by David Keck
She stood, and the chamber shivered to a flicker of eerie light, like a flash of distant lightning. “But how will he know me without our ring?” And as the specter turned, her pale gown floating upon the air, the neat room was a bare tower, hollow and stark. “We have been parted long and I fear that I, too, am much changed.” The girl’s breastbone rose and fell, and blades and fans of frost sprang from the masonry with her every gasp.
Where had the thing tied the rope? Durand wondered. Upon what tissue of dust and cobwebs had he trusted his life?
“What if he should never come? What if I am to be alone here for all time?”
The blue-black light flashed once more, and Durand saw the well below the girl, the empty shaft fathoms down to a white nest of broken bones. Here was every fool who’d ever climbed the tower and joined this mad girl in her tower cell. She had slain them all. Every one had fallen to leave their bones. But there was more. Beyond the tower walls, a throng had gathered, mobbing the base of the tower. Durand nearly grinned, for these were his own Lost comrades, come once more over mountains to find him.
The mad, dead girl was still speaking.
“But you,” she said. Between one glance and the next, the little room was restored. Godelind seemed a very mortal woman. Her skin glowed like white petals in the moonlight as she came near. Her eyes were wide and soft. But the frost bristled between Durand’s fingers, and a bone-splitting ache worked in his bones. “You have seen the ring,” she said. “You have touched it, I think.” Her face blazed, black and hollow and empty as the night at the top of Creation. “Where is it?”
He had touched the ring. It was true. He had it now. But could he give her the ring? Would it free him? He knew little more than that the Rooks had seen it in their dreams. Why had the Rooks seen it? Where did it figure in this business of kings and war and maragrim thralls?
The blazing face darted nearer. “What have you done with my ring?” she howled.
Durand shoved himself back, scrabbling from her reach, catching hold of the barrel of the tower by the cracks and outcroppings of the stones. Some were loose. His feet slithered till his toes found purchase. But Godelind was howling with the madness of lifetimes alone, lifetimes under the earth in the Lindenhall, lifetimes high here among these mad villagers who had not driven her out or summoned priests enough to lay her down.
“Let me go!” shouted Durand. “It’s been three hundred years! They’ve gone, your princes!”
The tower shook. Jagged rents like thunderbolts shot the length of the thing, and the mad spirit howled. All around, the death-light blazed, full of ice and agony. It snatched the air from Durand’s lungs as he climbed. Could a man argue with the howling dead? He scrambled for handholds with aching fingers and bloody nails. Blades of the death-light shot between the fractured stones. He caught the phantom rope and swung ten fathoms, then grabbed again at the tower as the rope gave way. Then there was nothing to do but creep downward, stretched to the snapping of sinews, stabbing with the soggy toes of his boots.
The Rooks darted past, laughing aloud. “She seems unhappy.”
“Is a wooer not meant to descend upon knotted bedclothes?”
“Perhaps all did not go well in the bower.”
Durand struggled, hooking his fingers in the raw gaps between stones.
“She seems quite preoccupied with that old ring.”
“This mad girl and the dreams that called us over the sea. It is strange.”
Durand climbed by his fingertips, dodging Rooks and the shafts of uncanny light, cursing the witch in the tower and the Rooks and Creation itself. Then he put a hand wrong, and there was no way to keep hold of the icy tower.
He fell.
The earth punched his lungs empty and left him stupid, gasping.
He blinked up into a circle of terrified friends and the Lost. The beggar king was already stooping, its tongue slithering for a gash of blood in Durand’s beard.
Two hundred years of rag dolls and moldering bones had broken his fall.
The instant he could lever himself up onto his feet, Durand led the others a reeling few hundred paces up a crooked lane and out over the fields. The madwoman was still in her tower. He wondered if the old ring might have calmed her. But he wasn’t sure. And still, it was too late.
He settled on his haunches and sent Ailric to learn the doom of the Solantine horses. “Be quick,” he said. “And careful, by Heaven!”
