The Path of Flames (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 1)

by Phil Tucker

  Slipping through the crowd, smiling as different folk nodded respectfully to her, Kethe made for the chapel. It was beautifully convenient that the entrance to the smith lay through the most respectful destination for the Lord’s daughter, a quirk of the castle’s construction that she adored, no matter how much the high priest objected. As a result, she’d garnered a reputation for devoutness that allayed her mother’s suspicions, and Simeon the priest was kind enough to not dispel any assumptions as to where Kethe spent her time.

  She stepped through the door, then hurried along the chapel’s back wall, pausing as always to curtsy to the great silver triangle that stood on the far altar, illuminated by the requisite ten candles. It was a sign of her father’s wealth that the candles were fine beeswax and not tallow, each as thick and tall as her forearm and always lit. Still, she’d not come to ponder the mysteries of Ascension; with barely a guilty twinge she hurried to the smithy entrance and stepped through into the gloom.

  When she was younger, entering the smithy had made her imagine she was passing through the Black Gate itself. The soft glow of the chapel candles would be replaced by the fitful illumination of the forge fires, the air acrid with smoke and the tang of scalded metal. Elon had seemed like an ogre, more massive than even an armored knight, and the hissing of quenched metal and the white and cherry-red glow of malleable steel had seemed to her to be instruments of torture. Now the smithy was her secret home, where she yearned to be when she wasn’t in the Greening Wood or riding Lady along the hills. She grinned as Tongs, Elon’s ebon firecat, flew up to land on her shoulders and curl about her neck just as Elon turned to regard her; she’d even managed to evade her younger brother Roddick, who thought it hilarious to race back to the keep and report her to their mother. She had at least a half hour before she was truly missed.

  “You’re pressing your luck, don’t you think?” Elon’s voice was a rumble more akin to boulders shifting in the depths of the earth than any normal person’s voice. Now that she was older he no longer seemed like an ogre; he was a friend, or at the very least an accomplice. His black hair thinning, his beard cropped short, the smith’s features were ruddy from a life spent bent over scorching heat. As always, he was wearing only a sleeveless tunic and his heavy leather apron. Kethe wagered that Elon could arm-wrestle any of the Black Wolves into submission without much effort—not that a knight would ever deign to contest with a peasant.

  “Yes, well, I’m almost done.” Kethe grinned and plucked Tongs from her shoulders, dropped him in his favorite spot by the furnace, and hurried to the back of the smithy. “Besides. Have you seen my needlework? Atrocious. Even my mother can’t find the words to compliment it.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Elon, watching her as she rummaged under a pile of empty hemp sacks. “You were nearly caught yesterday, and the day before that I came close to lying to Berthold when he came asking after you. What’s going on? Is there some crisis you haven’t told me about?”

  “Yes,” said Kethe, almost to herself. She grasped her treasure and pulled it out, then held it up to examine it in the light of the forge. It glimmered beautifully, like fish scales or a dream of silver under the moon. It was a hauberk, made slowly over the past year, each ring, each rivet, each and every piece tailored to her own body. “I need this finished. For me. Not for anybody else. For me.”

  She walked over to a trestle table and laid the hauberk down. Two more lines of rings were all that remained to be done before she would declare it complete. Then she’d edge it with leather—or perhaps calfskin, but that might not prove as durable—and then, finally, she’d be able to take it out to Greening Wood.

  Elon set down his tongs and hammer and stepped up beside her. He rubbed his jaw. “It’s not bad, I suppose.”

  “Not bad?” She wheeled on him. “It’s better than anything you’ve ever made, what with those big sausage fingers of yours.” She cut off at the sight of his grin. “I mean, yes. Not bad, I suppose.”

  Elon picked it up. “I still think you’ve meshed these rings too tightly together. Fine work, fit for jewelry, but you need flexibility as well.”

  Kethe bit her lower lip. “Maybe.”

