The Keeping Place Read online

  WITHOUT INTENDING IT, my mind reached out to her.

  Immediately, I felt her awareness of me, but before I could address her mind it spat out a rush of images that flowed so fast I felt my breath taken out of me.

  I tried to deflect her rage, but to my helpless horror, it drove down like a dark fist into the very deepest part of my mind, where my ability to kill lay coiled and almost forgotten.

  I felt her shock as it stirred.

  “No!” I cried in my mind, and thrust her violently from me.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHARACTER LIST

  MAP

  PART I THE WINDING PATH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  PART II THE ROAD TO WAR

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  PART III THE DREAMTRAILS

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ISOBELLE CARMODY

  PREVIEW OF WAVESONG

  EXCERPT FROM THE KEEPING PLACE

  COPYRIGHT

  For my many-talented sister Ellen

  CHARACTER LIST

  Alad: Beastspeaking guildmaster

  Angina: Empath guilden and enhancer; twin brother of Miky

  Aras: young Farseeker guilder

  Ariel: sadistic enemy of Obernewtyn, previously allied with the Herder Faction

  Atthis: Elder of the Agyllians, or Guanette birds; blind futureteller

  Avra: leader of the Beastguild; mountain mare; bondmate to Gahltha

  Bodera: ailing rebel leader in Sutrium; father of Dardelan

  Brocade: rebel leader in Sawlney

  Bruna: Sadorian; daughter of Jakoby

  Brydda Llewellyn (aka the Black Dog): rebel leader allied with Bodera and Dardelan

  Cameo: true-dreaming Misfit, killed by Ariel and his allies

  Cassell: rebel leader in Halfmoon Bay

  Ceirwan: Farseeker guilden

  Daffyd: former Druid armsman; farseeker; unguilded ally of Obernewtyn

  Dameon: blind Empath guildmaster

  Dardelan: rebel leader; son of Bodera

  Dell: Futuretell ward

  Domick: former Coercer ward and bondmate of Kella; living in Sutrium

  Dragon: powerful Empath guilder with coercive Talent; projects illusions; in a coma

  Druid (Henry Druid): renegade Herder Faction priest and enemy of the Council; leader of a secret community that was destroyed in a firestorm

  Elspeth Gordie (aka Innle, the Seeker): Farseeker guildmistress; powerful farseeker, beastspeaker, and coercer, with limited futuretelling and psychokinetic Talent

  Enoch: a coachman; ally of Obernewtyn

  Faraf: pony ridden by Elspeth in the Sadorian Battlegames

  Fian: Teknoguild ward

  Freya: beast empath; enhancer with a powerful effect on others’ Talents

  Gahltha: Beast guilden; bondmate to Avra; a formidable black horse sworn to protect Elspeth

  Garth: Teknoguildmaster

  Gevan: Coercer guildmaster

  Gilaine: daughter of the Druid; beloved of Daffyd

  Grufyyd: bondmate to Katlyn; father of Brydda

  Gwynedd: rebel Norselander; second to Tardis

  Hannay: Coercer guilder

  Idris: young rebel formerly of Aborium; trusted companion to Brydda

  Iriny: halfbreed gypsy; half sister of Swallow

  Jacob Obernewtyn: Beforetimer; wealthy patron of Hannah Seraphim

  Jakoby: Sadorian tribal leader; mother of Bruna

  Javo: Obernewtyn’s head cook

  Jes: Elspeth’s older brother; Talented Misfit killed by soldierguards

  Jik: former Herder novice and Empath guilder with farseeking Talent; died in a firestorm

  Kasanda: deceased spiritual leader of the Sadorians; left signs for the Seeker to help in her quest

  Katlyn: herb lorist living at Obernewtyn; bondmate to Grufyyd; mother of Brydda

  Kella: Healer guilden with slight empath Talent; former bondmate to Domick

  Lina: young, troublemaking beastspeaker

  Louis Larkin: unTalented highlander; inhabitant of Obernewtyn; honorary Beastspeaking guilder

