A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  He looked up, gazed at Cass with blank eyes. She nodded in greeting, stepped past him and walked for the gate in plain sight of a dozen others.

  No one tried to stop her as she went.

  • • •

  The descent back down to the market was quicker by far than the long walk up, but Cass lingered at the edge of that first terrace for a while. She found a seat at an open tavern, drank a half-goblet of bittersweet berry wine slowly as her gaze traced across the crowd. Not for the figure she was intent on speaking to, who she had spotted almost as soon as she sat down. Instead, she watched the sellers, the local patrons, the drinkers laughing where they lined a half-dozen carved trestle tables.

  In all those faces now, she saw the same shadow. A thing she would never have noticed before the events in the high garden, but which she looked for now and recognized with disturbing ease. Not in the travelers, though. No sign of that darkness in the scouts and merchants and wanderers who would be part of life in Anthila for a day, or a week. But as with the smith-turned-warrior, all the locals carried a kind of distance in their gaze. A weight threaded every conversation, every market transaction, every gale of laughter. A shadow passing across every set of eyes in the forest-home.

  Every set, that is, save one.

  Cass saw the golden hair through the crowd, dropping a handful of copper to the table as she slipped easily toward the girl and her basket and the sweet scent of butter and spice. She saw a smile of recognition as she approached.

  “I trust you enjoyed your pastries, my lady.” The young baker’s apprentice beamed.

  “They were beyond compare, child.”

  “Then take more for your journey. My master’s recipes keep well for the road.”

  “Why do you presume I travel?”

  “By your garb and accent only, my lady, and no offense to you.” The girl cast her face down as if in apology. But Cass saw now that the green eyes were upturned, the clear gaze never leaving her. She hadn’t noticed before.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “I am Pheánei, my lady.”

  Cass looked away for a moment, turning her face from the girl as if she was scanning the crowd. “Then I will have a dozen more of your pastries, if you please, Pheánei.” She spoke carefully, voice clear.

  When she turned back, the girl was still smiling, oblivious to what had been said out of her sight.

  “Will you have more, lady?”

  Cass mouthed the words without speaking aloud. You cannot hear, can you?

  A flicker of shame passed through the girl’s gaze like storm clouds across the sun. Cass saw the fear in the green eyes as Pheánei stumbled back, but she stopped her with a hand to the shoulder. As she had forced herself to so often in her youth, she smiled.

  “In the place were I grew up, there were many like you. Born without the senses of other children, and no gold for the healers who value coin more than the life they claim to protect. This is no cause for shame. On the contrary, you are very brave.”

  The girl nodded, uncertain. The green eyes were impossibly bright against the pale skin, making her look even younger than Cass might have originally taken her for. She knew enough of Pheánei’s culture to know the kind of hardship under which she lived. Physical perfection was an ideal the Ilvani lived by more so than most folk.

  “I was not born this way,” the girl said dutifully. “But when I was small, we lived in a village away from the forest-home. A fever came of some dark magic. It stole away sound and song from me. My parents died. My brother, too.”

  Cass felt something twist in her gut.

  “My family, too, was lost to me.” The words tumbled out without warning, past the stark silence within which they were normally held. Cass saw Pheánei’s expression change, a glimmer of sudden light in the green eyes.

  “I miss them very much,” the girl said. “But even more, I miss the song of the wind and the birds. My mother sang with the wind and birds, and I dream sometimes that if I could but hear them again, I would hear her voice once more.”

  The green gaze was fixed on some vision far beyond the golden light and the shifting crowd. Cass’s hand was shaking. She squeezed it to stillness as she nodded, thoughtful.

  “I do not remember my mother sing. I do not remember her face, but I dream of her all the same.”

  The girl shrugged, the weight of a sudden sadness settling in her. “It is only a dream,” she said. “It is not the world. A dream cannot fix what is broken in me.”

  “We carry more than one world inside us, Pheánei. And we are all broken in our own way, and the only healing that counts is that which we make for ourselves.” The words sounded strange in Cass’s ears. Words she had often thought but never said, she realized. Things she knew but was afraid to hear.

