Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  My hands, clasped at my back, clenched and released and clenched again. I’d revealed more than I intended . . . more than I had even realized, for what I said of Val Cleve was true. Twice, Dunlin and Heron had struck my bow just as I released an arrow at another man. They knew how rarely I missed. A squire had prevented me finishing his partner. And only at this distance did I recognize the appalling nature of the incidents. No simple fatigue or battle confusion had brought me close to murder. It was this septic anger.

  “You should have come to me with this, Greenshank. You were not the only one who discovered unpleasant things about himself at Val Cleve. That’s the purpose of such violent exercises, to expose weakness that it may be remedied before the consequences are even worse. A man who goes into battle with magic is the most dangerous weapon the world can know.”

  “I know that. . . .” How broken was I not to have recognized such aberrance earlier? And how childish, that this Marshal’s understanding helped ease guilt and horror.

  I struggled to recapture purpose, which was neither atonement nor gaining sympathy, but understanding this man’s place in conspiracy. Those of us, the Marshal had said of participants in Damon’s plan. Yet he was not of a single mind with the devil, either. I needed more.

  “A man who must run to his superior for reassurance that his sworn faith is not misplaced is no man at all. Once back from Val Cleve, I hoped to speak with Damon, to ask why, after so casual a restoration of my past, he’ll not allow me to use what I know. If I could just pursue my bent now in the service of the Order. To seek justice for my family—”

  “Damon restored your past? But that’s imposs— Of course, you speak of the relict-seeing, the portraits you did in captivity.” His shock, so quickly aborted, near cracked the great windows. And his swallowed denial suggested that he knew why restoration was impossible. “So it was Damon unmuted your bent. He should have told me.”

  So the Marshal, too, knew my bent was returned. It was surely the Archivist had told him. Damon certainly he hadn’t known on the morning of the relict-seeing. Raising yet another question. Bent, the Marshal had said, not bents; did he even know I had two? Did he understand that my magic could restore a broken bloodline or bring witnesses to Registry villainy across the boundaries of nature?

  “Yes, the seeing,” I said. “To view myself through Damon’s eyes, to witness my degradation at his hand and that of his colleagues . . . I watched myself alter the truth of my bent’s creation, Knight Marshal, a perversion that corrupts the soul. I learned it was my own family savagely murdered with the knowledge of these same curators. Yet, monstrous as my rage is, I cannot help believing it is short of what I ought to feel, because I experienced these things through Damon’s memory and not my own. Of all things, I desire to uphold the oaths I’ve sworn to the Order and to Damon’s reform of pureblood corruption. But now I hear rumor of a stranger violating Evanide’s boundaries, asking about me. If Damon knows where I am, the other curators must also. Doubts and fear gnaw my spirit and I’ve done nothing and I cannot mourn, cannot grieve, cannot hope. Last night, all I could think was that I needed to find my home, find my lost soul . . .”

  I near squeezed my trembling hands to pulp. Somehow the playacting had taken on the sensation of truth.

  “. . . but it took a storm that shook the boundaries of the world to remind me that I have no home but Evanide.”

  The Marshal’s curled fingers, gloved in their white silk, nudged my chin upward, so that we stood eye to eye. “I cannot give you what you desire, Greenshank . . . Lucian . . . as you well know.”

  His presence conveyed such stern and honest sympathy that in that moment I would have denied anyone who named him unworthy of his office. How could logic and certainty be so disjoint?

  The Marshal blew a note of disgust and pivoted sharply to face the window.

  “I have seen the dust of your past, as you have,” he spat. “The evil that was done you is reprehensible, and the consequence for Commander Inek beyond vile. The Archivist sees Inek’s healing as his life’s redemption. I believe he’ll manage it, and I’ve told him that no one, not Damon, not the Knight Defender, not the infirmarian, not a breathing soul save you or me is to know when that is accomplished. As for the stranger . . . A pureblood sorcerer indeed came here intending to take you captive. The Knight Defender ensured he was never truly a threat to your safety. Thanks to Damon’s brutish questioning, he’s no mind left to probe.