They hunkered down behind a berm. Durand could see the dead woman’s death-light darting through the chinks of her tower as she chased around from the frail heights to hollow bottom. He closed his eyes. Beyond his few friends, the dead were gathering now. And in the baleful lightning flashes of the tower, Berchard and Heremund looked no better.
He tried to think.
“We cannot meet more of these devils,” he said. “We must get to Coensar now.”
“Agreed,” said Berchard. “I am more tired than I’ve been in my life. But there’s no rest, not with these maragrim thralls loose in the land. It is madness. Where are the Ancient Patriarchs, eh? Not what they once were, these wards of theirs.”
“Benewith has no shrine, no sanctuary,” said Heremund. “It will have long been one of the maragrim’s crooked ways between the wards. They will have come this way time and again, though never in numbers like these. The shrine at Broklambe burned. I wonder, would we find that other shrines had fallen in recent days?”
Durand shivered as he recalled his last days in Abravanal’s court. “The high sanctuary has burned,” he said. “In Acconel.”
Heremund grimaced. “Once the land was bound in a web of priestcraft. During Radomor’s war, there were high sanctuaries in ruins through all of Errest the Old, and remember what we saw then? It seems there’ve been rats gnawing at the wards.”
“We are none of us priests,” Durand said. “Coensar will have been driving the duke’s party hard. Let us say he has reached Wrothsilver by this time.”
“It is a fortress town on a high hill,” said Berchard.
“And as full as any with priests and soldiers and idols,” added Heremund. “They will find no place as strong on their road.”
“They might have come so far,” said Berchard. “Coensar is crafty, and his men brave.”
“Wrothsilver it is, then. If they are dead in the road, we cannot help them. If they are alive, they must be in Wrothsilver. Agreed?”
Berchard nodded.
There were noises off in the village. “I should not have sent Ailric,” said Durand. “How is he meant to find horses in the dark?”
Heremund was watching the eerie tower. “What did you see in that place?” he said. “Who is she?”
“The woman from Fellwood. From Lindenhall.”
“I thought they had her in a reliquary, all neat and tidy.”
Durand had an eye on the tower, still. “Quietly, skald. The woman is Lost. She has followed something, abandoned her vigil. Come this far. She wanted this.” He pulled the fat carbuncle ring from his belt pouch; then, at another howl from the tower, he stuffed it back among his few coins.
“And you had other plans for it, did you?” asked Heremund.
“I don’t know. She is mad. How did these villagers put up with a dead woman all these years?” Durand wondered.
“It will be the tax,” declared Berchard. “A living master demands a thousand taxes. A dead woman will ask none. And be a better master than many for it.”
“Now she waits, sure that her man will follow the same track into Errest,” said Durand.
“If the poor woman had proper friends, they would have taken her aside long ago,” said Berchard. “No prince, live or dead, could be worth all this.”
Light slithered between the courses of stone, like an eye at a peephole.
“We should be gone from this place,” said Heremund. “Ah. Here’s Ailric.”
Ailric was lugging a coat of mail and a few packs. He was alone.
“How are they, th
ese horses of the Solantines?” called Berchard in a long-reaching whisper.
The young man shook his head. “There is nothing alive in Benewith but the few villagers who rallied at the tower, and they are taking their belongings to another town.” The man’s face was pale. Durand wondered when any of them had slept last. His eyes burned and a thousand pains assailed him. The boy stood under a mountain of gear.
Durand reached for the iron coat—and found the thing blood-greasy under his fingertips. “This is mine. I will carry it. But anything that can be left behind, we must leave—and count on reaching Wrothsilver before anyone is hungry.”
Durand led them, leaving the trembling tower and its howling denizen behind.
17
An Ill-Suited Hero
In the chill of the Dawn Twilight, a patrol of Vadir’s mounted sergeants rumbled down on Durand and his companions, bristling with lances and terror. The wide-eyed horsemen knew nothing of Abravanal or the rest—or at least they knew enough not to speak when put to the question by a pack of gaunt, blood-caked strangers.
Ailric knew two of the men. Had he not, Durand’s wild quest to reach the Duke of Gireth would have ended in the gatehouse cells, or a ditch outside the city. As it was, the riders rushed them up to Wrothsilver Hall and the seat of the barons of Swanskin Down.
