A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  The beast screams in pain, bucking backward even as she ducks below it. The warriors with crossbows find their line of fire broken. They draw swords instead, joining the sergeant as he fights to keep his horse in position, block the Golden Girl’s escape.

  She makes no move to flee, though. The White Pilgrim watches her weave between two of the northern knights, defying the advantage of elevation as she parries both their blades, drives the rapier through the hand of one and sends him tipping from the saddle. His torch tumbles to the ground, his uninjured hand groping for his fallen sword, but the Golden Girl sends the blade outside the circle of combat with a furious kick.

  The torch is snatched up in her off hand, the Golden Girl spinning to lock it to the rapier as she cross-blocks the sergeant, slashing at her shoulder. She hurls the flaming brand at his horse in turn, the beast rearing as it dumps him unceremoniously to his back.

  The last rider vaults from the saddle, not trusting his horse in the sudden chaos. The Golden Girl meets him, darting in fast and low as the incantation he utters marks him as the battle-caster of the group. His hands are twisting through the precise pattern of his magic even as the Golden Girl drives the rapier through one of those hands. The mage’s spell dies in a cry of pain as he staggers back. He raises his good hand by instinct as if to ward her off, so that the Golden Girl’s blade takes him through that hand just as cleanly, crippling his spellcasting in twin jets of blood as she screams.

  “En nom du haroya!”

  An oath in the tongue of Gracia, echoing through long years.

  In the name of the High King…

  She tries to reach the sergeant before he rises, but the Norgyr warrior twists serpent-fast. He rolls to his feet to parry her initial thrust, pushes forward with three fast strikes. One tags her cloak, slashed out in a feint as she slips past him. The second two crash off the guard of her blade. A second feint to slip back, but another of Arsanc’s knights is there suddenly. Then the third, leg bleeding as he screams in rage.

  Caught between them, the Golden Girl turns one to the other, dropping to a defensive posture. They fight in deadly rhythm by response, timing their strikes as she turns.

  Not even her speed saves her this time.

  The sergeant cuts hard at her shoulder, but his blade shrieks as it rakes steel, the armor she wears revealed as her tunic is slashed through. Tightly woven chain gleams the pale grey of dwyrsilver, but though the strength of that armor protects her, the force of the sergeant’s attack twists her off balance. He shifts behind her to strike low, cutting deep into her leg.

  The Golden Girl does not cry out as she falls.

  The sergeant pins her rapier hand beneath his boot, his mouth a wolf’s grin as she struggles in vain to escape. But then he spins on his heel suddenly, a hand at his shoulder. A look of surprise as the pommel of a Norgyr sword shatters his nose.

  The White Pilgrim is there, torch in one hand, the blade that the Golden Girl kicked free of the fray in the other. A moment of shock on the faces of the Black Duke’s troops as their sergeant staggers back, collapses to his knees even as they leap to the attack. Not fast enough.

  Torch and sword move in tight arcs, locked together to block and parry, then swung free, striking hard. Blades flash to left and right of him, but the White Pilgrim twists away like wind-blown smoke, driving one guard back with fire as he disarms the other with three furious strikes. The Norgyr’s blade is sent to the shadows behind him, his sword hand cut to the bone.

  The sergeant tries to rise, face a mask of dust and blood. His shaking legs go out from under him as the Golden Girl drives her knee to his stomach. She drops on him, his back cracking as she raises the rapier, gripped tight in both hands.

  The red-limned tip of the blade touches his neck. The White Pilgrim sees. Stops. He limps back from the one guard still standing, who dares not move.

  The Golden Girl fights to slow her breathing. The wound at her leg is a blossom of red-black. Shaking hands let the rapier slip, trace a razor-line of jagged red along the sergeant’s skin. His eyes are tight on hers, bruise-dark pits against the flickering firelight of the White Pilgrim’s torch.

  “Why do you follow me?” she says. Pain threads her voice, teeth set as a grim line against it.

  “My Duke Arsanc’s orders.”

  The White Pilgrim watches the sergeant spit blood as he speaks. Gareyth, the young warrior’s name is. He does not remember why he knows it. Uncertain suddenly as to why he stands there.

