by Helen Lowe
“That makes sense, if your father was Heir,” Tirael said, still sounding grave.
“Even over four hundred years ago.” Faro could hear the same considering note in Khar’s voice. “Kara must have realized something was badly amiss, though, even if she didn’t know Haarth well, if at all, and was keeping away from Derai ships.”
“It would explain why she never returned to Blood,” Nimor agreed. “Because otherwise . . . However unacceptable the marriage may have been in those days, Faro was still Ammaran’s legitimate son, and the last heir of the old line of Blood.”
“Mam was always worried about the stealing,” Faro told them confidently, because that was in his old memories. He frowned over the new ones. “But she said we couldn’t go to Blood anyway, partly because of her being a Storm Spear, but also because of a new oath that she didn’t like, both of which meant she wouldn’t be able to protect me.” Khar’s hand tightened on his shoulder and the others exchanged looks that told Faro, quite clearly, that they thought Kara had been wise.
“So what now?” Nimor said slowly.
“I believe it’s time we turned our attention to the shield-mirror,” Malian said. Everyone else looked toward the silver tray, but Faro kept his eyes on a moth beating about the lantern, and concentrated fiercely on willing it away from the hot glass.
“I suppose we have to deal with it,” Nimor said. He sounded as though he, like Faro, would much prefer not.
“From what I saw in Faro’s memories,” Malian replied, “it’s far too malevolent to let lie, even overnight.” Settling onto her heels, she lifted Mistress Ise’s staff clear of the tray. “Interesting,” she murmured, studying the twisted strands more closely, then looked up at Khar. “Between you and Nhenir, I think we can contain the shield’s influence.”
Khar nodded, and Faro felt the flare of his power, joining with the same moonlit presence that had been with Malian when she removed Thanir’s compulsion. Tirael and Nimor both looked equally intent as Malian set the staff aside and examined the tray. “I’ll lift it clear,” she said, “but it had better be Raven who touches the mirror.”
Faro craned around at once, realizing he had made the mistake of overlooking Malian’s companion, who had been obscured from his gaze by Khar. Watching us all—and missing nothing, Faro thought, his own gaze sliding away as Raven stepped forward.
“Why Raven?” Tirael asked, looking from Malian to the tall warrior.
“Because I’m largely immune to power,” Raven replied quietly.
The Son of Stars’ brows rose, and Khar, too, looked around, his expression arrested, before turning back to the tray. “How do we deal with the shield-mirror permanently, though?” he said, as though thinking aloud. “I assume it can be melted down?”
“Not in any fire we could light in this camp.” Malian’s eyes met his again. “I propose using the frost-fire sword.”
“You found it!” Khar exclaimed. Momentarily, delight broke through his grimness, so that he looked younger and less careworn than he had since the siege began.
“With Raven’s help,” Malian said, while Nimor and Tirael exchanged looks.
“Nhenir,” the Son of Stars said, as though testing the name. “And the frost-fire sword. You really are the Chosen of Mhaelanar.”
“I am,” Malian replied, but with so much regret that Faro looked directly at her, even though that risked glimpsing the shield-mirror. “Unfortunately, if we destroy the mirror, which we must do, I fear the Shield of Stars, or Shield of Heaven will pass beyond my grasp. It was shattered in the battle with the Worm, but it seems one of the shards went into this mirror’s making.” She paused. “I’ve had several visions of the battlefield now, all focusing on the broken shield, and in one I saw Thanir. He took something from beneath the body of the Worm, almost certainly a shield fragment. From what I overheard in Faro’s memories, the Swarm melded it into their shield-mirror, using the shard’s disguising influence to infiltrate Night, where Aikanor fell beneath the mirror’s sway.”
Ilai had mentioned Aikanor, too, Faro thought, when she spoke to Lady Myr at the end—something about using the mirror to whisper him into Madness. Now Taierin’s warding had been lifted, he knew this was one of the histories his mam had taught him: how Aikanor, the Heir of Night, had believed himself in love with Xeria, twin sister to his closest friend, Tasian of Stars. When she would not marry him, Aikanor had murdered Tasian and tried to seize Xeria by force, which plunged the Derai into civil war and ended with the Golden Fire being extinguished. By his mam’s account, it was Xeria who had called down the Fire to thwart Aikanor and his adherents’ attempt to assassinate their Derai enemies, at the peace feast intended to end the civil war.
