Stronghold

by Melanie Rawn

  There was no more protective dome leaping to encase group after group for slaughter. He’d suspected as much, and blessed Sioned for recognizing that it was time for the final push. Confidence bubbled up in him—he knew such elation was dangerous, but couldn’t help its escape from his throat in a sharp, satisfied laugh. He had succeeded in combining all Stronghold’s resources—Sunrunners, warriors, and military lore learned from a sire who had been the finest commander of his generation. Quickly he unthreaded himself from sunlight and shook a defiant fist at the enemy, still laughing.

  The Isulk’im, hidden from the rest of the battle by clouds of dust, were busy portioning off yet another section of the enemy, herding them like sheep toward troops commanded by Sethric of Grib and young Isriam of Einar. But this time there would be no shielding enclosure of light to trap the combatants and cut off outside aid. Maarken spurred his horse down the rise and caught up with them, bellowing Kazander’s name.

  The korrus instantly wheeled his own horse around and galloped to Maarken’s side. He was breathing hard, his teeth gleaming in a wide grin below his mustache. “Great and valiant lord!” he greeted Maarken. “A thousand thanks for this perfect day!”

  “Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Maarken responded. “But it’s time to regroup. You remember your part?”

  “It is engraved upon my soul, mighty lord, in letters aglow with Sunrunner’s Fire.”

  “Then get to it.” When Kazander grinned widely with excitement, Maarken couldn’t help laughing a bit in reply. He was actually growing fond of his verbal embroidery. “Have a care to yourself, you madman!” he yelled after him.

  As Maarken rode back to the main battle, he sobered on seeing how many Vellant’im were still left. He missed the effervescent confidence, but knew it could only have hindered him. This had to work—it would work. But so many were going to die at his command. He drew in a long breath.

  “And now,” he murmured to himself, “we find out if I’m even half as smart as my mother says I am.”

  • • •

  Chay strode through the outer courtyard, catching a fleeting glimpse of Chayla’s bright head. People hurried purposefully about, anxious but not frightened. Rohan’s influence, he thought approvingly. The man could calm a flight of raging dragons.

  The inner ward was less populated. He had not far to look before he found his wife’s slight figure, standing in the sunshine near the circle of faradh’im. Chay scowled, ready to march up and carry her back to her rooms if she even looked at him in a way he didn’t like.

  But then he saw Jihan. She stood motionless on the cobbles, her little face gone blank and blind. Jeni was over by the wall, her expression just as vacant, her bleeding fingers dug into the mortar between stones. Tobren and Rislyn huddled next to Myrdal, who was holding them up with an arm around each.

  Chay stopped dead. He knew what the look on those faces meant. His first instinct was to grab the children away, shake them out of it. But that might send them into a shock so deep they would never recover. Goddess help her, what has Sioned done?

  He approached Myrdal, who looked at him with bleak eyes. “We can only wait,” the old woman whispered. “She’ll use what she needs of them, and then weave them back together. She forgets her own power.”

  He took his granddaughter carefully from Myrdal’s frail arms. The blue of the child’s eyes had been nearly swallowed by their black centers. She looked just as Tobin had on the night of Zehava’s burning, when she’d been snared by Sioned’s hungry, powerful mind.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Rohan sat a horse to one side of the tunnel entrance, watching as much as he could of the battle’s progress. He absently massaged his left arm until the ache faded to numbness and went away altogether. If only that damned Vellanti warrior hadn’t swung to one side, making Rohan lurch to compensate, he might have a right hand good for something besides rubbing his other arm. At least the shoulder hadn’t been wrenched out of the socket, as Chayla had originally feared. But it was useless just the same.

  He followed the four divisions of his army with comprehension, but could not have anticipated them without having studied Maarken’s battle plan. Tactics had never been his strong point. He knew the basics, but had always relied on Chay to provide detail and inspiration. Maarken was proving just as adept at arranging the deadly dance of battle—in some ways it really was reminiscent of the pivots, whirls, approaches, and retreats of one of those court balls Meiglan had established at the Rialla. Only one did not leave one’s partner with a kiss on the hand, but a sword through the guts.

