Chapter 1: "I WAKE"

She might have jumped from her bed with the suddenness of the thought that roused her. She lay there beneath thick sheafs of sheepskin sewn together with leather strands, her breath rolling in a cloud over her face. She closed her eyes again and for the first time in her life she feared going back to sleep. She pulled her feet and hands close to her body for warmth, the chill of the night still in them. At least it was no longer the winter, when ice caked the walls and she had to pull her frozen robes into the bed to thaw them before she could dress. No, the winter was over. Now the snows came only occasionally. She could begin again to hope for release, for escape, for freedom. These things were denied her family, seemingly for all time.

Petra Harkess rose and wrapped herself in a heavy sheepskin robe. She tied her sheepskin boots tight around her feet, which still felt cold, and she made her narrow wooden-frame straw and sheepskin blanket bed as she had been taught. She sat on the bed and brushed her long black hair.

She was seventeen years old. She had refused marriage. The storm of the thing that woke her still loomed in her mind.

I wake, it had said.

That was what it felt like. Not a dream. Not a memory. She had few memories that were different at all from yesterday and the day before, and from what this day too would bring. Every day of her seventeen years had been the same, and every year of every generation had been the same for her family. In exile from the world, consigned to the remote Monastery on the secret island, living out quiet and cursed lives in the constant memory of the ancient heroes who had led them here, and then left them here.

I wake, it had said with a resonance that scared her. What wakes? There was only one thing that mattered, and in all her years and all the years of her family's exile it had never once spoken. She shook her head and frowned. What a prideful thing I am. Whatever the dream had been, it had certainly not been that. Once she had fancied herself a seer. She had imagined prophecies and visions, and in her foolishness she had believed them.

"I am a humble woman," she said aloud. "I am the daughter and the sister. I am the one who shall remain."

She hung her head. She remembered the oath she had taken to her parents. No more foolishness. She had refused marriage. She sat on her bed in the tight cubical stone chamber. The thick wooden shutters were supposed to keep out the light, the sea-winds, and in winter the deathly cold. She reminded herself to tell her father that they needed fixing.

I wake.

This was just more foolishness. She used a short soulfish bone to tie her hair up in a tight bow. She pulled on it until she could feel pain in every strand of her hair. That was just right. Then she stood up again and the smell of woodsmoke from the great room lured her for a morning meal. She closed the thick wooden door behind her and might well have floated from memory alone down the narrow corridor where all the sleeping chambers lay. These were the residences once of brothers and sisters who now lay in the ground at the bottom of the hill on which the Monastery stood. All were gone now but for Petra and her brother.

She greeted her father and mother, the Lord Larniku and the Lady Ysana, with the proper grace of a young Lady of the Harkess clan. They sat together in the warmth of a great fireplace so large that Petra could stand unbent within it if she wished. They bowed their heads slightly to her and and wished her good morning. Her mother's long grey hair flowed down over her robe like something fully alive, and her kind face seemed not to have changed in its capacity for love even as the years of futile waiting gradually reduced her spirit to silence. Her father seemed always to be locked in some grim state. His regard for her had not recovered since her humiliation of the bridegroom, the villager Jindobrei.

"Morning daughter," he muttered.

"Yes my Lord and Lady," she replied with the proper and expected sweetness. "It is a good morning."

"Eat," her father said. "Today we pray on Mericet's bones."

High on the wall that faced the west, the famous stained glass image of the Wheel shimmered with the grey light that penetrated the clouds and the shadows of the cliffs that stood between this island and the rest of the world. Eight round panels around the circumference of the Wheel portrayed the stations of life. One deep red panel in the center, larger than the rest, signified the hub.

Her mother had impressed on her with no small firmness that she rested on the outside. Her father and her brother and her husband might be the hub. Petra, as a lady and a dutiful servant of her family, would not ever be and should not ever pretend to be. This was her sin in their eyes. First with the seer games, and now with the marriage games. This is what they saw in her: a troublemaker, an ingrate, a insolent girl whom they had spoiled and from whom they must now reap their just shame.

