“This is the trouble,” said Astilaran. He seemed all of a sudden to be very tired; his eyes were hooded and his hand shook. “There is something under the skin here. A Free Magic charm of some kind, a very strong one. Perhaps even something necromantic . . . there is the hint of Death . . .”
Ferin stared at him blearily. The overwhelming pain in her stomach had certainly been centered in her clan sign. But it was gone now . . . and so was the pain in her ankle. She sat up straighter and looked at her leg. The swelling had receded, the wound no longer bled, and in fact it looked as if it had been healing well for at least half a moon. Small glowing symbols—Charter marks—were still crawling about, but they did not enter her skin.
Ferin flexed her foot experimentally. There was a dull ache there, but it was nothing compared to what it had been. She put her hands down and began to get up.
“Slowly, slowly,” said Astilaran. “I was forced to draw upon the stone and use a master mark to make the spell powerful enough to break through against the Free Magic talisman you have under your skin. The spell will make you feel stronger than you are for some time, but you still need rest.”
“You say there is a magic charm under my skin?” asked Ferin, her voice rasping. She took out her knife and set its point against the clan sign on her stomach. “I will cut it out!”
“No! No, you can’t do that!” protested Astilaran, grabbing her wrist. “It can only be removed using magic, Charter Magic. Or by whoever put it there in the first place, I suppose.”
“The Witch With No Face,” muttered Ferin. “It has to be. That is how my pursuers know where I am.”
“Very likely,” said Astilaran. “But you are going to the Clayr, Karrilke tells me. There are many mages among them who have the skill and the power to remove such a horrid thing.”
Ferin slowly resheathed her knife, her face set in a scowl. With Astilaran helping her, she stood, pausing halfway up to pick up her bow and arrow case. She glanced at her pack, but Astilaran shook his head.
“As I said, you feel stronger than you are. Let someone else carry it, for now. The pain and weakness will return all the sooner if you extend yourself too far. I also do not know how my spell will fare with that charm in your belly; it is possible it will wane all the sooner or take some unusual course. You must be careful.”
Ferin took a step, slowly putting her weight on her injured leg. The ache grew stronger, but her ankle would support her. She could walk, perhaps even run. Most important, she could stand well enough to shoot.
Many people were coming up the road now, scores of them, all carrying packs and bags, some even pushing little carts. They were quieter; there was none of the shouting and screaming that had gone on when the news first came.
Out beyond the breakwater, the raider was nosing into the last part of the channel. Very soon, the ship would tie up at a jetty, the wood-weirds would be freed from the rowing benches, and they would come ashore, with sorcerers and keepers close behind.
Then the hunt would begin.
Chapter Fourteen
NICHOLAS LEARNS ABOUT REAL LIBRARIANS
En Route to the Clayr’s Glacier, Following the Ratterlin
Oh!” exclaimed Lirael. She held her hand to her face, hiding a sudden bubbling up of laughter at Nick’s stricken face. He seemed more concerned about the prospect of sudden nakedness than he had been by the prospect of bleeding to death. “I should have thought of this . . . things made with machines in Ancelstierre, they fall apart once past the Wall. I have a spare cloak, I’ll get that for you.”
“Thank you,” said Nick, clutching his rags about himself. That prompted another memory. The owl and the dog, in his tent near the Red Lake pit . . .
“Um, I seem to recall I’ve been . . . ah . . . without clothes before . . . I mean, you’ve seen . . .”
“Yes,” said Lirael, coming over with a cloak in her hands. “You were not yourself, of course, under the sway of Orannis. You were very, very thin.”
“Oh,” said Nick, taking the cloak and quickly wrapping it around himself. What did that mean? Very thin? Did it mean “super-ugly very thin,” or was it just “extremely unhealthy very thin” or did it not mean anything, just an observation, like “that flower is yellow,” of no importance to Lirael, who had more pressing things to think about?
“I’ll just go over there,” he said, scuttling off like a large blue beetle, shedding various pieces of torn and disintegrating Ancelstierran cloth from under the cloak.
Lirael watched him for too long, realized when he got to the low bushes that they didn’t conceal him as much as he evidently thought they did, and looked away again quickly. The river rushing past reminded her that she also needed to go to the toilet, but she didn’t know whether to go around the far side of this small island now or wait for Nick to come back and then go, only deeper into the bushes, and then she wondered why she was thinking about this as being difficult. When she had been traveling with Sam both of them had simply diverted off a ways as required and done their business without even thinking about it, just like the Disreputable Dog; she didn’t make a fuss about necessary ablutions. It wasn’t because Sam was her nephew, because she hadn’t even known that straightaway. He’d just been a young man to her, like Nick. Only not like Nick for some reason . . .