  “But now what am I to do with you? Yesterday, I would have sent you straight to the Disciplinarian for a lashing and confined you in silence for thirty days while I considered further punishment. Your lack of control at Val Cleve could have merited anything from a reduction in rank to outright dismissal. This morning, however, everything is changed. . . .”

  His eyes squeezed shut and the fist that gripped the silver pendant spasmed so violently, I thought he might crush it. To imagine what could so shake a man of the Marshal’s demeanor did naught to soothe my own rioting blood.

  “Last night I learned a few secrets regarding my own past—agreements made, secrets kept, mysteries deepened, including those shadowing you, thus I must stand in judgment while suffering a state very like your own. Ripped apart. Not knowing what to feel or whether feeling is even possible when I have but fragments.”

  To stay still poised on the verge of illumination required every scrap of control I could muster.

  A blast of wind shook the broad windows. The day had clouded over and a draft raced through the chamber. Already, winter laid down its battle lines. Or perhaps it was only ghost memories and phantom answers caused the hairs on neck and arms to rise.

  As if the wind had dispersed his uncertainty, the Marshal moved briskly to his great hearth, cold and dead this morning. Beckoning me to join him, he pressed his fingers to the wall beside the hearth. A panel swung open to reveal a modest sleeping cell.

  The pallet, clothes chest, and washing table were little different from my own. But the Marshal’s cell also contained a small brazier, a round window that overlooked the sea, and a neatly ordered worktable. At the foot of his pallet, he’d set an oil jar, a few rags, and an open armor chest containing the exact white and silver armor and regalia detailed in the centuries-old mosaic in his outer chamber—the equipage of the Knight Marshal of Evanide, should he ever ride out to war.

  My back and arms were gooseflesh.

  “Sit.” The Marshal pointed to a rug on the floor beside the stone hearth. His touch to the brazier set the coals alight. As the fire pushed away the damp, he fetched a box from his table and joined me on the rug, placing a fist-sized, red lacquer casket between us.

  “Until last night, the Order was the entirety of my existence,” he said. “I cared naught for the man I had been. This was all I wanted—to live and die in these robes and mask, knowing that the world was more just than on the day I put them on. Knowing that the men who lived and the men who died by my word had found their proper destinies. But today . . .”

  He extended his white-gloved hand between us as if it were newly attached to his arm.

  “This hand destroyed my own memory relict on the day of my investiture as a knight,” he said, flexing his silk fingers. “And I destroyed a second one on the day I first donned this cocoon of anonymity—erasing every personal memory of my training and my years as a knight. That act brought sensations so immensely strange, I think it must be very close to birth or death—to retain such immense and detailed knowledge of the world, the Order, history, the kingdom and its cities, yet be unable to say what gods I favored or if my own skin was dark or pale. Pale, as you see.”

  His bare toes poked out from his enveloping white, and a wry grin shone through his mask. For a moment, he might have been Dunlin, sharing an unseemly jest outside our commanders’ hearing.

  “As it happens, my hammer did not destroy all knowledge of what those relicts held. Though disco
vering that someone has retained a few of your memories might seem exactly what you desire, I can tell you that experiencing them is immensely unsettling. Have you learned how to deliver memory pricks, as yet?”

  “Not yet.” Another thing I relished learning. Speak a fact retrieved from a subject’s missing memories, while delivering a jolt of tightly wrought enchantment—a memory prick—and the subject can recognize the memory as an inerrant part of himself. Truth. It was how the Marshal had told me I was eight-and-twenty, had once been wealthy but had fallen on hard times, and had been contracted to a necropolis. Memory pricks could be lasting, as those were, but they could also be crafted as ephemera, the knowledge vanishing at the moment the sorcerer unbound the spell.

  “On the day I was invested as Knight Marshal,” he continued, “not long after I destroyed that second relict, several old secrets were revealed to me by way of impermanent memory pricks. Such is not at all the usual practice. I was advised to write down my responses to those revelations before the memories vanished—not the information itself, as the memories themselves could snarl my official objectivity, but whatever I might need to carry forward to guide my decisions. I’ve carried those responses on my person every day of my tenure, almost two years now. Would you care to see what I wrote?”

