A Daughter of Kings, Part I

by Louis Piechota

  Chapter X

  “The Storm”

  For a few moments Alirah could do nothing but stare. First she looked after the phantom captain, then down at the ground around her. The fallen soldiers had gone, but their weapons remained strewn about in a great ring. Hundreds of swords, spears, and shields, from many more than thirty men, lay solid and rusted in the grass. Some of them were buried right down amidst the roots of the grass and sedge, or half embedded in the earth, as if they’d lain there for years.

  Slowly the roaring wind died away. Even the gentler breeze which had seemed a constant in that land now failed. The air became perfectly still and silent. At length Alirah shuddered and wiped her eyes. The overwhelming sadness had vanished with the fallen soldiers. Now that the danger seemed to have passed, her grief faded beneath confusion and growing anger.

  “What was that?” she cried at last.

  “I don’t know,” murmured Kelorn.

  “They chase us down, surround us, and scare us half to death, so they can what? Stare at us for a little while? Stare at me? What did they want from me?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think we should wait around to find out. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  They mounted and rode quickly northward. The sun had now sunk behind the rugged line of the Egarines to the west. Overhead stars were coming out one by one in a purple sky. Neither of them wanted to be anywhere near the barrows when full darkness fell. Fortunately they soon left the green mounds behind. The rolling plains smoothed out a little and became more thickly strewn with shrubs, willows, and a few giant sycamore trees. Here and there in the distance, they could see tiny gleams of firelight and plumes of smoke slowly fading against the darkening sky, but whether they marked the camps of outlaws or the homesteads of honest folk could not be told. Kelorn steered clear of all of them.

  “What did they say to you?” Kelorn asked after an hour or so. “What made you cry?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alirah. “They told me their stories, I guess. But all so fast and so many, I couldn’t repeat a word of them now. I just felt their sadness and their anger. I think they were angry at me. And they wanted to know why the war had to happen, or why they had to die, or something like that. But how in the world should I know? It was forty years ago; I wasn’t even born. My dad was just a little kid!”

  Kelorn shrugged, at a loss. They rode on for a few more minutes in silence, but now that she’d spoken Alirah felt too agitated to stay quiet for long. As time passed her superficial anger at having been scared receded, but a strange fury kept on smoldering deep inside of her. At last she grit her teeth and shook her head in frustration.

  “What were they, anyhow? I’m talking like they’re some people who just happened to have died a long time ago. Were they ghosts?”

  “It could be. I’ve heard of such things. In the north, in my country, men speak of dwurgin: evil spirits who haunt the graves and animate the remains of dishonored warriors. But those phantoms didn’t feel evil to me, just angry. Dwurgin are supposed to really be there, too. You can touch them and smell them and everything, kind of like those Maereshk creatures you say your parents ran into. These did seem more like ghosts, or even just…”

  “Memories,” murmured Alirah.

  “Yeah,” said Kelorn. “Unhappy ones.”

  By then full night had fallen. They made camp in a low hollow where a few huge, ancient sycamores grew. Alirah badly wanted a fire, but Kelorn refused to risk one. He volunteered to take the first watch and she let him have it; but when she lay down and closed her eyes, sleep eluded her. She lay tossing and turning for a long time, thinking about the phantoms. When she dozed off at last, her thoughts and her dreams blurred together.

  She kept seeing the faces of the dead. Most of them had been grown men to her eyes, old enough to be fathers. With their bright swords and fancy armor they might have been heroes from a storybook. Of course, they were still dead, and had left either parents or children or both behind. But some of the fallen had only been boys her own age. She kept thinking of the boys from home, imagining someone giving Berun a sword and plopping a helm on his head and sending him out to live or die for… what? Why had they fought? What had brought so many people to that quiet place, so far from their homes?

  Wondering this in her dream, Alirah saw long roads unfurl before her. One road led away north through dark woods, while the other wound its way south across hot sands that glittered in the sun. At the end of each road sat a king enthroned: proud and stern, bedecked with gold and jewels, and yet from her vantage point endlessly remote and insignificant. But they had raised their scepters and men had marched. Great seas of men had come to this far place and died by the thousands. The few poor folk who had dwelt there before had died too, or been scattered like fallen leaves in an autumn gale. Why? To what purpose? To no purpose, she was suddenly sure. No doubt the historians in both royal courts would have disputed her. No doubt they could have brought forth reams of evidence to show why the war had been necessary, and why it had been the other’s fault; but in her dream Alirah knew it was not so. Two old men had quarreled and that was all.

