There are places in Anglia where Dherak is denser than elsewhere. Old places. Places where magic has been used for so many years that it has seeped down into the earth and into the stones and up into the trees. Déynáir is one of them. The forbidden mountain is another. And there is a third place, beneath it all, that is older than both.
Professor Arcanus, noted down by a student during a lecture, never confirmed
Chapter 19
Surain
He came on a Wednesday.
Nobody had been expecting him. There was no announcement, no message from the Headmaster, no sign at all that a visitor was coming. He was simply there, in the morning, when I went down to the dining hall: a man in a plain brown robe standing in the entrance hall talking quietly with Professor Haltora. Haltora's wolf stood between them and looked from one to the other with yellow eyes.
Surain's scent reached me from the other side of the hall. Wet earth and animal fur and old metal and the distant fire that had never quite gone out. It was stronger than I remembered. Or else my ability to sense it had grown stronger.
He looked up as I went past. Our eyes met. He said nothing. Haltora said nothing. But Haltora looked from Surain to me and back with a look that said they were talking about me, and that they both knew I knew it.
I went on to the dining hall. Ahra and Retia were already sitting in our places. At the far end of the table Thea Lyndris was laughing at something, and I had walked past her without looking. I only noticed once I had sat down.
"Surain's here," I said, and sat down.
Ahra put his toast down. "The animal dealer?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know yet."
Retia looked at me over her cup. "But you think it's about you."
It wasn't a question. Retia rarely asked questions she already knew the answer to.
He found me that evening.
I was on my way back from the library on my own. It was late, the corridors were almost empty, and the torchlight had dimmed to the night-time glow that made shadows stretch up the walls. Alôpex walked at my feet with her ears turned backwards, alert to something I couldn't hear.
"Chris."
His voice came from a niche in the wall, one of those places where a window had once been and had been bricked up. Alôpex stopped at once, and her ears turned towards the sound, and her body was still and tense.
Surain stepped out of the shadow. His face was older than I remembered, or perhaps it was only the light. The torch on the wall threw deep shadows under his eyes and along his jaw, and his hands, hanging at his sides, had new lines in them that hadn't been there four weeks ago.
He looked at me with the calm, sad eyes I remembered from the hut on the island. But there was something new in them now. Something urgent.
"Surain," I said. I stopped. My feet found the position they always found when something took me by surprise: slightly apart, weight evenly spread, ready to move. The Fjord Run habit. It was in me now.
"Walk with me," he said. "There's something we need to talk about."
We walked. Not through the passages, but along the ordinary corridors, down stairs and across landings, and Surain walked with the slow care he always walked with, every step considered, every glance taking in everything it fell on. We ended up in a small room on the ground floor that seemed as if it were usually empty: a couple of chairs, a table, a window looking out over the garden in the dark. The air smelt of dust and old stone and the faint trace of Dherak that was everywhere in the oldest parts of the castle.
Surain sat down. I sat down opposite him. Alôpex jumped up onto the table and lay down between us with her head on her paws.
"Have you been having dreams?" said Surain. He said it without any introduction, without warming up, without the social game people usually play before they get to the thing that matters.
Cold in my spine. "Yes."
"About a woman crying."
It wasn't a question. I answered anyway. "Yes. In the rain. Something is burning far away. She's holding my hands. She knows who I am."
Surain closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, there was something in them different from anything I had seen in him before. Not the controlled grief from the hut. Something more acute. Something like haste.
"The dreams aren't dreams," he said. He got up from the chair and went over to the window and looked out into the darkness. His hands rested on the windowsill, and his fingers drummed slowly against the stone, a rhythm that said he was weighing how much he could tell. "They're something you're receiving. Your Dherak is strong enough to pick up signals from other Engle, even over great distances." He turned towards me. "And someone is sending to you. Knowingly or unknowingly. Someone bound to you by something deeper than magic."
"My mother," I said.