  “Three years since my father and I first saw the black boar, in Charath. Roaming Gracia in secret a full two years before your duke was even thinking on moving against Reimari. Why?”

  “My Duke Arsanc’s orders…”

  The sergeant closes his eyes, will say nothing more. He waits to die.

  The Golden Girl stares for a long moment. Then she stands slowly, keeps the blade at Gareyth’s throat until she steps quickly away, out of any reach. He is on his feet in an instant, stumbling back. The White Pilgrim is there, sword up in warning.

  “Leave your weapons,” the Golden Girl says. “Ride.”

  In the sergeant’s pack as he helps the wounded to their horses, the Golden Girl finds glass vials packed in sheepskin. They gleam with a pale blue light, the telltale sign of a healing draught. She takes two, leaves the other two for the sergeant and his warriors to sort among themselves. The White Pilgrim watches as she drinks, sees the blood at her leg staunched, the set of her wounded shoulder slowly straighten itself.

  The Norgyr move out at the slower speed of the wounded horse, hoofbeats vanishing quickly into the utter dark that their single torch leaves behind. The sergeant Gareyth is in the lead. He does not look back.

  The Golden Girl hurls three shortswords to the forest, cracks the stock of each crossbow with well-placed kicks. The White Pilgrim looks wonderingly to the borrowed blade in his own hand, thinks to throw it after the others. The fight is already fading in his mind. He slips the sword to his belt instead.

  The Golden Girl stands listening to the silence of the night, ensuring that the Black Duke’s soldiers are truly gone. And only then, the White Pilgrim sees her resolve crumble.

  Her bravado breaks for the moment it takes to reveal the child she is. She fights back tears, the weeping that wracks her slight frame, eyes squeezed shut. The dirt of a long road hides her fear. Thirteen summers behind her.

  Then the moment is past and the steel-blue eyes are dry. She passes the healing draught to the White Pilgrim, but he shakes his head. She slips it within her cloak. Stands in silence, watching him.

  “You fight well for a bastard brat,” he says finally. Dismissive. The Golden Girl’s blue eyes are cold as the White Pilgrim turns, heads off with torch held high. She follows a half-dozen steps behind.

  THE WHITE PILGRIM WALKS until the torch begins to sputter, breaking only then from the track of the road for the darker wood beyond. The Golden Girl follows, stays close to see the faint trail he finds and walks along. She glances behind her, as she does all the time since they set out. As she has before, she sees only darkness there.

  He moves with a slow certainty. Realizes that he passes this way before, long ago. The trees shift to gnarled scrub pine, tight-set bough to bough, a wall of shadow. And just as the torch threatens to gutter out, he leads the Golden Girl to slip past that wall and into the sheltered grove beyond.

  The White Pilgrim stoops where he remembers the shallow firepit scraped out from ancient soil. He finds charcoal fragments spread there, covered now with a skin of winter-dry leaves. He sets them burning with the last flickering of the torch, lets that kindling flame consume its stump. He shuffles in the shadows, finds branches that he adds slowly. Faint tongues of fire feed hungrily as they rise to a bright blaze.

  In the light of that blaze, the Golden Girl stares to the wall of forest where it marks the boundary of a great-stone circle that rises around them in the darkness. Slabs of white granite, rough-struck and planed. They taper faintly alon
g their length as they rise to twice her height, set in a perfect ring within which the ground is clear. The old magic of druidas. The tree-priests marking the consecration of this place.

  The White Pilgrim feels the power lurking within the whispering pines, kneeling to face the tallest stone as he murmurs thanks to Menos, god of travelers, for his grace and protection. When he turns back, the Golden Girl is sitting close by the fire, holding deadfall with which to feed it. Her cloak is a shroud of shadow where she crouches within it, stares to the darkness.

  Justain, her name is. He remembers.

  Her waterskin and pack are set out across from her, bread and salt pork waiting to be eaten.

  “Save the bread,” the White Pilgrim says as he paces. The strength of the battle just fought is still in his limbs, pushing the pain away for a time. The Golden Girl says nothing, flicks her gaze to meet his.

