The Poet King

by Ilana C. Myer

  She set her hands on his head. Like some parody of benediction.

  “My opponent and I will duel this day,” she said. “That is the time.”

  And he knew it was as she said, that he had no choice at all.

  She considered him. “You’re hiding something.” She glanced behind her, to the hills. “You have friends waiting up there to help you, perhaps,” she said, and he tried not to gasp at this. Her slow smile was dazzling. “No one can take you from me, Dorn Arrin,” she said. “However they may attempt it. You are mine.”

  She strode away. He saw that she held a long sword, a blade fashioned of cut crystal, containing and bending the sunlight, splitting it into colors that swept the grass.

  Dorn looked up to the hills again, murmured a prayer. He hoped Julien would keep far away from him.

  Etherell had wandered over. “You see?” he said. “Isn’t this all a marvel?” Never had his features looked so finely chiseled, his eyes bright.

  Dorn spoke, in part, as a deflection from what he felt. “I’m not sure which aspect appeals to you.”

  “All of it,” said Etherell Lyr. “I had grown so tired of things as they were. So dour and ordinary.”

  Dorn looked away from him. “There’s nothing ordinary about you.”

  Just then a shrill call sounded. Or so it began, until it rose to a higher pitch; where it became a thread of melody. It fell gentle on the ear even though it had risen high, to be heard throughout that battlefield.

  Under the influence of that sound, even the Queen’s followers fell still. They froze mid-motion like flies caught in glue. Dorn’s gaze traveled to the space of wildflowers and grass that lay between the armies. Into that space a horseman was approaching.

  As the rider drew near Dorn could see he was fully-armored, immense, in black plate. He was huge and carried an enormous double-bladed battleaxe. His stallion was black as soot, with bright red eyes.

  The Queen came forward to meet the rider, sword in hand. Though she did not ride, she appeared fully as tall. It had to be an illusion. The notes of the horn rose higher yet, sounding from hill to hill before at last they died away.

  The horseman raised the visor of his helmet. Within all Dorn could see were a pair of blazing red eyes. “It is the appointed time,” he said. His voice like a rumble of thunder. “In the appointed place.”

  “Then let’s begin,” said the Queen, and flung up her sword. Their blades met, crystal and black. A flurry of sparks went up. Dorn thought of sunlight flashing from the surface of winter ice.

  In that moment Dorn heard her voice as he had upon waking, private in his ear.

  You know what to do.

  And so as the White Queen and Shadow King battled on the grass. Dorn did what she compelled of him. From the back of his mind he drew it, as if it were a wrapped treasure he had kept in wait. Though he spoke it softly, almost to himself, he heard it echo in the air around him. And farther, as it traveled across the battlefield. The King’s true name, or one of them.

  One was enough.

  The first thing he saw was the way the White Queen, who already shone, became in that instant like a white torch; and her laugh brought to mind bloodshed. “You’re mine,” she cried.

  The black rider was changing. He began to shrink, to alter in shape. In moments he was the man Dorn had known in the castle, nondescript and greying, riding a grey gelding. His axe had become a plain, serviceable broadsword of a size appropriate to the man. His face impassive. “Not just yet,” he said. His voice now of a man, no more. But calm. “I do not yield.”

  She laughed again. “You will.”

  Then Dorn heard something else: a voice he knew, calling out. From such a distance he should not have heard it. But it was not an ordinary cry. It came of enchantments, he knew, just as his own had done.

  The White Queen hissed. She began to change. For a moment Dorn Arrin thought he saw a bird, a white peacock, in place of her; but soon she had changed again, back to a woman. But greatly reduced in height. Though she still shone, it was faint, no longer the blaze of before.

  “So,” she said. “So, so, so.”

  The Shadow King inclined his head. “You may not care for honor,” he said. “But it seems we now have a fair fight.”

  “I care only for blood,” said the Queen. Her sword, transformed to steel, still extended. “I’ll take yours either way.”

