by Kate Elliott
“Do you control it?” she asks, feeling faint.
“Nay, I only asked for its help. Just as I ask for your help.” Hanna sees her clearly now with firelight and starlight and the princess’ own shroud of magelight to guide her. Four huge bear claws hang heavily from a leather thong around her neck. Several miniature pouches hang from a belt at her waist, each one cleverly tied closed with thread as fine as spider’s silk. Her felt conical hat is missing, and she wears no covering at all on her head; her braids have been tied back behind her neck to keep them out of the way. She has a healing cut across the knuckles of one hand, and her leather coat has a huge rent in it, as though it was recently slashed and mended. Meat is cooking, and fat is boiling. Her nose is smudged with soot.
“How can I help you?” asks Hanna. “This is only a dream.”
“How can I find a dragon’s scale? All the dragons are gone. They vanished when the Lost Ones fled, so the old stories tell us.”
Hanna laughs. Maybe in dreams the truth is easier to find because it isn’t obscured by waking blindness. She drops to her knees and gathers up a handful of sand, lets the odd golden grains pour down through her fingers. The heat of them soaks her skin in dreamy warmth, like the kiss of magic. “Couldn’t these be dragon’s scales?”
The Kerayit princess laughs out loud, a whoop of joy. For all that her expression and demeanor are exotic and somber, still, she is barely a woman, no older than Hanna herself. She is no different than any other child, gleeful as she turns the trick back on a wily old teacher. In her excitement, she grasps Hanna by the shoulders, not unlike the monstrous griffin, and kisses her on either cheek, then slaps her under the chin with the back of her hand, an odd endearment. Her breath smells of sour milk. Her lips are dark, as if stained with berry juice.
“Hai ai!” she cries. “Stay with me, luck, and we will hunt down the others together. Seventeen items she said I must bring her, and I have five now. So I will prove myself worthy of becoming her apprentice.”
A bass rumble vibrates along the earth, felt through the soles of her feet more than heard. The princess suddenly grasps Hanna’s arm, and together they sway, only it isn’t them, it is the earth that is shaken and they only move with it. The land shudders and jerks as if dragons buried beneath a millennium of shed scales have woken and are trying to dig free.
The tremor drags at her, and she feels the ground slide away under her feet, spun not by sorcery or some monstrous flying creature but by a sudden disturbance cutting through the earth itself. She is torn away, but she is still dreaming. She hasn’t left the land of dreams, she has only been displaced.
The earth slides under her and the heavens are black. Neither star glints nor moon shines, but the breath of dawn licks at her face; she can see it in the graying scene unfolding before her, and she knows she has traveled a long way, thrown off course by the trembling earth. She is somewhere she has never been before. She feels another mind and another soul tangling with hers as she dreams, and he has brought her here, unawares, perhaps. No malice oppresses her, but the heart that beats inside her is unlike anything she has ever known, unlike her own simple and apprehensible heart, more cruel than merciful, more just than kind, yet in its contradictions unfathomable.
She walks among them and she falls inside.
Spring came early, as foretold by the merfolk who can taste the weather in the salt of the sea. No pounding storms troubled the fjords over the winter. Now he stands in the stern of his ship and the sea slides underneath as smoothly as melted grease coats a hot pan. The pull of the land is almost enough to draw them in. Scarcely does any oar touch the water.
Victory can be had in many ways, and this victory will be taken at dawn on a foe who lies sleeping.
Nokvi is, no doubt, shrewd and strong, and the magic of his allies can undo many an enemy. But that magic cannot harm the host of Stronghand, and Nokvi’s strength will not avail him in the confusion brought on him by a dawn raid.
The ships beach silently on the far side of the land’s finger, where a steep ridge thrusts out into the sound. His warriors disembark as mute as stones; for this raid, they have left their dogs behind. They begin the hike that will take them over the ridge and down into Moerin’s vale, where Nokvi rules. As they climb, pine and birch grow increasingly thick about them, and the host speeds silently between the trees until, cresting the ridge, they see the watch fires marking Nokvi’s long hall burning crisp and clean below them. All lies quiet.
