The Stone of Farewell (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, #2)

by Tad Williams

. . Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good. Where are now the warring kings, Word be-mockers?—By the Rood, Where are now the warring kings? An idle word is now their glory, By the stammering schoolboy said, Reading some entangled story: The kings of the old time are dead; The wandering earth herself may be Only a sudden flaming word, In clanging space a moment heard, Troubling the endless reverie. —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (from The Song of the Happy Shepherd)

“Nine times nine days, Binabik, your spear stood before my cave, and I waited for you.” The words were spoken in a ritual chant, but the voice wavered unsteadily, pausing for a moment before continuing. “I waited and I called out your name in the Place of Echoes. Nothing came back to me but my own voice. Why did you not return and take up your spear again?”

he’s thinkin’ on somethin’ grand, d’ye see? Somethin’ important. But he’s nice enough, in’s way. Not like a person, quite, but not a bad’un.”

Sounds like an Aelf.

The Doctor used to say that no one ever knows what will come to them—“don’t build on expectation,”

In his choking fear, he had almost cut his hand loose from his body to get the chittering things off.

The swarming diggers, far too numerous to have been defeated, did not follow. Is there some power in the forest that prevented them? Deornoth wondered. Or more likely, does something live here more fearsome even than they are?

When your fleeing spirits go squealing at last into the endless Between from which we ourselves escaped, it will be by our doing. We are the Red Hand, knights of the Storm King—and He is the master of all!”

She had not set foot on Perdruin since she had been a small girl, but she still felt, in a way, as if she were returning home. Her mother Hylissa had brought her here when Miriamele had been very young, as part of a visit to Hylissa’s sister, the Duchess Nessalanta in Nabban. They had stopped in Ansis Pelippé to pay a courtesy call on Count Streáwe.

In her child’s mind, Miriamele had pictured her mother captive in a walled garden somewhere, a lovely garden like the one they had visited on Perdruin, a beautiful place that Hylissa could never leave, even to visit the daughter who missed her so.

As her father had retreated from her she had pretended not to care, even though she had felt that she was being eaten away from within. Where was God, the younger Miriamele had wondered; where was He when love was slowly hardening into indifference and care becoming duty? Where was God when her father Elias begged Heaven for answers, his daughter listening breathlessly in the shadows outside his chamber? Perhaps He believed my lies, she thought bitterly as she walked down the rain-slicked wooden steps onto the lower deck. Perhaps He wanted to believe them, so He could get on with more important things.

“You and I are speaking Westerling, but except for your Erkynlandish fellow-countrymen—and not even all of them—no one else speaks it among their own people. Rimmersmen in Elvritshalla use Rimmerspakk; we Hernystiri speak our own tongue when in Crannhyr or Hernysadharc. Only the Perdruinese have adopted your grandfather King John’s universal language, and to them it is now truly their first language.”

“Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess,” he said quietly. “Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.” Miriamele thought about the obvious truth of what Cadrach had said as they walked on, but could not understand why it made her so unutterably sad.

Marmots, coneys, and other such small game were not the only reason the troll women carried spears. One of the furs ostentatiously wrapped around Nunuuika had been that of a snow leopard, dagger-sharp claws still gleaming. Remembering the Huntress’ fierce eyes, Simon had little doubt that Nunuuika had brought down that prize herself.

That night Simon dreamed once more of the great wheel. This time, as in a cruel parody of the passion of Usires the Son of God, Simon was bound helplessly to the wheel, a limb at each quarter of the heavy rim. It turned him not only topside-down, as Lord Usires had suffered upon the Tree, but spun him around and around in an earthless void of black sky.

Something else—some shadowy, icy thing whose laugh was the empty buzzing of flies—danced just beyond his sight, mocking him. He called out, as he often did in such terrible dreams, but no sound came forth. He struggled, but his limbs were without strength. Where was God, who the priests said saw every act? Why should He leave Simon in the grasp of such dreadful darknesses?

what emerged from the spinning void was not the expected red-eyed horror, but a small, solemn face: the little dark-haired girl he had seen in other dreams.

With Binabik imprisoned, who knew what Qantaqa had done? Her friend and master had been taken from her, just as Doctor Morgenes had been taken from Simon. The night seemed suddenly colder and emptier, full of the world’s heedless cruelty.

It occurred to him as he went, stepping carefully on the wet stone pathways, that he was doing a foolish thing.

like a spirit of the afterworld, she led him away from the fires of his own kind.