When Nick came back, Lirael offered him a small leather bag.
“Bread and cheese, and a water bottle. It’s empty, fill it from the river, the water is good to drink. I’m just . . . I’m just going over there. Like you. Also. I mean, um, your cloak is coming open—”
She fled, with Nick hastily winding the cloak around himself another half turn, making it so tight that he almost fell over as he sat down to eat some bread and cheese.
At the other end of the island, Lirael went to the toilet, then washed her hands and face in the river. The water was very clear and cold, even this far from its source under the Clayr’s Glacier. Lirael had seen the spring where the river was born, far beneath the inhabited parts of the Clayr’s sprawling underground vastness.
There is a spring. A very old spring. In the heart of the mountain, in the deepest dark.
The Dog had said that, when they were exploring together, shortly before Lirael had found the Dark Mirror and the pan pipes, the instruments of a Remembrancer, which in her case had been but the first step toward becoming an Abhorsen.
Lirael dipped her hand in the cool, clear water again, and sighed. When she was with Sabriel, dealing with the Dead or walking in Death, learning to be an Abhorsen, she didn’t have time to think about what she had become, or was becoming, and even less to think about her former life with the Clayr. Not only that, her office as Abhorsen-in-Waiting had proved quite a shield in social situations against the people who Ellimere was always trying to get her to meet and do things with; she need only say that she had Abhorsen business and they left her alone.
But the other side of that coin, Lirael knew, was that she still had almost no experience with how men and women could get together and become friends, let alone lovers, and not much more with how women and women could get together, as some of the Clayr did. Or mixing and matching, as even more of the Clayr considered perfectly straightforward and usual.
It always seemed easy when everyone else did it. Lirael frowned as she thought of various cousins pairing up with each other or venturing down to the Lower Refectory to laugh and drink with the traders and supplicants, later to bring them up to their beds.
Lirael really didn’t know how they went about these activities. She had been a loner all her life, one who had the great fortune to make one wonderful friend in the Disreputable Dog. Literally, in this case, since she had somehow summoned the Dog or helped her into existence. But the Dog was gone.
Now Lirael did have a kind of family, even sort-of parents in Sabriel and Touchstone, since she could never think of them as half-sister and brother by marriage. Sam and Ellimere were more like brother and sister to her; certainly they never treate
d her as an aunt.
But they were all a very work-obsessed family. Or maybe that should be responsibility-obsessed, Lirael thought. She was too, she supposed—but when there weren’t Dead creatures to battle or Free Magic entities to be bound, or some immediate problem to face, only the ordinary social interactions of normal people . . . she didn’t know what to do. Even Ellimere, who seemed to be able to make any social situation work exactly as she wanted it to, hadn’t been able to fit Lirael into any group of friends or introduce her to potential lovers.
Lirael almost sighed again, but swallowed it. The Disreputable Dog would not have approved of all this sighing. Lirael smiled, a wry, sad smile, and reached into the little pouch she’d affixed to her bell bandolier, beneath Ranna, the smallest bell. Inside that pouch was the soapstone statuette of a black-and-tan dog with sticking-up ears, a wide grin, and a lolling tongue. The statuette she had snatched up from the strange room of the Stilken, many years before, which in some way had been the seed of her conjuring of the Disreputable Dog.
Lirael scratched this little figure between those ears with the edge of one fingernail, then fastened the pouch closed again. She could almost hear the Dog telling her to simply get on with it.
Back near the paperwing, Lirael saw Nick tying the belt from his shredded trousers around the cloak he now wore, to keep it together and not suddenly part in ways unbecoming to his modesty. Which he seemed to care about more than Lirael did, but she had to remember he was from a very different country and upbringing.
“Handmade belt,” he said, and pointed with his left foot. “Like my shoes. Though the laces seem to be going . . . I will need to have words with Mr. Jollie when . . . if I get back to Corvere.”
“Mr. Jollie?” asked Lirael.
“My cobbler,” said Nick. Lirael was pleased to see that he had a little color in his face, and generally looked better than he had the previous night or even that morning. “Machine-made laces! Can you imagine!”