The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [191]
That night saw no reprise of the night before. Stephen lay awake for long bells, excruciatingly aware of Zemlé’s every breath and movement. His mind moved downward toward sleep in fits, but a strong breath or turn of her body would snap him back.
She’s awake. She’s forgiven me…
But he wasn’t sure he needed forgiveness. She’d slept with a praifec. Surely that was a sin even if Hespero was a Skaslos reincarnated. And just before—
He sighed. That wasn’t the real problem, was it?
Hespero’s touch was the shadow under his own. The touch of a man who knew how to please a woman.
He cycled through ever smaller orbits of remorse and anger until the stone floor parted like tissue and something pulled him through.
Suddenly he was sticky and wet, and his flesh and bone ached as from a high fever. Panic sent him grasping for something, anything, but he was in a void—not falling but floating, surrounded on all sides by terrors he could not see.
He tried to scream, but something clotted in his mouth.
He was on the verge of madness when a soothing voice murmured to him in words he didn’t understand but which reassured him nevertheless. Then, gently, a band of color drew across his eyes, and his heart calmed.
His vision cleared, and he saw the Witchhorn, much as it had looked in the light of sunset, albeit with more snow. He floated down toward it like a bird, over a valley, over a village, and then, with a touch of vertigo, up its slopes, along a winding trail, to a house in a tree. A face appeared, pale, copper-eyed, a Hadivar face, and he knew now that Zemlé was right, it just meant Sefry.
More words came, and still he couldn’t understand them, but then he landed. He walked to the north side of the mountain, where moss ruled, to a stone face and through a clever door, and then he was in the rewn.
Beginning to understand. Joy filling his heart.
He woke to a gentle pat on his face and found Zemlé there, her eyebrows drawn in concern, her face—her lips—only a motion away.
But when she saw that he was awake, she straightened, and the look of apprehension vanished.
“Bad dreams?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” he replied, and related his vision.
Zemlé didn’t seem surprised.
“We’ll eat,” she said. “Then we’ll go and hope we find this mythical town of yours.”
He smiled and rubbed the sleep grit from his eyes, feeling much more rested than he ought to.
Choron, he wondered to the heavens, have you become a saint? Is it you guiding me?
The descent was considerably more trouble than it had been in his dream, and his confidence in the vision faded as they made their way down the broken slopes into a deep, resin-scented evergreen forest.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Zemlé asked doubtfully.
For an instant he didn’t understand her question, but then he understood that their roles had changed. Since entering the valley, she had been looking to him as the guide.
“I think so,” he replied.
“Because there is a quicker way to the mountain.”
He nodded. “Perhaps, but I want to see something.”
A bell later, the signs began to appear. They were subtle at first: odd mounds in the forest floor, depressions that resembled dry streambeds but were too regular. Eventually he made out bits of wall, though rarely higher than the knee. He continued on foot, leading his mount, and between footfalls he had flashes of narrow, fanciful buildings and figures in bright clothing.
“Hadivaisel,” he said, motioning all around him. “Or what’s left of it.”
“That’s good, then?” she asked.
“Well, at least it means I do know where I’m going.”
And so they pressed on, east toward the mountain, to the traces of the trail there. The tree house of his vision was gone, but he recognized the tree, though it was older and thicker. From there he began to lead them north and steadily higher, to Bezlaw, where the mountain’s shadow never lifted and the moss grew thick and deep white forest pipes stood from rotting logs.
It was already nearing