Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  “Give him wine at the least. I don’t like my subjects twitching.” The ever-present irritability, voiced in tones so like rusty gate hinges, came from my left, but of course, I couldn’t turn my head to see if it was truly the Archivist, come all the way from Evanide.

  And the Archivist’s subject? No, no, no . . . “Merciful Goddess, Damon, what is this?”

  “Better he should feel what’s coming,” said another man before my panicked question got an answer. “Sooner or later we must all pay for the power we bear.”

  The words’ harsh meaning was wholly at odds with the mellow warmth of the speaker. But it was indeed the Knight Marshal who strolled into view alongside the Archivist. The three of them here together. Damon. The Archivist. The Marshal. Inek had warned me. Fool, fool, fool.

  As the Archivist left the others and joined me, he dropped his rust-red hood and removed his mask. I’d never seen him in the flesh. Scant white hair and beard lay like frost upon a scarred, cragged landscape of experiences, not just his own, but those of uncountable knights, parati, squires, and tyros. His lips were thin and arid, and pond ice in the frozen realm of Hansk could be no colder than the blue eyes examining me so intimately.

  “You will thank me,” he whispered, entirely without mockery.

  I would have laughed at such a solemn assertion, save for the knuckle-length splinter of silver he held in front of my eyes. With a blink of magic, he plunged it into my left wrist.

  “What are you—? Gah!” A second splinter pierced the right wrist. Was this how they cut off a doomed sorcerer’s hands?

  Anger bloomed like balefire, blunting fear. “Magrog’s unholy triumvirate. One servant, one puppet, one puppetmaster!”

  Another splinter a finger length above the first, just above the strap that immobilized my wrist. A matching sting on the left.

  “Knight Marshal, you can’t believe Damon will allow you to rule.”

  The Marshal chuckled. Damon remained silent. And as the Archivist placed new splinters, the previous ones shot blazing spikes into the veins of my arm, into the bones, erasing sensible thought. I’d felt this before. . . .

  The Archivist’s deft hands moved quickly leaving a chain of fire up the inside of both arms. When he moved away to the worktable, I prayed he was done, for I would swear a dagger had opened my flesh from wrist to shoulder.

  The Marshal stepped closer, tilting his head as if I were a curiosity. “I told you Damon had great plans for our future, Lucian. Yours just requires a bit more pain. Pain has always been the difference between us. While you dabbled in your art and learning, a soft youth of divine promise and nurturing family, I was arrested for practice of illicit magic. The Registry knew well how to teach halfbloods their proper place. Now I’ll direct the course of their dissolution. Amusing, isn’t it, how my impure blood will give me the life you assumed was yours alone?”

  “I believed in you,” I said, breathless from pain and the weight of my blindness. “I believed in the Order. You believed, too.”

  For an instant his eyes reflected the man he had been . . . yearning . . . focused on a righteous future just out of reach. But a blink left them hard again, and he flashed the rakish smile I’d glimpsed a lifetime ago in his dressing closet. “Ah, paratus, you shall certainly serve the Order’s future.”

  Then he leaned close and spoke softly so that only I would hear. “All that was before I remembered how much I despise purebloods like you and Inek. Yon Archivist doesn’t quite understand that Caedmon’s heir is not so devoted to his arcane fraternity as he is. The Order will be useful these first few months. But then, just between the two of us, I think it will be time for those self-righteous pricks to drown. Perhaps I’ll have you do it.”

  I couldn’t respond. The Archivist had returned with a handful of splinters longer than the first ones. Where was he going to put these?

  The inside of my left ankle. And then the right. My legs soon blazed from ankle to groin.

  Another handful. Tiny ones. Merciful Goddess.

  He planted the first just in front of my left ear, the next a knuckle length higher. The initial sting was bad enough, but it was the penetrating magic that cracked my skull as it shot all the way down to my gut. The Archivist had to step aside as I vomited.

  “Get it all out now,” he said, and then returned to his work. Another and another, across my forehead, down past the other ear, then another. I tried to stay sensible by counting or estimating what pattern he made, but I could not. None of this made sense.

