It weighed on him, she knew, the lives that had been lost or maimed through his maneuverings. Even as he believed he’d been in the right.
“I had to write of her, for this to work,” said Valanir Ocune. By light of the Branch his face was softened. A hint of laughter in his eyes. “Don’t tell her, Julien. I don’t believe in flattery.”
His song began quietly. Julien tried to still her shaking knees. The Seer Valanir Ocune was singing, a song none else had heard or would ever hear. It would be something to tell for a lifetime, or would have been, if it had been only a song. But this song was to bring an enchantment, and possibly the Seer’s death; how then could she ever tell of it?
His voice, unaided by a harp, filled the Hall nonetheless, transfigured for Julien the abiding silence of that place. He began, as songs often did, with a story. In her mind’s eye Julien saw the shining city of Tamryllin, a place she’d never been. It was the time of the Midsummer Fair. In his song, the Seer assembled the people: each with their Midsummer masks, each with a song of their own. In time, masks would fall away and songs would change, irrevocably. And in the midst of this, a woman who desired music against the loss of all hope. Julien realized she had forgotten to breathe.
The tale unfolded. Julien opened her eyes to look at the Seer. His eyes were distant, and she could not read his face.
It was a story everyone knew, in Eivar and beyond; but this was seeing it at a slant, in a way Julien had not heard it told before. This song was not about Darien Aldemoor’s sacrifice, nor the martyrdom of Hassen Styr. Nor was it about the treachery of Marlen Humbreleigh. The fox, the hound, the snake—that was a tale everyone knew.
This, rather, was about a different sacrifice—an intimate one, of which the songs were silent. Heart’s blood in a forest glade; gilded rooms where the art of a Seer was bent, distorted, in service to a foolish king. And then … very soon, death. Julien recalled the carving of a woman putting a sword through the heart of another woman; the same woman—herself. The notes of melancholy were gathering like storm clouds, sharpening in intensity until at last, fury; the Seer’s eyes were fire. Fury coarsened his voice, turned it deep. The sacrifices were too much; he raged against them like those men of myth who defied the gods. Until like the break of light after rain, Valanir’s face began to clear. He looked to be remembering something.
The fire has made of you
A bright steel blade, a golden chain
A light that blinds.
For the first time Valanir Ocune looked at Julien, smiled a little. The Branch lit half his face; the rest left dark. Gentleness had returned in full, to which he gave the final words.
I would have you walk in light,
Not become it.
Outside the song of Manaia had climbed, risen higher, as if it might break through to the heavens; and Julien saw in Valanir’s face a look of recognition, a realization dawning. “That is not of Manaia,” he said. “They work towards something else now, for some end I can’t see. But that will have to wait. I must find Lin.”
She watched the Seer’s eyes become abruptly absent, like the windows of an abandoned house; he had gone to another place and she was alone now even with her hands joined to his; with the sound of that unnerving song growing fuller, louder, tearing through the night as surely as those towers of fire; reshaping it towards an end even a great Seer didn’t know.
* * *
NIGHT cloaked the battlements, and Nameir Hazan kept watch. Almyria was built on a mountain, its fortress the spiked crown at its peak. From this height, looking down, the streets unspooled in a tangle like noodles. Nameir had earlier that day walked those streets, felt her calf muscles strain from steep inclines that followed the shape of the mountainside. It was hard to tell where the mountain ended and the streets began. Not for nothing was Almyria regarded as impregnable. Its Five Lords retained their relative independence from the Zahra at the cost of this austere hardiness, this isolation. Ferran, first of these lords, looked himself to be cut from stone. His trim beard was silvered black, his aspect one of grim authority. He was not pleased to shelter within his walls an army from the south. Distrust was a miasma in the ancient gold-pillared hall where the Five Lords and Mansur Evrayad held council.
