Circles of Stone

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“Well, I’m not against feisty, but I am against stupid,” said Triste archly. “She has no idea what’s around that bend. I can’t Scry so far ahead and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to warn her. She could paddle straight into a shoal of Slithen – or worse.”

Sylas thought back to the hideous reptilian creatures that had chased them from the Meander Mill. “Worse than Slithen?”

Triste looked surprised. “Much worse.”

Sylas glanced into the murk of the river and wished he hadn’t asked.

“I guess she’s just tired of waiting for me,” he said, pulling his eyes away.

“No,” said the Scryer. “It’s not you, it’s me.”

“You? Why?”

“Because she doesn’t want to be near me.”

Sylas laughed. “I think that’s a bit—”

“I remind her of her father,” said Triste, stopping his paddling.

“Her father? What makes you say that?” asked Sylas.

“I see it,” said Triste, tapping his tattooed skull. “Whether I want to or not.”

Sylas searched his face. “Is that what you meant this morning … ‘I see more than you think’?”

Triste nodded. “Just bad luck, I suppose. Especially since she was so close to him.”

“She was. Very close,” said Sylas. He gazed ahead. “That’s his coat that she wears all the time.”

Suddenly he felt unforgivably selfish: he had almost forgotten about her father. Over the past few days he had spoken endlessly about finding his mum and Simia had just been doing her best to help – it couldn’t have been easy for her. Was that why she had said nothing to him about Triste? Because he was too wrapped up in his own problems? His own mother? At least his mum was still alive.

Poor Simsi.

As though sensing Sylas’s darkening mood, the bright winter sun faded above their heads, not because it was late but because a blanket of grey cloud had rolled in, obscuring it from view. The forest too seemed drained of its colour, losing it to the thirsty grey skies. Its bare canopy no longer rang with the sounds of its residents, but had fallen silent and still – a stillness that they knew.

The Barrens were drawing near.

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“High upon the headland stood a tiny girl, turning Neptune’s owntempestto her will.”

AS SYLAS’S PADDLING FINALLY grew more confident, Triste no longer insisted on following him and drew alongside. When he thought he might not be noticed, Sylas could not resist the occasional glance over at the Scryer – and most of all at the strange tattoos around his scalp. He was drawn to the two mutilated eyes – the ones where the skin seemed to have been burned or twisted until they had lost their shape, almost as though they had been closed behind mangled lids.

“If you’re so interested, you should ask,” grunted Triste without turning.

Sylas dropped his gaze, horrified that he had been seen. But then, of course he had been seen.

“I was just wondering what happened to your tattoos,” he said. “The eyes … the ones that look … burned?”

Triste let out a long sigh. “I tried to close my Scrying eyes. It was the first time I ever used Kimiyya. It’ll be the last, I can assure you.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” said the Scryer with a bitter laugh. “I became tired of seeing as a Scryer sees. Like I told Simia, wars are no place for Scryers. Normal people see all the violence and the death and the suffering, which is awful enough. We see great tides of anguish and oceans of hate. We see despair and loss surging like great waves over the battlefield.” He looked at Sylas with his dark, tired eyes. “You see the broken bodies; we see the breaking of hearts again and again and again until the entire world seems full of sadness and pain and grief, until there is nowhere to hide, no hope of sleep. Until all we can dream about is being able to close our eyes.”

Sylas had stopped paddling several strokes back, and now just gazed at Triste as he rowed on. He hadn’t really thought about what had been said by the lake – he had been too consumed by his own emotions – but now he understood. What a torture it must have been to be a Scryer during the Reckoning. He thought back to Bowe at the Meander Mill, struggling with the gathered emotion even of a Say-So … what must it have been like when people were gathered to kill and be killed. He shuddered. How insensitive his question seemed now.

He dug in with his paddle and set out after Triste, but he could not quite bring himself to draw alongside. He felt too ashamed.

They travelled on in silence, passing deeper into the dreary landscape, and only spoke again when they finally caught up with Simia. As they rounded a bend, they saw that she had pulled into the outside bank, her red hair sharp against the drabness of the forest. Sylas noticed how quickly he was gliding between the trees and saw that the entire river was surging forward, swirling and churning as it veered around the bend.

And then they heard the unmistakable roar and thunder of rapids. The air became cool and moist and carried traces of spray, as though to warn them of what lay ahead. When they drew near to Simia, they found themselves having to back-paddle to control their speed.

The river divided, turning slowly away to the right while the left bank fell away down a slope, spilling the winter flood in a deluge of frothing, bubbling water over the rough ground beyond. They could not see all the way down, but even in the topmost stretch there were giant standing waves, deep, churning whirlpools and great eruptions of angry foam.

“This should be a bit more interesting!” grinned Simia over the roar.

“We won’t be taking the rapids,” said Triste firmly. “We’ll follow the meander – the two stretches join up again later.”

Simia’s face fell. “We took the meander on the Windrush – it took ages!”

“The canoes are fast enough. And anyhow, we’re going downstream now.”

“But the rapids will be so much quicker!”

“And much more dangerous,” said Triste, his tone final. “The stakes are too high to take that kind of risk.”

