Free The Singer of All Songs by Kate Constable

seemed to Calwyn they had been walking half the night before they came to the shining bulk of the Wall. She’d never seen it by moonlight before, immense and silvery-white. She could sense its dense chill near her skin, and for the space of a breath she felt almost afraid.
    In a hushed voice Darrow said, ‘You will raise the chantment now?’
    ‘I can’t. Not alone.’
    ‘Calwyn, I cannot cross the Wall as I did before. I have not the strength. And if I was injured again –’
    ‘You won’t have to cross by chantment. There’s another way.’ Perhaps the idea had been planted in her mind the first day that she and Darrow talked in the orchard, but she was certain now, as certain as if her mother’s ghost had whispered it in her ear: she knew how Calida had done it, all those years ago.
    On and on she led him, beside the great curve of the Wall. Once or twice the eerie call of a night bird echoed above their heads, or a whirring of wings swooped from tree to tree, or a small shadow scurried across their path. Then Calwyn would hear Darrow stumble, and she would slow her pace a little. They passed the grove of the bellflowers, and the place where Darrow had lifted himself over the Wall. On and on they walked, until at last they came to the place where the roaring river cut through the ice. The sky was beginning to pale after the long night; the dawn birds were singing.
    Calwyn halted at the water’s edge. This must have been where her mother had stood, so long ago, realising it was her only way out. ‘The river flows quickly here, and the Wall doesn’t cross the living water. You must let the river carry you out.’ She hesitated, trying to recall the word. ‘You must swim .’
    She had wondered if he would scoff, or argue, but he did not. Instead he took off his cloak, his boots and his jerkin and tied them up in a neat bundle around his stick. But when he was ready, he lingered by the bank, poised unsteadily on his crooked foot.
    ‘Will you go back to the Dwellings now?’
    ‘Yes.’ She hardly dared to think of what awaited her there: the infirmary in ruins; one of the sisters badly hurt – who was it? she did not even know; Tamen running about to Samis’s bidding. She said with sudden passion, ‘I can’t forgive Tamen for betraying you.’
    He shook his head. ‘Tamen’s first duty is to protect Antaris. She did what she thought was necessary. Do not judge her too harshly.’
    ‘But she was going to send you to the sacred valley on midsummer eve, to be sacrificed under the blazetree, if you had stayed.’
    Darrow raised an eyebrow. ‘A scorpion under one foot, a snake beneath the other,’ he said. Then his face twisted in a half-smile. ‘Perhaps she was unwilling to carry out that duty, Calwyn. Why else would she tell you what she planned? She must have known that you would warn me.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ said Calwyn doubtfully. ‘But she was still willing to hand you over to Samis.’
    Darrow reached into his pocket and drew out the object he had been carving earlier in the night. He threw it to Calwyn and, startled, she caught it. It was a small wooden ball, the kind that the village boys used to play skittles. But Darrow had begun carving it into a map of Tremaris. ‘It’s not finished,’ he said. ‘But I thought you might like it.’
    Calwyn cupped the ball in her hands. No one had ever given her a gift before, even at festival time.
    Darrow said quietly, ‘Thank you for all you have done for me, Calwyn. Perhaps we shall meet again some day.’
    She could not speak, but nodded silently, pressing the wooden sphere hard between her hands. For a moment Darrow seemed about to say something more, but then he turned toward the river. She watched him plunge into the water, holding his stick above his head. Already the river had seized him in its current; soon he would be carried beyond the Wall and into the Outlands. Once more he would roam the world, and sail the wide seas in those boats of his,