by Kate Elliott
Then the moment passed, and he merely stood in an ordinary chamber fitted out with the usual luxuries due to a fighting man of noble birth: two carpets thrown over the plank floor; a chest filled with clothing and linens; a table and, with it, a chair rather than a common bench; an engraved copper basin and pitcher for washing his face and hands as well as an enamel tray, several wooden platters, two bone spoons, two silver goblets and one bowl fashioned out of gold; a plush feather bed covered by a spread magnificently embroidered with the figure of a black dragon, sigil of his triumphs as a soldier. The globe of magelight illuminated every corner of the room and all that it held: every piece of it come to him out of his father’s treasury and his father’s favor, which was itself a kind of prison. His armor and weapons—his morning gift—gleamed under the light as if they had been enchanted with unknown powers. And perhaps they were: They had come to him through his own efforts.
“You propose to travel with us?” Anne asked finally.
“I am a king’s son, and whatever your lineage, my lady, you cannot look down upon my kin and my noble birth.”
“It is the sins of the world and the weaknesses of the flesh that I look down upon. Shall I subject my daughter to them further? Or save her from them by taking her away from all that tempts her?”
“The blessed Daisan said that within marriage we may find purification. Salvation arises out of creation.”
She folded her hands before her like a saint readying for prayer. “You are a learned man, Prince Sanglant.”
“Not at all. But I listen when the clerics read from the Holy Verses.” He allowed himself a smile, half lost on his lips and quickly passing away. He knew a battle joined when he met one; and, as always, he intended to win.
“What have you to offer me?” she asked.
“The protection I can bring you as we travel, in exchange for which you will agree to feed and clothe me, and supply me with a suitable mount.”
“I do not need that kind of brute protection. In addition, I have only two mounts suitable for riding. You have nothing but service to offer me, Prince Sanglant. Will you bind yourself to me as a servant, one who walks at my side?”
The first blow that lands always comes as a surprise. But he knew better than to flail.
Liath did not. Her anger fairly sparked off her. “I have something you want,” she cried furiously.
Her anger had no effect on the depthless calm worn by her mother. “What is that?”
“Myself!”
“Earthly ties can only interfere with the concentration and detachment required of any person who wishes to learn the arts of the mind.”
“I have a horse, and I will only go with you if Sanglant comes with us. He will ride beside us on my horse not as a servant but as a soldier. As a captain.”
“As he was once captain of the King’s Dragons.” Anne studied him. He recognized the measuring gaze of one whose course of action is not yet fixed. But he chose to wait. Perhaps Liath’s flanking action would serve the purpose, and the truth was that he did not care how the victory was won. He simply would not leave her.
“His name is famous among the people of Wendar and Varre, and among their enemies,” Liath continued. “He is worth more than you know.”
Anne lifted a hand to capture the magelit globe and turn its light directly upon him. He had to blink at first because the light was so strong, but he did not shrink from her scrutiny. “Nay, Liathano, I am not unaware of his worth, the child of human and Aoi blood. Not at all.”
Like a warning finger run up his back, his spine tingled.
“It is not what I expected,” she said, still studying him in the way an eagle gliding above the earth surveys the landscape below and all that runs there. “But still … We can learn more than we have known up until now.”
“Then it’s agreed?” Liath stuck stubbornly to the issue at hand.
“It is agreed.”
“Ai, Lady!” Liath embraced him, shedding a few tears. “I pray God that we find the peace you long for when we reach Verna.”
He kept his arms around her but his gaze on her mother, who watched them without approval and yet without any obvious censorious disapproval. Her gaze had its own disconcerting backwash. He did not trust her. Yet neither did he feel in his gut that Liath’s choice to go with her was the wrong one. This contradiction he could not explain to himself.
Liath sighed with satisfaction and raised her head to get a kiss, and of course he complied.
But that did not mean he stopped listening.
“This, too, is unexpected,” Anne murmured, too softly for Liath to hear, but he heard very well, as well as a dog. “But not without advantage for our cause.”