As they move down the slope, their noise increases, and he feels a stab of misgiving, but it is already too late. His warriors are beginning to howl, full of their cleverness, ready to slaughter, and as they break from the woods and course over the fields he knows that even with this brief notice Nokvi’s people will be easy prey, bewildered by the early hour and the unexpected attack.
Still no movement comes from the hall.
Distantly he hears a shriek, like a raven, suddenly cut off.
They reach the hall in a thundering roar, and it isn’t until the first of them strikes down the door and heaves it aside that he understands the worst. Outside, the watch fires bum. Inside, the hearth fire burns but warms no one, because no one stands or sits or leaps up in astonished and enraged surprise. The hall is empty.
“Blow the retreat,” he cries to his standard bearer even as he knows it is already too late.
Perhaps this will be his harshest test.
“Set the hall on fire,” he calls, “and light every torch we have.”
A new force emerges out of the trees, leaping in a wild ecstasy, and their ululations rise like the flames now streaking up the walls of the long hall. They are Soft Ones, but their skin is the color of the night sea and without clothing or adornment save spears and clubs spiked with iron they race toward the Rikin warriors shrieking and laughing like madmen. They plunge forward without fear, and in the instant before they fall upon his warriors, he sees robed humans walking among the trees with staffs upraised: sorcerers. His own staff he grips tightly, but their magic does not afflict his warriors, only their own, who hit the Rikin line with howls first of battle fever and then of agony.
“Retreat!” he cries again, and this time he wrenches the horn from his standard bearer and blows the call himself, sharp, imperative.
“Nay, nay,” his warriors cry, “let us slaughter them. They are weak as calves.”
But he drives his troops forward. They know to obey him. They know he is more farsighted than they are. And by now, some of them can see that they have been tricked. With spears and fire they beat their way forward through the throng of naked men, headed for the ridge and the trees. Only the stupidest are left at the hall when Nokvi’s troops come racing out of the dark from the other direction. It’s a clever plan. Nokvi hoped to catch Rikin’s army from behind while it wasted itself killing ensorcelled men.
It is a hard and humiliating run back up the ridge and down to his ships. Only four of the ships are burning so fiercely that the fires set on them can’t be stemmed. He kills one of the arsonists himself, a naked human man who gibbers and pokes ineffectually at him with a knife before the creature falls, doubled over, from a thrust to the guts.
Four ships lost, as well as a third of his men. One ship has to be scuttled in the sound, and ten more warriors dumped overboard when they die of their wounds.
But he counts himself lucky. He has underestimated Nokvi and his allies. It could have been much worse.
It is not in victory that you learn how strong you truly are.
Sorrow licked him, and he startled up like a hare bolting and found himself weeping at Lavastine’s bier.
It is not in victory that you learn how strong you are.
Ai, God. He could not weep for himself, not truly. He was weeping for what they had done to his father’s hopes and dreams, shredded now. Thrown to the dogs.
Not my father any longer.
Nay, King Henry had not yet judged the case. Yet if Henry ruled in his favor, could he ev
er truly call himself Lavastine’s son again without wondering if it were a lie to say so? Couldn’t it be true, as Cook said, that Lavastine had lain with the young woman as well? Might he not have walked to the ruins one night and succumbed to temptation as Alain had almost done so long ago with that girl, Withi? How could they ever know one way or the other? How could one tell?
What had linked Lavastine and poor Lackling, who were so unlike that it seemed impossible they could be father and son, even after Cook’s testimony? Nothing had linked them, except blood, except perhaps the way the hounds had whined and whimpered at both their deaths.
Geoffrey’s blood claim to the count’s chair was stronger than Lackling’s merely by reason of competence. But if fitness was the only standard, then couldn’t he argue that he would be a better steward than Geoffrey? Under his rule, the people would do better than under Geoffrey’s rule. Was it pride to think so? No, it was truth. Lavastine had recognized that truth and he had made his decision based in part on sentiment and emotion, certainly, but in equal part on reason, because Lavastine took seriously his duty to the land and people under his rule.
