Lirael (Abhorsen 2)

“The man Nicholas is the key,” said Sanar. “Once you find him, we think, you will know what to do.”

“But he’s with a necromancer!” exclaimed Lirael. “They’re digging up something terrible! Shouldn’t we tell the Abhorsen?”

“We have sent messages, but the Abhorsen and the King are in Ancelstierre, where they hope to avert a trouble that is also probably connected with whatever is in the pit that you Saw. We have also alerted Ellimere and her co-regent, and it is possible they will also act, perhaps with Prince Sameth, the Abhorsen-in-Waiting. But whatever they do, we know that it is you who must find Nicholas. It seems a little thing, I know, a meeting between two people on a lake. But it is the only future we can See now, with all else hidden from us, and it offers our only hope to avert disaster.”

Lirael nodded, white-faced. Too many things were happening, and she was too tired and emotionally exhausted to cope. But it did seem that she was not just being thrown out. She really did have something important to do, not just for the Clayr, but for the whole Kingdom.

“Now, we must prepare you for the journey,” added Sanar, obviously noting Lirael’s weariness. “Is there anything personal you wish to take, or something special we can provide?”

Lirael shook her head. She wanted the Disreputable Dog, but that didn’t seem possible, if the Clayr hadn’t Seen her. Perhaps her friend was gone forever now, the spell that had brought her meeting some condition that triggered its end.

“My outdoor things, I suppose,” she whispered finally. “And a few books. I suppose I should take the things I found, too.”

“You should,” said Sanar, obviously curious as to what exactly they were. But she didn’t ask, and Lirael didn’t feel like talking about them. They were just more complications. Why had they been left for her? What use would they be out in the wide world?

“We must also outfit you with a bow and sword,” said Ryelle. “As befits a Daughter of the Clayr gone a-voyaging.”

“I’m not very good with a sword,” Lirael said in a small voice, choking a little at being called a Daughter of the Clayr. Those words, so long sought, sounded empty to her now. “I’m all right with a bow.”

She didn’t explain that she was competent with the laminated short bow used by the Clayr only because she shot rats in the Library, using blunted arrows so as not to puncture books. The Dog liked to retrieve the arrows but wasn’t interested in eating the rats, unless Lirael cooked them with herbs and sauce, which she naturally refused to do.

“I hope you will need neither weapon,” said Sanar. Her words seemed loud, echoing out into the huge cavern of ice. Lirael shivered. That hope seemed likely to be false. Suddenly it was cold. Nearly all the Clayr had gone, all fifteen hundred of them, in a matter of minutes, as if they had never been there. Only two armored guards remained, watching from the end of the Observatory. One had a spear and the other a bow. Lirael didn’t need to get closer to know that these were also weapons of power, imbued with Charter Magic.

They had stayed, she knew, to make sure she was blindfolded. She looked away and took her scarf off, folding it with slow, deliberate movements. Then she tied it across her eyes and stood stiffly, waiting for Sanar and Ryelle to take her arms.

“I am sorry,” said Sanar and Ryelle, at the same time, their voices blending into one. They sounded to her as if they were apologizing not just for the blindfold, but for Lirael’s whole life.

By the time they reached her small chamber off the Hall of Youth, Lirael had not slept or eaten for more than eighteen hours. She was staggering with fatigue, so Sanar and Ryelle continued to support her. She was so tired that she didn’t even realize Aunt Kirrith was present until she was taken into a sudden, unwelcome, extremely tight embrace.

“Lirael! What have you done now!” Aunt Kirrith exclaimed, her voice booming from somewhere above Lirael’s head, which was kept firmly pressed into her aunt’s neck. “You’re too young to go off into the world!”

“Aunt!” protested Lirael, trying to free herself, embarrassed to be treated like a little girl in front of Ryelle and Sanar. It was typical of Aunt Kirrith to try to hug her when she didn’t want her to, and to not hug her when she did want to be hugged.

“It’ll be just like your mother all over again,” Kirrith was saying, seemingly as much to the twins as to Lirael. “Going off who knows where and getting involved in who knows what with who knows whom. Why, you might even come back—”

“Kirrith! Enough!” snapped Sanar, surprising Lirael. She had never heard anyone speak to Kirrith like that. It was clearly a shock to Kirrith too, because she let go of Lirael and took a deep, dignified breath.

