A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  In the end, she let the Reaper sing. She felt the scene around her slow to a precise storm of movement, dropping to take out two knife-fighters with a pair of back-to-back strikes that bit deep. Their blank eyes showed no pain, no understanding as the life flickered out behind them. Cass watched their bodies slide in pieces down the slanted tiles, but if she hoped to give the others pause where they fought to close in, it seemed only to increase their rage.

  Above her, Raub and Tajomynar fought in a blinding fury, but with every strike, Raub felt his strength flagging. Steel wasn’t enough, he knew. Steel alone had never been enough. He needed more, needed to push against the fear he saw now reflected in the bard’s black eyes.

  Since the year he was born, his father had been seneschal in Anthila. His father was lord of the forest-home and the wide wood beyond it, the borders of the Ilvani dominions of the Yewnwood marked by secret sign and ancient treaty. But for as long as Raub could remember, he had seen through the facade of nobility that his father wore like armor against any threat to his increasingly dark rule.

  Raub had challenged his father even before his own first-naming, possessed of that arrogance of the Ilvani that makes all things seem so possible. He challenged his father with what he had seen, accused him of controlling his people. Bending the will of the forest-home to his own ends, manipulating the nobles, the merchant lords.

  His father laughed then. The voice that carried the fate of a people sounded out bright, sunlight on water.

  “Minds as weak as these call out to be controlled. You will understand some day.”

  Tajomynar struck hard, pulling him back from the darkness of distraction. The bard was defiant, Raub’s blows ineffectual even when he landed them. The bright blade that had been his father’s healed away all hurt as its master fought on.

  “You held the right to both these swords your whole life,” Tajomynar laughed. “Son to the seneschal. Last of your line. You threw both away to play the rebel. Breaking your father’s law in the name of village rabble. I had more ambitious plans.”

  “I do them a favor,” his father said. “I grant them direction. I shape their collective fears to contentment, twist the conflict in their hearts to peace.”

  “You rode with us, Mynar.” Raub had to fight to force out the words. “You believed in the greater good before you betrayed us to my father. Or have you rewritten your story so effectively that you’ve come to believe it yourself?”

  “You were a coward,” Tajomynar hissed. “You are a coward. Afraid of what you should have been.”

  Raub raised the shortsword, defiant. He slashed out twice to lock with Tajomynar, the black blade and the white crossed for a long moment between them.

  “These weapons are what I am,” he said coldly. “This blade, I brought back in the hope that Anthila might raise up a leader worthy of carrying it again. That blade you hold is coin for my father’s treachery, and in my hands, it will mete out a lifetime’s justice to pay that balance in full. For your betrayal, Mynar, the first blood it claims will be yours.”

  The white flames that wreathed the backsword flared as Tajomynar grinned. “Your father is dead, Hawk. Your line ended when he placed this blade in my hand and let its power pull me back to life that night. When he bade me sing the ghostsong over his passage to memory.”

  Below him, Cass felt the surge against her redoubled, but three clashing strikes set the Reaper hacking through a half-dozen blades. The closest attackers leaped back, a haze of blood telling her the axe had cut through bone and flesh as well in its cleaving arc.

  “Anthila is mine!” Tajomynar shouted in triumph. “Palas Eryvna the bright blade and the name of Thrasus is mine!” He stepped back, pointed the white-flaming longblade at the black shortsword in Raub’s bloodied hand. “Valaendar of the Anthiliar is mine!”

  “Then take it if you can…”

  Steel had never been enough.

  Tajomynar lunged again, three quick strikes parried and returned as he shifted, but Raub was ready for him. He swung up and to the side, so that the burning blade slipped wide to block. It was a fool’s parry, Tajomynar’s left side wide open for the moment it took to make it.

  Raub hit hard, drove his fingers deep into Tajomynar’s eye even as he slammed forward, smashing into him shoulder to chest.

