“One of the Blessed,” she said quietly, knowing what an impossible thing that was to ask. “I don’t believe anyone else has the power to help him.”
Brys nodded again. He did not seem surprised. “East, then. Tarne Crossing.”
THAT DAY HE LED HER FARTHER east than she had ever been. East was Oakharn; east was danger. The charm-crafter’s cottage was as far as any of the village girls dared go, and that was considered a journey for the foolish and desperate. But Brys Tarnell seemed utterly unconcerned by the possibility of crossing paths with armsmen from Oakharn, so Odosse tried to ignore the tension knotting her shoulders and her nervousness at every snapped twig. If he wasn’t worried, then she shouldn’t be—but it was easier to say that than to believe it. Her stick was scant protection against arrows.
The sun slid to the horizon behind them, reddening the autumn leaves and filling the trees’ boughs with fire. The slanting light drew out the faded, timeworn runes etched into the waystones they passed, heightening the starkness of that ancient and angular script. Not for the first time, Odosse wondered who had planted the waystones by the road, and what they had written on their markers. Rhaelyand, people said, speaking the name like a veneration: the old empire had laid them there. But could that be true? How could an empire capable of building a road that would last a thousand years vanish so completely? No one in her world could even read the marks anymore; no one knew what warnings or blessings they held. The stones were simply there, old as the road, strange as the bends that it took toward cities long gone.
A chill wind picked up as the day waned, bearing a hint of smoke from the west. The road curved up a high bald hill, bringing them above the forest. A broken tower crowned the hill, the weathered gray of its stones flecked with luminous white like droplets of moonlight trapped in the rock. That was no local stone; it was the same curious rock as the waystones and the half-buried blocks that paved the River Kings’ Road. The stones seemed to glow with reflected radiance, holding warmth and the memory of light a little while longer into the dark.
“We’ll stop here,” Brys said when they reached the hilltop and its jagged tower. A crow perched among the stones at its top looked down on them with a black, unfriendly eye. “We’ll find no better shelter tonight, and the walls will hide our fire.”
“They say these ruins are haunted,” Odosse said.
“So they do. Its ghosts are welcome to haunt me as much as they like, so long as they haven’t got swords.” Brys took Wistan down from his carrier and handed the baby to Odosse. He watered his horse and tethered it on the lee side of the tower, where there was grass for it to graze and some shelter from the wind. Afterward he went down to the forest to gather deadwood while Odosse saw to the babies and threaded Brys’ rabbits onto sharp sticks for roasting.
The scent of smoke was stronger up here. A foulness seemed to taint the far-off smells of woodsmoke and burnt meat. Odosse was a country girl; she was no stranger to slaughter, and she knew the smells of blood and offal and rot. There was something worse on the wind, though it was so faint that she half-thought she imagined it.
In the distance to the west she could see tiny black specks circling over the trees. Ravens, or crows, or mere figments of her imagination drifting in the blue dusk. A hazy grayness seemed to cling to the wood there, melting into shadow so that it was difficult to separate one from the other. She could see none of the tiny lights that should have burned in Willowfield after dark: none of the fires of home or hearth or temple, however hard she strained her eyes to find them.
She was still standing there, staring into the night, when Brys came back with an armload of wood. She thought he gave her an odd look as he passed, but the darkness made it hard to tell.
A few minutes later a spark of firelight warmed the hollow tower. Odosse turned her back on the night and went in.
Brys took the rabbits from her and set them to roasting over a small fire. Wordlessly, Odosse took out the bread and hard cheese that she’d packed for herself that morning—it seemed a lifetime ago—and handed half of each to the big man. She sat on the opposite side of the fire, and they ate in silence broken only by the crackle of the flames.
He added another few chunks of deadwood to the fire after they had eaten, choosing thick, heavy pieces that would burn slowly into the night.
“You were hoping it wasn’t true,” he said. “About the village.”
She nodded, although she had not fully grasped the truth of that thought until that moment. “I hoped.”
“And now?”
