Whisper of Leaves Read online

  ‘You forget that the Last Telling only comes into being if the Healer sees a setting sun,’ said Erboran, his smile brittle. ‘Would you bring her out of the trees and ignite a fire to devour us all?’

  ‘The dead see nothing.’

  There was another torrent of discussion, much of it based on the garbled versions of the Last Telling that flourished lower on the slope, for the Last Telling was known in its entirety only by Ordorin’s line. It no longer mattered though; Arkendrin had captured the hearts of those present and that demanded action by the Chief.

  Erboran remained motionless, refusing to be swamped by the debate raging around him. Arkendrin might be at his most dangerous when he raged and blustered, but the opposite was true of her eldest son. He would be digesting Arkendrin’s words, sifting his intent, weighing his strengths, finding his weaknesses. Finally his voice rang out, powerful and hard, slicing through the hubbub like a flatsword.

  ‘Arkendrin! You have indeed brought us a message of immense import, and we offer thanks to the Sky Chiefs that they’ve chosen you to send us this warning. We are grateful, indeed, that it was you who was gifted with the sight of this cursed gold-eyed Healer, possibly the bane of which the Last Teller spoke.’

  Arkendrin faltered. ‘I . . . I haven’t seen her.’

  The assemblage muttered.

  ‘You have not seen her?’ said Erboran coldly. ‘Then who might we thank for this warning?’

  ‘It was Urgundin’s blood-tie Irdodun who was granted the sight.’

  ‘In that case, I’m surprised you judged the matter worthy of bringing before me, and before the other warriors present.’

  Tarkenda watched Arkendrin struggle – and fail – to regain control of the Speak. He’d thought the import of his message would be enough to bring the gathering to his cause, but he was wrong. Irdodun was the lesser blood-tie of Urgundin, and had no Voice. Arkendrin, like his father before him, had failed to think beyond the moment.

  ‘She’s the creature of the Telling,’ asserted Arkendrin, straining to be heard above the growing rumble of speech.

  ‘Then bring me proof.’

  ‘Proof?’ Arkendrin’s gaze flicked to Urgundin.

  ‘I can do nothing to protect my people until I have proof. Bring me this gold-eyed Healer, alive and blinded or dead.’

  The sorcha hushed and the gathering turned expectantly to Arkendrin, but for once he hesitated, his face now oily with sweat, his body rigid.

  ‘Is the task too difficult for you?’ goaded Erboran.

  ‘The forest is endless, its stinking trees clothed in darkness whether the sun’s risen or set, but our people will have their proof, Chief Erboran.’

  Erboran inclined his head. ‘It’s urgent they have it soon Arkendrin, for you might carry our doom in your hands. However, I recognise your difficulties. You have until the full moon after this to complete what you’ve pledged.’

  Erboran turned back to the gathering. ‘It’s fortunate my brother has called a Speak at this time,’ he began, ‘for there’s another matter of great import to the future of the Shargh that I wish to announce.’

  The sorcha hushed, the only sound the call of mawkbirds away on the Grounds.

  ‘Let it be known that I take Palansa, daughter of Ordaten, son of Orkandon, son of Ermamandin, son of Arpapan the One-Arm, as my join-wife, and that my first-born son will be Chief of all the Shargh, to rule in the time after I pass to the lands of the Sky Chiefs above,’ he said proudly.

  There was a ripple of surprised approval. Palansa was a good choice, despite her family’s lack of Voice, thought Tarkenda, possessing an intelligence and confidence that augured well for the future of the chiefship. But Arkendrin’s anger and frustration were palpable. Tarkenda’s head swam, then the sorcha walls were ripped away. It was as if she were floating, looking down at snow-capped mountains above a golden plain. Shargh warriors were being cut down by men on white horses, and funeral pyres were piled high with Shargh dead.

  The vision dissipated as quickly as it had come, leaving Tarkenda sweat-soaked and reeling. Breaking convention, she stood, and stumbled outside, clinging to the side of the sorcha while she sucked air into her lungs. No woman was a Teller, and no Tellers had walked the Grounds for countless seasons. So why had the Sky Chiefs chosen her, and why now? Other questions even more terrible burned too. Had her vision been the backwash of something already passed, or something yet to come? The sky in her vision had been as starry as the one above, but without beauty, promising only suffering and death. Stifling a groan, she made her way unsteadily down the slope.