  He felt the edge of the dais slip away beneath them. They fell for a timeless moment, then hit hard, Tajomynar shrieking as blood fountained from his ruined eye. Raub managed to find his feet as he swung down hard. The bard was faster, raising the bright blade to block as he rolled away and scrambled up.

  They were at the top edge of the upended central platform, feet set to find a precarious balance. Cass was a half-dozen strides below them, but a sudden silence fell around her now. Where Tajomynar’s scream rang out, it stilled the crowd in a way she didn’t understand. The power in the voice was broken somehow, the surging horde stopped where they clung to the ruined platform or spread out across the garden tier below it, blank eyes gazing upward.

  Raub had to fight to find the breath to spit, thick with blood and bile where it hit the tiles at the bard’s feet.

  “You’re finished,” he hissed. “You’re a shadow that the light will wipe away. This performance you play is as false as the face you wear…”

  “All life is performance, fool.” The silver hair was hanging in red streaks now, Tajomynar’s face a mask of blood. Already, the eye was healing itself, its torn tissue knitting, but his voice was still shrill with the pain. “You play a role now as false as the one you chose for yourself as a child. Pretending to be the outlaw, the rebel. The hero.”

  “Even as you play the dead man.” Raub felt the leg that the bard had cut threatening to buckle, had to lock it to prevent himself from falling. “You’ve walked the ground these six years in another body. Hiding behind another face. Who’s the pretender, Mynar?”

  The eye would heal as long as Tajomynar held the blade, Raub knew. The time it would take was all the time he had.

  “Tajomynar died, Hawk. I believe you were there.” With a surge of speed, the bard struck twice, the black shortsword up barely in time to parry. “By your father’s grace and the passing of this blade to my hand do I live and breathe,” he hissed, “but your death is the only thing that wipes away the pain of that night.”

  Below them, Cass had the Reaper balanced in her hand, ready to throw. She had a straight line and clear sight to the bard, but Tajomynar was in command now, his strikes coming fast enough that the slightest distraction would be Raub’s last.

  A feint. Strike and counterstrike. Raub nearly slipped, catching his balance only by luck.

  “You killed them,” the bard whispered. “You killed us all.”

  Raub felt the words burning in his mind like sudden fever. Something dark passed across his eyes, and then he was looking down to see Cass below him suddenly. She was caught up in a tight press of attackers even as she shouted a warning he couldn’t hear.

  In a blur of steel, Tajomynar cut him across the forearm even through the haze of his bloodied vision. The black blade of the Anthiliar lurched where Raub’s hand spasmed, and he saw Tajomynar almost break his defensive posture to lunge for it. Through blurred red, he saw a trace of madness suddenly. The bard’s hunger for the shortsword and the power it promised showed raw for an instant in the gleam of his black eyes.

  “Should have kept flying, Hawk…”

  Raub lunged. He threw all he had at Tajomynar, watched him easily evade the uneven thrust as he knew he would. The bard struck hard on the return, wheeling as the white-burning blade cut under and past the black shortsword.

  Raub was waiting for it. He took the lunge, twisted to catch it straight on. He felt the flaming blade punch through his shoulder, a moment of numbness there flaring to a crescendo of pain like he had never known. Tajomynar was an arm’s length away, but Raub twisted in and down. With the guard of the black shortsword, he caught the flaming steel of Palas Eryvna just above the hilt, t
wisting his body hard. His shoulder was the fulcrum on which he wrenched the bright blade from Tajomynar’s hands.

  With a surge of white flame, the backsword sang, punching through Raub where he stumbled back. He let Valaendar slip from his grasp, tossing it up before Tajomynar. He saw the black of the bard’s eyes flash suddenly back to violet, glazed over with mad desire as he snatched his prize from midair. He had a moment to shout in triumph before he died.

  Raub wrenched Palas Eryvna from his shoulder with a scream. Then the last of his strength drove an arm’s length of flaming steel through the bard’s heart, the blade that had been his father’s shunting out through ribs and mail and a spray of blood across the white floor.

