Amid the Winter Snow

by Grace Draven

  Jahna grinned. He hadn’t flinched when he saw her or looked away when he spoke, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of her birthmark. She liked him already. “I am a lady here to welcome you to Timsiora, my lord, but I’m also a king’s chronicler. Dame Stalt sent me. I’m Jahna Uhlfrida.”

  He motioned her inside, leaving the door partially open. Jahna appreciated the unspoken assurance. The rumors continued to prove themselves valid in one respect. The margrave was charming, but in ways beyond his renowned ability to seduce.

  She followed the motion of his hand to a small table and two chairs placed before a lit hearth and set her satchel down. She didn’t sit until he joined her, two cups in his hands. He passed one to her. “Hot tea,” he said. “To warm your bones.”

  They sat together, and Jahna emptied her satchel of its contents as Lord Pangion watched. “Uhlfrida you said. Any relation to the one marrying the king’s niece during Delyalda?”

  “My brother,” she replied. “Be prepared to witness a lot of comings and goings in this corridor for the next few days.” She didn’t exaggerate. The stones paving the hall’s floor should have worn smooth at this point with the constant stream of traffic trekking to and from Manarys Duron’s chambers. Servants, seamstresses, friends, and the endless number of family members that made up the Duron clan and assured Jahna that if family blood held true, Sodrin would be a father many times over in the future.

  She laid out her writing utensils and parchment. Lord Pangion’s room was warm so she removed the gloves she usually wore to keep her chilly fingers from stiffening and dipped her first quill in the ink. “Any time you’re ready, my lord,” she said.

  The margrave eyed her over the rim of his cup, amusement glittering in his gaze. He toasted her. “I admire your readiness, Lady Uhlfrida. By all means, let’s begin.”

  Serovek was a natural storyteller, and Jahna soon found it difficult not to pause in her writing and just listen to the man detail the events of the galla infestation that had destroyed the capital of the kingdom of Bast-Haradis and wiped out the entire royal family except for the heir’s youngest child and her uncle who acted as regent.

  Everyone knew of the galla, those malevolent entities born of the blackest, most powerful Elder magic. Banished and imprisoned in a realm outside of this one by their long-vanished creators, they had somehow managed to break free and cross over into this world to ravage it. Ravenous and immune to weapons of steel and fire, they had devoured much of the Kai population in Bast-Haradis’s fallen capital and begun spreading to the neighboring kingdoms of Gaur and Belawat.

  Beladine seers had prophesied the world’s ending in an apocalypse of unimagined horror. King Rodan had burned two of the seers at the stake for their unrelenting fear-mongering, but only the news of the galla’s defeat had finally quelled the panic that gripped all of Belawat.

  This man and four others had literally saved the world, and Jahna’s cynicism made her wonder how long it would be before Rodan decided that Serovek Pangion was far too powerful and popular to remain alive. The wily king brooked no threat, perceived or real, to his rule, and world saviors were threats to ambitious monarchs.

  Serovek took a break in telling his story to refill their cups. “My tongue is starting to stick to the roof of my mouth,” he complained. “I think I’ve talked more this past hour than I have in the past year.”

  Jahna used the interval to search through her parchment and pull out a drawing that made her blood run cold every time she looked at it. She slid it to Serovek, whose expression shuttered instantly at the sight.

  “Did the galla look like this?” she asked.

  The illustration, rendered in charcoal by a talented hand, depicted a creature born of a madman’s nightmares. Even on the static page, it gave one the sense of a writhing darkness whose edges were thin and razor sharp. The vague outline of a skeletal frame hid behind a gobbet of vaporous blackness, and where a face might be, there was only a dark socket for an eye and an open maw full of jagged, tenebrous fangs. The thing looked starved, not for food, but for souls.

  The margrave picked up the drawing by a corner pinched between two fingers, as if touching it risked plague. His voice, previously warm and jovial, sounded flat. “Shadowy, yes. Unnatural.” He set the paper down and wiped his fingers on his sleeve. “Imagine if you took the broken bones of various people and animals and stitched them together without plan or purpose, using thread made out of black mist.” Jahna shivered as a tendril of revulsion slid down her spine. Serovek looked from the illustration to her, a frown knitting his brow. “Someone else you spoke with saw one of these things?”

