When the King Comes Home

by Caroline Stevermer

  “There’s Red Ned,” Tig said. We had a poor vantage from our position at the extreme rear, but Tig knew where to look and what to look for. “Just by the royal standard.”

  I found the figure Tig intended. He was one of a knot of men near the foot of the standard bearing the banner of the kings of Lidia. There was no definition of heraldry that permitted such a breach of manners, but the intent to link Edward of Ardres’s army to King Julian’s antique authority was unmistakable. I craned my neck until it ached. “Where’s the king?”

  “There beside that bitch Dalet. She’s riding a milk white mare.”

  I followed Tig’s scorn to the pair of horsemen nearest the standard. The white horse was caparisoned, no other word for it, down to what looked to be bells on the bridle. Its rider, done up in a regal style gone at least a century out of fashion, was Dalet. Beside her, on a black horse, rode Julian. He was in practical clothing, with the only fanciful touch a tabard bearing what looked to be his heraldic arms. If the spell Rigo worked with the crown affected him, he didn’t show it. He sat his horse easily and seemed to keep his attention on what was immediately before him. I could not see that he ever seemed to look up, or around, still less to scan the throng around him.

  The sun rose higher and higher while the armies made their dispositions. Orders were bawled to drop us back farther and still farther.

  My neck ached, and I felt sticky and vile as my clothes went slowly from wet to clammy to all but dried. I began to wish I hadn’t come or that the whole day were over and all disposed, for good or even for ill. I tried to get out my notebook, but Tig snarled at me to pay attention. Though I obeyed him, I could not help but snarl back. “Are we to wait here all day long?”

  “No one asked you to come.”

  The battle started while we were squabbling. I’ve heard the songs. Seven days and seven nights the eagles battled. Rot. The battle lasted half a day. After that there were skirmishes, little more than running fights, that lasted three days at most.

  Tig and I were on a little rise, the rest of the camp followers around us. I could tell the armies apart as long as the columns were drawn up in order. When the men advanced and met to skirmish, the columns melted into chaos. I could not tell, even with banners, who fought whom, let alone who was winning.

  I had to watch. If I let myself look away, I felt guilty for wishing to escape. Tig was right. No one asked me to come. To watch, even if I flinched and cried while I did so, was my duty.

  By the end of the first hour, it was clear to my companions that the prince-bishop’s gunners were hopelessly mired. It was a question of losing as slowly as possible. Victory was not an option. The land was against us. To retreat was all that could be hoped.

  Our withdrawal was not utter chaos. So busy was I, obeying Tig’s orders, I did not even have time to be afraid. Only after a long while, when I was well along the way to exhaustion, did our pace slacken and our retreat cease.

  “We can stop now,” Tig told me. “Dismount and see to the horses.”

  “With what?” I felt like bursting into tears.

  “Do the best you can. As soon as they’ve cooled off a bit, let them have a drink.”

  We were beside the river again, that infernal river that had hemmed in our forces for so long. With difficulty, because my arms were weary and the horses were uneasy, I led Tig’s horse and mine into the water. We stood up to our knees in the chill current. The horses drank, and I stared into the water. It was dark brown, quite opaque even before we churned our way in. Perfectly usual color for river water at that time of year, yet I knew something was wrong ‘ with it.

  I was slow to realize that the drumbeat I’d carried with me was gone at last. There was nothing in its place but the knowledge that where I now felt emptiness something had once buoyed me up. The cold flow of the river pushed at my legs. The horses tugged me gently forward as they drank. I stood fast against the current, yielded but little to the horses, and as I stood there I realized with slow horror that the burnt umber of the water held not merely mud but blood.

  Awareness of the horror rose until it filled me, filled my mouth with the taste of blood, my nose with the smell of blood. The horses took no notice and I drew back, revolted by them.

  “Hail?” Tig called to me from very far away, but I was already scrambling to get clear of the horses, clawing at the muddy bank of the river, scraping my knees to regain solid ground. If he said anything more I did not hear it. I only lurched to my feet and ran, panting and mindless, back the way we had come.

