A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  “I expect so,” Cass said thoughtfully. “Sorry about shooting you this morning.” It was little more than a guess, but a correct one judging from how the smile flickered.

  “I’ve suffered worse,” the bard said. She put a little more weight on the walking stick, her leg twisting beneath her as if to underline the point. She came to a stop before Cass, appraising her thoughtfully.

  “You’ve been watching for him,” Cass said. She nodded toward Raub without looking, tried to appear more thoughtful than afraid.

  “Since the moment Irasol rode north with word of the elder Talmaraub’s death.” Halessi spoke with a candor that told Cass no one else in the room would remember the words once this was done.

  “I met Irasol,” Cass said, remembering. “A spy of yours?”

  “A spy of Talmaraub’s, actually. Watching his father.”

  “But under your control.”

  Halessi smiled. “When it suited me.”

  “As you control all the rest of them. In command, always.”

  “When I need to be.”

  “And that’s why Raub scares you.”

  In the light of the evenlamps, the gold-violet eyes were suddenly cold.

  Cassatra scanned the wide chamber as she paced, making a mental note of potential defensive points, the lack of other exits, the best places to cut through the walls to make up for that. “Because last night wasn’t about killing him,” she said thoughtfully. “You wouldn’t have come alone. A half-dozen Yewnwood Ilvani against two of us in the dark, asleep. It doesn’t get any easier than that, but you kept your distance.”

  As she turned back, she saw the bard’s hand stray to the hilt of the black shortsword at her waist. Cass smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “All this talk must be a distraction to you. Far be it from me to interrupt your little game.”

  “This is no game.” Halessi’s voice was raised and pitched to carry, and Cass heard the subtle weave of the charm-song that was the bard’s power thread through it. From across the room came a sudden swell of anger. “We are a people whose faith is history. The deeds and words of our kin go back ten thousand generations.”

  “The last generation is the only one I know about,” Cass said quietly. “Who was Tajomynar?”

  Beneath its curtain of silver hair, the narrow face turned pale. Halessi stood silent for a long moment. “I never dreamed that would be a story he would share,” she said at last. “I misjudged him.”

  “You didn’t,” Cass said truthfully. “Raub shares very little.”

  The bard laughed. “A child’s name is what he goes by now?”

  “I suspect he has a few more, like you. That one serves him well enough, though. Ale and memory speaks through him, sometimes. He talked of his father once, and of someone named Tajomynar who he betrayed.”

  Halessi stepped close now, and Cass felt a shiver twist through her as the lacquered nails of the bard’s string hand came up to touch her cheek. Her hand tightened on the Reaper’s haft as she dug deep for the will to focus.

  “That treason was only one of many,” Halessi whispered, and Cass felt all the power imbued within the silver-sweet voice slip through her. “Your lover has betrayed you now, as he betrayed his people his whole life. As he betrayed what and who he was.”

  Cass laughed then, surprising both of them. In the echo of her own voice, she felt her sight clear against the faint haze that Halessi’s words carried, as a cold wind pushes cloud away. “We’re not lovers.”

  “Friends then.”

  “Something else,” Cass said, and she was thoughtful suddenly. More than she had at any point of the journey that brought them here, she felt the awkwardness of her presence. She felt the urge to turn away, to leave Raub to whatever dark destiny this place was for him. But against that urge came the sudden understanding that in following him this far, she had done so for a reason.

  “Some bonds go deeper than that,” she said quietly. “Some bonds have no easy name.”

  Halessi stepped back then. She hammered the walking stick to the floor, raising it high as it burst into white light that wrapped it as a sheet of flickering flame. It was a weapon in its true form, Cass saw. A single-edged longblade, the image she had seen on the gate, blazing so bright that its steel could barely be seen within the flames that wrapped it.

  “Iastora!” the bard shouted, and Cass recognized the command. Sing. Halessi’s voice was pitched again to carry to the crowd. “The anger that lingers in the heart of Anthila runs deep! Anger for lost sons, for lost faith!”

