The Pagan Night

by Tim Akers

  The hymn came and went as the winds shifted and the chorus drifted, but Ian was sure he could pick out the chords of summer mixed with autumn’s melancholy, and on the edges of the harmony was the dirge of winter, the first trace notes of the coming court just starting to weave themselves into the hymn.

  “Gabriel Halverdt is a painfully holy man,” Malcolm said, marking his son’s attention. “He employs the finest choir outside of Heartsbridge. Perhaps finer.”

  “I had forgotten about the hymn,” Ian said.

  “Hard thing to forget, boy, but you’ll stop hearing it after a while.”

  “No,” Ian said. The hymn was weaving its way into his mind, even as they moved toward the gates. “I don’t think I will.” The city gate loomed just ahead of them, but Malcolm directed the column away from it, to the tourney grounds, which lay outside the walls to the west. The knights who had come with them, and many of the men-at-arms, unraveled themselves from the caravan.

  Ian could see a canvas town, several villages’ worth of tents huddled in the shadow of the city walls. The sounds coming from that direction were louder, happier, somehow more joyous than anything coming from the city proper. The perimeter of the tourney grounds was guarded by a rope fence, hung with the icons of the summer court and blessed by clerics of Lady Strife. A number of priests of Cinder were circling the fence, checking it for doctrine and scrutinizing the icons their brothers of summer had chosen to use. Ian marked this, and leaned over to his father, pointing.

  “Do they truly need to ward against gheists this close to the Allfire?” he asked.

  “Need? No, there is no need. But the duke of Greenhall is… cautious, when it comes to gheists.”

  “He’s scared shitless of shadows,” Dugan said. “He keeps a cadre of torchbearers in his room to ward off the pagan night.”

  “Not exactly true,” Malcolm said, allowing himself a grin, “but he does spook easily. Of all the things you might fear in Greenhall, we can be sure there will be no gheists under the bed.”

  “There will be danger enough, without your pagan gods,” Beaunair called out. Ian and his father twisted to see the high elector riding slowly toward them, his shining face leaning out of the lead wagon. The priest’s column of wagons had fallen behind as soon as they left Houndhallow, creating an intentional gap. Beaunair and Blakley had agreed that they shouldn’t arrive at Greenhall hand in hand. Even their arriving on the same morning would put Halverdt on edge. The high elector waved happily to the city, the pavilion, the sky itself. “But there will be joy as well. Find the pleasure of the bright lady on the Allfire, Duke. Your task here is to join the church together.”

  “My task here is to prevent a war,” Malcolm muttered. “I’ll take my joy in that.”

  Beaunair laughed but rumbled past. At the sight of the high elector’s banners, horns sounded along the castle walls, and a general sound of welcome and joy raised up from the city.

  Malcolm snorted. “I don’t imagine they’ll be giving us the same greeting,” he said. “Come. Let’s find some peace and quiet. I’ve had enough of priests for the day.”

  Malcolm led the column to a patch of grass at the periphery of the tournament grounds. The lesser melees had already started, and the sound of pitched battle hung over the grounds as Ian and his men started to unpack. There was empty grass around them, with pavilion sites still to be filled. The Allfire was imminent, however. By the time the first lance was broken, this entire field would be full of pavilions from many of the southern houses and lesser tents for their vassals and various petty lords. There would be few Tenerran banners, despite Greenhall’s proximity to the border, and the other Tenerran pavilions would house a rougher sort of knight than the Blakleys brought to the joust.

  Once the tents were up and the pavilion festooned in the harsh black and white heraldry of House Blakley, the knights split up to find their rest. Most headed to one of the dozen makeshift taverns that ringed the tournament grounds, or into the city to try their luck with the Suhdrin women. Sir Dugan and Sir Doone wandered away to watch the early melees—these were fought entirely between unlanded lancers hoping to catch the eye of some noble house in need of a squire, or a mercenary company searching for recruits.

  Ian and his father were left alone in the breezy expanse of the pavilion. Malcolm undid the straps on his armor and let it fall onto the ground before unfolding a camp chair. He eased himself into the chair, hissing and wincing as his bulk settled into the fabric. Ian stood awkwardly by the door.