But in relating these events, Mam had spoken of circumstances that were raw and recent and bitter, not the five-hundred-year-old history they were to everyone else in the tent. She had not known about the mirror, but Faro remembered Ilai saying that, unlike Aikanor, Lady Myr had not been susceptible to its influence. He wanted to remind everyone of that, but their faces and the wyr hounds’ rigidity held him motionless. “Aikanor,” Khar said, as though he had tasted something rotten.
Malian nodded. “What was intended, I suspect, to thwart another child born of Night and Stars by corrupting his feelings for Xeria, ended achieving so much more.”
Tirael was white. “Tasian’s murder, the whole wreckage of the Betrayal War, and the loss of the Golden Fire . . .” Any trace of a drawl had vanished.
“The mirror may also explain why Xeria was able to wreak what she did.” Malian was very quiet, almost stern. “We know she was extremely powerful, but even so, I’ve always wondered how she was able to override the Golden Fire’s prohibition against striking at the Derai—especially since until then, the Fire had been resolutely neutral in the civil war.” A silent growl vibrated through the wyr hounds. “We know she was no longer sane,” Malian went on, “and sometimes that increases strength. But by that stage, even if part of the mirror was from Yorindesarinen’s shield, the Swarm influence about Aikanor and those sworn to him must have been so strong it was growing discernible.”
Khar scrubbed a hand over hair darkened by sweat and dust. “So when he initiated the Night of Death, Xeria persuaded the Fire they were striking against the Swarm. She probably believed it herself . . .”
“She must have,” Malian said, more quietly still, “because she couldn’t have hidden a lie from the Fire. And in one way, because of the mirror’s hold over Aikanor, she was right.”
The tent was so quiet that Faro could hear the warriors from Malian’s escort, talking outside. He almost cried out as the moth finally came too close and singed its wings against the lantern glass. Crippled, it spiraled to the ground, where Malian saw its distress and killed it. Her movement broke up the tableau: Tirael rolled his shoulders as though sloughing off the old, dark history, while Khar bent to examine the line of solder running through the phoenix. “Was this more shards?”
Malian nodded. “Two of the larger pieces, I imagine.” Her gaze went to Faro. “When you called your lightning, the power activated a residual virtue in the tray.” Abashed, Faro fixed his eyes on the phoenix as everyone looked at him again. “Rithor,” Malian said, reclaiming their attention, “was the only one of Yorindesarinen’s squires who accompanied her against the Worm. The divisions within the Alliance must have been less entrenched in those days, because Rithor was of the Rose. Yorindesarinen sent him away before the final battle, but he can’t have gone far because I saw him creep back afterward.” She glanced at Raven. “I think Fire’s arrival drove him off before he could retrieve more than the shield fragments. But,” she finished softly, “if we looked far enough back along Mistress Ise’s family tree, I suspect we’d find Rithor.”
“So we know how the tray got here,” Nimor said, almost explosively. “But how could the mirror get from the Old Keep of Winds on the Night of Death, to a place among Lady Myr’s possessions?”
“How does the
Sea Keep get an envoy and his secretary, both weatherworkers, past the Blood Gate?” Khar was grim again, lines drawn deep about his mouth. “It could have been brought to the Red Keep in the confusion that followed the Night of Death. All the normal bonds of Derai society had been frayed by the civil war, so I wouldn’t rule out looting, even between supposed allies.”
“Or the Swarm may have recovered it when they penetrated the Old Keep six years ago.” Malian was calm. “If what we’ve learned through Faro is correct, a Swarm agent infiltrated Lady Myrathis’s household, so planting the mirror is perfectly feasible. Still, we may never know exactly how it came about. But now,” she said, steel tempering her calm, “we need to make an end.”
