He says the words or variations on them uncounted times before. He is used to the challenge of knight and outrider, farm lord and brigand. From the glance the leader gives to the rider next to him, he hears words like them before.
“These are dark times to be abroad, priest.”
“I am no priest. Only a pilgrim in all the gods’ names.”
“And the dead behind us burned themselves?”
The White Pilgrim glances back to the pyre. Brighter now as darkness and cloud scour the eastern sky. “In the absence of a priest, any of the faith might perform the rites of new life and death.”
“You and your fellow pilgrims will find precious little new life in Sannos, old man.”
The Duchy of Sannos. Heart of Gracia. Broad hills rolling green with forage and cropland. Broad rivers cutting through sable soil to reach the sea. The White Pilgrim remembers, but he knows not why.
“I am not of these lands,” he says simply. But his vision is a wash of light suddenly, and he thinks on his endless road.
“Do you have a name, pilgrim?”
“The name I once bore is lost to my sins and past, my lord…”
The Empire is gone, fifty years and more ago now. And with each year come more folk to walk the leagues-long trek of four seasons. Each year brings a dozen new fanes along the old roads that carry him between the mountains, Drachen’s Teeth to Shieldcrest, north to south. Other roads draw him east and west, sea to forest and all the broad lands between. A lifetime of wandering. Seeking solace that never comes.
“I am duke, old man.”
“The name I once bore is lost, my duke.”
The White Pilgrim feels the light pass, swarmed by shadow. He forgets now. Content to live by the shorter cycle of light and dark, step by step, day by day.
“You are thoughtful, old man,” the dark figure says. “Why?”
“The death you seek is here…”
Only as he hears his voice does the White Pilgrim realize he speaks aloud. He knows the words, cannot remember.
A subtle shift marks the dark warrior’s gaze. The curiosity of a man used to being feared, who senses now that the White Pilgrim has no fear anymore.
“We kill only those who stand against us,” this Black Duke says. “They will stop, in time, and so shall the killing stop with them. I am come to heal Gracia. To see it rise once more to the greatness taken from it.”
“The blood of children is on your hands and mine, my duke…”
From the corner of his eye, the White Pilgrim sees the standard-bearer’s hand come up. A pulse of spell-fire flares there whose power she draws forth from her blood, her voice. Five other hands hold weapons at the ready in response to the White Pilgrim’s words, but he does not flinch.
He sees the Black Duke raise his own hand to stop them all. A dismissive gesture, the warriors under his command obeying without thought. The black boar charges on its crimson field, twisted by the wind.
“I am Arsanc of Thorfin,” the dark warrior says evenly. “I am a freelord of Norgyr and duke of Gracia, and I will kill any man or woman who stands against my rightful claim to the throne of this land. But I do not kill children.”
“These were boys. By the forge…”
“The villagers are killing their children themselves.” A dark weariness to the voice speaks to the truth it tells. “Their faith in your gods of the Orosana runs strong enough that they are willing to embrace the sacrifice of life that all faith demands in the end.”
The White Pilgrim feels the words twist in his mind. A thing he cannot think on.
“It is said that the Black Duke fights in the vanguard of his own forces, while the dukes of Gracia linger behind stone and spell-wall.” The White Pilgrim recognizes his voice again. He remembers these things, but he knows not why. “He sweeps down from the snows of Norgyr and through the borderlands like a dark storm.” Words overheard in shrine and fane. Tales told by refugees across meager fires in the night.
The Black Duke, Arsanc of Thorfin, laughs aloud. The White Pilgrim hears the edge of respect in his voice. Does not understand it.
“You are an observant one. Tell me what you see in your wanderings. Tell me what you know.”
If they are razing homesteads, it means that the main brunt of the fighting is done. No one risks warriors and mounts in skirmishes against farmhands if real war yet has any chance to be fought. The forces of the black boar are moving village to village, seeking fealty to a conqueror. When it is not given quickly enough, they burn settlements razed and rebuilt in the aftermath of war a year before, and five years before that, and on and on back through three generations of war that seeks and fails to claim what little remains of Gracia’s ancient soul.