  “Father, listen…”

  “No conversation that we have goes well when it begins like that.” Malcolm rested his face in his hand and sighed. “There must be a bottle around here somewhere.”

  “A bit early, don’t you think?”

  “We are at the end of half a day in the saddle, son, and nearly a week on the road. No time is too early.”

  Ian cast through his father’s baggage, finally producing a bottle of whiskey and two tin cups. The drink tasted like burning moss in the back of his throat. They sat quietly, wincing into their cups.

  “Father,” Ian began again. “I need your permission to ride in the joust.”

  “No, you don’t,” Malcolm said.

  “Maybe,” Ian admitted. “But I want it.”

  “The joust will take any man’s mark, as long as he has his own horse and the heraldry to fly.” Malcolm tossed another finger of whiskey into his cup but then held it between his hands, rolling the cheap tin back and forth between his palms. “You have a horse. You have a name, and the honor to go along with it, and I’m fairly sure Frair Daxter taught you how to make your mark.”

  “If I enter the lists, you will bless that entry? You will toast my victories and honor my defeats?”

  “No, lad. I forbid you to enter the joust.” He drank a little, grimaced, and finished the cup. “But I am lord of Houndhallow, and we are in Greenhall. My word is not law.”

  “I won’t defy you,” Ian said sharply.

  “Good for you. Wait for next year.”

  “How old were you when you first rode in the lists?” Ian asked.

  “Two years younger than you, and at my father’s insistence. I was nearly maimed and lost my favorite horse when Ewan Thaen dipped his lance and tore a hole through her ribs.” Malcolm shook his head. “I shouldn’t have been up there.”

  “So I am two years older than you were, and twice as prepared. I ride the joust at home all the time. Sir Dugan says I’m as fine a lance as any in your service.”

  “Sir Dugan flatters his master’s son, though he’s not far wrong. As I have already said, we are not at Houndhallow.” Malcolm leaned back in his chair, old joints creaking, back aching. “This is Greenhall, and I will not have my son ride his first joust under Halverdt’s baneful eye.”

  “Then why am I here?” Ian snapped. “Why did you bring me along on this fool’s mission?”

  “This fool’s mission was brought to us by the church, and blessed by Strife. If we fail in this, your first lance may splinter in a heavy charge, rather than in the lists.” Malcolm sighed. “Though that may be no less deadly.”

  “You think it’s dangerous?”

  “What I know is that farmers along the Tallow are robbed more often than the countryside has thieves. That Sir Calmorte and Sir Hamon beat a Tenerran boy near to death when he dared strike them at the Frostnight duels, and that the boy’s father took it upon himself to burn Calmorte’s tent to embers by morning.” Malcolm rubbed his face and tossed the empty cup clattering to the ground. “I know that every time Tenerran knights gather to bless the gods and turn the seasons at Halverdt’s court, they’re half as likely to end the week in a drunken brawl.”

  “I’m not afraid of a fight,” Ian said.

  “Neither am I, but fights become wars sometimes, and I’d rather not be the start of one.” Malcolm raised himself slowly to his feet. “Enter the archery contest. Wrestle with your friends. Flirt. But there will be no joust for you.”


  “Flirting with Gabriel Halverdt’s daughter would do just as much to start a war, don’t you think?”

  “Well…” Malcolm shrugged. “That might be worth it. Now go. I need to rest for a moment before I speak to Gabriel Halverdt.”

  “If I can’t join the joust, then I don’t understand why I came at all. What’s the point?” Ian asked. He rushed out of the tent, the flaps billowing behind him.

  Malcolm sighed and sat back down. The heat of his son’s anger filtered through the room.

  “Because a son stands by his father’s side,” Malcolm said quietly. “And if it does come to a fight, I would rather have your sword beside me than any other.”

  * * *

  Ian spent the rest of that afternoon cleaning the armor he was convinced he would never get to use. All that hard work, close on the heels of his long journey, left him sapped and sour by the time the evensong mingled with the choir’s constant hymn.