Nameir approved of this distrust, thought it eminently sensible. In fact so far she had been impressed with the steely authority of Lord Ferran even as it had inconvenienced them; he was a man she could imagine following in battle. History had often demonstrated the fatal error of allowing an outside force through one’s gates, even one that offered aid. This one was swelled greater than ever, with a detachment sent by Vizier Miuwiyah. It had taken hours to negotiate terms with Ferran as they had stood outside the gates in the punishing sun. When at last Mansur’s men were permitted to march through the gates, the streets were desolate. The city’s inhabitants had taken refuge indoors, watched from upper windows.
Once inside, negotiations had continued in the fortress. Mansur still led the troops alone, assisted by Nameir; against all expectation, Vizier Miuwiyah had not accompanied his own men. Though she did not say it, this seemed an ominous sign to Nameir—that the vizier had forgone the prestige of command. He claimed to be in the midst of orchestrating the marriage of his eldest son with a foreign princess; was thus unable to get away. Nameir thought, given the protracted nature of such affairs, that this was unlikely. She could tell Mansur thought the same, though his comment was, “We’re better off. Miuwiyah would complain if his pristine new battle cloak got a tear.”
She’d wondered if Mansur comforted himself with the words, if it was true. For there was a deeper truth she knew. A man might die with his sword in hand and thank the god, with his last breath, for a chance at glory. But there was scant glory in these night raids, with their taint of obscene magic, of hopelessness.
Tonight the streets were lit, every one. That was Nameir’s idea. It carried risks, but she thought it far riskier to be surprised by Fire Dancers in the dark. Lord Ferran and Mansur had acquiesced. There was no precedent for the fighting they were about to experience; no one could be sure what was a wise course of action.
Before she had departed for her watch, Lord Ferran had approached Nameir. It was the first time she saw him up close, saw he was no taller than she, even as his presence commanded one’s attention. “We are unlikely to survive this,” he said. “I would rather die here, in the place of my ancestors, than flee like a rat to its bolthole. Leaving my people to their fate. Is that a thing that makes sense to you, Nameir Hazan?”
She was able to meet his gaze with clear eyes and conscience. “It is how I’ve lived my life, Lord Ferran.”
“I had thought as much.” His dark eyes were direct. “I’ve heard much about you, Nameir Hazan. Enough to know Prince Evrayad has been fortunate—perhaps more so than he deserves. If we survive this, I am offering you a chance to work for me. Until these troubles began, I had my eye on lands to the east of here. I’ll need talented command to aid in taking them. You could name your price.”
“What is said of me?” Nameir could not help asking. Her world was garrisons and fields of battle; surely she could leave sophistication, intrigue, to others. She wanted to know.
The directness of his gaze did not change. “That you are, in fact, a woman. And, perhaps, a child of the sea. Oh yes, that is how we call them, in the north. Once we had many children of the sea here in Almyria and they were massacred, their temples burned. A black day. Perhaps one for which we now pay the price.”
She let out her breath; it had caught at woman. “Yet you’d put me in command of your men.”
Lord Ferran waved his hand in a gesture of annoyance, as if a dish had been served to him too cold, or cooked to toughness. “Who cares for that sort of thing nowadays?”
Almost she could have laughed; and later, recalling it again as she awaited imminent attack, allowed herself an inward smile. Only a man such as Lord Ferran, glorious, imperious, could imagine that petty hatreds had outlived th
eir time. She liked him for it.
It was a temperate night, with just a slight breath of wind from the mountains. The streets of Almyria were this time of year adorned with curtains of lilac; the scent carried up to her even here. Nameir allowed herself a moment to imagine a different life: one in which this was her place of service—even, perhaps, her home.
“There you are.”
She stood immediately at attention. “Yes, my lord Evrayad?”
“Nameir.”
“I must keep watch.” She felt suddenly tired. It was easier not to look at the prince, to keep her eyes ahead, downward, on the goldenly lit city streets. No moon; it was young yet, and shrouded in clouds tonight.
