The Sending Read online

  Contents

  PART ONE: THE PATH FROM OBERNEWTYN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART TWO: THE HIGH ROAD

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART THREE: THE PERILOUS DREAMTRAILS

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  EPILOGUE

  Characters of the Obernewtyn Chronicles

  Question and Answer with ISOBELLE CARMODY

  Acknowledgements

  Isobelle Carmody began the first of her highly acclaimed Obernewtyn Chronicles while she was still at high school, working on it while completing a Bachelor of Arts, and then a journalism cadetship. The book was shortlisted for the CBC Book of the Year Award for Older Readers. The series, and her short stories, established her at the forefront of fantasy writing in Australia.

  She is now the author of over thirty novels and many short stories for children and adults. The Gathering was the joint winner of the 1993 CBC Book of the Year Award; Darkfall won an Aurealis for Best Fantasy Novel in 1997; Billy Thunder and the Night Gate, volume one in The Gateway Trilogy, was shortlisted for the Patricia Wrightson Prize in the 2001 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards; and Alyzon Whitestarr won a Golden Aurealis in 2006. The Legend of Little Fur was Isobelle’s first series for younger readers, and The Red Wind, first in The Kingdom of the Lost series, was awarded the 2011 CBC Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers.

  Isobelle divides her time between her home on the Great Ocean Road in Australia and her travels abroad with her partner and daughter.

  obernewtyn.com.au

  SERIES BY THE SAME AUTHOR FROM PENGUIN BOOKS

  Other titles in The Obernewtyn Chronicles

  Obernewtyn

  The Farseekers

  Ashling

  The Keeping Place

  The Stone Key

  The Legendsong

  Darkfall

  Darksong

  The Gateway Trilogy

  Billy Thunder and the Night Gate

  The Winter Door

  The Legend of Little Fur

  Little Fur

  A Fox Called Sorrow

  A Mystery of Wolves

  A Riddle of Green

  The Kingdom of the Lost

  The Red Wind

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Scatterlings

  The Gathering

  Green Monkey Dreams

  Greylands

  This Way Out (with Steve Taylor)

  Alyzon Whitestarr

  for my friend Kristin Olson,

  who has all the qualities of a good heroine:

  she can kickbox, she is courageous and clever and

  intrepid, and she has perfect manners.

  PART ONE

  THE PATH FROM OBERNEWTYN

  1

  At the far end of a narrow passage, a yellow light flashed a dull summons in the grainy dimness. The ground underfoot was broken and dangerously uneven, but a sense of urgency drove me on.

  ‘Stop!’ a woman’s voice commanded.

  The murk quivered and thinned and I saw Dragon ahead, sitting on a broken stone column and gazing into an ornamental pond surrounded by a terrace of cracked paving stones. A wall mosaic half-obscured by a shaggy creeper rose up behind her and the full moon floated in the pool at her feet, its light limning her face and hair silver.

  ‘Dragon,’ I murmured, marvelling as ever at her astonishing beauty.

  It was no more than a whisper but she looked up, her lips curving into a smile. I felt a stab of sorrow, for though she had once regarded me as a beloved older sister, it was long since she had looked on me with anything but fear and mistrust. A breeze lifted her red-gold hair and moved over the surface of the water, sending ripples out beyond the edges of the pool.

  This is a dream, I thought.

  I tried to wake but a forest clearing wove itself into a living cage about me, the breeze that fanned my cheeks pungent with the scent of pine needles. A figure appeared before me suspended above the ground, emanating pallid lavender light. Human-shaped but scaled like a fish or a lizard, its eyes were a queer cloudy white, its hair insubstantial as mist.

  ‘Guildmistress, help us.’

  I drew in a breath of astonishment, for the voice of the spirit-form was that of the empath Angina. ‘What do you want of me?’

  ‘The black sword,’ he answered. ‘You must use it to save Miky.’

  ‘I am dreaming,’ I told him and willed myself to ascend until I was floating above the clouds through which the pale eldritch dreamtrails wound. I had taken on my winged spirit-form, though I had not wrought the change. A vague sense of unease nudged at me, but I continued to rise until the dreamtrails were barely visible. I had never thought it possible to go higher than them.

  The world blurred to misty swathes of colour that bled into one another in a rhythm that mesmerised my senses. I felt myself relaxing and blurring like the colours about me.

  Then a shadow fell over me.

  Once, in madness, Dragon had taken on the spirit-form of her dreadful namesake to attack me on the dreamtrails, and the memory made me instinctively dive for safety. I flung back a probe to discover what hunted me but could find no mind to engage, there was only a vast gaping darkness full of brutish thrashing power. I tried to retract my probe, but a deadly lethargy flowed along it from the darkness to sap my will.

  My descent slowed as darkness grew and thickened about me. Terror fluttered in my throat, frantic as a bird trapped in a chimney, but I could not summon the will to quicken my fall.

  ‘To wake is the only escape,’ a voice whispered urgently into my ear.

  ‘I can’t make myself go down!’ I cried. ‘Help me!’

