The Crimson Queen

by Alec Hutson

  She laughed again. “The girls think we make them uncomfortable because even Ama’s light isn’t as satisfying as the touch of a beautiful woman.”

  “Sacrilege. Best keep such musings from the mendicant’s ears. I’d hate to have you all branded as witches. Now, what else happened?” The emperor watched her closely, hoping for a reaction. “Oh, yes, a sorcerous assassin penetrated the imperial audience chamber, right under the noses of the Pure. Ama Himself crashed a heron through a window to warn His beloved emperor of the danger. Here is my memento from the battle.” Gerixes held up his hand, showing his concubine the livid, red scar.

  Alyanna took his hand and brought it to her lips. Her tongue played with the wound, and he winced. She smiled wickedly when she saw this.

  “Did you hear me? I said there was an attempt on my life today.”

  “I did, Divine Lord. But I know that no harm will ever come to the chosen of Ama. A higher power watches over you.”

  “Your faith is admirable,” the emperor replied, not bothering to keep the annoyance from his voice.

  His concubine laughed and pulled him closer.

  The cairn would be simple, as she had been. Just a pile of rocks pulled from the stone wall that meandered around their farm, marking where she lay among the roots of the apple tree she’d loved so much. In seasons to come, her body would turn to soil and provide nourishment for the land, a final gesture for a place that had given her – given them – so much.

  Jan sat back on his haunches and raised his face to the sky, squinting at the sunlight filtering through the latticework of branches above. Burying her had taken all morning; the earth was soft, almost as if it welcomed receiving her body, but despite the cool early-summer day his tunic still clung to him, and his hands ached from prying loose and carrying the stones that would mark where she rested. His fingers made patterns in the loose dirt. So strange to think that she lay only a few feet below him, her face mercifully free of the pain that had ravaged her these last few weeks. What would he do now? He could not stay here – twenty years of piled memories would prove too heavy a burden. Also, he was awake again. This was no fit place for an immortal.

  What had brought him back to himself, after all these years? Had it been her death? Perhaps, but the awakening had not happened when the last trickle of life seeped away as he clutched her close, nor in the long hours afterwards when grief had consumed him utterly. It had come as a shock, in the very early morning as he lay beside her body; he could only compare it to being thrown sleeping into a fast-running, ice-cold mountain stream. One moment he had been Janus Balensorn, a crofter for nearly two decades on the lands of Ser Willes len Maliksorn, and the next he was Jan, the Bard. Again.

  Frenzied barking interrupted his thoughts. He turned to find a piebald mare ambling toward his farmhouse, being challenged by his sheephound, Dragon. Jan whistled sharply, and Dragon bounded his way, tongue lolling and eyes bright with excitement, apparently content with having alerted his master to the intruder’s approach.

  “Good dog,” Jan said, scratching hard behind his ears.

  The visitor turned his horse toward the apple tree, and Jan recognized Robert Simeonsorn, the miller from the village. He looked much older than Jan remembered, having gained a steep widow’s peak and a layer of paunch. How many years had it been?

  “Janus Balensorn,” Robert said, sliding from his horse. “I would say good day to you, but from the looks of it this day cannot be good.”

  Jan stood, wiping clean his hands, and stepped forward to clasp the miller’s forearm. “Aye, you’ve the truth of it. But it’s good to see you, Robert.”

  The miller shook his head, staring at the stones scattered about the grave. “A sad day. My nana always said that tragedy comes upon like a summer storm, when you least expect and fiercer than you bargained.”

  There was something in his tone. “What else has happened?” Jan asked.

  A shadow passed across the miller’s face. “Later,” Robert said, squatting beside the mounded dirt. “After we finish. This is Elinor, yes?”

  Jan crouched beside him, his eyes burning. “Aye, it’s her. It was the weeping. Stole into her this spring; at first we thought it was just a chill, but then came the red tears . . . she was always a sickly thing. Goodwife Roesia tried her best . . .”

  A calloused hand clapped his shoulder. “We all go to the light, Janus. Ama will preserve her, and she’ll be waiting for you in the golden city when your days are finished.”

