by Carol Berg
After only a moment, the chancellor dropped his hood and raised his palm, five fingers spread wide in Iero’s blessing. But as he lowered his hand, he briefly held it vertically, fingertips heavenward, at his breast—the brothers’ signing language for the abbot—and then clenched his fist and pressed it to his heart. Obedience. And then…nothing. Gods. Nothing.
Anger flooded from my hollow breast to my frost-nipped cheek. How dare they lay their pious obligations on me?
Discipline forbade communication with an onlooker, but surely the little monk must see the flush of fury heating my face. He stood there for a while longer, his small hands folded piously. The milling crowd gradually swallowed him, and I could not judge when it was he left the square.
Gildas had said Luviar would not release me from his tether as long as he had use for me. What did he think I could do for him, trussed up like a string doll forced to perform for laughing children? Damnable holy men! I hated them all.
Chapter 23
On the eleventh morning of my exhibition, as we marched into the Temple District, we passed no more than ten people. Though I remained maddeningly unenlightened about events in Palinur, I judged the situation had gotten worse. Five temples faced the great circle—those of Kemen, Samele, Erdru, Deunor, and Arrosa. Throughout the day, liveried servants bore every size and shape of burden up the broad steps of the brightly painted buildings: calyxes and caskets small and large, crates of statuary and rare fruit, wine casks, grain sacks, urns, and caged birds. Someone even led a matched pair of white oxen into Kemen’s gold-columned temple. Offerings to placate the gods. The wealthy people of the city were worried. I imagined I could smell the nivat. Some of the boxes surely contained that most favored offering.
Though I tried to banish the thought of nivat as soon as it arose, my mind would not let go of it, and I found myself plotting ridiculous ventures to slough off my bonds and snatch the most likely containers. Whatever would I do when I needed it again?
I had used my last supply on the journey to Palinur. After three days on the road, Thalassa had accepted my word that I would attempt no magic and allowed me to travel with unbound hands—my salvation two nights later when my disease struck and I was forced to pay the price of my incomplete doulon. That her aide Silos—he of the cheap scent and well-aimed firebolts—had eventually detected my spellworking, and that she had angrily bound my hands and shackled my feet for the rest of the journey, did not matter. Neither of them had found the mirror or the needle or discovered the truth. I owned one secret for a while longer, from all but Brother Gildas. The worst part of this whole disgusting mess was that these unpredictable intervals between attacks of my disease had fueled a subtle anxiety that never left me.
Thoughts of Gildas led inevitably to thoughts of Brother Victor and what he could be doing in Palinur. I scanned today’s crowd. He wasn’t here. Surely he would not have come all this way to deliver one more warning to keep me mute. If the cabal no longer needed my help, then how, in Magrog’s fancy, were they planning to contact the Danae? Bah, I thought, let the pious pricks flounder.
Reminded of the wonders I had seen at Caedmon’s Bridge, I let my imagination stray. I imagined the Dané woman dancing in the moonlit fields beyond the abbey, joined by the man with the dragon sigils. The Danae twined the lives of trees and lakes, rocks and stream into their dances, so stories said, joining the elements of the world in a great pattern, so that a vine in Ardra and a river of Morian and a rocky pinnacle of Evanore became part of one great whole. What magic, what vigor, would enliven such a dance. Under my breath I hummed the harper’s song I’d heard on the road to Elanus; the Danae would dance to such music as that. I could almost feel them leaping and whirling…caught up in the moment as I had been in the Elanus tavern…stretching, driving, pounding their feet—
“Attention, plebeiu,” snapped the voice in my ear. Caphur’s fingers dug into my arm and jostled me. “Open your eye and look upon the ugliness of the ordinary world. You are forbidden to escape your punishment in sleep.”
The squalor of Temple Square and the gawking crowd scrubbed away the glorious image, and the howling wind deafened me to the music of memory, leaving only a starved ache in my chest. Legends and stories…the Danae might live, but no pattern existed in this ugly world. In all my years of running, I had never felt so alone.