  * * *

  THOUGH it was hard to see what was happening in the field, it was clear something had changed when Julien Imara released the Queen’s name to the wind. From a distance she could see both figures diminished in height.

  Why both?

  Archmaster Hendin wasted no time wondering. He stood at the highest point of the hill. A murmur came from him that as Julien listened, became a tune. He closed his eyes. His hair and cloak stirred as from a gale. Over his right eye the mark of the Seer showed complete. Sparks chased each other along its strands as the Seer continued to chant.

  Below, the duel went on. Its sights and sounds less fearsome now that both parties were diminished. They could have been any man and woman fighting, if not for the strangeness of a mounted warrior fighting a woman on foot. But Julien could see little of it. They were small enough now to look, from here, like insects.

  And in their weakened state, the Seers worked against them.

  Julien began to feel her spirits lighten. She looked to the green pavilion and thought she could make out one of the figures, tall, in black. But knew she wanted it to be him, and couldn’t be sure.

  That was when she heard a sound behind her. Like choking. Archmaster Hendin was clutching his neck. He looked like someone was strangling him from behind, though there was—of course—no one there. They were alone on the hill.

  Julien ran to him. She tore his hands from his throat but it was no use; his face was turning blue. With horrible clarity she understood: the magic had put him in harm’s way. Now that she wasn’t a Seer, there was nothing she could do.

  The Seer’s eyes opened, but only the whites showed. His knees buckled and he fell, as she tried to catch him. She ended up on the ground beside him, on her knees. He lay on his back in the grass, convulsing. And then went still.

  Julien held his head. She had begun to sob, and now felt she could do nothing else, bent double over the Archmaster in the grass. She had no powers. She had given them up in return for one thing, the tiny thing she had used. Used up.

  Down the hill the duel went on, a ringing of blade on blade. It seemed irrelevant. But soon would sweep them all away. This thin plan of theirs—the name, the gathering of Seers—had been their arrow-shot. The only one.

  So steeped was she in grief that it took several moments—moments that might have been hours—before she noticed a change. The sound of the blades had paused. No, stopped altogether. A rising wind came toward her that smelled of earth and wet. The live, sweet smell of a storm. A tingle in the air that precedes lightning. The winds strengthened to a gust, powerful as the breath of a giant. The grasses bent flat, smooth as green water. Julien held to Archmaster Hendin, afraid he’d be torn from her by the wind and lost more fully, forever.

  A roaring had begun, low and ponderous in the distance. Through the curls that flew around her face Julien could just make out the battlefield, where people had begun to run in all directions. Both sides were chaos. As the wind swept the grasses the Queen’s pavilion tipped over onto its side. It lay waving like a great green banner.

  That was the moment Julien saw, on the horizon, what looked like a pillar of black smoke. It was opaque, edged with gold light. Like a patch of night on the horizon. There was beauty to it, yet it looked like something from nightmares. From it came the roaring, which had swelled like multiple thunder strikes. And grew louder. A cacophony—hundreds, perhaps thousands of cries. All different, yet united.

  What came through in every voice from the widening night was rage.

  So she was almost not surprised, then, when from the pillar of
darkness they came, figures of black. They were hard for the eye to fix upon, as if made of smoke. But real enough to carry swords and spears. Their roaring rose higher, and Julien heard something else that ran together with their fury. It made her shudder. A chamber of torture would sound like this, if its victims numbered in the thousands. As if they shrilled out death agonies on the battlefield. And still they came.

  CHAPTER

  26

  THREE days before the battle, Lin Amaristoth arrived in Majdara. Though enchantments had aided her in reaching the capital along with Syme Oleir, the two were profoundly weary. But there was no time to lose.

  It was worth it all to see Eldakar’s face when she was brought before him. They clasped hands. She saw he was altered. Lin knew he’d taken an arrow to the shoulder, but now, seeing Eldakar’s face, thought there was a wound that went deeper.