  The backsword flared even brighter, setting the bard’s face in stark shadow as the assembled nobles surged to their feet. The diatribe was for their benefit, Cass knew. Raub’s summary sentence. Judgement, then execution. True to the Ilvani custom, the nobles were uniformly well armed, most with the long knives of the woodland hunters, a few with swords of their own. The blank eyes watched as Cass took it all in, the room around her wholly under the bard’s direction and the song the sword made.

  “You are outnumbered and surrounded,” Halessi said. “Every blade in the room waits for my order to put you down. However, the lives here have value to me, and I am loath to spend them needlessly. I hope I needn’t worry about you doing anything foolish.”

  “No worry at all.”

  With a fluid motion, Cass spun toward the bard, the Reaper a blur in her hand as she threw it, but Halessi was ready. She twisted away easily to watch the axe sail past, realizing only too late that missing her was exactly what Cassatra intended.

  She had stalled as long as she needed to, watching carefully for the subtle shift in Raub’s breathing that told her he was finally conscious. As Cass hoped, whatever injuries he suffered had left him with enough control to hide his waking. The Reaper spun through the air as a silver blur, slicing through the leather thongs a finger’s-breadth above where they bound Raub’s hands. Even as he fell, his eyes shot open, dark gaze fixed hard to the bard as he hit the ground.

  Halessi was sprinting toward him as he kicked the Reaper back across the floor, Cass scooping it without looking. The violet of the bard’s eyes was black now, burning against the gold with a seething rage. The bright blade flared white-hot as the silver-sweet voice summoned up a spell of command.

  “Kneel!” Halessi shouted, and Cass saw Raub stumble with the effort of resistance. It was the moment’s distraction she needed to leap the distance between her and the bard, hitting hard from behind, a solid slash to the shoulder that cut through the robe and what felt like tempered mail beneath it and the bone beneath that.

  As Halessi staggered forward, Cass reached for the dwyrsilver belt. She drew the black shortsword with her free hand, the bard too slow to grab it. Halessi had taken the crippling strike in silence, but she screamed now.

  The white-flaming backsword flared again as she lunged, but Cass was faster, lashing out with a kick that shattered the bard’s jaw and forced the spell she was speaking to die in her throat. The Reaper followed, arcing for Halessi’s neck even as a desperate thrust shot her sword up to meet it, a gout of white flame arcing off as the axe was deflected wide.

  That the bard’s blade could survive the Reaper’s touch showed the strength of its magic. Cass stumbled back but Raub was there. As if they had practiced it, she threw the black shortsword to him, Raub catching it as he slashed down, hitting Halessi at the line of shoulder and neck with a two-handed killing stroke. A gout of blood sprayed to the air, catching him as the bard twisted and collapsed to the ground.

  The flaming backsword was sprawled across the floor. The wooden tiles burned beneath it, Halessi’s fingers still traced across the grip. Cass was wary, watching the crowd of nobles where they shifted in silence. She waited for a sign that Halessi’s control was broken. In the instant, she realized what not seeing it meant.

  Looming over the fallen bard, Raub reached down to liberate the burning blade. Even as Cass shouted a warning, the sword came up, slashing hard at an impossible angle. It struck R
aub with enough force to knock him back, his jerkin smoldering.

  As Halessi lurched to her feet, she laughed. The runes on the bright blade flared ebon black within their shroud of white flame, so dark that it hurt to look at them. Raub and Cass moved at the same time, but the bard was faster, scrambling back with blade up, blazing as it blocked attacks from both sides.

  Blood mottled Halessi’s cloak and tunic, but the gaping wound at her neck was already healed. White flame was flowing up her arm, coursing across her body as her strength returned. The voice of sweet silver that Cass had crushed a moment before rang out with mocking laughter now.

  “Your legacy,” Halessi said to Raub. “This blade you dreamed of wielding some day. Yet your father knew your weaknesses so well that he would not trust you with the knowledge of its power.”

  Raub’s eyes were locked tight to the bard’s as they circled each other. And in that gaze, Cass saw a recognition she didn’t fully understand.

  “This blade has a name. Palas Eryvna, it is called. But your father never even told you that. Did he?”