“I am only a pilgrim, my duke.”
He tries to not think on it. Tries to drive the sense of what this war means from his mind, but it lingers like all the rest of his lost life. Images graven into his dreams by knives of shadow.
“So you said. In all your gods’ names.” Arsanc laughs again.
The doors of the farmhouses are burned with a mark he recognizes. The black boar of the standard, carved by spell-fire. The White Pilgrim sees the same mark in every other village he passes through on this leg of the long journey. Eastbound this time. The light of dawn at his eyes as the endless leagues carry him closer to the days of the High Spring.
“Your dead gods will stay that way, old man.” The Black Duke slips his helm back on, but the strength of his voice does not waver. “Take that message and this one to every temple and mud-shrine you see wherever your wanderings carry you. Duke Hestyoc has sued for peace, and orders his folk to accept his fealty to the black boar. The lands on both sides of the Farwash and the Vouris are under the stewardship of Arsanc, Freelord of Thorfin and Innveig, Duke of Reimari, protector of Mundra, Liana, Lamitri, and Sannos, and heir to the empty marble throne of Gracia.”
No sense of hubris carries in the words. Only the dark familiarity that says they are earned and paid for.
“I am not worthy of a place in the gods’ fanes,” the White Pilgrim says quietly. “But I will take your message to any who might listen.”
But in that time when name and heart are cleansed by the memory that takes me, then all Gracia that I saved shall embrace that memory, and I will return for all who speak this Prayer for Dead Kings.’
The Black Duke laughs. “Your impudence marks you as either wise or a fool, old man.”
“Very much the fool, my duke.”
And with only a flick of leather leads, the dark figure is gone. His great steed leaps to the air with an unfurling of black wings, limned by the last light of day. Shadows slash across the White Pilgrim where he stands. The other warriors follow, thrashing the air to a sudden storm of thunderous wing-beats and the cries of the hassas as they climb, racing each other to the height of the settling darkness.
The White Pilgrim watches for a long while, sees them bound for the east. Gleaming wings dwindle slowly against the black line of the sky.
He walks far by darkness. He passes where the road snakes into dark woods, so that he might escape the sight of the pyre whose glow will outlast the night. He sleeps in a copse of sweet heather and spring lilac. Perfume shrouds the deep descent of night beneath the haze of the Clearmoon, its clipped face sinking within a dark sea of cloud.
In the darkness of that sleep comes the dream.
HER SKIN IS FAIR ONCE beneath the crust of grime. The dirt of a long road hides her features, her age. The cusp of womanhood, thirteen summers behind her.
Early morning, approaching a market village with a name lost to memory. Within the dream, the White Pilgrim feels a vague recollection of a day he passes there, long ago, but he sees it now with a clarity of sight beyond the softness of his aged eyes. In the distance spreads a wide copse of white cottonwood, branches gleaming leafless and fire-bright as they screen the rising sun. A tumbling creek wends its way north, the grey walls of a mill standing mist-shrouded against th
e forest behind.
Twisting away from the creek, the ruts of a farm track mark the progress of a wain loaded with flour sacks as it passes. Two emaciated oxen labor heavily as the cart’s wheels bump along toward fields cut by low stone fences draped in a haze of hanging smoke.
A few paces behind the wain, caught in the shroud of its dawn shadow, the Golden Girl walks.
For the better part of a week, she follows the farm tracks that parallel the twisting course of the wide-flowing Farwash, four leagues to the east. Her eyes are the blue of burnished steel. Her hair is long, the gold of rain-fresh straw. Tied back and swept beneath the collar of a travel-stained and much-patched cloak. The wind catches this as she walks, revealing a shapeless pack of black leather at her back, a thin blanket tightly rolled.
A third bundle is slung between pack and blanket, more than half her height across back and shoulder. Wrapped and rewrapped in rough homespun, concealed again as she quickly wraps the cloak tight around herself.
