by Mark Smylie
“It would be a pleasure,” said Stjepan with an easy smile.
“We will hold you to that, scion of Morfane,” said Lestra, as the sisters stood up. She had gold-painted lips, and gold lines painted on her cheeks under her dark eyes, and a gold circle in the center of her forehead. The two sisters walked off, glancing over their shoulders at Stjepan, smiles playing on their lips and their chins held high.
Gilgwyr caught Erim’s eye and shook his head, rolling his eyes. Erim shrugged and sighed. That’s Black-Heart for you, she thought. “So who was this Morfane, then?” she asked. “Some ancestress of yours? That even seemed to impress that Manon knight, Sir Ulbraece, sure enough.”
“Morfane was one of the Spring Queens of ancient An-Athair, at the height of the Golden Realm,” said Stjepan.
“What, you’re some kind of Athairi royalty, then?” asked Erim, startled.
Stjepan laughed. “No, no, my father was a yeoman tenant of the Earl of An-Athair. A farmer and woodsman, from a long line of farmers and woodsmen. The Spring Queens were but priestesses of the Green Temple. That was just what they were called, in those ancient days.” He smiled at her, seeing her frown. “If the Spring Queens ruled the ancient Golden Realm it was through love and wisdom, not through title or bloodline or any formal right, and none ever wore a crown, unless it was of laurels and flowers. Any woman could become a Spring Queen, and many women did, not just from amongst the Athairi, though admittedly Morfane is pretty famous amongst them. The same was also true for the Golden Knights of An-Athair, who drew their fabled ranks from Danians and Daradjans and Maelites, and even from amongst the Aurians, not just the Athairi.”
“There were Aurians amongst the knights of An-Athair?” Erim asked, confused. She’d always thought of the Aurians and the Athairi as implacable enemies then, and even now.
“Aye,” said Stjepan. “Any place that allied itself with the Golden Realm took the prefix an- to their name. Hence, An-Andria, An-Ogruth, An-Athark up in the Highlands . . .”
Erim frowned. “What, even An-Ydain, way to the east?”
“Yes, even An-Ydain; though that was the furthest east that An-Athair’s allies stretched,” said Stjepan. “Many of the old place names have been renamed, covered over by something new that erases its connection to the Golden Realm. The city of Truse was once An-Truwyn, Misal Ruth was once An-Daruthaine, Bessiter was once An-Bess. Any man could become a knight of An-Athair; some were originally farmers or woodsmen, crafters or tinkers. Amongst the Aurians, it was mostly their nobles who heeded the call; the Aurian lords Odyr and Helggar became Golden Knights first, then later in the east it was Günner and Giselher. Their descendants include the Lodyrs who rule in An-Andria and An-Ogruth; the Lohengrins, who rule in Dyn Cail and Whitebridge and Bainwell; the Liefrings who rule in Misal Ruth; the Günnersons who rule in An-Ydain; and the Goselhings, who rule in Bessiter.”
“Some great and wealthy baronies on that list, then,” said Erim. “But if memory serves of what you and Harvald used to tell me about the Court’s politics, those families are also mostly out of favor of late, save the Günnersons? One of them’s married to the Grand Duke . . .”
“Aye, the Duchess Ilyana is a Günnerson,” said Stjepan. “The Aurians have never really gotten over the schism between those that went native and allied themselves with the local power of An-Athair, and those that sought to destroy An-Athair and impose Aurian rule over the whole of the Danias. And it’s gotten worse in recent years, with the Crown Prince being the prick that he is, and listening to the bile coming out of King Colin of Dainphalia about the sanctity of Aurian bloodlines and their purity.”
Erim studied Arduin’s profile across the camp, and looked at his knights. “Let me guess, the Orwains of Araswell . . . I’m gonna guess that none of them became Golden Knights.”
“No, Arduin’s ancestors were amongst those that destroyed An-Athair, and tore down the Green Temple, and raped and killed the Spring Queens,” said Stjepan quietly. He smiled playfully. “But blood and lineage do not bring guilt with them, do they?”
“Tell that to Heth, and the legions of the drowned,” Erim said with a snort. “The God of the Sea condemns them, to this very day.”