  “Not me. Another king’s chronicler. She sat with a farmer who described seeing a clutch of galla gathered on one side of a stream that borders his land. He drew the picture. According to him, they would have swarmed him had it not been for the stream.”

  Serovek nodded. “They can’t cross water. We used that weakness against them on more than one occasion to trap them in a pincer maneuver.”

  Jahna tucked the illustration back into her stack of parchment, glad to put it away. “They’re hideous.”

  “That sketch doesn’t do them justice, and how they look isn’t as bad as how they sound or move. They can mimic the voices of those they devour, even take on their victims’ appearances for a few moments. They hunt in swarms. Not like bees or locusts. More like roaches.” The revulsion in Serovek’s voice could have curdled milk.

  Jahna scribbled fast to capture every word and wrote as she spoke. “It’s said the Kai regent created a spell that allowed you and the others to fight the galla without coming to harm.”

  Serovek’s gaze took on a faraway cast. “A powerful enchantment. Elder magic no human has ever wielded and most Kai have forgotten. We became what the Khaskem and his Elsod called Wraith Kings. Split apart three ways and then brought back together again.”

  Once more a serpentine shiver slid down her back as he described a ritual of violent death and unnatural resurrection in which those whom the Kai named Wraith Kings became as strange and grotesque in their new incarnation as the creatures they battled.

  It seemed disrespectful somehow, almost blasphemous, to keep writing while Serovek spoke. She wanted to lay down her quill, fold her hands in her lap and listen, both enraptured and horrified as he recounted the struggle against and final defeat of the galla. But she kept writing until her aching hand went numb. When he paused, she scribbled a little more, then stopped to shake out the cramps in her fingers.

  Reliving the horror of that conflict had altered Serovek’s face. He was pale and pinched around the mouth, his eyes hard as the obsidian the trade caravans sometimes brought over the mountains from the far southern kingdoms.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jahna said. “We can stop there if you wish.”

  The margrave shook himself as if to slough off something foul. “No, this is why I agreed to our meeting, so even generations beyond us will remember what happened and hopefully learn the lessons we didn’t regarding the dangers of Elder magic.”

  “And heroes should be remembered and celebrated,” she added.

  A wry look flickered over his still pale features for a moment. “We aren’t heroes. We did what we did to survive and suffered a defeat with the loss of one of our own. Megiddo paid the ultimate price for our triumph.”

  A terrible despair painted his words. Jahna chose not to write those down. There were some things meant to be remembered with ink and parchment while others were best served with fading in memory just so one might heal.

  While five men rode out to battle the galla, only four returned home. The heretic Nazim monk, Megiddo Cermac, did not, and Jahna shied away from dwelling on the suffering his soul must be enduring trapped in the malevolent realm of the galla.

  She struggled for some words of sympathy to offer Lord Pangion over the loss of his comrade-in-arms. “Maybe since the galla never touched his body, there’s still a chance he can be saved? Didn’t you say as long
as your bodies were protected from the galla, you couldn’t die?”

  “There are the dead, and then there are those who are worse than dead.”

  It might have been the dancing light of the hearth’s fire or even the tilt of Serovek’s profile as his gaze shifted from her to the inner horizon of a distant memory, but Jahna swore, in that moment, thin lines of spectral blue fire etched the whites of his eyes, and his face no longer looked quite human.

  She was half out of her chair when, with a single blink, the margrave of High Salure was once more just a handsome man wearing a faint smile and sitting in a chair far too small for his big frame. His eyes were still the deep-water blue she found so arresting, but only the irises. The otherworldly cerulean spiderweb that fractured his sclera was gone.

  He didn’t seem to notice when she eased back into her seat, gripping her quill like a dagger. “Ask your next question,” he said.

  She kept him another half hour, until her hand threatened to seize entirely and her ink ran dry. When they finished, Serovek helped her pack up her supplies, offered more tea which she refused, and escorted her to the door.

