by Helen Lowe
Survival breeds necessity; necessity drives hard decisions: Malian repeated the Shadow Band adage to herself. But this—If the Golden Fire really had been forged out of a compulsion wrought from the power of the gods themselves, then that act went against every tenet the Derai held sacred. The sanctity of friendship, she thought, doggedly combating the sensation of falling—and keeping faith with comrades, as well as Earl, Heir, and House. Not least, the taboo against slavery.
Yet the binding Raven had described was a form of enslavement, in fact if not name.
“That is how the Sworn tell the story, at any rate.” Nhenir was calm as moonlight.
Malian frowned, her eyes fixed on the starry horizon and the mass of shadowed ridges below it, rolling into a distance that would eventually become the River. “Have you heard it told differently?”
Uncharacteristically, the helm conveyed hesitation. “I know Yorindesarinen held that truths may not always be as they first appear.”
“Did she know of this?”
“She found out. And vowed to set it right, except death intervened.”
Is that when the Derai buried knowledge of the Sundering? Malian asked herself. Is it possible that’s why we buried it? This time, she looked south rather than north, as though she could see across time and physical distance to the Aralorn tower where she had refused to compel the Ara-fyr back into the Derai Alliance. Yorindesarinen’s influence had shaped that choice, since the dead hero did not seem to believe that sacrificing anyone or anything to the Derai cause was what it meant to be the Chosen of Mhaelanar, champion of a god.
Yet if the gods themselves had loaned their power to the compulsion that transformed nine Ascendants into the Golden Fire, bound to the Derai keeps and the Blood of the Nine Houses . . . Malian shook her head, deciding that the world, already far from straightforward, had just grown considerably murkier.
“It was largely because of your decision not to compel the Ara-fyr,” Nhenir reminded her, “that Raven revealed himself and returned the sword. Do not forget that you are also part of what the Derai are.”
And the moon turned both dark and light faces to the world: Tarathan had told her that on Imuln’s blessed isle. “I suppose you’re right.”
Jehane Mor, too, had spoken words of reassurance when telling Malian and Kalan of the cataclysm that the Derai’s arrival had wreaked on Haarth. “It was a long time ago, and it was not the two of you, or any of the Derai who live now, who destroyed Jaransor.” Malian repeated the herald’s words, her mindtone thoughtful. “If Jehane were here now, she would say the same about the Sundering.”
“She is wise.” Nhenir paused. “They both are.”
Malian suspected the hesitation arose from the need to include Tarathan in that wisdom, since the helm had been swift to tell her, after Imuln’s Isle, that he was not for her. Briefly, she felt the fire from the path of earth and moon reignite along her veins . . . But her heart tugged toward her seer’s memory of the Gate of Winds, breaching mist and darkness with the vast body of the Derai world concealed behind it. Until the civil war, that world had included the Golden Fire, the core of the Derai’s Alliance and their bulwark against the Swarm—a lost legacy she had been raised to honor. Setting Raven’s account against it was painful, a blade that struck to the heart.
The moon has two faces. Malian repeated the adage to herself, but knew she could no longer assign the light face to the Derai while naming the other as Darksworn. Yet when Hylcarian had aided her, six years before, he had said that he and his fellows were the Derai’s long allies and their friends in the age-old war against the Swarm. When she left the Keep of Winds, he had also said that he would be waiting on her return. “Perhaps Yorindesarinen was right. The truth, like the moon, may wear more than one face.”
“She, too, was wise.”
And kind, Malian thought—although neither attribute saved her. That thought, too, was a blade, companion to the realization that despite a history that seemed little more than one long unraveling of betrayal and death, she still yearned to return to the Derai. “Are you still there?” She cast the mindwhisper toward her last memory of Hylcarian, a slender bridge across the leagues of darkness between Aeris and the Derai Wall. Yet the only answer was the night breeze, speaking of emptiness and distance as it had throughout her exile.