  I came to my senses slowly. For a long time all I knew was that I was cold. I ached in some places and was numb in the rest. Hearing came next. There was a fire somewhere nearby. No heat from it but I could hear the occasional crackle. I smelled horses. Mud. Shit. Not just horse shit either. People.

  My mouth was dry, metallic tasting. I swallowed painfully and opened my eyes. I could see the sky. It was ultramarine, the color of the Madonna’s mantle. After sunset or before sunrise. I couldn’t decide. It occurred to me eventually that I could wait and see which. Or I could do something. So I tried to sit up. No. Settled for rolling onto my side. That hurt. It would hurt more, I realized, if the numbness ever left my bound arms and legs.

  No one had noticed that I was awake. I decided that was just as well. For a moment I wondered if I ought to pretend I was still dead to the world, at least until I had some idea of what had happened. I could remember the smell of blood, but the rest of my recollection was blurred. I had run for a long time, driven along like a sheep. All night? I thought the sky was growing lighter.

  Someone kicked the sole of my foot. I couldn’t help reacting. Someone stepped into my range of vision, and I realized it was Dalet. Even in the poor light, the costume she was wearing was more striking at close range. It wasn’t just old-fashioned. It verged on the biblical. She even wore a wimple to cover her hair and throat. It was faultlessly white, and the crown that held it in place was familiar. It was the one I’d made for Rigo. For the king.

  “Almost ready,” Dalet said, though not to me.

  My mouth tasted terrible, so I spat. It didn’t come out right, my mouth was too dry, but the intent was clear enough.

  Dalet kicked me again. “I could put you back to sleep if I wanted to. It’s better this way.” She walked around me sprinkling what looked like white sand as she went. The mud should have made that sand disappear at once, but it didn’t. The sand lay like a white ribbon against the rich brown mud.

  “Let me go.” I said it, first louder and louder, then softer and softer as my voice returned and then left again. I was so frightened I didn’t even stop when she laughed at me. “You bitch,” I finished, but by that time I was audible only to myself.

  She was going to do something to me, and I knew what. Like an extra lurch in every beat of my pulse came the certainty that she was going to call back the dead, and this time it was my body that would provide her a receptacle.

  Gold has no memory. The words came back to me, and I would have sworn aloud if I’d been able. Instead I swore inside my mind, bloody great oaths of rage against Maspero. Without him, none of this would have happened. None of it.

  My mind tangled itself in none of it for a while. After I thought it over and over a few dozen times, I began to realize that my wits were not the sharpest.

  Dalet began to laugh. In an annoying little singsong, she said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  I found I could speak after all. “Who?” If Maspero was right, and suddenly I found myself hoping he was, I’d never know. It would all be over for me by the time she called back the soul that would reshape me into something else utterly. “Who?”

  Dalet’s amusement reminded me that she liked to turn into owls. I bit back the desire to repeat myself further. She held up a woman’s wedding ring. Perhaps our thoughts were linked, or perhaps I read the answer in her satisfaction.

  Queen Andred. I thought of Maspero’s gisant. I had never seen it. I
would never see it now. In a way, I would become it.

  It pleased Dalet to answer my question. “Only to please Julian. To advise Edward. To obey me.” She continued with her preparations. “She was old when she died. So she’ll come back old. But she was wise. She knew how the world works.”

  I saw the medal Dalet wore. The siege medal, the real one, which Maspero had forged for Julian. My copy was lost, merged into the metal of the crown that I had reforged for Rigo and the prince-bishop. Our army scattered, our battle lost, at last it occurred to me to wonder what had become of the prince-bishop. How had she come by the coronet?

  Dalet finished her ring of sand. I rolled back to look up at the sky. Sunrise was not far off. She didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Against the deep blue I could just make out shapes moving overhead. Birds? Perhaps not.

  Strange the way the memory works. I heard myself praying aloud. It wasn’t mere repetition of comforting words, either. This was real prayer, the burning kind, sincere as a child’s, eager to strike a bargain.

