Raven's Shadow rd-1

by Patricia Briggs

  “It’s faster if I start with the Path,” said Tier after thinking about it for a minute. “The rest of the story should fall out of that.” Briefly he outlined the information Telleridge and Myrceria had given him.

  Phoran stopped him. “They kill the Traveler wizards for power, these wizards who wear black robes?”

  Tier nodded. “So I’m told. I’ve only met two people—three with you—since I was brought here.” He thought the ladies in the bath didn’t count. “I haven’t actually seen any of this for myself.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you are doing here,” said Phoran. “Or who you are, other than someone who fought under Gerant in the last war.”

  “I am a farmer who occasionally sings for a few coppers at the local tavern in Redern,” Tier said. “I usually spend the winter months trapping for furs. I was on my way home. I have a vague memory of seeing a group of strangers, and then I awoke in this cell. Telleridge—that’s the man I told you about—”

  “Telleridge?” said Phoran. “I know him, though I didn’t know he was a wizard. Did he tell you why they wanted you enough to take you from Redern?” asked Phoran. Then a strange expression came over his face. “Is that the Redern that belongs to the Sept of Leheigh?”

  “Yes,” Tier agreed.

  “Avar?” said Phoran almost to himself.

  Avar, Tier recalled, was the given name of the new Sept, the new Sept who was supposed to be so influential with the Emperor.

  “Is Avar a member of this Path?”

  Tier shrugged. “I don’t know. The only two I’ve met by name are Telleridge and Myrceria—and I don’t think she’d be considered a member.”

  Phoran got to his feet and began pacing. “Why you?” he asked again. “Why did they go all the way to Redern to find you? You aren’t a Traveler, not if you’re a farmer in Redern who used to be a solder.”

  “Because I have a magical talent usually associated with the Travelers,” replied Tier. Preempting the next question, he began telling Phoran what he knew about the Orders.

  Phoran held up a hand. “Enough,” he said. “I believe you. Let’s get you out of here, then you can explain anything you feel necessary.”

  Tier followed him to the threshold, but when he leaned forward to step through the door, white-hot pain convulsed his body and a shock of magic threw him back several feet into the cell.

  “What was that?” said Phoran, startled.

  “He is bound,” said the Memory. It sounded like a crow’s mating call or the rattle of dry bones.

  Tier wobbled to his feet. “It talks?”

  The Emperor looked at the Memory. “Sometimes. But this is the first time it’s ever volunteered information. Are you all right?”

  Tier nodded. “Your Memory is right. There must be some sort of magic here I cannot cross.”

  “Can you do something with it? Didn’t you say that you have magic?”

  “He is bound,” said the Memory again.

  “Stop that,” said Tier, a command that usually worked when Jes began to get too creepy. He turned to Phoran. “I don’t have the kind of magic that could counter this, and they have managed to keep me from what little useful magic I do have. It looks like I’m stuck here.”

  Phoran nodded. “Very well.” He came back into the room and shut the door. “There are wizards who are supposed to serve me, or serve the Empire at least, but I don’t know if any of them are the ones who belong to the Path. Find out who the Path’s wizards are, and then maybe I can find a wizard to undo this.”

  He gave Tier an apologetic look. “I am more emperor in name than in reality or I could just order your release. The twentieth—nineteenth by common reckoning—had real power.”

  Tier grinned, “That’s because he’d ordered the death of fifteen Septs by the time he was your age and accounted for another three or four personally.”

  “I’m rather finicky in my food choices,” said Phoran with mock sadness. “I’ll never manage to be properly terrifying.”

  “You wouldn’t have to suck the marrow from their bones the way the Nineteen—ah, excuse me—Twenty did,” said Tier solemnly. “I suspect a cooked heart or two would do just fine.”

  “I don’t eat heart,” said Phoran firmly. “Though I suppose I could feed it to the grieving heir—that might have a similar effect.”

  Tier and Phoran gave each other a look of mutual approval.