“Well, I’m going down the rapids,” announced Simia, launching herself out from under the trees. She plunged her paddle into the water and wheeled the canoe around. “Sylas, are you coming?”

Sylas dropped his head between his shoulders. “Simia,” he sighed. “Triste’s right, and anyway I’m not as good in a canoe as you are.”

“You’ll be fine. It can’t be very long.” She looked from one to the other. “Look, if you won’t come I’ll go on my own and meet you later.”

“Simsi, it just doesn’t make—”

“Oh, come on, Sylas,” cajoled Simia, pushing back into the main current. “Think of everything we’ve done together! This is nothing!”

Later, Sylas would struggle to understand why he gave in. Perhaps it was because he was still feeling a little guilty about her father, or because he didn’t want her to think him a coward, or because he was genuinely worried that she would attempt the rapids alone. Whatever the case, it went against all his better judgement.

He shrugged and said: “OK.”

Triste whirled about in disbelief. He grabbed Sylas’s boat. “Don’t, Sylas! It’s insane!”

“It’ll be OK,” said Sylas with more confidence than he felt. “We’ll take it one stage at a time. Anyway, you heard her, if we don’t go she’ll try it alone.”

“Let her!” shouted the Scryer. “You’re too important to risk this kind of nonsense!”

“Yeah, because I don’t matter! I’m just here for the ride!” said Simia, with fire in her eyes. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

Triste let out a long, exasperated sigh.

“Come on, Sylas, let’s get going,” said Simia, heading off in the direction of the rapids.

Sylas looked from Simia to the Scryer, then dipped his paddle.

Then he said: “Let’s just get this over with,” he said.

It was a tumult of rocks and stones and trees. Naeo was thrown this way and that, hurled from bank to boulder, slammed against tree and trench, as she snaked across the forest floor.

The pain in her back was almost unbearable as the scars were snagged and pummelled, but she closed her eyes and pushed it from her mind. There was no time for pain – no time to think – this was all instinct: instinct for earth and forest.

She felt the ground beneath her and the trees above, the folds of soil and root, the barest beginnings of bank and slope and drop. They were part of her now.

Her father’s words echoed in her mind: “I see the hearts of men, but you see so much more! You see Nature herself!”

And so she did. It had always been this way, since she could remember. When her thoughts and feelings reached into the world around her, they found their true home. They became lost in the currents of streams, the pulse of animals and the fibre of living things. And yet she did not feel lost. In fact, it was like opening her eyes wide – like seeing the world true and clear, with its thriving mesh of connections: mighty trunk to tiny leaf; raindrop to raging sea.

And she did not just see these connections, she felt them.

The forest wrapped itself around her thoughts and bowed before her feelings. She flew across moss and leaves as though they lay down before her, shaping themselves to her will. The stream carried her at impossible speeds, banking left, then right, then heaving her into the air before catching her on a mossy bank and sending her on, down the hill. Ahead, a constant flux of trees, bracken and bush warped as though seen through a lens: shifting and arching, turning and stretching, drawing her on and on and on.

It was like no Groundrush that Ash had ever seen. Not that he saw much of it, because he spent most of his time on his face, or peering between his knees, or with his eyes pressed closed, pleading for it to end. It was slicker, faster, more savage than anything he and his friends had conjured in their youth. This was no childish toy. This was the unbridled force of nature.

And that was not all. Somehow, by some new trick, Naeo was forging the Groundrush even as they careered down the hillside, feeling out the route in an instant and clearing the path ahead in what seemed the blink of an eye. But there was something else that Ash had never seen before: the Groundrush did not take the quickest path down the slope but traversed it, following not the simplest route but the one that travelled the greatest distance, threading between obstacles, keeping them high, allowing them to whisk along the shoulder of one hill until they joined up with another, avoiding the valleys, hollows and dells.

He was lost in an endless tumult of water, leaves and undergrowth, his limbs flapped about him and his mass of curls were plastered across his face, but Ash knew that everything was as Naeo wished it to be. Somehow, by some miracle of Essenfayle, she was taking them all the way to the Barrens.

Icy waves scythed like teeth, thrashing the side of Sylas’s canoe, sending the bow leaping into the air. Then it turned and twisted, plummeting downwards into a deep grey hole, almost pitching him overboard. As the hull ploughed into the depths, he dropped the paddle and clung to the sides. The river spat him back out, but only sent him lurching backwards into a whirlpool, spinning him round once, twice, and then slamming the boat against a wall of water. He heard Triste somewhere behind him.

“The paddle!” he screamed. “Use the paddle!”

Sylas reached down and grabbed it from the bottom of the boat, but when he jabbed it over the side, it flailed in nothingness – he had been launched high into the air and the paddle simply wafted through the spray. When he looked down the length of the hull, he saw to his horror a gigantic wall of foam. It was the surface of the river, far below him. He felt a sickening sensation of weightlessness, his stomach rising into his chest.

Then a crack on the side of the head.

The last thing he saw was his rucksack flying over his shoulder.