  5

  The mira kiraon arced through the predawn darkness, a leafmouse dangling from its beak. Alighting on a castella branch, the owl’s eyes flashed gold as it watched a figure pass beneath. It waited till the forest was silent again before beginning to eat.

  Kira went quickly, oblivious to the owl hidden above her, the dew-laced air beading her cape and filling her senses with silversalve and icemint. The forest canopy was chinked with moonlight but Kira’s stride would have been equally swift had the night been cloudy. Tremen were keen-sighted, their vision honed by seasons living in muted light, and Kira’s sight was particularly acute. Some said it was a trait passed from her forebear Kasheron – a man renowned for his surefootedness – but others argued it was a natural counterpart to her healing ability. Certainly Healers had to see the smallest herbs hidden in litter or shadowed by shelterbush, as well as recognise the subtlest changes in leaves and stems denoting ripeness and potency. Whatever the case, in all her growing, Kira had never lost a game of find, much to Tresen’s and Kandor’s annoyance.

  She rushed on without pause, scarcely aware of the world turning back towards the sun, the air beginning to lighten and the castellas and chrysens shrugging off their night-time browns and blacks. Her belly growled, forcing her to chew on pitchie seeds. Her father had gone to the Clancouncil at the Kashclan longhouse and she hadn’t wasted time breakfasting, needing all of the day to reach the Warens, explore the Writings, and return before him.

  The shrill calls of springleslips finally penetrated Kira’s thoughts and she smiled in delight. Dawngreeters, Kasheron’s folk had called them, and it was apt, their joyous voices announcing that the sky was now ripe for flying. The branches whispered under the dart of their blue and yellow plumage. After a while there came the sound of water, too, and the trees gave way to a stream lined with stones as round as tippet eggs. Tossing down her pack, Kira settled on the bank, letting the chill water run through her fingers.

  The Drinkwater rose north-west of the Renclan longhouse and exited the Arborean through the Kashclan octad. It had once serviced all the octads, the clans carting water for drinking, cooking and bathing. It must have been hard, thought Kira, hauling buckets through the stands of shelterbush and bitterberry, through the tearing grip of sour-ripe vines, up and down stony slopes and drifts of leaves. Even bucketing water the short distance from the roof-barrels was a chore children bickered over. Kira snorted as she recalled the rumour that Morclan brought water inside using hollow branches. Whoever had spread that tale must’ve imbibed too much withyweed ale!

  Cupping her hands, she drank deeply, the water clean and bright and tasting faintly of cinna, a welcome change from the moss-tainted water of the Bough. Emptying her waterskin, she refilled it from the stream, then started back along the path.

  ‘Kira! Kira! Wait!’

  By the ’green! Kandor must’ve run all the way to have caught her here. She watched him dashing towards her, the scatter of sunlight and shadow painting his hair honey-gold then brown, his face red with running. When he was almost upon her, Kira gave a whoop and set off in a mad sprint, tunic clutched high, leaf litter spurting from her feet. Trees flashed by and Kandor’s voice wailed in the distance.

  ‘Kiraaaa . . .’

  Taking pity on him after a while, she came to a halt – breath scouring, chest heaving – and flopped down on a sever log. How quickly her muscles w
ere softening during her confinement!

  Finally Kandor came plodding up, collapsing beside her. ‘That was . . . a mean trick,’ he panted.

  ‘You’re just annoyed because I can run faster than you.’

  Kandor’s head came up. ‘That’s not true and you know it. I’ll race you the rest of the way to the Warens.’

  ‘It’s not behaviour behoving someone of the Bough,’ she said, mimicking her father’s clipped tones exactly.

  ‘Neither’s this,’ said Kandor, rolling off the sever with theatrically flailing arms and lying prone in the leaf litter.

  Kira laughed.

  Kandor’s dive into the leaves had roused the scents of russetwort and redreed, summer herbs, despite spring having not yet ended. ‘It’s going to be a dry season,’ said Kira.

  ‘That’s what Tresen says too,’ said Kandor, tucking his hands behind his head.