Time to focus on the present, Malian thought, and my immediate responsibilities. The pines, stark against the stars, made retracing her path easy; when she reached the hollow, Raven was still on its far side. She saw his head turn her way, but spoke first, deliberately adopting Crow’s sword-for-hire manner. “All’s clear out there. And now it’s my watch.” Picking up her blanket, she held it out. “I doubt it’ll make much difference, but one of us might as well try and be warm.”
“I should have thought of that myself.” Raven’s voice matched hers for matter-of-factness as he took the blanket.
Malian repressed a sigh of relief. “If I’d thought of it sooner, I would have asked for yours.” She kept her tone light as she settled into a vantage point on the lip of the hollow and studied the pattern of slope and shadow beyond. Soon, her attention was absorbed by the need to both stay awake and keep warm. She had heard the Aeris winter was hard and could imagine how bitter it must be once snow lay low on the hills. It would be difficult then, if not impossible, to survive a night in the open without a fire. Now, Malian used activity to combat cold as the night crawled by, changing position as Raven had and rechecking her trip wires and Band wards—although at one point she thought the first gray light might never come. When it did, she moved to a tree that looked south rather than east, so the rising sun would not dazzle her. But the lightening of the world was slow, the cold still iron.
Her seer’s vision came with the first line of gold on the far side of the Aeris basin. The color split the grayness above from the darkness of the world below, as an answering fire arced across Malian’s inner sight. Part of her remained aware of the pine hollow and surrounding hillside, while the seer within stood on a pebbled plain. In the vision, sheer mountains rose on either side, and a high massif loomed ahead. A thin wind shrilled, and the entire scene filled Malian with foreboding.
“Dread Pass,” Kalan’s voice whispered, as though he were standing beside her. Somewhere in Haarth, she knew his dream must be overlapping her vision.
Dread Pass, Malian repeated. The wind whipped the grit into clouds, blinding her, and when she shaded her eyes and looked again, the plain was covered in low-lying cloud. Armies fought through it, first one side and then the other reeling forward and then back, all within an utter silence that belonged to the seer’s vision. Is this a battle yet to come, she wondered, whether in my or the Derai’s future—or the glimpse of some long ago past, a clash during the civil war or on some distant world? Horses charged, a thunder across the plain that she felt as a reverberation through her body, and she forced her seer’s sight to focus on the combatants. Gonfalons hung heavy in the fog, but she recognized Swarm fighters: fell lizards hurtled forward as a were-hunt brought down riders. A warrior rose in his stirrups, rallying those about him, and she saw the blazon on his shield as he led a counterattack that drove the Swarm assault back.
More cloud rolled in and the grayness thickened until clinging damp displaced the Aeris cold. For a long time the brume remained dense—then swiftly lifted to reveal low, rounded hills and outcrops of jagged rock. A double column of warriors traversed a narrow defile beneath discolored sky, and Malian felt a shock of recognition, knowing she had seen this once before, when she looked into Yorindesarinen’s fire in the glade between worlds.
The seer’s vision might be an uncertain art, but she waited with a sense of inevitability until the attackers rose, seemingly out of the ground, to hack and slay. Swords rose and fell, only this time Malian could hear the wounded crying out and horses screaming as they fell. The riders sought to rally about their leader, holding a path for his escape, but there were too many attackers. One by one the
defenders fell, until the leader alone was left and his assailants closed in. At the last moment, exactly as in her first vision, the leader vanished, winking out from beneath his assailants’ blades while they howled rage and frustration to the bruised sky.
“I could only save one.” The mindvoice spoke out of Malian’s memory of a cavern ringed with crystal torches and filled with an army of sleeping warriors. “Time and the blades of the murderers pressed, so I had to act swiftly or lose all three Lines. Cruel,” the mindvoice whispered. “Bitter. But I had to choose.”
The vision swirled again: sky, hills, the narrow defile and the ambush; the assailants closing in on the last rider, screaming death and bloodlust as they reached out to drag him beneath their blades. Fire roared across Malian’s vision, but the screaming and clamor of battle went on. When the fire cleared, the sky was still discolored, this time by smoke from the fires that burned both within and outside the River city of Ar. As she watched, catapults hurled rocks and more fire while siege engines lumbered toward the soaring walls.