  The young Jeddein had been just as ill served by their ruler, but it was to the north that she looked in her fury. She glared at the man who sat where her father might have, hating him. She didn’t know if she beheld the man who’d sat there forty years ago or the one who sat there now, but she didn’t care. She knew they were alike. Her father would never have sent people to die for nothing! And if he ever did it would haunt him to his grave. He would never again sit at ease like the man she saw now: fat, rich, and happy, surrounded by other old men of like mind ready to praise him.

  The longer she glared at the wicked king and the more she hated him, the less clearly she could see him. He seemed to recede into gathering shadows. Then at length she perceived that there was another vague figure hidden in the shadows behind the king on his throne. He was laughing at her, and his eyes glowed red. She thought at once of the shadowy monster which had arisen from the Taragi rite, and she gasped in horror.

  But then her dream changed. Suddenly she stood upon a battlefield once more. Arandian dead lay all around her. Only they were not the same dead, and it was not the same field. The young men lying around her were newly slain; their blood still stained the ground. The rolling green fields and warm, summer sun had vanished. She stood now in a forest of tall pines and maples whose leaves were changing with the fall. Cold, wet leaves and pine needles scrunched beneath her feet, and a silvery mist drifted through the trees. Her breath puffed out before her.

  She shivered, and heard a faint clinking sound as she moved. Looking down, she saw that she wore a bright shirt of mail. She held her sword out and ready in her hand, as if she’d been fighting. Red blood dripped from the blade. Blood was also spattered all over her glittering mail, along with some kind of black, sooty grime.

  Seeing all the blood, and the slain all around her, Alirah began to tremble. A cold, sick horror surged up in her breast.

  What I have done? she thought.

  “Hey Princess,” said a voice.

  Alirah gasped sharply and whirled around.

  “Dad?”

  Ethyrin stood a short distance away. He wore strange clothes: a long tunic and pants of soft, dark fabric embroidered with golden threads. A crown of gold, set with sapphires and diamonds, lay upon his brow. He did not look at her. With his head bowed he gazed down at the fallen men.

  She wanted to run to him and throw her arms around him and hold him tight. But he was clean. If she touched him she’d get blood and muck all over him, and the thought of doing so was appalling.

  “I didn’t want this to happen,” he said softly. His voice was raw and bitter.

  “I… What happened?” stammered Alirah. “What did I do?”

  “Only what you thought was right, I’m sure.”
>
  She gaped at him with wild eyes, then looked again at the fallen. They littered the ground as far as she could see through the woods. Now as she looked again she realized they were not all young men in armor. Here and there lay women and children and the elderly, weaponless, in ordinary clothes and in cowering attitudes.

  Alirah wanted to throw up. She flung away her sword as if it were a snake she’d picked up by accident. Though it fell upon sot pine needles, it landed with an eerily loud, ringing thud.

  “You know I thought of coming back myself once,” said Ethyrin, still not looking at her. “A few years after your mother and I first got home, before Elidan was born. But your mother didn’t want to leave again, not to go so far; and by then I wasn’t going anywhere without her. A part of me was very sad at the time. But now I’m glad I didn’t go. It would have been even worse, then.”

  She did not understand what had happened, only that it was her fault. His sadness hurt her more than any anger could have.

  “I… I’m sorry!” she gasped, voice shaking. “I’m so sorry!”

  “I know you are, Sweetheart. I know you are.”

  At long last he turned to look at her. He tried to smile, but he failed. Tears glistened in his eyes. After a moment he sighed heavily, then turned and started to walk slowly away through the trees.

  “Wait! Dad! Please don’t go!”

  She ran after him. Or at least she tried to. Though he seemed only to stroll away, lost in thought, he quickly outpaced her. Her mailshirt weighed her down. Desperately she clawed at it, trying to pull it off, but her hands kept slipping on the blood and grime. The more she worked at it the heavier it felt. At last she fell and lay upon the ground, thrashing.

  “Alirah? Wake up, Alirah.”

  Her eyes flew open. She sat up with a strangled, gasping cry. Beside her Kelorn drew back, looking scared. The night air was warm and humid again. Thousands of stars burned in a clear sky overhead.

  “Are you okay?” asked Kelorn.

  She stared at him. Already the details of her dream had begun to slip away, but the horror and grief remained. At length she nodded, unable to speak.

  “It’s time for your watch,” he murmured. “But I can keep going for a while, if you need me to.”

  “No…” she croaked at last. “No, I’m fine. It was just a bad dream. You get some sleep. You need it too.”