  “It’s been too long,” she said.

  “I agree,” he said. “And you’ve picked quite a time. I would never have asked your help, but here you are. And Aleira keeps prophesying doom for us all.” He kept his tone light.

  Lin chose her words carefully. “I am here about that,” she said. “I mean to be of help, if I can. But I can’t promise it will work. It is something dark and shadowed, that still eludes me. This man—Syme Oleir—he is necessary to the mission.” She motioned Syme to step forward. “Syme, this is the king of Kahishi. Show respect for his grace, King Eldakar, son of Yusuf Evrayad.”

  Syme stood staring. Lin prodded him, but it did no good. He had retreated into himself.

  She sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said to Eldakar.

  “We don’t need formalities,” he said. “Not you and I. Your companion is welcome.” The gaze he turned on Syme, for an instant, was of piercing curiosity. There was something strange about the young man, and Eldakar was unlikely to miss that. But was too polite to question Lin, or try to draw him out.

  The room was full of light. They were in a solar of tall windows, opening to balconies strung with green vines. In summer these would be dancing with bees and hummingbirds in the blooms. Even in winter Majdara was far enough south that the day was mild, the sun’s beams playful on the mosaic tiles.

  It was not the Zahra, but it was a place that brought to mind her time there. The time had been short yet sprawled in her memory as if to take it over, a glistening chain of days.

  The Zahra was the reason she was here.

  She could have bypassed this place, and seeing Eldakar again, in pursuit of her mission. It would not have occurred to her. Though she hated farewells, always had, and the thought crept up that this might well be one.

  They had taken their places on a couch. Syme had thrown himself with a child’s abandon to a pile of cushions on the floor. At any moment he might start to whine. She had biscuits ready.

  “There’s something I feel, when I look at you,” said Eldakar. The sun and silence of the room seemed to enfold them both. “As if you’re not really here.”

  Perhaps she was saying goodbye within herself, without knowing it. And this king who knew people so well, even as he hadn’t known the hearts of those closest to him—he could feel it.

  “I have a job to do,” she said. “One that I hope will help us both. But it’s a risk.”

  “The dark and shadowed thing,” he said, and smiled. “No surprise that it’s a risk. Lin, sometimes I wonder why you have not been allowed to live in the world as you were meant. Always you are bent to a mission for others.”

  She was startled. Though with Eldakar, perhaps she shouldn’t have been. She thought of Zahir Alcavar giving her the Tower of the Winds, a space of her own, away from her responsibilities. She thought of Ned’s loyalty. There had been some solace, some kindnesses along the way.

  She said, “A lot of things are not as I’d want. But there are other things for which I’m grateful. This friendship is one.”

  He smiled. “I know you mean that,” he said. “But I’m not sure I can compete. You have other friends here, as it happens.” And before she knew what he was about, he rose and opened the door. Standing in the doorway a man, hovering with lank awkwardness on the threshold. Beside him, a woman with golden hair.

  Lin felt as if her breath had been knocked from her. She looked from one to the other.

  Head high, Rianna Alterra strolled into the room. She was resplendent in the light. “We thought you’d come,” she said. “We heard that bitch was on her way east.”

  At last Lin found her tongue. “So you came here.”

  Ned came forward too. “We couldn’t let you face her alone.”

  * * *

  THE night Ned came home, Rianna had lain wakeful for hours. She’d been home only a handful of days herself. She knew it was cause for joy to be reunited with her child, with her father. But there was the White Queen in her mind’s eye. The abattoir the throne room in Tamryllin had become.

  And it all was more vivid, in a way more real, than being home.

  She went through the days holding Dariana and reading to her. And of course disciplining the child. Her grandfather had spoiled her with sweets and late bedtimes. It was not necessarily a happy occasion when her mother returned. But that night she’d fallen asleep with her head in Rianna’s lap, after shrieking for hours, as if deep beneath the thwarted rage she was glad.

