He is shouting, voice breaking with a strength he does not hear for so long. The acolytes at their fire rise as one suddenly, slipping through the canvas-curtained doorway at a run. His mind is clear. He does not understand.
Then battle after battle, Gilvaleus and his Companions cut away at the cords of steel and stone and spell that held the Usurper’s Kingdom strong, striking without warning in the Far South of Charath, then appearing days later in the Spring snows of the Mundra Mountains. And folk called the host of Gilvaleus the Ghost Dragons, whose red-and-gold banners blazed in the light of dawn as his force rode down garrison and patrol, then vanished again to elude the pursuit of the anguished captains of the Usurper’s scouts.
“Fifteen hundred years, the Empire held a world,” the White Pilgrim says. “Created a golden age by the wisdom of its masters and the knights of the Lotherasien who were its virtue. A thousand years of peace in the Elder Kingdoms, and I sought only to remake that glory in this smallest part of the world, then destroyed all I worked for in a single lifetime of hubris and deceit.”
And though Thoradun in his rage did threaten and pledge that a hundred years would be only the beginning of his dark reign over Gracia, it took but a single year through which Gilvaleus did harry and assault the forces and citadels of the Usurper, and day by slow day did his Companions win back the hearts of Gracia and break the will of those who were yet bent to the Usurper’s rule.
“No nation can rise above the weakness of those who lead it,” The White Pilgrim says, quieter now. “Weakness is a scourge that plagues us all.”
Then in the bright Spring of that next year, the realms of Charath and Staris were reclaimed, and the lands of Andrezou and Aynwel by Summer, and then Valos and Cosiand, and Eudorin, and the Southlands were united once more, as the Kingdom that Eurymos held before the Usurper’s black treachery on the Day of Death. Then was Maris routed by the armies of Prince Sestian and claimed by his line, and the Usurper’s forces driven back across the River Vouris for the first time in nine long years.
“The dream still lives in your name,” the Golden Girl says. “The legend lives, and you are the legend. You can bring back the glory that the folk of Gracia yearn for. Your story does not end yet. Your right to the marble throne…”
And the White Pilgrim laughs, the sound ringing out darkly in the empty shrine. “And tell me, girl, how a dead king proves himself? Fourteen years have I walked to pay the penance of my sins.” The White Pilgrim knows that number perfectly now. His mind is clear, all the past laid out before him suddenly. “Tell me how I walk into the king’s conclave and claim a legacy lost to mind and memory?”
The Golden Girl undoes the clasp of her cloak then. She lets it fall to one side as she shifts the bundle that she wears lashed beneath it. More than half her height across back and shoulder. Wrapped and rewrapped in rough homespun that she tears free with shaking hands, revealing a gleam of white and gold beneath. A scabbard of ivory and gilt leaf, no trace of dust clinging to it despite the grime of a fourteen-year road that sheds from its wrappings in a dark cloud.
The Golden Girl is on her knees. The White Pilgrim does not remember her moving.
He stares as she lifts the sword to him, clutches it through the mask of rags, hands shaking. Without knowing how, he understands that neither hilt nor scabbard is ever touched by her bare hands. The Blade a thing she holds for so long, keeps only for him.
Then the horns of war sang in the South, and Thoradun’s forces of the Norgyr broke and fell even as the Gracian folk of the Northlands took up arms against them, and so was the rule of the Usurper undone at last. But the traitor would not yield, and called Gilvaleus to him at Beresan, and stood waiting at the ruined court where the High King’s Father had fallen.
The hilt where it meets the scabbard is ivory and grey leather, and he reaches for it by forgotten instinct. Feels a surge of warmth thread through him as he grasps it. Feels the pain of his heart gone suddenly, the shadow that clings to sight and mind cast aside as he draws forth a longsword with a whisper-silent hiss.
The cross-guard and fuller are in steeled gold. Ancient glyphs of prophecy and power are scribed there in white, pulsing with a faint glow. An edge and ridge of dwyrsilver steel shed the shadows like water spilling from oilskin.