  They stood together at the threshold for a moment. He bent a little so he wouldn’t hit his head on the lintel. “Should you ever find yourself in the hinterlands, Lady Uhlfrida, come to High Salure. We’ll make you welcome, and if the weather is fine and we’re still at peace with the Kai, I’ll take you to the new Kai capital at Saggara. You can meet the man who wielded the wraith spell and led us into battle.” His eyes narrowed with a wry humor. “The Khaskem isn’t quite as impressive as his wife or his his second-in-command, but I think you’d like him.”

  Jahna swallowed a squeal of delight, certain that such a demonstration would make the margrave rescind his offer. “You’re most generous, Lord Pangion,” she said, thankful she sounded so calm, as if war heroes offered to introduce her to Elder rulers every day. “I hope to take you up on that offer one day.”

  He bid her goodbye and disappeared back into his chamber. Jahna raced down the hall, eager to return to the Archives and conscript a pair of amanuenses to help transcribe her extensive notes into a neat composition for Dame Stalt to read and review.

  As with every year prior to this one, the bailey was a surge of humanity packed in a space too small to fit it comfortably. Thanks to Rodan’s new decree that the various hawkers and vendors were to set up their stalls outside the walls instead of in the bailey itself, there were areas within where one didn’t have to squeeze past bodies and livestock to reach their destination.

  Hunger pangs made Jahna’s stomach rumble. She hadn’t eaten all day, and the wine she drank while speaking with the margrave sat in her belly on a sour note. The smells of roasting meat and nuts toasted over fires rose above the stench of unwashed bodies to tease her nose. She had time to make a quick detour outside the fortified walls to purchase something before returning to the Archives.

  Without the confinement of the palace’s fortified curtain walls, the impromptu market that sprang up during Delyalda sprawled in every direction on the land King Rodan had designated. The snow-covered ground had been churned into a slurry by the tread of carts, people, horses and oxen. Straw had been laid down to help with footing, but its effectiveness didn’t last long. Jahna was glad she wore her sturdiest boots with the tightest laces, or the mud would have sucked them right off her feet as she trudged toward a stall where a vendor turned skewers on a grate resting across a fire pit dug in the ground.

  She passed other booths selling Delyalda charms, gloves and wraps, jewelry and pottery. More offered services such as hair-braiding, fortune-telling and even hip baths for the truly brave willing to stand naked in the frigid air for a good scrubbing.

  Jahna purchased a skewer stacked with pieces of roasted goose and stood on the periphery of the thoroughfare to eat and observe the endless procession of humanity. Across the main avenue, a group of barbers had set up their reclining chairs to shave the men who wanted their beards clipped or shorn. Jahna grinned at the notion it looked a bit like a sheep-shearing competition, with the barbers’ knives flashing in the sun as they soaped, scraped, wiped and pushed their customers out of their chairs before gesturing for the next man in line to take a seat.

  She forgot her food and demanding stomach when, through the gaps in the milling throng, she spotted a man roll nimbly out of the barber’s chair and hand payment to the barber. His back was to her, and he’d been too quick out of the chair for her to catch a glimpse of his face, but the sight of broad shoulders and vivid ginger hair made her breath hitch to a stop.

  “Radimar?” she mouthed and plunged into the crowd, uncaring that her lunch had fallen from her hand, forgotten, or that her hood had slid farther back, revealing more of her face to a growing number of stares.

  He had already disappeared into the crowd, where even his hair didn’t distinguish him amidst the press of so many people. The sucking mud slowed her down, and she feared dropping her precious parchments in her satchel or worse, losing her footing and being trampled. Such a thing had happened more than once during a Delyalda festival. She gave up after a few more futile attempts to spot the red hair and retreated from the mob for the sanctuary of the Archives. She came across Sodrin while crossing the bailey.

  “What happened to you? You look like you’ve been dancing in the pig sty.”

  Jahna glanced down to see what inspired his rude remark. Mud caked her dress from knee to hem and lay so thick on her boots, she no longer saw the straps. She was a mess. “I stopped at the market to buy something to eat. It’s a mud pit there.”