“That he does,” Stjepan said with low satisfaction, his smile twisting into a feral grin as he watched Arduin a couple of campfires over. “That he does.”
Stjepan noticed two cloaked figures approaching the campfire that Arduin and some of the other knights of his household had set, and he surmised it was Annwyn and Malia. They sat down discreetly at the fire, and Arduin glanced their way, but did not say anything; it was the first time they had mingled at the campfires since the start of their journey. Annwyn had her hood up, hiding her face, but Malia’s face could be seen in the firelight, and she locked eyes with Stjepan. She signaled for his attention, beckoning him with her hand.
“Excuse me, but it would appear I am summoned,” Stjepan said to Erim, and he stood, taking his plate with him as he started walking over toward Malia and Annwyn.
Erim watched him go, and took a deep breath, shaking her head.
Gilgwyr shifted so that he was next to her. “Don’t let Stjepan fool you with his talk of his father being a farmer,” he said with a conspiratorial air, leaning in close. “The Athairi trace lineage through both father and mother, and either can be a line of power and inheritance. His ancestors may not have been actual queens, but the women of his mother’s lineage make every Athairi sit up and take notice. Morfane, a Spring Queen and the greatest Magician of the Golden Realm; her great-granddaughter, Urfante, the Winter Century Witch that aided the hunters of the Last Worm King and led Gobelin to the ruins of the Green Temple so that he could forge Gladringer; their descendant, Arfane, called the Queen of Ghosts, who dwelt in the Witch’s Cairns and could summon the very stars to her doorstep. Arfane was so powerful that some thought she might be the Throne Thief.” Gilgwyr looked over at Stjepan and grew quiet. “And then there was his mother herself.”
“Argante was her name, yes?” said Erim. “I’ve never asked him about her, but I know what happened to her.”
They sat for a bit in silence.
“All these people with lineages steeped in ancient history,” she said with a morbid tinge of sadness, watching Arduin and his knights and the Athairi about the campfires. She felt alone, and insignificant. “And what of your people, Gilgwyr?”
“No great story for me, I’m afraid,” said Gilgwyr lightly. “My grandfather could remember his grandfather, and told us his stories about the Liadaine line, of which there are not many worth repeating. Danians, we are, of no particular note. As far as I know we’ve never been amongst the great land lords, never fought in any historic battles. And we have been worshippers of the Divine King for as long as anyone could remember, so all of our ancestors are safely ensconced in Heaven’s vaults.”
“No one to come visit you on the Day of the Dead, then?” asked Erim.
“Thankfully, no,” said Gilgwyr, with a bit of a shudder. “The best thing about sending a soul to Heaven is that it stays there.” He contemplated her for a moment. “And what of your people, Erim?”
“I wish I knew,” she said with a shrug.
“No one knocks on your door on the Day of the Dead?” Gilgwyr asked. Erim shook her head. “Well, nothing to worry about, they’re all up in Heaven, then.”
Or locked up in Hell, she thought glumly.
Stjepan sat down next to Annwyn in a spot indicated by Malia. Arduin saw this and frowned, but he did not interfere.
“My Lady; Mistress Malia,” he said in greeting. “Is there some new development with the map to report?”
“No, Master Stjepan,” said Malia, shaking her head. “The images that are appearing seem to be the same as before.”
Stjepan nodded. Annwyn cleared her throat, and Stjepan frowned. He wasn’t sure if she had actually said something. He had to lean forward a bit so that he could see under Annwyn’s hood; she looked pale and drawn, but focus
ed, and she surveyed the scene around them with interest.
“It has been a long time since I traveled,” said Annwyn finally, hesitating a bit as she spoke. “We used to travel the West King’s Road every now and then, to follow the Great Tournaments and watch my brothers in the lists. I went almost every year once I was of age. But my debut was the Tournament of Gavant in 1459.”
“She was the Tourney Queen there, and again at the Grand Tourney,” said Malia proudly.
“I remember my fellow students at the University being very eager for a glimpse of you at Court after the Grand Tourney that year,” said Stjepan with a nod.
Annwyn waved them both away. “That was a different age, a long time ago, and I feel like I have been cooped up for a long time. There is no point in dwelling on the past,” she said. She looked the camp over. “If I am not mistaken, your kinsmen are far from their native woods.”