  Lukas Seraphim: first Master of Obernewtyn, which he built on Beforetime ruins; Rushton’s grandfather; deceased

  Madellin: ailing rebel leader in Port Oran

  Maire: gypsy healer; grandmother of Swallow and Iriny

  Malik: rebel leader in Guanette

  Marisa Seraphim: second wife of Lukas Seraphim; researcher who knew location of Beforetime weaponmachines; deceased

  Maruman (aka Yelloweyes): one-eyed cat prone to fits of futuretelling; Elspeth’s oldest friend

  Maryon: Futuretell guildmistress

  Matthew: Farseeker ward

  Merret: Coercer guilder with beastspeaking Talent

  Miky: Empath guilden; twin sister of Angina; gifted musician

  Miryum: Coercer guilden

  Pavo: former Teknoguild ward; died of rotting sickness

  Powyrs: rebel sea captain

  Radek: rebel leader in Morganna

  Reuvan: rebel seaman from Aborium; Brydda’s right-hand man

  Roland: Healer guildmaster

  Rosamunde: one-time lover of Jes; unTalented inhabitant of Obernewtyn

  Rushton: Master of Obernewtyn; latent Talent

  Salamander: secretive, ruthless leader of the slave trade

  Sallah: rebel mare; companion to Brydda

  Selmar: Talented Misfit and one-time ally of Rushton; killed by Ariel

  Swallow: Twentyfamilies gypsy and heir to D’rektaship

  Tardis: rebel leader in Murmroth

  Yavok: rebel leader in Aborium

  Zarak: Farseeker guilder; previously a Beastspeaking guilder

  Zidon: horse ridden by Malik in the Sadorian Battlegames

  PART I

  THE WINDING PATH

  1

  IT WAS A chill, moonless night, the only light a raw glow from the fire in a stone-lined pit that reflected dully on the cobbles around its edge. Everything that lay outside the reach of the fire’s brooding lume was lost in that blackest shadow that seems to attend any night light. Sometimes it seems to me that the dark is drawn to the light, as a moth to flame. Maybe it is the nature of all things to be pulled toward their opposites.

  I dragged my eyes from the hypnotic lurching of the flames, determined to read on while I was yet undisturbed. Holding the pages instinctively to the light, though the marks on them would have been all but invisible even in daylight, I ran the tips of my fingers over the rough lines of holes in the paper. I had learned the code of prickings much as I once learned my letters, and I knew the words they shaped, yet skimming over what I had read before, it seemed that other meanings hovered above them.

  Perhaps this was only because he who had made them did not see the world with his eyes but with his other senses. I could smell and hear and taste, too
, of course, but not as well as Dameon. Since he lacked sight, his other senses had gained strength to compensate.

  When he had pricked the pages he had been sending me, had Dameon realized more than the words he set down? Knowing him, I could not doubt it, for he was ever subtle. As an empath, he had the power to read emotions and transmit them, yet I had always attributed his keen perception to his blindness rather than to his Talent. Of course, it was impossible to try to separate their effect on him, for together they made Dameon what he was.

  I missed the empath, and perhaps that was what made me strive for the essence of him within his letter, carrying it about with me despite its bulk and snatching what moments I might to read a few lines. With him gone, it was as if Obernewtyn had lost something vital to itself, some necessary spark so modest as to reveal its importance only in its absence. I did not know what name to give to it. Miky said we lacked our heart without him, and Angina said it was the soul we missed with their master away. Rushton called Dameon his conscience and regretted the loss of his sharp-honed ethical sense. But I thought it had some finer shading than all of those things. To my mind, Kella told it best when she said she missed Dameon’s sweetness.

  “Funaga-li need names for all things, even that which cannot be named,” Maruman sent from where he lay on the bench seat behind me.