As the day waned, the torments of flesh obscured those of spirit. The snow turned to sleet. My face felt stripped raw from peppering ice and the abrasion of freezing metal. The wind drove ice-bladed knives through clothing and flesh and bone. Every part and portion of me was frozen. I could scarcely see, and my clogged nose forced me to breathe through my mouth—the pinched half of it outside the mask. I struggled to remain calm. Only the approach of evening held off despair.
“Harrow! Purify!” A scuffle broke out in the back of the twenty or thirty remaining gawkers—a mix of elaborately gowned temple aides, beggars, and idle drovers, and the tall, odd man in the sky-blue tunic.
I pressed my snow-crusted arm across my eyes, trying to blot the tears and drips. A bony youth, wearing a Harrower’s orange rag tied around his head, had pushed to the front ranks, supporting himself on a crutch. Half of one of his legs was missing. He waved a clenched fist at me. “Them as flout the gods cause these evil days. Them as serve the Snake of Ardra or the Bastard of Evanore, them as worship in corrupted temples or Karish halls…they bring forth the pestilence. Only Prince Bayard sees the truth. But the drums ye hear be not the valiant Smith’s drums but the drums of doom. The Gehoum howl on the wind! The earth cries out for harrowing! Make it level. Make it smooth! Purify!”
He raised his hand…
His missile glanced off the silver mask just over my cheekbone. Pain lanced through my skull. Eyes watering, I staggered backward.
Caphur jumped down from the platform and briskly kicked the offender’s crutch out from under him. The youth crashed to the pavement, and the masked guard touched his bronze staff to the fallen lad’s back. The tip of the staff glowed red. Smoke curled upward from the ragged cloak and burst into flame. The boy wailed…
Great Iero’s hand! Though the mask trapped my bellowing curses in my throat, I lunged at Caphur, swinging my bound fists at his bristly jowl like a bludgeon. But my shackled ankle brought me up short, and I crashed into an awkward heap, one foot on the platform, the other foot and knee twisted behind me, still on the block. The Registry man dodged my blow without a glance.
The Harrower youth flailed and screamed. A few onlookers rolled him in the snow and beat at him with hands and cloaks to smother the fire. Others ran away. Caphur stepped back and waved his staff, pointing at one and then another of the murmuring crowd until they backed away from the platform.
Caphur’s partner dragged me to my feet and motioned me back on the block. I wrenched my shoulders from his grasp. He raised one finger in warning and motioned again.
There’s nothing to be done, I thought. Not today. You’ll only make things worse. Grinding my teeth, I stepped up and dropped my arms, straightening my back and head as was required. My overseers faced the crowd, staves gripped firmly in their hands, prepared to defend me. I could not stop shaking.
A tall woman bundled in ragged cloak and orange scarf pushed to the front and pointed a long finger at the fallen youth. “Heed the work of arrogant princes! Their pet sorcerers, abominations to the Gehoum, can slay us at their will. Noble and pureblood live in corrupted luxury and praise imaginary gods, whilst we burn, our children starve, our grapes fail.”
Her voice seared the gloomy afternoon with lightning—blazing far beyond the group in front of me, reaching into alleys and byways, shops and taverns. “Tell your brothers and sisters. Fetch your cousins and uncles and friends to lay hand to the Harrow. Not until the false princes and false teachers have been purified will the Gehoum set the seasons right again.”
The last of the temple aides scurried away toward the green-and-red painted temple of Samele. A sudden bluster of
wind raised whorls of snow and then died as quickly as it came. As two ragged citizens piled snow on his blistered back, the crippled youth began to whisper between his sobs, “Harrow. Purify.”
The woman in the orange scarf took up the chant, tended and nurtured it as if it were a budding flame, moving through the crowd and touching one person and then another on the shoulder. Though only a few in the crowd wore orange rags, many joined her in the chant. More and more, until the words pulsed like a soft heartbeat. “Harrow. Purify…”
At the boundaries of the square in every direction, torches winked out of the gloom and flowed toward the center like fiery streamlets emptying into a lake. The Harrowers’ chants echoed from the painted facades around the square, the pulse become war drums.
Sleet clicked on my half-metal face. The wind whipped my cloak as if it were tissue. Had the cursed sun not yet set behind the blackening clouds? Shackled to the damnable block, I had no pleasant thoughts about being the center of a riot.