“I’ve been wanting to speak with you,” he said. “I can’t seem to find you alone.”
“Whatever is between you and Rihab Bet-Sorr isn’t my business,” she said. “As long as it doesn’t get us killed.” She had an awareness of her spine lengthening, impervious with a strength she willed herself to feel. “It may get you killed, which matters to me … but that’s not my business, either.”
“Do you think I would betray my brother?” He sounded more anguished than outraged. “There is nothing between Rihab and me, Hazan. I swear I told you true. That man said nothing to me of the queen after we were left alone. I don’t recall anything he said. My only memory is of you, finding me. The blood on my hands.”
It sounded too plausible, given how he’d acted when she found him. “I may believe you,” she said. “But I was not the only one privy to that conversation. Men will talk—have talked. And it will get back to your brother. By then, it won’t matter what you’ve done or haven’t done, my lord. People will suspect the worst—of her, of you. The crime, of course, mostly hers.”
“You think the Fire Dancers plot against the queen?” It was not quite a question; he had the sound of one who had made a discovery.
She was startled by how logical it sounded, once he uttered it aloud. “It may be.” He was about to speak again, but at that moment she raised a hand. “Wait.” In the street she had seen … a flicker. Something dark pass by. It could have been a bird, but …
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” For the first time she realized the night was very, very quiet. A curfew had all the city residents in their homes; in that silence, other sounds of night ought to have surfaced—birds, insects. There was nothing.
“Something’s wrong,” she told Mansur, and as her eyes scanned the streets, she began to walk briskly towards the ladder that would take them down into the keep. “They may already be…”
He understood. “Inside.”
It was dark in the courtyard where she descended the ladder. It shouldn’t have been. It had been lit before, she was almost certain. So she was not entirely surprised when on the ground at the foot of the ladder, face-down, Mallin lay. Gore made a sticky mass around his head. The years of training, of her hopes for him, passed before her eyes in that instant.
There had been more men assigned here. As Nameir squinted into the dark she thought she could make out even darker shapes sprawled here and there on the ground. At least five of their men. It must have happened quickly, silently.
Mansur dropped down beside her from the ladder. She couldn’t tell, in the dark, if emotion showed on his face when he saw Mallin, and made out the other shapes in the courtyard. In the next moments they would raise the alarm, run with swords bared into the keep to defend what they could. It was the last coherent thought Nameir would have for a long time, as the enemy came for them that night in a way that made all the other times seem a game—cat and mouse, bait and bull; a mockery of death that at last gave way to this, a cold awakening.
By morning the story of Almyria would be on every tongue. That story would spread south, down the River Gadlan and, at last, to the capital. Of the red, clotted rivers the streets became; of the heads of the Five Lords arrayed on pikes above the fortress battlements, bodies cruelly mangled and flung to the streets below. Chief among them Lord Ferran, who was said to appear stern above the battlements even after vultures had picked out his eyes. The deaths that day numbered in the thousands. It was said, in centuries to come, that the city would never be scrubbed clean of its blood, or ghosts.
Deep in the night Nameir would find herself slipping on flagstones coated in blood, in her arms carrying a wounded man who wept tears of blood. She would be screaming as she cut her way through warriors that were faceless. Only once at the brief emergence of the moon she saw, within a Fire Dancer’s cowl, the thin, scared face of a boy. Eyes wide, almost innocent, as if stunned by the carnage around them. But he’d then towered above her again, features fell back to concealment within the cowl and his sword upraised; became again an appendage to a horde that showed neither mercy nor fear.
None of these events were known yet to Nameir Hazan when she first descended from the battlements to find her men lying dead. She ran into the dark of the keep. The young prince followed after.
* * *
HE’D feared to come here, though had not said so to Julien. Not because he might give his life for Lin Amaristoth. A man might go to his grave secure in the knowledge of his worth and place in the world—such as could be reckoned a good death. His last time in the Otherworld, Valanir Ocune had faced the reverse of this: an image of himself that he did not believe, could not credit, yet knew was the truth.