  Rianna sensed a steely quality in herself, and knew it was not what her child needed or deserved. She tried to stifle it, along with the memories that reared up. She remembered Elissan Diar’s face just before he had ceased to have a face.

  No surprise, then, that she couldn’t sleep.

  So she was awake when there was a sound on the stair. An urgent footfall, too quick to be her father. The stairs in this house, a country home, were made of wood plank; the sound from every footfall carried.

  When Rianna met her husband at the doorway to her bedroom it was with a knife. She held it poised in hand and watched him come. He saw it, his drawn face turned to her in lamplight, before she lowered the blade to her side. The shadows beneath his cheekbones were more pronounced, and he nearly had a beard. That wouldn’t do, she thought.

  His eyes had followed the knife as it was lowered. When he spoke, he sounded hoarse. “I saw you make a decision, just now. Dare I have cause to hope?”

  “Not a decision,” she said. “A pause to consider.” A long moment she stood there, looking him over. “It would help your case if you shaved.”

  “At once, my lady,” he said gravely.

  It meant standing aside for him to enter, bringing with him the smell of wet winter roads. She watched as he lit a lamp beside the basin. His neat, economical motions as he drew the shaving kit from his pack. She knew its contents well: Soap like a smooth pebble in its wad of paper, bottles of soothing ointments, and a blade. He went to the basin, and the mirror there. Light glanced from the blade’s edge.

  She stood at a distance behind, in the shadows beyond the lamplight. Watched as he caressed his left cheek with the blade. Stubble scraped away to reveal pale skin, uncomfortably sharp bone. He cupped water in his hands to rinse.

  For as long as he worked, he couldn’t speak. Nothing unnatural, then, in a silence.

  When he was done he looked thinner yet, and exhausted. He didn’t cross the shadows to her. He stood at the basin and looked at her where she stood at the foot of the bed. They watched each other. Rianna caught a wariness in his eyes.

  She realized she still held the knife. She put it away. Now was not the time for theatrics. And in truth, she didn’t know which emotion she would choose to display even if theatricality had been her inclination. She didn’t know if she felt anything.

  At last Ned spoke. “I’ll go first,” he said. “I know about Elissan Diar. Of the golden-haired mistress who would have been his queen. It is not the talk of the village taverns as much as what came after, but it is a part of the tale that traveled.”

  “Yes,” said Rianna. “What you heard is true.” She still didn’t know what
she felt, only that his words had planted in her a coldness. She could only stand there and look back at him, and say those insufficient words. What you heard is true.

  Ned moved forward. Rianna stiffened, but he didn’t come near. Instead he sat down on the bed with a groan. “That’s better,” he said. “I hope you’ll pardon me. It was a long ride. I came as fast as I could, after I’d done my last job for the queen. The worst of them. I think she knew I’d be done with it all after that. But I didn’t tell her. I slit a man’s throat and that was the end of it. I came home.”

  “I would not have been his queen,” said Rianna. “I would have killed him. Should have, when I had the chance. I failed.” The words came slowly, with a flat inflection, but what she felt was the old bitterness.

  “You’d have been killed if you’d done that,” he said. “I’m glad you didn’t. I’d die if you did, don’t you know that?”

  She shivered a little.

  He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He said, “I’ve been thinking of the time we freed your father from imprisonment. When we came against Nickon Gerrard. You and I, we had just pledged ourselves to one another, but we’d had no time. Until then I’d been running at death … I courted it like a fool. And suddenly here was fear. Knowing what I could lose.”

  He stopped, and lay gazing upward into nothing.

  She said, “I remember.”

  “But then I came back,” he said. “And we were joined, and happy as we were—that fear soon dwindled to memory, and I wonder what else we forgot.”

  Rianna joined him on the bed. Swinging her legs up to lie beside him and look up at the ceiling too. There was nothing to see. It was too dark.

  She reached for his hand. It closed around hers, and she felt, all at once, the coldness within her rush away like melted ice.