Surain looked at me. For a long time. Alôpex lifted her head from her paws and looked too, and the two pairs of eyes, the human and the animal, held me fast.
"Yes," he said. "Your mother."
The words hung in the room. My hands lay on the table, and they were still, but inside me something was shaking, something deep and old and frightened and glad all at once.
"She's alive," I said. Not a question. A statement. Something I said out loud to make it real.
"Yes. She's alive." He said it quietly, with the weight words have when you have held them in too long. "And she's in danger." Surain went back to the chair and sat down and leant forward. His hands lay flat on the table, the same hands that had shaken when he told us about his father, and they were shaking again now. "There are people watching you, Chris. Not only here. Everywhere. And there are people who want you to stay in the dark. People who believe that the less you know, the safer you are."
"Like Edrin," I said.
Surain's eyes flickered. Only for a moment. But it was enough for me to know I had hit something.
"Edrin does what he believes is right," said Surain carefully. "He has his reasons."
"Everyone has their reasons," I said. "Hanne had her reasons. Haltora has his reasons. Kalmin has his reasons. Everyone keeps something hidden and calls it protection, and nobody asks me whether I want to be protected."
The silence that followed was long and heavy. Alôpex's tail moved slowly back and forth across the table.
Surain drew a deep breath. Leant back in his chair. His hands stopped shaking and lay still. "I meant to wait until you were older," he said. "But the mountain has started calling you, and it doesn't wait for anyone to be ready."
"Your father was one of the Thirteen," he said. His voice was low. "But that isn't what I remember about him. I remember his hands. They were always cold, even in summer, because he went out into the river every morning and stood there so long I thought he'd fallen asleep." He looked down at his own hands. "Your mother was trained by another of them, and became one of them herself. They had you. And then your father was killed, and your mother went into hiding to protect you."
He looked at me with eyes full of something that was more than grief. Something like guilt.
"You're not an accident, Chris. You're a plan. You're what they left behind, and there are people in this world who are afraid of what that means."
My hands lay on the table. Still. My eyes were dry. My body was still. But inside me there was a storm so big that it made no sound yet; it was still too far off, still behind the horizon, but it was coming, and I could feel it in my bones.
"Train me," I said.
"What?"
"Train me. In what you know. In what isn't on the syllabus. In what my father could do, and what my mother can do, and all the things everyone keeps hidden from me. Train me, so I can protect myself and stop waiting for other people to do it."
Surain looked at me. And for the first time since I had met him, he smiled. It was a small, tired, sad smile, but it was real.
"Yes," he said. "I will."
We began that night.
Surain led me out through a passage I hadn't found yet. The ring round my wrist grew warm as we went into it. It was a narrow corridor that ended in a small clearing behind the castle, down by the river, hidden behind tall bushes and old oaks. The sky was clear, and the stars were the strange stars that hung over Anglia, and the air was cold and smelt of night frost and dead leaves and the faint trace of autumn that still lingered in the earth.
"Sit down," said Surain. "And say nothing until I ask you something."
"For how long?"
"We'll find out."
I sat down in the cold grass. Alôpex lay down beside me. I closed my eyes, the way Haltora had taught us in Dherak lessons.
And listened.
First there were the outer sounds. Wind in the treetops. An animal moving in the bushes. The river in the distance, its endless, slow sound. The castle walls creaking faintly in the night cold.
"Deeper," said Surain.
I tried. But I heard nothing. What I did was smell. The frost in the grass, the dead leaves, the oak bark, Alôpex's fur, the river, Surain's wet earth and old fire. Every time I tried to get down beneath the sounds, I ended up in a new smell instead, and the next, and the next. Half an hour passed. My legs went stiff, and the cold from the ground crept up into my hips.
"You're listening with your nose," said Surain. "Close it."
"How do you know?"
"Your nostrils have been working the whole time." He stood up. "Come."