“There is still a brittle respect between the Zida’ya and some of the Sunset Children—chiefly the Hernystiri and the Qanuc. Five desolate centuries cannot so easily overwhelm the millennia of grace. Still, things have changed. You mortals—Lingit’s children, as the trolls say—are in ascendancy. It is not my people’s world any longer.”

The debts of the Zida’ya run deep and dark. They carry with them the stuff of myth. I owe you such a debt.”

The Zida’ya are not totally without friends, even in this bold young world of mortals.”

The White Arrow, the black sword, a golden ring, and a Sithi seeing-glass—you are so weighted down with significant booty that you will clank when you walk!”

If I understand its meaning, it does not concern you now in any direct fashion, and knowing what it said would not help you in any palpable way.”

I’m in a sort of story, just like Jiriki said. A story like Shem used to tell—or is it History, like Doctor Morgenes used to teach me . . . ? But no one ever explained how terrible it is to be in the middle of a tale and not to know the ending. . . .

Men and women both passed skins of some highland liquor back and forth, laughing and gesturing as they drank. Haestan watched this procedure gloomily. “I talked one of ’em into givin’ me sip o’ that,” the guardsman said. “Tasted like horse piss, did.

continued. “Since Ookequk’s apprentice did not come to his duty—to sing the Rite of Quickening—the Ice House still has not melted. Because the Ice House is unmelted, Winter will not leave Yiqanuc.

Although her gaze was clouded as though by anger or fright, Simon thought he sensed a strong-willed, defiant tilt to her jaw, a sharpness to her eye—not her mother Nunuuika’s blade-edged glance, but the look of someone who made up her own mind. For a moment, Simon felt he could see her as one of her own would—not a gentle, pliant beauty, but a comely and clever young woman whose admiration would not be easy to win.

left. I could not have reached you, but the child Leleth has abilities . . . she is like a burning-glass through which I can narrow my will. She is a strange child, Simon.”

You must go to the Stone of Farewell. That is the only place of safety from the growing storm—safety for a little while, anyway.

God did not fear a fight, the earl knew, or a little blood—in such ink were His intentions written, a philosopher had once said. But, Usires curse it, this was different, was it not?

He held her awkwardly in his dry-stick arms as she sobbed.

“Waste of time, crying,” Einskaldir growled, his eyes never leaving the blade as he lifted it to the red firelight. “Fight and live, fight and die, God waits for all.”

Miriamele guessed that the tunnel had been the salvation of many an earlier nobleman, forced to flee his stately quarters by night when the peasantry became unexpectedly frisky or turned disputatious about the rights of the privileged.

The wolf had apparently used this for scratching her back, since the design bore the distinct marks of having been rolled upon. All that remained was part of the rune-wrapped border and an edge of some white thing beneath a sky filled with twirling red stars.

“Daughter, I thought you were a fool when you determined to marry this wizardling. Now—well, I will say at least that you are a loyal fool.”

“I go on a long journey, and in such times that I cannot know I will come back. So, I lay my death-song on this hide, that it can be my voice when I am gone.”

It appears I am no longer bound for an unfortunate plunging,”

a sad song from happier times,

“Hope,” Eolair often said, in that quiet but fox-clever way of his, “is like the belly-strap on a king’s saddle—a slender thing, but if it snaps the world turns topside-down.”

Thinking of the count, she felt a rare flash of anger. What could he know—what could anyone know about death who was as alive as Eolair, to whom life seemed a gift from the gods?

What gift of the gods was worth the gray burden of pain, the unceasing rut of bleak thoughts?

Tall as a man, clumsy and blunt in her words, far more like a farmer’s daughter than a princess—who could ever love Maegwin?

*Raises hand*

“Do you know ‘The Leavetaking Stone’?” Maegwin asked the harper suddenly. “It’s an old song about the Sithi, about someone named Nenais’u dying.”

He would talk to his old friend Elias, here in the empty hours of night when men told the truth.

The world still spins, but it spins toward us.”

“Pitiful, short-lived things. Are you not yet used to dying with your questions unanswered?”

I will go clean the fairy blood from my sword.”

“Perhaps that is one of the virtues of Thorn and Minneyar—that they are invisible to the Norns’ magic.” He slapped at his thigh. “Of course! They must be, or the Storm King would have found them and destroyed them! How else could weapons deadly to him still exist!?”

why have they tried to prevent our going east?” The prince shrugged. “Who can say? We must think on this more, but I believe it is the answer. They fear we already have one or both of the swords