Dalaay Saad – 1301 – early summer – morning
(Two days later.)
Answers are only new questions.
The artmaster who principally taught me—the one I always imagined was my own mother —used to say that.
I don’t know how, how to start this, there is no beginning that can compass the whole. No way to explain to those who do not already know—I understand now, I am not just writing this for myself. I cannot, for what began as a desire to record those small things that are so unimportant to my kind, so crucial to the lives of human beings...I wanted Talana to understand where she came from, to see both sides. So perhaps from the beginning I wrote this for her. Now it is more.
As usual, I wander from the essential point, which is that our sure knowledge that the myrrim were gone from this world has been proven indubitably false. One of them is here and it is no answer at all.
It seems at first to be an answer, surely: why the old boundary of Simindâr stops so abruptly at the base of the Tiderosc. Why the people of the hills worship a forest god neither of Simindâr, nor of the Nine Kingdoms. Why the wolves have an intelligence like to men. Why I feel a magic here that is not mine, but like it as close kin.
That is as much of what I suspect as I dare reveal. My daughter, if the day comes when you read these...if it is true, it is not that I wished to hide the truth from you. I dared not speak, without proof. Perhaps you will be the one to discover the answers.
Did they parcel out the world, then? Were there more than these who stayed when their kind vanished in the doom that made the Northern Waste? Did each claim a place to be his dominion, with a people and a power to rule? To what have our kind given service?
More questions, with answers I do not wish to know. I can write here that I am afraid. The answers I can imagine make too much sense for my mind to rest upon them.
This one’s name is Eresh. Dalaay Saad is not his home, but here he remembers more clearly who and what he was, and he has told me much. I recall his name and history, more of it, it seems, than he does: how he was renowned in the last days of the myrrim, though he was not one of the Nine; how he was said to have set out on some journey or other, or perhaps quarreled with Myrrine herself, or with Dalrra; how he vanishes from all that has come down to us from that time. His disappearance was taken as such a matter of course that it was scarcely noticed in the tumult that followed.
He has made himself a shadow, and did not wish to show his face. The horns about his head are not mentioned in the legends of the myrrim, but so little is said of him that he might have had three heads with one eye between them and none chanced to remark on it. The myrrim loved to remake themselves.
The wolves brought me to the circle, a walk of almost a full day, and from there departed. They have not gone far. They insisted that I remain within the stones, which made for a very uncomfortable feeling. There is an uneasiness about my skin, as though someone were rubbing it with raw wool. I keep thinking that it is about to storm, but the weather remains clear.
We arrived here yesterday, and here I remained as night fell. He came to just within the stones and made a fire. In its light I caught glimpses of his face. Aside from the horns, he looks like an ordinary man. He might even have been an ordinary man, one that Eresh took from among his worshippers along the border. The myrrim used to do that, too, if the old accounts can be believed.
I cannot set down all that he told me; there is not enough time to write it. Day breaks and I wish to be gone from here. But I have written the most important things, save one: what has happened to my daughter.
I am not sure that I believe what he told me. He said that he came upon her in the woods, and that she attacked him. Possible, though I admit it grudgingly. She is still a child, and she must have been frightened even before she encountered him. He is quite alarming.
He did no more, he says, than protect himself and his from her spell, which otherwise would have burned them to cinders. I did not know that she had such strength in her.
But the worst of all is this: he does not know what he did. I think his wolves take greater thought for what they do than he does. As to how to restore her to herself, he has not the least idea.
So I know what I must do, and though I resist I know the necessity. They may shame me, but what is that when my daughter’s life may be at stake? I will have to go to Simindâr.
First, however, I will stop at home, where they must wonder what has become of me. Perhaps Talana is all right. Perhaps she has awakened.
Perhaps. But I think not.