* * *
The palace slept as they made their way through the upper enclosure, but it was a natural sleep; he recognized its rustlings and murmurings. As they packed their few possessions, Liath had haltingly told him the entire story of Hugh’s attack, and while at first he had certainly wanted nothing more than to get his hands around Hugh’s throat and throttle him, he knew enough to let the feeling swell and then burst. They were in enough trouble. Henry would refuse to let them leave; all three of them knew that unsavory fact, and they worked more quickly, and in such silence as they could, because of it, although it was a tricky business getting the gelding out of the stable.
When at last they arrived at the gate where three mules and one horse waited, he began to doubt Anne’s princely appearance because she had no retinue. An instant later, he knew himself mistaken when he heard whispering on the air. They spoke in a language he did not recognize, more wind than voice, and he could not see them, but he heard the breath of their movement and the rustling of that portion of their invisible bodies which gave them substance.
“Who is there?” murmured Liath, as if afraid her whisper would wake the palace. The magelight seemed now to Sanglant merely a particularly bright lantern—although its glow had too steady a flame to be natural.
“My servants,” said Anne softly.
He shuddered as fingers trailed over his back, searching, then vanished. Breath tickled an ear, and his hair stirred, blown into his eyes. By the time he brushed it away, he was alone again. He threw his armor—muffled in the dragon-sigil-bedspread—over the back of one of the pack mules and tied it on securely, then handed the spear to Liath. “I must get the dog.”
“The dog!” He had surprised Anne.
“My retinue,” he said sardonically. “If I leave it here, they will kill it. It saved my life more than once.”
“Ghastly creature!” she muttered, but then that flicker of emotion fled and she merely nodded, as if the exchange—and the presence of the dog—were too trivial for her to notice.
He had to go quietly. In the chapel, clerics sang Vigils. Their voices rose and fell so sinuously that he almost lost step and forgot to walk, caught in their melodious prayer. Lions snored lustily at his door; none had woken from their magicked sleep. He crossed the threshold, hoisted the dog, and hauled it back to the gates. He threw it like a sack of grain over the back of one of the pack mules and fastened it there with rope, then calmed the mule, who did not take well to the smell of Eika on its back. But even working quickly, he did not finish in time.
Soldiers came out of the gloom, twenty or thirty of them, all of them leading horses burdened with a soldier’s kit.
“My lord prince!”
Yet they spoke in whispers, not in a shout that would wake the palace and the gate guards who still slept at their posts.
“Who are these?” asked Anne mildly.
“My lady Sister!” Well trained to a man, they knelt respectfully as such milites would before any noble cleric. Surprised Sanglant glanced at her. She had pulled a golden strip of cloth over her hair to cover it; no gold gleamed at her throat to betray her exalted rank. “I beg your pardon, my lord prince,” continued their spokesman, the same Captain Fulk, “but when your recent trouble came upon you, we met together and
pledged an oath all as one: That we would follow you if you left the king. We beg you, Prince Sanglant. Let us ride with you. We will follow you even into death if only you will give us your pledge to lead us faithfully.”
“Ai, God.” How could he answer them? Yet such a thrill of joy throbbed through him at the thought of men he could lead, comrades to live and fight beside, that he was at once stricken to tears at the memory of his brave Dragons.
Anne answered before he could find his voice. “Nobly offered. But where we go, they cannot follow. We cannot support so many in idleness, and in idleness they would grow bored and difficult. Nay, the contemplative life is not for such as these.”
The men muttered at her words, but they waited for his answer. So many faces turned up to him: all of them young and newly come to soldiering except for two weathered-looking men, one of whom was Captain Fulk. Sanglant met each man’s gaze and nodded at him, and each in turn responded in his own way with an answering nod, a cocky grin, a serious frown, a bob of excitement, a tightening of the jaw as resolve set in.
