People she called the Clayr.
She’d written a message to be sent to them, in particular for her own daughter. She’d repeated that, over and over. Saying her daughter’s name as if it meant everything.
Lirael.
Lirael of the Clayr.
The elders had taken the message, but had not sent it. The foreign sorcerer had not always been accurate in her foretellings, and they thought there was a chance she was wrong.
But then the Witch With No Face was killed, and she came back from Death, and two moons past, the messengers had come with the new demands that were exactly what the foreign sorcerer had said would lead to the end of the Athask people.
So the elders had belatedly decided they must send the message to the Clayr. And who better to take it than the Offering, the best of her people, whose life was in any case forfeit?
Ferin had that message now, secure in her head and safely memorized, for anything written could be stolen or lost. She had to get across the river and go to the glacier, to deliver the message and save her people.
Without being killed by those who served the Witch With No Face, who almost from the moment she had left the mountains to cross the steppe had pursued her as if they knew what she was, and where, if not where she intended going.
But Ferin didn’t spare any thought for how her enemies were always close behind, or on anything else, like the fact that she had no idea where the Clayr’s Glacier was on the other side of the Greenwash. She lived in the moment, and was entirely focused on her immediate goal.
To get across the river.
She looked out over the water. The snow was still falling, but lightly, and the last sliver of the sun was disappearing in the west, so she couldn’t see very far, certainly not to the other side of the river. The Greenwash was at least three thousand paces wide here, and was roaring with snow-melt, its furious current made visible by the chunks of ice that whirled past, remnants of winter that had lingered in the more sheltered parts of the banks until the spring floods scoured them out.
There was no way Ferin could swim across, even if she were uninjured. The current was far too swift, and the water too cold. She would be drowned or frozen before she got even part of the way.
The bridge was now out of the question. The only way onto it was through the North Castle, and the shaman and his keeper would have been only the vanguard of other nomads who would be watching there, waiting for her to approach. If there were enough of them, they might even start searching along the riverbank and to the north, in case she’d doubled back. But it was more likely now they’d wait till morning, and light.
Which meant Ferin had to somehow get across this great, swollen, ferociously cold river in the darkness.
She tore off a strip of the alder bark—it was good for wounds—and chewed on it thoughtfully, looking along the riverbank in the fading light. There was a large clump of some kind of rushes nearby. Not the same as the ones that grew in the high alpine lakes of her home, but similar.
Ferin lifted her head and listened to the noises about her. The rushing waters of the river were so loud she had to focus deeply to hear anything else. But her hearing was acute, and well trained. She stood silently, behind the alder trunk, putting all the small sounds together. None of them suggested other people, particularly people sneaking up on her.
Ferin left the alders and crawled carefully along the bank, making her trail look like some small animal’s so she left no obviously human marks in the snow and mud. When she reached the reeds, she stopped and listened again, while watching for any signs of movement in the knee-high grass beyond the riverbank.
Again, there was nothing untoward. Ferin drew one of the tall reeds down and examined it as best she could in the fading light, and by touch. Its long stem was hollow, like the lake reeds she knew, but it had a large, flowery head instead of a closed, spearlike point.
Ferin cut it off close to the base with her knife and laid it down in front of her. Again, she waited and listened, then slowly cut another and put it down, before listening once more.
In this patient, laborious way, she spent the next several hours watchfully cutting reeds. It grew colder as the sun departed, but it was nothing like the piercing winter cold of the high mountains, at least not under the athask cloak, reversed so the white fur warmed her, and the goatskin lining, deeply oiled, shed the snow and did not give her away.
The snow eased off around this time, and the clouds began to move away, revealing a crescent moon and a bright swath of stars. Ferin scowled at the brightening sky, for she did not need the light, but those who hunted her might be encouraged to set out at night now, rather than wait for the dawn.
Ferin had spread the reeds into nine separate bunches. She quickly bound each of these bundles together individually, and then made a raft, using four bundles for the base and one on each side to make low gunwales. The ninth she only bound halfway and splayed the other end, for a makeshift paddle. All of this took every bit of her available cordage: the twine normally employed as the first stage of lofting a rope by arrow or grappling hook; six ells of the beautiful braided silk rope all the Athask people coveted; and three of her four spare bowstrings.
It did not look like much of a craft to tackle the Greenwash in full flood, but any doubts Ferin had about using it were dispelled when she heard sounds in the distance that were not part of the natural small noises of the night. Horses moving, the creak of saddles, the faint chink of armor, the whisper of commands given in low voices. Whoever it was, they weren’t even being careful, probably because there were lots of them and they felt secure in their numbers. They were not wrong. Ferin might shoot two or three before they got her, but she knew she probably wouldn’t even kill one, not if there were many more archers sending an arrow storm back toward her.
Quickly, Ferin made sure everything on her person was securely fastened. She put her pack and bow case on the raft and tied them to the loose ends of the reed bindings, drew her cloak tightly around herself, and pushed the raft into the shallows, diving on top of her pack as the river immediately snatched up this new gift and dragged it spinning into the heart of its turbulent waters.
Chapter Four
A MAN AND A CREATURE LIE AS IF DEAD
Ancelstierre, Near the Wall
You had better stay here,” said Lirael, “until I see what kind of creature lurks beyond.”
“We should come with you, milady,” countered Captain Anlow. The thirty guards she led were gathered behind her, in a single line stretching back along the tunnel through the Wall and out the northern side, into the Old Kingdom. They had come with Lirael from Barhedrin, where she had landed her paperwing. “There might be other dangers. The wind is from the south, their weapons are working, those sharp barks we heard earlier are called gunshots, and some guns are very deadly at a far distance. They are always fearful here, and shoot too readily; they often have accidents—”
“I have been in Ancelstierre before, and I know about their guns,” said Lirael firmly. “This is Abhorsen business. You stay here until I have dealt with the creature.”
They stood by the gate that Anlow had just opened. Behind them, on the northern side of the Wall, a meadow full of wildflowers proclaimed the beginning of spring and the sun was just beginning to set, a red light falling across the land.
On the southern side, the crisp chill of winter still prevailed, and it was the middle of the night. A waning moon and cloud-obscured stars did little to illuminate the broad no-man’s-land of bare earth ahead, crisscrossed with a veritable bramble forest of rusted, red-brown barbed wire, overlaying the craters and shell-holes, evidence of a continuing belief in the use of high explosive, despite the fact it did not stop many of the things that came across the Wall.
Among the hundreds of rusted, bent star pickets that supported the wire, there were wind-flutes. Lirael could hear them, and feel their power, even though she couldn’t see them in the darkness. Created by the Abhorsen, the wind-
flutes whispered a song redolent with the same power of her bells, helping to close the border between Life and Death. There had been many, many deaths here. Without the wind-flutes, the Crossing Point would not just be the place where travelers went from north to south or vice versa, but would also be a yawning, open door for the Dead to slither, crawl, or stride out into the world of the living.
Lirael could feel the closeness of Death, the chill of that inexorable river, the weight of so many dead in this blood-soaked ground. That was to be expected here. But she could also smell the corrosive, hot metal tang of Free Magic, and sense its presence, not least by the beginnings of an unpleasant shivering ache that was spreading through her bones and teeth.
Powerful Free Magic, something that should not be here. She had felt it as soon as they opened the southern gate in the Wall, making her stop in her tracks and order the guards to halt, and then to remain where they were.