“You can’t talk to me like that, San . . . Ry . . . which-ever one you are,” Aunt Kirrith finally said after several deep breaths. “I’m Guardian of the Young, and I am in authority here!”

“And we, for the moment, are the Voice of the Clayr,” replied Sanar and Ryelle in unison, lifting the wands they still held. “We have been invested with the powers of the Nine Day Watch. Do you challenge our right, Kirrith?”

Kirrith looked at them, tried to take an even deeper breath, and failed, her breath wheezing out of her like that of a toad that has been stepped on. It was clearly a recognition of their authority, if not a very dignified one.

“Fetch the things you want to take, Lirael,” said Sanar, touching her on the shoulder. “We must soon go down to the boat. Kirrith, perhaps if we could speak outside?”

Lirael nodded wearily and went to the chest that held her clothes, while the others went out and shut the door. Without looking, she reached in. Her hand hit something hard, and her fingers were around it before she looked and gave a little gasp of recognition. It was the old soapstone carving of the hard-bitten dog, the one she’d found in the Stilken’s chamber, the one that had vanished when the Disreputable Dog had appeared.

Lirael hugged it close to her chest for a moment, a faint hope breaking through her weariness. It was not the Dog, but it was a hint that the Dog could be summoned again. Smiling, she put the statuette in the pocket of a clean waistcoat, making sure its soapstone snout could not be seen poking out. She put the Dark Mirror in the same pocket and the panpipes in the other one, and transferred The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting to a small shoulder bag that seemed exactly made for it. The clockwork emergency mouse she put in a corner of the chest, followed by the whistle. Neither of them could help her where she was going now.

As she undressed and quickly washed, thankful for the larger room and simple bathroom she’d moved to on her eighteenth birthday, Lirael considered changing her clothes completely, to wear something that did not identify her as a Clayr. But when it came time to dress, she once again donned the working clothes of a Second Assistant Librarian. That was what she was, she told herself. She had earned the right to the red waistcoat. No one could take that away, even if she wasn’t a proper Clayr.

She had just rolled some spare clothes into her cloak, and was thinking about her heavy wool coat and its likely usefulness in late spring and summer, when there was a knock on the door, followed immediately by Kirrith.

“I didn’t mean any nastiness about your mother,” Kirrith said from the doorway, sounding subdued. “Arielle was my little sister, and I loved her well. But she was outlandish, if you know what I mean, and prone to trouble. Always getting into scrapes and . . . well . . . it’s not been easy, what with being Guardian and having to keep everyone in line. Perhaps I haven’t shown you . . . well, it’s hard when you can’t See how others feel or will feel about you. What I mean to say is that I loved your mother—and I love you, too.”

“I know, Auntie,” replied Lirael, not looking back as she threw her coat back in the chest. Even a year ago she would have given anything to hear those words, to feel that she belonged. Now it was too late. She was leaving the Glacier, leaving it as her mother had done years before, when she had abandoned her daughter seemingly without a care.

But that was all his

tory, Lirael thought. I can leave it behind, start my story afresh. I don’t need to know why my mother left, or who my father was. I don’t need to know, she repeated to herself.

I don’t need to know.

But while she mumbled those words under her breath, her mind kept turning to The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting in the bag at her side, and the pipes and Dark Mirror in her waistcoat pockets.

She didn’t need to know what had happened in the past. But while she had always been alone among the Clayr for her blindness to the future, now she was alone in another way as well. In a perverse reversal of all her hopes and dreams, she had been granted the exact opposite of her heart’s desire.

For with the Dark Mirror, and her new-found knowledge, she could See into the past.

Chapter Thirty-One

A Voice in the Trees

Hidden a mere hundred yards into the fringe of the forest, Prince Sameth lay like a dead man, sprawled where he’d fallen from his horse. One leg was caked with drying blood, and black-red blotches marked the green leaves of the bushes that shivered around him in the breeze. Only a close inspection would have shown that he was still breathing.