  The girl nodded. And then she let the moment pass as if she was conscious suddenly of the unheard market around her. Remembering the task that was set for her by whatever merchant had taken her in, most likely for the debts her parents left her. She proffered the basket again. “Will you have more, lady?”

  “I will, child. And what is more, I will gladly pay extra for the answers to certain questions.” She patted the purse at her belt, the comfortable jingle of coin there.

  Cass could read in Pheánei’s expression that she didn’t understand, but the girl nodded with the eagerness of one for whom every extra copper made a difference.

  “On the high stair,” Cassatra said, “there is a fine terrace house that stands dark tonight, and for many nights past by the look of it. Its gate is marked with a burning sword. Who lived there?”

  “That is Garania Hall, my lady.” Pheánei’s voice carried a sudden echo of sadness. “It was the place of our forest-home master Thrasus Talmaraub Garania. He was master of Anthila for many years, until he died a half-year past.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. I have another question, though you might well be too young to know. Did this Master Thrasus have a son?”

  The wind picked up again, a cloud of golden leaves sweeping past them, cold. “I am young, lady, but all the forest-home knows the story of our late master Thrasus, seneschal of Anthila. His was a life of hardship, from which he drew the wisdom by which he ruled our realm justly and fairly from long before I was born.”

  The girl turned full somber suddenly. She spoke with the easy familiarity of one repeating a story often told. “Our late Seneschal Thrasus had but one son who was his only family when his wife passed. He was named Talmaraub for his father. But this son was the dark shadow of his father in every way, unjust and scornful. The Hooded Hawk, he called himself. A masked outlaw in his youth and a stain on the name of his family. A rogue and knave, he brought near-ruin on Anthila when he tried to seize his father’s power by force. Those who followed him were killed, and the son was driven into exile and never seen again.”

  The girl’s eyes were dark, an anger there suddenly. A thing born not of her own heart, Cass knew, but of this story she retold that would have been instilled in her since she was old enough to understand it. The Ilvani fascination with lore, turning the legends of clan and race-kin into the fire of the heart and a passion strong as steel.

  “When the traitor-son fled, he carried with him not only the mark of his own crimes and his family’s shame, but the past of the Anthiliar. We who range and shepherd these great woods from the bright lights of our forest-home. The blade Valaendar is the Kin-Sword in the high tongue of the Ilvani. A weapon of ancient craft and older magic, predating the arrival of the Empire in the east and carried from hand to hand along the line of the rulers of these woods. From his father’s own hand, the Hooded Hawk stole away the blade that was the symbol of the Anthiliar, and it is lost to us still.”

  “A black shortsword,” Cass said. “Leaf-edged and marked with ancient glyphs of power. Ever-sharp and glowing with a pale light.”

  The girl nodded, surprised. “You know the story, lady?”

  On Myrnan, not long before they took the Bl
ack Stair down into shadow and madness, the Gracian warrior Dilaon asked Raub in a quiet moment why he had never regaled them with tales of his own family. All the clan legends that every other Ilvani the mercenary had ever met seemed to carry with them like necessary baggage.

  “Not all stories are worth telling,” Raub had said then.

  Not long after, in a night built on fear and the strength of dark ale, he had told Cass alone the only story she ever heard from him. The story that stuck with her still.

  “Another question,” Cass said to the girl. “Did you learn that story from the bard who plays in the market? The woman with silver hair?” She spoke with a degree of casualness that she realized she didn’t need, the girl reading only the impassive inflection of her lips.

  “She is no mere bard, my lady,” the girl said brightly. “She is Halessi, our new seneschal of Anthila. She is our lord and protector, and she is very beautiful.”

  “Indeed she is, and her songs as well.”

  The girl was suddenly wistful. “I read our lady’s speech when she sings,” she said, “so that I know the stories though I cannot know the song. For many years, she played for the pleasure of our late seneschal Thrasus, and when she plays, she holds all the crowd rapt, as you saw. We get many bards in Anthila, traveling the forest road, but my lady Halessi’s songs are special.”

