Chapter Forty-Four
Abhorsen’s House
When Lirael came back downstairs, she was very clean indeed. The sending had proved to be a true believer in scrubbing and plenty of hot water—the latter supplied by hot springs, Lirael guessed, for the first few basins had been accompanied by a nasty sulphurous whiff, exactly as sometimes happened back in the Glacier.
The sending had put out rather fancy clothes for her, but Lirael had refused them. She put on her spare Librarian’s outfit instead. She had worn the uniform for so long that she felt strange without it. At least in her red waistcoat she could feel something like a proper Clayr.
The sending was still trailing after her with a surcoat folded over its arm. It had been quite insistent that she try it on, and Lirael had been hard pressed to explain that waistcoats and surcoats simply didn’t go together.
Another sending opened the double doors to the right of the stairs as she came down. The bronze knobs were turned by pale spell-hands, hands that stood out in stark relief against the dark oak as the sending pushed the door open. Then the sending moved aside and bowed its cowled head—and Lirael caught her first glimpse of the main hall. It took up at least half the ground floor, but it was not the size that immediately struck Lirael. She was seized with an intense feeling of déjà vu as she looked down the length of the hall to the great stained-glass window that showed the building of the Wall. And there was the long, brilliantly polished table laden with silver, and the high-backed chair.
Lirael had seen all of this before, in the Dark Mirror. Only then the chair had been occupied by the man who was her father.
“There you are,” said Sam from behind her. “I’m sorry I’m late. I couldn’t get the sendings to give me the right surcoat—they’ve dug up something odd. Must be getting senile, like Mogget said.”
Lirael turned around and looked at his surcoat. It had the golden towers of the royal line, but they were quartered with a strange device she had never seen—some sort of trowel or spade, in silver.
“It’s the Wallmakers’ trowel,” explained Sam. “But they’ve all been gone for centuries. A thousand years at least. . . . I say, I like your hair,” he added as Lirael continued to stare at him. She wasn’t wearing her headscarf. Her black hair was brushed and shining, and the waistcoat didn’t really hide her slender form. She really was very attractive, but something about her now struck him as rather forbidding. Whom did she remind him of?
Sam pushed past the sending that was holding the door open, and was halfway to the table when he realized that Lirael hadn’t moved. She was still standing in the doorway, staring at the table.
“What?” he asked.
Lirael couldn’t speak. She beckoned to the sending that carried her surcoat. Lirael took it and unfolded it so she could see the blazon.
Then she folded the surcoat again, shut her eyes for a silent count of ten, unfolded it, and stared at it again.
“What is it?” asked Sam. “Are you all right?”
“I . . . I don’t know how to say this,” Lirael began, as she undid her waistcoat and handed it to the sending that appeared at her elbow. Sam started at her sudden undressing, but he was even more shocked when she put on her surcoat and slowly smoothed it out.
On the coat were the golden stars of the Clayr quartered with the silver keys of the Abhorsen.
“I must be half Abhorsen,” said Lirael, in a tone that indicated she hardly believed it herself. “In fact, I think I’m your mother’s half-sister. Your grandfather was my father. I mean, I’m your aunt. Half-aunt. Sorry.”
Sam shut his eyes for several seconds. Then he opened them, trod like a sleepwalker over to a chair, and sat down. After a moment, Lirael sat down opposite him. Finally he spoke.
“My aunt? My mother’s half-sister?” He paused. “Does she know?”
“I don’t think so,” muttered Lirael, suddenly anxious again. She hadn’t really thought about the full ramifications of her birth. How would the famous Sabriel feel about the sudden appearance of a sister? “Surely not—or she would have found me long ago. I only worked it out myself by using the Dark Mirror. I wanted to see who my father was. I looked back and saw my parents in this very room. My father was sitting in that chair. They had only one night together, before he had to go away. I suppose that was the year he died.”
“Can’t have been,” said Sam, shaking his head. “That was twenty years ago.”
“Oh,” said Lirael, blushing. “I lied. I’m only nineteen.”
Sam looked at her as if any more revelations would turn his brain. “How did the sendings know to give you that surcoat?” he asked.