  The old cat used the derogatory form of funaga, which was the thoughtsymbol beasts used for humans, but his mental voice lacked its usual bite. No doubt because he had been lolling in the sun all afternoon.

  “Maruman does not loll,” he sent indignantly. I turned to find his single yellow eye regarding me balefully, but the rest of him—his many scars, his battered head and torn ear, the empty socket of his ruined eye—was hidden in my shadow and the general darkness.

  He was bad-tempered and difficult at the best of times, yet there was no beast so close to my heart. His had been the first mind I touched with my own. Later, he had followed me to Obernewtyn, convinced that I was destined to lead beasts to freedom from humans. I had long argued with him that I was not the Innle, or “Seeker,” of beastlegend, but I had been called by that title now in too many strange circumstances to reject it outright. Nonetheless, I sometimes wondered why, desiring freedom from humans, beasts would want a human savior.

  “One does not want a tree or the sky, but they are. No more do beasts desire a funaga to lead them. But we accept/know/see what is/will be. Unlike the funaga always asking whywhywhy,” Maruman sent rudely. “Funaga-li rushrush body and mind here/there/other-where to prove they exist.”

  I made no response other than to give the old cat’s intrusive probe a mental shove to shift it outside my mindshield, much as I sometimes pushed him from my lap when my knees had grown stiff from his weight. But he was right. We humans did seem to love our busyness for its own sake. Possibly it was the nature of our kind, for though our thoughts did flurry here and there, from that frenzy came whatever shaped us.

  I smiled at myself wryly, for was I not guilty now of another human trait, which was to take ourselves too seriously, ever devising clever ways to prove to ourselves that all we do is vital simply because we do it?

  My smile faded, for it came to me that this very characteristic was responsible for the doom that the Beforetimers had brought to their world. “Their” world—I always found it difficult to think of them as our ancestors, even though all who live in the time after the Great White were descended from the survivors of the holocaust and dwell in what little remains habitable of their world.

  What we knew of them was incomplete and difficult to understand, being gleaned from ruinous bits and pieces left over from their time, most of it utterly disconnected from whatever context gave it meaning. We knew that they were very numerous and had divided themselves into a number of great nations. We knew their civilization had spanned the world and they had ruthlessly used nature for their gain and their amusement, to the detriment of all nonhumans.

  We knew from the Teknoguild’s researches that they had created machines that enabled them to think with incredible speed, fly and speak from one land to another, and build their cities of shining towers. This ability to make machines whose powers exceeded their own had been the secret of their might, but it had led them into folly, for they had made weaponmachines that had finally put an end to all their terrible cleverness.

  I wondered what had possessed them to create the means of their own doom. How had they not lived in terror that the machines would be used? The Teknoguildmaster Garth said it was pride that led them to create such things and believe they could control them, but that did not explain why to my satisfaction. For their wars, Rushton said. To be sure they would win. But what good was a weapon that destroyed everything, including its user? There could be no winner in such a game. Yet they had made them and used them, and so had they severed themselves from us and become naught by the mythical beings of stories and nightmares.

  Some said it did not matter that our memory of them was fragmented and fantastical, since their time was gone forever, along with all they wrought.

  I wished that were truly so.

  Chilled by where my pondering had brought me, I folded Dameon’s letter into my pocket, arched my back to stretch the ache from it, and gazed about the company beginning at last to assemble. I could see only the parts of them that faced the fire, and at first glance it seemed that disjointed fragments of people and beasts were about me. Things that held the light caught my eye: the gleaming gold of the Beastspeaking guildmaster’s arm-band; the shining curls of the empath-enhancer Freya; the pale shimmer of Avra’s mane and ear tips; and the ruff of the white ridgeback she-dog that sat between them.

  I studied her with interest. The ridgeback had come to the mountains at the melting of the wintertime snow that each year blocked the narrow trail connecting us to the rest of the Land. She had led a great limping horde of half-starved domestic animals. One of the coercers on duty at the pass had notified Obernewtyn of their approach, and Avra had hastened out to meet the unlikely company.