  “Indeed they are. I would tell her so myself, would that I knew where to find her.”

  “I can show you, lady,” the girl said happily, caught up so much in the feeling of her own importance to Cass’s questions that she had seemingly forgotten the market, forgotten her life for just a moment. But as she turned to lead, Cass stopped her with a hand to the shoulder.

  “Only directions, if you please. It is best if Halessi and I speak alone.”

  Despite her not hearing them, the girl seemed to feel the dangerous undertone in the words this time. She nodded, uncertain, but she told Cass what she needed to know.

  When it was done, Cass went not for her purse but for the leather bag Raub had dropped, slung now from her belt. She slipped it into the girl’s hands, watched her react to its unexpected weight.

  “Find a healer, Pheánei,” she said. “Hear your mother sing.” Then she kissed the golden brow and slipped away.

  The girl watched her go, curiosity overcoming confusion quickly enough as she tugged at the drawstrings of the pouch. Within was the gleam of cold platinum coin of a lost age, catching and reflecting the golden light of the market in green and wide-open eyes.

  • • •

  The necropolis was bright in the moon’s-light, the ancient vines that marked its edges each as thick around as Raub’s waist. The wood of the open cemetery’s half-dozen wide terraces was worn smooth with age, bleached to silver-grey by long years of rain and sun. The main gate was a rare ghost yewn, rising on a split trunk. A great white arch of living wood, its appearance suggested that it had somehow been grown from the sky down where Raub slipped beneath it.

  Beyond the hedge of yewn into which the gate was set, a garden spread. The path that led into it was overgrown with muskflower and sun creeper, whose tight-clustered pods shimmered like fireflies in the night. Within the maze of overhanging branches that swallowed the Clearmoon’s glow, evenlamps shone pale green through the screen of broad leaves around them.

  Before, from his high vantage point above Garania Hall, Raub had watched and waited what seemed a long while to see Cass exit through the open gate of his father’s house, his childhood home. The frenzied altercation there was the last thing he expected, and he felt all its uncertainty rooting deep in his mind as he slipped easily through the great canopy of branches crossing above the high ward. He fought to clear his head, feeling a kind of shame at his unexplained anger and the dark sorrow that had driven it.

  Even before he climbed, he had seen Cass reach for the axe beneath her cloak as she backed away from him. An instinct against the unexpected agitation of the crowd. Sudden assault, a selectively brutal response, and a fast exit was a tactical scenario he and she were well-versed in, making use of it in more taverns and roadhouses over the previous two years than he cared to remember.

  In the end, she hadn’t been forced to fight her way out of the discord he left for her. But even as he waited for her to come close enough that he might call out, Cass turned west along the path that wound between the high houses of Anthila’s nobles. Heading back the way the two of them had first come, he realized. And even as he did, he understood that it was better that way.

  As he slipped through the shadows, Raub held the black-wrapped shortsword before him. It felt strange removed from his belt. Its weight and shape against his hip for the span of all those seasons were things he had long grown accustomed to.

  Carefully, he unspooled the black gauze that wrapped it, catching the scent of road dust and well-oiled leather. He tossed the cloth to the tall grass, and the blade that emerged from the rough scabbard beneath it flashed silver in the moon’s-light, then flared even brighter with the blue light born in the heart of its glassy steel. It was a shortsword of the Ilvani, its edge marked with delicate glyphs that he couldn’t read. One of the ancient tongues, out of the south. His father would have known it, but had never shared its meaning.

  Talmaraub was the name he had been born with. His father’s name, and a thing that no one outside Anthila knew. A thing he never told Cass.

  As a child, he shortened it to Talrab, which in the forest speech of the northern Ilvani was the black-hooded hawk. This was a fist-sized raptor that flew in flocks through the shadowed trees, as Raub and his friends had once run. They were as fearless then as the talrab, which would attack in swarms of a dozen to take down hare and ground squirrels six times its size, harrying with beak and claw and sheer perseverance.