She was careful, lifting the tray clear, but the shield-mirror beneath appeared dormant, and remained that way once Raven picked it up. Even Faro felt compelled to look more closely, despite his reluctance, and saw no movement in the shadowed depths. “The mirror may have to be activated from the other side,” Raven said, propping it on a barrel set against the tent’s main pole. “But whatever else went into its making, it stinks of Salar’s handiwork.”
Salar, Faro thought, his stomach churning as he remembered the Ship’s Prow House, where the name had clearly referred to some greater demon that Nirn and the others feared. Ilai might have mentioned the name, too . . . “Do it!” he said shrilly, but although Khar looked around, it was Malian who answered.
“Fear not, Pha’Rho-l-Ynor, I shall.” Faro was reassured by her certainty, but almost immediately disappointed by the so-called frost-fire sword’s plainness, once drawn. And rather than raising the sword high and shearing through the shield-mirror, the Heir of Night simply sighted along its length. As though she’s getting the mirror in perspective, Faro thought, puzzled.
“‘Free me,’” Malian murmured—which sounded like she was repeating someone else’s words. Clasping the hilt with both hands, she extended the blade until its tip touched the mirror, but even then she did not thrust the sword deep. Faro had just decided that being Chosen of Mhaelanar couldn’t be anything special—not like Khar defending the camp—when silver-white fire glittered along the blade and coruscated about its tip.
Electrified, he stared at the image of sword and flame reflected in the mirror’s surface. Both remained frost-white, with lines spreading out from their reflection like fissures in ice, until the entire surface of the mirror was crackle glaze. “Free me,” Malian repeated softly, before her voice rang out, commanding as a note struck on the great gong in Seruth’s Grayharbor temple: “Be free!” The sword belled on the same note, the top of its range piercingly high, the bottom so profound Faro could feel the reverberation inside himself. From the strain in Khar’s face, he thought that the sound must be testing his shielding, and wondered if he should help—the same way he and the wyr hounds had loaned Khar their strength last night, when the assault of power was at its height.
“Wait; watch.” The wyr hounds’ caution was also a command. The belling note was building rather than dying away, the invocation ‘be free’ weaving through it like the entwined strands of Ise’s staff. Both the actual and reflected swords blazed whiter until the mirror clanged, harsh with protest, and a sulfurous mist poured through the widening cracks in its surface. The sword belled again, insistent, and everyone except Malian—and Raven, Faro would remember afterward, wondering if that was what it meant to be immune—clapped their hands over their ears. Again the belling note swelled—and the mirror shattered into a cloud of steel fragments.
Faro expected the splinters to fall to the floor, but instead they revolved about the sword’s white blade. Every revolution drew the filing cloud closer—like the moth and the lantern, he thought, riveted—until the first particle touched the sword’s edge. “Free . . .” The whisper was a breath out of the air as the entire cloud vanished. Nothing remained, not even specks of steel dust in the lantern’s beam.
“Free,” Malian said, remote as the moon. By the time she lowered the blade, its appearance was that of any other plain, workmanlike weapon. Tirael made a gesture, partly salute to Malian, partly valediction.
“It had to be done,” Khar said somberly, as she sheathed the sword.
The others were silent, focused on the place where the mirror had been. Finally, Nimor shook his head as if to clear it. “There’s still Lady Myrathis’s vigil. We must keep that.”
“You should rest first,” Tirael told him. “We don’t all have to keep the full vigil.” But someone must: Faro knew that, too, from his mam’s teaching. He supposed that would end being Taly, since Khar had already been delayed and must still make his captain’s rounds of the camp. Nonetheless, as if glad of the excuse to leave, within a very few minutes everyone had moved outside. The Blood exiles, who were keeping the first honor watch for Lady Myr, were still deployed about the garnet-and-gold tent, so Faro guessed it could not be as late as he had thought.
Nimor stopped, intent on the solitary star that could be seen through the Gray Lands’ cloud. “The pilot’s star,” he said softly, and even the wyr hounds turned their silver eyes skyward, following his gaze. No one spoke, but Faro knew they all understood that Nimor had not expected to see it again. “You know,” the envoy continued, “there’s still one thing I don’t understand in all this.”
“Only one,” Tirael murmured.