  All at once he realized that he didn’t understand what was going on out there. Maarken’s careful template no longer fit. He urged his mount forward a little, searching the field. The little circle of white-hot battle that had jumped over the plain all morning no longer existed. Piles of corpses indicated where Sioned had directed the working—but no new skirmish was enclosed.

  Good Goddess—so soon? he thought, remembering Maarken’s plan. “Sting them from behind—and don’t let them regroup. Kazander and Sethric will drive them forward. Our main force will split down the middle to accommodate them. We’ll funnel them toward the canyon, and hit them from both sides at once. The Sunrunners will establish a screen halfway up the canyon. We have to keep pushing them forward, cramming them in, making them panic.”

  The indicated spot for Sioned’s weaving was only a little way ahead of him. Rohan’s halfling gift responded to its proximity like the pricking of a cat’s whiskers. But he was no more use to her than to Maarken. All his power as High Prince, of his wealth in dragon gold, of his education and spirit and insight, and he was no use to anyone right now.

  When a group of bearded warriors broke through at a gallop and headed straight for him, Rohan didn’t even move. His nervous mare lifted her front hooves tentatively, scraping them against the stony ground, but he held her fast. Let them come, he thought—let them come. I have my Sioned as my sword and shield.

  They caught sight of him, and after his performance at Remagev they knew him even without the circlet on his brow. “Kir’rei!” one of them thundered, and it took him a moment to translate that into High Prince.

  An archer braced in one of the canyon niches behind him yelled out a warning. He heard the cry echo back for a troop to protect him from the onslaught. Rohan smiled and shook his head. It was a curious experience, to sit calmly on a horse while a score of enemy warriors thundered toward him, desperate for his blood. Even more strange to watch them slam into an invisible wall. Most bizarre of all was this feeling of omnipotence, knowing he was wrapped in the power of his wife’s mind and nothing could touch him.

  • • •

  When the first new and unexpected colors hovered outside the weaving, Morwenna barely noticed. But then a second presence was snagged into the pattern, and a third and even a fourth, and Sioned used them. Morwenna sensed the surge in strength lent by young, untrained, highly gifted minds. That so many Sunrunners could be threaded together so easily more than justified Andrade’s faith in her.

  But then Morwenna recognized that sameness she’d felt in Pol. Two of the newcomers were pure Sunrunner. Another was like herself and Pol, a half-breed. But the last was diarmadhi to the bone: rich colors, dark and lustrous, garnet and emerald and onyx and amethyst, all edged in opaque black. These colors, this power, remained outside Sioned’s grasp. It was by independent choice that a small hand wearing a delicate ruby ring reached up, rested atop Pol and Morwenna’s joined hands. There was innocent wonder and a bright laughing delight in this marvel as the colors stitched themselves throughout the weaving with instinctive, frightening skill—and shaded every strand with a silvery sorcerer’s glow.

  • • •

  The quiver of light on the far edges of Rohan’s perceptions flared and then nearly vanished. Something replaced it that kept the enemy from him just as effectively, but which he could not sense at all.

  He turned at the sound of cl
attering hooves. Ten mounted soldiers stormed through the tunnel behind him. “No!” he shouted. “Get back!”

  Dannar reined in beside him, green eyes as big as two-crown coins as he saw the Vellant’im thrust themselves against that barrier and fall back stunned. “My lord? What in all Hells—” He gulped. The thought Sunrunner magic—was written all over his face. “My lord—please come back within!”

  “Ah, no. I’m a very effective lure.”

  “At least let us stay to protect you!”

  “Back up the canyon, if you must,” he conceded, “but out of their sight. I’m the one they want. Let them come after me.”

  “No, my lord, please—”

  “Enough, Dannar!”

  The boy gave him a last agonized glance, then led his troop back up the canyon. Rohan stayed where he was, calming the skittish mare, and tried not to think what it meant when he could no longer sense a Sunrunner weaving.