  There was no answer, but a second later a blur of violet streaked with red and blue appeared beside me. The energy flowing from it told me it was a spirit-form, but I could not see it clearly for I was still within the realm of merging colour. I felt it reach out to grasp my hand, and then it dived, dragging me with it towards the dreamtrails. I felt the darkness striving furiously after us. Terror broke my paralysis and I threw myself downwards, dragging the spirit-form with me. Even so, the darkness would have had us if I had kept diving towards distant consciousness, but the violet spirit-form suddenly wrenched me sideways into a dream of a black road running across a moonlit, bone-white desert.

  I was floating above the desert and could now see that the other spirit-form was a fiercely beautiful violet-coloured man with a black wolf’s head and wings of red fire. The beastman’s eyes shone like burning embers and he spoke to me in a harsh misshapen whisper. ‘Wake you fool! Wake now, before you draw it to you!’

  Then he vanished and the darkness formed claws and tore open the dream of moonlit desert and black road as easily as if it were parchment, exposing me. Instead of fleeing, I closed my eyes and used every bit of strength and will I possessed to coerce myself awake.

  I opened my eyes to the distant sound of thunder and a shattering headache.

  Later, as I made my way through the greenthorn maze that separated the main buildings of Obernewtyn fro
m the farms, the headache was only just beginning to fade. I dismissed the long, fragmented dream as yet another nightmare in a period when my sleep had been more unsettled than usual. Yet I could not forget the terrible helpless passivity that prevented me from waking.

  ‘I was not trying to wake,’ I muttered to the fragrant greenthorn hedges. ‘I was dreaming of trying to wake.’

  Coming to the end of the maze, I glanced up at the dark clouds brooding on the mountains visible above the wall surrounding Obernewtyn. I hoped the storm they harboured would hold off until evening, but there was no predicting weather patterns. Over the years since I had come to Obernewtyn, the weather seemed to have become ever more chaotic, though the incidence of firestorms had lessened.

  I was about to take one of the worn tracks leading away from the maze gate when I noticed Gavyn kneeling by a tree at the bottom of a slight slope running down to the nearest orchard, gazing intently into the face of the enormous pale ridgeback, Rasial. If it had been anyone else, I would have gone down to ask what she was doing, for Gavyn had no beastspeaking Talent. Indeed, these days he hardly seemed to take in what was said to him and Rasial never responded to any communication from humans except during the Beastguild meetings which she presided over in the absence of its true guildmistress, the mountain mare Avra.

  I turned to make my way towards the scatter of farm buildings that lay between the maze gate and the wall surrounding Obernewtyn, pondering the friendship that had grown up between the unlikely pair. In my opinion, Gavyn’s attachment to Rasial was not a reflection of the boy’s inclination to beasts, as the Beastspeaking guildmaster believed. Nor did I consider that he had thralled the she-dog, even if that would explain why she rarely left his side. In truth I could not imagine the bitter, iron-willed canine being enthralled by anyone or anything.

  Thralling was the name we had recently given to the rare and difficult blend of coercion and empathy, but there were too few possessing it to warrant a guild. Indeed, the only other enthraller at Obernewtyn was Freya, and her Talent was not something that could be controlled. In practice it enhanced the Talents of those about her, but she could not prevent herself enhancing nor specifically direct her Talent. She simply affected anyone within her limited range. Aside from Gavyn and Freya, I had known only three other enthrallers. One was the infant Lidgebaby, whose fledgling power I had encountered when held captive by the renegade priest Henry Druid. The second was Dragon, whom I had rescued from a feral existence among Beforetime ruins, but Dragon’s Talent worked exclusively upon humans.

  The third enthraller was my nemesis, Ariel.

  As far as I knew, Gavyn was the only one who could direct his enthralling powers to affect beasts and humans alike, although he had shown no interest in learning how to manage or strengthen his abilities. What we knew about his Talent came from observation and from all his nursemaid, Seely, had told us.

  She had fled from the west coast with her young charge after discovering that Gavyn’s stepmother intended to report him to the Herder priests as a Misfit. I had discovered them hiding not an hour’s ride from Obernewtyn. That was the first time I had witnessed Gavyn’s use of his Talent, exerted in an attempt to keep me from finding them. The second time he had used it to transfer the disruptive maternal fixation of an orphaned owl from the healer Kella to himself. His nursemaid was one of the few humans the boy had communicated with willingly, and after her departure to the west coast with a Teknoguild expedition, he had withdrawn so deeply into himself that it had given me some concern, until he had formed his mysterious bond with Rasial.

  Remembering how intently he had looked at the she-dog, I wondered suddenly if they had found some new way to communicate. At Obernewtyn, we were always alert for new Talents, or for new ways of using old ones. I would have given much to be able to discuss what I had seen with an empath, but the Empath guildmaster had yet to return to Obernewtyn, and the twins who mastered the guild in his absence were ill.

  Thinking of the twins reminded me of my dream of a spirit-formed Angina. It was no surprise that I had dreamed of the Empath guilden. The boy had been ailing ever since he had been wounded during the rebellion that had seen the fall of the oppressive Council that once ruled the Land. The wound had long since healed, yet somehow Angina had not. His decline had been inexorable, and for weeks now he had lain in a coma, unreachable even by a healer drawn deep into his mind by a futureteller. Only the previous day, the Healer guildmaster had told me that he had expected Angina to die long since.