“I told them,” said Mogget, his head popping up from a chair nearby. It was obvious that he’d been snoozing, because his fur was sticking up all on one side.
“How did you know?” asked Sam.
“I have served the Abhorsens for many centuries,” said Mogget, preening. “So I tend to know what’s what. Once I realized that Sam was not the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, I kept my eyes open for the real one to turn up, because the bells wouldn’t have appeared unless her arrival was imminent. And I was here when Lirael’s mother came to see Terciel—that is, the former Abhorsen. So it was rather elementary. Lirael was clearly both the former Abhorsen’s daughter and the Abhorsen-in-Waiting the bells were meant for.”
“You mean I’m not the Abhorsen-in-Waiting? She is?” asked Sam.
“But I can’t be!” exclaimed Lirael. “I mean, I don’t want to be. I’m a Clayr. I suppose I am a Remembrancer as well, but I am . . . I am a Daughter of the Clayr!”
She had shouted the last words, and they echoed through the hall.
“Complain all you like, but the Blood will out,” said Mogget when the echoes faded. “You are the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and you must take up the bells.”
“Thank the Charter!” sighed Sam, and Lirael saw that there were tears in his eyes. “I mean, I was never going to be any good with them, anyway. You’ll be a much better Abhorsen-in-Waiting, Lirael. Look at the way you went into Death with only those little pipes. And you fought Hedge and got away. All I managed to do was get burnt, and let him get to Nicholas.”
“I am a Daughter of the Clayr,” insisted Lirael, but her voice sounded weak even to her. She had wanted to know who her father was. But being the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and one day—hopefully long distant—the Abhorsen, was a much more difficult thing to accept. Her life would be dedicated to hunting down and destroying or banishing the Dead. She would travel all over the Kingdom, instead of living the life of a Clayr within the confines of the Glacier.
“ ‘Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?’ ” she whispered, as the final page from The Book of the Dead came shining into her mind. Then another thought struck her, and she went white.
“I’ll never have the Sight, will I?” she said slowly. She was half Clayr, but it was the Abhorsen’s blood that ran strongest in her veins. The gift she had longed for her entire life was finally and absolutely to be denied to her.
“No, you won’t, Mistress,” said the Dog calmly, as she came in behind Lirael and put her snout on Lirael’s lap. “But it is your Clayr heritage that gives you the gift of Remembrance, for only a child of Abhorsen and Clayr can look into the past. You must grow in your own powers—for yourself, for the Kingdom, and for the Charter.”
“I will never have the Sight,” Lirael whispered again, very slowly. “I will never have the Sight. . . .” She clasped her arms around the neck of the strangely clean Dog, not even noticing that the hound smelled sweetly of soap, for the first and probably last time. But she did not cry. Her eyes were dry. She just felt very cold, unable to warm herself with the Dog’s comforting heat.
Sam watched her shiver but did not shift from his chair. He felt as if he should go over and comfort her somehow, but didn’t quite know how. It wasn’t as if she were a young woman or a girl. She was an aunt, and he didn’t know how to behave. Would she be offended if he
tried to hug her?
“Is it . . . is the Sight really that important to you?” he asked hesitantly. “You see,” he continued, twisting his linen napkin, “I feel . . . I feel amazingly relieved that I don’t have to be the Abhorsen-in-Waiting. I never wanted the sense of Death, or to go into Death or any of it. And when I did, that time, when the necromancer . . . when he caught me . . . I wanted to die, because then it would be over. But I somehow got out, and I knew that I couldn’t ever go into Death again. It was just everyone else expecting me to follow in Mother’s footsteps, because Ellimere was so obviously going to be the Queen. I thought maybe it was the same for you. You know, all the other Clayr have the Sight, so that’s the only thing that matters, even if you don’t want it. It would be the only way to meet their expectations, like me being the Abhorsen-in-Waiting. Only I didn’t want to be what they wanted, and you did. . . . I’m babbling, aren’t I? Sorry.”
“More than a hundred words in a row,” remarked Mogget. “And most of them made sense. There is hope for you yet, Prince Sameth. Particularly since you are quite right. Lirael is so obviously an Abhorsen that wanting the Sight must be solely a peculiarity of her upbringing in that ridiculously cold mountain of theirs.”