  He blacked out for a moment. When his head cleared, he was on his knees. He heard the sudden silence in the wide chamber around him, broken by the pounding of his own heart. He smelled the tang of blood, tasted metal in his mouth. He saw Tajomynar lifeless in a spreading pool of red before him.

  Raub’s blood-soaked jerkin was still smoldering where the burning blade sundered it, but he felt no pain. There was a warmth at his ribs and in his leg where Tajomynar had cut him. The bleeding had stopped, torn flesh scarring over as the power of the bright blade restored him. He lifted it slowly, felt the unfamiliar weight in his hand. His father’s sword, and everything it meant.

  That night six years before, they had been caught with ridiculous ease. His father was alone as Raub knew he would be, a brazen assault within the forest-home inconceivable even to his dark paranoia. But even alone, his father’s sorcery was a storm that struck them down in a hail of black fire the moment they set foot within the house.

  They had been brought from Garania Hall to the council. Put on display and bound as the condemned. With his will controlling the minds of the nobles who would have decided their fate, his father didn’t bother with the pretense of a trial. Just killed them all, one by one.

  That night, a renegade son was his weapon.

  “Raub.”

  He shook his head to clear it, turning to see Cass below him. A circle of combatants around her stood in stunned silence. He felt a kind of subtle panic in the Ilvani nobles, a disconnect between what they had just witnessed and their ability to react to it. Against that uncertainty, Cass displayed the same preternatural calm as always.

  Raub kicked at Tajomynar’s body, gave it enough momentum that it slid slowly down the sloping tiles. A wide swath of blood trailed out behind it, marking the corpse’s path as it toppled off the edge beside Cass and fell in a sodden heap to the floor below.

  Six years ago on this very floor, the charm-song of the bright blade in his father’s hand had worked Raub’s muscle and mind like a puppet, turning the blood-fury intended for the seneschal against the others. Against the friends who had followed him.

  Tajomynar had been the first, too shocked to understand what was happening as Raub gutted him from navel to neck.

  Having witnessed Tajomynar’s fall, the others understood. Their screams and Raub’s had shattered the dull silence and the pale glow of the chamber’s white walls.

  “Iastora,” Raub whispered. He remembered Tajomynar’s command as he remembered his father’s from long ago. White flame danced along the blade of the backsword, an unheard music flaring in a song that spoke of new beginnings. Raub tried to find his voice, an unaccustomed fear in him as he felt the power of Palas Eryvna filter through him. He sensed a connection to those around them, felt his thought press out to touch them. He felt their minds waiting for his commands, attuned to the blade over long decades of control.

  He thought of the retribution he had waited years to deliver, but the shadow that dogged him all that time still shrouded him now. Something else needed to finally clear it.

  To the stupefied nobles, he spoke the last command the sword would give them.

  “Know the truth,” he said, and across every face that watched him blankly, there came a sudden rush of shock and fear.

  A moment’s silence hung before chaos erupted. Two score voices were shouting, screaming, as the elders of Anthila pressed in around the shattered remains of the seneschal who had betrayed them. Cass could pick out only fragments of the fast-spoken Ilvani, but she heard the awareness there, felt the rage in those who circled closest to their fallen former master.

  In the tumult, she slipped away. She turned back once to see the black blade that was Valaendar, the symbol of the Anthiliar and the badge of their leadership, driven down into the blood-streaked wood of the crippled floor.

  Though she tried to find him in the frenzied crowd, Raub was already gone.

  • • •

  In the bright green of the vine walls outside the necropolis gardens, Cass waited as the sun rose, the day dawning bright and unseasonably warm. She had slept for a while as the Clearmoon set, her back to the white arch. Each time she awoke, it was to the expectation that she would see Raub sitting across from her. But as day broke, she began to make plans for the road back to the forest’s edge. What might lay beyond there, she didn’t know.

  She had made her way down to the market in the aftermath of the events on the council terrace, moving quickly but still arriving behind the news from above. Even against the clamor she had seen earlier, the market was chaos, every shouting voice spreading the same shocked story of lies and retribution. On the forest road below, she could hear horses in motion, couriers heading out by the last light of the Clearmoon, she guessed. Taking word of the night’s dark events into the forest and beyond.