  Jan nodded his appreciation at the miller’s words, and then together they bent to the task of building Elinor’s cairn. At first Robert was silent, no doubt out of respect for Jan’s loss, but after some gentle prodding he opened up about some of the happenings in the village since Jan had last ventured out of the hills. A new smith had set up his forge in the square, giving old Gwynn some competition; there had been deaths and births, a wandering minstrel who played not half so well as Jan, Robert assured him, but like Jan had stolen the hearts of more than a few young lasses in town; and a nasty dispute between a few farmers over a straying boundary stone that had ended with a broken arm and the admonishments of a very angry mendicant.

  “More or less,” Robert said as he set the final stone atop the pile, “the same goings on as every season, every year. Until last night.” The miller wiped a hand across his suddenly pale face, leaving a smear of dirt. “I’ve been trying not to think of it . . . but I rode out here to tell you and Elinor, and the others that live around these parts, and I have to do my duty, Ama protect me . . .”

  Now it was Jan’s turn to reach out and comfort Robert. “Tell me what happened.”

  The miller swallowed hard. “You’ve been out of the village for a few years, so you might not have heard, but Ser Wille’s youngest, Tristan, had gotten himself knighted, and had been entering into a few tournaments, the big one they hold every Husking Day down in Tellindale, a few others. Had some success in the lists, too. Pleased his da right well, especially with the eldest choosing to go study in that Reliquary out west.” Robert tugged on the ends of his drooping mustache, his agitation plain. “Anyway, young Tristan had been at the joust held to celebrate Lady Isabel coming of age; he’d been expected back today or tomorrow . . .”

  “And? Was he killed in the tourney?”

  “No, no. He left the grounds all right, even looked like he’d won a nice suit of plate off one of the Fen lords. He was almost home, must have woken up at daybreak to surprise his da, and . . . and something came upon him on the forest road, over those there hills.”

  Just before daybreak. “Something?”

  “It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t me who found him. That was Hewan, drivin’ his goats down to the brook. But I saw later, after we’d calmed Hewan down and made him lead us back. There was blood everywhere.” Robert rubbed his face again; his hands were shaking now. “Not much left of young Tristan. He’d been cut apart. But not like with swords. In my . . . in my mill we keep a lot of cats; can’t have mice burrowing in the flour, getting into the bread. Sometimes the cats don’t eat what they kill; maybe they’re full, I don’t know. But they don’t just kill the poor bastards. They take them apart, scatter them around. My Dolores is always screaming when she finds a tiny little head in her shoe. That’s . . . that’s what it was like. And not just the men. Horses, too.”

  “How many men?”

  “Three. Tristan, his squire, and one of the freesworn knights that lives up at the keep. All with swords, though none drew their blades.”

  Three men, mounted and armed, and none had fought back? Jan sat back heavily, staring out into the dense bracken before them. The forest suddenly looked much more forbidding.

  “The mendicant has already declared it a demon’s handiwork and sent word to the east asking for the Pure to come and track down whatever did it. Ser Willes has locked himself in his keep, won’t even let the townsfolk in, and
there’s many who want to be behind some stout walls right now. Dolores begged me to stay, but I thought . . . I thought you folks out here should know that there’s something terrible in these woods. Probably not hungry anymore . . . but like I said, it didn’t look like that was what it was after in the first place.”

  “You’re a good man, Robert, and brave. Not many would have come.”

  The miller gave him a shaky grin. “It’s the dog, actually.” He reached out to pat Dragon, who had curled up between them. “Animals know when something’s not right. If there was a demon about he’d have his hackles up, I’m sure.”

  “There’s truth to that,” Jan said, thumping Dragon hard on his side.

  They sat together in silence for a moment, and then Robert stood, dusting himself off. “Well, there’s another three homesteads I need to visit before dusk comes, and I’ve already spent too much time here.”

  Jan climbed to his feet and gripped Robert’s arm again. “Thank you.”