Wrothsilver had always been limewashed from top to bottom. Durand and the others followed their guides through pale and shadowed lanes while the uppermost stories of the citadel blushed in the morning’s touch. Finally, a pair of astonished guards ushered them into the polished gates of Wrothsilver Hall.
Berchard chuckled. “We are making many friends here. You’d think they had never let four reeking scoundrels into the baron’s hall before now.” His whisper was the only sound in the place.
The hall was abandoned.
Perhaps Vadir had ridden for Yrlac, or the maragrim had taken the castle and left it barren and cold.
But instead, as the hall door opened, Durand looked into the faces of a hundred people. They filled the feasting boards before Vadir’s high table. Every soul stopped to stare at the four battered interlopers.
On a dais at the hall’s farthest end stood the high table. Vadir, Abravanal, and Coensar sat with Kandemar the Herald. Every face was somber.
“You had better come,” said Vadir. He did not even need to raise his voice.
The four men entered the hall, passing between long feasting boards till they could bow before the high table: an eerie march.
It was only as Durand made to speak that he saw Deorwen. Her eyes were so full of despair that he nearly forgot the maragrim and the Hornbearer both. What had happened when he’d been in Fellwood? What had they walked into?
There was Abravanal, broken. There was Coensar, his fist a sudden coil on the tablecloth. Many men from the Lindenhall tourney were absent. Raimer, for one, ought to have been at the high table.
“Lordship. Your Grace. Sir Coensar,” he began. “We had meant to bring word that Leovere had summoned the Hornbearer, that his host was on the move in the Fellwood and Errest … but I can see you know much of this already. What has come to pass?”
No one spoke.
Deorwen met his glance, and he half forgot the throng behind him as he noticed an absence more important than any hundred tourney knights.
“Where is Almora?” he grated.
“Lost,” said Deorwen. The rest, Durand could hardly hear over the rushing of blood in his skull. “A thing from the night, in the high passes.… Terrible noise.… Raimer left, and half the fighting men with him. No word.… No sound from the pass at all.” He thought Heremund caught hold of his arm, but he shook the man loose.
Durand looked up and down the table, the hollow of his chest thundering like a drum. He wanted to rail against them for failing to search, but what would anyone have done? Could Coensar let old Abravanal scour the mountains, wild with grief, his lungs still raddled with the sickness, and Gireth and Yrlac all tied up with him? They could not remain in the pass with the mountains full of maragrim.
But Durand knew that he would be in the mountains still, tearing at the cliffs with his teeth and nails, had he been with them. Images of the girl danced like flame before his mind’s eye. He remembered her as a toddling thing, chased around the Painted Hall. He remembered the siege of Acconel, when she had kept a starving mob from despair.
Somehow, he should have been there: a better man would have contrived it.
He had looked, unthinkingly, to Coensar, but found that he recognized the memory, regret, and disbelief storming behind the old knight’s eyes. None of them should be in Wrothsilver.
A bird flapped the length of the hall, its small, dark wings snapping.
“How did it happen?” said Durand.
Coensar blinked. “In the night. A giant, its face full of horns, quick as a spider from the dark. It threw the men off like rats. Blades made no mark upon it. Then it was gone into the black again.”
Durand’s mind was a millrace of accusations. He had seen the thing in Fellwood. Had it tracked him? Could he have slain it if he’d had the wit? Where were Coensar’s sentries? How could Coensar be here and alive and obscenely breathing if the girl was taken? How could they break their fast in Wrothsilver Hall with the girl in the mountains, alone with that thing?
Or dead and frozen like a rag on some mountainside.
This last image seemed very clear in his mind’s eye.
What would they do now?
“She is the world,” Abravanal said, speaking for the first time. “And she is gone.”
It seemed that he was right.
* * *
DURAND WAS STILL standing there like a man who had been knocked senseless when a boy darted to Vadir’s side, crouching low with a message.
Vadir straightened. “From the gate. A delegation. From the king, they say.”