She slips away from the cart as it rumbles on where the field fences meet the road. The rough shapes of close-clustered houses stand beyond, dull with the grime of passing winter. Two reluctant goats are dragged along by an unsmiling youth. A peddler leading a laden mule calls out his wares with little enthusiasm.
The Golden Girl ignores all of it. She walks a little more quickly than casual. Around the closest shanties and the muddy sheep track that circles them, the smoke-shrouded fane comes into view.
A thatched roof rises over walls of rough fieldstone, primitive. Shuttered windows are open to the air. The main doors, the two side doors, all of banded planks, stand closed. Above the main doors, a woven crown of white beech branches is set with three stones. She eyes it warily as she pushes inside, is hit by the haze and warmth of the fire that sends a shiver through her, seems to remind her how cold she is.
A broad rust-iron brazier sits atop three stones where a hearth once stands, long ago. A memory of when this place is the village’s great hall. Incense is set along the edges of the great bowl, twice-burned charcoal blazing within it in a haze of yellow-white flame. A narrow chimney sits above at the confluence of the ceiling’s great beams, venting twisted snakes of smoke to the bright sky. The beams are old but newly carved in the signs and faces of the gods of Gracia. Newly restored to the faith of village folk north and south from Staris to Kannis, west and east from the walls of the Yewnwood to the Leagin coast.
The Golden Girl opens her cloak but does not step toward the fire. A look around to make sure she stands alone, then she adjusts the belts that hold her gear in place, always shifting as she walks. She feels heat thread through her, feels the chill of the oblong bundle lashed tight to her back even through leather, armor, and cloth.
“You are welcome to the fires of the Orosana, pilgrim.”
The voice precedes the shuffling steps behind her. The Golden Girl pulls her cloak tight as she fixes the set of her tunic to cover the talisman on its leather thong, cover the chain shirt that lies unseen beneath that. The talisman is the symbol of her father once, who gives it to her mother, who gives it to her. Steeped in the dweomer of protection by the essence of her mother’s own life and blood before she dies.
The priest newly slipped out from the shadows wears the livery of a speaker of the Pantheon. The long-dead Orosana who dwell in the twelve mountain peaks of the north and south. His body is soft, rippling beneath the grey robes whose cleanliness shows how infrequently he leaves this dark hall. Eyes set small in a doughy face, porcine in their gaze. A ceremonial mace hangs at his belt, strong enough to deal out injury to a not overly large rat if one happened by.
The Golden Girl takes him in at a glance. She lowers her voice, lets it find the tone of the fatigue she feels. “I am no pilgrim,” she says. He will not hear the well-practiced mockery in her tone.
“All travelers are pilgrims in the eyes of the Twelve, and shall carry the blessings of the Orosana if they walk with faith.”
In most of the fanes she stops in, the faithful whose faces mark all the endless leagues of her young life are born of the unseeing memory of youth. The legends of Empire and the traditions of the dead faith of the twelve gods of the Orosana are both equally mythical to those who never know either. This priest is older than she expects. Might well remember the last days of Empire. Seeking solace in a dead faith because at the end of his life, he has no time left to hope for the return of the world he knows.
“I seek a pilgrim, though,” the Golden Girl says quietly. “An older man, grey hair and beard. He travels alone in the gods’ names, passing Miandale four days ago. He did penance at two different fanes outside the city, then left along the farm roads, they said.”
“Many pass this way, child.”
“He is scarred, this one. On his neck and cheek, an old wound. A limp that cannot heal.”
“A soldier?”
“Once. Perhaps.” A trace of uncertainty twists through her, hidden as quickly as it comes. She distracts the priest’s gaze with the sudden glint of copper in her hand, pressed to his palm.
“I saw one such in the village,” the priest says with carefully measured gratitude. “He did penance in the dawn rites. Two days past, I think it was. His health appeared poor, so I bade him take shelter with us, but he was gone before the morning broke.”
“He did only penance? Did not stay to rest, to sleep, to warm himself?”