What was blood, anyway? It was everything, all that you had to mark kinship, and yet the bond he had shared with Lavastine was no less real whether or not blood had tied them together. He and Lavastine had been woven together in some way evident to them both.
He loved him still, and he had a bitter intuition that had Cook reluctantly brought her testimony before Lavastine, the count would have smiled in his terse way and told her that it made no difference to him.
Nay, the failure had not been Lavastine’s. He had always known what he was about. He had known what would happen, and he had made every effort to prepare for it.
But Tallia wasn’t pregnant. Alain had failed and, worse, he had lied to the man who trusted him most.
The knowledge lay in his heart as bitterly as the accusation that he might be nothing better than the ill-gotten child of a whore and her father, born out of incest and cruel poverty. Ai, Lady. No better than the poor beggars who had sheltered in hovels on his land and pleaded for food for their starving children.
Yet did God love them any less than They did the fine nobles who never wanted for elegant clothing and full platters?
But you’re nothing so noble as a beggar’s child. The voice scraped at him like a finger picking at a fresh scab. Did God love whores, too? The shame of having it spoken out loud in front of everyone still gnawed at him. It would never cease gnawing. His foster father Henri had protected him from the truth of what she was all this time. He had only ever said one thing about her, that she was beautiful. As if that was all that mattered. And maybe, in God’s heart, that was all that mattered.
Rage whined, butting him, and he scratched her around the ears, buried his face in her massive neck as he patted her and she grunted contentedly. What about the testimony of the hounds? Yet where had Fear gone? Would he ever return?
He ran a hand over poor Terror’s stone flanks where the old hound lay in death at Lavastine’s feet. The curse had marbled as the old hound stiffened and died, so that he looked hewn of a dark stone stippled with white. Lavastine lay peacefully, with Steadfast guarding his head and Terror his feet. The shame of this day did not touch him, for certainly he had atoned for his sins; his soul had ascended to the Chamber of Light. Alain had to believe that.
Beside him, Sorrow stood stiffly, growling, but made no move to plunge forward. Alain clambered to his feet and combed back his hair with a hand.
But he stood alone in the church, just as he had stood alone in the hall.
Then he saw her back by the door, peering nervously out from behind the first square column. “Come forward. The hounds won’t hurt you.”
Lady Hathumod moved with the hesitancy of a fawn approaching tame lions, innocent enough to trust and yet held back by an ancient caution.
“Have you brought word from her?” he asked eagerly. She halted three paces from him, head bowed modestly, fleshy hands clasped in an attitude of prayer. “Nay, my lord. She refuses to see you. She refuses to send you a message.”
“Then I will go to her! It isn’t right that Duchess Yolande keep us apart in this way.”
Boldly, she stepped forward to lay a hand on his forearm as if she meant to hold him in his place. Then, as quickly, she jerked back. Her cheeks flushed a bright red. She still wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Nay, my lord, please do not do so. You will only humiliate yourself.”
“How can I possibly bring on myself any greater humiliation than was heaped on me yesterday?” Bitterness rose in his throat, bile burning up from his stomach. “Tallia trusts me. She only need see that I haven’t blamed her for what happened. It isn’t her fault that Duchess Yolande dragged her away. I’m sure she didn’t want to go, not truly.”
“I pray you, my lord.” She seemed almost to weep out the words as she clutched her hands together so tightly that her knuckles were white and the tips of her fingers red. “Do not blame Duchess Yolande. No matter what you say, Lady Tallia will not see you. So you must either be seen begging outside her door like a vagrant or breaking into her private chambers like a common thief.”
“Since most of the nobles here think I am no better than a whore’s son, how will it harm me—?” Knowing it was excessive, he broke off. He simply could not believe that Tallia had abandoned him so callously.