  The Archivist stepped away. Only the leather straps held me upright. Breath came ragged. Spittle and bile dribbled down my chin. Though legs and face yet blazed, the pain in my arms had settled into to a grinding ache, as if every bone was fractured.

  Damon hurried over and I flinched when his hand reached for my face. But it was only a towel he offered to blot my chin. And then a sip of water from an earthen cup. Even if I could have spoken, I would not have thanked him. Whatever this was, it was his idea.

  The Archivist returned and placed a basket at my feet. I could not move enough to see what it held. Instead I tried to slow my breathing and remember all that Inek had taught me about enduring pain. Focus outside yourself . . . erase emotion . . . erase the body . . .

  It didn’t help. Not when the Archivist knelt down and wrapped something about my left ankle atop the first splinter. It felt as if it ripped out a ring of flesh, and I could not hold back a cry. And then another ring, and another . . . My body shook and heaved. I vomited again.

  A long interruption allowed my vision to clear. Damon and the Marshal stood together, drinking, well away from their puking, sweating prisoner. The aroma of wine near made me heave again.

  The Archivist, his brow wrinkled, examined my shoulder, then ran a finger down the outside of my arm. He paused and snapped his gaze to mine. “Fix!”

  Panting, trembling, I could not imagine what his quiet exclamation meant.

  “Allow the pain to become a part of you,” he said softly, “altering the body without obliterating the spirit. That will make this go easier. Fix would tell you so.”

  Fix. The Archivist had found the Knight Defender’s splinter in my arm.

  When he wrapped something . . . metal . . . around my right wrist, I panted through the burning and considered Fix and his splinter. Threading? Is that what this was about? But that would change everything . . .

  I sought his eyes. “Archivist—”

  Another band went on and ate its way into my arm.

  This time, I let go of reason and followed the snaking fire into a well of pain.

  • • •

  “Time to move forward, Greenshank. Geraint and the Archivist are off to breakfast. We’ve an hour to alter the course of history.”

  It was an effort to open my eyes. The lids were stuck together and weighed of lead. “Don’t want to move.”

  I hadn’t lost consciousness. From some great distance, I had felt them take me down from the wall, sit me on a bench, and wrap me in the black mantle. Now Damon crouched in front of me, solemn and sympathetic. “Come, you survived it, did you not?”

  “What have you done to me?” My ribs ached with every breath. To speak made the pounding in my head thunderous. However unlikely, arms, legs, and face no longer pained me. All I could feel was a certain tightness. But I was shaking so hard my teeth rattled.

  “I told you the truth. We prepared you for your proper destiny.” He leaned close. “Though not everyone who watched understands that destiny entirely.”

  Damon, ever the spider.

  Spice-scented steam bathed my face. “Drink this. You need your strength and your magic.”

  “Can’t.” My gut was too unsettled as yet.

  He held the cup to my lips. “Drink. Two hours hence you will stand before the Three Hundred.”

  He poured it down me
slowly, giving it time to work. The flavorful posset was gloriously hot, the milk thick and soothing, the wine strong. For the first time in an aeon, the shivering stopped.

  He refilled the cup and did it all again. Muscle and bone felt stronger already. Power swelled between my eyes and behind my breastbone. I slurped the third cupful like an infant at its mother’s breast.

  “What destiny?” I said, as the edges of the world became exceedingly sharp. The castle around us teemed with waking life . . . with householders . . . with strangers . . . hundreds of people.

  Damon rose and picked through the items on the worktable. He returned with a bit of purple fabric dangling from his finger. Silk, it appeared, embroidered in gold. “This. Take it. It’s yours. Well deserved and fairly earned.”

  But when my hand found its way out of the black mantle, my gut hollowed. My arm was banded in bracelets of hammered silver, finely engraved with a variety of sigils. No embossing. Trigger points weren’t needed, because the bracelets were embedded in my flesh. Threaded. Like Fix’s splinter, like Fix’s own bracelets, their magic could be triggered with will alone, not touch.