“No,” the priest says. “Not while I was here to see, at any rate.”
The Golden Girl fights to control the hope that threads her voice.
“Where had he come from?”
“I did not see him arrive…”
“What did he say? What did he speak of, what was his path?” She does not need to ask the destination.
“That he came from the north is all I know. He talked of having crossed the Farwash within sight of the Free City at the spring flood. I expressed surprise that he survived that journey with all the roads of Mundra and Liana teeming for war, but he showed no sign that it concerned him.”
The Golden Girl knows that road. She walks it often enough. She turns from the priest as if he vanishes from her thought and attention, already focused on the end of her long journey.
“If the pilgrim should pass this way again, who should I say is seeking him?”
In his voice, the Golden Girl hears the twist of uncertainty. Her focus is back, and sharpened. She meets the priest’s faint eyes in the shadows. Knows that it is not on his own behalf that he asks. “Only an old friend. Seeking counsel.”
The pig eyes narrow in dark assessment as she turns, but the voice calls out in last hope. “Join me at the fire of Denas the all-father before you go. Join me in prayer for your safe journey in Menos of the road’s name.” The priest steps to within a pace of the brazier, bends to his knees in a well-practiced ritual.
The Golden Girl turns back, the cloak swirling to let slip a glimpse of the scabbard she wears. High and just behind the hip, letting it slide with her leg as she walks. Easier to conceal but slower to draw. Not that it matters.
She measures the three paces to the brazier, catches its wide edge with her spit. It hisses there, the priest stuttering as he starts to his feet. A look of horror on his face, hands up to make a supplicant’s pleading motions to the empty images graven across the fane’s smoke-blackened beams.
“I am no pilgrim,” she says again as she turns to go.
She keeps her days long. Awake and on the march well before dawn, then adding the moons’ light to the steady spring lengthening of the sun. She can only hope that her quarry does not do the same. She takes the time to eat, gnaws a crust of bread as she moves quickly along the northward track. Her pace quickens as she shadows the stone fences.
Two days. Her face shows the effort of trying to hold the calm she feels slipping from her. Six seasons of searching, and seven long years before that, and she is never this close before.
The Golden Girl feels the talisman that is the memory of her
mother and father lying cold against her breast. She presses her hand to it through cloak and leather. A reminder of the things her father fought for, dying without knowing whether the lost dreams of the Empire that had been sacred to him would one day be drawn forth from the shadow.
The peddler seen earlier is on his way out of the village already, no buyers that morning but still shouting out for custom. His voice punctuates the sucking of his cart’s wheels in the mud.
At her chest, the talisman still held within the flat grasp of her hand, the Golden Girl feels a sudden warmth like the summer sun.
The heat of the charm’s warning spreads through the chain shirt against which it rests, pulses in time with her heart, quickening now. The magic of her mother, long dead but still watching her. Protecting her as it does so many times before.
The Golden Girl hears the wet thud of hoofbeats on the road ahead, rising over the shrill cries of a herd of goats that scatters at their approach. She moves absently off the track, kneels in the shadow of a stone wall as if searching for something lost in the mire at her feet. From the corner of her eye, watched carefully, four armed riders appear at a slow canter. The peddler is forced to scramble, dragging mule and cart aside to clear their path as they come.
From the corner of her eye, she sees the black boar. Her pulse quickens.
She rises, keeps her eyes cast down. She feigns a limp as she hunches low in her cloak. She changes her shape, changes her height, her gait. Letting their eyes pass over her where they search.
She almost succeeds. But like the tingling that marks a foot fallen to blood-sleep, she feels the faint trace of spellcraft twist through her.
A shiver takes her despite her best efforts to quell it. No way to tell the nature of the spell, but in the instant, she pushes all thought, all understanding from her mind. In the recognition of magic, she must force herself to not recognize the magic. She concentrates on the muddy ruts at her feet, counts her steps, whispers a childhood song her mother once sung to her, a lifetime ago now.
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Page 25