She could see them now – just there, ahead – unfolding in endless waves of grey. The Barrens beckoned like an open grave, calling them on past the last few skeletons of trees. And yet to Naeo, they seemed far away, as though they were behind a sheet of glass, because something was happening to her – something deep inside her. It sucked the air from her lungs and whipped her thoughts into a frenzy. It was a gathering, terrifying, all-consuming panic.

The moment it gripped her, she lost control. The path ahead fogged as quickly as her thoughts, the little stream spilled haphazardly down the hillside, the curtain of shrubs twisted back into shape, the ground once again became rutted and treacherous. And although she saw this, she could do nothing. She was still behind the sheet of glass, her mind and body fighting some unseen horror. She opened her mouth to scream but in that instant her feet caught a rock and she was thrown high into the air, somersaulting over a line of blackened bushes and sent sprawling into the grey mud beyond.

All was silence, blackness and cold. Bone-shattering, skin-pinching cold.

Sylas tumbled in the dark, a massive force pushing him ever downwards. Currents clawed at his clothes and forced water into his mouth and nose. He felt his body flip over and over until something hard and solid smashed against his shoulder. He cried out in a gush of bubbles and then, to his horror, he realised that he had no air in his lungs. He thrashed the water, but it was futile – he had no idea which way was up.

Then, suddenly, a shimmering glow. Not so much light as the promise of it – a lessening of the blackness. And in the midst of the shade and shadow, something sharp and distinct: a hard, black edge.

A shape. A hand.

It grabbed him by the chest – or was it his throat? – he could not tell. All that mattered was that in the midst of the tumult and the horror, something – somebody – had hold of him. He could feel their strength heaving him up, fighting all that would drag him down.

As his lungs were about to burst and his eyes bulged, his world erupted with a blinding light, a rage of noise. But these things he hardly noticed, because at the same moment he heaved air into his lungs – wonderful, beautiful, life-giving air that flooded his floundering body with energy and purpose. He threw his hands up, dug his fingers into something soft, and clung on. As the intensity of the light faded he saw a new shape, a face, peering down at him, shouting something.

“I’ve got you!” said the voice. “I’ve got you!”

Naeo hit the ground hard, slamming her shoulder into the hard-packed earth. She tumbled over and over in mud and twigs and dirt, twisting awkwardly and catching her knee on a stone as she went. She yelped with pain and threw out her hands, clawing at all that flew past, trying desperately to stop.

Finally she slid to a halt, spluttering into the mud, gasping for breath. She lifted her head and heaved air into her lungs.

And then she heard heavy steps pounding the earth behind her. Strong hands turned her over and a face peered down. It was plastered in mud and pale with fright.

“I’ve got you!” Ash panted. “I’ve got you!”

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“The Suhl are a people of two parts: of dark and light, of loss and hope. They suffer the Undoing, but they are the last to beundone.”

THEY SAT SHIVERING AT the water’s edge, neither of them saying a word. Simia was hunched forward, her elbows resting on her knees and her wet hair a curtain around her face, hiding her features from view. Sylas simply stared out at the endless bubbling churn that had so nearly taken his life. He felt at once impossibly weary and intensely alive, as though these were the first few moments of a new life: precious and fragile. Even the throbbing pain in his temple was somehow welcome – it meant he was still here. He felt a trickle of blood rolling down his cheek and did not wipe it away. He savoured its warmth, its tickling touch.

He looked upstream and saw the splintered remains of his canoe laid over a boulder, and a little nearer, the wreckage of Simia’s, which barely looked like a boat at all. The only recognisable part was the tip of the bow, hanging from a low-lying branch like lifeless fruit.

He looked over at Simia and saw how she had folded into herself, alone and shivering and full of shame. He knew he should be angry with her but he wasn’t. He was just glad she was there; broken and bruised, but there.

“You have to get warm!” said Triste, emerging suddenly from the bushes. He dumped a load of firewood by their feet and immediately set about making a fire. “Get your heavy clothes off – quickly! Lay them over the rocks by the fire.”

By some miracle, the Scryer’s flint and tinder were dry and within moments he had started the fire. When Sylas and Simia had laid their clothes out on the rocks, they joined him, warming themselves by the flames. Still no one spoke.

When their fingers had warmed a little, they busied themselves checking through their belongings. Sylas found his bag drenched but intact and with a sinking heart he opened the drawstring and reached for the Samarok. The cover felt strangely dry and as he leafed through its pages, he found them surprisingly untouched by the waters.

Finally they all sat back in silence, basking in the radiance of the flames as they grew into a blaze. Simia stared blankly into the flickering light.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, finally. Her voice was just a whisper. She lifted her face and looked at Sylas with tears in her eyes. “So … so sorry.”

Sylas reached across and took her hand. It was as cold as stone. He knew that she had tried to come back for him, that she had only fallen in because she was trying to reach him – Triste had mumbled that much – but he had no idea how long she had been in the water. By the feel of her, it had been far, far too long.

“It’s OK, Simsi,” he said. “We got out of it, didn’t we?”

“Barely,” grunted Triste.

Simia turned to the Scryer. “I’m really sorry,” she repeated. “I don’t know what we’d have done without you.”

“You’d have drowned!” growled Triste, fixing her with his piercing blue eyes. “And the hopes of the Suhl would have drowned with you!”