Odosse didn’t answer. The enormity of the question was too great for words. It was like wondering how many mouthfuls it would take to empty the sea: she knew that her grief was there, vast as that endless, never-seen water, but it did not seem possible that she would ever be able to make it small enough to swallow.
This morning she’d had a home and a hearth and a family who loved her. Now it was night, and if she believed Brys, she had nothing outside this tower. Her family, her entire world, was gone as surely as the vanished empire that had built the roads she’d walked today. In a handful of seasons, no one would remember where they had been. The forests would reclaim their stump-fringed fields, the foxes and sparrows would make nests in their houses, and no one would remember their names.
If she believed him. She didn’t want to. But there’d been no lights in the dark. Not a candle for her village. And that left her here, wondering how long it would take to drink down the sea.
She picked up Aubry and rocked him slowly to sleep, watching the firelight on his round, peaceful face. In that moment she loved him with a fierceness that threatened to bring tears to her eyes. At the same time she knew that her love was a fragile thing, no greater than their tiny fire holding back the dark. Love hadn’t stopped her village from dying.
No matter. While she was there, the night would not have him.
“Who would kill Willowfield?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Brys drew one of his knives, honing its blade by the flames. After every few strokes he ran it against his thumbnail to test its edge. “Whoever they were, they had a Thorn.”
“What’s a Thorn?”
“A Maimed Witch. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them, though perhaps you’re too far west to have seen many of them yet. They come out of Ang’arta, where they are trained in the Tower of Thorns by her bloody highness Avele diar Aurellyn, wife to the Golden Scourge and whore to the world.” Distracted, Brys cut himself too deeply with the razor-sharp knife; he sucked blood from his thumb and spit it into the fire. “They’re sadists and killers and very, very dangerous. And not human anymore, not when they come out of that tower. The Thorns worship Kliasta, the Maiden of Pain, and the ones who survive their training have no more mercy than their mistress.”
“You know them.”
“I know of them,” he corrected, sheathing the first knife and sharpening another. “When I was younger I sold my sword around Thelyand. We had our troubles with Ang’arta’s ironlords and their pet witches there. I’ve fought them three times and those were the worst campaigns of my life, but I know they can die.”
Odosse stared at the flames, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. She knew the name of Ang’arta, but only as a distant, unreal danger, like a monster in some childhood tale. The Iron Fortress lay hundreds of leagues south and east, all the way past the Sunfallen Kingdoms. She had never laid eyes on any of its reavers, nor did she know of anyone who had.
She knew the stories, though. Everyone knew the stories. The reavers of Ang’arta went blood-mad in war, fighting past wounds that would kill ordinary men. After battles they spitted their victims on their own broken swords, so that they could die on the weapons that had failed them, and carried children back to their fortress to become reavers in turn.
Religion united them, not birthplace or language. The soldiers of Ang’arta could, and did, come from anywhere in the world. They went into the Iron Fortress as children,
and they came out as the hardest soldiers in the world—fanatics willing to fight and die for Baoz, their iron-fisted god, who accepted no sacrament but war.
Those were the stories, at least, and the stories were all she knew of them. The stories made no mention of Thorns. “What would they want in Willowfield?”
“I don’t know. Thorns will kill villages, sometimes, if they need that many deaths for a spell. But there’s no reason they’d have come all the way to Langmyr for that. They’ve plenty of slaves in Ang’arta to use, and plenty of villages in what they conquered of Thelyand. Something else must have brought them here. Someone else.
“As for what that person wanted … my lord’s life, I presume. And his wife’s, and his son’s.” Brys nodded toward the tower wall, where Wistan lay quiet in his swaddling. Whether the baby slept, or languished in some fevered delirium brought on by his ailment, Odosse could not say. But his eye had been half red when she laid him there, and every time she glanced in the baby’s direction she was afraid that he might have stopped breathing. “They haven’t had that last one. Yet.”