  The miller shrugged away his words. “Anyone who walks in the Light should do the same. And to be true with you, I had a bit of a debt to discharge, as well. You might not have seen it, ‘cause certainly Elinor didn’t, but I loved her deeply when I was younger. Course, I was just a pimply baker’s boy, and she was our Queen of Summer, fresh-flowered and pretty as the dawn. I used to imagine winning her heart, though I never truly envisioned how I would so such a thing.” Robert chuckled sadly. “And then you arrived, with your honey voice and lordly manners. Everyone thought you must have been castle-bred, some lord’s get, yet no-one looked down on you as they did other bastards, even the most high-born ones. All us boys loved your songs and the way you carried that sword, but we hated how the girls watched you moon-eyed, and sometimes late at night I’d slip from my cot and fence with the shadows, pretending it was you.” The miller smoothed his mustache, shaking his head. “Took me years to forgive you for stealing her away. But I saw how you doted on her, and loved her like I had. And now here we are, twenty years on, standing over her grave. Me old and fat, and you not looking a whisker older than the day you wandered into town.”

  Jan caught the miller’s arm as he turned away. “Robert, I’m leaving. There’s not much for me here, with Elinor gone. I want you to help dispense what I have among the needy. I have some good iron pots and shearing tools, Elinor’s loom, Dragon and my sheep. I’ve settled with Ser Willes on the land until the spring, and he’ll be needing a new tenant.”

  “Aye, that’s generous of you, Janus.” Robert reached down to ruffle Dragon’s fur. “You know, I could use this pup to keep those cats in line down at the mill.”

  Jan smiled. “I’d be pleased to know he had a home with you. Let me talk with him.” Crouching beside Dragon, Jan took the dog’s head in his hands, staring into his soft, brown eyes. “Dog, Robert here is your new master. Serve him as you’ve served me, and I’m sure they’ll be plenty of meat-bones in your future.” Jan extended a sorcerous filament, reaching inside Dragon’s mind to replace his loyalty toward him with the miller, linking all the good things in the dog’s world – food and play, warmth and petting – with Robert’s smell and sound. Such bindings were infinitely more complex with humans . . . even the greatest of the old masters would have had trouble doing the same to a person, but a dog’s mind was refreshingly simple. Jan had found that among all creation, only dogs and children offered unconditional love – the crofter Janus might have thought differently, but Janus had died this morning. At the same moment, he suspected, as poor Ser Tristan.

  And that needed to be investigated. After Robert had left on his piebald mare, Dragon loping along beside the horse, Jan went back into his farmhouse and began collecting provisions. A few loaves of brown bread, cured mutton from the larder, a wheel of cheese, and a sack of ghostcap mushrooms Elinor had gathered the previous spring. He traded his doeskin shoes for traveler’s boots of hard, gnarled leather, and strapped his lute across his back.

  Then he returned outside and went to where an ancient elm spread spidery limbs over the gate to the small pasture where his flock grazed. He knelt and began digging, and after a few minutes he had pulled from the shallow hole a wrapped bundle. Jan unwound the rotted cloth, his fingers tingling as he brushed warm metal. Steel rippled in the sunlight, flashing with silvery runes, and the fist-sized fire opal set into the hilt burned like a frozen flame. Despite decades underground his sword Bright was just as unblemished as when it had first been forged a thousand years ago, when Jan had watched it drawn hissing from the mountain-pure waters of Nes Vaneth and struck with hammer and spell.

  He was ready now.

  The sight of the ambush had not been difficult to find. It looked like a great fist had come down from the sky and smote the land: the flattened grass was already yellowing, dried and desiccated months too early, and the trees listed away from the road, many of their branches ripped away and splintered into kindling. The bodies of Tristan and his men had been removed, but what was left of the horses remained, and Jan suspected that much of the blood splashed about had once flowed through human veins.