  “Show yourself,” Raub hissed, and that dark whisper held all the anger of his exile. All the anger that had sent him to the Sorcerers’ Isle and underground, and into a dark madness that Cass hadn’t understood until it was almost too late.

  The bard laughed as she paced past him, the silver voice bright as she discarded her ruined cloak behind her.

  “Do I know you, friend?”

  “Aside from myself and my father, only four others knew of that blade’s power to control the minds of those around it. Because I told them of that power the night we swore to seize and throw it down.”

  “And you succeeded, young Talmaraub. Succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. The old order put down and a new hope for freedom in its place. You never came back to the glory you sought, though. You were the Hooded Hawk, a hero to them all. At least you were until your father and I told them differently.”

  And even as Cass watched, the silver hair blurred. The eyes shimmered as the body beneath the bloodied grey tunic changed. It was done in a heartbeat, and standing in Halessi’s place was an Ilvani male who could have been the bard’s brother. Their features were the same. The silver hair, the gold and black eyes bright in the magical glow of evenlamps all around.

  For a timeless moment, all Raub could do was stare. Then he feinted, struck hard, but the flare of white fire sent the black shortsword wide as this new figure let the burning backsword bite deep at the shoulder. Raub’s cloak flared and smoldered, blood suddenly welling there in a wide swath.

  “The bright blade has many powers,” Tajomynar said. The voice had changed, but it carried the same confidence, the same silver sheen that threaded through Cass’s mind. “Your father had no need for this one, at least as far as I know. It takes some getting used to, but it makes a powerful disguise for a dead man.”

  The bard glanced to Cass, raising his voice to the nobles below him. “Kill the outsider! Justice for the traitor is mine!”

  Raub and Tajomynar traded off a fast flurry of strikes as the Ilvani of the council swarmed toward the stairs and Cass like a living wave. She didn’t wait for them to reach her. Leaping from the edge of the dais, she hit hard in the heart of the frenzied crowd as she let the instinct take her. The training that was her childhood had taught her to fight by the sheer grace of every balanced motion, by sense of touch as much as sight. As fast as they came within range of fist or foot, the Ilvani dropped around her.

  In all their eyes, she saw the same emptiness she had seen in the guards outside, and as it had then, that blank stare kept the Reaper at her side. However, Cass already had her sights set on a better target for its edge.

  On the dais platform above, the glow of the black shortsword was bright in Raub’s hand, a dull blue cast washing across his features as he circled. Tajomynar was across from him with the backsword that was the blade of Raub’s line, the two trading strikes as they tested each other.

  In a moment of brief respite, Raub whispered. “It was you…”

  Tajomynar laughed again, the silver voice threading through the chaos of the chamber. Below, Cass was moving. In the circuit she made earlier, she had carefully noted the lay of the guy-ropes whose thickly woven trunks suspended the floor of the hall. Now she retraced that route, twisting past the blades of a quartet of young nobles that she clubbed senseless one by one with the Reaper’s haft.

  “It was me,” the bard said. “So wonderfully obvious that it took only six years for you to understand. All that time, blaming yourself. All that time, seeing our faces…”

  “Get out of my head,” Raub hissed.

  Tajomynar laughed again. “Your mind is an open book, Hawk. I need no more skill than a carnival soothsayer to lay open its secrets.”

  As the bard struck, Cass jumped, flipping backward over two more sets of outstretched arms. Within reach of the closest rope, she slashed out at its thickly wrapped pillar of steel-strong Ilvani weave. It would have taken a dozen blows from a woodcutter’s axe without so much as fraying, but she felt it part like paper at the Reaper’s touch.

  With a sickening lurch, the central platform of the hall collapsed. From all around came the tearing of cord and screen as the sculpted walls tore free, twisting in a sudden storm of white. The remaining four ropes were more than enough to hold the floor up, but with its balance lost, the chamber dropped and lurched. The nobles who were closing in around Cass a moment before were upended, spilled to open air and the outside terrace below.