  I ripped off the mantle. My other limbs were banded the same. Six on each arm, eight on each leg. I fumbled about my face, and hairless scalp, relieved to find no trace of metal. Perhaps that part had been delirium.

  “What are these?”

  “Tools. You’ll need the support they can provide for great magics.” Damon sat on the bench beside me and held out the slip of purple again. “This is the answer you’ve been seeking, Greenshank. This is yours, do you but choose it so.”

  A full-face mask. Silk, yes, a deep purple. The mask told the tale of Damon’s use for me, for the purple of Caedmon’s Ardra was bordered with a chain of three-petaled lilies worked in gold. Royal lilies.

  “You are entirely mad,” I said, hoarse.

  “Many would say that. Navronne needs a Sorcerer King. But it needs one with brilliant magic and the discipline to use it, one with a true passion for justice and the strength to pursue it, not an ill-educated marketplace charlatan with a golden voice. You heard him. Geraint will use the cleansing of the Registry to make himself a tyrant. His voice will gather men and women to his side, and they won’t know what’s happening until it’s too late.”

  But the Marshal’s flaws could not qualify me to be the king of Navronne. “This is ludicrous. I am not of Caedmon’s blood, and the judges supported him because of that royal kinship. I’m condemned for murder. I’ve nothing: no past, no family, no follower, not even a name I can use.”

  “Caedmon’s blood has been proved. No further validation is needed, not with the Fifty as witnesses. You’ll likely never need to demonstrate the medallion’s magic. But if you do . . . this might help.”

  He held up his hand and in a trick every pureblood child learned before age ten, twisted his fingers and produced a coin—a gold coin struck with a raised edge and a woman’s face.

  “You heard Geraint swear to go masked every hour of every day, for I told him that such appearance of humility would win him favor, as you saw it do. So this mask will be threaded to your face—the Archivist has prepared you for it—never to be removed. No one will ever know you are not the man who spoke to the Fifty.”

  The Marshal and I were the same height, the same build. And Damon had shaved off my black hair, so different from the Marshal’s red-gold.

  “This is what you’ve planned all these years—to put a true sorcerer descendant of Caedmon on the throne of Navronne, only to replace him with an imposter? With me?”

  “Geraint de Serre is corrupt. Deceit and conjuring men’s hearts are the pillars of his nature, just as discipline and a passion for justice are yours. Unlike any usurper in history, he is armed with magic . . . and the Order. The old Marshal, the good, wise man who read my own soul so clearly, threatened to revoke Geraint’s knighthood for repeated recklessness. Then he died. Suddenly. Inexplicably. Using his divine gift, Geraint persuaded the Archivist to skew the count and name him Knight Marshal, for the Archivist is more devoted to the ideal of the Sorcerer King even than I. Geraint’s first acts as Marshal were to destroy your relict and lay that abhorrent trap. In the same way, he will manipulate purebloods, crush those who defy him, and use the Order to work his will. Once he is untouchable, he will destroy the Order, too.”

  “He told me he would force me to destroy the Order.” And Inek had told me how unexpected the old Marshal’s death had been. He’d had suspicions . . .

  “Listen to me, Greenshank. Beyond all these things, you’ve a qualification that no other sorcerer in Navronne has displayed for more than a century—two mature bents. It’s the source of your extraordinary magic.”

  I was instantly wary. “You never mentioned two bents.”

  “Come, come, Pluvius admitted he told you. The greedy fool would have done anything to steal you away.” Damon was near running over his own words in his eagerness, like the flood tide driving me closer and closer to dangerous shoals. “Your grandsire discovered a terrible secret in his investigation of Xancheira, a secret about bloodlines and those born with two bents.”

  “Yes. The Registry’s great lie.”

  “How did you learn of—? No.” A headshake erased his surprise. “It doesn’t matter. But that’s very good that you know, for I believe you can find a path to use that knowledge, to redeem our centuries of wickedness, to truly change the world without brewing a new and most terrible war amongst ourselves.”

  The world shook itself like a wet pup and trotted off in a new direction. Damon wanted the secret of the stola told, not buried . . . and he wanted me to do it. Me. The king of Navronne.