  Raub felt his blood beating fast at his neck, in his chest. He cursed himself for his weakness, not for the first time.

  He felt the weight of the blade in his hand. He remembered the first night he held it.

  He remembered the pledge he made then, to leave that blade in his father’s dead heart.

  With a care born of the fear that had dogged him for long years, he used the sword’s light to make his way along winding paths. Dark arches of branch and moon’s-shadow twisted overhead, and where the sun creeper shone, it showed the spirit markers woven of living branches into the shapes of ancient Ilvani glyphs. He saw the open biers of bleached bone, whose flesh with each passing day had been consumed and rendered back to the world that spawned it.

  When he turned his back on Cass, Raub had kept climbing. Up beyond the highest tier of noble’s houses that had once been his world, to ascend to the last tiers whose black-stained staircases wound up to the silent porches of the dead. Bone and ash were the paths he walked on now. Bone and dust were the dirt and loam from which the flowers of the necropolis bloomed in vivid hues through all seasons, drawing warmth and nourishment from the lives laid to rest here.

  This custom was the reason the Ilvani kept their traditions of death a closely guarded secret. Not for the forest folk were the ways of burial or burning, sending the dead to the dark or the fire. The Ilvani way was the sense of connection to the life of the wood. The Ilvani way was the eternal transition of seasons, and the ceremonies that marked the point at which life ended by setting down the future’s roots.

  At each wrong turn and wild-grown dead end, Raub used the shortsword to hack away at screens of creeper and saplings, its touch barely felt as it sliced wood and vine as though cutting through water. Beyond the last of those screens, pale in the moon’s-light, he found the spirit markers he sought.

  The Ilvani way was thilanatir. The ghostsong. A ritual of binding that connected all the truths of a person’s life, and by which the spirits of the dead would be joined to the memories of the living in a magic older than the fallen Empire of the Lothelecan, older than all Ilvani lore. A magic older than time.

  To make the ghostsong, friends and family, fathers and d
aughters, mothers and sons would sing of the deeds done in life by the dead, drawing forth the spirit of those who had passed on. Memory, the Ilvani said, was the manifestation of the spirit in flesh. And so by the singing of the ghostsong, those left behind would seal away a fragment of the fallen within themselves.

  Even before he fled his people and his life, Raub hadn’t believed it. Not exactly. Still, he understood the greater truth of the timeless ritual, which was that the spirit possessed its own force, its own presence beyond the body by which it was confined. And so it was that for six years, he had vowed that this ghostsong would be his final gift to the father he had tried and failed to kill.

  His mother’s spirit marker was all but gone now, but he saw his father’s set beside it in a copse whose walls were a shower of blood-red heart-vine. He was a child the first time he stood here, when his mother’s woven bier had held her body for ten cycles of the Clearmoon’s rites. He was an outlaw the last time he saw that bier, vines and creepers long ago grown over to consume the mortal shell that had borne his mother’s grace and beauty, and to return that shell to the spirit-vault of earth and sky.

  The night he fled, he named himself Raubynar, which meant the wandering hawk. Part of the name he had worn in childhood. Part of the name of a friend from that childhood who was dead now, and whose life Raub felt burning deeper into his memory each time he heard that new name spoken aloud.

  Tonight, he would sing the ghostsong. He would add his voice to the chorus that told the stories that were the only things remaining now of his father’s life. But the story he sung would be the one his father never told. A story that no one else would tell. His voice would be raised against the silence of the bier to curse his father’s memory and spirit with the truth that only the exiled son knew.

  Raub felt something cold twist through him as he stepped close. His father’s body was already enclosed by its cocoon of vines, glowing faintly white with the magic by which the rites progressed. He remembered his mother’s rites, all the days of silent mourning that led to the procession that had placed her here. The bier had been set with her body and its burial robes, dark to match her exotic complexion. Her rings were there, and the diadem she wore that was the gold of her eyes. These things that were closest to her were part of the rite of remembrance, and would be reclaimed in the final rites as the body crumbled. Taken by family who would bid farewell to the spirit of the dead, and who would turn away from their sorrow at last.