Malian did not cry out, they had trained that out of her in the Shadow Band, but she swallowed hard against bile. She was aware that the dawn sky above Aeris was fading from fire to rose—but the vision persisted, wrapping her in the darkness of another plain that was scored by a multitude of smoldering brushfires. Their glow outlined a small hill, but it was not until Malian drew closer that she realized the mound was the ruined bulk of some giant beast, dead upon the plain. She stepped back, stumbling over metal shards, and when she looked down saw the shattered remains of a shield. A warrior’s body lay beyond it, sprawled not far from the dead beast, with one gauntleted hand still resting on the hilt of an unsheathed sword.
“I know who you are,” Malian whispered, “where this is.” But the hacked and bloodied figure did not sit up, the riven armor shimmering back into unbroken silver as it had in the glade between worlds, with Yorindesarinen’s smile glinting like the stars in her hair.
We did for each other, that Worm and I. This is the reality, Malian thought: bodies that stay dead in the middle of a devastated plain. In the distance a hound howled, a long, drawn-out cry that spoke of disaster and war. The plain stretched, becoming an impassable expanse that separated Malian from the dead, both Worm and hero. Slowly, the fire glow dwindled and the plain, like her vision, faded away.
18
The Wayhouse
The first blue was creeping into the sky, and somewhere a dog really was barking. Malian shook off the last shadows from the seer’s vision and scrutinized the hillside. Behind her, she was aware that Raven was on his feet, hand on sword hilt, but she shook her head without looking around. “That dog’s not hunting. And I can’t detect anything out of place.” Noises often sounded close in such empty country, and she knew from last year’s journey that there were farmsteads scattered throughout these hills. The dog was probably some shepherd’s companion, beginning work, or a farmer’s hound greeting the day.
“Sound carries,” Raven said, echoing her thought, but he studied the surrounding terrain as carefully as she had, even after the dog fell silent. Eventually he turned that careful look on her. “Still, it could be wisest not to linger.”
“Another gate will give us more distance.” She shivered in the aftermath of her visions and the night’s cold, weighing risk. “It’s worth it, since there’s no sign of pursuit.”
They erased any obvious evidence of their presence beneath the pines before Malian opened the gate, bringing them out a good half day’s journey farther west. Her locus point was a crumbling wayhouse with a straggle of orchard on one side and a field of wild fennel on the other. She had found, when she practiced using gates during her River years, that the farther apart the entrance and exit were geographically, the more likely the time of day would have altered when quitting the gate. But she had deliberately kept this distance small, to minimize any disturbance caused by the portal, and they arrived in the clarity of the same postdawn hour.
The only signs of life were a flock of goats, their tuft tails disappearing into the fennel, and a blackbird calling from among the fruit trees. Malian could detect no evidence that their passage had attracted attention, an impression Nhenir affirmed, so decided it should be safe to eat before continuing on. In hopes of dispelling the shivery aftereffects of so powerful a series of visions, as well as thawing out, she settled into a patch of sun against the wayhouse wall and did not object when Raven lit a small fire to cook their breakfast. By daylight, the glow would not betray them, and the fuel was so dry that the smoke was little more than a shimmer against the air, one that soon dissipated. Her eyes grew heavy, but rather than dozing she reexamined the visions, particularly the one of Yorindesarinen’s shield. Both Nhenir and Raven had said that it was broken, but she had imagined that meant riven into two or three parts, not shattered into fragments.
Not just broken, Malian thought now, but destroyed—which would explain why Nhenir has not detected the shield’s presence since that time. She welcomed the distraction provided by hot food, and once it was ballast in her stomach she sat back, her eyelids sinking again, while Raven brewed a hot drink. When he spoke, she was hovering close to sleep: “Malian.”