  He feels something familiar in those eyes, so he turns away.

  He sits finally, remembers that he still wears the Norgyr warrior’s shortsword when its narrow guard catches him hard in the ribs. He pulls it naked from his belt, stares at its edge against the firelight for a moment before he sets it aside.

  Justain eats a piece of the pork, chews slowly to soften it. Thoughtful. “Bread ill-feeds the exertion of battle,” she says finally. “Wounds need the nourishment of meat to heal. A warrior would know that.”

  He answers by tearing a piece of bread, peeling mold from the crust before he eats.

  “You were a soldier once?” Her voice is flat, emotionless in a way that draws his attention to it. Hiding something. “A general? Something more?”

  She calls him a name, before the fight. He tries to remember it but cannot.

  “I saw that limp you have,” she says. “I thought you might have been a soldier.”

  “Think what you like.”

  “I think you know who I am. So why do you pretend?”

  With a twisted length of pine branch, the White Pilgrim banks the fire, sending sparks to spiral up past the standing stones. Dark shapes against the star-streaked sky. His hand shakes, a hint of anger in his gaze. She sees it.

  “People have too many things to remember,” she says. “Too many regrets. Do you have regret?”

  “A man who dies with no regrets dies without having lived.” His voice tells him he is angry. He knows not why.

  On the closest stone, the White Pilgrim sees weathered runes in a script he cannot read. Not Gracian but older. Their meaning hidden now, lost over the endless years of Empire that shaped language and thought to one unbreakable whole. Likely no one left in any land who can still read all the stories that only the past now speaks.

  Then at the High Winter did Prince Sestian of Marthai and Veneranda declare for Telos, and so did war press finally to the borders of Magandis. And King Astran did send forth Guderna who was Gilvaleus, in lead of two hundred Knights of his realm, and in those battles he did acquit himself in great heroic form.

  “My father died a year ago. Before he did, he told me he had only one regret,” the Golden Girl says.

  And standing singly against full scores of Sestian’s best swords, the young Captain Guderna took no wound, and showed his foes great quarter and did turn countless of them against their Lords and to King Astran’s side. And Telos fighting in the South heard word of this new Captain but had no knowledge then that his Son had been bound to the Daughter of his enemy’s ally, and neither could know the other across the gulf of war in the North.

  The White Pilgrim waves his head to show his disinterest, drinks from her waterskin. He realizes how parched he is only when he hears himself speak, throat tight, voice raw with the fear he cannot place.

  “And what was that?”

  “That he never saw his high king again…”

  With the words comes a weight of loss and apprehension. She looks up to the sharp light of the stars, then back. The White Pilgrim does not meet her gaze.

  “You are Gilvaleus,” she says.

  “No…”

  A single name. So small a word in response, but he fights to force it out. He feels a pain that stabs at his chest like a rusted blade plunged in, then again, again.

  “He followed you from the field at Marthai. When you turned away from him. He followed you like he’d followed his whole life.”

  “No.”

  Then it happened that Nàlwyr heard of this brash young Captain of Magandis who had defeated all his Prince’s best, but who tempered victory with mercy and had claimed full hundreds of Marthai and Veneranda’s force to the armies of Magandis. And he marveled ‘This is a Knight of great heart, and woe to the times that make us enemies, and the fates that will force me to face him.’

  “But he lost you when he fell sick outside Odradale,” the Golden Girl says. “It was winter.”

  “You don’t…”

  And at the High Spring, they did face each other at the head of two great forces along the banks of the River Konides that flowed with the full rage of Winter, and could not be crossed save at three narrow fords whose claim and hold would be paid in blood.

  He feels the anger like a black flame suddenly, burning at his heart and in his hands where fists squeeze blunted nails into his palms. Pain there like the pain at his throat, where the words he means to say are caught tight.

  The Golden Girl stands slowly, cloak wrapped around herself. Small in the shadows. Justain.

  “My father. Nàlwyr.”

  From within her tunic, she brings forth the thong of leather at her neck. The talisman hangs there, an oval of pale gold to catch the light. At its center, a dragon rampant in blood-red, claws of black. Eyes of silver gleam where it coils its tail around itself, ready to strike.

