The Waters Rising Read Online Free PDF Page A

There she stopped, throwing a frantic look over her shoulder. She could not remember coming through the kitchen garden, she could not remember unlocking the gate, yet how could she have come this far without unlocking the gates? Above and behind her, Woldsgard Tower thrust its prodigious arm into the darkness, the five clustered bird lofts at its top holding back the moonlit clouds in the east. Lights burned up there in the lofts, softly yellow, and she choked down a customary sorrow at the thought of the one who lit them and watched there through the night. No time for sorrow. No time. Lost, everything lost.
    She had come this far twice before, she reminded herself. The first time, her journey had ended in panicked flight back to the safety of the walls when the white stone had spoken to her. The Woman Upstairs had said nothing about speaking stones. The second time, the stone had been blessedly silent and she had gone farther into the wood, though threatened at every step by the same shadows that were piled around her tonight. They lay under the trees like pools of troubled smoke, moving uneasily as though something hungry swam within them. The thought of the possible swimmers shriveled her heart, which caught; her throat, which closed; her eyelids, which squeezed themselves shut.
    “Think,” the wagon driver’s voice whispered in her mind. “Just think.”
    Slowly, she forced both jaws to unclench, eyelids to open, hugging herself tightly. I’ll be very, very quiet. I won’t brush against anything. If I don’t bother them, they won’t bother me.
    A fine resolution, but it was no more helpful than in the past. As she moved down the path the shadows came with her: charred stumps of twisted darkness seeming to writhe in agony like burning creatures, sinuous ropes of tarry blackness that oozed serpent-like from crevices in the rock. Last time she had actually heard them hissing. “Think!” the man had said. Very well, she would think. She would think about being . . . furious! She was not accustomed to anger, but she knew how it felt. She was angry at the sleeping footman who was supposed to keep watch. Angry at the other one who called her names and laughed at her when she cried. Angry at Great Bear, who always, always told her to be quiet and not ask questions. Angry at herself for the strange feelings she had some of the time. Most of the time. So she would be angry! Let the shadows bite her. Let them kill her! Being killed could be no worse than hearing the Woman Upstairs saying, “Xulai! You must do this. My soul hangs upon your loyalty. I am lost if you do not do as I have bid you.”
    “But, but,” she had planned to say, “but Great Bear told me . . .” Great Bear, though he was afraid of nothing, had taught Xulai that fear was appropriate, that she should be afraid of many things: the rear ends of horses; dogs one had never met before; armored men with their visors closed, all in a great rush to get somewhere without looking down. Even as she remembered these warnings, she knew she would rather face an army of murderous horses, furious men, and ravening dogs than spend one more moment among these rippling, crouching, slithering shapes that stopped her breath and froze her legs into immobility.
    Except for that voice! Always before, always, it had been calm, gentle, loving, without harshness, without threat. Tonight it had spoken with tortured despair. It had panted, begged, almost screamed in her mind, inexpressibly agonized, at the very end of its strength. It had said that this was the last, the only time left, or she was lost. Again the word rang, reverberating. Lost . . . lost . . . lost. . .
    “Think!” the wagon man had said. Why else had he come if Ushiloma had not sent him? She must have sent him, so Xulai had to pay attention. Think! No one speaking as the Woman had spoken could be that tired and go on living. Not the bravest or the finest. No one could ask for help from that agony