  Most of the host returned to the camp just long enough to change out of the clothes in which they had traveled, before heading once again into the city. Malcolm never reappeared from his visit to the castle, so Ian was left in an empty tent as dusk passed into night. Restless despite his fatigue, and too hungry to take the time to wrestle a meal from their supplies, he buckled a blade to his belt and went into the torch-lit lanes of the tournament city.

  The air smelled of incense, ale and sizzling meat. The lanes, marked by rope lines and already muddy from traffic, were filled with crowds that flowed between the tents. They were vibrantly dressed in the colors of summer, they were happy and loud, though most of them smelled like they had been living in the forest for the last month. There was an air of desperate joy to the festivities. The Allfire was Lady Strife’s highest day, the longest sun before the slow descent toward winter’s harrowing. Most of the celebrants were determined to squeeze every last drop of joy from the season.

  Ian paused at a food cart and purchased a hot pie of steaming meat and onions, then found his way to the melee grounds. The last skirmish of the day was winding up, the shadowy figures at the center of the field struggling in the flickering light of the dozen torches. Fatigue made them move with dream-like slowness, battering at shields and helms with blunted swords, the armored men and women staggering back to fall gracelessly to the ground. It looked to be a hard fight, mud and shadow combining to give the combatants an otherworldly appearance, like soldiers made of earth and arcane power.

  Ian was just finishing with his pie when another figure, a man who had been walking around the outside of the melee, noticed him and walked over. In the shadow and his armor, it was some time before Ian recognized Martin Roard. Mud obscured the copper tint of his plate, and the tightly tied tabard around his chest was a spattered ruin, but his smile and the brightness of his eyes were unchanged.

  Martin was an effortlessly handsome youth. He was dark of hair and complexion, which was unusual among the Suhdrin houses. Martin’s family held the hard lands to the southeast, along the rocky coast of the Defiant Sea. He and Ian had known each other since they were children, their fathers having fought together at the battle of the Henge, though they only rarely met in person these past few years.

  “As I pray and sing,” Martin said brightly. “Ian bloody Blakley! I heard the banner of the hound had gone up beside a particularly grim and dreary sort of tent, but I wasn’t sure you’d make the trip. Good to see you, brother!”

  “And you,” Ian answered, clasping arms with Martin and then wiping his hand clean on his robe. “Have they already beaten you out of the fight?”

  “Not at all. I’ve passed my round and have until the morning to drink and woo and make merry. These poor blighters are in the elimination round.”

  “Why in hells do you enter this thing, anyway? The proper tourney hasn’t even started yet. Is there a single nobleman out there?”

  “Besides me, you mean? No, I don’t think so. It’s mostly masterless lances and squires hoping to catch an eye. Maybe some of gentler blood, entered under a false name, but who can tell in all that mud?” Martin rubbed the muck from his chest and shook it from his fingers. “It’s not a noble fight.”

  “Then why are you out there?”

  “Because, my dear friend, this is what war looks like. These men are desperate for the win, desperate to come out on top. They’re poor, they’re hopeless, they may have nothing more than the horse they rode here and the armor on their shoulders. Winning this tournament could change their lives for the better.”

  “Then you mean to ruin that?”

  “Not at all—I mean to learn from it. In true battle, lives are on the line, and there are no stewards circling. If I spend my life in the lists, Ian, I will only know how to fight noble men, in noble tradition, and I may not always be fighting noble men. I would rather dip my honor now, and keep my head later.”

  “As always, you have thought this through more than is necessary,” Ian said. “I just assumed you like to wade in among the peasants and hit people with your blade.”

  “There is that as well,” Martin answered wryly, “but I have to give Father a better excuse than that, if he’s going to let me risk my noble neck.”

  “Well, that’s a glorious plan you have, but I think I’d rather practice against men who know which end of the blade to wield.”

  “It’s your funeral. Is Halverdt’s field too dangerous for your likes, or will you be joining the lists?”