  • • •

  Walvis had found comfort for his son’s death in the deaths of the enemy. As he worked, as assiduous in weaving a fabric of blood on the sand as the faradh’im were in threading light across the sky, he chanted softly to himself.

  “This one for Jahnavi’s first year. This for his second. This for his third—” and so on until he had accounted for each of his dead son’s twenty-six winters. Then he had started over. He’d reached six for the third time when he was wounded badly enough to be hauled out of the fighting. But once his wife had bound his leg he escaped her and remounted, intending to finish the tally and at least two more before the day was through. He just hoped there would be enough Vellant’im left.

  He was at twenty-five and looking around for the gold-speckled beard that would complete the third recital when his eye caught on a structure being raised from a nearby dune. The great wooden frames that had flung destruction at Remagev had finally been brought into play.

  Sunrunner’s Fire had not touched the awful things at Remagev. But Walvis swore to himself that if those ropes resisted his sword, he’d put gold beads in his own beard and join the Vellanti army. Shouting at Visian, who was glued even more tightly to his side now that Chay was back at Stronghold, he wordlessly pointed his sword at the wooden tower.

  Visian put fingers between his teeth and gave a piercing whistle that brought ten Isulk’im to him in a matter of moments. “This abomination offends the eyes of Remagev’s noble lord. Destroy it.”

  They surged forward at Walvis’ command. But the enemy knew how to defend as well as attack; the wooden arm drew back and let fly the contents of its hand before it was hacked to bits.

  But this time it was not stones the arms threw. It was steel. Knife blades broken from hafts and otherwise useless, arrow tips split off wooden shafts—the Vellant’im knew the Sunrunner weakness. Walvis plunged his own steel into five more breasts and swung around, squinting into the storm of dust.

  • • •

  Iron struck the weaving with ferocious suddenness. Morwenna had readied herself in anticipation, but the death-metal cut into her in a thousand places and agony robbed her of reason.

  Then she felt children scream.

  Their pain was intense and terrifying, and their panic shot through the weave like wildfire. Sioned’s control turned rigid in response. The children struggled like caged hawks, their undisciplined powers more potent than any trained Sunrunner defense. In the next instant Sioned must have realized her mistake, for the spun colors relaxed as if a loom’s tension had been undone. Morwenna thought it might work—but then the weaving began to unravel.

  Morwenna snatched her hand from Pol’s. She groped for the children, constructing her own fabric of diarmadhi light around them. As she had protected the other Sunrunners, so now she strove to blanket the children. But Relnaya still had hold of her other hand—the faradhi part of her, locked by Sioned’s strength into the faltering dome.

  She had spread herself too thin. She realized it at once, but there was nothing she could do. The pull in opposite directions, Sunrunner and sorcerer, was ripping her apart. She could do one, but not both. She could shield the children or she could take the entire weaving herself, trusting her diarmadhi heritage to give Sioned time to stitch everyone back together.

  She must choose. She could feel herself shredding at the edges, ragged threads falling away. Calling on the dranath in her blood, she made a grab for Pol’s fingers once more and firmly placed that other small hand in his. Screams raced through the weaving as she withdrew her sorcerer strength—and left the Sunrunner part of her behind.

  • • •

  It had felt so familiar, weaving the protection of light around her lord. But too familiar was this frantic reworking of chaotic color into recognizable, unique patterns. Tobin first—then Meath—so familiar to sort swiftly through bright threads—a stray, slightly mad thought crossed her mind that this must have been the way the world had been formed, when the two deities sat down to decide that these elements should make a tree, and these others a fish, and these a drop of water, until everything had its own uniqueness. Had they ever changed their minds? Had they ever reconsidered the horse, taken its wings back and given them instead to dragons? What if she gave Hollis’ graceful garnet faceting to Meath, replacing it with his complex topaz angles and arcs?