And another bird shot down the length of the hall, bothering the high table.
Durand wheeled in time to see the wings pouring into Wrothsilver Hall. Dark birds tumbled through smoke holes and louvers, starlings all. Men and women crouched low, warding their faces, and Durand drew Ouen’s long war sword.
In the doorway stood a stout and grinning man. He wore the black robes of a court functionary and bobbed an awkward bow.
“Hod!” said Heremund, astonished. “It is old Hod, alive and in the flesh.” But he faltered. “The man should be dead, Durand. The way he slipped us out of Eldinor and away from those creatures of the king. He was sure they’d have him. He was sure!”
The stout man bobbed his way up the central aisle, skirting the hawthorn flowers in the big hearth and casting sheepish glances at the birds. Prattling as he came: “Odd. Most odd. Shoo. Shoo. Yes. Excuse me. Do excuse me.”
Finally, he bowed himself between Durand and his friends, wincing up at the high table.
“Baron Vadir. A pleasure. Oh yes. And Your Grace! I am the most fortunate of messengers, I see. I had not hoped to find you so far advanced on your journey, but here you are, and much riding have I been saved. Oh, yes.”
Heremund stared at this strange figure with his mouth slack. The man, Hod—who had tutored Ragnal and Eodan, the rebel, and even Lost Prince Biedin in their youths—had behaved nothing like this prating fool.
Abravanal seemed to perceive only that the strange man was speaking to him. Coensar interrupted.
“You have come from Ragnal?”
The man squinted. He was always wincing and squinting. Glancing at the east windows. “Oh yes. Yes. Well. No, I should say, I suppose. His Highness has called the Great Council while you’ve been.… Where was it? Lindenhall. Oh, yes. The Lindenhall.”
“You say that he has called the Council?” said Coensar.
“Oh, yes. And they are in Acconel. Your Painted Hall, in fact, waiting for His Grace. And the talk concerned you, Your Grace. This business of two duchies and one duke, and whom the rightful heir might be—of Yrlac, not Gireth.” The creature grin
ned with oily condescension, clearly looking to find favor with Almora. “Where is her young ladyship, by the way? There’s been some talk of her as well, I must confess.”
The thing with Hod’s face looked at Durand, who stood in blood and tatters with a bare blade in his fist. Durand stared back. Could this be the man who spirited Durand and Lamoric and Deorwen from the Mount of Eagles in Eldinor?
“Has there been some unpleasantness here?” said the thing that wore Hod’s face.
Durand made no answer, and, after a querying moment, the thing turned back to Abravanal.
“Regardless, we must have you in Acconel. Oh, yes. At once, I should say. It is time. A homecoming of sorts. His Highness has sent an escort, these times being what they are.” The man fumbled among his robes a moment. “Yes. It is three hundred knights, Your Grace. A strong party.” A battalion. “Strong enough to keep the peace, oh, yes. His Highness wishes you in Acconel, and there is time for nothing else.”
“When?” said Coensar, drawing Hod’s attention.
“I should think that you might finish your meal. Yes. But Acconel is not around the next corner. Your king calls. He deliberates. Will you tarry over your courses in Wrothsilver? In any case, I will leave you to your decisions and rejoin your escort. They will water the horses, that sort of thing. Each man knows his own conscience best.” With that, the thing that could not be Hod bowed and departed, wincing and shrinking into the morning light, hauling a deep hood over his face.
“Three hundred,” said Coensar.
“It is no escort,” said Deorwen. “We have been taken prisoner.”
“I cannot leave,” said Abravanal.
Coensar stood. “Baron Vadir, we will need fresh horses.”
“We have already come too far from the pass,” said Abravanal, his voice faltering. “You told me Wrothsilver. We cannot go farther.”
Coensar set his teeth, not looking at the duke. “Baron, as many as you can spare. We leave at once. The king has commanded, and we are bound hand and foot.”
* * *
THE KNIGHTS OF the Great Council had been wise enough not to wait beyond the gates. There would be no siege. The armed men of Hod’s escort filled the streets.