  The audacity of such a plot—the blatant treason—was breathtaking. But such a trust . . . such opportunity . . . such responsibility . . . a responsibility I would welcome . . . justice on a grand scale . . .

  “Why this way? You could have taken ten simpler courses. And what of the Marshal? You were the one who sought him out. Exposed him.” Surely if I asked enough questions I would discern the course of right.

  Damon blew a note of disgust. “My determination to find an alternative to Eodward’s vile spawn outstripped my judgment. By the time I had proved Geraint was of Caedmon’s blood, I had to ensure he didn’t take off on his own and find himself an army. I prayed the Order would make him wise . . . nurture the discipline needed to accomplish great purpose . . . teach him of magic’s glory and its responsibility. I saw glimpses of the man he could be—you saw them, too—but the true man ever bled through the masking. He persuaded the Archivist to feed him enough of the truth of himself to ‘keep him focused.’ Though his magic showed flashes of brilliance, his instincts remained those of the trickster and thief he was when I found him. His only true talent is to bind men’s hearts. Fortunately I have none to bind.”

  “You could have stopped at any time. Wiped his memory of the Order, of his bloodline.”

  “What man who cares a sliver for the world could dismiss such opportunity as the gods had given me?” he said. “And in the very year I despaired at Geraint’s indiscipline, I saw your portraits and watched you deal with adversities that would crush a lesser man, growing ever stronger, more determined. . . .”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me any of this.”

  “Couldn’t. Geraint became Knight Marshal, who could have you drowned at his word. I was never sure what he knew of himself—or you. So I made sure you despised me; you certainly had reason enough. And I contrived a role for you that would fit with his expectations.”

  “His strong right arm.”

  Damon’s hot gaze threaded itself into my flesh. “If Geraint de Serre becomes king of Navronne, I will bear the guilt of the worst mistake made since the Mother birthed the world.”

  I drew the black mantle around me, wishing it might hide temptation. I wanted it. Gods forgive me, every one of my aching
bones wanted to take the mask from his hand that moment and strive to be a worthy successor to Eodward. I could not be worse than Bayard, who pandered to the Harrowers, or Perryn, the cheating coward, or Osriel, who stole the eyes of the dead. I wanted it, even if it meant giving up all other dreams. Even if it meant never feeling the sun on my face again. Even if it meant living as someone else . . . meaning Juli, Bastien, Conall, Fix could never know me, for there could be no chink in the armor of my identity. The scale of the work was so much larger than that of the Order. If by the grace of the gods, the Xancheirans lived, I could shape the peace between us, draw on their wisdom and experience. . . .

  But thoughts of Xancheira brought me around to my own arguments. How could we repair centuries of lies and murder with more lies, more murder?

  “So it’s the headsman if I refuse.”

  “Lucian de Remeni was beheaded eleven days ago.”

  “What?” I leapt to my feet and backed away from him.

  “Twelve nights you bided in that cell. Order magic allowed you to sleep most of the time and forget the rest. The Fifty saw incontrovertible evidence that their judgment was carried out at midday eleven days ago, three Registry curators hanged for corruption and one madman portrait artist named Lucian de Remeni-Masson beheaded for murder. The news has been spread, likely to Palinur itself by now. The Sitting of the Three Hundred begins today.”

  He rose and wandered back to the worktable, leaning his back on it, his fingers working the purple mask. The magelight lamp above the bench revealed worry lines and weariness, but I refused to concede sympathy. My young sister believed I was beheaded. What could balance such cruelty?

  I spat the next query. “Who did you choose to die in my stead?”

  “Someone from Ferenc’s dungeons. A poacher, a thief . . . I don’t know. But it leaves your choices quite limited if you refuse my offer. You will either become Geraint’s secretly disloyal lieutenant—a most dangerous road—or you must run for your life while he reshapes the world to his image. You’ve seen his true face, so he will find you. His magic is no match for yours, but he can convince men or armies to follow him anywhere. He will destroy the Order and destroy Navronne.”