And when Gilvaleus came to him, the Usurper laughed with dark malice, saying ‘Thou art a boy who seeks power he is not fit to hold, and my lasting curse on this land is to bequeath it to thy weakness.’ But Gilvaleus said ‘I am the chosen of the Sword of Kings, and carry the age and anger of all its masters before, and thy power is as a child’s against mine.’
Ankathira. The Whitethorn is held in his shaking hands. He remembers.
And with Dark Sorcery did Thoradun attack, but the power of the Sword of Kings protected Gilvaleus as he struck. Then long did both battle within the circle of Companions, and in the end, the Usurper fell. Then with the King’s Sword the Whitethorn, Gilvaleus ended the dark reign of Thoradun in blood, and called the name of his Father and his Mother as he did.
“My father carried it from the field,” the Golden Girl says. “He kept it for the dream of seeing it in your hand once more.”
The White Pilgrim fights to find the words, wracked with a fear and a longing that he knows once before.
“I saw you…” he says. Not sure who he speaks to. Memory of a dream, early morning at a market village with a name lost to memory. A vague recollection of the day he passes there, long ago.
He remembers those visions he sees through the Blade when he holds it, long ago. The sight it grants him when the Whitethorn is the sign of his reign, the ancient sword of kings. Resting for the thousand years of peace that is the Lothelecan, then rising again in a time of war. Seeking the hand that can wield it to rule this land.
Then the fighting was done, and Gilvaleus in triumph returned to Mitrost with Nàlwyr at his side. And Aelathar was there, and walked with Gilvaleus as he called for the Keep to be remade, and for the city he had named as his capital to be built around it. And in that peace of Autumn and the Winter that followed, Gilvaleus sealed away the Unseen Pathways that led him to victory, for they were opened by the power of the Whitethorn, and the power of the Sword of Kings was to be shaped to peace.
And he understands now. He feels it clearly as the sight returns to him, the sword of kings in his hand. All the pain of seeing the Blade. Of understanding how long it is separated from his touch.
Then the Kings and Princes who had shown their loyalty to Gilvaleus were crowned and named the Dukes of the new Gracia, and those who had too long held fealty to the Usurper were set aside, and new Dukes named in those lands and in Magandis and in Mundra and in Liana whose Princes and Kings had fallen in the last of the Usurper’s War. And the High King swore his love again to the Lady Aelathar, and with all the Dukes of Gracia in attendance and Nàlwyr at his hand, they were bound in marriage at the High Autumn that marked the days of Gracia reborn.
“No,” the White Pilgrim says.
He feels that pain like a white fire at his breast as he forces the Blade back to its scabbard. Feels the hiss of steel and velvet shiver cold through his hand like a viper’s kiss. The Golden Girl stares in shock as he returns it bundled to her hand. She makes to speak but is interrupted by footsteps behind them.
The White Pilgrim turns, sees the priest whose shrine this is slipping through the canvas with two acolytes at his heels. An older figure, bent and hairless save for the wisp of a beard tucked into the grey robes. A look of recognition dulls the anger in his gaze.
“There is nothing to fear,” the White Pilgrim calls to him. The Golden Girl is on her feet, the Blade behind her suddenly, wrapped within her cloak. “We will take the healing waters.” The White Pilgrim bows thanks before the priest can respond, forcing the wizened figure to simply nod as he retreats back through his curtain.
The White Pilgrim limps once more for the dark oak doors, hands shaking as he pushes through. The Golden Girl stands alo
ne for a long moment before she follows.
GREY STONE IS SHROUDED by darkness and the shimmer of steam that curls along the walls of a broad courtyard. A latticed roof of black wicker cuts a cloudy twilight sky to grey haze, brighter beneath where evenlamps hang from posts along all four walls. The magical light of nobles and lords, a last testament to the status and wealth of whatever family line ends here in the aftermath of war.
Then the scarred land was cleansed by the healing power of Druidas and Animys, and Aelathar herself traveled throughout all Gracia to lead the Druids in the reclamation of earth and soil, glade and stream burned through by the arcane force that Thoradun’s War-Mages had unleashed.
The baths of Angarid sit in open air within the center of the four-armed quadrangle of the shrine. The White Pilgrim stands bent along the edge of the dark pool, sulfurous waters clinging as a crust of yellow to grimed marble.