  The dais platform in its own web of ropes remained level, but the stairs were torn away above the sloping floor of the main chamber below. Still trading blows with Tajomynar, Raub swung wide, watching the bard step back from it easily. His arm was aching, the lighter weight of the shortsword unfamiliar in his hand. He was overcompensating, hitting from the shoulder, too hard.

  “We are alike in all ways,” the bard said, smiling. “I was angry, as you were. I sought to make things right, to reclaim the glory that was Anthila as you did. Like you, I saw the weakness in your father. Unlike you, I saw the opportunity there.”

  Below him, Cass was clambering up to the high side of the fallen floor, trying to close the distance to Raub. She found her footing easily enough away from the severed anchor point, pulling herself up along a makeshift ladder of shredded wicker and fallen ropes. Unfortunately, more than a few of the combat-ready nobles were doing the same.

  “You betrayed us to him,” Raub whispered, and he understood it now as he should have understood it long before. He cursed himself for his folly. Cursed the memory of that face framed by silver hair, and of the love held in his memory that had turned to bile in a heartbeat.

  Six years before, they fled the forest-home as outlaws and had ridden unseen in the deep woods for more than three seasons. Arnos Iranthilia, they called themselves. Anthila’s Watch.

  Raub had seen Tajomynar die that night. He saw them all die, felt their blood wash over him like a red-black rain.

  Over long years before his exile, the ranger garrisons of the Ilvani had slowly begun to shift out from the deep woods to the unstable Gracian frontier. The destruction of the Imperial capital at Ulannor Mor was on the far side of the world and a lifetime away now. However, every province of the Elder Kingdoms, every forest-home in the Yewnwood had its stories of the breakdown of rule in the aftermath. Gracia and Vanyr, straddling the mighty Yewnwood like a yoke, had fought wars for the throne of their long-lost kings. In the northern freeholds of Norgyr and in Ajaeltha to the south, they were fighting still. Would-be tyrants and warlords forging new conflicts from the legendary wars of the past.

  In the aftermath of the Empire’s fall, Raub’s father played the fear and ambition of his people like a bard bent to a dark song. Under his hand, more and more power was drawn to the center, concentrated in the nobles and the merchant lords he controlled. Anthila prospered, even as the outlying villages became little more than work camps, their people toiling i
n the name of tithes and fealty to the new order.

  As the Arnos Iranthilia, Raub and the others made short work of the bosses and bandits that ruled in his father’s name, drawing the folk of the outlying villages to their cause of freedom. The five were the strong core at the center of something larger, putting Raub on a collision course with the rule of a father whose name and corruption he had turned away from. In short time, the talk of uprising that spread throughout the deep wood made its echo felt in the forest-home. Anthila’s own rangers were sent to hunt them, and with the four he had set out with a year before, Raub crafted a daring and dangerous plan.

  They rode for Anthila that night, determined to bring an end to it. One swift stroke, the blade falling on the soft neck of the elder Talmaraub’s corruption. They had the advantage of surprise, of strength, of youth and purpose.

  None of it mattered in the end.

  As they made their careful way up the forest-home in the dead of night, Raub’s father was ready. He had known their every move to the great terrace of Garania Hall, it seemed, where the seneschal should have been sleeping, alone.

  Raub and four others rode for Anthila that night. Only he rode out again.

  On the twisted floor below him, Cass was fighting for her life. Six foes pressed in around her, half of them young gentry with long knives in hand and a speed that suggested they practiced hard with them. She had already seen the guards she left outside fighting their way toward her, caught up in the spell of the bright blade as were all the rest.

  Like Raub, the Ilvani were natural climbers, slinging their way one-handed through the shredded rigging of the walls. She had to work to stay in position without slipping, the platform twisting now beneath the weight of combatants whose weapons threatened to turn it into a killing floor.

  Most of these weren’t warriors, she reminded herself. These were nobles and merchants years away from hard labor or the warbands, but they were Ilvani all the same. A lifetime’s training to blade and bow burned in them, one grey-haired elder demonstrating that prowess with an elaborate double-feint that made it past her. He tagged her shoulder, a flare of white-hot pain rising where he cut her to the bone.