  And when she sat alone in the dark, after Kelorn had gone to sleep, she told herself the same thing over and over. It was just a bad dream… It was just a bad dream… It was just a bad dream…

  They spent two more days riding across the northern reaches of lost Caluran. Now with every mile the land grew a little more hilly and more thickly strewn with trees. The Egarines curved east as they ran north, so that while Alirah and Kelorn travelled in a straight line they eventually found themselves back among the skirts of the mountains.

  Early in the afternoon on the fifth day since they’d left the Khor’dua, Alirah and Kelorn came back to the Great Road. Following it for a mile or two they emerged onto a high, open ridge. Alirah found herself looking down upon a huge river, much larger than any she had yet seen in her life.

  On the south side of the river, where they stood, the road ran straight down to the water’s edge along a long, gentle slope that was covered only in tall grass. A few cottages stood in a cluster near the riverbank. A sturdy dock extended far out onto the water, and a couple of ferries lay alongside it ready to carry passengers the quarter of a mile or so to the far bank.

  There the land rose much more swiftly than it had fallen, in high, weathered bluffs. A stone pier stood upon the far bank of the river. From it the road climbed up in tight switchbacks bordered by low stone walls. A fortress stood squat but proud atop the bluffs, surrounded by a little, walled town. Two banners floated from the castle’s watchtower, three hundred feet above the surface of the river. One of these banners was totally unfamiliar to Alirah; it depicted a black, stylized hawk upon a crimson field. The other hung a little lower, and it bore a golden dragon upon a deep blue field. Alirah had never seen that device in real life, but she recognized it at once. Her eyes flew wide.

  “Are we here, then?” she asked excitedly. “Is this Arandia?”

  Kelorn grinned but shook his head. “This is not Arandia itself. This must be Verusa, one of the Tributary Kingdoms. The river is called the Podrai, and those are the Bluffs of Podrai. The Arandian flag there is meant to signify that whoever attacks this land also attacks Arandia itself, which is a dangerous thing to do.“

  “Come on,” he added. “Let’s get down and across the river. We ought to be able to get some hot food and sleep in real beds tonight.”

  They rode down to the ferry. An old man sat there as if he’d been waiting for them. He puffed on a long, wooden pipe and eyed them up and down as they approached. He was short, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders. He wore a thick, neat beard, though the hair on his head had long thinned and turned to gray. After Kelorn gave him a couple of silver coins for passage across the river, he became quite friendly.

  The old man chattered constantly as he poled them across the wide river. Despite his age, he never seemed to grow short of breath as his thick arms worked. Alirah understood little of what he said, however. All of the names he mentioned were unknown to her. On top of that he had a thick accent and lapsed frequently into his own language, which sounded as rich and deep as the black soil upon the riverbanks. Nonetheless, she gathered that there was anger and some kind of suffering in the land. When she and Kelorn took their leave on the far bank, the old man left them with ominous words.

  “You seem like good kids, and people are fair in Versek. Just stay on the main road, keep your heads down, and you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Alirah, as they rode slowly up towards the town. Suddenly its stone walls, and its guards with round shields and war axes, looked much more intimidating.

  “We both look like Arandians,” said Kelorn. “Or at least I’m obviously one and you could pass for one.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s been some kind of crop trouble down here the last few years, I think, and there’s a famine. The people here are probably even more angry than usual about paying the tribute.”

  “The tribute?”

  “Long ago, Verusa and the other Tributary Kingdoms agreed to pay for Arandia’s protection against the barbarians of the west. Once upon a time it was an honest arrangement; Arandian soldiers have died helping to defend their lands from invasion. But since the Tyrant Kings have come to power the tributes have grown unjustly, and there hasn’t been much of a barbarian threat. The Verusans are paying for protection from us now, and I can’t imagine they’re happy about it. We should do as the ferryman says.”

  They rode nervously into town. The people of Verusa were short and broad, like the ferryman, with dark hair that tended to curl. All of the men wore neat, thick beards. They and their town exuded proud poverty. Many faces that should have been round and red were lean and drawn with hunger. Many homes looked run down and partially dilapidated. But every street and every porch-step was clean.

  At first the ferryman’s warning seemed unnecessary. Nobody confronted them. Children ran alongside the road, laughing at their own play and ignoring Alirah and Kelorn completely. But out of the corners of her eyes Alirah began to catch dark, suspicious looks from the grownup men and women. Most frightening were little groups of young men that stood about idly here and there, as if they had nothing to do other than stare at travelers. These men scowled straight at her and Kelorn with an obvious, hostile interest that made her shrink in her saddle.

  She was grateful when they finally found an inn where they could spend the night. When Kelorn suggested they take their dinner up in their rooms she did not gainsay him. The dinner itself was disappointing. Kelorn grumbled about the price, and stil
l the meal consisted only of a couple of boiled turnips, black bread, and a watery rabbit stew. Alirah went to sleep hungry and distressed by both sympathy and guilt.