  ‘It is as if he clings to life,’ Roland had growled. ‘I cannot think why, when he is aware of no one and nothing now.’

  Angina’s mysterious decline was tragic enough, but as if their fates were connected, as some superstitions about twins suggested, Angina’s sister Miky had recently fallen ill too, and now she lay in a bed alongside her brother. No doubt it was my visit to the Healing Hall the day before that had sparked the dream of Angina begging me to save his sister. I had gone chiefly to see if there was any improvement in the girl’s condition, but I went first to her brother’s bedside. Seeing Angina lying so frail and white, shadows under his eyes as dark as bruises, it had been hard to remember that this was the same young man who had competed so gallantly alongside me in the Sadorian Battlegames. Yet the sight of his sister moments later had shocked more than saddened me, for Miky had been ill only a sevenday, yet she looked near as wasted as her brother.

  ‘Hannay believes she is dying of grief for Angina, but although she loves the lad as maybe only one twin can love another, I do not see Miky as the sort to die of love,’ Roland said, after we’d left their chamber. His voice had been tight with anger, which I knew sprang from his powerlessness to help the girl. He had put the twins in a small chamber away from the main hall because initially Angina had been disturbed by the emotions of the other patients. Neither he nor his sister would now be disturbed by anything, I thought bleakly, as we returned to the large Healing Hall where most patients lay.

  ‘How long does he have left?’ I asked.

  Roland scowled, telling me he had no idea but that however long it took he doubted Miky would long survive her brother.

  It was the healer’s bleak words coupled with my dream of Angina asking me to help his sister that had prompted me to scribe a letter to Dameon that morning, despite my headache. I had asked the Empath guildmaster to return to Obernewtyn as soon as possible. It was not a decision I had made lightly. Dameon and the master of Obernewtyn were in Sutrium, meeting with the two high chieftains of the reunited Land, and with representatives from the Norselands and Sador, concerning the expedition that was to be mounted to the distant Red Queen’s land before wintertime. According to the futuretellers, the expedition was vital to the safety of the Land, and Rushton relied upon Dameon’s counsel, but the empath had a right to know how things were with his guilden. I did not think he could help Angina but he might be able to discover what ailed the boy’s sister and save her.

  I had sent Hannay to the lowlands with the missive, knowing it had been killing him to sit helplessly by while the girl he loved mysteriously faded away.

  My thoughts circled back to Gavyn and Rasial as I came in sight of the gate that led through the wall surrounding Obernewtyn to the thick wood beyond. When Rasial had arrived at Obernewtyn leading a motley band of farm beasts after killing her brutal master, she had made no secret of her disappointment at finding humans where she had thought to find none. That no human at Obernewtyn owned any beast or regarded them as a lesser form of life had not consoled her, nor had she been reassured that many of us could communicate with animals. Chillingly, she had told me that she had come to Obernewtyn to seek her death. Yet she had stayed on, forging her inseparable if incomprehensible bond with Gavyn and even serving as Avra’s replacement as mistress of the Beastguild.

  As if summoned up by my thoughts of his mate, Gahltha appeared at the gate, his silken mane floating back from his long dark neck. As he cantered towards me, I felt a fierce su
rge of joy at the sight of him, and when he came to a halt beside me, scolding me for my tardiness, I mounted meekly.

  Fastening the bag of supplies to my belt, I sat back comfortably to signal that there was no need for haste since I had warned Ceirwan that I would not be back until dusk. But Gahltha wheeled and broke into a brisk trot that had me straightening my back and tightening my knees. The black stallion had taught me to ride and was wont to test me if he felt I was riding carelessly, though maybe now he was only eager to begin our long-awaited jaunt. I had been promising to go out with him since our return from Sador, without being able to find the time for it. In truth, the pleasure I would take in the ride was not my primary reason for it.

  There were two trails leading away from the farm gate. One ran along the wall to the main gate, and joined the road that went to the mountain pass leading to the lowlands. The other trail wove a little way through the forest then forked. One fork led to the great mound of stones and boulders that surmounted the caves where the Teknoguild had established their hall, and the other ran towards the high mountains. Gahltha chose the latter and broke into a canter. Thereafter he alternated walking with cantering or galloping hard whenever there was a stretch that allowed it. Many smaller paths and trails led away from the main path and he chose whichever his mood dictated, save that he always advanced up the valley towards the high mountains.

  Fingers tangled into his mane and legs firmly about his body, I relished not having to decide the route almost as much as I enjoyed the exercise after so much talk and so many meetings. It was all too easy to be swallowed up by the demands of ruling a settlement as complex as Obernewtyn had become. In truth I dreaded how much busier it was likely to be once it was officially a settlement, or more specifically, the walled heart of a settlement. Rushton’s idea was to allow a village to grow up outside the walls, and to gradually demolish the wall until the village and what had been Obernewtyn were knitted together.