  There was a palpable sense of wrongness, obvious even without touching his magic. The air was cold and heavy, fetid with the smell of death and the bitter, coppery tang of blood. And when he unclenched his Talent . . . Jan shuddered. Dark sorcery had been unleashed here, something he had never sensed before. Or he thought he hadn’t. His memory was . . . scattered, riddled with holes. He remembered his life as Janus, and a decade of wandering before that, but the time beyond was shrouded, and the harder he strained to seize his past the farther it receded. The forging of his sword was etched sharp in his mind, but little else. Some fragments floated through the mist – he stood on a balcony as morning climbed out from distant peaks, his arms around his lover’s slim waist, gazing out over a great city of twisted stone. An obsidian-scaled dragon was silhouetted against the sun, answering the call of a bone-carved horn blown by a tiny waif of a girl, her black hair streaming in the wind. And women, many women, in different dress, from peasant blouses to silken robes, but all tall and willowy, with hair of spun gold – and they all bore more than a passing resemblance to his lost Elinor.

  It was as if he had lived a hundred lifetimes, but all were as insubstantial as dreams. Jan shook his head and tried to focus. Puzzling out the riddles of his past would have to wait.

  What had attacked these men? He crouched beside a severed horse leg. The wound had been cauterized, sealed shut, but that must have happened after all the blood had been drained and splashed about like a child playing with paints. And where were the horse’s heads? Jan ranged the edges of the ambush, searching among the ferns, but it wasn’t until birdsong made him look up that he found them. Staring down at him from where they had been wedged among the highest branches of a great sentinel pine were the heads of a pair of destriers, warhorses bred for combat, and that of a smaller garron, all of their mouths twisted open in frozen death cries.

  It was intelligent, this thing. And sadistic. But it had not been subtle. A trail led east, easily followed . . . almost too easily. Jan’s eyes wandered to the knife-blade peaks of the Bones, some already dusted with snow, others still clear. Was it there, having retreated back to the depths of the mountains, or beyond, in Menekar? And did he sense something else beneath the creature’s pungent spoor, a sweeter, more familiar scent that tickled at his mind? He concentrated, willing up a name to match with the feeling, and grudgingly it came, echoing up from the well of his memories, a single word, meaningless now, but he could tell that once hearing it would have stirred great passions within him . . .

  Alyanna.

  “You all right, lad?”

  Keilan blinked, surfacing from his thoughts. He turned to look at Pelos seated beside him and forced a smile.

  “Yes. I was just . . . just daydreaming.”

  The fishmonger sucked on his teeth and snapped the reins, spurring his two old nag
s to trot faster. Keilan had to grab the wooden railing to keep himself from bouncing out of the wagon and joining the men striding along the path beside them. “Eh. Usually a look like that on a boy means only one of two things. So which is it: a fight, or a pretty girl?”

  Neither, in truth. Keilan had actually been considering that last lingering look the mendicant had given him a few days ago, but he couldn’t discuss such a thing with Pelos. That’s about all he’d been thinking about ever since it had happened, and each evening when they’d returned to the village from the beach he’d been expecting to find . . . something. What, exactly? The mendicant, standing in front of a stake, with the village all gathered around to watch him burn?

  He was being foolish. No mendicant would take the accusations of a child seriously. But still . . . that look . . .

  “Ah, it was a fight,” Keilan finally said.

  Pelos nodded sagely. “Thought so. That bruise – someone hit you good.”

  Keilan reflexively touched his face. The pain had almost gone, but his cheek was still swollen from where his cousin had struck him. That whole morning now seemed like a dream, and he’d barely given it any thought since then, overshadowed as it was by what had happened when he and Sella had returned to the village.

  “One of the other fishermen’s boys?”

  Keilan nodded. “My cousin. Davos’s son.”

  “The fat one?” Pelos cleared his throat noisily and spat over the side of the wagon. “Did he say something about your mother?” The fishmonger grunted when he saw Keilan’s look of surprise. “Not hard to figure out, lad. Your mother was different, like you are. And in a place like this, being different can be hard.”

  Pelos’s expression suddenly turned serious, and he gripped Keilan’s arm. He was surprisingly strong for an old man. “Listen to me, lad. I knew your mother for many years. We would talk, sometimes for hours, on the beach waiting for your father to return with his catch. Your mother . . . she was filled with light. She was too bright for this place. You and your father kept her here, but she wasn’t meant to be a fisherman’s wife. And you’re not meant to be a fisherman’s son.”