  The next day they rode out of Versek, and for several days afterwards they continued north without incident. The land grew hilly and rugged. The road ducked down into ravines and wound up over great outcroppings of rocky earth which thrust out from the Egarines like gnarled roots. A vast, primordial forest covered the land. The sycamores of Caluran gave way to huge, twisted oaks and tall ash trees. The great trees frequently cast their boughs all the way across the wide road. At the same time shrubs and hawthorns pressed in about the edges of the highway. Alirah soon began to feel as if she were riding along through an endless, green tunnel.

  On the morning of the fourth day from Versek they came to a crossroads. A smaller road ran up from the southeast, crossed the Great North Road beside a tiny speck of a village, and then wound its way westward into the high country. Hesitating and blushing, but as if unable to help himself, Kelorn told her that the southward road led down to a place called Rovos. There the king of Verusa dwelt in a high castle built upon crags beside the sea. Alirah blushed herself, and smiled at him.

  By then August had come. That day was hotter and more humid than any other which Alirah could remember. She sweated continuously as she rode along. Despite the deep shade under the trees, she felt as if she were stifling. Ahead of her Kelorn sat damp and drooping upon his saddle. Even the two horses seemed sluggish and mournful.

  Alirah did not feel at all unhappy, therefore, when she saw great storm clouds gather above the mountaintops to the west. By noon they hung all across the sky like a violet wall. Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance and a hot wind began to buffet the tops of the trees. Though it looked as if it would be a ferocious storm, she waited for its deluge with more longing than dread.

  A little after noon Alirah noticed a plume of smoke rising above the treetops to the north. She thought little of it, and only supposed that another village lay nearby. For the next hour or so they rode through a particularly dense and wild stretch of forest, and she could see nothing ahead but fifty yards or so of road. Then they passed over a high spot where the trees grew a little thinner and some semblance of a view returned. When she chanced to look upwards again, she started and reined in Tryll at once. Kelorn drew up short alongside her.

  The smoke now rose thick and bilious just a few miles ahead. It climbed above the level of the treetops in a massive column. There it gathered into a thick, black cloud, which even the gusts of the oncoming storm could not wholly disperse. Alirah’s nose prickled suddenly with the scent of burning.

  “What is that?” she asked, slowly. Something in the blackness of the smoke and its eager rush skywards filled her with dread.

  “Some kind of fire,” said Kelorn.

  “Thanks.”

  He smirked. “Well how should I know? It could be a forest fire, but…” he trailed off.

  “But what?” she prodded.

  He glanced at her, then looked back ahead. For a few seconds he hesitated as if holding some internal debate. Finally he took a deep breath and spoke in a grave voice.

  “I don’t know what it is. But it looks like a village or a town burning. That’s too much smoke to be a farmer clearing brush, or even to be a single home ablaze. And the smoke isn’t spreading. It’s all rising from the same place.”

  Alirah’s eyes widened. She looked back northwards with fresh alarm.

  “We should go and help them, then!”

  She straightened up in her saddle, and was about to urge Tryll into a gallop when Kelorn threw up his hand for caution.

  “Wait, wait!” he cried. “I said I don’t know what it is. We don’t know if there’s anyone up there who needs our help, or who wants it.”

  “But you just said… We can’t just sit here!” protested Alirah.

  “Of course not! Take it easy, will you? We’ll go check it out. Just be careful! Stay behind me. There’s no telling what we’ll find up there.”

  They rode forward more cautiously. The road descended again, and they lost sight of the column of smoke; but now they could smell it in the air. The wind grew stronger and reached ever further down below the tangled canopy of the forest. At last Alirah felt it like a cool caress. High above, the oncoming clouds suddenly hid the sun. The forest was plunged into deep, gray-green shadows. Solitary raindrops began to fall. The noise of rustling leaves gathered into a ceaseless roar, broken only by the occasional boom of thunder. At length Kelorn slowed once more and looked with concern to the west.

  “Well, whatever’s on fire, it’s not going to be for long,” he said. “I think we should find some shelter while we still can.”

  Alirah hesitated. She felt suddenly and strangely convinced that they must not stop. She knew they were needed up ahead and must ride on no matter what the storm did; but she could not think of how to tell him so. Then as she fidgeted upon her saddle a new sound reached her ears. Voices rang upon the wind. They were faint, hardly to be caught above the cacophony of the leaves, but they were not ghostly whispers. People were shouting in anger.