  “I already owe you a favor,” said Phoran, “but your experience is different than my own. I’d like your opinion on my problem.” He waved at the Memory.

  “I am, always, your servant, my emperor,” Tier was rather pleased to find that he meant it.

  “For the past three months,” Phoran began, “I’ve had this creature. Not that it follows me all the time, you understand. Usually, it just visits me once a night.” He smiled grimly and sat down on the bed.

  Tier followed his example and collapsed on the other end of the bed. He should have waited until the Emperor bid him sit, but between whatever happened during the time he couldn’t remember and the jolt the doorway had given him, his joints were all but jelly.

  “Sometimes when I can’t sleep,” Phoran said, “I go exploring the shut-off places in the palace. I have this key,” he took one out of his pocket. “It’s supposed to open every door in the palace. It didn’t do yours, but it opened the turnkey’s box that had your key in it.”

  He put it away and began his story again. “Anyway, one night a few months ago I was wandering through the Kaore wing—that’s one of the ones my father shut down, I’m told. It’s usually pretty boring: long corridors with identical rooms on either side, that sort of thing. But this time I heard some noise at the end of one of the corridors.

  “No one’s supposed to be there—but sometimes people are. I sneaked down to a door that was ajar.” He pulled the velvet fabric of his pants and absently rubbed it between thumb and index finger.

  “There were a number of people in dark robes with hoods over their heads. They were standing in a loose circle, chanting. A seventh man was kneeling, blindfolded and bound in the center. If I’d known what they were going to do, I’d have tried to stop it somehow. But by the time I saw the knife it was too late. One of the robed men had already slit the bound man’s throat.”

  Phoran got off the bed and began to pace restlessly. “There was blood everywhere—I hadn’t realized… It was too late for the dead man, and I thought that they might not be too excited at having a witness so I left as quickly as I could. The Memory came to me the next night.”

  Phoran looked at the creature solemnly, then sank back onto the bed and began rolling up his sleeve. “It comes to me every night,” he said, showing Tier marks on the inside of his wrist that climbed in fading scars to the hollow of his elbow.

  “After it feeds it tells me that in return it owes me the answer to a question. Usually its answers aren’t very useful. Tonight I asked if it knew someone who could tell me something about the Sept of Gerant’s lands and it brought me here.”

  Tier said, “You think that you interrupted them killing their last Traveler prisoner.” He considered it. “I think you are right—how many groups of dark-robed men do you have going around killing people in the palace?”

  “There might be as many as five or ten,” he said. “But not that manage to summon or create something like this.” He pointed at his dark comrade. “This is wizardry.”

  Tier nodded slowly. “I’m not a wizard, but I’ve dealt with them. If this was something that might result from their meddling, I’d think they’d be careful that it would not attach itself to them. Maybe some magic. That would mean that you were the only one there it could attach itself to.”

  He got off the bed and walked closer to the Memory. His eyes wouldn’t quite focus on it, reminding him forcibly of the way Jes could fade into the shadows when he wanted to.

  “How did you know that I could answer the Emperor’s question tonight?” asked Tier.


  The thing shifted restlessly. “You fed me true,” it said at last. “I know you as I know Phoran, twenty-seventh emperor of that name.”

  “I fed you?” Tier asked.

  “ ‘Numberless were the heroes who fell,’ ” whispered the Memory in a voice quite different than it had been using: it was no longer without inflection. The change was remarkable.

  “You were my listener?” said Tier.

  “I was Kerine to your Red Ernave,” agreed the Memory.

  “What else are you?” Tier took a step nearer to it.

  “I am death,” it said and was gone.

  “Did you understand what it meant?” asked Phoran.

  Tier rubbed his hands together lightly. “Only a bit of it,” he said. “Apparently it feeds on more than just blood. I gave it a story and it took more than I offered—which is how it knew that I’d been one of Gerant’s commanders.”