The urchins and beggars scattered like dry leaves in the wind. The remaining drovers ran for their rigs. The man in the sky-blue tunic had vanished. My guards hefted their staves higher, and for once I rejoiced that they were sorcerers. The flood of fire swept toward us.
A shouting arose among the chanters. They pointed toward the golden-domed Temple of Samele, where a short robust woman, wearing the green and gold robes of Samele’s priestess, stood on the broad steps between the green and red columns. Torchbearers stood to either side of her, and their light glinted in the gold fan rising from her long black hair. Even from such a distance I could see the dark lines about her eyes like a mask. Thalassa.
The streamlets of fire curved toward the temple, as if they had encountered logjams in their course. When the chanters in front of me hurried off to join their fellows, the rabble-rousing woman hurried away into the dark streets, her evening’s work done. The burned youth lay abandoned, already half buried in snow. Melting gobs slid from his blackened flesh.
Two ranks of green-liveried guards poured from the temple and fanned out on either side of Thalassa as she began to exhort the mob. Half deaf as I was, I could not understand her proclamation, but only the hisses and jeers that punctuated it. Flaming torches arced through the night, thrown toward the temple. Thalassa raised her hands and the torches shattered into showers of sparks that fell back on the crowd. Did Mother Samele appreciate the advantages of a pureblood Sinduria?
Mesmerized, I scarcely noticed as Caphur unlocked my ankle. But he tugged at my arm and I half stepped, half stumbled from the block and the platform. As my shepherds marched me away, I twisted my head to see over my shoulder. A green veil of light now hung over the surging throng. The line of temple guards, wielding clubs and staves, had surrounded the mob. Screams and curses rose louder.
The lurid scene was soon lost to view. With grim urgency, the guards rushed me through rapidly darkening streets, winding ever upward toward the Registry tower that sat near the lower walls of the citadel. As we crossed the deserted marketplace, a large troop of horsemen—perhaps seventy men with no visible colors—galloped toward the broad causeway that led to the palace gates. The pennants billowed heavy and listless on the battlements, only half visible in the swirling snow and sleet. I halted in my tracks.
Caphur growled impatiently. “Keep moving.”
When I shook my head and raised my bound hands in the direction of the banners, he lowered his staff and stared, as well, touching the shoulder of his partner and pointing where we looked. The trilliot—the white lily of Navronne—still flew on the castle of Caedmon and Eodward, but the purple and gold banner of Perryn of Ardra was nowhere to be seen.
Yet, even as the world shifted, mystery took a stranglehold on my spirit. From across the empty expanse of trampled snow, the tall man in the sky-blue tunic and green ribbons stood watching us. I blinked and squinted. His feet were bare. On such a day. Wondering, I raised my bleary eye, met his gaze, and knew him. He had once reached out to me from an aspen grove, his bare skin glowing with sigils of blue fire.
Caphur snatched my arm and dragged me stumbling from the square.
I paced my tower room in the dark. Though shed of my frozen finery, I was not yet warm. Once free of the hateful mask, I had dared denounce Caphur as an arrogant coward for burning a cripple. That outburst and my violent behavior in the Temple District had cost me food, light, and fire. Lukas had provided me one flask of watered ale for my supper and dressed me in dry layers of cambric and plain, padded wool, but had left my little brazier unlit and taken away my lamp. Tomorrow would likely bring more extensive penalties. I grabbed a blanket from the bed and wrapped it about my shoulders. So be it.
My pacing took me to the window again, back to matters of far more import than impotent recondeurs or even scorched madmen. Frost rimed the corners of the panes. After three years of war, could Palinur have been taken without a fight? Certainly Ardra’s prince had fallen. The missing banner was no mischance, no oversight. Not in these times. Yet Bayard’s banner had not been raised. I saw no evidence of battle in the night and storm beyond the tower, only scattered fires in the lower city. Thank the gods for the snow and damp that would check the spread of flames.
And then there was the matter of the barefoot man. Here in my tower room, it was easy to blame my nonsensical conclusion on cold, hunger, and a yearning to see something of hope in a world disintegrating before my eyes. He’d had no dragon wings scribed on his face or on the bare legs that poked out from under his pale tunic, yet I felt a certainty that stripped of his odd attire he would display the dragon marks. A Dané here in the city. A Dané I had seen before. Stories said Danae died if they remained too long in cities or man-made dwellings.