She knew this.

I wake.

She shook the words from her mind.

* * *

Beneath the Monastery lay two caves. The preferable one emitted warm wet air all through the year. This is what made the island a refuge in the cold sea beyond the world's edge: it had been blessed with hot water at its core, which in addition to heating a crystalline pool in the warm cave below the Monastery and providing life-giving warmth even when the worst ice storms covered the island in a thick freeze, fed warm springs down on the lower slopes toward the inlet that the islanders used as a harbor for their fishing boats. There was only one Monastery. The servants of the Harkess family lived in tiny villages. The hot springs gave them life.

On the slope below the Monastery the ancient monks who had hosted Petra's family long ago had built a rectangular pool and at one end they had fashioned the statue of a ram's head. Hot water flowed from the ram's head in a constant fountain that enabled the villagers to keep their sheep and goat flocks alive during the worst times, and no one on the island failed to recognize its blessings. In the coldest days the steam from the ram's head pool poured into the air and villagers might rest in the huts that they had built around it. Another hot spring down closer to the inlet provided the sustenance for a second village, this one where the fisher families hid themselves when the sea ice kept them from their tasks. Hot water also bubbled out into the inlet itself, so that at all times it attracted fish and eels for the taking. Even during the worst of winter the fishermen might spear their take as they stood on the rocks that jutted out into the steaming water.

There was another cave. This was not the preferable one. In this cave the bones of the famous Harkess heroes rested for all time. Tradition and practice among the Old Believers of Thane held that the bodies of the dead should be interred in the earth in tribute to the Wood. Even though they lived as exiles and had no contact with the spirits of the Wood since their flight some generations ago, the Harkess family had done just that: every child and woman and man who died on this wretched island went into the earth accompanied by the song of the spirits as best the islanders could reproduce it. This is where Petra's brothers and sisters were, and her grandparents and cousins and all the rest, save the firstborn sons of the family. These waited together for their return to Thane. The skeleton of the first and greatest hero, Mericet Harkess, sat in a kingly pose in a small wooden chair, facing the south as if to face his old enemies who now ruled Thane: the Devils and their traitor Thanian allies. Mericet was not quite just a skeleton: the skin of his face had become black and leathern and pulled tight across his skull. Ragged brown robes hung from his frame, which had lost all its substance in the long years of its rest, and now seemed hunched and decrepit. His hands had become black wisps as well, the bones enclosed in skin that had become like the most delicate ash. On the wall beside the body of Mericet Harkess hung his relics: the battle-worn and noble sword with which he had fought at the final battle in the lost war against the invaders, the helmet that he had worn every day of his exile as he prepared to fight again, thick metal-studded leather body armor that now seemed as time-beaten and weak as his body. Another leathern and decayed body sat in a chair beside Mericet. This was his son Taius, who made the crossing of the sea as a boy in his mother's arms, and who stood by his father's side until death took them both in the same year, the father from age and grief, the son from a killing fever. Beside Taius, in another chair bound in shadow, sat the body of his own son Visser. He led the Harkesses in battle when the monks would no longer accept them as true lords, and in the end all the monks died by the hands of Harkess fighters. The family and its servants took over the Monastery, its followers established governance over the villages, and monks fell away into the din of memory.

After Visser, din it became. Petra had never memorized the long list of Harkess lords who did not merit their own chairs in the chamber, for room ran short with the Wheel set into the stone floor and Mericet's vanguard could not accommodate even one more revered personage. No, a long wooden shelf ran the length of the darkest inner wall of the cave, opposite the display of Mericet's relics, and on the shelf, which had first only run part of the length of the wall but had by necessity been extended once and again and again to make room for more, lay the skeletal remains of every one of the men who had reigned over the island since Visser. At least twenty bodies lay in the shelf. All earned their place in the vanguard. All would one day return with their fathers and sons to be interred in a land that none had seen, in honor of the holy Wood, whose spirit emissaries none had ever seen.