  ‘Oh, does he now? It must be true then, if a mighty Protector says it. And when did you see Protector Tresen?’

  ‘At the Kashclan longhouse yesterday. Father sent me with some of Sendra’s nutcakes for today’s Clancouncil. Tresen came home as I was leaving.’

  It was nearly a moon since Kira had seen Tresen and she missed him more than she liked to admit. Between her father’s prohibitions and Tresen’s Protector training, their jaunts together seemed a distant memory.

  ‘And what else did he have to say?’ she asked, hauling Kandor upright.

  ‘Oh, that he’s been on patrol beyond the Third Eight for a moon quarter, and that he’s now such a fine swordsman that Commander Sarkash does nothing but heap praise upon him.’

  Kira rolled her eyes, plucking another sprig of pitchie as she walked.

  ‘He asked where you were, and said to tell you his patrol came back past the starstone and the rednuts are almost ripe. He’s on leave for the next moon quarter and suggested we can pick them together. We can go and get them, can’t we?’ said Kandor, catching her arm. ‘It seems an age since we were there.’

  Kira hesitated. The starstone; she couldn’t remember whether it had been her or Tresen who’d named it. It was just an irregularly shaped pale boulder really, not star-shaped at all, perched right on the edge of the Everflow and shrinking in size each time they visited it. Yet it remained special. The rednuts grew on either side and they would sit on the stone at the end of the day’s harvesting, gorging themselves and telling wild tales of what they’d do when they were all full-grown.

  The groves were in Kenclan octad, just beyond the Third Eight, well over two days’ journey from the Bough. The rednut trees were prolific and Kenclan had never objected to their occasional harvesting by other clans. From her tenth season and Tresen’s eleventh, they’d gone there. Filling their packs with dried osken, beggar leaves and fruit, they’d set off through the trees, taking turns to carry Kandor when he was very small, and setting their sleeping-slings high in the ashaels at night.

  ‘Can we go, Kira?’ asked Kandor, blocking her way, his eyes almost level with hers. At this rate he’d be as tall as Merek by the end of the season.

  Kira considered quickly. Her penance in the Bough was almost finished, and she’d been to the rednut groves many times before. Her father couldn’t possibly have any objections. And it would be so good to be there again, just the three of them.

  ‘Yes, we’ll go,’ she said, grinning.

  Kandor whooped and capered, pulling out his pipe and playing a lively tune more commonly heard in the training rooms than in the polite company of the Bough.

  ‘Your playing’s certainly improved,’ said Kira, laughing. ‘Can you manage “The Parting”?’

  Kandor nodded and, carefully adjusting his fingers on the pipe, began to play. His efforts were faltering, and now and then he hit a wrong note, but the air was filled with the poignant melody. ‘The Parting’ told the story of when the northern peoples had been broken, with Kasheron bringing his followers south. But Kira always thought of it as Birika’s song, not Kasheron’s, for Kasheron’s bondmate had left her father and brothers in the north, never to see them again.

  What must it be like to lose everyone? she thought, her eyes filling with tears.

  Kandor’s arm came round her, his face creasing in a crooked smile. ‘My playing’s not that bad, is it?’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Kira thickly.

  The entrance to the Warens was so close to Nogren’s bole that Kira and Kandor had to edge round it in single file. Kasheron’s people had probably planted the alwaysgreen there to disguise the fissure in the rock, thought Kira, or maybe they simply hadn’t realised how big the tree would grow. Kira let Kandor go first, pausing to look up into the alwaysgreen’s heavy, dark foliage, a favourite haunt of the mira kiraon. The trees of the First Eight were massive and far older than the Bough; Kasheron had brought the seeds from the north and planted the great circles of the Eights long before the longhouses and the Bough had been built.

  There were no gold eyes winking down at her today, and with a sigh she followed Kandor into the first cavern, chill after the summery air outside and filled with an instantly recognisable odour of windblown leaves, twigs, dry blossom and the stone’s peculiar scent.

  The Warens were gloomy, and in parts damp, ignored by all but the Protectors who lived there during their training and service, and organised the storage of each season’s excess gathering there. Still, Kira found a certain enjoyment in their solitude, away from her father’s chilly disapproval and the Tremens’ sideways glances and whispers about her eyes. Lately she’d found more time to read the decaying Writings in the further caverns. Had they been left to moulder because they spoke of Terak ways? She didn’t know and she daren’t ask her father in case he forbade her from going there.