This rite of sacrifice he had claimed to do for love, but likely it was also to counter that image that had risen before him: of the Seer he had not wanted, yet in that moment known himself, to be.
Who are you, Lady Amaristoth? He’d wanted to know, wondering at her difference, at the alternating flame and chill of her; but he’d wanted also to compel her to think of the answer, really think it through to the end. Not discover that answer late, as he had done.
He was in a hall that went on forever, where he’d been once before. He had sung himself here. This time he had an idea where it would lead, since he had engineered his journey deliberately: through one of these doors, he would find Lin, the Seer he had made years ago. He wasn’t sure she would be aware of his presence, how it would work. But Valanir Ocune thought, if the enchantments had indeed returned and a Seer could bring death to his maker this way, surely he could offer his life. For every enchantment there was that doubling—the light, and the shadow it cast.
In this case, it was light he brought. This time.
For my sins, perhaps, some recompense.
There it was.
The mark around his eye was burning in all its strands; it shone with its own light, not the reflected light of the moon.
He felt pulled forward, summoned by echoes of a song he had himself created. The melody, the elegy for Lin’s life as he saw it, which was likely to be different from the way the Court Poet herself might see it. He heard strains of his own music and knew they bore him forward, so when at last he chose one of the doors, he expected she would be there on the other side.
What met Valanir Ocune instead was a sensation like an ice wind, and silence, an abrupt cutting off of that song. The shock that lanced through him in that moment was a sacrifice for nothing; it was nothing he’d planned. It crushed his voice from him, his art, his words, until nothing existed in the world but a howling center of pain.
It was someone else, not Lin, who was waiting.
* * *
SHE saw the change in his eyes; the way the pupils began to distend, like an inkblot spreading on paper, until the green had all but disappeared. His face drained to the color of lime, terrifying her. Julien shouted into his face.
His jaw hung slack; the sound that emitted from the cavern of his mouth was terrible. It was the sound of a tree branch cracking, but going on, and on, like nothing that should have come from a human mouth. The black of his eyes still swelled; now the green of them was gone; now the white. His eyes were holes. And that cracking sound went on.
She was whispering, whispering his name. Her ter
ror was complete; she had a sense, though she kept her eyes on his face, that the carvings on the walls had come to life at every side: the dragons and women and poets and knights, all alive, lips cracking open to mock the horror that had come to that room. The harps still in their places, improbably serene.
Yet it was worse when he did respond. When in that horrible rasp he said her name in turn. Forced from seamed lips, “I’m done. I failed. Will you try and do … what I could not?”
“Valanir … how?”
“You accept it?”
“What—”
“Do you accept it?”
She stared into his obliterated eyes, caught her breath. Said, “Yes.”
With his right hand, the Seer grabbed hold of the Silver Branch beside him, gasped as if it pierced him with its light. Silver bathed his face, gentled for a moment its dreadful color. His left hand, he reached out to Julien. She tried to seize his hand; he evaded her grasp and kept reaching forward, lurching as if he might topple off balance. But he didn’t. He set his hand on her forehead. Its texture like a gnarled tree. Yet it was nearly in his true voice that Valanir Ocune made his last utterance in life. The mark on his eye gathered the light of the Branch to itself, flared like a star. “All that I am … to you.” He sagged, buckled at the knees. “Gods. Forgive me.”
The light surrounding his eye had died. Was gone. Julien stared: Valanir’s mark of the Seer was gone.
At first, registering this, she felt numb. The world around her seemed to freeze. She saw Valanir Ocune, grey-faced, in the act of pitching forward, still suspended midair. She felt the dry dead hand on her forehead. It was only in the next moment that time resumed, and the change began; and then it was as if she had been strolling alongside a cliff, suddenly tripped, and could not stop falling.
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