Petra kneeled at her mother's side. They bowed down low and rested their foreheads on the cold stone floor, around the edge of the Wheel. Her father kneeled too, on the other side of her mother, and beside him kneeled Petra's brother Vandar. Strangely, two of Vandar's friends had joined the ceremony and crowded in behind Vandar. These were Torjek and Koeno, who had been her brother's companions since childhood, and who were like members of the family in her parents' eyes, and defenders of the islanders. They had lost a fourth friend, Lazar, also like a brother (and the kindest of all in Petra's eyes, except perhaps for Vandar himself), in a fight with a waterman on the edge of the fisher-village before the last winter. Petra had sung with the whole island as they placed him into the earth.

As she sung now. The whole of the remains of the Harkess family joined their voices together in a single unified tone. She hoped that it would be different this time, but she knew beforehand that it would not. They raised their voices together, raised them fervently and with more emotion and more desire.

We are your servants.

Command us.

Petra did not notice the exact moment that Lord Harkess, without warning, stopped singing. She kept to it as she kept to all her obligations now, with a conviction that the meaning was greater than she might immediately perceive, and when she noticed that he had stopped and raised his head the others were already aware.

Lord Harkess rose to his feet. He stood before the hubstone, where no spirit had every made itself visible, and something in him seemed larger and more vital than she had ever seen before. It was something new and indomitable in him. It was his refusal.

"Fathers," Lord Harkess addressed his gathered dead forebears. "I am Larniku, your son and defender. I have borne the Harkess shield my whole life, as you did, and I have sworn your vow, Mericet, to return to Thane and reestablish on its land the dominion of the Wood. Harkesses have always hewn to the Wood. Harkesses always shall. I tell you today because you went before in the vow. I tell you this: our family is dying. We have lost seven children in this family. Perhaps their spirits are known to you. They were sweet babies all. We are not the only family on the island to lose children. No, all the loyal families are shrinking, dying. I do not know what the next generation will bring. My vow is to return to Thane. I tell you today that we are going to fulfill that vow. Tomorrow my son departs to cross the sea. I tell you so that you will hear it from me, your own son and heir. It is my decision."

Now she saw the reason that Torjek and Koeno had joined them. Great anxiety filled her. She heard it again: I wake.

"Son, step forward," Larniku Harkess said next as he removed the silver medallion from around his own neck. This Wheel-shaped symbol of the Harkess family hung from a strong silver chain, and as Petra scoured her memory of the far recesses of the past it had always hung from her father's neck.

No more.

She could hardly contain her emotions. She hung her head down and pressed her forehead to the stone floor. She heard Vandar taking a new oath before Mericet and Taius and Visser and the others.

"In honor of you I shall take these companions to seek justice in Thane. For you, Mericet, I leave my own blood on the hubstone."

He removed a knife and made a small cut in the palm of his left hand. He wiped the blood across the smooth hubstone. Then Torjek stepped forward. He offered his blood in memory of Taius. Then Koeno offered his to Visser.

It was all wrong.

Now her father spoke again: "Mericet, you fought at the last battle against the invaders. You saw the holy witness float over the field. Our son Vandar shall seek a new fight in honor of all the men who died there and all those who have suffered since. May the Wood send a witness to what he will achieve: the end of the false church, the end of the traitor lords, the end of the Devil empire. Will you take that vow, Vandar?"

"I swear it now, father!"

No, no, no.

Then all the men dropped back to their knees in respect to the dead lords, these same lords whose vow had been to await summons, to preserve strength, to return when called. This was the vow of Mericet Harkess: that no man would return to Thane until the Wood commanded it. For all that her father said about the dying families on the island, which she knew was true and she knew that the poor prospects for the future fell partly to her refusal to marry, the one immutable fact was this: the Wood had issued no summons, no command. Her voice screamed inside her: "Why do you act so precipitously? Why do you ignore your vow?" She would have said something to this effect, but she knew that they would not listen.

She pressed her head down on the stone.

Wishing for silence inside.