  He’d invoked magic in that story—more magic than he’d ever brought forth before—and it had only been shortly after that when Telleridge had informed him that his magic was contained. He’d thought that Telleridge had meant that they’d taken his magic away—but perhaps it was more subtle than that.

  “Would you tell me a lie?” he asked Phoran.

  “My stallion is cow-hocked,” he said immediately, apparently unfazed by the abrupt change in subject. “What are you doing?”

  “Well,” said Tier. “I misunderstood what Telleridge meant when he said they had contained my magic. I can tell if you lie—but not Telleridge or Myrceria.”

  “Your magic works, but not on the members of the Path,” Phoran said.

  “So it seems.”

  “I have two more requests before I go,” said Phoran. “First, I ask that you not tell anyone about the Memory.” He gave Tier another bleak smile. “It’s more than a social problem for me, you know. If a whisper of the Memory got out I’d face a headsman’s axe. The Empire cannot forget the lessons learned from the Shadowed: the Emperor must be free of magic.”

  “Without your permission, no one will hear it from my lips,” promised Tier.

  “Would you see if you can find out if your Sept, Avar the Sept of Leheigh, is a member of the Secret Path?” He sighed. “Telleridge is… a spider who avoids the light of day while he spins his webs and sends his friends and foes whirling in deadly earnest, unaware whose threads pull them this way and that. If he is involved with the Secret Path, then they are a threat to me and vice versa. I need to know who I can trust.”

  “If I can discover it,” Tier agreed, then gave his emperor a wry grin. “Since I don’t have any choice about staying, I might as well make myself useful.”

  He slept for a while after Phoran left. He had no idea how long because his cell allowed for no daylight, just the endless glow of the stones that lit his room.

  Longing for home brought him to his feet. Frustration sent him pacing. He hadn’t been able to ask if Phoran could get a message to Seraph. His tongue wouldn’t shape the words.

  By Cormorant and Owl, I bind you that you will not ask anyone to help you escape… Seraph would help him escape if she could. He supposed that was enough to invoke Telleridge’s magic.

  If Seraph knew where to find him… but she did not. She probably thought him dead after all this time.

  He probably would die without seeing her again: there was something in the arrogance of Telleridge that told Tier that many Travelers had died here.

  Tier closed his eyes and rested his face against the cool stone wall. Without the distraction of sight, he could pull her into his heart’s thoughts. Owl memory, she called it, when he was able to recall conversations held months before. Gifted, his grandfather said, when he could sing a song after the first time he’d heard it. Blessed, he thought now, visualizing the pale-faced child Seraph had been the first time he’d seen her. Blessed to have his memories to keep in his heart in this place.

  In his mind’s eye, he built her face as it had been, little by little, loving the curve of her shoulder and the odd pale color of her hair.

  Proud, he thought, she had been so proud. It was in the stubborn set of her chin, raised in defiance of the men in that tavern. He could see the bruise on her wrist where the innkeeper had grabbed her and yanked her out of bed.

  He’d been intrigued by her then, he thought as he had before. In the clear light of his memory he could see how young she’d been, little more than a child, and yet they’d been married less than a season later.

  Eschewing the luxuries his cell now offered, Tier sat on the floor and set his back against the wall. He remembered the very moment that he knew he loved her.

  Two days after Jes was born, Tier came back from the barn to find Seraph sitting on the end of the bed, back straight as a board, with Jes held protectively in her arms.

  “I have something to say to you,” she said, as welcoming as an angry hedgehog.

  He took off his coat and hung it up. “All right,” he’d said, wondering how he’d managed to offend her this time.

  Her eyes narrowed, she told him that their son was a Guardian. She explained how difficult Jes would find it to maintain a balance between daytime and nighttime personalities.

  “If he were a girl, he would stand a better chance,” she said in the cold, clear voice she only used when she was really upset. “Male Guardians seldom maintain their balance after puberty. If they become maddened, they will kill anyone who crosses their path except for those in their charge. Once that happens, they must be killed because they cannot be confined.”