It was the first time, she realized, forcing her eyes open, that he had spoken her Derai name without the honorific “of Night.” Raven was concentrating on the small, dented pan over the fire, so she could not read his expression—but whatever he was brewing smelled remarkably good. Malian inhaled deeply, trying to decide what it was as he looked up, his level gaze meeting hers. “Seeing your strength,” he said quietly, “but also knowing your Derai upbringing and Shadow Band training, it’s easy for me to forget how young you are.”
I suppose I am, she thought. And then, with a spark of humor: although anyone would be, compared with you.
“Also to overlook other things,” he went on, still in that quiet voice. “Like the way the Band see themselves as champions, despite being Dancers of Kan.”
“Because of Kelmé,” Malian said, then wondered why, when he must know the story better than she did. Besides, she knew what he was trying to say.
“Because of Kelmé,” he agreed. His expression remained steady, but she heard a smile in his voice.
“It’s all right,” she said. And then, because something more seemed required, “I understand.” That you weren’t attacking me with your explanation of the Sundering, she added silently, or not intentionally, anyway. She could see, too, how he would have assumed that a story so integral to the Sworn would also be remembered by the Derai. “But you’re right about the Shadow Band. As well as what you do not say,” she added. “That we Derai also like to think of ourselves as champions.”
Heroes, she thought sadly, as she recalled Yorindesarinen, dead on the plain. Despite every unpalatable implication of the shield’s loss, that was still what caught at her throat. She lifted her face to the sun, thinking how it never shone on the Wall of Night. The first time she had experienced anything but leaden skies and pale daylight had been in Jaransor. Her Derai teachers had said the invisible sun was just another star, one of the many the Derai had encountered in their long conflict with the Swarm—a vast history that now seemed to dwindle to this one moment, as small as a campfire in the back country of Haarth.
The contents of the pan bubbled and Raven lifted it clear of the flames, pouring hot liquid into their tin cups. “I do understand,” Malian repeated, taking the one he held out. “And we’ve forgotten so much, or suppressed the knowledge, that I need you to share what you know, however difficult I may find it.” She paused, sniffing, then peered at her drink. “Is this Ishnapuri chocolate?”
“It is.” He lifted his cup in salute. “Hedge knights are good at foraging.”
“I think,” Malian said, very dryly, “that unless you paid out the gold needed to buy it in Emer, having Ishnapuri chocolate might count as looting.”
He smiled slightly. “Foraging, looting . . . Either way, I thought we
both needed something to counter last night’s cold. And when we heard the dog barking, you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
Several, Malian thought bleakly, but kept both voice and expression light. “If it gets me chocolate, I’ll see wraiths more often.” She blew on the chocolate’s surface to cool it, before taking a long sip. “Or perhaps whole legions of them, this is that good.” Immediately, Malian remembered the armies in her vision and wished she had chosen a better jest. Curling her hands around the cup’s warmth, she watched him over the rim. “I saw you,” she said, “in my seer’s vision. I’m almost sure it was you, anyway.”
Raven raised his eyebrows, which she took as sufficient invitation to describe the ambush beneath a bruised sky. “I’ve seen it once before,” she finished, “only some years ago now, before I met you.” He was right last night, she decided: the young man on the horse had looked very different from the one sitting opposite her now. “This time I heard Amaliannarath’s voice, saying that she could only save one. And in Stoneford, you said that you were the last from all three Lines of the Blood of Fire.”
His expression had grown shuttered. “Yes,” he said at last. “If that was your vision, then it was indeed me that you saw, on the day Amaliannarath snatched me from beneath the swords of Aranraith’s killers.”
Malian hesitated, because his expression was not inviting. But if she was truly to take the House of Fire as her own, she needed to know what she was dealing with. “Was it because of the sword?”
“It was.” Malian thought that might be all he was going to say, but then Raven set his cup down. The metal clinked sharply against a stone. “There is always a price,” he continued quietly, and Malian’s heart jumped, because they were the words from her fever dream in Stoneford, the ones whispered out of Rowan Birchmoon’s cairn. “What we can never know is how that price will be exacted. Khelor took the sword and triggered the geas it laid on him, and through him, on us all. Yet possession of such a weapon, and so great a secret, are difficult to conceal.”