  “I hope whatever you ate was delicious enough to make it worth it. Go wait over there.” Sodrin pointed to bench occupied by a cage full of chickens. “I’ll go to the Archives and ask one of the scribes to bring you a pair of shoes from your room.”

  He soon returned with a clean pair of shoes and a towel. Jahna carefully folded back the first layer of her filthy skirt while Sodrin used the towel to unwrap and remove her mud-slathered boots.

  “Sodrin, I think I saw Radimar Velus at the market.”

  Sodrin glanced up from his task, eyebrows lifted in a surprised arch. “Are you sure?”

  She shook her head. “No. It was just a glimpse as he stood up from a barber’s chair. I never saw his face, but you couldn’t miss the hair.” Or the shoulders. Or the back and long legs.

  She expected Sodrin to chastise her for being overly fanciful and reminding her that there were other men with red hair roaming the capital. Instead, he tossed aside one of her muddy boots and set to work on unstrapping the other one, his features contemplative.

  “It might be him. I sent a missive to Ilinfan months ago inviting him to the wedding. I never got a reply and didn’t expect to. Last I heard, he was in the Lobak Valley supporting the Nazim monks in their fight against the warlord Chamtivos.” He glanced up at Jahna, hope in his eyes.

  A giddy rush of euphoria enveloped her, and she ruthlessly crushed it. Except for a letter of sympathy over her father’s untimely death two years after Radimar returned to Ilinfan, neither she nor Sodrin had seen or heard from the swordmaster in nearly a decade. He still haunted her dreams, and her lips sometimes throbbed at the memory of his kiss, but she had resigned herself to never seeing him again. Even if, by some slim chance, it was Radimar she’d glimpsed in the market, any reunion between them now would be painfully awkward.

  A sudden thought occurred to her. “Wait. You invited him to the wedding? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Sodrin set aside the second muddy boot, dropped the ruined towel on top of it and stood. He handed Jahna her shoe. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think you’d care.”

  That startled her. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  He shrugged. “You never spoke of him after he left us and didn’t seem interested when I did. It was as if he no longer existed to you.”

  Dismayed at the idea she’d done such a good job of hiding her despair that her
brother perceived it as disinterest, Jahna sighed. “I never meant to give that impression. Of course I care. He was a member of our family for three years.” And I was in love with him.

  “I have another function to attend this afternoon, probably another roasting by Manarys’s father. I haven’t even married his daughter yet and he’s already threatened at least twice to kill me if I upset her in any way. I can meet you afterwards to see if we can find your mystery redhead.”

  Jahna giggled and reached out to pat him on the cheek. Her brother had matured into an admirable man who had ably taken control of the Uhlfrida estate once their father died. He was now Lord Uhlfrida, and both the title and the wealth that came with it had attracted the interest of the powerful Duron clan’s patriarch. He might threaten Sodrin at every gathering, but Jahna suspected it was mostly bluster. The Durons were directly related to the king. They could choose any candidate for a union with one of their daughters. Sodrin was a coveted catch on many levels, and everyone knew it.

  “He won’t kill you, Sodrin.”

  “Maim me then.”

  “That either.” She laced her shoes and stood, careful to keep her muddy hem from smearing their tops. “I have to take these parchments to the Archives for transcribing. You’ll have to hunt alone, or better yet, just wait. If it’s Radimar, he’ll come to you when he’s settled in. I’m sure he’s as eager to see you as you are to see him after all this time.”

  “You as well,” Sodrin said.

  Jahna only smiled, hoisted her satchel onto her shoulder and thanked her brother for both the help and the offer to get her boots cleaned and returned to her by the following day.

  She spent the remainder of the day at her desk, alongside two other amanuenses, copying the pages of her notes from the meeting with Serovek Pangion. The steady scratching of busy quills were sometimes interrupted by quick inhalations or low-voiced exclamations as her helpers came across some of the margrave’s more gruesome descriptions of the ravages inflicted by the galla on the unfortunate Kai people of Bast-Haradis.