  Jes began to fuss and she set him against her shoulder and rocked him gently—keeping Tier at a distance by the force of her gaze. “I had a brother who was a Guardian, adopted from another tribe. Often Guardians are given to other clans to raise because the normal anxieties of birth parents seem to add strain to the Guardian’s burden. It is an honor to raise a Guardian child, and no clan would refuse to take him.”

  Give up his son? The shock of the suggestion ripped cleanly through dismay that had encased him as he realized the terrible thing that the gods had laid upon his small son. How could she think that he’d entertain a suggestion that they throw Jes away because he was too much trouble? How could she consider deserting her child?

  She wouldn’t. Not she. She who fought demons for people she didn’t even know, would never, ever, shrink at anything that would threaten her second family.

  “How old was your Guardian brother when he died?” asked Tier finally.

  “Risovar was thirty,” she said, her hands fluttering restlessly over Jes, as if she wanted to clutch him close, but was afraid she might hurt him if she did. “He was among the first who died of the plague.”

  “Then you know how it is done,” Tier said. “Jes will stay with us, and you will teach me how to raise a Guardian who will die of ripe old age.”

  Her face had come alive then, and he saw what it had cost her to be honest with him. When he cradled his family against him, mother and child, she’d whispered, “I’d have killed anyone who would have tried to take him.”

  “Me, too,” Tier had said fiercely into her moon-colored hair. No one would ever separate them.

  “Me, too,” said Tier, in his cell in the palace at Taela.

  How best to weather this captivity? The answers came to him in Gerant’s dry tenor. Know your enemy. Know what they want so you know where to expect their next attack. Discover their strengths and avoid them. Find their weaknesses and exploit them with your strengths. Knowledge is a better weapon than a sword.

  He smiled affably when Myrceria entered his room.

  “If you would come with me, sir,” she said. “We’ll make you ready for presentation. After the ceremony you’ll be given the freedom of the Eyrie and all the pleasures it can provide you.”

  The women who’d tried to bathe him once before were back in the bathing pool, and this time Myrceria wouldn’t let him send them out. They scrubbed, combed, shaved, trimmed, and ignored his blushes and prote
sts.

  When one of the women started after his hair, Myrceria caught her hand, “No, leave it long. We’ll braid it and it will look properly exotic.”

  They persuaded him into court clothing, the like of which he’d have never willingly put on. He might actually have refused to wear them, even with his resolution to be a meek and mild guest while he gathered knowledge of his enemy, if it weren’t for the fear in their eyes. He could see that, if they didn’t turn him out pretty as a lady’s mare, it wouldn’t be him that suffered. So he protested and made rude comments, but he wore the silly things.

  There was a polished metal mirror embedded in the wall, and the women pushed and shoved him until he stood in front of it.

  Baggy red velvet trousers, tight at waist and ankles, were half-concealed by a tunic that hung straight from shoulder to knees. From the weight of it, the tunic was real cloth of gold. Under the tunic, his shirt was blood-red silk embroidered with metallic gold thread. They’d shaved his face smooth, then oiled his hair with something that left flakes of metal in it that caught the light as he moved. Then they’d braided it with gold and red cords that gradually replaced his own hair so the braid hung down to his hips, where it ended in gold and red tassels. On his feet were gold slippers encrusted with bits of red glass. At least he hoped it was glass.

  After looking at the full effect, he hung his head and closed his eyes.

  “Lassies, if my wife ever saw me like this she’d never let me live it down.”

  Myrceria tapped him playfully with one manicured finger. “You look handsome, admit it. We did a good job, ladies, although he wasn’t so bad to start out.”

  Tier looked at himself in the mirror again. If he looked carefully, he could see how the outfit might have been inspired by Traveler’s garments. They wore the loose pants and the knee-length tunic—but one of the things that Seraph liked about Rederni clothes was the bright colors. Her own people wore mostly undyed fabrics or earth tones.