  “Do you hear that?” Alirah asked.

  “I…”

  Before Kelorn could answer a crashing noise arose suddenly in the high shrubs alongside the road. Alirah whirled just in time to see a man leap out of the foliage. He stumbled onto the road right beside Kelorn and Melyr. He was a Verusan, little taller than Alirah herself but easily twice her weight, with thick, powerful arms and legs. He wore a battered shirt of ring mail over torn and dirty clothes. Twigs had caught in his hair and beard, and a light of panic shone in his eyes. In one hand he held a short, broad axe, and its blade was crimsoned with blood.

  Alirah stifled a shriek. Melyr neighed and sidled away from the man, but astride her Kelorn only froze for a moment, blinking. He started to say something, but his words turned into an indistinct yelp of alarm. For after a split second of wild-eyed staring, the Verusan lunged forward. He seized Kelorn’s sword belt with his free hand and, with a mighty heave, hauled the young Druid right out of the saddle. Yelling incoherently, he flung Kelorn to the ground. Then he groped for Melyr’s reins as if he meant to climb up and ride off with her.

  Kelorn lay stunned and winded on the hard earth. For a split second Alirah could only look on in horror. Her heart stopped as she imagined him trampled by Melyr’s stamping hooves, or slain by a casual axe-stroke. Then red rage clouded her sight. She tore her sword from its sheath, dug her heels into Tryll’s flanks, and charged straight at the Verusan.

  “Get away from him!” she screamed.

  The Verusan froze and looked up at her with a stupefied expression. Either in his panic he had not realized that Kelorn had a companion, or he had not considered her to be a threat. Now he quailed before a wrathful princess and her shining sword.

  Alirah could not have said afterwards whether she meant to cut the man down or not. Fortunately she did not get the chance. Tryll was no war horse. Rather than trample a man she reared up in alarm. Alirah had to clutch her saddle with both hands to stay mounted, and she all but dropped her sword. But as Tryll fell back to earth one of her shod hooves struck the man’s forehead with a dull thwack. He dropped to the ground like a felled tree.

  Alirah did not know whether he was dead or just senseless, and she wasted no time checking. With a cry she leapt down and hastened to Kelorn’s side.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I… I’m fine,” he said, shakily.

  She helped him to sit up. He rested there for a moment, still gasping for breath but apparently unhurt. Then he looked up at her with amazement in his eyes.

  “Um…thanks.”

  “Any time,” she murmured, and she felt herself blushing.

  By then the rain had begun to fall more steadily. The voices had grown closer. Deep men’s voices raised in shouts a
nd curses rang out through the woods, seemingly from all around them, accompanied now by the ring of steel upon steel.

  Kelorn’s eyes cleared, and with her help he scrambled to his feet.

  “It isn’t just some fire,” he cried. “It’s some kind of battle! Quick, get back on your horse. We’re getting out of here!”

  By that time both horses were thoroughly agitated, both by the storm and by the sudden attack. Tryll especially was overwrought; she would not stand still long enough for Alirah to climb up. At last Kelorn took hold of the mare’s reins and helped Alirah up, then ran back to Melyr so that he could mount up himself.

  Just before he could do so, lightning struck nearby. A blinding flash of light annihilated the shadows under the trees. A deafening, bone-jarring boom of thunder followed instantaneously. Alirah clapped her hands over her ears reflexively. She saw Kelorn jump in alarm, and Melyr broke into a panicked canter. At the same time she felt Tryll go taut with fright beneath her. The mare’s head lowered and her eyes flew wide.

  Oh no! Alirah thought.

  A second passed in slow motion. Alirah knew what was going to happen, but could not react in time to stop it. She’d coiled the wet reins atop the saddle before her, but as she’d covered her ears she’d let go of them. Now too late she reached for them again. At the same time, with an awful petrified neighing, Tryll bolted. The reins fell away out of reach.

  “Alirah!”

  She heard Kelorn’s voice ring out behind her, but she couldn’t answer. In a panic Tryll charged straight towards the hawthorns which grew thick beside the road. Alirah just had time to close her eyes and flatten herself against the horse’s back before they hit the wall of greenery.

  Twigs and thorns tore at her clothes and scratched her skin. They must have bit into Tryll as well, but the mare did not break her stride. In less than a second they were through the wall, but the woods beyond were only a little less dense.

  Tryll ran on. Alirah hardly dared to open her eyes, let alone sit up, for fear of being gouged or struck by a low hanging branch. She heard Kelorn calling out to her, but his voice quickly fell away and was lost in the noise of wind and rain. Alirah could only hang on desperately as she was borne away into the green gloom of the forest.