  The White Pilgrim is on his feet, does not remember standing. The fire is before him but he circles, the Golden Girl across from him, risen to pace away from him, angry. Justain.

  “They all say you died. That Astyra the king’s-bastard had slain you before he fell. Priests and fools announcing that your body was carried on a chariot of fire up to Orosan, taken to the lap of the gods, but you walked away!”

  “You do not know!” he shouts at last. He tastes blood at his tongue where he must have bitten it. He does not remember. “No one knows these things! Memories and lies! All of it, lies!”

  “This is no lie. This is what my father said to me before he died. Captain to the high king, first of the companions of Mitrost…”

  “You do not know!”

  The White Pilgrim turns from her, cannot bear to look at her anymore. The bottomless blue of her eyes, her face blurred with tears to match his own. Footsteps around him mark where she follows as he tries to rub his eyes, feels the burning of the blood still clinging to his fingers from the fight.

  He tries to get away. He must get away. He tries to not think of these things anymore, the memories almost gone.

  “He came to you at Marthai!” Her words are a blade, cutting open the oldest scars. “He came back for you, out of exile, out of the wilderness for you. He fought by your side, offered you his life. He watched you crawl out from a field of shattered bodies, and he followed you, he begged you!”

  ‘And now my High King Gilvaleus? What fates are left to me, now that you turn from me, left alone with all my enemies at hand?’

  He hears her father’s words in the Golden Girl’s voice, sharp with the edge that betrayal makes. Hears the rage there handed down to him like a dark judgement for all his deceit, all his weakness.

  “He begged you and you walked away. He told me…”

  He twists from her grasp as he strikes her arm away with a shaking hand. The darkness of his look stuns her to sudden silence where she stands.

  No. Not the look. The shortsword in his hand that he cannot remember picking up. It thrusts out to touch the paleness of her throat, so fast that she has no time to avoid it. A point of blood rises there, spreading black in the firelight.

  “And how good are you?” the White Pilgrim
whispers.

  The Golden Girl stares. Does not understand.

  Her hand strays to her belt, the scabbard hanging there. Slowly, slowly in the hope that he does not see. A stripling’s trick, where a veteran would draw at speed to distract the foe.

  “Bastard brat. You steal a man’s memory. Try to steal his name. You don’t know…”

  And with blinding speed, the White Pilgrim thrusts through the pale throat, all the force of leg and shoulder punching through flesh and bone, blood and spine. The blackened steel of the Norgyr sword is a deadly shadow in the blaze of firelight.

  Except the Golden Girl is gone.

  There and not there, forcing herself back as she falls beneath the killing stroke. She rolls two paces away, dropping her cloak as she rises again. The White Pilgrim is on her, going low for the right side, opposite her scabbard. A savage strike, no way to block it, but his blade hits steel. A flash as her rapier comes up, slashes out and down, too fast to even see.

  “How good would you have to be?” he screams, a dark rage in his voice that is stilled for long years. “How good to prove that Nàlwyr’s blood flows in your veins?”

  Her silence answers as she wheels, tears the torn sleeve of her tunic free to take no chance on it hindering her movement. The tight-woven links of the chain shirt twist like silvered snakeskin as she lurches back from the White Pilgrim but he presses, relentless. Slashes down and across with a series of killing strokes, speed driven by the lightness of the Norgyr blade.

  The Golden Girl retreats again, gets no quarter as she parries, no room to take advantage of the longer rapier as she sends strike after strike wide by a hand’s width. She parries his next blow with the same cross-hand movement as the last three. The White Pilgrim feels himself set for the follow-on. Then he watches her blade suddenly flash down and across, slipping beneath his. The repetition of her defense lulling him into a pattern of counterattack he cannot see.

  She takes the advantage, lunges in with a thrust that catches his tunic but misses his arm as he twists wide. The White Pilgrim drops his sword to deflect her next attack, a low thrust from the opposite side, impossibly fast. And then she has the offensive, the razor tip of the rapier weaving a bright pattern in the firelight as she strikes, strikes again, swords meeting in a clash of steel that rings out against the silence of the stones and the night beyond.