  She gathered up her cloak, picked two handfuls of early berries from a vine-strewn lattice, and packed them carefully for the road. Idly, she found herself wondering how long it would take for an entire clan of people, for all its settlements forest-wide, to reclaim a collective memory denied them for so long. She felt the twinge of an old sadness then, and a familiar ache that she set aside as she always did.

  All memory was precious, she thought. If Raub’s people hadn’t realized that before, they would know it now.

  “Ilvani tradition holds that the spirit lingers for a time in the mortal world.”

  Cass hadn’t heard Raub approach, his movement silent through the trees as all Ilvani seemed able to do when they put their minds to it. He was crouched a dozen strides away at the edge of the terrace, looking not at her but at the white arch above, the great trunk twisting together as it rose into green shadow.

  “The life force exists outside the body it inhabits,” he said. “The spirit takes time to have its life read to it by those who know it. The final words of those who shaped our lives, imbued with all the emotion engendered by our death, are the ghostsong.”

  “That’s why you came back? To sing the truth?”

  Raub threw his hood back but didn’t answer, seemingly lost in thought. Cass approached, dropped to sit three strides away. Dried blood still marked his face, hair streaked red-black. But in the light, she could see that the wounds of the deadly fight were gone.

  His bow and quiver were still missing, as was the emerald-hilted longsword that had been the greatest treasure Raub carried out from the darkness under Myrnan. Instead, Palas Eryvna, the black-runed bright blade that had been his father’s, hung at his belt.

  “What did I tell you?” Raub said.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Cass said truthfully. Even with the snatches of sleep, she was exhausted, her thoughts slow. Caught up in the old sadness that she couldn’t shake.

  “That night that you said I spoke of my father. I don’t remember it. What did I tell you?”

  Cass was silent a while. The wind was warm again, coming from what felt like the west, but she had little sense of direction within the silent expanse of trees. “I was in the market this morning,” she said by way of not answering. “To a person, all Anthila is talking about the Hooded Hawk.”

  “Let them,” Raub said, and only in saying it did he realize how little it mattered to him now. “How did you find it?” he added. “This place?” />
  “I asked a deaf girl where your father was interred.”

  Raub weighed the answer, didn’t bother asking the obvious questions in return. “And how did you know I’d be here?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Above them, the wind dislodged a cloud of golden leaves. And even as they fell, their slow drift was suddenly disrupted by a half-dozen dark shapes shooting out from the shadow of the trees. A phalanx of fist-sized hawks shrieked and soared on fast wings, flashing black and gold in the light for a moment, then gone.

  “What did I tell you?” Cass heard the edge in his voice that told her he wasn’t going to ask again.

  “All of it,” she said.

  Raub stared out toward the edge of the tier, a screen of branches there framing blue sky beyond.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means you told me all of it. What he was, what you did. You standing against him, fighting for your people. What he made you do in the end. What you tried to do after.”

  “Remember this.”

  Those who had followed him were dead, and their blood drenched his shaking hands.

  “Remember this,” his father had said, and then he turned away, and Raub felt the power of the bright blade Palas Eryvna in his mind break beneath an aching rage he had never known before.

  That night six years ago, he stumbled forward, seizing the shortsword where it hung at his father’s belt. His father was old even then, too slow to stop him. He died quickly, the sword Valaendar that was the symbol of his rule and the corruption he had visited on his people buried deep in his back. The flaming backsword was still in his grasp as he fell, the black blade wrenched free and in Raub’s hand as he fled.

  In the resultant chaos, he stole a horse and rode for the Free City, far from the reach of Anthiliar law. With the sword of his people in his possession, he lived on the coin the horse brought as he waited for long days, then for weeks. He expected to hear the news of his father’s death made public, word of his corruption exposed. Expected to return to Anthila with Valaendar in hand, the black shortsword ready to be presented to the new leader of the forest-home.