  “Very much so.” More than anything, I wanted to understand this man. As ever, he had me dangerously inclined to believe in him.

  He passed me a scrap of parchment pulled from his robe. It was worn to the pliability of cloth, and the ink was sorely faded, but quite readable.

  Lares de Attis-Damon’s vision of the future matches your own in almost every respect.

  Do not deviate from his advice and guidance regarding the missions of the Order.

  Beware of him at every step.

  I handed back the scrap. Nothing startling. It was exactly what the Marshal had advised me on the day I submitted to Damon.

  “You’ve no idea what prompted these responses?” That was the interesting part.

  “Until last night I could answer yes.” He inhaled a great breath and expelled it slowly. “But now . . . It seems that you and I are both pawns in Damon’s vision of the future.”

  As if his gaunt figure remained in the room with us, I knew the Archivist, the Order’s keeper of memories and secrets, had paid the Marshal a visit last night. And I knew at least one of the things he’d revealed. “You were Damon’s other paratus.”

  The Archivist had been furious that Damon had been named my guide. He’d come straight to the Marshal.

  “Exactly so.” Again the fleeting grin and a spiky satisfaction. “I’d long suspected I had some special relationship with Damon because of these, but I had no idea . . .” He waved his flimsy page, then peered at it as if it might tell him something new. “The matters revealed to me confirmed these conclusions in every respect. Understand, Lucian, I’ve only fragments, some of which are intensely personal. But it is clear that our fates, yours and mine, are bound one to the other for good or ill. Thus I’ll share what I can that might illumine your own path. If you’re willing, of course. Judgments based on fragments of information bear dangers. . . .”

  “Yes. Please.” The hungering rasp was scarce recognizable as my own voice.

  “Understand first, I was given no explicit knowledge of the role Damon intends for you. The Archivist assumes one thing; I don’t agree with him. But certainly this rage you feel—this divisive uncertainty and disconnection from the discipline and fraternity of the Order—is Damon’s intent. But that’s unhealthy for a man who has committed himself to the Order as you have; thus I’ve tried to enlarge that singular view. He demands that your training in weaponry and tactics take second place to your development in other kinds of magic and skills more appropriate to a commander than a warrior, as if you had some predilection to violence that made combat training risky. That’s why one of the first memory fragments returned to you was that you were not guilty of a murder that had been ascribed to you. That struck true, did it not?”

  “Yes.” The fired memory yet remained as vivid as a single silver coin among a thousand brass ones, as it had on that morning when I ran the mudflats, retrieved a delivery of cereus iniga, and encountered Morgan again for the first time.

  “In the same way, I made sure that when Damon showed you the relict of the Harrower assault, you also saw the Registry connection, and that you knew the Order was founded as reparation for such crimes, not as a conspirator.”

  “The two purebloods who laughed at the massacre,” I said, stunned. “You showed them to me, not Damon. Do you know who they were?”

  “No.” There was no wavering in his answer, nor in the sincere sympathy that followed. “Until that very morning, I’d no idea the victims were your own family. Lucian de Remeni’s exposure of Registry corruption in front of several hundred members of the Registry and Prince Perryn’s entourage was legendary even here. The world believed Remeni captive or dead. Only Damon—and likely the Marshal of those days, my predecessor—knew better. Somehow Inek guessed, though. He referred to the possibility in one of his petitions to review your relict. To my lasting regret, I had no choice but to refuse him. My predecessor had declared that your relict would be unreviewable. At that time I didn’t know it was nonexistent.”

  Belief and shifting understanding rearranged the world—Damon was not the sole manipulator in this business—even as reflex delivered the relevant question. “So did the old Marshal destroy the relict or did Damon?”

  “Neither. I did it.”

  “You!” The world shifted yet again. “And the trap spell?”