  “Stop that.” Dalet looked as if she wanted to kick me, but she didn’t cross the sand to do it. If she did something to stop me speaking, it didn’t work. The words kept bubbling out of me like water from a spring. “Be quiet.”

  I tried to keep my eyes on the sky behind the birds. Or whatever they were. If I were to be cast out of my body to wander with those lost things, it would happen no matter what. Passionate prayer wouldn’t hurt my chances.

  Dalet looked cross. “I can’t stand that noise.” She made a rude gesture in my direction, and my voice dried to nothing again. I kept on shaping the words of my prayer despite my silence.

  Dalet began her necromantic ritual. It sounded like a nasal drone to me, but I could feel, under my leaping heartbeats, the power there within her.

  It was a ritual of order and severity. I sensed the shape of it coming and going all around me, and I could sense Dalet’s power, like a thunderstorm gathering, behind the shape of the ritual. It would be like sinking into the mud, once the power closed in on me. I would know nothing more than the eternal coldness of the earth.

  My prayers faded away, not merely from my lips but from my thoughts as well. It was all a lie. Even if it was truth for some, there was no truth in it for me. Why should there be? My sins were too numerous to count. I was as bad as any sinner had ever been, and worse than that, I was silly. The vanity, the absolute laughable vanity of it, of trying to make what I could feel, what I could think, into something that had value.

  My mortification burned until I was half glad of the chill mud beneath me. I hoped gold had no memory. I knew mud had no memory. I was counting on it. I welcomed the oblivion to come. Let the earth swallow me.

  The last sin in my long litany: despair. It weighed me down, pressed me into the earth. Dalet was calling the queen, calling Andred the Fair back into the world she had known so well.

  From a distance, I heard. But I didn’t care. I felt nothing. I could do nothing. My whole life, I had done nothing. Or worse than nothing—I had tried to do something and I had failed. Every work of mine was marred, every single thing that I had put my hand to. Except the circle I had chalked on Madame Carriera’s floor.

  What was Adam before the creation? Dust. The dust we all return to. What was there, that day in Madame Carriera’s house, but her stone floor, her bit of chalk and my bit of dust, my hand? Something more was there too, but what? The voice that bade me draw? The idea of a circle? The need to make the mark, to divide the world into order and disorder, dark and light?

  No matter what it was, no matter where it came from, that which made creation necessary was in the world before I was, and it would remain in the world after I left. No matter if my ears were stopped, someone else would hear it. Another circle would be drawn, perfection from the dust.

  But my ears were not stopped yet. The world was far away, but I was in it still. I opened my eyes, and the sky was there, deep above me. There was no breeze. No clouds. Only the dark flecks that wheeled and soared against the blue.

  My heart beat in my ears, steady as the tempo of Dalet’s incantation. I could feel the power of that incantation weighing upon me. Part of the power was from the siege medal. Part of the power was from the coronet I’d made out of Maspero’s votive crown. It was not just the blood that had been employed in Maspero’s casting that made her magic strong. It was the power of his invention, his idea, his design. My work was weak by comparison, a pale copy of his, a mere thread of gold in the base metal that replaced the citadel he’d crafted. But my work was mine. Part of Dalet’s power derived from the crown she had stolen—the crown that bore my mark.

  It was easy to think in circles, lying there looking up. The wheeling shapes circled us. Dalet’s voice circled me. I thought with longing of the mindless ease with which I’d achieved that chalk circle the first day. One day I would know so much of my art that I could forget it all and draw again, close the ring in perfection. The thought came to me with such gentleness that I could not tell from where it came, within me or without. It came, and I could not tell if was realization or resolution. I will make something.

  I felt the cold again. The mud was my bed. The sky was all the blanket I had. The sun cleared the horizon, and I prayed.

  The words of Dalet’s incantation rode the tempo she set, deliberately slow and growing slower. The hammer of my heartbeat in my ears grew as I prayed. As I felt the cold anew, shivering racked me. The tempo faltered, not just in my ears but in the outer world. Dalet drew more deeply on the sources she had mastered, yet her incantation grew uneven in tone and measure. Her voice wavered. Her concentration intensified. As she drew on her sources, the power wavered, shivered. She steadied it and went on.