“Sister Anne’s words ring true enough,” he said finally. His heart ached for what had been offered but was not his to take Not now. Not yet. “I mean to go into seclusion … until my father’s anger toward me cools. I would gladly lead you, my comrades, but it would be no fit life for you, and it is true you would only grow bored and contentious, and you would fight among yourselves.”
“Then what are we to do, my lord prince?” asked Captain Fulk, almost pleading.
He owed them consideration. They had offered him everything that mattered to a soldier: to stand beside him. He could not simply dismiss them. “Go to Princess Theophanu. I tender you into her care. She keeps her own counsel, and she will watch over you. She rides south to Aosta soon enough, where you will see plenty of fighting. When I have need of you, then I will know where to find you. I will fight no battle without you at my side.”
“We will do as you wish, my lord prince. But we will be waiting for your call.”
He walked in among them, then, took each man’s hand between his own as a sign of their fidelity. He recalled the names of those who had been at Ferse, and asked the names of the others. All twenty-seven had strong shoulders and an iron glint in their eyes: Men who dared defy the king to ride with him. He admired them, and he knew their worth.
Anne and Liath had already mounted, Anne upon one of the mules like a good churchwoman and Liath on the smaller horse, leaving Resuelto for his greater weight. They waited for him, and in the end he had already made his choice. It was time to go.
But God knew how hard it was to leave behind his life as prince, lord, and captain, made doubly hard by the oaths just freely offered to him.
“We will wait for you, Prince Sanglant,” repeated Captain Fulk, and the men murmured those same words and by speaking them made them binding. Then, as if Fulk understood that their presence was a chain binding the prince, he directed the soldiers to disperse, which they did with dispatch and admirable efficiency. They had even muffled their horses’ hooves in cloth to cover the sound of so many riding out.
Sanglant mounted Resuelto and hurried to catch Anne and Liath, who had already vanished through the gate and now rode down the road through the lower enclosure. The pack mules plodded behind them, burdens swaying in a steady rhythm. Of Anne’s servants he saw no sign. An owl hooted but remained hidden in the darkness. The waning gibbous moon rode low in the west, and its light made the road gleam as though an enchanter’s hand had laid that light down before them to make their way easy—and safe from anything that might harm them.
Anne did not even look back as they crossed out of the lower enclosure and picked their way down through the ramparts. Liath glanced back once at the palace grounds now high above them, walls washed a pale gray under the moon, and she looked relieved more than anything. But he wept softly, in grief for the estrangement from his father and in regret for the brave men he had left behind.
VI
ONE STONE AT A TIME
1
HE gathers stones, none larger than his fist, none smaller than a hen’s egg, and collects them in a leather pouch. The stones must not be too large, all together, for him to carry, but they must not be too small to serve his purpose—and there must not be too few of them. Here in the northlands, stone offers a rich harvest, and although his specifications are strict, he has no trouble finding what he seeks.
He hears footsteps, but it is only one of his slaves, come to report. He sends the slave on her way. Armed with this intelligence, for he has made of his slaves a net of listening posts to seek out his rivals, he makes his way up along the vale to the spot where his last two rivals face off.
He finds a vantage point between two boulders. With interest he watches the duel: First Son of the First Litter, calm, canny, and strong, waits as Seventh Son of the Second Litter circles in aggressively. Too aggressively. He watches dispassionately as the two brothers meet, clash, rip, and leap back. Seventh Son is quick and ruthless. First Son has greater strength, but he wastes it not, for the duel is still young. He lets Seventh Son feint and circle, lunge, parry, and retreat, and hoards his own strength meanwhile.
Another lunge, another blow. Blood flows, eases. First Son wears a gash in his left shoulder. Seventh Son limps. They begin again.
In the end it is simply a matter of time. Seventh Son is fierce, but fierceness does not count for everything. First Son did not escape from the ruin of Gent with a large portion of his warband intact by being foolish. Nor is he foolish here.