“Yes and no. For many of the Athairi, the past is as much a part of the present as anything else,” said Stjepan. He gestured out to the rolling hills and plains around them, black shapes beyond the campfires. “This was once part of the Erid Wold, the great wood of An-Athair. The Wold once stretched from where the Great Wall of Fortias is today, all the way east to the Abenbrae and what is now Abenton, the greatest wood of the lands of the Mera Argenta. The Hada Wold, the Haras Wold, the Neris Wold, the Uthed Wold, the Tiria Wold, the Gra Wold . . . most of the woods of the Middle Kingdoms were once part of the Erid Wold, until the fall of the Golden Realm; only the Sare Wold in the east and the Dav Wold in the far west were not part of the Erid Wold.”
“What happened?” Annwyn asked, and immediately regretted it, as she already knew the answer.
“Your ancestors happened, my Lady,” Stjepan said, evenly and without reproach. “In ancient days the Golden Knights of An-Athair drew power from the magic trees of the wood, and so their enemies learned to chop down the trees, and place an enchanted stone upon the stump, so that nothing would grow back.” He pointed to the large flat stones that were spread out on the earth around them. “Buried under each of those stones is a dead tree stump. And the underside of each of those stones is marked with a rune, that curses the tree and earth beneath it.”
Annwyn’s eyes grew wide. “But . . . we’ve been skirting through the Plain of Stones for two days already . . . we’ve passed thousands of these stones . . .” she gasped.
“Yes,” said Stjepan. He winced ruefully. “No one likes to talk about it but it is, I suppose, one of the greatest magical undertakings in our history, rivaled perhaps only by the cursing of Uthedmael by the Sun Court, and the Oracle Queen’s call of doom upon the Imperial capital of Millene, and maybe the Wall of Fortias. It took years of labor, and whole cadres of Aurian shamans and magicians, to destroy so large a swath of the Wold. The slate came from the hill quarries near Har Misal; miners literally took apart entire hilltops to provide the stones for the effort. And so the forest was made smaller, and the Knights of An-Athair grew weaker, and the Golden Realm was lost.” Stjepan shrugged. “And then over time man and nature have finished the rest, so that now the once-great Erid Wold is broken up into little pieces, and is now but a pale echo of what it was once before.” He indicated the Athairi around the campfires. “My kinsmen still wander the old boundaries of the wood as an obligation to the Fae Courts, singing to dead trees the promise of the Spring Queen’s return.”
“The Fae Courts?” asked Malia, making a quick sign against the Evil Eye.
“Aye, for what transpires in the Known World has effect in the Otherworld, as well,” said Stjepan. “When the old wood was broken up into pieces, and dismembered, so too were the Fae Courts; so where there was once a single great Court of the Fae, now there are Seven, and many of my people feel we owe them a great debt, having lost the battle to preserve the Wold and the Golden Realm.”
“I suppose each of us bears the history of our blood in different ways,” Annwyn said. She frowned. “Why not just remove the cursed stones, then?”
“It’s been tried, but the stone’s effect seems permanent unless the magic of each rune itself can be undone, and no one has ever been able to identify the rune that is carved in the stones. The mark was taught to the Aurian magicians by a mysterious man that most believe to have been either the Horned Man or the Corn King in disguise; a manifestation of the Devil, in other words,” Stjepan said quietly. He leaned forward, and drew a mark into the earth. It looked like a complicated version of the letter R in the Middle Tongue, but with crossed lines that formed jagged forks. “Most think it is a corruption of the Mark of Binding of Bragea, the old smith-god. But it has never been encountered before, or since.”
Annwyn and Malia both shuddered, looking at the mark in the earth; it was just a scribble in the dirt, but there still seemed to be some malevolent and malignant spirit that was attached to it. Stjepan wiped it away with his boot.
“Almost every Athairi magician for a millennia has tried to undo those runes, and failed,” said Stjepan. “Most believe that until the Green Temple is restored, and the Spring Queens return, that any effort to undo this curse magic will be fruitless. And so my people travel the old paths, and sing songs to the trees, and ask them to be patient.”