  She was dangerously near madness. Sanity reasserted itself with angry impatience, rock-solid practicality ruthlessly quenching wild whimsy. She was the only one who could do this thing. But she had never done it before with children whose terror made the work doubly urgent. It was that critical need for swiftness that brought her back to reality—Sunrunner reality, which the ungifted might easily mistake for a kind of madness.

  The children slipped through her fingers like fine, trembling silk filaments. She tried to be gentle, but their fear was more dangerous to them than her power. At last she clamped down on them with all her strength. First Tobren and Jeni, who were Sunrunners only; then Rislyn, with more difficulty because of her diarmadhi blood. Jihan was infuriatingly elusive. She tugged Sioned along with her by the thin glittering light that connected them. Now that there was no more pain, she was determined to explore this new world. The sorcerer in her was strong enough to take Sioned with her.

  Sensing Pol nearby, Sioned cried out soundlessly to him. It was he who brought Jihan back—coaxing, cajoling, finally tricking her with a skein of even more brilliant color that attracted the child’s curiosity. Sioned finally felt herself whole again, no longer woven into the pattern of Jihan. She let go of the sunlight and collapsed to her knees on the courtyard stones.

  Eventually she had the strength to look up. Pol clasped his sorcerer child to his chest, his face still stricken with fear even though she was safe in his arms. Rislyn was weeping quietly in Hollis’ embrace. Chay knelt, clutching his wife to one shoulder and his granddaughter to the other, eyes closed in silent thanksgiving. The castlefolk clustered at a respectful distance—no, Sioned amended, a frightened distance. She could hardly blame them.

  At her side crouched Meath, waiting for her to notice him. When she did, he gestured wordlessly to the two still forms crumpled nearby.

  “Morwenna?” she whispered. “I thought she’d done it herself—separated herself and Relnaya from the rest of us.”

  “I tried to reach them,” Meath said, low-voiced. “I couldn’t. And don’t you try,” he added tersely. “She’s gone, Sioned. They both are.”

  “No.” She made it to her feet and he helped her over to where they lay. “They’re still breathing—”

  The tall Sunrunner shook his head. “She’s functioning on diarmadhi instinct now. We can’t touch her, not that way. Relnaya didn’t have the strength or the skill to free himself.”

  “We can do it for him—for both of them—”

  “No, I tell you! There’s no pattern to either of them anymore—except the pattern of that dome outside.”

  She wove sunlight just the same, trying to connect to them. She caught her breath in horror. Meat
h was right: both Sunrunners were no longer really there. Only the weaving existed. Despite Relnaya’s Sunrunner presence within it—helplessly trapped—Morwenna had woven it of sorcery. Nothing in the Star Scroll could help Sioned. “Oh, Goddess,” she whispered, “what have I done?”

  Meath shook her arm emphatically. “You couldn’t have known she’d do this. Who’d believe that she could?” He knelt where Morwenna lay senseless and almost lifeless on the ground. She was barely breathing now. “The nearest thing it compares to is being shadow-lost. Except—except there are no shadows.”

  Sioned made a choking sound.

  He looked up at her with a strange intensity in his blue-gray eyes. “I’m guessing that the work will last as long as they do.”

  “But we can’t leave them like this,” she breathed. “There’s something of them alive still, Meath—not just the gifts, something of them.”

  “There’s nothing we can do to bring them back.”

  When she understood what he meant, she gasped.

  “It has to be done, Sioned. They might live until evening.”

  “No—”

  “Would you want to live even one moment this way?” he asked harshly.

  He made two painless, efficient strokes with a gleaming knife. There wasn’t even much blood from the two heart wounds.

  Sioned turned away. So once again someone else had done her killing for her. Kept the final guilt from her. She could no more look at Meath now than she had been able to look at Ostvel then. But Ianthe’s had been a death she actively desired. Morwenna and Relnaya—their deaths were her responsibility. Her failure. Her shame.

  Rohan—she must find Rohan. She glanced around wildly, dizziness sweeping her. Myrdal came forward, and Meath, to hold her up as she swayed. But it was no use; she fought the encompassing blackness and lost.