Nimor ignored him, his eyes on the star. “I suppose Faro may know. But what quest was so pressing it sent an Heir of Blood into Jaransor, then led him to appropriate a Sea House ship?”
Faro shook his head, because if Mam knew, she had never said. In the brief silence that followed, Murn came out of the infirmary to join them. “Rook’s awake and urgent to speak with you,” he told Khar. “He won’t settle until you come.”
Khar nodded and started to turn away, but checked when Malian spoke. “What drove your stealing in those same times?” she said to Nimor. “Our Alliance had not only lost its bulwark against the Swarm, but the privation that followed the loss of the Golden Fire nearly destroyed us. As if that were not enough, the Blood Oath was taking hold, turning us more deeply against ourselves. We were like an animal in a trap, which sees gnawing off its own leg as the only way out.” She paused. “What else could Ammaran have been doing, except seeking to restore the Golden Fire?”
One wyr hound moved sharply, but the rest stood motionless. “It seems obvious, once you frame it that way,” Tirael said finally. “But even if Ammaran thought restoring the Fire possible, why voyage into the Southern Realms? What was he seeking there?”
“Power.” Malian dropped the word into their midst like a pebble down a well. Faro could have sworn he heard the echo. “A source of power to draw on, since we had decimated our own.” Her coolness was tempered again as she met their eyes one by one. “And now that we know the Wall has been breached at least once, while Yorindesarinen’s shield is lost, we had better find a way to complete Ammaran’s quest.”
61
Storm Wrack
For the first time since the siege began, Kalan heard a rat-fox bark, farther out on the plain. The wind carried the coughing cry to him where he stood in the shadow of the breached earthworks, with part of his mind monitoring the muted sounds of both the camp and the wider night. The remainder of his attention was absorbed by the words Rook had spoken, risen onto one elbow in his urgency. At one level, the Adamant youth’s account was a confusion of a crow woman come alive, who was also Emeriath out of legend, and how the hind in the tapestry must run. The rest was all too familiar: the Hunt striving to break free, precipitated by the finding and claiming of the spear.
My fault, Kalan thought, his jaw ground together. Not Faro’s, for having crossed Thanir’s path, or Tirael’s for acknowledging Myr as kin: mine and this cursed ring’s. He was tempted to drag it off and hurl it away, as his first instinct had been to cast The Lovers onto the nearest fire and watch it burn to ash—except he did not know what either action might mean for Myr’s spirit, caught in the eternal
cycle of hind and Hunt. Also, according to all Rook had witnessed with his power joined to Myr, and through her to Emeriath, the sacrifice must be willing. And Myr had been willing, not least for Kalan’s sake.
“She said you were hers. Her champion and Honor Captain, I suppose. That’s when she agreed.” Kalan heard Rook’s words again, each one a reproach, although he knew that was not why the youth had told him of events in the tent. Yet so long as Myr was bound to the hind, her spirit would never come to the Hurulth’s Hall. Rook, raised in Adamant, which served the Silent God first among the Nine, had not said that, but Kalan had spent seven years in Night’s Temple quarter so he had not needed to be told.
I was supposed to champion and defend her, he thought, frowning at the ragged hole blasted through the dike, only to fail at the last. While she—the shy, the gentle, the one Blood considered unfit to be its Daughter—not only stepped between Faro and Thanir’s knife, but into Mayanne’s web to save us all. From what Malian had gleaned from Faro’s memories, Myr had been naturally resistant to the mirror’s influence as well. Otherwise, Kalan thought bitterly, she would doubtless have been permitted to live and take her place as Countess of Night. But then—less bitterly—she would not have been Myr . . .
Reason might assert that both the shield and The Lovers had been in place long before his arrival. Nonetheless, he had not paid either of them the attention they merited. Because, the voice of reason pointed out, you had your mind on other imperatives, like a camp on the verge of annihilation. Still, Kalan now knew how Lannorth must have felt, with Rowan Birchmoon dead on his watch. The situation was not the same since guards under his command had not slain Myr. Yet Faro’s involvement, however unwitting, meant the parallel ran close enough.