  “Not this year. My father won’t allow it,” Ian answered. “He’s afraid some Suhdrin knight will put his spear into my skull, or that I’ll mistakenly kill the wrong southern bastard. No offence,” he added hastily. “I keep telling him that we’re allies now, Suhdra and Tener. It’s a pity we’re having this tournament under Halverdt’s banner, but if we’re to make peace with the likes of you, I suppose we must make peace with the likes of him, as well.”

  “I do wonder about that.” Martin gazed thoughtfully on the muddy fight beyond the barrier. “But your father isn’t far wrong to keep you away from certain spears. There are more lords here that lean Halverdt’s way than you might think. I know our fathers are close, Ian, but you will find your share of enemies on these fields.”

  “You’re sounding like Sir Dugan, bless his name,” Ian said. Martin laughed, though with little joy. “You’re serious?”

  “There’s always trouble to be found.” Martin looked his friend over with a smile that seemed almost condescending. “Things are simpler in the north, I suppose, but a smile doesn’t make a friend. Not here.”

  “Then you shouldn’t smile when you say that.”

  Martin laughed, then wiped more mud from his chest and looked at it distastefully.

  “I think I’m done here. Have you eaten?”

  “Some, but it’s been a long trip. I could do with more.”

  “Then let us eat, and drink, and let me forget that I’m going to spend the morning getting beaten into the mud by some lumbering clout from Halfton who traded his hoe in for a hammer and likes nothing better than using it on fancy noblemen’s sons.”

  “Fancy noblemen’s sons who should know better than to enter the melee,” Ian corrected him. “Let’s not forget that.”

  “Yes, yes, I should know better—but we’ll see how it shakes out. Now, to my tent, to my clean robes, and then to my favorite house of bad intentions. Come!”

  7

  THE WAY AHEAD was dark and crooked. The gheist’s path left the wreckage of Gardengerry and traveled north, twisting from river to road and beating back the thick oak and elm trees of the forest like a trail of broken bones. The shadows of its passage lingered in the sun, clinging to the dirt in scraps of night and nightmare.

  Frair Lucas followed this trail as much in his dreams as during the day. Each night his mind conjured the shape of the following day’s journey, tracing the widening damage the gheist was doing to the naetheric paths of Lord Cinder.

  There was something awful about this newborn god, unlike any
demon Lucas had hunted before. A gheist manifesting on the verge of Lady Strife’s highest holiday, it wrenched the life from the land, leaching the vital energies from trees and soil, leaving them ashy and soft. Bark crumbled under Lucas’s hand, and his boots sank deep into the ground. The air in the wake of the gheist tasted like charred incense.

  Nothing about this was right. Nothing about it was sacred.

  * * *

  Lucas was three days from Gardengerry when he woke one morning with the distinct feeling that one of his dreams had found its way into the daylight world. He lay perfectly still, listening, blinking up at the eaves of oak leaves that had sheltered him through the night. His breath was slow and tired. His bones ached from another night on the road, another lifetime far from home. Lucas was just starting to sit up when something stirred at the edge of his hearing. It sounded like the dry shuffling of leaves, though autumn had not yet robbed the trees of their clothes.

  Lucas eased his legs beneath him, then sat up. His staff lay across his lap.

  The gheist was at the opposite edge of the clearing. A field of dew-tipped grass glistened between them, crowned by midsummer glory, trees and shrubs as bright and green and swollen with life as Lucas could imagine. Even the sunlight was heavy with golden energy.

  When Lucas had fallen asleep last night, this clearing had been gray and sullen, leached of greenery, prey to the passing demon Lucas was tracking. Something had changed. Everything had changed.

  The gheist lumbered out from the trees and into the clearing, a shambling mass of muscle, a bear with fur that glimmered amber and sunlight, tall as a horse and as wide. It snuffled among the grasses, and the blades of grass writhed around it like eddies of water in a turbulent stream. The fur on the bearlike back rippled in response, and then the individual hairs blossomed and grew, each one twisting open into a dandelion seed. A wind rose, and a cloud of seeds wafted off its body, drifting in the shafts of sunlight, gliding to earth to sprout new growth and new life.