In the end, it is Seventh Son who lies bloody and torn upon the earth. Fifth Son does not wait for First Son to cut the braid that will mark his victory, but retreats from his hiding place and cuts through trees to the path that leads up to the fjall, to the nest of the WiseMothers. He passes the newest WiseMother, still on her slow journey to the flall, but he does not stop to speak to her. He must have time if he is to defeat First Son.
At this elevation all vegetation has been scoured away by the unceasing wind and the unforgiving chill, all but moss, moss everywhere except on those slopes where there is a recent fall of scree. Snowmelt streams flow downslope, as clear as air and bitterly cold. Everywhere rock lies, tumbled in the streambeds, smothered in moss, blanketing the slopes; rock is the mantle that shrouds the deep earth and the hidden fire.
Here an arm of the fjord has sliced into the high fjall, and a stream spills over a cliff that plunges straight down like a knife cut. The falling water booms down to the tongue of the fjord. The cliff he stands on is mirrored in the still water far below. For a moment, he sees his own shape, indistinct and tiny, a transitory blot upon the ancient land, and then the wind moving over the water obliterates him—as will his own mortality, in time. But not this day.
A dog howls in the distance. A hawk soars above the opposite cliff face, joined by a second hawk, then a third.
Wind stirs on his shoulders, and he turns away from the edge and makes his way to the ring of WiseMothers. He watches the ground with care, because here on the fjall the silvery nets of the ice wyrms change from season to season as their paths change, snaking lines of glimmering sand, each grain a crystal shard of venom: Their trail.
It is a peculiarly still day, wearing away to what passes for night at this season. Here on the fjall the wind usually cuts unceasingly, sawing and grinding away at the rock. Today it rests quiescent, stirring only occasionally as if it, too, awaits the decision soon to be reached on the nesting ground of the WiseMothers.
The land dips to make a hollow, where the Rikin WiseMothers congregate and whisper. Their thoughts reverberate into the heavens, and touch OldMan, the moon, the priest who in ancient days was banished to the fjall of the heavens as punishment for his transgressions. That is why the moon alone among all the heavenly creatures fades and dies, and is born again out of darkness. Such is the fate of all sons of the RockChildren.
The WiseMothers stand hunched in a rough circle, huge bodies ossify
ing, too heavy now to move. Each one stands with her toes just grazing on the expanse of silver sand. The sand lies smooth; no trace of the ever-present wind touches it; no debris lies scattered from recent storms; no scallops ripple its surface, for the nest of the WiseMothers is impervious to wind and guarded by the ice-wyrms.
Only the WiseMothers know what they are incubating here.
For a long while he watches the glimmering hollow. Nothing stirs. Nothing.
But that is illusion.
Even the small creatures that haunt the fjall know to avoid the nesting grounds.
He takes a rock from the pouch and tosses it. Where it hits the sand with a thunk, a shudder ripples out from it actually visible in the surface just as a tossed stone ripples still water. As the vibrations stir the sand away on the other side, where the rock fell, he slides one foot onto the hard surface and follows with the second.
The stone tilts, rocks. A gleaming claw, translucent like ice, surfaces to hook the stone. That fast, stone and claw vanish. He stops dead still. The sand where the stone hit eddies, smooths over, and lies still again.
He waits.
He dares not move.
He does not fear the claws of the ice-wyrms. They are fragile creatures, sightless, as thin as rope, at home only when they burrow deep in their nests of crystallized venom. Even starlight burns them.
But there is no creature the RockChildren fear as much as the ice-wyrms. No death compares to the wretched fate that awaits one who is stung. The venom of the ice-wyrms nourishes the WiseMothers, who nurse the roots of the earth. They alone are strong enough to take succor from it.
To all other creatures, it brings that which is worse than death. In this way Bloodheart protected himself, with a dead nestbrother animated by magic and fueled with venom. That is the mark of an enchanter: Even after death his hand can strike down the one who killed him.
He reaches into the pouch, draws out another stone, and tosses it. One stone at a time, he slides out across the nesting ground toward a small hummock that emerges from the silver sands in the center. As hard as iron, the surface of the hummock is polished to a pearlescent gleam.