Locks rattled and the door slammed open. “Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine, stand forward.”
I spun away from the window and backed into the shadows. Perhaps my penalties had come earlier than expected. A midnight visitation was every prisoner’s nightmare.
The lantern dangling from a fleshy hand illuminated a thickset man with a fat black braid and a drooping mustache. He wore his black silk mask in the horizontal fashion, covering only his eyes and brow as some pureblood families prescribed. Caphur and his partner stood behind the newcomer.
Stepping out of the shadow, I dropped the blanket and bowed to my principal Registry overseer, Sestius de Rhom-Magistoria, some colineal relation of my grandfather’s family. “Domé.”
“Prepare to go out.”
“Of course, domé. If I might inquire—”
“You may not.”
Of course he would answer no question of mine. I could imagine the instructions of the Registry judges. Keep the prisoner ignorant. Keep the prisoner frustrated, isolated, and on edge, not knowing what humiliation will befall him next. Prove to him that he has no control over his life.
Suppressing pointless fury, I laced up my damp boots, snatched the yellow cloak from the hook, and fastened its clasp at my shoulder. Then I turned to Sestius, the silver mask in my one hand, a silk one in the other, and the inquiry posed on my face.
“Use the silk. We’re in a hurry. But bring the other. You are not finished with it yet. More insolence and you will be wearing it for a year.”
I bowed and slipped on the silk mask. It felt like a second skin compared to the silver. But I did not escape every discomfort. Caphur brought out his roll of silk cord and bound my hands. Tighter than other days. Showing his teeth, he also made sure that the silver mask came with us. Bristly hair poked through the silk of his own mask around his bulbous chin. Likely his family discipline mandated a clean-shaven face, else Caphur could have grown a beard the size of a hedgehog in three days’ time.
They whisked me down the stairs, where a party of two torch boys and eight or ten armed ordinaries waited. Only an extraordinarily dangerous night would occasion purebloods to call in extra escorts.
We hiked briskly through the deserted city, skirting the main streets and marketpl
aces. Ice coated every blade, twig, gutter, and cornice. I shivered in my ermine-lined cloak and thanked the Lord of Sea and Sky that the wind had abated.
I could not imagine where we were off to so late, until we climbed a long flight of worn steps to a crossing lane that bordered an ancient wall. The otherwise straight bulwark of stone, the remnant of some early defense work, had been designed to circumvent a notched pyramid of native rock. In the notch, water bubbled from moss-lined cracks and dribbled into a pool the size of a wide-brimmed hat. The pool, called the Aingerou’s Font, never dried up and never froze, and every spring a different variety of flower grew out of the cracks in the rock. Even lacking the Cartamandua bent, I could have found my way to this lane from the depths of the netherworld. For fifteen wretched years I had resided not half a quellé from the Aingerou’s Font.
The tree-shrouded lane followed the ancient bulwark past the Font to a walled stone house built in the grand Aurellian style. Large airy rooms enclosed inner courtyards, the sprawling structure ornamented with pedimented windows, meticulously designed gardens, fluted pillars, and brightly painted arches. A bronze gryphon, grasping a rolled map in its claws, loomed above us from the iron gate. As Sestius rang the bell, my entire being felt as hollow as my growling stomach. I was home.
The gate swung open before the echoes of the bell faded. A man in green livery motioned us into the snow-draped courtyard. Caphur dismissed our escorts, dropping a small pouch in their gawking leader’s outstretched hand, while the man in green exchanged a private word with Sestius.
I stood stiffly by, my mind skipping from one thing to another, unwilling to acknowledge the arrival of a moment I had dreaded for so many years. Three lamps hanging from iron posts lit the path to the front door. Lights shone from a few rooms: my father’s study to the left of the entry door, the reception room to the right, my mother’s bedchamber around the corner on the right. Horses had been here before us. Four or five. They’d been led around to the stables. The hedges had grown tall. The ancient lime tree had lost a limb; it would never survive this kind of cold. The green livery…one of Thalassa’s men from the temple then…Was she here?