And for the love he granted her, Gilvaleus sent Nàlwyr as the captain of Aelathar’s company, and Nàlwyr swore to his King that no hurt should come to her while he breathed, and that in the union of Noble King and Fair Queen was found the beauty that would be the reflection of a land made whole again.
Carefully, he pulls off the robes that are the pilgrim’s white, long ago. He feels pain flare in his chest and shoulders as he carefully folds them. He is weary as he catches sight of the faintest of reflections in black water. A weathered scar rises chest to neck to cheek, half-hidden by ragged growth of beard the same grey as his hair. He is shorn, but badly, a rough knife-cut that he administers only when weather and blood-mites remind him to. The face of an old man.
The Golden Girl carefully closes the doors behind her. A rippling and a splash ahead heralds the bent and pale figure slipping naked to the water. The White Pilgrim’s expression is dark as she paces around him, looking to all four shadowed corners of the open court as by reflex. Making sure they are truly alone.
Her shock is gone, and the expression of the betrayed that he will always recognize. The anger threads her voice again. “Why did you walk away from Marthai? From who you were?”
The White Pilgrim hears her voice as through shadow, must turn to see her before her words can be heard. He remembers her. Justain.
But in the dark of that Winter of the Peace of Gilvaleus, there came word from the North of the death of Cymaris, who had been set aside after her Father’s death, and who fled Magandis for Mirdza and a life held in secret from her kin and the life she had known.
“You must be weary from your journey,” he says. “You should take to the waters. One of the customs of the Empire you are so fond of.”
The Golden Girl only sits at the black pool’s edge, lets her fingers curiously touch its steaming surface. The silence is broken by the dark-stone echo of faint dripping. The wind is rising, rattling the lattice of the open roof. The White Pilgrim’s back is to her as he speaks.
“The sins of Gilvaleus cost him his throne.” He fights to find his voice, hears the weakness in it that he sees in his reflection. “They preclude him ever taking it again. Sins of avarice and madness and murder that cannot be forgiven.”
And Gilvaleus heard at night the voice of Cymaris that he knew, which spoke to him as cold bitterness and said ‘Thou hast a Son, my king, who is born and raised in secret, and will be the legacy of the love and hate thou grantest me…’
“You are king,” the Golden Girl says, and in her tone, he hears that she does not understand. “Kings will kill for the sake of what is right.”
“You do not know…”
And Gilvaleus awoke in a fever, not knowing whether it was Sorcery or Dream that filled him so with dread, but even as he rose came word from Mirdza that Cymaris was dead by her own hand. So it was learned that in the time before, she had given birth to a boy whose Father she had not named, and which she had sent away with trusted servants before her end, and whose place and whereabouts where known by none now. And the name of the babe was told to Gilvaleus, who fell to dark thoughts when he heard it as ‘Astyra,’ that name of prophecy that had been his Mother’s last word to him.
“A king must slay those who stand against him,” the Golden Girl says.
The White Pilgrim shivers even in the heat of the ancient spring. Alone in the darkness. A frail old man.
“The blood of children on my hands…”
Then Gilvaleus drew upon the sight of the Sword of Kings that had shown him the treason in Cymaris’s heart, and he saw her dead and on her bier, and the child gone as the messenger had spoken it. And he felt again the moment of his Mother’s own death in his mind, and heard the fear in her voice as she spoke the name of ‘Astyra.’ Then accepting the sight of the Whitethorn, he knew that his Mother’s final word was a warning to him, and that all he had built was threatened by the babe that was the fruit of Cymaris’s betrayal, and that the peace of his new Kingdom was in peril unless that threat was faced.
“Do you know why Arsanc’s forces pursue you, child?”
“He hates my father as he hates all the companions,” she says, too easily. “His lackeys brag of it. They say he killed Fossa himself, two years past. He drove Baethala into exile and death beyond the Shieldcrest. He found where Gauracta and Ilfamor and Lutain were burned and interred after Marthai, then he scattered their bones for the dogs.”
The shadow twists through the White Pilgrim, squeezes tight his heart. They are old names, the memories of them burning like cinders in his eyes.
