They did not go down to Farbourand. The outpost, the farthest extent of the forest kingdoms’ influence, was sheathed entirely in the demon’s mark, and within the bowed palisade some huge, single thing rocked and bleated, its bloated, rounded mass visible over the wall, filling almost all the space. They passed on quickly and for once the sorcerer sought no closer study.
Soon after, Allwer stated they were close to the demon’s house, and with evening coming they made camp.
“If we make a fire, will it know?” Lyn asked, but Nyrgoth had no answer. He had been quiet all day, sunk into himself. Now he could only say, “I don’t know. I can’t say anything about this. I don’t know why I don’t know.” And then, just as she was drawing back with the resolution to pass a cold night as best she could, he gripped her wrist.
She froze. Is it now? Does he demand some price from me, or else he’ll leave us here? He wasn’t looking at her, though; the fingers seemed to have acted of their own volition.
“I will need time, tonight,” he said awkwardly. “But I cannot just go and find my own camp, away from here. I need to face the enemies that lie within me, like before. And I am afraid, Lyn. Lynesse. Because of what we have seen, and because of my own ignorance. I should be the master of any strangeness in this world, because my people know the secrets of the universe. We travel the night sky and craft objects of power and change our very bodies so that we are no longer heir to the frailties of humanity. And yet I am in this forest with you, and the darkness between the trees is just as fearsome to me.” His voice was flat, the affectless tone fighting against the actual words he used.
“What do you need, Elder?” she asked him. “What can I do?” Here it comes, and I will have no chance but to pay his price.
But he just said, “I don’t know. It wasn’t like this with Astresse. I am going to feel, Lyn. And it will hurt. And I won’t want to go on. I won’t want to do anything. And if it gets very bad, I may just want to die. And I can only tell you these things because my protections hold. I can be so very dispassionate about these things, right now. But the reckoning has come. I can’t hide from it, and I will need to think clearly tomorrow.”
Lyn thought about feeling, the good and the bad of it. “We will have no fire tonight,” she said, “but we can have the things the firelight brings, when friends are together in a hard place. And perhaps that will help you feel other things, better things.”
He stared at her blankly, and she went to talk to the others.
Later, she saw the moment that he withdrew his iron control: no grand outburst, no railing at the sky, just an inwards hunching to him, a sagging of his head. He was doing his very best to hide it, she realised, because shame is a feeling, too. So, when she spoke, it was not to him but to Esha and Allwer, and what she told was a story.
Lyn had grown up on stories. She was in this mess, this self-appointed duty on her shoulders, precisely because of them. When a thing like this demon arose, a princess of the blood should step forth to combat it. That was how the world was supposed to be. And so she told such a story, some princess of the dawn age, some other threat, met with steel and bold words and a defiant spirit. She made the best performance of it she could, remembering how such tellings had made her feel, sitting at her mother’s knee back when she was too young to know any better.
Esha took over then, giving them one of the Coast-people’s twisting story - in - story - in - stories, full of humiliation for the proud and fortune for the clever. Allwer had what looked to be a story about three brothers at first, but then turned into a spectacularly ribald joke that nobody back home would ever have dared tell a Fourth Daughter. Then it was Lyn’s turn again, and she conjured up another tale of heroes, some time-smudged past era when another demon had come from outside to be faced with courage and blades and the solving of riddles. And so it went, around the circle where the fire should be, and Lyn stole glances at the huddled sorcerer and tried to work out if any of this was having the desired effect. He did not laugh at the joke or at the funny turns in Esha’s tale. He did not seem to rally at her own inspirational hero-talk. And yet she could tell that he listened.
And then, when her turn came about for the third time, she summoned her courage to reach over and touch him on the arm, cocking her head in invitation.
“Very well then.” His voice was slow and bleak, but all the stories had hooked something deep inside him and hauled it up to the air, nonetheless. “I will tell the story of a sorcerer.”
He had told her many things before, that he had plainly expected her not to understand, but which had been entirely transparent to her. Talk of the ancients, of magical workers and familiar spirits, all of it fitting neatly with her own tales and what she knew about the world. This story of his was not like that. She could not follow it, and he told it poorly because to be a magician was not the same thing as being a bard, and who did he have, in his tower, to practice the craft on? He went back on himself or repeated himself, corrections and contradictions and leaps in logic that nobody could quite follow him in. And yet the sense of it came over: there was a sorcerer, but the sorcerer was just a man. He had travelled from the otherworld of the sorcerers, which was the world her ancestors had journeyed from, long ago. He had come to his tower—his outpost, as he called it—to watch and study, and not interfere. But then the other ancients had left and returned to their otherworld and closed its doors behind them, and he ceased to hear their voices through the night sky, and he feared that all his kind, every one of them, had met some dark fate. The craft of travelling the rivers of the sky was lost, many mortal lifetimes ago. He was the last.
And she’d known he was the last of the Elders, but she had never stopped to think what that meant. How terrible it was to know yourself the last of anything.
But, at the end of the telling, something of the burden was gone from him. The set of his body said that the beast still loomed over him, but perhaps it had been driven off a pace or two. Lyn took his hand, and then Esha his other one, and after an awkward moment Allwer made up the circle.
“Tell me of Astresse and Ulmoth,” Nyrgoth said, almost like a child at bedtime. “Tell it to me, the way you know it. Tell me how we were.”
And so Lyn found one last tale within her, and gave the full rendition of the deeds of her glorious ancestor, and told the sorcerer how he was remembered: Nyrgoth Elder, terrible, wise and mighty, whose magic had turned Ulmoth’s behemoths of destruction to mere statues so that Astresse could meet the warlord blade on blade and slay him.
At the end, he was smiling, and weeping also. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “Not really. But your way is better. Keep telling it like that.” And then, after a long time staring at her, “You are not Astresse.”