  The smith set the hauberk back down. “Though it’s all academic, isn’t it? Like one of Magister Audsley’s theories about the Age of Wonders.” His words were soft as he regarded her, his eyes gleaming under his heavy brows. “Do you truly expect to wear this in battle, Kethe?”

  She stepped over to his scrap pile and took up two heavy bars, one in each hand. A year ago they’d been too heavy for her to lift. Staring fixedly at the stone wall, she raised both bars till her arms were level with the floor. Within moments her shoulders began to burn with the effort.

  “Yes,” she said. The bars began to tremble. “You heard Esson, that bard who came through with Lord Gysel six months ago.” It was hard to speak smoothly when she wanted to clench her stomach and lock her breath in her throat. “Women can be knights. There’s a female order far to the south, the Order of the Ax.” Her hands were starting to dip, and she forced herself to not lean back so as to compensate. “And Lady Otheria was a knight.”

  “Lady Otheria,” said Elon, stepping up to where she stood, “may not have even existed.” He stood in silence for another minute until her arms began to tremble wildly, and only then did he take the weights from her.

  Kethe let out a sharp breath as she dropped her arms, then shook them out and rubbed her shoulders. “Even if she didn’t, the idea of her is enough.” This was a familiar argument, one that Elon had indulged her in many times over the past year, but something had changed. Perhaps it was the near-completion of the chainmail.

  He dropped the bars into the scrap pile and then turned back to his anvil, rubbing the back of his head. “I’m just a simple smith. It’s my own limitation, not understanding why a pretty young noble lady like yourself would want to get into vicious battles with full-grown men.”

  Kethe blew a strand of her auburn hair out of her face. “That’s all right. When they’re singing songs about me, then maybe you’ll understand.”

  He laughed. “Songs? My, the young lady has some real ambition. Though it points her in a terrible direction. I know all too well what the weapons I craft can do to flesh and bone.”

  Kethe assumed an innocent expression. “As my mother says, women make, men break. I’m simply creating a hauberk, Elon.”

  “Oh? You plan to run into battle with no weapons, then?”

  “Well, maybe a sword. If a man tries to break what I’ve created, do I not have the right to defend myself?”

  Elon crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back on his heels. “I’d like to meet the knight who would strike a lady. I’d stave in his helmet with my hammer.”

  Kethe grinned. “If I didn’t do him in first. And what would you be doing out on a battlefield?”

  The smith scowled. “Chasing after you, no doubt, and still arguing till the last moment against your folly. Now. Are you going to finish those links? I’ve set the wire out for you over there.”

  Her mother, Lady Iskra Kyferin, had lectured her on the value of mindless tasks such as needlework. Letting your hands work allowed your mind to drift, she said, and it was during these moments of reverie that insights and ideas would come. Kethe put on her apron, pulled out the wooden stool and sat at the work station, then pulled the length of thick wire over and grabbed her rod. Tongs padded over and twined himself between her boots, his black feathered wings bumping against the undersides of her thighs. She began to wrap the wire around and around the rod, doing so with slow and methodical care. Some women enjoyed distracting themselves with needlework. She loved creating chainmail. Once the wire was completely wrapped, she’d snip circles from its coiled form, and then these she’d interweave with the unfinished hem of her hauberk and weld them shut. Quiet work. Delicate, repetitive work that allowed her to dream, to let slip her mind from the smoky confines of the smithy and out to wonder on her hopes an
d aspirations.

  She’d never managed to convey to Elon why she wanted to dress in armor and wield a sword. Elon was a practical man; he understood the world in terms of what he could shape and handle with his powerful hands. To him weaponry meant blood and injuries and dirt and campaigning and death. Which was all true. Kethe knew that being a warrior was not a glamorous business, not like they sang about in the epics. She knew that all too well. But simply being a woman was just as dangerous and brutal in its own way.

  Three years later, it was still too easy to summon the terror, the bitter, galling sense of helplessness. To remember his face as he came at her with his sword, his eyes blank with his determination to kill her. It had been three years, but she could still vividly recall the tearing pain in her throat as she’d screamed. Screamed, because she’d been unable to defend herself. Screamed, because she was weak and had to summon others to save her.