“I pray you, my lord,” she said in her soft voice. “Do not waste yourself suffering over that woman, for she is not worthy of you.”
Amazed, he watched as tears slipped down her cheeks. “What do you mean?”
“Tallia is the flawed vessel. She is how God has tested our faith, for truth was given to her, but it cracked her.”
He was too stunned to reply. How had she concealed this disrespect for her mistress all these months? He had never guessed that Hathumod was anything but an obedient companion, willingly accepting banishment from Quedlinhame in order to remain with her beloved lady.
“I know, my lord, that you do not believe the true word as revealed to us by Brother Agius, to whom God granted the glory of martyrdom. Yet who am I to question God’s design? I, too, am only God’s vessel.”
“Surely the Lady sent you to stand beside Tallia. She needs someone to take care of her.”
Her mouth, tightening, gave away the depth of her disgust. “She turned her back on the one who loved her selflessly. I am leaving her service, my lord.”
“But where will you go? Back to your family?”
“Nay, they sent me to the cloister because they have too many daughters and not enough land to divide between them. They do not want me back.”
“Then where? You can’t just strike out on your own. A mendicant’s life cannot be for you, Lady Hathumod.” He gestured toward her clothing, a good linen gown embroidered with cavorting rabbits; she was almost rabbitlike herself, with a soft round face, someone you wanted to pet rather than kick. She wore bright red cloth slippers, the kind of courtly, delicate shoes that would wear out after a day of walking. Her hands bore no calluses. Her skin was still as soft as a rose petal. “Will you go back to Quedlinhame?”
He recognized the stubborn set of her shoulders. “They won’t have me back. It matters not where I go, my lord. I will trust in God’s wisdom.” Finally, she gained the courage to look him in the eye, and he was startled by her quiet yet passionate certitude. “But I know what I have seen here. I saw what happened with the loaves among the poor. If it is God’s will to hide Her servants among us, then I will keep silence.”
Then, astoundingly, she knelt before him and kissed his hand as a lady would that of her regnant.
“Nay, you must not!” he cried, embarrassed by this act of devotion. He lifted her gently to her feet, but could say no more, because the king’s Eagle came in then, looking for him, and called him to court.
And in the end, when they had all assembled, Alain watched as the Tallia who would not speak to him nor even look at him, the
only woman he had ever truly loved, came before her uncle the king.
“Can you swear before this court and by the name of Our Lord and Lady that the marriage was never consummated?”
“Yes,” she said, and it seemed to him that she was glad to say it, that she positively rejoiced in that one word that shamed him and ruined him.
A nobleman laughed, a snorting chuckle. Henry looked up from his study of his niece, and it became so quiet that Alain could hear Rage’s toenails clicking on the floor as she shifted her head on her paws. Someone nearby had farted ripely. A bee buzzed outside one of the open shutters, and from the distant fields he heard a hoe picking at dirt, someone chopping as if they were bothered and angry.
“By the oath you swore in front of witnesses on your marriage night, you have the right to support him as his kinswoman,” continued Henry, almost suggestively. “Will you speak on his behalf?”
“I am not his wife,” said Tallia, and the gleam of triumph colored her thin face. “If it was not consummated, then the marriage never took place.”
The faintest scent of a fading dog rose drifted to him, vanished, and he became aware of his own rose hanging against his heart, as heavy as a lump of worthless iron slag. The point of the old nail had shifted, driven against his breastbone as if striking for the heart.
It was her betrayal that hurt the most.
Henry sat back with an obvious sigh. “So be it,” he said, sounding more than a little displeased. “No woman or man can rule without kin to support them. Because this man Alain has no kin to support him, I have no choice but to rule in Lord Geoffrey’s favor. His daughter, Lavrentia, I name as count of Lavas, to be guided under her father’s regency until she comes of age at fifteen.”
After that it was all meaningless noise.
And yet, hadn’t the judgment been passed a year or more ago? Hadn’t his foster father Henri accused him of everything Geoffrey had, excepting sorcery?