“Why?” she murmured, as much to herself as to him. She knew the name of Sir Galefrid Ossaring of Bulls’ March. Everyone on the borders did, even in a hamlet as tiny as Willowfield. Lord Ossaric of Bulls’ March held one of the most important castles on the Oakharne side of the Seivern River, and Galefrid was his eldest son. Together with his grandson Wistan, he represented the succession of a crucial domain.
And, perhaps, a turning in the politics of this part of the world. It had been rumored for weeks that Sir Galefrid might pay a visit to Langmyr. Some claimed he intended to go all the way to High King Theodemar’s castle at Craghail. Others said that he was only going to Lord Eduin Inguilar’s stronghold at Thistlestone for the Swordsday matches—not so deep into Langmyr, but still enough to show a wish for reconciliation between the two nations. The details remained a mystery to Odosse, but like everyone else in her village, she had heard the rumors and understood, vaguely, that Sir Galefrid’s visit meant a small step toward peace.
If he was dead, and dead on Langmyrne soil, those hopes would wither on the vine. More: the deaths could be taken as a provocation toward war, not just on the border but all the way to King Raharic’s seat in Isencras. The murder of a new mother, and her baby, and an entire village on the border … the atrocities could easily inflame either side. Or both.
“Who profits by war?” she asked.
Brys looked up from his blade and gave her a half smile, grimly pleased she had worked it out so far. “I do. So do all my kind. Little call for sellswords in peaceful times. Nor for arms out of Ironfell, or horses from Mirhain, or any of a thousand other needs of war. Ang’arta will sell you companies of the cruelest mercenaries in Ithelas, and Seawatch will loan you coin to pay them. Everyone profits save the lands being fought upon, so we’ve no shortage of suspects there—and that supposes the killings were done to plunge the border into war. Might just be that a Langmyrne lord with money to match his resentments saw an opportunity and hired a Thorn to seize it.”
“No,” Odosse whispered, shaking her head.
“No?” Brys echoed, his green eyes glittering with mockery. “You grew up on the border. Can you truly tell me the old hatreds don’t run that deep?”
She could not. There wasn’t a family in Willowfield that hadn’t been scarred by the enmity between Oakharn and Langmyr; there wasn’t a soul she knew who couldn’t tell a story about a crippled relative, or a dead friend, or a proudly held ancestor who’d done worse to the Oakharne in revenge. But it was still impossible that anyone could hate so fiercely that he would kill a village of his countrymen to get at a baby from the wrong side of the border.
“No,” she said again, but this time she could barely hear the word.
Brys didn’t seem to hear her at all. He yawned and stretched out by his side of the fire, wrapping himself in his dark green cloak. “Get some sleep,” he advised, pulling a saddlebag under his head as a pillow. “It’ll be a longer day tomorrow.”
Odosse tried to follow his lead, making herself as comfortable as she could with what she had. She kept Aubry cradled to her chest, and brought Wistan close to share the warmth of her body. Sleep eluded her, though. She watched the fireshadows dance on the tower walls, and looked up at the moon shining bright through wind-tattered clouds, and wondered how her world had changed so much in a day.
Again her thoughts brushed against the vastness of loss and recoiled from it. She wasn’t ready to grapple with that yet. Instead she found herself thinking of smaller things, simpler ones, something closer to routine in a life where that word no longer had meaning.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow would find her on the road, one day closer to Tarne Crossing. Odosse wasn’t sure how far that was, exactly; it lay across the river, in enemy land, and she had never been there. But others in her village had, and she had heard their tales.
In good years, when there hadn’t been any killings to stir up tempers, people from Willowfield sometimes went to Tarne Crossing to trade. They said it wasn’t as bad as the little villages where the people had a lifetime of grievances to nurse, or the towns deeper in Oakharn where they’d never seen a Langmyrne except when their lords called them to war. In Tarne Crossing were travelers and traders and people who lived on the border but didn’t have roots in its blood-soaked soil.
She was a fool for going to Oakharn at all, though. Odosse shook her head at the thought. Aubry burbled sleepily, and she chided herself for disturbing the babies’ rest.
