He laughed.
“He fears you. The king . . . he fears you,” she told him. She didn’t tell him how she knew, but Bayr nodded once, like it was something he already understood, and ducked into the tunnel. The wall scraped closed behind him.
“He did not hurt you?”
She heard the fear in Hod’s question when she told him about her night singing for the king.
“No. He did not hurt me. He hurt Bayr. But Bayr did not leave me.”
She had not returned to her bed when Bayr left her in the sanctum. The dawn would be coming soon. The cock had already crowed. Instead she had walked out into the garden and through the rear gate, invigorated by her sudden freedom in the lavender-colored dawn.
Hod would be awake, she was almost certain. She’d drawn her finger over a thorn and watched as a drop of blood fattened on the tip. Tracing the rune, she’d begun to call out to him, singing the same lullaby that had accompanied her through the night.
“Why does Bayr not fight back? He has killed men with his bare hands. Surely he could defend himself.”
Hod sounded as if he wanted to kill Banruud himself, but he knew the answer to his question.
“He is the king,” Ghisla said. “And Bayr is not interested in defending himself.”
“He wants to protect everyone else.”
“Yes.” She felt close to tears and blinked them back. Her tears would not make her whole again, and tears could not fix what was wrong in Saylok.
“Is there not something more than this, Hod?”
“More than what, Ghisla?”
“More than suffering? Even the king, who causes so much pain . . . is wracked with it.”
“What did you see when you sang to him?”
“I saw Desdemona.”
“Desdemona?”
“Bayr’s mother.”
“Can you show me?”
For a moment she just hummed the lullaby, not singing the words, just like she’d done for the king, and she concentrated on the flickering image she’d seen in his head—the black-haired beauty, a sword in her hand, and a child swelling her womb. Then she released the image and let the old Songr melody score the changing sky in her here and now. She was too weary for the king’s demons.
“I am looking at the most beautiful sky,” Hod whispered.
“You can see my sky?”
“Yes,” he breathed. “What color is that?”
“It is many colors.”
“Rainbow?”
“No. Blue and black and purple—violet—and there at the bottom, lining the hills, it’s—”
“Gold.”
“Yes. The sun is rising.”
For a moment she hummed the melody, letting him see through her eyes.
“Your power is growing, Ghisla.”
Her laugh was dry. Hard. “It is odd, isn’t it?”
“What is odd?”
“I can hear a king’s thoughts and sing him to sleep. Yet I am still his prisoner.”
“Yes. I suppose . . . in a way . . . we all are. Ghisla?”
“Yes?”
“Promise me you will not give up.”
“I will not give up today.”
Hod’s conversation with Ghisla had left him shaken, and when he climbed up from the beach to return to the cave, he was in no mood for Arwin’s announcement. He had not yet slept. He rarely slept when Arwin slept.
“We will leave for Adyar soon.”
“I do not want to go to Adyar.”
“But I have found you a new teacher. He will teach you to better use your stick as a weapon.”
Arwin had secured yet another warrior to try to kill Hod for a month while he did his best to not be killed. He would be bruised and battered when he returned, and no closer to ever putting his training to any real use.
“Someday the Highest Keeper will call on you, Hod. You must be ready,” Arwin warned. He had said the same thing a thousand times.
“Why will he call on me, Master?” he sighed.
Arwin huffed at Hod’s pessimism. “I have told you. Repeatedly, I have told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“Your mother brought you to the temple. She was ill. She was desperate. And she asked Master Ivo to heal you. But the Highest Keeper recognized you.”
“He recognized me?” Hod almost laughed. Each time Arwin told the tale, it became bigger and more dramatic.
“Yes! He knew you were sent by the gods. By Odin himself.”
“So he sent me here to you to await the day when Saylok needs me,” Hod parroted. He was tired. Saylok needed girl children, not blind men who could wield a stick and draw runes.
Arwin was angry now. “Do not mock me, Hod.”
“I do not mock you, Arwin. I only mock myself.”
“You will see,” Arwin snapped. “Someday you will understand. And you will thank me for my faith and your mother’s sacrifice.”
“My mother’s sacrifice,” Hod whispered. He had not thought of Bronwyn of Berne for a long time. He had no face to match the name. He remembered very little at all of his mother, but Arwin said she was pretty and young and alone in the world. She’d died not long after delivering her small blind son to the cave keeper, and Arwin had buried her in a clearing near the cave. A boulder marked the spot where she lay.
Hod tried to summon her memory, but instead an image rose. Not his mother, but the woman—Desdemona—Ghisla had shown him from the king’s thoughts. Desdemona. A shield maiden. Bayr’s mother. She too was dead. She too had sacrificed for her son, Hod was sure. Mayhaps he and the Temple Boy had that in common.
“We will go to Adyar,” he sighed, relenting. At least it would distract him for a time.
“That is best,” Arwin said, immediately mollified. “Trust me, Hod. Trust me, and when the time comes, you will be ready.”
11
TUNNELS
The Tournament of the King had turned the hillside into a wash of color. A rainbow. Ghisla showed it to Hod in her mind’s eye, the tents and the teeming horde, the citizens of every clan lining up to see the daughters and seek a blessing from the keepers.
“Those who make the pilgrimage are mostly men now. Lines and lines of men,” Ghisla told Hod. “They want to touch our hands, and some throw flowers at our feet. One man threw himself at Elayne and knocked her to the ground. He was dragged off by the temple guard and put in the stocks in the square.”
“Is Elayne all right?”
“Yes. But yesterday, three men approached on their knees, as though to worship us. They were clanless—no warriors’ braids and no sashes—but all at once they stood, daggers in their hands, and one grabbed Dalys and ran. An archer on the wall shot him as he fled. The other two were hung on the north gate as an example to all those who would seek to take a daughter of the temple.”
“I am horrified . . . and I am glad,” Hod confessed.
“Poor Dalys screamed in her sleep last night. I sang to her, but I dared not touch her. I did not want to see her dreams.”
“You should not be on display. It is not safe.”
“Master Ivo barred the temple doors and refused to bestow favors and blessings, but people have waited so long. The keepers are supported by the public, and he opened them again this morning. The king and the chieftains insist the people see us. And Dagmar agrees. He said the people’s adoration is both a bane and a blessing. It endangers us even as it keeps us . . . safe. We are symbols of Saylok, and Master Ivo claims we will not be touched or traded or given away in marriage to the clans or the chieftains, though there is always talk.”