  Kethe pursed her lips and stared down at the wire. Having a sword at her hip would mean never feeling that way again, never letting an animal like that knight terrorize her to the point of having nightmares for a year afterwards. She would be like her father, feared and respected for his strength. Nobody intimidated him. Nobody took advantage of him. He was the strongest, most capable man she knew. Kethe bit her lip as she wove the wire around and around the rod. Elon’s hammer began to ring out anew. Methodical, rhythmic.

  But becoming a knight had become more than simple self-defense. Over the past few years the blade had come to symbolize the ability to forge her own destiny. Choose her own path. Cut through the layers and layers of strangling expectations, and stand tall and proud and free. A foolish dream, no doubt. There had been many times when she’d felt desolate and alone, and had nearly thrown her coat of mail into Elon’s forge. Moments when she’d felt foolish and pathetic, a child indulging in fantasies. But she hadn’t given up. Coming to the smith—escaping the stifling confines of the keep whenever she could—was the only true pleasure that was hers and hers alone. Even riding Lady was stilted, accompanied as she always was by Hessa and two guards.

  Shouts disturbed her thoughts. She turned to Elon, who stopped, hammer raised above his head. Both then turned to the smithy door. The cries weren’t of fear or panic, but rather excitement tinged with alarm.

  “A visitor?” Elon set his hammer down and wiped his hands with a dirty cloth.

  “News from Father?” Kethe stood and threw a cloth sack over her mail.

  Lord Kyferin had been gone two months, along with every Black Wolf and all the squires. Two months was a long time to campaign, but not unusually so; word had reached them intermittently that the Agerastian force had been avoiding pitched battle for weeks now, burning its way across the countryside as it avoided the Ascendant’s forces.

  More shouts. Kethe hurried through the door into the chapel just as Father Simeon came walking down the aisle with his chaplain at his heels. He was a tall, stern man, with a high forehead, severe cheekbones, and the rich bronzed skin of a Noussian born. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Kethe said, and stepped outside into the bailey.

  Everybody was emerging from their respective buildings to crowd around the gatehouse. Kethe stepped forth, people parting for her with the usual respectful nods. A young man was riding over the castle drawbridge. His white hair and skin as pale as milk marked him for a Bythian, though why he was mounted she couldn’t fathom… Wait. Asho? He looked like he’d been dragged backwards by his horse through a field filled with thorns. Half his face was discolored with bruising, and his long hair was spiky with dried sweat and dirt. His horse looked blown, with its head hanging low and its hooves almost dragging across the boards.

  The young man’s expression was haunted, and Kethe felt the crowd harden around her. Almost every castle servant here was an Ennoian, and none of them appreciated the sight of the upstart Bythian squire.

  Asho rode through the gatehouse, the sound of his horse’s hooves echoing loudly in the silence until he emerged once more into the weak afternoon sunlight.

  “It’s Lord Kyferin’s squire,” muttered somebody to her left.

  Asho gazed about the quiet crowd with his pale silver-green eyes, unabashed and disconcertingly direct for a Bythian. As always she felt that prick of annoyance that was just shy of anger at his insolence. He’d not the wit to realize how a little natural deference would ameliorate the anger his arrogance provoked. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a pang. His delicate, almost elfin features were terribly aged. The last she’d seen of him he’d appeared but fourteen years old, a fresh-faced youth with large silver eyes and a quiet manner. Now he looked almost a man, harrowed by some experience she couldn’t guess at.

  Asho slid from the saddle. He was so exhausted his knees buckled as he landed, and were it not for his grip on pommel he might have fallen. Nobody moved forward to assist him, though murmurs of alarm flickered through the crowd. Raising her chin and pushing back her shoulders, Kethe stepped forth, fearing his news but knowing in her core that there was no hiding from the bleakness in his eyes.