Still. It was foolish. Outside of Willowfield she had neither kin nor friends, but at least in a Langmyrne village she didn’t have to worry about being thrown into the river with a millstone necklace for having the wrong accent. Brys seemed competent, but she barely knew the man and she could hardly rely on him. He would take her to the next town; that was the extent of their bargain. So why had she agreed to go?
Because of Wistan.
It was that simple, Odosse realized as she lay awake in the night. She was willing to travel with Brys, to go into the kingdom of her enemies at a time when they would be calling for Langmyrne heads, because a baby needed her help. Unwise as it was, she looked at Wistan and saw a child like her son. She couldn’t refuse his need.
That he was the child of her enemies didn’t matter. That her people might be blamed for the death of his family didn’t matter. Wistan was a baby; he had no part in such things. He needed her—and, like her, like Aubry, he had no one else to help.
She would go to Oakharn for that.
A small lump poked into her side. Odosse reached down, expecting to find a pebble under her cloak, but it was the charm-crafter’s bottle instead. She pulled out the tiny blue bottle, almost black in the firelight, and tilted it so that the liquid sloshed inside. A whisper of fragrance, rich as a king’s incense, stole out into the night.
She had wanted so badly to be beautiful. She had been so happy to hand the wrinkled old charm-crafter her hard-earned pennies, so happy to listen with a heart full of hopes to her promises … but all along she had known, in the secret depths of her soul, that what she was buying was more wish than truth. There was no magic in the world. Not for someone like her. Still, it had been nice to hold that dream, to tell herself that story while walking with her baby through an autumn wood.
Odosse squeezed the bottle tighter, feeling her heartbeat against the glass, and pushed it deep to the bottom of her pocket. Autumn was failing, and Aubry didn’t need her to be beautiful. He needed her to be clever and careful and strong.
And that she would have to do on her own, without any potions to help.
3
Bitharn hid a sigh as the squat cone-topped towers of Thistlestone came into view ahead, rising above the red lace of the autumn wood. Her idyll would end when they reached the town and the heavy weight of responsibility settled back onto Kelland’s shoulders.
Out on the open road, far from the demands of the commonf
olk and their lords, she could pretend that the two of them were carefree as summer larks. Kelland could smile, even laugh, without worrying about the dignity of his office. They had no one to impress on the road.
In Thistlestone that would change. He would become a Blessed again, losing himself in his duty without realizing what had happened. And he would need her more than ever, whether he recognized that or not.
The two of them had grown up together as cloister children: babies abandoned on the steps of the Dome of the Sun by mothers who did not want them or could not care for them. It happened every year in Cailan, regular as rain. Girls found themselves pregnant but unmarried, or birthing a baby that too obviously wasn’t the husband’s, or faced with another mouth in a home already hollowed by hunger. The sickly and deformed were left out for alley dogs; no one would take those. The others, if they couldn’t be placed with kin, were left on the doorsteps of guilds or craftsmen. Someplace a child might find mercy, shelter, maybe a chance at learning a trade.
Once in a while a baby went to the steps of honey-gold marble that led to the Dome of the Sun. That was a rare choice, however. The commonfolk said that whoever gave a child to the Bright Lady sacrificed all the rest of their family’s favor, ever after, to buy the goddess’ mercy for that baby. Celestia saw every grief and sin under the sun; daily she was assailed by the prayers of the needy, crying to her from Calantyr to the Sunfallen Kingdoms. But even a goddess couldn’t heal all the world’s ills. There were limits. By asking her to help their children, the parents gave up any further claim to her intercession for themselves. Only the most desperate mothers, or the most devout, left their babies at Celestia’s door.
Bitharn’s mother had made that choice. So had Kelland’s. And so the two of them had grown up closer than siblings, sharing their secrets and wishes and dreams, for neither had anyone else in the world.
Then, early in the spring of their twelfth year, Kelland had heard the Call and Bitharn had not, and the paths of their lives split as neatly as that.
The River King's Road Page 3