rather, I know what you mean by them. I do not know them. I have not seen nor sensed them here.
“I’d expect you to see them if anyone could. And you’d think Farwithiel would be just the place for lin,” said Yaret a little wistfully, “or woodwones, certainly, if they existed. Do you think they don’t actually exist, then?”
Again there was no answer for a while.
She began to explain, “My grandmother swears that the lin are real, although–”
They may be real. They are not as the Farwth is. It is tree and earth and air and water, but not spirit.
“But surely everything alive has a spirit?”
I do not know what you mean.
“Well, everything that is conscious–”
You spoke of your grandmother. You need to go back home.
At once she was alert and anxious.
“Why? Farwth, have you learnt something? My gramma – is she ill?”
Again that pause, during which Yaret wondered how much she ought to worry, and a formless fear grew like a sickness in her throat.
I have no cause to think that she is ill. That is not something I would be able to detect.
“Then have you learnt something else about her? Or Grandda?”
I know nothing about them except that it is time for you to leave. You need to prepare.
Maybe she had just outstayed her welcome. Outside Farwithiel the autumn was passing; winter would be swift in coming, to Obandiro if not to here. Provided she was fit enough she ought to leave here soon in any case.
She stood up somewhat clumsily, picked up her one-string gourd and bowed.
“I thank you for your hospitality,” she said, “and for your many kindnesses, whether you call them that or not. I am extremely grateful, on my own behalf and on behalf of Madeo and her Bandiran descendants.”
The Farwth did not answer. So she set off walking towards the Wardens’ houses. She was several steps away before she heard it speak again.
It was your grandmother, and not your grandfather, who was descended from Madeo.
Yaret came to a halt and turned to stare back at the twined and impenetrable green. “But I assumed… My grandmother isn’t even from Obandiro! She’s from Ioben.”
It was to Ioben that Madeo went to have her child. She brought it here to Farwithiel so that I would know it; and then she said that she intended to return to Ioben and there leave the child with friends.
“With its father?”
She did not say.
“Who was its father?”
She did not say.
“Well,” said Yaret. “Can I tell my gramma? Or does she already know?”
Again a long, long silence. The trees dripped.
She knows everything that she needs to know. And you need to prepare.