  “That, too.” He opened his hands wide. “I ask no forgiveness or forbearance. The deeds were accomplished before I assumed this mantle, and I am not privy to the circumstances behind them. My predecessor must have approved both. Though I can scarce comprehend that I would consent to such deeds, the certainties that compelled me to write these instructions must have fed my choice. It can be no consolation to you, Lucian, but this tears at my own soul. I question my own decency. Justice required me to tell you.”

  His confession, abhorrent though it was, demanded belief. What purpose could be served by telling me? And if it was true, then what answer could I make? I had been no violent felon. Bastien’s and Morgan’s and my own sister’s witness affirmed it. So why would the former Marshal agree to such a thing, unless he was Damon’s partner in conspiracy? And yet . . .

  “Was your predecessor the same who sent Damon away from the Order?”

  “Yes. You see the conundrum. He must have believed in Damon’s vision, too, though he viewed the man himself as seriously flawed. Unfortunately, his writings reveal nothing of his decisions with respect to you. Yet he didn’t abandon you entirely to Damon’s ministrations. He appointed Inek as your guide. Damon has always hated that.”

  Bitterness threaded my veins like poison. Had Damon somehow driven Inek into the trap spell? Considering all I’d revealed to my guide, it would not have been difficult.

  “These other things you now know,” I said, “this vision of Damon’s . . . is it worth allowing a despicable man to continue to work his will?” Protocol, manners, and discretion had crumbled. “Is it righteous to achieve great ends no matter the cost? War? Murder? Purges?”

  The Marshal’s enveloping garb forbade any specific assessment of his demeanor, but as ever, the intensity of posture and voice communicated his conviction. “These Registry curators’ cruel and perverse usage of a gifted colleague—you—must reap punishment. Such casual corruption, such hubris, cannot, must not, will not stand. And I do not exempt Damon from guilt. He gloated about your submission and claimed that your assurance of a future reckoning for his sins was but additional evidence of your suitability for his purpose. He knows and accepts and . . . relishes . . . that I agree with you. And yet . . .”

  “Why do you tolerate him?” I growled. “You are t
he commander of the most powerful military force the world has ever known. Kill him. Pursue the right without the taint of his corruption.”

  “Listen to yourself, Lucian,” he said softly.

  The echo of my words sickened me. I had just demanded he use the Order to serve vengeance with murder.

  “Justice and right are not simple in this case,” he said. “Nor are strategy or logistics. Damon has been working on his plan for more than twenty years and has immense resources and complex strategies already in place. I’ve not been told how he plans to accomplish his goals. The Archivist maintains his own secrets, but he lives far removed from the realities of the world and knows nothing of how this will proceed, either.”

  “What of the Knight Defender?” I blurted.

  “The Knight Defender is wise, and I cannot even comprehend half the magic he knows. But his single task is the defense of Evanide. He would be no more help in this matter than a villein from the river country called to design a fortress in the mountains of Evanore. It is you and I hold the opportunity for a better world in our hands, Lucian de Remeni, and we must decide how to move forward and when to unleash our righteous anger.”

  I could not argue the point without betraying Fix’s trust and exposing too many other secrets. I certainly wasn’t ready to trust the Marshal with everything I knew.

  He pulled his box close. The lacquer gleamed like fresh blood in the firelight. The interior was divided into three compartments. One held a thumb-sized silk bag, tied with a thread. One held four smooth, round tokens of various sizes, like those that carried the spell that obliterated a memory. The third compartment held a litter of silver splinters, each the size of a nail paring. He pulled out two splinters.

  “I know your trust in me wavers,” he said. “Rightly so. Stay wary of everyone in Damon’s sphere. But my faith in you does not waver—even after last night.”

  The Marshal held the two splinters up to catch the light. “I’m asking you to stay close to me, Lucian. There’s still a great deal I don’t know about myself, about your place in all this, about our future that is so entwined and how it is to be accomplished. But no matter your experience at Val Cleve, you are a man of honor and decency, and I trust you to keep watch both on me and for me. If you’re willing to do so, I’ll do the same for you.”