  Dalet had called me, using the power of my work, and drawn me to her. I had left the horses at the river’s edge and followed her summons, step by step, the rest of the day and all night long.

  I had left the horses at the river’s edge, but Tig had not. He had followed me doggedly until nightfall and picked up the trail again, now with the horses rested, at the earliest opportunity.

  I saw him slip near. I remembered the fight with Istvan on the night the king returned. Tig could not fight like Istvan. I knew that he could never overcome her. If she had sentries posted, he had eluded them, well and good. But Dalet was even stronger now, and she would no longer need to flee.

  Tig glanced about, then looked to his left. My range of vision was limited. I could not see what or who he was watching. Yet something in his posture warned me that he was waiting for a signal. For no reason in the world, I was sure that the signal was to be from Ludovic.

  Bad enough Tig was stalking Dalet. The unreasoning fear that Ludovic was with him made my heart jerk and my throat tighten. Whoever it was, it was bad enough. Let it not be Ludo.

  Dalet’s chant faltered, resumed at an increased pace, then wavered and stopped. She looked around, not impatient at the interruption, merely curious. She saw whoever Tig was watching and she smiled. “Time enough,” she said. “I’ll finish…”

  Tig shot her in the back with my pistol.

  She fell without a word.

  I strained to look. When I saw Ludovic join Tig in his wary inspection of the body, I relaxed back into my mud. Overhead the sky was clear blue. Nothing wheeling any more.

  Tig untied me. At first I was as useless as if I were still bound. Cold and caked with mud, I was helpless. With a combination of scolding and what sounded to me like clucking, Tig helped me to my feet and propped me there.

  If ever I complained at traveling with the luggage, the luggage was well revenged. To be borne away to safety was my only desire.

  This desire was not fulfilled. Far from it. Tig urged me over to the mortal remains of that bitch Dalet. Without any consideration whatsoever, he urged me to remove the crown. Once I had pawed it aside, he covered it with a cloth and tied it in a bundle.

  “Orders,” he told me.

  At Tig’s insistence, I
climbed up into the saddle of a horse held ready for me by another soldier, one of half a dozen attending us. As my head cleared, I looked around and realized that Ludovic Nallaneen was not with us. The figure to which Tig had shown such deference turned out to be Istvan, who was looking more battered than I’d ever seen him. He carried Ludo’s sword, its blade too foul to sheathe. The harvest that blade had reaped was all around us, men of Dalet’s escort, slain.

  Tig followed my addled look with ease. “No one stays to fight him any longer.”

  “They stayed,” I said. I meant Dalet’s men. My voice was very small, but it was mine again.

  “She made them.” Tig tied the bundled crown to my saddle and mounted his own horse.

  I looked back as Tig took my reins. Dalet, forbidding still, lay prone in the mud, attended even there by her escort. “Shouldn’t we do something? Bury her?”

  “She’s dead. That will have to do. Bad luck to touch her, even.”

  “You made me touch her.”

  “Only to get back what she stole. You had the right to get it back. Anyway, if there is bad luck for you, Rigo will set you right.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Back with the captain. The prince-bishop is dead. Killed. The army has scattered. We’re headed back to the captain, if we can get there. Rigo will use the crown to free the king.”

  “Dalet’s dead. Won’t that free him?”

  “Not from Red Ned. Not without help.”

  “I thought Ludo was with you. I couldn’t see very well.” Truth to tell, though my vision had cleared, my wits were still scattered. I hung on and let Tig lead me. The world folded in until it consisted of nothing more than coldness and the aches in my back, my neck, and my knees. The mud dried into a crust that weighed me down like armor. I wanted to be clean and dry and warm in my own bed in Giltspur Street, or better yet back home in Neven, or even just to be allowed to sit on the ground and be still for one clear moment, without fear for myself or my friends.