“My father was the last,” the Golden Girl says, “and his burial place is what Arsanc seeks, but he will not find it through me.”
“No, child.”
And through endless long days, Gilvaleus sent forth the sight of the Whitethorn to seek the babe that Cymaris sent away, but the power of her own sorcery had bred with the subtle treason of her heart and mind, and the boy Astyra was hidden from even the sight of the Sword of Kings. Then came the turn of the third year of the Peace of Gilvaleus, and the return of Aelathar and all her Healers, and Nàlwyr her servant leading them.
He rises slowly, feels where the heat turns the pain at his leg to a duller ache. The pain at his heart still burns, no balm that can cure it. He pulls himself to the slick stone steps and ascends carefully, claiming his robes where he left them.
“Against you, it is a darker revenge that Arsanc seeks,” the White Pilgrim says. And though he tries to push the shadow of memory away, he feels it weave around him as dark mist and chill light, drawing forth the dreams like venom from a wound.
And that High Spring was the most joyous celebration of peace across all Gracia, but the mood of Gilvaleus at Mitrost was dark, for in both Aelathar and Nàlwyr upon their return, he felt a change in the love they granted to their High King. And using the sight of the Whitethorn, the High King saw for himself the secret ardor that had developed between his Captain and his Queen, and the darkness of Cymaris’s betrayal paled beneath the pain of this new deceit. And the vision of the Whitethorn counseled patience, for Gilvaleus knew that more years would pass before Cymaris’s betrayal could be met, and he knew what must be done.
He tries to not think on these things anymore.
“The Black Duke calls your father the butcher of children,” the White Pilgrim says. “I do not know yet why it tasks him, but in the fifth year of Gilvaleus’s reign, your father went in secret to a Reimari refuge on a mission of murder. The high king believed that the prophecy that Irthna had made held the kingdom, held the future of Gracia in its grasp. Only by the death of the king’s-bastard Astyra before he came of age might the doom of Gilvaleus be undone. For the sake of the kingdom, Nàlwyr went to ensure that the child king’s-bastard would be slain.”
“You lie…”
The new anger in the Golden Girl’s voice has the edge of splintered stone. She is away from the black water, bootsteps ringing out loud as she paces to the White Pilgrim, the steel-blue gaze holding him fast. “My father was no murderer. My father was the soul of the honor of your court. Nothing could ha
ve made him take such a path.”
The White Pilgrim does not remember the Golden Girl standing, does not remember having dressed again. The shadow roots deep in his mind, feeds the dreams in the name of the pain he cannot fight.
But in the end, the sight of the Whitethorn found the boy Astyra whose name was as a wound in the High King’s mind for long years now, and saw him dwelling in a refuge that was called Stondreva, where the Sons and Daughters of nobles were schooled. Then Gilvaleus called Nàlwyr to his side and found the words that had burned in him for just as long, and speaking, said ‘Thou art my Captain and my friend, and I know the love thou bearest me. But also I know of the deceit thou weavest with thy love for my Queen, and by my name and the power of the Whitethorn by which I rule, I call on thee to pay the price for thy betrayal.’
“An order from his king would have.”
The Golden Girl’s eyes are bright in magical lamplight, blue and gold like the summer sunrise. An age in those eyes beyond the paltry years of her childhood.
“An order from his king did,” the White Pilgrim says.
And when Gilvaleus gave his order, Nàlwyr fell to his knees and despaired, and pleaded innocence in the matter of the love that Gilvaleus had seen pass from him to the Queen and back again. But the Whitethorn saw through the deceit of his friend, whose lies cut as deep as any blade, and Gilvaleus ordered Nàlwyr to stand before him as a Knight, and his Captain wept, and pleaded ‘What dark counselor hath directed thee so?’ But Gilvaleus only turned away, and Nàlwyr was broken by the will of the Whitethorn and the weight of his betrayal, and determined that Gilvaleus’s will be done.
“Gilvaleus believed that your father loved Aelathar the queen, and he was consumed by madness as he watched the love grow between them. Knowing that he loved both too much to send either from his side.”
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Page 33