  ‘Ah, the lovely gold-eyed Healer of the Bough.’

  Kira started, irritation rousing. She didn’t go round greeting people by commenting on their eyes, or hair, or ears for that matter, yet people felt perfectly free to do so with her.

  ‘I’d thought this day dreary but I see now that fortune’s smiling on me,’ the speaker continued.

  He was very tall and Kira had to tilt her head back to look at him; Morclan, she guessed, for no other clan had hair as white as hoarfrost. He also had the blue eyes common among Morclansmen and women. His self-assured manner was no doubt due in part to the Protector Leader insignia he wore at his shoulder.

  ‘I have no idea who you are,’ she said bluntly.

  His smile didn’t falter. ‘Ah, I am disappointed, Kiraon.’

  She glanced beyond him to the tunnel Kandor had disappeared into, regretting her delay at Nogren. This man, whoever he was, was wasting precious reading time.

  ‘I’m Protector Leader Kest, of Morclan,’ he said, noting the direction of her gaze.

  Tresen’s commander. Was that why he expected her to know him? She couldn’t recall him coming to either the Feast of Turning or Thanking, and with eyes like those, she’d surely remember him. Not that all Tremen made the journey to the Bough, choosing instead to celebrate in their own longhouses.

  ‘Ah, you lead my clanmate Tresen,’ she said politely.

  He remained intent on her but she didn’t know what else to offer, and with a brief nod went to pass on. Annoyingly, he fell into step beside her.

  ‘You go to the stores?’ he asked.

  Kira hesitated, caught between the wish to be free of him and a reluctance to lie. ‘No, beyond the training rooms.’

  Kest frowned. ‘It’s unwise to go further than the lamps. Not all of the Warens have been mapped and it’s easy to become lost.’

  This was all she needed: a man as bossy as her father! ‘I’ve been well beyond the lamps many times, Protector Leader Kest, and I can assure you, I’ve never been lost.’

  He looked at her doubtfully and she softened her voice. ‘Please don’t be concerned on my behalf. I’m a Healer and healing requires an excellent memory. I could stand here and recite the entire Herbal Sheaf to you, and every caver
n and tunnel turning between here and where I’m going . . . if I had time,’ she added, smiling sweetly.

  Kest hesitated, clearly unconvinced. ‘I request you report to one of the Protector Leaders on your return so that we know you’ve come out safely. Protector Leaders Kertash, Pekrash and Dekren are within today. You’ll find them in the training rooms.’

  Kira nodded, quickening her steps, and he gave a small, informal salute, watching her until she’d disappeared into the gloom.

  Kiraon of the Bough, he mused, Tremen Leader Maxen’s only daughter. He hadn’t seen her for two seasons, not wanting to ‘enjoy’ Maxen’s company at the Turning celebrations. She’d certainly changed, even if she did still wear her hair like a child. How old would she be now? he wondered. Merek was coming up for twenty-six at Turning and Lern must be twenty-two, having finished his Protector training a season ago, which must make her close to seventeen. His men regularly reported seeing her wandering about beyond the Third Eight, which was baffling considering Maxen’s propensity for controlling Allogrenia and everyone in it.

  Kest followed in Kira’s direction, taking several more turnings before coming to the Water Cavern. The spring that surfaced through the stone gave the cavern its name but also its moisture, making it useless for anything other than filling the water barrels for the training rooms, and occasionally replenishing the waterskins of Protectors who’d either forgotten or were unable to visit the Drinkwater.

  Commander Sarkash had asked him to check the flow, something Kest did regularly, but which most Protectors saw little point in. The amount of water in the subterranean river was a good measure of rainfall north-east and north-west of Allogrenia and therefore of the likely growth of forage plants in the northern octads. What he saw now didn’t augur well, for the level was lower than last moon, and that had been lower than the moon before. It was news that Sarkash would pass on to Maxen at the Clancouncil, not that Maxen would welcome it, Kest thought, as he made his way back towards the entrance. Maxen didn’t welcome anything he didn’t have control over.