  The mountain pony explained that Obernewtyn was a secret refuge for humans and beasts. The newcomers could find food and healing there, and other help if they wanted it. At first, the travelers had refused the invitation, patently dismayed to learn that the freerunning barud the white she-dog had promised them was occupied by humans. Avra had explained mildly that the humans who dwelt in the valley did not interfere with them. As the travelers were exhausted and in need of food and treatment, she argued persuasively, they might just as well come to Obernewtyn and see for themselves.

  It was the Beastspeaking guildmaster, Alad, who told me their story. They had all come from a farm just below the Gelfort Range. One day, the white ridgeback, Smoke, had turned on her master and killed him. Then she had convinced the other animals to come with her to seek the fabled freerunning barud.

  It was a remarkable journey they had made, all the more because the beasts had no survival skills, being bred and reared by humans. But for the will and determination of the she-dog, they would doubtless have been recaptured or killed by wild beasts, or they would have perished simply because of their inability to shelter and feed themselves. She had made them travel at night, fighting off predators, hunting for food, and forcing those who could not eat meat to forage for roots and grains to sustain them. When they would have given up, she drove them with threats that she would eat them if they fell by the wayside. Arriving in the White Valley at last, they managed to eke out a bare existence waiting for the pass to thaw.

  After their initial disappointment, the beasts began to see that Obernewtyn was not like any funaga place they had known. They were nursed back to health by our healers, and they learned the fingerspeech devised by the rebel Brydda Llewellyn, through which humans could mimic the gestures and movements that animals used to communicate at the most rudimentary level. When Avra finally offered the choice of remaining and working as free beasts and members of Obernewtyn’s community, with the right
to speak in Beastguild, many chose to stay. For those few who wanted to leave, the Beastguild appointed teachers to show them how to survive in the wild.

  The ridgeback had been among those who stayed, though she was clearly capable of fending for herself.

  Without intending it, I reached out to her with my mind. Immediately, I felt her awareness of me, but before I could address her mind, it spat out a rush of images that flowed so fast it took my breath away.

  I saw a man cut the throat of a cow. The red line at its throat was like a gaping mouth, and when the beast fell, a bloody froth stained the snowy ground. I heard the keening anguish of its newborn calf and felt the departing mindforce of the dying cow brush me, felt the sweet sigh of its farewell to her calf and the watching dog. The man turned to lift the tottering calf’s head back, baring its throat, and I felt the hot, terrifying fluidity of the dog’s fury roar through her veins.

  I tried to deflect her rage, but to my helpless horror, it drove down like a dark fist into the very deepest part of my mind, where my most lethal ability lay coiled and almost forgotten.

  I felt her surprise as it stirred.

  “No!” I cried in my mind, and thrust her violently from me.

  I stared across the fire pit into her eyes, which were so pale a blue as to be almost colorless.

  “The master-li killed the bovine and would have killed her calf because it lacked an ear,” she sent in a powerful mental voice. “I do not know why. All beasts know not all of a kind are born alike/exact. None can know what darkness/madness drives the funaga.”

  “Why did you show that to me?” I sent, shaken to the depths of myself by the hot, hungry power that she had almost roused.

  She ignored my question, sending, “Oldstories tell that the Innle who will lead beasts to freedom from the funaga has the power to kill by will alone.”

  “I have that power, but I do not use it,” I temporized.

  “I felt/smelled the use of it on you.”

  “Once only. Knowledge of it first came when the life of my mate was in danger, and I used it to save him. But not now/nevermore.”

  The dog gave the mental equivalent of a shrug. “It is nature to defend one’s mate. It is nature for some beasts to kill and for others to be killed. The funaga are meateaters, and killing is nature for them, but they seldom hunt their meat with courage. They trap/breed/ chain/fence until the killing, which is done without respect/dignity. Beasts eat flesh, but the funaga do what no beast would. Funaga eat freedom.”