The Revenants

was built by the wizards – at least / think so. It is protected more powerfully than even Ephraim or I can understand, and we’ve made a bit of a study of the matter. The people of Orena know where this place is, this place and others like it, places older than our histories but seemingly made for this purpose. As for us, well, we would have gone away on a journey of our own long since if we hadn’t had a child full of questions to look after. We were going to leave the summer we found you.’
‘Why didn’t you just take me and go?’
‘If we had gone alone, just the two of us, likely only one of us would have survived the trip. With a baby, it’s likely none of us would have made it. It’s hard to hide a baby, even under an orbansa. Babies cry, you know. They get hungry at inconvenient times. Certain people out there, certain creatures out there, seem to have an appetite for babies and young ones.’
‘They’d have killed me, huh?’
‘They’d have done that, yes. Or worse. Now Ephraim says he’s too fragile to go.’
‘I know. He says the wind plays in his bones.’
‘His bones remember pain. That doesn’t make things easier.’
Jaer thought long on this, unsure whether to be glad that the old men had thought enough of the baby to give up their journey or sad that they had given up so much. It was a thought which came back at intervals as Jaer learned and experienced what the place afforded. In the forests there were many birds and beasts, some of them belonging to that group of beings which the old men called ‘mythical.’ They were always amused when Jaer said he had seen some of that kind, rather as though they thought he was creating stories for them. Jaer was not sure how to react to this attitude, nor was he sure about the difference between the ‘mythical’ creatures and the others. He treated them all with the same polite caution. He did note one seeming difference. Mythical creatures were not generally considered edible by the other kind.
And then, too, there were the strange happenings. Once in a great while Jaer could tell what it was the old men were thinking. They called this ‘being psychic,’ and they explained that it was an unreliable talent which people had had, more or less, always. Starting a fire without using his hands was something Jaer could do now and then, when he felt like it, when no one else was around. He never mentioned this to either Nathan or Ephraim, somehow knowing it would upset them.
One thing he did mention to Nathan from time to time was the strange dreams he had, she had, often – though not always – at the time the body changed. She saw herself in a place of towering stone which seemed to breathe with ominous life. Beside her strode a man, black, his hair flowing behind him in wild tails, carrying a shaft of silver fire. There was a woman with them, dancing. Jaer dreamed, sometimes, of another woman, one who walked among huge beasts with her hands on their heads, calm with contained fury and crowned with gemmed light. Jaer dreamed of an old woman, too, who in some strange fashion was dreatning of Jaer. When told all this, Nathan laughed and told Jaer to forget the dreams, that they were only sleep visions, the endlessly active mind sorting through the day’s memories to store them away.
Jaer did not believe this, knowing that nothing in the visions could be found in his day’s doings or readings, but in time he did forget it. Nathan forgot it, too, or did not know he had not. The images Jaer had spoken of, though haltingly, were compelling and could not have been altogether forgotten.
So life went on, and sometimes he/she was happy, bubbling with the joy of being healthy and alive in a world full of wonders. Always, however, something hovered just at the edge of that world, staining it, threatening it. Ephraim did not name it. Neither did Nathan. Only once in a great while, one of them would say, ‘I think it stems from … that,’ with the word ‘that’ said in a whispering spit as though it meant something unutterably foul. Jaer puzzled over this. ‘We dare not go,’ Ephraim said. ‘Because of that!’ His tone was such that Jaer could not ask about that. It was something which included the Keepers and the Separation and the Temples, the far off fields, no longer tended, going back to thistle and thorn. It was a shadow beyond the things one could see or define, something to the east, he thought, beyond the Concealment, beyond the ruins of Tchent. The Thiene were in it somehow, and the ancient times, and the name Taniel.’ Jaer learned not to think that as he had learned not to cry in that certain way, for to think it seemed to invite the shadow’s attention.
So, Jaer grew, and learned, and waited, and pondered, and was not more impatient for life than was bearable. The years passed, and Jaer was ten.

CHAPTER FIVE
LEONA
Year 1163
Deep within the sullen moors of Anisfale lay the lands and leaseholds of the family Fathra, and deep within that family lay the fate and future of lean-limbed Leona, third daughter of a third daughter, fifth child of a fifth child on the father’s side, doubly unlucky, therefore utterly without honorable position. The family was so disgusted at her birth that they did not even have new-made the traditional birth-gift of maidens, the circlet with which her hair would be bound until marriage. Instead they found one in some ancient storage room of the fastness and dusted it off, out of fashion though it had surely been for generations. Though the error had been her father’s (he might, after all, have restricted his attentions to