  “My Lady,” said Asho, his voice barely more than a whisper. He straightened with a wince, and she realized he was not only exhausted but wounded too; his hauberk was torn along his ribs, and dirt was deeply ingrained in the links over his shoulder as if he’d fallen hard to the ground.

  “Squire Asho.” Her nerves made her speak more coldly than she’d meant to.

  “I bring grave news, my Lady.” He spoke as if they were standing alone, a terrible kindness in his eyes that she wanted to dash away with a slap. He hesitated, the moment come. The moment, Kethe realized, that he must have been dreading even as he fought to get here with all his might. “We were defeated in battle. Lord Kyferin and all his Black Wolves are dead.”

  The crowd erupted into exclamations of horror, and Kethe closed her eyes and rocked back on her heels, feeling her whole body grow numb. With those words her world had suddenly and irrevocably changed. People were calling out angrily, shouting questions, but when she managed to open her eyes again she saw that Asho was standing silently, ignoring everyone but her.

  She had to do something. Control the crowd. Give commands. But all she could do was hold Asho’s gaze. No words came to her lips. No thoughts beyond the one terrible and impossible fact: her father was dead. What would she tell Roddick?

  “Yet you survived.” Her voice came from a far distance. She could barely hear herself over the rushing in her ears. She wanted to hurt him. How dare he look at her with pity? “Did you flee the battle?”

  “No,” Asho said. He was holding on to the saddle as if it were a branch that was keeping him from drowning. “I only left after the Ascendant’s Grace and his Virtues quit the field.”

  “Then come,” she said. “The Lady Kyferin will want to hear your news at once.”

  The curtain walls seemed impossibly high, the barbican receding into the distance. She felt a moment of vertigo as she turned away, and tears pricked her eyes. She’d show him no weakness. She was Lord Enderl Kyferin’s daughter. She would show him only strength. Almost blind with tears she refused to wipe away, she wheeled and strode toward the barbican, sending people scattering as they stumbled out of her way. She didn’t care. Memory guided her footsteps. She strode up the stone ramp to the drawbridge, passed quickly over it, and only once she had stepped into the darkness of the barbican did she shudder, a deep soul quake that almost undid her knees. She pressed her hand to the wall and paused, another pang causing her lungs and heart to spasm. She gasped for breath, the sound loud in the corridor. It felt like somebody had punched her right in the solar plexus.

  Father was dead. The strongest man she had ever known was gone. It was like learning that a mountain had suddenly disappeared. And all his Black Wolves with him? Thirty-three knights. Brutal, cruel men who had at once scared her and ensured her safety. Each with his own manse or fort in the countryside about the castle, each a minor lord of his own staff and serv
ants. Dead. All of them. She stared blindly at a wall torch as names tumbled through her mind. Her mind reeled, and then she pushed away from the wall. She took a deep breath. Held it. If she was to be a knight, that she had to accustom herself to pain and loss. She had to be strong. Roddick would be looking to her for comfort. And yet the floor felt like it was slipping out from beneath her. Before more tears could come, she strode forth down the hall and turned right at the elbow. Out the gate and onto the second drawbridge, moving swiftly, head lowered.

  She passed through the drum towers and out onto the keep stairs. Lifting her dress, she ran up the steps, not caring for decorum, not caring who saw. She flitted up to the keep door and hauled it open. She turned quickly away from the large kitchen, ignoring the puzzled looks of the servants, and ran up the intramural staircase to the third floor.

  While the Great Hall down in the bailey could seat over a hundred and often did, the Lord’s Hall here on the third floor of the keep was more intimate, and her father tended to use it as an audience chamber in which to receive distinguished guests. A dais was set against the back wall, with her mother’s pale oaken seat set next to her father’s massive and beautifully carved cherry wood throne. Two long trestle tables ran down the length of the circular room, whose walls were hung with tapestries depicting her father’s favorite pastimes: war and the hunt. Wall candles complemented the light that filtered through the arrow slit windows.