Annwyn felt a great sadness like a weight, as though one of those cursed stones was pressing down upon her body, crushing it to the earth.
“Ah, the great haunted Erid Wold of An-Athair . . .” she murmured at last, her eyes far away. “Was it really so large, once upon a time, that it reached to our home at Araswell? I would like to visit the Wold one day; I have passed it by, but never entered it.” Her eyes came to rest on Stjepan. “Though I gather that for you it would not be a happy homecoming.”
Stjepan froze, and then looked into her eyes. He didn’t speak for a long moment, measuring her with his hard gaze; but she didn’t look away. “My mother’s ashes coat its leaves,” he finally said in a flat, quiet voice. “My father wandered mad into its thickets, cursed with her dying breath; my sister ran away to hide in its boughs, and has not been seen since. What son of An-Athair would not yearn to see its depths again? I still have family there. But we will not pass through it on our way to the wizard’s barrow.” He looked at her carefully. “Perhaps when this journey is over your brother will let you find refuge there.”
Annwyn broke his gaze, shyly smiling with sympathy, and with sadness.
“My brother . . . will not let me find refuge anywhere,” she said quietly. She seemed to withdraw into herself a bit.
Stjepan started to say something when he sensed someone at his side. He looked up to find the Athairi woman Leda looking down at him with raised eyebrows. “Time for that dance, scion of Morfane,” the Athairi woman said with a smile, and she grabbed him by the hand, pulling him up and away. He glanced over his shoulder apologetically back at Annwyn, and then he was being dragged into the dancing circle where Lestra awaited them. Each sister took an arm, and they started to move with Stjepan in tandem, taking several stutter steps to one side and then a kick, and then several stutter steps in the other direction.
Annwyn thought the three dancers looked like they were in a playful tug-of-war. And then the trio was spinning out in a circle, joining in with about thirty other revelers who were dancing in two circles around two campfires, occasionally switching from one circle to the other. The dancers were mostly their Athairi hosts, but she could see Stjepan’s young squire Erim dancing, and Master Gilgwyr as well, along with a couple of Arduin’s knights—Sir Holgar, and Sir Theodore, and there was the squire Brayden, looking very scared but excited as a pretty young Athairi showed him the basic sideways stutter steps of the dance.
She watched Stjepan dancing with the two Athairi sisters, and felt an ache of longing and jealousy that surprised her. Not about Stjepan, or at least she didn’t think so; it was the Athairi women that she watched with startled, envious eyes. They had a freedom and surety of movement that she had never seen in a woman dancing before, a confidence about thei
r bodies, their sexuality, their identity that she found dizzying and discomforting. The shake of their bare hips and bellies, the way they used their bracelets and anklets and shimmering belts as instruments to accompany the drummers, the sheer joy on their faces, the perspiration that made their sun-kissed copper skin glisten in the firelight, the way they improvised their dancing to the music. She’d been considered an excellent dancer when she was younger, but that was in the mannered, measured style of the courtly dancing of the High King’s Court, all rigid steps and control. She had never danced like these women; she’d never had the chance to. But she could remember when she had wanted to dance like that, a long time ago, when she was young, when she . . . She stifled a sudden sob, caught it in her throat, and willed it to die.
The tempo of the drumming increased a notch, and the tenor of the dance changed; it became wilder, more barbaric, and suddenly long curved swords with watered steel blades were being passed about. She could sense Arduin and the other knights shift in confusion and nervousness. The swords were being handed to the Athairi women, and they lifted them over their heads and gave a great cry and a whoop, and suddenly they started weaving the curved swords in and out of the spaces between and around them and their dancing partners. She marveled at their skill, watching the bared blades flashing in the firelight, the bodies jumping and dancing through the whirling danger. Athairi sword-dancing, she thought suddenly. I’ve read about this. The two Athairi sisters effectively had Stjepan trapped as they danced, their swords flashing about on each side of him as the three of them spun about the fires.
And then the Athairi women started to sing as they sword-danced, and she felt like her heart had been pierced through and through.
Arduin frowned disapprovingly, one eye on his transfixed sister, and the other on the dancers circling the campfires. He almost opened his mouth to order Malia to take his sister back to her tent; but he stopped himself, and said nothing, and just let himself fume.