He walked down to the water's edge, and I followed. The river was black and smooth in the starlight. He pointed out into it, and I pulled off my boots and rolled up my trousers and walked out until the water reached my knees. It was colder than in the morning, a cold that bit at my shins, and the current pulled at my ankles.
"Close it now," said Surain from the bank.
I did as Gopaltu had taught me. Breathed through my mouth. Thought of cold water, and that wasn't hard, because I was standing in it. The smells closed one by one, like doors down a long corridor, until there was only the dark and the water round my legs.
And then I listened deeper. Past the sounds. Down beneath them. And there was something. A sound that wasn't a sound. A vibration in the earth, in the air, in everything. Dherak. Not my Dherak. The world's Dherak. The island's Dherak. The same hum I had felt that first night on the test island, the night Alôpex had said the island knew we were there.
"Can you feel it?" said Surain.
"Yes."
"That's the earth's Dherak. It's everywhere. In the stones. In the water. In the roots under your feet. Most people can't feel it. You can."
"Why?"
"Because you are who you are." He stood on the bank just above me with his hands in the sleeves of his robe. "Your father could do it too. He said it was like listening to something that was always speaking, but that most people had forgotten how to hear."
We were quiet. I listened to the riverbed beneath me. To the slow, deep pulse that ran through everything, through the stones and the roots and the water and up through my legs and into my chest.
"What you need to learn," said Surain, "isn't how to use Dherak. The teachers can teach you that. What you need to learn is to listen to it. To feel it in everything. To let it guide you instead of forcing it. That's what your father knew, and that's what frightens people."
"Why does it frighten them?"
"Because a person who listens to the Dherak in everything can feel things others can't feel. Can find things others can't find. Can know things others don't want them to know." He paused. The night was still around us, and the only sound was the wind in the crowns of the oaks and the distant murmur of the river. "Your father called it 'going with the current'. Not the kind of current you can see. The one that runs under everything."
He brushed the dust off his robe. The night was cold, and his breath was white in the moonlight.
"When I'm here, we'll meet by the river at night," he said. "Don't tell Edrin. Don't tell Haltora." He paused. "Tell your friends. They need to know. But nobody else."
"You were talking to Haltora this morning," I said. "About me."
"Haltora knows I'm here. He doesn't know why." He looked out over the garden, towards the mountain rising dark against the stars in the north. "I leave early tomorrow. But I'll come back. And again. Until you can do what you need to be able to do."
He went. His steps made no sound on the grass, and he vanished into the shadow between the bushes, and soon there was only his scent, slowly dissolving into the night air, wet earth and old fire, and then he was gone.
I came up out of the water and sat down in the grass with numb feet. Alôpex lay down beside me with her head on my legs. The stars hung above me, strange and distant and beautiful.
My father was one of the Thirteen. My mother was still alive. And I was a plan.
I didn't know yet what that meant. But I knew that something had changed. Not something outside me. Something inside. A door had opened into a room I hadn't known existed, and behind it something was waiting, something big and dark and important, and it wouldn't wait for ever.
Surain told me less than half the truth that night. But the half he told me was enough to change everything.
Alôpex lifted her head and looked at me with her black eyes.
"Home?" she said.
"Home," I said.
And we went into the castle, in through the passage, up the stairs, over the creaking seventh step and into the room. It was three o'clock. Nihil was lying on his back with his eyes open, and he said nothing. But the window, which I had left ajar, was shut, and the room was warmer than the corridor.
I lay down in my bed. Looked at the wall. Two black feathers were there, side by side, black against the bare limewash.
My father had had cold hands, even in summer. Of everything Surain had said, that was what I kept coming back to.
It was a lot to fall asleep on. But Alôpex lay down against my neck, and her heart beat against my cheek, and the earth under the castle pulsed slowly in time with something older than all of us, and I fell asleep with the smell of ice and earth and clean air and the distant echo of a woman crying somewhere the fire had not yet gone out.